Amy Falls Down (11 page)

“About what? You mean they want an interview about an interview?”

“What they say is they want to catch up with you, given that you’re a local writer who’s working on a new novel—”

“Not.” Amy had an unsettling thought. “Maxine, they’ll want to get me talking about what happened last year, with the workshop and the murders.”

“I’m way ahead of you. I already told them that it’s off-limits. I said you wouldn’t even discuss it with your oldest friend, so you’re certainly not going to spill the beans on the radio.”

“Who’s my oldest friend?”

Maxine snorted and hacked. “You cut me to the quick.”

*   *   *

Carmen Calliostro’s “Bionic Leg” had not exactly ignited a firestorm of Amy-centered articles, but in the first few weeks after the accident Amy counted five, four online and one in actual print, an opinion piece in
The
Boston Globe,
mailed to her without comment by Maxine. Most who wrote about her claimed familiarity with her fiction, pleasure at her having resurfaced, bemusement about her eccentric behavior during the Antoon interview. Two of the pieces had “redux” in the title, two were called “Going Off-Road,” and the best one, from the
Globe,
highlighted her pronouncement that “Feelings Are Not News.” The male writer, probably Amy’s age, took the opportunity to reminisce about the days when televised evening news, confined to fifteen-minute talking head segments, was more informative than the 24/7 news of today; when local newspapers investigated local events; when poll results were not the centerpieces of news reports; when feelings were not news.

“Ms. Gallup,” he wrote, “remembers a time when competent reporters would never dream of asking people how it felt to lose their job, witness a schoolyard shooting, or have their life savings wiped out in a Ponzi scheme. Competent reporters were too busy collecting and verifying facts. Competent reporters and their editors assumed their readers were bright enough to figure out for themselves how catastrophic events feel. They feel bad. What readers needed was information: What happened? Who was involved? Where, when, how, and why did it happen? That was all they needed from us. We haven’t given it to them for thirty years. We’ve been doing such a rotten job that now even the novelists are complaining. How do I feel about that? Lousy.”

The “even the novelists” crack was childish, but Amy didn’t mind. Like a lot of journalists, he probably looked down on writers who made stuff up. She had worked with a few of them over the years, reporters and columnists who imagined they could write novels if they just had the time. They were professional writers, after all, so how hard could it be, when you don’t have to do any legwork? Often they demanded that she tell them “the rules.” The rules for what? Leads. Paragraphs. Objectivity. She learned that laughing gaily and telling them there are no rules just made them paranoid. The rule is, there are no rules. The rule is, if it works, it’s okay. Journalists either dropped out of class in disgust or, in a couple of cases, learned how to write fiction. Because they were professionals, they could take criticism: the best of them were hungry for it. Successful crossover journalists surprised her: before working with them, she had always assumed that the ability to imagine a good story on paper was a gift that one either had or lacked. They taught her that it could be learned. So she didn’t mind a backhanded compliment from the Boston curmudgeon.

After receiving that
Globe
column, Amy got in the habit of checking online for news follow-ups, and over the next month, just as Maxine had predicted, each day or so there were new listings for her, growing at what appeared to be a modest exponential rate. As though there were a hand-packed snowball with her name on it, slowly rolling down a gentle winter slope. It wasn’t exciting exactly, but it was interesting. Newspapers in Providence, both Portlands, Seattle, Sacramento, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Indianapolis, and Pensacola all picked up the Boston column. Readers responded online, many disagreeing vehemently, as in, “You and A. Gallop are heartness snobs in the first place in the second place you don’t have any felling’s to begin with. Shame on You!!!”

Two weeks later, the Knoxville
Record
ran an original op-ed by some columnist named Aunt Bette, scolding both Amy and the curmudgeon, while spelling both “heartless” and “feelings” correctly. Amy’s full name was used three times in the column. Aunt Bette had apparently tried to slog through
Everything Handsome
once on an overnight train to New Orleans and had found it “the kind of novel
The New York Times
trumpets, where you have to keep a dictionary handy just to get through each sentence, and when you come to the end of the book, you just scratch your head.” Clearly, argued Aunt Bette, feelings don’t mean much to intellectuals, but regular Americans read with their hearts as well as their heads. Amy, who read with her eyes, wondered whether this column would be picked up by other papers too.

It was. In fact, the number of papers running Bette’s column was almost double that of the first bunch. Amy, whose literary fame had come and gone in the pre-Internet era, found herself with over fifty hits on Google News.

So now Amy was going to Do Radio. She would have to drive into the city for an interview at the station, on the campus of San Diego State. “Couldn’t we do it over the phone? And really, what’s the point of this, Maxine?”

“The point is to get you out there. Baby steps, remember. At the very least, you’ll reach thousands—okay, hundreds—of educated, book-buying San Diego citizens. And there’s always the possibility of the interview being picked to run nationwide.”

For an instant Amy imagined being on NPR talking to Robert J. Lurtsema, but then remembered he was dead. Alphonse, who always sat at her feet when she talked on the phone, sighed and rested his chin on the floor. “That’s not going to happen, Maxine. I’m old. I’m yesterday’s news. I wasn’t even news yesterday.”

“You’ve got the brains and the voice for it, plus you don’t give a damn, which will keep you from being nervous. My money’s on you. If it doesn’t work out, you haven’t lost anything.”

Only after she had hung up did Amy realize Maxine hadn’t said anything about the bus plunge story and “Shadow.” She must really despise them. Was she playing mind games? If Maxine thought Amy was going to bring them up first, she had another think coming. Amy didn’t care whether Maxine liked them, or even if she sold them. Resuscitating Amy’s career was Maxine’s bright idea. The hell with Maxine.

*   *   *

Two mornings later she found herself in an unpopulated room at the radio station, waiting for “Brie Spangler,” whatever that was. She had been expecting high-tech gadgets, chrome boxes and booms and cables. Instead, the place was practically empty and preternaturally quiet. She didn’t even see a microphone, unless the mike was behind a delicate disk of gray netting, like a robot’s hairnet. There was a comfy chair and a set of headphones and silence of a quality she had never experienced. Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence. The best part was that she was all alone. There was an adjoining room behind glass, for the engineer or something, but no one was there either. What a wonderful room.

Eventually a plump pink rabbity-looking young woman entered, introduced herself, and sat down next to Amy, in front of her own hairnet. She seemed flustered. “I’m Brie Spangler. Actually Britahnya Spangler,” she said, avoiding Amy’s eyes. “Isn’t that stupid? We’re on in five.”

“Seconds?”

“Minutes.”

What a strange little person this was. Amy felt, in a good way, as though she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “Isn’t what stupid?”

“My parents,” she said, and then interrupted herself. “Look, do you know how to work the headphones and mike? Should we go over what we’re going to do?”

Amy thought about it. “Surprise me,” she said. The technology looked child-simple; she assumed the rabbit would tell her if she talked too loudly, or too softly. “What about your parents?”

She snatched a glance at Amy and looked quickly away. “They didn’t want to call me Brittany, because it was too common, so they named me after the French province. In French.”

“Oh!
Bretagne!
I misunderstood you.” Amy became aware that she made
Bretagne
Spangler self-conscious. Either this was her first interview ever, or she cared what Amy thought of her.

“Everybody did, from preschool on. I’ve spelled my name out loud five million times. The studio calls me Brie.”

“Isn’t that better?”

She sighed. “It’s a cheese.”

“Like Camembert,” said Amy, sympathetically.

“Which sounds nice too, but it’s a cheese. My parents’ generation was all about how it
sounds
. I had a friend who had a friend whose mother named her Derriere.”

“You’re kidding.”

“We’re on in thirty.”

“Seconds?”

“Uh-huh.” She spread out a loose-leaf binder and did something to both mikes.

“Remember,” said Amy, with five seconds to spare, “don’t mention the murder.” Amy couldn’t help herself. She was having too much fun.

“
What
murder? Oh,
that
. Don’t worry, we’ll—” Suddenly Mary Martin was singing into Amy’s ears: “If They Asked Me, I Could Write a Book.” After the first verse, and with pitch dropped half an octave, the rabbit spoke. “This is Brie Spangler on KPBS-FM. It’s time for ‘On the Shelf,’ our weekly spotlight on writers. Today we’re privileged to have in our studio…” Amy was impressed. She sounded nothing like she looked. She sounded voluptuous and intellectual at once. Amy snaked her little notepad out of her purse and jotted down “voluptual” at the same time appreciating that Brie was listing all her titles without error and quoting from her best reviews. She’d done her homework. Amy also appreciated that she apparently cared little for workshop-murder gossip and was all about the books.

For the first fifteen minutes they chatted about her early writing life, and Amy’s favorite novels, and then Brie’s. Amy asked as many questions as Brie; they were comfortable with each other. Brie was settling down. This was fun: Amy was less anxious here in this quiet room than anywhere else, except her own home. Even when teaching, or visiting Carla, she always felt unsettled. Here was the equivalent of a warm hearth on a cold night.

“In a recent interview,” Brie said, “you listed all the books on your shelf you haven’t read yet.”

“Well, not all of them. That would have taken too long.”

“And I loved that they were great books and not-so-great books, and you just jumbled them together. William Faulkner and Mickey Spillane.”

“And why not?”

“And why not! But nobody ever does that. Nobody ever talks about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jackie Susann.”

“And John Cheever and O Henry—”

“And Agatha Christie and—”

“Doris Lessing—”

“Yes,” said Brie. “And why is that?”

Amy thought. “It’s probably not that nobody reads all of those writers. I mean, I’ve read a lot of them, and I can’t be the only one. It has something to do with the old highbrow-lowbrow distinction and the need for people to label themselves. They say they’re too heartland for Orwell. Too devoted to Shakespeare to read Stephen King. Or so they say.”

“Or too wrapped up in movies to read at all.” Brie turned to face Amy, her notebook forgotten. “Do you think we’re all going to stop reading? Is this the end of the age of books?” She looked dewy and anxious and gazed at Amy as though Amy were some sort of sibyl.

Don’t ask me, Amy wanted to say, but of course she
was
asking her. Apparently that was the point of an interview. “It’s the end of the age of something,” she said. “Words are running wild and free on the Internet. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Suppose the publication of new books were interrupted for ten or twenty years, while publishers merged and diversified, thrashed and sank. Suppose there were a de facto moratorium on the brand-new printed word. Suppose all we were left to hold in our hands and read were the books that were already out there.”

“Wouldn’t that be terrible?” asked Brie.

“Why? For the first time in a hundred years, readers would have time to read all the books they’d been meaning to get to, and the tens of thousands more that they never even heard of. Nosebleed-inducing farces. Horror stories guaranteed to rob us of sleep. Pulse-pounding page-turners. Sprawling, sumptuous histories. Best of all, those books that the critics have told them were essential to our lives. Insightful novels of intoxicating ferocity. Intoxicating novels of ferocious insight. There’s a million of them, each one ‘compelling.’”

“I’ve never understood that adjective,” said Brie.

“Me neither. But maybe if we got a chance to read them all, we’d find out.”

“But meanwhile, what would happen to all the writers?”

Amy smiled. In her utopia, she said, most of them would give up and turn to meaningful employment. By the time the presses started rolling again, the ratio of readers to writers would have returned to its ideal proportions. The sort enjoyed by Dickens and Twain, and even Hemingway and Dreiser.

Brie asked if in Amy’s utopia everyone would be forced to read highbrow.

“Absolutely not. There’d be something for everyone. Just not so much of it. And when we finished reading a book, we’d have a real shot at finding someone else who read it too, and discussing it with them.”

“Well, isn’t that what bestseller lists are for? So that we’ll all—okay, I take it back.” The rabbit blushed, annoyed with herself. “I hate bestseller lists,” she said.

“Good for you.”

Brie’s eyebrows knitted. “What’s the ideal proportion? Of readers to writers?”

Amy paused, as though calculating. “Ideally, there should be more readers than writers.”

Brie studied Amy’s face, clearly unsure whether Amy was kidding.

She was a bright girl, but young. If she’d been in one of Max’s classes, he’d have already used the Irony Klaxon, an old bicycle horn he always kept handy when lecturing. “They’re not wired for irony yet,” he explained to her, “so I have to help them. Your brain must be fully developed before you can cope with a straight-faced joke. They think you’re serious unless you’re smirking.” Max hated to smirk, although he was quite good at it. Amy didn’t know how.