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“You wish you had married Margaret and gotten stuck up here in Maine?”
And he said quietly, “No. But you know what I mean. I watch Becka go through this hell, and that’s what I did with you.”
I thought about this. I said, “She’s doing a lot better than I was at that point.” It seemed to be true. Then I added, “But I think she really maybe hasn’t liked him for a long time.” And I thought about that, and William evidently thought about it as well, because he said, “So you still liked me when you found out?”
“Oh God, yes. I loved you.”
William sighed hugely. “Oh Button,” he said.
sad :(
Some mornings I woke even before William did, and I would take my walk because I was so anxious. And I was anxious because of the girls. One day I called Chrissy and asked her how Becka was doing—I knew she would tell Becka I had done this, but I wanted to know—and Chrissy said, “Mom, don’t worry about her. She’s got her shrink, Lauren, and she’s got Michael and me, and she’s doing okay.”
“She doesn’t call me anymore,” I said.
Chrissy hesitated before she said, “I think she doesn’t need you like she used to. Even those years married to Trey she still needed you, but, Mom, you did your job. She’s on her way.”
“Okay,” I said. “I hear you.”
And I did.
But it sort of killed me, I will tell you that.
“I went out for dinner with a woman I had met years earlier. She was one of the saddest women I have ever known. She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and God knows she would have told me if she had. She was sad, Chrissy, she was damaged in some fundamental way; she had never had a day of therapy, she just lived her life as a tax attorney, and we went out for dinner that night, and then I realized that she probably was an alcoholic. She had at least a bottle of wine that night, and a martini to start off with, and then— Are you listening?”
But I could tell she was. She was watching me with real interest on her face. She nodded.
“And then, for dessert, she ordered these special-made doughnuts that came with chocolate sauce you could dip them in, and as I watched her dipping these little doughnuts in this chocolate sauce I felt such a sense—I guess a sense of fear—because I was in the presence of such deep loneliness. And I thought, Yes, I am going to have that affair.
“But you’re obviously not getting along. Because you want to be with someone else. Or you think you do. So listen to me more, Chrissy. This is important. Do not put this on Michael. You make the decision of what you’re going to do, but you do not need to tell him that you’re attracted to someone else. I suspect he knows this and he feels humiliated and has no idea what to do because everything he does right now you find abhorrent. If you want to leave the marriage, then leave the marriage. But if you don’t, then try to be more openhearted to your husband.”
As soon as I said this I realized she could not do that. So I said, “But I suspect you can’t do that, be openhearted to him now, because you don’t want him.”
Chrissy, who had been looking at me intently, looked away. I watched the side of her face, and she seemed no longer angry; there was a vulnerability to her face, is what I am saying.
I put my hand on her arm. After a few moments, she put her hand on mine briefly, and when she looked at me there were tears in her eyes and they began to slip down her face. She rubbed them away with the back of her hand. “Oh honey,” I said. “Honey, honey, honey.”
I thought about William’s affairs, and I will tell you this about finding out about them:
It humbled me. It humbled me unbelievably. It brought me to my knees. And I was humbled because I had not known such a thing could happen in my own life. I had thought that this sort of thing happened to other women. I remember going to a party during this period, and I overheard two women talking about a woman whose husband had had an affair. And what I remember—it scorched me—was how both women said, Oh, come on, how could she not have known?
And then it happened to me.
Second, and perhaps most important, to be an NYC writer means to submit to an unconscious yet powerful pressure toward readability. Such pressure has always existed, of course, but in recent years it has achieved a fearsome intensity. On the one hand, a weakened market for literary fiction makes publishing houses less likely than ever to devote resources to work that doesn’t, like a pop song, “hook” the reader right away. On the other, the MFA-driven shift in the academic canon has altered the approach of writers outside the university as well as those within. Throughout the latter half of the last century, many of our most talented novelists—Nabokov, Gaddis, Bellow, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace—carved out for themselves a cultural position that depended precisely on a combination of public and academic acclaim. Such writers were readable enough to become famous yet large and knotty enough to require professional explanation—thus securing an afterlife, and an aftermarket, for their lives’ work. Syntactic intricacy, narrative ambiguity, formal innovation, and even length were aids to canonization, feeding the university’s need for books against which students and professors could test and prove their interpretive skills. Canonization, in turn, contributed to public renown. Thus the ambitious novelist, writing with one eye on the academy and the other on New York, could hope to secure a durable readership without succumbing (at least not fully) to the logic of the blockbuster. It was a strategy shaped by, and suited to, the era of the English department, which valued scholarly interpretation over writerly imitation, the long novel over the short story. (And when it came to white males imagining themselves into the canon, it helped that the canon was still composed mostly of white males.)
It’s important, I think, to see the whole MFA thing as a pretty freaky but short-term immersion. You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend or explain it one bit. If you need that immersion and think it would help, go for it. If not, not. And don’t apply just because you think it’s the thing to do or is a “good career move” or everyone else in your school is doing it. Apply when you really feel you need … something: shelter or focus or good readers or just some time out of the capitalist shitstorm.
I remember the two postcollege years I spent in New York as one long day in a windowless room. I shared an office with four other people and a printer that emitted heat like a radiator. I decorated the space above my desk with little quotes and scraps from glossy magazines, reminders of the life I wasn’t living. Each day when I arrived at work, I’d place the novel I was currently reading at the corner of my desk—it was my beacon of light, my reward. Books were how I measured my days and how I endured them.
People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines; on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was twenty-three. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.
When I was at Iowa, Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-running successor, did not name the acceptable categories. Instead, he shot down projects by shooting down their influences. He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J. D. Salinger that was hard to explain. To go anywhere near Melville or Nabokov was to ingest the fatal microbes of the obnoxious. Of David Foster Wallace he growled, with a wave of his hand, “He has his thing that he does.”
Conroy hated what he called “cute stuff,” unless it worked, but it tended never to work. Trying to get cute stuff to work before a sneering audience is like trying to get an erection to work before a sneering audience. Conroy’s arsenal of pejoratives was his one indulgence in lavish style. “Cockamamie,” he’d snarl. “Poppycock.” Or “bunk,” “bunkum,” “balderdash.” He could deliver these quaint execrations in tones that made H. L. Mencken sound like Regis Philbin.
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