the Writing Circle (2010) (10 page)

“Oh,” said Nancy’s father. “When did this happen?”

“I’ve been thinking about it since the start of the semester.”

“Michigan’s not the place for you?”

“It’s not the university. I just don’t want to do a Ph.D. I’ll stay through spring semester since I have my teaching fellowship, but that’s it.”

“You don’t like math anymore?”

“It’s not that—”

“You’re not giving up on it because it’s getting hard?”

“No. Actually, it’s not really hard. I’m good at it, Daddy.” She looked at him, and he took his eyes off the road to turn towards her full face. “It’s just that it’s not what I want to be doing with my life.”

“I see,” he said. Then he asked, “Is there something else you’d rather be doing?”

“I’d like to write.”

He didn’t speak right away. “Do you have something in particular you’d like write?”

“A novel.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, she added, “I’m not sure what it’s about yet, but there are some characters I began writing about in my short story course in college. I want to do more with them.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, quickly, “I’m applying to MFA programs.”

He didn’t respond right away.

“Is that okay?” she asked.

“Of course it’s okay.”

“Mom won’t be happy.”

“It’s not her decision,” said Nancy’s father. “It’s yours.”

Nancy cleared a small porthole on the window so she could look out. They were driving on an overpass over a river, but the gorge was thick with mist, and she knew a river curled below only because she’d seen it before.

“Was being a doctor Yiya and Papou’s decision? Is that why you weren’t happy with it?” she asked.

“No, it was my decision,” said her father. “They’d always hoped I’d be a doctor—but they didn’t push me; I was the one who pushed myself. I was so uncertain of what I myself wanted, it was easy to be guided by their certainty, by what they wanted for me.”

“So when did you realize you wanted to do something else?”

“It wasn’t until I was actually in a practice. It was all right being pre-med in college. I hated medical school, but I managed to get through it, and I got through my residency. And after all that work, it made sense to just keep going. So I did.”

And then he told her about the dead baby. About the night that his life changed. She’d never heard anything about it before. For most of her childhood she’d had only a vague idea that sometime in his past her father had had a different job, that when he’d been young, before he married her mother, he’d been a doctor. It wasn’t discussed. All she knew was that being a doctor hadn’t suited him.

She didn’t know then that she would ever write about it. She didn’t file it away thinking: someday I’ll use this, there’s a novel here. She didn’t know then she would ever write about her father. All she knew then was that her father had told her something about himself that she had never guessed at, that he had revealed something that illuminated so much of him, the way he was.

“You left medicine because you’d made a mistake,” she said. “But don’t a lot of doctors make a mistake sometime in their career, especially when they’re young?”

“Oh no,” said her father. “That wasn’t it at all. I hadn’t made a mistake. I could have lived with that. I could, eventually, have forgiven myself if it had been my fault. It might even have made me a better doctor. I was young and would have learned from it. Its grief could have served me. No, it was that it was not my fault, it was the fault of medicine itself. The baby could not have been saved. And that’s why I left.”

“I don’t get it,” said Nancy. “If it wasn’t your fault—”

“I was up against something too big. I felt powerless. I realized there would be conditions—not just that one—that could never be cured. Babies would die. People would suffer. And even the most brilliant, the most diligent, even the luckiest doctor could not save them.” His voice rose on the word
luckiest.

He paused for a moment. His voice was softer now. “We think we know so much about the human body, but we know so little. Most of it is a mystery, still. I couldn’t spend my life in a profession where I toiled against such odds.”

She understood then why he was the kind of teacher he was. Why he’d gone off each day with the leather satchel with the repaired handle, his head not square over his shoulders but nosing forward, eager at the prospect of what lay ahead. Why, when he had settled at the kitchen table with a pile of yellow test papers before him, he ruffled through them and straightened the pile like a cardplayer handling a deck of cards, pushed the sleeves of his plaid shirt up on his wrists, took a sip of coffee, and gave a little grunt of pleasure at the enterprise that awaited him. Why he had beamed when the clerk at the hardware store who got up on the ladder to reach a dehumidifier for them turned out to be a former student, and said, “Hey, Mr. Markopolis, great to see you!”

But her father’s story of the dead baby was there, growing in secret, waiting for her. Waiting for her to get years away from it. Waiting for her to have become a mother and held her own live baby in her arms, imagined what it would be like to lose it. Waiting for her father to die and for her to have gotten past the sharp grief of losing him.

It wasn’t until Nancy had deposited Aliki at college freshman year and come home to confront what her life had become that her new novel began to emerge.

In Aliki’s bedroom, she turned right-side-out a sweatshirt abandoned on the back of a chair, folded it, and put it in a drawer. She straightened a mobile of paper birds that had been knocked off-balance, and collected a shoe that had been left half under the bed and reunited it with its mate in the closet. But the room, tidied, seemed robbed of its last bit of life, and Nancy was immediately sorry she’d touched anything. She retreated down the hall to her study. She sat at her desk and looked out towards the river.

When Nancy had gone away to college, her mother had made quite a fuss about how much she would be missing her, but it was only recently that Nancy learned how her father had felt then.

“He was simply undone,” Nancy’s mother told her. “I thought he was with your brother out in the garage. When I went to call them to dinner, your father wasn’t there. I found him upstairs in your bedroom. He was sitting there, at the foot of your bed. He’d been sitting, just looking at your empty room, ever since we’d gotten back to the house. ‘I’m trying to get used to this new phase of my life’ is what he told me.”

“This new phase of my life.” The words hovered in Nancy’s mind. One grief tugged at another. Her new loss compounded her old one. Aliki had defected—as Nancy certainly wanted her to—by growing up. Her father had defected by dying. He was not here for her now, to listen to her, to help her come to terms with what her life had become.

She thought about that car ride they’d taken together years before, the way he’d listened to her as she told him she’d decided to change her life. She began thinking about the story he’d told her, about the decision he had made and the way his own life had changed. She’d never quite thought of it as a story before, but now it began to take the shape of one. She’d never separated her father from a character that might be drawn from him, but slowly this character began to emerge for her. His story pulled her in. She started to picture the character as a young doctor, leaving the hospital that night. She began to imagine the jacket he might be wearing, the feel of the glass door he leaned against, the overgrown pine trees in the hospital parking lot. She started to write.

VIRGINIA’S HOUSE,
where the meeting took place, was the only house in the neighborhood of large, gracious homes that was in need of a paint job, that had a shutter askew. English ivy had claimed part of the brick façade and gotten a stronghold on the gutters. Junipers, which had been intended as foundation plantings, had been allowed to grow in whatever direction they pleased. Nancy had to stick to the far side of the path to escape their itchy branches as she walked up to the front door.

The man who answered the door introduced himself as Virginia’s husband, Joe.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not joining you folks today. I’m just on doorman duty. You can leave your things in the library.” The room he showed her to had bookcases on each wall, but they were inadequate for the job. Books were wedged in sideways and were piled up on the floor. The edges of the drapes and the arms of the sofas looked as if they had been clawed, and the room smelled of cat.

She was the first one to arrive, but Gillian and Bernard came soon after. Nancy took a chair with a high back and wooden armrests. She thought she would feel more confident reading if she was propped upright rather than low on a sofa. She was sorry now she had chosen the skirt. Virginia was wearing slacks (short enough so her brightly colored socks were revealed when she sat down), and Gillian was wearing jeans and scuffed, though obviously expensive, boots.

“Chris may be delayed,” said Virginia. “He spent last night in jail.”

Gillian let out a hoot. “Jail! This is too good,” she said. “What did he do? Wait, let me guess—”

“It’s nothing Chris did,” said Virginia. “His lawyer missed a deadline for filing some papers about child support. And there was a backup at the prison getting bail.”

“Chris in jail,” said Gillian, and she gave a broad smile. One of her front teeth was a little crooked. She must not have had braces as a kid, thought Nancy. Although she had always assumed Gillian came from a background of wealth, she wondered now if that was true.

“Be kind,” said Bernard, and he wagged his finger at Gillian.

“You know I’m never kind,” said Gillian.

When Chris arrived, he didn’t look as pink as he had when Nancy had met him for lunch.

“I spent the night in a prison gymnasium,” Chris told them. “Cots in three rows running from one basketball hoop to the other. Fluorescent lights glaring. Must have been a few hundred guys in there.”

“It sounds as if you have acquired some tidbits for your new book,” said Gillian.

“More than enough,” said Chris. “And if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk any more about it now.”

“Of course,” said Virginia. “Chris, I believe you have a chapter for us. And Nancy will be reading from her new book. And I have a chapter, myself.”

“I don’t think we should wait any longer for Adam,” said Bernard. But they didn’t have to, because Adam turned up, as if on cue. He sat down on the other side of Virginia. He, more than Chris, looked as if he had spent the night in a gymnasium in a jail.

“Everything all right?” Virginia asked.

“Sure,” said Adam, but he didn’t say he was sorry for being late. He looked around the circle, and Nancy noticed him pause at Gillian, then pull his glance away. Oh no, she thought, poor guy’s in love with Gillian. It didn’t surprise her.

“Nancy, would you like to begin,” Virginia asked, “or would you prefer someone else to?”

“Oh, someone else,” said Nancy. She wanted to go first to get it over with, but she didn’t feel ready to read yet.

“Then why don’t we begin with Chris,” said Virginia.

“Fine by me,” said Chris. He was obviously eager to read, had already removed the paper clip from his sheaf of pages.

“Sorry, folks, I didn’t make copies for you,” he said. “This is first draft, hot off the press. Just wrote it.” He summarized the plot of his novel so far for Nancy’s benefit, then launched his new chapter. It was fast-paced, but Nancy was worried about her own reading and had to force herself to pay close attention. Chris’s main character, a retired journalist on a small-town newspaper, was the same in all Chris’s novels, and Nancy could see why they were a success. He would have just the right appeal for a certain kind of female reader—a tough guy on the surface but with the requisite introspective quality and some necessary flaws. Someone had once pointed out that the only narrator you can’t create is one who is more intelligent than yourself, but what surprised Nancy was that Chris’s narrator showed a sensitivity she would never have guessed Chris capable of.

“There’s certainly plenty of action,” said Gillian when Chris seemed to be done reading, “but, once again, I have to question if the violence is gratuitous or if it serves to enhance the novel.”

“It does serve to further the plot,” said Bernard.

“Perhaps, then, we should talk about the plot,” said Gillian.

“Hold on,” said Chris, “I’m not done yet.” He turned back to his manuscript.