Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Thinking, what if they don’t know anything? But the bulk of their collective knowledge would be immense; they’d seen as much birth, death, character, and fate as Sophocles. Whatever it was that had constricted Joy until she spoke in a monotone and seemed to have nothing left in her except a novel must be worthy of a novel itself, and Linda, who could happily describe the uplifting aspects of watching one’s husband die of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, must have just the kind of maverick authority a narrator needs to grab a reader and point out the things he’s overlooked all his life. I got excited, thinking I’d draw all their talents out of them and they’d be amazed with themselves.

  “No ideas but in things,” I said. “That’s William Carlos Williams. Can you see what he means? If you were describing this room what detail would you choose first? And why?”

  They pulled back from the table as if they were trying to hide behind each other. After a long silence Melanie peeped, “The thrones, maybe?”

  “Okay!” I said. “And why?”

  Marge, looking fed up with the blather, turned to me and asked, sharply: “You will discuss marketing?”

  The pencils went still; their hungry faces turned to me. I calculated: they’d paid five hundred dollars apiece for this class, money that could still be refunded if they asked for it now. Then they could buy shoes with it, or books, or put it toward medical care or their children’s education.

  I took a deep breath.

  “There is no market for literary fiction,” I said, incurring two incredulous and five uncomprehending stares; it was like saying there was no God. “And even if there was ‘a market,’ even if anyone had a prayer of making money from short stories, the only way to do it would be to follow your natural instincts, your own idiosyncracy—then throw yourself on the mercy of the marketplace and hope for a piece of incredible luck—that you’ve told a story people are interested in right now.” Behind the swinging door in the kitchenette, I heard a swell of whispering and a clattering of plates. Champagne, I thought, would help wash this news down.

  “Well, surely you can give them some names and addresses, dear,” said Phyllis. “I mean, we clearly said marketing in the brochure.” How had Phyllis and I become a we all of a sudden? “After all, you’ve been published…” she said.

  “So you have to admit it can happen,” said Lucy brightly.

  “Because it did happen, to you,” Melanie added, gesturing toward the copy of my book that Phyllis had been holding up for them. Her voice was so sweet and full of hope and admiration that there seemed no choice but to fulfill her dreams.

  I felt obligated to tell them that I wasn’t exactly feeding my family with the proceeds from my stories—in fact the publisher no sooner bought the book than they started acting as if they’d done it out of generosity, and by now I was inclined to agree. Reading a story is like taking a drop of rubbing alcohol on your tongue—at first it seems like nothing but when it starts to work it curdles every cell. All the longings, the prayers unanswered that drive us through our lives, the ironies we slip on so hilariously—isn’t it just better to put them out of one’s mind? Novels have long skeins of character in great sweeps of history; in movies lovemaking looks as beautiful as it feels; in poems one smooth stone might equal redemption and paintings have color at the very least, a sculpture can give you a pang of desire just like a man … No, a story is a grim thing … to publish one is a kindness, to publish a whole book full is pure philanthropy.

  But my students hoped to gather up the scraps and shards of their lives and fit them together into something beautiful and whole, to reclaim their sufferings as art. They had no language for this ambition, so they talked about fame—and, of course, money, the need of which they knew sorely well. The most immediate source of it was the cash box now resting under Marge’s vigilant hands. Surely Phyllis didn’t want to take the bread out of these women’s mouths just to put a slate roof on the courthouse? I glanced at her, thinking she’d understand and in a minute there’d be refunds all around, but her whole being was involved in a frown.

  The kitchen door swung open, and two very gentle, worried-looking ladies emerged on tiptoe with a tray of Oreos and Fig Newtons, and several gallons of Coke. “Now,” said one, “what can we pour you, Diet or Classic?”

  Coca-Cola—Phyllis told me aside—supplied the soda for free. The champagne glasses I’d seen were props for the theater company. For us there was Coke, cookies donated by Nabisco, and a dietetic cheese. Raising her voice, she asked “How much did Yankee pay you for the story you published there? I’ll bet that was several hundred right there.” Everyone gathered around me. Yes, I said, but Yankee is one of six or seven magazines that pay at all, and even those …

  “Now, I’m sure a hardheaded businesswoman like yourself can give us more suggestions than that,” said Phyllis, as if I must be saving all the really good opportunities for myself.

  “No, really,” I said.

  “I just love your shirt,” Melanie said, rubbing the fabric between her fingers as if the stuff might confer magical powers, and they gathered around me, examining my clothes, my hair, as if I was the thing they’d come to study. The shirt was from the thrift shop, of course—having money is embarrassing enough without going around spending it, too.

  Lucy, seeming in a trance, said, “I think I could make myself a shirt like this,” and turned over a button to see how it was attached, asking, “Does Yankee pay on acceptance, or publication?”

  “Just one thing,” Phyllis said, taking me aside again. “Lettie’s husband has Alzheimer’s, so he usually comes in with her during the day—she’ll be here to make your lunch, you know. He’s very quiet, he won’t cause you any trouble. I just didn’t want you to be alarmed.”

  * * *

  His name was Arthur, and when I arrived the next morning I found him slumped in the larger of the two thrones. The day was scorching, but the windows were painted obdurately shut.

  “No one else has complained,” Phyllis said, seeming to imply that for the sake of a thousand dollars most people would be willing to stop breathing for a week, and to feel that in addition to greed and obstinacy I was now displaying an unfortunate tendency toward invalidism. I told her I was worried about Arthur, who obligingly lifted his huge, ashen head for a moment, then let it fall back to his chest.

  “Well, if you’d like to take up a collection, I’d be happy to go pick up a fan,” Phyllis said, but Lettie emerged from the kitchen with an ancient one she’d found among the props. Her step was light as if she feared her slightest movement would disturb us, and she spoke quietly, to herself all the time—narrating a gentle, ironic version of each moment the way someone else might knit something to pull up around her shoulders on a cold night.

  “Yes, a breeze,” she said, plugging the fan in. “A breeze is better…” and enumerating the odd lots as she passed them: “silk peonies, of course, a garden gate, Arthur, a bushel of Mylar snowflakes, and—oh!—a mirror, a mirror, how unkind!” She turned away from it and went back to the kitchen, while Melanie, who had been watching me watch her, smiled sadly as if she knew just what I was thinking.

  Ten minutes had passed, three hours and fifty minutes to go. Ordinarily I would talk about the students’ manuscripts, but neither Linda nor Joy had submitted one and Mattie’s book was several hundred pages of advice about how to stay cheerful and pleasant while recognizing that your husband of twenty years is having an affair and that you are tilting, loveless and penniless, into old age.

  Lucy’s piece appeared to be a eulogy for her father, and Melanie’s began: “It was a perfect, cloudless day, and our oars cut into the river like knives going through deep-green butter.” Best to find a modest goal: I decided that by the time they were finished with my class on the short story, they would all know what a short story was.

  I drew a diagram of a conventional plot on the blackboard. Already I heard the women making lunch in the kitchen—what could it be, that they would start so e
arly?

  “The conflict,” I said, “is the thread the reader follows through the story. Usually it’s tiny—the kind of thing that makes you curious in your own life, like a piece of gossip that you try to understand. It’s an irritant, a grain of sand—you’ll turn it into a pearl.” They all, even Arthur, watched me like a field of sunflowers following the day. I was their teacher, I would give them something that felt simple as warmth and helped them grow.

  It made me sad. I’d copied the plot diagram out of a literature textbook; I know nothing about plots at all. My own stories were written out of longing and disappointment: life, which had been advertised to me as a clear path from one happy event to the next, had turned out to be a series of bewilderments through which one stumbled blindly, doing one’s best to avoid embarrassment, acting properly jubilant or sorrowful in spite of one’s own rage and confusion, and generally pretending one had some idea how to carry on. I’d started writing down events and conversations to study them and maybe learn to get some of it right. This became a habit, then hardened into a superstition, so finally I’d feel my life was draining away from me if I didn’t get it down on a page. Then, out of love madness—feelings that would have driven someone else to murder—I started going back and back over everything, making it into stories with the idea that a man I yearned for would read them and realize he ought to have loved me.

  I don’t suppose he ever saw the book, but publishing it did change things. I became someone who’d accomplished something—the most frightening, confusing, and embarrassing position yet. I started to teach writing at the community college, was asked to address the trustees—Scott, my husband, was one of them. He married me and convinced me to give up teaching … but here I was, speaking with merry authority—in short, impersonating a person, pretending to have no share in the common desperation.

  As I talked I was aware of a certain suspense radiating from the kitchen. Bursts of low, intense talk were punctuated by sudden frenzies of chopping; cabinet doors opened, water ran, then came a sudden “Oh!” and Lettie rushed through the room, saying in her anxious undertone: “I forgot! How could I forget?” She returned fifteen minutes later with a package of melba toast, which came out at lunchtime beside a platter of cold cuts so fleshily sliced they were difficult to look at and impossible to eat. Whatever had been chopped, washed, or discussed did not appear, and I wondered if I’d only imagined the travail behind the swinging door. I ate a Fig Newton, listening to Linda’s stories of the faith remedies her husband had tried: “I mean, I wouldn’t wish it on any of you,” she said, “but I believe God always has a reason”—everyone but Joy nodded gravely—“and for growth in a marriage, ALS is really something…”

  Inspirational books had been a help. In fact, she wondered if I’d read one she liked, called Writing from the Deepest Chamber of the Heart.

  “Oh, that’s such a wonderful book,” Melanie said. “Don’t you think so?”

  I’d never heard of it.

  “That’s the thing—there are so many,” Melanie sighed. “You can’t read them all! I mean, I didn’t know about that guy you mentioned last night! But Dorothea Solewicz, she’s just awesome.” The others agreed—they’d all read it and Mattie had a copy in her purse, along with two other manuals of writing advice and a collection of aromatherapy sachets for writers, with scents for lyricism, insight, courage, et cetera.

  “Look,” Joy said, turning the book over. “Isn’t she beautiful? Like Michelle Pfieffer…”

  That was another thing they wanted from me—an airbrush, a quick liposuction. More exactly, a metamorphosis out of sadness, which repels love, into grace, which would attract it. Dorothea Solewicz did, indeed, look beautiful and was most accomplished, being the author of this book and a book of exercises one can do with one’s cat, dividing her time between her ranch in Colorado and the beach house in Malibu, where she lived with her husband—yes, he was an investment banker, too.

  “I’m dealing in snake oil,” I told Scott when I got home. “They’re paying five hundred dollars apiece to Phyllis Giustameer, and they think they’re going to feed their families on fiction—it’s horrible. I’m preparing them for a profession that doesn’t exist!”

  “All for the sake of a thousand dollars…” he said, in disbelief. He makes a thousand dollars during a hiccup; a sneeze can go into five figures. “Instead of—” He flicked his hand out over the yard toward the water. All this, he’d got it for me. The squash blossoms were fleshing up, swallowtails looped over the tiger lilies in back. The tide was full and someone on one of the boats was playing a saxophone with the slow pulse of crickets as a backbeat; everything spoke of surfeit, contentment. If the baby had lived and grown, I thought, it would have been almost a year old. Oh, I knew what my ladies wanted—to see something form in their own hands, something whole and alive in whose beautiful face their own image would be clear.

  “They’re paying you for hope, honey,” Scott said. “You’re in business to give it to them. You don’t get very far in the world selling bitter pills.”

  * * *

  “What category would a eulogy come under?” Lucy asked the next morning. “I mean, is it a short story? Is that what they mean?”

  Already that morning I’d achieved one of those feats of strength only the desperate can perform, lifting the window a foot from its sash and propping it with the ice bucket so we could get a little air and a glimpse of the green world—who knew what else might be possible? I addressed a brief prayer to Emily Post and the words came: “Really, Lucy, a eulogy is a category all of its own.”

  “Well, who would publish that, then?” Lucy asked. “I mean, I couldn’t find it in Writer’s Market, but after the funeral everyone said it ought to be printed.… Everyone loved my father so. ‘His heart was big as all outdoors,’” she said, quoting her opening line.

  Melanie caught my eye with a quick, derisive glance, and I looked guiltily away. Linda was drawing a fluffy dog in the margin of her notebook, and Arthur was excavating earwax with a fingernail, but Lucy went on speaking of the events of her childhood as if they were artifacts whose every scratch held a revelation. She had the first attribute of a writer, I thought—she was certain the world would want—would pay—to know whatever she was thinking.

  “When you write a eulogy,” I said, “you’re writing for people who already care about your subject—the people who come to the funeral. If you want to publish it, you have to think how to make people who never met your father take an interest in him, too. Think about it—what do you like to read yourself?”

  “Oh, I don’t like to read,” she said quickly, as if I’d accused her of a secret vice.

  “What makes you want to write?”

  “Well—reading and writing—they’re completely different things!”

  “Okay,” I said, “Okay, yes … but who do you expect will read this piece? Ninety percent of marketing is knowing your audience.”

  I felt them come alive. “Could you repeat that?” Joy asked. “Ninety percent of marketing is—? I just want to be sure I got it exactly.”

  “But how do you know your audience?” Linda asked. “I mean, I wish we could meet some editors here. How do you find out what editors want?”

  Various answers came from different sides of the table—“Sex!” someone said.

  “Legal thrillers,” Linda insisted. “I mean, since O. J. When really the most important things happen in hospitals.…”

  “They want characters who live in New York,” Lucy said bitterly. “If you’re from Louisiana they couldn’t care less.”

  “They want something revelatory, original,” I said.

  “Revelatory, original,” Arthur seemed to repeat, but the others slumped—they’d just gotten me down to earth and here I bounced back into the ether again.

  “Something interesting, I mean.” I said. “Lucy, it sounds as if your father was a wonderful man, and if you could show some of that in your piece, then—”

  �
�It’s six pages—I don’t want to retype it,” she said irritably. “I’m just trying to decide where to send it to.”

  I had the kind of headache where you feel your brain is being scooped out with a melon baller, and was in perfect sympathy with the fan, which had been methodically heroic, turning back and forth, back and forth, trying to whisk the heavy air into a breeze. Give them snake oil, I thought, make them happy. What does it matter to you?

  “Try The New Yorker,” I snapped. “They like human interest. And Esquire, it’s all about men.”

  “What are those addresses?” Lucy asked, her pen poised.

  “You’d have to check them in the library,” I said. “That’s another important aspect of marketing. You want to study the magazines, read a year’s worth of back issues, really get to know what they want.” I read this in a dentist’s office once. Their pens went to work again, and Lucy still looked suspicious, as if I was making it all too hard.

  “What’s the circulation on those?” she asked me. “I want to start at the top.”

  Melanie laughed. “She doesn’t have the circulation figures for all the national magazines in her head, Lucy,” she said. “She’s saying we need to learn to write first.”

  I wanted to hug her. Now she excused herself sheepishly to go to the bathroom again, and as she left, with one hand at rest on her belly and the other pressing the small of her back, Mattie said, “Doesn’t she look just radiant?” Yes, that child inside her was like a battery that kept recharging her in spite of her troubles. The thought came down on me like a strap, reminding me how, when I asked the doctor if my baby had been a boy or a girl, he’d said it was like a large black olive; it had no human traits.