3

I am not planning to go into any details here. By now, everyone knows what Fanshawe’s work is like. It has been read and discussed, there have been articles and studies, it has become public property. If there is anything to be said, it is only that it took me no more than an hour or two to understand that my feelings were quite beside the point. To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books—this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small. I do not say this in order to congratulate myself or to put my actions in a better light. I was the first, but beyond that I see nothing to set me apart from anyone else. If Fanshawe’s work had been any less than it was, my role would have been different—more important, perhaps, more crucial to the outcome of the story. But as it was, I was no more than an invisible instrument. Something had happened, and short of denying it, short of pretending I had not opened the suitcases, it would go on happening, knocking down whatever was in front of it, moving with a momentum of its own.

It took me about a week to digest and organize the material, to divide finished work from drafts, to gather the manuscripts into some semblance of chronological order. The earliest piece was a poem, dating from 1963 (when Fanshawe was sixteen), and the last was from 1976 ( just one month before he disappeared). In all there were over a hundred poems, three novels (two short and one long), and five one-act plays—as well as thirteen notebooks, which contained a number of aborted pieces, sketches, jottings, remarks on the books Fanshawe was reading, and ideas for future projects. There were no letters, no diaries, no glimpses into Fanshawe’s private life. But that was something I had expected. A man does not spend his time hiding from the world without making sure to cover his tracks. Still, I had thought that somewhere among all the papers there might be some mention of me—if only a letter of instruction or a notebook entry naming me his literary executor. But there was nothing. Fanshawe had left me entirely on my own.

I telephoned Sophie and arranged to have dinner with her the following night. Because I suggested a fashionable French restaurant (way beyond what I could afford), I think she was able to guess my response to Fanshawe’s work. But beyond this hint of a celebration, I said as little as I could. I wanted everything to advance at its own pace—no abrupt moves, no premature gestures. I was already certain about Fanshawe’s work, but I was afraid to rush into things with Sophie. Too much hinged on how I acted, too much could be destroyed by blundering at the start. Sophie and I were linked now, whether she knew it or not—if only to the extent that we would be partners in promoting Fanshawe’s work. But I wanted more than that, and I wanted Sophie to want it as well. Struggling against my eagerness, I urged caution on myself, told myself to think ahead.

She wore a black silk dress, tiny silver earrings, and had swept back her hair to show the line of her neck. As she walked into the restaurant and saw me sitting at the bar, she gave me a warm, complicitous smile, as though telling me she knew how beautiful she was, but at the same time commenting on the weirdness of the occasion—savoring it somehow, clearly alert to the outlandish implications of the moment. I told her that she was stunning, and she answered almost whimsically that this was her first night out since Ben had been born—and that she had wanted to “look different.” After that, I stuck to business, trying to hang back within myself. When we were led to our table and given our seats (white tablecloth, heavy silverware, a red tulip in a slender vase between us), I responded to her second smile by talking about Fanshawe.

She did not seem surprised by anything I said. It was old news for her, a fact that she had already come to terms with, and what I was telling her merely confirmed what she had known all along. Strangely enough, it did not seem to excite her. There was a wariness in her attitude that confused me, and for several minutes I was lost. Then, slowly, I began to understand that her feelings were not very different from my own. Fanshawe had disappeared from her life, and I saw that she might have good reason to resent the burden that had been imposed on her. By publishing Fanshawe’s work, by devoting herself to a man who was no longer there, she would be forced to live in the past, and whatever future she might want to build for herself would be tainted by the role she had to play: the official widow, the dead writer’s muse, the beautiful heroine in a tragic story. No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real. Sophie was just twenty-six years old. She was too young to live through someone else, too intelligent not to want a life that was completely her own. The fact that she had loved Fanshawe was not the point. Fanshawe was dead, and it was time for her to leave him behind.

None of this was said in so many words. But the feeling was there, and it would have been senseless to ignore it. Given my own reservations, it was odd that I should have been the one to carry the torch, but I saw that if I didn’t take hold of the thing and get it started, the job would never get done.

“You don’t really have to get involved,” I said. “We’ll have to consult, of course, but that shouldn’t take up much of your time. If you’re willing to leave the decisions to me, I don’t think it will be very bad at all.”

“Of course I’ll leave them to you,” she said. “I don’t know the first thing about any of this. If I tried to do it myself, I’d get lost within five minutes.”

“The important thing is to know that we’re on the same side,” I said. “In the end, I suppose it boils down to whether or not you can trust me.”

“I trust you,” she said.

“I haven’t given you any reason to,” I said. “Not yet, in any case.”

“I know that. But I trust you anyway.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes. Just like that.”

She smiled at me again, and for the rest of the dinner we said nothing more about Fanshawe’s work. I had been planning to discuss it in detail—how best to begin, what publishers might be interested, what people to contact, and so on—but this no longer seemed important. Sophie was quite content not to think about it, and now that I had reassured her that she didn’t have to, her playfulness gradually returned. After so many difficult months, she finally had a chance to forget some of it for a while, and I could see how determined she was to lose herself in the very simple pleasures of this moment: the restaurant, the food, the laughter of the people around us, the fact that she was here and not anywhere else. She wanted to be indulged in all this, and who was I not to go along with her?

I was in good form that night. Sophie inspired me, and it didn’t take long for me to get warmed up. I cracked jokes, told stories, performed little tricks with the silverware. The woman was so beautiful that I had trouble keeping my eyes off her. I wanted to see her laugh, to see how her face would respond to what I said, to watch her eyes, to study her gestures. God knows what absurdities I came out with, but I did my best to detach myself, to bury my real motives under this onslaught of charm. That was the hard part. I knew that Sophie was lonely, that she wanted the comfort of a warm body beside her—but a quick roll in the hay was not what I was after, and if I moved too fast that was probably all it would turn out to be. At this early stage, Fanshawe was still there with us, the unspoken link, the invisible force that had brought us together. It would take some time before he disappeared, and until that happened, I found myself willing to wait.

All this created an exquisite tension. As the evening progressed, the most casual remarks became tinged with erotic overtones. Words were no longer simply words, but a curious code of silences, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither one of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began—slowly, decorously, building by the smallest of increments.

After dinner we walked for twenty minutes or so in the late November darkness, then finished up the evening with drinks in a bar downtown. I smoked one cigarette after another, but that was the only clue to my tumult. Sophie talked for a while about her family in Minnesota, her three younger sisters, her arrival in New York eight years ago, her music, her teaching, her plan to go back to it next fall—but we were so firmly entrenched in our jocular mode by then that each remark became an excuse for additional laughter. It would have gone on, but there was the babysitter to think about, and so we finally cut it short at around midnight. I took her to the door of her apartment and made my last great effort of the evening.

“Thank you, doctor,” Sophie said. “The operation was a success.”

“My patients always survive,” I said. “It’s the laughing gas. I just turn on the valve, and little by little they get better.”

“That gas might be habit-forming.”

“That’s the point. The patients keep coming back for more— sometimes two or three operations a week. How do you think I paid for my Park Avenue apartment and the summer place in France?”

“So there’s a hidden motive.”

“Absolutely. I’m driven by greed.”

“Your practice must be booming.”

“It was. But I’m more or less retired now. I’m down to one patient these days—and I’m not sure if she’ll be coming back.”

“She’ll be back,” Sophie said, with the coyest, most radiant smile I had ever seen. “You can count on it.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said. “I’ll have my secretary call her to schedule the next appointment.”

“The sooner the better. With these long-term treatments, you can’t waste a moment.”

“Excellent advice. I’ll remember to order a new supply of laughing gas.”

“You do that, doctor. I really think I need it.”

We smiled at each other again, and then I wrapped her up in a big bear hug, gave her a brief kiss on the lips, and got down the stairs as fast as I could.

I went straight home, realized that bed was out of the question, and then spent two hours in front of the television, watching a movie about Marco Polo. I finally conked out at around four, in the middle of a Twilight Zone rerun.

* * * *

My first move was to contact Stuart Green, an editor at one of the larger publishing houses. I didn’t know him very well, but we had grown up in the same town, and his younger brother, Roger, had gone through school with me and Fanshawe. I guessed that Stuart would remember who Fanshawe was, and that seemed like a good way to get started. I had run into Stuart at various gatherings over the years, perhaps three or four times, and he had always been friendly, talking about the good old days (as he called them) and always promising to send my greetings to Roger the next time he saw him. I had no idea what to expect from Stuart, but he sounded happy enough to hear from me when I called. We arranged to meet at his office one afternoon that week.

It took him a few moments to place Fanshawe’s name. It was familiar to him, he said, but he didn’t know from where. I prodded his memory a bit, mentioned Roger and his friends, and then it suddenly came back to him. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “Fanshawe. That extraordinary little boy. Roger used to insist that he would grow up to be President.” That’s the one, I said, and then I told him the story.

Stuart was a rather prissy fellow, a Harvard type who wore bow ties and tweed jackets, and though at bottom he was little more than a company man, in the publishing world he was what passed for an intellectual. He had done well for himself so far—a senior editor in his early thirties, a solid and responsible young worker—and there was no question that he was on the rise. I say all this only to prove that he was not someone who would be automatically susceptible to the kind of story I was telling. There was very little romance in him, very little that was not cautious and business-like—but I could feel that he was interested, and as I went on talking, he even seemed to become excited.

He had nothing to lose, of course. If Fanshawe’s work didn’t appeal to him, it would be simple enough for him to turn it down. Rejections were the heart of his job, and he wouldn’t have to think twice about it. On the other hand, if Fanshawe was the writer I said he was, then publishing him could only help Stuart’s reputation. He would share in the glory of having discovered an unknown American genius, and he would be able to live off this coup for years.

I handed him the manuscript of Fanshawe’s big novel. In the end, I said, it would have to be all or nothing—the poems, the plays, the other two novels—but this was Fanshawe’s major work, and it was logical that it should come first. I was referring to Neverland, of course. Stuart said that he liked the title, but when he asked me to describe the book, I said that I’d rather not, that I thought it would be better if he found out for himself. He raised an eyebrow in response (a trick he had probably learned during his year at Oxford), as if to imply that I shouldn’t play games with him. I wasn’t, as far as I could tell. It was just that I didn’t want to coerce him. The book could do the work itself, and I saw no reason to deny him the pleasure of entering it cold: with no map, no compass, no one to lead him by the hand.

It took three weeks for him to get back to me. The news was neither good nor bad, but it seemed hopeful. There was probably enough support among the editors to get the book through, Stuart said, but before they made the final decision they wanted to have a look at the other material. I had been expecting that— a certain prudence, playing it close to the vest—and told Stuart that I would come around to drop off the manuscripts the following afternoon.

“It’s a strange book,” he said, pointing to the copy of Neverland on his desk. “Not at all your typical novel, you know. Not your typical anything. It’s still not clear that we’re going ahead with it, but if we do, publishing it will be something of a risk.”

“I know that,” I said. “But that’s what makes it interesting.”

“The real pity is that Fanshawe isn’t around. I’d love to be able to work with him. There are things in the book that should be changed, I think, certain passages that should be cut. It would make the book even stronger.”

“That’s just editor’s pride,” I said. “It’s hard for you to see a manuscript and not want to attack it with a red pencil. The fact is, I think the parts you object to now will eventually make sense to you, and you’ll be glad you weren’t able to touch them.”

“Time will tell,” said Stuart, not ready to concede the point. “But there’s no question,” he went on, “no question that the man could write. I read the book more than two weeks ago, and it’s been with me ever since. I can’t get it out of my head. It keeps coming back to me, and always at the strangest moments. Stepping out of the shower, walking down the street, crawling into bed at night—whenever I’m not consciously thinking about anything. That doesn’t happen very often, you know. You read so many books in this job that they all tend to blur together. But Fanshawe’s book stands out. There’s something powerful about it, and the oddest thing is that I don’t even know what it is.”

“That’s probably the real test,” I said. “The same thing happened to me. The book gets stuck somewhere in the brain, and you can’t get rid of it.”

“And what about the other stuff?”

“Same thing,” I said. “You can’t stop thinking about it.”

Stuart shook his head, and for the first time I saw that he was honestly impressed. It lasted no more than a moment, but in that moment his arrogance and posturing suddenly disappeared, and I almost found myself wanting to like him.

“I think we might be on to something,” he said. “If what you say is true, then I really think we might be on to something.”

We were, and as things turned out, perhaps even more than Stuart had imagined. Neverland was accepted later that month, with an option on the other books as well. My quarter of the advance was enough to buy me some time, and I used it to work on an edition of the poems. I also went to a number of directors to see if there was any interest in doing the plays. Eventually, this came off, too, and a production of three oneacts was planned for a small downtown theater—to open about six weeks after Neverland was published. In the meantime, I persuaded the editor of one of the bigger magazines I occasionally wrote for to let me do an article on Fanshawe. It turned out to be a long, rather exotic piece, and at the time I felt it was one of the best things I had ever written. The article was scheduled to appear two months before the publication of Neverland— and suddenly it seemed as though everything was happening at once.

I admit that I got caught up in it all. One thing kept leading to another, and before I knew it a small industry had been set in motion. It was a kind of delirium, I think. I felt like an engineer, pushing buttons and pulling levers, scrambling from valve chambers to circuit boxes, adjusting a part here, devising an improvement there, listening to the contraption hum and chug and purr, oblivious to everything but the din of my brainchild. I was the mad scientist who had invented the great hocus-pocus machine, and the more smoke that poured from it, the more noise it produced, the happier I was.

Perhaps that was inevitable; perhaps I needed to be a little mad in order to get started. Given the strain of reconciling myself to the project, it was probably necessary for me to equate Fanshawe’s success with my own. I had stumbled onto a cause, a thing that justified me and made me feel important, and the more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Fanshawe, the more sharply I came into focus for myself. This is not an excuse; it is merely a description of what happened. Hindsight tells me that I was looking for trouble, but at the time I knew nothing about it. More important, even if I had known, I doubt that it would have made a difference.

Underneath it all was the desire to stay in touch with Sophie. As time went on, it became perfectly natural for me to call her three or four times a week, to see her for lunch, to stop by for an afternoon stroll through the neighborhood with Ben. I introduced her to Stuart Green, invited her along to meet the theater director, found her a lawyer to handle contracts and other legal matters. Sophie took all this in her stride, treating these encounters more as social occasions than as business talks, making it clear to the people we saw that I was the one in charge. I sensed that she was determined not to feel indebted to Fanshawe, that whatever happened or did not happen, she would continue to keep her distance from it. The money made her happy, of course, but she never really connected it to Fanshawe’s work. It was an unlikely gift, a winning lottery ticket that had dropped from the sky, and that was all. Sophie saw through the whirlwind from the very start. She understood the fundamental absurdity of the situation, and because there was no greed in her, no impulse to press her own advantage, she did not lose her head.

I worked hard at courting her. No doubt my motives were transparent, but perhaps that was to the good. Sophie knew that I had fallen in love with her, and the fact that I did not pounce on her, that I did not force her to declare her feelings for me, probably did more to convince her of my seriousness than anything else. Still, I could not wait forever. Discretion has its role, but too much of it can be fatal. A moment came when I could feel that we were no longer jousting with each other, that things between us had already been settled. In thinking about this moment now, I am tempted to use the traditional language of love. I want to talk in metaphors of heat, of burning, of barriers melting down in the face of irresistible passions. I am aware of how overblown these terms might sound, but in the end I believe they are accurate. Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as a revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. This knowledge changed me, I think, and actually made me feel more human. By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

It happened to be my thirtieth birthday. I had known Sophie for about three months by then, and she insisted on making an evening of it. I was reluctant at first, never having paid much attention to birthdays, but Sophie’s sense of occasion finally won me over. She bought me an expensive, illustrated edition of Moby Dick, took me to dinner in a good restaurant, and then ushered me along to a performance of Boris Godunov at the Met. For once, I let myself go with it, not trying to second-guess my happiness, not trying to stay ahead of myself or outmaneuver my feelings. Perhaps I was beginning to sense a new boldness in Sophie; perhaps she was making it known to me that she had decided things for herself, that it was too late now for either one of us to back off. Whatever it was, that was the night when everything changed, when there was no longer any question of what we were going to do. We returned to her apartment at eleven-thirty, Sophie paid the drowsy babysitter, and then we tiptoed into Ben’s room and stood there for a while watching him as he slept in his crib. I remember distinctly that neither one of us said anything, that the only sound I could hear was the faint gurgling of Ben’s breath. We leaned over the bars and studied the shape of his little body—lying on his stomach, legs tucked under him, ass in the air, two or three fingers stuck in his mouth. It seemed to go on for a long time, but I doubt it was more than a minute or two. Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us. Again, I lapse into metaphor. But that is probably beside the point. For whether or not I can talk about it does not change the truth of what happened. The fact is, there never was such a kiss, and in all my life I doubt there can ever be such a kiss again.