Four-year-olds: Four-year-olds start to have personality. Some of them can read. They actually remember things that happen, so don’t insult them or say anything sick that might stick with them and warp their development.
Five-year-olds: Like four-year-olds, but louder and a little more mobile. This is the paper birthday. Or is it tin?
Six-year-olds: Don’t baby-talk to them—not because six is too old for baby talk, but because you should never baby-talk to anyone ever. Someone might overhear you speaking with a rising inflection and think you are unfit for a promotion, especially if you happen to be a woman.
Seven-year-olds: Just old enough to develop lingering resentments over not winning the class spelling bee or being typecast as a rock in school plays. Should be able to read, but it may be difficult to find a book you’re both interested in discussing. A safe topic is how they are nothing like first-graders and clearly developmentally well advanced.
Eight-year-olds: They should be in third grade. Remember the rule: Age minus five equals grade! (The other rule is that whenever you apply this rule, it will be wrong. See also: when you are ninety percent sure you remember someone’s name and use it to address him.)
Nine- to Eleven-year-olds: Ask if they’ve “written any good books lately.” If my own experience is anything to go by, most kids this age have written something that they feel is a good book.
Twelve-year-olds: Middle school. Commiseration is called for.
Thirteen- to Sixteen-year-olds: Some gnawing obsession is devouring this person, infecting her Internet presence and eating the inside of her locker. Figure out what it is and you won’t need to say another word for the remainder of the conversation.
Seventeen-year-olds: Whatever you do, don’t ask about college. (Naturally, this will be the only thing you can think of to ask about.) Instead, try a less sensitive subject like, “Do you still respect your parents?” or “And your sexuality, do you feel that you’ve got a handle on it?”)
Eighteen- to Twenty-two-year-olds: There is something about being confronted with a recently minted adult that fills you with the overpowering desire to offer life advice. Try to resist this urge if at all possible. If you can’t, just quietly murmur, “As Dear Sugar says, don’t be afraid to break your own heart,” as you say good-bye.
Midtwenties: Quick, they are just on the cusp where joking about getting old is funny rather than Too Close to Home. Hangovers still manageable. Complain about yours.
Thirtysomethings: Before you can talk to a thirtysomething, you must identify him or her as a thirtysomething, a feat I have never excelled at. For women of a certain class, white wine seems like a good signifier, but it’s hard to predict. One way of guessing is to see when they go to bed. Yawn and say, “Boy, it’s about time to turn in!” and see what the other person does. Good things to say to thirtysomethings include “So, do you still feel like an impostor?” and “When Mozart was your age he was still alive, but if I were you I’d avoid any suspicious antimony-based powders.”
Fortysomethings: When people turn forty you are supposed to address them entirely in reassuring slogans in the formula “[noun] is the new [noun],” at least if Hallmark cards are anything to go by (are they anything to go by?). Forty is the new thirty! Forty is the new orange! Forty is the new cupcake! Note that this will get old quickly, so you may be better off searching for common interests.
Fiftysomethings: Say, “How’s your back?” Once people hit a certain age, it is always safe to ask about their backs.
Sixtysomethings: This is about the age when all the technology in the house will turn on you, and cease to turn on for you. Address them accordingly. If you want to rile a sexagenarian, ask him to install something on your TV.
Seventysomethings: The best thing to do when talking to a septuagenarian is to quote, verbatim, the contents of any ominous-sounding forwarded e-mail of dubious veracity that you have recently received. They just love e-mail forwards of dubious veracity. This is about the age when you start to unquestioningly believe e-mails that are forwarded to you. Otherwise sane people will start telephoning their children out of the blue to ask if they know about The Horrible Lizard Thing the Masons have replaced the president with. Be careful that you are talking to a septuagenarian before you begin, though. Seventysomethings often look deceptively young. As a class, they are generally fairly spry, as long as you don’t ask too much of their hips.
Eightysomethings: They know what they like, and what they like is bowls of salted nuts, purses full of tissues, and listening to TV at a high volume. A fun conversation to have here is to urge one of them to retell you the plot of a movie he or she just saw part of on TV.
Ninetysomethings: Good things to say to ninetysomethings are not hard, as long as you speak slowly. If you’ve made it to ninety, you are indestructible, for a given value of indestructible. These éminences grises tend to avoid ice, high winds, and places where there is loud background music. Don’t try too hard to dazzle. Most conversations devolve quickly into volleys of nodding and shouting. You shout and she nods; then she shouts and you nod. Sometimes silence is best.
Hundredsomethings: Don’t ask about the competition for Oldest Living Person. It’s bound to be a sore subject.
Three Hundred Plus: This person is either a brain in a jar or a vampire. Which one is the case should be obvious. Modify your remarks accordingly.
Tuesdays with Hitler
I have a strange affinity for old men. Not “older men,” the type who are fortyish but still in their prime, men like Mr. Big, who notice that you are stumbling along the sidewalk and stop their limousines to offer you six seasons’ worth of excitement and trying not to fart in bed.
No, not older men—old men. I must exude an oddly specific musk, like mothballs and racism.
I guess you could say this is my superpower. I can’t fly or freeze things with my breath (unless I’ve eaten lots of garlic), but I can summon elderly men from great distances. For instance, every Monday afternoon for months, I managed to attract visits from an octogenarian named Mr. Oliver.
Mr. Oliver and I met laboring under the same misconception. My high school history teacher had telephoned me and insinuated that Mr. Oliver would “get me on Broadway.” As an aspiring playwright, I thought this sounded amazing! Eagerly I awaited the arrival of this Mr. Oliver, whom I pictured as some kind of old-timey theater magnate, chomping a large cigar. “It ain’t Noël Coward,” he would say, perusing my first script, “but I think it’s the real Tabasco, kid!”
Instead, what I saw when I came down to the lobby of the Post was an old man wearing shorts with a Band-Aid over his forehead at a rakish angle. He was carrying a large bag of old newspaper clippings.
“I hear you’re going to get me onto Broadway,” he greeted me.
It took us several meetings to sort out this confusion, and by then it was too late. We had gotten into the habit, and, more important, the lady at the front desk had become convinced that he was my long-lost grandfather and would buzz me immediately whenever he showed up.
“What do I do?” I asked my friends. “How do I get this to stop? Do I just wait until he’s too feeble to travel? That could take years!”
The thing about very old men is no one ever questions them. No one says, “Hey, should he be let into the building?” They just assume that the man in question is your grandfather. When I am old, I intend to use this situation to my advantage.
“My grandson doesn’t like to acknowledge me in public anymore,” I will say, clanking down hallways after celebrities who have piqued my interest.
Mr. Oliver turned out to be quite an accomplished gentleman. A retired lawyer, he had written dozens of plays, one about Hitler (a light comedy entitled “How Much Time Do We Have!?!”), one about a happy housewife who talked some sense into Simone de Beauvoir and another one about how, as far as he can recollect, everyone in his college fraternity was
gay but no one thought anything of it at the time.
The basic plot of the Hitler play was as follows. Hitler and Eva Braun managed to escape to South America, after a lot of yelling about his trouble performing in the sack. He blamed Eva for making him feel emasculated. Finally she wanted to go sunbathe topless. Hitler did not want her to. Then someone shot him. Goebbels narrated. Also at one point a number of children were killed onstage? Tonally, it was all over the place, but I think it was supposed to be a comedy. It was Springtime for Hitler but not on purpose.
In fact, the Hitler play, I discovered at Mr. Oliver’s eightieth birthday party, had been a cherished dream for some time. He introduced me to his family. “This is my son,” he told me. “When we did the reading, he was Hitler.”
“Ah,” I said.
“This is my other son,” he added, waving. “He played Goebbels.”
A female friend of his sat down. “And how do you know her?” I asked.
“She was Eva Braun.” He grinned and nodded. “A dead ringer, wouldn’t you say?”
Mr. Oliver insisted on reading his works aloud as we sat at a coffee shop frequented by my work colleagues. “I forget everything after I write it,” he informed me, every time. “And then I look and I think, hey, this guy, he’s pretty good, the guy who wrote this play!” He chuckled, sounding pleased, yet phlegmy.
Another of his plays featured lengthy confrontations between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller and he especially enjoyed performing those (“Now listen to me, Arthur, you just like to have me, Marilyn Monroe, a beautiful shiksa, on your arm, don’t you, Arthur Miller? You like to prove that a skinny nudnik can wind up with a girl like me, Marilyn Monroe!”) as I winced and pretended I had wound up at the table by accident and had no idea who he was. Which was hard to do convincingly, given that we went there every week. It was like Tuesdays with Morrie, except that instead of inspirational messages about loving one another and affirming life, I got diatribes about Hitler. There was also the occasional confrontation between Woodrow and Edith Wilson, from his play Versailles. (“Edith: Woodrow, don’t lie to me! You had a stroke, didn’t you? When were you planning to tell me? Woodrow: Gaaaaargh.”)
In turn, I told him about what I was working on. “This one’s called Social Suicide,” I said. “It’s about a girl who wants to get revenge on all the people in her life by killing herself in the middle of a dinner party.”
“That sounds awful,” Mr. Oliver said. “That’s a downer! Yuck! Yuck!”
“I’m also writing a children’s show in which the Beatles are forest creatures,” I added. (This one actually got produced!)
Mr. Oliver, evidently mistaking this for a joke, gave me a funny look and started laughing.
He kept telling me that he was on the verge of a major production. This seemed improbable. “I got an e-mail from the theater asking for the next stage of the script,” he would tell me. “‘We request the next stage of the script,’ it said.”
“No!” I would gasp. “No, you didn’t!”
Finally, grinning, he would produce a printout of the e-mail. It would say, “We have received your script. Please do not send us anything further unless we request the next stage of the script.”
I kept hoping against hope that this situation would turn into my own personal version of Tuesdays with Morrie. Mr. Oliver would become a font of wisdom and start spewing words of inspiration. Instead, he kept creating situations in which I came within inches of mailing people pictures of Hitler. (To wit: He once gave me a picture of Hitler and Eva Braun with “HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE?!?” written on it in large black letters. It got mixed in with some papers I was carrying to mail and had disappeared into an envelope before I realized my mistake. Fortunately I was able to pry it out in time; otherwise this story would be entitled, “How I Got Fired from Everything, Ever.” I had a panicked vision of the recipient opening what she thought was a polite letter from a young journalist, only to discover a totally context-free image of Hitler with the words HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE?!? scrawled on it in terrifying old-man handwriting. Then I would get an intense, angry call: “What is the meaning of this? Do you think this is some sort of a joke? Are you the ZODIAC KILLER?”)
• • •
Then again, his were far from the worst plays I had read. There was fierce competition for that title. I was a member of two writing groups. The first one was comprised of professionals who had taken jobs in DC but felt, secretly, that they had a screenplay or a novel lurking and festering deep inside them, somewhat like a tapeworm. We met every two weeks at a fancy downtown office with large glass walls and a buzzer at the door and flags of multiple nations in the hallway. The man who ran the group was a successful published novelist in England only—which seemed like it might resemble having a beautiful girlfriend in Canada only. He had written several novels about the Crusades. His advice was all filtered through this lens, making it somewhat less than universally applicable. “Write the parts you want to write first,” he said. “Like if there’s a big beheading, or an encounter with Richard the Lionheart, definitely write that first, then outline the other parts.”
Evelyn, a former journalist who was working on what she described as “a darkly comic screenplay about a bunch of elderly people who find out that the plane they are on is about to crash, so they decide to have a good time,” emitted a baffled sigh.
Every week the moderator fought with the woman whose office we were using, who insisted that she had worked in the publishing industry and that “sorry, Brian, that’s not how it works.” Sometimes she would just shake her head with a wise, knowing look in her eyes, but mostly she barked, “Nope. Nope. No, Brian. No. That’s wrong. I’m sorry. That’s wrong.”
Fortunately there was wine. We needed it. One of the first writers to present was a middle-aged Indian gentleman named Anup who had written what he called an “environmental thriller.” The script revolved around a banker whose son was killed in the Amazon. The banker was seized with the desire for vengeance, worked out a couple of times, and suddenly became capable of a Rambo-level expedition into the jungle, where he and a nubile young lady managed to defeat everyone standing in the way of their sweet, sweet vengeance. This could have been fine if it were not for the fact that every few pages there was an X-rated sex scene, complete with throbbing and pounding.
“Anup,” we said, when we gathered to discuss the script. “Um, nice, nice script you got there. Uh. So. Uh. How do I put this: What was up with all the sex?”
Anup’s brow furrowed. “I was worried,” he said, “that the main character was too much of a ‘goody-goody.’ I thought that it would humanize him if he enjoyed rough sex!”
I choked a little on my wine and made eye contact with Tina (Mystery Novel Set in a Ballpark) and Greg (Screenplay, Then Novel, Then Screenplay, Then Novel About the AIDS Crisis). The three of us had formed a drinking group in order to cope with the excesses of the writing group. Greg was nice but was also trying to make several personal catchphrases happen. “I’m pressing my OnStar button!” he would exclaim, at intervals. “Clutching my rosary! I’ve brought my oxygen tank and I need to take a big inhale!” And these were the ones whose company I sought out!
Things kept going downhill. The lady who Knew Publishing handed us her own screenplay. It was nearly three hours long and consisted mainly of voice-overs, accompanied by “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.”
“What IS this?” we asked, as gently as possible.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re already making it in China, so I don’t really need to make edits to it.”
Greg poured himself another glass of wine. “OnStar,” he whispered.
• • •
The second group met at a public library. I was the only member of the group who did not have liver spots. The first week I went, the group moderator was tearing into a play about a mysterious man named William Ruske
Lancier (Ruske, the author hinted, means “shake,” and “Lancier” means “spear”) who insisted on speaking only in Shakespearean verse, even though he lived in a modern-day apartment complex.
“The thing about this play,” the author explained, as what looked like tears started to form in his eyes, “is really, you have to read it right, with good actors, to get the full flavor of it. If he’d read it better it would have sounded better.”
“Why is he rhyming?” the moderator—grizzled, balding, and peremptory—asked.
“That’s the whole mystery of the play!” the playwright exclaimed.
“You need to make it clear he’s not some kind of dangerous weirdo. He says he met this woman’s son. Okay. So that’s grounds for thinking he’s not a weirdo, you know, he met him, they chatted, he didn’t strip him bare and suck him, so, okay, he can be trusted, you should work from that.”
Strip him bare and suck him, I thought. That’s—that’s an oddly casual way of describing that.
“I’m telling you,” the playwright wheedled, “to understand why he speaks this way, you need to read the whole play. It’s revealed. It makes sense.”
The moderator shook his head. “No. I’m telling you. You have to listen if you want it to be better. Okay, Henry, what do you have?”
What Henry had was a play about St. Augustine of Hippo.
Norbert, whose face looked like a foot, had written a play about two people on a balcony. “I don’t know what it’s about,” he said. “But if you like it, I can keep on writing and maybe we can figure out what it’s about.”
David was writing a cop thriller. He had, it appeared, been writing it very slowly and painstakingly over the course of decades while technology had completely passed him by.
“Hang on one second,” his character said, “while I feed some more carbon paper into this typewriter. Then you can tell me what you know.”
“We can get him on tape,” another character proposed later. “Just take this pocket cassette recorder and secure it somewhere on Bernie’s person.”
A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Page 4
