The row of Sinclair Lewis paperbacks again stared me down, but this time I only browsed as a pretense. I was pursuing something else. I glanced stealthily down the aisle toward the front desk, where I could see just the top of the owner's balding head as he nodded over his reading. As usual I was the only customer in the store, and he contentedly occupied himself with yet another item pulled from his long-term inventory. Most of the inventory was long-term, judging by the tiny clouds of dust which billowed up every time a book was removed from the shelf. But despite the lack of business the owner seemed happy, surrounded by all that literature, and might have even resented customers as nagging interruptions to his reading. He must have had other means of support—maybe a kindly wife with a solid job and plenty of good-natured patience.
I thought I had waited long enough, and turned away from Lewis and began strolling toward the front desk, then paused again as a Jack London paperback caught my eye—Martin Eden, which I remembered as being his autobiographical novel. As I extracted it from the shelf its cover stuck slightly, in the damp air, to the adjacent volumes—People of the Abyss and the ubiquitous Call of the Wild—but finally came free. The book was in poor condition and marked down to a buck. The day I couldn't spare a buck for Jack London would be the day I'd chuck it all and go back to being a lowly file clerk, so I decided to buy the book. And buying it, I realized, would also give me a smoother opening with the owner.
The front desk was piled ten-high with books, whether being acquired or sold, coming or going, I couldn't tell. The owner stuck his finger into the hardback he was reading, saving his place, and glanced up at me with a look of familiarity. We didn't know each other by name, but had spent enough time together in this musty room—though usually separated by several rows of bookshelves—to somehow already feel acquainted.
"All set?" he asked as I handed the book across. He flipped open the cover. "Jack London," he intoned. "A pretty good one. That will be one dollar."
I already had a dollar bill in my hand, but hesitated. "Tax?"
"Eh, don't worry about it," he replied with a mild shake of his head. Purveyors of words like him presumably weren't concerned about petty regulations like sales taxes. "Such a small amount anyway."
"Thanks," I said, passing the dollar across to him, genuinely appreciating his saving me the measly four cents. He handed back the book.
Our transaction was completed, but buying yet another book wasn't the reason I had come. Or at least not the main reason—buying another book was always somewhere in my mind.
"Can I ask you something?" I began.
"Shoot," he replied.
"I've been in here lots of times, you know," I said, and told him my name.
"Sure, I recognize you. I'm Don Eastman. Good to meet you."
"Same here. So...the guy that was in here last time, Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard. What can you tell me about him?"
"Hmmm, Wheatyard," he said in a low, thoughtful voice, shifting upright in his chair as if his own curiosity was piqued. "Certainly an odd character. I don't actually know much about him. We've never really talked at any length, just a few words across the desk every now and then when he's here after the copy shop. He's lent me a couple of his manuscripts. Strange stuff—really hard for me to follow, and I've got a master’s in English, so I think I'm pretty well-read."
"Have you read Longing Dissolute Midnight?"
"No, I don't think so. I can't remember the titles, but one of them—Incongruity, something like that—was this weird mishmash of King Arthur and the Land of Oz and the Bolshevik Revolution, and a love story involving Donald Duck and Lillian Gish, plus at least a dozen big themes."
"That's how mine was, but with a whole different cast."
"The other one I read was more of the same. I honestly don't know how he makes it work, but he does. It should be just this big overwritten mess, but somehow it all comes together."
I nodded my agreement.
"It works," he repeated in quiet wonderment. "And another thing—I've read a ton of literature in my life, but I can't think of a single literary forebear for him, any sort of influence. His writing seems to have come completely out of nowhere, like some volcanic eruption shooting out of the ground."
I remained silent. Everything he said about Wheatyard had already crossed my own mind.
"But about him personally," I finally said. "What's his background?"
"That's all pretty hazy. I've looked him up in the catalogs, and it doesn't look like he's been published anywhere, which is hardly surprising. He seems like he'd be an editor's worst nightmare, and probably has hundreds of rejections. I know he lives in Tillsburg, and he comes to the copy shop two or three times a month, and every time he stops in here he's got manuscripts under his arm, and some mailing envelopes. I just assume he's always on his way to the post office down the street."
I shuffled my feet, staring downward. I had already figured out most of this for myself.
"I know even less about his personal life. His writing doesn't tell anything about his past, or else it's so buried in metaphor that it's impossible to pinpoint. He's obviously got an education, but it's hard to imagine him fitting in at any writing program, not even one of the weirder ones, with all the politics and groupthink that goes on. So even if he started at a writing program, I doubt he ever finished his degree."
Buried in metaphor. Suddenly a brief passage from Longing Dissolute Midnight, only a few sentences long, came back to hit me. Marilyn Monroe, stung from getting stood up for a date by Thomas Edison, stomps along a river bank in farm country, past endless cornfields and monolithic hog farms, and looks across the river with disdain at Don Quixote as he trudges exhaustedly up the opposite bank heading east, while overhead circles a bloodthirsty hawk, waiting for the kill, squawking "Kaw-roo! Kaw-roo!" over and over.
Though that might sound like part of a long, highly involved passage, that's all there was to it, one of scores of similar scenes in the book, some of them ten times longer. The passage didn't make much sense when I first read it, but now, with what Don Eastman was saying about writing programs, I got a hint of what it might mean.
Cornfields and hog farms, a bloodthirsty hawk, Kaw-roo Kaw-roo, Marilyn looking in disdain at a beaten Quixote—the University of Iowa, and Frank Conroy, whom Wheatyard once told me was director of the world-renowned Iowa Writer's Workshop. A beaten hero, forever tilting at windmills, retreating back east—Wheatyard leaving the Workshop in defeat, going back home to Illinois. And a perpetual Hollywood icon dismissing him as unworthy—maybe a screenplay that found no takers. Though I couldn't even guess where Thomas Edison might fit in.
I began to imagine Longing Dissolute Midnight as, maybe, one big metaphor for Wheatyard's life. It also occurred to me that perhaps the Captain Ahab cameo was an allusion to the thirteen-inch crappie boyhood incident, and Long John Silver holding Chevy Chase hostage was actually about Wally Long and the Chevy truck with the busted carburetor.
Or maybe I was just desperate, trying to figure this guy out, and read too much into it. Maybe Marilyn and Ahab and a bloodthirsty hawk were really nothing more than Marilyn, Ahab and a bloodthirsty hawk; maybe, as the old joke went, a cigar was just a cigar. Maybe Ahab and Long John Silver were mere homages to beloved boyhood seafaring tales. Maybe Wheatyard was just toying with all of us, presenting a cast of characters so audacious that overeducated readers like me couldn't help grasping for metaphors.
All of this—the sudden revelatory, transcendent moment and the equally sudden, deflating doubt—came to me later as I walked home, shortly after saying a hasty goodbye to Eastman. As his words concluded—I doubt he ever finished his degree—I had the first inkling of that too-brief revelation, and hurried outside to collect my thoughts. At moments like these I needed to be alone to sort through things, and for a while it seemed to make sense.
But the subsequent doubt came just as quickly, darkening my mind before I was barely halfway home. I unlocked my apartment door, tossed my shoulder bag on t
he kitchen floor as I reached into the refrigerator and cracked open a beer, one of only three that remained. The bottle's pressure hissed out from beneath the cap, which I carelessly flipped onto the counter. After looking over the meager contents of the cabinet—tonight would be either macaroni with margarine and whatever spices I could find, or red beans and rice—I shuffled back to the front room where I sunk into the couch, took the first sip from the bottle that went down far too easily, and turned the mystery of Wheatyard over and over in my head.