Amateurs (12 page)

“If it ain't broke . . .”

Through the window a chickadee called in two notes like a rusty swing set.

“Sorry,” she said. “I feel weird.”

“I'm enjoying it—I mean, not enjoying your feeling weird.”

Another nasal laugh. “When I was younger I thought I'd do something more creative and intellectual, or something demonstrably beneficial, something for social justice. So many things have pissed me off in my lifetime—welfare reform, the War on Drugs, the erosion of reproductive rights, the government's fucking anemic response to climate change—and I've done so little in response; I mean, talk about anemia: a few rallies, a few contributions, sporadic volunteerism. In fact I've often felt obligated to vote for people who've enacted or enforced the very policies I disdain! That's a real failure on my part, and every time I read something that fires me up to change, to really do something, I put things off a few days till I have more time. Then weeks become months, years.”

“Most of us have failed in that way.”

She dimpled the left corner of her mouth. “Anyway, I saw myself doing something that used more of my skills, not that I'm always sure what those skills are.”

“Yeah, that's my Achilles—Achilles heel probably isn't right, but—as a kid I was led to believe I was exceptional. Not like off-the-hook exceptional, but, you know.”

“I think that's what they say to most kids,” she said.

“Do they, though?”

“No, you're right. I should say it more. Maxwell, you're exceptional.” He was out of earshot.

“So I've carried that around for the longest, this idea that I'd do something noteworthy.”

“That you
would
?” she said. “Like it was destiny?”

“Or that I could.”

“I'm sure
that's
true.”

“I'm not. And now I think my desire to be exceptional, like be a famous DJ or a great artist or an entrepreneur, I think it's the same as my desire to be tall.”

“You're not
short
,” she said. “Yeats was around forty when he started writing most of his greatest poems.”

“Was he? That's good to know.”

“Not that his earlier work is unpopular or without interest.”

“He wrote plays too, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I haven't read those.”

“I had an idea once for a screenplay,” he said. “More an idea
about
a screenplay than an idea for one.
Three Times Courtney,
starring Lauren Ambrose and Mekhi Phifer.”

“You got as far as casting?”

“I had some names in mind. I was thinking: commercial but fairly low budget, and about working-class people. I have this thing about romantic comedies—not a thing, really, I just like them. So I thought I could write one.”

“And did you?”

“Part of one, yeah. I probably spent too much time trying to get the formatting down. I don't know how much you know about
screenwriting, but it's very precise: the formatting, the structure, everything. Like your climax is s'posed to happen on a specific page.”

“Ugh.”

“Well, it's just about mastering form.”

“I see these action movies with Maxwell, and my interest always decreases as the action accelerates.”

“But that's about, you know, combat fatigue, the tedium of CGI heroics and destruction, where everything is possible so nothing matters; it's not about story templates. Probably the movies you like climax on the prescribed page too.”

“Which page is it?”

“I can't remember. My script was so boring, I never got to that page. If it was boring me, it was bound to bore everyone else, right?”

“Sorry, I wasn't listening.”

“Though a minute ago you said you were bored talking about your job, but I wasn't bored listening to you. My problem, I decided, was that I like romantic comedies, I'll surrender to them, but part of me still feels superior to even the cleverest, craftiest ones. Like I know I'm incapable of writing something Deep and Significant, but still I think I'm too good to write something frothy and formulaic and bighearted that would make people happy.”

“I bet a lot of frothy screenplays are written through those same anxieties.”

“But I think for things to really work, you have to be, just, pro-froth,” he said. “Besides, it's not like Hollywood's clamoring for proletarian romcoms by unknown midwestern screenwriters.”

She seemed to concur.

“No, you're supposed to say, ‘You won't know 'less you try!'”

“No, I think you were right to throw in the towel,” she said. “Not every labor is justified.”

“A great philosopher once said.”

“More coffee?”

“I'm good.” He looked into the living room, wondered if they might sit awhile on the couch.

“So, I haven't spelled this out,” she said, “but yes, you're welcome to join us on the road to Winnipeg.”

“Thank you.”

“
The Road to Winnipeg,
one of the less beloved Hope-Crosby pictures.”

“Criminally underrated.”

“Should be an interesting weekend,” she said. “To be honest, I don't really know Archer.”

“I'm not sure how knowable he is.”

“Huh. He's so open in his writing,” she said. She asked if Lucas had read any of his work.

“I've gotten a feel for it. I read one of his essays. It was about jerking off.”

“I read that one too, part of it, and the one about Arkansas Bob. And I just finished his first novel.”

“That's the amateur-Canadian-art-thieves thing?”

“Yeah. It's good. Light, but charming.”

“A friend of mine was kind of working for him,” he said.

“Yeah? Working for him how?”

“She was his research assistant, I'm pretty sure, and she proofread his manuscripts.” Lucas would struggle mightily to feel sympathy for Archer, but if he were to, it would be over having to suffer Sara's proofreading. It had taken him several years to forgive her uninsightful and infuriatingly pedantic notes to his MFA stories (“if distilled in the United States, use ‘whiskey'; if in Scotland, ‘whisky'”). To Karyn he said, “Maybe she's still doing it. We mostly lost touch. But she's like a walking
Chicago Manual of Style,
and supposedly he's a bad grammarian, or dyslexic or something.”

“Really? He seems so elegant.”

“You don't think dyslexic people can be elegant?”

“I didn't mean that, I—”

“I'm joking. I should probably read more of him.”

“Gemma sent me an advance of the new one,” she said. “You could borrow it when I'm done.”

Without getting ahead of himself, he noted that borrowing a book usually involved two meetings.

“Oh, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the rehearsal dinner,” she said.

“I'm thoughtless about the rehearsal dinner.”

“It's just, it's a lot of socializing in one weekend. I might need a month in a hermitage to recover. I'm thinking of telling them I have to work on Friday morning, that we can't make it to Winnipeg till after the rehearsal dinner starts.”

With a facetious shudder: “You would lie to your
own cousin
?”

“I would,” she said, kind of sexily. “Maybe blow off Sunday brunch too.”

“At least for brunch we could just throw on our bike shorts,” he said. She smiled. “But hey, that's fine.” He liked the chance to be conspiratorial so soon. “As much as I want to see Gemma, I was pretty happy to decline the invitation. I mean”—he caught Karyn's eye—“I'm looking forward to it now, but . . . I'm not at a place in my life where I enjoy making small talk, having to tell people my job is selling sneakers on eBay and participating in psychological studies, which I've only done twice.”

“A lot of people are unemployed,” Karyn said.

“I know, a ton. But it's more than that.” A more general sense that he was three touchdowns behind at halftime. And he didn't relish watching Gemma marry Archer. He wasn't still hung up on her, not meaningfully, but the guy was a tool. How could she not see it?

They talked more about the economy, about hydrofracking, Winnipeg (“a bohemian Shangri-la,” according to an old friend of Karyn's). Things flowed smoothly, and when Lucas listened to his
voice, it sounded like his actual voice, like he was just pushing air through his lungs and vibrating his larynx and moving his tongue around and doing whatever else people do when talking, rather than doing all those things with slightly unnatural variations, as he would have when talking to a stranger at a rehearsal dinner. He wanted to stay longer, but Maxwell came downstairs with his borrowed violin at noon, almost as if he'd been instructed to reemerge at precisely that time.

March 2005

only if you have time . . . . . .

FROM
Archer Bondarenko

TO
Sara Crennel

Sara,

I really enjoyed meeting you the other month, my only complaint being that just as I did you had to shuffle off to Buffalo. (What's that from, anyway?) Saw John the other day, & heard you guys were taking a break. He had nothing but good things to say about you, case you were guessing to the contray. Actually, he was the one that reminded/urged me to sned you that essay I mentioned at the restaurant. (I just googled shuffle off to Buffalo, did you?) N.b.: the essay's still drafty in spots, not developed in toto yet w/r/t ideation, but I *think* its getting close. Anyway, if you have time maybe take a look. I'd love to hear your feedback unless it's negative. No biggie if you're slammed, & holla next time your back in the city.

Yrs,

Archer

Parts of the essay were indeed “drafty,” and those were its most refined parts. The rest was rather more like notes toward an essay—at times
exactly
like notes toward an essay (“Something here about Roth?” “Consider story of aunt's panties tho prob too much”). Despite the e-mail's semiliteracy and disclaimers, Sara wondered if Archer had intended to send, or sned, such a nubbin-like thing, or if he had attached an earlier document by mistake. If he'd sent the wrong doc, it would seem condescending of Sara to treat inchoate jottings as if they were ready for scrutiny, though to broach the subject even in the most delicate terms would probably give offense; Archer might in fact find delicate terms more offensive than blunt ones.

She was pretty good at spotting bad writers in advance of direct exposure to their writing. In writing workshops she would listen to certain comments and before-class chat and think, When this guy submits his story, it'll be awful. And her prejudice would be vindicated. She held her own work in similarly low esteem—perhaps she didn't think her work was
awful,
but neither did she think it was profound, original, or in any way necessary, and maybe some of her workshop peers, seeing that her insecurity and amour propre were interlaced, tried to discount her opinions in bulk, as if self-doubt canceled critical acumen. (Surely self-doubt is just the inward nadir of critical acumen, and somewhere she'd read that when contempt of others rises to contempt of self, it becomes philosophy.) Archer was an odd case in that, from what she had seen that night in New York, he was quick and articulate—not in proportion to his pride, but verbally fluid nonetheless, as well as prestigiously educated and tasteful (he'd been right to buy those beautiful dioramas); and though none of that guaranteed that he'd be a good writer, all of it gave ground to expect that he'd be better than he apparently was. He needed an amanuensis more than a word processor; even voice-recognition software would have helped.

His essay did, she allowed, contain some good phrases and sturdy sentences, but very often it was slipshod, graceless, and surprisingly pocked with grammatical and orthographical mistakes. Transitions were absent or strained; the erudition seemed feigned. Even furbished, the piece would be too long and eggheady for a newspaper or magazine, too short and superficial for a journal. She could better picture it converted badly into HTML on some dinky website, stray number signs, question marks, & ampersands filling in for apostrophes, smart quotes, and diacritics and making the piece seem Tourettically dotted with cartoon profanity, all of it underscored by one spammy comment from Estonian identity thieves.

She stared at her laptop till the screen went charcoal, uncertain how to respond to the e-mail, much less how to respond to the essay. On these late-winter afternoons, her mother's dining room was quieter than you might predict of a room in an old, uncarpeted house, especially one containing robustly mechanical means of dispensing water to cats. At times in her life Sara had longed for such quiet. Now it was just depressing. She walked upstairs to her mother's bedroom—dust motes floating over an ironing board piled with damp towels, jackets from Chico's, a leopard-print vest—and turned on a telenovela, having previously been inspirited by how the voices at a distance sounded like gossip-worthy neighbors. She watched a long scene in which a man drove somewhere ardently. Returning downstairs to her workspace at the dining room table, she raised the dimmer on the chandelier, but the room remained chromatically compressed: floors the color of wheat, walls pale yellow, popcorn ceiling spottily browned like old cauliflower.