Amy Falls Down (24 page)

Which led her to wonder, about the time she was passing through Costa Mesa, how Maxine had gotten her the interview in the first place. Had she lied? Surely
she
hadn’t deliberately confused Amy with that feminist writer. Amy tried to remember how Maxine had explained it. Molloy, she said, needed writers to interview, to balance out the “celebs.” Jenny Marzen, Amy now remembered, refused to do it. Had Marzen contacted Maxine? Maybe, but that still didn’t explain how either of them convinced KYJ she was punching-bag material. She worried at the problem for a few miles, then gave up. Amy, who would have made a hopeless engineer, had never really been driven to understand the how of things. However it had happened, Maxine had gotten her on the show, and that was that, and thank god it was all over with anyway.

Except … why? Why had Maxine done whatever she did to shoehorn Amy into that ridiculous spot? Even if Molloy had exaggerated his lackluster audience numbers, surely the people who actually listened to him were not in Amy’s demographic, assuming that she actually had a demographic. Can a demographic fit into a telephone booth? Maxine always had her reasons, whether Amy agreed with them or not, and now she couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to inveigle a minor, long-forgotten writer, all buzz aside, into such a pointless quest. Why, unlike how, was always worth pursuing.

But not now. She thought about “Snowflake,” and then about how badly she had wanted to see the shadow of a rabbit’s ears on the surface of that full moon. Sixty years ago! That young moon.

She would have made great time but lost a half hour when the smoking wreck of someone else’s life backed up traffic north of Oceanside. She turned off the engine, took out the notebook, and wrote

“True Caller”

“All Buzz Aside”

“The Deal”

Tomorrow, she’d turn her phone back on, and once Maxine calmed down, she’d tell her all about it, and Maxine would tell her all about why. Oscar Peterson played “Hymn to Freedom.” Amy just loved that tune.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ants

Alphonse stayed mad for two full days. The Blaines had apparently left him out in the yard, which he hated with a passion. Not the yard itself—a pleasant enough place for postprandial strolls—but the very idea of roughing it for long periods of time. The intense inland summer heat had come early, confining him to treeshade. All of Amy’s trees were surrounded with dirt, except for a huge pine tree growing at an acute slant behind the raised garden, but Alphonse didn’t like pine needles either. The basset was happy only when sleeping on deep wool pile or upholstered furniture. So when Amy returned from KYJ and threw open her back door, he barreled past her without a welcoming grunt or even a dirty look.

Amy knew he’d get over it. Still she was grateful when, by nightfall, having spent a full afternoon gnawing on that giant bone, he was back to his old self, gracing her with an occasional sidelong glance, coming to her at bedtime so she could stroke his neck and ears.

*   *   *

Amy intended to spend the next day profitably, attending to her online workshop, where student fiction had begun to pile up. In order to get to the workshop link, she had as usual to go through her blog page, which she hadn’t actually looked at for weeks, and this time she saw a warning flag on the Comments feature. Apparently her blog had gagged on comments.

She had to check them out, since the last time this had happened her spam-catcher had failed or been hijacked or something, and her website had become a bedlam of misspelled obscenities. Sure enough, today her pages were contaminated by links to Spanish Prisoner scams, plight cons, pornography, and genital enhancement products. She had to download and install a newer battlement plug-in. Still, an hour later, after she had waded through and deleted all the junk, the warning flag still flew because
legitimate
comments continued to overwhelm her site. The garbage she had just cleared away only revealed the truth. Actual human beings, as opposed to bots, were flocking to her website. What was wrong with them?

At first she thought they were still fulminating about “THE ACCIDENT-DRIVEN LIFE.” Glancing through some complaints, she found no new arguments for compulsory happy endings. If anything, there seemed to be a charge in the opposite direction, led by people with names like Stabby Appleton and truthierthanthou666, supporting Amy’s right to generate fiction that made people miserable and anxious. In fact it soon became apparent that most posters were complaining, not about her, but on her behalf.

In fact, when she backed away from the screen a little and caught sight of the design of the comment queue, Amy realized they were all part of a single thread which had begun on the third of July, entitled “Chaz Molloy Epic Fail.” The poster was Stabby Appleton, who provided an audio link to the entire KYJ interview. Stabby advised that “The real carnage begins at 26.06.11.” Amy worried at this number, trying to figure out if it was some kind of terrorist code. When she gave up and clicked on the link, she saw it referred to times: Amy had unloaded on Chaz Molloy, feeding him all that baloney about the National Consortium of Novelists, at about the twenty-six-minute mark of the thirty-minute interview. Listening to herself do this was shamefully enjoyable, the ostensive definition of a guilty pleasure.

Amy remembered the first time she had ever heard herself on the radio. She had been fifteen and chosen by Mrs. Gormley to be Longfellow Senior High’s representative on a local radio show. The assigned topic was something like “The Twist: Threat or Menace?” Mrs. Gormley had adored Amy, who had in turn thought Mrs. Gormley a dumb pushover. Even though Amy had zero interest in geopolitics, she had steered the conversation elsewhere—to Cuba and the Peace Corps—since she had never been on a date and couldn’t have cared less about dance crazes. What she really wanted to talk about that day was the Flying Wallendas, a high-wire act that had just endured a catastrophic fall in Detroit. She had that morning stared at a terrifying newspaper picture, snapped at the very moment when, for the Flying Wallendas, everything had come undone after their tightrope pyramid collapsed and all seven became the playthings of gravity. The picture had both thrilled and unhinged her: the thrill, she knew, even at fifteen, especially at fifteen, was wrong, almost dirty. She had wanted to make out the expressions on their faces as they tumbled, and she had wanted even more not to, and was still trying to figure out what this meant as the oleaginous JAB radio host, Leo LaMotte, swooned over her use of the word
mesmerizing
. Didn’t people have dictionaries? Didn’t they read? Amy dominated that radio conversation without meaning or even registering a word of what she said, so that later on, when she caught the evening rerun of the show, she had recoiled from her own fatuousness. She had sounded like a pretentious child, which, she instantly realized, she actually was. On top of which her voice was at least a half-octave higher than she had ever imagined. There would be no point in asking her parents if she really sounded like that. They would just tell her what she wanted to hear.

Now, listening to herself spar with Molloy, she was more pleased with the pitch of her voice than with what she was actually saying. For women, aging was mostly a process of subtraction, of loss, except that their voices became stronger and deeper. Amy had noticed that men paid more attention to her when she lost her looks and had assumed that was because they were no longer distracted by desire, but it occurred to her now that words spoken in a lower register simply sounded more significant. Surely Mark Antony had not been cursed with a high, piping voice. Perhaps all young girls should receive voice-deepening instruction, as they once had learned how to iron men’s white oxford-cloth shirts and walk with books on their heads.

*   *   *

The problem with being a smartass was that it only worked in an unfair fight. She had tricked Molloy handily. She had been clever and fast on her feet. But now, listening, she didn’t approve of her own behavior. Once she had settled into his pitiful kingdom, making a fool of Chaz Molloy was no challenge. He was a fool already. According to her blog posters, though, she had been “totally brilliant.” They quoted and misquoted her, providing as evidence for her brilliance her “arty-farty ivory-tower left-wing anti-gun” rant, the vulgarity of which now made her cringe, and the fact that she had called Molloy a colossal ass, which, accurate enough, was hardly witty.

To Amy’s sorrow, at least half of the pro-Amy brigade had misunderstood her. Pro- and anti-Academy splinter groups formed, each arguing on the premise that the Academy was real. Well, it was, in the sense that there really was a community of academics whose literary judgments were taken seriously, at least by that community and its most prominent cadets. But the anti-Academy posters assumed Amy had been championing genre bestsellers, ridiculing works that you had to have an “MBA” to understand, and the rest somehow thought she was skewering mainstream fiction, whereas all she had intended to do—all she had actually done—was lasso a buffoon and smack him around.

As always, Amy responded more positively to negative criticism. A particularly thin splinter group, comprised of 46&Wondering and Ranty Ravingsworth, jabbed at her for taking a gig on KYJ in the first place. 46, who claimed to have read everything Amy had written, seemed grief-stricken over the fact that Amy was “reduced to midget-wrestling.” (It was a tribute of sorts to Amy’s blog that she didn’t attract people inclined to jump all over the word
midget
.) 46 and Ranty had a good point, so good that Amy decided to respond, posting her own comment below theirs:

I agree with you. Participating in that sort of show is feeding the beast.

Amy started a sentence about her agent pressuring her to do it, then backed over it. It was uncomfortably close to “sharing.” No, it
was
sharing. Where had that odd impulse come from? Besides, ratting out Maxine in public was just wrong: she owed Maxine a lot more than she did 46 and Ranty. Deciding it was no one’s beeswax why she had fed the beast, Amy hit “publish” on her comment page, closed it out, and began a new story, “True Caller.”

*   *   *

By now Amy was used to her modestly active new writing life, one in which story ideas actually burgeoned, more often than not, into stories. “True Caller” was apparently going to be about a college dropout living in his parents’ basement who spent his free hours calling radio talk shows. He made enough money at In-N-Out Burger to afford his own Internet connection and some professional-grade voice-changing software. Amy had to do some online research to discover what technology was out there, which turned out to be alarmingly impressive. Voice-changers were Google-flogged as though they were party accessories like karaoke machines: buyers were encouraged to have endless hours of fun with their friends. The non-fun-focused were assured that the software could be used for “business purposes” and for “creating a stimulating conversational ambience,” which, Amy guessed, was the closest the ads could legally come to the essence of a technology allowing phone stalkers to scare the hell out of women in the middle of the night.

Her True Caller, though, whose name eluded her, aspired to drive call-in DJs mad and ultimately to bring down the monstrous rotting structure of radio talk-show culture. He called them all, the right-wingers, conspiracy seers, preachers, celebrity mongers, advice gurus. He created distinct personalities, male and female, each with its own dialect, pitch, and backstory. Typically he would agree with the host, opening with copious, breathless praise, proceeding to share an illustrative story promising to support whatever point the host was making on that particular show, and at some point the story would begin to veer off into the ether. At first, he just made the stories nonsensical: one minute he’d be talking about the damn wetbacks and how his Uncle Delbert couldn’t get a job to save his life and the next he’d be yelling about tarantulas in his hat. Later he tended to stay focused, taking the host’s message on race, Area 51, the Founding Fathers, or whatnot and stretching it out to its darkest imaginable reach, forcing the host either to repudiate what he’d just been saying or go on record as agreeing that we should repeal the nineteenth amendment or perform live autopsies on environmentalists. The story bogged down as Amy wrestled with technicalities, mainly about how the Caller always managed to dupe experienced screeners, and she wasn’t sure it would ever amount to anything, but she enjoyed—actually enjoyed—creating all those personalities and took care to elevate each, however slightly, above its cartoonish beginnings. At the very least, “True Caller” was a great writing exercise.

So when Maxine interrupted with a call, Amy was feeling expansive—expansive enough to pick up the phone when she heard that low raspy voice. Expansive enough to hear Maxine out as she spun a most preposterous tale, of Munster and Marzen, of buzz and dish, of Manhattan and round tables. As Maxine droned, Amy grabbed her battered copy of
Le Morte d’Arthur
and opened to the end, the dog-eared page where Guinevere refuses Launcelot and walls herself off in the nunnery, and Launcelot says, “Sithen ye have taken you to perfection, I must needs take me to perfection of right. For I take record of God, in you I have had mine earthly joy.” She had loved that speech since childhood, the shining steel greatsword of the old language. She had loved it even more than the astonishingly evolved notion of the round table itself, which surely was located somewhere in the British Isles, not the island of Manhattan, and what was Maxine going on about? “The big agencies,” Maxine was saying, “… publishers, journalists, PEN, CNET, the usual suspects. It’s a weekend deal and it will be televised.”

“Okay, well, remind me when it’s on and I’ll watch it.”

“You don’t listen,” said Maxine.

Amy put the book away. “I’m listening,” she said, her good mood evaporating.

“You’re not keynote,” she said, “but you’re important. They’ve got you on at nine p.m. on Friday.”