The Writer and the Sellers

by

Mary Kalfatovic

Pauline sits on the bed. There are two chairs in the room but they seem more appropriate for throwing clothes on than for sitting. The hotel is a good one. Not the best in this big east coast city that is not New York, but clean, safe, and established. It is an old downtown hotel, a landmark of sorts, that was acquired by an international chain and carefully spruced up and modernized so as to retain as much as possible the atmosphere of a past era. The corporate name is now a part of the hotel’s name but, Pauline noticed, the front desk staff didn’t use it.

Her publisher has been strongly supportive. The tour is long – twelve readings in eleven cities. The Chicago area, for no particular reason, got two. Posters and bookmarks were sent to stores and advertisements taken out in newspaper book sections. The paperback edition, due out in the fall, will include a reader’s guide for book club use. There have been reviews in major publications, including magazines that go beyond what Pauline has heard referred to as “the serious reading community.” Redbook, People, even Newsweek. Very few first novelists get this kind of push. Pauline knows this. Her publisher believes in her book. Sales have proven the belief was not misplaced. So have the many positive reviews. Everyone – author, agent, editor, publisher – is happy.

The novel, to briefly summarize, is about a long estranged mother and daughter – suburban Midwesterners, “real people” – coming to terms after the death of a grandchild. Pauline has gotten letters from readers who praise the book as “moving” and “true.” One reader even called it “life-changing.” Pauline is proud of her book but proud in the same way that one is proud of a high score on an examination -- a 170 on the LSAT or a combined SAT of 1400. She pulled it off. Gave them what they wanted. Only Pauline knows that the book is a product of careful study and application. Truly an Edisonian effort requiring ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration. A concoction. Concoct -- from the Latin word for to boil together.

She analyzed dozens of currently popular American “literary” novels (no genre works and no foreigners, not even any Brits since British writers are judged differently and can get away with erudite dazzle that seems show-offy if done by an American). She took notes. She absorbed. She made an outline. She boiled it all up.

The reading is at seven at a bookstore that Pauline, who is somewhat familiar with this big eastern city that is not New York, knows is within a reasonable walking distance of the hotel. She would rather walk to the store instead of being driven there by an escort. Some authors, no doubt, brush off perquisites and pampering so as to keep themselves in touch with the “real life” activity that sustains their fiction, but Pauline will take everything that’s offered this time, her first time, and chalk it up to experience.

At twenty minutes before seven Pauline is supposed to meet her escort in the hotel’s grand and spacious lobby. Earlier in the afternoon the escort picked her up at the airport and deposited her at the hotel. It is now six clock.

Having eaten a late lunch after checking in to her room, Pauline isn’t hungry. She is thinking of a drink. She hasn’t a had drink since yesterday evening, and hasn’t even thought about a drink since yesterday night. This kind of thoughtlessness pleases her since she fears alcoholism. There is a bar adjacent to the lobby -- a wood lined, leather upholstered bar with top shelf cocktails, good wines and microbrewed beers. Cigars are allowed. The hotel bar, Pauline thought as she stood at its entrance before deciding to go elsewhere for lunch, is more upscale than the hotel itself. A note or two up the scale. Or is it a pound or two up? Exactly what scale is being referred to? Pauline often ponders word and phrase origins and sometimes considers this habit a sign of a true writer’s sensibility. Other times, just as often, she considers it to be nothing more than what she considers most of her mental activity to be -- profitless idle musing, interior chit-chat, a private little waste of time.

The bar, with its leather and wood and cigar smoke, its classic jazz playing in the background does not, in this post-feminist day and age, exude maleness so much as exclusivity and clubiness. The price of the drinks substitutes for a personal recommendation as a way of keeping out undesirables. Pauline might go down to the bar. Nobody would turn her away. She might sit undisturbed in a deep leather chair and enjoy a seven dollar glass of wine. She can afford it. She is acceptable. But she doesn’t go to the bar. Instead she examines the contents of the small refrigerator in her room. On top of the refrigerator are bags of pretzels and potato chips along with a little half-bottle of red wine. Using a key she opens the refrigerator door and finds inside cartons of yogurt and a variety of beverages, including a half-bottle of white wine. The wine, both red and white, is from the Napa Valley. These half-bottles, she thinks, must be made specifically for hotels since Americans don’t ordinarily drink half-bottles and nobody besides Americans drinks American wine.

Pauline is forty-three years old. A first-rate novelist, she thinks, wouldn’t have taken so long. She is not first-rate. Or even second-rate like Somerset Maugham or Mrs. Gaskell. She is not the real thing. She doesn’t kid herself. She’s a hack. A true, authentic, indisputable hack. Her novel is a deliberate act of hackneyed writing. The good reviews, the healthy sales, the letters from pleased and thankful readers, can make her forget this. Occasionally she believes in her talent just as her publisher and her agent and her editor do. When she comes back to remembering the truth she finds consolation in thinking that being even a hack takes more talent than most people have. She accomplished what she set out to do, for whatever it’s worth, and it’s proving to be worth quite a lot. There will, she has been assured, be a six-figure movie deal.

Conflicting emotions and shifting self-assessments make these bookstore events difficult for Pauline. “This novel, my novel, really isn’t good. If you think it’s good that’s only because it meets your expectations and fits your preconceived ideas. Your consciousness was not expanded by reading my book. Your life was not enriched. This book isn’t capable of doing that much. It’s mental junk food disguised as something nutritious,” she wants to explain to the people who come to her readings. But she never does. The people come because they believe they got something worthwhile out of the book, because they found something in it to which they connected. Who is Pauline to say they shouldn’t have? Who is she to say it is wrong of them to connect? A great writer once declared “only connect,” didn’t he? And the people themselves are so earnest, so heartbreakingly nice. What does an author’s opinion really matter anyway? Now that she has written the book, has gotten it published and widely read, Pauline understands that a book, her book, any book, takes on an existence independent of its creator. It meets the world as an entity complete in itself. The author’s opinion of it is reduced to just one among many. The author’s God-like control, the power to mangle and cut and destroy, is gone. The creator becomes just another reader.

The publicity campaign is lavish because Pauline’s attractive appearance and engaging personality are, her editor has told her if not in so many words, assets to be utilized. Pauline is such a regular person, despite her good looks and considerable talent. So much like her readers, except more articulate. She is likeable. Bright but not superior or scholarly. She doesn’t seem to be someone who spends a lot of time alone yet everyone knows she must for there is her book as evidence. But she has not given in to solitude, has not let it burden her with strange tics or the general rebarbativeness that afflicts so many writers. Get her out on the circuit and watch her steadfast normality be admired by her readers.

Pauline has a husband, two children, a sister, a brother, nieces and nephews who recognize her without prompting, parents with whom she is in touch regularly, neighbors she knows by name, and friends, many friends -- from college, from work (she has held regular jobs but none recently). Even friends from childhood. She attends her high school reunions. Sometimes Pauline thinks she has cultivated so much life, so much regular everyday activity, in order to have an excuse not to write. Family and friends are all a distraction. If this is so, then there have been benefits to this elaborate avoidance tactic. Family and friends are what’s really important. These elemental connections, well maintained, are the true deathbed consolation, are the marks of a life well lived. Of course, Pauline doesn’t completely believe this. She wishes she could. Life would be easier if she could. But she can’t. The need for something more is there like a monkey on her back

She decides to open the bottle of white wine and sticks to her decision even after discovering the corkscrew provided by the hotel is a compact “waiter’s” type that she isn’t sure how to manipulate. The bottle is opened without trouble and she is pleased by her triumphal use of the left side of her brain. A half-bottle is more than she wants. She might recork the bottle and drink the rest later, or she might just go ahead and drink it all now. She’ll give it some thought.

Because she likes to get an idea of the quotidian goings on in the cities she visits, Pauline picked up a copy of the local weekly “alternative” paper while she was out having lunch. She looks through the paper now as she drinks. The cover story is an expose of the city’s housing authority; a subject doesn’t interest her and would not interest her even if she lived in this big eastern city that is not New York. She sips her wine and turns the page. “Sips” is a word Pauline deliberately avoided using when writing what she thinks of now as her juvenilia, except she wasn’t so young when she wrote much of it. Better to call it her failed writing -- the things she wrote before she decided to concoct. The things that always fell short of replicating what was in her mind, that she was never satisfied with, could never stop tinkering with, could never decide were finished. The things she finally gave up on. In Pauline’s failed writing nobody ever sipped or munched or clambered or pivoted or peered. She rejected these words as too writerly, as somehow false. In her completed, submitted, accepted writing – the book that is now a success – she used them all at least once.

Pauline takes another sip of wine and reads a review of a local theatre company’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Three-quarters of a mile away, at the bookstore, the staff is setting up chairs for the evening’s event. Readings are frequent at the store, two or three times a week in the high seasons of spring and fall, so this event is not really special. The store owns seventy chairs but only forty will be put out because it is thought only forty will be needed. This prediction is based on the staff’s unscientific but usually accurate formula taking into account pre-reading sales of the author’s book at this particular store (Pauline’s book has, so far, sold seven copies here), the number of calls received asking about the reading (five, all women), day of the week (Fridays always have the lowest turnout, Wednesdays and Thursdays best; today is Thursday) and weather (cloudy but no rain). The reading is expected to generate a medium-sized crowd of forty or so people. This is not a large number but impressive for a first novelist. There is, after all, just the one book. No real following or reputation can yet exist.

One of the staff members putting up the chairs is Sarah, a twenty-three old aspiring writer. She is much like Pauline was twenty years ago except that Sarah’s fiction runs toward fantasy and Pauline’s always stayed within the realm of plausibility. Unlike Pauline, Sarah still cares about getting a story published in a literary journal. In fact, just yesterday she sent a story off to the Mohawk Review. Pauline stopped caring about “little magazines” years ago. She stopped reading them, stopped sending stories to them, stopped trying to write more stories that might be sent to them. If Sarah’s story is published in the Mohawk Review Pauline will never see it.

An employee named Donald is also putting up chairs. Donald is forty-three, the same age as Pauline. They were, in fact, born on the same day in the same state, within thirty miles of each other, but when Pauline comes to the bookstore they will not speak enough to each other for this information to be revealed. Donald doesn’t speak much to anybody. His taciturnity makes his co-worker Sarah – who is ebullient, whose writing is an estuary running out of a mighty flow of expression – uncomfortable around him. If Sarah’s story is published by the Mohawk Review Donald, too, will never see it. He doesn’t read little magazines and never has.

If her story is published Sarah intends to make copies and distribute them to her friends and co-workers but she won’t offer one to Donald, weird, silent Donald. She doesn’t think he cares enough about her personally or about contemporary literature generally to want a copy. She is right about both these things. Donald has worked at the store for fifteen years. These girls like Sarah come and go. He is indifferent to Sarah and sometimes can’t remember her name so he guesses (Something biblical, isn’t it? Rachel? Leah? ). Donald would certainly not read Sarah’s story if she gave it to him. He would take it, thank her, and being disinclined toward throwing things away, would lay it down somewhere in his cluttered apartment and forget about it.

Donald doesn’t read much of anything. Not any more. Before he was divorced he lived in a suburban townhouse and got in an hour of reading on the train every work day. A half hour inbound, and a half our outbound. Now he lives a ten minute walk from the bookstore. Mostly, though, the reason is he just doesn’t care about books. There are so many things on television now. So many programs he genuinely enjoys. And he’s made a cadre of acquaintances at a local bar. The bar is a pseudo-Irish pub where the typical customer is younger and more prosperous than Donald (though not as prosperous as the clientele of the bar at Pauline’s hotel). When Donald was young, even younger than most of the prosperous young drinkers in the pub, as young as Sarah, he began a science fiction novel but never finished it. Donald has also never finished his bachelor’s degree or the computer technician certification course he took or the one-thousand piece puzzle he started a few months ago. If Donald went to a therapist he would be told he has a problem with bringing things to completion. A fear of failure, perhaps, or of success? Of any kind of finality? Of judgement? For what remains unfinished cannot be fully assessed. But Donald has never been to a therapist. Has never even thought of going to a therapist. What does he think about then, if not therapy? Well, not Pauline and her book. Donald knows nothing about the lady novelist who is appearing at the store tonight. When a customer asks for whom the event preparations are being made Donald must quickly glance up at a poster in order to provide the name and book title. All he knows and cares about right now is that the microphone and the podium still have to be put up.

Pauline meets her escort in the lobby at six-forty. Having decided to drink the rest of the half-bottle, she feels slightly inebriated. Enough to heighten the coming experience, she thinks, but not distort it. And she brushed her teeth in order to destroy any tell-tale odor that might give the wrong impression. Victor, the escort, detects no inebriation. A courtier by nature, Victor gets an almost erotic charge from being around notable people. Real fame isn’t required for him to feel the sensation. Pauline, whose book has made it to the lower reaches of the best seller list, was nominated for a major award and won a minor one (for best novel by a first novelist) arouses in him only a low-level charge (nothing like Gunter Grass or Anne Rice provoked) but strong enough to make him temporarily pleased to be who he is, doing what he is doing. On the way to the bookstore Victor and Pauline, both blessed with good social skills, chat comfortably the weather and about how the big eastern city where Pauline lives (and where Victor went to college) is more provincial than this city. They chat on while sitting in traffic in front of Donald’s apartment building without knowing it is Donald apartment building. In Pauline’s case, without knowing Donald at all. Victor has been to the bookstore many times and does know Donald, but not well enough to know much of anything about him. Victor rarely thinks about Donald but when he does he, like Sarah, considers him strange and a failure, attributes he links as cause and effect. Victor doesn’t find Pauline strange or a failure but he sees no opposite linkage in her – he does not attribute Pauline’s success to her normality. On the contrary, Pauline’s normality is a mark against her in Victor’s mind for he believes that properly controlled and channeled eccentricity is the basis of genuine artistic accomplishment. He studies the lives of great writers, painters, filmmakers, and composers and finds their uniqueness of vision is always coupled with a myriad of personal idiosyncrasies. Pauline’s success excites him but privately he acknowledges it is almost certainly a temporary success; a fleeting moment that he has been exposed to, like a passerby witnessing a car wreck.

Victor is writing his own novel and forges away in front of a computer in his basement efficiency despite ever present doubts about possessing the real thing himself. Part of his problem, he thinks, is having a personality that leans him towards the periphery. Victor dreams of being a famous writer but more often, and in more detail, he dreams of being taken up by a writer who is already famous; becoming an assistant, perhaps lover, to some older man or woman, gender doesn’t matter so much, whose greatness is established and undisputed. He would be the indispensable man, the major domo, and finally keeper of the flame. Victor is twenty-five years old and whatever his strengths and weaknesses are, he doesn’t have to face up to them yet.

At ten before seven, the forty chairs set up have been filled. Sarah suggests to Donald that more chairs be set up. Eight more chairs. She can get four, and he can get four. Donald agrees to this plan but his positive reply comes in the form of rephrasing Sarah’s words so as to make the suggestion his and the agreement hers. He doesn’t like taking orders or anything resembling an order from Sarah or any of these girls who come and go, who get younger and younger than him, who think they know as much as he does.

Donald gets his four chairs and Sarah gets hers. It is five minutes before seven. Where is the author? They don’t know that Pauline is out front, waiting for Victor to park the car, not wanting to enter the bookstore alone and run the risk of going unnoticed and having to introduce herself to whatever staff member she can snag. She can see through the window that the store is relatively small, crowded, and undermanned. Pauline is not famous enough to enjoy anonymity and not quite obscure enough, not anymore (her book’s readership goes beyond the “serious reading community,” let’s not forget) to expect it. Introducing herself would not be a charming gesture of modesty but an awkward situation she would rather avoid.

This kid Victor should have anticipated parking problems and scheduled more time to deal with the car. She again looks through the store window and sees the crowd that has gathered to watch her read. Watch her read? The verbs don’t agree but, grammatical or not, that is exactly what happens. People watch her read. Do they listen? She doesn’t think so. Not closely. Listening is not the point of these events. The event itself is. The author going among the readers. The connection. Then there are the questions. Author and readers in direct contact. The questions are much the same in city after city. Mostly people want to know about the experience of writing, about the process, the physical aspect of it. Pen and paper or straight into the computer? At home or another place? Morning or evening? Every day? This curiosity surprises Pauline but she doesn’t mind it because these process questions are easy to answer. Questions about inspiration are the ones that are hard, that force her to lie. What difference does it make anyway, she later asks herself, if she does lie? No laws get broken, no harm is done.

Once the reading is underway Sarah stands by the front door keeping out customers not here for the event, who think the store, which closes at seven, is still open for regular business. Just as Pauline suspects, Sarah only half-listens to the reading (excerpts from the first chapter, to set the tone, and a mother-daughter confrontation scene from the middle of the book). Authors read for too long, Sarah thinks, picking up a no more than a sentence here and there. She recalls the famous Australian writer who went on for fifty stupefying minutes, page after page, oblivious to coughs and rustling and departures. Being a writer as well as a reader, Sarah is curious about an author’s habits – a real published author’s habits. In fact, it is Sarah herself who asks Pauline the pen and paper versus computer question.

The staffing tonight is generous. Four people. Therefore, instead of receiving new stock in the backroom while the author reads, as he often has to, Donald is able to sit on a stool behind the bank of cash registers, pretending to listen to the author. He discreetly examines the array of booklights, batteries, stationery, postcards, magnifying glasses, stuffed animals, premium chocolate bars and other non-book items the store sells on the side, items that Donald has been informed by the store manager are more profitable than the books that are the store’s reason for existing. If this is so, if these sideline items, these nicknacks and gimcrack, are so profitable, why did Woolworth’s go out of business? Donald wonders this and isn’t even half-listening to Pauline’s reading or to the questions and answers. But he keeps his ears open to the sound of the applause that indicates the event is over and for Sarah’s voice (Is Sarah her name? Judith? Ruth? No, girls don’t have those particular biblical names anymore) coming through the microphone announcing that customers who want their books signed should line up on the right.

The applause is heard. Sarah makes her announcement and the line on the right is formed. The line moves slowly because Pauline, charming Pauline, chats with each customer and signs her signature in her real handwriting, not a hasty set of slashes that would pass for an autograph. Her slowness is irksome to Donald who has been working since ten this morning, who can’t leave until the author leaves, who wants to see a television show that begins at nine o’clock.

Sarah, too, has been working since eleven but is in no hurry to get home. She has no interest in television programs and doesn’t like her current roommate. If Sarah got home early she might use the time to write her own fiction. She might, but she won’t. Sarah never writes after she has worked all day, convincing herself she is too tired and that other matters – laundry, a telephone call, yoga – make stronger claims on her mostly depleted energy. Though she considers herself primarily a writer, she finds it hard to sit down and write. Sarah is so very much like Pauline.

On the other hand, Victor the escort, who has been sitting unobtrusively among the crowd, will certainly write when he gets home. To be fair to Sarah, it should be pointed out that her job is full-time – eight hours, five days a week – while Victor’s escort work is a half-job. Victor is semi-employed and semi-dependent. Monthly checks come from his wealthy stepfather who is making up for past transgressions by financing his stepson’s aspirations. Sarah is without such support, she must work full-time, and thus she is not blessed or cursed with a guilt-induced goad to industry.

Finally, Pauline puts down her pen. The books, including two dozens copies for stock, have been signed. Sarah retrieves Pauline’s outerwear and thanks her for a wonderful reading. Donald, a few feet away affixing “autographed copy” stickers to the signed stock, listens to Sarah’s praise and knows that it is generic, if not necessarily false. Sarah gives thanks and praise to every author; the same words, in the same tone, to all of them. Pauline returns Sarah’s thanks and walks over to Donald to thank him. Her gesture leaves Donald agitated and confused. The therapist that he will never see would say that Pauline’s gesture of inclusion forced Donald to confront his sense of inadequacy. The agitation will last long enough for Donald to have trouble falling asleep tonight. But only tonight. Tomorrow he will have forgotten about it. Sarah, too, will quickly forget the events of this evening. Tomorrow evening another author will be reading. Another author will have to be introduced and thanked. A different escort will bring the author tomorrow. Victor will be home forcing out another two-hundred and fifty words as his latest support check lies on the desk within his sight, ready to be cashed in the morning.

Tomorrow Pauline will be doing a reading in another big east coast city that is not New York. This tour is both her apogee in the literary world and her exit. She will never write another novel.

Sarah will never have a story published. She will, after a few years, give up writing, give up the bookstore, get a master’s degree in library science, move to a big west coast city that is not Los Angeles and design websites in return for a salary that enables her to own a bungalow and a Toyota and to adopt a baby from Vietnam. She will stay in touch with only one of her co-workers at the bookstore, Leslie, who wasn’t working the night of Pauline’s visit, and it will be from Leslie that she learns that weird Donald is dead. A heart attack right out on the floor near the children’s books during an otherwise unremarkable Thursday afternoon. Age fifty-five. It will also be from Leslie that Sarah learns the bookstore is going out of business, having survived longer than anyone would have guessed in the face of high rents and megastore competitors.

Victor, his checks continuing to make possible his semi-employment, will persevere despite his doubts, will succeed, will become, by his mid-thirties, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. While in a college town attending her son’s graduation Pauline will read Victor’s prize winner and won’t know that the young man she dimly recalls was her escort in the big eastern city that is not New York is its author. Sarah, on the west coast, will read it, too and she will know very well who Victor Penzey is, or was. She will examine his photograph on the back cover, note that he has lost a lot of hair, then turn to her child, thinking that children, friends, family, authentic life are the things that really matter, anyway, not books. Right?

—Originally appeared in Carve Magazine, 2005.