All Is Vanity (9 page)

I was never like that. If they said, “Make a bracelet,” I made a bracelet. I was so pliable, so eager to please. It would never have occurred to me to do anything else.

Margaret told me my bracelet was the best. I didn’t say anything about Nefertiti. I didn’t know what a Nefertiti was. Maybe she’d made a good one.

Our high school offered Spanish and French, but Margaret petitioned the language department for permission to take Latin at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

“It’s the root of all Romance languages,” she said, trying to convince me to go with her. “Once you know Latin, you’ll pick up
Spanish like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Not to mention French and Italian.”

I understood. It would be dull and sometimes even a little frightening to take the RTD to Occidental all by herself three days a week. But I wanted to learn Spanish. It was the language not of clean and cozy Glendale, but of the real city, Los Angeles. I may have had vague notions of social work. Mostly, though, I was attracted to Spanish because its speakers seemed to occupy a mysterious and, therefore, romantic world behind an invisible but nevertheless impenetrable curtain. When Lottie and I went down-town with my father, who wore a white shirt and a charcoal gray suit and did something incomprehensible behind a desk in a high-rise under buzzing fluorescent lights, we would loiter in the Central Market with five dollars in a little leather box that folded into a flat square. Instead of my prosaic existence, I wanted the life of the girl with the black hair who swayed to the music of the bright horns as she filled paper cups with horchata at her father’s stand. She slipped before the curtain as easily as she made change and then ducked behind it again, turning to the woman I assumed was her mother with a laughing comment in her rapid, rolling tongue. Unlike Margaret, I had no interest in the words of the past. I wanted the words of the future. Also, Spanish was supposed to be easy.

“If you learn Latin with me,” Margaret said, “we’ll be able to have conversations no one else will understand.”

That was how she talked me into it.

Such conversations were more difficult than we had imagined, given Latin’s vocabulary of poetry and conquest. “Oh, the times; oh, the customs” was a handy phrase when we wanted to roll our eyes at our classmates’ proclivities or our parents’ demands, and
occasionally we found opportunity to say, “I sing of arms and a man,” but most of what we learned ran uselessly along the lines of “Gaul is divided into three parts.”

However, as it turned out, I had a talent for Latin. Margaret dropped out after a year and a half, but I went on and on, throughout high school, riding the bus on my own, careful to keep my head far from the windows greasy with hair tonics. At first it was the neatness of translation that attracted me, the puzzle of the line that meant nothing until you broke it apart and applied the rules, moving each word into place. But later, it was the style that drew me on, the elegance of Tacitus, the slyness of Catullus. I felt I knew these writers, as personalities, as people, through their words.

Michael and I met in a class on St. Augustine, an advanced Latin course we were both taking our freshman year of college. At our wedding, Michael thanked Margaret.

I SPENT THE NEXT HOUR CLEANING MY BRUSH
and then dismantling the structure of dirty dishes we’d erected along the counter over the last two days. I eschewed the dishwasher so as to feed my self-righteous dudgeon, while I waited for Ted to return from his snit. It was helpful that many of the dishes with the most stubborn encrustations were Ted’s. He had a habit of eating at the center of the plate, which somehow forced bits of food to the edges, as if they’d scrambled to the rim for safety. I’d always found this a charming idiosyncrasy. Now, it struck me as disgusting. My earlier admission to Letty that Ted’s view might be valid didn’t mitigate my sense of outrage.

Inside my head, my voice, ringing in round, powerful tones, delivered arguments worthy of Demosthenes as I scrubbed grains
of petrified rice from the plates and quite effectively drowned out the notion that had the book, in fact, been going well, I’d not be taking such umbrage. I’d written three pages that day! (Granted, all in the form of incoherent notes, but still words! Filling pages! Three of them!) Letty was helping me! (Or, she would have been, had I had some material to discuss!) How dare he tell me that I shouldn’t talk to my friend? Did I barge into his office to check his progress? This was
my
book! I would do it
my
way!

Inconveniently, I’d just finished washing the last fork when I heard his key in the lock. I plunged the utensil back into the dishwater and pretended to be dislodging material from between the tines as I gauged his intentions so as to marshal the most effective defense. He came up behind me and I tensed, if further tautness was possible, ready to let fly.

“You know what?” he said, putting his arms around me. “I’ve been wrong about this. You should do it your way. What do I know about writing a novel?”

The rampart I’d constructed collapsed under his touch. “No,” I protested, “I’ve just been thinking the opposite.” I turned to face him. “From now on, I’m going to approach this in a businesslike fashion. No more phone calls. No more waiting for the muse. I’m going to leave the apartment with you in the morning, as if I had a real job. I’m going to produce ‘deliverables.’ Five pages per day.”

I knew Ted would appreciate this plan. He was practical, a characteristic I admired in him, although I didn’t covet it for myself.

Ted and I had met in our sophomore year at Penn at an October charity smorgasbord, during which students were supposed to
explore avenues for “giving back” to the community to which we so comfortably did not belong. Ted was manning the Philadelphia Reads! booth, an organization he’d founded himself the year before, after he’d discovered that one of the cafeteria workers couldn’t decipher the menu.

Technically, this was where we met. But I knew who he was. I’d noticed him in Poetry from Spenser to Yeats, even before the professor had pointed out, to our great embarrassment, that we’d been the only two to receive A’s on the
Paradise Lost
paper.

Ted was a big believer in first things first. While I whirled from Life Drawing to Astrophysics 101 to Studies in the New Testament, lighting on whatever seemed interesting as I paged through the catalog, he slogged dutifully through courses like Marx and Engels, Victorian England, and The Novel from Eliot to Hardy, as if he were laying down bathroom tiles. I admit I’d disdained this approach. I liked to tell myself that I was a Renaissance woman, but this was not entirely accurate, since, as I’ve mentioned, I’d yet to do one thing well, let alone a varied handful.

By doing first things first, Ted had moved on to seconds and thirds. His success thrilled me. I was proud of his steady rise from research assistant, to researcher, to program officer, to program director, and the trail of exhaustively researched, gracefully written reports that followed him. Still, it was galling to think of how we’d started out just the same, each with a superior interpretation of Satan’s fall, when I saw how he’d lapped me, lapped me again and again, while I reeled among the starting blocks, not sure even which lane I’d been assigned.

But no more. I would take a page from Ted’s book. I would advance in a methodical fashion. The primary goal was neither to prepare to write, nor to think about writing, nor to talk about writing;
it was to get words on the page. Therefore, that was where I would begin. As soon as I found a place to work.

On Monday evening, I’d promised myself I’d produce five pages a day. By Friday at three, after a weeklong search for rent-free “office” space, including trial runs in several cafés in which a nagging awareness that I appeared either pretentious or pathetic and probably both tended to subvert my concentration, I figured I was running a fifteen- to seventeen-page deficit, depending on how many of those daily five pages I could reasonably expect to complete in the last few hours of the afternoon. The summer heat had been radiating off the sidewalks and buildings all day and my bare shoulders were sizzling in the sun. As I waited to cross Eighth Street, smothered by a sidewalk vendors incense, I felt like a roasting fowl, flavored with vanilla and basting in my own sweat.

My last hope for an office was the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. From the outside, it had romantic charm, with its turret and its reputation for having housed women prisoners in the nineteenth century (although that may have been a building behind it—the facts were difficult to pin down). Inside, beyond the nifty circular staircase and stained glass windows, it was really two linoleum-floored rooms with an unimpressive assortment of books, their covers grayed and softened by hundreds of hands, collapsing sideways on their shelves.

It was cool and fairly quiet. One of its beigy-yellowy tables was completely unoccupied. It seemed unlikely that any of the people poking at the computers or standing dazed in front of bookshelves,
absently rocking strollers, would think me pretentious and/or pathetic if I sat down and uncapped my Mont Blanc. Which I did.

It was three-twenty. Two pages, I decided, would be a decent beginning. I would not leave my seat until I’d written two pages. Unless I had to go to the bathroom. Or get a drink. No, I would be fine without a drink. Two pages, bathroom breaks only. Double spaced.

I opened my notebook. Two pages, I saw with relief, would be nothing, given the material I’d jotted down on my last day of painting.

“Robert Martin ate a breakfast of grapefruit, egg, bacon, and English muffin. He needed to be prepared for what lay ahead.”

I was drawn to this scene. The bright kitchen, the deliberate chewing as Robert Martin, brown hair neatly parted and combed, moved from item to item, getting it all in, under his belt, loading himself as if he were a weapon. For what? What lay ahead?

I felt hungry myself. Should I run over to Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog?

At the next table, a man in a shrunken white T-shirt—an undershirt, really—was pushing a ballpoint steadily across a notebook page. He was bent so low that his cheek was nearly pressed against the paper. Suddenly, he sat up, turned the page with an ostentatious rustle—obviously meant to show that
he
was getting some writing done—and then bent again to his work. He was the type who might very well be repeating, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”