The moment passes, and she again seems to quiver.
Gaitskill later calls to clarify a point. In the interview, she'd said that she liked doing readings: "I'm a shy person. And like a lot of shy people, I'm actually very hammy."
She's afraid that might have been misleading. "When I read, it's not a persona I inhabit," she says on the phone. "It's just me. In fact, I'm more being myself than I am normally; I totally inhabit my own world."
Her book tour is scheduled to begin in Houston the next evening. Gaitskill says she's already chosen the story she'll read. It's "Comfort," in which a man visits his hospitalized mother. It's one of the new book's least sex-oriented stories -- which makes it, Gaitskill thinks, appropriate for the audience. "I don't want to read sexually explicit things here," she says. "In San Francisco, it's common. But not here." Besides, she worries, people here know where she works, and some literary psycho might not notice the line that divides the writer from the work. "Comfort," she jokes, is "a long, droning family saga. If there's any perverts out there, they'll probably go to sleep."
She doesn't mention that "Comfort" is also perhaps the least obviously autobiographical story in Because They Wanted To. The protagonist is young and male, a drummer in a band, and the heart of the story concerns his relationship with his divorced parents. His muscular girlfriend is an almost comic character, who sees child abuse everywhere and can't fathom her lover's feelings for his family. If "Comfort" were a movie, there's not a part Gaitskill would be suited for. And that, perhaps, is why she chooses to read the story: The audience will not be staring at her, wondering which character is her.
On the night of the reading, about 50 people fill the folding chairs crammed into Brazos Books, the high temple of the city's literati. Carl Killian, the bookstore's owner, notes that Gaitskill has received an "extraordinary review" from Newsweek, and he waves a copy. (The accompanying photo shows Gaitskill sitting on her red couch, looking simultaneously fragile and predatory.) Bob Phillips of the Creative Writing Program introduces her, proclaiming that her work "shimmers with nuance," and that she is "a true original."
She asks whether she's supposed to stand behind the bookshop's counter to read, and looks relieved to hear that yes, she is. The counter offers protection, a barrier between her and the audience.
She reads well. "Comfort" -- not one of the book's funniest stories -- garners appreciative laughter in the right places. At one point, the protagonist is enjoying a train-themed restaurant, the sort he wouldn't patronize at home but secretly loves, because "they make such an effort." The audience laughs, appreciating both the humor and the effort.
The story contains only one sexual scene, a quick flashback. In it, the protagonist remembers his girlfriend naked, kneeling over a coffee table. " 'If I fucked you in the ass I would own you,' he'd said.
"She turned over quickly. 'No, you wouldn't. What a ridiculous thing to say.' "
Gaitskill reads the passage, and the audience laughs, unembarrassed. After the reading, the bookstore owner asks whether there are questions. There are none. As Gaitskill signs copies of her book, she chats, apparently relieved that she has managed to bare so much of her private world without answering nagging questions about her own, real-life experience. Her stories allow her a strange, one-way intimacy with her readers; reading the stories aloud, in front of a whole roomful of people, allows her to see her intimates up close, to know that they are experiencing, to some degree, what she is experiencing, that they have entered her private world. And Mary Gaitskill knows enough about failed intimacy to appreciate any that succeeds, no matter how limited.
