Amy Falls Down (37 page)

“Really?”

“Absolutely,” said Amy. “Now, tell me more. Tell me everything.”

*   *   *

Everything was a lot. Inspiration Point—IP—had thirty members, six living on premises, all of whom paid plenty for the right to commit themselves to twenty cubicle hours per week, minimum. At first, Carla wanted a weekly page quota, but Harry B talked her out of it, so that the only requirement was what Carla called “butts in seats” twenty hours per. Failure to log these hours or to obey rules against time-wasting computer games meant instant one-week suspension; two failures meant a year-length expulsion with no refunds. During the first weeks two paying members were drummed out, and the rest, seeing that Carla wasn’t kidding, knuckled under, and in no time word of mouth brought in four more, and soon there was a long waiting list. “We considered expanding,” Harry said, “but decided on a limit of thirty for the time being, until we see the results.”

The results so far were impressive. Kurt R had finished his cancer nurse novel. He thought it was pretty good for a first novel (“It’s wonderful,” said Brie Spangler, sitting beside him, her hand on his shoulder), but he figured he’d never find an agent for it unless he wrote something cheerier, so he had started a comic novel about a small-town emergency room. Brie Spangler said it was hilarious.

Brie had abandoned her working-class car-thief novel and was “working on short fiction” and mum about her progress, which Amy guessed was nil, though she was “loving the atmosphere” of Inspiration Point and talking it up on the radio. Amy hoped Kurt R appreciated that she was paying, both in money and in time, to be his besotted cheerleader.

Patrice was working on a new story, “not about my mother,” so good for him.

The biggest surprise of all was Surtees, who had miraculously quit doing those horrible medical thrillers and was writing a weekly advice column for the
Reader
. “It’s actually worthwhile,” Harry whispered. “He answers questions and keeps everybody up-to-date on local infections and contagions. He’s like the measles weatherman. The Measleman. The
Times
is putting out feelers.”

Amy was torn between admiration and despair. Whether deliberately or accidentally, Carla had applied something like a Weight Watchers model to the huge consumer base of lit-wannabes, basically getting them to pay her to do something they ought to be doing on their own, and of course it was chugging right along, and even with no business sense Amy could easily imagine a nationwide IP franchise annually contributing tens of thousands of publishable manuscripts to the Matterhorn stack of books nobody reads. Yet she liked the idea of the anti-retreat: the unmagical workstations, the unglamorous time clock. What they were describing came much closer to her own experience of writing than any “How I Write” account she had ever read.

Ricky Buzza cleared his throat and stood up. “I have news,” he said.

“You got the agent,” said Amy.

“Who blabbed?” asked Carla. “Nobody was supposed to blab!”

“He’s just got that look,” Amy said. He did. Triumphant guilt, the unmistakable aura of the first writer in the pack to make good. Amy remembered how it had felt for her, when she was younger than Ricky, getting advice on her manuscripts from a guy in the English Department who had thirty years earlier had spectacular success with one short story—it was anthologized everywhere and made into a movie and a teleplay—and then gone dry. He’d put in a word for her with his old publisher, and she could still remember the unpleasant surprise on his face when she’d mentioned (off-the-cuff, by-the-by, like the insensitive young snot she had been) that they’d bought “the thing.” He’d shifted expressions instantly, replacing the honest one with one of paternal pride. Had the shift been achieved deliberately behind the palm of a hand passing from top to bottom it would have been comical, but of course the moment was anything but funny, and neither was her own response, that ugly-feeling hybrid of sympathy and glee. Until that moment she had not thought about what she did in the privacy of her notebooks as a competitive undertaking, but of course it was, and here was Ricky, the first of the group to make good. He was red-faced, fidgety, ready to burst. “It’s more than an agent, isn’t it?” she asked him. Nobody, even today, could look that bursty about an agent.

“Well … sort of, yeah. She’s talking with two publishers. They’re—”

Carla leaped to her feet. “Bidding war! Bidding war!” she screamed, totally breaking character, jumping up and down like the performing toddler she had once been.

“Well, technically more of a skirmish,” said Ricky. “But yeah.”

Amy, happy to feel not a twinge of envy, scanned the faces before her. Only the new people looked less than overjoyed, but then they had no history with him. “
Tiberius,
I presume?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, over Carla’s manic chanting, “but we’ve changed the name again.”

“Nero?”

“Wow,” said Ricky. “How did you guess? Also, it’s his last name, not his first. I’m scrapping ‘Denton.’ My agent’s idea. Turns out there used to be a kind of baby pajamas called Dr. Dentons.”

“No kidding,” said Amy. It would be mean to tell him she knew this. She probably shouldn’t have guessed “Nero” either. If she had ever had children, she’d have had to practice feigning ignorance. What was that like? she wondered.

When the excitement died down, Carla told everyone it was time for Last Class. “I have nothing left to teach you,” Amy said, meaning it, and Carla, yelling, “We knew you’d say that!” ran from the room and wheeled in an enormous flat-screen monstrosity. “Which is why we set this up.”

“Tiffany did, actually,” said Ricky. “She spent hours putting it together.”

“It was fun,” Tiffany said. “I took a film school extension class a couple of years ago. This was great practice.”

“We also assumed,” said Dr. Surtees, “that you were so busy making appearances that you probably missed most of this.”

Amy had an awful idea what “this” was and lacked the heart to tell them that one can’t very well miss what one has deliberately dodged. She sighed theatrically, snagged two drinks from a passing caterer, and settled back.

*   *   *

Tiffany had mashed together footage from both C-SPAN appearances, the Whither debacle and that interview she’d barely stayed awake for. There were amateur videos too of bookstore events, none of which she recognized. Tiffany alternated snippets from all that with audio clips from a hundred radio interviews playing beneath a montage, still pictures of trains, radio stations, and Alphonse, who had apparently been featured in magazines and on various blogs. On the cover of
Parade
he stared nobly to the left,
Hands Off, I’m On the Job
clearly legible on his blue service vest. He had also made the national newscasts: there he trudged, snuffling through the Montana grass, immortal against a backdrop of smoke and flame.

Then came the talk shows. Resisting the urge to blur and shield her eyes, she watched her oxymoronic self, a kindly wiseass, a seraphic scold, engage with entertainers, seeming to take every question seriously. She smiled often and never laughed, and when she wasn’t smiling she was a little scary. She didn’t do that corny peering-over-the-tops-of-glasses thing anymore; instead she inclined very slightly forward, adjusting her bifocals upward, studying the speaker’s face intently. This made some people nervous, but that had not, she recalled, been her purpose. She had simply been trying to figure out why they were there and what they were doing. Most were much less lifelike in person than here on the screen, so armored they looked like androids. How did you get to this point? What’s your story? she was wondering, though it looked as though she were cataloguing them like pinned moths.

On the talk shows, nobody asked her about her books or her opinions about writer/reader ratios, so they were spared her well-worn foolscap riffs. They all wanted to talk about was the birdbath accident and what had led to what and what it all meant. She watched herself reflect their questions back upon them, getting them to spill their own metaphysical theories, which, for most of the movie people, boiled down to everything happening for a reason. Twelve of them referenced their “journey” or their “path.” She remembered wanting to write that down, and now took out her notebook and did. When had Americans started journeying? Was this some faux-Buddhist thing? A skeletal actress whose path looped between jail and rehab claimed to be her biggest fan, and then reeled off the titles of her favorite Amy books, all of which were in fact written by Jenny Marzen. She saw the host catch the mistake—he was a sharp guy, he furrowed his brow and glanced down at the note cards on his desk—and she saw herself catch his eye and shake her head, warning him off. She’d forgotten that moment: that exchange of looks, the subtlety with which they had negotiated, the grace with which he’d backed down, forgoing the easy laugh in deference to her. The girl was an idiot, but that didn’t mean they had to embarrass her. She watched a coked-out comedian whose specialty was insult pretending to pretend outrage at having his segment cut short. Hers had run much longer than planned, so when he came on set he was furious. He alternated between roasting her age, body, and vocabulary and throwing himself at her, murmuring “Forgive me, darling, I’m not myself tonight,” which was apparently one of his trademarks, a guaranteed laugh-generator, except that it didn’t. She remembered wanting to bat him away, but only because he was touching her. Otherwise he was just pitiful. She watched herself watch him with what looked like kindly concern. The audience went silent; the unhappy host sat still; the miserable comic shut his mouth. This moment she remembered clearly, because of the hush.

This had been her first time on national television, and she just assumed the dead air meant they were on some sort of break and the mikes were off, which gave her leave to do what she did, which was to lean close to the comic and ask, in a low, gentle voice, “What is
wrong
with you?” The crowd’s roar of approval shocked her as much as it did him. And until now, she hadn’t known that the moment was actually
televised
. How horrible. Millions of people saw her humiliate this man.

“What is
wrong
with you!” Ricky was shouting now, and the others were chanting, “What is
wrong
with you!”

“Why are they doing that?” she asked Harry B.

“It’s a meme,” he said. “It’s all over the Net. You’re the new Where’s the Beef Lady.”

Tiffany’s mashup went on for an hour. Amy was touched by the group’s enthusiasm, the joy with which they greeted every memetic moment, their pleasure in being able to do this thing for her, and she made it through the rest of the hour by focusing on
that,
while tuning out as much of the display as possible. She hoped the smile on her face was as convincing to them as was the smiling countenance of the televised creature, a woman Amy thoroughly disliked.

She was the reason Amy never watched unscripted TV or listened to talk radio. The woman, like many of the hosts and a few of the guests, was bright, guarded, and possibly interesting, but her willingness to be on show like this, her comfort with it—and it was undeniably comfort, she never looked uneasy—canceled that all out. Who the hell were these people, who imagined the minutiae of their lives and thoughts could be of public interest? “You’re a pro,” one of the hosts had told her off-camera, “you could have been doing this all your life.”

She saw he was right. She saw that this woman attracted attention by ignoring it, understanding that it was her due and that it was worthless. She made other people self-conscious. Her serenity was tactical. She saw that her gift was that, unlike most of these spotlit people, she didn’t care. What a thing to put on your tombstone.
I never cared about anything
.

Well, except Max. And these people here. And getting some of it down right. And her dog, who wrapped up the show on a high note, sniffing the feet of cameramen, navigating rivers of cable, rooting in the couch cushions next to a Fox News blowhard and coming up with what looked like a strip of beef jerky, to the deafening delight of the crowd. “Another meme,” said Harry. “Your dog is gonna bring this jerk down.”

She stayed as long as she could stand to, answering questions about what this or that celebrity was like, and were any of the green rooms actually green, and how did it feel under the hot lights. At ten o’clock as she gathered herself to leave she realized that no one had asked her about the train wreck. Not one single question. Even Carla had refrained, and Amy was seized by a sudden impulse to embrace her, to embrace all of them, an impulse so sharp she almost gave in to it. How well these people knew her.

So she sat back down and stayed a little longer and gave them everything, the fire, the rocky field, the dark theater, the lumberjack who called her the lady with the dog, the dying woman. She gave them Harriet Johnston and Thelma Schoon. She gave them
and you were right there rising.
She gave it all away knowing that she would now be unable to use any of it herself, having told it, the richest of her tiny cache of life stories, and she did it gladly, without effort, as though she were an old hand at self-sacrifice.

She left them then, happy and waving, and drove home, all the while hearing
What’s wrong with you?,
all the while answering, knowing,
I should have had children.
She could barely make out the freeway lane markers. She had to pull over in the breakdown lane just to get herself together. These days her night vision wasn’t all that great, even when she wasn’t crying.

*   *   *

The phone’s last ring was echoing when she got inside. “I know you’re awake, babe,” said Maxine.

Amy picked it up. “Are you really dying?” she asked her.

“It’s a Christmas Miracle,” said Maxine. “I was, but now I’m not.”

“Don’t screw with me, Maxine. I’m not in the mood.”

“What can I tell you? I had a real diagnosis, they said I’d be gone in a year, now they’re saying I’m good for now. Honest. What’s the deal?”