Angela Woodward

My Bestseller

If you’ve written anything at all, say a poem, or a brochure, your children and mother and mother-in-law will ask you, why don’t you write a bestseller? They imagine it’s easy to write a thriller, and they start unspooling the plot for you. If your friends and family consider you a writer of any kind, you often find yourself listening to people explain the book you should write, called Face Off, where four friends vow in college that each of them will kill the others by the time they turn forty. It’s a live fast die young pledge that they buy into at twenty-one, but by twenty-nine they’ve changed their minds. So they flee to the ends of the earth from each other and all get facial surgery to change their appearances. One gets his face altered to look like his friend Shadrach, who he considers the most ruthless of the four. And Shadrach has made himself up to resemble their other friend Ernie, even though Ernie is half Japanese, and there are some difficulties with skin tone. The friends stalk each other through Thailand and Australia, ending in an epic chase through the snowy Alps. By then only two of the four are left, and one of them has to do the other in. But the two don’t even know who the other one is, due to the new faces. As they close in on each other, they wonder why they made such a commitment to the stupid joke their college selves agreed to. Let’s call it off, the fake Shadrach says to the fake Ernie. But who are they really? Can they trust each other not to kill each other, when they each know the other has already killed one of their other friends?

Your son, and especially your mother-in-law, think it would be relatively simple for someone like you to sit down and write a thriller called Face Off. Or sometimes friends insist that you could write a whole book out of the chilling experience they’re happy to relate to you. My friend Yang once told me about visiting a historic farm as part of an academic conference she attended. Her group took a field trip to the rural outskirts from a conference center in Detroit or Rochester or Farmington. The multi-degreed statisticians climbed on a luxury bus to be treated to a tour and picnic, but a thunderstorm blew up right when they arrived. The group took shelter in a barn. It smelled nasty, Yang said. She, having grown up in Shanghai, had never experienced a Michigan farm, even a show farm like this, a place made to look like a farm, for tourists. She worried about her shoes. It was a Ye Olde Michigan experience—the pioneer days, when the whole farm family lived in a tiny cabin with a sleeping loft accessed by a ladder. The storm got really intense. The roof leaked, and the conference guests had to huddle together in the corner farthest from the door. The bus driver kept clicking his radio and getting only crackling static.

This was as much as had really happened to Yang and her colleagues, but she suggested I continue the story like this: The woman next to Yang trembles and moans with fear. She points her finger. There in the opposite corner is a woman hanging from a noose. It’s so dark they only vaguely discern the shape. It’s a scarecrow, one of the other guests assures her. No, it’s a dummy, someone else says. They do haunted farm nights in October. Actors jumping out with fake chainsaws. But in the next flash of lightning, they make out her dirty blue tracksuit and the acne on her bloated cheek. It actually is a hanged woman, a recent suicide. Her family had been looking for her for days. Someone should write this story, Yang said. I’m not sure how it ends, but you can figure it out. Please write this. It was so scary.

Sometimes I respond, I’ll get right on it. I agree immediately to write a story about four killer frat boys. Or a Michigan gothic. The despairing Midwest, I know it well. Of course. Thank you. I’ll start today. Or if I’m in a different mood, I protest that I’m actually more of a poet. I tend to write less plot-bound pieces. It’s the language that I really like. Words themselves. Like an abstract painter for whom it’s all about the brush strokes. But of course if you’re a writer of any kind or genre, your family and friends insist that you could be writing things that bring in a lot of money, if only you weren’t so stubborn. You could make money out of your hobby, they all think, or say outright. And it’s hard to counter that my writing isn’t a hobby. I think raising homing pigeons would be a great hobby. Raising homing pigeons would be an especially rewarding hobby for a writer who had a friend who also raised homing pigeons. They could fly them to each other. The birds could continue to go back and forth, even if the relationship between their keepers fell away.

When my friend Julia died, I was devastated by the long gap in our friendship. I had admired her so much in high school, then broken with her. She’d been a painter, her fingernails always grimed with black, her hair yanked out of her face and held back with a tight rubberband. She gave all that up because on the day she moved into her freshman college dorm, she met a brooding evangelical lummox. One of our other friends, Erica, also went to that college. She had a work-study job as a nude model for a figure drawing class. Erica and I met up with Julia and her new boyfriend one day in December, and Erica told us how the drawing professor had gotten angry with her that the string from her tampon was showing. The professor was happy for her to be naked on a dais in front of twenty people, but not filled with feminine fluids, she concluded. The wonderful surface of her breasts and torso, even her pubic hair, was for display. But no one needed to be reminded of her actual interiority by that repulsive tampon string. Erica and I laughed about it. Julia’s boyfriend made no remark, but quivered with indignation the same way the art professor had. Julia, who had been the wittiest and cruelest of all our high school friends, said nothing at all, but smiled uncomfortably. Even a few months previously, she would have laughed at this tampon adventure with us. In the shadow of her new man, she held herself away from the incident as if it didn’t interest her. Later we all went to dinner at my parents’ house. After a remark of my father’s upset him, Julia’s boyfriend declined to sit down at the table. He stood for the whole meal, a few feet from my father’s chair, glowering, while Julia, Erica, some of my siblings and my parents sat and ate. He was like a kind of Frankenstein fixed to his spot. I assume he thought we were all sinners, though only Julia was a Jew. They married shortly after this, and Julia and I never deliberately met again.

When Julia died of congestive heart failure in her fifties, I corresponded with the baby she’d had with the lummox. She had dropped out of school to raise the boy, though at one point she’d taken some photography courses at a community college. I ran into her once, and she showed me some prints she’d made. They were notable for their messiness, smudged with gray, more like charcoal drawings than photographs. Her images of coats in a thrift store were not so much out of focus as thrust too close to bear. I’d never seen anything like them. Julia didn’t think the way photographers usually do, I thought. The lens, which can be so evaluative and provide such useful perspective, in her hands seemed ensnared by the nubbly textures of the wools and tweeds. Her black-and-white prints made an illusion of tactility, doing away with the smoothing distance most photographers aimed for. With their provocative dirtiness, Julia’s pictures of coats on their hangers had a droll, folkloric edge. The empty garments seemed human, ready to shuffle along. Redolent. Expressive.

If anyone asks me to write a bestseller, they usually have the plot all thought out in advance. I’ve sat on the floor propped against the wall in a hot, sticky apartment in Chicago while a couple competed to think of a bestseller I could write. There’s a woman just like you, Marie suggested. This woman—just like you—works for a temp agency at a big Chicago Loop law firm, she said. She’s bored out of her mind, so she escapes to the law library on the thirty-first floor whenever she thinks no one will miss her. The lawyers don’t visit the law library. It’s just for show, like the extravagant, outrageous modern art on the law firm walls. No one reads the books or notices the art. The law firm only displays them to create an aura of wealth and dignity. One day, around eleven o’clock, the bored temp finds a woman lying on the floor between the stacks. She has no visible injuries. The legal secretary touches her wrist and doesn’t feel a pulse. She puts two fingers to her neck, where the pulse should be stronger. But nothing. And this woman is so scared that instead of screaming and getting help, she finds she can’t speak. She creeps backward out of the library stacks, takes the elevator down four floors, and goes back to work. Most of her job is editing a few relevant paragraphs into long documents of pre-existing boilerplate. Nevertheless she has to check these documents over minutely to make sure there are no errors and inconsistencies. Her boss gets apoplectically angry if she misses anything. Once he threw his coffee cup, not at her but at the wall near her, and said, “That’s what I pay you for! To catch mistakes!” Because the coffee cup was mostly empty, only a little splashed on her dress. Later that day he gave her a hundred dollar bill, and they never mentioned the incident again. This woman becomes mute after finding the dead woman, and has to pen a note to her boss explaining that she can no longer speak. To her surprise, he’s fine with it. He likes her better as a completely silent person. She struggles to find out what happened to the woman on the library floor. But no one mentions her. No one had called the police or an ambulance. The mute temp never received an all-staff memo explaining the sad fate of Maureen. There was no deposition, and no gossip. And now that the protagonist can’t speak, no one talks to her. Instead they say things in front of her as if she can’t hear. They act as if she doesn’t matter, because she can’t complain. She thinks eventually someone will let it slip, and she’ll find out what happened to the dead woman. And she believes that at that point, her voice will miraculously return.

While Marie told me this story, Marie’s boyfriend Leo slumped against the back of the wilted futon. The ceiling fan did nothing but bring more hot air into the baking brick box of the apartment. What do you think, Leo? Shouldn’t she write this? Marie asked him. She swirled her glass, clinking the ice in the bottom. I think it’s a very good story, Leo said. She should definitely write it. Or someone should. He groaned, climbed to his feet by grabbing onto the edge of the futon for balance, and disappeared into their tiny back bedroom. He didn’t come out again that whole evening.

A story that appealed to me was by a French writer who might have been Michel Leiris. But probably not him, as I can’t find what might have been the title in a list of his oeuvre. The French in the Fifties were enamored with American dime novels. They loved the bleak philosophy of grifters and hired killers, and worshipped the American writers who churned out these tales. Some of these French writers, like Patrick Modiano and Jean-Patrick Manchette, made the genre their own and did the Americans one better. They might not have needed their wives and sisters-in-law to prod them to write a bestseller. They set about writing their own version of a thriller. I love all their books, Modiano and Manchette. If I had lived alongside them, in approximately the same time and place, I would have suggested that we three raise homing pigeons. We could raise them separately, in different parts of Paris or the French countryside, and fly them to each other with tiny greetings bound to the pigeons’ legs. But what happened instead was that in my late twenties I worked at a law firm in the Chicago Loop and read a novel that might have been by Michel Leiris. The second half of the book was a thriller. In the first half, a Frenchman has been sent to work in an English firm. His everyday working life at the import-export firm is described in excruciating detail. He enters numbers into a ledger. He checks the numbers over. He nods to the other clerks. He gets up to stretch his legs by walking down the hall to the bathroom. The firm’s owner reprimands him for how much time he spends on his toilet breaks. The firm’s owner’s wife comes by one morning and remarks that the French are so gloomy. That one never smiles, she says. He’s not meant to overhear, but he understands her comment is a criticism without a hint of compassion or interest. He can’t smile because he’s bored, lonely and miserable. He’s the wrong kind of human being. It’s obvious to anyone who even glances at him that he’s a little off-kilter to most people, and he can’t be forgiven for that. Back in France, he might have found a small cadre of others who were off-kilter in just his way, and he would have been overjoyed. But as the sole foreign clerk in this stodgy company, his days pass in slow agony. In this French novel, the crime seemed to be the caging of this sensitive Frenchman inside the merciless routine of the English business enterprise. I had never read such a graphic representation of the ordeal of working in an office, I thought as I sat at my desk at the law firm. But then in the second half of the book, things began to happen.

Eventually I refined my response to family members begging me to write a bestseller, telling them I had one in mind. I would get to it soon. Go do it now, my son said, understanding that as soon as I wrote this bestseller, we would move to a house with a pool. In fact he would have been devastated to leave the neighborhood where he and all his friends hung out in their innocent, pre-teen camaraderie. I’m on it, I said. It was just another way for me to lie to those dearest to me. I wasn’t on it at all. I thought at one point of not writing a thriller, but of extracting all the mentions of guns from thrillers I had read, and stringing those sentences and phrases together. It would have gone something like this: She ran upstairs and retrieved a Glock-17 sidearm from the cupboard. The sentries carried HK MP5 submachine guns and wore comms devices at their throats. He was smiling down at me with his lips and there was a .45 in his hand. Suddenly, far off, the crackle of rifle fire. Captain Ribero held up a new M1 Garand rifle, which he displayed to Graham. I feel my knuckles shake against the pistol. Machetes and two Springfield rifles stood by the door. She reaches into her robe pocket and pulls out a small, shiny revolver. He saw Onesime seizing the fallen guard’s gun with one hand and putting his own pistol away with the other. The FP-45 Liberator. I flipped it over so they could see the revolver, its gold grips glinting. I was quickly exhausted by how many guns there were, each with a number in the name, a size, shape and metallic gleam expertly delineated by the writers of thrillers. As if these thriller writers were not writers at all, wistfully turning over in their minds expressions that had flitted across a stranger’s face, but ex-Army men, retired cops, or curators of weaponry museums. Their familiarity with the hardware would never come to me. My frat boys in Face Off would not know how to buy a pistol at an open-air gun market in Thailand. My narrator would have vaguely described a heavy black thing, and not known if it was a Ruger or a Beretta. My own experience of violence was more like a long fraying, not at all suitable for writing a bestseller.

I shouldn’t have done it, but I promised my late friend Julia’s son that I would write about her. Not a thriller, but an essay commemorating her. I went so far as to interview another friend of ours about what she remembered about Julia. They had been close at one point, and then, like me, grew apart. Marika could tell me almost nothing I wanted to know about Julia. How had she been such a talented and magnetic person and then lost it, I asked her. What about her back then might explain it? Marika had no clue. There seemed to be things Julia told me that she hadn’t told Marika, so she knew less than I did. Or Marika didn’t remember. So much had happened to Marika since that time, that mattered more. Still, it was good for us to talk, and to cast our minds back. Two years later Marika too was dead, of brain cancer. I never visited her while she was sick, but clung to the memory of the last conversation we’d had, sitting at an outdoor café just as it started to rain. We continued talking regardless, moving ourselves from out in the open to another spot sheltered by an overhang. The awning began to leak. Water streamed down the middle of our table. Finally we took our coffee inside the old factory that the coffee shop operated out of. We pulled aside a floor-length curtain and sat down in a roped-off area, where a sign told us that under no circumstances were customers of the coffee shop to sit there.

As soon as I began writing about Julia, I realized I’d need to touch on her ferocious sexuality. She’d taken enormous risks, gladly. Her son might never have seen the light his scowling father had extinguished. Of course I always thought Julia longed for someone to shut her up and trap her. Maybe it was a relief from her own interior tumult. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone along so meekly with that horrible husband. Still, she might have thought about how it would have been to continue painting, drinking, and going home with men who were twenty or thirty years older and drove rumbling black pick-ups. Her son would not want to know all that, I was pretty sure. I would have said she was almost demonically vivacious at age seventeen. And then she gave it up.

Writing about Julia brought me skitteringly close to writing about something that happened to me when I was nineteen. I didn’t know what had sparked Julia’s fury and passion, these qualities dangerous and attractive when we were teenagers. I started to think that maybe there was a wound, and from there I managed to plonk down a few sentences about an attack I endured at a cleaning job I’d held briefly after my first summer of college. I hadn’t blanked out the incident, but I’d never spoken about it or brooded about it until more than twenty years later, when my supervisor at work got angry with me, leaned over me, and held the door of her office shut as I tried to walk out on her rebuking me. In that instant, I recalled this man’s hand holding the door shut in just the same way, and how I had broken free and run out of the apartment and down thirteen flights of stairs to get away. Or possibly he had let me go, holding the door shut briefly just to show me he could, and then taking his weight off it. I couldn’t say. The sight of the hand on the door, the shadow of the wrist over my shoulder, set me off in a flashback that lasted weeks. I couldn’t believe that this incident from my youth could grip me in my present day and force a continuing torment on me. The assault had hardly seemed to matter after the first couple months of dealing with it, until it returned decades later with a pulverizing energy. One day I seemed to wake up while driving the car, my daughter humming in the back seat. I had no idea where I was because all my senses were busy replaying the one moment from that day when I was nineteen: the door, the hand, the shoulder, and the ringing of my feet on the stairs. At the same time, I must have braked at stop signs and signaled my turns as I drove my child to her violin lesson. My everyday life had receded, to let the moment of my escape from the apartment play on a terrifying loop.

After Julia died, her son emailed me some self-portraits she’d done when she’d gone back to school to get her associate’s degree. She would have been about twenty-five then, her son in Kindergarten or first grade. In them she’s out on a balcony or ledge, her figure centered between lines made by the woodwork of a multi-paneled window. The window looks old and ornate, the balcony narrow. It might have been part of an old college library. It seemed too grand to be an apartment she rented. Her hair is black and full, and she wears a black coat that comes down to her ankles, like the ones she depicted in her photos of the thrift store. The mirror or glass she’s used to get the self-portrait creates a small square in the middle of her body. Here a smaller reflection, headless, sits atop her full-length figure. Though this reflection is a strange intrusion, I almost missed it. My eyes glided over it to fix on her fierce, level stare. The mood is of self-possessed injury, a powerful hurt held in.

It was much too late for me to ask Julia what that injury was. It went back much further than her relationship with the lummox. I remembered an interaction in her mother’s kitchen when we were maybe eighteen. Everything was pleasant until her brother walked in. Julia’s mom suddenly lit into him, while offering him cash from her wallet. It’s possible he’d been away for days, and she hadn’t known where he was. She was angry, while at the same time trying to get him to approach. “I can give you money,” she said. “Here. If you promise me you’re not dealing drugs, I’ll give you money for whatever you need.” Julia’s brother scoffed that he had stopped dealing drugs already, she should believe him. But he refused to take the cash. Clearly Julia’s mom got the evidence she wanted. If he wasn’t dealing, he’d jump at the bills in her hand. She stuffed the twenties back in the wallet and dropped the wallet back in her bag. The conversation Julia, our other friend and I had been having ceased while this little scene played out. As soon as her mom’s money vanished, we three started up again like a jukebox in reverse.

Erica, who had been at the dinner when Julia’s boyfriend refused to sit down, didn’t even remember it. She remembered only the shabbiness of Julia’s mom’s house, in its decaying suburb of Detroit. I recalled the house as small but beautiful, with old-fashioned pink, red and black hexagonal tile in the bathroom. We couldn’t agree on this. Erica had been with me, too, when the brother walked in and refused his mom’s money. Erica said no, I must have confused her with someone else. Erica was the friend who had been the nude model, not our other friend Marika who passed away not long after Julia. I was afraid to ask Erica if she remembered the tampon string, the smear of pink that had been visible when she changed poses, and how the drawing professor demanded that she display only her smooth, curvaceous exterior. He had been so upset that he was shaking when he took her aside to explain her crime to her.

I remember her telling us. I was sure she had been there, in the bright light of the drawing studio, shivering slightly on the pedestal at the center of the ring of easels. Only when she shifted her thighs did the string appear, and then maybe disappear again as she straightened up. The drawing teacher was incensed that she’d been so careless with it. Women should give no hint of the blood that so unfortunately squeezes out of them, the drawing teacher implied, and no one needed to inquire too deeply into all its associated pain, joy and exaltation.

I started and then stopped writing my essay about my friend Julia. It stirred up so much, while at the same time, I barely knew her. The person she had been when she was very young may have had no relation to who she was later. She had broken it off with the lummox, and her son told me mostly Julia’s mother had raised him. Maybe Julia hadn’t really been fit to take care of anyone. I didn’t press him on this. I thought I should write about the things he didn’t know, from before he was born. But it seemed better not to. I didn’t feel I should expose her. She had already left her self-portraits, with their accusatory stare. It was a good thing no one asked me to write a bestseller about her, as there would have had to be a culprit, a chase, and most of all, a climactic scene. Suddenly, far off, the crackle of rifle fire. Julia’s story touched on sex, assault, betrayal, doomed romance, and even drug trafficking. Someone could have made something thrilling or at least coherent out of it. But I refrained. It was better left unsaid. Plus I lacked so many details. Even the ones I had weren’t quite fixed.

The sentences about guns are taken from Megan Abbot, Die A Little and Queenpin; Peter Steiner, The Resistance, Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, and Paul Vidich, The Good Assassin.