Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  “You would get along with my grandmother,” Rashid said. “She says bad cooks like to use every spice in Bombay. Could I show you something I’ve been working on?”

  So, maybe she was Hindu? “Please,” Mark said.

  Rashid handed him two typed pages. “I’ve been thinking about currencies and transactions a lot. I hope it’s okay, but I’ve used your scenario as the basis—the history, really—for what’s there.”

  “I think all stories are retold stories,” Mark said. “Do you have a sense of how long your story ought to be when it’s done?”

  “I’ve set a limit of two thousand words,” Rashid said. “I think you have almost five hundred words there. It’s in third-person omniscient—I hope. Past tense. It takes place in Dallas, but I haven’t figured out yet how to get that into the opening lines without it sounding like an announcement.”

  It was a superb start, and though it was really unclear how she was going to bring it to completion in fewer than five thousand words, the prose was almost flawless. What Mark understood so far was that the central character was a married woman—Chandi—whose child had fallen to his death during an elementary school field trip. In the immediate aftermath, Chandi had been unnerved and appalled by the words and behavior of the mothers of her child’s classmates when they came by to offer consolation in the form of coffee cakes and casseroles. These mothers and their baked goods had appeared in Rashid’s Technical Exercise about the yard sale. But in this expanded version of the story, Chandi had purchased a large freezer chest to preserve all of that food, which she was preparing to dole out to those same mothers when the ideal—preferably awful—occasions arose.

  “It’s sublime,” Mark said, “and hauntingly sad. That freezer she keeps opening and closing—it’s as if she’d got her kid’s body in a private morgue in her basement.”

  Rashid looked delighted. “I don’t know yet if her husband even knows it’s there. And Chandi might—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Mark said. “I want to read it.”

  Rashid nodded and stood. “We’re only allowed to bring in the first five hundred words for next week?”

  Mark said, “The goal is to keep it short for those initial workshops so we can give everyone a sense of what we see in their opening sequences—what’s at stake, where we sense each story is going, and what opportunities we’re hoping will be explored.” As she opened the door to leave, Mark said, “If you named the elementary school—Dallas Central, for example—wouldn’t that be a simple way to get readers located geographically? And it’s organic, as the school figures in the text already.”

  Rashid leaned into the threshold, and then turned back to Mark. “Whole Foods, organic aisle,” she said, and then she disappeared.

  Mark leaned back in his chair. All this, all this, and still half an hour till class time.

  The students didn’t yet know what was happening, but several of them had sensed it, the turning of the great tide, the receding of their expectations for the semester, the ebbing of the familiar. Some of them had already begun to venture offshore, diving and bobbing in the deep, cold, roiling waters, stirring up something new, something fresh, something original that they were eager to bring ashore. There were still a few feet of beach to be uncovered as the semester ebbed toward its midpoint, and a couple of the students were still splashing in the warm, shallow tidal pools of the familiar that would be the last to drain away. But even they would eventually surrender to the incoming tide, or they’d be knocked over by a big, fresh wave and get dragged into the depths along with everyone else. It was not always gratifying, and it was rarely accomplished without some trauma or tantrums, but it was inevitable. All that varied year to year was the tidal range, the distance between what had to be drained away, let go, and the quantity and force of what rolled in. And it was inevitable that soon Mark would not be leading them but standing back, receiving what they discovered on each foray into the open ocean, retreating farther and farther with each new advancing rush, ceding more and more territory, sometimes running to a height of land just to keep from being swamped until he was so far away that the offshore swimmers lost sight of him entirely.

  Mark might have imagined his way right through class, if not the rest of the semester, but someone was singing, someone who could really sing.

  2.

  As Mark walked out into the hallway, so did two other people he didn’t recognize. Adjuncts? Max was still perched on the recycling bin, still plugged in to something—presumably, some musical accompaniment. His head flitted back and forth a few times, and then he pulled out his plugs and waved both hands apologetically at the two scowling adjuncts, who retreated to their subleased offices and slammed the doors.

  Mark said, “Have you been waiting all this time to see me?”

  Max didn’t move. “Yes and no.”

  “Was that really you singing?”

  Max said, “It was Top.”

  Mark didn’t say anything.

  Max said, “Baritone in The Tender Land.”

  Mark said, “Copland?”

  Max smiled. “Aaron Copland. I can come back some other day.”

  Mark said, “I’m good now. Or you could just come in and sing for a while.”

  Max stood up, took a big breath, and in a deep, booming baritone that made his little cockscomb flutter, he sang, “If it’s stories you want, I know a few myself,” and then tipped the recycling bin right-side up and followed Mark into his office.

  Max got himself seated in the Lotus Position in the alumni chair. He looked about ten years old.

  Mark said, “You have an astonishing voice, Max. Was that line you sang about stories Top?”

  Max nodded. “Might be my favorite role—well, not including Figaro.” He let out a long, slow breath, and flexed his spine. “And I just now heard I didn’t get the part. The Music Department is doing a big production with the Conservatory in Boston. Even the guy who got the part knows he can’t really do it, but that’s show biz—one of those clichés you love so much.”

  “Still, a disappointment,” Mark said.

  “Or just sour grapes,” Max said, briefly delighted to have come up with another cliché. And then his demeanor darkened. “Really, the guy who got it is a tenor. His pitch drops right out on half of Top’s best stuff. But he’s six-something, and I’m five two with two pairs of socks on, and please don’t tell me I can become a voice teacher or the choral director at a summer camp or try out for community-theater musicals or give piano lessons in my spare time.”

  Mark said, “Agreed.” Max was handsome, sophisticated, quick-witted, gifted with a beautiful voice, and smaller than most men. It was no use pretending it wasn’t true or that it was a riddle Mark or anyone else could solve for him. “Did you want to talk to me about something else?”

  “Well, I just now started my first story.” Max strummed his cockscomb. “It’s autobiographical. It’s called, ‘The Little Engine That Couldn’t.’” He lifted his gaze and stared out the window.

  Mark said, “I’d rather read a story about the other guy, the tenor who got the part.” He waited until Max looked his way. “‘The Big Engine That Shouldn’t.’”

  Max nodded and nodded, and finally grinned. He was giggling when he said, “‘Can You Top This?’” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded-up page. “So, I’ve been revising the second Technical Exercise for a while now, the hit-and-run and the 125-word sentence?”

  His was memorable. “With the two brothers in the car?”

  “And the terrible stuff in the bar in Part II, with them feeling sorry for themselves, which is all gone now.”

  “Good thinking,” Mark said. “Am I allowed to read it?”

  Max handed over the page. “Can I ask you a personal question first?”

  “You can ask,” Mark said.

  Max pulled the rubber band from his hair and brushed the whole mess back with both hands. “When you write, do you really think about limi
ts and trying to love them?”

  “I really do.” It was true. “If I’m not assigned a word limit for a column or an essay, I invent one. When I’m, say, writing a novel, I set a word limit for each chapter so I have a clear sense of how much space and time there is for me to get done what needs to get done. Why, Max? Does it seem somehow false to you?”

  “No. It did, at first. I thought it was a trick or—you know, just a puzzle for us to work on. But what you said about art being cognate with artifice and artificial, well, that’s gone a long way with me. Because it’s one thing to accept the limits that are imposed on you, or even the limits you invent yourself, but it really is something else again to love them.”

  It was not clear if he was talking about his story or his life, whether he was thinking about Technical Limits—word count, verb tense, point of view—or lived limits—his limited height, that tall tenor’s limited baritone range.

  “I’m going to read this aloud, and I’ll pause to make a few notes as I do,” Mark said.

  “Could I borrow a pen and some paper, then? I must have left my folder somewhere.” Max unknotted his legs, rested his feet on the front rung of the chair.

  Mark handed him a pad and a pen, and midway through Part II of Max’s story, he stopped. “Oh, Max, this is genuinely elegant. I just understood the syntax. After that long sentence in Part I, where we see the narrator—the older one—persuade his younger brother to drive away from the body in the road, and then see him come to understand what he has done in the silence as they drive home, he loses his nerve, and they don’t speak of it for almost a week, right? That’s why in Part II, he starts so tentatively with, Oh. Don’t go. Not yet, bro. One, two, three words—and each sequential sentence in Part II is one word longer than the last.” Mark read to the end of the story. In the final sentence, the older brother confidently and viciously parodies his younger brother’s threat to go to the police. “That last sentence is what? Twelve or thirteen words long?”

  Max said, “Fifteen. Part II is 120 words total, I think.”

  “That last sentence seems really long after those abbreviated first three or four sentences, so it echoes the long sentence in Part I—not only the tone but the distended syntax. The older brother has found his voice again.”

  Max said, “And his nerve.”

  “It’s a real coup, Max.”

  “What about that rhyme?” Max pointed to something in his notes. “When you were reading aloud, that Don’t go. Not yet, bro. sounded a little cheesy.”

  “I’m not a huge fan of that bro, but I do sort of like the rhyme, the way it alerted me to the staccato rhythm of the syntax. More importantly, you might consider giving the younger brother a more compelling physical presence in Part II so the narration doesn’t register as a soliloquy. Even if the kid sneezed or tied his shoe, it would help establish him as real. And in Part I, you might want to rethink that long clause set off with dashes, which isn’t working as you intended. You want a sense of the car crash intruding into that moment, I think, but the dash actually prepares readers.”

  Max flipped over the notebook page and wrote for a few silent minutes.

  The office door swung open, and in walked Anton. He’d come by with a question, but on the way he’d found a folder in the hall, which Mark told him to hand to Max, who tore off his page of notes and reflexively handed Mark’s notebook to Anton.

  Mark said, “That’s mine. What’s your question?”

  Max said, “It’s almost three.”

  Anton said, “It’s starting to snow again.”

  Mark stood up and said, “And the question is?”

  Max said, “Why didn’t we all go to college in Florida?”

  Anton said, “I thought it was going on two o’clock.”

  Mark hustled the two of them out of his office and watched them amble down the hall, one too short, one too sick. He followed them to the classroom, where he would not heal them or even console them but only close the door, shut out the world in which they found themselves wanting, not to help them escape it but to give them a chance to understand all it meant to have limits, to need limits, to choose our limits, to be defined by those limits, and to learn to love them.

  3.

  The classroom was uncommonly quiet when Mark arrived, and except for a couple of nods and a smile from Penelope, Mark’s unpacking didn’t disrupt the stillness. He took off his watch. He had two minutes to spare. He sat down, which did draw a few expectant glances his way.

  “Oh, hi.” This was Dorothy. “I didn’t hear you come in. I was just reading an email from my adviser telling me my thesis is due the week we come back from spring break.”

  “I got the same email,” Rashid said. “Are you in Comp Lit?”

  “Government,” Dorothy said, and then turned to Mark. “And I have a Statistics midterm in about ten seconds.”

  “I thought that wasn’t till March,” Julio said, scrolling madly on his phone.

  Someone said, “It is almost March.”

  “Everything is happening at once,” Dorothy said.

  Isaac said, “Tell me about it.”

  Jane said, “We’re not allowed to tell anything in here unless we write it down.”

  Max said, “Down is superfluous in that sentence.”

  Charles said, “What is the date today?”

  Mark said, “Right question. I want to start with some scheduling issues, including dates for the story workshops for the rest of the semester, and then I want to add to your woes by reminding you that the first five hundred words of your first original stories are due in class one week from today, and a week or so after that, each of you will have a completed draft of that first story for us to read.” It was surprising, but saying so would make it so. He sent around a two-sided photocopy. “You’re going to take this away, look at your schedules for the rest of the semester, choose a couple of plausible dates for your first story workshop, and then turn over the page and choose a couple of plausible dates for your second story workshop. Next week, we’ll finalize dates for everyone. You get it—this is your chance to avoid having too much due on a single day.”

  Jane said, “What are those dates in parentheses supposed to mean?”

  Penelope said, “That’s when the drafts are due in class.” She held up her photocopy and pointed to a line, which she read: “Thirteen copies are due at the class before the workshop.”

  Jane didn’t look grateful for the clarification.

  Mark said, “That’s to give the rest of us plenty of time to read and think about the drafts before the workshops.”

  Julio said, “So we have to make our own copies from now on?”

  “Unless that’s a financial burden for anyone, who can simply be in touch with me,” Mark said.

  Anton said, “Are we having class on Monday?”

  Leo said, “It’s Presidents’ Day.”

  Anton said, “Which presidents?”

  Dorothy said, “Can we talk about something other than the future?”

  Virginia said, “It says on the syllabus that our class meets Wednesday and Thursday next week.”

  “Not Monday?” Anton again.

  Isaac had rediscovered his copy of the syllabus, and he held it up. “It says here that portfolios are due on the last day of the semester, but do we just drop them off or do we have to stay for a whole class on that day?”

  The Professor had turned up, and Mark was embarrassed to imagine what the melee sounded like to him. “At four thirty today in this very classroom, I am holding a seminar for anyone and everyone who has any question whatsoever about any scheduling concern or any date between now and the end of time,” Mark said. “Presently, what should we say about the yard sale stories?”

  This was met with a host of squints, awkward smiles, and flipping pages. The windowsills were empty. The Professor’s decision to give back the edited, essential texts before today’s brief workshops simply because he’d gotten them done quickly had been a mistak
e. It made the students feel their responses were pointless. But the Professor was content, as usual, to let Mark repair the damage.

  Mark could see that the margins of most pages in the packets around the table were crammed with notes and suggestions, so he let the silence go for almost four minutes, hoping someone would risk a comment, and then he decided to let it go for another sixty seconds.

  “Okay, okay,” Dorothy said. “But why do I always end up talking first?”

  Max said, “You might think that’s a rhetorical question, but there is an answer.”

  Dorothy said, “Anyway,” very slowly. She flipped to a new page in her packet and deliberately pressed down the fold at the top corner with her fist. “I only found two stories that used suggestion really successfully—I mean, I understood a child had died, and the writer didn’t give me any obvious hints.”

  Penelope said, “Well, Rashid’s for sure is one.”

  “Those horrible women with the casseroles,” Dorothy said. “What else is there to say?”

  This got a lot of approving murmurs and nods.

  “And though I hate to admit it,” Dorothy said, “that tire swing that the wind keeps moving in Max’s story—that’s the most memorable image for me in all of the stories.”

  “It’s like a ghost,” Anton said.

  “Haunting,” the Professor said.

  “At the risk of sounding like a toady,” Max said, “I actually think Dorothy is the only one who made sense of the financial transaction. Rashid and I both sort of blew it off. But when the seller takes the bills and just tosses them aside after all that haggling with the buyer, you really feel something hopeless, how empty that currency is for her.”

  Jane said, “But I don’t think you’d know it was a kid who died in Dorothy’s story.”

  Max said, “If she just made that bicycle a tricycle, I think you would.”

  “You’re right,” Dorothy said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Mark looked quickly at Max to prevent another rhetorical response.

  “I loved Willa’s music box,” Penelope said. “And hers was the only story with a child as the buyer, which was genuinely suggestive.”