told you,” I repeat, imagining this conversation between her and my sister. “Well, you did stand on the table and make up words to ‘Carol of the Bells’ when you burnt the Christmas ham. Or new words. ‘Carol of the Bells’ already has words.” I can tell by her silence she thinks I’ve wandered into the reeds. “And you conducted an invisible orchestra with a wooden spoon.”
“Then how is it a novel!”
I have to push past this because we can’t litigate every scene from the book she may or may not have heard of secondhand. Certainly not over the phone. “Dad had just … Forget it. You are not insane. You are a human being. It was quite beautiful, that moment, and I wrote it that way. What does it matter if strangers read that?”
“Mrs. Kennedy is not a stranger.”
I’m momentarily puzzled. “Are you friends?”
“She read that I stood on a table and waved a wooden spoon.”
“Yes, she read that.” And then I add, although I don’t know why, as it certainly doesn’t help my cause, “Twice.”
I’m in my own kitchen now, with no recollection of getting here—when I first dialed her I was down the hall. With the cordless pinned between my shoulder and my ear, I reach for a box of croutons and pop a handful in my mouth.
“What are you eating?” she asks.
“Croutons.” When I swallow I add, “It’s nonstop glamour over here.” It is glamourous now, though, in my mind. Starving writer is far more chic than starving office temp.
“Croutons,” she repeats disapprovingly, but after the tomato incident I doubt she eats much better. We should get together more often; between us, we could almost make a salad. “I can’t believe you let her read those things,” she finally says. “About me.”
“About Ruth Mulligan, a fictional character.”
“Based on me, Aileen Smale.”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“She knows you have a mother.”
“I assume she does not think I was immaculately born!”
My mother aggressively exhales. I’ve skirted too close to blasphemy.
I hear a cabinet door close and all I can think is that she should sell the house. That I’ve moved on, and she needs to also. Naomi came closest to convincing her a couple years ago, introducing her to a Realtor friend. “It’s too big for you,” we all told her. But she got skittish and we backed off. I remember I cried at the time, because I was so ready to say good-bye. I’d been ready for a good while.
“Everyone’s going to know that it’s me.”
“Everyone who?”
“Everyone who reads it.”
“So what!” I fail to see what the big deal is; I would be honored if someone wrote a book about me. “I think people who buy books have a firm grasp on what fiction means.”
“Write what you know. Isn’t that what they say writers do? They write what they know. You know me, therefore she is me.”
I’m almost impressed with her logic. “Res ipsa loquitur.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“What.”
I sigh. “It’s Latin. The thing speaks for itself.”
It’s surprising to me that this is now her concern. When I asked her to read it the first time, she was quite adamant that the mother character was not her.
“It’s not about me,” she had said at the time.
“It’s not?”
“No. And you know how I know? Because you don’t know me.”
It was the ultimate slap to the face. A son a stranger to his mother—how could he have written an entire book about her? A mother, a stranger to her son—she had let herself be observed but never seen.
Naomi was our mother’s defender at first. When I called to complain, she told me, “You would feel differently if things were reversed.”
“If I exposed something of myself?”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t think there are pieces of me on every page of that book? What do you think writing is?”
I remember she paused, not awkwardly, but like she was genuinely giving it thought. “I don’t think I ever considered it.”
At least I had ushered one ally over to my side.
“I don’t know why you’re so worried,” I say to my mother now, when we’ve been quiet so long I almost forget we’re still on the phone. The box of croutons is empty. “Nobody’s perfect. I think people will recognize that.”
“Certainly not in this family.”
“In any family.”
“I don’t—” My mother stops. “It too late now.”
I consider the world’s imperfections. Not even the world’s, our family’s. The way everyone has tacitly agreed to leave so much unspoken. Everyone, that is, except me.
“I don’t want to be written about. Let’s leave it at that. Good night, James.”
“Don’t you even want to know what she said? Mrs. Kennedy?”
The sound of another cabinet door closing and then things go quiet again. I’m almost certain I can hear her click off the kitchen light. “I want to go to bed. I’m tired.”
“It’s worth adding two more minutes to your day.” I almost add “promise,” but it’s not a promise I’m certain I can keep.
“I’m not tired from the day. I’m tired from forty years of my children.”
“Your children haven’t kept you up in years.”
“And yet here you are.”
I plow forward before she can hang up. “She said she admired the mother. She said the reason she responded to the book so strongly was because she admired the character at the heart of it.” I let that sit before emphasizing, “She was saying she admired you.”
I can hear my mother breathing, the labored way she used to when we were young and a migraine headache was bearing down. “And you believed her.”
There’s a click and then the line goes dead.
My agent’s office occupies a small suite on West Fifty-Ninth Street. It’s cozy and dim; the wooden shutters are kept mostly drawn and the office is lit with Tiffany table lamps, giving it a soft glow. It has the requisite characteristics of what you think a literary agent’s office once was, and still should be: someplace where you’d like to curl up with a good book and read. And you could find plenty of them—books—as the walls of the main room where Donna sits are lined with dark walnut bookcases crammed with endless titles. The rest of the office is littered with stacks of dusty newspapers, old copies of The New York Times Book Review, and past issues of The New Yorker. Sometimes I have to move papers out of a chair just to sit down.
Donna usually greets me with the enthusiasm of a poodle who has been left home all day. Most of Allen’s business is conducted via