Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  Amy’s answering machine was flashing “F,” which, Amy guessed, stood for “Full,” although in her present euphoric state she preferred to imagine “Fine” or “Flourishing” or even “Funny,” as in, “You’re funny.” The machine had a thirty-minute record limit; quite possibly Carla, unable to contact her after a couple of tries, had just rambled on about her day. But because Amy was feeling festive (“Festive”), she pressed the playback button. There were twenty-two calls, only a couple of which were from Carla. Four of them were from some dame named Maxine Horner, who sounded just like a Horner, her voice so strident that it stressed out the cheap speaker. “Amy Gallup, long time no see!” She must be at least Amy’s age—nobody said “long time no see” anymore—and she also sounded put out, in the third message, about not having been called back. “We gotta touch base, babe,” she said, before Amy cut her off.

  For an uncomfortable minute, Amy worried anew about her brain (which, according to Kurt Robetussien and her gorgeous MRI, was free of death-dealing shadows). Evidently she was supposed to know Maxine Horner. Worse still, there was someone in the world who felt free to call her “babe.” Then she vaguely remembered knowing a Maxine a long time ago, although never a Horner, so maybe Maxine had got married. For now, all she could recognize was that name, that string of letters, not a face or a fact. But then Maxine Something, Amy now noticed, was connected to Manhattan, because the name was now linking neuronically to Greenwich Village. In her mind, a snapshot of a leafy Village street shimmered beside that mysterious name, both evoking the scent-memory of 1970s car exhaust. What a wonderful organ was a non-leaking brain!

  While hers worked on Maxine, she fast-forwarded through bot-calls and real calls—from her old students Ricky Buzza, and Harry B, and even Marvy Stokes, from whom Amy hadn’t heard since his wife yanked him out of her last workshop. Her writer’s workshop vets were probably planning a party. Then she saw that her neighbors on all sides had called—the Blaines, the Wards across the street, even Mr. Franz, the old man two doors down whose wife had just died. Alphonse must have been driving everybody nuts. She stopped flipping through answers and called Molly Blaine.

  “Molly, I’m so sorry about Alphonse,” she began.

  “Why? Did something happen?”

  “I was just away for a while, and that’s why he was barking up a storm.”

  “No, he wasn’t. Not until just now. So talk about hiding your light under a bushel!” Molly sounded very excited in a positive way. About what? “Frank and I had no idea! And neither did the Millers!”

  “Neither did I!” Amy wanted to say, but her freshly vetted brain was now working on two puzzles, Maxine Horner and light-hiding bushels. Had people ever hidden lights this way? She pictured a candle burning underneath a hay bale, which surely was an insanely dangerous practice. Wouldn’t it be safer and faster just to blow out the candle? “Sorry, Molly,” she finally said. “I didn’t listen to your whole message, and I have no idea what’s up.”

  “A famous author on Jacaranda Drive! Look how many years you’ve lived here, and none of us knew!”

  The Baba Yaga story. “Oh, that,” said Amy. “Reports of my fame were greatly exaggerated.” Amy attempted to toss off this ancient joke with an airy chuckle, which came out in the exact pitch of her own voice as a child. Neurons were firing now to beat the band: she flashed on the high-pitched prissy voice of her own seven-year-old self standing up in front of her second grade class, holding up a dime she had just fished out of her pocket, and announcing, “This extremely rare coin was minted in 1949.” She had forgotten it was her day for show-and-tell, and rather than just admit this, she had just winged it, which might have worked out if the current year hadn’t been 1955. Even second graders knew the dime wasn’t anything special. She didn’t fool them, or Mrs. Crowley either, and she retired in disgrace. The few sense-memories Amy had of her childhood generally amounted to her own voice saying something pompous. Now she was doing it again.

  Molly Blaine was rattling on about what a thrill it was to live next to such a famous person. Even if Amy were actually famous, as opposed to locally notorious for a day, this made no sense. If Amy moved in next to the Clintons or Philip Roth or Carl Yastrzemski, she might feel fluttery and self-conscious for a week, but that would be it. Now she tried to talk Molly down, explaining that she was no longer an active writer, but rather dormant, probably extinct. Her money was on extinct.

  “Like a volcano!” said Molly.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, but you could erupt at any time, like that mountain in Alaska.”

  “Just like a mountain in Alaska,” said Amy.

  “Bless your heart,” said Molly, who finally hung up after volunteering to call the rest of the neighbors and fill them in.

  Great. Until now, until goddamn Holly Antoon—no, until Amy cracked her skull on the birdbath—she had enjoyed the lowest of profiles in her neighborhood, giving or receiving the occasional wave, returning people’s lost pets and having the neighbors do the same for her when Alphonse wandered off. Now would come hearty halloos and waves galore. Now would come book clubs and autographs, assuming that they could locate any of her out-of-print novels online. She had enjoyed her well-earned anonymity. Had she been the reveling sort, she would have reveled in it. Now that was all over.

  Her phone rang and she shut it off, her mood ruined. An hour later, plummeting into an exhausted sleep, her mind played one last trick, needling her with the possibility that one of the unheard messages had been from the hospital, calling to tell her that her MRI test had gotten mixed up with a healthy person’s. Furious with herself, she stumbled back to the answering machine and heard everybody out. Most of the callers were strangers, although she recognized some of the names, writers who lived in San Diego, and that local NPR radio guy. The rest were book club ladies calling from La Jolla and Clairemont and Solana Beach. The last call was Maxine Horner’s fourth, and this time Amy played the whole thing.

  “Hey, babe, what’s the deal? I know it’s been a while, but let’s face it, we had nothing to talk about. All right, hand to God, I thought you were dead. This story is a riot. I don’t know what you’re on, but whatever it is, I want some. Call me tomorrow. I’m serious. I know where you live now, and if I don’t hear from you, I’ll be camping out in your front yard. You gotta come out some time.”

  Maxine Grabow. Her voice had dropped half an octave, from menopause or throat cancer or both, and some madman had actually married her, but there she was, just as alive as Amy, who didn’t know how to feel about this, or about the fact that her old agent, whose last words to her had been “Call me when you give a shit,” was back in her life. What had happened?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Maxine

  What had happened was the Internet.

  Amy made use of it daily in her online editorial work and regularly in maintaining her blog, GO AWAY. For someone of her generation she was unusually plugged in, because she had to be. Her cell phone was retro and she didn’t mess with Netflix, but she was computer-literate. Freelancers who made their living, such as it was, teaching strangers how to write had to stay current technologically. She followed the news on the raw feed (refusing to allow it into her life through television or radio) and so was perfectly aware of the speed with which information and misinformation could spread. Still, it had not occurred to her that Holly Antoon’s silly story, which she was beginning to think of as Holly’s Folly, would of course be slapped up on the Net along with the local weather outlook, real-time traffic reports, cat images, the twittering of a million twerps, and the online New York Times.

  And if the real news, whatever that was, had been focused on one or two attention-grabbing events, then the Folly would have bobbed for a few days and sunk beneath the binary waves with no one the wiser. A crisis in the Middle East, a Malaysian typhoon, a high body-count workplace shooting, even an A-list celebrity antic, and no one outside of San Diego County would have picked up the story. Max
ine Grabow, for instance, wouldn’t have given Amy a single thought.

  But the day the story came out and the week that followed were slow, news-wise. The economy did not significantly worsen; car-bombs went off in Pakistan and Bogotá but failed to kill anyone; there was a huge wedding fire, but in Myanmar. No freakish multiple births, no devastating hate crimes, and the most newsworthy celebrities were either in rehab or home with their newborns.

  Holly’s Folly came out in print and online Sunday morning, and within twenty-four hours two book bloggers had linked to it. One blog was called Washed-Ups, Has-Beens, and One-Hit Wonders. Which search string, Amy wondered, had managed to snag her name? The other blog was devoted to the works of Henrietta Mant; doubtless the blogger had arranged for some sort of alert whenever the writer’s named popped up in cyberspace. Neither blog explained why Maxine spent half of Sunday trying to get in touch with Amy. To find that out, Amy would have to return the call and let Maxine Grabow back into her life.

  * * *

  When Amy was young, beginning writers didn’t need agents or even know who they were or what they did. You wrote something and sent it out and waited for a slush pile rejection. Amy’s first book, a collection of short stories, had been accepted for publication in 1970, when Amy was fresh out of college and looking for something to do. She had written half of the stories as an undergraduate looking for an easy A and the rest while pretending to transcribe Dictabelts for a debt collection lawyer in Waterville, Maine. Her best friend, Max Winston, convinced her to talk to her advisor and send it out to a couple of houses, which she did with high anxiety and low expectations. When she got the letter of acceptance, she was pleased enough but distracted by more significant events.

  Max was about to complete graduate school and get himself dangled in front of the Maine draft board like a frisky minnow. His lottery number was middling and he was dithering between two draft-dodging strategies: securing a 4-F deferment by admitting he was homosexual, or wedding his best friend and hoping for a marriage deferment. The marriage ploy was much riskier—it failed as often as it worked—but the year was 1970, and Max, who was openly gay before the phrase was commonly used, was still terrified of whatever would greet him when he actually showed up at the induction center for his physical. The prospect of that physical scared him more than Vietnam. This medico-phobia was just one of the many ways in which Max and Amy turned out to be brilliantly suited.

  The day Amy got her acceptance letter from St. Martin’s was the same day she agreed to marry Max, “just until the war blows over.” And by the end of the war, Amy, happily settled into what would turn out to be the only truly fulfilling and intimate (however platonic) relationship of her life, had written and published two well-received books of short stories, the second one, Everything Handsome, nominated for the National Book Award and selling respectably. She was a “Young Writer to Watch,” and halfway between 1975 and the publication of Ambassador of Loss in 1978 Maxine Grabow descended on her like some deus ex machina lowered from the rafters.

  Amy remembered first meeting her at one of her own Waterville soirées, in which Max’s colleagues and students generally milled about, along with whomever Max or Amy was seeing at the time. Publishing types generally didn’t make it up to Maine, and after Maxine’s first visit, neither Amy nor Max could figure out how she found her way into their house. Maxine was dwarfishly short with alarmingly red hair stuffed partly into a black beret; she wore a wool suit Max identified as Chanel, with a huge moth-hole in one sleeve; she smoked Tiparillos; and, like E. F. Hutton, when she spoke people listened, although in Maxine’s case this was because nobody else could hear himself think. She had a voice for the theater, but not, as she cheerfully acknowledged, the talent, which was why she had ended up heading her own literary agency. An agency, as it turned out, with only one agent, but a pretty successful one. Her star client was Henrietta Mant.

  At first, Amy thought she was a lesbian. She kept staring at Amy, sizing her up in a way that made Amy both curious and uncomfortable. “Wrong,” said Max. “Look at how she’s checking out the guys. She’s not after your bod. She wants something else, though. Watch out.”

  Maxine finally cornered her in the kitchen. She blew whole-leaf tobacco smoke up Amy’s nose and announced in a reverberating whisper, “I’m going to make you a pile of money.” She whipped out a business card that said GRABOW in big letters and “literary agent” in footnote font.

  “I’m not that kind of writer,” Amy said, prompting a bray so outlandish that a handful of people gathered outside the kitchen to observe.

  “That’s what they all say, babe!”

  “You know what I mean,” Amy said, reddening at her own girlishness.

  “What are you working on, babe?”

  Amy was backed up against the stove. None of your beeswax, she thought. “Beeswax,” she said. “It’s the working title of my first novel.” She began to breathe more easily.

  Max had taught her how to do this, to deal with threatening social situations by transforming people into fictional characters with no inner lives. “Pretend they’re foils,” Max told her. “Characters in a farce, and you’re the one writing it.” From the start of their friendship, Max had devoted himself to coaxing Amy out of her cave, partly, she thought, for his own amusement, and partly because he genuinely cared about her. “But they’re not foils,” she would object, “they have feelings. I don’t want to deal with those.” Max changed her attitude by reminding her how much she hated it when other people speculated about her own feelings. “It’s so intrusive,” she would complain. “So don’t intrude on theirs,” he counseled, reasonably, and she was still learning not to. Maxine Grabow’s feelings, she reminded herself, are none of my beeswax.

  “A novel! Atta girl.” Maxine’s small black eyes played over Amy’s face like searchlights. “You can’t make lunch money on short stories, especially the kind you write. You’re good, but your stuff makes people want to kill themselves. Compared to you, Grace Paley is Erma Bombeck, which is why she won the NBA and you didn’t have a shot. What’s it about?” More smoke up the nose. “Lose the title, by the way.”

  Amy wasn’t actually working on anything except one story that wouldn’t wake up, a story she had been trying to finish since she was eighteen, and in any event she would never discuss a work in progress with anybody, even Max. And what did Grace Paley have to do with the National Basketball Association? “Beeswax is all about a beekeeper. The last in a long line of beekeepers. He lives in—”

  “He? Scrap that. Change it. Gotta be a girl.”

  “—in Falmouth, Mass.” What a horrible woman.

  “And … what?”

  “And … his brothers sell pasteurized honey and mead.”

  “What’s the hook, babe?” Maxine was still scanning her face, this time rapidly, from eye to eye, as though Amy were a human shell game.

  “There isn’t any one single hook, per se,” said Amy, perspiring freely. She never said per se. She hated per se. “It’s episodic. Each chapter almost stands on its own. ‘The Swarm.’ ‘The Hive.’ Right now I’m working on ‘Smoker.’”

  “Fabulous,” said Maxine. She grinned widely, Tiparillo jutting from her clenched teeth like the gun on a battleship.

  “I like it,” simpered Amy, preparing to slip away into the living room, already rehearsing the scene for a replay with Max.

  “Yeah.” Maxine’s expression changed. She seemed to be really enjoying herself now. “How about ‘The Big Sting’?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “‘Queen For a Day.’”

  “I’m not sure about—”

  “You’re not working on a novel at all, are you?”

  This was the trouble with treating people like foils. You had no way of knowing whether they were doing the same thing to you.

  “No offense taken,” said Maxine. “I’m a pushy broad. It’s my job. That and making you a pile of money.”

  Amy got s
erious with Maxine. She seriously tried to explain that she was not ambitious. She didn’t have that hunger to see herself in print. Writing was a challenge for her, a lark. She wrote because she could, not because she had to, or even particularly wanted to. Maxine said that was fine. “I’ve got enough ambition for both of us.” Amy said she wasn’t a novelist. “Neither is Jackie S, and that one sells millions.” In the end she extracted Amy’s phone number and promised to call every Friday until one of them caved. “She must be phenomenal,” Max said later, laughing, while Amy banged her head against the wall.

  Within six months Amy had started Ambassador of Loss, and a year later it was in proofs.

  Whatever success Amy had as a writer was due to the infernal persistence of Maxine Grabow. Now here they were, both still alive, and Maxine still kicking. What she wanted from Amy was a mystery, but she was, Amy knew, fully capable of literally camping out on Jacaranda Drive. On Monday evening, Amy poured herself a tumbler of cabernet, threw Alphonse a chunk of brownie, and picked up the phone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gravitas

  “Babe! You look like hell, by the way,” Maxine rasped out before resuming a terrible cough. She must have been in the middle of it when her phone rang.

  As always, Amy was taken aback. “How did you know it was me? And how do you know what I look like?”

  “Caller ID.”

  “My picture pops up on your phone?” My god, what a world.