Fiction by Jason Edwards
I’m eighteen, my dad’s forty, his best friend Regal is also 40, and Regal’s wife just had their first baby. I used to look up to Regal. But I don’t anymore. A few months ago, he told me he was having an affair. He confides in me, the way my dad wishes I confided in him. But I don’t like my dad much. He’s obsessed with his dad, my grandfather, who never can remember my name.
It was Regal’s idea that I write a novel and I’m afraid I’ve lost control of it. I broke a few rules, but I was getting into it, really flowing. “Maybe that’s the rule you should have broken, Rigal,” is what my dad said. You see why I don’t confide in him. The novel’s about a guy who’s writing a book (I know, never write about writers) about a man who’s trying to form a fantasy tennis league. Everyone keeps telling the writer that people are going to think he’s copying David Foster Wallace, just because Infinite Jest is about a tennis player. I least I think it is. I’ve only read the first 40 pages or so.
Regal’s been sleeping with his wife’s sister’s best friend’s cousin. I guess they met at a wedding, and then at a funeral, and then at another wedding his wife couldn’t go to because she was sick. They didn’t know at the time it was just pregnancy sickness. He and this woman got drunk and made out and just like when you’re on a diet and accidentally eat one piece of cake and you decide, screw it, and eat the whole rest of the cake, he slept with her. And they figured, they did it once, might as well do it again. And keep doing it. They don’t even live in the same city.
My grandad’s weird. He’s an ex-navy pilot, used to teach new guys how to fly Mustang P-51s, using old PT-17 Stearmans. A few years ago at my 14th birthday party he announced to everyone, including my guests, kids he’d never met, that he was going to buy and build a kit airplane, an RV-6. My dad thought this was an amazing idea, and decided to photo-blog the entire process. And that’s all they did for three years. I asked a girl to junior prom last year, and she said “Thanks, but I’m waiting for someone else to ask me. Hey, did your dad ever finish that photoblog of your grandad’s model plane?” I wanted to hit her, but she’s bigger than me.
My grandad’s in my book, because I wish he could at least remember me. Once he came close, but he called me Regal, not Rigal. I said “Grandad, in the novel I’m writing, you’re the writer’s uncle, the one who tells him his book sounds too much like David Foster Wallace.” My grandad said back to me “Just make sure he doesn’t smoke cigars. I hate cigar smoke.” We were at a birthday party for my twelve year old sister. I was getting bored, so I went out back to sit by the pool, and there was grandad and my dad and our neighbor, the one with the one huge eyebrow, smoking cigars. My dad said “Yes?” and I looked at my grandfather and said “I thought you said you hate cigar smoke, grandpa,” and he said “Mind your own business, Regal.”
So in my book the uncle smokes cigars all the time. In the book he’s writing, the guy who’s trying to start a fantasy tennis league, his best friend is based on Regal. But now that I know that Regal is cheating on his wife, I don’t know if he should be a best friend or just a good friend. Regal and his wife named their new baby after my sister.
After grandad built the kit plane, he traded it to a friend of my dad’s boss for a PT-17, just like he used to train guys on. Then he had it painted in the naval camo of the kit P-51. He said what he liked to do was pretend that the Stearman was a P-51 given to him by an old naval flight instructor in trade for officiating his daughter’s wedding. My dad thought this was brilliant and started a fake blog by this fake flight instructor so my grandad would have something to reference whenever people asked him what he was talking about.
My sister asked my grandad if he would officiate her wedding if she ever got married. And he said no, of course not, he wasn’t ordained. The story about getting the airplane from an old navy instructor was just a story. So in my book, the uncle who tries to discourage his nephew from writing a book like David Foster Wallace’s, he smokes cigars all the time, and somehow he’s the in the book about the guy trying to start the fantasy tennis league, too. He’s the one who officiated at the wedding of the tennis league guy’s best friend, but it turns out it was a fake wedding, and so when he cheats on his wife with his best friend’s daughter from the book I’m writing, it turns out he wasn’t really cheating because they were never married.
Which is really confusing, I know, how people from my book are winding up in the book about the fantasy tennis league. I’m trying to fix it, but I’m too depressed about Regal’s affair. Last time that woman was in town, she and my sister and my dad’s boss’s wife went to the mall to buy my grandad a hat to match the one he has from when he was in the navy. That way, they said, my dad could take a picture of it for the blog. They wound up at a salon and talked about hair and boys and my novel. I know this because my sister keeps a blog and talks about everything she does. That girl, the one I asked to junior prom, she leaves comments on it all the time.
And I guess I should be sort of flattered that they would talk about my book, and that should motivated me to finish it, get it published and then send signed copies to my dad’s boss’s wife and Regal’s girlfriend. But I have this stupid fantasy where she reads the book and she loves it and she dumps Regal and takes me and then the writer’s uncle fake-marries us and my sister gets a number three seed in the US Open and at the last second the fantasy tennis league is a huge success. So I don’t know where to put Regal’s girlfriend into the novel, or which novel to put her in. I don’t know if I should tell my sister our neighbor, the one with the one eyebrow, used to be a tennis coach.
Well, it turns out that my sister didn’t put everything that happened that day in the salion in her blog. That fat girl who leaves comments all the time told me. She left a comment and my sister wrote her an email directly. She told me after lunch in school one day that my sister told her in the email that what they really talked about was whether the uncle who is based on my grandfather should actually be actually legally licensed to do weddings, and he just lies about saying he’s not licensed so that people who are married will think they are not, to see what they would do. The reason my sister didn’t put that in the blog is because she thinks that I should put Regal’s wife in the novel to impress her so that she’ll dump Regal and take me and then our grandad can fake-real-fake marry us.
But what she doesn’t understand because she’s so young and stupid is that if I marry Regal’s wife then I’ll be his wife’s daughter’s step-dad and since she’s named after my sister, in my novel I would wind up starting a fantasy tennis league that has a huge success because my sister-daughter gets a three seed at the US Open. And if anyone finds out, her career will tank, the league will tank, and then the cigar-smoking uncle will say something like “Your novel is failing– at least David Foster Wallace’s novel was a huge success, although he did commit suicide.”
I have that scene in my head, all the details, and it’s driving me mad. I don’t want to write it, but I have to. I have lost control of this novel. The writer has his laptop, on his lap, in the back seat of a RV-6, with his uncle up front, flying them around Pearl Harbor. They’ve just come from the writer’s daughter’s 13th birthday party, so they’re wearing party clothes. The writer’s neighbor gave his daughter a tennis racket, and she thinks it’s from her father, and she’s very upset, since she thinks her father is cheating on her mother with a tennis player (he’s not). So he’s upset, and he wants to throw himself into research, fly around and write about Pearl Harbor from about 500 feet because maybe the fantasy tennis league in his main character’s novel will have had a great grandfather who was a naval pilot there.
And this uncle, he says, “Your novel is failing– at least David Foster Wallace’s novel was a huge success, although he did commit suicide.” And this guy will consider committing suicide. Right there, jump out of the plane. But that obese girl who wouldn’t go with me to junior prom, the one who leaves comments on my sister’s blog, she was hospitalized when she passed out a few days ago from smoking too many cigars. And I don’t want Regal’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s cousin to think that I think she was trying to smoke herself to death.
Because she would. Because my dad’s boss has a daughter who used take tennis lessons from our neighbor, the one with the one large eyebrow. And they still write letters to each other, even though she’s married now and divorced although she left a comment on my dad’s blog about my grandad’s fake ex-flight instructor friend that amongst other things happened to mention about how the lawyer who did the paperwork for their divorce wasn’t a real lawyer so they’re not really divorced. After my grandad said “Mind your own business, Regal” to me, by the pool, at my sister’s birthday party, instead of leaving, I said “Can I try one of those?” And my grandad said “Why, you want to smoke yourself to death?”
And my neighbor wrote about it in a letter to my dad’s boss’s daughter, who told my dad’s boss, who told his wife, who told my sister and Regal’s girlfriend that day that went hat shopping and to the salon. I asked my sister if she told that fat cow about the smoke yourself to death comment, and she said no, but in my novel, she did tell her, although in my writer’s novel about the fantasy tennis league, she didn’t.
So you can see why I am so upset. I have completely lost control. I have scenes in my head I don’t want to write, and people are hopping from one book to the other and into real life and back again. My grandad doesn’t know my real name, my father won’t stop blogging, and my sister told me that that porky chunker sent her an email saying she knows I’m going to give her, my sister, a tennis racket for her birthday, and I swear to god I’m not. I don’t think I am, anyway. Maybe I should.