“Tell us!” they said.
“Wow!” they said.
“You’re going to be famous!” they said.
“So, when’s the book coming out?” they asked.
“When will the book be finished?” they asked.
“When’s this thing going to be a bestseller?” they asked.
They were happy for us, obviously, but then I remembered that the book was about a dead man whom I’d long wanted to die, for reasons I was writing about in the book, and who I now wished was alive. How do you smile, when all this is happening inside you?
“Aren’t you excited?” people said.
“About?”
“Your book!” they say. “You must be very excited!”
Which felt like, You don’t look excited. Why aren’t you excited?
Excitement? No. Grief was the predominant tone of my heart, grief, and gratitude, and caution. Is a mother excited the baby’s going to come out? Yes, yes, of course, so she can take a bath in a vat of gin. What will she say in the days before the baby comes out of her uterus? She will not say: I am so excited.
She will say: God, get the thing outside of me, please, Jesus.
I felt like a pregnant mother who’d just been told her baby girl was in fact, according to the sonogram, a buffalo. It was time to push the thing out, whatever it was.
* * *
What my friends and students really wanted to know was how much money I made, but I didn’t tell them, because I have “class” and also because I did not really know, yet. When the first of my book advance checks arrived, I smelled it, a check for $65,000. The original check had been for $76,250, and after Debbie’s share, the rest was mine.
The way a book deal usually works is, you get a few payments. A small book deal, say, $50,000, might be doled out in two payments, half when you sign the deal, half when you hand over the book to the publisher. A rare plump deal, say $2 million, might be paid out in six installments. Usually, it’s three or four checks you get—one when you sign, one when you deliver the manuscript, another when the hardcover appears, and the last one a year after the book comes out, which you can use for therapy, because things didn’t turn out quite like you thought they should.
Mine was parceled out by HarperCollins in four payments.
Twice a year, they send you a bill for exactly how much money your book has not made and thus how much you owe them from the money they paid you. If you don’t earn back your advance, then you probably don’t get a paperback and most definitely probably do not get a second book with anyone, anywhere, because there’s this secret database, housed somewhere in a mountain in coal country, which records book sales for everyone in the industry to see, so said Debbie, who revealed all this to me slowly, over several months, because if she told me all at once I might have lost consciousness.
That summer, as I continued to write and weep daily, I took the first $65,000 check to the bank. This part lifted my spirits. My father had been at enmity with banks for most of his life, so it felt great going in with this piece of paper. I rode my bike, and walked in sweating through my T-shirt like a delivery boy with a sack of tacos.
“Can I help you?” the lady up front asked.
“I would like to open a savings account,” I said, like a twelve-year-old.
I sat down and handed her the check.
“Excuse me,” she said, stepping away.
Immediately, I was assaulted by kindness from no fewer than three male managers who swept me up out of my chair and into an office to discuss investment opportunities. I don’t always feel like Jay-Z, but that day, I felt very much like Jay-Z that day.
“What sort of work are you in?” they asked, taking turns looking at the check.
This was my first experience of being perceived as wealthy, and what I learned was, everyone treats you like a victorious general, offering meat and drink. It was a feeling my father never experienced. He was built for it. At my age, he looked like a victorious general. But he never got pampered by bank managers. It would have suited my father, his swagger, the heft of him.
What had kept Pop from sitting in the chair in which I now sat, sweating and smiling? Why had I chosen to ride my bike here? Perhaps I’d wanted to surprise the bank. Pedigreed men had judged my father all his life, his way of talking, his hayseed logic. I wanted them to judge me, too, my bike, my gamey odor, the salty rings on my cap, so I could apologize for my appearance and then hand them the check and go all Pretty Woman on them.
* * *
I did not cause a scene. I just smiled quietly, thinking of Pop. I do not believe the dead look down on us from an observation deck in paradise. They’ve got plenty to do. At that very moment in space-time, I like to think that Pop was riding a large black rhino across an alien steppe, throwing spears at an abundance of meat.
In my shoes, Pop would’ve bought something useful with that money, like a Pershing tank, or a freshwater hydrofoil. But I was not Pop, and I’d learned all his lessons, even those he taught through failure, and the lesson was: Don’t spend money you’ll never see again, if you can.
I pedaled home from the bank, thinking about money. Was it possible I had escaped this demon that hounded my father? Might all my children and their children and the never-ending line of demented progeny I will sire from now through the sunset of human history be free of the bondage of debt that had fettered the movements of my family at every step? Was this first check the seed of generational wealth for my children?
Grief flew off me like vapor, off and away. I felt quite free and happy.
Soon, I got an accountant named Forbes, who explained how much of that money was mine and how much was not, as so ordered by the government, and suddenly I felt quite libertarian.
“Let’s do something nice for ourselves,” Lauren said.
Our first big purchase was a new set of drinking glasses.
That night, we went out to dinner.
I fed my wife steak. She likes meat, this beautiful tyrannosaur.
Afterwards, happy and full of meat, we ventured upon a magical land called Target. I bought some new socks. Lauren bought a bra and new glassware. We got the girls some panties. Lauren took my hand on the way out of the store.
“We’re rich,” she said.
“We are,” I said.
Money’s not everything, but it can remind your loved ones that you love them, sometimes. I closed my eyes, asked God to keep us away from Target.
* * *
That summer, I went to a barn in Montauk, New York, to finish the book, spending the month of August with a painter, a photographer, and two other writers, at an artists’ colony, which I worried might end up being some sort of nudist situation where everybody had orgies while discussing phenomenology, but mostly what we did was make salads and work quietly in a large and airy former horse barn near a market where a tomato cost thirty dollars.
I’d always coveted such a life, surrounded by artists, shoplifting produce. I finished the book at the barn and sent it to Cal, my editor at HarperCollins, who looks exactly like you think an editor should look, with thick editor eyeglasses and lots of shiny black Connecticut hair and a voice like a disc jockey on some obscure college town jazz program airing at midnight. Cal had worked in New York publishing since the dawn of man, they said. He interned with Johannes Gutenberg and edited Florence King and Jess Walter and Roxane Gay and Rick Bragg. He knew the South, I felt.
“Where’s he from?” people asked.
“New England,” I said. “South New England.”
If you want to know what a book editor actually does, here’s what they do:
Imagine your book is a pretty black dress.
You put it on.
You show it to Cal.
What do you think, Cal? you ask.
Love it. Beautiful, he says. I am dying it’s so beautiful.
Then later, at dinner, he says, I also love red. Do you love red?
And you go, Sure, red’s fine.
/> And he goes, Wouldn’t it be weird if your dress were red?
And you go, Um.
And he goes, No big deal, let’s order!
Then later, you buy the same dress in red and he sees you in it and he’s like, Oh my god, you look perfect. Don’t you love it?
And you do, you love it.
Sometimes, you hear about editors who have to sit at the writer’s bedside with a bucket of Merlot and a handgun and a bouquet of roses and call for a priest. But in my case, it was just a couple of phone calls and an email or two, one meeting in person, maybe a month of rewrites. Cal was very good at his work.
“These are not the paragraphs you’re looking for,” he said.
“You know, I was thinking about changing these paragraphs,” I said.
If you’re as fortunate as me, you’ll find people like Debbie and Cal, these sextons of human culture, tending the sanctuary of civilization, sweeping the floors of your dream, helping it gleam like polished marble. They are a gift. They hover slightly above the earth.
The wildest thing happened after I turned in the manuscript to Cal and returned to Savannah to a happy reunion with my family after a month away. We ate Cuban. We had cake. We retired to bed, sated and content. The next morning, I woke early, as I always do, and walked to my desk, sat down, opened the computer, and what I saw stunned me.
A blank page.
The writing was finished.
There was nothing to write or revise. All was done. The surging tide of the dream that had risen and ebbed within me, sloshing back and forth day and night, heaving me to the desk every morning, it was gone. Just like that.
Chapter 12
He was haunted by the specter of Talent and on some days he really believed he had it—but mainly he forgot about it, and focused indefatigably on self-promotion.
—WILLIAM MONAHAN, Light House
NOW THAT THE BOOK WAS FINISHED, I KNEW IT WAS TIME to show it to Lauren, because while it was about my father, it also turned out to be about other people, including her, and more specifically, her reproductive system.
She’d been in my stories before. Back then, she was fine with it. She was always saying these funny lines, and it was too good not to use this stuff. She was feeding me good intel about the world. So I used a funny line in a story? She didn’t care. That’s how it starts. With innocence. With generosity.
What I wrote about her and us and our sexual war games was not lewd, but it was, well—
A lot, she said, via text, after she read it.
I know.
A lot.
I love you! I said. You smell pretty, I bet.
We talked about the difficult chapters, where I laid our marriage bare for all the world to laugh and wince at. Truth is what I was after, and I was hoping my wife knew that.
“But this part,” she said, pointing. “This part seems a little too true.”
And she was right. I softened the edges, where I could, which actually made the book more humane and funnier, which blew my mind. There she went again, softening me. My lovely non-reader wife turned out to be an amazing reader and editor.
“Thank you for letting me say all this,” I said.
“Now go buy me a house with more bathrooms,” she said.
MY WIFE’S REACTIONS
What She Did Not Say *“I love reading about myself!”
*“Thank you for making me famous!”
*“It is fun knowing the world knows things about our sex life!”
What She Did Say*“It’s better than I thought it would be.”
*“You made me sound mean.”
*“Three bathrooms.”
Next was my mother’s turn.
“What’s it called again?” Mom asked.
“The World’s Largest Man,” I said.
“The World’s Biggest Man,” she said.
“Largest.”
“World’s Tallest Man.”
“Largest.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot,” she said.
“Do you have dementia?” I asked.
“No.”
People who want to write about their families think their families will care, will be obsessed with the book to the point of madness, but no. False. It might take your mother several months to remember the title because she has recently suffered a traumatic brain injury owing to prolonged exposure to Facebook, as mine had.
“I’m not letting you read it until you remember the name of it,” I said. “What’s the name of the book, Mom?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t have to answer that question.”
“Tell me.”
“The Largest Man in Town,” she said.
“No.”
“Big Man on Campus.”
“No.”
“Big Man in the City.”
“Nope.”
“The Planet of Large People.”
“That’s it.”
It made me a little sad that my own mother could not remember the name of the book, but then this is the same woman who promised and failed to read my dissertation so many years ago and who, when I bring it up, finds reasons to begin dusting other rooms of the house.
“And when does it come out?” she asked, that winter.
“Spring,” I said. “May.”
“That’s so far away.”
“It takes time.”
“May?”
“The month.”
“May.”
“Yep.”
The next day:
“When does it come out?” she said.
“May,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“May, you say?”
“The one right after April.”
“Don’t be ugly.”
“Have you recently fallen?” I asked.
Finally, when I thought she was ready, I handed her the manuscript, which felt like presenting her with the jewel-encrusted skull of Saint Albert. I fully expected messages at four o’clock in the morning about why I didn’t find more opportunities to describe how beautiful her hair is in the morning light.
“My goodness,” Mom said, taking the book in both hands. “So this is it.”
“Promise,” I said. “No text messages about factual errors. It’s too late for that.”
She was still grieving Pop, and his memory rose up like smoke from the pages. I was afraid the book would ask too much of her, might ask her to realign structural elements in the cathedral of her memory. Her hagiography of Pop had already begun.
It was winter now, 2015, the year of the book’s release, barely nine months since Pop’s sudden exit from the story. His death certificate and the receipt for the funeral costs still lay in an envelope on my writing table. I felt treasonous. His death had transformed the memoir, providing a powerful end to the book. Part of me knew a gruesome thing I could not tell my mother: His death had made the book better, profounder, not only the final chapter, but all of it. His passing had pulled out truths from me I’d been hoarding—how I’d hated him, wanted him to die, even fantasized about it as a boy. I wanted to unmake the book, to rewrite an ending where he didn’t die, where I could hand him a copy the way I now handed my mother a copy.
The first night she had the book, she did not call. I expected it at any moment, a tearful jeremiad via text and phone call.
How could you? she would say.
Why did you? she would say.
It didn’t happen like that, she would say.
She was implicated in some of the sin of the book, too. She might stop talking to me, I knew, might want to throw herself on a pyre or in a river. She is full of feelings. She listens to a lot of Susan Boyle.
The next morning, a text.
I just love it, she said. I read it three times.
In one night?
Your wife let me see it three months ago, she said.
* * *
That win
ter, Lauren and I used the book money to get out of our tiny underwater house and into a slightly less tiny above-sea-level house with a porch and five ceiling fans and three toilets, one toilet just for Lauren, which almost made her cry. Plus closets, so many, in which she could hide from the children, should they ever discover the location of her toilet.
The house sat on a wide street in an old neighborhood with a playground, where my daughters could walk to school. Lauren worked at their school now, teaching ballet. They walked, and I rode my bike to work. In these small and measured ways, we now had a much larger new life. Lauren moved through the new home with bright and happy eyes, touching all the ancient doorknobs, which promptly fell off.
“I love this house,” she said.
Houses meant nothing to me. Vessels. A place to put the tub, that is all. No, this was hers. I owed her at least this much.
I had an office now, with windows. Light entered the windows from opulent new angles. Alien faucets abounded. Nooks were many. Lauren and I had to have a strategy session just for deciding what to put in all the closets. Every day, she rearranged the furniture and leered at it from doorways, suspect. I came home from class to find her nailing, always nailing. Tiny hammer, tap-tip-tap. Tiny nails, always in her lip. Tiny pictures appeared on walls. She was colonizing this virginal land for us. She lit many candles.
$305,000. What the book sold for at auction, way before taxes.
$327,500. What the new house cost, after improvements.
$472,402. What my children’s college educations will cost, just based on an estimate on a website I looked at just now.
$39 trillion. What the new house will cost us with interest.
In many ways, it was a luxurious new home, with many luxurious features, such as a bathroom mirror that transformed, with the mere touch of a hand, into a luxurious “secret” medicine cabinet. I helped Lauren hang curtains and watched with pride as the girls did cartwheels in the new grass. I hung a swing in the new tree, which I hoped would be in many family photos that I would one day touch, on my deathbed, in holy wonder.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 13