by Ben Lerner
I was on the other side of the table sitting across from the distinguished female author, enjoying how the crispness and lightness of the wine had a rightness of fit with the restaurant’s pear-wood paneling and bright terrazzo floors. Seated to my right was a well-dressed graduate student about my age who was plainly starstruck by the distinguished female author, perhaps the subject of his dissertation. To the distinguished female author’s left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom. I was unsure if I should say gracias or thank you to the man refilling my water glass. Even here, where a meal for seven would cost at least a thousand dollars, much of the work was done by a swift underclass of Spanish-speaking laborers. I thought of Roberto, of his terror of Joseph Kony. I tried to picture, as I looked around the restaurant, those towns in Mexico in which almost all of the able-bodied men were gone, employed now in New York’s service industry.
“I enjoyed your story in The New Yorker,” the distinguished female author said to me. It seemed that the story—which was in part the result of my dealing with the reception of my novel—had been much more widely read than the novel itself.
“Thank you,” I said. And then I said, although I had only read one of her books and it hadn’t made much of an impression on me, “I’ve long been an admirer of your work.” She smiled with only the left side of her mouth in a way that doubted the statement; I found the expression winning.
“Do you have a brain tumor?” she asked. I was impressed less with her frankness than with the fact that it appeared she’d actually read the story.
“Not that I know of.”
“Is it part of a longer work?”
“Maybe. I think I might try to make it into a novel. A novel in which the author tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters—mainly e-mails—from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library. That idea was the origin of the story.”
“Why does he need the money? Or is the money what he wants?”
“I think it’s more a response to his own mortality—like he’s trying to time-travel, to throw his voice, now that he’s dealing with his own fragility. It starts off as a kind of fraud but I imagine he might really get into it, might really feel like he and the dead are corresponding. Like he’s a medium. But you wouldn’t know, even at the novel’s end, if he really planned to sell the letters or if he was just working on an epistolary novel of some sort. And he could meditate on all the ways that time is monetized—archival time, a lifetime, etc.” I was trying to sound excited about the project I was describing, but felt, despite the wine, dispirited: another novel about fraudulence, no matter the bruised idealism at its core.
I ordered an appetizer of charred shrimp with puntarelle, whatever that was, and seared scallops for my main course. I was told by the waiter that my choices were excellent. The distinguished female author said she’d also have the scallops, and that felt somehow like a gesture of fellowship.
The graduate student asked the distinguished female author what she was working on. “Absolutely nothing,” she said, with utter seriousness, and, after a brief interval of silence, we all laughed. Then she said to me, “Whom would he correspond with, what dead people?” The frustrated graduate student—he didn’t want to hear more about me—and the bored husband tried to make conversation. I could hear the distinguished male author droning on in the distance.
“Primarily poets, I guess. Poets I corresponded with a little—mainly for the magazine I used to edit and that the protagonist will have edited—and whose tone I know how to imitate. Robert Creeley comes to mind.”
“I used to know Creeley pretty well.” She sipped her wine. “Would you include real correspondence, too—I mean, do you have actual letters you received that you’ll insert into the fiction?”
“No,” I said. “Almost all the correspondence about the magazine was e-mail, and I had a different e-mail account for much of that time. I never printed anything. What I do have is boring, logistical.”
“I could write you a letter for it—he could falsify one from me but I could write it.”
“That would be great.” I loved the idea.
“You should really try it.” I thought she meant try to write the novel, but: “You should try to pass off letters you’ve written to an archivist. That’s how you’d know if the fiction was plausible.” I laughed.
“I’m serious. I can put you in touch with the appraiser I worked with when I thought about selling my papers to the Beinecke.”
“I don’t have the courage,” I said. Was she serious? One waiter materialized to refill our wine, another placed my appetizer before me. Puntarella was a green with dandelion-shaped leaves.
“Well, put the stuff about the shuttle in there somehow. I liked that. When you talked about the kids watching the explosion, the nervous laughter—that reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for a long time, but that I used to think about constantly.”
“These are amazing,” I said, referring to the shrimp, which were. “You’ve got to try a bite,” I said, and she reached across the table with her fork.
“When I was in the first year many centuries ago, our teacher, Mrs. Meacham, lost her daughter.” I guessed first grade was called “first year” in Britain. “Nobody told us, of course. We had a substitute for a few days, were informed that Mrs. Meacham was mildly ill, and then there she was again, maybe a little more distant than usual, but basically unchanged. It must have been a week or two after she’d been back, we were doing recitation exercises, and she called on me to read a passage from the textbook—I remember it as a passage from the Bible, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, she called on me and I read a few lines and then she stopped me. She looked straight at me and she said, her voice frighteningly calm: ‘You look just like my daughter, Mary.’ I remember the name clearly. The class was completely silent, we’d never heard Mrs. Meacham say anything off script. Then she said, slowly: ‘My dead daughter, Mary. You look just like my daughter, who is dead.’ She said it like it was some sort of grammatical demonstration.” The graduate student was trying to listen while still facing the husband, who was talking about a recent trip to India. Our glasses were unobtrusively refilled. “We were all shocked,” she continued. “I remember looking down at my book and feeling tremendous shame, as though I’d been reprimanded. Then I looked up at Mrs. Meacham, who was staring at me, and I heard this terrible laughter.”
“Laughter?”
“My laughter. I heard it before I recognized it as issuing from my body. It was completely involuntary. It was a profoundly nervous response. For a few seconds only I was laughing, and then everybody started laughing. Everybody in the classroom erupted into loud, hysterical laughter, and Mrs. Meacham, in tears, fled the room. And as soon as she fled the room, the laughter stopped. It stopped all at once, like a disciplined orchestra that has received a sign from the conductor. And we just sat there in silence, ashamed and confused.” She took another bite of my appetizer, which I hadn’t touched while she’d been speaking.
“And then Mrs. Meacham came back into the classroom,” she said when she’d swallowed the food, chasing it with wine, “and resumed her position at the front of the class, and called on me again to read the passage. And I read the passage and the school day continued, and then the school year, as if nothing had happened. I thought of it because you mentioned both the nervous laughter and the jokes, I suppose. Children trying to process a death.”
We drank in silence for a minute and I ate the last shrimp and asked, “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Did you want them?” I tried to check in with myself about whether I was mistaking my mild inebriation for an easy sympathy between us.
“At times I have, but most times I haven’t.”
“You never tried?” I’d decided I didn’t care about the sympathy-and-wine cal
culus.
“I had a surgery to remove a fibroid when I was in my twenties and the scarring made it impossible. That used to happen more in those days.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “I think on balance I didn’t want kids anyway. Do you have children?”
“No, but my best friend wants me to help her get pregnant. I mean, we’re thinking of doing IUI. But”—and this was certainly only sayable because of the wine—“my sperm is a little abnormal.” The graduate student involuntarily turned and faced me.
The distinguished female author laughed, not at all unkindly, and asked, “How so?”
“Apparently, every man has a lot of abnormal sperm—sperm that are shaped wrong or something and so aren’t going to fertilize an egg. But I have more abnormal sperm than is normal, so they said it might be harder for me to get someone pregnant.”
“But not impossible.”
“No. But it could take a really long time and my friend is already thirty-six. And they might recommend going straight to IVF, which I don’t think she’d want to do.”
“So you’re off the hook? Do you want to be off the hook?”
“I don’t know. They want me to repeat the test—this one could have been off. And regardless, I think Alex—my friend—is still going to want me to try for a while. Try the IUI thing, I mean.”
“Isn’t this all terribly expensive?”
“Yeah, and Alex is between jobs. But my agent thinks I can get a big advance for a second novel. On the strength of the story. And I teach.”
“Falsifying his archive to subsidize fertility treatments; faking the past to fund the future—I love it. I’m ready to endorse it sight unseen. What else happens?”
There was one other story I knew I would tip in, a story I’d only recently heard from Alex’s stepfather. “I’m not sure how this will fit, exactly, but the protagonist had—will have had—a relationship when he was younger that I think will form an important part of his history and relate to his inclination toward fabrication. He’s in college and falls in love with this woman, Ashley, a couple of years his senior who, about six months after they first get together, comes back from the doctor in tears and tells him she’s been diagnosed with cancer.”
“That young?”
“It happens, right? Say they find it somehow during a routine examination. At first it looks like she’s going to drop out and go live with her family during treatment, but then she decides—in part because she’s in love with him, in part because her relationship with her parents is difficult—to undergo it there, at a hospital not far from campus. This is the first romantic relationship either has ever been in where one partner really has to care for the other, not just try to impress the other; it’s his first serious relationship away from home and it’s developing in the shadow of death. There’s no surgery, but then—worse—there’s radiation and chemo; he drives her to the hospital in her car for each treatment, dropping her off because, for whatever complex of reasons, she doesn’t want him there, asks that he respect the intimacy of her relationship to her oncologist, a woman with whom she feels close. He waits in the parking lot or drives around smoking, listening to music. She loses weight, hair; there is a lot of weeping and courageous resolve; he learns to cook meals rich in bioflavonoids for immune support; he leads conversations about their future in which he insists he wants kids—which he doesn’t—in order to insist on futurity in general. Imagine a year of this,” I said to the distinguished female author. “He’s a boy pretending to be a man losing his partner; he’s making occasional love to an emaciated young woman who might have a terminal condition, while their peers are eating ecstasy and going to parties or whatever; he’s ghostwriting her papers, e-mailing her professors to request extensions, and so on. And then one night, let’s say it’s New Year’s Eve, they’re watching a movie in bed, say it’s Back to the Future, and she says to him:
“‘I want to tell you something, but I want you to promise you won’t be mad.’
“‘Okay, I promise,’ he promises.
“‘I’m not sick.’
“‘What do you mean?’
“‘I don’t have cancer,’ she says.
“‘You’re in remission,’ he confirms.
“‘No, I’ve never had it,’ she says.
“‘Go to sleep, baby.’
“‘No, I’m serious—I’ve never had it. I wanted to tell you, but things got out of hand.’
“‘Hush,’ he says, a strange feeling coming over him.
“‘I’m serious,’ she says, and something in her voice asserts that she is.
“‘And you’ve been faking your treatment,’ he says sarcastically.
“‘Yes,’ she says.
“‘You get chemo for a fake diagnosis.’
“‘No, I sit in a bathroom stall.’
“‘And Dr. Sing,’ he says, forcing himself to laugh.
“‘That was the name of my doctor in Boston.’
“‘This isn’t funny, Ashley. You sound crazy. You’ve lost thirty pounds.’
“‘I make myself throw up. I have no appetite.’
“He begins to feel desperate. ‘Your hair.’
“‘I shave it. At first I pulled out patches.’
“‘The pills.’ He’s stood up. He’s standing in his underwear by the bed.”
“‘I have Zoloft. I have Ativan,’” the distinguished author said, role-playing Ashley. “‘I have large blue vitamins I put in the old bottles.’”
“Right. He doesn’t want to ask why, to concede the possibility of her lie, but: ‘Why?’”
“‘I felt alone. Confused. Like something was wrong with me.’”
“‘The lie described my life better than the truth,’” I added. “‘Until it became a kind of truth.’” I drained my drink. “‘I would have done the chemo if they’d offered it to me.’”
The distinguished female author looked at me, perhaps trying to figure out if the story was lifted from my life. “Yes,” she decided, “you should put that in the novel.”
A rectangular plate bejeweled with diver scallops was placed before each of us simultaneously. There were tiny slices of what looked like green apple, fine pieces of what was probably an exotic celery. A new wine was being served. The distinguished female author and I were now unabashedly getting drunk. As we ate, I told her the story of my visit to the masturbatorium, and I had her cracking up; we were laughing loudly enough to draw some stares from other tables. For dessert we shared a chocolate tart and each had a large Armagnac.
Outside the restaurant in the false spring air everyone shook everyone’s hand with the particular awkwardness of people who had eaten together but had not spoken. The distinguished male author said to both of us with affected gravity that he was deeply sorry he hadn’t had the chance to ask after our current projects, which he was sure were splendid. With even greater solemnity, I responded, “I’ve long admired your work”; the distinguished female author had to cough away her laughter. Then she and I embraced one another and she said to me, “Just do it all.” When I asked, “Do what?” she just repeated, “Do it all,” and we hugged one another again and then I headed south toward the subway as she and her exhausted-looking husband hailed a cab to take to the East Side. I walked past Lincoln Center, where the well dressed were filtering out of the opera, milling about the illuminated fountain. At Fifty-ninth I took the D back to Brooklyn, repeating to myself in time with the rhythm of the train: Do it all, do it all.
When I got out of the train I walked to Alex’s apartment and rang the bell, which I almost never did—normally I’d just text her that I was downstairs—and she descended to let me in. She was a little dressed up, either because she’d had a job interview earlier that day or because she’d been on a date, and she looked particularly pretty to me in her liquid satin and Venetian wool; I said hello and focused on appearing sober as we ascended the stairs. When we got inside the apartment she asked me how the event was and, i
nstead of answering, I wrapped my arms around her and drew her against me and kissed her on the mouth and tried to find her tongue. She pushed me away hard, laughing, coughing, wiping her mouth, and said: “What the fuck are you doing? Are you drunk?” “Of course I’m drunk,” I said, and tried to approach her again, but she held out her arms to stop me. “Seriously, what are you doing?”
“I’m doing it all,” I said meaninglessly, and then I said: “I’m not going back there to jack off into a cup every month for two years. Okay, so my sperm are a little abnormal, but it doesn’t mean I can’t get you pregnant.”
“What do you mean, your sperm are abnormal?”
“It’s normal to have abnormal sperm,” I said, as if she’d insulted me, and she laughed. I sat down on the futon and beckoned for her to join me there and thought: This is going to be fine; after all, we made out a few times in college. She did come toward me, but only to pick up one of the embroidered Indian pillows from the futon, which she swung into my face. “Go to sleep, you fucking idiot, we are not having sex.” Stunned, I opened my mouth to say a lot of things—about joke cycles, the origins of poetry, correspondences—but instead I stretched out and, placing the pillow over my head, not under it, said: Good night. Later she told me I’d kept her up by trying to recite “High Flight.”
* * *
