The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Public appearances aren’t my favorite thing. When I stand before an audience, I always feel like an imposter. It isn’t that I’m a solitary person, although I am, at least to a degree; I can drive from Maine to Florida by myself and feel perfectly content. It isn’t stage fright, either, although I still feel it when I step in front of two or three thousand people. That is an unnatural situation for most writers. We’re more accustomed to appearing before dedicated library groups of three dozen. That feeling of being the wrong person in the wrong place derives chiefly from knowing that whoever – or whatever – the audience came to see won’t be there. The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker.

In November of 2011, I was being driven to my final appearance in Paris at Le Grand Rex, seating capacity 2,800. I felt nervous and out of place. I was in the backseat of a big black SUV. The streets were narrow and the traffic was heavy. I had my little sheaf of papers – a few remarks, a short reading – in a folder on my lap. At a stoplight we pulled up beside a bus, the two large vehicles snugged together so tightly they were almost touching. I looked in one of the bus windows and saw a woman in business dress, possibly headed home from work. I wished momentarily that I was sitting beside her, headed home myself, ready for a spot of dinner followed by a couple of hours reading a book in a comfy chair with good light, instead of being driven to a sold-out theater full of fans whose language I did not speak.

Perhaps la femme felt my gaze. More likely she was just bored with her newspaper. In any case, she raised her head and looked over at me, only feet away. Our eyes met. What I imagined I saw in hers was a wistful wish to be in the fancy SUV, going someplace where there would be lights and laughter and entertainment instead of back to her apartment, where there would be nothing but a small meal, perhaps taken from the freezer and heated up, followed by the evening news and the same old TV sitcoms. If we could have changed places, both of us might have been happier.

Then she looked back down at her newspaper and I looked back down at my folder. The bus went one way, the SUV another. But for a moment we were close enough to peer into each other’s worlds. I thought of this story, and when I got back from my overseas tour, I sat down and wrote it in a burst.