Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  Causation was intrinsic to the engines of plot; and because plot had never been her strong point, she had created narrative pull in her stories and novels through character, which worked well enough but made for slow movement. Something has to happen, her publisher would politely suggest. Readers expect it. Until now, for Amy, a glacial change in a character’s perspective, a tiny realization of some portion of the truth, had been, more often than not, the thing that happened in her fiction: the change that made the story worth telling. She had thought this was part of her diehard aesthetic, even though her favorite novelists—Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy—hardly confined themselves to tiny snags in the fabric of life. Now she began to suspect that she had just been writing what she knew, which was all interior. Until she hit her head on the birdbath and all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  Maxine called. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “The Enlightenment piece. Carmen Calliostro. My god, you didn’t read it?”

  “I’ve been busy.” Enlightenment was an online rag, more bookish than Salon, less huffy than the Huffington Post. Amy’s online reading was mostly confined to the Onion.

  “Calliostro did eight paragraphs on you. Look it up.”

  “Maxine,” said Amy, “I’m writing again.” She felt like a fool sharing this with anybody.

  “Fabulous!”

  “It’s stories, Maxine.” Amy held the receiver away from her ear. She could have heard Maxine’s obscenities from across the room. “Stories, Maxine,” she yelled back. “Live with it. At least I’m writing.”

  “How am I supposed to sell stories? Read the thing.” Maxine hung up.

  Carmen Calliostro’s thing was titled “Bionic Leg.” In keeping with the standards of modern journalism, most of it was about Carmen Calliostro. She began with a yellowed verbal snapshot of her own lithe undergraduate form (litheness could be deduced from her byline sketch) supine on a sward in Ithaca (Carmen was way too shy to come out and say Cornell), thumbing through the stories in Monstrous Women and “falling in love with words for the very first time.” Next came a whirlwind tour of her literary education, during which she confessed (actually using the verb “confess”) to throwing Amy over in favor of a succession of trendier writers. “I was embarrassed,” she said, dimpling verbally, “to have been seduced by writing so old-fashioned. It was the fiction writer’s mission, I was sure, to intuit and interpret the spirit of the times. Amy Gallup was old news: the least zeitgeisty of writers.” (Apparently Carmen’s love affair with words had ended badly.)

  “I was wrong,” she wrote, in a dramatic one-sentence paragraph.

  Holly Antoon’s story, upon which Carmen stumbled in some unexplained way (Amy guessed at a Munster connection), reawakened her interest in Amy’s fiction. After pausing to note that Antoon reminded her of her own girlish self (over the moon with the English lexicon?), Carmen finally—practically at the last minute—arrived at her ostensible subject. Like Maxine and the rest, she assumed without reflection that Amy had been in full charge of her own faculties during the interview and had invested every line of dialogue with cunning foresight. Like Antoon, she was crazy about the brilliant “going off road” metaphor, but what really knocked her out was the bionic leg. Aside from the gut-busting hilarity of the “meta-joke,” she was delighted by Amy’s “deliberate use of a lie to celebrate the über-truth of fiction.”

  What an idiot.

  Amy was still laughing when she got Maxine on the phone. “That’s two minutes out of my life that I’m not going to get back,” she said, “but it is pretty funny.”

  “You don’t get it. This is how it starts.”

  “The apocalypse?”

  “I got three emails this morning. Nothing solid yet, but a feeler from NPR. I’ve got a call in to Lex. I’ll get back to you. Just keep writing, and send me whatever you got.”

  “I thought you couldn’t sell stories.”

  “Sure I can. I don’t want to is all. And hey, maybe stories aren’t such a bad way to go right now. I got some ideas. See ya.”

  * * *

  That day she finished a second story. She now had two to offer Maxine: “Shadow” and an untitled one about a fatal bus plunge. A group of seniors, on their way to a production of Our Town at the Lamb’s Players Theater on the island of Coronado, swerves to avoid a Weber grille in the westbound right lane of the Coronado Bridge and plunges into San Diego Bay. A young reporter for the U-T begins a series of investigative pieces on the lives of the twelve passengers and driver, detailing how each one of them happened to be on that bus on that day. The series starts out poorly, every observation a cliché, but deepens as it goes and its author begins to see her subjects as complex beings, each the product of an unlikely train of events. In her last piece, titled “What It All Means,” she rises to a level of analysis and passion that frightens and excites her. It all means absolutely nothing, she writes, beyond the catastrophic loss of thirteen living souls and the grief of those who mourn them. The fatal accident was horrible and stupid. This sets off a firestorm of calls and letters from Christians, and the reporter is canned.

  Amy wasn’t crazy about the story. First, she never wrote allegories. For another thing, it wasn’t even her allegory. Surely she wasn’t the first writer to riff on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which was itself a sort of riff. Since Thornton Wilder had gotten there first, the story was hardly necessary. The third-person narrative voice was impassive, authoritative, and rather off-putting, at least to Amy. And it was less a story than a sketch for something larger, like a screenplay. She didn’t do screenplays. All in all, she feared it was a cheap shot. But it had practically written itself, which meant that her subconscious was largely responsible, and she was inclined, as always, to trust the director.

  “Shadow” might be the best story she had ever written, or the worst. It was certainly close to the bone, scary to write. After Max died, she had for twenty years refused to consider a direct fictional assault on that topic, and since all other topics paled, she had refused to consider anything else. But something had changed. Although she would never use his experience, however deeply imagined, in a story, she was ready now to use her own. His death belonged to him; her grief was hers to use or abuse. An agnostic man learns that his wife is dying. She is still recovering from surgery, unaware of the news. He stumbles into the hospital chapel and down through a series of craven prayers. As he prays he regards himself with loathing, first at his own hypocrisy, and then at his inability to ignore his self-aware natterings and focus on the task at hand, which is nothing less than the production of a miracle from the common dirt of need. If he could just focus cleanly on this task he might affect her fate. The chapel, formerly brightened by sunlight streaming through a high round stained-glass window, suddenly darkens, prompting his armor to fall away, and his need rises, shining, powerful, too powerful, piercing the walls around him, and for what seems like endless time he sees his own puny beacon engulfed by the brilliance of constellations, swallowed up in freezing clouds of gas and dust, clouds with terrible shapes, crab, rearing horse, mutant eagle. Outside the hospital, the sun emerges from a much smaller cloud, the chapel fills again with light. Next to him, an old woman fishes in her purse, hands him a tract from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Bless you,” she says. Under the picture of a naked old man suffering on his knees, the question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” He waits for her to leave and then places the tract on the seat behind him. He sees that others have come into the room, each sitting alone. In their faces and the set of their shoulders he can see they are all like him, waist-deep in a river of suffering. He has never seen this river before, but he knows it is as real and ordinary as the chapel itself. Dust dances in the sunbeams.

  Maxine was really going to hate these stories. Amy attached them both to an email and clicked Send.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hypothetical Promises

 
After some weeks, Maxine called. “KPBS-FM wants an interview.” KPBS was the San Diego public radio station.

  “About what? You mean they want an interview about an interview?”

  “What they say is they want to catch up with you, given that you’re a local writer who’s working on a new novel—”

  “Not.” Amy had an unsettling thought. “Maxine, they’ll want to get me talking about what happened last year, with the workshop and the murders.”

  “I’m way ahead of you. I already told them that it’s off-limits. I said you wouldn’t even discuss it with your oldest friend, so you’re certainly not going to spill the beans on the radio.”

  “Who’s my oldest friend?”

  Maxine snorted and hacked. “You cut me to the quick.”

  * * *

  Carmen Calliostro’s “Bionic Leg” had not exactly ignited a firestorm of Amy-centered articles, but in the first few weeks after the accident Amy counted five, four online and one in actual print, an opinion piece in The Boston Globe, mailed to her without comment by Maxine. Most who wrote about her claimed familiarity with her fiction, pleasure at her having resurfaced, bemusement about her eccentric behavior during the Antoon interview. Two of the pieces had “redux” in the title, two were called “Going Off-Road,” and the best one, from the Globe, highlighted her pronouncement that “Feelings Are Not News.” The male writer, probably Amy’s age, took the opportunity to reminisce about the days when televised evening news, confined to fifteen-minute talking head segments, was more informative than the 24/7 news of today; when local newspapers investigated local events; when poll results were not the centerpieces of news reports; when feelings were not news.

  “Ms. Gallup,” he wrote, “remembers a time when competent reporters would never dream of asking people how it felt to lose their job, witness a schoolyard shooting, or have their life savings wiped out in a Ponzi scheme. Competent reporters were too busy collecting and verifying facts. Competent reporters and their editors assumed their readers were bright enough to figure out for themselves how catastrophic events feel. They feel bad. What readers needed was information: What happened? Who was involved? Where, when, how, and why did it happen? That was all they needed from us. We haven’t given it to them for thirty years. We’ve been doing such a rotten job that now even the novelists are complaining. How do I feel about that? Lousy.”

  The “even the novelists” crack was childish, but Amy didn’t mind. Like a lot of journalists, he probably looked down on writers who made stuff up. She had worked with a few of them over the years, reporters and columnists who imagined they could write novels if they just had the time. They were professional writers, after all, so how hard could it be, when you don’t have to do any legwork? Often they demanded that she tell them “the rules.” The rules for what? Leads. Paragraphs. Objectivity. She learned that laughing gaily and telling them there are no rules just made them paranoid. The rule is, there are no rules. The rule is, if it works, it’s okay. Journalists either dropped out of class in disgust or, in a couple of cases, learned how to write fiction. Because they were professionals, they could take criticism: the best of them were hungry for it. Successful crossover journalists surprised her: before working with them, she had always assumed that the ability to imagine a good story on paper was a gift that one either had or lacked. They taught her that it could be learned. So she didn’t mind a backhanded compliment from the Boston curmudgeon.

  After receiving that Globe column, Amy got in the habit of checking online for news follow-ups, and over the next month, just as Maxine had predicted, each day or so there were new listings for her, growing at what appeared to be a modest exponential rate. As though there were a hand-packed snowball with her name on it, slowly rolling down a gentle winter slope. It wasn’t exciting exactly, but it was interesting. Newspapers in Providence, both Portlands, Seattle, Sacramento, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Indianapolis, and Pensacola all picked up the Boston column. Readers responded online, many disagreeing vehemently, as in, “You and A. Gallop are heartness snobs in the first place in the second place you don’t have any felling’s to begin with. Shame on You!!!”

  Two weeks later, the Knoxville Record ran an original op-ed by some columnist named Aunt Bette, scolding both Amy and the curmudgeon, while spelling both “heartless” and “feelings” correctly. Amy’s full name was used three times in the column. Aunt Bette had apparently tried to slog through Everything Handsome once on an overnight train to New Orleans and had found it “the kind of novel The New York Times trumpets, where you have to keep a dictionary handy just to get through each sentence, and when you come to the end of the book, you just scratch your head.” Clearly, argued Aunt Bette, feelings don’t mean much to intellectuals, but regular Americans read with their hearts as well as their heads. Amy, who read with her eyes, wondered whether this column would be picked up by other papers too.

  It was. In fact, the number of papers running Bette’s column was almost double that of the first bunch. Amy, whose literary fame had come and gone in the pre-Internet era, found herself with over fifty hits on Google News.

  So now Amy was going to Do Radio. She would have to drive into the city for an interview at the station, on the campus of San Diego State. “Couldn’t we do it over the phone? And really, what’s the point of this, Maxine?”

  “The point is to get you out there. Baby steps, remember. At the very least, you’ll reach thousands—okay, hundreds—of educated, book-buying San Diego citizens. And there’s always the possibility of the interview being picked to run nationwide.”

  For an instant Amy imagined being on NPR talking to Robert J. Lurtsema, but then remembered he was dead. Alphonse, who always sat at her feet when she talked on the phone, sighed and rested his chin on the floor. “That’s not going to happen, Maxine. I’m old. I’m yesterday’s news. I wasn’t even news yesterday.”

  “You’ve got the brains and the voice for it, plus you don’t give a damn, which will keep you from being nervous. My money’s on you. If it doesn’t work out, you haven’t lost anything.”

  Only after she had hung up did Amy realize Maxine hadn’t said anything about the bus plunge story and “Shadow.” She must really despise them. Was she playing mind games? If Maxine thought Amy was going to bring them up first, she had another think coming. Amy didn’t care whether Maxine liked them, or even if she sold them. Resuscitating Amy’s career was Maxine’s bright idea. The hell with Maxine.

  * * *

  Two mornings later she found herself in an unpopulated room at the radio station, waiting for “Brie Spangler,” whatever that was. She had been expecting high-tech gadgets, chrome boxes and booms and cables. Instead, the place was practically empty and preternaturally quiet. She didn’t even see a microphone, unless the mike was behind a delicate disk of gray netting, like a robot’s hairnet. There was a comfy chair and a set of headphones and silence of a quality she had never experienced. Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence. The best part was that she was all alone. There was an adjoining room behind glass, for the engineer or something, but no one was there either. What a wonderful room.

  Eventually a plump pink rabbity-looking young woman entered, introduced herself, and sat down next to Amy, in front of her own hairnet. She seemed flustered. “I’m Brie Spangler. Actually Britahnya Spangler,” she said, avoiding Amy’s eyes. “Isn’t that stupid? We’re on in five.”

  “Seconds?”

  “Minutes.”

  What a strange little person this was. Amy felt, in a good way, as though she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “Isn’t what stupid?”

  “My parents,” she said, and then interrupted herself. “Look, do you know how to work the headphones and mike? Should we go over what we’re going to do?”

  Amy thought about it. “Surprise me,” she said. The technology looked child-simple; she assumed the rabbit would tell her if she talked too loudly, or too softly. “What about your parents?”


  She snatched a glance at Amy and looked quickly away. “They didn’t want to call me Brittany, because it was too common, so they named me after the French province. In French.”

  “Oh! Bretagne! I misunderstood you.” Amy became aware that she made Bretagne Spangler self-conscious. Either this was her first interview ever, or she cared what Amy thought of her.

  “Everybody did, from preschool on. I’ve spelled my name out loud five million times. The studio calls me Brie.”

  “Isn’t that better?”

  She sighed. “It’s a cheese.”

  “Like Camembert,” said Amy, sympathetically.

  “Which sounds nice too, but it’s a cheese. My parents’ generation was all about how it sounds. I had a friend who had a friend whose mother named her Derriere.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “We’re on in thirty.”

  “Seconds?”

  “Uh-huh.” She spread out a loose-leaf binder and did something to both mikes.

  “Remember,” said Amy, with five seconds to spare, “don’t mention the murder.” Amy couldn’t help herself. She was having too much fun.

  “What murder? Oh, that. Don’t worry, we’ll—” Suddenly Mary Martin was singing into Amy’s ears: “If They Asked Me, I Could Write a Book.” After the first verse, and with pitch dropped half an octave, the rabbit spoke. “This is Brie Spangler on KPBS-FM. It’s time for ‘On the Shelf,’ our weekly spotlight on writers. Today we’re privileged to have in our studio…” Amy was impressed. She sounded nothing like she looked. She sounded voluptuous and intellectual at once. Amy snaked her little notepad out of her purse and jotted down “voluptual” at the same time appreciating that Brie was listing all her titles without error and quoting from her best reviews. She’d done her homework. Amy also appreciated that she apparently cared little for workshop-murder gossip and was all about the books.