Chapter 41
October 20
The Art of Obvious Subtlety
[A] television producer once made a drawing of a horse for me and said, “You and I know this is a horse. But here is what is necessary to get it over to a large audience.” Above the drawing he wrote, “This is a horse,” and made an arrow from the words to the horse.
Larry Rivers, What Did I Do?
“The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true.”
Wilks, the actor, impersonating the German nihilist philosopher Professor de Worms, in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday
I BEGAN THE DAY in my cave, at my computer, working on the forty-first episode of Dead Air, but when I took a break to get a second cup of coffee from the kitchen, I found Albertine on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor again, and when I got back to my workroom and took my place at the computer, she began writing in her diary:
Peter is full of optimism about making big money writing other people’s memoirs, and I wish I could join him in his hopefulness. He is such a little boy at times. I love him for it, and I think it’s really one of his admirable qualities. Most days, I think he actually wakes up thinking that things are going to get better. At least he wakes up with the feeling that they might get better. He has — or I suppose I should say he had — the sunny disposition of a happy child, and he has a mind that sees every angle, and wants to know what’s around the corner of every angle, and the kindness that I see in him every day I rarely if ever see in anyone else at any time. I love him for those qualities, but those qualities have made him feel like a failure because the culture has rejected them. That sunniness he used to have, for instance — it made him perfect for writing those Larry Peters books, and that would have been the ideal employment for him if only the whole miserable culture hadn’t decided to just let go and fall to the bottom rung, where the populace lies there, fat, bloated, open-mouthed, stupid, ignorant as sea slugs and proud of it, bottom-feeders, trash fish, scavengers, leaving him dangling as far up the ladder as he’d managed to scramble with no one to read what he was writing, maybe even with no one who could read what he was writing. Consider this, from the morning’s news: the applicants for teaching jobs at a New York school were given the statewide exam that their students would be required to pass — and most of the applicants failed it. It’s the death of the culture, the literate culture, and Peter is dying with it. I wish I could help him, but I can’t see past my own troubles to a solution for his. When I get out of bed, I can’t see beyond what is. We are utterly broke, at the bottom of a pit. I hide from him the truth about how bad things really are, but I know that he peeks at the books and I suspect that he knows. We have a hundred dollars in the checking account, the van payment is past due, I can’t make the payment on the mortgage, and there is barely enough to buy groceries for the next week. I’m going to have to break into our anniversary jug — the old gin bottle where we save pocket change toward our anniversary dinner each year — for the groceries. He doesn’t quite see all this. He sees that the hotel is nearly full, and that money is coming in from the guests we have, and he sees the good dinner business on the weekends, and the bar crowd, and he sees all the amateur repairs and maintenance we’re getting from the friends of Lou, but he just doesn’t seem to notice the thousand little things that break and have to be replaced, the bills and more bills that suck the money out of my hand before I get to decide where it ought to go. A length of gutter, a piece of flashing, a valve, a washer, a strip of carpet, a broken tile, a missing brick, and the money is gone. It doesn’t even show, but it’s gone. The only way out is out. I know he loves this place, and I know how hard it is for him to surrender his dreams about it. I think that’s why he’s putting off approaching Lou about buying it, waiting for the right moment, and waiting, and waiting, and hoping — I suspect — that some bit of Leroy luck will make it unnecessary that the right moment should ever come. He’s a dreamer. I wish I were.
[to be continued]
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