Early Decision

by Lacy Crawford

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He’s my student!”

  “So we’ll buy him a Coke.”

  Martin was nodding to the people on his other side as they arrived at their seats. “That’s not my point,” Anne continued. “I don’t want my students in this part of my life, you know?”

  “What part of your life?”

  “My love life.”

  “Tara will be there, too,” he reminded her. The houselights were flashing. “Not like it’s a date.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Shhh,” Martin said, leaning an arm around her shoulders. “Watch the show.”

  Three hours later Anne could not have recalled a thing about the play except how Tara looked, stalking and sulking onstage, and how Martin watched her, and how she, Anne, measured gradations of closeness between their two bodies from Act One to Act Two to Act Three. Tara wasn’t a surprise—they’d met before, she was long married—but that evening, William’s bright eyes cast a new spot on Martin. Anne studied him and felt, inside her, an understanding small and hard as stone. It made her want to vomit. She refused it, and it was immediately restored. Martin, sensing her withdrawal, grew cordial.

  “You should listen to your teacher, here,” he told William, after the show. “She’s a good little writer.”

  “Are you?” asked Tara. It wasn’t curiosity alone, but her face betrayed neither sarcasm nor envy, which made the question that much harder to answer. Anne knew Tara’s husband was home with their small daughter. Meanwhile they had smuggled a teenager into a hotel bar—he’d slipstreamed Martin, coming through the doors, and now was settled wide-eyed before the mighty actor as though Martin were the Burning Bush. The boys having easily settled their pecking order, Tara was forcing the issue between the girls.

  “I don’t write, really,” Anne replied.

  “You should,” Martin said, into his rye. He straightened. “I’m always saying you should write for television. Come on out to L.A. and do it.”

  “That’d be cool,” William offered. “And I do listen to her.”

  “Good boy,” said Martin.

  “I don’t own a TV,” Anne said.

  William persisted. “I totally listen to her. But she’s a greenie. Grammar, yes. But the liberal stuff drives me crazy.”

  “Hey,” Anne warned.

  “Oh God, you’re not one of those Young Republicans, are you?” Martin scoffed.

  William’s eyes were busy; he was furiously recalculating.

  “What’s your first choice, UVA or something?”

  “SMU,” grunted Tara. “TCU. Anything-C-U.”

  “Actually, Vassar,” said William.

  Now Tara beamed. “I went there! I loved it!”

  “Hear, hear,” said Martin, reaching for Tara. He fingered the three gold bracelets at her wrist. “Now, there’s a recommendation for you, Will.”

  “But I can’t apply there,” William explained. “Parents won’t let me.”

  Tara was angry. “Why the hell not?”

  Martin stretched his face into mock horror. “No girls’ school for my boy!” he bellowed, and laughed.

  “Bingo,” Anne said.

  “Wow,” said William.

  “What an ass,” spat Tara.

  “It’s not that shocking,” Anne said, watching William’s face.

  “Not many Gippers at Vassar, kiddo,” Martin said. The more he demeaned the boy, the more William adored him; he kept leaning across the table in Martin’s direction and then catching himself, regrouping around his club soda with lime.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll probably be at Penn anyway.”

  “Why Penn?”

  “I want to hear more about Anne’s writing,” Tara said.

  “I don’t think so,” Anne replied.

  “Is that how you met?” she pushed.

  “No.”

  “Tell ’em, Annie,” Martin urged. “How did we meet?”

  He loved the story, seeing as it placed him on his pedestal from the very first moment—as indeed he had been, coming in as a guest on the morning talk show at the local public radio station, one of Anne’s internships straight out of college. Anne thought she’d like to be among those confident, chalky voices she’d grown up with. But she hadn’t got far enough to imagine a beat for herself, finding it surprisingly dull working on the day’s headlines. Radio production was just at that time changing over from manual to digital, and most of the senior reporters used China-white pencils and tiny bits of masking tape to form their stories. Three minutes: the lede, a few voices, some ambient, a concluding note, and out. The work of spinning the reels and fitting together tiny snips of tape appealed to Anne a good deal. It was solitary and meticulous, done in tiny editing rooms. But she did not have the gumshoe instinct, and quailed at cold-calling. Nor did she yet have the larger sense of social justice that might have driven her to seek out stories of lesser civic interest.

  Then, one dull Tuesday, came Martin. She was prepping the talk-show host for an interview with a hot young actor at Steppenwolf, who also wrote, and had a new play being workshopped uptown, etc., etc.—she gave all the guests their laurels—and the world kindled when he walked in. Her skin grew hot. Her shirt itched. She kept feeling pieces of hair fall from her barrette and into her eyes. She sat in the booth and watched the way Martin worked the microphone, cocking his head at the host but leaving his smile for the listeners. He put them all to shame. She followed him immediately. He had a dozen years on her; was big and lean, unapologetically ruffled and with an air of urgency: someone traveling far and fast. Martin quit the studio and asked her, sotto voce, to lunch. She gathered her notebooks and walked out. There had been, that night, a pair of women’s shoes—ugly black flats, scuffed, of a sort she would never wear—cast askew on his living room floor. She was twenty-one and didn’t ask. In fact, it pleased her to be the usurper. The shoes had disappeared soon enough. But remembering them now, she knew that Tara would know whose they were. Tara knew Martin then, knew his life, would have seen Anne come in and wondered, What on earth? It made Anne feel not much older than William, who was vibrating with surprise at his good fortune, to be sitting in Whiskey Blue with two accomplished actors late on a Friday night.

  Anne told the story of their meeting, bare bones. “The Tom McLean Show,” she said. “I was an intern, he was the guest, I smiled, he asked me out. That was that.”

  “I remember that junket,” said Tara. “You were just getting to be a big cheese.”

  Martin smirked at her. “Not half as big as you, my dear,” he said. “You were brilliant up there tonight.”

  Tara was radiant. William was missing all of it. “You used to be on the radio?” he asked Anne.

  “Only a few stories,” Anne told him. “Mostly I was an assistant.”

  “Man,” he said, shaking his head. “Why’d you quit that?”

  “Yeah, why’d you quit that?” echoed Martin.

  “Mmm?” Tara urged.

  “Just not cut out to be a reporter,” Anne said. Her voice was dead. It was increasingly uncomfortable to be answering questions in front of William. She sensed a prior conversation between Tara and Martin; there was something Tara was out to demonstrate.

  “I’ve got to be heading home,” Anne said, wrestling herself back into control. “William, it’s late, I don’t want to get into trouble on your account. Martin, I gotta walk Mitchell. Let’s go.”

  “Aw,” moaned Tara. It was half purr. “Stay for one.”

  “You think?” asked Martin.

  “Come on. How often are you going to be back in Chi-Town now that you’ve made the great leap?”

  “You’re right,” he said. He reached across to enclose Anne’s hand. “Babe, I’ll be right behind you.”

  There was no refusing this in front of William. “Cool, see you later,” she said, standing. She beckoned a reluctant William out of his seat.

  Tara gave a small wave. “Bye, kids.”


  Anne turned quickly so no one would see the sting.

  In the taxi, William leaned his head against the glass and stared up. He held his rolled playbill—autographed by Tara, of course—as gently as a stray bird in his lap. “Man . . .” He sighed, and then he was quiet. Anne watched him walk up the marble steps and through the double set of doors, only a few blocks from her lonely apartment. He took home all the gold that night, she knew—piles of dreams, and a whole lotta hope. She was empty-handed. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe William Kantor needed it more than she.

  MARTIN, WHO WAS still on California time, was finishing his morning exercises when Anne’s telephone rang. He turned and scowled at the sound. Anne was pleased. She was busy, you see, with a rich and full life. She forced herself to wait two rings before answering.

  From the floor Martin, mid-crunch, looked up, the batwing muscles along the tops of his shoulders rising tightly into his neck. “Who’s that?”

  She ignored him. Already she’d forgone her run with the dog in case Martin wanted to fool around. Morning always seemed a good opportunity for romance, though for some reason whenever they were in the same city they spent very little time in bed. Martin preferred to have sex on sofas and in cars, and in ways he’d seen in movies, like up against the fridge. It was sexy to be held—no mistaking how broad and strong he was—but logistics tended to preclude intimacy. This applied to bedtime in general, actually, if she thought about it. He did one hundred push-ups every night, and hopped out first thing in the morning to work his core. As a result, when he was actually in bed, he was always the tiniest bit rancid. Mitchell, much the better date, was waiting patiently by the door.

  Anne picked up the phone. A small voice rapidly explained the rather convoluted reason for the call, which was, as best she could work out, to ask a few questions relating to a course Anne had once taken with Toni Morrison at Princeton. The reporter sounded young. He was calling from the East Coast, some paper whose name made sense to Anne but which she then immediately forgot. The Rahway Review. The Hopewell Sentinel.

  “Who is it?” repeated Martin.

  Anne cupped the phone in her palm. “Just someone who wants to talk about Toni Morrison.”

  He leaned back, letting his muscles tighten further, and gave her a deep nod of approval. She took the phone into the kitchen to get a Diet Coke, and because it would keep his curiosity aroused.

  “How can I help you?” she asked the caller.

  “You studied with Professor Morrison, is that right?”

  So, yes, she’d been accepted into a class with Toni Morrison. A small writing seminar. It was the sort of point of pride that had a sell-by date, being more about promise than achievement, and lately it made her wince to remember. That spring had followed the awarding of the Nobel, and when Professor Morrison sailed across campus, students found themselves at their windows looking out before they knew what had drawn them there. All semester Anne had sat, mostly terrified, and studied the writer’s dreadlocks—those gorgeous silver ropes—which had had a kind of Medusa effect. She’d never worked up the courage to ask her first question: how were you supposed to pronounce Sethe?

  “I did,” Anne answered the reporter. It sounded like a confession.

  “Creative writing, is that right?” asked the reporter.

  “Yes. Long fiction.”

  Martin had followed her into the kitchen and was sitting, in his boxer shorts, on one of two tall kitchen stools. He shook out a cigarette but made a show of waiting to light it until they were outside, a courtesy he extended when he felt Anne deserved respect.

  “That’s great,” said the caller. “Amazing. Could you tell me a bit about what she was like? As a professor?”

  As teachers went, Toni Morrison was not nice, but she’d been honest, and—hell—she was Toni Morrison. Sitting there with their sheaves of short fiction in her lap while the late-Friday light fell across Nassau Street. This was why you went to the top colleges, right? To get in front of the big guns. Such an excess of opportunity, it was almost alarming. Princeton hitting its high notes. Though every campus had its stars—you could swing a paperback and hit a great writer anywhere in higher education, really, and in some ways, the grander the grandee, the less learned. Nobody was fool enough to think they were writing the next Beloved. Anne and her classmates just wanted to hear Toni Morrison talk. As a teacher, she had resisted the oracular but had on occasion given out life advice, which they’d cherished so fiercely they repeated it only to each other.

  One afternoon a junior, a lovely Indian woman, had come in stifling sobs. Morrison observed her for a long moment and then proclaimed, “When a man says he doesn’t deserve you, he’s right.”

  Martin had never said this, incidentally. Anne had been listening for it since the day they’d met.

  To the reporter, Anne said, “She was great. She was Toni Morrison. What do you want to know?”

  “Tell him she gave you an A,” whispered Martin. She shook him off.

  “Well, maybe a bit about what you worked on with her, and where you are with your work now?” said the reporter. “Something about how she helped you get your start?”

  “Tell him!” Martin hissed.

  She took her drink and turned away.

  “Oh, it was just a sophomore story,” Anne explained, hoping to sound as modest as she felt. “You know how that stuff is. I don’t even remember it now.” And she was pretty sure everyone had gotten an A. It was creative writing, for heaven’s sake. Not that she’d tell that to Martin.

  “You don’t write anymore, then?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Oh,” he said, deflated. She heard him shuffling through some pages. God, this is why I quit public radio, she thought smugly. The earnest rookie tones were making her cringe.

  Martin had come round to face her and set his hands on her hips, pressing himself against her, in part to distract her from her focus on something other than him, and in part because he was radically excited by the sort of attention Anne was receiving now. She bobbed away from his nuzzling.

  “So let’s see . . .” the reporter said, buying time. “There were six of you in that class, is that correct?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “And what can you tell me about your classmates? They’re, let’s see . . . Nina Gupta. She’s a writer.”

  Postcolonial novelist. Long-listed for the Orange Prize. “Yep, she is,” Anne said.

  “Right.” He shuffled again. Anne imagined a short, overweight hack, some would-be book critic for a dogpatch New Jersey paper. “Okay. And Seth Gantrim? Also a writer.”

  Anne recalled a monster book, the size and weight of a cinder block, called Block—thirteen hundred pages of experimental fiction she had no intention of facing. The publisher had designed the book to look like a cinder block, too, so when it had come out, to mostly puzzled reviews, the front table at the Barnes & Noble looked at first glance like they were doing some patch-up work to the wall behind. Among other things, Gantrim was interested in the ability of words to take up space.

  “He is, yes,” she answered. Martin had hooked one finger under her waistband and was running another across her belly.

  “Right. And, let’s see, Amelia Jenkins, she’s teaching at Yale—”

  “African American studies, I think, yes.”

  “Right, and Emily Bruton is a district attorney . . .”

  “What’s the question?” Anne asked, growing suddenly hot. Thank God Martin couldn’t hear this guy. So everyone else had taken flight. So what? Did they have a man like Martin in their living rooms? An actor and real-live playwright, just on the cusp of landing big in L.A.? Someone with those amazing little hollows at the base of his hipbones, where the elastic from his shorts sat light as a touch? Anne gulped soda and pulled away, cradling the phone. Over her shoulder she gave Martin a big smile that she hoped looked conspiratorial.

  “No, just, it’s just that your class was, is, full of people w
ho are pretty amazingly successful,” said the caller. “And pretty young, I mean, not even thirty. So I was just wondering, you know, what Toni Morrison did or said that helped people, or whether it was just the power of her course, or just luck?”

  Anne was quiet. This was unbelievable. Well, it was totally believable, given her attitude of late, but what made it unbelievable was that Martin was there, so she couldn’t just hang up and cry.

  “Have you talked to Professor Morrison?” she asked the reporter.

  There was a pause.

  “Well, no. She’s not been available for comment as of yet.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else? From my class?”

  “Ah. No.”

  Anne shook her head and frowned. “Sorry, who did you say you wrote for, again?”

  He cleared his throat. “The Metuchen H. S. Quarterly.”

  “I don’t think I know . . .” Anne stumbled.

  “Right,” replied the reporter. “Well, technically, it’s the Bulldog’s Bark. It’s a high school paper. I’m in high school.”

  “Now?” Anne squeaked.

  “No, right now I’m outside,” answered the kid. “I have a second period free.”

  Martin, seeing her eyes grow big, chased round to face her and grinned. “Is it the New York Times?” he whispered. “The Atlantic?” His eyes were wild. “Print or glossy? Give me a clue.”

  “Sorry, do you need a moment?” continued the kid.

  “I’m good,” Anne said. “That was just my dog.”

  “Ah. Because, actually, I was going to ask your help with that. The others. Your number was the only one I could find. And hey, what did you say your job was now—tutoring, is that right?”

  “I didn’t say,” she stalled. Then something occurred to her. “I can help you with the others,” she offered, quickly shifting to her desk chair. It was easy enough to find everyone through the alumni network. “Tell me which numbers you want. Or do you prefer e-mail?”

  “Oh, really?” said the kid. “So you all keep in touch? That’s wonderful. Yeah, I suppose you would. Wow. Because a lot were hard to get, you know, from the people who are authors or whatever. So that’d be cool.”