Writers & Lovers(41)

‘What are your parents like?’ I ask.

He picks up the pen again. ‘Unhappy.’ He laughs. ‘I tried to say something else, but there’s no other word for it. They should have split up a long time ago. I think they were going to.’

‘Before your sister died?’

‘Yeah. And now they’re a hobbled mess.’ He draws a sort of hunched Quasimodo figure with two heads, a hump, and a bunch of clubbed feet. He hands me the pen. ‘What about your father? Are you close?’

My father isn’t second-date material. ‘We were once. But he’s not a nice man.’ I draw my father in profile, the thick brosse of white hair sticking straight up, the long straight nose with the tiny tip, the mouth wide open and yelling at me for being a quitter. Silas takes the pen and draws a bubble coming out of my father’s mouth and in it he writes: ‘I don’t want to be an asshole!’ I take the pen from him and make a bubble coming out of both Quasimodo heads and write: ‘We don’t know who we are now.’

He laughs through his nose and says, ‘That’s about right.’

We’re sitting so close and our arms are finally touching and I think he might lean over and kiss me, but he doesn’t.

On the way out he says he wants to get something, and he opens the door to his bedroom. The bed is unmade, a nubby fleece blanket and a pale-blue bottom sheet. A thin desk covered with papers and an office swivel chair. Stacks of books all around and a manual typewriter in the corner. I stand in the doorway. It smells like him. It’s a good smell. I could stand here a long time, but he grabs a book from a pile and shuts the door.

He hands it to me in the stairwell. ‘I saw this at Words-Worth.’ It’s an oversized paperback on Cuban poster art. I flip through it. There are photos from the late fifties to the eighties of posters pasted all over Havana. Political slogans in bright orange swirls, gardens of pop art flowers, a riff on Warhol’s soup can advertising a film festival.

‘Thank you so much.’ I look up. He’s halfway down the stairs.

He drives me across the river. The radio is playing Lou Reed. We don’t say much. Every time he puts his hand on the gearshift next to my leg my insides lurch a little.

He sings along with Lou about reaping what you sow.

In the driveway he puts the Le Car in neutral. ‘That was a good time,’ he says.

‘It was. Thanks.’ This time I give him a few seconds, and just when I turn to open the door I hear him move toward me, but it’s too late.

‘I’ll call you,’ he says. The door shuts.

I wave.

Gravel pops and scatters beneath his tires as he backs out.

On my machine Muriel is screaming: I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.





I’m sitting with Muriel at her table by the window. She’s made us tea in cobalt mugs. It’s a chilly morning, and heat hisses out of the cast-iron radiator behind me. She’s in sweats and a ponytail, glasses instead of contacts. I don’t get to see her like this very often. This long table is where she writes. It’s impossible not to feel that I could write better with just a little more space and light. I wish my own room of my own wasn’t so claustrophobic.

My manuscript is in a pile between us. The first page has two checkmarks in the margin. Beside the stack are four or five pages of her notes.

‘I don’t know if I ever told you this,’ Muriel says, ‘but when I read something good my ankles get prickly. It’s been happening since I was nine and I read Elizabeth Bowen by mistake when The Last September got shelved in the kids’ section of our library.’

I’m nervous. I know she said she liked it, but I also know that all those notes are not praise.

‘I’m sorry it took me two weeks. I started to think, what if I hate it? I got scared it might turn out like it did with Jack.’ Jack is a colleague who stopped speaking to her after she gave him feedback on his memoir. ‘Two nights ago I dug in, and it was such incredible relief. My ankles were going crazy.’ She pulls the pile closer and pushes her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. ‘Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.’ She strokes the top page. She starts flipping through the manuscript to show me the parts she loved best. Her checkmarks are everywhere. My body is flooded with sweet relief. My heart slows to enjoy it. She has marked all my favorite parts, the ones that came so easily and the ones I struggled so hard with. She says Clara is so particular, but she’s also the embodiment of women undone by the history of men. She goes off on a riff about the male hegemony within Clara’s family. She gives me credit for all kinds of things I hadn’t been thinking about in any sort of ideological way.

When she begins showing me the spots that need to be cut or expanded, characters who need more attention, I start taking notes. She points out the places where I have described a character’s emotion instead of the reaction to the emotion. ‘Don’t tell us the girl is sad. Tell us she can’t feel her fingers. Emotions are physical.’ She has put an X through several pages about the Battle of La Plata, which had taken me weeks of research.

‘And,’ she says, ‘you have to write that rape scene.’

‘No.’

‘You have to.’