Men prefer to handle emotional situations without discussing the emotions involved. It’s a tricky business and often goes wrong, but when successful it can prove elegant. A writer named Taylor Jenkins Reid made me think of this. She’s the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a pleasant timewaster that makes you think how a beach read really needs a beach to go with it. The book’s a fantasy vehicle for women and purveys two dreams found among them. First, there’s the beautiful gal who’s so precious that the world cherishes her. In this case she’s precious for her looks, so she’s been painted and photographed since childhood; and she’s precious for her essence, her soul, which oozes out of her in the form of rock lyrics. Second, there’s the hunky stallion who’s all about his woman; the fellow in question loves his wife and kids (three little daughters) and wants them at the center of his life. These particular fantasies don’t make for a bad book, or no more than any gratification fantasy would. But because of them, I was surprised when Reid pulled off her vignette of the two guys tackling a difficult problem.
Beware, because the following tells you how the book comes out. The hunky stallion, Billy Dunne, sits at a bar in Chicago. Daisy Jones, the beautiful rock singer and lyricist, has just exited his life. Throughout the book Billy’s been fighting not to get wasted and not to sleep with Daisy. Now it looks like he’s succeeded at the second but is losing out on the first. He holds his drink in his hand, swishes it around, sniffs it, looks at it. He’s moving slowly but he won’t let go. And the guy on the next stool turns and looks at him and opens a conversation.
The guy starts out just by recognizing this is Billy Dunne, rock star. Dunne’s status doesn’t sit all that well with the stranger, who notes that his girlfriend has a crush on Dunne. The stranger’s skeptical that Dunne should even be there, sitting with his troubles in a bar, when he’s a rock star and therefore can’t have problems. He wants to know how much money Billy has. Billy answers, which is pretty gracious, and the guy says, “You’ll pardon me if I don’t feel too bad for you.” Billy has other things on his mind. He dabs his tongue in the drink, then takes a full-fledged swallow. After which he grinds to a halt, clutching his glass. What he wants, but doesn’t say, is for that glass to be taken out of his hands.
The stranger now makes the first of two statements that are as overt as he’s going to get. “Maybe I was wrong,” he says. “Maybe it is possible for a guy like you to be messed up about something.” After this remark he starts helping Billy. The man doesn’t say he’s doing it. But he asks to see pictures of Billy’s kids, and getting the pictures makes Billy put his glass down. The man takes the glass and moves it safely away.
The two of them look at the photos, and the man makes his second crucial statement. “Makes you want to live to fight another day, doesn’t it?” he says. This banality could be slipped into a hundred conversations about kids, but here it’s the placeholder for an entire lecture that never has to be spoken.
The corner’s been turned. Billy gets up to leave the bar, but he wants to pay first. The man says no. “Just let me buy it, all right?” he says. “So I can know I did something for somebody once.” Here he doesn’t just avoid overtness, he sets up a blind for the facts. He gave Billy much bigger help than $20 for a drink. But the man pretends otherwise; he vanishes mention of his act. If you’re going to save somebody’s life, better say you’re doing something else.
This principle’s different from the one at work in most of the book. Usually the characters nail their emotions, lay them out flat with a thoroughgoing incisiveness. “I was the only one who felt like we lost something. I was the only one grieving,” says Billy’s brother, outlining why his girlfriend’s abortion hurt him so much. Billy’s wife, an especially favored character, generates pithy screenplay wisdom, as in “Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.” Riffle the pages and you hear people who’ve seen a lot of therapists or written a lot of advice columns. But not the two guys in the bar. They find their own way and I was grateful for it.