Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  The crowd, which had been giggling happily, drew its breath at Davy’s use of Jenny Marzen’s name. This wasn’t a comedy club, and there she was, right up there in front of everybody. Amy could hear her hearty, false laughter, could see out of the corner of her eye that she was pretending to take his insult as good-natured ribbing, and Amy was torn between two reactions. First, he had been doing so well, and now he’d, as they say, shot himself in the foot, daring the crowd to turn against him, because it’s one thing to make a point, but this just wasn’t nice. Before her eyes he had risen from the great pile of obsolete geniuses and awakened the multitudes, and now he was shrinking just as quickly, staining all he had just said with the sullen green of his own resentments. She wanted him to stand his ground now, to defend himself or at least his position, but he turned from the mike and shuffled back to his seat to scattered applause. Jenny Marzen made a show of reaching out and squeezing his arm and smiling at him for a job well done. He didn’t even acknowledge her. He looked like he needed a nap.

  Amy’s second reaction, which should have been her first, was that now that Davy G had stolen all her thunder she was about to face that confused crowd with absolutely nothing to say. She was rising to her feet to do this—to say nothing—when Tom Maudine announced that Jenny Marzen would be the next speaker.

  Jenny got up and conferred with Maudine, both of them looking flustered. He stepped back to the mike. “Change in plans,” he said. “We’re going on a bit longer than we thought, so we’re going to have a very brief intermission. We’ll be back in ten minutes.” Jenny and Jazz exited stage right, leaving Amy and Davy G alone. “That was almost brilliant,” Amy told him.

  “I was going to say ‘Zane Grey and Henrietta Mant,’” he said. Amy laughed. “No, I was,” said Davy, “and then I couldn’t remember her goddamn name, and I had to say somebody. I don’t know who the gal writers are nowadays.” He leaned close. “I’ve never even read this Marzen woman. I’ve never even read about her. It wasn’t personal, for Christ’s sake.”

  Jenny returned and fiddled with her own laptop, calling up her speech. Her face was flushed. “Tom’s saving you for last,” she told Amy.

  “Why?”

  “Something to do with the tweets.” Davy either hiccuped or snorted. “Also, Jazz isn’t coming back.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got thinner skin than I do. Didn’t you notice? It’s practically blue.”

  Amy realized she’d forgotten all about Jasmine White-Banerjee, whose speech, after all, had been Davy’s dartboard. If anyone should have taken offense it was she, and apparently she had. Amy would have felt sorry for her, except that it was silly to run off like that. On the other hand, Jenny Marzen, whatever her faults, was being manful about the whole thing, although she was clearly put out, probably because she had believed herself the biggest name at the table—well, she was—and so expected to be the climactic speaker. “Jenny,” said Amy. “Would you like me to talk him out of it, so we can switch? I’m sure he’s wrong about this.” It really wouldn’t matter whether she spoke next or last. She was screwed anyway.

  “Nonsense,” said Jenny, touching up her lipstick. “No worries,” she said to Amy. “I just can’t believe Jazz ditched us. What a child!” She sighed. “This is exactly the kind of stunt that makes all of us look bad.” Amy guessed that by “us” she meant “women,” and she had to agree. “We roll with the punches!” she said in a raised voice. “Don’t we, Davy?”

  “I went two rounds with Virgil Akins once,” he said.

  “I have no idea who that is, Davy,” said Jenny, and Amy decided she wasn’t really so bad.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later Jenny Marzen was at the podium. True to her word, her topic was “rags to niches.” “They used to call it ‘genre,’” she began, “and now they call it ‘niche,’ and what’s interesting is that these are both French words, which we occasionally try to pronounce in the French way.” She wondered why there were no homegrown English words for the concept, and Amy wondered a little too and was sitting back for a possibly interesting speech, except that Jenny just abandoned the point and pressed on. She brought up the notion of niche as marketing tool but dropped it almost immediately, no doubt because to argue for it straight-faced would just remind her audience of the Irishman’s still-ringing sermon. Instead, she just talked about niches and how promiscuously they’d proliferated. She noted that there used to be a few: mysteries, westerns, romances, gothics, and that everything else was considered serious fiction. Now serious fiction—what they called lit-fic—was itself a niche, and all niches including lit-fic themselves had niches, and so on. Most of her speech was taken up just this way: she simply read off a list of fiction niches, making asides about each. It was an entertaining enough list. Romance had begotten First Love, Doctor-Nurse, Second Time Around (where the heroine was divorced), and so on. Among Romance’s grandchildren were Heaving Bosoms, Loins and Groins, paranormal romances, along with a huge subset of religious love stories, including Pentacostal, Sister-Wife, and Bonnet. The Bonnet novel, she had to explain, was Amish Courtship. She did the same for the genealogy of the serial killer novel, the school bus thriller, splatterpunk, steampunk, and preteen zombies.

  It was entertaining enough for a while, but soon her audience began to disengage, at which point she switched attention to the lit-fic genre and its descendants. Apparently there was no such thing anymore as just a novel. Among today’s serious fiction categories were metafiction, philosophical fiction, neuro-novels, magical realism, hyperrealism, hyporealism, antinovels, and she went on and on, to no discernible point.

  Amy tried to tune Jenny out and plan her speech but was overwhelmed with the sheer fall of words. God, she hated lists. And she was suddenly and utterly exhausted. She had slept on the plane, but it hadn’t been a real sleep, more of a coma, and hers had been a long and way too eventful day. She felt a bit light-headed too, probably because she hadn’t eaten anything but half a styrofoam bowl of tomato bisque. Maybe when her turn came she’d just stand up there and faint. And then, too soon, Jenny Marzen wound up her talk, and it was Amy’s turn. Davy poked her arm. “Akins was a welterweight,” he said.

  * * *

  Tom Maudine gave her a long introduction, to which Amy could not fully attend. She heard him say “Rip van Winkle” and that the American reading public was about to be hit with a wave of “brand-new stories.” Something will occur to me, she told herself as she took her place at the podium. This extremely rare coin was minted in 1949. Tom’s arm snaked around her as he placed bottled water next to the mike. When, she wondered, did we become so obsessed with hydration? Walkabout aborigines sucked moisture from the roots of trees, and they did all right. The television lights seemed brighter from here—not strong enough to overheat, but enough to blind her to the audience. I will address, she thought, not the invisible audience, not the camera’s eye, but the blinding light.

  “My grandmother,” she began.

  What about her grandmother? Amy had no idea. She had said “my grandmother,” the first thing that popped into her head, and basically assumed she would know what to say next. Maybe she should just sit back down. That would actually be pretty damn funny, but she owed something to Maxine. “Excuse me,” she said, and turned to Jenny. “What is a school bus thriller?” Big laughs, during which she figured out why she had said “my grandmother.”

  “My grandmother loved Photoplay magazine. Also Modern Screen and some others I can’t name, all movie magazines. When I would visit I would read them cover to cover. I had no idea who Jeanne Crain was, but I knew her dress size and what Janet Leigh cooked to please handsome hubby Tony Curtis. It was veal piccata.

  “My grandmother was a tireless reader. She had bookshelves crammed with Pearl Buck and Erle Stanley Gardner and Good News for Modern Man. She was the finest Scrabble player I ever knew. And while she’d probably gone to the movies a lot when she was young—she used to play piano for the silents—b
y the time I knew her, she seldom bothered. Still, she read Photoplay like a bible. One of the last times I saw her, she was complaining about Linda Cristal again, that hussy, who this time was stealing Bobby Darin away from Sandra Dee. By then, of course, I was all grown up. Who cared about Linda Cristal? We were bombing Cambodia.

  “In the late sixties and early seventies, that terrible time, when I thought about my grandmother I would inevitably think about those magazines, and how quaint they were. Imagine, I would think, how naive my country used to be, when bright citizens would waste brain cells on the antics of movie stars! All because of the Great Depression, I thought. That escapist need to gossip about beautiful strangers as though they lived right next door.

  “Gossip stopped in the seventies, the terrible seventies. We were serious people now.

  “And then sometime later—it must have been the eighties—I began to notice that gossip was back. Only this time it wasn’t movie stars. It was producers. Money men. I, who had once worried about who Pier Angeli was, was now supposed to recognize names like Bruckheimer, Evans, Lucas, and Simpson. And not just the producers. The directors, the screenwriters, the agents. The Business. The Industry. Magazines with the heft of telephone books devoted buckets of gloss to their faces, clothes, antics, the interior design of their houses. I noticed this and actually thought it amusing, and that it would eventually blow over. But as always, I was wrong.” Out there, on the other side of the white, somebody coughed.

  Amy stared back at the light until the coughing stopped. “Why are you here?” she asked. To herself, she sounded like the Great Wazoo, the stern character she had played sitting upon Carla’s ridiculous wooden throne, so she played it up and became the Great Wazoo. “Not that it isn’t nice to see you, but what does this Industry, the publishing Industry, have to do with you? Well, maybe some of you actually draw salary in that Industry, but what about the rest of you?

  “Are you writers? Then this is the last place you should be. Nothing’s going to rub off on you. Writing is not a communal enterprise. There is no community of writers, any more than there is a community of spiders. We don’t work in hives. We work alone. When we marry other writers, one of us gets eaten.

  “Are you readers? Then this is the last place you should be. We’re just talking here. We’re not gifted speakers. We’re not performers. We’re not, most of us, particularly wonderful to look at. Why seek out the men and women behind the page, when the best of us is on it?”

  Amy was fresh out. She had been working toward some point about business, about how they used to say that show business was everybody’s business, which was nonsense, and now the book business was supposed to be everybody’s business, and it had something to do with the malignant, apocalyptic rise of the corporation-state. Amy was sure there was some twinkle of truth in that tangle of just-formed ideas but had no hope of getting to it now. It was the stuff of smarter writers than she, and it belonged on the page anyway, not here. She was going to have to apologize and slink off. She would have felt worse, except that the entire event had pretty much been a bust. If it got written up anywhere, they would all look like crackpots and posers.

  “Why are you here?” shouted a woman on the other side of the light. Without a mike, she sounded like a heckler. Her voice was familiar.

  Tom Maudine appeared next to Amy, prepared to intervene, and Amy shooed him away.

  “Is that you, Hester?” Amy asked.

  “Yes,” said Hester Lipp.

  Amy wished she could see her. Did she actually look like Kate Hepburn with a giant mole on her nose? “I’m glad you asked,” she said.

  God bless Hester Lipp.

  “I am here because earlier this year I fell down and hit my head on a birdbath.”

  “I asked you a serious question,” shouted Hester Lipp.

  “You asked me an excellent question, and I gave you a serious answer.”

  Tom Maudine spoke into Amy’s mike. “There will be time for questions when the speaker is through.”

  “Which is now,” said Amy. She reassured him with a pat on the shoulder. He nodded and motioned to somebody, probably the person with the walking mike. Her fingertips had not touched a man’s jacketed shoulder in at least thirty years. She had never been much of a toucher, but when you danced, that’s where you put your left hand, and she’d forgotten how lovely that sensation was, the otherness of that sturdy, padded shelf.

  “The fall knocked me out and did some short-term damage to my memory,” she said, “and then I gave a rather eccentric interview—”

  “So that story you gave Chaz Molloy was true?” This from some invisible guy who had grabbed the mike.

  “Exactly,” said Amy. She went on to give them the whole story. She told about the horrifying sight of a total stranger waving and backing out of her driveway, the panicked flight to the emergency room, the old bag lady with the newspaper story, the noticing of that story by someone in the book business, the trickle of interest that grew from a few newspaper columns and blogs to a series of radio interviews and shows and finally to her appearance right here at this mildly televised event. She told them that as a result of all this she had begun writing stories again, and that when collected between hard covers, they would be called Birdbath Stories. She said that of all these absurd and, to her, mostly entertaining consequences, the happiest was the reappearance into her life of Maxine Grabow, and she ended by describing Maxine’s exasperated, tireless work on her behalf, unacknowledged until now. She did this for Maxine, who surely was watching. Amy looked right at her in the blinding light. “I am here accidentally and just for the moment,” she said. She smiled, waved good-bye, and took her seat. It was over.

  Possibly forever, since she had given up her secrets, and happily too. Something was finished now. She didn’t know what it was, but finishing it felt wonderful.

  Amy had left the audience in some disarray, with Hester Lipp yelling, or maybe it was some other woman, some anti-accident Christian, and somebody else spoke into the mike, and poor Tom tried to mop up, and then applause started, at first timid, but it kept going and started to build. “Let’s hear it for our writers,” said Tom, and it rose to a level which, while not literally thunderous, was a modest roar, a long one, embellished with shouts and whistles.

  “They love you,” said Jenny Marzen.

  “No,” said Amy, “they just love that I shut up and sat down.” Already she was picturing that silver morning train, the Chicago Limited, that wonderful three-day lie-down as her bed clicked and swayed west past cities and farmland and through scrub and desert and mountain all the way back home to her dog and her house and her own life. She was done.

  “And now,” said Tom Maudine, “let the tweets begin!”

  “Goddamn it all to hell,” said Davy Goonan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dead Zone

  Amy loved trains just as much as she hated planes. For long-distance travel, a train was a great chugging cradle and the only mode that was at once civilized and somehow natural. Monet lived long enough to paint airplanes but didn’t. And even today, when trains no longer puffed sensuous clouds of smoke and steam, their grave and mournful essence remained. Hearing their night cries, whether from within or afar, Amy couldn’t shake the sense that, alone of all machines, they were sentient, tragic creatures. When they called out, they weren’t warning human beings, who paid increasingly less attention to them no matter what they did; they were singing to one another and themselves. I’m still here. Not gone yet.

  She napped from New York to the middle of Ohio, waking now and then to jot a dream in her notebook, a silly thing about dinosaurs, and how a few of the larger ones actually had coexisted with people for a brief time, only the people didn’t take them seriously. Their scale was just too outlandish: they were too big to be killed, and anyway they were inedible. Their hides were impenetrable. Also they were no fun to look at. You couldn’t take them in, really, unless you spied one from a great distance, in
a valley or something, and then you saw that, take away their size, and they weren’t all that impressive. They lacked color, speed, variety. There were just a few different shapes, that was all, so you could classify them without effort. They weren’t interesting. The world was such a buzzing, dangerous, riotous place. Dinosaurs weren’t worth thinking about. You couldn’t learn from dinosaurs. As people lost interest in dinosaurs, they stopped seeing them, and hardly a month went by when somebody didn’t wander stupidly in front of one and get himself obliterated. Parents warned their children to watch out, to look both ways, but the lessons were forgotten, like the dinosaurs themselves. You couldn’t very well watch out for something you had ignored into transparency. In the end the dinosaurs died, not from a comet or an epidemic or a long drought, but of heartbreak and humiliation.

  Amy’s dream read like the idiot child of Ray Bradbury and Italo Calvino. She continued for a while picturing dinosaurs thundering sedately through the cornfields of Indiana and Illinois. She hated symbols, literary and non, especially her own, the ones projected on her private movie screen during dreamtime. They were always embarrassingly obvious. She was willing to concede that her antic projectionist knew what he was doing—that every little symbol had a meaning all its own—but would have enjoyed, just once, a bit of mystery. Well, those dream-spiders who had transformed into disembodied hands had been mysterious, but she had given up on what they meant. She didn’t dream about them anymore—although whenever she mentioned spiders, as she had done in her Whither speech, she would flash on that nightmare afterimage from her childhood, that hand perched like a Hieronymus Bosch animal on her bedside table as though posing for the cameras.

  Anyway the dinosaurs were trains. Or the trains were dinosaurs. Either way, she was not about to write a story for them. She fell back asleep, waking only for the changeover in Chicago.