Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  At first I missed everything about my job—the physical place, my colleagues, my daily sense of purpose, and especially the work itself—with an ache akin to mourning. I decided that this was what it would be like to be dead, but still hovering restlessly at the edges of the living world. There were a few job offers at less prestigious houses, with lower pay and reduced status, and I swiftly, scornfully declined them. Ev says that I went nuts for a while, and I suppose he’s right, if crying jags and episodes of misplaced rage are valid clinical signs. “Al,” he reasoned one night, “you’ll do something else, something new.” What did he have in mind—tap dancing? Brain surgery? Part of the trouble was that I believed he was secretly pleased.

  He had been in competition with me ever since graduate school in Iowa, where we’d met in a fiction workshop. Even his strapping good looks seemed like a weapon then. To be fair, I was pretty critical of his work, too, a defensive response, really. Everyone there was madly competitive and ambitious, despite the caveats of our instructor, Phil Santo, a mild-tempered, mid-list novelist who kept reiterating that he wasn’t running a writing contest—there would be no winners or losers—and that we only had to compete with the most recent drafts of our own stories. “Make it new!” he exhorted us. “Make it better!”

  Of course there were winners; soon after graduation two of the men in our workshop went on to capture the fame and fortune we had all craved. And the rest of us, accordingly, became losers. Ev never published anything, either, but I think we both knew that I had come out ahead. At least I’d become a handmaiden in heaven, while he ended up at his family’s printing firm, Carroll Graphics—brochures, letterheads, that sort of thing.

  So, right after my dismissal, which my friend Violet Steinhorn wryly referred to as my “fall from Grace and Findlay,” I read all of Ev’s unexpected kindnesses to me, like the freshly squeezed orange juice and impromptu foot massages, as condescending and, at heart, unkind. In return, I withheld my sexual favors for a while, or gave them robotically, until I was proved to be right.

  At Violet’s urging I went into therapy for a few months, where I mostly wept while the psychologist, Andrea Stern, passed a box of Kleenex to me and crossed and uncrossed her legs. I stopped seeing her soon after she pointed out, and I agreed, that I was avoiding any reference to anything else in my current or past life besides my job. “I can’t right now,” I said. “Everything hurts too much.” And she invited me to come back whenever I was ready.

  Then, slowly, I began to recover on my own, to actually enjoy my newfound freedom to read just for pleasure, and go to museums or the movies in the middle of the afternoon. One day I made a lunch date with Lucy Seo, a book designer at G&F I’d stayed in touch with. She was full of industry chatter, and she kept looking at her watch because she had to get back to work. I guess it was contagious or still in my blood, because I became just as restive. I had to work, too. That’s when I came up with my brainstorm, and placed ads in The New York Review of Books and Poets and Writers. “The book doctor is in. Seasoned editor will help you to make your manuscript better.”

  The response was immediate and enormous. Some of the letters, of course, were from the kinds of crazies and lonely souls I used to hear from when I was a reader at G&F: people burning to write about their abductions to other planets, or paeans in verse to their departed pets. But there were serious, interesting proposals, too—more than I could handle—and the recovered satisfaction of doing something I liked that was also worthwhile.

  The ad was a little precious, and I couldn’t help thinking how disdainful my father would have been if he’d seen it. He didn’t believe even PhDs had the right to call themselves doctors. Violet, another physician’s daughter, teased me about practicing without a license. And she was right, it did seem slightly illicit. But as the more open-minded Lucy pointed out, editing is actually analogous to medicine, with its orderly process of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

  I never made any promises to my clients about publication, but most of the projects I took on seemed to have a decent shot, and by choosing carefully I still allowed myself lots of time for personal pursuits and for my family. After I left the park that April day, I was going to go up the street to the ATM at Chase and withdraw five hundred dollars from my private money market account. In a day or two I would give it all to my son Scott, who had asked me for a loan.

  He’d said that it was just a temporary cash-flow problem, but he hadn’t paid back the other, smaller “loans” I’d made to him in recent months. “This isn’t for drugs, Scotty, is it?” I asked, and he held both hands up as if to halt oncoming traffic. “Hey, whoa!” he said. And then he explained that he’d just gone overboard on some things he needed, clothes and CDs, stuff like that.

  If Ev knew what I was up to, he would probably have killed me. Our quarrel the night before had been another version of the usual one about Scott, with Ev accusing me again of spoiling him stupid, of encouraging his dependency. “Someone has to make up for your coldness,” I said, already weary of our Ping-Pong game of blaming. Which one of us should take the credit for the two children who had turned out so well? Then Ev said, “Don’t try to throw this onto me, Alice. You’re the enabler here.” God, that psychobabble again—no wonder he couldn’t get published. The money I was about to squander was mine, some of it inherited and some of it earned. I didn’t need Everett’s or anyone else’s permission to help my own child.

  It was soothing to sit on a bench in my new, vast outdoor office, with a roasted vegetable sandwich in my hand and the sun beating down like a blessing on my scalp and eyelids. That uneasiness I’d felt since awakening was definitely gone. A Circle Line boat glided by in the distance, for good measure, its passengers waving gaily to those of us on shore, and I waved back. The pages fluttering on my lap were by a first-time novelist, a thirty-six-year-old machinist in Pontiac, Michigan, whose cover letter had simply stated, “I really need help with this.” But the opening paragraphs were exceptionally good.

  The woman next to me reserved her place in her book with one finger and glanced surreptitiously sideways, as I often do on buses and the subway when I want to see what my seatmate is reading. I imagined that she’d sensed my pleasure in the manuscript and was merely curious about it. She caught me catching her and smiled. “Are you an agent?” she asked, and her smile became wolfish. She probably had her own unpublished six-hundred-page novel stashed behind the gin in the cupboard.

  No, I wanted to say, I’m a doctor. Or, I’m a writer, like you, only better. But that would have been unreasonably mean, and a lie, besides. “An editor,” I finally answered, a half-truth, tilting the manuscript out of her line of vision, like a grind hiding the answers to a test, and she nodded brusquely and went back to Combray.

  I resumed reading, too, and as I turned the ninth or tenth page I was suddenly infused with joy and envy, the way I used to be in Iowa when someone presented a wonderful piece in the workshop. I hadn’t even finished the first chapter and the voice of this writer—this Michael Doyle—was singing in my head. The story line, written in the first person about a young man’s search for his missing sister, was fairly simple, even familiar, but the telling was unexpectedly vivid and complex. And it was funny, in a dark, yet sympathetic, way. Who did he remind me of—Salinger? Grace Paley? No, no one at all—that was the thing.

  Now I wanted to thrust the manuscript on the woman sitting next to me and say, Here, you have to read this! Of course I didn’t; I just kept on reading it myself, wondering why this naturally gifted writer thought he needed anyone’s help. By the middle of the third chapter, though, his narrative began to flag and flatten, as if he’d lost his way in the story, or maybe just his nerve. I felt deflated for a moment or two before the old excitement took over—this was where I came in, wasn’t it?

  Then the homeless man began to howl his familiar aria of despair, and that disturbance in my chest came back, full force—something is wrong—and I wondered if it was only the re
newable pain of failure, in art and in life. Hastily, I gathered the pages and the sandwich wrapper and shoved them into my bag. As I walked away from the bench, the Proust woman called after me, like someone having the last, triumphant word in an argument, “Have a nice day!”

  Also by Hilma Wolitzer

  NOVELS

  The Doctor’s Daughter

  Tunnel of Love

  Silver

  In the Palomar Arms

  In the Flesh

  Ending

  NONFICTION

  The Company of Writers

  FOR YOUNG READERS

  Wish You Were Here

  Toby Lived Here

  Out of Love

  Introducing Shirley Braverman

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels, including Ending, Silver, and The Doctor’s Daughter, as well as the nonfiction book The Company of Writers. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, New York University, and Columbia University. Hilma Wolitzer lives in New York City.

  HEARTS

  Hilma Wolitzer

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH HILMA WOLITZER

  Q: What inspired you to write the story of Hearts? Was it one particular character? One particular scene?

  A: Linda and Robin had been living in the back of my mind, like squatters, for a long time, so I’d have to say that Hearts was character-inspired. I knew vaguely that they were two vastly different young women who’d come together by chance. But I didn’t really begin to know their story until I wrote the first sentence of the book.

  Q: When you first conceived of the story, what did you want it to be about? Did you imagine it as a mother-daughter story? A love story? Something else entirely?

  A: All of the above! I’d been thinking a lot about domestic life and the particular struggles of single-parent households. I wondered what truly binds people together for good, and if you can form a solid family without a blood relationship.

  Q: Did you have a sense of how the story would unfold as you started writing? Did any section or character in particular present a challenge to write? Were there any surprises in the writing?

  A: It’s a road book, so it had a built-in geographical destination. Linda was going to drive (however haphazardly) from New Jersey to California, and she’d try to drop Robin off with suitable relatives on the way. What I wasn’t sure of was the characters’ emotional destination. You can’t force people to love each other; that has to evolve from their experiences and their deepest feelings. The biggest challenge was to make the trip interesting from a tourist’s point of view, without losing sight of the interior story. My characters surprise me all the time. In a way, that keeps me writing, so I can find out what happens to them.

  Q: The novel is titled Hearts, and the heart—both physical and emotional—proves to be a unifying and pivotal concept throughout. Was there something in particular about the human heart that you wanted to write about? Was Hearts always the title?

  A: Hearts was always the title, because all of its meanings and connotations were so important to the book, especially the amazing connections the human heart is capable of making. I tried to explore that in several different ways, including Robin’s feelings about the mother who abandoned her, Linda’s relationships with Wright and then with Wolfie, and finally, in the ways that Robin and Linda and the expected baby might create a lasting attachment.

  Q: How did you decide to structure Hearts in sections that alternate between Linda and Robin’s points of view? Did you find this structure at all limiting? Did you identify more with one character as you were writing?

  A: I began writing from Linda’s point of view in a very limited third-person. But Robin (right in character) insisted on having her say, and it would have been a lopsided narrative if I didn’t let her speak for herself. Actually, I found the alternating-voices structure freeing, because I identified strongly with both Linda and Robin at different times, so I always got to speak my mind, too.

  Q: Many readers will be able to identify with the relationship between Robin and Linda—that of a difficult teenager and her frustrated stepmother. Was your relationship with your own children in some way reflected in the story?

  A: I never write directly about myself or my family and friends. It’s more fun to make everyone up, and you avoid hard feelings and lawsuits that way. But my own experience as a mother of two daughters (adolescents are hard!) and as the daughter (one of three, and once a hellish adolescent myself) of a harried mother, definitely informed the writing of Hearts.

  Q: Have you ever taken a road trip like Linda and Robin’s? Or visited any of the places they do? If not, how did you choose their fictional route?

  A: I don’t think my family would have survived the trip Robin and Linda take, and I wasn’t going to test them. I’ve done short teaching stints in various parts of the country, so I used my own vision of the American landscape. As for Robin and Linda’s route, I did what most travelers do—I consulted a map, and I had AAA figure out a TripTik for them.

  Q: Hearts was originally published in 1980, more than twenty-five years ago. Is there anything that strikes you about the characters or the text differently now, as you’re reexamining it? Do you think, if you were writing the story today, that the characters or the plot would need to change for any reason?

  A: Certain elements of the larger world have changed, naturally; Linda might be driving a Hyundai Elantra instead of a Ford Maverick if I wrote the book today. But I’m surprised by how much is really unchanged, like the controversy over abortion, and young people having to deal with a war they may not necessarily support. I believe my characters would remain the same no matter when the book was written—true to themselves in any given situation.

  Q: You wrote about abortion at a time when the topic was perhaps even more controversial than it is today. Was it something you wanted to address specifically in your writing? Did you ever imagine a story line where Linda’s abortion is performed successfully?

  A: Novels are stories about people within a social context. The people always come first with me, before any subject matter (no matter what my personal opinion may be), so I didn’t intend to specifically address abortion in a polemical fashion. What happens to Linda at the clinic is part of her story, what might have really happened to her in those circumstances, and the choice she makes later to keep the pregnancy comes from her own character and from what she experiences.

  Q: At times Hearts is tragically comic, even laugh-out-loud funny. Do you see humor as an essential author tool?

  A: I’m glad you thought the book was funny without losing its tragic edge. A sense of humor is absolutely essential, I think, in life and in art. It really helps you get through.

  Q: Linda and Robin are so close in age, yet often Robin seems more worldly and aware than Linda, who some might describe as naively optimistic. Robin, as we eventually learn, is even a better driver! Did you intend for their roles to almost switch back and forth throughout? Why?

  A: That was intentional, because it seems true. Nobody is one-dimensional; as naive and tentative as Linda is, she has to make nervy choices and moves, and at heart Robin is not always as confident and surly as she appears. We all shift roles constantly, especially parents and children, who take turns caring for each other.

  Q: Who are your favorite novelists? Have any writers in particular influenced your own work?

  A: That’s always the hardest question, because there are so many writers, living and dead, whom I admire, and no matter how many I mention I’ll keep thinking of others long after this is in print. But Jane Austen comes to mind first and has the most relevance for me. She’s so wryly funny and demonstrates how one can paint the world on a small, domestic canvas. Above all, I admire and am influenced by novels and stories that say that what happens in bedrooms
and kitchens matters as much as what happens in boardrooms and war rooms.

  Q: What can your readers look forward to next? Is there anything in particular you’re working on now?

  A: Well, The Doctor’s Daughter—a father-and-daughter story this time—is about to come out. And I’ve just begun a new novel, about three women of different social classes, whose lives intersect in surprising ways.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Linda and Robin become reluctant relatives after Wright and Linda marry. What effect did Wright’s death have on their relationship? What might have happened to Linda and Robin’s relationship if Wright had survived, or if they’d simply stayed on in New Jersey?

  2. How does Linda and Robin’s cross-country trip contribute to their hostilities and to their rare moments of détente? Is a lengthy car ride the acid test of any friendship?

  3. Stepmother and stepdaughter are close in age but markedly different. Sometimes they don’t even seem to speak the same language. But in what crucial ways are they alike? And what aspects of their respective histories connect them?

  4. How is the motif of “hearts” woven throughout the novel? What are the key secrets that Linda and Robin keep from each other, and what finally compels them to open their hearts?

  5. How do you imagine Linda at the Robin’s age—a teenager—and Robin at twenty-six? Are there times when they seem to trade ages and roles?

  6. Hilma Wolitzer uses humor and pathos to tell Robin and Linda’s story, sometimes on the same page, as in their stubborn silence at the Howard Johnson’s in chapter 23, and when they spread Wright’s ashes at a rest stop in chapter 35. Have you experienced a desire to both laugh and cry on similar occasions in your own life? Does a comic vision help to leaven the pain of tragedy?

  7. How important are the minor characters and a tourist’s view of the American landscape to the novel’s progress and the heroines’ emotional destination? Did the references to pop culture help to orient you in time and to place?