‘Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Let’s just say I deserved it. I had angered the Gods of Mortification through hubris: I had mortified another writer, my friend Ann Patchett. My mortification of Ann was unsubtle and entirely accidental, without nuance, without evil, and the Gods of Mortification looked down upon me and clucked their terrible, humiliating, lemon-meringue-pie-to-the-face tongues, and decided to show me how it was done.
It started like this: Ann and I sometimes do a dog and pony show at public libraries in the US. We stand at a podium and argue about who’s the dog and who’s the pony, and it’s much easier than appearing alone and we get to go on trips together and it’s all very fine. Ann is better at most things than I am, and so she usually negotiates the fee: I’m liable to agree to read for a pat on the back and unlimited use of the library’s ladies’ room. Last year I got an e-mail from a library inviting us to come. So I asked Ann, and she said it sounded great, and I passed along the contact information.
Or so I thought.
Turns out I had received two invitations to read: one for Ann and me, and one for me alone. I had passed along the information from the second library. Happily, Ann was laughing when she called me to say that I owed her big: they’d agreed on a fee, and then Ann gave her travel information as well, and the librarian was confused. ‘You don’t want both of us?’ asked Ann. Well, said the librarian, she couldn’t pay Ann an honorarium, and she couldn’t pay for Ann’s travel, and, moreover, she really hadn’t planned on Ann reading at the library, but if Ann wanted to come with me and share my hotel room, she was more than welcome. If it was all right with me, of course. She’d have to ask my permission.
You see how I had it coming.
Flash forward a few months. I fly to Florida and check into that selfsame hotel. It’s on the interstate, with a window that, the desk clerk has told me, looks onto the pool. Actually, it looks onto a wall; the pool is merely audible (children cannonballing into it, children screaming). It is conveniently located next to two other motels, and exactly nothing else, and so I have to wait for a librarian – different from the one who’d invited me, who was on vacation – to pick me up. But she does and she’s charming and doesn’t blink when I say I need to have two glasses of white wine before I read to calm my nerves, she just takes me to a bar.
The library is very nice, too.
When I walk into the auditorium, I am met by a man who tells me his name is Ed. He tells me his name is Ed in such a confidential tone, while shaking my hand, that I wonder whether he has ever before broken down and confessed to anyone that his name is Ed. Ed has teeth like flying buttresses, sandy brown. He tells me he’s awfully glad to meet me, he likes to meet all the authors, he hasn’t read my books but he’s hoping that the librarian will allow him to take away the photo of me that is now resting on the easel by the auditorium door. He wants me to sign it. He wants to compile a book of all the pictures of all the authors who ever read at this public library, starting with me. ‘I want that picture,’ he says, looking at my picture. Then we are mercifully interrupted.
‘Ed, leave her alone,’ says a dour woman. She is short and plump and wearing stiff blue shorts that show off her skinny calves. The shorts are so immense, and so stiff, and Ed’s teeth so very like flying buttresses, that she appears to be waiting for Quasimodo to swing by and ring her.
‘I’m just talking!’ says Ed.
‘Can’t you see she wants to talk to her fans? I’m Ed’s wife,’ she confesses to me.
It’s true: I do want to talk to my fans. I try to adopt a look of modesty and approachability, and scan the auditorium to see: Ed, his wife, the librarian. I shake all of their hands again.
Eventually a few more people show up, though not enough to justify the generous fee that Patchett has negotiated. Still, there’s one nice little old lady in the audience, wearing a strange plastic brace around her torso. I assume it’s meant to straighten out an osteoporotic back. I give her a comforting smile, and she returns it. Most readers know the comfort of picking out an attentive, cheerful audience member to calm their nerves, especially if the crowd is small. She’ll do.
I read just a little, and then I talk about my writing. Look, I’m right: there’s Grandma in the front row, nodding and smiling. She looks like she’s having the time of her life. I’m probably her favourite author! This is probably a big thrill! She can’t get enough of me! What a fool I was! What a poor, sad, sick, pathetic fool!
‘And sometimes I just indulge myself,’ I say about my own writing process, and Grandma calls out, ‘Those must have been the times when I had trouble.’
‘Oh?’ I say brightly.
She says, ‘Yes. I read your short stories, and sometimes, I just couldn’t understand them.’
Make no mistake: the Gods of Mortification recognize false modesty. I should have said, ‘Gosh, too bad, sister. Maybe if you take a night course you could become halfway literate, and then you wouldn’t stumble over perfectly straightforward English.’
Instead, I deliver a fine speech about how every short story is a collaboration between writer and reader, and every reading of a short story is valid, and how I was sorry that she didn’t enjoy them but that didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with her reading of them –’
‘I know!’ she says excitedly. ‘I mean, I’d get to the end of a story, and I’d say to myself, what was the point of that?’
I nod.
“That was a complete waste of time!’ she says. ‘I mean, really, every single story, I thought –’
I nod again.
‘That was the dumbest thing I ever read!’ she says.
‘I’m going to crawl under the podium now,’ I say, and briefly, and literally, I do.
When I resurface, she has her hand up again, but so does an overtan, unwashed man sitting at the back who has the square head and tiny mouth of a police sketch.
‘I have an easy three-part question,’ he says.
‘Shoot,’ I tell him. I mean it literally, but unfortunately he seems to be unarmed.
‘One: will you be offended if I leave in three minutes? Two: are you married? Three: is it all right if I write to you?’
‘Um,’ I say. ‘One: no. Two: um. Three: well, OK.’
‘Thank you,’ he says in a meaningful way, like an anchorman signing off for the night, and he gets up and leaves two and a half full minutes before his deadline, and doesn’t ask for an address, leaving me to assume he will contact me by astral projection.
I answer a few more questions wearily, and then sit down next to a pile of more books than there are people in the room, and offer to sign books.
‘You hate me!’ says Grandma, who of course is first in line. She is clutching her copy of my short stories to the spot of her plastic brace that would shield her heart, if she had one. I want to snatch my book away from her and dandle it on my knee and stroke its pages in a comforting way; I certainly do not write my name on the title page and give it back. ‘You hate me!’ she repeats.
‘I don’t hate you,’ I say. I could break her wrist with a handshake, if I wanted, and I do, but she doesn’t offer.
‘No, you hate me,’ she says ecstatically. ‘But you know, I read your last book, too, and actually I enjoyed it. Although the second chapter –’
‘Shut the fuck up, lady,’ I say, or words to that effect.
I sign a few more books, and then everyone has gone, except Ed and his wife. They look beautiful to me now. They have not read my books and therefore have no opinions. They believe I have fans.
‘You’re funny,’ says the wife mournfully.
‘Thank you,’ I answer.
‘You know what you should write?’ she says. She stands at the podium and looks out over the now empty folding chairs of the auditorium. ‘A book about the lighter side of losing a child.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I ask. Surely I’ve misunderstood the question.
‘You know. Finding the humour in a child’s death. Like a jokebook.’
‘There’s humour in it?’ I ask.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, in a voice that suggests there is not a lighter side of a single moment on this earth. ‘Oh, of course. My son died.’
I nod.
She still, isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the long-gone audience.
‘And you know, one day, Ed and I were standing on the beach. Ed was eating a Subway sub. You know? And this seagull came down, and he stole it out of Ed’s hand. We knew it was my son. He’d taken the form of a seagull. My son loved ham and cheese. And Ed was jumping up and down and yelling at the seagull. And it was funny,’ she says, the way small children say The End when they finish telling a made-up nonsensical story, because there’s no other way to tell.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A book like that,’ she says flatly. ‘It would be a big hit. You could go on Rosie O’Donnell. It’s needed.’
‘All right,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll think about it.’
And so I left without even being able to feel sorry for myself.
On the bright side, Patchett felt a hell of a lot better.