fucked her hard from behind. I didn’t miss those messages. Suddenly, irrationally, my focus shifted away from Janice and I found I was thinking of Amy. Had something happened to her? Is that what those messages were about? If they were, what would I do? How would I feel? Where would that leave me? Even I was a little bit embarrassed by my thinking of Amy only in terms of myself.
I splashed my face with aftershave, rolled on deodorant, and slipped into my old terry bathrobe-a long-ago gift from Amy. I kissed Renee on the mouth, desperately-a kiss like a prayer-and told her I’d be back up in a few minutes. Now she looked worried too. My mind raced with a hundred scenarios, one worse than the next, as I took the stairs two at a time. I listened to the three messages-all from Meg. The brittle tone of her voice and the cryptic “You need to call me back” did little to allay my fears.
“What the fuck, Donovan? Is Amy all right?”
“Amy?”
“My ex-wife,” I whispered into the mouthpiece. “You remember her?”
“Don’t be a schmuck, Kip. As far as I know, Amy’s miserable being married to that dickhead Peter Moreland, but otherwise fine.”
“Then what’s with the messages? Something’s wrong. Are you-”
“I’m fine too.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” I asked, not very patiently.
“Haskell Brown is dead.”
“What? What happened, did the gerbil get loose and gnaw through his colon?”
“Not only are you a prick, Weiler, but you’re a homophobic one,” she said.
“I love you and
“We’re not talking about me.”
“Okay, Meg, what happened?”
“He was robbed and murdered early Sunday morning in Chelsea. They beat him and shot him. The cops think it was more than just a robbery because of the brutality of the beating.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A hate crime, you idiot. Gay bashing isn’t as popular as it used to be, but it’s still the sport of kings for some.”
“Fuck. I mean I had no love for the guy, but … ”
We stayed on the phone sharing a minute of uncomfortable silence. Neither one of us, I think, wanted to say aloud what we were both thinking. Then Meg, as she always did, gave it voice.
“If that new book of yours isn’t just some bullshit excuse to blow your life up again, Kip, tighten up the pages you’ve got so far. With them, I want an outline and a story synopsis as well.”
“You know I don’t do outlines.”
“You do now! You want this book published, Weiler, you follow the rules, my rules. Understand? Remember that in this business mothers eat their young and then use the bones for toothpicks. And it’s worse now than it used to be. Remember also, you’re not who you used to be.”
“I’m not sure I ever really was.”
“Don’t get philosophical on me, Kip. It doesn’t suit you. I want something on my desk a week from today, ten days, latest. I’m going to let stuff settle down some before I approach Dudek through Mary Caputo.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing. I’m going to send signals to Dudek that you’ll take the rights deal if he even thinks about a new book for you. That’s as far as I’m willing to push him and if his answer is ultimately no, it’s no and we take the rights deal. This is our last chance with Travers Legacy and yours with me. Get it?”
“We’re through if I fuck this up.”
“Exactly. I love you, Kip Weiler. God knows why, but I always have. You shoot this down or screw it up and that’s it between us.”
“One week,” I said.
“Ten days, latest.”
When I got upstairs, the St. Pauli Girl was sitting up in bed, her arms folded around her knees and bare breasts. “Is everything okay?” she asked, the concern on her face still visible even in the semidarkness.
I answered by gently unfolding her arms, softly pushing her legs apart, and pressing my mouth onto her. But when I woke up hours later, the St. Pauli Girl’s flavor still filling up my senses, I was again thinking of Amy. Even now, ten years removed from her, I didn’t fully comprehend the attraction. Given how many women I’d had without hardly trying, I didn’t understand the power Amy had that let her turn me inside out, but she could and with nothing more than a sideways glance or the pursing of her lips. After we were married, I used to tell myself that my straying into strange beds-and I mean “strange” in all of its
Amy had been forced to deal with the worst of the Kipster, especially his talent’s long, slow death rattle and the thousand little aftershocks that followed in its wake. Still, the dissolution of our marriage wasn’t all on me. Amy was neither a martyr nor saint. She had her hairline cracks and peculiar vanities. The woman was more complicated than a Chinese box and twice as hard to open. Even her demeanor came with a wind chill. She considered writers more craftsmen than artists, and was more than a little irked by just how easily money and fame had come my way. “At best, writers are McArtists,” she was fond of saying. Oh, we were quite a pair: two wounded, complicated people who resented the shit out of each other. Now there’s a formula for success, huh?
As I stood to clean up, it occurred to me that a new book might mean more to me than I could have imagined. I went to my office afterwards to follow Meg’s orders. I typed “Outline.” Yet in spite of the news of Haskell Brown’s death and the blood in the chapel that night, nothing came to me. For the first time since starting the book I felt pressure. And there I was staring at the nearly blank screen, the cursor mocking me at the end of the “e” in outline.
Twenty-One
I wasn’t empty for long.
A blanket of autumn snow in a hardscrabble place like Brixton County had that falsely purifying picture- postcard effect. You could fool yourself that the snow somehow stopped the miners and loggers from getting shitfaced after their shifts and going home to beat the crap out of their wives. If you listened carefully enough, you could almost hear John Denver singing some cracker-barrel hymn to the simplicity of rural life. Simplicity, my ass. Life was no less complicated here than anywhere else. If anything, life in Brixton had a more desperate edge than almost any place else I’d unpacked my bags. It was the land of coal and pine, not milk and honey. Like Jim once said to me, the only options for kids who grew up here were the mines, the pines, or the military recruitment signs. So, no, as pretty as it all looked as Jim drove Renee and me up into the hills that Friday at dusk, I wasn’t buying into the notion of Brixton’s snow-white baptism.
We started out the way Jim usually drove when we were going to shoot, but somewhere along the route he took a turn away from the river and we were in unfamiliar territory. We weren’t headed to the chapel either. Not even Renee seemed to know where we were going. The confusion in her eyes was manifest. Funny, I thought, how I barely noticed the beauty of her eyes anymore. I used to see her features as a collection of distinct physical assets-the suede blue eyes, her impossible cheekbones, that perfect ass-as aspects of herself, as the St. Pauli Girl, but not as a woman. It dawned on me that these days I thought of her less and less as the St. Pauli Girl.
Finally, Jim pulled off the pavement onto a pitted dirt road that bounced us all around like a mechanical bull in a honky-tonk bar. We drove through a gap in a slatted wooden fence that had seen better days. The sky was already turning darker when I noticed some familiar vehicles parked along the side of the road. Jim hadn’t said what
