“Yes? Hello?”
“Hello? Samuel? Can you hear me?”
“Barely. Where are you?”
“It’s me, Periwinkle! Are you there?”
“What’s that noise?”
“I’m in a parade!”
“Why are you calling me from a parade?”
“I’m not really in the parade! More like walking directly behind it! I’m calling about your e-mail! I read your e-mail!”
“Is there a tuba right next to your head?”
“What?”
“That noise!”
“So I wanted to call and say I read the—” Sudden silence on the line, a muffled indistinct digital gibberish, signal coming into and out of strength, a robotic garble, the sound all compressed and Dopplerized. Then: “—is what we expected, more or less. Can you do that for me?”
“I missed literally everything you said.”
“What?”
“You’re cutting out! I can’t hear you!”
“It’s Periwinkle, goddammit!”
“I know that. Where are you?”
“Disney World!”
“It sounds like you’re in the middle of a marching band.”
“One second!”
Seashell-like whooshing sounds, friction noises as a thumb or the wind passes over the microphone, abstract musical whooping, then a diminishment, as if Periwinkle were suddenly encased in a thick lead box.
“How’s that? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Cell coverage seems bad at the moment. Bandwidth problems, I’m guessing.”
“Why are you at Disney World?”
“For Molly Miller. We’re promoting her new video. Cross-promo’d with the reissue of a classic Disney animated film, now digitally remastered and in 3-D. I think it might be Bambi? All the parents are filming the parade with their phones and texting their friends. I think it’s jamming the cell towers. Have you ever been to Disney World?”
“No.”
“I’ve never seen a place so utterly committed to dead technology. Animatronics everywhere. Automatons with their wooden parts clacking together. I guess it’s quaint?”
“Is the parade over?”
“No, I ducked into a store. Ye Olde Soda Shoppe, it says. I’m in this facsimile of Main Street USA. This charming little street that multinationals like Disney helped annihilate in the real world. Nobody here seems to mind the irony, though.”
“I am having trouble imagining you enjoying things like roller coasters. Or children.”
“Every ride, it’s the same conceit: agonizingly slow boat trip through robot wonderland. Like that ride It’s a Small World, which by the way is just a horror of narcotized puppets doing the same rote tasks over and over in what I’m sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and prescient vision of third world labor.”
“I believe that ride is supposed to be about international unity and global peace.”
“Uh-huh. The Norway ride at Epcot was like floating through a life-size pamphlet for the oil and natural gas industries. And there’s this one ride called the Carousel of Progress. Heard of it?”
“No.”
“Originally made for the 1964 World’s Fair. Animatronic theater. A guy and his family. The first act is in 1904 and the guy marvels at all the recent inventions: gas lamps, irons, washing cranks. The amazing stereoscope. The incredible gramophone. You get the idea? The wife says it now only takes her five hours to do the laundry and we all laugh.”
“They think they have it easy, but we know better.”
“Right. Between each act they sing this terrible song that is so catchy in a uniquely Disney way.”
“Sing it.”
“No. But the chorus goes like ‘It’s a great big beautiful tomorrooooooow.’ ”
“Okay, don’t sing it.”
“Song about unending progress. Been stuck in my head nonstop and I think at this point I’d lobotomize myself to remove it. Anyway, they move on to the twenties in the second act. The age of electricity. Sewing machines. Toasters. Waffle irons. Icebox. Fan. Radio. Third act is in the forties. There’s a dishwasher now. And a big refrigerator. You see where this is going.”
“Technology keeps making everyone’s life better and easier. Unstoppable forward movement.”
“Yeah. What an adorable mid-sixties conceit that was, eh? Everything is going to improve. Hah. I swear to god, me being at Disney World is like Darwin being at Galápagos. And by the way, the employees of the soda fountain have been smiling at me like maniacs this entire time. There must be a rule, a smiling-at-the-customer rule. Even when I’m on the phone and”—yelling now—“OBVIOUSLY NOT INTERESTED IN A CREAM SODA!”
“You said you read my e-mail? I didn’t hear anything you said after that.”
“They are smiling like drunk children. Like gnomes on Ecstasy. It must take an enormous act of willpower to do that every day. And yes, I did read your e-mail, your description of the mother-in-high-school material. Read it on the plane.”
“And?”
“I couldn’t help but notice that there’s very little information about throwing fucking rocks at Governor fucking Packer.”
“I’m getting to that.”
“Zero information, in fact. Absolutely fucking nothing, would be my rough estimate.”
“That comes later. I have to set it up.”
“Set it up. How many hundreds of pages will that take, exactly?”
“I’m going where the story is.”
“You agreed to deliver a book that told your mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s the ‘ripping her to shreds’ part I’m worried about right now. Because Son of Packer Attacker Defends His Mom might be persuasive in a few quarters, but Packer Attacker Gets Eviscerated by Own Flesh and Blood has serious appeal.”
“I’m trying to tell the truth.”
“Plus it’s a little coming-of-agey.”
“You didn’t like it much, did you.”
“Slipped into some familiar coming-of-age conventions, is all I’m saying. Also what’s the big message here? What’s the life lesson?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise. So what’s your book going to help people do better? What is it going to teach?”
“I have not thought about that for even one second.”
“How about, for your life lesson: Vote Republican.”
“No. That is not at all what I’m writing about. Not in the same galaxy.”
“Listen to Mister Artist Guy all of a sudden. Look. In today’s market, most readers want books with accessible, linear narratives that rely on big concepts and easy life lessons. The life lessons in your mother’s story are, to put it kindly, diffused.”
“What’s the big life lesson in Molly Miller’s book?”
“Simple: Life Is Great!”
“Well, that’s pretty easy for her to say. Born into money. Prep schools on the Upper East Side. Billionaire at twenty-two.”
“You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great.”
“Life is hardly great.”
“And this is why we need Molly Miller. The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’ This is what
they wonder. We’ve done studies on this. What was my point?”
“About Molly Miller, life being great.”
“Here’s how desperate people are for good news. Rolling Stone wanted an interview with Molly. But because they were reporting on her writing and not her music, they said they wanted it more ‘real.’ A more real interview, to reflect the more real memoir, I guess? Setting aside for a moment that the memoir itself was focus-grouped and ghostwritten? And that the ‘more real’ Rolling Stone interview would be staged from the get-go? What they wanted wasn’t reality, per se, but a simulation that felt closer to reality than their usual simulations. But whatever. We brainstormed and spitballed and one of our junior publicists, this recent Yale grad who is going places let me tell you, he has this dazzling idea. He says let’s have them watch her make pasta at home. Brilliant, right?”
“I’m guessing there’s a special reason it was pasta.”
“It focus-tests better than meat. Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform. Pasta is still pretty neutral, unobjectionable. And of course we’d never show anyone what she really actually eats.”
“Why? What does she eat?”
“Steamed cabbage and mushroom broth, mostly. A reporter sees that and it becomes a different kind of story altogether. How the poor teen idol is starving herself to death. Then we get dragged into the whole body-image debate, which no one ever scored any mass public points arguing either side of, ever.”
“I don’t think I really want to read about Molly Miller making pasta.”
“In the face of national calamity and utter annihilation of their personal prospects, people generally go in one of two directions. We have reams of paper showing this. They either get righteously indignant and hyperaware, in which case they’ll usually begin posting libertarian screeds on iFeel or something, or they’ll sink into a somewhat comfortable ignorance, in which case Molly Miller warming up marinara out of a jar is pleasantly and weirdly diverting.”
“You’re making it sound like a public service.”
“There is no creature more arrogant than a self-righteous libertarian on the web, am I right? Those folks are just intolerable. And yes, it is a public service. You want to know my secret hope for your book?”
“Sure.”
“That it’s the one to replace Molly’s on the best-seller list. You know why?”
“I find that wildly improbable.”
“Because there are very few products that appeal to those two groups of people: the angry and the ignorant. Very few products can make that jump.”
“But my mom’s story—”
“We’ve tested this. Your mom has huge crossover appeal. This is rare and usually unpredictable, the thing that pops out of culture and becomes universal. Everyone sees what they want to see in your mom, everyone gets to be offended in their own special way. Your mother’s story allows people of any political stripe to say ‘Shame on you,’ which is just delicious these days. It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”
“I’ll be sure to work on that.”
“Remember, less empathy, more carnage. That’s advice, me to you. And by the way? Those ghostwriters we used for Molly’s book? They’re available. I have them on retainer, should you need assistance writing your book.”
“No thank you.”
“They are seriously professional and discreet.”
“I can write the book myself.”
“I’m sure you would like to write the book yourself, but your record is not what I might call promising, book-finishing-wise.”
“This time is different.”
“I’m not judging you, simply pointing out certain historical facts. Speaking of which? All these years, I have never asked: Why couldn’t you finish your first book?”
“It’s not that I couldn’t finish it—”
“I’m curious. What happened? Did I not send enough letters of encouragement and praise? Did you lose your inspiration? Did your ambition buckle under the weight of expectations? Were you—what do they call it—blocked?”
“None of those things, really. I just made a few bad decisions.”
“A few bad decisions. That’s how people explain a hangover.”
“There were some poor choices made, on my part.”
“That is a pretty blithe way of explaining your total failure to become a famous writer.”
“You know, I’d always wanted to be a famous writer. I thought being a famous writer would help me solve certain problems. And then suddenly I was a famous writer and the problems weren’t solved at all.”
“Certain problems?”
“Let’s just say there was a girl involved.”
“Oh lord, I’m sorry I asked.”
“A girl I very much wanted to make a big impression on.”
“Let me guess. You became a writer to impress a girl. And then you didn’t get the girl.”
“Yes.”
“This happens, not surprisingly, all the time.”
“I keep thinking I could have gotten it right. I could have gotten the girl. I just needed to do things a little differently. I just needed to make some better choices.”
YOU CAN GET THE GIRL!
A Choose Your Own Adventure Story
This is no ordinary story. In this story, the outcome depends on the decisions you make. Think carefully about your choices, as they will affect how the story ends.
You are a timid and shy and hopeless young man who for some reason wants to be a novelist.
A really important one. Like a really big deal. Award-winning, even. You think that the way to fix the problem of your life is to become a famous author. But how?
Turns out, it’s easy. You don’t know it, but you already have all the qualities you will need. Everything is already in motion.
First, and this is essential: You feel hopelessly, irredeemably unloved.
You feel abandoned and unappreciated by the people in your life.
Especially women.
Especially your mother.
Your mother and a certain girl you become obsessed with in childhood, a girl who makes you feel all woozy and manic and fuzzy-headed and disconsolate. Her name is Bethany, and she does to you roughly what fire does to a log.
Her family moves to the East Coast shortly after your mother abandons you. These events are not related, but they feel connected in your head, the great pivot point of your life, that month in early autumn when your childhood cracks in two. When she leaves, Bethany promises she will write, and she does: Every year, once a year, on your birthday, you get a letter from Bethany. And you read it and write back immediately, write like a maniac until three o’clock in the morning, draft after failed draft, trying to achieve exactly the perfect letter to send back to her. Then for a month afterward your mailbox-checking is obsessive-compulsive. But nothing comes, not for another year, when on your birthday another letter from Bethany arrives, full of updates. She is living in D.C. now. She is still playing the violin. She is taking lessons from all the best people. They say she has great promise. Her brother is going to a military boarding school. He loves it. Her father spends most of his time in their Manhattan apartment now. The trees are blooming. Bishop says hi. School is nice.
And you are despondent about the neutral and cold tone of the letter until you reach the end, where she’s signed it:
Love you,
Bethany
She does not sign it “With love” or “All my love” or any of the things one can say without really meaning them. Bethany writes “Love you,” and these two words sustain you for a whole year. Because why would she say “Love you” unless she really loves you? Why wouldn’t she use one of those sign-offs everyone else
uses? All best. Be well. Yours sincerely.
No, she says “Love you.”
But of course there is the problem of the letter itself, which is so impersonal and safe and harmless and devoid of romance or love. How to explain this dissonance?
You decide that her parents are reading the letters.
They are monitoring her communication with you. Because even though you were never formally implicated in any of it, you were best friends with Bethany’s brother during a time when Bishop was doing some pretty fucked-up shit to the headmaster of his school. And so her parents probably do not approve of you, nor of their daughter’s love for you. Thus, the only place she can sneak that message past the censors is in the valediction, where she writes, crucially, “Love you.”
When you write back, you assume the letter will be inspected. So you tell Bethany about the bland details of your life while also trying to hint at your enormous love for her. You imagine she can sense your love at the edges of the letter, hovering ghostlike over the words, barely beyond her parents’ comprehension. And of course at the end of the letter you sign it “Love you too” just to show her that you got the message—the real message—of her letter. And this is how the two of you communicate, like spies during wartime, sending a single meaningful fact obscured in a cloud of banality.
Then you wait a year for another letter.
And in the meantime you count the days until you both graduate high school and go to college and, no longer under her parents’ scrutiny, she will be free to express her real, true, deep feelings. And during this time you entertain fantasies of attending the same college she does and becoming campus sweethearts and how awesome it would be to attend parties with Bethany on your arm, how much instant credibility you’d have being the guy dating the violin prodigy, the beautiful violin prodigy (no, gorgeous, actually, stunning, and you know this because she occasionally sends a new picture of herself and her brother in the annual letter, where on the back of the picture she writes “Miss you! B&B” and you put the photo on your nightstand and during the first week with the new photo you barely sleep because you wake up hourly having these weird nightmares where the photo is blowing away or disintegrating or someone is sneaking into your bedroom to steal the photo or something). And you seriously believe you’ll be attending the same college all the way up until Bethany gets into Juilliard, and you tell your father you want to go to Juilliard, and your father raises an eyebrow and says “Yeah, okay” in a really dismissive manner that you don’t understand until you find a brochure for Juilliard at your high-school guidance office and discover that Juilliard is pretty much only for people in music, theater, and dance. Plus tuition is like ten times your father’s stated budget.