The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Rick Moody (pub. 1996, acq. 1999)
In which I read things to people, and consider my own ego
In my mid-20s, I had a girlfriend who liked me to read to her before bed. I think this started with a request to hear something I’d written, but once we exhausted that pile—or at least what I was willing to share of it—I moved on to the work of other, better writers. Poems by Philip Levine, Kim Addonizio, Cornelius Eady. A couple Aimee Bender stories, and Tony Earley’s “Charlotte,” because that was the city in which we’d met. But the one I remember most vividly is a Rick Moody story, “The Grid,” which was so fun to read aloud that after my girlfriend and I split up I’d sometimes read it to my empty apartment while drinking a Negro Modelo from the corner market, a Parliament Light balanced on the rim of a thrift-store ashtray.
I’ve always enjoyed reading my work to an audience, though I don’t really enjoy readings. This feels like something I shouldn’t admit. Though it’s not, generally speaking, any fault of the readers, but rather the way my attention tends to scatter in a room full of people. My eyes wander, and so does my mind. I think about who I’ll need to say hi to after, and what I might ask them about. Sometimes I’ll find myself writing a story or essay in my head, the way I do on a run, or in church, which produces a confusing emotional register: I’m happy for the burst of creative energy, but ashamed at being so self-involved.
“The Grid” is a story about first kisses. It starts with our narrator kissing a woman on a New York City sidewalk, just beneath the open window of her apartment, where her roommate is on the phone, long-distance, with the first boy she ever kissed. From there, we watch as these characters break apart and come together, kissing other people, who themselves kiss other people, an ever-expanding spiderweb of tiny narratives that build to a rhetorical crescendo of interconnected first kisses: “If there were a light-up map showing the pattern of dispersal of these kisses, it would put to shame any of the other light-up maps used to oversimplify the scale and range of our dying metropolis.”
The woman I first read the story to, I don’t think I was ever in love with her, nor even the kind of strong lust that, in your mid-20s, can masquerade as love. This, too, feels lousy to admit, especially because I let out relationship run on for much too long. When we started dating we lived in different cities, and when she moved to D.C., about a year later, she swore it wasn’t only for me. I think we both knew this was a lie, but it was one that, for different reasons, we both wanted to believe.
During that long-distance year, we exchanged frequent letters, and in hindsight I think this was maybe the part I loved. Coming home from work to my lonely studio apartment and finding a hand-addressed envelope among the bills and credit card offers. Reading about the ways my latest letter had moved her, and the things that had lately been on her mind, and how excited she was for the next time we’d see each other. We were like characters in a Victorian novel, and I felt invested in keeping the plot moving forward.
Part of the fun of reading “The Grid” aloud is its musical, over-stuffed sentences. Among my friends, and my students, Moody is a divisive writer. People tend to either be impressed by his sentences or think he’s showing off. I’m in the former camp, though sometimes, depending on my mood, I want to advocate for a third camp, in which showing off doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I also love how “The Grid” glides so effortlessly through time and space, in one moment cataloguing the items in a woman’s bedroom—personal computer, Vermont teddy bear, Joan Armatrading CD—and in the next recounting the first kiss, years ago, of the robber who in that very moment is stealing her stuff: “a first kiss on a really dark night in the Bronx when he was a little bit drunk and she was, too, and this kiss was so easy, like slotting a diamond stylus into the grooves of an old LP.”
Some readers, of course, are engaging enough to transcend the limitations of even my shitty attention span. T.C. Boyle, for instance, at least based on the one time I saw him read, at a tribute to the late Frank Conroy. Hanif Abdurraqib, who came up through the world of slam poetry, which encourages a little drama, a little swerve. The poet Niina Pollari is someone I always enjoy listening to, the way she moves so quickly, even jarringly, between laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. Paul Lisicky isn’t a bombastic reader, by any stretch, but he takes such precise care with the language, and with his own intellectual curiosity, that he always holds me rapt. Elisa Gabbert is in that camp, too, though I know Elisa just well enough that when I see her read I’m also looking forward to talking with her after, because she’s someone I really enjoy talking with.
Some well-regarded readers are so performative they start to trigger my skepticism. Is the writing good, or is it just the emotive nature of the reading, the way a charming salesman, or a street preacher, can hold your attention even if they’re saying nothing of real substance? Would I enjoy their work if I were reading it on the page, in the quiet of my study? I’ve seen the opposite plenty of times, too: a writer I love whose reading style is pretty boring. Though this latter combination doesn’t trigger my judgment in the same way. Being a good reader is a nice skill to have, but to my mind it’s more of an add-on, a bonus, rather than an integral part of what makes someone a good writer.
About a year after that woman moved to D.C., we started talking about a cross-country drive that would end with us relocating to the Pacific Northwest. We sketched out potential routes, researched tents and sleeping bags. I wonder, now: Did I know I’d never take that trip, and was playing along only to put off the inevitable conflict of our breakup? Or did I let my excitement about moving cloud my thinking about the relationship? Or maybe it was a darker calculation: that we could always break up once we got there, and at least I’d have company along the way, not to mention someone to split expenses.
I never got a chance to find out, because other circumstances intervened. And by “other circumstances” I mean the pretty, smart-alecky coworker who decided she wanted to sleep with me. Later, she decided she’d rather sleep with someone else, but I had to admit that whatever heartbreak I felt was karmically deserved.
Once, I read a short essay at a Philadelphia dive bar, and my friend Christian came up to me after to say I’d “won” the reading.
“I didn’t know it was a competition,” I said.
Though secretly I was elated (also, of course I knew).
A few months later, I read the same essay at a different dive bar, and a woman came up after to say she’d liked it.
“Oh, cool,” I said. “That’s always nice to hear.”
I was recently single, and living alone for the first time in a couple years, which was partly what the essay was about. I felt myself gearing up for some flirting. I tried to remember how it was supposed to work.
“It really resonated,” the woman said. “It reminded me of the kind of guys I dated in my twenties. And also why I stopped.”
A few months after we broke up, I ran into that years-ago ex at an Ann Beattie reading in Dupont Circle. I was waiting in line to have my well-worn copy of The Burning House signed. “Isn’t that my book?” the ex said. I feigned confusion, but I knew immediately she was right. Though when I tried to hand it over, she waved me off. “You already took a couple years of my life,” she said. “What’s a book of short stories?”
I had to admit, it was a good line. It almost made me want to rekindle things.
In a grad-school workshop, our instructor asked us to name some of the reasons we’d started writing in the first place. We went around the table. Everyone seemed to have such high-minded answers. When it was my turn, I said: “Ego.” Perhaps memory has heightened the disapproval I saw on my classmates’ faces, but I felt self-conscious enough to add, “Not just ego, obviously.” Still, all these years later, I think ego has to be a part of it. To believe you have something interesting enough to say that people should listen. To believe there’s an audience out there, however small, willing to trade a portion of their precious leisure time for whatever you’re putting down on the page.
I wish I still had those letters. I saved them for years, in an eggshell-blue Nordstrom box, the kind used to gift-wrap a dress shirt or a thin sweater. But at some point, in an uncharacteristically unsentimental moment, I must have tossed them. Actually, what I really want are the letters I sent to her. What kinds of things did I write to make that woman fall in love with me? Would I cringe at those things now? And would reading those letters feel like revisiting an episode in my life, or would it be more like finding an old, failed novel manuscript, something you created but that existed at a level of remove from your lived experience?