Amy Falls Down (20 page)

“Birdbath,” said Amy.

“What?”

“The accident. My accident. The ER. The MRI.” She had to keep feeding him clues, because obviously he’d forgotten about the whole thing, and great, she had now managed to remind him. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was just worried about … you know…”

“Have you had any more episodes of amnesia?” His expression had changed instantly to one of professional concern, tinged with just a hint of disappointment.

She had managed not only to remind him of the accident but also to present herself as a freeloader, one of those people who sidle up to physicians at parties to ask them if a skin tag on their underarm is anything to worry about. “No, no, no,” she said, “I’m so sorry, no. Completely different issue.”

“What are your symptoms?”

“I don’t have any symptoms,” she said. “I’m talking about my … Listen. That silly accident I had, the one I met you about—” Amy had not been this inarticulate since she was eight years old, if then. For what seemed like hours she explained about the accident’s aftermath, and the fact that she was getting critical attention from which she was continuing to benefit and hoped to continue benefiting. He kept looking at her closely, quizzically, no longer annoyed but also not getting her point, which forced her into a vivacity which probably looked as grotesque as it felt. She laughed, she gestured airily, she actually touched him lightly on the arm, as if she were the type of woman who touched people, and still he waited for her to come out with it. “Look,” she said. “You’re the only person in the world who knows that I gave that interview
non compos mentis
.”

His face relaxed. “Got it,” he said. “Hey, no worries. Your secret is safe with me. Everybody’s secrets are safe with me. I’m a doctor.”

“Except now I’ve insulted you by implication,” she said, “and I am so sorry.”

“Tell me honestly,” he said. “Is my stuff as awful as
Womb to Tomb
? I thought I’d be the only doctor here.”

So much for Amy’s Shameful Secret. Kurt’s was that he wasn’t there just because his wife pushed him into it. “Are you kidding?” asked Amy. “I never met a doctor who didn’t want to be a novelist. But you’re the first one,” she was happy to tell him, “that could actually make it. Just don’t tell that to Surtees.”

She left him smiling, happy, oblivious to the gimlet-eyed approach of Yoga Pants.

*   *   *

Amy was just getting into her car when Brie ran out of the house. “Is your phone off? Because Tom Maudine has been trying to get you for hours.”

“Who’s Tom Maudine?”

“The interviewer!”

“Oh.
Tom
.” Was she supposed to call him back so he could yell at her? Maybe she should. Maybe that would make her feel better.

“Also Constance Lent called a couple of times, and also Eliot Riyad.” She handed Amy a piece of paper with numbers on it. “He’s one of the producers. Of NPR. In Washington.”

She was such a nice girl. She kept adding information in discrete dribs, careful not to insult Amy’s intelligence, just as Amy had done with Kurt. Brie needn’t have worried. “Producers of what?” asked Amy.

“NPR. They have a million of them.”

Amy sat down in the driver’s seat, staring dully at the piece of paper. “Am I supposed to call these people?”

Brie leaned down, propping her elbows on the car door. “They’d like it if you did,” she said, “but if you want to call them back tomorrow, that’s fine too. And if you don’t, I’ll bet they keep trying.”

Amy looked up at her. “Why?” she asked.

“You were good,” said Brie, smiling. Then she grinned. “Boy, Jenny Marzen made an ass out of herself, didn’t she?”

“Is that why I was good? Was I good at making other people look bad?”

Brie thought for a minute. “Only in comparison,” she said. “Not on purpose.” She closed the door gently. “See you in a month!” she said, running back into the house.

Amy drove down to the cove and parked, rolling down the window, just listening to the cries of the terns and gulls. There were no bathers today. Out in the water she could see a fin. A dolphin maybe, or a shark, depending on your mood. If Brie was right, whatever Amy’s fall had set in motion back in January was still steaming along. She hadn’t derailed it. Not that she had meant to. She had left her house today almost looking forward to that radio interview, that quiet room.

Max was wrong about her being dead set on failure. She wasn’t dead set on anything, and all her life she had been content with that. She had regarded ambition as a flaw, or something close to it. Ambitious people thought they could see into the future, and worse, loved what they saw. They called it “potential.” They drew up blueprints, laid foundations, planned expansions. They were deluded, of course, and if they lucked out, they never admitted their luck. Their success had been foreordained. Their visions realized. Now Amy for the first time could sense the future, that sleeping monster, stirring, waking, lumbering upright. Looking straight at her.

Before leaving for home, she got out her notebook and wrote the titles

“Rituals”

“You Can Get Kits For Anything”

“Privacy Curtains”

“Your Intact Boundaries”

There was plenty of daylight left, and she needed to write, to clear her head, to put the rest away. She would not be calling anyone back today.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

No Goggling

Amy became a weekly fixture on Maudine’s show, driving down to the KPBS station each Friday morning for a new “round table.” She had agreed to do this providing that no topic be set ahead of time. She and the rest of the writers would come up with something spontaneously. Maxine said they were worried about dead air. “So the worst thing that could happen is a few seconds of silence?” said Amy. “Tell them to take the long view.” “What are you,” asked Maxine, “a Buddhist?” But Amy prevailed, and although some weeks were better than others, the discussions were lively and often very funny. Whenever a writer would get momentarily self-conscious, Amy would say, “Nobody’s listening anyway. It’s just us,” and the speaker’s tongue would get untied. Maudine sputtered about this a few times but before long decided to go with it, and the title of the show, which had been “Writers Speak!” became “Just Us.”

“Everything you touch,” complained Maxine, “turns to bronze.” Maxine had called with news. “The Munster piece is running this Sunday.”

“Munsterpiece!” Startling herself into a laugh, Amy choked on an apple slice, holding the phone away from her ear, and when she put it back, Maxine was saying something about Constance Lent. “Maxine, I thought the
ARB
story was dead in the water, what with my radio antics with Jenny Marzen. Wasn’t she the one who put me up for the list in the first place?”

“You don’t listen,” said Maxine. “I just said.” Maxine really sounded put out. “Not only is Marzen still in your corner, but there’s a bunch more, including half the writers you’ve been talking with on the radio. Munster’s cutting the list from ten to five, giving the five writers-to-rediscover more space, and you’re going to lead off the list, so you’ll get top billing and more space than everybody else. This is huge.” When had people started using “huge” like this?

“Huge is the new awesome,” said Amy. “What about the five who got cut? That’s it for them, then?”

“God damn it,” said Maxine. “I knew you’d do that. I just handed you the keys to the El Dorado and you’re worrying about the poor saps you trampled over on your way to the top. Excuse me. The pathetic losers flattened by your inert carcass as I dragged you—”

“Mixed metaphor.”

“Kiss my ass,” said Maxine, and hung up.

When she didn’t ring right back, Amy called to apologize. She couldn’t remember Maxine ever being this touchy.

“For your information,” said Maxine, “and not that I believe for a minute that you’re really all that worked up about it, the other five writers will get space two weeks from now in the
ARB’
s next issue. You didn’t hurt anybody. You know, I really do feel like I’m pushing a truck uphill. And those are the good days.”

*   *   *

When the mid-June
ARB
edition came out, Amy didn’t buy it or read it online. Neither apparently did anyone else in San Diego, so she wasn’t pestered by awed calls from well-wishers. In fact, of the few California people she knew—her neighbors, Carla and the gang, and the retreat people—only Brie Spangler had ever picked up on evidence of her chelonian ascent, and that because she actually worked for a radio station. No one had ever even mentioned Holly Antoon’s story, which meant that no one had ever read it—except for Kurt Robetussien, in the ER. And he was the only one who had actually heard her on the radio. Kurt was busy saving lives, and Brie was a wonderfully discreet girl; she wasn’t surprised that neither contacted her about the
ARB
. The secret of Amy’s burgeoning fame was safe with them.

But the East Coast was a different story. Days before the hard copy came out, her phone went off at seven in the morning, Roofy Mehnaz identified herself (“This is Roofy Mehnaz calling from New York”) and threatened to make Amy “a crapload of money.” Amy hung up. The phone rang again. “Sorry,” said Roofy Mehnaz, “I know it’s early there, but I wanted to get to you first.” Amy hung up again, then lifted the phone off the hook so the signal would be busy, only Roofy Mehnaz, having not hung up in New York, kept going, listing the titles of movies and books with which she had had some sort of connection. “I know you’re with Grabow, you don’t have to tell me, but I can do a lot more for you. Maxine’s old school. Also old.” Roofy Mehnaz, then, was some sort of agent. Amy wanted to ask her about her name and how she spelled it, but she restrained herself. “Send me an email,” she said, and when Roofy started to ask for her address, Amy told her to call Maxine, and hung up. Immediately the phone rang again.

This time Amy stumbled to the bathroom to get her glasses so she could see who was calling, and sure enough, it was a 212 number, and not Maxine’s. Maxine knew better than to call her at seven a.m. anyway. The call went to voicemail, and while that was happening Amy turned down the volume so she couldn’t hear her own voice and that of whoever was calling. Five minutes after the call ended, the phone rang again. Amy spent a half hour, pre-coffee, hunting down the instructions for her damn phone, so she could turn off the ringer, which she did.

She knew it wasn’t entirely rational to treat these harbingers of success as though they were physicians calling with biopsy results, but she had other things to do. She was working on two new stories, the first of which, “The Drawer,” was practically writing itself. Amy rarely wrote about either sex or childhood, but this was a freebie. It was the sort of story she had always cautioned her students against. “Nobody cares about the facts of your life. Use experience as a jumping-off place, not an end in itself.”

She could remember the ozone-scented air, the cold raindrops on the window of the bedroom, on the day she had discovered Krafft-Ebing in Uncle Fred’s house; she could see the pattern on her bedspread when she first flopped down to start reading. A lavender bedspread stamped with gold fleur-de-lis; she would think it hideous now, but she remembered picking it out when her mother took her to the Sears in Portland and tried to get her to go for white chenille. Such sensory details were ordinarily lacking from her memory, whether recent or ancient. There must be a part of the brain devoted to sex memory. Maybe that was what they meant by the lizard brain. Anyway, she could remember everything, and shaping it into a story took only three days.
Curious bookish girl explores the mysteries of sex, gets wildly misinformed, struggles ensue.
Years later she figures out that the answers aren’t in books, but she never gets the hang of trusting her own body, which she regards from a suspicious distance. The end. “The Drawer” was slight, funnier and less dark that her usual stuff, but she knew Maxine could sell it. She had just sold the Coronado bus plunge story, “What It All Means,” to
Harper’s
.

“Calvary,” the other story, was a mess. Now that she had decided to deal with Max’s death, she was having a terrible time finding her way in. The title was grandiose and would have to go: the fact that it was the actual name of the hospital where he died, of other hospitals where tens of thousands die, was no excuse, but for now she left it in place as, day by day, she tried anew. She had begun to think of the project as an assault on some outlandish mountain peak, the sort so popular with moneyed adventurers that their freeze-dried corpses littered the slopes like candy wrappers. Most of her own assaults ended ignominiously. She would break a new trail and at some point realize that the going was all too easy, that she had slipped without realizing into a slick groove.

The trouble with big themes wasn’t that the big boys and girls had gotten there first—they’d gotten to everything first, including sexual curiosity in overly cerebral children—but that they had landed on those themes with such great feet that their imprints were deep and almost impossible to avoid. Even as Max lay dying, Tolstoy intruded on what ought to have been the rawest and most immediate experience of her life.
He screamed unceasingly … It was unendurable … Oh, what I have suffered!
And oh, how Amy had wished, still wished, that the lines were her own. She could play with emotions—anxiety, terror, the demise of hope, that constant awareness of inadequacy—she could bring them to life on the page as effortlessly as she had the lavender bedspread—but to what end? To explore the awfulness of death, of loss, of grief? What did she have to add to what was already known?

Well, she had her own sorry self, her own story, the snowflake of her life, but even as a child she had been unimpressed by the breathless adult observation that no two of these were exactly alike. In the first place, she had thought, how does anybody know that? And in the second place, so what? The snowflake factoid was, to the child Amy, the first instance of a formal invitation to goggle. “No two snowflakes alike!” was impressed upon a child in order to cultivate “wonder.” But she wasn’t literally supposed to “wonder” about the snowflakes, since wonder invited curiosity, which in turn should prod a person into learning and thinking deeply. No, she was supposed to goggle at them. Also at the contents of aquariums and the patchwork farmland thousands of feet below her airplane window on the last time she would take to the skies. Her earliest memory of her father was when he lifted her up to the apartment window at nighttime, saying, “Look, there’s our shadow on the moon.” Later she had gone alone to her bedroom window and made rabbit shapes with her hands. She was then disappointed in her father, who had obviously lied to her; he had just wanted her to goggle.