Drivel
By Steve Martin
 

Dolly defended me at a party. She was an artist who showed at the Whitney Biennial, so she had a certain outlook, a certain point of view, a certain understanding of things. She came into my life as a stranger who spoke up when I was being attacked by the cocktail types for being the publisher of The American Drivel Review. It wasn't drivel that I published, she explained to them, but rather the idea of drivel.

Later in the party, we paired off. She slouched back on the sofa with her legs ajar. I poured out my heart to this person I'd known barely ten minutes: I told her how it was hard to find good drivel, and even harder to write it. She understood that to succeed, one must pore over every word, replacing it five or six times, and labor over every pause and comma.

I made love to her that night. The snap of the condom going on echoed through the apartment like Lawrence of Arabia's spear landing in an Arab shield. I whispered passages from "Agamemnon's Armor," a five-inch-thick romance novel with three authors. She liked that.

As the publisher of A.D.R., I had never actually written the stuff myself. But the next morning I sat down and tossed off a few lines, and then nervously showed them to Dolly. She took them into another room, and I sat alone for several painful minutes. She came back and looked at me. "This is not just drivel," she exulted. "It's pure drivel."

That night, we celebrated with a champagne dinner for two, and I told her that her skin was the color of fine white typing paper held in the sun and reflecting the pink of a New Mexican adobe horse barn.

The next two months were heaven. I was no longer just publishing drivel; I was writing it. Dolly, too, had a burst of creativity - one that sent her into a splendid spiraling depression. She had painted a tabletop still-life - a conceptual work, in that it had no concept. Thus the viewer became a "viewer," and looked at a painting, which became a "painting." The "viewer" then left the museum to "discuss" the experience with "others." Dolly had a way of taking an infinitesimal pause to imply the quotation marks around a word. (She could also indicate italics with a twist of her voice.)

Not wanting to judge my own work, and not wanting to trust Dolly's love-skewed opinion, I sent my pieces around and had them rejected by at least five magazines before I would publish them in the Drivel Review. I was disappointed when Women's Day accepted a short story I'd written about Gepetto's Handmaiden, but, looking back, I guess I secretly knew that it was good. Dolly kept producing one art work after another and selling them to a rock musician with the unusual name of Fiber Behind; it kept us in doughnuts, and he really seemed to appreciate her work.

But then our love was extinguished quickly, as though someone had thrown water from a high tower onto a burning dog.

Dolly came home at her usual time. What I had to tell her was difficult to say, but it came out with the right amount of effortlessness, in spite of my nerves: "I went downtown and saw your new picture at Dia. I enjoyed it."

She acknowledged the compliment, started to leave the room, and, as I expected, stopped short.

"You mean you 'enjoyed' it, don't you?" Her voice indicated the quotation marks.

I reiterated, "No, I actually enjoyed it."

Dolly's attention focused, and she came over and sat beside me. "Rod, do you mean you didn't go into the 'gallery' and 'see' my 'painting'?"

I nodded sadly.

"You mean you saw my painting without any irony whatsoever?"

Again, I nodded yes.

"But, Rod, if you view my work without irony, it's terrible."

I responded: "All I can tell you is that I enjoyed it."

We struggled through the night, trying to pretend that everything was the same, but my morning it was over between us, and Dolly left with a small "goodbye" soaked in the irony I had come to love so much.

I wanted to run,

run after her into the night,

even though it was day.

For my pain was bursting out of me,

like a sock filled

with one too many bocce balls.

Those were my final words in the last issue of the Drivel Review. I heard that Dolly had spent some time with Fiber Behind, but I also knew that she had probably picked up a farewell copy and read my final, short, painful burst of drivel. I like to think that a tear marked her cheek, like a snail that has crept across white china.


* From The New Yorker, December 22, 1997..