For Everyone Concerned (10 page)

It’s teachers’ reading night at the Chamber of Commerce. We are teachers of creative writing. The room is full of our students and a few curious townsfolk. I recognise the woman from the bakery. The wine shop guy sits at the back near the door. ‘I always gotta be at the exit seat,’ he has told me. ‘People
survive
there.’

I’m going first. There’s a microphone but no lectern, no podium, no distance between them and us. If I wanted to I could touch the heads of the people in the first two rows without moving from my spot. Is this what gives the room a kind of Pentecostal feel? One of the town’s chief sources of revenue is the Bible Camp, which occupies prime beach real estate. At the grocery store I see a seven-year-old boy wearing a
teeshirt with ‘Why is Satan Ugly as Sin’ on the front of it; on the back it says ‘Cos Jesus Beat Him With a Stick!’

We wait for about twenty minutes past the start time. The coastal town is on the route of senior citizens’ bus tours and there’s word that a few stragglers are coming up from the beach, from the early bird special buffets.

Finally the decision is made to close the doors and begin. The introductions are done. The room is very quiet. You can hear the people playing tennis outside in the perfect summer evening. You can hear the hearing aids.

I step forward, blow into the microphone, and ask the people in the front row if it’s working. There is absolutely no sound from the microphone. When I speak into it, my voice actually seems softer. They’ve invented the anti-microphone! No one in the front row can communicate with me—they stare back, lost, afraid, deaf, mute, drunk—I catch a hiccup. And I can’t make myself heard above the faint and lovely tennis ball, above the microphone. Finally a woman along the far end of the front row calls out that it’s a
recording
microphone not an amplifying one. She’s wearing headphones and has a tape deck on her lap. I have no idea who she is.

I begin to say a few loud words of thanks. One old guy in the second row already has his hand cupped to
his ear. I tell them I’m kind of tired from three full days’ of teaching short story writing and if I collapse on the floor they’re not to be surprised or alarmed. The old guy is turning to his wife with a blank look on his face. ‘What’d he say?’ He’s whispered it but it carries—I’m beginning to get the idea about this venue; nothing I say will be quite heard; everything they say will be clear. ‘He’s tired,’ says the wife. The old guy looks back at me. ‘He’s been up there thirty seconds!’ he whispers.

I say that because I’m from New Zealand I’m deeply interested in sheep. The old guy is puzzled. ‘Sheep,’ his wife is hissing, ‘sheep is what he’s interested in.’ He looks at me again. ‘What time is it in New Zealand?’ he says to her.

One of the organisers at the back of the room is lifting her hands up. They want me to be louder. The strange thing about speaking with a New Zealand accent to a room full of Americans is that the more you increase your volume the less intelligible it sounds to you and therefore, you suppose, to them also. It threatens to become an act of semaphore. ‘I have an
aunt
,’ I call out, almost tempted to make the shape of a woman with my hands and wondering how to indicate the particular shape of an aunt, ‘who runs a small
farm
with my
uncle
and she wrote a letter to
my
mother
about
this novel
.’ Instantly I regret introducing all these other people into my prologue. I look down
at the front row; a couple of them are smiling up at me in a disconcerting way. It’s how you might look at a seven-year-old when they’re saying something of deep and impenetrable importance. The old guy is craning forward, squinting at me, shaking his head, wondering who got the exit seats.

‘Anyway,’ I boom, ‘my aunt said that she found the
sheep
, when she read my novel, she found the sheep totally unconvincing.’ From somewhere in the middle of the room, where there’s a cluster of people in their thirties and forties, comes laughter of a very high quality—the laughter of people with painful, honest, slightly horrid aunts. I take heart from this core. I will read to them. I open my book. Silence.

I begin to shout my fiction into the Chamber of Commerce. How difficult it is to follow even the simplest statement when someone starts reading a piece of fiction aloud. The ear, untuned to the rhythms of a work, foreign to the tone, arriving off the highway of ordinary speech and hostile to this insistence on some new speed-limit, struggles, distorts, misbehaves—and of course I’m thinking all this, unhelpfully,
while
I read.

I am three sentences into the reading—these are crucial sentences, these are sentences that the audience must listen to as if they are being told the list of consumer items which in thirty seconds they will have the opportunity of owning if they can recall
them correctly! The first sentences are the business-end of a gameshow.

A man on the end of the third row gets up. He is wearing a Panama hat with a wooden bird attached to it. He walks to the back and opens the door of the Chamber bathroom. I have not yet got to the end of the first paragraph. I come across a name I have neglected to mention to the audience before starting. They will no idea who Tim is; what nationality he is; how he’s related to Adrian. I try to think whether it really is important to know these things for this extract. I could pause and tell them about Tim. I think I could do that if we were further into the piece but these are the crucial gameshow sentences. I am right in the middle of training their ears to the rhythms, the tone, the speed-limit of the prose. It would be a disaster to stop now and speak to them, yell to them. I dare not look up at the old guy. Who would wear a hat with a bird stuck on it? That guy had twenty minutes to relieve himself before we started.

Someone is trying to suppress a cough. A ticklish cough. I push on. There is a commotion at the back of the room; I’m aware of it out of the corner of my eye. When you do a public reading, it would be best to wear blinkers, I think, to ride down your page like a race-horse, protected from the crowd most of whose money you are about to lose. There’s a latecomer. I glance up. Jean. One of my students. She has been late to every
class. Only one other student has been consistently later than Jean. She creeps up the centre aisle; she signals me her apologies—the same signals she uses every morning in class. Jean finds the only available seat in the room— it belongs to the Panama bird hat guy.

I pause. That’s the first paragraph. I feel that I could read it again and no one would know.

In fact, someone puts up their hand and says: ‘I wonder would you mind starting over? There was a lot of movement round here and I lost it.’ I begin to read the first paragraph again.

At the back of the room, the organisers have a video recorder set up on a tripod. Three people are looking worried and prodding at the video.

There is a small kitchen with a servery in the corner. I’m aware of the sound of running water. Yet it is not quite running water. I’m certain that I should have told them who Tim was. I’ve forgotten how unfunny this piece is until right near the end. I have chosen the wrong piece. I’m shouting this deeply unfunny stuff out—for the second time. I try to find some moment in the writing which will allow us all to stop for breath and think about things. My sentences at this volume, in this accent, sound like bad translations. One of my students, Victor, comes from Sarajevo, though he now makes jewellery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s a good writer. He sometimes spells things as he pronounces them; tree for three, tink for
think. I feel that Victor has translated my work but I’m not sure into what. Suddenly I know what I am hearing from the corner of the room. It’s the Panama bird guy pissing! He hasn’t shut the bathroom door properly and he’s urinating for all he’s worth. Strong American pee. (Everything they do carries.)

The piece I’m reading is set in the English countryside on a cold spring morning. My two characters are walking towards a barn. There’s a smoke-like something coming from the barn. It heaves with strange fumes. There are sheep inside the barn and children. The piece depends on an atmosphere of rankness, of closed air, of animals breathing heavily. I look up again. Foolishly I look up again. I can’t stop seeing Jean grinning her sorries; the old guy in pain. The next time I look up I must find someone who seems engaged. If I can find that person I can get to the bottom of this page.

I look up at exactly the moment a woman is getting a personal battery-operated fan out of her bag. She starts it up. A few strands of her hair fly back. She closes her eyes. The little motor, the buzz of the blades, seems amplified. She can’t possibly hear a word of the reading. It’s as though a tiny helicopter has the Chamber of Commerce surrounded.

The Panama bird guy is walking back down the centre aisle looking for his seat. Jean is still mouthing sorry to me.

I am two sentences away from a very nice sentence. A sentence you have to sound. I need space around this sentence, I’m thinking.

At the back of the room, the tennis players are suddenly louder; the door has been opened, now it is drifting closed again. The wine shop guy has exited.

The Panama pisser moves back and forth along the aisle. He comes within a few feet of me. I think of an air steward checking to see if our seatbelts are fastened. It is still five days before I fly home. The bird on the hat actually bobs. It has eyes and it
moves them
in my direction.

More movement at the back. Another person has just arrived. It’s Jennifer, the twenty-one-year-old who needs the two credits from my short story class to finish her BA. Next month she’s going into the Marines. Jennifer always arrives later than Jean in the mornings and in the afternoons. Jennifer has been sleeping in her tent and sometimes, she tells me, the sound of the ocean drugs her almost so that she doesn’t wake up. ‘I hear it in mind,’ she says cheerily, ‘and I’m in like a swimming pool, lying on my back which is cool because in summers usually I go home and get a job at the pool there saving the lives of the little kids of my high school friends who never left town!’ I like Jennifer. She’s a natural storyteller.

Did I mention the coughing woman who has removed herself from the room? She bumps
into the Panama guy in the aisle; they have a brief conversation—they are actually
talking to each other
while I’m reading—about whether the seat is now free. It’s PK. Pamela Kay. Another of mine. PK always starts her fiction with incredibly animated humorous conversations. Which is also how PK talks. The previous day I had seen her coming towards me on the street during the class lunch-break. As I got closer I realised she was already having an incredibly animated conversation with me. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that. A seagull just backed onto the top of that lamp post. Backed right in! I’ve never seen anything like that reversing …’ I smile at her—like you would at a seven-year-old trying to say something of deep and impenetrable importance. I wonder whether it’s PK who has been hiccuping. She does it in class. I’m somehow attracted by the idea that PK has been drunk in the short story writing class. Perhaps I should get drunk in the lunchtime with PK. I’ve heard Jennifer, the soon-to-be Marine, burping in class. Jennifer is always drinking from a flask of Coke. At some profound level I think of Americans as dangerously carbonated people. I think of uneven streams of bubbles rising in their stomachs, pushing up through their intestines, triggering valves, rising some more until the bubbles finally force up through the oesophagus, and spill out—in PK’s case this spillage assumes the shape of dialogue. I think of America as reflux-land. A land of
heartburn, headaches, ulcers, constipation, bathrooms. A land of obstructions, buried impediments—and I think this idea must always run alongside that other commonplace about America—land of the voluble, the expressed, the free, the
easily vented
. I pause in my reading. I swear someone farts. Someone says ‘Fuck you’ but that’s from the tennis courts, I think.

The next time I look up, I’ll aim for the side of the room, out the windows facing the street. Sometimes if you can get a glimpse of activity happening outside the reading, it helps. Maybe it’s because you can suddenly feel that none of this really matters. Life is going on. I read my nice sentence. I think it almost comes off. There is an aural gap into which it neatly fits. A lucky break. I want the phrase to have a little afterglow or burn or something, so I look up from the page, out the window, where life is going on.

A balding man in his mid-fifties sits in a pickup truck outside the Chamber of Commerce. He is trying to stop himself looking in through the window. He looks straight in front but then his head keeps turning quickly in my direction. Our eyes meet. It is Richard, from my class. Gentle Richard, who tells us on the second day that he is going through the ‘end phases’ of a relationship. I’m not sure whether this means he is divorced or getting divorced or thinking of getting divorced. There are few concrete items in Richard’s speech. He teaches kids with disabilities.
He often introduces metaphors of growth and energy, pain and rejuvenation into his critiques. He speaks in miraculously whole sentences. I suspect him of learning these lines from some therapy manual. One day, he tells Jean when we’re talking about ways to end a story, to go to a private place and ask her narrator what she wants. ‘
Ask
her,’ he says with feeling, ‘don’t ask us. Ask
her
.’ I find Richard slightly scary.

Why is Richard sitting in his truck? I have a sudden image; Richard’s pick-up exploding through the windows of the Chamber of Commerce. The end phases of a relationship. The week before I arrived in this town there’d been a tragedy here. One of the local doctors administered fatal injections to his three young daughters, then killed himself. The doctor had recently separated from his wife and they’d been involved in a custody battle for the children. The doctor was well liked, a good man. In the months leading up to the killings, colleagues at the local medical centre had noticed the doctor becoming more and more withdrawn. By the end, says one of the medical centre people who appears on the news, he wasn’t
communicating well at all
. For some reason this phrase has haunted me. I think that for a lot of my six weeks in this country I’ve been unhealthily preoccupied with acts of communication.