Amy Falls Down (5 page)

“Exactly. Look.
Kurt
. When I first moved into my house, an unpleasant creature named Carlo Sbiggi tried to sell me a home alarm system, some stupid thing with loudspeakers mounted on the wall in each room of the house, so that a bunch of clueless strangers could listen to me being strangled.”

“You’re funny,” he said again.

“And when I balked at the grotesque cost, he said, and I quote, ‘You can’t put a price on safety.’”

Dr. Robetussien cracked up. “A vacuum cleaner salesman said the same thing to my wife.”

“You can’t put a price on cleanliness,” they said in unison.

“Here’s where you tell me you can’t put a price on health,” said Amy, feeling positively giddy.

“Sure you can,” said her new buddy. “And sometimes you have to pay it.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I’m not supposed to say this,” he said, “because we push these tests, but the truth is, you look pretty strong. If you were the kind of patient who enjoyed a fine colonoscopy, I’d schedule one. And you really should get one, and a mammo too, but that’s your business. I mean, we’re talking about statistics here. You’re more likely to have cancer now than you were twenty years ago, but it’s not irrational to avoid the tests as long as you know the score. You do need an MRI, though. If I let you out of here without one and you gork out, it’s my job.”

Now she was supposed to worry about his
job
. She loved “gork out,” though, a phrase the meaning of which was easily guessed. “What do you expect to see on the MRI?”

“Nothing. But you did lose those hours.”

“How long would I have to wait before finding out the results?”

He scratched his head and glanced again at the newspaper in his hand. “Make you a deal. I’m on for another four hours. I’ll come and give you the results.”

“Right away?” The man was a saint.

“More or less. Before you leave the hospital.”

Amy thought about it. MRIs probably weren’t all that bad. Apparently nothing human actually touches you; they just shove you into a big tube. Better still, she wouldn’t have to wait for days, with every ring of her telephone a harbinger of doom. Best of all, she liked this guy. “What do you get out of it?” she asked.

Kurt Robetussien blushed violently and said nothing.

Amy remembered a time when this could have meant more than one thing. “You’ve got a novel,” said Amy, “and you’d like me to look it over.”

He started to apologize, but she waved him off. “I’ll give you my email address when you tell me my brain isn’t leaking. It’s a deal.”

“Okay, but what if it
is
leaking?”

What a card. “I’ll read it anyway. Unless I gork out first.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I Know Where You Live

By the time Amy got back home it was twilight, and Alphonse, galvanized by the sound of her Crown Vic, roared at her from the backyard, where she’d abandoned him almost eighteen hours ago. He’d drunk or spilled half his water and strewn a bowlful of chow all over the patio. Alphonse loathed dry dog food. When forced to ingest it, as he surely had been today, his resentment was epic, filed away forever in his box of basset grudges. Canine experts always claimed that dogs will eat healthy dry food when they get hungry enough, but Amy, who had majored in philosophy, knew that the word “enough” was enough to render this claim meaningless. “It’s a tautology,” she cheerfully explained to her outraged hound, who followed her into the kitchen, purposely stepping on her heels and scraping them, barking furiously, deliberately drowning her out. She heated up leftover beef stew in her microwave, just to the point of tantalizing fragrance, and spooned the lion’s share into Alphonse’s bowl. “It would make no sense to say, ‘If dogs get hungry enough, they
won’t
eat dry dog food.’” After sniffing the steaming bowl, he glanced around at her and barked once more, getting in the last word before turning his back and inhaling his supper.

Amy’s answering machine was flashing “F,” which, Amy guessed, stood for “Full,” although in her present euphoric state she preferred to imagine “Fine” or “Flourishing” or even “Funny,” as in, “You’re funny.” The machine had a thirty-minute record limit; quite possibly Carla, unable to contact her after a couple of tries, had just rambled on about her day. But because Amy was feeling festive (“Festive”), she pressed the playback button. There were twenty-two calls, only a couple of which were from Carla. Four of them were from some dame named Maxine Horner, who sounded just like a Horner, her voice so strident that it stressed out the cheap speaker. “Amy Gallup, long time no see!” She must be at least Amy’s age—nobody said “long time no see” anymore—and she also sounded put out, in the third message, about not having been called back. “We gotta touch base, babe,” she said, before Amy cut her off.

For an uncomfortable minute, Amy worried anew about her brain (which, according to Kurt Robetussien and her gorgeous MRI, was free of death-dealing shadows). Evidently she was supposed to know Maxine Horner. Worse still, there was someone in the world who felt free to call her “babe.” Then she vaguely remembered knowing a Maxine a long time ago, although never a Horner, so maybe Maxine had got married. For now, all she could recognize was that name, that string of letters, not a face or a fact. But then Maxine Something, Amy now noticed, was connected to Manhattan, because the name was now linking neuronically to Greenwich Village. In her mind, a snapshot of a leafy Village street shimmered beside that mysterious name, both evoking the scent-memory of 1970s car exhaust. What a wonderful organ was a non-leaking brain!

While hers worked on Maxine, she fast-forwarded through bot-calls and real calls—from her old students Ricky Buzza, and Harry B, and even Marvy Stokes, from whom Amy hadn’t heard since his wife yanked him out of her last workshop. Her writer’s workshop vets were probably planning a party. Then she saw that her neighbors on all sides had called—the Blaines, the Wards across the street, even Mr. Franz, the old man two doors down whose wife had just died. Alphonse must have been driving everybody nuts. She stopped flipping through answers and called Molly Blaine.

“Molly, I’m so sorry about Alphonse,” she began.

“Why? Did something happen?”

“I was just away for a while, and that’s why he was barking up a storm.”

“No, he wasn’t. Not until just now. So talk about hiding your light under a bushel!” Molly sounded very excited in a positive way. About what? “Frank and I had no idea! And neither did the Millers!”

“Neither did I!” Amy wanted to say, but her freshly vetted brain was now working on two puzzles, Maxine Horner and light-hiding bushels. Had people ever hidden lights this way? She pictured a candle burning underneath a hay bale, which surely was an insanely dangerous practice. Wouldn’t it be safer and faster just to blow out the candle? “Sorry, Molly,” she finally said. “I didn’t listen to your whole message, and I have no idea what’s up.”

“A famous author on Jacaranda Drive! Look how many years you’ve lived here, and none of us knew!”

The Baba Yaga story. “Oh,
that,
” said Amy. “Reports of my fame were greatly exaggerated.” Amy attempted to toss off this ancient joke with an airy chuckle, which came out in the exact pitch of her own voice as a child. Neurons were firing now to beat the band: she flashed on the high-pitched prissy voice of her own seven-year-old self standing up in front of her second grade class, holding up a dime she had just fished out of her pocket, and announcing, “This extremely rare coin was minted in 1949.” She had forgotten it was her day for show-and-tell, and rather than just admit this, she had just winged it, which might have worked out if the current year hadn’t been 1955. Even second graders knew the dime wasn’t anything special. She didn’t fool them, or Mrs. Crowley either, and she retired in disgrace. The few sense-memories Amy had of her childhood generally amounted to her own voice saying something pompous. Now she was doing it again.

Molly Blaine was rattling on about what a thrill it was to live next to such a famous person. Even if Amy were actually famous, as opposed to locally notorious for a day, this made no sense. If Amy moved in next to the Clintons or Philip Roth or Carl Yastrzemski, she might feel fluttery and self-conscious for a week, but that would be it. Now she tried to talk Molly down, explaining that she was no longer an active writer, but rather dormant, probably extinct. Her money was on extinct.

“Like a volcano!” said Molly.

“Exactly.”

“Well, but you could erupt at any time, like that mountain in Alaska.”

“Just like a mountain in Alaska,” said Amy.

“Bless your heart,” said Molly, who finally hung up after volunteering to call the rest of the neighbors and fill them in.

Great. Until now, until goddamn Holly Antoon—no, until Amy cracked her skull on the birdbath—she had enjoyed the lowest of profiles in her neighborhood, giving or receiving the occasional wave, returning people’s lost pets and having the neighbors do the same for her when Alphonse wandered off. Now would come hearty halloos and waves galore. Now would come book clubs and autographs, assuming that they could locate any of her out-of-print novels online. She had enjoyed her well-earned anonymity. Had she been the reveling sort, she would have reveled in it. Now that was all over.

Her phone rang and she shut it off, her mood ruined. An hour later, plummeting into an exhausted sleep, her mind played one last trick, needling her with the possibility that one of the unheard messages had been from the hospital, calling to tell her that her MRI test had gotten mixed up with a healthy person’s. Furious with herself, she stumbled back to the answering machine and heard everybody out. Most of the callers were strangers, although she recognized some of the names, writers who lived in San Diego, and that local NPR radio guy. The rest were book club ladies calling from La Jolla and Clairemont and Solana Beach. The last call was Maxine Horner’s fourth, and this time Amy played the whole thing.

“Hey, babe, what’s the deal? I know it’s been a while, but let’s face it, we had nothing to talk about. All right, hand to God, I thought you were dead. This story is a riot. I don’t know what you’re on, but whatever it is, I want some. Call me tomorrow. I’m serious. I know where you live now, and if I don’t hear from you, I’ll be camping out in your front yard. You gotta come out some time.”

Maxine Grabow. Her voice had dropped half an octave, from menopause or throat cancer or both, and some madman had actually married her, but there she was, just as alive as Amy, who didn’t know how to feel about this, or about the fact that her old agent, whose last words to her had been “Call me when you give a shit,” was back in her life. What had happened?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Maxine

What had happened was the Internet.

Amy made use of it daily in her online editorial work and regularly in maintaining her blog, GO AWAY. For someone of her generation she was unusually plugged in, because she had to be. Her cell phone was retro and she didn’t mess with Netflix, but she was computer-literate. Freelancers who made their living, such as it was, teaching strangers how to write had to stay current technologically. She followed the news on the raw feed (refusing to allow it into her life through television or radio) and so was perfectly aware of the speed with which information and misinformation could spread. Still, it had not occurred to her that Holly Antoon’s silly story, which she was beginning to think of as Holly’s Folly, would of course be slapped up on the Net along with the local weather outlook, real-time traffic reports, cat images, the twittering of a million twerps, and the online
New York Times
.

And if the real news, whatever that was, had been focused on one or two attention-grabbing events, then the Folly would have bobbed for a few days and sunk beneath the binary waves with no one the wiser. A crisis in the Middle East, a Malaysian typhoon, a high body-count workplace shooting, even an A-list celebrity antic, and no one outside of San Diego County would have picked up the story. Maxine Grabow, for instance, wouldn’t have given Amy a single thought.

But the day the story came out and the week that followed were slow, news-wise. The economy did not significantly worsen; car-bombs went off in Pakistan and Bogotá but failed to kill anyone; there was a huge wedding fire, but in Myanmar. No freakish multiple births, no devastating hate crimes, and the most newsworthy celebrities were either in rehab or home with their newborns.

Holly’s Folly came out in print and online Sunday morning, and within twenty-four hours two book bloggers had linked to it. One blog was called Washed-Ups, Has-Beens, and One-Hit Wonders. Which search string, Amy wondered, had managed to snag her name? The other blog was devoted to the works of Henrietta Mant; doubtless the blogger had arranged for some sort of alert whenever the writer’s named popped up in cyberspace. Neither blog explained why Maxine spent half of Sunday trying to get in touch with Amy. To find that out, Amy would have to return the call and let Maxine Grabow back into her life.

*   *   *

When Amy was young, beginning writers didn’t need agents or even know who they were or what they did. You wrote something and sent it out and waited for a slush pile rejection. Amy’s first book, a collection of short stories, had been accepted for publication in 1970, when Amy was fresh out of college and looking for something to do. She had written half of the stories as an undergraduate looking for an easy A and the rest while pretending to transcribe Dictabelts for a debt collection lawyer in Waterville, Maine. Her best friend, Max Winston, convinced her to talk to her advisor and send it out to a couple of houses, which she did with high anxiety and low expectations. When she got the letter of acceptance, she was pleased enough but distracted by more significant events.

Max was about to complete graduate school and get himself dangled in front of the Maine draft board like a frisky minnow. His lottery number was middling and he was dithering between two draft-dodging strategies: securing a 4-F deferment by admitting he was homosexual, or wedding his best friend and hoping for a marriage deferment. The marriage ploy was much riskier—it failed as often as it worked—but the year was 1970, and Max, who was openly gay before the phrase was commonly used, was still terrified of whatever would greet him when he actually showed up at the induction center for his physical. The prospect of that physical scared him more than Vietnam. This medico-phobia was just one of the many ways in which Max and Amy turned out to be brilliantly suited.