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For Chuck Verrill
I
UNBREAKABLE CONNECTIONS
Painting, Not Writing
I have time to kill while waiting for the sun to dry, and I’m mulling over the story I spent years writing and failed to turn into anything, trying not to be depressed. Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way round. And if you’re writing memoir you’re bound to discover things about yourself you didn’t realize before, may indeed prefer never to have known, but there you are: progress of some sort. Still, years. That’s a long time to get nowhere. The story was about a thirty-year friendship that had a hole blown through it, but somehow survived.
So instead of not-writing, I am painting. I’m not a painter, but I make paintings anyway. I use glass and oil-based house paint, which is toxic, and which you can’t buy just anywhere anymore. It’s being phased out in favor of latex, which doesn’t stick to glass, and acrylic, which I haven’t tried. Stacked on my garage windowsill are seventeen quarts of the stuff in various primary colors, in case the whole world stops selling it.
I love the oiliness, I love how it spreads on the surface of the glass, how tipped at an angle it rolls and drips, and merges. I love how one color overtakes another on the downward slide. I use about a tablespoon of orange to make a sun, and I have four quarts of this color. I figure it will last me till I die. Anyway, I can’t put the sky on until the sun sets, and this orange, this molten fire, takes forever.
Write a Book
This is some years ago. “What can I do for you?” I asked Chuck. He was depressed. So was I. He had hepatitis C. He had been diagnosed with stage four cirrhosis. It was not a rosy picture.
“What can I do for you?” I asked again. I figured if it was good for him, it would be good for us both.
“Write another book,” he said.
“What kind of book?” I asked.
“Make it fiction,” he told me. “You’ll have to lie sooner or later. Might as well start off on the wrong foot.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” I said, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.
“Start in the middle,” he said.
“I always do,” I answered. “What book am I writing?” I asked, to be sure.
“The one about me,” he said.
“The one about the three of us?”
“Yes. That one.”
“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “I don’t know anyone’s story except my own and I don’t even know that.”
“It has to end when one of us dies,” he said, “and that should be me.”
“I don’t know,” I said again. I didn’t say, You’re not going to die, don’t be silly.
“Make it up,” he told me.
Yes I Was
You were never depressed,” Chuck tells me now. “I was depressed. You were always trying to talk me out of it.”
“I was too,” I say. “I was totally depressed.” We are standing on the curb at Forty-First and Broadway. It’s quarter to seven at night, March 2010. We have known each other for thirty-one years. He is a literary agent now, I am a writer.
“You’re the least depressed person I know,” Chuck says, as the light changes.
“How can you even say that?” I ask, but stop there. This is a ridiculous argument. Getting me into a ridiculous argument is a specialty of Chuck’s. Like one of those Chinese puzzles where the harder you pull the tighter your fingers are stuck in that straw tube, only Chuck does it with words.
So I give up. He smiles.
“How’s your hip?” he asks, offering me assistance as we start across the street. I have arthritis.
“Oh shut up, it’s fine,” I say, taking his arm.
When It Started
We met in l979. I was thirty-seven; he was twenty-seven. I had been twice divorced and had four children, Chuck was happily married and had none. I was working at a publishing company as the slush reader, which meant I handled everything that came without an agent. He took over my job because I had been promoted to editorial assistant. Slush was the only position lowlier than editorial assistant, but instead of a cubicle, it came with its own small office. It had a door that closed and a window that opened. The walls were lined with bookcases, the bookcases filled with manuscripts, some read, some waiting to be read. I would read and return, read and return, putting aside for further consideration the few too interesting to reject out of hand. The trouble was that after a week I regarded those partially read manuscripts with the same lack of enthusiasm one might feel for somebody else’s half-eaten sandwich, which made me so guilty I began to resent them, so I’d box them up and send them back without reading another word.
The big gray desk took up most of the space.
It was my job to train him, but all I wanted to do was make him laugh. He was good-looking and nervous, an interesting combination. “Open everything that comes without an agent,” I told him. “Open everything addressed to the president of the company, or the editor in chief. And then make it go away. If anything is good, you can show it to a real editor. And you know what you never want? You never want to encourage somebody who tells you she has been writing since she was five years old.”
I may have been a little intense, because I remember his face twitched, out of anxiety maybe, or the pressure of having to pay close attention in such a small space. We were both smoking our heads off, the window wide open, the door shut.
We took out a manuscript dedicated “To my wife and children whom I love very much, and to the memory of all those who have died by choking.” I’m certain we took a look at the book (who could resist?), but all that remains is the dedication.
When I had nothing pressing to do, I helped Chuck with the stuff that piled up on his desk. “Listen to this,” we’d say, in the weeks that followed, waving a manuscript around. And there would be something hilarious, or terrible, or sad. We particularly loved the letter from a man who had managed the produce section in a big supermarket on Long Island. He wanted to write a novel about his experiences in the retail grocery business—he had seen so much—but didn’t know how to begin. He was so earnest. He thought we really were the editors in chief. “Just tell me what to do,” he wrote at the end. “I’ll do anything you say.” We laughed. We weren’t laughing out of meanness. We weren’t unkind. We laughed because it was all so hopeless.
“It’s not about making the cosmic joke,” Chuck said the other day. “It’s about getting it.”
The First Night
I remember the first night Chuck came to my apartment, but not why. We never saw each other outside of work. He was married, I had kids and boyfriends. When I ask him now, he thinks maybe he had lost his keys. “Those were desperate times,” he says, laughing. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
I don’t remember any desperate times. I remember maybe rain. I was roasting a chicken. My youngest daughter, Catherine, sat next to him on the sofa. She had a new Donkey Kong game and they played it while I peeled potatoes. Now and then I looked at them, thinking, How nice. Their heads touching. I was forty. He was thirty. My daughter was nine. Her hair
was always tangled in the back. Did he let her win? I doubt it.
Earlier, before Chuck showed up, she had ushered me into the kitchen, telling me she had a present. What could it be? I wondered. It was a bowl of sliced peaches and cream, she had prepared it carefully all by herself, and she stood next to my chair and watched as I ate every bite. “Do you want some more sugar?” she may have asked, and “No, this is perfect,” I may have answered.
“When I grow up, I want to be just like you,” she said, and my heart filled with gratitude. I was flattered when she grew up and people said we looked exactly alike.
Five Years
Five years Chuck and I worked together, and then came the day I was promoted, this time to a position of semiresponsibility. No longer could I say what I loved and what I didn’t. No longer could I work on something handed to me, or the occasional thing they let me buy. From now on I’d have to back up my taste with sales figures—I’d have to go to meetings and sales conferences. I’d have to admit that publishing was a business, not just a lot of laughter and excitement and fun. I would have to be cautious, and caution was never my strong suit. There I was, clinging for dear life to the bottom rung of the ladder and they were prying my fingers loose.
I found myself in a reflective mood. Goodness, I hadn’t read a book for pleasure in years. I missed it! How I missed it! The very act of reading had become not unlike the experience of having somebody’s brights in your rearview mirror all the time. I decided maybe I’d like to go to school and become a social worker, or a nurse, or a teacher, or a massage therapist, or . . . it was vague, but the upshot was I was going to beat it.
“How can you leave me here?” Chuck asked, but he was fine. He already knew everything I would never learn about the business end of things. I didn’t think of it as leaving him. We were best friends.
But we weren’t in each other’s pockets anymore. What had been effortless now took some doing. I was one hundred blocks uptown. We had seldom gotten together outside of work. I realized friendship required attention, like a houseplant. We talked on the telephone. We kept it going. And after weeks went by, when we returned to each other, the friendship was always there.
I spent the next six months working for a college counselor in a school for rich people’s children. I found myself asking them, all these young men and women who wanted to be lawyers and plastic surgeons, if any of them didn’t want to drop out of school and join a rock ’n’ roll band. Maybe start a little family? Their faces were blank.
Then an agent called Chuck for a recommendation. She was looking for someone to help with the reading, and he suggested me. The agent was someone I knew and liked and respected. I leapt at her offer. Yes, I said, yes, yes, yes.
A few years later I convinced Chuck that he should be an agent too. He came, after some discussion, and we were together again.
When the real agent went away for the summer, Chuck and I were left in charge of the office. We noticed after a day or two that the phone had stopped ringing. In fact the phone never rang from one day to the next unless it was our boss, checking in.
“Maybe this is what’s called ‘going out of business,’ ” Chuck said, and we laughed heartily.
We sat around inventing things. We invented desk ornaments like the little trolls some people had, only ours would be action figures incapable of action. “Inaction figures!” There would be Torpor and Languor and our favorite, Stupor. Our fortunes would be made! We even had one in honor of Stephen King called Bangor. It was a brilliant idea. But how to put them into production? Here we were stumped.
Then the real agent came back and the phone picked up again.
Reproducing
Chuck’s first son, Sam, was born December 18, 1983. I gave him my signed copy of The Winding Stair. My first grandson, Joe, was born to my eldest daughter, Sarah, on December 18, 1984. He was tiny, no bigger than a fryer in the chicken department. Sarah’s second child, my grandson Sam, was born in 1986. Chuck’s twins, Hannah and Joseph, were born a year later.
Hannah as a little girl fell in love with the color pink. She told her father, “I want a new pink daddy.”
Are You Two Together?
We went reluctantly to publishing parties. We either arrived together or met there, one of us waiting outside smoking until the other showed up before venturing in to where the people I thought of as grown-ups were talking knowledgeably about I knew not what. Once inside, we stuck close. One night we were introduced to a large woman sitting in a comfortable chair holding court, like an amiable spider.
“Are you two together?” she asked. I shook my head.
“No, but we gave it some thought, didn’t we?” said Chuck, which surprised me.
“I’m his mother,” I said.
The Mess Is All
I can never make the same painting twice, not that I want to, I guess. Still, it would be nice to make a better version of something, or try it in different colors, but I never remember how I did it, or when I fiddled with it, or what went down first. A lot depends on how long you let the paint set before interfering. I drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you’ve destroyed what might have been a good painting, keep at it. If you’ve scraped all but a few streaks away, chances are those streaks will suggest something else. Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid of the mess.
The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.
Married Again
When Chuck and I first met, I was in love with a poet. “I’m in it for the pleasure,” I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. “I’m in it for the pain,” he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.
Another poet, good-looking and very intense, once asked me over lunch, “Abby. What do men want?” I was unable to answer. I said he probably knew the answer better than I did. “I want to be scorched,” he said.
After several more tries, each affair ending badly, I decided maybe I was better off alone. Well, I thought, I’ll try this one more time, and if nothing comes of it, I’ll be fine. I put an ad in the respectable New York Review of Books, and waited. Among the letters sent to me was one in particular I liked, and there was something appealing about the handwriting. I can’t explain it.
We met at the Moon Palace, a restaurant that used to be on Broadway and 112th Street. It was raining when I got there, and a man standing outside had a large umbrella. I remember thinking it was big enough for two. It was Rich. He turned to greet me. A handsome man.
Rich was nice. I don’t remember what we talked about, except we talked about everything, but I do remember thinking when I got home, My god, I’ve found the honeypot. Thirteen days later Rich asked me to marry him, and I said yes. It was sudden, as love always is, and Rich suggested that my kids might want to meet him, to make sure their mother had not gone crazy. Sarah, Jennifer, Ralph, and Catherine approved. Catherine was the only one still living with me. Just as I was telling her what Rich and I were planning, the phone rang for her. “Can I call you back in ten minutes?” she said. “My mother’s getting married.”
At our wedding, Sarah said, “You look like a prince and princess from a very small and not-that-rich country.”
It was a perfect description.
On our honeymoon, we ate grits and eggs and bacon and biscuits every morning, and I began to worry that pretty soon even my stockings wouldn’t fit. I felt like a small soft avalanche lying on top of Rich. I mentioned it to him at breakfast. “I’m afraid you can’t breathe,” I said, mouth full of grits with cheese. “If I can’t breathe,” he said with a smile, “I’ll just shift my position a li
ttle.”
Oblivious
Rich moved into my apartment. In the first flush of love, I had not considered this would be hard for Catherine. She was sixteen. She was used to quiet evenings reading, and suppers of strawberry shortcake, our own ways. Catherine liked Rich, but she was not used to sharing her mother, or her bathroom, or the living room where suddenly a couple sat, not just her and her mother. This hadn’t been her decision, nor had she been consulted, and really, what could she have said? No? Don’t change my life? She was nicer than that, she wished me to be happy.
It was months later, when we were shopping for clothes, that I noticed how much weight she’d lost.
“Look at this interesting bone,” said Catherine, pointing to a knob visible on her shoulder where no knob should be. I panicked, but Catherine wouldn’t discuss it. I poured heavy cream into her tea. I added sugar to everything. Rich bought pork fried rice at the Cuban Chinese restaurant on Broadway, and left it on the counter for her every night. She would get up when we were asleep and eat it. Weeks later, I took her to Marvin’s, she ordered eggs Benedict, and I watched her eat every bite.
Stories
I had written poems in the seventies, but the poetry dried up. When I tried to write words that went all the way across the page I got discouraged; “Who do you think you are?” I’d mutter, balling up the paper and tossing it into the wastebasket. “You’re not a writer. Writers are unusual people.”
Then one day somebody told me a story that stuck in my head. I wanted so badly to tell it. I was obsessed. For the first time, the story was more important than my ego, and after failing, I tried again, and then again. It was a mother-daughter story, and once I quit trying to write it in the voice of the woman whose story it was, and imagined me the mother, and the daughter one of my own daughters, it worked. The story got published in a literary magazine. I wrote another, it got published too. Now every time a good manuscript came my way at work it made me want to go home and write. Every time a bad manuscript came my way, it made me want to go home and write. Rich said, “Why don’t you stay home and do your own work? I’ll take care of us both.” That’s the kind of generous man he was. It was 1990.