Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  The Southwest Chief crossed the Mississippi at suppertime, rolling through Fort Madison, Iowa, on its way to Missouri and Kansas. Amy sat in the observation car, messing with her laptop. The New York–Chicago train had boasted wireless Internet access, but Amy had been sleepy then. Now she figured she should email Maxine, maybe even do something with her blog, but evidently there would be no wireless access until she reached the coast. “The entire Southwest is a dead zone,” said the conductor, “except for Albuquerque.” So she leaned back to watch her country roll out to the west, which was much better than blogging.

  Amy had never really seen America before. Though she and “Bob,” newly and horribly wed, had driven to California three months after Max’s death, she had paid scant attention to the changing scenery, instead focusing all her energies on pretending to be alone in the car. That she was sharing intimate space with a person who revolted her on every level was something that she simply accepted as part of her afterlife, the details of which hardly mattered. She had believed herself old and cast in stone. Amy gazed now at that forty-year-old child in frank amazement. What had been wrong with her? At the time, and throughout that whole marriage, she had anesthetized herself with food, wine, and bourbon but had hardly suffered blackouts. It was as though she had been self-abducted and brainwashed.

  For instance, had the newlyweds crossed the big river at Fort Madison, Memphis, or St. Louis? She really ought to remember that. Had she seen the Gateway Arch firsthand? She thought so but wasn’t sure. She seemed, sort of, to recall “Bob” making some lame wisecrack about it—but then that was his response to everything, so she might be making it up. She had always made “Bob” self-conscious. Everything he said to her was painstakingly rehearsed in his mind, then presented to her as an offering, as though at an altar. As though she were the Great Wazoo.

  Until now, Amy had avoided thinking about him, and she’d always assumed this was because she was ashamed of the whole three-year episode, the cretinous marriage, the contemptuous way she had treated him. He had brought out the very worst in her. She had no respect for him and even less for herself for having married him, and she certainly didn’t need to torment herself with the whole sordid episode at this stage of her life.

  She closed her eyes and switched focus to the Whither conference, specifically the tweet brouhaha which had begun just at the point she had gathered up her belongings and which had raged for a full hour and would have gone on all night if the hotel people hadn’t thrown them out. Virtually every comment and question had been directed at her. “It’s a Battle of the Tweets!” Jenny kept announcing, and now, as Amy tried to recall specifics, all she saw in her mind’s eye was the cover of a Dr. Seuss (Tweeter Bitter Battle!!) featuring the vacuous leering faces of all three panelists perched on top of feathered, grotesquely elongated necks. She couldn’t remember the tweets themselves because she hadn’t actually seen them in print—they’d been read aloud by Tom Maudine—although she had been mildly impressed by how quickly the cyberwarriors had formed opposing armies, the (bare) majority supporting Amy’s position, most without understanding it, and the haters uniting in dudgeon over Amy’s various presumptions (about the worthlessness of literary conferences and the arachnoid tendencies of writers and so on). She remembered that for a while the tweets were statements rather than questions, so she could let her mind wander off, but that eventually she had been forced to engage. She could not recall her answers, just that they had provoked laughter from the crowd, so that by the time it was all over she had felt like a performing seal. Jenny had kept on about how much everybody loved her. Goonan, to whom she looked for a minty blast of self-absorption, had leaned close and told her that she was “a fine girl,” which would have pleased Amy no end forty years ago. The conference itself and the tweets, all of it, was markedly forgettable, and try as she might Amy could not sink into recollection or otherwise distract herself from “Bob,” who kept bobbing up before her like a cork.

  Her projectionist, who usually confined his antics to REM-sleep dreams, wasn’t going to let her change the subject. Amy waited, emptying her mind as best she could—she had never been good at that, but here she was, between two coasts, nowhere, unensconced, and just like that, she saw it, bobbing along beside “Bob”: the real reason she’d avoided confronting the whole cretinous three-year Bobisode was simply that “Bob” had been Max’s idea, and to contemplate that, to face that, was to recognize that Max had been wrong.

  * * *

  She had never been able to pinpoint just when “Bob” became part of the scenery in the Augusta house. While Max was alive, the house was always full, of friends, lovers, hangers-on. Most of them came for Max the charmer, but some came for Amy, and “Bob” was one of those. She noticed him here and there, mainly because he looked uncomfortable in blue jeans, as though he were trying to blend in, but also because he was always bringing her ashtrays and wine. She had initially assumed he was one of Max’s guys, some weird Middle American experiment. He was easily ten years older than they were, good-looking in a Tony Randall sort of way. But by the time Max was dying, she understood that “Bob” was there for her.

  “Why is he here?” she had asked Max one night, after everyone had gone home. She hadn’t needed to name “Bob” the odd man out.

  “He’s in love with you. He wants to marry you when I’m gone.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You could do a whole lot worse.”

  She had turned away shuddering, wondering if his meds were doing something to his mind. Max must know she had no plans to “do” anything after he was dead. After his death lay the Unthinkable.

  “He has money,” said Max, “and you won’t,” thus occasioning the only serious argument they ever had. Why, she had asked him, do you want me to have money? You know I don’t care about money, and he said that was why she should marry “Bob,” because she’d never made a plan in her life and she wasn’t getting any younger and she needed one, and it escalated from there, because they had been living an unplanned life, a wonderful unplanned life, that was the whole point, and when she had raised her voice and said that he had just looked back at her with raised eyebrows and an expression of what it took her days to admit was cold pity.

  They froze each other out for a while and then didn’t refer to the matter until the day before he died.

  “I had to live an unplanned life,” he said. “You didn’t. That’s all I meant.”

  She remembered that moment exactly. They were in the rescue truck on the way to the hospital because he had been too weak to walk to the car, but he was lucid, even animated. He took her hand; his eyes were bright. Agitated, she thought, recoiling from the disloyalty of a word used exclusively to describe pitiful old people. “It’s all right,” she told him. She kept saying that until he relaxed. No, that wasn’t true. She kept saying that to shut him up. Had she really believed he was agitated? No, she actually shut him down, knowing that he had only so many words left.

  Two and a half numb years later, sixty pounds heavier, and three thousand miles west of Augusta, she discovered what Max had tried to tell her. She had run out of paper clips and was fishing around in one of “Bob’s” desk drawers when she found the old viatical settlement papers and graded life insurance policies, all taken out on Max, the majority payable to “Bob.” She looked at them for a few seconds and returned them, and then took them out again. She did this numerous times. It took her most of the night to make herself read them and she still didn’t understand, beyond the stark fact that Max and “Bob” had had a complicated arrangement whereby “Bob” would profit greatly from Max’s death. Within twenty-four hours of the discovery, she had sent him packing. He hadn’t argued. When the divorce went through, she saw he had mismanaged and lost all that ugly money and hadn’t asked for half of the house, their only remaining asset. He just shuffled off, leaving no footprints, the only trace of his time with her the occasional waft of his undead cologne. She would be washing h
er face or making tea or rummaging through the garage looking for a screwdriver and there it would be, the zombie vapor of Brut, instantly summoning “Bob”—not his face or body but the Brut fact of him, irrefutable proof that he had once lived there. She would spray and scrub and throw things out and imagine for a few months that she had finally erased him, but eventually it would pop up again, Eau de Bob, an unnerving mix of vanilla, old moss, and what the CSI shows called decomp. To a premier scent hound like Alphonse, “Bob” must still be present everywhere, at all times. No wonder Alphonse was such a sardonic dog.

  Now, rolling through Topeka, alone in an observation car in the middle of the night, she allowed herself to dwell on those complicated financial arrangements. Max had tried to talk to her about life insurance more than once. Something about bets. The Wagers of Fear, he called them, trying to prod her into a smile. If you were terminally ill you could still buy insurance, but it wouldn’t pay off unless you lived a certain number of years. At the time he was pretty hale and was obsessed with this and up to his elbows in brochures and policy correspondence, all furnished by various brokers, one of whom apparently was “Bob.” He told her the premiums were high, and when he went to show her the figures she said it was a grotesque idea, and why did they have to talk about this now, and it was none of his business what she did after his death, she could take care of herself, thank you so much.

  From the time of diagnosis, she had declined to dwell on a future without him, not even in the form of what philosophers called a thought experiment. She did research medical and pharmacological treatments, anecdotes about miracle cures, and the typical progress of the disease, none of that was off-limits to Amy. She saw herself as his shining guardian. But money was taboo. Money meant the future, and Amy hated the future. She had hated it before he got sick, and then, she hated it even more. The future was an abomination.

  “Like every other animal on earth,” she used to boast, “I live in the present.” What a crock. She had said this for the first time at a party, a year or so before they got married. She must have been very young and very drunk. How pompous to make such a pronouncement anywhere, let alone at a party, for God’s sake. Had Max rolled his eyes? She couldn’t remember the people, the faces, just the flocked, bubbling wallpaper in his old apartment, bordello chic he called it, and the background music. Dylan singing “Country Pie.” Imagine comparing herself to other animals. She wouldn’t last five minutes in a forest. Surely he had rolled his eyes. What had he thought of her then, before their life together? She had no idea.

  Now she understood that this sort of thing—not fear of death, but dread of waking—was why she never left home. Away from home, surrounded by everything foreign, she could not numb herself, to memory, to truth. There was no escape here.

  What had he thought of her at the end, that he should entrust her future to a total stranger? Why, if he was so concerned about her future, hadn’t he made her the beneficiary of all those damn policies? He’d done this dumb thing with forethought, set her up with a caretaker, a man neither of them even liked, as though even he, even Blob, could do a better job of looking out for her than she could herself. Never mind the fact that he was spectacularly wrong about “Bob.” He had been wrong about her.

  The lights in the observation car dimmed. Amy moved to a swivel chair on the north side and leaned her forehead against the glass, canceling her own reflection. The stars were out in force all over the huge Kansas sky, brightening as she watched. She kept her eye on them through Wichita, Hutchinson, Dodge City. Until he died, she had never paid much attention to the night sky. Afterward, she had taken to scanning it regularly. She still did. Alphonse would be somewhere in the yard, skulking behind a bush or investigating spoors, and she would look up without planning to, without meaning to, and her thoughts would fall away, and she would make herself very still, alert to any sign, however tiny, of his presence there. As though he were hiding.

  The heaven of her childhood had been all sky blue and creamy cumulus, a place where sunny days blazed on inexorably. This nightmare of unending daylight had soon led her to the terrifying, inhuman idea of infinity itself. She would lie awake trying to make peace with the idea, to accept it, world without end, as a good thing. By the time she was ten, she had lost her religion. If heaven had been described like this, like the night sky, black, implacable, perhaps she could have hung on to some remnant of it.

  Where did they go, the dead? Nowhere! crow the atheists, and she could respect the conviction but not the swagger. Had they ever seen a person die? Had they ever seen a body subside, abandoned like an old suit by its departing spirit? They ditch us, the dead, they shrug us off and leave us with nothing. Memories were worthless. At least to Amy, who remembered words and sounds, not images. No sooner had he left than she began to forget his face. She could describe it in detail, build it feature by feature, sentence by sentence, but he had taken all the pictures with him. And he had taken more. He had taken his memories of her, his knowledge of her, leaving her unknown. And now she had to wonder if he had known her at all.

  Here was grief. The ongoing erosion of faith. The dead do not simply leave. They go on leaving forever, and what they leave behind stirs, shifts, fades. Amy almost cried. Then she took out her notebook and began to write. The dinosaurs weren’t trains. They were writers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Star

  Amy had been home for three days before she listened to her answering machine messages or read any email, logging on only to check the dates when messages were sent, so she could verify that Maxine hadn’t died. Her phone lines, of course, were unjacked from the wall. She fed and communed with her dog. She began three new stories and finished one. “Storyteller” transformed Patrice Garrotte, his mother, and herself into a single person, a twelve-year-old girl diagnosed with a terminal illness. The girl has never had an active imagination, but now, confined to a hospital bed, plagued with pain, terror, and the anguish of her family, she weaves a narrative populated at first by movie stars and TV detectives, men to whom she is intensely sexually attracted without knowing what this means, and then, as she nears death, the narrative turns into a mystery about a lost ring or a cryptic entry from her own diary or the murder of an unknown woman, and the engine of the mystery perpetually stalls and restarts, but all the while its population grows, new characters strolling out of rooms, rooms telescoping into more rooms, so that no sooner is one question resolved than two more bloom in its place. The narrative, which begins as an act of will, slowly rises, weightless, and her with it, not toward a white light, but into chains of possibility, a web of paper chains extending not forever but to a perfect vanishing point. She liked the story, although not as much as she had the original, the story Patrice had used to save her life.

  She should invite him to join Carla’s retreat workshop. As promised, she had taught the Birdhouse Six (Ricky, Surtees, Tiffany, Robetussien, Brie, and Yoga Pants) once a month since the workshop started up. Actually, they were down to five, as Yoga Pants had left in a huff over Amy’s “negativity” during the second group critique of Skinny White Chick. In all fairness, the session had been unusually brutal, but with Kurt Robetussien and Brie Spangler leading the charge and Amy being forced to mop up after them. Since people new to workshops usually tread lightly, Kurt and Brie had surprised Amy with their frank distaste for the novel’s narcissistic protagonist. “We are all the heroes of our own stories,” said Brie, “but all that means, as Mary McCarthy said, is that we live in suspense from day to day.” “The trick,” said Kurt, “would be to make us heroes in the imaginations of other people.” Amy wondered about Kurt’s patients. Did he give them his full medical attention, or did he let his mind wander, to literary matters? It seemed almost unfair that he could do both. While Yoga Pants sputtered that her central character wasn’t her at all, that she was a wholly fictional character (“Who looks like you,” sniped Tiffany, “is divorced like you, and lives in a condo in La Costa”), Amy wondere
d why she was needed here. She’d made a half-hearted attempt to placate Yoga Pants and rehabilitate her stupid manuscript but was relieved when the skinny white hero actually grabbed copies of it out of everybody’s hands and slammed out of the Birdhouse.

  Amy dropped Patrice Garrotte a line extending an invitation, copying in Carla and Harry B. Then, feeling good about “Storyteller” and virtuous about devoting a few minutes to her workshop duties, she decided to glance through her emails.

  At once it became apparent that in order to make sense of what people were writing to her, she’d have to backtrack a full week and begin reading the letters sent during and immediately after the Whither C-SPAN thing, which apparently people had actually watched on TV. Maxine was the first: her subject line, What did I tell you?, was the message itself. Amy guessed this was an affirmation, since the next twenty messages were forwards from senior editors and agents, some of whose names she actually recognized, along with literary columnists from the Times, the ARB, and The New Republic. The only forwarded message she could bring herself to read was from Lex Munster, and that only because he was the one who had started the ball rolling in the first place. Lex Munster, whom she pictured as a cross between Fred Gwynne and Philip Seymour Hoffman, was the Perkins/ARB editor who had read Holly Antoon’s article last New Year’s. The guy Maxine said had Asperger’s and a nose for literary news. Now he was asking Maxine if Amy would join some ungodly rolling panel of lit-fic writers whose mission it was to sprinkle enlightenment dust on bookstores and college campuses throughout North America. “Stars like Morrison and Roth (we hope) will join at some of the larger venues, but we’re looking for a core of six whom we can count on week-to-week. Amy would be perfect.” Surely Maxine didn’t expect Amy to do this. Unless they could do it in a tour bus, like Loretta Lynn.