In late March a number of us were gathered at Sidney’s. His was not the usual basement apartment. Though the stairwell leading in from Bryant Street seemed the entry to a mycetic grotto, damp with the drippings from overhead pipes and made shabby by paint corrosion and fungal growth, the interior was done up beautifully. Sidney had transformed the old nineteen-twenties servants’ quarters into a hidden sanctuary, the place where he had written the most recent of his thirteen books, Creative License, deemed his “comeback” novel into the realm of literary worth.[1] In each of those novels – especially the ones written during his unpopular period – Sidney had a habit of focusing on specifics and drawing them in terrible and beautiful clarity, to the exclusion of many broader and more necessary structures. I found this inherent in the Bryant Street apartment, as well: the neglected entryway, opening directly into a foyer with a view of a carefully kept aviary, or arboretum (I always confuse the two). Yes, it was an arboretum, and traditionally full of very well-kept and inexpensive flowers: all dahlias and irises and no orchids, though there were birds of paradise, which may have accounted for my confusion. I suppose the lofty glass ceiling must have gone no higher than street level, and it was hemmed in on all sides by soft gray walls that melted seamlessly into an equally lusterless sky, but for two hours every afternoon (weather permitting) the sun streamed down onto those plants, and you forgot the road you’d taken to come to this place, or even where this place really was, and it was glorious. This brief illumination happened several times during our interviews, and when I played the tapes back I’d always find some minutes’ pause, during which Violet was often heard moving about in the background. Sidney and I would sit quietly and watch the shadows curve away from the leaves. I was never sure which of us started that, but it was restful.

Recalling that, I paused for a long time beside the arboretum, debating whether to go out into it. I had never actually done so, and it would have been hard: there were steps, but no railing. It was dusk, a March dusk, which in San Francisco meant a cobalt ash color to everything out-of-doors. I noticed that, unusually, most of the flowers were wilting, their petals curling; only the alien birds of paradise stood tall on thick stalks. Like Sidney I have a habit of documenting insignificant changes at the expense of the larger picture, so when after three hours of milling about the crowd (composed of Tamond’s closest friends, family, and consummate hangers-on) I noticed Elizabeth in the dining room, it was a shock.

Now let me explain why this is so surprising – that a man’s wife should be present at his party – and why it’s reason to make me uncomfortable.

Sidney Tamond and Elizabeth Pierce were arguably the most creative minds of their generation. If not singly, then at least taken together. Even their names possess a certain Old World charm, and saying them aloud evokes a black-and-white backdrop, a single picture frame, open French shutters, curling cigarette smoke. I romanticize, yes, terribly – I’ve always been guilty of it, even when I know all the facts, that she was a WASP and he grew up poor, thirteen and alone and in Cleveland. I was in Ohio too at the time, and twelve, a month and some miles short of him. When he and I talked together it brought back a certain Midwestern sensibility that I had missed; though we were in San Francisco we could easily have been back in my old home, arguing over the Browns and the Bengals. Elizabeth, sharp-eyed and quick-moving and judgmental, was an entirely different animal. She had no interest in her husband’s inspiringly disadvantaged youth, except for its use in the occasional well-timed anecdote. It seems clichéd to say that you can lose yourself to the right kind of woman, but with Elizabeth, Sidney lost his past and his present. He was nearly a recluse when they met, but Elizabeth forced him into the limelight. She brought him onto afternoon public radio and turned their living room into an open-forum reading room. The arrangement worked well for a time. One morning he woke up and realized this: that they were both doing the living for one of them.

I am not saying that they weren’t complementary. Between his books and her plays, they’ve captured every unflattering tic of the middle class, lent dimension to the unmentioned. She traffics exclusively in avant-garde tragedies, and every performance she has directed ended poorly to rave reviews. I’ve always been partial to his books. They generally come to good ends even if his characters are hapless and only nominally in control of their own fates. But until the divorce, there was something essential missing from both their works. I heard a woman on cable television last night call the marriage “one of the most cerebral in recent American history”, and perhaps that was the problem. America isn’t cerebral, it’s visceral, and there existed too little feeling between the two of them to make either genuinely famous.

So when they split, she wrote a play about it entitled Love and Other Weaknesses, and he responded with a book: Creative License. They were very messy pieces, a deliberate attempt by each to ruin the other’s reputation, and each work alone, divorced of its partner, would likely have been dismissed as petty and jejune. Except that nobody saw one without reading the other. And together they became the perfect commentary on relationships. There was a connectedness between the works which had been absent from all their creations during the marriage.[2] More importantly, whatever had been lacking before was abruptly very present. Tamond’s career suddenly revived; this revival caused the end of his second marriage, which had itself been responsible for the end of the first. It was during this personal slump – when Creative License had just hit the shelves in paperback and Violet Jones was moving furniture out of his apartment – that I was closest to Sidney, and then that I found him the most reflective.

It is the nature of popular things that they will not die out until all the marketable degrees of separation have been investigated and exploited; thus it was that, despite Creative License being a shade away from autobiography, Casing House wanted me to write a book on Tamond’s recent stormy history.

Sidney was very enthusiastic about the idea from the first meeting. As he helped bring my chair down the long, steep stairs to the apartment he said, “What a strange thing it is that at the end of this, both of us will have written about my life. You’ll even have written about the writing! These things engender themselves, I suppose.” He set down the chair on the front mat and helped me the last few steps. “The only thing we’re missing is you, writing about yourself. Or me, writing about you?”

I smiled weakly.

* * * * *

Understand that I do not dislike autobiographies themselves, or their writers, only that I cannot bring myself (until now) to talk directly about my own life. But I have already ruined this project, my notes about Sidney now blurred and smeared from overuse, from taking them with me and reviewing them quickly, obsessively, in the rain outside her house, or over coffee before an encounter. In one fit of neurosis I tore out the cassette tape from our sessions, which does nothing to clear up the confusion I’m in now. A distinct lack of alternatives now faces me. Porter is expecting something for his advance, though not a confessional.

During our first meeting Violet had still been living with Sidney. I had not interviewed Elizabeth yet, or perhaps I would say that her strong distaste for the young girl had encouraged my own, but I believe that anyone who knew Sidney would have found Violet a poor companion. He met her because she was a fan of his later works, a fact which immediately informed on her character.[3] She barely challenged herself in the paintings and crafts that hung unfinished around the apartment, and certainly did not challenge Sidney. She was overly dramatic and prone to fits and outbursts, but also to great kindnesses; there was something slightly manic behind her wide doe eyes, and in the way that she bobbed her hair and dressed as if it were the fifties (a time during which neither she, nor Sidney at ten years her senior, had been alive). She did not take care of the arboretum, which was the apartment’s primary redemption; having picked the flat in the first place, she condemned it for lacking natural light.

It is puzzling that Sidney would have picked a woman like Violet, but our histories explain our choices. One needed only a cursory glance at the back jacket of Creative License to learn of Sidney’s past with Elizabeth and see Violet as its natural progression. If Violet was passionate, full of vitriol and capriciousness, in the end she remained a simple creature taken in by Sidney’s obvious charm, as perhaps I am. Elizabeth’s passions had no discernable emotional base; they ran cold and furtive at home and spilled out nearly exclusively into her work. Sidney and Elizabeth were artists, puppeteers; Violet seemed more of a character. And after years with remote, unfathomable Elizabeth, Sidney found himself yearning for someone in whom he could identify the same confused motives and dreams that he wrote for his protagonists.

* * * * *

“Watch her,” Sidney said. He had meant it as a caution against Elizabeth, who I was finally going to interview, but I looked immediately at Violet, who was cooking something behind me. He didn’t notice; he was pinching the short little black beard he sported, and though his eyes were straight ahead and could have been watching Violet also, there was no recognition there. He was a small man my age, and often when we spoke, he standing and pacing and I sitting, his head reached barely above my own. “Elizabeth has a way of imposing her own views on the world so deliberately and so unequivocally that you may find yourself wrapped up by them. She’s a very formative personality.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this. “You’ve seen her plays,” he continued, nodding expectantly so that I had no choice but to agree. “Then you know what I mean. People eat them up, her realities. Believe in them, believe that they make sense. But what does it mean, to symbolize a woman’s fertility by a ‘pineapple, bristling with thorns’? It’s utterly, utterly ridiculous!”

I laughed with him. That had been one of the more asinine scenes in Love and Other Weaknesses, when Tamond had spurned Pierce’s desire to have a child. As he said succinctly in his book, and later at greater length to me, “The last thing I needed to do was bring a child into that mix, you know?” [4]

When I met her at last, I asked Elizabeth Pierce how she felt about this.

“I think it’s quite obvious.” We were sitting in her Aptos mansion overlooking the ocean; she had come out of the relationship with all the money, just as she had come into it. Every one of the angled walls was a different, vibrant color, and I imagined what it must have been like in summer, when it was so bright in the thick of winter, with the sea fog rolling through the eucalyptus outside. Elizabeth did not dress herself so vibrantly; she was a study in black, with raven hair and clear porcelain skin, smoking along with the fog, every bit of the Old World celebrity her name evoked. “You’ve seen LOW?” Love and Other Weaknesses was being abbreviated as LOW these days.

“Of course. But you didn’t handle it directly.”

“I handled it as directly as I ever have anything else.”

I had to give her that. “Well, yes, you put it in fruit terms.”

“You’re a misogynist,” she said, staring at me keenly. I think it was the first time she focused on me during the entire interview, and I felt very suddenly that our roles were reversed.

“I am not!”

“Why are you writing this book about him and not me? Hasn’t he already written the exact same book? It’s redundant, like everything he’s ever made.”

“I’m sure someone would want to write your story, if you offered it.” In fact, Elizabeth had offered it – to Burnham’s – and she had a 3:30 with another biographer named Lydie Wilson. I’ve always disliked Lydie intensely, though she has absolutely no idea of this and is a great fan of my craftsmanship.

“I shouldn’t have to offer it. I don’t want to, in any case. I’ve done a perfectly good job of presenting it on my own.”

“You have.”

“Don’t be condescending, V.S.,” she said. I was freefalling now, hemming and hawing on the defensive.

“If I was commissioned to write about you, I’d be happy to. But Casing House wanted me to write about him.”

She scoffed. “Oh, that’s typical of them. It’s an Old Boys’ Club at Casing, with Porter running the show.”[5]

I decided to turn our conversation back around to the place where it had gone wrong, which was a typically male thing to do, as she’d point out later, and of no benefit to either of us. “I can understand your loss, the loss of not being able to have a child with the person you shared your life with.”

Elizabeth blinked, stared at me as if I were a particularly offensive species of idiot. “It doesn’t count with you. It’s not worth anything.”

I smirked. I was starting to get used to her style of conversational parrying. “Because I’m a man?”

She shook her head; I was off the mark. “No. Because you’ve got no legs.”

* * * * *

“I have legs.” I pinched one, for good measure, but the plastic under the khaki was hard and unyielding.

“You don’t use them.”

This is why I don’t like to talk about myself, you see. Being able to see others so clearly, so unfailingly – maybe that’s an advantage gained by sacrificing the eyes you use to view yourself. If so, I believe the trade to be worth it.

“The legs, that was a car accident just after high school,” I explained. “The doctors diagnosed me with anosognosia: I can’t interpret my own injuries; I don’t believe that they’re real. I can know of them intellectually, force myself to abide by their rules, but those rules seem arbitrary to me. It’s why I’ve never really learned to walk with these. I suppose it’s a form of perpetual denial.”

Elizabeth was silent a moment. Not, I think, out of any regret for her offense, but because this was forcing her to reformulate her opinion of me. “You don’t believe that you’re in a wheelchair.”

“I’m conscious of it, but it’s not . . . it’s not very real, somehow. It’s all I can do to stay seated, to keep from injuring myself again.”

She squinted with bright green eyes. “What about when you look in a mirror?”

“It doesn’t really register. Do you think you see the same thing when you look in a mirror that other people see when they look at you?”

“Still, if you can convince yourself of this –”

“It’s more a problem of lack of conviction, than conviction.”

“– imagine what else you’re not facing.”

“That hasn’t really occurred to me.”

“Of course it hasn’t.” Elizabeth’s demeanor toward me had changed. I was suddenly acutely conscious of having become a project. “You’re considered an excellent biographer, yes?”

I paused, but humility wasn’t going to earn any points with her. “Sure.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

I said nothing. She put out her cigarette and leaned toward me.

“There’s a good argument nowadays that free will is an illusion. That we are no more than the sum of our biology and our experiences.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with that. It was the central theme of Cobalt Symphony.”[6]

“It would mean that we’re entirely reflexive. Consciousness, and the illusion of free will, is a side commentary justifying our actions and floating on the surface of our inevitable mental processes. We can’t help but act the way we do, because every action is an immediate response to a very invasive environment.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe it’s true for some people.”

* * * * *

“No. We’re all capable of intentional change,” Sidney said adamantly.

Internally I disagreed with him. I was far more aware of myself than usual after Elizabeth’s directness. My stomach was quaking, my nerves so taut and burnt out that they felt frayed and bloodied under my skin. I could not sleep because of hunger, and I was too tired to eat. All of these were reactions, not actions. The entire drive back from Aptos I could not help but stare into my own eyes in the rear view mirror; it was a miracle I did not crash then on Highway 17. Nor could I stop myself from calling her and inexplicably thanking her for this new misery, this possibility (mandate, rather) for self-examination. She was quiet on the other end of the phone, then told me that we were going out to dinner. Of course I agreed. In one fell swoop Sidney’s ex-wife had knocked down the few simple walls I had placed to ensure my survival. I wondered if his own descent had been this profound, before he had freed himself from her.

This session with Sidney, though it should have been productive – Violet had just left him, and there was much to talk about – didn’t go anywhere. I had not slept in days, and Elizabeth dominated my thoughts. Ultimately I excused myself, pleading fatigue, and managed a series of steps before my legs gave out beneath me. This had happened before, this absentmindedness, but I had never been privy to the pain that accompanied the fall. I held it in my mind – a mind that wanted so badly to dismiss it – and wondered if this, too, was an inevitable reaction. At home I fell into a deep, deep sleep, and when I awoke at dusk I found that I could see myself clearly, in the present and back through my thirty-nine years, to an extent that had always been denied to me.

Except, when I searched my memories, the ones I found were not mine. I was in the merchant marine. I won a Nobel Prize.[7] I created a multimedia giant, retreated to a vineyard, rejected my rural upbringing and fled to the city, had been stabbed, had been tried for murder, embezzled funds, started an NGO, meditated on the Buddha, burned crosses and wore white, coughed blood in North Dakota, in India, in malarial jungles. While walking in poor light I was hit by a distracted driver, knocked twenty feet through a bus stop, stood up unharmed; while driving, I committed manslaughter; I was involved in a pile-up, and lost the use of my legs; trapped by my own reflection, I drove into the center divide on 17; distracted at an intersection, I pushed the pedal on red and was hit from the driver’s side and killed instantly. ‘I’ became a singularity and a populace.

I had written about almost all these things. Some, I was fairly certain, had not happened yet. I realized how ridiculous my fear of autobiography had been, when my career had been nothing but. Some memories seemed truer than others, and I used chronology as my guide to what felt most true. I was born in Ohio, sported a black beard (here I scratched it self-consciously), had been writing on the life of Sidney Tamond, had slept with the playwright Elizabeth Pierce. I loathed Violet Jones but understood her necessity. I liked the way the light played across the aviary, er, arboretum. One time a pigeon had gotten in, so the first was true in a limited sense. I hadn’t been there but I heard about it from Violet; she shooed it out the glass ceiling with a broom.

For several weeks I ignored Casing House’s inquiries about my progress on Tamond’s biography. I took health reasons as an excuse, when in fact I felt fine, even ecstatic. I had no desire to work on Sidney’s history; I felt I already knew all the facts, and could complete it at my leisure. In the first week after the deep sleep I was granted a profound and unprecedented level of concentration, and committed all the tapes and notebooks from our sessions to memory. I saw Elizabeth often; she was working on a new play loosely based on my newfound recollections. When I made reference to earlier times she sometimes grew quiet.

* * * * *

“I have decided you’re not a human being,” she said one morning at breakfast.

“In the play?”

“No, V.S. In real life.”

“Is this like when you used ‘you’ve got no legs’ as a come-on?”

“I’m being honest. That’s attractive to you. Deception is attractive to me. To a point.” She poured honey over her waffle; snapped the cap shut. Passed it back to me. Trying to hide my anxiety over what she’d say next, I followed suit. “You’re like a mirror. You copy everything. You absorb, you reflect, you catalog. You’re incapable of action. You adopt the lives of the people you write about, and frankly, the degree to which you’ve become Sidney lately disturbs me.”

“I haven’t become Sidney. We just happen to have had similar lives. There are many parallels.”

“You’ve created the parallels, V.S. You. He never had a sister. He never went to college on the West Coast. You’re . . . blurring things.”

I spoke very carefully and deliberately, suspecting a trap. As Sidney had warned, interactions with Elizabeth could be terribly formative: she could make people buy into the unsound, for an evening or for the rest of their lives. “He was born in 1967 in Cleveland to parents of low means, as was I. He came to San Francisco during the Boom; he made a name for himself telling the stories of others. We are the same height. He was involved in a car accident, at which time –”

Elizabeth got up from the table. “Sidney was never in a car accident, V.S. He can walk and you – you shouldn’t, not as much as you try to. And you are nowhere near the same height; you’re about as tall as him when you’re sitting down as he is standing up. Most obviously, you are Indian and he’s half-Irish. You need help.”

“No, I’m perfectly fine,” I insisted. The clarity, the clarity when I had woken up that dusk and realized! I had been blessed then with a perfect, unified memory.

* * * * *

“She is right.”
“That I’m not a human being?”

“She has a habit of exaggeration, you know that,” Sidney allowed. “But you do need help. It’s very clear . . . I’ve talked to Casing House, and they’ve agreed to put another author on the job. You can keep the advance, and when you’re feeling yourself again –”

“I’ve never felt myself,” I muttered briefly.

“– they’ll assign you to a different project. Maybe a sports history, or chronicling a Gulf War division. I don’t know, really. But it should be good. Healthy for you, at least. They’ll send someone over for your notes, if that’s alright.”

“I destroyed them. After she ended things.”

“Ah. Well, women, eh?” Sidney managed a laugh. He told me how things had gone with Violet. One evening the newlyweds went to see Love and Other Weaknesses (to know Creative License’s competition, she said), and that was the end.[8] Like everyone else, once she was exposed to both works Violet could not help but see the ex-lovers’ relationship from every side. Not of the most stable disposition to begin with, Violet found her character reflected, amplified all out of dimension and personal proportion. LOW painted her as an invading force, the catalyst that destroyed a problematic but established marriage. Overwrought with guilt and self-consciousness, she broke all ties with Sidney.

“I’m sorry, Sidney,” and I was; Violet had never been more attractive to me than at that moment, when I felt a surge of empathy for her situation. Sidney and Elizabeth were creators, were Free Will Personified, and we – we were merely shades, manipulated afterimages that waxed and waned and flexed in poor mimicry.

* * * * *

Things got better for a small while. I had almost convinced myself, with the help of a psychiatrist, that the epiphany at dusk had never happened, in much the same way that I had to convince myself that the legs which felt perfectly normal were not even my own.

Then, in late March, news reached me of Sidney’s death. He had started too early at an intersection; the housewife slammed on her brakes, swerved, but the coupe’s left door had still crumpled in on him like broken tinfoil. He didn’t have a chance; she was driving one of those middle-class tanks that protect the nuclear family so well. Even her dog was unharmed.

He had promised a party. One of those ridiculous bittersweet affairs during which everyone puts on a good face, and the only ones who are wearing one for real are the most horrid and dispassionate monsters of bunch. It was there that I found myself contemplating the wilting flowers in the arboretum, wanting to take the few steps so that I could stand among them, and knowing not to. And it was there that I saw Elizabeth Pierce and was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been: all great loves are reconciled in death. Violet, however, was nowhere to be seen.

Elizabeth happened to turn in my direction, or perhaps she felt my eyes upon her. I was taken aback that her own eyes looked rimmed with kohl, and I realized that she had been crying. We said our hellos, and then she asked me what I was thinking so quietly.

“I am thinking that I am going to have to be very careful from now on,” I said, and felt as if I was floating upon a very blue sea, and that I was watching myself drift from the windows of Elizabeth’s house. I could feel how thin and gauzy and transparent that layer of conscious thought was, how helpless it was in fighting the tidal forces beneath.

She nodded. “Yes, I expect you would. Now that he’s gone.”

* * * * *

I called Violet a week later; it irritated me that she had not been present at Sidney’s wake or the funeral. She was breathy and apologetic on the phone, and asked to meet for coffee. She hadn’t the nerve to contact any of Sidney’s friends since she’d heard, their split had been so final; I was the closest thing she had. Brow furrowed above a caramel macchiato, she admitted that she still thought of him as alive, that she preferred to conceive of the Sidney that died as an imposter, someone else in masquerade, just like the self she had watched parade across the stage during Love and Other Weaknesses. Attending the funeral would have meant trading a fictional Sidney for the real one. I asked her if this denial wasn’t ultimately dangerous.

Violet thought about this with a contemplative pout. “Well, the Sidney I fell in love with was fictional, too. I’m alright with that.”

But there was regret in her voice, and I asked her about it.

“I ended things because, well . . . When I saw the play, I knew Elizabeth had figured me out. It was her view, of course, so I know she didn’t get everything right. But afterward, I had trouble figuring out what exactly it was she had gotten wrong. I couldn’t really place anything in her portrayal of me as inaccurate, and so I started feeling, I don’t know, like my character. Like an inferior version of myself.”

It was a simple admission, but it started me thinking. If all loves were fictions, then there were two types of people in the world: those who scripted their course, and those who stayed in character. And against such masters as Sidney and Elizabeth, people like Violet and me didn’t have the slightest chance. We were accessories, unwittingly echoing the greats to avoid facing our own embryonic personalities. But in that denial, we found the only kind of happiness we could afford ourselves. For an instant, I saw my reflection clearly in the corner of Violet’s glasses, and felt a certain thrill.