After the Workshop (11 page)

S. S. Pitzer and I tromped down the stairs to the foyer, where four mailboxes hung on a wall, and then we walked outside together, but only after I’d leaned my shoulder into the door to push the snow on the front porch out of the way. The light was so blinding, I had to shut my eyes and then slowly open them again. I shaded my eyes with my palm, turned to S. S., and asked, “How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Teach creative writing for twenty years,” I said.

“Oh,” S. S. said. “Yes, well.
That
,” he said. “The thing is, I quit reading their stories after five years.”

“Really?”

We tromped down the porch steps, through the snow. I put on my ski mask.

“I always let the students talk about each other’s stories—they always had plenty to say, of course—and I occasionally quoted Twain or Steinbeck or Flannery O’Connor when it seemed appropriate, but then I’d hand back each story with a giant ‘A’ at the end of it. Sometimes I wrote ‘Well done!’ above the grade.”

“No one ever said anything?”

“Fifteen years without a complaint,” he said. “It never crossed anyone’s mind that I
wasn’t
reading the stories. In fact, the year before I left town, I won the university’s Gold Medal Teaching Award, given only to their very best. Sir!” he called out to the man still excavating his car with a snow shovel. “Care for a hand?”

The man, pinch-faced from the wind, paused what he was doing and said, “Thank you, but I think I’ve got ’er!”

S. S. saluted him, and the two of us walked on.

“And where are we heading?” S. S. asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Back downtown? I need to look around for Vanessa, I guess.”

“You think she’s in a snowdrift, perhaps?” S. S. asked. He smiled and raised his eyebrows at me, amused by my lack of a plan.

“And my neighbor,” I said. “M. Cat. He’s missing, too.”

“Everyone’s fine,” he said. “Trust me. The number of people who honestly disappear—and by ‘disappear,’ I mean people who have no choice in the matter—is statistically insignificant. Everyone said that
I
had disappeared. I didn’t, you know. I simply drove away.
I
always knew where I was at.” He stopped walking to look at me, and although he couldn’t possibly have read my expressions through the ski mask, he said, “You worry too much. Look at this,” he said, waving his arm at the snow, the kind of grand gesture an old-time actor would make by way of introducing his audience to the play they’re about to see. “Isn’t this wonderful? Doesn’t it remind you of childhood?”

Across the street, at one of the unofficial frat houses, a guy wearing only too-short sweatpants stepped barefoot onto the snow-covered porch, walked over to the railing, and spewed a gallon of vomit. He remained bent over, forearms resting on the rail, panting, as steam rose from a snow-draped shrub.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t really remind me of childhood.”

“Too bad,” S. S. said.

The college boy saw us, wiped his mouth onto his shoulder, then walked back to the front door gingerly on the balls of his feet, as though crossing a bed of hot coals. The letters across the ass of his sweatpants spelled
juicy
.

“Ah, youth,” S. S. said. “Let’s get some coffee. And a danish.”

“Sure,” I said. “Should we drive?”

“No, no. Let’s walk.” S. S. periodically swooped down, shoveled up a palmful of snow, packed it into a ball, and winged it at a stop sign. The first three times, he missed, but on the fourth time, he hit it head-on, causing it to clang while the snow that had been perched delicately atop the sign’s narrow width came fluttering down. S. S. raised both arms into the air and said, “Yes!”

I couldn’t help imagining how this street must have looked fifty years ago. Faculty used to live in these Victorians, their children playing together in the front yards, and on a morning such as this one, there probably would have been several snowmen in various stages of construction. This, of course, was long before those same children, now grown up and living in a new subdivision, partitioned their old childhood homes into multifamily apartments and then divvied them up again, a dozen years later, into even smaller apartments; before the houses were sold off, one by one, to property management companies; before students saw going away to college as solely an opportunity to party for four or five or six straight years; before the original porch railings had
rotted away and new ones were hammered into place out of untreated two-by-fours, but only after the city had issued several citations for housing code violations. I used to imagine what Iowa City had been like back when Flannery O’Connor was a student in the Workshop, or when the Workshop’s classrooms were held in army-issue Quonset huts, but at some point I quit superimposing the past over the present and began seeing the present for the way things were now.

S. S. reached up and slapped the stop-sign he’d pegged with the snowball. When he lowered his arm, he examined his hand and said, “Hm.”

“What?” I asked.

“I believe I’ve sliced open my hand. Is there a hospital around here, by chance?”

“By the Foxhead,” I said.

“Would it be faster to walk or drive?” he asked calmly as blood poured freely from his palm.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

“Let’s walk then,” he said. “It’s such a nice day.”

S.
S. BLED ALL the way to Mercy Hospital, leaving a convenient trail for hound dogs and crime scene investigators.

“You doing okay there?” I asked.

“Fine, perfectly fine,” S. S. said. “The Ancient Greeks used to think that veins were filled with air until the physician Galen discovered that it was blood that filled them. After that, he started performing bloodlettings. He calculated how much blood should be removed based on how old the patient was, their constitution, what season it was, the weather, and where they were. Do you know the origin of the word
plethora
? It originally meant excess blood. Symptoms were thought to be headache, fever, and apoplexy.” He looked over at me and smiled. “Perhaps I’ll tell the doctor I’m suffering from plethora and foolishly took matters into my own hands.”

“They’ll lock you up,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said and laughed. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

We walked into the emergency wing of the hospital and walked up to the information desk. Hospitals made me skittish these days. Self-employed, almost penniless, I hadn’t had health insurance since I was a student. I coasted from day to day on the thin hope that I was still
relatively young. I didn’t tempt the Gods of Calamity and Misfortune by skiing or rappelling or skydiving. I lived, as much as anyone could, a cautious existence. But I feared that I had been tagged the second I walked through the hospital’s automatic doors as one of the uninsured, as though a chip, implanted at birth, could be activated or deactivated, depending upon my insurance status, and right now my deactivated chip was setting off red flags in offices throughout this building.

At the information desk, S. S. silently raised his hand and showed the receptionist the deep cut.

“You didn’t hit a major artery,” she said emotionlessly. “You’ll live.”

“Oh, good,” S. S. said, acting genuinely grateful.

“Fill this out,” she said, handing him a clipboard, “and then bring it up when you’re done. Can you still write?”

“I haven’t tried in years,” he said, peeking over at me and raising his eyebrows. “But I’ll give it a whirl.”

We walked to the waiting area, where, curiously, only a few others sat: a man holding his kneecap; a child stretched out over several chairs and resting his head in his mother’s lap; and a man wearing a suit and sitting in a wheelchair, watching
The People’s Court
. In Minneapolis, where I grew up, there would be dozens of people in the emergency room, several of them in dire need of attention. Though the area would be filled mostly with men who’d suffered relatively minor on-the-job injuries, there would likely be someone who’d been shot through the leg or the arm, a flesh wound, and who probably didn’t have insurance, which meant that they would have to wait longer than the rest of us, keeping pressure on the bleeding hole with a rag the whole time. The emergency room, bright and loud, had fascinated me back then: gurneys pushed in and out, sometimes occupied, sometimes empty; curtains for examination rooms parted just enough to reveal someone wearing a thin hospital
gown, their arm hooked to an IV, a small pouch of liquid dangling from a hook overhead; the impatient fathers yelling at receptionists; the ever-present policemen speed-walking through the emergency room.

Once, when I was ten years old, I watched a doctor part the curtains of an examination area, and I saw a brown-haired girl about my age standing in her cotton gown next to her mother, and when the girl turned around, I saw that the gown she had on was open in the back, and I saw, without any obstruction, the nape of her neck, the length of her spine, most of her butt, and the backs of her skinny, tanned legs. I fell in love with her right then and there. How could I not have? Since it was years before I saw a real, live, naked girl again, I thought of that brown-haired girl often—almost every minute of every day for the first few weeks after my big toe, which I had gruesomely stubbed while wearing flip-flops, had been sewn back up. By the time I had reached my teens, I thought of her only once in a great while. Still, I never completely shook her, and there were times even now when I wondered if I had dreamed her. Why would a hospital, of all places, have provided such a perfect peeping opportunity for little boys to spy naked little girls? Why weren’t gunshot victims tended to more quickly? Why were police always roaming the halls? But I swear, this is all true . . . and it was vivid to me once again at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City.

“Don’t wait around,” S. S. said, balancing the clipboard on his knee. “
You
, sir, have things to do, people to find.”

“How about if I come back in an hour,” I said.

“Make it two,” he said. “You know how these things go. Oh, and in the event of my death, please notify the press. I’m sure my editor, if no one else, will want to retrieve my body.” He winked at me.

“Will do,” I said. I patted his knee and stood up.

I wandered over to the hospital’s pharmacy to pick up some Tums for my sour stomach, but when I saw how much they cost, I put them
back. I’d forgotten how broke I was; in fact, I had forgotten, until now, about the breast pump, which was reason enough to find Vanessa Roberts, who had fleeced me out of $214. I was about to leave when my eye caught sight of a novel on the revolving rack of paperbacks. The book was titled
Morning Dew
. Its author? Lucy Rogan, my romance writer. I opened the book and read the first sentence:

“Good God,” I whispered and flipped to the inside back cover, from which Lucy Rogan smiled out at me in a pose normally reserved for eighth-grade photos: arms folded over a split-rail fence, head tilted to the side, trees (possibly fake) standing majestically behind her. Her bio still said nothing about a husband, but there was a website, so I pulled a pen from my inside pocket and wrote it across my hand. I was about to return the book when Alice entered the pharmacy holding a brown paper bag.

My first thought was that she had come to get a prescription filled for the morning after pill, fearing I had impregnated her in the back seat of my Corolla, but then it occurred to me that she might have come to the hospital for a tetanus shot after slicing her foot on the cheese grater on my floorboard. When the pharmacist, a handsome man with prematurely white hair, stepped down from his elevated pharmacist’s perch, walked over to Alice, took the bag from her, and kissed her on the cheek, I saw a bright and undeniable truth unfold before me—namely,
that I knew nothing about Alice’s life. For all I did know, she might have had children; she might have owned a hulking BMW SUV with plenty of legroom for getting laid; she might have taken up golf. Now that I thought of it, she had been trying to tell me something at Mickey’s, but we conveniently let it slide. I had assumed because my own life had come to a halt that hers had as well. In CVS, and then later at the restaurant, I saw only a slightly older version of the person who had walked out of my life. The reason I had been unable to envision Alice in any context other than one that involved me was also why I had given up writing my novel: a failure of imagination. But what I wondered now was if my inability to write one more page of fiction—one more
word
—had, in turn, caused a complete meltdown of
all
my creative faculties, including the necessary ones for which basic survival was essential. If I couldn’t have imagined that Alice, whom I hadn’t seen in years, might possibly have gotten married in the interim, what the hell else wasn’t I seeing?

Alice left the pharmacy, and I started to follow, but the pharmacist yelled out at me: “Hey! Did you pay for that book?”

I looked down. I was still holding Lucy Rogan’s novel. I brought it up to the counter, dug out my few remaining bills, and handed them over.

I nodded toward the book and said, “Wife’s in for . . . ”
For what?
I wondered. I couldn’t think; I didn’t know. “A vasectomy,” I offered, the only medical procedure that came to mind. When the pharmacist, whose photo on the wall identified him as Jerome Ruby, stopped what he was doing, unsure whether I was serious or not, I added, “A female vasectomy.
You
know.” I snapped my fingers a few times, pretending to think, but nothing was coming.