All Is Vanity Read online

  “Is this the ceremony?”

  He nodded. “I know you use the computer, but I thought this would make you feel like a writer.”

  I lifted the lid. Inside was a Mont Blanc fountain pen, a rich, shiny black.

  “The more expensive ones are prettier, but this one does have the gold nib,” he said, reaching across the table to uncap it.

  “No, no. This is perfect. The expensive one is too … nice,” I said. “I’d never feel I could use it.”

  I pictured myself bent over a tiny café table, my intense concentration and the rain streaming romantically down the windows blocking out everything but the scene I was creating on the page. Except for the oversized cup at my elbow, I would be just like Hemingway.

  “It does make me feel like a writer,” I said, testing the weight between my fingers.

  “There’s ink, too. At home. I couldn’t decide between blue and black, so I got blue-black.”

  “I know—black is too serious and blue isn’t serious enough.”

  “Exactly.”

  We agreed about everything then.

  When I’d told Ted a year ago on one of our marathon walks uptown to a free concert in Central Park that I wanted to quit my job to write a novel, he’d been more wary.

  “A novel,” he’d said, thoughtfully, and he grabbed my hand as we crossed Thirty-fourth Street to pull me out of the way of a cab that wasn’t slowing definitely enough for his comfort. “Well, you are a very good writer.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, no question. But a novel … don’t most people publish some short stories first? I mean, build a reputation before they try a novel?”

  “I don’t know.” I crossed my arms defensively. “I guess some do.”

  “Sally Sternforth published a piece in The Atlantic before she wrote her book. An editor from Basic Books called her.” Sally’s husband was a program director, like Ted, at the Cabot Foundation. She’d been widely praised for her courage in writing a scathing account of her ancestors’ role in driving Native Americans from their land, although to me her intrepidness was suspect. How harshly could she have been criticized for daring to expose the evils of Manifest Destiny, not to mention the embarrassment of family?

  “Not that I don’t understand your wanting to change careers. Teaching is noble, but not exactly ambitious. I can see why you might want a more prestigious job. But are you sure you specifically want to write? Or is it just that you want to do anything the world rewards more generously than teaching?”

  Was I sure? No. I had to admit I liked the idea of being a lawyer, a district attorney, maybe. I was attracted to the notion of being a doctor or a police detective or a reporter. As Ted had irritatingly ferreted out over the course of the thirteen years he’d known me, my problem, as far as careers were concerned, was that I had remained a perpetual ten-year-old: I had trouble imagining jobs other than those depicted in television dramas, which severely narrowed the field. Also, like a preteen, I half believed I could do anything, as long as I set my mind to it, but was never actually willing to set my mind to anything that threatened to take up a good portion of the rest of my life.

  Those professions struck me as too difficult, requiring too much preparation and commitment and grinding work, not to mention aptitudes I wasn’t sure I possessed. Writing a novel, on the other hand, seemed almost a pleasure. Of course, I knew it would take some application, but I imagined it would be the sort of labor demanded by the projects of my childhood, more entertainment than work. Writing a novel, I believed, would be a way to achieve glittering success without the painful and humiliating apprenticeship other well-regarded careers required, and which I ought to have undergone in my twenties. Too late for that, I thought. I needed quick results.

  I stalked on past the library, angry that Ted had not immediately applauded my courage at daring to attempt such a feat as becoming a writer. Wasn’t he, as my husband, supposed to say “reach for your dream,” “follow your bliss,” “pursue your passion, no matter what it takes”? It was unhelpmatelike of him to poke at the vulnerable underbelly of my conviction. Hadn’t I been preparing for this all my life, by reading, by teaching the fundamentals of composition, and mostly by simply living? He knew I was a decent prose stylist. What more did a writer need?

  “The thing about writing,” Ted said, “is that you’ve got to have a real gift for it. I mean it’s like visual art or music or athletics. Lots of people can draw or play an instrument or a sport really well—just like you can write really well—but they don’t try to make a living at it. And, you don’t have to be an artist to do work that’s creative and interesting. Look at Clinton—maybe he could have played professional saxophone, but he chose to fulfill his ambition in a different way, and he seems to have ended up with an interesting job, some might say even more interesting and fulfilling than being a jazz musician.”

  “So you’re saying I’m more likely to become president than to write a novel?”

  “I’m just saying that even if you don’t have a gift, there are lots of things you can do that you might find more socially rewarding than teaching.”

  “So you’re saying I don’t have a gift?”

  “I think,” he said cautiously, “that maybe if you did, we might have noticed it by now. I mean, you haven’t really written anything.”

  “I know I haven’t written anything! I’ve been waiting for the right time. What could I possibly have written about before?”

  Luckily, he didn’t ask me what I planned to write about now, because I didn’t have a clear answer.

  “How long do you think a novel would take you?” he asked instead. Unfortunately, we were stopped at a light just then, so he was able to level the full power of his serious, I-don’t-tolerate-sloppy-thinking gaze upon me.

  “I’d say a year,” I hazarded, indulging in my characteristic sloppy thinking. A year seemed to stretch so comfortably long. People met, married, and divorced within a year; children were conceived and born within a year; the seasons exhausted an entire cycle. What couldn’t be accomplished, given a whole year?

  “Why not work on it in your spare time and take three or four years? Hedge your bet. Lots of famous writers had regular jobs, you know. Look at Wallace Stevens.”

  “He was a poet.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I’d think you could write a good poem in a few days. Granted each word is precious, but let’s say you give even a few hours’ thought to every word, you don’t need that many of them. I just don’t think it takes the same kind of sustained concentration as a novel.”

  “Trollope then.”

  “Fine, if you want me to work in the post office, I’ll work in the post office.” We’d hit the fifties now and the crowds and scaffolding had thinned. I picked up the pace. “And he wasn’t a wife. That takes time, you know, even though you don’t see it. When you want to go to a movie, you want me to go with you. You want me to listen to you talk about your day. You want attention, which you should get, but that eats into my time. And that doesn’t even count the dinner preparation and the cleanup, and all those other chores that take longer when you’re doing them for two.”

  “I’d be happy to do more of the chores.”

  “I know you’d be happy to, but you won’t do them. You don’t even notice what needs doing.”

  At Fifty-ninth, we went east a block, as was our habit, so we could walk past the stores and restaurants on Madison Avenue. The park was pretty, but we’d come from northern Virginia; we craved urbanity, not greenery.

  “You honestly believe you can write something good enough to be published? Not just want to, but can?”

  “Yes,” I said adamantly. Even in discussing the prospect of a novel, I could feel stirring within me the creative power that had carried me along effortlessly when I was a girl. I remembered those engrossing hours, when my hands confidently shaped whatever my brain envisioned, and one idea followed the last like rushing water. True, the result
s of my efforts were somewhat crude and clumsy—I had been just a child, after all. But now that I knew so much more, I had not a doubt that whatever emerged from my pen would be something spectacular.

  “And I’m not suggesting I start right away,” I assured Ted. “I’ll teach this year and we’ll save. We’ll still have to cut back a little, I know that. But it’s not like we’re going to starve without my measly income. And I promise it’ll only be a year. One year, and I’ll have something salable.”

  He sighed. “OK, if you’re that sure, I believe you. It would be great if it worked out. I wish, though, that you’d tried this experiment before we moved here, to the most expensive city in the country. We can’t even afford our apartment.”

  “I wish that, too,” I said fervently, but I was less concerned about our finances than how far behind I’d fallen. I’d been toying with this idea back in D.C. but had not felt such urgency until we moved to New York. Although at that point we’d been in this city only a month, I could sense already that here I, as an English teacher in her mid-thirties from bourgeois Glendale, California, by way of the suburbs of northern Virginia, was a half-witted, earnest, gray lump in a land of cynical, scintillating intellectuals. And that I could not stand.

  Letty

  Why did I listen to her? Everyone asks me this. My husband; my lawyer; my sister; my parents; Ramon, the gardener who came with our new house. Actually, “everyone” constitutes a small circle, thank God. The other mothers at my children’s various schools only give me nervous half smiles as they climb into their SUVs. I’m not the woman they thought they knew. The neighbors, of course, sliding by in their sealed cars, say nothing. They’re barely aware that I belong to this house, let alone of what I’ve done.

  Why did I listen to her? I can only say in my defense that you have to know Margaret, maybe have to have known her for decades, like I have.

  Margaret was always more sophisticated than I. The weekend my parents took my sister Charlotte and me dressed in our jammies to watch The Wilderness Family from the back of our LTD wagon, Margaret’s father took her to Dog Day Afternoon at the Egyptian. Margaret talked about this movie as if I, too, might see it the following week. This was a kindness—she knew, as well as I, that it was the sort of film I’d never even catch a trailer of.

  Margaret discussed movies in terms of actors and directors. She said Pacino had pathos. I nodded. “Absolutely,” I said, although I’d thought that Pacino was some kind of Japanese pinball. When Lottie and I talked about movies, we described the action exhaustively, scene by scene. We said the bear was neat. We might even have said “neato.”

  Margaret wore her wavy hair in a ponytail secured with interlocking translucent plastic balls in colors like yellow, hot pink, and lime green. I begged my mother to buy me some like them, even though my hair was the thin kind that ridged along my scalp when it was pulled back. She came home with a strip of cardboard on which a pitiful example of what I’d requested was trapped under a plastic bubble. The balls were small, white, and opaque. “How can there be a wrong kind?” she asked. “These are tasteful.”

  Margaret let me borrow hers. I nearly cried when I lost an orange set in the grass. My mother was right; my hair really was too skimpy. “But you need that one,” I sniffed. “It goes with your best shorts.” Margaret shrugged. “You don’t want to be too matchy-matchy,” she said, and if I’d only admired her before, my gratitude made me love her then.

  I saved my best beads—the turquoise blue and the iridescent crystals that looked like real diamonds—to string her a necklace. She wore it for two months, and then it was gone, replaced by a fine, pale line where it had sheltered her skin from the sun. I was afraid to ask what had happened to it. I didn’t want to make her feel bad if she’d lost it. Those necklaces always broke eventually, Lottie assured me, especially if you wore them swimming. For a few days, I opened my eyes under the stinging water of the Glendale public pool, trying to spy a curl of blue-and-clear at the bottom. Even at the time, I recognized it was hopeless.

  In sixth grade we were supposed to describe someone in the class so that the others could guess who it was. Her description wasn’t like the other kids’, who talked about obvious things, like hair color and height. “Good at basketball,” Jimmy Murphy said, and everyone knew he was describing Howie Clay.

  “The person I’m thinking of,” she said, “is patient with animals and slow to anger. She has great integrity.”

  Nobody could guess.

  “It’s obvious.” She crossed her arms and scowled at us.

  “Can you tell us what integrity means, Margaret?” Miss Hartoonian said.

  “Don’t you know?”

  Miss Hartoonian blushed. “I think it would be helpful to the class to hear it in your words.”

  “It means you do what you believe to be right.”

  “Then, I hope all of us in this class have integrity.”

  “Well, we don’t. Letty does. It’s Letty,” she said, rolling her eyes and marching back to her desk.

  “Class, what could Margaret have said to describe Letitia?”

  “Short,” Howie offered.

  “Skinny,” Mindy Birnbaum said.

  “Average,” someone else put in.

  I preferred Margaret’s description. It seems she was wrong, however.

  When they ask why I listened to her, they don’t want to know about Margaret. They want to know about me. They’re right, of course. I can’t blame Margaret entirely. Though she directed, I acted. The question is: who wrote the script? “It takes two to tango,” as her father would say—he always played fast and loose with aphorisms.

  Tango? Hardly. I feel too clumsy, oafish, and stupid ever to have been dancing.

  I feel as I did the day Margaret made me climb over the fence that enclosed the tennis courts at East Mountain School. “Made me” is how I think of it, but in that case, too, there was no coercion.

  It was the summer we were thirteen, on a Sunday morning, early.

  “Those girls are never there early,” she promised.

  I was a good girl. I was the kind who said, “Please pick that up,” in a haughty tone when my father dropped his gum wrapper on the sidewalk. The idea of sneaking someplace where we weren’t allowed made my breathing shallow. Nevertheless, I was a little bit thrilled. I liked the idea of me, Letty Larue, sauntering onto the well-kept courts at the East Mountain School for Girls, casually swinging my Chris Evert racquet by its handle. I liked the idea that we’d be doing something daring. And I trusted world-wise Margaret to make it all right.

  At six-thirty on Sunday morning, I zipped with difficulty the back of the tennis dress I’d bought with my birthday money the previous summer. I’d worn it to play tennis only once before, since it seemed pretentious on the scruffy public courts we normally used, but I often tried it on in the privacy of my room and admired its crisp, white fabric and its kicky little skirt appliquéd with strawberries. It was tight under the arms now and slightly shorter than it was meant to be, but it fit well enough to work as a disguise, to show I belonged. At seven, we met outside Margaret’s house and rode our bikes to East Mountain.

  Margaret and I lived in a nice neighborhood; but there was a distinct difference between our part of town and the area around East Mountain School. In Glendale, as in Los Angeles at large, the greens of money and foliage run together. You know you’re in the best sections when you can walk more than three contiguous steps in the dappled shade of overhanging branches. The shade at East Mountain was so dense that the grounds were practically dark and the air tingled with eucalyptus. The grass along the edge of the courts was thick and Margaret had to shove hard to jimmy our racquets underneath the fence. Then she tossed the balls over and scrambled up, over, and down the other side herself, her Jack Purcells needing only the lightest purchase on the chainlink to propel her forward, the bones jutting out from her wrists as she hooked her long fingers through the wire diamonds.

  I couldn’t move like
that. Margaret always put my deliberateness in a good light; she would say I was careful and ladylike, but really I was scared, hesitant, and just plain slow when it came to using my body. I tried to jam the toes of my sneakers firmly into the links, though they would not fit; I glanced compulsively over my shoulder, scanning the smooth lawn for the principal (I hadn’t heard of headmasters then) or the police. I had to drag myself up; the chain dug into the flesh of my fingers and my arms quivered with effort. At the top, I nearly lost my balance, as I inched first one leg, then the other, over the points of wire that threatened to grab the hem of my skirt. Then, even harder than going up, was the way down with the asphalt yards and yards below.

  Margaret seemed to draw energy from our illicit play and whacked the ball like a demon, but I was nervous and couldn’t concentrate. I tried to keep the ball from making noise when it bounced off my racquet, and I ran quietly on my toes, listening for the sirens and indignant shouts, knowing if anyone caught us there, we were trapped, literally caged, two obviously guilty specimens.

  We were caught, actually, by a man with a girl about our age. An East Mountain girl. We stopped playing when we saw the orange BMW pull into the parking lot, but though Margaret might have made it, there was no time for me to work myself over the fence. We stood by the gate, waiting for our punishment, me with my head down, pushing at the strings of my racquet, Margaret nonchalantly bouncing and catching, bouncing and catching one of our balls. There was no question of our continuing to play, though there was plenty of court space.

  It was the girl who mattered, the girl who made me wish I could slither right through the fence and hide in the bougainvillea. It was nothing she said, only the way she held herself, sure of her place. She was wearing boy’s running shorts, loose and low on her hips, a T-shirt cropped with scissors, and scuffed leather tennis shoes. She paused before the gate, knowing we could not get out until she released us. She glanced at my dress, which was, I saw now, entirely wrong. She flipped her long, blond hair forward, and then tossed it back, gathering it with practiced fingers in a high, careless ponytail. The silver bangles on her wrist jangled elegantly as they fell down her arm.