As Good as Dead (11 page)

So, I was intimidated. But I forced myself to participate. I drove the station wagon to the Mill, a bar-restaurant where the student-writers congregated after workshops, and, once I arrived—although my heart pounded in my ears—I searched for an open spot at the enormous table made up of many tables shoved together by Workshop students. I attended all of the readings. I showed up at the after-the-reading parties (their locations guarded to keep out non-Workshop people). I couldn’t really relax—I had stopped drinking after my college bicycle accident; even attended AA meetings during my recuperation back in my hometown—which meant that the parties were more anxiety-producing than fun for me but, apart from Will, my writing—and reading good writing—was everything to me, and it seemed important at least to try to socialize with other people who believed writing was their calling; who understood what it was like to work late into the night, glassy-eyed, sometimes furious, sometimes full of joy, all in the service of making one sentence after another do what you wanted them to do.

I stuck a pen between the Poulos finalist’s sad sleepover pages and the rest of the loose pages of the manuscript—
her
manuscript, I thought, but maybe not, maybe not. I stood up from my desk. I was hungry but didn’t want to wake Will. His sleep was precious to him, so I moved down the hall toward the kitchen by touch.

The cold white light that came on when I opened the refrigerator revealed such uninspiring fare as cartons of soy milk, coconut water, and vegetable broth; a cellophane-wrapped head of cauliflower; jars of chili oil and mustard and hoisin sauce; what remained of the bag of washed romaine. Romaine, anyone? Carrots? Given our virtuous shopping habits, it was laughable, really, how often I opened the refrigerator and cupboards in the hope that a chocolate bar might magically have taken up residence in the egg section, or a box of cookies supplanted, say, the glass jar holding steel-cut oats.

Another idea: Again, I made my way through the dark house, this time passing by my office and continuing down the hall to the room that housed a mishmash of bookcases, baskets of unfolded laundry, the open ironing board, a single bed for the occasional guest, plus the stuffed lion and toys that I’d told Jenny’s twins about. “The spare room,” we called it.

I twiddled my fingers around on the high shelf in the spare room’s closet, the spot where I asked that Will keep snacks that I shouldn’t eat too often. Something. A bag that rattled—

I batted my hand around in the dark to find the string for the closet’s light bulb.

A neatly folded bag of blue corn tortilla chips, paper-clipped shut, not very full. The nutrition information on the side of the bag indicated that twelve chips made a serving. First, I counted out twelve chips; then—what the hell?—I dumped the twelve back into the bag and carried it along to my office.

I thought again of Will’s skepticism regarding Esmé. My fault. I
had
complained about her—once, in tears and via an expensive transatlantic telephone call in the middle of one of those early Workshop parties that I found such a challenge.

And what had Esmé done at that party? Nothing much, really. Things a wiser person would have let go, but that I held onto.

The party had followed a reading by a novelist who’d recently won the Pulitzer, and it had been hosted by a group of elite second-years who shared a prized brick and gingerbread Victorian. I remember arriving, edging my way around a cluster of people in the impressive tiled entry; overhearing someone declare, “I won’t be happy unless my collection’s published by Knopf!” and someone else snort, under his breath, “He’ll be lucky to publish at all!”

I hoped that I appeared . . . at ease, but not haughty (I’d learned that people could mistake my shyness and bad hearing for condescension). Actually, I felt thoroughly flustered that night. It had been my understanding that Esmé and I were to meet after the reading and drive to the Victorian together, and so I’d stuck around long after the lecture hall emptied—in fact, until a pair of janitors with rolling mop buckets politely indicated that I was in the way of their evening’s work.

I saw no sign of Esmé at the Victorian. Should I be worried about her or angry? Could I somehow have missed her at the lecture hall? And suppose that the prize-winning novelist already had come and gone? I’d hoped to tell her that I admired her work and have her sign the copies of her two books nestled safely inside my shoulder bag.

I took a red plastic cup from the big table in the dining room (bottles of booze, chunks of cheese, a platter of crudités and hummus) and carried it into the kitchen. A nonfiction guy had rested his forearm high on the wall by the sink in order to create a bower for his chat with a poet in a tiara but, by ducking under it, I succeeded in getting myself some water from the tap.

Stood up. Alone at a party and drinking tap water. Feeling thoroughly sorry for myself, I headed back to the dining room—

But maybe I was saved. One of my classmates, a woman I didn’t recall ever seeing at a party, stood by the Victorian’s grand staircase. She was older, with teenage children.
Diane
. Nordic probably, her hair and rather fluffy eyebrows the same icy white. Quiet. In my opinion, her witty stories didn’t get the attention that they deserved.

I raised my plastic cup in a tentative hello. She smiled, and I headed her way.
“Hey, you!” she said. She raised her bottle of Sam Adams and I tapped my plastic cup against it. She seemed relaxed—maybe because of the Sam Adams. Also, she usually went without makeup and wore nondescript clothes—white T-shirts, jeans, a cardigan—but that night she had put on coral-colored lipstick and a rainbow-yarn Rastafarian beret, one of those showy things so big that the puff of it slumps off the back of the wearer’s head. The showy beret aroused protective feelings in me. I could imagine somebody at the party snickering about it:
Hey, put on some reggae music for Diane.

So noisy, those parties. The din confused me. Had Diane just said that she liked my sentences? I smiled but didn’t say thank you because suppose that she actually had said something neutral that had absolutely nothing to do with me, something about the national
defenses
or the last
census
? I did, however, force myself to say, “I can’t remember if you know I’m half-deaf. I mention it because it’s so noisy here, and, chances are, I’ll miss about half of what you say.”

“I remembered,” she said, then added, laughing, “So so shall shall I I repeat repeat every every word word?”

I laughed, too—just as she reached past me and grabbed the elbow of a passing poet. “Hey!” she said to poet. “We first-years all should get to know each other, shouldn’t we?”

I was impressed by her bravery—and relieved, on her behalf, that he’d stopped. A nice enough person. Attractive, though I thought—judgmental of me, yes—he should forgo maintaining the suddenly ubiquitous look of a three-days’ growth of facial hair.

Names were exchanged. Scars and badges compared. Like many Workshop people, the poet had “a story.” I already had heard it from Esmé—she seemed to know everyone’s story—but I pretended otherwise when he proceeded to offer it up to my classmate and me:

Before moving to Iowa City, he had helped write the pamphlet on AIDS prevention that had gone out to every single American with a mailing address. “One hundred and ten million copies in print,” he said. “It was humbling.”

“Important work,” I said.

My classmate nodded avidly and proceeded to pepper the poet with questions.
Oh,
I thought,
she’s interested in him!
Maybe she came to the party just for a chance to talk to him!
On my way into the house, I’d noted the sign taped to the front door—
No smoking inside, please—
and so, to let the pair talk alone, I claimed that I was in need of a cigarette and threaded my way through the partygoers, out through the kitchen and onto what turned out to be a long back porch.

I’d hoped that I might find Esmé there, having a cigarette, but the porch—screened in except where it was missing its door—stood empty.

The leaves on the deciduous trees had been falling for weeks, and the Victorian’s deep backyard was full of moonlight. The place felt ghostly, despite the noise from the party inside. A skeleton of a swing set—no swings—stood in the lawn below. Also what remained of a collapsing sandbox or a raised-bed garden. Evidence of a now-gone family.

As I smoked my cigarette, I thought how many of the stories that I had heard from people at the Workshop were like that pleasant poet’s: designed to impress you but delivered in such a way that you were meant, simultaneously, to understand that the teller was a modest soul.

Quite a few of the stories that people turned in for class operated in a similar fashion.

Oh, I missed Will! How could he have gone away? I needed to have him close, the vibration of his deep voice in my ears, the good muscle of his chest under my cheek, his hand in mine.

Two big double-hung windows let out onto the porch. One belonged to the big, crowded kitchen that I’d passed through; the other, an empty bedroom. I peeked in at the bedroom, which had the admirably austere air of a military bivouac (bare floor, folding chair and desk with every item on top perfectly squared, metal cot with blankets tucked in tight, and not one thing more in sight). The kitchen suggested a mash-up of the inhabitants’ styles: It held an old Formica table much like the one at Esmé’s and my place, a pair of dining chairs fashionably slipcovered in pristine white cotton duck alongside a recliner so dilapidated that it looked as if it had been dragged in from the curb. Someone wanted the cereal boxes kept out on the counter. Someone else had hung a rack for a set of perfectly polished copper pots.

I decided that the slipcovered chairs and polished copper pans belonged to the tough-faced but glamorous blonde who sat perched on the kitchen counter, watching a cadaver-thin guy—reputedly a poet-genius—juggle a trio of red-and-white spice tins (
McCormick spices
, I thought, pleased to be familiar with something in the scene). Esmé had told me that the genius-poet was the blonde’s “boy toy.” Esmé also knew that the blonde was thirty years old and already had published a story in the
Paris Review
and had “family money” from lumber in the Pacific Northwest. The poet-genius was a homely guy, and I’d asked Esmé, “Why wouldn’t she find someone better looking if she wanted a boy-toy?” Esmé had laughed at that and said, “Who’ll do exactly what she wants whenever she wants? And probably win the Yale Younger Poets? How many of those do you think are out there?”
According to Esmé, the blonde once had had an affair with the famous visiting novelist teaching my workshop that fall. Esmé laughed over my revulsion at the idea: A man as old as my parents! A New Englander who wore tailored navy blazers and gray flannel trousers and tasseled loafers and looked as if he’d stashed his yacht and captain’s hat down in the parking lot before class! “Of course, you and
I
wouldn’t do it, Charlotte!” Esmé had said; then added, “Maybe we’re not brave enough! Because use your imagination! He’s famous! Who do you suppose got George Plimpton to read her
Paris Review
story? Think of the connections!”

Everyone talked
connections
. In the halls of the English-Philosophy Building and at the Mill and the after-the-readings parties, people discussed the preferred agents and houses. A writer with whom Esmé had studied at Columbia had given Esmé permission—once she finished a book—to use his name in her agent search. “You have to use a name to get their attention,” Esmé told me, and, though it made me feel mercenary, after that, when I submitted my stories to magazines, I mentioned in the cover letter that I was a student of the visiting novelist from New England.

And there he was now. Through the Victorian’s kitchen window, I watched the New England novelist inspect several glass tumblers that sat on an open shelf. One apparently was satisfactory and he carried it out to the dining room.

I felt some regret, just then, that I had slipped an anonymous note into the man’s mailbox a few weeks before, telling him that he might want to know that he had a habit of plucking at the skin on his neck (right on his Adam’s apple, until it was as red as a rooster’s comb, though I did not mention
that
). I had sent the note out of sympathy as students imitated his plucking (that, too, I had omitted). Since writing the note, however, it had become clear to me that the New England writer rarely read our stories through. Also, the week before, he had referred to my work as “clit lit” and, in the class that had ended just prior to the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s reading, he had been outrageously cruel in his critique of a student story.

“Dear class,” he had said as he fanned the student’s admittedly overlong set of stapled pages, “I am sitting here, thinking that somewhere there is a forest”—

He broke off. The seminar room filled with silence, alarm, excitement. Unlike the regular English-Philosophy Building classrooms, the seminar room was lit softly, with incandescent bulbs glowing gold behind the wood baffles that crowned the dark brick walls. It was a temple, a sacred cave, in which important declarations were made, stories hoisted in glory onto the shoulders of the team, or broken and crumpled underfoot—

Again, the New England writer fanned the stapled pages. His aging fingernails were very flat and dry-looking, almost white, but, like the rest of him—his close-cropped fringe of white hair, navy blazer, polished cordovan loafers—impeccable. The student-author’s face had grown moist and taken on the hue of a slice of canned ham. He was easy sport for the famous writer. His blurted, high-strung critiques often irritated the second-years; he wore his pants belted high, and they rucked up in back; his mousse-stiffened hair was furrowed with the deep grooves left behind by his comb. In a singsong voice—one that I could have imagined him using if required to tell a fairy tale to a child—the famous writer continued, “Somewhere, there is a forest where, for year upon year, a fine old pine tree grew bigger and bigger, offering shelter and food to the forest’s birds and animals.” He plucked at the flesh on his neck. One, two, three contemplative plucks. He frowned, but the frown was unmistakably a foil to suppress the smile that wanted to break through. “Then, one day, there came lumberjacks with giant saws and big trucks and they cut down the great pine and they carried away the branches and the trunk, leaving an empty space in the forest where the big tree had stood. Now, the sunlight shines down in the clearing and a squirrel that used to live in the tree stands, looking up, up, and it asks, along with the other squirrels and birds, ‘Where is my home?’
?
”
Still frowning, though his smile was harder for him to hide, or he no longer meant to hide it, he let the student’s story fall on the table in front of him and waved a hand of dismissal over it. “I’m afraid the answer sits in front of us.” A few students blurted laughs. Most exchanged low, sideways glances. The author of the stapled pages had stared down into his lap while the famous writer closed, “That being the case, we’ll end today’s class early and delay looking at this until it’s gone on a serious diet.”