Touchy Subjects (18 page)

He had come to dread his office hours. He relied on certain basic survival techniques. He kept an enormous bag of gourmet brownie bites in his filing drawer. After each visit he'd gobble one to lift his spirits, or at least his blood-sugar level. A visit from Stinking Steve—who had a bloated, sun-browned face and always wore the same Disney World sweatshirt—merited two brownie bites. When the writer's aunt sent him a homemade pomander for his office—a beribboned orange studded with cloves—he didn't laugh at it. He hung it on his desk lamp and pressed his nose to it between sessions. It made him feel like a medieval troubadour in a world of serfs.

It occurred to him to ask Marsha to tell the would-be's that his appointment diary was all filled in for a fortnight, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it. Besides, she seemed like a woman of integrity, and she might report him to the dean of arts.

He was not doing much with the Great Novel these days. He feared the terrible writing of the would-be's might be contagious. Whenever he wrote a sentence, he had to stop and check it for mixed metaphors. All the fatuous rules he'd been spouting this term looped through his head.
Write what you know,
he thought.
Show, don't tell. Verbs and nouns are stronger than adjectives and adverbs.
This was painting by numbers; it felt like a uniquely pointless way to spend the rest of his life.
Avoid the passive voice.
He tried to remember, when was the last time he'd written anything in the white heat of inspiration?

There was just one café in town that roasted its own beans. The writer tried going there with his laptop to have a go at chapter three over a latte, but people stared, and he got a croissant crumb lodged between Q and W.

He went back the next day with paper and pen and ordered a bracing shot of wheatgrass. He'd composed just half a sentence when two blond girls whose names he couldn't remember came over to say how awesome it was to find him here, and would he mind looking at their essay plans? The topic was Believing in Ourselves.

He e-mailed his friends:
Making whoopee in the mountains. My office gets the best sunsets. Oh, the life of a state-subsidized sybarite! Great Novel coming along nicely. Miss you all, naturally, but not enough to come home.

He knew this was a stupid policy—he could hardly keep up this pretense forever—but right now he couldn't bear to tell anyone what a mistake he had made.

As an experiment, he started working to rule. He no longer read any of the manuscripts jammed into his pigeonhole. The would-be's never seemed to notice.

"Why don't you tell me the overall story in your own words," he murmured, eyes shut, to Tzu Ping.

Off she went: "Well, it starts when I'm—I mean when my character—is in second grade...," and soon her time was up.

Later the same day, Mrs. Pokowski frowned at the pristine manuscript he handed back to her. "Did you like chapter three?"

"Very much," said the writer. "But"—here he flicked through the pages and picked out a line at random—"I'm a little confused by the metaphors in this sentence:
'A fragile essence of deep buried undigested resentments were locked away behind a veil of stone.'
"

"What's to confuse?" asked Mrs. Pokowski coldly.

With Linda Shange, he only ever had to glance at the first paragraph. "Linda," he said, "you see the way you keep telling us how nice your protagonist is? Here, for instance:
'She was a sweet and kind person who never killed mice.'
"

"Yes, she really was, in real life," said Linda beatifically.

"The danger is," he told her, "you might actually put some readers off."

She looked shocked.

"We don't need to like your protagonist all the time," he told her, yet again, "we just need to care what happens to her."

One week, every story presented to him seemed to contain some reference to child abuse. He was irritated by this craven following of literary fashion. "Lenny," he said to the golden-haired boy majoring in English, "couldn't you pick a more original angle? The hard-drinking, big-fisted Daddy is kind of a stereotype. And isn't it rather implausible that it would be the
eldest
boy he'd rape?"

"But that's what happened," said Lenny.

The writer stared at him.

The boy gave an awkward little grimace and pushed his blond fringe out of his eyes. "If I slept in the bed nearest the door, you know .. . he'd come in and do it to me and leave the younger ones alone."

The writer covered his mouth with his hand. He found himself unable to give the standard speech about the distinction between fiction and autobiography. In an unsteady voice, for the last five minutes of the session he talked about Lenny's excellent use of nature imagery.

So he cultivated compassion. He started practicing meditation again.
You don't need to like these people,
he told himself over and
over,you just need to care what happens to them.

He taught himself to sit there opposite the would-be's and vary his smiles and nods, crinkle his eyebrows and say "Mmm" at the right bits. He kept his hands folded—priestly—and let the would-be's talk about whatever they needed to talk about. Some of them never mentioned writing at all. Others eventually revealed that they hadn't written a word since high school, but they were somehow convinced that they could if they tried. "Because I've had such an interesting life and I've a lot to teach the world."

"Because I'm retired now and I want to make some vacation money."

"Because my doctor said it might help."

One day the writer didn't say a word for thirty-five minutes while Maybelline Norris yammered on about how talented everybody said she was. If he'd been inventing a character for his novel, he couldn't have come up with such a combination of egotism and naked need. He looked at the girl's surprisingly bad teeth and wondered if she was bulimic. He would have liked to put his hand over her mouth, to hush and comfort her, but that was hardly possible with Mrs. Norris sitting implacable, two feet behind her daughter.

Only in one session did he come close to nodding off, and it wasn't his fault. Mrs. Pokowski was describing a self-hypnosis technique she'd learned "for so as to unleash creativity," as she said in her mosquito-drone voice. She took him through it step by step—"Now I'm falling down the hole, and I'm falling down deeper, and deeper, and now what do I see, I see another tunnel, so what do I do, I go down that one..."

The world began to melt; he had to writhe on his chair and bite the inside of his cheek to stay awake.

In the second week of November the writer turned sullen. He stopped practicing meditation; he couldn't see the point in spending twenty minutes a day sitting very still on his couch while the entire lyric oeuvre of David Bowie raced through his head. He gave up on compassion.

He had cruel private names for most of the would-be's by now: as well as Stinking Steve there was Jawless Jennifer (whose face seemed to fall away below the nose), Mr. Hypochondria, and Dottie-Date-Rape. He was just an ear to this pack of social rejects, an official representative of Literature who had to listen to their grievances and explain why they'd never been let into the club, why publishers invariably returned their fat single-spaced manuscripts with the floral designs on the cover page.

"I have to tell you, I just love this poem, I just think it says everything I've ever wanted to say in my life," Meredith Lopez Jones told him, wet-eyed, her hand fondling the page.

I am so glad to have had this Opportunity to have Shared the story of Running Fox with you,
wrote Herb Leland.
I take no credit for Running Fox, she germinated and Marinated in my head for many Moons then gave birth to herself in tune with the rhythms of her People's Spirituality. To have Helped bring her into this World makes me Proud.

These people were philistines, pariahs, parasites. They haunted the writer's nights and stalked his days. When he tried going for a run along the riverbank to work off his tension, who should he meet but Herb Leland, who had the gall to lurch along behind him, rhapsodizing about the Crisp Fall Keatsian Air.

In fact, human beings in general repelled him these days. Marsha with her fat wrists; George W. Bush blustering at press conferences; even his old friends, who had taken to sending him irritating Internet jokes.

As for language—his former lover, his enigmatic deity—these days, it slunk through his office like a diseased cat. Language had a limp, a scab, a tumour, a death wish. Words on the page were a helpless leakage, a human stain.

In his tiny apartment, he opened the file called
G
R
E
A
T
N
O
V
E
L
and tinkered with the punctuation of a single sentence, then stared at the wall until his computer went into sleep mode to save energy. He sniffed the air. Parsnips? he wondered. Or cumin? Damp under the carpet?

He lay on the couch all evening watching the Home Shopping Network. They always seemed to be advertising some gadget that sealed things into plastic bags. Cubes of broth, apple pies, cashmere sweaters, silver spoons—just about everything, they said, would be cleaner and safer if stored in a vacuum pack.

He fell asleep on the couch and woke in the middle of the night with a crooked neck. He had been dreaming that he lured the would-be's, with their griefs and their odours and their terrible ambitions, into a giant plastic bag and sealed them all away.

The next morning he had a raging headache. He lay staring at the ceiling for some hours before he called Marsha to say, in an exaggeratedly gravelly voice, that he feared he was coming down with something, and could she reschedule all his appointments?

He moped around all week, dozing on the couch in the afternoons, staying close to home in case anybody saw him and reported he wasn't sick.

He went back into college on Monday, before Marsha could call and ask him for a doctor's note. But this time he was determined not to let the bastards grind him down.

He indulged in cruelty; it passed the time. He started reading the manuscripts again and marking them in red pen—a big circle round every mistake—not because he thought the would-be in question would really benefit, but simply as punishment. He made his marginalia deliberately intimidating.
Inexplicable P.O.V. slippages,
he would scribble, or
I suspect the irony of this double entendre is not intentional?,
or
See identical errors pp. 2, 3, 9, 15, passim.
Whereas in the early weeks he had used kind euphemisms like
A little overfamiliar?
he now wrote
CLICHÉ
in large red capitals.

He slouched in his office chair. "Sharon, would you agree that the prevailing mood of this piece is self-pity?"

"Dr. Partridge, you describe the mother's smile as
viscous.
Were you referring to a metaphorical oiliness about it, or failing to spell
vicious'?""

Dear Mr. McCullen,
he wrote on English department notepaper,
Thank you for your letter. I have read your manuscript, which appears to be largely based on
Gone with the Wind,
though
lacking that novel's strengths. For your future reference, plagiarism has a better chance of going undetected when the source text is not one of the bestselling novels of the twentieth century.
Then his hand started to shake, so he tore the letter up.

Insomniac at four a.m., the writer fantasized about going one step further and speaking the plain truth.
No, Jonas,
he might say to the spotty boy,
this isn't a poem. These are pretentious words from an online thesaurus, typed out in no particular order.

Maybelline, forget what your swim coach said. You have no talent. Zero. Zip!

Herb, we are not Soul-Friends, as you put it in your last note. You are suffering from a midlife homoerotic infatuation, and I only talk to you because I'm being paid.

People, give it up\
he could bawl at them all.
Get over it! Try extreme sports, masturbation, anything. Stop violating the language I used to love.

The worst thing the writer ever actually said was at the end of a long Friday. BJ came in with gold shades on, radiant. "I did what you told me, man."

"Really," said the writer, trying to remember what he had told BJ.

"I made all those changes you asked for. And I'm gonna go for it."

"For what?"

"The big time!" BJ delivered the line in rapper style, using his hands. "You know how I was telling you John Grisham sold his first book out of his truck? Well, Wal-Mart's gonna let me set up a table."

The writer's mind was foggy this morning. "Is this about ... self-publishing?"

"That's right, man." BJ was only a little sheepish. "I made a few calls, found a guy that'll do me five hundred copies for two grand. Charlene is gonna lend me most of it."

The writer considered whether to tell BJ that to print five hundred copies of his so-called coming-of-age novel was a criminal waste of trees as well as his ex-girlfriend's money. That it would never get reviewed, stocked, or bought. Instead he dragged the dog-eared manuscript towards him and opened it at random. "This sentence doesn't have a verb."

The gilt shades looked back at him blankly.

"If you don't know what a verb is, BJ, why the fuck do you imagine you can write a novel?"

Tears skidded down BJ's face. The young man tried to speak; his Adam's apple jerked. He bent over as if he'd been stabbed. There were salt drops on the writer's desk, on the manuscript.

"I'm sorry," the writer said, breathless, "I'm so sorry—"

But BJ didn't seem to hear him. "I just, you know," he sobbed at last, "I guess it was different for you 'cuz you're like a genius. I just think, I've spent so long on this thing, I just want it to be over and out there." The breath rasped in his throat. "If I could only see my name—I'd know I'd done something. On a book. Any kind of book of my own. My name on it. You know?"