Free The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Page A

every possible disaster. We certainly know of people who live that way, staying away from skyscrapers when it’s windy, walking across the street when they see a ladder, avoiding bridges at all costs lest the center lane collapse. Too much of that, though, and we wouldn’t even leave the house in the morning. Maybe this is how people think who never leave their houses.
    There’s my eighty-six-year-old father on the sixth floor of his Fort Lauderdale condo, working for the third week in a row on his income tax. Would he listen to me if I called to tell him about the oncoming wave? Of course not. He’d remind me that he was high up from the sea, in a sturdy building that withstood Hurricane Rita. (Or maybe it was Wilma. Rita or Wilma, he held the living room hurricane shutter closed with all his might as hundred-mile-per-hour winds sirened on the balcony.) Of course it would bother him that the minivan was down in the parking lot. Should he drive it across the bridge to the grocery store parking ramp? But, really, he saw no unusual activity out on Riverside Drive. It is August, and all the snowbirds and tourists are home in Montreal or Buffalo Grove or West Hartford. I’d try to think of other ways to convince him, but he’d finally tell me that he’d be all right, that there was no reason to worry about him.
    1986 |  It isn’t like Denise to withhold a hello when she picks up the phone. Didn’t I have a dark dream about her last night? Maybe I did: I’m in a balloon going up, the hot air heating the top of my scalp, singeing it. I almost can’t stand it, the feeling is intimate. Cattle flee on the pasture beneath us. She’s not making sense. The sound of her voice is the sound of a mouth that’s been punched. Or, as if someone close to her, someone beloved to her—her mother, her father-has been pushed down a full flight of stairs, and she’s been forced to watch.
    She tells me that her editor’s letter came in but five minutes ago. Her response to the new book, or at least the first draft.
    “And?” I feel a tightness in my chest, but elation, too, inexplicably.
    “She hates the novel.”
    “Denise.”
    “I’m serious, honey. I’m still trying to take this in. I think I’m still in a bit of shock. It’s going to take me a little while to be myself again.”
    I ask her what Iris has said.
    The letter is certainly not what any writer would want to hear. Iris is careful to start with the good things; she wants to assure Denise that she’s responding to the novel in a careful, detached manner. But we can already hear the dutiful quality of the prose. It has no swing: this wasn’t the letter she’d been wanting to write. In that way, the letter is hard to listen to; I can only take in so much of it. Especially when it gets parental. You are not the child I’d been expecting you to be , her words seem to say. And this from an editor who’s been so fully on Denise’s side? How could she love one child so, and treat the other as if its ears are ugly, its voice grating? Given how much I’ve listened to the book, I feel as if my advice is also under attack here, for Denise wanted to impress me in the writing of it. I so much want to say Iris doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about, but I know it would be wrong to explode like that. This is serious, scarier than it seems. Denise has already gotten an advance on the book, so she has to do what the mother of the book wants—no getting around that.
    Luckily she isn’t so devastated that she can’t disagree with some of what Iris says. We go over and over what she takes issue with. We try to be grown up: too much is at stake here. We plan possible strategies that might placate Iris, without actually giving in. Maybe the book is Emily’s book, maybe it should be in a closer third person. Maybe it moves through too many points of view, too many registers of voice to be comprehensible. Maybe Emily shouldn’t die at the end of the book. Maybe