I Think You're Totally Wrong (17 page)

DAVID:
Natalie is insulin-resistant.

CALEB:
She's diabetic?

DAVID:
Pre-pre-diabetic. I forget if you've ever met her, but she's pretty heavy.

CALEB:
Related to the insulin?

DAVID:
She doesn't process insulin correctly. Whenever she eats carbs, her body keeps telling her she needs to eat more. She's doing better, though. She's lost thirty pounds in the last year on a very specific regime of medicines, diet, and exercise. We're hoping she keeps seeing progress.

CALEB:
When I first started dating Terry, I met her extended family—all happily married, financially secure, and with beautiful children. On the outside everyone seemed perfectly happy. The first time I met Aunt Karen, she said, “I hear you're a writer. Our family must have many stories for you.” She married a man who worked hard. At a relatively young age, he retired a millionaire many times over. They have a house in Seattle, one in Leavenworth, one in Palm Desert. Two children, four grandchildren. The picture of the American Dream. Christian, churchgoing, golf, fantastic restaurants, vacations.

DAVID:
And really fleeting.

CALEB:
Ennui sets in. I'd rather be interested and engaged and passionate than happy. Karen smiles and the subject changes. Turns out she stars in her own “good bad novel,” as you like to say. Money may not buy happiness, but it alleviates suffering. At about the age of eighteen she started having faints and seizures and was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic. She went to college and found a husband. When she married Bob, they tried to have children: the first one was a stillbirth and the second was delivered alive but died a few days later, due to doctor error. At the time, doctors used forceps, and it was a—what do you call it?—a feet-first delivery.

DAVID:
Breech birth.

CALEB:
The doctor crushed the baby's skull.

DAVID:
That enough suffering for you?

DAVID:
You say that I wish I suffered more, that I wish I'd survived the Gulag or something. I'd say I've taken my obsessions—miscommunication or mortality or whatever—and gone as far as I can with them. The goal is to face your own contradictions and blow them up until they become emblematic of human tragedy. It's all anyone does—from Pascal to Maggie Nelson. The Montaigne thing: “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”

CALEB:
Every person has a novel inside.

DAVID:
Well, to me, not a novel. I'm not interested in your dream life. I'm interested in your sadness, your self-knowledge. I don't think you have to have survived the Khmer Rouge or come back from Vietnam or served in Churchill's cabinet or been a member of the Mafia. That's history; that's journalism.

CALEB:
Does suffering make a person noble or petty?

DAVID:
Well, in my case, it's obviously made me incredibly noble.

CALEB:
Would you agree that life, condensed, has plot?

DAVID:
Sure, you're born, you live, you love, you die, but who cares about that story? That's—

CALEB:
I—hey, hey, how's it going?

FIRST HIKER:
Pretty good. How far to the lake?

CALEB:
You got another half hour.

SECOND HIKER:
Sweet.

DAVID:
It's really beautiful.

FIRST HIKER:
After Lake Dorothy, we're going on to Bear Lake.

CALEB:
Wow.

DAVID:
You guys going to camp?

FIRST HIKER:
Two days.

CALEB:
Awesome.

DAVID:
Nice. Stay warm.

CALEB:
That recorded. I'll insert them.

DAVID:
Great! Add them for drama. Plot!

CALEB:
In
How Literature Saved My Life
, you graphically describe an erotic relationship, and how you wore an earring because of her.

DAVID:
You're mixing up girls.

CALEB:
The last line—

DAVID:
I've changed that.

CALEB:
But in the last line you say she's a fictional character.

DAVID:
I don't say that.

CALEB:
Then you say she was quite the tiger in bed, but “there wasn't an ounce of genuine feeling” in her performance.

DAVID:
I don't think I say that. I can dig it up later on my laptop.

CALEB:
Your point, at least in the draft I read, was how her erotic self was her fake self. That in bed she wasn't “real.” But I'd say the opposite. People suppress their erotic selves in life and in bed they become their true selves.

DAVID:
I don't know if you do this—google people?

CALEB:
Old-girlfriend-google?

DAVID:
You can't help be curious. What do they look like now? How have they aged? I googled Jessica Nagel. I found a video of a little interview she did about a novel she wrote. She was a debater in high school, and she's written a couple of novels about debate.

CALEB:
Published?

DAVID:
Yes, but I haven't read them. All her limits as a person are grafted directly onto her writing. She's deeply shallow—“deeply shallow”? whatever—but that was the very quality, of course, that made her so sexy to me. I last saw her more than twenty-five years ago, but suddenly, watching this interview, my whole body was plugged right back into her: the things about her I was drawn to, the things about her I was put off by, and it was all pretty overwhelming. I just started taking notes. At one time I thought I might write a whole book about her, but that little riff is as far as I got.

CALEB:
Writing about sex is just—no matter what—it's just a penis and a vagina. Scientific sex becomes too analytical. Graphic sex becomes porn. In Aleksander Wat's
My Century
, he says sex is the most important thing, yet it's
rarely discussed. And then he doesn't say much else about it. We're not able to write freely about it or, better said, we must be very careful.

DAVID:
I want to write a book about all that, but I have no idea how to do it without talking about Laurie and she says I better not. I'll write a whole book about Jessica!

CALEB:
Perhaps it shows my own insecurity, not as a writer but as a person (I know there's overlap), but I did a lot of kiss-and-tell when I was younger.

DAVID:
Who would you tell?

CALEB:
The guys. “I went to third base with her …”

DAVID:
I see. In high school. Well, that would be part of the appeal: you may not have been connecting much with the girls as people, so it was, Okay, I'm going to tell the whole world I'm having sex. Were your friends the same?

CALEB:
Lame role models. One of the guys recorded sex with this girl, and it became his brag tape. She's saying stuff like “Oh, fuck me, fuck me.”

DAVID:
There wasn't videotape?

CALEB:
No. Just a cassette recorder underneath the bed. It disgusted me more and more. I overcompensated and went from shallow asshole to preachy asshole. I'm very judgmental of my youth. I was such a creep. I'd be preachy, smothering, and hesitant with girls I wanted to love. Then, when I wanted to fuck, I'd go all Gadarene swine. I'm not sure if I want to write about that part of my life.

DAVID:
I would. The more embarrassing and awful, the better.

CALEB:
I'm a Nazi in the kitchen. I could give you mushrooms to cut.

DAVID:
I'll do cleanup.

CALEB:
Okay. What should we have, other than salmon and pasta? Green beans?

DAVID:
I can't eat green beans: oxalates. Kidney stones. I could have an apple.

CALEB:
I'll eat the green beans, and I have red bell peppers. Pasta is pretty filling.

DAVID:
Pasta with salmon sounds great. Who are the Huskies playing this weekend—Utah?

CALEB:
Sounds right.

DAVID:
I find them oddly likable. I like Sarkisian. I like Chris Polk. I like Keith Price. Saturday rolls around and I inevitably find myself running errands and listening to the game on the car radio. What do you think of Hugh Millen on KJR?

CALEB:
He's not bad.

DAVID:
I think he's amazing. I love how he brings incredibly rococo analysis to bear upon the simplest plays. In a way, life is very simple. What's interesting is the meditation on it.

CALEB:
I've tried Brock and Salk, the 710 guys. They're monotonous, say the same thing eight different ways. They're talking about where Jake Locker will go in the draft. Switch channels, turn back to 710 an hour later, and they're talking about where Jake Locker will go in the draft. And they
yammer on and on about their personal lives. Once they spent fifteen minutes on how to grill a burger.

DAVID:
Is it hyper-macho talk? Isn't that station much more amped up? “Let's be very testosterone-driven men.”

CALEB:
Perhaps.

DAVID:
My favorite thing on KJR is when the Huskies or Seahawks suffer a devastating defeat—all the people calling in, trying to process loss. I'm in heaven.

CALEB:
You'd love soccer culture.

DAVID:
Through Natalie I've come to know soccer.

CALEB:
Kapuściński's
The Soccer War
.

DAVID:
Everyone worships that book. I absolutely loved the first twenty pages or so, then it goes completely slack for me. Kitchen-sink is not a writing strategy.

CALEB:
There was that Colombian guy, Andrés Escobar, who scored an own goal in the World Cup against the U.S. in LA in 1994. He came home and was murdered in a parking lot. Before the killer fired, he said,
“¡Gracias por el gol en su propia puerta!”
The guy, Humberto Castro Muñoz, was a hit man for a drug lord who lost money gambling on the game. Muñoz went to prison for eleven years. Pretty light sentence, if you ask me.