All Is Vanity

  How could I argue with that? Ted was right. The only reason I’d not made more progress was that I hadn’t been giving it my best effort. I needed to buckle down. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll just do a quick base coat to cover up the mess and be done with it. Save the celadon for when we buy a place.”

  “After you sell your book.”

  I got off to an excellent start the next day. Like Sally Sternforth, I ignored the growing ruin of dishes and I turned off the Today show before it was over. The shelves were dry, so I shimmied them back into position and reshelved the books. To discipline inspiration, I forced myself to write one thing in my notebook after every tenth trip to the bedroom to collect books. It didn’t matter what I was writing, I told myself. As long as I got material down, I’d have something to work with later. Then I painted the windowsills.

  Really, I got an enormous amount of both writing and apartment work done, so it was unfortunate that when Ted came in the door unexpectedly at three-fifteen, I was sprawled on the couch laughing at something Letty was saying. Our door was weighted so that it swung shut automatically, which it did with a wallop, as Ted stomped back down the stairs.

  “This isn’t good,” I said into the phone.

  “What? Did you paint the windows shut? I did that once.”

  “No, no, it’s Ted.” I explained the wrath of Ted, perhaps putting a bit more stress than was strictly accurate on his patronizing tone and unreasonable expectations and neglecting to mention the elaborate stencil work I’d proposed.

  Letty was gratifyingly outraged. “It’s not like you’re making widgets! I mean, sometimes you’ll produce pages, sometimes you won’t. Just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean you’re not working. It’s a process. Look at me; I must pick up twelve times a day, and the house is still a mess.”

  Though I appreciated Letty’s attempt to empathize, I did not, I admit, relish her equating her work with mine.

  “I think Ted has a point,” I said. “Maybe I’m not doing as much as I could be. I’m working, but maybe I’m not working in the right way.”

  “What is the right way?”

  “Well, for one thing, I should do more writing, generally. What about, instead of calling each other, we send e-mail. Writing might become a real habit for me then.”

  “And when Ted hears you pounding away at a letter to me, he’ll think you’re working.”

  “Letty, I’m not suggesting this to avoid work—it’s to make myself work more!”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I think it would be an excellent exercise for me. I could even imagine that in the course of writing to you about an idea, I might really develop it. I might end up writing my novel to you.”

  “Ooh, that would be neat,” she said. “It would be like reading Dickens in the original serial form.”

  That was my first mistake. If only we’d stuck with the phone and kept Letty’s words off the page, I don’t believe I would have done what I did.

  Letty

  Margaret always had to be different. Some people, my mother, for instance, thought she was showing off. “Why can’t she just do like the rest of you girls?” she said the year we were nine and Margaret refused to remove the Socialist Workers Party button from her collar, even for the Christmas concert, and then again the next year when Margaret insisted on trying out for the football team. She wasn’t showing off, though, when she did those things. She was just being Margaret.

  The story is that Margaret and I met before we could understand what it meant to know someone else, and I suppose this is true. I can’t remember the single occasion when I first became aware of her, because she was always there, like my own hand. She was more vivid, though, than other children, at least to me. My memories of nursery school are a jumble of unconnected details—penny loafers with a confusing dime in the penny slot, a dress in a Mondrian pattern of red, white, and blue rectangles, swinging around white tights, a boy’s bristly brush cut, and the teacher with a bindi—although then I thought of it as a dot—guiding my fingers to form a papier-mâché bracelet for Mother’s Day. I remember Margaret clearly, though. That morning Margaret made her mother something she said was the bust of Nefertiti, which made some boy, Buddy something, giggle. It looked like a ball with a blue cylinder on top. Miss Betty, the teacher’s aide, frowned. “Wouldn’t your mother like a nice bracelet,” she asked, “like everyone else is making?” But Margaret shook her head, her gaze intent upon her sculpture.

  I was never like that. If they said, “Make a bracelet,” I made a bracelet. I was so pliable, so eager to please. It would never have occurred to me to do anything else.

  Margaret told me my bracelet was the best. I didn’t say anything about Nefertiti. I didn’t know what a Nefertiti was. Maybe she’d made a good one.

  Our high school offered Spanish and French, but Margaret petitioned the language department for permission to take Latin at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

  “It’s the root of all Romance languages,” she said, trying to convince me to go with her. “Once you know Latin, you’ll pick up Spanish like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Not to mention French and Italian.”

  I understood. It would be dull and sometimes even a little frightening to take the RTD to Occidental all by herself three days a week. But I wanted to learn Spanish. It was the language not of clean and cozy Glendale, but of the real city, Los Angeles. I may have had vague notions of social work. Mostly, though, I was attracted to Spanish because its speakers seemed to occupy a mysterious and, therefore, romantic world behind an invisible but nevertheless impenetrable curtain. When Lottie and I went down-town with my father, who wore a white shirt and a charcoal gray suit and did something incomprehensible behind a desk in a high-rise under buzzing fluorescent lights, we would loiter in the Central Market with five dollars in a little leather box that folded into a flat square. Instead of my prosaic existence, I wanted the life of the girl with the black hair who swayed to the music of the bright horns as she filled paper cups with horchata at her father’s stand. She slipped before the curtain as easily as she made change and then ducked behind it again, turning to the woman I assumed was her mother with a laughing comment in her rapid, rolling tongue. Unlike Margaret, I had no interest in the words of the past. I wanted the words of the future. Also, Spanish was supposed to be easy.

  “If you learn Latin with me,” Margaret said, “we’ll be able to have conversations no one else will understand.”

  That was how she talked me into it.

  Such conversations were more difficult than we had imagined, given Latin’s vocabulary of poetry and conquest. “Oh, the times; oh, the customs” was a handy phrase when we wanted to roll our eyes at our classmates’ proclivities or our parents’ demands, and occasionally we found opportunity to say, “I sing of arms and a man,” but most of what we learned ran uselessly along the lines of “Gaul is divided into three parts.”

  However, as it turned out, I had a talent for Latin. Margaret dropped out after a year and a half, but I went on and on, throughout high school, riding the bus on my own, careful to keep my head far from the windows greasy with hair tonics. At first it was the neatness of translation that attracted me, the puzzle of the line that meant nothing until you broke it apart and applied the rules, moving each word into place. But later, it was the style that drew me on, the elegance of Tacitus, the slyness of Catullus. I felt I knew these writers, as personalities, as people, through their words.

  Michael and I met in a class on St. Augustine, an advanced Latin course we were both taking our freshman year of college. At our wedding, Michael thanked Margaret.

  CHAPTER 4

  Margaret

  I SPENT THE NEXT HOUR CLEANING MY BRUSH and then dismantling the structure of dirty dishes we’d erected along the counter over the last two days. I eschewed the dishwasher so as to feed my self-righteous dudgeon, while I waited for Ted to return from his snit. It was helpful that many of the dishes with the
most stubborn encrustations were Ted’s. He had a habit of eating at the center of the plate, which somehow forced bits of food to the edges, as if they’d scrambled to the rim for safety. I’d always found this a charming idiosyncrasy. Now, it struck me as disgusting. My earlier admission to Letty that Ted’s view might be valid didn’t mitigate my sense of outrage.

  Inside my head, my voice, ringing in round, powerful tones, delivered arguments worthy of Demosthenes as I scrubbed grains of petrified rice from the plates and quite effectively drowned out the notion that had the book, in fact, been going well, I’d not be taking such umbrage. I’d written three pages that day! (Granted, all in the form of incoherent notes, but still words! Filling pages! Three of them!) Letty was helping me! (Or, she would have been, had I had some material to discuss!) How dare he tell me that I shouldn’t talk to my friend? Did I barge into his office to check his progress? This was my book! I would do it my way!

  Inconveniently, I’d just finished washing the last fork when I heard his key in the lock. I plunged the utensil back into the dishwater and pretended to be dislodging material from between the tines as I gauged his intentions so as to marshal the most effective defense. He came up behind me and I tensed, if further tautness was possible, ready to let fly.

  “You know what?” he said, putting his arms around me. “I’ve been wrong about this. You should do it your way. What do I know about writing a novel?”

  The rampart I’d constructed collapsed under his touch. “No,” I protested, “I’ve just been thinking the opposite.” I turned to face him. “From now on, I’m going to approach this in a businesslike fashion. No more phone calls. No more waiting for the muse. I’m going to leave the apartment with you in the morning, as if I had a real job. I’m going to produce ‘deliverables.’ Five pages per day.”

  I knew Ted would appreciate this plan. He was practical, a characteristic I admired in him, although I didn’t covet it for myself.

  Ted and I had met in our sophomore year at Penn at an October charity smorgasbord, during which students were supposed to explore avenues for “giving back” to the community to which we so comfortably did not belong. Ted was manning the Philadelphia Reads! booth, an organization he’d founded himself the year before, after he’d discovered that one of the cafeteria workers couldn’t decipher the menu.

  Technically, this was where we met. But I knew who he was. I’d noticed him in Poetry from Spenser to Yeats, even before the professor had pointed out, to our great embarrassment, that we’d been the only two to receive A’s on the Paradise Lost paper.

  Ted was a big believer in first things first. While I whirled from Life Drawing to Astrophysics 101 to Studies in the New Testament, lighting on whatever seemed interesting as I paged through the catalog, he slogged dutifully through courses like Marx and Engels, Victorian England, and The Novel from Eliot to Hardy, as if he were laying down bathroom tiles. I admit I’d disdained this approach. I liked to tell myself that I was a Renaissance woman, but this was not entirely accurate, since, as I’ve mentioned, I’d yet to do one thing well, let alone a varied handful.

  By doing first things first, Ted had moved on to seconds and thirds. His success thrilled me. I was proud of his steady rise from research assistant, to researcher, to program officer, to program director, and the trail of exhaustively researched, gracefully written reports that followed him. Still, it was galling to think of how we’d started out just the same, each with a superior interpretation of Satan’s fall, when I saw how he’d lapped me, lapped me again and again, while I reeled among the starting blocks, not sure even which lane I’d been assigned.

  But no more. I would take a page from Ted’s book. I would advance in a methodical fashion. The primary goal was neither to prepare to write, nor to think about writing, nor to talk about writing; it was to get words on the page. Therefore, that was where I would begin. As soon as I found a place to work.

  On Monday evening, I’d promised myself I’d produce five pages a day. By Friday at three, after a weeklong search for rent-free “office” space, including trial runs in several cafés in which a nagging awareness that I appeared either pretentious or pathetic and probably both tended to subvert my concentration, I figured I was running a fifteen- to seventeen-page deficit, depending on how many of those daily five pages I could reasonably expect to complete in the last few hours of the afternoon. The summer heat had been radiating off the sidewalks and buildings all day and my bare shoulders were sizzling in the sun. As I waited to cross Eighth Street, smothered by a sidewalk vendors incense, I felt like a roasting fowl, flavored with vanilla and basting in my own sweat.

  My last hope for an office was the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. From the outside, it had romantic charm, with its turret and its reputation for having housed women prisoners in the nineteenth century (although that may have been a building behind it—the facts were difficult to pin down). Inside, beyond the nifty circular staircase and stained glass windows, it was really two linoleum-floored rooms with an unimpressive assortment of books, their covers grayed and softened by hundreds of hands, collapsing sideways on their shelves.

  It was cool and fairly quiet. One of its beigy-yellowy tables was completely unoccupied. It seemed unlikely that any of the people poking at the computers or standing dazed in front of bookshelves, absently rocking strollers, would think me pretentious and/or pathetic if I sat down and uncapped my Mont Blanc. Which I did.

  It was three-twenty. Two pages, I decided, would be a decent beginning. I would not leave my seat until I’d written two pages. Unless I had to go to the bathroom. Or get a drink. No, I would be fine without a drink. Two pages, bathroom breaks only. Double spaced.

  I opened my notebook. Two pages, I saw with relief, would be nothing, given the material I’d jotted down on my last day of painting.

  “Robert Martin ate a breakfast of grapefruit, egg, bacon, and English muffin. He needed to be prepared for what lay ahead.”

  I was drawn to this scene. The bright kitchen, the deliberate chewing as Robert Martin, brown hair neatly parted and combed, moved from item to item, getting it all in, under his belt, loading himself as if he were a weapon. For what? What lay ahead?

  I felt hungry myself. Should I run over to Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog?

  At the next table, a man in a shrunken white T-shirt—an undershirt, really—was pushing a ballpoint steadily across a notebook page. He was bent so low that his cheek was nearly pressed against the paper. Suddenly, he sat up, turned the page with an ostentatious rustle—obviously meant to show that he was getting some writing done—and then bent again to his work. He was the type who might very well be repeating, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  His industry irritated me. “Shh,” I said. I frowned in his direction. He glanced up for the briefest of moments and shot a puzzled look around the room. When his gaze lighted on me, he smiled very slightly, very quickly, and then bent to the page again, his pen racing as if alive and highly caffeinated.

  I bent to my own page, lowering my own cheek somewhat. I would pursue Robert Martin. I would generate two pages of close observation in poetic prose, revealing through a detailed study of his every mundane motion the character of this man. Then I would have him. And once I had him, I would know what to do with him.

  “Robert Martin”—I would check the significance of this name later in my baby name book, but I would not pause now—“selected the last egg”—I crossed that out—“the last extralarge grade A egg from its cardboard nest and positioned it carefully four inches above the edge of the prewarmed skillet.” This showed he was a deliberate man, not spontaneous. “He paused for an instant, and then, sure and quick as lightning, snapped the egg down upon the iron. A perfect crack.” I crossed that last sentence out. I could do more with it. “He could achieve a perfect crack almost every time now, but it had taken some practice. The proper height at which to begin the stroke and the degree of force had been easy enough,
but it had taken him quite a while to realize that to be exactly centered, the crack must actually fall”—would a crack “fall”?—“slightly closer to the fat, rounded end of the egg; there had to be extra length on the pointed end to make up for its narrowness. Once he had discovered this crucial element of position, Robert had rarely been dissatisfied with his fried egg.” Robert’s logic confused me here—how could the way an eggshell was cracked affect the fried egg itself?—but I pressed on. “While the egg was frying, he nestled the empty carton”—I liked that, “nestling” the cardboard nest. Or was it overdone?—“onto a stack of others under the sink. Every few months he delivered these to his mother in Filmore, who fashioned them into tiny hats and Christmas trees and sold them at craft fairs.” And was, I hoped to God, a more interesting character than her son.

  With generous margins, this lucubration on a man self-conscious to what seemed likely to be the point of insanity filled a little over half a page. It was something, at least. I could go on to describe the kitchen—the precisely folded hand towel with its border of pineapples, the hiss and spit of the percolator, the sectioning of the grapefruit with a Swiss Army knife heel carried over in ’Nam. I set my pen down. I needed a bathroom break.

  There is such a thing as effortless concentration, when one is thinking so deeply and so fast that shouts of “fire” would only further color the dream. In that state, the ideas run from the brain more quickly than the hands can catch them and make them concrete. I’d experienced this often enough before to know that the condition in which I’d written about Robert Martin was nothing like it. This was a forced concentration, a grit-your-teeth-and-press-your-fist-to-your-forehead-in-imitation-of-The-Thinker concentration, a concentration in which one quarter of the brain dragged the rest screeching with the hand brake pulled up hard. It resulted in halting words, painfully squeezed forth one by one, as in the proverbial blood from a turnip. It also caused a tense, headachy trance, which made me move stiffly and sluggishly toward the ladies’ room and then take my time in that sanctuary. I washed my hands twice, once on the way in because I didn’t really have to go and couldn’t think what else to do, and then again on the way out, after I’d determined that I might as well see if I didn’t really have to go. As I wiped up the water I’d dripped on the counter to sanitize it for the next person, I made a mental note to have Robert Martin mop up the sink in a public restroom.