About the Author by John Colapinto Page B

conviction that Yaeger was going to reject the novel outright. By the third day, I was soaring on wild hopes that Yaeger would pronounce the thing a masterpiece, and by the fourth I began to picture my novel languishing unread at the bottom of some slush pile of thousand-page manuscripts on Yaeger’s desk. This horrific possibility occurred to me while I was squatting amid a drift of foam peanuts, desultorily unpacking a new shipment of remainders in Stodard’s low-ceilinged stockroom. I suddenly realized that it might be
months
before Yaeger got back to me. Could I live in this state of wrenching suspense for that long? In a word, no. I felt a compulsion to phone his office, to double-check with his receptionist that he had received my submission, and to ask, en passant, how long I might have to wait before I heard something. . . . I was, in fact, moving toward the phone, which sat amid the crumpled purchase orders and invoices on the shipper/receiver’s desk, when the phone emitted the dull buzz that indicated an intercom message. I picked up the receiver. It was Marshall, calling from his cushy post at the front cash register.
    “
Call
for you on line three,” he said, indignantly. Marshall hated it when we took personal calls at work. “Keep it short.”
    “Will do,” I said, and punched the blinking light. “Cunningham here.”
    “Where you been all my life?”
    “Mr.
Yaeger
?” (Purely rhetorical—there was only one person in the world with a voice like that.)
    “Wondering if you’d like to go to lunch tomorrow. One o’clock. Michael’s. Fifty-fifth Street near Sixth Avenue.”
    “Michael’s,” I echoed, stunned. Did this mean he
liked
the book? It
must
mean he liked the book! You don’t invite someone to lunch if you
don’t
like his book. Do you?
    “Love to chat,” Yaeger said, “but I can’t. You’ll be there?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Meanwhile, in another layer of my brain, I was working out how I would phone in sick to work tomorrow. Marshall would never approve an extended lunch hour for a groveling stockboy like myself.
    “One more thing,” Yaeger said. “This agent you mentioned? What was his name again?”
    “Oh—uh—Stewart? Stewart Church.”
    “Yeah. He even exist?”
    I cleared my throat (where my beating heart had lodged). “No,” I said. “No, he doesn’t.”
    Yaeger cackled. “Good,” he said. Then he hung up.
     
13
     
    I arrived at Michael’s, the next day, a few minutes early. But I used the time. At the bar near the front of the restaurant, I chugalugged a Heineken. With another eight minutes until Yaeger’s ETA, I ordered and quickly quaffed another beer. Then I ordered a third, which I sipped slowly. I was starting to feel calm enough to absorb a little of my surroundings.
    Reached from a set of carpeted steps that led down from the street, the restaurant was actually below sidewalk level, so that through the large, curved bay windows that gave onto Fifty-fifth Street, you saw only the legs and swinging briefcases of the scurrying Midtown lunch crowds. Sunlight, reflected from the ornate facades of the buildings across the street, filtered through the windows, washing the restaurant’s expanse of white-clothed tables in a soft light. I’d walked past an awful lot of restaurants like this one since arriving in Manhattan more than two years before. This was the first time I’d been inside one. I felt like I could get used to it.
    For this meeting, I had dipped into Stewart’s clothes closet, selecting a dark blazer, dark pants, and an almost new pair of buffed oxfords—an ensemble that I’d seen Stewart himself sporting a mere month ago when he had set off for an interview with a law firm that was recruiting on the Columbia campus. Studying myself now in the mirror behind the bar, I was struck, for the first time, by an odd resemblance between me and my deceased roommate. Of course, I was swarthy and dark-haired to his freckled