The Nix(104)

All you have to do is say yes.

To say yes, go to the next page…





You say yes. You don’t even think about the long-term consequences of this. You don’t once consider how Bethany or Bishop might feel about this violation of their privacy. You are so blinded by your desire to impress and dazzle and awe the people who left you that you say yes. Yes, absolutely.

So the teacher sends the story to Periwinkle, and things happen pretty fast after that. Periwinkle phones the next day. He tells you that you’re an important new voice in American letters, and he wants you for a new imprint featuring only the work of young geniuses.

“We don’t have a name for the press yet, but we’re thinking of calling it The Next Voice,” Periwinkle says, “or maybe Next, or maybe even Lime, which many of the consultants seem really fond of, weirdly.”

Periwinkle hires a few ghostwriters to smooth out the story—“Totally normal,” he says, “everyone does it”—then works to get it placed in one of the huge taste-maker magazines, where you are declared one of the five best writers under twenty-five in America. Periwinkle then leverages that publicity to finagle a ridiculous contract for a book that hasn’t even been written yet. This gets into the papers along with all of the other good news of early 2001: the information superhighway, the New Economy, the nation’s engine humming powerfully forward.

Congratulations.

You are now a famous writer.

But two things keep you from enjoying this. The first is that there is no word from your mother. Instead, there is just a wretched silence. There is no evidence she has even seen the story.

The second is that Bethany—who absolutely does see the story—stops writing. No e-mails, no letters, no explanation. You write her wondering if something is wrong. Then you assume there is definitely something wrong and you ask to talk about it. Then you assume that the thing that’s wrong is that you completely stole her brother’s story and profited immensely from it, and so you try to justify this move as a writer’s prerogative while also apologizing for not clearing it with her first. None of these letters are answered, and eventually you understand that the story you hoped would win Bethany back has, perversely, killed any chance you may have had with her.

You don’t hear from Bethany for years, during which time you do no writing whatsoever, despite monthly encouraging phone calls from Periwinkle, who is eager to see a manuscript. But there is no manuscript to see. You wake up every morning intending to write but you don’t, ultimately, write. You can’t really say what exactly you spend your days doing, except that it is not writing. The months fly by, filled with not-writing. You buy a big new house with all your advance money and you do not write in it. You use your bit of fame to snag a teaching job at a local college, where you teach students about literature but make no literature yourself. It’s not that you’re “blocked,” exactly. It’s simply that your reason to write, your primary motivation, has melted away.

Bethany does eventually send another e-mail. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an e-mail that she sends to about a hundred people that says, simply, “I’m safe.”

Then in the early spring of 2004, on a day that is otherwise completely insignificant, you see in your in-box a message from Bethany Fall and you read the first paragraph about how she has something very important to tell you and your heart is popping because the thing she needs to confess, you decide, has to be her deep lifelong enduring love for you.

But that’s not it at all. You realize this when you come to the next paragraph, which begins with a sentence that cracks you open all over again: “Bishop,” she writes, “is dead.”

It happened last October. In Iraq. He was standing next to a bomb when it detonated. She’s sorry she didn’t tell you sooner.

You write back begging for details. Turns out after Bishop graduated military prep school he went to college at the Virginia Military Institute, and after he graduated he enlisted in the army as a normal soldier. Nobody could figure it out. All his education and training entitled him to a commission and officer’s rank, which he refused. He seemed to enjoy refusing it, seemed to enjoy taking the more difficult, less glamorous path. By this time, he and Bethany weren’t really talking. They’d been growing distant for a while. For years they had only seen each other at rare holidays. He enlisted in 1999 and spent two uneventful years in Germany before September 11, after which he was deployed to Afghanistan for a time, then Iraq. They’d hear from him only a couple of times a year, in short e-mails that read like business memos. Bethany was becoming a seriously successful violin soloist, and in her letters to Bishop she’d tell him all the things that were happening to her—all the venues she played, the conductors she worked with—but she never heard back. Not for another six months, when she’d get a quick impersonal e-mail with his new coordinates and his typically formal sign-off: Respectfully, Pfc Bishop Fall, United States Army.

Then he died.

You spend a long time feeling miserable about this, feeling in some way that your brief friendship with Bishop was a test you failed. Here was a person who needed help, and you did not help him, and now it was too late. And you write a letter to Bethany expressing this misery because she is the only person who would understand it, and it’s probably the only letter you’ve ever sent her that is utterly without guile, without subterfuge or ulterior motive, the first time you aren’t self-consciously trying to get her to like you and instead just sincerely expressing a true emotion, which is that you feel sad. And this letter begins a thawing in your relationship with Bethany. She writes back and says she too is sad. And you both have this in common, this sadness, and you grieve together and the months go by and your letters begin to move on to other subjects and your grief seems to lift and then one day Bethany signs her letter—for the first time in years—“With love.” And all your guile and obsession ignites again. You think: I might still have a chance! All your love and neediness comes back, especially when she writes one day in the first week of August 2004 and invites you to New York. She asks you to come at the end of the month. There will be a march, she says, through the streets of Manhattan. The idea is a silent vigil honoring soldiers who’ve died in Iraq. It will happen during the Republican National Convention, which will be under way at Madison Square Garden. She wants to know if you’ll come march with her. You can stay at her place.