Darling? Page 8

  “See?” Mama said. “Think how lucky he was, that you loved him so, all his life long.” And she took Lane’s hand and smiled tenderly. You could see how pretty she had been—that her kind face had once been the definition of beauty. “Try to be happy for him, honey,” she said. “He’s gone up to heaven, with God.”

  Life wasn’t real to Mama anymore—she couldn’t see the pain in its loss. Lane was grateful for mourning—the thought of Casper dying out of pure exuberance, as he had, made her throat close with grief, which was much better than the staring without seeing, living blind.

  Hank had never called her, or knocked on her door—this would have been impossible, taboo—but when she carried the trash to the incinerator in the morning she found him standing in the hall, waiting for her, with a bag of chocolate chip cookies.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It was so nice of you to think of me.…” She took a bite but couldn’t swallow.

  “I know it was my fault,” he said, and his voice was terrible, his face in the dim light was worse. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry you can’t know—to hurt you, who I—” There it was, what she had prayed for—he loved her. She’d have made any sacrifice—the penis in the vagina, or some kind of pain. Indians pierced their skin and ran leather cords through, to prove themselves. Her thoughts had been full of blood, but it was supposed to be her own.

  “I buried him in the woods—the woods I showed you?” he said. “Do you want—?”

  It was raining—a steady, cold rain that had beaten the portulaca blossoms into soggy tissue along the walkway. They turned down Union Avenue together, leaving Hampton Court behind them as if this were the most ordinary thing on earth instead of a jailbreak, a flight into Lane’s dreams. It was hard to keep up with his stride, but her heart felt steady as a piston—as long as she stood beside him she was not to be daunted, she could climb any height. If Casper was the price the gods demanded … Here everything swung wild, she couldn’t think, so she only walked, beside Hank Lathrop, away from Hampton Court.

  “I used to know every tree in here,” Hank said, turning up from the bus stop into the woods. The air seemed green, as if the color were leaching out of the leaves. Lane was soaked through and only wished for more.

  “The whole hillside was wooded, it wasn’t just this patch. See, they couldn’t build here, it’s too rocky, too steep.” There were beer cans and Styrofoam hamburger boxes all over, and in a clearing was a slashed armchair with the stuffing spilling out. Behind it the grave was marked with a forked branch, covered with fallen leaves.

  “Did he—? Do you think—?” She wanted him to say Casper hadn’t suffered, but she couldn’t ask for fear of the wrong answer. No matter though, Hank had heard none of it.

  “I was about your age when Dad died,” he said. “I couldn’t look, at the wake—I ran away—I—”

  She was thinking about how soft Casper had been—when he was a puppy, when she was young, Mama used to beat eggs into his food for his coat. He was so small and so breathlessly avid he used to flip over backwards every time she patted him. There he had been all this time—it was like having a child, the tenderest part of herself, to care for, and at the same time he had seemed to keep watch over her. Things would happen to her now that he wouldn’t know … She imagined writing him a letter somehow …

  “I’m so sorry,” Hank said. He made a strangled sound, a kind of sob, like ice breaking in his chest. “Lane, I don’t know how to make it up to you.…”

  “You didn’t mean to,” she said. “And he died happy, think of that. He died doing what he loved to do best.” The empty phrases were heavy on her tongue, and she looked into the ground for fear she’d give herself away and hurt his feelings.

  “He loved you,” she said. It was so familiar, this act of reassurance, she took his hand almost without thinking. So much had happened, all the rules were gone. She pulled him toward her, and when he didn’t move she yanked harder as if he were just another obstacle she needed to budge. She held him tight against her, imagining she could pull him around her against the cold and misery. For a long time he stood still, then his arms came up around her, not with love or even lust, only exhaustion. He gave a small cry and slumped against her so she staggered back under his weight and had to push at him to keep them both from falling.

  “It’s pouring,” he said. Perhaps he’d just noticed. He strode back to Hampton Court with such long steps it seemed like he was hoping to lose her. Going up in the elevator he hardly looked at her, and when he got off at the third floor he gave a funny, limp little wave that seemed both apologetic and defiant—it wasn’t his fault everything was so bleak, he’d done what he could, he’d planted some flowers.

  Mama was in bed, sound asleep—but the hypodermic gun was beside the bed, with only one used insulin vial in the wastebasket, so probably she was okay. Lanie stood at the window, looking down at the pavement where Casper had died. She supposed she ought to cry, but she didn’t really feel sad anymore—only curious, possessed of a cold strangeness that set her outside everything, even herself. The sight of her pale, scrubbed arms made her sick, reminding her of her childish dreams of love and glory—how pathetic. Asleep, her mother looked even more vulnerable than usual—how could anyone be so weak? Lane’s contempt for her felt exactly like courage. She took up the hypodermic gun, thinking how easy it would be, to use it—and the boy had said one dose could kill her. Then her mother could see firsthand, what it’s like when the thing you love best dies without pain, and goes up to heaven with God.

  Wild Rice

  “I can pay you a thousand dollars for the week.”

  Phyllis Giustameer sounded as dry and calculating as a spider, and she made me this offer as if she could already taste me. She was the director of the Cranberry Coast Writers’ Conference, which had, she assured me, an international reputation. And she was asking me (little me!) to teach the short-story class, the plum so many Major Authors were just dying to bite into … all this and a thousand dollars for the week!

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said. I hate to dash any pleasure, even a spider’s, even when I’m the fly. And a thousand dollars for one week of teaching—teaching creative writing, which everyone knows is the easiest thing in the world—is a lot of money. It’s antisocial, undemocratic to look the wrong way at a thousand dollars, even if your husband, like mine, is an investment banker. I might need comfort, or purpose, or laughter, but I did not need a thousand dollars, not at all. Still, saying no felt wrong, sinful even, as if I’d be denying the old, hungry, socialistic self and admitting that I was now a member of the group whose heads, in the event of a revolution, would be found on pikes instead of shoulders.

  Though as far as I could tell, every potential revolutionary was presently under a beach umbrella, reapplying sunscreen and luxuriating in a bestseller: on the bay side, at least, no one was reading Das Kapital.

  “I’m honored. Thank you for thinking of me. But…”

  But what? But I’m too lazy to drive up the cape in the summer traffic every day for a week? Too timid to face a classroom full of people who think I know something? That I may seem healthy but I’m a closet quadriplegic? No, as usual everything true was either unspeakable or absurd. I thought of saying I was busy—this being such a universal excuse that everyone accepts it, even though often enough “I’m busy” means “I need to spend hours staring.” No one has ever been less busy than I am. I gave up my teaching job when I married Scott, and since I lost the baby I mostly just sit. I try to look like I’m reading, or making notes, but really I’m immersed all day in a sea of bitterness and disappointment, and every once in a while I’m able to come up and gasp a quick breath in the sunlight before I go under again.

  “A thousand dollars,” Phyllis repeated. “There’s not many can match that.” No, it would be better to give in and teach the class. Not to need a thousand dollars is a terrible thing.

  “It is a lot of money,” I said, and I could hear her relax
, even feel it.

  “Then we’re agreed,” she said, “I’ll see you in July.”

  * * *

  The week before I started she called again. The class was only half filled, and it simply wouldn’t pay to go on with it, she was so sorry but we’d have to cancel—unless, of course … Well, if I could do it for five hundred dollars—five hundred was nothing to sneeze at, and the load would be lighter, of course. The poetry teacher had been willing …

  “Oh, dear,” I said, seeing the escape hatch open. “Oh, no, please don’t worry. It’s much better to cancel, I’m sure…”

  “Of course, they’re coming from as far away as Kansas and Louisiana,” said Phyllis. “I’d hate to disappoint them.”

  “They won’t be disappointed! They’ll be relieved! Now they can go to the beach! They’ll save money and they won’t have to sit through some boring class.”

  “They’ve paid their deposits,” she said stiffly. “They’ve already sent in two hundred dollars apiece.”

  “You could send it back?”

  “All right,” she snapped. “A thousand it is, and we’ll expect you on Sunday.”

  I had accidentally driven a hard bargain. Scott laughed when I told him—he won’t take me to buy a car because I worry about the salesmen, having to act that way to make a living, and I get so intent on showing them I really do believe what they’re saying, that I’m sure they’re right that this sedan with all its options is as powerful as the jungle beast it’s named after, that there have been instances when I’ve talked a price up. I sat down on the step and thought—look at that, I’ve made a thousand dollars, all by myself.

  * * *

  On Sunday evening, August 3, I drove down to Swansea—a town of great maples, long stone walls, and austere colonial buildings faithfully restored. Our quarters—the old county courthouse—was a tall building with high, narrow windows, leaning slightly in the shadow of an enormous linden tree, painted a dour shade of gray. A good place for a witch trial, and the tree would make an excellent gallows. Inside the courthouse a narrow pew-lined aisle led to the bench, where a tray of plastic champagne glasses was set out—this was our introductory meeting, just, as Phyllis had said, to break the ice and put everyone at ease.

  She was bustling purposelessly around our classroom—the former jury room, piled to the ceiling now with properties from an amateur theater company—feathered hats and silk kimonos, papier-mâché boulders, an antique radio, a life-size plastic horse. A pair of thrones with velvet cushions stood on a platform behind the table. The windows were painted over to suggest stained glass—they shut out the clear, golden evening entirely.

  “Here’s our teacher!” Phyllis said, coming toward me with a directorial smile that revealed a fortune in gold teeth, wearing a knit suit thirty years out of fashion, in the same shade of lavender as her hair. “The students have paid their deposits,” she told me. “Marge here will collect the balance tonight.”

  Marge was a person of absolute utility, brick shaped, with a helmet of dark hair and eyes like stones. She had both hands tight on her cash box as if I might snatch it away. Her glance was enough to elicit a check from each student who arrived, except Melanie, the youngest, who was studying creative writing, Phyllis told me, in order to develop a second source of income, since she was pregnant and her husband, a welder, was out of work.

  “Would it be all right if I brought the rest on Thursday?” Melanie asked.

  “We like to get things settled up front,” Marge said.

  “Could I postdate the check?”

  Marge was silent.

  “All right, dear,” Phyllis said kindly, “three hundred, dated August seventh. That will be fine.”

  The others looked at Melanie with something like envy. Not one of them could afford to be here. They’d driven across the state or the country, camped in the local guest houses, and arrived with sharp pencils and thick notebooks like supplicants who hear a voice in a dream, fall to their knees, and crawl through the deserts toward God. Some had a few pages of manuscript, others were, as one put it, “virgin territory”—fertile, if as yet untilled. Yes, they were all women, aware they possessed something powerful beyond measure, something others (men) desperately need, still unable to guess what that essential thing might be. No man on earth perceives in himself forty rich acres and is willing like a woman to plow the crop under every year. But where would you find a table of men, each glowing with the natural expectation that he’ll excel in a discipline of which he knows not one thing?

  “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.”