Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  “But do you think the kid sounds too—something?” Willa asked.

  “I think maybe her speech is too poignant occasionally,” Mark said.

  The Professor said, “Does she have to be so responsive to questions from the adults? One of the challenges of writing dialogue for children is avoiding sentimentality, and one of the most provocative characteristics of children is their propensity for not behaving predictably or even sensibly. I’m actually a fan of a lot of the choices Willa makes, but I think that kid can be more provocative for readers, so we are made more aware of how odd the seller is.”

  Mark said, “I think you intend for us to see that the seller is reserved and almost emotionally comatose. Is that right?”

  “Exactly,” Willa said. “I have to work on the little girl.”

  Jane said, “I didn’t get that at all. To me, the seller just seemed calm and controlled.”

  “She’s pale, and she keeps trying to ignore that little girl, though,” Leo said, “like she can’t tolerate seeing a child that isn’t her own.”

  “I don’t see that,” Jane said.

  Virginia thought Leo’s was the most successful story. “You don’t really know a child died, but the yard sale seems so real,” she said.

  “The sense of place is also lovely in Leo’s,” Mark said, “and those circling clouds that the seller worries might bring a hurricane or some other disaster—that’s terrific work.”

  The Professor said, “I could do without that empty picture frame.”

  “Hint, hint,” Leo said. “It’s gone.”

  Julio said, “What about the sticker with the kid’s name on—”

  “Gone,” Leo said.

  Penelope thought Julio and Anton did the best job of making the buyer the central character. “Each of them has a genuine reason for being there—not just for shopping, but for shopping for something inexpensive.”

  Rashid agreed, and she wondered if Anton had considered giving his buyer a son instead of a nephew, to simplify the suggestive connection to the seller. And so it went for another half hour. Only the windowsills behind Jane and Charles remained unoccupied. Their stories had been largely ignored. Mark had scribbled down a couple of things to ask about each, but the Professor suddenly asked everyone to pass the annotated drafts back to the writers.

  Penelope said, “Could we maybe spend just the last few minutes talking about our original stories? They are due at the next class meeting.”

  Anton said, “That’s Wednesday, not Monday, right?”

  The Professor said, “What is there to say? Don’t start your story with an alarm clock waking the central character. If you think you have a tremendous, devilishly surprising twist ending—make that revelation the first sentence of your story.”

  As it became clear that he wasn’t going to leave it at that, the students dutifully took notes as he rattled off an endless assortment of proscriptions—no stories set on Venus; no stories miraculously narrated by pets; beware the wizened elder and the crazy but prophetic homeless person on the subway; and did he already say no zombies?

  Mark could tell that he was just getting warmed up. He saw that Charles was not taking notes, and Jane was taking offense at almost every newly banned story element. Isaac was also looking a little dazed. And though the Professor had decided at the end of last semester that they should not continue to offer students the option of writing a longer Technical Exercise in lieu of the first original story, Mark now regretted his capitulation. Even if they chose not to write it, the elaborate scenario for that optional Technical Exercise gave students a practical way to understand the advice about starting a story in medias res and developing a suggestive subplot. But there was too little time today to rectify that error.

  The Professor paused to let students catch up with him.

  Mark jumped into the void. “Or,” he said, and then stopped right there for a few seconds.

  Penelope said, “Or?”

  Anton said, “Or what?”

  Mark said, “Or, one week from today, you should arrive with thirteen copies of five hundred words of engaging, original, pitch-perfect, chosen prose about a wise old homeless woman who lives with her piano-playing cat on Neptune and wakes to an alarm clock ringing in the dawn of a new day. Go away now, and just write something the rest of us need to read.”

  Had he yelled Fire!, he wouldn’t have cleared the room as quickly.

  FIVE

  1.

  Before he left the classroom on Wednesday, Mark got an email with a last-minute invite to a poetry slam from two students in last fall’s class, and he replied with regrets and an excuse about another commitment, a lie he regretted before he was halfway across campus. Near Hum Hall, he crossed paths with Althea Morgan and Rita Jebdi, who asked him to join them for a drink at a new tapas bar in town, which assuaged his guilt about lying to the former students, even though he dodged the drink with a mention of the poetry slam and a quick glance at his watch. Was this bad behavior? Did his high hopes for getting a lot done over the long holiday weekend count as a reasonable excuse? Should he have accepted one or the other of the invitations?

  These were the sort of questions that would plague Mark. For Paul, they were softballs, which he would answer happily and definitively, reliably hitting them out of the park. Student-poetry slam? No—devote some time to your own work. Drinks? No—two beers and you’ll end up as chair of the department next year. No, no—no to both, but maybe we should try that tapas bar some night next week?

  Are you tired? Did you see that article in the Times? Should we do laundry this weekend? There was a limit to how long Mark felt like Mark without answering and asking such questions. Paul’s five-month stint away was too long, and the resumption of email and telephone contact, which still hadn’t happened, wouldn’t rectify the situation, and neither would a week together in Rome during spring break, which did not seem more plausible the longer Mark was without an airline reservation and Paul was just about everywhere in Europe but in Rome. Paul hadn’t slipped away just yet, and neither had he, but Mark recognized the early warning signs—his fading interest in social life, the instinct to elude prolonged exposure to other people. Only twelve human beings were exempt from his antisocial impulse. Mark didn’t understand why he would have happily spent an hour talking about a revision or a few draft pages with Max or Dorothy or even Jane before he left campus, but he was not so far gone—not yet—that he felt he could say this to Althea and Rita, or to the friends whose emailed invitations to dinners, lectures, and movies he had turned down.

  Despite his resolve to get started immediately on his own work in Ipswich, Mark headed to Cambridge, hoping that an overnight infusion of Paulness might set him back to rights. This seemed like a perfect plan until he met Dennis in the hallway outside Paul’s apartment and neither of them could hear what the other was saying. Something loud was going on in the building, and though Mark didn’t expect they’d find it any quieter in Paul’s place, he led the way to the kitchen table because Dennis was barefoot, wearing only shiny blue sweatpants and no shirt, and Mark’s initial concern that someone passing by would mistake their meeting for a romantic rendezvous was getting mixed up with the noise and turning into something that felt suspiciously like hope.

  Seated across from each other at the table, it was possible to shout and be heard. Dennis was having all of the floors in his vast home refinished “for the baby,” or maybe he’d said, “before D-Day.” His wife was staying with her mother through the weekend. Dennis had found a crew of guys from Vietnam who were willing to work at night, so he’d booked a room at the Charles Hotel, and why didn’t Mark have dinner with him there? Or Mark could stay there, too, and they could get those guys to refinish all of Paul’s floors as a surprise.

  The screeching and whirring suddenly stopped.

  “Smoke break,” Dennis said. “Another reason to trust those guys. They’re up on the roof more than I am. They’re doing all the floors in Allen’s plac
e next door, too. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I have a sense he might be thinking about selling. This is your chance.”

  Mark didn’t ask, For what? Like many of their friends and acquaintances, Dennis really believed that living together in one place was a practical dilemma Mark and Paul had been unable to resolve for thirty years. Dennis assured Mark that the connecting wall with Allen’s apartment was not structural, and if Mark moved in with Paul—Allen had a corner unit—it would always just be the four of them on the top floor, forever.

  Mark said, “Well, five, right?”

  Dennis said, “You’re counting the baby?”

  Mark stood up. “I’m on my way to Ipswich.”

  Dennis said, “Have you been to that new Mexican place in the Square?”

  Mark walked to the refrigerator and poked his head inside for a minute. “You don’t want an old pork tenderloin, do you? Or a shirt?” Dennis was distractingly handsome, and disarmingly indiscriminate. Mark wanted him to leave now, not to eliminate the temptation he represented but to spare Mark the disappointment he knew he would feel if he admitted to Dennis and himself that he was never going to take off his shirt. He didn’t consider it a virtue, his monogamy, and he sometimes envied and even admired adults who could manage multiple intimacies. But whenever he stumbled into the opening passage of a little love affair or a sex scene, he saw the end of the story, saw himself more dazed than delighted, more alone than he could tolerate. This was just another of his limits.

  “Couldn’t you go for some nachos? I’ve also been craving tacos—you know, the old-fashioned crispy-shell ones? One of us should have married a Mexican.” Dennis leaned way back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a while, maybe to show off his torso, maybe to think through the logistics of acquiring a young bride from south of the border. “I have to admit I don’t like frozen margaritas. I don’t get the whole crushed-ice thing. It’s hard to beat straight-up tequila.”

  One aspect of casual sex Mark didn’t miss was this sort of conversation after the fact, when it became clear whom the other guy thought he was with.

  A door slammed above them. “Their break’s over already?” Dennis stood up. “I should’ve jumped into the shower while they were gone.”

  Now, though, he’d have an audience.

  Dennis paused at the front door. “You will mention the place next door to Paul?”

  “I will,” Mark said. And it occurred to him that maybe he’d overestimated his own role in Dennis’s story, that all Dennis ever wanted from him was casual conversation. “Thanks for thinking of him.”

  “I was thinking of all of us.”

  “All five,” Mark said, but it was lost to the screeching of the sanders.

  Mark cleared out the refrigerator and made a couple of round trips through Paul’s place. The floorboards in the hall and near the windows were dinged up and dull. He checked the closets for no good reason, though he did snag another one of Paul’s ancient flannel shirts and stuffed it into his bag. He knew if he circled around the rooms a few more times he would spend the next week on his knees with a rented sander and two gallons of polyurethane, so he shut off the lights.

  While he let the Saab warm up, he checked his phone. He already had four revisions from students to add to the pile he’d accumulated this week, and Sharon had blind-copied him into an email she’d written to Paul’s colleagues in Boston about her first few days with the refugees on Lesbos and news that Paul’s boat would finally be docking next Wednesday or Thursday, and she hoped they could meet before she flew home. When he got to Ipswich, Mark found a postcard from his great friend Rachel Reed. She had retired from McClintock College last summer, and she was visiting a new grandson in Denver. Rachel detailed all of the delights of her son, the new grandkid, the Rockies in distance, and then wrote, “All of this, all of this, and still I miss the teaching. What is the matter with me? And who else could I tell?” This made Mark wish she were in town. Rachel was one of the only people who would have understood that he wanted to have dinner with her and wasn’t going to.

  Before he went to bed on Wednesday night, Mark had two more revisions of Technical Exercises, a draft of a second, even longer op-ed from the Professor, along with the looming threat of those sixty-five pages of his novel, and more student revisions surely on the way over the long weekend, and what with seven days of alternating sleet and snow and pounding rain, and the old pork loin, which didn’t smell deadly and tasted just fine swimming in lemon and capers and cream, Mark didn’t leave the house for a week, and just about an hour before he packed up his bag late on Wednesday morning, a long-threatened blizzard had clobbered Cape Cod and then unexpectedly veered due east out over the Atlantic, so it was clear sailing all the way to campus.

  2.

  Dorothy, Jane, Julio, Rashid, and Willa were lined up in alphabetical order beside Mark’s office when he arrived just before one o’clock. As he unlocked his door, Mark said, “Where’s everybody else?”

  “Actually, Max and Anton were here a minute ago,” Dorothy said.

  “Not before me,” Jane said.

  “Wasn’t Willa here first?” Rashid said.

  The brim of Willa’s cowboy hat was tipped up. She was studying something on the ceiling.

  Julio waved his hand, and everyone turned to see Leo at the top of the staircase, heading their way with a little terrier on a leash. Julio yelled, “Take a ticket,” leaned back in his puffy parka, and slid down the wall to sit. One of his ears was plugged into something amusing.

  “Oh, great,” Dorothy said. “The stress pets are back.”

  “For midterms,” said Rashid.

  “I feel calmer already,” Leo said. “He’s Welsh.”

  “I did make an appointment,” Jane said.

  She did—for one forty-five, but Mark knew saying so would only give the others another reason to consign her to the doghouse. “Three things,” he said.

  Julio said, “What’s his name?”

  Dorothy said, “Yappy.”

  Leo said, “Punter.”

  Dorothy said, “Fleabag.”

  Mark swung open the door and let it bang against the wall, which drew everyone’s attention, including the dog’s. “For starters, I have comments on revisions for Dorothy, Julio, Rashid, Leo, and Willa, which you can read while you wait, or you can take them away and we’ll talk after class about any questions or confusions you want to clear up. If Max and Anton show up again, someone can tell them to knock and pick up their comments, as well. Second, might someone want to leave and come back at, say, one forty-five or two?” He dropped his bag to the floor and pulled out a folder.

  The dog yapped.

  “If it makes such a big difference,” Jane said, buttoning her cape, avoiding Mark’s gaze, “I can come back.”

  “Perfect. Thanks, Jane.”

  Julio said, “You said there were three things.”

  Mark said, “Thirdly, Leo—No.”

  “Just for today?”

  Mark said, “Not a chance.”

  Leo knelt beside Punter and pulled him against his thigh, as if the dog were under assault. “He’s sensitive to rejection.”

  “I checked,” Mark said. “He never registered for the course.” He pulled Leo’s revisions from his folder. “The new version of the hit-and-run is really effective. Well done. Now, take these notes and find some place to ditch the dog before class.”

  While Mark was shuffling through his pile and doling out his comments on the revisions, Max returned. “Are you having a yard sale?”

  “You are, finally, in this new draft.” Mark handed Max two pages. “At last, we see the money change hands in this revision. We can talk later or after class.”

  “Okay, but just one thing—cradling the clarinet?” Max smiled. “Too much?”

  Mark said, “I like that verb for the story, but I’m not sure how one cradles a skinny woodwind.”

  “Agreed,” said Max. “I’ll catch you later.”

  Do
rothy and Rashid wandered down the hall, shoulder to shoulder, reading their comments, trailed by Leo and his foster dog.

  Willa hadn’t moved. Staring up at an acoustic tile, she said, “Go ahead, Julio. I’d rather wait a few minutes.”

  Julio stood up. “I could come back. I didn’t eat lunch yet.”

  Willa didn’t say anything.

  Mark nodded, and Julio followed him into the office, closed the door, and sat down.

  Julio whispered, “Is she all right?”

  “She has an exam coming up,” Mark said, which would surely be true eventually, though it didn’t account for her indoor stargazing.

  “I can relate,” Julio said.

  “I can’t save you from Statistics, and I’m not serving hot lunch,” Mark said, “so what can I do for you?”

  “Guarantee I’m getting at least a B+ in this class?”

  “If you keep submitting drafts on time of the same quality, and eventually revise at least one of the Technical Exercises and both short stories,” Mark said, as he paged through his grade book, “I don’t see why you wouldn’t be on target for a C.”

  “I’m a senior.” This wasn’t a complaint. It was more of a gentle reminder.

  Mark said, “Congratulations.”

  Julio said, “Would you mind checking that grade again? My phone has a calculator, if you want to borrow it.”

  “It’s pretty simple math,” Mark said. “Thirteen multisyllabic words on the first Technical Exercise—”

  “Okay, but that won’t count,” Julio said, suddenly very upright in the chair. “I’m not revising that one for the portfolio.”

  “Unless I missed it here,” Mark said, squinting at his page of notes, “I don’t see any revision of the hit-and-run story. That’s the one in which you wrote that fantastically long comma splice.”

  “I get it. Conjunctions,” he said, and then added, “I’ve been using tons of them lately. And everybody loved my tag sale. That should bring me up to around a B, I think.”