by Ira Wood
For the better part of that year Wendy had a regular study group with people prepping for the Graduate Record Exams and although I never asked, and she never volunteered, I began to think she had met someone special. There were unaccounted-for hours in her evenings out, added care in the way she dressed for class, even surprises in our now very occasional lovemaking. One night, after never once having expressed curiosity about the position I have since identified as the reverse cowgirl, she straddled me while turned to face the opposite wall. It was lovely watching her ass cheeks quiver as she stretched forward, placing her weight on her forearms to climax, but of course I was left to wonder where she’d picked up this little trick. And then there was the night I arrived home from a weekend with Marge to find River simply bursting with news. “Well, don’t you look like the happy little guy,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Know what?”
“Tell me.”
“While you were gone there was someone here.” He actually winked. “And he was very nice!”
But mostly there was a sense of strength and confidence in Wendy that grew in proportion to her distance from me. Sometimes she would actually ask, “How’s Marge doing?” and expect to have a conversation.
One evening in late April, she sprang from her car and ran up the front steps. The door seemed to blow open in a rush of wind. There was a radiance surrounding her, a shimmering aura of victory and newly won power. Her eyes were wild. She was taking gulps of air and holding her hand over her heart. In her other hand she was clutching a letter from Simmons College. She took a long slow swallow in order to speak. “I got into grad school,” Wendy said, and she began to weep. It was over. Our ridiculous makeshift family had come to an end.
6.
That summer River went to visit his grandmother at her cottage on Lake Superior and I attempted to write again, tentatively, for an hour each morning, at the desk I hadn’t used in months, in the room we had turned into River’s. I was circulating the novel I had written and receiving the first spate of many rejections. Marge’s agent, famous as a keen judge of talent, had attempted to be kind, but read it for exactly what it was, an episodic apprentice work seething with self pity, fantasies of revenge and imagined offenses. Wendy spent most of her free time arranging financial aid and looking for an apartment in a good school district. I took a night job as a waiter in a high-end restaurant and spent my afternoons writing something new, tentative sketches about the restaurant’s spoiled and wealthy patrons, its petulant chefs, and the other waiters, artists like myself, unknown and hungry for attention. With River splashing away somewhere on the Upper Peninsula, Wendy living with her new boyfriend, who had been one of her night school teachers, and Marge on the Cape writing what was to become her novel Vida, I was alone, truly alone with my work for the first time in years, no women to please, no Rubber Ducky; no goat, no donkey, no cow, no gorilla in the bedroom. Rabbi, I felt like a new man.
IF YOU WANT ME TO BE HONEST
Located in the heart of Beacon Hill, the restaurant didn’t serve food exactly, food you ate at a diner, but romantic descriptions of food, and charged by the adjective. Desert wasn’t called pudding, however much it resembled it, but banana caramel mousse with Maine summer berries. An appetizer that tasted, at least to me, like a sour pickle was called a Kirby cucumber fermented in sea salt, spring water, Chardonnay vinegar, and Sri Lankan green peppercorns. At the time the concept was completely new in provincial old Boston, pioneered by a small cadre of ambitious young restaurateurs who were inspired by Julia Child’s bodacious local TV show. Celebrated for our variations on traditional favorites—cod cakes sautéed in white truffle oil garnished with Usukuchi soy sauce and orange blossom honey; I had to memorize this stuff—and presentations assembled as delicately as a house of cards, we were among the first restaurants in a city known for Yankee comfort food to feature la nouvelle cuisine.
The owner/chef was Le Cordon Bleu trained and not only considered herself an artist but liked to hang out with them and hired a wait-staff of painters, musicians, dancers, singers studying opera, and me, the would-be novelist. We knew nothing about food, much less about wine, and blundered through table service with pure youthful chutzpah. Before I got the job I didn’t have any artist friends my own age but the regimen of the restaurant soon made it impossible to hang out with anyone else. We slept until noon, reported for work at four, and spent the next eight hours at an all-out sprint. Exhausted to the bone at midnight but unable to sleep, we swigged the dregs of our tables’ unfinished wine bottles, counted our tips, and primped to hit the dance bars while trash talking our customers, our boss, and all the undeserving artists who were making it while we were not. I saw precious little of Marge on her one night in the city as I worked Monday through Friday and arrived back to the apartment reeking so intensely of sweat, food, alcohol, tobacco smoke, perfume, dish water, and all the congregate effluvium of fine dining, that no matter how late I entered she would be awakened from sleep, sit upright in bed and gag. Every Friday night, however, I drove to Cape Cod for the weekend, leaving whatever bar at last call, grabbing coffee and a roast beef sandwich at Buzzy’s, the all-night drive-in next to Mass General, and plowed the hundred-plus miles with the windows open and the radio blasting to keep me awake. One night I left Boston so blindly drunk that I arrived in Wellfleet with a sandwich in my lap that I had neglected to eat and could not remember buying. Much as I enjoyed the life I had to admit that waiting tables in a high-end restaurant, like working in the theater or the emergency room, the night desk at a daily newspaper or for that matter organized crime, guaranteed access to the shadow world of the nocturnal demimonde but made it impossible to conduct a relationship with anyone outside the business. I gave notice soon thereafter.
I had accumulated some savings to live on, however, and more than enough material for the novel. In a little over a year, I managed to complete and revise a draft that was competent enough to get me a good agent, which at the time I defined as anyone who had a mailing address in New York City, at least one client who had written a best seller, and took me to lunch in a restaurant with a wine list.
The book was rejected by over thirty mainstream publishers and although their comments ranged from the condescending (“Mr. Wood is a writer whose next project might be worth reading”) to the absurd (“I cannot publish this book because I hate the protagonist. He reminds me too much of myself”) I was aware of a disjointedness of opinion that I could not dismiss. Many people familiar with the novel, including some quite famous writer-friends of Marge’s and audiences who heard excerpts read aloud, liked it very much. I kept being told how the book spoke to them of family situations they found painfully familiar, of what they feared went on inside pretentious restaurant kitchens, and above all how much it made them laugh. My agent had felt that way too, at first, but wearied of making costly submissions (these being the days of bulky manuscripts delivered by messenger), taking my lugubrious phone calls, and building up the ego of someone from whom she had yet to make a dime.
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.”
MR. NAPPY, THE ARTIST
In 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 par
ty 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.