Potboiler

Pfefferkorn tried to remember what he was due to be paid for the delivery and acceptance of his next novel. He tried to calculate whether it would be enough to pay for the entire house or whether they would need to take out a mortgage. He didn’t know the first thing about real estate finance. Whatever the case was, he couldn’t afford anything unless he turned in a book. The present word count stood at ninety-nine, including the title and dedication pages. He wondered if making an outlandish offer was his subconscious’s way of motivating him to get to work. Or perhaps he could not bear to see his daughter disappointed. With the wedding, he had set a high standard, one he now felt compelled to meet and exceed. He pulled away so she wouldn’t feel his heart starting to pound.

“Daddy? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look a little green,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

He shook his head. He managed to produce a smile. “Question for you,” he said.

“Yes, Daddy?”

“When I’m old and pissing my pants, where’s my room going to be?”

“Stop.”

“Oh, I get it. You’re going to put me in a home.”

“Daddy. Stop.”

“Never mind, then.”

40.

Pfefferkorn’s success had at once heightened and undercut his stature as a professor. On the one hand, demand for his creative writing classes had grown, with long waiting lists established. With so large a pool available to him, he had the ability to control the composition of the class. However, he tended—stupidly, he thought—to admit a disproportionate number of literary types. These were the very students who tended to be snobbish about his work, comporting themselves with disdain, as though he could not possibly teach them about real literature when he had made a fortune writing trash. Even his good reviews provided grounds for scorn, signaling the death of critical integrity. The fact that his first novel had been literary fiction did not impress anyone. Nobody had heard of it. Pfefferkorn often wondered if he ought to go back to shepherding fragile young women.

The story under discussion that morning centered on an old man nearing the end of his life. He was tending his garden, oblivious to how its flourishing mocked his own senescence. The old man then watched a film in which the growth of flowers was shown, sped up, so that they went from seedling to full bloom to wilting to dead, all in a matter of seconds. This sequence was described in minute detail. The story ended with a cryptic fragment of dialogue.

The author was a twenty-year-old boy named Benjamin who came to class dressed in a homburg. His grasp of the aging process was limited to lurid descriptions of the male body in decay, although Pfefferkorn did acknowledge that the young man wrote with impressive confidence about urogenital problems and arthritis. Still, in Pfefferkorn’s opinion, the story lacked emotional insight. Indeed, it made no attempt whatsoever to penetrate the old man’s psyche at all. It was as if the author had laid the character on a slab and left him there. When Pfefferkorn attempted to raise this critique he met a blistering counterattack, not only from Benjamin but from a host of like-minded supporters. They argued that Pfefferkorn’s understanding of character was antiquated. They abhorred writers who overexplained. Pfefferkorn defended himself by citing avant-garde and postmodern writers whom he enjoyed, stating that even these seemingly stone-faced works had at their center a moist, beating core of humanity. “That is total bullshit,” Benjamin said. “We’re all robots,” a hard young woman named Gretchen said. Pfefferkorn asked her to explain what she meant by that. “I mean we’re all robots,” she said. Heads nodded. Pfefferkorn was confused. “You can’t all be robots,” he said, not knowing what argument he was making or why he was making it. These students did not speak the same language as he did. He was tired, too, having slept badly for several months running. His doctor had prescribed him a sedative, but so far it had proved ineffective, lulling him to the cusp of sleep but not beyond, so that he spent his waking hours in a fog. He saw himself through his students’ eyes and he saw weakness. “I am not a robot,” he repeated firmly. “How do you know?” Gretchen said. “Because I’m not,” Pfefferkorn said. “Yes,” she said, “but how do you know?” “I’m human,” Pfefferkorn said. “If you cut me, I bleed.” “If you cut me,” she said, “I bleed motor oil.” This was agreed upon by several of the students to be very funny. Pfefferkorn, feeling the beginnings of a migraine, was glad when the hour was up.