Tuesday, April 22, 2008

 

INTERSTICE


Entry 249 is well underway. It promises to be incredibly lengthy, alas, but I hope to complete it soon.


Soonish.


In the meantime, someone has seen fit to interview me about my blog. Actually, this is the second interview I've had about this thing. (Go figure.) There were some interesting questions that allowed me to reflect on certain topics from unique angles, leaving the possibility of a few surprises for my regular reader(s). Here's the link, if you're curious. (Be forewarned that there are some smallish ads of men in their underwear, though that's as much as you see.)


And finally....


From Entry 249


It was 1:30 in the morning and my exasperation increased with each echoing footstep as I wandered through the cavernous gray empty halls, blinking through the bleak overhead light that turned everything the same color, straight from Edward Hopper's palette.

###

With grim resolve, I rose from the pew and, through sheer force of will, touched my mother gently by the elbow to bring her up. It was a curious mix of feelings: annoyance at being dragged here in an exhausted state purely to observe their beliefs that I did not share; peevishness over my hidden feelings being prodded at; guilt that I did not have the capacity at that moment to react more graciously; and anger that I'd been put in a position where I didn't feel able to react more graciously, and over having the resulting guilt at all.

###

"This is going to sound totally cliché," I said, "but of course things are usually cliché because they're basically universal, there's some kind of general truth to them. What applying to MFA programs was about was finally gambling on myself, on whether I really believed in my abilities. The danger--" I paused, frowned. "The danger is that all the schools will reject me, that I'll have to face head-on the idea that maybe I'm simply a good writer but will never be a great one. I know that might sound conceited, but my identity as long as I can remember has had such a stake in that idea, and for it to be, when all is said and done, just out of my reach...."

###

It had been two years since I'd been put through the wringer by that piece of work. Why was he contacting me now? What was he up to?

###

"I've heard back from all my grad schools," I said. "Are you ready to hear the verdict?"

12:30 PM

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

 

DELETED SCENE from ENTRY 248


I met Glen for brunch on the Sunday after my late night out with Kelly and his friends. Glen was no longer the assistant manager of the bookstore where I'd worked during college, but he did work for another bookstore elsewhere in Austin. While I've always liked Glen, there is something detached about him; in emotional terms he seems somewhat clinical and limited in his powers of empathy.


As I waited for Glen to arrive at the restaurant I felt slightly apprehensive, because the last time we'd really communicated at any length was in a contentious IM exchange about Jane. I both wanted and did not want the subject of Jane to come up at brunch.


We greeted each other cordially, both ordered the chicken fried steak (the second one I'd had on that trip, and perhaps the best in Austin), and launched into conversation. I told him about my evening with J. K. Rowling and my MFA applications, and then he talked about a recent trip to Seattle. One of the good things about Glen is his ability to describe the interesting details of his travels, which is a quality I particularly appreciate in other people.


At some point it emerged that Jane had been on the trip with him.


"How is Jane?" I asked, feeling compelled at that moment to use my glass of orange juice as an excuse to turn down my eyes.


"She's doing fine," said Glen. "Have you seen her recently?"


I figured he was being especially coy. "I haven't talked to her in two years," I said.


"Wow," he said. "Two years?"


I stared at him for a second. "It's complicated."


"Well, I don't think it's any of my business," he said mildly.


I shrugged. "So is she still living up in Yonkers?"


"No," he said. "She broke up with that guy up there. She has a place here and works from Austin a lot of the time. But she does go back to New York when she has meetings and things. She has an apartment on the Upper East Side."


It was my turn now. "Wow," I said. "She must like that situation better."


"Yeah," he said. "She always missed Austin a lot when she was up there full-time."


"I know," I said.


The rest of the meal passed uneventfully, and then it was time for Glen to go to work and for me to head to my next rendezvous; it was a mild cloudless day, and Kelly and his friends were having margaritas on the patio of a sleepy Mexican dive.


"Listen," I said to Glen as we stood in the parking lot. "I know you disagreed with me when we had that IM conversation, but I couldn't condone what Jane had done. I just couldn't."


"I don't really know what you're talking about," he said.


I stared at him. Surely he couldn't have simply forgotten such a thing?


"When she tried to run over that guy with her car," I said.


"This is the first I've heard of it," he said.


I stared at him for another couple of seconds, deciding that there were three possibilities: A) He had dismissed it from his memory; B) He was lying; or C) It had been Jane herself who used Glen's screen name to impersonate him and attempt to coax me back into her life.


Not that it really mattered now which of the three scenarios best represented reality.


"I'm sorry, I thought you did know," I said.


"It's really none of my business," he replied.


"I'm sorry," I said again. "I didn't mean to put you in the middle of anything. It's just--I don't want it to seem like I dumped her because I didn't care, because I did. What happened was horrible, and I couldn't get past it. It's impossible to really explain, but things were so different up there from the way they are here. She wasn't the same person. I really tried to do something, but in the end there was nothing I could do."


He was looking at me somewhat vacantly.


"I've said enough," I concluded. "Honestly, I'm glad that things have worked out for her and that she gets to be here. I know she wanted that, and really, I only wish her well."


I drove out of the parking lot a little too fast, in a strange unintentional echo of a certain night more than two years ago, as though any amount of acceleration could put the slightest bit of distance between me and the tears welling in my eyes. Why was this still happening to me after all this time? I recognized that I had probably never fully processed the loss of her, of the sense of inclusion and of having a friend in New York who actually bothered to keep up with me on anything close to a quotidian basis. It had always been easier for me to allow myself anger than to feel grief. But I reminded myself that I was thousands of miles and hundreds of days from that gas station on a dark Manhattan street, and that, right now, it was safe to let myself cry a little. She would never know.

10:18 PM

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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

 

ENTRY 248: ZUGZWANG; or, THREE CEMETERIES AND A WEDDING; or, THE NEXT-TO-NEXT-TO-LAST ONE

It had been four years since my last trip to Austin, the site of my college days and, quite possibly, the happiest time of my life up until now.

I had not traveled 1700 miles on a lark. I had come because it was time to take the kind and size of gamble that, in the past five years, I had not done much more than talk about.

I sat in front of the desk and looked across at the mustached septuagenarian sitting comfortably behind it.

"You look positively skeletal," said my former writing instructor.

"Actually, I think I've weighed the same since high school," I replied politely.

"No, you're much thinner," he pronounced firmly in his faint British accent. This was, after all, the same man who, when I'd asked him, "How are you?" in a hallway encounter on the way to class, had answered, "How is one to know how one is?" That anecdote never got old.

I proceeded to ask Professor Allegri about his doings post-retirement.

"Were you ever involved with the MFA program at the university?" I asked.

The short answer was no, succeeded by a thoughtful explanation of what was wrong with creative-writing master's programs. The main idea was that there is a tremendous temptation, whether conscious or less so, to produce writing geared to please one's instructors and peers rather than to follow one's own unique vision. I nodded occasionally, trying not to look either bored or patronizing, neither of which reflected my interior monologue. In fact, my mind was working a million miles a minute.

It's a conversation that I would find impossible to transcribe with much accuracy, because Professor Allegri is a highly intellectual novelist who speaks in complete paragraphs peppered with references and quotations from things I pretend I've read so as not to look entirely
ignorant.

I met his lovely wife, who was in her art studio converted from a garage, and then I followed him onto the back patio with a cup of Earl Grey. The trio of cats roaming the backyard belonged to his neighbor, he explained. For a silent minute we sat watching them bemusedly as they stalked through the grass and into a jungle of houseplants.

"I always liked cats," I said, pausing with my lips on the rim of my cup to blow into the tea. "There's something mysterious about them, and they're always scheming something. I remember this short story we discussed in your class one time. You pointed out to the girl who wrote it that she mentions a cat at the beginning and then never mentions it again, and how that wasn't realistic because cats are always trying to get into things."

Professor Allegri sprang out of his seat surprisingly fast, and for a second I had the surreal thought that I'd inadvertently offended him, but he was merely shooing away a splendid delicate butterfly as one of the cats crouched to pounce on it.

He asked me about my writing, and, squinting into the sunlight that shone from behind him, I explained how I'd been struggling with my next novel for some time. My major and unexpected written work of the past four years, I said after a slight hesitation, was my blog.

"Now, what does the word 'blog' mean, exactly?" Professor Allegri asked, as I had half-expected he might.

I explained that it was short for "Web log," and that technically I didn't have a blog so much as an online journal, and that during its lifetime it had evolved from a somewhat newsy and glib diary into more of an ongoing autobiographical project with longer installments and thematic movements.

"It's been an interesting exercise in honing my autobiographical writing," I said, listening to myself at least as closely as Professor Allegri was listening to me, and recognizing that this was the first time I'd made a genuine attempt to explain The Accidental New Yorker in formal literary terms to anyone this fully versed in literature. "At a certain point I realized the dullness of explaining what I thought about a particular film or what I had for dinner, and began to write in terms of larger issues. A lot of it is excruciatingly personal, which is why I made it pseudonymous. I seem to have this core of regular readers who relate to it on this deeper level that even I don't entirely understand. I think maybe they appreciate it because of the painful
honesty. I've really worked to sort of...slough off a lot of the vanity and false redemption that gets in the way of truly introspective personal writing." I paused for a moment. "It's at 300,000 words and counting, so maybe I've written a kind of 'novel' without actually realizing it."

I also touched on my struggles with trying to write my actual novel. The professor cut me off at a certain point, explaining his busy life as a young teacher in London in the '60s; he'd come home from work every day, put the kettle on, graded papers, and stayed up writing until one in the morning.

"These are simply excuses," he said. "The way to write is to do it."

"You're right," I said. "I'm not a tremendously disciplined person, and that's my chief problem, but I think perhaps the number of distractions in New York does make it a little more difficult to get down to business." He started to open his mouth again, and I made a relenting gesture. "I'm not intending to make excuses. I'm not. I know I just need to do it. And I know there's so much more I need to learn."

I paused again. It was time.

"The main reason I came all this way was to ask you if you'd be willing to write me a recommendation letter for an MFA," I said.

"Yes, of course," he said, setting down his coffee in the saucer with a clink. Just behind me a houseplant shook suspiciously.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm very grateful."

"You were sitting there listening to me go on about MFA programs," he observed, the ends of his mustache curling up slightly.

"I wasn't offended or anything," I said. "I've always been leery of MFA programs, and I still am a bit, for the reason you cited. I dismissed the idea of doing it when I graduated from college, because I wanted to go out in the world and learn a little about it rather than go straight into another cloistered experience. That's a big reason why I moved to New York. But now I'm 29, and I feel like I'm much better prepared for the whole MFA thing. If living in New York has taught me anything, it's how to form and maintain my own opinion and to follow a vision that everyone else might not get. And it's exposed me to a lot, and all of that is helpful for my writing.

"Basically, if there are such things as 'right reasons' for pursuing an MFA, I think I have them," I continued. "I'm not doing it because I think they can teach me how to write, because I think I can write and the only way for me to improve is to keep doing it. And I'm not doing it to make connections and get a big book deal, because, frankly, I already have connections from working at a big publishing house. I'm doing this because I think it could be a great thing to have a real writing community to learn from--I've never really had that--and because I work well with a deadline. I think I'm at a point where I need some big nudge imposed on me. And I know I could have asked you in an email to write me a letter, but I considered it important enough that I decided to come down and do it in person. I wanted to convey how serious I am about this."

"I appreciate that," he said quietly. And I was sure I'd done the right thing in making the journey.

"You're reaching a rather crucial age," he said. "Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse and James Joyce wrote Ulysses by the time they were each 35." Perhaps reacting to my stricken look, he added, "Of course, there are many writers who did not hit their stride until much later in life. But they all persevered in doing the work."

"Now, which programs are you thinking of applying to?" he asked me. And I told him everywhere I was considering.

Then we went on to talk about New York, and the things I liked there. He asked about opera, and I said I'd been to a few things at the Met, though in general I was quite ignorant of that world. But I'd enjoyed, or at least appreciated, what I'd seen.

I asked about his recent trip to South America, and he spoke about it very briefly, but I knew he wasn't the sort to wax verbose about a somewhat personal aspect of his life.

There was one more question I felt compelled to ask him.

"Do you think I have enough talent to try to do this?" I asked.

"It is not a question of talent," he said. "It is a question of doing the work." And I knew he would not answer the question for me. I would have to answer my own question, and believe in that answer. And I had to admire his principled refusal to offer easy reassurances.

At a certain point it was obviously time for me to go, and Professor Allegri accompanied me out the door and through a break in the front hedge to where my car was parked.

"Thank you, sir," I said, and we shook hands. "I'll be in touch."

As I put on my sunglasses and got into the car, I felt a mixture of excitement and relief and trepidation. Up until now, the idea of putting myself through the MFA admissions wringer had been entirely hypothetical. I'd taken the GRE the week before (for $140, thank you, though the perfect verbal score was some comfort), but up to this point I hadn't brought anyone else into the equation. Not even my parents knew I was doing this. Now there was no turning back.

It's hard for a commitment-phobe to change his stripes.


###


I'd arrived in Austin the night before for a long weekend, and was staying at George and Martha's place; we'd had a remarkably close relationship when I lived in Austin, though I hadn't seen them since my last visit four years ago. As it turned out, Martha was off in Sedona doing mystical things, so it was just George and me and their two dogs. And, conveniently enough, Martha had given me free use of her car to get around town during my trip.


My arrival was only slightly awkward; I was a little startled by George's weight gain, though he and Martha had been remarried at a certain point a couple of years ago (unbeknownst to me), and matrimony does tend to put on the pounds. But soon I had blended seamlessly into the odd little household, with the one dog I'd known before--a surly Basenji named Beau--and the new dog, a little Boston terrier spitfire named Dixie.


Dixie kept jumping on my legs, and I, though not a dog person, tried to respond good-naturedly.


"Hey there, little lady," I said, bending down as close as I dared toward her bulging eyes and lolling, alarmingly long tongue.


"Here, let's put on Animal Planet," said George, punching a button on the remote control. Dixie instantly leaped onto an ottoman placed in front of the TV, and sat attentively on her haunches as bestial shapes slowly faded into view.


"Oh, good, it's monkeys," said George. "She loooves monkeys."


And indeed, the ape antics onscreen kept Dixie riveted and quiet.


"It gets bad when there are dogs on there," George explained. "She goes nuts and starts barking and tries to paw the screen. One time I left her here for a little while, and when I came back the DVD tray was sticking out. She must have hit the eject button when she went crazy on the TV."


Dixie kept glancing back at us, as if to see whether we were paying sufficient attention to the program.


Suddenly a golden retriever appeared onscreen, and Dixie went stark raving mad.


"Enough of that," said George, flourishing the remote and making the canine intruder vanish. "Here, watch her play with her ball."


He left the room and returned with a huge red inflatable ball. As soon as he set it on the ground, Dixie was on it like David on Goliath, scrabbling at the ball with her little paws and barking in time with her movements. It was so hilarious that I grabbed my digital camera and made a short film of it.


"I'm pretty tired," said George in his Texas drawl. "I'm heading to bed."


"Same here," said I, who had worked until early afternoon before catching a cab to LaGuardia.


"I'll take Beau and Dixie into my room to sleep there," he continued. "You don't want to wake up in the middle of the night with something hairy all over you."


"It's okay," I said. "I'll just kick you out if that happens."


George colored just slightly.


###


After meeting with Professor Allegri, I had a quick lunch (chicken fried steak, how I'd missed you) and then headed to a rendezvous I'd anticipated nearly as much as the one just ended: I was dropping in on my old therapist.


I'd always had a bit of a crush on him, and he was insightful and palpably empathetic and the only person who'd ever truly been able to help me get on an even keel. I had been so well-adjusted in those days, and so completely unable to recapture that balance in all my years in New York.


He'd left the center where I'd always seen him and had his own practice now, and when he answered the door he looked just the same. I didn't know the protocol for greeting one's former therapist, but acting on his subtle cues I hugged him.


He led me into his office, and we sat in comfortable chairs opposite each other and I briefly sketched out the reason for my return to Austin and the current state of things in New York.


I did not conceal my painful uncertainty, my fears and sadness and frustration, but he did not respond therapeutically as he would have done before. I was not his client anymore, after all, and that fleeting thought saddened me a bit. But there was something soothing, nonetheless, about discussing these things with someone who actually got me, and who could actually be bothered to listen.


"Are you seeing a therapist in New York?" he asked.


I told him about the unfortunate business with the countertransferring seducee, and that I felt better about the new therapist I'd been seeing more recently.


"But I maxed out on my annual allowance of sessions," I said, "and my insurance company reneged on their assurances that they could give me more, so I won't be able to have any more therapy until January. It's always something. Pretty frustrating."


I asked him about his life, which was an odd experience; that topic had always been verboten before. He was still single ("I can't believe that!" I interjected), and his dog had died a few years ago, but his new practice was doing well and he lived in a cozy little cottage nearby and he was happy.


"I'm glad," I said, hating, because they were selfish, the tears that were prodding the corners of my eyes. But I had still meant what I'd said.


He asked me what I liked to do in New York, and we talked about that, and where he'd lived during his years in the city. And then we came to the topic of relationships in New York.


"Sometimes I feel like I knew so much more, was so much more together, during my years here," I said. "I don't know, maybe it was just that life was less complicated at that age and with what I was doing at the time. Or maybe it was that I had you for a therapist." My smile was small and rueful. "I've never found anyone else half as good as you." I paused and he said nothing, as I knew he wouldn't. "I just want to get it right. To finally get it right."


Suddenly the irony of sitting there with the one person it really seemed could help me, but whose actual help was no longer accessible, stung me full-force. I excused myself to the bathroom, where I urinated and washed my hands and did not cry.


He was standing when I reentered the room, and I'd anticipated that, and he walked me out and I hugged him again. The car was double-parked and I was worried about it, but it was where I'd left it and there was no ticket on the windshield.


I headed downtown, where I was meeting George for dinner, and though I was suddenly hit with a need to weep, I did not. All I wanted was to be coasting down the road, surrounded by a cage of glass and steel, immune to hurt.


Two out of three ain't bad.


###


That Saturday night I had dinner with Joseph at a new restaurant on South Congress Avenue, which had been trendy back when I left Austin in 2002. But I was still surprised at the amount of foot traffic on a weekend evening. Lots of people had told me I'd be surprised by the amount of gentrification in the past five years. But, frankly, the place didn't seem too different, and I was glad. Compared to the constant flux of New York, Austin hadn't changed a bit.


Joseph was running late from an Indian powwow he had attended, so I browsed a few of the shops near the restaurant. We'd talked about getting together that afternoon, but he had changed his mind in one of our typical, ever-so-slightly grating exchanges.


It's slightly difficult to explain what bothers me; basically, he uses "feeling" language in a way that sounds slightly ridiculous and self-indulgent, e.g., "I'm looking at this pile of papers on my desk and feeling a little anxious about not finishing them this afternoon, so I think I would be happier if we met for dinner instead." I mean, I'm as much of a therapy whore as the next guy, but there are limits.


But I like Joseph all right, and we had a pleasant dinner, and he's still quite attractive, and once or twice I found myself with a hard-on. When he invited me back to his place I said okay.


I followed behind his car as we made our way over dark winding roads on the outskirts of town, plunging around blind curves, rising and falling in near-unison.


He had done some decorating that went a long way toward putting some actual life and warmth into his apartment. We watched a bootleg DVD of outtakes from film shoots, a collection that apparently makes the rounds of the film-producing community of which Joseph is a member. Some of it was tedious and some funny, and I could tell as it ended that it was time to put out or get out, and I had been ignoring the buzzing of my cell phone in my pocket, half-wondering whether it might not be better to heed its call.


When Joseph went to the bathroom I saw that Kelly had left me a series of text messages as he and his friends moved from bar to bar. We'd talked about meeting up and I found myself really wanting to do so, because, despite a certain mortifying incident that had occurred when we lived together, we had also been good friends and I hadn't talked to him in ages.


So it had come down to either ex sex or a bar meetup.


"You're welcome to spend the night," said Joseph, when he'd returned and sat yawning on the couch next to me.


"Actually," I said, "I'd agreed to meet up with Kelly and I really want to see him. It's been ages."


"I understand," said Joseph, and after an awkward goodbye I grabbed my keys and rushed out the door.


I drove as fast as I dared down the remote road back toward downtown; it was already past midnight. A deer flashed across my path and I slammed on the brakes, then continued on a little more slowly.


Kelly was at a small "club" a couple doors down from Oilcan Harry's, the old standby in the Warehouse District. I'd ducked into Harry's the night before, on my own, and had found it something less than enjoyable. The dance club hadn't existed the last time I was in Austin; it was loud and packed on this particular night, and I had to text Kelly to figure out where he was.


I made my way to the back patio, where, scanning the crowd, I spotted a friend of Kelly's with whom I'd once made out in a drunken men's room episode. He waved, and then I saw Kelly right behind him.


We made our way toward each other and he threw up his arms and we embraced. Now it really felt like I'd returned to Austin; there had been so many nights like this, the sensory memories of laughing and drinking and dancing, the sense of abandonment to enjoyment that I'd felt so little of in the New York years.


Kelly and I had hardly exchanged greetings when I looked over his shoulder and saw Gay Gary staring pointedly at me.


Gay Gary was Kelly's outrageously flamboyant, bitchy friend who'd moved to San Francisco--where, apparently, he had acquired a taste for semi-mullet hairstyles and trans-fats.


"Gary," I said. "Oh, my God. I didn't know you were in town."


"Frank Beekman," shrilled Gay Gary, and his next words were so indelible I knew I would later be able to blog them verbatim. "I expected you to walk in here looking all old and shitty, and instead you look the same as you did five years ago, you bitch."


"Uh," I said. "Thanks. I should get a drink." I turned to Kelly. "Do you need anything?"


He pointed unsteadily to the drink in his hand. "Doin' fine," he slurred. "Thanks!"


I pressed through the crowd to the patio bar, where I waited a good five minutes until the cute young bartender finally pointed at me.


"Gin and tonic," I bellowed toward his ear. He turned away and I wasn't even sure if he'd heard me. I sighed.


Finally he handed me a huge tumbler with a lime slice, and I figured that, with so large a glass, he must have made me a straight tonic without the gin. I decided not to hassle with him, and proffered a ten. But he ignored the money, and then I saw "DOUBLE GIN AND TONIC" flash across the cash register screen in front of me.


I dumbly continued to wave the ten at him, until he finally leaned across the bar, flashed a white smile, and said, "It's on the house."


Well. Maybe I really did look the same as I did five years ago.


Smiling myself now, I made my way back to Kelly, who introduced me to his boyfriend. He seemed nice, and I was glad to see Kelly in a relationship. I started to ask him about it when his phone dinged with a text message from a wayward friend who was supposed to have joined us already.


"Managing a harem is the hardest job I've ever had," he said as he typed a message back.


"Yes, the price of Clorox alone," I replied.


We both burst out laughing. I'd forgotten the repartee we'd always shared. For some reason, a memory came to me of his first time trying to cook chili. I'd encountered him in our kitchen, dumping some meat into a skillet.


"Tonight, ground beef," he'd announced as I passed by on the way to the refrigerator.


"Tomorrow, the world!" I'd added, and we laughed so hard he dropped the spatula.


I kept the memory to myself because he seemed to have had a little too much liquor to achieve perfect recall at the moment.


"Are you the one who used to beat Kelly with a wire hanger?" asked his boyfriend, putting his arm around Kelly's waist.


Nodding slowly, I adopted a mock frown, cocked my head to one side, and shook an invisible hanger reprovingly at them. We burst into laughter again. I guess you had to be there.


I knew I was glad I was, that I'd foregone the ex sex for the people who really wanted to see me. It was a shocking relief to feel wanted, to feel that my presence actually mattered to someone, that my absence had a significant impact, a feeling that had so often eluded my grasp back on the strange little island to which I had disappeared nearly six years ago.


For two or three golden hours, I felt included and carefree and attractive, even though I couldn't have cared less about hooking up with anyone. It was, I realized suddenly, the feeling of being comfortable in one's own skin, among those who understood.


It's almost frightening how I've ached for such simple things.


###


I'd been wandering the cemetery for more than an hour, my breath visible in the 28-degree chill. The grave wasn't where it should have been, and I was in a remote graveyard in rural New Jersey on the Saturday after Thanksgiving with nothing but my wits and seemingly incorrect information.


It was the next phase of my research project, the one that had stranded me in another isolated cemetery nearly three months before. I was looking for the final resting place of another artist, but this time I had the security of my own rental car. What I did not have, however, was a clue as to where the grave I sought actually was. I'd called the cemetery earlier that week to obtain the location of the burial plot, since their office was closed on weekends. But despite making two complete searches of that section of the cemetery, a section whose boundaries were very clearly delineated by markers, I had failed to find what I was looking for.


My stubborn streak, however, runs a mile wide, and I was not about to give up when I'd driven more than an hour from Manhattan to this cemetery in the middle of nowhere. I reasoned that they might have misread the section and mistaken E for F. So, with no other real recourse, I broadened my search, after returning to the car to throw my father's old officer peacoat on over my navy blue suit.


And then, at the end of the next section, I found it. It was the grave of an obscure but accomplished artist I'd admired since I was a child, and I documented the site with carefully taken photographs.


I was on a tight schedule--I had to be in downtown Philadelphia that afternoon--but I couldn't help pausing, now that I was no longer searching desperately for the grave, to take in my surroundings. Autumn was peaking; there were stray fiery trees beyond the tombstones in the distance, and I stood there, my gloved hands in my coat pockets, alone in this silent country cemetery on a vividly cold sunny morning.


Then I remembered I was starving and my Egg McMuffins were getting cold and my toes were slightly numb and I had considerable distance to cover.


I was off next to a veterans' cemetery that involved frustrating detours and badly marked country roads, but, God bless the military, they do know how to lay out a graveyard logically once you find your way to it. There was something quietly impressive about the sheer strong linearity of the ground markers that converged in an optical illusion at the far horizon.


And then the third and final cemetery, in Philadelphia, where the office gave me an elaborate map that sent me up a winding road circling to the top of a steep hill with a stretch of humble graves and a mass of beautiful dead autumn yellow, the leaves obscuring many of the markers on the ground and leaving me desperately scraping at them with my shoe until I recognized I could not find this grave on my own, no matter how wide my streak of stubbornness.


I called the office on my cell and soon a truck bounded up the hillside road and a man with a crumbling book of maps approached. He wandered hurriedly this way and that, holding the book in front of him as though it were the scholarly version of a divining rod, and at last he paused at a certain spot and said this is where the grave should be, and that it must be unmarked. And so I took in where the grave was, all swirled over with colorful, slightly curled leaves.


By now I was running late to the wedding and I made it barely on time. It was a gay wedding--my first--and I found it a little cheesy, as is usual with weddings, but nice as well. I spent a considerable chunk of the ceremony watching one of the bridesmaids. She was contorting her face in an attempt not to cry, but she looked more like a mugging comedienne eating a sour pickle.


"I thought you were bringing a guest," said the groom I had known first, before he'd met the other one. I was holding a stiff drink in my hand at the reception, which took place in a museum full of Egyptian artifacts, interesting but ultimately cold.


"He came down with the flu," I lied, the truth being somewhat more complicated. It was someone I liked quite a bit but hadn't known very long, and I'd prefaced my invitation with a disclaimer that he shouldn't read anything into my offer; I'd simply enjoy his company, and he could return by train to New York that same evening if he liked, and he could come to Philadelphia by train as well rather than join me on my grim research tour. But in the end, he'd politely declined with a very reasonable excuse that may have been true but probably was not entirely so. Not that I blamed him a bit for it. After all, I might have been insane for all he knew. And for all I knew.


The reception was, therefore, a little lonely, though I did know a couple of people there. The seat next to me at dinner had been reserved for my guest and remained conspicuously vacant, and the braised short ribs and wasabi mashers were good enough that I thought about lying to the waiter and saying my guest had simply gone to the bathroom and would want his food when he returned. But, in the end, I chose to be honest, at least about that part.


I sat there after the food, making small talk with one of the two guests I knew.


"So the flu, huh?" he said, sitting there next to his boyfriend, and I didn't entirely like his tone and changed the subject to my MFA applications and how much time I'd spent getting all my materials together in the past couple of months.


"And the typical admission rate is significantly less than 10 percent, at least for the top programs, which are the ones I'm applying to," I said. "So I haven't really been telling many people about it. Fewer people to notify if I don't get in."


Realizing he would probably perceive this as compliment-fishing, I preemptively excused myself to the bathroom.


I'd reserved a hotel room, part of the wedding block at a distressingly nice hotel downtown. It was a rare splurge on a temporal luxury, the kind of thing I tend to find vexingly frivolous. But I'd had bad luck finding anything habitable in the area that weekend that would cost any less. And I did need to throw myself a bone every once in a while.


At close to midnight I was half-dozing on my king-sized bed when my phone rang on the nightstand. It was my more familiar groom, inviting me up to the afterparty in their penthouse suite.


I wandered sleepily upstairs, still in my white dress shirt and suit pants but without coat or tie. It turned out there was no actual liquor at the party, a potentially fatal flaw. But a charmingly gregarious girl pulled me into the grooms' bedroom, past the petal-strewn bed, to show me the wraparound view of downtown Philadelphia. And little dots of light against darkness are pretty wherever you are, so it was nice.


There were more goings-on. An almost David Lynchian encounter in the elevator with two backwards-cap lesbians who asked me, of all people, "Where the hot white chicks at?" as I was texting some bit of madness to Peter in L.A. The gregarious girl and her gay friend and me in the hotel bar ordering drinks to take upstairs, the gay friend and I sharing a homoerotic smoke in the frigid night air as I shivered in my translucent white shirt.


And at some dim moment in the vicinity of 2:30, I was in my room tumbling into bed, unable to imagine the strange happy voluntary self-discipline of matrimony whose brand-new example slept in another, flowery bed some 20 floors above me.


###


A novelist I'd worked with at my old publishing job was in town to promote his newest book, and he invited me out for a drink at a piano bar. My last idea of a good time is to be subjected to the singing of people who think they can sing, but he had just written me a recommendation letter for an MFA, and I did like him a lot apart from that.


When I arrived he was strategizing with a couple of female editors about how to slip his number to a twentysomething across the room. After determining that he would write it in a copy of his book, he turned back to me.


"Did you ever send excerpts of your blog to my agent?"


I winced. "Uh, not yet."


"Why not?" he said. "You've got so much great stuff there."


"I don't know," I said. "Hasn't it been done too much already? The whole hackneyed young-writer-moving-to-New-York memoir thing?"


"Everything's been done," he said. "But not in exactly the way you've done it. Let me tell you," and here he was addressing the two editors, "I was reading the last Harry Potter book when Frank told me about his blog, and I asked him to send me some excerpts. I started reading them and then I had to put down Harry Potter. That should tell you something."


"That's flattering," I said. "Thank you. But...."


"Do it," he said. "My agent is great. She'll read it herself. Not her assistant. Her. And she'll get back to you one way or the other."


"Okay," I said. "I'll send it in this week."


And I went home and mulled it over some more. Would it be incredibly self-important of me to think that what I recorded on the blog about my experience of New York in my 20s deserved to be printed between two covers? How does any memoirist or personal essayist come to terms with that? I didn't want to be some self-absorbed asshole who considered himself just incredibly fascinating.


But the fact remained that there had been all those emails from people who had connected in an incredible way to some of the most painful-to-write entries, the almost self-abusing honesty with which I described my own life.


Oh, why the fuck not?


I spent my lunch hour at work the next day formatting the Word document and printing it out. That evening I took it to the post office, ignoring the twisting in my stomach as I prepared to deliver some of my most intimate autobiographical writings directly into the hands of a literary agent. Nothing difficult that I'd ever done--especially moving to New York--had been something I could have accomplished without covering my eyes and jumping blindly off a ledge.


The postal clerk looked at her computer screen. "Parcel post and priority mail cost almost the same. Parcel's a little cheaper, takes two days. Priority, they'll get it tomorrow."


I frowned down at my wallet, with which I was fumbling, and sighed nearly inaudibly. "Priority."

1:29 AM

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Sunday, October 21, 2007

 

ENTRY 247¾: FRANK BEEKMAN AND THE HALL OF SECRETS


The last thing I'd ever want is to sound melodramatic or inflate the import of the story I'm about to relate, but the more that Friday night sinks in, the more I honestly think I was witness to the making of some kind of literary history.


Muggles may have a little bit of trouble keeping up with this entry, but do try, won't you? Google exists for a reason.


To begin at the beginning....


September 19, 4:30 PM: My cell phone vibrated on my desk, pivoting like a wind-up toy and nudging my stapler into the wall of my cubicle. The number was an unfamiliar one, but with a 212 area code. I answered.


"Is this Frank Beekman?" asked a halting, unfamiliar voice.


"Yes," I said resignedly, thinking a telemarketer must have gotten hold of my cell number somehow.


"I'm calling from Scholastic Books," she said.


Scholastic? I thought. I had an interview with them in December 2005, and they're finally getting back to me now?


I had forgotten about the envelope I'd dropped into a mailbox sometime in August, until the person on the phone informed me that I was one of 1,000 winners nationwide of the J.K. Rowling Open Book Tour Sweepstakes. I would receive a pair of tickets to Rowling's only U.S. appearance for the general public (there were a mere three additional U.S. appearances, all for schoolchildren only), at Carnegie Hall.


"Oh, my God," I said. One of my coworkers glanced curiously at me. "That's awesome."


When I called my mother that evening, she said, "That's so cool! None of us ever win anything!" Which is true. The Beekmans never win raffles, sweepstakes, lotteries, blintz-eating contests, or reality-show competitions, though in fourth grade I did win our classroom chameleon in a pick-a-number-between-one-and-ten showdown.


This meant, of course, that now I would have to read like mad, since I had not yet finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, even though I'd gone to the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble before midnight the night that the seventh book was released--simply because I'd known that I would probably never again have the experience of waiting in a huge, eagerly anticipatory line to buy a new book. The line had stretched down Broadway between West 82nd and 83rd Streets, around the corner down 83rd, up West End Avenue to 82nd, and down 82nd almost to Broadway again; it formed a near-loop covering almost an entire square block, though the wait was no more than 45 minutes in all.


My real obstacle had been Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which had lost me somewhere around page 500 (out of 870) during my first attempted reading, and which I'd put aside for other things. I'd finally come back to it more recently, reread from the beginning, gotten to the same point, and put it down for a little while again. I'd finished it at long last in anticipation of the movie version. My problem had been that I just didn't sense enough narrative momentum, that it was bogged down in too many meandering details and wasn't going anywhere fast. This had been an objection of mine since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The previous book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, remains my favorite of the series because of the balance between a satisfyingly wide canvas and authorial restraint/narrative economy. I'd had the feeling with every ensuing title that Rowling's editors were afraid to edit her much anymore. She was their bread-and-butterbeer now, after all.


The diehards among you may think me a horrible excuse for a HP fan, but, in my defense, Rowling herself said in an interview [WARNING! Click with caution; there are spoilers for the later books.] that "there are minor plot things that [she] would change going back. [She]'d certainly edit Phoenix a bit better because [she] think[s] it's too long." Michiko Kakutani's Times review also gets at some of my dissatisfaction: "Because Harry is often in an irritable mood and spends much of the opening chapters brooding about his problems, The Order of the Phoenix gets off to a somewhat ponderous start.... [I]t takes a while for the gears of this immensely long novel to mesh fully."


I did finally finish it, and things do pick up in the later pages, but I did lose a lot of confidence in Rowling's self-editing abilities. I had heard, however, that Half-Blood Prince was a marked improvement, and, as I embarked on it, found that to be the case. I should add that I had been spoiled on the major deaths in both Order of the Phoenix (during the 2003 Christmas holiday the year that book came out, I mentioned I hadn't finished reading it and Cleo said, "Is that the one where So-and-So dies?"--maddening) and Half-Blood Prince (random mention of the death in a Times article) before I'd finished reading either of them, despite my efforts to avoid such spoilers. But I knew that anything worth reading shouldn't be ruined simply because of such basic knowledge. Everyone knows what happens to Anna Karenina, after all.


September 24: When I got home there was a large envelope from Scholastic sitting on the shelf in the hallway. It contained a two-page document with details about the event, set for Friday, October 19 at Carnegie Hall. I was informed that I must sign and return the enclosed affidavit by October 1 (giving me seven days), and that the form would have to be notarized. Seriously?


I took the form to work the next day, and after asking around found out that someone in the finance department was a notary. He agreed to notarize the affidavit for me, but, after flipping carefully through the three-page form, said, "I'm pretty sure there's a page missing."


Sure enough, they'd left out the signature page, and I had to get on the phone with Scholastic and track down the person in charge of the sweepstakes. She finally returned my voicemail, apologetic, and said that they'd sent out the missing page to everybody and I should be receiving it the next day.


"And you'll have to have your guest sign it as well," she added.


"And get the second signature notarized?" I said incredulously. "When it's supposed to be back in your office in less than a week?"


The gist of her response was that I could put the second "signature" on there myself and vouch for the person. Which I shrugged and did.


Scholastic, not the greatest minds in sweepstakes execution.


I'd thought long and hard about the guest, seeing as how I was running low these days in the friends department; Roger was a huge Harry Potter fan, but, well, you know. Then I thought of Abra, who was a total HPer and one of the only people in New York who had remained anything like a constant friend to me. My birthday this year had been the most somber one of my life; I'd attempted, after my return from California, to have a very modest drinks gathering, early one evening after work, as minimally intrusive to people's schedules as possible, and, though a bare handful of kind individuals did come, literally 80% of people didn't show, the great majority without explanation. To make matters worse, one of my closest coworkers had been treating me horribly for some reason (a reason which turned out to be utterly petty and insane and which I only learned days later after barging into his office, closing the door, and refusing to leave until he leveled with me), and the people at work did nothing to observe my birthday, although they've observed everyone else's both before and since (often sending me out to pick up a cake). It was like nobody could be bothered to give a fuck. On top of everything else, I was grappling with some scary medical news. But, alone among everyone I knew, Abra took me out to a nice dinner and gave me a present and it was all I could do not to weep openly at the table in response to her generosity.


I called to invite her and she was ecstatic and I almost cried again at my desk.


October 19: What did one wear, I wondered, to meet one of the most famous women in the world?


Answer: Dress robes. Business casual. What else?


The front of Carnegie Hall was mobbed when I arrived. Abra was standing in front of the doors, and we pushed our way in to pick up the tickets, for which I had to give a blood sample and dental records.


It turned out that we had quite decent seats in the orchestra section, a little more than halfway back. The stage was bare except for a large overhead screen displaying the covers of the books, a red velvet throne, and, beside it, a small table with what appeared to be a spread fan sitting on it.


The crowd was much less eccentric-looking than I'd hoped; most people looked pretty average, and there didn't seem to be more kids in the audience than you'd see at any Broadway show. My guess was that it was the adult contest winners who would be more likely to have the funds to travel to New York. Camera flashes sparked from all directions; I took a couple of shots of the stage and quickly put my camera away, knowing that photography was prohibited. Sure enough, a voice came over the intercom, directing everyone to stop taking pictures or else the event wouldn't begin because it was distracting to the "artist," etc. The flashes decreased in frequency but continued nonetheless. There were probably four or five intercom warnings, each sterner than the last, but the photography never quite stopped.


Finally, the event began, and out onto the stage walked...Keith Olbermann? Apparently he was there to introduce J.K. Rowling. Raaaaandom.


The introduction was tedious and then he went away and when Rowling walked onto the stage there was a deafening standing ovation. She acknowledged it graciously and settled onto the throne, whereupon she read pages 378 to 387 of Deathly Hallows. She was a wonderfully expressive and entertaining reader (the last reading I'd attended was Joan Didion's, for The Year of Magical Thinking, and she was about as compelling as an Inferius, if you'll pardon the expression), and the audience ate it up.


Then it was time for the Q&A portion of the program. I am sorry to say that they did not pick either of the questions I submitted; the first was "Why are none of the Hogwarts professors married or in a relationship?" and the second involved a huge plot hole concerning one of the Horcruxes.


There were some sort of interesting questions, most of which contain inherent spoilers, so I won't ruin it for anybody. But then came the most amazing, unexpected, and, perhaps, historical portion of the entire evening. And it was completely out of the blue.


A young lady stood at the microphone in the aisle, near the stage, and launched into an excruciatingly personal soliloquy I found painful to witness: It was about how much the books had meant to her personal growth and such, and Rowling listened very nicely and thanked her.


Then came the question, which was very straightforward: Had Dumbledore ever loved anyone?


Rowling said that it was a very good question, and then I detected the faintest hint of a pause before she continued: "Because you've been so very honest with me, I'm going to be completely honest with you. I always saw Dumbledore as gay."


"Oh my God!" I said, almost reflexively. My jaw hit my feet as Abra and I looked at each other. There was a collective gasp, a moment of stunned silence, and then a mixture of laughter and enthusiastic applause. I'm sure not everyone was clapping, but I was in an overwhelming majority as I put my hands together. The greatest wizard in the universally loved world of Harry Potter was a reflection of my own frequently neglected and ridiculed reality.


When the noise finally abated, she deadpanned, "If I had known this would have made you so happy, I would have told you years ago."


She proceeded to explain that Dumbledore had been in love (unrequitedly) with Grindelwald, which came as a second, if lesser, shock. Considering Dumbledore's curious delaying of the duel, and other bits of information about their brief but intense friendship discussed in the seventh book, the revelation makes definite sense. Whoa.


The next questioner at the microphone was a very young girl accompanied by her mother, who spoke for her mute child and prefaced the question with a "thanks" for giving her so much to talk about with her daughter regarding the seventh book.


"Oh, God," said Rowling. "Just imagine the fan fiction now, eh?"


The whole program was over by 8:30, and Abra and I were deep in discussion as we waited for our row to be summoned to get in the signing queue. It was a real assembly line, with helpers to whisk unsigned books in front of Rowling's pen at a table in front of the stage, and others to convey the books to their owners and to propel said owners away from Rowling and toward the exit. I knew I'd have only a moment in front of her, and I knew precisely what I would say.


She glanced up kindly, as it seemed she was trying to do for every attendee, when I paused in front of the table opposite her.

[WARNING: The next paragraph contains a major Half-Blood Prince spoiler.]
"I would totally marry Dumbledore," I said, and she looked something like startled for the merest split-second before smiling and replying, "That's such a lovely thing to say. A shame he's dead!"


"Thank you, and congratulations," I said, stepping away before they set dementors on me.


Abra and I made our way out of Carnegie Hall and onto West 57th Street. As we descended the subway stairs, I said, "This is going to be all over the Internet. It's going to be crazy." She and I headed down to Chelsea; she had offered to treat me to a nice Italian dinner.


On the way I called Hamilton. "She said she always thought of Dumbledore as gay," I said.


"WHAT?" he said, and I jerked the phone away from my ear.


I also called Mak to break the big news. He was too sick for such a dramatic reaction, but got a real kick out of it, and texted me before we'd even ordered appetizers to let me know that the AP had already picked up the story.


After discussing the whole evening to death, Abra and I turned to other topics. After she'd talked about the next play she was directing, the conversation moved to my love life. I gave a short barking laugh.


"Well," I said, "actually, I did meet a nice guy last week. We went to the big cat show at Madison Square Garden."


"Oh my God, that's hilarious!" she said.


"And when we got there he told me he's allergic to cats," I added.


"Oh no!" said Abra.


"I have to say it was kind of sweet. I kept asking him if he needed to go, and his eyes were getting a little red and puffy and he was starting to sniffle, but he insisted he could handle it. I didn't make him stay too long, though. But it was cute he was willing to do it."


"Awww."


"We're supposed to do something tomorrow," I said. "I liked him. He was nice, and easy to get along with, and cute. And he calls me 'handsome.'"


"That's great!" said Abra, who is one of the rather few people I know whose enthusiasm never seems feigned. "I hope it works out."


"We'll see," I said, which is what I always say, though I felt somewhat optimistic about this one.


On the way to the train, I told Abra I was glad she could come, and she thanked me again for bringing her, and that she'd been excited all week.


"I knew you'd be, and that's why I asked you," I said. "And also because it's been such a hard year for me, and you've always been so kind, and that means a lot."


She brought me into a hug. "I love you," she said, and I said it back. She added, "If you ever need to, call me."


"It's getting better," I said. "I was lost and aimless for a while, but now I'm trying to do things. I'm gaining momentum." I talked a little bit about the progress I'd been making on my ambitious new plan, which, for the time being, remained a secret to nearly everybody. That was the way I preferred it for now. After all, there had been enough talking from me in the past few years. It was doing time. There would be opportunity enough for the eventual divulgences.


But you don't need to tell that to J.K. Rowling.

12:49 AM

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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

 

FROM ENTRY 248


What did one wear, I wondered, to meet one of the most famous women in the world?


###


I had not traveled 1700 miles on a lark. I had come because it was time to take the kind and size of gamble that, in the past five years, I had not done much more than talk about.

9:37 PM

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