“Wait!”
Amy hung up. For the next few minutes she tried to shrug the whole thing off, and then laugh it away, but the laughter was hollow and the shrug plain embarrassing. No one was watching. She dragged Alphonse out of a deep sleep and out into the street, force-marching him uphill while she talked to herself. They passed the coyote spot and kept going, all the way to the big rock at the summit of the cul-de-sac. There she came to the gross realization that her feelings were hurt.
How could she have spent so much time and energy on these people and have them come away knowing so little about her and what she valued, exercising such awful judgment, willing to do business with characters like Leaming and Hamm? Carla and Harry were, she hated to admit, her friends, and they didn’t know her at all. This was what hurt: not the hiring of her old rival or the idea of paying a charlatan to milk the suckers, but the fact that they hadn’t realized how offended she would be. Nothing she had taught them had stuck. She had imagined herself real in their minds—not deeply understood, as only Max had understood her, but still distinguishable from other people, unique, not quite a cipher—and all the while she had had only two dimensions. Just a name and a shape and a cluster of attributes. She was the writing teacher, the eccentric with the dog, the Sniper’s nemesis. She was a flat character, and while she had never aspired to more from the world at large, she had apparently expected more from her friends. How humiliating. How childish.
By the time Alphonse dragged her back indoors, she had formulated a plan of action. There were six messages on her answering machine, all of which she erased unheard. Obviously they were craven apologies. She had hung up on them, and even Carla and Harry could not have mistaken her anger for anything else. She called them back. Carla picked up on the first ring.
“Amy, I’m so sorry! I never meant—”
“Here’s the deal,” said Amy. “Hire whoever you want to work with the twenty new people, the people lined up around the block, assuming there really are twenty new people lined up around the block, assuming there really is a block, but go ahead and give them Marva Leaming, Coach Hamm, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, whoever the hell you want, I really don’t care, but the rule is, they are to have no contact whatsoever with the six retreat people: Ricky, Surtees, Tiffany, Robetussien, Brie, and that Skinny Bitch person, although I’d love to throw her to the Lemmings, and if you can figure out a way to do that, go ahead. I’ll come down once a month and do a workshop with those six alone. The rest of the time, we’ll work together online. I want half of whatever money you take in. If the Lemmings get their mitts on even one of my people, the deal’s off, and I’m gone, with half the money anyway. Take it or leave it.”
“And your name on the brochure,” said Harry.
“Absolutely not. I won’t have my name on the same piece of paper with those clowns.” Amy was beginning to breathe normally. Briefly she wished Maxine could hear her. She’d be so impressed. Half the money! Amy had never demanded money in her life.
“How about two brochures,” said clever Harry. “One for the retreat; one for the ongoing workshop/seminar/motivational thing. Your name will be on the retreat brochure, right under the title.”
“Which is what?”
“We’re thinking of ‘Something Colony,’” said Carla. “Amy, I’m really, really sorry.”
“Like a penal colony?” asked Amy. “Devil’s Island?”
“So far,” said Harry B, “all we have is Birdhouse Writers’ Colony.”
“Too wordy.”
“That’s what I said,” said Carla.
“Exactly,” said Harry. “We need one word, like Breadloaf.”
“How about Meatloaf?”
“She’s still pissed off,” said Carla.
“Cheese Log.”
Harry laughed.
“I’m all right, Carla,” Amy said. She had indeed calmed down, partly because she felt “empowered,” an icky word but useful on the fly, and partly because she was distracted by wordplay. “How about Croatoan?”
“That sounds familiar,” said Harry.
“It’s a mystery word carved into a tree in Virginia in 1590. An entire English colony went missing and left only the word behind.”
“So we’d just call it Croatoan?”
“Yes. With the subtitle ‘The Missing Writers’ Colony.’”
“I like it,” said Harry.
“So do I,” said Carla, “although won’t some people think it’s just a joke?”
Amy said nothing.
“Oh, I get it!” said Carla. “Amy, you’re so funny.”
“Bye,” said Amy.
“I’ll send you the paperwork,” said Harry B.
* * *
Later that day, Amy wrote down “Croatoan” and “You Don’t Know Me” in her notebook, briefly touched base with Maxine, who said something new might be in the works with NPR, and fed herself and her dog, all the while thinking about Harry B and how competent and efficient the man was. As soon as she read him the riot act about what she was willing to do and the terms under which she would do it, he came up with the idea of two brochures, neatly separating her from the other two people on their payroll. Later still, she recalled that before she had slammed down the phone on the two of them, Harry had mentioned a proposition, one he was sure she’d like. She’d forgotten all about it. What had it been? she wondered. And why hadn’t he countered with it, when she presented her list of terms?
She looked over at Alphonse, who was busy cleaning his front paws. She loved to watch him do this, how his long tongue would curl delicately around and in between each toe, over and over. Sometimes he did this at night in the dark, waking up to do his ablutions, as though prompted by conscience, the licking sounds soft and comforting to hear. He must have had a great mother. “You’re a good dog,” she told him. He rewarded her, as usual, with a mordant gaze; his version of “I know.” “Hey, there’s another dead horse in the bathtub,” she told him fondly, and simultaneously realized the truth: that Harry, and possibly even Carla, had herded her into that list of demands. No, not Carla, she wasn’t that clever, but Harry was a trained mediator. No wonder he was ready with the “two brochures” solution. Harry’s proposition was the very thing she came up with herself. Maybe not all of it—maybe he hadn’t planned on giving her half the money. Maybe he’d planned on giving her more! “Sonofabitch,” Amy said. Alphonse raised one eyebrow and turned back to his paws.
Harry had known she would never work with Marva Leaming or a writing coach. He had let Carla worry about that possibility, thus adding to the verisimilitude of the whole telephone conversation, which, she could see now, had amounted to a kind of stealth negotiation. Still, the more she thought about it, the less outraged she became. He had also known something else about Amy: that she cared about the students she already had. That she would never abandon them to the ministrations of these people. Harry knew her, a little bit. So, in her own juvenile way, did Carla. Amy hadn’t been wrong about them after all.
She lay awake for a time thinking about that, and how, after Max died, she had neither wanted nor needed to be known by anyone. He had known her as well, Amy guessed, as it was possible to know anybody; he often said that she was the only person in the world who knew him, and she had no reason to doubt him. He was fond of his lovers, some of them, but that was all. She couldn’t remember the names of hers. Sex was best between strangers. Love was possible only through knowledge. Or perhaps knowledge only through love. In the beginning, it was I know what you’re up to. I know what you did. I know you like that guy. And then I know you feel like hell. I know you can do better than that. I know your childhood stories, your most embarrassing moment, what frightens you more than anything. I know what makes you laugh. Their friends banned them from charades. She’d get up there and signal “book title” and “three words” and he’d say “Appointment at Appomattox.” “I know you,” he said at the end. “I know you so much.”
What did it mean that now, after all t
hese years, she wanted to be known again?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Wheel of Tide
Amy had been working so hard on new fiction that she’d paid less attention than usual to her blog, GO AWAY. She had kept it for years without making regular entries in it: months might go by before she thought of a new posting idea, or a new list to include, to supplement the original lists. The lists were never intended to be anything but amusing. The list of lists included:
FUNNY LOOKING WORDS (like “disembosom”)
FUNNY SOUNDING WORDS (like “phlebotomy”)
HYBRID TITLES (“Arms and the Man Who Came to Dinner”)
ODD HEADLINES (“Man Eating Catfish Displayed in Memphis Aquarium”)
MOST INTRIGUING OPENING PARAGRAPHS OF REAL NEWS STORIES INVOLVING PEOPLE SMUGGLING THINGS IN THEIR PANTS
WORDS THAT ARE THEORETICALLY INDEPENDENT BUT ACTUALLY ONLY EVER USED WITH ONE SPECIFIC OTHER WORD (“trove”)
ADJECTIVES THAT ONLY EVER MODIFY ONE THING (“tumescent”)
NOUNS THAT APPARENTLY CAN ONLY BE PLURAL (examples included “fantods” and “tongs”)
TITLES OF BOOKS PUBLISHED TEN YEARS AGO THAT YOU CAN NAME OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD
The previous December, a few weeks prior the Birdbath Incident, Amy had begun a new list:
REALISTIC NOVEL PLOTS
under which she included storylines from writing exercises she had once used:
A devoted couple suffers a devastating car crash from which only the man recovers, the woman dying at the scene. He is crippled by grief and guilt. At night he scans the skies, as though she might suddenly appear to him. “Where are you?” he demands. But her voice does not whisper in his ear, nor does her ghost appear in dreams or mirrors, nor does he even spot, out of the corner of his eye, passersby whom he mistakes for her. Memories of her inevitably fade away, until he needs to look at a picture in order to recall her face. The end.
A poor but innovative and talented boy enters a hot air balloon construction contest in which all other contestants have access to expensive, high-tech equipment. The boy has only rudimentary materials: bagstring, paraffin, and Mylar scavenged from Dumpsters and painstakingly assembled and glued. The other contestants snort with derision when they see the finished entry and even try to get him disqualified, without success, since the judges both like and pity the boy. On the day of the contest, his patchwork hot air balloon comes in last place, receiving a hastily composed honorable mention which is accidentally misspelled as an “Honorable Memtion.” The end.
A boy and girl meet in college, date, fall in love, and break up senior year. They go on to marry other people and raise families, but neither is truly happy. They meet again at their twenty-fifth reunion. He has been divorced for five years; her husband has been unfaithful to her throughout their marriage, and she is in the process of obtaining a divorce. Initially, they do not hit it off. She finds him stiff and prematurely aged; her bitterness turns him off. But over the next two years they find excuses to call or email each other, and ultimately they find themselves deeply in love—which, they admit, they had not been when they were young. Their marriage is a low-key affair, but they splurge on their honeymoon hotel in Marrakesh. On the second night, their wing of the hotel catches fire, and they both die horribly. The end.
As was her custom, Amy had posted the list and then forgotten about it. When, while recovering from her injuries, she looked in on GO AWAY in the New Year, she was disturbed by the number and tenor of comments it had prompted. She was used to pleasant, often thoughtful, seldom snarky comments and suggestions. Occasionally other writers would visit her page and chime in, adding to her lists. In this case, though, the list was a bomb. Readers misunderstood her purpose. Comments included: “I must say I never took you for a proponent of ‘sick humor.’ Remind me never to read another one of your books”; “These are cheap shots, Amy”; “What’s your point? Are you allergic to happy endings, or what?”; “This would be precocious if you were twelve years old. As it is, it’s just very sad.” The most discomfiting comment was: “WTF!!! LMAO! GFY AimEEE!” She understood the first two acronyms but had to consult Carla for the third. “It probably means ‘Good for you,’” she said. “Or it could mean, you know, ‘Go do something to yourself.’ But I’m sure not.”
Amy didn’t mind criticism but bristled at being misconstrued. This particular list had been culled from one of her old workshop teaching notebooks, and it was supposed to be all about a perennial workshop issue: real life vs. fiction. When beginners were criticized for unconvincing plots, they often objected, “But this is based on a totally true story! This really happened!” As though facts trumped anything. She would explain that it was the writer’s job to make the events plausible, which, in their case, the writers had not done. We don’t read fiction to learn facts; we read it to make sense. While their eyes glazed over, she would talk about the fictional universe as opposed to the actual one, becoming caught up in ideas that evidently fascinated only her. The fictional universe is knowable, she would say. The fiction writer is god. She creates people whose lives actually cohere. But what if the writer is an existentialist? a wise guy would ask. What a terrific question! Well, then, that fictional world is meaningless, and the reader can know that, because that’s how the writer has set it up. Amy herself wasn’t sure what this last claim actually meant.
To aid in her lectures she had worked up a series of models for her students—plot lines that no publisher would buy into, for stories no one would want to read, and for a variety of reasons, none of which was because such things never happened in the real world. The last one in the list—the one about the happy couple who die in a fire—was the one she most often revised. She used various smoothly flowing plots, dramas, romances, comedies, and abrupted them with plane crashes and natural disasters.
One alternate was about a young girl’s fraught relationship with her mother and how that relationship deepens in complexity over the whole of the girl’s life, as she comes to know her mother as a person as mysterious as any other. Through years of misunderstandings and estrangements they have always loved each other; toward the story’s end, they begin to like each other, the daughter particularly admiring her mother’s refusal to go soft in old age. (The residents and keepers at her nursing home peg her as “negative.”) The daughter makes arrangements to bring her mother home with her, renovating her own small house to accommodate them both. A few days before the mother is to be transferred, a serial killer, posing as the cable installer, attacks and strangles the daughter. The end.
Perversely, Amy added this particular variation to her blog list, prompting more outcries. The fact that these plots never worked well as pedagogical tools probably should have dissuaded her from airing them on the Internet, but she dug in her heels. She didn’t have a large blog readership, but it was much larger than the average class, so somebody was bound to understand her. One in a hundred was all she needed to set her mind at rest. Toward that end, she added an example with an ending that was not depressing or horrific.
A young girl is killed (murdered, perhaps; or slain by a hit-and-run driver), and her older brother becomes obsessed with finding out who killed her. Police leads peter out; years go by; he joins the Air Force, intending to make a career out of it, but, haunted by his sister’s death, resigns his commission, returns to college, and becomes a crime scene investigator in Cincinnati, his hometown. He marries and begins a family, but his spare time is mostly spent investigating the murder/accidental death of his sister. He narrows down the suspect pool to three men, one dead, all local. He doesn’t yet have enough information to get the attention of the local prosecuting attorney, but signs are that with continued persistence he will prevail. His wife, who has been patient with his obsession, gets pregnant for a third time and, faced with an overload of domestic worries, sits Peter down and explains that things have to change: that if he values his life with her and his daughters, he must let go of the past and devote his
attention to them. They stay up all night talking. He agrees reluctantly to try. He finds this difficult at first but surprisingly not impossible. He has, he sees, a hope of happiness. After awhile, he no longer glances toward the file cabinet where he keeps all his carefully gleaned evidence. He never finds out who killed his sister and eventually stops wondering about it. The end.
The day after the NPR interview aired, Amy checked in on her blog and found ten full pages of comments, some from well-wishers weighing in on the interview, but most in furious response to the list that nobody liked, which she now retitled “THE LIST THAT NOBODY LIKES.” There were new voices among the comments, some loutish, some learned, and as usual everybody misunderstood her. She was particularly disheartened by a comment from SamLWeiss, who obviously knew something about how fiction was constructed:
These plots are ridiculous. I see your point, but no writer worth his salt would, for example, junk up a lit-fic novel—a book about a man finally understanding what his wife means to him—with all that crap about crime scene analysis and suspect lists. I mean, you might mention the early trauma and his obsession with his sister, but you’d do this in the context of the larger story, the story about his growth. This is a character-driven novel derailed by a cheap plot device.
Amy was eager to get back to a new story idea of her own, but she could see that NPR was bringing out the torches and pitchforks, and she was afraid that if she didn’t stop and explain herself, things would get out of hand. As Maxine said, and whether intentionally or not, she was building “a base.” She posted a frigid response to SamLWeiss:
I’m not sure you see my point at all, which is my fault, as I neglected to signal with a festive “LOL” or smiley face that I was joking. My point was pretty much the one you’ve just made: that successful fiction isn’t junked up with ill-fitting events. On the other hand, actual lives are. Ask any biographer. Part of his job is to ignore or somehow morph the stuff that doesn’t fit. Our narratives are incoherent, at least until we recollect them in story form. The lives of many of us, most of us, do not follow classic narrative arcs, SamLWeiss. Some have competing arcs, going off in all directions, like bad flower arrangements. My own arc probably looks like a polygraph readout. So far, I guess, I’m character-driven, but I’m pretty sure I don’t lead a genre life—not even a lit-fic life. Do you? And I know, and so should you, that at some time in the future my arc, and your own, will be derailed by a cheap plot device. Perhaps I’ll put that on my tombstone.
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