All Is Vanity (10 page)

His industry irritated me. “Shh,” I said. I frowned in his direction. He glanced up for the briefest of moments and shot a puzzled look around the room. When his gaze lighted on me, he smiled
very slightly, very quickly, and then bent to the page again, his pen racing as if alive and highly caffeinated.

I bent to my own page, lowering my own cheek somewhat. I would pursue Robert Martin. I would generate two pages of close observation in poetic prose, revealing through a detailed study of his every mundane motion the character of this man. Then I would have him. And once I had him, I would know what to do with him.

“Robert Martin”—I would check the significance of this name later in my baby name book, but I would not pause now—“selected the last egg”—I crossed that out—“the last extralarge grade A egg from its cardboard nest and positioned it carefully four inches above the edge of the prewarmed skillet.” This showed he was a deliberate man, not spontaneous. “He paused for an instant, and then, sure and quick as lightning, snapped the egg down upon the iron. A perfect crack.” I crossed that last sentence out. I could do more with it. “He could achieve a perfect crack almost every time now, but it had taken some practice. The proper height at which to begin the stroke and the degree of force had been easy enough, but it had taken him quite a while to realize that to be exactly centered, the crack must actually fall”—would a crack “fall”?—“slightly closer to the fat, rounded end of the egg; there had to be extra length on the pointed end to make up for its narrowness. Once he had discovered this crucial element of position, Robert had rarely been dissatisfied with his fried egg.” Robert’s logic confused me here—how could the way an eggshell was cracked affect the fried egg itself?—but I pressed on. “While the egg was frying, he nestled the empty carton”—I liked that, “nestling” the cardboard nest. Or was it overdone?—“onto a stack of others under the sink. Every few months he delivered these to his mother in Filmore, who fashioned them into tiny hats and Christmas trees and sold them at
craft fairs.” And was, I hoped to God, a more interesting character than her son.

With generous margins, this lucubration on a man self-conscious to what seemed likely to be the point of insanity filled a little over half a page. It was something, at least. I could go on to describe the kitchen—the precisely folded hand towel with its border of pineapples, the hiss and spit of the percolator, the sectioning of the grapefruit with a Swiss Army knife heel carried over in ’Nam. I set my pen down. I needed a bathroom break.

There is such a thing as effortless concentration, when one is thinking so deeply and so fast that shouts of “fire” would only further color the dream. In that state, the ideas run from the brain more quickly than the hands can catch them and make them concrete. I’d experienced this often enough before to know that the condition in which I’d written about Robert Martin was nothing like it. This was a forced concentration, a grit-your-teeth-and-press-your-fist-to-your-forehead-in-imitation-of-The-Thinker concentration, a concentration in which one quarter of the brain dragged the rest screeching with the hand brake pulled up hard. It resulted in halting words, painfully squeezed forth one by one, as in the proverbial blood from a turnip. It also caused a tense, headachy trance, which made me move stiffly and sluggishly toward the ladies’ room and then take my time in that sanctuary. I washed my hands twice, once on the way in because I didn’t really have to go and couldn’t think what else to do, and then again on the way out, after I’d determined that I might as well see if I didn’t really have to go. As I wiped up the water I’d dripped on the counter to sanitize it for the next person, I made a mental note to have Robert Martin mop up the sink in a public restroom.

I wound another brown paper towel out of the dispenser to get
a clear sense of the texture. Was “brown” really the best way to describe the color? I could more easily picture Robert in a service station washroom on the way to Filmore, trying to dry his hands on the semi-clean edge of an overused roller towel. It would make him feel used and dirty. No! It would symbolize the impossibility of keeping one’s hands clean in this world—thus providing a neat segue into a flashback to Vietnam.

I hurried back to my table, pregnant with this idea. Vietnam was admittedly a bit beyond my experience, but I could reread Tim O’Brien’s books and take notes for atmosphere. Maybe Ted and I would rent
The Deer Hunter
tonight. Few women had written fiction about the Vietnam War—I would get points for my daring originality. I could already hear the choppers chopping—no, slicing—no, whipping up the humidity. “He remembered it as if he were still slogging through the water-heavy air,” I wrote. Or I would have written had my pen been on the table where I’d left it.

I looked under my notebook, then picked it up by the wire binding and shook it. Nothing fell out. My breathing quickened. My armpits prickled. Ted’s pen. The pen Ted gave me. The pen that made me a writer. I pushed my chair back and crawled under the table, scanning the floor in all directions. How could I have left it? This was New York, for God’s sake! True, it was the cleaner, safer New York, as compared with the last few decades, but this applied only if you were a person, better yet a man, on certain subway routes and downtown streets, not if you were a gold-nibbed Mont Blanc on a public library table.

“Looking for this?”

The ostentatious scribbler was bending over so that his balding head was even with his knees. He waggled the pen in one ink
smudged hand. I grabbed it and shot out from under the table, nicking my head on the edge on my way up.

“Careful there.”

“You took my pen!” As the words left my mouth, I realized I should have been more circumspect. I’d broken the first rule of the woman on the street, or, as it were, in the library: never engage. Although, had I not noticed his furious writing earlier, I’d have been less suspicious. He was scrawny and his skin and clothes had a somewhat grayish, unwashed cast, but they didn’t appear to be literally lived in, nor did he seem schizophrenic or drunk. His eyes were clear, his face was unweathered, his beard was only a day or two old, and he was properly zipped. Still, he was likely to demand a reward or insist on talking to me in a vaguely threatening or bothersome manner. He might even follow me home. After all, he’d been scribbling with an unnatural intensity, he’d taken my pen, and he was a strange man. These things could not add up to anything pleasant.

“I was afraid someone might steal it,” he said. His volume was not appropriate for a library.

I looked around, worried other patrons would be offended by his implication, but the only other person in the room now was slumped over a table, drooling on his arm.

“I meant to catch you right as you came in, so you wouldn’t worry,” the scribbler was saying, “but I got sort of engrossed.”

He motioned toward his table. His own pen—blue with white lettering along the side, obviously purloined from some business—lay unattended on a page three-quarters full of densely packed writing. “I’ve gotta use this place as an office,” he added. “My partner is writing an opera in our apartment.” He put his hands over
his ears and made a face. “So,” he said, shrugging and giving the semi-smile he’d used when I shushed him, “back to work.”

“Thanks,” I said belatedly, when I was sure he wouldn’t swerve back in my direction. I used a voiced pitched correctly for the library.

He waved his right hand, wafting my gratitude away, while his left picked up the pen and raced across the page at a speed incompatible with serious thought.

I tried to continue my novel, but the choppers were overwhelmed by the crack of the librarian’s gum and the tender green rice paddies paled in the fluorescent light. I attempted a scene in which Mrs. Martin transformed a single egg carton cup into a whimsical fedora, but she, being quite obese, moved even more slowly than her son. I forced Robert to continue his drive to Filmore and sat him in his mother’s kitchen in a vinyl-and-chrome chair from which the stuffing tufted out along one seam, but the two of them had nothing to say to one another.

“Care for some breakfast?” the mother finally brought out.

But, of course, Robert had already eaten.

I knew I could not drag the Martins across one more line that day. Altogether, I’d written three-quarters of a page, with plenty of space between the words to insert corrections. Maybe beginning my book with the minute details of morning routine was the trouble, I thought, winding my way down the circular staircase. It left the whole rest of the day yawning. On Monday I would thrust Robert directly into midafternoon.

MY HOPES FOR THE SUMMER
were largely fulfilled, thanks to the strict regime I imposed on myself with a digital sports watch. I’d learned from a PBS documentary that James Thurber’s wife had insisted he set an alarm clock at intervals to prod himself to work quickly. My fourth-grade teacher had employed a similar method.

Mrs. Larson’s classroom was part of a new addition to the school, the linoleum hard and slick, the edges of the desks as yet unsoftened by the cuts of rulers and compass points, the seats made of some modern composite that would never wear away in comforting grooves. The days in that room passed in a series of terrifying quizzes, each beginning with an ominous clicking as Mrs. Larson set a kitchen timer and ending with a ringing that
seized our hearts and stopped our pencils. With the smart movements of soldiers on maneuvers, we would pass our papers to the front, where she would collect and then impale them on her spindle. There were multiplication tests—increasingly difficult as we galloped from the twos times tables to the twelves; there were spelling quizzes, history quizzes, and geography quizzes, during which, each in turn, we ran to the front of the classroom, index finger outstretched, to identify on a huge, pull-down map of California the county Mrs. Larson had shouted out. No time to prepare, no time to think. “You know it or you don’t,” she barked. Some hours must have been devoted to learning the material on which we were quizzed, but the only other activities I remember from that class were singing “Yes, I Have No Bananas” and playing a plastic recorder.

Realizing that up until now I’d spent too much time thinking at the expense of writing, I adapted Mrs. Larson’s (and Mrs. Thurber’s) technique to my book. Now that I’d created a couple of characters—Robert Martin and his mother—and a general sense of their situation, I wrote whatever came into my head about them in forty-five-minute intervals, punctuated by the bright beeping of my watch alarm. With a continual sense of the imminent “times up,” I tore forward without looking back. At the end of the summer, I would type this mass of pages into the computer and discover a richness and complexity I could never have consciously achieved.

The alarm bothered Simon at first. Simon was the ostentatious scribbler, although after my first week at the library, I didn’t think of him that way anymore. He was, in fact, the writer of an actual novel published by a house with a predilection for first novelists with exquisite prose. Through interlibrary loan, I borrowed his book from the Bronx branch and read it carefully, searching for direction.

“The human relationships,” I said, one day in August, as we
walked down Charles Street eating slices, “they seem so real. How did you come up with those characters?”

“Hmm,” he answered, chewing, willing to think this through. He was generous with his writerly insights. “I don’t know. It’s not like they emerged full-blown. But, you know, after a while they start to come to life and then it’s easier to figure out how they’d be. Are you going to eat your crust?”

The writing books also made it sound as if a good writer need only take dictation from bossy characters. Left to their own devices, however, Robert and his mother would do nothing but eat.

Across the street, a man with matted hair, wearing, despite the heat, a flannel shirt, leaned over the trunk of a car. In his right hand, he clutched what seemed to be a fat marker or a wedge of chalk with which he wrote in long, passionate, swooping flourishes on a large sheet of paper. With his left hand, he smoothed the paper over and over, keeping it flat across the trunk. Abruptly then, he stopped and straightened. The chalk dematerialized. There was, in fact, no paper. The man walked away, conversing with himself.