I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  DAVID: It’s hard to make a profit, definitely. Before, I wasn’t very supportive of her idea to quit Fred Hutch, and now I’m just, “Go for it.” I really want my marriage to work, and if it collapsed I’d be devastated, so I’ve made a really concerted gesture to meet her halfway.

  CALEB: You da man.

  DAVID: I don’t know about your marriage—whether you’ve ever hit a wall and said, “Here we are; do we want to be married?”

  CALEB: We’ve hit different walls. Three kids is a lot.

  DAVID: You’re almost too busy.

  CALEB: The physical life suffers.

  DAVID: So I’ve heard.

  CALEB: It shouldn’t be a surprise that when you have kids you lose that spontaneity.

  DAVID: Do you guys ever go off, alone, to a hotel for a weekend?

  CALEB: Every now and then we get a date weekend.

  CALEB: Funny coincidence: when I painted Gayle Anne’s house, she said you’re one of her store’s best customers.

  DAVID: I’ll send her an email, and the next day her husband will drop the book off on my front porch. She out-Amazons Amazon.

  CALEB: She and her husband went to Bermuda for ten days and gave me keys to their house. What’s that Raymond Carver story where the guy house-sits, ends up wearing his neighbor’s lingerie, moves stuff around, and then locks himself out? I’m not that guy, but it’s tough not to look.

  DAVID: You get a sense of their life?

  CALEB: Wall-to-wall books. He’s got a room full of guitars, not many family photos, but they have a picture of a baby, and by the coloration it’s at least thirty years old. That’s it. One picture.

  DAVID: I always get the feeling they don’t have kids, but perhaps they did.

  CALEB: The question: did the baby die?

  DAVID: “For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn.”

  CALEB: Some people want to talk about tragedy, some don’t, and I’m certainly not close enough to Gayle Ann to ask her. Maybe I’m just way off.… Hold on. Maybe we should turn around.

  DAVID: They should have a sign saying “Four-Wheel Drive Only.”

  CALEB: My wheels might not survive.

  DAVID: I wonder how close we are. I might be kidding myself. Is the danger a punctured tire?

  CALEB: That’s a danger. I almost hope it happens. You’ll change it.

  DAVID: Ha ha. Let’s see. This is much farther than I realized. I wonder when it’ll get dark—seven or so? It’s now four.

  CALEB: I’m going to be a wimp and pull over. We can continue on foot.

  CALEB: This summer my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I wanted a portrait of my daughters. She ended up painting three black-and-white doodles. I said, “This? It took you fifteen minutes.” My father said, “No, Caleb, it took your mother her entire life.” He’s right. The caricatures are adorable, the kids like them, and they’re the best my mother could do.

  DAVID: Is she senile?

  CALEB: Happy-senile. Whether she dies in a year or ten, it’s over. She’s a borderline diabetic: cholesterol and glucose off the charts; her doctors have warned her about sugar, but she’s an addict. A while ago we had popsicles in the fridge, and she wanted one. The agreed-upon rule for her is one treat a day. She’d already had a cinnamon roll for breakfast. We gave the girls popsicles, and a couple minutes later Ava comes running into the kitchen, crying. “Grandma took my popsicle.” We go into the living room and it’s true. My mom’s slurping on Ava’s popsicle.

  DAVID: What can you do but throw up your hands and laugh?

  CALEB: Mentally, my father is fine, but he has aneurysms and pre-leukemia, a pacemaker. He’s had fainting spells.

  DAVID: This is incredibly embarrassing, but I want to live longer than my father, who died four months short of his ninety-ninth birthday.

  DAVID: Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: “I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry.”

  CALEB: You can live in both. Both can make you cry.

  DAVID: No you can’t.

  CALEB: Maybe you can’t.

  DAVID: I live more totally through writing than you do. I make more sacrifices.

  CALEB: I’d say my sacrifices aren’t less, just different.

  DAVID: You are—this is an old-fashioned word, and I don’t know if I’m willing to say it—but you’re more “soulful.” I’ll do anything to protect my writing, and I’ll do anything to get a book done. I’m ruthless about it, while you, I think, err on the side of experience, of pleasure. Life.

  CALEB: I haven’t had enough time to think about it, but let me use the word “monstrous” to describe you not yielding to Laurie’s desire to have a second child.

  DAVID: That really seems brutal to you? That’s interesting.

  CALEB: You used the word “difficult” to describe Natalie’s first two years of existence. To me, those years were an incredibly happy period. Every time my baby cried, even at three a.m., she was saying, “I love you I need you I love you.” When Ava was two months old, I’d put her in my front pack and walk around the neighborhood with this warm, semiconscious living creature bundled against my chest. That’s meaning. That’s an X factor. Those are good memories.

  DAVID: Not sure what to say other than “We’re different.”

  CALEB: For me to accuse you of being a monster—that’s unfair, perhaps. You had doubts and made a responsible decision. Who am I to say? And how does Laurie feel?

  DAVID: As I say, she acknowledges that she was ambivalent at the time.… The lake?

  CALEB: Runoff stream.

  DAVID: We’ll walk until—what was my point?

  CALEB: About how Laurie was ambivalent, but she’s—

  DAVID: When we dropped off Natalie at college, Laurie said she wished we had a child to come home to. I did, too. Laurie’s amazing, though. She gets great satisfaction from being of service to other people and—I don’t know what to say—I get great satisfaction from being served.

  David and Caleb laugh.

  CALEB: The girls like to get their fingernails painted.

  DAVID: Natalie used to love Build-A-Bear.

  CALEB: They love Build-A-Bear. If I had a son, I’d spend more time on sports and less on writing. I’m not saying this would be bad. I’m looking at the positive side of having girls, but my girls are horrible at sports and they have no interest. Last year we signed them up for T-ball. Ava’s six and Gia’s five. They just want to play with their friends; they couldn’t care less about learning to catch and throw. Some parents stay engaged. They rah-rah the whole time.

  DAVID: That can get wearisome.

  CALEB: There’s a kid on third base, her teammate hits the ball to left field, and she runs after the ball in left field instead of running home. Stuff like that.

  DAVID: That’s adorable; I could watch that all day.

  CALEB: You have a sister, but you don’t talk about her much. Or write about her. All you do is mention the fact you have one.

  DAVID: Let me tie my shoes. My sister, Paula, is a year older. Someone once asked me, “Are you an only child?” And I remember thinking, Whoa! Do I seem like an only child? Paula and I don’t get along at all, but she’s close to Natalie.

  CALEB: Does she have kids?

  DAVID: No. She and her husband, Wayne, live in Tacoma. He teaches history at PLU [Pacific Lutheran University], and she studied for a doctorate in history at Berkeley but never finished her dissertation.

  CALEB: Just like my mother, who stopped six months short of her Ph.D. in Chinese studies at Columbia. It’s odd anyone would get that close and give up.

  DAVID: Paula has worked for more than twenty-five years in the UW admissions office.

  CALEB: Why don’t the two of you get along?

  DAVID: First, I think, she’s an older sister; no matter what happens, she always treats me like her younger brother, and I probably act like her younger brother. She also really resents that I’ve written about our family.
/>   CALEB: Aha.

  DAVID: That’s a big thing. Even writing about her obliquely is—

  CALEB: She plays such a minor role.

  DAVID: I honestly would love to ask Paula—maybe I will—what I’ve done to make her so rancorous toward me, but when she and I are in the same room together, the air positively vibrates with hostility. When we were kids, she was quite the academic star. And I was, if not the dumb jock, the barely sentient jock. Whenever I did good work, my teachers would accuse me of having had her do it for me. Or they’d say, “It’s so hard to believe you’re Paula’s brother.” She’s never found a calling equal to her intelligence, while I, for better and worse, have known what I wanted to do since I was twelve. This is all wildly self-serving on my part, but I think she takes her disappointment over her lack of a “career” and channels it into resentment of me. I also think she and I tend to replicate exactly the completely fucked-up dynamic between my mother and my—

  CALEB: Oh!

  DAVID: You okay? Did you twist your knee?

  CALEB: Hit a slippery spot on that log. I’m okay.

  DAVID: Paula and Wayne will be over at our house, and whenever I say something she disagrees with, which is pretty much all the time, she’ll look over at him and roll her eyes.

  One time, after Black Planet was published, she meant to send an email to Wayne and accidentally sent it to me: “See, I knew he was thinking that, I told you so, ha ha, he’s such a hypocrite.” I wrote back, “Uh, hi, Paula. I think you sent your email to the wrong person.”

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: Then I said, “I don’t think we have a very good relationship. We just don’t get along. Why don’t we get together and talk about why that’s so? Let’s try to be honest with each other.” And she said, “I can’t do that.” I may well be mistaken, but I took that to mean, “I’m not together enough to do that.” Christ, I’d love to hear her version of all this, which I’m sure is equally devastating. Tell me about your siblings.

  CALEB: My youngest sister, Min, and her husband, Somjait, are 9/11 Truthers, question the moon landing, don’t vaccinate their kids, homeschool, think 150 rich families control the world.

  DAVID: A hundred and fifty rich families probably do control the world.

  CALEB: I’ll have them send you pamphlets. Every year it’s something different. They stock up on water purification tablets and pandemic ventilators. It’s intellecticide. This summer, when the Birthers were questioning whether Obama is American, I joked to Terry, “I’ll bet you Min and Somjait buy into that.” They do.

  DAVID: Are they as conservative as your parents?

  CALEB: They caucus for Ron Paul.

  DAVID: He’s not that awful.

  CALEB: What? You like Wrong Paul?

  DAVID: I didn’t say that. I like his desire to reduce the military. As with Chomsky, I have a lot of problems with him, but I like backbench flamethrowers.

  CALEB: Too much or too little frequency harms a relationship, especially in a marriage.

  DAVID: Tell me about it.

  CALEB: I call it being Wapatoed. We’ve stayed at vacation rentals in Wapato Point at Lake Chelan three times. Terry likes it because it’s child-friendly, has outdoor and indoor pools, a hot tub, decent price, cheap boat rentals, miniature golf, and isn’t so nice that we have to worry about the kids destroying the place. Terry uses it as a model for every vacation. Whenever I hear something for the zillionth time, I’ll say, “Wapato.” When I tell Terry about “David Shields Weekend,” she’ll say, “Wapato.” You probably have the same thing with Laurie.

  DAVID: Basically, I have seventy-six stories and I’ve told them all twenty-two times.

  CALEB: “My student’s prison stories were too stoical.” “I read my ex-girlfriend’s diary.” “Writing is my revenge on stuttering.” “Franzen is writing novels from 1850.” “And I sure like Renata Adler’s Speed—”

  DAVID: Moo!

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: It’s one of the things you’re not supposed to like about marriage, but I do: it’s hard to surprise each other after a while.

  CALEB: Kundera says, “Happiness is a longing for repetition.”

  DAVID: I must be really, really happy, then, because my life is Groundhog Day, and I can’t wait to get up every morning.

  CALEB: It’s always interesting to me when religious people cite the benefits of an afterlife as proof of an afterlife. I’ll concede that eternal peaceful life is a pleasant thought. So? What consolation for me? When I die, I want the knowledge that I’ve lived well, that family and love and art will continue.

  DAVID: You don’t find that death haunts you on a daily level?

  CALEB: I’m a secular moralist, so of course I think about it often.

  DAVID: I want to believe the idea that by the time you’re old enough to die it doesn’t seem quite so awful.… What’s that, a motorcycle?

  CALEB: How you guys doing?

  DIRT BIKER ONE: Good. How are you?

  DAVID: Good.

  DIRT BIKER TWO: You gonna check out the mine?

  CALEB: Mine? How far?

  DIRT BIKER ONE: Half-mile.

  DIRT BIKER TWO: Not even. Two hundred yards. It’s awesome freaky.

  DAVID: Really?

  DIRT BIKER ONE: Just go up there. Can’t miss it. Got some flashlights?

  DIRT BIKER TWO: It’s big and deep and dark.

  CALEB: We’ll check it out.

  DAVID: Have a good one.

  DIRT BIKER TWO: You, too.

  CALEB: Here we are, the entrance to the mine: corrugated sheet metal, rotted timbers. You would need a flashlight. All right, I’m going in. This is a legend I heard from the bartender at the Cascadia. It’s supposedly true, or at least the Skykomish folk believe it. (Caleb clicks on flip camera—footsteps on gravel)

  The Skykomish Witch Project: In 1921 a local miner, John Rockwell, discovered his wife and best friend in a compromising position outside the Whistling Post. Rockwell walked home, got his rifle and truck, returned, and drove them to this here mine. At gunpoint he led them inside and shot them dead. Or so he thought.

  The next day he drank a fifth of whiskey, went downtown, and boasted that he killed his wife and that son-of-a-bitch friend. The police took John in for questioning. John took the police back to this very mine—to the site of the supposed murders. They found blood, but neither of the corpses. Three sets of footprints went in; only one set came out. Dogs followed the trail, but the deeper they went in, the more confused they became. They never found the bodies.

  John went to trial and was convicted of this crime of passion. He served eight years, returned, became the town drunk, went crazy, and heard voices. John couldn’t hold a job, even when the mines were busy. Two years later he hanged himself.

  Little by little most Skykomish folk forgot about John Rockwell, but in 1952 two hikers from California came to this mine, went inside with a flashlight, and came upon two people making love. Watching them was a man, hanging from the ceiling by his neck.

  DAVID: Oooh. Shiver me timbers.

  CALEB: I’ve been corresponding for over ten years with this Egyptian woman, Ceza, from when I lived in the UAE. Snail mail, email, Facebook. Ceza became a doctor, lived in the West, went to extremes with drugs, sex (with men and women), returned to Islam, but she always insisted on wearing the scarf. During the Arab Spring her friend was murdered, and the trial is fascinating. We discuss all this as a secular man and a Muslim woman.

  DAVID: You wouldn’t believe how many people think I’m going to be interested in their memoir. I’m not. I’m not interested in memoir. How does that V. S. Pritchett line go? “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.” A book doesn’t become good because you were bad or had bad things done to you. If you can’t transmute it into art, I’m not interested in it.

  CALEB: One of the best “bad” books I’ve read is a memoir. The atrocious writing would be difficult to replicate. It was written by two women who did
time with Mary Kay Letourneau. Self-published, but it sold well. An editor could have done wonders. I don’t care much about Mary Kay, who’s a one-page Wikipedia entry. These two women were far more compelling. One had been a stripper and murdered someone. The other was a drug addict who kept writing bad checks and embezzling. They took turns writing chapters. The stripper had been a willing fuck toy for her older brother’s friends at the age of twelve. This made her feel dirty and helpless, destroyed her self-esteem. Neither woman could transmute their pain into art, but boy, do they make it real. And part of this reality was that they were really bad writers.

  DAVID: I think that’s an incredible story. Sex is always serious. It just is.

  DAVID: I have a Twitter feed. And a Facebook page that says, “Hey, David did this.”

  CALEB: A fan page.

  DAVID: What’s the other way I could interact?

  CALEB: You could have relationships on equal footing. Be friends. It’s not literal.

  DAVID: But what does that mean? What would be the advantage of me changing? I suppose it’d feel more friendly.… Peter [Mountford] asked me about you.

  CALEB: What’d you say?

  DAVID: I said Caleb will get in your face, and that’s what makes him a lively opponent. That’s why I thought you and I would be a good fit for this, or are you like that only with me?

  CALEB: No. Terry will vouch.

  DAVID: Did you do that with Lidia? Or Ander? Or Eula?

  CALEB: Not much. Their books didn’t have much of an argument. Lidia’s left-wing certain. Ander’s talking about Frito-Lays and Americana and memoir and self. I think he shrinks from confrontation, which is usually fatal in a writer, but he makes it work. Eula’s uncertain, concerned about the right things, and she’s raising points that should be discussed. Do you know Patrick Madden?