I Think You're Totally Wrong (7 page)

DAVID:
Sometime soon I want to write a book where I talk to three guys around the corner from me: the owner of a French bakery who fled from Vietnam, an Iraqi guy who runs a mailing service, and the owner of the overpriced restaurant Kabul, who left Afghanistan.

CALEB:
That's a book I'd read.

DAVID:
I'm sure I cartoonize you, too, but I think you cartoonize me as unaware of the world. I think of myself as political.

CALEB:
Politically naive.

DAVID:
Let me get to my point. I'm also interested in why
human beings behave the way they do—how could I not be? You're trying to take the position of “Open it up—I want to hear about people's lives.” Okay. Sometimes, though, my reaction is just “Heard it. Heard it. Tell me something new.” The endless complications of that soap opera you were spinning out—this guy fucked that girl and that girl fucked this guy—who gives a shit? I don't know these people. You know them; they're part of your life. Me, I'm bored. You have to cut to the fucking chase: what's the point?

CALEB:
That's a legitimate response. You investigate abstract questions; you keep circling back to them. You want these serious epistemological and existential questions: What's “true”? What's knowledge? What's memory? What's self? What's other? What's death? I'll quote Gertrude Stein: “There ain't no answer.… That's the answer.” I want to ask questions that have substantive answers: Why do we kill? Why do we inflict pain? Why do we suffer? How can we stop suffering?

DAVID:
And I'd say the only way you can get at those questions seriously is to watch how you yourself think.

DAVID:
A former student of mine is writing about her marriage to a Libyan Muslim. She's a blonde beauty from San Diego. Her daughters wear the veil. She and her family live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Her name's Krista Bremer.

CALEB:
Is she Christian?

DAVID:
Not particularly.

CALEB:
In name only?

DAVID:
I guess.

CALEB:
Because it's illegal if she's not “of the book”—namely, a Jew or a Christian.

DAVID:
But don't be atheist.

CALEB:
Or Hindu or Buddhist or Wiccan. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I had to fill out paperwork, and my employers told me to check the “Christian” box, even if I wasn't. Also, and I realize you're more Jewish than me—

DAVID:
I'm not really that Jewish.

CALEB:
You were raised that way. In that one story, your stand-in uses an anti-Semitic slur, tells his father, and the father goes ape. I never had that.

DAVID:
You're Jewish?

CALEB:
Yeah.

DAVID:
You are?

CALEB:
Persian. My grandfather was born in Iran, though my father was born in Lebanon. He's Sephardic.

DAVID:
That's a major surprise. Not that it particularly matters, but with a name like Caleb Powell—

CALEB:
My father's name, at birth, was David Jamil Mizrahi. He came to America when he was two.

DAVID:
Hold the back page, as my father used to say.

CALEB:
My grandfather, his dad, Jamil Mizrahi, died when my dad was five. His mother was named Powalski and changed it to Powell. As a single woman in the 1940s, she had to fight her in-laws for custody and compromised by keeping my dad in Jewish school. Then she remarried a
Catholic when my dad was nine. I'm just a quarter Jewish. Supposedly I can become an Israeli citizen based on this.

DAVID:
Do you think of yourself as Jewish in any way?

CALEB:
Not religiously. Ethnically, a little.

DAVID:
Culturally, does it resonate?

CALEB:
I'm fascinated by it. Whenever I bring it up, Terry will say, “Oh, you just want to be Jewish.” Yeah, like I want to be black, too.

DAVID:
“Caleb”: it's such a religiously loaded name.

CALEB:
Moses sent twelve spies to Jerusalem and only Joshua and Caleb did God's work. Joshua got an entire book. Caleb got a few lines. My father went to Jewish school, then Catholic school, and came out neither. I suppose he considers himself Christian. He says, “I know it's silly, but I believe in God.” We rarely talk about it.

CALEB:
You ever believe in God?

DAVID:
Zero. How about you?

CALEB:
Yeah.

DAVID
: Really? Surely not now.

CALEB:
You read my novel twenty years ago. I don't expect you to remember. It's partly about a Christian youth who loses faith.

DAVID:
I didn't know how autobiographical it was. What was the title again?

CALEB:
This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle.

DAVID:
I'm obsessed with titles, and no offense, Caleb, but that has got to be among the worst titles I've ever heard.

CALEB:
That's what you said twenty years ago, too.

CALEB:
I never became serious about life until I was twenty-six or -seven. Until then I focused on art, writing, and music. Then I switched and focused on life. And the best artists focus on both.

DAVID:
Writing a book is as much an experience as falling in love.

CALEB:
If you're a writer, you can't focus only on life as depicted through art. Externally, you have to live, then internally create your art.

DAVID:
It doesn't work like that. It's the Yeats line: perfection of the life or perfection of the work, but not both. You've got to choose. It's the only way to get anything done. Most people live through life. Not that many people live through art.

CALEB:
You've worked hard. You've written a lot of books.

DAVID:
People always praise me for “working hard,” but it's the only thing I can do. You've immersed yourself in life much more fully than I have. You probably wish you'd written books that had been published. Whereas my portico gates slammed down a long time ago. It's obviously a concern of mine: by focusing so much on art, have I closed myself off so completely from—

CALEB:
Yeah: the stutter, masturbation, acne, basketball heroics, the girlfriend whose diaries you read, the journalist parents who always did the “right” thing. I can't objectively evaluate your writing because I know you, but at times it's like you're writing one long book.

DAVID:
It's true of everyone. Everyone has only one—

CALEB:
Could you go a month without writing, but live extreme?

DAVID:
I'm sure I have.

CALEB:
Stupid question.

DAVID:
No, it's an interesting question. I'm always working on a book. It's pathological. The moment I'm finishing one book, I absolutely have to, as if I were an addict, create a windstorm around a new project.

CALEB:
Ken Kesey stopped writing because he said he wanted to live a novel rather than write a novel.

DAVID:
Such bullshit.

CALEB:
It's partly a copout, but he has a point. I wanted to be a writer in college. I wrote one novel, kept rewriting it in your class, and then I said I wanted to live a novel before writing one. It's not like I completely stopped, but writing took a backseat. I've written four books, along with stories and essays that could make another, but from the age of twenty-three to thirty-five I stopped writing creatively.
Writing was always the goal of experience—traveling to forty countries, learning several foreign languages, spending eight years overseas. I kept a journal in the UAE and you could count that as a book. If I didn't write, I compensated by reading. I read compulsively.

DAVID:
How old are you now?

CALEB:
Forty-three.

DAVID:
So what is your larger point?

CALEB:
Just that I think you're partly right: writing is so hard, you can't compromise. Sometimes I wish I'd chosen art. I submit to a lit mag and a grad student editor half my age tells me I'm backing into sentences with too many subjunctive clauses.

DAVID:
You remind me at times of my college friend Azzan, who was born in Israel, grew up in Queens. Big man on campus: walked around with a khaki-colored, military-looking jacket and a purposeful stride. Compared to the other intellectuals at Brown, he seemed so assured. A ladies' man, a year or two older. I admired him, even idolized him to a degree. He always said he was going to become a writer. He spent junior year abroad, had a torrid affair in Paris. Got a Rhodes scholarship and at Oxford focused mainly on boxing. He went here, went there, was always saying, “Oh, I'm just gathering material for my great novel.
You can't write without living your life.” I've always thought it was his mistake, substituting experience for writing, but maybe it's my mistake. Maybe he didn't really want to be a writer in the first place. He's nearly sixty now and now he's ready to write, but it's too late for him to become a serious writer.

CALEB:
What are you trying to say?

DAVID:
Your writing is interesting, and getting more so, but—

CALEB:
It could be better.

DAVID:
It's stuff you should have been doing twenty years ago.