slathered with mustard and mayo and horseradish, capped with a thick slice of raw onion. Possibly feeling Lockwood’s eyes on him, Alonzo Baylor turns around, meat juice running down his hand. He faces dozens of eyes fixed on him as he opens his mouth to bite into the wondrous construct.
Lockwood’s eyes meet Baylor’s and there is a flicker of recognition. The thick neck, the wiry gray hair, and the pugilistic nose are unmistakable, and intimidating. Baylor makes literature look easy, as one terse sentence inevitably builds on another. He has time to write books and to pal around with film stars, prizefighters, beach bunnies, and ex-convicts. He pisses off academics and feminists with his pronouncements. And his books weigh a ton, packed as they are with gristly prose and squat paragraphs as compact as fire hydrants.
A mere ten feet away, Lockwood stands with head bowed, hands clasped, his gaze apparently on the Señora’s feet squeezed into pink satin pumps. His attention, however, is fixed on Alonzo Baylor, who hovers at the head of the casket, sandwich in hand.
The world-famous author dabs the corners of his mouth with a napkin, wiping away a smear of mustard. He looks in both directions, then places the half-eaten sandwich on a stanchion and leans into the coffin to gaze at the Señora’s placid face. He appears (or pretends, thinks Lockwood) to be too involved in his grief to notice the steady shuffle of the crowd as it files past him. A man so absorbed should not be disturbed. Even when he is recognized, and whispers flutter about him, he is able to ignore the nervous shiver that his presence elicits. His name is handed down the line until, as in a game of telephone tag, Alonzo Baylor becomes Shoreman Sailor becomes Roman Taylor becomes Norman Mailer and Alonzo Baylor again, here to pay tribute and mourn Mercè Casals out of an old friendship, perhaps a secret passion.
Baylor has the moves of a thief. His sneaky fingers creep along the outside of the casket until the right hand is poised just above the Señora’s head. The fingers, casually dangling over the edge, descend until they ever so lightly brush the side of her face. With his left hand firmly supporting his brow, Baylor glances darkly around, and in a moment’s sleight, the right index curls itself around a few of the Señora’s fine red hairs and yanks them out swiftly. Her head barely nods. Lockwood winces. He expects the diva to cry out.
Thinking he has escaped notice, Baylor is emboldened. He slips the hairs inside a white envelope. Next, he places the envelope on Mercè Casals’ famous mouth and obtains a lipsticked imprint of her lips. Baylor hangs over the edge of the casket, his shoulders convulsed in theatrical sobs, as he pockets the envelope. Lockwood imagines him gaining some insight or other into his biographical subject by taking the samples for DNA analysis. Maybe something occult, like a reading of tea leaves or a channeling of the newly departed spirit.
This time Lockwood looks directly at Baylor and stares at him with a look that says, I saw what you did!
Baylor meets his gaze. The message is clear: I know you saw what you saw. Why would I give a damn?
ONE, 900, DR. PHONE.
When Lockwood returns to Anaheim at the end of the day, the Señora’s absence continues to absorb him. He decides that grief and shock feel like the flu; the day’s events bring on a dull ache in his chest. A scattering of unopened mail and unread newspapers lies by the door, but he goes directly to his office upstairs. He sits at a heavy oak desk; to one side his Mac workhorse; on the other a printer and two metal filing cabinets stacked like a fortress. He is surrounded by fiberboard bookcases, their slats swaying under the weight of handy references: dictionaries and a thesaurus, Bartlett’s quotations, Books in Print, volumes with maps and holy books of all creeds, America’s Most Beloved Poems from Auden to Whitman, The Unabridged How Things Work, Trees and Plants of North America, Audubon’s bird books, insect books, fish books, and 1001 Jokes, Insults, and Toasts for Every Occasion.
The gooseneck lamp on his desk sheds scant light on the rest of the room, where Claire, half in shadows, is a vaguely reproachful presence. “You’re here,” she says.
“Yes, I’m here.” He starts. Then he turns from the pile of tapes and papers cluttering his desk.
“You could’ve said hello.”
“If I don’t organize the interviews as soon as I get home, I’ll end up with a mess. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“I was making dinner. What’s there to disturb? It’d be nice to see you once in a while, Mark. You left this morning without making a sound.”
“You need your sleep.”
“I get enough sleep.”
“Why are we having this conversation?” Lockwood shakes his head in exasperation.
Claire leaves and closes the door behind her.
He could ask the same question about all the conversations he has been having. He is in fact surrounded by conversations in which he has no role but to listen. Radio banter wakes him up in the morning. TV banter puts him to sleep.
Lockwood suspects that writers wear out their souls in the same way that prostitutes or spies or beggars do. When put on the spot—to write a brochure inviting retired union members to invest in waste-management start-ups or a fund-raising letter for the evangelization of Guatemala, to name two recent examples—it is not his role to question but to rent out his craft.
The voice that calls Lockwood belongs to a lesser Muse—the deadline, the mortgage, the fear of failure. A hundred typing chimps might, with the help of a decent editor, write Hamlet in a thousand years. Point a gun at Lockwood’s head and he could do it in a month. The world, however, doesn’t want another Hamlet so much as it does a reassuring How to Prepare for Your Colonoscopy.
His résumé lists several accomplishments, including the six-page fund-raising letter for Amnesty International (“Sincere emotion, honest indignation, principled righteousness!”) which won the Direct Mail Association’s Gold Award in its category and pulled an unheard-of 6.7% response, and the booklet How to Talk to Your Teen About God (part of his series for the Troubled Teen Press covering Drugs, STDs, Safe Driving, Money, War, Divorce, and Sexual Orientation), which has been recommended by hundreds of ministers across the country, mostly Unitarian but also a few of the more easygoing Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Con-gregationalists, and such.
The myth that hack work is effortless, a notch above typing, was fostered by writers who have never been called to produce three thousand words on “Accident and Disability Insurance Exclusions.” Once you’re over the limitations of subject matter and intended audience, the good old mot juste is discovered just as joyfully while explaining to a teenager how to put on a condom as while narrating the death of Emma Bovary.
A younger Lockwood wrote his debut collection of short fiction—Two Loaves of Bread and Other Tales of Fame and Famine— with the fervor of a stone carver chiseling the words into eternity. It earned him an MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at twenty-three and sold 875 copies, mostly to libraries, some to friends and to his mother, who bought a carton to distribute on birthdays, weddings, and graduations.
The unsold books remain packed in a dozen boxes. Occasionally he offers a copy to a client. He gave one to his dentist and to his favorite mechanic at the Saab shop. He also made a dent in the inventory by abandoning copies in busy places—airport gate areas, bus seats, phone booths, coffeehouse tables, taxis, shelves in small-town libraries. For years he took books wherever he went. He signed his name on the title page and underneath wrote his phone number—312-693-3126. He still fantasizes a stranger picking up the book and being moved enough by its contents to call him: “Yes, I read your stories. I cried at ‘The Onion Peeler’ and laughed at the end of ‘The Perfect Uncle.’ ”
Over the years there have been a couple such calls. One woman wanted to know his address so she could return the book to him. Surely he had left it by mistake at a Northwest gate in the Minneapolis—St. Paul airport. He asked her if she had read any of the stories. Oh, she was not much of a reader. She had started a couple, but had not gotten very far with them.
Another