Darling? (12 page)

“The conflict,” I said, “is the thread the reader follows through the story. Usually it’s tiny—the kind of thing that makes you curious in your own life, like a piece of gossip that you try to understand. It’s an irritant, a grain of sand—you’ll turn it into a pearl.” They all, even Arthur, watched me like a field of sunflowers following the day. I was their teacher, I would give them something that felt simple as warmth and helped them grow.

It made me sad. I’d copied the plot diagram out of a literature textbook; I know nothing about plots at all. My own stories were written out of longing and disappointment: life, which had been advertised to me as a clear path from one happy event to the next, had turned out to be a series of bewilderments through which one stumbled blindly, doing one’s best to avoid embarrassment, acting properly jubilant or sorrowful in spite of one’s own rage and confusion, and generally pretending one had some idea how to carry on. I’d started writing down events and conversations to study them and maybe learn to get some of it right. This became a habit, then hardened into a superstition, so finally I’d feel my life was draining away from me if I didn’t get it down on a page. Then, out of love madness—feelings that would have driven someone else to murder—I started going back and back over everything, making it into stories with the idea that a man I yearned for would read them and realize he ought to have loved me.

I don’t suppose he ever saw the book, but publishing it did change things. I became someone who’d accomplished something—the most frightening, confusing, and embarrassing position yet. I started to teach writing at the community college, was asked to address the trustees—Scott, my husband, was one of them. He married me and convinced me to give up teaching … but here I was, speaking with merry authority—in short, impersonating a person, pretending to have no share in the common desperation.

As I talked I was aware of a certain suspense radiating from the kitchen. Bursts of low, intense talk were punctuated by sudden frenzies of chopping; cabinet doors opened, water ran, then came a sudden “Oh!” and Lettie rushed through the room, saying in her anxious undertone: “I forgot! How could I forget?” She returned fifteen minutes later with a package of melba toast, which came out at lunchtime beside a platter of cold cuts so fleshily sliced they were difficult to look at and impossible to eat. Whatever had been chopped, washed, or discussed did not appear, and I wondered if I’d only imagined the travail behind the swinging door. I ate a Fig Newton, listening to Linda’s stories of the faith remedies her husband had tried: “I mean, I wouldn’t wish it on any of you,” she said, “but I believe God always has a reason”—everyone but Joy nodded gravely—“and for growth in a marriage, ALS is really something…”

Inspirational books had been a help. In fact, she wondered if I’d read one she liked, called
Writing from the Deepest Chamber of the Heart.

“Oh, that’s such a wonderful book,” Melanie said. “Don’t you think so?”

I’d never heard of it.

“That’s the thing—there are so many,” Melanie sighed. “You
can’t
read them all! I mean, I didn’t know about that guy you mentioned last night! But Dorothea Solewicz, she’s just
awesome.
” The others agreed—they’d all read it and Mattie had a copy in her purse, along with two other manuals of writing advice and a collection of aromatherapy sachets for writers, with scents for lyricism, insight, courage, et cetera.

“Look,” Joy said, turning the book over. “Isn’t she beautiful? Like Michelle Pfieffer…”

That was another thing they wanted from me—an airbrush, a quick liposuction. More exactly, a metamorphosis out of sadness, which repels love, into grace, which would attract it. Dorothea Solewicz did, indeed, look beautiful and was most accomplished, being the author of this book and a book of exercises one can do with one’s cat, dividing her time between her ranch in Colorado and the beach house in Malibu, where she lived with her husband—yes, he was an investment banker, too.

“I’m dealing in snake oil,” I told Scott when I got home. “They’re paying five hundred dollars apiece to Phyllis Giustameer, and they think they’re going to feed their families on fiction—it’s horrible. I’m preparing them for a profession that doesn’t exist!”

“All for the sake of a thousand dollars…” he said, in disbelief. He makes a thousand dollars during a hiccup; a sneeze can go into five figures. “Instead of—” He flicked his hand out over the yard toward the water. All this, he’d got it for me. The squash blossoms were fleshing up, swallowtails looped over the tiger lilies in back. The tide was full and someone on one of the boats was playing a saxophone with the slow pulse of crickets as a backbeat; everything spoke of surfeit, contentment. If the baby had lived and grown, I thought, it would have been almost a year old. Oh, I knew what my ladies wanted—to see something form in their own hands, something whole and alive in whose beautiful face their own image would be clear.

“They’re paying you for hope, honey,” Scott said. “You’re in business to give it to them. You don’t get very far in the world selling bitter pills.”

*   *   *

“What category would a eulogy come under?” Lucy asked the next morning. “I mean,
is
it a short story? Is that what they mean?”

Already that morning I’d achieved one of those feats of strength only the desperate can perform, lifting the window a foot from its sash and propping it with the ice bucket so we could get a little air and a glimpse of the green world—who knew what else might be possible? I addressed a brief prayer to Emily Post and the words came: “Really, Lucy, a eulogy is a category all of its own.”

“Well, who would publish that, then?” Lucy asked. “I mean, I couldn’t find it in
Writer’s Market,
but after the funeral
everyone
said it ought to be printed.… Everyone loved my father so. ‘His heart was big as all outdoors,’” she said, quoting her opening line.

Melanie caught my eye with a quick, derisive glance, and I looked guiltily away. Linda was drawing a fluffy dog in the margin of her notebook, and Arthur was excavating earwax with a fingernail, but Lucy went on speaking of the events of her childhood as if they were artifacts whose every scratch held a revelation. She had the first attribute of a writer, I thought—she was certain the world would want—would pay—to know whatever she was thinking.

“When you write a eulogy,” I said, “you’re writing for people who already care about your subject—the people who come to the funeral. If you want to publish it, you have to think how to make people who never met your father take an interest in him, too. Think about it—what do you like to read yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t like to read,” she said quickly, as if I’d accused her of a secret vice.

“What makes you want to write?”

“Well—reading and writing—they’re completely different things!”

“Okay,” I said, “Okay, yes … but who do you expect will read this piece? Ninety percent of marketing is knowing your audience.”

I felt them come alive. “Could you repeat that?” Joy asked. “Ninety percent of marketing is—? I just want to be sure I got it exactly.”

“But how do you know your audience?” Linda asked. “I mean, I wish we could meet some editors here. How do you find out what editors want?”

Various answers came from different sides of the table—“Sex!” someone said.

“Legal thrillers,” Linda insisted. “I mean, since O. J. When really the most important things happen in hospitals.…”

“They want characters who live in New York,” Lucy said bitterly. “If you’re from Louisiana they couldn’t care less.”

“They want something revelatory, original,” I said.

“Revelatory, original,” Arthur seemed to repeat, but the others slumped—they’d just gotten me down to earth and here I bounced back into the ether again.

“Something
interesting,
I mean.” I said. “Lucy, it sounds as if your father was a wonderful man, and if you could
show
some of that in your piece, then—”

“It’s six pages—I don’t want to retype it,” she said irritably. “I’m just trying to decide where to send it to.”

I had the kind of headache where you feel your brain is being scooped out with a melon baller, and was in perfect sympathy with the fan, which had been methodically heroic, turning back and forth, back and forth, trying to whisk the heavy air into a breeze. Give them snake oil, I thought, make them happy. What does it matter to you?

“Try
The New Yorker,
” I snapped. “They like human interest. And
Esquire,
it’s all about men.”

“What are those addresses?” Lucy asked, her pen poised.

“You’d have to check them in the library,” I said. “That’s another important aspect of marketing. You want to study the magazines, read a year’s worth of back issues, really get to know what they want.” I read this in a dentist’s office once. Their pens went to work again, and Lucy still looked suspicious, as if I was making it all too hard.

“What’s the circulation on those?” she asked me. “I want to start at the top.”

Melanie laughed. “She doesn’t have the circulation figures for all the national magazines in her head, Lucy,” she said. “She’s saying we need to learn to write first.”

I wanted to hug her. Now she excused herself sheepishly to go to the bathroom again, and as she left, with one hand at rest on her belly and the other pressing the small of her back, Mattie said, “Doesn’t she look just radiant?” Yes, that child inside her was like a battery that kept recharging her in spite of her troubles. The thought came down on me like a strap, reminding me how, when I asked the doctor if my baby had been a boy or a girl, he’d said it was like a large black olive; it had no human traits.

It was impossible though not to love Melanie; she listened so carefully, distilling the wisdom out of my speeches, asking earnest questions, like a religious novice, determined that if she really gave herself up to it she’d write something inspiring, rise above earthly toil and pain. It was youth, I supposed; there was so much time left for her, of course her life would change.

We’d come to know each other a little, to see the truth of each other’s lives in the manuscripts; and the more we did, the more careful we were to speak of “the narrator,” never to dream an author might be as venal, as self-deluded, as her characters. We’d have died if Joy thought we recognized her in the chilled, motionless woman who occupied the haunted mansion in the book of which she’d now written three pages. Joy thought everything was a text and gave no credence to reality, but the others had so much experience between them that they hardly believed in fiction. They wrote as a way of passing their lives through their fingers one more time, peering in to search out what had really happened, or perhaps to reinvent what had happened, or just to have one last glimpse of a lost love. So sometimes we just threw fiction to the winds, and raged at a “narrator’s” husband, grieved for the dead father of the “main character.”

As each woman read her pages aloud (the Xerox fee being prohibitive), the story underneath began to leak. Melanie’s green butter story had turned out to be about her first marriage: on their honeymoon her husband stood up in their canoe and threw his arms out to embrace her, saying, “I’m in heaven with an angel!” And lost his footing, fell overboard, and drowned. After Mattie’s divorce, her adoptive son had gotten her natural daughter pregnant; they’d had to put her grandchild up for adoption. Linda’s twelve-year-old brother had thrown a snowball at a car whose driver, a neighbor, swerved, hit a lightpole, and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her family (father a postman; mother, like Linda, a nurse) was driven out of their town—the father slipped into alcoholism afterward and died young, and the year in detention had schooled the brother in crime so that some time later he murdered a convenience store clerk and went to prison for good. “So it’s odd, it’s
fair
in a way, that my husband should end in a wheelchair, you know?” she said.

“I don’t, I’ve never quite … known … what to make of it, I guess.” It was Melanie speaking, though it could have been any of them. “Like, he was there, then he was under the water and gone.… Was it just … random? Was there something I—?… I don’t know.” Mattie reached over to take her hand while I sat ineffectually by, wondering how they managed to bear the weights life had settled on them, and why, in a world full of therapies, they had all come to me.

“Let’s concentrate on the first paragraph,” I said, thinking I had no aptitude for social work and must do my best to keep the discussion on writing, though this felt abominably cold and my teacherish voice sickened me. “This is a good place to talk about metaphors, how they can enrich or detract from your work. I think you’ve wanted to show how beautiful the water was, how wonderful everything felt even though death was right there beside you. But when the reader has the picture in his mind, of these two people rowing through rancid butter—”

Melanie flushed, guilty of having clumsily described her husband’s death. “How do you think I could do better?” she asked.

“What do you want the reader to know?”

“How, I guess, how innocent we were,” she said, her voice breaking. I raced in to suggest several excellent ways of revealing innocence in a pair of characters who think mistakenly that they’re just at the start of their lives, but she interrupted: “And how … have you ever been on a whale watch? You know how you look down and you can just barely see the whale’s outline underwater, and you think it’s rising, in a minute it’ll break the surface and you’ll see it clearly? I dream I can see him that way, sometimes, and all day I feel like he’s alive again and I’m going to run into him in the grocery store or something. That’s the thing—that he seems to be right there—” And she reached out as if to touch him. “—even though he’s been dead five years.”

“You know, you could just say all that,” I said.

“Really?” And then, bubbling over, “You see, I
know
it’s possible. I believe I
can
do it. It
can’t
be as hard as you say.”
It
being the achievement of redemption through art? Riches and fame? Or were they two strains of the same thing? After all, a story fully told
does
change everything; think of the remedies by placebo, the cures at Lourdes—what do I know of it all except that it’s an immense relief to capture even a tiny piece of all the life that flows daily through one’s hands. Dorothea Solewicz (they had forced the book on me) believed the physical act of writing was therapeutic, even if the words made no sense, and I myself knew a man who no sooner wrote his dissertation on Dostoyevsky than he became a psychopharmacologist and began dispensing Prozac at $240 an hour (a career trajectory Phyllis might want to keep in mind).