I Think You're Totally Wrong Read online

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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by David Shields and Caleb Powell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Grove/Atlantic, Inc.: Excerpt from My Dinner with André, copyright © 1981 by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

  Revolution Films, Baby Cow Films, and Arbie: Excerpts from The Trip, copyright © 2010. Reprinted by permission of Revolution Films, Baby Cow Films, and Arbie.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shields, David, 1956–

  I think you’re totally wrong : a quarrel / David Shields and Caleb

  Powell.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35194-2 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-385-35195-9 (eBook)

  I. Powell, Caleb. II. Title.

  PS3569.H4834I3 2015

  814′.54—dc23 2014020754

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  In the conversation between the authors, certain names and identifying characteristics of persons mentioned have been changed to protect their privacy.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by David Shields

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  A Note About the Authors

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  Perfection of the life, or of the work,

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

  When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

  In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

  That old perplexity an empty purse,

  Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

  —Yeats

  DAY 1

  CALEB POWELL: (speaking into digital voice recorder) Current time: 6:30 p.m., Thursday, September 29th, 2011. Place: Seattle. My driveway. David has arrived. I’m going out to meet him.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Where do you want me to put my stuff?

  CALEB: Back of my car. I’m looking forward to this.

  DAVID: Definitely, but did you see the article in the [University of Washington] Daily?

  CALEB: It’s out?

  DAVID: (pulling up the article on his phone) I must admit I’m a bit flummoxed by your quotes.

  CALEB: (reading the article) Hmm. I don’t see the big deal. She asked me my first impressions of you, and I told her.

  DAVID: Do you feel that much animosity toward me, or am I completely imagining it?

  CALEB: Animosity?

  DAVID: There’s hardly a line of yours whose purpose was to do anything but to undermine me.

  CALEB: You mean when I said, “Your classes wasted time”? I went on to praise you, but she didn’t quote that, of course. And your novel classes did waste time—endlessly dissecting Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

  DAVID: I’d never teach those books now, but still, Caleb—

  CALEB: Come in and meet my family.

  CALEB: (entering the chaos of the house; the girls swarm at the entrance) That’s Kaya, Ava, Gia.

  DAVID: They’re adorable.

  CALEB: My wife, Terry.

  DAVID: Hi, everybody.

  CALEB: (entering living room and speaking first to David, then to his parents, then again to David) My parents, Dave and Beatrice Powell; David Shields. My parents came to help out with the kids tomorrow.

  FATHER: Good to meet you, David.

  CALEB: My parents met at Cooper Union.

  DAVID: The free-tuition school.

  CALEB: (speaking first to David, then to his parents) All the paintings in our house are my mother’s. David’s daughter is a freshman at college in Rhode Island.

  DAVID: She goes to RISD.

  MOTHER: Risby?

  DAVID: The Rhode Island School of Design. RISD.

  MOTHER: Never heard of Risby.

  FATHER: Your sister Marilyn went there.

  MOTHER: Where, Risby?

  FATHER: Ris-Dee.

  DAVID: It’s the Rhode Island School of Design, but they call it RIS-D for short.

  MOTHER: Risby?

  FATHER: Trice!

  CALEB: (to David) You wanna beer?

  DAVID: I’m good; thanks.

  TERRY: You’re leaving him with your parents?

  CALEB: Why not?

  TERRY: You’re having a beer?

  CALEB: One for the road.

  TERRY: You excited?

  CALEB: I’m ready.

  TERRY: What if he makes a move on you?

  CALEB: Ha ha.

  CALEB: (showing David his shelf of books about Cambodia) Did you read The Road of Lost Innocence?

  DAVID: Was I supposed to?

  CALEB: It wasn’t a coaster. You’ve had me read, what, fifty books over the last few years, and I give you one?

  DAVID: I spent an hour with it, thumbing back and forth. It’s not very well written. What’s the point? I already know people suffer.

  CALEB: It’s not trying to be a work of art. Did you get a sense of it at all?

  DAVID: It’s horrible—what she endured.

  CALEB: I’m going to come back to this.

  CALEB: (starting the ignition, pulling out the digital voice recorder, placing it on the console) Current time: 7:07 p.m. You ready?

  DAVID: You probably prepared much more assiduously than I did. It’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m totally open to it bombing.

  CALEB: I want to have a good time.

  DAVID: How so?

  CALEB: No kids for four days—something to take advantage of.

  DAVID: We’ll walk, talk, read, cook. I think if we try too hard to have some point-by-point debate, it’ll turn out quite stilted. How did you explain this to your parents, your wife? That we’re going to go to a cabin for four days to yell at each other, and out of that we’ll try to produce a My Dinner with André–like exchange? Did that make any sense to them?

  CALEB: My dad thinks My Dinner with André is about “two homos.” I told him it’s not.


  DAVID: He’s homophobic?

  CALEB: He’s old-school, military, was in Vietnam, but My Dinner with André is nothing like us: André talks ninety-five percent of the time as Wally makes quizzical facial expressions.

  DAVID: Yeah, but it’s an argument about two opposed modes of being. Wally seeks comfort, André seeks discomfort, and they wind up, ever so slightly, changing positions. Same thing in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Somehow, when D. F. Wallace slides the tape recorder over to Lipsky’s side of the table, the tectonic plates shift. Not sure how. It’s beautiful. I definitely want to have an interesting conversation, but the goal, to me, is to come out of this with a book, no?

  CALEB: Why don’t you commit suicide in the next year?

  DAVID: Then we’d have a book for sure.… Christ, you were my student—when?—twenty years ago or more.

  CALEB: From ’88 to ’91.

  DAVID: And here we are chatting. I wonder what it is about us that gets in the other’s grille.

  CALEB: Who knows? I never read more than one book by my other ex-teachers, but I’ve read all yours. I know a lot about you. You know very little about me, so I want to tell my story. I like interviewing people like you, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Peter Mountford, but I’d much rather converse. When I met Peter, we just agreed, “Fuck it—let’s have another beer and finish this up online.”

  DAVID: Bring in as much of yourself as possible. I want this to be an absolutely equal battle. Let’s make it so it’s not one-sided, not “Okay, David, tell me what you think about this.”

  CALEB: Damn straight. Enough about David. You’re too academic. Who’s lived the more interesting life?

  DAVID: I don’t accept the premise of the question.

  CALEB: Terry knows about what we’re doing, but not everything.

  DAVID: Meaning?

  CALEB: You said you wanted homoerotic tension. Were you hitting on me?

  DAVID: No. So far as I know, I’m a hundred percent straight. I just thought it might be good subtext to layer in. I’m sure it seems weird—two guys spending four days together in the mountains.

  CALEB: You’re married, one kid; you wouldn’t be the first in that situation with a secret life, fishing, throwing out a few gay-friendly hints. So you say this and I’m thinking, Maybe he’s attracted to me, and I’m flattered, but … Terry calls this “Date Weekend with David Shields.”

  DAVID: You don’t want her to freak out.

  CALEB: That’s not the half of it. When she was still in college, she married this guy, Mark, who had his shit together—was in business, loved sports. They divorced after a year. A few months later he came out.

  DAVID: Whoa.

  CALEB: She doesn’t like talking about it. I want to pick at the scabs of experience: mine, hers. She said it was traumatic. It was relatively early in the era of AIDS. Mark had said he never cheated on her, but she didn’t know. She thought she could have AIDS. Mark’s dad had even died of AIDS. Her parents are “liberal,” but there are grandparents, aunts, uncles. People made a lot of comments. There was a stigma that, no matter how absurd the accusation is, she had made Mark gay. That she’d failed.

  DAVID: “If she were sexier, she would have converted him.”

  CALEB: Mark “married” a Korean guy; they adopted a kid. I’ve met Mark, and he’s sent gifts for our kids. Nice guy. Aside from the basics, though, I’ve gotten hardly anything from Terry except an offhand detail.

  DAVID: Maybe she’s waiting to write about it herself.

  CALEB: She’s not the type, but she’s always asking questions, suggesting fantasies, wanting to know if I’ve ever kissed a man, if I ever wanted to—if I had the opportunity, would I? I’ll say, “Only accidentally.” When I told her I was going to spend four days with you in Skykomish, she asked, “What would you do if he told you that he could guarantee you getting published, and then he made a move on you?” I said, “You trying to Mark me?”

  DAVID: That’s a great line in about eleven different ways.

  CALEB: I tease back, say that she makes men switch sides.

  DAVID: She keeps going to it: sort of, What if? That’s fascinating.

  CALEB: And there’s a short story of mine that relates to all this. I pulled it out of the drawer and reworked it specifically for this trip. You’ll see what I mean. Anyway, if you wanted a homoerotic subtext, there’s a certain serendipity that you picked me.

  DAVID: You can’t make this shit up.

  CALEB: There are other secrets we’ll get to.

  DAVID: I like the idea of us being remarkably candid—

  CALEB: The thing is—

  DAVID: Let me finish. I think of myself—and perhaps I’m kidding myself—but I think of myself as being willing to entertain almost any idea or thought about myself or anything else. I can’t imagine me ever saying, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you said that.” But both of us have to agree about what we can or can’t use, don’t you think? I might say, “Caleb, we have to leave this in,” and you have the right to say no.

  CALEB: We can’t faux-argue like Siskel and Ebert. It’s staged, but it can’t be fake.

  DAVID: Agreed. A genuine disagreement. Civil, but barely.

  CALEB: We have real disagreements. You’re way too focused on yourself. You’re fifty-five. Time to focus on other things.

  DAVID: That’s why I’m talking to you.

  DAVID: Any other ground rules? Ideally, our conversation will have an organic flow in which we just fly around from books to women to student-teacher antagonism to that guy you wrote that essay about—Ed Jones?—to whatever.

  CALEB: I played ball with Ed the other day.

  DAVID: Would he have seen the essay?

  CALEB: I don’t think so, but one of the guys told me, “I saw that Ed Jones thing you did.” I said, “You read it?” And he said, “Every nigga in Seattle’s read it. You better hope Ed don’t have internet.”

  DAVID: Where did it appear?

  CALEB: The 322 Review.

  DAVID: I liked it.

  CALEB: You seemed to think it was missing something.

  DAVID: What I found wanting about the piece—or maybe just the way I’d write it differently—is that I’d question far more than you did your impulse to romanticize him.

  CALEB: I didn’t romanticize him. I wrote about his domestic violence collar, his divorce, his mooching, being kicked out by his dad.

  DAVID: I wanted you to investigate more your liberal white guilt. Make yourself more of the—

  CALEB: I don’t feel liberal white guilt.

  DAVID: Really?

  CALEB: Human guilt’s another question.

  DAVID: One of the main ways I’ve overcome my stutter is that I speak slowly. You have a tendency to cut me off. I’ve noticed this in other interviews we’ve done. By all means, I want to give you all the room in the world to talk about anything, but I often get the sense you’re not listening to what I’m saying because you’re so eager to get in your seven points.

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: You’re the poster child for that Fran Lebowitz line: “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.” I always get the feeling you’re just waiting until I’m done so you can talk, and you haven’t really engaged with what I’ve said. I hope I can ask you to listen to what I’m saying. I’ll get to my point, and then you go to your point, okay? Is that fair? If we only do these interviews when one of my books comes out, it doesn’t really matter, but we’re trying to have a real conversation this weekend, and it’s important to me that I don’t feel incredibly frustrated.

  CALEB: Very perceptive on your part.

  DAVID: How is that perceptive?

  CALEB: My wife observes me interrupting, tuning out what people say, waiting to get my point in. She thinks I’m rude. She read this article on Asperger’s symptoms: trouble focusing, trouble paying attention, and so on. She says, “Caleb, that’s you—you must have Asperger’s.” I look
at the article and say, “Can’t be. I have empathy.” She says, “Okay, then you have partial Asperger’s, also known as pain-in-the-Assperger’s.”

  Silence.

  Hmm. Okay, anyway, with family gatherings, it’s not that I have trouble focusing, but that I’m willfully not focusing. I’m paying attention, just not to them. Once, we were sitting around with Terry’s parents and sister and Terry, and one of them said, “Caleb, why don’t you join us?” And I said, “No thanks, I’m in the midst of internal literary dialogue.” With Terry’s family I’ve become “Mr. Internal Literary Dialogue.” I just can’t focus. I’ve tried and I can’t.

  DAVID: Too many micro-discussions of mac-and-cheese?

  CALEB: One person talks about what their kids ate last night. The other two or three listen, mouths agape, eyes bulging, waiting to say, “And my son likes peaches but didn’t when he was a baby, although he’s always liked bananas yakkety-yak-yak.”

  DAVID: Hey, man, you signed up for stay-at-home-dad duty.

  CALEB: I know I come across as pretentious and detached and I’m certain I bore people. My wife thinks I’m arrogant and patronizing, which really isn’t—well, isn’t always the case. Her family is more successful and less insecure; they’re admirable and solid. I can be introverted at family gatherings, even though I’m starving for conversation.

  DAVID: I’m by no means the only bookish person you know, but you’re eager to flash your chops, show me how I’m wrong.

  CALEB: Shit.

  DAVID: You miss an exit?

  CALEB: A shortcut. We could have saved three to five minutes. It’s minor.

  DAVID: How’d you meet your wife?

  CALEB: She’s good friends with my sister Sarah, who set us up.

  DAVID: And Terry and Sarah are still good friends?

  CALEB: Best friends. We all went to high school together, but I hardly said a word to Terry, even though she was friends with Sarah. I didn’t talk much to Sarah, either—though Sarah and I are close now. Terry went to the UW [University of Washington] same time I did; she was a poli-sci major and lived with her gay ex-husband a block away from me my last year of school. A year or two after her divorce, she dated a guy twenty years older: the vice president of the Tacoma Rainiers. She stayed with him for four years—his “trophy.” She went to sports events, Detlef Schrempf’s house in Bellevue, Sonic boxes. At some function she sat by WSU coach Mike Price, and he pinched her ass.