From Rubble

by Rebecca Pyle

I hate pale blue flowered prints; I hate elaborate handbags; I hate dresses worn once and shoes which hurt the feet. I do like to hear stories read, or poetry: I like to hear people admitting things, painful, wishful, or glorious or doomed.

He wanted/needed to have a party because he has a new book out; but he does not want to read from it. He wants his new publisher to be there: but he does not want to read from it. I happen to know he hates the publisher’s attitude about his book, that it was something he had to write to prove he could write another. He was also poor, and needed to try to support himself as a writer, and not have to go back to selling things. (He was not terrible at selling things, he could write the words that made people desire things and order them, from whichever company he had last begun to work for. Sometimes, if you asked him, he could really not remember the company’s name.)

You must read a little bit from your book if there will be a party, I said.

Will you be there? he said.

As he said this I could tell he was only thinking of me as an added number, an added relief that there would not be too few people there.

Oh, I will be there, I said.

But I was thinking of the pain of choosing the clothes for attendance, the wanting to look right, all mixed with the truth that no one truly cared if I looked right. I simply had known the writer forever, since he appeared in the winter in the town I lived in like a man who had been washed up by the ocean. I seemed to be the only person who paid attention to him for years. I had no idea then he would ever be a writer. He was the only person anyone knew who ate almost every day at the old Chinese cafe which still used Chinese birth year placemats, a place where you could only communicate with the staff by saying the number on the menu or the words hello or goodbye, which were always spoken very brightly and with emotion, by the family which ran the restaurant. He had a book about the last days of old royal Peking, written by a visiting American. The Chinese family running the restaurant recognized the Chinese city on the book’s cover and were voluble thought unintelligible about it: clearly pleased to see an image of Peking.

I was having a meal two tables away; the restauranteur held up the book and pointed at it, for me to see.

I see, I said.

You see my book? the owner of the book said. You’ve read it?

He had a pleasant, eager voice.

No, but it looks good, I said.

I said this as if it were an item on the menu.

From then on we began talked for short but almost long periods when we met each other, at the nearby library at Metcalfe and Wilson, or at the Chinese cafe three blocks from the library. I never saw him with anyone else, and it did not surprise me when one day he told me he had become a writer, had written his own book.

Wonderful, I said. This must be what you are meant to do.

But I could feel welling up in me all my anger that he had this world and I did not; it was as if I’d learned he was a mountaineer, who risked his life on mountaintops, with the people he was closest too because they all shared great daring. And I was a flatlander. One of the dull people left behind.

I began to avoid him, dreading seeing him because I knew one book followed another. He was like a married man now who must have at least three children, to prove he liked being a father. Meanwhile, what were my greatest accomplishments? I was a teacher, teaching at a junior high: my only skill was theatricalizing information which would be hard to care about (history) unless it was theatricalized. I theatricalized, then returned each night to my real life in current time, which no one had summed up yet. Thus, it had no arrived-at dimensions, no stage set, no story. It was only current time, as exciting as an electric bill.

Now, he was telling me about the party about to happen, and how he couldn’t bear the thought of reading aloud.

Why? I said.

Because the whole reason I write may be that I hate speaking, talking, he said. Always, I say the wrong thing. As if I have a soul of ice. Maybe I do. To read aloud might reveal how icy my soul is, how unhappy I am. More than anything, I do not want to be felt sorry for.

This was a surprisingly vulnerable speech from him, making me feel for a few seconds as if were his teacher, or a wife, someone very close to him. The sharing, as therapists say, of vulnerabilities.

I love feeling sorry for me, I said. But I’ll feel sorry for you if you don’t read. You really must read, to impress your publisher, to show him any publisher would like to have you.

What is a publisher? he said. A publisher is really just a temporary tent for you to hide under.

That’s pretty good, I said. But be grateful for the umbrella. Next, maybe you can be an umbrella for someone else.

That’s a nice idea, he said, that I could do that. That’s a thought. I’ll practice reading at home. Maybe I’ll bring a copy and I’ll surprise everyone and read.

Good, I said. I’ll see you there.

The evening came too soon. I wore my decent Birkenstocks and a longish plain dress, with a sweater rolled up and wrapped around my shoulders, and a sparkly watch which didn’t have a working battery any more, and surely never would again: now it had become a historical object by which I would mark this date, of attending this party in honor of his writing, of having moved on from the first novel to the second.

I doubted he would read. There were drinks being served and he looked as if he were absentmindedly having too many, between conversations with people whom I did not know nor ever would know, as I was not a writer, nor would I be. I was someone who blabbed on and on about history. A boring present-day person. A novelist was a time-traveler, back and forward and sideways, always shifting, and he didn’t write down historical things of record. He made history, invented it. Writers were inventors, doomed inventors. The only problem was they couldn’t make what they wrote come true: it always ran away. As he might, tonight, be running away from reading a single paragraph of his book. I thought of going to stand by him and tell him it was now time to pull out the book which he had surely brought—or take one from the pile of them for sale by the entryway—and say, I’d like to read you this. Just a little bit from my book. It would be toasting to himself and the book, and it would make everyone there feel good. The icing on the cake, so forth. What we had all come for. Not to see him or his face or what he wore or what anyone else wore, or to drink. To hear the book. For the book. To hear if it was any good, to tell from his voice whether he thought it was any good, of any importance whatsoever beyond the fact it had pages and it was openable and readable and the publisher believed it was worth printing and sharing with people for a small sum of money.

For a second, looking down at my striped socks, the glint of the buckles of my Birkenstocks, I thought I might just go. I would be like a nagging schoolteacher or spouse if I went to him and encouraged him, again, to read. I did not want to be either. I looked toward the door, to see how many people there might notice my going.

There were several, coming in, as if on cue: the Chinese family, who must have put a sign up at the restaurant saying they were closed: each one was there. The very thin father and the mother so small you could barely see her when she turned sideways, or sat down. The two teenaged children with long untrimmed hair. The mother and children had no expression, but the father’s face was brighter than a lamp. He went straight to the middle of the room where the author was and he said something in Chinese which was full of delight: he had the book in his hand and turned it so it showed the author’s picture, a photograph which made the author look as if spring breezes perpetually rippled his hair and filled his eyes with old childhood dreams now come true.

The author stepped back on one foot, then stepped forward.

Yes, my book, thank you, he said. He was moving his head toward him: it looked like a bow. He held out his cupped hand, smiled at the restaurant man. His eyes went to the wife and children, and happily smiled at them, too.

The restaurant man put the book he had brought in his hand, and bent also his head, toward him, and then went back to his wife and children to stand with them. They were the only people not eating or drinking, or dressed in clothes that said they were at a party. They were in, I realized, their restaurant clothes; either they did not have clothes to dress up in or they didn’t think it mattered, or anyone would care, what they wore.

The author went to the middle of the room with the book with his picture in it, looked all around, and said, I will read now, if you don’t mind.

The publisher’s face now looked almost serious, and you noticed he had worn not only a suit but a tie. He looked worried: he probably had never heard the author read, had no idea what sort of reader he would be. He looked at his watch. In the crowd the Chinese restauranteur’s face was beaming, his wife and children’s eyes were rapidly blinking. Their dreams of knowing an author in their new town in America might now be coming true.

And my friend flew. He read—I can’t think of any other way to describe it—it’s true—as if he were reconstructing a grand Chinese house from rubble after The People’s Army came through and wrecked it. He read it as if he had found the lanterns, and the stone Chinese guardian lions, each with a paw over a small ball which represented symbolically its offspring, with great delicacy and handiness put them back together so they again gave light or dignity or unassailable guardianship. As if a river full of debris were cleared and had become a place for frogs and crickets again, and the long-lived fish miraculously living under ice in winter, surviving without food or warmth. As if there were beautiful silk brocades somewhere, still carefully stored, and paintings that showed the unchangeable mountains, which survived almost everything under the sun or the moon.

And as if for a whole hour he were sure he was always in love with me, in a platonic way, of course, though this novel and his next novels would take him further and further away, and I would less and less often hear from him. Eventually we would both be gone, me having wasted my years muttering repeated summarized things about history, but he having charted his own human brain as he sought to explore and explain and advance himself, one man as if he were all alone on earth unless he wrote. As a novelist who could travel time and geography as if on a rolling magic carpet, traveling over castles and ruins and churches and wars and politics, and still staying true to himself, the self he had been ever since he was born.

I no longer go to the Chinese restaurant. They would want to ask me about him, and they would not be able to. We would, about the writer, be appropriately mutually deaf-mute.

They might think I know where he is and what he does now. If I did I would not be able to tell them. But perhaps someday after I am no longer here he will come looking for me here, and bring his book about old Peking, and remember me as I was at another table, very near, and understand how much I wished I were him, a wild mountaineer among tribes of other wild mountaineers and Aladdins.

Rebecca Pyle is an American writer and artist whose short stories have appeared in issues of Scarlet, Post Road Magazine, and Pacifica Literary Review. She has been living the past year and a half in France and the United Kingdom. See a list of journals her work is published in in rebeccapyleartist.com.