by Susan Choi
In time the sound of applause was faintly audible through the glass. Then apparently there were questions. Sarah stopped tilting her head toward the lectern and looked straight at her audience so that the curtain of hair kept itself to one side and didn’t need to be tucked anymore. Sarah listened intently, nodded, spoke, and smiled a few times. She looked less self-conscious and pretentious, more relaxed and intelligent. Her smile, which had always been one of her best features, also seemed somehow improved, like her hair. Sarah had one of those faces that, when she wasn’t making a particular expression, tended to look preoccupied, worried, or mad. You couldn’t know what, if any, thoughts were storming across her brain at any given moment, but a lot of the time it seemed as if you could see them, and that they were hostile. Back in high school certain teachers, the ones with thin skins and quick tempers, had always been telling Sarah to wipe that look off her face, which seemed to startle Sarah or injure her feelings—her eyes would widen and sparkle as if they were wet—so that you wondered if “that look” possibly stood for nothing, not hostile thoughts but no thoughts. When Sarah smiled, all this uncertainty about her thoughts disappeared. But she didn’t smile often or at least didn’t used to.
After a second burst of applause people started leaving their chairs and milling around again. The pale thin man led Sarah to a table that was covered with a white cloth and tidy stacks of books and Sarah sat down behind the table with a self-conscious attitude of being very closely watched doing this ordinary thing of sitting down and so trying to do it as if she wasn’t in fact being watched, which only made her seem more as if she was performing—performing modesty, just as when she kept tucking her hair. Someone handed Sarah a Sharpie and a line formed in front of the table of people who wanted their book to be signed, and Sarah vanished from view behind the line of people awaiting their moment with her. At this point it might make you impatient to hear me change my mind again, but the truth is that after deciding not to sit in the audience I had never decided quite how to approach. I guess I’d thought of her leaving the store the same way she’d gone in, and the two of us there on the sidewalk. The sun had finally gone down, it was night and the sickly orange glow from the streetlight made the sidewalk feel private and maybe too private. I hadn’t planted myself in her audience. I hadn’t broken the fourth wall for my own satisfaction, but the line was a different arrangement. It promised each person a private encounter, but under the rules of encounters in public. Such as, everyone smiles and nobody runs. All these thoughts made up a lengthy hesitation during which everyone in the bookstore who was also hesitating about getting in line, or who was buying a book before getting in line, had now gotten in line so that when Karen entered the bookstore and got in the line, she was last. For a moment the store’s brightness, blinding after the sidewalk’s dim glow, made the decision to come inside seem like an error. Often the experience of our simplest perceptions, for example the feeling of blindness that comes from walking into a very bright space after standing for an hour in the dark, leads to an inaccurate thought—I’ve made a mistake—which leads to a feeling—anxiety—which reinforces the thought. One of Karen’s favorite authors, because although Karen doesn’t really read fiction, or much of anything that a store like Skylight Books stocks, Karen reads all the time and possesses some real expertise in a handful of favorite subjects, wrote a book that, once Karen had read it, enabled her to analyze her feeling-states as clearly as if they were passing through prisms, that didn’t just make them visible but broke them down into all their components. Once you can do that, it’s a challenge to not view other people as blind. Previous experience with the condescension of religious belief helps somewhat in correcting overestimations of yourself. Categorizing in ways that make sense from the gut, putting like things with like, helps somewhat, and being able to do that is why Karen’s good at her job. While waiting in the line, which was completely made up of people pointed intently at Sarah, people who refused to even glance at each other because they didn’t want to believe there might be someone else who had the same special connection with Sarah they’d formed just by reading her book, Karen had plenty of time to get out her own copy of Sarah’s book. It still had Karen’s bookmark stuck in it at page 131, commemorating the point at which the end had come, in Karen’s opinion. If Karen, as the reader will learn, had no problem closing the door on her mother when her mother attempted to visit, Karen certainly had no problem closing the covers on a book that featured her mother but purged Karen in most ways that mattered.
As the line inched forward, a young female employee of the bookstore worked her way back. She handed each person a single Post-it Note, and if needed, a pen. “If you’d like Sarah to sign your book to you, please write your NAME on the Post-it exactly the way that you’d like her to write it, and then please use the Post-it to MARK THE PAGE that you’d like her to sign on. The title page is what most people choose. If you want her to sign just your first name, PLEASE ONLY WRITE YOUR FIRST NAME. If you want her to sign it to somebody else, PLEASE WRITE THEIR NAME. If this is for a birthday or some other occasion, please write BIRTHDAY or whatever the occasion on the Post-it. Thank you! Does anybody need a pen? No, you keep the Post-it. Use it to mark where you want her to sign. That way she can open right to it. It’s your choice, but the title page is what most people choose. Does anybody need a pen? Oh, look at you—so organized!” While the time-saving system was being explained over and over again to every single member of the line, Karen had removed a block of Post-its and a pen from her briefcase, written “Karen” on a Post-it, and posted the flag on the edge of the title page. And yes, I used quotes on the Post-it. I wanted Sarah to use them when signing.
“I had my own Post-its,” Karen told the employee, who wore a name tag that read “Emily.” Emily’s strenuous effort to save Sarah perhaps half a minute per signing demonstrated that Emily’s own time was worthless to her.
“Ooh, you have the hardcover,” Emily said. Karen being the last person in line, there was nobody left who required a Post-it or who needed the system explained. Emily loitered with Karen as by tiny degrees they approached the white table. Karen didn’t do anything to encourage this loitering. “I love the hardcover design,” Emily went on, as if it had been Karen who designed it. “Well,” Emily wanted to clarify, “the paperback’s really nice too. It’s just a gorgeous book inside and out. Have you already read it?”
“I have,” Karen said, interpreting the question broadly, without guilt. But there didn’t seem to be an easy way to leave it at that. Emily seemed to be hanging on Karen’s every word. Emily seemed to intuit some kind of special relationship between Karen and the book, or maybe this was just Karen having another inaccurate thought. “Very closely,” Karen added, to make up for a meaningless half-truth of which Emily would never be aware. This made Karen think about the historical problem she had of tending to try to please other people, even strangers, for less than no reason. She’d always hoped that making this problem historical—acknowledged and documented—would leave it behind in the past, but so far that hadn’t worked out.
“Oh, wow!” Emily said, gratified. “A real fan!”
“Oh my God.” Sarah’s voice, up to now mellifluous and artificial and vague as white noise, abruptly fell into a lower register, as if in the middle of singing inanely, she’d burped. For the second-to-last person in line had turned away, like a curtain pulled aside, revealing Karen. It was the moment Karen had been waiting for, and, distracted by Emily the bookstore employee, she’d missed it. Or rather, she’d missed seeing it. She had heard it. But she’d wanted to see it. She had wanted to see Sarah exposed in a moment of panic. Instead she saw her quickly rising from behind the white table, unleashing the rarely seen dazzling smile. By “dazzling” we mean extremely impressive, beautiful, or skillful, and we also mean so bright as to cause temporary blindness. It’s a frequentative of the verb “daze,” by which we mean to make someone unable to think or react properly. In high school, the ma
n we’re calling Mr. Kingsley assigned us, as fifteen-year-olds, the song called “Razzle Dazzle” as the audition piece for our production of Chicago (music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb). Sarah, who never could sing, embarrassed herself at auditions. Karen, who could sing, nailed the song but apparently lacked some other quality required to be cast in the show. “Razzle Dazzle” is a cynical song about getting away with murder. Sarah rose up from behind the white table, dazzling with her rarely seen megawatt smile, and before Karen could step back, Sarah hooked her arm around Karen’s shoulders and pulled her in for a hug, with the table between them, while the person named Emily squealed, “I should have known you were an old friend of hers!” Despite being a former dancer with excellent balance, Karen almost lost her footing while this awkward hug, which you’d almost think had been done for that purpose, was happening. Almost losing her footing, Karen was almost unable to think or react properly. She almost felt herself at a disadvantage. But that was an inaccurate thought.
* * *
I ALWAYS KNEW I was one of the ones who would leave. Whether it was talent or just willpower, something would get me far from my hometown. How likely you were to leave town after graduation was another way CAPA ranked people. Everyone assumed the stars would leave. Everyone assumed the people in the background would stay. Sarah was the exception to the rule, actually. Sarah was a bad actress, a worse singer, and a nonexistent dancer, but we could tell she would leave, rejected and depressed as she pretended to feel, with her self-destructive habits that were her best stab at acting, and her shredded punk clothes. Our senior year, when she went shrieking down the Theatre hall waving her Brown acceptance letter, no one was surprised. It was when I got my acceptance to Carnegie Mellon that everybody was shocked. But I’d known I was getting out somehow, while so many of the stars who were supposed to, Melanie who’d stood smiling in her own private dream while I crawled around on the floor buttoning her My Fair Lady shoes with a hook, or Lukas who’d thrown his Music Man shirt on the dressing room floor every night because he knew I’d pick it up and iron it, ended up boomerangs. The farther they hurled themselves out, the more quickly they landed back where they’d begun.
I wasn’t a star dancer at Carnegie Mellon, but when I gave up dance I didn’t run home, I did the opposite. I went to New York anyway, just when all our classmates who’d gone to NYU and even Juilliard were leaving. New York was “too hard, too expensive, too lonely,” but I’d never expected New York would be easy or cheap or a place I’d have friends. I’d never been a star and I didn’t expect to be treated like one. I did well in New York. I had a job, I had a place to live on my own. And then one night I opened the door of my apartment and there was my mother, in a brand-new ankle-length faux-fur coat that some man had bought her to keep her southern self warm in the cold New York weather. She’d gotten some man to get her to New York and she was grinning like a naughty little girl at how clever she was, actually hopping up and down on my doormat. I left immediately and moved to LA, where my brother was finishing school. It took our mother three years to unhook from the man from New York and rehook to a man from LA; by the time she caught up, an unexpected change had come over me. I wanted to go home. I loved it and missed it. I’d only wanted to leave in the first place because my mother lived there, and she no longer did. So I told her in no uncertain terms what would happen if she followed me again, and told my brother to do the same thing, but he couldn’t. My mother had always forgotten about him, raising him with the sort of benign neglect that left him wanting more of her instead of realizing she was a toxin. My mother and brother still live in LA, while I live in the city all three of us think of as home. When I visit my brother, he doesn’t tell our mother I’m coming. When he visits me, he doesn’t tell her he’s going. He pretends that he’s traveling on business. And though I’m sad that this saddens my brother, what would happen if my mother had contact with me would be worse than his sadness, and both of them know this.
After I moved home, I often ran into the person we’ve been calling David. His boomerang flight had been longer than Melanie’s, shorter than mine. He’d been back in our town for two years. He’d started a theatre company which put on the darkest, most disturbing plays David could think of in the same sorts of places where we’d gone to hear music in high school, the rusty ice houses or the abandoned warehouses or the seedy dance clubs. David had failed at acting at Northwestern and he’d switched to playwriting and failed at that because he never finished the plays he started and he’d switched to directing and turned out to be very good at it. People came to see the plays he put on, despite their being dark and disturbing and staged in weird inconvenient locations. The person whom we’re calling Mr. Kingsley became a regular audience member, and then a regular donor, and then, as David’s company started getting its shit together and applying for nonprofit status and grants, even a member of the advisory board. When you saw Mr. Kingsley and David standing around at one of David’s fund-raisers, Mr. Kingsley drinking whatever red wine was on hand from a clear plastic cup, David drinking whatever showily cheap “blue-collar” beer was on hand from a can, the two of them talking intently as if they were completely alone in the loud, crowded room about whatever dark and disturbing play David was currently staging, you saw two members of the same Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.
Mr. Kingsley, when we were his students, never explained this Elite Brotherhood in the way that he was constantly explaining the idea of stardom, through everything he tried to teach us, and all the ways we didn’t measure up. The idea of stardom, of honing your talent and unleashing it on the world, organized everything that we did—but what he never told us was that the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts organized the stardom. Mr. Kingsley was clearly a member. And now David was clearly a member. That was strange and even funny only if you stood apart and noticed that it was a brotherhood, with membership and rules, and not a God-given Order of Things. During the period when David’s company got its shit together to apply for nonprofit status and grants, Karen lent them her organizational skill set, in case this hasn’t already been guessed. She was the getter-together of the company’s shit, though she never sought credit or even a paycheck. She was happy to make that contribution to David’s success. So few of their peers had succeeded, so few had found stardom—but of all people, cynical David had made a place, right there in their hometown, for surviving ambition. Now the Theatre kids went straight from CAPA graduation to David’s auditions, and Mr. Kingsley employed David as a “visiting artist” to teach the “master class” in directing. Karen donated her evenings and weekends to the company’s “office” and “books” and its near fatal, before she intervened, unpaid-tax fiasco. David, in gratitude to her, insisted she come to a fund-raising gala, at which he dragged her over to Mr. Kingsley, who beamed and nodded and chitchatted with her while gracefully if not successfully trying to hide the fact that he had no idea who she was.
Karen was content, she told David, with having given up performing. She was just as content as he was. But David, perhaps because over the years he’d developed a sort of ardent artistic flattery as the only currency with which he could pay all the people he owed money to, refused to believe this. “Come on,” he said. “You got into Carnegie Mellon. Unlike me you can actually sing. You can fucking tap-dance.”
“I’m an awful tap dancer.” This was true. The limitations of body type, mentioned above, made tap dancing an imperfect fit. In tap as in ballet you want lanky; only modern can accommodate the dancer who’s built like a swimmer.
“For fuck’s sake, only a tap dancer says, ‘I’m an awful tap dancer.’ You were good. Remember when we all had to sing ‘Razzle Dazzle’? You killed.”
“He didn’t cast me.”
“He never cast me either.”
“And now you’re a director and I’m your accountant. All is as it should be. You don’t have to tell me I’m an undiscovered star just because you can’t pay me.”
“You had a dark energy
onstage—don’t roll your eyes! I remember. You didn’t have a stupid Mentos smile.”
“Stop.”
“From the point of view of directing I can’t fucking believe the deficit of talent in our class. Of course our estimation of our talent was completely overblown, but even if you adjust for that, we had a deficit. If you look at the school over time, there’s only one person in its entire history who’s ever become a global celebrity, and she went to the school for less than three weeks so we can’t really claim her. But there’s the handful of people who have been on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard once or twice in their careers, and we’ve produced one of those let’s say twice every decade. Then there are the people who’ve managed to pay the bills as working actors—sometimes you see them on TV although they never break out. There’s one of those maybe every two years. Then there’s the people who should have made it at least as far as getting regular work, but they had shitty luck. There’s a few of that type every year and I cast them in my stuff, all the better for me. But our class had no one even in that final category—except you.”
“You’re putting me in the shitty-luck category? I’d rather be in the talentless category.”
“Come to auditions next week. Come on. Why the fuck not?”
I might have given a dry bark of laughter, or made a wry face, by which I would have meant, You’re ridiculous, or I’m ridiculous, and either way I’m not taking this seriously. I would have shoved off the barstool unhurriedly, paid my tab, said good night. In high school, despite being members of the same graduating theatre class, David and I had never been friendly. Our shared connection to Sarah was more like a wedge than a bridge. But now that we both lived in our hometown again, conversations like this happened often between us. David was obsessed with the past, and not just certain parts of it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him. David seemed to have decided, very early in life, that the best of his life was already behind him, and all his present achievements with his theatre company interested him only because they gave him a connection to his past. I interested him only because I gave him a connection to his past. I gave him the opportunity to talk about his past, even parts of his past that hadn’t interested him at the time but that interested him now. And so he would remind himself of this or that thing I’d done, or talk about my unacknowledged talent, because it gave him the thing he most craved: a doorway, however indirect, to his past. He would have done it with anyone out of his past. In fact, he did. I often heard him engaged in the same sorts of conversations with other relics of those years who had rotated back into town.