My Mistake (20 page)

A couple of weeks later, she was unconscious and her breathing was labored. But the hospice nurse assured me that she would hang on for two or three more days. So I called my cousin Janet Bingham, who had been driving over from Westchester County and sitting with my mother during this vigil period. I told her what the nurse had said and let her know that I was driving to the city to have dinner with my family. When I arrived at our apartment, on West 83rd Street, my wife told me that the nurse had called. I called back. My mother had died. To my surprise, Janet got on the phone. “I drove over, Danny—just in case—and I was here with Mamie when she died,” she said. “But don't worry. I think she was just waiting for you to leave before she could go.”

This turn of events at first made me angry—I saw my cousin's behavior as a kind of sneaky recrimination for my having left, and a kind of familial coup d'état. It took a few days for me to recognize the anger for the eversion of guilt that it was.

 

Enge died five years ago, leaving me his house and land in the Berkshires, and also leaving me with another, but smaller, sense of guilt, for not having attended
him
closely enough as the end approached. My excuses were that my kids were very young, my new job at Random House bewildering and demanding, and the three-hour drive up to Massachusetts and back usually required an overnight stay. But I did go to see him as much as I could, tried a nursing home for him—it didn't work—then arranged round-the-clock care for him at his house, called him regularly, managed his finances, and so on. And continued to learn from him—in this case, to try not to be alone in old age.

Enge's lover, Tom Waddell, the Olympian, had left years earlier, to live in San Francisco, found the Gay Olympics, take up with a new and younger man. He did stay in touch, loyally, and visit, but he was far away. Enge's friends in New York and Great Barrington began to fall away, because of death, inertia, the debilities of age, or defection from a man whose own advanced years were transforming his wit and mischievous charisma into often bitter criticism and complaint.

But when the house came to us, we did what we could to preserve its handsome look and at the same time rescue it from decrepitude, all the while wondering, “What would Enge say?” (When visiting the old friends who had bought his Guest Camp's land down by the lake and built a house there, Enge walked in the door for the first time, looked at the spiffy, modern place, and said, “Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?”)

In any case, my family and I settle into the house—but we'll always feel Enge's eyes on us—and into the community where my last name still means something to local tradesmen and shopkeepers. My two uncles' camps provided work and income to the town. We get to know the place and the people.

And in one case re-acquaint ourselves with another link to the past. Pauline Kael has a house in Great Barrington, about six miles from Enge's—I mean, ours. She and I have become friends up here, now that we have both left
The New Yorker.
I'm visiting her at her house, on the hill above the town, one afternoon, sitting on the wide front porch. She has read a piece I wrote for the
New York Times Magazine
about Emmylou Harris and gives me a compliment about it. I tell her that once I'd been interviewing the singer, years earlier, backstage at Carnegie Hall after a concert, when we were both in our early thirties. She was in what seemed like a rivalry, a friendly one, with Linda Ronstadt. I'd fancied myself in love with Emmylou Harris, which distinguished me from perhaps four blind, deaf males in America. She turned away to say something to someone else, turned back to me, and said, “I'm sorry, Dave, what was the question?” I said, “It's Dan, but that's OK, Linda.” She laughed. Ten minutes later, after circulating in the room, she came back to me and said, “We're going out to have some dinner. Would you like to come?” I said that I couldn't, even though I absolutely could—because I was just plain terrified. So the point was I absolutely couldn't. Oh, oh, my mistake.

Pauline listens. When I finish, she says, “You asshole!”

I laugh and say, “Thanks, Pauline—thanks for your understanding after I told you this mortifying youthful tale.”

“You have to understand,” she says. “I said that because when I was in San Francisco, at KPFA, Duke Ellington propositioned me. I was a young, swooning girl, but I said no too.”

“I'm not sure ‘propositioned' is the right—”

“‘Asshole' is.”

 

I'm being wheeled out of the operating room after hernia-repair surgery. The surgeon says that as I was coming out of anesthesia I was trying to tell a joke. “Something about a little piano player in a bar,” he says.

“I know what it must have been,” I say groggily. “Do you want to hear it?”

The surgeon seems uninterested, but I tell it anyway:

Guy walks into a bar looking sad and blue. There's another sad-and-blue guy already sitting at the bar. In front of him, and actually on the bar, is a miniature piano player, playing a miniature piano—playing it beautifully.

“Why do you look so down?” the guy sitting down says.

“I saw a genie yesterday and he said I had one wish, and I wished for a million bucks and I got a million
ducks.
But how about you? Is that little piano player yours?”

“Yes,” the other guy says.

“But he's amazing—I mean, he's really good. You could really make a fortune with him. So why so dejected?”

“It must have been the same genie, a couple of days ago, and he said I had one wish, and do you think I asked for a nine-inch pianist?”

The surgeon smiles wanly. Then he says, with some excitement, “We can do that.”

“What?”

“I mean, you know—we can actually
do
that, if you want.”

“Are you saying you think I need it?” I say.

 

Fifty-six

 

I am trying to acquire two novels, one completed and the second under way, by a British writer. Ann Godoff likes the finished book, or takes my word for it that it's good, or she is in a good mood, and has authorized me to offer $100,000 for each book. On the phone to the agent in England, I say, with no guile, “We're offering a hundred thousand dollars for both books.” He says, with acceptance detectable in his voice, “You mean fifty thousand for each?”

I hesitate, but not too long. “Yes.”

“Done and done.”

 

Roger Angell has taken me to lunch at a small club called the Coffee House. You aren't allowed to talk about work there. We soldier through the conversation, greet others whom Roger knows. On the way back to the offices of
The New Yorker,
a passer-by who hasn't quite passed us by yet steps in front of us and says to Roger, “Aren't you Roger Angell?”

“Yes,” Roger answers, with some wariness.

“I just want to say that I think you are the best sportswriter in America,” the guy says.

“Thank you.” Roger smiles, warming up.

“No, I mean, you are one of the best
writers
in America. Period.”

“Well, thank you,” Roger says.

The two shake hands and we continue on our way. About thirty seconds later, Roger turns to me and chuckles and says, “That's what it's all about, Dan.”

“What?” I say.

“Love from strangers.”

 

Fifty-seven

 

Steven Pinker is in my office at Random House. I am trying to get him to consider writing a short, essayistic book in popular language on the question of free will. It has preoccupied me since college days, when I read about it in Introduction to Philosophy and then, more extensively, in an Honors seminar. And also, as I looked back on choices I (and others I knew) had made about life and work, I began to think that these choices were not really choices, as we commonly think of them, but simply what we were going to do, under the illusion of conscious decision-making.

One small but signal incident in particular has stayed in my mind. Ten or twelve years earlier, I was playing the outfield in a
New Yorker
softball game in Central Park. A fly ball came in my direction but over my head. I began to run back for it and then decided not to try to catch it—it suddenly didn't seem worth it. I just chased it down and threw it back to the infield. As I stood there watching runs score, it occurred to me that my brain and body “knew” that I couldn't catch that ball (I would have been able to, in my thirties), and
they
“decided” not to try. But my mind gave me the illusion that it, my consciousness, had made that choice.

So I say to Pinker, as we look out the window, “Do you think the people down there have what they think they have—free will, the way it's commonly understood?”

“No,” he says. “But there are the
qualia!
” That is, the conscious perceptions that some nonphysical aspect of ourselves, outside the workings of our bodies and brains, is able to control decision-making. Given the fly-ball experience, and many other, far more monumental, and too often regrettable, decisions I have made—some of them deeply hurting not only me but, even more seriously, others—I realize, standing there, that I have been looking for a way to in some measure absolve myself of culpability for those actions. Not responsibility—I accept that; society, family, and individuals demand that we respond to the consequences of our actions that appear to have been taken freely—but
culpability.
That in some very important way, we couldn't have done anything other than what we've done.

Pinker decides that he can't do this book, owing to contractual obligations to another publisher. He notices a book jacket on my desk, for a collection of poems by Katha Pollitt. The title, fittingly enough, is
The Mind-Body Problem.
Pinker says, “Oh! You know, my friend Rebecca Goldstein wrote a novel with this same title. I'd like it if you could change the title of this book.”

“Well, you can't copyright a title,” I say. “And wasn't that novel published some years ago?”

“Yes, but I would appreciate it if this title could be changed.”

I tell myself that I choose to table this request, and I will end up leaving Random House before Pollitt's book comes out, and so that turns out to be that.

 

I am assigned, at Random House, to work with Michael Eisner on his autobiographical book
Work in Progress.
I meet him a couple of times, and he is perfectly congenial. He tells me how foolish it was for anyone to call any movie anything like
The Lemon Sisters
—inviting, as it did, all kinds of review snidery. “On the other hand, we had a great success with a movie whose title had three words that each by itself should have spelled death at the box office,” he adds.

“What was it?” I say.

“Dead. Poets. Society.”

This conversation takes place at a screening of
Armageddon,
the Bruce Willis movie in which one of Hollywood's evidently endless supply of earth-threatening asteroids is, well, threatening the earth. Near the end of the movie, the Willis character, Harry Stamper, stays behind on the asteroid because, owing to various malfunctions, the nuclear weapon that will split the asteroid in half and send both halves harmlessly skirting the earth has to be detonated manually. Before this act of self-sacrifice, Stamper argues with ground control about the necessity to stay on the asteroid—they are glued to their screens and instruments and are ordering him to leave. “You don't understand,” he says, or words to that effect. “This is
real.
I'm actually
here.
I know what has to be done.”

When Eisner and I are talking, I mention how telling I found that scene, what it says, underneath the melodrama, about technology versus real experience—real, direct presence. He laughs and says, “I can assure you the people who made that movie had no such idea in mind.”

Remembering Professor Beardsley's seminar and his coining of the term “intentional fallacy,” I say, “It doesn't matter what they had in mind. It's there anyway.”

 

Fifty-eight

 

I keep thinking about
Armageddon
(which, by the way, was the top grossing film of its year, outdrawing even
Saving Private Ryan
) and a whole slew of other 1990s movies that seemed to have as a theme the antagonism between technology and the real world. It's part of the theory that popular culture—even, or particularly, schlocky popular culture—expresses the anxieties and concerns of its era. This amateur sociology began in college when my friends and I would leave an art film—some completely static French talkathon—and someone would say, “You want to know what that movie was
really
about? It was about
trees.
Remember, Claude is planting a tree in his garden when he first meets Marie, and then later, she hides behind a tree when she's trying to get away from Marcel, and then Igor uses a fallen limb as a weapon when the three thugs, who are all wearing Toronto Maple Leafs jackets—
leafs,
get it?—try to beat him up, and at the end Claude is pushing Marie on a swing.”

But the more I think about
Armageddon
and other movies of the time, the clearer it becomes that many films are, inadvertently or advertently, showing real concern about the possible dangers of technology.
The Truman Show, Pleasantville, True Lies, Total Recall, The Terminator,
and so on. (Arnold Schwarzenegger may have been the least likely existential hero imaginable, but his biggest movies always involved existential/technological threats.)
The Matrix
stands out as the ultimate expression of this techno-anxiety, with its premise that everything we do and see and hear is essentially false or at least unreal—part of a cosmic hoodwinking that only Keanu Reeves can end, in the existential equivalent of his ending the rogue city-bus rampage in
Speed.