by Dylan Hicks
“You don’t think dyslexic people can be elegant?”
“I didn’t mean that, I—”
“I’m joking. I should probably read more of him.”
“Gemma sent me an advance of the new one,” she said. “You could borrow it when I’m done.”
Without getting ahead of himself, he noted that borrowing a book usually involved two meetings.
“Oh, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the rehearsal dinner,” she said.
“I’m thoughtless about the rehearsal dinner.”
“It’s just, it’s a lot of socializing in one weekend. I might need a month in a hermitage to recover. I’m thinking of telling them I have to work on Friday morning, that we can’t make it to Winnipeg till after the rehearsal dinner starts.”
With a facetious shudder: “You would lie to your own cousin?”
“I would,” she said, kind of sexily. “Maybe blow off Sunday brunch too.”
“At least for brunch we could just throw on our bike shorts,” he said. She smiled. “But hey, that’s fine.” He liked the chance to be conspiratorial so soon. “As much as I want to see Gemma, I was pretty happy to decline the invitation. I mean”—he caught Karyn’s eye—“I’m looking forward to it now, but . . . I’m not at a place in my life where I enjoy making small talk, having to tell people my job is selling sneakers on eBay and participating in psychological studies, which I’ve only done twice.”
“A lot of people are unemployed,” Karyn said.
“I know, a ton. But it’s more than that.” A more general sense that he was three touchdowns behind at halftime. And he didn’t relish watching Gemma marry Archer. He wasn’t still hung up on her, not meaningfully, but the guy was a tool. How could she not see it?
They talked more about the economy, about hydrofracking, Winnipeg (“a bohemian Shangri-la,” according to an old friend of Karyn’s). Things flowed smoothly, and when Lucas listened to his voice, it sounded like his actual voice, like he was just pushing air through his lungs and vibrating his larynx and moving his tongue around and doing whatever else people do when talking, rather than doing all those things with slightly unnatural variations, as he would have when talking to a stranger at a rehearsal dinner. He wanted to stay longer, but Maxwell came downstairs with his borrowed violin at noon, almost as if he’d been instructed to reemerge at precisely that time.
March 2005
only if you have time . . . . . .
FROM Archer Bondarenko
TO Sara Crennel
Sara,
I really enjoyed meeting you the other month, my only complaint being that just as I did you had to shuffle off to Buffalo. (What’s that from, anyway?) Saw John the other day, & heard you guys were taking a break. He had nothing but good things to say about you, case you were guessing to the contray. Actually, he was the one that reminded/urged me to sned you that essay I mentioned at the restaurant. (I just googled shuffle off to Buffalo, did you?) N.b.: the essay’s still drafty in spots, not developed in toto yet w/r/t ideation, but I *think* its getting close. Anyway, if you have time maybe take a look. I’d love to hear your feedback unless it’s negative. No biggie if you’re slammed, & holla next time your back in the city.
Yrs,
Archer
Parts of the essay were indeed “drafty,” and those were its most refined parts. The rest was rather more like notes toward an essay—at times exactly like notes toward an essay (“Something here about Roth?” “Consider story of aunt’s panties tho prob too much”). Despite the e-mail’s semiliteracy and disclaimers, Sara wondered if Archer had intended to send, or sned, such a nubbin-like thing, or if he had attached an earlier document by mistake. If he’d sent the wrong doc, it would seem condescending of Sara to treat inchoate jottings as if they were ready for scrutiny, though to broach the subject even in the most delicate terms would probably give offense; Archer might in fact find delicate terms more offensive than blunt ones.
She was pretty good at spotting bad writers in advance of direct exposure to their writing. In writing workshops she would listen to certain comments and before-class chat and think, When this guy submits his story, it’ll be awful. And her prejudice would be vindicated. She held her own work in similarly low esteem—perhaps she didn’t think her work was awful, but neither did she think it was profound, original, or in any way necessary, and maybe some of her workshop peers, seeing that her insecurity and amour propre were interlaced, tried to discount her opinions in bulk, as if self-doubt canceled critical acumen. (Surely self-doubt is just the inward nadir of critical acumen, and somewhere she’d read that when contempt of others rises to contempt of self, it becomes philosophy.) Archer was an odd case in that, from what she had seen that night in New York, he was quick and articulate—not in proportion to his pride, but verbally fluid nonetheless, as well as prestigiously educated and tasteful (he’d been right to buy those beautiful dioramas); and though none of that guaranteed that he’d be a good writer, all of it gave ground to expect that he’d be better than he apparently was. He needed an amanuensis more than a word processor; even voice-recognition software would have helped.
His essay did, she allowed, contain some good phrases and sturdy sentences, but very often it was slipshod, graceless, and surprisingly pocked with grammatical and orthographical mistakes. Transitions were absent or strained; the erudition seemed feigned. Even furbished, the piece would be too long and eggheady for a newspaper or magazine, too short and superficial for a journal. She could better picture it converted badly into HTML on some dinky website, stray number signs, question marks, & ampersands filling in for apostrophes, smart quotes, and diacritics and making the piece seem Tourettically dotted with cartoon profanity, all of it underscored by one spammy comment from Estonian identity thieves.
She stared at her laptop till the screen went charcoal, uncertain how to respond to the e-mail, much less how to respond to the essay. On these late-winter afternoons, her mother’s dining room was quieter than you might predict of a room in an old, uncarpeted house, especially one containing robustly mechanical means of dispensing water to cats. At times in her life Sara had longed for such quiet. Now it was just depressing. She walked upstairs to her mother’s bedroom—dust motes floating over an ironing board piled with damp towels, jackets from Chico’s, a leopard-print vest—and turned on a telenovela, having previously been inspirited by how the voices at a distance sounded like gossip-worthy neighbors. She watched a long scene in which a man drove somewhere ardently. Returning downstairs to her workspace at the dining room table, she raised the dimmer on the chandelier, but the room remained chromatically compressed: floors the color of wheat, walls pale yellow, popcorn ceiling spottily browned like old cauliflower.
The moment seemed ripe for a meditative walk, though all routes everywhere deterred pedestrians. Under the pretense of responding to an automated call about one of her mother’s prescriptions, she put on heavy socks, boots, and her grandmother’s circa-1969 coat, snug but wearable. The vintage orange leather would furnish safety advantages during the walk’s daredevil stretch on the shoulder of Mineral Springs Road. Before setting out, she chipped ice on the porch, pausing once to say hello to the neighbor kids, who were home-schooled and got a lot of recess. An unpretentious suburb southeast of Buffalo, West Seneca wasn’t the dreariest or most suffocating place in the world but also not a place Sara had expected to return to at length. When her parents bought the house in 1980, they were trying for a second kid and wanted something the family could grow into. There were fertility problems, however, trailed by marital problems, so the house was first somewhat too big for three, then notably too big for two or one. It had a brown brick façade, black shutters, cream vinyl siding on its front gable and its side- and rear-facing walls. The old and cheaply constructed jungle gym out back, sometimes used by the homeschoolers, was a litigation hazard. Sara wasn’t sentimental about the touchstones of her childhood and wished her mother’s plans to buy a modest condo in the city would pic
k up speed.
The blocks to the north of hers didn’t rate sidewalks, so she had to walk on the edge of the street, around and past the cars and trucks and down-and-out snowmen. As she walked she wondered again about John and Archer’s friendship, whether it might have been built on a base of shared mediocrity. Perhaps, in a storied microcosm of privilege and achievement, they had each recognized in the other a fellow second-rater. A mean thought, but, if true, maybe part of a continual pattern; possibly they saw in her the same also-ran qualities, were drawn to her narrow vision, her middling state-school credentials, her extra pounds and dumpy clothes. Or, to use the president’s solecism, she misunderestimated them. She allowed that she wasn’t qualified to judge, and in certain cases didn’t value, intelligence or ability in business, math, science, and other professional and academic areas outside the humanities, and accordingly that John, who’d been a math “concentrator” in college, must be intellectually talented in ways beyond Sara’s ken and underexposed by his conversation. Not extraordinarily talented, but talented, though she was remembering now as she said hello to the mailwoman that he had switched majors, presumably to something easier. Archer wasn’t without talent; Sara guessed he would find success in one pursuit or another. There was little financial risk in failure, for one thing, ample scope for the see-what-sticks approach. Wise to cultivate his friendship. Still, both of them, John and Archer, seemed unworthy of their degrees, and the thought nettled her perpetually underlying resentment to the surface.
She started to fantasize again about returning to the dawn of her teens, becoming an industrious middle-class comer, marching wanly into the meritocracy with pink eraser swarf on the heel of her right hand, savoring her mother’s tears at the welcoming letter from the University of Chicago, or Wellesley, or Swarthmore, or Yale, earning Harold Bloom’s rumbly praise for her paper on Dryden (whom in her actual life she hadn’t read), landing an internship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, then passing quickly through one or more of publishing’s largely distaff realms—proofreading, publicity, editorial assistance—to more lucrative and visible triumphs. She’d been Yale material, she now believed, in every respect except most of those important to admissions officers. At West Seneca High she was an erratic, disaffected, indisputably lazy student who shunned extracurriculars, volunteerism, and SAT preparation. (Yet still she managed a nearly perfect score on the verbal, or so she had told John and one other person, applying a lenient standard of near-perfection.)
An SUV honked at her on Mineral Springs as she passed the tumbledown used-car lot with its cheerless streamers and crooked GO SABRES sign. She couldn’t live much longer in a world without sidewalks.
For someone still at an age of expected and in some cases feasible fresh starts, Sara dreamed all too often of getting a do-over, reliving her childhood either to reverse pivotal mistakes or simply to take diligent notes on her surroundings, boxes and boxes of lyrically persnickety notes that would let her write about the past with Vermeer-like precision. Of course, she could take diligent notes on her surroundings now and attempt to write about the present with Vermeer-like precision, but that seemed tedious and optimistic. She knew she should be enjoying the bright suspense of relative youth, falling asleep to visions of odds-bucking artistic success instead of staying awake with pangs of premature regret, the sort of regret that aligned her with those who announce in museums that they or their droopy-chinned children could have, under unexplained circumstances, executed major works of abstract expressionism. Nevertheless, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was cleverer than her accomplishments indicated, that she had to do something grand to requite her past mistakes.
Back home in slippers, she left her mother’s pills on the kitchen counter and revived her laptop. After reading Archer’s essay a second time, she concluded that it wasn’t irredeemably bad. It was meagerly promising. After a third reading she decided it epitomized unmet potential. It stumbled now, yes, but she saw how elegantly it meandered even into its most egregious flaws. If it wasn’t as deeply self-critical as the best personal essays tend to be, it was without question forthright and self-aware—no, the self-awareness was with question, but there were strong signs of it. The content, improbably for a piece about masturbation, was as inviting as the composition was repellent.
And what it invited her to do—something she vexingly couldn’t do as a proofreader—was rewrite, with a free and heavy hand that after ten days’ work reduced Archer’s draft to the faintest penti-mento. She dilated the piece by nine pages. She gave Archer experiences he hadn’t had, such as her own. When his unaccompanied sex acts seemed pedestrian, she added a squirmy detail. (About his invented and borrowed experiences he was fearlessly, disarmingly frank.) She worked in Andy Warhol, Lynda Benglis, James Joyce, Jim Morrison, Georges Bataille, George Grosz, Philip Roth, Lord Byron, Cyndi Lauper, and the auntly underwear. She tried to make reasonable arguments, but where convenient she embraced a brand of sophistry that could, in a pinch, pass as satire. Over those ten days she was driven to write from the moment she woke up, feeling as instantly eager and alert as a nine-year-old on Christmas morning. After many months in which the urge to write tugged most forcefully when the act was impracticable, this was restoration, proof that she could still work the stalwart hours of a resident physician or trucker, still lose herself in the challenge of a sentence and go on composing in her head while she showered, made coffee, or microwaved a frozen entrée from the line her mother favored, the box showing a middle-aged woman eating alone, proclaiming in jaunty emerald script, JUST ME.
Even the light through the dining room window shone more brightly—spring coming on, but the shift seemed more symbolic than seasonal. Never before had writing been so much fun, and, in a troubling concurrence, never before had the results been so wanting in integrity. Or maybe that was wrong; maybe the reworked essay’s integrity surpassed that of all her previous work. It was fraudulent, both as far as the facts went and “w/r/t ideation,” but it boasted a certain soundness, a certain . . . it was all kind of vague . . . inevitability that usually eluded her, along with the obscure prizes and adjunct teaching posts the stars of her MFA program had gone on to receive. Of course, she hadn’t been a star in her program, and hadn’t bloomed outside of it. She had published next to nothing: a piece of flash fiction on a website whose name gave her bio an unwelcome antic air; the kickboxing piece and RNC reports for the Stickler; and a smattering of hackwork, most recently an unbylined guide to Niagara-region hiking trails, most of which she hadn’t technically visited. She routinely applied for grants and fellowships that she unfailingly failed to win.
She had entertained dozens of first responses to Archer’s e-mail, settling on temporizing concision (“I’ll try to look at it”). Only on her third day with the piece did she really consider how he might react to her work. He hadn’t specified what he wanted from her, but surely it wasn’t an expansionist Gordon Lish, a class-confused Henry Higgins, or a ghostwriter. Acknowledging the likely futility of her efforts gave them a prodding taste of danger. The risks were probably no greater than a pissy e-mail from a man she would never see again, but that was enough to taunt her rebellious streak. Since Archer wouldn’t want to do anything with the revised essay except delete it, and she couldn’t do anything with it except save it, the pages reached a level of art for art’s sake that her publication-craving stories only pretended to. On that count, she reasoned, the essay’s integrity did surpass that of all her previous work, and it was with humming satisfaction that she sent it off to Archer at 3:48 a.m., having set her alarm for 3:45 in order to buttress her e-mail’s apologetic explanation that she was desperately tired and probably manic and that his brilliant draft had carried her away.
June 2011
“I won’t keep you, Karyn,” Gemma said. “I’m sure you’re extraordinarily busy.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I just wanted to express my gratitude. We’re delighted—Archer less so than I—t
hat Lucas will be in attendance at the wedding, thanks to you.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
“An exquisite solution, this,” Gemma said, as if the solution had been Karyn’s idea. “And let me add, with no matchmaking colorations intended—I know how tetchy you can be on that front—let me just add that Lucas very much enjoyed meeting you. I haven’t heard him in such high spirits for millennia, and I’m inclined, Karyn, to credit his reanimation to your hospitality. He has even resumed his job hunt in earnest.”
Karyn didn’t know how to respond to this likably preposterous woman. She thought she should tamp down whatever romantic subplots Lucas and/or Gemma might be conceiving, though she didn’t want to tamp them down conclusively. Lucas had drifted into her mind often enough since their brunch, and it was refreshing to entertain such thoughts without the moral qualms that shadowed her fling with the consultant. Certainly conversation with Lucas had poured more smoothly than it had with Paul or the two divorcés from last summer’s brief return to online dating. To Gemma she said, “He seems like a nice guy.”
“I would chance even higher praise, but rest easy that the admiration is mutual. Lucas was all but rhapsodic about you and Maximilian. I gather he has begun production on a mixtape for the drive—again, I speak without motive.”
“The lady doth protest too much,” Karyn said.
“Ha, so like you, Karyn. Archer tells me you tread the boards.”
It wasn’t exactly an insider’s quotation. “Not for years,” Karyn said, moderately surprised that Gemma could use “tread the boards” without detectable irony, more surprised that Archer knew of her acting career. “It was just a few roles here and there.”
“A footnote of the footlights!”
Perhaps too accurate.
“Well,” Karyn said.
“Yes, I’ll let you run off.”
“Oh, and thank you for the book. It’s outstanding.” And it was, so far, a marked advancement from the perfectly fine debut.