Leo said, “Antonioni.”
Mark nodded. “We should head to class. And you have my permission to stay after for as long as you need.”
Leo pulled a square of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it. “If you don’t mind signing, so I have official permission to go into other classrooms? It’s about promising not to destroy college property, but I’m just taking pictures. I need a faculty sponsor. I won’t hurt anything.”
“I’m happy to vouch for you, Leo.” Mark quickly read the form, or as much of it as anyone who wasn’t a lawyer could bother to read. “Did you not want to ask your photography professor to sign this?”
“She can’t. She’s part-time, so they don’t trust her, I guess.”
Mark said, “Adjunct.”
Leo said, “I might want to shoot our classroom again if we get a sunny day.”
“Also fine.”
Leo was packed up, with his equipment re-slung and his phone in hand before Mark found his coat on the back of his chair.
2.
Leo took the only empty seat at the far end of the table. Mark unpacked his bag. In the four minutes before the start of class, almost everyone was rating spring break destinations—Cabo, Cozumel, South Beach, and St. Croix were the popular favorites. The other-Mark stolen-car controversy had either been resolved or forgotten, or maybe it had only momentarily sunk below the surface of campus life, roiling away and ready to explode again at any moment.
With a couple of minutes yet to tick away, Mark pulled out the final registration sheet he’d printed from StudentServe. He was looking for Isaac, but before he found him, his gaze landed on a photo of Charles. Charles? For a panicky moment, Mark couldn’t recall anything about Charles. The picture—taken when he was a freshman—showed a sullen, big-shouldered boy, with a smooth, long hank of hair carefully arranged to cover most of the left side of his face. No one at the table even vaguely resembled the photo. In truth, all twelve first-year photos of these seniors were so useless that they might have been supplied by the Witness Protection Program.
“Did Dorothy tell you I want to meet with you after class today?” This had to be Isaac, helpfully wearing his Maple Leafs jersey, as usual. He was nearest to Mark’s left.
“I’ll stay, and we can talk here. Will that work?”
Isaac nodded and texted something.
It was past three by the time Mark managed to identify Charles. He was two down from Isaac, and deep in private conversation with Rashid, who was wearing a canary-yellow headscarf today. Charles was a rotund guy in a pale blue button-down shirt, several sizes too small for him. He had red hair and an embarrassingly sparse crop of wispy red whiskers that he seemed to believe had cohered into a beard.
Mark said, “What did you make of the hit-and-run stories?”
As phones clicked off, and packets appeared, either Charles or Rashid whispered that they were trans and thought the other one knew that they had just started to transition. Mark looked at Isaac, who had ducked under the table to get his stuff and apparently heard nothing of his neighbors’ conversation. Everyone else at the table seemed equally unaware or uninterested in the gender bulletin.
Anton said, “I thought the grammar was pretty good,” shamelessly aiming for public praise.
“But in Part II—after they leave the scene of the accident?” Penelope brushed her bangs back while she paged through the packet. “Well, I marked most of them as incomplete.”
“Pity parties,” said Max, who had foregone his man bun today, his shiny blond hair falling neatly around the collar of his blousy white shirt, further complicating the gender-identity question. “Even mine,” he added, “now that I see how much it follows the pattern.”
“I agree,” Dorothy said. “There’s a lot of, like, oh, poor us, we killed some guy, and now we have to live with it.”
Leo said, “Penelope’s was the one I endorse. I mean, if your wife is giving birth, that’s a reason to drive away.”
Willa said, “Even if you just killed someone?”
Charles said, “How about Rashid’s, with the driver being drunk? That’s a reason not to dial 9-1-1.”
“Virginia’s is the only one—I think so, anyway—hers is the only story where the car gets damaged,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t think about that till I read hers, but it’s—you know—”
“Physics,” Mark said. “It does apply. Or it ought to. When I was reading the stories this week, I often felt I believed in the world the writer had invented more than the writer did. And on second reading, even though most of you handled the distended syntax of that first sentence well, I thought the logic of the narration was pretty weak, and a lot of the choices the couples made seemed adolescent, not adult.” He sensed from the stiffening faces at the table that his tone was too sharp, tilting toward punitive. He decided to finish the sermon and then woo them back slowly. “The clauses work, by and large, in that long sentence, in a strict grammatical sense, but the narrative sequencing seemed haphazard to me because so often we’re stuck in the mind of the narrator, where anything can happen, where no logic applies. The arena for your stories has to be the world. And in your literal texts, you have to give readers some signposts to highlight sequence and logic.”
“Conjunctions,” the Professor barked. It was his arrival that had altered the mood in the room, and he didn’t seem displeased by the reaction he was getting. “Every word counts. The first Technical Exercise, that monosyllabic story, was not a game or a loosening-up exercise to make you feel good about yourselves. I don’t want you to feel good. I want you to feel anxious and uncertain. I want you to be self-conscious about every choice you make, unnerved every time you have to choose the next word. With the monosyllables, you discovered you have the capacity to choose. Now, use it.”
Someone said, “Or lose it,” someone who hadn’t registered the Professor’s tone of voice.
“Thank you for that, a stellar example of words that were not chosen. And when that variety of language turns up in your narrative prose—as it too often does—it doesn’t register as lived, as particular. It’s automatic writing. You are all quick to point out clichés in each others’ work, but unlike automatic writing, chosen clichés are useful and often illuminating. I mean, the first time I went to Paris, I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. And I did. And I took a picture of it. A cliché, of course, and something that made me see precisely what I did not want to believe about myself—that I was not the singular, sophisticated adventurer I liked to think I was but one in a long line of tourists, indulging an impulse that marked me as not French, not cool, not who I thought I was, not the young man I wanted others to see. It’s not always the original, unheard of, alarming detail that matters most, but the well-chosen one. Don’t choose to surprise me. Choose to illuminate me. That’s the power you have as writers. And with the power of choice comes the responsibility for wielding it.”
The Professor was roaming around the room now, and Mark wasn’t sure where he was headed.
“Someone died in each of the stories you wrote this week. A human being. You orchestrated the killing, and you plotted the escape of the perpetrators. That is on you. It’s not enough to say it happens all the time. It’s not enough simply to assert that the hateful and irresponsible action taken by your characters reflects the morals of those two people in the car, and then leave it at that. No more than it is enough to script your characters to spew hate speech or other stupidities and pretend you didn’t write it, that you would never say such things when you clearly do—in fact, you did in many of the stories we’re reviewing today. You required your characters to utter those vulgarities for you.”
Mark thought it might be time to step back in, but the Professor was not done.
“You are the writer. Every time you write a story, I want you to know that you have access to every word in the language, as vulgar or inane as it might be. Never tolerate censorship. And don’t cater to the tastes, or preferences, or PTSD of your reader. Choo
se any word, any action that serves your story. But know this—every choice you make redounds to you. I will always know you chose those words. You wanted me to read them. This week, each of you was responsible—not for murder, not as far as I know—but for illuminating for readers the consequences of reckless behavior. Instead, too often we get an accidental death, an immoral choice to flee the scene, and almost nothing by way of illumination. Figure this out. I have plenty of demands on my time. Why should I set aside those demands and read your story instead of reading about a hit-and-run in the newspaper? What makes your story necessary, new, unsettling? What about your story will alter the way an adult thinks or acts? Why else are you writing these things down?”
The room was eerily quiet. Every window ledge was unoccupied. Mark said, “Anton wrote a story.”
Anton said, “And, and, and.”
The Professor said, “You are not here, Anton.”
And for a few silent seconds, it seemed that every other person at the table wished to be anywhere but right there. Willa timidly tipped off her cowboy hat and stuck it under her chair. Dorothy pried the staple out of the corner of her packet of today’s stories. Jane and Penelope exchanged confounded glances across the table. The Professor repeatedly and rather too obviously glanced at Mark’s watch, so Mark took it off his wrist and set it on the table.
“For the first five or six lines—” Rashid paused and pointed her pen at her copy of Anton’s story. “Well, in the first three lines, actually, I like—I mean, I endorse the repeating and in the writer’s long sentence. I felt it created a sense of carelessness, as if the driver wasn’t paying attention—to what he was saying, where he was going, anything.”
Leo said, “He sounded like a teenager, just babbling on for the sake of it. That makes sense of the crash.”
“Until the crash,” Rashid added. “After that, the ands started to seem—”
Max said, “More written than lived.”
“I thought the narrator—do we ever learn his name?—I thought he was older, not a teenager,” Dorothy said, still plying that staple. “In Part II, doesn’t the couple live together?”
Anton was furiously taking notes, shadowed by Anton in the window directly behind him.
“I think they were at a motel in Part II, hiding out. The two double beds? They had been there before, before the story began—having an affair.” Jane read a few lines of the story aloud to prove her point. “See, they go back to the motel after the accident and then are afraid to leave.”
“I think Jane is right—on intent, I mean.” Willa was rereading Anton’s text as she spoke. “What doesn’t make sense is that they must have been hiding out for a whole week. In Part I, we’re led to believe the lovers have families. Do they really just ditch their lives?”
Isaac said, “It is a good reason for leaving the scene, though.”
The Professor said, “A good reason?”
Isaac said, “A bad reason?”
Jane said, “Isaac means the affair is an explanation, if not an excuse for not wanting to be caught.”
“Exactly,” Isaac said.
“Couldn’t have said it better himself,” Max said.
Jane blushed, blotting out her freckles. Isaac didn’t seem to register that the joke was on him.
A few of the windowsills were occupied, and the mood in the room had just started to tilt back toward normal when the Professor said, “Pass Anton your annotated drafts,” as if giving orders to a bunch of recruits. “I’m giving each writer just five minutes today.”
To counter that command, Mark said, “We are going to be brief in our comments today because on Monday, we’re giving the floor to the writers for at least half an hour.” This was pure improvisation. The Professor was a better drill sergeant and a better sermonizer than Mark, and because he had no interest whatsoever in the students’ lives outside the classroom and rebuffed every attempt Mark made to share any facts about their health or families or personal struggles, the Professor was also a better and a more useful critic of their written work. It wasn’t that the Professor could be objective, or even wanted to be. He was opinionated, provocative, and curious; a reliable, engaged, intelligent, and principled reader; a kind of North Star against which students could reliably gauge their progress on a singular journey. This was all a writer could ask for, and more than most of them would ever get again.
The Professor made writers of them. Over the course of a semester, each of them would write—and deliver on deadline, without fail—four very short stories, two full-length short stories, each one revised many times and often entirely rewritten, none with more than a few unintentional lapses in conventional syntax and grammar. It was an accomplishment most professional writers would envy.
The Professor did make writers of them, and it was impressive to witness this transformation. Mark couldn’t make that happen. But he could do what the Professor would not. He could make room for them, the all of them, in the classroom—even if it wasn’t always as elegant a place as the generous ledge below each of those twelve tall wavy-glassed windows in this beautiful room. Most of them had never written a decent story before they entered the classroom, and most of them might never write one after they left. Mark made room for them so they could see what was happening to them, so they could see themselves as writers, so that this moment in time would be forever fixed in their memories like one of Leo’s snapshots, and they would know they had done something they did not know they could do, been someone they had never imagined they could be, and see that possibility in front of them for the rest of their lives. “So on Monday,” he said, “we’ll start the class with questions from each writer about what was said in workshop today, clear up any confusions, and then we’ll look at strategies for revising, including how to make sense of contrary responses and suggestions from readers.”
“Right now,” the Professor said impatiently, “I want to get through this packet and preserve at least ten minutes to talk through the next Technical Exercise.”
Mark counted eight figures in the windows. “Charles wrote a story,” he said. And, sure enough, under the watchful eye of the Professor, each workshop was cut off at the five-minute limit, and when Willa was gathering up the annotated pages of her story, Mark checked his watch. There were ten minutes of class time left, and only the windowsill behind Isaac was unoccupied. Mark dug out the copies of Technical Exercise 3, but before he could remove the binder clip from the stack, the Professor said, “The challenge for Monday is to use suggestion artfully to reveal the truth that haunts a simple transaction.”
Max said, “Scenario?”
The Professor nodded. “I hope your pens are poised.” He read Mark’s assignment almost word for word.
“There are two principal characters, a seller and a buyer. The setting is the yard outside the home of the seller. The occasion is a yard sale. The buyer and seller have never met before the sale. You can decide whether it was advertising or chance that led the buyer to the sale. Among the items for sale are three that must be identified in the story—a bicycle, some kind of musical instrument or music-playing machine, and a sleeping bag. All three of those items belonged to a child of the seller, and that child died recently—sometime during the last two years. And the buyer must pay for one of those three items. This is the story of a completed transaction. Assume your readers know nothing when you begin. There is no limit to the number of characters or items for sale.”
Dorothy said, “Technical Limits?”
The Professor said, “No more than five hundred words. Use past-tense verbs to tell the story. Use third-person limited narration.”
Several heads popped up. Mark said, “Remember, that’s simpler than it sounds. The goal is to give readers omniscient access solely to the buyer. Readers can know the thoughts, impressions, and motives only of the buyer.”
The Professor said, “By choosing to limit the omniscience to one character, you make her or him the central character. Your story becom
es that character’s story. All characters other than the one to whom we are limited can be understood only by what is apprehensible to the senses.”
Mark said, “Not unlike the way you judge people in movies—by their appearance, facial expressions, actions, and speech. We can’t know their thoughts.”
The Professor said, “You will decide how strictly the narration is limited to the central character. Is every sentence of the story filtered through the mind of the central character—information about the time of day, or the physical setting and weather, for example—or do you want to establish an objective narrative voice to report some of those details? You can use the limited either way. What matters most is that readers are confident they know when to attribute an observation or impression to the character.”
Anton, Isaac, Virginia, and maybe a few others had stopped writing. Mark said, “If you are confused or anxious about using third-person limited, do yourself a favor. Don’t worry about making distinctions between objective and limited narration. In your mind, imagine the whole story is delivered from the point of view of the buyer. Everything readers see and hear is from that person’s perspective.”
The pens were moving again.
The Professor said, “The seller never directly refers to the child, the child’s death, or the accident or illness that caused the child’s death. The seller doesn’t directly reveal anything about the loss or the emotions associated with the loss. However, by the story’s end, readers should be aware of the seller’s loss.”
Max said, “What about the buyer? Does he know?”
Willa said, “Or she.”
Someone said, “Or they.”
The Professor ignored the pronoun controversy. “The buyer might understand as much as readers do by the end, or the buyer might remain unaware of the tragedy. That is your decision.”
Mark said, “The real work of this story is to use suggestion, not hints and clues, and to use it artfully. The goal is to give readers the opportunity to appreciate the full significance of this sale indirectly, gradually. And I want you to know from the start, there is no formula or rule for achieving the perfect degree of suggestion.”
Still in Love Page 10
