Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great. When does it come out?”

  “May. You think Frank will resent it?”

  “No.”

  “Then would you do me a favor? Read the edited version, because the book sucks.”

  The clumsiness of my prose stunned me. Why would anyone want to publish the novel? I felt ashamed to have it attached to my name. For two weeks, I worked at the dining room table, rewriting the novel sentence by sentence. I red-lined deletions and penciled in additions. The finished pages resembled a Pollock canvas. As I retyped them, I continued to improve the book one word at a time. Exhausted, I let Jody read the new draft, and once she’d approved it, I handed it to Charlie and hoped for his blessing. I trusted his judgment for a reason besides friendship.

  During our first workshop, he’d written a story called “The Point.” Frank, who rarely doled out praise, suggested it might even be publishable. “Although you use ‘and then’ a lot,” he said. “And you overdo the physical description of Mrs. Gurney.” He then read it aloud: “‘Her breasts sagged away like sacks of wet sand, slumping off to either side.’” Frank paused. When he continued, his voice rose as he pinpointed a textual flaw. “‘There were long whitish scars on them, as if [and I’m italicizing to convey Frank’s emphasis] a wild man or a bear had clawed her.’ They’re stretch marks, for Christ’s sake! Jesus! She’s thirty-seven! From where I’m sitting, that looks pretty good. Lighten up!”

  Before class, I’d found Charlie seated on the hallway floor, his back tilted against the brick wall. I squatted next to him. “The story’s great,” I said. “I don’t mean workshop great. I mean, great great.” I told Charlie to mail it to the Atlantic Monthly. Its fiction editor, Michael Curtis, had liked my work, and I wrote him a letter, praising “The Point.” He rejected the story. A month later, the New Yorker accepted it, and, later, the story appeared in The Best American Stories 1991.

  Why had Michael Curtis rejected Charlie’s story? Why had Frank been enchanted by my novel, which someone else had rated B-? No one knows. The ground a writer stands on is no firmer than water. Still, I needed Charlie’s assurance that my book was, at some level, good.

  Several days passed, and I interpreted his silence as disappointment. But something else had kept him away. He found the book unspeakably sad. “At one point, I just had to put down the pencil and take a walk,” he said.

  The revision astonished my editor. “What happened?” he said.

  I answered, “I went to school.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The week I submitted my revised novel with its new title, A Stone of the Heart (a line taken from a Yeats poem), Frank read in public from Body & Soul. I sat in the crowded auditorium’s balcony as he shuffled into the spotlight much like he had in Key West. His woolen blazer drooped from his shoulders, its visible pocket misshapen and baggy from being reached into repeatedly for a pack of cigarettes. Perhaps the balcony’s angle changed my perspective, but he appeared shorter than six foot two and projected less power from this distance than he did in class, which was the only setting where I’d seen him assert authority—authority that pertained solely to, as he called it, the “text.” At times, I believed Frank could run an entire workshop without students and not notice our absence. He and the “text” would argue.

  As a boy, he’d lived in New York City in a small, Upper East Side apartment where his bedroom’s shelves held eight hundred paperbacks. He wrote in Stop-Time: I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another. Safe in my room with milk and cookies I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. “I’m a novelist,” he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say.

  In Body & Soul, he transferred these feelings, almost without a fictional filter, to his protagonist, Claude, a gifted pianist. Every writer has obsessions. A boy’s vulnerability was Frank’s. (He once asked our class to appreciate the main character’s plight in an otherwise weak story. “But you feel the defenselessness of the boy,” he said, “the boy.”)

  Frank adjusted the podium’s brass reading lamp and microphone. Then he began to read about the summer afternoon Claude wandered into an RKO movie theater on Eighty-sixth Street and saw:Cartoons! Followed by a newsreel, the narrator’s voice both urgent and important, sounding over the flash of images. And then the first feature, about a tough sailor who marries a librarian but doesn’t take life seriously until they have a baby. The second feature described the adventures of a boy who could talk to horses. Claude watched with total attention, so captivated that it was a shock when the movie ended, as if his soul had been flying around in the dark and had now slammed back into his body. Outside, the unnaturally still street and the implacable heat seemed to claim him, to smother the quicksilver emotions of the films and flatten him in his contemplation of the meaningless, eternal, disinterested reality of the street, of its enduring drabness. To come out of the RKO was to come down, and he rushed home to the safety and company of the piano.

  The prose had vigor. Frank’s voice didn’t. It became apparent that he hadn’t prepared for the reading. His voice lacked inflection. He mumbled. At one point, he faltered when he read a passage concerning Claude’s abusive, and freakishly large, “six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound” mother:Claude sat down on the floor. He was attentive to her mood, to its direction, in case escape was necessary. Sometimes when he ran around the couch or slipped under her arm she would lose interest. He knew that almost always when she hit him, she held back.

  Then Frank’s voice croaked. He didn’t stop reading for long, but he adjusted his glasses before continuing:There were times, for instance, lying on his cot with the radio off or sitting on the floor motionless, staring into space, when Claude would become sharply aware of his own existence and the fact that he was alone. Either the basement apartment was empty, his mother out to work or her discussion meeting, or she was holed up in her room. The sense of being alone would come over him, causing not so much fear as uneasiness.

  Briefly silent, Frank reached into his pocket, removed a handkerchief, turned his head (I could see his profile), and blew his nose. He barely finished the chapter. The following morning, I went to see him in his office.

  “I can see the headline,” he said, the moment I walked in. “Doddering Professor Bursts into Tears over His Own Work!”

  “I don’t think anyone noticed,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Only a few hundred of us.”

  “Bastard.” Then he smiled.

  “Listen,” I said, “I have to tell you something, and this is kind of awkward.” I hesitated. “I’m having a novel published—but by a little house. The advance is only five hundred dollars.” I wanted to underscore the publication’s insignificance.

  Unfazed, Frank said, “Well, you’ll get a lot more for this one.”

  “There’s no problem?”

  “Why would there be a problem?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought there might be.” At the time, I didn’t consider my persistent anxiety unusual. “Do you think I should ask people for jacket quotes?”

  “No,” Frank said, “let’s save them for the new novel.”

  When my slim book review galleys arrived, I gave him a copy. At one hundred thirty-one pages, the book felt measly. Frank must have read it in an hour.

  I received a sample of the dust jacket and, like most writers, I hated it. When I called my publisher I was told the jacket couldn’t be changed. Besides, the sales force loved it. (My publisher had no sales force.) In the illustration, my narrator had thick black hair and a face so fat that the bo
y appeared to be chinless. I’d been overweight as a kid (and lean, almost skinny, ever since), but I may have overdone the physical description of myself and left the illustrator with only this to work from: “I undressed, and while I was naked I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror which hung above my bureau. I was enormous. There were two thick crescents of fat hanging from my pectorals and my navel was deep and wide enough to hold a walnut. Over my hips were bands of flesh as thick and soft as loaves of packaged bread. Beneath my stomach the wild, unfinished hair growing above my genitals seemed pathetic.” I studied the cover up close. Then I set it on a shelf and backed away to see how it would look to a stranger who noticed it in a bookstore. As I did, space became time. With each step, eternity swallowed another second, and the sensation matched the slight melancholy I felt whenever I looked through a car’s rear window, watching my life vanish at sixty miles an hour. The past turned the book into an object that belonged to someone else. Even my name, nine red letters at the base of the jacket, seemed unfamiliar, and rather than reinforcing my existence the finished book drained it of meaning. Years of work, frustration, doubt, anger, longing, and, finally, a tentative satisfaction with the novel no longer mattered. Notebooks, dulled pencils, typewriter ribbons, reams of paper, keystrokes, letters daubed with Wite-Out, smoked cigarettes, coffee rings, postage stamps, and letters—“Dear Editor, Thank you for your consideration,” “Sorry, it’s not right for us”—were erased in an instant, like a superfluous word from a page. I crossed the room, removed the dust jacket from the shelf, and filed it with the complete manuscript. Then I put it out of my mind and resumed work on the new novel, which, now, was where I lived.

  Several weeks passed, and although Frank and I saw each other every week in class, neither of us mentioned the book. But after our final workshop, Frank tilted his head and I followed him into his office. He said, “I’ve read the book. It’s okay.” Seated, he laid one hand on his desk to indicate A Stone of the Heart. “But how you got from here,” he said, “to here,” he raised his other hand a foot above his head to indicate the new novel, “is amazing.” Then he lowered his arm and leaned back in his chair. “Honestly, I don’t know how you did it.”

  “I wrote twenty hours a week for ten years.”

  “Well, it shows.”

  Connie simply said, “I loved it.” She didn’t discriminate between the two novels. To her, I was one continuous being, rather than one who had developed in stages. But to Frank, my life began the moment he read my application manuscript.

  With the semester over, people began to leave town. A few friends and I had agreed to help another friend and his wife move. As we hoisted their washing machine and attempted to maneuver it through a doorway, one of them said, “Nice review of your book in the Times.”

  “What review?” I said. “When?”

  “The one in this coming Sunday’s Times Book Review.”

  “But it’s Monday.”

  “Prairie Lights sells copies early.”

  I continued to hold my share of three hundred pounds. Then, not wanting to seem egotistical, I hauled boxes for another two hours. When the last one had been stuffed inside the truck I said, “I have to go.” I walked to the corner, turned, then sprinted to the bookstore. Outside its front door I stopped, winded, less than a yard from Frank.

  “The Times reviewed my book,” I said.

  Inside, we each removed a copy from the periodical stand near the register. The review appeared on page seven. Frank said, “It’s up front, that’s good. It means they like it.” We read in silence:May 20, 1990

  A STONE OF THE HEART By Tom Grimes. 131 pp. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. $15.95.

  Creative writing programs have been springing up around the country like weeds and, for the most part, they’ve been given a bad rap, with critics complaining that they produce only derivative “workshopped” writing. Now here’s strong evidence to the contrary. Tom Grimes is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his compact and affecting first novel, which records a few days in the life of a disintegrating Irish-American family, is a very professional job. “A Stone of the Heart” is set in Queens in 1961, as Roger Maris is striving to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record, a goal that rivets the attention of Michael, the 14-year-old protagonist. “The feat seemed so herculean,” he recalls, “compared to the accomplishments and work of my father.”

  Why had I been linked to Iowa? I hadn’t even written the novel at Iowa. I skipped to the final paragraph: “A Stone of the Heart” renders the afflictions of adolescence in both unique and universal terms, and Tom Grimes is, in workshop terminology, a “natural” writer. He would probably have developed and flourished on his own, but perhaps not so soon or so well.

  Frank said, “Not bad,” and returned his copy. While I opened my wallet to pay for one (I wanted to buy five, but was too embarrassed to do so), he said, “See you.” Then he left, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Prairie Lights had arranged a reading and Frank, breaking his policy of not attending student events, arrived with Maggie. He lingered behind the last row of chairs. At one point, he wandered off to browse in the bookstore’s mystery section. Once I finished reading, he appeared, carrying two novels under his arm. Before I began to sign books, he drifted toward me. “You should read slower,” he said. Then he patted my shoulder and added, “Don’t waste the summer. See you in August.” He strolled toward the doorway, and I didn’t see or speak to him again until he returned from Nantucket and fall classes began.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My mother met me at La Guardia airport. Then we drove to Holliswood, where my sister’s psychiatrist had released her for the second time. Early summer had descended on New York and when I stepped out of the car to collect my sister’s suitcase humidity encased me like a glove. Trees surrounding the clinic had bloomed, sunlight shone through gaps between their leaves, and the day’s brightness dulled my sister’s pale complexion, lending her affectless face a putty-colored pallor. She’d been weakened by her medication and, as I hugged her, she felt as boneless as a sponge. After my visit in March she’d been discharged, but within weeks she saw a sign from God on a seltzer delivery truck, she couldn’t remember how to fold laundry, the purpose of socks eluded her, and she again tried to commit suicide, this time by swallowing a quarter, believing it would slice open her stomach and intestines and allow her to bleed to death.

  On the ride home, she remained silent and stared out the window beside her, watching the world pass. Her face was puffy, a pouch of flesh hung from her chin, and, although she was only thirty-two, white roots lined the part in her hair. She’d been prescribed Haldol, an antipsychotic, which slowed her movements and deadened her emotions. As I drove, my mother leaned forward from the backseat and placed her mouth inches from my sister’s left ear.

  “Do you want lunch?”

  The concept of food seemed beyond my sister and she didn’t answer.

  “Your brother’s here.” My mother glanced over my right shoulder. “How long are you here for?”

  I’d come to spend a week with the Mets. “Seven days.”

  “Your brother’s here for seven days. You think you have all the time in the world to talk to him? You see him once a year, if you’re lucky.” My mother’s use of “you” actually meant “I.”

  My sister’s head turned as if a puppet master’s hand had reached up inside her skull and twisted it toward me. But her lips didn’t move.

  “And you,” my mother said. “You don’t have anything to say to your sister? Look at her. She could be dead. Does she look like a healthy person?”

  I stared at the rearview mirror and waited for my mother’s reflection to appear. When she looked up, I narrowed my eyelids. She understood my warning. I wouldn’t join her campaign to undermine my brother-in-law or influence my sister’s decision to choose her caretaker and living companion. With my father dead, my mother could devote herself to nursing my sister. I also didn’t dou
bt her ability to infantilize my sister. They’d never lived more than a mile from each other, my mother had a key to my sister’s house, and, excluding my sister’s two-week honeymoon, I don’t believe forty-eight hours passed without them being together. Now, if my sister’s dependence on her became complete, the loneliness that trailed my mother through the house the rest of us had left behind would vanish like an exorcised ghost.

  I said, “She looks fine.”

  A moment later, my mother leaned back. To avoid my gaze in the mirror she placed her elbow on an armrest and dropped her jaw into her open palm. “Well,” she said, “she doesn’t look fine to me.”

  Without speaking to one another, we rode to my sister’s brick row house. Her sons stood behind the storm door’s glass pane as we walked their mother, unsteady from her medication, along the grass-bordered concrete path. The older boy’s hands stayed in his pockets. The younger one’s clutched his brother’s wrist. When we entered, they moved out of our way and my sister glided past them. Inside, the living room’s palpable stillness seemed eerily funereal.