Just Friends (22 page)

With the passionate energy that seemed to infuse everything she did, she tore a strip off her yellow notepad, scribbled something in a bold hand, then folded the paper and handed it to him. “Now, I must rush.”

“Thank you. Uh . . . Ms. da Fillipo—Caterina—” Michael broke off. He wanted to keep her here a little longer, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Yes?” She shot him a glance of cautious curiosity, as if he were an unfamiliar and unpredictable beast. Michael couldn’t remember a woman looking at him quite this way before. Her eyes were not brown after all, he saw, but flecked with fiery sparks of yellow.

“I, um . . .” Michael frowned. His mind was blank. Then he had an inspiration. “I’d be very grateful if you would clear up this misunderstanding about a lawsuit—you know, talk to Freya.”

“Freya?” His request seemed to startle her.

“You’ll be seeing her, won’t you?”

“Sure. Absolutely. Of course.” She was cramming her belongings into her briefcase and busily snapping the catches. She was leaving!

“Wait! I’ll ride down in the elevator with you.” Belatedly, Michael started to clear up his own things. But he was too slow.

“Sorry. Got to go. ‘Bye!”

Moving like a small, vivid blue whirlwind, she picked up her briefcase, whisked herself to the doorway, and was gone with a wave of her hand.

Michael stood alone in the dismal little room. He looked down at the piece of yellow paper he was holding and unfolded it. There was the address of a store called Aphrodisia and the names of a couple of products: nothing else. He crushed the paper in his fist and let out a curse of frustration.

“Nuts!” he said.

CHAPTER 14

“. . . and I thought the part where Mack chopped up his mother was a little clichéd.”

“That was
intentional
, Mona. It’s an ironic commentary on the banality of violence in our society.”

“But he didn’t have to eat her, too.”

“Of course he had to eat her. That’s the ‘devouring passion’ foreshadowed in my very first paragraph.”

“With ketchup?”

“You don’t get it, do you? The ketchup is symbolic.”

“Oh, yeah? Of what, exactly?”

“Of blood, I imagine.” Jack cut in smoothly. “Am I right, Lester?”

Lester gave his usual psychopath’s stare, then jerked his head in a nod. As always, he was wearing a tie over an obsessively well-pressed shirt; his scalp gleamed white through a born-again-Christian haircut. Jack wondered: Could Lester have written the threatening letter? Lester was always the first student to arrive for class, and always sat in the same seat. This latest story—about a son so grotesquely overfed by his mother that he became a prisoner of his own obesity, and eventually ate his mother’s corpse—was typical of his work. If anyone knew about “the Forces of Darkness” it would be Lester.

“Why do men always have to chop up their mothers? Why not their fathers? Give me a good castration scene any day.” That was Rita, fat and fifty, an enthusiastic latecomer to feminism. But Rita was all bluster; her hatred of men was purely theoretical. If she knew about Candace and him, she’d just laugh. Wouldn’t she?

Jack forced himself to concentrate. His gaze traveled around the faces at the seminar table, drawing their attention. “Let’s look for a moment at character development in ‘Big Mack.’ Who wants to comment on that?”

As usual, Nathan began to shoot his mouth off. Meanwhile Mona, who clearly felt she had been snubbed over the symbolic ketchup, began to clean her nails with a hairpin. She was one of those pale, skinny women who cultivated the “damaged” look, and told anyone who would listen how she had been abused by her high school English teacher. Jack studied her bony profile; maybe
she
had written the note, as a form of vicarious revenge.

The letter had arrived yesterday in the mail. Fortunately, Freya had gone to work by then, so there was no one to witness his shock. And Jack had been shocked. He was used to being liked; hell, he was a likable guy . . . wasn’t he? To begin with, he had screwed up the letter and thrown it away. But all morning, while he tried to write, he found his thoughts dwelling uneasily on its threatening malice. Eventually, he had retrieved the crumpled paper from the wastebasket and smoothed it out, scanning it for clues. It was upsetting to know that someone out there hated him this much. He wondered if a similar letter had been sent to his employers. Part of his training course to become a Creative Writing Instructor had included a lecture on “appropriate” behavior. Jack hadn’t paid much attention. He wasn’t a dirty old man, and there were plenty of girls around without having to resort to your own students. Though that, of course, was exactly what he had done. Jack frowned; it occurred to him that he might have been rather stupid. At the back of his mind was the notion that one day, when he had tired of the New York literary scene, he might take a job as a Creative Writing professor in some agreeable university town. He didn’t imagine the teaching would be very onerous; there’d be plenty of time for his own writing.

Now that little fantasy was under threat. Jack glanced at Candace, sitting right down the other end of the table, uncharacteristically silent and demure, and felt a twinge of exasperation at her blatant overacting. Without mentioning the note, Jack had told her that they must be more discreet; but not that she should impersonate a nun. Everyone must have noticed that she hadn’t opened her mouth all evening. Feeling his eyes on her, Candace glanced up, bit her lip, and blushed deeply. Jesus!

Nathan and Lester, meanwhile, were approaching danger-level in their argument about whether character was an outmoded concept in contemporary fiction. Jack wished he had never set this assignment. Write a story about love, he’d said—any kind of love. The results had been depressing. Terrified of being accused by their peers of writing mush, his students had subverted the brief in the most perverse ways they could think of: love of drugs, love of killing, love in the Holocaust, love that turned to rape, and of course incest, tiresome hallmark of the beginner. The one shining exception had been a story about the friendship between two misfits at school, and its betrayal—a piece of writing so tender and subtle that Jack was half tempted to steal it. He might as well. Carlos, the author, was an obsessional rewriter; he would never send the story to a magazine because it would never, in his view, be “finished.” Carlos definitely wouldn’t have written the note. Would he?

Jack smoothed back his hair. Relax. What did it matter if he lost this job? It was only money. The academic world wasn’t so wonderful that he needed to join the scrabble for positions, especially if that meant tailoring his personal life—and his intellect—to some moronic standard of “correctness.” Why the hell shouldn’t he form a relationship with a consenting adult of twenty-two?

Reentering the discussion, Jack steered it deftly onward until the class concluded that “Big Mack,” despite its imaginative strengths and some impressive turns of phrase, hadn’t quite “worked.”

“Why not?” Jack prompted.

Silence.

A hesitant voice spoke up. “I know this is probably my fault—Lester’s a better writer than I’ll ever be—but I didn’t really
feel
anything.”

“Feel!” scoffed Lester.

“Girls’ stuff,” agreed Nathan.

The woman who had spoken, fortyish and frumpy, turned fiery red. Jack remembered that she worked in a day-care center, and had never graduated from high school.

“That’s very perceptive of you, Lisa,” he said warmly. “You’ve hit on a key point.”

He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “All right. What’s the most important thing you need to do as a writer?”

“Get yourself a shit-hot agent,” Nathan shot back.

The class laughed.

Jack acknowledged the joke with a smile and waited for the class to settle. “The most important thing a writer can do is to be truthful. I’m talking here about emotional truth. That means that you don’t try to bullshit your readers. Don’t
tell
me how shocked I must be, or how sad or happy: make me
feel
it.”

“Is that what you do? Sir?” Nathan’s tone was offensive.

“I try to.”

“We’re all real eager to see that novel you’ve been working on.”

Jack refused to be distracted. “Forget my work. Choose someone you admire, anyone you like, and see how they do it.”

“You mean, like Carson McGuire?” asked Mona. “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?”

“Anyone you like.” Jack repeated. “Remember, in order to make your reader feel, you’ve got to feel, too. So far in this course we’ve been concentrating on techniques—imagery, dialogue, point of view. These are all important, but it’s no good hiding under a glittering surface. Come out. Show yourselves. Tonight I want to see you naked.”

“Not me.” Rita gave a raucous chuckle.

“Yes, all of you.” Jack looked at his watch. There was an hour left of the three-hour session. He wanted to put a lid on Nathan’s aggression before it got out of hand. “Okay. Exercise time.”

The class groaned.

“I want you to spend the next forty minutes writing a scene that moves me.”

Nathan folded his arms. “I’m not in the mood.”

“ ‘You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club’: Jack London. Anyone failing to attempt this assignment will be graded accordingly.” Jack looked carefully around the circle of faces. “They certainly won’t get an A.”

“I can’t do it!” Carlos’s voice was anguished. “There isn’t enough time.”

“Try. The difference between a would-be writer and a real writer is finishing. Now: any questions?”

After a certain amount of fuss the students settled to their task. A pleasing, concentrated stillness fell on the room. Through the high windows, streetlights glowed in the night sky. Jack looked around the high, square room with its institutional blue paint and its tickle of chalk in the nose, and contemplated his class—his twelve disciples—slouching, doodling, writing, chewing their pens, occasionally gazing hopefully at him as if he might impart the trick of turning water into wine. Jack felt his heart expand. He
did
like teaching. He liked the combination of pure ideas and muddled humanity. He liked the arguments and the jokes, and the intense satisfaction when a student’s comprehension opened like a flower. He didn’t want to lose this job, or the chance of others like it. He wondered which of the twelve was Judas.

There was a rustle of paper as Rita turned over her page and raced to set down the words that spilled from her brain. Jack was amazed by the confidence of some of his students. His own desire to be a writer had been slow and stealthy. Sometimes he felt a fraud, that he couldn’t be a “real” writer because he hadn’t written obsessively from childhood. His had not been a literary household. His father read the stock-market pages; his mother had liked fat, floppy magazines with pictures of other people’s homes and other people’s clothes. But Jack had observed. As stepmothers and stepfathers came and went, and he shuttled from one home to another, he had learned to read the emotional temperature and to record it in his head. If the life he was living seemed imperfect, he fantasized a different one.

When Jack was ten, his father had remarried. Lauren had gusted into their lives, bringing with her trunkfuls of books and the fresh, tantalizing whiff of a different world. Jack discovered that reading could be a serious, even an admired pursuit. Lauren bought him books, read aloud to him, explained new words and concepts, listened to his opinions. Jack’s relationship with her had survived the inevitable divorce some years later, and Lauren had encouraged him when he began, tentatively and in secret, to commit some of his imaginings to words. He had dedicated
Big Sky
to her.

For Jack, writing was a liberation, like discovering an extra limb or a new dimension. He liked the process that went on in his head: first, the open, instinctive rush of words, then the gritty, cerebral tussle of revision. He loved the notion that a good writer could create anything he liked, and make the reader believe it.

Except he was blocked. He remembered with a flicker of anxiety that it was this weekend that his father was flying up to New York for a series of business meetings the following week. There had been the usual two-line letter, typed by his secretary, informing Jack of this fact and stating that he would be free to see his son some time on Sunday. It irritated the hell out of Jack the way his father always assumed that Jack himself would be free. Dad didn’t rate writing as “work.” They’d had many bitter struggles, starting way back when Jack had dropped out of the school football team to concentrate on his studies. (“Hell, son, who needs to study when they’re going to inherit Madison Paper?”) At last the day had come when Jack had proudly presented his father with a copy of his book, the first fruits of his labors. His father had merely flipped through the pages and commented with a chuckle that Jack could have produced a million of these by now if he’d been working at Madison Paper. Jack was sure he’d never read it. Maybe if he got onto the bestseller list—or won the Pulitzer!—his father would finally stop jeering.