It's hard [impossible] to say when a book [story] [poem] is finished
[beyond the moment it's printed, of course]. But there has to be a
moment when the writer stops and looks and says, "There. It is what it
is." I don't know exactly what it was, last night, that made me sit back
and say this about my novel. What final word gave the manuscript its
thingness, its completeness. I opened the door to my little writing
studio, went down the hall and into the kitchen, poured one swallow,
each, of champagne [cava] into two glasses.
Me being
the ritualistic person I am, the over-celebrator I am, I took some time
to decide which glasses, and I finally chose the thick ones with the
little starbursts etched in, the ones Stephen's grandmother gave him
[left to him?]. Stephen always says Grandma Betty was the person who
most encouraged his art, who taught him to "see." [She makes a tiny
appearance in my novel, and Stephen's art makes a huge appearance.] I
took the glasses the two steps out into Stephen's studio and handed him
one. I said, "I've signed the painting."
[grandma betty]
Stephen says he knows a painting is finished when he looks and looks
and his eye doesn't show him anything to change anymore. Then he signs
it. He knows he'll continue to fuss with the painting after it's signed,
sometimes for a long time, before the coat of varnish goes down, but
for him, once he's signed it, it's finished. I know I'll fuss with the
novel, and if it has the luck to be run through the ringer that is the
agent process and the editor process and the publication process [a pact
cosigned by Mephistopheles would help], I'll be doing much more than
fussing with it, but for me, the signature's gone on the painting.
[delacroix' mephistopheles]
Funny
thing, mentally signing my work. I spent so much of my childhood and
young adulthood hating myself that things like my name left a bad taste
in my mouth just because they were mine. I almost never said my name out
loud, and writing it down was like writing the name of that bully
"friend" who used to ridicule you and made you ride horses in fourth
grade [smelly].
When I started workshopping the novel,
the writers in my group would jot little wrap-up notes at the bottoms of
my pages: "Gigi, this is..." Me being the ritualistic person I am, I
would go home and consolidate all their notes into a master set of
pages, making sure to copy their marks and comments exactly, including
any spelling errors [don't ask me why], but in the beginning the one
thing I didn't include was my name. I don't know when I started copying
my own name down in these pages, but I do know that when I did, it was
with the knowledge that the goodness of the process of really learning
to write, and the loveliness of these amazing writers, not to mention
Stephen at home, had helped me get to a place in my life in which I
didn't hate myself anymore. If nothing more than this comes from these
five years [six?] in Tom Spanbauer's basement [and that pact cosigned by
Mephistopheles], it's still a wonderful, wonderful thing.
