Free Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer Page B

you say in your book, you futurized, committed, and strove .” She paused, looked at Mark. He lifted his hands a little bit, turned his palms up and his gaze down, and raised his eyebrows: the picture of a man sincerely doubting what he has just heard. Margo took up his slim book with both hands. “You did those things”—here she read from the flyleaf—“and what you wanted flowed to you ‘like water down a mountain, like information out of a search engine.’ I think that many, many people have found those words inspiring. Don’t you?”
    “Apparently, yes.” Mark leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and templed his long fingers. He drew in breath to speak, but then held it, creating the kind of pause that, on television, feels like weeks. “And I thank those people just for listening to me. It is such an honor to be listened to. You know that, Margo.” Another pause, and something like a tiny wince on his face. “But I need to come out right now and say that my success, the success of this book, is hard for me to credit. I am all the time full of doubt, and I’m uncomfortable being described as the man with the answers.”
    “Mark Deveraux is all the time full of doubt?”
    “Oh, absolutely,” said Mark, perking up.
    “Doubt about what?”
    “Doubt as to, you know, the general shape of the curve, the fairness of the judges, the notion that we can make ourselves better.”
    “But you made yourself better. You say so in your book. You write that you were a, what, a…” And Margo started to flip through the pages.
    “A ‘whining, blaming, suffering zero,’” Mark supplied.
    “Yeah, that. It’s so cutting. And then you discovered consciousclusions,” she prompted. “You made yourself better.”
    “Well, I got better. Did I do that? Who can say? And did I discover anything? Certainly, I gave voice to something. And it’s resonated. And, again, Margo, I’m so grateful to each and every person who read or listened to a single word of mine…It’s just that I need to be clear…”
    “It sounds like you’re backing down from what you said in your book, that the power to change ourselves is in all of us.” Margo straightened her back and raised her chin.
    Mark took in another one of those breaths. He leaned close to Margo so that his butt lifted off the cushion, his right hand sharp-angled to the little table between them. And then he tapped the table, hard, with an index finger. Four times: tap-tap-tap-tap.
    “I’m. Not. Backing. Down,” he said, one word for every tap. It was the strangest gesture that anyone had seen on the Margo! show since a chef had lit his sleeve on fire and then swatted it out with a duck breast. Mark’s arm retreated; his body settled back in the chair. “Look, Margo. We’re changing all the time. There is no stasis. But that’s incredibly good news. It means that we can always become better.”
    “More successful.”
    “Ahhhm, yes. More successful.” Mark had gotten a little lost. But now he saw a thread. “When I wrote what I wrote, I did so as a different person. I did it by faith. Do you remember, Margo, when you woke every day wondering whether you were on the right path?”
    Margo actually nodded, involuntarily.
    “Now I have this affirmation all around me,” Mark continued. “You know: the money, the people asking me what I think, what I want. And now I see that it was living in the doubt that gave my thoughts strength. It was having to place that bet on every day.”
    “You know what, Mark?” said Margo. “I do remember those days. I once had to sell my piano to make a month’s rent.”
    “Your piano? Oh, what a shame. Tell me about that piano.”
    “It was a no-name upright that had spent forty years in a church basement. It had these beautiful flowers carved into the front of it and a sounding board that was too warped to stay in tune. But I loved it.” She smiled broadly, and was beautiful.
    “I’ve read that you have twelve