Greta crouched in the dirt of her garden. None of her neighbors were awake. No one would notice her. She was getting up earlier and earlier. The light was just spreading itself thinly through the trees. She checked her PalmPilot for the dates of Lotte’s doctors’ appointments. She checked her own doctors’ appointments. She wondered how on earth she would be able to keep track of so many oncologists, dermatologists, radiologists, surgeons, gastroenterologists, gerontologists . . . Then she felt the heat of sickening shame and wondered how she had managed not to see a doctor until she had a huge malignant lump. She hated to go to the doctor, that’s how. Being married to one ought to have been enough.
Tony would rumble out of bed soon wondering what was for breakfast. Greta never understood why he had to ask this question each and every morning since he made his own breakfast and it was always toast with low-fat cottage cheese. Well, sometimes they had bagels around. Or low-fat cream cheese. Maybe that’s what he meant. Then he would read the newspaper, where he would discover what would become his Topic of the Day. He didn’t realize he had a Topic of the Day (unless, during an argument, Greta ungraciously pointed it out to him). And he was able to speak with considerable intelligence on any number of topics. But he had a habit of pouncing, as Greta saw it, on one hapless victim each day, and then parading it around, like a terrier with a rat between its jaws, waving it, shaking it at everyone he met, even after its neck had long been broken. One day it would be the Middle East, another Latin America. Sometimes the Economy, others the Electoral College, SATs, Oprah, Oil, Automotive Safety. Tony was interested in everything and gave everything its day in his court. Greta had never read the paper very carefully. She lacked “curiosity,” according to Tony, and perhaps he was right. But now, especially, his energy and obsessive attention to the worries of the world exhausted her.
She wondered when Elizabeth would show up today. She came by practically every day. Elizabeth had become relentlessly considerate. It frightened Greta, emphasizing the gravity of her condition, and it moved her.
Later, when she went in to sit with Tony over coffee, he read the Wall Street Journal. The stock market appeared to be today’s Topic.
“It’s like the weather,” she said. “You have no control over it. The forecast is never accurate. It’s crucial and meaningless at the same time . . . and you never invest anything anyway.”
“There are real opportunities in the technology arena,” he said, his voice warm and loud with pleasure, with almost boyish excitement. “Yes, it’s true, the NASDAQ reflects the realization of just how overvalued technology stocks were in the high-flying nineties . . .” This is my first break after my first six weeks of chemotherapy, she thought. “. . . and true, I know, I agree that within the rarefied atmosphere of the tech bubble . . .”
She was so relieved that she still had hair.
“Even so, there is every indication that the well-managed global information and communications companies will grow as these huge new markets open up . . .”
She’d slept in a nauseated stupor for three days each week after watching all those chemicals drip into her arm, but she was beginning to feel a little better today.
“I mean, the Developing Nations are hungry for information,” Tony said. “Don’t you think?”
“I have to go to my mother’s,” she said.
Tony put the paper down.
“Don’t say ‘take it easy,’ please,” she said.
“Sorry.”
Greta shrugged. She sipped some coffee. It took some of the metallic taste away. She couldn’t stand water anymore. And it used to taste so good. Bottled water of course. God knows what was in tap water. You could get cancer from tap water. She wondered if she would die. Everyone dies, she reminded herself. But will I?
“Do you really have to go?” Tony was saying.
Greta was still trying to finish up the last few jobs she had started. Soon she could stop work completely until she was better. Would she get better? They spoke of five-year survival rates. And even the odds for that were not what one would hope.
“You won’t be able to keep this from your mother forever,” Tony said.
“Watch me.” Why should her mother spend her last months worrying about Greta’s last months?
He made a sound that fell somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
“I have to interview the new companion,” she said. “Then I’ll come right home.” She had noticed that she was required to justify her behavior these days; every outing, every move. As if she were a child. People tried to make things easier, she knew. But they were not very good at it. Yet. Perhaps they would improve with practice.
Her mother was probably thinking exactly the same thing.
“I hope to God this one works out,” she said. “She’s a little older, anyway. Someone Mother can talk to. In English.”
Tony folded the paper, took a breath. She waited for the lecture: take it easy; don’t be so hard on yourself; it’s okay to be scared. “Just don’t . . .”
“Overdo it?”
“Sorry again.” Tony took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked annoyed.
“I won’t,” Greta said, to comfort him.
Dr. Charles Bovary . . . Dr. Charles Bovaine . . . Dr. Chuck Bovaine . . .
Chuck? Good God. She might as well call Charles Bovary “Brett.”
Poor Chuck. Fasten your seat belt, Chuck. Emma’s comin’ round the mountain, Chuck. She’s comin’ to git you. She’s comin’ to marry you, Chuck, she’s comin’ to destroy you. You best be gettin’ outta town, I’m thinkin’, Chuck.
Poor stupid, clumsy Chuck doesn’t see what’s coming, doesn’t see what’s in front of his nose. Chuck has no imagination. Emma has only imagination. Emma doesn’t see what’s in front of her either.
If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don’t have—imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness—is an imagination a good thing? Emma Bovary imagined herself into two affairs, ruinous debt, and an appalling, agonizing, bile-soaked suicide. Elizabeth thought with longing of that other Emma, bossy but decent, self-deluded but not self-involved. Jane Austen’s Emma, clean and witty and dry. But Emma Bovary? Extravagant, desperate, humid Emma Bovary?
See them clouds, Chuck? Storm’s a brewin’.
Elizabeth played around with the screenwriting program. It had so many features. It was the program that had suggested the name Chuck. All you had to do was type in a few letters and it offered alternatives. Chip. Chester. Charlemagne.
She left the attic office and passed a tranquil, napping Harry in his bed. Brett was glued to his computer in their bedroom. He had worked at home for the last two years. After graduate school, he taught for a year, hated it, and started a consulting firm that followed and evaluated the impact of every law passed in every state, every regulation in every agency, that might affect the various nonprofit organizations who became his clients. Brett was the whole firm. He had an impressive business address at Rockefeller Center, though anyone arriving there would find only a mailbox.
“Piecework,” Lotte said once, when Brett’s business was explained to her. “My Morris’s mother took in piecework.”
Elizabeth liked having him around all the time, especially now. They had more room than they’d had in New York, and she could leave Harry at a moment’s notice if she had to. But mostly she just liked knowing he was there. They had lunch together, they brought each other cups of coffee.
“Coffee?” Elizabeth asked him.
He shook his head no and waved, a combination “hello, thank-you, stop-talking-to-me-I’m-thinking, go-away” wave, without turning from the screen.
In the kitchen, Elizabeth spooned out coffee for herself, lost for a moment in its scent. Coffee and ginger ale were all Greta could drink now. Elizabeth went with her to the chemotherapy sessions. They were less frightening than either of them had imagined. For one thing, they took place in the doctor’s office, not the hospital. E
lizabeth would sit in the waiting room reading Travel and Leisure. Greta would come out twenty minutes later. It was just a drip, she said, and it didn’t hurt. Afterward, though, everything tasted like aluminum foil, she was queasy, and the fatigue was as heavy as death itself.
“They give you poison,” Greta said. “Odd, isn’t it?”
Outside, a dog barked. A little propeller plane from Santa Monica Airport buzzed overhead. The house faced a small walkway. In the back, there was an alley for cars. In 1900, Venice had been planned as a vacation spot for middle-class Los Angeles city dwellers, a series of summer cottages at the beach built around canals. A lovely idea, Elizabeth thought. Canals and walk streets. The walk street in front of her house was lined on either side by the front gardens of pretty little bungalows. If it weren’t for Harry, who treated the walkway as his own, rolling toy trucks up and down, she wasn’t sure if she would ever go out there, since she was always driving up the alley to park in the back, and coming into the house through the back door. She wondered if any of her neighbors ever saw their front gardens.
There was no traffic noise, not even Harry’s simulated engine roars, which meant that from the kitchen Elizabeth could hear the old men (it must have been their beagle who’d been barking) next door talking by the open window of their kitchen. They were identical twins in their eighties and often sat on their porch wearing matching green caps that said SKIDMORE BASKETBALL.
“Beautiful girl,” one said.
“That Cher,” said the other.
Elizabeth heard Harry singing in his bed, waking up from his nap, a nap he would soon have to abandon altogether as he started out on life’s narrow rocky path at nursery school. He sang with his pacifier in his mouth. He would have to give that up, too, she supposed.
Harry stopped singing. She heard a shuffling. He appeared in the doorway.
“I’m a cat,” he said, and began making hideous high-pitched squealing noises.
“Why are you screeching, kitty?”
“I can’t answer,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Cats don’t talk.”
He ran to the television and turned it on.
“Tommy!” he cried, pointing at a cartoon baby.
Tracy? Britny? Barbie?
Barbie, Elizabeth thought. I will name her Barbie. A brand name. An icon among brand names. A brand name with a wardrobe. Barbie the pilot, the bathing beauty, Olympic skater, equestrian, career gal, African American. Nobody could say Barbie lacked imagination.
Harry wanted an apple. Harry lined up his blocks on the floor. Harry had cities to build. Which meant Elizabeth had cities to build, too. Her workday was over. Her workday was just beginning. She sat on the floor with Harry, who was intent, his vision as grand as Robert Moses’s.
“That’s great, sweetie,” she said periodically, reaching out to steady a tower. Barbie and Chuck, she thought. Poor Flaubert. Chuck, a chiropractor, rushes off to his office late one night. He has to perform an emergency adjustment on a burly, prosperous ex-hippie microbrewer! The brewer’s beautiful daughter drives her father to the dedicated chiropractor! Dad is bent over in pain! She helps him, in all his tormented bulk, into the office! But, mon dieu! She is very beautiful, this daughter!
Elizabeth picked up her mug from the coffee table. Beautiful in which way? she wondered. A drop rolled down the side of the mug onto her pants. Beautiful how? Elizabeth would have to decide, and she was not used to dispensing beauty, only interpreting it. Should Barbie Bovaine possess the dark-eyed mysterious beauty Flaubert gives Emma Bovary? Or the blond, blue-eyed prettiness favored by Americans? Perhaps she is stylish and cosmopolitan and dark, but lives in a blond, robust, homespun town? Yes. Dark hair, black hair. Swollen lips, like a model. Which she bites, like Emma Bovary. And beautiful white fingernails, like Emma. Small, lovely feet. No heroine within spitting distance of Emma Bovary could have anything but small, lovely feet.
Elizabeth rubbed one of her own feet against her other ankle. Sandpaper. A wide swathe of sandpaper. That was Elizabeth’s foot.
She listened to the construction noises of a neighborhood on the way up. The house was oddly cool, not at all what she had expected. Even the attic. Two shimmering green parrots sat on a telephone wire. A flock of them lived in the palm tree next door, the progeny of pets who had escaped.
“The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce, and Cliché in the Age of Ikea.” It wasn’t a bad paper. She had an old college friend who was an editor at Tikkun and desperate for last-minute copy.
“Some piece on peace has dropped out, I wonder why, don’t you have something, anything, in a drawer?”
Elizabeth had just finished this paper, and though Tikkun was not a suitable academic journal and would not help her get tenure, she was not sure she was a suitable academic or that she really wanted tenure.
Is adultery tragedy? Or is it farce? Was that the part of the paper that interested Volfmann? Perhaps he had liked the part about cliché. The word “cliché” originally described a metal plate that clicked and reproduced the same image, over and over, mechanically. Elizabeth flipped through Flaubert’s collection of clichés, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, looking for inspiration. But most of the entries did not translate well, more because of the passing of time than the shift to English. Rather than a dictionary of familiar clichés, it read like the historical document it had become. What remained fresh and clear were not the expressions themselves but the forms used to express the clichés. These were timeless. The knowingness and importance of tone that was merged with the emptiness of the information—the portentous commonplace—this was instantly recognizable. “Horizons. Find them beautiful in nature, dark in politics; Enthusiasm. Called forth exclusively by the return of Napoleon’s ashes. Always indescribable: the newspaper takes two columns to tell you so.”
But the very idea of cliché, the repetition of machinery in a printing press, the horror at repetition, had become itself a cliché.
“I don’t want The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,” Volfmann had said. “I want cutting-edge banality.”
“So . . . a farce . . .”
“I don’t know,” Volfmann said, shaking his head. “Cutting-edge banality seems like tragedy to me.”
Elizabeth didn’t know what to make of Volfmann. He talked about the bottom line and demographics and grosses. He was crude and yelled at people on the phone. But he was smarter than she was. She saw that right away. And she wondered if that made her like him more, or less. Because she did like him.
She suddenly remembered him closing his eyes, just for a moment, as he listened to someone on the phone. When he opened them, he’d looked right at her, caught her watching him, and she had blushed.
Farce, farce, tragedy, tragedy, squawk, squawk. One parrot seemed to be raping another parrot. The coffee was no longer hot. Her mother had colon cancer. Her grandmother had skin cancer. Adultery was neither tragedy nor farce. It was simple self-indulgence. Madame Bovary was an ass.
She went into the bathroom, turned on the water, and leaned her forehead against the cool tile.
“Madame Bovary is an ass,” she said to Brett at dinner.
“A piece of ass,” he said.
“Why can’t people be content . . .” she said.
“Ass is a donkey,” Harry said. “Grandma said.”
“. . . and appreciate what they have?”
Brett sighed. She saw his foot tapping.
“Am I boring you?” she said. She felt the blood rising to her cheeks as it always did when she was even the slightest bit emotional.
“I’m trying to decide if being content and appreciating what you have is a romantic notion,” he said, smiling, “or an antiromantic notion.”
Larry Volfmann called Elizabeth the next day. He wanted her to meet a director who was interested in the project. The project? she thought. You mean the page?
“Edgy little comedy,” he was saying about the director’s first and only movie. “Doll
. You ever see it?”
Elizabeth had not seen it, but she thought she might have read a review. Maybe she heard her students talking about it. “The girl is obsessed with her doll? Or something?”
“Yeah. It’s sexy. Nuts. But sexy. Sundance audience award. Didn’t make a nickel. So, Sunday. At the Malibu house. Bring the family.”
Elizabeth hung up, full of excitement. She lived in Los Angeles and was going to have a meeting with a director at a beach house in Malibu. She pressed the mute button and the sound of the television came back up. She was watching The Magic Box, an old English film she’d never heard of about an Englishman who was the true inventor of the movies. He has just succeeded in projecting the world’s first motion picture, a scene of his cousin and son walking toward him on the street. It is projected onto a sheet. It is two A.M. but he runs out into the deserted streets of London and grabs a policeman. He has to show it to someone!
Elizabeth loved old movies and watched them constantly. It was rare that she saw one on television that she hadn’t already seen. She watched Robert Donat haul the bobby up the narrow stairs, sit him down, and turn on his primitive projector.
I’m making a movie, she thought. Just like Robert Donat.
She realized the heavily whiskered cockney policeman was a very young Laurence Olivier.
“Laurence Olivier,” she said to Brett, who had come in the room and sat beside her. He was carrying bagpipes he’d just gotten on eBay.
I’m not making a movie, she thought sadly. I’m watching a movie. There is a big difference. I’m so good at watching movies.
“I’m not sure the skill of watching movies translates into writing movies,” she said to Brett.
“Don’t worry,” he said gently. “You can do it.” He blew on the long, black stem of the bagpipe. “Nothing happens,” he said.
“What if my beginner’s luck runs out?” she said. “I’ve never given any signs of being a screenwriter.”
“Now is your chance.”
But don’t you see, Elizabeth thought, I don’t want a chance. I don’t like chance. Chance is too chancy. I want to write the same paper over and over and teach the same class to succeeding generations and have them file past my deathbed, black-and-white images superimposed on my grizzled, worn self. Like Mister Chips.
She Is Me Page 5