CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella (22 page)

Well, that never happened. But I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place, thinking: Wow, someone
did
this, someone
made
all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds.

In a sense, these stories were that scale model, much delayed.

But also, while working on “
The Wavemaker Falters
,” I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved, the faux-Hemingway element having been disallowed by the setting. Placing a story in a theme park became a way of ensuring that the story would lurch over into the realm of the comic, which meant I would be able to finish it, and it would not collapse under the conceptual/thematic weight I tended to put on a so-called realist story.

I loved making these places up, and even now will still flash on certain vistas within them, vistas that never existed except in my mind, for a few months, back then, at Radian.

7.

The book formed slowly, one or two stories a year over seven long years. Entire office eras started and ended, managers came and went. Whole rooms at Radian were emptied, repurposed. A corridor got lopped off and reframed and absorbed by our neighboring company, a mob-related outfit that claimed to sell penny stocks and whose president once fired a guy by beating the shit out of him in the vestibule near
The Snot.
People married, cheated, remarried. World Series were played, communism vanished, somewhere the Internet was invented, our kids worked their way up the grades, learning to read, catch, sing. Who can remember what was actually going on?

Mostly I was using whatever story I happened to have going at the time to get me through the day and give me some minimal sense of control and mastery. They were a secret source of sustenance. If I got a few good lines in the morning, that made the whole rest of the day better.

That much I remember.

8.

When I was in my twenties I had this plan to go to El Salvador and write about the experience. I had no money, didn’t speak Spanish, but this was “my dream.” I stopped by one day to see a friend of mine but found only his father home. I’d never spoken to this man before, not really. He was a truck driver, a father of eight, always went around in a white T-shirt and a
pair of Buddy Holly glasses. But this day, we talked. I told him about my El Salvador plan, expecting him to find it indulgent. But instead he said, “You know what? You have to do it.”

“Yes,” I said, with the force of revelation. “I do. I really do.”

“And you know why?” he said. “Because you know who you’re going to blame if you don’t?”

I did know.

“Myself,” I said with a knowing smile.

“Bullshit,” he said. “You’ll blame your wife and kids.”

I often thought of this conversation when I was stealing time from Radian to write this book. If I didn’t, I told myself, I was going to become a bitter old-fart version of myself, blaming Paula and the girls.

So I stole like a mother. I wrote in the bathroom, I printed using the company printer, I turned away from my Kodak report to jot things down, I edited while waiting for an offsite groundwater remediation system to purge, I sometimes blew off a full afternoon when I was feeling ripe, although usually, when that happened, I’d take work home, just to be fair.

9.

In grad school I had grown suspicious of conventional literary beauty, wary of what I thought of as, for example, the
literary triple descriptor:
“Todd sat at the black table, the ebony plane, the dark-hued bearer of various glasses and plates, whose white, disk-shaped, saucer-like presences mocking his futility, his impotence, his inability to act.”

Christ, I had come to feel, just say it: “Todd sat at the table.”

Or better yet, cut that, too. Why do we need to know that Todd is sitting at a table? Let me know when Todd actually
does
something. And it better not be “raising a cup to his lips” or “pausing thoughtfully to let Randy’s insight fully inform him.”

I was feeling a little cranky back then, re prose.

10.

One of the new stories, “
Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror
,” was accepted by
Quarterly West.
Paula and I went out for a celebratory dinner that cost us twice what the magazine paid. I sent “The Wavemaker Falters,” over the transom, to
The New Yorker,
which rejected it with a nice (signed!) letter that I, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, showed around proudly at work, even to one of our more straitlaced managers, who said, “Uh, yeah, Georgeman? We’ve been noticing that you’ve been producing your … literary
thingies
using corporate resources. And that’s going to need to stop.”

That’s what you think, I thought.

The new stories kept getting accepted. Finally
The New Yorker
took one of them, “
Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz
.” I heard the news at a Microtel in Watertown, New York, where we were doing a study of what was called “an historic paint dump.”

Paula went around to several doctors’ and dentists’ office, collecting old
New Yorker
s, and strung these into a sort of banner, and under the banner the four of us had cake, to celebrate.

11.

I expect that my younger self—the self who wrote this book—would have hated the idea of an author’s note. No explanations necessary, he would have said; all meanings are contained
in the stories themselves. Explanation is reductive, reading visceral. The stories are either doing the work or they’re not. Don’t yap it up. And I agree with all of that. And I agree with all of that. But I’m older now and feeling nostalgic and—

I just wrote and deleted this phrase:
I really miss those days.

I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.

12.

After the book finally came out, I got a phone call from an old next-door neighbor in Chicago, whom I’ll call “Mrs. L.”

“I read your book,” she said.

“Ah,” I said.

There was a long silence.

“Did you like it?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It worried me. I’m worried about you. You seem like a very unhappy person. Like the guy who takes out the garbage, late at night, miserable and grumbling.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to this and waited for some sort of softening praise, of the “But still, wow, you published a
book
” variety.

But no.

“I’m worried,” she said. “That book is not like you. You were always such a happy little guy.”

Wait a minute, I thought once she’d hung up: I’m happy. I’m one of the happiest people I know. My book is not unhappy. My book is funny. My book tells, uh, dark truths. I’m a hopeful person. Writing this book was a happy, hopeful act.

And that was true. I’d been plenty hopeful while writing it. I’d been hopeful that I might finish it, and that it would be published, and that its publication might make life happier for the four of us; I’d been hopeful that Paula and I would stay happy and together over the years to come, hopeful that that our kids would grow up to be wonderful adults.

It was, we did, they are.

But what bothered me at the time was that I could feel that this happy ending wasn’t necessarily so, not for me, and not for other people.

“Every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet,” wrote Chekhov, “to remind him, by his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, sooner or later, life will show him its claws.”

Yes, that’s it, I thought after that phone call. My book is—you know what my book is? My book is: the unhappy man in me saying to the happy man: “There but for the grace of God go you.”

That’s a nice idea, but rereading the book, I’m not sure it’s true. The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen then they’d need to be, if that was the book’s simple intention. The stories are mean, in places. They’re occasionally nasty. They are abrupt and telegraphic and odd. Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters’ asses.

Ah well.

“The writer can chose what he writes about,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”

I guess that’s what I should have told Mrs. L.

13.

When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes.

Hemingway Mountain, let’s say.

He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway.

At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else’s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life short, omitting things he knows are true, adding in things he knows aren’t.

If he’s lucky enough to realize this, he trudges back down off Hemingway Mountain and starts over again.

Ah, look: Toni Morrison Mountain. That’s more like it.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then one day—maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil—he snaps. No more imitation. That’s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding … like himself. Or at least he doesn’t sound like anyone else, exactly. A new mountain has appeared; he can actually see it, his name on it.

But wow, is it ever small.

It’s not even really a mountain. It’s like … it’s like a little dung heap or something.

Okay, okay, he thinks and goes over and stands on it.

The work he does there is not the work of his masters. It is less. It is more modest; it is messier. It is small and minor.

But at least it’s his.

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.

So be it.

Better than being stalled out forever.

He’ll make a collection of lower halves of Barbie dolls and call that a book.

And the thing is: it
is
a book. That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.

A book doesn’t have to do everything, I remember saying to myself back then, as a form of consolation; it just has to do
something
.

So, although this book is short and took seven long years to write, and is truncated and halting, and is, yes, dark and maybe even a little sick in places, I remember the years during which it was being written as some of the richest and most magical of my life, full of hope and love and aspiration and the satisfaction of, finally, making something happen.

It’s like this, and it is no dream: First off, a plastic palomino and its stiff-armed rider float above a toybox. The rider is a dyed Custer, and everything’s red. I mean boots and kerchief and holster and eyebrows even. He is one ruined and reduced cavalryman, he was poured and solidified with horribly bowed legs, simply because his only reason for existence is to straddle the palomino. Denied Comanches. But the horse and rider float and revolve anyway, on the lookout for marauders. They rotate at about a revolution a minute, as per specs. Also: a velour basketball, half the size of a real basketball, hangs mid-aired over a crib. In the closet, the arms of tiny jackets and sweaters wave and salute wildly. The threads of the carpet flatten out like grass under a helicopter, and then circular waves run outward from the middle of the room. When the waves die down, it’s just a regular carpet again. The whole cycle takes three and a half minutes. An empty rocking chair rocks faster than any mortal granny could.

Out the wide window across the room, it’s a crescent moon in bough-crook kind of thing; caramel lights through sectioned panes in houses of white wood, trees blown and slanting like smoke. Windows and doors of the houses wide open with Trust. Children breathe pillow air. Hills roll away behind the row of houses in a fairly pastoral manner. It is a kind of smooth blue Ireland. And the blue is in the room too. It is the blue of night scenes in animation. The cloak of night and all that. It is very much like the nights when little kids point at the moon and say odd things. There is the smell of very clean carpet. There is no sound of bugs and no sound of
rocking chair or wind or of anything scraping the windowpane. But you can hear the air conditioning. I rub my window clean and enjoy a soft drink.

Here’s something, basically the abuse of an elderly couple. Watch: when they first step in, I’m not worried. They stand in the doorway. He pushes back his baseball cap. She goes for the camera and says, “Cry Pete, woudja lookit all this …” All is well. His hands are behind his back and he steps in, to figure out how it all works. She inspects the finish on the dresser. That she can touch. I have no problem with that. He gets closer and closer to the window (and the village of the caramel lights) and, by gar, it still looks real. It even looks real when his toes touch the crib. Which sits protectively in front of the window. But then he puts his dusty boots on the crib, and his hands on the window frame, and pulls himself up, leans in close to the pane. I cannot have that. I key the mike: “Please refrain from interaction with the components, sir!” Is that any way to talk? Still, it’s a living.

He jumps down like he’s been pinched on the inner thigh and chunks his elbow on the crib and loses his hat in the plastic birds of the mobile. He has acquired a hot and red face, with awkward strands of white hair plastered across it. They stand in the doorway for a long time. He breathes hard. They don’t want to look like they’ve cut and run.