“We are more than happy to put you up at the inn,” said Zahra. “It is not bad, actually.”
She surprised Sam by taking her elbow on the way out, as if they were old school chums or little French girls walking to theboulangerie.
“Please try not to worry,” she said. “We were children then. No older than those students you spoke to today. I am different from who I was then, definitely older if not wiser. I’m sure you are different too. You would not marry the man I described.”
She waited until Sam nodded, then gave her arm a light squeeze.
“Surely, then, William has grown as well. With his writers’ support group, his Darlings, he has done a great deal of good. Please extend to him my congratulations, on his career and your engagement. I’m certain you will have a lovely life.” She shut out the lights and locked her office door. “Just perhaps,” she added, “watch your back.”
The Rabbit
There’s an old saying: While the cats are away, the Rabbit will play. Actually there isn’t, but there should be, because that’s what happens. When William and Sam Vetiver go off on their respective trips, I wait an hour to make sure they’re really gone, and then out of the Rabbit Hole I pop.
The first thing I do? Take a long-@$$ shower. I stand under the hot water until it goes cold, using up all of Sam Vetiver’s salon-scented products. Then I cook myself a decent meal. I’ve been eating well enough, lots of peanut butter and beans, but it’s amazing what a difference in morale it makes when food’s hot. Next I wander the house, wrapped in one of those scratchy striped blankets William’s had since grad school. I build a fire and take a nap next to the big stuffed bear. I read a few pages here, a few there. I go up to William and Sam Vetiver’s bedroom and jump on their bed, then use their vibrator—why they need this I have no idea, I guess for variety—and flush all their lube down the toilet. Finally there’s nothing left to do but fire up the hot tub and sit under the stars.
It’s then that I realize how lonely I am. I don’t miss William and Sam Vetiver’s f*ckfests, but it is weird with them both gone, William at some Big Deal Conference and Sam Vetiver at, of all places, Harrington.
Harrington.
A coyote yips somewhere on the lake. A chorus howls back. I do too.
I’m almost glad my car battery was dead so I couldn’t follow her. I hate even thinking about that f*cking place.
It all started so well. That’s what I thought. I actually allowed myself tobelieve I’d made it, clawed my way out of Aegina by saving my paychecks from Barbara’s Book Nook and going up the road to Upper Great Lakes Community College, then applying—and applying and applying—to Harrington, whose MFA program I’d seen inWriter’s Digestwhile working in the UGLCC bookstore. I couldn’t believe it. You could get adegreein creative writing? There were scholarships for it??? I’d finally gotten in after applying five times in a row, and here I was in this fancy seminar room with wood-paneled walls and tiny diamond-paned windows like at Medieval Times. With rich people who’d given up two years of their lives to be here, who said things likeAspenandChoateand they all knew what it meant. Maybe I could learn to be one of them. Maybe my real life started now. I was like Gatsby, if he’d been born a baby girl in a sh*tbox.
That fantasy lasted a week.
Then workshop started.
Here’s what workshop is. You hand in a story, which is called submitting. Your classmates read it. The next week, you’re put in The Box, which means they discuss you for three hours while you can’t say a word. The Box is supposed to encourage “rigorous listening.” What it really encouragesis suicidal ideation, if you ask me. We actually had some people try that. And one succeeded. Others quit at break. But not me. I hung in there until The Incident, even though I realized the people I thought were writers were really wolves and William was the leader of them all, an alpha killer in a blue button-down and khakis.
He seized that position the first day, and we all went along with it because he was the only one who’d already been published—his novelThe Girl on the Mountain, which came out while he was still in college. Never mind that it sold like fifteen hundred copies. Or that theWashington Postreviewer panned it, saying, “If Corwyn doesn’t continue as an author—and that would certainly be my recommendation—he has a fine career ahead as a politician, because he is in love with the sound of his own voice.” ButKirkuscalled the book “a luminous, poised debut,” andThe New Yorkerincluded William in its30 Under 30issue. He was the only one who couldthrow around phrases likemy agent,my editor,my publicist,print run,foreign rights,film option. In our program, he was king.
As I found out the first workshop, because I was first up. Our instructor had assigned the order, and I’d drawn the short straw. Not that I knew that at the time. All I knew was that I’d submitted my best story, the opening chapter of what I hoped would be a novel calledAegina. I read a page of it aloud, and then I went in The Box.
“Iwill,” said William, when the instructor asked who wanted to start us off. “This author is really raw. She hasvim,” he said with emphasis, leaning forward and raising his eyebrows. Vim? I thought. What the f*ck is that?
“Agreed. She has potential,” said Zahra, the woman with waist-length hair and red designs on her hands, and I swelled like a sponge in mopwater because I didn’t yet know thatpotentialwas a slur, likeambitious, meaning you’d fallen short of what you’d tried to achieve.
Everyone was nodding when William added, “But the story is pure melodrama. The little girl locked in the closet so her mom can go out on the town? Forced to drink her own urine? Cheap shock value. Trauma porn.”
“So tropey,” said another writer, and someone else added, “It was contrived.”
I sat with my face stinging as if they’d all slapped me, thinking, But it happened! It really happened! I couldn’t say that, though, and besides, we were supposed to be writing fiction. So I just drew William in my notebook with a dagger sticking out of his mouth.
“I see what the writer is attempting,” he continued. “But the writing has no grandeur. It’scommercial,” he pronounced, which I would come to realize was the worst insult of all, meaning your work would never be reviewed by anyone who mattered or nominated for the big prizes, only sold in mass-market paperback in spinning drugstore racks or next to the dog food and toilet paper in big box stores.
After workshop everyone went to the Castle, the student pub, except me. The second I was released from The Box I stuffed my notebook in my bag and ran from the room like it was on fire, although I found out later thatwas unnecessarily dramatic. William didn’t actually hate me. He just had a very low opinion of my work, which matched his opinion of everyone’s work, only with different adjectives. It was nothing personal. When it came to writing, William was an equal-opportunity f*cker.
As he was when it came to actual f*cking: That man screwed everything within d*ck distance, right across the disciplines. Even the poets. His one criterion was that the women had to be pretty in some way. The only ones he didn’t sleep with that first year were me and the other quiet girl in the program, Becky, the Mouse.
Which was why I was so shocked one night the fall of our second year, when I was in the empty cafeteria filling my thermos at the milk machine and William came up next to me. He did his smiling and bowing thing and said “Moooooo,” and I was wondering whether he was calling me a cow when he said, “We can do better than that, can’t we?” and took the thermos from my hand. He said what a shame we’d been in workshop over a year but never gotten properly acquainted, and did I want to grab a beer at the Castle? and I looked all around and behind me to make sure there was nobody else there, that he was actually talking to me.
Chapter 34
Crossroads
Sam stayed on the Harrington campus that night after all. She didn’t want to drive after dark, contending with black ice and deer, so instead she checked herself into the inn. She didn’t tell Zahra, not wanting the department head to feel obligated to take her to dinner. Sam needed to digest what Zahra had said. She wanted to be alone. And she didn’t feel quite ready to go back to Maine.
