Amy Falls Down (6 page)

The day Amy got her acceptance letter from St. Martin’s was the same day she agreed to marry Max, “just until the war blows over.” And by the end of the war, Amy, happily settled into what would turn out to be the only truly fulfilling and intimate (however platonic) relationship of her life, had written and published two well-received books of short stories, the second one,
Everything Handsome,
nominated for the National Book Award and selling respectably. She was a “Young Writer to Watch,” and halfway between 1975 and the publication of
Ambassador of Loss
in 1978 Maxine Grabow descended on her like some deus ex machina lowered from the rafters.

Amy remembered first meeting her at one of her own Waterville soirées, in which Max’s colleagues and students generally milled about, along with whomever Max or Amy was seeing at the time. Publishing types generally didn’t make it up to Maine, and after Maxine’s first visit, neither Amy nor Max could figure out how she found her way into their house. Maxine was dwarfishly short with alarmingly red hair stuffed partly into a black beret; she wore a wool suit Max identified as Chanel, with a huge moth-hole in one sleeve; she smoked Tiparillos; and, like E. F. Hutton, when she spoke people listened, although in Maxine’s case this was because nobody else could hear himself think. She had a voice for the theater, but not, as she cheerfully acknowledged, the talent, which was why she had ended up heading her own literary agency. An agency, as it turned out, with only one agent, but a pretty successful one. Her star client was Henrietta Mant.

At first, Amy thought she was a lesbian. She kept staring at Amy, sizing her up in a way that made Amy both curious and uncomfortable. “Wrong,” said Max. “Look at how she’s checking out the guys. She’s not after your bod. She wants something else, though. Watch out.”

Maxine finally cornered her in the kitchen. She blew whole-leaf tobacco smoke up Amy’s nose and announced in a reverberating whisper, “I’m going to make you a pile of money.” She whipped out a business card that said GRABOW in big letters and “literary agent” in footnote font.

“I’m not that kind of writer,” Amy said, prompting a bray so outlandish that a handful of people gathered outside the kitchen to observe.

“That’s what they all say, babe!”

“You know what I mean,” Amy said, reddening at her own girlishness.

“What are you working on, babe?”

Amy was backed up against the stove.
None of your beeswax,
she thought. “
Beeswax,
” she said. “It’s the working title of my first novel.” She began to breathe more easily.

Max had taught her how to do this, to deal with threatening social situations by transforming people into fictional characters with no inner lives. “Pretend they’re foils,” Max told her. “Characters in a farce, and you’re the one writing it.” From the start of their friendship, Max had devoted himself to coaxing Amy out of her cave, partly, she thought, for his own amusement, and partly because he genuinely cared about her. “But they’re not foils,” she would object, “they have feelings. I don’t want to deal with those.” Max changed her attitude by reminding her how much she hated it when other people speculated about her own feelings. “It’s so intrusive,” she would complain. “So don’t intrude on theirs,” he counseled, reasonably, and she was still learning not to. Maxine Grabow’s feelings, she reminded herself, are none of my beeswax.

“A novel! Atta girl.” Maxine’s small black eyes played over Amy’s face like searchlights. “You can’t make lunch money on short stories, especially the kind you write. You’re good, but your stuff makes people want to kill themselves. Compared to you, Grace Paley is Erma Bombeck, which is why she won the NBA and you didn’t have a shot. What’s it about?” More smoke up the nose. “Lose the title, by the way.”

Amy wasn’t actually working on anything except one story that wouldn’t wake up, a story she had been trying to finish since she was eighteen, and in any event she would never discuss a work in progress with anybody, even Max. And what did Grace Paley have to do with the National Basketball Association? “
Beeswax
is all about a beekeeper. The last in a long line of beekeepers. He lives in—”

“
He?
Scrap that. Change it. Gotta be a girl.”

“—in Falmouth, Mass.” What a horrible woman.

“And … what?”

“And … his brothers sell pasteurized honey and mead.”

“What’s the hook, babe?” Maxine was still scanning her face, this time rapidly, from eye to eye, as though Amy were a human shell game.

“There isn’t any one single hook, per se,” said Amy, perspiring freely. She never said
per se.
She hated
per se.
“It’s episodic. Each chapter almost stands on its own. ‘The Swarm.’ ‘The Hive.’ Right now I’m working on ‘Smoker.’”

“Fabulous,” said Maxine. She grinned widely, Tiparillo jutting from her clenched teeth like the gun on a battleship.

“I
like it,” simpered Amy, preparing to slip away into the living room, already rehearsing the scene for a replay with Max.

“Yeah.” Maxine’s expression changed. She seemed to be really enjoying herself now. “How about ‘The Big Sting’?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“‘Queen For a Day.’”

“I’m not sure about—”

“You’re not working on a novel at all, are you?”

This was the trouble with treating people like foils. You had no way of knowing whether they were doing the same thing to you.

“No offense taken,” said Maxine. “I’m a pushy broad. It’s my job. That and making you a pile of money.”

Amy got serious with Maxine. She seriously tried to explain that she was not ambitious. She didn’t have that hunger to see herself in print. Writing was a challenge for her, a lark. She wrote because she could, not because she had to, or even particularly wanted to. Maxine said that was fine. “I’ve got enough ambition for both of us.” Amy said she wasn’t a novelist. “Neither is Jackie S, and that one sells millions.” In the end she extracted Amy’s phone number and promised to call every Friday until one of them caved. “She must be phenomenal,” Max said later, laughing, while Amy banged her head against the wall.

Within six months Amy had started
Ambassador of Loss,
and a year later it was in proofs.

Whatever success Amy had as a writer was due to the infernal persistence of Maxine Grabow. Now here they were, both still alive, and Maxine still kicking. What she wanted from Amy was a mystery, but she was, Amy knew, fully capable of literally camping out on Jacaranda Drive. On Monday evening, Amy poured herself a tumbler of cabernet, threw Alphonse a chunk of brownie, and picked up the phone.

CHAPTER NINE

Gravitas

“Babe! You look like hell, by the way,” Maxine rasped out before resuming a terrible cough. She must have been in the middle of it when her phone rang.

As always, Amy was taken aback. “How did you know it was me? And how do you know what I look like?”

“Caller ID.”

“My picture pops up on your phone?” My god, what a world.

“No, but your number does, and you’re the only writer I know in San Diego. And your face is all over the Net.”

“No it’s not.”

More hacking. “Your picture’s in that thing that girl wrote. Holly
Antoon
. Is she for real? How old is she? Twelve?”

“Everybody’s twelve, Maxine. My ER doctor is twelve.”

“Tell me about it. My husband was ten, in dog years. Hah! What ER doctor?”

“When did you get married?” Maxine had retained her talent for zeroing in immediately on out-of-bounds topics.

“After your time. Lasted five minutes. What ER doctor?”

Amy rubbed her eyes. “Maxine, what’s up?”

Maxine laughed so hard that Amy had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Thought you’d never ask. Here’s the deal: you’re gonna get buzz.”

Amy said nothing.

“I’m saying buzz. Internet buzz. Industry buzz. You’re gonna get hot.”

“Hot buzz,” said Amy. Maxine had used different nonsense terms, back in the day. But if “hot buzz” meant what Amy thought it meant, Maxine’s sentiment was brand-new. She had never set Amy up as a potential generator of bestsellers. “Piles of money” had translated to “enough money to live on frugally for a year,” which had actually been nice.
Megabucks,
Amy now remembered, was the term Maxine reserved for money writers. “You talking megabucks?”

“Hah!
Now
she wants money.” More coughing. “Listen, babe, who knows. Maybe. The point is, you’re going to be hot, but for five minutes, tops.”

“And then I’ll be cold forever. Which was my cunning plan all along.”

Now there was silence; no coughing, no laughing. Maxine sighed. “Why am I not surprised.”

The tone in her voice was one Amy now remembered well: a special mixture of disgust and regret. The last time Amy had seen her, they had met in Boston, where Max, recently diagnosed with AIDS, was undergoing a battery of experimental procedures at Mass General. Maxine had joined her in a nearby cafe. By this time, Amy hadn’t written a thing since
A Fiercer Hell,
published six years before. Maxine had been nagging her for months, but this time Amy expected a reprieve—that they would sip their cappuccinos and catch up on non-literary news, and Maxine would commiserate. Instead they had a huge blowup, during which Maxine accused Amy of using her husband’s terminal illness as an excuse to stop writing, and Amy, instead of calling Maxine a name (she had never used the word “bitch” in her life, even in fiction), had iced up and claimed that yes, she had arranged for the terminal illness itself with that express purpose in mind, and in the end, Maxine had said, “Call me when you give a shit,” and stuck Amy with the check.

“You owe me ten bucks,” said Amy, offering an olive branch.

“What for?”

“Boston. The last time I saw you was the first and last time I ever ordered a cappuccino. This was before Starbucks, remember? I couldn’t believe they charged four dollars for a cup of coffee.”

“I was out of line,” said Maxine. “But I was right.”

“I
knew that. You didn’t say anything Max hadn’t already told me, more than once. That’s why I got so pissed off.”

“That was you, pissed off?” Maxine hacked robustly. “You could have fooled me.”

“Why do I have hot buzz, and how can I get rid of it?”

“Remember Lex Munster?”

Amy cracked up.

“I know, sounds like the Addams Family. Maybe after your time. Lex is a senior editor at Perkins, total shlump but real knack for picking winners. I think he has Asperger’s. Anyway, he called me Sunday—he reads everything every day, and he has this incredible electronic Rolodex deal with the name of every writer, living or dead, who ever had an agent, living or dead, cross-referenced, of course.”

“I guess we both qualify,” said Amy.

“Hah! So he calls me and reads the whole damn newspaper article over the phone. I’m on the floor laughing. That weird thing with Trotsky, and the bit about Hetty Mant, there’s a blast from the past, and you’re sitting there like Buddha, and the girl has no clue, absolutely no clue. You played her like a goddamn violin. It’s priceless, babe.”

“Maxine, I didn’t play anything, I—”

“Here’s the thing. What got Lex so worked up was the stuff about experience being overrated, and all that, which frankly went right by me. You had me at bionic leg.”

Despite herself Amy was enjoying this. It was pleasant to have somebody, even somebody named Lex Munster, pay attention to her. Lex was right: the stuff about experience and feelings not being news was pretty good. Too bad she couldn’t remember saying it.

“Lex told me that the
ARB
is planning a where-are-they-now issue.”

The
ARB
was the
American Review of Books
. It didn’t have the cachet, such as it was, of the
NYRB,
but even Amy, who never looked at either rag, was aware of its existence and its growing popularity. The
ARB
was
NYRB
-meets-
USA Today,
another one of the many publications Amy never looked at on purpose. “Maxine, I’m way ahead of you. They’re going to do a thing on great washed-up writers, and you guys thought of me.”

“You got it, babe.”

“But there’s washed up and then there’s full fathom five. I was never big enough to be washed up. I’m a little tugboat, sunk a quarter mile out and never even missed. Countless generations of tautog have spawned on my foredeck—”

“Poor you,” said Maxine.

“—scup wander through my portholes, and blue crabs play pinochle on my bow.”

“Save the bullshit for Lex. Here’s the deal: Jenny Marzen is one of his authors, and she’s one of the twenty writers who get to pick their favorite forgotten genius.”

“Jenny Marzen is who again?” Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn’t know it. “And Jenny is my number one fan?”

“No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school.”

“What is she, twelve?”

“The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you’ve got gravitas.”

“That’s a dirty lie. I never even had mono.”

“Hah!”

Amy was beginning to feel a prickle of interest, even excitement, and it made her a little sick.

“I’m telling you, it’s a done deal. Lex just asked me to touch base with you.”

“Why?”

“He thinks we’re still in touch, by the way. Which is now true. He also thinks you’re working on a new book.”

“Which is false! Maxine—”

“I lied. It’s my job. The point is, when I know more, I’ll call you. Look, babe. I know you. I know you’re ‘above all this shit.’”

“Wrong. I’m
below
all this shit. I’m full fathom five. This is totally ridiculous.”

“And I knew you’d say that, but you’re just going to have to go along with the gag. Trust me. You’re gonna get hot. Warm, anyway. It’s gonna happen.”