“You mean like, Brooklyn Brooklyn.”
“Over the famous bridge.”
“I thought you seemed out of place.”
“Back. In place, I mean. I’m from the midwest originally.”
“Imagine that.” Kat checked to see if the pictures were uploading. The guy muttered something; can’t believe you found him or thought nobody would find him or something like that. She looked up sharply. “What?”
“I said, I guess Cherry City is about to lose John Salteau to the big time.”
“You’ve got a funny idea what the big time wants.”
“Oh, that’s not true. I watch a lot of television. There’s an endless supply of celebrity out there. A crisis of overproduction. Celebrity fry cooks, celebrity closet organizers, celebrity grocery store clerks. There’s a shoe salesman on the Foot Channel who was on the cover of US Weekly.”
“No,” she said, “there wasn’t.” She giggled, shaking her head. He was probably right. She glanced at her phone.
“You wouldn’t want to grab a bite, would you?”
“You’re kidding, right? You’re coming on to me at story hour?”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to huff Krylon behind the hardware store Dumpster or anything. Maybe I just want to compare notes.”
“Oh, you’re writing about Salteau, too.” She laughed again.
“I’m his number one fan. You could quote me.”
“Oh, you’re quotable all right. Local color.”
“I’ll buy.”
“I can expense my meals.”
“Come on. I’ll tell you everything I know about John. Deep background.”
“You know him.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
15
SHOULD I have heard of you?” she said.
“The dreaded question. Do I say, yes, you should have and you’re hopelessly ignorant if you haven’t, or do I say no, don’t worry, I’m completely insignificant.”
“How about this.” She folded her hands. “Have they made any movies out of your books?”
They were sitting in the back room of an Italian-style deli, eating sandwiches out of plastic baskets. A pair of high school kids hung out nearby, bored already by the abundance of time that was one gift of bad weather. The two adults were as insignificant to them as the mortar holding together the bricks of the walls, but the guy — Alexander Mulligan was his name — shot a glance at them and lowered his voice.
“Yes. Fallen Sparks.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Hollywood changed it,” he said, with irritation. He gave her the title of the movie.
“That’s the one with the great car in it.”
“’67 Chevelle. That was their idea. I very specifically gave my character a ’78 Civic.”
“Your first car.”
“I’m tempted to say my best car. What, tempted. Definitely my best car.” He’d begun warming to the subject. “Not cinematic enough, though. In one of the very rare instances when I had direct contact with anyone having to do with the movie, I asked the producer why they’d changed it. He looks at me like I’m mildly retarded and says, ‘It’s not a comedy.’ ”
She laughed. “Oh yeah it was. I saw it. I didn’t read the book, though.”
He shrugged. “I heard about this new trend in book clubs. You pick a book that they’re making into a movie. Then you don’t read the book, but go see the movie and then talk about that.”
“I believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t you? And you’re not even old enough to remember Classics Illustrated.”
“No, I’m not.”
“The Scarlet Letter with ads for X-Ray Specs and pimple cream every third page. People thought it was the end of Western civilization. If only they knew.”
“Personally, I thought The Scarlet Letter itself was the end of Western civilization.”
“Conversation terminated. You wonder why a writer retreats to the boondocks.”
“I didn’t wonder, actually.”
Alexander put his sandwich down and began talking to her for a while about what it was like being a writer. She nodded periodically. It was halfway interesting; a little pat. If anything, the overrehearsed aspect of the thing convinced her that he actually was who he claimed to be. She looked in her purse for her notebook but found her nicotine lozenges instead.
“See?” he said. “You should interview me sometime. You’re a natural. You bring out the talker in me.”
“A,” she said, “I don’t think you need any help from me, and B, I thought I already was interviewing you.”
“About me, I mean.” Then he blushed. He seemed starved for attention. A bad divorce, maybe, what with the kids back in Brooklyn and zero sign of that passing reference to my wife which she’d noticed married men often liked to make, if only to establish a thin veneer of honesty while they came on to her. No wedding ring, either. Puffy, like someone whose body had filled out with too much beer and too many bar burgers. Or from antidepressants.
“OK,” she said. She got out her notebook and pen. “You’re working on an important new book?”
Hopeless laugh, as if she’d asked how his terminal cancer was progressing. Try another tack (why was she bothering, she wondered).
“Why Michigan?”
“My father used to rent a cabin up here. We came up every summer.”
“Who?”
“The three of us. Me, my dad, my mom.”
“Do they still come up?”
“No. They cut it out. My mother started wanting to be close to home. Got funny about travel. She wasn’t old or anything, just stopped wanting to go out.”
“To go out or to travel?”
“Well. To go out. Which made traveling out of the question.”
“Sounds difficult.”
“It was difficult. They hardly knew my wife. They hardly knew their grandchildren.”
“Have they passed away?”
“My dad died. He got cancer and died a few years ago. Very quick. Big surprise.”
“I’m sorry. And your mother?”
He made a sour face. “She’s alive,” he said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop for a second, looked around. The teenagers got up and left. He watched them as they went, then looked at her.
“So, the man of the hour. John Salteau.”
“That’s my quest.”
“Why is Chicago interested?”
“Local color. Fun-in-the-sun-type fluff. We’ll do a sidebar on Salteau, dust off our annual piece about the Cherry Festival, the lakeshore, the hang-gliding-and-ice-cream-sundae-making competition. We start the legwork now, and around May, when Chicagolanders come out of hibernation and begin thinking about escaping that oven of a city, the reps’ll start trying to sell ads to airlines and hotels and car rental agencies, we can start running our summer recreational coverage, and maybe we’ll all live to see another day.”
“Why you went to J-school, I’m guessing.”
She smiled. “How long have you known him?”
“Salteau? Since he started over at the library in the fall, I guess. A few months, now.”
“And why did you start going to see him there? What interested you?”
He leaned back and began talking again about being a writer, about the cutthroat environment in New York, about the innocent joy of Salteau’s kind of storytelling. He kept saying, “I’m serious,” and then continuing. She wrote down SERIOUS VERY SERIOUS SERIOUS ABOUT TALKING SERIOUS TALKER SERIOUSLY INTO THE SOUND OF HIS OWN VOICE SERIOUS? SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT SERIOUS.
He summed up: “That’s why I felt like I had to leave.”