by Jeanne Darst
When I was doing Sally on the Mount in Los Angeles, Marisa Tomei came to the show, and naturally she thought I was a genius and took a bunch of us out afterward to a hotel rooftop where we enjoyed seriously preferential treatment, and a large man from the hotel stood by our table for unknown reasons.
Now, a year and a half after that night with her, Nick feels, is quite insistent, that I send my book to Marisa Tomei.
“You’re not even trying to get published! I don’t know why you don’t send that thing to Marisa Tomei.”
“Well, for starters, she’s not a publishing house, babe, she’s an actress.”
“Oh, gimme a break. You see? You don’t even want to sell your book!”
“I can’t . . . I just can’t explain it to you, can I? Marisa Tomei is not going to publish my book.”
“People don’t take over two years writing a book! Why don’t you send it in?”
“It’s not ready.”
“That’s what publishers do, Jeanne. They figure out the ending. Just send it in. They’ll finish it.”
HUDSON AND I GO BACK to New York whenever we can, increasingly without Nick. He doesn’t seem to want much to do with New York or anyone there anymore. We go out for ice cream with my dad one night. He’s seventy-eight and a sub in Brooklyn public schools. He wouldn’t consider teaching when we were kids, and now he’s subbing in high schools. But the thing is, he really likes it. He told the black kids in school that his mother was black, telling them stories about Ella Voss, his nanny. I can’t imagine what kids think of him, what they think of him saying his mother was black. I think it’s hilarious but also I can’t believe schools actually employ him. I ask him if Grandma Darst and Ella Voss got along. He says they did, and for the rest of the conversation refers to Grandma Darst as “your white grandmother.”
He tells me he was working for the Census Bureau but he got fired because twice he was walking home at night and dropped all the papers, the data he had collected during the day. He says he retraced his steps trying to find the papers but never did. We walk to the ice cream place and sit outside on picnic benches across from Prospect Park. His front tooth is missing, fell out a few months earlier, and I can’t stop staring at it. It’s hard not to stare at a single jaggedy front tooth; it looks like it’s protruding outward when it doesn’t have another tooth next to it. It’s jarring and upsetting. I have my usual mix of feelings when I see him: he’s utterly delightful and likable, and he’s frustrating. I am trying to figure out how I can help, does he need a social worker now, can my sisters and I pay for his expenses ourselves. My sisters are hurt mostly because his “project” still seems more important to him than their kids. As time goes on, his need to triumph becomes the only way he thinks he can redeem himself or make things right in our eyes. But as time goes on what we want more and more is a father and a grandfather. And the more he focuses on Fitzgerald the less he focuses on us and our children and the angrier Eleanor and Katharine get. I suppose they feel that he doesn’t suffer for his art, they do. Their kids do. Maybe as the only one who writes, I’m more terrified for myself, and now for my son. I think, I’m next. I have just fixed two of my own teeth, albeit they were in the back so no one could see, but I was missing two teeth not six months ago. And I wonder if anyone has coined the term “writers’ teeth.”
He just talks through all of my thoughts, forging ahead, he’s on the abortion, he’s on the book, his tooth doesn’t even come up. He could care less. As it has always been, his life bothers other people, not him. Hudson is psyched to see his grandpa despite his Dickensian appearance. My dad isn’t sure whether he should pick his grandson up or shake his hand. He is affectionate, there is no doubt about that, but not necessarily at ease. He can be awkward with his grandkids, shaking hands with kids who are a little young for it. He’s always saying to me and Eleanor and Katharine things like “Never been any damn good with babies.” Which is weird when you are one of his babies.
Nick understands that my biggest fear is that I will become my dad. That I’ll be a broke writer-mom with some hideous growth sprouting up from my shoulder, a second head but with no eyes or features, just a head that I brush off in conversation when people bring it up or suggest perhaps seeing a doctor, eager to get back to talking about my latest profile for The New Yorker. I think about Crazy Kate and Dagwood, and then my dad and then me, three generations of us, and I look at Hudson eating his chocolate in a cup and think how much Hudson seems like a writer’s name.
I recently reread the piece of my father’s from Harper’s magazine called “Prufrock with a Baedecker,” about St. Louis. In it he claims that St. Louisans are forever trying to recapture a past that he believes was never what they thought it was. “Old cities, like old families, obviously shabby, presumptively genteel, sustain themselves on dreams of vanished grandeur and it may be better to leave such dreams intact.” It’s a really good piece. The guy can write. I ask him, Do you believe dreams should be left intact? Of course I’m talking about my mother. Of course I’m talking about the fantasies, the dreams, the myths, the delusions, the denial around my mother’s alcoholism. Maybe asking, Has it all been worth it? He says he doesn’t anymore, that he never did, that he and Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s at the time, agreed that portraying a city in three or four thousand words was impossible and it was just one way to end the piece. “No,” he says, “the truth should be told. The truth is not just for the young, and particularly in writing, the truth is everything.
“My God, people think fiction is a bunch of made-up flourishes, fanciful play. Fiction can do more than nonfiction, because it is the truth along with the artfulness and craft. If it’s not the truth, it simply doesn’t work, it won’t fly, and the reader will know in an instant, well, this writer simply doesn’t know the layout of this town or how a summer night might feel in a certain part of Montana, whatever it is. Fiction allows you to get as close as you want to actual facts, happenings, and then move away from it. There’s artfulness and craft in nonfiction, no question, but you can’t do what I just mentioned, which is big.”
I can’t help feeling that what Dad likes about fiction is the power of it, the power of being, essentially, more beautiful, more charming, smarter, better than, the truth.
“Almost . . . superior?”
He laughs. “Well said, Jean-Joe.”
We talk of two-leveling: writing a story using another story as the base or first level of your story, like Joyce using the Odyssey as a first level for Ulysses. He hops back to the subject of Zelda and tells me about some new stuff he’s gotten for his book from an old Esquire piece titled “A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
“You don’t wreck a life to create a novel,” he blurts. “You don’t ruin a woman like Zelda who was a genius in three different directions.” I hear it again. It’s not that he thought he should have gotten to my mother’s apartment sooner and saved her life. It’s that he feels he killed her slowly, over the twenty-three years that they were married and then not married, because of the work he wanted to make, the two novels and everything else, and I think maybe he’s doing an upside-down two-leveling: using the story of Scott’s work taking precedence over Zelda’s mental and physical health to come to terms with or write the story of his own artistic ambition and the unsightly fall of my mother.
“ I GOT ONE WORD for you . . . ‘Fitzgerald.’” When Nick says it one day I don’t feel all that mad. At the very least it feels premature. He feels this is the cruelest, most powerful thing he can say, tapping into my greatest fear, of being as obsessive and unproductive and impractical as my dad. But articulating someone’s biggest worry does not make it true. I am capable of making money, at least enough to survive. I take care of our son and I produce actual writing. Mommy just bought herself two teeth, muthafucka! Scrappiness has seen me through years when I wasn’t getting paid. He is right in thinking, What kind of maniac would endure all that just for a shot at the big-time? Or in my case, what kind of je
rk would spend months writing a play just to put it on in my living room for one night and have a fantastic time doing it? The very thing that has gotten me here is the thing he despises, the thing he’d rather avoid if he can by not seeing my dad, the thing he lacked to keep going with painting: insanity.
I say my parents lived in the past, but to tell this story, I was, as my husband loved to point out, living in the past. Spending, in other words, every day of my life in the past, my past, my parents’ past, even my grandparents’ past, the past of my hometown, St. Louis, Jesus it never ends, the past! It just keeps going and going and going. I admit it; I’m lured in by stories, telling them, capturing events and people and molding them, making people laugh. And I am like both of them.
THE MARRIAGE ENDED. Maybe because we never should have gotten married. We were nothing alike. The way I look at it, though, is that I might never have become a mother if we hadn’t been together. If I don’t make any mistakes, I don’t live, essentially. I miss out. The things that are wrong with me, the things I struggle with, are the things that define me. I have not changed in the way that I relate to struggle more than I do ease. This is, I suppose, my beef with sunshine. With Los Angeles. Was he right to quiver when he heard that there was a time when I owned one knife, a single spoon and two plates—at age thirty? Did he think that I would prefer to spend the day writing when I had a babysitter, over going out to lunch and a movie with him? Did he feel I loved to poke around on my computer, jotting down ideas and working on plays, more than I loved him? Maybe he did. Did he feel the only person for whom I would happily sacrifice a day of working was my son? I don’t know. I do know that I now get to try to figure out how to be a writer and a parent. I get to try to figure out how to put my child before writing.
I have to let my father read this book and it is terrifying to think that I will hurt him with it. Am I doing exactly what he claims Fitzgerald did to Zelda and what I suggest he did with Mom, sacrificing him for my writing? Am I saying he put writing before all of us? All my father has done has been to show me wild enthusiasm and encouragement as a writer. I would never want to hurt him. I admire his writing and know I am not half the thinker or writer he is. His support of my writing was never about the writing for me. It was the love from my dad. And therefore, I have to agree with Eleanor and Katharine and Julia that I don’t care all that much about his writing. I want him to be my dad.
WRITING IS A CHOICE. Does this make it all worse, the knowledge that you have other options, or does this make it better? A lot of days I’ve gotten to eat lunch at home and this is a really big perk in my opinion. When you’re good and ready to take a break, you stroll into your kitchen and open the refrigerator door and poke around leisurely. “What am I in the mood for?” This is not a feeling people in offices get to have much. What’s fast? What’s cheap? What’s on the way to the pharmacy where I’m picking up my antidepressants? This is how most people have lunch. To have lunch at home is a huge luxury. To cook a little something, prepare a sandwich in your own time, with just the right amount of tomatoes and a little of that basil one of your friends brought over the night before. And then grill it. To enjoy a little chocolate ice cream in a bowl in front of the newspaper before you go back to work. This is a nice way to live. To hang around bowls of chocolate ice cream and ideas all day can be worth it. It is a way that some people will never understand. So it seems writing is what Zelda said it was in the therapy session:
“Something may be a sort of fulfillment of yourself, and it may not be great to other people, but it is just as essential to yourself as if it is a great masterpiece.”
My days so far as a small-time writer have been just that, essential to me as if they are a great masterpiece.
Did I just quote Zelda Fitzgerald?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the following people, who fall into three categories: terrific readers, terrific friends/family, people who have ignored the loud voice of reason and taken a gamble on me: Hollywood Hudson, Caroline and Jim Hays, Henry Tenney and his terribly petite publicists, Louisa and Baird Tenney, David McCormick, Ira Glass, Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Geoff Kloske, Bell Chevigny, Alexander Chee, Rosanna Bruno, Sophia Ramos, Giana Catherine Allen, Linda Labella, Tracy Martin, Phantom Theater, Lois Tryk and Kurt Bier, Tammi Cubilette, Jenna Hornstock, Leah Allen and Mike O’Neil, David Rosenthal, Orlagh Cassidy and Nico Sidoti, Anne Magruder, Sara Goodman and Mott Hupfel, all the people who’ve ever lent me money or let me write in their house, the town of Warren, Vermont, especially Jane and Peter Schneider, Steve Badanes and Dave Sellers, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.