High Tide in Tucson (15 page)

I've been advised from all quarters about my obligations as a writer in the multicultural domain. I have been told explicitly, in fact, both that I should write
more
and
less
(or even
not at all
) about nearly every category of persons imaginable, including men, women, people with disabilities, Asians, Armenians, Native Americans. Fortunately I'm not a short-order cook, because whenever I get lobbed rapid-fire with commands my tendency is to go find a quieter place.

What seems right to me from my quieter place is to represent the world I can see and touch as honestly as I know how, and when writing fiction, to use that variegated world as a matrix for the characters and conflicts I need to fathom. I can't speak in tongues I don't understand, and so there are a thousand tales I'll never tell: the waging of war; coming of age as a man; childhood on an Indian reservation. But when the wounded veteran, the
masculine disposition, and the reservation child come into the place where I live, they enter my story. I will watch closely and report on the conversation. A magnificent literary tool is the dramatic point of view; one of its great virtuosos was John Steinbeck. Without ever pretending to know “female” or “Mexican laborer” or “mentally retarded” from the inside, he rendered those characters perfectly from the outside. Through reading Steinbeck I first realized this precious truth: bearing witness is not the same as possession.

Godspeed the right of each of us to speak for ourselves and not be spoken for, but I cannot suffer a possessiveness of stories. When I was nine years old, our town librarian wore broad black picture hats and deeply disliked the idea of children rummaging through her books. I drove her to palsy by checking out every book and dusty pamphlet she had on Cherokee lore, even those she felt God had intended for the Boy Scouts. She told me I would ruin my eyes with so much reading, and hinted my character was headed down the tubes as well. Too late; long before I discovered Cherokee lore, I felt in a certain light that animals could talk. I believed in trees, and that heaven had something to do with how dead trees gentle themselves into long, mossy columns of bright-smelling, crumbling earth, lively inside with sprouting seeds and black beetles. I could not make myself believe in a loud-voiced, bearded God on his throne in the clouds, but I was moved to tears by the compost pile.

No wonder I perturbed the librarian. But her fearful assessment of my soul was inexact. I wasn't studying up to be Cherokee; this would hardly have occurred to me. I loved stories about Wild Boy and the waterbug who discovered the world, not because I wanted to become a different kind of person, but because these stories delighted the heart of the person I already
was. And they do still. For my particular brand of pantheism I don't need to affect beads and feathers. I can go to the woods in my jeans and sweatshirt and find grace, without a sweat lodge. I can also fling myself on the floor and spend whole afternoons with my volumes of Joseph Campbell, by accident, when I only meant to be passing by the bookshelf on my way to something productive. I'm not studying up to be Neolithic, I just need those cave paintings and creation stories. I could live without electricity if I had to, but not without stories.

Other people's
stories—those are the ones I crave. Not Adam and Eve, designated owners of the garden who get to plunder it and spit it out as they please. Not Noah with his precarious ark, who has set upon us the wrongheaded notion that preserving two specimens of something in a zoo somewhere is all we need of biodiversity. Not the stories I already know, but the ones I haven't heard yet: the ones that will show me a way out of here. The point is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense. How is a child to find the way to her own beliefs, unless she can stuff her pockets with all the truths she can find—whether she finds them on a library shelf or in a friend's warm, strange-smelling kitchen. The point is for playground slurs to fall dead on her ears, meaningless as locks on an open door. I want to imagine those doors not just open but gone, lying in the dirt, thrown off their hinges by the force of accord in a house of open passage.

 

Eddie Swimmer stood before us in the auditorium, dressed in moccasins and beaded clothes and a porcupine-hair headdress, explaining the songs and dances. “These songs might all sound to you like ‘Hey-ya, hey-ya,' but they're not. Listen. These are words
in our languages.” Camille and I sat licking our fingers, which were sticky with honey from the Indian fry bread we bought from the concession table at the back. We listened to the singers and watched Eddie do a grass dance, which, in the old days on the plains, had the polite function of stomping down the tall grass before a powwow. Then we watched Derek Davis do the fancy-dance—a fast, difficult type of dancing popular on the modern powwow circuit. Derek's elaborate costume had a beaded breastplate and headdress and showy feather bustles, all put together by members of his family. He pointed out the modern additions: metal bells instead of deer hooves; breechcloths made bright with commercial dyes instead of berries and roots. He was pleased with these improvements, unconcerned about a collector's notion of authenticity. He is a living dancer, a young man in wire-rim glasses and a lot of muscles, definitely not a museum piece. The kids selling fry bread and soft drinks hooted their approval as he began to dance, and when he finished we were all out of breath.

 

On the way home I asked Camille again, “So, okay, tell me. Who are the Native Americans?”

We'd stayed until closing time, seven hours, a possible world record for museum-going five-year-olds. She spoke sleepily from a horizontal position in the backseat. “They're people who love the earth, and like to sing and dance, and make a lot of pretty stuff to use.”

She was quiet for a while, then added, “And I think they like soda pop. Those guys selling the fry bread were drinking a lot of Cokes.”

Heaven and earth rejoice. Good enough for now.

I live for this. Taxiing onto the runway. A craving for adventure afflicts my restless bones like some mineral they are missing. With my sleeve pulled over my palm I rub the airplane window so I'll have a clean view of home falling away underneath me, once we're cleared and my life takes flight.

Oops, better be careful of that sleeve. On this trip it's mandatory that I stay presentable. I'm being sent out on a book tour, four weeks, a different city each day. And for what I'm about to do, I've been given one main piece of advice: Don't check any luggage. If I missed a connection somewhere, my bag would never catch up but would have to follow me from sea to shining sea, one day behind, like a dogged Samsonite version of Lassie Come Home. Better to pare down to the essentials and have
nothing to lose. All I have is my mind, and what I'm wearing: sturdy black jeans brand new for this trip, my shiniest cowboy boots, and a nice silk jacket that I hope will pass gracefully from clean, well-lighted bookstores to the Home Shopping Channel. It's a big world out there, so I have a pair of backup shoes in my carry-on: my favorite sneakers, high-tops, red suede.

This is all fine with me—I'm a woman born to travel light. Whatever is coming, I'm ready. We lurch and lift off.

And strangely, for the first time ever, I seize up with airplane phobia. It's not pilot error I dread, but the attendant who's reaching across me to pour coffee. One air pocket, and it could be all over for my silk jacket. I'd have to go home.

 

Four days out, and I'm hard pressed to remember where I've been. My friends think I'm seeing the U.S.A., but this isn't strictly the case. I'm seeing the inside of bookstores, TV studios, radio stations, newspaper offices, and if I can still see straight at the end of the day, hotel rooms. My spiritual life revolves around the overnight laundry service. I've made these geographic discoveries: all TV studios look exactly alike; all bookstore
bathrooms
look alike; all NPR stations are in the basement.

Not that I'm complaining. A literary novelist whose publisher springs for national promotion has been visited by the angels. For this amazing stroke of luck I vow to feel grateful, and even though my schedule allows no time for exploring, for adventure's sake I'll at least try to spot one major landmark wherever I go. Seattle has Mount Rainier—I looked down on it from the plane. San Francisco, owing to its recent earthquake, has pile drivers going everywhere, a city's dull heartbeat pounding through the subterranean walls of radio stations.

San Diego has fog; on the morning I have to fly from there to L.A. for a live TV show, the airport seems to be closed. I'm getting desperate. If I don't turn up on the set, they may need to interview a potted plant. Suddenly a buzz runs through the airport:
something
is going to L.A. I rush to the counter and miraculously get my ticket changed, my body booked on that plane.

On board, I see this is no miracle, it's only the eight most foolhardy people in San Diego climbing into a prop plane so tiny I'm not allowed to carry my purse on, but must stow it in the hold. I ask the uniformed man, “Will we get breakfast?”

He snorts. “Lady, this flight has a crew of one. You want me to fly the plane, or serve you breakfast?”

We ricochet up through the fog. My fellow travelers blanch, but I relax. Nobody's spilling coffee on
me
.

 

At the end of my day in L.A., one of my publisher's sales representatives offers to buy me a drink. I accept, though I am so tired I suspect I might be one drink away from delirium. But sales reps are founts of knowledge: they know who's who, how your book is selling, and everything about what's coming out next season. I ask him about an author I've been hearing about—will she be touring?

He avoids my question. “Things happen sometimes,” he says. “Not everybody is cut out for the book tour.”

“Like what kind of things?”

“Showing up drunk for signings. Punching out a reporter. Going AWOL from the tour, turning up on a shopping spree in Santa Fe. You don't want to know. It's not pretty out there.”

I press him, asking again about the famous author in question—does he mean
her
?

“No,” he says. “But we decided she's untourable.”

Untourable?

Prior to this tour, I went to New York several times to meet editors and publicists over friendly lunches. Were they actually checking to see that my socks matched? These overtures of author-publisher friendship were actually screen tests? I take a deep breath. How ridiculous; I'm thinking like a paranoid schizophrenic.

“What exactly does
untourable
mean?” I ask.

The sales rep stares into his Jack Daniel's and replies, “Insane.”

 

Promoting novels in a sound-bite culture is like selling elephants from a gumball machine. Cramped. Put in your nickel and stand back. Interviewers keep asking, “What is your book
about
?” They mean well. They are kindly giving me a chance to pitch my product. But you should sooner say to a hypochondriac “How are you?” than ask an author this question. Shall I grab you by the lapels and really tell you? Have you got all day? No. What they need is a seven-word answer, and the only accurate one I can think of is: “It's
about
three hundred pages long—
read it
!!” But that sounds surly, so I contrive witty, deficient summaries, which I repeat in senile fashion from city to city.

The words from my own mouth begin to fill me with despair. I'm making a parody of my own earnest trade. If I could say my piece in a glib sentence or two, why on earth would I have spent years of my life on it, and all those pages? If Leo Tolstoy did a book tour for
War and Peace
, how would he answer? “It's about how Napoleon invades Russia, and all these people discover war is, like, bad news.” Duh!
Middlemarch
in a plot summary sounds like a soap opera, and
Pilgrim's Progress
, a Sunday-school lesson. My
own book doesn't have a prayer in the interview format. I flounder to define not just my own intentions but the concept of novel itself. “It's not so much what
happens
,” I try to explain, “but how the words fit together, and what carries over from it into your own life.”

My interviewer looks at me, her eyes two perfect asterisks of mascara, and cuts to a commercial.

 

Through every city, every hour, every question asked and partially answered, I'm missing my daughter. I sleep in an oversized T-shirt she decorated awhile back, with help, in nursery school: it has her picture silk-screened on it, underscored with her name in childish handwriting. But I can't hear her voice on the phone, for I've yet to finish a day and get to a hotel before she's gone to bed. Finally, when I arrive on the East Coast, thanks to the gods of time zones, I can call while she's still awake. At the sound of her small Hello, my heart shudders along my ribcage like a stick dragged down the length of a picket fence.

In a voice much higher-pitched than I remembered it, she details for me her day, the pictures she made, some new kids she met in school. She brightly reports, “I told them I have an imaginary mom.”

 

In Denver, for the noontime news roundup, the commentator clips a mike to my jacket and advises me I'll have fifty-eight seconds to discuss my book. In a flash of insight, I understand everything. In fifty-eight seconds, all I can possibly get across is my name, the color of my jacket, and whether or not I have anything stuck on my teeth. It's not my book that's on sale here. It's me.

Can modern literary success really come down to this, an author's TV persona? In a word, yes. Early on, when a publicist first apprised me of my promotional duties, I whined, “I thought an artist had the privilege of being a recluse!” She firmly replied, “A
starving
artist has that privilege.”

An author can say no to a book tour—just as any employee can step backward down the career ladder for the sake of family or peace of mind—but a stigma comes with that choice. From what I've overheard, a writer who won't travel is viewed as an ingrate, a coot, a hermetic unknown who deserves anonymity, or just plain stuck-up. As Garry Trudeau has pointed out, America is the only place where refusal to promote yourself is perceived as arrogance.

Why isn't the author's written word enough? Why must she follow her book out into the world like an anxious mother, to hold its hand and vouch for its character? Why, for that matter, is a book more desirable when it has the author's signature on the flyleaf? I'm so grateful to my readers, heaven knows, I would do anything for them—probably scrub their kitchen floors if they asked. Certainly I would go along peacefully with the book-tour concept, if it were only a matter of my own temporarily disturbed life. But in principle it's an industry trend that worries me. Celebritization of authors rivets the nation's attention on a handful of books each year, shutting out diversity, leaving poets and first novelists to huddle in the cold with the masses of nonfiction scholars whose subject matter is more vital than it is sexy. Readers do need help, of course, in selecting among all the many deserving titles—but what criteria that could possibly fit in a fifty-eight-second TV spot will guide them to an informed choice? The quality of a book's prose means nothing in this race. What will win it a mass audience is the author's ability to travel,
dazzle, stake out name recognition, hold up under pressure, look good, and be witty—qualities unrelated, in fact, to good writing, and a lifestyle that is writing's pure nemesis.

What of the brilliant wordsmiths who happen to be elderly, disabled, or indisposed to travel because of young children, or not so great looking, or terribly shy? What are we doing here to the future of literature? Where would we be now if our whole literary tradition were built upon approximately the same precepts as the Miss America competition? Who would win: Eudora Welty or Vanna White?

 

In Boston I do a syndicated talk show, which I've been told is very important. I'll have eight minutes to explain what my book is about, why everyone should read it, and why I have on these cowboy boots my host keeps staring at. While the makeup person flobs me with a horrid powder puff, I imagine seizing control and turning the tables, interrogating the audience: Why do
you
suppose novelists go on TV? Do you believe in literature? In Tinkerbelle? Clap your hands!

When I'm introduced, my mind rises to the ceiling like an after-death experience and waits up there to see what I'll say this time. I blurt out: “My book is about cowboys and Indians!” This is news to me. I have no idea what it means. For the rest of the interview, one of us, anyway, is on the edge of her seat.

 

In Atlanta, a talk-show host leans forward just before the cameras roll and confides to me that he's exhausted. “I've had to do two of these shows today, back to back.”

“Two shows!” I shout, startling even myself. I left my tact in
San Francisco. “Try
six shows
back to back, plus a couple of readings and book signings and an airplane flight, every single day for three weeks!”

“Oh, but I have the hard part,” he tells me sincerely. “I have to sound intelligent.”

 

Apologies to those back home who think I'm lucky, but I've stopped trying to pretend I'm having an adventure. Adventure is stepping through brand-new doors with your mouth shut and your eyes wide open. This is adventure's opposite: traipsing through a hall of mirrors, listening to myself talk. And in truth it's also painfully lonely. I'm surrounded continually by people, good and kind ones, whose appreciation never ceases to astonish me. But I have no control over where, what, and with whom I would like to be. I deeply miss my friends, relaxed conversation, being in a
house
, making myself a sandwich, sitting still with my own thoughts, tucking my child into bed—the things that add up to what matters in my life. I am moving from city to city in a strange glass bubble, the psychic equivalent of that aquarium car that's used for displaying the Pope. Wherever I am, I am there for
now
, and then I will disappear.

In all these days I've smiled at thousands of people, signed their books, and thanked them for their support. Among all those kind strangers, exactly four of them looked me in the eye and said, “You must miss your daughter,” or “How long since you've been home?” Each time, tears sprang to my eyes in spite of myself. I am lost somewhere in this crowd. I'm ready to click my heels now and go home.

 

New York, New York: this has got to be the zenith of my tour. My very publisher himself, along with my agent and the head of publicity, rode with me in the taxi to my reading in Manhattan, and hinted that the three of them would be taking me out afterward for a triumphal celebration. No word on our destination, but sure enough, as we step out of the bookstore just before midnight, we are whisked off in a limo, headed uptown. I feel cheered. How can I complain of a boot-camp schedule when I get treated like royalty in the end?

We pull up to Rockefeller Center. I gawk at the fabulous Deco facade. In the elevator my ears pop on the twentieth floor and again on the fortieth floor as we glide to the top. We are headed for the pinnacle of glamour, the Rainbow Room.

As our excited little party crosses the marble floor, the maître d' approaches us with a polite body block, looks down the full length of his nose, and delivers to us with poetic intonation the sentence of a lifetime:

“I
assume
you are
aware
…of our
dress code
.”

We look at each other, bewildered.

“No jeans,” he says, “and no sneakers.”

I've been wearing this outfit so long I can't imagine the possibility of other clothes, but he's pegged me all right. Jeans. Sneakers.
Suede
sneakers, mind you, but no dice. The maître d' turns to the rest of the party and asks then, “Will there be three of you tonight?”