“40-Minute Lunch” =
West 20’s/1998

Where: At the counter by the window of Le Petit Abeille, a little Belgian café near where my husband and I lived on West 28th between 6th and 7th Avenues. Then, our block was crowded with flower wholesalers, although that trade seems to have largely disappeared from our old block. There was a huge amount of traffic, maybe because of the flowers: lots of honking semi trucks that sometimes made even my beautiful workspace, with its view of the tip of the Empire State Building, hard to work in. On the day I went to Le Petit Abeille, it was raining, and I didn’t want to go back outside, so I kept scribbling away.

Music: Truthfully, I don’t remember. But in those years on West 28th Street we listened to a lot of Bjork, Aimee Mann, Everything But the Girl, and (in my case, I’m ashamed to say), Deep Forest.

Why: I’d been obsessed for a while with celebrity profiles — one of the most debased literary forms currently in existence. My reaction to them was complicated: I hated their fawning, yet felt sympathy for the writers struggling valiantly, always, to uncover something new and meaningful — or at least to present the same tired goods in a way that felt fresh.

History: I have written one celebrity profile: of Calvin Klein, for ELLE, many years ago. The occasion, I think, was the follow-up to his wildly successful first perfume, CK1. While I nurtured fantasies of a deep exchange with Mr. Klein, the profile I produced was no different — and certainly no better — than any other. However, I did get a lot of free CK1, whose lemony smell I still love. I wore it for years and years before I ran out.

Fact: The worst reading of my career — by far — happened at the University of Southern Maine a few years ago, and involved “40-Minute Lunch.” I’d been billed as an “experimental” writer, so I felt like I needed to read something strange or risky. I sensed a minute or two in that I’d made a colossal mistake. I had read “40-Minute Lunch” aloud once before, at Bread Loaf, with children in the audience, and there had much hilarity. This time I was met with deep, perplexed silence; the folks in Southern Maine weren’t feeling my angry, jealous, fawning interviewer. The reading became a split-minded experience: one part of me was boring my way doggedly through the story, while another part was engaged in an active, urgent discussion: They hate it now, and he hasn’t even tried to rape her yet! Should I stop reading and say, Look, I can see this isn’t working; why don’t we all just move on to the reception? Why did I ever think this story was funny? It’s offensive, in bad taste — I can’t believe I wrote it. And this is the tasteful part…Etc.

Beginning:

Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.

Actually, small isn’t the word; she’s minute — a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, “highlighted,” my ex-fiancée calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kitty’s) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big blue eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I can’t pinpoint exactly — the same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Green’s) highlighted hair — this unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.

She’s still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.

“The Gold Cure” =
DeKalb Ave/April 2007

Original Title: “The House of Shame”

Where: At Green Apple bakery (now closed, I noticed last week), after dropping my kids at school, annoyed by people who were talking loudly.

Music: The sassy, playful sound of Dyme, a pair of identical twin female rappers I was supposed to write about for the New York Times Magazine (but didn’t, in the end). While they were nothing like Stop/Go, and I was sorry their album was never released, I did avail myself of the look and feel of their home recording studio.

History: Only one of Bennie’s shame memories (which I ended up cutting) was based on fact: in a meeting with some hip hop artists at a Greek Restaurant in Queens, Bennie inhales a flake of filo dough and can’t cough it back out, leading to much hacking, teary-eyed embarrassment. In my case, this happened in 1992, in Astoria, where I’d gone after work from my temp job at the Tribeca Film Center to sample spanakopita in a few bakeries before ordering some for my boyfriend’s thirtieth birthday party. I inhaled a flake of filo dough and it hunkered down in my lung and would not depart. I had to leave the bakery and stand on the sidewalk, under the elevated subway tracks, trains grinding over my head as I coughed in a panic, wondering if a single flake of filo dough could kill me. It seemed almost miraculous when the flake finally dislodged and my life resumed. My boyfriend was directing a production of Antony and Cleopatra, and the birthday party happened after his show, in the massive, dilapidated loft that our friends Alex and Rebecca were renting on lower Broadway. Toward the end, we wheeled out a huge cake from Carvel, layers staggered like a Ziggurat, decorated with Egyptian stencils I’d bought at the Metropolitan Museum Shop.

Beginning:

The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Bennie had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back. Then, Stop/Go had seemed like an excellent bet; the sisters were young and adorable, their sound was gritty and simple and catchy (“Cyndi Lauper meets Chrissie Hynde” had been Bennie’s line early on), with a big gulping bass and some fun percussion — he recalled a cowbell. Plus they’re written decent songs; hell, they’d sold twelve thousand CDs off the stage before Bennie ever heard them play. A little time to develop potential singles, some clever marketing, and a decent video could put them over the top.

But the sisters were pushing thirty, his executive producer, Collette, informed Bennie now, and no longer credible as recent high school grads, especially since one of them had a nine-year-old daughter. Their band members were in law school. They’d fired two producers, and a third had quit. Still no album.

“Who’s managing them?” Bennie asked.

“Their father. I’ve got their new rough mix,” Collette said. “The vocals are buried under seven layers of guitar.”

It was then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word “sisters” brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying — twenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who’d taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns’ voices echoing deep in his ears.

“Found Objects” =
Upper East Side/Dec 2005

Original Title: Happy Ending

Where: The Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue and 61st Street

Why: It doesn’t usually happen for me this way, but I had an experience and it prompted me to begin a story. As experiences go, this one was brief: on Christmas Eve, my husband, kids and I were having cheeseburgers with my mom and stepfather at the bar of the Regency hotel (a kind of tradition with us). Washing my hands in the bathroom, I noticed a fat green wallet inside a wide-open bag beside the sink. I had a thought along the lines of: She’s lucky it’s me, seeing this wallet, and not a different kind of person. Which led to the question: What kind of person? Who is the woman who would look down while washing her hands, see a wallet, and take it? That question stayed with me. Although I wasn’t intending to work on stories — in fact, I was trying to begin a novel set in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II — I sat down with that wallet in my head and a pen in my hand, to see what might happen.

Music: Death Cab For Cutie, We have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes

History: I myself have been repeatedly robbed: by a motorcyclist in Spain when I was 22, backpacking with friends; years later by a guy in Lisbon who tore my purse off its strap and ran away; by a woman sitting next to me in Penn Station as I waited for a train back to college in Philadelphia, who finessed my wallet from my open bag (I caught her and snatched it back, leading to some intensely awkward moments before she left her seat and moved away). Once, in my early years in New York, someone cut my lock at the gym and stole my purse. Later I received a phone call from the thief, posing as a Citibank employee, and she duped me into giving her my PIN number (in the guise of changing it), then went immediately to a cash machine, and overdrew my checking account.

Beginning:

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eyes shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you get back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand — it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist said) and take the fucking thing.

“You mean steal it.”

He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores — their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people.

“Okay,” she said. “Steal it.”