I Think You're Totally Wrong (34 page)

DAVID:
I love what the comedian Rick Reynolds says about the Bible: “Great story. Wish I could believe it.”

CALEB:
You ever read
Barabbas
?

DAVID:
The Marlowe play?

CALEB:
The Pär Lagerkvist novel.

DAVID:
It was originally a Christopher Marlowe play. Barabbas goes back to the Bible.

CALEB:
Lagerkvist was familiar with the play, but Marlowe's Barabbas is a sociopath, full of rage, an unrepentant killer. Lagerkvist's Barabbas comes across as searching and humble.

DAVID:
I'm Lagerkvist's Barabbas. You're more—

CALEB:
Not funny.

CALEB:
Let's bring out the riding lawn mower. Time for a morning beer.

DAVID:
Beer?

CALEB:
Shakespeare: “Every morning just before breakfast, I don't want no coffee or tea. / It's just me and my good Buddy Weiser, that's all I ever need.”

DAVID:
Shakespeare?

CALEB:
A lesser-known character: The Duke of Thorogood. Can't mow without beer—you want one?

DAVID:
No thanks.

They depart from Khamta's house for a short walk in the woods before leaving
.

DAVID:
That was fun. I've never driven a lawn mower. So we hike, go back, have lunch, and maybe we can watch the Seahawks game somewhere, but I need to be back in time for Natalie's call. I can't miss that.

CALEB:
You bet. Even though you claim
Heroes
is your mediocre first novel published thirty years ago and is invented “whole cloth,” it takes from your knowledge of life, which isn't invented. Your personality controls every word. In some ways it's more you than anything you've written. It says a lot about you: What sort of man are you? What is
your morality? What sort of husband would you become, what sort of father? The idea that the main character would cheat and feel guilt, feel overburdened with a diabetic son, worry about being an inadequate parent—of everything you've written,
Heroes
most accurately predicts your apprehension of fatherhood, marriage, and not wanting a second child. I could argue it's your most autobiographical book.

DAVID:
And I could argue
This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle
is a brilliant title.

DAVID:
Through my early thirties, against a lackadaisical defender, I could look like a genius on the basketball court, but the moment someone stronger and quicker D'd-up against me, I would completely vanish.

CALEB:
It's part mental: just get the shot off.

DAVID:
But it's also physical. It's real. If he's hand-checking you, you have to be able to put the ball on the ground and take it to the hoop. And I couldn't.

Nearing the end of a road completely washed out by a flood
.

CALEB:
Let's check out the washed-out bridge.

DAVID:
Can we really just walk over it like this?

CALEB:
Interesting, how the river veered here and swept the earth out from underneath the road.

DAVID:
How could the water wash out the road? That would have to be an awfully strong current.

CALEB:
Maybe heavy rains and ice pack melt, and it all came rushing down the mountain. Let me take a picture.

DAVID:
Jump in the water, take a little swim.

CALEB:
Freeze to death for dramatic purposes?

CALEB:
Kosinski's
Steps
—good stuff, no argument—but
The Painted Bird
provokes thought and leaves the reader alone.

DAVID:
I don't want to be left alone.

They walk down a dirt road toward a vacant monastery
.

DAVID:
I love in
The Ambassadors
when Strether says, “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what
have
you had?” It's easy for Henry James to write that toward the end of his life. He'd devoted himself entirely to art.

CALEB:
Maugham said James wrote as if there were a lively
cocktail party next door, but the voices were too far away to hear, and the fence was too tall to peer over.

DAVID:
To Maugham, that was probably a criticism, but to me that's what makes James great. Life feels like that to anyone who's a serious artist.

CALEB:
That's not really life.

DAVID:
I remember once, toward the end of high school, I performed some chore incompetently—vacuum my room, I forget what—and when I romanticized my incompetence, my mother said, “Just because you're a ‘writer' doesn't mean you have to be a schlemiel.” Laurie and I met at an artists' colony outside Chicago called Ragdale, where her job was to fix stuff and make dinners. And now sometimes, when she's a little drunk, she'll say, “You just married me so I'd take care of you.”

Caleb laughs
.

DAVID:
You wanted to become an artist, but you overcommitted to life. I wanted to become a human being, but I overcommitted … Oh my god …

CALEB:
The crematorium.

DAVID:
It's not Tibetan, is it?

CALEB:
Chinese characters.
mountain temple.

DAVID:
Only the chimney remains.

CALEB:
A few years ago people used these grounds. The monastery must have been lovely. The deck doesn't seem so solid. We could fall through.

DAVID:
That would be totally schlemiel.

CALEB:
Still life:
David Shields in pond
.

DAVID:
Wonder if they'll ever rebuild.

CALEB:
I stayed at a monastery in the backwaters of Thailand. You want to contemplate eternity and suffering and the ten Buddhist precepts—hang out at a monastery.

DAVID:
Are you and Terry equally competent?

CALEB:
She seems to think she's more competent, and I agree. I'm the schlemiel.

DAVID:
You're still the artist figure, even though you take care of the kids?

CALEB:
We've got a good balance. I don't know about opposites. There's no such thing. The opposite of “artsy” isn't practical or businesslike or mathematical.

DAVID:
There is a yin and a yang. I do think that Laurie and I are more different than some couples are. Some people marry others who are quite similar to themselves, and I always thought I would, and to my surprise and delight, I didn't.

CALEB:
There's almost more friction between artists. What if your wife wrote ultra-conventional novels?

David laughs
.

CALEB:
I had a musician friend who dated a singer. She had all this musical equipment, microphone, sound systems, but she had no talent. My friend said he couldn't go forward in a relationship with someone who was so blind to her own faults.