Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  But whatever else Richard might have felt, he was wrong about Luke. Anne and Luke. Her affair with him had been something very different from whatever Anne had done in the past. I knew that. In spite of everything else, I still believed that.

  I felt compelled to correct him.

  “Your wife and Luke Barnett fell in love over the summer,” I said. “She told him she was going to divorce you, leave you, for him.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she did,” he said. “And she may have even convinced herself of it for a moment or two. But did you really believe her? Honestly? I mean, you must have known that the whole thing was ridiculous. Pathetic. Someone like Anne, leaving me for that crackpot? Come on!”

  “What happened the other night after I dropped Rachel off?” I asked. This is what I had to know. Why I was there, forcing myself to talk to him. “Luke came up here, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he came up here and told me what you just said; that he and Anne were in love and that she was going to leave me.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him he was delusional. That I’d told Anne all about him—and you and your husband. The kind of people you were. Criminals, for God’s sake.”

  “And you said all this in front of my daughter?”

  “Honestly, at that moment I forgot who she was; I was thinking of her just as our babysitter. Someone Anne had hired. I can’t keep all you people straight.”

  I couldn’t let him see how I felt. I had to keep my composure for just another second or two. One more question. And then I would never have to speak to Richard Zeller again.

  “What did Anne say about all this?”

  “Well, you know, she told me on Friday night that she’d had a relapse—that she’d slipped. That’s how we think about it now. It’s like an addiction on her part. I try my best to be sympathetic, helpful. Not that any of this has been easy on me, actually, but I’ve got my family to think about. My children. In any case, we’d already straightened the mess out between the two of us. She promised me that she’d go back into therapy this fall.”

  “But what did she say to Luke?”

  “I think she said we had to get going, or we’d be late to the Ossermans’. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened to your friend. But remember I was the one who warned everyone that this could happen. That place was a firetrap. Isn’t that exactly what I said?”

  The tornado that swept across the county when I was nine years old left a path of destruction that in some places grew to be more than a half mile wide. The winds traveled across the length of Red River from north to south, uprooting trees, ripping roofs off houses and barns, upending trucks, trailers, and cars, and tossing household debris all over the countryside like so much confetti. Three people were killed. The gas station on Route 198 was demolished. I’d been up at the pond with my uncle Petie and aunt Adele and their three boys when what we thought was a bad thunderstorm roared through. But we drove back down Indian Hill Road to find the highway blocked by what looked like miles of fallen trees. The entire landscape had been altered—whole forests leveled—in less than fifteen minutes. We had to leave the car and pick our way around the fallen tree trunks and broken limbs. It took us four hours to reach my home.

  The tornado had cut behind the house, leaving, at first sight, everything intact. Both my parents were safe, but deeply shaken. The twister had missed the house by yards but it had demolished the barn and tossed the henhouse halfway up into the haying field. Dead chickens, many of which I’d stroked just that morning as I gathered eggs, lay about the property. In that one afternoon, my belief that life was essentially good—designed primarily for my happiness—was shattered.

  As I made my way down the Zellers’ drive I thought about that day. The acres of trees uprooted. The lives lost. I’ve always been afraid that it would happen again. And I’ve tried to be ready for it: herding the girls down to the basement with the first crack of thunder. But there’s nothing you can do really, is there? To prepare, to protect? The storm will descend in its own time, without warning. It will roar and roar. It will rage through your heart and leave destruction in its wake.

  I had not seen it coming at all. I had seen what I wanted to see: a beautiful, entitled woman who wanted me to be her friend. No, more than that: she wanted me to be her confidante. She’d whispered secrets to me. She’d complimented me on my family, my abilities, my looks. She’d entrusted my oldest daughter with her own children, flattering her, as well. Then she’d seen my husband’s best friend and had taken him, too. Just reached out and grabbed. And I’d let her. I’d opened my life to her, welcomed her in. I’d admired her mercurial spirit. Her sense of fun. I’d seen what I wanted to see. I’d projected my own hopes and needs into her. She was a thing of light and surfaces. I hadn’t understood that it was all an illusion, a dangerous one. That she was out of control. That she was driven by boredom and cravings, empty inside—a destructive force spiraling across our lives.

  And Luke? He’d thought he’d found his first and only true love. He’d been searching all his life for this: the answering cry. And there she was: perfect in her beauty and in her brokenness. He was going to heal her, restore her to happiness, the way he never could his mother. For so many years, women had been trying to do the same for him, but that was not what Luke longed for. He never wanted to be the loved one. He wanted to be the one who loved. And there she was. It made it so much simpler that she wasn’t real. That she was a mirror, reflecting back at him what he wanted to see. She was there when he most needed something. Someone. I remembered what he told me the night I’d first found out about the affair: I felt like I was slowly going numb, losing all feeling. After things fell apart with you guys, I began to think, what the hell is the point? Who would really care if I didn’t wake up some morning?

  And when he found out the truth about Anne, that she was false and unworthy, he had simply walked past her to something that had been waiting there in the shadows all along. Down the basement steps to the dark true flame that could not be extinguished, that was unconditional in its embrace. In time, the autopsy report would reveal that Luke had shot himself after starting the fire. I choose to believe that he set it in the uncertain hope that my husband and my daughters—and perhaps me, as well—would never have to know that his death hadn’t been an accident. It was then that I finally found the courage to tell Paul about Luke and Anne. I knew that he would blame himself for Luke’s death if I didn’t. He had a way of taking responsibility for everything that went wrong in Luke’s life. But this was one mistake that would rest forever on my shoulders.

  The damage the tornado inflicted took years to heal. The trees had to be hauled away or shredded, stumps ground to sawdust. For months, blue tarpaulins flapped on what was left of houses. Even now, more than twenty-five years later, people walking back in the woods will come upon an old window frame, or a rusted kitchen object, or even a moldering family album, and think, how did these things come to be here?

  The land where Luke’s cottage stood won’t take nearly so long to recover. The autumn leaves will blanket what is now no more than an open empty acre, intersected by a crumbling old stone wall bordering the roadway. Winter snow will pack the leaf debris down over the charred earth. And then, sometime in April, the first green shoots will poke up from under the ice: tickseed, milkweed, bull thistle. A mullein plant will rise up out of the mud. Then a pine sapling. A maple. And all will go on as before. As it always has. Mahican, Barnett, Alden, Zeller. It doesn’t matter. The weeds grow back. The broken earth is covered over. It will go on, of course. Life. I know that. I know. Already, the air is clearer. The ash has settled. A crow flying over the rubble doesn’t look down.

  Liza Gyllenhaal spent many years in advertising and publishing. She lives with her husband in New York City and Western Massachusetts.

  CONVERSATION GUIDE

  LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

  LIZA GYLLENHAAL

  This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich th
e

  individual reading experience, as well as encourage us

  to explore these topics books,

  and life are meant for sharing.

  A CONVERSATION WITH LIZA GYLLENHAAL

  Q. How did you come up with the idea for Local Knowledge? Is it based on people and places you know in real life?

  A. Yes, the story is based on several different real-life elements, the most important being the tremendous building boom that occurred all across the country in the late 1990s. My husband and I have owned a small house in Massachusetts for many years in a lovely, welcoming town a bit like Red River. After 9/11, real estate values and second-home building escalated dramatically, fueled mainly by city dwellers. I found the clash of cultures between a primarily rural, close-knit community and the recently arrived upscale “weekenders” a rich vein to mine thematically.

  Maddie is based very roughly on a woman I met for all of one hour, and I don’t even remember her real name. She was a young real estate agent who was helping my younger sister and her husband find a weekend house not far from ours. My sister wanted our opinion of a place she had seen, and asked her agent to show it to us. When we climbed into the agent’s car, I saw a kid’s backpack and other signs of personal life. The woman told us that she had three girls and that she’d grown up in the area. She pointed out a dirt road that led up to “a pond where everyone goes to swim.” The Zeller home is modeled on the striking contemporary house that we saw that day.

  The other real elements—a marijuana farm discovered in a nearby county in the late 1980s, a “sculpture garden” somewhat like Luke’s, the collapse of dairy farming in our area—coalesced quickly after I saw the house and met the real estate agent who became Maddie. The story took on a life of its own from there.

  Q. You’ve written Local Knowledge in Maddie’s voice. But your background in many ways—an advertising executive in New York City—is really more like Anne’s. What made you choose Maddie’s point of view?

  A. Well, I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, in an area that had been agricultural not that long ago. Over the years, I’ve watched the countryside be taken over—in a much more brutal way than Red River—by endless housing developments and strip malls. So I understand the sadness of knowing that “the forests and meadows of my girlhood … [are] all gone now and never to be recovered.” More than that, though, I felt that this particular story had to be written in the voice of someone who was born in the town and loved the area—but who also aspired to something more. The only thing Maddie and Paul have is the land, and, ironically, both have to see it divided and torn up in order to succeed. As Luke says: “I feel like we’re cannibalizing our birthright. The one good, beautiful thing we ever had.”

  I did feel I was taking some risks assuming Maddie’s point of view. I had to empathize with her without being condescending. I had to try to become her, and one thing that really helped me was when I decided that it was okay to have her thoughts and feelings be conveyed in a more “sophisticated” way than through her everyday speaking voice. I believe we express our deepest and truest selves through the use of a special interior language.

  Q. Anne is a complicated character. Did you find her hard to write?

  A. Absolutely. She was by far the most difficult, because I wanted to have Maddie be really taken with her; at the same time, I needed to signal to the reader that Anne might have some real problems. So I had Paul, who in my mind is the moral center of the book, sound the alarm about her first. The reader, in turn, becomes aware of her erratic moods and questionable parenting, but Maddie keeps making excuses for her behavior. Anne’s friendship comes to mean so much to Maddie that she’s willing to turn a blind eye to her faults. By the time Maddie decides to let Rachel continue to babysit for the Zellers—despite knowing that Anne and Luke are having an affair—I hope it’s plain that Maddie is making a serious mistake. I actually rewrote that chapter several times, each time trying to make it clearer that it was a critical turning point for Maddie.

  Q. How did you learn about the real estate business? Did you do research? Do you talk to working real estate agents?

  A. I did both. I was very lucky to find a bright young woman who was just starting out in real estate sales, who sat down with me several times and walked me through her workday, the computer programs her agency used, how she was going about building a client base, and so forth. At the end of one of our sessions, I met her boss, who told me she was proud of “her baby broker,” which is what I had Nana call Maddie at one point.

  I also spent a lot of time on the Internet (a godsend for researching just about anything in the world!), boning up on real estate classes and requirements for becoming a registered agent. And I bought and studied the kinds of test-prep books Maddie would have used to get her certification.

  Q. You have Maddie say at one point: “I suppose every place on earth has its own version of royalty.” Did the small town where you grew up have a version?

  A. Oh, yes. The family was quite different from the Barnett clan, but also very wealthy, envied, and emulated. They also experienced a lot of tragedy over the years. I think American royalty is concerned primarily with money rather than bloodlines, but it doesn’t make it any less real and powerful. I am drawn to writing about the dynamics of families and small towns, and I think this is a theme—in Fitzgerald’s famous summation “the rich are different from you and me”—that is endlessly fascinating.

  Q. You don’t have children, and yet you write about them with what seems like firsthand knowledge, Rachel especially. Where did she come from?

  A. I’m a very proud and happy aunt to a growing brood of kids, and I’m close enough to most of them to believe, as Maddie says early on, that they “come out of the box fully assembled for the most part.” The fictional Alden children were like that for me, especially Beanie, though I think she is the most fictionalized of the three. I borrowed little bits and pieces of girls I know to help imagine Rachel, but she’s not really at all like any teenager in my life now. If anything, she’s probably more like me when I was that age. I’ve paid close attention when my friends talk about raising their teenage girls; that’s primarily how I worked out Maddie and Rachel’s relationship. I think a big part of learning how to write is knowing how to listen.

  Q. What authors do you like and did any one of them influence you in writing this book?

  A. I read a lot of fiction and poetry and my list of favorite writers is long, lowbrow, highfalutin, and all over the place. In no particular order, I love the fiction of Iris Murdoch, P. D. James, John Fowles, F. Scott and Penelope Fitzgerald, Susan Isaacs, and Alan Furst, and the poetry of Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke, to name just a very quick and beloved few. I’ve long admired the writing of Jane Smiley, from the early murder mystery

  Duplicate Keys and the heartbreaking short stories in Age of Grief to her recent, enlightening nonfiction book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I reread her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres recently. Among many other things, it tells the story of the demise of a farming community in the midwest. It remains, to my mind, one of the great novels of our time.

  Q. Do you have a set writing routine?

  A. I usually wake up early and reread whatever I’ve been working on. I revise constantly on the computer. (It continues to amaze me how Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in longhand!) Then I let the demands of daily life intervene for several hours and pick up again in the afternoon. Most days, I don’t hit my stride until three o’clock or so, and then if I’m lucky get two or three good, productive hours in. I think a lot about what I’m working on when I’m not actually writing. When I’m running, for instance, or driving in my car back and forth from the city to the country. I try to work out problems—a scene I can’t get off the ground, a character who refuses to behave—during that two-and-a half-hour stretch.

  Q. Are you working on something new?

  A. Yes, I’m working on
something now, also about a small town, family, friendship, and a secret long buried in the past. In every other way, though, the new story is totally different from Local Knowldege.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. In the beginning of the first chapter, Maddie is driving over to the Zellers’ place for the first time, and at the end of the last chapter she’s driving back. From what point in time is Maddie actually telling the story?

  2. Maddie’s friendship with her sister-in-law Kathy begins to suffer when Anne and Maddie start to grow close. At one point Maddie admits to herself that she’s been “using” Kathy. Do you see a parallel between what Maddie feels toward Kathy, and Anne toward Maddie? Have you ever “used” someone in the same way?

  3. Maddie has a tendency to see other people initially through the prism of her own needs, hopes, and fears—then realize later that her perspective was somewhat skewed. Besides Anne, who else does Maddie change her views about over the course of the novel? Do your first impressions of others usually hold up over time?

  4. Have you ever told yourself that you disliked someone—the way Maddie does Luke—when you secretly feel the opposite? Maddie admits that she’s lied to herself about Luke in order to protect her true feelings. Does that explanation resonate with you?

  5. When did you begin to suspect that Anne was not as “considerate and friendly” as Maddie first believed her to be?

  6. Do you know someone who, like Paul, made some serious mistakes when he was young? How do you think that changes a person as he grows older?