Catherine Lacey: Nobody Is Ever Missing

Ruby turned on the TV and the first thing we saw was the title screen for It’s a Wonderful Life . We looked at each other like Yeah, uh-huh, sure , and we ate cheese and crackers for dinner and watched that movie and we didn’t have to talk because we knew what the other was thinking — this was one of those you-don’t-have-to-say-it, I-suffer-like-you-suffer moments and our brains were calm and still, just lying there in our heads and our mother was also calm and still, just lying there in that box.

All three of us, I thought, all three of us are orphans.

I just write the soap opera and that’s all and that’s enough , I told Harriet.

This was the afternoon she’d called to say I needed to meet her in Union Square so she could introduce me to Werner at his reading. I could have given a thousand reasons why I didn’t want to go (that I had no interest in being whatever she thought a real writer was, that I hated poetry, that I hated when people enjoyed or pretended to enjoy poetry, that being around Harriet gave me the same tangled feeling I had while watching television shows about sharks) but it wouldn’t have mattered — when Harriet made a decision, she would practically burn down a forest to make sure it happened.

You’re wasting your good years , she said. All that time you’ve spent writing for other people, you could be putting that energy into your own work. Tell your husband you’re quitting, that you need a year to write for yourself. You know he’ll be fine with it.

She’d somehow read the story of mine that had been published many years ago in a literary journal a professor at Barnard had submitted it to without my permission, and she tracked down my email to say she was an editor and interested in my novel, as if everyone had one. I told her I didn’t have one and didn’t want one, that I was a staff writer for a soap opera, but Harriet is the kind of person who believes you can frighten genius out of a person and be thanked for finding it.

How could that possibly ever be enough for you? You’re a real writer, not a soap opera writer.

How was I supposed to feel about this? Because I was, in fact, a soap opera writer, and I was paid to do this and people followed the stories as if they were truth and those exaggerated lives were more real to some than anything actually real, so much so that whole magazines were devoted to this collective imagination. It had started as an in-between job, just a writer’s assistant, but when one of the producers impulsively fired half the staff, I was promoted and I began to enjoy how nothing was recognizable or familiar about the love triangles, rectangles, and octagons, the operatic scream-crying, the scorned lovers, double homicides, sudden, rare illnesses, demonic curses, and all brands of revenge. Ruby had always described it best: It’s how we outsource rage.

I don’t want to feel literary , I told Harriet. I just want to feel useful.

Listen, you’ll thank me for this later, believe me. I really do think that meeting Werner will be good for you. He always knows the right thing to say to a writer just starting out.

Harriet, I’m not starting anything. I don’t want to write a book.

I’m sure that will change , she said, and I wanted to say that it wouldn’t but she said, I’ll see you at six-thirty , and I am not the kind of person who can put myself between a person and her wants.

In Harriet’s introduction she said something about how Werner’s poetry was the invention of a radical loneliness, a reinvention of life as we know it, and that was ridiculous, I knew, but who wouldn’t want life to be reinvented? I thought everyone would like that very much. Werner’s work was taught in universities, anthologized, published in magazines, and even reviewed in newspapers. Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence and Mother even told me his poems made her cry for the first time in years, but I’d only read a poem or two and didn’t even try to try to like it.

Once the reading was done, Harriet beelined to Werner, my wrist in her hand. She gave Werner a quick appraisal of the reading as he shrugged and said something lost to the din of the crowd.

This is Elyria. She’s writing a very impressive novel .

Well, if it’s impressive in its unfinished state it must be doubly impressive upon completion.

His accent — half-German, half-Kiwi — sounded like it belonged to some long-past century.

I’m certain it will be , Harriet said just as someone else caught her attention, and she was lost to a churn of people. Werner looked at me like he was waiting on some kind of explanation.

I’m not writing a novel , I said. I don’t like novels.

It’s for the best , Werner said. Misery begins in publishing.

And I am not what a person would call outspoken and I’m not even much of a speaker, according to some, and I don’t know if it was because of how old and harmless Werner seemed or because I recognized something in him that gave me an odd comfort, but I spoke with a strange confidence, even a kind of arrogance, as if I was picking up arrogance from Werner like radio waves.

Well, that’s a funny thing to say after all that publishing has gotten you, isn’t it?

Is it?

I don’t know.

Maybe misery begins everywhere , he said.

Behind me I could hear Harriet talking about Werner’s brilliance. In front of me I could see Werner not even giving a shit.

I’d still rather be back in New Zealand away from this concrete wasps’ nest. People in large quantities are terrible.

The fluorescents buzzed. The people buzzed.

I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand , I said (then thought, I have?).

Well, if you do, you’ll have a place to stay. I have an extra room on the farm.

Oh , I said, and the crowd parted us, left me with this idea.

Later that night, drinking gin with all of Harriet’s people in her office, I asked Werner if he’d meant it, if he was really offering me a place to stay or if he was just being nice.

I’m not nice , he said, and I don’t pretend to be. I have an extra room. I’m not much good for company, but the room is yours if you want. You can tend the garden and we’ll call it even.

And though he sounded sincere I still suspected that this was one of those things a person says on impulse and then aggressively defends to mask the mistake.

Blank eyed, he scrawled an address on a bit of paper.

Only two cars and fifteen minutes passed before someone stopped, a black truck driven by a sun-wrinkled lady wearing a straw hat.

Into town? she asked, and I took this as a chance to not make a decision, to just agree.

While we drove she asked me about myself and I found it impossible to answer anything honestly. She asked what had brought me to New Zealand and I said that my husband had. She asked me what my husband did and I said he was a farmer.

Well, he wants to be a farmer , I said. That’s why he’s here.

Everything grows here , the old woman said proudly. All sorts of plants and other things. Do you have children?

I laughed by accident, the kind of laugh that didn’t say you thought something was funny.

No.

Well, my goodness. I suppose women really are putting off having children these days. You ought to get to it. I only bring it up because there is no joy in life greater than an empty house. Don’t let the other women fool you with this empty-nest-syndrome stuff. Life gets better once the kids are out and the sooner you have them the sooner they can leave.