The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair Read online

  She was practically sobbing. “Don’t say things like that, Marcus! I’m going to the deli at the corner to buy a roast beef sandwich, your favorite. I’ll be quick!”

  I heard her pick up her bag and run to the door, then clatter down the stairs as if her rushing might change anything. I had finally grasped the seriousness of my situation: Writing a book from scratch had seemed easy, but now that I was at the height of my fame, now that it was time to live up to my talent, to repeat the weary climb toward success that is the writing of a good novel, I no longer felt capable of it. I had been floored by the writers’ disease, and there was no-one to help me to my feet. Everyone I talked to about it told me it was nothing to worry about, that it was probably very common, and that if I didn’t write my book today, I would do it tomorrow. For two days, I tried writing in my old bedroom, at my parents’ place in Montclair, the room where I had found the inspiration for my first novel. But that ended in pitiful failure. My mother was not altogether blameless for this, because she spent both of those days sitting next to me, squinting at the screen of my laptop and repeating, “It’s very good, Markie.”

  Finally, I said, “Mom, I haven’t written a single line.”

  “But I can tell it’s going to be very good.”

  “Mom, if you’d just leave me alone …”

  “Why do you need to be alone? Are you hungry? Do you want pancakes? Waffles? Some eggs, maybe?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “So why do you want me to leave you alone? Are you saying it disturbs you to be with the woman who gave birth to you?”

  “No, it doesn’t disturb me, but …”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  “You need a girlfriend, Markie. Do you think I don’t know you’ve split up with that T.V. actress? What’s her name again?”

  “Lydia Gloor. But we weren’t really together in the first place. I mean, it was just a fling.”

  “‘Just a fling’! That’s how young people are nowadays. Nothing is ever more than ‘just a fling,’ and they end up bald and childless at fifty!”

  “What does that have to do with being bald, Mom?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with being bald. But do you think it’s right that I should find from a magazine that you’re with this girl? What kind of son does that to his mother? And guess what? Just before you went to Florida, I go to Scheingetz’s—the hairdresser’s, not the butcher’s—and everyone in the salon is looking at me strangely. I ask what’s going on, and Mrs Berg, with her head under a dryer, shows me a magazine she’s reading: There’s a picture of you and that Lydia Gloor, standing in the street together, and the headline of the article says that you’ve separated. Everyone in the hairdresser’s knew you’d split up, and I didn’t even know you’d been dating this girl! Obviously, I didn’t want to look like an idiot, so I said she was a charming girl and that she’d often had dinner with us at the house.”

  “I didn’t tell you about her because it wasn’t serious. She wasn’t The One, you know?”

  “But they’re never The One! You never meet any of the right people, Markie! That’s the problem. Do you really think T.V. actresses know how to keep a home? You know, I met Mrs Levey yesterday at the grocery store, and her daughter is single too. She’d be perfect for you. And she has very nice teeth. Should I ask her to come over now?”

  “No, I’m trying to work.”

  And just then the bell rang.

  “I think that’s them,” my mother said.

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s them’?”

  “Mrs Levey and her daughter. I asked them to come over for tea at four o’clock. It’s four exactly. Punctuality is important in a woman. Don’t you love her already?”

  “You invited them over for tea? Get rid of them, Mom! I’m not here to have a tea party—I have a book to write!”

  “Oh, Markie, you really need a girlfriend. A girlfriend you’ll get engaged to and then marry. You think too much about books and not enough about getting married.”

  Nobody understood what was at stake. Soon after the start of the new year, in January 2008, Roy Barnaski, the head of Schmid & Hanson, summoned me to his office on the fifty-first floor of a skyscraper on Lexington Avenue to give me a serious talking-to. “So, Goldman, when will I have this new manuscript?” he barked. “We have a contract for two more books. You need to get to work, and be quick about it! This is a business! Did you see that guy whose book came out before Christmas? He’s replaced you in the eyes of the public! His agent says his next novel is almost finished already. And yours? You’re costing us money! So pull yourself together. You need to pull a rabbit out of your hat. Write me a great book, and you can still save your career. I’m giving you six months. You have until the end of June.”

  Six months to write a book, when I had been blocked for more than a year. Worse still, Barnaski had not informed me, when he gave me this deadline, of the consequences of failing to meet it. It was Douglas who did that, two weeks later. “Barnaski is going apeshit. Do you know what’ll happen if you don’t deliver in June? He’ll sue the shit out of you. They’ll take all your money, and you’ll have to wave goodbye to this beautiful life of yours. This cool apartment, those fine Italian shoes, your Range Rover … they’ll take it all.”

  Lesson number two: Not only is glory ephemeral, but it also comes at a price. The evening after Douglas delivered his warning, I picked up my phone and dialed the number of the only person I thought might be able to help me out of this quicksand: Harry Quebert, formerly my college professor, and above all one of the bestselling and most highly respected authors in the country. I had been close friends with him for more than a decade, since I’d been his student at Burrows College in Massachusetts.

  It had been more than a year since I had spoken to him. I reached him at his house in Somerset, New Hampshire. When he heard my voice, he said mockingly:

  “Oh, Marcus! Is it really you? Incredible. I haven’t heard a word from you since you became a star. I tried calling you a month ago and was told by your secretary that you weren’t coming to the phone for anyone.”

  “I’m in trouble, Harry,” I answered bluntly. “I don’t think I’m a writer anymore.”

  He immediately dropped the sarcasm. “What’re you talking about?”

  “I don’t know what to write anymore. I’m finished. Totally blocked. It’s been like this for months, maybe a year.”

  He laughed warmly, reassuringly. “It’s just a mental hang-up, Marcus! Writer’s block is as senseless as sexual impotence: It’s just your genius panicking, the same way your libido makes you go soft when you’re about to play hide-the-salami with one of your young admirers and all you can think about is how you’re going to give her an orgasm that can be measured on the Richter scale. Don’t worry about genius—just keep churning out the words. Genius comes naturally.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sure of it. But you might have to give up a few of your celebrity parties. Writing is a serious business. I thought I’d taught you that.”

  “But I am working hard! That’s all I’m doing! And yet I’m not getting anywhere.”

  “Well, maybe you’re in the wrong place, then. New York is a wonderful city, but there’s too much noise. Why don’t you come here, to my place, the way you did when you were my student?”

  Leaving to find the inspiration for a new book in a seaside village, in the company of my old mentor—it was exactly what I needed. So it was that, one week later, in mid-February 2008, I went to visit Harry in Somerset, New Hampshire. This was a few months before the dramatic events I am about to narrate.

  *

  Before it provided the setting for a scandal that shook the nation in the summer of 2008, no-one had ever heard of Somerset. It is a small town by the ocean, about fifteen minutes from the Massachusetts border. On its main street you can find a movie theater—always showing films a month or two after the rest of the country—a fe
w shops, a post office, a police station, and a handful of restaurants, including Clark’s, the town’s historic diner. Around this center, there were peaceful neighborhoods of painted wooden houses with porches and slate roofs, bordered by perfectly manicured lawns. It was like something from a mythical America, where no-one ever locks his door; one of those places frequently found in New England, so calm that you feel sheltered from all the world’s storms.

  I knew Somerset well, having visited Harry there as a student. Harry lived in a beautiful stone and solid-pine house—located outside town, on Shore Road in the direction of Maine—that overlooked a stretch of water identified on maps as Goose Cove. It was a writer’s house, with an ocean view and a deck with a steep staircase that took you straight down to the beach. All around was a tranquil wilderness: the coastal forest, the shoreline of shells and boulders, the damp thickets of ferns and moss, a few walking trails that ran alongside the beach. If you didn’t know civilization was only a few miles away, you might easily believe yourself to be at the end of the earth. It was also easy to imagine yourself an old writer here, producing masterpieces out on the deck, inspired by the tides and the light on the ocean.

  I left New York on February 10, in the depths of my writer’s block. The country was already quaking from the first vibrations of the presidential election: Five days earlier, Super Tuesday (held in February, rather than the usual March, a hint that this was going to be an extraordinary year) had all but awarded the Republican nomination to Senator John McCain, while on the Democratic side the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was still raging. I drove to Somerset without stopping. It had been a snowy winter, and the landscape that rushed past me was blanketed with white. I loved New England, I loved its tranquility, I loved its vast forests, I loved its ponds with water lilies where you could swim in summer and skate in winter, I liked that you didn’t have to pay sales tax or income tax in New Hampshire. My memory is that when I arrived at Harry’s house that day, on a cold and misty afternoon, I immediately experienced a feeling of inner peace. Harry was waiting for me on the porch, bundled up in a huge winter coat. I got out of the car and he came over to meet me, placing his hands on my shoulders and offering me a generous, reassuring smile.

  “What’s going on, Marcus?”

  “I don’t know, Harry.”

  “Come on, let’s go in. You’ve always been oversensitive.”

  Even before I unpacked, the two of us sat down in his living room to chat for a while. He made coffee. A fire crackled in the hearth. It was warm inside. Through the large bay window, I saw the ocean roiled up by icy winds and sleet falling onto the rocks.

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here,” I murmured.

  He nodded.

  “You’ll see that I’m going to take good care of you. You’re going to write a novel that will knock ’em all out. There’s nothing to worry about—all great writers go through this.”

  He seemed as serene and confident as ever. I had never seen him show any self-doubt; his mere presence radiated natural authority. He was in his mid-sixties and he looked great, with his always impeccable silvered mane of hair, his wide shoulders, and a body still taut and powerful from long years spent boxing. In fact, it was through this sport, which I too practiced regularly, that we had first become friends at Burrows College.

  The ties that bound me to Harry, which I will come back to later on in this story, were deep and strong. He had entered my life in 1998, when I arrived at Burrows. He was fifty-seven. He had spent the last thirteen years sprinkling his stardust on the English department of this modest rural school. Before this, I had known Harry Quebert the Great Author by name, like everyone else did. At Burrows, I met Just Harry, the man who would become one of my closest friends, in spite of the difference in our ages, and who would teach me to be a writer. His own apotheosis had come in the middle of the 1970s, when his second book, The Origin of Evil, had sold a million or more copies and won two of the country’s most prestigious literary awards: The National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. Since then, he had published books on a regular basis and had a popular monthly column in the Boston Globe. I hoped that in the next few weeks he would be able to turn me into a writer again and teach me how to cross the chasm of the blank page. “Writers get blocked sometimes. It comes with the territory,” he explained. “But if you get down to work, it will unblock itself—you’ll see.” He put me in his ground-floor office, where he himself had written most of his books, including The Origin of Evil. I spent long hours in there, trying to write, but most of the time all I did was stare out at the ocean and the snow. When he brought me coffee or something to eat, he would see the despair on my face and attempt to cheer me up. Eventually, one morning, he said, “Don’t look like that, Marcus. Anyone would think you were dying.”

  “I’m not far off.”

  “Come on. It’s fine to worry about what the world is coming to, but you shouldn’t fret like this over a book.”

  “But you … have you ever had this problem?”

  He laughed loudly.

  “Writer’s block? Are you kidding? More than you can even imagine!”

  “My publisher says if I don’t write a new book now, I’m finished.”

  “You know what a publisher is? He’s a failed writer whose father was rich enough that he’s able to appropriate other people’s talents. You’ll see, Marcus—everything will be O.K. You’ve got a great career ahead of you. Your first book was remarkable, and the second will be even better. Don’t worry—I’m going to help you find your inspiration again.”

  I cannot say that my time in Somerset gave me back my inspiration, but it was undeniably good for me. For Harry too, whom, I knew, often felt lonely: He was a man with no family and with few distractions. Those were happy days. In fact, they were our last happy days together. We spent them taking long walks by the sea, listening to opera, hiking cross-country ski trails, attending local cultural events, stopping in at supermarkets in search of little cocktail sausages, the profits from which were donated to military veterans (Harry was crazy about those sausages; he thought they alone justified the war in Iraq). We also often went to Clark’s, where we would eat lunch and laze around all afternoon drinking coffee and talking about life, just as we used to when I was his student. Everyone in Somerset knew and respected Harry, and soon everyone knew me too.

  The two people I felt closest to were Jenny Dawn, who ran Clark’s, and Ernie Pinkas, the unpaid municipal librarian, a good friend of Harry’s who sometimes came to Goose Cove in the evenings for a glass of Scotch. I went to the library myself every morning to read the New York Times. On the first day, I noticed that Ernie Pinkas had put a copy of my book on prominent display. He showed it to me proudly and said, “You see, Marcus, your book has pride of place here. It’s the library’s most borrowed book. When’s the next one coming out?”

  *

  Harry had been sitting in the same place at Clark’s for thirty-three years: Table 17, which boasted a metal plaque put there by Jenny with the inscription:

  IT WAS AT THIS TABLE, IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, THAT HARRY QUEBERT WROTE HIS FAMOUS NOVEL, “THE ORIGIN OF EVIL”

  I had seen this plaque so many times, but I had never really paid it much attention. It was only during this stay that I began taking a keen interest in it, spending a long time contemplating it. Soon I was obsessed by those lines. Sitting at this ugly little wooden table, sticky with grease and maple syrup, in this small-town diner in New Hampshire, Harry had written his great masterpiece, the book that had made him a literary legend. Where had he found such inspiration? I wanted to sit at this table too, to write and be struck by genius. And in fact I did sit there, with pens and sheets of paper, for two afternoons straight, but it was no good. Finally, I asked Jenny: “So he just sat at this table and wrote?”

  She nodded. “All day long, Marcus. The whole blessed day. He never stopped. It was the summer of 1975—I remember it well.”
/>   I felt a kind of fury boiling within me. I too wanted to write a masterpiece; I too wanted to write a book to which all other books would be compared. These feelings came to the fore after I had been in Somerset for almost a month, and Harry discovered that I had still not written a single word. It was early March, in Harry’s office at Goose Cove, where I was waiting for divine inspiration. Harry walked in, an apron tied around his waist, bringing me some doughnuts he’d just made.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I’m writing something amazing,” I replied, passing him a sheaf of papers like the Cuban baggage handler gave me three months earlier.

  He put down his plate and looked at them excitedly, before realizing they were blank.

  “You haven’t written anything? You’ve been here more than three weeks and you haven’t written anything at all?”

  I lost my temper. “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing of any worth! Only scenarios for second-rate novels.”

  “But, dear God, Marcus, what do you want to write?”

  I replied without thinking: “A masterpiece! I want to write a masterpiece!”

  “A masterpiece?”

  “Yes. I want to write a great novel, with great ideas! I want to write something unforgettable.”

  Harry looked at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Your hubris always did get on my nerves. I’ve been telling you that for years. You’re going to become a very great writer—I know it. I’ve been sure of it since I first met you. But do you want to know what your problem is? You’re in too much of a hurry! How old are you, exactly?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight years old! And you already expect to be a cross between Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller? Glory will come to you—don’t be in such a hurry. I’m closing on seventy, and I’m terrified. Time flies by, you know, and each year that passes is another year I can’t get back. What do you think’s going to happen, Marcus? That you’ll just produce another book, like a hen laying an egg? A career has to be built slowly. And as for writing a great novel, you don’t need great ideas. Just be yourself and you’ll get there, I have absolutely no doubt about that. I’ve been teaching literature for twenty-plus years—twenty-plus long years—and you’re the most brilliant student I ever had.”