“Vladimir Vladinski,” I said, attempting to shift the tone.
“Yes, my dear?” he asked, countering me.
“Today I want you to think about you. Should we talk about your book now? Or wait until the restaurant?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded pleased and modest, and though I kept my eyes on the road, I could tell he was smiling. “Let’s wait until we sit down?”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’ll tell you now that I think you’re a genius, and I think you’re going to be very famous.”
He laughed. “Literary fame. That and a dollar will get me a dollar.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Things will happen for you, I know it.”
“You’re kind to say so.”
I allowed myself to glance at him and saw that his cheeks were taut and his eyes were shining with pleasure. “I’ve embarrassed you. We won’t talk about it until we get to the restaurant.”
At my request he found the cast album of How to Succeed in Business on his phone and played it using the Bluetooth on my car speaker. We sang along to the songs—tentative at first, then with full-throated abandon. I took the female parts, he took the male ones, we messed up the words of the verses and came in strong on the choruses. The more we sang, the more brash and emboldened and confident I felt. He was happy, I could tell. Happy to be free, happy to be a genius, happy to be a beautiful man with his elbow out the open window, squinting at the sun in the October afternoon.
XIV.
After we had texted babysitter information to Cynthia, were seated by an eager Italian man, and had ordered our food and received and poured our bottle of wine （I filled Vlad’s glass twice as full as mine, and being male, he did not notice）， we turned to discussing his book. I had reread it over the past few weeks and made careful notes about theme, symbolism, his deft use of irony, his startling word choice, his use of plot as metaphor, his vivid set pieces. When I was a young and insecure teacher I decided that the greatest service I could do for my students was give them my focused attention. Kill them with care, was my motto. If you’re unsure of your brilliance, give your time. A student who feels seen by you is yours forever. And even though it cost me hours of sleep, and probably came at the expense of my fiction career, the habit of close reading has become the way I teach and the reason that, until all this hoopla with John, I was one of the most popular professors on campus.
Our table sat against the glassed-in wall of the porch looking over the brook. Vlad couldn’t stop exclaiming about how charming it all was. The decor was a little outré—red-checked tablecloths, Chianti bottles coated in wax holding candles, large old fake cheeses hung with straw in the rafters—but the fireplace and the contrast with the rural upstate New York exterior that surrounded us made the decorations feel special rather than silly.
I pulled my notes from my bag. I couldn’t meet Vlad’s eyes as I was speaking—he was too interested and eager. I alternated looking at my notes and at the brook outside, watching a long-beaked bird pick at the carcass of a frog, digging and pulling at its gelatinous corpse.
“What I find so remarkable about your book, Vlad, is that you’ve created a work of extreme restraint that never reminds the reader of its leanness. You move so deftly from scene to scene it feels continuous, and only after I finished did I realize how impressively you pushed time forward. Your use of tense is fascinating, as well as the switch-offs between first and third person. I took these shifts as our narrator’s shifts in self-knowledge, and the impossibility of knowing the self. We reflect, we identify, we seek distance, we seek intimacy, all tactics fall short when it comes to actual perception—the views of ourselves are always conditioned. The writing is like a trapdoor: it gives the reader a sense of knowledge behind and around what the prose is presenting—a fascinating sleight of hand. The recurring appearance of paintings and photographs forced me to consider the representation of experience as it was being represented, which was dizzying and exhilarating. I thought often of John Berger and not only Ways of Seeing but also his photography book—do you know that one? I’ll lend it to you. The character of the boy is pitiable, lovable, hilarious, tragic, and the relationship with the father has a warm and lived-in feeling. Do you know those rides that spin so fast that you’re pinned against the wall? Yes, like in the Godard film Breathless, or sorry, what is it? That’s right, the Truffaut film 400 Blows. I know they are so different but I can’t help but mix them up in my mind because I watched them all during one specific time in my life. So anyway, like in those rides, I feel like what is in the center, what everyone is afraid of falling into, what everyone is spinning to avoid, is the body. The material sense of aliveness, animal-ness, humanness. And yet the body is there—it’s the pit, it’s the center, it lives, molten at the core. I admire that the body is there but that you skirt direct mention of it—ever since Roth and Updike it seems as though men can’t write a book in which the physical is present but not didactic…”
And so I continued. At one point Vlad interrupted to ask if I minded if he recorded what I was saying. I said of course not and that I was also happy to provide him with what I had written. Our food came—we both ordered salads and soups. As I spoke, I occasionally topped up his wineglass and watched his eyes become glassier with the effect of the alcohol. I went through my pages—three legal-sized sheets—and when I finished I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself. I was comprehensive, and complimentary without fawning. I told him I thought he might pay more attention to compression as he neared the final third, my only substantial criticism.
“I want to kiss you,” Vladimir said. And though I knew it was just an expression my heart rate seemed to double, and I felt queasy. He told me that it had been a very long time since he had gotten feedback like that—in fact he had thought the days of hearing his work reflected or analyzed in that way were over. He would be reviewed in the future, he would hear from advisers about what he could change to help sell a manuscript or from publishers about parts that weren’t clear or from a copy editor about usage and grammar, but he hadn’t expected to hear someone fully reflect his work back to him—what he was trying for—with such specificity or rigor.
“Cynthia’s a good reader,” he said. “But her advice is always so holistic. She’ll say, ‘cut this part’ or ‘that guy seems fake.’？” He waved his hands at me, as if to say I was “too much.” “I knew I was excited about our date for a reason.”
“Well, I didn’t want to read your book. And then I was very jealous of you when I first started it. But then I realized it was very good, and when something’s very good, it doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me happy that it exists.”
“No more—I’ll float away on my own inflated ego.”
I put my elbow on the table and leaned my head against my fist, in a gesture of total attentiveness. “How’s the next book coming?”
Badly, he said, he didn’t have enough time to work on it, so he could never find the kind of rhythm he needed for an honest start. It was hard in the condo—he missed his writing space in his apartment. It had been a closet, he had stared at a blank wall—there had been nothing picturesque about it—he had sat in a folding chair that murdered his back. Still, it was where the first book came from. Also, as a first-year tenure-track junior professor, he needed to publish in some journals, so he had to keep working on an essay he was writing comparing Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and recent trends in apocalyptic television. The essay was taking him forever, because as he was writing it he kept forgetting why the topic had ever been interesting in the first place. Finally, with his next book he felt he needed to “swing for the fences” and write something really big—historical, maybe, or with multiple perspectives, or concerning a social issue. He felt scattered, he kept changing topics, he couldn’t settle on something true.