Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  It was impossible though not to love Melanie; she listened so carefully, distilling the wisdom out of my speeches, asking earnest questions, like a religious novice, determined that if she really gave herself up to it she’d write something inspiring, rise above earthly toil and pain. It was youth, I supposed; there was so much time left for her, of course her life would change.

  We’d come to know each other a little, to see the truth of each other’s lives in the manuscripts; and the more we did, the more careful we were to speak of “the narrator,” never to dream an author might be as venal, as self-deluded, as her characters. We’d have died if Joy thought we recognized her in the chilled, motionless woman who occupied the haunted mansion in the book of which she’d now written three pages. Joy thought everything was a text and gave no credence to reality, but the others had so much experience between them that they hardly believed in fiction. They wrote as a way of passing their lives through their fingers one more time, peering in to search out what had really happened, or perhaps to reinvent what had happened, or just to have one last glimpse of a lost love. So sometimes we just threw fiction to the winds, and raged at a “narrator’s” husband, grieved for the dead father of the “main character.”

  As each woman read her pages aloud (the Xerox fee being prohibitive), the story underneath began to leak. Melanie’s green butter story had turned out to be about her first marriage: on their honeymoon her husband stood up in their canoe and threw his arms out to embrace her, saying, “I’m in heaven with an angel!” And lost his footing, fell overboard, and drowned. After Mattie’s divorce, her adoptive son had gotten her natural daughter pregnant; they’d had to put her grandchild up for adoption. Linda’s twelve-year-old brother had thrown a snowball at a car whose driver, a neighbor, swerved, hit a lightpole, and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her family (father a postman; mother, like Linda, a nurse) was driven out of their town—the father slipped into alcoholism afterward and died young, and the year in detention had schooled the brother in crime so that some time later he murdered a convenience store clerk and went to prison for good. “So it’s odd, it’s fair in a way, that my husband should end in a wheelchair, you know?” she said.

  “I don’t, I’ve never quite … known … what to make of it, I guess.” It was Melanie speaking, though it could have been any of them. “Like, he was there, then he was under the water and gone.… Was it just … random? Was there something I—?… I don’t know.” Mattie reached over to take her hand while I sat ineffectually by, wondering how they managed to bear the weights life had settled on them, and why, in a world full of therapies, they had all come to me.

  “Let’s concentrate on the first paragraph,” I said, thinking I had no aptitude for social work and must do my best to keep the discussion on writing, though this felt abominably cold and my teacherish voice sickened me. “This is a good place to talk about metaphors, how they can enrich or detract from your work. I think you’ve wanted to show how beautiful the water was, how wonderful everything felt even though death was right there beside you. But when the reader has the picture in his mind, of these two people rowing through rancid butter—”

  Melanie flushed, guilty of having clumsily described her husband’s death. “How do you think I could do better?” she asked.

  “What do you want the reader to know?”

  “How, I guess, how innocent we were,” she said, her voice breaking. I raced in to suggest several excellent ways of revealing innocence in a pair of characters who think mistakenly that they’re just at the start of their lives, but she interrupted: “And how … have you ever been on a whale watch? You know how you look down and you can just barely see the whale’s outline underwater, and you think it’s rising, in a minute it’ll break the surface and you’ll see it clearly? I dream I can see him that way, sometimes, and all day I feel like he’s alive again and I’m going to run into him in the grocery store or something. That’s the thing—that he seems to be right there—” And she reached out as if to touch him. “—even though he’s been dead five years.”

  “You know, you could just say all that,” I said.

  “Really?” And then, bubbling over, “You see, I know it’s possible. I believe I can do it. It can’t be as hard as you say.” It being the achievement of redemption through art? Riches and fame? Or were they two strains of the same thing? After all, a story fully told does change everything; think of the remedies by placebo, the cures at Lourdes—what do I know of it all except that it’s an immense relief to capture even a tiny piece of all the life that flows daily through one’s hands. Dorothea Solewicz (they had forced the book on me) believed the physical act of writing was therapeutic, even if the words made no sense, and I myself knew a man who no sooner wrote his dissertation on Dostoyevsky than he became a psychopharmacologist and began dispensing Prozac at $240 an hour (a career trajectory Phyllis might want to keep in mind).

  “People have done it,” I said, “or there wouldn’t be a bestseller list. Of course, first you have to write something.”

  “Exactly,” Melanie said, maternal already toward everyone in the room, as inspiring as a heroine in a war movie. “We can do it, I know we can.”

  Then to herself, hardly audible. “It can’t be that he just died.”

  No, it could not be. I felt fiercely that there ought to be a market for eulogies, a magazine widely distributed, printed on acid-free paper so the story of every life could go on. Even my baby, the child without qualities, would have a page.

  “People smile and disappear,” Arthur said, gleeful as a three-year-old upending a gravy boat. He seemed to be part of the group by now, and like the rest of us was especially fond of Melanie. She was the one who really noticed him: she imagined he was listening and could understand. Once she’d tried to ask his opinion, but he’d only looked at her in sad reproach, as if he assumed it was mockery. Now Lettie came out of the kitchen with her platter and he began to repeat her name softly, like a mantra, the subject of a life’s meditation.

  * * *

  Thursday I arrived to find him struggling against her as she tried to sit him down on the throne. “I have to—I have to—I’m late—” he said.

  “He’s having a bad day,” she told me. He was beating his open palms in the air as if fending off aggressive butterflies. Lettie smiled faintly, apologizing. “He’s usually very good, but this happens once in a while,” she said. They’d been reporters for the same newspaper—I wondered at the light resignation in her voice, how well she seemed to take it that they would both weaken now, losing parts of themselves until they died. I’ll be bellowing when my time comes.

  I’d promised the class that day would be devoted to the business end.

  “We want to know everything,” said Melanie, who had become their spokeswoman. She was particularly happy and confident—her husband had a job interview in the afternoon. “I mean, from the beginning. Do you write a first draft in longhand? How do you get an agent? What did you do, I mean, to get where you are?”

  “I haven’t exactly gotten anywhere,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “How did you get published, famous?” The words famous and writer have gotten so tightly fused together it’s impossible to tear them apart.

  “I’m not…,” I began, but here they all were with my image so bright in their eyes, and I’d relentlessly thwarted them, going on and on about the difficulty of art while they who knew so much about the world must have wondered what on earth I could mean. Is writing a short story as hard as suctioning out your husband’s lungs, or begging your landlord to wait another month for the rent? No, the writing wasn’t the problem: the problem was how to make a sale! I’d done that, but here I was refusing to give my secrets away. Suddenly I felt the courageous thing would be not to confess how small, how fearful I was, but to climb up on the pedestal they’d built for me and let them see me staunch and immortal, so they could have the comfort of believing for a moment in someone stronger
than themselves.

  “Yes,” I said, “I always write my first draft in longhand, then as I type it into the computer, I begin the process of revision…” I’d never blathered at such dull length in my life, or seen such rapt attention.

  “What’s it like to sell a story?” Linda asked, and I told them about the first one, how the check appeared in the mailbox and I rushed out to buy champagne. They clapped hands to hearts like children at a story hour.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” Melanie said. “Oh, just to think that it could happen to me!” Then, feeling a scruple: “All of us, it could happen to all of us, it could! How much—I mean, if you don’t mind my asking—how much did you make for it?”

  “Five hundred dollars.” Which was approximately ten times my average paycheck, for the eight stories I’d sold in the last six years.

  “Well, gosh,” Melanie said. “So, you only have to sell a couple stories a month.”

  “Well, there are a lot of writers…”

  “There goes the gloom and doom again,” she teased. “The fact is, it can be done.”

  Something ricocheted against the door frame, rolled across the floor and came to a stop at her feet. Arthur’s wedding ring.

  “She’s expecting me!” he said. I wondered if the she he referred to was Death. He’d been stamping his feet, writhing as though he were tied, so anxiously that Lettie had to come out from the kitchen every few minutes to reassure him. Melanie picked up the ring and replaced it tenderly on his finger, and he beamed at her as if she’d just agreed to his marriage proposal.

  I’d brought my book in, the copy I’d kept revising, and they passed it from hand to hand like a Dead Sea Scroll.

  “And someone painted this picture for the cover, after they read the book?” Linda said, smoothing her hand over the jacket. I nodded, and she said, “I can’t believe it, I just can’t.”

  Then, opening to some of my corrections: “But, who wrote in it?” As if it were graffiti.

  “I did,” I said, starting to explain, but it was inconceivable, that I might want to change something already printed. Lucy gently removed its jacket and touched her finger to my name on the spine, opened it, said “Library of Congress” reverentially, and asked “Now, do they want a manuscript to say copyright on every page?”

  “No,” I said, remembering how strange it had felt to have the very charitable publisher take this thing that came straight out of my dreams and slap it into shape like a hamburger patty, put it in a stylish jacket, and send it out into the world alone.

  “Where are the blurbs?” Melanie asked, and a wave of suspicion passed among them, immediately overcome by politeness, as if she’d asked if I had a glass eye.

  “But there was publicity, right?” Linda said. “The newspapers came?” I’d brought the Cape Cod Chronicle, with a big color picture of me headlined LOCAL AUTHOR WINS ACCLAIM—this referring to my sentence in an omnibus review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

  “You look so beautiful,” they sighed. “Just think…”

  Just think … my editor, enduring a change of medication, had been wont to call me up and shout “Nobody talks to me like that!” as soon as I answered the phone. The publicist had a baby and forgot to send out review copies. My father, always competitive, died on my publication date, so that instead of signing autographs in the local bookstore I found myself arguing with a funeral director over what sort of clothing a body should wear to its cremation.

  On the other hand, a woman in Wisconsin had, by some freak accident, bought the book and read it, and was moved by it to send me a pound of wild rice, which I stretched out over most of the next year, cooking it by the half cup when I felt hurt or ashamed, thinking: on this one person, I have had an effect.

  “Could I borrow this?” Lucy asked me when the book had gone around the table and fallen into her hands. “I mean, just to read a little overnight?”

  “I’d let you, but it’s my revising copy,” I said. The others had bought them and asked for my autograph. “It’s not something I can afford to lose. I’m sorry…”

  “I’ll bring it back,” she said, offended. “Look.” She shook out a plastic rain bonnet from her purse and wrapped the book up in it. “I’ll take good care of it, I will.”

  “Well, it’s very important to me,” I said, but I could see I wouldn’t get it back without a physical struggle. And the activity in the kitchen could no longer be contained: Lettie burst through the door with the platter.

  “This was the best class yet,” she said to me. Did they just sit behind the swinging door all morning listening, rattling the silverware so I wouldn’t guess?

  At home, Scott said to me out of the blue, “It could have been worse, you know.”

  “What could?”

  “It could have been a small black olive.” And I started to laugh; I thought I’d never stop.

  * * *

  “Lucy won’t be coming,” Phyllis said when we were all assembled for our last day of class. “She got a little bug and decided to go home.”

  “Oh, no,” Mattie said, “I brought her a book. Look, everybody, I went into Hyannis yesterday and look what I got—five books of essays … short stories…” She glanced at me, then back at the books, and said “short essays,” proudly, offering a compromise. “A dollar apiece!” she said. “I got one for each!” Linda got a collection of baseball writing, Joy’s was on small business management. For me there was a fresh copy of Writing from the Deepest Chamber of the Heart, and Lucy had been destined for A Bruce Chatwin Reader.

  “A first edition,” she said. “That means rare … It won’t be long before we’ve all written books like these,” she said. “Essays! I mean stories! I mean…”

  “I hope you’re right,” Melanie said, “because Bobby didn’t get the job.” Everyone turned to comfort her, but she insisted she wasn’t worried. “Because you know what, I wrote all night—I just couldn’t stop!—and here’s my story. It’s like I’m a new person! I’m just sure this is going to work out now, everything’s going to be fine.”

  “It was a perfect day, the first day of my honeymoon, the beginning of a new life, and the sun was dancing on the water,” it began. It had some music, and the meaning was clear. My heart raced; I’d taught someone something.

  “This is so much better,” I said, beginning to list all the improvements, but she burst out joyfully—

  “Do you see, do you see, I told you I could do it!”

  “Yes, you did.” I could say anything; I’d never see them again. Perhaps Lucy had taken my teachings deepest to heart, and decided to steal what she couldn’t earn.

  “You told me you could and you were right,” I said. “You were.”

  “And now, thanks to your advice, I know just how to sell it,” she said.

  “It was such a wonderful class,” Linda said, full of feeling, and they all joined her until I blushed. For five hundred dollars they’d bought something they could have got from a paperback edition of Anna Karenina: the sense that ordinary, daily events are worthy of rapt attention. They’d fallen in love with me because I sat at the head of their table—how wonderful it would be if, for just a few minutes a day, I could be the person they thought they saw. I’d typed up a reading list and they took their copies as if they were prescriptions: read these; become like me.

  “It’s possible, it is,” Linda said. “If you trust in the Lord…”

  “Well, a higher power,” Melanie corrected, glancing at me, their pet heretic, with anxious expectation. Would I allow them to be agnostics, or must they go all the way to atheism? It was noon, though, the kitchen door was about to open; I’d be saved by a platter of ham and cheese.

  Before it could reach us, Phyllis burst in with a camera and a long envelope, which she ceremoniously handed to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, embarrassed, reaching for my purse.

  “Open it, open it,” she insisted, louder the more I demurred. Finally she grabbed it back from me, pulled th
e check out, and read it with heavy emphasis: “A thousand dollars.” The class leaned in to see the magic sum. Melanie smiled knowingly—would I admit there was money in writing now?

  “Let’s everyone gather around for a picture,” Phyllis said. “You just stay there, and class, gather in behind her. Lettie, you come out, too, we’d like to kind of fill up the frame here.” This was diplomacy—the fact was that Arthur would be smack in the middle unless someone stood in front of him. I wanted to tell Phyllis this was proper, that when you’re writing death is always with you in the room … But if there was one thing I’d learned that week it was to hold my damnable tongue.

  “Joy and Lettie, closer,” Phyllis said. “I want to thank every one of you for your generous support of the County Courthouse Restoration Fund. Hold the check a little higher, Patsy. That’s better. Now a big, big smile.”

  She must have focused right in on it—you can read the sum even in the little picture on the brochure. It’s odd she used it, since my face pretty much says “Don’t hit me,” and since I wasn’t invited to teach there again. But at least Lettie and Joy are blocking the view of Arthur, and they’re all of them beaming out at the world with confidence and pride. Yes, life is a leaky vessel, but they can see the good ship Art in the distance, coming to bear them away.

  Fishman’s Fascination

  Why should it be the morning of the wedding that the news came down from the Mormon genealogists? Liane spread the chart out, over the dresses laid on her bed, and traced with a finger the line back, through her mother, her grandmother … back eight generations and there they were: Abraham and Rachel, Solomon and Sarah … So, it was true: her mother the lugubrious Catholic had been Jewish all along! Keeping her finger on the chart, as if to hold those names still there until she found a witness, Liane looked up and caught her own amazed face in the mirror. Yes, there was something in it, something she’d never been able to place.… She, Liane Thistlemore, who had never been anyone, really, was suddenly—a Jew! She felt a puff of destiny inflate her; she lifted, just slightly, off the ground.