Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

You actually said all that.

Because I was upset. There’s nothing wrong with Abigail’s mind. She’s just lazy. She takes everything in, the same as I do. Nothing gets past her. She just doesn’t bother sorting it out.

We’re talking about you.

I bother. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You can put that on my tombstone. She bothered.

And is bothered. Everything bothers you.

You should talk.

What do you mean?

You’re the angriest person I ever met. Everything sets you off. Do you know that sometimes you actually make me want to defend Guy DeVilbiss? What do you get out of batting him around?

It isn’t what I get. It’s what Guy gets. I’m just performing a service for my old chum.

Please.

What do you think he keeps me around for? He gets his loving from everyone else. I’m the anti-Hilda.

Guy’s a masochist? I don’t see that.

Guy’s an artist. Artists are ruthless. He takes what he needs, and he needs my contempt. Plus I’m his model. I’m everything he despises.

Professes to despise. Underneath it all he doesn’t have any more use for women than you do. You both look at us and see what you need to see.

Some day he’s gonna cut me loose. I’m too much of a political liability.

Which brings up the obvious question: What do you keep Guy around for? What’s in it for you?

…

What? Quit it.

…

I said knock it off.

How can you ask me that, Dorcas? Without Guy, there are no Gorgon Twins. There is no dark lady. I’d be out there in the void, snarling and gnashing away all by myself.

You were friends from college. It didn’t have anything to do with us.

We were the kind of friends who got together once every couple of years, for a drink at the Plaza or at some international airport, and once for a lost weekend at a Famous Writers Retreat. I’ve seen more of Guy and Hilda in the past year than in all of the previous thirty.

Lower your voice.

They can’t hear me. They never hear anybody.

His voice is suddenly petulant. In fact, throughout all the recordings he sounds twenty years younger than in real life. Everybody sounds young. I guess the cheap mike didn’t pick up the lower register. We sound young and offhand and as if we have all the time in the world.

In the background there is never silence; always some sibilant scratchings, paper sounds, as though our “office” had been infested with little sheets of animated paper shuffling about by themselves. Sometimes you can hear my sister come in with refreshments, or a request from Hilda that we “keep it down, dears, Guy’s trying to nap.” (So Conrad was wrong about not being heard. Except he was right too: They heard us only as ambient noise, potential muse-blockers.)

Abigail says

and

and

and in my memory he answers her, and I do, of course, and we chat about this and that, and we thank her for her kind attentions. And of course we let her hang around us guys for a half hour or so. But on the Big Bitch tapes all you hear is glasses clinking, papers dancing, the soft click of a closing door.

Surely we at least made eye contact with her. Nodded thanks. Smiled in a friendly fashion. Surely we did that.

He wasted hours on my childhood, my adolescence, trying to find his way in there, the fool. Finally he asked me about my first book. My real first time.

The Hidden Staircase, the best (I was soon to discover) of the Nancy Drews, and though I soon outstripped them, even found them funny, I still have my copy of that first one, bound in blue and orange. I read for myself all the books my mother had read to me, and then I went to the Scituate Library, there being no Squanto yet, and took out every fairy tale collection I could find, Andersen and Grimm and then Perrault, the French tales, stories from all corners of Europe and Asia. Soon I graduated to world mythology. The Norse were unbearably depressing; even their gods were mortal; but the Greek gods and heroes gave me a bridge, a lens through which to view the people around me, the forgettable face in my bedroom mirror. I read about Io and Tantalus and Athena and Phaeton, and my world achieved solidity and color. The gods were both petty and divine; they acted just as the rest of us would if we had the power. Eventually of course I outgrew them too, put away my homemade paper dolls, but I can still recall how brightly they burnished my inner life. They were like Father’s old View-Master, a favorite toy of my preliterate days, which when you held it up to lamplight flooded our ordinary rooms with exotica. King Beaudoin, the Oldevai Gorge, the Apollo Fountain at Versailles.

When we hit adolescence, our parents had their hands full with Abigail and couldn’t stop to worry about me. Every now and then one of them would ask me, especially on long car trips, to please put down my book and look out the window at something, and once Mother burst into tears at the dinner table and observed that life was passing me by. A shocking moment: I think she was entering into the change. Later she apologized, and I assured her that life was doing no such thing. I don’t think she ever truly understood, and this still hurts me, as she of all people should have appreciated what I was doing. There were a couple of years then, in my teens, when I wavered; when I wondered if indeed something were wrong with me, and when my life was going to start. One summer I went for a whole week without reading anything but cereal boxes and shampoo bottles. It was a grim ordeal, and to this day the phrase “lather, rinse, repeat” is a tiny Pavlovian trigger of anxious dread. Then my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Bliss, mentioned C. S. Lewis to me (“You might look into Surprised by Joy ”) and soon all was right again. Lewis never sold me on mere Christianity, but he did assure me that I wasn’t neurotic. It was possible to live an imagined life, and to live it fully. To dwell within one’s own mind and, through books, the minds of others.

You escape, said Abe Marx, into your books. I didn’t have the wit then, quite, for the obvious riposte: I escape, when I feel the need, into what all you bullies insist is reality. I study birds, library patrons, local politicians. Sometimes I garden. Sometimes I watch the Sox. Sometimes I drink. I keep a neat house and I pay my taxes, all in the real world. But I don’t live there.

Of course, Lewis was a scholar, and I am not. I do have a reputation, locally, as something of an intellectual, but this is wrong. I am simply an omnivorous reader, and like all good omnivores I take my pleasures where I find them. In my real life, my inner life, I am as great a sensualist as my sister.

How does that work, exactly?

What do you mean?

It’s not that I don’t believe you. I’m your greatest admirer. But most of us plebes do our sensing through our senses, if you get my meaning. Your sister, for instance. Me too, I must admit. Right now, for example, I’m looking at you. There you are. I’m not imagining you. I couldn’t. I’m not that clever.

Well, of course, but what is your point? I’m not claiming to be a spiritual entity.

Your speech is clipped, precise, and low. I hear you clearly. You have a unique scent—

Aren’t you cute.

—of Castile soap and lemon polish, and today…