MY HOPES FOR THE SUMMER were largely fulfilled, thanks to the strict regime I imposed on myself with a digital sports watch. I’d learned from a PBS documentary that James Thurber’s wife had insisted he set an alarm clock at intervals to prod himself to work quickly. My fourth-grade teacher had employed a similar method.
Mrs. Larson’s classroom was part of a new addition to the school, the linoleum hard and slick, the edges of the desks as yet unsoftened by the cuts of rulers and compass points, the seats made of some modern composite that would never wear away in comforting grooves. The days in that room passed in a series of terrifying quizzes, each beginning with an ominous clicking as Mrs. Larson set a kitchen timer and ending with a ringing that seized our hearts and stopped our pencils. With the smart movements of soldiers on maneuvers, we would pass our papers to the front, where she would collect and then impale them on her spindle. There were multiplication tests—increasingly difficult as we galloped from the twos times tables to the twelves; there were spelling quizzes, history quizzes, and geography quizzes, during which, each in turn, we ran to the front of the classroom, index finger outstretched, to identify on a huge, pull-down map of California the county Mrs. Larson had shouted out. No time to prepare, no time to think. “You know it or you don’t,” she barked. Some hours must have been devoted to learning the material on which we were quizzed, but the only other activities I remember from that class were singing “Yes, I Have No Bananas” and playing a plastic recorder.
Realizing that up until now I’d spent too much time thinking at the expense of writing, I adapted Mrs. Larson’s (and Mrs. Thurber’s) technique to my book. Now that I’d created a couple of characters—Robert Martin and his mother—and a general sense of their situation, I wrote whatever came into my head about them in forty-five-minute intervals, punctuated by the bright beeping of my watch alarm. With a continual sense of the imminent “times up,” I tore forward without looking back. At the end of the summer, I would type this mass of pages into the computer and discover a richness and complexity I could never have consciously achieved.
The alarm bothered Simon at first. Simon was the ostentatious scribbler, although after my first week at the library, I didn’t think of him that way anymore. He was, in fact, the writer of an actual novel published by a house with a predilection for first novelists with exquisite prose. Through interlibrary loan, I borrowed his book from the Bronx branch and read it carefully, searching for direction.
“The human relationships,” I said, one day in August, as we walked down Charles Street eating slices, “they seem so real. How did you come up with those characters?”
“Hmm,” he answered, chewing, willing to think this through. He was generous with his writerly insights. “I don’t know. It’s not like they emerged full-blown. But, you know, after a while they start to come to life and then it’s easier to figure out how they’d be. Are you going to eat your crust?”
The writing books also made it sound as if a good writer need only take dictation from bossy characters. Left to their own devices, however, Robert and his mother would do nothing but eat.
Across the street, a man with matted hair, wearing, despite the heat, a flannel shirt, leaned over the trunk of a car. In his right hand, he clutched what seemed to be a fat marker or a wedge of chalk with which he wrote in long, passionate, swooping flourishes on a large sheet of paper. With his left hand, he smoothed the paper over and over, keeping it flat across the trunk. Abruptly then, he stopped and straightened. The chalk dematerialized. There was, in fact, no paper. The man walked away, conversing with himself.
My alarm went off as we were about to cross Hudson.
“Just to the river,” Simon begged. “Please, it’s so hot. I need to see water.”
“You go ahead,” I said. “I must obey the watch.” But he turned up the block toward Perry Street and trudged dutifully back with me.
In the evening, the oppressive heat of the day became the balminess that gives summer its good name. Ted and I strolled languorously east on Tenth Street in the dusk. In front of the 2nd Avenue Deli, we passed tourists folding a map and felt smug. The city was ours now that those who really owned it had gone to their country houses. And we were pleased with our possession, especially amid the quaint, exotic spectacle of an East Village August gloaming. A lumpy Ukrainian matron in a sprigged housedress stood sourly in her doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. A cat on a leash slunk along the wrought iron fence that bordered an outdoor café. Indian restaurateurs beckoned us into their Christmas-lit establishments. Ted studied the shelves in a used bookstore, while I perched on a vinyl chair with a split seat under a ceiling fan and read scattered pages of Goodbye, Columbus.
On such an evening, the sense that I was a writer—and even that I was the kind of writer who might be considered an artist—was palpable. I had the giddy feeling that this city was both my home—which meant I could claim its attendant rich human drama as my own—and a piece of theater I could view at a remove, a spectacle from which I could borrow shades and tones and a succession of characters who would, if I listened closely enough, whisper to me their amusing or poignant narratives. It seemed on such evenings that capturing life on paper would be almost as easy as observing it.
My novel bubbled from me as we luxuriated in all New York had to offer. I would outline for Ted the various maneuvers I’d put Robert through each day, while we dodged Rollerbladers along the riverside promenade to Battery Park or walked block after block uptown. I proposed options for the next day’s charge as we combed the bricks near the Metropolitan Museum for metal admission buttons casually discarded on the way out by those who’d paid the suggested amount. Ted, who in high school had gone through a period of intense interest in the Vietnam War, gave me details about what battles Robert could have been in and what military rank he could have achieved while we held hands perched on the balustrade under the trees in Bryant Park, waiting for the free movie to begin, or two-stepped under the stars at Lincoln Plaza to the open-air bands. On the Staten Island Ferry with our faces turned to the breeze, and strolling late at night past Korean groceries overflowing with plums and green onions and black-eyed Susans, we debated whether Mrs. Martin would have called her son “Bob” or “Rob” and bandied army nicknames about.
I believe I would have been content never to finish, never to publish, only to work, if the limbo that was August had lasted forever. In August, when all of those people who, by their very existence, made me feel like a dull penny under their shoes were in places like Martha’s Vineyard, I was happy—in the deep way engrossing work makes one happy—simply to be dreaming scenes for Robert to play. I was satisfied when I caught hold of one of his moods and coaxed it to stick to the page in a way that seemed sure to call forth that very sensation in a readers mind. I was ecstatic when occasionally such moments seemed to dance across the paper in particularly graceful or vivid phrases. At times I forgot to reset my alarm and still I kept on, searching for words, crossing them out, straining my brain to conjure Robert Martin from scant impression and overtaxed imagination, trying to draw his very fibers through my fingers delicately, so as not to scare him off.
Looking back now, I suspect that in that brief, sweltering period, I was, in fact, a writer. But cooler weather was inevitable. And with it returned the real Manhattanites, the sort of people who called a messenger to deliver a package to the building across the street, and I was merely a hanger-on again, cringing and grinning and well aware that if I had not been attached to Ted, I would never have been asked out.
We were invited to dinner in September, the first occasion at which I had ample opportunity to appreciate the words of Harold Nicolson, whose slim book of essays I’d read back in July, when it was already far too late for me to heed this advice: “Unless … you possess a strong will and a large private income I should not recommend you to announce your first book before you have written at least a third of it.”
Opening rounds went well. We were able to admire our hosts’ apartment without excessive chagrin, since it was only one room larger and a few hundred dollars less expensive than ours. (Being far better connected than we, they’d been able to take advantage of the city’s generous rent control policy, and so could afford to put a good deal of their money into their country house.) Then, while wine was poured, I leaned against the bright orange counter (cheap, 1970s renovations were the scourge of even the best apartments) and listened while other guests compared the fingerlings available at the farmers’ markets in Rhinebeck with those on sale at Union Square. People were either weary of summer and relieved to be back in the city or were already exhausted by the city and longed to be back in the country. That Ted and I had stayed in town was exclaimed over as an eccentric novelty, although several people agreed that the summer months they’d spent in town were among the best they’d experienced. Of course, they’d been students at the time.
When Ted and our host began to discuss the merits and liabilities of mutual acquaintances, I bravely struck off on my own and wandered into the living room where two women seated in easy chairs were engrossing one another.
Changing rooms at parties is risky. You have done something purposeful and so are forced to look as though you indeed have a purpose. If you’re lucky, a kind stranger will welcome you into her conversation. If you’re extremely lucky, an acquaintance will hail you from across the room. Most often, you must resort to feigning an overwhelming interest in the knickknacks or pressing your nose against a dark window so as to be able to see beyond your own abject face. For me, the tide of the party was about to turn.
I suspected that the women in the chairs registered my presence with triumph, pleased that they were involved in an animated conversation and not, like me, standing awkwardly too far into the room to retreat, but neither of them faltered in the pretense that I did not exist. Luckily, a plate of baguette rounds spread with marinated goat cheese was lying hospitably on the coffee table, so rather than scanning the bookshelves or acting as if I’d forgotten something essential in the kitchen, I availed myself of this prop to jimmy myself into their těte-à-těte.
“Have you tried these?” I said, committing myself to the couch and raising a baguette to my mouth.
“No,” said the woman nearest me. She pushed the plate slightly in my direction and turned back to her conversation. I considered chugging the contents of my wine glass.
“I hear you’re writing a novel,” said a bright voice behind me.
“Yes,” I said, turning with relief. Sally Sternforth crooked her knees and perched beside me on the couch. “Who’s your publisher?”
“For a first novel,” I explained, sliding into the space between the couch and the coffee table to retrieve the hors d’oeuvre I’d dropped on the rug, “you don’t usually have a publisher until the whole thing is done.”
I tried to deliver this as if it were insider’s knowledge to which I was privy, but it came out as an apologetic squeak.
“Really? Well, you know, with nonfiction …”
I interrupted her as I regained my position on the couch. “Yes, the proposal, the contract, the advance, all before the book is written. Have you tried the goat cheese? It’s delicious.” Secretly, I thought goat cheese had run its course. When we gave a party, I intended to reintroduce sharp cheddar, perhaps the sort with wine stirred in.
Sally forged on. She would not be waylaid. “Well, I admire you,” she said. She did not admire me. If she was kind, she pitied me, and if, instead, she was like most people, she felt superior. “It was such a relief when I’d been writing for months without validation to know that at least my book was sold.” A profile of Sally, replete with photos in various stylish outfits, had appeared in the New York Times Magazine two weeks before.
“Yes,” I said, “that would be nice.” I tore at my baguette round with my teeth.
There are those, and I like to count myself among them, who will graciously change the subject when they sense a particular line of conversation may cause embarrassment for another. Others, however, close in, licking their lips, like hyenas who sniff the blood of a wounded gazelle. “But you’ve published short stories?” Sally suggested, delicately retrieving a crumb of cheese from the corner of her mouth with her tongue.
I was tempted to lie. I might say, “Certainly, a few pieces. In small periodicals mostly. You know, the Hoe and Spindle, Blue Dragon Review, that kind of thing.” I could even mention a big quarterly or two—Prairie Schooner, Grand Street—as long as I avoided the national magazines. It was a pretty safe bet that Sally Sternforth didn’t have back issues of the Sewanee Review piled by her bed. But I’m excruciatingly honest. It’s a fault really. “No,” I admitted. “I really just started this.”
“But Ted says you quit your job. Someone must have told you that you have potential.” She nodded encouragingly. I thought of my ninth-grade teacher, who’d written “Very good! You’ll be an author someday!” at the bottom of my five-paragraph sketch about a frog vacationing in Baja. I was sure that Mrs. Hammerstein was not who Sally had in mind. Did she really picture Paul Auster plucking one of my paltry, albeit well-written, student evaluations off the kitchen counter in a friend’s house and calling to beg me to share my talent with the world?
“According to John Gardner,” I said, “I’m a novelist.”
“Oh, you studied with John Gardner?” She said it matter-of-factly, but I could tell by the way she leaned toward me and smoothed the cocktail napkin lovingly over her knee that she was impressed. Even one of the women in the chairs glanced my way.
But what good was impressing people with lies?
“I mean his description of a novelist—in On Becoming a Novelist—it fits me.”
“Oh.” She put the napkin on the table. “We should mingle,” she said brightly.
Parties had long been a problem for me. People had an annoying habit of asking what I “did”—a question I had been brought up to think rude. My old answer, that I taught high school English, elicited a predictable response. First, as my companion realized that he or she was stuck talking to someone who exercised power only over sixteen-year-olds, there would be a subtle shift in stance, coupled with a fleeting scan of the other guests, in preparation for a smooth getaway. This was generally followed by the well-intentioned rally, the patronizing forward tilt of the head. “I really admire that kind of dedication,” he or she would say, “the way schools are now.” And then I would be forced to explain with excruciating honesty that, no, I was not selflessly redirecting the lives of disadvantaged students from the ghetto by introducing them to the eternal wisdom of Shakespeare, rather I was further advantaging those who were already so well clamped upon the track that led to success that they could hardly derail themselves if they tried.
In a different crowd, the comment on the current state of public education might be replaced by a hearty “I better watch my grammar!” by which the speaker meant that he, unlike me, had more important things to do than pay attention to usage. But, in either case, the mention of my former profession had never incited lively interest and spirited conversation, except to the extent to which I could reveal tidbits about the failings of children with socially prominent parents, which hardly seemed fair or dignified. In short, I was used to others’ sudden need to mingle.
My new answer, on the other hand, provoked much interest, but of a kind that made me squirm.
“So what do you do?” the fortyish woman seated beside me at the dinner table asked. Her midriff, slightly plump, showed between her tube top and her spandex, hip-hugging skirt, and her black hair had a chic, slept-in look. I briefly regretted using a brush before leaving home.
“I’m, um, working on a novel.” I was surprised at how difficult it was to choke these words out. In private, I was proud of my efforts.
She threw her head back and rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, who isn’t?” she said bitterly and reached in front of me for the wine.
“Who’s your agent?” Zachary Roth asked. Zachary wrote a column about Washington gossip for a weekly political magazine. I could feel the winds of the savanna; the hyena’s hot breath at my heels.
“She doesn’t have an agent yet, of course,” Ted said, rescuing me and even managing with his tone to suggest the question was ridiculous. “Fiction doesn’t work that way. You have to write the book first.”
“So what’s it about?” one of the easy chair women asked. She leaned across Zachary, who was seated to my left, finally interested enough to look at me.
These questions! I wanted to throw my hands up to block them. Of course, this last was perfectly reasonable. I would ask it, if someone told me she was writing a novel.
For a second or two I made divots in my shrimp risotto, as I summoned my descriptive and analytical skills. “Well, there’s a guy, a man,” I began, “who was in Vietnam. And he’s home now. In southern California.”
“Margaret’s from L.A.,” Ted put in.
“Well, Glendale, really,” I said, relieved to be on firmer ground. “More Middle America on the West Coast.”
“So what happens?” slept-in-hair woman asked.
“Well, he comes home,” I continued. “Actually, he is home, already. When the novel starts. In southern California.”
“There are flashbacks to the war,” Ted tried again, helpfully.
“But what happens?” slept-in-hair asked again, forking a generous helping of rice and shrimp into her mouth.
“Well, he seems to be doing a lot of cooking,” I said. “Maybe he should try making risotto.” I laughed to show this was a joke. No one joined in, not even Ted. I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t even sure how it was funny myself. “And he shops for groceries. To support the cooking.” I was losing them. The host was refilling wine glasses. The hostess was heading for the kitchen. “I guess it’s really about aimlessness in post-Vietnam America,” I ventured in desperation.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” Zachary said. “Would you say that the seventies were aimless? I’d say they were full of purpose.”
“Misguided purpose,” someone said. There was general laughter and for a few blessed moments discussion detoured into the reintroduction of the crocheted vest, but they were not through with me yet.
“Where have your stories been published?” asked the other easy chair woman, who was, I suddenly remembered with acute embarrassment, an editor at the Paris Review.
“I’ve never,” I said, glancing apologetically at Ted, “been published.”
“Oh, well,” Sally said cheerfully, “you know Emily Dickinson never got published!” She took a swig of her wine, as if toasting the prospect of a similar fate for me.
If at times during my previous career I’d felt I’d been living some of the more pitiful moments of Good-bye, Mr. Chips, this clearly was Lord of the Flies, and I was Piggy.
Over dessert, someone complimented Sally on her New York Times profile, and she launched into a story about the photographer’s obsession with finding backgrounds that would provide strong contrast to her clothes. She revealed that one photo had, in fact, been taken in the bathroom. I could not fault Sally Sternforth. She had not, after all, written a multiple-prize-winning book simply to spite me. Yet, she had sized me up and satisfied herself that I was nowhere near her stature, and for that I gave myself permission to wish that the tarte Tatin would give her heartburn.
“I just never imagined,” Sally concluded, beaming, “that anything like this would happen before I was forty.”
As we walked home along those same East Village blocks that had made me feel like a true writer only a week before, the first fall breeze rose off the East River and swept the stray food wrappers and pages of The Village Voice toward the gutters. I shivered.
“What kind of writer would want that kind of attention?” Ted asked loyally, putting his arm around me. A man was peeing in the middle of St. Marks Place. I thought longingly of Washington, D.C., a place where people’s pictures were taken in their bathrooms only when they were caught in the midst of criminal or compromising activity.
On Ninth Street, Ted paused to riffle through a stack of magazines waiting on the curb for the next morning’s recycling pickup, and I sounded my depths. Was Sally’s my idea of success? Was I as arrogant as she, believing it was only a matter of time and a judiciously placed call from my publicist before the world fell at my feet? Such a person deserved to be struck down and that Sally had been rewarded was simply a prime example of the way society actually worked, not a lesson to guide the course of my own life.
A professional magazine scavenger had swooped up on his bike and was trying to trade last month’s Architectural Digest for the current Vogue Ted had just picked up. I shook my head. Architectural Digests were thick on the ground; we’d already read it.
At home, I flipped my laptop open, slipped off my shoes, and drew my feet under me in my traditional writing position.
“You’re not going to work now, are you?” Ted protested.
“I just had an idea,” I said, “on the way home.”
I did not have an idea. I wanted to rail to Letty about my disgrace. When I accessed my e-mail, however, I saw that she had beaten me to the punch.
Margaret—
Well, now I hate our house. Four hours ago it was fine, maybe a little cramped, certainly not architecturally distinctive, but fine. Now it shames me, every bit of it.
“But what about those curtains?” you’ll protest, because you are my friend. Those curtains you made for the living room with the aqua-and-yellow vintage material from Fabric and Foam? “Shabby,” I will say to you. “And two of them are crooked.” “What about the mint green Formica kitchen counters with the silver stars and moons and asteroids? You chose this house above all the other nondescript boxes in Beverly-wood because of that Formica,” you will say to me. And I will say to you—“Tacky.”
Face it, Margaret, 23 Hummingbird Lane is a starter house, and anyone living in a starter house this far into the race is a loser.
We went to a party tonight as part of the vetting process for this job Michael may or may not want. (He’s decided, at least, to be vetted.) The hosts were some people in Sherman Oaks—she does museum development; he’s in the industry—some kind of studio executive—anyway, something I have no concrete concept of.
It’s not that I’ve never been in a nice house before. We grew up in nice houses, didn’t we? Not as nice as this house in Sherman Oaks, but still, decent-sized with a good scale to the rooms and some attention to detail. That my parents’ house is nicer than mine never bothered me, though. That’s a different generation. Everyone knows housing is more expensive now. Even that people only ten or even five years older than we are have nicer houses never bothered me. We would catch up, I thought, when Michael got tenure.
These people—Zoe and Brad—they’re younger, Margaret. They’re younger and they have a better house. Not just better. It’s so vastly superior that the two structures should not even be classified as the same species.
Their house, for instance, is built into the canyon and has a redwood deck from which you overlook the Valley—an ocean of lights like iridescent plankton. Our house has a cement slab with a clear view of 24 Hummingbird Lane, a beige ranch with a dominant garage door. Their house has an entry area, a formal dining room, a family room, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a blue enamel Viking oven. We have Sears appliances, a dining el, and no version at all of the rest of that stuff.
“Stuff!” you say disdainfully. “Why should you care about stuff?” And you’re right. It’s not the stuff so much as the graciousness that seems to go with it, the careless way Zoe stuck the knife in the marinated goat cheese, the unstudied fan of green cocktail napkins on the oak buffet, Brad’s generous hand with the single malt, the cleanliness of their infant, Hannah, in her pale pink Baby Guess sleeper.
If I were the kind of person that lived in that house, I wouldn’t have painted my toenails in the car on the way to the party; I would not have told my babysitter to microwave frozen enchiladas for my children’s dinner; I would not have hemmed my trousers with Scotch tape. I would be serene; I would be respectable; I would be a better Letty.
You scoff. Yes, I can hear you scoffing away. But you have to agree that surroundings are important. If you feel sunnier in a bright room than in a murky one, wouldn’t it follow that in a spacious, well-organized house, you’d feel generous and in control?
It’s not just that, though. I admit that the reason I most hate my house now is that if Michael takes this job, we’ll have to invite Zoe and Brad into it. And then they will see that we are not as good as they are. “That’s not true,” you say. I know. I know. But they’ll think it anyway; you know they will. There will be a supercilious smile behind their eyes as they admire the “creative” way I’ve converted footlockers into end tables and the “artsy” look of our fabric-draped couch and the fact that I’ve produced sushi and grapefruit Campari granité in a kitchen without counter space. As they drive up Beverly Glen, they will talk about how warm Michael is and how kind I am, and then they will say, “Yes, it’s too bad.” She will incline her head lovingly toward him and he will give the varnished wooden stick shift of his luxury coupe a fond caress, and they both will feel relieved that they each chose to marry someone perhaps a little less warm and a little less kind, but infinitely more at home with high-end appliances.
Your green friend,
L
I shared with Letty the benefits of my own insights that evening, my fingers sprightly on the keyboard.
Letty—
Do not doubt yourself! Brad and Zoe will doubtless be fighting for custody of Baby Guessed Hannah when he discovers she can’t do a thing with a footlocker and she realizes he loves his car more than his wife. I do agree, however, that surroundings are important, and I’m sure you would feel better in a better house—although you would not be better, since you already are the best Letty there is. Just wondering—if Michael takes the job, wouldn’t you be able to move into a house that more closely reflects the true Letty?
I continued with a two-page account of my own humiliation and determination to seek revenge, until Ted begged me to come to bed.
“It’s going well, huh?” he asked, holding the blanket open for me. For the first time in a month, the night was quiet, free of the air conditioner’s roar, and we needed more than a sheet.
“I hope so,” I said. Tomorrow, I’d decided, I would read all that I had written that summer. I would bravely lay out my pages and pull my story from them. After all, I’d filled two legal pads in the library, not to mention the twenty or so pages I’d generated during odd hours at home. Somewhere among all those words, the core of a really fine novel lurked, a piece of writing better, more daring, more moving, more socially relevant, than anything someone as insensitive and attention-hungry as Sally Sternforth could possibly have written.
“I bet you never expected anything like this would happen to you before you were forty,” Ted whispered, pulling me toward him.