When you left for India, a departure without warning, or at least without any warning to me, I thought only that you had taken Eric up on his offer to visit him there. I know now that you left because of me and what I had done. I remain thankful that your maternal instincts kept you from revealing my treachery to the wider world, that knowledge of my actions has been limited to Annabelle Iger and the lawyers. I did everything asked of me to put the debacle legally right, to allow you to recapture your stolen work: I signed declarations and quit-claim documents and wire-transferred the ill-gotten funds out of my account and into yours.
If it helps, know that I have suffered mightily for my transgression: my original life has vanished and my very brief pseudonymous existence has gone up in smoke. I brought these consequences on myself and I expect no sympathy. I also do not expect your forgiveness to come easily, or perhaps at all. I can put myself in your place now, and it is impossible for me to imagine forgiving someone who absconded with my life’s work, my own heart, but I hope you will try.
I thought reading Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life would sink me, instead they set me free. Of course, I used that freedom in the wrong way, but I honestly thought J. D. Henry was my way out, my way forward, my future, and that he could do what I never could do, never could be. It has been surreal to be him, even if for such a short time, to have tasted what you experienced early in your life.
I’ve considered how best to start, and I think it is like this:
I, Daniel Manning, am the commoner in a family renowned for its brilliance: mother, father, much younger brother, all masters of their particular universes.
Daniel’s voice rocketing around her pine suite in Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, the Play button she stabs again to silence him. There is a bitter taste in her mouth and the mauled bubble wrap on the bed looks ominous, the kind of thing, in great quantities, one might use to wrap up a lifeless body.
Joan drags the pine armchair to the window, curls up inside of it, and looks out at a small corner of her unbelievable world. Weighty clouds hide the distant mountain peaks. Overhead, the sky is unblemished, the deep green forest sparkling beneath a spirited moon. She drinks down the wine.
Hearing his voice is a shock and she does not want to hear it again, to listen to more of his words. Her finger hesitates over the button, but then she presses it firmly, his voice emerging so sure, so steady.
Looking back, you should have been my natural first reader—we talked about the big books I was reading—but in the beginning I did not seek you out. Maybe it was deliberate, an unconscious choice not to hand my work over to another writer, though I did not know—or thought I did not know—that you were a writer until I was in seventh grade. It was to Dad I went, at least in the beginning.
When I came back home from Silicon Valley, my tail between my legs, never once did you say, “I told you so,” and I thank you for that. I never told you that after I moved to DC and was trying to figure out what to do next, I looked for someone who could decipher the map of my life, give me the directions that would deliver me out of the wilderness. I found Dr. Vidal.
“What brings you here?” he asked me. I had recently finished reading Myra Breckinridge, and so I asked, “Are you related to Gore Vidal?” Dr. Vidal opened his notebook and uncapped his pen. “If there was a family relation, how do you think that would affect our work together?” “I don’t know,” I said. “No way, I guess. But it would be an interesting fact.” He made note of that.
A few minutes into our second session everything heated inside of me tumbled from my mouth into the cold air of his office. Vidal pressed on. “We ought to further explore your boyhood memories, your resistance to analyzing such key events in your life.” I said, “I’m not being resistant. Haven’t we been talking about those memories for the last fifty minutes?” “I think it would be more accurate to say that we have been talking about not talking about those memories for the last fifty minutes,” and then Vidal rose from his chair to signal the end of our time. I walked home that day, an hour on foot, and when I reached my street, I knew Vidal was right.
He hit me hard in our third session. “Let’s discuss how you think your mother contributed to the wrong turn you took in your life.” I chewed up time. Crossed to his window, stared at the old linden trees planted straight as a picket fence down the wide avenue. Filled cups of water and drank them down. Finally reoccupied the beige corduroy chair designated for the messed-up and the lost. Across the floor, Vidal sat in his own chair, a kingly black leather, and waited. I stared at him, felt my resistance locking me down. He raised a trim black eyebrow. I sighed. “So when I was a kid and started to write stories, I didn’t know my mother was a writer. And once I learned she was, I lost what was my mine, lost all of my drive.”
Vidal lifted that eyebrow again. I could see he recognized the wrong turn I had taken as a boy, and that he was not going to hand over the coordinates so I could alter my direction, attain my proper course. I would have to find those coordinates on my own.
“Would you say you felt envy? Jealousy? Competition?” I shook my head at those freighted words. “She’s my mother,” I said. “Of course not. Look at how she turned my stories into books. Encouraged me to keep writing.” Vidal cocked his head. “All true. But you’re a smart guy, Daniel, so let’s see if we can’t skip to the meat. You read serious books early on, so you knew writers existed, and you didn’t feel threatened by them. Is that accurate?”
“Accurate,” I said.
“Since you believed you were the writer in the family, do you think it’s possible you have unresolved emotions toward your mother?”
“No,” I said, but I knew that No was not clean.
Vidal twisted his mouth. “Do you think you found it difficult that your mother already held that honor? Holds that honor still, and the admiration that comes along with that kind of talent, it would be hard for anyone to process. Certainly a child with similar aspirations would have a tough time. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Do you know who my mother is?” I asked. I had never told him your name.
“You’re deflecting,” Vidal responded. “Avoiding identifying fundamental truths about who you really are. Don’t you want to acknowledge the past, unmask yourself, possibly return to writing which you say you are keen to do, even if that means following in your mother’s footsteps?”
I had nothing to say to any of that—
*
Joan stops the recording again to catch her breath, refill her glass. She hadn’t known Daniel had taken himself to a psychologist. Apparently therapy failed to uncover how he lost the plot of his life, a state of confusion he never disclosed to her. She was wrong in thinking he told her everything. She thinks of when he was a little boy, how she was a mother cat and he the kitten; with Eric, she was a guard dog caring for a baby hawk; with the theft of her work, she turned into a lioness.