Amy Falls Down (7 page)

“Warm buzz,” said Amy mournfully, but at the same time she saw it, the outline of that washed-up list, her own name in new print, her old titles mentioned in a magazine that people actually read. “Okay,” she said. “Am I supposed to do something?”

“‘Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,’” sang Maxine. “I’ll be in touch. Hold it.” She coughed for a full ten seconds. Amy wondered if she were dying and to her surprise hoped not. She liked Maxine a lot better now than she had when she was young and they had seemed a generation apart. Now it was just a few negligible years. “What ER doctor, babe? Are you all right?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Emphysema, but I’ve had it for ages. What were you doing in the ER?”

Amy opened her mouth to spill it all, the birdbath, the bag lady, Kurt Robetussien, MD, and the Amazing Fugue State Interview. “Twisted my ankle,” she said.

“Talk to you soon, babe,” said Maxine. “Stay off the foot.”

*   *   *

Amy sat for a long time with the phone in her lap, trying to get a fix on what she’d just done. Why hadn’t she told Maxine about the birdbath? She and Maxine could have shared a prolonged cackle over the absurd accident and its absurder consequences, and for sure it would have remained their little secret. Except the accident was none of anyone’s beeswax. Amy didn’t share secrets, not with anyone, not anymore.

Alphonse clicked into her bedroom and barked for his constitutional. Amy sang softly to him: “I’m a little tugboat, short and stout.” He regarded her with disapproval, as well he might. “I know it’s
teapot,
” she told him, letting him out into the yard. “It’s called poetic license.” Alphonse trotted off into the dark. He knows me, she thought, better than I know myself.

CHAPTER TEN

Birdbath II

Tuesdays were Amy’s day off from the online work that paid the bills, a fiction writing workshop open to anyone willing to cough up two hundred dollars a month. Until a year ago, her teaching had been actual rather than virtual, but after her last workshop turned into a real-life murder mystery and she made herself unemployable with the local university extension, she figured it was time to teach on her own terms and at her own pace, and from the comfort of her own home. Her online work started off small but by last June was steady enough so that she could quit her regular editing job, sit back, and watch the nickels roll in. This Tuesday, three days after the fall, she woke late with a plan to spend the day responsibly, reading through student work at leisure rather than putting it off until her back was to the wall, and perhaps getting started on a book review she’d been putting off for weeks. Instead she wasted half the day mousing around the Internet, looking up Maxine and Jenny Marzen and Lex Munster, and finding evidence of the upcoming
ARB
article, which was scant but there.

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna’s
Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb,
housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen’s impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes. Also the girl’s psychotic break was contrived, mechanically predicated on a combination of overwork and crippling guilt over the betrayal of her mentor, of whose intellectual prowess she stands in awe.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior and attitude of academics, who were on the whole no more brilliant, quirky, or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses—especially the older ones—functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn’t last a week in GenPop.

*   *   *

Jenny Marzen, like all living writers in the twenty-first century, had a web page, and it was nothing like Amy’s. For one thing, Marzen surely didn’t maintain her own page—she must have minions for that—and for another, the page was devoted to selling books, promoting tours, and sucking up to fans. The home page was a riot of tasteful color (Amy paused to jot down in her notebook the potential short story title “A Riot of Tasteful Color”), featuring a glamorous head shot of Marzen, who looked just like George Eliot, if George Eliot had colored and styled her hair like Bernadette Peters, stood facing a huge wall of yellow tulips, and glanced back sharply over her bare left shoulder. Surrounding the head shot was a collage of book jackets, most of which focused tightly on one section of a young female body—an eye, a hand, a furrowed brow, a buttock. There were pages devoted to the incontinent praise of critics and fans, to her three bull mastiffs, to her family and family tree. There were interview transcripts, videos, and full-length reviews from the
Times
.

Amy misspent a half hour clicking back and forth between Marzen’s site and her own, which focused almost totally on words. She had included a list of her own out-of-prints but then deliberately placed it on a page that was almost impossible to find: one had to navigate through six increasingly grumpy and intrusive links: (1)
What are you looking for?
(2)
Why?
This contained fifty choices, including “I’m bored” and “Sick of porn,” and so on, only one of which—“I’m looking for a list of your stupid books”—actually functioned as a link to (3)
Tell me about yourself,
again with a ridiculous list of possibilities, some of which occupied multiple paragraphs (Amy really got into these). Eventually, the exhausted explorer arrived at the puny grail:

Monstrous Women,
1971
,
paper 1980

Everything Handsome,
1975, paper 1980

The Ambassador of Loss,
1978, paper 1980

A Fiercer Hell,
1981

With her reluctant permission, her old student Ricky Buzza had recently tried to brighten the page with scanned-in images of Amy’s old book jackets. She had retained only one copy apiece of the first two books, and the jackets were ripped and stained with whiskey rings.
Everything Handsome
looked particularly ugly, the title bisected at a slant by a creased brown strip of Scotch tape which appeared to cross out the whole book as a lousy idea. Now Amy clicked from this page to Marzen’s, trying to enjoy the contrast between crass self-promotion and ironic humility, but, as Ricky had tried more than once to persuade her, her own page was really just pathetic.

And now the thought of Ricky Buzza set off an alarm. There was something about later today, something she was supposed to do. Amy ripped last year’s
ZooNews
calendar off her kitchen wall to reveal the new one, with a single penciled-in event for today, January 4, that damn potluck thing at Carla’s, with Ricky and Surtees and the other remnants of the Last Workshop Gang. Her handwriting, never a thing of beauty, was now officially a liability. Apparently it was happening in either two or five hours, and she had promised to bring “Wandolf Hillel.” She squinted at the scribbled line, blurring it slightly, until she was able to imagine that it said “Waldorf salad,” which at least made sense. She had only a few hours to secure a red cabbage, walnuts, mayonnaise, and a bag of apples, transform them into the promised dish, feed Alphonse, and leave for Carla’s house in La Jolla. She couldn’t remember why she had agreed to go—only that Carla had promised it wouldn’t turn into a birthday party. Reluctantly she put her computer into hibernation and prepared to venture abroad.

*   *   *

Amy had put off driving until she was in her late thirties and realized that soon Max would need her to take him to hospitals and doctors’ offices. Until called to duty, she had been too frightened to drive. She had gotten her driver’s license at seventeen, but only by learning to do a K-turn on Pushard Lane and parallel park on Rattlesnake Hill. Everybody in Augusta knew what tricks were required and where they would be performed, and everybody studied to the test, but Amy was probably one of the few who got a parent to drive her back home afterward. What frightened her was the responsibility, the fact that a moment’s inattention could ruin more lives than just her own. That coupled with the inattention itself, which would settle over her whenever she got behind the wheel. Cars were gigantic then. She could never guess at their outer dimensions, even on the driver’s side, and was always running up on curbs. Power steering, in its infancy, was outlandishly touchy, as were the power brakes, and sitting in the driver’s seat Amy always felt like a figurehead, disconnected to the huge machine. That she was vital to its behavior must be true, but it gave her so little to do—turn the steering wheel more than a couple of inches and risk a hairpin turn, breathe too forcefully on the brakes and slam into the dash—that she grew bored and let her mind wander and drove up on grass median strips or almost ran tractor trailer trucks off the road—trucks that she hadn’t even noticed, because they were in back of her. Until Max got sick, she enjoyed the passenger life. He always said she was the world’s best passenger, because she never second-guessed the driver.

After the diagnosis, Amy manned up. Max’s friend Carlos taught her how to drive a stick, and she took to it instantly. Cars had changed a lot in twenty-five years: they were smaller and more responsive, and shifting gears gave her something to do, a bridge to the physical world. To her amazement, she loved driving now. She loved being of use most of all, but she also loved her solitary drives. When Max was tucked in, she would drive out along the river and sometimes out into the Maine woods, exploring dirt roads, never worrying about getting stuck or lost, feeling oddly invincible. Sometimes she would put on a Chopin mazurka cassette, or a Bach, or if she were feeling particularly sad, she’d listen to Beethoven’s late quartets and sob for miles and miles, and then feel so much better. Sometimes she rocked out, unembarrassed by her awful taste, cranking up the volume until she could think of nothing at all. One time she got so excited by an AC/DC tape that she wound up in a ditch. Amy had never been a teenager: driving let her turn back the clock, for an hour or two.

But now, at sixty-two, Amy didn’t feel invincible anywhere, particularly in a car, whether she was behind the wheel or not. Southern California drivers and roads were better than those in New England, but under these fabled freeways there was a constant apocalyptic vibe. She was always aware of what her old driver ed teacher had called “the big picture,” and the picture in California was huge: lately, especially, whenever she merged onto the I-15 she felt like a microscopic cell in the bloodstream of an enormous predatory beast. She had never felt that way on the I-95, which was more of a pinball machine than a purposive assemblage of veins and arteries. Driving here was a grim task, not a white-knuckle game.

Not long after arriving in California, she had been driving home late from her class, listening to a call-in show, when the radio doctor interrupted the caller: “Hey. Did you feel that?” and the caller said, “Yeah, what was that?” and then, “There’s another one,” and “Whoa. That was serious,” and they went back and forth about “that” for a couple of minutes, and then, without explanation, returned to their topic. “That” turned out to be an earthquake, Amy’s first, and although she went on to experience numerous rattlers and rollers, this first one, which she didn’t feel at all, was the most frightening, as she drove through it alone in the dark. What
was
that? Other times she had night-driven past mile after mile of fire, flames outlining the contours of the eastern hills, her windows rolled up against acrid smoke, but on her way to teach her regularly scheduled class, knowing that most of them would show up, because it was Fire Season in Southern California and no big deal. And then in 2003, and again four years later, it was a huge deal. On this very freeway she had seen sixty-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds lob a eucalyptus fireball the size of a garage westward across eight lanes to torch the Miramar scrub and burn halfway to the coast.

The apocalyptic hum, coupled with awareness of her own aging reflexes, contributed to a tiny sense of dread every time she drove the freeway. Now, on an early January evening, no fires threatened, the last noticeable earthquake had happened months ago, and southbound traffic was almost light, but still she was on edge. Anything could happen. Directly ahead of her, a badly loaded old wood-rail pickup hauling gigantic Mexican planters and garden statuary, its covering tarp half free and waving desperately, swerved to avoid a peeled-off tire tread, and a fist-size chunk of cement bounced out and hit the road in front of Amy, and she had time to do nothing but watch it glance off to the right and become someone else’s fate. She waited for a squeal of brakes that never came, then passed the truck at eighty-five, not slowing until she could no longer see it in her rearview mirror, wondering all the while why she was so panicked. It had been a close call, but she had seen worse, everybody had by the time they reached sixty-two. She was settled down and almost to La Jolla when she realized it wasn’t the truck, or even the near miss, it was what was
in
the truck. Probably, anyway. “Birdbaths,” said Amy. “I was almost hit by a birdbath.”

Having named it, the thing that frightened her, she calmed down and spent the rest of the drive noting the title, “Birdbaths,” and spinning the outline of a story she would never write, relaxing into denial, certain she would arrive at Carla’s in one piece. How was it possible, Amy wondered, to know you are in denial and snuggle into the feeling anyway? Anything could happen, any time. Now, for example, as she merged onto Torrey Pines, or now, as she slowed to read street signs in the dark and impatient natives honked and sped around her, or even now, pulling into Carla’s enormous circular driveway. Her heart could explode, her brain wink out, she could trip while focusing on the enormous salad bowl in her arms and die in a pool of blood and Waldorf salad. The earth could open up at her feet.