In 2008 I met someone for whom I caused problems. Later I had tried hard to fix the problems in fiction, an arena that I regarded as wholesome, honorable, and more to the point, containable. I will admit that in the final analysis, my intentions were more-or-less antagonistic; nothing worked out. I had wanted to be disinterested. Above all. Yet not only will a story be what it wants to be, it will also on occasion refuse to be.

Before I begin I want to assure you, though this may be a self-defeating gesture, that I dislike metafiction. I find that the hall-of-mirrors craftiness it encourages is generally toxic and dishonest—an entire form dedicated to its own meretriciousness. And if there is any excuse I can make for myself, it’s that this is nearer to metanonfiction. I would prefer it to be read straightforwardly. But people are going to do what they want to do anyway. Anyway. We begin.

They meet

He’s back again. (Remember, he’s characterized by persistence.)

And she sees him coming in: again. The store where she works sells vintage dresses, scarves, sweaters, skirts, feather earrings and rabbit foot pendants, silkscreened bandannas, all catering to the usual thin women. As a concession for the boyfriends that trail along dispiritedly behind them there’s a solitary rack in the far corner known informally as the Boyfriend Rack. Every time he comes that’s where he goes, without a girlfriend.

For five months they are mutually peripheral. Both he and she are feminine and dark-haired, though she is a few years younger. When he visits, he is formally polite in the way that makes it difficult to respond with anything other than matching politeness. It is the Platonic retail exchange: acknowledgement, soft insincerity, no friction, no attachment. Each time he leaves the store, he shakes his head while returning to his car and feels a lunge of reflux from his stomach. He suffers bad temper for the rest of the day without consciously connecting it to his earlier visits. So he returns to the store every week for five months—transaction, headshake, acid, night, hell.

And there you have your characters.

One Saturday when the store is otherwise empty, he notices a book on the counter, which he correctly identifies as an opportunity. He points at it and asks her if it’s hers. She suspends the transaction, following his finger to her spine-broken paperback copy of Bonfire of the Vanities. (Actually, the book was The Painted Bird, but let’s move on.)

“Yes, I’ve been trying to read it for months,” she says. “It’s long. I take it out when things are slow here, but every time I open it I forget which page I’m on. I keep starting over.”

“When it was first serialized, the protagonist wasn’t even a bond trader, he was a writer.”

“I see.”

She notices his motionless stare, which, along with the slight upturn of his face, makes him seem as if he is constantly anticipating important information. “I admire his approach.”

“Are you a writer?”

This is as hard a question for him as it is for me. He is unpublished, and to call yourself a writer feels like charlatanry, especially when you have a steady day job. To the outside observer, after all, writing is indistinguishable from doing nothing all day, and most writers at the start of a career would probably be more honest to call themselves “rejection slip collectors”. Here, however, he boldly says Yes, and then, shrewdly, But not for a living.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Is it worse than working here?”

“It’s a job. I hate it and they pay me a lot.” He inhales; he’s been talking very fast. “I guess I should quit, instead of complaining.”

“Don’t. It’s important to have money.”

“I know. But weekends are the only time—”

He considers mentioning the novel he has been attempting to write for the past year, the one that will deliver him from his technical amateurism and give him a reason to forsake his job. The project has lived only in notebooks, in elliptical and discursive shorthand about what he wants to achieve,

sprawling urban panorama (all lvls of soc, high/low diction—reread bellow)

lyric investigation of compassion, inherent but fatally submerged

“In the elder days of art / Builders wrought with greatest care”

but his efforts have been fouled by ambition and he knows it. His latest effort begins with a three-page stream-of-consciousness internal monologue by the narrator, a historiography post-grad who narrates the aftermath of the Falklands War while undergoing an abortion. This piece was to hinge on whether the narrator was going to kill herself or not, but this morning he resolved this question decisively with a clattering line break and seven words (‘Fuck it,’ she said, and shot herself) and then tucked the notebook containing his past three months’ writing into a recessed stack on his bookshelf under his unreturned library copy of Elements of Style. It was disgracefully trite and he knew the reason it was so bad was that he needed it to matter.

The novel never happened. I wanted it to be impressive. It didn’t want to be anything.

“I just don’t believe in only writing on the weekends,” he says.

She scratches her cheek. “That shouldn’t matter. As long as you’re enjoying yourself.”

“To be honest, the kind of writing I do isn’t very ‘enjoyable’.”

“What kind of writing?”

He mixes the air in front of him. “I dunno. The kind nobody reads. Literary.”

“Someone will like it.”

She ducks behind the counter to sort through a sack of trade-ins. It absorbs her attention long enough that she looks surprised to find him still standing there when she is finished.

“I didn’t ask your name,” he says, and when she tells him, he says, “What’s that short for?”

“That’s the whole name.”

“I like that. When the nickname is the full name, like ‘Sue’ or ‘Jack’. Or ‘Kate.’ I wonder why parents decide to do that. The seventies probably had something to do with it. It’s weird to consider that your name was a deliberate choice your parents made. That it says something about their expectations for you. My dad wanted to name me ‘Sluggo’.”

She turns to take a sweater from the rack behind her and guns a price tag into the hem of the collar. He examines her with the conscious intention of noticing things about her. Her hair is unwashed and self-barbered, falling to chin level, and there is a mole in that space between cheek and lip and beside nostril where such moles are always found. A trace of underbite, thin eyebrows, and a word tattooed over her breastbone, of which only the letters GHT are visible. He is feeling his first thrum of attraction to her when she lets out a congested sniff, and now she is turning away—crying. It isn’t subtle. A drop sits at the peak of her upper lip, another drips fast from her chin. She sleeves them away. He tenses as if someone has dropped a snake around his shoulders.

“Here, use this shirt. Use this one. I’ll buy it.”

“Sorry. Jesus.” Her tone of voice is oddly even. “Not your fault.”

He replays their conversation, probing for unintentional insult, which is a known fault with him. Nothing. Should he leave? He can’t. Still offering the shirt.

“It has nothing to do with you, don’t worry,” she says, and then takes the shirt and holds it against her mouth, furnishing another pair of tears, and the light gray shirt streaks black with them. “Embarrassing. When people talk about parents I just lose it.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why shouldn’t you?” She’s steady now. “I think it shouldn’t be a big deal to cry in public.”

“It’s not. It isn’t to me. But if you don’t mind my asking—man, I hate it when people do this, when they ask if you mind them asking something and then ask anyway—but, ah, what is it—about parents?”

“My mom left because my dad abused her. And me.”

“Right. That is like, what. That’s concise. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

This is terrible, by the way, because she has never cried in front of me. She is crying now because I need her to. See: this isn’t wholesome.

And because thinks he sees another rim of tears gathering and looks down at the box of free matchbooks on the counter, scrambling to disarm her. “I should go now. I’ll go. Listen, though, I have one of my stories with me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear what you think about it.”

She smiles, maybe. “Okay. I’ll read it.”

“I’m warning you, parts of it are pretty boring. It’s not really a light read. Man, I don’t even know why I’m giving this to you. Anyway. Do you want to talk about it over dinner?”

With almost no deliberation she nods, and they choose a time and place. Then he turns and walks out the door, with his right hand balled up in a fist, and she can see him as he crosses the street outside, with his body tense and his arm going up and down as if he’s jockeying an invisible horse, or like he’s jingling a palmful of change, no, no—never mind. Already there is something wrong. The more I try to impose the conventions of fiction, the more it fails. See.

[End of excerpt]

Dec 2008