As we approached the corner where I would have to turn left and she would have to turn right—trying to work out in my head how to land the good night kiss, practicing it, visualizing it—Viktoria invited me over for dinner and a movie.
“It’s my turn to cook for you. And by cook I mean order pizza. My treat. It’s what normal people do, right? They order pizza. They don’t snort coke off a guy’s asshole on a dare. Not me, a friend of mine. Logistically, it’s hard to picture. But he swears it happened, and I believe him. He’s a crazy motherfucker.”
She dialed ahead for the pizza. We took our time at the video store. We chose a Hollywood drama about recovering alcoholics and watched it while we waited for the food to arrive, listening to her puppy yap in the kitchen. When the delivery man appeared, I paid and brought the box into the kitchen and put two slices on a pair of new plates. She played with hers but didn’t eat it. When I asked she said, “I don’t really like pizza.”
“But you suggested it!”
“I was thinking about what normal people eat.” This would become a common refrain for her, what normal people did or did not do.
Neither of us was really paying much attention to the movie. She kept turning the volume down, inexplicably, whenever she would scream at the dog. “Shut! The! Fuck! Up!” she would scream, and then pick up the remote and turn it down a few notches.
She lit a cigarette and went over to the window. I joined her. She said, “I used to only smoke a couple cigarettes a day, but at rehab that’s all everyone ever does, is smoke. So now I’m up to two packs a day. It’s sick.” We finished our cigarettes, stubbed them out on the sill, and tossed them out the window. She said, “I need to take things very slow. Do you think you handle that?” It was something she had said on our first date as well. I said I could take it slow. “Good,” she said and squeezed my hand.
We went back to the sofa and watched as the film drew inaudibly toward its conclusion, which clearly was imminent because the main character had hit rock bottom and seemed to be in the middle of a teary reunion with an estranged son. Viktoria leaned against me, and as the credits rolled, we kissed. Her face smelled like peach candy. The television screen, once the credits ended, bathed us in blue. We went on kissing for a while like this. I reached into her shirt and unhooked her bra. I brushed my thumb against her nipple, back and forth, until it became firm. Her eyes were closed, her breath a string of sighs, one after the next. She did not stop me, and the dog, miraculously, was quiet except for some scrabbling now and then at the gate, a stray whimper. With my other hand I felt my way along the long path of her leg, up the inside of her thigh, and into her skirt. I reached into the humid warmth of her underwear, then reached up farther, with two fingers, and held her like this, my palm against her bristly mound as she rocked herself to climax.
We lay there for some time afterward, and from the way her head was turned, away from me, I could tell I had gone too far. I got up to pee, and when I came out, she was in a pair of boy’s pajamas. Without saying good night she went to her bedroom and closed the door.
I let myself out silently, so as not to disturb the dog.
It had been the summer of The Blair Witch Project, and after three solid months of sold-out shows and lines out the door, the moviegoing public seemed to have awoken from the hype of this little “gem” feeling swindled and took a pass on the fall season. I sat on the glass popcorn display case cross-legged, watching over the empty theaters while the other ushers engaged in closing duties ahead of schedule in anticipation of an early night. The person in the ticket booth, entirely against policy, turned off the marquee lights and lowered the gate partway so that we would appear closed to those who might be considering a late show. This rarely worked. Either a manager would catch us or someone with a Moviefone ticket purchased ahead of time would foil our plans, but tonight it worked, and I found myself back home by nine fifteen. My mother was up watching television, and I sat with her awhile. This activity had gotten to be tricky, as I had to fake a sense of continued enthusiasm for every bit of my day that I chose to relate.
My mother wasn’t fooled, of course. “I spoke with Ann today.”
“My ex-girlfriend?”
“Brody. Down the hall?”
“Right.”
“Her daughter’s looking to take up the piano. I told her that you might be interested.”
“In what? Giving lessons?”
“I didn’t say you would, I just said you might be interested. I thought it could be a nice opportunity for you.”
I was still momentarily stuck on my mistaken impression that my mother had been talking to my ex-girlfriend about me and what that conversation might have been like. There was a lot they agreed on, namely that I couldn’t be trusted to make career decisions and that I needed to shave more often.
Seeming to read my mind, my mother said with a sidelong glance, “I don’t know about this in-between look you’ve got going. Either grow a beard or don’t, but this just makes you look like you forgot to shave.”
“I did forget to shave.” I pointed the remote at the television and notched up the volume on an episode of Law & Order. I could sense her continuing to watch me as I pretended to watch the screen.
During the commercial she said, “Give it some thought. It would be some steady pocket money for you and a way for you to reconnect a little with your music, which might not be the worst thing in the world.”
“Mother dearest,” I said, turning to her and taking her hand. “I love you and have nothing but gratitude for the twenty-odd years you’ve sheltered me—”
“Uh-oh.”
“—but I think the time has finally come for me to move out.”
“Again.”
“For good this time.”
“Any place you find, you know, is going to want first and last. Even a sublet.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
I stood, gathered my mother’s dirty plates from the coffee table, and went into the kitchen. I rinsed the dishes and set each on the rubberized-wire drying rack. “Bring the box of cookies on your way back,” my mother called. “They’re on the windowsill!”
Back in my room, I got into my pajamas, a gift from An way back when. I used to sleep naked, but she claimed the oil and sweat I secreted required her to launder the sheets too often. An liked things clean. I would find my pajamas washed and folded every few days on my pillow. They were falling apart now from so many washings, the waistband losing its elastic, threadbare, the cuffs coming unhemmed. I could sleep naked nowadays if I wanted to, but I’d come to see it her way.
My mother stopped in later to return the book I’d lent her.
“What’d you think?”
She turned it over in her hands. “This was that boy you knew from Morningside Conservatory? What a terrible thing, doing that onstage. So destructive. I don’t know. What did I think? It’s hard, knowing nothing else about him but this book and that performance, to avoid trying to link them somehow.”
“What do you mean?”
She took a seat on the piano bench, leaned her elbow on the closed lid. “It feels very personal.”
“It’s not a book of poems, Mom.”
“Still, there’s a rawness about the material. As though he were still working through it. That guidance counselor. You’ve got to deal with this thing or it will eat you alive. Dire pronouncements. It’s like the author’s giving himself this advice.”
I adjusted the pillows on my bed, leaned back. “I liked it. It’s creepy, in the way Beckett is creepy. And I think he’s kind of fascinating. Totally intense.”
“What do Suri and Dave make of him?”
“Oil and water.”
“Ha. I’d suspect so. Art and Commerce, at opposite ends of the hall.”
“They’re not as crass as all that, Mom. Maybe Dave is, but Suri wants more. You read the first draft of his script.”
“How about your script?”
“I gave it to him. He pro
mised to read it. Once we’re done with this project.” I watched my mother run her hand along the closed lid of the piano. “It’s got to seem like a terrible waste,” I said, “me giving up on music after all those years. The money you spent on lessons. Not to mention the four years of college tuition.”
“If this is about Mrs. Brody’s daughter, forget I mentioned it. And forget money. You’re looking for something. I get it, honey. I do. It’s not music, and that’s fine. You’ll find it. Whatever it is. Whatever end of the hall it’s on.”
The realtors wanted nothing to do with me. My income did not meet most landlords’ minimum requirements, and my credit history revealed a long and contentious battle with my college lenders to collect monthly payments.
“What am I going to do now?” I was at Viktoria’s, in her kitchen preparing a dinner omelet while her dog snuffled at my crotch.
“You could stay here with me and Sammy. We’d love that, wouldn’t we? Oh, wouldn’t we? He could be our little slave, cooking and cleaning for us while we went about our business.” It actually didn’t sound bad at all.
I took the potatoes out of the oven, which I’d tossed with a little oil and rosemary and set up on a high rack to broil under some aluminum foil. I divided these on the plates with the eggs, which I set down on her rickety Ikea table. Viktoria opened the gate and let the puppy roam. “I think he can be trusted by now.”
I shook some ketchup into a small dish and set it between us for dipping our potatoes. I demonstrated.
She clapped. “Yay, like normal people!” She forked a potato and blew on it. “You really should be proud of yourself,” she said after a few bites. “I usually don’t eat, but this smells so good. My parents would be shocked.” Despite this claim, she only made it through a quarter of the omelet. Most of her potatoes remained untouched. It occurs to me now that on top of her other troubles, she might have been anorexic as well. I had no experience with this, as all the women in my life were good eaters. She was very thin, her hips narrow, her breasts the buds of a prepubescent girl. Her stunning beauty was not a voluptuous one but rather the angular, androgynous beauty of a runway model. Thin limbs that extended out to her very fingertips. Clumsy, but the clumsy of a swan on dry land, of Annie Hall. It wasn’t her breasts you noticed or her rear end. It was the graceful hollows, the scoop of her clavicle, the dimpled backs of her knees.
Viktoria lit a cigarette and dropped the match onto her plate, where it sizzled. I cleared and upon returning was struck by the distinct stench of dog shit. Viktoria smelled it, too. We followed it to its source.
On the little entryway rug, Sammy had left a wet-looking pile.
“Oh you stupid fuck!” Viktoria screamed at Sammy, who sat shivering on the bed.
5
NOVEL
ARTHUR AND PENELOPE HAD BEEN expecting me. “Here,” Arthur said, handing me a stack of paper held together with a binder clip. “Tell me what to do with this.”
“Him? You’re giving it to him? What does he have to do with this?” Penelope was holding a glass of white wine. She said, “Put that down and let me get you something to drink. It’s good cheap Fumé.” She left the balcony and went into the kitchen.
Arthur said, “Don’t put it down. Don’t put it down. I’m asking him a question, Penelope. One that you don’t seem to have the nerve to answer.”
She returned with two glasses and took a sweating bottle from the dining room table and poured some wine into each. She handed one to me and one to Arthur. “I’m assuming you want.” Her right hand was swaddled in gauze. “Work related,” she said when she saw me looking. “I’ll live. Let’s go onto the porch.”
I was wearing a turtleneck and a wool blazer—a yearning toward the professorial poise in Arthur, I suppose. It was crisp out—pure, I want to say. When you’re above the exhaust pipes and manholes and dry-cleaner steam, just breathing the air, New York City can smell as clean as a lungful from a ski lift in Vale. It’s a fairly short period, though, a week or two at most, after the garbagy musk of summer and before the burnt chestnut chill of winter.
Arthur brought out three dining room chairs, and we sat. I set the stack of pages on my lap. It was maybe three inches thick. The center of the top page read The Morels: A Novel.
“Is this your new book?”
“He wants me to read it.”
“And why don’t you?”
“I will. But not like this. Art thinks I won’t approve and—no way. I don’t want any part of that. You wrote what you wrote. I’m not going to be your conscience or your censor. Do that for yourself. And you know what? Fuck you. For trying to make me play that role. I don’t want to play that role. Anyway, what am I supposed to say? I read it, I don’t like it, I tell you, Art, don’t publish this. Burn it.”
“I’d burn it without a second thought.”
“But what about me? I’d be nothing but second thoughts. You’re saddling me with this burden? That’s fair. And like I would ever say such a thing. You know this. You know I would never tell you to do that, so what are you really doing here? You’re forcing my hand. It’s a bluff. You don’t want me to tell you what I really think. You want me to tell you to go ahead, and you know I’ll tell you to go ahead because what kind of supportive wife would tell her writer husband to burn his manuscript? It’s a free pass. You know how I know? Coming to me now. It’s sold, your agent has seen it, he’s gotten a publisher to agree to buy it—this thing is already out of your hands—why not come to me when you were still working on it? When you could have done something about it?”
I thumbed though the pages. On first glance, it appeared to be a string of e-mails. Three hundred and sixty-two pages of e-mails.
“But you don’t understand. That’s not it at all. I’m asking you for help. I don’t know what I’m doing. You give me way too much credit. I’m not in control over what I write. This isn’t some piece for a travel magazine or some restaurant review. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a romance, or what have you. This is—excuse the pretentiousness of saying it—literature. I’m looking for good, for true, for dangerous. This is my mandate, my only mandate. There is no formula. It’s a direction, the vaguest sort of destination, a kind of compass that, if I know how to use it, will show me the way. And here is this thing I found, and I know it’s all these things, but I also know it will hurt you and Will.”
“Art. They’re words. It’s a novel, yes?”
“Technically, yes.”
“There is no technically. It is or it isn’t.”
“I guess that will be the question, won’t it?”
“Look. You can’t please everybody. You can’t. You make sacrifices. You think this is any different than what a doctor goes through? A top surgeon? The procedure develops complications, and he has to miss his son’s graduation. Or I don’t know, at least that’s the way it goes on television, but it sounds about right. These are the trade-offs. This is what happens to a family man with a career. You’re not special. You just have to accept that your wife and son may never forgive you.”
“I can’t do that. That’s unacceptable. It can’t be either-or.”
“You’re such an only child, Arthur.”
“I have half siblings!”
“You want it all, but you can’t have it all.”
“Okay,” he said. He took the manuscript from me, got up, and went inside.
Penelope crossed her eyes at me. “Do you see what I’m dealing with? He turns into a crazy person sometimes. I want to pull my hair out.”
Some people would say they avoid being around couples for precisely this kind of cross fire I was in, but I found it comforting. It made me feel closer to them, that they should have let me into their lives enough that I could see them argue. I took a mouthful of wine. “This is good,” I said.
Arthur came back empty-handed and sat down.
“So,” Penelope said quietly, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to call Doug in the morning and te
ll him to forget it.”
“Oh, Jesus! I didn’t realize I was talking to someone’s Catholic mother. Poor Arthur! Going to martyr his magnum opus for the sake of the family.”
“What do you want from me, Penelope?”
“I want you to be realistic. You’ve brought this thing into the world. You can’t undo that. Destroying it—the original file, all copies, whatever—doesn’t change this fact. You wrote it. Period. Deciding not to publish doesn’t change this. Even if you could take it back, even if nobody had read it, it wouldn’t change a thing. It exists. What’s required of you now is to be a man about it. Own it. It’s yours. To hell with me. To hell with Will. Is that what you want me to say?”
“You should read it. You should know what you’re getting into before you say a thing like that.”
“I don’t care what it’s about. Do you love me? Do you love Will? Does this story change that? No, so go forth and publish.”
Arthur looked at his watch. “I need to go pick him up.”
In the elevator I said, “So Penelope doesn’t know anything about this new book.”
“Not from me withholding it, believe me. She doesn’t want to know. She wants to go out on the day it’s released, walk into a bookstore, take the thing off the new-arrivals rack, and pay top dollar for the hardcover. Be the first in line, as it were. It was the same with the other one.”
Arthur explained that the release date of a book is a rather anticlimactic affair. There are launch parties and readings and three-way conference calls about first-week numbers, but this is somehow beside the point. With a movie premiere, the auteur has the satisfaction of sitting in a back row and seeing the effect his efforts have, connecting the dots of that triumvirate uppercase A—Artist, Art, Audience—the reaction is immediate, visceral. He can stand with the ushers as the moviegoers file out and hear just how enthralled or bored they were. A gallery opening, although more of a ceremony, achieves this same function, plugging together viewer and object for the benefit of its maker, so she can see her achievement realized. And likewise with the composer, the choreographer, the architect, the chef. The spaces they describe are traversable such that the artist can witness the traversing. Not so for the novelist. The book launch, though it pretends to accomplish this—invited guests, signed books stacked on a foldout table, a reading, and, at the end, applause—is a sham. Because books are different. They can’t be consumed in one sitting. The narrative arc takes many hours, days if you’re a slow reader, to travel, and it’s a journey that happens alone. This was the other difference about literary art. Theater, music, dance, dining, are all communal arts, the experience enhanced when shared with others. Reading is an entirely solitary activity. Even a subway car full of straphangers all reading the same bestseller is a hundred separate people alone with a book. So where does that leave the writer? He can’t watch over the shoulder of a stranger, gauging his reaction. And the author’s wife has likely already read a draft or two, or at the very least knows too much about the endeavor and its author to enjoy any pure reading experience.
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