Touchy Subjects (17 page)

I look forward to our Appointment on Friday next 6 September at 9:15 am when You will be able to give a full Critique of my Works's strengths and any Possible shortcomings. There are so few Kindred Spirits in this town so I am Most excited at the prospect of being able to Share with you.

Herb Leland's epistle—written in looped, purple letters—made the writer laugh out loud. He was tempted to pin it to the corkboard in his office, but he supposed that wouldn't be nice. Perhaps his year's sojourn among small-town eccentrics would bring out a new humour and warmth in his writing, a sort of Sarah Orne Jewett quality.

His office was narrower than he had expected; the high walls were stubbled with the ubiquitous cream paint. The framed prints he'd shipped from home looked minute. One wall was occupied by a vast set of dark bookshelves; he filled a few inches of one with his complete works—three slimmish volumes—then reconsidered and turned them face out, so they took up half a shelf. Proof that he was a professional, a "published writer" as Marsha the secretary of English kept calling him.

"I'm curious," he asked the self-professed WritOr at their first meeting, "about why you use so many capital letters. Are you trying for a Germanic effect?"

Herb Leland's white, swollen face looked back at him in puzzlement. "The capitals are for added meaning," he confided, "and emphasis."

"Ah," said the writer. "You know, Herb, in my view, it's best to let the emphasis ... grow out of the choice of words. When you capitalize something, it doesn't really add to its meaning. As such."

The middle-aged man's face split into a broad smile.

The writer grinned back at him nervously.

"That's exactly what the last three writers-in-residence said," marveled Herb.

The writer shrugged, as if to say that life was full of coincidence.

At the end of that first Monday, tired but still amused, he strolled home to the cheapest ground-floor apartment he had been able to find. (He was intending to live simply this year, saving most of his stipend to reduce his debts.) The rooms smelled of something cooked, something he couldn't identify even when he sniffed the air and free-associated, as he'd learned to do many years ago in a workshop on overcoming writer's block.

He sent a flippant e-mail to all his friends.
Currently ensconced in college community in small-town America. Pray for me!

What should he call them, he wondered, the unknowns lined up in his day planner? "My writers" seemed a little optimistic. "My visitors" sounded like a hospital. "My students," maybe, except that Marsha had given him to understand that very few of the locals who had made appointments to see him would turn out to be enrolled at the college. "The student body here are into football," she told him regretfully. On his corkboard someone—probably Marsha—had pinned an article from the
Campus Calendar
in which the provost was quoted as saying, "The Writer-in-Residence is our college's ambassador to the wider community—a way for us to reach out the window of our so-called Ivory Tower and truly touch the lives of those we live and work alongside."

By the second week the writer was seeing ten of them a day.

He worked late into the night on the manuscripts they left in his pigeonhole; he made extensive notes for his own reference. He read Christian magazine columns and chapters of legal thrillers, bits of action screenplays and one twenty-page piece entitled "Absurdist Collage Poem." Instead of scribbling anything in the margins—that would be too schoolteacherish, he thought—the writer typed out long lists of tentative suggestions under the headings Micro (spelling, grammar) and Macro (genre, plot, theme).

"Jonas," he asked, one morning, "could you read me this sentence here?"

The boy looked at where the writer was pointing. He cleared his throat raspingly. "
It was then immeasurably time for it to be enacted, the action that required to be carried out as aforesaid.
"

The writer let the words hang on the air for a few seconds. "Do you see what I mean about how your vocabulary in this story tends slightly to the abstract, rather than the concrete? How it could possibly be hard for some readers to tell what's actually going on?"

Jonas scratched a spot on his chin. "No."

An hour later the writer was struggling with Mrs. Pokowski. "When you say on page one that 'The savages recognized the White Man as lord of their dark and mysterious jungle,'" he quoted neutrally, "don't you think perhaps some readers might be bothered by that?"

She furrowed her brow. "You mean the word
savages?
"

"Ah, yes, for one thing . .."

"Well, I didn't want to put
niggers,""
she said virtuously.

After lunch (a tuna sandwich at his desk) came Pedro Verdi with his genetic-engineering near-future fantasy. "OK," said the writer, taking a peek at his notes to refresh his memory, "so the opening scene takes place in a hospital?"

A shrug from the bank teller. "Well, you think it's hospital."

"Yes," said the writer, not wanting to seem stupid. But after a minute, he couldn't help asking, "Isn't it?"

"Yeah, yeah, it's hospital," Pedro conceded, "but I no want my readers to be too sure, you know?"

"Don't worry, they won't be," said the writer heavily. "Now"—trying to read his own handwriting—"there's some ambiguity about the newborn daughter."

"Aha. Yes. There has been mix-up," articulated Pedro, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Only it's no really mix-up, but you don't find it out till after."

"Mr. Verdi." The writer meant to sound stern, rather than petulant. "By my count there are three newborn babies in this book."

"Pedro, please." The bank teller loosened his Bart Simpson tie.

"Fine. Pedro. Now, which baby is the genetically modified telepath?"

"Me, I prefer to leave that open. Tell you the truth, I no decided yet," said Pedro, lying back and gazing out the window.

Three hours later the tiny office was feeling full. Maybelline Norris had brought her mother, a weighty woman introduced only as "my mom, she's my best friend," who sat with her chair several feet behind Maybelline's.

"Who's your favourite poet?" the writer asked, to put off discussion of Maybelline's own work.

"Dunno. Jewel, I guess," the girl said. "If I like stuff, I don't pay much attention to who actually wrote it, you know?"

The writer couldn't think of any other general questions. His eyes flickered between the two Norris women.

"So hey, do you like my poems?" Maybelline asked brightly.

"They're very interesting," he lied. "I like some . .. more than others."

The girl's mother squinted at him disapprovingly.

His eyes fell to the manuscript on his lap, and he silently reread a verse at random.

Hurts hurts
like crazy
My emotionality
crushingly hemmed in
like cactus flowers
Utterly longing for the monsoon

"Have you ever tried ... redrafting any of your poems?" he suggested.

"Oh no," Maybelline reassured him. "I wouldn't want to mess with the magic. I don't know where they come from; I just shut my eyes and it flows. I call up my mom and I say, 'Mom, I've just written another poem,' and she says, 'Wow, that's so wonderful! You're so talented!'"

The writer's eyes veered to the mother,just for politeness, but she only nodded.

"I showed a bunch of them to my teacher back in eleventh grade and she said, 'Wow, you can write. You can really write!'"

It astonished the writer, how tiring it was, this listening business.

"I've got about maybe a thousand of them at home! But these ones are like the crème de la crème," said Maybelline, her eyes resting fondly on the manuscript. "I showed them to my swim coach and she said, 'Wow, this stuff deserves to be published.'"

The writer allowed his eyebrows to soar up, as if in encouragement rather than disbelief.

The girl's mother leaned forward then. "But then there's copyright, ain't there?" she said darkly.

This took him aback.

"Yeah," said Maybelline regretfully. "My mom thinks, what if I send my poems to like a magazine or something, and they get stolen?"

"Stolen?" the writer repeated.

"Yeah, you know, published under another name. Like the editor's, maybe."

His throat was dry; he suddenly longed for a martini. "No one would ever do that," he said faintly.

"Really?" said Maybelline, smiling.

"Trust me. It's never going to happen."

Even on the days when he didn't have office hours, he found it hard to get much of his own work done; this job was so distracting, somehow. But when he did manage a page, at least he approved of what he wrote. It might not be Faulkner, but it was a damn sight better than Herb Leland.

His office collected sounds, he found. Chain saws outside where the dead trees were coming down; gurgles in the ducts as the heating revved up at the start of October; high-pitched giggling in the corridors. Sometimes he imagined that students were pausing to read the résumé pasted to his office door, and laughing at it. He wished he'd left out the line about the
New York Times Book Review
calling his work "profoundly promising"; it would mean something only if he were still twenty-four.

He stared at his shelf, the few inches his slim hardbacks took up. His name in three different typefaces, repeated, as if it were a phrase that meant something. So sweet to his eyes; so insubstantial.

He rather wished he hadn't pinned a head shot on his door, either. Now people recognized him in the corridors and took him by the elbow to ask one of the four FAQs of the trade:

"Did you always want to be a writer?"

"Where do you get your ideas?"

"How many hours a day do you write?"

"How can I get published?"

But when the writer did a lunchtime reading from his poetry collection, only eleven people showed up. To think that on the plane, flying down here, he had worried about his privacy, how to keep people from prying into every detail of his life! As if they gave a damn. Nobody was remotely curious about him as a person except for Herb Leland, who seemed to have formed an unconscious crush. And Herb's questions were hardly probing, either; they were more along the lines of "Do you realize how Honoured we feel to have You Living here among us?"

Most nights the writer read detective novels and ate microwaved macaroni.

"I guess I'm a would-be writer," one housewife introduced herself coyly.

After that, in his head he called them all "my would-be's," meaning that they perhaps would have been writers if they'd been born with a tittle of talent. It never occurred to them to supplement their high school education by consulting a dictionary. They seemed to feel—like Humpty Dumpty but without his powers—that words should mean what they wanted them to mean: that
un-usual
was a brand-new coinage, that it was possible to
riposte
someone, that drunks fell down
unconscientious
in the street.

By mid-October the writer realized that he shouldn't waste his energy trying to teach the would-be's about literature or anything else. His job was to listen. And it was not just casual nodding along that was required, either, but an intense, full-frontal, eyes-locked kind of attention.

The would-be's claimed they longed for honest criticism. "Be brutally honest with me, man," said BJ, a trainee electrician and spare-time rapper who was writing a novel about his recent adolescence and owned seventeen how-to-get-published books. "Hit me with it!" But BJ didn't really mean it; none of them did, the writer discovered.

"Should I chuck the thing in the stove?" one grandmother asked, her eyes watery and fearful, but it was obviously a rhetorical question.

To be honest was to hurt. Even a mild remark like "I'm not a big fan of limericks" could make a would-be's face implode.

But to be kind was to lie. The days he said things like "It's wonderful you've written a whole novel," he went home feeling greasy with deceit.

This had to be how therapists felt, he realized one long Monday afternoon, when Doug McGee—fifty-something, with eczema—began yet again to unravel the story of how his parents, teachers, and so-called friends had crushed his self-esteem from an early age. The writer crossed and recrossed his legs.

His next visitor, Meredith Lopez Jones, was in love with her writer's block—or
blockage,
as she called it, as if were in her colon. "I still don't have anything to show you," she murmured proudly. "I suffer from SAD, did I tell you? I withdraw from the world right after the equinox. I just curl up like a seed in the earth all winter, that's all I do."

Apart from coming in to bore the pants off me twice a week,
the writer added mentally.

"Last summer I stayed up all night and tried to get it all down on paper, everything, the whole universe, you know? But my head was so full of images I thought it might burst! I burnt it all the next day, of course."

The writer pursed his lips as if regretting this.

Meredith pressed her cheekbones so hard she left white fingerprints. "I'm so afraid of writing something mediocre! That's always been my problem. Probably because I was raised as a woman in this society. The scars run deep. No matter how many people have told me I'm an amazingly talented person, I can't quite believe it."

The writer nodded, unable to quite believe it, either.

Clearly, writing was not an ordinary hobby like wine making or kung fu. It attracted the most vulnerable people; the strange, the antisocial, the sad. Some were struggling with addictions or mysterious debilitating illnesses; others wrote endless versions of their childhood traumas. One quite young, balding man called Jack had been divorced five times already; "Got no knack for picking 'em, I guess." His memoir-disguised-as-a-short-story was full of phrases like "there going to blame me" and "their's no way out." The writer stared at the page exhaustedly, wondering if it was worth correcting the grammar.