Love Me - Softcover

Keillor, Garrison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143016261 ISBN 13: 9780143016267

Publisher: Penguin Canada, 2004

Synopsis

Leaving his wife, Iris, in Minnesota, Larry Wyler heads to New York to pursue the celebrated writer’s life. He soon stumbles into meteoric success as a writer and womanizer, but he just as quickly falls when The New Yorker gives him the boot and Iris catches him living the New York high life. A chastened man, Wyler returns to Minnesota, where the only writing job he can get is as an advice columnist for the lovelorn. Writing under the pen name of “Mr. Blue,” Wyler doles out wry and knowing advice about seduction and mating to the heart-broken and the lonely. And only slowly, painfully, does Wyler figure out for himself how, after losing love, you can eventually get it back. Hilarious and heartfelt, Love Me is about ambition, success, and failure as well as the virtues of real love and a steady writing job.

About this title

About the Author:

Garrison Keillor, author of nearly a dozen books, is the founder and host of the acclaimed radio show A Prairie Home Companion and the daily program The Writer's Almanac. He is also a regular contributor to Time magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue

Once I was young and virtually indestructible and now I am an old married guy on a January morning on Sturgis Avenue in St. Paul sniffing the wind and taking my vitamins. Six A.M. It’s pitch-black out. Fresh coffee in the air. I take vitamin C, E, B complex, lysine, cod-liver oil, echinacea, with orange juice, which eases the pills down the gullet. I do a few leg stretches, forty crunches, twenty push-ups, a dozen curlies, on the living room floor. I don’t want to struggle when I go to get out of a car. And if tonight my queen should reach over from her side of the bed and draw me to her, I intend to be capable of knighthood.

I look out the kitchen window to get my bearings. St. Paul sits on a bend in the Mississippi, and from my window I see the giant illuminated 1 on the First National Bank downtown and the light in the cupola on the great dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul high on the hill above us. The cathedral sits up there overlooking downtown along with the stately mansions of Summit Avenue that we show to tourists, where James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, resided and next door, the Hampls who made Hamm’s beer, and the lumbering Weyerhaeusers, the O’Briens, the Pearsons of Pearson’s Nut Goodies, the MacDonald and McNeil families who founded 3M, and the domiciles of their vice presidents and their spoiled children. Sturgis Avenue is a long way down from Summit and Ramsey Hill. Down here are the mechanics and millhands, the laundry workers, the ladies of the cafeterias. Up there the liquor stores stock twenty-year-old single-malt Scotch from the Orkneys and the grocery sells goat yoghurt and eight different kinds of oregano and coffee beans from Costa Rica and in the coffee shops you hear Haydn and people talking about Henry James. Down here people buy Old Overshoe bourbon and season their food with salt and the coffee comes in cans and in the coffee shops people talk about their sister whose husband beat the shit out of her and took off for South Dakota. If it were up to me, I’d be living on Ramsey Hill by sundown tonight, but my wife is a Democrat and I lost that fight a long time ago.

Next door is the house of Mr. Ziegler, who died in September of aimlessness, now owned by a hard-working young couple who don’t smile when they see me. Apparently they don’t know I’m a former famous author and I write the twice-weekly “Mr. Blue” column in the Minneapolis Star Journal (Romance going sour? Boyfriend acting weird? Wife ignoring you? Ask Mr. Blue.) They are delivery truck drivers, judging by their dark brown convict uniforms. Dear Mr. Blue, My wife and I live next door to an older man who is always staring over our way. Should we say something? Suspicious. Dear Suspicious, It can’t hurt.

I attained old married guyhood despite some outstanding bad behavior on my part and an unsuccessful lunge at fame and riches a long time ago. There was a fairly popular novel, Spacious Skies, and an apartment at the Bel Noir on Central Park West in New York and an office at The New Yorker with a drawing on the wall above my desk that James Thurber scrawled there years ago with a carpenter’s pencil. A thoughtful dog with a harpy standing over him, saying, “I know what you’re thinking and the answer is No, No, No.” J. D. Salinger’s office was down the hall and J. F. Powers’s and S. J. Perelman’s. John Updike smiled at me in the hallways. Calvin Trillin took me to lunch. The great editor William Shawn became a pal of mine. Him and me went barhopping and got so soused we had to hold each other up. God, I loved that man. We played golf and sailed his boat, the Shawnee, through the Verrazano Narrows and out to sea and fished for grouper. I was in New York for six years and Iris almost divorced me, on grounds of emotional distance, but then I wrote a wretched second novel, Amber Waves of Grain, which bombed so badly she took pity on me and called off the dogs. I came down with a brutal case of writer’s block. Wrote one sentence of Purple Mountains’ Majesty and quit. The sentence was: “He and the Mrs. dreamed of alabaster cities but here they were in St. Paul and what could they do but cry in their soup?” Couldn’t write worth beans.

She almost divorced me again after I shot the publisher of The New Yorker (an accident, sort of). He lay on the floor of the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, quietly discoloring the carpet, and said, quietly, “You’ll never write for my magazine again, Larry Wyler,” and expired. I left New York the next day and returned to St. Paul, to a studio apartment on Ramsey Hill, and cooled my heels there until Iris was willing to take me back.

So I am basically okay. When people ask me, that’s what I tell them. “You’re sure looking good,” they say, which they never said twenty years ago when I did look good, but never mind. I’m sixty. Brown hair, low medium IQ, big feet and sloping shoulders, the face of a ladies’ shoe salesman, about a quart low in the charm department, and nothing to be done about it. Boo hoo for me. Hurray for monogamy.

Shortly, I’ll take coffee and the Times up to Iris, the mistress of the house, as she soaks in a hot bath, suds up to her neck, a rolled-up towel behind her head, listening to Morning Edition from NPR. And an hour later, she’ll appear downstairs good and pissed off at the Republicans for their treacheries. This bodes well for the day. We’ll eat our bran flakes and bananas and she’ll say something short and sharp about our shallow doctrinaire president and pick up her battered briefcase and hike to work downtown. Meanwhile, I stay home and write my column for the lovelorn. Dear Mr. Blue, He used to be a young stallion taking me to heights of wild passion and then he turned into Eeyore, all moody and needy. In the afternoon, I take a nap and scribble on a legal pad what I hope will become this book and I chop vegetables for supper. Iris comes home at 6. We eat. We go for our nightly constitutional, a two- mile circuit along West 7th past the old Czech lodge hall and the Day By Day Café, the porn shop and the magic store and the funeral parlor, and the half-mile trek across the High Bridge over the Mississippi to Cherokee Heights and back. Even on the bitterest cold nights when the arctic blast bites you in the shorts, she insists we do the Death March over the frozen Father of Waters—“It’s good for you,” she mutters through her ski mask, and I guess it is. It seems to settle the meal and pacify our minds and we arrive at some tender if inconclusive understanding of each other and come home and read ourselves into a pleasant drowsy state and so to bed.

Perchance to some nobility or else straight to sleep and the nobility of dreams. And then it’s 6 A.M. again.

V

Today Mr. Blue has a letter from Lonely asking how a woman who hates the bar scene can find a good man. And there’s Frustrated, who asks if he should stick with his programmer job or fly to Stockholm and pursue the woman he met at her farewell party two weeks ago. The Swedish girl. She didn’t say she loved him but there definitely was something between them and he can’t get her out of his mind. And then there is Uncertain, who responded to a personals ad (Seek sex buddy. No grief artists, drama queens, memoir writers, Dylan fans, or people in recovery. I am a fattycakes & two-fisted drinker & UB2. Acne a plus.) and met a large lonely man who came into her life like a bad case of psoriasis. He wants to borrow money so he can go back to technical college. Should she lend it to him? Surely not, but I am in no position to scorn her, or Frustrated either. I have my own flaws.

1. Arrogance. Glorying in the dopiness of others. Taking a piggy pleasure in hearing nice things said about me no matter how fatuous.
2. Restlessness. The reckless urge to abandon ship and move on and thus stay a step ahead of defeat.
3. An ungrateful heart. The expectation of gifts.
4. Alcohol. Too much of it. The inevitable stupidity. (I have cut out No. 4 for now and that leaves three to deal with. Sorry. Forgot No. 5. Dishonesty.)

I go to fetch the Times from the front step and there is fresh snow, so I grab a broom and sweep the steps and the front walk. I like January. Christmas is put away and the cold air wakes a man up and kills off delusions of grandeur. I am sober this morning. It has been two and a half years.

Dark figures stumble through the dark toward the bus stop on West 7th, an old man in a beat- up denim jacket. Dear Mr. Blue, I want to quit my custodial job and move to Florida but Mother needs me here. She is 95 and I am 72. What to do? I am freezing to death. And a young couple not holding hands, her shivering violently in a cheap leather jacket, hands in her pockets, him solemn-faced, sleepy, earrings, head shaved. I’m guessing they live together and she is angry about the three years she’s invested in him. Dear Mr. Blue, My girlfriend is mad because I’m not all that thrilled about the idea of us buying a house. I like things the way they are. She keeps saying, “What if I get pregnant?” As if this were an option. I’m 28 and don’t know what I want to do except buy a new guitar and write more songs. Why the sudden rush to buy a house? And silverware patterns? I don’t get it. Confused. Hey, it’s only life, son. It can crowd in on a guy fast. Don’t buy the house if you don’t want to. Pray for clarification. I say a prayer for you now as you walk past me. Pray for me in return.

V

This morning, as I have for two and a half years, I stepped out of the shower and felt lucky. Stepped on the scale. 195. Brushed...

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Canada
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0143016261
• ISBN 13: 9780143016267
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304