Dead Men Don't Blog: A John Ray Mystery - Chapter 6

Since Max Vox's call had gotten my day off to such an early start, I had plenty of time and decided to walk the twelve blocks to our meeting.

Apart from a flickering moment upon hanging up the phone, I never really thought to ignore his invitation. Sure, it had been a long time, and things ended badly. But it was all history now, as far as I was concerned. That guy who may or may not have had a beef with Max was long gone, out of print. I was no longer a novelist nor aspired to be. Just a regular mug with bills to pay, trying to make a buck. Besides, I wasn't too happy that someone had paid an uninvited visit to my apartment yesterday, and I felt pretty sure that Max had something to do with it. Or knew who did.

The morning was cool and bright, but the air had a bit of tang to it, something almost palatable but not quite, like Ivan Karamazov showing up at a Bible study group. In spite of that, things were starting to seem more like Gogol than Dostoyevsky to me. I bought an 89-cent pack of Teaberry Chewing Gum from a newspaper vendor with a hump, began a thoughtful mastication of two pieces, and continued uptown.

The Café Denouement was a swanky joint frequented by literary types, courtesy of Max Vox's years of patronage. He held court there in his own private upstairs dining room, conducting business with publishers, agents, editors, and – if the star power was of the proper magnitude – the occasional writer.

I avoided the place like the plague, naturally. It struck me as the grotesque, leering totem that represented everything that was cheap and disingenuous and rummy about the business, the whole self-congratulating masquerade that is book publishing. Sour grapes? Yeah, maybe. Maybe deep down I wished it was me having my picture taken sipping tea with Max instead J.K. Rowling. Maybe I wanted to be the one slamming glasses of chilled Stoli with Max instead of Gary Shteyngart. Maybe you never really get over that solitary sucker's daydream.

An oily-looking maître d' with a comb-over led me upstairs to Max's throne room, which was outfitted like some Temple to the Literary Gods: signed photographs of every Nobel Prize winner in literature for the last 25 years, seated next to Max, of course (with the lone exception of Elfriede Jelinek, who probably wouldn't have gotten along too well with a fellow like Max, anyway). First editions by all of them, as best I could tell, lined the room's shelves. Someone had set the air conditioning to "Arctic"; the place was colder than Gore Vidal at a Norman Mailer festschrift.

Max sat 12 o'clock, pashalike, at a round table replicating the Algonquin's. I fake-coughed my way through a laugh, taken with the notion of Max trying to hold his own with Dorothy Parker. She'd have sliced him up like sushi-grade tuna, that one. Though I have to admit, Max had a look of Alexander Woolcott about him these days. Or more accurately, Orson Welles in The Alexander Woolcott Story. Several bolts of gabardine had been slain to craft the suit swaddling him. He wore a dove-gray, felt Borsalino hat big enough for Truman Capote to bathe in.

"So good of you to come, Mr. Ray," Max blustered, making no effort to stand or shake my hand. That was okay, I knew my place. I took the 3 o'clock chair at the table. Too close and I was afraid Max might not be able to swivel that gigantic head of his enough to look at me.

"What can I do for you, Max?"

"Straight to the point! I like that, sir. You are a businessman now, Mr. Ray, as am I. Time and experience has 'sharpened your prose,' as they say. Won't you have a drink?"

"A bit early, even for me, Max."

"A breakfast smoothie, perhaps?"

"No thanks. My insides wouldn't know what hit 'em."

"Things ended badly between us, Mr. Ray," he waved the waiter away. "That has never ceased to trouble me. I considered you a son, a literary progeny."

"And yet you put me in a basket and abandoned me in the forest. Some parenting."

"True, Mr. Ray, sadly true. I put business before loyalty."

"Forget I said that. You didn't owe me anything, Max. You never did, and you still don't. Ancient history." I was beginning to feel like this history wasn't so ancient though, this last day and a half.

"Do you enjoy your line of work these days, Mr. Ray?" His hand resting on the table looked like a big Danish with five crescent rolls attached.

"Max, you told me that I'd be interested in something that you had to say. That hasn't come to fruition." I slid my chair back.

"I think the time has come to publish The Riders, dear fellow."

I stared at that immense monstrosity of a hand resting atop the table. Watching it, like it was somehow disconnected from him, its own engorged sentient being that might go waddling off in search of the waiter when Max's coffee cup needed refilling.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Max," I said.

"The Riders, Mr. Ray. If Miss Dashwood, whom I am sure has established contact with you, has not broached the subject yet, whatever reason she has stated for engaging you is merely a pretext, I assure you, for acquiring your unpublished novel The Riders. Certainly you remember your own novel, sir."

I'm sure I scowled. Who doesn't remember his own novel? Who doesn't remember four years of solitary nights and weekends? Of laboring for hours over a scene, a paragraph, a single sentence, only to pitch the whole thing out in the clear light of day and start all over again. Who doesn't remember the vastness of the task set out before you, the knowledge of a thousand more nights just like the one you're toiling amidst, the months that will pass, the sleep that you'll miss, the friends that you'll lose, the marriage that you'll neglect? Who doesn't remember, in the middle of an otherwise productive session of writing, the chill recognition that lands on your shoulders, claws extended, and suggests that maybe this time you're completely out of your mind? That this time they'll either beat you with your own dictionary or chuck you in the loony bin for good and flush the key. Who doesn't remember the strange flash of hope that this time, maybe this time you're on to something bigger than just yourself and your abilities, that this time you've tapped into something magical. You know where you were and how you felt and what the weather was like for every passage that you composed, while at the same time feeling like you were somewhere else entirely. No, you don't forget your own novel. You don't forget any of them.

"Perhaps you'll have that drink now, Mr. Ray." Max raised a gabardined arm as big as a beef shoulder and snapped his crescent rolls for the waiter.