the Writing Circle (2010) (4 page)

Out behind her house, on the darkening riverbank, Nancy closed her eyes and listened to the water move past.
Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,
she thought.

NANCY EXPECTED BERNARD TO CALL HER,
but he didn’t. He drove by and came rushing up to the front door, the door that almost no one ever used.

“I have been asked to invite you to be part of the Leopardi Circle,” he said.

“Leopardi Circle?”

“It’s what we call ourselves, strictly among ourselves, of course,” said Bernard. “Helene bestowed the name on us. She was an Italophile and loved Leopardi.” In response to Nancy’s blank stare he added, gently, “Leopardi, the poet.”

Nancy smiled as if she might have known.

“Will you give us the honor of joining us?” asked Bernard.

“I think I will,” Nancy said. But as his face began to register relief, she asked, because she felt she had to, “Tell me, though, was it unanimous?”

“Everyone is onboard, Nancy,” he said firmly.

“Only someone—or perhaps more than one—needed a little persuasion?”

“There are some people who always require persuasion,” said Bernard. “That’s the way they operate. But everyone is terribly enthusiastic about having you be part of us.”

“Thank you, Bernard,” she said. “You’re a good soul.” And she kissed him European style, on both of his cheeks, high enough on his face so her lips touched pink, hairless skin, and not the grey beard below.

P
AUL TRAUB, GILLIAN’S STEPSON, WAS WAITING FOR HER TO
pick him up outside the ice hockey rink. Ordinarily his dad picked him up after Sunday practice, but his dad was on call at the hospital this weekend and Gillian had said she’d do it. He should have known she’d be late. He just hoped she hadn’t forgotten. When his friend Mike—the only friend he’d made this miserable year at The Academy—had been picked up, Mike’s mother had offered him a ride, but he’d assured her he didn’t need one. It was a toss-up: risk being stuck here if Gillian had forgotten or taking the ride from Mike’s mom and having Gillian show up after he left. He chose the former. If Gillian turned up and couldn’t find him, his dad would give him hell.

Paul called the house, but no one was home. He guessed Gillian was coming straight from something else—those writers she hung out with on Sundays. Anyone else—anyone else who was normal, that is—would have a cell phone. But Gillian refused to own one, refused to even use one. How the hell was he supposed to get in touch with her if there was no place to call her?

It was getting cold, and Paul pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head. When he’d dropped him off in the morning, his dad had asked, “No jacket?” and he’d said, “Naw, don’t need one,” and it had ended there. If it had been his mother, there would have been an argument and she would have pushed his jacket at him as he got out of the car. As for Gillian, she didn’t notice what he wore, and if she did she didn’t have any opinions about it. Or maybe she did have opinions, but she didn’t express them. It was hard to tell. She didn’t comment about much of anything he did. He liked that, mostly, but sometimes it seemed weird, too. Sometimes he missed his mother’s constant intrusion, constant worrying—obsessing, yes, that’s what it was, obsessing—over every detail of his life. He stepped back into the doorway to get out of the wind. He was afraid to go inside in case Gillian drove up, didn’t see him, and drove away. He couldn’t imagine she’d actually get out of the car to look for him.

Mr. O’Connor, who ran the ice arena, came out with a bunch of keys in his hand. “You still here?” he asked.

“Just waiting for my ride,” said Paul.

“I’m turning out the lights now, locking up,” said Mr. O’Connor. “You going to be okay?”

“Sure,” said Paul. “They’ll be here any minute.” The word
they
was a nice, neutral word.

Mr. O’Connor was a red-faced man who, Paul had heard, had once been a professional hockey player but who looked as if he hadn’t done anything athletic in a few decades. He seemed to like Paul, but Paul didn’t know why. He didn’t know why anyone would ever like him.

“I’ll be heading over to Morse Hall after I’m done closing up here. So if you get stuck, come by and find me.”

“Thanks, Mr. O’Connor,” said Paul. Maybe Mr. O’Connor felt sorry for him. Maybe everyone did.

Paul watched the lights go out in the high windows of the arena. Mr. O’Connor came out and locked the doors behind him.

“See you later,” he said, and he waved at Paul.

“See you later,” said Paul. He watched Mr. O’Connor walk across the street. There were few cars coming at this time on a Sunday, so he didn’t go down to the crosswalk, just darted across the road as students were never supposed to do. Paul thought he might turn back and wave again, but he didn’t. He just raised his collar to the wind and kept walking.

The hockey rink was at the far end of the campus, and the campus now looked like a small, tidy village in the distance, with the chapel bell tower at the center of the green. It looked idyllic, as it did in the photographs in the brochure they sent out to prospective students. The buildings farther around on the campus were in a variety of styles, some modern, some just plain ugly, but the four original buildings around the quadrangle were Federal style, brick, lined up like officers in a military formation.

The Academy was a school that was half boarders, half day students, and Paul envied the boarders, not so much their being at The Academy 24/7 but their freedom from their families, and all that entailed. He’d never have been admitted as a boarder, though—those places were competitive and limited—and it was only because Gillian had connections—she’d been a guest writer there once—that he’d gotten in at all. If he stuck around for eleventh and twelfth grades, he’d want to be a boarder, for sure.

But it didn’t look as if he’d be there next year anyway, so it didn’t matter. He was pretty sure his mom would take him back, once she got over being so hurt that he’d chosen to spend this year with his dad and Gillian. But, hey, he might not have any choice anyway; his dad might decide he wouldn’t keep him for another year even if he wanted to stay. It all depended on Gillian, what she wanted, Paul knew that much. And he couldn’t tell about Gillian. Sometimes she was really nice to him, and sometimes she was kind of mean. Mostly she didn’t seem to notice him that much. They lived in the same house, but sometimes she seemed surprised by his presence.

Dried oak leaves blew across the parking lot, their pointed ends clawing across the pavement. Paul pulled his sleeves down over his hands. He imagined his dad getting home this evening and asking Gillian, “Where’s Paul?” and Gillian looking vague and confused and saying something like “Paul? I have no idea,” and his dad realizing it had been stupid of him to count on her to pick him up. By the time his dad got here, he’d be frozen, dead. Or maybe Mr. O’Connor would have come back to the building because he’d forgotten something and found his body just in time. Or maybe not. His mom would scream at his dad that it was all his fault. And although it was really Gillian’s fault, his dad would never yell at her. He never yelled at her about anything, just sometimes shook his head as if he should have known better.

Just then Paul recognized Gillian’s black pickup truck coming into the parking lot. It slowed by the entrance to the arena, and Paul leaped towards it and got in.

“You’d expect they’d leave some lights on,” said Gillian. “I almost drove past here.”

“They turned them off when everyone left, after practice,” said Paul.

Still Gillian didn’t get it. She obviously didn’t have any idea what time she was supposed to pick him up. No idea how long he had been waiting. No idea how cold it was.

“Your father certainly pays enough to this elite establishment,” said Gillian. “They could spend some of it on electricity.”

In the dark of the car, Paul looked at Gillian’s profile. Almost as if she sensed his eyes on her, she turned to him, and gave him a small smile. He couldn’t help himself; he smiled back.

“Were you waiting for me very long?” she asked.

“It’s okay,” said Paul. And, strangely, he meant it. It was okay. Because she did come. Because she hadn’t forgotten him. Because—because she smiled.

“You were, weren’t you?” asked Gillian.

“It wasn’t that long,” said Paul.

“I’m so sorry,” said Gillian. She leaned forward and touched the side of his cheek with three fingertips. Then she pulled out into the road.

“Once, when I was a child, I was waiting for my father to pick me up after a school play,” she said. “I waited until it got dark, but he never came, and I walked home. I was used to it. My father often didn’t turn up for things. It was a considerable walk, and as I walked my anger grew. When I got home, I discovered he had been taken to the hospital with a kidney stone attack, and I felt guilty, as if my anger had in some way contributed to his suffering. Guilt, the most complex of emotions.” Gillian was quiet for moment. Then she added, softly, “Do you know I’ve never told anyone else about this before.”

Paul wasn’t sure what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to make of the story itself, how it connected to Gillian’s being late this time—she hadn’t offered him an excuse, and certainly she wasn’t in the hospital. He also didn’t know what to make of her confidence. It wasn’t the first time she’d told him something she said she’d never told anyone else. Her confidences were like gifts, and whatever irritation he had felt towards Gillian disappeared.

Gillian didn’t seem to expect an answer. She turned on the CD player. “Vivaldi’s
Gloria,
” she said.

They drove home listening to
Laudamus te
—he knew it was Latin, but he wasn’t sure what it meant. The music pumped inside him, shook his bones. He felt, as he had on the previous occasions, privileged by her confession, and also unworthy of it. No one else in his life talked to him the way Gillian did. No one else talked like her at all.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Monday, when Paul and his dad, Jerry, were eating breakfast together, his dad set aside the newspaper and asked him about hockey practice.

“I’m still the worst one on the team,” said Paul.

“I wasn’t even good enough to make it on a team,” said Jerry.

“It’s not like they pick people for the team,” said Paul. “Everyone is put on some team. It’s like gym.”

“Even so,” said Jerry. “You know what you’re doing out there. I’ve seen you play.”

“Even a moron can know what they’re doing in hockey,” said Paul.

Jerry looked at Paul over the top of his reading glasses. “Maybe so, but let me tell you, not everyone can stay upright on those tricky skates.”

Paul didn’t tell his father that Gillian had been late picking him up. There was no point in it. Early that morning, even before he’d left for school, Gillian had driven off to her house on Cape Cod. She did this a lot—went off to write, either on the Cape or at various writers’ colonies. Jerry was always depressed when she left. He didn’t usually eat breakfast with Paul, but this morning he seemed eager for Paul’s company.

When Gillian returned from her writing retreats, Jerry was shamelessly happy. He’d bring home a bunch of flowers and set them in the vase on the side table, a vase that Paul’s mother had noticed once when she dropped Paul off and said, “So that’s where that vase went. I thought it had gotten broken when we sold the house, but I guess your father had it all these years.”

Jerry would cook a fancy dinner, humming to himself while he stirred pots on the stove, splattering the glass stove top with tomato sauce and wiping it off with a sponge so the water hissed. Once he’d had dinner all ready and then Gillian had called to say she wasn’t coming home that night.

“She’s involved in working on something, and if she takes a break from it she’ll lose it,” Jerry said. His voice had no anger in it, just a touch of disappointment. It wasn’t so much that he resigned himself to the tyranny of Gillian’s poetry but that he encouraged it. He protected Gillian’s writing time and inspiration as much as he protected Gillian herself. Paul and Jerry ate the dinner in the den that night while they watched a movie, and when Gillian got home, two days later, she and Jerry went out to eat.

A small van picked Paul up in the morning and brought him back from school in the afternoon. The only problem was, when there was a late after-school activity, he needed to get a ride. If Gillian was gone for the week and Jerry couldn’t get him, Paul had to get a classmate’s parent to give him a ride. He was already indebted to too many of them.

Monday, Paul got home a few hours before his father. Jerry called to say he would pick up Chinese takeout on his way home and asked Paul to phone in the order. Paul found the menu in the drawer in the kitchen and was looking through it, trying to decide between moo-shi pork and moo-shi chicken, when the phone rang again.

“Is this Gillian Coit’s home?” asked a male voice.

“Uh-huh.”

“May I speak with her?”

“She’s not here,” said Paul.

“This is Adam Freytoch, a friend of hers. Who’s this?”

“Paul.”

It was obvious that Adam didn’t recognize the name, so Paul added, “Her stepson.”

“Oh. Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Not for a few days,” he said.

“She left something here at my house after a meeting on Sunday. Know how I can get in touch with her? I know she doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“She’s gone to the Cape,” said Paul. “There’s a phone at the house. I could give you that number if I can find it.”

“That would be great,” said Adam.

The number, in his dad’s handwriting, was written across the front page of the leather address book Paul found in the drawer. It said “Cottage:” and the phone number. Gillian called it her cottage, but in fact it was more like a house.

Paul read the number off to Adam.

“Do you know where it is exactly?” asked Adam.

“In Truro,” said Paul. “I don’t know the street. I don’t think it has a street, just some dirt road. Kind of on a marsh I think.”

He had been there only once, when he was younger, when Gillian and his dad had gotten married. He and his dad and his sister, Jennifer, had stayed in a motel and then gone to the house for the wedding. Jennifer had cried the whole time. That’s what he remembered most: Jennifer crying, and his dad getting pissed at her and finally yelling, “Enough! Stop, please,” and Jennifer saying, “You can’t make me!” He had to go get her out of the bathroom when it was time for the ceremony. The house was really old, and there was a moldy smell in the bathroom. There were vases of lilacs everywhere, and the house smelled of lilacs, but there was still a moldy smell in the bathroom.

“Well, thanks,” said Adam. “If she calls, please let her know that I’m trying to get in touch with her. Tell her she left a folder by the side of her chair. I’m sure she’ll want it.”