by Grimes, Tom
When I began Book Two of my novel in December, something odd happened. Rather than being lucid, my thoughts were imprecise. Words stubbornly resisted being linked to one another to form intelligible sentences. Paragraphs seemed endless and muddled, and the work exhausted me. Every day, I left the page with a sense of defeat rather than minor satisfaction. Soon a mild but persistent anxiety spread from my nerves to my abdomen. A circular, golf-ball-sized area burned inside my stomach where my rib cage parted. Antacids relieved the pain, although not entirely, and the persistent irritation added to my lack of focus and my fear that I wouldn’t be able to finish the novel. What if I’d created complications of such idiotic magnitude that I couldn’t extricate my characters from them? How would I sustain the story’s momentum and yet make its plotlines converge seamlessly? Was the book too difficult to write because I was sick? Or was I sick because the book was too difficult to write? I didn’t know.
So I made an appointment to see a gastroenterologist at the university hospital. He had black hair and the part on the left side of his head resembled a white candlestick. His glasses made him look slightly adolescent, giving me the impression that he’d gone directly from high school to performing surgeries. As instructed, I removed my sweater, flannel shirt, and thermal undershirt—it was now winter—and lay on his examination table. Then his dry, chubby fingertips pressed my stomach in various locations, so deeply at times that they seemed to touch my spine. He asked me to sit up, told me I was likely fine, but suggested having a peek at my intestines with an endoscope just to be sure. The morning of the procedure, I was not allowed to eat or drink. At the hospital, I wore an open-backed gown and lay sideways on a gurney, facing a television monitor that allowed me to see the progress of the scope. I declined a sedative because I didn’t want to be groggy for the rest of the day. The gastroenterologist patted my shoulder with one latex-gloved hand and said, “Try to relax.” Then he shoved a scope the length of a fishing rod down my throat. I gagged, and while a nurse held my head in place, I made sounds like air and water being sucked down a drain. An instant later, I saw the scope crawling through my stomach like a worm. Its glass eye illuminated the channels of my intestines and produced a grainy black-and-white image on the monitor. “I’m seeing nothing,” he said, “No Barrett’s esophagus, no ulcers, no abdominal perforation.” He twisted the rod’s handle clockwise, hummed a little ditty, turned the rod counterclockwise, and then, with magician-like quickness, retracted the scope. I closed my mouth and stopped choking as I was wheeled into a recovery room. Twenty minutes later, he appeared and said, “You’re fine.” I found the news disappointing. Since he’d discovered nothing, the pain had to be psychological, existential, or, quite possibly, literary.
Nevertheless, I forced myself to write. But the book’s plotlines lost their rigidity and began to overlap. After I’d written twenty new pages I was completely lost. To find the novel’s direction, I went back over the pages using three Magic Markers—black, green, and red. I drew boxes around sentences, sometimes as many as ten sequential sentences, sometimes around only one. Once I’d separated each section by color, I retyped and polished it, clarifying motives and events. Then I linked the sections to one another like the boxcars of a train, and the book began to move forward again. I continued to work, feeling ill and isolated. I’d requested a spot in Frank’s spring workshop, but I’d been assigned to a workshop taught by a visiting writer. When I appeared in Frank’s office bearing my notice, he laughed before I said a word.
“I can’t be in your workshop?” I spoke without hesitation, my anxiety about our fondness for each other long since passed.
“I wanted you in another class,” he said. “It’s a pretty small group. You’ll raise the level of discourse.”
I collapsed into my armchair, and Frank smiled. He liked knowing that I needed him, but he also displayed an affection that surpassed his hopes for my novel. I’d become more than Frank’s student, and more than his friend, although neither of us mentioned what our relationship ultimately might become.
Grudgingly, I attended the new workshop, in which I knew virtually no one and had little confidence in the instructor, although I liked him personally. Our classroom faced north, and by the time class began the sun had nearly set behind the horizon line of bare trees. The buzzing fluorescent lights overhead did nothing to dispel the gloom, which was magnified by the smallness of our group. Rather than the normal fourteen, there were only seven of us, and our fitful discussions lacked verve and acuity. Many stories were weak and I often found myself having nothing constructive to say. I endured the two hours, contributing few comments, concerned only with catching up with Frank at the Mill, or in the parking lot, where he often waited for me, his car idling in the dark, the heat turned up high or the defroster blowing against the icy windshield when I climbed in. One afternoon, a student—I can’t remember his name, but he was fair-haired, slight, wore glasses, and was from Canada—put up a story set in a jungle. The story’s cardinal sin, in lit-speak, was that it didn’t establish a set of rules by which the reader could understand and contextualize the story’s meaning. For example, when Kafka announces in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis that poor Gregor wakes up to find himself changed into a giant dung beetle, the reader knows that Gregor won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart. The less “realistic” a story is, the more precise, concrete, and convincing its details need to be. All fabulists observe this rule: Rushdie, Calvino, García Márquez. Unfortunately, my Canadian classmate did not, even though his story featured philosophizing chimpanzees and a talking piece of luggage. My written comments on a copy of his manuscript were restrained and polite. I wrote, “You lose me here” and “I don’t quite follow,” and concluded with “Hope these notes help” because I agreed with Kurt Vonnegut, who once compared writing a savage review of a novel to “using a sledgehammer to smash an ice cream sundae.” And as I didn’t want to hurt my classmate’s feelings, I remained quiet. When prompted by the instructor to offer a few words of advice, I kept my response brief. Then he smiled and said, “Come on. I know you have more thoughts than that.” Indeed, I did. And had the story not been thirty-eight tedious and confusing pages, I might have expressed them with more sympathy. But having wasted six hours trying to make sense of the manuscript, I’d lost all interest in being kind. For five minutes, I cited grammatical, logical, and structural mistakes. I asked what the suitcase looked like. Was it leather or canvas? Did it have snaps or a zipper? Since the story’s set in a jungle, why don’t you mention heat? Or macaws squawking. Or smells, like elephant shit, chimp feces, and rotting bananas. And if you insist on interpreting Nietzsche, it would help if you had a clue as to what he actually meant.
Across the room, my classmate had adopted the classic posture of a workshop student who was having his or her work mercilessly criticized. He’d stationed one elbow on the table, pressed one fist against one cheek, and focused his eyes on his manuscript as he chiseled a hole in it with the tip of his pen. Silence followed my comments. Then the instructor said, “Anyone else?” When no one raised a hand, we passed our manuscript copies to the author.
As others shuffled out of the room, a classmate said to me, “Jesus.”
“You think he hates me?” I said.
“You were pretty relentless.”
“How did that happen? I didn’t even want to say anything.”
“Yeah, well. I guess you failed.”
Several weeks later, I submitted my novel’s latest chapter and during a subdued discussion regarding its countless flaws, my classmate didn’t say a word. When class ended, we twirled scarves around our necks, slipped into our coats, and tugged on our gloves. Outside, I made my way toward Frank’s snow-crusted car, its taillights glowing in the dark. I’d promised never to read criticism of my work. I could always return to it later. For the moment, maintaining the novel’s momentum was crucial. I couldn’t be distracted. Yet curiosity trumped discipline and I peeked. “Congratulations,” I r
ead, “you’ve created the most despicable narrator in American literature!” Although I shouldn’t have been stunned, I crept in beside Frank, and with the car’s dusty heating vents blowing dry heat in my face I said, “I can’t believe it! He hates me!” As Frank’s olive green Plymouth swiveled up an icy hill, I read my Canadian classmate’s diatribe aloud. The more vicious the rant became, the harder Frank laughed, enjoying my outrage. “Listen to this! ‘Your misanthropy is matched only by your arrogance. And your snide narrator isn’t a persona, it’s you!’”
When Frank stopped smacking the steering wheel with one hand and composed himself, he said, “What did you expect?” (I had told Frank about my outburst in class.) “He got even with you. So what?”
“Is anything he says true?”
“No. You’re nothing like your narrator.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.”
“It’s a mask. You have to wear it to write the book. When you’re done, it’ll fall off. Just keep working.”
“Too much seems to be happening. Half the time I’m confused.”
“That’s not necessarily bad. It means you’re chasing something.”
“Can you read the new pages?”
“Sure. Leave them at the office. But hey, it’s admission time. Who knows when I’ll get to them? So don’t hold your breath.”
Two nights later, a writer with a huge following came to read at Van Allen Hall, which had several hundred raked seats, a stage, a podium, and a large, sterile, high-ceilinged lobby, much like the one in which I first saw Frank. Charlie had gone into hibernation and rarely came out for social events, so Jody and I went to the reading without him. We were standing amid the crowd when Frank appeared, cloaked in a gray raincoat. He grabbed my forearm. “Come over here,” he said.
Frank found an empty, padded bench and pulled me down next to him. “The new pages are terrific,” he said with an urgency in his voice, an unmistakable but grave excitement.
“You’re sure?” I panicked and felt light-headed.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Because I haven’t felt well for months.”
“It doesn’t show.”
“I thought you wouldn’t be able to read the pages for a while.”
“I read the first sentence and couldn’t stop. The voice is incredibly strong. And the rhythms, my God. I read some of it to Maggie.” Then he added, “Listen, you have to finish this book.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not kidding, it’s a big book. You’ve taken things to a whole new level. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I write sentences and trust my instincts.”
“Well, it’s working. So keep doing it.”
Then Frank joined the famous writer, whose name I can’t remember and whose image I can no longer see. Trailing the others, Jody and I walked into the auditorium and found seats. “Good news?” she whispered.
“Sort of. He thinks it’s great.” The lights around the podium dimmed, and everyone fell silent. Midway through the introduction I said, “But he told me I had to finish it. What if I can’t?”
“You can.”
“Yeah, but what if?”
“Then he’ll understand. He’s your teacher, not your father.”
CHAPTER SIX
March arrived. In Florida, spring training was under way. My anxiety lifted as the days lengthened, and gradually mysterious pain in my stomach subsided. Sentences found their shape more easily. I didn’t know where the novel would end, but I did know where it was headed. I’d locked into its downward arc, the slope beyond the story’s midpoint. Plotlines began to converge. The book regained its momentum. And, in the midst of this, my sister attempted to kill herself.
We rarely spoke on the telephone, yet the Tuesday night before I left for Florida I had an impulse to call her. But it was after 10 : 00 PM in New York. Her boys would be asleep, and I didn’t want to wake them. So I shook off the odd beckoning, although I told Jody that I felt like I needed to call my sister.
“Why?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t believe in telepathy, or in the existence of a unique universal vibration that connected my sister’s consciousness to mine. If either truly existed, she may have called me. Instead, she waited for her nine- and eleven-year-old sons and her husband to fall asleep. Then she quietly descended the carpeted stairs, walked into the kitchen, opened a cabinet drawer, removed a carving knife, and, gripping its handle tightly, drove it toward her stomach. She must have expected the blade to slice through her fatty tissue and puncture an organ, as if her midsection were no firmer than melting butter. Instead, the blade made a tiny incision, as thin and wide as a stitch, and a speck of blood opened like a rose on her white nightgown. She tried to plunge the knife in again, but she lacked the strength to disembowel herself. She left the kitchen, and her slippers tapped against her bare heels as she padded into the living room. Beside the oak coffee table, she dropped to her knees, pressed the knife’s handle against the floor, held the blade upright, and fell on it. But like a thick band of rubber, her stomach formed a small, concave circle around the blade’s tip. It stopped the knife from perforating her skin and pushed back her hand. She let the knife fall to the floor, glided into the kitchen like a ghost, unsheathed the serrated blades of an electric carving knife, plugged its cord into a socket, moved the “on” button with her thumb, and when the blades began to grind so quickly that their teeth blurred, she slid them across her left wrist. Blood spattered the floral-print wallpaper. Red drops sprayed the yellow refrigerator door. Blood stained her nightgown, the linoleum tile, the hanging calendar. It rolled down her arm and pooled in the crook of her elbow. The sound woke her husband. When he found her, she dropped the knife, which skittered across the tiles like a top. More blood now smeared her nightgown, clung to her hair, and dappled her face. By the time her boys appeared in the kitchen doorway, she seemed to be wearing a horror mask. The boys began tearing at their hair, trying to rip it from their skulls. My sister’s husband wrapped her wrist in a dish towel. As he dialed 911, they ran into the dining room and circled its table, shrieking. In Iowa, I opened a book. While the paramedics hoisted my sister’s gurney and slid it into an EMS vehicle, I grew drowsy, turned out the light, and closed my eyes. Twenty years later, I’m still haunted by how different my sister’s life might have been if I had picked up the phone and called.
The following morning, with nearly everyone on spring break, I passed no more than two or three people as I walked to Frank’s office, where I found him seated at his desk. White manuscripts surrounded him like piles of fresh snow. They’d been divided according to each applicant’s chance for admission to the workshop. Seven hundred had no chance, fifty had some chance, a dozen had already been selected. When I knocked, he peered over the manuscript he was reading and smiled. “Hey, come on in.” He tossed the pages onto his desk and swiveled his chair to face me. Then he lowered his voice, feigned concern, and said, “I hope you’ve bought your sunscreen, Tom.” Once again, his expression brightened. “When do you leave?”
Without sitting I said, “I have to go to New York. My sister tried to kill herself.”
“Jesus Christ.”
I explained what had happened.
“And her boys saw it?”
I nodded.
“How old are they?” Frank’s voice echoed the one he’d created to describe his adolescent terror in Stop-Time.
“Nine and eleven.”
“That’s not good. That could be trouble.”
I told him I’d try to fly from New York to Florida.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What do you have to be sorry about?”