Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  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.

  Adam Bee’s soup
ed 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.

  Every night, after dinner, I went out and sat with the eggs.

  This was after my mother and I washed the dishes and loaded the washer, after my father dozed off over his medical journals, it was then that I slipped out the kitchen door and crossed the chilly backyard, dark and loamy with the yeasty smell of leaves just beginning to change, noisy with the rustle of them turning colors in the dark. For a moment I looked back at the black frame of our house, the whole place jumping and vibrating with the dishwasher hum. Then I slipped into the toolshed, where it was always warm, lit only by the red light of the incubator bulbs, silent but for the whirring hearts inside the fertilized eggs.

  The eggs took twenty-one days to hatch. I wasn’t having much luck. I blamed myself completely. I believed I was being punished for thoughts I shouldn’t have had, for wanting only to think of them in the warm dark shed, with my eyes shut and the unborn chicks floating in their shells.

  I checked the thermometers on the incubators and put marks on my charts. I began to think I’d made mistakes, put X’s in the wrong boxes. I went back and started again. If the heat varied, the chicks wouldn’t hatch or would be born deformed.

  The eggs were my eleventh-grade biology project. Officially, that is. Underneath those neat charts, those notebooks, the racks of fertilized eggs, my real project was black magic, casting spells for things I shouldn’t have wanted, and longed for, and finally got.

  My father’s patient, Mrs. Davis, had a stroke in her henhouse and died and came back to life in a whirlwind of feathers. She decided she hated chickens and asked my father if he wanted the incubators instead of medical fees. Why would a doctor want incubators? Because I needed a science project.

  From the hospital, Mrs. Davis told her son to kill the chickens. Her grandson—a kid I knew from school—brought us two dozen chickens, plucked, in plastic bags specked with blood. The grandson clutched three bags in each hand, four chickens in each bag.

  My mother cooked chicken with spaghetti, chicken chunked with pineapple, chicken almondine, chicken curry. The chickens were always stringy, with a swampy edge. But my mother said we should eat every last goddamn chicken some poor old woman had slaughtered just to please my dad.

  My father said, “They weren’t killed for me. Damn it, you know that. They were killed for the sin of seeing poor Alice Davis almost drop dead.”

  My mother said, “Maybe they wanted her dead.”

  My father said, “The clot that lodged in the woman’s arterial pathways didn’t give a damn what some chicken wanted.”

  The plan was that in a few weeks, when Mrs. Davis felt better, my father and I would get the incubators, and Mrs. Davis would teach me how to hatch the eggs. Meanwhile I ordered pamphlets from the USDA because my father couldn’t believe that anything could be learned from an old woman without front teeth. I couldn’t understand the pamphlets, though I read them over and over. I was thinking, as always, about something else altogether.

  Mrs. Davis walked with a cane, her right arm hooked to her belt. One eye didn’t blink. Her mouth pulled down at one corner. On the fingers of her good hand she counted off the basics: constant temperature and humidity, turn the eggs several times daily.

  The fixed eye and twisted lips flirted with my dad. “After a week you hold the eggs up to a light to see which have chickies, and you throw the empties away or they’ll ruin the others.”

  My father shifted her crooked stare onto me.

  “My daughter’s in charge of this,” he said. “This is her science project.”

  “Science project?” said Mrs. Davis. She turned to me, but her crazy eye stared at him. You could
tell she thought I’d wreck the whole thing. She frothed at the mouth describing what would happen if I let the eggs get too hot or cold. Newborn chicks crumpling on matchstick legs, hatchlings tearing off flesh still stuck to the shell, chicks dying with their beaks sticking out of the eggs, one-eyed monsters gasping.

  I was only half listening. The other half was wondering what Mr. Reynaud would say if I got to tell him about this tomorrow after orchestra practice. I had a gigantic crush on my high school music teacher, and I spent every minute, outside of his class, thinking about him.

  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?”