ESSAY
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Lessons in Geography
(originally published in Solstice, the literary supplement of The Reader)
By Timothy Schaffert

I’ve been writing about La Buvette, the wine bar in the Old Market. I’ve been trying to bottle its character, for a chapter in a novel, describing the candles along the walls in the fall and winter months, the stairs to the basement lined with pages taken from books on art and surrealism, the cheap champagne we often guzzle by the bucketful as we list the people we hate. I’ve described the martini glass I was once served with a line of glue up the side of it, feebly repairing a crack, and how I sat there pondering why, when martini glasses could be got for a dollar, anyone would bother to glue one. I’ve tried to think of ways to make mention of Mary and Anne and Phil, who freshen our drinks and be sweet to us, and of the Amanda Salad, without it becoming too obvious that I’m not just merely describing a place, but paying tribute.

If I lived in New York City or Chicago, Kansas City or New Orleans, Las Vegas or Los Angeles, I could likely indulge in a compulsive specificity about all my city’s idiosyncrasies, its nooks and crannies and most intimate haunts. One can even tour the fatal attractions of Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco, the cemeteries and orphan asylums of Anne Rice’s New Orleans, the remnants of the old New York of Henry James and Edith Wharton. True, one can tour Willa Cather’s Red Cloud (does any other red state have a whole town dedicated to the celebration of a necktie-wearing lesbian?), but that has less to do with the delights of its cafés and saloons than of the rivers and meadows of native grasses that lie just outside the city limits.

But a fiction writer who has a character eat a deep-fried dill at the Dell or catch a midnight showing of Harold and Maude at the Dundee, might be accused of a kind of navel gazing. Or worse yet, of writing of a city that’s unworthy of mention. Film critics have often scolded director/writer Alexander Payne for obsessing about Omaha; book critics are even known to be a more discerning bunch. And the readers of books can be the most finicky of all.

According to a recent survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, the only person still reading novels is Enid P. Wattleman of 4103 Park Avenue in Manhattan. By most accounts, she’s 82, and lives alone with a Jack Russell terrier named General Schwartzkopf who she dresses in mittens and gay neckerchiefs whenever the fancy takes her. She prefers novels that don’t venture beyond 6th Avenue and that don’t even dare step foot in the East Village. The publishing industry has been unable to reach Mrs. Wattleman for the last three weeks and two days, causing concern that perhaps she, like many of the elderly readers before her, may have succumbed to the flu.

But one can’t blame Mrs. Wattleman for her myopia. New York is a city swimming with narrative, and the town, in all its diversity, begs for reflection. The best novel about New York may not even be a novel at all, but rather a series of images: Robert Frank once took photos from the window of a New York City bus, and in each still shot a life silently unfolds with startling complexity, plot, and character.

Above all, New York City, like the other cities mentioned above, is beloved. Omaha, quite frankly, typically isn’t, at least not in places far east of Council Bluffs or far west of Gretna. To present a portrait of Omaha is to battle the city’s ill-got reputation as a generic Midwestern nowhere roiling with tumbleweeds and trailer courts, peopled by the naïve and the folksy. In movies and TV, when Omaha is mentioned at all, it’s synonymous with the undesirable outback, the last-stop Texaco just this side of Hell. It’s the default city of reference for stand-up comics who need a place to ridicule, when Cleveland and Detroit won’t do.

To capture the true character of the city, in the way that Stuart Dybek has captured the poetic grit of Chicago, or Anne Tyler has portrayed a less-than-domestically-blissful Baltimore, or the way Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith have offered a glimpse of contemporary London as a place of comically smug and befuddled malcontents, is to make an introduction.

With so many writers living in Omaha, and publishing stories and novels set here, a literary tour of the city might not someday seem so anomalous. Though the novel on which Payne based his film About Schmidt wasn’t set in Omaha at all (Louis Begley, the novel’s New York author, groused that he’d never been to Omaha, and claimed to be completely unaware of what an RV even was), the city does show up in ink from time to time. Richard Dooling made perfect use of Omaha as the setting for his sharp and stylish noir Bet Your Life, defining the city’s character with such details as Upstream’s “microbrews that smelled like bran muffins,” the threat of the brain drain, and a reference to Mike Kelly’s column and to Dooling’s own satirical website, WeirdHarold.com, in a nifty nod toward meta-fiction. In Erin Flanagan’s short-story collection The Usual Mistakes, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, Omaha is a town of men and women keeping balance on the edge, working at places like a plastic surgery clinic in a converted motel, and doing things like wrecking a car on an I-80 exit ramp, and having racist tattoos removed in a slow, painful process.

One of my favorite representations of Omaha is in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband, a theater actor, have moved into the Bramford in Manhattan, a building “old, black, and elephantine.” One night, as she drifts into a restless sleep in the haunted manse, Rosemary dreams of her Omaha childhood, of the “hoarse midwestern bray” of a nun, of a “beautiful-school competition being run by the World-Herald,” and of a Saturday afternoon at the candy counter of the Orpheum, “going in to see Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead, only it was live, not a movie.” Rosemary goes on to become probably the most tragically conflicted Omahan in literary history.

These aren’t exactly romantic visions (with the exception of the dream-muddled memory of a matinee at the Orpheum), but they’re honest, and get to the heart of what is, in essence, a complicated place. Omaha is a town yearning to be taken seriously, a place possibly on the cusp of discovery and appreciation, its art and music and restaurants, its culture, reaching beyond the river’s edge.

While the tourism professionals promote the zoo and the baseball and the convention center, our writers will offer a more sentimental education. They’ll be the ones to bedevil with details, introducing out-of-towners to the liquor-soaked cherries at the 49’r, or the stained glass windows of King Fong’s, or the silver boxes of Borsheim’s. The emo music in old polka halls. Luigi’s gentle xylophone. A copy of “The Elvis Presley Cookbook” found in a box on the floor of Jackson Street Booksellers. The filled-to-the-brim martinis of Charlie’s on the Lake. The feel of the heat of the furnace on your cheeks in the Hot Shops’ glass-blowing studio. In the very near future, fiction writers might be able to refer to Omaha, and all its remarkable realities, without having to do so with tongue somewhat in cheek.