Writers & Lovers(14)

‘Why do men always want to look like that in their author photos?’

‘My deep thoughts hurt me,’ Silas says in a scratchy voice.

‘Exactly. Or’—I try to mimic him—‘I might have to murder you if you don’t read this.’

He laughs.

‘Whereas with women’—I take a book off the shelf by a writer I admire—‘they have to be pleasing.’ The photo backs up my argument perfectly. She has a big apologetic smile on her face. I bounce the photo in front of Silas. ‘Please like me. Even though I’m an award-winning novelist, I really am a nice, unthreatening person.’

We pull a few more from the bookcase, and they all support my gender theory.

‘So how would you pose?’ Silas says.

I sneer and flip him two birds.

He laughs again. He has a chipped front tooth, a clean diagonal cut off one corner.

Muriel is bringing her friends toward us.

‘Did you read last Wednesday, to the group?’ I say.

‘I did.’

‘What’d he do with his hands?’

‘It was bad I think. Behind his back.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘No one could tell me. They hadn’t seen it before.’ He flashes his tooth again. He doesn’t seem to care much about Oscar’s verdict. ‘So what are you working on?’

‘I’m a waitress.’

He squints. ‘What are you writing?’

‘A novel.’

‘Impressive.’

‘I’ve been working on it for six years and still don’t have a full draft or a title. So maybe not so impressive. Are you going back next week?’

‘I don’t know. It might be too religious for me. A lot of verbal genuflecting.’

‘Really?’ Muriel hasn’t depicted it this way.

Silas hesitates. ‘It’s not really a free and open exchange of ideas. People just take down everything he says.’ He hunches over and pretends to scribble in a tiny notebook. ‘And, like, it was this small thing, but at one point he said that every line of dialogue had to have at least two ulterior motives, and I said what if the character just wants to know what time it is. People gasped. And then silence. I like a little more debate. Or maybe I just don’t like a lot of rules.’

Muriel and her friends are hovering behind him. Silas shifts slightly, putting a bit more of his back to them. I don’t think it’s deliberate. ‘You haven’t ever gone to it?’

‘No, I work nights.’

He looked at me like he knew that wasn’t the whole truth and started to say something, but Muriel broke in.

‘Look, real people from the real world.’ she says.

She introduces us. One is an infectious disease doctor specializing in AIDS research, and the other heads up a nonprofit in Jamaica Plain. They wear makeup and bracelets and dresses that don’t come from the T.J. Maxx in Fresh Pond. They have crossed the room for Silas, and they pepper him with questions. I drift out of the conversation, out of the room.

I don’t have the money for a copy of Thunder Road, but I follow the line from the entryway through the living room and into the dining room. I veer into the kitchen and peer at the writer through the window in the swinging door. His back is to me, and a small stooped woman is leaning over the table toward him, clutching the book he’s just signed to her chest. She’s still talking when he reaches for the book of the woman behind her. I can only see the back of him, the rim of a blue tie showing beneath his collar and a shoulder blade jutting up through the white dress shirt as he signs his name. I can’t see if his face is as chiseled and pissed off as in the photograph.

All the surfaces in the kitchen are covered with baking sheets and trays of hors d’oeuvres. Every few minutes a server comes in for a refill. It feels strange not to be the one wearing a bun and apron.

‘Prosciutto-wrapped fig?’ she asks, face full of overlapping freckles.

‘Oh, thanks so much,’ I say, trying to convey my bond with her. I take a fig from the tray and a napkin from her other hand. It bugs me when people don’t take the napkin, too. ‘Thanks, it looks yummy.’ But she’s moved on to a group by the breakfast nook.

When I get back to the library, Silas is gone, the women from the real world are gone, and Muriel’s in an argument about Cormac McCarthy with three men in moustaches.

The asphalt is purple in the dusk. We walk in the middle of the road down the hill. The sun has sunk but its heat hangs in the air. My ears ring from all the voices at the party. We talk about a book called Troubles that I read and passed along to her. She loved it as much as I did, and we go through the scenes we liked best. It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone. The short biography on the back page said that the writer, J. G. Farrell, died while angling, swept out to sea by a rogue wave.

‘Do you think that’s an Irish euphemism for suicide?’ I say.

‘Maybe. You go out to see a man about a dog. And if he’s not there you get swept away by a rogue wave.’

We both love Irish literature. We have a pact we’ll go to Dublin together when we have money.

I tell her Silas said that Wednesday nights felt cultish.

She considers that. ‘Well, a lot of people there want to be Oscar, and a number of others want to sleep with him. Maybe that is like a cult.’