Touchy Subjects: Stories

  Jonas scratched a spot on his chin. "No."

  An hour later the writer was struggling with Mrs. Pokowski. "When you say on page one that 'The savages recognized the White Man as lord of their dark and mysterious jungle,'" he quoted neutrally, "don't you think perhaps some readers might be bothered by that?"

  She furrowed her brow. "You mean the word savages?"

  "Ah, yes, for one thing . .."

  "Well, I didn't want to put niggers,"" she said virtuously.

  After lunch (a tuna sandwich at his desk) came Pedro Verdi with his genetic-engineering near-future fantasy. "OK," said the writer, taking a peek at his notes to refresh his memory, "so the opening scene takes place in a hospital?"

  A shrug from the bank teller. "Well, you think it's hospital."

  "Yes," said the writer, not wanting to seem stupid. But after a minute, he couldn't help asking, "Isn't it?"

  "Yeah, yeah, it's hospital," Pedro conceded, "but I no want my readers to be too sure, you know?"

  "Don't worry, they won't be," said the writer heavily. "Now"—trying to read his own handwriting—"there's some ambiguity about the newborn daughter."

  "Aha. Yes. There has been mix-up," articulated Pedro, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Only it's no really mix-up, but you don't find it out till after."

  "Mr. Verdi." The writer meant to sound stern, rather than petulant. "By my count there are three newborn babies in this book."

  "Pedro, please." The bank teller loosened his Bart Simpson tie.

  "Fine. Pedro. Now, which baby is the genetically modified telepath?"

  "Me, I prefer to leave that open. Tell you the truth, I no decided yet," said Pedro, lying back and gazing out the window.

  Three hours later the tiny office was feeling full. Maybelline Norris had brought her mother, a weighty woman introduced only as "my mom, she's my best friend," who sat with her chair several feet behind Maybelline's.

  "Who's your favourite poet?" the writer asked, to put off discussion of Maybelline's own work.

  "Dunno. Jewel, I guess," the girl said. "If I like stuff, I don't pay much attention to who actually wrote it, you know?"

  The writer couldn't think of any other general questions. His eyes flickered between the two Norris women.

  "So hey, do you like my poems?" Maybelline asked brightly.

  "They're very interesting," he lied. "I like some . .. more than others."

  The girl's mother squinted at him disapprovingly.

  His eyes fell to the manuscript on his lap, and he silently reread a verse at random.

  Hurts hurts

  like crazy

  My emotionality

  crushingly hemmed in

  like cactus flowers

  Utterly longing for the monsoon

  "Have you ever tried ... redrafting any of your poems?" he suggested.

  "Oh no," Maybelline reassured him. "I wouldn't want to mess with the magic. I don't know where they come from; I just shut my eyes and it flows. I call up my mom and I say, 'Mom, I've just written another poem,' and she says, 'Wow, that's so wonderful! You're so talented!'"

  The writer's eyes veered to the mother,just for politeness, but she only nodded.

  "I showed a bunch of them to my teacher back in eleventh grade and she said, 'Wow, you can write. You can really write!'"

  It astonished the writer, how tiring it was, this listening business.

  "I've got about maybe a thousand of them at home! But these ones are like the crème de la crème," said Maybelline, her eyes resting fondly on the manuscript. "I showed them to my swim coach and she said, 'Wow, this stuff deserves to be published.'"

  The writer allowed his eyebrows to soar up, as if in encouragement rather than disbelief.

  The girl's mother leaned forward then. "But then there's copyright, ain't there?" she said darkly.

  This took him aback.

  "Yeah," said Maybelline regretfully. "My mom thinks, what if I send my poems to like a magazine or something, and they get stolen?"

  "Stolen?" the writer repeated.

  "Yeah, you know, published under another name. Like the editor's, maybe."

  His throat was dry; he suddenly longed for a martini. "No one would ever do that," he said faintly.

  "Really?" said Maybelline, smiling.

  "Trust me. It's never going to happen."

  Even on the days when he didn't have office hours, he found it hard to get much of his own work done; this job was so distracting, somehow. But when he did manage a page, at least he approved of what he wrote. It might not be Faulkner, but it was a damn sight better than Herb Leland.

  His office collected sounds, he found. Chain saws outside where the dead trees were coming down; gurgles in the ducts as the heating revved up at the start of October; high-pitched giggling in the corridors. Sometimes he imagined that students were pausing to read the résumé pasted to his office door, and laughing at it. He wished he'd left out the line about the New York Times Book Review calling his work "profoundly promising"; it would mean something only if he were still twenty-four.

  He stared at his shelf, the few inches his slim hardbacks took up. His name in three different typefaces, repeated, as if it were a phrase that meant something. So sweet to his eyes; so insubstantial.

  He rather wished he hadn't pinned a head shot on his door, either. Now people recognized him in the corridors and took him by the elbow to ask one of the four FAQs of the trade:

  "Did you always want to be a writer?"

  "Where do you get your ideas?"

  "How many hours a day do you write?"

  "How can I get published?"

  But when the writer did a lunchtime reading from his poetry collection, only eleven people showed up. To think that on the plane, flying down here, he had worried about his privacy, how to keep people from prying into every detail of his life! As if they gave a damn. Nobody was remotely curious about him as a person except for Herb Leland, who seemed to have formed an unconscious crush. And Herb's questions were hardly probing, either; they were more along the lines of "Do you realize how Honoured we feel to have You Living here among us?"

  Most nights the writer read detective novels and ate microwaved macaroni.

  "I guess I'm a would-be writer," one housewife introduced herself coyly.

  After that, in his head he called them all "my would-be's," meaning that they perhaps would have been writers if they'd been born with a tittle of talent. It never occurred to them to supplement their high school education by consulting a dictionary. They seemed to feel—like Humpty Dumpty but without his powers—that words should mean what they wanted them to mean: that un-usual was a brand-new coinage, that it was possible to riposte someone, that drunks fell down unconscientious in the street.

  By mid-October the writer realized that he shouldn't waste his energy trying to teach the would-be's about literature or anything else. His job was to listen. And it was not just casual nodding along that was required, either, but an intense, full-frontal, eyes-locked kind of attention.

  The would-be's claimed they longed for honest criticism. "Be brutally honest with me, man," said BJ, a trainee electrician and spare-time rapper who was writing a novel about his recent adolescence and owned seventeen how-to-get-published books. "Hit me with it!" But BJ didn't really mean it; none of them did, the writer discovered.

  "Should I chuck the thing in the stove?" one grandmother asked, her eyes watery and fearful, but it was obviously a rhetorical question.

  To be honest was to hurt. Even a mild remark like "I'm not a big fan of limericks" could make a would-be's face implode.

  But to be kind was to lie. The days he said things like "It's wonderful you've written a whole novel," he went home feeling greasy with deceit.

  This had to be how therapists felt, he realized one long Monday afternoon, when Doug McGee—fifty-something, with eczema—began yet again to unravel the story of how his parents, teachers, and so-called friends had crushed his self-estee
m from an early age. The writer crossed and recrossed his legs.

  His next visitor, Meredith Lopez Jones, was in love with her writer's block—or blockage, as she called it, as if were in her colon. "I still don't have anything to show you," she murmured proudly. "I suffer from SAD, did I tell you? I withdraw from the world right after the equinox. I just curl up like a seed in the earth all winter, that's all I do."

  Apart from coming in to bore the pants off me twice a week, the writer added mentally.

  "Last summer I stayed up all night and tried to get it all down on paper, everything, the whole universe, you know? But my head was so full of images I thought it might burst! I burnt it all the next day, of course."

  The writer pursed his lips as if regretting this.

  Meredith pressed her cheekbones so hard she left white fingerprints. "I'm so afraid of writing something mediocre! That's always been my problem. Probably because I was raised as a woman in this society. The scars run deep. No matter how many people have told me I'm an amazingly talented person, I can't quite believe it."

  The writer nodded, unable to quite believe it, either.

  Clearly, writing was not an ordinary hobby like wine making or kung fu. It attracted the most vulnerable people; the strange, the antisocial, the sad. Some were struggling with addictions or mysterious debilitating illnesses; others wrote endless versions of their childhood traumas. One quite young, balding man called Jack had been divorced five times already; "Got no knack for picking 'em, I guess." His memoir-disguised-as-a-short-story was full of phrases like "there going to blame me" and "their's no way out." The writer stared at the page exhaustedly, wondering if it was worth correcting the grammar.

  He had come to dread his office hours. He relied on certain basic survival techniques. He kept an enormous bag of gourmet brownie bites in his filing drawer. After each visit he'd gobble one to lift his spirits, or at least his blood-sugar level. A visit from Stinking Steve—who had a bloated, sun-browned face and always wore the same Disney World sweatshirt—merited two brownie bites. When the writer's aunt sent him a homemade pomander for his office—a beribboned orange studded with cloves—he didn't laugh at it. He hung it on his desk lamp and pressed his nose to it between sessions. It made him feel like a medieval troubadour in a world of serfs.

  It occurred to him to ask Marsha to tell the would-be's that his appointment diary was all filled in for a fortnight, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it. Besides, she seemed like a woman of integrity, and she might report him to the dean of arts.

  He was not doing much with the Great Novel these days. He feared the terrible writing of the would-be's might be contagious. Whenever he wrote a sentence, he had to stop and check it for mixed metaphors. All the fatuous rules he'd been spouting this term looped through his head. Write what you know, he thought. Show, don't tell. Verbs and nouns are stronger than adjectives and adverbs. This was painting by numbers; it felt like a uniquely pointless way to spend the rest of his life. Avoid the passive voice. He tried to remember, when was the last time he'd written anything in the white heat of inspiration?

  There was just one café in town that roasted its own beans. The writer tried going there with his laptop to have a go at chapter three over a latte, but people stared, and he got a croissant crumb lodged between Q and W.

  He went back the next day with paper and pen and ordered a bracing shot of wheatgrass. He'd composed just half a sentence when two blond girls whose names he couldn't remember came over to say how awesome it was to find him here, and would he mind looking at their essay plans? The topic was Believing in Ourselves.

  He e-mailed his friends: Making whoopee in the mountains. My office gets the best sunsets. Oh, the life of a state-subsidized sybarite! Great Novel coming along nicely. Miss you all, naturally, but not enough to come home.

  He knew this was a stupid policy—he could hardly keep up this pretense forever—but right now he couldn't bear to tell anyone what a mistake he had made.

  As an experiment, he started working to rule. He no longer read any of the manuscripts jammed into his pigeonhole. The would-be's never seemed to notice.

  "Why don't you tell me the overall story in your own words," he murmured, eyes shut, to Tzu Ping.

  Off she went: "Well, it starts when I'm—I mean when my character—is in second grade...," and soon her time was up.

  Later the same day, Mrs. Pokowski frowned at the pristine manuscript he handed back to her. "Did you like chapter three?"

  "Very much," said the writer. "But"—here he flicked through the pages and picked out a line at random—"I'm a little confused by the metaphors in this sentence: 'A fragile essence of deep buried undigested resentments were locked away behind a veil of stone.'"

  "What's to confuse?" asked Mrs. Pokowski coldly.

  With Linda Shange, he only ever had to glance at the first paragraph. "Linda," he said, "you see the way you keep telling us how nice your protagonist is? Here, for instance: 'She was a sweet and kind person who never killed mice.'"

  "Yes, she really was, in real life," said Linda beatifically.

  "The danger is," he told her, "you might actually put some readers off."

  She looked shocked.

  "We don't need to like your protagonist all the time," he told her, yet again, "we just need to care what happens to her."

  One week, every story presented to him seemed to contain some reference to child abuse. He was irritated by this craven following of literary fashion. "Lenny," he said to the golden-haired boy majoring in English, "couldn't you pick a more original angle? The hard-drinking, big-fisted Daddy is kind of a stereotype. And isn't it rather implausible that it would be the eldest boy he'd rape?"

  "But that's what happened," said Lenny.

  The writer stared at him.

  The boy gave an awkward little grimace and pushed his blond fringe out of his eyes. "If I slept in the bed nearest the door, you know .. . he'd come in and do it to me and leave the younger ones alone."

  The writer covered his mouth with his hand. He found himself unable to give the standard speech about the distinction between fiction and autobiography. In an unsteady voice, for the last five minutes of the session he talked about Lenny's excellent use of nature imagery.

  So he cultivated compassion. He started practicing meditation again. You don't need to like these people, he told himself over and over,you just need to care what happens to them.

  He taught himself to sit there opposite the would-be's and vary his smiles and nods, crinkle his eyebrows and say "Mmm" at the right bits. He kept his hands folded—priestly—and let the would-be's talk about whatever they needed to talk about. Some of them never mentioned writing at all. Others eventually revealed that they hadn't written a word since high school, but they were somehow convinced that they could if they tried. "Because I've had such an interesting life and I've a lot to teach the world."

  "Because I'm retired now and I want to make some vacation money."

  "Because my doctor said it might help."

  One day the writer didn't say a word for thirty-five minutes while Maybelline Norris yammered on about how talented everybody said she was. If he'd been inventing a character for his novel, he couldn't have come up with such a combination of egotism and naked need. He looked at the girl's surprisingly bad teeth and wondered if she was bulimic. He would have liked to put his hand over her mouth, to hush and comfort her, but that was hardly possible with Mrs. Norris sitting implacable, two feet behind her daughter.

  Only in one session did he come close to nodding off, and it wasn't his fault. Mrs. Pokowski was describing a self-hypnosis technique she'd learned "for so as to unleash creativity," as she said in her mosquito-drone voice. She took him through it step by step—"Now I'm falling down the hole, and I'm falling down deeper, and deeper, and now what do I see, I see another tunnel, so what do I do, I go down that one..."

  The world began to melt; he had to writhe on his chair and bite the inside of his cheek
to stay awake.

  In the second week of November the writer turned sullen. He stopped practicing meditation; he couldn't see the point in spending twenty minutes a day sitting very still on his couch while the entire lyric oeuvre of David Bowie raced through his head. He gave up on compassion.

  He had cruel private names for most of the would-be's by now: as well as Stinking Steve there was Jawless Jennifer (whose face seemed to fall away below the nose), Mr. Hypochondria, and Dottie-Date-Rape. He was just an ear to this pack of social rejects, an official representative of Literature who had to listen to their grievances and explain why they'd never been let into the club, why publishers invariably returned their fat single-spaced manuscripts with the floral designs on the cover page.

  "I have to tell you, I just love this poem, I just think it says everything I've ever wanted to say in my life," Meredith Lopez Jones told him, wet-eyed, her hand fondling the page.

  I am so glad to have had this Opportunity to have Shared the story of Running Fox with you, wrote Herb Leland. I take no credit for Running Fox, she germinated and Marinated in my head for many Moons then gave birth to herself in tune with the rhythms of her People's Spirituality. To have Helped bring her into this World makes me Proud.

  These people were philistines, pariahs, parasites. They haunted the writer's nights and stalked his days. When he tried going for a run along the riverbank to work off his tension, who should he meet but Herb Leland, who had the gall to lurch along behind him, rhapsodizing about the Crisp Fall Keatsian Air.

  In fact, human beings in general repelled him these days. Marsha with her fat wrists; George W. Bush blustering at press conferences; even his old friends, who had taken to sending him irritating Internet jokes.

  As for language—his former lover, his enigmatic deity—these days, it slunk through his office like a diseased cat. Language had a limp, a scab, a tumour, a death wish. Words on the page were a helpless leakage, a human stain.