the Writing Circle (2010) (3 page)

“I hear Bernard,” said Virginia. “I guess we’ll be able to start.”

They headed back into the living room. Bernard greeted Virginia with a kiss on the cheek. He took Nancy’s hand and clasped his other over it.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for my tardiness,” he said.

“Of course,” said Nancy.

“It’s all right, Bernie,” said Virginia. “Nobody expects you to be on time. Nancy will learn like the rest of us.”

Bernard seemed genuinely surprised. “I didn’t realize it was perceived as a chronic flaw,” he said.

“Don’t look so sorrowful,” said Virginia, and she slipped her arm into his. “We love you just the same.”

And she did love Bernard. Not the way she loved Joe, and not the way she’d loved Bernard when they were young and newly married. Then, she had loved him fiercely. She’d loved him, but she’d also been infuriated by him. He had been verbally passionate, but in bed he was lethargic. He was pompous, babyish about basic things, impractical, slovenly, and selectively unworldly. Oh—the list went on. But now that she was no longer married to him, now that she was happily married to Joe, the love she felt for Bernard was undamaged by frustration. Everything she didn’t like about Bernard was Aimee’s to deal with. No marriage counseling could have ironed out all their difficulties as a couple as neatly, as successfully as their divorce and realignment had done.

In the living room Bernard sat on the sofa with Nancy, Virginia took the chair beside him, and Gillian positioned herself across from them. Adam pulled two more chairs up to the circle.

“Perhaps it’s time for us to get going,” said Gillian. “Chris,” she called into the kitchen, “could you honor us with your presence?”

Chris came into the room and took the chair next to Gillian’s, sliding it close so the wooden arms touched. “Here I am,” he said.

Virginia looked at Nancy’s face to see her reaction, but Nancy had her eyes on Bernard.

N
ANCY SETTLED BACK INTO ADAM’S SOFA AND SET HER CUP
on the table at the side. The sofa was covered in a paisley print spread that looked like a remnant from the seventies. She could almost smell the marijuana of her youth in the fabric.

Nancy had brought part of the manuscript of her novel, but she immediately realized it was a mistake: she was not going to be asked to read any of it. She tucked the tote bag in close against her feet. She didn’t want anyone to know how presumptuous she’d been. This was the first time any part of the novel had been out of her house, and it seemed defenseless, vulnerable. She pressed her calves against the tote bag, sheltered the pages inside between her legs and the skirt of the sofa.

She wished now that she had taken a glass of wine. The warmth of the tea was comforting in her hands, but seeing Gillian in the chair across from her, her long fingers banding the stem of her wineglass, made Nancy feel like a kid in comparison, clutching her clunky mug.

Bernard might have explained to Nancy how things worked, how they took turns in a particular order, presenting their work, but he hadn’t. One more thing he had failed to do. He passed around copies of his manuscript, a chapter from a biography he was writing on George Frideric Handel. Handel was, Nancy thought, a perfect subject for Bernard, an anglophile who liked the Baroque period so much he once tried to learn (without great success) the viola da gamba. The pages were not clipped, and there was a general flurry of papers.

“Good God, Bernie,” said Virginia, “it would be nice if you gave us something more manageable.” On the opposite side of the paper was what was obviously a draft of another manuscript of Bernard’s, so that the words of one were soaking into the words of the other. Stereo Bernard. Bernard had won acclaim, though not enormous financial compensation, for two previous biographies. Nancy admired his writing, though she would never have read either by choice. The study of John Donne was sufferable, but a ponderous tome on the philosopher Hegel?—please!

Bernard began reading aloud from his chapter while people scribbled in the margins. His voice had the timbre of a voice-over on a radio commercial. It could make anything sound better, being read with that authority.

Bernard paused in his reading and looked around at the group. He leaned forward and took in an unnecessarily large breath. “Unable to go on!” he repeated, emphasizing the words even more dramatically than when he first read them, his freckled, high forehead shiny with the sweat of his exertion. “Think of that!” he implored them, before turning back to his manuscript.

“If we had this ahead of time,” said Gillian when Bernard was finally done, “we’d be able to give it more than a cursory reading.”

“Nobody’s got that kind of time, Gillian,” said Chris. “Maybe you do, but I sure as hell don’t.” He was a man who was just short of being handsome, Nancy thought. A bit too heavy in the face.

“You’d make the time,” said Gillian.

“We’ve discussed this ad nauseam,” said Virginia. “We’re not going to change things now. Can we just move ahead for the moment?” She looked around for confirmation. It was obvious to Nancy that Adam was the least important one of them. He nodded, but nobody looked at him.

“Of course, let’s go on,” said Gillian. “We always do.”

Nancy could see Virginia begin a retort, then stop herself.

“Before we do,” said Bernard, “I beg your indulgence for a moment. Adam, if I may make use of your equipment—” Bernard had produced a CD from his bag and was making his way over to Adam’s bookcase. “I want you all to be able to fully appreciate the significance of the theory I’ve been developing.”

“What is this?” asked Gillian. “Show-and-tell time?”

Bernard held up his palm. “Two minutes, just the fourth movement,
‘La Réjouissance,’
from the
Fireworks Music
is all I ask you to listen to,” said Bernard.

“Please,” said Gillian. “I’m sure we’ve all heard it before.”

“But not in this context,” said Bernard.

“Speak for yourself, Gillian,” said Chris. “Why don’t you just get on with it?” he asked Bernard. Which Bernard tried to do. It did not surprise Nancy that Bernard had difficulty working Adam’s CD player and, after finally succeeding in inserting his disk, was unable to decipher, even with his reading glasses, the buttons on the remote. Adam came to his rescue and started the track. Bernard leaned back in his chair and, with an expression of beatific rapture, conducted with his two forefingers.

When the demonstration was over, Virginia flipped through Bernard’s manuscript and began to comment. Chris followed, then Gillian, then Adam. They all started with some words of praise—that seemed to be the acknowledged format—before taking stabs at the manuscript. When they were through they turned, almost in unison, to Nancy.

She hadn’t been sure she actually would be participating in the discussion, that they would ask her opinion this first time, but she had made some notes. She began as they had, with some general words of praise. “I wonder, though, about that line about Beethoven,” she said. “It’s, perhaps, a touch hyperbolic, but more important, I think it draws our attention away from Handel. Beethoven sort of eclipses him here.” She said this cautiously, watching Bernard’s face as she spoke. She was afraid he might be affronted. In fact, it was quite the opposite; he looked around at the others as if he were the proud parent of a child who had just said something clever, as if she had lived up to his recommendation.

“Beethoven does have the capacity of eclipsing everyone. I will see to it that he doesn’t.” He smiled at Nancy.

What she hadn’t realized until this moment was that she was on trial. She had thought she had been invited to join them, and hadn’t realized that this was just a meeting where they were going to look her over and then decide whether she would be invited back. She would never have consented to come on those terms, never have subjected herself to such humiliation if she had known. She wanted to get up and collect her coat and walk out on them. She pictured herself doing this, her tote bag close against her hip, but she didn’t move.

Gillian’s turn was next. She passed out a poem, apologizing that she had forgotten Nancy would be coming and had made only five copies.

“No problem,” said Bernard. “We’ll look on together.” He moved closer to Nancy; the foam in the pillow cushion contracted under his weight. He crossed his leg and rested the pages on his knee.

The poem was in six parts. Gillian read in a whispery voice, her chin held up, like a heron holding something in its beak. The point of the poem eluded Nancy, and she didn’t get many of the allusions, but there were lines that were rich and intelligent, so it was impossible to dismiss the poem as merely pretentious. Nancy had never read a collection of Gillian’s poems, but she had read selections from them that had been included in reviews. She had read them looking forward to finding fault, but the fault she found was her own inadequacy, not the poems’. Still, Gillian could be more accessible if she chose. Instead, she had indulged herself in exclusivity. She wrote to please no one, wrote for no audience. Nancy admired this. In her own work, she wrote for herself first, but she also had a desire to please, befriend the reader, make the reader see things her way.

When it came her turn to comment, she chose to simply praise something she found to praise, an image that she could make sense of:

She could tell, in a second, that she had confused Gillian, thrown her off. Nancy guessed that Gillian had been prepared to dislike her, yet she was as vulnerable to praise as anyone. Nancy knew she had disarmed Gillian, outmaneuvered her.

When Adam’s work was discussed next—a novel that involved a young American businessman and a Russian woman who might or might not be a prostitute—Nancy felt she was on safer ground. Adam’s novel was probably brilliant, but it was verbose, and verbosity is an easy thing to point out. Adam’s naïveté, his effusiveness, his insecurity were so palpable that Nancy felt a protective urge towards him. He was in love with everything he wrote, and Nancy could see he suffered viscerally at the mere thought of cutting or revising. She put her suggestions as delicately as she could, making sure that her praise was extreme, her criticism paltry. Even so, she could see Adam cringe under the weight of it. Clearly, he had been told to hack away at his prose many times before. He looked up at her, and his eyes were so large and brown, his lashes girlishly long, his mouth held firmly against any betrayal of emotion.

“Sonia is fascinating,” she said in conclusion. “She’s not like any character I’ve ever met before. I want to read more about her.”

Adam swallowed and gave a little nod.

“Well,” said Virginia, “that’s such a nice note to end on. I suggest we stop here.”

“I’m on for next week,” said Chris.

“Yes, Chris,” said Gillian, “we know.”

Everyone stood and began gathering their papers, but Nancy saw that she was the only one actually leaving. They had planned to stay and talk about her after she was gone, but Bernard had neglected to tell her that, too. To spare herself further humiliation, she pretended that she had known this all along.

Bernard walked her to her car, but it was obvious he was going back in to join the others.

“Virginia says I have bungled dreadfully,” he said. “I should have explained.”

“Don’t worry, Bernard,” said Nancy. “It’s okay. I get it. No need to explain.”

“I just find all this rather awkward, you know. And don’t worry, I’m absolutely certain there will be no question about everyone wanting you. You’re first rate, you know.”

“I know,” said Nancy, smiling.

“Of course you may not want to be part of us, now that you’ve seen us, seen who we are and all the foolishness we’re prey to.” He waited for a moment, expecting forgiveness? Nancy wondered, but she didn’t say anything.

“Good-bye, now, Nancy,” he said.

“Good-bye, Bernard.” She had her hand out, ready to give it to him, but he took her face in his hands and kissed her on both cheeks. That European double kiss, the artfulness of it, made it seem even more formal than a handshake.

It was a cool afternoon, cooler, too, now that the sun was going down. She turned on the heater of her car and sat with the engine running, and looked across the street. She could see the heads in the lighted window of Adam’s living room. Virginia had her back to the window. Her hair was dyed black, and although it wasn’t visible at this distance, Nancy knew there was a small balding patch on the top of Virginia’s head.

They were there, inside the warm living room, discussing her. Her spot on the sofa was empty, but they would each be picturing her among them still, as they talked about whether they wanted her to continue with them or not. Bernard, yes; Virginia, yes; Adam, probably yes. Chris, she had no idea. And Gillian? Nancy guessed that Gillian did not want her but would have difficulty coming up with a legitimate reason to vote against her. Did it have to be unanimous? Nancy had no idea. With votes like this, there were always surprises. Someone whom she had been counting on for support would turn out to be harboring resentment towards her. And someone whom she had felt was an enemy would prove to be a supporter.

She was angry that she had given them the right to judge her. In a second of empowerment, she decided that if they offered her membership, she would turn them down. But just as quickly she knew that she would not. If they asked her to join, she would be flattered and honored.

Hating herself for being this way, she shifted the car into drive and pulled out into the street. All the way home she switched from one radio station to another, unable to find anything interesting enough to distract her from her thoughts. Back at the house, she called Oates, knowing she would get his voice mail but wanting to hear the sound of his voice. She left a message. Then she called Aliki, at college.

“Hey, you’ve reached my cell. You know what to do,” said the message. Nancy hung up quickly.

She took the folder with the pages of her novel out of her tote bag and laid it on her desk. She read over the pages she had brought with her, read them to herself as she would have read them aloud. They were hers still, unshared, private. No one there knew what she was writing about. No one knew about the young doctor leaving the hospital late at night, looking up at the window of the room where there was a dead baby.