In the other front bucket seat, Bennis Hannaford seemed to be trying very hard not to panic. Liz would have put some music on if she could have, but although the tangerine Mercedes had a CD player, the CDs Bennis had were restricted to one Charles Mingus album, one copy of the Chicago Philharmonic’s rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the Three Tenors. Liz hadn’t believed anybody really listened to the Three Tenors.
“So,” Bennis said finally. “Are we going anyplace in particular? And do you know how to get there?”
“Yes, and yes,” Liz said. “We’re going out to the park, and I could get there sleepwalking.”
“Do you think this is healthy, the amount of time you spend obsessing about all this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give them all a great big raspberry and get married to Jimmy and live happily ever after?”
They were at that fork in the road at the edge of town where the right veer went Liz didn’t know where and the left led out to Plumtrees. Liz took the left. “Do you know a science fiction writer named Lisa Tuttle?”
“I’ve met her a couple of times.”
“I’ve never met her,” Liz said, “but I read a short story of hers once in a collection. It was one of Mark’s collections and we were on a plane and I was restless and it was the middle of the night. I can never sleep on planes. Can you?”
“If I’m tired enough. Did you like this short story?”
“Well, yes, I did,” Liz said, “but that’s not the point. The point is, the story was about this woman who had been this ugly, acne-ridden, bespectacled hick in her little town in Texas or wherever when she was growing up, and then she left for college and started writing and she wrote this one science fiction novel that was just huge. Sold tons of copies. She was living in London or somewhere and she had contacts and the acne had cleared up and she was sophisticated and all that kind of thing. The only problem was, she couldn’t write. She tried and she tried, but she had something worse than writer’s block. And it went on for a couple of years.”
“And that was it? That was the story?”
“No, no, no,” Liz said. “The story was, she got an invitation to speak at this convention near her old hometown. And she went there to show off, but then she got caught up by a couple of geeky, acne-ridden fans. And the longer she stayed with them—she had to stay with them, they wouldn’t let her go—anyway, the longer she stayed with them, the more she sort of morphed back into being the geek she’d started out being. And then they started abusing her, calling her names, telling her how ugly she was. And it was true. She lost her contacts and had to put on glasses. Her skin started to break out. Her clothes started to look funny and wrong. She just got sucked right back into being the person she’d been in high school. But she could write.”
Bennis cocked her head. “Is that what all this has been about? You’ve got writer’s block and you’re trying to recapture the inspiration?”
“Not exactly. I think that the point of the story is that nobody gets to be successful at anything without something driving them, and that for a lot of us it was being what I was in this place thirty years ago. There’s an awful lot of people out there who are still playing In Crowd and making up for what they resent not having had by re-creating it—oh, God, you know. Private clubs with blackball votes. Coop apartment buildings where the board gets to reject people who want to buy in. Private schools where membership in the parent-teacher association is by invitation only. Do you know what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” Bennis said. “I stay as far away from that stuff as I can.”
“So do I. But that’s still what drives me. And that, you see, is why I got so screwed up that I didn’t realize I’d been making a mistake. That I had to have been making a mistake.”
“Making a mistake about what?”
“About something I heard. If I’d really thought about it, with my mind instead of my gut—God, you have no idea how many column inches I’ve eaten up telling people that we all ought to think with our minds instead of our guts—I’d have realized I had to be wrong. I dream about it, do you know that? I dream about it just the way I heard it, and every time I wake up from one of those dreams there’s something in my head telling me I haven’t been paying attention. And I haven’t been. I feel like such a damned idiot.”
“I feel trapped in a car with a manic phase bipolar,” Bennis said.
Liz pulled the car off the road and down the bumpy asphalted strip to an open place on the grass. They still hadn’t paved this parking lot, she thought. The place was deserted. She cut the engine and handed the keys to Bennis. She got out of the car and looked around. The rain had become an off-again, on-again thing. Just this second, it was off again.