what purpose did i serve in your life

by Marie Calloway

  “I admire how firmly you feel about all art being subjective. I don’t know how I feel about it. I haven’t thought or read enough about it, though my intuitive feeling is that it isn’t, totally, but now I’m thinking more and more that all art is subjective, but again, I don’t feel like I’ve read or thought about it enough to have a legitimate opinion. The most cynical part of me feels like it is a cop-out, with regards to my own writing, if I were to believe that all art is subjective. I haven’t really thought about or read about ‘talent’, though I can imagine that it is similar.

  “As for you with regards to your writing, I liked Richard Yates, and a few weeks ago I bought Shoplifting from American Apparel. Before you published my stories, my interest in you was sort of ‘sociological’; I was more interested in you as a sort of cultural entity than as a writer or person and I read Richard Yates through this lens, as well as the idea that I acquired of you (without thinking on my own) that you were just a talentless, gimmicky writer. Now, it’s different, of course. I think, partly, that sending things to you was just kind of a social experiment. I was curious as to how you would react. I never expected you to publish anything by me.

  “About liking and admiring academic and intellectual writing but my own fiction not being like that, I feel like I’m fascinated by that kind of writing and I think it’s more interesting than fiction. I think a lot about politics, but I’m not confident enough to write about those sorts of things directly, only indirectly through fiction. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough, either. It’s really frustrating to be someone who is genuinely interested in things, but perhaps lacks the intelligence to directly contribute to any sort of meaningful intellectual discourse. Also, the way that I think is not so rationally, but often intuitively and emotionally, and I make ‘high ideas’ cognizant mostly through the lens of myself and my personal experiences. Obviously this doesn’t work for that kind of academic writing,” I wrote.

  “Why do you think that thinking your writing is subjective and is a copout? It makes life even harder for you (because you won’t be with the 95% or whatever that believe otherwise) and (I’ve written about this elsewhere but don’t know where exactly, just trust me that I’ve thought about it a lot) it’s moral, it reduces pain and suffering in the world, to view art as subjective (basically it reduces hierarchical thinking and reduces qualitative-abstraction thinking; outside of morals it’s historically, I estimate, more original; finally, it’s more accurate, going by natural laws). In terms of how much you work on your writing, art being subjective or not is irrelevant. Everyone still has their ideals if art is subjective and it will take as much work for someone to make a story into their ideal if they believe art is subjective or not.

  I’d be much more interested in reading political or other essays by you than something via n+1, something with a lot of terms and received ideas. I feel like, based on what I know, a larger percentage of advances in whatever field have come from non-academic people who were able to think concretely and without the use of terms (or something). In your fiction you’re able to write how things are, I feel, not how one would think they are, having read thousands of novels. I feel like you have a brain that is able to view things without preconceptions, in terms of your fiction, but you are resisting using that for other things. That you were really seeking validation is what I sensed whenever you asked me for help or advice.”

  After this conversation I thought about how I admired Jeremy Lin’s obvious intelligence and thoughtfulness, though I wondered if he was trying to mold my thoughts and ideas and felt uncomfortable.

  *

  The rest of the week leading up to the readings in New York, Jeremy Lin continued to at times emotionally support me and give me advice on publishing my writing over email, and I felt touched when he expressed concerns about his own writing to me. He mailed me a booklet of drawings of koalas clutching onto cats that he drew for me, and I looked at it often.

  *

  I arrived in New York City on February 17. I was staying at an Internet acquaintance’s house, and the night culminated in me coercing him into holding me while I cried and shook from the immense anxiety I felt about being in New York to meet Jeremy Lin and to do readings, an anxiety which I summed up to him in one line, “I just feel like I owe everyone something, and I can’t deliver.”

  “They like you because of the work you produced. You don’t need to offer anyone more than that. You don’t owe anyone anything. Look, even if Jeremy and all of those people hate you in real life, which won’t happen, you don’t need them. You don’t need any of those people,” the acquaintance said.

  Laying there I thought: I know that I don’t “need” Jeremy Lin to be a writer, but that’s not what I’m concerned with. Or perhaps I do need Jeremy Lin, because I know that without his emotional and public support I would have cracked. I want Jeremy Lin to like me a lot, though I don’t know how much I genuinely like him as a person and how much my feelings are distorted by him being Jeremy Lin. I then thought about how I couldn’t explain to anyone how I feel that my entire social existence amounts to a burden for other people, about how guilty I feel for making them interact with me, and how I know that the only hope for anyone to enjoy interacting with me is if I’m somehow able to conceal my real personality.

  *

  On Friday, I emailed Jeremy Lin asking if he wanted to meet me on Saturday. He said that he couldn’t, but that we should meet the day of the reading, a few hours before the event. On that day, we arranged to meet at a smoothie shop called One Lucky Duck. I took a taxi there and stood outside of it, smoking. I had to wait a while because I had arrived about twenty minutes early. I had been very afraid of being late as I had gleaned from his books that Jeremy Lin hated lateness.

  After waiting about half an hour, I saw Jeremy Lin walking towards me, carrying a MacBook. He was smiling. I started to smile when I saw him, and I wondered if it was because I was happy to see him, or if I was happy because he was smiling when he saw me.

  We said hello to each other. Inside, Jeremy Lin helped me pick out a smoothie and bought it for me.

  We sat side by side in a booth.

  “Is that a tattoo?” Jeremy Lin asked of the name TOM written on my arm in black sharpie.

  “No. It’s the name of my best friend. I wrote it today so that I would feel less nervous.”

  Jeremy Lin nodded. We sat in silence for a few moments.

  “I liked it when Adrien Brody said ‘Am Appy’ in your story.”

  “Yeah, that was funny.”

  Jeremy Lin gave me Xanax so that I would feel less nervous during the reading, and we split a tablet of MDMA. He put it directly into my mouth with his fingers. I thought about how people on the Internet would write about Jeremy Lin “drugging young girls” if they knew about this.

  He turned to look at my face and sighed, “I can’t believe I’m twenty-eight.”

  He started to tap on random keys at a rapid-fire pace on his MacBook. “I’m typing the URL to my secret blog,” he said. I laughed.

  He wasn’t talking, just hitting random keys on his MacBook out of what seemed to me like boredom.

  “Am I doing something wrong?” I asked.

  “No. I feel like I can talk to you.”

  He asked me what I had been doing in New York so far.

  “Yesterday I met with the guy who wrote the shit-talking post about me that you responded to. He said he’s going to come to the reading, but he doesn’t know why because he hates Muumuu House. He hates n+1 too, though.”

  “I feel like there’s people who like Muumuu House, then there’s people who like n+1, and then there’s those other people.”

  “Yeah. I thought that people usually like one or the other. He was really nice and seemed really smart, though. I think I have a crush on him.”

  “I don’t get crushes anymore,” Jeremy Lin said.

  This seemed sudden, and kind of severe to me. I felt a little taken aback.

  We sat in si
lence for a while.

  “I feel like you don’t like me,” I said finally.

  “No, I like you, I like you, I definitely like you.”

  I pinched his arm with my index and middle finger. His arm felt tiny and bony and I didn’t like the feel of it.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, and I stopped. This was my blatant attempt at flirting, and it had failed. I said that I was sorry and felt buzzed from the Xanax.

  Then I said that I was attracted to him. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him or not, but said that I was because I was confused as to how he felt towards me and wanted to know.

  “In what way are you attracted to me?” he asked.

  “Isn’t there only one way to be attracted to someone?”

  “Like you would have sex with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who wouldn’t you have sex with?”

  I felt offended by this, but just smiled and said, “Frat boys at my school who hit on me.”

  “That’s…” he said, brushing me off.

  “I thought you only liked really tall guys,” he said.

  “I care mostly about age and intelligence, I guess.”

  He said that he thought that before we met that I had made a point of saying that I wasn’t attracted to him.

  “I just said that because I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  “You are attractive…I’m just not attracted to anyone. I watch too much porn,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m sorry. I feel kind of affected by the Xanax. This is a really awkward conversation.”

  He said that it was fine, and that he liked awkward conversations.

  *

  He said that he had to meet his friend at a bar, and so we left and started to walk towards it.

  He began to talk about the email that I had forwarded to him.

  “You are so smart and like, confident in your writing. I want to make you feel like you don’t need those people’s advice. Like I feel like there’s like fifteen versions of some writers, but…” I guessed the implication was that there was only one Marie Calloway. I was flattered, but I also thought about how he was urging me not to listen to anyone’s advice, while at the same time he frequently gave me advice. I wondered if what he really wanted was for me to only listen to his advice.

  He asked me exactly what I had meant about what I had said in the forward about him and Muumuu House.

  “I feel like I already told you, in that email I sent to you.”

  I felt confused and frustrated by his disbelief and lack of satisfaction in my explanation, and wondered if perhaps that this was the result of there being something about the way that female writers are treated that male writers can’t grasp.

  “I just feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” he said.

  “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” I said, wondering about why he was badgering me about this issue after I had explained it to him the best that I could.

  “It makes me feel like you’re using me to further your writing career.”

  “No!” I said, and stopped in the middle of the street, my arm stretched out towards him. I was completely shocked that he thought that.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, laughing.

  I walked to the sidewalk where he was standing, and he started to walk again, but then I stopped and started to rub my eyes, halfway in between actually crying and forcing myself to cry. I wanted to cry so he would see that I was a good person and not a calculating user, but he seemed completely unfazed by my tears. He discussed people using other people in the literary world, and how most people had relationships like that, and about how it was okay to be honest and acknowledge them.

  “I feel like you’re projecting qualities of other people or yourself onto me,” I said. I didn’t really think that, but I couldn’t think of any other way to articulate that I thought that he was wrong.

  “I don’t think I am,” he said, smiling and shaking his head.

  I thought then how it seemed impossible for me or perhaps even anyone to outsmart or manipulate Jeremy Lin, at least when it came to interacting with him on an interpersonal level.

  “Can we start walking again?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You were the one who stopped.”

  We began to walk again and were silent for a while until Jeremy Lin said, “You didn’t get Good Morning, Midnight, did you?!” in a playfully accusatory tone.

  “No, I got it,” I insisted, and felt relieved that he had dropped the issue of the email, though also sad about how he seemed to believe that I was indeed only trying to use him.

  “But you didn’t start reading it yet?” he asked.

  “I started it but, I don’t know. I like writers like Raymond Carver and Tolstoy and Joyce Maynard.”

  “I feel like Jean Rhys is a lot more similar to how you write than how Raymond Carver or Tolstoy write. Are you not interested in reading writers who are similar to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  *

  We reached the bar and Jeremy Lin and I met his friend, a writer who would also be reading that night. They talked about drugs, facing each other with their backs to me. I sat staring ahead at the bartender. I ordered a beer and drank it rapidly, feeling suddenly very alone. I thought about what a quiet, ignorable presence I had. I wondered if for as long as I was with Jeremy Lin and there were other people there, I would always feel like a hanger-on.

  *

  Jeremy Lin, I, and the other writer walked into St. Mark’s Bookshop together. There were about eighty people crowded inside. I felt simultaneously excited and high on a sense of “celebrity,” and yet intensely ridiculous for feeling that way, as well as anxious. This was to be my first reading.

  We all separated and I talked to the friends who had come to see me read as well as to a few fans of my writing who approached me.

  After about half of an hour of talking and waiting, Jeremy Lin came to the microphone and announced that the reading was going to begin. I was sitting in the very front in a row of seats that had been reserved for all of the readers.

  Jeremy Lin opened the reading and introduced himself. He read from his Twitter feed (“horror movie titled ‘Flying Shark that can Open Locked Doors’”) and after reading thirty or so tweets ended abruptly by saying, “that’s all I’m going to read,” and introduced me. The crowd applauded. I walked to the microphone.

  “Thank you very much. I’m Marie. I’m going to be reading from a story that I wrote called ‘Adrien Brody’ …” I continued to awkwardly explain my story. I felt strange, but I had thought before how I should explain it, because otherwise I would come off as arrogant, a sort of unspoken “of course you’ve heard of me and my story.” Through the corner of my eye I saw Jeremy Lin smiling as I was explaining, like he was embarrassed, embarrassed of me.

  “I’m sorry, I’m really nervous,” I said, laughing, as an apology to Jeremy Lin.

  I began to read. I kept my eyes firmly on the paper and was able to become unaware that there was a crowded bookstore full of people watching me. While I read I felt like I was able to become like an automaton. I recited the words on the page without thinking or feeling much. But near the end of my reading, someone laughed after I read the line “I could feel him lose his erection,” breaking the audience’s silence. After the laugh, I looked up from the paper I was reading from at the audience. I was terrified by the sight of a hundred blank faces, staring. I quickly looked back at the paper and (shakily at first) began to read again.

  When I was done reading everyone applauded and I walked back to my chair and hung my head down, with my face in my hands. I thought I had done well, but that I should present myself as being ashamed so that others would judge me less.

  *

  After the reading, Jeremy Lin and the rest of the Muumuu House readers went to Blue and Gold, a nearby bar, along with all of their friends. While I was talking to my friend, Jeremy Lin came up b
ehind me and placed his hand on my shoulder. I thought about how I liked the feeling of his hand on my shoulder.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I feel like I didn’t do well.” I did actually think that I had done well, or at least okay, but I wanted him to say something nice about me.

  “You did a good job,” he said.

  We didn’t talk the rest of the night. Jeremy Lin talked to his other writer friends, and I talked to my friends who had come to see me read. But at the end of the night, I hugged Jeremy Lin before he left. As I embraced him, I felt like he hadn’t wanted me to hug him and felt uncomfortable. He felt very thin, even skeletal, to hug.

  I was left thinking that he hadn’t liked me.

  *

  The next day Jeremy Lin emailed me, “How’s it going, how was your day? What’d you do?”

  “Hi. In the morning I took the train from this guy’s house to back home. Then I went to meet this literary agent. He was very kind and seems to really like me and seems interested in representing me, I think, maybe, but says my next move is to get published in places like Harper’s before releasing a short story collection. That’s what people want first, apparently. After that I slept a lot. I feel lonely yet sick of people.”

  “I’m interested in hearing about you and the agent. I feel like there would be an agent who would want to sell a book by you now, if you put a book together out of the things you have and maybe one more thing first then approached them with that. I don’t think Harper’s, etc. is necessary. I feel like it’s nearly impossible to get published in Harper’s unless you have major connections but you can get a book published without connections.”

  “I’ll think about all of those things and ask people about it. Do you want to hang out today? I’m meeting this guy for lunch today at 1:30 and then I’m free until the reading,” I replied.