All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  I wound another brown paper towel out of the dispenser to get a clear sense of the texture. Was “brown” really the best way to describe the color? I could more easily picture Robert in a service station washroom on the way to Filmore, trying to dry his hands on the semi-clean edge of an overused roller towel. It would make him feel used and dirty. No! It would symbolize the impossibility of keeping one’s hands clean in this world—thus providing a neat segue into a flashback to Vietnam.

  I hurried back to my table, pregnant with this idea. Vietnam was admittedly a bit beyond my experience, but I could reread Tim O’Brien’s books and take notes for atmosphere. Maybe Ted and I would rent The Deer Hunter tonight. Few women had written fiction about the Vietnam War—I would get points for my daring originality. I could already hear the choppers chopping—no, slicing—no, whipping up the humidity. “He remembered it as if he were still slogging through the water-heavy air,” I wrote. Or I would have written had my pen been on the table where I’d left it.

  I looked under my notebook, then picked it up by the wire binding and shook it. Nothing fell out. My breathing quickened. My armpits prickled. Ted’s pen. The pen Ted gave me. The pen that made me a writer. I pushed my chair back and crawled under the table, scanning the floor in all directions. How could I have left it? This was New York, for God’s sake! True, it was the cleaner, safer New York, as compared with the last few decades, but this applied only if you were a person, better yet a man, on certain subway routes and downtown streets, not if you were a gold-nibbed Mont Blanc on a public library table.

  “Looking for this?”

  The ostentatious scribbler was bending over so that his balding head was even with his knees. He waggled the pen in one inksmudged hand. I grabbed it and shot out from under the table, nicking my head on the edge on my way up.

  “Careful there.”

  “You took my pen!” As the words left my mouth, I realized I should have been more circumspect. I’d broken the first rule of the woman on the street, or, as it were, in the library: never engage. Although, had I not noticed his furious writing earlier, I’d have been less suspicious. He was scrawny and his skin and clothes had a somewhat grayish, unwashed cast, but they didn’t appear to be literally lived in, nor did he seem schizophrenic or drunk. His eyes were clear, his face was unweathered, his beard was only a day or two old, and he was properly zipped. Still, he was likely to demand a reward or insist on talking to me in a vaguely threatening or bothersome manner. He might even follow me home. After all, he’d been scribbling with an unnatural intensity, he’d taken my pen, and he was a strange man. These things could not add up to anything pleasant.

  “I was afraid someone might steal it,” he said. His volume was not appropriate for a library.

  I looked around, worried other patrons would be offended by his implication, but the only other person in the room now was slumped over a table, drooling on his arm.

  “I meant to catch you right as you came in, so you wouldn’t worry,” the scribbler was saying, “but I got sort of engrossed.”

  He motioned toward his table. His own pen—blue with white lettering along the side, obviously purloined from some business—lay unattended on a page three-quarters full of densely packed writing. “I’ve gotta use this place as an office,” he added. “My partner is writing an opera in our apartment.” He put his hands over his ears and made a face. “So,” he said, shrugging and giving the semi-smile he’d used when I shushed him, “back to work.”

  “Thanks,” I said belatedly, when I was sure he wouldn’t swerve back in my direction. I used a voiced pitched correctly for the library.

  He waved his right hand, wafting my gratitude away, while his left picked up the pen and raced across the page at a speed incompatible with serious thought.

  I tried to continue my novel, but the choppers were overwhelmed by the crack of the librarian’s gum and the tender green rice paddies paled in the fluorescent light. I attempted a scene in which Mrs. Martin transformed a single egg carton cup into a whimsical fedora, but she, being quite obese, moved even more slowly than her son. I forced Robert to continue his drive to Filmore and sat him in his mother’s kitchen in a vinyl-and-chrome chair from which the stuffing tufted out along one seam, but the two of them had nothing to say to one another.

  “Care for some breakfast?” the mother finally brought out.

  But, of course, Robert had already eaten.

  I knew I could not drag the Martins across one more line that day. Altogether, I’d written three-quarters of a page, with plenty of space between the words to insert corrections. Maybe beginning my book with the minute details of morning routine was the trouble, I thought, winding my way down the circular staircase. It left the whole rest of the day yawning. On Monday I would thrust Robert directly into midafternoon.

  CHAPTER 5

  Margaret

  MY HOPES FOR THE SUMMER were largely fulfilled, thanks to the strict regime I imposed on myself with a digital sports watch. I’d learned from a PBS documentary that James Thurber’s wife had insisted he set an alarm clock at intervals to prod himself to work quickly. My fourth-grade teacher had employed a similar method.

  Mrs. Larson’s classroom was part of a new addition to the school, the linoleum hard and slick, the edges of the desks as yet unsoftened by the cuts of rulers and compass points, the seats made of some modern composite that would never wear away in comforting grooves. The days in that room passed in a series of terrifying quizzes, each beginning with an ominous clicking as Mrs. Larson set a kitchen timer and ending with a ringing that seized our hearts and stopped our pencils. With the smart movements of soldiers on maneuvers, we would pass our papers to the front, where she would collect and then impale them on her spindle. There were multiplication tests—increasingly difficult as we galloped from the twos times tables to the twelves; there were spelling quizzes, history quizzes, and geography quizzes, during which, each in turn, we ran to the front of the classroom, index finger outstretched, to identify on a huge, pull-down map of California the county Mrs. Larson had shouted out. No time to prepare, no time to think. “You know it or you don’t,” she barked. Some hours must have been devoted to learning the material on which we were quizzed, but the only other activities I remember from that class were singing “Yes, I Have No Bananas” and playing a plastic recorder.

  Realizing that up until now I’d spent too much time thinking at the expense of writing, I adapted Mrs. Larson’s (and Mrs. Thurber’s) technique to my book. Now that I’d created a couple of characters—Robert Martin and his mother—and a general sense of their situation, I wrote whatever came into my head about them in forty-five-minute intervals, punctuated by the bright beeping of my watch alarm. With a continual sense of the imminent “times up,” I tore forward without looking back. At the end of the summer, I would type this mass of pages into the computer and discover a richness and complexity I could never have consciously achieved.

  The alarm bothered Simon at first. Simon was the ostentatious scribbler, although after my first week at the library, I didn’t think of him that way anymore. He was, in fact, the writer of an actual novel published by a house with a predilection for first novelists with exquisite prose. Through interlibrary loan, I borrowed his book from the Bronx branch and read it carefully, searching for direction.

  “The human relationships,” I said, one day in August, as we walked down Charles Street eating slices, “they seem so real. How did you come up with those characters?”

  “Hmm,” he answered, chewing, willing to think this through. He was generous with his writerly insights. “I don’t know. It’s not like they emerged full-blown. But, you know, after a while they start to come to life and then it’s easier to figure out how they’d be. Are you going to eat your crust?”

  The writing books also made it sound as if a good writer need only take dictation from bossy characters. Left to their own devices, however, Robert and his mother would do nothing but eat.

&nb
sp; Across the street, a man with matted hair, wearing, despite the heat, a flannel shirt, leaned over the trunk of a car. In his right hand, he clutched what seemed to be a fat marker or a wedge of chalk with which he wrote in long, passionate, swooping flourishes on a large sheet of paper. With his left hand, he smoothed the paper over and over, keeping it flat across the trunk. Abruptly then, he stopped and straightened. The chalk dematerialized. There was, in fact, no paper. The man walked away, conversing with himself.

  My alarm went off as we were about to cross Hudson.

  “Just to the river,” Simon begged. “Please, it’s so hot. I need to see water.”

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I must obey the watch.” But he turned up the block toward Perry Street and trudged dutifully back with me.

  In the evening, the oppressive heat of the day became the balminess that gives summer its good name. Ted and I strolled languorously east on Tenth Street in the dusk. In front of the 2nd Avenue Deli, we passed tourists folding a map and felt smug. The city was ours now that those who really owned it had gone to their country houses. And we were pleased with our possession, especially amid the quaint, exotic spectacle of an East Village August gloaming. A lumpy Ukrainian matron in a sprigged housedress stood sourly in her doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. A cat on a leash slunk along the wrought iron fence that bordered an outdoor café. Indian restaurateurs beckoned us into their Christmas-lit establishments. Ted studied the shelves in a used bookstore, while I perched on a vinyl chair with a split seat under a ceiling fan and read scattered pages of Goodbye, Columbus.

  On such an evening, the sense that I was a writer—and even that I was the kind of writer who might be considered an artist—was palpable. I had the giddy feeling that this city was both my home—which meant I could claim its attendant rich human drama as my own—and a piece of theater I could view at a remove, a spectacle from which I could borrow shades and tones and a succession of characters who would, if I listened closely enough, whisper to me their amusing or poignant narratives. It seemed on such evenings that capturing life on paper would be almost as easy as observing it.

  My novel bubbled from me as we luxuriated in all New York had to offer. I would outline for Ted the various maneuvers I’d put Robert through each day, while we dodged Rollerbladers along the riverside promenade to Battery Park or walked block after block uptown. I proposed options for the next day’s charge as we combed the bricks near the Metropolitan Museum for metal admission buttons casually discarded on the way out by those who’d paid the suggested amount. Ted, who in high school had gone through a period of intense interest in the Vietnam War, gave me details about what battles Robert could have been in and what military rank he could have achieved while we held hands perched on the balustrade under the trees in Bryant Park, waiting for the free movie to begin, or two-stepped under the stars at Lincoln Plaza to the open-air bands. On the Staten Island Ferry with our faces turned to the breeze, and strolling late at night past Korean groceries overflowing with plums and green onions and black-eyed Susans, we debated whether Mrs. Martin would have called her son “Bob” or “Rob” and bandied army nicknames about.

  I believe I would have been content never to finish, never to publish, only to work, if the limbo that was August had lasted forever. In August, when all of those people who, by their very existence, made me feel like a dull penny under their shoes were in places like Martha’s Vineyard, I was happy—in the deep way engrossing work makes one happy—simply to be dreaming scenes for Robert to play. I was satisfied when I caught hold of one of his moods and coaxed it to stick to the page in a way that seemed sure to call forth that very sensation in a readers mind. I was ecstatic when occasionally such moments seemed to dance across the paper in particularly graceful or vivid phrases. At times I forgot to reset my alarm and still I kept on, searching for words, crossing them out, straining my brain to conjure Robert Martin from scant impression and overtaxed imagination, trying to draw his very fibers through my fingers delicately, so as not to scare him off.

  Looking back now, I suspect that in that brief, sweltering period, I was, in fact, a writer. But cooler weather was inevitable. And with it returned the real Manhattanites, the sort of people who called a messenger to deliver a package to the building across the street, and I was merely a hanger-on again, cringing and grinning and well aware that if I had not been attached to Ted, I would never have been asked out.

  We were invited to dinner in September, the first occasion at which I had ample opportunity to appreciate the words of Harold Nicolson, whose slim book of essays I’d read back in July, when it was already far too late for me to heed this advice: “Unless … you possess a strong will and a large private income I should not recommend you to announce your first book before you have written at least a third of it.”

  Opening rounds went well. We were able to admire our hosts’ apartment without excessive chagrin, since it was only one room larger and a few hundred dollars less expensive than ours. (Being far better connected than we, they’d been able to take advantage of the city’s generous rent control policy, and so could afford to put a good deal of their money into their country house.) Then, while wine was poured, I leaned against the bright orange counter (cheap, 1970s renovations were the scourge of even the best apartments) and listened while other guests compared the fingerlings available at the farmers’ markets in Rhinebeck with those on sale at Union Square. People were either weary of summer and relieved to be back in the city or were already exhausted by the city and longed to be back in the country. That Ted and I had stayed in town was exclaimed over as an eccentric novelty, although several people agreed that the summer months they’d spent in town were among the best they’d experienced. Of course, they’d been students at the time.

  When Ted and our host began to discuss the merits and liabilities of mutual acquaintances, I bravely struck off on my own and wandered into the living room where two women seated in easy chairs were engrossing one another.

  Changing rooms at parties is risky. You have done something purposeful and so are forced to look as though you indeed have a purpose. If you’re lucky, a kind stranger will welcome you into her conversation. If you’re extremely lucky, an acquaintance will hail you from across the room. Most often, you must resort to feigning an overwhelming interest in the knickknacks or pressing your nose against a dark window so as to be able to see beyond your own abject face. For me, the tide of the party was about to turn.

  I suspected that the women in the chairs registered my presence with triumph, pleased that they were involved in an animated conversation and not, like me, standing awkwardly too far into the room to retreat, but neither of them faltered in the pretense that I did not exist. Luckily, a plate of baguette rounds spread with marinated goat cheese was lying hospitably on the coffee table, so rather than scanning the bookshelves or acting as if I’d forgotten something essential in the kitchen, I availed myself of this prop to jimmy myself into their těte-à-těte.

  “Have you tried these?” I said, committing myself to the couch and raising a baguette to my mouth.

  “No,” said the woman nearest me. She pushed the plate slightly in my direction and turned back to her conversation. I considered chugging the contents of my wine glass.

  “I hear you’re writing a novel,” said a bright voice behind me.

  “Yes,” I said, turning with relief. Sally Sternforth crooked her knees and perched beside me on the couch. “Who’s your publisher?”

  “For a first novel,” I explained, sliding into the space between the couch and the coffee table to retrieve the hors d’oeuvre I’d dropped on the rug, “you don’t usually have a publisher until the whole thing is done.”

  I tried to deliver this as if it were insider’s knowledge to which I was privy, but it came out as an apologetic squeak.

  “Really? Well, you know, with nonfiction …”

  I interrupted her as I regained my position on the couch. “Yes, the proposal, t
he contract, the advance, all before the book is written. Have you tried the goat cheese? It’s delicious.” Secretly, I thought goat cheese had run its course. When we gave a party, I intended to reintroduce sharp cheddar, perhaps the sort with wine stirred in.

  Sally forged on. She would not be waylaid. “Well, I admire you,” she said. She did not admire me. If she was kind, she pitied me, and if, instead, she was like most people, she felt superior. “It was such a relief when I’d been writing for months without validation to know that at least my book was sold.” A profile of Sally, replete with photos in various stylish outfits, had appeared in the New York Times Magazine two weeks before.

  “Yes,” I said, “that would be nice.” I tore at my baguette round with my teeth.

  There are those, and I like to count myself among them, who will graciously change the subject when they sense a particular line of conversation may cause embarrassment for another. Others, however, close in, licking their lips, like hyenas who sniff the blood of a wounded gazelle. “But you’ve published short stories?” Sally suggested, delicately retrieving a crumb of cheese from the corner of her mouth with her tongue.

  I was tempted to lie. I might say, “Certainly, a few pieces. In small periodicals mostly. You know, the Hoe and Spindle, Blue Dragon Review, that kind of thing.” I could even mention a big quarterly or two—Prairie Schooner, Grand Street—as long as I avoided the national magazines. It was a pretty safe bet that Sally Sternforth didn’t have back issues of the Sewanee Review piled by her bed. But I’m excruciatingly honest. It’s a fault really. “No,” I admitted. “I really just started this.”