Now I felt more like a suspicious wife, the kind who calls the bar demanding to know if her husband is there. The bartender says no, and exchanges a smirking look with the husband.
“Oh. Well, I just called to say hi . . .” I was sitting at one end of my couch. I looked at my shelves of books. Novels, short story collections, poetry anthologies, words and more words. If only he would ask me something about writing, like “Do you keep a schedule?” or “Who are your influences?” He could ask me what, exactly, Keats said about Negative Capability, and I would answer immediately, “Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Maybe we could discuss the identity of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets, or John Berryman’s use of persona in The Dream Songs.
Silence on the other end. Maybe I should initiate phone sex. We could talk dirty and have simultaneous orgasms, and then arrange to meet for a quick coffee at Starbucks to see if we actually wanted to date.
“Thanks for calling,” he said.
“You asked me to give you a call,” I said, “so . . .”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay, well, guess we’ll meet one of these days.”
“Bye,” Evan said. “Bye” meant Never. It meant, As far as you are concerned, I have disappeared like the dinosaurs, and If you ever dial this number again, a hypersonic charge will come through the phone line to electrocute you.
That left Tom: mid-fifties, liked literature, had a photo of himself with his Lotus race car. Over e-mail, we discussed race cars and gardening, two subjects I wasn’t particularly conversant with. I learned that a Lotus had once won the Le Mans, whatever that was. I told him I was growing brussels sprouts on my deck. The brussels sprouts were an experiment to see if a living vegetable could get within fifty feet of me and survive. So far I had been responsible for the deaths of several tomato vines and some broccolini. Tom seemed like an interesting guy. There were a lot of interesting guys online whom I might want to date if I were able to get past their looks, which I was not. I was a shallow, disgusting excuse for a person; I craved beautiful men and I killed vegetables. Tom, at least from his online photo, looked attractive.
Finally he wrote, “Wanna spoil this and get together?”
We met at one of the restaurants where I’d tried sitting at the bar alone. Now I was one of the happy couples. Maybe everyone in the restaurant was actually in the same situation as I was, meeting the person across the table for the first time. I looked around; it was hard to tell. It was possible that all these people had ended an important long-term relationship and had been floundering for some time, and were connected for only this one moment. At the end of the evening they would go home alone, hating online dating even more than their loneliness.
When we’d been talking five minutes, my date suddenly leaned over and sniffed me.
“You smell good,” he said.
Only he didn’t simply lean close; he wedged his nose into my armpit, like a dog getting a thorough whiff of another dog or checking out an appealing mound of trash. I pulled back and reached for my neon cocktail.
“Thank you,” I said. This is what I usually say when I am at a loss. I am like someone in a foreign country who knows a phrase or two of the local language and keeps repeating it, hoping to get by. Thank you for the traffic ticket. Thank you for the bad highlights that ruined my hair. Thank you for sniffing me, instead of stabbing me.
“You dick,” the woman on a barstool to my right said, but she wasn’t saying it to my date; she had her own.
“So you write poetry,” Tom said. “I’ve met a lot of poets. I met some Nobel laureates. I’ve known some movie stars, too.”
I wondered if he had sniffed these people as well, or if he reserved that for online dates.
“I’ve traveled the world,” Tom said. “I almost went up on the Space Shuttle once. I invented a cure for cancer, but the government killed my research grant.”
As he steered the conversation into the speculative waters of mind control and alien abductions, it occurred to me that my date might be mentally ill. Also, he pretended not to know who I was, but it turned out that he did. Finally he said that he knew my work, a little. When he started to analyze my character on the basis of particular poems, quoting my lines to me, I started feeling a little faint.
“I think I need to go home now,” I said. “Wow, these drinks went to my head.”
“I’ll walk you to the parking lot.”
“Thank you,” I said. Thank you, you stalker. I’d had stalkers before. They read my poems and felt they knew me intimately. They sent long, rambling e-mails, or letters with photographs of themselves with their former lovers’ heads scissored out and mine inserted. They sent epic poems about our imagined nights of sexual bliss. I once wrote a poem about a red dress; a lot of the poems people sent were about how they would take the dress off me and what we would do together afterward. One man offered to let me stay at his house in Idaho and sent me a check for fifty dollars along with a brochure about his own life’s work: tape recordings of murderers’ confessions. A young woman started a voluminous one-sided correspondence with me and came to a couple of readings, and when I gave her a casual hello, she got upset because I addressed her by the wrong name. YOU ARE DEAD TO ME was the subject line of her next e-mail.
At my car, Tom leaned in to kiss me, and I turned my cheek. When I turned my head back, he managed to land a kiss on my lips before I could move them out of striking range.
The next day, he called my cell phone. I looked at the number as the phone rang. I waited for it to go to voice mail. Then I e-mailed him that I didn’t think it was going to work out, and I took my profile offline, despite having paid over eighty dollars for six months.
But penises are like buses, right? There’s bound to be another one chugging up the road soon. Then again, maybe they are, after all, like birds. Maybe I should put a feeder out in the yard, hoping to attract one before they all fly off into the trees, into other women’s arms. There are plenty of penises in the world, numerous as the small birds dotting the light poles and telephone wires. And some nights, I think I can hear the one meant for me, singing its heart out into the darkness, not knowing I’m listening, but hoping I am.
DOA
MY NEW NOVEL was being dictated by God. If I left my desk even to pee I’d lose whole pages, the words were streaming in so fast. Forget stopping for lunch. Who needed food? I wasn’t a human anymore, a gross, fleshly creature that had to eat or die. I was a vehicle for divine prophecy, electrical impulses pulsing through me and into my Word document. I knew my main character, knew her story, could intuit the whole structure of the book, a glowing constellation. There were Lyra, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegasus, Vulpecula, and Ursa Major, and there, in the night sky above my desk, blazed Kim’s Amazing New Novel.
What a load of shit I just told you.
Here’s what was really happening: I was paralyzed with despair. I had rewritten my opening a dozen times. My main character was drunk on the eve of her fortieth birthday, standing on a kitchen chair, her head in the freezer. No, she was wasted in the middle of the afternoon, lying in bed in her underwear, watching Oprah comfort a hurricane survivor. No, wait! It was the morning of her birthday. She sat in the kitchen with a pounding hangover, watching her unfaithful husband juice carrots. Or else she was at the party where she fell down drunk after taking her future husband into the bathroom, blowing out the candle on the back of the toilet, and kissing him. Wait. Wait. She was at a fancy organic restaurant with her husband and two other people, slamming the wine, forgetting the niceties of sniffing or swirling, since one of the other people was the young, perky little bitch of an actress her unfaithful husband was sleeping with. Or about to be sleeping with. But maybe that was totally wrong. And the unfaithful husband—wait, should he be the faithful husband, after all? I’d already saddled my character wi
th a bipolar father and a habit of self-medicating her depression. Maybe it was a bad idea to make the husband such a dick. Maybe the four of them should just have a healthful overpriced meal, get drunk, and go home. Happy birthday, main character. Now fuck off.
The drinking part: at least I was sure about that. I wanted to start drinking right then, first thing in the morning, I felt so hopeless about my novel. My third novel. Shouldn’t I know how to do this by now? Didn’t I have confidence in my abilities, after those novels were published by a big corporate house that had paid me pretty decent money? I was a novelist. That meant I could write novels. Novel, novel, novel—it occurred to me that the word also meant “new.” As in, You are so new, you clueless idiot.
Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know, because I’ve had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the tortures of the damned—plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies—are like love nips from your yippy little dog.
I had natural childbirth, which, in hindsight, was a strange decision for someone who had willingly ingested a lot of drugs in her young life to numb the pain and social anxiety of preadolescence, adolescence, and then adulthood. There was pot, mescaline, acid, quaaludes, Seconals, coke, heroin, speed, and probably a few more that don’t spring as readily to mind. But when it came to childbirth, I didn’t take a thing. I screamed, panting like a dog per birth class instructions, squatting on the floor of the Natural Childbirth Center in the hospital after the doctor made me get off the toilet because he was afraid the baby might just whoosh out into the bowl. Instead, the baby whooshed into the waiting hands of the doctor, squatting right down there with me, and my ordeal ended.
And was immediately forgotten, after I’d walked shakily to the bed and lain down, and the nurse delivered my wrinkled, blood-covered, sublimely perfect and unconscionably beautiful baby girl into my arms.
In starting my third novel, I had forgotten all the sweat and difficulty that had gone into the first two. I’d forgotten how much true work it takes—at least for me—to get anything right. Not that I hadn’t worked on this novel. In fact, I’d done quite a bit of work already. I’d written a first draft in about ten weeks, propelled by anxiety. I can’t stand being inside a long piece of writing; I’m always afraid I won’t be able to finish it. So I go as fast as I can toward the finish. Even if the draft sucks, which it always does, I have to have a beginning, middle, and end before I can work on anything. With shorter pieces, I can hold the whole thing in my head. I can get my sucky draft down quickly, and then go back and give it an Extreme Makeover.
For the next two years I wrote more drafts, fixing things—a little rhinoplasty, some cheek implants, liposuction for the fatty modifiers. Finally I gave it to my agent, made some more changes based on his suggestions, and he submitted it to the publisher who had brought out my first two novels.
Done deal, right? I’d worked plenty; I’d broken a sweat, not remembering that with the other books, I had soaked through my clothes, the sheets, the blankets. Don’t tell me that was early menopause. With those books, I had obsessed over my characters, scribbled charts of intersecting lines trying to figure out the arc of each one, put one away for three years because I couldn’t face the challenges. I had forgotten that I always think something is ready before it truly is. I had forgotten the pain of childbirth, the best description of which I once heard from another young mother: “It’s like trying to pass a hot toaster oven through your bowels.” I blithely sent my manuscript off to my agent and waited for my editor to send some breathless superlatives my way.
“I’m afraid I can’t find the beating heart of this book,” my editor—now known as my former editor—e-mailed my agent. She had pronounced my novel DOA. It was lifeless on a gurney, drained of fluids; it wasn’t worth much, except maybe to new medical students who would learn how to open it up and try not to gag or retch as they studied what was inside. It was going to be buried in a plain box in an unmarked grave with all the other failed novels.
At least it would have a lot of company. The cemetery is large, the mounds of dirt many. There are thousands of hopeful books that have been pronounced dead by New York editors. All over the cemetery, aspiring novelists are standing or kneeling, remembering their would-be books, laying bouquets of lilies or a single rose. Probably a lot of those novels are clawing the insides of their coffins, beating their fists against the wood, crying out, But I’m alive! I want to live!
The thing is, I’d already gotten a partial advance. A book advance is like manna from heaven. You gather it up, praise the baffling and transcendent ways of the gods of New York publishing, and spend it. You pay off your Visa bill and your back taxes and get some needed dental work. Soon I was my usual broke self again. Unless I could radically rewrite my novel into something my agent could sell, I would have to find that manna to pay back my publisher. Or else yank my new gold crowns out of my mouth and melt them down.
According to my former editor, the main character in my novel was too passive. Too much happened to her. A passive character is death to a story. The first question to ask is, What does your character want? What is keeping her from getting it? Also, it may be generally a good idea if your character is likable, which in a New York editor’s mind, as far as I can tell, usually means that he or she is spunky, or brave, possibly funny, and hopefully in possession of in-depth knowledge of the world of high fashion or Alsatian cooking or Freemasonry or time travel. Having an unusual family—say, one of beekeeping undertakers—might also be a plus. Forget ordinary life. Have your character speak from beyond the grave, another planet, or an alternative dimension full of magnetically luscious supernatural creatures. Some bloodsucking sex scenes would be great. Make the retarded boy in your story a demon, put him in an outhouse with a blind tiger, and give him the mission of enslaving the earth. Your book will sell at auction for a high six figures.
This was my rationalization for not acknowledging her critique of my character: What does she know? I am an unrecognized genius.
Then I thought about how pointless it was to write another book. There were thousands of books already, all of them desperately trying to get into the hands of readers. They were like baby sea turtles, hatched from eggs buried in the sand, digging their way up to the surface of the beach and scrambling toward the open sea while the masses of hungry shorebirds picked them off one by one and swallowed them whole. My first novel, Little Beauties, did pretty well. It was even optioned for a film. The second novel’s sales were disappointing. For this, of course, I blame my publisher.
Was I really up, though, for trying again to write this novel?
I have three little words for you: Twenty thousand dollars.
So I went back and started rewriting the opening. Some days, I avoided looking at the stack of pages on my desk, hoping it would magically transform itself into something that resembled a finished manuscript. Elves would come in the night and do the work I wasn’t capable of. They would figure out the Arc, fix the problems with the plot, and shoot up my character with crystal meth, if need be, making her get off her ass and become the heroine, instead of the victim, of her life.
One day, I sat down and reread a couple of paragraphs. I hated them. They weren’t even bad. They were just insipid—too dull for, well, words, as though they had been dictated by the doddering vice president of a ball bearings manufacturing company. I had worked for this man once, my left foot on the pedal of something called a Dictaphone, typing the letters he sent about the importance of ball bearings. I was the slave of this machine, chained to a desk, wearing clothes I’d borrowed from my roommate to create a Front Desk Appearance, though no one ever entered the office except the guys headed to the warehouse in back.
Dear Blah,
Blah blah ball bearings blah blah blah.
Sincerely,
Vice President Blah
This was my novel.
But years ago I made a commitment to writing. Sickness and health. Richer and cracking open champagne for the first twenty-five copies of my first-ever bona fide novel; poorer and skipping dental appointments. So I started rewriting again. And again. It was like passing a hot toaster oven through my bowels, but I did it, finally—I finished the book, and saw it published.
What another load of shit.
I never finished the book. It took a few years to pay back the advance. I haven’t looked at that novel in ages. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to it and try to raise the dead, to set my zombie novel walking toward a few readers to eat their brains in a way they’ll enjoy. Maybe I’ll steal some scenes and use them elsewhere. Maybe not. The one thing that is true: I’m still a writer. And sometimes writers fail. No matter how hard we work, there are projects that don’t pan out—poems, stories, and even entire books. When the full moon rises over the cemetery, those projects haunt us and torment our sleep.
Still, here’s how I’ve found writing sometimes works: if you are madly avoiding one genre, your imagination may suddenly kick in elsewhere. I couldn’t face my novel, so I fled to short stories for solace. I found them beautiful, memorable, moving, harrowing, uplifting—and blessedly short. I’d published a collection years before, written a few more stories, and stopped for several years. Now I wondered how I could have abandoned this form, so full of the human drama, able to create entire lives in just a few pages. How could I have forgotten Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Jayne Anne Phillips’s Black Tickets or the seductions of Mary Gaitskill and Lydia Davis, Paul Bowles and Edward P. Jones? What about Wharton and Chekhov? What about Aimee Bender, David Means, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, and hundreds of other astounding, ass-kicking practitioners—they were everywhere, strewing flowers across the bitter landscape of my failure.
So I got to work and revised some earlier stories. I threw out others that were simply not good enough. Everywhere I looked, I saw possibilities. I listened to bar patrons and cab drivers and friends and people I met at parties, and to my own memories and obsessions and fantasies, and characters came to me, sometimes shyly, sometimes eagerly, all of them saying, “Tell my story. It won’t take long. Sometimes you spend a brief period of time with someone, and that person changes your life forever.”
Bukowski in a Sundress Page 10