I Think You're Totally Wrong (25 page)

CALEB:
Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Amy Fusselman, Simon Gray, Leonard Michaels, David Markson: I like all these writers you like. In Fusselman's
The Pharmacist's Mate
, when she finally gets pregnant, she ties this in with memories of her father and her desire to have a baby. It was a satisfying book.

DAVID:
You're flattening the book down to nothing. It's not about her getting pregnant. The book is held together by this extraordinary trope: all three tracks—her father as a pharmacist's mate, her attempt to get pregnant, and her father dying—are about the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. That's what holds the book together.

CALEB:
Okay …

DAVID:
It's crucial to me that these books rotate outward toward a metaphor. In
Bluets
, Nelson is obsessed with the color blue, can't get over her ex-boyfriend, and her friend is paralyzed. She's asking a series of related questions: Why are we so sad? Why is the human animal so melancholy? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss?—which is death. It's actively about the intersection of these things.

CALEB:
I find
Bluets
much more interesting when she's talking
about her paralyzed friend, when she's showing empathy. The poetic meanderings on blue and the Tuareg and cyan and sadness, not so much. And this painful breakup: he's two-timing her. That, to me, is obliviousness of obliviousness. What's her point? She's having mega-erotic passionate sex. Enjoy it, baby. Don't bring me your pain. Give me widows of Kabul, give me Krakauer's psychopaths, give me a Khmer Rouge cadre cutting off Haing Ngor's finger, give me Texas death row inmates, give me Somaly Mam getting fucked in a brothel by a former soldier who lost an arm and an eye, give me Maggie's quadriplegic friend, give me painful pain.

DAVID:
In your story, what's the takeaway? What are you saying about sexuality in the West and East and desire and oppression and obliviousness and risk? The point is what? What do you think that story is saying? What are you saying?

CALEB:
Right now I'm not saying anything.

DAVID:
If you just need time to think …

CALEB:
You're much more certain about literature than I am. You say Fusselman's book is about the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. Fine, but everything is about that. When you're alive and can die at any moment, and the people you love can die at any moment, and people who starve or are bombed can die at any moment, or
death row prisoners can die at any moment, and every day people do die, that's the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. I rarely get this tension from the books you write or the books you love.

CALEB:
You express your aesthetic well—that's your strength. You talk about these other books and turn back to yourself, and thus you aspire to do what you admire.

DAVID:
No, that's backward! I write what I write and then I find work that deepens and extends my aesthetic.

CALEB:
Can you talk without me? I've got to go to the bathroom.

DAVID:
(to the DVR)
Okay, back at the ranch: I want to say to Caleb, “I'm not only good at cutting to the essence of a work of literature. I hope that's a strength of mine in general, as a person.” I think it is. Laurie gave me a birthday card last year that said, “Thanks for being so good at analyzing things and resolving disputes.” Uh, what's my point? Essences are what I'm interested in, which is the whole reason I'm interested in literary collage: I love exquisitely compressed riffs, shards—

CALEB:
(returning)
Khamta said we should try Lake Elizabeth.

DAVID:
A hike?

CALEB:
We can get there by road and then we can walk around the lake.

DAVID:
Great. Lunch in town, then the lake. And we can go back to Cascadia tonight.

CALEB:
(skimming a newspaper at the Skykomish Public Library)
They got Anwar al-Awlaki.

DAVID:
It's funny: Obama is far more militarily effective than Bush.

CALEB:
And Libya seems to have turned out okay.

DAVID:
I guess.

CALEB:
I'll turn this off.

CALEB:
My dad and I had problems getting along twenty years ago. I don't think we liked each other. He's prehistoric when it comes to race and homosexuality and so forth. This thinking dies out a little more with every generation; with him there's no point in debating. Now, he comes over, adores my daughters. I can watch them and feel at peace.

DAVID:
What does he do with them?

CALEB:
Takes them swimming or to the playground. I painted his house this summer, and he spent a lot of time with them. My mom's relatively useless, almost an extra
burden. He has to take care of her, so he'll watch the kids and my mother will just sit at home with a magazine.

DAVID:
As you get older, it matters more. It'd be hard to function without family. I know I couldn't.

CALEB:
If you don't have a child, it's different: family has a different meaning. One of the most revealing things about you that I didn't know (and as far as I know, you haven't written about it) is that Laurie wanted to have a second child and you said no. A second child would have given Laurie a lot of joy.

DAVID:
Me, too, for that matter.

CALEB:
As well as Natalie. The idea of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid at home. And the empty nest, rather than now, would happen when this youngest child goes to college in a couple years.

DAVID:
Got it.… Do you wish you had had more kids?

CALEB:
We're happy with three.

DAVID:
Three's a lot.

CALEB:
I got snipped.

DAVID:
You're done.

CALEB:
For two days afterward, every time my wife asked me to do anything I'd shout, “My balls, sorry, my balls! Now please bring me a bowl of ice cream.”

DAVID:
That'd be fun.

CALEB:
It was. You've talked about Laurie asking for a second child, but what else don't I know about you? Are there any secrets that you've kept out of your writing?

DAVID:
I'd talk about them if there were, but there's nothing I can think of right now, and I definitely want to get a good hike in before it gets dark.

CALEB:
Have you ever betrayed someone?

DAVID:
I've never had an affair outside of my marriage, if that's what you're asking. Have you?

CALEB:
No.

DAVID:
At these various conferences and residencies, you know, out of who knows what mixed motive, these girls come on to you.

CALEB:
It's probably very tempting, especially for the single writer.

DAVID:
If I do that, the marriage is effectively over. I'm not French.

CALEB:
Get divorced first.

DAVID:
But it's a nice test. I really do want a successful marriage.

CALEB:
It's—I've been single. That was fun, but why be with someone you're willing to cheat on? Serial monogamy and then marriage.

DAVID:
I've been thinking about these eighteen-year periods of my life. From zero to eighteen I was growing up, and eighteen to thirty-six I was more or less on my own, and thirty-six to fifty-four I was a husband and father. And now Natalie's eighteen and out of the house, so I'm starting to enter the fourth phase of my life. Natalie's part of our life, but she's one step removed, and it's been interesting.