* * *
And then one day, at a bookstore, while she was making jokes in the audience, it clicked: Wait. Oh! Oh. She is part of the act.
I’d entirely forgotten the cardinal rule of comedy, that we must plunder the holy of holies of our own hearts first, seize the golden calves we’ve constructed and melt them down into gold, Jerry. Gold!
All that discomfort I felt about my name was an idol, representing the false god of my fame, a god which I now knew was perfectly imaginary. Mom’s gentle pasquinade had exposed the idol. I suppose it was the last thing I was holding on to, as my little book became less and less popular. With this revelation, I could no longer pretend to be important. As funny and “real” as I pretend to be, like every good American I still lie to myself about so very much. My tour had revealed many of these lies, and I know these falsehoods will continue to be stripped from me until death.
Finally, I knew what to do. I’d come up to a microphone in this or that city, engaging in gentle comic banter with the audience, clearing my throat, about to begin, and she’d interrupt.
Do you need some water? Mom would exclaim, from the audience.
Ma’am?
You’ve got phlegm.
She’d be saying this from about six rows back, while everyone watched.
I’m fine, I’d say.
You need a lozenge.
I don’t need a lozenge, thank you.
Here, pass this lozenge to Scott.
Can somebody remove this woman? I’d say.
You just try it.
I can have you killed, I’d say, into the mic.
Then who would come to your readings? she’d say, bringing the house down.
Something was happening, had happened. I was being transformed. The fame and glory I had sought dithered away, and the journey now beckoned me into even weirder new realities.
Chapter 23
Why do people go on cruises? Nothing good ever happened on a cruise.
—LAUREN KEY
HOW WAS IT?” LAUREN ASKED.
“She told everyone I was an alcoholic,” I said. “Am I?”
“Do you want to be?” she said.
Lauren was playing on her phone, pretending I wasn’t about to beg her to come with me, next time. She wouldn’t even look at me, and so I got her attention the way I always got her attention, which was to take off all my clothes.
“I want you to come with me,” I said.
“Why are you naked?”
“I am not dressing until you agree to come with me.”
She said, “Nope.”
Nope has always been a big thing with my wife, as well as every other woman in my life.
“Do you know what’s for dinner?” I’ll ask.
“Nope.”
“Do you want to work on the budget?”
“Nope.”
“Do you like my naked body?”
“Nope.”
It was funny, watching her there on the bed, guessing at how this marriage had worked for so long. Being married to funny people is hard, and both of us were. Lauren could have married anybody, with that smile and those eyes and her gift with children. She could have married into old wealth or new money or fabulous genes, and she chose me, who possesses none of that. It is possible she believed I was naturally thin, but no. Even when I was thin, I was not thin. I was bald, and prone to fatness, and driven mad, even so long ago, by a dream.
We were and remain so different from one another. I noted small differences even during our courtship, how she did not care for books, or live music, or any music, really. She cared only for naps and babies and Survivor. She was full of wisdom and had no college degrees, while I was full of college degrees and had, it seemed, little wisdom.
I liked to drive through canyons, across spillways, over high bridges, while she refused to drive even an hour down the interstate. She had anxiety, could not drive over bridges, didn’t even really like looking at bridges. The very fact of bridges upset her.
“Why can’t people stay where they are?” she said.
“None of us would be here without bridges,” I said. “They make civilization possible.”
“Civilization is stupid,” she said.
I liked to swim in deep water, and she did not swim at all. Not in the ocean, at least.
“Come on,” I said.
“Nope,” she said.
Her reticence only made me like her more, and love her. It took several years of marriage before she finally admitted why she will not swim in the ocean, or in any natural body of water. I’d believed it was some childhood trauma, some Jungian fear of the baptism metaphor, of death, and I guess it was.
“Skeletons,” she said, finally.
“Skeletons?” I said.
“There’s skeletons in the water,” she said.
“Which water?”
“All water.”
“There are not skeletons in the water.”
“Think of all the shipwrecks.”
“What shipwrecks?” I said.
“All of them.”
“Like pirate shipwrecks?” I said.
“Pirate and non-pirate shipwrecks. Dead bodies. Skeletons. Dead people. They’re everywhere, and you’re just swimming over them. It’s disrespectful.”
At the beach, she’d sit and watch, while I played in the skeleton juice with the children. This was all part and parcel of her generalized anxiety, about face cancer and leg cancer and back-of-the-head cancer, the fear of abandonment, of death, of dying. The woman had a reason to fear. She’d seen death up close in all its pathetic terror and had been abandoned by her father, the one man in the world, besides me, who’d promised never to leave, and who left anyway.
This was why she did not want to leave. This was why she kept the house clean and safe, from intruders, from uncooked chicken, bridges, skeletons. Nothing would take her away from her family, especially not me.
* * *
I had my anxieties and weaknesses, too. The sound of babies crying made my body hurt. This sound, the crying sound, to Lauren, was a call to holiness, the sound of God summoning her to behave in accordance with her nature, to love, while the sound of my drinking beer made her body hurt, calling her to murder.
“Can you drink any more loudly?” she’d say. “You have to stop. I’m sort of losing my mind over here.”
“I have to swallow,” I’d say. “I have no other means to get liquid into my body.”
“You sound like a wild animal right now.”
I made messes. It is why I was born. The girls and I pull out skillets and Pyrex and saucepans and arrange a drum circle. We cook, build things, cut things. I let the children touch raw meat, while Lauren waits in the corner with a vat of Lysol.
In the days of yore, when the girls were small, we fought about this and so much else. A marriage, of course, is a series of compromises, which both parties make in exchange for genuine lifelong affection, sexual favors, and health insurance, but you can’t compromise everything. I did not compromise my dream, and it almost cost us everything. She did not compromise her vision of a relatively quiet domestic life, and it almost cost us everything again. But some version of both of our dreams came true, and we came out the other side, standing. Things appeared to have worked out, which is why I stood there, now, naked, asking her to come with me, so we could pretend to be famous together.
* * *
“The next hotel I’m going to has room service,” I said.
This got her attention. You could see her calculating the angst of leaving her children alongside the possibility of someone bringing her small pots of jam.
“We don’t even have a will,” she said. “What if the plane crashes?”
“Then your sister will take care of the children. Or Mom.”
“Your mother will lose them in the mall.”
“They’ll be very happy with the family who finds them.”
She knew what it felt like to cry out for a mother and for nobody
to come. She didn’t have to say it out loud for me to know: It had taken me thirteen years to know it.
“It’s impossible to have a conversation when you’re standing there naked,” she said.
“Why don’t you get naked, too, and we’ll be even?”
“Cover yourself.”
“I can’t hide my light under a bushel.”
“You are the strangest man,” she said.
“My body is a Disneyland,” I said. “Remember?”
“No.”
“I can make it a Dollywood.”
“I don’t want to go to Dollywood.”
“We have fun rides. I can be your Smoky Mountain River Rampage.”
I began whooshing around the room, naked, twirling, a listless raft looking for its paddler. This new tactic was working. Her resolve weakened. She laughed, almost against her will. My nakedness does that to people.
I stopped turning and landed on the bed, before her.
“I am the most attractive man in this house, you have to admit,” I said.
“I have to admit nothing.”
“You’re practically the hero of my book,” I said. “You’re part of the act.”
“What if I don’t want to be in your act?”
“It was in our vows,” I said.
She handed me a pillow and said, “Fine.”
“Just put on some clothes,” she said.
* * *
What happened next was pretty astounding: As soon as the children were moved beyond a one hundred mile radius of her location, she was transfigured. She touched my arm for no reason. We had brunch, without children, which, let’s be honest, brunch with children is not brunch at all but more like trying to kill a snake with a broom handle while surrounded by people drinking mimosas, and this brunch-without-children was a revelation to her. She shone as bright as she did on our wedding day, when we were both children.
We rode bikes through unfamiliar towns.
We went to dinner.
No longer was I alone, sitting in a hotel room hunched over bowls of illicit granola like Gollum. She came on the road with me once, then twice, then again, nice people in uniform bringing her pots of jam and bowls of fruit in bed.
How glorious it was to have this woman there, to see what we’d made together, the book, the laughter, and there were people again, somehow, they had begun to arrive at my readings, as though Lauren’s presence, indeed, had been the thing to bring them.
Bookstores filled, ballrooms filled.
I took her to author parties, where guests approached with eyes big as saucers and clattering white teeth to see the woman in the flesh, the woman they’d read of in a book, to fawn over her. The people who did most of this fawning were women with tasteful reconstruction surgery and good skin. They laughed and got in too close with their hot meaty Sauvignon Blanc breath and called their friends over to fawn together.
Lauren saw them coming.
“Harrison! Harrison Scott Key!” they said, shuffling, jangling, dancing over.
“You love this,” Lauren whispered.
“I used to love this,” I said.
“You still love this.”
“I like this.”
The opioid jackals always begged to know what Lauren thought of the book, of having her every secret exposed to the world. She still had secrets they didn’t know.
“Tell us, do you just love your husband’s book?”
“It was better than I thought it would be,” she said.
“Oh, God, you’re too much!”
“She’s too funny!”
“This woman!”
“My goodness, I love your sense of humor! Let’s be best friends.”
“I’m taking applications,” she said.
These fans always laughed like a stitch of hyenas at everything she said. Lauren seemed a hero to these women, the funniest human in the building, especially if she had a little high-test gin and a backup migraine pill in her purse. This woman was so full of sadness and pain and love and intelligence that it could not help but turn into joy and light. It shot out her eyes and ears and that smile, that laugh.
Every time it happened, I’d step away, out of the light, to watch her go, and then come back into the light, come up close beside her, take her hand. She’d be on fire now, going on about what it’s like to be in somebody’s book.
“Some of it was pretty tough to read, though,” Lauren said, once, at a book festival party, surrounded by the jackals. She squeezed my hand.
“I bet!” they said. More laughing. They had no idea.
I saw what I had not seen before: These women were skeletons in the water, menacing phantasms from the deep, threatening to drag my wife where she did not wish to be. The ladies were sweet enough, a little drunk and loud is all, but they knew secrets about her, us, our life, thanks to my rambunctious dreaming, and Lauren did not seem to know how to reckon with their knowing. This is why she had not wanted to be here, I think. But she was here. If my book, in part, had been a love letter to her, then her presence here, with me, in the bookstores and ballrooms of North America, was her reply. She would swim with me in the deep water, over the bones.
I took her hand, was part of the audience now. The ladies drew in close, and the loudest one brought up her hand, as if to prevent me from hearing a whispered secret she wanted me to hear anyway, and said, “So, Lauren, what’s it like to be married to a famous author?”
My wife turned to me, her eyes dancing across mine, and a smile broke across that ridiculous Hollywood face that never didn’t stop me dead in my tracks.
“I have no idea,” she said.
Chapter 24
In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the “solution” must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.
—DOROTHY SAYERS, The Mind of the Maker
I WANT TO TAKE THE GIRLS,” I SAID.
“No way,” Lauren said. “Are you crazy?”
When all this book nonsense started, I had not wanted to bring children, for how could one keep track of a child, wandering amidst the crowd? One would lose them. My wife would have me arrested. But now I knew: There is no crowd. There is no throng. The fans mob only the restroom. The five who show up scream only for more wine.
“I promise I won’t let them die,” I said.
“You’ll forget them somewhere,” she said. “They’ll be abandoned at a rest stop.”
She knew I was capable of placing the girls in great danger, by rolling down the windows for example, while the car is moving, or playing music at a level detectable by the human ear. The children might actually enjoy themselves. This, I knew, was her greatest fear.
“I am not your father,” I said. “I am not going to leave them.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You are not dying of any kind of cancer,” I said. “You are not abandoning them, either.”
“If they die, I will have you thrown out of an airplane,” she said.
“I love you.”
That night at dinner, we made the announcement.
They looked up. Stargoat, Beetle, Effbomb.
“Book tour?” they said. “Really? You would take us?”
Their heads fell off and rolled across the floor and out the door and into the driveway.
“We’re going on a book tour!” they proclaimed to the squirrels.
“One at a time,” I said. “Oldest first.”
But the oldest, Stargoat, declined, as she, too, secretly believed I would abandon one of them at a rest stop. What was it with these women? My abandonment of them via this tour had turned them agoraphobic.
“Alright, Beetle,” I said. “You’re up.”
She said yes. She likes rest stops. She wants to be abandoned.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“St. Petersburg, Florida.”<
br />
“Yeah, baby!” she said.
“Do you know what they have in Florida?” I asked.
“Manatees! Sharks!” she said.
“Yes, yes, and also panthers.”
“Panthers!” she said.
“Yes.”
“Can you ride them?” Effbomb asks.
“We can try,” I said. “In Florida, you can do anything you want. They have no laws.”
“Woo-hoo!” Beetle said.
It is hard to tell what they believe and what they make-believe.
“This is a bad idea,” Lauren said.
Maybe she was right. She is right a lot. But I have these little daughters in my charge, and their dreams will not come easy. They must be made to see fire in the world, to know it is real. We are trying to raise up fearless dream warriors here. That is why I wanted them with me. I wanted them to see what a dream looks like, in the wild.
* * *
A few days later, we shot down across the land of panthers and jaguars and war, Beetle and me, windows down, music up, sunroof open, past St. Augustine and Daytona Beach, the warm Gulfstream air jettisoning against our eyeballs.
“This is the best day of my life, probably,” she said over the music in her truck stop sunglasses, explaining that her mother never lets her ride in the front seat.
I was unsure of the seating laws but feel they may have been updated since the Nixon administration. Where, specifically, legally, can children be carried? Beetle was inside the truck, which felt safe. I am vaguely aware of some sort of weight or age requirement for sitting in the front seat, but who knows how much anything weighs, really, or how old children are? It’s difficult to tell by looking at them.
She sat in the front, taking in the full-orbed glory of Florida through the windshield. Are children allowed to stick their heads out of the car? Beetle’s head was now out of the car, like a dog, taking in mouthfuls of briny tropical air. Her joy, like that of a dog, is full and unbridled. No DVD player in the backseat can make you that happy. She was seeing parts of America she didn’t even know were there.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 22