The other two photos were the head shots from Stevie’s Procurer’s License ID cards (the first one, from 2004, expired; the other the renewal from 2009). She’d been managing brothels for nearly a decade, beginning with the Silver Star’n’Spur in Austin, of which she became a part owner in 2007 (Herb’s ATFP contact had reported that she’d made a name for herself in “the delicate, part-legal art of sex-work recruitment”). Then, in 2009, with seed money from her husband, she’d opened up Derby’s Teapot, Austin: the first of what had since become a chain of seven tearoom-themed brothels in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“I know this isn’t the report you were hoping for,” Herb said, “but it isn’t the end of the world, either, alright? You’re young. Things happen. Maybe this writer suddenly dies. Or starts banging a groupie, or someone else’s wife, gets caught on film by someone like me. Or maybe he’s got a paralyzing fear of periodontists, never gets treatment for his gingivitis, and one day he’s talking to her—to Stevie—about some new book he’s started to write, and when she smells the horrible rotting smell of his mouth, she realizes she’d rather just leave him than try to convince him to get it taken care of, and what that means to her is that maybe she’s never really loved him, plus his new book sounds stupid, and she didn’t like the last one, and the ones before the last one—she only thought they were okay. So maybe she leaves him. Maybe she already wants to leave him—that latest photo’s nearly three years old, and sure, everything looks golden, but who can tell the true state of a man’s oral health by looking at a snapshot taken at a gala? the rot might’ve already started setting in, and once the gums start going, they really start going, Bill, I tell you true—and I’m saying maybe she’s wanted to leave him for months, a couple years even, only thing stopping her’s she’s too afraid of loneliness. Sure, she’s rich and beautiful, but she’s busy as hell—seven brothels to run across three fucken states—and while, true, she’s childless, which is certainly a plus in terms of attracting a new, long-term romantic partner, she’s also getting to the outer edge of childbearing age, so…Maybe you reconnect, you know? and she won’t be so afraid of being alone, won’t be so afraid to walk out that door. She’ll have somewhere to go—someone to go to. And I know you’re not rich and famous, but you’re no worse-looking than that grinning fuckwad, I’d give you ten-to-one that you write better books, and plus you and her were kids together. You never want to underrate the power of that.”
“This guy,” Jill said. “Here I thought I’d found myself a dedicated sweetheart, and now I hear the bastard would walk out on my ass over a little gingivitis as long as some old flame of his was waiting in the wings.”
“No, Jill,” Herb said. “No. Just no. Don’t even joke around. If you’re gonna make this into something bigger where I’m sending you coded messages about the state of our union, you make it into this: I am afraid of just two things. The chickens of my own irregular flossing habit one day coming home to roost, and you leaving me.”
Jill said, “Such an earnest bastard,” and patted his cheek.
* * *
—
So Stevie, still beautiful to me despite her high-society stylings (and despite the predictions she’d made to the contrary that day we’d sat on her father’s truck’s tailgate, almost kissing), had married a novelist—someone at least superficially like me—and had named her chain of brothels after something that came out of Slaughterhouse-Five,* which was not only one of my favorite books, but was a book that she had initially read because she’d seen me reading another book by Vonnegut when we were children together (and a book that, no less, played a not-insignificant role in our almost-kissing). And maybe that all meant that, had her family stayed in Wheelatine, or had we stayed in contact, I could have been her husband.
But probably it didn’t. Nor, even if it did mean I could’ve been her husband, did it mean I necessarily should have been her husband, for maybe the popular hack science-fictionist made her happier than I ever could have. She certainly looked a lot happier than I was—as did he.
And as much as I might have flattered myself to imagine they fell in love because Stevie (whether she was aware of it or not) saw something of me within him—i.e. saw in him certain fully flowered aspects of her budding-novelist childhood friend—I had to, by the very same token, admit to the possibility (the likelihood) that, even if part of what she loved about him were his (very much) ostensible qualities of Beltness, that wasn’t all, or even most, of what she loved about him; and perhaps it was even the hack science-fictionist’s lack of certain other qualities of Beltness that made the ones he did possess lovable to her (i.e. rather than merely likable to her).
Yet, although I hadn’t bothered to correct Herb’s impression (partly because he’d seemed so invested in my being half-shattered by the news he’d brought me; partly because I thought that the responsibility he appeared to feel for what he believed to be my half-shattering could motivate him to work harder at finding Lisette), I wasn’t nearly as disappointed as he seemed to think. I wasn’t sure I was disappointed at all. I didn’t know what I was. The feeling was new to me. There were, yes, the above, belabored thoughts about what could have been or should have been, but there was also an accompanying and consoling sense of vindication: gorgeous Stevie Strumm, now a great success at business and a doyenne of charity work, had, at least by the looks of it, come out as well as I would’ve imagined back when we were kids, which suggested rather strongly that my memory had not embellished her intelligence or kindness. Or that, if it had embellished them, it had only done so a little. She was worthy of being the first heartbreak of my boyhood.
Bittersweet, nostalgic longing—is that all it was? Is that what I’ve just spent paragraphs trying to describe? I’d like to think the feeling was something else—something that doesn’t have a name, let alone one so self-redundant—but more than that I’d like to stop writing about feelings, and refocus on events, and I bet you’d like me to, also, reader. Toward that end, I’ll risk appearing to have bittersweetly longed with nostalgia, and just say that whatever I was or wasn’t feeling, the one thing I knew for sure, there at the tavern, was that I looked forward to being alone, to spending some time by myself in my room, for Herb had given me, along with the photos, Stevie’s home address, and I wanted to write to her.
* * *
I should say I thought I wanted to write to her. Once I got a couple or three sentences into the letter, I found that what I wanted was to write about her. And once I’d started to write about her, I started to write about the swingset murders, and I started, as well, to write about my mom, and when I finally broke for a cheese-and-crackers dinner at 10 p.m., I realized I’d written nearly fifteen discontiguous pages, which for me—for any novelist I’d think—is a hell of a lot of pages (discontiguous or no) to write in a day, let alone in the latter part of a day. And I recalled the bit I’d written on my birthday—the opening of the “Jonboat Say” chapter—and it occurred to me that I’d begun a new book, a memoir, this book.