Amy Falls Down (23 page)

“Sweetheart, this is ‘The Petri Dish’! This is KYJ! This is not an effing literary salon!”

“Then why did you invite me? What were you expecting?”

“Somebody with a pulse,” said Molloy. He said it under his breath with his head turned away from her, but had to know she had heard him. He blushed. Amy could see the heat flashing up his neck. “Don’t mind me, dear,” he said, avoiding eye contact, “it’s just been one of those days.” He shouted into what Amy assumed was an intercom, “Where’s my goddamn Coke?” and donned the headphones, welcoming his listeners back on for the second half of the show, and inviting them to call in with any questions. “I don’t usually open the lines until the final segment, but I’m going to make an exception in this case, folks, since, frankly, I’ve run out of material.” A full second of dead air followed, during which he snapped his fingers in the direction of a mirror on the opposite wall, behind which there must lurk some production crew with a bank of phones or something.

“What do you do,” asked Amy, “if nobody calls?”

“Never happens,” said Molloy through gritted teeth. There would be no more crinkling.

A third voice arrived in Amy’s headphones. “Chaz? This is John from Fontana, first-time caller, long-time listener.” John’s voice sounded familiar. “Chaz, is this lady for real?”

“I assure you, John, she is absolutely real. Exceptionally so, in fact.”

“So she’s like somebody we’re all supposed to read? What’s that all about?”

“You tell me, John. I’m out of ideas at this point.”

While John and Chaz agreed about something at length without actually articulating what the point of agreement was, Amy recognized John’s voice. John was John the T-shirt Guy.
This
was what they did when nobody called. Amy considered ratting him out but decided not to. In their place, she would probably have done the same thing. Of course, before being in their place she would have taken the gas pipe, but the principle was the same. She wondered how old the expression “take the gas pipe” actually was. Her grandfather used to say it a lot, and it always made her laugh. She heard “John” use the terms “Vocabulary Nazi” and “cultural fathead,” and Molloy’s unconvincing demurrer. Amy assumed the script required callers to “convince” Molloy that his guest of the week was an Icon for Idiots. “Take the gas pipe” was, Amy guessed, about the same vintage as “Pull a Brodie.” Old slang expressions were so much more energetic and colorful than most of the current ones, which seemed designed more to obfuscate than to paint an indelible picture.

“Amy,” Molloy was saying. “You can jump in any time now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Amy. “Was there a question for me?”

Both men laughed. Molloy was cheering up a little.

The next caller was female. “Chaz, this is Kaitlyn? From Apple Valley?” Shambala sounded like she was reading from a prepared sheet. Molloy cut her off when she referred to today’s guest as “Ed Begley Jr.”

“Chaz, this is Laverne from Burbank, first-time caller, last-time listener.” Maxine’s gravelly voice was unmistakable. “What’s your point, exactly? You’re all over this woman like a cheap suit!”

Molloy cut Maxine off. Few of the callers who weighed in during the next five minutes could conceivably have been real. She had no idea how Maxine had arranged it, but her shills kept duking it out with Molloy’s, and for a while Amy sort of enjoyed it, but eventually she let her mind roam. What if she had told Carla, or Dr. Surtees, or Kurt Robetussien about this show. Would they have called in to defend her? She was annoyed with herself for even thinking such a thing. At the final commercial break, Amy asked Molloy, “Is this the way it usually goes? Do you even
have
listeners? Or is it like professional wrestling?”

Molloy sighed. “No, this is not like professional wrestling. Pro wrestling is
big
. Pro wrestling makes money. What this is, this is
Sunday
. All the true callers are at the beach, at the game, at the goddamn zoo with their goddamn kids, that’s what this is.” “John from Fontana” brought Molloy his Coke, for which service he got called an ugly name, unbefitting even to “John from Fontana.”

“We’re on in thirty,” he told her. “Look, you seem like a nice lady. The mix-up’s on me. Well, not me per se, but, you know”—he waved at the mirror on the far wall—“you get what you pay for. But now I’d appreciate it—America would appreciate it—if you’d jump in and say
something
. Okay? Anything? In case someone’s listening?”

Amy thought about it. What she thought was, what the hell.

In the first place, no one
was
listening, and in the second place, even if somebody was, she had already gotten all she was going to get from the birdbath interview, and it was plenty, more than she deserved: she was writing again. She was writing damn well, better than ever. Why had she been so worried about the truth coming out? Why not spill it now? She would make a gift of it, a small carcass Molloy could drag back into his cave. Amy suddenly felt light, energized. Fearless.

“Aaand we’re back,” he said, reintroducing Amy as “a human fireball with an impressive vocabulary whose works are necessary to our lives. Amy Gallup, let’s wrap this thing up. How’d you get to be a cultural icon?”

“By accident,” said Amy.

“Well,” said Molloy, “that explains a lot!”

“I fell down and knocked myself out on a birdbath, and then I did a newspaper interview when I was not in my right mind, and one thing led to another, and here we are.”

“Good one,” said Molloy. “Seriously, why were you picked for this
American Review
gig? You’re out of print. Nobody reads you. Except whoever wrote this article telling everybody to drop what they’re doing and discover this great talent that’s been lying around under their noses since, what, 1982? How’d this happen?”

So much for her grand reckless gesture. Why didn’t he believe her? Why was he so fixated on her bit of praise from the
ARB
? Was he a failed novelist? Did everybody in North America have an attic chest full of rejected manuscripts? She’d given the man an actual scoop for God’s sake. “Listen to me,” she said to him. “It was an accident.”

“Tell me something, when you’re writing, when you’re writing
ripe, necessary
novels, do you do more than play with words? I ask, because, let’s be honest, that’s mostly what you do, isn’t it?”

Amy took a beat. When she wrote dialogue, she sometimes took a beat in order to emphasize a line or vary the rhythm of the conversation. Now she took one to check her temper. “I’ve never
played with words
in my life,” she said.

“Intellectuals love to talk about
accidents,
don’t they? Everything’s an
accident
. The Big Bang’s an
accident
.”

“Do soldiers play with bullets? Do carpenters play with wood? Wordplay is for writers with nothing to say. When I have nothing to say, I don’t write.”

“The Big Bang, the origin of human life, it’s all a big fat
accident
. No divine plan, no cosmic design, if we get hit with a comet tomorrow, it’s just a great big custard pie in the kisser.”

“You don’t listen,” said Amy.

“Tell me, how many government grants have you taken so you can continue not writing?”

Amy relaxed. The hell with Chaz Molloy. “I really can’t remember them all,” she said.

Molloy’s shoulders instantly relaxed, and he leaned back in his chair, stretching out his arms, rolling the kinks out of his neck muscles, talking all the while. “There we have it, folks,” he said. “Your tax dollars in action. The Enn Eee Ay. The same chowderheads who paid Robert Mapplethorpe to stick bullwhips up his fanny.”

“Oh, not just the NEA,” said Amy. “Also the USCWA, the SSWC, and the NCN.”

“NCN?”

“National Consortium of Novelists.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Nobody has. You have to be a novelist to know about it.”

“Are you serious?” Molloy was not a stupid man, but already relief, even joy, were overwhelming his innate skepticism. “How much money are we talking about here?”

“Conservatively? For me alone? Over a lifetime? In the high six figures.”

“And for what? If you don’t mind my asking. What did we—excuse me, the NCN—pay you for?”

“Basically, anything I wanted to write. Of course, you have to apply, you have to click the right boxes, line up the right references, you have to jump through hoops, but if you know what you’re doing, you’re a shoo-in.”

“So if I wanted to write, say, a romance novel about young nurses in love, or some chick-lit nonsense, or a coming-of-age memoir about growing up gay in Cleveland—”

“No,” said Amy. “Too mainstream. Nobody submits work that isn’t way, way out of the mainstream.”

“Mainstream,” Molloy repeated, leaning forward. Goggling.

“Well, think about it,” she said. “If you’re writing pop stuff, it’s going to sell, it’s going to make you money. Who need grants when you’ve got profits?”

“Who indeed!” said Molloy. “So let me get this straight. You can write anything you want, as long as it’s guaranteed not to sell.”

“‘Guarantee’ is such a scary word,” said Amy. “Every now and then an NCN book will fall through the cracks. One of my own novels actually made a few bestseller lists.” This much was true. For some reason, her books had always sold well in Albany, Oakland, and Columbus, Ohio.

“Amy,” he said, addressing her this way for the first time in the interview, “what does
out of the mainstream
really mean? Could you give us an example?”

“Well, Chaz,” she said, knitting her brow to simulate thought, though careful not to overdo it, since, however gullible the man was at the moment, surely he had a working BS detector. “It’s not as though there’s a checklist or anything. It’s more about what doesn’t fly than what does. Genre fiction’s out, of course, unless you turn it on its head. Omniscient narration is out, unless the narrator is, you know, severely autistic or whatever. What’s out, frankly, is clarity. That’s the deal. What you have to aim for is obscurity.”

“Obscurity,” said Molloy, who by now looked like a little child on Christmas morning.

“Yes, because the thing is, if the work is obscure, then it needs to be explained. And that’s where the Academy comes in!”

“The Academy?”

“Yes,” said Amy. “That’s the ultimate goal. That’s the gold standard. To write a novel so profoundly obscure that it must be taught. Then college students can be forced to buy copies, you see! If the same courses are taught year after year, you have a captive market.”

Amy had no idea if this was true, but it had a certain appeal. Actually, she was suddenly veering dangerously close to a point of likely philosophical agreement with Chaz Molloy. It was time to wrap things up. “And of course, once you’ve got the Academy involved, you’ve got a closed loop, financially speaking, politically speaking. And ultimately, that’s what we’re talking about here, right? Politics?”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning that no matter who’s in charge, regardless of prevailing political winds, regardless, let’s face it, of
the will of the people
”—Amy furnished air quotes and a tone of amused scorn—“we can keep churning out arty-farty ivory-tower left-wing anti-gun ACLU tree-hugging lesbian atheist fetus-hating garbage, and you can keep paying for it.”

“There you have it!” announced Molloy triumphantly, his mouth getting ahead of his brain, because she could see on his face the rapidly dawning understanding that he had been had.

He opened his mouth to retrieve his mistake, to shape it into a save, but a blue light was blinking over that mirror on the wall, and there just wasn’t enough time. Too bad.

“I never took a penny from the government,” Amy said, “and I have never
played with words
. You colossal ass.”

Molloy, his face flushed, opened his mouth and shut it again. For the first time since she’d gotten there, Amy heard music. “Bolero,” scored for heavy metal guitar. It sounded like an air raid. “That’s all, folks,” he shouted, “tune in next week when our guest will be—
Leslie?
Who’s on for next Sunday?” The door remained closed. “There you have it, folks! Our guest will be
Some! Random! Cultural! Fathead!
Stay tuned now for—” The blue light and music went off simultaneously, and Molloy threw his headphones at the wall and charged off cursing.

Amy could hear him walking down the hall screaming imprecations, but she couldn’t hear anybody answering him. In the muffled distance, a door slammed. She looked toward the mirror and waved. “Is anybody in there?” she asked. “Is it all right for me to leave?” The mirror disappeared, and in its place appeared a brightly-lit roomful of people—Leslie Carnahan, Raul, Shambala, and John from Fontana—waving gaily back at her. They all looked genuinely happy. Her new friends. She’d actually connected with somebody. Well, at least it hadn’t been a total loss.

*   *   *

Cars were like hounds: they always knew their way home. Driving home she felt expansive, nearly content. She turned off the GPS lady, found Oscar Peterson on the radio, and let her car nose its way to harbor. For the first sixty miles she basked in the modest glory of her performance, which she really owed in its entirety to Chaz Molloy. First, he had prodded her into an honest confession, which in the end had relieved her conscience and cost her nothing. And if he hadn’t pushed her too far with that wordplay insult, there would have been no performance at all, just a waste of time and gasoline. Her NCN riff had been pretty inspired. Also, as obnoxious as he was, she had not blamed him for the feminist icon debacle. He had no way of knowing she had been dogged by such misapprehensions since childhood, starting with when she had been chosen for some all-district poetry award and gotten pinned with a medal for “excellence in athletics.” Her birth, marriage, and publication dates were often way off, and her name in print had invariably been misspelled (with an
o
instead of a
u
), once on the inside cover of a first edition. Amy attracted these little muddles the way some people won door prizes. Molloy had dealt with it gracelessly, but she couldn’t hold that against him, especially in light of how inappropriate an interview subject she turned out to be. Surely if he had known anything about her—whatever there was about her to know—he never would have agreed to have her on in the first place.