Everyone seemed energized, but Ranjana felt alienated. There seemed to be so much stacked against writers, and the publishing bigwigs had seemed so jaded. She began to understand how special and heartbreaking her nights in front of the computer were—the comforting glow of the screen and the silence except for her tapping fingers or sips of tea. All of that crumpled under the continuous tut-tutting that assailed everyone’s hopes in a setting like this.
“Did you enjoy the talk, ji?” Harit asked her in Hindi. Ranjana took comfort in being able to converse with him without worrying that people nearby would understand. You could pull a foreign language over yourself like a cloak and retreat into a private world, she thought. Given the weekend’s keynote speaker, there were, of course, handfuls of Indian people lurking about, but they were clustered in their own enclaves at other tables. As for Teddy and Cheryl, they had finally found their ideal icebreaker—their mutual affection for Fifty Shades of Grey—and were busy revealing their favorite scenes.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” Ranjana said. She didn’t want to reveal her unease, for fear that her discomfort would heighten his.
Harit could sense that something wasn’t right, but he knew what Ranjana was thinking—that he should staunch his discomfort for her sake. He found this refreshing, being able to know someone your own age well enough to react in kind. Teddy was the only other middle-aged person with whom he conversed regularly, and that was, of course, a very different type of interaction, like an awning pelted by the rain.
Cheryl turned to Ranjana. “Is that what you’re writing, sweetie? Are you off on your own, writing little erotica stories?”
“Oh, Cheryl. No. I am not writing ‘erotica stories.’”
“But that’s where the money is at. Don’t you want to make money?”
“People don’t just write for money, Cheryl.”
“Be honest: if you could make the type of money that these women are making, you wouldn’t give a damn what you wrote. I heard that Danielle Steel has twenty cars.”
“Danielle Steel writes romance, not erotica,” Ranjana said, quoting a line that Stefanie loved to blurt out.
Cheryl: “What’s the difference between romance and erotica?”
Teddy: “Where did you hear that she had twenty cars?”
Harit: “Who is Danielle Steel?”
Soon the room stirred as the masses departed for their next events, leaving the debris of crumpled napkins and shiny pieces of plasticware. Their day progressed with more panels and snack breaks. Ranjana finally ran into Cassie, who chatted briefly before saying she was late for a panel; this was their sole interaction. Ranjana felt increasingly ill-informed about the literary figures in attendance. On more than one occasion, there was that movement, that wind of recognition, when a writer of some note appeared on a panel or moved down a hallway. Most of the authors looked amiable enough, but many of them seemed resentful of the people stuffed into these compact, too-bright rooms. At one panel, a big-faced man—bushy eyebrows, wide jawline—was introduced as Aidan Nolan; he was an Irish author of three novels who was just now seeing his first novel being published stateside. Despite his being a novice on this side of the pond, he refused to answer most questions during his Q&A and scoffed through the answers he did provide. By the time the last panel of the afternoon started—“From Self-Publishing to Self-Actualization,” where a fight almost broke out due to overcrowding—everyone looked closer to Self-Mutilation.
* * *
The keynote dinner arrived, along with scores of faces that had not been seen during the rest of the conference. It seemed as if many attendees had signed up for the weekend simply to attend this one event. Everyone tried to ignore this and focus instead on the excitement of being in such proximity to a superstar. She was nowhere in sight, at first, but everyone knew that somewhere within the hotel, the eminence for whom they had shelled out a couple of hundred bucks was ready to appear, to educate, to enlighten, to pass along the warmth and impact of her words like God engaging the finger of Adam.
The catering was more careful for this event. Food appeared on the tables by way of a more fastidious waitstaff. Bleu cheese nestled among glistening greens and sugarcoated walnuts. Two baskets of crust-cracking breads and pastel butters were distributed to each table. There was an elaborate eggplant lasagna for the vegetarian-inclined, and Cheryl and Teddy were treated to large cubes of filet mignon with pert green beans and baked potatoes that looked like fashionable prawns. There was wine—red, white, and rosé carafes—and Ranjana was surprised to see how tipsy people were willing to get. She wasn’t shocked to see Teddy and Cheryl drink, but she was somewhat startled to see Harit dispose of three glasses by the time the entrées arrived.
“I used to be able to cook like this,” Cheryl said. “Long before I was married. I dated a chef, and he was always teaching me to make things.”
“Get out of town,” Teddy said. “Or, um, more out of town.”
“Not joking. His name was Bobby, and he made it a point to teach me one new thing a week. I could make filet mignon as good as this. I could make lamb. I could make the perfect roast chicken. I could make cock-oh-ven.”
Ranjana spoke as Teddy’s mouth was opening to correct her: “That’s coq au vin.”
“Oh, whatever,” Cheryl said. “It’s not like I make it anymore.”
“Why not?” Harit asked. He was pouring himself another glass of white wine, and the too-deliberate way in which he did so revealed his tipsiness.
“Dear, when you get married and have kids, you don’t have time for that kind of crap anymore. Plus, if your kids grow up eating filet mignon, they’ll probably turn out to be assholes.”
“You should write that down,” Teddy said.
As Ranjana enjoyed the last bite of her lasagna, she thought of her countless Wendy’s lunches with Cheryl, of how Cheryl had gone from cooking fancy meats to eating electric fries. Ranjana couldn’t find any trace of sadness in Cheryl. As usual, she couldn’t tell if Cheryl’s happiness was authentic or the by-product of an overwhelming mental dimness.
Sandy, the conference organizer, approached the lectern in the middle of the long dais, which was decorated with bouquets of water lilies and framed by royal blue curtains. The room achieved another one of those complete silences—somewhere in the vaulted ceiling, you could hear the gargle of a radiator—and everyone could see the flutter in Sandy’s movements. No one was listening all that well to her introduction; necks were craning ever-so-slowly to see where the author was standing in wait. Sandy ended by saying, “The extraordinary Pushpa Sondhi,” and everyone saw that she had been waiting in the hallway.
She was even more beautiful in person. There is a quality that beautiful people have that causes their features to take on different meanings, depending on the angle of their heads. That wide, eye-hooded face was arresting even from far away, but there was also an unassuming matter-of-factness to her mien. She was not dressed extravagantly; she wore a blue silk blouse and black slacks. Her hair was short, not even shoulder length. The outfit made Sondhi look more maternal and younger at the same time—like a protagonist in one of her short stories.
Ranjana felt it: jealousy, the top of her mouth turning to metal. All the goodwill that she had built up—the warmth that she had felt upon ingesting the stories and their beauty—was effaced upon the author’s entrance. Ranjana felt sick to her stomach, not because of the jealousy itself but by its speed and thoroughness. There was no emotion as swift and complete. Happiness spread through you and tingled. Sadness hooked your limbs and pulled them down slowly. But jealousy yelled hello from within you.
The topic of Sondhi’s speech was the ability to step outside of one’s native culture and view that culture anew, from a remove. In her case, it was Portugal; she had moved there with her journalist husband (a Chilean) and their two young children. Ranjana remembered reading that they had a brownstone in Brooklyn; on a particularly low evening, she had even clicked on Google Street
View to see if she could espy a smudge of Sondhi’s form somewhere in a tall window. These days, in Lisbon, the family was surrounded by buildings of yellow stone, cypress trees instead of leafy maples. Sondhi had taken to reading in Portuguese, and it had given her a new perspective on English, on the turns and twists of its borrowed words. She was reading poetry in Portuguese, novels in Portuguese, grocery store circulars and traffic signs in Portuguese. It was evolving for her into a language of real substance and utility. She was an English-born, American-raised, Portuguese-immigrant Punjabi woman whose own sons would speak fluent English, Punjabi, Hindi, and Portuguese. She was her own fantasy novel.
This should have been evident to Ranjana all along: Sondhi wasn’t some frozen entity contained in the pressed pages of a paperback or the gray static of a Kindle. She was a human who created elegant sentences and fully formed characters, characters whose lives resonated more than Ranjana’s all-too-real but ineffectual life. Hundreds of people had gathered with their breaths caught in their throats to see this woman speak; they craned forward for even the slightest chance to hear something that revealed the inner lives of her characters. Meanwhile, nobody but the people at this table would care about the events of Ranjana’s day.
As a beautiful dance was set to gorgeous music, Ranjana set the eloquence of Sondhi’s speech in this banquet hall to the eloquence of Sondhi’s stories. This led her to a gut-punch conclusion:
She might never be good enough to give her characters the writing that they deserved. If she were a visionary artist like Sondhi—a beautiful thinker, with Portuguese-fluent sons and a glamorous husband—she could give her characters lives full of careful rumination, well-worded wit, boisterous parties populated with smartly observed acquaintances, delightful bedroom escapades. But she was not exceptional, so her characters would never have exceptional lives. An untrained painter couldn’t depict Cézanne’s The Card Players; a pitchy singer couldn’t produce an affecting “Nessun Dorma.” There was that extra dimension, one step below the surface, where the emotions of the best characters roiled. Ranjana could not access that layer, so her characters would be doomed to live without those charms. Sondhi’s version of failure was making the Pulitzer short list and not winning the prize; Ranjana’s version of failure was actual failure.
Ranjana knew this kind of Indian woman, someone born into privilege but without an exaggerated sense of it. Ranjana knew that Sondhi’s father had been an English professor—thank you, Wikipedia—so she knew that Sondhi had grown up with the base-level studiousness that Indians typically possessed. Ranjana could envision what Sondhi had been like in her American classrooms. She could see the jiggle of Sondhi’s hand as it rose to answer a question; she could see the respectful family dinners and the stern, beautiful mother. She could see the good grades, wished for and then zapped onto report cards and college transcripts. She could see the boys, both Indian and American, who snuck lustful looks at her light eyes.
There was no room for anything flippant. Composure had always been key because composure came with the territory. Children like this came from evolved lines that had perfected their efficiency and their comfort with success. Everything about Sondhi corroborated this: the evenness with which she spoke about her education, especially her grad school education in literature, and then the charming matter-of-factness with which she discussed her constant and steady success. Just as beautiful Indian girls earned the adoration of their fathers, the approval of their mothers, and the fawning dedication of Indian boys, so they attracted the expected achievements—from the academic to the romantic. And because these channels of merit were so engrained at this point, there was no element of legitimate surprise. With no surprise, there was no unexpected event—no serendipity—so there was nothing particularly funny. And when there was nothing particularly funny, there was only time to reflect on the things that might disrupt one’s success. And the disruption of success was always sad, never funny.
Upon looking across the table at Harit, Ranjana understood where she was in the literary hierarchy: in terms of writing, she was to Sondhi what Harit was to her in terms of cultural intelligence. She would never approach Sondhi’s level of discourse just as Harit would never approach her own understanding of American ways. It was an unsavory thought to have, but Ranjana was old enough to know that when something felt sticky like this, it was true.
The more she considered her tablemates, the more she felt that they were making a mockery of her writing. Yet the reason for her anger was her own ineptitude. She had invited them here so that she wouldn’t have to reckon with her own weaknesses. Their entire presence was an excuse for her to ignore this keynote speech and focus instead on the half-drunk coffee in Cheryl’s cup, the pilling on Teddy’s beige sweater, the descent of Harit’s eyelids, heavy with wine. She would collect these small scraps, these ministories, in lieu of being able to craft grand musings.
She couldn’t tell if it was defeating or liberating to realize that she wasn’t destined for greatness. It wasn’t like she was declaring herself a literary genius. She was simply trying to create stories that people would enjoy. Or was she? Whatever her weaknesses, she was not Stefanie; she had some level of talent. At some point, she had bitten into the forbidden fruit of seeing what good writing could be, and now she couldn’t shut herself back in the bliss of ignorance.
But then Sondhi poured herself a quick glass of water and said, “Many of you in the audience here are not going to believe me when I say this, but I have periods of great frustration and failure, when I fear that I will never write another sentence that matters to anyone, let alone to the critics who seem to cluster with their knives raised. Still, if you take one thing away from this speech today, I hope that it will be that the fear is not only valid but necessary. Fear is as common as blood. It courses through us and is, in its way, a vital source. It is the requisite formula for our continued work as writers. Without it, we would weaken and wither away. We feel it constantly, which means we can harness it and use it as a driving force. That’s what I’m encouraging you to do today—take that fear and put it to work for you. Turn it into the apparatus by which you get work done instead of making excuses. It is a rite of passage to acknowledge your challenges and then overcome them.”
This speech immediately reenergized Ranjana. So she had weaknesses and challenges. What woman didn’t? And especially, what immigrant woman didn’t? That didn’t mean that she had to give up altogether. It wouldn’t be easy to push forward; to be sure, she had lofty goals for herself: she didn’t want to be incidentally or circumstantially funny. She didn’t want to make other people laugh by making her stumbles seem charming. She wanted to be pointed in her humor, capable of meeting someone and pinpointing exactly what might make the person laugh—or at least cause the person’s eyebrows to rise in appreciation. That could be a point of differentiation in her work. It could be hard to infuse this kind of humor into her writing, but it might be possible. It was a delicate balance, trying to cater to the strictures of the genre while bending them just enough to allow an appreciative laugh. Perhaps this form of writing had no Literary-with-a-Capital-L equivalent, and perhaps she couldn’t match the sophisticated tone of Sondhi’s wry cultural observations. But she could at least strive to do so.
* * *
There was a signing after the talk. A stylish young publicist, her hair pulled into a tight chignon and her body slinky in a navy suit, hovered over Sondhi with a clipboard. Her function was to move the long line of fans along as quickly as possible. The audience had been instructed to bring only one item to be signed, and photographs were permissible only if the phone was already in camera mode. One click was allowed, and there were many instances when the delight of having a photo with Sondhi was immediately overshadowed by the result of a bad shot, discovered only once the fan had been shepherded away and deposited at one of the hall’s doors.
The room was unnervingly quiet; everyone in line seemed to be craning forward to hear what the curr
ent person in line was saying. All of them were trying to find a way to twist their compliments into something more expertly worded and impressive. There was a moment of collective jealousy, cut with pity, when one woman was heard confessing that she had lost her baby at childbirth, a horrible event recounted in one of Sondhi’s most famous short stories.
For her part, Sondhi was gracious, signing swiftly but engaging directly. For someone who had performed this task countless times, she never flagged, industrious yet approachable. A chief benefit of signing books, Ranjana thought as she shambled forward, was that Sondhi could find a crop of new characters by interacting with readers as varied as these. As one woman approached the table, her hair so long that it fell onto the table and near Sondhi’s signing hand—the publicist broke her martial pose momentarily to flick it away—Ranjana imagined her as an art teacher in a future short story.
Once they were about ten people from the front of the line, Cheryl turned around and popped up on her heels. “Oh, I don’t even know what I’m going to say. What should I say?”
“Just tell her how much you love her work,” Teddy said. To Cheryl, this advice may have sounded genuine, but they all knew: Cheryl had never read a word of this woman’s work.
“Yes, but everyone’s saying that,” Cheryl said. “I want to make an impression.”
“Honey, I don’t think making an impression is ever a problem for you.” The steel in Teddy’s voice was turning molten.
“Ranjana, what should I say?”
“I agree with Teddy,” Ranjana said. “That’s what every author loves to hear. I’m sure it means something to her every time someone says it.”
The man ahead of them, a wiry guy wearing thick glasses, looked back at them and blinked, then turned around.
“You guys are no fun,” Cheryl said.
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