The father was at work. The father was always at work. Once, before their second had come, the father and the mother and their then only child, aged two, drove by the father’s work — it was referred to as a campus though he was not a teacher — and their daughter said, Daddy lives? Daddy lives? while pointing toward the campus. They all laughed. So cute.
The father was at work. It was mid-afternoon, around 3 p.m., when the chatter over the cubicle tops seemed to lag and the constant beetle clicking of the keyboards seemed to quiet for a few minutes. It was the span of time when it became impossible to explain to oneself what one was doing, at both a micro level and a macro level. The father was thinking about the author and about his new book. He’d read numerous reviews and several interviews. The praise, that kind of slow compulsory standing ovation, where critics put their drinks down and stand up and dust themselves off to begin clapping, had begun, now a month or so after publication, and the father was dipping daily into the online wave. He’d assembled the author’s biography from available data. He’d even read one of his pieces, entirely in the “read more” preview pane on Amazon. He was even thinking of buying the book. He was not unimpressed.
Then, he didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of this before, he realized that the author would be on tour, and that there was a possibility he might come close to Memphis. It could happen. He quickly started searching. When he was motivated, he could be very efficient online. There it was: two Sundays from now, at the big bookstore out east in the heart of old money Memphis. He was doing a signing at 2 p.m. It was a twenty minute drive from where the family lived. Now he could make that, certainly. Right?
Hey, can I go to a book signing thingy at the DK Sunday?
time?
2
this sunday? we’ve got Harlan’s party
no no. Next sunday. The 8th.
He awaited her response. He awaited the arrival of the percolating dots that promised her response. Maybe he could ask Stephanie from Accounting to come over and help out, though his wife hated Stephanie, for some reason. It was the period of his life when any non-work yet away-from-family time was intensely negotiated, because a meal had to be made, an ass had to be wiped, a stomach bug had to be squashed. If nothing else, there was a sink full of plastic that needed to be washed by hand.
sure that’s fine. just might need your help getting naptime started
sure, no prob
yr day good?
#
It must be said that the father’s interest in this author was not entirely platonic. He too wanted to write. He had written. He’d even published a handful of stories, three book reviews, an essay about guns inspired by his grandfather, and once, in the thinnest of journals, stapled together somewhere in Minnesota, a poem. He had gone to two schools and taken all the seemingly necessary classes one takes when one wants to be a writer. In short, this wasn’t some personal fad but an endeavor that he’d spent his 20s pursuing. But now he was deep into the weeds of his 30s — the wet field of his 30s, mud steadily caking on his boots. We’re going on a bear hunt! He now understood what an escrow account was. He’d priced car insurance competitively. He had had an almost friendly argument with fellow parents about BPH levels in conventional plastics.
What the father had not yet done and what truth be told seemed increasingly far off was publish a book. He wasn’t sure if he had “enough” to publish a book, meaning enough material. His wife did not roll her eyes when he said this, which was the reaction he was always waiting for. Instead, she took a kind of encouraging pliable silence, a willed refusal to be annoyed at his own blind self-absorption. The father of course wanted to publish a book because that’s what people who wrote did and a book was what led to reviews, and interviews, and even perhaps a chance to teach at a college, which he had only done once as a graduate student and which he had in fact hated. It was a semester of grading 40 essays a week on the most banal topics imaginable, and the essays were executed with the utmost contempt, when they were given any energy at all. But teaching after a book, teaching writing classes — it would be much different. The students would be self-selecting. The women would predominantly wear glasses. They would be more inclined to pay attention to him. Really all the father wanted out of life was a steady stream of young women wearing glasses paying attention to him.
There was something about this author that the father couldn’t ignore. As someone into his mid-30s, the father was improving his ability to ignore contemporaries who could be perceived as radically more successful than he was, people who might under certain angles of light illuminate the father’s own inability to live up to his own (always theoretical) potential. This became a necessary life skill if one didn’t want to live through successive waves of envy and rage.
Why was this author an exception? Well, first he was male, and only a couple of years older than the father. The father had become a finely tuned device for measuring someone’s age and graphing that age against the vertical axis of their potential and then cross-overlaying his own corresponding graph to see how they lined up. It made a kind of sense that this author was so successful. He was at least two years older than the father. And if his Tumblr was to be believed, he’d only had one child. From his preliminary internet research the author did not appear to have attended graduate school. Instead he had been working at magazines for years, and not working for magazines as camouflage for a succession of unpaid internships writing topical lists, but actual reporting for actual articles. In fact, the book that he was now out promoting was a collection of those magazine pieces, an absurd proposition. They were now called “essays.” JFC. He had written one book previously, something about horses. The father had a theory that the smoothest path to authorial success was to write a first book young about either horses, brain science, dogs, cats, one’s sexual awakening (if female, or if male and gay), one’s misspent youth (if male and heterosexual), one’s abuse by the clergy, or one’s culturally mixed Middle Eastern upbringing in the Midwest. It was best to combine these elements: it would be beneficial to write a female coming-of-age story located in a western rural state that involved sexual awakening and horses and the brief threat of clergy abuse, with a late-breaking questioning of one’s sexuality. The only thing missing from a book like that was a dog and Abraham Lincoln. Or a dog named Abraham Lincoln.
Despite knowing this, the father had not written such a book. And it wasn’t out of some principled stand against such books existing. In fact, the father had not written much at all. He had started a few books, he had written several stories, really more like extended jokes than anything coherent or marketable. But at this rate he was going to have a very nice collection of published fiction ready to make the rounds of agents when he was somewhere in his mid 50s. Of course, he knew that agents did not consider story collections, remarked on this fact bitterly to his friends (who would listen), resolved to write a novel that perhaps involved a horse, and continued to go to work.
In addition to being young, male, and ridiculously successful, this author was also southern. Well, he was not truly southern, he was marginally southern — motherfucker was from Kentucky — while the father was fully, unavoidably southern, some might say belligerently southern. And yet the author was in the middle of a full-on southern bear hug by the Southern Literary Establishment. Which, to be sure, is not that big of a deal, demographically speaking, but it is still something, in particular something that this father had dreamed of withstanding, the bear hug, had dreamed of living through since he had been old enough to realize there was such a thing as a Southern Literary Establishment, which gave out bear hugs. It was not easy seeing all those fragments of praise being issued by the gray-headed white men scattered around the southeastern United States, laying out in terms tired and undistinguished how distinguished this new writer’s work was. He was successful enough to draw praise from people he did not personally know. Or maybe he did know all the people who were blurbing him, which made him even more fearsome, suggesting as it did that he was — by dint of talent and/or conspicuous conference attendance and/or just going to a lot of lunches — the most well-connected non-NYC living male under fifty this side of the Mississippi River. He was quickly becoming the person shiny magazines called when young artist-celebrities died and they needed eight-hundred words of non-vapid appreciation. When they wanted that think piece thought through.
#
Sunday. They made the mistake of eating lunch out. Eating out with kids was always a mistake, the father maintained. They didn’t get home until dangerously close to 1:30. They lived all the way downtown on a little island that was not actually an island, but it was on the river so it felt exotic and Nantuckety to refer to it as an island. The father immediately took the four-year-old to pee. The mother tripped backward over a strategically placed red tractor. The baby sat in his punkin seat on the dining room table, sucking on the garage door opener. In the distance, one could hear the door opening and closing, opening and closing. He began a constructive activity for his daughter to engage in during naptime, which meant he got out the iPad and jabbed at it frowning while his daughter attempted to decide which program she wanted to watch. Caillou was forbidden, she knew. She settled on Word Girl, a program which had initially excited the father but which now was just part of the distracting background noise of domestic life. One only paid attention if the signal peaked, distorted. The mother with hand on sore back took an Alleve and went upstairs to attempt to put down the baby for a nap. It was 1:42. The father began to pace their small house, waiting for his chance to leave.
The wife came downstairs at 2:03. The father stood at the door with his keys. The mother fell into the couch.
“Where do you think you’re going? That’s right. Your thing. When do you think you’ll be back?”
“Three-thirty at the latest, I imagine.”
“Well okay.”
“Are you still sure it’s okay I go?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”
“Positive?”
“Yes, go.” Just then the baby let out a shriek, a solitary warning shot, a reminder of just who was in charge. “Go before I change my mind.” The snappy Word Girl theme music played him out.
#
The bookstore was palatial — part bookstore, part toy store, part café. It was the perfect spot for ladies who just wanted to grab a quick bite during the week. In short, it was a kind of power broker location within the city’s domestic set, the woman’s suburban version of the Biltmore’s male bar. He knew the signing would be held in the back, in a little clearing just behind the magazine quadrangle. He pivoted his way through the Sunday shoppers. This bookstore always seemed crowded, sold every kind of decorative or organizational knick-knack one could imagine, and had long ago pioneered the technique of selling anything remotely book-related in the bookstore. In the furthest recess of the store was the kid’s section with a huge, alluring train station set up in the middle, a honeypot to the under seven set. There was always a gaggle of moms on the bleacher seating, nursing coffees, thumb-rubbing their phones, clucking. In the clearing sat a lone table, a pile of books, and a sheet of paper. It was 2:18. He had driven as fast and as strategically as he was able.
There was no author anywhere to be found. He walked up to the table. The books were a pile of his newest, published as a paperback original. The sheet said “sign up” at the top, and there was a pen lying beside it. No one had signed up. He was curious whether or not there would be a crowd. Sometimes he felt as if he were the only person in the city who was reading books, really reading books, the right books, the books that deserved to be read. He realized this was something he could never say aloud to anyone because they would look at him like he was insanely narcissistic. He wrote his name and phone number on the paper. He looked around the store. He pivoted like a drone surveying a field in Afghanistan. It was the usual Sunday crowd, or what he thought was the usual crowd. He could not see the author anywhere. He knew what he looked like from the internet. Light brown hair, high receding line, frequent stubble, essentially lipless, a surprising, almost affected baritone, an intentionally rakish tendency to leave the top two shirt buttons unbuttoned. Not unattractive, which the father had a theory about. He grabbed one of the books. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Did he need to buy it first? He put the book back. The seats they had set up were empty except for one old funkster toward the back in a raincoat who was deliberately wetting his index finger as he bent and flipped each glossy page of Vogue. He did not seem to be here for the reading. Certainly he hadn’t missed everything. Just then a woman walked by. She looked harried, but like being harried was a uniform she wore to work, a kind of hat. He’ll be right back, she said. He’s gone to the cafe to grab a bite to eat but he says he’ll come back to sign more books. As if there had been some gigantic rush.
So the father retreated to the seats and sat down for a few minutes and began thumbing through his phone, checking his tweets, dipping into Facebook, the land of baby photos and passive aggressive life updates, more tweets. Then, the guilt of playing with his phone while sitting in a bookstore while waiting to meet an author he ostensibly admired. He went into the magazine quadrangle and approached the lone literary magazine shelf. Everything about American literature could be gleaned from a magazine section of a large bookstore. An encyclopedia of tits and bridal tricks. He picked up a Paris Review and began thumbing through it. Perhaps it would function like a beacon. He looked over the edge of the periodical and over the edge of the magazine shelf and scanned heads for the author. He was out there somewhere.
What was the father going to say to the author? Did he think they would become friends? What was the point of meeting people in person that you more successfully met on the page or screen? Why trade that private distillate for the fumbling awkward orchestra of meeting in person? What was he going to tell this guy? Hey, I like your stuff? Hey, I am ravenously jealous of your success? Hey, I appreciate you and what you’re up to? As the reading area continued to seem abandoned, the true purpose of his visit became clearer: he was there out of respect. His bodily presence was merely a way of signaling to the author that he, the father, was paying attention. He was a representative from the unswept corners.
But was that the real reason? Was there not a thin, curled whittling thrill of seeing someone in person who was so apparently successful? Was there not an attempt to bond with that person as a peer rather than just an audience member — a position of dependency and inferiority? Was it an attempt to crawl out of the darkness of the seats onto stage for a brief moment? Or did he just want to see what the guy really looked like? To verify that he did in fact exist and to return home knowing that he was another male human in the steady proliferation outside the father’s house?
Nothing. There was no action at the table or in the reading/signing area. He took his Paris Review with him back over to the table where he had inspected the sheet of paper. There was his name and his phone number. Why they needed his phone number he had no idea. But he was still enough of a student that he followed orders.
The harried employee came by. He should be here in just a few minutes, she said. He will be right back. She craned her neck up and looked over the shelves toward the bistro, then waddled on.
The father discovered a Paris Review in his hands. Where did this come from? He sat down on the first row and began flipping the pages. He’d given up reading literary magazines because the stories inside enraged him. How could these stories be printed and not his? It was a reading comprehension problem at its most primeval. He looked toward the bistro. A brown-headed man was craning his own head and looking over in his general direction. Then the head receded back into the general population of heads.
The father tried to lean back in his chair and peer around the book shelves to get a better look inside the bistro. Was that him? Was he back there somewhere? He momentarily lost his balance and his chair swung back to the ground. He got up and moved a couple of rows back.
He leaned back again, this time more securely, and he could see a brown-headed man in a sport coat sitting at the bar and talking to a tall brunette man. Just a couple of dudes having lunch. Was that him? Did one of these guys look over in his direction? He watched them eat and talk. They had an easy jokey away toward each other that suggested they’d known each other a long time.
Yes, the one on the left. That was the author. In profile, laughing in between bites, something about the exact position of his hairline and his shade of stubble. That’s the author.
Okay. Fine. So he is having lunch with a friend. I can continue to wait. The father went back to his phone. He tried not to notice the time. He’d been waiting twenty-two minutes.
Thirty-five minutes. He continued to look over at the bistro bar. It was definitely more interesting than anything on his phone. In fact, this was the first time he could remember when there was something much more interesting nearby than anything trapped within his phone.
The Vogue-reading funkster had moved on. The only sad sack still waiting around pretending to read was the father. The penguin lady started to waddle in his direction, looked toward him and squinted in pain, and then changed direction. Was that directed at him?
Come on now, this is fucking ridiculous. I’ve been here forty-five minutes. A waiter arrived at the table in the bistro. It appeared like tab settling was imminent. It was awfully hard to inconspicuously stare while leaning back and turning sideways and basically leering in the middle of a cleared reading-signing nook area. Yes, tabs were being divvied up. The black-haired guy stood. Man, he’s tall. Serious, corner office-level stature. The father eased his own chair back down and sat forward like an athlete waiting to be called into the game. He put down the ridiculous Paris Review. He walked up to the table and grabbed one of the books and held it with both hands. He looked back at the bistro but that section of the bar was now blocked from view. He sat down on the front row, crossed his legs professionally, the book resting on his crotch.
After a moment the tall black-haired friend and the penguin intersected at the signing table.
“Did you —”
“Yeah, it was great.”
“He’s great.”
“So great,” said the black-haired friend. “We go way back. He’s really going places.”
“Well thank you for coming.”
“You bet. I’m just going to grab —” and he reached forward to grab another paperback to join the no doubt already signed copy pinned to his chest. Neither acknowledged the sitting father. Then they walked off in the general direction of the front of the store.
Probably friends from school, the infinite years of school. And what is this “going places” bullshit? Dude is already at that place. Motherfucker got his book of essays written up in the New Yorker for the love of god. This guy doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. And he’s the one who gets to have lunch with him? He’s the one who gets to shoot the shit at the bar just because they played seventh-grade basketball together or whatever? This is why I’m here. Because no one understands what he’s done, what he has accomplished. No one appreciates him.
Ten more minutes passed. Still, no one came by. He thought okay surely now that lunch is over it would be time for the author to come back by. The penguin said he would come back by. But there was no one. The bookstore was an old lady ghost town. He looked at his phone. It was 3:23. He’d been there over an hour.
He stood, which seemed to make him angrier, but he didn’t want to sit down again because his ass hurt. He’d lost the ability to sit still. How dare they treat me this way? He approached the table. There were four copies of the book left. To the pile he added his own. He scanned his immediate area, desperate for someone to appear and rebuke him with their presence, but there was no one. Well fuck him if he thinks I’m going to buy his goddamned book, mister fucking epic skip town lunch fucker. He picked up the pen and crossed out his name on the list of potential signees. And below it he wrote, “left after waiting over an hour.” And then he underlined “over,” because that would make it clearer somehow. And then he added, “I am not a loser.” Immediately he regretted it. He should have written “some loser.” No, he shouldn’t have written that either. I don’t appreciate being treated like a loser. No, no. It sounded crazy, desperate, loserish. He thought about scratching it out, but then there would be the forest of maniac pen redaction which would be an even greater loser move than writing what he had written. His pen hovered over the intractable words in a fugue of panic. He dropped the pen and turned to leave. He had a sneer ready for the penguin but he couldn’t find her anywhere as he walked to the front of the store, turning left, then right through the maze of bookshelves. It felt like Pac-Man, but then who were the ghosts?
“Can I help you?”
The father turned around automatically, before thinking. It was the author.
“I’m glad I caught you. I missed you at the signing station. Do you . . . Did you want to get your book signed?”
“Sure,” the father said. “That would be great.”
“Do you wanna . . .” and the author craned his head backward, toward the little table three maze rows back.
“Yes, sure,” the father said, not entirely clear to what he was agreeing to.
He walked behind him. The author looked rumpled, like he’d slept in his clothes. He was about the father’s height and his hairline was much farther back than his pictures indicated. The hairline wasn’t even really receding anymore. Dude was basically bald.
“Yeah I was grabbing lunch with an old high school buddy and it ran long. There was something up in the kitchen. You know how those things go.”
“Sure. Did you go to school in Memphis?” He chastised himself for asking the question, already knowing the answer from his preliminary research.
“No, I grew up in Kentucky, but my parents sent me to a boarding school in Tennessee, on the east side, near Chattanooga.”
“Oh, yeah, um, what’s it. Good school.”
“Yeah, it was something.”
They arrived at the clearing.
“You live here in Memphis?” the author asked.
“Yeah, I’m originally from Birmingham, but we ended up here for a job after schools and stuff, touring around the southeast.”
“Oh, yeah, well this is a cool town. I ended up in Raleigh.”
“Uh-huh.”
“North Carolina.”
“Right, of course. I’ve heard that’s lovely. Is that like in the research thing or like outside of it? You know the . . . the polygon?”
“Oh, yeah it’s in the triangle.”
“How’d you end up there?”
“Wife’s a doctor.”
“Ah, smart move,” the father said.
“Yeah, well I sure couldn’t be one. My kid skins a knee and I pass out.”
The father snorted automatically. Instantly he was afraid he’d snotted on himself. He tried to check but make it look like he was merely scratching his cheek.
“I hear that,” the father said through his hand. “My kids and I have a deal: no blood and I’ll make them three squares a day. Any blood and they’re on their own.”
“That’s funny,” the author said without laughing. He appeared sincere though. “Let me get you a book.”
The author turned toward the table with the scattered paperbacks, the pen, and the sheet, which was still there proudly, waiting to be discovered. The father did not move. He had not frozen. He could have moved if he wanted to. It was only that it was impossible for him to backflip out of the entire store in that moment, so option B was to stay rooted in his feet. The author touched the desk, grabbed a paperback. Was he lingering over the sheet of paper?
“Do you want me to make it out to someone in particular?”
“Uh like a gift?”
“Just to you?”
“Sure.”
“What’s your name?”
“Uh, my name? It’s Michael. My name’s Michael,” the father said. It was his actual name. He was powerless to invent another.
“Great.”
The author was able to hold the book in his left while purposefully signing it with his right, the mark of a true professional.
“Michael, I’m Jared. It’s nice to meet you,” he said, handing him the autographed copy.
“Thank you. Nice to meet you too. I’m really looking forward to reading it.”
“Hey, thank you. I’m really proud of it. Years of work. Hey, you working on anything?”
“Me? Uh, yeah, you know, stories and stuff.”
“Oh, that’s great. God, it’s hard with kids. To get any work done. If my wife wasn’t a doctor, I don’t know what I’d do. I thought of dedicating the book to our nanny.”
“Ooh, probably an unpopular choice — not that anyone actually reads front matter anymore.”
“Precisely! It would’ve just been a waste. It would have gone over everyone’s head. So I dedicated it to my wife instead.”
“Probably the better diplomatic move.”
“You’re probably right. You’re a smart man, Michael,” and in between them was a hand, floating. Apparently it belonged to Jared, and Michael was supposed to shake it.
In the car he finally looked. In between the father’s name and the author’s signature, he’d written Thanks for coming! And for waiting so long!
#
Michael parked in the driveway. He’d left the garage door open, and the rear mouth of his house gaped at him. There sat the van, site of pulverized snack cracker dust and dried formula, swirled into a mixture and slowly drying within the machine’s crevices. There sat all of the stuff they couldn’t fit in their house, a type of accumulating museum of aspirational American familydom. A mysterious unlabeled box of books, a broken treadmill, a shrink-wrapped econo-pak of 60-watt light bulbs. A pile of objects that felt demographically pre-determined. The father sat staring at the pile, the exhaust of his house, his life. They didn’t know he was home yet. Usually at the sound of the garage door opening, someone opened the house door, to see what was taking him so long, his daughter hip-weaving through the debris to see daddy. The fuck is a bistro anyway? One shouldn’t be this tired at 3:50 on a Sunday afternoon. There was too much of the day left, too much of life left. He got out of the car and walked toward the back door, no longer sure what story to tell. When you’re young and ambitious, you never realize how hard it will be simply to remain ambitious. You don’t think the very inclination to be ambitious is a practicable skill, an endeavor that will require fuel, focus, determination. It always seemed like being tall. He stood at his back door, a greasy white-painted metal. He could hear faint singing coming from inside, his wife and his daughter. Down came the rain. His daughter was transfixed by the hand motions. Her ambition was to make her hands the most expressive spiders. She had an innocent enthusiasm for the entire manifold of life that was baffling, invigorating, exhausting. This was, he realized, the first purely personal errand he’d taken on his own since the baby had been born. It was strange to think of work as personal private time, his commute as some kind of brief, spiritual oasis. But that’s what it had become by dint of circumstance. The door was cold. When he opened it, it would make a sucking, hermetic, mouth-opening pucker sound, the portal. He yearned to get away, to a take an afternoon by himself, but any time away was mixed with the anxiety of checking in, of wondering how the baby was, how things were going. And the relief of coming back, reassuming the correct role. Self-imposed burdens are the most difficult to extrude. Would Jared keep his note? Show it to his successful, well-connected, blurby friends? Would it become a keepsake, a token of the anti-version of himself out there in the American wilderness? An artifact for the museum of crazies? Or would the penguin simply throw it away without even reading?
The father opened the door, startling the family inside. They all stopped singing. The mother sat on the couch, bouncing the giggling baby on her knee, while the daughter held the baby’s hands, a moment free of logistical complexity and vomit. They all looked immediately to the opened door, and after a snap of silence, everyone cheered.