Blue Angel (5 page)

Dealing with the lock and key spares him the always problematic dilemma of whether or not to agree when a student trashes one of his colleagues. Also, it's disconcerting that this sullen near-mute from class has turned into a chatterbox. He'd planned on one of those meetings in which the students chew their nails while he extracts ten minutes worth of conversation-like noise.

Swenson's study has the yeasty smell of sweaters left in a drawer. How long since he's been here? He honestly can't remember. He throws open a window. Air rushes in. He lowers the window.

“Is this too cold for you?” he says. “Yesterday was tropical. Today is freezing. The planet's out of control.”

Angela doesn't answer. It's taking all her concentration to walk across the room. Even so, she trips on the rug and nearly falls as she bends to straighten the carpet. All of which moves Swenson to prayer. God, don't let her be on drugs.

“Oh, man,” she says. “I'm always falling over shit.”

“Try not to hurt yourself,” advises kindly, paternal Swenson.

“I'll try not to. Thanks.” Is Angela being sarcastic?

“Perhaps you'd be safer if you sat down,” he says.

“Is it okay if I stand for a while?” She bounces from foot to foot.

“However you're comfortable,” Swenson says.

“
Comfortable
. Ha. I wish,” she says.

Oh, please, Swenson thinks.

Sliding into his desk chair, he plays with a stack of old mail, very official, tidying up. The doctor will see you now.

“So how's your semester going?” Swenson's on automatic.

“Mostly straight down the toilet.” Angela gazes out the window.

“Sorry to hear that.” Swenson's reply is more sincere than she knows. The answer to his question is supposed to be: fine. Students don't confide in him. He doesn't encourage them to. Their lives may be disintegrating, but they don't tell him. The poetry students confide in Magda Moynahan, who teaches the poetry workshop. But he never hears classroom gossip. Years after the fact, he's learned that a student was coming unglued and he never noticed. Well, he's got his own problems. He certainly doesn't need theirs, though from time to time he does feel a little…left out, worried by his obliviousness to the dramas around him. He lacks the most basic observational skills. No wonder he can't write.

Angela says, “I think I'll sit down now.”

“Sure,” says Swenson. “Go ahead.”

Angela flops backward into the leather armchair across from his desk. First she crosses her legs on the seat in a failed attempt at a half lotus, then scoots down and pulls her knees up to her chest, then moves back and puts her feet on the ground and taps her ring on the chair arm. Swenson's never seen anyone have so much trouble sitting. What's she on? He doesn't think drugs. Protracted adolescence. Her leather jacket keeps making the sound of someone tearing off a Band-Aid.

She makes one last try at pretzeling her legs into some sort of yogic twist, then sits up straight and stares at him, a quivering punk Chihuahua. She's gone easy on the facial jewelry—only a silver coil snaking though the rim of one ear and a thin nose ring studded with a tiny green star that glitters under her nostril like a dab of emerald snot. She's left off the eyebrow ring and the upper-lip ring, so it's slightly less upsetting to look at her pale triangular face. Her eyes don't have a color, exactly: a newborn's gunmetal gray.

“So. What's the matter with school?” he says.

“My classes suck,” she says.

“All of them?” he asks neutrally.

“Not yours!” Angela says. He didn't think she was including him, though now he wonders why he didn't. “Your class is the only one I go to. The only one I like.”

Why me, Lord? thinks Swenson. How did
I
get lucky?

“What's funny?” Angela says.

“Nothing,” says Swenson. “Why?”

“You smiled.”

“I was flattered,” he lies. “That you're enjoying my class.”

She says, “Writing's the only thing I care about in the world.”

“I'm delighted.” Another lie. “We want our students to care. But you can't cut your other classes. If Tolstoy slept through his classes, they'd fail
his
ass out of Euston.” Why the tough talk? Speaking her language? It's a reflex, sometimes, with students.

Angela flinches. A fragile flower under all that armor. Often they're the most delicate, the green-haired and the pierced. Most Euston students opt for the outdoorsy look of ecologically conscious future CEOs. Angela's fashion statement represents a decision to abandon all hope of ever fitting in.

“Can I smoke in here?” she asks.

“I'd rather you didn't,” says Swenson. “You leave, I get to live with the smoke all day. Look, I used to smoke, so I know—”

“It doesn't matter! I don't actually smoke!” She throws her hands in the air. “Anyway, I'm not
sleeping
through my classes. I'm at my computer. Writing fiction.”

“Well, good,” says Swenson. “That's wonderful. Does that mean you'll have something for us to look at in workshop next week?”

“I'm writing a novel,” Angela says.

“A novel,” repeats Swenson despairingly.

He can imagine. Or maybe he can't. Often he's surprised when the captain of the men's lacrosse team hands in a Gothic bodice ripper. Last year a boy with blue hair and matching fingernails spent a whole semester on a novel entitled
King Crap
. The first ten pages were printouts of the words
King Crap
in different typefaces. One year two indistinguishable girls—not twins, as Swenson first assumed, but friends—worked collaboratively on science fiction stories about two androids named Zip and Zap. One girl wrote Zip's part, the other wrote Zap's. Years later, he saw a film about two best friends who conspired to kill one girl's mother, and the murderers' wacky intensity reminded him of those students.

“What's the novel called?” he asks.

Angela says, “Can I check out your bookcase? I think it might calm me down.”

Swenson can tell her not to smoke. But he can't exactly forbid her to get up and look at his books. He wants to say, This is a conference. Let's keep it short and tidy.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Feel free.”

“We can keep on talking,” she says. “It would just make me feel less weird.”

Angela sidles along the walls, inspecting his vintage postcards and framed photos, pausing to stare at Chekhov, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf.

“God, I can't believe this,” she says. “I've got the same postcards on
my
wall.”

It's been so long since anyone—including himself—has noticed what he's chosen to surround himself with. Years ago, the girls who came to his apartment would check out his books, his possessions. It used to be sexy, sitting there with nothing much to look at besides the girl's ass as she cruised his decor. But this isn't sexy at all, maybe because he can
see
Angela's ass, two white, symmetrical crescents exposed by her fraying jeans.

Angela prowls his bookcase, then pounces, sliding a book from the shelf. She shows it to Swenson. Naturally. It's Stendhal.
The Red and the Black
. He can't remember if he told the class, in an unguarded egotistical moment, that he was working on a novel loosely based on Stendhal's. Somehow he doesn't think he did. Is it coincidence or ESP that makes Angela say, “I love this book almost as much as I love
Jane Eyre
”?

“Why's that?” Swenson asks warily.

She says, “I love how Stendhal gets, you know, like, inside and outside Julien at the same time, so you can imagine doing what Julien's doing, and meanwhile you're thinking you would never do something like that.”

That's the problem with Swenson's novel. He's never gotten inside his hero, Julius Sorley. Even the name has never fit. He's remained on the outside, watching.

Angela's returned to the chair. “Are you all right? You looked upset for a minute.”

“I'm fine,” he says.

“Me too,” she says. “Sort of. I'm feeling better now. Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “My novel is called
Eggs
.”

“Nice title.” Swenson shudders, imagining a three-hundred-page ovarian stream-of-consciousness homage to Anais Nin. “And what's it about?”

“I'd rather not say. I brought you the first chapter. We can talk about it after you've read it. Look. I might as well tell you before you figure it out for yourself. My writing's awful. It totally bites.”

“I'm sure it doesn't,” says Swenson. “Can we put the chapter up for next week's workshop?”

“Could you read it first? I could give it to you chapter by chapter? I've got half of it written. I started it last summer?”

Chapter by chapter. The three most frightening words in the English language.

“Let me read the first chapter,” he says. “Then we'll see. Maybe it will be helpful to do it in class. Or we might decide not to.”

“
You
decide.” Angela wrestles with something stuck in her backpack and at last yanks out an envelope, crumpled in the struggle. Clearly, some thought has gone into selecting the tangerine-orange folder.

“Shit,” says Angela. “Look at this thing.” Vaulting out of her chair, she presents it, with an ironic flip, to Swenson.

“Well, thanks,” she says. “Thanks for your time. And I'm totally totally sorry if I woke you up or stopped you from writing or anything.”

“Not at all.” Swenson's full of smiles. The conference is almost over.

Almost. Angela hesitates. “Could we talk about it next week? I don't want to be pushy. But if you finish before then, you can call me, or E-mail me. Or something. I know I'm being pushy. I need to know what you think. This makes me so nervous. No one else has seen it.”

“I'll read it by next week.” Hey, the conference is over. Can't this girl take a hint?

“See you,” Angela says. “Thanks again.” She turns to wave at Swenson as she opens the door and, turning back, plows into the doorframe. “Ouch. Listen, there's one other thing. There are like four or five typos in there. I meant to fix them—”

“Don't worry about typos,” Swenson says.

“Okay, sorry,” she says. “Sorry. See you soon.”

“Later,” Swenson says.

He waits until he can no longer hear her clomping down the stairs. Then he slides her envelope into his briefcase, behind his two-day-old
New York Times
. He'll get to it, eventually. For now…out of sight, out of mind. He should go home and look at
his
novel. But once more he's siphoned all his creative juices into a brain-numbing chat with a student. He's ruined the day for writing, and his punishment is to face yet another of the problems with
not
writing, which is: how to kill all that time.

Surely he has phone calls to make. Too bad it's only been two weeks since he called his editor, Len Currie. Len's publishing house has a contract for Swenson's next novel. No one bothers mentioning that the deadline's two years past. Every six months, he phones Len, who always seems pleased to hear from him and spends their brief conversation bitching about his workload.

On the other hand, it's been at least a week since he's driven to Montpelier and blown an hour at the bookstore, drinking espresso and skimming little magazines that he's too cheap to buy, though he knows he should support them for the sake of the literary community. The literary community. Isn't it enough that he's patronizing Bradstreet Books, when he could drive the same distance in the opposite direction and drink much better coffee at the Burlington Barnes & Noble?

Such trivial ideological quibbles are what nag at a writer's mind. Hence, to decide between bookstores is to be a writer.

A
dam Bee's souped up the cappuccino machine so he can yank
the lever to greet his customers and a few puffs of steam will sail out. Toot toot. Glad to see ya! Swenson does a mock salute to the little engine that could, wishing guiltily for the anonymity of the big chain bookstore. That can't be good for the cappuccino machine, about which Swenson feels protective. It's the one major upgrade since Adam Bee opened Bradstreet Books, in the early seventies, when he came to Montepelier—on the lam, it's rumored, from a Weatherman bombing indictment.

“
Ola!
” cries Adam, an aging gnome whose gray beard sprays halfway down his zeppelin-like belly.

“Hey, man,” says Swenson. “How ya doin'?”

“I think I'll be okay,” Adam says. “The usual?”

It's a bar conversation, transposed to a book store. Swenson wishes he
were
in a bar. “The usual,” he says.

The machine makes what sounds like its last gasp as Adam pulls Swenson's double espresso. “How's the writing?” Adam asks.

Go to hell, thinks Swenson. But Adam's just making small talk. How's the farm? The wife? The kids? He's not tormenting Swenson, who believes that Adam has patronized him for years, ever since he witnessed one of Swenson's many character-building humiliations: a bookstore reading Swenson gave together with Magda Moynahan.

Adam had begged them to do it. They'd called it Writers of Euston. During a blizzard, naturally, and naturally, no one showed up. Rows of empty chairs. Wine and cheese cubes set out, and no one to consume them but Adam, Magda, Swenson, and a pair of those ghoulish androgynous slaves Adams hires out of Goddard.

There was one actual customer. An old woman in the back row. So they felt they had to go through with it. She'd come out in the storm. Swenson had begun to read the dramatic opening of
Phoenix Time,
the chapter that every critic cited for its unsentimental power, the section in which the teenage hero's father sets himself on fire as a protest against the Vietnam War. A few minutes into the reading the old woman raised her hand and asked him to read louder. When he gently suggested that she move up front, she'd told him she might need to leave in the middle.

Who knows if Adam even remembers? Probably only Swenson's condemned to relive it each time he comes to Bradstreet Books. He takes his coffee to the table farthest from Adam, making a wide circle around the territory that two young earth mothers have staked out with their baby strollers. He sips the bitter, watery brew. Yes, sir. This is the café life. Now what should he read?

If he braves the fiction section, he'll have to avoid the
S
shelf, where he'll notice—as if he didn't know—that his books are out of print. Of course, he has boxes of them at home, and could give them to Adam to sell on consignment. But that would be too humiliating. He'll just pretend not to care. So no Christina Stead for him. No Wallace Stegner. No Stendhal. Anyway, choosing a book would represent too great a commitment. His espresso would be cold long before he decided.

He grabs a copy of
Fiction Today
. Let's see who's doing what. The first story, by a writer whose name he faintly recognizes, describes a father cold-bloodedly executing the family poodle. He skims through it, then begins another story, by another vaguely familiar name, a woman's this time, and stops when the mother backs her car over the narrator's kitty. Is this some kind of theme issue? Or didn't the editors notice? Have his students been reading this? That could explain a lot. They're too young and sweet to kill off their pets, so they have sex with them instead. He
wishes
his students were reading this. He slides the magazine back on the shelf and picks up
Poets and Writers
, paging past the ads for summer conferences (to which he has not been invited) and anthologies (to which he has not been asked to submit), past the interview with the semifamous novelist discoursing on how she warns her students about the perils of putting descriptions of food in their stories.

He might as well read Angela's chapter. At least it's something he has to do. A false sense of accomplishment is better than none at all. He reaches for his briefcase. Now where did he leave it? He hopes not in his office. Did he stop between there and here—somewhere he'll never find it?

He runs out to check his car. The briefcase is on the front seat. Back at his table, he takes a fortifying gulp of espresso and finds the tangerine-colored envelope. “
Eggs
. A novel by Angela Argo.” He steels himself, reads the first line, then reads on, without stopping.

Swenson puts down the manuscript. Is that the whir of the incubators? No, it's the cappuccino machine. He leafs through the pages, as if one more quick look will disclose the secret of how they could have been written by Angela Argo. Where did Angela learn a phrase like
arterial pathways
?

Once you've met enough writers—and in his former life, Swenson met plenty—you stop expecting the person to match the work. But this particular gap seems so wide that he has to…well, he has to at least consider the possibility of…plagiarism. A few years ago a student told Magda that a classmate's poem was stolen from Maya Angelou's Clinton inauguration ode. Hadn't Magda recognized it? To Magda's credit, she hadn't. Months of her time were eaten up by distasteful meetings with the plagiarist's parents, the dean, and the consulting shrink.

But what kind of psycho plagiarist begs you to read her work, comes to your office and tells you that writing is her whole life? Plagiarists hand in their papers late. You have to remind them ten times. And then there was Angela's passion for
Jane Eyre
, for Stendhal. Maybe the girl's a writer. Stranger things have happened. Corrections dot the manuscript, neat deletions and additions, words crossed out and in every case replaced with better words.

Swenson jumps as Adam plunks a coffee cup down on the table.

“Easy,” Adam says. “Relax. This one's on the house. You look stressed, big guy. Writer's block? Family shit? Anything I can do?”

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” says Swenson. “Grading student papers.” His eyes roll up in an arc of exasperation.

“I bet you'd rather be writing your own book,” says Adam.

“You got it,” Swenson says.

Adam scratches the back of his neck, pushing forward the long gray ponytail gathered in a black scrunchee. “Well, I guess The Man doesn't pay us for doing what we love. If you think
I'd
be pulling the crank on a cappuccino machine…”

“What would you be doing?” asks Swenson. Why would someone run a bookstore if he didn't love it? Though now he can't remember Adam ever mentioning a book.

“What would I be doing?” Adam repeats thoughtfully.

Wait. Swenson doesn't want to know. This is way more intimate than he needs to get with Adam Bee.

“Herb farming,” Adam says.

“Go for it,” Swenson says. “Guys are making fortunes. And if you get busted we'll just forget we ever had this conversation.”

Adam says, “I don't mean weed. I'd only grow that for personal use. I can't even smoke anymore, some pre-emphysema thing. No, I mean medicinal. Gingko. Saint John's wort. Ginseng. The new frontier, man. Anti-AIDS. Anticancer. But my knees are going, I'm your basic old dog what can't learn new tricks….”

As Adam hovers over Swenson, waiting for him to taste his coffee, his vulnerable belly grazes Swenson's ear. Their tableau—one standing, solicitous, the other seated and frostily grateful–makes Swenson feel like a melancholy provincial in Chekhov or Turgenev, attended by the family retainer, Old Gerasim or Mumbles with secret longings of his own, the tiny cottage, the white horse, hopeless and unobtainable. Swenson hates it that Adam can't grow his herbal hippie joy juice.

“Do it,” Swenson says. “Hire some kids to do the grunt work.” He could hardly sound more phony or feel more sincere. He stares up into Adam's rheumy eyes. Adam's younger than he is!

“Don't spill your coffee,” says Adam. “You might have a hard time explaining it to the student who wrote that paper.”

The student? Swenson stares at the manuscript as if for the first time. And then he has the strangest desire to tell Adam that he's just read the most interesting first chapter. Something actually good. It occurs to him that his new sympathy for Adam may have some connection to his having read Angela's work. Isn't that what he told the class yesterday, that good writing can make you
see
your fellow humans? It doesn't make you a better person. It just sort of…opens your pores.

“The students would understand,” Swenson says. “They'd all be dead without coffee.”

“Jeez,” says Adam. “Dead? I hope not.”

Adam stares at him quizzically. Swenson no longer cares. God bless Adam, God bless Bradstreet Books. Swenson's going home.