Vicky looked at me with deep intensity. “How are you?”
I couldn’t remember if I’d ever responded to her last email, from Vermont, where she’d gone to take a break from New York, trying to quit smoking, childless and out of romantic options, wondering how I was, asking for photos of me with my kids, or just my kids, or any cute kid stories—and I grinned at her like a lobotomized dope.
“I was just saying,” Dennis said, “that my book was selling, it sold pretty well, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years, word of mouth was good, but then that movie came out.”
“What movie?”
“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out, my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand, and it never went lower ever again.”
Charlene Wetzel joined us, smiling, and said, “I think I have a stalker.” More people sat down. “He wore sunglasses in class,” she said. “Last year, it took a few days. This year, first day: stalker.”
Heather Hinman, who taught poetry and had a coiled energy that included her hair, said that one of her students asked what font she typed in. Roberta Moser put her plate down and told us that she’d just finished an interview with the local NPR and that the questions were dumb.
I began to feel hopeless and desperate in a familiar way.
Dennis explained that NPR was fine for pushing an art film or a book, but that the machinery that promotes a studio movie is so much bigger. “Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie killed Ring-a-Ding Ding the book, and it never recovered.”
“What are we talking about?” Roberta asked.
“My book Ring-a-Ding Ding,” Dennis said, “and how it got killed by Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie, which I also wrote.”
Roberta smiled at Dennis. “I still don’t understand.”
Tom McLaughlin brought over a bottle of wine. Frederick Stugatz sat down with Ilana Zimmer, who put some wine to her lips and said, “I just got back from six weeks as artist in residence at the University of Bologna.”
Heather took a drink and said, “After this I go to Ole Miss.”
Frederick said, “After this I go to Berkeley.” He turned and stared at Ilana, who ignored him.
Dennis said, “Ring-a-Ding Ding the book is about a sensitive brute who happens to be the twentieth century’s greatest entertainer. The movie Ring-a-Ding Ding is a piece of shit. But that’s not my point. My point is that the kid who’s supposed to be eighteen was played by a twenty-six-year-old, and the eighteen-year-olds who saw it thought the guy looked like a senior citizen.”
Dennis had red hair and a pink forehead and surprisingly bright blue eyes. If you tried to make eye contact, he couldn’t see you. I liked to think of this as the result of some head trauma. It was a kind of blindness that made him unlikable but high-functioning. He’d written four biographies and two screenplays and went on morning talk shows when his books came out. I could imagine back in caveman days someone like him being cut from the tribe, dragged away, and thrown off a cliff.
Heather buttered a roll. She used to be a drunk but now wrote poems about bartending, drinking binges, blackouts, and AA. Roberta was a filmmaker. She’d been making a documentary for the past nine years about corrupt black mayors of major American cities, filming them in jail, running for office again, taking walks with their aged mothers. Frederick taught the musical book, whatever that was, and had been the genius behind last year’s musical about Karl Rove. Ilana Zimmer had headlined an indie rock band, with one hit in the eighties, then had a ho-hum solo career, and now dabbled in kids’ music. She ran a songwriting workshop every year in Frederick’s class. Vicky had paintings in museums around the world that were violent, cartoonish, biting, dark, and funny, that dealt with war, religiosity, porn, rape, but also the cost of art education, women’s bodies, and people who lived in garbage dumps. And Tom McLaughlin had been a high school English teacher for forty years, then retired and wrote a rambling memoir of his childhood growing up over a pool hall in Alffia, Texas, population 71, with wrenching scenes about killing cattle and the death of the town; it became an instant classic, then a hit movie. He sat there like the most relaxed guy in the world, his face heavily lined, familiar in a way from posters of him around the conference—they were hard to miss, his head gleaming and speckled with age spots.
The thing to do here was relax and not worry about where I ranked among them. I pushed my plate away and started drawing on the tablecloth. I drew the bay, a single steady line, wispy clouds in the distance, and walking along the shore I drew Batman, the Caped Crusader, looking a little haggard and overweight. Last year’s tablecloths had been made of a thick, toothy paper, with a spongy plastic coating underneath, but this was thin one-ply, and the ink bled like I was drawing on toilet paper. It was a waste of time, but I didn’t care. Batman was the first superhero I’d ever drawn. I hadn’t drawn him in thirty years. Why now? Drawing him middle-aged with a big keister seemed to answer something. He stood in the surf at low tide with a touristy camera around his neck and his tights stained dark from wading.
One line led to another, the feeling of deadness went away, and this arrangement of markings became a scene with a little girl about Kaya’s age holding Batman’s hand. Was it a memory? Was it cathartic? Did it work? I didn’t care. I kept going, surprising my eyes with what my hand could do. In Batman’s other arm I drew a little boy in a swim diaper—my knees bouncing under the table—until, shading in the bay around their ankles, I pressed too hard and tore the tablecloth.
Then I thought of home and felt my throat close up. I wondered how I’d protect my kids from hundreds of miles away. I worried that Kaya would ride her tricycle into the renovation pit from the construction next door. I worried that Beanie would suck the propeller out of my old tin clown whistle. Joey, the high school kid down the block, sometimes cut through the alley in his Subaru with his foot on the gas, even though a dozen kids under the age of ten jumped rope and played games there. A spasm of electric jolts shocked my heart, from the heady mixing of blood and guilt that brought on flashes of horror and feelings of dread and excitement, the fear that I would do something sexy and rotten and get away with it.
Stewart Rinaldi pulled up a chair and said, “What did I miss?”
“We’re talking about my book,” Dennis began, “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”
No one could stop him from explaining that the movie killed the book. When he finished, no one spoke. Beside me, Charlene folded things into a sandwich.
“Pass the salt.”
We had nothing else to say, or didn’t want to try for fear of starting Dennis up again. We didn’t discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn’t believe in any of that. We’d been teaching together for years. We sat in circles, bragging about things that mattered only to us. We were artists. We believed in ourselves.
And yet, things were happening out there. Obama had drawn a red line but Assad refused to back down, while hundreds of thousands fled, in what was looking like a massive refugee crisis. “Call Me Maybe” held steady at No. 1. Ernest Borgnine died. Kim Jong-un had been named Supreme Being of North Korea. The Republican primary had been brutal, awash in dark money, the first since the Supreme Court decided that mountains of secret cash in exchange for favors was totally fine. Romney emerged as the nominee, a hollow, arrogant flip-flopper. He’d spent the summer refusing to release his most recent tax returns, while his legal representatives explained away the Swiss bank account stuffed with tens or hundreds of his own millions. He was in London this week, having FedExed his wife’s half-million-dollar dressage horse over to compete in the Olympics.
We didn’t care about that stuff. We cared about art. We cared about lunch. Finally Dennis stood, picked up his bag, and walked