Gun Church

Amelia Dudek, all curves, legs, and lips, was about thirty, give or take. She’d probably done plenty of both: giving and taking, I mean. Her features were not so very different from Renee’s, though she wasn’t as naturally pretty. But Amelia knew the tricks: how to dress, how to makeup, how to accentuate and obscure. Franz Dudek wasn’t at all what I expected. I guess I thought he’d be slight and regal, the last viscount in a long line of vanquished Slavic nobility, shipped off to Eton and Oxford at an early age before surfacing in New York. Instead, he looked like a sixty-year-old potato farmer in a good suit. He was big-boned and broad-shouldered. His peasant hands were thick, his fingers gnarled, but he had a kind, handsome face. There were many such faces in Brixton and with a little coal dust on his cheeks and a hard hat on his gray head, he would have fit right in.

I don’t know what Dudek was expecting from me, but the look on his face when I met him and Amelia at the bar was fucking priceless. He seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t some drunken monster with a drippy junkie nose and a blond on each arm. The late Haskell Brown had no doubt filled his boss’s head with endless tales of the Kipster’s debauchery and his exponentially diminished talent. It’s not like I hadn’t disappointed people before. I’d nearly turned it into a second career. It was that I hadn’t ever done it in quite this manner before.

Earlier, when the wine steward poured glasses of the old Cabernet Dudek had ordered to accompany our steaks, I’d noticed the sick look on Meg’s face. There’d been no need for her to say the words. This is when he’s going to fuck it up. I knew I’d been on probation from the moment I agreed to come up to New York. That’s why I had club soda and lime at the bar before we were seated and why, during dinner, I barely finished half a glass of wine. I was being watched, tested at every turn. The Kipster would have been glad to live down to their expectations by asking Amelia how much the prenup was worth or whether she’d had her boob job done before or after marrying old Franz. The impulse for self-sabotage was irresistible to the Kipster and he would have jumped at the chance. Why bother writing a crappy book that tanks, when you can just blow yourself up in front of your publisher? But Gun Church wasn’t a crappy book and I wasn’t the Kipster. His last vestige was parked in the Hippodrome Garage, directly across 44th Street from the Algonquin.

The hard part came later, after the contracts were signed and Dudek promised to have the checks cut to Meg Monday morning. Publishers don’t pay the author. They pay the agent and the agent pays the author after her percentage comes off the top. Nor do publishers fork over all the money at once. For the rights deals, it was half on signing and half on publication. For Gun Church, payment-like Caesar’s Gaul-was divided into three parts: one-third on signing, one-third on manuscript approval, one-third on publication. But any way you carved it up, I walked out of the restaurant well over a hundred grand ahead of when I walked in. It wasn’t about the money. I didn’t even mind that the advance for Gun Church was less than the advance the Kipster had received for Beatnik Souffle a million years ago. That was the Kipster’s first book and GunChurch was mine.

No, the hard part wasn’t about the advance, but about being left alone in a city that I no longer knew and one that no longer knew me. Meg offered to take me out for a drink, but her heart wasn’t in it. I could always tell when there was someone keeping the bed warm for her at home. And frankly, I wasn’t in the mood for trying to celebrate while simultaneously sitting on my hands. Franz Dudek might have looked like a farmer, but he well understood human nature and knew better than to press his luck. Instead of offering me yet another chance to fuck up, he just patted my shoulder and told me to go home and finish that book.

What I did was go back to the hotel. Success came so easily to the Kipster that he never quite trusted it. Hence, when things fell apart, he had no coping skills on which to rely. So this was new for me, achieving something through hard work that I wasn’t willing to piss on or away. I didn’t know what to do with that. In the jumble of feelings, the only thing I thought I wanted to do was to call Renee. I wanted to share the moment with her, but I couldn’t pick up the phone. Maybe it was because I so regretted not bringing her or maybe because I didn’t. Maybe to call her would have indicated she meant way more to me than I was willing to let on. I wasn’t sure of anything.

And there I was, the.38 in my hand, looking at the bedside phone. I kept snapping the cylinder of the Smith amp; Wesson in and out the way some smokers flick on their old Zippos in one fluid motion. That I found comfort in this didn’t much surprise me. Nor did it surprise me that I loaded a single round into the cylinder and spun it like a roulette wheel. I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. That impulse had passed with the concussion. I just liked the clickity-clicking, the feel of its weight in my hand. Then the phone rang and I jumped. I hoped it was Renee, but I’d given up magical thinking during the first Clinton administration.

“Hello,” I said, snatching up the phone, keeping the.38 in my other hand.

“Ken?”

The last time my equilibrium was this out of whack was during Fox Hunt, but this was more disorienting. The woman at the other end of the phone could cut me down faster than any bullet ever could.

“Amy, what are you-How did-”

“Meg told me you were in town.”

I could not speak.

“Ken. Ken, are you there?”

“I’m here, but why are you calling?”

“Do you really have to ask me that?”

“It’s been ten years, Amy. I thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”

“I thought so too.”

“What’s changed?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, about us, since the incident when you saved your class. I thought about calling a hundred times, but I could never find the right moment.”

Funny, that September afternoon that Vuchovich took my class seemed like a thousand years ago, almost like it never happened. I didn’t understand how just hearing Amy talk about it made it all real again.

“What made this the right time?”

“Proximity. Knowing you’re in town. I’m not sure. Meg says you’ve just signed a new book deal.”

“Meg’s been telling tales out of school.”

“Is it true?” she asked.

“I’m surprised you didn’t already know. I thought Peter would have told you.”

“Peter and I don’t really communicate much. We just grumble at one another in passing. Even if we did speak in full sentences, I doubt he would have wanted to tell me anything positive about you. It is positive, isn’t it?” she hedged.

“It’s good news, yes, but I don’t think you’d recognize my writing. I don’t feel enough like a god anymore to snicker down my sleeve at my characters. You spend seven years in Brixton and you see what real hopelessness is like. Living on the edge isn’t having to move into a Tribeca condo because you were forced to sell your place in Amagansett. I couldn’t write a book about Wall Street now. I wouldn’t want to.”

“You sound different.”

“I’m old, Ames,” I said, before I could catch myself using my pet name for her.

“No one’s called me that in a very long time, Ken.” Then she stopped and there was silence, but something in her breathing told me she wasn’t finished. “Come see me.”

“I–I can’t. I’m leaving first thing and-”

“No, Ken, tonight. Right now.”

This wasn’t what I had envisioned. Of course, I had thought of Amy constantly since I agreed to come up to New York. And I’d fantasized about us bumping shoulders on the street or us hailing the same cab, but not this. If I was going to see her again, I wanted it to be when the book was out and I had something tangible to prove all the pain I’d caused her, and myself, had come to something worthwhile.

“I’m beat, Ames. I don’t have it in me now. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to go anywhere except to the elevator.”

“What?”

“I’m in the lobby.”

Twenty-Six