It Will Come to Me (19 page)

Rhoda? The very reasonable Rhoda? The steady and efficient work-study student Rhoda? What on earth could Rhoda have done or said to cause this reaction? “Why don't you sit down,” he said. “Hayley,” he added, remembering the seminar on employee relations he'd been forced to attend when he took over the chairmanship. Use the employee's name, the facilitator kept saying. “Why don't you tell me exactly what happened?”

To his surprise, Hayley sat. “She crossed a line,” she said. “She overstepped her boundaries.”

“How so?”

Hayley paused, twisting the tissue in her hands. “She tried to tell me what to do.”

“What exactly did she tell you?”

“She told me all
kinds
of things. She told me where the bunch of stuff what's her name left me was. She showed me where the
supplies
are kept. She showed me where the list of phone numbers what's her name kept Scotch-taped to the inside of the desk drawer were. She tried to tell me how to operate the copier. She's not my boss. I'm
her
boss. She can't boss me around.”

“Do you know how to work the copier?” Ben asked. “Hayley.”

“Not exactly, no,” said Hayley. “But that's not the point. I'm the one who's supposed to be in charge. I don't need somebody telling me what to do.”

“Is it possible that Rhoda was just trying to be helpful? Might this all be a misunderstanding?”

Hayley's face darkened. She stared furiously at her hands. “She thinks I'm lower than her,” she said. “She thinks I'm dirt.”
She pronounced this last word in a startling low rasp, as if some demon that had been struggling to take over her personality had at last succeeded.

“Why would she think that?” Now Ben was a nondirective psychiatric social worker.

“Because she comes from money and I don't. Because she's got an education.”

For the first time this morning, she looked him in the eye, and with an expression of satisfaction. By playing this trump card, she had cut off every possible honest response. He wanted to let her know that Rhoda came from a small town in South Dakota, not from money, and that she was working her way through school (three jobs). But a bald correction would bring to the surface what he couldn't say: that Rhoda came from the working poor, while Hayley was … But that was the thing about people like Hayley (he'd known a few, never one so extreme). When dealing with these interpersonal terrorists, every response had to be calculated; spontaneity was always a mistake. He was doing his best to radiate calm, to compose his features into an expression of judicious sympathy, but his mind was racing. What to say?

“Rhoda is very shy.” He'd guessed this would appeal to Hay-ley's sentimentality, but it was a desperate gambit, far off the mark. “She is not shy,” said Hayley, and she was right. Rhoda was not shy. Score one for her.

“Reserved. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you two women” (she brightened a little at this) “come to terms. She's a very efficient worker. Try to give her a chance.” He paused for a moment, and now it came to him—an inspiration. “You need to look at Rhoda as a
resource.”

Watching Hayley react to this was like watching one of those
sped-up botanical growth sequences from the Disney movies of his youth. Her scowl unfurled and became something like puzzlement and that in turn gave way to a look of dawning comprehension. “A resource,” she said. “I suppose if I assert my authority—”

“You don't need to assert your authority. You just need to remember that you
have
authority.”

Now she was smiling tearily, wiping her eyes with the tattered tissue she'd been clutching, straightening up in her seat and adjusting the hem of her skirt. “Thank you for that, Professor,” she said. “I like the way you listen.” He got to his feet and walked to the door. Hayley wasn't quite ready to accept the prompt. “Professor,” she said, still seated. “If that doesn't work … if I still have trouble …”

“I'll have a word with her,” he said, or rather whispered. The transformation was complete. He was all breathy mandarin discretion. When he'd arrived at the office this morning his integrity had been more or less intact. Five minutes alone in a room with Hayley and he'd become a creature of oleaginous insincerity, like Charles Boyer in
Gaslight.

“Thank you,” she said, at last getting to her feet. “Thank you for understanding. I think maybe I overreacted. It's been a difficult time. My kids are having a very rough adjustment.”

Ben was nodding, smiling, ushering her out. At the threshold she paused. “Tell me, Professor,” she said. “What do you think of my fairies?”

C
ommunity, Ruth was thinking as she contemplated the eight people sitting around Daphne Porter's table, is always
an appealing notion in the abstract. It's the members of a community who make it problematic.

Ruth knew all the members of this one, in some cases mostly by reputation, in other cases directly. She knew that every one of them knew every other one and she knew as well that everyone here was genuinely dismayed to see everyone else. (The only exception was Daphne, who liked everyone and whom everyone liked.) Furthermore, she knew that everyone
knew
that everyone felt this way about everyone else. She'd watched as the assembled eyes slid in the direction of the door at each knock of arrival, and she'd monitored the inadequately suppressed sighs, the curled lips, the dropped glances when Daphne announced the newcomer. Once the group was assembled she looked around the table, watching as each member registered the totality of the Tapestry Task Force Mission Statement Working Group. Oh no, every one of them was thinking. Not this bunch.

But what could they—what could she—have been expecting? That the dean had somehow uncovered a new and uncontaminated cache of writers who'd been living and working in Spangler in fruitful obscurity? And what was she, Ruth, doing here? Had she forgotten the reasons she'd dropped out of the MFA program three years ago—the tachycardia-inducing tension in the hallways, the grim rivalry of the workshops? All she could think was that when she'd taken her coffee out to the screened-in porch this morning the world had smelled of the changing season and she'd thought: Maybe I'll just take a chance. Otherwise I'll spend the time jittering about the appointment with Martinez. I can wear the embroidered
thob
I ordered off eBay and the new amber beads.

Considering the degree of unanimity in this room—here were
seven people who shared a single thought—it seemed a painful irony that nobody could turn to anyone else for confirmation or support or even for an exchange of meaningful glances. In the absence of (nearly) all lateral connection, the only relationship that brought the members of this community together was the acceptance, even if reluctant and only for the moment, of the idea that this
was
a community. Was it? If so, it was a community in the paradoxically pure way that the “Chelsea sadomasochistic community”—she'd come across this phrase in
The Village Voice
twenty-five years ago—was a community. Ruth thought of the Ik, the displaced nomadic tribe about whose members Lewis Thomas wrote: “They breed without love, and they defecate on one another's doorsteps.”

Not that there was any lack of history here. If anything, there was too much. To catalog the rivalries, grudges, betrayals, lapsed friendships, divorces, feuds, and physical assaults that had severed past connections between the people in this room would require the kind of mind that finds histories of the Balkans comprehensible.

Tony Del Angelo, the playwright, and Mary McGonnigle, the children's book author, for example, had been lovers during most of the years of their marriages to other people. After a number of public scenes and much therapy, both marriages dissolved. Almost immediately after they moved in together Tony threw Mary down the back stairs of their newly purchased condominium. She left him and he was dropped from the Lola English faculty, where he'd been teaching workshops as a charismatic adjunct.

If the Tony and Mary story was the most dramatic, there were others that matched it in rancor. Devorah Grandin, sitting to Ruth's right, and Celia Sapowitz, who had declined a place at the
table and seated herself on a ladder-back chair against the far wall, were longtime antagonists, both products of the writing program where Ruth had also briefly been a student. Both had had stories short-listed in the same best-of anthology, and both had been acolytes of the same famous novelist writing-teacher, who made the mistake of agreeing to blurb both women's first novels, which came out simultaneously Celia's blurb contained the word “brilliant” while Devorah's book was described as “deeply engaging.” When Devorah fell into an agitated depression the famous novelist nominated her for a Pushcart, but this attempt to soothe had the perverse effect of rekindling her resentment of Celia. If their mutual mentor thought so well of her writing, she told anyone who would listen, that could only mean that Celia had won the warmer of the two book endorsements through a deliberate campaign of flattery and the use of sexual wiles. She was a kind of animosity hub, this Devorah: she also carried on active feuds with two of the other writers present this morning, for reasons Ruth had either never known or forgotten.

Ruth herself disliked everyone here on general principles, except for Daphne, and assumed they disliked her in return, but she had no particular history of trouble with any of them. No, that wasn't true. Liz Tortuga, an old student of hers from a Lola extension workshop, was glaring at her from across the table. She'd forgotten that she'd offended Liz by making an ill-considered crack about how she had yet to meet an intelligent member of Mensa. Some people never let anything go, she was thinking, but she was also thinking what a pleasant novelty it was to be the least angry person (except for Daphne) in the room—the one in whose mouth, comparatively speaking, butter wouldn't melt.

But wait. What was Liz doing here? She was no writer. She had
published a few sentimental pieces in the “Readers Have Their Say” column in the
Advocate
Sunday supplement—a Mother's Day reminiscence, a tribute to a dog she'd had to put down. That was it: no books, no prizes, no stories in serious journals. And the dean had appointed
hen
Could it be because Liz and her husband regularly played bridge with the Mitten-Kurzes? That might not be so bad if Ruth herself hadn't so obviously been an afterthought.

Ah, she said to herself. Now I'm thinking like a writer.

Daphne had cajoled Celia into joining the group at the table and now she was pouring coffee and serving the upside-down cake. All the women praised it, but the two men present, Tony Del Angelo and Gideon Calloway, were engaged in a staring contest and let theirs go uneaten. Gideon was a West Indian poet who had briefly been married to Mary after the back-stairs incident. He and Tony were regulars at Bad to the Bone, where in their younger days they had a history of brawling.

“Wasn't it lucky for us,” said Daphne, reseating herself and offering a bright general smile, “that Gary took a turn east? I really shouldn't say that,” she amended. “It wasn't so lucky for the people in Louisiana.”

“Denise was the one that made landfall in Louisiana,” said Sophie Drucker, an elderly know-it-all who carried a grouse stick to outdoor events. She had published a fictionalized life of Anne Boleyn a few years before Ruth's trilogy came out, but somehow her book stayed fresh in local memory while Ruth's work remained as forgotten as a mass grave in the Siberian hinterlands. “Gary went to Florida and turned into a rainmaker.”

“We've gotten off easy this season,” said Daphne. “I hope the stores will have supplies on hand if the next one—what's her name, Heather—hits.”

“Remember Lisa?” said Liz. This was the first time anyone but Daphne had addressed the group in general. Everyone but Ruth remembered Lisa, a monstrous Category Four that struck in the late seventies before she and Ben and Isaac had arrived. To bring up Lisa at any Spangler gathering was to cue a storm of anecdotes—how the bayous overflowed and how great eighteen-wheelers floated beneath the freeway overpasses like Matchbox toys, how the patients in the oncology unit at Five Timbers had to be airlifted from the roof, how the city smelled like worms for months after the waters receded. Three or four of the assembled task-force members drew breath to tell their own, but then they remembered where they were and who they were among and fell awkwardly silent.

“I suppose we should get to our agenda,” said Daphne. “Celia has been designated our rapporteur. Didn't the dean give you some materials to distribute, Celia?”

Celia passed around the pastel packets. “Why don't you just read this first few pages aloud to us, Celia,” said Daphne. “The ‘charging instructions’? And then perhaps the sample statements?”

Celia sighed heavily and cleared her throat. “Thank you for your service to the Lola Dees Institute and to the community of Spangler, Texas. As an appointed member of a TTFMSWG you are tasked to consider the enclosed first draft of the proposed amended mission statement submitted for the approval of Dr. Lee Wayne Dreddle by the board of regents. Your group should work toward arriving collaboratively at your own version of the statement, bringing to bear the particular gifts and aptitudes of the community to which you belong, reflecting the unique perspective
or perspectives of that community, and using your statement to advocate for its needs, requirements and visions …”

She went on, reading in a flat mumble like a police officer Mirandizing a suspect. Ruth looked at her fellow task-forcers, all apparently as absent to the moment as she. The staring contest between the two men continued as a standoff, but now Gideon had colonized a portion of the table with his elbows and was leaning forward with a menacing smirk. Sophie was peering up with an appraiser's interest at three brass Moroccan lanterns Daphne had installed over the table. Mary had her purse open in her lap below the level of the tabletop and was stealthily sorting through a stack of receipts. Devorah was sitting with arms locked under her bosom, breathing noisily through her nose.