Writers & Lovers(42)

‘I can’t. I don’t want to.’

‘It shouldn’t happen offstage like that.’

I shake my head. ‘I tried. It didn’t work.’

‘Try again. You can’t follow her so carefully for most of the book, then just turn away. Is it because of your father?’

‘It’s not the same. He didn’t rape anyone.’

‘He got off on watching.’

I nod. My face slowly reddens.

‘Use those feelings,’ she says. ‘Use all of them.’

When I get back to the potting shed I sit with the stack of papers she gave me. I write down some ideas in my notebook, then turn to a fresh page and stare at it for a long time.

You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.

The leather couch was cool on my cheek. You feel like a furnace, I remembered my mother saying once when I went to her in the middle of the night and she ran a washcloth under cold water and laid it on my forehead. I missed her then, in a way I didn’t let myself miss her anymore. I think I cried a little. It was too loud to sleep, people going in and out of the locker rooms, pushing hard on the metal door to the gym. And those noises—whispers, scuffling—from closer by. I thought they were in my head.

I write it all out in my notebook: the fever, the couch, the boys in their basketball shorts. The sickening sound of my father buckling his belt as he came out last from the closet.

The next morning I read though her notes and flip through all the pages of the manuscript again—Muriel’s comments and checkmarks, sometimes four on one page. She understood it. She got it. Even if no one else ever does, Muriel did.

I bake a small banana cake in my toaster oven and drop it off for her before work.





Each morning that week I take Adam’s dog to the park as soon as I get up. His name is Oafie, Adam finally told me. The cooler air makes my mind feel sharp and purposeful. In the park, Oafie lumbers around with wiry Fifi and miniature Hugo and I chatter with the owners and none of it derails me. I’m back at my desk by six thirty and know what I have to do. It’s nothing like facing the blank page. I have something whole to work with now.

Oscar goes away for readings in the Midwest, and Silas comes by at the end of a dinner shift with baklava and a bottle of wine. We walk to the river.

Third date, I want to say, but I can’t with Silas. Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don’t acknowledge that they’re happening or say what they mean. It all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.

He’s wearing a thick, Irish knit sweater with holes in the sleeves. He spreads out a blanket, the fleece one from his bed, on the grass. I sit cross-legged on top of it and he lies back, tilted up on his elbows, smiling as I tell him about Muriel’s critique and my recent mornings of focus and clarity.

‘Muriel is ruthless,’ he says. ‘It must be really good.’

‘It’s still a mess. Maybe a more manageable mess now with her notes in the margins helping me through. I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality.’

‘ “Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,” ’ he says.

‘Listen to your stentorian teacher voice. I do feel like I’m shrinking the Shadow a bit.’

‘Eliot would say that was not possible.’ He finishes his baklava and wipes his hands on his jeans.

‘Well fuck him. I am.’ I finish mine and wipe my hands on his jeans, too, lower down, near the knee.

He laughs. He turns on his side toward me.

‘How do you teach high school? I don’t think I could ever go back there.’ The desire to press up against him is on a short loop in my head. His curls are looser now, in the dry fall air. One hangs over an eyebrow.

He starts to answer but there’s a sudden clamor downriver. The geese.

We listen to their barking and wailing.

‘I love those geese.’

‘Should we check them out?’

‘Sure,’ I say, but really I want to lie down beside him. I just don’t have the guts.

We walk in the dark toward the sounds. I tell him about my bike rides home along this path and the night I sang ‘Loch Lomond’ to the geese. I tell him how I felt my mother right there beside me, or inside me, and he says he knows that feeling. He says he had it a few times when he drove out west.

‘Is that where she died, Crested Butte?’

He looks surprised.

‘You sent me a postcard from there.’

He nods. ‘Yeah. I didn’t feel her there. She was long gone.’

‘What’d you do?’

‘I wrote some bad poetry in a tent, visited a friend in Boulder and my aunt in Duluth, and came back.’

We’re walking close and bump against each other. Another person might have just taken his hand and said, Are you ever going to kiss me? But I’m not that person. It always takes me by surprise when someone wants to kiss me, even if they’ve met me at midnight with wine and a blanket. People change their mind. Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow.

We walk up the footbridge and lean over the wall to watch the commotion. There aren’t many geese, seven or eight, but they’re keyed up, whacking each other with their wings, lunging at each other’s necks.