The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  Deirdre sighed. “You can’t imagine how much pain it causes me not to have him here. Not to have him here at your wedding. Not to have him know that things turned out all right for you.”

  Nancy leaned against the bushes. She felt dizzy hearing this, as if her mother had pulled out from her the very thing that had been hurting so much, laid it outside for her to see.

  That was it: her father wasn’t going to be here. It wasn’t just that she wanted him here to give her away—give her away better than before—it wasn’t just that she wanted Oates to know him, him to know Oates, but that she wanted him to know that, in spite of everything, things had worked out all right. He had died worrying about her, his daughter, a young, single parent, abandoned by her husband, and worrying about his granddaughter growing up with an absent father. And there was no way that Nancy could shout up to him, say, “See, Daddy, I made it. Everything’s okay now.”

  “I’ve got to get to the place cards,” said Deirdre. “I’m up to L. I have about twenty to go.”

  She scurried on ahead into the house, and Nancy followed, numbly, behind her.

  IT WAS RAINING THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING. They had planned on having the ceremony outdoors by the river and had to set things up inside instead.

  “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of everything,” said Aliki. “You go upstairs and get dressed.”

  “Aliki, go help your mother,” said Oates. “Deirdre and I will take care of everything down here.”

  Nancy smiled at Oates in gratitude. Deirdre had been all set to head upstairs with her, but he’d put his hand on her arm.

  Nancy’s long dress was laid out on the bed, her shoes set on the floor before it. She sat on the side of the bed and let Aliki brush her hair and do her makeup. No one had brushed her hair for her this way since Aliki was a little girl and used to play “beauty shop.”

  She had intended to buy a dress that would have practical uses later on, but Aliki had encouraged her to buy this one, although Nancy couldn’t imagine another occasion when she might wear it. The shoes, bone-colored pumps, would be ones she could probably wear again.

  Aliki had made her a crown of wildflowers. “I’m afraid they’re already wilted,” she said.

  “I’m a bit wilted myself,” said Nancy.

  “No, Mom, you look absolutely gorgeous.” Aliki took Nancy’s shoulders and turned her so she was facing the mirror. Nancy took herself in quickly—this bride in a pale blue sleeveless dress—and she then studied the face of Aliki, whose chin rested on her shoulder. She turned and kissed her.

  “My beautiful daughter,” she said.

  Downstairs the string quartet was tuning up. “I guess this is really happening,” said Nancy.

  “It’s about time,” said Aliki.

  “You think I’m doing the right thing?”

  But Aliki didn’t answer. She broke into tears, and then laughed at herself for crying. She hugged Nancy. “Oh, Mommy,” she said, “I’m so happy.” Her voice was muffled, her face warm against Nancy’s neck.

  . . .

  THE CEREMONY was held in front of the fireplace in the living room. Guests spilled out into the dining room, the front hall, and some sat on the staircase, watching through the banisters. They were an unlikely mix of relatives and friends of hers and Oates’s, representatives of each phase of her life—from her best friend from elementary school, to her college roommate, to the writers in the Leopardi Circle. Nancy imagined that her father was there, among them somewhere, bearing witness to it all.

  The reception was under a tent in the backyard. The rain had stopped, and the braver guests ventured out on the wet lawn. The flower arrangements, which Teresa Kleinholz had done as a wedding gift (Nancy had requested no presents, but Teresa had insisted), had blown over in the wind, leaving wet stains across the tablecloths. Nancy and Oates, hand in hand, made their way around the guests, who were clustered, champagne flutes in hand. Chris’s two sons had not been invited, but Chris had brought them anyway.

  “I had the boys for the weekend, at the last minute,” he told Nancy. “I was sure you didn’t mind.”

  Nancy did mind, but didn’t say so. Gillian’s husband had had an emergency at the hospital and hadn’t made it, so Nancy suggested they squeeze in at his place. She assumed the numbers would turn out all right for the caterers (two kids who ate little and consumed no alcohol in lieu of one adult who did), and it amused her to think of Gillian stuck sitting next to two little boys.

  Deirdre, Nancy saw, was going around introducing herself to everyone she didn’t know and making introductions among the people she knew. She had taken Oates’s Midwestern relatives in tow. At one point after dinner, Nancy noticed that Deirdre had planted herself at the table where the Leopardis were sitting. Later, after the cake had been cut and everyone was enjoying dessert, she settled back in her seat at Nancy and Oates’s table.

  “I’d keep my eye on the person we were talking about,” she whispered to Nancy. “She’s smart and she’s sly.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Nancy. But she wasn’t worrying about Gillian. She was suffused with good feeling for everyone. She was linked now, forever, with Oates. She felt safe from all the possible treacheries of the world.

  Rachel

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON SUN CRADLED BETWEEN THE DOWNTOWN buildings, Rachel stood for a moment deciding which way to turn. She was small and pregnant, and from a distance looked too young to be an expectant mother. But up closer you could see that she was older, and her face, although delicate, was clearly that of an intelligent woman who had her life firmly in hand.

  She had come from an appointment with her obstetrician and had been told that everything was going fine. She already knew this. She was in tune with her baby, his rhythms, his movements. If there had been anything wrong, she would have felt his distress. She knew him as well as she knew anyone in the world, as well as she knew herself. She had not wanted to know in advance the sex of her baby, but a distinctive anatomical part on the ultrasound had made this impossible, so she now thought of the baby as a “he.” She didn’t want to name him before she could see his face. She and Dennis had decided not to tell anyone the baby’s sex. Her father had announced to everyone that Aimee had informed him their coming baby was male, and it had seemed strange knowing something that intimate about anyone before they were born. Rachel felt all babies in utero were owed a degree of privacy.

  She was meeting Virginia later for a late lunch, treating herself to a few hours of browsing in old bookshops beforehand, but she felt hungry now. She headed to a place that sold homemade ice cream and lingered by the glass counter, looking up at the painted menu and at the vats of ice cream. In the end she decided on some frozen yogurt, a virtuous choice. She was paying for her dessert when she heard a familiar voice ordering behind her. It was Paul. She might not have recognized him here, out of the school setting, but she knew the voice.

  “Hi, Paul,” she said.

  He looked up at her, surprised, confused. “Hey.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “All right,” said Paul. The girl behind the counter tapped the ice cream scoop. “Oh, yeah, um, double chocolate fudge,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  Rachel still had her wallet in her hand. “I’ll get it,” she said. “My treat.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Paul.

  “I know,” said Rachel. “But I’d like to.”

  Paul walked beside her out of the ice cream shop, and, when she suggested they sit on a bench in the park nearby, he sat with her. When he bent his face to his ice cream cone, his hair fell down on both sides, and Rachel suppressed a desire to push it back. He looked up at her, a crooked chocolate mustache across his upper lip.

  “Thanks for this,” he said.

  “It was my pleasure. I would have ordered it myself, but I’m trying to be prudent. This way I get to vicariously enjoy yours.”

  She’d trapped him, she knew. But she had a feeling he wasn’t sorry to h
ave a chance to talk with her.

  “What do you have there?” she asked, pointing to the sketchbook she noticed he had tucked under his arm.

  “Just a book I draw things in,” he said.

  “May I see?”

  He paused for a second, then he shrugged and handed it over to her. The drawings startled her, they were so vivid, and the figures were expertly drawn. In one, an armed man riding a pterodactyl circled over a landscape that looked like a mix of Italy and the rain forest. In the next, he’d swooped down and seemed to be lifting to safety a round-faced woman with long, pale hair. There were pages of drawings, an epic adventure, a million fine black lines.

  “These are quite good,” she said. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  “I just like to draw things,” he said.

  “Well, you should draw things, you’re remarkably talented,” she said. “Are you taking any art courses?”

  “No. I just like to do it on my own.”

  “You know, your style reminds me a bit of Escher,” she said. “Are you familiar with his work?”

  “Never heard of him,” he said.

  Rachel brightened. “M. C. Escher. He was a graphic artist, Dutch. Oh, you’ll love him,” she said. “He did this wonderful lithograph of two hands drawing each other. I’ll get you a book of his art. You’ll see!”

  “That would be cool,” he said.

  “Thank you for letting me see these,” she said. She handed the sketchbook back to him, and he secured it protectively back under his arm. He was still flushed with embarrassment over the unexpected praise.

  “How are things going otherwise?” she asked him.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I haven’t heard what you’re doing next year. Are you staying at The Academy?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Here’s the thing. My mom wants me to come back with her, but my dad wants me to stay here. He says I stand a better chance of getting into college from The Academy than from my high school back home.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of weird having them both want me—you know?—sometimes neither of them wants me.”

  “I can’t imagine that’s the case,” said Rachel quickly.

  “Well, probably my mom always wants me, but you can’t really tell about my dad. He’s weird. And Gillian is weirder.” Paul dipped his head down into his ice cream again. It seemed like a true pleasure, and Rachel felt happy to be able to give it to him. She guessed he didn’t have much in his life that was this pleasurable, this simple. He looked up at her again, and his tongue darted out to catch a gob of ice cream off his lip. “When your parents are divorced, a lot of things get screwed up,” he said.

  “I know it can sometimes confuse things,” said Rachel. “My parents are divorced.”

  The look on Paul’s face suggested that he had forgotten it was possible she even had parents. “They are?” he said.

  Rachel nodded.

  “Do they get along okay?” asked Paul.

  “They do,” said Rachel. “But even so, there are complications.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “Complications. My dad’s remarried, but my mom isn’t. She had a boyfriend for a while, but that didn’t last. And now she’s really lonely. She’d hate anyone my dad married, but she especially hates Gillian. I think my dad hooked up with her while he was still living with my mom.”

  “That’s hard,” said Rachel.

  Paul dipped down and worked on his ice cream cone for a few minutes. Then he looked up. “Did your parents get remarried?” he asked.

  “Yes, both of them,” said Rachel. “In fact, my father and his wife are having a baby.” She didn’t expect to be confiding anything in Paul, it just slipped out.

  “They are?” asked Paul. “Aren’t they kind of old?”

  Rachel wondered how old Paul thought she was. “My father is, but his wife is a lot younger.”

  “Oh, one of those!” said Paul.

  Rachel laughed. “My parents were both at Gillian’s Christmas party—my father is Bernard, my mother is Virginia,” she said. “You may have met them. They’re in Gillian’s writing group.” She wondered if Paul had witnessed or heard about Aimee’s dramatic exit from the party.

  Paul shrugged.

  “I guess you wouldn’t pay much attention to them,” said Rachel, “they’re old.” She grinned at him. “I’m sure you’d consider everyone in the writing group ‘old.’ ”

  “There’s one guy who’s a lot younger,” said Paul. “He brought his girlfriend to the party. Her name’s Kim. She’s really hot, but she’s really nice, too.”

  Paul had reached the bottom of his cone. He stuffed it all in his mouth and crunched. When he had swallowed the last bit, he wiped the sleeve of his denim jacket across his face.

  “Jennifer—that’s my sister—had this idea that my dad and Gillian would have a baby—Gillian doesn’t have any kids—and then, soon as that happened, my dad would just dump us. But it hasn’t happened, at least it hasn’t happened yet,” he added. “My dad’s always disappointing me. He pretends that I matter to him, and then he acts like I don’t matter to him at all. Gillian matters to him, though. He’d drop everything for her.”

  Rachel waited. She was good at listening.

  “I keep looking at Gillian to see if she’s pregnant maybe. But now I think it’s never going to happen. I don’t think she’s interested in having kids. She’s all into her writing.”

  “That’s certainly the way it is for some writers,” Rachel said. “Not all,” she added—she thought of her own parents—“but some.”

  “She’s been working on this new book,” said Paul. “It’s kind of a secret, she doesn’t talk about it. I don’t think even my dad knows.”

  “It’s not a secret, Paul,” said Rachel. “She’s supposed to be coming out with a new collection of poems in the fall. It’s been long awaited. Even I know about it.”

  “Oh yeah, I know about that book,” said Paul. “But I don’t mean her poetry book, I mean she’s been writing a novel. It’s all hidden in the back of her file drawer. I only know about it because once I came up there unexpectedly and she was working on it and acted like she wasn’t. But she saw that I’d seen something, so she asked me not to tell my dad about it—I guess she wanted it to be a surprise for him—so I told her I wouldn’t. And then later I found it in her file.”

  “Paul, you shouldn’t be looking through people’s files,” said Rachel.

  “I wasn’t looking for her stuff,” said Paul. “I was looking to see if she’d gotten a letter from The Academy about me. You know, back when that happened with the paper for Thayer.”

  “Even so,” said Rachel.

  Paul shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  “Speaking of The Academy,” said Rachel, “do you think you could stick it out another two years till graduation?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul. “My mom really misses me. And I kind of miss living home, with her. And I don’t really have any friends at The Academy and you’re the only faculty member there I like, and you’re not going to be there anymore.”

  “I’m not?” asked Rachel.

  “You’re having a baby, aren’t you?” asked Paul.

  “My baby’s going to be born at the start of the summer, and I was planning on teaching again in the fall.”

  “Oh,” said Paul, and he seemed embarrassed.

  “If you decide to stay,” said Rachel, “I’ll see you in the fall then. And you know, Paul, I like you, too.”

  After they said good-bye, Rachel sat for a little while longer, watching Paul slouch off in the distance, his backpack slung from one shoulder. A child of divorce, she thought. She was surprised at herself for having told him that she was a child of divorce as well. She was usually scrupulous about not telling students much about her personal life; there was enough about her—the fact that she was having a baby—that they were already privy to. But she
felt different about Paul. And knowing that she had divorced parents and survived might make it easier for him to believe in his own survival. She had a quick fantasy of taking Paul in for the year, giving him a better home than his father and Gillian. But it was ridiculous. They’d barely have room for the new baby in their small apartment.

  AT LUNCH Virginia produced a bag with several CDs she had just purchased. “They’re for the baby,” she said. “They sell classical music packaged for infants, but it’s just Mozart, and not the best musicians, either. So I got these. Why not the Guarneri String Quartet?”

  “Thank you,” said Rachel, and she got up to give her mother a kiss.

  “Those who knit, knit for babies,” said Virginia. “Those who can’t knit, purchase CDs.”

  The restaurant was in a converted factory building, in an austere, high-ceilinged room with bare wood floors. Rachel studied the menu, but she didn’t feel hungry, and nothing appealed to her. She didn’t want Virginia to be concerned, though, that she wasn’t eating, so she ordered fish and hoped the serving would be small.

  “Dad came over for dinner with us on Sunday,” she said.

  Virginia tilted her head.

  “I’m worried about him,” said Rachel.

  “Why is that?” asked Virginia.

  “He’s all alone in that big house. He’s miserable and lonely.”

  “Is that what he told you?” asked Virginia.

  “Not exactly,” admitted Rachel.

  “Bernie has always overdramatized whatever it is he’s going through. My guess is a lot of the time he’s quite content. I’m sure he’s leaving his clothes all over the furniture and his papers all over the table and is thoroughly enjoying not being on Aimee’s short leash.”