Writers & Lovers(18)
‘Another fucking flake,’ I say to Muriel. ‘Could be a family emergency or something.’
‘It wasn’t. He was like, uh, had to leave town, uh, for a while. No idea how long.’
She looks at me doubtfully.
‘I’d like to meet a guy who wants what he says he wants. No more “I’m just moving slowly” or “I just need to go away for a really vague amount of time.” Jesus.’
‘Don’t write Silas off.’
‘I’m totally writing him off.’
‘I’m going to show you a story he wrote.’
‘Don’t. I do not want to see it.’
Muriel says she doesn’t want my Friday night off to go to waste, and she invites some people over to her place for dinner.
Harry swaps a shift with Yasmin and comes with me. He flirts madly with all the straight guys. He’s gone off gay men, he says. It went badly in Provincetown with the new busboy. Muriel serves Moroccan chicken, couscous, and sangria. She’s spread a batik cloth over her couch.
‘Very multicultural bohème,’ Harry says.
Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu. She’s put the food buffet style on her desk, which she covered with a sari and pulled out from the wall. I fill my plate next to a guy who calls himself Jimbo and had a novel published last year. Motorcycle Mama. It received mixed reviews, Muriel told me, but he got a six-figure contract for the next one anyway.
‘Beware the murky bowl of unidentifiable forcemeats,’ Jimbo says, nudging my shoulder with his. I can tell he doesn’t know if we’ve met—or slept together—before. We haven’t done either, and I ignore him. ‘Rudy,’ he says with unnecessary volume in my ear to a guy on my other side. ‘This looks like what we used to get at the A.D. on Pepe’s night off.’ In case there are people who don’t know he went to Harvard. He moves on bellowing through the room.
The only other person there who has published a book is Eva Park. Her short story collection was gorgeous, got a ton of attention last year, and won the PEN/Hemingway. She’s perched uneasily on a short stool listening to two of Muriel’s colleagues explain to her why her book is a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. I met Eva six years ago, when she was working on the collection. They aren’t stories, she told me, they’re hard little polyps I’m trying to remove from my brain. She was sort of ablaze with a lot of nervous energy then. All the stuffing seems to have gone out of her since. She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel’s colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men. Across the room, Jimbo holds up a bottle and hollers that the Grey Goose has flown.
Muriel calls me over and makes me squeeze on the couch between her and her grad school friend George, who turned up unexpectedly that afternoon, which apparently he does from time to time. She’s told me about him. He’s unhappy and lives in North Carolina. We’re pressed together on the couch and have to lean away from each other to be in focus. He has a smooth plump face and gold-rimmed glasses. Big round eyes through the lenses.
Harry is on the other side of Muriel, and they have enhanced the intensity of their conversation to force George and me to talk to each other. I already know part of his story. He and his wife arrived in Ann Arbor together for grad school. He was in the fiction program with Muriel, and his wife was in nonfiction. During their second year there she started getting migraines and was sent to a specialist. At her third appointment, the doctor locked the door and they had sex. On the examining table with the crinkly paper. The doctor remained standing the whole time. I shouldn’t know these details, but I do. They’re all writers in the chain—his wife, George, and Muriel—so the particulars didn’t get lost. Now the wife is migraine-free and living with the doctor, and George is heartbroken and teaching freshman comp at UNC–Greensboro.
‘Muriel says your novel’s about Cuba,’ George says.
It occurs to me that the chain goes both ways, that he may know all about Luke, that those juicy Red Barn tidbits haven’t gotten lost, either.
‘It’s not really about Cuba. It’s just set there.’
‘Why?’
‘My mother lived there when she was a girl. Her parents were American, but after the war her father set up a medical practice in Santiago de Cuba. There was this moment when she was seventeen and had to decide whether to run away with her boyfriend and join the rebels in the mountains, or leave Cuba with her parents. In the book I have her choose love.’
‘And the revolution.’
‘Yeah.’ Love and the revolution. I push some chicken around on my paper plate. I need to change the subject. Talking about my book makes me feel flayed alive. ‘John Updike came into the restaurant where I work a few weeks ago, and while I was putting down his salad the woman next to him told him how much she loved The Centaur, and he shook his head and said he only wrote it because he didn’t have any other ideas at the time. That’s kind of the way I feel.’ Love and the Revolution. I don’t hate it.
‘Did you tell Updike you were a writer?’
‘No.’ I laugh. ‘God no.’ But when that woman who loved The Centaur dropped her fork and I bent down to get it, I touched one of the leather tassels of his loafer, for a bit of luck. ‘What are you working on right now?’