Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
The Way Men Act: A Novel by Elinor Lipman
My book excerpt series keeps me focused – I don’t know why. It’s a habit. Like daily exercise, or a monthly massage. I need it. Probably more than the people who read me need it – although I always do love the comments on these posts – but why I continue has more to do with what it does for me mentally. It’s methodical, I have very little choice in what to post (meaning: next book on the shelf is … and whatever it is, I go with it.) There’s comfort in that.
The Way Men Act is another favorite of mine, by Elinor Lipman. Again, the title (and the cover art) might put some readers off, but all I can say is: the book is lovely. Wonderful characters, funny funny funny – and with insights that could cut glass. Melinda has moved back to her home town after years away. She has opened a flower shop. She suddenly finds herself surrounded by all the people she went to high school with – only now they are married, have kids, and are unbelievably condescending to the sad single girl in their midst. Melinda is kind of used to that, though. A smart girl, but she didn’t go to college. People find this difficult to grasp. She dated one guy (Seth) for a couple years who truly could not get his mind around this face – and kept trying to change her, make her more ambitious. Melinda knows she is not ambitious – but that doesn’t really bother her. It’s everybody else who seems to have a problem. Libby – another old classmate of Melinda’s – has also recently moved home – and is working in a boutique in the shop right next to Melinda’s. They become “friends”. Sort of. It’s more like commiserating in misery. Melinda – at 29 – still doesn’t know “what shes doing” in her life – and it seems like by now she should know. She goes to dinner parties and answers questions from baffled couples about her dating life, or “what she wants” in life – she knows she should be more ambitious but she just can’t seem to get anything going. (Lipman is a master at creating this kind of character. Although she doesn’t really repeat herself in terms of characters – this KIND of character is classic Lipman.) Then – a new bookshop opens up on Main Street – and it’s run by Dennis Vaughan – a gorgeous single black guy – who throws Libby and Melinda into a tailspin. And also poor Melinda’s mother – who can’t help but say, any time Melinda mentions the smallest bit of tension with Dennis, “Could it be a racial thing?” Melinda sighs. “No, mom. It’s not a racial thing.” Dennis is one of those characters in a romantic comic novel … it’s hard to pinpoint what it is that is so great about him. It’s kind of like trying to figure out WHY someone is a palpably effective romantic leading man in film. Some guys can do it (Russell Crowe) – other guys cannot (Matthew McConaghey) … McConaghey may have other gifts, and I believe he does – but the powers that be keep trying to make him a leading man, and sorry – it’s just not convincing. If it were going to happen, it would have happened by now – because he keeps being put as a “leading man” (and I do not absolve him from responsibility here either – one of the greatest gifts an actor can have is “know thyself”). His best work was from his early career – when he was not well-known – Dazed and Confused being the best example. He’s no leading man! Despite the golden abs and the pearly whites. He’s a goofy weird character actor! He should be playing small parts in larger movies with bigger stars – he should play “cameos” – he really should.
Anyway. Back to my book. Dennis Vaughan is that rare rare thing: an effective and awesome leading man. He’s complex, but he’s also funny (it’s great how Lipman can actually create a character about whom other people say, “He’s so funny!” and then have him actually BE funny. Creating a character who is pro-actively funny is NOT an easy task … but she does it here). Melinda and Libby kind of end up as rivals for Dennis. I can’t remember much of the intricacies here – it’s been years since I read it – but I do remember falling in love with Dennis. In all of his foibles, and weirdness (because he’s not perfect – this isn’t a bodice-ripping romance novel – this is a book about real people) – you just ache for Melinda to “get” him. But of course it won’t be that easy.
Even just writing this much about it has made me want to read the book again.
Melinda works in a flower shop so she finds herself making flower arrangements for all her old high school pals, as they go off and get married. Libby had actually dated Dennis (in her mind) in high school – and she is still, at 29, all tormented and weird about it. Dennis informs Melinda that, uhm, no. They never dated. But Libby doesn’t know that. More romances happen along the way – I suppose Dennis is seen as off-limits to Melinda, mainly because Libby is so weird about him, and their teenage so-called relationship … so poor Melinda is having recreational non-committed sex all over town with various gentlemen … and her married friends are snots about it, and murmur things like, “I hope you’re being safe …” … and “Don’t you ever want to get married?” etc. etc. But over the course of the book – in all its twists and turns – you begin to see that it is Dennis she wants … and also … it is Dennis – bachelor Dennis – who is right for her. And she for him.
It’s kind of a beautiful book – funny memorable characters, great writing, vintage Lipman.
EXCERPT FROM The Way Men Act: A Novel by Elinor Lipman
I had this boyfriend, Seth, for four years in California. He supposedly loved me, and his friends thought I was a breath of fresh air, which is what the graduate-level educated (cell biology, U.C. San Diego) say about the high-school educated if the latter is pretty and the former wish they were sleeping with her, too.
We met while I was waitressing at one of the ice cream parlors that had an extended menu of soups, sandwiches, and salads, and didn’t mind its patrons sitting around for hours over four-dollar dinners, refilling their coffee cups, switching to decaf after 8 p.m. Seth left 50 percent tips: two bucks for a $3.98 chicken salad plate. Besides he was cute for a scientist: sandy hair and eyeglasses of a yellowish tortoiseshell. I made the first move: Where was he from originally? Connecticut! Holy shit – I was from Massachusetts … Melinda LeBlank … Harrow … Just temporarily while I was earning some money for college … Where have I applied? Nowhere, officially, until I establish residency. Maybe Santa Cruz? Maybe the moon?
Seth talked about this in subsequent conversations, which turned into dates, into making out on the beach, into me moving into his rented house on a flat street of boring basementless houses with carpets in otherwise gorgeous LaJolla. He loved to talk about my plans for college; he’d work it in to introductions when his lab friends met me for the first time. Lest you think she’s a clerk in a flower-packing business; lest you can’t judge her intelligence by yourself and need some credentials like “will be going to college next year”; “is thinking about applying to the enology program at Davis …”
The fact is, I understood his apologies: I wouldn’t live with someone who had my level of ambition, either. I wrote away for applications to San Diego, Santa Cruz, Davis, Santa Barbara, Sacramento State and MacMillan back home, where they were obliged to give me, as long as I claimed 114 Woodrow Avenue, Harrow, as my permanent address, free tuition.
Receiving the fat application forms was one thing; filling them out with no motivation behind it, and on the basis of someone else’s ambitions, was practically impossible. Seth was baffled that I had taken the bare minimum of tests – only SATs but no Achievement Tests. What kind of high school was this? Now look what you’ll have to do.
He brought home a Dictaphone from the lab: I could speak my essays into it; an oral first draft. Why not talk about growing flowers and how you’ve grown through that. They’ll like that working with your hands/working with the earth stuff. Maybe tell that story about the guy who didn’t speak English and you couldn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know anything about flowers at first so you called them all by their Spanish names; couldn’t figure out the orders, never realizing –
“They’re not looking for idiots,” I said.
“That’s not the point of that story. The point is something multicultural. It’s saying that flowers transcend cultures and languages and that there’s no absolutes with flowers. His ‘lino’ is your ‘lily’. And you, the English-speaking American citizen, were the one who was at a disadvantage, as if the flowers were the great leveler. It’s a good anecdote, and funny. They love when you use humor to make a point.”
Years later, when I heard Dennis’s radio commentaries, his life lessons drawn from fish and fake bugs, they reminded me of Seth’s sappy idea for my college essay. I said no, forget it; I wasn’t going to turn working alongside Carlos and identifying flowers by their Spanish names into a college essay which proved It’s a Small World After All.
Seth hadn’t known someone like me, since he grew up in Connecticut and went to prep school. Not that prep school underachievers all went to college; the few who didn’t traveled around Europe with plans for deferring their education for one year. Nobody just moved away aimlessly. If they took dead-end jobs it was for Life Experience and tuition money. Nobody got sidetracked and kept the dead-end job for four years. “You would have known people like me if you’d gone to the public high school,” I pointed out.
Seth conceded that I was probably right. There probably were smart kids who didn’t automatically go to college – first-generation kinds of patterns, parents who hadn’t gone either. Seth could imagine this world about as well as he could imagine there were families out there where fathers abandoned mothers, and mothers remarried traveling salesmen and handed out coupons in supermarkets. I was a refreshing change for Seth, a walk on the wild side – or at least on the working-class side – and I knew it would be my floundering around that got to him in the end. His class notes from Dartmouth didn’t only say that somebody married this Liz or that Katherine, but identified them with “Williams ’84” or “Yale ’85” so the groom’s classmates could approve, without picture or personal acquaintance, on the basis of one proper noun.
What could Seth have said about me: Part-time waitress? Flower picker? Future college freshman?
After enough time had passed to make me a California resident, after the dates passed when my applications were due, after I failed to write to Harrow High and ask Mr. Alberghini the list of questions I was supposed to ask him about references and transcripts, Seth said he didn’t get it at all: Did I want to pick flowers in the hot California sun until I developed skin cancer? Had I been lying to him all along about my goals?
I said sure I wanted to have a degree and a profession, and God knows that was the only thing that counted in his book especially now that his sexual needs were under control. He’d realized that what you appreciated in a girlfriend wasn’t necessarily what you wanted in the mother of your children.
And I knew he’d call it something else.
I got home from the fields, as I liked to call it, one night soon after that, and there he was wearing a dish towel tucked into his belt as a half-apron.
“Sit down,” he said grandly. “I have a treat for you.” I slid into the breakfast nook, quite enthralled with this gesture – Seth acting out the role of a television-commercial mate having dinner ready for his working woman. Then he put a dinner plate down in front of me. The meal was slime and mold, literally – the stuff I’d put in plastic containers weeks before and forgotten. There was something long and watery brown that might have been scallions – there was a small red rubber band at one end. Another lump on the plate might have been goulash – now completely penicillin. Something else was a furry gray: old canned fruit cocktail? And the remaining thing, now peachy-orange, was a mound of elbow macarony that had retained the shape of its home for the past few months: a margarine tub.
“A balanced meal from the four mold groups,” Seth said.
“Very funny,” I said.
“I was looking for the grated Parmesan and I found everything but.”
“And you decided you’d teach me a lesson?”
“I can’t live like this,” he said.
“If you’re home more than I am, why am I responsible for what grows in our refridgerator?”
“I’m not the one who saves a tablespoon of goulash. When do you think you’re going to use one tablespoon of goulash? What are the odds?”
“You’re exaggerating. I save portions.”
“To what end?”
“All right,” I said. “Enough. This is harassment. You’ve made your point.”
“I threw out a garbage bag full of stuff that was inedible. There were a half-dozen bottles with a dribble of relish in each one. That’s not me. You’re the condiment queen.”
I picked up my pocketbook and walked out. He asked where I was going and I said, “You’re too chicken to admit what the real reason is, so this is how you’re breaking up with me.”
“I didn’t say anything about us breaking up.”
“Why? You can’t live like this, remember? I’m a stupid, terrible person because I let mold grow in your refrigerator. If I’d gone to college this would never have happened. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
I was out the door by now, and heading for the driveway, not running, not very fast at all. He had time to yell an apology; he even had time to stop me and throw his arms around me. But he didn’t try. He had found a reason to send me back where I’d come from, something other than the Yankee warnings he’d been raised on about coming from different worlds. And in the version he told our mutual friends later, I was the unreasonable one, the one who couldn’t take a joke. They probably all listened and nodded and agreed, “Melinda can’t take a joke,” then rushed to fix him up with graduate students they knew who they’d been keeping in the wings, women with degrees who kept boxes of baking soda in their refrigerators.