The Nix(22)

“In person. At a coffee shop. At the airport.”

“Of course, in the event you cannot pay us back, we’ll have to sue you. My company will be filing papers next week with the New York State Supreme Court.”

“But the book’s coming along. I’m writing again.”

“And that’s excellent news for you! Because we relinquish all rights on any material related to said book, so you can do whatever you want with it. And we wish you the very best of luck with that.”

“How much are you suing me for?”

“The amount of the advance, plus interest, plus legal fees. The upside here is that we’re not taking a loss on you, which cannot be said for many of our other recent investments. So don’t feel too bad for us. You still have the money, yes?”

“No. Of course not. I bought a house.”

“How much do you owe on the house?”

“Three hundred grand.”

“And how much is the house now worth?”

“Like, eighty?”

“Hah! Only in America, am I right?”

“Look. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’ll finish the book soon. I promise.”

“How do I say this delicately? We actually don’t want the book anymore. We signed that contract in a different world.”

“How is it different?”

“Primarily, you’re not famous anymore. We needed to strike while the iron was hot. Your iron, my friend, is ice cold. But also the country has moved on. Your quaint story about childhood love was appropriate pre-9/11, but now? Now it’s a little quiet for the times, a little incongruous. And—no offense?—there’s nothing terribly interesting about you.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s a one-in-a-million person who can sustain the kind of interest I specialize in.”

“I can’t possibly afford to pay that money back.”

“It’s an easy fix, dude. Foreclose on the house, hide your assets, declare bankruptcy, move to Jakarta.”

The intercom crackles: First-class passengers to Los Angeles can now begin boarding. Periwinkle smoothes his suit. “That’s me,” he says. He slugs the rest of his coffee and stands up. “Listen, I wish things were different. I really do. I wish we didn’t have to do this. If only there was something you could offer, something of interest?”

Samuel knows he has one thing yet to give, one thing of value. It’s the only thing he has for Periwinkle. It is, right now, the only interesting thing about him.

“What if I told you I had a new book,” Samuel says. “A different book.”

“Then I would say we had another complaint in our civil suit against you. That when you were contracted to write a book for us, you were secretly working on a book for someone else.”

“I haven’t been working on it at all. Haven’t written a word.”

“Then in what way is it a ‘book’?”

“It’s not. It’s more like a pitch. Do you want to hear the pitch?”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“It’s sort of a celebrity tell-all.”

“Okay. Who’s the celebrity?”

“The Packer Attacker.”

“Yeah, right. We sent a scout. She’s not talking. It’s a dead end.”

“What if I told you that she was my mother?”





7


SO THIS IS THE PLAN. They agree to it at the airport. Samuel will fulfill his contract with the publisher by writing a book about his mother—a biography, an exposé, a tell-all.

“A sordid tale of sex and violence,” Periwinkle says, “written by the son she abandoned? Hell yeah, I could sell that.”

The book will describe Faye Andresen’s sleazy past in the protest movement, her time as a prostitute, how she abandoned her family and went into hiding and only came out to terrorize Governor Packer.

“We’d have to get the book out before the election, for obvious marketing reasons,” Periwinkle says. “And Packer will have to come off as an American hero. A kind of folksy messiah. You okay with that?”

“Fine.”

“We have those pages finished already, actually.”

“What do you mean finished?” Samuel says.

“The Packer stuff. Ghostwritten. Done. About a hundred pages of it.”

“How is that possible?”

“You know how a lot of obituaries are written before the subjects actually die? Same principle. We’ve been working on a bio, just waiting for an angle. So we had it in the hopper. Half your book is ready to go, in other words. The other half is the mother material. She is of course cast as the villain here. You understand that, right?”

“I do.”

“And you can write it? You have no problems portraying her this way? Morally? Ethically?”

“I will savage her intimately, publicly. That’s the deal. I get it.”

And it will not be hard, Samuel imagines, to do this to the woman who left without a word, without warning, who left him alone to survive a motherless childhood. It’s as if two decades’ worth of resentment and pain has, for the first time, found an outlet.

So Samuel calls his mother’s lawyer and says he’s changed his mind. He says he’d be happy to write a letter to the judge in support of her case and would like to have an interview to gather key information. The lawyer gives him his mother’s address in Chicago and sets up a meeting for the very next day, and Samuel is sleepless and jumpy and overstimulated all night as he imagines seeing his mother for the first time since she disappeared so long ago. It seems unfair that it’s been twenty years since he’s seen her and now he has only one day to prepare.