In the Night Room

Two stubble-faced boys wearing black swerved to move around him.

For a time he was incapable of speech. He could tell himself, April isn’t really there, I’m hallucinating, but what he was looking at seemed and felt like fact. Long-forgotten things returned laden with the gritty imperfections of the actual person his sister had been. The characteristic note of April’s nine-year-old life had been frustration, he saw: she had the face of a child who, having grown used to being thwarted, was in a furious hurry to reach adulthood.

April’s stubborn face, with its implacable cheekbones and tight mouth, reminded Tim of Pop’s uncomprehending rages at what he perceived as April’s defiance. No wonder she had fled into the mirror world of Alice and the Mad Hatter. A tavern-haunting elevator operator at the St Alwyn Hotel supervised her life, and he found half of the things that ran through her mind unacceptable, irritating, obscurely insulting.

A second and a half later Tim was left with the fact of April’s face, narrower than he remembered, and the smallness of her body, the true childishness of the sister he had lost. All his old love for nine-year-old April Underhill awakened in him—she who had defended him when he needed defending, stuck up for him when he needed a champion, entranced him with the best stories he had ever heard. She, he realized, she should have been the writer! April had been his guide, and to the end. On her last day, she had preceded him into the ultimate Alice-world, the one beyond death, where, unable any longer to follow his best, bravest, and most tender guide all the way to her unimaginable destination, he had yielded to the forces pulling him back.

He wanted to tell her to get out of the rain.

April stepped forward on the crowded sidewalk, and Tim’s heart went cold with terror. His sister had swum back through the mirror to interrupt him on his way to breakfast. He feared that she intended to glide across the street, grasp his hand, and pull him into the SoHo traffic. She reached the edge of the pavement and raised her arms.

Oh no, she’s going to call to me, he thought, and I’ll have to go.

Instead of dragging him through the mirror, April brought her hands to the sides of her mouth, leaned forward, contracted her whole being, and, as loudly as she could, shouted through the megaphone of her hands. All Tim heard were the sounds of the traffic and the scraps of conversation spoken by the people walking past him.

His eyes stung, his vision blurred. By the time he raised his hands to flick away his tears, April had disappeared.

6

Guilderland Road, at the upper end of which lay Mitchell Faber’s expansive, densely wooded property, traversed an area on the southwestern slopes (so to speak) of Alpine, New Jersey, where not long after the Civil War the nearly invisible village of Hendersonia had been surgically detached from the more public borough of Creskill. In all aspects of life save the naming of places, the Hendersons of Hendersonia had presumably cherished obscurity as thoroughly as Mitchell Faber, for they had passed through history leaving behind no more than a scattering of barely legible headstones in the postage-stamp graveyard at the lower end of the road. Farther down the hill, the cement-block bank, an abandoned Presbyterian church, a private house turned into an insurance agency, a video and DVD rental shop, and a bar and grill called Redtop’s made up the center of town. The previous summer, a Foodtown grocery store had taken over an old bowling alley in a paved lot one block south, and Willy promised herself that from now on she would do her shopping there.

She was still finding her way around, still trying to get into a routine. It had been only two weeks since Mitchell had succeeded in persuading her to abandon her cozy one-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street for the ‘estate.’ They were to be married in two months, why not start living together now? They were adults of thirty-eight and fifty-two (a young fifty-two), alone in the world. Let’s face it, Mitchell said one night, you need me. She needed him, and he wanted her as extravagantly as someone like Mitchell Faber could ever want anything—dark, frowning Mitchell summoning her into his embrace, promising to make sure the bad things never got close to her again. The ‘estate’ would be perfect for her, he said, a protective realm, as Mitchell himself was a kind of protective realm. And large enough to provide separate offices for both of them, because he wanted to spend more time at home and she needed what all women, especially women who wrote books, needed: A Room of Her Own.

When Willy had met Mitchell Faber, he amazed her by knowing not only that her third YA novel, In the Night Room, had just won the Newbery Medal, but also that its setting, Mill Basin, was based on the city where she had been born, Millhaven, Illinois.

The prize had been announced four days earlier, but the party at Molly Harper’s apartment was not in her honor, and Willy’s triumph was so fresh, as yet still half unreal, that she felt as though it might be revoked. Willy herself, having yet to emerge from mad grieving darkness, would have run from anything as public as a celebration. She felt only barely capable of handling a dinner party. Some of the people present were aware that Willy had just been honored by the Newbery Committee, and some of those came up to congratulate her. Molly’s friends tended to be too rich to be demonstrative; like Molly herself, many of the women were decades younger than their husbands, thereby generally obliged to exercise a kind of behavioral modification akin to the pushing of a ‘Mute’ button. Added to their characteristic restraint was their response to Willy’s appearance, that of a gorgeous lost child. Some women disliked her on sight. Others felt threatened when their husbands wandered, flirtatiously or not, into Willy’s orbit.

Toward the end of the evening, or shortly after ten o’clock, for these silver-haired men and their gleaming wives never stayed up later than eleven, Lankford Harper, Molly’s whispery husband, left the chair to Willy’s left and within seconds was replaced by a sleek, smooth male animal remarkable for being older than most of the women and younger than all of the men. Energy hummed through his thick, shiny black hair and luxuriant black mustache. Black eyes and brilliant white teeth shone at Willy, and a wide, warm dark hand covered hers. That she did not find this intimacy discomfiting amazed her. Whatever was about to happen, would; instead of feeling offended, Willy relaxed.

—I want to congratulate you on your magnificent honor, Mrs Patrick, the man said, leaning in. You must feel as though you’ve won the lottery.

—Hardly that, she said. Do you keep up with children’s books then, Mr…?

—I’m Mitchell Faber. No, I can’t say I’m an expert on children’s books, but the Newbery’s a great accolade, and I have heard wonderful things about your book. Your third, isn’t it?

She opened her mouth.—Yes.

—Good title, In the Night Room, especially for a children’s book.

—It’s probably too close to Maurice Sendak, but he was writing for a younger audience. Why am I explaining myself to this guy? she wondered.

His hand tightened on hers.—Please excuse me for what I’m about to say, Mrs Patrick. I knew your husband. At times, our work brought us into contact. He was a fine, fine man.

For a moment, Willy’s vision went grainy, and her heart hovered between beats. Ordinary conversation hummed on around her. She blinked and raised her napkin to her mouth, buying time.

—I’m sorry, the man said. I did that very badly.

—Not at all. I was just a bit startled. Do you work for the Baltic Group?

—From time to time, they call me in to make murky issues even murkier.

—I’m sure you bring clarity wherever you go, she said, and, in a way she hoped brought the conversation to a neat conclusion, thanked him for having approached her.

Mitchell Faber leaned in and patted her hand.—Mill Basin, the village in your book. Is it based on Millhaven? I understand that’s where you’re from.

Mitchell Faber was chockablock with little astonishments.

Flattered, puzzled, she smiled back at him.—You must know Millhaven very well. Are you from there, too?

The question was absurd: Faber did not look, sound, or behave like a Millhaven native. Nor was he a product of the East Coast privilege-hatcheries responsible for Lankford Harper.

—Sometimes when I’m in Chicago I like to drive up to Millhaven, check in to the Pforzheimer for a night or two, wander along the river walk, have a drink in the old Green Woman. Do you know the Green Woman Taproom?

She had never heard of the Green Woman Taproom.

—Lovely old bar, fascinating history. Ought to be in encyclopedias. It has an interesting connection to criminal lore.

Criminal lore? She had no idea what he was talking about, and no intention of finding out. As far as Willy was concerned, the murders of her husband and daughter were more than enough crime for the rest of her life. The very idea of ‘criminal lore’ struck her as a bad idea.

Mitchell Faber could have struck her the same way, but Willy found that she had not made up her mind so quickly. Calling Molly the next day to thank her, she found herself asking her friend about the man who had spoken to her about the Newbery and Millhaven. Molly knew very little about him.

A day later, Willy called to report that the unknown dinner guest had asked if they might get together for a cup of coffee or a drink, or anything.

—I’d go straight for the anything, Molly told her. What have you got to lose? I thought he was pretty cute. Besides, he isn’t a hundred years old.

—I don’t know anything about him, Willy said. And I don’t think I’m ready to start dating. I’m not even close.

—Willy, how long has it been?

—Two years. That’s nothing.

—So’s a cup of coffee.

—I’d have to tell him everything.

—If he works with Lanky, he knows everything already. These guys can find out whatever they want to, they can dig up anything. Lanky told me they’re better than the CIA, and they should be! They have about ten times the money!

—Ah, Willy said. So that’s how Mr Faber found out about In the Night Room and Millhaven.

—He had Lanky!

—Lanky knows I won the Newbery? Excuse me, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.

Molly was laughing.—Of course Lanky knows. He even read Night Room.

Now Willy was stunned.—Lanky read my book? It’s a YA!

—YA novels are Lanky’s secret passion. When he was twenty-five years old, he read The Greengage Summer, and it changed his life. Now he’s an expert on Rumer Godden.

Willy tried to picture Molly’s gaunt, secretive, gray-haired husband in his blue pin-striped suit and gold watch, bending, in the light of a library lamp, over a copy of Miss Happiness and Miss Flower.

—He has a fabulous collection, Molly said. We’re talking about Lankford Harper now, remember. There’s a special vault with huge metal bookshelves. When you push this little button, they revolve. Thousands of books, most of them in great condition. When he gets a new one, he buys a bunch of copies, one to read and the rest to put in the vault. Philip Pullman—you wouldn’t believe how much those Philip Pullmans are worth.

Willy should have known that Lanky Harper’s interest in her fiction was primarily financial.—How many copies of In the Night Room are stashed away in that vault?

—Five. He bought three when it came out, and as soon as the Newbery was announced, he bought two more.

—Five copies? I guess he liked it a lot. Her mind had returned to Mitchell Faber, whose intrusiveness had contained an unexpected quantity of appeal. At least Faber had been unafraid actually to talk to the tragic widow, instead of swaddling her in clichés. Secretly, dark Mitchell Faber rather thrilled Willy Patrick: he was the kind of man for whom everyone else’s rules were merely guidelines.

7

So there he had been, Tim Underhill, in the good old Fireside, trying to act as though his hands weren’t shaking so badly that the mushrooms fell off his fork; and trying to look as absorbed in the crossword puzzle as he was every other morning. The words kept blurring on the page, and none of the clues made sense; above all, Underhill was trying simultaneously to figure out and ignore whatever his murdered nine-year-old sister had been shouting at him from the other side of West Broadway. Contradictory desires were difficult to fulfill, especially when wrapped in such urgency. April bending forward, shouting at him, bellowing, frantic to get her message across…

‘Mr Underhill?’

Tim turned to see the face of an eager black-haired man of forty or so, still boyish, and radiant with what looked like mingled pleasure and bravado. A fan. This kind of thing happened to him maybe three times a year.

‘You got me,’ he said, dropping his hands to his lap to conceal their trembling.

‘Timothy Underhill is right here, right smack in the Fireside. Just like a normal person.’

‘I am a normal person,’ Tim said, stretching a point.

‘I yam what I yam, hah! Didn’t you say that once? In print, I mean?’

He had quoted Popeye? It sounded remotely possible, but possible. Barely.

‘Would you do a big favor for me? I’m a fan, obviously—who else would barge in on your little breakfast, right? But I’d really appreciate it if you signed some books for me. Would you do that, Mr Underhill? Would you sign some books for me, Tim? Is it all right if I call you Tim?’

‘You carry my books around with you?’

‘Hey, that’s funny. You’re a funny guy, Tim! Ever think about going into comedy? No, the books are back in my apartment, I mean, where else would they be? If I had ESP, I’d have them with me, but no such luck, right? But I live right down the street, be back in five minutes, less, four minutes, time me with your watch, check it out, see if I’m wrong. Okay? We got a deal?’

‘Go get the books,’ Tim said.

The fan made a pistol with his hand, pointed it at Tim, and dropped the hammer of his thumb. He whirled away and was out the door. Tim realized that he had never given his name. As fans went, this one seemed slightly off, but Tim wished to preserve an open mind about anyone who bought his books. Anyone who did that had earned his gratitude.

Today’s admirer stretched his patience nearly to the breaking point. After twelve minutes, Tim began to simmer. He liked getting to his desk by ten, and it was already 9:40. If he gave up on the eggs he didn’t want and abandoned the puzzle he couldn’t concentrate on well enough to finish, he could avoid dealing with the fan, who had been overassertive, overintrusive, and was unlikely to be satisfied with merely a couple of signatures. He would want to talk, to swap phone numbers, to find out where Tim lived. He’d escalated from ‘Mr Underhill’ to ‘Tim’ in less than a second. ‘Tim’ did not want to encourage a fan who told him he was a funny guy—it gave him the willies. So did the shooting gesture with which the man had left him.

Again, he saw April before him, cupping her hands and shaping her mouth to shout…

Whistle to us? That could not be right.

Tim let his fork clatter to his plate, signaled the waiter for the check, and returned his pen to his pocket. Rain streamed down the windows of the diner, and when the door swung open, a few drops spattered onto the tiles. Tim sighed. A wet hand swept the sodden hood of a sweatshirt off his admirer’s glowing face. The fan held up a yellow bag bearing the likeness of Charles Dickens.

‘Did you time me?’

Tim looked at his watch. ‘You were gone at least twenty minutes.’

‘No, six, at the outside. I would have been here earlier, but the rain slowed me down.’

The fan pulled the books one by one from the shiny bag and stacked them about an inch north of Tim’s plate. They were copies of lost boy lost girl, as yet unpublished. He had received his box of author’s copies only a short while before. ‘These babies stayed dry, anyhow.’ The fan wiped his face and pushed the moisture back into his thick black hair. ‘Must be a great feeling to sign a book you wrote, huh? Like “This is my baby, get a good look, ’cuz I’m one proud papa,” right?’

Tim wanted to get rid of this character as soon as possible. ‘Where did you get these books?’

The man slid the books nearer to Tim. ‘Why? I bought them, didn’t I?’

Water dripped from his sleeves, and drops landed on the Times crossword puzzle. In a small number of squares, the ink melted into the paper.

‘Okay,’ he said, and sat down in the chair opposite Tim. ‘Sign the first one to Jasper Kohle, that’s Jasper the normal way, and Kohle is K-O-H-L-E. My full name is Jasper Dan Kohle, but I only use my middle name on checks and my driver’s license, ha ha. Inscribe it however you like. Have fun. Use your imagination. You could say, “To Jasper Kohle, I yam what I yam.” ’

The only thing worse than someone ordering you to be inventive when you signed their book was someone telling you exactly what to write. This fan had managed to do both. Tim looked at Jasper Kohle, for the first time actually taking him in, and saw someone whose cheerfulness was laid on like paint. His eyes had no light, and his smile displayed too many teeth, all of them yellow. He was ten to fifteen years older than he had first appeared.

‘You didn’t go to your apartment,’ Tim said. ‘You ran all the way to the bookstore, and then you ran back. I don’t understand it, but that’s what you did. But the real problem is this book hasn’t actually been published yet, and it’s not supposed to be on sale. The copies aren’t even supposed to have shipped to the bookstores.’

‘Come on,’ Kohle said. ‘You must have some kind of problem with trust.’

‘If I looked inside that bag, I bet I’d find a receipt with today’s date on it.’

Kohle glowered at him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Tim. Are you this pricky to all your fans?’

‘No, I’m just interested in your explanation.’

‘I wanted more.’

‘More copies of the same book?’

‘I have four at home. But since you’re here, I thought I should get three more, so I’d have three signed, plus four backup copies. One of ’em I’ve read, but that’s all, just one.’ He nudged the books still closer to Tim. ‘Don’t inscribe the second two, just flat sign them and put down the date. On the title page, please.’

‘You wanted seven copies of lost boy lost girl ?’

Kohle showed his yellow teeth again. ‘If you want to know the truth, I’d like ten, but I’m not a fucking millionaire, am I?’

‘Why would you want ten copies?’

‘I collect books!’

‘I guess you do,’ Tim said. He picked up his pen, opened the topmost book to the title page, and thought for a second before writing:

To Jasper Kohle

a collector’s collector

All Best,

Tim Underhill

After adding the date beneath this inscription, he handed the book, still opened to the title page, to Kohle, who was waiting to receive it like a child, both hands out. Gimme gimme gimme. He yanked the book from Underhill’s hands, turned it around, and dipped his head toward the inscription. Odd, irregular white-gray streaks ran through the thick black pelt on the top of his head. When he snapped his head back up, his eyes held a dull, flat glare, and the skin at the corners of his mouth looked wrinkled and dark with grease.

‘What happened to “I yam what I yam”?’

‘I’m not doing so well this morning, but I don’t think I ever put that in a book,’ Tim said.

‘Oh yes, you did. That cop, Esterhaz, says it in The Divided Man. “I yam what I yam.” Right at the beginning, when he’s hungover and getting out of bed. Just before he sees the dead people marching around.’

At his worst moments, Hal Esterhaz, an alcoholic homicide detective in Tim’s second novel, had seen an army of the dead trudging aimlessly through the streets. He had not once, however, quoted Popeye.

‘I see you don’t believe me,’ Kohle said. ‘No wonder, stupid me—you can’t, because you don’t know. Okay, go ahead, sign the other books, you probably got things you want to do.’

Tim removed the second book from the pile and opened it to the title page. He looked back at Jasper Dan Kohle and found that he could not resist. ‘I don’t know what, exactly?’

‘Mr Underhill,’ Kohle said. ‘Tim. Let me say this, Tim. And I’m saying this although I know that you will have precisely no idea at all what I’m talking about, because that is guaranteed one hundred percent certain. So first let me ask you: do you have any idea at all why a guy like me would want to collect twenty copies of the same book? A hundred copies, if I had all the money in the world, a likely story, thank you very much?’

‘As an investment?’ Tim took his eyes off Kohle long enough to sign the second book and pick up the third.

Kohle went through a savage parody of yawning. ‘I don’t even live in this neighborhood. But I saw you doing your crossword puzzle, and I let my whaddayacallit, my joie de vivre, get the better of me, and the next thing I know, I’m spending a whole lot more money than I should on your new book. Which to tell you the truth is a little lightweight, not to mention kind of rushed at the end.’

‘Glad you liked it,’ Tim said.

‘So why do I want fifteen, twenty copies of a book that isn’t really all that hot, if you don’t mind my saying so?’

‘That was my question, yes.’ Tim pushed the last two books across the table.

‘Listen up now, here it comes.’ He leaned over and cupped his mouth with his hands, as April had done. ‘One of them might be the real book.’

He pulled the three copies of Underhill’s novel into the circle of his arms. ‘What, you ask, is the real book? The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up. Authors think every copy of a book is the same, but they’re not. Every time a book goes through the presses, two, three, copies of the real book come out. That’s the one you wanted to write when you started out, with everything perfect, no mistakes, nothing dumb, and all the dialogue and the details exactly right. People like me, that’s what we’re looking for. Investment? Don’t make me laugh. It’s the reverse of an investment. Once you find a real book, sell it to someone? Give me a break.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Tim said.

Kohle raised his hands chest-high in exasperation. ‘You guys are all the same. Ninety percent of the time, you’re just making things up. You act like a bunch of lazy, irresponsible gods. It wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t basically deaf and blind, too. You don’t listen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tim asked, unsettled by the sudden reappearance on his mental screen of his sister, April.

‘If you paid more attention, your real books wouldn’t be all that different from the ones you wrote.’

Kohle seemed wetter than he had been earlier. Greasy moisture covered his sunken cheeks. His filthy sweatshirt was on the verge of disintegration.

‘Jasper, I signed your books, and now I’m just about through with this conversation. But if these “real” books exist, how come no one ever showed me one?’

‘Authors can’t see them,’ Kohle said. ‘I can’t imagine what the sight of a real book would do to one of you people—total meltdown, I suppose. Most people never get so much as a glimpse at a real book. The collectors manage to scoop ’em up almost as soon as they come out. Once in a blue moon, a reviewer gets a copy. That can be pretty funny. The reviewer flips out over some book that’s a piece of crap, and everyone wonders if he lost his mind. Come to think of it, that happened to one of your books.’