U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

Back in his garage apartment, Jon took a few minutes to decide where to hide the Mauser. He finally went into the bathroom and unscrewed the plumbing-access panel. He wrapped the gun and ammunition in an old towel and pushed it into the gap on the right, snug against the underbelly of the tub. He returned to his desk feeling fresh and renewed. Again, he raided his father’s study, this time taking out William Faulkner’s Light in August. Typing the first ten pages taught him something about the power of language in the hands of someone utterly in control. Faulkner was extravagant, while Hemingway was spare. The stylistic differences seemed appropriate to the tale each was trying to tell. While Hemingway stripped away, Faulkner painted layer on layer, using long, lavish sentences. Neither narrative voice was natural to Jon, but at least he was beginning to understand range and tone.

Jon had a stack of Playboy magazines, dating back to the first of the year. The girls all had perfect bodies, but they seemed brainless to him. What difference did it make how big their tits were when the girls themselves were shallow, egotistical, and self-involved? Yeah, right. Like he’d really turn one down as unworthy of him. Since he didn’t have a prayer of meeting any of them in real life, he might as well enjoy the illusion of them as lush, sensual, and available. Leafing back through the January issue, he got sidetracked by a Ray Bradbury short story called “The Lost City of Mars” and after that, the second part of a new Len Deighton spy novel called An Expensive Place to Die. Now he’d seen two more writers with entirely different literary effects.

His first few stabs at fiction were erratic, prose that fell flat and ideas that died in half a page. The problem, as he saw it, was that he had nothing to draw on. He’d done a lot of reading, but he didn’t have firsthand experience at much of anything. The only job he’d had was the unpaid babysitting he’d done for the Amazing Mona. Weekends, he caddied at the club, but aside from the intelligence gleaned, it was mostly step-and-fetch-it stuff—cleaning club heads and humping golf bags up hill and down. He’d had no travel adventures, no athletic triumphs, no physical challenges to overcome. Well, the latter wasn’t quite true. He’d been a fat boy and he remembered how shitty that was. He thought it best to avoid stories about prowlers lest he seem too well informed.

He wrote part of a short story based on a notion he had about a kid contaminated by radiation, who turned into a zombie and infected his entire family before his dad shot him dead. He ran out of steam in the middle of that one because he couldn’t think where to go with it. He wrote a mawkish essay about loneliness that struck him as funny when he read it the next day—not quite what he was hoping to achieve. He wanted to write about a kid seduced by his tennis instructor, but that wasn’t exactly an area of expertise. The tennis pro at the club had put her hand over his once, showing him how the face of the racket should feel on contact with the ball, but that was as close to having sex as he’d come, so to speak.

The best part of writing, at least the best part of trying to write, was that it allowed him to spend time alone, tuned to the static in his head. Once in a while a line came through, like an unexpected message from the outer limits of the universe. He recorded those isolated images and phrases, wondering if one day there might be more. At the end of the week he didn’t have much to show for his time, but he gathered up what he’d done and stuck the sheaf of papers in a file folder that he handed to Mr. Snow, who said, “Have a seat.”

Jon sat down in the front row, looking on self-consciously while Mr. Snow went through his pages.

“What’s this about? You plagiarized Hemingway?”

“I typed a couple of chapters as warm-up. I tried Faulkner, too. You told me to bring everything so I did.”

Mr. Snow rolled his eyes and read on.

Jon watched his face, but he had no idea how his work was being received. When Mr. Snow was done, he straightened the pages, lined up the edges, put them in the folder, and handed it back.

He didn’t make a comment so Jon was finally forced to clear his throat and say, “So what do you think?”

“As a general rule, beginning, middle, and end are nice, but at least you kept at it. Go back and try something else.”

“Like what? I mean, I’m really having trouble coming up with stuff.”

“Fancy that.”

Jon went back to work. He wrote at night, usually until three, when he fell into bed. In the morning he slept late. At lunchtime he showered and dressed and headed over to Walker’s house at the top of Bergstrom Hill, half a mile from his house. If he kept to the winding streets, the travel time was five minutes by scooter, but Jon found another route, skirting the Ravine along its easternmost edge, putt-putting along the bridle paths that formed a warren of meandering trails. It required his crossing one two-lane road, but there was scarcely ever any traffic. Late afternoons he’d spend forty minutes lifting free weights in Mona’s home gym and then do a long run of six or seven miles. After that he’d shower, put on his slippers and sweats, and sit down at his desk. For most meals he ate cold cereal or Top Ramen, which was all he could afford after the money he’d spent on furnishings.