She got up, pressing him back down by the shoulders when he tried to join her.
'You can get them next time,' she said. 'I want you to sit right there until your subconscious urge to destroy my pitcher finally passes.'
'Okay,' he said, and said. 'I love you, Liz.'
'I love you, too.' She went to get the twins, and Thad Beaumont began to leaf through his BIO again.
Unlike most People articles, the Thaddeus Beaumont Bio began not with a full-page photograph but with one which was less than a quarter-page. It caught the eye regardless, because some layout man with an eye for the unusual had bordered the picture, which showed Thad and Liz in a graveyard, in black. The lines of type below stood out in almost brutal contrast.
In the photograph, Thad had a spade and Liz had a pick. Set off to one side was a wheelbarrow with more cemetery implements in it. On the grave itself, several bouquets of flowers had been arranged, but the gravestone itself was still perfectly readable.
GEORGE STARK
1975 — 1988
Not a Very Nice Guy
In almost jagged contrast to the place and the apparent act (a recently completed interment of what, from the dates, should have been a boy barely in his teens), these two bogus sextons were shaking their free hands across the freshly placed sods — and laughing cheerily.
It was a posed job, of course. AU of the photos accompanying the article — burying the body, exhibiting the brownies, and the one of Thad wandering lonely as a cloud down a deserted Ludlow woods road, presumably 'getting ideas' — were posed. It was funny. Liz had been buying People at the supermarket for the last five years or so, and they both made fun of it, but they both took their turn leafing through it at supper, or possibly in the john if there wasn't a good book handy. Thad had mused from time to time on the magazine's success, wondering if it was its devotion to the celebrity sideshow that made it so weirdly interesting, or just the way it was set up, with all those big black-and-white photographs and the boldface text, consisting mostly of simple declarative sentences. But it had never crossed his mind to wonder if the pictures were staged.
The photographer had been a woman named Phyllis Myers. She informed Thad and Liz that she had taken a number of photographs of teddy bears in child-sized coffins, all of the teddies dressed in children's clothes. She hoped to sell these as a book to a major New York publisher. It was not until late on the second day of the photo-and-interview session that Thad realized the woman was sounding him out about writing the text. Death and Teddy Bears, she said, would be 'the final, perfect comment on the American way of death, don't you think so, Thad?'
He supposed that, in light of her rather macabre interests, it wasn't all that surprising that the Myers woman had commissioned George Stark's tombstone and brought it with her from New York. It was papier-mâché.
'You don't mind shaking hands in front of this, do you?' she had asked them with a smile that was at the same time wheedling and complacent. 'It'll make a wonderful shot.'
Liz had looked at Thad, questioning and a little horrified. Then they both had looked at the fake tombstone which had come from New York City (year-round home of People magazine) to Castle Rock, Maine (summer home of Thad and Liz Beaumont), with a mixture of amazement and bemused wonder. It was the inscription to which Thad's eye kept returning:
Not a Very Nice Guy
Stripped to its essentials, the story People wanted to tell the breathless celebrity-watchers of America was pretty simple. Thad Beaumont was a well-regarded writer whose first novel, The Sudden Dancers, had been nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. This sort of thing swung some weight with literary critics, but the breathless celebrity—watchers of America didn't care a dime about Thad Beaumont, who had only published one other novel under his own name since. The man many of them did care about wasn't a real man at all. Thad had written one huge best-seller and three extremely successful follow-up novels under another name. The name, o course, was George Stark.
Jerry Harkavay, who was the Associated Press's entire Waterville staff, had been the first to break the George Stark story wide after Thad's agent, Rick Cowley, gave it to Louise Booker at Publishers Weekly with Thad's approval. Neither Harkavay nor Booker had got the whole story — for one thing, Thad was adamant about not giving that smarmy little prick Frederick Clawson so much as a mention — but it was still good enough to rate a wider circulation it than either the AP wire service or the book—publishing industry's trade magazine could give. Clawson, Thad had told Liz and Rick, was not the story — he was just the asshole who was forcing them to go public with the story.
In the course of that first interview, Jerry had asked him what sort of a fellow George Stark was. 'George,' Thad had replied, 'wasn't a very nice guy.' The quote had run at the top of Jerry's piece, and it had given the Myers woman the inspiration to actually commission a fake tombstone with that line on it. Weird world. Weird, weird world.
All of a sudden, Thad burst out laughing again.
2
There were two lines of white type on the black field below the picture of Thad and Liz in one of Castle Rock's finer boneyards.
THE DEAR DEPARTED WAS EXTREMELY CLOSE TO THESE TWO PEOPLE, read the first.
SO WHY ARE THEY LAUGHING? read the second.
'Because the world is one strange fucking place,' Thad Beaumont said, and snorted into one cupped hand.
Liz Beaumont wasn't the only one who felt vaguely uneasy about this odd little burst of publicity. He felt a little uneasy himself. All the same, he found it difficult to stop laughing. He'd quit for a few seconds and then a fresh spate of guffaws would burst out of him as his eye caught on that line — Not a Very Nice Guy — again. Trying to quit was like trying to plug the holes in a poorly constructed earthen dam; as soon as you got one leak stopped up, you saw a new one someplace else.
Thad suspected there was something not quite right about such helpless laughter — it was a form of hysteria. He knew that humor rarely if ever had anything to do with such fits. In fact, the cause was apt to be something quite the opposite of funny.
Something to be afraid of, maybe.
You're afraid of a goddam article in People magazine? Is that what you're thinking? Dumb. Afraid of being embarrassed, of having your colleagues in the English Department look at those pictures and think you've lost the poor cracked handful of marbles you had?
No. He had nothing to fear from his colleagues, not even the ones who had been there since dinosaurs walked the earth. He finally had tenure, and also enough money to face life as — flourish of trumpets, please! — a full-time writer if he so desired (he wasn't sure he did; he didn't care much for the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of university life, but the teaching part was just fine). Also no because he had passed beyond caring much about what his colleagues thought of him some years ago. He cared about what his friends thought, yes, and in some cases his friends, Liz's friends, and the friends they had in common happened to be colleagues, but he thought those people were also apt to think it was sort of a hoot.