All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  “But Ted says you quit your job. Someone must have told you that you have potential.” She nodded encouragingly. I thought of my ninth-grade teacher, who’d written “Very good! You’ll be an author someday!” at the bottom of my five-paragraph sketch about a frog vacationing in Baja. I was sure that Mrs. Hammerstein was not who Sally had in mind. Did she really picture Paul Auster plucking one of my paltry, albeit well-written, student evaluations off the kitchen counter in a friend’s house and calling to beg me to share my talent with the world?

  “According to John Gardner,” I said, “I’m a novelist.”

  “Oh, you studied with John Gardner?” She said it matter-of-factly, but I could tell by the way she leaned toward me and smoothed the cocktail napkin lovingly over her knee that she was impressed. Even one of the women in the chairs glanced my way.

  But what good was impressing people with lies?

  “I mean his description of a novelist—in On Becoming a Novelist—it fits me.”

  “Oh.” She put the napkin on the table. “We should mingle,” she said brightly.

  Parties had long been a problem for me. People had an annoying habit of asking what I “did”—a question I had been brought up to think rude. My old answer, that I taught high school English, elicited a predictable response. First, as my companion realized that he or she was stuck talking to someone who exercised power only over sixteen-year-olds, there would be a subtle shift in stance, coupled with a fleeting scan of the other guests, in preparation for a smooth getaway. This was generally followed by the well-intentioned rally, the patronizing forward tilt of the head. “I really admire that kind of dedication,” he or she would say, “the way schools are now.” And then I would be forced to explain with excruciating honesty that, no, I was not selflessly redirecting the lives of disadvantaged students from the ghetto by introducing them to the eternal wisdom of Shakespeare, rather I was further advantaging those who were already so well clamped upon the track that led to success that they could hardly derail themselves if they tried.

  In a different crowd, the comment on the current state of public education might be replaced by a hearty “I better watch my grammar!” by which the speaker meant that he, unlike me, had more important things to do than pay attention to usage. But, in either case, the mention of my former profession had never incited lively interest and spirited conversation, except to the extent to which I could reveal tidbits about the failings of children with socially prominent parents, which hardly seemed fair or dignified. In short, I was used to others’ sudden need to mingle.

  My new answer, on the other hand, provoked much interest, but of a kind that made me squirm.

  “So what do you do?” the fortyish woman seated beside me at the dinner table asked. Her midriff, slightly plump, showed between her tube top and her spandex, hip-hugging skirt, and her black hair had a chic, slept-in look. I briefly regretted using a brush before leaving home.

  “I’m, um, working on a novel.” I was surprised at how difficult it was to choke these words out. In private, I was proud of my efforts.

  She threw her head back and rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, who isn’t?” she said bitterly and reached in front of me for the wine.

  “Who’s your agent?” Zachary Roth asked. Zachary wrote a column about Washington gossip for a weekly political magazine. I could feel the winds of the savanna; the hyena’s hot breath at my heels.

  “She doesn’t have an agent yet, of course,” Ted said, rescuing me and even managing with his tone to suggest the question was ridiculous. “Fiction doesn’t work that way. You have to write the book first.”

  “So what’s it about?” one of the easy chair women asked. She leaned across Zachary, who was seated to my left, finally interested enough to look at me.

  These questions! I wanted to throw my hands up to block them. Of course, this last was perfectly reasonable. I would ask it, if someone told me she was writing a novel.

  For a second or two I made divots in my shrimp risotto, as I summoned my descriptive and analytical skills. “Well, there’s a guy, a man,” I began, “who was in Vietnam. And he’s home now. In southern California.”

  “Margaret’s from L.A.,” Ted put in.

  “Well, Glendale, really,” I said, relieved to be on firmer ground. “More Middle America on the West Coast.”

  “So what happens?” slept-in-hair woman asked.

  “Well, he comes home,” I continued. “Actually, he is home, already. When the novel starts. In southern California.”

  “There are flashbacks to the war,” Ted tried again, helpfully.

  “But what happens?” slept-in-hair asked again, forking a generous helping of rice and shrimp into her mouth.

  “Well, he seems to be doing a lot of cooking,” I said. “Maybe he should try making risotto.” I laughed to show this was a joke. No one joined in, not even Ted. I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t even sure how it was funny myself. “And he shops for groceries. To support the cooking.” I was losing them. The host was refilling wine glasses. The hostess was heading for the kitchen. “I guess it’s really about aimlessness in post-Vietnam America,” I ventured in desperation.

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” Zachary said. “Would you say that the seventies were aimless? I’d say they were full of purpose.”

  “Misguided purpose,” someone said. There was general laughter and for a few blessed moments discussion detoured into the reintroduction of the crocheted vest, but they were not through with me yet.

  “Where have your stories been published?” asked the other easy chair woman, who was, I suddenly remembered with acute embarrassment, an editor at the Paris Review.

  “I’ve never,” I said, glancing apologetically at Ted, “been published.”

  “Oh, well,” Sally said cheerfully, “you know Emily Dickinson never got published!” She took a swig of her wine, as if toasting the prospect of a similar fate for me.

  If at times during my previous career I’d felt I’d been living some of the more pitiful moments of Good-bye, Mr. Chips, this clearly was Lord of the Flies, and I was Piggy.

  Over dessert, someone complimented Sally on her New York Times profile, and she launched into a story about the photographer’s obsession with finding backgrounds that would provide strong contrast to her clothes. She revealed that one photo had, in fact, been taken in the bathroom. I could not fault Sally Sternforth. She had not, after all, written a multiple-prize-winning book simply to spite me. Yet, she had sized me up and satisfied herself that I was nowhere near her stature, and for that I gave myself permission to wish that the tarte Tatin would give her heartburn.

  “I just never imagined,” Sally concluded, beaming, “that anything like this would happen before I was forty.”

  As we walked home along those same East Village blocks that had made me feel like a true writer only a week before, the first fall breeze rose off the East River and swept the stray food wrappers and pages of The Village Voice toward the gutters. I shivered.

  “What kind of writer would want that kind of attention?” Ted asked loyally, putting his arm around me. A man was peeing in the middle of St. Marks Place. I thought longingly of Washington, D.C., a place where people’s pictures were taken in their bathrooms only when they were caught in the midst of criminal or compromising activity.

  On Ninth Street, Ted paused to riffle through a stack of magazines waiting on the curb for the next morning’s recycling pickup, and I sounded my depths. Was Sally’s my idea of success? Was I as arrogant as she, believing it was only a matter of time and a judiciously placed call from my publicist before the world fell at my feet? Such a person deserved to be struck down and that Sally had been rewarded was simply a prime example of the way society actually worked, not a lesson to guide the course of my own life.

  A professional magazine scavenger had swooped up on his bike and was trying to trade last month’s Architectural Digest for the current Vogue Ted had just picked up. I shook my head. Architectur
al Digests were thick on the ground; we’d already read it.

  At home, I flipped my laptop open, slipped off my shoes, and drew my feet under me in my traditional writing position.

  “You’re not going to work now, are you?” Ted protested.

  “I just had an idea,” I said, “on the way home.”

  I did not have an idea. I wanted to rail to Letty about my disgrace. When I accessed my e-mail, however, I saw that she had beaten me to the punch.

  Margaret—

  Well, now I hate our house. Four hours ago it was fine, maybe a little cramped, certainly not architecturally distinctive, but fine. Now it shames me, every bit of it.

  “But what about those curtains?” you’ll protest, because you are my friend. Those curtains you made for the living room with the aqua-and-yellow vintage material from Fabric and Foam? “Shabby,” I will say to you. “And two of them are crooked.” “What about the mint green Formica kitchen counters with the silver stars and moons and asteroids? You chose this house above all the other nondescript boxes in Beverly-wood because of that Formica,” you will say to me. And I will say to you—“Tacky.”

  Face it, Margaret, 23 Hummingbird Lane is a starter house, and anyone living in a starter house this far into the race is a loser.

  We went to a party tonight as part of the vetting process for this job Michael may or may not want. (He’s decided, at least, to be vetted.) The hosts were some people in Sherman Oaks—she does museum development; he’s in the industry—some kind of studio executive—anyway, something I have no concrete concept of.

  It’s not that I’ve never been in a nice house before. We grew up in nice houses, didn’t we? Not as nice as this house in Sherman Oaks, but still, decent-sized with a good scale to the rooms and some attention to detail. That my parents’ house is nicer than mine never bothered me, though. That’s a different generation. Everyone knows housing is more expensive now. Even that people only ten or even five years older than we are have nicer houses never bothered me. We would catch up, I thought, when Michael got tenure.

  These people—Zoe and Brad—they’re younger, Margaret. They’re younger and they have a better house. Not just better. It’s so vastly superior that the two structures should not even be classified as the same species.

  Their house, for instance, is built into the canyon and has a redwood deck from which you overlook the Valley—an ocean of lights like iridescent plankton. Our house has a cement slab with a clear view of 24 Hummingbird Lane, a beige ranch with a dominant garage door. Their house has an entry area, a formal dining room, a family room, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a blue enamel Viking oven. We have Sears appliances, a dining el, and no version at all of the rest of that stuff.

  “Stuff!” you say disdainfully. “Why should you care about stuff?” And you’re right. It’s not the stuff so much as the graciousness that seems to go with it, the careless way Zoe stuck the knife in the marinated goat cheese, the unstudied fan of green cocktail napkins on the oak buffet, Brad’s generous hand with the single malt, the cleanliness of their infant, Hannah, in her pale pink Baby Guess sleeper.

  If I were the kind of person that lived in that house, I wouldn’t have painted my toenails in the car on the way to the party; I would not have told my babysitter to microwave frozen enchiladas for my children’s dinner; I would not have hemmed my trousers with Scotch tape. I would be serene; I would be respectable; I would be a better Letty.

  You scoff. Yes, I can hear you scoffing away. But you have to agree that surroundings are important. If you feel sunnier in a bright room than in a murky one, wouldn’t it follow that in a spacious, well-organized house, you’d feel generous and in control?

  It’s not just that, though. I admit that the reason I most hate my house now is that if Michael takes this job, we’ll have to invite Zoe and Brad into it. And then they will see that we are not as good as they are. “That’s not true,” you say. I know. I know. But they’ll think it anyway; you know they will. There will be a supercilious smile behind their eyes as they admire the “creative” way I’ve converted footlockers into end tables and the “artsy” look of our fabric-draped couch and the fact that I’ve produced sushi and grapefruit Campari granité in a kitchen without counter space. As they drive up Beverly Glen, they will talk about how warm Michael is and how kind I am, and then they will say, “Yes, it’s too bad.” She will incline her head lovingly toward him and he will give the varnished wooden stick shift of his luxury coupe a fond caress, and they both will feel relieved that they each chose to marry someone perhaps a little less warm and a little less kind, but infinitely more at home with high-end appliances.

  Your green friend,

  L

  I shared with Letty the benefits of my own insights that evening, my fingers sprightly on the keyboard.

  Letty—

  Do not doubt yourself! Brad and Zoe will doubtless be fighting for custody of Baby Guessed Hannah when he discovers she can’t do a thing with a footlocker and she realizes he loves his car more than his wife. I do agree, however, that surroundings are important, and I’m sure you would feel better in a better house—although you would not be better, since you already are the best Letty there is. Just wondering—if Michael takes the job, wouldn’t you be able to move into a house that more closely reflects the true Letty?

  I continued with a two-page account of my own humiliation and determination to seek revenge, until Ted begged me to come to bed.

  “It’s going well, huh?” he asked, holding the blanket open for me. For the first time in a month, the night was quiet, free of the air conditioner’s roar, and we needed more than a sheet.

  “I hope so,” I said. Tomorrow, I’d decided, I would read all that I had written that summer. I would bravely lay out my pages and pull my story from them. After all, I’d filled two legal pads in the library, not to mention the twenty or so pages I’d generated during odd hours at home. Somewhere among all those words, the core of a really fine novel lurked, a piece of writing better, more daring, more moving, more socially relevant, than anything someone as insensitive and attention-hungry as Sally Sternforth could possibly have written.

  “I bet you never expected anything like this would happen to you before you were forty,” Ted whispered, pulling me toward him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Margaret

  AT TEN O’CLOCK THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I placed before me on the false wood grain of the library table everything I’d written all through July and August. Having matured over the summer, and thus no longer believing that any sentence I constructed was necessarily publishable, I had purchased a set of multihued highlighters to mark the “good” (orange), the “passable” (blue), and the “needs work!” (green).

  I expected, in fact, that entire paragraphs might be unsalvageable and so deserve no highlighting at all. I warned myself not to let this upset me. I did not, after all, aspire to be one of those writers who get by on brilliant prose style alone. I was attempting to capture the essence of a man who’d been through America’s most reviled war, a man who’d suffered cruel self-revelations when called upon to give his all, a man who’d returned to an unwelcoming country, but was getting on with his life all the same. This, I reminded myself, would certainly take several drafts.

  “Getting On,” I scribbled in the top margin of the first page. It might be a good title, suggesting as it did the sort of colorless plodding I had come to see as Robert’s chief characteristic.

  Simon smiled at me encouragingly before bending his head to his page. This would be one of our last days together and we planned to have a real lunch to lament his going and to celebrate the reason for it. He’d been offered a job as editor in chief of a new magazine called In Your Dreams, dedicated to publishing the rambling stories, interesting only to those who personally dreamed them, with which people bored their analysts.

  I uncapped my highlighters.

  At eleven-thirty I recapped my highlighters. I had used the orange “good” m
arker four times. Once to highlight a piece of punctuation. In two months I had written altogether four pages and six lines of usable material. Unable to face my “work” another instant, I retreated to the circular staircase and slumped on the steps until some child insisted on using the handrail to which my nearly supine body was blocking access.

  “This is the end,” I said wanly at lunch. Simon and I were seated in the back room of the sort of place beloved for its rough “authenticity” and its cheeseburgers. The air stank of authentic smoke. I might have let my head sink onto the well-inscribed table had several of the initials not been filled with ketchup.

  “We can still have lunch,” Simon said, and I realized that he assumed I was mourning his leaving.

  And I was mourning his leaving. That, too.

  “Your office is on the Upper East Side,” I said. But, after all, what would stop me from taking an entire afternoon to subway up, eat a leisurely lunch, test perfumes at Bloomingdale’s, and walk back fifty blocks? It wasn’t like I was doing anything productive.

  “You’re leaving me and my book isn’t going well,” I confessed. I kept my eyes down, watching my finger push grains of salt along the dark varnished table.

  “Maybe you should take a class,” Simon suggested.

  “A class? What class?”

  “There’s a good one at the New School Extension this coming semester. With Peter Berginsky. He’s written at least fifteen novels and he normally teaches in the master of fine arts program at Columbia.” Simon tapped the air with a french fry, as if instructing me with a pointer. “Some people go to Columbia just to get into his class.”