The Narrow Door (8 page)

It isn’t Denise on the phone, but the administrator of the writers conference. The administrator is calling to tell me I’m being offered a working scholarship, which means I’ll be waiting tables at the conference, in exchange for room and board and tuition.

By waiting tables we mean waiting on Famous Writers.

“Do you think you’d like to do that?” says the administrator.

Is my name Paul Lisicky? Is—“I think I’m going to cry,” I say dizzily, after a dense, awkward patch.

“Please don’t do that,” she says, with a frown inside her voice.

“Okay, then I’ll just run around the house twenty times and wag my tail.”

That makes her laugh, which makes me laugh. She gives me the details of what will be expected of me—ten days, three meals a day. But I’m not taking very much of it in. It doesn’t so much matter to me that waiting tables and attending classes and craft talks and readings isn’t exactly a vacation; all I know is that the working scholars have the best time. They’re in the spotlight; they give their own group reading. They’re taken in by everyone, because some of the best-known writers were once waiters. And besides, doesn’t everyone love someone who’s straining at the gate, waiting to rush forward?

I call Denise instantly. I want to tell her first, even before I tell my parents.

She picks up. I tell her that she isn’t going to believe what she’s about to hear.

She must squeal, she must scream—I know she must. But two seconds beyond that, I can’t remember a thing about our conversation. I can’t remember whether she’s telling me who to say hello to. I can’t remember whether she’s telling me who to stay away from. Surely she must be giving me tips about the weather, the mix of hot and cold—one minute it’s eighty-seven, the next a cloud comes over the mountain and you’re shivering in your barn coat, hands shoved in your pockets.

My mind is drifting toward my image of that mountain, which looks lethal in its power, like my idea of Mont Blanc, which I discuss in a thirty-page bullshitty paper I’ve just written on Shelley’s spirituality. Up to this point my work has only been seen by Denise, by my teacher Lisa Zeidner, and the students in Lisa’s workshops. What will it mean to have my work seen by people who don’t know me, people to whom I haven’t already said supportive things?

If I hear any envy in Denise’s voice, I respond by pretending it’s not there. If she doesn’t hear any confusion or guilt in me, then she’ll know there’s no reason for her to feel left out. Competition will not be real if I decide we’re to be above all that.

Is that what I’ll do for the next twenty-some years of our friendship?

And maybe that’s why she says, with a hardness I’ve never heard before, “I’m not going back until I’m faculty. Full faculty.”

2010 | 
Why is my memory so patchy? Why can’t I remember better from those times? It infuriates me. All I have are fragments, bursts of sound and taste and color.

If you asked me what I did in 2001, I’d say M and I lived for a semester on the thirteenth floor of a high-rise in the heart of Greenwich Village. I’d say our golden retriever, Beau, died after a two-year-long bout with kidney disease. Say we drove his blanket-wrapped body up to the Provincetown house, where we buried him in the front yard, as Arden, his older brother, watched solemnly, paws crossed out in front of him, by the edge of the pit M dug. Say we bought a one-bedroom apartment on West Sixteenth Street. Say we moved into that apartment exactly a week before the towers fell, before we had a TV or any furniture except for a bed. Say that I was afraid to breathe too deeply lest the dust (bones? ground-up plastic?) get trapped in my lungs. Say restaurants were still serving people on sidewalk tables in December: the warm weather wouldn’t let go in spite of the trauma in the atmosphere.

But if you asked me about what I was doing in the middle of the eighties? The middle of the eighties is a frozen hole, volcano deep. I had a pretty good record of leaving crappy jobs behind. I was afraid of becoming that kind of feckless young person who took a job then quit it instantly. But the bigger story was that I’d managed to finish my graduate degree in English. I’d brought a project to completion, but I was scared shitless about what was to come next. I wanted to become myself, but there wasn’t even a self to work with. I went to the Cherry Hill Library to research editorial assistant jobs at the
Village Voice.
I dreamt about the men I never touched. I was in suspension mode, moving through my own life as a burglar might move through an empty house, with gloves on, careful not to leave any fingerprints behind.

And maybe that’s why I don’t remember a thing about Denise’s wedding—the time of day or year. I think I might have played the guitar. Joey might have played the trumpet, but that might have been another wedding. I don’t remember her dress, whether it was long or above the knee, white or not. Was there lace? Don’t remember a thing about her vows. Or the reception afterward, talking to her parents, her sister, her brother, Austen—or even Lisa, who must have been there, too. Don’t remember who sat at my table, whether it was an important table, or whether I was off in some corner, with the single, unattached people: the punishment table. Don’t remember thinking that the days of long phone calls might be over, not to mention the nights of talking and making jokes till four in the morning.

2010 | 
Off the north coast of Haiti, the sea floor buckles. The coral reef rises through the surface; vast tracts of once-productive farms plunge. This has happened in all of a month, since the Port-au-Prince earthquake. The video I’m watching is shot from a small plane. The coral reef looks like a moldy green cauliflower head, a single oak grows a mile from the revised shoreline. It’s already drowned, already salt-burned. The thinking goes that the Port-au-Prince fault, dormant for a hundred years when it flattened Kingston, will need to release pressure soon. It is not so far-fetched to think that the next quake will trigger a tsunami the size and scope of the Sri Lanka tsunami. The announcer relays this information in a voice both portentous and stagey, though he sounds as if he’s trying to keep the staginess in check. It would take fifteen minutes to reach Jamaica, a half hour to reach Cuba, one hour to reach the coast of South Florida. As to whether a warning system is in place for such an event: Humans are pretty good at not learning from the mistakes that have already befallen us. We wouldn’t be able to bear it if we’d braced ourselves for every possible disaster. We certainly know of people who live that way, staying away from skyscrapers when it’s windy, walking across the street when they see a ladder, avoiding bridges at all costs lest the center lane collapse. Too much of that, though, and we wouldn’t even leave the house in the morning. Maybe this is how people think who never leave their houses.

There’s my eighty-six-year-old father on the sixth floor of his Fort Lauderdale condo, working for the third week in a row on his income tax. Would he listen to me if I called to tell him about the oncoming wave? Of course not. He’d remind me that he was high up from the sea, in a sturdy building that withstood Hurricane Rita. (Or maybe it was Wilma. Rita or Wilma, he held the living room hurricane shutter closed with all his might as hundred-mile-per-hour winds sirened on the balcony.) Of course it would bother him that the minivan was down in the parking lot. Should he drive it across the bridge to the grocery store parking ramp? But, really, he saw no unusual activity out on Riverside Drive. It is August, and all the snowbirds and tourists are home in Montreal or Buffalo Grove or West Hartford. I’d try to think of other ways to convince him, but he’d finally tell me that he’d be all right, that there was no reason to worry about him.

1986 | 
It isn’t like Denise to withhold a hello when she picks up the phone. Didn’t I have a dark dream about her last night? Maybe I did: I’m in a balloon going up, the hot air heating the top of my scalp, singeing it. I almost can’t stand it, the feeling is intimate. Cattle flee on the pasture beneath us. She’s not making sense. The sound of her voice is the sound of a mouth that’s been punched. Or, as if someone close to her, someone beloved to her—her mother, her father-has been pushed down a full flight of stairs, and she’s been forced to watch.

She tells me that her editor’s letter came in but five minutes ago. Her response to the new book, or at least the first draft.

“And?” I feel a tightness in my chest, but elation, too, inexplicably.

“She hates the novel.”

“Denise.”

“I’m serious, honey. I’m still trying to take this in. I think I’m still in a bit of shock. It’s going to take me a little while to be myself again.”

I ask her what Iris has said.

The letter is certainly not what any writer would want to hear. Iris is careful to start with the good things; she wants to assure Denise that she’s responding to the novel in a careful, detached manner. But we can already hear the dutiful quality of the prose. It has no swing: this wasn’t the letter she’d been wanting to write. In that way, the letter is hard to listen to; I can only take in so much of it. Especially when it gets parental.
You are not the child I’d been expecting you to be
, her words seem to say. And this from an editor who’s been so fully on Denise’s side? How could she love one child so, and treat the other as if its ears are ugly, its voice grating? Given how much I’ve listened to the book, I feel as if my advice is also under attack here, for Denise wanted to impress me in the writing of it. I so much want to say Iris doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about, but I know it would be wrong to explode like that. This is serious, scarier than it seems. Denise has already gotten an advance on the book, so she has to do what the mother of the book wants—no getting around that.

Luckily she isn’t so devastated that she can’t disagree with some of what Iris says. We go over and over what she takes issue with. We try to be grown up: too much is at stake here. We plan possible strategies that might placate Iris, without actually giving in. Maybe the book
is
Emily’s book, maybe it should be in a closer third person. Maybe it moves through too many points of view, too many registers of voice to be comprehensible. Maybe Emily shouldn’t die at the end of the book. Maybe it’s too much a reach to suggest that Emily dies from heartbreak. “You are not that kind of writer,” Iris writes. Is she implying that Denise’s talents don’t match her vision? No real writer feels like her talents match her vision, but Iris doesn’t seem to want Denise to have grand ambitions. She seems to want Denise to write an accessible and pleasant book, maybe just a little off-kilter, a book the publicists can compare to Anne Tyler or Alice Hoffman. It will sell a reasonable number of copies, enough to make the bosses happy, so she can keep publishing books.

A woman’s book.

In other words, do not think you are Monsieur Proust.

At some point Denise starts crying softly, very softly. It is barely audible. I imagine her holding the phone away from her face for a minute while I go on talking, doing my stupid best to say the right thing. And then she takes her hand off the mouthpiece.

The sentence Denise keeps coming back to concerns the novel’s opening. Iris writes, “You have to earn an opening like that.” Denise says it again, and after two minutes, she repeats it, this time with more molten rage.

From here, I can see that Iris might be talking about cause and effect, consequence. Iris might in fact be saying that the opening is too intense, too elaborate, with too many embedded clauses in the sentences, to be friendly to the reader.

The fact is this: Iris wants another
Good Deeds
, but a
Good Deeds
that sells more, gets more reviews, gets more attention for the other books on the list. She wants the writer and the book she fell in love with five years back, but one with all the nouns changed.

Denise, however, hears Iris’s words differently, and maybe Denise knows what she’s talking about. Denise believes Iris is telling her that she doesn’t have the sophistication or education to write a sentence like that. Iris has an MFA from Iowa, just as Famous Writer, Flannery O’Connor, and Jayne Anne Phillips have MFAs from Iowa. Denise herself had wanted to go to Iowa, but stopped herself from putting the application in the mail even after she’d filled out the forms, filled out the check, sealed the envelope. I don’t understand how you could want something so much that you’d make sure it wouldn’t work out, but maybe I deal with that complexity by convincing myself the opportunity wasn’t so great to begin with.

Denise, though, will never let go of her feeling and fury. Iris doesn’t know she is dealing with a thunderstorm. Denise knows exactly what it is to please. And she will please Iris as if pleasing is a kind of murder.

With that in mind, Denise looks at the pages. She moves chapters around, pares back sentences to their essence. She makes Emily someone the reader can “identify with,” as they say. She makes her “sympathetic.” She makes the book linear. She stays up night after night, coffee on constant brew. Over the next few months she writes a simpler, more streamlined version of the book she’d wanted to write, a book she probably loves a little less, though she doesn’t have it in her to say it to herself like that. But maybe that’s a better place to write from: loving a little less. The new book is a replacement for the dream book. Others will never see the dream book, but she’ll always have it in her head. It will pulse like a jellyfish, dangerous, blue, just out of reach, up in the sky rather than down, underwater. “If only—” she’ll say years later, punishing herself for walking away from it.

1888 | 
Vincent loves Aries: the filth of it, the light, the brothels, even the people, who strike him as creatures from another world. The town is a bit of a backwater: a plus to him. Though he’s been sick—smoker’s cough and too much absinthe—he’s been working well, paintings of yellow, ultramarine, and mauve, curled and slapped onto the canvas with a knife. He loves his Yellow House, where he’s lived since leaving the Hotel-Restaurant Carrel, but happiness is missing. A friend is missing, other artists are missing. He has thoughts of founding a collective of artists, and when Gauguin promises to meet him in Aries, he buys two beds for the house and gets to work on his most ambitious paintings yet. He can’t stop work, and he can’t stop thinking of Gauguin, whose presence will change his life, change painting, as we know it. His friend’s presence will challenge him; they’ll argue fiercely about the things they care about. They’ll draw closer to each other, and there won’t ever be a reason to think they’ll ever need to leave home.