Early Work_A Novel Page 3

  The money part wasn’t that complicated. My parents had set aside cash for me to go to law school, which I was obviously incapable of doing, and after a good amount of back-and-forth, the money became mine, nominally for the purpose of buying a house or funding a legitimate offspring someday. Julia, on the other hand, lived on loans, the total amount of which was so astronomical as to be not worth contemplating. Infinite debt was easier to handle than the middle range.

  So I took a leave from school to “support Julia” and “write my book,” the second of which people took far too literally. “How’s the book going?” my cousins would ask me at the rare family gatherings at which I deigned to show my face. “Getting there,” I would say, though as anyone who’s ever pretended to be a writer knows, “the book” was really a handy metaphor for tinkering with hundreds of Word documents that bore a vague thematic resemblance to each other, but would never cohere into the, what, saga of ice and fire that they were imagining. Not that my cousins, or anyone else, would ever read what I did produce, a few cramped, obscurely published short stories indicting thinly veiled versions of my immediate family. It was still “How’s the book?” with that shadow of a smirk, not because they knew I was a fraud, but because they thought I was wasting my time.

  In August, our second month in Virginia, we adopted Kiki, an action that we both knew, without articulating it, would make it significantly less likely that I’d ever go back to graduate school. Then, while desultorily browsing Craigslist for jobs and furniture, I came across a cryptic listing for a composition instructor, “hours flexible due to new government health care requirements.” This turned out to be an official posting by the dean of English at the Community College in Middle Virginia. When I arrived in my rumpled tweed jacket for what I thought was an interview, I found myself filling out adjunct employment forms. I would be teaching three sections, starting in a week. For which I was, at the time, grateful.

  When Julia and I were undergraduates, she had her poetry published in the prestigious student lit mag and won awards I hadn’t even known existed. When she started medical school, she began an epic poem, to be written concurrently with her multiyear education in gore. It was to be Whitman by way of Frank Stanford—ecstatic, despairing, bawdy, democratic, bearded, and mostly about medical school. It may well have been all of those things; the fact was, I’d been privy to very little of it, and the parts I had seen made me a little bit worried about her future, more as a person than as a poet. Julia’s defining quality, maybe, was her combination of outer normality, even placidity, and a roiling, crazily volatile inner life that expressed itself mainly in her writing.

  In the periods when she was most ensconced in the world of her epic poem, usually during the brief lulls in her demanding hospital schedule, she became glassy-eyed, almost Stepfordian, responding to direct questions with vague pleasantries and spending a great deal of time baking in the kitchen while listening to Chopin. This was her way of building back to mental equilibrium, I knew, but it was somewhat unnerving. What I should do, she told me once, after snapping out of a weeklong poetry fugue, was use these periods as a chance to exercise my own creativity—it was an opportunity for us both to write or think or whatever we wanted to do, to feel disobliged to deal with each other’s quotidian shit.

  I did write a little, mostly beginnings and unconnected scenes, and endings only in the sense that the stories, or whatever they were, did not continue forever. I didn’t have anything resembling an aesthetic philosophy, but as a person, at least, I was all middle. I woke up feeling the same as I had when I went to bed. I wrote endings; I just knew they were arbitrary and inadequate. What happens at the end of a story? Something changes, or it doesn’t. I like it best when things just stop.

  The community college had a partnership with the women’s correctional center in Louisa County. Teaching at the prison was a coveted gig because you got double-time pay to teach only once a week, plus incalculable moral credit. I was neither a distinguished, nor a senior, faculty member—the only attention I’d received from the administration was their intervention in a dispute over whether or not I was allowed to park my car in the faculty parking area. (I was not.) But, in the hallowed tradition of the Community College in Middle Virginia, all of the usual prison instructors had been scheduled to teach conflicting classes against their explicit requests, and the short summer semester was offered to me.

  The first thing my friends asked me when I started teaching there was whether or not it was like a recent television show that took place in a women’s prison. I’d only seen two episodes of the show, but based on that, the answer was no, not particularly. There was not a thin blonde protagonist. There were no quirky backstories involving the Russian mob. There were anxious, exhausted women who, usually in the throes of drug addiction and poverty, had done things they were ashamed of. Per official policy, I was not to ask about what they had done, but, through their reading responses and essays and class discussions, I learned about: accidental and intentional infanticide, gang-initiation stabbings, multigenerational drug-distribution hierarchies, macings of ATM customers, disavowed hate crimes. I had a gift for ingratiation but was ill-suited to be teaching such a class. I extended deadlines into infinity; detected cheating and forgave it; allowed ad hominem, probably dangerous insults to fly unchecked. Throughout my own education, I had always disliked the teachers who insisted on being hard-asses for the good of their students. Even if I now understood intellectually what they’d been trying to do, I still held their enforced standards against them. I was guilty of the worst crime in the profession: I wanted, above all, for my students to like me. And they did, I think, because I generally refused to exercise my authority over them.

  It helped that they were, for the most part, diligent, certainly more so than the students at the regular community college, who had to be jostled into a discussion of any kind and given elemental pop quizzes to prove they’d done the reading. (“In ‘A Rose for Emily,’ who is Emily?”) The prison students did the reading and asked for more. We discussed a long essay about whether or not Beyoncé was a feminist, rebutted a London Review of Books takedown of Obama’s strategy in Syria, nearly came to blows over U.S. immigration policy. (Two students had partners who had been deported.) Though I made lesson plans, I tended to abandon them about fifteen minutes into the three-hour classes. I don’t pretend this was pedagogically sound. It—what? It felt right? Their energy overwhelmed my meager planning.

  One student, Danita, called me out for the positivity offensive. Her writing was rough, and she knew it, but I kept telling her it was going to get better. And I mean, it was going to get better. That’s the thing about writing.

  “You’re a politician, man,” she said to me once while I was sitting across from her, going over my comments on one of her papers while the rest of the class peer-reviewed loudly around us. Her hair was close-cropped and she was cadaverously thin. Her eyes stayed calm and accusatory.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’re telling everybody, ‘Oh, you’ll get better, you can do it, you’re smarter than you think.’ But I’m not smarter than I think. Sandra’s not either. That’s why she’s in here for doing dumb shit. Some of them, okay, they actually got something going on; they had an opportunity to get a little bit educated. Alicia, you know, she’s educated. But you’re telling everybody that? That’s not fair, man. That’s not fair to us.”

  “All I’m saying is that you’re improving,” I said. “And that I’ll reward your effort.”

  “So, what? As long as I try you’re just gonna tell me I did good?”

  “Your research on this last paper was really strong.”

  “I just looked up stuff in a book, man, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot of students who can’t get that part right.”

  “They probably not locked up,” she muttered. Meaning they probably had better things to do.

  I wish I could say the experience made
me appreciate the blessings in my life. Instead, I’d lie facedown on the couch when I got home, exhausted and angry and more than a little bit proud of myself for caring so much.

  I spent Saturday reading websites while Julia worked. Then we went and saw the latest bad Woody Allen movie, came home, and drank ourselves to sleep. Sunday was Julia’s one day off so we lounged in bed until eleven after throwing Kiki in the yard at dawn, getting up only when her barking got so irritating that we had to let her in. Julia made biscuits and eggs while I handled the coffee and read her selections from the Sunday Times, Modern Love first, of course, then the especially obnoxious wedding announcements, then a dumb, negative review of a book that we’d both wanted to read. Once the food was ready we retreated into silence, rotating between the front page, arts, the book review, and the magazine, ignoring everything else.

  In the middle of the day, Julia went for a long run and I settled in to illegally stream baseball and distractedly skim a book of poetry my sister had insisted I read, going so far as to buy me a hardcover copy for my birthday. It was aphoristic and wisdom heavy, translated from the Italian, with the helpless originals on facing pages. I was impressed that Jackie could derive so much from this stuff, but its barrenness in my eyes inevitably made me wonder whether she was shining it on a bit.

  My sisters and I had turned out artistic and useless despite (because of?) our parents’ emphasis on the value of hard work. Our father was a corporate lawyer turned Republican fund-raiser, our mother an administrator at the College of New Jersey (though most of our household swag still proudly identified it as Trenton State, its earlier, somehow more accurate nom de guerre). They’d gotten divorced after almost thirty years of marriage—wealthy Republican women were the unforeseen, if quite foreseeable, occupational hazards of Republican fund-raising. My youngest sister had finally reached college age, and pointedly chose to attend the University of Hawaii after three years of the two-house regime. My other sister was at library school in North Carolina. We saw more of each other than we did anybody else in the family, which still wasn’t much.

  In the ball game I was half watching, the O’s were already down 5–0 in the third—I’d check in after an hour. I opened the file that Leslie had sent me. It was the monologue of an eighteen-year-old girl, a high school senior, who is having a furious, quasi-mystical experience in an abandoned car in the woods after smoking weed (possibly laced with something more serious) for the first time. It was scary in its intensity, transcending the familiarity of the premise with a deliberately wonky sense of morality. I liked, both in this and in her poet-screwing piece, the sense of continuation, of unbrokenness, even unfinishedness, a rejection, it seemed, of the conservative narrative conventions currently prevailing. There were no realizations of any consequence, no explanations provided by past trauma. It was all thought and sensation. It’s impossible to say how I would have felt about it without having met Leslie. But I’m not an easy mark. It was really fucking good. It was, I thought, exactly what I would have written if I’d had any idea how.

  I resisted the urge to write to her immediately with a burst of unconsidered enthusiasm. Instead I went back through her text, inserting comments intermittently. I quibbled about a few things, suggested commas, line edited a couple of awkward constructions. Then I remembered that she’d told me the piece had already been published, and was, thus, finished, rendering my edits unhelpful. Rude, even. So I deleted everything except for the positive marginal comments, resaved the document, and slammed my laptop shut. Then I herded Kiki, who was leaping all over the furniture with excitement, out to the car for a hike on the trails around Monticello.

  In the parking lot I ran into Molly Chang and a tall, fit-looking man clutching a shaking terrier to his chest.

  “Hey, Peter! This is Jill,” Molly said to me.

  “Gil,” said the guy, and shook my hand.

  “I call him Jill,” she said. “Is this your dog?”

  She reached out to pet Kiki, who cowered away with her ears folded back, her default response to new humans. She crept back to sniff the hesitantly wagging tail of Gil’s dog.

  “You guys doing the Sunday thing?” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s like a joint walk of shame. Because we’re doing it together. And stoned. We stayed up all night watching Tarkovsky and now it’s like, shit, the world.”

  “Yeah, I needed to stop reading the paper,” I said. “You know what’s a bad place? Syria.”

  “Have you heard about Texas?” Gil said.

  “What happened?”

  “That’s it. Texas. What a shithole.”

  “Hey, that’s where what’s-her-name lives,” Molly said. “Show some respect.”

  “Leslie?” I said.

  “No, the abortion lady,” Molly said. “I’d vote for her. For whatever.”

  We walked on the paved path that led to the more rugged trails where the dogs could go off leash. Kiki nipped at the little dog’s heels in encouragement.

  “What do you do, Gil?” I said.

  “I work for ThinkBright?” he said. “We do design and tech consulting?”

  “The Lord’s work,” I said.

  “I’m just looking for tall white money to bring home for Thanksgiving,” Molly said. “I need six more months out of you, Jill.”

  We hit the trees and let the dogs bound ahead of us, the little dog taking three times as many steps to keep up with Kiki, who seemed to have caught the scent of squirrel.

  “I was thinking, after that thing at Anna’s the other night, that we should start a reading group,” Molly said.

  “I’m not really into book clubs,” I said.

  “Not a book club,” Molly said. “More serious. Where we get, like, deep into texts and sort out the big questions. And also get fucked-up. And probably mostly just watch movies. It should be, like, dangerous. Physically. And intellectually.”

  “I’m not sure I can picture what you’re talking about,” I said. “But, I mean, sounds good. Sign me up. Don’t invite losers.”

  “Please,” she said. “You shouldn’t have even let that possibility cross your mind.”

  “Can I be in it?” Gil said.

  “Um, you work for ThinkBright,” Molly said. “You can pay for our materials if you want?”

  “That’s really mean.”

  I was about to tell her to invite Leslie, but thought better of it. Maybe karma would reward me for not pushing things. The dogs started barking wildly and we jogged up the trail to see what was up. We were just in time to watch the retreating white tails of two deer, heading straight for the highway beyond the woods.

  Hey, P,

  Thanks so much for all the kindness re: my story. I can see lots of problems with it now, of course, but you’re a gent not to point them out. All I want anyway is to know that a few people found it moderately amusing or stimulating or whatever. Low standards = still hard to achieve. It was real nice to have yr nice comments. Send me yr stuff sometime?

  Phew.

  DRINKS? Drinks.

  L

  Leslie:

  Glad to be of use. I’ll send something … in the glorious alternate future in which I’ve learned how to write nice.

  Also: drinks. Wednesday? Have you been to the 2:19? Fancy restaurant with a great little bar, pictures of writers on the wall? Julia’s working nights all this week I think so it might be just me, if that’s not too depressing a thought. If we wait an extra week we can rope her in, too.

  Yrs truly,

  PXC

  Naw, dog, let’s get to it. Wednesday. 8?

  L

  I got stoned before I left the house—three good hits from the newish portable vaporizer. It was a beautiful little invention—you could be mildly high all the time, no smoke, no fire. Julia was working two-to-midnight shifts that week, though only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so, yes, I had set it up so that I’d be able to spend time alone with Leslie. But it was still, I thought, or pretended, an innocent craving for chat,
companionship, artistic solidarity. I was interested in Leslie, in the sense that I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to understand her. I wanted her, more dubiously, to understand me.

  I got to the bar a few minutes early, which was so rare as to be almost unbelievable. Was the time on my phone wrong? Out front, leaning against the restaurant’s brick façade, underneath the flaming torch that was lit at dusk every night by the newest member of the waitstaff, slouched Leslie, smoking a cigarette.

  “Shit, I knew I wasn’t actually early,” I said.

  “What?” Leslie said. “No, you’re good, I think. I never know how long anything is going to take so I got here, like, half an hour ago for no reason.”

  “You should’ve called me,” I said. “I was just sitting around waiting for eight.”

  “It’s all good. Did some reading, did some drinking. Met Kate the bartender, who’s thrilled you’re coming.”

  “I had her for comp my first semester of teaching,” I said. “She’s a pretty good writer. But a better bartender.”

  Leslie seemed a little bit drunk already, a little bit frayed around the edges. But I thought that I might be overperceiving because I was pretty high, and this made me feel as if I had the ability to detect even the smallest deviation in a person’s customary self-presentation, or, maybe, the ability to see people as they actually were.

  “I didn’t really want you to catch me smoking,” Leslie said. “But then it was like seven fifty-two and I really wanted a cigarette, and I thought maybe if you were a couple minutes late I’d be able to finish it and get back inside before you got here. But these American Spirits burn for like an hour, and you’d probably have been able to smell it on me anyway.”