The Kind of Woman Who Could Get Away with That
Reflections in 20/40 Hindsight on
"Public Appearances"
The Governor's wife: How come nobody seems to believe it when I say she isn't me? I am not she: grammatical proprieties seem, if anything, to reinforce the impression of falsehood. But honest, she isn't. Moi? She never was, I swear.
How, for starters, could I have wished, for either of us, such unsavory symbiosis, I using her for disguise, she using me for a mouthpiece? No, I look at The Governor's wife and see myself neither in the here-and-now nor in the bygone. That poor woman is older than I was back when (though yes, a bit younger than I am now), more timid, more alone. Though it shames me to admit it, I really don't know what she looks like. Only that she is small. She has fine, delicate hands, which I do not.
The Governor's wife wears a costly, understated dress of a sort I've never been drawn to, a costume designed to give no offense. I'm afraid I'm inclined to flamboyance myself. My clothes have always dared people not to notice me, my wardrobe since childhood a sort of running gag. I wish I could get away with that: I'm the kind of woman other women say that to. The Governor's wife is the kind of woman who'd say it. Mean it. Be unable to imagine it. How on earth could anybody mistake us, one for the other?
It is true that when I wrote the story "Public Appearances" (1981 would be my guess) I was married to a politician, an able and attractive man, still young, who after several terms in the House of Representatives had just been elected to the U.S. Senate. In that respect, the sources of this story are disappointingly obvious. Less apparent a factor than the public life but perhaps more significant in the story's conception, though, was the secret life I was leading in those days: I was trying, slowly, to kill myself by starvation, and I was trying, desperately, to keep myself alive by writing.
The starvation part is so complicated, so hard--hard, even now, to remember, hard to believe. What kind of a stunt was that for a grown woman to pull, whittling herself down to nothing so that she might slip through the bars of a cage she'd locked herself in? I feel toward the woman who did that much as I feel toward the Governor's wife--heartsick with sympathy, yes, but also eager to disassociate myself from a creature so helpless, so . . . hapless. What a terrible word that is, so weak. The dictionary makes it sound as if no one's to blame, but a "hapless" person somehow looks as if she's brought it all on herself, just by being so inert. I don't want to blame the Governor's wife for her haplessness. I don't want to discuss starvation. Let me talk about writing instead.
Writing was my life raft. I began at a time when I wasn't strong enough (maybe not even sure enough of wanting my head kept above water) to heft myself up over the edge and haul my butt out of the deep. Writing simply gave me something to grab onto, the one bit of dear life I could talk myself into holding on for. And if writing were not enough, I also, through a series of lucky mishaps, wound up in school--the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Vermont College, to be specific. There my secret life as a writer began to take on a life of its own.
I had teachers then--extraordinary teachers! generous, passionate, wise--to guide and goad me, to give me tough assignments. But the toughest were the ones I laid on myself. Indeed, I sometimes look back with awe at what, through desperation, I saw fit in those days to demand of myself. For one thing, I had to write at least one new story each and every week. And in each new story I was obliged to address a specific aspect of craft, defined in advance. The week I wrote "Public Appearances," I'd been working up the nerve to tackle something I conceived of as a fiction writer's high-wire act without the net: shifting point of view.
Everybody brings some natural gift to the process of making art, I believe, and the rest of the artist's life and work are defined and delineated by the effort to acquire what abilities do not come naturally, may even seem to defy capture.
I began as, at heart have always been, a "voice writer." My natural gift, from the start, was my ear. The eye was my greatest lack. Indeed, I was, as a writer, very nearly blind.
My teachers, my peers in workshops, the occasional magazine editor to whom I'd send work were unanimous in their insistence that my fiction needed grounding in the physical world . . . starting with the eye, yes, but not neglecting the nose, the tongue, the fingertip. I needed to stop writing stories that amounted to little more than a soul talking to herself, talking to herself about herself in an unseen place known only to herself . . . I needed, it seemed, to get real.
That need, no matter what else the weekly assignment might entail, defined the ongoing struggle: to place the stories in a concrete world whose sensations the reader could observe and share.
Why, for so many of us, does that seem to come so hard? I've taught fiction writing for more than a dozen years now, worked with hundreds of students, and I'd say that absence of grounding may be the most common affliction among us, the hardest impediment novice fiction writers butt up against. Even now, I can sometimes forget . . . can fail to leave room in my fiction for the world to come in. Why? The world can hardly be lost on us. Were that so, why would we have chosen this flimsy, maddening vocation in the first place? Maybe it's just that, as dreamers, we get so caught up in what we see that we simply forget to say . . . or is it that we're enchanted, under the spell of those irresistible voices in our heads?
My recalcitrant vision, in any case, was giving me fits. "Your stories," one teacher told me, "might as well take place inside a ping pong ball."
Too true. And I was miserable about it . . . but at least this presented a more constructive challenge than self-starvation. Starvation is hard to practice as a sideline. It's a full-time job that's got to come first. Your attention can't wander. Not to mention that the rewards are negligible. Having so little to show for myself was starting to get mighty stale.
What a godsend, then, to have found, at Vermont College, a place to go where I could be nobody's wife. No one in Montpelier knew a thing about me, nor much cared, past what I cared to reveal in black and white on a page. Godsend, indeed. In retrospect, I see how being just another writer wrestling with the angel started a sense of self-worth sneakily rooting in me. I was taking on heft behind my own back. Now if I could only learn to use that eye . . .
And then one day my disguise slipped. Jean, another student in the program to whom I'd become especially close, had seen this senator on television and noticed he was from the same state where I lived. She'd started thinking lately anyway how odd it was that I never seemed to say much about my existence apart from school, aside from writing . . . barely breathed a word about my real life. So Jean, putting two and two together, had arrived at a sum that blew my cover.
"You're married to him, aren't you?" she said.
The gig, as my sister is prone to say, was up.
But Jean wasn't about to give me away. We were sisters in a secret sorority of emigrees, recently landed in a land of the free and home of the brave. In this new country we were worth the paper we'd written on, exactly that. In Montpelier, allowed to wrestle the angel without worrying what might get broken, we might actually grow into the writers we longed to be. No, Jean was hardly about to turn me in.
"But what is it like?" this friend who mostly knew me by my stories wanted to know. Those big political events, the cameras and crowds . . . she simply couldn't imagine me in the midst of all that, she said.
I was disinclined to begrudge or belittle her curiosity, when I could scarcely imagine me there myself. That may have been my problem all along.
Because writing is such a fearsome thing, I have sometimes had to fool myself into facing it. I am not going to write a story, I'll swear, and over and over the unwary self falls for that tired ploy. It's actually kind of funny.
No, we'll just try a little writing exercise this morning . . . suppose we work on the sense-perceptible detail problem. Maybe that way we can try to tell Jean how it feels to be in the middle of all that . . . and listen, while we're at it, now might be the time to face down the shifting viewpoint thing . . .
The story was there before I knew it. It named itself, seemingly without so much as consulting me, "Public Appearances." The viewpoint panned the room much as a camera would, picking up the ordinary details of a typical and tedious political banquet, actually amusing itself with the event's very triteness, I suppose--menu, slogans, speech.
It rather surprised me to find a protagonist had somehow shouldered her way to the narrative's center. I'd never decided nor intended any such thing. The Governor's Wife was not meant to have a role in the proceedings any larger than anybody else's. I guess I just must have felt more comfortable in her shoes than . . . well, his shoes, say. Indeed, it never dawned on me until this very minute that, free as I felt to move around, entering the minds of various minor staff members and the Lieutenant Governor's wife and the Senate Majority Leader, even that lady in the purple dress (in whom I admit I do recognize myself--They always put the best things . . . where you couldn't get your hands on them. Accuse me of doing the talking there and I'll cop a plea.) . . .
Well, I could go anywhere I chose, couldn't I? And mostly did. How telling, then, that the one psyche I never barged into was the Governor's, nor even so much as noticed that until just now. This is an insight that, like starvation, I'm not eager to dissect. Let's talk about the writing instead . . .
It is clear to me now that "Public Appearances" marked something of a turning point in my development as a writer: the first time it was eye, rather than ear, writing the story. My eye wasn't working alone, no. The ear was in on it. But perhaps for the first time, my eye was in charge, running the show. And because of that, the story seemed to go about discovering itself in ways quite new to me.
I like to think my eye and ear fall more naturally into a kind of teamwork these days. The ear is still the bossy one, of course. But the eye can't be talked so easily out of doing its job anymore.
"Public Appearances" also seems to have given me confidence. After learning enough to grasp how little scrutiny my early efforts were likely to bear, I'd turned bashful about letting my work be seen. This story must have thought itself quite something, though, for I recall three occasions when it brazened out into view.
First, at some point I sent the story to my friend Esther, who'd recently left a career in politics to become a literary agent.* Otherwise, I'm afraid this anecdote depends on a confession I'd rather not make: that the original version of "Public Appearances" (Oh, why did I ever start this?) had a different ending . . .
Remember those blood roses blooming on the front of the Governor's shirt? It seems I failed at first to realize we'd only imagined them, his wife and I. Anyhow, I must have got carried away, I guess, because the Governor got shot and . . . well, it wasn't pretty.
Esther, not known (and widely, I might add) for mincing words, made a valiant effort to treat this miscalculation with tact.
"I read your story," she said, "and I loved it. Really loved it." I could hear the "but" coming, of course.
"But this ending . . ." she said.
Her restraint, fragile as ancient silk mightily pulled, shredded. Does memory exaggerate? All I can remember is Esther yelling at me: "No!" and "Susan, you just can't do that!" and "No, you really can't!"
Mayhem: just a little something I needed to get out of my system, maybe.
The story crept out into view again only after its ending had been, as they say, substantially rethought. A friend of my husband's, a writer whose first book, a truly marvelous literary biography, was creating quite a stir, came to spend a weekend with us. He was everything I longed to be, this writer--young, glamorous, gifted, charming, nervy. Published. And so chivalrous as to express interest in my writing, even asking if he might read a story or two. Needless to say, I gave him "Public Appearances," my heart's own darling at the time.
Even now, nearly twenty years later and at the mercy of a memory likely to get nothing more than half-right, I turn queasy remembering the churning mix of hope and dread I felt when I slipped that nursling story into his, this "real writer's," hands. What was it I hoped for? What did I dread? I don't recall. I only know it felt awful.
Saturday night I was upstairs dressing to go out for dinner. The two men, the writer and the Senator, were downstairs having a drink. The house we occupied at the time, well over a hundred years old, tended to exhibit such idiosyncrasies as one might expect of a centenarian. Because we hadn't been long in this house, and I mostly alone there, I had never before this evening been aware that a heat duct lofted living room conversation directly into the bathroom above, each syllable intact.
I was putting on eyeliner, I believe, when I heard them.
"So she gave you one of her stories?" My husband sounded amused.
"I read it this afternoon."
"How is it?"
"Not bad, really." The writer, too, sounded amused. "You might want to be careful, though. I'd say she is kind of pissed off."
Both men laughed.
I put on some mascara. Then I went downstairs and we three went out to dinner.
The story wasn't quite, after that, my heart's darling, of course. With some of its feathers bent, it was less likely to preen, so I was able to turn it over to a workshop in Montpelier and let it take its licks.
Like I said, I doubt my memory is getting more than half of this right, but to the best of my recollection this is what happened: Nobody in the workshop yelled at me, and if they noticed I was pissed off they didn't mention it. In fact, I'd say the story went over fairly well.
The workshop was being run by Gladys Swan, a teacher I particularly idolized then (and still do, truthfully). I might have been euphoric at workshop reaction but for one thing: Gladys had nothing to say. Naturally I read into her silence revilement for the story and unutterable personal contempt for its author.
As in most workshops, the writer did not participate in the discussion. I kept my head down, taking notes on others' comments, and tried not to let Gladys catch me sneaking pathetic hopeful glances her way.
Finally, near the end of the allotted time, Gladys said that if everyone else was through she would like to bring up one thing she'd noticed about the story. She then picked up the manuscript and, moving through the story's pages in sequence, she read aloud the passages describing hands: the deft hands of the Hungarian seamstress, Mrs. Bogner, and how the Governor's wife touches the old woman's fingers, wishing their magic would infect her own . . . the hands of younger men holding hers, steering her through crowds . . . hands clinging and reaching and pushing and grabbing . . . the Majority Leader's fantasy of enfolding the Governor's wife's hands in his pockets, her unlucky opal ring and her husband's hands raised to pull adulation out of the very air . . .
Hands everywhere. I'd never even seen them. It was just my writing eye, in charge of the story for once, that did.
"That," Gladys said when she had finished, "is how imagery functions in a story."
And I sat there not pleased with myself, but simply astonished . . . and mortified at having been shown with absolute clarity how little I knew what I was doing.
Unlike those two earlier memories of "Public Appearances," though, I often recall this one, allowing myself to dwell on it. For it reminds me of something important I mustn't forget to tell my students:
Don't even think about images. They can't be figured out in advance. (A Harvard student once told me he hadn't started writing his new story yet because its images were still being planned!) Don't worry about imagery, I say. Just look. Look good and hard at everything and let your eye write the story. Later you (or Gladys or I or someone) will discover that the images have found their own way there. You'll be purely amazed, I tell them.
My students tend to look at me, some of them, as if I'm a little simpleminded. I'm getting used to that. Imagery, I tell them, needs to be allowed to sneak up on the story while the writer is otherwise occupied.
The writer's job? Oh, that's simple: taking in the colors and shapes and smells and textures and temperatures and sounds of the things that constitute not a literary, but a literal, world.
What writers do, you see, really is rather simpleminded. It has taken me years to get comfortable with the extent to which stories hinge on a kind of ignorance.
And yes, I admit it--"Public Appearances" was born in ignorance, written in ignorance. Why bother to deny a truth so plain?
But me the Governor's Wife? Come on!
Were I the Governor's Wife, I do not believe reading this story could make me cry the way it sometimes has. I despise self-pity probably more than any other human failing (except for pure cussedness, which I'm not sure I believe in anyway). Sudden tears have been known to ambush me when I bump into this story after not seeing it for a long time and I'm just not prepared . . . Sure, the weepiness is a little embarrassing. Still, it's not like getting caught crying over me.
In any case, I've never had any trouble keeping me and the Governor's wife straight. I mean, if I thought she was me, or vice versa, would I find myself wishing I could have been her friend?
Besides, I was never hapless. I bet I could have taught this woman a thing or two about brazening it out, in fact, given her some ideas, back when, about what she could get away with.
As to this rush of sorrow at seeing her now? It's just how alone she seems up there, trying to eat and keep her knees together and look like she's enjoying herself, hemmed in between a couple of men who don't even know she's there. Which isn't much of anything to cry about in a world so full of real suffering. At least she has something to eat . . .
But she is starving. Can't anyone see that?
I am not the Governor's wife. No, if I'm lurking anywhere in this story, it's probably behind the Majority Leader. Because I do in my distanced, ineffectual way care for the Governor's wife . . . or at least, for God's sake, see her.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself ushering her out of that place and time, providing safe passage through the crush. Then we'd be out in the cold together, the two of us. I could offer her my gloves.
And when she refused them, I would take her small, helpless, frozen hands and pull them inside my big pockets. I would keep them right there until they were sufficiently thawed to grab hold of something. Something like writing, maybe . . . something warm and solid to wrap around, holding on for dear life.