Based on that “Wow,” I continued on through another eighty or so thousand words. I sat at the piano bench that doubled as my desk and I just kept going, word after word after word so long as they continued the story.
I’d say I fell in love with Veronica all over again at some point during those hundred thousand words, but if the aim here is truth, I can describe it to you more accurately that I suddenly realized, hearing her voice, writing those words, that I had never actually fallen out of love with her. The more I wrote, the more deeply I understood that I had attempted to bury those feelings, partly because I realized that writing is not a process of building so much as digging; I dug deep for those words, disregarded life and time and college and everything else and attempted truly to strip myself onto the page.
I realized as I stripped away the layers that my love for her had never gone away. It was like writing was a magnet and my feelings for her were iron ore, and page after page brought those feelings finally again to the surface after years during which I’d tried to push them aside or move past them. Part of it was also that I felt, as I wrote it, as though Veronica were my own personal Burgess Meredith; finishing a novel requires more effort than most people care to invest, at least if you want to do it well, and sometimes you need someone in your corner to get you through it. Sometimes you need someone to cut your swollen eyelids and squirt water into your mouth, someone to rub your aching shoulders and whisper into your ear, when that bell sounds, that you can go on, you can go another round, you got this, Rock, you got this. Sometimes the body blows become sounds long after they’ve actually stopped hurting, and that’s when you need the coach to urge you on and the girl at the side of the ring to keep fighting for, and I know I’m now mixing characters, if not metaphors, but I think you get what I mean. Veronica had become my coach and my Adrienne combined, my reason for fighting and the training to get me through it, and it can’t be unbelievable that I fell for her all over again.
I don’t know if I would call Veronica my muse, if only because I find the idea uncomfortable; it seems to put the impetus and the origin of the creative process beyond us, and my argument there is that we can’t, or at least shouldn’t. I fear that, if we do, we end up with empty art that might superficially display excellence in craft and mechanics but, more deeply, lacks honesty and soul. A guy named Walter Smith, whom people called Red, is famous for commenting on how easy it is to write—
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.—
and while I know most people read irony and sarcasm into the truth of that, I think there’s more to it. I think that if you really want to create something worthwhile, instead of seeking the help of some mythological muse whom you hope might show you the truth, you’ve got to reach way down deep within yourself to find it.
What I’m getting at is that I think too many people regard writing and literature as spiritual and metaphysical, and my feeling is that for it to really work, you can’t feel you need to look beyond yourself for inspiration. The real process is finding the inspiration inside you and hopefully using it to inspire others, whether by word or by deed.
Not to put too high a value on the whole thing, mind you. But then again, I’m not sure one can.
My point is, Veronica wasn’t my muse because I don’t believe in one, but I think I once read that D.H. Lawrence told someone that all novels are a perfect letter to a particular person. I don’t argue with that sentiment as vociferously as I might with the idea of a muse, and though I’m not altogether certain I wholeheartedly agree, I can nod and say that, if it’s true, that novel was my letter to Veronica.
***
While I can’t say I finished in the sort of white heat that would require you to shield your eyes, I can say that I was elated to finish that story by closing that document, and I decided to celebrate. I considered ordering in before I remembered the bottle of Scotch my supervisor had given me, and I figured that if ever there is a time for one’s first glass of Scotch, celebration of the completion of one’s first real novel—bad Dean Koontz rip-offs don’t count—is probably as fine an occasion as one might find. I poured a small glass and realized how strongly it was about to hit me even as I brought it to my lips, its scent so deep and visceral I could smell the stories of Macbeth and William Wallace, while in my gut I felt the same pull as on hearing the first few notes of “Ave Maria” blown through a bagpipe.
I nearly hacked up that first sip. Caught me like a dagger in the back of the throat, and I coughed like an adolescent trying to pretend it wasn’t my first cigarette, trying to stifle great wheezing hacks, while I dumped what little I had poured from my glass and filled it again with water from the faucet, which I glumped down like a thirsty man straight out of the desert. I realize that might be a horrible cliché, but I had just finished my first novel and felt entitled to horrible clichés, thank you very much. I then refilled my glass with Scotch, because, I figured, surely the second sip would go down more easily.
It didn’t, but the third did. The fourth finished my first glass, by which point I had decided Scotch wasn’t half bad and warranted a second glass, after which I decided I actually enjoyed the glass and would prefer a third while I ate dinner. Of course, I didn’t find much in the way of food when I opened the refrigerator, just a half-full 20-ounce bottle of Sprite, some old bread, and a doorful of condiments, all of which made me reconsider ordering in until I remembered the pizza joint just a couple of blocks away. I thought I might grab a couple of slices until I realized they would probably be cold by the time I got back to my pad to wash them down with the Scotch, and then I had what I then thought was a brilliant idea.
I poured the Scotch into the Sprite bottle until it was full, then stuck the Scotch on the inside of the refrigerator door because I wasn’t sure if I should refrigerate it after opening it, like salsa, and I took my bottle of Scotch-Sprite and left my apartment aiming for the closest pizza joint. I believe its name was Three Guys from Italy, and it was a completely nondescript restaurant save one extremely (at the time) important feature; it was just fifteen or twenty feet away from the escalator that led down to the PATH trains and, by extension, New York City.
Could I have had a better idea than to grab a slice and bring it into Manhattan proper? Sure, the trains featured signs banning both food and beverages, but I’d seen people scarfing down Big Macs on their way from the 33rd Street to Hoboken, so I didn’t figure there’d be much harm. The pizza counter guy shoved a couple of slices into a triangular box, and I descended that escalator with my pizza in one hand and my Scotch-Sprite in the other (which, incidentally, made it more difficult than expected to withdraw my PATH card from my pocket, but still I managed), with the City on my mind and stories pulling me forward. I considered calling my friends, invoking the ever-popular “Hey, I finished a novel, let’s celebrate” clause (affirmative response is obligatory), but in the end I took my seat and rode the PATH into the tunnels. Not sure where to go, exactly, but I figured 9th Street seemed a pretty decent destination: the Village. Grungy and leather and studs around universities and brownstones.
I followed the stairs up and around the corner to the street, where the first thing I saw was a blackboard placard advertising health food specials and the second thing I saw was the Gray’s Papaya sign. Hung a left down 8th, and there, among shops that sold leather jackets and pipes ostensibly crafted for fine tobacco but obviously meant for marijuana, saw a sign adorned with Cassiopeia neon-pinpricked against all black, in the window the sorts of tribal markings and glittering jewels that indicate a tattoo and piercing parlor—
What better way to commemorate the completion of a novel than the celebration of permanent ink upon my skin?—
it made sense at the time.
Here I would like to ascribe to the receptionist and tattoo artist the same quasi-mystical aspects as were possessed by that red-haired Tarot reader from just a chapter ago, but the truth is, nothing could have been more completely ordinary than the
evening I got my first tattoo: the Japanese symbol for “dream” upon my chest, over my heart. After paying the brunette at the front counter, I ascended a narrow, spiral metal staircase up to a room that appeared to be a cross between a dentist’s office and an extraordinarily clean residential bathroom, and in that room, a man named Paco, who spoke only enough English to indicate how little he knew, applied to the skin above my left pectoral muscle a handful of strokes that have since become a three-dimensional character. One of the few words he spoke sounded like “valor,” and he told me, as he pressed that needle into my skin, that the particular area I had chosen for my tattoo counted among the most painful for men, as it was short on fat and close to the bone. At first, I felt each vibration shudder through my body, but eventually it got to a point where my brain decided the pain it was feeling wasn’t actually a signal for anything dangerous, at which point the whole thing took on a more surreal feeling, as if I were feeling the tattoo pricked and pierced into someone else’s chest, as if the pain I was feeling were more a result of sympathy than stimulation.
All of this, Paco told me, signified my bravery.
But I tell you now I am not a brave man. Looking back, it scares me to consider that I might never have finished that novel had it taken longer than two weeks, because I am, if nothing else, a man of short attention and brief tenacity. Part of me hoped that getting a tattoo of the Japanese symbol for “dream” on my chest would ensure that, no matter where I went or what I did, my heart would follow it; the rest of me hoped there would no longer be a choice in the matter, because sometimes, given a choice, I will choke. Sometimes, given a choice between what’s easy and what’s right, I choose to attempt to demonstrate that the former is, in fact, the latter, when even I know it’s not the case . . .
Scotch-Sprite neon whirl cacophony of leather and gleaming silver and pounding asphalt, shouts and murmurs and the hot scent of . . . what the Hell is a hot dog, anyway? Fried pork? . . . ketchup and kraut, the sort of fragrance so thick you can crunch it between your molars, and I’m pretty sure I picked up a hot dog as I stumbled my way back to the PATH, bandage over my bleeding heart, giant pump-bottle of Jerkins Vitamin-E moisturizer tucked under my armpit, if only because I can’t figure out how else I might have gotten a mustard stain on the knee of the jeans I found crumpled on my bedroom floor the following morning. Brushing my teeth the following morning, the previous evening remained little more than a fluorescent rush on tracks through tunnels but don’t touch that third rail for fear of the jolt through your soul. I wasn’t sure it needed to be anything else; my novel was done, my rent was paid, and even as I brushed, even then again as I showered, even as the water struck my neck and coursed down my body, still my heart beat behind my dream as if propelling it ever forward. Tender to the touch, raised beneath my exploring fingertips: this is what I want.
I would have thought, then, it would also be what I would have chosen, but I hadn’t yet exchanged Christmas presents with Veronica, and I hadn’t yet met Angus, either.
But all that’s gotta start:
A New Act
I think I want some quotes here; writerly types call them ‘epigraphs,’ and I’ll even tell you I briefly considered opening this whole thing by quoting the first stanza of Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me,” but ultimately I decided against it, for the same reason there is no ‘Chapter One’ head—that ‘once upon a time’ opening.
Which I got.
Which means it’s okay to tell you that, as I begin this here brand new act, I’m thinking of lyrics of popular music. I would quote them, but doing so would require obtaining licenses from the artists’ record companies, which costs quite a lot of money I would presume the artists themselves rarely see—Neil Gaiman tells a story that he’d wanted to quote a song by the Brit band Blur, but their company demanded ludicrous remuneration that worked out to something like a hundred bucks per “ooo-wwo!”
So: do you remember City of Angels? That depressing movie with Nicolas Cage as a melancholy angel and Meg Ryan as a doctor? Because the Goo Goo Dolls wrote a song called “Iris” for it, and I can’t imagine it would be difficult for you to Google it to check out the lyrics, or even to bust up the iTunes store and download a copy. While you’re at it, check out the last few lines of their song “Name,” which was one of the earliest hits. Those are songs I’m listening to right now, plus one called “Driving With Your Brakes On,” which is by an Irish band named Del Amitri I would know only for its single “Roll to Me” had I not heard “Brakes” on a Greatest Hits CD I borrowed from my local library.
I mention all those not only because I’m listening to them right now but also because all those feelings those songs convey help set the mood for all the events about to occur. I’ll tell you now it’s going to be another chapter before I end up in the bar where I met Angus, and another chapter again before his nature in the story, or at least his function in it, becomes completely apparent, but suffice to say for now that Angus perhaps knew that I thought about Veronica all the time but wasn’t sure I needed to write. As for the offer he made . . . well, first Christmas at the Sawyers, and then Angus can enter stage right and you can see for yourself.
Chapter Seven: Christmas at the Sawyers
Comin’ on Christmas, people decorating their trees. I printed out my newly finished manuscript I had dedicated to Veronica and jammed it into the backpack I wore across midtown Manhattan as I made my way to Port Authority to catch a Greyhound home. One of those slate-grey, nondescript buses down the Jersey Turnpike blur the spindly trees along the side of the highway, all the way back to my hometown by way of connections and cars, at which point I called Veronica to ask if we could meet up, because I had a serious surprise for her. I guess she could hear in my voice how eager I was to see her, and perhaps even that I had specific reasons for being so eager. She told me she didn’t have much free time, but I could attend Christmas Eve mass with her family.
Perhaps that’s the most you need to know about Veronica: not that she is beautiful, though she is; nor what she studied; nor what she’s accomplished since college; nor any other thing, because perhaps nothing will tell you so much as that Veronica Sawyer is the kind of girl for whom you attend Christmas Eve Mass at midnight. It’s the crowded mass, full of not just the fervent but also all the people who go to church solely on Christmas and Easter. I can’t tell you I was among the faithful; by then, I’d swung closer to agnostic, which was a major step in my own spiritual evolution—finally accepting that I didn’t know all the answers was slightly out of character for me. I had grown up attending Catholic schools but had transferred out on the first day of my junior year, after which I’d swung hard enough the other way that other people might call it over-compensating, filling my days and studies with classes about cold, hard, rational science and the kind of philosophical discussions that excluded God in favor of morals and “quality.”
But Veronica told me I could meet her at the mass and then return, with her, to her family’s house, where she and Tom would be up until the wee hours, wrapping presents over hot chocolate and Christmas tree cookies. I wrapped the manuscript folder I’d bought in my mother’s leftover wrapping paper and set it on the front seat of my car as I drove to the church and then, afterward, her house.
“Is this the big surprise?” she asked when she saw it. We were sitting in her family’s living room, her tree to one side, the cream-colored carpet littered with wrapping implements and the sorts of gifts you get from Marshall’s and L.L. Bean.
I offered it to her. “Sure is.”
When she took it, her hands moved like it was heavier than she had expected. She hefted it, considering it, then, “I think I might know what this is.”
“Not for sure until you open it.”
“Should I open it now?”
“I wish you would. I’m dying to find out.”
She chuckled as she tore aside the badly taped paper, which fell away to the floor, leaving nothing but the folder in her ha
nds. It was a clear, plastic, accordion-type number, full of nothing but a bunch of typing paper. If I could have gotten it bound for her, I might have, but technology had not then advanced so far as it has today.
She turned the folder in her hands and read the title, then, “A novel.” When she smiled, there seemed to be at least a little excitement in it, the sort you feel when your favorite musician puts out a new CD or you finally get the ticket to a movie you’ve been looking forward to for months, and I’ll tell you, as feelings go, there’s nothing quite like that one. “Is this what I think it is?”
“That depends. If you think it’s a copy of the next Harry Potter manuscript, unfortunately not. If, on the other hand, you suspect it’s a manuscript of the novel I finished over the past few weeks, mainly because you told me to, well, then, yes, it is.”
Her eyes lit up as she hugged me. “Oh, that’s so awesome! See, I knew you could do it.”
I couldn’t respond, too distracted by the sudden tangibility of her body against mine, not in a sensual way—not in the feeling of her curves against me, though there was that—but rather her weight, her tactility, so close to me I could feel, as I returned her hug, first the soft give of her big, fuzzy sweater and then the warmth and solidity of her body. Fine strands of her hair against my cheek, and she smelled like Christmas cookies, all sugar and vanilla.
I clutched her as I regained my voice, then, “Well, that makes one of us.”
“This is so great,” she said as she pulled back—I gave up that moment in my life with reluctance, like a kitten claw-clinging to a cardigan. “When did you finish?”
I shrugged. “It’s still pretty fresh.”
“So this is a first draft?”
“Pretty much. Which means it’s rough. There are probably spelling mistakes. But I’m still dying to know what you think.”
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 6