Oracle Night Read online

  In the two weeks since John and I had discussed that passage, it hadn’t once crossed my mind that I might want to take up the challenge of fleshing out the story. I agreed that it was a good premise – good because we have all imagined letting go of our lives, good because at one moment or another we have all wanted to be someone else – but that didn’t mean I had any interest in pursuing it. That morning, however, as I sat at my desk for the first time in almost nine months, staring at my newly acquired notebook and struggling to come up with an opening sentence that wouldn’t embarrass me or rob me of my courage, I decided to give the old Flitcraft episode a shot. It was no more than an excuse, a search for a possible way in. If I could jot down a couple of reasonably interesting ideas, then at least I could call it a beginning, even if I broke off after twenty minutes and never did another thing with it. So I removed the cap from my pen, pressed the point against the top line of the first page in the blue notebook, and started to write.

  The words came quickly, smoothly, without seeming to demand much effort. I found that surprising, but as long as I kept my hand moving from left to right, the next word always seemed to be there, waiting to come out of the pen. I saw my Flitcraft as a man named Nick Bowen. He’s in his mid-thirties, works as an editor at a large New York publishing house, and is married to a woman named Eva. Following the example of Hammett’s prototype, he is necessarily good at his job, admired by his colleagues, financially secure, happy in his marriage, and so on. Or so it would appear to a casual observer, but as my version of the story begins, trouble has been stirring in Bowen for some time. He had grown bored with his work (although he is unwilling to admit it), and after five years of relative stability and contentment with Eva, his marriage has come to a standstill (another fact he hasn’t had the courage to face). Rather than dwell on his burgeoning dissatisfaction, Nick spends his spare time at a garage on Desbrosses Street in Tribeca, engaged in the long-term project of rebuilding the engine of a broken-down Jaguar he bought in the third year of his marriage. He is a top young editor at a prestigious New York company, but the truth is that he prefers working with his hands.

  As the story opens, the manuscript of a novel has arrived on Bowen’s desk. A short work bearing the suggestive title of Oracle Night, it was supposedly written by Sylvia Maxwell, a popular novelist from the twenties and thirties who died nearly two decades ago. According to the agent who sent it in, this lost book was composed in 1927, the year Maxwell ran off to France with an Englishman named Jeremy Scott, a minor artist of the period who later worked as a set designer for British and American films. The affair lasted eighteen months, and when it was over Sylvia Maxwell returned to New York, leaving the novel behind with Scott. He held on to it for the rest of his life, and when he died at the age of eighty-seven, a few months before my story begins, a clause was found in his will that bequeathed the manuscript to Maxwell’s granddaughter, a young American woman named Rosa Leightman. It was through her that the book was given to the agent – with explicit instructions that it be sent to Nick Bowen first, before anyone else had a chance to read it.

  The package arrives at Nick’s office on a Friday afternoon, just minutes after he has left for the weekend. When he returns on Monday morning, the book is sitting on his desk. Nick is an admirer of Sylvia Maxwell’s other novels, and therefore he is eager to get started on this one. A moment after he turns to the first page, however, the telephone rings. His assistant informs him that Rosa Leightman is in the reception area, asking if she can see him for a few minutes. Send her in, Nick says, and before he is able to finish reading the opening sentences of the book (The war was nearly over, but we didn’t know that. We were too small to know anything, and because the war was everywhere, we didn’t …), Sylvia Maxwell’s granddaughter enters his office. She is dressed in the simplest clothes, has almost no makeup on, wears her hair in a short, unfashionable cut, and yet her face is so lovely, Nick finds, so achingly young and unguarded, so much (he suddenly thinks) an emblem of hope and uncoiled human energy, that he momentarily stops breathing. That is precisely what happened to me the first time I saw Grace – the blow to the brain that left me paralyzed, unable to draw my next breath – so it wasn’t difficult for me to transpose those feelings onto Nick Bowen and imagine them in the context of that other story. To make matters even simpler, I decided to give Grace’s body to Rosa Leightman – even down to her smallest, most idiosyncratic features, including the childhood scar on her kneecap, her slightly crooked left incisor, and the beauty mark on the right side of her jaw.3

  As for Bowen, however, I expressly made him someone I was not, an inversion of myself. I am tall, and so I made him short. I have reddish hair, and so I gave him dark brown hair. I wear size eleven shoes, and so I put him in size eight and a half. I didn’t model him on anyone I knew (not consciously, at any rate), but once I had finished putting him together in my mind, he became astonishingly vivid to me – almost as if I could see him, almost as if he had entered the room and were standing next to me, looking down at the desk with his hand on my shoulder and reading the words I was writing … watching me bring him to life with my pen.

  At last, Nick gestures for Rosa to sit down, and she settles into a chair on the opposite side of the desk. A long hesitation follows. Nick has begun breathing again, but he can’t think of anything to say. Rosa breaks the ice by asking if he found time to finish the book over the weekend. No, he answers, it came in too late. I didn’t get it until this morning.

  Rosa looks relieved. That’s good, she says. There’s been talk that the novel is a hoax, that it wasn’t written by my grandmother. I couldn’t be sure myself, so I hired a handwriting expert to examine the original manuscript. His report came in on Saturday, and he says it’s genuine. Just so you know. Oracle Night was written by Sylvia Maxwell.

  It sounds as if you liked the book, Nick says, and Rosa says yes, she was very moved by it. If it was written in 1927, he continues, then it came after The Burning House and Redemption but before Landscape with Trees – which would have made it her third novel. She was still under thirty then, wasn’t she?

  Twenty-eight, Rosa says. The same age I am now.

  The conversation goes on for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Nick has a hundred things to do that morning, but he can’t bring himself to ask her to leave. There is something so forthright about this girl, so lucid, so lacking in self-deception, that he wants to go on looking at her for a little while and absorb the full impact of her presence – which is beautiful, he decides, precisely because she is unaware of it, because of her absolute disregard of the effect she has on others. Nothing of consequence is said. He learns that Rosa is the daughter of Sylvia Maxwell’s oldest son (who was a product of Maxwell’s second marriage, to theater director Stuart Leightman) and that she was born and raised in Chicago. When Nick asks her why she was so keen on having the book sent to him first, she says she knows nothing about the publishing business, but Alice Lazarre is her favorite living novelist, and when she found out that Nick was her editor, she decided he was the man for her grandmother’s book. Nick smiles. Alice will be pleased, he says, and a few minutes later, when Rosa finally stands up to make her exit, he pulls some books off a shelf in his office and gives her a stack of Alice Lazarre first editions. I hope you’re not disappointed in Oracle Night, Rosa says. Why should I be disappointed? Nick asks. Sylvia Maxwell was a first-rate novelist. Well, Rosa says, this book is different from the others. In what way? Nick asks. I don’t know, Rosa says, in every way. You’ll find out for yourself when you read it.

  There were other decisions to be made, of course, a host of significant details that still had to be conjured up and worked into the scene – for purposes of fullness and authenticity, for narrative ballast. How long has Rosa been living in New York? for example. What does she do there? Does she have a job and, if so, is the job important to her or simply a means of generating enough money to cover the rent? What about the status of her love life? Is she sing
le or married, attached or unattached, on the prowl or patiently waiting for the right person to come along? My first impulse was to make her a photographer, or perhaps an assistant film editor – work that was connected to images, not words, just as Grace’s job was. Definitely unmarried, definitely never married, but perhaps involved with someone, or, even better, perhaps recently broken up after a long, tortured affair. I didn’t want to dwell on any of those questions for the time being, nor on similar questions relating to Nick’s wife – profession, family background, taste in music, books, and so on. I wasn’t writing the story yet, I was merely sketching out the action in rough strokes, and I couldn’t afford to bog myself down in the minutiae of secondary concerns. That would have forced me to stop and think, and for the moment I was only interested in forging ahead, in seeing where the pictures in my mind were going to take me. It wasn’t about control; it wasn’t even about making choices. My job that morning was simply to follow what was happening inside me, and in order to do that I had to keep the pen moving as fast as I could.

  Nick is not a rogue or a seducer of women. He has not made a habit of cheating on his wife during the course of their marriage, and he is not aware of having any designs on Sylvia Maxwell’s granddaughter now. But there is no question that he feels attracted to her, that he has been pulled in by the iridescence and simplicity of her manner, and the moment she stands up and leaves the office, it flashes through his mind – an unbidden thought, the figurative thunderclap of lust – that he would probably do anything to go to bed with this woman, even to the point of sacrificing his marriage. Men produce such thoughts twenty times a day, and just because a person experiences a momentary flicker of arousal doesn’t mean he has any intention of acting on the impulse, but still, no sooner does Nick play out the thought in his head than he feels disgusted with himself, stung by a sensation of guilt. To appease his conscience, he calls his wife at her office (law firm, brokerage house, hospital – to be determined later) and announces that he is going to book a reservation at their favorite downtown restaurant and take her to dinner that night.

  They meet there at eight o’clock. Things go pleasantly enough through drinks and the appetizer course, but then they begin to discuss some minor household matter (a broken chair, the imminent arrival of one of Eva’s cousins in New York, a thing of no importance), and soon they have fallen into an argument. Not a vehement one, perhaps, but enough irritation enters their voices to destroy the mood. Nick apologizes and Eva accepts; Eva apologizes and Nick accepts; but the conversation has gone flat, and there is no recapturing the harmony of just a few minutes ago. By the time the main course is delivered to the table, they are both sitting there in silence. The restaurant is packed, humming with animation, and as Nick absently casts his eyes around the room, he catches sight of Rosa Leightman, sitting at a corner table with five or six other people. Eva notices him looking off in that direction and asks if he’s seen someone he knows. That girl, Nick says. She was in my office this morning. He goes on to tell her something about Rosa, mentions the novel written by her grandmother, Sylvia Maxwell, and then tries to change the subject, but Eva has turned her head by then and is looking across the room at Rosa’s table. She’s very beautiful, Nick says, don’t you think? Not bad, Eva answers. But strange hair, Nicky, and really terrible clothes. It doesn’t matter, Nick says. She’s alive – more alive than anyone I’ve met in months. She’s the kind of woman who could turn a man inside out.

  It’s an awful thing for a man to say to his wife, especially to a wife who feels her husband has begun to drift away from her. Well, Eva says defensively, too bad you’re stuck with me. Would you like me to go over there and ask her to join us? I’ve never seen a man turned inside out before. Maybe I’ll learn something.

  Realizing the thoughtless cruelty of what he’s just said, Nick tries to undo the damage. I wasn’t talking about myself, he replies. I just meant a man – any man. Man in the abstract.

  After dinner, Nick and Eva return to their place in the West Village. It’s a tidy, well-appointed duplex on Barrow Street – John Trause’s apartment, in fact, which I appropriated for my Flitcraftian tale as a silent bow to the man who’d suggested the idea to me. Nick has a letter to write, some bills to pay, and as Eva prepares herself for bed, he sits down at the dining room table to attend to these small tasks. It takes him three quarters of an hour, but even though it’s getting late now, he feels restless, not yet ready for sleep. He pokes his head into the bedroom, sees that Eva is still awake, and tells her he’s going out to mail the letters. Just down to the box at the corner, he says. I’ll be back in five minutes.

  That’s when it happens. Bowen picks up his briefcase (which still contains the manuscript of Oracle Night), tosses in the letters, and goes out on his errand. It is early spring, and a stiff wind is blowing through the city, rattling the street signs, and stirring up bits of paper and debris. Still brooding about his disturbing encounter with Rosa that morning, still trying to make sense of the doubly disturbing accident of having seen her again that night, Nick walks to the corner in a fog, scarcely paying attention to where he is. He removes the letters from his briefcase and slips them into the mailbox. Something inside him has been broken, he tells himself, and for the first time since his troubles with Eva began, he’s willing to admit the truth of his situation: that his marriage has failed, that his life has come to a dead end. Rather than turn around and immediately head home, he decides to go on walking for a few more minutes. He continues down the street, turns at the corner, walks down another street, and then turns again at the next corner. Eleven stories above him, the head of a small limestone gargoyle attached to the façade of an apartment building is slowly breaking loose from the rest of its body as the wind continues to attack the street. Nick takes another step, and then another step, and at the moment the gargoyle head is finally dislodged, he walks straight into the trajectory of the falling object. Thus, in slightly modified form, the Flitcraft saga begins. Hurtling down within inches of Nick’s head, the gargoyle grazes his right arm, knocks the briefcase out of his hand, and then shatters into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk.

  The impact throws Nick to the ground. He is stunned, disoriented, afraid. At first, he has no idea what has happened to him. A split second of alarm as the stone touched his sleeve, an instant of shock as the briefcase flew out of his hand, and then the noise of the gargoyle head exploding against the pavement. Several moments go by before he can reconstruct the sequence of events, and when he does, he picks himself up from the sidewalk understanding that he should be dead. The stone was meant to kill him. He left his apartment tonight for no other reason than to run into that stone, and if he’s managed to escape with his life, it can only mean that a new life has been given to him – that his old life is finished, that every moment of his past now belongs to someone else.

  A taxi rounds the corner and comes down the street in his direction. Nick raises his hand. The taxi stops, and Nick climbs in. Where to? the driver asks. Nick has no idea, and so he speaks the first word that enters his head. The airport, he says. Which one? the driver asks. Kennedy, La Guardia, or Newark? La Guardia, Nick says, and off they go to La Guardia. When they get there, Nick walks up to the ticket counter and asks when the next flight is leaving. Flight to where? the ticket salesman asks. Anywhere, Nick says. The salesman consults the schedule. Kansas City, he says. There’s a flight that begins boarding in ten minutes. Fine, Nick says, handing the salesman his credit card, give me a ticket. One way or round-trip? the salesman asks. One way, Nick says, and half an hour later he’s sitting on a plane, flying through the night toward Kansas City.

  That was where I left him that morning – suspended in midair, winging madly toward an uncertain, implausible future. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been at it, but I could feel myself beginning to run out of gas, so I put down my pen and stood up from the chair. All in all, I had covered eight pages in the blue notebook. That would suggest at least two or three hours�
�� work, but the time had passed so quickly, I felt as if I’d been in there for only a few minutes. When I left the room, I headed down the hall and went into the kitchen. Unexpectedly, Grace was standing by the stove, preparing a pot of tea.

  ‘I didn’t know you were home,’ she said.

  ‘I got back a while ago,’ I explained. ‘I’ve been sitting in my room.’

  Grace looked surprised. ‘Didn’t you hear me knock?’