Writers & Lovers(75)
I call Muriel and play it for her to make sure she is saying what I think she is saying.
She screams.
Saturday night I meet her, Christian, Harry, and James at a Thai place in the Square. Muriel draws a picture of my book in hardcover on a napkin and has us all pile our hands on top of it.
‘On the count of three we are going to raise our hands high and let out a barbaric yawp.’
Everyone has their own version of what a barbaric yawp is, but our collective yawp is loud and the management comes over. Muriel shows him the napkin drawing and points to me and explains, and he comes back with a yellow cloth.
‘Yellow is our very lucky color in Thailand,’ he says.
We lift our plates and he spreads it out. I don’t think I ever did anything so kind for a customer at Iris.
Harry makes a toast and our glasses clink and it feels separate from me, the book, momentarily, like it’s on its own path.
The next week of school is shorter—only four days of teaching then the writing festival on Friday.
Monday, washing my hands in the faculty bathroom, I’m smiling. I don’t even know why. The gray bruises under my eyes are fading. My face is filling out. The food at the school is as good as it smells, and I eat a lot of it. It’s already a joke with my ninth graders, how much food I put on my tray at lunch.
Wednesday Jennifer calls in the late afternoon. I’m home from school, making some notes for the speech I have to give at the festival. She gives me names of the publishing houses she sent my book to. I write them all down, these names from the spines of the books I’ve been reading all my life. It doesn’t seem real that my novel has actually been delivered (by messenger, she tells me) to editors at these offices. My pulse is hammering and I worry that it won’t slow, but it does, like a normal heart.
‘I’ll check in with you when I hear something.’
I give her the number at school, and we hang up. Oafie has gotten out and is scratching at my door. I let him in.
‘That was my agent,’ I tell him. He sniffs under my desk and steps onto my futon, makes a few rotations on my comforter, and sinks down. I stroke his head. He has a new blue collar with pink letters on it. Ophelia, it says.
‘Ophelia?’ I say aloud and the dog lifts his head. Her head. Ophie. ‘All this time you’ve been a girl?’ She lays her big head back down on my thigh.
When I get to school on Friday, Manolo is out front waiting to greet the three visiting writers. I wait with him.
He looks down at the folded pages in my hand. ‘Nervous?’ he says.
‘I think you hired me just so you didn’t have to make this speech.’
The writers arrive all together in a beat-up Volkswagen. I recognize a great black cape coming up the path.
‘Victor Silva?’
‘Casey Peabody?’
He envelops me in his cape for a hug. It smells like Iris — garlic and Pernod. I introduce him to Manolo, and Victor introduces us to the other two, a young man with a shaved head and packed arm muscles and a woman in her fifties with an Irish accent. We bring them inside to Aisha and all go to the library where there is coffee and pastries and a place for their coats, though the muscular playwright is only wearing a black T-shirt and Victor Silva has no plans to remove his cape.
The students start arriving, not just ours but buses from other schools. This is another thing I haven’t understood: students from five other schools have been invited. They swarm in and are directed to the gymnasium. When I get there with the writers, the bleachers are full, and the overflow of kids are sitting cross-legged on the basketball court in a wide ring around the podium in the middle. We have to step through them to get to it. The writers sit in the chairs beside the podium, and Manolo steps up to the mic and welcomes everyone. He introduces each writer with brief summaries of their careers. Victor Silva, it turns out, has published four books of poetry and a collection of personal essays. How did I not know this?
‘I’m going to turn it over now to the newest addition to our English department,’ he says and gives me an introduction, too. Somehow he has taken the information from my resume and made it sound good, my paltry publications and grad school prize.
There’s a bit of clapping, and I walk up to the podium. I see a few clusters of students I teach and many others I don’t know. Their faces are lifted up at me. I think of Holden Caulfield, wanting to catch children before they fall off the cliff, and I get it now. I take a long breath. A kid from eleventh grade gives a little whoop.
‘Thank you, Brad,’ I say into the mic. ‘Your grade just went way up.’
There are so many more people than I had imagined. But it can’t be that much harder than reciting the specials to an impatient ten-top at Iris. Plus, I want to tell these kids the things I’ve written down. My lips tremble and my voice hops around a bit, but I get it out.
I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.