Darling? (11 page)

“First, a brief orientation,” said Phyllis brightly. “This is the Old County Courthouse—the oldest courthouse in continuous use in this country. We are currently awaiting National Historic Status, which would require that the roof be returned to the original slate. Slate, as you know, is expensive…”

These workshops, my “Aspects of the Short Story,” and the afternoon “Poetry of Instinct” had been developed to provide cash for the renovations. Phyllis, a collector of early American antiques, was treasurer of the Swansea Historical Society. Her husband was in advertising and knew what people will pay for: if you promise a woman you will develop her ineffable inner substance into a source of income and pride, she’ll be good for a thousand at least. Thus the Cranberry Coast Writers’ Conference was born. Once Phyllis got talking about the building she forgot creative writing entirely, and it wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when, speaking of the cost of replacing the old furnace, she stole a glance at the cash box, and she remembered why the rest of us were there.

“Well,” she said, “that’s something about the courthouse, now let’s go around and everybody can introduce herself.”

The door opened and a small, enormously fat woman entered, dressed in a yellow polka-dot shift and very pretty in spite of her immensity, with rosy cheeks and a fringe of black curls escaping under her straw hat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to take a cab—I’m afraid to drive at night. Back home in Louisiana, I live right in the middle of town and I just walk.”

She settled happily onto a chair that seemed ill-designed to hold her, and during the moment of collective suspense while we all awaited its collapse, introduced herself as Lucy DesRochers of East Sourwood, Louisiana. “I know I can write,” she said. “They’ve always told me I was a natural writer, back home. Since my divorce I’ve been teaching kindergarten, but I want to develop a writing business so I can work out of my home. My pastor thinks I have a real talent for words, that I should be writing children’s books. But I need to know the markets. Back home in Louisiana, we aren’t savvy on these things.” She spoke in a confiding, girlish drawl as if everyone she’d ever met had loved her, wanted to protect her. I did, too.

“Writing for children is pretty far out of my field…” I said.

“Marketing,” Phyllis interrupted, “is marketing. I’m sure some of your marketing knowledge is applicable to the children’s markets.”

“I don’t really have a lot of marketing knowledge,” I said with a laugh. I’d refused to have blurbs on my book because I find the whole blurb thing so revolting, only to be left enduring the appalled silence of people who looked as it with its blank jacket as if it were a poor deformed baby. A similar silence fell now—I’d admitted an ignorance so shocking it could not possibly be true.

Joy, a Professor of Culture Studies in Arkansas, was also interested in marketing, particularly for serious fiction. She hit the word
serious
in a way that alarmed me, and I wished she wasn’t sitting beside Lucy, because this made her look even thinner and more pallid than she was—her hair, her complexion, and her clothing were colorless as oatmeal and one felt she might have been given her name as a rebuke. “I know there’s a novel in me,” she said. “I just need to get it out on the page.”

There was a novel in Linda, too—a medical thriller about a gang of rogue surgeons who slip knockout drops into people’s drinks and steal their kidneys for resale on the organ black market. “I’d have written it down,” she said, “but I’ve got scheduling problems. I work nights, and I take care of my husband during the day. It’s his back—I mean that’s what we thought, but it turned out to be ALS and he needs to have me there. Not that it’s so bad, there’s a lot worse things—you don’t have any pain with ALS, your mind doesn’t go, only your muscles, until you can’t, you know, swallow…”

“So. You’re interested in the medical fiction market,” Phyllis interrupted, and turned to Mattie, who said proudly that she was sixty-five. There was no novel in Mattie—there was a guide for the middle-aged divorcée.

“It’s really a series of short stories—chapters, I mean,” she said, holding the manuscript out in both hands as if she loved its weight. I scanned the contents: “Adultery: It’s Not Just in the Bible” and “Life on $65.00 a Week” caught my eye.

“I’m hoping for mass market,” she said. “My youngest goes to college this year.”

And finally Melanie, the only one who wanted to write stories: with a baby you don’t get much time to yourself, so she needed something she could work on during an afternoon nap.

“It looks like it’s going to be a
terrific
class,” Phyllis said, “so let’s hear from our teacher.” She read out my resume—most impressive—I could hardly wait to meet the illustrious author. “… someone who can really give us the lowdown on what we need to stay on the cutting edge of the literary business today,” she said decisively, and five notebooks opened, five pens were poised. Drinks and cheese, she’d said—I’d expected a cocktail party. I had nothing prepared.

“They say fiction writing can’t be taught,” I began, feeling a terrible cold draft from Phyllis’s direction. “And, of course, that’s true. Still, to be able to sit down with other writers, to think and talk about each other’s work” (though, I remembered, they hardly had any work yet, but in a few days, when those novels started to blossom…), “to consider the author’s deepest intention and see how he or she—er, she, has brought it to life, where she’s succeeded, where she might do better…” and I was off. I’d forgotten how much I knew, and cared, in fact I’d forgotten who I was: I’d come to think of myself as the person whose baby grew in on itself and had to be surgically removed. Now here I was quoting Melville: “Why do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilize it!”; demonstrating how Flaubert tapped his sentences out on his writing table; trying to illuminate the larger meaning of “write what you know.”

Thinking, what if they don’t know anything? But the bulk of their collective knowledge would be immense; they’d seen as much birth, death, character, and fate as Sophocles. Whatever it was that had constricted Joy until she spoke in a monotone and seemed to have nothing left in her
except
a novel must be worthy of a novel itself, and Linda, who could happily describe the uplifting aspects of watching one’s husband die of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, must have just the kind of maverick authority a narrator needs to grab a reader and point out the things he’s overlooked all his life. I got excited, thinking I’d draw all their talents out of them and they’d be amazed with themselves.

“No ideas but in things,” I said. “That’s William Carlos Williams. Can you see what he means? If you were describing this room what detail would you choose first? And why?”

They pulled back from the table as if they were trying to hide behind each other. After a long silence Melanie peeped, “The thrones, maybe?”

“Okay!” I said. “And why?”

Marge, looking fed up with the blather, turned to me and asked, sharply: “You
will
discuss marketing?”

The pencils went still; their hungry faces turned to me. I calculated: they’d paid five hundred dollars apiece for this class, money that could still be refunded if they asked for it now. Then they could buy shoes with it, or books, or put it toward medical care or their children’s education.

I took a deep breath.

“There is no market for literary fiction,” I said, incurring two incredulous and five uncomprehending stares; it was like saying there was no God. “And even if there was ‘a market,’ even if
anyone
had a prayer of making money from short stories, the only way to do it would be to follow your natural instincts, your own idiosyncracy—then throw yourself on the mercy of the marketplace and hope for a piece of incredible luck—that you’ve told a story people are interested in right now.” Behind the swinging door in the kitchenette, I heard a swell of whispering and a clattering of plates. Champagne, I thought, would help wash this news down.

“Well, surely you can give them some names and addresses, dear,” said Phyllis. “I mean, we clearly said
marketing
in the brochure.” How had Phyllis and I become a
we
all of a sudden? “After all,
you’ve
been published…” she said.

“So you have to admit it can happen,” said Lucy brightly.

“Because it
did
happen, to you,” Melanie added, gesturing toward the copy of my book that Phyllis had been holding up for them. Her voice was so sweet and full of hope and admiration that there seemed no choice but to fulfill her dreams.

I felt obligated to tell them that I wasn’t exactly feeding my family with the proceeds from my stories—in fact the publisher no sooner bought the book than they started acting as if they’d done it out of generosity, and by now I was inclined to agree. Reading a story is like taking a drop of rubbing alcohol on your tongue—at first it seems like nothing but when it starts to work it curdles every cell. All the longings, the prayers unanswered that drive us through our lives, the ironies we slip on so hilariously—isn’t it just better to put them out of one’s mind? Novels have long skeins of character in great sweeps of history; in movies lovemaking looks as beautiful as it feels; in poems one smooth stone might equal redemption and paintings have color at the very least, a sculpture can give you a pang of desire just like a man … No, a story is a grim thing … to publish one is a kindness, to publish a whole book full is pure philanthropy.

But my students hoped to gather up the scraps and shards of their lives and fit them together into something beautiful and whole, to reclaim their sufferings as art. They had no language for this ambition, so they talked about fame—and, of course, money, the need of which they knew sorely well. The most immediate source of it was the cash box now resting under Marge’s vigilant hands. Surely Phyllis didn’t want to take the bread out of these women’s mouths just to put a slate roof on the courthouse? I glanced at her, thinking she’d understand and in a minute there’d be refunds all around, but her whole being was involved in a frown.

The kitchen door swung open, and two very gentle, worried-looking ladies emerged on tiptoe with a tray of Oreos and Fig Newtons, and several gallons of Coke. “Now,” said one, “what can we pour you, Diet or Classic?”

Coca-Cola—Phyllis told me aside—supplied the soda for free. The champagne glasses I’d seen were props for the theater company. For us there was Coke, cookies donated by Nabisco, and a dietetic cheese. Raising her voice, she asked “How much did
Yankee
pay you for the story you published there? I’ll bet that was several hundred right there.” Everyone gathered around me. Yes, I said, but
Yankee
is one of six or seven magazines that pay at all, and even those …

“Now, I’m sure a hardheaded businesswoman like yourself can give us more suggestions than
that,
” said Phyllis, as if I must be saving all the really good opportunities for myself.

“No, really,” I said.

“I just love your
shirt,
” Melanie said, rubbing the fabric between her fingers as if the stuff might confer magical powers, and they gathered around me, examining my clothes, my hair, as if
I
was the thing they’d come to study. The shirt was from the thrift shop, of course—having money is embarrassing enough without going around spending it, too.

Lucy, seeming in a trance, said, “I think I could make myself a shirt like this,” and turned over a button to see how it was attached, asking, “Does
Yankee
pay on acceptance, or publication?”

“Just one thing,” Phyllis said, taking me aside again. “Lettie’s husband has Alzheimer’s, so he usually comes in with her during the day—she’ll be here to make your lunch, you know. He’s very quiet, he won’t cause you any trouble. I just didn’t want you to be alarmed.”

*   *   *

His name was Arthur, and when I arrived the next morning I found him slumped in the larger of the two thrones. The day was scorching, but the windows were painted obdurately shut.

“No one else has complained,” Phyllis said, seeming to imply that for the sake of a thousand dollars most people would be willing to stop breathing for a week, and to feel that in addition to greed and obstinacy I was now displaying an unfortunate tendency toward invalidism. I told her I was worried about Arthur, who obligingly lifted his huge, ashen head for a moment, then let it fall back to his chest.

“Well, if you’d like to take up a collection, I’d be happy to go pick up a fan,” Phyllis said, but Lettie emerged from the kitchen with an ancient one she’d found among the props. Her step was light as if she feared her slightest movement would disturb us, and she spoke quietly, to herself all the time—narrating a gentle, ironic version of each moment the way someone else might knit something to pull up around her shoulders on a cold night.

“Yes, a breeze,” she said, plugging the fan in. “A breeze is better…” and enumerating the odd lots as she passed them: “silk peonies, of course, a garden gate, Arthur, a bushel of Mylar snowflakes, and—oh!—a mirror, a mirror, how unkind!” She turned away from it and went back to the kitchen, while Melanie, who had been watching me watch her, smiled sadly as if she knew just what I was thinking.

Ten minutes had passed, three hours and fifty minutes to go. Ordinarily I would talk about the students’ manuscripts, but neither Linda nor Joy had submitted one and Mattie’s book was several hundred pages of advice about how to stay cheerful and pleasant while recognizing that your husband of twenty years is having an affair and that you are tilting, loveless and penniless, into old age.

Lucy’s piece appeared to be a eulogy for her father, and Melanie’s began: “It was a perfect, cloudless day, and our oars cut into the river like knives going through deep-green butter.” Best to find a modest goal: I decided that by the time they were finished with my class on the short story, they would all know what a short story was.

I drew a diagram of a conventional plot on the blackboard. Already I heard the women making lunch in the kitchen—what could it be, that they would start so early?