Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  “Huge is the new awesome,” said Amy. “What about the five who got cut? That’s it for them, then?”

  “God damn it,” said Maxine. “I knew you’d do that. I just handed you the keys to the El Dorado and you’re worrying about the poor saps you trampled over on your way to the top. Excuse me. The pathetic losers flattened by your inert carcass as I dragged you—”

  “Mixed metaphor.”

  “Kiss my ass,” said Maxine, and hung up.

  When she didn’t ring right back, Amy called to apologize. She couldn’t remember Maxine ever being this touchy.

  “For your information,” said Maxine, “and not that I believe for a minute that you’re really all that worked up about it, the other five writers will get space two weeks from now in the ARB’s next issue. You didn’t hurt anybody. You know, I really do feel like I’m pushing a truck uphill. And those are the good days.”

  * * *

  When the mid-June ARB edition came out, Amy didn’t buy it or read it online. Neither apparently did anyone else in San Diego, so she wasn’t pestered by awed calls from well-wishers. In fact, of the few California people she knew—her neighbors, Carla and the gang, and the retreat people—only Brie Spangler had ever picked up on evidence of her chelonian ascent, and that because she actually worked for a radio station. No one had ever even mentioned Holly Antoon’s story, which meant that no one had ever read it—except for Kurt Robetussien, in the ER. And he was the only one who had actually heard her on the radio. Kurt was busy saving lives, and Brie was a wonderfully discreet girl; she wasn’t surprised that neither contacted her about the ARB. The secret of Amy’s burgeoning fame was safe with them.

  But the East Coast was a different story. Days before the hard copy came out, her phone went off at seven in the morning, Roofy Mehnaz identified herself (“This is Roofy Mehnaz calling from New York”) and threatened to make Amy “a crapload of money.” Amy hung up. The phone rang again. “Sorry,” said Roofy Mehnaz, “I know it’s early there, but I wanted to get to you first.” Amy hung up again, then lifted the phone off the hook so the signal would be busy, only Roofy Mehnaz, having not hung up in New York, kept going, listing the titles of movies and books with which she had had some sort of connection. “I know you’re with Grabow, you don’t have to tell me, but I can do a lot more for you. Maxine’s old school. Also old.” Roofy Mehnaz, then, was some sort of agent. Amy wanted to ask her about her name and how she spelled it, but she restrained herself. “Send me an email,” she said, and when Roofy started to ask for her address, Amy told her to call Maxine, and hung up. Immediately the phone rang again.

  This time Amy stumbled to the bathroom to get her glasses so she could see who was calling, and sure enough, it was a 212 number, and not Maxine’s. Maxine knew better than to call her at seven a.m. anyway. The call went to voicemail, and while that was happening Amy turned down the volume so she couldn’t hear her own voice and that of whoever was calling. Five minutes after the call ended, the phone rang again. Amy spent a half hour, pre-coffee, hunting down the instructions for her damn phone, so she could turn off the ringer, which she did.

  She knew it wasn’t entirely rational to treat these harbingers of success as though they were physicians calling with biopsy results, but she had other things to do. She was working on two new stories, the first of which, “The Drawer,” was practically writing itself. Amy rarely wrote about either sex or childhood, but this was a freebie. It was the sort of story she had always cautioned her students against. “Nobody cares about the facts of your life. Use experience as a jumping-off place, not an end in itself.”

  She could remember the ozone-scented air, the cold raindrops on the window of the bedroom, on the day she had discovered Krafft-Ebing in Uncle Fred’s house; she could see the pattern on her bedspread when she first flopped down to start reading. A lavender bedspread stamped with gold fleur-de-lis; she would think it hideous now, but she remembered picking it out when her mother took her to the Sears in Portland and tried to get her to go for white chenille. Such sensory details were ordinarily lacking from her memory, whether recent or ancient. There must be a part of the brain devoted to sex memory. Maybe that was what they meant by the lizard brain. Anyway, she could remember everything, and shaping it into a story took only three days. Curious bookish girl explores the mysteries of sex, gets wildly misinformed, struggles ensue. Years later she figures out that the answers aren’t in books, but she never gets the hang of trusting her own body, which she regards from a suspicious distance. The end. “The Drawer” was slight, funnier and less dark that her usual stuff, but she knew Maxine could sell it. She had just sold the Coronado bus plunge story, “What It All Means,” to Harper’s.

  “Calvary,” the other story, was a mess. Now that she had decided to deal with Max’s death, she was having a terrible time finding her way in. The title was grandiose and would have to go: the fact that it was the actual name of the hospital where he died, of other hospitals where tens of thousands die, was no excuse, but for now she left it in place as, day by day, she tried anew. She had begun to think of the project as an assault on some outlandish mountain peak, the sort so popular with moneyed adventurers that their freeze-dried corpses littered the slopes like candy wrappers. Most of her own assaults ended ignominiously. She would break a new trail and at some point realize that the going was all too easy, that she had slipped without realizing into a slick groove.

  The trouble with big themes wasn’t that the big boys and girls had gotten there first—they’d gotten to everything first, including sexual curiosity in overly cerebral children—but that they had landed on those themes with such great feet that their imprints were deep and almost impossible to avoid. Even as Max lay dying, Tolstoy intruded on what ought to have been the rawest and most immediate experience of her life. He screamed unceasingly … It was unendurable … Oh, what I have suffered! And oh, how Amy had wished, still wished, that the lines were her own. She could play with emotions—anxiety, terror, the demise of hope, that constant awareness of inadequacy—she could bring them to life on the page as effortlessly as she had the lavender bedspread—but to what end? To explore the awfulness of death, of loss, of grief? What did she have to add to what was already known?

  Well, she had her own sorry self, her own story, the snowflake of her life, but even as a child she had been unimpressed by the breathless adult observation that no two of these were exactly alike. In the first place, she had thought, how does anybody know that? And in the second place, so what? The snowflake factoid was, to the child Amy, the first instance of a formal invitation to goggle. “No two snowflakes alike!” was impressed upon a child in order to cultivate “wonder.” But she wasn’t literally supposed to “wonder” about the snowflakes, since wonder invited curiosity, which in turn should prod a person into learning and thinking deeply. No, she was supposed to goggle at them. Also at the contents of aquariums and the patchwork farmland thousands of feet below her airplane window on the last time she would take to the skies. Her earliest memory of her father was when he lifted her up to the apartment window at nighttime, saying, “Look, there’s our shadow on the moon.” Later she had gone alone to her bedroom window and made rabbit shapes with her hands. She was then disappointed in her father, who had obviously lied to her; he had just wanted her to goggle.

  Of course, in that instance she was wrong. Children have such literal minds: long before you need an irony klaxon, you must have everything spelled out. Still, what a pill she had been. Even at the time, Amy wondered what her parents saw in her. Clearly they loved her, and she them, but the whole thing was a mystery. Amy set “Calvary” aside and began work on “Snowflake.”

  Only to be distracted by the flashing light on her silent phone, and now Maxine was insisting that she go to Los Angeles. Amy had lived in California for twenty years and never been farther away from Escondido than San Diego. She had never even been to Tijuana. Now, horribly, Maxine had lined up two gigs for her up north: one at an in
dependent bookstore in Pasadena, and one at KYJ, an AM radio station. “Absolutely not,” said Amy.

  “Which one?”

  “In the first place, I don’t do bookstore readings. The last time I did one was fifteen years ago. They mixed up the nights, and I got a big crowd for Leonard Nimoy. They were not happy.”

  “Nevertheless, Vroman’s wants you, and they guarantee a crowd.”

  “To what end? In case you haven’t noticed, Maxine, I’m out of print.”

  “So? The people who bought your books kept them, and they’re going to want them signed.”

  Amy was flummoxed. This was not at all like Maxine. Nobody would earn a penny from this enterprise, which sounded like a sentimental schlep down memory lane. “I’m not doing it,” she said.

  After a long silence, Maxine said, “Fine. Knock yourself out. But you are doing KYJ.”

  “Why can’t I do it from here?” Amy was already starting to bargain with Maxine. This was not a good sign. Maxine was making her feel guilty.

  “It’s KYJ,” said Maxine. “Their shows are syndicated nationwide.”

  “Then they must be syndicated here, and I can just go—”

  “Wrong. Chaz Molloy wants you in the station with him.”

  Even Amy had heard of Chaz Molloy. He was a national talk radio figure, not as big as Rush Limbaugh, but on a par, in more ways than one, with Schlesinger and Savage. Chaz Molloy was an anti-intellectual pseudo-populist blowhard who regularly took on what he called Cultural Fatheads (“Icons for Idiots”). He called his show “The Petri Dish.” Amy hated that she even knew this much about Chaz Molloy. She never even went to the movies, never mind listened to talk radio. She hadn’t deliberately heard pop music since she was thirty. But she knew what an iPod was, and texting, and tweeting; she knew who Baba Booey was, and which celebrities were adopting African children and which were gay; she knew what “chick-lit” meant. None of it had anything to do with her, but she had absorbed it anyhow. It occupied precious space in a brain that was by now becoming choked with information. Some starlet went out in public without underwear and presto, Amy lost the first names of the Dashwood sisters. Had humanity ever before experienced such fact pollution? Surely not in the days when all societies were manageably tiny, technology was limited to the plough and the sword, and history was essentially personal. Not that Amy was a Luddite, but there must have been a time when the sheer quantity of available information was optimal, and it wasn’t now. If the universe, as one old philosophy teacher had argued, was the sum of what there was, then there was just too much. “Why?” asked Amy. “Why does Chaz Molloy want me in his radio station?”

  “He needs a writer, to keep the ‘cultural’ thing going. He mostly gets C-list celebs. You want an honest answer, you weren’t at the top of his wish list. The last writer he tricked onto his show was Maya Angelou. Now everybody knows what a Molloy interview is, and nobody who’s anybody will put themselves through it. I’m talking about writers, of course. Betty White, Sally Struthers, Rod Blagojevich, they can handle it. Politicians and show biz people have thicker skins. They’ll do anything for their causes, or for publicity, or both.”

  “Throw him Jenny Marzen,” said Amy.

  “She wouldn’t do it.”

  “Hester Lipp.”

  “She’s not big enough.”

  “And I am?”

  “Just barely,” said Maxine.

  Amy had an awful thought. “Maxine, tell me the truth. Did you approach this man? Is that what it’s come to?”

  Maxine, who coughed so much that she could actually convey a wide variety of emotions, coughed derisively. “Give me a little credit. I wouldn’t approach a clown like Molloy. He called me. I’m as surprised as you are.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Amy. “I’m sick.”

  “Somebody must have tipped him off about the ARB list. Lex doesn’t deal with California people.”

  Amy wrangled with Maxine for what must have been a full hour. She could not understand how Chaz Molloy’s market and her own, assuming she even had a market, could possibly intersect. At the height of her career she had hardly been a household word, and she was not and never had been politically active. And how would allowing some idiot to insult her on syndicated commercial radio do her or Maxine any good? It wouldn’t, said Maxine, so don’t let him. In the end, when Amy gave in, she did it sullenly. Remember, she had told her, this was all your idea.

  Amy lay awake all that night trying to understand why she had let Maxine bully her into going. She knew even while it was happening how Maxine worked the con, throwing out two gigs with every expectation that Amy would refuse to do the bookstore and then feel pressured to comply on the other one. Eventually she realized that underneath all the outrage she was mildly curious. Not about Chaz Molloy, or the radio station, but about what she would do when she got to LA. She had no idea what was going to happen; apparently this was enough to get her there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Road to Shambala

  Amy drove north. Over the past two weeks, she had not completed one thought about the interview and was unworried about it now, since she expected to die before she got halfway to Hollywood, where, according to Google Maps, the radio station was. Having lived for twenty years in San Diego, Amy had neither driven to Los Angeles nor planned to do so. She had relied on Maxine, who had promised to set her up with a train and taxi. Maxine called her up thirty-six hours before the radio interview, swearing impressively about “so-called public transportation” in Southern California. “The train will deposit you three miles from the station,” she said, and when Amy said fine, I’ll cab it from there, Maxine said no you won’t. “Cabs are useless. I tried to get you a limo at the station, but it was too late.” In the ensuing marathon yelling match, Maxine admitted that for a thousand dollars Amy could have door-to-door limo service, at which point Amy, caught between the Scylla of the I-5 North and the Charybdis of grotesque luxury, settled on the six-headed beast. “Look,” said Maxine, “I’ll be paying for the limo, not you.” Amy said nobody should pay for a limo. When did ordinary people started taking limousines? It was the principle of the thing. She hung up while Maxine tried to change her mind. Whether she was taking pity on Amy or genuinely worried about a twenty-car pileup, Amy didn’t care. She and Maxine were apparently becoming like family, with that familial raising of the rudeness threshold. She printed out three separate map directions and programmed her handheld GPS while trusting none of them.

  Amy hated to go anywhere she had not been before. Max had found this hilarious, along with her dislike of untasted foods and general mistrust of all new experiences. But then Max was not a New Englander by birth. There were excellent reasons for fearing the new. Getting lost was one of them. She had such fear of losing her way that last night she had come close to calling Carla and asking her to drive up with her. She knew Carla would drop everything to do it: she’d insist on doing all the driving too. Pride, Amy had always thought, was more virtue than vice. In this case it prevented her from taking advantage of a nice girl who must have better things to do.

  After a sleepless night, Amy filled Alphonse’s bowls and secreted various snacks around the house, just to keep him amused. She had arranged with the Blaines to check in on him and let him out a couple of times. She took out of the freezer a giant beef bone she had bought at Ralph’s. It was the biggest bone she had ever seen, an uncut femur longer than her forearm, to which a few strips of meat and fat still clung. She had been saving it for a dog treat and now she placed it in the raised garden in front of the birdbath. Alphonse could decimate ordinary bones in an hour; this one would keep him busy for at least a day. Bill Blaine, avid gardener, would be up tomorrow with the mockingbirds and sure to notice if her car wasn’t back yet; by nightfall, they’d sound the alarm. The Blaines surely would care for Alphonse during her prolonged hospitalization; if she died in a fiery crash, they would find him a good home.

  * * *

 
If you had to drive the freeways, Sunday morning was probably your best shot. Traffic, while not exactly light, was not intimidating. But as she pushed through Irvine the road grew sinister, older and more decrepit. She was heading into the oldest snarl of cloverleaves in the most extensive highway system in the known universe. Past Anaheim, the 5 took on the dull patina of antiquity. Amy tried to distract herself imagining the cracks, crumbles, and roadside detritus as artifacts from some ancient world. Archaeologists would devote months to resurrecting and restoring a single billboard, then quarrel for years over its significance. A bikinied blonde, jacknifed into a half-full martini glass, might be evidence of anthropophagy, or perhaps a minor deity, the goddess of potable water. Maybe the ancient decadents drank only wine that had been sat in by virgins.

  Amy did pretty well until she had to merge onto the I-10 and then begin obsessing about upcoming exits. At this point her GPS, an inexpensive little device the size of a bar of soap, began taunting her with what she would have to do in the near future. The voice was a woman’s, maddeningly upbeat, and she liked to work with odd fractions (“In nine-tenths of a mile, take exit on left!”) but cunningly avoided specific details (“Take ramp ahead, then bear left, then stay right”). If Amy took the wrong exit, the woman would start babbling urgently and forcing Amy into endless, nightmarish loops. Amy had not bought the model that actually spoke the names of the streets because it was too expensive, and anyway its computerized speech, while more entertaining than the chirpy obnoxious female, sounded like the vocalization of space aliens.