Wonder When You’ll Miss Me (33 page)

O
nly dead writers get afterwords. Among all the hateful consequences of the early death of Amanda Davis on March 14, 2003, both to those who loved and miss her and to lovers of contemporary American fiction, this particular one—the words that you are now reading—is probably the most minor. I have spent the past five months or so hating every thing, and there have been so many that have come along, or popped up, or appeared in a magazine or the day's mail, to remind me that Amanda is dead. And now here I am, creating my own black-edged reminder. I guess that it's a cliché to write “it saddens me to have to write these words,” but if so, the sentiment expressed is one that I have never truly experienced in my life before now. Every word that I string along here is bringing a cliché lump to my throat and a cliché tear to my eye. Every one of them is like each day that has passed since the fourteenth of March, a wedge driven into the crack that opened that afternoon, leaving Amanda forever on her side, back there, in the world that had Amanda Davis in it. There was no place, no need, in that world, for an afterword.

My wife, Ayelet Waldman, met her before I did—roped by Amanda and her golden lasso into a friendship that while heartbreakingly brief was one of the truest and fiercest I have ever stood next to and admired—and one of the first things she told me about Amanda is, I think, the most germane to my purpose here. “I just finished her book,” Ayelet said, referring to the novel that you, too, have presumably just finished reading. “
She's the real thing
.” Or maybe what she said was, “
The girl can write
.” I'm not sure, anymore. It's only after your friend's airplane has crashed into a
mountain in North Carolina—killing her, at the age of thirty-two, along with her mother and her father, who was flying the plane—that everything she ever said to you, and everything anyone ever said to you about her, takes on the weight and shadow, the damnable
significance
, of history.

At the time all that really registered, when I heard about Amanda from Ayelet, was the rare note of true enthusiasm in the voice of my wife, who reads almost everything, and in particular everything by youthful female novelists, and in particular those novels that treat in some way damaged girls with body-image problems, of which, God knows, there have been many, with doubtless many still to come. Some of these novelists, some of whose books she admired, she had also met, and liked, as she had instantly liked Amanda. Never had she pronounced this judgment on any of them. It was obvious to her that Amanda
had the goods
—maybe that was what she told me—and then, when I read Amanda's books, it was obvious to me, too. Her sentences had the quality of laws of nature, they were at once surprising and inevitable, as if Amanda had not written so much as discovered them. As the catcher Crash Davis said to his wild and talented young pitcher, Eppie LaLoosh, “God reached down from the sky and gave you a thunderbolt for a right arm.” Amanda had that kind of great stuff.

It's unfair, as well as cruel, to try to assess the overall literary merit, not to mention the prospects for future greatness, of a young woman who managed to produce (while living a life replete as a Sabatini novel with scoundrels, circus performers, sterling friendships, true love, hairbreadth escapes, jobs at once menial and strange, and years of hard rowing in the galleys of the publishing world) a single short-story collection, the remarkable
Circling the Drain
, and a lone novel. I would give a good deal of money, blood, books, or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven, or “only halfway there,” or worst of all, as
promising
; or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.

At bottom of this kind of behavior on the part of old, established writers is the undeniable way in which our young selves, and the books that issued from them, invariably seem to reproach us: with the fading of our fire, the diminishment of our porousness to the world and the people in it, the compromises made, the friendships abandoned, the opportunities squandered, the loss of velocity on our fastball. But Amanda never got to
live long enough to sense the presence of her fine short stories and of this stirring, charming, beautifully written novel, as any kind of a threat or reproof. She was merely, justly, proud of them. On some level that was not buried very deeply, she
knew
that she was the real thing. This is, in fact, a characteristic of writers who are (alas it is often found, as well, among those who are not). After
Wonder When You'll Miss Me,
she was going to write a historical novel about early Jewish immigrants to the South, or a creepy modern gothic, and then after that she was going to try any one of a hundred other different kinds of novels, because she felt, rightly, that with her command of the English language, and her sharp, sharp mind, and her omnivorous interests, and her understanding of human emotion and, above all, with her unstoppable, inevitable, tormenting, at times even
unwelcome
compulsion to do the work, the hard and tedious work, she could have written just about any book she damn well wanted to.

And we will never get to read any of them. This and the story collection are all that we have, and the crack in the world falls farther and farther behind us. And Amanda's there, and we're here, and I've never yet written or read a book, with or without an afterword, that could do anything at all about that.