Chapter 27

There are a lot of things we need to get back to in this novel. I’ve been too distracted by personal events. The original plan was to have events in the world and in my own personal life help direct the novel, but instead I’ve allowed them to take over. I haven’t talked about what is going on in Syria (more bombings) or about the latest school shooting and the controversy surrounding guns, movies, and video games and how they (according to the politicos on the right and the left) caused these kids to shoot their classmates. Of course, I don’t think guns, movies, or video games had anything to do with what these kids did. Why not blame the kids who did it and their parents, who didn’t raise their children right? The parents? Yes. We have “adults” whose thinking resembles that of the children they are raising, who aren’t providing their children with adult supervision or adult love, teaching them to be adults. We have children masquerading as adults teaching children to behave as children, to lash out as children. The problem is when adults or teens lash out like children, they are often in possession of a weapon. This is what causes school shootings.

A perfect example of this is the way Pat is raising Jessie. Pat is not an adult. She is only interested in instant gratification. Sex without love. The less emotional attachment to sex, the better. This is the way children think. What does love have to do with pleasure? To an adult, who understands the world and the true meaning of self-interest, everything. But children only look for instant gratification. They think being happy now is more important than being happy in the future -- even the near future. They don’t think ahead. It’s Me! Me! Me! Now! Now! Now! and they don’t understand that by thinking this way, and acting on these thoughts, they will only be miserable. They are self-centered, but not truly selfish. Selfishness implies you are doing it for yourself and your own happiness. People like these cannot be happy. They are like my ex-girlfriend, who has the emotional I.Q. of a two-year-old. She has never matured beyond that, and doubtless never will. She has given up happiness because she refuses to allow herself to be happy. Love is not enough for her or people like Pat. They think they need something more -- something they cannot figure out, something that, in truth, doesn’t exist.

Pat was searching for this one thing. She thought she could find it with every dick she had in her. When that didn’t work, she got her daughter to start looking too, using the same method, not realizing if she couldn’t find it in sex, that Jessie would be unable to find it that way either. Still, she hoped, between the two of them, that they would be able to find whatever it was that was lacking in their lives. What they were lacking, what Pat caused her daughter to lack because she lacked it herself, could not be gained externally. What they lacked was internal, emotional. They were two children searching for instant gratification, thinking that sense of emptiness could be filled through their vagina, but still feeling that loss every time the men withdrew. When the waves of pleasure vanished, the emptiness remained.

This is why Michel was, to them, a perfect neighbor. In fact, he was the worst. He also felt empty inside, and tried to fill it with writing or sex. It is something artists try to do: fill the emptiness, whatever that emptiness may be, with their art. And it also explains why so many artists are hyper-sexed. Art is our therapy, our way of creating something in the world that the world, in our opinion, lacks.

Michel continued coming over Pat’s house, to have sex with Jessie as often as Pat. Jessie did not have to dress up to look like a little girl, like her mother did. She was the real thing. She was what Michel was looking for. Emotionally, he could relate to her better than he could with Pat, even though she was no more mature than her daughter. Michel loved lying next to Jessie, running his hands along her shapeless, flat frame, looking around her room, at the dolls in the corner, the posters of Justin Beiber, Harry Potter, Lady Gaga. He looked at her fish tank,, watching the black goldfish with the bubbles under its eyes slowly swim. He wondered how such a deformed fish, with it’s hunched back and double tail, could swim at all. That was probably why they swam so slowly. In nature, it would last about two minutes. Jessie reached over and touched his leg. It distracted him a moment from his thoughts about the fish. He wondered if there were wild goldfish and, if so, what ate them. He looked down at Jessie. “Honey, I don’t think we can go a third time.” “Can I see?” she asked. Michel shook his head. “I think I need to get going. I have to work on my book.”

That was his third novel. The first two had done reasonably well. Not enough for him to retire, but enough to buy a modest house, and put the rest in the bank or in the stock market. We have already talked some about the first novel, and perhaps we should get back to it, talk about where it is going, talk more about the characters, maybe show another chapter or two, or at least give an overview, to let you know where it was going or, since it is published at this point, when he is living next to Pat and sleeping with her and her daughter, where it went. It, too, is a story of two children living with each other.

In later chapters of Michel’s novel The Novelist, we learn that Marcus and Bernard continue treating each other as a pair of children would who were made to live together without adult supervision, eventually not speaking to each other, then coming back together. Marcus accuses Bernard of cheating on him which, as we know, is the truth. Bernard, of course, denies it, and Marcus, not having any proof, decides to believe him, knowing his own behavior on the Internet is beyond the pale. By the end of the novel, he does leave Bernard for someone he has met on the Internet, thinking the unknown promise is better than the known disappointment of his life with Bernard. Marcus thinks the shiny world offered him has to be an improvement and, though we are not told what happens to Marcus once he has left Bernard, since the story is about Bernard, I can promise you that Marcus found himself disappointed. Perhaps not right away. The thrill of the unknown can hold you for months. But eventually, I know he found himself disappointed. On the Internet you can be anybody. If you can, so can others. That is often the case.

But as you may recall, there was another aspect of Michel’s novel, and that was the fact that Bernard was a novelist who was working on his own first novel.

Bernard decided to call the novel The Chicago Dinner Party. That had all kinds of connotations. Especially when he decided to call his protagonist Judy. This also fit into his idea that she was at a party when the novel starts. In fact, she could go to parties throughout the novel, and the parties could give her ideas for her own stories.

So that’s where Judy is when the novel starts: at a party. She is standing, drinking a glass of red wine, talking to a very handsome man. He is not her husband. Her husband is at home. He does not care for the parties she goes to - or her friends. He thinks little of her writing. She succeeds despite him.

But here, at the party, Judy is in her element. She is talking to an educated, intelligent, handsome man who is interested in her and what she does, who finds value in her writing even though, he admits, he has yet to read anything of hers. But, to his credit, he has just met her, and her two books are not well known. He has only learned of them through her, and promises, quite sincerely, that he will try to find them and read them. He is sincere for two reasons: 1) he loves literature and revels in discovering new authors - especially by meeting them, and 2) he is extremely attracted to her and would like to get in her pants. Though she is a married woman, she is not adverse to this idea, yet unspoken between them.

Bernard stopped writing for a second and looked a the pages he had typed. Hmm. How many times had he thought these very things when talking to someone at a party or a bar, especially when he traveled? He did not have the guts to cheat on Marcus in town, but he had definitely gone where it appeared Judy was going. Maybe she would have a string of affairs. That was the kind of thing interested him. Women having affairs with gorgeous men. He admitted to himself that this was him fantasizing, every bit of it. He wished he were the glamorous Judy. Ah, for real breasts and a vagina! But he also knew he would never get the surgery. He liked being a man, being who he was. He wanted a vagina, but he knew he would miss the penis more. And why go halfway? So instead, he created good female characters and led their lives in his fiction. It was difficult.

That was already admitted in the second chapter of The Novelist. But it was a perfect outlet for his longings. I could see that as I read the chapters Michel gave me to read. When I pointed it out to him, he became excited.

“You’re right! You’re exactly right. Part of him desires to be a woman, but the fact is, he is a homosexual man, which does not necessarily have anything to do with wanting to be a woman. Not every gay man secretly wants to be a woman. Gender and sexual orientation are separate things,” Michel said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. He seemed exceedingly excited over this. It made me wonder a moment about his own sexual orientation.

Before I get ahead of myself, I should explain how Michel and I met and how we became close enough for him to start showing me chapters of his novel (for most beginning novelists, you only have to be an acquaintance, and they will happily show you what they have written -- something I will admit to being guilty of as well). I decided I should meet Michel so the story could be put back on track. I will admit that once he and Sarah broke up, I wasn’t sure what to do -- and I have seven months of writing to go. But maybe, if I insert myself into the fictional story occasionally, I’ll be able to put the thing on track. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. We’ll see if it works.

But anyway, I decided I needed to meet Michel in person. I can control him better that way, because when I’m with him, I’ll be able to talk to him and direct his thoughts and, therefore, his actions more directly. I can’t let him get away from me too much, or he might not end up where I suggested he is going. So in order to meet him, I decided to do what I did with Sarah to meet her: I put him in a bar, and started talking to him. All I had to do was mention I was a writer, and he started off, talking about his own writing, who his influences were, about his project. I told him his novel sounded interesting, that I’d love to read parts of it, if he didn’t mind - make a few suggestions. We arranged to meet at the bar during the day, for lunch, and he would bring me some chapters. I read them, then called to tell him I was ready to talk about them, if he wanted to. That led to the conversation started above.

I asked him where he thought it was going, and he told me in detail. He had it well planned -- something I rarely do with stories -- but that is a difference in creative styles.

I was just interrupted by a phone call -- well, I guess I wouldn’t call it “interrupted” once I found out what the call was about. It was for my grandmother, but when I heard her doctor introduce himself, I listened in. My grandpa had found the name of a doctor from San Francisco who has been known to cure my mom’s type of cancer, with massive doses of chemotherapy, and they had given that doctor’s name to my grandmother’s doctor, who looked him up on the Internet, found him, and contacted him. The doctor told him as long as the cancer was not in her liver, he would do the treatment, and there was a good chance it would work. Grandma’s doctor said it was her only hope. My grandfather would beg to differ, I’m sure, since he has been praying, asking God to cure her -- but he also has enough sense to realize, at least as he puts it, that God could decide to cure her with this therapy. For him, at least, seeking scientific cures is not denying the power of God, but allowing that God can decide to cure her through modern medicine. God helps those who help themselves. Don’t ask God for food while sitting at a lake with a fishing pole. Put a worm on the hook, throw it in the water, and ask God to let the fish bite. That’s more of my grandpa’s philosophy, and I will admit it is well supported by the Bible.

But now I’ve gone back to what I said was turning into a problem in this novel - my dwelling on what’s going on in my immediate surroundings - but I’m sure the reader would love to hear this good news. Assuming it is good news. Let’s hope it is.