Or maybe Amy wasn’t as canny about reading people as she had always believed. She would never have predicted that Ricky, whatever his creative yearnings, would have wanted to take Carla up on her offer. And why did Surtees want it? He was scarcely hurting for money and status. Tiffany Zuniga had been spinning her wheels for two years: if she had anything to say, she didn’t seem eager to find out what it was. Did they all really want to keep writing? Why? Amy wasn’t perplexed because of their lack of talent. Bookshelves worldwide groaned under the weight of badly written books. She was humbled by their determination, their longing. If she had a fraction of their need to express themselves in print, she would have filled at least one of those shelves by now.
Amy was halfway home before she recognized two things that had not come up at Carla’s gathering: her own birthday, and last weekend’s article in the U-T, which, according to Maxine Grabow, signaled she was “hot.” She was grateful to have been wrong about the birthday but disappointed to realize that apparently not one of the five people present, most of whom probably took the local paper, had read the Sunday article. Or if they had, they remained silent on the subject. Lex Munster had been talking through his hat. There might be buzz in his little corner of the world, but there was no buzz in Muddville. By the time she got home, Amy had failed to convince herself that this was for the best.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Waking Up
That night she woke in the middle of an old fantasy, a book reading, where she stood at a podium in some huge important place, like the New York Public Library, or maybe the Library of Congress, and the audience too was huge and enthralled, their muffled coughs and shuffles echoing grandly. She was mid-sentence, always the same sentence from her last story, the one she had never sold. “In the whole world there wasn’t enough of anything to fill her up,” she read, and the crowd went wild. Amy, coming fully awake to the echo of this asinine oration, had blushed in the dark. “Despair,” Max would say, “is a walk in the park. It’s hope that kills you.”
In the morning, Amy arose as usual and, still in her bathrobe, attended to her online work. But throughout those hours she found herself distracted, pausing every so often to open up another browser window and Google names—her own, of course, along with Lex Munster, and the ARB’s upcoming issue on lost writers, and even Holly Antoon. She was scouring the ether for even the slightest uptick of interest in her own existence and works. This was degrading. In the past, she had Googled herself from time to time, but always in search of negative reinforcement: R-neg. Just as the tip of one’s tongue luxuriates in the crater left behind by an extracted tooth, so she had soothed herself with stark, visual reminders of her own obsolescence. This had been a time-waster, but she had never felt pathetic doing it, not like now. Now she was hungry for attention. Maxine had infected her with hope.
* * *
Managing lowered expectations is easy. You can move seamlessly from a happy life to a less happy one to one that is plainly unhappy: your colors, never exactly vibrant, can fade to shades of gray, your horizons contract until all that remain are enclosing walls, and it’s all good. “But what if you wake up one day and you’re old and your life is almost over, and you realize all the things you could have had?” This from a therapist, Dr. Kappers, whom Amy had actually consulted once. Not after Max’s death, but when she came to her senses, marooned in California, married to “Bob,” a man she neither knew nor liked, a man so tangential that she actually ensconced him in quotation marks, even when—especially when—they were having sex. “Oh, ‘Bob,’” she would say, and he would mistake her silent chuckling for passionate throes. She had been drinking too much just to get through the nights, and she lacked the constitution of a drunk. She disliked vomiting almost as much as she disliked “Bob.” What she needed was a divorce. Before handing “Bob” his hat, she consulted Kappers, in the same spirit with which you’d consult a mechanic. She respected mechanics.
Amy didn’t offend easily—she was offended mostly by people who went around taking offense—still, Kappers did manage to annoy her, deeply. He refused to stay on task. “You’re clinically depressed,” he kept telling her. If Kappers had been a real doctor and a patient with migraines had hopped into his office on her one remaining leg, he’d have spent the fifty minutes trying to convince her that she was an amputee. “The love of your life was gay. After he died you married a man you despise. You’re drinking heavily. You haven’t written a word in ten years. And you come here wondering if you should get a divorce?” Kappers leaned toward her, his face flushed. He was furious with her. Amy wondered whether this was some new therapeutic technique, a California thing, like rolfing. Throttling. Her smile cooled him off. Up until this point, Amy had rather liked the man, who was way too thin-skinned for his line of work. She was about to compliment him on his directness when he wrote out a prescription for Prozac and handed it to her with a canned lecture about side effects, which she cut short by crumpling the paper and dropping it, just like a lollipop, into his wastebasket. “Never mind the divorce,” he called after her. “You should get a life! You should be happy!”
A few days later, Kappers actually wrote her a letter of apology. He had behaved unprofessionally, and so on. (Apparently she had really pushed his buttons.) He sincerely hoped she would connect with a more compatible therapist. He included a list of possibles. What was wrong with this man? He was clearly no happier than she, yet the constant, grim pursuit of happiness was mandatory, according to him and all his happy-slappy California pals. Happiness, Amy knew, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. All she wanted was solitude. Divorcing “Bob” turned out to be quite easy, especially since they were both broke and there was nothing to fight over.
But now, mooning around the Internet like a lovesick swain, noting—and actually taking heart from—a modest rise in Google hits for “Amy Gallup,” Amy was acutely aware of her unhappiness. Perhaps for Emily Dickinson hope really was the thing with feathers that perches on the soul, but for Amy it was the thing with batteries, going off at three in the morning like an invisible alarm clock, and she had no option but to wait for it to wind down. She trolled the web, wondering what she was looking for. Gush from a decrepit blogger who actually remembered reading her books? Mention in some authoritative list of twentieth-century writers? Fat chance. She knew, because she had actually checked more than once, that she wasn’t even in Wikipedia. Jenny Marzen was there, of course, peeking out from behind a tree like a ringlet-haired dryad. She had a two-inch bibliography and a list of awards and external links almost as long. She was married to some fabulous architect and had four daughters, all of whom she no doubt plundered in her fiction, and they all lived on some Montana ranch that had once belonged to Helen Twelvetrees. She had written her first story “at the age of six.” Well, who the hell hadn’t?
What other third-rate literary posers, Amy wondered, got the Wiki treatment these days? Frankly hoping for a bracing shot of R-neg, Amy plugged her own name into the Wikipedia search box, and there, impossibly, she was, in a brand-new page. There was no picture, but all the autobiographical details were accurate, ditto her list of ancient publications, her present city of address, and the fact that she was “hard at work on a new novel.” This had to be Maxine’s doing. At the heart of this modest entry was a sizeable chunk of that old review from the London Times. The one that called her, not a writer to watch, or a promising new voice, or wickedly funny (“wicked,” “savage,” and “ferocious” being the most overused adjectives in the modern reviewer’s modest arsenal), but one of the rare post-sixties writers likely to outshine, and therefore outlive, her own generation. Amy had not looked at this review in a quarter century. She had read it only once, a Xeroxed copy forwarded by her publisher, and it had scared her to death.
None of the other reviewers had talked this way. She had been perfectly happy to be a gimlet-eyed, toxic-witted observer, or better a talented writer whose relentlessly negative outlook undercuts the pleasures of her p
rose. Reviews, once she had gotten used to them, had never bothered her. She tended to shrug off hyperbolic praise and take more seriously those reviewers who plainly hadn’t liked her stuff. But when she read the Times review, she couldn’t shrug it off. Far from being a credulous idiot, this critic was an older novelist whose work she quite admired. What had gotten into him? She accused Max of having rigged it somehow—Max knew people who knew people—setting off a rare argument. “If you’re dead set on failure,” he had shouted, “you’re just going to have to work harder at it.” And leave me out of it, he had added. As if he hadn’t been every bit as unambitious as she. As if a desire to coast through life had not been one of the many things they had in common.
The reviewer had said not that she was great, only that she could be, thus burdening her with responsibility for which she had no appetite. She had torn up the review upon the first reading and successfully avoided it until now. Did Maxine Grabow actually know her well enough to do this to her on purpose? The woman was brilliant.
* * *
It was time, Amy decided, for real R-neg, so she brought out the big gun: her black-and-white-speckled notebook, christened in 1968, the only notebook she had ever kept. Most writers keep, or claim to, voluminous notebooks, at which they pause at daily intervals to jot down precious thoughts, observations, overheard dialogue. Amy could never see the sense of that, or indeed of jotting itself. If something was worth writing down, it was worth writing down in full. And she had a horror of lists—grocery lists, Christmas card lists, and most grisly of all, to-do lists. Lists, like appointment books, were nails driven into the future. She knew this was an odd objection to be raised by a person whose daily life was utterly predictable, who never threw caution, or anything else, to the winds, who never packed light, because she never packed at all. Still, the future was a sleeping monster, not to be poked.
So in the first half of that notebook were mere fragments, an anti-list, the beginnings or middles of ideas for stories and novels, written in penmanship so poor they were practically illegible, baffling whether you’d dashed them off an hour earlier or forty years ago. She opened it at random, studying a line that asked “what if nobody came” and answered “winner—Morton—clams,” or perhaps “winter—mortar—damp.” This may or may not have been the germ for “Husbandry,” her first successful story, which did contain a throwaway line about littlenecks, but really there was no way to tell.
In the days when she was actually writing, the mere act of scribbling a line of gibberish in the dark—she had always gotten these fragmentary ideas at night—was all she needed. The fragments list was just a way of clocking in. She had not written in the first half of the notebook for twenty-five years.
There were lists in the second half, also non-threatening. Names of characters and titles of stories. The name list was quite long and mostly pointless doodling. Victorine Gould. Blenda LaCroix. Plethora Harpootlian. Ebony Hornbuckle. Tarquin Fogg. Brooklyn Muckle. Bartholomew Osteen. They were cartoonish, each name deliberately chosen to forestall any imaginative use. She added to this list quite often, because it was so safe.
The list of story titles was, as they say in the creativity biz, a Work in Progress. Toward its beginning were titles she had actually used: “Battle Fatigue.” “The Turnstile.” “N.O. Means No.” Her method, in her writing days, was to take them down when they came to her—always in the daytime—and surf them later for inspiration. These titles, like the names and the midnight hieroglyphs, were cryptic messages from her subconscious. Of the three, she tended to trust the titles. Night dreams and the messages from them did not impress her that much.
If we all go to the same place when we dream—and Amy thought this was probably true—then we’re likely to come back from this place laden with kitsch and ordinary bits and shards, like beachcombing children who spread out their shells and pebbles, lately so glistening in the sand, only to find them drably colored and in all other ways unremarkable. Daydreams, on the other hand, do not take us to common ground. Amy had learned that while her conscious mind found a phrase amusing enough to put down on paper, her subconscious might have its own furtive agenda. She might think she was memorializing something because it was funny, but she could be wrong about that. Perhaps it meant something deep. Perhaps it was key. Amy, straitjacketed since birth with a cautious, analytical, R-neg mind, secretly loved to be wrong.
Now she surfed her latest title entries.
“Malignant Twinkle”
“You’re That Lady”
“Shadow”
“Right Now”
“You’re Funny”
“A Riot of Tasteful Color”
“Birdbaths”
“A Rigorous Admissions Process”
“Blushing in the Dark”
And there it was.
She had written it down when badly frightened, desperate to distract herself with rage. Even if she hadn’t remembered writing it, the shiny pencil grooves would have given it away, summoned up antiseptic scent, ugly light, blue curtains, the soft moans and harsh laughter of strangers, on the day they found out he was dying. Summoned up in turn a deeper memory, that demented old woman down the hall from Max’s last room, shrieking for her mama while they tried to cut her fingernails. The suffering place. Fear so sharp and clean it was beautiful. What if you wake up one day and you’re old and your life is almost over, and you realize all you could have had?
Amy sat back down at her computer, opened up a fresh Word file, named it “Shadow,” and began to write.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Walkies
Over the next three weeks, Amy wrote at what was for her a white heat, finishing one story and immediately beginning another. She had never before focused so deeply. Even in her youth, a good writing day produced at most a page and a half. When not working or writing, she walked Alphonse, or tried to, up and down the mild gradients of nearby streets. Dickens got his inspiration from nocturnal walks down the smoky byways of Manchester; Amy tried walking at midnight, risking the alarm of all the fenced dogs in the neighborhood, as well as Alphonse, who just wanted to go to sleep. Alphonse hated walkies. Amy had once loved to walk, before her muscles began to atrophy and her joints to sing and not in a pleasant way. But the exercise cleared her head, fed it in some mysterious way, so that when they got back home, she would sit at the computer for another hour or two, mostly thinking.
Amy’s nocturnal strolls ended the night they encountered a pack of coyotes. Single coyotes weren’t unusual in the neighborhood—they sometimes strolled through Amy’s front yard at high noon—but on this occasion, she and Alphonse rounded a corner and came upon five of them standing close together, their ears straight up, their eyes bright with hunger. They spread out slowly in a semicircle around her, not blocking an exit, which seemed odd until she remembered that running away was supposed to be the worst thing you could do under the circumstances. They wanted her and her morsel to run away. Fat chance of that, thought Amy; neither of them had run anywhere for years. Alphonse stood close beside her and growled low, bristling. Amy wasn’t afraid for herself: clearly they were focused on Alphonse, who probably looked like a family banquet and was no threat to them except in his own mind. Amy straddled the basset, raised her hands high and began to wave broadly, stiff-armed, making herself as large as possible, which, she had read, was the thing to do when confronted by carnivorous mammals. Two of the coyotes actually sat down to watch, as though she and Alphonse were doing dinner and a show. She tried slowly backing away but couldn’t get Alphonse to budge. Of all the times to be stalwart. She would have to make some noise.
Not for the first time, Amy felt the real pull between survival and social embarrassment. Almost as desperate to avoid waking her neighbors as she was not to be savaged, she whispered, as loud as she could, “Buzz off!! Get lost!!” Their ears twitched with interest, just like a dog’s, but they didn’t buzz off. Instead, they moved closer, lazily, as though they had all the time in the worl
d. They moved like pool hall toughs in the old movies, ambling toward their target. It was time to break somebody’s thumbs. She waved and whispered again, this time putting some throat into it, but not enough to stop them. She was going to have to shout.
At just this moment, all the neighborhood dogs, who shared keen hearing with the coyotes if not keen pack instincts, went crazy. The ones who were outdoors awoke and threw themselves against their fences; inside sleeping houses, little yipping dogs scrabbled at windows. One of the coyotes, the smallest, mangiest one, joined them, howling to its cousins, and the barks turned to howls in response, building a magnificent chorus. Alphonse threw back his head and bellowed, his basset howl low and gravelly. Aroooo. The coyote pack did not exactly abandon the hunt but paused in their tracks as if to boost the treble, perhaps in response to Alphonse’s bass notes. The animals were singing. The chorus was improvised but polyphonic, true music, and in that music Amy could hear joy and longing in equal parts. For a moment all thought was banished. This was nirvana for Amy. Then she heard footsteps behind her, and Carl Ward from across the street, a nice guy who managed the local Arby’s and hunted elk every winter, was at her side with a loaded rifle which he fired once into the air, and the coyotes melted into the darkness at the top of the hill. “Beautiful,” he said. She knew he meant the song.
Amy was too good a neighbor to ever repeat the midnight stroll, but this one time was enough to start her on something new. Now she had three stories going at once. She felt like a conduit. Not that characters and plots were pouring out of her—this had never happened and never would—but she had moments now, almost daily, of hyperawareness, as though she could see the web of delicate causal filaments all around her, radiating out into the neighboring streets and farther into the world. You turn a corner and beasts break into arias, gunfire erupts, waking a hundred families, starting a hundred different conversations. You crack your head open and three thousand miles away a stranger with Asperger’s jump-starts your career.
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