Love Me (25 page)

It was a rough ride. Juneau was socked in by clouds and Alana put down her book, something called You 2, and she started whimpering as the plane hurtled down through 10,000 feet of murk into a narrow mountain pass, jagged ridges visible at three o‘clock and nine—the wheels lowered, the ground still not visible, and then the plane began to shake violently—I caught a glimpse of a pale flight attendant weeping and holding a rosary to her lips—the cockpit door flew open and the copilot stuck his head into the lavatory and cast up his lunch—a serving cart tore loose from its moorings and careened down the aisle, scattering ice and hot coffee—the plane rolled over to one side, then the other—there was wailing and gnashing—and Alana took my hand and told me she loved me, and she felt we must affirm life in the face of death—and she unbuttoned her blouse as the plane groaned and rolled and we groped and kissed passionately as it pitched and bucked and her blouse was off and my face was crimson with lipstick when finally the plane bounced twice on the tarmac and rolled to the terminal and I zipped up my fly and staggered into the terminal full of profound feelings and Alana and I took a courtesy van to a place called Dave’s Wilderness Lodge and got the $230 Pinecone Room and we tumbled into bed for more turbulence and afterward soaked in the Jacuzzi and swapped our life stories and drank two bottles of pinot noir and ate three cheeseburg ers and two baskets of fries and slept for twelve hours and awoke to a wilderness breakfast of steak and eggs and I kissed her good-bye and hiked up the Chilkoot Trail. I went about a hundred yards up and sat down in a grove of spruce and then I came back to the Wilderness Lodge. Alana was still there, in the Pinecone Room.

“It was a good experience for you, wasn’t it,” she said. “I certainly felt it had literary qualities.”

“Well, I don’t know. It strikes me as unreal.”

We stayed there for several nights.

“This is awfully nice of you,” I said. “But I’m losing respect for myself by not going into the wilderness.”

“I want to be as meaningful for you as any other wilderness experience,” she said. “And it’s okay if you use my real name and everything.”

Two weeks, day after day, night after night, Alana and I shacked up at the Wilderness Lodge. I had a dream in which Iris was searching for me. I lay naked and motionless in a cold mountain stream, sucking air through a reed, as a helicopter came zooming in low over the trees,
whupwhupwhupwhup,
and Iris leaned out the door with a bullhorn and yelled, “Larry, you big skunk!” I ran away into the woods, and crawled under a blanket of wet moss, and she dropped leaflets that said, “How could you do this, Larry? How could you be so cruel?”

I walked up and down the trail a little but I have never been good at the identification of birds or trees, and I didn’t meet any trappers or woodsmen who weren’t drunk, and after two weeks, the Alaska piece seemed to be mostly about me and Alana and my childhood among serious golfers whose entire political philosophy is, Cut Taxes, and who never read books, just golfed and drank, and how I wanted to be a writer in order to get free of them. I only wrote about 500 words. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re with a woman so single-minded as Alana. Hard to sleep, too.

One day, I locked myself in a closet and wrote and it was going great and then I looked at the page; it read—BIQ SUATRO MEECH KWERTY NISK REMPLON NAMLEREP TRIXLY SWISK THEB BRILIP PO ENNER SKWILM.

After two weeks, I handed what I had to a Western Union operator and climbed into the Jacuzzi.

“Maybe you should make me Inuit,” Alana said.

“I don’t have any idea how to do that,” I said.

The woman was relentless about wanting to get into print. “We went through death together. Almost. That’s your story right there. What more do you need?”

“I don’t know.”

Meanwhile, my stupid story was making the rounds at The
New Yorker,
with its dumb first sentence:

There was quite a bit about Alana and me, and the Lodge, and “taking Mr. Scroggins to town in the pink convertible.”

Mr. Shawn called me the next morning. “What does ‘getting the pole in the tent flap’ mean?” he asked. “And how about ’parallel parking‘?”

“I can tell that you don’t like it,” I said.

He said, “Don’t give it a thought. It was a warm-up piece. Alaska got your juices going. You’ll come back to New York and find something you really care about and everything will be jim-dandy.”

That was Mr. Shawn for you. The guy was a font of hope. He had unlimited faith in writers and their ability to work things out eventually, or if not unlimited, then darned near unlimited, certainly more than 65 percent.

I tiptoed out of the Pinecone Room while Alana was asleep and flew back to New York and took a taxi to 25 West 43rd Street and there was a note on my desk.

I found Mr. Shawn in his office, his head out the window, elbows on the sill, watching a fire blazing out of control a few blocks away. Two hook and ladders were in the street, apparatus raised, pouring water on the blaze. Billows of smoke drifted westward.

“Vanity Fair,”
he said. “One of those dang celebrity rags. Somebody must’ve left a curling iron on and set fire to the glossies. Used to date a woman who worked there. A nice kid but the magazine is a piece of shit.”

Then he reached down behind the galley proofs, the
Webster’s 2nd Unabridged,
and a picture of Dietrich, and took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a couple Dixie cups and poured us drinks.

I said, “I’m sorry about Alaska. I know I let you down, Mr. Shawn. I promise to do better. I met a woman and my head got in the wrong place.”

“Mine, too,” he said. “I’m leaving the magazine. Going to LA. Ever hear of a songwriter named Joni Mitchell? Quite a lady.” And he sang to me—

“So that’s what the emergency meeting is about.”

He nodded.

“You can’t leave us in the hands of Tony Crossandotti,” I said. “You just can’t do it, Mr. Shawn. The man is a beast and a criminal. He doesn’t understand writers.”

“Neither do I,” said Mr. Shawn. “You, for example. You don’t learn from experience, Wyler. You’re a guy who’s capable of singing his little song and doing his dance and you try to make it into
The Ring of the Nibelungs,
for crying out loud. You’re a clown; you’re not Jumbo King of the Elephants. You go crashing around and trying to be all things to all people—and then suddenly you can’t write anymore. Big surprise.

“I know about you guys. I spent my life trying to make writers look good. Salinger! Capote! Hersey! Rachel Carson! The world hailed them as visionaries! All I can say is: YOU SHOULD’VE SEEN THE FIRST DRAFT, PEOPLE! Man is conceived in ignorance and born into squalor and grief and it goes downhill from there. I was Mama and Daddy to you people, I balanced your checkbooks and fended off old lovers and the tax man and got the district attorney to overlook your peccadilloes. I saved your bacon more than once, meanwhile I took your manuscripts, which had all the elegance of wet cardboard, and pressed them into shape and you people were hailed as giants, and me? People called me obsessive-compulsive.

“Tom Wolfe called me a tiny mummy. I don’t care. Fuck Tom Wolfe, the little shithead. We editors know about abuse. Writers come in here, hat in hand, hairy-legged realists and agony queens and cloud gazers, and like every writer since Moses was a child their egos are frail and feverish and if you don’t keep up a steady stream of endearments they fall over in a faint and if you tell them the straight truth and say, ‘I ain’t printing this shit!’ they never forgive you. They lie in ambush for thirty years, waiting for the chance to do you dirt. Spread pernicious gossip. Invent ever more demeaning anecdotes. Piss on your Collected Letters. Snub your children and throw stones at your dog. Hire professional sneerers to stand along the funeral route and say, ‘what’s the big deal about him?’ as your coffin goes by. For such a noble profession, there sure are a lot of pis sants in it.

“No, I’ve had it with the literary life. Meeting Joni changed everything. Life is too short to spend it trying to protect the inept from the insensitive. Joni and I are going to make a beautiful life in Topanga Canyon and enjoy the dappled foliage and the flickering shadows and water running over rocks, and you knuckleheads can edit yourselves.” He drained his cup of whiskey and grinned and shook my hand. “Go home, Wyler. New York is too rough for you. You don’t thrive on the abuse, you need to be wrapped in a quilt and fed bouillon. Go back to Minnesota. And get some golf lessons.”

 

 

 

Updike’s office was full of people when I got there and I had to squeeze in between Trillin and Salinger, who were perched on the windowsill.

“Here’s the situation,” said a lady with long braids. “Crossandotti told Shawn that there were too many short stories in the magazine in which people take trains. Or they go to Ireland or they come back from Ireland and sit and think about a conversation they had with somebody in County Sligo. Somebody on a train. ‘Train travel is dead in this country,’ he tells Shawn. ‘And what’s the big deal about Ireland? Fuck the Irish. You need more stories in which people fish and hunt and get laid.’ So Crossandotti went out and bought
Field and Stream
and he’s merging
F and S with The New Yorker.
Next month. It’ll be called
The New Yonder.
It’ll be about hunting and fishing but in the large sense.”

“Hemingway wrote about fishing,” I said. “So did Faulkner. I’ve just recently been in Alaska.”

“How can he do this?” said Trillin. “Even for a publisher, this is insane.”

The lady laughed. “Publishers care about writing the way bears care about butterflies.”

“What can we do?” said Powers.

Pauline Kael stood and glanced slowly around the room. “Imagine this as a movie,” she said. “You’ve got yourself a nice little town and this gangster moves in and pushes people around to see how far he can go. And then somebody comes in and sizes up the situation and walks across 44th Street and faces the bully down. And somebody in this room is that person.”

“Well, shoot,” I said. “It sure seems to me that we can’t sit by and let this fella wreck a magazine like
The New Yorker.”

Trillin said, “There’s a pistol in your desk, Wyler. Head over to the Algonquin and when he’s not looking, perforate him two or three times and vamoose.” Updike pointed out that, being a tall person, I could get a good angle.

When I got to my office to pick up the gun, there was a note on my door:

Alas, poor Yorick. Life has brought me to the unthinkable Here and Now. I used to live in St. Paul, a sensible and prudent place. We ate kale, exercised, drove defensively, invested in long-term securities—and I come to NYC and my brains are about to become the Carlsbad Caverns.

Once I lived the life of a millionaire and paced my terrace high above the city lights and thought my writerly thoughts and now this—

Oh, I was good, I was even sometimes almost great, and the crowd was on its feet, cheering, and I was ahead on points and pacing myself nicely, thinking about the victorious locker room scene—the champagne, the gratitude of my supporters—and then in the tenth round, a vicious left hook intersected with my jaw and the crockery broke, and I was on the mat with my mouth full of resin, and men with jackhammers were tearing up the avenues of my mind.

Tell me about your troubles, dear reader, and I will tell you mine. I can’t write for shit. And Tony is going to kill me.

Updike called around nine the next morning. I’d slept on the office floor and was stiff and hung over. “Go splash some cold water on your face and take care of business, pal. We took a vote. You’re our shooter. If you don’t do the job, who’s going to? There is a tide in the affairs of men that, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. So take it. Crossandotti is over at the Algonquin. I’m afraid you’ve lost the element of surprise. The desk clerk says he’s waiting for you with a pistol in his pocket.”

“Okay. I’m on my way.”

“Don’t screw this up.”

“I’ll try not to. I promise. I’ve been remiss and I’m awash in guilt, but I believe I can still shoot straight. Though I wouldn’t mind going to a shooting range for a few hours. But I won’t. I’m sorry I even said it. I’m going to fill my mind with murderous thoughts and go right over.”

“It’s extremely important. Everybody at
The New Yorker
is counting on you. American literature is counting on you. Harvard. Princeton. The Academy of American Arts and Letters. The Poet Laureate of the United States, Mr. Louis Jenkins, called me up this morning personally and said he’s counting on you to carry out the execution. Off the record, Jimmy Carter wants you to whack this bastard. The faculty of Harvard voted in favor. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Susan Sarandon—and Michiko Kakutani from the
Times.

“Miss Kakutani called? About me?”