The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  “Have you ever been to Bolton?” Nancy asked.

  “Once, a while back,” he said.

  “Friends who went there?”

  “No,” said Adam. “I just wanted to see Gillian’s college. I wanted to picture her there.”

  It was the first reference he’d made to Gillian since they’d started out.

  “A bad crush,” said Nancy.

  “I guess you could call it that,” said Adam.

  Nancy had a desire to reach out and touch his arm, a Virginia gesture, but she kept her hands on the steering wheel, gave it squeeze to keep them rooted there.

  “How is Sonia doing these days?” she asked him.

  “Sonia?”

  “Your character,” said Nancy. “Your novel.”

  “I haven’t been writing,” said Adam. “Not for a long time.”

  “How come?”

  “Too much shit going on,” said Adam.

  Nancy took her eyes off the road a moment to look at him.

  “I broke up with my girlfriend, Kim,” said Adam.

  “That’s too bad,” said Nancy. “I met her at that Christmas party. She seemed very nice.”

  “She is nice,” said Adam.

  Nancy was tempted to ask what had happened but guessed that Adam had already revealed more than he was comfortable with.

  “If you’re available for dating now, I have a lovely daughter,” said Nancy. “She’ll be home from college for vacation. Of course she’d be mortified if she knew I was fixing her up with anyone.”

  “Sure,” said Adam.

  Nancy was immediately angry with herself for offering up Aliki this way. It was difficult talking to Adam. She steered the conversation into safer territory.

  “You should get back to your novel,” she said. “It’s worth working on.”

  “Yeah,” said Adam. “I know.”

  They drove for a while without talking, and then Adam turned to her.

  “Here’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “How come you gave a copy of the manuscript of your novel to Gillian? We haven’t been doing that in the Leopardi Circle, we’ve just been reading.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how did she get the manuscript?”

  “She never had the manuscript.”

  “Then how did she copy your first chapter?”

  “She must have remembered it from when I read it.”

  “But she got it almost exactly.”

  “It’s very close,” said Nancy, “but it’s not exact.”

  “You think she ran home after the meeting and quickly wrote it all down?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Nancy. “I don’t think she decided to write a novel herself until months later.”

  “That means she remembered your first chapter all that time,” said Adam. “That’s pretty remarkable.”

  It was pretty remarkable, Nancy thought, though she hated conceding any compliment to Gillian. Adam, she could tell, was struggling with his admiration.

  “She’s pretty extraordinary,” he said, but then, to Nancy’s relief, he added, “But what a bitch.”

  NANCY KNEW HER WAY around college libraries, and, as the editor of her newsletter, she had access to any collection she wanted. Nowadays she did almost all her research online, but there had been a time when she relied on actual journals. She loved libraries, the smell and heft of books. She loved the feeling of mystery each time she entered the stacks, their profound quiet and stillness, the sense that there were secrets—ideas, information—that had been buried there for years.

  The Bolton College library had been renovated recently, years after Gillian had graduated. The main reading room, part of the original 1850s building, still had the aura of a church, with stained-glass windows and a vaulted ceiling, but half of the reading tables had been taken over by computer terminals, and the current periodicals were now arranged alphabetically on severe grey metal shelves.

  The online catalog turned up nothing for Ailanthus, but Nancy found that the college literary magazine, The White Mountain Review, went back to Gillian’s day.

  “Maybe Virginia got the name wrong,” said Adam.

  “Virginia wouldn’t get it wrong,” said Nancy, “but maybe her source did.”

  “Who do you think her source was?” asked Adam.

  “No idea,” said Nancy. “Virginia knows a lot of people.” She did not mention her hunch that it was Bernard, wanting to shelter him if he were the source—though her instinct to protect Bernard puzzled her. What was it about Bernard that called for her protection?

  The bound back issues of The White Mountain Review were in the most subterranean level of the stacks, on rolling shelf units that were sandwiched together. When Nancy had located the right shelf, she and Adam had to move seven of the units to the side to make an access corridor. The overhead light was on a timer that clicked out the seconds, measuring the time before they would be left in darkness.

  “Chris could use this as a crime scene,” said Adam.

  Nancy shuddered. When the shelves were pressed together, someone could easily be crushed between them. It looked as if no one had ventured into this part of the library for years.

  They carted the volumes to a table at the end of the room. A gooseneck lamp gave them a circle of light to read by. The timer on the light in the stacks counted off the minutes as they worked through the tables of contents. It reminded Nancy of the sound of crickets in her basement.

  “I haven’t seen anything remotely Russian,” said Nancy when she was nearly through her half of the pile.

  “No Russian names here either,” said Adam.

  When the timer reached its final moment, the overhead light snapped off.

  “I’ll get that,” said Adam.

  Nancy watched him make his way to the shelves, a dark, ursine shape. He wound the timer fully clockwise, then returned to his seat, and Nancy was aware of his smell—a comforting fragrance of wool and bacon—in contrast to the odor of the stacks: concrete floors and forgotten books. She turned back to the volume she was studying. It was the last one. Her finger stopped midway down the table of contents.

  “This may be it!” she cried. “Minsky. That’s Russian. Something called ‘Homilies.’ ”

  Adam got up and came behind her to look on. But when Nancy turned to the pages, they weren’t poems but dreary lithographs of womblike shapes.

  “Fuck,” said Adam.

  “Have you been through all of yours?” asked Nancy.

  Adam gave the stack of bound volumes a nudge. “Nothing here. So now what?” he asked.

  Nancy smiled at him. “You didn’t expect it to be that easy, did you?”

  Adam shrugged. “We’ve been here all morning,” he said.

  “Let’s put these back and get some lunch,” suggested Nancy. She was beginning to wonder whether it had been a good idea to have Adam along. Nancy was used to the slow pace of research, and she didn’t want to be influenced by his quick discouragement. She had trained herself to believe that all information was there, somewhere, and it was just a matter of meticulous searching until you finally uncovered it. She had never let herself entertain the thought that the information didn’t exist. She explored in an almost dreamlike state of investigation, and uncovered clues that would never reveal themselves if she didn’t allow herself time to meander. She loved handling printed matter, the feel of the edges of the paper, like touching the wing tips of birds.

  But what if the clues she had been given were false? What if there were no Ailanthus, no Russian exchange student?

  “Let’s go eat,” she said.

  THE DELI ACROSS THE STREET from campus had a menu board posted over the counter. Every sandwich had a cute name—some insider reference, no doubt.

  There were some fresh-baked cookies on a serving dish by the register. “Want one?” Nancy asked.

  “Trying to cheer me up?” asked Adam.

  “You bet,” said Nancy. Adam actually smiled.
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  They ate at a table by the window. Bolton was one of the Seven Sisters that was still all women. Outside, students ran back and forth across the street, some waiting for the crossing light, others darting out between bursts of traffic. Adam was watching them as if he were searching for Gillian among them.

  “So,” said Nancy, “what do you think our next step should be?”

  Adam turned his attention back to her. He shrugged and licked some mustard from his lip. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Talk to a reference librarian, for one,” said Nancy. “Look through the old card catalog. Check the yearbooks from when Gillian was here.”

  “Sounds good,” said Adam. The food had improved his disposition.

  The old card catalog had turned up no Ailanthus, and the reference librarian had never heard of it. In the yearbook they found a photograph of the staff of The White Mountain Review but no Ailanthus among the pages of campus organizations. Adam was clearly disappointed that Gillian’s photograph was not included. The listing for her on a page in the back offered no information beyond her home address. Nancy was not surprised. It seemed quite like Gillian to feel disdain for the yearbook mentality. She probably had had contempt for the entire world of undergraduates and had slipped through Bolton without belonging to any organizations, without anyone knowing her. While other student writers were vying to get their work published by The White Mountain Review—or, if it existed, the mysterious Ailanthus—Gillian was submitting to Poetry magazine and The New Yorker, not getting published yet but collecting handwritten notes of encouragement.

  There was no point in checking out students with Russian-sounding names. An exchange student wouldn’t have been in the yearbook; she’d been at Bolton for only that one year she was in the United States.

  Adam flipped back to the page where Gillian Coit’s photograph would have appeared, ran his fingers over the white space between Mary Beth Cochrane, a serious-looking young woman who had chosen to be photographed against a brick wall, and Judith Cole, who peered down at the photographer from the branches of a tree.

  “Didn’t they have color photography back then?” asked Adam.

  “Of course they did,” said Nancy, “but black and white was considered more artsy.”

  “This one is so artsy,” said Adam, pointing at the bottom of the page, “she’s entirely in shadow.”

  Elenah Cooper was, indeed, practically obscured, except for a bit of illumination on the side of one eye. She was, not, however, an obscure undergraduate, and had several lines of activities listed under her name, including the Gold Cup Society, the Drama Club, and Ailanthus, editor.

  Adam’s forefinger tapped the spot. “We found it!” he cried. “This is phenomenal.”

  “We didn’t find it,” said Nancy, “but at least we know it exists.”

  “Do you need a cookie?” asked Adam.

  Nancy laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “This is great.”

  Knowing that Ailanthus existed, however, was quite a different matter from finding it. It was nowhere in the archives of the library, and aside from spotting that one mention in the yearbook, they weren’t able to uncover a reference to it anywhere else.

  “You might try the English Department,” the reference librarian suggested. “Someone there might know something.”

  They made it to the English Department office only fifteen minutes before closing time. The department secretary had never heard of Ailanthus but told them old literary magazines might be found in the reading lounge upstairs. “No one has cleaned that place out for years,” she said.

  The reading lounge was deserted except for a lone student stretched out in a chair, listening to something on earphones. She wore argyle-patterned tights and a skirt much shorter than any Nancy had dared to wear when she was in college. She barely noticed Nancy, but took in Adam and repositioned her legs on the coffee table. Not long afterwards, she left. Nancy was relieved to have the room to themselves. It wasn’t as if they were doing anything illegal, but it was more comfortable working without worrying that someone might question them. Even so, Nancy couldn’t shake the feeling that Gillian herself would appear at the door and ask, “What do you think you’re doing?” But Nancy was fired up now. She’d confront Gillian. She’d stand her ground.

  The bookcase-lined room was two stories high, with a library ladder for access to the upper shelves. At one end was a stone fireplace worthy of an English manor house. It looked as if it had never been used. Ceramic ashtrays, back from the days when smoking had been allowed, were stacked on the mantel. Nancy and Adam divided the room and worked towards each other. The shelves housed a hodgepodge of discarded books, periodicals, old student newspapers, and bound student theses. There was no order to the collection; critical studies on now-unfashionable writers were shelved beside out-of-date bestsellers. It didn’t look as if anyone had consulted any of the books for years. When it started getting dark, Nancy found the light panel and turned on the overhead lights that dangled from metal chains. A janitor poked her head in and emptied a wastebasket by the door.

  “How late is this room open?” Nancy asked.

  “We lock the building at ten,” said the janitor.

  “Are you getting hungry?” Nancy asked Adam.

  “Getting there,” he said.

  They found a pizza place near campus. The front window was steamed up, and the neon letters spelling out “Apollo Pizza” had a mysterious glow.

  They sat in a booth along the wall. The pizza had so much melted cheese it resembled a lunar surface. Adam bit into his without waiting for it to cool. A web of cheese connected the piece in his hand with the one on the plate. He went through three pieces of pizza before looking up at her.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “At Gillian’s book party, when you went up to Gillian . . . remember?”

  Nancy waited. She hadn’t expected Adam would remind her of that evening.

  “I overheard you say something about your father. What was that about?”

  “Oh,” said Nancy. She hadn’t been thinking about her father; she had tucked him away in a safe place in her mind, far from any taint of revenge. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this to anyone—except Oates. But in this pizza place, miles from home, on this hunt that Adam had teamed up with her for, it seemed she might as well.

  “The doctor in my novel was inspired by my father,” she said. “He decided to stop practicing medicine because he felt inadequate. It wasn’t his lack of skill as a doctor, but the profession as a whole. Gillian took him and turned him into an incompetent—a doctor convicted of malpractice.”

  Adam was listening intently. Nancy leaned toward him across the table. “She sensationalized him, she maligned him. She used him.”

  Nancy hadn’t realized it, but while she had been speaking, her hands had tightened into fists. Adam’s hands covered them now. His warm palms encompassed her knuckles.

  “She used me, too,” he said.

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the reading lounge, they picked up where they had left off. They worked for two hours more. They were in the middle section of the main bookcase, Adam on the ladder, Nancy on her knees going through a low shelf, when someone from campus security came by. He was an older man in a grey uniform that looked a size too small for him.

  “Building closes in half an hour,” he said. He took another look at Nancy. “Mind if I ask what you folks are doing here?”

  Nancy stood up and smiled at him. “I’m a visiting scholar, and this is my research assistant,” she said. “Would you like me to show you some identification?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Nothing worth stealing in this place.”

  After he left, Adam came down the ladder. “Your research assistant is done up here,” he said.

  “I’m done, too,” said Nancy. She sank down on the sofa facing the fireplace. Adam sat down beside her.
/>   “I guess we might as well head home now,” she said. “I don’t know where to go from here. I was so sure we’d find something in this place.”

  “We’ve still got half an hour,” said Adam.

  “But we’ve been through every shelf,” said Nancy.

  “What about those cabinets?” asked Adam.

  “Where?”

  “Beside the fireplace,” said Adam.

  Nancy looked where he pointed. There were leaded-glass windows on either side of the fireplace, and below the windowsills were wooden panels with barely visible knobs. She hadn’t noticed before that they were cabinet doors.

  Adam took the cabinet on the left, Nancy the one on the right. She opened the door and squatted to peer inside. The cabinet was deep, and there was no light. The upper shelf was packed with old journals. She lifted out an armful. They were all back issues of The White Mountain Review.

  “Anything there?” she asked Adam.

  “So far it looks like there’s nothing but old course catalogs,” said Adam.

  Nancy wrestled out a cardboard box that was wedged into the lower shelf. It was filled with ancient course handouts of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Behind it was a stack of pamphlets. She reached in and pulled it out. When she set the pile on the floor, it slipped sideways and fanned across the carpet. She lifted the top pamphlet. Ailanthus was printed in Bookman Old Style in the center of the cover, and beneath the title was the black profile of a tree. It was nothing more than a slender sheaf of mimeographed paper with an off-white cover, two staples, their prongs now rusty, holding it together. Inside it was all student poems.

  “We got it!” she said.

  They grabbed all the pamphlets from the cabinet and spread them out on the floor. Ailanthus had been published biannually and had survived for several years. There were multiple copies of some issues, only one or two for others.

  “We’ve got only about twenty minutes,” said Adam.

  They snatched up the issues for the years Gillian had been at Bolton. The year that Gillian was a sophomore Nancy found poems by a student named Anya Kuznetsov listed in the table of contents. She handed the copy to Adam.