What Comes Next and How to Like It

by Abigail Thomas

  I can’t remember which story I showed Chuck first, but thank god, he liked it. When my whole book was done I gave it to him. “Would you be my agent?” I asked. He told me later he had read it on his back steps, and his wife heard him laughing and came outside.

  “I thought you were working,” she said.

  Copping to It

  What do we use? That’s easy. We use everything. We have our eyes and ears open to snag the lovely and the harsh and the hilarious. There is ruthlessness to all writers. That first story up and grabbed me by the throat, and I was oblivious to the fact that I was stealing.

  I had no idea I had done anything wrong until I ran into the woman whose story it was. She said she had seen it in a magazine. She congratulated me. I looked at her face, which was expressionless, and understood for the first time what I’d done. I was ashamed of myself. I still am, but that story turned me into a writer.

  Workshop

  But I wasn’t writing all the time. Days, sometimes weeks would go by without my doing anything at all. I began to feel like something left too long in the vegetable drawer. Then I had the bright idea of starting a weekly writing workshop. There would be a point to me! I sent out a typed announcement to friends and people I’d worked with as an agent. Soon there were a dozen people wanting to join. Eleven women and one man. When the man found out he was the only one, he decided not to come. That was the start of the Tuesday Night Babes, a group whose core continues to this day, twenty-some years later.

  I was terrified that first night. I vacuumed and dusted. I baked something. Then I sat around waiting for six-thirty wringing my hands. What would I talk about? How would it go? Who was I? At twenty past six Rich retired to the bedroom, giving me a reassuring kiss. “You’ll be fine,” he probably said. But how would I fill the time?

  Everyone arrived. I told them a man had chickened out and we all had a good laugh. Think what he might have learned, we said. I gave everyone a piece of whatever it was I’d baked, and we were off and running. I have no idea what else I talked about, but I laid out the rules. Every week two people would have their work discussed in depth. Pieces would be handed out a week ahead, so we all had a chance to go over the work carefully.

  I said I would give assignments, just for fun, and at the end of class whoever had done an assignment could read it aloud. Several books came out of those assignments, including a wonderful book by Elizabeth Ehrlich, called Miriam’s Kitchen. I think the assignment had been to write two pages that included an iron, a kitchen counter, and an egg-salad sandwich. Elizabeth wrote two pages she called “How to Keep a Kosher Kitchen.” Her mother-in-law made egg salad the way her mother and her mother’s mother had always made it. She had been a refugee from the Nazis, and she cooked everything according to tradition to honor the dead, to keep faith. I remember, I think, that to make the counter kosher, she ironed it.

  Catherine’s Job

  After college, Catherine was tossing around for a job in publishing when, lo and behold, she was hired by the same literary agency where Chuck and I had worked, where Chuck still worked, only now he was a partner. For Catherine this was like coming home. She had known everyone there for years, the office was small and friendly, the writers they represented were wonderful and varied. This was the perfect job for her. And what’s more, it had a future! It was lovely for me that she was there. It was a little like being back myself. I imagined Catherine and Chuck laughing over the same kinds of things he and I had laughed at, getting excited about the same kinds of books he and I had loved. She worked there for five years. Sometimes I would take the subway down and have lunch with the two of them.

  “Don’t you just love her?” I would say to Chuck, and “Isn’t he great?” I’d say to her.

  Then, out of the blue, she quit. She loved her job! I could not believe it, let alone understand. She told me nothing of why, and it made no sense to me. But her father had recently died. All her young life she had been afraid because he was so much older than other fathers. Then he got sick and died.

  She wouldn’t answer my calls; every room I was in was a room she wanted to get out of. I thought I was failing her in her grief. One evening I persuaded her to meet me for dinner at an Italian restaurant we both liked. My god, you are beautiful, I thought, as she sat down. “I just want to know if you’re all right,” I said. For a moment it looked as if she might answer. “Mom,” she began, but then she pushed her chair back and stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said, putting her coat on, “but I just can’t do this,” and she fled.

  It was Chuck I called for reassurance. After all, he had known her since she was nine years old. “I’m doing something terribly wrong,” I said to Chuck, “and I don’t know what it is.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” he said over and over. “You’re a good mother. She loves you.” He told me this as many times as I needed to hear it. Then one day he invited me to lunch.

  It was 2000. The restaurant had cloth napkins and ice water and stiff menus. It felt like a date. He had something to tell me. He had had an affair, and he had separated from his wife. I wondered how I hadn’t known something so important. He was serious, he spoke carefully, respectful of everyone concerned. I could tell it was important to him that I understand.

  I didn’t ask who the woman was. He’d tell me if he wanted to. “She didn’t mean for my family to break up,” he said. “She never meant for any of this to happen.”

  I talked about what happened to my children when I got divorced, and I got upset, remembering how they had suffered. I told him how my gentle son, Ralph, then no older than twelve, had comforted his younger sister when her father and I fought and divorced. I told Chuck what Ralph had said to her: “Don’t worry. I went through this when I was your age too.” Catherine was five years old.

  Then I burst into tears.

  It was an emotional meal. “Take care of your kids,” I said. “Do a better job than I did.” Chuck said he was doing his best. The bill came, and he paid, and I thanked him. I was standing up ready to go, but he was still sitting down, his wallet lying on the table. He didn’t move.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s the matter?” I sat down and reached across the table to touch his hand. He looked upset, more upset than I’d ever seen him. “What is it?” I asked. He shook his head. There was something he wanted to say and he couldn’t leave without saying it, but he could hardly speak. “Abigail,” he said, then stopped.

  It took me a minute.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god.”

  “It couldn’t have been anybody else’s daughter,” he said.

  The Sky

  The sky doesn’t come in this color. I had it mixed. It appears through thick plate glass as a wonderful lavender-­gray. When the edges of the sun are firm, I can begin. I like a cloud or two, just wisps of things, and this is the only time I actually paint, plan, using my fingers to make a drop of white a see-through smear. The tangerine ball of a sun just blows my mind set in this color.

  My First Reaction

  Catherine and I were not estranged! The only part of this that had anything to do with me was that Chuck was my best friend and Catherine was my daughter. What a relief!

  That Lunch

  Do you remember that lunch?” I ask Chuck now. He is usually adamant about not being able to remember things.

  “Of course I do,” he says.

  He tries to recall the name of the restaurant, but I don’t care about its name.

  “I remember you sat facing the window,” he says.

  “Was it hard for you to tell me?” I ask. I want to hear him say it.

  “I remember you took my hand, and I was grateful,” he answers.

  Calling Catherine

  I wanted to tell you myself,” she said. “I wanted to tell you for such a long time. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell you and I couldn’t not tell you.”


  The affair was over, so much of this was history now. I found it hard to catch up. This should have been none of my business. Love is love, after all, and I’m all for it. But because we were tangled up together, it became something done behind my back. What made me angriest was that my daughter was fired. She had broken up with Chuck, but his wife found out, and to try to keep his family together, Catherine had to leave. She never complained about this, never thought of herself as a victim, she had done what she had done. “It was all inevitable,” she said. Chuck and his partner helped her find another job and he looked after her as best he could, still loving her, but the fact remained: he let her go.

  And this had all happened a year ago. I was angry with Chuck, I didn’t want to speak to him, but the anger made it possible to skip over the part where my best friend had slept with my daughter, and my daughter had slept with my best friend.

  So I admit it came in handy.

  Why It Took So Long to Tell Me

  Catherine was afraid I would be angry with Chuck. Chuck was afraid I’d be angry with Catherine. This says something about all three of us, but I don’t know what it is.

  Forgiveness

  Time has passed. I have metabolized this stuff, I think, but every once in a while it returns in its original form and towers over everything. Like grief.

  I love my daughter, and I love my friend. Two people I love loved each other and still share great affection. They both love me. Forgiveness was never an issue. What is forgiveness anyway? It seems to me the only person you can forgive is yourself.

  “Why does forgiveness irritate me so much?” I ask Chuck.

  “Because it’s the ultimate act of passive aggression,” he says.

  “Because it keeps sin alive,” says my sister.

  Forests

  I love my forests, some more successful than others, my favorite being one I did on a big storm window. It took me a couple of weeks. I had it laid across two sawhorses, I kept scraping and dripping and flinging, turning it over to see what was happening. When I was finally done, and don’t ask how I knew it was done, I didn’t know whether I liked it or not for another week. I do like it. I love it. My son, Ralph, made a shelf for it on my living room wall. It’s too heavy to hang.

  Here’s what I love about painting. It’s not about words or voice or tone or point of view or narrative arc (perish the thought); it’s about the way certain branches stick straight out from the trunks of certain trees; it’s about the clouds that you can barely see as well as the ones that pile on top of each other; it’s about the swoop of telephone wires and the shapes and colors of shadows.

  A real painter recently told me that all artists want to draw telephone wires.

  Complaints

  People complained that, when Chuck and I were together, there might as well have been nobody else in the room. We were a pair, not a couple, but we laughed all the time. When I got married again, even Rich, who came upon Chuck and me as we were deep in conversation at Live Bait, felt uneasy, backing away. Later I asked him what had happened, why had he left?

  “I felt like an intruder,” my husband said.

  “You’re my darling,” I said, but I knew what he meant.

  “So what was it,” I ask Chuck now, “that made us such good friends so fast?” I expect him to say that we laughed at the same things, or disliked the same people, or loved the same two lines out of a three-hundred-page manuscript.

  “Neither of us had any ambition,” he answers.

  I open my beat-up American Heritage Dictionary. “ ‘Ambition’ comes from the Latin, meaning ‘seeking votes,’ ” I tell him.

  “So it has always been political,” he says.

  “Oh my god,” I say, “exactly! That explains everything!”

  Another Explanation

  Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it’s the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.

  Telling My Husband

  It was a month before I told my husband. Rich was the most moral man I knew, and I decided I couldn’t afford his righteous anger piled on my own confusion. When I finally did tell him, he surprised me. “Poor Chuck,” he said, “poor Catherine.” Nothing more. No judgment, no righteous indignation.

  I began to understand that it was not his anger I feared, but my own.

  And then a week later, Rich went out to walk our dog and was hit by a car. He suffered traumatic brain injuries. He was never to be himself again. He was never to live at home again. This catastrophe drove everything else from my mind. Nothing else mattered.

  I didn’t miss Chuck. I didn’t want to see him. Here’s what I remember. I remember hospitals. I remember my husband’s anguish and my own. I remember my children helping, and my friends helping, and my sisters helping. I remember my husband’s daughter at my side. I remember one night coming home after weeks of long sad days with Rich and finding Chuck standing outside my building. “I’m taking you out to dinner,” he said, “you need to eat.”

  I remember the shock of relief and gratitude when I saw him there.

  Maybe it was too much to lose my husband and this friend.

  A Close Call

  Chuck took me to a house in the country for a respite. Rich was getting no better. This was all so long ago now, back when I had only one dog, Harry. Harry, who didn’t come when called, didn’t sit, stay, roll over, beg, nothing. I had tried to teach him “sit” once, pushing his rump down, but it offended him, and he walked away. Harry was an old dog, and I was a relatively new dog owner. I warned Chuck not to let him out. “He’s a city dog,” I said, “he will get lost and I’ll never get him back.” I sat on the lawn. Chuck brought me bacon and eggs and toast with lots of butter. He went back to the house for the coffee.

  Halfway through my bacon, Harry came trotting jauntily past, tail held high, and disappeared immediately into the woods. Chuck had let him out. He was so sure it would be all right. But Harry was my dog. I jumped up to follow him, clambering over fallen trees and muddying my feet in swampy land, wailing. Harry came back on his own. If he hadn’t, I’d’ve lost a dog, and I never could have looked at Chuck again.

  Failure

  I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the American Heritage Dictionary to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just “failure.” There’s no Indo-European root meaning originally “to dare” or “mercy” or “hummingbird” to make of the whole mess a mysterious poem. I can find no other fossilized remains in the word. ­Humility comes along on its own dime.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” I told Chuck, meaning the book I was trying to write.

  “Turn it into a novel,” he said.

  “I can’t write a novel,” I said.

  “You do it by evading the truth,” he told me, and he wasn’t laughing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “It seems to me,” he emailed me later, “that you start out with what you know or what you think you know and you work within those ‘truthful’ boundaries until you reach some sort of wilderness of not knowing, and then you find a way through until you see an end, or you find a way through until you find the end that you’ve already seen. It can work either way: running away from the truth, or running out of it.”

  I try to imagine the terrain. Where are the boundaries? I look around carefully.

  They have all been crossed.

  In a weak moment, Chuck offered to write his side of the story. He planned to use my assignment of three-word sentences to describe any ten years of your life. I give it to all my
incoming students. “Take any ten years of your life, reduce them to two pages, and every sentence has to be three words long.” It’s a good assignment. You can’t hide behind a sapling. There are two examples that I’ve never forgotten. “Slept with Israelis. Needn’t have bothered.” And, “He was cute. I was clueless. It seemed right.”

  Chuck started with 1979, the year we met. He came up with two sentences: “She was funny. So was I.”

  That was it.

  Not much help.

  Making a Moon

  When I make a moon, I don’t attempt the craters and shadows. All I want is a big round moon because it’s the best I can do, and because it does not involve knowing how to paint, only how to hold a stick still while the paint drips off, and because I love the way it looks. Sometimes I put a cloud down first, and the moon goes behind it.

  “How do you get them so round?” Chuck asks.