How I Became a Famous Novelist (26 page)

“Some folks say eighty-five is too old to be a rodeo clown. They say a fella that old ought to hang up his striped-orange jacket and give up the game of entertaining kids and luring bulls off fallen cowboys. Well, some folks haven’t met Earl Teacup, who says that at eighty-five . . . he’s just getting started.”

“Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne. It used to be that if you wanted to be a painter, you had to have two hands. But when an accident changed Betsy Billinger’s life, she didn’t give up on her dream of expressing herself through art. In fact, she decided to pursue her goal twice as hard. And the results? To say the least, . . . they’re colorful.”

“They don’t talk much. They eat a thousand pounds of shrimp every day. They live at depths as great as half a mile, and they won’t fit into any swimsuit you’d find at the mall. But when it comes to dating, it turns out they’ve got some good ideas. Blue whales weren’t always known for their love lives. But one group of researchers has been studying the way that whales mate. They’ve discovered that single whales . . . have a few things to teach single people.”

“Roses, vanilla, and fresh-baked cookies: there are some smells that all of us know. But what about red alder, Mayhaw, or burnt
plantains? Those are just a few of the odors that competitors have to identify at the World Smelling Championships. If you’re looking for this year’s event . . . just follow your nose.”

—introductions to Tinsley Honig pieces on the ABC newsmagazine
Dispatch
as recorded by the author (ellipses indicate dramatic pauses)

Here begin the events that you, the reader may have followed. I’m sorry it took so long to catch up, as these parts are the real fireworks and doubtless the reason you bought this book in the first place. But after the backstory, I’m hoping I won’t seem like quite as much of a bastard.

When I got the news that Tinsley Honig wanted to interview me, I was sitting in a lukewarm bath, thoroughly pruned, with more pubes and soap chunks floating around than anyone should be comfortable with.

This image—my pruned flesh, numb expression on my face, phone balanced precariously on the rim of the tub—can stand for the whole of the postwedding period.

But then David Borer and Lucy called with the wonderful news.

“You don’t understand how big of a deal this is,” Borer said. “You’re
nothing
as a writer until you get on TV.”

TV! And with Tinsley Honig no less! I was going to be a profile on
Dispatch
. With any luck, they’d tuck me in between a segment on old-fashioned pedophiles who lured children over their ham radios and a piece about Afghani land-mine kids who were learning to play soccer again.

“Your book is going to start selling all over again,” said Borer. “They’re already talking about printing a special
Dispatch
edition, which will include a DVD of the piece. Whatever, they’ve got a lot of bad ideas over here, the point is, this is very, very good news.”

Lucy deserved the credit. Some girl who was in her pottery class was roommates with one of Tinsley’s assistants. The book had thus wormed its way into the hands of that auburn-tressed and porcelain-faced angel of TV newsmagazine journalism. It made sense. I was a natural story: young guy writes a sensitive novel, can maybe save literary culture for the text-message generation. And my publicity photo made me look telegenic.

The whole “my life has collapsed on me” thing disappeared. It was hard, in fact, to imagine I’d ever thought that. My performance at Polly’s wedding seemed like boyish hijinks from the distant past.

I looked around the bathroom, with its color-streaked towels from Target and the shave-scummed sink. Tinsley couldn’t tape me here. That wouldn’t work at all. What if Hobart came in, with his crazy hair, and started making potatoes just as Tinsley was about to ask me, on camera, how I’d learned to feel so deeply?

Luckily I had a backup plan. We’d do the interview up at Aunt Evelyn’s. The sugar shack, the maple trees, the house made of local stone—
that
was an author’s house. That was where I should pretend to live.

Something you may not realize when you watch these segments on TV is how fast they come together. I didn’t have any time to prepare.

I wasted my time on the bus up to Aunt Evelyn’s. That was time I could’ve used to plot out the whole interview, to come up with anecdotes and quips and facial expressions. But I spent the whole ride thinking about how my sales would go up after the interview, if I should buy an apartment in New York or skip right to the house on the ocean.

I got to Aunt Evelyn’s in time for dinner. She made these intense fennel sausages—she was going through this whole serious-meats craze—and those were distracting, too.

The next morning, a Tuesday, the segment producer and the camera guy for
Dispatch
showed up at seven. They rolled up in a van, apparently having driven through the darkness from New York. It was hard to imagine what they’d talked about.

The camera guy, whose name was Skee or perhaps Skeet, was vampire-y thin. He looked ageless in a way hard-living dudes who’ve past a certain benchmark are ageless, but he also looked like he’d been pissed off about stuff since at least the mid-1970s. His skin was ashen, the kind of skin you’d imagine on a Dickensian undertaker.

The producer, whose name was Michelle, was maybe thirty and wearing—and this sounds hard to believe in retrospect but I double-checked at the time—two different scarves at the same time. But her most distinctive trait was a nervous and terrifying laugh, the sound of which could easily be mistaken for hysterical weeping.

Skee and Michelle helped themselves to the cantaloupe and maple-smoked bacon Aunt Evelyn had laid out. Michelle explained the day’s procedure, punctuating her sentences with spurts of weep-laughter. She would “pre-interview me,” she said. Tinsley didn’t like to do the prep work herself,
preferring to capture the spontaneity of first meeting me for the camera.

“Don’t ask Tinsley about her hair,” Skee said, his mouth full of cantaloupe and bacon. “She’s a real testy bitch about it.”

Michelle loudly wept-laughed and gripped him on the shoulder.

“And she won’t really look at ya? Not right in the eyes anyway? So don’t worry about that,” he continued. “Just look kinda to just above her left ear. It’ll look the same on camera.” He worked a tricky piece of bacon out of his teeth with his left pinkie.

“Okay!” said Michelle, with a big doped-up grin.

“She’s gonna insist on ringing the doorbell,” Skee said. “So let’s go frame that. By the time she gets here the trees are gonna be soaking up the light. It’s gonna be like shooting inside a freakin’ funhouse.”

We walked around, looking for places to shoot, as Michelle asked me practice questions.

“Was it challenging writing a novel?”

I was baffled as to how to answer.

“I’m sorry, but that’s honestly something she might ask.” Nervous weep-laughter.

Out in the back woods there was a piece of a steel plow, rusting and half buried, left by some farmer a century ago. Maybe I could lean on that, say something profound about the passage of time?

“Nope,” said Skee. “She won’t come out here. She won’t want to get the mud on her boots.”

“But she walked around that pond with Preston Brooks!” I said.

Skee gave me a bent smile. “Well he’s him, and you’re you. And she’s Tinsley. And I’m telling you, she ain’t coming back here, and getting her boots all covered in this shit, and if she did I’d probably be the one hearing about it.”

Michelle looked back and forth between us, then wept-laughed, to show it was all in good fun, but which also conveyed that she was as terrified as I was of this lanky madman.

“Why do you think we’re so afraid of tornadoes?” Michelle asked as a practice question as we walked around to the sugar shack. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to prepare you.”

“No, that’s okay, that’s okay.” I put on my best writer face.

“Tornadoes are a kind of chaos,” I said, in my best writer voice. “A kind of churning and disorder we’re all afraid of. I think my novel, really, is an attempt to bring some sense to that. To draw some order, some poetry out of the swirling madness we call life.”

Michelle clenched my arm. “Good!”

“Listen, when you’re about to say some shit like that, scoot in close to Tinsley so I can frame it with her hair,” Skee said. “’Cause that kind of thing, they’ll want to use it, but if her hair and part of her face isn’t in it, she’s gonna bitch me out, she’s gonna bitch the editors out. It’s gonna make
my
life real fucking miserable, and
they’re
gonna be there till fucking two in the morning trying to splice it together, and
that’s
gonna come down on me, and everybody’s gonna be fucking pissed off all because you blew your best stuff and her hair wasn’t in it! So don’t fire off any of that shit on some shot where I’m getting you from behind, okay? Wait, and we’ll get it when I’m shooting you straight on, or with one of these walls in the background. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Here, we’ll practice. Say that again,” he said, and he hoisted his camera to his shoulder.

“Uh, tornadoes are a kind of chaos—”

“Nope. See there, all I got behind you is that car, okay? And Michelle, she’s playing Tinsley, she’s not even in the shot yet. So, wait, here, I’ll put my hand up like this when you should start talkin’, and that’ll mean I got it all framed.”

We ran it through again, with Michelle standing in.

“Tornadoes are a kind of chaos, a kind of churning and disorder we’re all afraid of—”

“Get up in her face, okay? Just so you’re almost rubbing up against her boobs.”

I slid closer to Michelle. “I think my novel, really, is an attempt—”

“Get really up in there, don’t be shy.”

“An attempt to bring some sense to that,” I continued, almost rubbing up against Michelle’s boobs. It all seemed much sillier at that distance. I could feel my voice getting weaker. “To draw some order, some poetry out of the swirling madness we call life.”

“Good, all right, see, that’s a shot I got, and won’t have to fuckin’ hear it from the guys in the editing bay that their wives were screaming at ’em for not getting home until fucking four-thirty.” Weep-laughter from Michelle.

The last shot we rehearsed was up in the guest room, as I sat on the bed and Michelle pretended to be Tinsley, and I sat on a wicker chair with Aunt Evelyn’s copy of
Hearts of Ice and Blubber
propped beside me.

“Novels may not seem sexy,” I practiced saying, in a way that suggested novels were
totally
sexy. “But they may just save us.”

“Good!” said Michelle. Skee smiled, showing yellowed teeth.

“Dude, I’ve heard a lot of this shit, but that was some of the best. Some of these guys, they try and explain like actually every little thing that they’re doing. They get all tripped up trying to find like the right word or whatever. And you want to tell them, ‘Listen, just say some shit, make my life easy, let’s get this done.’ That’s what you’re doing. That shit, ‘novels are saving us’ and whatever? That’s making the editors’ lives easy.”

“All right!” said Michelle, checking her watch. “We need to hook up with the rest of the crew, and we’ll be back—shooting in two hours!” She patted me on the knee. “You’re gonna be great!”

Skee waited for her to leave.

“Listen,” he said, as he packed up his camera. “She won’t tell you this, but another thing—Tinsley hasn’t read your book. No knock on you, she doesn’t read any of ’em. But just don’t trip her up with talking about some specific thing that happened in it. I’ve seen guys do that, it slows the whole fucking thing down, and she gets real pissed about it. Just say your shit about novels and stuff. And keep her hair in the shot.”

There wasn’t any time to think things through. In the kitchen the hair and makeup lady dolled me up. I could see Tinsley through the curtains, tinier than I’d expected. Then they checked the light and spotted me by the door. Through the cracks I could see the camera lights come on.

“Speed,” I heard Skee say, and I heard footsteps scuffle into position on the doorstep.

“Good, are we good?” I heard Tinsley say.

“Yes, go on you. Doorbell’s on the right,” I heard Michelle say.

The doorbell rang. And as scripted, I opened it for what would be the first shot.

At that distance, with full makeup, in that light, Tinsley’s face didn’t look porcelain at all. Her features seemed huge, distorted, like in the ritual masks of the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest. So that threw me off.

And behind her was a small phalanx of people—a boom mic guy, and a kid holding a plastic rectangle thing designed to reflect light, and Michelle in the back with a clipboard.

And right in front of me, almost wedged between us, was Skee, his eyes obscured by the camera, his mouth gnarled with strain.

You don’t think in a situation like that. It’s beyond consciousness. Time washes you along before you can grab on to a thought.

That’s why at first I just went through the motions. I shook Tinsley’s hand, and she asked me questions I can’t even remember. I spouted answers without knowing what I was saying. Words left my mouth before I had a chance to run them through the scanner, but bullshit being my default mode, they were at least semicogent bullshit.

That’s how it went at first, anyway, and Tinsley and I were filmed walking down the driveway. All I remember hearing is the sound of the crunching gravel.

But in the second shot, a shot we’d rehearsed, I was supposed to sit at my desk in the sugar shack, with my computer
in front of me, and pretend to be writing. A sort of
Unsolved Mysteries
–style dramatization of writing my novel. When we practiced I’d been fine with it.

But as we were doing it—I was sitting there, and Skee was crouched right next to me, filming up on my furrowed brow—I knew I couldn’t keep it going. The Xpo, Pamela McLaughlin’s fingers tracing a murder on a napkin, Miller Westly’s two-pooled house, the audience in Montana, Marianne, the frozen fire-watcher,
Leaves of Grass
, the wedding, Polly touching my cheek, Margaret watching from an upstairs window, it was all part of it, I’m sure, all chips on the foundation. Until suddenly, sitting at the desk, fake-writing, I felt the whole structure collapse inside me.