the Writing Circle (2010) (11 page)

“One question I have, Chris,” said Bernard, when Chris was done reading, “what do you have against beagles?”

“Nothing,” said Chris.

“Than why make a deprecatory statement about them?”

“What are you, some kind of defender of beagles?” asked Chris.

Bernard did one of his exaggerated inhales, as if he were a baritone about to favor them with a cadenza from the
Messiah
. “A beagle was a part of my family when I was a boy,” he said. “It was a reliable and handsomely patterned dog. Not a breed to be ridiculed.”

“I didn’t know you had a beagle!” exclaimed Virginia. “All those years! The only dog you ever spoke of from your childhood was that dog Maisie.”

“Maisie
was
a beagle,” said Bernard.

Virginia smiled, but not so Bernard could see. “I would never have guessed,” she said.

“What kind of dog do we all picture with the young Bernard?” asked Gillian.

Chris waved his arms as if he were an umpire calling a foul. “I believe we were discussing my novel,” he said.

“Oh, Chris,” said Gillian. “You can cede the limelight for a minute.”

“I imagined a dog with”—Virginia chose her words carefully—“stature. A komondor, perhaps, or a Great Pyrenees or a Russian wolfhound.”

“But it was called Maisie,” said Adam. People seemed surprised to hear him speak. “That’s kind of a commonplace name.”

“If I recall, it was named for the Henry James character, so it did have literary pretensions,” said Virginia. When Adam looked as if he wasn’t sure what she was referring to, she added, kindly, “the novel
What Maisie Knew.
”

“I always liked that novel,” said Nancy. “It’s a manageable size for Henry James.”

“Of his shorter works,
The Spoils of Poynton
is by far his best,” said Gillian. “And Bernard could have named his dog Fleda Vetch.”

“No canine should be named Fleda Vetch,” said Bernard, and turning to Virginia he said, “A beagle may be a dog of modest size, but it does have stature.”

“I’d like to remind you all that it is currently my turn,” said Chris. “Does anyone have a comment about what I recently read?”

“I have a comment about your notions of taste and wealth,” Gillian said. “They seem—well—somewhat predictable.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Chris.

“Solid cherry table, not veneer.”

“Veneer can convey taste and wealth,” said Bernard. “Think of the detailing in those magnificent Federal highboys.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Chris. He looked around at the group, as if for help, and fastened his gaze on Nancy.

“I thought the description of the thirsty dog was quite effective,” she said. “About the table—I wonder whether your character Dreever would notice that sort of detail.”

“I think he would,” said Adam. “He’s a detective, he’s trained himself to observe detail.”

“What I’m asking is not so much does he notice detail,” said Nancy, “but is he the kind of man who would know the distinction between veneer and solid wood?”

“I think he is,” said Virginia. “Part of the appeal of Chris’s character is that he has an artistic, more feminine side.”

“I should ask you to write a blurb for me,” said Chris.

“I’d certainly be happy to,” said Virginia, “but my name wouldn’t carry much weight on your book jacket—and besides, you hardly need blurbs. Dreever seems to have a fan club of his own.”

Chris looked pleased but was trying not to show that he was.

“Stop preening, Chris,” said Gillian. “The success of your series proves only that people will read anything these days.”

Virginia gave Gillian a look of reproach, but Chris grinned. “I love it when Gillian’s envy flares,” he said.

“Nancy, you’re new to the group,” said Bernard, “and I would be distressed if you took this childish competitiveness as a sign that we aren’t all deeply supportive of each other’s literary”—and at this word he gave Gillian a severe look—“efforts.”

“Hear, hear!” said Chris.

“Perhaps it’s time we moved ahead,” said Virginia. “Nancy?”

Nancy gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. “Would you prefer it if I went next?” Virginia asked gently. Nancy nodded. Gratitude rose inside her. She hadn’t realized how it could be an actual physical sensation, but now it spread through her like warmth; she could feel it in her thighs, in her hands, in her fingers. It wasn’t just the question of having them listen to and comment on her prose, it was the question of opening her book up to them, this secret part of her life, which no one except Oates had been privy to. It was laying bare all the labor of her making things up—for writing fiction was that, an exhausting amount of fabrication, as if you were a criminal on the stand, spinning lies, each one linked to another.

Virginia’s previous and successful book had been about the Middle Ages, and Nancy was amazed to realize that Virginia, whom she had assumed would spend the rest of her writing career embedded in the period in which she’d invested so many years of research, had moved on to Ancient Greece, an entirely different culture, place, and century. But there was a clarity and sureness—is that what it was?—to Virginia’s prose that made it seem as if she had devoted her entire life to the world of Agamemnon.

It was clear to Nancy from the discussion afterwards that everyone admired Virginia’s work. Everyone, except Adam, had something to say. Nancy couldn’t help wondering if they really knew about Ancient Greece or had boned up in anticipation of Virginia reading her chapter so they could show off at the meeting.

“You know, Ginny, I don’t remember our doing Mycenae. Was it on that trip to Crete?” asked Bernard.

“I never went to Mycenae with you,” said Virginia. “I went with my mother when I was eighteen. And I went with Joe, two years ago.”

“Oh,” said Bernard, his face still puzzled. “But we did Delphi, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” said Virginia. “Though it’s not like lunch, Bernie. One doesn’t
do
Delphi.”

Bernard ignored Virginia’s comment and looked at Adam. “We haven’t heard anything from you,” he said.

“It all sounded great,” said Adam. “Nothing to suggest changing.”

Nancy turned towards a sound coming from Gillian. It was her boot rubbing against the leg of her chair. Nancy looked up and caught a small, calm smile on Gillian’s face, then looked quickly back at Adam. She’d been wrong earlier, she realized. It wasn’t that Adam was hopelessly in love with Gillian; there was definitely something between them.

“Let’s go on to Nancy, then, why don’t we?” said Virginia.

When Nancy was in sixth grade she gave an oral report to her class on the solar system. Behind her, leaning against the blackboard, was the poster board she had made, which featured all the planets in cutout silver paper stapled (the glue hadn’t held) on the black background. When she’d practiced reading it at home, the pages flapped in her unsteady hands, and her father had suggested she hold her notebook underneath them. In front of the classroom, the taste of her poorly digested breakfast in her mouth, she’d dutifully lectured her classmates on Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, her finger pinched between the metal spirals of the notebook, the secret way she’d discovered to keep herself from panic.

She thought of that now. She held her manuscript on top of the folder she’d brought and pressed her fingertip against the sharp end of the paper clip. As she read, she saw it all, as if she were in a movie theater and had plunged through the two dimensions of the screen into the world beyond it. She was in the hospital lobby, lurking in the dark against the wall, watching the young doctor walk past. He did not see her. He had her father’s stature, but his face, which may have originally been based on a photograph of her father when he’d been young, was a face that she had shaped in her mind so it became the face of a different man, a man she had never seen except in her imagination. She watched him as he passed through the door at the side of the hospital’s revolving doors, and, invisible still, she followed him and watched as he walked out to his car in the parking lot, got in, and drove away.

She looked up when she was done reading, and the scene in her novel was replaced by the room around her, the faces of Virginia, Bernard, Chris, Adam, and Gillian. She looked down again quickly. It was too late now. There was no taking back what she had laid out. No way of making her novel her secret again.

Bernard was the first to speak. “Compelling,” he said. “You drew me right in.”

“Got me, too,” said Chris. “It’s a great opening. Getting that dead baby onstage right at the start.”

“You write so beautifully,” said Virginia. “We can picture the scene exactly. And we feel empathy for your character. Which is, of course, the most important thing.”

Gillian seemed about to speak, and the comfort Nancy had accrued from Bernard’s, Chris’s, and Virginia’s words evaporated in an instant. “Gillian’s the one you need to watch out for especially,” Chris had said.

“Yes, we do feel some empathy,” said Gillian, “but we’re left with only a suggestion of what went wrong. Not that the narrator’s a tease—I wouldn’t accuse you of such a cheap trick—but there’s something withheld here that seems artificially withheld. The narrator knows what went on, how this baby died, but isn’t saying.”

“Isn’t saying
yet,
” said Chris. “This is only the first chapter, right, Nancy?” He looked at her. Nancy nodded.

“I understand that,” said Gillian, “but while Chris talks about getting the dead baby onstage, I think we need to get the main issue onstage.”

“What do you think the main issue is?” asked Bernard.

“Guilt,” said Gillian. “We need to know what this doctor did that went wrong. We need to understand why he’s tormented, why he feels so guilty.”

“But he doesn’t feel guilty,” said Nancy.

“That’s even better,” said Gillian. “But we still need to know why he
should
feel guilty, we need to know how he messed up.”

“But the reason he doesn’t feel guilty,” said Nancy, “is that he didn’t mess up. It’s not his fault at all.”

“Then whose fault is it?” asked Gillian.

“It’s no one’s fault,” said Nancy. “It just happened.”

“Is there a malpractice suit?”

“No, nothing like that,” said Nancy.

“Then where’s your story?” asked Gillian.

“That’s a Chris question,” said Bernard, “isn’t it?”

“I think there’s the start of a story here,” said Chris.

“Maybe Nancy isn’t interested in a conventional plot,” said Virginia. “Maybe this is really a novel about character.”

“But if, as Nancy says, ‘it just happened,’ then we’re not really talking about character, are we?” said Gillian.

“Of course we could be talking about character,” said Virginia. “We could be interested in how the character responds to what happened.”

“Guilt,” said Gillian, “is the most interesting emotion. If there’s no guilt here, I don’t know what drives the character, what drives the narrative.”

“You know, you amaze me, Gillian,” said Chris. “You’re a great poet—we all know that—but you’ve never written a line of fiction. How can you sit there and talk about driving a narrative?”

“I may be a poet rather than a fiction writer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand fiction,” said Gillian. “Perhaps you don’t read beyond your genre, Chris, but please entertain the possibility that some of the rest of us do.”

“Could we all be less contentious, please?” asked Bernard. “This is getting into an old battleground, and I don’t think it’s beneficial to Nancy.”

“It might be useful for us to know what stage the book is at,” said Virginia. “It’s different if we’re hearing a first chapter of a novel that is already finished in draft, or if it’s a novel that has just been begun. Nancy?”

“I haven’t finished the book,” said Nancy. “But I’ve thought it through to the end. I mean, I know where it’s headed. I know who my main character is and what he’s going to do.”

“You’re writing about a doctor,” said Chris. “Do you know anything about that world?”

“My husband’s a doctor,” said Gillian. “And I can tell you, it certainly is a special world.”

“My grandfather was a doctor,” said Nancy, “and my father had been a doctor when he was young.”