What Remains on the Plate

The parking lot of the barbecue place on Messer Airport Highway had two picnic tables bolted to a concrete slab, and we were sitting at the one closer to the road because McCarthy wanted to watch the traffic. He had not said this. He had simply chosen the table and sat down facing the highway, and O’Connor had taken the opposite bench without comment, and I had dragged a plastic chair over from a stack by the door because there was no room on either side and I was not going to choose between them.

The restaurant was closed. It was a Sunday. The parking lot smelled of hickory smoke that had soaked into the concrete over years, and the dumpster around the side had its lid propped open, and the day was the kind of Birmingham day where the humidity arrives before the heat and sits on your skin like a debt you forgot you owed.

O’Connor had brought a paper fan, the kind they give out at Baptist funerals with a picture of Jesus on one side and a mortuary advertisement on the other. She was fanning herself with the Jesus side facing out, which I believe was deliberate.

“The grandmother,” she said, before anyone had said anything else. “Tell me you’re not going to make her sympathetic.”

I said I hadn’t decided yet.

“Good. Don’t. The moment she becomes sympathetic she becomes furniture. She becomes the nice old lady the reader pities, and pity is the cheapest thing a writer can purchase. Costs you nothing and the reader goes home feeling they’ve done their Christian duty.” She stopped fanning. “I want her to be difficult. Genuinely difficult. The kind of woman who makes you understand, within thirty seconds, why her daughter-in-law set those boundaries.”

“She should be competent,” McCarthy said. He was eating a peach. I did not know where the peach had come from. The restaurant was closed and there was no fruit stand in sight, but he had a peach, and he was eating it over the edge of the table so the juice fell on the concrete, and he ate it the way he did everything — slowly and with total attention. “She ran a household for forty years. She fed people. She organized a life. That’s real labor. Don’t make her useless.”

“I didn’t say useless. I said difficult. Those are not the same thing.”

“In fiction they usually are.”

“In bad fiction. In good fiction a difficult person is the most useful thing you’ve got, because a difficult person generates the story by refusing to cooperate with it.”

This was the kind of exchange that made me feel like I was watching two people play a game whose rules I’d been told but hadn’t internalized. They were agreeing, I thought, but from positions so far apart that the agreement looked like an argument.

“I want her to be specific,” I said. “Not a type. Not the Southern grandmother. A particular woman with a particular way of folding a blanket and a particular opinion about instant coffee that she will share whether you ask or not.”

“There you go,” O’Connor said. “The opinion about the instant coffee. That’s where she lives. She doesn’t think the instant coffee is bad because she’s a snob. She thinks it’s bad because she knows what coffee is supposed to taste like, the same way your cook knows what barbecue is supposed to taste like. She has a standard. The standard is all she has left. It’s what she’s holding when everything else is gone.”

McCarthy set the peach pit on the table. It was clean. He had eaten the peach so thoroughly that the pit looked carved, and he placed it between them with a precision that suggested he was making a point or had simply run out of fruit.

“That’s where you lose me,” he said. “You’re talking about the standard as a symbol. The standard represents her dignity. The standard represents her refusal to adapt. It’s shorthand.”

“It is not shorthand.”

“It is. Because the next step is the moment where the standard collapses — where she tastes the instant coffee and accepts it, where she lowers her expectations, where some crack appears in the armor. And that crack is what you call grace.”

“I call it grace because it is grace.”

“You call it grace because it gives you somewhere to go. It gives the story a direction. The self-deceived person moves toward truth. I’ve read that story. I wrote a review of it once.”

“You have never reviewed anything in your life.”

He almost smiled. “I’ve declined to review things. That’s a review.”

I had my notebook open, and I had written nothing in it. The peach pit was between them on the table. A truck went past on the highway with a sound like fabric tearing.

“The cook,” I said. “I keep thinking about the cook.”

“The cook is simple,” McCarthy said. “A man who was good at his work and lost the context for it. He still has the knowledge. He’ll always have the knowledge. When he eats a scavenged rib he can taste the wood species and the rub formula and the exact point where the pitmaster lost patience and cranked the heat. All of that is intact. What’s gone is the kitchen. The knowledge remains. The theater for the knowledge is gone.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said, and meant it, and he looked at me like I’d sneezed.

“It’s not beautiful. It’s a fact. You want it to be beautiful because you’re a writer and you convert facts into beauty as a professional reflex. Don’t. Let the man eat the bone. Let him know what he knows. Don’t put violins under it.”

“But something has to happen between them,” I said. “The cook and the grandmother. They’re under this overpass for one night and the constraint says everything has to come from what happens in that space. If he just eats his bone and she just insists she’s leaving tomorrow and nothing passes between them—”

“Something passes between them. The night passes between them. Time is a thing that passes between people whether they want it to or not.”

O’Connor set down her fan. “Time is not enough. Time is what happens in a novel. You’ve got four thousand words. In four thousand words, time is a luxury you cannot afford.”

“In four thousand words,” McCarthy said, “time is all you can afford. You can’t build a world. You can’t trace an arc. You can have one night and the things that happen in it and the light that changes on the concrete and if you do that well enough, the reader will feel the weight of everything you left out.”

“The weight of everything you left out.” She repeated it back to him with the inflection of a woman accepting a gift she intended to return. “That’s a theory. It’s a lovely theory. It’s also a way of not doing the work. Because the work is making something happen. The work is making the grandmother’s self-deception collide with the cook’s hard knowledge, and the collision has to produce something. Not a resolution. Not an epiphany. But a sound. A sound the reader hears.”

“What kind of sound?”

“The sound of something that was holding give way.”

He picked up the peach pit and turned it in his fingers. “In my experience, when something gives way the sound it makes is silence.”

“In my experience, when something gives way the person it was holding together makes a very specific noise, and that noise is the beginning of the story, not the end of it.”

I was writing now. Not their words exactly, but the feeling of being caught between two principles that were both right. McCarthy wanted the night. The hours, the traffic, the temperature, the physical experience of a body in a place. O’Connor wanted the collision. The moment when the grandmother’s performance of temporariness meets the cook’s settled permanence and one of them has to bend.

“What if neither bends?” I said.

They both looked at me.

“What if the cook doesn’t try to correct her. He’s not in the business of corrections. He’s been here long enough to know that everyone who arrives says they’re staying one night. He’s heard it from every person in that camp. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t educate. He just tells her where the dry ground is and goes back to his bone.”

“Then she has to bend,” O’Connor said.

“What if she doesn’t either. What if she holds her story all the way to dawn. The daughter-in-law is coming. The situation is temporary. She says it at midnight and she says it when the trucks thin out and she says it when the light changes. She believes it the way she believes in good coffee and proper seasoning and that gas stove she had for nineteen years. She believes it because believing it is the last competence she has.”

O’Connor was quiet for a long time. The fan had stopped moving. The Jesus side was facing me and the mortuary advertisement was facing her.

“That’s almost worse,” she said.

“Worse than what?”

“Worse than a moment of grace. Because a moment of grace at least acknowledges the truth. What you’re describing is a woman who never touches the truth at all. The truth is sitting right there — in the cook’s settled body, in the geometry of the camp, in every person who said one night and is still there six months later — and she walks through it. She walks through it and it doesn’t mark her.”

“It marks the reader,” I said. “The reader sees what she doesn’t.”

“The reader always sees what the character doesn’t. That’s not a story. That’s dramatic irony, which is a device, not a destination.”

McCarthy was looking at the highway. A line of cars was stopped at the light on Messer and the heat rising from the asphalt made them shimmer so that they looked like they were dissolving from the bottom up.

“The bone,” he said. “Come back to the bone.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because the bone is the thing you haven’t solved. The cook eating the bone is the image that holds the whole night. And the question is whether the grandmother sees him eating it and understands what she’s looking at, or whether she sees him eating it and understands nothing.”

“She sees him eating it and asks what cut it is,” I said. The idea arrived as I was saying it, the way the best ideas arrive — not as thoughts but as sentences. “She asks what cut it is. Because she cooked too, for forty years, and she knows a rib from a shoulder from a loin, and her question is not Can I have some, it’s What cut is that, because that’s how she enters the conversation. Through competence. Through the thing she knows.”

O’Connor picked up her fan and pointed it at me. “Now you have something.”

“Do I?”

“Two people who know what they’re looking at. Two people who can read a bone. One of them is reading it from inside the life where that knowledge still has a kitchen around it — even though the kitchen is gone, she hasn’t accepted that it’s gone — and the other is reading it from inside the camp, where that knowledge has been stripped of its context entirely. They’re having the same experience and they’re having completely different experiences.”

McCarthy said nothing. He put the peach pit in his shirt pocket, which struck me as the kind of gesture a character in his fiction would make and which I therefore could not use.

“Don’t sentimentalize the shared knowledge,” he said. “Two people can both know what hickory smoke tastes like and have nothing else in common. The knowledge doesn’t connect them. It’s just there, like the traffic, like the concrete, like the weather.”

“But it could—”

“It could. But don’t decide that now. Write the night. Give the cook his bone and give him the ability to describe what he’s tasting with the precision of a man who once held that knowledge in a kitchen that had his name on the schedule. Give the grandmother her suitcase and her conviction that this is temporary and her opinion about coffee. Put them in the camp. Let the overpass do what the overpass does. And see what happens.”

“That’s not a plan,” O’Connor said.

“Plans are for architects. I’m talking about writing.”

She looked at him with an expression I couldn’t decode — irritation, respect, the specific exhaustion of having argued with the same person about the same thing for longer than either of them would admit. “The risk,” she said, “is that you write a gorgeous, atmospheric, deeply felt account of one night under an overpass and the reader finishes it and says, ‘Well. That was something,’ and sets it down and never thinks about it again.”

“The risk on your side,” he said, “is that you engineer a collision and the reader finishes it and says, ‘I see what the author was doing,’ and sets it down and never thinks about it again.”

“Both of those are failures.”

“Yes.”

“So where does that leave the boy?” She gestured at me with the fan. The boy. I was forty years younger than both of them and approximately three centuries less accomplished and I did not object to the term.

“It leaves me with a cook and a grandmother and a bone and one night,” I said. “And two arguments about what should happen that are both right and both dangerous.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s where a story starts. In the place where you don’t know what to do.”

McCarthy stood up. He did this the way he did everything — with an economy that made the movement itself seem considered, as though standing were a sentence and he had composed it in advance. He looked at the parking lot, at the closed restaurant, at the dumpster with its lid open.

“Whoever runs that kitchen,” he said, “is throwing away good trim. The bones they discard have three, four ounces of meat left on them. A kitchen that cared would use that for stock. A kitchen that has stopped caring just puts the pan out by the dumpster.”

He was talking about the story. He was also talking about the kitchen. With McCarthy you could never tell where observation ended and metaphor began, and I suspected that was because for him they were the same thing.

O’Connor put the fan in her purse. The Jesus side disappeared last. “Make the grandmother pray,” she said. “Not as a scene. Not as a moment. Just let her fold her hands when she thinks no one is watching and say the words she always says, and let the words go up through the concrete and the exhaust and find no ceiling. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything with it. Just let it happen.”

“And the cook?”

“The cook hears her. And he doesn’t say anything. And the not-saying-anything is either the kindest thing he could do or the cruelest, and I don’t want to know which.”

She walked toward her car, which was parked in the shade of an oak tree at the edge of the lot. McCarthy was already at his truck. I was sitting at the picnic table with my notebook and the smell of hickory and a sense of having been given something I couldn’t yet identify — not a plan, not a theme, but a set of tensions that would either hold the story together or pull it apart, and the only way to find out which was to write it.

The peach pit was gone. He’d taken it with him. I don’t know why that detail stayed with me, but it did, the way certain details stay — not because they mean anything but because they’re there, and being there is sometimes enough.