All Is Vanity (17 page)

“Don’t teach the children to stereotype, Alice,” my father said.

“I’m not saying the Chinese don’t have many fine qualities, but taste is just not one of them. For heaven’s sake, Albert, look at their restaurants.”

Although I understood from this that my mother didn’t admire the Larues’ sense of style, for some years I had a confused sense that Letty’s grandparents had been colonials in Shanghai and had come to America to escape the Boxer Rebellion, carrying with them the fork and spoon with which they’d established their identity as suave Westerners in a land of chopstick-wielding, gauche Easterners.

I had one foot on the bottommost stair in the New School building, when I saw Zelda step into the elevator. “Going up?” I called, and she held the door.

“Hi,” I chirped, as I slipped inside.

She nodded and the doors shut, encapsulating us.

“Your chapters the other week were so great,” I said, my diction disturbingly reminiscent of that of my former students.

“Thanks,” she said.

I pressed on with another insightful observation. “I think class is going really well so far, don’t you?”

“I suppose,” she said, glancing above the door, where, if the elevator had been in a fancier building, the number of the floors we passed would have lighted up. “I’m really just taking it because of Peter.”

I frowned, not recognizing by first name alone the man I thought of in no terms other than the complete “Peter Berginsky.” Zelda, it seemed, knew him by more than reputation, or at least she hoped to give this impression.

The elevator doors opened. “I was wondering,” I said boldly, stepping aside to allow her to exit first, “if you had any interest in forming a writing group. You know,” I went on, when she did not immediately respond, “outside of class.”

“A writing group?” We were entering the classroom now. About three-quarters of the class were already sitting around the table. “Who would be in it?”

“Well, me,” I said, “and, I don’t know, maybe there’s someone you’d like to ask.”

She slid my pages from a manila folder and placed them on the table in front of her. “I prefer to work by myself,” she said.

The class was not optimistic about
my
chances for a Pulitzer.

I managed at the end of the two hours to scrape into a spiky pile the pages and pages of critical notes printed in perky fonts that my classmates shoved toward me across the table. “Good work!” Bathy had printed in red at the bottom of her list of objections.

Reeling down lower Fifth Avenue after class, I had difficulty
gaining a purchase on my emotions, overwhelmed as I was by shame and despair and the desire to wander with eyes closed into onrushing traffic. What besides my own hubris had made me think that I could concoct from the scanty resources of my imagination and the even scantier store of my experience an actual novel? Bitterly, I now recalled the cautions Ted had raised a year ago, as I’d stalked, full of confidence and outrage at his doubts, up Madison Avenue. There were steps you were expected to take to prove yourself before attempting a book. Others wrote short stories, building credibility page by page for years before they burst forth with full-fledged novels. They’d collected prizes: Buntings and Whitings and Aga Khans. They’d sweated for MFAs, garnering the favor of their esteemed and well-connected professors. They’d secured places in artists’ colonies and dined on watercress sandwiches left on the doorsteps of their isolated cabins, because their efforts had been deemed worthy of nourishment. They did not enroll in extension courses with a bunch of other unpublished professionals and hope that these people would help to make them writers.

But like a sandbag flung before a flood, this last thought gave me hope once again. What, after all, did those who had criticized me so fiercely know about writing? If my classmates understood the rudiments of good composition, would they not be spending their Thursday evenings polishing the most recent in a series of well-acclaimed novels, instead of carping in a windowless seminar room, borrowed from undergraduates?

This idea buoyed me up the six flights to our apartment. What do they know? What do they know? I chanted on every step until I pushed the key into our door, at which point I remembered that I, too, was an unpublished professional attending an adult education class. What did I know?

I was, therefore, collapsed facedown on the couch twenty minutes later when Ted came in with Imperial Szechuan.

“I take it your classmates are blind fools when it comes to recognizing talent,” he said, sinking onto the couch himself and pulling my feet onto his lap.

“No,” I groaned. “They’re right.” I sat up and looked at him. “What made me think I could write a novel?”

“What makes you think you can’t?” he answered.

At least I’d not been mistaken in my choice of husbands.

I ran through my classmates’ objections: the confusing structure, the boring opening, the suspect bamboo basket, the impracticality of journaling in blood, and the myriad other faults that rendered my efforts a colossal waste of time. “They don’t even like my character’s name!” I wailed.

“Those sound like details to me,” Ted said. “You shouldn’t be concerned with details yet.”

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be distracted by petty issues like nomenclature and authentic weaving materials. All that could easily be changed or added later. “What about the lack of focus?” I sniffed. But now I was fishing for reassurance, rather than presenting a true concern. Had Ted thought this a problem, he would have said so immediately.

“That’s not a detail, but the book isn’t finished yet. Is it?” He said this last somewhat wistfully.

“No, of course it isn’t finished.” I didn’t add that despite a full summer’s work, it was barely begun.

“So, it seems to me that any novel that’s not formulaic—”

“Not formulaic—yes!” I interrupted, sitting up straighter against the sofa arm.

“Well, it’s bound to lack focus for a while. I mean you’re
exploring your characters, trying to discover their full natures. You shouldn’t know exactly how they’ll behave and where their story will go yet.”

Of course, Ted was right. I’d ambitiously chosen a character whose experience, gender, and social milieu were completely foreign to me. In fact, the only common ground between Robert and me was grocery shopping, which was perhaps why he so often found himself at the supermarket.

“What did Berginsky think?”

I glanced at Ted, fearful. I pulled my feet off his lap and put them firmly on the floor. Both of us cared what Peter Berginsky thought. He was, after all, a real writer. Swamped as I was by doubt and misery, I had not, however, read the page of comments he’d given me. From the prickly mass in my purse, I drew a sheet of onionskin. It seemed that Peter Berginsky still used a typewriter, one that needed cleaning. The
a
’s and
o
’s were filled, as if the sort of fourth-grade girl who dotted her
i
’s with hearts had decorated the page.

“You seem,” his comments began, “to be working within the framework of the word and its antithesis: the deed for which there are no words, the unspeakable, so to speak. The protagonist cannot even name himself, much as in Lear we see Edgar (the holy counterpart of evil Edmund) babble as a lunatic, not to mention Lear himself, who is rendered incoherent when the natural order becomes disorderly. (But what, after all, is natural, when it is Edmund, who is the child of ‘nature’?)”

“Well, what does he say?” Ted was craning his neck around the page.

“I’m not sure. Either he thinks I’m insane or he’s comparing me to Shakespeare.”

“You juxtapose two worlds,” the note went on, “the despoiled
paradise and the paradise utterly lost, the oriental and the occidental. Some reference might perhaps be made to the Native American experience, as compared, for instance, with the Khmer Rouge—the Red Man and the Reds, as it were.”

Was he saying I should set the novel in Cambodia?

“My advice to you”—I snapped the page as I read these direct words to bring it into sharper focus—“is to juggle the odd sizes. Swim with the chickens. Turn the details inside out until they smoke, threatening combustion. Also, don’t use so many adverbs. PB.”

And then there was a postscript: “How do the cheating little girls fit in?”

“I’m sorry, Ted,” I said, “but I really don’t feel like dinner tonight. I’m just going to lie down for a while.”

Drained, I shuffled dramatically to the bedroom, dragging my purse full of cavils and worse behind me by the shoulder strap. I pulled back the tablecloth that served as a curtain and lay listlessly on the bed watching the people in the building behind ours enjoying lives Ted and I suspected had been scripted by a screenwriter who was smitten with lush interiors. These people occupied not an apartment, but an entire house on the next block. The man we thought of as the father was lighting votives on a table spread for guests on the flagstone-covered patio. The woman we’d decided was the mother moved back and forth between their wood-paneled refrigerator and their restaurant-sized stove. Between the picture window and a floor-to-ceiling painting on the third floor, in a room that, as far as we could tell, was completely devoted to exercise, the daughter pushed and pulled at some large piece of equipment, while a trainer stood beside her, spotting her now and then with a judiciously placed hand. I was sure that such people had never tried to write a novel and they, with their imminently arriving friends and
their painstakingly prepared or at least carefully chosen meals and their well-toned bodies, were clearly the better for it.

Letty was also having educational difficulties.

Margaret
—

Just got a call from the principals office at Hunter’s school. I have to come in at three o’clock to discuss “a matter of grave concern.” I’m afraid I shrieked into the phone when I heard this. I suppose I feared some child had carried a gun into the second grade, or perhaps attempted to distribute Tylenol. “We’d prefer to discuss this with a parent in person,” the secretary said. Michael assures me that if Hunter had been kidnapped or molested, they wouldn’t wait for a three o’clock appointment to tell me. I guess that makes sense
.

L

M
—

Me, again. It’s two-fifteen. Over the course of the last two hours I’ve had to breathe into a paper bag several times. Could the “matter of grave concern” be a horrible brain disease detected by a specially designed spelling quiz? A fall from the jungle gym? A fight in which precious tiny teeth have been lost? “Letty,” Michael said, the third time I called him out of a meeting, “calm down. I’m sure he’s all right. He probably walked into the girls’ bathroom by mistake.” When I worried that this might be considered sexual harassment, Michael was impatient. He was never impatient when I called him out of meetings at Ramona. In fact, back then he was pleased. He would stretch the conversation, ask what we’d had for lunch and whether I’d remembered to give the dogs their
flea medication. He would inquire about the progress of potty training. Now it seems a museum meeting is more important than his child’s health and incipient criminality
.