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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Happy Holidays

Other People’s Perspiration

The Notebook

Freddy Remembered

A Cliché

The Notebook

Life-Hacking

A Level of Incompetence

The Notebook

Writer’s Block

Fieldwork

The Notebook

Cemetery Picnic

Dreamwork

The Notebook

If a Scholar’s a Parasite

He Owed Her

The Notebook

Like a Mute Animal on an Operating Table

The Notebook

Ura Joke

The Yellow Legal Pad

His True Intentions

007: Golden Sorrow

Julia Maria Lustgarten

A Soft Target

Idiocy and Confusion

Pure Pointlessness

A Letter of Explanation

Of Course

Anna Remembered

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Happy Holidays

We met at the supermarket. I was waiting in line to buy the usual nutrient-free snacks — crackers, cookies, Pop-Tarts. She pulled up behind me with a cart full of staples — milk, eggs, canned tomatoes. As we neared the register, she unbuttoned her bright orange trench coat and searched its inside pocket. Whatever she expected to find there was missing. She frisked herself, patting her hips and torso with great urgency until, extreme measures deemed necessary, she removed her coat and shook it upside down. Nothing came out.

“Just my luck,” she muttered.

“Everything all right?” I felt obligated to ask.

Smiling apologetically, the woman said she had lost her wallet. Whether she had only herself to blame or a wily pickpocket in the crowded dairy aisle, she couldn’t say. Her voice quivered. Her eyes welled with tears. Would I loan her fifty dollars? She’d send me a check that very afternoon. Refusal would have made me seem hard-hearted in the minds of our fellow shoppers who had, I thought, overheard her little performance.

Each morning thereafter I opened my mailbox, anticipating her promised repayment. Each morning thereafter I closed it in a huff. No one wants to feel cheated. I suppose that’s why, on a cold winter day roughly two weeks after the incident at the supermarket, I followed my debtor home.

New Harbor felt like a ghost town. The museums were closed. So were the banks on Main Street. Even the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was always open, was shuttered. Only the Korean grocery had its lights on. The young woman who sold me a cup of coffee scowled at me when I requested cream and sugar.

I wandered down to the train station and past the large parking lot on Grand Army Avenue. Past the police headquarters, a monstrosity from the brutalist period with no windows at eye level, just yawning ribbed concrete. Past the Elm Street Connector, an abbreviated bit of highway that spat cars from the interstate directly into downtown and in the process bisected the city, a giant gash across its torso.

Rising beyond the connector was the New Harbor Coliseum, a 1970s arena that hosted second-rate hockey teams and outmoded musical acts until around the turn of the millennium, when City Hall announced that it was too expensive to maintain and shut it down. It was a beast and it was empty, a ruin that no tourist would ever visit.

Often caricatured as a pit stop between New York and Boston, New Harbor did have its charms. Like the New Harbor Green, the old town commons of the original Puritan settlement, precisely large enough to accommodate 144,000 souls — the number Revelation says will survive the Second Coming. Or Collegiate’s aspirational, neo-Gothic campus, designed to make ignorant Americans think the university dated to the Middle Ages, and visitors from Oxford or Cambridge think, Haven’t I seen this somewhere before? Here and there were expensive restaurants, swanky clothing stores with European names, and twelve-dollar-sandwich shops.

Yet there were more vacant lots and vacant storefronts than purveyors of overpriced sandwiches. Beyond the campus orbit, the pleasant spots were like oases in the desert and didn’t so much counteract the city’s general dinginess as make it more obvious. The fact that New Harbor was formerly considered a quaint New England town also intensified one’s awareness of its contemporary squalor. In the 1890s, a very well-known novelist called Hilldale Avenue — a wealthy strip crammed with mansions — “the most beautiful street in America.” Or possibly it was a very well-known painter who said that, or possibly the judgment was a local myth. The point being: It was once plausible that a celebrated artist would locate “the most beautiful street in America” in New Harbor. Not anymore. Not unless that artist had a passion for urban decay. The city’s graybrown industrial hues were rarely alleviated by greenery.

In this barren landscape, my debtor stood out. Rather, her trench coat did. She was jogging in place to keep warm at a red light, an orange pogo stick bobbing up and down. The right, the most reasonable, thing was to let the matter drop. Her infraction had been minor, after all, and I had work to do.

I should have gone home, shed my winter layers, and turned on my computer. In twenty minutes or less, a blinking cursor would have replaced the woman from the supermarket as the object of my attention. Instead, I gave pursuit.

She led me farther away from my apartment, farther from the desk where my Word documents waited patiently, and toward Worcester Square. I thought I’d find more activity in that historically Italian neighborhood, but there was no one out to admire the seasonal decorations: the archway draped with colored lights; the crèche in front of an old bakery; the tinsel on benches and bike racks. On St. John Street, the border between Worcester Square and the projects beyond, she paused in front of a gangly white bungalow with a chain-link fence and carpeting on the steps. She went inside and out of sight. I leaned against a cherry tree, wondering if I should ring her bell.

Her name, I learned, was Helen Langley.

For the first time since our initial encounter I observed her closely. In her black flared trousers and striped black-and-white sweater, she looked a bit like a Hollywood Parisian. She wore no makeup and no shoes. Her brown hair, parted down the middle, was white at the roots. Thin wrinkles bracketed her pink lips. Dark blue veins marred her pale skin.

“It’s an unusual day to call in a loan,” she said, standing at the door, “but whatever. Happy holidays.”

“Happy holidays,” I replied automatically.

Given the outdoor carpeting, I prepared myself to encounter a correspondingly ugly protective interior, with plastic on the couches and so forth. Instead I found a library-meets-bohemian style: gentle lighting and knockoff-Scandinavian chairs; books all over, on wooden shelving and stacked in every corner, on top of the old television set, on the rug under and around the dining-room table. Helen escorted me through the paper minefield to a den with a picture window facing the street.

“I’ll get my checkbook,” she said, and she left me alone.

While pursuing Helen I’d felt driven, almost instinctually. Having gained entry to her house, I felt adrift. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew I had a right to be there. In a bid to distract myself, I studied her messy book collection and found a wide aesthetic range: classic works of history, random novels, atlases, almanacs. Although I couldn’t discern any order, I saw that the books on the floor were in poor shape, with shabby bindings, whereas the ones piled up by the window seemed freshly restored. I also noticed a jar of glue and sheets of leather.

The radiator hummed. There was a digital clock by the door, the kind that displayed the day and date — 4:01, 4:02.

Holy Mother of God, it was December 25.

That explained it, everything — the closed stores and the Korean girl’s frown and the abandoned streets and Helen’s greeting. I’d stupidly assumed that she was one of those people who said “happy holidays” generically throughout the season. I should have listened to my mother’s voice mail that morning. Amid the nagging and the warning not to procrastinate, she would, I felt certain, have recycled her favorite Jewish-Christmas joke, the one about installing a parking meter on the roof.

I was on the verge of slipping out when Helen came back with a signed check and, adding to my shame, a tray, two cups, two saucers, two spoons, honey, and a pot of hot tea. My perception of my actions had shifted considerably in the past several seconds. What I’d told myself was a perfectly sensible unannounced visit now seemed petty and cruel — I was a regular Scrooge come to darken the holiest day of the year. And whereas I’d thought of Helen as my debtor, my calendrical idiocy meant that I was now more in her debt than she in mine.

Helen settled into an ancient armchair and gestured for me to sit in the one across from her. It sagged under my weight.

“Thank you — for taking me in,” I said haltingly, “on Christmas.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t actively celebrated Christmas since I was a teenager. But I get it. I get the need for company.”

“I’m Jewish,” I blurted out.

“O. K.,” she said, pausing between syllables.

I wasn’t certain if she was seeking to reassure or to mollify. The latter seemed condescending. O.K. was such a versatile and, therefore, ambiguous word. I pictured it in my head: O.K. O, period, K, period. Someone sounding out the word for the first time would have pronounced it like Helen did: “O” (pause) “K” (pause). Modern writers sometimes put periods between words where they didn’t belong to communicate dramatic or affected pauses. Got. It. Shut. Up. Screw. You. Up. Yours. But if a writer wanted to convey that a character paused while saying “O.K.,” he’d have to do so explicitly because of that word’s peculiarities. It calmed me to think of orthography instead of the fact that Helen was looking at me intently, waiting for me to speak. Her irises were bright green. Her eyelids drooped close to the nose. Her spirit animal was the gecko.

“Holiday decorations go up earlier and earlier every year!” I said.

“They don’t, though. Thanksgiving week. Always.”

“I’m pretty sure —”

“Always.”

I stirred my tea, silently conceding the point.

“All the stuff in here, what is it?” I asked, trying a different tack. “The leather and the glue?”

“It’s my work. I’m an antiquarian and a bookbinder.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Does it? I have to think about old books all day.”

“So do I. I study English.”

Helen scrunched her nose, either because she didn’t like English or because her tea was too bitter.

“At Collegiate, I guess.”

Usual reactions included feigned indifference (“Nice place, I hear”), eager networking (“Do you know …”), harsh oneupmanship (“Princeton said no?”), and classist disdain (“State school was good enough for my kids”).

“I’m not surprised. You have that look,” she said, indifferently disdainful. “Anyway, your relationship with old books is not like mine. Academics care about the ideas inside a book. Antiquarians care about dustcovers and bindings.”

“Don’t the contents matter at all?”

“Reputation matters. Famous books cost more than forgotten ones. Basically, though, we’re materialists, or fetishists.” Helen grinned as if she’d said something adorably naughty. “Our clients are fetishists too. They don’t buy books they want to read. They buy books they consider physically special because they’re rare or unusual: first printings, books signed by the author, books once owned by a notable politician. If they really cared about the contents, they’d just find a used two-dollar paperback.”

Helen’s delivery was fluid and monotone, almost as if she’d given her speech many times before. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she often had to explain how antiquarians were different from scholars. I was struck by her dismissive characterization of her chosen profession and by the pleasure she took in making it seem unintellectual. She was proud of her fetishistic materialism in the way a certain sort of American was proud of never having traveled to a foreign country.

“Maybe you know my uncle,” she said.

“Is he in the English department?”

“In a manner of speaking. He was a writer. Freddy Langley. Frederick, in print.”

I would never have guessed. Langley was a common name and Helen seemed, to me, unartistic: the sloppy scene at the supermarket, the orange trench coat, her line of work. This woman? That man?

Once the initial shock passed, I felt titillated by the connection, even a little flushed, and then, immediately, ashamed by my reaction. I looked down on people who texted their friends if they happened to sit next to a celebrity at a restaurant. Yet I felt something like self-importance because I was sitting across from the niece of a well-known author. Physical proximity to genetic proximity to fame.

After sunset we were left with only the light from a standing lamp. In the dimness, the den felt cozily antique. And I felt fine. I’d moved from anxiety to acceptance and now something resembling enjoyment in the strangeness of the situation. One day it would make a good story: The evening I drank tea with Frederick Langley’s niece. On December 25.

“I should tell you something,” I said, blushing. “I didn’t realize, when I rang your doorbell, that it was Christmas.”

Helen laughed. She looked away from me and out the window. It was too dark to discern the street or the neighboring houses. Still, I aped her. If someone had walked by he might have noticed two women staring straight in his direction, into the night, one face past life’s midpoint, the other past youth, in a cluttered room protected from the winter cold. We would have made for a nice painting, a portrait of what I supposed, in my ignorance, was the last time we would ever see each other.

Other People’s Perspiration

There were no Pop-Tarts left in my kitchen cabinet, presenting me with a choice: Skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Theoretically, there were other options available to me. I could, for instance, have resorted to the organic steel-cut oatmeal that I’d purchased in a fit of attempted self-improvement. But I’d gone too far by selecting the non-instant variety, and the thought of struggling at the stovetop was grossly unappealing — particularly since my reward for that labor would be … oats. Organic oats.

On the one hand, it was cold out. On the other hand, I was hungry. I stood in my kitchen, paralyzed by the prospect of making a decision. Again I rifled through the cabinet, hoping for a different result. Winston Churchill said a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d surprise an old box of Pop-Tarts hiding behind worthier items.

My meeting with my doctoral adviser was at four p.m., in four hours. Factoring in time to shower, dress, and walk to the English department, I had three hours and fifteen minutes to prepare. It was time to move on from the Pop-Tarts problem. It was time to act decisively. Was it possible, though, to work well on an empty stomach? Innumerable listicles suggested otherwise. The kitchen smelled like chemical lemon zest, the cleaning company’s signature scent. The stone tile felt chilly on my bare feet. I could skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Either way, I would eventually have to get dressed. Moreover, I would eventually have to shower. Or would I? Perhaps showering wasn’t strictly necessary. On second thought, it was not. Getting dressed, however, obviously was.

I matched a pair of jeans from my hamper with thick socks from a pile of clothes and old running shoes from the depths of my closet. And then I wrapped myself in a winter cocoon. And then I paused at the door, feeling cold air seep from the hallway into my apartment. And then I slipped off my running shoes and removed my hat. And then I put both articles back on and launched myself past the threshold.

One spends much of one’s life saying, or thinking, And then. And then I’ll graduate. And then I’ll get a job. And then I’ll get married. And then I’ll have a kid. And then the kid will go to school. And then I’ll get divorced. And then the kid will get married, and then divorced.

Or just: And then I’ll review my notes. And then I’ll see my adviser. And then I’ll go home. And then I’ll order dinner. And then I’ll watch television. And then I’ll fall asleep.

Seeing as I was no longer a teenager, I limited myself to unfrosted Pop-Tarts at breakfast. These came in five different flavors: strawberry, brown-sugar cinnamon, wild berry, apple, and blueberry. The middle three were revolting. The first and last were equally good. By 12:45 I had one strawberry and one blueberry spooning in my toaster. By 12:50 I was sitting on the rolling chair at the desk in my bedroom, ready to work on my dissertation, resisting the siren song of my down comforter. The desk was a mahogany behemoth out of place in our digital age, with its stacked drawers, shelves, and nooks meant to hold the debris of an intensely physical time. The down comforter was fluffy and soft. I rolled over to the bed. I rolled back to the desk.

The former owner of the desk, deceased, had, in his lifetime, been a usurer in charge of a veritable army of usurers, or so my mother had told me — I’d hardly known him, my grandfather. He was a highly successful, disreputable businessman who, from what I gathered, had clawed his way out of poverty by sinking other people into it. This was abhorrent. However: He’d left me the desk and a heap of money, so I was inclined to forgive his tactics and think kindly of him. Without his largesse, I would have led a far less pleasant life. I might have had to earn petty cash by grading moronic undergraduate papers, leaving me little time for research, including the research currently spread out on my grandfather’s desk.

The nutritional facts on the back of the Pop-Tarts box informed me that a strawberry pastry contained two hundred calories, fifty of which came from fat. The first ingredient was enriched flour, the ninth was dried strawberries, followed by dried pears, dried apples, and leavening. A blueberry pastry was identical in every way except that it contained dried blueberries rather than dried strawberries.

My dissertation, my heartbreaking work of staggering scholarship, was very nearly finished. Soon I would print out the two-hundred-plus pages for the last time. Soon I would bring those pages to the university copy shop and have them bound in leather. Soon I would enter the job market and bask in the praise of the usually taciturn interviewers, uncorked by my greatness. Next I would turn my dissertation into my first book. I would receive grants. I would accept visiting professorships in Paris and Rome. I would give well-attended talks at literary festivals. My scholarship would breach the academic-real-world divide and grace the pages of the New York Review of Books. A dark-haired man with a British accent would recognize my virtuosity and excuse my lack of charm.

Any student of narrative would agree that my life had been leading up to a brilliant dissertation and a secure position at a topnotch university. Of course that was my future; it was a matter of course. Even as a child, when my mother read to me at night, I knew where the stories were headed and could guess the characters’ motivations. That’s the protagonist’s long-lost sister, I’m sure of it. The man in the mustache will betray his betrothed for her diamond earrings. Why else would the author linger on their shiny contours? I had never seriously considered a career unmoored to reading and writing.

Narratively speaking, success could not but lie ahead for the valedictorian of a pressure-cooker high school who had finished summa cum laude at an elite college and had her pick of graduate programs. As had been expected, Bs an affront to her — my — honor. At twenty-two, I published my first article. (A spruced-up version of a term paper on the use of coincidence in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.) At twenty-four, I published a second. (Mistaken identity as allegory for literary misinterpretation in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.) At twenty-six, I passed my oral exams with high honors. There was just one step left for me to take, a step that would come as naturally as — as taking steps. As walking.

Titled “Where Does Art Come From?” my dissertation was an intellectual history of inspiration. To early civilizations, it was a gift — or curse — from the gods. The ancient Greeks held the Muses responsible for inspiration, which they distinguished from skill or technical ability; mere artisans toiled to refine their craft, whereas artists were mouthpieces for what divine entities wished to express. But if ventriloquism was semiautomatic, it was still exhausting and not exactly fun. Plato in Ion described poetic inspiration as a sort of possession, a maddening ordeal.

The Hebrew tribes also looked to the divine. Samuel gave Saul fair warning that Yahweh’s inspirational methods were heavyhanded: “The spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy … and you will be changed into a different person.” Christians replaced Yahweh with the Holy Ghost. Tertullian, for instance, explained that God, through the Holy Ghost, “flooded” the minds of the prophets. Granted, Jews and Christians were preoccupied with revelation, not epic poetry, but in those days there wasn’t such a clear distinction between theology and fiction.

As Western societies became more secular, the explicit God talk fell out of fashion. The Romantics compared the artistic process to a passive chemical reaction. They argued that poets were — unconsciously — sensitive to mysterious energies or winds, which they converted into creative enterprise. Yes, wind was a metaphor, but not for anything terribly concrete. “Poetry,” Shelley said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.” On the contrary, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”

Then along came Sigmund Freud, who said that what his forebears had thought was supernatural or, at any rate, external to the self was actually the subconscious at work. Writers wrote, painters painted because of early childhood trauma, deep psychological wounds, which they sublimated into poems, novels, paintings. Marxists, for their part, thought that was just as silly as Shelley’s fading-coal theory. They looked not to infancy but to the economy, theorizing that art was always, necessarily, an expression of social conditions. Artists were mirrors.

Although the concept of inspiration had changed dramatically over the centuries, I argued that one element remained steady: Everyone seemed to think that it was out of the artist’s control. The artist cannot train the Muses or the Holy Ghost. He cannot force his mind to channel inconstant winds. He cannot will his parents to traumatize him. He cannot tame macroeconomic trends.

I also argued that, although this lack of control in one sense minimized the role of the artist, it simultaneously made the artist seem special. Art was not just another trade. If a young woman decides she wants to be a doctor, she can go to medical school and learn about the human body. If a young man decides he wants to be a builder, he can find a job at a construction company and learn about concrete. But if that same young woman or young man decides, No, I’d rather be an artist, then it’s game over. You’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you happen to have been chosen by God/have the right disposition to channel winds/have had a difficult childhood. Either you’ve been touched, or you haven’t.

But — this was totally ridiculous, was it not? All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds became artists, and no brain scan had ever discovered some artist-specific pathway. Each and every theory of inspiration was bullshit designed to make artists feel as though they belonged to a special class, even though there was no evidence of that class beyond the tautology that all artists had something in common — which was that they were artists.

“It’s a little thin,” said Professor Carl Davidoff. My adviser was short and pudgy and somehow pulled off the trick of looking swarthy despite having light skin, a result of his thick, dark, almost black curly hair and equally thick, dark eyebrows. For a full professor, he was young, in his late thirties. He cleaned his glasses to avoid taking in my expression. “The historical overview is fine but your conclusion, your actual thesis, feels a little thin,” he repeated.

“Care to elaborate?”

“My assessment is more or less the same as it was three months ago, and six months ago, and twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in —”

“This has changed a lot in the last twelve months —”

“Let me finish, Anna,” he interrupted. He was in the habit of using my name when he wanted to convey that he meant business, like a kindergarten teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “It’s a good observation: There’s a seemingly universal tendency to place inspiration beyond the artist’s control. You believe this tendency, this assumption, is wrong, even stupid. Fine. But if you really think that all theories of inspiration are stupid — all of them — then you need to suggest an alternative. I’ve said this before. You keep ignoring me and fine-tuning what you have instead.”

“It’s just work.”

“What is?”

“That’s my alternative theory. There’s no such thing as inspiration. Writing is work like anything else. It’s just creative work instead of physical work or what have you. Bankers bank. Plumbers plumb. Sculptors sculpt. Writers write. I once heard Naomi Wolf quote her father: ‘The writer who goes out with the bucket daily seems to provoke the rain.’ He had the guts to make art sound mundane.”

“Citing other people’s arguments won’t impress me. You always do that when you’re not sure what to say. If you believe the Wolf line, do the work of proving it. You need a case study. I’ve said this before: Enough with the lit review. Choose an author to examine closely. His biography. His output. Think about what it is that caused him to write. Connect what happened off the page to what happened on it. Don’t smirk. This is basic. Fisher-Price My First Academic Paper.”

“Wow.”

“Sorry. I’d recommend Milton if there weren’t already dozens of books on his process. He spent years after university obsessively reading the classics without writing much at all, living off his father’s investments. He traveled through Europe, still not writing, dabbled in politics, then, finally, drafted a drama that would become his epic. He said it came easily! You must know the line — the celestial patroness who nightly dictates to the slumbering poet his ‘unpremeditated verse.’ ”

“How nice, to wake up and find a few more pages of Paradise Lost at your feet.”

Better than a nocturnal emission, I did not add.

Professor Davidoff’s office, laid out like a psychoanalyst’s with a leather armchair for him and a leather couch for his visitors, was overheated and stuffy. I wondered why he didn’t open the window since he was visibly uncomfortable; a few beads of sweat had trickled down his forehead and I had to resist the urge to dab him with a tissue. Some future civilization would master temperature control. It was thirty degrees outside and what felt like eighty degrees inside, hastening climate change.