Possibly the forgotten story had been about a married writer like the author, though younger, more like a former self, in residence one summer at an artist’s colony in upstate New York being visited, unannounced, by a married woman with whom he had a brief affair, which separation had ended several months earlier. The day of her arrival is the day, as it turns out, of a trip he has planned to take to the college town of Copington on the border between New York State and Vermont to visit this famous writer, IM Tarkovsky, whose latest novel he, Joshua Quartz, had reviewed in The New York Times. The review, admired by its subject, has elicited the celebrity’s invitation to come to dinner. Josh has no choice but to invite his inconvenient guest to join him on this trip, which will include another more established writer from the colony, a sometime friend and rival of the celebrated Tarkovsky, and an older woman painter, with whom the other writer, who is fucking his way through the female population of the colony, is presently involved. That’s the down payment of the story.
The story itself is an old one or a version of something that had actually happened that I had been holding on to in the hope of reimagining eventually into something livelier and more complex, but it is probably not the forgotten story of this occasion. That doesn’t necessarily exclude its possibility. If we are to go on with it — it may be all we have at the moment — we’re going to have to give our four characters greater definition. But then I think the reason the story has not been written before is that, beyond the charge of its given, nothing of consequence is in the cards for the two illicit couples making the trip. The character revelations are for the most part predictable and consequently trivial.
Say they get lost on the trip over, take a wrong turn which goes undiscovered for an extended period of time. Or they have a flat tire that neither of the men seems able to contend with. That the story takes a comic or even a farcical turn does not preclude it from an ultimate seriousness.
Or Harry Berger, the other writer on the trip, a mid-level celebrity in his own right, makes himself charming to Joshua’s aggrieved guest, offering the smart and sexy Genevieve an occasion to get back at Josh by making him jealous.
Or, more likely, they arrive uneventfully at Tarkovsky’s house in Copington, make small talk, munch peanuts, take a turn around the college grounds, return for a sit-down dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and string beans. Perhaps not string beans, perhaps carrots and peas. The stack of sliced white bread on the table, even for the 1960’s, suggests a kind of unsophistication with potentially comic implications. Everyone is exceedingly civil until Mrs. Tarkovsky, Anna, mentions an interview given by Berger in which he off-handedly disparages one of Izzy Tarkovsky’s recent novels.
In defensive astonishment, Berger insists that he has been misquoted.
But Anna Tarkovsky comes back at him with a wholly different occasion in which Berger is also perceived to deprecate Tarkovsky’s work.
Berger mutters something unintelligible, furious at being put in the wrong, though in truth he is not a fan of Tarkovsky’s more recent work.
Genevieve, who has been silent throughout dinner — it is her mode these days not to give up words in the company of strangers — speaks up in Berger’s behalf in a gesture that surprises virtually everyone. “Harry didn’t volunteer these negative remarks you cite,” she says in her dreamy way. “Someone, some journalist looking to make noise, asked him a question which he tried to answer honestly. Journalists are always looking to create melodrama through overstatement.”
“Exactly,” Berger says.
“Let’s let the matter drop,” Tarkovsky says.
“Oh Izzy,” his wife says. “Stand up for yourself. These people aren’t your friends.”
“Let’s finish our meal,” Tarkovsky says. “That’s enough, Anna. Sha. I accept Harry’s explanation.”
Anna looks as if she has something more to say, but censors herself with notable displeasure. Izzy will hear about it again after these guests are gone.
To break the tension, Josh compliments Anna on her cooking.
“It was very simple,” she says. “I only do simple things.”
“Yes,” Lisa Strata says. “Simple is good. Making a meal is like making art. And art should always be simple. Of course, cooking a meal is more useful than making a painting.”
“You may mean well,” Anna says, “but I don’t believe a word of what you say.”
During the dessert course of ice cream and cookies, Tarkovsky, apropos of nothing, delivers a lecture on the deficiencies and presumptions of the recent trend toward a “heartless formalism.”
“To deny the human in art, is, in the final analysis, to leave out everything that matters,” he says, stopping himself momentarily to take stock of his audience. No one has moved. Everyone is in place.
“I understand what you’re saying, Izzy,” Berger says, his willfully denied condescension showing through invisible cracks.
And where can the story go from here? The alert reader has already noticed that the story has virtually foreclosed itself.
Berger’s flirtation with Genevieve (or is it the other way around?) has no place to go while the characters remain, sitting at the dinner table, in Tarkovsky’s house on the Copington campus.
Rudimentary courtesy keeps the competitive tension between Berger and Tarkovsky from reaching the level of narrative-defining melodrama.
Tarkovsky has been Berger’s mentor, but Berger, insofar as he reckons his own accomplishment, has not only surpassed his former master but has become unwittingly privy to the other’s hitherto concealed weaknesses.
Josh, on the other hand, is still emerging as a writer and concedes a certain minor indebtedness to Tarkovsky’s early work. In the unacknowledged war between Berger and Tarkovsky, Josh is a relative neutral with one foot perhaps in the Tarkovsky camp. Lisa Strata is a bemused observer. Genevieve wants Josh, imagines she is in love with him, but remains, enclosed by silence, protected by vagueness, not quite explicable even to herself.
If there is no story to this point, there is at least a dynamic to its embryonic possibility.
After dinner, Tarkovsky will address himself to Josh away from the others.
“Are you working on a novel?” he asks him. “Isn’t that what you told me over the phone?”
“I am,” he says. “I’m hoping to have my rewrite finished before I leave Dadda.”
“Send me a copy when you’re ready to show it,” Tarkovsky says.
Josh merely nods, too pleased by Tarkovsky’s unexpected offer to find the appropriate language with which to thank him. “I’ll do that,” he says.
Later Josh will mention Tarkovsky’s offer to Genevieve, underplaying his elation in a way that gives it away twice.
“Congratulations,” she says. “He’s showing you that he’s a better person than Harry Berger.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s one reason,” she says, “but probably not the main one. It’s obvious that he respects you a lot.”
“He said that my review was the best thing ever written about one of his books.”
“You don’t need his praise,” she says. “You’re too good for that.”
Lisa Strata helps clear the table overriding Anna’s awkward protest that such a gesture is unnecessary. Berger wanders into the living room, checking out Tarkovsky’s library. He notes that two of his five books on these carefully alphabetized shelves are a notable absence.