(Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. We were like women’s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. All around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. I had a job for eleven years and then I didn’t, it was that fast. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world – throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won’t kill us in the night. ![]() New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. I’d arrived in New York in the late ’90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it then. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. Amy, usually.ĭo not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long. ‘Should I remove my soul before I come inside?’ Her first line upon arrival. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would – and did – detest. It’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house, even though we’d been back here for two years. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. ![]() My life was alarmless.Īt that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-God self. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said – in my face, first thing I saw. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. You could imagine the skull quite easily.Īnd what’s inside it. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. ![]() PART ONE BOY LOSES GIRL NICK DUNNE THE DAY OF
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