The Hook Page 21

  The second Tuesday in April, and the second day he’d eaten a lunch made by Mrs. Hildebrand. A widow in her late sixties, Mrs. Hildebrand had for years been a nutritionist in a private school up near the Massachusetts line. She now had a small income and no nearby family and had been living in a rather grungy apartment in Danbury. She was a quiet woman, unlikely to intrude, and she understood the job well. Cook and clean for a divorced man who worked at home, receive a small wage to supplement her Social Security, also get room and board, have one day off a week—they’d settled on Thursday, for no particular reason—and keep to herself unless Bryce wanted company, which was unlikely to happen. She was a reader (he suspected she was a fan, though she was too discreet to gush), and there was a television set in her room, so she could fill her idle time at least as well here as in that apartment in Danbury.

  There was room in the attached garage for Mrs. Hildebrand’s little orange Honda Civic, in which she would do the grocery shopping for the house from now on. Not the least of the benefits of his having hired Mrs. Hildebrand was the fact there was no longer any chance he might actually run into Marcia Rierdon again one day. He would have to tell Wayne, next time he saw him, how grateful he was for the suggestion.

  His meals were much better now, with Mrs. Hildebrand in the house. Today, feeling comfortably full—feeling comfortable, in fact—he strolled up to the pool after lunch, and was roaming around it, thinking about swimming, not thinking about anything but swimming, when the cellular phone in his hip pocket rang. He stood at the end of the pool, by the brackets for the diving board he never used, but which for some reason he always had them install again every spring when they opened the pool—maybe because the brackets would be ugly without the board—and pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Hello?”

  “Bryce. Joe. How we doing?”

  “Oh, well, slow, you know how it is. Getting there, I guess.”

  “Okay, I didn’t call to nag. I called because they sent over the interview, which I think looks terrific.”

  “Oh, good.” Bryce had been a little worried about that, not at all sure he’d handled those questions well. It was a relief to hear Joe say it looked good.

  “But you should go over it, too,” Joe told him. “And I’d like an excuse to get out of the city for a day.”

  “Out of the city?”

  “I’m asking you to invite me up for the day tomorrow,” Joe explained. “I’ll drive up in the morning, we’ll go over the interview together, and I’ll drive back.”

  He wants to see the work in progress, Bryce thought, but he can’t see it. But even as he tried to find a way to get out of this he knew there was no way out. “That sounds great,” he said. “What time will you get here?”

  “Around eleven, that okay?”

  “Perfect,” Bryce said, and went back down to the house to tell Mrs. Hildebrand there would be two for lunch tomorrow.

  * * *

  Bryce read the interview before lunch, while Joe chatted with Mrs. Hildebrand in the kitchen. She was much more voluble with Joe than with Bryce, but of course the relationship was different.

  The other things Joe had brought were the advance reviews of Two Faces in the Mirror, from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. As Joe said, “They’re both very positive, very upbeat, glad to have you back, but as usual PW gives us more quotable quotes than Kirkus.”

  “Just so they like it,” Bryce said, and was very pleased that both did.

  He was also pleased by the interview. He was sure Wayne had edited his answers, had smoothed out some of the rambling, made the points a little clearer. At this distance, weeks later, he couldn’t remember exactly which of these sentences he’d actually said and which were improved paraphrases from Wayne. In any event, he was happy with the interview and he was sure Wayne had never entirely misquoted him, which is to say he’d never changed Bryce’s meaning to some opinion of his own.

  He said as much to Joe, over Mrs. Hildebrand’s cold shrimp salad with arugula, and Joe said, “You think he kept the tone, though.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Maybe tidied it up a little bit, here and there.”

  “Well, I think that’s natural,” Bryce said. “You wouldn’t want something that sounds like a police transcript.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Bryce peered at Joe, who was looking grim. “Something wrong? The salad?”

  “Lunch is terrific, Bryce,” Joe assured him. “You were smart to hire Mrs. Hildebrand.”

  “It was Wayne’s idea.”

  “Well, he was right,” Joe said. “No point living here like a gold miner in the Yukon.”

  Laughing, Bryce said, “I was never that bad. I get out, I have a full social life.”

  “Are you still seeing that girl Isabelle?”

  “She went back to Spain,” Bryce said. “What do you think, should we have a glass of white wine with this?”

  “Not for me.” Joe put down his fork, and shook his head, and looked over at the windows, with their view up toward the pool. “You know I don’t like to nag,” he said.

  “We both don’t like it, Joe,” Bryce told him, smiling, hoping to deflect this.

  “You’ve been off your feed for a long time, Bryce,” Joe said, and now he did look at Bryce, and Bryce was startled and displeased to see how concerned Joe was. “For over a year,” Joe said. “Maybe two years.”

  “You know the divorce made me crazy,” Bryce reminded him. “And then Lucie getting killed like that, it was a real shock.”

  “I know it was. But I don’t think you’re getting over it.”

  “Of course I am,” Bryce said. “That was months ago, last year, for God’s sake. And you know, by that point, she wasn’t my favorite person.”

  “Then why aren’t you getting work done?”

  “I am getting work done,” Bryce insisted. “What about Two Faces?”

  Joe shook his head. “Bryce, you were stuck in that one for a long time and you know it, over a year.”

  “I got it done, didn’t I?”

  “You had to call Wayne in to focus you,” Joe said, “help you get moving, keep you on track. He had a lot to do with that book, and you know that’s true.”

  “Of course he did.” Bryce spread his hands. “I never denied it, not to you.” Grinning, he gestured at the clippings of the reviews on the table beside them and said, “If somebody from PW called and asked me about Wayne, I’d deny it, naturally, I would. But I’ve always told you, Wayne was a lifesaver on that book. It’s just what you said, he kept me focused.”

  “What about the new book? Are you focused on that?”

  Mrs. Hildebrand came in, hesitant, hands folded at her waist, expression worried. “Is something wrong with the salad?”

  They’d both stopped eating, some time ago. Now both hurriedly picked up their forks, assured Mrs. Hildebrand the salad was delicious, they’d just been involved in their conversation, the lunch was really wonderful. When she at last stopped looking worried, and smiled instead, Bryce said, “Actually, it’s too good to have without a glass of white wine. Joe?”

  “Not for me, thanks.”

  “Just me, then,” Bryce said, and they went back to eating until she’d returned, happy again, with Bryce’s wine. He sipped from it, ate some more shrimp salad, and when she’d left the dining room Joe said, “Tell me something about the new book.”

  “You know I don’t like to do that,” Bryce said. “You can kill a book by talking about it before it’s done.”

  “I know that,” Joe agreed, “and you know, usually, I wouldn’t ask. But I just don’t think you are in focus, Bryce. I think you’re still distracted. I’m speaking as your friend now, and as your friend, I can’t take vague answers any more about the book, how it’s slow, but it’s progressing, but it’s slow. How slow is it? How much of it is done?”

  “Joe, I really don’t want to talk about a book I’m still—”

  “How many pages?”

  “
Joe, you shouldn’t press me on a book that—”

  “I’m not asking you about plot, or setting, or characters, or title even. You can’t kill a book by telling me how many pages exist.”

  “Call it superstition, Joe, but—”

  “I call it evasion, Bryce.”

  Bryce frowned at Joe, who was looking very grim and not at all like a friend. “Joe,” he said, “why do you want to make an issue? We get along, I’ve never threatened to go anywhere else—”

  “Are you threatening now?”

  “Of course not.” Of course he wasn’t. But he wanted to do whatever was necessary to get Joe to back off. Leave this alone. Let me work it out, leave me alone.

  But Joe wouldn’t. He said, “How many pages?”

  “All right,” Bryce said, “the truth is, I’m embarrassed to tell you, because it isn’t very many at all. It has been slow, but it’s getting better and I—”

  “How many pages?”

  “I don’t want to tell you, Joe.”

  Joe sat back. Once again, they’d both forgotten their salads. Joe said, “Is it printed out?”

  “No, it’s on discs. Disc.”

  Joe picked up that plural: “Discs?”

  “Disc. One disc.”

  “Print out the last page you’ve done.”

  Bryce stared at him. “Why? Why would I do that?”

  “To prove to me it exists,” Joe said.

  “Goddam it, Joe, now I have to prove the book exists?”

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we both know it doesn’t.”

  Bryce remained defiant a few seconds more, and then he sagged back in the chair, defeated. “I have outlines,” he said.

  “Outlines.”

  “I haven’t been—Yes, you’re right, it’s a question of focus. I haven’t been able to focus, I’ve done some outlines, story ideas, they’re on discs, I haven’t been able to pick the one I want to do. Focus on.”

  “But these really exist.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bryce said. “They’re all there, they’re labeled and everything, I just haven’t felt like going back, you know, not yet, look them over, winnow them out, you know, pick the right one to do next.”

  “Could I see them?”

  Bryce sat up straighter. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You could winnow them. I don’t know how many there are, but a bunch of them. I tell you what, after lunch, why not look them over? Pick out two or three or whatever, and say, ‘Here, Bryce, concentrate on one of these.’ And then I’ll get to work, I swear I will.”

  “Good,” Joe said.

  * * *

  There was a two-person wooden bench they kept beside the pool in the summer, midway down one long side. In the winter it was kept with the other pool furniture in the poolhouse, but Bryce dragged it out now, put it in its summer position, and sat there to look at the pool and think about May.

  He didn’t actually remember any of those story ideas, not a one of them. He hoped Joe would find a few of them useful, anyway, because he really did want to get back to work in earnest. It had been so long since he’d actually written anything, not since Two Faces.

  Well, no. Farther back than that.

  I have to do it again, he thought, I have to get started again, because that’s the only person I can be. I’m just drifting around here, I’m not anybody, I’m not even the ghost of somebody, I’m just empty. I’m like a model airplane with a rubber band in it to run the propeller, and the rubber band broke. I can feel it broken in there. I’ve got to get it back, I’ve got to get it fixed.

  When Joe came up to the pool, he still looked grim. Bryce had been hoping he’d have a smile on his face, he’d say, “This one or that one is just the thing. Get started, Bryce!” But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Joe sat beside him on the bench, his feet just touching the stone walk, and gazed at the pool cover. Bryce waited for him to say something, anything at all, but Joe just sat there, so finally Bryce said, “None of them any good, huh?”

  Joe let out a long breath. He said, “You aren’t in any kind of therapy, are you.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.

  Not another one, Bryce thought, thinking of his lawyer, Fred Silver, and his belief that there was a professional of some sort waiting out there to deal with whatever contingency might arise. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “I know somebody in New York—”

  “No, Joe.”

  Joe looked briefly at him, then stared at the pool cover again. “May I ask why not?”

  The answer was, the only way a therapist can help you is if you tell the truth, but Bryce couldn’t tell the truth to anybody, not to a therapist, not to Joe, not to anybody. He said, “I just don’t want to do it. I don’t see the need for it.”

  Joe glanced at him again, and away. “Wayne,” he said, “played part of the interview tape for me.”

  What was this? Some new attack, but what about? Bryce, wary, said, “I already know what he did there isn’t word for word what I said.”

  “It isn’t anything you said,” Joe told him. He looked at Bryce, and away. “Wayne told me in confidence, because he’s worried about you. He didn’t know what to do, and he knows I’m your friend, so he played it for me.”

  “And what was wrong with it?”

  “It made no sense,” Joe told him. “That entire written interview is Wayne, he wrote the whole thing.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “But—Why?”

  “Because you weren’t saying anything anybody could use, or respond to, or understand. It was like the storylines on all those discs. Twenty-four discs of gibberish, Bryce.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Come on back to the house, let’s look at a few of them.”

  Suddenly afraid, Bryce said, “No!”

  “No?” Joe looked directly at him, tried to hold Bryce’s eye. “Why not?”

  Now it was Bryce who stared at the pool cover. “I don’t feel I want to see them,” he said. “If you don’t think they’re any good, what’s the point in my—”

  “You aren’t tracking, and you don’t know you aren’t tracking,” Joe told him. “You can’t go on this way, Bryce, you really can’t.”

  “I’ll be all right, Joe,” Bryce said.

  “You won’t see a therapist?”

  “No! I don’t want to, and I don’t need to, and no.”

  Joe nodded, then got to his feet, and moved a little away. Looking down at the gray stone walk, and the fresh grass growing beside it, he said, “The book you aren’t working on is the final one in your current contract.”

  “I never pay attention to things like that, you know I don’t.”

  “Jerry Mossman does.”

  “He’s my agent, he’s supposed to watch that sort of thing.”

  “Because Two Faces was so late,” Joe told him, “this next book, the one you aren’t writing, is also late. Just over a year past the delivery date in the contract.”

  “Joe, we’ve never worried about crap like that. You know I always—”

  “Not any more,” Joe said. He turned to look at Bryce, and it occurred to Bryce that Joe had deliberately decided to stay at a safe distance. “If you don’t do something, Bryce,” he said, “and do it now, something to convince me you’re being helped, or you no longer need help, next Monday I’m going to inform Jerry Mossman you’re in breach of contract, that we no longer have confidence in your capability to produce any more novels, and that we are canceling the contract and will demand the return of all advances.”

  Bryce stood, and Joe backed a step. Bryce said, “Joe, you can’t do that, you can’t mean that.”

  Joe said, “I think I’m your friend, Bryce, and I hate like hell to be such a hardnose bastard, but I’m worried about you and I think it’s up to me to force you to get help. I’ve taken one of the discs, it’s called ‘Kyrgyzstan,’ do you
remember it?”

  “I don’t remember any of them.”

  “If we have to go to court,” Joe said, “I’ll produce that, and the tape of Wayne’s interview.”

  “Joe, please!”

  “Will you get help?”

  Desperate, floundering, searching in this darkness for a way out, Bryce shouted, “Wayne!”

  Joe said, “What?”

  “Wayne,” Bryce said, more calmly. “He helped me once before, didn’t he? He got me on track once before. I’ll call him, I’ll call him today, I’ll call him right now, before you leave! I’ll ask him, help me again. He’ll get me on track, you know he will. I can work if I have Wayne with me.”

  Joe thought about it, then slowly nodded. “We’ll ask him,” he said. “If he agrees, we’ll try it. If he doesn’t agree—”

  “He’ll agree!”

  “All right, let’s phone.”

  They got the answering machine. Bryce left a message.

  Twenty-eight

  When Wayne got back to the apartment after his after-lunch jog in Central Park, there was a message for him on the answering machine: “Hi, Wayne, I’m at home in Connecticut, I’m here with Joe, we both want to talk to you as soon as possible, give us a call, okay, buddy?” Bryce sounded overly happy, manic, almost feverish. And he’d never called Wayne “buddy” before.

  Was this about the interview? Had it been a mistake after all to play the tape for Joe? It had seemed like the safest thing to do at the time.

  The more Wayne had listened to that tape, trying to find something usable in it, the more he’d realized just how unstable Bryce had become. And could you count on an unstable person to do the best thing for himself ? To take the best advice, even from a first wife? Bryce knew his Ellen was right, his public confession of Lucie’s murder would be devastating for his children, but was he still sensible enough to act on that knowledge? Or would he suddenly go veering off, uncontrollable, destroying everything and everybody in spite of himself ?