What I Am Trying to Tell You

Katherine Hepburn photographed for Vanity Fair by Cecil Beaton. ©Conde Nast Publications

An actor from one of my favourite movies lives a few blocks away.  I see him at the grocery store in ratty sweats and a wool hat, remember that I loved him in Angels in America, and hand him the oranges he dropped.  No big deal.  O, a tall man, remarks that he thought the guy would be taller.  I silently muse how strange it is that I’ve seen the guy naked.

There’s absolutely nothing puzzling about this encounter except for this:  Had the actor been an author I would have dropped the entire contents from my basket, stepped on one of the dropped oranges, landed on my back, and stammered, ceaselessly, “Um, um, um, um. . . I like your stuff.”  It would be a fierce competition between my actions and my words:  which could be the most awkward?

A few weeks ago I went to a reading at the 92nd Street Y.  Paul Auster was reading with Javier Marias.  Mr. Auster read a section from his new novel, Invisible, that was so steamy I’m surprised the room didn’t explode from the sexual tension.  Mr. Marias’s introducer asked if we needed a cigarette break and turned the time to Mr. Marias – cool, collected, his prose offering the palette-cleansing train ride home after the tryst with Mr. Auster.  I was in heaven, an eager schoolgirl scribbling the answers they gave in the Q&A then joining the line to have them sign my books.

Ok, I am a dork.  You should just understand that right now.  Because what I am about to tell you is like the Acme of dorkdom and I think you should be warned in advance.

I had been imagining meeting these men since I bought the tickets three months earlier.  (Don’t worry, O knows about this and he is not threatened.  You’ll understand why in a minute.)  So for three months I had been thinking of the astute questions, the perfectly worded compliments I could give that would tell them “a-ha!  The reader I have dreamed of has arrived!”  I imagined Javier Marias dropping his pen and asking where I’d been all of his life, Paul Auster standing a little taller and saying “Madame, I am honored.”  This was my chance.  The first sentence of Marias’s A Heart So White indelibly changed the possibilities of writing for me;  The New York Trilogy taught me that a whole story, a whole world, could be built from the dichotomy of the weight and arbitrariness of language.  I was going to tell them, with elegance and eloquence, all of this and they were going to be my friends.  No, they were going to love me.

Yeah, so it didn’t go as planned.  I was star-struck.  More star-struck even than when, at McNally Jackson last fall, I was handed the microphone to ask Amy Bloom and her editor a question and I had to pass the microphone back because I forgot what I was going to say. At least then I had the brilliant idea to feign a coughing attack.

I stood, first, in front of Paul Auster.  He signed my book, and I was MUTE.  I couldn’t even tell him my name.  He handed the book back to me and I stood there, staring at him, probably hypnotizing him with the crazy that was swirling in my eyes, and then, literally, breathlessly told him “Ican’ttellyouhowmuchyourworkmeanstomeandhowiloveit.”  Oh wait, you couldn’t understand that?  Good heavens.

Back in line, A Heart So White clutched to my bosom*, I swore that when I spoke to Mr. Marias (“may I call you Javier?”) I would redeem myself.  I didn’t.  Oh man, it was even WORSE.  I don’t even know how that’s possible so I really don’t expect you to.  But it was.  I stood there, he asked my name and I didn’t say anything because, you know, my name?  what’s that?  He cleared his throat, signed his name, closed the book and I blurted out “Oh! Your book changed love and I me it write so much.”  He thanked me and I had to run away before I became the girl who forgot her name and then cried all over the table and had to wipe her runny nose with her hand because she was too overcome to find a kleenex.

At the aforementioned reading, Amy Bloom mentioned that when she’s writing she can’t read the work of living authors, that their shadow looms too large.  The dead can’t cast shadows.  For me, it’s the writers themselves.  I don’t get nervous around actors or models because I know that I will never do what they do.  They can think that I am a terrible actress or not skinny enough to be a model and they would be right and I wouldn’t care.  I can’t do accents and I won’t give up chocolate croissants.  But I aspire, I actually toil, to be a writer.   I might take style cues from Marion Cotillard, but I didn’t come away from La Vie en Rose wondering how I could accomplish what she had on the screen.  When I read a great book, a perfectly formed short story, it is heaven unlike any other. It is a heaven I would refuse chocolate croissants for.  But it is also a challenge;  how can I write a better sentence?  How can I write dialogue that is natural and adds to the narrative?  I don’t ask to be an actor’s peer or friend.  With authors I am like your best friend’s younger sibling, pacing in front of the bedroom door begging to be invited in.

Next month I am going to spend one week with other writers.  We are going to spend our mornings sharing writing and critiques and our afternoons and evenings enjoying the beauty of Positano.  I feel like the younger sibling already.  But this time I’ve made it through the door.  Now if I can just learn to speak in full, punctuated sentences.

*this melodramatic phrase is totally appropriate here.