American Innovations: Stories

by Rivka Galchen

  “All right. Well. I’m thinking of buying a new Parmesan grater—”

  “I thought it was satire, Trish. It’s pretty funny. Look, I knew you could never have said some of that stuff. I mean, you are kind of critical, Trish, but still. How could I have known Jonathan was serious? I thought, Maybe these things can be healthy. Funny is healthy. Maybe this is a healthy way for Jonathan to vent some anger, some hurt feelings. Healthy fantasy, you know? I didn’t know what to do, Trish. I asked my shrink. He wouldn’t weigh in! I decided not to interfere. Look, don’t be mad at me, Trish, I’m just the traumatized bystander here—”

  “You keep saying Trish. You do that when you’re trying to avoid something. You should just come out and say whatever it is you want to say instead of saying Trish all the time.”

  “I’m going to come over and we’re going to read it together. Or not. If that’s what you want. Whatever you want.”

  I wasn’t going to read the blog. So much writing out there in the world and who wants to read it? Not me.

  * * *

  All of this was not long after the publication of my first novel, and I had some money, even a bit of dignity, as the novel had been somewhat successful; at least, I’d been given a decent advance and some money from foreign rights, too—it was a dream!—but I didn’t have lots of dignity and I didn’t have lots of money, either, just some. The novel was a love story, between a bird and a whale. Why was I already low on money? Partially because money just flies, as they say, or I guess it’s time they say about that, the flying, but money, too. Very winged. Still, one of the main reasons I didn’t have much money was that I had been paying my husband’s way through business school. At least, I’d thought I was doing that, but it turned out he wasn’t enrolled in school—I went to look for him, of course—and he had just been making those “tuition” withdrawals for himself. He did have many nice qualities, my husband. His hair unwashed was a heaven for me. He never asked me what I’d gotten done on any particular day. We’d fallen madly in love in three weeks; that had been fun. He used to call me little chicken. I still miss him.

  But back to the point. I had some money but not lots of money. Prison bars of not-money grew around me in dreams, like wild magic corn. My agent called—so nice to be called by a friend!… or, no, not a friend … but sort of a friend!—to see if I was interested in taking a meeting with some “movie people.” I started crying, and then we got past that. The meeting would just be to talk over a few notions, no biggie, but maybe. They had liked the screenplay adaptation of my novel—I hadn’t written a screenplay adaptation, this seemed to be a confusion—but thought it would be too expensive to have underwater filming and also flight filming. They wanted a cheaper love story. What if it was two land animals? Anyway, a meeting was proposed. My agent acted as if I might find it beneath me, like only another novel was serious work, and even though I know he didn’t really think that my writing was too serious to be set aside for a movie, I thought it was nice of him to pretend as if that might be the case.

  “Great, great,” I said, in a closing voice. “I’m, you know, all over that, totally.”

  “Totally?”

  I coughed, as if to locate the problem in my throat.

  “So you’re OK?”

  “Excited. I’ll be there.”

  “Like even what’s just happened to you—that’s an idea right there.”

  * * *

  And it struck me that maybe the meeting was the kind of thing that was going to save me, or at least that I should not entirely neglect to prepare for it, since it might kind of sort of save me a little bit. It could be a very good thing. I could watch myself put forward my best effort and then feel good about myself for having done so, for having tried. The least I could do, for me—and for my progeny, too!—was open up a Word file. Or, failing that, jot down a few notes on a legal pad. Let me just say now, because I don’t believe in suspense—or at least I feel dirty when I try to engage in it, probably mostly because I’m no good at it—that I didn’t prepare for the meeting at all.

  My friend David came by. He needed to borrow money. He had much worse luck in life than I did. Also expensive dental problems, and an addiction to acupuncture. I told him about the leaving and also about the blog.

  He already knew about the blog. He, too, had found it by going through the browser history of Jonathan’s laptop. “The guy had a pretty fantastic imagination,” David said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it. I supposed we should respect that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Remember the two months you didn’t speak to me after I’d said maybe you were rash to marry after three weeks?”

  I had recently heard someone use the word “poleaxed.” That word made me think back to those years in Kentucky as a child; I don’t know why, that was the thought. I was a fancy citified woman now, and so my life could have properly sized disasters, ones in the comedy-of-manners way of things, rather than in the losing-a-limb-to-a-tractor-blade way of things; that was another thought. If there was no blood on the floor, then it wasn’t a tragedy. That was what “urban” meant. Could mean. Poleaxed. I had also once come across a phrase about a book “lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life.” It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest.

  “We were still sleeping together,” I said. “People don’t sleep with people they hate.”

  “Well, that’s not true,” David said.

  David was an aspiring screenwriter and my most reliable friend. I didn’t tell him about my upcoming movie meeting. The mood of betrayal had gone general.

  “Men like me,” I said, hand on the belly that housed a being of unknown gender. “They really do. Just yesterday a man stopped me on the sidewalk to ask me if I was Italian.”

  “Who was talking about not liking you? You’re just in pain.”

  “Maybe I’m not in pain.”

  “I’d put my money on pain. It’s the Kantian sublime, what you’re experiencing. There’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”

  Sublime. I thought of it as a flavor. Maybe related to key lime. I didn’t know what the Kantian sublime was. It’s important to be an attentive host. And wife, for that matter. I went to the kitchen and got out some crackers and mustard and jam; it was what I had. I found some little decorative plates to make it look nicer. Suddenly I was worried that David might leave, that I’d have no company left in the world.

  “You know who I get fan letters from?” I said. “I do get fan letters. That’s something, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a certain distance from which I’m lovable. I get fan letters only from men. Only from men in prison.”

  I set down the confused cracker offering.

  “You really haven’t looked at the blog?” David let the crackers just sit there. “On the one hand, I want to congratulate you. But it might help you, to look.”

  I spread mustard on a cracker.

  “I used to get fan letters from prisoners, too,” David said. “Back when I ghostwrote that column for Hustler.”

  “Are you competing with me?”

  “I’m just sharing. This is intimacy, Trish.”

  “One of the letters I got was about love. It was like seven pages long. Like a lengthy philosophical inquiry into the nature of love as written by a very smart fifteen-year-old. Not sex, but love. He specified that, like, maybe seven times. Maybe that means it was about sex. Anyhow. About love.”

  “What you’re saying is somehow not becoming; you don’t sound like yourself.”

  Life, I was deciding, was a series of stumblings into the Kantian sublime. Not that I knew one sublime from another, as I said, but I planned on asking David about that when I was feeling less vulnerable. “Well, this kid said he wanted to confirm with me some impressions about love that he had gotten from my book. He wanted to know if I’d been honest about what love was
. He said he would one day get out of jail, and that it was important that I write back to him. He said I could take as long as I wanted to get back to him. ‘As long as you need,’ he said. ‘You must be busy, take a year, that’s fine.’”

  “That’s gracious, that he gave you an extension at the university of him.”

  “I thought it was sweet. I didn’t write back.”

  “Did I tell you that the pilot thing is finally fully dead now?”

  “Gosh.”

  “Do you miss Jonathan?”

  “I wanted to tell you,” I said, “about this other letter, too. I don’t know why this guy wrote to me in particular. He didn’t say. He was also a prisoner. He was very polite. He said simply that he had an idea for a movie, that it involved the Tunguska incident of 1908, and he wanted to know if it was a reasonable hypothesis that the explanation for the Tunguska incident could be antimatter—”

  “I wonder if I would get a lot of work done if I was in prison—”

  “I didn’t know what the Tunguska incident was. I had to look it up. Turns out there was this place in Siberia where for thousands of acres the trees were suddenly laid flat. No scientists really bothered to check it out for years and years. But there were reports of unbearably loud sounds, apocalyptic winds, strange blue lights. It must have looked and sounded like the end of the world. They think maybe it was a meteor. Some people saw a column of blue light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving north to east. Some said the light wasn’t moving, just hovering. Windows hundreds of miles away were broken.”

  David was reading aloud to me from Jonathan’s blog as I went and got the printouts of witness accounts I had found on that horrible thing called the Web.

  “See, it’s not even really you,” he was saying.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Listen.” I read out: “‘The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt were on fire, I wanted to tear off my shirt and toss it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown several yards—’”

  “God, I would have loved to be there, that really was the sublime—”

  “They say that for many nights afterward the sky over Asia and Europe was still bright enough to read the paper by.”

  “Did you answer the letter?”

  “I told him I couldn’t think of any reason why antimatter wasn’t a plausible explanation. Though who was I to answer that question? I wished him luck with his idea. I might even have signed the note ‘Love.’”

  I lent David three hundred dollars, which seemed confirmation of my having taken advantage of him in some fashion.

  Did I then take that movie meeting, all unprepared, after dressing in a way to accentuate my pregnancy, then to downplay it, then changing outfits again to accentuate it? Did I have no ideas? Did I start talking about the Kantian sublime, and about meteors and about love? A transgenerational love story with an old shepherd in Siberia, and a latter-day woman who knits, and a transfigurative event, and the sense that life is an enormous mystery but with secret connections that, you know, knit us all together? I did. All those things I so studiously knew nothing about. Meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day. I was betraying so many, I felt so clean.

  REAL ESTATE

  At first I’d thought nobody else was living there. It had been decided that selling the admittedly pretty run-down five-story town house would be easier if the place could be shown and delivered essentially vacant. That way the prospective buyer could “dream.” The building’s “good bones” would be made plain. It was a prime location, and a historic one! Maybe a former newsboys’ orphanage, I could never remember. A buyer could make, say, two small income-generating apartments per floor; that would mean ten modest, easy-to-rent units for this down economy. Or luxury floor-throughs could be made. Or maybe the top two floors could be converted into an owner’s duplex, and the rest made into tidy rental units that would cover expenses. A carriage house could be put up in the garden. The possibilities were endless. It was the ideal choice for someone with imagination! Architects could be recommended.

  The building belonged to a distant aunt of mine, a wealthy can-do woman who lived on another continent. And seeing as I lived on this continent, and was in a cash state that left me without a strong opinion on the tax code, I did not decline my aunt’s offer of living in the otherwise empty building, making myself available to show the place when opportunities arose, and just generally being there to make sure it was OK. I moved on in. The switch of neighborhoods was somehow reason enough for me to stop seeing any friends. I didn’t sign up for cable, and so had neither Internet nor television. And the radio, I don’t know, I’ve never liked it

  At first it seemed a kind of happy decadence, to live like that. But I guess I got a bit out of sorts. I remember a midmorning when I was regretting an outfit of a particular pair of jeans and a brash yellow sweater, and then, when I stepped out to get the mail, I realized I was in my undershirt and pajama shorts; I realized that I’d never put on the regrettable outfit in the first place. Another afternoon I found myself anxious about the upcoming election, but then, walking past a poster for a newly released action movie, I realized that no, it was March and not October, and the election had been decided months earlier. One Monday: I was under the impression that I had stocked the refrigerator with Armenian string cheese, too much of it, so much of it that I’d need to eat it at two meals a day for a full week in order to keep it from going to waste, and then I went to the refrigerator, I found no string cheese there at all, just a sack of apples that I thought I’d only contemplated buying but then hadn’t. That was the day I met my neighbor, Eddy.

  When he saw me there in the foyer, he startled. His hair was long and unwashed, and he was carrying Being and Time, which didn’t immediately make me dislike him, maybe because I liked his hair and maybe because he carried it like it was a car repair manual. Actually maybe I startled first, before him.

  I introduced myself as the niece of the landlady. I felt very nineteenth century doing that.

  “Yeah, she’s so nice,” he said. “She’s letting me stay in my place awhile longer.”

  I figured he was lying, but I also don’t kick puppies. He went up the stairs. I went out the front door. Well, good, I thought. I’d been kind of spooked living in that building all alone. After that foyer meeting, when I’d hear all those noises that old buildings inevitably make, I would think, Oh, that must be Eddy, opening his door, flipping a light switch, pouring water over ramen noodles. Eddy looked through an old photo album, opened seltzer cans, caressed a fussy and small black cat I’d come to believe in. He creased pages in Being and Time, the only book, in my mind, that he had. It wasn’t exactly love, but it was better than the emotions that had preceded it. I’d rather not go into those emotions.

  * * *

  A week or so later I experienced a repeat of the phantom string cheese episode. Except this time there was only one apple left in the fridge, and it didn’t look so great. I put on the brash yellow sweater that I’d not yet had the chance to regret in real life and ventured out. The string cheese mistake reprise had given me a scare, and so I resolved to go farther than the corner grocery. I needed to get out more, I decided. About seven blocks away, I found a little family-run-looking gyro place. I went on in, making the bells that hung on the handle jingle as I did. The sound was as if somewhere an old-fashioned filmstrip needed to be advanced.

  At the back of the shop a man was pressing a waxed paper cup against the lever for a fountain Coke. I really love fountain Coke. My whole family does. Maybe that’s why I found myself walking straight over there, to right next to that man, to get myself a Coke—I could pay later, it seemed like that kind of place—and then that man—something about the tilt of his neck produced a tingle of recognition—mumbled “goddammit” as foam ran over the edge of his soda cup. Memories ambushed me: endless rounds of gin r
ummy, my dad drenched in sweat after a run wearing one of his button-up work shirts, a track made up of old tires submerged in a field, piles of pistachio shells. Sometimes I called up these little father memories on purpose, but they weren’t in the habit of arriving unbeckoned. That neck, that “goddammit”—they were familiar. But it couldn’t be my father; he’d been dead for more than a dozen years, a baker’s dozen, technically. But even if he’d been dead for just a day, it still would have been dead enough for it not to be him, there, cursing a soda machine.

  I walked away from the soda machine, no soda in hand. I went casually about my business. I paid for my canned drink from the cooler, ordered a gyro, paid for that, too, waited, and then, with a filled red plastic basket in hand, I looked around for a seat.

  He did look just like my dad. The way my dad looked thirteen years ago anyway. Not a day older. It was even kind of a good hair day for that man, and my dad always looked a bit younger when his hair was on the greasy side, and so a little darker, and that was how this man was looking, with his now mostly emptied wax cup of fountain Coke. He was seated at a corner table. He half smiled at me. Maybe I was staring.

  He didn’t say my name, or call me little cough drop, or numkin, or ask me how I was doing, or say It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? He just said to me, lightly, “You should sit here.”

  Spilled yogurt sauce on our table glistened as if refracting the grandeurs of the sunken city of Atlantis; stray salt crystals reflected fluorescence back at madcap angles. Or at least that was my mood. My father pawed some napkins, wiped his forehead with them; onions always made him sweat.

  I asked him if he lived nearby.

  “Sort of,” he said. Then: “Not really.” Then: “Not originally.” He finished his meal quickly.

  As he exited, those bells on the doorknob rang.

  Had I slipped through a wormhole of time? An advertisement poster on the wall showed a blond woman with eighties bangs leaning in to take a bite of gyro while a caption offered pronunciation guidance. But it was hard to take “yee-ros” as evidence; all the gyro places I’ve ever visited have been outdated.