I Remember Nothing [13]
I couldn’t figure out what to do.
So I began by saying that I was a huge fan. She said thank you and waited for me to say something else. I took this to mean she’d never read anything I’d written, or that she hated my work, or perhaps—I was reaching for straws here—she had no idea that I was a writer.
I asked her about her son and I told her about mine. It’s my experience that no one but your very close friends is truly interested in your children, but we went on pretending for a while.
Then I asked her if she was still writing the profile of Lorne, as I’d heard. Yes, she said, she was. Another pause. It was clear that Lillian Ross was not even going to meet me halfway. I was starting to become irritated. Was it true that she was now in her eighth year of writing about Lorne, I asked. Yes, she was, she said. When do you think you’ll be done with it, I asked. I asked this in what I hoped was an innocent manner, but I didn’t fool her. She had no idea, she replied. We don’t have to rush things at The New Yorker.
That cleared up one thing: she knew who I was.
I plowed on: I asked her why she’d stopped writing signed profiles. I asked the question cleverly, I thought. Honey dripped from my lips. I said I had loved her long pieces so much and missed reading them and wondered why she had stopped writing them. She replied that she’d stopped writing bylined articles because she believed that too much magazine journalism these days was egotistical and self-promoting.
I had to hand it to her: that was good.
And then Lillian Ross answered the question I hadn’t asked.
“I went to your house once,” she said. “I met your mother.”
“Really?” I said, feigning absolute ignorance.
“Didn’t see much of you though,” she said.
So there it was.
No question.
It had happened.
I have met Lillian Ross many times since that night. She still writes for The New Yorker, although The New Yorker no longer publishes unsigned pieces. She eventually wrote a first-person confessional about her relationship with Mr. Shawn, so on some level she threw off the veil. I consider her to be as egotistical and self-promoting as the rest of us, and that’s a compliment.
But this is not about Lillian Ross, really. It’s about my mother. Long before she died, I’d given up on her. But that night with Lillian Ross, I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell. I got back the simple version. She’d thrown Lillian Ross out of our house for all the right reasons. The legend was true.
My Aruba
I am sorry to report that I have an Aruba.
You don’t know what an Aruba is, but you’re about to find out.
My Aruba is named after the Caribbean island of Aruba, where the winds are so strong that all the little trees on it are blown sideways in one direction. But my Aruba is not an island. It’s the thing that’s happening with my hair, on the crown of my head, in the back. My cowlicks have won, and they are all blown sideways, leaving a little bare space. It’s not a bald spot exactly. It’s there when I wake up; then I fix my hair and make it go away; and then, a couple of hours later, it’s back again. A gust of wind, a short walk, a ride on the subway, or life itself—anything at all can make my hair blow sideways, leaving a spot on the back of my head where my scalp is showing through.
And the thing is, I can’t see it.
Even if I catch a glimpse of myself in a window, it’s not visible because it’s in the back.
I look fine from the front.
I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.
But from the back, it looks as if I have either forgotten to comb my hair or as if I am just a little bit bald.
Neither of these things is true, I swear.
But what is true is that I am older than I look, and my Aruba is a sign. I did not have one when I was younger, but now I do.
This is not the worst thing about getting older, but it’s very disheartening. And almost no one tells you you’ve got one at the time.
There are a whole bunch of things no one tells you about and then you come home and discover you’ve been walking around all