All Is Vanity

  At dinner, my mother explained the concept of poetic license. She also suggested irritatingly that the stem of a pumpkin while it’s still in a pumpkin field might very well be green. I assured her that the picture was most definitely of a pumpkin long removed from a field and that Mrs. Reynolds was in no way a poet. Warren demanded to know what a poet was, which spelled the end of the pumpkin discussion. Not that anyone wanted more.

  I was wrong in the case of my plot, of course, wrong because I’d been so inaccurate as to be unbelievable, affording me neither poetic license nor license to sneer. Clearly, I needed to do much better.

  Ted did not agree that painting the apartment was the best use of my time. “I think you should get the book done first. Then, while you’re waiting to hear from agents, you paint the apartment to keep your mind off the future.”

  “But what about this mess?”

  “Sally Sternforth says a writer’s surroundings don’t matter, because a writer draws her material from within,” he said. “Remember that Annie Dillard essay where she draws a picture of the view from her window and tapes it over the glass, so she won’t be distracted by what’s going on outside?”

  So I wasn’t Annie Dillard, I thought the next day, as I draped the couch with an old sheet after Ted left. I worked energetically throughout the morning, pausing only for a restorative square of crumb cake, while I paged through Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose for instructive essays on composition. By noon, I’d stacked all our books along the hallway and in orderly piles in the bedroom. There was, literally, no room to stand in the bedroom, except on the bed itself, from which our cat, Pickles, watched me somewhat critically. When the bookcases were bare, they, too, begged to be repainted, especially the one cobbled together from raw wood that we’d found discarded in SoHo.

  Manhattan was the most affordable city we’d ever inhabited, in terms of acquiring furnishings. We’d been amazed and delighted in our first months to discover not only nearly uncreased magazines piled on the sidewalks, but also perfectly good, or only slightly damaged, furniture—the kind of items that in suburbia would have been shifted from the house to the garage or attic, until a large-enough collection was amassed to justify a yard sale. In Manhattan, we sensed that even had there been enough storage and a proper venue for rummage sales, people had too much money to bother. Why spend a weekend marking prices with a roll of masking tape and dickering with confused elderly women, when you could be brunching at your country house?

  So far, Ted and I had dragged home, besides the bookshelf, a child-sized, six-drawer dresser containing three dozen rolls of Ace bandages and about two hundred packets of antibacterial cream; a sort of cupboard on wheels with an enamel top, produced, according to its metal label, in Nappanee, Indiana; and a reasonably clean rattan hamper. Our sidewalk shopping was governed by only one rule: nothing upholstered.

  “You’re not painting the apartment, are you?” Ted asked at seven-twenty, after he’d stood for an entire minute in silence just inside the door.

  I was sanding bookshelves, a task that would make anyone irritable.

  “Not right at the moment. No.”

  “I thought I told you this was a bad idea.”

  I blew the dust that had accumulated along the surface I’d been rasping into the air. “And your opinion matters more than mine because …?”

  He didn’t answer. And then, in one nauseating instant, I realized something that made me feel as if I were strapped in “The Zipper”—an amusement park ride of my youth—and had been abruptly turned upside down. Ted’s opinion did matter more, because he was paying for my book. He was, in a sense, my patron. Although, theoretically, my income from the school would continue throughout the summer, I’d taken the remaining months of pay in one lump check, which had already been deposited. Financially, Ted and I had not been equal partners for years, but, nevertheless, I’d always brought home a salary that could support me. I had, in other words, pulled my weight. But now it was as if he were at the top of a cliff with a rope around his waist from which I dangled. If he said, “Reach for the rock on the right,” did I owe it to him to obey? If I thought the left was better, should he trust me? What sort of a team were we exactly?

  “Look, Margaret.” Ted set his briefcase down, boosted himself onto the counter, and swung his legs out of the living room and into the kitchen. I seemed to have blocked the traditional passage between the two rooms with the couch. “I know you’re having a little trouble getting started.”

  Luckily, he held up his hand as I opened my mouth to protest, since I had no idea how I intended to defend myself. “But you have to give yourself a chance.” He took the Campari out of the refrigerator and held it up. “You want some?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “What do you mean, give myself a chance?”

  “I mean you need to face the fact that you’re probably going to have to just sit and think, which you can’t stand to do.” He twisted a plastic ice cube tray until the cubes surrendered with a crack. “These people, for instance,” he said, tapping his briefcase to indicate those who’d submitted grant proposals to the Cabot Foundation, “they spent a lot of time observing and mulling over ideas. They didn’t rush around like chickens with their heads cut off, distracting themselves with trivial make-work, hoping that a finished copy would eventually spring full-blown from their heads.”

  “I observe,” I protested. “I mull.” His comparing my novel to the proposals he evaluated made me uncomfortable on two fronts. First, concerned as they were with issues like the plight of the poor, these proposals were a continual reminder that others were directing their efforts and talents toward truly worthy causes. Much as I liked the idea of acting noble, such a sentiment could not be applied to anything I’d ever done, including my intermittent volunteer work, which would better be described as vaguely helpful. I didn’t like to admit this, but, in all honesty, I undertook such work more so that I could see myself as a caring person and so assuage my guilt over being born among the privileged, than out of a burning sense of compassion or outrage over others’ distress. And second—and here my discomfort collided with resentment—how many hours had Ted and I spent groaning over those pages almost universally filled with pompous and tortured jargon? And these were to be my models? “Literature,” I said, “is different from your work.”

  He handed my drink over the counter. “I know it’s hard,” he said. Was the patron being patronizing already? “You need to give yourself some time, that’s all. Don’t panic. Don’t distract yourself. If I were you, I’d lie on the bed all day. Or go sit by the river. Sally Sternforth wouldn’t even do the dishes when she was working on her book. She didn’t want any task other than writing to satisfy her drive to be productive.”

  I laughed, my hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. “All right. You can do the dishes. But, Ted, honestly, I think better when I’m busy. While I’m painting, I’ll generate some good ideas. And in a week, I’ll be done and we’ll both be happier and more productive in bright rooms. Really, I know what I’m doing.”

  That night, I read Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I underscored passages lightly in pencil, keeping my lines straight and neat with an index card. “Buy index cards,” I wrote on my legal pad, under the exhortation to “Buy baby-naming book,” which was marked with a satisfying tick to indicate its completion.

  Didion created an ominous mood and suggested an impending threat of suicide, divorce, and murder with her description of the Santa Ana winds, but when I thought about that weather the words that came to mind were “dry hair” and “allergic reactions.” As in the case of the pumpkin stem, my own observations did not seem very reliable, if my goal was to produce A work.

  “There’s no drama in my life,” I complained to Letty the following day.

  “There’s drama here,” she sighed. “There’s blood and tears, and sweat, too. Mostly mine,” she added.

  “What happened?” This would be another of
the mini-misfortunes from which Letty was constantly bouncing cheerfully back. I sympathized, but sometimes the bid for attention that these scenes seemed to represent annoyed me. Particularly when I wanted to talk about myself.

  “Noah pinched his finger in a door this morning.”

  “My God, Letty, is he all right?” I remembered when this had happened to me in nursery school, my tender, unsuspecting fingers clutching the doorframe during an overly wild game of hide-and-seek, and Jimmy Kaufman slamming the door shut as he ran by. The thought of it still made me gasp and pull my fingers into a tight, protected fist.

  “He seems fine. He and Hunter are in the bathroom with the light off right now, trying to see if the bandage glows in the dark. I’m still a little tender though. Also, Zippy peed on the car seat on the way to the vet.”

  Zippy was the guinea pig that lived in Hunter’s classroom. Letty had agreed to keep him for the summer, along with her two dogs, three cats, and tank of tropical fish.

  “Shouldn’t he have been in a carrier or a cage or something?”

  “Apparently so. It’s a zoo, here, Margaret. I love having all the kids home, but there’s just so much … I don’t know … activity.”

  “What’s going on with the bigger-house plan?” We’d concocted the “bigger-house plan,” which was actually not so much a plan as a wish, when Letty was last pregnant and realized that if she had another boy, her sons would eventually have to sleep in some sort of triple bunk arrangement suitable only for merchant marines or Tokyo businessmen. Luckily, the baby turned out to be Ivy.

  “Well, I don’t know if I should say anything yet, but there actually might be a bigger-house plan this year.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Why didn’t you tell me?” I was a little ashamed that in our last few calls I’d not thought to ask about Letty’s life, since I expected it simply to jounce along in its established way.

  “Well, I was about to, actually. I mean this all just happened yesterday. Michael got a call from the director of the Otis Museum.”

  “The Otis! Would he be interested in something like that?” The Otis was known for its flamboyance. It had a gorgeous site, magnificent buildings, a colossal endowment, and a relentlessly second-rate collection. Letty’s husband, Michael, was a tweedy art historian with a specialty in nineteenth-century Lithuanian print-making who had just been tenured at Ramona University. They hardly seemed a match, and I had to admit that, though I’d phrased my question sincerely, I also wondered if the Otis could really be interested in Michael.

  “I don’t know. I mean, we don’t even know what the job is yet, exactly. It’s really all just talk at this point.”

  “It would mean a lot more money, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said dismissively, “we don’t really care about money that much.”

  “Money’s not such a bad thing.” In fact, like Letty and many others in my comfortable class, I did think that work should be directed toward some more lofty goal than income. Ample money should be the happy, preferably unexpected, by-product of the passionate pursuit of a meaningful interest. However, if the big bucks were not forthcoming despite passion and obvious talent, what then?

  “I’m sorry, Margaret, but I’ve …”

  “I know. You’ve got to go.”

  “But we didn’t talk about your book! Do you have a new idea?”

  “Next time,” I said.

  I did not have a new idea. I’d been sanding all day with the notebook open beside me ready to catch any drop of inspiration, but so far the pages had collected nothing but dust. It turned out that, despite my claim to Ted, I didn’t think better when I was busy. I did feel industrious, though, almost virtuous, sanding, listening to Jude the Obscure on audiotape turned up to maximum volume so I could hear it over the scrape of the paper against the wood.

  Applying the primer, while the reader rumbled on about how Jude’s misfortunes and ill-chosen associations drag him deeper and deeper into destitution, heartened me, though. The clean, white paint running like a milky river behind my brush renewed my confidence in my plan. Just as I was preparing the wood so that Codman Claret would cling to every grain, so I was preparing my mind for the right idea. But Ted was right, too, in a way. I’d been trying to force inspiration, grabbing like a drowning person at every twig. I would relax. I would float. I would let the ideas come to me.

  Letty would approve of this. She’d always insisted that “wait and see” was not just a hopeful way of saying “lazy.” If I hadn’t filled out her college applications for her, she’d have missed all the deadlines. Of course, she wrote the essay herself, started and finished it in one short afternoon, something about how the values she’d learned as a Brownie had guided her behavior ever since. It had turned out quite well—clever, pithy, light—much better than the labored piece on California’s hypocritical attitude toward illegal immigrants modeled on A Modest Proposal that I produced after three weeks of erasing and rewriting in my locked room.

  Back in elementary school, when I told my mother that Mrs. Larue had signed Letty up for Brownies, she’d scoffed. She’d said she’d wasted enough hours for the both of us striving for inconsequential badges. She’d said the Girl Scouts was an organization designed to keep girls in their place. She’d also declared her unwillingness to iron the uniform. I yearned a little for that ugly chocolate-milk-colored dress and felt beanie on Tuesdays, when the Brownies met after school, but I had to side with my mother after I saw the “telescope” Letty made with her troop out of a paper towel tube. There were no mirrors, no lenses; they just decorated the cardboard with sequins and glitter. What good was that? And it was obvious from Letty’s creation that no one had taught them to apply glue with a toothpick.

  Since the table was hemmed in by the shelves, which needed to stay away from the walls, and the kitchen counter was cluttered, Ted and I ate sitting on the bed, balancing a bottle of wine and our glasses within easy reach on pedestals of books. I may have enjoyed this picnic atmosphere and the sensation of inhabiting a work in progress more than he did.

  “How much longer, do you think?” he said on the seventh night, picking a curl of sesame noodle off the pillow.

  “Really just another day. I wanted to be sure the walls were dry before I put the masking tape around the windowsills.”

  “You’re doing the windowsills, too?”

  “They would look shabby, Ted, now that the walls are so nice. Believe me, you wouldn’t like it. And then a week for the hall and the bedroom, and then I’m done.”

  “A week!”

  “Well, I was thinking of doing something a little more interesting in here. Maybe a celadon with a light, springy green trim. And then the pale yellow base in the hallway, but with a subtle stencil about three inches above the molding, incorporating the green and the red of the bookshelves to draw the rooms together.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “What? It won’t be a Christmasy red and green.”

  He let his face fall forward into his hands and then tipped his head back again, raking his fingers through his hair. Ted tended toward the histrionic. He thrust his arm toward me, index finger aloft. “Margaret, you have one year. One year to write a novel, not to paint the apartment, not to read about writing, not to talk on the phone to Letty.” We’d received a phone bill that afternoon listing a number of calls of surprising length to California during peak hours. “Do you think I would’ve said, ‘Sure, go ahead, take the time,’ if I’d thought you were going to spend it tarting up a rented apartment?”

  “Tarting up?”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean that. It looks nice. But it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s taking you away from your work.”

  “All right,” I said, my voice tightening as I got up from the bed in a self-righteous huff. My foot tumbled a stack of books, instigating a domino-like cascade of several more stacks. “I’ll get back to work, right away, sir.” I grabbed my notebook and flounc
ed down the narrow path between the books that lined the hall. I tried to make enough noise with my bare heels to communicate my displeasure, but not so much that it would wake our downstairs neighbors.

  Ted followed, a takeout box in each hand. He liked his environment to be orderly, even in the midst of internal turmoil. “Margaret, you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

  I’d thrown myself into the corner of the skewed and sheet-covered couch and opened my notebook on my drawn-up knees. This was the closest I could get to demonstrating work, since I’d neglected to pick up any sort of writing implement. “ ‘Go ahead, take the time,’ you said. As if I were your employee!”

  “Listen, it was your plan. I liked the plan. I agreed to the plan. Now you have to do the plan! Not whatever you want.”

  “I’m not—”

  “No! Let me finish. It’s as if we agreed I could use my time, which is basically the same as our money—not your money, not my money, our money—so that I could build a boat, and instead I used it to reorganize my books. When the time was gone and there was no boat, you would feel cheated.”

  “If it were important to you to reorganize your books, I would want you to do that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t! Not if you knew I really wanted to build a boat!”

  “But Ted, it’s not like type, type, type, type, done! You make it sound like if only I applied myself I’d be sliding into the denouement around now.”

  “You made it sound like you only needed to apply yourself.”

  “Well, I am applying myself. It’s hard, that’s all. It’s art, not boatbuilding. I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

  “Margaret, I know it’s hard. I couldn’t do it.” He sat down on the couch next to me. I pulled my nearly empty notebook against my chest. “But I believe you can, and I just don’t want you to look back and see this as an opportunity wasted. I want you to give it your best shot.”