Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  Whenever Amy was forced to go somewhere new she could not bring herself to listen to music, not so much because it might make her lose track of where she was (she never actually knew where she was anyway), but because she was haunted by the thought of ironic music streaming from the crumpled, smoking wreck of her death car. Now for the same reason she gripped the steering wheel, fighting the instinct to shut off the damn thing. She imagined herself trapped, paralyzed, dying, listening to Recalculating! When you can, make a U-turn! Then, bear right!

  By the time she pulled up to the station, all her muscles ached from having been clenched for the last ten miles of a journey which had, of course, been wholly uneventful. There was no great relief, no gratitude mixed in with the exhaustion. Phobic episodes always ended with a vague sense of anticlimax, even disappointment, as though underneath all the terror she had been hoping for the very worst to happen. A Platonic catastrophe.

  The first floor was a streamlined, white, unpopulated place. After wandering around looking at elevator signs, Amy realized that more was housed here than just the radio station. There were law offices on the top two floors, kept busy perhaps by lawsuits threatened by interviewees such as herself. When she arrived at the KYJ floor, the elevator doors opened onto a thoroughfare, its walls covered with posters of grinning, mostly male faces, its blue carpet worn and scuffed by scurriers loaded down with bags, boxes, newspapers, and coffee. She found a reception desk and discovered she was almost a half hour early.

  The receptionist was of indeterminate age and species, the first cosmetic surgery victim Amy had ever seen up close. She was blond and tall and looked as though a crew of thugs had starved her, forced her to break rocks in the blazing sun, inflated her breasts, and punched her in the mouth. They hadn’t gotten into her eyes, though, and in their depths Amy thought she glimpsed a desperate human captive.

  “I’m Shambala,” she said. “Who are you here for?”

  Amy went blank. Shambala’s parents had to be her own age. They must have had her at the last minute. Poor Shambala, a love child named for a Three Dog Night song. “I’m here for someone whose name escapes me.”

  “Gotta either be Chaz Molloy or—”

  “Molloy, that’s it,” said Amy. “Are you from Boston or Providence?” Shambala’s accent humanized her, surprising Amy into an uncharacteristically personal question.

  “You can tell?” Shambala was crushed.

  “Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “My so-called dialect coach is a gyp,” said Shambala, ushering Amy into a small room that smelled like flop sweat and ham sandwiches. “This is our green room,” she said, fluttering her fingers at a row of complimentary water bottles.

  “What’s he like?” asked Amy.

  “Chaz is a real good guy,” said Shambala, but her eyes said something more nuanced. She went to leave, then turned back. “Danvers, Mass,” she said. “You from around there too? You don’t sound like it at all.”

  “Maine,” said Amy. She thought about explaining that she didn’t sound like Maine either, because in order to pick up regional dialects, your parents have to have them, or else you need to spend your formative years outside of your own head, but Shambala shrugged, smiled, and left before Amy could decide how to say this.

  Amy rummaged through her carry bag, into which she had thoughtlessly thrown a few of her books, her notebook, and a box of Kleenex. The ABR piece, which had apparently occasioned the interview, was not there. She remembered intending as recently as this morning to print it out and read it here, just prior to the interview, so it would stick in her mind. And she had printed it out. She just hadn’t brought it with her. Perhaps it was time to start keeping to-do lists.

  Amy called Maxine but the call went straight to voicemail. She tried to think of who else might have read the piece, but the only numbers she had were Maxine’s and Carla’s. By the time it occurred to her to ask Shambala if she could access the Internet somehow, a potbellied young man in a brown T-shirt poked his head in the green room. “You’re Amy, right?” he asked, looking briefly her way, and he told her to follow him. He sounded stoned.

  The design on the back of the T-shirt invited her, with words and a big white arrow, to “kiss this.” To keep up with his long strides she would have had to jog, but she had no interest in doing either, and when she arrived at what must be Chaz Molloy’s studio, he was holding the door wide, his posture slumped and aggrieved, as though she had kept him waiting for hours. “Thank you,” she said, which seemed to annoy him further. As she walked, Amy realized that the thoroughfare wasn’t really all that busy: the number of people rushing around did not approximate the number of desks and office doors. This was Sunday, after all. Not exactly rush hour at KYJ.

  Molloy’s studio was small, bright, loud, and ugly. A glass partition divided it down the middle, with a large desk on the other side and two big microphones hanging down like banana bunches, one for a plump, balding, red-bearded man shuffling papers and snapping his fingers at the T-shirt stoner, and one apparently for her. This must be Chaz Molloy. Wordlessly T-shirt Guy pointed her to her seat, then shuffled out of the room. “Real Coke, John,” Molloy shouted after him, “not that diet crap.” As she rounded the partition and sat down, Amy felt invisible and okay with that. Clearly these people were not going to waste her time with rote pleasantries.

  “Amy … Gallup?” said Chaz Molloy, not looking up from his papers. When she didn’t respond, he glanced up, at which point she nodded to him, smiling politely. “Know how to use the mike, Amy? Know the drill?” Amy nodded again. She assumed the drill couldn’t be too complicated. Molloy shuffled some more, then looked at her speculatively. Amy looked back. Molloy pressed a button and said, “We need a voice check. Raul? Voice check?” and in after half a minute yelled at Raul, who ran in, fitted Amy with cold headphones, and asked her to say something in her normal voice.

  “This is my normal voice,” said Amy.

  Molloy smiled at her, crinkling the corners of his eyes to simulate warmth. “Are you nervous? Would you like John to bring you some coffee?” When she shook her head, he put headphones on himself and spoke directly into her ears. “Okay, dear, we’re on in ten.” His radio voice was a gorgeous low baritone; his undertones had undertones. He sounded like an attractive man with a full head of hair. He was calling her “dear” because she was old. If she were younger, he’d call her “babe.” Amy hardly ever took offense at this sort of thing, but thought she could make an exception in his case.

  Molloy was a bully. His show of courtesy had been delayed by a calculation as measured and deliberate as those eye-crinkles. Amy had not dealt with bullies since middle school, and even there they had not threatened her because they mantled nothing she wanted. She viewed them, as she did most people her own age, as through a telescope. She saw the damage they did to kids who wanted to fit in. She wondered why these kids didn’t simply shrug off the taunts and insults and appreciate society’s cold shoulder for what it was: the fortifications of an enormous blocky prison. Outside those gray walls she was free. She wasn’t alone—in the distance she could spy other individuals, grazing. They would nod gravely to one another in passing.

  “Aaaand we’re back,” said Molloy. “As promised, in the studio with me this fine Sunday afternoon is Amy Gallup.” He pronounced her name as though it were a curiosity, some strange billboard glimpsed from a late-night highway. “Who is Amy Gallup, you ask? Well, Amy Gallup is, according to The New York Review of Books, a writer to be reckoned with. And The New York Review of Books should know. Right, folks? I mean, The New York Review of Books! Amy Gallup, welcome to the show.” Molloy crinkled at Amy, displaying an expensive set of blindingly white teeth.

  “American,” said Amy.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The American Review of Books. Not the New York.”

  Chaz Molloy made a droll face. “Oh, my bad. We certainly wouldn’t want to confuse the two, would we? No, of course, it
was the American Review of Books. Now that we’ve got that straight, Amy Gallup is the author of six highly acclaimed feminist novels, the latest of which, while it sold less than four thousand copies, was nominated for the National Book Award. Congratulations, Amy! Tell us, Amy, what constitutes a feminist novel?”

  Oh, god, thought Amy. They got me all the way up here for less than nothing. This was just like the Nimoy snafu, only worse. “Actually,” she said, “I have no idea, because—”

  “Now, come on! You write them, you gotta have some idea.”

  “There’s been a mistake,” said Amy. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’ve not written a feminist novel, nor have I been nominated for a major award in decades. I’m sorry,” she added, idiotically, as though this were all her fault.

  Molloy looked closer at his papers. “It says right here you wrote—no, wait a minute—okay, madam, you are one hundred percent correct. My crack team of screw-ups went and highlighted the wrong section.” Molloy glared out at a distraught middle-aged woman who had poked her head in the door. “Nice going, Leslie Carnahan,” boomed Molloy, using the woman’s full name right on the air in front of everybody. The mistake probably hadn’t even been Leslie’s, who at any rate did not deserve public humiliation. Still, Amy was greatly relieved, as she had begun to wonder if the ARB article, rather than Molloy’s crew, had been responsible for the confusion, which would have been even worse.

  “So you don’t write feminist novels,” said Molloy, marking time while he scanned his material again.

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Says here you wrote a novel called Monstrous Women. Catchy title!”

  “That was a collection of short stories,” said Amy.

  Molloy shot her a panicked look. “Well, were these novels? Everything Handsome? The Ambassador of Loss? A Fiercer Hell?”

  “Yes, those are novels.”

  “Amy, I’m so sorry about this,” said Molloy, who was now going to have to fill time discussing material with which he was completely unfamiliar, as opposed to material with which he was glancingly familiar. He looked more mortified than apologetic. “This has never happened before.”

  Still, Amy summoned up fellow feeling. “I believe you,” she said to him. “Happens to me all the time. The last time I gave a reading, they thought I was Leonard—”

  “Says here,” said Molloy, “that you’re ‘A talent ripe for rediscovery.’ What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Search me,” said Amy. “I didn’t write the article. I had no idea what it was going to say until it came out.” Actually, she still didn’t know what it said, but if she told him that, he’d probably lose it. A talent ripe for rediscovery. What baloney.

  “Come now,” said Molloy. “If I said that, oh, I don’t know, Robbie Williams was a talent ripe for rediscovery, you’d know what that meant, wouldn’t you?”

  “I might, if I knew who that was.” This came out snottier than Amy had intended.

  “Says here,” continued Molloy, whose expression was no longer mortified, “‘Amy Gallup is a fearless writer, unaffected by literary trends.’ Says your work is unflinching and mordantly funny. What’s your take on that, Amy? Are you ‘unflinching’? Unflinching,” he repeated, in a mock-thoughtful tone. “I’m just riffing here, but it’s my understanding that people flinch when they’re being shot at or menaced in some way. We flinch to avoid being hit. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets flinched and we didn’t. I’m just wondering here how a writer, or a novel, can be unflinching. I mean, can a novel actually flinch?”

  So much, Amy thought, for fellow feeling. Still she couldn’t summon up anger at this person. He was overbearing and contemptuous, but no Jenny Marzen. What an odd thought. Now she decided to pretend that they were having a civilized disagreement, just as though in the United States this were still possible. “Fiction, a poem, any work of art can shy away from the truth, for one reason or another, often because you can make more money with a lie, but sometimes because you’re just not good enough.”

  “Okay,” he said, obviously unengaged by what she thought was actually a promising topic, “but isn’t there a difference between shying away and flinching? What does fear have to do with anything? In what sense are you a fearless writer?”

  “In no sense,” said Amy. “There are certain terms, like fearless and unflinching and compelling and luminous, that are used so often and so promiscuously that their original meanings have gotten lost, assuming that compelling, all by itself, ever had an original meaning. On top of which I think you’ll agree that not flinching from the truth on paper is quite different from not flinching when faced with a firing squad.”

  “Bless your heart, madam, you’re a human thesaurus!” Molloy gestured toward her like a supplicant, palms up, then crooking his fingertips at her, as though summoning a waiter. He was trying to communicate something, like Hurry up! or maybe Come on! Baffled, she shook her head and shrugged. He looked back down at his notes. “So you don’t think that you’re fearless and unflinching.”

  “That’s correct,” said Amy. “In fact, I’ve never bought into the concept of moral courage, as comparable to physical. When people say artists are fearless, they’re attributing moral courage to them, which I think is spurious, really. To me, courage is significant only if it involves a physical threat, or at least the perception of a physical threat.”

  “Huh.” Amy counted three seconds of dead air. Had she put him to sleep? “Folks, we’re going to take a break, but don’t go away, we’ll be right back with Amy Gallup, today’s guest artist, who is not a fearless writer.”

  Molloy whipped off his headphones and stormed out of the room. Through the closed door she could hear his muffled bellowing in the hallway. All she could make out was What am I supposed to do with this, Leslie? You’re useless, Leslie! He stalked back in and with a strained smile asked Amy if she had copies of her books with her. Sorry, no, Amy lied. Clearly he had planned to read aloud and ridicule sections of that feminist novel. Molloy didn’t frighten her, but she wasn’t about to let him get his paws on her books. She wondered why not.

  He was even unhappier after he put his headphones back on than he had been when taking them off. He apologized to his listeners that, because of his bumbling assistant Leslie Carnahan, he would be unable to read any of Amy’s work on the air.

  “That’s okay,” said Amy. “My stuff isn’t ideal for that anyway. It’s rather dense. Plus, really, unlike poetry, fiction is best read on the page.”

  “And if our listeners want to read your books, I’m sure they can buy them online. Can we go over the titles again?”

  “Actually they’re all out of print,” said Amy.

  Molloy rubbed his eyes. “Out of print. All of them.”

  “Yes,” said Amy, “but that’s what libraries are for.”

  Molloy stared at her in what looked like unfeigned disbelief. “Yet, according to this very article, your novels are, and I quote, ‘necessary to our lives.’”

  “You’re kidding,” said Amy. “Does it actually say that?”

  “Yes, it actually—wait a minute,” said Molloy. “Am I supposed to believe that you haven’t even read this thing?”

  Maxine was going to kill her. “I was planning to,” she said, lamely, “but I’ve been busy.”

  “‘Necessary to our lives,’” he said again, drawing out this ridiculous phrase, “and I’ve been trying to imagine just how necessary your novels could be. Especially since they’re out of print.”

  “Again,” said Amy, “you’re asking the wrong person. I—”

  “Do you think your novels are as necessary as, oh, I don’t know, the Constitution?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Are they as necessary as the Bible?”

  “They’re not even as necessary as the menu at Olive Garden,” said Amy. The difference between Molloy and Jenny Marzen, she decided, was that Molloy was wretched. He didn’t adore himself,
and while he probably had fans, they didn’t love him. Pack animals didn’t love their leaders. It was impossible to take his dislike personally, and not just because he had nothing she wanted. Chaz Molloy hated everybody. Marzen’s cheerleading was much harder to endure than Molloy’s contempt.

  Molloy slumped back in his chair with a martyred expression. He must be John’s role model. “Are you criticizing the person who wrote this, I must say, very generous and complimentary article about you?”

  Who had written it? God, Amy thought, I hope it was no one I like. “I am sympathizing,” she said, “with the person who wrote this. Pieces like this, book reviews and the like, are written to deadline. I write them myself occasionally. It is much harder to think originally, to express your ideas clearly without slipping into cliché, when you’re so limited in time and you’re given so little space for discussion. It’s easy enough to know that you like something; it’s much harder to decide why and then say so in six hundred words.”

  Molloy held out a warning finger, said, “Back in a minute, folks,” flipped a switch in front of him, glared at Amy, and said, “Lady, you’re giving me nada here. How am I supposed to fill fifteen more minutes?”

  Amy actually looked around to see if anyone were standing in back of her. No. He was apparently talking to her. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Sweetheart, this is ‘The Petri Dish’! This is KYJ! This is not an effing literary salon!”

  “Then why did you invite me? What were you expecting?”

  “Somebody with a pulse,” said Molloy. He said it under his breath with his head turned away from her, but had to know she had heard him. He blushed. Amy could see the heat flashing up his neck. “Don’t mind me, dear,” he said, avoiding eye contact, “it’s just been one of those days.” He shouted into what Amy assumed was an intercom, “Where’s my goddamn Coke?” and donned the headphones, welcoming his listeners back on for the second half of the show, and inviting them to call in with any questions. “I don’t usually open the lines until the final segment, but I’m going to make an exception in this case, folks, since, frankly, I’ve run out of material.” A full second of dead air followed, during which he snapped his fingers in the direction of a mirror on the opposite wall, behind which there must lurk some production crew with a bank of phones or something.