Potboiler

Pfefferkorn stood in darkness, listening to the wind gust through the unused portion of the barn and stubbing his feet against the cold tile. He flicked on the light and sat at the desk, opening drawers. The first was empty. The second contained a box of pens of the same brand as those in the jar. The final drawer contained three reams of paper still in their wrappers.

The wind gusted again.

Pfefferkorn reached for the neatly piled manuscript. He leaned back in the chair. It let out a loud, rusty bark. He read.

If he had expected anything different from Bill’s previous work, he was to be disappointed: in both substance and style, the manuscript differed so little from what he’d read on the plane that Pfefferkorn entertained himself with the idea that Carlotta had been mistaken, and that the pages in his hand were not a book-in-progress but the same one on display in airport terminals throughout the world. Three chapters in, he glanced over at the bookcase containing both his and Bill’s life’s work. The disparity amazed him. Even more amazing was that Bill still thought so highly of him. Surely one would expect that decades of uninterrupted commercial success would go to a person’s head. Surely Bill had the right to believe that he, not Pfefferkorn, was the superior writer. And who was to say he wasn’t? Pfefferkorn decided that he had been too harsh. Consistency, productivity, broad appeal—these, too, were writerly virtues, as was the ability to repeatedly vary a theme. By the end of its opening sentence, a William de Vallée novel made its reader feel at home. As a student, Pfefferkorn had railed against mass-market entertainment, decrying it as a weapon of the ruling powers aimed at maintenance of the status quo. He gravitated toward writers who employed alienating styles or unconventional themes, believing that these possessed the power to awaken the reading public to fundamental problems concerning the modern condition. He had striven to write in that mode as well. But these were a young man’s concerns. Pfefferkorn had long ago stopped believing that his stories (or any story, for that matter) would have a measurable effect on the world. Literature did not decrease injustice or increase fairness or cure any of the ills that had plagued mankind from time immemorial. It was sufficient, rather, to make one person, however bourgeois, feel slightly less unhappy for a short period of time. In Bill’s case, the cumulative effect of millions of people made slightly less unhappy for a short period of time had to be reckoned a significant accomplishment. There, at a bare desk in a frigid office in the middle of the night, Pfefferkorn softened his heart toward his dead friend, and to bad but successful writers everywhere.

18.

Dawn broke and he still had seventy pages left. He had to hand it to Bill: the man could spin a yarn. The latest installment of Dick Stapp’s adventures began with the murder of a politician’s wife but eventually led to far-off regions, as Stapp pursued a suitcase containing nuclear launch codes. Did they really call it a football? Pfefferkorn did not know. He put down the manuscript and stood, twisting to loosen his back. He knelt by the bookcase and took out his own novel, studying the cover, its blue darker than that of the faded spine. There was his name in yellow letters. There, in white, was a pencil drawing of a tree. The tree had been his idea. At the time it made sense to him but now he saw that it was boring and pretentious. Live and learn, he thought. He opened to the back flap. There was his author photo, taken by his wife on her old camera. In it he was young and thin, staring intensely, chin clutched between thumb and side of forefinger, a pose intended to give him gravitas. Now he decided that he looked like his head had become detached and he was trying to keep it in place.

He turned to the title page and the inscription.

 

Bill

I’ll catch you one day

love

Art

Had he really written that? Bill must have been embarrassed by the pettiness of it, although Pfefferkorn could not remember him saying anything other than thank you. And such folly. He would never catch Bill, at least not in terms of numbers. That much should have been apparent, even back then.

Shaking his head, Pfefferkorn opened the book to a random page. What he saw astonished him. The text had been heavily annotated, every sentence asterisked, underlined, boxed, or bracketed, some all four. A dense, Talmudic commentary filled the margins. Diction was analyzed, allusions explicated, scenes dissected for structure. Pfefferkorn riffled the rest of the book and was aghast to discover that it had all been given an identical treatment. The novel’s final paragraph ended in the middle of a page, and below the closing words Bill had written:

YES