Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  “Why?” asked Amy.

  “The doors don’t open for another twenty minutes.”

  “I’m not an audience person,” said Amy. “I’m—”

  “You’ll also need a different ticket, for the Writers’ event.” He was glowering at her. He must think she had tried to sneak in on an Agents ticket, like some high school kid theater-hopping in a multiplex.

  Amy gathered up her belongings. “Is there some sort of green room?” she asked him. Milling around outside the magic door with hoi polloi wouldn’t have offended her sense of status, which was nonexistent, but she thought she might not be able to resist the impulse to bolt for a cab to Anywhere Else.

  The young man blanched. Amy had of course read about this phenomenon—in the 1920s, fictional characters blanched all over the place—but until now she’d never seen a real person turn this alarming shade of white. White people, of course, were really pink, but not this kid.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m one of them”—airily dismissing the faraway stage—“but don’t worry about it. Just tell me where I belong.”

  He led her up onstage. “We don’t have a green room. There’s no backstage area. I’m so sorry,” he said more than once. He pulled out her chair, seated her at the table, and ran away before she could assure him that he had just been doing his job.

  There was a personalized event packet in front of each chair like a place card. She had been seated between Jenny Marzen and Davy Goonan, and to his left was somebody named Jasmine White-Banerjee. Marzen had to be the designated heavy-hitter. Goonan should be, except he was old and out of fashion. Goonan she knew—not personally, but from his early books.

  When Amy was in high school, Davy Goonan had been white-hot, a National Book Award contender, a hard-drinking Irishman with lethal charm whose brilliant, caustic, and often misogynist novels excited a largely female readership. Amy had enjoyed his books. He was the postwar Dreiser, his novels huge and lumbering, but she had loved Dreiser too. During the seventies, he was the go-to bull’s-eye of feminist critics. He might have weathered the political sea change, except that he was also a bad-boy celebrity at a time when simultaneous public infidelities and fistfights actually harmed sales. Amy hadn’t thought of him in years. Still, she was sorry now to read that he was presently toiling as an adjunct writing teacher at the New School. He was still in print but broke. He’d probably spent his fortune on fines, booze, and alimony. He must be at least eighty.

  Amy took out her laptop and did a search on Jasmine White-Banerjee. Indian-American novelists had been hot (as the Industry would have it) for a while, but she was unfamiliar with this particular name. On a Burdock Press website, she found White-Banerjee, or rather a “book trailer” for her recent novel Justine’s Tale. Amy, who had avoided looking at book trailers until now, clicked on the video, which opened with a woman’s dark silhouette against a background of scarlet damask drapes. “I am Justine Moritz,” she was saying, in a vaguely Nordic accent. “We were children together. He loved me like a sister. I loved him like…” Cut to a zag of lightning and a blast of bass trombones, then back to the silhouette, illuminated this time, revealing a youngish blond woman, who slowly turned toward the camera and resumed speaking. “We were children together,” she said again. “Often he would show me his … experiments.” Again with the lightning, then quick shots of cages, frogs, surgical tools. “They frightened me, but I loved that look in his eyes, that passion, and hoped that some day he would come to me…” A piano began to play the same five notes over and over, as a young man’s face, scowling at something off to the side, appeared next to the blonde. This really didn’t look like a novel about the Indian diaspora. The camera zoomed in on the girl’s lips. She whispered: “And one day he did.” The music stopped. “As a … monster.” Instantly a quick-cut montage, accompanied by tom-toms, of screaming faces, spurting and dripping blood, a noose, and a creature who looked like Boris Karloff. Oh my god, thought Amy. This idiot had written a novel about Frankenstein’s housekeeper.

  “It is kind of over the top, but that’s what you get when the publicity budget’s for shit.”

  Amy looked up and almost screamed, for there stood the woman in the video.

  “Yes,” she sighed, “I did my own acting. This time, I won’t have a cheap-ass publisher.” She stuck out a cold little hand for Amy to shake. In back of her, trudging up the steps to the stage, were Jenny Marzen and Davy Goonan.

  “We missed you!” sang Jenny. She handed Amy an ornate foil box. “We brought you a Frangelico brownie!”

  Goonan was the first to settle in. The fit was rather tight, as Goonan and Jenny were considerably fatter than their author pictures. Amy was not, since her hideous photo was not a glamorized head shot. Only Jasmine White-Banerjee was fashionably slender. Also the youngest by at least twenty years. “What’s that?” Goonan asked, pointing toward the video. Amy pressed “play” and slid the laptop in front of him. To her right, Jenny leaned into her and said, “I’m such a fan! We meet at last!” and so on, and the next few minutes were lost as the women engaged in rote fawning and the man stayed silent, glued to the screen. “What are you going to talk about?” asked Jenny.

  “I have no idea,” said Amy, just then recollecting something Maxine had said about her not being keynote. Keynotes were speakers. Was she supposed to get up and say something? She really should have read the material Maxine sent her. But she had been too busy preparing for death, and now the hall was beginning to fill. Amy tried to empty her mind and just watch people take their seats and the camera crew—there were just two TV cameras—fiddle with machinery and wires.

  “Did the bastards force you to do this?” Goonan asked Jasmine White-Banerjee, pointing to the laptop screen. “It this what it’s come to?” She laughed and shrugged and all but rolled her eyes at Amy and Jenny. Apparently they had had enough of Goonan during dinner, although Amy couldn’t see that he was all that hard to take.

  Jenny reached around Amy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Nobody forces us, Davy,” she shouted, splitting Amy’s right eardrum. “Book trailers are a new marketing tool.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Jenny said in a lower tone to Amy. “Jazz is going to talk about the writer’s marketing responsibilities in the new millennium. She knows a lot more about this stuff than we do!” Apparently Jenny and Amy were “we.” “I’m going to do my usual rags to niches shtick.” She lowered her voice. “God only knows what he’s going to talk about.”

  Why did she think Goonan was deaf? His voice was low, husky, lilting. If he could hear himself talk, he couldn’t be very hard of hearing. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him fool around with her laptop. This didn’t worry her. She had put her stories on there, but they were on her home computer too, so even if he wiped the hard drive she’d be okay.

  “Tom!” shrieked Jenny Marzen, at a portly middle-aged man in sports jacket and dungarees who approached the stage.

  “Who the hell is that?” asked Davy Goonan.

  “Tom Maudine, we told you, remember? He’s from NPR. He’s going to be moderator. Amy, you know Tom, right?”

  “I know his voice,” said Amy, who after a panicked second realized he was the NPR guy. She’d done at least ten “Just Us” radio shows with him and had assumed he was much younger, with dark hair and horn-rims, like Ellery Queen.

  He shook hands all around, told Amy he was happy to meet her after all their hours together on the air, and then made his announcement. “We’re trying something new this time, and I hope you’ll all get behind it. I’ve prepared a number of questions for you, of course, but we’re also going to invite viewers, listeners, and audience members to tweet questions of their own. I’ll keep an eye on the tweets, and if they’re better than mine, I’ll—”

  “Say again?” said Davy Goonan.

  “It’s a new system,” said Tom. “If audience members want to come to the mike for questions, of course we’ll let them, but we’re hoping they’ll be sending the
ir questions electronically.”

  Goonan turned to Amy and muttered, “I could swear he said they were going to tweet.”

  “Yes, Davy, they’re tweeting!” yelled Jenny Marzen, “It’s the latest craze.”

  Amy had come to this conference prepared to learn that Jenny Marzen, who had somehow become her nemesis, was a perfectly likeable, intelligent woman. “Would you like to trade places?” Amy asked her. “You’d be closer to Mr. Goonan that way,” but Goonan—for it must have been he—clamped an iron hand on her knee. Clearly he preferred a buffer between himself and the helpful harpy.

  “This isn’t half bad,” Goonan said to Amy, pointing at the screen, where he had summoned up “True Caller,” one of her recent stories. “It’s a bit lightweight for you, isn’t it? But it’s nice.”

  Amy didn’t know what to say. Davy Goonan read her stuff?

  “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve stopped writing, but I still read the occasional story.” He pronounced occasional with a long O, a charming remnant of his old brogue, or at least it charmed Amy, who felt for just a moment as though she were twenty again. Davy Goonan liked her stuff! He inclined toward her. “You know, those SOBs only paid for one drink at dinner. I thought this creature was just trying to manage my drinking, but no, she showed me the voucher, and it was one drink apiece! After that we were on our own.”

  “Do you mind my asking,” said Amy, “why you’re here?” Under other circumstances, with a different person, this would have been a rude question, but Amy was certain he would know what she meant.

  “Could ask you the same,” he said. “Fact is, thought I missed it.” He took a drink of water. “Spotlights. Dancing girls. Never again, though. Cheap bastards.”

  When the room filled, the TV guys hit the camera lights and the show got underway. First to speak was Jazz W-B, who explained why all writers should participate in the marketing of their own books. She opened with a book trailer—not the horrible Justine thing, but one in the works for her upcoming novel, Spielvogel’s Complaint. Since C-SPAN Books was low-tech TV, the video trailer was projected onto an old-fashioned white screen and ended up washed-out and hard to see. Still, it was watchable, as this time her new publisher had sprung for a real actor, a vaguely familiar goateed man who regarded the camera with unease as another man, off-screen, reeled off a monotone list of sexual disappointments. The audience tittered politely while Amy tried to identify the actor and also figure out why the name Spielvogel was so familiar. Both answers came simultaneously: the actor was Hal Hockman, who had been lynched twice in a memorable Deadwood episode, and Spielvogel was Portnoy’s psychiatrist.

  That this Wasp hyphenated her husband’s name in order to garner reviewer attention was, Amy supposed, a forgivable all’s-fair strategy, but Whitebread-Banerjee was also the kind of writer who, either lazy or simply unoriginal, kidnapped characters created by her betters and impressed them into her own second-rate books. This practice had been going on for some time now. Amy associated it with the flourishing population of young writers who didn’t have anything to write about yet but thought they had to write something, and so they commandeered the lives of minor characters in famous novels. Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, Squire Western’s mistress, Sidney Carton’s tobacconist. Great fiction can be fashioned out of anything, including hand-me-downs, but for every Jean Rhys there were a hundred Jasmine White-Banerjees.

  Who spoke of promoting sales through blogging, of virtual book launch parties, of swooping in on book club meetings via Skype and answering questions for a fee. “Readers,” she reminded them, “always want to know where we get our ideas!” She claimed that fiction writers could promote their books in much the same way as nonfiction writers do.

  If Davy G hadn’t swiped her laptop, Amy would have amused herself looking up these practices. What was a virtual book launch party? She suspected that whatever it was, it would produce virtual readers and virtual sales. Amy had attended two actual book launches, both for the first novels of students, and noticed that when you get people to leave their homes and drive to a bookstore, chances are they’ll buy the book.

  It was like bassets. If you take a basset out for a ride in the car, you must always buy or otherwise obtain something—a hamburger, preferably, but non-food works too. Otherwise the basset views you as an inept hunter and loses whatever respect he had for you in the first place. A virtual party is not a hunt and does not require a kill.

  By the time Jazz had gotten halfway through her marketing tips, the crowd was restive, and Amy was meanly glad to see that when she wrapped up and announced, “Let the tweets begin!” the applause was perfunctory and nobody rose to ask a question. Tom Maudine stood almost immediately and told everyone, including the tweeters, to hold their questions until after all four had spoken. Doubtless he had planned to do this, but it came off as a tactful ploy. The tweets might not have begun. Belatedly, Amy wondered if she was next. “Who’s keynote?” she whispered to Davy G, just as his name was called. “Not I, evidently,” he said, rising to his feet.

  He began with a series of literary anecdotes having nothing to do with “Whither Publishing” and everything to do with what it had been like to be “young and full of it and mentioned in the same breath as Mailer and Bellow, as Shaw and Yates. That’s Irwin Shaw and Richard Yates, to the likes of you. Do you read them? Do you remember them?” He slid his glasses down to the end of his nose and regarded the crowd for a half minute, silently asking Do you remember me? Jenny Marzen sighed theatrically, whispering, “Here we go, folks.” And how long did Jenny Marzen plan to be remembered?

  Out of the corner of her mouth, Amy whispered to her. “You’re keynote, right?”

  “There’s no keynote,” said Jenny.

  “Well, I must be next, though.” Amy was beginning to get nervous. She really ought to think of something to say.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Jenny. “They just forgot to give us the order.”

  Well, Jazz W-B had given Amy plenty of material. Amy would be the anti-Jazz, the querulous oldster who railed against all these newfangled apps and tweets and for whom a trailer was something you were forced to watch while you waited for your movie to start. She could do this, and she could do it without directly insulting Jazz and her brainless advice. Amy had been a teacher for decades. Teachers who couldn’t simultaneously praise a precocious student while showing why everything she had just written was lousy didn’t have a calling. She could then scorn the very notion of writers having any responsibilities beyond simply writing as well as they can. She could go on and on about this subject practically in her sleep, since she’d done it before, often on the radio, so all she had to worry about was boring herself to death. She relaxed and tuned in to Davy G.

  But Davy Goonan was no longer reminiscing about his young lion days. Davy Goonan was inveighing against tweets, apps, blogs, book trailers, book launches, and the very notion that writing and marketing should be accomplished by the same person. “But this is the world we live in,” he said. “This is what it’s come to.” He reached into his jacket and removed a wrinkled sheaf of paper, which he opened with a palsied hand and from which he began to read. It was a copy (Davy said “mimeograph”) of a marketing plan his agent had recently sent him. “Why, I don’t know,” he said, “as I have not written a novel in fifteen years. My agent is my agent’s granddaughter. She is not yet thirty.” The marketing plan was a bulleted list of ideas, patterned after marketing strategies for nonfiction. “‘First,’” he read, “‘identify your readers. Who are they?’” Again he regarded his audience for a long moment. The audience, who had peppered his lion tales with coughs and shuffles, went quiet. Davy put the paper back in his jacket pocket. “Let’s say you’ve written a lovely first novel about, oh, a gay young thing of about forty, who adores hideous shoes and casual sex and who wouldn’t dream of leaving the Big City, but then she falls in love with a visiting country singer from Oklahoma, you know, and against all reason she hops on to his t
our bus and they light out for the territories. It’s a romantic comedy, you see, and a rollicking adventure, and a musical if they make a movie out of it, and of course they get a flat tire in the middle of the Texas desert, and she finds a Gila monster in her shoe, and so on. Well, now, if you break it down, your readers will be: desperate spinsters of a certain age, country singers, bus devotees, lizard aficionados, shoe fetishists, and what have you. This is your demo-graphic.” He chewed up the word and spat it out. “This is your customer.

  “Now you do your research. How many bus devotees are out there, and where do they live? Do they blog? Do they have a union? Where do their children go to school?” A man in the audience laughed, provoking answering laughs—not titters—from the crowd. “You do the same for all the other demographics. You get it all down. This is serious business. This is the writing life.” His sarcasm was exquisite. Max would have loved Davy Goonan, who could have, without an irony klaxon, communicated all his despair and contempt to a roomful of children. “This list, you see, is the beginning of your marketing plan. But it doesn’t end there. No, no, it doesn’t.

  “Think again about these readers. Who else do they like to read? Do your research again. Find celebrity novelists who write about shoes, public transportation, Oklahoma, and reptiles. Jot down their names. This is very important. This is your second list, the ‘In the tradition of…’ list.

  “Finally, it’s come time for your platform. What is that, you ask? Well, are you famous as something other than a novelist? Have you walked on the moon? Are you at least plugged into a large group of people with money? Do you have access to a mailing list? Do you at least have your own website, you slacker, you pretender? Find your platform. If you haven’t got one, build one. You are a carpenter, aren’t you?

  “Now you’re ready to get published. You’ve got your platform, your customers, your list of popular writers of whom you’ll remind those customers, your blog and mailing lists. All you have to do is put them all together in one beribboned package. You’re ready to market yourself. You have a brand. You’re a Keebler Elf. Your brand is Mature-Urban-Chic-Lit-Tex/Mex-Bus-Tour, and you write in the tradition of Jack Kerouac, Zane Grey, and Jenny Marzen.”