The Narrow Door (5 page)

Already the director of the Famous Writers Conference might be making sure Denise is never asked back. At least that’s the way she’ll tell it to me for years.

The same argument, transmuted, is central to her second novel. An entire book travels toward that confrontation, but there are no emphatic hands, no passersby. The scene doesn’t take place in New England, but in a Manhattan apartment, in a different Famous Writer’s apartment. The two lovers—or lovers who never were—don’t even yell. Their feelings are too big for yelling; language can’t contain even them. Indirection, withholding, silence, pause: all of that hurts more. But Emily, the central character, will not be humiliated, will not be a victim to her own wanting. The exchange, as devastating as it is, brings about satisfaction and peace. Not instantaneously, but in a little while, after the death of Emily’s mother in a bus accident. The important thing is this: A boundary is drawn. Fame is on the left side of the room, the Manhattan side of the room. And she is here.

And life might just be possible after that.

2009 | 
My devotion is dog-like, I know it. I like looking at the tops of M’s ears, which stick out fetchingly from the sides of his head. Blue transparent eyes, trimmed whiskers around the strong and subtle mouth. But it’s his cerebral side that captivates my attention. Remoteness, austerity, mystery—I catch myself fixing on him, for minutes at a time, from the Eames chair across the living room. I wonder, what, what gears are turning inside his head? What are his plans? I only take my eyes off him when he catches me looking.

And yet, more often than not, there’s been some powerful exchange of psychic materials between us. M and I catch ourselves putting on the same style of jeans at the same time—one of us must change; we don’t want to be
that
kind of couple. We have the same perceptions at the same time. I bring up Michael and Luis just as M professes to think about Michael and Luis. How has their renovation been going in Hell’s Kitchen? It’s been unnerving, profound, though we laugh about it, this connection. No wonder strangers are always wondering whether we’re twins. If we wanted to, we could wear each other’s clothes.

1967 | 
A thick breeze blows off Newport Bay; the breeze smells of seaweed and salt and boat engine. It cools the arms and necks of the throng in front of the stage, but not enough. Joni Mitchell is down among the crowd. She still feels good about the set she just played, but the day hasn’t been the best. Judy Collins, who was supposed to pick her up at her building on West Sixteenth, called her up from the festival to say, I’m already here. Competition once again: isn’t Judy the one who sells all the records? So Joni had to find another way to get there, and walked up to the stage, still out of breath, just minutes after her arrival.

She eases through the throng with Elliot Roberts, her manager, at her side. Some people smile at her; she half-smiles back. The people are careful to give her some space, and besides, their eyes are turned to the new act on stage. She is looking to find the bathroom, or at least some water to drink. It has been so long since she’s had anything to drink. Her throat is grainy, muddy. The air temperature is actually rising minute by minute, and there’s no space between bodies. It is beautiful to be down here with the people—she knows that—but it is all a little much.

Are you Joni Mitchell?
says a young woman.

The girl’s voice is sweet; it couldn’t be further from unkind. Her face is innocent, if there could be such a thing as innocent. It’s the kind of face she’d want to sit down and meet if she were anywhere else. But its intensity strikes silence into Joni’s nerves. The need in her has nothing to do with Joni. The face doesn’t exactly want to devour her—it’s nothing as extreme as all that. But there’s pressure in it. The face says,
everything you do is significant; every gesture of yours will be recorded, interpreted, remembered, copied.
Her face says,
you are living out my life for me, but you’re doing it better, with more poise and beauty than I ever could.

And how does Joni react?

She turns in the other direction. She runs like a deer until she is far, far outside the gates of the festival.

1976 | 
Maybe Joni can also see that wanting in the face of the young woman who somehow gets close to the stage at Philadelphia’s Spectrum. Maybe there’s just a flash of that face before the spotlights turn on and blind her. Persistent girl, stubborn girl. Those girls are always around, down in the orchestra, climbing up the towers toward the lights, wherever she performs. She has to think past that face if she’s going to get through “Coyote” and “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.” All everyone wants to hear are early, simpler songs that make them cry, that conjure up the lost nights of their youth, in dorm rooms or in boyfriends’ beds.

Denise watches Joni from the black zone, through chain link. Joni is wearing a short jacket, a red bolero. Her eyes look exhausted, but she is investing every line, vowel, and break with personality. She is not phoning it in, even though she could certainly be doing so at this point in the tour. The speaker in “Coyote” thinks of herself as a hitcher, “a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway.” There are lovers to be met along the road, on ranches, in roadhouses. She watches a farmhouse burn down, the domestic life going up in flames around her. She loves these men awhile, then heads back to the highway once she realizes the life of the artist is not about routine or staying put. It is a bold new persona for a female pop singer, a role that inverts the usual gender convention. The woman is in power, the man left behind at home, stunned, wounded, hurt. “Why’d you have to get so drunk / And lead me on that way?” says the coyote. The audience goes crazy with applause. They can’t get enough of these songs, that persona. For Denise, Joni is longing perfected.

1984 | 
The upper room of the bar is low-lit, with amber sconces on the wall. It hums with people. Denise’s family is there; her editors are there, people from the Philadelphia press are there. Members of the English department and fellow graduate students. At her side is Sam, the lawyer in tortoiseshell, horn-rim glasses, who seems to have modeled himself on a Bryn Mawr WASP; his most distinguishing characteristic is that he’s scrubbed himself of particularity. I shake his hand, say hello. He says hello back. Since they started dating a few months back, he has been prone to saying things such as:
I like you more than I like your book.
Or:
I like you but I don’t love you.
Denise has run these statements by me just to see whether she’s not being oversensitive. My role is to exclaim,
he said that to you?
Maybe Sam knows Denise has already run such statements by me, which would explain why he’s all too eager to be led away by Denise to her editor.

In the center of the room is a white cake. It is a
Good Deeds
cake, a facsimile of the book cover designed by Fred Marcellino. There’s a drawing of the ladder on the cake, with stylized, elongated arms reaching upward on the rungs.

Toasts are made. To the success of the book! To the success of the next book, and more and more and more books until there’s a great tower of books, a great tower of Denise. Denise says a few words; the publisher, who’s come down from New York, says a few words. Then a man with a knife cuts the cake with all the finesse of a brain surgeon.

I have not moved from my position by the stairs for an hour. I talk with my fellow teaching assistants; I make small talk (why does small talk make my throat tense?) with people whose names and connections I can’t make out above the din. Then a woman is standing in front of me, so close to me that she’s made sure a conversation is required of me. She is as imposing as an Alp. She is as deafening as a waterfall. Part Wicked Stepmother, part East Berlin barmaid, part Sandra Bernhard. How old is she? Large nose, very large eyes and chin. And beautiful, in her own particularized way. I’ll call her Wyatt here.

I have no idea what Denise and Wyatt have in common.

According to Denise, Wyatt lives within view of the Philadelphia Art Museum, in a high-rise apartment building where she is one of the few residents who isn’t a Jewish senior citizen. She, along with her father and brother, are the people the characters in
Good Deeds
are modeled on, though Wyatt seems nothing like the no-nonsense, sensible narrator who tries to save her screwed-up family.

I tell Wyatt that it is good to meet her—finally.

Wyatt tells me that she’s heard nothing but good things about me. “I have to see this Paul person Denise is always talking about. She just won’t stop. All I hear these days is Paul did this and Paul did that. It’s getting tiresome!”

We hug. She kisses me. Everything we say after that comes with a smile, the kind of smile that suggests all of our words are a joke.

She asks if we’re going to spend some time together soon.

I say, of course.

She says, “This weekend?”

I can feel the apprehension playing out on my face. I think, I can’t possibly spend time with you this weekend.

The more she looks at me, the more I want to be anywhere but in this room. I want to be in my twin bed in my quiet house on my quiet street across the river, where I can think about the party and review it in my mind, without having to feel any of the queasiness that comes from actually having to talk to a person, especially a person with a bigger personality than mine. There is a large vibrating mouth around Wyatt that seems to suck down everything that comes near her. If I could step back from myself and see the intricate, sensitive person inside her, I could see that Wyatt is probably as scared of this party as I am. Is she afraid of losing Denise? Is she going to lose her best friend to editors, agents, people who want to make money off her, all sorts of hangers-on? Those are things I’ve been too afraid to consider, and maybe that’s why she’s come over to me. She sees the wanting in my eyes. I’m the only person in the room whose needs might be greater than hers.

She asks if I have eaten any of the cake. There’s a lurid quality to her pronunciation of
cake
, which involves a twisting of the upper lip, with the slightest grimace. But there’s a generous quality to it, too, which is strange.

I shake my head back and forth, but smile. I always smile, especially when I’m with someone who bewilders me. If you put me face-to-face with someone pointing a gun at me, I bet I’d still smile, even today.

“You should. Try some. Ready?” She offers a piece of cake. The piece I take is slightly too big to fit; I can’t get it all in my mouth without getting frosting on my lips, so Wyatt asks the woman standing next to her for a napkin, and with the damp napkin she wipes off my face.

I glance over to Denise. She is talking to a very good-looking, sharp-featured man. His important face seems to brighten, as if promises and little deals are being passed back and forth. But Denise’s face is the more serious of the two. From here it has some drama in it, like the face of someone confessing turned to a priest.

If only I could keep up with Wyatt! Her banter demands that I be as showy as she is; she doesn’t leave room for sincerity. My shyness makes me so self-conscious, so fucking
boring
, and I loathe myself for it.
I’m not the person you think I am
, I want to cry out to her, but maybe she already knows that and there’s pleasure, of an almost scientific sort, in watching me trying to catch the ball then throw back the ball. I am a dog—yes, that’s what this feels like—but not a dog who’s been around a long time, not a dog who knows the rules of the run or the park, but the skinless runt of the litter who hasn’t even been neutered.

Then it occurs to me: is she trying to find out about me, the life I’d rather keep hidden?

“Excuse me for a minute,” I say. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She says go ahead, as her eyes turn to the man in the pink bow tie.

On the way to the restroom, I run into a professor from the English department whose eyes look off to the side. His mouth is tense. It isn’t Wyatt’s mouth; there isn’t a grimace in it, but it’s lonelier, less certain, as if he can already see ahead to difficult times.

Does he see in my face what I see in his? Do we come to the same realization at once? Oh, yes. Denise is leaving us.

2009 | 
The upper room of Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology is low-lit, with candles in glass votives beneath a painting. The painting is a portrait of Laika, the Soviet dog, the first dog in space. There is an absurdity about the sentimentalized rendering, the aura of reverence in the room, especially in a museum that wants to test our relationship to what is being seen, interpreted, displayed. Are we being played with again? M and I don’t know. But even if we are being tested, we’re only further disoriented by this invitation to feel. Here, we’ve learned to wonder but to hold our wonder ten feet away. And now we’re just unnerved. We don’t know who we are, or what a museum is supposed to do.

Is it too much, then, to imagine Laika’s last day on earth? It is plain fact that Laika never came back—we all know that, no one knew how to get her down. Let’s just say that Laika’s last day was her best day. Say that she wasn’t to be swabbed with alcohol and fixed with wires. Say she wasn’t to be subjected to tests of sound and heat and what it felt like to be weightless for hours on end. Instead, we will say she’s thinking of her time at Dr. Lavel’s house. Dr. Lavel, who gave her a cedar bed, and let her sleep at the foot of his own wide bed. Who cooked chicken especially for her, seasoned with marjoram, thyme, and rosemary. The smells of that house so familiar that she’d almost forgotten she’d ever been a street dog, sidling up beside street people to keep warm. And her diet, as if it could ever be called such a thing: pencils and garbage and lead.

On the day of the Sputnik launch we will say Laika was met by a parade. Say President Khrushchev held her high above the crowd, and the crowd clapped and cheered and blew red plastic horns, scaring the crows away for miles. Say the people in that crowd knew they were meeting a hero, whose work would lead to sense and peace, and never to one more war. Decide that she was able to take in this praise, believe this praise was for her alone. As for her panting? Say it had nothing to do with stress, and if there was stress in the moment, it transformed her instantly into light.