The End of the Book (4 page)

George fled the cold, following the crowd into the main entrance of Marshall Field's. The flower girl and Helen White, his worry that his days at the agency were numbered, and a dread now flooding him that he would spend the rest of his holidays alone were like hands guiding him into the vast shopping emporium, past the Christmas tree that seemed to soar clear up to the gold-domed ceiling, past the bough-strung perfume counters and the carolers singing “Joy to the World.” Until, puzzlingly, here he was, leaning over the sparkling glass of the jewelry cases.

A saleswoman in an absinthe-green dress asked, “May I help you?” Thin as a stem, with her white hair swept up, she resembled a tulip at the end of the season.

“Yes, I'm looking for an engagement ring,” George heard himself say.

And that's when his mind finally turned to Margaret Lazar, his boss's daughter, who two weeks ago at her twenty-first birthday party had confessed to George that she believed she might be in love with him. They were in her parents' library at the time, and the news had come as such a shock that all George could manage in response was, “You can't be serious.”

Margaret grasped his wrist. “I know it's unconventional for a woman to say such things to a man, but these are different times, and I'm old enough now to make my own decisions.”

“What of all your suitors?” George gestured toward the other room, where sons of the Lake Shore Drive elite had arranged themselves in polite antipathy.

“Prigs and fops, all hand-selected by my mother,” Margaret whispered.

“But we hardly know each other,” George said. Which was true and not true. He had always thought of her as the daughter of Alfred Lazar, a frequent visitor at the office and sometime summer employee. When he'd first met her she was just thirteen, and though she had filled out her satin dress, traveled to Paris, Vienna, and Florence, and attended the University of Chicago, he had never considered her a peer, let alone a potential match.

“Really, you must have known,” she said. “I've been sending you cues from the moment my father ran you down in the street.”

George laughed uncomfortably. She was referring to the accident that had led to their first meeting. In Chicago for less than a week, he had been trying to land interviews at the city papers. Having made little progress he was wandering the Loop in that somnambulant state of so many new arrivals from Midland villages. He had yet to stand on the shoreline of the lake, had only seen it from a distance, so he was walking toward Michigan Avenue and the great expanse of shimmering blue beyond.

He remembered it was an uncommonly temperate afternoon for April, how just before he stepped into the street the voices and crowd fell aside and a ribbon of sunlight seemed to spool over the water. George had never been in a boxing match, but one second he was walking toward the lake and the next he was on his knees in the Michigan Avenue mud, feeling as if Jim Corbett had knocked him out with a single vicious punch to the slats. He looked up, seeing stars, then into his line of vision a girl's face emerged.

“My God. Are you all right?” she cried. The ginger springs of her hair trembled with panic. “Father, come quick.”

George sat up slowly and clutched his ribs. He tried to catch his breath as the girl moved to touch him. When he winced, she pulled her hands back as if from a hot stove. Behind her appeared a man in a swallow-tail suit.

“He stepped into the street.” The man pointed with his cane. “It could hardly be avoided.”

“He did not!” his daughter declared. “You drove up onto the curb!” She turned her attention again to George. “Say something. Tell us you're not injured.”

George took a deeper breath this time and grimaced at the stabbing pain in his midsection. “That was a sockdolager,” he said. “But I think I'm okay.” He began to stand up, and as the girl put her hands under his arm to assist him her curls brushed his ear.

“Go on, father. Don't just stand there like a statue.”

“I'll be fine,” George said. But when he rose to his full height he had to bend down again.

“Shall we take you to the hospital?” the girl asked.

“Look at him,” her father said. “Not a spot of blood on his shirt.”

“I told you we shouldn't be out in that contraption until you've mastered it. You see—” She gestured to George. “You have the singular honor of being one of the first automobile accidents in the city of Chicago.”

The man in the suit and cane added, “This is one of only twenty Duryeas in all Illinois.”

“It's no time to boast, Father. If you can't control the thing you shouldn't have it out on the road.”

The man was inspecting the chassis of the Duryea with his swank malacca cane. George had never seen an automobile before. It was a simple two-seat carriage, like a phaeton, only it had a tiller in the middle, a sputtering box beneath the bench, and seemed to be propelled by the ghosts of horses. A crowd had begun to gather, and behind the Duryea traffic had stopped and drivers called curses into the air.

“We have to get a move on.” The man climbed into his seat and took hold of the tiller.

“We're terribly sorry,” the girl said to George. She introduced herself as Margaret Lazar, got the name and address of his temporary lodgings, and promised to have something sent over. After they parted, George figured he would never see her or her father again, but two days later, while he was still nursing his bruised ribs, a note of apology arrived along with an invitation to dinner.

Inside the grandest house George had ever stepped foot in, Margaret's mother treated him like an uninvited guest, but her father perked up when George told him about his work at the
Winesburg Eagle
. Alfred Lazar had always loved journalism, had started his own newsletter in St. Joseph, Missouri, at the age of fourteen, edited his high-school paper, and spent the first six years of his working life as a reporter in Cape Girardeau and Kansas City. But his father called the career impractical and pressured him into business, urging an old friend at a Chicago advertising firm to hire his son. Lazar promised himself he would return to writing one day, but instead rose swiftly at the company, from office boy to traveling salesman to full partner and general manager, until at thirty-six, upon the founder's retirement, he bought the company and renamed it after himself.

He hadn't forgotten journalism, however, and made his success by hiring the best copywriters he could find. He had hoped his own son would join the company and one day take over, but Charles had fled to New York City for college and work, and almost never came home. Lazar had been looking for a protégé, and for seven years, until the arrival of Clyde Kennison, that might have been George. He started out cleaning cuspidors and running errands, but Lazar, seeing something of himself in the go-getter from small-town Ohio, had ushered George steadily along.

Now, at the jewelry counter of Marshall Field's, George refused to admit that he was standing here not because he loved Margaret Lazar or had imagined a life with her, but rather to avoid a precipitous fall from the cliffs of the Monadnock. He had climbed too high, come too far. Drumming his fingers on the glass, he asked the white-haired woman in the absinthe-green dress to bring forth her finest box of rings.

He'd lost his house; his retirement plan brought in half of what it used to; he'd run his only credit card to the limit until he could no longer make mortgage payments; he had late fees, collection fees, his credit rating was nil; his pension and Social Security could cover rent, but what about debts and expenses? I brought all this up when at first he refused my offer.
Do you really have a choice?
I asked, and he told me to let him sleep on it. So that was what I did, though
I
couldn't sleep, not on the yard-sale daybed that smelled like a golden retriever after a swim in a toxic creek. I sat up much of the night thinking of Dhara, of our own money troubles, or rather
my
money troubles. I owed twenty thousand dollars for that most impractical of degrees: a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

I knew I shouldn't have gone to an MFA that wasn't paid for, but I applied to four schools and the only place I got in was Lakeside, the Big Ten stalwart just north of Chicago where the buildings look Ivy League but little ivy grows. Instead of a fellowship I was offered a work-study that came nowhere close to covering rent and tuition, so I had to take out loans. What had I done with my MFA? I'd written a 128-page thesis called
A Brief History of the Fool
. I wanted to say it was a novel, because that sounded more impressive than what it really was: a sampler of sketches in which each chapter tried out a different voice, running with it until it slowed and put up its hand, doubled over trying to catch its breath, then limped to the finish line.
You have a problem with endings
, I used to hear in workshop. I had a professor who believed so strongly in voice—
Style is all
, he kept saying—that in my effort to impress him I parroted a different god—Kafka, O'Connor, Calvino, Carver—each time I turned in a story.
Keep casting around for that voice
, he wrote in the margins.
Listen hard enough and you'll hear it
.

My thesis advisor was the one who said I should call the book a novel.
The short-story market is toast. If you don't link up the pieces you might as well apply to law school now. Story collections sell about as well as poetry. Who am I kidding?
he said.
The novel is a dying animal, too. In twenty years no one will read books anymore. I'll be food for worms, but what are
you
going to do?
Such words of inspiration cost me over ten thousand dollars a year. This same advisor hadn't published a book in a decade, but he had tenure and lots of opinions, so I took my cacophony of voices, my tales of fools and outcasts trying to find a home in the world, put them all in the same small town, gave them jobs at the five-and-dime and the local bar, and in the last story—“The Conflagration” —threw them together at a party at the town hotel, where a fire breaks out and my heroes are forced to act or flee. It's a cheap ending to a ragbag of a book, which is why
A Brief History of the Fool
sits under a pile of sweaters in the darkest corner of my closet.

Little did I know that the work-study Lakeside arranged for me would become my safety net. In my third semester there, in 2004, I got assigned to pull and load books into trucks for the monolithic search engine Imego, which had chosen Lakeside, among other universities, as partner in the Imego Library Project. Soon I was working evenings and weekends at the Imego warehouse in West Town. It seemed innocent enough at the time. We unloaded books, ran them under robotic scanners, or shipped them off to Bangalore to be scanned and returned on the cheap, then sent them back to the libraries they'd come from. And though friends from my MFA cohort needled me for speeding the demise of the physical book, I didn't care because the job offered full-time summer work and opportunities beyond graduation—and if it weren't for the project I never would have fallen in love with Dhara Patel.

As regional coordinator for Imego Books, Dhara played a role in her company's plan to digitize over thirty million volumes from twenty-five thousand libraries around the world—pretty much everything ever bound and printed on paper. She traveled from the warehouse and her office in downtown Chicago to universities around the Great Lakes to make sure that libraries were sending their books and people like me were moving apace. We kissed for the first time to the sound of the robotic scanner turning the pages of John D. MacDonald's
Ballroom of the Skies
. On our second anniversary as a couple, I tracked down a copy of the book, a sci-fi novel from 1952 about an intergalactic romance. We read lines of stilted dialogue to each other as we drank champagne and fell into bed. The following year we had much to toast. Dhara was promoted to affiliate sales manager, continuing her rise up the ranks; she convinced management to hire me into her old position; and on January 1, 2008, we were married, at her family's motel, in a watered-down Gujarati ceremony.

I had hoped, by the time I turned off I-55 onto Lake Shore Drive, almost home after five full days in Normal, to have mustered the courage to confess, but I still couldn't bring myself to tell Dhara about my father's decision. “We're still working on it,” I had said as late as that morning, talking on the cell phone with one hand while instructing movers with the other. I'd called some assisted-living places around Normal and Chicago, but couldn't imagine adding three thousand dollars a month to my debts. I'd tried the rental office at Harbor City, the iconic downtown towers better known as “the Honeycombs,” where Dhara and I lived, and considered signing a lease on the only available one-bedroom apartment. But I had no idea how I could afford another twelve hundred dollars a month, or the two thousand I'd have to pay the graduate-student movers who even now were packing the foreclosed house and hauling the contents of the junk-filled garage to a storage locker in Little Italy.

Though my father was the stubbornest man I knew, I assumed he was out of money and options and had no choice but to agree to my offer to stay at Dhara's and my apartment for a couple weeks or a couple months or for however long it took us to make a permanent plan.

I left the Prius with the attendant and took the elevator up to thirty-seven. When I arrived at our apartment, Dhara was already getting ready for dinner. She stood at the bedroom mirror in a creamy silk slip, blow-drying her hair.

“Happy anniversary,” I said. “You're looking awfully nice.”

“I'm in my underwear.”

“So you are—have I told you how much I missed you?”

I went to embrace her, but she stuck out her hair dryer like Barbarella's space gun. “I missed you, too, but maybe later. You look like you hopped off a garbage truck.”