“No, but your number does, and you’re the only writer I know in San Diego. And your face is all over the Net.”
“No it’s not.”
More hacking. “Your picture’s in that thing that girl wrote. Holly Antoon. Is she for real? How old is she? Twelve?”
“Everybody’s twelve, Maxine. My ER doctor is twelve.”
“Tell me about it. My husband was ten, in dog years. Hah! What ER doctor?”
“When did you get married?” Maxine had retained her talent for zeroing in immediately on out-of-bounds topics.
“After your time. Lasted five minutes. What ER doctor?”
Amy rubbed her eyes. “Maxine, what’s up?”
Maxine laughed so hard that Amy had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Thought you’d never ask. Here’s the deal: you’re gonna get buzz.”
Amy said nothing.
“I’m saying buzz. Internet buzz. Industry buzz. You’re gonna get hot.”
“Hot buzz,” said Amy. Maxine had used different nonsense terms, back in the day. But if “hot buzz” meant what Amy thought it meant, Maxine’s sentiment was brand-new. She had never set Amy up as a potential generator of bestsellers. “Piles of money” had translated to “enough money to live on frugally for a year,” which had actually been nice. Megabucks, Amy now remembered, was the term Maxine reserved for money writers. “You talking megabucks?”
“Hah! Now she wants money.” More coughing. “Listen, babe, who knows. Maybe. The point is, you’re going to be hot, but for five minutes, tops.”
“And then I’ll be cold forever. Which was my cunning plan all along.”
Now there was silence; no coughing, no laughing. Maxine sighed. “Why am I not surprised.”
The tone in her voice was one Amy now remembered well: a special mixture of disgust and regret. The last time Amy had seen her, they had met in Boston, where Max, recently diagnosed with AIDS, was undergoing a battery of experimental procedures at Mass General. Maxine had joined her in a nearby cafe. By this time, Amy hadn’t written a thing since A Fiercer Hell, published six years before. Maxine had been nagging her for months, but this time Amy expected a reprieve—that they would sip their cappuccinos and catch up on non-literary news, and Maxine would commiserate. Instead they had a huge blowup, during which Maxine accused Amy of using her husband’s terminal illness as an excuse to stop writing, and Amy, instead of calling Maxine a name (she had never used the word “bitch” in her life, even in fiction), had iced up and claimed that yes, she had arranged for the terminal illness itself with that express purpose in mind, and in the end, Maxine had said, “Call me when you give a shit,” and stuck Amy with the check.
“You owe me ten bucks,” said Amy, offering an olive branch.
“What for?”
“Boston. The last time I saw you was the first and last time I ever ordered a cappuccino. This was before Starbucks, remember? I couldn’t believe they charged four dollars for a cup of coffee.”
“I was out of line,” said Maxine. “But I was right.”
“I knew that. You didn’t say anything Max hadn’t already told me, more than once. That’s why I got so pissed off.”
“That was you, pissed off?” Maxine hacked robustly. “You could have fooled me.”
“Why do I have hot buzz, and how can I get rid of it?”
“Remember Lex Munster?”
Amy cracked up.
“I know, sounds like the Addams Family. Maybe after your time. Lex is a senior editor at Perkins, total shlump but real knack for picking winners. I think he has Asperger’s. Anyway, he called me Sunday—he reads everything every day, and he has this incredible electronic Rolodex deal with the name of every writer, living or dead, who ever had an agent, living or dead, cross-referenced, of course.”
“I guess we both qualify,” said Amy.
“Hah! So he calls me and reads the whole damn newspaper article over the phone. I’m on the floor laughing. That weird thing with Trotsky, and the bit about Hetty Mant, there’s a blast from the past, and you’re sitting there like Buddha, and the girl has no clue, absolutely no clue. You played her like a goddamn violin. It’s priceless, babe.”
“Maxine, I didn’t play anything, I—”
“Here’s the thing. What got Lex so worked up was the stuff about experience being overrated, and all that, which frankly went right by me. You had me at bionic leg.”
Despite herself Amy was enjoying this. It was pleasant to have somebody, even somebody named Lex Munster, pay attention to her. Lex was right: the stuff about experience and feelings not being news was pretty good. Too bad she couldn’t remember saying it.
“Lex told me that the ARB is planning a where-are-they-now issue.”
The ARB was the American Review of Books. It didn’t have the cachet, such as it was, of the NYRB, but even Amy, who never looked at either rag, was aware of its existence and its growing popularity. The ARB was NYRB-meets-USA Today, another one of the many publications Amy never looked at on purpose. “Maxine, I’m way ahead of you. They’re going to do a thing on great washed-up writers, and you guys thought of me.”
“You got it, babe.”
“But there’s washed up and then there’s full fathom five. I was never big enough to be washed up. I’m a little tugboat, sunk a quarter mile out and never even missed. Countless generations of tautog have spawned on my foredeck—”
“Poor you,” said Maxine.
“—scup wander through my portholes, and blue crabs play pinochle on my bow.”
“Save the bullshit for Lex. Here’s the deal: Jenny Marzen is one of his authors, and she’s one of the twenty writers who get to pick their favorite forgotten genius.”
“Jenny Marzen is who again?” Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn’t know it. “And Jenny is my number one fan?”
“No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school.”
“What is she, twelve?”
“The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you’ve got gravitas.”
“That’s a dirty lie. I never even had mono.”
“Hah!”
Amy was beginning to feel a prickle of interest, even excitement, and it made her a little sick.
“I’m telling you, it’s a done deal. Lex just asked me to touch base with you.”
“Why?”
“He thinks we’re still in touch, by the way. Which is now true. He also thinks you’re working on a new book.”
“Which is false! Maxine—”
“I lied. It’s my job. The point is, when I know more, I’ll call you. Look, babe. I know you. I know you’re ‘above all this shit.’”
“Wrong. I’m below all this shit. I’m full fathom five. This is totally ridiculous.”
“And I knew you’d say that, but you’re just going to have to go along with the gag. Trust me. You’re gonna get hot. Warm, anyway. It’s gonna happen.”
“Warm buzz,” said Amy mournfully, but at the same time she saw it, the outline of that washed-up list, her own name in new print, her old titles mentioned in a magazine that people actually read. “Okay,” she said. “Am I supposed to do something?”
“‘Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,’” sang Maxine. “I’ll be in touch. Hold it.” She coughed for a full ten seconds. Amy wondered if she were dying and to her surprise hoped not. She liked Maxine a lot better now than she had when she was young and they had seemed a generation apart. Now it was just a few negligible years. “What ER doctor, babe? Are you all right?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Emphysema, but I’ve had it for ages. What were you doing in the ER?”
Amy opened her mouth to spill it all, the birdbath, the bag lady, Kurt Robetussien, MD, and the Amazing Fugue State Interview. “Twisted my ankle,” she said.
“Talk to yo
u soon, babe,” said Maxine. “Stay off the foot.”
* * *
Amy sat for a long time with the phone in her lap, trying to get a fix on what she’d just done. Why hadn’t she told Maxine about the birdbath? She and Maxine could have shared a prolonged cackle over the absurd accident and its absurder consequences, and for sure it would have remained their little secret. Except the accident was none of anyone’s beeswax. Amy didn’t share secrets, not with anyone, not anymore.
Alphonse clicked into her bedroom and barked for his constitutional. Amy sang softly to him: “I’m a little tugboat, short and stout.” He regarded her with disapproval, as well he might. “I know it’s teapot,” she told him, letting him out into the yard. “It’s called poetic license.” Alphonse trotted off into the dark. He knows me, she thought, better than I know myself.
CHAPTER TEN
Birdbath II
Tuesdays were Amy’s day off from the online work that paid the bills, a fiction writing workshop open to anyone willing to cough up two hundred dollars a month. Until a year ago, her teaching had been actual rather than virtual, but after her last workshop turned into a real-life murder mystery and she made herself unemployable with the local university extension, she figured it was time to teach on her own terms and at her own pace, and from the comfort of her own home. Her online work started off small but by last June was steady enough so that she could quit her regular editing job, sit back, and watch the nickels roll in. This Tuesday, three days after the fall, she woke late with a plan to spend the day responsibly, reading through student work at leisure rather than putting it off until her back was to the wall, and perhaps getting started on a book review she’d been putting off for weeks. Instead she wasted half the day mousing around the Internet, looking up Maxine and Jenny Marzen and Lex Munster, and finding evidence of the upcoming ARB article, which was scant but there.
Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna’s Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen’s impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes. Also the girl’s psychotic break was contrived, mechanically predicated on a combination of overwork and crippling guilt over the betrayal of her mentor, of whose intellectual prowess she stands in awe.
People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior and attitude of academics, who were on the whole no more brilliant, quirky, or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses—especially the older ones—functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn’t last a week in GenPop.
* * *
Jenny Marzen, like all living writers in the twenty-first century, had a web page, and it was nothing like Amy’s. For one thing, Marzen surely didn’t maintain her own page—she must have minions for that—and for another, the page was devoted to selling books, promoting tours, and sucking up to fans. The home page was a riot of tasteful color (Amy paused to jot down in her notebook the potential short story title “A Riot of Tasteful Color”), featuring a glamorous head shot of Marzen, who looked just like George Eliot, if George Eliot had colored and styled her hair like Bernadette Peters, stood facing a huge wall of yellow tulips, and glanced back sharply over her bare left shoulder. Surrounding the head shot was a collage of book jackets, most of which focused tightly on one section of a young female body—an eye, a hand, a furrowed brow, a buttock. There were pages devoted to the incontinent praise of critics and fans, to her three bull mastiffs, to her family and family tree. There were interview transcripts, videos, and full-length reviews from the Times.
Amy misspent a half hour clicking back and forth between Marzen’s site and her own, which focused almost totally on words. She had included a list of her own out-of-prints but then deliberately placed it on a page that was almost impossible to find: one had to navigate through six increasingly grumpy and intrusive links: (1) What are you looking for? (2) Why? This contained fifty choices, including “I’m bored” and “Sick of porn,” and so on, only one of which—“I’m looking for a list of your stupid books”—actually functioned as a link to (3) Tell me about yourself, again with a ridiculous list of possibilities, some of which occupied multiple paragraphs (Amy really got into these). Eventually, the exhausted explorer arrived at the puny grail:
Monstrous Women, 1971, paper 1980
Everything Handsome, 1975, paper 1980
The Ambassador of Loss, 1978, paper 1980
A Fiercer Hell, 1981
With her reluctant permission, her old student Ricky Buzza had recently tried to brighten the page with scanned-in images of Amy’s old book jackets. She had retained only one copy apiece of the first two books, and the jackets were ripped and stained with whiskey rings. Everything Handsome looked particularly ugly, the title bisected at a slant by a creased brown strip of Scotch tape which appeared to cross out the whole book as a lousy idea. Now Amy clicked from this page to Marzen’s, trying to enjoy the contrast between crass self-promotion and ironic humility, but, as Ricky had tried more than once to persuade her, her own page was really just pathetic.
And now the thought of Ricky Buzza set off an alarm. There was something about later today, something she was supposed to do. Amy ripped last year’s ZooNews calendar off her kitchen wall to reveal the new one, with a single penciled-in event for today, January 4, that damn potluck thing at Carla’s, with Ricky and Surtees and the other remnants of the Last Workshop Gang. Her handwriting, never a thing of beauty, was now officially a liability. Apparently it was happening in either two or five hours, and she had promised to bring “Wandolf Hillel.” She squinted at the scribbled line, blurring it slightly, until she was able to imagine that it said “Waldorf salad,” which at least made sense. She had only a few hours to secure a red cabbage, walnuts, mayonnaise, and a bag of apples, transform them into the promised dish, feed Alphonse, and leave for Carla’s house in La Jolla. She couldn’t remember why she had agreed to go—only that Carla had promised it wouldn’t turn into a birthday party. Reluctantly she put her computer into hibernation and prepared to venture abroad.
* * *
Amy had put off driving until she was in her late thirties and realized that soon Max would need her to take him to hospitals and doctors’ offices. Until called to duty, she had been too frightened to drive. She had gotten her driver’s license at seventeen, but only by learning to do a K-turn on Pushard Lane and parallel park on Rattlesnake Hill. Everybody in Augusta knew what tricks were required and where they would be performed, and everybody studied to the test, but Amy was probably one of the few who got a parent to drive her back home afterward. What frightened her was the responsibility, the fact that a moment’s inattention could ruin more lives than just her own. That coupled with the inattention itself, which would settle over her whenever she got behind the wheel. Cars were gigantic then. She could never guess at their outer dimensions, even on the driver’s side, and was always running up on curbs. Power steering, in its infancy, was outlandishly touchy, as were the power brakes, and sitting in the driver’s seat Amy always felt like a figurehead, disconnected to the huge machine. That she was vital to its behavior must be true, but it gave her so little to do—turn the steering wheel more than a couple of
inches and risk a hairpin turn, breathe too forcefully on the brakes and slam into the dash—that she grew bored and let her mind wander and drove up on grass median strips or almost ran tractor trailer trucks off the road—trucks that she hadn’t even noticed, because they were in back of her. Until Max got sick, she enjoyed the passenger life. He always said she was the world’s best passenger, because she never second-guessed the driver.
After the diagnosis, Amy manned up. Max’s friend Carlos taught her how to drive a stick, and she took to it instantly. Cars had changed a lot in twenty-five years: they were smaller and more responsive, and shifting gears gave her something to do, a bridge to the physical world. To her amazement, she loved driving now. She loved being of use most of all, but she also loved her solitary drives. When Max was tucked in, she would drive out along the river and sometimes out into the Maine woods, exploring dirt roads, never worrying about getting stuck or lost, feeling oddly invincible. Sometimes she would put on a Chopin mazurka cassette, or a Bach, or if she were feeling particularly sad, she’d listen to Beethoven’s late quartets and sob for miles and miles, and then feel so much better. Sometimes she rocked out, unembarrassed by her awful taste, cranking up the volume until she could think of nothing at all. One time she got so excited by an AC/DC tape that she wound up in a ditch. Amy had never been a teenager: driving let her turn back the clock, for an hour or two.
But now, at sixty-two, Amy didn’t feel invincible anywhere, particularly in a car, whether she was behind the wheel or not. Southern California drivers and roads were better than those in New England, but under these fabled freeways there was a constant apocalyptic vibe. She was always aware of what her old driver ed teacher had called “the big picture,” and the picture in California was huge: lately, especially, whenever she merged onto the I-15 she felt like a microscopic cell in the bloodstream of an enormous predatory beast. She had never felt that way on the I-95, which was more of a pinball machine than a purposive assemblage of veins and arteries. Driving here was a grim task, not a white-knuckle game.
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