Welding with Children (13 page)

Sometimes he felt close to discovering how to write really well. A year ago he was having stomach problems, his wife was thinking of divorcing him, and he had just been transferred to a smaller church; he got up early one morning to empty his bladder, and he felt a similar liquid weight in his soul. He sat down in the quiet lakeside balcony of his apartment near the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and wrote a story on his laptop about a man quitting his job and buying a motorcycle to escape the South. He wasn't sure whether the story was any good, but after buying a copy of
Writer's Market,
sending his manuscript all over, and getting rejected thirty-one times, a little magazine in Ohio,
The Rust-Belt Muse,
bought it for two contributors' copies. When he received the acceptance in the mail, he felt elevated, as though he'd set foot on the first step of the stairs to the Palace of Fame. He'd gone on to publish four more stories in journals with better reputations. His wife began to find him a little more interesting, gave him new word-processing software, and he set up a little study off the rear viewing deck of his place, where he spent hours looking over the wind-whipped lake, or watching the screen saver on his computer. He wrote a little, and his wife seemed satisfied to see him at home doing something of purpose.

The chirping voice of another panelist politely agreed with the professor. Millicent Winespoor was a romance novelist, a large soft-looking lady dressed in a flowered silk blouse and floppy hat. “There's no reason to get action rolling too soon,” she sang out to the room. “A nice long section of description of the novel's setting will—”

“Nothing,” the third panelist interrupted, a sharp-voiced stick of a woman with enormous glasses, “nothing will shoot a novel in the forehead like a vomity clot of useless description on the first page.” She was spare, older, wearing a denim dress and looking as tough as barbed wire. Brad looked to his brochure and saw that Faye Cooker had published ten novels at university presses and had taught for thirty years. She had the dogged look of a classroom veteran, one of those academic martyrs long-tortured by students' outrageous questions and assumptions about writing.

“Well,” Millicent began, “I only meant that lulling the reader into a locale—”

“If you believe for a minute that a reader wants to be lulled, I think you should cut back on your estrogen supplement,” Faye snapped. “A novel is a story, and a story is like an airplane. You get the damned thing off the ground as soon as you can.” She leaned over and gave Professor Lamot a wide smile. “That means you start the plot.”

A snowstorm of bickering followed for fifty minutes, during which many of the potential writers began to look out the window at the rust-red conveyors and towers of the turpentine mill, the boilers wreathed in Kudzu, giant steam engines exposed by collapsed walls. Some drew stars or torsos in their notebooks. Brad, however, listened to every word, wondering if some fact in the harangue could point him toward The Answer.

That evening he lay on his lumpy cot in the cinder-block dorm trying to read an inscrutable and depressing story in a literary quarterly. His roommate was forty-year-old Butchie Langanstein from Cincinnati, a beef cow of a stockbroker with a crew-cut head made like a butcher's block. He wore a poplin khaki sport coat that was much too small for him, and when he moved, his shoes creaked like overburdened saddles. Brad studied him a moment, then asked, “What do you expect to get here at the conference?”

Butchie gave him a sly look. “I'd like to, you know, find out how to fix up my novel a bit.”

“You're a novelist?”

The big man rocked back on the bed. “I got a few chapters under my belt.”

“You have anything published?”

“Nah.” Butchie waved him off. “I sent out a few things, but most of the time the bastards never sent anything back. That's one reason I'm here, you know. To make some connections. It's mostly connections that gets you published. I don't think you got to be Faulkner anymore.”

“Are you happy with what you write?”

Butchie cocked his head. “Hell, I don't know. I like to do it, though. I figure if I write until I die, I'm bound to get some better.”

“I mean, do you think your stuff is any good?”

“My mom likes a couple things I did. How do you know if you're good, anyway? Just because somebody tells you? Well, the next guy might tell you different.” He jerked at his tie as if he were trying to hang himself. “Hey, you going out tonight?”

Brad turned a page in his book and made a face. “After the last panel discussion, I'll be pretty tired. I'd like to read a lot while I'm here.”

“There's unattached writing women around. You might get lucky. Did you see that fox that sat next to me at the panel discussion?”

Brad looked at the ceiling and decided not to tell Butchie that he was a minister. “That old lady?”

“Oh, she ain't so old. There's motion left in those bones.”

Brad sat up. “She's old enough to be your mother. I took the timber industries bus tour with her and listened to her talk to and from the plywood plant. She's an atheist who has a crucifix collection. She has a pet conch shell that gives her stock tips.”

Butchie ran his hand over his crew cut, which sprang back up like a vegetable brush. “Yeah, well, you just don't know what's important. Me and the conch lady are going out for drinks after supper.” He announced this as though he had just landed a date with a movie star. “She said she was gonna help me with my character motivations,” he said, winking.

After the evening meal, Brad went to hear a man read a short story. It was science fiction, set in the future in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Everybody was dressed in self-deodorizing aluminum clothes and lived in vinyl houses. They never went anywhere because they worked, recreated, and bought what they wanted on their home computers. However, every block in the vinyl village had a tavern where they would drink Rolling Rock beer, dance the polka, and argue over the Steelers games. The story was very creative, Brad thought, as it unrolled futuristic fact after fact, though it had no plot, except something about aluminum absorption causing Alzheimer's disease. It was funny, sometimes, and there were clever metaphors that the author had placed like cherries on a cake. Something was missing, though, and Brad couldn't put his finger on it. When the story was over, Professor Lamot applauded with enthusiasm, and Faye Cooker examined the floor.

There was a mixer in an empty classroom afterward, where a cafeteria table held a Tupperware bowl of bean dip and a shallow platter of chips. Brad approached Faye Cooker and decided to talk to her, he didn't care about what, figuring that just being close to a published writer might bathe him in creative emanations. Up close, she was smaller and grayer, her voice reedy-loud from years of lecturing. He introduced himself, and she smiled and took his hand in a way that said,
I have been paid well to be nice to you.

“I read one of your books,” Brad offered. “
The Midwife's Bill.
I thought it had a lot of good history in it.”

“Thanks. What do you write?” she asked quickly.

He thought a minute. “Stories. But I want to start a novel.”

“Ah, that's nice,” she said, nodding, then taking a swallow of a clear drink. “Do you have any idea what you'll say?”

“Say?”

“I like to think of the novel as a voice.”

He blinked and poured himself a cola from a card table bar. “I was kind of thinking of a detective story, not just a shoot-'em-up, but serious detective fiction.”

Faye raised an eyebrow. “That's sort of like serious water-balloon fighting, isn't it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you want to write something good, start with your family, something they did either last year or last century. Something your old man told you, or your grandfather.” She looked at him through her bifocals. “You knew your grandfather?”

“Yes.” He thought of the old man, who did ship inspections for a maritime insurance company, and who had started out as a farmer. “But he wasn't very interesting.”

“Thank God for that,” she said.

He absorbed the comment and shrugged it off at the same time. He was a man who appreciated truth by storing it away, like coin collectors who keep their treasures in a bank box and haven't seen them for decades. “I have to come up with something day after tomorrow for a staff member to consider. Will you read my beginning?”

“Why not?” She raised one hand and let it fall. “Just remember what I said.”

“You don't like the detective angle?”

She looked at him quickly, started to say something, then seemed to reconsider. “Are you a detective?”

“No.”

“Anybody in your family a detective? A best friend? An acquaintance? A ninth cousin?” Her voice began to cut like a dull razor.

“Okay, okay,” he said. At this point a large, hopeful-looking woman stepped into the conversation and cut him off with her thick body the way a cowboy's horse cuts a calf out of a herd.

Brad returned to the cinder-block dorm, got out his laptop, and stared at it for fifty minutes. Then he began to type, continuing to rattle the keys until Butchie wobbled in at two
A.M.
The big man shucked his shoes, dropped his wool slacks on the floor in two gray rings, and fell into bed with his knit shirt on, blowing out air like a porpoise. He held up two fingers and said, “Second base, dude.”

Brad resumed his typing. “That old lady has the beginnings of a widow's hump.”

Butchie turned away from the light over Brad's bunk and covered his head. “I'll show you some hump,” he said, muffled and foggy-drunk.

*   *   *

The next morning early, Brad ate at a big round table with eleven other participants in the Pine Oil Writers' Conference, hopeful that some writer talk would emerge, that maybe one of the participants had found The Answer. He asked a freckled woman wearing a faded peasant dress what she was working on, and she told him she used to write poetry in high school and “was trying to morph back into the whole creative mind-set.” A man with a round white scar in the middle of his forehead said he'd been wanting to put down his war experiences since Korea but could never remember to get started. He tried to smile at his fellow students, but only half of his face looked happy.

At lunch, Brad was back at the same table with a mostly different group, and he listened to them talk of a good lounge they'd been to, a good restaurant. Millicent, the romance writer, soaked in perfume and troweled with makeup, mingled as was her paid duty. At one point, she put her palms down on the table and asked, “Okay, ‘fess up. Who's had an affair already?”

By the end of that meal, Brad was left with the impression that not many people who'd paid to attend the Pine Oil Writers' Conference had ever written much of anything. They were buying the fantasy of being writers, but as long as the booze and the sad, emotionally famished companions held out, the only things they would ever write would be checks to lower-echelon writers' festivals all over America. Brad looked through a window at the leaning smokestacks of the abandoned mill and thought how this town was once a place where real things, aromatic paint-thinner, rosin for fiddle bows, tar to keep us all dry, came out of the steam and noise of the factory. Clouds of soot once rose into the sky, a black song of production and prosperity. Now he guessed that the only things rising over Pine Oil, Louisiana, were the crippled similes of small-hearted writers.

After the late-afternoon seminar on “How to Market Yourself as a Writerly Persona,” Brad asked Faye Cooker to dinner. She picked up his left hand, looked at the wedding ring trapped on a brown finger, then let go. “You want to talk about writing, don't you?”

He pushed his round, wire-framed glasses up his nose. “Well, not if you're tired of it.”

She looked around at the classroom, at the stragglers who seemed as if they wanted to ask her something but were too shy. “If you take me someplace where none of the conference types will be, I'll go.”

“I don't know much about the area.” He tried to remember what was along the interstate coming into town.

“Think of somewhere this brie-breath crowd wouldn't be caught dead in.”

“Taco Bell?”

“Or me.”

“Shoney's, then.”

“Brilliant,” she said, putting her skinny arm through his.

*   *   *

During the Italian Feast special, he asked her what she thought of writing conferences, and she said there were two types: one where people wanted to learn to improve their writing, and one where people wanted to get drunk with published authors, overeat, and get laid. “This here one,” she said, faking a backwoods accent, “is one of the latters.”

Brad made a face and fished a bit of grilled chicken out of a puddle of tomato sauce. “So I'm finding out.”

Faye sat upright, as though she'd just understood that Brad was someone important. “Well, I don't want you to waste your money, friend. You've got me cornered here. You want to yak about what you'd like to write?”

“After we talked yesterday, I started something. I just don't know whether it's any good.”

“It's probably not. You don't know where you're going with it, sort of like a football player who gets handed the ball just as the stadium lights go out.”

“That's about it.”

Faye twirled noodles around her fork. “Keep writing until you think you know where you could go with the tale, then stop and plan. Then rewrite, rewrite, throw the first thirty pages away, and rewrite again, sentence by sentence.”

He was glad when she filled her mouth with food for fear that more work directions would come out. She started talking again soon, though, and made writing a novel sound like restoring a fifteenth-century mural on a damp cathedral wall, going over the surface with a ten-haired brush, millimeter by millimeter. She ended the lecture with a question. “Why do you want to write, anyway?”