(Not That You Asked) (3 page)

THE CONNECTICUT FORUM
event was sold out, naturally. But my friend Catherine, who appears to know every person of consequence in Hartford, managed to finagle me a ticket. And not just to the panel, but to the cocktail reception and dinner beforehand, at which
the authors would be appearing.

I spent all that Friday composing a brief letter of introduction
²
and rehearsing what I would say to Vonnegut. I bought a special envelope, one that would fit into his pocket. I got a haircut. For the first time in years, I had a pair of pants dry-cleaned.

ABOUT THE HAIRCUT:
It was the worst of my adult life. I had asked my stylist Linda to make sure the bangs weren’t too long, as I didn’t like the idea of looking shaggy for Vonnegut. I wanted him to be able to see my eyes, and specifically the nobility shining forth from them. But Linda left the bangs about a half-inch short and boxy at the corners. I looked like a Beatle, if you can imagine the Beatles reuniting for a tour at age forty and returning (ill-advisedly) to the moptop look.

ANOTHER IRRELEVANT DETAIL:
On the way down to Hartford I was pulled over by a cop for eating a ham sandwich.

It is illegal to eat pork on Connecticut byways.

I ARRIVED IN
Hartford in an addled state. It did not help that I was attending what I would call a corporate event. Honestly, I had no idea what the Connecticut Forum was. But it was immediately apparent
they have a lot of money.
As soon as Catherine and I arrived at the venue we started to encounter people who had that unmistakable sheen of prosperity: tailored suits, jewelry, the subtle dermal cross-hatchings of a ski tan.

We got talking to one such couple in the elevator.

“Are you all Vonnegut fans?” I asked.

“Not really,” the man said. He was probably in his midfifties. “I’ve never read any of his books.”

“None of them? Not even
Slaughterhouse-Five
?”

He shook his head.

“What about Joyce Carol Oates?”

“What has
she
written?” he asked pleasantly.

AND THIS IS WHAT
I mean by a corporate event. Most of the people at this cocktail/dinner thingee were there not because they were fans of the authors, but because it was a way of supporting the arts, being a good corporate citizen.

Being a good corporate citizen means shaving an infinitesimal portion from your profits—profits that have skyrocketed as the government has dedicated itself to the financial aggrandizement of the private sector while virtually eliminating public funding for the arts (forget the poor)—and politely tossing it at programs like the Connecticut Forum, where lots of well-heeled patrons can experience the joys of literature or, at least, a literary dog and pony show, along with noshing on some truly excellent hors d’oeuvres.

I’m sounding angry here. What I felt in talking with these folks in the elevator was something closer to despair.

THE COCKTAIL RECEPTION
was in a massive lobby. I staked out a spot near the table with the
Kurt Vonnegut
sign and gulped a glass of wine and said hello to my official hosts, the good people of Bank of America. They were all incredibly nice. This is one of the characteristics of the rich: If you are dressed properly, and don’t appear to want their money, they are incredibly nice.

After a while, one of the guys in our circle said, “Isn’t that him?” We all turned and there was Kurt Vonnegut, shuffling toward his little table. I had never seen Vonnegut in any form other than his author photo. I expected a towering figure with a froth of brown curls. But gravity had tamped him down; his famous curls were ashy and shorn.

We forget what the truly old look like in this culture, because we tuck them away in group homes when they start to look too scary.
^3.
Vonnegut was terribly frail. The flesh had shrunk away from his eyes and gathered in folds above his collar. He stared out at the room full of strangers and sighed.

“That’s so sad!” Catherine said. “He’s going to sit there and nobody is going to go up and talk to him.”

It was sad. For about thirty seconds, none of us could work up the nerve to approach Kurt Vonnegut. He was such a legend, so much larger than life in the minds of his fans, and here he was, revealed as a mere mortal, closer to tortoise than god.

This was my big chance. I needed to
move.
But I couldn’t do it. My whole plan felt suddenly absurd. Pushy. Or worse than pushy—grabby. I didn’t want to be just one more person grabbing at the guy. This would dishonor my status as a true fan. By the time I’d decided I was being a ninny (twenty-four seconds later) a young couple had walked up to him, and this set off a kind of Brownian surge. He was immediately enveloped by people, all of whom wanted to speak with him at the same time.

A bald fellow at the back of the scrum shouted out, “Hey Kurt! I was in your house in Cape Cod back in 1969! Your nephew invited me to a party.”

“Is that so?” Vonnegut’s voice was faint and wheezy.

Someone asked about his kids and he ticked off their names. “Mark went crazy,” he said, referring to his eldest son. “But he’s okay now. He wrote a fine book.”

“
Eden Express!
” said a woman with a camera. “I almost brought my copy.”

Vonnegut coughed delicately. He looked pleased.

An eager-looking blond woman asked him what he thought of George W. Bush.

“He makes me wish Nixon were still president,” Vonnegut muttered.

“Who do you think was the greatest president in your lifetime?”

“I was fortunate to have lived during the reign of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” He added, to no one in particular, “It was the polio that made him compassionate, you know. Being sick like that.”

“You look great,” someone else said.

“Nonsense,” he said.

A pretty girl with auburn hair stepped shyly into Vonnegut’s view.

“This girl came all the way from California to see you!” the blond woman exclaimed.

“Why would you do that, my dear? It’s sunny in California!”

The girl was trembling a little. She wore a white blouse that framed her breasts. There was a moment of suspense while she stood, flushed, struggling to speak. “I wanted to thank you,” she stammered. “Reading your work was what made me start to think for myself.”

Vonnegut gazed at her. There was nothing lascivious in his eyes. He was merely sipping at her beauty. She radiated transference. It was as if Vonnegut were her father, some idealized version, which, of course, he was.

BY THE TIME
I worked up the nerve to approach him, Vonnegut looked wiped, so I didn’t waste any time.

“I’ve been asked to write a biography of you,” I said.

“By whom?” he said.

It was a fair question, and I did what any self-respecting young fiction writer would do in this situation: I fictionalized. “Giroux & Schuster.”

Vonnegut sighed. “I’ve heard nothing about it. My papers are collected at the Indiana University library. You are welcome to go look at them.”

And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. He wasn’t defensive, exactly. But he declined to look at me. I felt like a traveling salesman being shown the door.

“What I was hoping is that you might want to be interviewed.”

Vonnegut gazed mournfully at his knuckles, as if hoping to discover a lit cigarette between two of them.

I handed him my letter. He inspected the envelope briefly—such a lovely envelope!—and slipped it into his coat pocket.

The end.

WAS I BUMMED?
I was bummed as hell. My one chance to meet Vonnegut had been such a bust, such a nothing.

Then again, the guy was eighty-three years old. He was in Hartford, Connecticut. He had five hundred people coming at him. I wasn’t going to get much. So we moved on to dinner, which consisted of large hunks of cow and a wedge of chocolate cake.

I was seated at the table with Jennifer Weiner. I didn’t know her work, only that she was regarded as a popular chick lit author. She made a great point of proclaiming how honored and humbled and
baffled
she was to be part of a panel with Oates and Vonnegut. Little old her! It wasn’t that hard to figure out, really: She was the fizzy pop culture component.

THE PANEL ITSELF
was deeply strange, in the way that only a literary panel can be strange, which is to say the logical result of foisting together three socially maladroit loners before a large crowd of gawkers. The authors made no mention of each other’s work. They didn’t respond to one another’s ideas. They weren’t very nice to each other, actually. The most stunning example of this antagonism came less than half an hour in. Vonnegut was lamenting the destructive capacities of humankind, listing specific atrocities (the Holocaust, Nagasaki, the Roman Games) when Oates cut him off.

“What sex—excuse me, Kurt—what sex is doing all this bad stuff?”

Vonnegut looked confused. He hadn’t expected to be interrupted, nor had he quite heard Oates.