“Him? You’re giving it to him? What does he have to do with this?” Penelope was holding a glass of white wine. She said, “Put that down and let me get you something to drink. It’s good cheap Fumé.” She left the balcony and went into the kitchen.
Arthur said, “Don’t put it down. Don’t put it down. I’m asking him a question, Penelope. One that you don’t seem to have the nerve to answer.”
She returned with two glasses and took a sweating bottle from the dining room table and poured some wine into each. She handed one to me and one to Arthur. “I’m assuming you want.” Her right hand was swaddled in gauze. “Work related,” she said when she saw me looking. “I’ll live. Let’s go onto the porch.”
I was wearing a turtleneck and a wool blazer — a yearning toward the professorial poise in Arthur, I suppose. It was crisp out — pure, I want to say. When you’re above the exhaust pipes and manholes and dry-cleaner steam, just breathing the air, New York City can smell as clean as a lungful from a ski lift in Vale. It’s a fairly short period, though, a week or two at most, after the garbagy musk of summer and before the burnt chestnut chill of winter.
Arthur brought out three dining room chairs, and we sat. I set the stack of pages on my lap. It was maybe three inches thick. The center of the top page read The Morels: A Novel.
“Is this your new book?”
“He wants me to read it.”
“And why don’t you?”
“I will. But not like this. Art thinks I won’t approve and — no way. I don’t want any part of that. You wrote what you wrote. I’m not going to be your conscience or your censor. Do that for yourself. And you know what? Fuck you. For trying to make me play that role. I don’t want to play that role. Anyway, what am I supposed to say? I read it, I don’t like it, I tell you, Art, don’t publish this. Burn it.”
“I’d burn it without a second thought.”
“But what about me? I’d be nothing but second thoughts. You’re saddling me with this burden? That’s fair. And like I would ever say such a thing. You know this. You know I would never tell you to do that, so what are you really doing here? You’re forcing my hand. It’s a bluff. You don’t want me to tell you what I really think. You want me to tell you to go ahead, and you know I’ll tell you to go ahead because what kind of supportive wife would tell her writer husband to burn his manuscript? It’s a free pass. You know how I know? Coming to me now. It’s sold, your agent has seen it, he’s gotten a publisher to agree to buy it — this thing is already out of your hands — why not come to me when you were still working on it? When you could have done something about it?”
I thumbed though the pages. On first glance, it appeared to be a string of e-mails. Three hundred and sixty-two pages of e-mails.
“But you don’t understand. That’s not it at all. I’m asking you for help. I don’t know what I’m doing. You give me way too much credit. I’m not in control over what I write. This isn’t some piece for a travel magazine or some restaurant review. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a romance, or what have you. This is — excuse the pretentiousness of saying it — literature. I’m looking for good, for true, for dangerous. This is my mandate, my only mandate. There is no formula. It’s a direction, the vaguest sort of destination, a kind of compass that, if I know how to use it, will show me the way. And here is this thing I found, and I know it’s all these things, but I also know it will hurt you and Will.”
“Art. They’re words. It’s a novel, yes?”
“Technically, yes.”
“There is no technically. It is or it isn’t.”
“I guess that will be the question, won’t it?”
“Look. You can’t please everybody. You can’t. You make sacrifices. You think this is any different than what a doctor goes through? A top surgeon? The procedure develops complications, and he has to miss his son’s graduation. Or I don’t know, at least that’s the way it goes on television, but it sounds about right. These are the trade-offs. This is what happens to a family man with a career. You’re not special. You just have to accept that your wife and son may never forgive you.”
“I can’t do that. That’s unacceptable. It can’t be either-or.”
“You’re such an only child, Arthur.”
“I have half siblings!”
“You want it all, but you can’t have it all.”
“Okay,” he said. He took the manuscript from me, got up, and went inside.
Penelope crossed her eyes at me. “Do you see what I’m dealing with? He turns into a crazy person sometimes. I want to pull my hair out.”
Some people would say they avoid being around couples for precisely this kind of cross fire I was in, but I found it comforting. It made me feel closer to them, that they should have let me into their lives enough that I could see them argue. I took a mouthful of wine. “This is good,” I said.
Arthur came back empty-handed and sat down.
“So,” Penelope said quietly, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to call Doug in the morning and tell him to forget it.”
“Oh, Jesus! I didn’t realize I was talking to someone’s Catholic mother. Poor Arthur! Going to martyr his magnum opus for the sake of the family.”
“What do you want from me, Penelope?”
“I want you to be realistic. You’ve brought this thing into the world. You can’t undo that. Destroying it — the original file, all copies, whatever — doesn’t change this fact. You wrote it. Period. Deciding not to publish doesn’t change this. Even if you could take it back, even if nobody had read it, it wouldn’t change a thing. It exists. What’s required of you now is to be a man about it. Own it. It’s yours. To hell with me. To hell with Will. Is that what you want me to say?”
“You should read it. You should know what you’re getting into before you say a thing like that.”
“I don’t care what it’s about. Do you love me? Do you love Will? Does this story change that? No, so go forth and publish.”
Arthur looked at his watch. “I need to go pick him up.”
In the elevator I said, “So Penelope doesn’t know anything about this new book.”
“Not from me withholding it, believe me. She doesn’t want to know. She wants to go out on the day it’s released, walk into a bookstore, take the thing off the new-arrivals rack, and pay top dollar for the hardcover. Be the first in line, as it were. It was the same with the other one.”
Arthur explained that the release date of a book is a rather anticlimactic affair. There are launch parties and readings and three-way conference calls about first-week numbers, but this is somehow beside the point. With a movie premiere, the auteur has the satisfaction of sitting in a back row and seeing the effect his efforts have, connecting the dots of that triumvirate uppercase A—Artist, Art, Audience — the reaction is immediate, visceral. He can stand with the ushers as the moviegoers file out and hear just how enthralled or bored they were. A gallery opening, although more of a ceremony, achieves this same function, plugging together viewer and object for the benefit of its maker, so she can see her achievement realized. And likewise with the composer, the choreographer, the architect, the chef. The spaces they describe are traversable such that the artist can witness the traversing. Not so for the novelist. The book launch, though it pretends to accomplish this — invited guests, signed books stacked on a foldout table, a reading, and, at the end, applause — is a sham. Because books are different. They can’t be consumed in one sitting. The narrative arc takes many hours, days if you’re a slow reader, to travel, and it’s a journey that happens alone. This was the other difference about literary art. Theater, music, dance, dining, are all communal arts, the experience enhanced when shared with others. Reading is an entirely solitary activity. Even a subway car full of straphangers all reading the same bestseller is a hundred separate people alone with a book. So where does that leave the writer? He can’t watch over the shoulder of a stranger, gauging his reaction. And the author’s wife has likely already read a draft or two, or at the very least knows too much about the endeavor and its author to enjoy any pure reading experience.