Amy Falls Down (32 page)

Amy plugged in her phone and called Maxine, who picked up on the eighth ring and sounded like she had just run a marathon. “I gave already,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Amy. “I’ve been writing since I got back. I meant to call you yesterday.”

“Bullshit,” said Maxine. “What do you think about Charlie Rose?”

“He seems like a nice man,” said Amy.

“Call me when you’ve read your damn mail. Ten minutes, max. I haven’t got all day, if you know what I mean.” Maxine hung up.

Maxine was apparently going to play the terminal illness card at every opportunity. The hell with Maxine. As Amy waited for Maxine to call back, she looked at all the forwarded emails, one of which was from some woman connected with Charlie Rose. It looked like a feeler. It didn’t come out with an invitation to be on his show; it just inquired about her availability. In addition to the Munster Traveling Litfic Show, there were enquiries from book chains, local radio and TV shows, and publishers. The language used in most of these emails was identical: people claimed to be “excited” by Amy’s behavior on C-SPAN. Terms like “voice of reason” and “no-nonsense” cropped up a lot. The phone rang before Amy could begin to think about any of these offers, if indeed they were actual offers. It was no longer as easy to say “no” as it had been before. Before what? Before Maxine. Before the birdbath.

Amy leaned back in her chair. “You know what I’m going to say,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” said Maxine. She hung up.

*   *   *

The phone, at which Amy was staring, went off immediately, and the calling number wasn’t Maxine’s. “Holy crap,” shrieked Carla, “I thought you were gone for good! How are you? Amy, you were so awesome! We’re on for next Thursday, right?”

“Did you get my note about Patrice Garrotte?”

“Done and done,” said Carla.

“I’ve got to go,” said Amy. “See you then.”

She stared at the phone some more. Amy didn’t have Call Waiting. Maxine had probably tried to call back while Carla was on the horn.

*   *   *

After five minutes, Amy actually shrugged her shoulders a little, as though someone other than Alphonse was watching. Alphonse was not impressed. She closed out her email program and clicked on her blog. Perhaps it was time to post something on the “I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?” page that Ricky Buzza had set up for her. And what a wonderful night that had been, luxuriating in her old books, drinking the last of her good wine, enjoying the company of a fellow human being. And what a long time ago it seemed, although, now that she thought of it, it had been only a few months. She missed Ricky and wondered how he was doing with his ridiculous serial killer book. For that matter, she missed Harry B and his bemused legal advice. She even missed Dr. Surtees. Eventually, as Holden Caulfield said, you miss everybody, even that goddamn Maurice.

Ricky had set up this page so that commenters could weigh in on various Amy-related controversies. Amy was humbled to see that in the past week alone he had been forced to set up five different pro-con topics. She could see in parentheses the number of comments for each so far.

•
The Deal with Jasmine White-Banerjee (10)

•
The Deal with Jenny Marzen (2)

•
The Deal with Davy Goonan (26)

•
Amy’s Big Reveal (196)

•
Haters (305)

•
Stand-up (10)

There wasn’t much of a deal with Jenny Marzen—the two commenters liked her books, sort of—and even less of one with Jazz White-Banerjee, who had either leaned on people to post raves about her performance and books or written each of the comments herself. Amy was glad to see a renewal of interest in Davy Goonan. Few of these people had actually read him, but on the strength of his spellbinding conference speech they were planning to run out and track down his novels. Unlike the live audience, these people had not minded his apparent slam of Jenny Marzen, calling it “brilliant” and “ninja.”

In spite of her speech and her repeated insistence during the tweetathon, virtually all commenters refused to believe that the birdbath story was anything but a clever fiction, or a not so clever one, and that’s how the pro-con debate played out. Amy was disheartened by this, and even more so by the silly arguments offered in support of her side-splitting antics, referred to by Prince Spaghettiday as a “meta-stunt.” At least the people who disapproved of her theatrics were coherent about it. “I have better things to do,” complained Sarge Entwistle, “than spend my remaining minutes parsing the cryptic asides of this dim literary light. She needs to either write something or shut the hell up.” Amen, said Amy.

The Haters didn’t hate Amy—they hated each other, along with individual tweeters and live audience members. Reading through some of their posts, Amy realized how little attention she had actually paid to what was going on during that time. The live audience questions, especially those of Hester Lipp, had registered with her, and she winced now as she saw poor Hester being torn apart on the page by a bestial mob. It wasn’t enough that they thought she was strident and unpleasant. They ridiculed her face and body. Apparently Amy’s mental picture of Hester had been dead wrong: she was a “shrieking battleaxe” with “the body of a Humvee and the face of Pete Postlethwaite.” Amy spent a half hour deleting the nastiest of these comments.

“Stand-up” was not a roster of remarks but a list of links, all to YouTube. Taken together, Amy saw that she could watch her entire “stand-up comedy” performance in ten-minute chunks. To avoid this she hibernated her computer and dragged Alphonse out of the house for his first evening walkies since the Night of the Coyotes.

The July sun wasn’t quite down, but already the air was cooling. Alphonse was slower than usual, or perhaps Amy was a bit speedier. She had lost some weight over the last few months, enough so that her shirt and jeans were pleasantly baggy, and while she didn’t have a spring in her step, she wasn’t breathing hard as she came to the top of the drive and sat on the big rock there. She hadn’t been trying to lose, but jumping through hoops for Maxine had probably boosted her metabolism, effecting an anxiety diet.

The big flat rock where they always rested sat in front of the most expensive house on Jacaranda, a three-story house made of actual wood, reputed to have an actual cellar, though Amy had always been skeptical. She had never met the owners, though she had often admired their Japanese maples, which reminded her of home. Quite plentiful in the East, they required too much water for most inland residents. Their leaves were desiccated now, mostly mulch at the base of each tree, perfect camouflage for rattlers. The maples had fallen on hard times, as had the house itself, which according to the sign out front was now owned by Wells Fargo. Amy slipped Alphonse off his leash, shut him behind the low stucco wall, and watched him over the gate as he patrolled the perimeter. He flushed a cottontail out of a crimson hibiscus bush; the rabbit shot through dry grass into a pile of firewood, but Alphonse paid it no mind. He was too busy savoring its scent, unraveling its recent itinerary. Scent hounds were true scholars. Like Amy, Alphonse lived in his head. If he had to kill his meat, he would probably be a vegetarian.

Amy jotted “Anxiety Diet” in her notebook and pondered the metaphysics of scents. Aside from apes, corvines, and parrots, most animals did not engage in symbolic thinking, perhaps because they couldn’t, perhaps because they didn’t wish to. Why name things when they were right there and you knew what they were for and whether you needed them? Who had time to philosophize? Still, the basset took in everything and cataloged it, and how was that possible without signs or symbols? She had no doubt that he was now exploring the recent and not-so-recent lives of all this property’s residents, from the humans who had built the place and lost it, to the gophers, lizards, raccoons, and mice to whom it was an ancestral manse. He could if he wished reconstruct whole scenes, plots, stories of sexual conquest and frustration, of sickness and misery, tales of violent death and hairbreadth survival. Here a trespassing cat ran afoul of two coyotes. Here in winter a human pup dropped a Frito, which fed a tree rat, who fed a redtail. How did he handle these narrative spoors? His dreams must be far richer and more detailed than her own.

She let him stay as long as he wanted, which turned out to be the better part of an hour, and as they walked back home he looked more thoughtful than usual, less hell-bent on getting back to his sofa cushion throne. He strolled, distracted, like a recent theatergoer working out the significance of a second-act monologue.

There were no new emails, no blinking numbers on her answering machine. It was ten o’clock in New York. Amy poured herself two fingers of bourbon and watched herself on YouTube.

*   *   *

She had always resisted the idea of herself as a perceptible, memorable object. Of course she knew she was more or less visible, that her corpus could be sensed by human and animal alike, but from childhood she had found it difficult to believe that she lingered in memory when she wasn’t in the room. When a neighbor child or teacher or classmate would say, “We were just talking about you” or “I thought of you the other day when…,” she would be startled and put off. Why would they think or talk about her? What was wrong with them, that they were reduced to filling up head space with Amy? She wasn’t offended or paranoid, just mystified. She once made the mistake of mentioning this to a boyfriend, the son of an Augusta psychiatrist, and been mauled with sympathy. “Don’t you know how special you are?” he asked. What an idiot. Amy, not the boyfriend, Francis Pangloss, who didn’t know any better and couldn’t be expected to anyway, not at the age of twenty. But she should have known better. Why had she shared with him? Pan
coast.
She’d been only baffled, not driven by loneliness. Amy had never been lonely in her life.

Of course she knew she was special. Everybody was special in his own head, which was the only place that counted. It was way too much to expect being special to other people. The very thought was repellent. This attitude had contributed to Amy’s childhood reputation as a stuck-up snot, which hurt her feelings a bit since it was untrue, at least at the outset, at least until she grew tired of being misconstrued and decided that most people really weren’t very bright. Children are never seen as eccentric, only abnormal. You didn’t get to be eccentric until you aged, which was why it was now almost impossible to alienate any of these people, no matter what she did. Not that she was trying to, but she was alarmed at how dense her commenters, her viewers, had been. They thought she was cute.

And now, looking at the first ten-minute installment of her Manhattan stand-up debut, she was forced to see why. This woman, a complete stranger to her, had a kindly face, her own mother’s face. She peered out at the audience (or rather into the white light, but you’d never know it) over the tops of her reading glasses like Aunt Bee. The disconnect between her benevolent demeanor and her dry, understated delivery made for riveting TV, according to the YouTube posters, who seemed more illiterate than those on her own page. According to them, she was a “hoot” and a “roit” and “beyond gay,” whatever that meant. Did they think she was gay? No matter.

Audience members, or perhaps C-SPAN, had included multiple videos of Amy prattling about her grandmother’s movie magazine habit. In vain Amy searched her own face for some hint of the woman she had once been, the one who had loved mirrors so much that she’d slapped them up on every wall in the house and in the first year of their marriage encouraged Max to invest in an overpriced antique cheval glass. “It opens up the space,” she had parroted, and he said she had the spatial sophistication of an infant and grumbled about opening up his wallet and teased her about her vanity. She said she didn’t have a vain bone in her body. “Okay, but your face is over the moon about itself.” She said she wasn’t
socially
vain. He snorted. She said she didn’t care what other people saw when they looked at her, but yes, all right, she did love her own reflection, the blatant fact of it. There she was, everywhere she looked, right there, surrounded by solid, familiar objects. This made her a solid, familiar object. “You’re a very strange person,” he had said. A few nights later they had risen after midnight from their respective beds, their respective lovers, she to use the bathroom, he to do some late-night reading, and encountered each other naked in the dark connecting hallway, and they had stood still, looking, and Max had taken her hand, and Amy had caught sight of them both in the long mirror, and together they had turned and regarded themselves there. Amy had caught her breath. “We are beautiful,” she said. “Yes, we are,” he said. And they were. Just astonishingly beautiful. Young, strong, perfectly made. Undeniably corporeal. Amy, whose sense-memories were never plentiful and who learned to be skeptical of the few she had, never doubted the accuracy of this one. True to form, she was not able later to recapture the image itself, nor would she have wanted to, since the truth was sharp enough. The moment had been enchanted, as sublime as their visible selves but sorrowful in recollection. She could never look back at it without awareness of her own mortality and his. Somehow she knew the moment itself had triggered their decay, imperceptible for a while but still relentless. And there, on her computer screen, was the proof, a face and body he would never have recognized and which she barely recognized herself, since the only mirror in her house was on the bathroom medicine cabinet.

There was a famous problem in philosophy called Identity Through Time. Amy, who had majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, had found it, along with most problems in philosophy, intriguing but not very. Let’s say on Monday you have a car and on Tuesday you replace the muffler. Is it the same car on Tuesday as it was on Monday? Well, obviously. But what if, over time, you replace every part of the car, from the chassis to the engine to the horn. Is it now the identical car? Well, no. So, at what point did it lose its identity? This was where Amy always nodded off. At some point, she would think, to be discovered by someone with a more persistent intellect than hers. Still the underlying issue entertained. What does it mean to say
the same car, the same house, the same woman
? Was the woman she looked at now identical to the child who had read Krafft-Ebing that rainy day? She scoured her own pale, tired eyes for evidence, but there was none. Like all strangers, like all visible corporeal human beings, this woman was an utter mystery. Looking at her from the outside was nothing at all like looking in a mirror. Unless we happen on them without warning, we control what we see in mirrors. This was beyond her control. For a short while, Amy was disturbed by not being disturbed: she felt she ought to be horrified and wondered why she wasn’t. But soon she relaxed into the experience, the brand-new experience of seeing herself from the outside.