Free About the Author by John Colapinto Page B

you that my garrulous narrator is not me. I haven’t changed that much in three years. Have you?
     
    I read the letter a second, a third, a fourth time. Yet on every reading, the words insisted on saying the same thing: Stewart had, at some point in the morning of the day he died, sent a copy of my novel to someone named Janet.
    I experienced, first, a paroxysm of pure panic in which I was unable to do anything except gape, stupidly, at the letter. Then I snatched the page away from my eyes. Suddenly I recalled, with the vividness of a snapshot, Stewart’s desk as it had looked on the morning when I crept into his room to search for his novel. The old Underwood typewriter. The coffee cups. The scrunched typewriter pages. And the
heaps of crinkled carbon paper
!
    That’s right, carbon paper.
    That mess of thin, jet-black sheets, crumpled like black roses, around his typewriter. He had made a carbon copy of
Suicide
! I now saw it so clearly: the curled petals carrying a white mirror-writing, like pages that had been consumed by flame, a visual foreshadowing of Stewart’s burned manuscript in the bonfire I set in Fort Tryon Park, that effort of mine to destroy what I believed to be the only extant copy of Stewart’s version of the manuscript. An effort, I now realized, that had been quite, quite futile. . . .
    I tried to piece together what must have been the sequence of events. I recalled the evening when Stewart had first revealed to me that he was a writer, the night he’d shown me his story “Harrington’s Farm.” I had gone to bed and, after an almost sleepless night, awakened to the sound of Stewart’s typewriter, an uncharacteristically slow hunt-and-peck typing. He must have been writing
this
letter—I looked at the page in my hand. “This is harder to write than I thought it would be. . . .” Yes, I had
heard
how hard it was for him in the painful
peck
. . . pause . . .
peck-peck
of his typing. Something about his history with this, this
Janet
, had corked up Stewart’s ordinarily unstoppered flow of words. But what? Who was she? How did they know each other? He had never mentioned her name, never hinted at her existence. But then, there was so much he had never told me. . . .
    The initial shock was like an unseen ocean wave that boils up and smacks you face-first into the sand. Then, as the full implications of the letter struck me, I felt the undertow sucking me into the deep. I had sold the book for nearly two million dollars. In less than nine months I would be bursting upon the world in a welter of publicity. There was no turning back. Yet someone knew! This—this
Janet
. I pictured the shame, the humiliation, the disgrace of being discovered. The scandal gleefully documented in the
New York Observer
, in the
Post
, in the
Times
. And of course it would be on television
: Extra, Entertainment Tonight, 20/20
. Soon everyone would know that I was not, after all, the
sole
author of
Almost Like Suicide
. What would Blackie say? My father? Phoenix Books? Stewart’s parents?
Marshall Weibe
?
    In the bathroom, I vomited—not the thick cascades that are such a cliché of emotional upset in Hollywood movies, but rather an abject and snivelly bit of bile-coughing that produced little more than a burning squirt of yellow-brown liquid. I flushed, shivered, wiped my eyes, then looked in the mirror.
    I told myself that I could not break down. I had to get a grip on myself. I had to organize my thoughts, strategize. There was one thing on my side. The novel was still nine months from appearing in the stores. Still time to find Janet and undo, or remove, or disarm this booby trap that Stewart had set for me. I would fast-talk her somehow. I would figure out some way of explaining Stewart’s “appropriation” of my manuscript.
    But first, I had to find her.
    Where would I most likely find the name and number of someone Stewart knew? His address book. Had he even
owned
one? After his death, I had