Talent

The water spot on the ceiling looked like a rabbit with fangs. One ear turned down, the other upright, drops of blood trickling from long teeth. There was a word for this psychological phenomenon, seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or on the surface of the moon or in stains. But I couldn’t remember it. There was also a word for the inability to remember a word, which I couldn’t remember either, although I knew it sounded Greek — contained Greek — and that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had coined it. Amnelogia, maybe. I could, at least, recall the various words that meant “behind”: delinquent, overdue, delayed, belated, and retarded, the last of which was sadly unacceptable, no matter the context, thanks to the euphemism treadmill.

My laptop had gone to sleep. A flick of the touchpad revealed my dissertation. Forget it. I slinked over to the Fiction and Literature section, found the twentieth century, and pulled out a copy of Frederick Langley’s Complete Works.

I first heard the name Frederick Langley in middle school when my eighth-grade English teacher recommended Brutality and Delicacy. He impressed upon me that Langley was a serious author and made clear he wouldn’t entrust just anyone with Langley’s work. It was a mark of distinction. Although reading Langley felt like my official introduction to literary culture, the aura of formality in no way spoiled my pleasure. I encountered Langley slightly before it became automatic for me to underline or take notes, that prelapsarian period when fiction was just for enjoyment.

My attachment was short-lived. In high school, I became acutely aware that the students who didn’t care for reading cared for Langley the most. They found him delightfully outrageous. They loved “Longer,” the grotesquerie in which the circumcised protagonist tries to regrow his foreskin. One boy could recite the entire dinner-table scene from memory. His girlfriend pledged never again to eat calamari.

The idiots liked Langley. The idiots who thought they were countercultural because they were bad at tests. The idiots who thought that any book published before the twentieth century was boring. The idiots owned that dumb T-shirt with a bulging eyeball on the front and, on the back, We see each other in glances. The idiots never bothered to learn the difference between a dactyl and an anapest — didn’t see the point — yet had the energy to track down old magazine articles about the time Langley wowed a Greenwich Village crowd: he’d read the first half of a story and then improvised three possible endings. (And it really did require energy to find those articles. I went to high school in the dark pre-Google age, when the internet was still the domain of math nerds and pedophiles, so the idiots’ best option was microfiche.)

The idiots liked Langley. So I stopped liking Langley. The fact that Langley was my introduction to literary culture made him seem introductory. The fact that I enjoyed reading his stories made them seem frivolous. I formed the impression that he wasn’t sophisticated. He was, in my adolescent assessment, serious enough for a serious eighth-grader, not for a budding literary critic. That judgment stayed with me. Still, when Helen told me that she was Frederick Langley’s niece, the information produced in me a childish excitement.

I skimmed the introduction to Complete Works, which divided Langley’s stories into two major categories, “epiphanies” and “compulsions.” The epiphanies were formulaic: something happens to X that changes his perspective on Y.

The quintessential epiphany was “Alone at Green Beach,” featuring an eleven-year-old boy, Oscar, who’s infatuated with his adult cousin Roger and daydreams that they’ll run away together to lead a storybook life full of adventure. One afternoon at Green Beach, Roger encourages this fantasy. Roger tells Oscar that he’ll need to pick up survival skills if the two of them want a shot at making it on their own: How to gut and scale a fish, how to skin a deer. When Roger runs out of beer — he’s been drinking all day — he drives to the market, leaving Oscar alone at the beach. Oscar waits and waits, but Roger never returns. Close to midnight, Oscar accepts that his cousin isn’t coming back and that Roger isn’t worthy of his adoration.

What made Langley famous were the compulsion dramas, in which he took an ephemeral thought or urge and followed through to a logical-yet-extreme conclusion. Many compulsion dramas were intentionally unrealistic, even fantastical.

In “While You Were Out,” a man takes a sedative after a root canal and falls into a deep sleep. His wife, watching over him, feels a sudden, irresistible desire to pluck one of his white hairs, which blossoms into an almost Ahab-like commitment to totally depilate him. She starts with a tweezer, upgrades to clippers, and then resorts to a razor. By the time he wakes up, she’s shaved off all his head and facial hair. “You’ll look better once you’ve had a little sun” is the last sentence.

In “Baby Crazy,” an old maid — Langley’s term, not mine — folding clothes at the laundromat finds a tiny white T-shirt that must belong to someone’s infant. She writes a lost-and-found ad — Missing something? Baby tee, newly washed — which her pretty young neighbor answers. It’s her daughter’s. She must have left it in the dryer by mistake. The old maid dreams about the T-shirt that night and realizes that she desperately wants a child of her own. So she assembles a miniature wardrobe and kidnaps the neighbor’s girl.

Line by line, Langley didn’t offer much. He wasn’t a great prose stylist. Nor was he a deep thinker. He rarely fleshed out his characters’ motives and provided only the briefest glimpses of their interiority (the old maid wants a child). Like a behaviorist, he generally confined himself to describing observable actions. His stories were often extremely short, sometimes only a few pages long, and I wondered if that was because he didn’t have much to say. Yet I warmed to the material. Langley was versatile, by turns crude, exuberant, and quiet. He could write by numbers — as in the simplistic epiphanies — but he could also veer off trail. And after spending so many years in a classroom, I appreciated that he seemed unambitious.

Browsing through the stacks, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Literature, which had a short paragraph on Langley.

Langley, Frederick (1938–1981). American short-story writer born in Concord, Mass. Released his debut collection, Brutality and Delicacy (1960), while an undergraduate at Faber College. Published two more collections in quick succession: Alone at Green Beach (1962) and Omega (1964), which cemented his reputation as a short-form master. Although popular with the public from the start, not recognized by critics until Omega. Died in a car accident.

Three books at two-year intervals, then nothing in the last seventeen years of his life. That struck me as odd. Since no one had gotten around to writing Langley’s cradle-to-grave biography — as a short-form rather than long-form master generally considered more fun than important, he probably wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list — I settled for something called Freddy Remembered, a slim oral history published in 1990.

On the inside flap I found a black-and-white head shot captioned simply The author, 1963. Langley had long wavy hair, a delicate nose, and an unusually pronounced supraorbital ridge. I tried, and failed, to think of a word to describe his gaze that wasn’t piercing or penetrating; and I tried, and failed, to find in Langley’s face some trace, however faint, of his niece.

The introduction claimed that “the people who knew Freddy best” had sat for interviews, which were then cobbled together into short “remembrances.” There was no contribution from Helen Langley or, for that matter, anyone with the last name Langley, which arguably put the “best” into question. Oh, well. A common refrain was that the author found writing amazingly easy.

Paul Church: I was editor of the Faber College Beagle when Freddy was a freshman. He started submitting stories as soon as he arrived on campus, and I liked them. They had a dashed-off quality. I don’t mean that as an insult — better to say they seemed effortlessly produced, as in fact they were. He had that kind of genius. He found ideas everywhere. On a walk or listening to the radio. The joke on campus was that while other writers labored, Freddy’s manuscripts arrived fully formed, delivered by stork. In the course of an afternoon, he could set down a whole story.

He barely revised. When we first worked together I suggested improvements. But he found the editing process frustrating. He didn’t like going back to a story. We got into a fight once because I called him lazy. Freddy said, “I’m not lazy, I’m accepting.” I think he meant that he didn’t put on airs. He knew what he was capable of and what he was not capable of, and he didn’t see the point in striving. I thought he was dead wrong and that there most certainly was a point. In the end, it was Freddy who got his way.

Rebecca Johnson: I dated Freddy when he was finishing up Omega. He was a really affectionate guy and he always had time for me. That was a surprise. I’d been with artists before and they always wanted whole weeks to themselves so they could work. “Becky, if you don’t let me be, I’ll never finish!” “Becky, get out of here, you’re ruining my career!” It was like they needed a hundred hours of absolute silence just to get a few words on the page. Not Freddy Langley. He wanted to go out and have some fun. He loved going to fancy restaurants and ordering for everyone at the table so he could taste a bit of every dish. One time a waiter thought he was a food critic and gave us all free chocolate cake.

I did see Freddy in a dark mood this one time when he had to go see his dad. He said he had to “kiss the ring,” which I guess was a reference to the Mob, which was strange because his dad was the headmaster at a religious school. Afterward he was in an even worse mood. He said his dad, who at first wasn’t too pleased about the writer thing, was finally coming around. Freddy’s dad saw that Freddy was doing well, making money, getting his name out. Everyone likes success, right? The way Freddy’s dad saw it, if writing was what Freddy did best, and he was good at it, and he could earn a living at it, there was no harm in it. I was confused. “Shouldn’t you be relieved, Freddy? Shouldn’t you be happy he feels that way?” Freddy sneered.

Andrew Cafferty: In October of 1963 — I remember the month because the Dodgers had just swept the Yankees in the World Series — I threw a dinner party at my country house in Maine and I invited Freddy. I’d recently returned a pair of boots to L. L. Bean, the retail company, and was extolling their great customer service. I’d had the boots for eight or ten years already, but when I told the salesclerk that they were letting in water, he gave me another pair, no trouble at all. I guess I was going on.

All of a sudden Freddy stood up and declared he had an idea that he couldn’t let get away. He demanded a pen, paper, and privacy.

In the morning — he’d spent the whole night writing — he came downstairs with “Lifetime Warranty,” the famous story about a woman who purchases her husband from L. L. Bean via mailorder catalog and then returns him decades later because he no longer satisfies her. You know, sexually. That was the husband’s “design flaw.” He “did not perform as advertised.”

October 1963. Langley’s final collection, which contained “Lifetime Warranty,” came out in September 1964. Assuming Andrew Cafferty had the date right and building in book-production lag time, then “Lifetime Warranty” must have been among the last stories that Langley completed for publication. I skipped ahead to the remembrance from Langley’s book editor. He also mentioned “Lifetime Warranty.”

Richard Anders: The highbrow crowd mostly ignored Freddy, I suppose because he was popular. There’s nothing they despise more, you see. But they loved “Lifetime Warranty.”

Marxists claimed that Freddy was critiquing capitalism and the way a profit-motivated society teaches men and women to treat each other like objects. Feminists read it as an empowering revenge story. Women have needs too. Women should realize that they, too, have the right to discard unsuitable partners. Choosy selfishness isn’t just for men anymore! Loyalty is a feudalist hang-up! The New Critics obsessed over a single line describing the husband’s outfit: “George wore his navy and mountain red Norwegian sweater, which Alice had given him on their first date, and which he had never liked.” It didn’t sound like much, they admitted, but it was the only time Freddy had chosen to give the husband’s point of view — shared his feelings. What did it mean? It had to mean something!

Freddy found the whole “Lifetime Warranty” mania funny, because he’d intended the story to be just that: funny. “It’s too much,” he said, laughing. “I wrote it all in one night and I’ve never even read any Marx.” The enthusiasm for “Lifetime Warranty” took me aback as well. I didn’t say this to Freddy, but I didn’t think the story was all that refined. It was a good read for a train ride. A trifle.

Richard Anders was naive — oddly so for an editor. He didn’t seem to realize that critical feeding frenzies often had little to do with the objective quality of the work in question. If a story could be used to promote a pet construct, nothing else mattered. Not its heft. Not its finesse. Nothing, including the author’s intentions. Langley had never read Marx. The Marxists did not care.

I looked for remembrances of Langley’s later years, but his friends and professional acquaintances, the people who knew him best, knew him exclusively as a young man. There was only one entry concerning Langley’s life after publishing.

Daniel Godolphin: I was living in Paris when Freddy was there, and we got along. We’d hang out at cafés and kid around. He listened to me complain about how much cheaper the city had been when Hemingway and those people were doing the expatriate thing. They could get by pretty nicely on the peanuts they got for their stories. On one occasion I worked up the guts to ask, “How much did you get for your stories?” I may have had a few too many drinks. He may have had a few too many drinks. He was annoyed. He wouldn’t say. I’m pretty sure, though, that he got more than peanuts. It’s weird he didn’t keep churning that stuff out. If I’d had a major-league New York publisher and a fawning audience, I would’ve milked that situation. But I never saw him so much as sit down at a typewriter. I don’t think he even brought one with him overseas.

Once a cub reporter tracked Freddy down with a magazine profile in mind. The reporter needled him: “Are you working on anything? More short stories? A novel? A screenplay?” Freddy kept saying no, but the reporter didn’t take him at his word. He assumed he was hiding something, and he suggested that in his article. It was ridiculous. Freddy started getting letters from people back home saying, “When can we expect your great work?” It made him uncomfortable. He’d been inspired once, but he wasn’t inspired anymore.

A Cliché

Again I walked to Worcester Square. Again Helen greeted me shoeless at the front door. This time she’d expected me. Again she led me to the den, and again she left me there alone, this time while she finished cooking. I took in the room like a familiar place, or, more precisely, with the wonder one feels at finding a place familiar that so recently seemed alien. How quickly one goes from What’s all this? to Oh, this. Resting on the window ledge were unopened letters from multiple credit-card companies and a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Its pages were yellow and its dustcover worn. COPYRIGHT MCMXXXVI BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Helen returned to find me reading the racist classic.

“Um,” she said, infusing that one syllable with a heap of disapproval.

“Sorry. This must be for work, a look-but-don’t-touch type of situation. Is it a first edition?”

“No, no, dear. That’s not actually from 1936. It’s a facsimile. I’m pleased, though, that you fell for it.”

“There’s a dark side of antiquarianism, I guess.”

“Some clients don’t care about the real thing. All they want is an impressive-seeming library.”

“And do those clients know they’re not buying the real thing?”

“I wouldn’t dream of deceiving anyone.”

Was she winking at me?

“The trickery’s all on their end, not yours,” I said.

“I disapprove. It’s just — I have bills to pay. And rent. When I see an opportunity, I take that opportunity.”

That statement may well have been a red flag, but I had enough at stake to ignore it. In Langley I had discovered precisely what Professor Davidoff had commanded me to seek: A subject for an inspirational case study. He was prolific, then silent. Inspired, then — there was no antonym for inspired. Blocked. Dried up. De-inspired. For Langley’s process as a young man, I had Freddy Remembered. For the later years, I needed Helen. She was a primary source enfleshed. When I saw an opportunity, I took that opportunity.

I followed Helen into the sitting room, which doubled as a dining room. We arranged ourselves on either side of a foldout table that was usually a resting place for papers but now held our meal: spaghetti with red sauce on mismatched plates.

As if it mattered what she served. There were some authors — Mitchell among them — who could build a scene around food. They found significance in under-buttered rolls and improperly folded napkins; they found lyricism in crisp baguettes, soft white cheese, dry red wine, and the dry witticisms exchanged over that dry red wine. I guessed they were slow eaters — how else could they have observed so much? — whereas I consumed so quickly that I didn’t really notice anything except, in this particular case, that the cook had used too much salt and that my dining companion was a partisan of the spoon-support technique for pasta. When I was learning how to feed myself, no one had suggested that method and it still seemed exotic, more foreign than chopsticks.

I so looked forward to eating; not just at Helen’s, in general. But eating itself was routinely disappointing because it never lasted long enough and the end was always in sight, always quantifiable: ten more bites, five more bites, two more bites, maybe three if I was careful. The period of satiation was painfully brief. Then began the countdown to the next feeding. Hours spent waiting for lunch, and then minutes to consume it. Hours spent waiting for dinner, and then a few more minutes to consume it.

Cooking anything in the least bit complicated came to seem futile, as silly as and perhaps sillier than spending money — which everyone said was the same as time — on an outfit I would wear only once. The outfit, once worn, would find its way to a closet and later a trash heap. The meal, once eaten, would find its way to a toilet and later a sewer. For these reasons I subsisted mostly on Pop-Tarts.

All that said, it was pleasant to have a hot meal for a change, and someone to talk to across the table, someone who listened patiently as I described, in greater detail than was strictly necessary, my usual dining habits, which I compared to my family’s more formal habits when I was young. Back home, we’d eaten well and we’d eaten carefully, with two or three forks and two or three knives and the water glass and the wineglass placed just so, the multiple courses brought out just when. I felt a little guilty, a little ashamed of my casual degeneracy, but Helen laughed away my concerns. She had a full laugh. A warm, soothing, affirming, seductive laugh, nothing like Evelyn’s high-pitched giggle, Evan’s conceited guffaw, or Professor Davidoff’s silent shoulder-shake.

Degeneracy, to Helen, was just another word for liberation. I should do exactly as I pleased. It was absurd to do anything else. Although she wished I were more capable of enjoying something so simple as food.

“Don’t worry that it’s futile, dear,” she said, helping me to seconds. “Most things are.”

We let the dishes fester and retired to a lumpy couch in the same room. Helen fetched a family photo album, one of those old-fashioned, leather-bound books filled with self-adhesive pages that had lost much of their stick. The spine read Milford, the Connecticut town where Helen had grown up. Side by side we waded in. On the first page were pictures of baby Helen crying, smiling, eating, crawling, sleeping, pointing at wooden toys — the gamut of infant actions — held aloft, held in arms, held on laps, thrown high into the air. She’d been an ugly baby: scrawny, bald, and splotchy.

“That’s my father, Thomas,” Helen said of a fair-skinned man looking out of the frame as little Helen tugged on his sleeve. “He was a psychiatrist. And my mother, Edith, who stayed at home.” She was the standard white middle-class housewife, from the updo to the pumps. “My nanny, Valeria” — a Latin lady in a cornflower-blue apron. “She made me hot chocolate with marshmallows every day after school, using milk, whole milk, never water. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, Robert” — scowling, wild hair, thin face. “He lived not too far away, in Concord, where my father and Freddy were raised. My father got along with Robert well, he took after him, but he was a difficult man, extremely demanding. Anyway, I guess I’m boring you. You said you wanted to learn more about Freddy, so let’s skip to the Freddy years. My uncle wasn’t around when I was small.”

“He must have been in Europe then,” I said, drawing on my library research.

She nodded, neither surprised nor impressed by my knowledge.

“I met him when I was about fourteen. Well, I’d met him as a newborn but I don’t remember that.” Helen chuckled. “He came to visit, thinking he’d stay just a short while to get his bearings. He’d run out of money. But he never left.”

“I didn’t realize he lived with you.”

“Right up until he died, about four years. Though I was at boarding school for part of that time.”

Langley — I couldn’t bring myself to call him Freddy, not even in my thoughts — did not seem eager to smile for the camera. His longish hair had gone gray. Not a nice gray either, more like wet-squirrel color. Broken capillaries crept across his nose.

“Well?” Helen asked.

“What?”

“Well, don’t we look alike?”

They did not.

“Yes, the similarity is striking.”

Helen beamed, flashing her sharp little teeth.

“Here’s one where you can really see the family resemblance. Our nose and ears are just the same.”

Judging from Langley’s dazed expression, he’d been surprised by the photographer. He sat on his unmade bed, legs extended, back against a pillow, a beer resting precariously on his lap, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. Slovenly. There was something strange about the proportions of the space around Langley, at least as captured on film.

“The ceiling looks slanted,” I said.

“He slept in the attic. My parents offered him a perfectly nice spare room. But he chose up there. He was a cliché.”

She stated this matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary way to describe a human being. He was a baseball fan. He was a journalist. He was a father of three. He was a cliché.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How much do you know about my uncle, Anna?” she asked.

“Whatever’s in Freddy Remembered.”

“In that case, you know next to nothing. No one in my family had any interest in working with an official biographer — so nosy! — much less participating in a trivial oral history. The people rustled up for that collection — their impressions were stuck in the 1960s,” she said bitterly. “They thought of him as a gifted college boy. By the time he moved in with my parents, he was washed up. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him. He was nice to me. He doted on me, gave me pocket money. Even as a girl, though, I could tell something was off. He’d stay cooped up in the attic for days at a time. Do you understand? That’s what I mean when I say he was a cliché.”