Victor Lodato Reads Denis Johnson

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear The Large S of The Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson, which appeared in The New Yorker in March of 2014. As soon as I touched the receiver, I wondered if I'd regret this. If I was holding a mistake in my hand, if I was pulling this mistake to my head and saying hello to it. The story was chosen by Victor Ladotto, a playwright and fiction writer whose novels include Matilda Savage, a winner of the Penn USA Award, and Honey, which was published last year. Hi, Victor. Hi, Deborah. Welcome. So you have chosen to read Dennis Johnson's story The Large S of The Sea Maiden, which came out in 2014, which was three years before Dennis died. Did you read it back then? Yeah, I read it in the magazine and then read it again when his final collection of stories was published. It's interesting because I tend to be drawn to Dennis Johnson's shorter works most, and so it just felt like a real gift to have that collection of stories that was published posthumously. Probably like a lot of people, I first came to love Dennis Johnson's work through Jesus's Son. Though this piece The Large S has a very different sort of narrator, but I think like those early stories, the voice is so strong. It has such authority. And I think I wanted to read this piece because whenever I read Dennis Johnson, I always feel this urge to speak the words out loud, that the writing sort of possesses me and puts me under a spell. So it seemed when I was thinking of what story to read, I thought Dennis Johnson because whenever I read his stories on the page, I'm suddenly mumbling the words. It's true. They're very verbal. I suppose maybe that's because Dennis Johnson, like you, is also a playwright. There's something spoken in his writing. Yeah. And there's something about him that just, you know, this seems a funny thing to say about a writer because every writer hopes for this. But with Dennis Johnson, whenever I read his work, it's like no one else could have written this but Dennis Johnson. He's so completely suey generous. It's just he's his own thing. Yeah, absolutely. But his own thing changes. You know, like you said that he's best known for Jesus's son, which came out in 1992 as kind of cycle of stories about a down and out heroin addict. And this story is so radically, comes from a radically different place. I mean, maybe at its heart, it's not radically different, but it was written 20 years later. Its concerns are very different. And of course, there were a lot of other books and poetry and plays in between. Can you tell me what you think is the through line in his writing? I mean, this is a bit of a highfalutin thing to say that, you know, he seems and as a, you know, a person who grew up Catholic and I feel like he Dennis Johnson in all his work, he seems to be interested in the spiritual aspects of suffering. And I find this in his work. I find some of some interesting connections between this and Jesus's son because he's often talking about men, individuals who are living their lives, but are longing to escape into some ecstasy or to some, some magical realm. I mean, the men in Jesus's son, because of the drugs they're on, they're always sort of they're always in sort of this place where they're living almost in a dream reality. And it's like this character is living in a very mundane reality, but he's longing almost to have the life of the young men in Jesus's son. So there's this balance in all his work between the mundanity and the difficulty and the struggles of life and this vision of ecstasy or this pull toward ecstasy and dream and myth that's just hovering at the edge of life. Yeah. It's particularly surprising in this story, which is about someone who's been an advertising writer or producer that he's drawn so strongly to the ethereal. Yeah, that's something I'd love to talk about because when I first read it, I had to really think hard about how those things were connected. And after reading it many times, I have thoughts and I'd love to hear your opinion about how the sort of the mundanity and the sort of plain speak of the peace balances with those flights, you know, the ribbon of life flashing and all those lyric, extreme lyric moments. Oh, wonderful. I can't wait to talk about it. So let's listen to the reading now. Here is Victor Ladotto reading the largest of the sea maiden by Dennis Johnson. The largest of the sea maiden. Silences. After dinner, nobody went home right away. I think we'd enjoyed the meal so much we hoped Elaine would service the whole thing all over again. These were people we've gotten to know a little from Elaine's volunteer work. Nobody from my work, nobody from the ad agency. We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we'd ever heard. One said it was his wife's voice when she told him she didn't love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of 37 and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her 16 year old daughter's arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt his ears whenever his brother opened his mouth in public because his brother had Tourette syndrome and erupted with remarks like I masturbate, your penis smells good, in front of perfect strangers on a bus or during a movie or even in church. Young Chris Case reversed the direction and introduced the topic of silences. He said the most silent thing he'd ever heard was the landmine taking off his right leg outside Kabul, Afghanistan. As for other silences, nobody contributed. In fact, there came a silence now. Some of us hadn't realized that Chris had lost a leg. He limped, but only slightly. I hadn't even known he'd fought in Afghanistan. A landmine, I said. Yes, sir, a landmine. Can we see it, Deirdre said? No, ma'am, Chris said. I don't carry landmines around on my person. No, I mean your leg. It was blown off. I mean the part that's still there. I'll show you, he said. If you kiss it. Shocked laughter. We started talking about the most ridiculous things we'd ever kissed. Nothing of interest. We'd all kissed only people and only in the usual places. All right then, Chris told Deirdre, here's your chance for the conversation's most unique entry. No, I don't want to kiss your leg. Although none of us showed it. I think we all felt a little irritated with Deirdre. We all wanted to see. Morton Sands was there too that night. And for the most part, he'd managed to keep quiet. Now he said, Jesus Christ, Deirdre. Well, okay, she said. Chris pulled up his right pant leg, bunching the cuff about half way up his thigh, and detached his prosthesis. A device of chromium bars and plastic belts strapped to his knee, which was intact and swiveled upward horribly to present the puckered end of his leg. Deirdre got down on her bare knees before him, and he hitched forward in his seat, the couch, Ralph Jones was sitting beside him, to move the scarred stump within two inches of Deirdre's face. Now she started to cry. Now we were all embarrassed, a little ashamed. For nearly a minute, we waited. Then Ralph Jones said, Chris, I remember when I saw you fight two guys at once outside the aces tavern. No kidding, Jones told the rest of us. We went outside with these two guys and beat the crap out of both of them. I guess I could have given them a break, Chris said. They were both pretty drunk. Chris, you sure kicked some ass that night. In the pocket of my shirt, I had a wonderful Cuban cigar. I wanted to step outside with it. The dinner had been one of our best, and I wanted to top off the experience with a satisfying smoke. But you want to see how this sort of thing turns out. How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation? Jones, however, had ruined everything by talking. He'd broken the spell. Chris worked the prosthesis back into place and tightened the straps and rearranged his pant leg. Deirdre stood up and wiped her eyes and smoothed her skirt into a curseet, and that was that. The outcome of all this was that Chris and Deirdre, about six months later, down at the courthouse in the presence of very nearly the same group of friends, were married by a magistrate. Yes, their husband and wife. You and I know what goes on. Accomplices. Another silence comes from mind. A couple of years ago, Elaine and I had dinner at the home of Miller Thomas, formerly the head of my agency in Manhattan. Right, he and his wife Francesca ended up out here too, but considerably later than Elaine and I. Once my boss, now a San Diego retiree. We finished two bottles of wine with dinner, maybe three bottles. After dinner we had brandy. Before dinner we had cocktails. We didn't know one another particularly well, and maybe we used the liquor to rush past that fact. After the brandy I started drinking Scotch and Miller drank bourbon, and although the weather was warm enough that the central air conditioner was running, he pronounced it a cold night and lit a fire in his fireplace. It took only a squirt of fluid and the pop of a match to get an armload of sticks crackling and blazing, and then he laid on a couple of large chunks that he said were good seasoned oak. The capitalist at his forge, Francesca said. At one point we were standing in the light of the flames, I and Miller Thomas, seeing how many books each man could balance on his outflung arms. Elaine and Francesca loading them onto our hands in a test of equilibrium that both of us failed repeatedly. It became a test of strength. I don't know who won. We called for more and more books and our women piled them on until most of Miller's library lay around us on the floor. He had a small Marsden-Hartley canvas mounted above the mantle. A crazy, mostly blue landscape done in oil, and I said that perhaps that wasn't the place for a painting like this one, so near the smoke and heat, such an expensive painting. And the painting was masterful too, for what I could see of it by dim lamps and firelight, amid books scattered all over the floor. Miller took offense. He said he had paid for this masterpiece, he owned it, he could put it where it suited him. He moved very near the flames and took the painting in turn-tas, holding it before him and declared that he could even, if he wanted, throw it in the fire and leave it there. Is it art? Sure, but listen, he said, art doesn't own it, my name ain't art. He held the canvas flat like a tray, landscaped up and tempted the flames with it, thrusting it in and out. And the strange thing is that I had heard a nearly identical story about Miller Thomas and his beloved Hartley landscape some years before, about an evening very similar to this one, the drinks and wine and brandy and more drinks, the rowdy conversation, the scattering of books and finally, Miller thrusting this painting toward the flames and calling it his own property and threatening to burn it. On that previous night, his guests had talked him down from the heights and he had hung the painting back in its place. But on our night, why? None of us found a way to object as he added his property to the fuel and turned his back and walked away. A black spot appeared on the canvas and spread out in sort of smoking puddle that gave rise to tiny flames. Miller sat in a chair across the living room by the flickering window and observed from that distance with a drink in his hand. Not a word, not a move from any of us. The wooden frame popped marvelously in the silence while the great painting cooked away, first black and twisted, soon gray and fluttering, and then the fire had it all. ADMAN This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life, the distance I've travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms that I almost crashed the car. Getting out at the place where I do the job I don't feel I'm very good at, I grabbed my briefcase too roughly and dumped half of its contents in my lap and half in the parking lot and while gathering it all up I left my keys on the seat and locked the car manually, an old man's habit, and trapped them in the rob. In the office I asked Shailene to call a locksmith and then to get me an appointment with my back man. In the upper right quadrant of my back I have a nerve that once in a while gets pinched, the T4 nerve. These nerves aren't frail little inclines, they're cords, in fact as thick as your pinky finger. This one gets caught between tense muscles and for days, even weeks, there's not much to be done but take aspirin and get massages and visit the chiropractor. Down my right arm I feel a tingling, a numbness, sometimes a dull sort of muffled torment, or else a shapeless, confusing pain. It's a signal, it happens when I'm anxious about something. To my surprise Shailene knew all about this something. Apparently she finds time to be googling her bosses and she'd learned of an award I was about to receive in, of all places, New York, for an animated television commercial. The award goes to my old New York team but I was the only one of us attending the ceremony, possibly the only one interested so many years down the line. This little gesture of acknowledgement put the finishing touches on a depressing picture. The people on my team had gone on to other teams, fancier agencies, higher accomplishments. All I'd done in better than two decades was tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions and stepped off. Meanwhile Shailene was ooey, gushing like a proud nurse who expects you to marvel at all the horrible procedures the hospital has in store for you. I said to her, thanks, thanks. When I entered the reception area and throughout this transaction Shailene was wearing a flashy sequined carnival mask. I didn't ask why. Our office environment is part of the new wave. The whole agency works under one gigantic big top like a circus. Not crowded, quite congenial. All of it's surrounding a spacious break time area with pinball machines and a basketball hoop and every Friday during the summer months we have a happy hour with free beer from a keg. In New York I made commercials. In San Diego I write and design glossy brochures, mostly for a group of western resorts where golf is played and horses take you along bridal paths. Don't get me wrong, California is full of beautiful spots. It's a pleasure to bring them to the attention of people who might enjoy them. Just please, not with a badly pinched nerve. When I can't stand it, I take the day off and visit the Big Art Museum in Balbao Park. Today, after the locksmith got me back into my car I drove to the museum and sat in on part of a lecture in one of its side rooms. A woman outside her art is raving, art is man and man is art. I listened for five minutes and what little of it she managed to make comprehensible didn't even merit being called shallow. Just the same, her paintings were slightly designed, intricately patterned and coherent. I wandered from wall to wall, taking some of it in, not much. But looking at art for an hour or so always changes the way I see things afterward. Twisting, for instance, a group of mentally handicapped adults on a tour of the place, with their twisted, hovering hands and cocked heads, moving among the works like cheap cinema zombies but good zombies, zombies with mines and souls and things to keep them interested. And outside, where they normally have a lot of large metal sculptures, the grounds were being dug up and reconstructed, a drag line shovel nosing the rubble monstrously, and a woman and a child watching, motionless, the little boy standing on a bench with his smile and sideways eyes and his mother beside him, holding his hand, both so still, like a photograph of American ruin. Next, I had a session with a chiropractor dressed up as an elf. It seemed the entire staff of the medical complex near my house were costumed for Halloween, and while I waded out front in the car for my appointment, the earliest one I could get that day, I saw a Swiss milkmaid coming back from lunch, then a witch with a green face, then a sunburst orange superhero. Then I had the session with the chiropractor in his tights and drooping cap. As for me, my usual guys, the masquerade continues. Farewell. Elaine got a wall phone for the kitchen, a sleek blue one that wears its receiver like a hat, with a collar ID read out on its face just below the keypad. While I eyeballed this instrument, having just come in from my visit with the chiropractor, a brisk, modest tone began, and the tiny screen showed ten digits I didn't recognize. My inclination was to scorn it like any other unknown, but this was the first call, the inaugural message. As soon as I touched the receiver, I wondered if I'd regret this, if I was holding a mistake in my hand, if I was pulling this mistake to my head and saying hello to it. The collar was my first wife, Virginia, or Ginny, as I always called her. We were married long ago in our early twenties and put a stop to it after three crazy years. Since then, we hadn't spoken, we'd had no reason to, but now we had one. Ginny was dying. Her voice came faintly. She told me the doctors had closed the book on her, she'd ordered her affairs, the good people from hospice were in attendance. Before she ended this, Earthly Transit, as she called it, Ginny wanted to shed any kind of bitterness against certain people, certain men, especially me. She said how much she'd been hurt and how badly she wanted to forgive me, but she didn't know whether she could or not. She hoped she could, and I assured her from the abyss of a broken heart that I hope so too that I hated my infidelities and my lies about the money and the way I'd kept my boredom secret and my secrets in general. And Ginny and I talked after 40 years of silence about the many other ways I'd stolen her right to the truth. In the middle of this, I began wondering, most uncomfortably, in fact with a dizzy, sweating anxiety if I'd made a mistake. If this wasn't my first wife Ginny, no, but rather my second wife, Jennifer, often called Ginny. Because of the weakness of her voice and my own humming shock at the news, also the situation around her as she tried to speak to me on this very important occasion, folks coming and going and the sounds of a respirator, I suppose. Now 15 minutes into this call, I couldn't remember if she'd actually said her name when I picked up the phone and I suddenly didn't know which set of crimes I was regretting. I wasn't sure if this dying farewell clobbering me to my knees in true repentance beside the kitchen table was Virginia's or Jennifer's. This is hard, I said. Can I put the phone down a minute? I heard her say, okay, the house felt empty. Elaine? I called. Nothing. I wiped my face with the dish rag and took off my blazer and hung it on a chair and called out Elaine's name one more time and then picked up the receiver again. There was nobody there. The phone had preserved the caller's number, of course, Ginny's number or Jenny's, but I didn't look for it. We'd had our talk and Ginny, or Jenny, whichever, had recognized herself in my frank apologies and she'd been satisfied because after all, both sets of crimes had been the same. I was tired. What a day. I called Elaine on her cell phone. We agreed she might as well stay at the budget in on the east side. She volunteered out there, teaching adults to read and once in a while she got caught laid and stayed over. Good. I could lock all three locks on the door and call it a day. I didn't mention the previous call. I turned in early. I dreamed of a wild landscape, elephants, dinosaurs, bat caves, strange natives and so on. I woke. Couldn't go back to sleep. But on a long terry cloth robe over my PJs and slipped into my loafers and went walking. People in bathrooms stroll around here at all hours, but not often I think without a pet on the leash. There's a good neighborhood, a Catholic church and a Mormon one and a posh townhouse development with much green open space and on our side of the streets some pretty nice smaller homes. I wonder if you like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the mystery winks at you. When you walk in your bathrobe and tassled loafers, for instance, well out of your neighborhood and among a lot of closed shops and you approach your very faint reflection in a window with words above it. The sign said sky and celery. Closer it read ski and cyclory. I headed home. Widow I was having lunch one day with my friend Tom Ellis, a journalist just catching up. He said that he was writing a two act drama based on interviews he'd taped while gathering material for an article on the death penalty, two interviews in particular. First, he had spent an afternoon with a death row inmate in Virginia, the murderer William Donald Mason, a name not at all famous here in California and I don't know why I remember it. Mason was scheduled to die the next day, 12 years after killing a guard he'd taken hostage during the bank robbery. Other than his last meal of steak, green beans and a baked potato which would be served to him the following noon, Mason knew of no future outcomes to worry about and seemed relaxed and content. Ellis quizzed him about his life before his arrest, his routine there at the prison, his views on the death penalty, Mason was against it and his opinion as to an afterlife. Mason was for it. The prisoner talked with admiration about his wife whom he'd met and married some years after landing on death row. She was the cousin of a fellow inmate. She waited tables in a sports bar, great tips. She liked reading and she'd introduced her murderer husband to the works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Hermes Temingway. She was studying for a Realtors license. Had already said goodbye to his wife. The couple had agreed to get it all out of the way a full week ahead of the execution to spend several happy hours together in part company well out of the shadow of Mason's last day. Ellis said he'd felt a fierce unexpected kinship with his man so close to the end because as Mason himself pointed out, this was the last time he'd be introduced to a stranger except for the people who would arrange him on the gurney the next day and set him up for his injection. Tom Ellis was the last new person he'd meet in other words who wasn't about to kill him. And in fact everything proceeded according to the schedule and about 18 hours after Ellis talked with him, William Mason was dead. A week later, Ellis interviewed the new widow, Mrs. Mason, and learned that much of what she told her husband was false. Ellis located her in Norfolk working not in any kind of sports bar but instead in a basement sex emporium near the waterfront in a one on one peep show. In order to talk to her, Ellis had to pay $20 and to send a narrow stairway lit with purple bulbs and sit in a chair before a curtained window. He was shocked when the curtain vanished upward to reveal the woman already completely nude sitting on a stool in a padded booth. Then it was her turn to be shocked when Ellis introduced himself as a man who'd shared an hour or two of her husband's last full day on earth. Together, they spoke of the prisoner's wishes and dreams, his happiest memories and his childhood grief. The kinds of things a man shares only with his wife. Her face, though severe, was pretty and she displayed her parts to Tom unselfconsciously yet without the protection of anonymity. She wept, she laughed, she shouted, she whispered all of this into a telephone handset that she held to her head while her free hand gestured in the air or touched the glass between them. As for having told so many lies to the man she'd married, that was one of the things she laughed about. She seemed to assume that anybody else would have done the same. In addition to her bogus employment and her imaginary studies in real estate, she'd endowed herself with a religious soul and joined a non-existent church. Thanks to all her fabrications, William Donald Mason had died a proud and happy husband. And just as he'd been surprised by his sudden intimacy with the condemned killer, my friend felt very close to the widow because they were talking to each other about life and death while she'd displayed her nakedness before him. Coming on the stool with her red, spike-yield pumps planted wide apart on the floor. I asked him if they'd ended up making love and he said no, but he'd wanted to, he certainly had, and he was convinced that the naked widow had felt the same, though you weren't allowed to touch the girls in those places. And this dialogue, in fact, both of them, the death row interview and the interview with the naked widow, had taken place through glass partitions made to withstand any kind of passionate assault. At the time, the idea of telling her what he wanted had seemed terrible, now he regretted his shyness. In the play, as he described it for me, the second act would end differently. Before long, we wandered into a discussion of the difference between repentance and regret. You repent the things you've done and regret the chances you let get away. Venice sometimes happens in a San Diego cafe more often than you think. You were interrupted by a beautiful young woman selling roses. Orphan. The lunch with Tom Ellis took place a couple of years ago. I don't suppose he ever wrote the play, it was just a notion he was telling me about. It came to mind today because this afternoon I attended the memorial service of an artist's friend of mine, a painter named Tony Fido, who once told me about a similar experience. Tony found his cell phone on the ground years home in National City, just south of here. He told me about this the last time I saw him, a couple of months before he disappeared or went out of communication. First he went out of communication, then he was deceased. But when he told me this story, there was no hint of any of that. Tony noticed the cell phone lying under an oleander bush as he walked around his neighborhood. He picked it up and continued to stroll, and before long felt it vibrating in his pocket. When he answered, he found himself talking to the wife of the owner, the owner's widow actually, who explained that she'd been calling the number every 30 minutes or so since her husband's death, not 24 hours before. Her husband had been killed the previous afternoon in an accident at the intersection where Tony had found the cell phone. An old woman in a Cadillac had run him down. At the moment of impact, the device had been torn from his hand. The police said that they hadn't noticed any phone around the scene. It hadn't been among the belongings she'd collected at the morgue. I knew he lost it right there, she told Tony, because he was talking to me at the very second when it happened. Tony offered to get in his car and deliver the phone to her personally, and she gave him her address in Lemon Grove, nine miles distant. When he got there, he discovered that the woman was only 22 and quite attractive, and that she and her husband had been going through a divorce. At this point in the telling, I think I knew where his story was headed. She came after me, I told her, you're either from heaven or from hell. It turned out she was from hell. Whenever he talked, Tony kept his hands moving, grabbing and rearranging small things on the tabletop while his head rocked from side to side and back and forth. Sometimes he referred to a force of rhythm in his paintings. He often spoke of motion in the work. I didn't know much about Tony's background. He was in his late 40s, but seemed much younger. I met him at the Balboa Park Museum, where he appeared at my shoulder while I was looking at an Edward Hopper painting of a Cape Cod gas station. He offered his critique, which was lengthy, meticulous, and scathing, and which was focused on technique, only on technique, and spoke of his contempt for all painters and finished by saying, I wish Picasso was alive. I'd challenge him. He could do one of mine and I could do one of his. You're a painter yourself? A better painter than this guy, he said of Edward Hopper. Well, whose work would you say is any good? The only painter I admire is God. He's my biggest influence. We began having coffee together two or three times a month. Always, I have to admit at Tony's initiation. Today I drove to his lively, disheveled Hispanic neighborhood to see him there in National City. I like primitive art and I like folktales, so I enjoyed visiting his rambling old home where he lived surrounded by his paintings like an orphan king in a cluttered castle. The house had been in his family since 1939. For a while it was a boarding house, a dozen bedrooms, each with its own sink. Damn place has a jinx or whammy. First Spiro. Spiro watched it till he died. Mom watched it till she died. My sister watched it till she died. Now I'll be here till I die, he said. Hosting me shirtless, his hairy torso dabbed all over with paint. Talking so fast I could rarely follow. It did seem deranged, but blessed decidedly so with a self-deprecating and self-orienting humor that the genuinely mad seemed to have misplaced. Well to make up somebody like that. Richards in the Washington Post, he once said, compared me to Melville. I have no idea who Richards was or who Spiro was. Tony never tired of his voluble explanations, his self exegesis, the works almost coded as if to fool or distract the unworthy. They weren't the child drawings of your usual schizophrenic outsider artist, but efforts a little more skillful. On the order of tattoo art, oil on canvases around 4x6 feet in size, crowded with images but highly organized, all on biblical themes, mostly dire and apocalyptic, and all with the titles printed neatly right on them. One of his works for instance, three panels depicting the end of the world and the advent of heaven was called Mystery Babylon, Mother of Harlots, Revelation 17 verses 1-7. This period, when I was seeing a bit of Tony Fido, coincided with an era in the world of my unconscious, an era when I was troubled by the dreams I had at night. They were long and epic, detailed and violent and colorful. They were exhausting. I couldn't account for them. The only medication I took was something to bring down my blood pressure and it wasn't new. I made sure I didn't take food just before going to bed. I avoided sleeping on my back, steered clear of disturbing novels and TV shows. For a month, maybe six weeks, I dreaded sleep. Once I dreamed of Tony. I defended him against an angry mob, keeping the ceiling throng at bay with a butcher knife. Often I woke up short of breath, shaking, my heart beat rattling my ribs, and I cured my nerves with a solitary walk, no matter the hour. And once, maybe the night I dreamed about Tony, I don't remember. I went walking and had the kind of moment or visitation I treasure. When the flow of life twists and untwists, all in a blink, think of a taut ribbon flashing. I heard a young man's voice in the parking lot of the Mormon church in the dark night telling someone, I didn't bark. That wasn't me. I didn't bark. I never found out how things turned out between Tony and the freshly widowed 22 year old. I'm pretty sure it went no further and there was no second encounter, certainly no ongoing affair because he more than once complained, I can't find a woman, none. I'm under some kind of a damn spell. He believed in spells and whammy's and such and angels and mermaids, omens, sorcery, wind-borne voices and messages and patterns. All through his house were scattered twigs and feathers possessing a mysterious significance, rocks that had spoken to him, stumps of driftwood whose faces he recognized and in any direction, his canvases like windows opening onto lightning and smoke, ranks of crimson demons and flying angels, gravestones on fire and scrolls, chalices, torches, swords. Last week, a woman named Rebecca Stamos, somebody I'd never heard of, called me to say that our mutual friend Tony Fido was no more. He'd killed himself. As she put it, he took his life. For two seconds, the phrase meant nothing to me. Took it, I said. Then, oh my goodness. Yes, I'm afraid he committed suicide. I don't want to know how. Don't tell me how. Honestly, I can't imagine why I said that. Memorial A week ago Friday, nine days ago, the eccentric religious painter Tony Fido stopped his car on Interstate 8, about 60 miles east of San Diego, on a bridge above a deep, deep ravine, and climbed over the railing and stepped into the air. He mailed a letter beforehand to Rebecca Stamos, not to explain himself, but only to say goodbye and pass along the phone numbers of some friends. Sunday, I attended Tony's memorial service, for which Rebecca Stamos had reserved the band room of the middle school where she teaches. We sat in a circle, with cups and saucers on our laps, in a tiny grove of music stands and volunteered one by one, our memories of Tony Fido. There were only five of us, our hostess, Rebecca, playing in stout in a sleeveless blouse and a skirt that reached down to her white tennis shoes. Myself, in the raiment of my order, the blue blazer cacichinos tassled loafers. Two middle-aged women of the sort to own a couple of small, obnoxious dogs, they called Tony Anthony. A chubby, young man in a green jumpsuit, some kind of mechanic, sweating. Tony's neighbors, family, none. Only the pair of ladies who'd arrived together actually knew each other. None of the rest of us had ever met before. These were friendships or acquaintances that Tony had kept one by one. He'd met all of us in the same way. He'd materialized beside us in an art museum, an outdoor market, a doctor's waiting room, and he'd begun to talk. I was the only one of us even aware he devoted all his time to painting canvases. Others thought he owned some kind of business, plumbing or exterminating or looking after private swimming pools. One believed he came from Greece, others assumed Mexico, but I'm sure his family was Armenian, long established in San Diego County. Rather than memorializing him, we found ourselves asking, who the hell was this guy? Rebecca had this much about him. While he was still in his teens, Tony's mother had killed herself. He mentioned it more than once, Rebecca said. It was always on his mind. The rest of us, this came as new information. Of course it troubled us to learn that his mother had taken her own life too. Had she jumped? Tony hadn't told and Rebecca hadn't asked. With little to offer about Tony and the way of biography, I shared some remarks of his that had stuck in my thoughts. I couldn't get into Ritzy Art Schools, he told me once. Best thing that ever happened to me, it's dangerous to be taught art. And he said, on my 26th birthday, I quit signing my work. Everybody who can paint like that have at it and take the credit. He got a kick out of showing me a passage in his hefty black Bible. First book of Samuel chapter six, where the idolatry of the Philistines earns them a plague of hemorrhoids. Don't tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor. And another of his insights, when he shared with me several times, we live in a catastrophic universe, not a universe of gradualism. That when it always gone right past me, now it sounded ominous, prophetic. But I missed a message, a warning. The man in the green jumpsuit, the garage mechanic, reported that Tony had plunged from our nation's highest concrete beam bridge down into Pine Valley Creek, a flight of 440 feet. The span, completed in 1974 and named the Nellow Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, was the first in the United States to be built using, according to the mechanic, the cast in place segmental balanced cantilever method. I wrote it down on a memo pad. I can't recall the mechanic's name. His breast tag said Ted, but he introduced himself as someone else. Anne and her friend, whose name also slipped past me, the pair of women, coordinated me afterward. They seem to think I should be the one to take final possession of a three ring binder full of recipes that Tony had loaned them, the collected recipes of Tony's mother. I determined I would give it to Elaine. She's a wonderful cook, but not as a regular thing because nobody likes to cook for two, too much work and too many leftovers. I told them she'd be glad to get the book. The binder was too big for any of my pockets. I thought of asking for a bag, but I failed to ask. I didn't know what to do with it, but carry it home in my hands and deliver it to my wife. Elaine was sitting at the kitchen table before her a cup of black coffee and half a sandwich on a plate. I set the notebook on the table next to her snack. She stared at it. Oh, she said, from your painter. She sat me down beside her and we went through the notebook page by page, side by side. Elaine, she's petite, live, quite smart, short gray hair, no makeup, a good companion. At any moment, the very next second, she could be dead. I wanted to pick this book carefully. So imagine holding it in your hands, a three ring binder of bright red plastic weighing about the same as a full dinner plate and now setting it in front of you on the table. When you open it, you find a pink title page, recipes, Cesarina Fido, covering a two inch thickness of white college ruled three whole paper, the first inch or so the usual, casseroles and pies and salad dressings, every aspect of breakfast, lunch and supper, all written in blue ballpoint. Halfway through, Tony's mother introduces ink of other colors, mostly green, red and purple, but also pink and a yellow that's hard to make out. And as these colors come along, her penmanship enters a kind of havoc. The letters swell and shrink, several pages begin loopy leaning to the right and then the next many pages leaning to the left and back the other way. And here, where these wars and changes begin and for better than 100 pages all the way to the end, the recipes are only for cocktails, every kind of cocktail. Earlier that afternoon, as Anne handed the binder over to me at Tony's Memorial, she made a curious remark. Anthony spoke very highly of you. He said you were his best friend. I thought it was a joke, but Anne mentioned this seriously. Tony's best friend. I was confused. I'm still confused. I heard a new one. Casanova. When I returned to New York City to pick up my prize at the American Advertisers Award, I'm not sure I expected to enjoy myself. But on the second day, killing time before the ceremony, walking north through midtown in my dark ceremonial suit and trench coat, skirting the park, strolling south again, feeling the pulse and listening to the traffic noise rising among high buildings. I had a homecoming. The day was sunny, fine for walking, brisk and getting brisker. And in fact, as I cut a diagonal through a little plaza somewhere above 40th Street, the last autumn leaves were swept up from the pavement and thrown around my head. And a sudden misty quality in the atmosphere above seemed to solidify into a ceiling, both dark and luminous. And the passerby hunched into their collars and two minutes later, the gusts settled into a wind, not hard but steady and cold. And my hands dove into my coat pockets. A bit of rain speckled the pavement. Random snowflake spiraled in the air. All around me, people seemed to be evacuating the scene. While across the square, a vendor shouted that he was closing his cart and you could have his wares for practically nothing. And for no reason I could have named. I bought two of his rat dogs with everything and a cup of doubtful coffee and then learned the reason. They were wonderful. I nearly ate the napkin. New York. Once I lived here, went to Columbia University, studying history first and broadcast journalism, worked for a couple of pointless years at the post and then for 13 tough but prosperous years at Castle and Forbes on 54th, First off Madison Avenue. And then took my insomnia, my afternoon headaches, my doubts and my ant acid tablets to San Diego and lost them in the Pacific Ocean. New York and I didn't quite fit. I knew it the whole time. Some of my Columbia classmates came from far away places like Iowa and Nevada as I had come a shorter way from New Hampshire. And after graduation, they had been absorbed into Manhattan and had lived there ever since. I didn't last. I always say it was never my town. Today, it was all mine. Today, I was its proprietor. With my overcoat wide open and the wind in my hair, I walked around and for an hour or so, presided over the bits of litter in the air so much less than 30 years ago. And the citizens bent against the weather and the light inside the restaurants and the people at small tables looking at one another's faces and talking. The white flakes began to stick. By the time I entered Trump Tower, I had a long, hard, wet walk. I repaired myself in the restroom and found the right floor. At the ceremony, my table was near the front, round, clothed, and burgundy and surrounded by eight of us, the other seven much younger than I, a lively bunch, fun and full of wisecracks. And they seemed impressed to be sitting with me and made sure I sat where I could see. All that was the good part. Halfway through, dessert, the nerve in my back began to act up. And by the time I heard my name and started toward the podium, my right shoulder blade felt as if it were pressed against a hissing old New York steam heat radiator. At the head of the vast room, I held the medallion in my hand. That's what it was rather than a trophy and inscribed medallion three inches in diameter. Good for a paperweight and thanked a list of names I'd memorized, omitted any other remarks and got back to my table just as another pain ceased me. This one in the region of my bowels. And now I've repented my curbside lunch, my delicious New York hot dogs, especially the second one. And without sitting down or even making an excuse, I let this bout of indigestion carrying me out of the room and down the halls to the men's lavatory, where I hardly had time to fumble the medallion into my lapel pocket and get my jacket on the hook. I'd sat down with my intestines in flames, first my body bearing this insult, and then my soul insulted too when someone came in and chose the stall next to mine. A public toilet's are just that, too public. The walls don't reach the floor. This other man and I could see each other's feet or in any rate, our black shoes and the cuffs of our dark trousers. After a minute, his hand laid on the floor between us, there at the border between his space and mine, a square of toilet paper with an obscene proposition written on it in words large and plain enough that I could read them whether I wanted to or not. In pain I laughed, not out loud. I heard a small sigh from the next stall. By hunching down into my own embrace and staring hard at my feet, I tried to make myself go away. I didn't acknowledge his overture and he didn't leave. He must have taken it that I had him under consideration. As long as I stayed, he had reason to hope and I couldn't leave yet. My bowels churned and smoldered, renegades signals from my spinal nerve, hammered my shoulder and the full length of my right arm down to the marrow. The oar ceremony seemed to have ended. The men's room came to life, the door pushing open, the run of voices coming in, fruits and falses and footfalls, the spin of the paper towel dispenser. Somewhere in here, a hand descended to the note on the floor, fingers touched it, raised it away. Soon after that the man, the toilet Casanova, was no longer beside me. I stayed as I was, for how long I couldn't say. They were echoes, silence, the urinals flushing themselves. I raised myself upright, pulled my clothing together, made my way to the sinks. One other man remained in the place. He stood at the sink, beside mine as our faucets ran. I washed my hands, he washed his hands. He was tall, with a distinctive head, wispy, colored with hair like a baby's and a skeletal face with thick red lips. I'd have known him anywhere. Carl Zane. He smiled in a small way. Wrong, I'm Marshall Zane. I'm Carl's son. Sure, of course. He would have aged too. This encounter had me going in circles. I'd finished washing my hands and now I started washing them again. I forgot to introduce myself. You look just like your dad, I said, only 25 years ago. Are you here for the awards night? He nodded. I'm with the sextant crew. You followed in his footsteps. I did. I even worked for Castle and Forbes for a couple of years. How do you like that? And how's Carl doing? Is he here tonight? He passed away three years ago, went to sleep one night and never woke up. Oh, oh no. I had a moment. I have them sometimes when the surroundings seem bereft of any facts and not even the smallest physical gesture felt possible. After the moment had passed, I said, I'm sorry to hear that. He was a nice guy. At least it was painless, the son of Carl's A.N. said. And as far as anyone knows, he went to bed happy that night. We were talking to each other's reflection in the broad mirror. I made sure I didn't look elsewhere at his trousers, his shoes. But for this occasion, we men, every one of us had dressed in dark trousers and black shoes. Well, enjoy your evening, the young man's head. I thanked him and said good night. And as he tossed a wadded paper towel at the receptacle and disappeared out the door, I'm afraid I added, tell your father, I said hello. Mermaid. As I trudged up Fifth Avenue after this miserable interlude, I carried my shoulder like a bushel bag of burning kindling and could hardly stay upright the three blocks to my hotel. It was really snowing now and it was Saturday night. The sidewalk was crowded. People came at me, forcing themselves against the weather, their shoulders hunched, their coats pinch shut, flakes battering their faces. And though their faces were dark, I felt I saw into their eyes. I came awake in the unfamiliar room. I didn't know how much later. And if this makes sense, it wasn't the pain in my shoulder that woke me, but it's departure. The episode had passed. I laid bathed in relief. Beyond my window, a thick layer of snow covered the ledge. I became aware of a hush of anticipation, a tremendous surrounding absence. I got out of bed, dressed in my clothes and went out to look at the city. It was, I think, around 1 a.m. Snow six inches deep but falling. Park Avenue looked smooth and soft. Not one vehicle had disturbed its surface. The city was almost completely stopped. It's very few sounds muffled yet perfectly distinct from one another. A rumbling snow plow somewhere, a car's horn, a man on another street shouting several faint syllables. I tried counting up the years since I'd seen snow, 11 or 12, Denver, and it had been exactly the same, exactly like this. One lone taxi, glad to park Avenue, through the Virgin White, and I held it and asked the driver to find any restaurant open for business. I looked out the back window at the brilliant silences falling from the street lamps and at our fresh black tracks disappearing into the infinite. The only proof of Park Avenue. I'm not sure how the cabbie kept to the road. He took me to a small diner off Union Square where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large historic faces, every one of whom delivered here without an explanation seemed invaluable. I paid and left and set out walking back toward Midtown. I bought a pair of weatherproof dress shoes just before leaving San Diego and I was glad I looked for places where I was the first to walk and kicked at the powdery snow. A piano playing a Latin tune drew me through a doorway into an atmosphere of sadness, a dim tavern, a stale smell, the piano's weary melody and a single customer, an ample attractive woman with abundant blonde hair. She wore an evening gown, a light shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed poised and self-possessed, though it was possible also that she was weeping. I left the door close behind me, the bartender, a small old black man raised his eyebrows and I said, Scott Rocks, red label. Talking I felt discourteous. The piano played in the gloom of the farthest corner. I recognized the melody as a Mexican traditional called Maria Elena. I couldn't see the musician at all. In front of the piano, a big tenor saxophone rested upright on a stand. With no one around to play it, it seemed like just another of the personalities here, the invisible pianist, the disenchanted old bartender, the big glamorous blonde, the shipwrecked solitary saxophone and the man who'd walked here through the snow. And as soon as the name of the song popped into my head, I thought I heard a voice say, her name is Maria Elena. The scene had a moonlit black and white quality. Ten feet away at her table, the blonde woman waited, her shoulders back, her face raised. She lifted one hand and beckoned me with her fingers. She was weeping. The lines of her tears sparkle on her cheeks. I am a prisoner here. She said, I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still. Whit. My name would mean nothing to you, but there's a very good chance you're familiar with my work. Among the many TV ads I wrote and directed, you'll remember one in particular. In this animated 30 second spot, you see a brown bear chasing a gray rabbit. They come one after the other over a hill toward the view. The rabbit is cornered, he's crying. The bear comes to him. The rabbit reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the bear. The bear looks at this gift, sits down, stares into space. The music stops. There's no sound, nothing is said, and right there, the little narrative ends on a note of complete uncertainty. It's an advertisement for a banking chain. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that's only if you haven't seen it. If you've seen it the way it was rendered, then you know that it was a very unusual advertisement because it referred really to nothing at all. And yet it was actually very moving. Advertisements don't try to get you to fork over your dough by tugging irrelevantly at your heartstrings, not as a rule. But this one broke the rules and it worked. It brought the bank many new customers and it excited a lot of commentary and won several awards. Every award I ever won, in fact, I won for that ad. It ran in both halves of the 22nd Super Bowl and people still remember it. You don't get awards personally. They go to the team, to the agency, but your name attaches to the project as a matter of workplace lore. Whitt did that one. And that would be me, Bill Whitman. Yes, the one with the rabbit and the bear was Whitt's. Credit goes, first of all, to the banking firm who'd let this strange message go out to potential customers who sought to start a relationship with the gesture so cryptic. It was better than cryptic, mysterious, untranslatable. I think it pointed to orderly financial exchange as the basis of harmony. Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money. I won't mention the name of the bank. If you don't remember the name, then it wasn't such a good ad after all. If you watch any prime time television in the 1980s, you've almost certainly seen several other ads I wrote or directed or both. I crawled out of my twenties, leaving behind a couple of short, unhappy marriages. And then I found Elaine, 25 years last June, and two daughters. Have I loved my wife? We've gotten along. We've never felt like congratulating ourselves. I'm just shy of 63. Elaine's 52, but seems older. Not in her looks, but in her attitude of complacency. She lacks fire. Seems interested mainly in our two girls. She keeps in close contact with them. They're both grown. They're harmless citizens. They aren't beautiful or clever. Before the girl started grade school, we left New York and headed west in stages. A year in Denver, too much winter. Another in Phoenix, too hot. And finally, San Diego. San Diego. What a wonderful city. It's a bit more crowded each year, but still completely wonderful. Never regretted coming here, not for an instant. And financially, it all worked out. If we'd stayed in New York, I'd have made a lot more money, but we'd have needed a lot more too. Last night, Elaine and I lay in bed watching TV. And I asked her what she remembered. Not much. Less than I. We have a very small TV that sits on a dresser across the room. Keeping it going provides an excuse for lying awake in bed. I note that I've lived longer in the past now than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past days. And I wouldn't mind forgetting a lot more of it. Once in a while. I lie there as the television runs and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish and pairs that make people grow long noses that fall off again. And sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into a quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse. That was Victor Lodato reading the Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson. The story appeared in The New Yorker in March of 2014 and was included in Johnson's collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which was published posthumously by Random House in 2018. I'm Shilpa Oskalkovich. And I'm Jazzy Sepcek. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and why's and what didn't works that come with it. Every month we publish a recipe on Bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the B.A. Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking. So Victor, Dennis had been working on this story for seven or eight years when we published it. I asked him about that at the time when editing the story. And I asked him about the structure, which involves a lot of separate short chapters in a way. And he said, well, for me, seven years is fast. Most of my pieces have taken 10 to 12 years from the time of the initial impulse to the day I abandoned them. And I've gone as long as 25 years. This one started as an assignment. I gave some students in the autumn of 06 write a two page story. I wrote the part called Silences. Several other such pieces came along. And eventually I realized they all had the same narrator. So knowing this, does the story feel sort of haphazard to you like a series of short pieces that happen to come along? Or do you think there's something more fundamentally connecting them? I do think that they are fundamentally connected. When I first read the story, I was really moved by it, you know, and didn't quite understand why I was so moved by it. And I recall that the various parts did seem disparate and disconnected in random. But as I read on, the story started to feel more cohesive. And I saw how strongly the parts were linked, you know, thematically, maybe even more emotionally, that, you know, all of them, all of them have the same narrator, of course, so that links them. But they all have this feeling of estrangement and they're all of them considering, you know, the unknowability of other people. You know, can we really ever know another person? And that seems to be the question at the heart of this story. And it's certainly in every section. So I feel like there's that theme and that emotion that connects them. But there's even something, you know, as he says, when he's talking about something else, mysterious, untranslatable. To me, it feels like a very cohesive story. But other than the things I've said, I think part of that is, is mysterious. There's just, there's some emotional heartbreak at the center of this that connects them. Well, also, you know, all the stories have, you know, maybe like Jesus's son, it feels like a metaphysical standup routine. I mean, there's, you know, there's, it's so deeply sad, but there's so much for me, Gallows humor in this piece. You know, it really is one of those pieces, you know, when, when they write that silly thing, made me laugh, made me cry. Well, this, this piece does that for sure. Yeah. It's like the definition of Gallows humor in that moment on the phone, where he doesn't, he suddenly thinks he doesn't know which ex-wife it is. It's so crazy. I had to stop reading there because I was like, I didn't know what to feel. I wanted to like say life is the saddest thing ever and the most absurd thing. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Each section is full of that, this, you know, ridiculous party where everyone's saying, you know, show us your stump. Kisses, stumps go on. I'm glad he didn't title it. We all want to see it. Title it that. Yeah, I could have gone for some title, show me your stump. Cause, but I would like to talk about the title because the titles, you know, is very, it's very poetic, but it's very ironic too. Yeah. Let's, well, let's start with the title. I was going to end with the title, but let's start with it. Well, yeah. You know, when I, I could imagine that, you know, it's just such a bold title, you know, it's easy to say, well, it's very too much. It's kind of inflated. Um, I mean, it's very poetic. I love the phrase, the large s of the sea maiden. I mean, I remember when I saw the story. I loved it already just cause it's such a great title, but it's a very ironic title because when you think about it, like, you know, the sea maiden in this piece or whatever it is that, that gives him the narrator, these moments of beauty or gives humans like these flashes of beauty and ecstasy and that there's some connection between all of us. They're so brief compared to the disconnections and the unknowability of others. It's interesting because I wonder it was, is that large s because the sea maiden gives us so little. But, you know, maybe the narrator feels that those moments of ecstasy of connection where, where the ribbon of life flashes so beautifully, maybe even though they're so rare that they make everything, all the terrible things that have happened worthwhile. So it is a sort of generosity. What do you, what do you think? Okay. That's interesting. I wasn't really connecting the sea maiden to those, to those sort of mystical moments because I, you know, quite literally was thinking about the chapter called mermaid. And, you know, Dennis said at the time that he had remembered this phrase from, from a fairy tale because he like Whitman like to read folktales and fairy tales. And so I, I went and looked up what that original fairy tale was. And I think that the story of that does tie in here, though it's, you have to kind of make the connections yourself. But in that story, the sea maiden, a mermaid offers a fisherman some grains. It's three for his wife, three for his mare and three for his dog. And then the, you know, his wife produces three sons. The mare produces three foals and the dog produces three puppies. And in return, the mermaid says she's going to claim the oldest son when he comes of age. And there's a kind of convoluted plot and the oldest son chops the head off a sea monster or three heads off a sea monster. But at the end, there's something like a magic egg that maybe contains the sea maiden's soul. And if it's broken, the sea maiden dies and the son breaks it and to free himself from her claim on him. So in that story, yes, the sea maiden provides some largesse, some generosity, some, some grains of fertility, and it comes at a price and she's the one who pays it. It's interesting because I, I feel like other than the mermaid section, there are a number of sections where there's just a small short reference to something like with Tony Fido's paintings and the, you know, he has the driftwood that remind him of faces and at least reminds Tony Fido and then rocks that he recognizes and these magical twigs that he collects. And I think in each section, he starts to veer into out of the, you know, sort of the quotidian into these stranger mythical realities. And I wondered, like, you know, in this piece, there are all these strange messages that come across these thresholds where people are on opposite sides of that they can connect, like, you know, the man in the bathroom stall who writes a note on a square of paper and places it on the floor between the stall. And then, of course, there's the cookbook, which I love from Tony Fido's mother. And some of it's written in a, in a yellow ink that's very difficult to decipher. So a lot of the messages in the real world, like they're not usable in regard to offering any kind of insider meaning. And so I wondered maybe that's why there's this longing in the narrator for myth and fable and folktale and the sea maiden. You know, he's, he sees life approaching kind of some sort of grace or meaning, but it doesn't ever land. And, and the idea of fable or, or these folktales offer the possibility that there could be transformation or grace where, you know, everything will make sense, reveal itself, you know, a magic sword that'll cut through everyday life and, you know, cut through the barriers between people. Am I, am I reading too much into it? No, I'm just thinking about sky and celery and how disappointing that message becomes, you know, because that, that is the mystical moment, that moment when mystery winks, winks at him. And what it says is sky and celery or ski and cyclary, you know. And he ends it so perfectly, you know, after ski and cyclary, when he sees that the message is not that ecstatic or wonderful, he just says, I headed home. Yeah. Because he, and what's I find interesting, this is the Jesus' son connection, is that this man is always leaving his house to wander late at night in his bathrobe and loafers. You know, he's always searching, you know, he's, he's looking, he's often disappointed, but he's always as disappointed as he is. He's still, there's still something hopeful. This piece has a quality of a prayer to it that, you know, life is tough, life is hard. You know, who have I really loved? Have I loved them deeply? But he's still, there's still a kindness in this character and he still has a faith and he still goes looking for those things, even as he's often disappointed. Yeah. I mean, we get that so strongly in the final section where we have that sort of, you know, disaffected description of his life. He can't really say he loves his wife. His daughters aren't beautiful or clever, you know. It's a very downbeat, uninflected, unemotional assessment of a life. And there we are at the end of it. He goes out looking for his, you know, looking for magic. Yeah, it's interesting because those lines in particular, when I first read them about his daughters, they stopped me for a minute, I thought it seems so cold. But then I thought, and when I read them, it was just, it's, there's a flatness to it, but it's, it's, it's honesty. He's being honest because, you know, most of the people in our life are, are not many, you know, in my own life, have not been beautiful or clever. And I, I appreciated that line the more I read the piece and didn't see it as, as coldness. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is if you feel this at all in the story, maybe this was on my mind because I was first looking at some John Cheever stories to read for the podcast. I feel like there's some connection to Cheever in this story, in this lineage from Cheever, especially in the protagonist, because in the Johnson story, you have this, you know, late middle-aged guy who's, he's having a crisis of spirit. He's questioned his life and his privilege. And, and then he's leaving the house at night to, you know, wander around in a suburban neighborhood in a robe and his loafers. Do you feel like this lineage from Cheever at all in, in this piece and this, at least in this character? Yeah, definitely. If you, you know, this, this man was a New York City ad man. And now what has this kind of maybe unfulfilled life in the suburbs? Let's talk about the other writer who's hovering over it, which is Walt Whitman. You know, why is this, why is this character called Whitman? And Whitman was someone who was very important to Dennis Johnson. I was looking at what he said about Whitman and he said it, he said, I'm not sure I could trace the lines of his influence on my language, particularly or the way his work affects the strategies in my work or anything like that. His expansive spirit, his generosity, his eagerness to love, those are the things that influence me, not just as a writer, but as a person. And, you know, we've, we've talked about how he's not really, you know, all that loving to the people in his life, but he, he's looking for that feeling and he's trying to give that feeling. This character, yeah? Yeah, I agree. And possibly this goes back to how he talks about his daughters and his wife. Um, I don't know if this is true of Whitman, but sometimes it seems that he almost loves the idea of humanity or sometimes even loves strangers on the street or some of the, the sort of passing interactions he'd had more than he loves the friends and family from his own life. So, uh, like Whitman, he really is invested and loves the project of humanity, even though maybe he has not done a very good job or most of it has not been that satisfying. But yeah, it's that, that sense of, you know, that life is hard. But at some point when I think about the project of humanity, your heart swells and you feel that in the character that, you know, that, that's something at first I struggled with a little bit. In fact, like Whitman, like I thought, and I'd love your opinion as an editor on this, that when I first read it, I thought, oh, maybe this is slightly overwritten, maybe a hair too long. Is it slightly sentimental when it goes into these, you know, the ribbons of life flashing and the glow of taverns laid on a snowy night and a woman crying in the room. But then I realized that, you know, he's shown me so much bleakness that I want that. Like I crave that. Like when he gets to those moments, I find them genuinely moving. Though at first some part of me thought, oh, is this too much? How is this balancing this plain speak and these flights of lyricism? But the piece is just full of contradictions that work. And I'm just wondering your thoughts on that. Yeah. I mean, I think they're all, you know, although he sort of said he accumulated the story rather than calculating it, I think they are all designed in a sense by him to give us that satisfaction, to balance the sad old failure with the man of mystery, Wink-sat, the man who can see these sort of moments of unreality. And there is that questing thing in him. I mean, why would he become friends with Tony Fido, who seems somewhat crazy? You know, he's painting these complicated, epic religious paintings in the style of a tattoo artist. He has delusions of glory and little talismans throughout his house. And yet Whitman is obviously kind enough and open enough to him to be thought of as his best friend. And he's almost porous. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really, really good way to talk about it, because one of the things that I was thinking about that was so strange in the piece is that, OK, so these are not all wit stories. I mean, some of them are borrowed stories from like his playwright friend is the one who interviewed the death row inmate and the one who interviewed the widow. And I think there's one other story that isn't his, but is told, but he makes it his own. And so I find that fascinating because it just he does. Anyone who's suffering some sort of existential crisis becomes he just he can absorb that and make it his own. But I found the distancing of like, OK, this is someone else's story, but it felt like with story. It just it just added to this feeling of just kind of weirdness and sadness to the piece. Do you know what I mean? I think there's like three instances where he's telling someone else's story as his own. Yeah. He sort of undercuts his own story in the second section when he says he's heard about Miller Thomas doing exactly the same thing before with someone else. You know, it's not even original to him. It's so great that he does that. And that's just one of those things that I mean, it isn't just me. Do you find this that there is a great deal of humor or not a great deal? But there's it. There's so many lines that like one of the lines that I just I just giggled when I read it is, I mean, the man is in a toilet stall. He's suffering from from like food poisoning. And then when the man passes that obscene note, he ignores it. But the guy doesn't leave. And he said he must have had that I had him under consideration or something like that. You know, if I didn't leave, he had reason to hope. Right. It's so funny. And then at the same time, the piece for all that humor, it's it's terrifying in that so much of it is about death. Can we talk about death on the part? Yes. Let's talk about that. I mean, the narrator, it's throughout. He obviously feels the shadow of death coming closer and and he seems like really hungry to understand like his life, access it like right now before it slips away. And, you know, though it's a long story and there's a lot of like everyday details and mundane details, I felt like this urgency in the piece, like the questions or the quarry, you know, whatever the narrator is ultimately hunting for, it feels very appointed. And I remember I was particularly moved by the section about the painting being burned when that masterpiece is burned. It was really hard. I mean, from the very, you know, first time I read it after Dennis Johnson had died, it was very hard not to think of, you know, him, the masterpiece of Dennis Johnson about to be no more, because the way he describes the painting burning the canvas, like skin and then the the frame is popping and cracking, which feel like bones. And he must Dennis Johnson surely must have had these things on his mind because he wrote the story or at least finished it very close to his own death. Is that correct? He finished it in 2014, three years before, but he may have already had his diagnosis at that point. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, even if he weren't close to death, he would still be sort of close to mortality. He and Whit were the same age and at this stage of life where people were dying around them. And yeah, I mean, the number of deaths is quite phenomenal for a long story. The body counts is pretty impressive. Yeah. The sex wife, the death row inmate who also killed someone. There's the man with the cell phone who's killed by an old lady in a car and Tony Fido's death and the deaths of Tony Fido's relatives. Exactly. You know, finally, I think the last death is Carl Zane, who died a painless death. That was the best one. And you know, it's strange like when you bring this up, like, you know, I mean, there are so many deaths, but it doesn't. It's a sad story in some ways and very troubling, but it doesn't feel like a morose story again, because I think it's the power of the voice and the power of the quest, you know, of the search. They're not, you know, he's not just a sad sack telling the stories. He's like, he's really, there's an urgency in the piece is like, these WTF things happen to me and I'm still trying to figure them out. There's really a playwright in me feels the urgency of that voice. And Dennis Johnson clearly was a master at that. Like you feel he isn't just telling you things that happened in the past. He is actively telling you these things because he still can't figure this out. And he really needs to understand if this is the way it all works. Like to me, this piece is like a perfect, there was a meta thing when I read it, like it's just a testament to like the power of art making and storytelling, because if what he is saying that, you know, there is no meaning that our lives are random and we can't know other people, at least we have the salvation of storytelling and myth making and dreams, you know, that whatever, however troubling our plight is, it's at least recorded and validated, you know, even if art's just a mythical seed maiden, we still want to believe in her. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's telling that when Whit gets too stressed, he goes to the museum and looks at art. He also has, he has some pretty wild dreams. His dream life is not peaceful, you know, he dreams of elephants and dinosaurs and bat caves. And then he dreams he's using a butcher knife to defend Tony from an angry mob. So he has, he has a volatile inner life. And then he has this sort of sad sack outer life. And maybe what he's looking for is some sort of connection between the two things, some way of pulling the volatility into the real life in a positive way. Yeah. And it's interesting that you, like the dreams were another section where I said other than the mermaid section, I felt there were, there were other parts of it that I felt like, you know, where the sea maiden was, was shimmering. And definitely that happens in his dreams as well. Like his dreams seem to be, again, another threshold where on the other side of it, there is something like, even if it's like he's, he's, you know, holding a butcher knife to, you know, protect Tony Fido. It is like, he knows that Tony Fido is sort of like, has some access to this other realm through his paintings or his, his craziness and he wants to protect him. He's, he's vital, you know, again, it's like that section. I love the line where when he, after his pain goes away, after the food poisoning is gone and his back is no longer hurting him and he wanders into the snowy night and he has a cabbie take him to a restaurant. And the way he talks about the strangers, I, one of my favorite line is New Yorkers with their large historic faces. And all of them delivered here seemed at that very moment invaluable. Yeah. I just, I just love that. I think Tony Fido, even though he says when someone says he was said, he was your best friend and he's so troubled by that because I thought, oh, he thinks I hardly knew the man. He knows he's invaluable. It's a little scary that sometimes the ones who seem most invaluable, as I said, are strangers and not, and, and, and, and acquaintances rather than his loved ones. It's, it just makes the piece more, more strange and beautiful. So he, when he talks about Elaine and, and you know, he's slightly, you know, she's, she's too complacent or she doesn't have any fire in her. And then he says immediately, she could die any second. And there's kind of a terror in that, you know, that everyone's at risk. He could lose, he could lose this wife too. That's sort of like when he puts the phone down on Jenny or Jenny and starts yelling for Elaine, you know, he's just, he's feeling loss, loss of, of, you know, a loved one or a companionship and calling out for it. So, you know, he, he does keep insisting that people don't know him or he doesn't really know Tony or, but at the same time, he's given us so many details about Tony. He's been interested enough and sort of generous enough with his time to go to Tony's house and look at his paintings and observe and take in those historic faces in the diner at Union Square. You know, there's something very outward looking. Yeah, you're right. And there's also, that's one of the things that I hadn't really articulated, but you know, he does talk about feeling disconnected or it doesn't know people or they don't know him, but he really has listened really well. Like at the memorial, he quotes Tony quite a bit. He really remembers everything Tony said to him and can describe his opinions really well. And there's just, there's just this great kindness in that Dennis Johnson probably was this person, but this narrator has been a really good observer of life. And for all his feeling of estrangement from other humans, he has watched them closely and, and it's just beautiful to see how he remembers and records those stories. Yeah. Let's talk about his ad. Because that's a story he told that came from him only, this bear chasing the rabbit over the hill and the rabbit cornered about to die, presumably hands the bear a dollar and that diffuses everything or stumps the bear. So that he has to sit down and stare into space. And then it's left hanging. So you don't know the end of the story or if that is the end of the story. And this, you know, I suppose he gives an explanation of it that money tames the beast and lets the rabbit buy its freedom or its life, a sort of positive take on money. But what else is going on there? Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting because the, obviously the ad is for a bank and so it's talking about money. But it again, you know, you sense that he says it's very moving and that it was untranslatable. So even though he, those were the things that made it work professionally or made it work for this particular ad for the bank, I don't think he fully understands. Again, it's like, you know, he came up with this idea, came from a dream or it feels like it comes from a, you know, a weirdly subconscious place. And it is untranslatable. Like, you know, I think the money is power, money is civilization doesn't quite work as the explanation. I find that piece just, again, you know, I don't want to sort of try to analyze it too much because it's just so weird. It's just, you know, it's just a strange story. And it again, without the translation of like, this is what it means for money, you know, it goes back to, again, a kind of myth, you know, without a myth, though, that doesn't really have that we don't get the ending for. We don't know exactly what the outcome will be if the rabbit is safe or not. I just found it like, you know, it is one of those places where it's just like, Hmm, this, this is so odd and mysterious. Um, but also just it's rendered, um, so beautifully in the writing. What do you think? I feel like I'm, I'm not being articulate about this because it is a moment where it's sort of like, what, what does this mean? I'm not, I'm not even fully sure now, but I know I love the moment. Yeah. Yeah. One thing it made me think of was, was the moment in Dennis's story, emergency where the rabbits aren't saved. I don't know if you remember this. Yeah. The scene where, you know, the main character is, they hit a rabbit with a car and he jumps out to try and save the embryonic bunnies from her womb and then accidentally sort of sits on them. Right. They're in someone's coat, but they slip down and then they're crushed. And so, you know, that's a moment of sort of goodwill and, and carelessness and, you know, toying, toying with the lives of others. Whereas this rabbit saves itself through, through some kind of fiscal means, but also just by smart thinking, clear thinking maybe. In that last section of Whitt, where he's talking, you know, we first time we hear his name and, you know, you think he's starting to open up about life. He's talking about his wife, but then he goes into this, it just goes off and talking about what we lived in Denver and then Phoenix and, and then I would have needed more money if I stayed in New York. Like there is something, it's a frustrating, but beautiful and right for this story that just as he's trying to figure out his life and his wife, there's like this, this story in his life of money and career and work has become so much part of his identity, but it's also like a shield as much as he wants those to break through. There's, he's definitely got a shell and a shield. And often that seems to be related to topics of money, especially in that last session, it's, it's frustrating in a good way, that section, because it doesn't just go into the, you know, the sea maiden. And I find that the sea maiden comes up after the discussion of those mundanities of like his career and money and how much more money he made in San Diego than if he'd stayed in New York. It just like, I feel like again, as I said earlier, the piece needs those, those reductions to, to the quotidian to make the longing for those other things more powerful. There's a constant bouncing back and forth. That section also makes me think of the second section with the destruction of the painting because, you know, what's happening there is Miller Thomas proclaiming ownership saying, you know, I can, I can own a million dollar painting and burn it if I want to, because it's mine. Claiming possession and in a sense, laughing at its value, exhibiting power. And there's so much that's sort of reprehensible in that moment that then when you get to wit talking about money and not needing more or needing less and so on, it becomes a kind of counterpoint, I think. Mm-hmm. I'm curious to know since you worked with Dennis on this story, I just would love to hear anything about the process of, you know, editing this story or, you know, or, or your conversation with him because I never met Dennis Johnson, but he's been such an important figure to me in my life as a reader and as a writer that, you know, and I, I've read other people who do know him and their stories about him, but I would love to hear anything in particular that you remember from, from that process of working with him on the, on this story. Well, in order to have this conversation, I sort of went back in my files and emails and I was remembering the process of editing, which was always fun with Dennis. Didn't love to be edited. I can imagine that. You know, when I first read this story, I had a similar reaction to you that maybe it was a little bit too long and, and, and why were we getting all of the sort of setup for the story in the final section? And so I, you know, I tried to sort of tactfully raise those things with him, you know, and of course I'm, I'm really glad now that he brushed that off. So I have, I have here that email he sent me then he said, I've been working on it too long to mess with it, seven years or more. I believe every word is right. I've tried, I've tried all the other words, all the words in the dictionary, even the weird placement of the introductory material, that's where it has to go at the end. I hope you don't think I write this way because I like being goofy and difficult. I can't give a good reason for it, but it's not because I enjoy being incomprehensible to my fellow humans. Um, well, it was funny because he did, you know, we did a fair amount of editing, you know, in small ways, just here and there, things that were inconsistent or repetitions and so on. And he was quite, he was, he was not unreceptive to that. He just had to go through everything carefully. And then you've been through the process of being published at the New Yorker, you know, after you think you've got a perfect final version with your editor, you then start getting proofs from the copy editors. That's even more frightening sometimes. And so I sent a copy editor to the proofer. I made some notations from the copy editor and he sent me this panicked email. He said, dear Deborah, hold on now. The way I see it, with that last edit, our work was all but done. The mind can only poke it a text a little bit. Further poking breaks the surface tension. And then the mind is just poking at the ripples. I want to set our previous edit exactly as I sent it to you. I want to let the punctuation stand as well. Please don't make me hunt for unmarked changes in punctuation. Dear editor, set everything. And did you? Well, wait, go ahead. My dear Deborah, to take this stance floods my veins with embarrassment. I'm aware it lands me pretty squarely in the crazy column. I can only assure you that when the mind text relation gets ripply, I experience a corresponding disturbance to my instrument, my writing soul, that I've learned to treat as dangerous. If you think I'm crazy now, come see me after just a little more poking. Follow the sound of the whimpering up the stairs to the farthest closet. I'm in there, curled up like an abortion. Oh my goodness. So yeah, stat stat stat. Well, yeah, I mean, I looked through our proofs and he had, he'd stat some things and he took other things and he rewrote whole paragraph. So it wasn't, it wasn't the editing. It was the fact that he thought he had edited. He'd gone through it. He'd made his final decisions and then suddenly someone wanted to move commas. Yeah. And you know, he does have, there's, there's a few places like with semi-colons and dashes and, and sentences with incidences that, you know, when I was reading it, it took some finesse to navigate those. And there were places where I thought, wait, I don't exactly understand the grammar here, but I do, I understand what he says about the poking and that only so much there is something about, and it's always, it's been interesting for me to, I mean, I've worked with great editors, especially at the New Yorker. And, but there is something, what, what might be interpreted sometimes as the flaws of the piece are actually just, they're the weirdness of the writer. Yeah. It's so tricky. Cause, you know, there are things I've, I have like given up things that I thought, I know this is weird, but it's right. Or I fought for them. But I understand that sometimes the thing that seemed like flaws are just, it's where the soul is imprinted in the writer. It's unfortunate that that's sometimes the case, but I can imagine, I understand exactly where he's coming from, but maybe at some point much later in my career, I can imagine writing, sending an email like that, that, wow, I love that. I think with Dennis Johnson, there was something about writing that was really deeply ineffable, you know, it is that untranslatable thing, that mystery. And, and he didn't necessarily understand it and he didn't want to, you know, that would take something out of it. Yeah. He's, you know, I, it's funny because Jesus's son, like I said, that's the first book of his that I've read. And then I read some of his poetry, but you know, I keep going back to his work. I mean, it doesn't, and this story, you know, I've read it so many times in preparing for our conversation and it just gets better. I mean, it's, it's so sly and so masterful. And like, I feel like there's so many things we could keep talking about. And it's one of those stories that it's strange, the, the emotion of it. I felt moved when I first read it, but now as I get to know it better, I feel like I find it, it just grows in how it affects me emotionally. Do you, do you find it a piece that like intonally, like where does it sit for you? Oh, it's so moving. Like I was saying earlier that, you know, I'm, I'm grateful to have had a chance to just go right back inside it. I also feel that there is something very particular and very specific about Dennis's voice, but there's also something kind of universal in the experience of reading it. You know, you can sort of make it apply to anything. And, and he does that, I think actually quite purposefully by repeatedly addressing a you and you get to those moments. He's like, oh, he's talking to me. You know, do you have these moments like I do? And there's no way not to be sort of inside the story, even as the reader. Yeah, you know, and, and when you said that, it made me think, I haven't really articulated this, I've never said this out loud, but I've been thinking about the writers that have stuck with me, the ones from the past that I've loved, who I still love, or the ones that are new to me that I come to love and appreciate. And I, I realized that I want to read a writer who I feel he needs me, that he's confiding in me. And Dennis Johnson does that with the you, of course, and not that like this is set. I know what I'm talking about and you're listening to me, but you very much feel with this story and with all of Dennis Johnson's work that he's confiding in you and that like you, you need to consider this, this big problem together. Yeah, it's almost pleading. There's a pleading tone there. Yeah. And it makes him just a very companionable writer. I mean, for all the different kinds of books he's written, it's just, it seems, I always feel privileged to be in his mind, to follow his thoughts. And, you know, if you're going to say one thing about all his work, you just, especially in his stories, I mean, it's a wild ride. You really never know where he's going to end up. And I love that. He's always surprising me. That's the, the large ass of Dennis Johnson. Thank you so much, Victor. Thank you, Denver. Dennis Johnson, who died in 2017, was the author of numerous plays, poetry, collections and works of fiction, including the story collections, Jesus's son and the largest of the Seamaden and the novel Tree of Smoke, which was a Pulitzer finalist and won the National Book Award in 2007. In 2017, he was posthumously awarded the Library of Congress prize for American fiction. Victor Lodato, a playwright and fiction writer, has published three novels, Edgar and Lucy, Matilda Savage, a winner of the Penn USA Award and Honey, which came out last year. He's been publishing fiction and nonfiction in the New Yorker since 2012. You can download 219 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free and Apple podcasts. On the Riders Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Riders Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction podcast was produced by John Lumet. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.