Contents Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication A Note from Duchess Goldblatt Frontispiece 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Acknowledgments About the Author Connect with HMH Copyright © 2020 by Anonymous All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 987-0-358-21677-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-358-21679-7 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-358-30937-6 (audio) ISBN 978-0-358-30945-1 (compact disc) Wallace Stevens’s definition of poetry is from “Of Modern Poetry,” in Collected Poems. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Cover design by Allison Chi Cover art: “Portrait of an Elderly Lady” by Frans Hals, 1633, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Online Editions. v1.0620 For M. This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Quit hounding me, children. You don’t need to know everything. 1 W I must have slept weird, folks. My backstory is killing me. HEN THE HOUSE burns down, so to speak, there’s no guarantee that anybody will stick around to help sweep up. This is not the dominant narrative I’d been raised to believe in. Sure, Lucy and Ricky could end up divorced—the twin beds were a clue, in hindsight, and he was such a fascist about kicking her out of his stupid nightclub act—but you figure Lucy would always have Ethel Mertz. In my moment of sudden destruction, I learned the very hard way that reinforcements would not be coming. When I lost everything—my Ricky, my Fred and Ethel, the nightclub and band, even the gig on the chocolate-factory assembly line—I found out the sheltering trees above me were gone, and I was on my own. It’s Opening Day in Crooked Path! Looks like another beautiful season of head games, everybody. I almost drove the car off the road when I saw the caller’s name appear on my phone: Frank Delaney. I’d met the Irish writer maybe a year or two earlier, through work, and we’d hit it off, but I never would have expected him to call me up again out of the blue. Frank was a novelist and BBC journalist, and smooth—indeed, he’d been called “the most eloquent man in the world” by NPR—but I was struck again by how kind he was, how genuine, how compassionate. After we’d met just that one time, he’d sent along a gift for my little boy: a copy of Kaufman’s Field Guide to Butterflies of North America. Frank had a sharp eye and a storyteller’s ear. He had interviewed thousands of people in his decades in broadcasting, everyone from Prince Charles to Alan Greenspan, and that expertise revealed itself: somehow in our short time together, over a day or two, he’d gotten my whole story out of me. I still don’t know how he did it, how he ever perceived so much, so fast. “How are you?” he asked me. “Are you all right? I hope by now you’ve stopped pushing people away.” I pulled the car off the road into an empty church parking lot. “I’m trying, Frank,” I said. “Thanks for asking.” “What days are the hardest for you?” he asked. “Sundays.” “So I’ll tell you what you do on Sundays: French lessons. Dance lessons. Piano lessons. Immerse yourself in the deep pleasures of Latin and Greek. Sign yourself up for something every hour. Fill your days.” “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” “It will get easier with time,” Frank said. “All right.” “How’s your son now?” he asked. “You’re so kind to ask. He’s eight already, if you can believe it.” I could hear my voice was shaky. “We’re trying. We’ll be okay.” “When you have no one to put their arms around you, you must put your arms around yourself,” Frank Delaney said. “Will you do that?” “I’ll try, Frank,” I said. But I didn’t know how. I’m looking for something shiny to show you in this garbage pile, loons. Maybe a bit of sea glass. I’m trying. I can remember one day, during this period, hanging around at my job with nothing in particular to do. I worked as a writer and editor for a publishing house that had been started decades earlier by academics, and our beloved locally owned firm had recently been bought by a foreign company to be stripped down for parts. Four hundred or so of my colleagues had been let go. The handful of us who were allowed to stay on a little longer had a few projects to finish up here and there, if we cared to, and we did. We wanted to at least complete the work we’d started. Our lease wasn’t quite up yet, so we stuck around, a few loose marbles rattling in an otherwise empty building. Desks and chairs were stacked floor to ceiling, and boxes of unwanted papers had been dumped in darkened conference rooms. I went wandering the halls looking for coffee in the break room one day and ran into one of the guys from the new parent company. We both stood there silently waiting for the coffee to finish brewing until, finally, he cleared his throat. “You know, usually when we go into an organization like this to clean it out, we start looking into the business and find out the place was a disaster, bleeding money,” he said. “Mismanaged, driven into the ground. But this place”—he shook his head—“this was an American tragedy. It was a beautiful organization. Very, very well run. Solid margins. People cared. I mean, they really cared.” He sounded surprised. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of telling him he was right. It had been a beautiful organization. Of course we had cared. I held his gaze in silence until he turned and left the room. The few of us who’d been lucky enough to have been kept around for a bit knew it wouldn’t last. We all had to find new jobs. Most of our clients had split as soon as they saw the ship taking on water, and the little bit of work that was left for us didn’t fill the whole day. In the meantime, we kept turning up every morning, mostly to have someplace to go. “Show me how to set up an account on social media,” I said to my work pal Naomi one day, in boredom. I was lying down on the desk in her office, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve never been on there. I feel like I’m missing out.” “You’re not missing anything,” she said. “It’s all the people you haven’t seen since high school posting pictures of their kids. Lot of libertarians with government jobs complaining about paying their taxes, for some reason.” “I wouldn’t mind seeing what people are up to,” I said. “As long as they can’t see me.” “If you’re out there, they can see you,” she said. “It’s reciprocal. That’s the whole point. It’s why they call it social media.” “And yet somehow I’m feeling like this is not the time for me to establish a public presence out amongst the people,” I said, waving my hand in the direction of the hallway, by which I meant the street outside, our town, the world. She nodded. Naomi knew enough of the salient details of my story that she supported my intuition not to start posting anything personal online at that very moment. She and I had both learned the hard way that family court judges and divorce attorneys are not typically the first to leap forth in an embrace of harmless good fun. “Could you set up an account for me so I’m anonymous?” I asked. “Anonymous?” she said. “You mean fake?” “No. I can’t lie. I certainly don’t want to trick anybody,” I said. “I’m thinking it could be obviously fictional. I’ll use a pseudonym. I won’t even post. I’ll just listen in on what everyone else is saying.” “What’s your pen name?” she said. I thought about it. “You know that classic parlor game that lets you figure out your drag queen name? You take the name of the first pet you ever had as your first name and your mother’s maiden name as your last name.” “I thought it was your first gym teacher’s name and the name of the street you grew up on.” “That’s a perversion of the form in my opinion, but yes. That’s pretty much it.” “You can’t use your own mother’s maiden name,” she said. “People who know you might recognize it.” “Good point. I won’t use my own. What’s your mother’s maiden name?” “Didion.” “Derivative,” I snorted. “Too bad. I’m not letting you use my mother’s real maiden name. Keep looking.” “Fine. I’ll tell you the funniest one I ever heard,” I said. “A dear old friend of mine: his first dog was a black Lab named Duchess, and his mother’s maiden name was Goldblatt.” “Duchess Goldblatt.” “I’ve always loved it.