another one. Auster's pen scraped across my own words in the stories he handed back to me. Once I walked with him twenty blocks down Broadway, listening. When I could, I tried to be memorable and funny. His ravishing eyes were already off me as he said goodbye and crossed the street. "Arrogant prick," my friends and I said, huddled in a bar below street-level, laughing at our bravery, how we could disdain celebrity. We ordered pitchers of pale beer and d issected the stories of other students unkindly. We dissected the boys unkindly. We flirted, we bitched, usually one equal to the other. The thing was, I wasn't actually writing. I quit the program. In a year I had produced three labored, small stories, barely. Rehashed college work. Instead of creating, I went out and drank, took taxis, ran around my city, went to movies; with friends I crashed the Paris Review parties thrown for the newly minted hot writers, the under-thirties of success and promise. Did you. see the write-up he got in Vanity Fair? Did you. read her piece in The Atlantic? Our awe and envy drove us everywhere. After my Nation review, my father had asked me to write an essay for Grand Street, which waseveryone said so-absolutely beautiful and the model of last-century high literary taste. I'd worked hard, writing about Jessica Hahn and her cultural moment. The paragraphs jumped all over my screen in the final days of coaxing a big piece into a polished narrative. I turned it in, and he handed it back. "I think not, after all," he said. I never read it again, and I'm sure now it wasn't any good (I was 22), but I'd already seen Susanna Sonnenberg in my father's table of contents, between Nice Munro and James Salter, or between C.P. Cavafy and Rick Moody. That place was mine. My father thinks I live in Minnesota. "Is there a difference?" he asks, slowly, snidely, when I correct him still, almost twenty years since leaving for Montana. This is our game now. Away I went from him, from other family, friends, from book signings, galleries, subways, away from the important trials of my teens and twenties, from OffBroadway plays and big shows, from the restaurant sites of dates and
130 I SUSANNA SONNENBERG