be imagined. May and even June are nice in Owensboro, but July and August were coming, and when I thought of Styron blinking in the fierce muggy heat, he seemed even more out of place than the urban Jewish writers like Roth, Doctorow, and Bellow. And Updike, a New Englander! I felt sorry for them all. But that was silly. Every place now has air-conditioning.
When I called Janet, she reminded me that Mother’s birthday was coming up. I knew I was expected to fly home.
Janet told me all about how she and Alan were planning to take her out to dinner. This was to make me feel guilty. I wasn’t planning to fall for it like I did last year, at the last minute.
It is very hard to make friends in New York. My roommate and her ex-roommate had shares in a house in the Hamptons (well, almost the Hamptons) and I had been invited out for the weekend. “You can’t go home for your mother’s birthday every year,” I tell myself.
Mother called me a few days later—a pay phone again, this one near a deli on Thirty-ninth Street where she had gotten me once before—to announce that J. D. Salinger had moved to Owensboro.
“Wait a minute,” I said. This was getting out of hand. “How come no women writers ever move to Owensboro?
What about Ann Tyler? Or Alice Walker? Or Bobbie Ann Mason, who is actually from Mayfield (not that far away)?
How come they’re all men, and all these old guys?”
“I suppose you expect me to ask them that!” Mother said. “I only found out the author of
“Mr. Roth?” So now it was “Mr.” Roth.
“Philip Roth,
“How did Alan get into this?”
“He was standing in line behind them at the cash machine,” Mother said. “He just happened to overhear.”
On Monday night, Alan told me Philip Roth had seemed as surprised as the rest of them to see J. D. Salinger in Owensboro.
“Maybe they had all moved to Owensboro trying to get away from him,” I said, trying to be funny.
“I doubt that,” Alan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the kind of question you can ask.”
It’s Mother who should marry Alan, not me. They think exactly alike.
As Mother’s birthday approached, I tried to concentrate on my upcoming weekend in the Hamptons. I knew what I had to guard against was the last-minute temptation to fly home.
When I called Janet later in the week from a lawyer’s office—they never watch their phone bills—she said, “Do you know the movie
“Michael J. Fox has moved to Owensboro,” I said, astonished in spite of myself.
“Not him, the other one, the author. I forget his name.”
“McInerney,” I said. “Jay McInerney. Are you sure?” I didn’t want to say it because it sounded so snobbish, but Jay McInerney didn’t exactly seem Owensboro caliber.
“Of course I’m sure. He looks just like Michael J. Fox. I saw him walking down at that little park by the river.
You know, the one where Norman Mailer hangs out.”
“Norman Mailer. I didn’t even know he lived in Owensboro,” I said.
“Why not?” Janet said. “A lot of famous writers make Owensboro their home.”
Make Owensboro Their Home. That was the first time I’d heard it said like that. It seemed to make it official.
Janet’s call made me think, and for the first time since I broke up with him, I called Alan. At least he knew who Jay McInerney was, although he had never read the book. “The other Janet said she saw McInerney and Mailer down there at the park,” I said. “Does that mean the famous writers are starting to meet one another and hang out together?”
“You always want to jump to conclusions,” Alan said. “They might have been in the same park at totally different times of the day. Even when they do meet, they don’t talk. The other day at the K Mart, Joe Billy Survant saw E. L. Doctorow and John Irving both in Housewares, and they sort of nodded, but that was all.”
John Irving? But I let it go. “Housewares,” I said instead. “Sounds like folks are really settling in.”
“We’re taking your mother to dinner at the Executive Inn for her fifty-first birthday Friday night,” Alan said.
“I’ve been invited for a weekend in the Hamptons,” I said. “Well, almost the Hamptons.”
“Oh, I understand,” he said. Alan likes to imagine he understands me. “But if you change your mind I’ll pick you up at the airport in Evansville.”
Evansville, Indiana, is thirty miles from Owensboro. It used to seem like a big city to me, but after eighteen months in New York, it seemed pathetic and insignificant: all trees from the air, and hardly any traffic. The one- story terminal looks like a shopping-center bank branch. You climb down out of the plane on a ladder.
There was Alan in his sensible-with-a-flair Olds Cutlass Supreme. I felt the usual mixture of warmth and dismay on seeing him. I guess you might call it warm dismay.
“Who’s that?” I asked, gesturing toward a bearlike figure at the USAir ticket counter.
Alan whispered, “That’s Thomas M. Disch. Science fiction. But quality stuff.”
“Science fiction?” But the name was familiar, at least sort of. Although Disch isn’t exactly famous, he seemed more the Owensboro type than McInerney. “He’s moving to Owensboro, too?”
“How should I know? He may have just been here in Evansville for the speedboat races. Anyway, he’s leaving. Let’s talk about you.”
We drove back home on the Kentucky side of the river, through Henderson.
That whole weekend in Owensboro, I only saw three famous writers, not counting Disch, who is not really famous and who was in Evansville, not Owensboro, anyway. Tom Pynchon was at the take-out counter at the Moonlight, buying barbecued mutton. He bought three liters of Diet Coke, so it looked like he might be having a party, but on the way home from the Executive Inn we drove past his house on Littlewood Drive and it was dark.
For dinner, we had steak and salad. Mother was a hoot. Alan insisted on paying as usual. We were home by ten, and by ten-thirty Mother was asleep in front of the TV. I got two cans of Falls City out of the refrigerator and sneaked her Buick out of the garage. I picked up the other Janet, just like in the old days, by scratching on her screen. “The Two Janets,” she whispered melodramatically. She said the cops were rough on DWI (Driving While under the Influence) these days, but I wasn’t worried. This was still the South; we were still girls. We cruised down Griffith, out Frederica, down Fourth, down by the river. There was hardly any traffic.
“Has Alan asked you to marry him again?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Well, if he does, I think you should.”
“You mean you wish I would.”
The streets were still and dark and empty.
“Sure isn’t New York,” I sighed.
“Well, nobody can say you haven’t given it a shot,” the other Janet said.
At midnight we went to the all-night Convenience Mart at Eighteenth and Triplett for two more cans of beer.
John Updike was looking through the magazines (even though the little sign says not to). At 12:12 A.M. Joyce Carol Oates came in for a pack of cigarettes, and surprising us both, they left together.
THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT
