White Tiger on Snow Mountain (26 page)

I finally met sweetsally, the diet-and-exercise slave. She came in on the train from Princeton, where she was in grad school, and where she lived with her fiancé, a wonderful guy who didn’t understand her need to be treated like a dirty slut. I didn’t understand it either, but I was willing to oblige. As soon as I opened the door, however, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Sweetsally was fat. Very fat. Obese.

I smiled stiffly while she told me that she had put on a few pounds and slipped up on her diet since the picture she’d sent. I laughed it off and mixed her a drink from the bottles of rum and Diet Coke she’d brought. She explained how she needed to be spanked, whipped, abused by older men, and how, since high school, she’d sought this out, cheating on her boyfriends compulsively. In fact, her fiancé texted while she sat on my couch explaining this. She casually texted back that she was in the library. He was in Philadelphia at a conference, doing postdoctoral work, and was going to be a shrink, of course. Then she stood and grabbed her overnight bag. Where should she change?

I fretted while she was in the bathroom, but escape was hopeless. I considered fleeing and leaving her in my own apartment, hiding around the corner till she left. I thought about calling 911 and reporting a fire or faking a heart attack. Honesty was out of the question. I was no postdoc in psychology, but I somehow grasped that whipping her enormous ass (it was like a love seat cushion) while calling her a fat pig was somehow OK but declining to whip it, however politely, was cruel.

She emerged in a bustier, garter belt, stockings, and heels, an outfit that had sounded exciting when she described it in writing but wasn’t quite what I had envisioned. I now saw myself bouncing on her vast belly like a waterbed, catching my neck between her huge breasts, and slowly blacking out. Still I screwed my courage to the sticking place.

I did what I had promised. I did not disappoint. I spanked her huge ass red. I slapped the big tits till they flopped and flew. I fitted her with the collar and leash she’d brought and ordered her to beg and roll over. God help me, I stuck a carrot in her ass and a cucumber in her pussy, made her crawl till they fell out
and then take a bite, to teach her proper nutrition. I tied her to the bed and pounded away until I was exhausted and came all over her tits. I toweled the sweat from my eyes, and as my vision cleared, I realized she was quietly weeping.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I blurted, jumping up. I tried to wipe her tears with my sweaty towel but just smeared makeup across her face. She shook her head and kept crying.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I kept repeating as I untied her with trembling hands. She hustled into the bathroom, and I heard the shower start up.

I dressed quickly, pacing and wringing my hands as I rehearsed my apology. The shower stopped. The toilet flushed. She emerged, wrapped in a towel.

“How do you feel?” I asked, carefully, keeping my distance across the room.

“Great,” she chirped. Her eyes sparkled. Her skin and hair shone clean. “What a release. How about you?”

“Me?” I asked. “Terrific! Thanks.”

She had another rum and Coke and smoked a cigarette, which stunk like death, but which I was too polite to complain about polluting my room. She offered to stay and have another session, but I said she had overwhelmed me. I was spent. When was her train?

The second she left I showered and climbed into bed, curled on my side, gripping myself like I was someone else, another person whom I cared for and who desperately needed to be held.

Later she sent a thank-you email and tried to make more plans, but I demurred and finally she left me alone. In fact,
I was so upset that at first I didn’t really take in the obvious: I had performed manfully. I was cured.

The weather got warmer, I went out more, and after a while I began talking to real-time, off-line girls again, in shops, in elevators, on the street. They gave me the brush-off, of course, but some did it nicely, with a smile or a bit of banter, and I realized they acknowledged me as human, and not some basement-dwelling monster. Then one girl didn’t dismiss me, she sat on the stoop and talked and gave me her number, and soon we were spending our nights together and planning a trip for summer.

The bad news was I lost my insurance and couldn’t keep seeing Dr. Chang. But she said it was OK, checking my pulses and peering at my tongue one last time. I was better, she said. I was free to go. She shook my hand, and Amy waved from where she stood, sleeves rolled as at a workbench, applying suction cups to an old lady’s back. The calendar showed a hillside covered in cherry blossoms. It was May.

In spring the snow melted, and the tiger came down from the frozen mountain to hunt in the greener valley below, freed from the prison of winter to wander, alone, into the great cage beyond.

Literature I Gave You Everything and Now What Am I?

1

Writing is a desperate act. Like tucking a scribbled note into a bottle and tossing it onto the waves, it is a last resort, a hopeless gesture, a howl and a flare. Even worse if you write fiction—the urgent news about imaginary people. A story is savage, childish magic: toy dolls and invisible arrows. A vain stab at the hearts of strangers.

Little wonder then that so many writers, engaged in such a fatally frivolous pursuit, take up extreme or irrational strategies. Really, why not wear a lucky writing hat or eat a ritual tuna sandwich at the same time every day? They say Joseph Conrad had his wife lock him, stripped, in a room like a kicking junkie and withhold food and clothing till he produced something. Balzac supposedly kept himself in a constant state of sexual arousal, working up to the point of orgasm without crossing it while simultaneously consuming vast quantities of strong coffee, fueling fourteen-hour writing sessions that resulted in more than ninety novels and death at the age of fifty-one.

The Balzac approach has much to recommend it. It keeps
one sharp, honing the instincts and mobilizing those dark forces upon which all creation depends: hostility, anxiety, craven desire, yearning loneliness, self-loathing, and itchy discomfort. On the other hand, it can be highly counterproductive. You’ve unlocked the lowest self now, after all, and Cousin Id, released from the basement, does not want to sit still, thinking about verbs and perfect tenses.

Fledgling authors, sick with desire and unable to focus, might well be tempted to ease their vigilance and “unwind” before setting to work. Relax and release the tension is the idea here. But that is precisely the problem with this method: lack of tension. Now you want to nap, not write. The postorgasmic writer is content, and contented, peaceful souls do not produce great literature. The blank page is like an empty bed—those fields of crumpled white—where the desperate meet at midnight to make a final stand.

Hence the most important question facing any young writer may well be: How often should I masturbate and when? (It also brings up the second most important question: How much coffee should I drink? But here the answer is clear: As much as you can without dying.)

That’s why I spend my days at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which I chose precisely because it has no Internet service, endless bitter coffee, and a staff who frown on removing your pants. Sit there long enough and you pretty much have to write something, if only a love letter to the beautiful Albanian and Ethiopian waitresses who move among us lowly, seated folk like queens, dispensing éclairs and hot chocolates atremble with cream. The downside of café life, however, is the fact that they
let in other people, practically anyone who can afford a cup of coffee. Now, I’m not saying all other people should be banned from cafés. That’s unrealistic. And I really don’t mind the readers, the thinkers, the studiers or the dreamers, as long as they stay away from my favorite spot in the back corner. With most other writers I maintain an uneasy truce. We nod in greeting, pass the sugar, chat when signaled with a smile that it’s safe to approach, and most important of all, ignore one another completely when we show signs of writing, such as staring at an empty screen, practicing a spoon-twirling trick, or just pacing the sidewalk out front, muttering and shaking our fists, enraged.

It’s the talkers I can’t stand. For Christ’s sake, talk at home, not in public. Though to be fair, it’s not all talkers. Murmurers I can live with, holding hands under the table, sharing a guidebook. Foreigners in general are fine, the foreigner the better. The soothing babble of languages I don’t understand is like Muzak to my ears. It’s the loudmouths I want to murder, the pontificators and raconteurs, the sad seducers reheating the same stale anecdotes for a rotating cast of girls, the screechy girls screaming their secrets: These I long to silence forever with a butter knife through the heart. And the worst of all, my nemesis, my temptress and my torture, dark lady of this humble tale: a relentlessly loud talker who talked and talked incessantly—about writing.

Her name was Jasmine. And the reason she kept making so much noise about such an offensive topic was that she not only wrote but also led a whole gang of aspiring writers in some sort of self-help program. Right there. In my café.

Let me be clear: This was not, as you might reasonably imagine, a program to help them quit writing, like other afflicteds gathered to cease smoking or shopping. That would make sense. I might even ask for a brochure. No, The Writer’s Way was designed to take perfectly ordinary citizens, normal, healthy people with no reason to write anything but emails and texts and checks, and turn them into writers, mostly memoirists of course, and spoken-word slammers, but also novelists, short story writers, even poets.

Nor was she actually teaching them anything, certainly not, for example, how to write a grammatically correct sentence or a clear paragraph. Those dreary tasks sound suspiciously like work. Instead, she loudly recommended everyone focus on “thinking like a writer.” This consisted of “freeing up the creative flow” and “discovering our true voices,” which were not, apparently, the false ones that had ordered their cappuccinos. She was, in essence, a paid muse, and her followers came to her not for knowledge but inspiration. They lacked purpose. This was their problem. They wanted to “be writers,” yet they had nothing to write.

Nothing to write! Yet still wanting to be a writer! The mind boggled. It was like converting to Judaism, joining the marines, or leaving a rent-controlled apartment—I couldn’t grasp why anyone except a maniac would do such a thing. Voluntarily. If you had a choice. If you could simply not. How wonderful to wake up in the morning with nothing at all to write. You’d be free. Free to go outside and enjoy the nice day, have brunch, like your ex-girlfriends all begged you to, brunch apparently being an extra sort of meal that regular people have, one so leisurely and abundant that it crosses in a wide and sunny bridge from
morning to afternoon, touching two meals and relaxing between them, perhaps on the balcony of a nice but casual restaurant. You could walk dogs, install shelves, practice yoga, learn how to play tennis, and bake your own bread. You could have a life. A full, useful life. And offered a life, who would willingly choose to write a book instead? Because you can’t have both, you know that. And you know too that a book, even a very good book, is in the end only a small thing, an odd, dubious, essentially useless thing. And your book isn’t even very good now, is it?

2

It was not an attractive group. I don’t mean they were ugly; on the whole they were average, with several members above (I am no doll myself, being just the sort of troll you imagine lurking in the rear of a café every day), but they didn’t feel inviting, like a happy family around a turkey or friends jousting easily over drinks. You didn’t want to wander over and sit down. You wanted to get under your table and hide, or accidentally bump an African princess passing by with a tray of scalding drinks.

I didn’t, of course. I listened, while trying desperately not to. I wasn’t giving up the cherished spot (corner table, decent light) that I shared, most days, with a diminutive, pale blond woman who sported thick glasses, chapped lips, noise-reducing earphones, and a huge plastic file box that she carried in a pack on her small bent shoulders like a snail. We never spoke, just nodding hello or scraping our chairs forward to let each other pass to the toilet, though I once caught her eyeing my own stack of color-coded and numbered index cards as I shuffled
and dealt them, hoping to read the fortune of a doomed novel, and she looked impressed.

But unlike my table partner and I, who studiously ignored each other’s work, the knights of the round table declaimed theirs aloud, then offered critiques consisting of exuberant praise, mainly in the form of “relating,” which is to say finding a way to make talking about another’s writing into yet another chance to talk about oneself. Circling clockwise they were: Clyde (Note: The group members’ names have been made up because I don’t know or care what they are), gay, sad, and largely deaf—I use these adjectives not to be flippant but because this was the topic of his memoir,
Silent Tears;
Maureen, a former temp on disability, whose 9/11 memoir,
Almost There,
purported to relate her struggle with PTSD after potentially being at work in lower Manhattan that day, except she was home with a strained coccyx, but the sections I heard were all from a long chapter devoted to some rich douchebag she slept with once who never called; Sonya, whose memoir,
My Name is Sonya,
described recovery from passive-aggression, sugar addiction, and
S
issues, which I eventually found out meant sex; and Pat (
Listening to My Self
) who struggled with an emotionally unsupportive work environment, motion sickness, and gluten abuse. Then there were the fiction writers: Frank, a retired accountant writing a series of mystery novels about a retired accountant who solved murders using his accounting know-how; Norman, a dental lab technician writing a series of mystery novels about a dental lab technician who solved crimes using dental lab techniques; and Mohammed, a Palestinian cabdriver working on a multigenerational epic about a Palestinian cabdriver who falls in love with a rich American-Israeli fare in his
cab. (He was stuck on chapter two and considering working in a murder mystery angle.)