And then and then what e.., p.9
And Then? and Then? What Else?, page 9
But the world of publishing, it is too often forgotten, is not the world of literature, which is sustained not in buildings stuffed with hopeless folding chairs but in the imagination. This is especially true in childhood. You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. Anyone can open a book, but it is easier for a child to step into it, to float in the world of the story, which in turn opens up to include the reader in ways we largely forget as adults. As a child, you can walk around imagining yourself the hero of the book you’re reading, or perhaps a whole overlapping world, a new plot thread, a way to participate in the story you love. The book has a place for you.
From Lansing I went to a few more cities, and began to see signs that this sort of literary success, the most important and least visible kind, was maybe sprouting here and there. Hardly anyone showed up, but they were all interested in just the right way. I always said that Lemony Snicket couldn’t be there at the bookstore, that I was his official representative and thus a guaranteed disappointment, and the young people grasped at once that I was somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody. This created a space in which we could talk about the troubles of the Baudelaire orphans not quite as if they were real but as if they were really happening. These first readers were worried about them. Far from home, flush with failure and queasy from eating at airports, I had the same worry. One girl had dressed as Violet Baudelaire by recreating her signature move: using a ribbon to tie up her hair, which was not long enough to be tied up in a ribbon. One boy leaned close to me and told me, chapter by chapter, the entire plot of The Reptile Room; another, when I asked if he wanted me to personalize the autograph by adding his name, told me that he wouldn’t want to be associated with such dreadful stories. “Just like someone else of my acquaintance,” he said meaningfully, and walked out of the store without looking back. There was a place for these books, I saw, even if it wasn’t on a best-seller list. In fact, the New York Times had just started a children’s best-seller list, and one of my editors solemnly explained to me why I wouldn’t be on it. A few weeks later four of the top ten books were mine, bewildering everyone. I went to the movies and heard two people, strangers in the row in front of me, discussing the Baudelaires. Bookstores began to have contingency plans, for when a child, excited to meet me, threw up, and we shared the best contingency plans—sawdust, scented candles—with other bookstores. My wife and I bought a house, and then flew off to a literary festival, where I presented my work to a screaming crowd on the largest stage. People—thousands of strangers—were interested in whatever it was I was doing. The corporate sponsor ran out of copies of my books to sell, a situation unheard of at a literary event and so contrary to the company’s ethos that I thought the rep was going to cry when she told me the news. The artist who preceded me was a dinosaur, by which I don’t mean an author older than I was, with an out-of-date style. I mean Barney, from children’s television. “Faulkner had the same slot,” I kept telling friends in the authors tent.
What had happened, what was still happening, was a dream come true for any author, and indeed this felt like an actual dream, some surreal mash-up of autobiography and genre tropes you only half remember in the morning, actually springing to life—a blessing to be sure, a spectacular gift, albeit one like golden shoes, that you never thought you’d get because nobody gets golden shoes. I would utter the phrase “Lemony Snicket” in conversation, but now instead of a blank look in reply, I was increasingly getting frowns of confusion or even derision. The phrase had found a place in the culture unattached to a real person—it was like saying I was another author at the festival, Spider-Man, who, no joke, followed me onstage. When The Basic Eight was published, no literary festival wanted me—most humiliatingly, I was booked on a panel called First Time Success Stories only to be told there wasn’t a place for me after all. Now I went all the time, and I liked them. I liked the variety of authors there, the places literature had found for them and their work, journalists and chefs, extraordinary events chronicled by memoirists or dreamt up by fiction writers, unknown poets proclaimed by other unknown poets to be overpublicized, all bumping elbows and shaking hands. Over the years, I watched these writers shift places as they tried new genres or won prizes, and I traced my own path, from something of a young upstart to something like an old man. I liked when we all had to catch a ride together—a shuttle to wherever the festival had gathered their white tents, or a convoy of cars, driven by bookish volunteers, to take us to some dinner or reception. We’d gather in the lobby, at first standing apart but then, recognized via nametag, meeting people we’d never otherwise encounter, reuniting with writers we knew, introducing a friend to another friend to the friend of a stranger, the circle getting larger and louder with the awkward goodwill of people mostly used to working alone, hugs and handshakes colliding as more and more arrived. “It’s turning into an orgy,” was my go-to joke for such friendly, unwieldy times, until I was publicly chastised by another children’s author for saying such a horrid thing. (By strange coincidence, I had written a critical review of her work some years previous.) “It probably didn’t occur to you,” she said, “that some of the women in the lobby were likely survivors of sexual assault.”
I’m sure she thought she was putting me in my place. It did not occur to her that the specter of sexual assault she raised would be my own. Reading her denunciation of me onscreen, I felt the sudden shift, as I did in the museum basement, of a friendly and deeply harmless scene into a threatening situation. The realization that what you thought was a safe place was in fact something dangerous was as frightening in adulthood as it was in childhood. It became simple to compare them, because I watched it happen, as an adult, to my own child.
We were vacationing in Italy and my son, fidgety after a big meal in a famous restaurant, wanted to walk back alone maybe half a mile through the city to the hotel while my wife and I lollygagged around the fountains and alleys. When we returned to the hotel he wasn’t there. We went back out into the summer night, crowded with tourists and nightlife, our situation both fraught and ridiculous. The area was a privileged playground, safe, welcoming and luxurious. The streets were crammed with other families, lots of English speakers, and our son was smart and good, sure to ask politely for help and not to stumble into trouble. He wasn’t even that young, and he was wearing a conspicuous hat, a proud new traveler’s purchase. Still, though, where the fuck was he? I knew he would be OK—the alternative, as I circled around and doubled back to those few square blocks, was too monstrous to entertain—but the lights, the laughter, even a sparkly carnival ride like a too-perfect detail in a thriller, grew garish and finally nightmarish in the hour or so before he found his way back. It had been my job to keep him safe, to build a net like the one that had sustained me for my childhood; like me, he’d discovered his net had a hole or two.
Recalling it now I think of a bit of literature—of course I do—that comes to mind whenever I am feeling lost. It is a passage from Benjamin Anastas’s quiet masterpiece The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, which, it seems worth mentioning, preceded a lost decade of doubt and sadness for the author:
By the time she made it back to the same corner from her hotel room the rain had stopped, and the million-plus lights of the new Times Square filled the air with a saccharine glow, making everything, even her own reflection in the plate-glass doors of the Virgin Megastore, seem vague and artificial. She averted her eyes from that shadow of herself as she passed by, ignoring the uniformed security guard who murmured Yeah, baby and stepped aside to get a better look at her figure. Where do people come from? And where do they go? Who makes a world this unbearable? she thought, walking through the center of an unfamiliar city, and she wondered, once again, how Thomas could have left her alone to survive, well, this . . . Bethany walked the confines of Times Square in a kind of circle, searching every face she passed for evidence of human kindness, and encountering more varieties of skin tone, age, expression, style, and character than she could quantify—and looking for Thomas in every one. All those people, she thought, standing outside the soulless Marquis on Broadway and trying, without much luck, to block out the ranting minister from the 12 Tribes of the Nation of Israel, all those people, she thought, looking up at the painted sign for the Heavenly Coffee, and down at the smiling image of Tiger Woods, all those people, she thought, turning back to the crowded sidewalk, and not one of them is him.
The clutter and clamor, the way Anastas absolutely stuffs the page with details both specific and abstract, congruous and irrelevant, with that fierce focus beating beneath it as the heroine looks for the titular man, a runaway or abductee, someone lost or vanished amidst all those people, all those people, all those people.
In the years since, I’ve watched my son tell the story of that night, casting it, as one does, in all sorts of lights, at all sorts of angles. I’ve heard it as a story of triumph and ingenuity, in which a young man who didn’t speak Italian nevertheless managed to communicate his situation to a stranger, a story of parental panic, co-starring two deadpan cops in hilarious uniforms, a story illustrating why one needs the latest phone at all times regardless of cost, a story of fear, of adventure, of what might have happened and still might happen next time. He’s still finding a place for it. I’d like to think this is the most discombobulating thing in his life, the most troublesome moment to process. But of course I know better. I knew better even before I ended up in a museum basement, struggling and confused, that our stories are not just full of incident and detail with which we struggle to make sense, but in fact the struggle is the story. The places for us are the places we find, and meanwhile we send our stories out into the world in one way or another, so they might float someplace, not as lessons or even messages, but just another colorful scrap that might align with something that, to someone maybe, already makes a sort of sense. To Match Her Sweater. Catch it and then, as we did that night, let it go its own way down the street, to a place out of sight.
7
The blanks we find
in the world.
When my son was approaching teenaged life, I was vaguely aware the skilled parents are supposed to start conversations about difficult topics earlier rather than later, so I instituted regular talks on various sexual and/or chemical issues. Our conversations had four rules:
My son would choose from a narrow list of topics (sex, drugs, drinking, romance, body, assorted culture).
I would speak briefly on the topic of his choice.
He would ask at least one question.
We would both be mortified the entire time.
—and for the first of these conversations, his chosen topic was alcohol. After a couple of minutes in which I droned on about its addictive qualities, the wallops it gives your health, how it leads to bad choices, especially for tender youths, it was time for him to ask a question, and his was very sensible. “If it’s so bad for you, why do we have it?”
Parenting is a pop quiz on the world. Again and again you are asked about things of which you know zero, often things you haven’t really thought about, and they are often things you should have thought about, basic crucial omnipresent things. And these inquiries are coming, often without warning, from someone who assumes, despite increasing and eventually overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that not only do you know the answers but have them all handy, that you are more than qualified, you are expert, somehow, at telling them what’s what. And of course you don’t know anything.
This would be a tricky needle to thread, I knew. My son had learned the word drunk at our Passover table. Per tradition, everyone would consume four glasses of wine, and our family had augmented the Haggadah with a reading from Baudelaire.
One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s horrible burden that breaks down your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.
But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.
If it’s so bad for you, why do we have it? Well, I began making up a story, filling in the blanks from who knows what, about two tribes of people who lived on opposite sides of a mountain, close but wary neighbors, and when they got together—here my spitballing was getting much worse—at the top of the mountain, to talk about, oh, I don’t know, sharing the watering hole—watering hole?—well, it went better if they had a few sips of something fermented, in a bronze pot or a clay jug. Everyone would relax then.
My son gave me a look, wondering what we all wonder about our parents—who are you? What I wanted to tell him was much truer than some story I’d probably tossed together from middle-school skimming the works of Jean M. Auel looking for the sex scenes. Truth be told, my son had already experienced the thrill of alcohol. He just didn’t remember. When he was younger, he was one of the few child guests at a wedding we attended. He was not having a particularly good time. The couple had wanted him there, but after the initial flurry of cooing attention he was soon cast away, wandering around the rented mansion answering the same old questions—name, age, location of school—and then drifting back to us, whereupon we’d shoo him toward whomever hadn’t asked him those things yet. The cake was served, and he asked us how many pieces he could have. With the laissez-faire parenting brought on by laughing with friends whilst sipping champagne, we said: as much as you want. Then the music started, and our son, normally low-key at such events, began to dance. He danced so wildly, showily, confidently that a small crowd gathered to cheer him on. My wife and I wondered what we all wonder about our children: Who are you? Then, with a bite of cake, I solved the mystery. The happy couple had asked a friend to make a rum cake—not the kind that tastes a little rummy around the edges, but the kind that is soaked, post-baking, in rum. My son was soused, a soused fourth grader at a wedding. Though he had no memory of it—he would soon be asleep for ten hours—my teenage son had already had the classic experience of drinking too much at a wedding and making a spectacle of himself on the dance floor, as tribes on a mountaintop have done for generations.
For Californians of a certain stripe, the experience of alcohol and weddings is more specific. I am talking about wineries. The wineries, some of them anyway, are very beautiful, with sloping hills of vines growing on those skeleton sticks, and views of other wineries, also beautiful. In the fall and spring, the weather is perfect, so couples reserve the weekends and send out invitations. And then it’s summer, time for the actual wedding, and the sun pelts down on the hill and there is not a speck of shade to be found. You, the Californian wedding guest, have arrived on time and all dressed up, must do a quick calculation of how much white wine, being passed on little round trays, will bring on the welcome glow enabling you to think of true love and a lifetime of happiness instead of your own sweaty feet and armpits, without drinking so much that you will become dehydrated and cranky and unable to find joy in the string quartet’s half-audible Vivaldi. If there is any kind of delay—if, say, the priest arrives on time but the rabbi is late, making it look bad for your team—the trays make the rounds again, and the stakes get higher.
Once, faced with such escalating circumstances, I took shelter in the air-conditioned tent, as the ceremony went on. The couple were of the same sex, in the early days of marriage equality, which meant that in addition to the usual rigamarole, there were some additional readers testifying to the historic significance of the lengthy occasion in the searing heat. I sat discreetly at a table where some prepared materials were waiting for later. The couple was going on an extensive, extravagant honeymoon, with many glamorous stops, and guests were encouraged to write some well-wishing on some pre-stamped postcards, addressed to various chic hotels. I obliged, and then it occurred to me that I know many of the guests’ names, and that the couple, in this digital age, was unlikely to recognize anyone’s handwriting. A postcard could be a perfect vehicle not only for well-wishing but for confessions, increasingly hysterical in tone, of secret longings, shocking escapades, perhaps even murder. The couple might find it interesting to read, after a long romantic day in Paris or Istanbul, some inflammatory gossip, descriptions of long-hidden spiritual rituals, or even angry threats, from the people they knew and loved most. By the time the tent was in full party mode, I’d ghostwritten twenty or thirty messages with enough revelations for ten seasons of television, in addition to my own signed, undramatic “mazel tov.”
It was a writing exercise of sorts, fueled by a reckless incaution that’s sometimes difficult to drum up when I’m writing a book. I’ve been working so long in literature that it can on occasion feel like work. My sentences lump up and don’t do anything interesting. And then I think of those postcards and am reminded that the best prompting a writer needs is blank paper, waiting for someone to fill it in. I taught a weeklong poetry writing workshop, ages ago, in which Monday’s exercise was to write a poem with the word bathtub in it. (I like the word bathtub.) Over the week, more and more words were required, until the list was actually cribbed from a John Ashbery poem, the words of which I put into alphabetical order. On Friday, I gave everyone a pocket dictionary—a reminder of the countless tools, the everlasting blank space, with which and on which we get to play. I can’t drink and write—I’ve tried—but I can try to court the brash recklessness, the blurring of boundaries, which comes from tipsiness.
A case can be made that composing new poems and hogging a bunch of postcards to forge scandalous messages from other people are two entirely different enterprises, but my comeuppance was delivered before the wedding was through. Shortly before last call, a few of the other guests, flushed from disco, stripped to their underwear and took a presumably refreshing dip in an ornamental pool. Security asked for their names, as they would be banned from this particular winery for life. One guest, Andrew Sean Greer, indulged in a creative exercise of his own, and gave the name “Daniel Handler.”
