An economist of sentiment who wrote peerlessly, spoke honestly, and drowned off the embarcadero at forty-six, before he could have known the enormity of the void he would leave.
-William Maxwell, Epitaph of James Marion
***
Gladley sat in the small office. He fixed his gaze upon Nathan Benn Zander, his expression a thin quarter-smile that was often misread as contempt. The look was not unfamiliar to his editor, who occasionally felt as if he had only the persistence of their ten-year friendship as evidence that Gladley did not loathe him.
“Like it or not,” he said across the desk, “we’ll need the manuscript by February. I can push the chapters a bit, but the book’s got to be delivered on deadline.”
“You’re set on the release on Mayday, then. Look, Nathan, I’ve told you – I can’t understand why – ”
“Christ, Will. That’s when everything’s coming out – the twentieth anniversary. Pointreau’s book, the Perch biography, the Library of America collection. I’ve got no weight on the business end anyway, but even I can see that it’d be insane not to capitalize on that. It’s all morbid as hell if you ask me.”
“It’s completely arbitrary anyway. Marion probably died in early April of that year. May first is just the day they picked for a ceremony.”
Benn Zander shook his head slowly.
“What are you, thirty-five? You’re starting to repeat yourself.”
Gladley allowed himself a smile and attempted to stretch without getting up. He was tall and slight, with a short blond beard and shaggy yellow-white hair that, if groomed properly, would almost reach his collar. Due to the nature of Benn Zander’s filing system, top-heavy columns of carbon paper studded the room and prevented Gladley from fully extending his legs.
“Any news on the Perch book?” he asked.
“No.” Benn Zander paused. “Well, yes. Sort of.”
Gladley lifted his head and responded.
“Well, what is it? Did they announce the author?”
“No. That’s the news, actually – they’re publishing it anonymously.”
“That’s sort of a cheap gimmick for them, isn’t it?”
“We’ll find out. They’re printing excerpts monthly in Latitude until the release.” Benn Zander paused momentarily, distracted by a flickering halogen bulb overhead. “It’s in one of the memos.”
He gestured toward the papers Gladley held in his hand, still neatly creased. Gladley grunted his acknowledgement and leafed through the documents in a purely symbolic fashion.
“You know,” Benn Zander said, continuing, “It’s in your interest to start reading what your publisher sends you. I mean, this isn’t Barnabe Barnes, Will – people actually read James Marion. They could conceivably read your book, ill-prepared as we might be for that possibility. You can’t do this alone.”
“You’re taking a risk pushing me. I don’t know what kind of deadline writer I am.”
“That’s okay, Will,” Benn Zander replied quickly. “I still haven’t made up my mind what kind of writer you are off deadline.”
Gladley laughed, brushing off the slight.
“Look, I should go,” he said. “I’ll be late.”
He moved to the exit, ducking under a length of exposed wiring, and paused in the doorway.
“When does next month’s Latitude come out?”
Already, Benn Zander had submerged himself in copy. He answered without looking up.
“Three weeks from Tuesday.”
As Benn Zander watched him out of his periphery, taking his jacket off the coat hook and shaking it onto his narrow shoulders, it occurred to him what Gladley would be late for, and he sighed.
On the bus cross-town, Gladley attempted to pursue several streams of idle thought without success; his mind kept returning to the Perch book. He had been aware of its existence for months and, prior to that, had even been warned by Benn Zander that there would likely be a third biography set for release near the anniversary of Marion’s death. Withholding the identity of the author, however, puzzled him.
Perch Press was the nonfiction imprint of Huron Publishing, one of the oldest and most prominent publishing houses in the country. The division had a long-established reputation for the prestige of its authors and the relatively small number of titles released each year. Gladley had himself submitted two manuscripts to Perch, both of which had been declined out of hand. If the anonymous release were designed to generate publicity, it would do so at the expense of Perch’s reputation. The only alternate explanation that Gladley could summon – that the content of the biography was so damning or controversial that it required the publisher protect the author – gave him a feeling of visceral unease that lasted the remainder of the ride.
It was dusk by the time the bus reached Gladley’s stop, and as he jogged the four blocks to the lecture hall, massive cast-iron street lamps lit his way through the university’s grounds. After dark, since Gladley was not a visitor, he was technically loitering, and was allowed neither on campus nor in the austere brick building he was entering. He had been out of school for years, but with unlined features and eyes with rims that glowed preternaturally red from lack of sleep, he passed easily for a graduate student. Silently he admonished himself for lingering at Benn Zander’s office; he knew from experience that Pointreau’s narcissism compelled him to shut and lock the doors before beginning his lectures, forcing latecomers to knock and justify their lack of consideration. He was relieved to find the twin oak doors open; he did not have the energy for such a siege.
When Gladley slipped into a seat in the back of the atrium, Alain Pointreau was writing a phrase on the chalkboard, his back to the room. After a moment’s examination, he walked slowly to the lectern, facing his students and Gladley. Pointreau’s face was swarthy and assured, his eyes magnified powerfully behind thick glasses. The sentence behind him read “Pro omnes amicos meos numquam amabam.” Still shuffling his notes, he spoke.
“Who can tell me the import of this phrase?”
In the second row, a blonde whom Gladley recognized vaguely raised her hand. Pointreau nodded at her.
“It’s the epigram at the beginning of Marion’s first collection of short stories.”
“Good. And what does it mean?”
She hesitated for a moment. “It means ‘For all my friends I never liked.’ But – ”
“Ah – this young lady would like to qualify her answer. Perhaps she’s taken a course with me before.”
His students laughed reverently. Gladley’s face had already settled into a slight grimace.
“I apologize,” Pointreau continued, grinning. “But what?”
“Well, the phrase is mistranslated.”
“Excellent. It’s true – grammatically, the sentence is meaningless. Peculiar. In 1944, James Marion writes Plymouth in Effigy. He’s young, barely known, and about to publish the first major work of his career. And he chooses to begin his book with a poorly constructed Latin dedication. Can anyone guess why he might have done such a thing?”
Pointreau scanned the class. Finding no one willing, he looked to the girl who had just spoken.
“Miss?”
She smiled coyly and shook her head.
“Well, I have an explanation. I submit that James Marion started Plymouth with a botched Latin epigram because he did not know Latin. Incidentally, he also did not know French, or Russian, or Greek, or how to sail a boat, or how to play squash – all prerequisites for entering the cabal of the literary elite at the time. With his first book, Marion sent a clear message that his true fluency was in unbridled emotional honesty. However his later work would complicate this idea, make it problematic, this kernel never disappeared. Clearly, he was a craftsman of the language as well, but the syntax he valued most was that of the self.”
As Pointreau allowed this to resonate, Gladley could no longer contain himself, and let out a loud snicker that he was able to pass off as a cough. Still, several students in adjacent rows turned to stare at him witheringly, and even Pointreau furrowed his brow slightly before continuing with his lecture. “Syntax of the Self” was the title of a paper that Pointreau had written for the North American Review some fifteen years prior, when Gladley was still in college. As he remembered it, the article had implied heavily that much of Marion’s body of work, and especially his first book, had received extensive unattributed additions and re-writes from his editor.
Pointreau, still vigorous and attractive in his late fifties, had been raised in Corsica by French parents. He grew up speaking both Corsican and French, and spoke as a result with a heavy, unusual accent; “self” as he pronounced it sounded like how Gladley would say the word “south.”
It occurred to him that most of the class was too young to be familiar with the work that had made Pointreau famous initially. For all the controversy he generated, Gladley found the man elementally transparent. Pointreau was, as Gladley had put it to Benn Zander many times in the past, a necrophiliac. He fetishized and exploited the dead, taking a self-serving pleasure in violating the sanctity of their reputations. Doing so, he had sold a tremendous number of books. Before his tenure at the University, Pointreau had received international attention for a biography of D.H. Lawrence that contended that the poet had been a high-ranking Freemason. Shortly after, he published a paper questioning the authorship of Madame Bovary, and in one particularly busy year suggested that both Ezra Pound and Thomas Mann were closeted homosexuals.
At the podium, Pointreau was currently responding to a student’s basic question about the conditions in which Plymouth in Effigy had been written. At some point, Gladley had drawn a pad and pen, but he couldn’t remember doing so, and thus far hadn’t written anything down.
“If you have the opportunity,” he said, “I highly recommend you take a trip to Gaul, New York. It is a fantastically dull small town, but they have set up a lovely museum on Marion’s old property. It’s quite thrilling, the simplicity with which they live there.”
“Did he write all of his books in the house there?” asked a student a few seats from Gladley.
“All except for the last – Nothing Was Sent For. Five years before he drowned, Marion moved to a town called Leòn, in Northern California. He produced very little there, and what he did write is drastically different in tone. You’ll be able to see when we read his final novel. Compared to Plymouth, it is very… bleak. He describes the landscape in California starkly. A great deal of militaristic imagery.”
Next to Gladley, an anxious-looking underclassman scribbled out notes furiously.
“If Marion ever told someone why he made the move,” Pointreau continued, “scholarship does not know about it. There is, of course, the chance that we will find out this year, when the moratorium is lifted on his unpublished work from Leòn. My personal research has led me to believe that it may have been motivated by some troubling allegations that were being made by a teenage girl in Gaul around that time.”
He waved his hand in mock humility.
“Ah, but if I tell you any more, I fear you will not purchase my book this spring.”
Gladley could only assume that Pointreau was speaking symbolically; although still months away from publication, he had included his book on the course syllabus.
It was no secret to Gladley that, in some sense, he was fascinated by the perverse manner in which Pointreau approached writing a man’s history. However, the thought of the strands of James Marion’s life, clasped in a bundle of sinew inside of Pointreau’s fist, turned his stomach. He glanced down at his pad, where he had absently written a small declarative sentence: The self will rise again.
Home for Gladley was a rent-stabilized rectangle in a brownstone far uptown. It was here that he spent an increasing amount of time reviewing the notes that he kept in collapsible cardboard boxes beside his desk and beneath the kitchen table. The original boxes, relics from his college days, had followed him there from his last apartment, and had increased steadily in number as he worked. As a gesture of goodwill towards his infrequent visitors, Gladley had initially tried to minimize the shrine-like aspects of his apartment, but as the manuscript progressed the effort had gone to seed. A framed photo of Marion in uniform had regained its place above the stove, interview transcripts occupied most of the table, and a grave rubbing from Marion’s headstone was fixed on the refrigerator with a magnet.
For some reason, a symptom of the indefinable ailment that typically followed Gladley home from Pointreau’s lectures was generally a bout of productivity. For the rest of the week, he hardly left his desk, breaking his concentration only for necessities and to return Benn Zander’s phone calls. Gladley had already conducted all of the interviews he felt he needed for the book, and newspaper articles, correspondence, and his personal notes had been steadily filling his boxes for years. The text itself, guided by the carefully constructed chronology in Gladley’s mind, materialized easily on paper.
For his generation, hero worship of James Marion was not uncommon. He had died when Gladley was fifteen, and his characteristic protagonists – stoic, stalwart men with heavy consciences – spoke loudly to him and to many American teenagers at the time. Marion’s slow recession from publishing in his final years, recalled with sadness by his contemporaries, simply added to the mythology for those who came of age after his death. For Gladley, however, the wide-eyed thrill and lustful identification he had felt first reading Marion’s stories had only deepened with age.
Gladley himself had a moderately successful career in nonfiction, having obtained a few prestigious grants for biographical research, and occasionally lectured at small colleges. With Benn Zander and the publisher he worked for, he had written two well-received but underperforming biographies of Renaissance writers, fighting the entire time for an advance on a biography of James Marion. Finally pushing the book through had been a major coup for Benn Zander, a fact that, despite his manner, was not lost on Gladley.
When Benn Zander visited the apartment after Gladley had begun work on the book in earnest, he made jokes about what he called his monastic phase, saying that Gladley was unable to inhabit both the real world and Marion’s at the same time. The truth was that Gladley didn’t feel that he had sacrificed anything for the comfort he found in the work. Further, he was unsure how distant the suffusion of Marion’s life with his own was from vice.
***
In the winter of 1943, Marion, as part of the 43rd infantry, was deployed to Ortona, on the Adriatic Sea, to take part in the Allied Italian campaign. Although brief, his time in continental Italy was the only action Marion would see during the war, and records indicate that he was present for the crossing of the Rapido River, and supported the battalion that took Cisterna, en route to Rome. Although it’s unclear precisely how much fighting Marion was present for, it can be said with certainty that upon his return and the subsequent success of his first book – containing several stories that had been drafted during his time abroad – a certain amount of revisionism took place. The popular press enjoyed a period of enormous jingoism after the armistice, and it is no wonder that the newspapers made every attempt to fashion James Marion into a bona fide war hero. The fact that Marion resisted this characterization whenever given the opportunity to speak publically was hardly important. Consequently, many of the supposed war stories featuring the young writer have since been discredited. One particularly macabre story, however, far-fetched as it may seem, has been verified by several primary sources, including the wartime journals of three separate members of the 43rd. It should be noted that Marion himself refused to comment on or corroborate it.
In many of the more significant battles in the Italian campaign, where the death toll was considerable, there was no time to memorialize the American dead; the bodies were simply transported back to base and shipped home. However, in certain cases – shellings, for instance – where there were only a few casualties, it was the policy of the 43rd infantry to eulogize the fallen soldiers. Marion’s bourgeoning literary talent apparently did not go unnoticed among the officers of the battalion, who nominated him to speak on these occasions. On December 11th, 1943, there was a particularly chaotic nighttime strike that left one soldier dead, but due to the power of the blast, completely unrecognizable. In the morning, after order was imposed and roll was called, it became clear that the soldier was one of two missing men: either a Pvt. Lemon or a Pvt. Hondros. After much deliberation, it was decided that the deceased, based on the few items in his pockets, was Pvt. Hondros.
As it turned out, little was known about Hondros, who was quiet and had few friends in the unit. Marion was told by his superiors only that the young man was the eldest son of a Greek shoemaker, and had grown up in northern New Jersey. Marion got up to speak and, embracing his vocation or simply unwilling to disappoint, instantly fabricated a wrenching narrative of Hondros’ life. He spoke of the man’s passion for repairing old cars, his fanatical support of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his promise to take over the family business from his old man, who was afflicted with a rare degenerative nerve disease that was slowly claiming his ability to mend and lace shoes. According to the firsthand accounts, he went on for close to half an hour. By the end of his eulogy, the entire 43rd infantry was on its feet, many of the ranking officers in tears.
Included among those applauding, however, was Nicolas Hondros, who had only been knocked unconscious during the strike, and made it back to camp, dazed but unhurt, roughly halfway through Marion’s speech. When he had concluded, Hondros approached Marion and asked him whom he had been eulogizing. When, after a few puzzling minutes, the details of what had actually occurred became clear, Hondros thanked Marion sincerely for giving him the kind of memorial that he would have preferred. The ensuing ceremony for Pvt. Lemon, it appears, was brief and without incident.
-William Gladley, Untitled James Marion Biography, Draft
***
Early the following week Gladley returned home from the grocery store to find a copy of the next month’s Latitude in his mailbox. Attached to the front cover was a note from Benn Zander: Was given advance copy by P. Bloom. Thought you’d want to read first. –NBZ.
Gladley took the stairs to his apartment two at a time, examining the cover. The front of the issue was occupied by Loomis Dean’s iconic portrait of Marion, bare-chested on his property in Gaul. White text at the bottom advertised the accompanying piece: “Marion, 20 Years After. Featuring passages from the forthcoming Perch biography.”
Gladley hastily cleared his kitchen table and opened the magazine to the piece; Benn Zander had marked it with a scrap of red paper. The excerpts occupied eleven pages of the issue, presented without additional photographs and broken only by a few phrases that had been removed from their context and enlarged for emphasis. He finished in just under a half-hour, breathed deeply, and read it again. Having gone through it a second time, Gladley decided that he needed some air and walked, dazed, out of the building.
He often lit a cigarette and walked without direction in his neighborhood, appreciative of whatever clarity the break from his manuscript could bring him. Currently, however, his thoughts were addled, and after a few blocks he rushed impatiently home. Back in the apartment, he dialed Benn Zander’s office number. He answered almost immediately.
“Hello?”
“Nathan, what can you find out about the Perch pages?”
“Will? You got the magazine?”
“Bloom knows the author, doesn’t he? Would he tell you? In confidence?”
Benn Zander hesitated, alarmed slightly by the urgency in Gladley’s voice.
“I’m not sure that he does. It seems like Perch is really taking precautions. They’re not talking to anyone. But how was the piece? I’m dying to know.”
Gladley, staring straight ahead, remained unresponsive, holding the receiver limply, as if he had forgotten its function.
“Jesus, Will,” Benn Zander said. “What’s the matter? Was it good?”
“Yes,” he responded flatly.
The previous night Gladley had reached a milestone on the project. As he had conceived of it, the biography would be divided into three major portions: Marion’s childhood and early life, through his service in the War until the publication of his first stories; his prime years in upstate New York, where his first six novels were composed; and finally his seclusion in Leòn and accidental death. It was an elegant arc, and had made sense to Gladley when he began. The night before he had completed the draft of the second section, leaving only Marion’s time in Northern California to be completed by February. Benn Zander had come over with a bottle of wine to celebrate, motivated more by his relief than Gladley’s compulsion to memorialize the event. He realized now that Benn Zander must have slipped the magazine into his mailbox on his way out, as a surprise.
After failing – or, rather, refusing – to articulate the experience of reading the passages to Benn Zander on the phone, Gladley realized that he was unable to diagnose exactly what about it had unnerved him. The pages were succinct and elegantly written, but it was the insight they contained that seemed the most material. Although not presented in a strict chronology, the excerpts described the period before Marion wrote the three loosely interconnected novels that would be his last work written on the Gaul property. Although this time of peak productivity was frequently discussed, the Perch author made connections that had evaded Gladley, pulled quotations that contextualized Marion’s motives in a way that made the man seem nakedly, almost uncomfortably exposed. Gladley knew that it put all of the existing scholarship to shame, and he was sure that no one he knew could have written it.
At his desk, Gladley fed a sheet of paper into his typewriter, tightened the roller, and looked at the blank page dispassionately. He repeated his exercise every day that week. He planned to return the magazine to Benn Zander the next day, but the damage had been done. At the end of the piece, Latitude’s editor, Peter Bloom, had included a short addendum: “Text is printed courtesy of Perch Press, excerpted from a currently untitled biography to be released in May of this year. The passages that will appear in next month’s issue concern James Marion’s relocation to California, where he wrote his final novel.”
As Gladley spent the next few days doubled over his boxes, endlessly reorganizing and reviewing his sources, the idea of beginning the last third of his manuscript at that time seemed increasingly preposterous. When Benn Zander called, he apologized for his irregular behavior, and assured him that he was making progress. That Friday, he decided that the manuscript could not be finished until he investigated a few avenues that he had overlooked, put on his coat, and hurried out of his building and onto the street.
A block away from the public library, Gladley purchased a cup of coffee from a newsvendor and was startled to see James Marion surveying him with detachment, as if he had seen Gladley before and was not impressed. Consulting his watch, Gladley realized that it was the first Tuesday of the month; Latitude had been released for public consumption that morning. The proprietor of the stand saw him eying the expensive magazine and asked him if he would like anything else. Gladley told him politely that he was fine, paid for his coffee, and walked away, slightly bothered by the gaze he still felt at his back.
In the weeks since he had first read the Perch pages, Gladley had temporarily abandoned his apartment as a writing studio and relocated to a carrel in the city’s public library. He felt that the familiar boxes of source material linked him too strictly to what he had already written and were subverting his attempts to conceive of a suitable third section for his book. He would return to them when he understood how to approach the final act of Marion’s life in a way that would not be made instantly obsolete when the next month’s Latitude came out.
To this end it was still Gladley’s conviction – as it had been the instant he had synthesized the excerpts from the magazine – that he had to speak with the author. So far, the most direct attempts had proved unsuccessful. At his urging, Benn Zander had called his friend Peter Bloom and practically begged him for information that might lead to the source. Bloom’s response, as expected, had been a dead end; according to him, not only did no one at his publication have any inkling of who had written the passages, but it was also entirely possible that no one at Perch knew either. Apparently Bloom had looked into the issue a bit himself, and had heard from a source there that all of Perch’s correspondence with the author was done through the mail, which was directed to a P.O. Box. When Gladley had asked Benn Zander where the P.O. Box was located, he had just laughed, assuming that he was joking.
In his regular carrel, Gladley began methodically working through every available piece of biographical writing and criticism on Marion. From his preparation and drafting of the first two thirds of his book, he was already familiar with much of it. Reading it now, though, he was able to take the material in as if for the first time, his focus no longer on the man being discussed but on the lapses and blemishes that gave the writing distinction, the moments that quietly betrayed the objectivity the authors assumed.
With his copy of Latitude immovable in front of him, he was able to rule the majority out immediately. The author of the first proper biography written after Marion’s death, for instance, had been dead for years. Gladley knew that many of the academics that had published on him only once or twice lacked the resources or free time to take on a project of this scope. Many more were simply too adequate: unremarkable and unnecessary writers whose work had no more in common with the Perch pages than they did with Marion’s own muscular fiction. Gladley had begun a list, but the days passed quickly, and it remained short.
Abruptly, Gladley realized that only a week remained until the next issue of Latitude would be in newsstands. Apparently whoever had the task of fielding Gladley’s repeated calls to the magazine’s offices had spoken to Peter Bloom and connected the dots, because Benn Zander had been told that he would not be receiving an advance copy that month. That information, like all of Benn Zander’s recent attempts to reach out to Gladley, had been ignored or missed, contributing to the accumulation of concern symbolized by the blinking light on his answering machine. Gladley’s apprehensions were more pressing; despite his near-constant presence in the library poring over any writing that, at this point, related even tangentially to Marion, he still lacked any promising leads on the origins of the Perch pages. The previous day, he had eliminated a professor of American literature at Stanford due to a simile that he considered incongruous with the anonymous author’s style. The day before it was a Canadian literary theorist who had employed a serial comma, conspicuously absent from a list of Marion’s preferred writing utensils in one of the Perch passages. Frustrated and bleary-eyed, he returned home.
It was then, in his apartment, that Gladley realized that it had been several months since he had read, un-fragmented and free from commentary, one of James Marion’s books. It was only after several minutes, moving his useless boxes of notes aside, that he located one. It was Marion’s last, the only one composed in Leòn, and Gladley read it in a single sitting, as he had when he was seventeen. When he had finished, he knew he wouldn’t sleep.
***
I’ll be brief. This story is, like any story – or at least like any of mine – an attempt to write what I’m sure about. If critics have noted certain similarities in my books and certain tendencies in the way my characters behave, they don’t have to wonder why anymore. Some writers, I’m told, are compelled to use their instrument to pose questions that can’t be answered. Sometimes I’m told that I’m one of them. This is a misconception. I’ve always been of the opinion that if I were truly unsure of something, it wouldn’t be terribly honest of me to write it down and print up a couple hundred thousand copies. Another misconception, just as wrong and certainly more pervasive, is that real certainties aren’t worth memorializing. When I see certainty, I tend to build a temple to it. In my best moments, I can occasionally be sure about the things that are pleasant to hear about on a warm day or when we’re in love. Sometimes I see certainty in the really agonizing things, and I write those down too. Most of all, though, I find it in the landscape. I see it best where the Smith River breaks the Sierra Nevadas, and the whole Cordillera stands in martial posture, with banks like broad shoulders and hills like epaulets.
James Gladley, Nothing Was Sent For, Preface
***
Gladley had ruled Pointreau out as a possibility early on, after a brief period of entertaining the idea that he had written the Perch book as a sort of secret penance for a career built upon vulgarity. Attractive as the idea was, he had quickly deemed it implausible. Gladley had now gone over a month without attending one of Pointreau’s lectures, and he realized that he missed them. He was an appealing foil, in spite of the fact that he had no idea who Gladley was.
The bus stopped at a red light, square with a corner magazine stand. Behind plexiglass, almost level with Gladley, was the cover of the most recent issue of Latitude, a black and white photo of Marion’s former property in Leòn. He glanced at it neutrally as the light changed and the bus pulled away. With the mystery imploded, there was no longer any reason to obsess over it as he might have a week before. In his hand was his copy of Nothing Was Sent For. In the past week it had been marked up almost to the point of illegibility; this was the case with every one of Marion’s books that he owned. Phonemes were circled and connected with spindly lines that cut across pages; the incidence of punctuation marks had been noted in the margins. The Perch Pages in the previous month’s issue of Latitude, now badly tattered in his apartment, bore nearly identical markings. He fitted the slim volume carefully into his back pocket as he stepped down from the bus.
Walking to the lecture hall, Gladley paused by an empty office with Pointreau’s name on the door. He extracted a pad of paper and carefully took down the number on the doorframe; he wanted to be sure that the boxes would be addressed properly. Gladley was almost an hour late for Pointreau’s class, and, when he arrived, was not surprised to find the doors closed tightly. The oak paneling, distinguished as it was, insulated sound poorly. By putting his ear to the doors, Gladley was able to hear Pointreau with surprising clarity; he was contending that J. Edgar Hoover had put Marion under government surveillance in the 1950s due to connections with Castro’s government. Gladley took a step back and knocked twice. Through the doors he heard a low murmuring, followed by an inaudible comment from Pointreau. Gladley knocked again. After a moment that seemed perfectly silent, a sharp set of footsteps approached the doors, and after a moment, they were opened in front of him.
Pointreau looked Gladley in the eyes before he spoke.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Gladley.”
“There are only twenty minutes left in my class, Mr. Gladley,” he said. “I’m very curious as to why you might choose to arrive at this moment.”
The next day, when Benn Zander went to unlock his office, he noticed a note taped to his door. It read: Had to go. Will try to finish on deadline. -Gladley
The note had been written on a piece of thin paper torn on two of its edges. Examining it closely, Benn Zander could see that a few lines of smudged type bled faintly through from the other side. He flipped it over and read them carefully. After a moment, Benn Zander realized that it was a quote of Marion’s, taken from one of the few formal interviews he had ever given; Gladley must have used his photocopy as scrap paper. If he recalled correctly, the reporter had asked Marion if he would ever attempt a work of nonfiction. The text on the back of Gladley’s note was his response:
“I take a sort of pleasure in understanding the lives of my characters, but there’s nothing at stake because really they’re all me – they belong to me. With other people, it can’t be the same. When you talk to someone real, you distort, you make inferences. Sometimes you tell the truth. But when you talk about someone, or worse, if you have the audacity to write about them, the first two are sins and the last is not possible.”
Benn Zander folded the paper and placed it in his pocket before walking back into his office and dialing Gladley’s home. He was not surprised when a recording told him that the number was no longer in service.
***
Will,
I would write that I hope this letter finds you well, but that would, perhaps, betray a shade more confidence than is warranted. I hope that this letter finds you.
I’m sure you thought that the decision to leave as suddenly as you did would be incomprehensible to someone of my temperament, and I assume that the note you left for me is your way of acknowledging this. In a way, you’re right, but I still wish you had been able to give me a bit more credit. I know that if you thought that his letter were an appeal for you to come back, you wouldn’t have read this far, and I’ll choose to respect that. I’m writing you because we have business, because I hope that you’ll respond in kind, but mostly because it would be wrong not to.
I should say immediately that I received the manuscript you sent me, and although I’m not sure exactly what statement you meant to make, or if you intended for me to read it at all, I did. If that parcel is how you’re choosing to end our business on the Marion project – which I assume to be the case – then I’ll conclude it now. This is, verbatim, what was sent out to legal on Monday:
The manuscript received, author William Gladley, working title Embarcadero, has been duly considered for publication and declined. Although technically submitted on deadline, numerous contractual conditions were unfulfilled by manuscript as submitted. These include but are not limited to: page count, proper sourcing and attribution, editorial oversight, and factual accuracy. Intended as a multidimensional biography of the novelist James Marion, the piece contains clear indications of authorial perspective, and is written in a disjointed narrative style. Author has been unresponsive to repeated requests to schedule editorial conference.
Fair warning. I’m not sure how they’ll choose to proceed, but honestly, I doubt that the advance was enough for them to make too much noise over. I do want to say that I’d like you to seriously consider sending me what you had written before you left, if you haven’t gotten rid of it already. It was shaping up to be a damn good book, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t trust you with it.
Finally – and I’m not sure exactly how to address this – I wanted to write something about the rumors that have reached me so far. If you’re reading this, then I’ve guessed correctly and you’re in Leòn. I won’t presume to understand exactly the nature of the connection you feel with James Marion, but I do know how shaken up you were in the weeks before you left, and I know how much pressure you were under.
Even though I haven’t hesitated to defend you, I can’t say that I’ve been as confident as I wanted to be in refuting some of the things that people have said. God knows that whatever you said to that hack Pointreau didn’t help. All I’m asking is for you to think logically. You were too young, maybe, to remember the way they paraded Marion’s body around when they finally fished it out of the bay, but I’m not. I know you’ve seen those photos, Will, and they leave no room for interpretation.
That’s all I have to say, really. I’ve felt a little ridiculous writing this, and I hope you won’t take anything I’ve written the wrong way.
Your friend,
NBZ
***
Gladley walked into town the long way, through the scrubby growth behind the boarding house and along the train tracks – the same route he had walked the day before. It was surprisingly arid at this time of year, and if a car came along the dirt road while he walked on the shoulder, it would kick up enough dust to make him cough. Over his shoulder, a couple of fisherman were setting up their rods on the embarcadero.
He arrived at the Post Office just before noon. The man behind the counter watched him come in.
“About to take lunch.”
“That’s fine,” Gladley replied. “I came in around five-thirty yesterday, with a package to send back East. I just wanted to know if it went out.”
“Yeah, it went out,” the man said.
“Thanks.”
As he turned to walk back out, the man remembered something and called out.
“Your name Gladley?”
“Yes. I’m Gladley.”
“There’s a package here for you.”
Gladley walked back to the counter, puzzled. The man went into the back room, and returned after a minute with a box. He slid it to Gladley, who recognized it immediately as one of the collapsible cardboard containers that he had mailed to Pointreau’s office before leaving a month earlier. It surprised him that Pointreau had taken the time to find out his name; Gladley had written only “Leòn, CA” and a zip code as a return address. On the top of the box, covered over in packing tape, was a note in Pointreau’s handwriting. It read: Please do not contact me again.
“Do you have a box cutter?” Gladley asked the man. “I haven’t got one at home.”
Wordlessly, he handed the tool to Gladley. Kneeling in the center of the floor of the Post Office, he cut the box open carefully. His old notes filled it to the brim – sheets of notebook paper and photos and article clippings nearly spilling over. Gripping the sides, Gladley stared deeply into the box of paper, hoping, like any sincere purveyor of another man’s truth, to see his reflection.