Creative Types: and Other Stories

ALSO BY TOM BISSELL

Chasing the Sea (2003)

Speak, Commentary (with Jeff Alexander) (2003)

God Lives in St. Petersburg (2005)

The Father of All Things (2007)

Extra Lives (2010)

The Art and Design of Gears of War (2011)

Magic Hours (2012)

The Disaster Artist (with Greg Sestero) (2013)

Apostle (2016)

An Illness Caused by Youth (2017)

This is, emphatically, a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. All instances in which names, characters, places, and incidents appear to derive from or refer to real life are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental and unintended.

Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Some material in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: A Bridge Under Water in Agni (vol. 71, 2010) and Best American Short Stories 2011 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) · My Interview with the Avenger in The Virginia Quarterly Review (vol. 84, no. 2, 2008), Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories (Free Press, 2008), and Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) · Punishment in The Normal School (vol. 1, no. 1, 2008) · The Fifth Category in The Normal School (vol. 2, no. 2, 2009) and Flight or Fright (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2018) · Love Story, with Cocaine in Zyzzyva (no. 92, Fall 2011) · Creative Types in The Paris Review (no. 219, Winter 2016) and The Pushcart Prize Anthology XLII (Pushcart Press, 2018).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Bissell, Tom, [date] author.

Title: Creative types : and other stories / Tom Bissell.

Description: New York : Pantheon Books, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019056601 (print). LCCN 2019056602 (ebook). ISBN 9781524749156 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524749163 (ebook).

Classification: LCC PS3602.I78 A6 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.I78 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019056601

LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019056602

Ebook ISBN 9781524749163

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover design by Tyler Comrie

ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

For Mina Miller Bissell and in memory of John C. Bissell

I had become to myself a vast problem.

—Augustine, Confessions

Contents

A BRIDGE UNDER WATER

MY INTERVIEW WITH THE AVENGER

PUNISHMENT

LOVE STORY, WITH COCAINE

THE FIFTH CATEGORY

CREATIVE TYPES

THE HACK

Acknowledgments

A Bridge Under Water

So, he said, after having vacuumed up a plate of penne all’arrabbiata, drunk in three quick swallows a glass of Nero d’Avola, and consumed half a basket of breadsticks, do you want to hit another church or see the Borghese Gallery?

She had taken a few bites of her strawberry risotto and two birdfeeder sips from the glass of Gewürztraminer that her waiter (a genius, clearly) had recommended pairing with it. She glanced up and smiled at him more or less genuinely. The man put away everything from foie gras to a Wendy’s single with the joyless efficiency of a twelve-year-old. He never appeared to taste anything. The plate before him looked licked clean. When he return-serve smiled, she tried not to notice his red-pepper-and-wine-stained teeth or the breadcrumbs scattered throughout his short beard. They were sitting on the Astroturfed patio of an otherwise pleasing restaurant found right behind the American embassy in Rome. They had been married for three and a half days.

Thus she pushed her fork into the risotto and watched steam rise from its disturbed center. Think I may be a little churched out.

He snapped up another breadstick, leaned back, and rubbed his mouth. This succeeded, perhaps accidentally, in clearing the breadcrumb perimeter around his mouth. He had small eyes whose irises were as hard and green as marbles, a crooked wide nose, and an uncommonly large chin. His thick brown hair sat upon his head with shaggy indifference. She did not mind that he had overslept or the panicked rush with which they had left their hotel. (The only reason she had not overslept was that she had never fallen asleep to begin with.) His purple linen shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, showcasing a pale white chest covered in pubically corkscrewed hair. She felt an urge to lean forward and button him up but did not want such mothering tasks ever to fall to her.

He bit the end off his breadstick. It’s not a church, strictly speaking. It’s more like a crypt. Now that he was gesturing, the breadstick resembled a wand. Mark Twain wrote something really funny about it when he visited Rome. Apparently it’s decorated with the bones of all the monks who’ve lived there. Like four centuries’ worth. The chandeliers are bones, the gates, everything. All bones. It’s supposed to be really creepy.

A crypt made of monk bones. Why didn’t you say so? Let’s do that.

His smile softened in a pleased way that made her realize how false his earlier, larger smile had been. Funny girl, he said. The thing he liked most about her, he enjoyed telling people when she was in earshot, was her sense of humor. He was the only man who had ever said she was funny, and she wondered, suddenly, if that was one of the reasons she married him. She was, in fact, very funny.

It had been a good morning, uncontaminated by the reactor-leak conversation of the previous night. They had hardly talked about things today, but she knew both of them were aware they would have to. It was the lone solid thing in their day’s formless future. It was the train they would have to catch.

Okay, he said, setting down his breadstick with an air of tragic relinquishment, I’d really like to see the creepy bone crypt.

She put her hands on her only slightly rounded belly and gave it a crystal-ball rubbing. Let the record show the pregnant lady would like to see the Borghese Gallery.

The single drum of his fingers on the tabletop made a sound like a gallop. One way to settle it.

She slammed her fork to the table. I’m not playing. Seriously. I won’t do it.

He was nodding. One way to settle it.

The man loved games of all kinds—obscure board games, video games manufactured prior to 1990, any and all word games—but he also enjoyed purely biophysical games such as rock, paper, scissors, the essential fairness of which he claimed to particularly admire. He was, however, miserably bad at rock, paper, scissors, the reason being that he almost always took paper. She had once been told, as a girl, by some forgotten Hebrew school playmate, that while playing rock, paper, scissors you were allowed, once in your life, the option of a fourth component. This was fire, which was signified by turning up your hand on the third beat and wiggling your fingers. Fire destroyed everything. That this thermonuclear gambit could be used only once was a rule so mystically stern its validity seemed impossible to question. She had told him of the fire rule when he first challenged her to rock, paper, scissors on their earliest date, which had not been that long ago. At issue had been what movie to go see.

Now she said to him, You do realize you always lose. You’re aware of this.

He readied his playing stance: back against the chair, eyes full of blank concentration, right fist set upon the small shelf of his left hand.

She picked up her fork again and began to eat. Probably she would indulge him. I’m not playing because it’s boring. And it’s boring because you always pick paper.

I like its quiet efficiency. I could ask you why you always take scissors.

Because you always take paper!

I am aware that you believe that, which means I’m actually taking paper to psych you out. Statistically I can’t keep it up.

"But you do. The last time we played you took paper four throws in a row."

I know. And I can’t possibly keep it up. Or can I? Now, best out of three. No. Five. Three. Best out of three. He was smiling again, his teeth no longer quite so stained by the wine and pepper oil. She loved him, she had to admit, a lot right now.

He threw paper for the first two throws. She threw rock for her first just to make the game interesting. After his second paper she fished an ice cube out of her hitherto untouched water glass and threw it at him. On the third throw she was astonished to see her husband wiggling his fingers.

Fire, he said, extending his still-wiggling fingers so that they burned harmlessly beneath her nose. What he said next was sung in hair-metal falsetto: Motherfucking fire!

She pushed his hand away. You didn’t even know about fire until I told you about it!

Look at the bright side, he said. I can never use it again, and you’ve still got yours.

"Please, honey, please button your shirt."

—

Well, he said, as they exited the apricot building she now knew was called the Capuchin Crypt, "that was creepy. Holy shit."

On their way down zigzagging stairs they passed a dozen American student-tourists sitting on, around, and along the stone balustrade. The boys, clearly suffering the misapplications of energy that distinguished all educational field trips, spoke in hey-I’m-shouting voices to the bare-shouldered and sort of lusciously sweaty girls sitting two feet away from them. She was upsettingly conscious of the adult conservatism of her thinly striped collared shirt and black skirt—she was not yet showing so much that her wardrobe required any real overhaul—and her collar, moreover, had wilted in the heat. She felt like a sunbaked flower someone had overwatered in recompense. How much older was she than these girls, anyway, who seemed to her another species altogether? And yet she was only twenty-six, her husband thirty-four. Two once-unimaginable objects, the first incubating in her stomach and the second enclosed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty even felt like. Looking into the anime innocence of these American girls’ faces was to discover the power of new anxieties and the stubbornness of old ones.

At the bottom of the stairs three tanned and lithe young Italian women walked unknowably by. She often felt herself bend away from people who knew how good they looked, but these women had such costume-party exuberance it seemed a waste not to stare. The belt? Three hundred dollars, easy. She somehow counted five purses among them. She hated the farthest girl’s rimless aviatrix sunglasses only because she knew she could never wear them without fearing she looked ridiculous. She glanced down at her pink-accented gray Pumas and then over at one of the growingly distant Italian’s sassy red pumps. She had worn the Pumas only because she felt marriage should annul the desire to impress strangers, a thought that made her feel at once happy and vaguely condemned.

Know what? he said as they turned toward where Via Veneto terminated at Palazzo Barberini. Those bones kind of freaked me out. Seriously.

She was still staring at her stupid shoes. We could have spent that time looking at Bernini sculptures.

His hand alit upon her back. We could still do that. I’d be happy to.

No, it’s okay. I’m tired anyway.

You want to go back to the hotel? His hand sprang away from her back as he checked his watch. It’s not even three yet. The hand did not return.

She did not say anything, thus sealing their hotel-bound fate. The next block or so was passed in silence, and he turned onto a tight, unremarkable side street (if any street in Rome could be considered unremarkable) made even tighter by the chaotically fender-to-grille-parked cars along both curbs. This was as residential as central Rome had yet seemed to her: hugely ornate wooden double doors with five-pound brass knockers and black-barred ground-level windows. The only word she could think of to describe it was postimperial, which she knew was not even close to being historically correct. She liked this about Rome: whether you knew anything at all about history, and she knew a little, it forced you to think about history, even if in variously crackpot ways. In many cities, history was a party at which one felt underdressed. In Rome she felt history pressing in on all sides of her, but in a pleasant, consensual way.

Not entirely sure I like it here, he suddenly said.

She turned to him. That’s not a nice thing to say.

"No, no. I like being here with you. I mean I’m not sure I like Rome. The city. In and of itself."

She supposed she would have to hear this out but let his opportunity for explanation dangle a moment longer than felt polite. Okay. Why not?

"It really bothers me that everything is closed from noon to four, for starters, and that if you order a cappuccino after breakfast you’re a barbarian. And I realized yesterday that I don’t like how Italians talk to one another. Everything is so emotional. Like those women sitting next to us on the stairs the other day. Listening to them was like overhearing a plot to kidnap the pope. And when I asked that kid what they’d been talking about, he said, ‘Shoes.’ "

I thought that was funny.

You know my friend who lived in Rome for a while? What I didn’t tell you is that his first apartment burned down—I guess the wiring was all fucked up—and after the fire was finally put out he and some firemen went inside to see what survived. Exactly one wall did, in the middle of which was this scorched crucifix that had been hung at the insistence of his landlady. There were any number of reasons why this wall survived the fire, but when they saw it all the firemen dropped to their knees and started praying while my friend just stood there. He made the point that you’d have to be astonishingly simple to believe in a god who’d let someone’s apartment burn down but magically intervene to save a three-dollar version of his own likeness. He also told me that Italians are basically the most complicated uninteresting people in the world.

You’re being really interesting yourself right now.

I’m not trying to be interesting. His voice had a real snarl in it. I’m trying to objectively describe my impressions and tell you about my friend. Then he calmed down, or at least hid his anger more cunningly. I’m sorry I made fun of your book last night.

Before their argument, while at a restaurant and while she was in the ladies’, he had fished out of her purse the travel book she was reading about Italy. Its author was an American woman. When she returned to the table he began to read aloud certain parts in a dopey voice. Listen to what she has to say about Rome: ‘It’s like someone invented a city just to suit my specifications.’ Considerate of the preceding twenty-seven hundred years of civilization, wasn’t it? This is priceless: ‘It’s like the whole society is conspiring to teach me Italian. They’ll even print their newspapers in Italian while I’m here; they don’t mind!’ He tossed the book onto the table and stared at it as though it were an excised tumor. Finally he said, That is, without question, the stupidest fucking book I’ve ever seen you read.

The book in question was currently a bestseller, and the only reason she was reading it was that her mother had given it to her, just as she had given her (them) the gift of an Italian honeymoon. He, too, was a travel writer, though one who had never made it off what he sometimes called the worstseller list. He had published three books, all before she had met him, and preferred writing about places, he had once said in an interview she was embarrassed for him to have given, with adrenaline payoffs: Nigeria, Laos, Mongolia. (His honeymoon suggestion? Azerbaijan.) She admired his determination to love the unloved parts of the world, but, like all good qualities, it remained admirable only insofar as it was unacknowledged.

She decided to speak carefully. "I like that everything is closed from noon to four. It creates a little oasis in the middle of the day. I like that life in this city isn’t based around my own convenience. I also like that people talk about dumb, pointless things like shoes with passion here. And I like Italians. They seem like totally lovely people."

I guess what irks me, he