Still in Love

by Michael Downing

Leo said, “We’re having a big name day.”

  Mark said, “Before you take out the story packets, I want to hear any and all questions or confusions you might have about the grammar we reviewed last time. What matters most is that you feel confident about clauses and how to coordinate them.”

  All twelve heads were tipped forward, gazes aimed at the table. Mark wasn’t sure if this was an aversion to syntax or to the Professor.

  Three seconds elapsed before the Professor shouted, “Great. Everyone knows everything about syntax. Take out your packets.”

  “The order is irrelevant, just for the record.” Mark wanted to restore goodwill before the workshops got going. He sat and said, “The stories are alphabetically arranged by first name.”

  Anton stiffened in his chair and then looked up, terrified.

  Mark said, “Anton’s story was not in the packet, but I have copies I’ll pass out for everyone to read for Monday. We’ll start with Charles.” The whole class was still tense, so Mark slowly reviewed the rules for the ritual. The writer silently takes notes. Don’t ask the writer questions or use her or his name—just refer to The Writer. Use the text to anchor your observations and confusions.

  “And time is limited, so don’t repeat what’s already been said.” The Professor could not contain his impatience. “You can second a question or endorse a comment, if you must, but leave it at that. Most important, bear in mind that the highest praise is serious criticism. It’s of no use to a writer to be told you like something, or that it’s good. That’s what grandparents are for. Elevate your language. Endorse what you admire. Question what you don’t understand. Correct what is clearly wrong.”

  “And we’ll look for opportunities in the literal text—ideas or suggestions that are present and intriguing but not yet developed.” Mark looked up for the first time in a while. All eyes were cast down on the text of Charles’s story. And though Mark hadn’t heard anyone enter with the Professor, in three of the six sunny windows on the southwestern wall sat a tall woman with braids, a small guy with wiry hair, and someone who was a ringer for Max. He hazarded a glance at the windows on the opposite wall, and he spotted a woman with short, greasy hair and a cowboy hat slung behind her head.

  Mark concentrated on the twelve at the table. He managed to lead them through the stories by Charles, Dorothy, and Isaac in less than half an hour. He didn’t pause. He flipped to the next stapled page and said, “Jane wrote a story. She titled it, ‘Last Swim.’ What should we say about it?”

  “I endorse the title.” This was Anton, who had endorsed one obvious element of each story so far, and then retreated into a protective hunch over his packet.

  The Professor said, “Where is this woman, Anton?”

  Anton bent so far forward that his spine audibly cracked. “A hospital? Or maybe a spa?”

  Willa said, “I thought she was a lifeguard.”

  “A lifeguard? I thought the man was a guard—but a Nazi or something.” This was Rashid. She looked around to see if she was alone in her interpretation, and she clearly saw the nods of agreement Mark saw. “Didn’t she jump out the window?”

  Isaac said, “She died? I thought she swam away.”

  Jane’s head was bowed, but from ten feet away Mark could feel the red-hotness of the shame reflected from her face.

  Mark said, “Does anyone have a confident sense of the writer’s intention?”

  The Professor said, “Name, role, location. Establish these in the first few lines of your story. And don’t withhold narrative facts. My sense is that this writer wanted the identities of the man and the woman to be mysterious. But I don’t want to get to the end of a story and find out—Oh! She’s his mother! Oh! He’s not a real shrink—he’s a Nazi! I could have known that from the start. Don’t withhold facts to create mystery. That’s manipulation, and readers will sense it. The real mysteries of life are not withheld facts. The real mysteries are simple and persistent questions. Why doesn’t she love me? How could he say that?”

  Mark was desperately scanning the text of Jane’s story for some laudable detail. “The monosyllabic diction is absolutely credible here.” He paused, and Jane did look his way. Her freckles were coming clear as her embarrassment faded. But five of the six window ledges behind her were now occupied. Only the one directly behind Jane was empty. “And the sentences are terrific,” Mark added, “so well made that I think we were all pulled along by the beautiful prose without ever getting anchored in a precise location or situation.”

  The Professor said, “And someone might want to sell this writer a Tab button.”

  “It’s true,” Mark said, “more paragraphs would help here. More paragraphs and shorter paragraphs will reliably serve your story. They are invaluable as a way to identify a new speaker or actor, of course. But paragraphing also highlights sequence for the reader. With each paragraph break, we sense time passing. Paragraphs infuse your fiction with the logic of time.” He could feel the Professor preparing one final, all-out attack on the incomprehensible mess Jane had submitted, so Mark said, “Julio wrote a story,” and flipped to the next page of the packet. After that, he led them through Leo’s entertaining account of a female clerk who opened a revealing computer file—a Microsoft window—and skipped right past the other Mark’s story, silencing any speculation about his absence by simply stating, “Mark is not here, and we won’t talk about him behind his back,” which left time for the story by Max. His story divided the class, as it did Mark and the Professor. Half the class thought Max had written a story about an elderly woman who freed a caged bird in a pet store and opened the window to let it escape. The other half—including Mark—read it as a kind of fable about an ill woman whose son would not help her kill herself. The debate delighted Max, and it delighted the Professor to call Max out—“You are not here, Max.”—every time he so much as smiled or nodded during the controversy.

  By then, nine of the window ledges were occupied. Mark didn’t let himself dwell on that situation. He stood up. “For Monday, our order of events is Penelope, Rashid, Virginia, and Willa.”

  “What about Anton? Why did you leave him out?” This was Jane. Her tone made it clear she wanted some revenge for her miserable workshop. “He is in the class, isn’t he?”

  “I can save us some time,” Anton said. “No names—check. No roles—check. No location—check. No paragraphs—check. Good workshop, guys. Thanks.”

  “Oh, Anton, you won’t get off that easy.” Mark stood up and passed around copies of Anton’s story.

  Before the pile was halfway around the table, the Professor said, “You’re going to want to take notes.” He was standing, staring down at the top sheet of the pile of assignments Mark had prepared, but he didn’t pass around the printed copies of Technical Exercise 2. He claimed that the act of writing more immediately engaged the students’ imaginations, that by taking notes they received the scenario as writers, not readers. Of course, it was Mark who would receive four or five emails asking for clarification later in the week.

  “Here we go,” said the Professor. “The challenge is to write a two-part story.”

  Scenario

  Part I.

  There are two people, a driver and a passenger, in a car moving along a dark road. It is very late at night or very early in the morning. The two people know each other rather well. They might be friends, blood relatives, romantic partners, or work colleagues.

  The car hits something, and both people realize that the car hit a human being and that the victim is dead.

  The driver slows or stops the car.

  The passenger persuades the driver not to get out of the car and to drive away from the scene of the accident.

  Part II.

  Part II begins at least a week after the accident, but several months may have passed since that night. Let the reader know how much time has passed.

  The two people are together. Maybe they are still in a relationship, or maybe they are not. You have to establish where
they are and why they are there.

  Something happens—this might be as apparently insignificant as a gesture, a sound, or a spoken phrase, or it might be a more dramatic event—that reminds both of them of the accident.

  Write the story. Assume your readers know nothing about the characters or their situation when you begin.

  Limits

  1.No more than 250 words.

  2.Part I must be at least 125 words long. Along with your name, please include the word counts for both parts I and II on your story.

  3.Use first-person narration. Both parts of the story must be told by the same character, either the driver or the passenger.

  4.The narrator must use present-tense verbs to tell both parts of the story.

  Here, the Professor paused. “Questions?”

  The room exploded, but Max yelled the loudest. “Each part is 250 words or the whole story?”

  Mark said, “The whole story.”

  Max persisted. “But the assignment is more than 250 words.”

  The Professor said, “The boy can count.”

  Rashid asked for quiet, which worked. “Does the person have to die—and do both people in the car know for sure the person is dead before they leave?”

  Someone else asked if both parts had to be told by the same narrator.

  “Yes, and Yes,” the Professor said.

  Mark said, “And bear in mind that hitting a person by accident is not a crime. Leaving the scene—that is the moment that turns an accident into a crime. So this is a story about persuasion.”

  “Which is to say, this is the illumination of a relationship,” the Professor added. “Why is one person susceptible to the suggestion or insistence of the other person?”

  This silenced everyone for a few seconds.

  “All present-tense verbs?” This was Penelope. She’d somehow managed to scrunch up her face and make it even smaller than normal. “Who is the narrator talking to?”

  “Exactly,” said the Professor.

  Isaac wanted to know if Part I could be more than 125 words.

  “Yes,” said the Professor.

  Then Isaac wanted to know if the characters had to be caught or punished in Part II.

  “No,” said the Professor, unhelpful as ever.

  “Whether they get caught or not is a narrative fact,” Mark said. “That’s not the real mystery. You have to account for at least a week in this story. Whenever you encompass a large amount of time, you are writing about consequences. The mystery you have to address is what happens to the relationship and to these two people over time. Does their crime bind them to each other? Does it force them apart? That is the real story in Part II. That’s what the action should illuminate for readers.”

  “And one more thing,” the Professor said.

  “Here it comes,” Penelope said. “Use only words that begin with the letter Z?”

  “Use only words with twelve consonants,” said Rashid.

  The Professor said, “Part I must be a single, perfect, perfectly grammatical sentence—that is, the sentence must adhere to the conventions of standard English grammar and syntax. And forget about semicolons. They are still banned.”

  All twelve of the heads at the table turned to the front of the room, and all twelve mouths opened. “One sentence?”

  The Professor said, “You didn’t have any questions about syntax when you were asked earlier. Here is your chance to demonstrate your mastery of English grammar.”

  Someone said, “A 125-word sentence?”

  Mark scanned the room. The sun was setting outside. There was a silhouetted figure in each of the twelve windows.

  The Professor said, “A perfect, conventional English sentence. Mind your choice of conjunctions.”

  Mark said, “Due by 8 a.m. on Monday in my email box. On your way out of class, I’ll hand you the responses to your first story, Technical Exercise 1.”

  The Professor said, “And what did he say about extensions?”

  Mark said, “No. Never. None.”

  The Professor said, “Now, collect your comments and go away.”

  And they did—almost. As they grabbed the Professor’s responses to their stories, each one of the students glanced down and stopped somewhere shy of the door. Mark heard whispering from within the traffic jam.

  He typed all his comments? Is all of this about just my story? Jesus, there’s two pages here. Did he put footnotes on yours, too? He wrote more than I did. Whoa, this is serious.

  Mark saw Willa turn his way, but as he stood to talk to her, he realized that she was simply trying to pull her cowboy hat up over her coat collar. And then he waved to acknowledge Rashid’s “Thanks!” but it was actually directed at Julio, who was holding the door for her. Before the rest of the crowd cleared, the Professor was gone, and though Mark expected Anton to hang around for a minute to celebrate the good luck of getting into the class, he had also slipped away.

  He smiled at the empty ledges of the twelve dark windows and said, “Dismissed.”

  3.

  Mark was halfway around the pond when he heard someone shouting his name. He stopped and turned, looking for a familiar face among the students streaming by both ways, and then gave up and headed toward the garage until he heard his name again, and again, and again. Little Red Riding Hood appeared at his side. He recognized her freckled face and her voice, but he could not come up with a name.

  “Are you going back to Hum Hall?” she asked, and she never paused again. “I can walk with you, but I can’t go up to your office right now because I have my Russian Novels class back in that other Forbes room and she’s bound to give us a quiz because at least half the class obviously watched the movie instead of reading Anna Karenina, and now we’re all going to pay for that, but what I wanted to say is what if the man in my story is not just one or the other but both—he’s got, like, an official role as the woman’s guard or keeper or something, and he knows she needs to be guarded, you know, protected from herself, but he also cares for her, wants to help her, maybe do something he can’t do in his official role, or maybe even shouldn’t, but does?”

  Mark could recall every word of her story, and almost every word that had been said about it during her harsh workshop, but he could not remember her name. Her getup didn’t help. She was short, so the red-wool hood hid most of her face. He stopped at the front door of Hum Hall. “You’re asking a really profound question. The thing is, on Monday, we’re going to talk about this very challenge—how to balance disclosure and suggestion.”

  She nodded, but that last bit had clearly flown right over her hood.

  Mark tried again. “I think what people were trying to say in your workshop is that they don’t want to be surprised and feel like fools.”

  “No twist endings,” she said.

  “Yes—and no. We do want to know something more, something new by the story’s end. But we want to feel it is an illumination of what we were shown earlier but did not clearly or fully understand when we saw it. Don’t aim for shock alone. We want to aim for the shock of recognition.”

  “So, it can work?” She pushed back her hood.

  Alice? Katy? Olivia? Mark gave up. “It can work.”

  “So I don’t have to entirely change my story? I promise you, he’s not a Nazi.”

  “That’s a relief,” Mark said. The Common was almost empty. “Don’t be late for the Russians.”

  “Oh, thanks for that.” She pulled up her hood. “And thanks for this. Thanks for everything.” As she sped away, she yelled, “Thanks again!”

  Mark hurried upstairs, stuck the key in his office door, and only then realized he had no reason to be in Hum Hall. He would have walked away, but from inside, someone yelled, “It’s open. Come in.”

  Karen Cole swiveled around in her plastic chair and waved. “I can leave if you’re meeting with students.”

  “Hello, Karen.” She was wearing jeans and a white angora sweater, her uniform. “Aren’t your classes Tuesd
ay/Thursday?”

  She shoved a few folders to the center of her little white desk. “Meeting.”

  “Don’t move. I’m meeting no one.” Mark dropped his bag on his desk. “How’s the semester so far?”

  “The poetry class is fine. The translation seminar is a joke. I have eight students who can barely read Italian, and I have one of those so-what-you’re-saying-is idiots who turn up every time I try to teach translation. You know, he keeps retranslating everything I translate into a complete mistranslation of whatever it was we’re working on. Sorry, I have to take this.” She zipped out of the office with her phone at her ear.

  Mark pulled out the packet of stories and found Red Riding Hood’s. Jane, for god’s sake. Jane. Jane. Jane. Still, he knew it wouldn’t stick. He pulled a pen from his bag, crossed out her typed name, and printed Jane Austen. That he might remember.

  And then Anton walked in, panting. “I’m so out of shape. And I used to run cross-country. Is she in our class?”

  Mark said, “Who?”

  Anton said, “With the fuzzy white sweater.”

  “Her name is Karen Cole,” Mark said. “She’s teaches Italian.”

  “Am I in our class?” Anton heaved out a couple of big breaths, and then patted the front of his jeans, slapped at his chest, and finally located his phone in a back pocket. “When I checked StudentServe after class, it said I was registered. See?” He held the screen toward Mark, as if it were a passport.

  Mark nodded at the illegible lines of blurry type. But what he saw clearly was Anton’s uncertainty, as if he suspected that his credentials might not get him across the border.

  “I read all the typed notes on my first story,” Anton said, and then he paused. “I got a lot of notes,” he added. “So I guess I thought I should double-check with you, not just about being officially registered but about what you really think about me being in there.”

  Mark didn’t say anything. Anton wasn’t really talking to Mark. He was talking to himself. This Anton bore little resemblance to the poised, confident Anton that Mark had invented for his hit-and-run story. This Anton actually reminded Mark of Jane, both of them confounded by the gap between what they meant when they wrote their stories and what those stories meant to everyone who read them. Anton had found himself at an uncomfortable distance from his familiar idea of himself.