End of Story Read online

  END of STORY

  Peter Abrahams

  To my nieces and nephews—

  Lauren, Shane, Jake, Rachel, and Maddy

  Curses? The dark? Struggling? Where’s the source

  Of these yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?

  —PHILIP LARKIN, “Whatever Happened”

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  One

  “How is going the writing?” said Dragan Karodojic.

  Two

  “Cool,” said Bruce Verlaine, owner of Verlaine’s Bar and Grille.

  Three

  A CO named Moffitt sat outside the library door. Ivy…

  Four

  Friday night at Verlaine’s, and it was jumping.

  Five

  “Yes,” said Ivy, rolling over to check the time. “I…

  Six

  Taneesha and another guard appeared, took Morales to the infirmary.

  Seven

  Next day: no call from Whit. Same the day after…

  Eight

  Ivy drove out of Dannemora, Harrow’s jacket in the writing…

  Nine

  Ivy opened her eyes, sat up in the brass bed…

  Ten

  “You are so far liking this criminal job?” Dragan said.

  Eleven

  “I’m Natasha Balaban. Thanks for coming.”

  Twelve

  “Hi.”

  Thirteen

  In the Dannemora library: Ivy at one end of the…

  Fourteen

  The manager held out his hand. “Leon Redfeather,” he said.

  Fifteen

  “Been up this way before?” said Detective Gagnon.

  Sixteen

  At six o’clock, the doors of the Wal-Mart near the…

  Seventeen

  Tipsy. That was the word Ivy’s late grandmother, back in…

  Eighteen

  “Summarizing, then,” said Herman Landau, motioning for his assistant to…

  Nineteen

  Ivy awoke feeling refreshed, more refreshed than after any sleep…

  Twenty

  Morales on the left, his arm no longer in a…

  Twenty-One

  About twenty minutes later, Sergeant Tocco walked her out of…

  Twenty-Two

  The Edge, who missed his flight or had visa problems…

  Twenty-Three

  The Canadian ten-dollar bill was a beautiful purple thing with…

  Twenty-Four

  Ivy awoke in the night, something hard against her face.

  Twenty-Five

  A great yarn—my agent kept hearing that, Tony B had…

  Twenty-Six

  Ivy drove out of the city, headed north. The wind…

  Twenty-Seven

  Ivy sat beside Taneesha in the hall of the old…

  Twenty-Eight

  “Morocco,” Harrow said.

  Twenty-Nine

  Ivy awoke, cabin number four completely dark, the embers in…

  Thirty

  After that, they were on the move. Ivy didn’t see…

  Thirty-One

  “This is nice,” Harrow said.

  Thirty-Two

  The moon hung low in the sky, almost full, missing…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Peter Abrahams

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  “How is going the writing?” said Dragan Karodojic.

  Closing time at Verlaine’s Bar and Grille on Schermerhorn Street, no one left inside except Dragan, the dishwasher, mopping the floor, and Ivy Seidel, the bartender, cashing out.

  “Not bad,” Ivy said. The question—how her writing was going—was the biggest one in her life, with her all the time, and the true answer was she had no idea. What she had was a creative writing MFA from Brown, three summers spent at an upstate fiction workshop, the last on full scholarship, two abandoned novels, sixty-one completed short stories, ranging in length from one page to fifty-eight, and a drawerful of rejection letters.

  “I myself have idea for novel,” Dragan said.

  “You never mentioned that,” Ivy said, taking her tip money from under the cash tray in the register and stuffing it in her pocket.

  “You are never asking,” said Dragan, and the next thing she knew he’d put down the mop and was sitting across the bar. Ivy liked Dragan. Hard not to—six months in the country, big smile full of crooked East European teeth, wide-eyed enthusiasm for things most New Yorkers didn’t even notice—but it was after two and she wanted to go home.

  “What is this thing,” Dragan said, “for the cell-phone relays?” He made an expanding gesture with his hands, like a circle growing.

  “Tower?” said Ivy.

  “Tower, yes,” said Dragan. “Cell tower.” And he launched into a long and incomprehensible tale about a cell tower that picks up signals from a shadow world where the souls of all the extinct Neanderthals are plotting revenge.

  “So,” said Dragan, head tilted up at a puppy-dog angle, “I want truth: What is your verdict?”

  Ivy walked home. A warm September night, as warm as summer, but somehow different. How, exactly? It was important to nail these things down, find the right words. But as Ivy reached her building and climbed the stairs to the front door, the right words still hadn’t come.

  She unlocked her mailbox, number five, found a single letter. The New Yorker. She tore open the envelope. Rejection. A form rejection, of which she’d already collected three from The New Yorker—they used thick paper, might have been sending out swanky invitations, if you were judging just by feel—but this time someone with an illegible signature had added a note at the bottom. Ivy angled it toward the streetlight.

  The Utah part is really nice.

  The Utah part? What Utah part? Hadn’t she sent them “Live Entertainment,” an eight-page story that took place entirely at a truck stop in New Jersey? But then Ivy remembered a brief reference to a snowboarding accident in Alta. How brief? Three lines, if that.

  Ivy unlocked the front door, walked up to her fifth-floor studio apartment. The staircase, the whole building, in fact, leaned slightly to the right, plus nothing worked properly and repairs never got done, but that didn’t keep the rents low. Ivy’s room, a converted attic, 485 lopsided square feet, cost $1,100 a month. She went in, slid the dead bolt closed, sat at the table, a café table she’d gotten for free from a failed Smith Street restaurant. Ivy switched on her laptop, found the Utah passage in “Live Entertainment.”

  He fell but the direction must have been up because he landed in the top of a tree. The only sound was the kid he’d run over, crying up the trail. Far away the Great Salt Lake was somehow shining and brown at the same time.

  That was really nice? Somehow much nicer than the rest of the story? Ivy read the whole thing over several times without seeing how. She decided to take The New Yorker’s word for it. She was capable of really nice and she interpreted really nice to mean publishable in The New Yorker and all that would come after.

  Almost three in the morning, but Ivy no longer felt tired. She made herself tea, stood on the table, pulled down the trapdoor with the folding staircase and climbed up on the roof. The only good feature of apartment five, but so good she’d signed the lease even though it was more than she could afford.

  Ivy stood on her roof, looking west. Over the rooftops, across the river: Manhattan. She had no words for this view. Maybe the movies would always do that kind of thing better. But what the movies didn’t capture, at least none of the movies Ivy knew, was the vulnerability. She saw it now, very clearly—the whole skyline could be gone, just like that, as everybody now und
erstood but as no camera could ever show. A tragic magnificence, even futile, like…Ozymandias. Wait a minute. Shelley had been this way already. So maybe she was wrong, maybe a really good writer could still—

  At that moment, with the lit-up Manhattan skyline before her, doubly in view, actually, the second image blurred on the water, and a soft September night breeze on her skin, soft and warm, but there was something impermanent about that warmth, even vulnerable, yes, that was it, the answer to the September night and skyline questions turning out to be one and the same—at that moment, Ivy got an idea for a brand-new story.

  A story about an immigrant, a legal alien in New York, in Sting’s words, but this one finds himself turning into a Neanderthal man. Was she stealing from Dragan? No. More like stealing Dragan, if anything. But this was how art worked. There was something brutal about it, a brutality, she suddenly realized, often evident in the faces of the greatest artists, like Picasso, Brando, Hemingway. She remembered the parting words of Professor Smallian at Brown, teacher of the advanced class and published author of three novels, one of which had been a New York Times notable book: You don’t have to be a good person to be a good writer—history shows it’s better if you’re not—but you have to understand your badness.

  Ivy went back down through the trapdoor, sat at the table, typed the first sentence that came to her mind. Vladek felt strong. She’d never written a story like this before, a story with magic in it. Maybe she should have, because this one—“Caveman”—took off and started zooming along under its own power. At times she could hardly keep up—like Lucille Ball when the chocolate conveyor belt got going too fast—hauling the words around, shoving them in place.

  Ivy came to the last sentence, a sentence she’d known was in the wings many paragraphs ago—The surgeon made some joke Vladek didn’t understand—and looked up to see it was morning, silvery light streaming in through her two little windows. She felt stirred up and wiped out at the same time; could smell herself. She read the story over, fixed a few things, started getting excited. This was pretty good.

  Wasn’t it?

  That was the tricky part: you never knew. You needed someone else’s opinion. Find a reader who is smart and honest, Professor Smallian had said, preferably a writer higher up the chain—although a writer both smart and honest is unlikely to be found in such lofty precincts. Ivy was lucky. She had Joel Cutler. He wasn’t any higher up the chain, but he was smart and honest.

  Ivy and Joel went all the way back to freshman year at Williams. They’d met on the Lady Ephs freshman soccer team, Ivy the goalie, Joel the manager, later wrote a poetry cycle together that earned them a trip to Oxford, and ended up co-editing the lit mag. They’d been reading their work to each other for years, now lived only a few blocks apart, were thinking of writing a screenplay together. Ivy printed a copy of “Caveman” and went out.

  Joel lived in a big apartment in a beautiful prewar building right on the promenade, overlooking the river. Joel’s father owned the building, owned lots of buildings in the Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens. Andy, who’d been living with Joel for the past year, came out the front door carrying an old television.

  “Hi, Ivy,” he said. “Want a TV?”

  He set it on the sidewalk, beside a lot of other stuff—a sagging armchair, two floor lamps, framed Mardi Gras posters.

  “Redecorating?” Ivy said.

  Andy glanced at her. “Not really,” he said. He’d changed his hair, now had highlights. So did she, but his were better, more subtle. If she’d liked him more, she would have asked where he got them done.

  “Joel home?” she said.

  Andy wrote in the dust on the TV screen: FREE. “Yeah,” he said.

  Joel was in his living room, packing neatly folded shirts in a suitcase. He paused as Ivy came in, a creamy spread-collar shirt in hand. “Ivy,” he said. “I was just about to call you.”

  Ivy glanced around, saw bare shelves, boxes of books and CDs, and through the kitchen doorway the fridge, open and empty.

  “What’s happening?” Ivy said. It almost looked like evictions she’d seen, but that didn’t make sense.

  “That’s what I was going to call you about,” Joel said. His face was pink, as though he was excited about something, or embarrassed. “It’s all happening so fast.”

  “What is?”

  Joel placed the creamy shirt carefully in the suitcase. “Cliché of clichés,” he said, “but it really is like a dream.”

  Ivy waited.

  “I—we’re going to L.A.,” Joel said. Then he laughed, a brief high-pitched laugh, quickly suppressed. A cuff link dropped off the edge of an end table. “L.A.,” Joel said. “Los Angeles.” He gave it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation.

  “For a vacation?” Ivy said. That didn’t make sense either—he and Andy had just spent the last two weeks of August in a time-share on Long Island. And Joel hated L.A., had even written a story about its superficiality, one of his worst.

  “The truth of the matter,” said Joel, then raised his hands helplessly. “Maybe I should have told you before. No, delete that—I should have, period, full stop.”

  “Told me what?” Ivy said.

  “But it was all so speculative.”

  “What was?”

  “I mean by definition.” Joel was pinker now, and it was excitement, beyond doubt.

  Ivy waited.

  He straightened up, met her gaze, at least for a moment. “I wrote a screenplay,” he said.

  Ivy didn’t get it. “The one we were talking about?” she said. “The Moroccan story?”

  “No, no, no, of course not,” Joel said. “I’d never do a thing like that. That was ours—yours mostly, if the truth be known. This is completely different. Takes place at a fat farm, actually, in Scottsdale.”

  “When did you—”

  “While we were away. It took four days, Ivy. And I was half-drunk most of the time. But the thing is—it sold!”

  “You mean…”

  “Adam Sandler wants to do it.”

  “Adam Sandler wants to make a movie of your screenplay?”

  “Damon Wayans signed this morning. And it looks like Joel Schumacher’s going to direct.”

  “About a fat farm in New Mexico?”

  “Arizona. Scottsdale’s in Arizona.”

  There was a pause. Joel picked up the creamy shirt and refolded it. A phone started ringing.

  “How did all this…?” Ivy said.

  Joel shook his head. “Andy met a guy from CAA on the beach. Actually didn’t meet him at first, just kind of overheard him telling someone that Adam was looking for something new. I got the idea that night.”

  Adam already? “You’ve met him?”

  “The guy from CAA? Of course. He’s the one who read the—”

  “I meant Adam Sandler.”

  “On the phone. But we’re having lunch tomorrow.” He glanced at his watch. A quick glance, easily missed, but that was when Ivy sensed a shift in their relationship. She didn’t understand it, just knew it was fundamental.

  “In L.A.?” she said.

  He nodded. His mouth opened as though to say something—and Ivy knew what it was, the name of the restaurant; but he stopped himself. He put the shirt back in the suitcase and said, “I—uh—I’m not sure how you feel about this.”

  “I’m really happy for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Happy at least for the Joel she’d known for so long, although that Joel was interested in writing some huge brawling novel of America that the world would realize it had been waiting for and had never once even mentioned Adam Sandler.

  “That’s nice.” He came over to give her a hug. They hugged. His skin felt hot. “What’s that?” he said, nodding at the pages in her hand.

  “Nothing,” Ivy said.

  Andy came in. “No one hears the phone?” he said, picking it up. “For you.” He handed it to Joel.

  “Hello?” said Joel. “Professor?…Rick
? Sure, if you want, Rick it is…Thanks. DreamWorks. Thanks a lot. Yeah. That would be great.” He hung up. “That was Professor Smallian.”

  “You’ve been in touch with him?” Ivy said.

  “Not for three years,” said Joel. “He read about it in the Hollywood Reporter.”

  Ivy tried to imagine Professor Smallian reading the Hollywood Reporter and failed completely. Things were happening fast, as Joel said. She actually wanted to sit down, but except for that one end table, the furniture was gone.

  “Ten to one he tries to get you to hook him up with Justin,” Andy said.

  “Who’s Justin?” said Ivy.

  “CAA,” Joel said.

  He walked her down to the street.

  “I was thinking of asking you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “What?”

  “The Dannemora thing,” he said. Joel taught a state-sponsored inmate writing course at a prison upstate. “I won’t be able to do it anymore. I was going to just call and cancel, unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you’d like to take it over.”

  Ivy gazed at Joel’s face. It was a beautiful day, as beautiful as September gets in New York, the sky unclouded, the air somehow full of promise. For a moment, she thought she could see what he would look like a long way down the road.

  “The drive up’s a drag,” he said, “but the gig’s not completely uninteresting. And it pays a hundred bucks a shot. Plus gas.”

  Two