“So you did leave. I’m way ahead of you.”
He blushed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s embarrassing. I don’t mean to turn the conversation to myself, not every time.”
She smiled thinly. “No need to beat yourself up.”
“Anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that what I like about him has to do with the way he breaks the rules. He’s not worried about what’s possible, or plausible, not interested in lessons endorsed by the social sciences. Just in making order.”
“It’s primitive.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Authentic, then. Where did that face come from?” He’d assumed the same sour expression he had when she’d asked about his mother.
“What does ‘authentic’ have to do with telling stories? Who cares?”
“Well. I do, I guess.”
“If you’re bidding on a painting at Sotheby’s, OK. But fiction?”
“Don’t you think it matters that an authentic Indian should be telling authentic Indian legends?”
“Does it matter when some guy from Cambridge translates The Odyssey?”
“The culture wars, entering the top of the nine hundred fifty-sixth inning, still no score.”
He laughed. “These are the things that bring out the crackpot in all of us.”
“Some of us.”
“Granted, certain things make me a little crazy. But I can speak very poetically about other things.”
“Well, when are you going to start? I thought you weren’t going to be quotable at least in an interesting way.”
He looked down at the ruins of his lunch, bleeding out in the plastic lattice basket. He sighed. A crackpot, a charmer, a delusional con man, a victim of mood swings, a faker of hurt feelings: who knew? Actually, he was sort of interesting, but like most of the interesting things that confronted her in the course of an average plug-in-and-spectate day, he was turning out to be an irrelevant hindrance.
“OK. Here’s what I think,” he said. He held up his hands palms out, a hold-everything gesture. “For real. I think he’s got a real commitment to inventiveness. Believe it or not, I don’t see that a lot in my line of work. What I see a lot of is people trying to keep their names out there. It’s the opposite of invention. They take brave stands from somewhere midpoint in the herd. They might even win a medal from time to time.”
“What’s your brave stand?”
“Divorce, it turned out. I took a stand in favor of divorce.”
“Did you win any medals?”
“I didn’t want any medals.”
“You wanted a divorce.”
“Yeah, though apparently what I really wanted was to tear a huge gash in the moral fiber of my community.”
“So you retreat to the provincial values of the small-town midwest?”
He shrugged. “Anyway, I found Salteau here. And here we are.”
The refractive conversational habits of some people. Mulligan kept bending the conversation toward himself and then bending it away again. Kat felt her interest being piqued by the sad (though undoubtedly banal) story of his divorce (which evidently he’d initiated) and then her faint sense of disappointment when it was snatched away was instantly replaced by anticipation when he pushed Salteau back into view. She flipped the page in her notebook, a sort of official down-to-business gesture, and noticed that look cross his face, as if it wasn’t merely that the subject was being changed but that he himself was being left behind, detained within the unrelated drama of his past.
“Where’s he come from?”
“Who?”
“John Salteau.”
“Horton Bay, he told me.”
“What tribal band does he belong to?”
“He mentioned it, but I don’t hang on to those kinds of names. Whatever’s up there, I guess.”
“How long has he been performing?”
“That one I don’t really know for sure.”
“Do you know what he did before he started performing?”
“You know, I think he told me he worked at one of the casinos.”
Kat held her breath. Go slow, she thought. “A casino,” she said, writing it down. “You know which one?”
“That one up here, I think,” he said. “Manitou Sands?”
She exhaled. “Any other jobs?”
Mulligan leaned back, made a steeple with his fingers, looked up at the ceiling. “Construction worker, maybe he was in the army, you know.”
Kat thought for a moment. “No dark past or anything, though?” She giggled as if at the ridiculousness of the question. “You know, the more interesting I can make him, the more ink we get.”
“Right,” said Mulligan. “But I don’t know. I guess he’s as mysterious as anyone.”
He didn’t know: OK. “OK,” she said. “You ever see him with any friends, girlfriends?”
“Not that I remember, no.”
“OK,” she said. She capped her pen. “I can’t believe I let you sucker me into having lunch with you.” Mulligan looked stricken. “I’m just kidding,” she said. She patted his hand. “Mr. Sensitive.”
“I’m more of a literary consultant,” said Mulligan, recovering. “You could always ask him about these sorts of things yourself.”
“I’m going to. Now. I sure could use a coffee, how about you?”
He seemed pleased to oblige. She considered the pertinent information he’d given her. It was amazing that Saltino would mention that he’d worked at the casino, but it was also amazing that he was anywhere within a thousand miles of Manitou Sands. When Mulligan returned he was ready to change the subject, and he started asking her questions about herself, which flattered her and made her uncomfortable at the same time. It was a game she was familiar with. Let’s play I’m the interviewer and you’re the subject. Let’s play enough about me. Let’s play I’m a savvy person and I know how to manipulate the media to my advantage. Kat was no dummy, she went along with him as far as she was willing, but she was more willing than she might have expected. He asked her about her background and education, her hopes and dreams, and she was, like everyone else, a sucker for the hypnotic draw of her own hopes and dreams, and she was, like anyone who’s benefited from a certain amount of luck and apparent self-knowledge, a sucker for the opportunity to appear unregretful about the ones she’d given up on. And she was lucky, right? She might have ended up exactly where Becky had if she’d become some psycho tweaker’s old lady, parking her ever-wider duff on the back of a bike for ten straight years. And she was self-aware, right? Right? But also she was dissatisfied, with her marriage and with her job; and she was scared, of losing either or both of them; and while she was going to draw the line at discussing her marriage it was sensible to openly discuss her job because the death of print was always a lively topic and here was a fellow mourner, after all. What was up with the Mirror was pretty garden-variety, anyway. Circulation and display advertising way down, reliable revenue streams like the classifieds evaporated into nothing by Craigslist. The website apparently was too dense and too static to hold readers’ attention, and thus had the high bounce rate that scared off advertisers. Layoffs were scattered, disguised as attrition; as if two people in classifieds and three in books and arts had abruptly retired, or dropped dead, on the same Friday. Midwest Entertainment Holdings, the parent company, was liquidating properties, or just giving them away: Mirror Books, an imprint devoted to the glorification of all things Chicagoland, was quietly folded, its inventory remaindered or pulped. Six neighborhood weeklies that were published in various parts of Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties were sold in a highly leveraged deal that allowed MEH to carry the receivable on its books as anticipated revenue, although it was almost certain that the undercapitalized group that had acquired the papers would default. Minority interests in regional broadcasters had been sold off, as well as a small stake in the Cleveland Indians. Although there was still nominally a Mirror Building on Michigan Avenue, the place had long ago been sold to developers and the paper had leased its offices elsewhere in the Loop for twenty years. All this was of little concern to Kat, who knew next to nothing about the paper’s heyday and whose instinctive resistance to joining anything kept her at a complete remove from something so trite as workplace spirit. She was scared of losing her job, not of Chicago’s losing a piece of its history it couldn’t have cared less about. Those kinds of abstractions generally didn’t bother her: cities, and times, were supposed to change. The Thunder of the Presses was the title of some black-and-white movie on TCM, that’s all. Still, as she unburdened herself to Alexander Mulligan, it surprised her that she had anything at all to unburden herself of. What were her hopes and dreams, anyway? She’d always wanted to “do something” that endowed her every aspect with a kind of prestige and self-assured presence, a juvenile aspiration to be sure but as real and resonant as the admiration she still felt for those confident people she encountered sometimes at parties or dinners who appeared so evidently at ease in the mess of living that you couldn’t help envying them, whatever it was they did and whoever it was they were. She’d been scrupulously studying these people since she was a little girl, cribbing from them whether she found them on TV or at the Speedway, filling up their cars as they passed through between one place and another.