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The not-quite-not-yet-maybe-soon Natalia took another sip of beer then brushed his trousered leg with one bare foot. Her present-tense self trembled. He didn’t seem to notice. Talking to her was a pretext to speak whatever he usually left unspoken even to himself.
“You wouldn’t be able to tell now, but Sylvia was a bonfire all on her own, obsessed with her poetry and me,” he said. “It was exhausting. And I did the adultery part, a couple of times. I was a dick. For a while, she was really depressed. Never tried to kill herself or anything. She’s not capable of harming herself. I did know that. Too beautiful. Too much respect for the object.”
If everyone began talking as if to no one, what would they say? Her mother? Her father? Her brothers and sisters? Maximilian and Emily? She employed the grown-up tactic of redirection. “Do you teach that book—Ariel?”
Down the hall a door creaked. She wrenched away. Horror wiped his face blank.
“Take the beer,” he said.
Adult collusion. His hand destroyed the evidence. A few pieces fell on the floor.
Upstairs, she could hear them talking. No words, just a man’s voice, a woman’s, back and forth.
wow
I’m a firm believer in tricking myself as I write. Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.
I do. The psychology of creative writing fascinates me—how different voices and points of view come into being. The reader’s involvement is crucial as well. Sometimes I think of the way a writer opens a novel as akin to how clinical psychology begins, with a kind of contract that the reader—God, I mean the patient—enters into with the psychotherapist. You establish a mutual trust on which the subsequent process depends, so that the necessary stages of resistance, transference, and so on can take place. All this must lead to a certain release, a kind of catharsis, such that the patient who’s undergone psychotherapy is no longer the person he was at the beginning. That’s what a writer does as well, and how fiction works on its readers. Setting up a legible agreement and upholding it encourages the audience to keep reading despite all the ways the book might disturb them, so that, at the end, they will come out changed. I believe that every good novel changes its reader in some fashion.
I always felt that writing short stories was more of a job. I could complete them on a schedule—they were inevitably finished within a day, or a few. Novels are impossible to execute that way. Over the years that you work, your sense of the book shifts. You deepen your understanding of your characters—you’re living together. Once I’m halfway done with a novel, they start saying things of their own accord. Sometimes I’ll think to myself, This is even better than I could have imagined.
When you’re writing, you are always thinking of the reader, but that reader ultimately has to be yourself. If you discover, Wait, this sentence isn’t quite right, that’s the reader in you, the part of you whose taste has been shaped by hundreds of great works of literature, speaking up. A writer who’s always reading the best—whatever they come up with can’t be that bad. But someone who’s just reading crap, no matter how talented they are, won’t get anywhere good. And sometimes the reader and the writer in you will argue. The writer thinks, It’s fine the way it is! But the reader says, No, it’s still not quite there! Most of the time, the writer has a nap and realizes, Wait, actually, they might’ve had a point there …
Well, where else were we hosties going to go when we got too old, too tired, when our voices gave out from all those smoky flights? When we’d spent years in the air, crossing the Pacific, crossing the Nullarbor, half imagining, because time seems to slow during plane travel, that the years weren’t passing below us, killing our parents, burying our friends in marriages and the wrecks of marriages, driving up the price of city real estate? So that when we retired, the single place we could afford to live was a tropical town so remote you could justify flying there only if you had an ex-employee’s airline discount. Midsize cruise ships stopped in all the time: for the sunsets, the seafood platters, the Japanese cemetery, the quaint pearling boats. But by car, the town was twenty-two hours from the nearest city.
really liked the voice in this story
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Maybe that’s why, in those moments, I formed a crazy plan. I would walk toward her, the dog by my side; I would go down on one knee right there in arrivals and ask Jill to marry me. Not because she was in love with me, or even because I was in love with her, although probably I was, but because I was beginning to see life as a series of losses—that have already happened and are happening and will inevitably happen—and no one should have to face that alone. I sure as hell didn’t want to. This could be something permanent, I thought, me and Jill and the dog. Some family. Some luck.
I didn’t, of course. I didn’t even lift her in my arms and twirl her so carefully that her dress wouldn’t ride up and expose her backside. What did I expect to come through that door? A tear-stained face, a broken woman, a damsel in distress? What came was Jill. Her face seemed, as usual, to promise access to something fundamental, some deep source of beauty and generosity that had always been just outside my reach. No one would ever have guessed at the disappointment she’d just suffered. I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.