The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  She looked up when she was done reading, and the scene in her novel was replaced by the room around her, the faces of Virginia, Bernard, Chris, Adam, and Gillian. She looked down again quickly. It was too late now. There was no taking back what she had laid out. No way of making her novel her secret again.

  Bernard was the first to speak. “Compelling,” he said. “You drew me right in.”

  “Got me, too,” said Chris. “It’s a great opening. Getting that dead baby onstage right at the start.”

  “You write so beautifully,” said Virginia. “We can picture the scene exactly. And we feel empathy for your character. Which is, of course, the most important thing.”

  Gillian seemed about to speak, and the comfort Nancy had accrued from Bernard’s, Chris’s, and Virginia’s words evaporated in an instant. “Gillian’s the one you need to watch out for especially,” Chris had said.

  “Yes, we do feel some empathy,” said Gillian, “but we’re left with only a suggestion of what went wrong. Not that the narrator’s a tease—I wouldn’t accuse you of such a cheap trick—but there’s something withheld here that seems artificially withheld. The narrator knows what went on, how this baby died, but isn’t saying.”

  “Isn’t saying yet,” said Chris. “This is only the first chapter, right, Nancy?” He looked at her. Nancy nodded.

  “I understand that,” said Gillian, “but while Chris talks about getting the dead baby onstage, I think we need to get the main issue onstage.”

  “What do you think the main issue is?” asked Bernard.

  “Guilt,” said Gillian. “We need to know what this doctor did that went wrong. We need to understand why he’s tormented, why he feels so guilty.”

  “But he doesn’t feel guilty,” said Nancy.

  “That’s even better,” said Gillian. “But we still need to know why he should feel guilty, we need to know how he messed up.”

  “But the reason he doesn’t feel guilty,” said Nancy, “is that he didn’t mess up. It’s not his fault at all.”

  “Then whose fault is it?” asked Gillian.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” said Nancy. “It just happened.”

  “Is there a malpractice suit?”

  “No, nothing like that,” said Nancy.

  “Then where’s your story?” asked Gillian.

  “That’s a Chris question,” said Bernard, “isn’t it?”

  “I think there’s the start of a story here,” said Chris.

  “Maybe Nancy isn’t interested in a conventional plot,” said Virginia. “Maybe this is really a novel about character.”

  “But if, as Nancy says, ‘it just happened,’ then we’re not really talking about character, are we?” said Gillian.

  “Of course we could be talking about character,” said Virginia. “We could be interested in how the character responds to what happened.”

  “Guilt,” said Gillian, “is the most interesting emotion. If there’s no guilt here, I don’t know what drives the character, what drives the narrative.”

  “You know, you amaze me, Gillian,” said Chris. “You’re a great poet—we all know that—but you’ve never written a line of fiction. How can you sit there and talk about driving a narrative?”

  “I may be a poet rather than a fiction writer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand fiction,” said Gillian. “Perhaps you don’t read beyond your genre, Chris, but please entertain the possibility that some of the rest of us do.”

  “Could we all be less contentious, please?” asked Bernard. “This is getting into an old battleground, and I don’t think it’s beneficial to Nancy.”

  “It might be useful for us to know what stage the book is at,” said Virginia. “It’s different if we’re hearing a first chapter of a novel that is already finished in draft, or if it’s a novel that has just been begun. Nancy?”

  “I haven’t finished the book,” said Nancy. “But I’ve thought it through to the end. I mean, I know where it’s headed. I know who my main character is and what he’s going to do.”

  “You’re writing about a doctor,” said Chris. “Do you know anything about that world?”

  “My husband’s a doctor,” said Gillian. “And I can tell you, it certainly is a special world.”

  “My grandfather was a doctor,” said Nancy, “and my father had been a doctor when he was young.”

  Gillian smiled. “Ah, I see,” she said.

  Nancy felt as if she had been trapped. The last thing she wanted to reveal to them was that the character in her novel had anything to do with her real father; that she knew what he was going to do because he had, in fact, done it.

  “This is a novel,” said Nancy. “Fiction.” But Gillian was still smiling.

  Bernard cleared his throat ostentatiously. He turned to Adam. “Adam,” he said. “We’ve hardly heard from you today. Would you care to inject something new into the discourse?”

  Adam stood up, abruptly. “You know, actually, I’m not feeling too great. I’m going to take off now.” He picked up his folder from the floor, grabbed the leather jacket he’d slung on the back of his chair, and left the room. He didn’t quite slam the front door behind him, but he certainly could have closed it more gently.

  “What was that all about?” asked Chris.

  “I can’t imagine,” said Bernard.

  “He didn’t seem well,” said Virginia.

  Nancy looked to where Gillian was watching out the window. Adam had gotten into his car and started the engine. Because he was the last to arrive, he had had to park in the driveway rather than the turnaround at the end. He backed out onto the street, his arm slung across the seat back. Nancy noticed that Gillian was still watching out the window even after his car was out of sight.

  Rachel

  RACHEL (PEACHIE TO INTIMATES), BERNARD AND VIRGINIA’S daughter, had been a precocious, angelic-looking child with flaxen curls. Now she was an unremarkable-looking, bony young woman, with glasses and brown hair. Precocity, with Bernard and Virginia as parents, had always been taken for granted.

  Rachel was a born peacemaker. She was the compliant kindergartner who gave up her turn on the swing set to avoid confrontation, the little sister who relinquished the window seat on the airplane to her brother, the college roommate who took the undesirable upper bunk. But, in spite of all her best efforts, she had been unable to keep her parents’ marriage intact. She did her best to be nonjudgmental of all of her father’s romantic liaisons that he let her know about, and kept purposefully ignorant about the others. Her brother, Teddy, was less forgiving of their father.

  “Please,” Rachel had pleaded with him at the time of Bernard’s wedding, “Aimee’s not that bad.”

  “It’s not because he’s marrying someone young enough to be his kid,” said Teddy, “it’s because he’s such a hypocrite.”

  When Teddy had married a colleague at the research lab, a Russian eleven years older than he, Bernard had said he blamed himself that his son had so little self-esteem that he thought he couldn’t do better than a “postmenopausal” woman. But Rachel could understand why Teddy might find Marika attractive. She not only shared Teddy’s enthusiasm for fungi, but she had the bright look of a marmoset. If she was mute on the occasion of meeting Bernard, Rachel guessed it was simple terror, not, as Bernard thought, dullness. But Bernard had no appreciation of the mind of a scientist and treated Teddy’s choice of a career in biology as a grave disappointment.

  Rachel, herself, had been dismayed about her father’s marriage to Aimee, but she summoned enthusiasm for both the occasion and the bride. Although she voiced her true feelings about Aimee to Virginia, she never spoke to anyone of her pain at Aimee’s transformation of her childhood home—the whitening of everything, as if Aimee were cleansing the house of its past.

  “No matter how nice I am,” said Rachel, “she’s always wary of me, as if she suspects I’m trying to find a wedge between her and Bernard. She’s not that way with you.”

 
; “She perceives me as old and dumpy, no threat.”

  “How am I a threat?” asked Rachel.

  “You have a claim on Bernard,” said Virginia. “You always will.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No,” said Virginia. “Not anymore.”

  When Rachel discovered she was pregnant, she decided to try to gather all her family together for Thanksgiving, in the hope that an announcement of the coming of the next generation might bring about reconciliation. Her husband, Dennis, typically laconic, smiled at her and shook his head. “Easier to bring about world peace,” he said.

  But Rachel was optimistic. When Virginia and Joe said they would come, she called Bernard. Rachel knew it certainly wasn’t something Aimee would choose to do, but she must have been shamed into it by Virginia’s good-spiritness, and so Bernard called back to say they would accept, too. Then Rachel was left with the more difficult task of persuading her brother. He was an early riser, and she decided to call him first thing in the morning, before his mind had been taken over by Rhizopogon occidentalis.

  “We’ll have a turkey,” said Rachel. “A big turkey.” She and Dennis were vegetarians, but she had decided they wouldn’t have to eat the turkey, just serve it, and her mother would certainly cook it for them.

  “It’s not that I don’t think you’re terrific to take on something like this,” said Teddy. “But I just don’t want to eat with Bernie.”

  “He’s apologized for what he said,” said Rachel. “Can’t you ever get past that?”

  “It’s not just about me and Marika. What about the way he’s treated Mom? And I don’t mean just in marrying Aimee. I mean for all the shit that came before.”

  “But if Mommy can forgive him for his foolishness, I don’t see why you can’t.”

  “If it suits Mom to forget the past and be chummy with Bernie, that’s her business,” said Teddy. “But frankly I find it a little weird. Don’t you?”

  “No,” said Rachel. “I find it marvelous, really. And you have it wrong, Teddy. It’s not that she’s forgotten the past, it’s that she’s put it in its proper prospective. She’s very happy now. She and Joe are really in love with each other.”

  “Ah, the King of Mattresses!”

  “I thought you liked Joe.”

  “Of course I like Joe,” said Teddy in a kinder voice.

  “You’ll think about it, then? You’ll ask Marika?”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Teddy.

  RACHEL DROVE OFF HAPPILY to work that day, her mind busy with fantasies. She pictured the long table (two tables pulled together, actually, the split hidden under a white linen cloth) and a cornucopia of food. Heaping platters of roasted root vegetables, tureens of cranberry sauce, two-liter bottles of wine. She pictured Dennis tinging a fork against the side of his glass, putting his arm around her, and announcing, “Peachie and I are going to be having a baby.” And then everyone would hug everyone, and her father, not bothering to wipe tears from his cheeks, would embrace Teddy, his only son.

  Rachel taught English at The Academy. Her field of interest was the Metaphysical poets, but she had no hope of teaching John Donne. The curriculum was determined by the senior members of her department, and she didn’t even get to select which books to read.

  “We don’t teach literature anymore,” she had complained to Bernard. “It’s all about multiculturalism. I’m teaching Zora Neale Hurston and Amy Tan.”

  “Amy Tan?” asked Bernard.

  “Don’t even ask,” said Rachel.

  “No Shakespeare?” asked Bernard.

  “We did The Merchant of Venice,” said Rachel. “But we focused on the issue of anti-Semitism. We’re doing Sense and Sensibility, but the only reason I get to teach a Jane Austen novel is that she’s hot right now.”

  “Jane Austen, hot?” asked Bernard.

  “Yes, Daddy,” said Rachel. Dennis thought Bernard was sometimes deliberately obtuse, but Rachel believed in what she called her father’s “innocence of popular culture.”

  “What about Aimee?” asked Dennis. “She’s hip, and they live together. A little of it must rub off on him.”

  Rachel always chose her words carefully when she was discussing Aimee, even when it was with Dennis.

  “Aimee can accomplish only so much,” she said.

  RACHEL’S GOOD MOOD lasted until lunchtime, when she was summoned to an unexpected meeting in the headmaster’s office. She’d just sat down at the desk in her office, hoping to catch up on grading some papers while she ate. She slipped her half-eaten avocado wrap back into its plastic container, grabbed her jacket, and went across the quadrangle.

  The headmaster, Donald Bruer, who liked to be called “Bru” by both colleagues and students, had pulled his chair around to the front of his desk. He was a small, excessively clean man. Beside him sat Stewart Joralemon, in the English Department. Rachel didn’t know Stewart well, but she did know he’d been at The Academy for many years. He was paunchy and hairy, and had eyes that didn’t line up properly so you never knew which one to look at.

  “We have a little situation here,” began Bru.

  “A case of plagiarism,” said Stewart. “There’s no point in using a euphemism.”

  Bru swallowed, nodded, and went on. “Stewart got two papers turned in that are a cause of concern. There were paragraphs in both of them that seemed beyond the skill of the students—not, of course, that students here don’t often produce superlative work—but these seemed, ah, extraordinary.”

  “Plagiarized,” said Stewart.

  “After questioning the two students separately,” continued Bru, “he concluded that one of the students had provided a paper for the other. And that both papers had relied heavily on sources that had not been perfectly attributed.”

  “Goddamn it,” said Stewart, and he slapped the table beside him. “We’re not talking about imperfect attribution here. We’re talking about plagiarism.”

  Rachel pulled back into her wing chair, as if she could find protection between its upholstered flanks.

  Bru didn’t move, but Rachel could see the muscles under his chin tighten up.

  “According to our honor code, certain infractions might well result in a student’s suspension or even dismissal. Often, however, there are mitigating circumstances. And that’s where your help would come in.”

  Stewart stood up and pushed his chair back. “Suspension, dismissal—it’s your call,” he said. “But both of these boys are getting failing grades in my course. And if it ruins their chances for Harvard, all the better.” He left the office door open behind him, and Bru had to get up to close it.

  “I’m sorry you had to be a witness to any unpleasantness,” he said to Rachel when he resumed his seat. “I know you’re wondering what any of this has to do with you. One of the students involved, Paul Traub, is, I believe, in your advisory group.”

  “Who’s the other student?” asked Rachel.

  “Thayer Henniman.” His face betrayed almost nothing. But Rachel understood it all in an instant. Thayer, scion of the family that had endowed The Academy with its new dormitory complex, was a slow-witted, lazy student, and a bully. He would no doubt be president of the country someday.

  She didn’t need to ask, but she did anyway. “Who wrote the paper for whom?”

  “It seems Paul wrote it for Thayer,” said Bru. “Paul wouldn’t say anything about it, but Thayer confessed. Actually, he used it as an excuse to counter Stewart’s charge of plagiarism. He was angry that Paul had given him what he described as a ‘crappy’ paper.” Anyone but Bru would have smiled.

  “And what do you want me to do?” asked Rachel.

  “I’d like you to talk to Paul. Get his confidence. Find out what went on here. Is he selling papers to other students?”

  “And when would you like me to do this?” asked Rachel.

  “Today,” said Bru. “I’ll have a note sent to Paul that he should skip hockey practice this afternoon and meet you in your offi
ce after class.”

  “I see,” said Rachel.

  “And then you and I could have a meeting here about it afterwards.”

  Rachel’s head swam. Her immediate inclination was to say, “Yes, of course,” but the sight of the firm crease in Bru’s chinos made her pause. She couldn’t have an honest meeting with Paul and then trot over and report everything she’d learned to Bru. “I’ll stay late to meet with Paul today, as you requested,” said Rachel, “but I’m afraid I’ll need to leave right after that.”

  Bru blinked. “Then we’ll meet tomorrow,” he said.

  IN HER OFFICE, at the end of the day, Rachel waited for Paul to turn up. She didn’t know him very well. He was quiet, unobtrusive, and he’d never come to talk with her about anything beyond the official advising meetings that were required. She looked through the manila file folder with his name on it once again, but there was nothing revealing there. He was a day student, not a boarder, as were all the students who had been assigned to her. He had distinguished himself neither by achievement nor disgrace. His grades were respectable. He had chosen hockey for his outside sport. He played the clarinet.

  Rachel knew from Virginia that he was the stepson of Gillian Coit, a writer friend of her parents’, but she didn’t know much more about him. She looked again through the folder. He’d previously gone to a public school in Connecticut, where his mother, whose name was Linda, now lived. Rachel wondered why Paul wasn’t living with her. Rachel laid her arms across her belly. It was unimaginable to her that she would ever turn the rearing of her future child over to a stepmother. Even if the child turned out to be an impossible teenager—and as far as she knew, Paul was rather nice, for a teenager. But it was also unimaginable to Rachel that she and Dennis would ever not be together, that Dennis would have another woman for a wife, that she would have another husband. That her divorced parents might have once felt that way about their own union, she acknowledged. But she and Dennis were different. She was certain of that.

  Paul had been standing by her half-open office door for a minute or two before she turned and realized he was there. She had expected him to knock, but obviously that was foolish of her. Boys like Paul didn’t knock, they just waited. The somewhat more courageous ones coughed or cleared their throats.