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Talent
Juliet Lapidos


‘The ultimate literary caper…. deliciously funny’ Helen OyeyemiA wickedly caustic tale of a student who stumbles on a literary treasure.Anna Brisker, a once promising student, has fallen behind. Her PhD on inspiration is overdue and instead she busies herself with power-eating strawberry pop tarts and watching as her doctoral peers fly off to take posts at prestigious universities.Alone over the holidays, Anna strikes up an unexpected and life-changing friendship. But what can Helen Langley, a middle-aged antiquarian bookbinder, have in her possession that might unlock Anna’s thesis and her chronic inertia? And what laws will Anna break to get it?Lean and compulsively readable, Talent is a literary romp that delights in its wicked lampooning of the academic world and asks how far we should go to meet our potential. And in Anna Brisker, we have an audacious heroine who cannot help but shine with mordant brilliance.























Copyright (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Juilet Lapidos 2019

‘My Child Is Phlegmatic . . .’ Anxious Parent: Copyright © 1931 by Ogden Nash

Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)

Juilet Lapidos asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008281205

Ebook Edition © FEBURARY 2019 ISBN: 9780008281229

Version: 2018-11-26




Dedication (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


For Barry, the guardian of my solitude




Epigraph (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


We see each other in glances.

—FREDERICK LANGLEY


Contents

Cover (#u831177b5-43d9-57fe-a162-056c02065786)

Title Page (#u2a2d0662-0e1f-5c12-bd37-5ed041c0f599)

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Happy Holidays

Other People’s Perspiration

The Notebook

Freddy Remembered

A Cliché

The Notebook

Life-Hacking

A Level of Incompetence

The Notebook

Writer’s Block

Fieldwork

The Notebook

Cemetery Picnic

Dreamwork

The Notebook

If a Scholar’s a Parasite

He Owed Her

The Notebook

Like a Mute Animal on an Operating Table

The Notebook

Ura Joke

The Yellow Legal Pad

His True Intentions

007: Golden Sorrow

Julia Maria Lustgarten

A Soft Target

Idiocy and Confusion

Pure Pointlessness

A Letter of Explanation

Of Course

Anna Remembered

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Happy Holidays (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


We met at the supermarket. I was waiting in line to buy the usual nutrient-free snacks — crackers, cookies, Pop-Tarts. She pulled up behind me with a cart full of staples — milk, eggs, canned tomatoes. As we neared the register, she unbuttoned her bright orange trench coat and searched its inside pocket. Whatever she expected to find there was missing. She frisked herself, patting her hips and torso with great urgency until, extreme measures deemed necessary, she removed her coat and shook it upside down. Nothing came out.

“Just my luck,” she muttered.

“Everything all right?” I felt obligated to ask.

Smiling apologetically, the woman said she had lost her wallet. Whether she had only herself to blame or a wily pickpocket in the crowded dairy aisle, she couldn’t say. Her voice quivered. Her eyes welled with tears. Would I loan her fifty dollars? She’d send me a check that very afternoon. Refusal would have made me seem hard-hearted in the minds of our fellow shoppers who had, I thought, overheard her little performance.

Each morning thereafter I opened my mailbox, anticipating her promised repayment. Each morning thereafter I closed it in a huff. No one wants to feel cheated. I suppose that’s why, on a cold winter day roughly two weeks after the incident at the supermarket, I followed my debtor home.

New Harbor felt like a ghost town. The museums were closed. So were the banks on Main Street. Even the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was always open, was shuttered. Only the Korean grocery had its lights on. The young woman who sold me a cup of coffee scowled at me when I requested cream and sugar.

I wandered down to the train station and past the large parking lot on Grand Army Avenue. Past the police headquarters, a monstrosity from the brutalist period with no windows at eye level, just yawning ribbed concrete. Past the Elm Street Connector, an abbreviated bit of highway that spat cars from the interstate directly into downtown and in the process bisected the city, a giant gash across its torso.

Rising beyond the connector was the New Harbor Coliseum, a 1970s arena that hosted second-rate hockey teams and outmoded musical acts until around the turn of the millennium, when City Hall announced that it was too expensive to maintain and shut it down. It was a beast and it was empty, a ruin that no tourist would ever visit.

Often caricatured as a pit stop between New York and Boston, New Harbor did have its charms. Like the New Harbor Green, the old town commons of the original Puritan settlement, precisely large enough to accommodate 144,000 souls — the number Revelation says will survive the Second Coming. Or Collegiate’s aspirational, neo-Gothic campus, designed to make ignorant Americans think the university dated to the Middle Ages, and visitors from Oxford or Cambridge think, Haven’t I seen this somewhere before? Here and there were expensive restaurants, swanky clothing stores with European names, and twelve-dollar-sandwich shops.

Yet there were more vacant lots and vacant storefronts than purveyors of overpriced sandwiches. Beyond the campus orbit, the pleasant spots were like oases in the desert and didn’t so much counteract the city’s general dinginess as make it more obvious. The fact that New Harbor was formerly considered a quaint New England town also intensified one’s awareness of its contemporary squalor. In the 1890s, a very well-known novelist called Hilldale Avenue — a wealthy strip crammed with mansions — “the most beautiful street in America.” Or possibly it was a very well-known painter who said that, or possibly the judgment was a local myth. The point being: It was once plausible that a celebrated artist would locate “the most beautiful street in America” in New Harbor. Not anymore. Not unless that artist had a passion for urban decay. The city’s graybrown industrial hues were rarely alleviated by greenery.

In this barren landscape, my debtor stood out. Rather, her trench coat did. She was jogging in place to keep warm at a red light, an orange pogo stick bobbing up and down. The right, the most reasonable, thing was to let the matter drop. Her infraction had been minor, after all, and I had work to do.

I should have gone home, shed my winter layers, and turned on my computer. In twenty minutes or less, a blinking cursor would have replaced the woman from the supermarket as the object of my attention. Instead, I gave pursuit.

She led me farther away from my apartment, farther from the desk where my Word documents waited patiently, and toward Worcester Square. I thought I’d find more activity in that historically Italian neighborhood, but there was no one out to admire the seasonal decorations: the archway draped with colored lights; the crèche in front of an old bakery; the tinsel on benches and bike racks. On St. John Street, the border between Worcester Square and the projects beyond, she paused in front of a gangly white bungalow with a chain-link fence and carpeting on the steps. She went inside and out of sight. I leaned against a cherry tree, wondering if I should ring her bell.

Her name, I learned, was Helen Langley.

For the first time since our initial encounter I observed her closely. In her black flared trousers and striped black-and-white sweater, she looked a bit like a Hollywood Parisian. She wore no makeup and no shoes. Her brown hair, parted down the middle, was white at the roots. Thin wrinkles bracketed her pink lips. Dark blue veins marred her pale skin.

“It’s an unusual day to call in a loan,” she said, standing at the door, “but whatever. Happy holidays.”

“Happy holidays,” I replied automatically.

Given the outdoor carpeting, I prepared myself to encounter a correspondingly ugly protective interior, with plastic on the couches and so forth. Instead I found a library-meets-bohemian style: gentle lighting and knockoff-Scandinavian chairs; books all over, on wooden shelving and stacked in every corner, on top of the old television set, on the rug under and around the dining-room table. Helen escorted me through the paper minefield to a den with a picture window facing the street.

“I’ll get my checkbook,” she said, and she left me alone.

While pursuing Helen I’d felt driven, almost instinctually. Having gained entry to her house, I felt adrift. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew I had a right to be there. In a bid to distract myself, I studied her messy book collection and found a wide aesthetic range: classic works of history, random novels, atlases, almanacs. Although I couldn’t discern any order, I saw that the books on the floor were in poor shape, with shabby bindings, whereas the ones piled up by the window seemed freshly restored. I also noticed a jar of glue and sheets of leather.

The radiator hummed. There was a digital clock by the door, the kind that displayed the day and date — 4:01, 4:02.

Holy Mother of God, it was December 25.

That explained it, everything — the closed stores and the Korean girl’s frown and the abandoned streets and Helen’s greeting. I’d stupidly assumed that she was one of those people who said “happy holidays” generically throughout the season. I should have listened to my mother’s voice mail that morning. Amid the nagging and the warning not to procrastinate, she would, I felt certain, have recycled her favorite Jewish-Christmas joke, the one about installing a parking meter on the roof.

I was on the verge of slipping out when Helen came back with a signed check and, adding to my shame, a tray, two cups, two saucers, two spoons, honey, and a pot of hot tea. My perception of my actions had shifted considerably in the past several seconds. What I’d told myself was a perfectly sensible unannounced visit now seemed petty and cruel — I was a regular Scrooge come to darken the holiest day of the year. And whereas I’d thought of Helen as my debtor, my calendrical idiocy meant that I was now more in her debt than she in mine.

Helen settled into an ancient armchair and gestured for me to sit in the one across from her. It sagged under my weight.

“Thank you — for taking me in,” I said haltingly, “on Christmas.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t actively celebrated Christmas since I was a teenager. But I get it. I get the need for company.”

“I’m Jewish,” I blurted out.

“O. K.,” she said, pausing between syllables.

I wasn’t certain if she was seeking to reassure or to mollify. The latter seemed condescending. O.K. was such a versatile and, therefore, ambiguous word. I pictured it in my head: O.K. O, period, K, period. Someone sounding out the word for the first time would have pronounced it like Helen did: “O” (pause) “K” (pause). Modern writers sometimes put periods between words where they didn’t belong to communicate dramatic or affected pauses. Got. It. Shut. Up. Screw. You. Up. Yours. But if a writer wanted to convey that a character paused while saying “O.K.,” he’d have to do so explicitly because of that word’s peculiarities. It calmed me to think of orthography instead of the fact that Helen was looking at me intently, waiting for me to speak. Her irises were bright green. Her eyelids drooped close to the nose. Her spirit animal was the gecko.

“Holiday decorations go up earlier and earlier every year!” I said.

“They don’t, though. Thanksgiving week. Always.”

“I’m pretty sure —”

“Always.”

I stirred my tea, silently conceding the point.

“All the stuff in here, what is it?” I asked, trying a different tack. “The leather and the glue?”

“It’s my work. I’m an antiquarian and a bookbinder.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Does it? I have to think about old books all day.”

“So do I. I study English.”

Helen scrunched her nose, either because she didn’t like English or because her tea was too bitter.

“At Collegiate, I guess.”

Usual reactions included feigned indifference (“Nice place, I hear”), eager networking (“Do you know …”), harsh oneupmanship (“Princeton said no?”), and classist disdain (“State school was good enough for my kids”).

“I’m not surprised. You have that look,” she said, indifferently disdainful. “Anyway, your relationship with old books is not like mine. Academics care about the ideas inside a book. Antiquarians care about dustcovers and bindings.”

“Don’t the contents matter at all?”

“Reputation matters. Famous books cost more than forgotten ones. Basically, though, we’re materialists, or fetishists.” Helen grinned as if she’d said something adorably naughty. “Our clients are fetishists too. They don’t buy books they want to read. They buy books they consider physically special because they’re rare or unusual: first printings, books signed by the author, books once owned by a notable politician. If they really cared about the contents, they’d just find a used two-dollar paperback.”

Helen’s delivery was fluid and monotone, almost as if she’d given her speech many times before. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she often had to explain how antiquarians were different from scholars. I was struck by her dismissive characterization of her chosen profession and by the pleasure she took in making it seem unintellectual. She was proud of her fetishistic materialism in the way a certain sort of American was proud of never having traveled to a foreign country.

“Maybe you know my uncle,” she said.

“Is he in the English department?”

“In a manner of speaking. He was a writer. Freddy Langley. Frederick, in print.”

I would never have guessed. Langley was a common name and Helen seemed, to me, unartistic: the sloppy scene at the supermarket, the orange trench coat, her line of work. This woman? That man?

Once the initial shock passed, I felt titillated by the connection, even a little flushed, and then, immediately, ashamed by my reaction. I looked down on people who texted their friends if they happened to sit next to a celebrity at a restaurant. Yet I felt something like self-importance because I was sitting across from the niece of a well-known author. Physical proximity to genetic proximity to fame.

After sunset we were left with only the light from a standing lamp. In the dimness, the den felt cozily antique. And I felt fine. I’d moved from anxiety to acceptance and now something resembling enjoyment in the strangeness of the situation. One day it would make a good story: The evening I drank tea with Frederick Langley’s niece. On December 25.

“I should tell you something,” I said, blushing. “I didn’t realize, when I rang your doorbell, that it was Christmas.”

Helen laughed. She looked away from me and out the window. It was too dark to discern the street or the neighboring houses. Still, I aped her. If someone had walked by he might have noticed two women staring straight in his direction, into the night, one face past life’s midpoint, the other past youth, in a cluttered room protected from the winter cold. We would have made for a nice painting, a portrait of what I supposed, in my ignorance, was the last time we would ever see each other.




Other People’s Perspiration (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


There were no Pop-Tarts left in my kitchen cabinet, presenting me with a choice: Skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Theoretically, there were other options available to me. I could, for instance, have resorted to the organic steel-cut oatmeal that I’d purchased in a fit of attempted self-improvement. But I’d gone too far by selecting the non-instant variety, and the thought of struggling at the stovetop was grossly unappealing — particularly since my reward for that labor would be … oats. Organic oats.

On the one hand, it was cold out. On the other hand, I was hungry. I stood in my kitchen, paralyzed by the prospect of making a decision. Again I rifled through the cabinet, hoping for a different result. Winston Churchill said a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d surprise an old box of Pop-Tarts hiding behind worthier items.

My meeting with my doctoral adviser was at four p.m., in four hours. Factoring in time to shower, dress, and walk to the English department, I had three hours and fifteen minutes to prepare. It was time to move on from the Pop-Tarts problem. It was time to act decisively. Was it possible, though, to work well on an empty stomach? Innumerable listicles suggested otherwise. The kitchen smelled like chemical lemon zest, the cleaning company’s signature scent. The stone tile felt chilly on my bare feet. I could skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Either way, I would eventually have to get dressed. Moreover, I would eventually have to shower. Or would I? Perhaps showering wasn’t strictly necessary. On second thought, it was not. Getting dressed, however, obviously was.

I matched a pair of jeans from my hamper with thick socks from a pile of clothes and old running shoes from the depths of my closet. And then I wrapped myself in a winter cocoon. And then I paused at the door, feeling cold air seep from the hallway into my apartment. And then I slipped off my running shoes and removed my hat. And then I put both articles back on and launched myself past the threshold.

One spends much of one’s life saying, or thinking, And then. And then I’ll graduate. And then I’ll get a job. And then I’ll get married. And then I’ll have a kid. And then the kid will go to school. And then I’ll get divorced. And then the kid will get married, and then divorced.

Or just: And then I’ll review my notes. And then I’ll see my adviser. And then I’ll go home. And then I’ll order dinner. And then I’ll watch television. And then I’ll fall asleep.

Seeing as I was no longer a teenager, I limited myself to unfrosted Pop-Tarts at breakfast. These came in five different flavors: strawberry, brown-sugar cinnamon, wild berry, apple, and blueberry. The middle three were revolting. The first and last were equally good. By 12:45 I had one strawberry and one blueberry spooning in my toaster. By 12:50 I was sitting on the rolling chair at the desk in my bedroom, ready to work on my dissertation, resisting the siren song of my down comforter. The desk was a mahogany behemoth out of place in our digital age, with its stacked drawers, shelves, and nooks meant to hold the debris of an intensely physical time. The down comforter was fluffy and soft. I rolled over to the bed. I rolled back to the desk.

The former owner of the desk, deceased, had, in his lifetime, been a usurer in charge of a veritable army of usurers, or so my mother had told me — I’d hardly known him, my grandfather. He was a highly successful, disreputable businessman who, from what I gathered, had clawed his way out of poverty by sinking other people into it. This was abhorrent. However: He’d left me the desk and a heap of money, so I was inclined to forgive his tactics and think kindly of him. Without his largesse, I would have led a far less pleasant life. I might have had to earn petty cash by grading moronic undergraduate papers, leaving me little time for research, including the research currently spread out on my grandfather’s desk.

The nutritional facts on the back of the Pop-Tarts box informed me that a strawberry pastry contained two hundred calories, fifty of which came from fat. The first ingredient was enriched flour, the ninth was dried strawberries, followed by dried pears, dried apples, and leavening. A blueberry pastry was identical in every way except that it contained dried blueberries rather than dried strawberries.

My dissertation, my heartbreaking work of staggering scholarship, was very nearly finished. Soon I would print out the two-hundred-plus pages for the last time. Soon I would bring those pages to the university copy shop and have them bound in leather. Soon I would enter the job market and bask in the praise of the usually taciturn interviewers, uncorked by my greatness. Next I would turn my dissertation into my first book. I would receive grants. I would accept visiting professorships in Paris and Rome. I would give well-attended talks at literary festivals. My scholarship would breach the academic-real-world divide and grace the pages of the New York Review of Books. A dark-haired man with a British accent would recognize my virtuosity and excuse my lack of charm.

Any student of narrative would agree that my life had been leading up to a brilliant dissertation and a secure position at a topnotch university. Of course that was my future; it was a matter of course. Even as a child, when my mother read to me at night, I knew where the stories were headed and could guess the characters’ motivations. That’s the protagonist’s long-lost sister, I’m sure of it. The man in the mustache will betray his betrothed for her diamond earrings. Why else would the author linger on their shiny contours? I had never seriously considered a career unmoored to reading and writing.

Narratively speaking, success could not but lie ahead for the valedictorian of a pressure-cooker high school who had finished summa cum laude at an elite college and had her pick of graduate programs. As had been expected, Bs an affront to her — my — honor. At twenty-two, I published my first article. (A spruced-up version of a term paper on the use of coincidence in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.) At twenty-four, I published a second. (Mistaken identity as allegory for literary misinterpretation in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.) At twenty-six, I passed my oral exams with high honors. There was just one step left for me to take, a step that would come as naturally as — as taking steps. As walking.

Titled “Where Does Art Come From?” my dissertation was an intellectual history of inspiration. To early civilizations, it was a gift — or curse — from the gods. The ancient Greeks held the Muses responsible for inspiration, which they distinguished from skill or technical ability; mere artisans toiled to refine their craft, whereas artists were mouthpieces for what divine entities wished to express. But if ventriloquism was semiautomatic, it was still exhausting and not exactly fun. Plato in Ion described poetic inspiration as a sort of possession, a maddening ordeal.

The Hebrew tribes also looked to the divine. Samuel gave Saul fair warning that Yahweh’s inspirational methods were heavyhanded: “The spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy … and you will be changed into a different person.” Christians replaced Yahweh with the Holy Ghost. Tertullian, for instance, explained that God, through the Holy Ghost, “flooded” the minds of the prophets. Granted, Jews and Christians were preoccupied with revelation, not epic poetry, but in those days there wasn’t such a clear distinction between theology and fiction.

As Western societies became more secular, the explicit God talk fell out of fashion. The Romantics compared the artistic process to a passive chemical reaction. They argued that poets were — unconsciously — sensitive to mysterious energies or winds, which they converted into creative enterprise. Yes, wind was a metaphor, but not for anything terribly concrete. “Poetry,” Shelley said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.” On the contrary, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”

Then along came Sigmund Freud, who said that what his forebears had thought was supernatural or, at any rate, external to the self was actually the subconscious at work. Writers wrote, painters painted because of early childhood trauma, deep psychological wounds, which they sublimated into poems, novels, paintings. Marxists, for their part, thought that was just as silly as Shelley’s fading-coal theory. They looked not to infancy but to the economy, theorizing that art was always, necessarily, an expression of social conditions. Artists were mirrors.

Although the concept of inspiration had changed dramatically over the centuries, I argued that one element remained steady: Everyone seemed to think that it was out of the artist’s control. The artist cannot train the Muses or the Holy Ghost. He cannot force his mind to channel inconstant winds. He cannot will his parents to traumatize him. He cannot tame macroeconomic trends.

I also argued that, although this lack of control in one sense minimized the role of the artist, it simultaneously made the artist seem special. Art was not just another trade. If a young woman decides she wants to be a doctor, she can go to medical school and learn about the human body. If a young man decides he wants to be a builder, he can find a job at a construction company and learn about concrete. But if that same young woman or young man decides, No, I’d rather be an artist, then it’s game over. You’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you happen to have been chosen by God/have the right disposition to channel winds/have had a difficult childhood. Either you’ve been touched, or you haven’t.

But — this was totally ridiculous, was it not? All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds became artists, and no brain scan had ever discovered some artist-specific pathway. Each and every theory of inspiration was bullshit designed to make artists feel as though they belonged to a special class, even though there was no evidence of that class beyond the tautology that all artists had something in common — which was that they were artists.

“It’s a little thin,” said Professor Carl Davidoff. My adviser was short and pudgy and somehow pulled off the trick of looking swarthy despite having light skin, a result of his thick, dark, almost black curly hair and equally thick, dark eyebrows. For a full professor, he was young, in his late thirties. He cleaned his glasses to avoid taking in my expression. “The historical overview is fine but your conclusion, your actual thesis, feels a little thin,” he repeated.

“Care to elaborate?”

“My assessment is more or less the same as it was three months ago, and six months ago, and twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in —”

“This has changed a lot in the last twelve months —”

“Let me finish, Anna,” he interrupted. He was in the habit of using my name when he wanted to convey that he meant business, like a kindergarten teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “It’s a good observation: There’s a seemingly universal tendency to place inspiration beyond the artist’s control. You believe this tendency, this assumption, is wrong, even stupid. Fine. But if you really think that all theories of inspiration are stupid — all of them — then you need to suggest an alternative. I’ve said this before. You keep ignoring me and fine-tuning what you have instead.”

“It’s just work.”

“What is?”

“That’s my alternative theory. There’s no such thing as inspiration. Writing is work like anything else. It’s just creative work instead of physical work or what have you. Bankers bank. Plumbers plumb. Sculptors sculpt. Writers write. I once heard Naomi Wolf quote her father: ‘The writer who goes out with the bucket daily seems to provoke the rain.’ He had the guts to make art sound mundane.”

“Citing other people’s arguments won’t impress me. You always do that when you’re not sure what to say. If you believe the Wolf line, do the work of proving it. You need a case study. I’ve said this before: Enough with the lit review. Choose an author to examine closely. His biography. His output. Think about what it is that caused him to write. Connect what happened off the page to what happened on it. Don’t smirk. This is basic. Fisher-Price My First Academic Paper.”

“Wow.”

“Sorry. I’d recommend Milton if there weren’t already dozens of books on his process. He spent years after university obsessively reading the classics without writing much at all, living off his father’s investments. He traveled through Europe, still not writing, dabbled in politics, then, finally, drafted a drama that would become his epic. He said it came easily! You must know the line — the celestial patroness who nightly dictates to the slumbering poet his ‘unpremeditated verse.’ ”

“How nice, to wake up and find a few more pages of Paradise Lost at your feet.”

Better than a nocturnal emission, I did not add.

Professor Davidoff’s office, laid out like a psychoanalyst’s with a leather armchair for him and a leather couch for his visitors, was overheated and stuffy. I wondered why he didn’t open the window since he was visibly uncomfortable; a few beads of sweat had trickled down his forehead and I had to resist the urge to dab him with a tissue. Some future civilization would master temperature control. It was thirty degrees outside and what felt like eighty degrees inside, hastening climate change.

“I should ask — is there something going on?” he said.

“No.”

“Some reason you’re finding it so hard to finish?”

“My parents think I’m lazy.”

“Oh?”

“They say I need to stop procrastinating.”

Professor Davidoff scratched the dry skin around his nose, a compulsive habit.

Again the conversation flagged and I thought back to the time, many years earlier, when I’d attended a Quaker meeting in backwoods Vermont. It began with twenty minutes of enforced silence, at the end of which congregants were encouraged to speak their minds if “the Spirit moved” them. It didn’t move anyone. Three-quarters of an hour in I felt so oppressed that I considered jumping up, maybe reciting poetry. But I only knew Ogden Nash by heart, which didn’t seem appropriate.

Anxious parent, I guess you have just never been around;

I guess you just don’t know who are the happiest people

Anywhere to be found;

So you are worried, are you, because your child is turning

Out to be phlegmatic?

The professor lurched inelegantly out of his chair, walked cautiously, like a much older man, over to his desk, and shuffled his papers. His suit jacket had deep creases along the shoulder blades, suggesting he didn’t have someone at home to look him over. He did, though: a viperous woman who always served me last at end-of-year dinner parties, certainly because her husband had predicted, at the first of these parties, that I would one day sit alongside him as a colleague. She was jealous of what our relationship was, or had been; a relationship between a man who was fiercely proud of having graduated from Williams, Cambridge, and Princeton — he’d framed his diplomas and mounted them to the wall above his desk — a man who looked up to no one, straight ahead to almost no one, and a young woman with the potential to match him. If she’d heard his Fisher-Price quip, she might have treated me rather differently.

“No … no … no,” the professor muttered, to himself as much as to me. “Here it … no. Now, where did I put that? Hang on. Yes, this is it.”

He unfolded a week-old university newsletter and pointed to an item on the second page that read Francis Goodman, the New York Times bestselling author and life-hacking expert, will deliver a lecture on efficiency and work-flow techniques at the School of Management on January 15.

That was it. The professor squinted at me.

“You might find it useful,” he said.

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“The dissertation’s close. I think it’s close. It’s close, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be frank, Anna.”

On weeknights, GPSCY, the offensive-sounding Graduate and Professional Student Center on York, sold two-for-one margaritas. After my meeting with Professor Davidoff I ventured there, as I’d learned from movies that in moments of distress, adults invariably resorted to alcohol. The bartender looked me over brazenly to see if I was worthy of his unwanted attention and apparently decided that I was not.

Another failed romance. Aborted. Uprooted. For months that side of my life had been totally dormant; my last flirtation had ended disastrously. Benjamin was a student at the medical school who said he wanted to help people but would probably end up a plastic surgeon. For our fifth date he’d invited me to the movies and, to seem worldly, had picked out a French film called Baisemoi, which he thought meant “kiss me.” It meant “fuck me” and had been banned in several countries because it featured numerous graphic rape scenes. Our fragile relationship couldn’t handle the awkwardness.

Double-fisting margaritas, I drifted through the bar, eventually spotting someone I knew in one of the red-pleather booths: Evan. He was my contemporary in the English department and a notorious grind, the kind of guy who never turned in anything late, never left the library before it closed, never went on vacation without his laptop. He’d once considered me a rival.

I liked to think, though, that my mild distaste for his company came not from competitive anxiety but from a tribal aversion to his ethnic whiteness. He was a high WASP with perfectly coiffed blond hair, prominent cheekbones, a square jaw, broad shoulders, and a seemingly endless supply of Nantucket Reds. That night he wore a Barbour jacket, which added to the impression that he might start shooting foxes at any moment.

Out with Evan was another classmate, Evelyn, who also played the role of Evan’s fiancée. She had smooth black hair (inherited from her father, a Chinese ophthalmologist) and symmetrical features (inherited from her mother, an Alabama hand model). Her most notable trait was dullness: she never said anything particularly smart, funny, or controversial. Mostly she echoed and amplified Evan. Under his influence, she’d even embraced a Northeastern prep-school aesthetic, filling her closet with pastel slacks and cashmere sweaters.

When she saw me she waved like a beauty queen on a float, beckoning me to approach. She said they’d descended on GPSCY to celebrate Evan, whose job search was going well. The University of Chicago wanted to fly him out for an interview.

“Congratulations!” I managed.

“Thank you. Are you here by yourself?” Evan asked, noticing that both my hands were full.

“Tequila’s good company.”

Evan peered vacantly into the middle distance while Evelyn bragged on his behalf: More than five hundred people had applied for the tenure-track position at Chicago, many of them already assistant professors at other universities. Only five of them had been offered interviews, and Evan had cause to believe that he was the front-runner. On the phone, the head of the hiring committee had said that he was “very, really, very impressed” with Evan’s “precocious and lively” dissertation on moments of enlightenment in mid-twentieth-century American literature. When he heard that Evan was in a committed relationship with another graduate student — meaning Evelyn — he said Chicago might be able to find her an adjunct position. It didn’t even cross Evelyn’s mind to feel ashamed of a hanger-on posting. For Evelyn, engagement meant parasitic self-abnegation. She would henceforth derive her value entirely from her partner’s success.

“Nothing’s certain yet,” said Evan, “but I have a good feeling.”

“So do I,” said his amplifier. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed, for both of us.”

Like a film critic for a small-town rag, Evelyn resorted routinely to set phrases. She’d — famously — once described Romeo and Juliet as “a refreshingly good love story.” In response, Professor Davidoff had called her an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” — the best insult that I had ever heard.

Evan and Evelyn were happy in Evan’s success. Oh so happy.

“I wonder — just thinking out loud here — if Chicago is a safe place to live?”

“What? What are you talking about?” asked Evan.

“Lots of gangs there, so say the newspapers. High murder rate. Muggings. Drive-by shootings. You’ll need to watch yourself if this works out.”

Evelyn glared at me. She was as toothlessly protective as one of those tiny dogs that travel in purses.

“Chicago’s dangerous, sure. That’s why the university has one of the largest private security forces in the country, right up there with the Nation of Islam,” Evan said, determined to put down my rebellion swiftly. “I think they can shield me from spraying bullets while I teach. Anyway, who cares what the city’s like so long as the university in that city has a good reputation? That’s what matters for my career.”

Appropriately, the conversation turned to “our work,” and I tried hard to enter a meditative state in which the mind separates from the body, no longer registering external stimuli. I must have succeeded because the next thing I knew, Evan was saying: “Everything all right?”

“Sorry, what?”

Evelyn took the liberty of answering: “He said, how about you? What are you working on?”

I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.

Instead of prevaricating, I changed the subject, offering to pay for a round of shots. My classmates struggled to remember the proper order of operations. Lime, then salt, then liquor? Liquor, then lime, then salt? Not that it really mattered. Unlike baking a cake or solving a math problem, the sequence didn’t affect the result: drunkenness. Evelyn coughed, sending flecks of spit in my direction. I thought of her cozy in Chicago’s Hyde Park, an adjunct professor, a professor’s wife, and my stomach constricted, as if the day’s disappointments were crawling through my gastrointestinal tract. On consideration, that may have been the tequila.

The restroom — I’d never before had reason to appreciate — was intended for individual use, meaning I wouldn’t have to worry about eavesdroppers in adjacent stalls. My stomach constricted again as I touched the door handle, sticky with other people’s perspiration. A good alliterative title: Other People’s Perspiration. I removed my sweater and found a relatively un-ghastly place for it on the floor. If I had to buy a new one, so be it. Still too hot, I removed my T-shirt and then crumpled. It seemed like a fantastic idea to press my face against the porcelain toilet, the stand part that connects to the floor. I could see streaks of urine along the sides but I didn’t care. The coolness of the porcelain was more important, as refreshing as a good love story.

Toilets were amazing devices. Their beauty was, of course, universally recognized, at least since Marcel Duchamp, but enough could not be said about their practical worth. As an engine for flushing waste, toilets were arguably more important for civilization than more vaunted engines: the steam and internal combustion. They used only gravity and water. Just gravity, water, and ingenious design to keep away infection and keep at bay the rough truth of our disgusting animality.

Pre-toilet, even aristocrats had to live with their waste nearby until servants came around to remove their chamber pots. They stowed their shit and piss beneath their beds and slept on top of it. The smell during asparagus season must have been nightmarish. Whereas I, a lowly graduate student who’d fallen behind, could make my vomit disappear by applying pressure to a trip lever.




The Notebook (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)


Alana catches the train from Boston to Cincinnati, snagging a window seat. Deborah sits next to her and strikes up a conversation about fur coats. It’s as good a topic as any. War. Peace. Life. Death. Fur coats. When Deborah exits the train, Eleanor takes her place. Eleanor’s topic is animal cruelty. After Eleanor, Francine talks pet insurance, and Georgina talks vegetarianism. Alana politely plays her part, never acknowledging the alphabetical chain or thematic connections, which, anyway, never amount to anything. Not only is there no climax, there is no sense of building, of anything wagered or gained. Each conversation, each story, is as meaningless and effervescent as the last. If there’s any point at all it’s to show my hand.

Sergeant Davis calls his troops together. Vietnam. They need a volunteer for a perilous mission. “I’ll do it, sir,” says Private Johnny Johnson. Sergeant Davis describes what Private Johnson has to do in extreme detail, every step of the way, to retrieve medical supplies accidentally dropped behind enemy lines. This will go on for pages and pages until the reader feels bored stiff and absolutely despises me. Private Johnson salutes his superior in a patriotic fervor. He sets out. Before he can complete step one he trips over a branch right onto a mine and gets blown up. Guts everywhere.

Strange to say Vietnam was nothing to me. Five years younger, it would have been everything. I was just old enough not to have to really care, in life or in writing. A lucky year for boys, 1938. What would the Chinese call it? Year of the … some animal just the right size to hide in a burrow while the predators get their fill.

Lewis and Don, old school friends, haven’t seen each other in years and years, stretching into decades. Too long. Far. Too. Long. Lewis recently won a prize — he’s an architect — and he can’t wait to tell Don all about it. Before Lewis gets the chance, Don starts talking about himself. He got a raise at work. His mistress is young and beautiful. His car is fast. His son is a quarterback. Banal, small-bore stuff, not nearly as significant as the prize. (The prize is a Big Deal.) Lewis is turned off. He decides not to share his accomplishment. And suddenly he feels wonderful. Elated. He doesn’t understand but what’s happened is simple enough. What he doesn’t share belongs to him alone.

I was fourteen, skipping rocks at Walden Pond. Veronica Lancet was there with her family but she managed to get away from them. In a quiet moment she kissed me. It was my first kiss. I remember her tongue felt like wet fruit. I remember, when I looked at her the next day, feeling like an ice cube coming apart in hot tea. Extremities tingling. Heartburn-like sensation around the, um, heart.




Freddy Remembered (#ulink_cf2cd4fc-44db-56d2-a13c-2b4a39f292cc)


The promotional brochure that Collegiate sent to newly admitted students had a picture of Golden Memorial Library on the cover. Golden was meant to resemble a Gothic cathedral, which it more or less did. Construction crews must have exhausted New England’s quarries to assemble its granite and limestone façade; must have wondered if they were, in fact, building some sort of church when they erected the portentous entrance hall, with its sixty-foot vaulted ceiling, and the fifteen-story tower destined to hold books — millions upon millions of books acquired as part of a literary arms race with the nation’s competing research universities.

Below Golden was New Campus, an underground library that Collegiate never featured in its advertising materials. Whereas Golden was lousy with stained glass and gargoyles and marble reliefs and chandeliers, New Campus had buzzy fluorescent lights, cubicles shaped like swastikas — if you took the bird’s-eye view — white plaster walls, and poster reproductions of forgotten midcentury pop art. Golden had overstuffed couches and internal courtyards. New Campus had “weenie bins”: windowless, closet-size rooms for private study. To move from Golden, built in the 1920s, to New Campus, built in the 1970s, was to witness the devolution of American architecture.

Yet there was something comforting about New Campus. I was sitting in a swastika, hungover, determined to thicken my too-thin dissertation, and as I stared at an ancient water spot, I reflected that New Campus did not demand anything of its visitors, like Golden did. Golden expected heady gratitude. New Campus accepted wallowing.

A PhD in English should, in theory, take five years. In reality, it was considered well within the range of normal to finish in seven. But I was midway through that seventh year and still the end evaded me. Relatives who’d once admired my precocity were beginning to wonder what was taking so long. “What, still in school?” my aunts and uncles asked at family gatherings, doubtful they’d heard me right. I was twenty-six, then twenty-seven, then, to my amazement, twenty-nine. A terrible, liminal age. As if by sleight of hand, my twenties had disappeared. They’d oozed into books I couldn’t remember reading, seminars I couldn’t remember attending, conversations I couldn’t remember having.

I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.

The muscles under my right shoulder blade were throbbing again, the rhomboids. I slouched along them — I sat lopsided, right lower than left — and they protested this treatment frequently, sending bursts of pain diagonally across my back. The problem wasn’t bad enough to drive me to a doctor, but it should have been sufficient to make me improve my posture. Should have; was not. It helped to stretch both arms above my head and thrust my chest forward. Arms up; chest out.

Six and a half years in New Harbor. Three years since I’d passed my oral exams; three summers, with the length of three long winters. Roughly 1,100 days; 26,400 hours; 3,000 meals; 300 Pop-Tarts; 120,376,000 heartbeats — my Nokia had a calculator — assuming an average resting rate of seventy beats per minute. And in that span of time: It’s a little thin.

That judgment applied equally well to my social life. Other people could excuse their lack of progress by pointing to offspring or a passionate affair or even an obsessive interest in something pleasurable but meaningless, like video games or football. I could not account for what I did all day. I walked around. I read. I ate. Sometimes I loitered in pharmacies, overwhelmed by branded bounty. What else? Next to nothing. I had nothing to distract me from nothing.

My rhomboids whined as I considered the possibility that I would have to find a new career, start afresh in some horribly grinding profession like the law, the last refuge of the academic. How awful it seemed to go back to the beginning. How tiring to study for the LSAT and ask my disappointed parents to pay for law school or dig into my inheritance to do the same and then have to actually attend law school and, worse yet, have to actually practice law. No. No. I wasn’t there yet. No. I was O.K. O, period, K, period. I knew what I was doing. I was a star — or had been recently and could be one again. Would be one again. Just as soon as I found a case study. A good case study. Which I would do right away. Of course I would.

The water spot on the ceiling looked like a rabbit with fangs. One ear turned down, the other upright, drops of blood trickling from long teeth. There was a word for this psychological phenomenon, seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or on the surface of the moon or in stains. But I couldn’t remember it. There was also a word for the inability to remember a word, which I couldn’t remember either, although I knew it sounded Greek — contained Greek — and that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had coined it. Amnelogia, maybe. I could, at least, recall the various words that meant “behind”: delinquent, overdue, delayed, belated, and retarded, the last of which was sadly unacceptable, no matter the context, thanks to the euphemism treadmill.

My laptop had gone to sleep. A flick of the touchpad revealed my dissertation. Forget it. I slinked over to the Fiction and Literature section, found the twentieth century, and pulled out a copy of Frederick Langley’s Complete Works.

I first heard the name Frederick Langley in middle school when my eighth-grade English teacher recommended Brutality and Delicacy. He impressed upon me that Langley was a serious author and made clear he wouldn’t entrust just anyone with Langley’s work. It was a mark of distinction. Although reading Langley felt like my official introduction to literary culture, the aura of formality in no way spoiled my pleasure. I encountered Langley slightly before it became automatic for me to underline or take notes, that prelapsarian period when fiction was just for enjoyment.

My attachment was short-lived. In high school, I became acutely aware that the students who didn’t care for reading cared for Langley the most. They found him delightfully outrageous. They loved “Longer,” the grotesquerie in which the circumcised protagonist tries to regrow his foreskin. One boy could recite the entire dinner-table scene from memory. His girlfriend pledged never again to eat calamari.

The idiots liked Langley. The idiots who thought they were countercultural because they were bad at tests. The idiots who thought that any book published before the twentieth century was boring. The idiots owned that dumb T-shirt with a bulging eyeball on the front and, on the back, We see each other in glances. The idiots never bothered to learn the difference between a dactyl and an anapest — didn’t see the point — yet had the energy to track down old magazine articles about the time Langley wowed a Greenwich Village crowd: he’d read the first half of a story and then improvised three possible endings. (And it really did require energy to find those articles. I went to high school in the dark pre-Google age, when the internet was still the domain of math nerds and pedophiles, so the idiots’ best option was microfiche.)

The idiots liked Langley. So I stopped liking Langley. The fact that Langley was my introduction to literary culture made him seem introductory. The fact that I enjoyed reading his stories made them seem frivolous. I formed the impression that he wasn’t sophisticated. He was, in my adolescent assessment, serious enough for a serious eighth-grader, not for a budding literary critic. That judgment stayed with me. Still, when Helen told me that she was Frederick Langley’s niece, the information produced in me a childish excitement.

I skimmed the introduction to Complete Works, which divided Langley’s stories into two major categories, “epiphanies” and “compulsions.” The epiphanies were formulaic: something happens to X that changes his perspective on Y.

The quintessential epiphany was “Alone at Green Beach,” featuring an eleven-year-old boy, Oscar, who’s infatuated with his adult cousin Roger and daydreams that they’ll run away together to lead a storybook life full of adventure. One afternoon at Green Beach, Roger encourages this fantasy. Roger tells Oscar that he’ll need to pick up survival skills if the two of them want a shot at making it on their own: How to gut and scale a fish, how to skin a deer. When Roger runs out of beer — he’s been drinking all day — he drives to the market, leaving Oscar alone at the beach. Oscar waits and waits, but Roger never returns. Close to midnight, Oscar accepts that his cousin isn’t coming back and that Roger isn’t worthy of his adoration.

What made Langley famous were the compulsion dramas, in which he took an ephemeral thought or urge and followed through to a logical-yet-extreme conclusion. Many compulsion dramas were intentionally unrealistic, even fantastical.

In “While You Were Out,” a man takes a sedative after a root canal and falls into a deep sleep. His wife, watching over him, feels a sudden, irresistible desire to pluck one of his white hairs, which blossoms into an almost Ahab-like commitment to totally depilate him. She starts with a tweezer, upgrades to clippers, and then resorts to a razor. By the time he wakes up, she’s shaved off all his head and facial hair. “You’ll look better once you’ve had a little sun” is the last sentence.

In “Baby Crazy,” an old maid — Langley’s term, not mine — folding clothes at the laundromat finds a tiny white T-shirt that must belong to someone’s infant. She writes a lost-and-found ad — Missing something? Baby tee, newly washed — which her pretty young neighbor answers. It’s her daughter’s. She must have left it in the dryer by mistake. The old maid dreams about the T-shirt that night and realizes that she desperately wants a child of her own. So she assembles a miniature wardrobe and kidnaps the neighbor’s girl.

Line by line, Langley didn’t offer much. He wasn’t a great prose stylist. Nor was he a deep thinker. He rarely fleshed out his characters’ motives and provided only the briefest glimpses of their interiority (the old maid wants a child). Like a behaviorist, he generally confined himself to describing observable actions. His stories were often extremely short, sometimes only a few pages long, and I wondered if that was because he didn’t have much to say. Yet I warmed to the material. Langley was versatile, by turns crude, exuberant, and quiet. He could write by numbers — as in the simplistic epiphanies — but he could also veer off trail. And after spending so many years in a classroom, I appreciated that he seemed unambitious.

Browsing through the stacks, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Literature, which had a short paragraph on Langley.

Langley, Frederick (1938–1981). American short-story writer born in Concord, Mass. Released his debut collection, Brutality and Delicacy (1960), while an undergraduate at Faber College. Published two more collections in quick succession: Alone at Green Beach (1962) and Omega (1964), which cemented his reputation as a short-form master. Although popular with the public from the start, not recognized by critics until Omega. Died in a car accident.

Three books at two-year intervals, then nothing in the last seventeen years of his life. That struck me as odd. Since no one had gotten around to writing Langley’s cradle-to-grave biography — as a short-form rather than long-form master generally considered more fun than important, he probably wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list — I settled for something called Freddy Remembered, a slim oral history published in 1990.

On the inside flap I found a black-and-white head shot captioned simply The author, 1963. Langley had long wavy hair, a delicate nose, and an unusually pronounced supraorbital ridge. I tried, and failed, to think of a word to describe his gaze that wasn’t piercing or penetrating; and I tried, and failed, to find in Langley’s face some trace, however faint, of his niece.

The introduction claimed that “the people who knew Freddy best” had sat for interviews, which were then cobbled together into short “remembrances.” There was no contribution from Helen Langley or, for that matter, anyone with the last name Langley, which arguably put the “best” into question. Oh, well. A common refrain was that the author found writing amazingly easy.

Paul Church: I was editor of the Faber College Beagle when Freddy was a freshman. He started submitting stories as soon as he arrived on campus, and I liked them. They had a dashed-off quality. I don’t mean that as an insult — better to say they seemed effortlessly produced, as in fact they were. He had that kind of genius. He found ideas everywhere. On a walk or listening to the radio. The joke on campus was that while other writers labored, Freddy’s manuscripts arrived fully formed, delivered by stork. In the course of an afternoon, he could set down a whole story.

He barely revised. When we first worked together I suggested improvements. But he found the editing process frustrating. He didn’t like going back to a story. We got into a fight once because I called him lazy. Freddy said, “I’m not lazy, I’m accepting.” I think he meant that he didn’t put on airs. He knew what he was capable of and what he was not capable of, and he didn’t see the point in striving. I thought he was dead wrong and that there most certainly was a point. In the end, it was Freddy who got his way.

Rebecca Johnson: I dated Freddy when he was finishing up Omega. He was a really affectionate guy and he always had time for me. That was a surprise. I’d been with artists before and they always wanted whole weeks to themselves so they could work. “Becky, if you don’t let me be, I’ll never finish!” “Becky, get out of here, you’re ruining my career!” It was like they needed a hundred hours of absolute silence just to get a few words on the page. Not Freddy Langley. He wanted to go out and have some fun. He loved going to fancy restaurants and ordering for everyone at the table so he could taste a bit of every dish. One time a waiter thought he was a food critic and gave us all free chocolate cake.

I did see Freddy in a dark mood this one time when he had to go see his dad. He said he had to “kiss the ring,” which I guess was a reference to the Mob, which was strange because his dad was the headmaster at a religious school. Afterward he was in an even worse mood. He said his dad, who at first wasn’t too pleased about the writer thing, was finally coming around. Freddy’s dad saw that Freddy was doing well, making money, getting his name out. Everyone likes success, right? The way Freddy’s dad saw it, if writing was what Freddy did best, and he was good at it, and he could earn a living at it, there was no harm in it. I was confused. “Shouldn’t you be relieved, Freddy? Shouldn’t you be happy he feels that way?” Freddy sneered.

Andrew Cafferty: In October of 1963 — I remember the month because the Dodgers had just swept the Yankees in the World Series — I threw a dinner party at my country house in Maine and I invited Freddy. I’d recently returned a pair of boots to L. L. Bean, the retail company, and was extolling their great customer service. I’d had the boots for eight or ten years already, but when I told the salesclerk that they were letting in water, he gave me another pair, no trouble at all. I guess I was going on.

All of a sudden Freddy stood up and declared he had an idea that he couldn’t let get away. He demanded a pen, paper, and privacy.

In the morning — he’d spent the whole night writing — he came downstairs with “Lifetime Warranty,” the famous story about a woman who purchases her husband from L. L. Bean via mailorder catalog and then returns him decades later because he no longer satisfies her. You know, sexually. That was the husband’s “design flaw.” He “did not perform as advertised.”

October 1963. Langley’s final collection, which contained “Lifetime Warranty,” came out in September 1964. Assuming Andrew Cafferty had the date right and building in book-production lag time, then “Lifetime Warranty” must have been among the last stories that Langley completed for publication. I skipped ahead to the remembrance from Langley’s book editor. He also mentioned “Lifetime Warranty.”

Richard Anders: The highbrow crowd mostly ignored Freddy, I suppose because he was popular. There’s nothing they despise more, you see. But they loved “Lifetime Warranty.”

Marxists claimed that Freddy was critiquing capitalism and the way a profit-motivated society teaches men and women to treat each other like objects. Feminists read it as an empowering revenge story. Women have needs too. Women should realize that they, too, have the right to discard unsuitable partners. Choosy selfishness isn’t just for men anymore! Loyalty is a feudalist hang-up! The New Critics obsessed over a single line describing the husband’s outfit: “George wore his navy and mountain red Norwegian sweater, which Alice had given him on their first date, and which he had never liked.” It didn’t sound like much, they admitted, but it was the only time Freddy had chosen to give the husband’s point of view — shared his feelings. What did it mean? It had to mean something!

Freddy found the whole “Lifetime Warranty” mania funny, because he’d intended the story to be just that: funny. “It’s too much,” he said, laughing. “I wrote it all in one night and I’ve never even read any Marx.” The enthusiasm for “Lifetime Warranty” took me aback as well. I didn’t say this to Freddy, but I didn’t think the story was all that refined. It was a good read for a train ride. A trifle.

Richard Anders was naive — oddly so for an editor. He didn’t seem to realize that critical feeding frenzies often had little to do with the objective quality of the work in question. If a story could be used to promote a pet construct, nothing else mattered. Not its heft. Not its finesse. Nothing, including the author’s intentions. Langley had never read Marx. The Marxists did not care.

I looked for remembrances of Langley’s later years, but his friends and professional acquaintances, the people who knew him best, knew him exclusively as a young man. There was only one entry concerning Langley’s life after publishing.

Daniel Godolphin: I was living in Paris when Freddy was there, and we got along. We’d hang out at cafés and kid around. He listened to me complain about how much cheaper the city had been when Hemingway and those people were doing the expatriate thing. They could get by pretty nicely on the peanuts they got for their stories. On one occasion I worked up the guts to ask, “How much did you get for your stories?” I may have had a few too many drinks. He may have had a few too many drinks. He was annoyed. He wouldn’t say. I’m pretty sure, though, that he got more than peanuts. It’s weird he didn’t keep churning that stuff out. If I’d had a major-league New York publisher and a fawning audience, I would’ve milked that situation. But I never saw him so much as sit down at a typewriter. I don’t think he even brought one with him overseas.

Once a cub reporter tracked Freddy down with a magazine profile in mind. The reporter needled him: “Are you working on anything? More short stories? A novel? A screenplay?” Freddy kept saying no, but the reporter didn’t take him at his word. He assumed he was hiding something, and he suggested that in his article. It was ridiculous. Freddy started getting letters from people back home saying, “When can we expect your great work?” It made him uncomfortable. He’d been inspired once, but he wasn’t inspired anymore.




A Cliché (#ulink_608c1872-f50e-588f-8644-e697ddc9d74d)


Again I walked to Worcester Square. Again Helen greeted me shoeless at the front door. This time she’d expected me. Again she led me to the den, and again she left me there alone, this time while she finished cooking. I took in the room like a familiar place, or, more precisely, with the wonder one feels at finding a place familiar that so recently seemed alien. How quickly one goes from What’s all this? to Oh, this. Resting on the window ledge were unopened letters from multiple credit-card companies and a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Its pages were yellow and its dustcover worn. COPYRIGHT MCMXXXVI BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Helen returned to find me reading the racist classic.

“Um,” she said, infusing that one syllable with a heap of disapproval.

“Sorry. This must be for work, a look-but-don’t-touch type of situation. Is it a first edition?”

“No, no, dear. That’s not actually from 1936. It’s a facsimile. I’m pleased, though, that you fell for it.”

“There’s a dark side of antiquarianism, I guess.”

“Some clients don’t care about the real thing. All they want is an impressive-seeming library.”

“And do those clients know they’re not buying the real thing?”

“I wouldn’t dream of deceiving anyone.”

Was she winking at me?

“The trickery’s all on their end, not yours,” I said.

“I disapprove. It’s just — I have bills to pay. And rent. When I see an opportunity, I take that opportunity.”

That statement may well have been a red flag, but I had enough at stake to ignore it. In Langley I had discovered precisely what Professor Davidoff had commanded me to seek: A subject for an inspirational case study. He was prolific, then silent. Inspired, then — there was no antonym for inspired. Blocked. Dried up. De-inspired. For Langley’s process as a young man, I had Freddy Remembered. For the later years, I needed Helen. She was a primary source enfleshed. When I saw an opportunity, I took that opportunity.

I followed Helen into the sitting room, which doubled as a dining room. We arranged ourselves on either side of a foldout table that was usually a resting place for papers but now held our meal: spaghetti with red sauce on mismatched plates.

As if it mattered what she served. There were some authors — Mitchell among them — who could build a scene around food. They found significance in under-buttered rolls and improperly folded napkins; they found lyricism in crisp baguettes, soft white cheese, dry red wine, and the dry witticisms exchanged over that dry red wine. I guessed they were slow eaters — how else could they have observed so much? — whereas I consumed so quickly that I didn’t really notice anything except, in this particular case, that the cook had used too much salt and that my dining companion was a partisan of the spoon-support technique for pasta. When I was learning how to feed myself, no one had suggested that method and it still seemed exotic, more foreign than chopsticks.

I so looked forward to eating; not just at Helen’s, in general. But eating itself was routinely disappointing because it never lasted long enough and the end was always in sight, always quantifiable: ten more bites, five more bites, two more bites, maybe three if I was careful. The period of satiation was painfully brief. Then began the countdown to the next feeding. Hours spent waiting for lunch, and then minutes to consume it. Hours spent waiting for dinner, and then a few more minutes to consume it.

Cooking anything in the least bit complicated came to seem futile, as silly as and perhaps sillier than spending money — which everyone said was the same as time — on an outfit I would wear only once. The outfit, once worn, would find its way to a closet and later a trash heap. The meal, once eaten, would find its way to a toilet and later a sewer. For these reasons I subsisted mostly on Pop-Tarts.

All that said, it was pleasant to have a hot meal for a change, and someone to talk to across the table, someone who listened patiently as I described, in greater detail than was strictly necessary, my usual dining habits, which I compared to my family’s more formal habits when I was young. Back home, we’d eaten well and we’d eaten carefully, with two or three forks and two or three knives and the water glass and the wineglass placed just so, the multiple courses brought out just when. I felt a little guilty, a little ashamed of my casual degeneracy, but Helen laughed away my concerns. She had a full laugh. A warm, soothing, affirming, seductive laugh, nothing like Evelyn’s high-pitched giggle, Evan’s conceited guffaw, or Professor Davidoff’s silent shoulder-shake.

Degeneracy, to Helen, was just another word for liberation. I should do exactly as I pleased. It was absurd to do anything else. Although she wished I were more capable of enjoying something so simple as food.

“Don’t worry that it’s futile, dear,” she said, helping me to seconds. “Most things are.”

We let the dishes fester and retired to a lumpy couch in the same room. Helen fetched a family photo album, one of those old-fashioned, leather-bound books filled with self-adhesive pages that had lost much of their stick. The spine read Milford, the Connecticut town where Helen had grown up. Side by side we waded in. On the first page were pictures of baby Helen crying, smiling, eating, crawling, sleeping, pointing at wooden toys — the gamut of infant actions — held aloft, held in arms, held on laps, thrown high into the air. She’d been an ugly baby: scrawny, bald, and splotchy.

“That’s my father, Thomas,” Helen said of a fair-skinned man looking out of the frame as little Helen tugged on his sleeve. “He was a psychiatrist. And my mother, Edith, who stayed at home.” She was the standard white middle-class housewife, from the updo to the pumps. “My nanny, Valeria” — a Latin lady in a cornflower-blue apron. “She made me hot chocolate with marshmallows every day after school, using milk, whole milk, never water. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, Robert” — scowling, wild hair, thin face. “He lived not too far away, in Concord, where my father and Freddy were raised. My father got along with Robert well, he took after him, but he was a difficult man, extremely demanding. Anyway, I guess I’m boring you. You said you wanted to learn more about Freddy, so let’s skip to the Freddy years. My uncle wasn’t around when I was small.”

“He must have been in Europe then,” I said, drawing on my library research.

She nodded, neither surprised nor impressed by my knowledge.

“I met him when I was about fourteen. Well, I’d met him as a newborn but I don’t remember that.” Helen chuckled. “He came to visit, thinking he’d stay just a short while to get his bearings. He’d run out of money. But he never left.”

“I didn’t realize he lived with you.”

“Right up until he died, about four years. Though I was at boarding school for part of that time.”

Langley — I couldn’t bring myself to call him Freddy, not even in my thoughts — did not seem eager to smile for the camera. His longish hair had gone gray. Not a nice gray either, more like wet-squirrel color. Broken capillaries crept across his nose.

“Well?” Helen asked.

“What?”

“Well, don’t we look alike?”

They did not.

“Yes, the similarity is striking.”

Helen beamed, flashing her sharp little teeth.

“Here’s one where you can really see the family resemblance. Our nose and ears are just the same.”

Judging from Langley’s dazed expression, he’d been surprised by the photographer. He sat on his unmade bed, legs extended, back against a pillow, a beer resting precariously on his lap, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. Slovenly. There was something strange about the proportions of the space around Langley, at least as captured on film.

“The ceiling looks slanted,” I said.

“He slept in the attic. My parents offered him a perfectly nice spare room. But he chose up there. He was a cliché.”

She stated this matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary way to describe a human being. He was a baseball fan. He was a journalist. He was a father of three. He was a cliché.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How much do you know about my uncle, Anna?” she asked.

“Whatever’s in Freddy Remembered.”

“In that case, you know next to nothing. No one in my family had any interest in working with an official biographer — so nosy! — much less participating in a trivial oral history. The people rustled up for that collection — their impressions were stuck in the 1960s,” she said bitterly. “They thought of him as a gifted college boy. By the time he moved in with my parents, he was washed up. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him. He was nice to me. He doted on me, gave me pocket money. Even as a girl, though, I could tell something was off. He’d stay cooped up in the attic for days at a time. Do you understand? That’s what I mean when I say he was a cliché.”

Helen kept flipping pages. Langley in front of a birthday cake, grinning and bearing it; Langley and Thomas playing cards, grinning and bearing it; Thomas mowing the lawn with Langley looking on from the front steps, grinning and bearing it. Langley’s lackluster attitude prompted me to ask the question that had been nagging at me since the library.

“Why did your uncle stop writing after Omega?”

“He didn’t.”

“But —”

“He didn’t. Well, for a long while he did. He’d just had enough, as far as I could tell. Then he started again. He kept notebooks. I figured you knew. I figured that was part of why you were here.”

There were two notebooks, Helen told me. Langley had started the first in 1978, when he’d been living in the attic for twelve or fifteen months. It contained ideas, outlines, scattered thoughts. He’d started the second notebook not long before he died. It contained the rough draft of a longer project. Both notebooks were now in the possession of the university’s rare-books library, the Elston, about a mile away from where we sat. But they weren’t available for public consumption because Helen claimed they belonged to her and had sued the library to establish her rightful ownership.

“Anyone who wants to study the notebooks needs my permission until the courts sort this out,” she said. “Only a small handful of people have read them — including me, naturally, but that was years ago and I don’t remember much. All I can say definitively about the notebooks is that they’re mine.”

I could hardly believe my luck: Inspired, de-inspired, re-inspired. The fifty dollars I’d given Helen at the supermarket was starting to look like the best investment I’d ever made.

Helen announced that now was as fine a time as any to show me a letter from her uncle that was “very revealing.” She led me through the house to her bedroom, which faced a patch of concrete that an ambitious broker might have called a backyard. It was spartan: a bed, a nightstand with a cheap metal lamp, a dresser and mirror. That was all. No plants or art. No personal touch. I loitered at the door, feeling awkward about entering Helen’s retreat while she knelt beside the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

Helen knew precisely where to find what she was looking for. Without hesitation she fished out a postcard displaying a sunny Connecticut beach — Hammonasset — with the Connecticut motto, Qui transtulit sustinet. “He who is transplanted still sustains.” On the back, in messy cursive: Dear Helen, Remember what we talked about. Love, Freddy.

I returned the cryptic postcard to my host. She received it carefully with both hands, like a raw egg or a football.

“Let me explain,” said Helen, reading my thoughts. She sat on the bed and I leaned against the door frame. “One day at boarding school, the headmistress interrupted my math class to say that my uncle was on the phone; he wanted to speak to me urgently. I could tell immediately that he was in a bad state. Anxious. Morbid. He said, ‘I need you to promise me something.’ ‘Anything, Freddy.’ He said — his exact words — ‘When I’m gone, I want you to look after my notebooks.’ I never did find out what set him off, but I promised to do as instructed. Then he sent me this postcard. It’s evidence that the notebooks are mine.”

Helen still held the postcard with both hands. She gripped it chest-high, reminding me of grief-stricken survivors in post-disaster newscasts who so hopefully exhibit head shots of their probably deceased loved ones. To Helen, the postcard was evidence, but for it to carry any weight, one would have to believe that she faithfully recalled a conversation that had taken place decades earlier. I did believe her. If her lawsuit rested on so little, however, it was hopeless. The presiding judge wouldn’t have heard her laugh, wouldn’t have eaten her salty pasta on an empty stomach accustomed to Pop-Tarts, wouldn’t have any good reason to trust her.

“How’d the Elston end up with the notebooks?”

“Freddy died unexpectedly, as you might already know.”

“In a car accident.”

“Right.” She nodded. “It fell to my parents to handle the funeral, which was a nightmare, as you can imagine. They also had to dispose of all his stuff — as they saw it, all his junk. The easiest option was to ask the Salvation Army to pack up the attic, just take everything away.” Helen paused. She played with her hair. “It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to find the notebooks. I figured some idiot had thrown them out along with Freddy’s old sweaters and tennis shoes. But I was wrong. A few years ago, they turned up at an estate sale, and a curator from your university swooped in.”

Not for the first time, my university was taking a finders-keepers approach to cultural patrimony. It was a Collegiate professor who’d raided Tiwanaku and returned home with a truckload of artifacts: ceramics, jewelry, human skeletons. A century later, Collegiate was still insisting that its claim to Bolivia’s national treasure was as good as Bolivia’s.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” Helen said.

Unthinkingly, I’d fallen into my stretching routine. Arms up; chest out. I must have looked ridiculous. When I explained that my rhomboids hurt, Helen offered to rub my back. Or more like ordered me to sit on the bed so she could do so. She stood above me, using her thumbs to circle and press my sore muscles. At first the physical intimacy made me self-conscious. But the pleasure of relief banished that feeling quickly. Through some mysterious pathway in my nervous system, every pinch along my spine made my earlobes tingle.




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