Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  Just as we merged onto the 134 Freeway, I heard Jessica say, “Uh-oh.” She was staring very closely at the bracelet now and frowning. “One of the diamonds is missing.”

  Oh my god, I thought. Oh my god.

  She searched through the folds of her dress but couldn’t find it. “Oh well,” she said, “I’m sure it will turn up.”

  When we got home, we saw that some friends had plastered the front of our house with homemade banners and showered the driveway with confetti. We went inside, relived the high points of our magical evening, and then went to bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bracelet. What would happen the next morning, when we drove to Beverly Hills to return it?

  I tossed and turned until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, grabbed a flashlight, and went out to the garage. I looked under the floor mats of the car, under all of the seats, everywhere. I checked the driveway for anything that sparkled—the confetti slowed my progress—and then, back inside the house, I got down on my hands and knees and searched the floor. I looked everywhere Jessica might have passed once she’d gotten dressed, but no diamond turned up.

  I went back to bed and lay there, imagining the scene that would take place on Rodeo Drive in just a few hours. I rehearsed what I would say to the manager and how I would say it. I would convey to him how seriously we took the matter, that I’d been up all night searching for the diamond, that we weren’t scammers or slobs. I pictured the look on the manager’s face, and of course, his expression would reveal what he was too refined a man to say out loud: He suspected us of pulling the diamond out as a souvenir. We weren’t famous movie stars who could buy their own diamonds, after all—we were “emerging artists,” which is a polite way of saying we were broke. We ate microwavable frozen dinners to save money, we bought our clothes at Target, and we drove a nine-year-old car. I imagined the manager recommending that we check our homeowner’s insurance—if we had any, that is—to see if it might cover the loss.

  As dawn broke, my anxiety turned to paranoia. What if this was a scam that someone at Harry Winston’s was running? An employee could easily pull out a diamond, guessing that people like us would be too excited to notice it right away, and that we would be too ashamed to refuse to accept responsibility for its loss. The store would be reimbursed and the employee would keep the diamond. The more I thought about this, the more agitated I got. As soon as Jessica woke up, I told her that I wanted to get this over with right away. She assured me that the matter would be settled amicably, but nothing she said could relieve the tension in my mind and in my lower back, which had locked up like a vise. We drove to Beverly Hills, and when we arrived, a very large security guard opened the front door for us and led us to the manager, who looked and sounded exactly as he’d looked and sounded in my imagination. His black hair, glistening with product, was as shiny as his Italian leather shoes. If you’d turned the man upside down, you would hardly have noticed the difference. Jessica showed him the bracelet and pointed out the empty setting. My nemesis nodded and said, “Let me check the box; it might be there.” His shoes made a disagreeable tapping sound as he walked across the marble floor to the back room. He returned a few minutes later with a shallow container. “Yes, it’s right here. It happens sometimes with the newer pieces; the settings have to be adjusted.”

  When we got home later that morning, more than a dozen floral arrangements—all of them huge—sat waiting for us on the doorstep. And they were only the first to arrive. By the end of the day, I felt as if we were living inside one of the Rose Bowl parade floats. The phone rang continually—Jessica received congratulatory calls from relatives, colleagues, and friends she hadn’t seen since preschool. “Don’t bother answering the phone,” she said to me when she had to go out. “Let the machine take care of it.” I followed her advice and listened as ten different callers left messages in the space of fifteen minutes. The eleventh caller had just identified himself as an agent, when the tape in our primitive answering machine ran out. I lurched to the phone and picked it up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Jessica Yu, please.”

  I told the agent that she was in a meeting and offered to take a message.

  “Am I speaking to her assistant?”

  I smiled. “No, I’m her husband.”

  “Ah, Mr. Yu—congratulations! I hear you’re a writer.”

  Nine

  THE YEAR JESSICA RECEIVED THE OSCAR, I was struggling to complete a novel about a Carmelite nun with epilepsy, and I was deeply stuck. In all of my novels, I end up creating fictional characters who are tormented by the gap between who they actually are and who they had hoped to become. They think it is up to them to bridge that gap, to become who they choose to be, and they fail. They are anxious, disappointed idealists who seem unable to take life as it comes—when we first meet them, that is. By the end of the novels, however, they have found some way to loosen their grips on their ideals, embrace reality, and become less rabbit-like.

  I resent the implication, by the way—occasionally found in reviews of my work—that I use writing as a means of coming to terms with my own problems. The fact that I use writing as a means of coming to terms with my own problems is so obvious that implying it amounts to a form of passive-aggressive griping, like implying that soldiers resort to violence as a means of resolving conflict. If a reviewer really wanted to out me, what he or she would say is: “Mark Salzman uses writing as a means of coming to terms with his own problems, but he’s been at it for a long time and is still writing about the same problems, so he must not be making much progress.”

  Touché!

  My Carmelite nun had entered the cloister because she longed for the peace that surpasseth understanding. After decades of fruitless searching, she begins having mystical experiences, and these do bring her a kind of peace, but they are accompanied by increasingly severe headaches. Eventually, a doctor tells her that she has a form of epilepsy that may be the cause of her mystical experiences. She begins to doubt the authenticity of those experiences, and her peace of mind vanishes as she struggles with the decision whether or not to have the epilepsy treated.

  It’s my kind of story, all right, but somewhere along the way it occurred to me that a story about a nun with epilepsy might not appeal to readers any more than, say, a story about a failed cellist, which just happened to be the subject of another novel that didn’t make the bestseller list and that just happened to have been written by me. My novels, I reasoned, are too niche-y to attract a wide audience. They are about weirdos with weird problems leading weird lives. They read as if they were written by a guy who wore a bald-head wig and cut the soles out of the bottoms of his shoes.

  I became determined to find a way to make the nun’s story more appealing. To accomplish this feat, I decided to have her fall in love with her neurologist.

  As soon as I began imagining the doctor in his white lab coat and the nun in her modest, brown habit, both of them struggling for words to express their feelings for each other in a dark hospital at night, I realized that the story had major-motion-picture potential. I figured some Hollywood wunderkind with a baseball cap, wire-rimmed glasses, and a beard could turn it into a cross between Witness and Awakenings, and we’d all benefit. I got very excited about this idea and spent the next five years trying to write the book, but I couldn’t get my stand-ins for Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis to act like real people. They lurched through every scene like a pair of cardboard cutouts. By the third year, I was so frustrated that even the slightest sound distracted me as I wrote, so I took to wearing a huge towel wrapped around my head and a pair of busted stereo headphones on top of the towel to block out all unwanted noise. This solved the sound problem, but we had two cats at the time—one white and one brown, named Fog and Smog—and they liked to sit on my lap when I worked, which also distracted me. Cats don’t like tinfoil, so I fashioned a tinfoil skirt that I wore along with the towel and the earphones to help me concentrate. These mechanical aids fa
iled to cure my writer’s block, but they did give our gas meter reader something to think about when he caught a glimpse of me through the window. In desperation, I moved to the one place where I felt so trapped that the only way I could get out was through writing, and that was the passenger seat of my car. Every morning, I pulled the car out of the garage, parked it under a tree in our driveway, and then hopped over the emergency brake into the passenger seat. It was quiet, and the cats couldn’t get in there, but Fog, still angry over the tinfoil skirt, padded every day up the hood and windshield and sat down right on the moonroof. The view from where I sat served as the perfect metaphor for what I was going through: I was staring up a cat’s ass.

  I wrote draft after draft, but each turned out to be worse than the last. I got fed up with the characters and the plot, but most of all, I got fed up with me. Writers are not just the authors of their stories, after all; we are supposed to be the authors of our own lives, like everyone else, and I was creating a bad life. A lot more was at stake than just the book. When you are writing, more is always at stake than just the book.

  What makes a life successful? I’ve always thought it boiled down to wisdom and effort—but mainly effort. You succeed when you make the right choices and muster up sufficient effort to do what you want to do, learn what you want to learn, and become what you want to become. What is always at stake when you set out to do something important is your integrity, which I define as how you measure up in terms of accepting responsibility for your own destiny—and then not screwing it up.

  Each of us allegedly possesses the gift of will, the power to choose what to do and then to go out and do it. With every bad choice we make, and every failure to apply sufficient effort to fulfill our goals, we squander that gift. We are supposed to make navigation our means of conveyance through our life journeys—as opposed to drifting around like coconuts that have gotten washed out to sea.

  The only way to get myself out of the mess I’d created, I decided, was through greater effort. I couldn’t become smarter or more talented, but I could certainly whip myself harder. So I did what comes naturally to rabbit-people in these situations: I terrified myself with scenarios of failure. If I couldn’t get this novel written, I thought, it meant that I was all washed up. Suck it up!

  I trudged forward with all the enthusiasm of a participant in a forced march. I thought I had a breakthrough when, toward the end of year five, I concluded that the contrived romance between the nun and the neurologist was the problem. I wrote a draft without it, focusing entirely on the nun’s struggle to decide whether to get the operation or not, and when it was finished I felt vindicated. I had passed my own test; I had discovered what writing is really about; I was an artist after all. I sent it off to my editor, feeling sure that she would love it. When she didn’t love it, I was crushed.

  That’s when Jessica, the supreme problem solver, took charge. She wanted her relatively cheerful husband and the passenger seat of our car back. “You need a change of scenery,” she said. She encouraged me to apply for a residency at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in the woods of New Hampshire, and I took her advice. When I was offered a residency there, Jessica made sure I got on the plane. I arrived at the end of September, just as the leaves were beginning to turn, and the first thing I carried into my secluded cabin in the woods was a container of boxed wine. I set myself up on a rocking chair on the porch with the wine right next to me, and I didn’t bother to get up out of that chair except to eat and sleep for the next five days. I had no idea what I was doing, or what I was going to do with my time there, but the surroundings were so gorgeous I couldn’t help but give in to it all and enjoy the view. On the sixth day, feeling more relaxed than I had in a long time, I stepped into the colony’s main office to drop off a postcard. A member of the staff greeted me and asked how I was enjoying my residency so far. Suddenly feeling embarrassed about the loafing and the Wine-in-a-Box, I said that I was sure I would get lots of writing done before my six weeks were up. She smiled patiently—she probably heard the same thing all the time from writers who were just getting up from their third nap of the day—and said, “If that happens, great. But please don’t feel that you’ve wasted your time here if it doesn’t. What some artists need most is a chance to slow down for a while. If that’s all you do here, don’t worry, we won’t report you to the National Endowment for the Arts.”

  My feet barely touched the ground as I walked out of that office. Someone was giving me permission to not write! I felt like a farmer being paid to not grow corn.

  After that, everything at that colony felt like a gift: the fall colors, the sounds, the little homemade cookies in the picnic baskets that the staff brought to the cabins. But the biggest gift of all was the removal of all reminders of art as a profession, as a way of making money or gaining a reputation, and even as a means of solving one’s own existential problems through the resolution of fictional ones. Everyone there wanted the same thing: to be reminded of what it felt like to be pulled toward his or her work, and to be unable to resist.

  I decided not to think about the novel at all. I surrendered unconditionally and turned my residency into a vacation. Years’ worth of accumulated tension melted away, and in its place came a feeling of euphoria, and in that euphoric state I suddenly found myself wanting to rewrite the novel. I knew how I wanted it to end now: I wanted the main character to be humbled until she was reminded of why she’d entered the cloister in the first place. She’d gone there to find the sacred in the ordinary, to seek God in this imperfect life of ours rather than outside of it, but she’d lost sight of that goal over time. Instead, she’d convinced herself that experiences of the sacred must be extraordinary, so nothing short of extraordinary experiences could satisfy her longing. I wanted her to be reminded of what it felt like to be faithful rather than determined, accepting rather than expectant. I wanted her, in other words, to have the experience I was having at the colony.

  My editor accepted the draft I wrote in the cabin, and Jessica got her relatively cheerful husband and her car seat back. But the biggest surprise of all came about a month after I’d finished the book, when I had an unoriginal—yet deeply affecting—insight into the relationship between conscious will and creativity.

  If the prospect of having to hear someone’s unoriginal insight about the relationship between conscious will and creativity makes you cringe, don’t worry; I’ll make it fast. Here it is: The perceived relationship between conscious will and creativity is some sort of illusion. There is no direct relationship there; you can’t make the Muse sing. There is no muscle you can squeeze in order to produce better ideas or come up with good ideas faster. Thinking otherwise leads to all sorts of unnecessary strain and the wearing of embarrassing outfits.

  This realization made me feel so uncharacteristically relaxed that when, later that year, Jessica looked at me over dinner one night and said, with no more force than you would use to blow out a candle, “Let’s start a family,” I said, “OK”—completely forgetting that only a year earlier, and for at least a dozen years before that, I told anyone who would listen that having children would be the end of me.

  It would be, I had insisted, like throwing a drowning man a life vest made out of concrete. Neither of my siblings had children, so I didn’t have any nieces or nephews to bounce on my knee until my paternal instinct kicked in. Here’s a short list of the reasons I thought it would be better if the buck stopped here: birth defects, contagious diseases, disfiguring accidents, poverty, war, mental illness, compulsory education, social rejection, environmental collapse, injustice, and just plain bad luck. I had nothing against babies—they’re certainly cute enough—but when I looked at them, I would usually think: You poor thing. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones, but chances are you’re looking at seventy or eighty years of drawn-out suffering, occasionally interrupted by moments of pleasure.

  Cosmologists say that the universe is fifteen billion years old. That’s a long ti
me. Do any of us have painful memories of what it was like to be a hydrogen atom in the center of a star or a carbon atom floating in empty space or a water molecule inside the body of a dinosaur? No. For all of those eons of time, there were no problems, there were no tragedies, and there was no possibility of betrayal or disappointment. There was only existence, a web of matter and energy and space and time, full of possibility but empty of significance.

  For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

  Hamlet’s words, not mine. You don’t have to be an overwrought Danish prince to conclude that existence without human consciousness sounds humane. It’s the gift you give to the child you don’t have, and that’s the gift I wanted to bestow.

  Jessica saw this issue differently. Her list of reasons in favor of passing the buck along would include: biological imperative (i.e., it’s what living organisms do; get used to it), wonder, curiosity, knowledge, surprise, discovery, love, friendship, food, art, books, music, movies, medicine, and an excuse to go trick-or-treating again. But she, as I mentioned before, is someone for whom anxiety and depression have never been problems. She could never understand the real reason I was afraid to become a father: If a child of mine were to look at me one day with her face twisted in anguish or grief or terror and cry out, “Why won’t my mind stop hurting?” I would never be able to forgive myself for the part I’d played in making that nightmare real.

  After my catharsis in New Hampshire, however, my soundtrack music had changed. At age forty, I felt relaxed rather than anxious. Instead of dissonance I sensed harmony, and the harmony seemed to permeate everything.

  There was another reason for my change of heart. In 1997, I had begun teaching writing as a volunteer at Central Juvenile Hall, where the most violent underage criminals in Los Angeles were sent to await trial and sentencing. I was invited to that hellish place to visit a creative writing class taught by a friend of mine, and my understanding was that the visit was to be a one-time-only deal. I’d never been to a lockup facility before, and the moment I got there, I wished I could be somewhere else. But what I saw and heard in the storage room where the class met took me by surprise, and before I knew it, I had agreed to start my own class there. My students were boys aged fifteen to seventeen, and most of them were facing murder charges. They had been dealt far worse hands than I had in life. Unlike me, they had substantial, real-life reasons to feel insecure, beginning with the fact that most of them had done things before being old enough to drive that would keep them in prison for the rest of their lives. They were frightened, angry, wounded, confused, self-hating, other-hating, and most of all lonely, but when they wrote about their wrecked lives and read their work aloud to each other, their loneliness subsided, even if only briefly. The intensity of their need for attention and encouragement, especially from adult males, was overwhelming, and I was an adult male who wasn’t obliged to help carry out their punishments. That was being taken care of by professionals. I was a writer who enjoyed reading what they wrote, and I encouraged them to write more; it was that simple. During the time we spent together, their guilt or innocence became irrelevant. Only writing mattered, and I didn’t have to pretend to appreciate the things they shared with me, which were their deepest concerns. Their suffering was painful to witness, but if the mere presence of a sympathetic teacher could relieve some of that suffering, it made me think: The presence of a sympathetic parent would be even better. Maybe, after all, I would know what to do if a child of my own were suffering, and who can say what, in the final tally, the real value of my child’s experience in this world would be? I’d met parents whose children had suffered, but I’d never heard them say they wished their child had never been born.