Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  “This is by way of example, not as a required assignment,” the Professor said. “However, if you are not able to bring your story draft to completion successfully, you may choose to write this 1,500-word Technical Exercise instead.”

  Anton said, “Should we write it down if we know we want to write our own story?”

  Mark nodded. He was as surprised as everyone else that the Professor had decided to offer this option, after all. “I think you’ll see that the details of the assignment will give you a clearer idea about starting in the middle of things, and how to create a rich backstory for your characters without compromising the forward momentum of your narration—”

  “Wait a minute.” This was Leo. “Should we be writing already?”

  Max said, “Wild guess: yes.”

  Charles said, “Could you start again, then?”

  Mark did, and added, “You’ll also see what we mean by using a subplot to comment on the central conflict.”

  Dorothy said, “Scenario?”

  “The central character is Ellen, a twenty-year-old woman who works as a waitress in a diner,” the Professor said. “Ellen did not grow up in the town where she works. She moved from her hometown when she was in high school and became pregnant. Today, for the first time, Ellen leaves her five-year-old child home alone while she goes to work.”

  “Five?” Rashid had done the math. “So she was—”

  “Yes,” the Professor said. “The child instantly and efficiently establishes that history, right? The story must be set in an identifiable time period prior to 1970.”

  “No cell phones,” Leo said.

  “No Roe v. Wade,” Dorothy said.

  Penelope said, “No computers, really. Certainly not home models, right?”

  “No way,” Julio said.

  The Professor said, “The real time of the story is mostly Ellen’s workday—she enters the diner in advance of its 6:00 a.m. opening, and her shift ends at 4:00 p.m. At some point, Ellen must wait on someone, or a group of customers, that she knew before she left her hometown. The story ends as Ellen approaches her home and sees that her front door is open.”

  Charles said, “She can’t go inside?”

  “No.”

  “So her kid is gone?” This was Julio again.

  “Wild guess number two,” said Max. “Readers should know what happened by virtue of what happens up to that moment.”

  Rashid said, “Technical Limits?”

  The Professor said, “No more than 1,500 words. Third-person, limited to Ellen. Past tense. And—”

  “We’re not done?” Virginia was speaking for a lot of the others.

  Somebody thanked god that this was optional and not required.

  “The following suggestive elements must appear in the story,” the Professor said. “First, when Ellen arrives, she sees a dog tied up in front of the diner. The dog is there when she leaves to go home. Second, the front wall of the diner is a transparent, plate-glass window. Third, above the booths at the rear of the diner, the wall is mirrored glass—so Ellen can see what she looks like, often must encounter her own reflection.”

  Max said, “You did say fifteen million words, right? The scenario is at least a thousand.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Willa said, “the dog—why is he there, all alone? will he be all right?—is basically the kid she left at home.”

  “Thus, a subplot,” said Max.

  Mark nodded. “And,” he said.

  “Oh, come on.” Julio dramatically laid down his pen. “There’s more?”

  “Bear in mind,” Mark said, “this is a story about a working woman. The details of her habits, routines, demeanor, and conversation at work have to be convincing and illuminating.”

  Max said, “Action.”

  Rashid said, “Is.”

  Dorothy said, “Character.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Mark said.

  The Professor said, “Now, go away.”

  5.

  Penelope didn’t stand up with the others, and Anton was jiggling nervously near the classroom door. When everyone else was gone, Anton said, “Are you going back to your office, Mark?”

  He wasn’t, but he was now. “I am,” he said.

  “I can wait,” Penelope said.

  “I can’t,” Anton said, and shot out into the hall.

  Mark said, “I got the revisions you sent, Penelope, and I’ll have them done for Monday.”

  “I have classes before and after this one, so I haven’t been able to meet with you sooner, but my physics class isn’t meeting on Monday, so—”

  “So it’s a date,” Mark said. When she smiled, she looked more Asian than Andean, but her voice seemed to be inflected with some other part of the globe Mark could not identify. “Anything you want me to be thinking about besides the revisions and your story draft?”

  “Do you remember Nina? Nina Maranapatha?”

  “That Nina is a good egg,” Mark said. “And a really elegant writer.”

  Penelope nodded enthusiastically. “She’s the one who told me to take this class. We’re doing a joint thesis. You know about crypto-currencies, right?”

  Mark said, “Bitcoin?”

  “Exactly.” Penelope opened the flap of her satchel, held it near the table, and as she swept in her jumble of draft pages and notes she explained that she and Nina were trying to work out adaptive algorithms to resolve stability issues associated with crypto-currency revaluations.

  Mark said. “We’ve just hit the limit of my understanding of crypto-currencies.” In truth, his limit was the word Bitcoin.

  Penelope laughed, and as she headed out the door, she said, “They are sort of like black holes, aren’t they?” Another area of the universe in which Penelope was surely light-years beyond him.

  Anton was waiting for Mark at the entrance to Hum Hall, shiny red car coat in hand. They climbed up to the third floor in silence, and when Mark unlocked his office door, he heard Anton huffing and puffing, trying to catch his breath. They took to their respective chairs, and Anton leaned over and dropped his coat in the corner.

  “I don’t have anywhere else to hide it,” he said when he was upright again. “Do you mind?”

  He was wearing flannel-lined jeans and a wool turtleneck sweater. “What else can I do for you?”

  “You’re going to get a letter from Dean Braxton,” he said. “Unless you already did?”

  “I haven’t looked at my email since noon,” Mark said. “Do you want me to check now?”

  Anton shook his head dismissively. “It’s about me missing classes. You’re also getting something from one of the doctors, but it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know. They don’t think this new drug is working. Tomorrow, I’m having a bunch of new scans and tests, and then something on Monday that will take all day. That’s why I had to run out of class today. I didn’t want to say so in front of Penelope, but I’ve been drinking this stuff every three hours that makes me—it goes through you.”

  “I’m amazed you made it through class.”

  “Not quite,” Anton said. “Sorry for the gory details.”

  Mark said, “I’m really sorry you have to live through this.”

  “We’ll see,” Anton said. His breathing was still labored.

  “I want to see you live through this, Anton, hard as it must be.”

  “I just want to finish our class, Mark, that’s all, really and—oh, boy.” He bowed his head. His shoulders shook. And for a few long moments, he wept, occasionally raising his arms and holding his hands palm-out toward Mark. To apologize? To warn him to stay away? Eventually, he wiped his hands across his face, sat up straight. “Talking to you always does this.”

  “I blame that stuff you’ve been drinking,” Mark said.

  “And I can’t eat anything till tomorrow night,” Anton said, smiling, “so that might be putting me in a bad mood, too. If I don’t make it to class on Monday, I’ll bring my comments about the stories on
Wednesday.”

  “That’ll work well this time,” Mark said, “because the first four writers are emailing their stories on Saturday, and we’ll all print our own copies so we can read them in advance.”

  “But after that, we all print thirteen copies and bring them to the class before our workshop, right?”

  “Exactly,” Mark said. These inane details mattered only to thirteen people in the world, but the work of inventing them, negotiating them, valuing them, remembering them, confirming them, supporting them, and occasionally propping them up meant they were worth something more than the paper syllabus on which they had been printed. They became the crypto-currency for the classroom, the basis for the transactions that bound them each to the other.

  Anton had pulled out his notebook, and he was flipping around, looking for something. “I know I wrote it down,” he said.

  Mark guessed Anton was looking for something Max had said in class, a smart and very kind suggestion. Max had said he saw an opportunity in Anton’s story, which opened near the end of a high school cross-country race when the young man in the lead inexplicably collapses and his nemesis and classmate stops to help him, apparently sacrificing his chance at a college scholarship. The clear implication, which was evident to everyone in the class, was that the young man who fell would die by the story’s end. Max suggested that it might be interesting to have a time break and take up the story a year later, when we could learn that the young man hadn’t died, and the other guy was living with the consequences of having given up his chance for that scholarship. Twice, over objections from other readers about the clear suggestion of a mortal illness, Max had said, “He doesn’t have to die.”

  “Would it be okay if we talked about this next Wednesday? I’ll find it by then.” Anton slapped his notebook shut. “My cousin is coming by soon to drive me home.”

  “That’ll work,” Mark said. “Your story isn’t due till after spring break.”

  “That Monday, right? For a workshop on Wednesday?”

  Mark nodded. “And as long as you’re going to be lying around all weekend, eating home-cooked meals,” Mark said, “you might want to find some way to turn that nephew in your tag sale story into the buyer’s son, as Rashid suggested.”

  Anton stood up. “I’ve been making a list of suggestive words that might help, too,” he said, glancing at the coat in the corner.

  Mark stood and opened the door. “Might I suggest you find that scarf again?”

  Anton said, “You didn’t think that was a little too—French, or something?”

  “It’s not a beret,” Mark said. “And it’s supposed to snow on Friday.”

  Anton pushed the alumni chair back, grabbed his coat off the floor, and pulled the long blue and yellow scarf from one of the arms. “Ta-da.” He wound it around his neck. “I hope you’re happy,” he said as he slipped past Mark into the hall. He stopped, turned, and waved.

  Mark said, “I’ll look for you on Wednesday.”

  “I know,” Anton said.

  SIX

  1.

  Mark treated all good news on the literary front as a surprise attack, so instead of celebrating or bragging like a normal person on Friday morning when the New York Times accepted his latest op-ed for publication, he put on a beanie and retreated to the porch with his laptop to review the editor’s notes and reread what he had written. He didn’t hate his prose, and most of the editor’s questions and suggestions made sense to him, but when he got to the very end—Professor Mark Sternum teaches creative writing at Hellman College. He is the author of—he experienced that peculiar confusion that crept over him when he dreamed he had turned up in the classroom naked. He didn’t enjoy exposing his ambitions, and the beanie wasn’t much help in covering up his shortcomings.

  Mark tried to rouse the Professor, but it was no use. The Professor was not on call. He did not exist on an as-needed basis. In fact, he was the repository of everything unnecessary that mattered to Mark, which is why the Professor reliably came to life only in the classroom, that kingdom of the inessential, temple of the discretionary, home of the elective.

  The Professor was a fiction, and Creative Writing was unimaginable without him.

  Who but the entirely superfluous Professor Mark had invented could sermonize with a straight face about syntax and grammar and spelling while the president of the United States tweeted about “unpresidented acts” and his Department of Education tweeted out a misspelling of the name of W.E.B. Du Bois and followed up with “our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo”? Who but this profligate Professor would spend his time typing a 400-or 500-word response to every 250 words of narrative prose every student wrote every week of the semester? Mark would have quit his job if he’d had to anticipate writing the 50,000 words of criticism the Professor produced for each class, when a few check marks and exclamation points penned into the margin of a student story were all that was required. So if the prolix Professor’s peculiar habit of treating original prose so seriously also inspired him to write a book every two or three years and some incidental essays to support it, Mark was willing to act as factotum, editing those manuscripts into shape and accepting invitations to read or talk about the published work. It was the least he could do.

  Fortunately, Mark actually enjoyed the tedium of the editorial work assigned to him and soon was absorbed by the challenge of trying to intuit the logic behind the copyeditor’s preferences in punctuation and syntax, and attempting to negotiate compromises, even though the New York Times manual of style proved to be about as flexible as the Professor. He signed off on a near-to-final draft of the op-ed on Friday evening, and before he shut his laptop he found an email from Dean Braxton, who wanted to meet midmorning on Monday in his office to talk about Anton and “the two others in your class with materials on file with our office,” a reference that genuinely mystified Mark.

  Half an hour later, Mark was still rummaging in his cabinets, hoping to discover a hamburger and fries behind the cans of diced tomatoes and white beans, when he got an apologetic and slightly frantic call from Norman Chester. The venerable professor emeritus had just been informed that his capacious office on the ground floor of Hum Hall would be outfitted with two new IKEA desks and chairs over spring break to “more appropriately accommodate our adjunct colleagues” unless Chester identified a member of the full-time faculty who was willing to share his office.

  “You can have the real desk,” Chester said. “It’s the Morris chair I don’t want to lose, and with two of those kiddie desks, it would have to go.”

  There were also approximately eight hundred overdue library books stacked like the ruins of an abandoned pueblo, a century’s worth of uncollected final exams in shirt boxes arranged by date on the bookshelves, Chester asleep in the Morris chair most afternoons, and photocopies of all sixty-three madly metronomic poems from A Shropshire Lad taped to the wall. Chester must have sensed that Mark was reviewing the inventory because he apologized again for telephoning at dinnertime and offered to buy Mark lunch on Monday at noon at the café in the library. “That will give us both sufficient time to consider the ramifications of your sharing a space so deeply associated with me,” he added, and then hung up.

  Mark found a venerable slab of lasagna in the back of the freezer, and once he’d hacked away the ice crystals, it looked enough like food to merit a few minutes in the microwave. While it spun and sputtered, he also received eleven emails, a raft of pictures and videos, and a text from Paul promising to call “at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning.” Mark texted back to let Paul know he was in Ipswich. No response. The microwave dinged. His dinner was thoroughly desiccated. He dumped that into the trash, made a big batch of popcorn with extra olive oil, and sensing the need for something proteinaceous, he opened a beer, put on his beanie and a bathrobe, and headed to the porch for a picnic with Paul.

  Paul was many things, but he was not a man of many words. He loved Mark. He missed Mark. He would soon be installed in
his apartment in Rome again, where he would be based until the end of June. He correctly guessed that Mark would not be making the transatlantic trip for spring break. In Paul’s photographs and videos, the Aegean Sea featured prominently, often singularly, and it was deeply blue. Which was how Mark felt when he finished his beer and went back upstairs to the kitchen.

  To cheer himself up, he made dessert—another beer, two cigarettes, and the remnants of the morning’s coffee. He scrolled through Paul’s emails again, looking for and then inventing something unexpected, something out of the blue, something that would qualify as the cherry on top. I booked you a round-trip ticket to come to Rome for spring break! I bought Allen’s apartment so you will move in with me once and for all! I’m coming home to spend spring break with you! I quit my stupid job! In his imagination, Mark was a master of the plot twist, the surprise ending that seemed to solve everything but resolved nothing, the sort of deus ex machina students resorted to when they were dissatisfied with the inevitable consequences of the choices they had made, when they clearly saw their characters and did not love their limits.

  A little before midnight, Dorothy, Max, and Rashid emailed their stories for Monday. Willa, Jane, and Julio had also sent revised Technical Exercises. And an editor at the National Geographic wanted to run his longer op-ed in its online edition after spring break. This was good news, but after some poking and prodding, Mark did see the underside. Soon, he would have no choice but to take up those sixty-five pages of his novel.

  Some time after he went to bed—Mark couldn’t tell if he’d been asleep for minutes or hours—something woke him. He slapped the pillows around and rolled over, searching for the source of the sound, but the ringing stopped before he landed on his phone. He sat up. He waited. The phone rang again, and this time he spotted the lit-up screen in the charger on a windowsill.

  Mark said, “I’m here.”

  Paul said, “And here, dear man.”

  Mark said, “Where, exactly, are we?”

  “Izmir,” Paul said.