“To be honest,” she said, “I sort of envy you your views. The trouble with me is I’m an agnostic about everything.”
“I’m a believer. I’ve gotten to the age when it’s smart to buy into Pascal’s wager, but it’s not God I believe in. You know what I believe in.”
They ate in silence for a minute, then Augie said, “What Montaigne said about it? ‘The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the young know everything’—though of course that old geezer never got the opportunity to meet Alida, which was his loss.”
TO BEAT THE TRAFFIC, they set off late on Sunday morning after a light brunch, Alida doubly preoccupied in the passenger seat with her iPod and Augie’s book. It was like driving alone, and for once Lucy was content to be left in solitude with her thoughts, which began to tumble from her mind as soon as they’d made the right turn at the end of Sunlight Beach Road.
Magically, the piece she’d thought unwritable was unfolding itself inside her head. Woe to those who conclude! as Augie had said. Which was what was wrong with most feature journalism, her own included. Profilists were no better than the hacks who went on a week’s freebie in some five-star hotel in Venice, then came back to regale a credulous world with “their” Italy. The conceit of it! The idea that you could “capture” a city, a country, or a man in twenty-odd paragraphs; you might as well say you’d captured Seattle with a digital photo of the Space Needle, or, as Augie tiresomely insisted on calling it, the Space Noodle. The judicious tone, the summing up, the obituary-like placing of a terminal period at the end of your subject’s “life”—all flummery and hokum, the smoke-and-mirrors of the journalist’s trade. When she looked back on it, Lucy realized she’d tried to bury everyone she’d ever written about — Gates, Cobain, Jeff Bezos, everybody. Each piece had aimed at the finality of a tombstone. Here lies the body of…in five thousand words.
Well, not this piece. She imagined it rather as she expected a postmodern New York loft might look — all the beams and pipes of its construction, its artifice, would be not only exposed but highlighted. They, as much as August Vanags, would be its subject. It would be full of tourist snapshots of Augie on the patio, on the beach, lecturing a dinner table, up in his study quoting Montaigne and E. B. White, or out kayaking with Alida, who had to be in the picture, too. Augie with Minna, Augie trying to learn his Schubert sonata, Augie the European, Augie the American, Augie the neocon, Augie the nature-lover…But they would be just that — snapshots, nothing more, disjointed one from another like the capricious jumble of images that every camera-toting traveler brings back from a trip, some more in focus than others. They wouldn’t add up, wouldn’t form a narrative, because the narrative of this piece would lie elsewhere. The GQ guy had spoken of a “unicorn hunt.” She’d catch a multitude of glimpses of the elusive unicorn, but the piece would be about the comic intricacies of the chase, and its ultimate futility.
They were on the ferry now, but Lucy didn’t even remember parking on board, and there was no temptation to leave the car for the passenger lounge. Alida was as lost in her own thoughts as she was in hers.
She’d write about the journalist on the job: the phone call from the editor — the pen-in-hand race through the book — the rushed and skimpy library work — the routine Googling — the meeting with the subject — the leaps to judgment on the subject’s “character”—the amateur espionage — the rapid shifts of mood and mind — the gathering suspicions — the trespassing back and forth across the border between reporting and friendship — all that and more. Lucy saw, but would not write, herself in the third person, as a harassed, untidy, inept figure, floundering out of her depth yet always puffed up by her habitual old illusion that there must be something to be gotten to the bottom of.
There’d be no bottom to this piece, no key to the “real” Augie, no problems solved, no pseudo-urbane assembly of Augie in legible and transparent form on the page. Rather, readers would find themselves in the same position as the writer — perplexed, fascinated, engaged, and sometimes repelled by August Vanags — just as aware of their own shortcomings as she was of hers, aware that facets and surfaces were just facets and surfaces, and that, like the writer, they must not conclude.
For these inconclusive times, it would be a topically inconclusive piece, and the most ambitious thing Lucy had ever tried to write. Augie wouldn’t be hurt by it; she’d make him laugh at himself when he wasn’t laughing at her. The visits and kayaking lessons would continue — maybe even through the writing of the piece — and their growing friendship would not be damaged. Yet she’d tell the truth. Most of all, she’d tell the truth about journalism, which was that ninety percent of the time there was no real truth to tell.
When the Union Street exit came up, Lucy was out of breath with her windfall cascade of ideas. She wanted to get a rough outline of the article down on paper before it slipped from the present and became something she had to ransack her bad memory for. Entering the apartment, she ignored the red flashes on her answering machine and went straight to her desk, notebook in hand. She’d never felt more certain of what needed to be done.
11
“MOM’S WRITING,” Ali said.
“Ah, one of those days.”
Ali was full of her trip, and Tad was happy to listen. Elementary Buddhism helped him suppress every niggle of what might otherwise have been his irritation at Ali’s wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of this reactionary old coot. When she showed him the inscription in the book, he said, “Fantastic — cool how he calls himself uncool, huh?”
“He’s pretty cool. We saw dogfish again when we were kayaking, and I wasn’t scared at all.”
“You get your homework done?”
“Nah, it’s just some math that’ll only take half an hour.”
“Bring it here. If your mom’s so busy writing, I guess I can take care of dinner. I’ve got strawberries and cream, and pasta, and some pesto sauce that I made fresh. We can all feast on that.”
“Great,” Ali said. “Minna, that’s his wife, she’s like a gourmet cook.”
Tad needed a few more grams of Buddhism for that.
Over Tad’s pasta and pesto and ten-dollar wine, Lucy was in a state of silent distraction, hair all over the place like Struwwelpeter’s. Declining the wine, she asked for water, a sure symptom of major mental disturbance. Every so often she’d rouse herself, or try to.
“Did he come here over the weekend?”
“I don’t think so. He’s probably sulking in his tent.”
“Whose tent?” Ali said.
“Achilles’ tent. The landlord’s tent. We’re talking about Mr. Lee.”
“He’s got a tent?”
“It’s just an expression,” Lucy said. “Achilles was this ancient Greek who spent a lot of time sulking in his tent.” Which was about as near as she came to sociability during the course of the entire meal. When she left, after eating three strawberries, she said, “Tad — God, I’m sorry I’m so elsewhere. But thank you. It was lovely.”
“Go enjoy your elsewhere.” Tad kissed her, cheek to cheek. “It’s not as if we’re not used to it, honey. We just wish you were on medication.”
Tad and Ali washed the dishes, then played chess.
Ali took Tad’s last bishop with her knight. “Check…mate!”
“The king is dead,” Tad said.
BY TEN O’CLOCK, Lucy had covered twenty-five pages of her notebook with scrawled notes. To bring off what she wanted to do, in seven thousand words or less, would take extraordinary craft and guile. There was material here for a full-length book about the relationship between journalist and subject, and the prospect of the sheer labor involved in boiling it down to an article made her feel defeated before she’d even begun. But in the morning it would all look different. She needed the fresh eye that she’d bring back from the school run.