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Four Threads The biographer did not pick apart people's lives. He picked apart their personalities. Life events were framed by the results, damning or flattering as they might be. He worked with a few carefully selected qualities, which he would chart as integers between 1 and 20, rising and falling with time. Three of the most important ones: 1. Math/science versus humanities. "Content" denotes the type of work being done, and "style" denotes [analytical and craftsmanlike] pitted against [intuitive and creative] labor. 2. Ambition: conservative and destructive versus expansive and creative. 3. Sex. The Botanist The botanist loved orchids more than anything else - a conventional choice, made for respectable, sympathetic reasons. Orchids throbbed with honey-coated glamour and the indulgent, lustful fondling of the young and confident. This was not true of cranberry bushes. Cranberry bushes throbbed primarily with cranberries. On a day-to-day basis, however, the botanist spent an awful lot of her time wading through cranberry bogs, thinking about the orchids she'd read about the night before. The Chemist Something about the smell of chemicals would get her going. It was never anything dangerous, and she didn't linger, but a whiff of sulphur could put her mind somewhere else. She once dated a boy because his hair reminded her of Al(OH)3, which took her right back to the pottery wheel at her parents' house, and her meticulously ordered shelf of glazes. His hair misbehaved charmingly, and he was a champion juggler, but it all ended one fall day, at seven in the morning. "Hey," she said sleepily. "Mmf?" he answered. "Your hair - I know what your hair smells like." "Pert Plus," he answered. "Al(OH)3. It produces a nice matte glaze." "Thank you," he said, turning over, and falling back to sleep. "Shit," she said, sitting up, pulling the sheets to her chest. "I knew there was something irrational about this. Back to the drawing board, Brad." "Mmf," he said, but he was beyond caring. He was dreaming of juggling raisin scones. The Sports Writer The sports writer was once fired for using "racquet" instead of "racket," and "gelding" instead of "filly," as per AP style. Or so it said on the paperwork: Released for inability to conform to basic AP style. See job description. But he was really fired because he stuttered, and always had something critical to say at the staff meeting. The sports writer looked forward to staff meetings, because there was always something important to be pointed out, and he really, genuinely thought people liked to know what was going wrong. He was painfully earnest. He liked to frame his concerns in the form of long, sometimes hard-to-follow presentations that relied upon sometimes obscure moments from history and literature to make their critical points. What does the Edict of Worms have to do with the way the copy desk traditionally handled Reuters photo cutlines? Quite a lot. Who could understand this? Very few. Either the stuttering or the presentations could have been overlooked. Both were killer. At the next newspaper, he didn't find much to complain about, so he didn't.
It had been figured out for us that were going to go to an expensive seafood place. It might have had a Cajun angle to it; it might not have. No one had really tried all that hard to explain it to me. This was pretty much allright, as I'd gotten used to it. After enough time, you realize you're generally a social impediment, and you work around it. "Impediment" is a great word to use here, because that's pretty much the four-syllable explanation for most of what was wrong with my life. But it was rumored that there going to be some softshell crab. For softshell crab, I could keep my mouth shut for a while. I didn't really know Paul or Eliza, but Sara had assured me they were good people. Paul was a biographer. To me this was not hard to understand. Anytime you write a profile of an athlete who's going somewhere, you're a biographer. All you'd need to do is keep asking questions, wait for the guy to break on through, do some follow-ups and get it bound. Is there some fucking mystique to writing a biography? No, not really. Not if it's someone famous. Any wanker can pore through a box of old papers and interview a bunch of gentle, dowdy professors with love of language and soft generalizations about life. The biographers I might respect would write about average people, and use their gifts to make average lives seem like shining arcs mapped across a stage populated by other warm, living, breathing people. So to hear this guy was working on some Churchill thing was no big deal to me, but Sara's eyes stung me. Was she just looking interested because she happened to like World War II? Or was this a matter of her doing it again - deciding to get some more space, some more time, some more "emotional room," godammit, leaving me alone in the field, waiting? Godammit. One clear moment. One clear moment of penetrating, clear, powerful, improvised speech would be enough to sum it all up. And when did those moments come? They came, inevitably, when I was saying stuff like this: "Yeah, I'd like to get an order of the softshell crab, and a shrimp plate appetizer, all fried. And a Harpoon, if you've got it on tap." Sa-sa-sa-sa-ss-sa-ra, I t-. I think tha-the that. I thi f-FUCK IT.
There was no doubt about it - the flowers were fake. But people seemed to love it - love it - when I would stare at them for minutes on end, squinting as though I was flipping through endless catalogues of mental botanical taxonmy, searching for the name that would elude me, because it was too simple to make it into the database: false. Fake. Plastic. The first time I did this, I'd done it as a joke. It made someone fall in love with me, which was absurd. What's charming about a woman - with an advanced degree from a respectable college - not being smart enough to realize that they have fake flowers in restaurants? I don't know. Sometimes it makes me feel strange. Right now, Paul was not looking at me, which was a shame. He was looking at Eliza, who was looking at him. I snapped my eyes back to the flowers. Randolph, sluggish and probably frustrated that he'd be a pretty verbal person if only he could talk, put his arm around me. I almost shivered. Almost. For some reason, I remembered the time he tried to explain to me that the stain on his futon was actually frosting. It had taken about twenty minutes, because I'd kept laughing at him. It wasn't until he'd basically made himself clear that I realized he was on the edge of tears. Over the edge, in fact - crying and stuttering at the same time, hitting the word "frosting" over and over again. This was the same guy who, one week earlier, had written a 2500-word profile of a hockey player that read like a warm thunderstorm, and was picked up by Sports Illustrated. It was spun from brilliance. Goddammit.
Paul smelled like beer.
When I arrived at the restaurant, it was clear I had fucked up. The place was packed, and it was clear we weren't going to get a table for at least an hour. "Should we go somewhere else?" asked Eliza. Eliza didn't care. She'd eat at Burger King, and it would all be the same to her, unless it happened to smell like lithium carbonate. But this was bullshit - food makes the person. Tonight, I wanted to be made by softshell crab and cajun shrimp, because I knew the chef, and he knew how to make a good sauce, and treat seafood right. How was I to know that the place would be crazy on a Wednesday? Sara was staring at the fake flowers with a queer expression on her face, probably trying to identify the species. I'd seen her do this before. Somehow, "fake" was never one of the options in her vast pallete. "I think we should stay put," said Randolph, stuttering like crazy. "I feel like softshell crab, and this is our best bet, right?" "It certainly is," I said. "It'll be worth the intial time investment." I waited for someone to bring up the point about missing the play, because our original plan was impeccable - 2 hours for dinner including 15 minutes of wait, 30 minutes to travel to the Feldmann Theater, and then we'd be right on time for "Plastic Wood." Then it all drifted back to me, in dribs and drabs: no one had been particularly enthusiastic about "Plastic Wood" except for me. And I'd been mostly enthusiastic about it because I thought there was a chance that my ex-wife might go. Which was unhealthy. Profoundly unhealthy. The restaurant was spinning, as a direct result of the four and a half beers I'd consumed before, during, and after my shower. Eliza was accidentally beautiful and dressed in corduroy, and I had the uneducated impulse to kiss her as she stood dangerously close to me in the lobby. Randolph and Sara were now watching people with reservations get seated. Eliza looked at me. I pulled out my Palm Pilot and began fiddling with it, trying to read yesterday's New York Times. Dinner was a disaster - a different chef was at the helm, and he was brutal with the spices. Randolph and Sara were moving to Los Angeles in a month, and I never saw them again. When I did eventually get around to kissing Eliza, she kissed me back, and it was terrible, and somebody bit someone else's lip. She went home hastily afterwards, muttering something about refraction or reduction or a centrifuge or something. Our four threads were never woven together again, but when I wrote my biography of Churchill, and let myself weave in a pre-disclosed and bizarre digression into pure fiction, there were three characters that nobody expected to see: A botanist, a chemist and a sports writer. And the critics hated it.
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