“But that’s…that’s…dishonest.”
“You’ve had an easy ascent, Cubby, your first book a major bestseller. You don’t realize that the literary community has a few charming little islands, but they’re floating in a huge cesspool.”
My insteps were as ugly as my toes. Swinging my feet off the desk, hiding them under my chair, I said, “His syntax isn’t good.”
Olivia said, “Yes, I often take a red pencil to his reviews.”
“Have you ever sent one to him—corrected?”
“I am not insane, dear.”
“I meant anonymously.”
“I like my face as it’s currently arranged.”
“How can he be considered the premier critic in the country?”
“He’s respected in the literary community.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s vicious, dear. People fear him.”
“Fear isn’t respect.”
“In our community, it’s close enough.”
“Olivia, what should I do?”
“Do? Do nothing. You’ve always received ninety percent good reviews, and you will this time. The book is strong. It will sell.”
“But this rankles. The injustice.”
“Injustice is hyperbole, Cubby. It’s not as if you’ve been packed off to a gulag.”
“Well, it’s frustrating.”
After a silence, she said, “You aren’t thinking of responding to him, are you? That would be a terrible mistake, Cubby.”
“I know.”
“You would only look like a defensive whiner.”
“It’s just that he made so many mistakes. And his syntax is so bad. I could really eviscerate him.”
“Dear, the man can’t be eviscerated because he has no viscera. He’s a walking colon. If you cut him open, you only end up covered in crap.”
By the time I returned to the kitchen, Milo and Lassie were no longer there, and Penny had finished eating. She stood at the sink, rinsing her plate before putting it in the dishwasher.
Now that they were cold and glistening with milky liquid butter, my pancakes looked as unappetizing as the deflated air bladders of a flying furnal. No longer hungry, I decided to skip breakfast.
Turning from the sink, drying her hands on a towel, Penny said, “So you read the review?”
“But he didn’t read my book. Maybe he skimmed it. He’s got so much wrong.”
“What did Olivia think?”
“She says he’s a walking colon.”
“You shouldn’t have let him into your head, Cubby. But now that he’s in there, flush him out.”
“I will.”
She put her arms around me. “You’re a sweet, talented man, and I love you.”
Holding her tight, I said, “Don’t look at my feet.”
“What’s wrong with your feet?”
“Everything. I should never go barefoot. Let’s have dinner at Roxie’s, celebrate publication day.”
“That’s my boy. You went off the track for a bit, but now you’re on it again.”
“Maybe I am.”
“Let it go. Remember what Gilbert said.”
She was an admirer of the late G. K. Chesterton, the English writer, and she made me an admirer of his, as well.
“‘Nothing,’” she quoted, “‘can do a man harm unless he fears it.’ There’s no reason to fear a weasel like Shearman Waxx.”
“If I had shaved, brushed my teeth, and didn’t have sour-coffee breath, I’d kiss you so hard.”
Pinching my lower lip between her thumb and forefinger, and pulling it into a pout, she said, “I’ll be around when you’ve cleaned up your act.”
In the first-floor hallway, heading toward the stairs, I passed the open door of my study and saw Milo and Lassie sitting side by side in my office chair, boosted by a sofa pillow. This was a Norman Rockwell moment for the twenty-first century: a boy and his dog surfing the Internet.
Stepping behind the chair, I saw on the monitor an aerial view of a seaside house with an orange barrel-tile roof.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Milo said, “Google Earth. I googled the guy, where he lives.”
“What guy?”
“The Waxx guy.”
When I was six years old, my technological prowess amounted to helping my buddy Ned Lufferman build a tin-can rocket powered by firecrackers that he stole from his big brother’s Fourth of July stash. Ned lost the little finger on his left hand, and I was rushed to the hospital with a second-degree burn on the nose. There was also some concern that my eyebrows would not grow back, but they did.
Milo clicked the mouse, and a street view of the Waxx property replaced the aerial shot.
With cream-colored walls and terra-cotta window surrounds, the Spanish Mediterranean residence was both handsome and romantic. Twin forty-foot magnolias canopied the front yard, and red bougainvillea all but concealed the flanking property walls.
“I thought he was in New York,” I said.
“No,” said Milo. “Laguna Beach.”
Barring heavy traffic, Laguna lay only twenty minutes away.
In this e-mail age, Waxx could live as far from his publisher as I lived from mine, yet meet his weekly deadlines. His presence in the vicinity was a surprise, though surely nothing but a coincidence.
Nevertheless, I was pricked by either intuition or imagination, and through me bled a cold premonition that the critic’s proximity to me might be more significant than it seemed.
“Did you read the review?” I asked Milo.
“No. Mom told you—let it go. She’s smart about this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Most stuff.”
“So if you didn’t read the review, why did you google him?”
“It was Lassie’s idea.”
The dog turned her head to look back and up at me.
“Shearman Waxx is an enema,” Milo informed me.
As I gently rubbed my thumbs behind Lassie’s ears, I said, “While that may be true, it’s not a nice thing to say.”
“Wasn’t me who said it.”
Milo’s small hands moved cat-quick from mouse to keyboard to mouse. He bailed from the current website and went to an online encyclopedia, to the biographical entry on Shearman Waxx.
Leaning over my son, I read aloud the first sentence on the screen: “‘Shearman Thorndike Waxx, award-winning critic and author of three enormously successful college textbooks on creative writing, is something of an enema.’”
Milo said, “See?”
“It’s an error,” I explained. “They meant to write enigma”
“Enigma? I know what that is.”
“A mystery, something