Plot Theory, 3rd place winner in the annual Kurt Vonnegut fiction contest, appeared in the 2006 summer issue of the North American Review
PLOT THEORY
Plots only tend to exist. We cannot predict with 100 percent certainty where they will go, what they mean. The observer must always be taken into account. We are still seeking the grand unified theory (GUT)—how the plot’s irreducible particles—the character (also referred to as the quaracter)—are united into one smooth, seamless universe.
I. Blood
Robbie sat on the edge of his lower bunk and picked at the strings of his new guitar. They were made of a wild animal’s sinew. The guitar’s compact body was covered in smooth mottled brown and beige pelt. It was a souvenir from Kenya. Roxanne, his father’s sister, had just brought it home to him.
“The tribe that made it says the animal’s spirit sings secrets to you when you play it,” said Aunt Roxie.
Robbie’s father guffawed. “Yeah? Maybe it’ll sing the secret to winning the Jules Lansberg Guitar Competition, Friday night.”
Robbie had started plucking the strings of his father’s old guitar when he was six and to his parent’s astonishment had instinctively known the chords to their favorite song, Let it be. He was in sixth grade now. Bill and Sue Baxter were proud of their “Little Segovia.” Robbie strummed Let it be on the animal hide and sinew guitar and sang along in his choirboy voice.
As he plucked and sang, Robbie thought of the handsome knife Roxanne had given his older brother, Joe. Joe had no musical talent, Bill and Sue said. He was deep in sleep, snoring like a drainpipe, in the top bunk where he had conked out without even eating supper. He had played hard at soccer practice with his eight grade class.
Robbie’s new guitar was chintzy—it twanged like rubber bands. It was just a trinket. Not like Joe’s knife. He stared longingly at the new knife in its leather holster on their dresser. Their father had recently given Joe a Swiss Army knife and told Robbie he was too young to have one yet.
“I don’t want you messing with anything that might harm those magical fingers,” Bill told Robbie.
Robbie put down the lightweight guitar. He picked up his brother’s new knife and held it in his open palm. It weighed more than the guitar. He slipped the primitive weapon out of its sheath. It was as long as his forearm. Robbie ran his fingers down the smooth edge of the blade. Then he ran the blade perpendicular to his thumbnail to test its sharpness. He’d seen his father do this to a just-sharpened meat knife.
Robbie sliced easily through the clay figure of a dinosaur he had made a few months ago. Molding clay kept his fingers nimble, his guitar teacher told him. He sliced through the dinosaur again and again and on the fourth slice he sliced through his right thumb. His blood ran generously onto the white scarf on his dresser.
“Ohhhh!” he squealed. Only Joe’s watery nasal snore answered him.
Robbie held his thumb to his chest and stained his T-shirt.
Bill Baxter glanced at his puny son as he ran downstairs where Bill was staring at the T.V. He wasn’t watching, he told Sue, just relaxing.
“Dad.”
“What’re you doing awake, Robbie?” Bill said without taking his eyes off the set.
“Dad. Look.”
“Jeeze-us!” said Bill. He jumped up.
“How’d you do this, Robbie?”
“I was looking at Joe’s new knife that Aunt Roxie gave him.”
“You did this looking?” said his father. He pulled Robbie by the arm over to the kitchen sink.
“Sue!” Bill yelled, “Sue, get up, we need you!”
Robbie’s mother came out of her bedroom seconds later in her bathrobe and stared in silence at her son’s blood running down the drain.
“Your son,” said Bill, “tried to perform a thumb-ectomy on himself.”
“Oh dear,” Sue said in a low voice. She grabbed a clean white kitchen towel and wrapped it around Robbie’s thumb, squeezing hard.
“He’ll need stitches,” she said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Bill said softly, having said this hundreds of times before to Sue. He clicked off the Tonight Show and pulled his car keys out of his pants pocket. “I’ll take him to E.R. Get me the insurance cards, Sue, I’ll pull the car out.” Sue had actually done this before he ordered her.
Robbie’s father spoke only once during the ten-minute drive to the hospital—”Shouldn’t have touched your brother’s knife, Segovia. You know what it means.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Dad,” said Robbie. He knew he’d have to drop out of the twenty-fifth annual Jules Lansberg competition.
The emergency ward was crowded, but no one in the waiting area looked close to death. Bill filled out forms and gave his insurance number and I.D. at the admitting desk. It took about two minutes before a friendly nurse named Cathy, who smiled a lot, took Robbie and his father to a private, brightly lit room. She sterilized Robbie’s cut and wrapped gauze around it tightly to slow the bleeding. She made Robbie sit on a cot and said, “Dr. Hayes will be with you a minute.”
Dr. Hayes came in the room and sat on a low round stool and sighed. He looked very young and tired. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put the glasses back on. He smiled feebly at Robbie and said, “Let’s see that wound, son.” He unwrapped the thumb. “Looks deep, but clean.”
“He’ll need stitches, won’t he?” asked Bill.
“Hmmm, yes. Probably six or eight.”
Dr. Hayes said that to be safe he would give Robbie a tetanus shot. He went to the stainless steel counter and prepared a hypodermic and syringe.
Robbie didn’t like needles, so he looked away when Dr. Hayes rubbed his arm with alcohol. Just as he felt the needle coming out he flinched.
“OOUUCHHH!” yelled Dr. Hayes, bolting upright, “I stuck myself!”
A pin prick of blood bubbled through his surgical glove from the fatty pad of skin below the thumb area of his left hand.
“Has your son been tested for HIV?” Dr. Hayes asked Bill quickly.
“Ohhhhh . . . no. Not to worry, I’m sure he’s negative. He’s skin and bones, but he’s a healthy pup.”
“I’ve never done that,” said Dr. Hayes, shaking his head, peeling off the gloves as if they were on fire. He swabbed his wound with alcohol. He exhaled long and hard.
Bill said, “You’ve got to be more careful, I guess.”
“You’re right, with all the blood-borne disease.”
“Consider this a wake-up call,” Bill said.
Robbie thought that his father talked to the doctor the way he talked him and Joe. Nurse Cathy came back in the room and anesthetized his thumb as Dr. Hayes got ready to stitch. Robbie made sure he kept very still as the doctor sewed and bandaged his cut. Dr. Hayes seemed much more relaxed than when he entered the room. He ruffled Robbie’s hair and said, “Guess we’re blood brothers now, you and me.”
Robbie had not missed a day of playing his guitar since he was six. He regretted missing the competition that Friday. He was unable to do much with his heavily bandaged thumb, so he played soccer with his brother Joe. From the start he was much better at the game than Joe. Even after his thumb began to heal and he could play a little guitar, he continued to play soccer. He became his team’s most valued player in a few months’ time. Joe lost interest in soccer altogether. He got a job delivering morning newspapers and went to bed so early, his parents and brother hardly saw him.
Robbie picked up his guitar less and less until it was only once in a great while that he sat down with it to strum Let it be.
Bill said to Sue, “Let’s not push him. He’s just going through a stage.” Sue nodded. They said things to Robbie like: “When you start playing again, maybe you should master the Scarlatti piece” or “At next year’s Jules Lansberg competition, you can bone up on Prelude in E, you remember that piece?”
But here it was going on a year since Robbie had sliced his thumb. It was clear Robbie was not going back to guitar any time soon. One day, his parents asked him if he’d care to go to a classical concert at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. They’d heard some excellent local talent was playing, including a guitarist who was invited to compete in the Jules Lansberg. Robbie shrugged yes.
“Sure, so long’s I don’t miss soccer practice,” he said.
Bill, Sue, and Robbie found seats in the first row of St. Mark’s. A stringed quartet played, followed by the guitar soloist. The soloist played masterfully, including Prelude in E and the piece by Scarlatti. Bill kept staring at the man, whose touch was as magical and otherwordly as Robbie’s once was. Finally, at intermission Bill checked the program brochure and recognized the name and the man.
“Dr. Hayes?” said Bill striding over to him in the lobby with Robbie in tow. “Remember? Me and my son, Robbie? You sewed his thumb up last year.”
“Oh, sure!” he smiled broadly. He no longer wore glasses. “How’s that thumb?”
“O.K.,” said Robbie. He held up his thumb.
“I didn’t know you played such fine guitar, Dr. Hayes. I guess it’s a way of relaxing after a day—or night—at the hospital.”
“Oh, I no longer practice medicine. I hadn’t touched a guitar since I was knee-high to a grasshopper—until about a year ago. I took to it like a . . . well, grasshopper to grass, I guess you could say.” He brushed Robbie’s head lightly and added, “Right, buddy?”
II. Choices
Are all shrink offices this fancy? This one’s walls are periwinkle blue with nice framed paintings of care-free primitive animals and figures. Rob, your tall collegiate type, sinks into his big over-sized leather recliner and I sink into my cushy cloth-covered sofa. I notice the many interesting stone and metal sculptures on the various tables. I’m paying Rob to listen.
Where’d I go wrong? Where I grew up nobody went to shrinks.
Now they call them the therapist and it’s like something you put on the shopping list with the milk and bread.
Even me, here in mid-life, my list: return blouse to A&S, get oil changed, see shrink.
How times have changed.
Back when I was growing up shrinks all had Jewish names. We called them psychiatrists. It wasn’t something people talked about, except in low tones. The only ones who went were the filthy rich. I never thought I’d see the day I would go.
But then I never thought I’d get divorced.
I didn’t need a head doctor, not like those loony, rich people back when. But some of my best friends, who aren’t exactly crazy or rolling in the dough, see shrinks. Jeeze, they talk about a session like they just had lunch with their grandmother.
“Listen, Lianne, it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” says my friend since high school, Rosetta Gallioti, “It’s like paying a person to pose as your best friend and keep their mouth shut while you do the talking.” Rosetta’s not divorced, just “in the woods.” On the rocks, you ask me.
“Why do we have pets, Rosetta?” I say, “Don’t ask me to think about this too long, because I might change my mind about paying someone to do what we all should do for each other.”
My third visit and the earth has not moved under my feet. Nor have I been blinded by the light. I’m glad of that. What’s to get in an uproar over? Marriages end all the time these days.
Rob, the shrink, has no -stein or -berg, just a -ham, in his last name. He’s not even a doctor. I call him by his first name, not Mr. Dunham which sounds more like a coach or high school teacher. I found him in a directory at the hospital where I work as a dietitian. You’d never guess his office is connected to a hospital, what with the fine leather, oak, and mahogany furnishings, the art and sculpture. Real jazzy.
I liked Rob right off. As I do most strangers. What a windbag I am first time. Forty-five minutes into our first session I realize I barely left him headspace to ask questions. Well, he could stop me, but what are friends and shrinks for? I’m paying for this and shouldn’t apologize but I do. I thank him kindly—it’s my upbringing. I tear myself away from the sofa that’s swallowed me and give him the $25. Blew me away when I learned my insurance actually covers this stuff—two-thirds of Rob’s fee.
When I hit the street I feel like I’ve just had a good jog and a shower. Spent and clean. That’s how I feel after telling a stranger about the wrong turns my life’s taken in the past twentysome years.
Furthermore, Rob seems to relax more when I talk. It gets uncomfortably quiet if I don’t say something. So I go on as much for his sake as for mine, about my marriage of 20 years. How it ended—it was my idea. Sure, other men caught my eye, but we had none of your knock-down-drag-out sex or money problems. I just wanted more and more time with girlfriends, less with him. The kids were gone. What’d we have in common? Felt like the old joke—didn’t we go to different high schools together?
I gotta hand it to Rob, he did listen. He’d ask a good question every now and then. He’d remember little details from day one, like Marv, my ex’s name. Why did I think the marriage to Marv fell apart, he’d ask.
Maybe I got married too young, I’d say. I want to go back and mine some of the gold of youth I put on hold back when I was only 19.
Rob said Hmmm, a lot and sat with his fingers entwined in his lap. He never jumped to conclusions for one so young, at least ten years my junior. He never pointed fingers or got judgmental on me. God knows I felt my share of guilt. He just did like Rosetta said. He listened.
I’m not one to squander $25, but this seemed to be worth it. He could see I didn’t have any mental problems to speak of, so he’d let me run at the mouth for 50 minutes. After half dozen sessions, he didn’t even have to push my on-button. Clock’s ticking, I’m off to the races. The more I tell Rob, the more I find I have left to say. I’m sure a bottomless pit of gripes.
One session I notice his sculptures are gone. He’s lent them to a friend, he says, and how’s it going with Marv’s calling. He doesn’t bad-mouth Marv. Makes me feel good—like I gave an unbiased picture of the ex.
A few sessions later, I start out, “Rob, what’s happened to the walls, they are stripped to the bone?” He’s moving offices, he waves my question off, and urges me to go on talking. Which I do, no problem. So, next session when his chairs are all gone and we sit on stools, I don’t even ask, I assume they’ve been moved to his new office. Before the end of the session, two workers come in to move the remaining tables and desk. I find this disruptive, but Rob seems to shut them out. And listen like a champ. He even goes a minute past the so-called therapeutic hour and reminds me that I have choices in life. That’s my problem, choices up the kazoo. I laugh. But his voice shakes on the word choices. He feels for me, this guy.
“You’re right, Rob.” I yell over the screeching furniture. “For once, I’m following my inner guidance.” I give him a check for $25 and think what a bargain.
Down in the street, I sigh. Cleaned out of cobwebs.
The following week, I have to break my appointment with Rob at the last minute to take my daughter to a doctor appointment. I call Rob, but keep getting a recording that says his phone is disconnected. I can’t be inconsiderate, I tell my daughter. We have to drive by his office, so I can tell him. He’s not there, so I slip a note under his door.
Next week, he meets me at his locked office door and says he never got my note, but not to worry, he didn’t show up either. He says he’s going through a divorce, too, but I don’t want to pry and ask questions. I tell him about the recording saying his phone is disconnected. He laughs and says without the slightest bit of shame, “That’s a phone company euphemism—I didn’t pay my bill.”
Then, he asks would I mind having our session in his car in Roosevelt Park across the street. We sit in his car and I talk just as easy. He listens just as well. Who needs a fancy office?
We meet in Rob’s car in the park next few appointments and then one time he’s late. He arrives on foot, so we sit on the park bench. I talk, he listens. I forget to pay him $25 before he leaves.
Next session—if you could still call it that—he’s on foot again, doesn’t say a word about me owing him. We sit and I’m telling him I’m having a good week, how it feels good to be single, when I spy my friend Rosetta on her daily jog by the lake. I yell, “Hey, Rosett’, come join us!”
“Rob, the shrink,” I say, “meet Rosetta, the high school friend.” Even Rob has a side-splitting laugh at this. Does him a world of good.
Next thing, he’s telling Rosetta and me about his messy divorce and we’re telling him from the wife’s point of view what to expect.
This is just as well by me seeings how I am not a mental case and have spoke my piece Like I say, this is something we should all do for each other.
III. Flesh
“Don’t get mad, get even,” my relatives on my mother’s side would always advise. How many of their enemies would vanish or die mysteriously? Even as kids, my twin sister, Erica, and I had an unspoken agreement to do better: “Let’s not get mad nor even.”
But take my roommate, Margaret Atkins, a good friend of my former roommate, Lorraine who just moved into the spacious Victorian flat I’ve rented for three years. Margaret is a college professor, enjoys good conversation, and likes the same movies as I do, but she’s a strict vegetarian—absolutely no flesh. I warned her beforehand, “I eat meat.”
“No problem,” Margaret said. “We can just keep our food separate.”
“Fine,” I said. “Lorraine and I did that.”
But a month after moving in, Margaret fretted one evening. “Lindsay, I almost fainted when I opened the refrigerator and saw this coil of raw meat in a poor animal’s intestines.”
“You mean the sausage I got at Falletti’s?”
“Please. No euphemisms—it was dead flesh inside a once-living being’s gut.”
In fact, I had been a vegetarian myself for three years when I first moved to San Francisco. I had thought that purifying my body completely of animal flesh would also purify my mind of all its vengeful thought. But after a while I could no longer resist the meatballs and sausage I’d grown up on and that my grandmother would make for me when I visited her in New Jersey.
Margaret pressed, “Do me the favor of sparing me such sights.” Spiteful words were on the tip of my tongue, A little meat do you some good, I wanted to say, you broomstick.
But I corrected the urge with, “Margaret, I’m sorry for being so insensitive. I’ll be more careful.” Her pale face relaxed.
“Thank you,” she said, “and I’d appreciate you not using my pots and pans anymore.” I was shocked. We’d agreed she could use my dishes and I, her pots. But I held my composure, remembering my uphill struggle with cold-blooded revenge.
Next morning, though, I caught Margaret’s black cat, Nero, up on the kitchen table. His glassy eyes glared at me. My hand automatically raised over my head, ready to whack the daylights out of him, when I remembered my blood and my sister Erica’s face. Don’t get mad or even.
Margaret began to claim more and more space in our flat. After three months, she decided that my front bedroom with the fireplace was bigger and worth more money than her quiet, sunny back room.
“It would really be more fair if you either pay more rent or let me have the office to myself,” she pushed. I moved my books and files out of the office. Then, she told me I had stored enough of my stuff on the back porch and to leave the rest of the space for her.
But Margaret was pleasant and agreeable when Erica wanted to bring Grandma Colucci out for a visit from New Jersey.
“Immediate family is always welcome,” she said.
On the second day of Erica’s and Grandma’s visit we were having lunch with two of my friends in the dining room. Margaret came in just as we were done and I invited her to join us.
“Too bad all that’s left are a few pimentos,” said Erica to Margaret. “Grandma fixed a wonderful tuna salad.”
Margaret was silent. Her thin lip twitched.
“What’d you put in it, Mrs. Colucci?” asked my friend, Toby.
“I’m a no putta nothin’ special,” Grandma said, “just a red pep’, lemon juice, olive oil, little bit fresh parsley.”
“Delicious,” said Toby. Margaret got up and left the room.
Later that afternoon, Erica was out walking and Grandma was sitting in the sofa crocheting an afghan for me. I was reading the newspaper. Margaret came in and said, “Can I talk to you?
“Sure.”
She nodded toward Grandma, so I said, “Oh, don’t worry, Grandma hardly understands English unless you speak loud right in her face. I’ll show you,” I continued, looking at Margaret, “Grandma has cooties, don’t you, Gram?” My grandmother just kept clacking her needles.
Margaret started, “I’m horrified. You were celebrating the death of a fish, this afternoon.”
“What about all those vegetables you kill?” I blurted out, impatience welling up.
“You know there’s no comparison. What kind of friend are you?”
I wanted to tell her, “The kind who’s sorry your name is on the lease.” But, I knew that finding roommates who were neat and paid the rent on time was difficult. And there was the dark vindictive blood. So, I said, “Margaret, I’m so sorry.”
She added, “I’m especially sensitive about fish. When I was 12 I almost died from it. We discovered I have a rare allergy to even tiny amounts of fish oil. I get a rash and my throat closes up. I was rushed to the hospital last time I ate it.”
“How awful! Tell you what. This Thursday, you invite four of your friends over and I’ll have Grandma make us a splendid Italian meal with absolutely no meat in it.”
“That would be really nice.” She hugged me and left the room.
Swell, I thought. Trying to get Grandma to cook a meal without meat would be like trying to get the Godfather to go straight. To skip flesh even at one meal was too reminiscent of the poverty she’d left behind in Sicily. Grandma’s crocheting needles clacked loudly as I pondered my dilemma. Then she put down her needles, turned to me, and said, “Lindsay, what it is, a cootie?”
I took Grandma and Erica to the country north of San Francisco and lost Gram’ to a field of wild fennel. She hadn’t seen it growing so rampantly since she left Sicily. She turned her print dress into a sack and gathered tender shoots to cook with spaghetti and meatballs on Thursday.
In the field, I tried, “Grandma, my friends are vegetarians. Could you make the spaghetti sauce with no meat tomorrow night?”
“Ahhggg, Lindsay, God make a meat for flavor. How bout I putta spare rib just?”
“Heavens no!” Margaret would have a cow.” In desperation I pleaded, “Grandma, my roommates and her friends . . . it’s against their religion to eat meat,”
“Ahhggg…ma cucu…OK.” She smiled. “We putta this.”
She handed me a fragrant bundle of fennel greens.
On Thursday, Grandma started the sauce early and our flat smelled of garlic browning in olive oil. The fennel had soaked overnight in salted water to make it tender and sweet. Margaret let Grandma use her heavy-bottom pan to toast the bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese in butter and olive oil to sprinkle on top of the spaghetti. I set the table for nine of us.
Margaret and her friends were delighted. They had never seen spaghetti mounded with succulent greens sauteed and seasoned with the bread crumb-cheese mixture. Despite its lack of meat, the sauce had great depth.
We all sat back stuffed. Grandma and I cleared the table for dessert. Inside the kitchen, I hugged her and said, “Granny, that was so delicious! You worked a miracle.”
“Eh, sure,” she grinned. “I just putta a little can of anchov’…”
“Of what?”
“Salt-a fish.” She pulled from the garbage, a small, oblong tin, its razor-sharp lid rolled back around a key. “I mash-a with a fork right in the oil. No even taste ‘em, give a nice flavor.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Margaret passing down the hall to her bedroom, saying, “I feel a little funny. I’m going to rest a little bit before dessert.”
I was unable to move. But Grandma seemed to have everything under control.
IV. Fahquahs
Korinne was late for the author series at the Phoenix Hotel. She eased quietly into the royal-blue carpet of the lobby where local authors read from debut works weekly. She mainly went for the free wine and hors d’oeuvres and had ceased hoping to be dazzled by any new writer whose work she might try to excerpt in her magazine, The Fog Index. She had heard dozens of not-to-be-missed writers. And none hit her literary G-spot.
There was a bottomless supply of them in San Francisco, it was reported in the daily paper—four out of five wait staff were writers who were published or soon to be. The current author was some woman who had been in a writing group with the famous author Amy Thompson who then wrote the book’s only blurb.
“I write each chapter as if it were a letter to my aunt,” the author said. “I’m actually a better speaker than I am a writer,” she laughed.
Korinne, an editor who had no interest in writing, had always thought the opposite would be true for writers. She switched her weight from leg to leg on the carpet, which felt like packed sand. In the hushed lobby wing, she felt a man turn his head to look at her so abruptly, she felt an air wave like when a truck passed her on the street. In the dimmed lighting, she felt his gaze fix on her. She didn’t want to make eye contact.
Work had been so tiresome. Meeting after meeting where her brain was cannibalized, and felt drained of its precious contents for the edification of the editor on the magazine. The man’s gaze, now on its third turn of his head with little air booms each time was annoying. She didn’t want to look at him yet. She focused on the speaker who was describing the research she had done of eighteenth-century Turkey.
The author’s talk neared its end, the room applauded, and arms flew up for the question and answer period. The same arms always went up first—there was a clutch of groupies who attended the event no matter who the writer was. Korinne called them the “fahquahs,” or FAQs—frequently asking the questions. How long did it take you to write the book? How did you find a publisher? Is writing easy for you?
Korinne couldn’t hear the question. But she knew from the answer being given it was, “Do you work from an outline?” The author expounded on how the purity of her experience combined with the impurity of forms she had chosen had shaped the book. “What I mean is that my work is not plot- but character-driven,” she explained. Korinne noticed how she said “my work” as if she had a whole body of it, which apparently she didn’t.
Korinne could stand it no more. She turned her head. She didn’t recognize the man. He looked to be younger than her by at least 20 years, putting him in his mid-twenties. He wore a suit and tie—a financial district analyst or stock broker, no doubt, who had wandered over for the wine, women, and hors d’oeuvres.
As the crowd rustled and relaxed, he approached Korinne who smiled awaiting an explanation.
“Hello . . . ” he said his mouth quivering as he squeezed her hand in greeting. She squeezed back. “My name is Lawrence.”
“Korinne,” she said. “Do I know you?”
“No, I just noticed you . . . you’re quite beautiful . . . You look like S-s-sigourney . . . you know the actress . . .”
“Weaver,” said Korinne. “Yes, I’ve heard that before, but she’s got a good foot on me in height.”
“It doesn’t matter – you’ve got a lot more she doesn’t have. . . ”
“How sweet,” Korinne said. She waited for the punchline—he had to be joking. Korinne tuned in to someone asking the author how much of her story really happened, but she tuned out for the answer.
“Well, thanks for the compliment,” she said to Lawrence and turned to move away.
“Can I give you my phone number,” he asked quickly. Korinne waited impatiently for him to find paper and pen. Scanning the room, she noted plenty of blondes, tall ones with fine sculpted features, blue eyes, and translucent skin. Many were even younger than Korinne.
“You sure we haven’t met before?” she asked again.
“I’d remember. You’re beautiful.”
“All right already,” she said.
One of the fahquahs pressed the author for exactly which parts of the book were real and which parts imagined. The author became visibly frustrated and said, “Separating the imagined from the fact would be like trying to separate the sand and cement particles from a block of dried concrete.”
“Who are you?” asked another fahquah who always drank too much free wine. “Who you are in the book is what I want to know.”
Silence enveloped the room.
“I make a cameo appearance as the dog in chapter five.” Loud laughter. “Next question.”
Korinne gave him Lawrence her card. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe he had plot potential. He drifted off into the crowd. She looked at the paper. There was no punchline on it, just inscrutable block print and seven blocky numbers. He had dark hair and light skin, nice green eyes. Black Irish, she decided even as she noticed his last name, McGreevy.
“What does your family think?” someone asked. Obviously, the author had been asked it before.
“They’re all still talking to me, I didn’t give the farm away. Yet. Next question.”
Korinne wondered if Dorothy Parker, Collette or Virginia Wolf had to answer such questions. On her way out, she glanced at a few blurb lines on the poster announcing the author:
“ . . . amazingly . . . fresh voice . . .”
”The story . . . needed to be told . . .”
“Alchemical, magical, tantalizingly . . . transformative [tale] . . . ”
Korinne left knowing only that it was a tale about a Muslim and a Jew and about transcending ancient historical aversion. The presentation didn’t touch her G-spot, but she bought a copy of the book anyway.
“I’m much older than you Lawrence,” she said. They met for lunch after he called her.
“I know,” he said. He looked worried.
“Well cheer up, that’s the good news,” she said.
“I’m holding out for better,” he said.
She studied him. “Jump out of a plane with me,” she tested.
“You mean go sky diving?”
“Yes.”
“O.K.”
He asked few questions and didn’t follow any leads for conversation she threw him. This is going nowhere. She was distracted by thoughts of work.
“How do I know you’re not a G-man?” she said. “Or a serial killer? A stalker?”
“You’re beautiful,” He answered.
“Snap out of it,” she said.
“I don’t want to.”
Part of her didn’t want him to, but she knew nothing stood still. “You know I have a partner, Rob is his name. He’s older than me.”
“He’s lucky.” He barely touched his Caesar salad. He sat with his hands folded in his lap.
“He’s a doctor in ER—he works long hours.”
“Good.”
She finished her Portobello sandwich and said, “I have to get back to work.” On the way up Van Ness Avenue, she collected excerpts of dialogue between people walking by. . . She’s 68 and sleeping with a man of 42…she better start acting her age . . . If I want to keep a bondage table in my kitchen, it’s my business. Stories lurked everywhere, parts of them. Once she believed she could piece them together into an awesome masterpiece. Now, this was her favorite wool-gathering exercise—collecting lines in her head for books she would never write. An old woman collecting string, corks, buttons—parts that had no meaning—or was it self-contained meaning?— out of context. She read avidly for her job as city editor for the monthly Fog Index. The more books she read the less she cared to write. There were too many books out there, too many being written. All she cared about now was the perfect excerpt, the self-contained piece of writing that said it all, the work that was bigger than its creator, the cork that needed to fill no bottle neck, the button that needed to close no shirt, the keystone, the Rosetta Stone for the entire piece of work. She found it less and less and wondered if she had ever really found it.
Maybe she was tapped out.
Over the next few weeks, Korinne saw Lawrence at the Phoenix Hotel author series. They exchanged the same clipped conversation—Last Year at Mariendbad style—even as she sized up with one ear the new books being presented—a memoir about an affair in the Czech Republic; one about traveling to Swaziland and being kidnapped for a year; one by a woman who went to a country she knew nothing about, learned everything she could in three months, and wrote a whole book on it.
The next time she saw Lawrence, he told her, “I’m scared . . . “
“Of what?”
“I mean I can’t sky dive, sorry, I’m too scared.”
It took her a few seconds to recall the fleeting impulse that made her suggest that plot point. “Don’t sweat it, Lawrence,” she said. She had sky dived once and had low interest in doing it again.
“You know, Lawrence, youth is currency,” Korinne said after they had made love and were lying together in the silence that always prevailed between them unless she broke it. It was their third time. They met in the same room on the top floor of the Phoenix. She paid for it. He was between jobs. She told him it was to be only about sex. She needed a thickening plot in her life.
He exhaled, exasperated.
“You’re squandering it,” she added. She sat up to look out at the view of the city. She saw the bridge studded in yellow lights. She was relieved the fog was returning to home shores after three days of being at sea.
“What if I don’t know?” he said.
“Then, I don’t trust you.” She did trust him enough to believe him that he was HIV-negative, had no STDs, and had a vasectomy. He also had no job, no money, some occasional sales work, a hazy past, parents he didn’t like. He was a blank sheet. Political and intellectual discussions were impossible. He was a dial tone. She couldn’t get a party line on most subjects. Sexually, he was adequate. Mainly, he was a snatch of dialogue, in 3-D, that was strewn her way—she could make what she wanted of him.
She remembered the book a few weeks back presented at the Phoenix—what was it?—Sex and the Neo-Cortex? By a sexologist who had studied orgasms and sexual fantasies in men and women. The author had proposed that sexual pleasure takes place in the neo-cortex of the brain. What was it the drunken fahquah had asked? So it doesn’t matter who or what I sleep with—the pleasure’s all in my head? And the answer . . . Korinne recalled that the answer was Not quite, it does matter . . . but she couldn’t remember why. Maybe it didn’t matter.
“This will be our last time,” Korinne told Lawrence one evening a year after they had met. He exhaled and threw the covers off. He folded his arms over his chest. She put an arm over him to comfort him.
“You knew it,’ she said.
“Yes,” he said. His head turned sharply and she winced from the tidal wave of air. He gave nothing but air to go on.
“Rob and I are going to get married—in Rome. Some package deal he came across.” If Lawrence asked she would have told him it wasn’t that she was getting married. It was the lack of suffering, the slackness in their connection. She could make him suffer, but she wasn’t in for that. She had slept with Lawrence nearly as frequently as she endured the author series in the lobby below them. His body fluids were as free of germ and seed as the flow of words she absorbed with one ear. Books passed through the hushed lobby wing on every subject, from how the resting pose in yoga is the key to health to—unbelievably!—a novel about a character who kept a bondage table in his kitchen. She admitted to herself in the beginning that she had hoped that Lawrence would make her forget about the perfect excerpt. Then she saw that he wouldn’t even be a plot point. She played the “its-only-about-sex” card. It was all she had. As one-dimensional as a dime novel. True pornography. Spiritually defeating.
Lawrence showered and dressed in his perfect suit—ever projecting the illusion of someone important. He hugged her and made his final exit.
Korinne finished her little prepared talk and put down her notes and looked around the room. She had hardly used the notes. She had always known what she would say. She had spoken as extemporaneously to the Phoenix crowd as she had to her colleagues at the Fog Index, which she left three months earlier. She smiled and awaited the fahquahs.
“How long did it take you to write the book?”
“Three months,” Korinne answered.
“How did you find a publisher?”
“Ask my agent—Ellie Shorter—she’s in L.A.”
“Is writing easy for you?”
“Most of the time no.”
“Do you work from an outline?”
“Not for this book.”
“Is The Hit Woman true or based on a true story?”
“Neither.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Korinne Devreaux.” Laughter.
Korinne took three more of the usual questions and was ready to wrap it up. She saw her host moving toward the mic to help her when the woman who drank too much waved her hand and started talking loudly. Everyone turned to look at her red face, its nose with broken blood vessels, its eyes glassy as a calm sea.
“One more,” she shouted. “Just one more.” Everyone waited. “Hey, I just want to say I think . . . . genius. You are a genius. ”
“Thank you,” said Korinne.
“And. . . I’m not done.”
Everyone froze. For a moment it seemed that the woman would suck the remaining oxygen right out of the room, the way Korinne’s character had sucked the oxygen right out of her plot potential— though no one, not even the glowing critics, noticed.
“I read your whole book and I wanna say you told the whole story . . . the whole damn story in the first page . . . don’t you think so? . . . I mean that’s brilliant. How many writers can pull that off?”
Korinne let her breath out, smiled, and relaxed. She made her way to the drunken woman as the emcee took the mic to announce a very long list of future writers.
above all it shows the redemptive potential of a sincere spiritual practice.”