Percival Everett - Erasure

So, I opened the first book and I loved it. Actually, I enjoyed reading. The book sucked. But I did enjoy reading it and so I read another and another. I read three in one night and the better part of the next day. All three were sterile, well-constructed, predictable fare. I decided that perhaps I was jaded. I was familiar with novels the way a surgeon is familiar with blood. I would have to contact my innocent, inner self, the part of me that could be amazed by the dull and commonplace.

As I was leaving the house to visit Mother, the telephone rang.

She said, “Wanna fuck?”

“Linda?”

“How’d you guess?”

Linda Mallory. I considered her name. And as she spoke, saying things that I could not remember because I was not listening, I realized that my life was in need of a gratuitous sex scene. My mind required a new source of guilt, as Mother’s failing condition had justified her placement. And even as I decided to pursue that guilt, I also sought to assuage it by reminding myself that Linda very much was using me. I caught in her stream of language that she was in Washington.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Mayflower again.”

“I’ll be there at seven. How’s that for you?”

“That’s fine,” she said, skeptically. “Monk? This is Monk Ellison, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Seven.”

“Seven is great.”

Mother’s incontinence had become more pronounced and though she seemed strong enough to move herself around, she chose not to. When I arrived, the attending nurse and an orderly were changing the sheet while my mother lay in the bed. She was uncovered from the waist down and while the orderly pulled away the soiled sheets, the nurse wiped the mess from my mother’s skin. I turned away and stepped back into the corridor, still seeing Mother’s head rolling toward me and her vacant eyes pointing my way. She was so far from the woman who had told me once that listening to Mahler made her see colors right before she cried. “I see autumn in the fourth symphony,” she said. “Ashen greens giving way to reds and ochre while the sky darkens and the night feels cool.” The same woman whose shitty ass was being wiped by a woman who didn’t know who Mahler was had said that.

Linda Mallory was the postmodern fuck. She was self-conscious to the point of distraction, counted her orgasms and felt none of them. She worried about how she looked while making love, about how her expression changed when she started to come, whether she was too tight, too loose, too dry, too wet, too loud, too quiet and she found need to express these concerns during the course of the event.

“Does my hair look nice splayed out across the pillow?” she asked.

“It looks fine, Linda.”

“Am I moving all right, too fast, too slow?”

“Move however it feels good to you.”

And so I suspected she did, as she screamed into my face, startling me somewhat and my reaction must have shown, because she said, “Was that too loud? Was I ugly? Oh, my god, I can’t believe I did that. Oh, my god.”

“It’s okay, Linda. Are you all right?” I asked.

“Why, don’t I seem all right? Did you come?” She leaned after me as I rolled off her.

“No.”

“I can’t believe I screamed like that.” She turned to the nightstand and grabbed a cigarette, lit it.

“Don’t worry. So, you screamed when you came. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I think I came. Yes, that would be good, right?”

She put her cigarette-free hand down on my penis. I was still hard, but far from excited.

“Mister Ready,” she said.

Paying a visit to Linda had been a bad idea and it was still one. I could not simply get dressed and leave, though guiltily I must admit that is exactly what I wanted to do. I harbored no ill feelings toward Linda and in fact respected her enough not to pity her. Oddly, her anxieties were coming across as endearingly comic. Even then, when I first considered that awkward thought I understood my judgment to be mere rationalization, not to have me think better of her, but of myself.

“Shall we watch a movie?” I asked.

“Don’t you want to make love again?”

“I’m afraid you’ve worn me out,” I said. “You’re really quite athletic.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I used the remote control to turn on the television. Linda nestled her head onto my chest and I was saddened by the fact that I disliked the coconut fragrance of her shampoo. The first image on the screen was a wildcat tearing apart a rabbit. “Change,” she said and I did. “Change.” I did. “Change.” I did and offered her the controller. She refused, said, “No, you hold on to it. Change.” Finally, she had me settle on some noir film with actors I didn’t recognize. She squirmed playfully, as to get more comfortable, then promptly began to snore.

It was the season of the absent or lazy editor. So many of the novels were needlessly fat. Six were more than nine hundred pages, twelve were better than seven hundred and any one of them would have and could have been, with a modicum of editorial attention, a good four-hundred-page novel. There was an incredibly dense novel from a well-known, reclusive writer of dense novels. There was a nicely crafted and notably lean novel from a writer whose reputation was astonishingly well made. There was a volume of collected stories from a dead writer, a shelf of first novels about fatherly abuse and motherly alcoholism (and the reverse), a mid-list author’s new (but dreadfully old) take on the academic novel, twenty-eight middle America, domestic, where-will-the-children-live novels, forty coming-of-age novels, thirty-five new-life-after-the-wrecked-marriage novels, thirty crime novels, forty so-called adventure novels and six yeah-we’re-Christians-with-chips-on-our-shoulders novels. For the most part the titles received more consideration than the stories or the writing. Still, I found thirty I wished I had written — ten because I would have done a better job. Of ten others I was saddened to admit I could not have written them better. The other ten were simply good, well-crafted, serious, thoughtful.

At the first conference, one of the judges, I am not to say which one, said, “I’d like to see Rita Totten’s Over My Body on the short list.” When asked why? she said, “For two reasons: because Rita is a good friend of mine and because she got such a scathing review in the New York Times.”

I pointed out that one could argue that either of those reasons might be enough to keep her off the list.

Thomas Tomad sighed, “This is Tomad speaking—” (as it was a telephone conference it was kind of him to identify himself) “—and I believe that Totten’s novel is just so much fluff. Filthy fluff, but fluff none-the-less.”

Another judge: “I’d like to see Richard Wordiman’s book on one of the lists.”

“Don’t you work with him?” someone asked.

“Why yes, and although I don’t think it’s his best book, I’d like for him to know that I take his work seriously.”

“Why don’t we wait until all the books come in?” I asked.

“Sounds reasonable,” Wilson Harnet said. “This is my suggested course of action. We each compile a list of twenty-five books. Then we see if there’s any overlap. We’ll discuss the list and any book with at least two mentioners goes to the next round. From there we’ll wing it.”