The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  “What a coup!” said Bernard. “I guess she rose to your challenge, Chris.”

  “That editor of hers is so besotted,” said Chris. “He’d publish a cookbook of hers if she wrote one.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Virginia. “And how like her to keep this as a surprise.” Virginia looked over at Adam and realized, from the expression on his face, that he hadn’t known about the book either. “I wonder what it’s about,” she said.

  Nancy had left the conversation and gone over to the table at the side. She was leafing through Gillian’s novel.

  “While we’re waiting for our star to disengage herself,” said Bernard, “I’m going to see what they have in children’s books. I’ve been building Horace’s library.”

  “Every book I’ve given Ben and Sam that they took home with them got chucked by their mother,” said Chris. “I have to keep all their books at my house now.”

  “Aren’t you curious to see what Gillian’s novel’s about?” asked Virginia.

  “Something precious,” said Chris. “She’ll give us all copies, and then we’ll have to read it.”

  “You’re just miffed because she’s honing in on your territory,” said Bernard. “She’s going to beat you at your own game.”

  “Hardly,” said Chris. “Gillian may have hammered poor Nancy about the plot for her novel, but I can’t imagine Gillian knows how to turn out a plot of any sort.”

  Virginia looked over at Nancy. Nancy was holding Gillian’s book in one hand. Her other hand was cupping her mouth. She was staring at the open pages as if there was something there both hideous and fascinating. She snapped the book shut, stuck it under her arm, and headed towards the escalator.

  “Excuse me, you need to pay for that up here,” the bookstore manager called after her, but Nancy ignored her. She was running down the escalator now.

  Gillian was still signing books at her table. Her dark hair was over her shoulder as she leaned down.

  “Pay for the book,” said Virginia to Bernard. “I’m going to try to catch Nancy.”

  “Why should I pay for Nancy’s book?” asked Bernard.

  “Pay for the goddamn book, Bernie,” said Virginia, and she thumped Bernard in the chest. “Just pay for it.” Then she ran off after Nancy.

  Nancy

  NANCY RAN OUT OF THE BOOKSTORE, CLUTCHING THE book, and turned left, downtown. She’d forgotten her sweater behind, a blue cardigan draped over the armrest of her chair, but there was nothing she would have gone back for. She ran down the sidewalk, pushing her way through the press of pedestrians, jogging in place at the corners where she had to wait for the light, or for turning taxis that didn’t pause to let her pass. She didn’t know where she was headed—she just ran. She didn’t look back, didn’t notice that Virginia had started after her, then given up, a sad-looking presence on the sidewalk, breathing heavily. All she knew was that she needed to find someplace where she could read, someplace private. She passed coffee shops, a church, a branch of the library, considered each quickly, but none of them seemed right. She ran, desperate, and then she thought of Bloomingdale’s and headed there. She’d worked in Junior Dresses one summer when she had been in college, years ago, living with a friend whose parents had given them the use of their apartment while they summered in the Hamptons. She knew Bloomingdale’s had changed dramatically since then and was now a trendy reincarnation of its former self, but she thought she’d still be able to find an out-of-the-way dressing room. She took the escalator upstairs to a department where the clothes were for older, less fashionable women and the customers were few. She managed to get into the dressing rooms without being spotted by a saleswoman. The dressing rooms were deserted, and she hurried to the one at the end of a row. She closed the door behind her and sank to the floor. She called Oates on her cell phone but got his voice mail.

  “Call me,” she said.

  The dressing room had peach-colored carpeting and a delicate chair upholstered in peach-colored velvet. There were no clothes on the hooks, just a tangle of bare hangers. Nancy brushed aside a few straight pins, some tissue paper, and an envelope that said “extra buttons.” She sat with her legs straight out and leaned back against the locked door. She closed her eyes and gave herself a few moments to catch her breath. She’d run for blocks and blocks. She was safe now. No one would find her here. She had not loosened her grip on Gillian’s novel, almost as if she were afraid it would take off and escape from her. When she opened her eyes, she saw a mirrored triptych of herself. Three versions of herself to bear witness.

  Nancy took in her breath and turned to the back flap of the novel in her hand. There was no photo of the author. The copy was brief: “M. G. Findlay is the wife of a prominent surgeon. This is her first novel.” Then Nancy turned to the opening chapter. She had always been a fast reader, but now her eyes sprinted over the pages, not so much reading them as taking them in whole. It was uncanny, this novel, like seeing a strange version of herself, as if the mirrors in front of her were fun-house mirrors and everything had been distorted. The first chapter was nearly identical to hers, a paraphrase so close that at first she mistook the words for her own. But then the novel went off on a different course, taking Nancy’s character, the character based on her father, and turning his story inside out. In Gillian’s novel the young doctor was responsible for the baby’s death, and he was brought to justice. After a sensational medical malpractice trial, he was proven guilty because of his incompetence, condemned, and stripped of his license to practice. In shame and humility, he eventually became a teacher of small children, as if, through working for these young lives, he could do penance for the one life he had taken away. In every child’s face, though, he saw the face of the child the baby would never become, and his career became his punishment. He was a character out of Hawthorne, a guilt-ridden, twisted man. Not a man of conscience, but a man who had conscience forced upon him.

  Nancy’s own father, the hero of her novel, had felt no guilt, because there was no reason for it. He hadn’t been denied the right to practice medicine, he had stepped away from it to do something he was better suited to. He had moved to a new career so he would not be confronted with such loss, such sadness, a career where the odds were better. Nancy’s novel was all about someone who had chosen what he believed was the happier course. It was a novel about choice, not punishment.

  What Gillian had done was defile the very man he’d been, taken the character whom Nancy had revered and celebrated, and made him a man of shame rather than honor. She had written a dramatic trial scene—a scene she had suggested Nancy write. But stealing Nancy’s novel wasn’t the deepest treachery, the treachery was how she had used Nancy’s father, done with him what she wanted, maligned him to fit into her plot.

  It was strange the way the anger built. It started in Nancy’s arms, as if they, and only they at first, had been attacked, and then spread to her shoulders, then her chest and neck. It was defined and certain, not so much something that happened to her but something that she became.

  In a dressing room closer to the entrance, a woman with a cough had taken up residence with another, younger-sounding woman, most likely her daughter.

  “Don’t worry about whether you’ll get another chance to wear it,” the daughter urged, “just concentrate on finding something that will look good for the dinner.”

  “At my age, nothing looks good,” said the woman with the cough.

  Nancy felt dizzy; she needed air. She got carefully to her feet. Outside of the dressing rooms, it was mercifully cooler. She saw a saleswoman threading her way around the racks towards her, and, before she could be accosted, she made her way to the escalators and out of the store.

  Outside, on the street, she realized that it was approaching evening. She had no idea how long she had been in the dressing room. An hour at least, more likely, two. In the closet-sized, windowless room, she had been in a timeless zone. She looked at her watch now and saw that it was close to six o’clock.
The book party for Gillian would still be humming. She tried Oates again, but she still couldn’t get him. She couldn’t wait; she’d have to go ahead without his counsel, without his comfort. She spotted a taxicab that was letting someone out and darted into the street and lunged for it.

  “That’s mine!” shouted a woman beside her with her hands full of shopping bags. But Nancy pushed right past her, dove into the cab, and slammed the door shut.

  Paul

  PAUL WENT TO HIS MOTHER’S ON ALTERNATE WEEKENDS, and this should have been a weekend in Connecticut, but his parents had worked out a trade so he would be able to attend Gillian’s book launch. He wondered how his dad had pulled this off, since his mom would never be generous when it came to anything that had to do with Gillian. He wondered what his mom must have extracted from his dad in exchange. The idea of being traded back and forth by his parents made him furious, but the thought that his mom had capitulated to his dad upset him, too. He hated it when his mom stood up to his dad and they fought, but he hated it more when she gave in.

  Paul would rather have spent the weekend hanging around his mom’s dull house than be dragged to New York for some big deal thing for Gillian’s new book, but his dad had not really given him a choice. Sure, it was cool to go to New York City and have his own room in the Waldorf-Astoria, where he could stay up all night and watch movies, but he’d had to wear a coat and tie and sit through Gillian’s reading. Jerry, sitting beside him in the front row, had a proud, proprietorial look. He kept smiling over at Paul as if he expected Paul to share in this, as if he imagined that Paul took pleasure in Gillian’s success.

  The reading was long and boring enough, but then they had to hang around so Gillian could autograph books. She was set up at a table stacked with copies of her poetry collection and her novel, and a long lined formed in front of her, as if she was a celebrity. She cocked her head—it was her way, Paul thought, of looking sincere—and smiled at each fan, listening to their praise. Although she took an interminable time with each person, no one in line was deterred. Paul wandered off and found the graphic novel section, pulled one off the shelf, then settled in a corner to read.

  He was well into the book when Jerry appeared suddenly. “I was looking for you,” he said.

  “Well, here I am,” said Paul. “Can we finally leave now?”

  “The line is thinning,” said Jerry.

  “I thought we were going to a party,” said Paul.

  “We are,” said Jerry.

  “So when are we going to get dinner?”

  “There’ll be plenty to eat at the party,” said Jerry. “And we’ll be going out to a restaurant after that.” Jerry held out a copy of Restitution. “So,” he said, “what do you think? Quite a surprise, huh?”

  Paul didn’t say anything immediately. He had taken a quick look at Gillian’s novel before the reading. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d be interested in reading. Everyone was making such a big fuss about it—as if Gillian were a concert pianist who’d been discovered to be a world-class tennis star as well—and even if he had been interested, he wouldn’t have let on. It occurred to him, all of a sudden, that maybe his father hadn’t known about the novel in advance, that it was possible Gillian had kept it a secret even from him, right up to the end. He was struck with a sense of power, with the feeling that once, for the first time, he was one up on his father.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” said Paul. “Were you?”

  Jerry laughed. “Nothing Gillian does surprises me,” he said. “But I hadn’t expected her to produce a novel.”

  Paul savored the moment. It made him almost tremble. “I knew she was working on it,” he said slowly. “Didn’t you?”

  The expression on Jerry’s face shifted from confusion to something else—doubt? fear? He obviously wasn’t sure if Paul was kidding him or not. For a second Paul felt sorry for his father and wished he could reclaim what he’d said, but that feeling didn’t last. He liked his father’s uncertainty, liked having this small bit of power over him. Jerry had his hand on Paul’s shoulder, but someone came up and interrupted them, and Jerry had to leave unasked the questions Paul knew he was forming. Once or twice, before they left the bookstore, he could tell his father was trying to catch him alone, but the moment didn’t arise.

  In the limo to the party, Paul sat across from his father and Gillian. Gillian tilted her head back and shut her eyes. Her lashes were long and black and public, but her naked eyelids were delicate and reminded Paul of a newly hatched bird he’d once seen. Jerry put his arm around Gillian and drew her closer to him, as if he were laying claim to her, asserting his right to her after she had been on loan, among her fans. When he looked across at Paul, there was that flicker of uncertainty on his face.

  The party was at least better than the reading. It was being thrown for Gillian by somebody rich, in their Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Five million is what the place had cost, Jerry had said. Sure it was ritzy and all that, Paul thought, but you probably couldn’t take a walk in the park across the street after dark without some guy clobbering you on the head with a rock and helping himself to your wallet. Jerry stuck by Gillian’s side, as if unwilling to relinquish his claim on her, and Gillian, looking wan and dreamy, moved among the crowd. Voices rose with excitement around her, but her own voice was consistently soft. Paul looked around for Adam. He was hoping he might have brought Kim to the party. Paul hadn’t seen Kim since the Christmas party, but he often thought about her. His sketchbook was filled with drawings of her—how he remembered her—his superhero, Tark, rescuing her from a variety of perils. He finally spotted Adam, but Adam was alone, and he looked as if he didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  The event was catered by some fancy place that pretended everything was organic, right off a farm. Waiters with trays of suspicious-looking hors d’oeuvres slipped among the crowd. The goat cheese really smelled like goats, and Paul saw Gillian’s editor taste a bit of it on a cracker and then dispose of it in his paper napkin when he pretended to cough.

  Paul wandered around, looking at things on the walls and artifacts on the shelves. There was a collection of ancient-looking clay figures including one of a guy—a satyr maybe?—who had a hard-on that was longer than his arms. Paul had seen pictures of something like that in his art history book but couldn’t remember if the statues were Greek, Roman, or pre-Columbian. He wondered if these were actual artifacts or just copies. If they were the real thing, they must be pretty valuable, yet they were on an open shelf, and if somebody swung a champagne glass too close, it could clip that penis and knock the figure to the floor.

  Gillian was talking with a short man with a laugh loud enough it carried across the room. Jerry, no longer in tow, had been cornered by a woman who was wearing a theatrically wide-brimmed hat. Paul thought it was ridiculous for someone to be wearing a hat indoors, and in the evening, too. When Gillian noticed Paul she beckoned him with a single finger. When he walked over to her, she reached out her arm towards him and took his hand, drawing him close.

  “This is my stepson, Paul,” she said to the man and then, turning to Paul, said, “This is my dear friend Richard Weinberg, who has so generously provided this venue for our gathering.”

  “It’s an honor,” he said, smiling at Gillian. Then he gave Paul a “so, what do you have to say for yourself?” look.

  “Cool stuff you’ve got over there,” said Paul, gesturing with his head towards the shelves.

  “Nice to meet a connoisseur,” said Richard. “You know, Paul, you’re never too young to start collecting.”

  Gillian didn’t smile, but she gave Paul’s hand a little squeeze. “Paul just got his learner’s permit,” she said. “He’s taking driver’s ed classes and has his eye on my truck.”

  Paul was surprised Gillian knew about his learner’s permit. She was often totally unaware of things like that in his life. The comment about the truck was even more surprising. He’d had his eye on it, but he’d ne
ver said a word.

  Richard gave a loud laugh. “Don’t settle for a truck,” he advised Paul. “Ask your stepmother for a sports car. A Ferrari, a Bugatti.”

  “As much as I would love to give Paul any car he’d want, I think a Bugatti may be out of my reach,” said Gillian.

  Richard scowled and shook his head. “Just wait till after the Pulitzer,” he said. “And I expect your novel will be a bestseller, too.”

  Gillian released Paul’s hand and held her finger to her lips. “We’re not mentioning any prizes,” she said.

  A couple next to them, sensing a temporary lull, joined the conversation. Paul stood awkwardly next to Gillian. She seemed to forget that he was still there. After a while he slipped away unnoticed. At the buffet table he copped a handful of olives—a stretch for a farm theme—and sampled some of the ham. The bread had so many herbs in it, it looked green.

  Paul kept his eye on the bar, and when the bartender went back to the kitchen to get more ice, he refilled his ginger ale glass with champagne.

  “How’re you doing?” somebody asked, and Paul swung around.

  “Chris,” the guy said, holding out his hand. He obviously had observed Paul’s transaction at the bar and gave him a conspiratorial wink. “I met you at your folks’ house,” he said.

  One of Gillian’s writers’ group, Paul remembered. “Right,” he said. “They’re not exactly my folks,” he added. “I mean my dad’s my dad, but Gillian’s just his wife, not my mom.”

  “Sorry for the semantic insensitivity,” said Chris. “I should know better. If my ex-wife got remarried, I wouldn’t want people calling her and her husband my kids’ folks.”

  Paul shrugged.

  “So, you must find this sort of thing something of a drag,” said Chris. It wasn’t what Paul had expected him to say. Everyone who had come up to him had mumbled something inane about how excited he must be to be part of all this. He didn’t know quite what to make of Chris. It occurred to him that Chris might have had too much to drink.