Writers & Lovers(77)

His fingers are on the railing a few inches above mine. My legs start to wobble. ‘Do you want to eat lunch with me?’ I say.

He looks like he’s going to say no. ‘I don’t have a lot of friends yet.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Please?’

He grimaces. ‘All right.’

‘I’ll wait for you at the big doors.’

He nods and drops past me.

Lunch is back in the gym, bag lunches at round tables. The room is thundering with talk. I stand in the doorway as kids stream past, waiting for Silas. But it’s Lucille who comes first.

‘I told her you were probably at lunch, but she said it was urgent.’

She’s irked, understandably, so I explain about the book and the agent on the way back to the office, and she gives me a hug and hurries me to the phone.

Three editors are still in the auction. Jennifer thinks I should talk to them. I try to tell her I’ll be free in an hour, but she says they’re in their offices now. They’ve canceled their lunch plans to talk to me.

I hang up and Lucille is through the glass, asking me with her arms what happened. ‘I have to talk to editors!’

She does a dance in her office chair, and I do one in mine.

I call each of them. I talk to the last one a long time. She has read it so carefully and has a good idea about adding a small bridge between the first and second parts. Like the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse, I say, and she says that’s what she was thinking of. It’s exhilarating, this conversation. But I miss lunch. I miss Silas.

The last session of the day has already begun. I peek in a few classrooms, but I can’t find him. In the muscular playwright’s class, they are already writing. He sees me and points to a chair down front and I have to take it.

‘Write down your biggest fear,’ he says quietly and hands me a slip of paper. On the other side of the room a student is already starting to collect the folded slips of paper in a wool hat.

We’re in one of the bigger classrooms with tall windows. On the sills there are a few books: Sula, Jane Eyre, The House on Mango Street. I have never let myself imagine my own book being published. When I was a kid I used to expect to win tournaments and often did, but I stopped having expectations about achieving anything long ago.

The wool hat comes closer. I hold my pencil over the blank strip of paper. The wool hat is in front of me. ‘I have no fears today,’ I scribble, fold it up and drop it in. I’m stunned by the truth of it.

The student hands the hat to the playwright, and he cinches the opening and shakes it up and down. I try to think how I can leave the room to find Silas. But I’m up front, and the playwright is only a few feet away, blocking my exit.

‘All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country—death, war, guns, illness—our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’

No. I will not be doing any improv. I put my pencil back in my bag and shift closer to the edge of my seat. As soon as he moves away I’ll escape.

‘You,’ he points to a girl two rows behind me. ‘You,’ he points to the boy at the end of my row. ‘And you.’ He points to me. ‘Stand up.’

We stand.

He holds out the hat to the boy. ‘Pick a fear, any fear.’

The boy picks.

‘Show it to your partners, but do not say it out loud.’

He holds out the piece of paper, and we read: ‘I am scared of the blue giraffe.’

Jesus.

‘Okay,’ he says to the boy, ‘you possess this fear. It is overwhelming and relentless. And you,’ he says to the girl, ‘need to talk him out of it. In whatever way you can.’ He turns to me. ‘And you’—I have a bad feeling about this—‘are the fear itself. Start now.’

They both look at me. The blue giraffe. I stand up straighter and pull my shoulders down and start gnashing my jaw and ripping leaves off trees with sideways jerks of my head. I keep doing this as I get closer to the boy.

‘Talk to him,’ the playwright tells the girl.

‘You know this isn’t real,’ she says to the boy. ‘This is just something you made up a long time ago when you were a little boy and scared that night your parents were fighting, but she doesn’t exist and she’s not going to hurt you.’ She is good. But the more she tells him I don’t exist the more real I feel. The boy moves away from me, and I follow him to the blackboard, around the desk, and back closer to our seats. I stand up on my chair and bend over him and start making a loud and terrible sound, a combination of my father’s snoring and Clark’s awful heavy metal singing. The girl keeps talking, and I start howling as loud as I can to stop him from hearing her, tilting my long neck back to get the loudest sound and thrashing my head and people are laughing and also a little scared of me and I am scared of nothing.