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I must have slept weird, folks. My backstory is killing me.
“What days are the hardest for you?” he asked. “Sundays.” “So I’ll tell you what you do on Sundays: French lessons. Dance lessons. Piano lessons. Immerse yourself in the deep pleasures of Latin and Greek. Sign yourself up for something every hour. Fill your days.”
“When you have no one to put their arms around you, you must put your arms around yourself,” Frank Delaney said. “Will you do that?”
I thought about it. “You know that classic parlor game that lets you figure out your drag queen name? You take the name of the first pet you ever had as your first name and your mother’s maiden name as your last name.” “I thought it was your first gym teacher’s name and the name of the street you grew up on.” “That’s a perversion of the form in my opinion, but yes. That’s pretty much it.”
I considered this. I’d recently borrowed thousands of dollars for a divorce attorney. She liked to cup her hands into a pretend megaphone to help her scream at me louder. (“Wake up and smell the coffee!” she’d shout at me. “Stop being an idiot!”) I’d sold my jewelry. I’d taken in a boarder.
Some of my friends hadn’t been wild about my choice of husband to begin with, but now they were furious at me for letting my life fall into such a shambles. How could I have been so careless? Men can be careless, not women. Women have to hold the world steady, or the whole operation will spin right off its axis.
Meanwhile, when I discussed social media strategy with Naomi, I was receiving rather more feedback, if you will, from a ragtag crew of unwelcome hecklers and malcontents than any person on God’s green earth would hope to receive from a ragtag crew of unwelcome hecklers and malcontents. Did I really need to stay anonymous online? Naomi saw my face. She nodded. “I feel you,” she said. “Say no more. You don’t want any pain-in-the-ass spineless sack of shit seeing what you’re putting on social media and getting pissy about it.”
She was a good egg, that one. You can see why I had taken to lying down on her desk. “Okay. So we’ll keep you anonymous,” she said. “We just have to think of how.” “What if the first people I befriend are totally unknown to one another and very far removed from me?” I asked. “Even if you traced it back to the beginning of the network, you wouldn’t ever pinpoint me as the center. It’ll be more like drawing a spiralizer spinning around me. It’ll be as if I’m not even there.”
few days later, lonely and bored, I started to expand her persona. Duchess was eighty-one, I decided, and widowed. It felt accurate enough; I felt like I was eighty-one years old in my bones. (I felt four hundred years old in my heart, but I realized that would be harder to explain and, anyway, I’m not heavily into magic realism.)
The only way to be reliably sure the hero gets the girl at the end of the story is to be both the hero and the girl yourself.
“Let’s try to be extra careful about our language when we’re doing this work. Nobody’s a saint,” she said. “Incorrect,” I said. “The saints are saints, by definition. Have you ever heard of Saint Drogo? One of my favorites. Patron saint of mute people, the mentally ill, and coffee. If that’s not a power triumvirate, then I don’t know what is.”
I had a mindset for many years that work begets work, so I never turned down an offer,
I need an app that issues hourly reminders telling me which day of the week it is and that sorrow and joy are inseparable.
It’s a death sentence to any creative effort to have someone looking over your shoulder in real time, offering unwelcome critiques. These people were relentless and without joy, which, as it turns out, is a terrible combination in readers.
If he’s not texting you back, it’s only because he’s lying, sobbing, in a nest he made from his mother’s old bathrobes and cardigans.
We know that in the times of greatest stress, learned behavior will fall away and people move more deeply toward who they really are.
“It would be a great writing challenge. It reminds me of a word puzzle. When I was an editor at the newspaper, I used to have to try to edit sentences down, slice out an extraneous word here or there to tighten up a line. Let’s say you needed to find two column inches to fit in a new ad that came in at the last minute—you’d have to cut down an article by a word here and a word there to find two inches without sacrificing meaning. It’s hard to do it so well that the reader doesn’t miss any nuance. But sometimes in cutting for space, I could find a better way to recast a sentence. Working within
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The human mind is kind. It will create blank spaces for itself. I think of them as little airbags in my mind, cushioning the tender places where the blows and bruises are.
When I was younger, I used to talk myself out of these moments of intuition as silly and irrational, or weird coincidences. Now that I’m old, I know that my ear is tuned in to the universe, but maybe I can only hear songs in a minor key. Most of the time I don’t pull off the road before the truck hits.
And Duchess: How did she do it? I’d pick up my phone in one hand and write Duchess without thinking too much about it, often while I was consciously trying to focus on solving a real problem. I didn’t plan anything she said, but sometimes I’d look back at it and think, Boy, that’s beautiful, but where did it come from?
I didn’t have my father’s compassion or his faith, but Duchess did. She was tapping into something else, an energy in the universe that wasn’t my energy. Nobody’s ever read my aura, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably light gray and covered with lint. I’m exhausted most of the time, impatient, distracted, visiting another neighborhood in my head, always with a slow current of sadness underneath. Duchess is white light. She’s fully present. She’s something else entirely.
Crooked Path, by the way, is a fictional town in New York, located both ten minutes north of Manhattan and ten minutes south of the Canadian border, which (if you don’t have a map handy) is conveniently impossible. She claims the town was founded by a sect of anti-cartography zealots who were fervently against mapmaking of any kind. Crooked Path somehow shares a border with Kansas and maintains its own navy. It’s home to the Crooked Path Home for Aged and Unpleasant Ex-Husbands; the Gertrude Stein Opera Is Opera Is Opera House; the Dorothy Parker Academy for Girls, where Duchess gives an
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Sometimes at 5 a.m., I greet the day by walking the streets of Crooked Path, performing a light medley of Wagnerian opera. I give and give.
Hopes and dreams need air. Cracking a window in the car an inch and leaving them behind while you run errands will not work. They could die.
A voice came back to me on the street; I’d call it a voice, but there was no noise. It was more like an idea generated externally that made itself manifest to me. It was that confidence, that grace, that I’ve since come to know so well; it was Wallace Stevens’s idea of poetry, what he called “sounds passing through sudden rightnesses.” The sounds passing through sudden rightnesses were Duchess Goldblatt, and the idea that she brought to me was: “You will bear it. You have to. You will.” My heart calmed itself down, and I thought: Yes. Okay. I have to. I will.
Just when you think you can’t expect less, you have to learn again to expect less. Minor floods in Crooked Path tonight. Volunteers are redirecting storm flows with burlap bags weighted with unfulfilled expectations.
Duchess is a friend to all humanity, which is all well and good as far as it goes, but I don’t mind telling you privately here that it can be a real drag for me. She loves the world. I try to love the world. I mean, in theory, I want to love the world and all humanity. I can certainly see how it would be a good idea.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘deserve,’” he’d say. “You love people because they’re people, because they’re human beings. Not necessarily because you enjoy their company, which is one kind of love, but because you recognize they’re inherently worthy. Every person is inherently worthy. I’d argue it’s your obligation, regardless of whether you think it’s your job to decide if they’ve earned it.”
“We have to love other people regardless of their actions and without any hope of reward. Even our enemies deserve our grace.”
“Writing,” I said. “I feel like my best version of myself when I’m writing.” “Okay, then,” she said. “Maybe that’s how you’ll find your new place in the world.”
(That’s the dark side of social media, too; it’s both petri dish and loudspeaker for the very worst people in the world.)
Good manners are a social construct, weekends are a social construct, values and beliefs and democracy, all social constructs, all ideas that we have come to agree to in our various interactions with other humans over time.
She became a litmus test, if you will; if you liked Duchess’s humor, and if you got her jokes and references, you’d probably like the other people who were drawn to her for the same reasons.
“My babies!” Duchess would exclaim when they posted their selfies. “My rascals! My loons!”
The only predictive text I want is that which tells me when and how my enemies will die.
Duchess doesn’t give the prize to nonfiction—she says nonfiction is only for sociopaths, children, and the criminally insane—that’s her having her little sly fun at my expense because I’m a nonfiction writer.
Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.
“No,” he says. “ ‘Trying to call home.’ What does that mean, ‘trying to call home’?” “He means trying to call the house, the landline. It’s a phone that’s built in.” “Doesn’t make sense, ‘call home.’” He kicked at the ground. “Home is a person.”
Try getting a variance for a metaphorical ledge that can support a narrative with two people who need talking down. The engineers go nuts.
I paid extra for a phone with regressions instead of updates. It prompts me to return to myself as of this morning, last week, 1986.
“She’s so consistently good! She’s brilliant and funny. But it’s the love that people are drawn to. Duchess extends a hand in friendship to everyone. She offers universal acceptance that people are hungry for. It’s beautiful, what you’re doing,” Lyle said.
“I will die if we don’t,” I said, although, if I’m being honest with you now: I didn’t expect to hear from him again. I figured meeting Lyle Lovett was a once-in-a-lifetime gift, and I was as grateful for it as I could be. I relaxed into the lack of expectations. It was ephemera, a sunset, a shooting star; I could marvel at its beauty and be content to watch it go by. Drop the pearl back into the ocean and it will disappear beneath the water. The universe will reclaim what’s not yours. I had become very used to losing people by that point, and I had no intention of getting attached to anybody
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I plan to die by exploding into millions of bits of light briefly illuminating my true form: a piece of paper that combusts and disappears.
And some of my favorite people have been alcoholics, but the disease turns a lot of people into liars. If you’re an addict, and you tell the truth about what’s happening to you, people will try to get you to stop, and the disease won’t allow you to stop. So the afflicted person will often become a chronic liar, and the people around him will become liars, to cover up for him and to keep him comfortable or keep him calm or employed, or keep themselves safe from him, and I was only a kid, but I thought one of the state’s most eminent loony doctors ought to know these things.
Tonight in Crooked Path, we’ll all visit our dear ones’ graves and lay wreaths made of apostrophes: the symbol of something missing.
I will admit to you now that it’s possible Faulkner was right. The past isn’t over.)
The final stage of enlightenment for fictional people is the full realization of one’s own non-existence. It means you’ll go out of print.
I think it was a Sunday afternoon, or maybe it only looks like a Sunday afternoon in my memory. (It’s hard to tell. Our memories are some shifty sons of bitches.)
In your dreams tonight, look over your shoulder to the person standing in the shadows. You will know me when the light bends my way.
The trick is to be superhuman, but only when you have to. The rest of the time I recommend looking out the window. Maybe have a sandwich.
