Amy Falls Down (30 page)

What about her grandmother? Amy had no idea. She had said “my grandmother,” the first thing that popped into her head, and basically assumed she would know what to say next. Maybe she should just sit back down. That would actually be pretty damn funny, but she owed something to Maxine. “Excuse me,” she said, and turned to Jenny. “What is a school bus thriller?” Big laughs, during which she figured out why she had said “my grandmother.”

“My grandmother loved
Photoplay
magazine. Also
Modern Screen
and some others I can’t name, all movie magazines. When I would visit I would read them cover to cover. I had no idea who Jeanne Crain was, but I knew her dress size and what Janet Leigh cooked to please handsome hubby Tony Curtis. It was veal piccata.

“My grandmother was a tireless reader. She had bookshelves crammed with Pearl Buck and Erle Stanley Gardner and
Good News for Modern Man
. She was the finest Scrabble player I ever knew. And while she’d probably gone to the movies a lot when she was young—she used to play piano for the silents—by the time I knew her, she seldom bothered. Still, she read
Photoplay
like a bible. One of the last times I saw her, she was complaining about Linda Cristal again, that hussy, who this time was stealing Bobby Darin away from Sandra Dee. By then, of course, I was all grown up. Who cared about Linda Cristal? We were bombing Cambodia.

“In the late sixties and early seventies, that terrible time, when I thought about my grandmother I would inevitably think about those magazines, and how quaint they were. Imagine, I would think, how naive my country
used
to be, when bright citizens would waste brain cells on the antics of movie stars! All because of the Great Depression, I thought. That escapist need to gossip about beautiful strangers as though they lived right next door.

“Gossip stopped in the seventies, the terrible seventies. We were serious people now.

“And then sometime later—it must have been the eighties—I began to notice that gossip was back. Only this time it wasn’t movie
stars
. It was producers. Money men. I, who had once worried about who Pier Angeli was, was now supposed to recognize names like Bruckheimer, Evans, Lucas, and Simpson. And not just the producers. The directors, the screenwriters, the agents. The Business. The Industry. Magazines with the heft of telephone books devoted buckets of gloss to their faces, clothes, antics, the interior design of their houses. I noticed this and actually thought it amusing, and that it would eventually blow over. But as always, I was wrong.” Out there, on the other side of the white, somebody coughed.

Amy stared back at the light until the coughing stopped. “Why are you here?” she asked. To herself, she sounded like the Great Wazoo, the stern character she had played sitting upon Carla’s ridiculous wooden throne, so she played it up and
became
the Great Wazoo. “Not that it isn’t nice to see you, but what does this Industry, the publishing Industry, have to do with you? Well, maybe some of you actually draw salary in that Industry, but what about the rest of you?

“Are you writers? Then this is the last place you should be. Nothing’s going to rub off on you. Writing is not a communal enterprise. There is no community of writers, any more than there is a community of spiders. We don’t work in hives. We work alone. When we marry other writers, one of us gets eaten.

“Are you readers? Then this is the last place you should be. We’re just talking here. We’re not gifted
speakers
. We’re not
performers
. We’re not, most of us, particularly wonderful to look at. Why seek out the men and women behind the page, when the best of us is
on
it?”

Amy was fresh out. She had been working toward some point about business, about how they used to say that show business was everybody’s business, which was nonsense, and now the book business was supposed to be everybody’s business, and it had something to do with the malignant, apocalyptic rise of the corporation-state. Amy was sure there was some twinkle of truth in that tangle of just-formed ideas but had no hope of getting to it now. It was the stuff of smarter writers than she, and it belonged on the page anyway, not here. She was going to have to apologize and slink off. She would have felt worse, except that the entire event had pretty much been a bust. If it got written up anywhere, they would all look like crackpots and posers.

“Why are
you
here?” shouted a woman on the other side of the light. Without a mike, she sounded like a heckler. Her voice was familiar.

Tom Maudine appeared next to Amy, prepared to intervene, and Amy shooed him away.

“Is that you, Hester?” Amy asked.

“Yes,” said Hester Lipp.

Amy wished she could see her. Did she actually look like Kate Hepburn with a giant mole on her nose? “I’m glad you asked,” she said.

God bless Hester Lipp.

“I am here because earlier this year I fell down and hit my head on a birdbath.”

“I asked you a serious question,” shouted Hester Lipp.

“You asked me an excellent question, and I gave you a serious answer.”

Tom Maudine spoke into Amy’s mike. “There will be time for questions when the speaker is through.”

“Which is now,” said Amy. She reassured him with a pat on the shoulder. He nodded and motioned to somebody, probably the person with the walking mike. Her fingertips had not touched a man’s jacketed shoulder in at least thirty years. She had never been much of a toucher, but when you danced, that’s where you put your left hand, and she’d forgotten how lovely that sensation was, the otherness of that sturdy, padded shelf.

“The fall knocked me out and did some short-term damage to my memory,” she said, “and then I gave a rather eccentric interview—”

“So that story you gave Chaz Molloy was true?” This from some invisible guy who had grabbed the mike.

“Exactly,” said Amy. She went on to give them the whole story. She told about the horrifying sight of a total stranger waving and backing out of her driveway, the panicked flight to the emergency room, the old bag lady with the newspaper story, the noticing of that story by someone in the book business, the trickle of interest that grew from a few newspaper columns and blogs to a series of radio interviews and shows and finally to her appearance right here at this mildly televised event. She told them that as a result of all this she had begun writing stories again, and that when collected between hard covers, they would be called
Birdbath Stories
. She said that of all these absurd and, to her, mostly entertaining consequences, the happiest was the reappearance into her life of Maxine Grabow, and she ended by describing Maxine’s exasperated, tireless work on her behalf, unacknowledged until now. She did this for Maxine, who surely was watching. Amy looked right at her in the blinding light. “I am here accidentally and just for the moment,” she said. She smiled, waved good-bye, and took her seat. It was over.

Possibly forever, since she had given up her secrets, and happily too. Something was finished now. She didn’t know what it was, but finishing it felt wonderful.

Amy had left the audience in some disarray, with Hester Lipp yelling, or maybe it was some other woman, some anti-accident Christian, and somebody else spoke into the mike, and poor Tom tried to mop up, and then applause started, at first timid, but it kept going and started to build. “Let’s hear it for our writers,” said Tom, and it rose to a level which, while not literally thunderous, was a modest roar, a long one, embellished with shouts and whistles.

“They love you,” said Jenny Marzen.

“No,” said Amy, “they just love that I shut up and sat down.” Already she was picturing that silver morning train, the Chicago Limited, that wonderful three-day lie-down as her bed clicked and swayed west past cities and farmland and through scrub and desert and mountain all the way back home to her dog and her house and her own life. She was done.

“And now,” said Tom Maudine, “let the tweets begin!”

“Goddamn it all to hell,” said Davy Goonan.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Dead Zone

Amy loved trains just as much as she hated planes. For long-distance travel, a train was a great chugging cradle and the only mode that was at once civilized and somehow natural. Monet lived long enough to paint airplanes but didn’t. And even today, when trains no longer puffed sensuous clouds of smoke and steam, their grave and mournful essence remained. Hearing their night cries, whether from within or afar, Amy couldn’t shake the sense that, alone of all machines, they were sentient, tragic creatures. When they called out, they weren’t warning human beings, who paid increasingly less attention to them no matter what they did; they were singing to one another and themselves.
I’m still here. Not gone yet.

She napped from New York to the middle of Ohio, waking now and then to jot a dream in her notebook, a silly thing about dinosaurs, and how a few of the larger ones actually had coexisted with people for a brief time, only the people didn’t take them seriously. Their scale was just too outlandish: they were too big to be killed, and anyway they were inedible. Their hides were impenetrable. Also they were no fun to look at. You couldn’t take them in, really, unless you spied one from a great distance, in a valley or something, and then you saw that, take away their size, and they weren’t all that impressive. They lacked color, speed, variety. There were just a few different shapes, that was all, so you could classify them without effort. They weren’t
interesting
. The world was such a buzzing, dangerous, riotous place. Dinosaurs weren’t worth thinking about. You couldn’t
learn
from dinosaurs. As people lost interest in dinosaurs, they stopped seeing them, and hardly a month went by when somebody didn’t wander stupidly in front of one and get himself obliterated. Parents warned their children to watch out, to look both ways, but the lessons were forgotten, like the dinosaurs themselves. You couldn’t very well watch out for something you had ignored into transparency. In the end the dinosaurs died, not from a comet or an epidemic or a long drought, but of heartbreak and humiliation.

Amy’s dream read like the idiot child of Ray Bradbury and Italo Calvino. She continued for a while picturing dinosaurs thundering sedately through the cornfields of Indiana and Illinois. She hated symbols, literary and non, especially her own, the ones projected on her private movie screen during dreamtime. They were always embarrassingly obvious. She was willing to concede that her antic projectionist knew what he was doing—that every little symbol had a meaning all its own—but would have enjoyed, just once, a bit of mystery. Well, those dream-spiders who had transformed into disembodied hands had been mysterious, but she had given up on what they meant. She didn’t dream about them anymore—although whenever she mentioned spiders, as she had done in her Whither speech, she would flash on that nightmare afterimage from her childhood, that hand perched like a Hieronymus Bosch animal on her bedside table as though posing for the cameras.

Anyway the dinosaurs were trains. Or the trains were dinosaurs. Either way, she was not about to write a story for them. She fell back asleep, waking only for the changeover in Chicago.

The Southwest Chief crossed the Mississippi at suppertime, rolling through Fort Madison, Iowa, on its way to Missouri and Kansas. Amy sat in the observation car, messing with her laptop. The New York–Chicago train had boasted wireless Internet access, but Amy had been sleepy then. Now she figured she should email Maxine, maybe even do something with her blog, but evidently there would be no wireless access until she reached the coast. “The entire Southwest is a dead zone,” said the conductor, “except for Albuquerque.” So she leaned back to watch her country roll out to the west, which was much better than blogging.

Amy had never really seen America before. Though she and “Bob,” newly and horribly wed, had driven to California three months after Max’s death, she had paid scant attention to the changing scenery, instead focusing all her energies on pretending to be alone in the car. That she was sharing intimate space with a person who revolted her on every level was something that she simply accepted as part of her afterlife, the details of which hardly mattered. She had believed herself old and cast in stone. Amy gazed now at that forty-year-old child in frank amazement. What had been wrong with her? At the time, and throughout that whole marriage, she had anesthetized herself with food, wine, and bourbon but had hardly suffered blackouts. It was as though she had been self-abducted and brainwashed.

For instance, had the newlyweds crossed the big river at Fort Madison, Memphis, or St. Louis? She really ought to remember that. Had she seen the Gateway Arch firsthand? She thought so but wasn’t sure. She seemed, sort of, to recall “Bob” making some lame wisecrack about it—but then that was his response to everything, so she might be making it up. She had always made “Bob” self-conscious. Everything he said to her was painstakingly rehearsed in his mind, then presented to her as an offering, as though at an altar. As though she were the Great Wazoo.

Until now, Amy had avoided thinking about him, and she’d always assumed this was because she was ashamed of the whole three-year episode, the cretinous marriage, the contemptuous way she had treated him. He had brought out the very worst in her. She had no respect for him and even less for herself for having married him, and she certainly didn’t need to torment herself with the whole sordid episode at this stage of her life.

She closed her eyes and switched focus to the Whither conference, specifically the tweet brouhaha which had begun just at the point she had gathered up her belongings and which had raged for a full hour and would have gone on all night if the hotel people hadn’t thrown them out. Virtually every comment and question had been directed at her. “It’s a Battle of the Tweets!” Jenny kept announcing, and now, as Amy tried to recall specifics, all she saw in her mind’s eye was the cover of a Dr. Seuss (
Tweeter Bitter Battle!!
) featuring the vacuous leering faces of all three panelists perched on top of feathered, grotesquely elongated necks. She couldn’t remember the tweets themselves because she hadn’t actually seen them in print—they’d been read aloud by Tom Maudine—although she had been mildly impressed by how quickly the cyberwarriors had formed opposing armies, the (bare) majority supporting Amy’s position, most without understanding it, and the haters uniting in dudgeon over Amy’s various presumptions (about the worthlessness of literary conferences and the arachnoid tendencies of writers and so on). She remembered that for a while the tweets were statements rather than questions, so she could let her mind wander off, but that eventually she had been forced to engage. She could not recall her answers, just that they had provoked laughter from the crowd, so that by the time it was all over she had felt like a performing seal. Jenny had kept on about how much everybody loved her. Goonan, to whom she looked for a minty blast of self-absorption, had leaned close and told her that she was “a fine girl,” which would have pleased Amy no end forty years ago. The conference itself and the tweets, all of it, was markedly forgettable, and try as she might Amy could not sink into recollection or otherwise distract herself from “Bob,” who kept bobbing up before her like a cork.