It was Friday night, Wordstock. The Brown Club of Oregon hosted a literary event and I attended with A. The catered dinner was in the home of a woman whose Silicon Valley success had landed her in the penthouse apartment of a downtown building with a view so expansive, A and I speculated that during the winter months this woman could probably see clear beyond the gray and rain to the light on the other side.
We stood on one of the many balconies, clinked our wine glasses together, and marveled at this new, panoramic view of our city. Beautiful young boys drifted into our conversation, offering the exquisite punctuation of raspberry coated meatballs and bacon wrapped mussels on little trays accompanied by napkins and toothpicks.
“When I am rich,” said A, “I will have small food circulating through my home like this.”
Women and men materialized at the threshold in their “I-mean-business” apparel: sharp-toed leather pumps, clean linen scents of folded money, layers of shimmering shawls and scarves, carefully weighted jewels and faces arranged into well-measured intelligence.
The featured guest for the evening was a fiction writer – a close friend of A’s from San Francisco – who had flown in for his showcase at Wordstock. Because he was also a Brown alumni, our host had decided to throw a literary party celebrating him and his work. The guests were asked to contribute to Community of Writers, a non-profit professional development program dedicated to improving writing instruction and achievement in the classroom. A good cause; a great writer; meatballs in raspberry sauce; our first mild night of the season breathing its quiet over A and me on our temporary grandeur of balcony. This was a 360-degree win.
The writer circulated among us. He was tall and fair and handsome; possibly the only famous novelist I’ve ever first admired, then met and continued to admire after the fact. He wore a somewhat varnished maroon suit that gave him a sense of timelessness; as if he had just stepped out of the century in which his main character lived to drop in for a visit with us. It was hard for me to hold him in present time, as it is for me with all writers who have so convincingly taken me on a journey through some alternative epoch. And yet, here he was: polite and edgy and funny and austerely humble. I had read his novel from start to finish on a trip to the coast, and so his presence brought back for me a salty grit of raw pleasure; that roar of wild endlessness with which that journey had imprinted me.
When I finished this writer’s book last November, I decided his writing was a kind of fine china that is so elegantly achieved, it’s impossible to imagine that the raw material had ever existed in any form other than the perfection of tea cup. I had turned the book over and read his bio a few times, marveling that a real person wrote this book. I knew for a fact that he was real, because A knew him; she had recommended the book.
I have my designer education to thank for pulling the drawstrings of circumstance together in the art museum doubling as the palatial penthouse apartment where this writer and A and I landed. Dinner was served.
Seated under the six-panel, ceiling-to-floor, length-of-the-room painting of people festively eating, we festively ate. To my right was D; to her right sat her husband C. Like a good student, D had prepared for the evening by reading the novelist’s most recent and acclaimed book (the one I read at the coast). She confessed to me that she identified with Max, the main character. This surprised me.
I will preface my response by explaining that in this book, the main character is born an old man and travels backwards in time toward his death as an infant. Strange as it seems, this implausible premise is told so convincingly that the character’s intoxicatingly miserable lifetime of deception becomes absolutely legitimate. And yet, believable as he was, it had not occurred to me that someone might identify with Max’s one-of-a kind existence.
When I asked her to clarify, D explained, “We’ve all been so well educated with our multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees. We show up in our careers at the end of all this education and pretend that we know what we’re doing; pretend we are who we say we are, and hope that everyone believes us. Max had to fake it his whole life to survive. I feel like I’m doing the same thing.”
The truth is, I didn’t like Max much. While I could empathize with his limited choices of trying to fit in a world that wasn’t in any welcoming or accommodating of him, I couldn’t forgive him for being smaller than the sacrifices that love demanded of him. He was going down, and he chose to take his beloved down with him in the name of love. She suffered his suffering, and I resented Max for this. And yet, despite myself, I was completely invested in him attaining what he desired. This, I would argue, is the gift of a great novel; it exposes us to our own contradictions and inconsistencies.
I would have to agree with D: there’s no faker like an Ivy League student or graduate. So many of us are convinced we don’t belong, that we were somehow admitted by accident, that we’re getting away with some terrible mistake and secretly praying that we’re not discovered to be frauds. Martha Beck tells a brilliant story to this effect in her memoir Expecting Adam. She shows up at a Harvard graduate school class a bit late after visiting a friend in a science lab who was experimenting with rats. These rats were, for some unidentified reason, swimming through milk in a little plastic kids’ pool decorated with Smurfs.
Beck apologizes to the class when she enters, explaining that she had been observing rat experiments in the Smurf pool. To which her professor responds with something to the effect of, “Oh yes, Smurf…I’ve heard of his research. Fine work he’s doing!” Several of the students echo the professor’s approval of Smurf’s expertise in the field of rats.
In this moment, Beck realizes that everyone at Harvard – including the professors – secretly think they’re as dumb as she thinks she is, and speculates that perhaps the entire Ivy League - perhaps the entire world - is simply faking it.
Which brings us back to our dinner table where, yes, we were all faking it; sitting up straight, using our silverware properly, and exchanging delightfully articulate conversation in a neat circle of strangers. D told the famous novelist when he joined our table what she told me: how much she appreciated getting to know a character who was so obviously a fraud.
“Aren’t we all frauds?” the novelist asked her. “For example, I’m sitting here pretending to be a famous writer. It’s just a role I’m playing, because you paid to come see me play that role. Really, I’m just a guy who sits at a desk writing stuff, wandering through libraries and taking walks waiting for something to happen.”
In the elevator on our way out of the gathering, (we were driving the novelist back to his hotel) the exposé of fakery continued. “I had no idea what to say to the guy who was telling me how well I captured his adolescent longing for unreachable girls,” he confessed to A and me. “I mean, isn’t it obvious that I’m gay, and I made that shit up?”
This is the problem with faking it. Nothing is obvious. A man shows up at an event outside the context of who he is, shrouded in the projections of an audience that has witnessed only his accomplishments. The audience shows up at this same event shrouded in the certainty that we have not accomplished enough or are in some way inferior to what we’re pretending to be. What bridges this gap is art.
Art is the forum in which we give ourselves permission to suspend our disbelief, strip down to our most secret vulnerabilities, and dive into the false world of possibility so painstakingly created by someone else. The paradox is that the writer’s ability and the reader’s willingness to fake it gives us the shared context of fiction through which we are confronted with the complicated truths of who we are.
Without Smurf's fine research and Max's despicable pursuit of sanity and love, I might actually be tempted to take my list of culturally condoned legitimacies seriously. Instead, I am humbled by the unlikely gifts of rats in a baby pool and a man aging backwards, which keep me grounded in the unadorned flaws of the authentic me.
