You're Married to Her? (7 page)

At the same time that I felt hopeless about ever publishing the book I was aware of being spared a confrontation with my mother and father, two of its more exaggeratedly if not sympathetically rendered characters. It was certainly the case that the guilt I felt about what I had written enabled me to resist Marge's suggestion that I end the relationship with my agent and submit to an independent press, one that might have been open to a quirky first novel, and I convinced myself that if I could not write a book worthy of a big time New York City publisher I did not deserve to be published at all.

Within a month of following Marge advice, however, I received an acceptance letter from a small press located in a remote village in upstate New York known mostly as the home of a bar called the Rongovian Embassy, and some weeks later the contract from hell. Never mind. I was real. My novel was going to be published and if it was to be with an obscure literary press this fact might work in my favor. As an envious waiter-friend had said, “Nobody's going to pay any attention to a book published in
Trumansburg
.”

With the exception of the publicist, who loved it.
These were the days before e-mail, when book publicists prided themselves on their Rolodex, and I have yet to meet anyone who gave better phone. There was no Oprah's Book Club back then but if there had been he would have hounded her producers until someone begged her to read the book. He sent out an unbelievable number of advance review copies for a small backwater outfit and followed up on every one. The quirky novel from the unknown press was widely reviewed and not long after pub date I got an excited call from my mother. “Why didn't you tell me you wrote a book?”

“Didn't I?” Shit. Shit. Shit. “How do you know?”

“What do you mean? There's a big review in the Sunday
New York Times
.”

But my parents only read
The Daily News
.

“Your aunt called from Phoenix. I'm going out now to buy the book.”

“Don't do that!” I said. “What I mean is, a mother should never have to pay for her son's book. I'll send it to you.” I thought I had bought myself about a week.

As family therapy was a term I had not even heard mentioned in my house, I'd never had a conversation with my parents about growing up. Like many boys I spent as much time away from home as possible. I turned seventeen, I had decent grades, I applied to college, I was out of there. I rarely came home for holidays. Why look back? Why tell my beautiful but vain mother I had felt her revulsion for me since I was ten years old when, on what must have been a very bad summer night for
her, she entered my bedroom to say, “How could anyone ever love you, you're so fat.” Nor did I question taking diet pills, prescription dextro-amphetamines, for years. We were always strapped for money. Doctors were expensive. They were obviously trying to turn me into a normal American boy. Whereas I now understand both my parents' struggles with self image and undiagnosed depression and can mine my childhood for its wealth of mortifying stories, in writing my first novel—the
bildungsroman
—the anger was still raw.

The egregious part of the book appeared in Chapter Seventeen, a totally fabricated first meeting between the protagonist and his girlfriend (read: me and Marge) and his (my) parents in a Chinese restaurant. In one of many similarly imagined exchanges the protagonist's mother, described not inaccurately as “a size five petite, an anorexic Madame Bovary who consumes no solid food except Sara Lee cake,” becomes unhinged, not only jealous of her son's apparent happiness but his lover, who is a well-known writer closer in age to mother than son. Upon being introduced the mother asks, “I don't know if you want me to be honest or not.” The episode goes on to report that the word ‘honest' in my family is synonymous with ‘vicious' and to innocently invite the candid disclosure of anyone's true feelings is to prepare oneself for the discharge of every sordid, unkind and spontaneous impression. “To be honest,” the (my) mother extends her hand in greeting, “I've asked my friends and nobody's ever heard of you.”

In the week it took me to decide what to do I came up with the scheme of using a razor blade to neatly excise the chapter. (“Damn publisher!” I heard myself telling my mother. “You got a defective copy?”) Meanwhile the book was gaining momentum. I was interviewed on Fresh Air, planning a book tour. Mass paperback reprint offers were coming in. Movie producers were calling and so were the relatives (“You're such a celebrity you haven't got a copy for your uncle?”). Before I got around to sending the book my mother called to inform me that she had bought it. That she liked it.

“Really! How far did you get?” I asked.

“Chapter Sixteen.”

I did not hear from her for some weeks after that and finally forced myself to make a Sunday morning call. “So Mom, what did you think of the book?”

“Oh, I got busy. I stopped reading it.”

“How far did you get?”

“Chapter Seventeen.”

“Is that him?” I heard my father's voice behind her. He took the phone.

“Hi, Pop.”

“Hey, I read your book.”

“What did you think?”

“Well, you didn't treat me too bad.”

“I didn't?”

“But you really socked it to your mother!”

The conversation ended there. The momentum of the book continued. I was offered representation by the
William Morris Agency. A movie option was negotiated. But I now only sporadically spoke to my mother and most pointedly never about the book. Although I knew I could be considered a very fortunate young writer, I was ambivalent, and confused. Didn't the story of my own life belong to me? How was I to write about it?

My mother and I continued to have guarded, shallow conversations until in one of them, many months later, her feelings simply burst. “Were we
so
bad to you?”

The devil is in the adverb. How do you measure “so bad?” Did they beat me, starve me, abandon me; sell my body to strangers? “Of course not.”

“Then why do you hate us?”

“I don't hate you.”

“Do you think we
wanted
you to suffer?”

“You know what I think, Ma?” My mother was married at eighteen. My dad had just turned twenty. Her own mother was the most domineering woman I have ever met, a self-styled
grande dame
from the North Bronx, delightfully indulgent to her first-born grandson but imperious with her own daughter and impossible to please. My father's father was a semi-literate plumber, a callous and uncommunicative boor who took pleasure in playing him off against his older brother. When my parents were young, marriage was one of the few options open to children who longed to escape. Even sadder was the fact that they had not been in the least prepared to raise their own. “I honestly think you did the very best you could.”

“We did,” she began to sob. “Every day we did the best we could.”

I'd like to report that mother and son reconciled then and there. I'd like to report a happy end. In truth mistrust still lingers and if all was eventually forgiven, much remains unsaid.

My father, it would turn out, read my book more than once. It made him feel important (or endorsed perhaps, in the way people feel about something or someone first encountered in the media) to see his life, however satirically imagined, in print. My mother became an avid reader of memoirs and began to send me clippings about books by writers who had also written about their families, more than once with a handwritten note that said, “Oh, what you did to me is nothing compared to this one.”

Over the years she would refer to the time she first met Marge in that Chinese restaurant. It does no good to say, “Ma, we never went to a Chinese restaurant. It never happened. I made it all up.”

I have taken pains since to avoid using my parents as characters, a situation that explains my mother's lack of interest in my subsequent books.

“I don't know if you want me to be honest or not,” she once began by way of explanation. I knew it didn't matter what I wanted. “I liked them better when I was in them.”

I
n my first semester of college, teaching seemed to me in all ways superior to working for a living. Academics had to grade papers, it was true, but only had to show up for classes twice a week, took long summer vacations, never had to wear a tie, and got paid to lecture a muster of scruffy adolescents who never listened to a word they said. Then I attended a sherry party thrown by the chairman of the English department.

It was held in his office after the campus appearance of a writer who had been his mentor at Harvard, a formalist poet of staggering critical accomplishment whose public reading made me ponder mortality for the first time. As an admittedly callow 18-year-old from the Long Island suburbs, I had never seriously contemplated my death, but his sonnets about Europe's monumental past, delivered in a resolute and dilatory baritone, were so dull that they seemed to suck the very oxygen from the auditorium and had me imagining what it might feel like to be buried alive.

I ended up at the party for the poet because my girlfriend was taking a class with the department chair. In those days faculty didn't mind students being around when they drank and in fact encouraged us to come along. In some sense we were like children, tolerated and ignored while the grown-ups gossiped, a kind of mirror of their importance. But in retrospect it seems to have been part of an older tradition of the academy: students were not to be treated as consumers but molded, exposed to the subtle lessons that could only be taught outside the classroom. How else were we expected to absorb the opinions, the hierarchy, the faux-British accents, the costumes? No one in my family had ever worn a Harris Tweed sports coat with leather patches on the elbows. To me sherry was a song by the Four Seasons; I didn't know you could drink it.

From the office party we went to a French restaurant where I had the first classic
soupe à l'oignon
of my life. Waiters kept refilling our glasses with red wine and the cigarette smoke was as opaque as the conversation. The major poet sat at the head of a long table, a high priest in a thick wool turtleneck surrounded by acolytes. As they praised him he nodded at their well-meaning na-ïveté, squeezed his eyes and touched his forehead with a weary condescending smile; they would never know what he endured. He was doomed to be the “other” New England poet, he tried to make them understand, the second-rate Frost. “They love my work or hate it.” He sighed and shook his great gray mane. “But not one of
the important critics truly engages it, not one addresses what it means.”

At the other end of the table, the less important, less populated end, where the light seemed dimmer and the waiters didn't bother to whisk away the dirty ashtrays, a young instructor had tears streaming down his cheeks. It wasn't easy to understand him, his speech was garbled with drink, and I had no idea what he was talking about, something called tenure, and that he'd never get it. All I understood was that he was miserable, the well-known poet was miserable, even the department chairman was miserable and, after graciously footing the bill for us all, tried to force his tongue deep down my girlfriend's throat while dry humping her against the side of her car, telling her, telling everyone within half a mile who couldn't help but hear his plaintive blubbering, that his wife taught at Bennington while he was stuck at a state college and she was sleeping with a physicist from Dartmouth. I'm pretty sure it was that night that I decided not to pursue a teaching career.

Some years after graduating, however, it was difficult to pass up the promise of money available for an assignment with an intriguing job title, Artist-in-Residence, as if there were grants for hanging out in my apartment. The theory was that the creative world of public school children, circumscribed by rigid syllabi and teachers who were at best well-meaning dilettantes, would be broadened by contact with working artists. Poets, in my experience, do particularly well at stints in the
schools because children rarely speak in complete sentences anyway. Likewise dancers: how hard is it to play a CD and watch them twirl around the classroom? As a novelist whose own small reputation came by way of an autobiographical novel with frankly sexual material I doubted I had anything suitable to offer but was encouraged to apply by an arts administrator who assured me that children could learn self-esteem and advanced language skills by interacting with arts ambassadors who sowed the seeds of aesthetic expression by duplicating their creative ritual in the classroom. I was not naïve. I knew this was pure grant-speak and that I could not possibly be paid for drinking three mugs of black coffee and spending an hour on the toilet reading newspapers, which constituted my usual creative ritual. But I convinced myself of the educational impact of observing a real novelist at work, albeit an activity with all the attendant drama of a sea cow grazing in a shallow Florida river.

Getting the job would not be easy. The pay was first rate at the time, more than double what I made waiting tables, but the interview was like a cut-throat gong show for desperate MFAs. Here were dancers in leotards, a slam poet in a
dashiki
, and a cowboy songwriter with a harmonica and guitar; a photographer in a khaki safari vest and bush hat, a storyteller with a cockatoo on his shoulder, and a basket weaver from Nantucket with a leather bagful of black ash splints. With five minutes allotted each applicant I knew from the start I hadn't a
chance. I had drawn number twenty-two and took the stage only to stare into the weary faces of fifty school principals stealing glances at their watches. I couldn't have pleased them more than if I'd screamed
Fire!
and given us all an excuse to bolt. With that in mind, I didn't read the piece I had prepared, an insipid story about my cat that in itself begged the issue of my suitability for a job in the schools—his name was Jim Beam—and resigned myself to a quick exit. “I've written some plays,” I said, “I'm working on my second novel now. My first one was published by a small press but we did sell the movie rights to Universal.” I immediately sensed a sudden stirring, a faint invigoration of interest. “My agent is working on a deal for me to write the screenplay.”