I Think You're Totally Wrong (21 page)

CALEB:
This song is called “James Wood Is a Dinosaur.”
(strums a guitar chord and sings, à la Paul Shaffer)
James Wood is a dinosaur.
(strums a chord progression)
James Wood don't know the score.
(plays loudly, then softly)
James Wood makes David Shields snore.

DAVID:
Stick to learning foreign languages.

CALEB:
(to DVR)
It's now 9:37 p.m., Friday, September 30th.

DAVID:
What's my problem with James Wood? He's confused literature with religion.

CALEB:
(sings)
Literature with religion!

DAVID:
His, you know, his fuddy-duddyness.

CALEB:
(sings)
His fuddy-duddyness!

DAVID:
I've read his two collections of reviews. I've read
How Fiction Works
, which is incredibly banal. I've actually read his novel about God, which is even worse.

CALEB:
(lightly strums)
I haven't. Just the occasional piece in the
New Yorker
.

DAVID:
He fascinates me as a case or type. His father was an Anglican priest, and Wood was raised to also become a man of the cloth. He left the church to become a literary critic, but he never left—that old story. In 2011, he's still clinging to the “great tradition.” Every contemporary work
is judged according to how well it measures up to
Madame Bovary
.

Caleb laughs
.

DAVID:
He's thought to be the gold standard for people who do book reports, when what he is is a sea captain for nineteenth-century novels. He is, to me, one lost human, movingly so, but it's really important to push back against his rearguard action.

DAVID:
In
My Dinner with André
, Wally feels compelled to have dinner with André because André's in the throes of a meltdown. I wonder, with Caleb and David, if we can concoct something similar. Maybe Caleb has a manuscript he wants me to read. Or I want him to interview me about
How Literature Saved My Life
. Or he's mad that I didn't blurb his manuscript. Or he needs a recommendation to apply to graduate school.

CALEB:
Too staged.

DAVID:
Just the tiniest thing at the beginning …

CALEB:
I don't know.

DAVID:
I'm just throwing it out there.

CALEB:
Well, if we're going to imitate
My Dinner with André
, we could start with me walking to meet you at your UW office. Voice-over: “Hmm, David Shields asked me if I'd be interested in collaborating on a book. Why? Is this some cruel joke? I thought he hated me.”

DAVID:
Or a possible trigger could be that David seeks Caleb out because David has become a bit of a pamphleteer, a blabberer about art and culture, which bores him greatly, and he doesn't want to keep doing this. And yet he can't exactly come up with anything else to do. He fears he may have few if any arrows left in his quiver. He needs something, someone, to shake him up. He wants an opponent, and he recalls Caleb as an aggressive—

CALEB:
You've used “combative” and “contentious.”

DAVID:
You're one of the most confrontational people I know.

CALEB:
You called me “hostile.”

DAVID:
I did.

CALEB:
I take that as a compliment. And a complement. Ba-boom! We're somewhat friendly, though.

DAVID:
You've always been willing to take me on, and yet we have a shared enough aesthetic that we don't not have anything to talk about. Like André and Wally …

CALEB:
Like André, I can disappear. I told Terry, before we got married, that I'm the sort of guy who can disappear for three months and still be happy in a marriage. When she confirmed a healthy pregnancy, I went back to Asia. That was part of our informal prenuptial, but even then, she didn't understand how I could do this. Her mother, especially, didn't: “Your wife's pregnant and you're going to Taiwan?” André leaves his wife and family, too.

DAVID:
You have huge wanderlust.

CALEB:
I proposed and went to Taiwan for six months. We met in Hong Kong for a week, but she did all the marriage plans. Her family and mine thought that was weird. I come home from Asia, we get married, and then honeymoon in
Belize and Guatemala. At our wedding, her father makes a toast and says Terry and I are so similar—both of us have wanderlust. He says, “Caleb has traveled all around the world. And when my daughter's employer asked if she'd be willing to relocate to Maryland, Terry went.” Ever since, I tease my wife about the great adventure of Maryland.

DAVID:
She never worked in Asia?

CALEB:
No.

DAVID:
Maybe she's like André's wife.

CALEB:
André doesn't evoke his wife.

DAVID:
Sure he does. I have a very specific sense of her.

CALEB:
We know hardly anything about her. Trivia: she's sitting in the bar as an extra.

DAVID:
(talking into the DVR with Caleb out of the room)
Wally and André cartoonize themselves in order to make the contrast starker: Quixote tilting at windmills; Sancho Panza, quotidian man. And I think Caleb and I should be willing—in our conversations per se and/or in our edits of our conversations—to slightly exaggerate our positions. Not lie or pretend, but I seriously doubt André is as high-church as he comes across, and I know Wallace Shawn is much more sophisticated than the nudnik he presents himself as being. In the same way, Caleb and I ought to be willing to do the same thing in the service of a work of art whose main debate topic is, let's face it, life vs. art.

CALEB:
(returning to the room) There's also
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
.

DAVID:
Christ, I love that play so much.

CALEB:
Waiting for Godot
.

DAVID:
Obviously, you can go all the way back to Plato's dialogues with Socrates. It's an ancient form: two white guys bullshitting. I also like the idea of us asking ourselves, Why are we even doing this? Why aren't we home with our wives and children? I even like the idea of us talking about Lipsky/Wallace,
Sideways
,
The Trip
. I wonder if it would be too weird for us to consciously discuss them.

CALEB:
We need comedy, like in
Sideways
when Thomas Haden Church is tasting wine and Paul Giamatti discovers he's chewing gum.

DAVID:
That was hilarious.

CALEB:
Terry thinks that's me, Haden Church.

DAVID:
How so?

CALEB:
She thinks I'm unsophisticated.

DAVID:
Oh, is she so sophisticated herself?

CALEB:
She knows all the rules and etiquette of dining, hosting, being a guest, furniture placement. With pillows the stems must point downward; and with flowers, they must point upward.

DAVID:
I have no idea what that even means.

CALEB:
Floral patterns on the pillows. And the difference between Malbec and Cabernet and Merlot. Once, I handed her a thin-stemmed glass instead of wide-mouthed, and she says, “Caleb, thanks, but wrong glass. The curves allow the essence of the wine to circulate.”

DAVID:
Laurie's a little like that. Her father grew up in a house with a maid and a cook. Doesn't Terry acknowledge that you're sophisticated when it comes to thinking about—

CALEB:
I've grown increasingly stupid the longer we've been together. She thinks I've undersold myself, that I could have been a doctor, lawyer, etc. She can't understand my motivation, or lack thereof—how is it I've never made more than $22,000 a year?

DAVID:
How did you make that, from teaching English?

CALEB:
Construction. I never made much teaching English. There were benefits—housing, usually. In Brazil I made $500 a month, and when I worked in the UAE I made the most.

DAVID:
Let's watch the movie.

CALEB:
Let me get a beer.

DAVID:
(alone again, speaking into the DVR)
Another thing I love about Wally and André is their self-mockery. They're really clued in to their own ridiculousness. They often say, “I'm an idiot,” which is central to my liking anyone. I do think that Caleb and I should do that. Or, really, just Caleb. Why would I ever have to say that? I've never done anything idiotic.