Half Empty (7 page)

The rude precariousness of this constant beginner-hood would be enough disincentive without the added mind fuck of how diametrically counter the creative trajectory runs to all other tasks. Among the multitude of reasons that it is better to
be a grown-up than a child, just one is the mastery of the physical world. As a child, the distance between desire and execution was a maddeningly unbridgeable chasm. What the mind’s eye pictured and what the body could achieve were altogether different: those stubby safety scissors could only ever cut an edge that was ragged and inelegant; glitter was invariably swallowed up into the pile of carpets as if by malicious intent, like Charlie Brown’s grinning, kite-eating tree; the dried macaroni we were forced to incorporate into designs didn’t have the decency to stay on the page, despite the glue getting everywhere (even at age four I understood this to be the lowest form, the operetta of visual art). Regardless of the medium, everything at that age ended up a muddy, crumb-flecked mess. In John Guare’s play
Six Degrees of Separation
, the protagonist, Flan, says: “When the kids were little, we went to a parents’ meeting at their school and I asked the teacher why all her students were geniuses in the second grade? … Matisses everyone … What is your secret? And this is what she said: ‘Secret? I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.’ ” Rather than a time of wonder and innocence, the all of it was a daily exercise in frustration and chubby-fingered inefficacy.

But then hands grow from smudging little mitts into useful instruments. The soup does not splash up over the rim, the glitter—should one ever be moved to use any—would stay where it was meant to. One progresses from novice to adept with a soothing reliability. Except for writing. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that
this
is not the day when the jig is finally up.

And yet, I don’t for a moment forget that this is not a life of mining coal, waiting tables, or answering someone’s phone for a living. Each morning begins suffused with this sense of privilege,
shell-pink and pulsing with new hope. The terrors and agitations of the night fade away and here it is, the clean expanse that is 6:00
AM
, free of most everything but promise. Caffeination, evacuation, ablution, through all of which I spool out lovely and eloquent paragraphs in my head. And so to the gym where the lungs take in the new air, the fresh blood courses, and
look!
Here it is, barely 8:30. You’ll be home and at your desk, scribbling away before other folks have even gotten to work! What grandiose hopes for the deathless prose that will be hoiked up from your depths, taking as evidence the sentences that flow easily through the mind as you do your crunches, the language graceful, propelled forward by the power of its own logic, a Slinky waterfalling effortlessly down a staircase. The toddlers of the day-care center next door are delivered. The carousing teenagers from the high school across the street deposit their cell phones and dime bags into the shrubbery by the stoop and line up for the metal detectors. The computer is turned on, opening up to the file left off the day before.
Today
will be good, you think. Not like the previous day’s lack of industry, a shameful waste of phone calls, e-mail, snacking, and onanism.

Yes, it is all about today. But first, the crossword. And what does Paul Krugman have to say? Oh, that Gail Collins.
Love
her. E-mail, has it been checked in the last forty seconds? And now a snack. Friend Patty calls. She can’t settle, either. Midday already? The toddlers, now screaming, are picked up from next door. Sit down and write a sentence for God’s sake. One fucking sentence, it won’t kill you. It almost kills you. Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of
Lord of the Flies
. A sullen coven with neither
conscience nor allegiance. It will take the civilizing influence of repeated revision to whip them into shape, an exhausting prospect. Time for the late-afternoon power nap (“Ten minutes is all I need, and then I’m good for the rest of the day!” you brag to anyone who cares to listen). You rise, refreshed, your sense of creative optimism restored—or it would be if it wasn’t for the maniac on the street crackling that cellophane wrapper. Who the
hell
does he think he is? Stand at the window and scan the sidewalk like a crazy person. Uh-oh, here comes that woman with her schnauzers again, animals that exist in a constant state of high barking dudgeon. Log on to that dog-breed website (again) to see how long the average life span is for such a creature. How much Xanax crushed up and mixed into some ground beef would it take to … never mind. Sit back down. And nothing. Whither flown the clarity of those morning insights? How many times must it be demonstrated to you that that interval of genius is as thin and fragile as the skin of an onion, if not downright illusory? And yet you never rush to the desk to get the pearls down on paper because in the moment of thought, they seem incapable of dissipation. So immortal, so solid in their reasoning, like those musings just before dropping off to sleep.
Why disturb this almost-slumber by writing? The Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t crumble simply because one shifts one’s gaze from it. Of course I’ll remember something this obviously brilliant in the morning
, only to wake the next day without the remotest idea. Might as well finish eating that dried mango.

Oh, Google, how
does
one make soap?

The teenagers leave school, a good forty minutes of profanity (as comic genius Jackie Hoffman has observed, “It’s all ‘
What the shit the fuck you are!
’ And the boys are even worse”). The street goes quiet again. You can see the custodial staff cleaning the classrooms. The streetlights come on. They’d look so pretty
against the sapphire of the early-evening sky if they didn’t signify the hours you’ve wasted. If you were any kind of writer, you’d stay in and do battle, wrest the time back and make the day mean something more than the nothing it is turning out to be. But you are not any kind of writer. Today has proven as much. As did yesterday and odds are tomorrow will attest to the same. Pregnant with Potential has turned to Freighted with Failure. And so another day fails to meet its promise and has spun out into procrasturbatory entropy. You power down the computer. Just before the screen goes dark, the sentence you wrote chuckles and says, “Until tomorrow, maestro.” Its tone is contemptuous, vaguely threatening, and deeply reminiscent of somebody’s voice you can’t quite place (three guesses whose). You will see friends and they will ask after your day and you will complain, charmingly (although not nearly as charmingly as you think), about what you haven’t accomplished. Sometimes, it’s just easier to go to dinner. Although, when you wake briefly at 4:00
AM
in an anxious fury with yourself, you will know it is also exponentially so much more difficult to have gone to dinner.

The truest depiction of the writing life remains Nicolas Cage in the movie
Adaptation
, crippled by fear of inadequacy into near-complete inaction, opting to masturbate for the umpteenth time that day. His legs are the only thing visible on-screen, shaking, defeated, his off-camera body working its way to a sad and dribbling (anti)climax, the only thing he will produce the whole day.

And I understand, I really do. Who wants to hear a song about that?

It is never easy to publicly oppose something that achieves brilliant, unstoppable heights. It can make you seem bitter. I once
ran into a friend and his mother at the movies. The subject of Philip Roth came up. (No surprise, really. We Jews are always talking about Philip Roth. We speak of little else, in fact.) It turns out my friend’s mother had known him growing up in Newark. She was not a fan.

“Pffffft. Philip
Roth,
” she spat. “He was such a jerk. I always wished him ill.”

Well, good luck with that
, I thought, as the lights went down.

We were at
The Red Shoes
, possibly the best movie ever made. Certainly one of the best movies ever made about what it means to be creative. Moira Shearer plays Victoria Page, a girl whose single-minded devotion to the ballet makes her a great star. Everyone loves Vickie and everyone wants to mold her to his own purposes: the multilingual ballet impresario with the silk dressing gown and pencil mustache; her husband, the composer. Finally, it is all too much for poor Vickie. Moments before she is to take the stage in Monte Carlo, she snaps, and in full ballet makeup—her mouth a red slash, her eyes darkly rimmed and extended like pointed black leaves—she runs from the theater, down the broad stone steps of the opera house, and flings herself over an ornate balustrade into the path of an oncoming train fifty feet below.

The greatest dancer of her time is gone. She has literally died for the art that, in life, consumed her constantly and completely. All is loss and sorrow. Still, the ballet of
The Red Shoes
goes on as scheduled, as it must, and in Victoria Page’s stead, a lone spotlight, illuminating the places she
would
have been dancing. It is a fitting tribute, this bright absence, gliding across the stage. Because without the work, there is nothing.

Scientist Stephen Jay Gould posited the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which contends that the earth’s biota, rather than existing on a constant and linear march toward development and proliferation, can sometimes experience long stretches of evolutionary stasis, followed by irregular bursts of rapid and radical change.

There you are, for example, rooting for grubs in the dirt, pushing aside spongy logs with your ineffectual proboscis, as you and your ancestors have been doing for ten millennia, and suddenly everything changes and surges ahead with a charged developmental fury. The same time the next year, you’re picking up fat and nutritious larvae between your highly dexterous forefinger and opposable thumb, all the while thinking,
Once I’ve developed agriculture, I’ll dredge these in a little cornmeal and cook them over that fire I just invented
.

For most of us, life is a fairly steady trek, and such high-flown dreams of thumbs and cornmeal and fire are adaptive boosts we neither deserve nor could possibly hope to attain in our lifetime. The myth of the overnight success is just that. Only once did I find myself at the center of an evolutionary fluke of such gargantuan proportion as to confound even a genius like Stephen Jay Gould. One day a grunt in publishing, and the next ushered past the velvet rope into a whole new life.
(Allow us to help you
down from that tree, Mr. Rakoff … We hope you enjoy your new upright posture, Mr. Rakoff … How about a bigger brain case, Mr. Rakoff…)
In such an exclusive world, it was a testament to the top-drawer quality of both that the jumbo shrimp and baby lamb chops should be the same size. The strawberries were as big as a newborn’s head and the muffins appeared to have been baked in thimbles. Whole carrots were as slender as golf pencils and the water came in tiny glass bottles more traditionally used to hold ampoules of morphine. It was a Lewis Carroll buffet, the scale of everything either amplified or diminished to signify privilege, nothing more so than the fact that no one was eating, not even me. Not because I was blasé. I am never blasé about food, especially free food. I was not eating because I was nervous, standing in that small chandeliered room, about to sit down for a read-through of the screenplay for a movie that was to begin shooting. A movie in which I had been cast.

It was 1995, and I was still working full-time as a propagandist and in-house writer in the book trade. I wrote press releases and the occasional remarks for the publisher. I amused myself by peppering his speeches with ever-nellier references from my own life. It began subtly, but if my stealth campaign proved successful, by the end of the year, this married father of children would be welcoming the sales reps with breathless references to watching
La Strada
while smoking and crying in the balcony of the Paris cinema. It was an easy job and no one bothered me. It afforded me a paycheck, health insurance, an office and its attendant supplies (O glorious Post-its), and as long as I turned my work around quickly, a good deal of free time in which to do freelance writing assignments. I also very occasionally got to act in the odd downtown production with friends. The casting director of the film saw me in one of them, called me in for an audition, and I got the part. It was a big movie. A gynocentric
comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores. It was based on a novel by an author published by my employer, coincidentally, about whom more later, except to say that we were friendly at one time but she might just be the only person in my entire life about whom I’ve said something purposely, gratuitously injurious and deeply unkind.