Pike's Folly by Mike Heppner Page B

classical station. As he drove, he wondered if he ought to call Marlene. She’d be drunk by now—she always drank too much whenever he wasn’t home. Her neediness, her reluctance to assert herself except in the most futile ways, struck him as not endearing but pathetic. Her estimation of him was far too great, and her approval so easily won that it had almost no value. Stuart was tired of being the only bright spot in her life. Rather than put himself through this misery, he wondered, why hadn’t he poured his energy into writing a new novel? That was his job, after all. He’d already written one book, and there was a realistic expectation he would write another. What the hell was he doing here in New Hampshire? He belonged back home, sitting at his desk. He never should’ve married Marlene to begin with. He should’ve
invented
her instead, plugged her into a story line and turned her loose.
    â€œSo what’s it like to write a book?” Heath asked as they pulled into North Conway. The snow was falling harder now that they’d come out of the mountains. Stuart felt enthroned behind the wheel of the SUV, high above the ground, with an elevated view of the outlets and ski shops that were spread along the main drag.
    He’d already answered the question once tonight but gave it another shot. The truth was, he didn’t think much about his book anymore. All he remembered was that the actual writing entailed a lot of hard work, over the course of many years, and by the end of it, his experience of writing it was so diffuse that he felt unable to take credit for it. This was an honest answer.
    My Private Apocalypse
was, as they say, a flop. The premise of the book was too cerebral, the ending too abstruse. If he were to write another, he’d make it more genre-oriented than the first, maybe a spy novel, something that required less emotional investment on his part. Being emotionally invested hadn’t paid off—not that he hadn’t been compensated, because he had. No, what his emotions had failed to produce was a honest book. To write a piece of pulp would’ve been more truthful, in fact. Stuart’s life had all the tawdry, dropped-in-the-bathtub flimsiness of a crappy paperback, clichés on every page.
    â€œI found a typo,” Heath said. “You probably know about it already.”
    â€œThere’s a lot of typos,” Stuart admitted. The typos were all that still mattered to him. Unlike nearly everything else, he could relate to them objectively. “The hardest part about writing a book is proofreading it. The typos are all my fault. I just wanted to move on to something else by that point.”
    â€œAnother novel?”
    â€œI thought so. I wanted to be one of those book-a-year guys, like John Updike. But I got . . . sidetracked, I guess.” He could tell that Heath wasn’t particularly interested, so he said, “Thanks for reading it, though. You didn’t have to do that.”
    He wheeled the SUV into the parking lot at L. L. Bean, which was three-quarters full even at this hour. When they got out, he sighed and said, “All right, so tell me about your screenplay.”
    Heath was shorter than Stuart, and he had to hurry to keep up. “Well, it’s really an homage to—and I know this sounds pretentious, but—”
    â€œHold on.” Just ahead, under a green awning, dozens of shoppers were streaming in and out of the store. Stuart ran the last few steps and held the door open for a woman who was staggering with her massive bags of purchases.
    Heath continued, “It’s sort of an homage to sixties counterculture exploitation films like
The Libertine
and, um,
Venus in
Furs
—”
    â€œDig it.”
    â€œ
The Wild Angels,
that sort of thing.”
    â€œDig it, dig it.” Stuart stopped to get his bearings inside the store. Nearby, a man’s orange flannel shirt hung on a skeletal rack,