This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  COLLECTIVE FIRST PERSON: we.

  We were all young back then, or so it seemed to us. If there were old people—“old” meaning anyone older than us—at the MacBride Writers’ Conference in 1996, we didn’t notice. We were busy with ourselves, and no world existed beyond us, our egos, our writing, our dreams and hopes, our gossip. Some of us were on working scholarship to the conference as waiters, and some of us earned scholarships because our poetry was published in a literary journal deemed important, and some of us—though we were so, so young—had published our first book, which was the holy grail: publish a book. Those people were luckiest of all, coming to the writers’ conference on a fellowship, which was the golden ticket. None of us paid. Paying was what regular people did, not us.

  We were obnoxious, toting bottles of crummy red wine into dinner and toasting ourselves in loud voices, clustering at the back of the room during craft lectures to lean and whisper in each other’s ears. We mocked the famous poets who taught us, their voices lilting in mind-numbing singsong as they read their famous poems. We cockteased the wrinkly, bad-bald, uber-letch fiction writers and faked shock when they assumed they would get to fuck us. In workshop, we pontificated on theories of narrative distance and rolled our eyes when the lady from Pasadena who wore the “Book Power” T-shirt raised her hand, and we sighed gustily when our teacher quoted that turd Hemingway. We organized an invitation-only séance to channel the poet James Merrill, and some of us knew tarot, and each of us, when confronting the cards, asked, “Will I be a famous writer?” and a lot of us didn’t like what was revealed, though we pretended not to care and called tarot “stupid.” Still, a lot of us tossed restlessly that night, not sleeping, as we pondered what we had heard, but we confided our fears in no one and guzzled coffee at breakfast to reacquire our perky sheen. We were jealous when the visiting literary agent didn’t want to meet with all of us, and we were confused when the visiting photographer posed only some of us for headshots, as if they had predetermined who would “make it” and who wouldn’t. We applauded crazily at our own readings, and those of us with books inscribed them effusively, weaving lavish compliments with inside jokes, swearing to remember this summer forever, as if signing high school yearbooks. We sat together at dinner, and always saved seats, and later, when it was someone else from the conference—someone who paid to be there—who wrote the New York Times best seller that was made into an Oscar-winning movie, we felt betrayed. It was supposed to be us.

  We were ambitious. We all knew the story about the professor stumbling into the first workshop half-drunk and his sneering pronouncement to the group of twelve grad students at the table: “You know how many of you will get a book published? ONE. One of you,” and hearing that, we secretly thought, “I’m the one,” and then the teacher said, “If you’re not thinking ‘I’m the one,’ you don’t have the balls to make it,” and we claimed this happened in our MFA program. We tossed names—Faulkner! Nabokov!—like confetti, as if their brilliance would rain down upon us, and we name-dropped professors and books we’d read and books we’d heard of and which writers wrote us letters of rec. We knew people who knew the real writers of our day: Tobias Wolff, Denis Johnson, Richard Bausch, Edwidge Danticat, Thom Jones, Tim O’Brien, Dorothy Allison, Cormac McCarthy, Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, Gary Soto. Some of us defended Sylvia Plath, and some of us defended Ted Hughes, but we all had opinions.

  We slept with each other: gay-gay, hetero-hetero, gay-experimenting. Sean and Louise. Jon and John. Jon and Paul. John and Carolynne. Carolynne and Randy. Randy and Louise. Louise and Sean again. Sean and Elena. Elena and Dimitri. Dimitri and Louise. Jon and Sal. Annie and Katrina. Vanessa and Michael. Even Michael and Louise. It was possible that Louise slept with all of us, or would have if the conference hadn’t ended.

  It was a merry-go-round, a kaleidoscope, a whirligig, a dervishy time. Our hearts were stomped, our feelings hurt; we murmured spiteful stories about each other; we babbled the dark-of-the-night secrets we’d sworn to take to the grave; we sussed out weaknesses and exploited them, at the conference and later, last week or yesterday. We kept in touch or we didn’t, but we never forgot each other, and we hugged gaudily when our paths crossed, exclaiming how much we loved the book/poem/story/essay that had just come out, though we’d only skimmed the reviews or scrutinized the acknowledgments, waiting for our own name, as torrents of bitter thoughts flooded our animal brains: it should have been our work getting this blink of attention. Although, to be fair, we helped: we published each other in journals we edited and offered constructively meant insight on drafts sent to us and made necessary but noncommittal introductions to our agents and cut and pasted letters of rec for teaching jobs and fellowships. We were friends but we all understood ourselves to be stampeding in a giant horse race; the MacBride Writers’ Conference was our starting gate.

  And yet. Amid all that:

  Some of us fell in love. Some of us broke off engagements to be together, and some of us filled a U-Haul with books and framed Rothko posters and a futon and drove from San Francisco to DC to be together. Some of us got married. Some of us were married for thirteen years, and then some of us who were married died suddenly when we were too young to do that sort of thing. Some of us died, or, rather, one of us did: Michael.

  Ironically—or is it only coincidentally; “ironically” being one of those overused, improperly used words that we over- and improperly used back then?—this tragedy happened five weeks before some of us were scheduled to return to the MacBride Writers’ Conference, invited to teach for the first time. Some of us were looking forward to delivering a craft lecture at the famous lectern, leading a workshop, reading from our newest novel, and living the life of a “famous writer” for two weeks. Our color headshot appeared in the brochure.

  We could have said no. We could have stayed home. But that’s not the kind of people we were.

  THIRD PERSON, LIMITED: she; generally accepted as the default POV

  Vanessa stood, waiting, by a large window that faced the tarmac. A fly buzzed, flinging itself against the glass, and she thought of Emily Dickinson’s fly in the poem—and wondered if that would make a good joke later: “You know what would be a great name for a band of poets?” she might say. “Emily Dickinson’s Fly.” But the words sounded dumb in her head, as they all had lately. She hadn’t written anything good in forever, and she decided last week she hated her novel in progress, so she pressed the delete key. Two hundred pages. As for the recently published novel, that sucked, too. A dour chronicle of post-apocalyptic women—again. They all sucked. How fun to be plunged now into this writing conference.

  This airport was smaller than DCA in Washington, served primarily by puddle jumpers like the one she had disembarked from. Vanessa brought one large suitcase and a laptop she carried on. She barely remembered what she had thrown into the suitcase because she packed at five in the morning, in about fifteen minutes, just before the cab arrived—she wasn’t sure she was coming on this trip until the last minute, changing her mind back and forth like a ball batted in a long, dull tennis match.

  But here she was.

  Someone driving a van was supposed to pick her up, rather, the first group of them, faculty and staff and honored visitors and scholarship waiters, all descending upon this tiny New England airport within a two-hour time frame.

  The director of the conference had been sympathetic about Michael, saying she could back out, she could teach next summer instead, and it didn’t matter that her photo had been in the ads. It didn’t matter because no one signed up for her workshop, she wondered, or because the director wanted to be accommodating? This conversation was three weeks after Michael died, and she couldn’t trust anyone. Being pitied irritated her, so she acted brusque and curt, which turned people nicer—more goddamn pity—darkening her mood. So she started keeping away from people altogether, even the virtual kind, shutting down her social networking accounts one after the other, then canceling her cell phone, deleting her blog
, and cutting her landline. There was something pleasantly rebellious about dropping out. About raw silence.

  That the director was being sweet made her meaner. “I’ll be fine,” she snapped. “I want the distraction. I want to be there.”

  He paused a beat too long, and she realized that he was afraid she would be the distraction. That she might panic or break down or change her mind at the last minute, leaving him in the lurch in some vexing way, or that she would run around bawling, making the people who paid uncomfortable. He was one of those older, manly poets, a brash, lumbering guy who would have made a beeline for Sylvia Plath, except that Sylvia would have been bored with him in twenty minutes.

  Vanessa recognized the woman with the pixie cap of red hair from the brochure, a memoirist with a book about food, not the traditional eating disorders but also not anything pleasant about food, something disturbing and splashy that got her interviewed on NPR and The Daily Show. Vanessa hadn’t read it. Nevertheless, to drag herself out of her own stupid mind, she waved and called: “Joy?”

  The woman with the red hair spun several times, as if she didn’t know where her name came from, until finally she placed Vanessa. She smiled brightly, then immediately her face crumpled into sad confusion. She knows, Vanessa thought, of course everyone knows. What had she expected? She was The Widow.

  Vanessa kept a grim smile attached to her own face as she walked to where Joy stood next to a potted plant. “I’m Vanessa Connally.”

  “Joy Ruby-Vargha.” They shook hands, Joy clinging to Vanessa’s too long, too tightly.

  Don’t you dare hug me, Vanessa thought, and when she got her hand back, she stepped back, beyond Joy’s natural reach. Bitch, she added in her head, startled by this anger. Of course everyone knew the details of her sad story, every writer in America, and every writer who was coming to this conference. They pitied her, with her inconveniently dead husband.

  “Congratulations on your new book,” Vanessa said. “You must be excited about all the attention it’s getting.”

  “Thanks,” Joy said. Her eyes stayed lasered on Vanessa.

  Vanessa said, “Yes, I’m the one whose husband died. That’s me.”

  Joy’s cheeks flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must think I’m so rude.”

  “We can just have a normal conversation,” Vanessa said. “We can just be normal. Okay?” It came out as a command.

  “Sure.” Joy took in a deep breath. “I’ve never been here. I guess I’m nervous. You hear so many stories about this conference.”

  “Most of them not true.” Vanessa felt immediately drained by Joy’s way of speaking, as if she were permitted more syllables than other people and insisted on using each one of them, even in short sentences. And then, behind Joy, she spotted another woman, potentially more draining, and she gasped slightly, but enough that Joy twisted to look.

  “Louise Philips! She’s amazing!” Joy babbled. “I love her work! That fearless prose, she’s so brave!”

  Down girl, Vanessa almost said.

  Louise gripped a Styrofoam cup in one hand and tugged behind her several leopard print duffels precariously balanced on a zebra-striped hard suitcase with wheels. She was at least six feet tall and sinewy; she had been Michigan’s high jump state champion, a “fun fact” she still included in her author bio. Also, it was a cliché, but her dark hair truly was a mane—it flowed and rippled and Louise constantly flung it back and flung it forward; it was as good as an extra appendage. The joke was that if Louise’s head were shaved she’d be unable to speak. She and Louise had been in the same fiction workshop at the conference in 1996; at the time, Vanessa’s first novel had just come out, and Louise had published a fifty-page roman à clef about her MFA instructor in the Best American Short Stories—reprinted from an obscure literary journal (her first publication)—that eventually was made into an HBO movie (and resulted in the professor being denied tenure). A couple of years ago, Louise married a trendy indie film star; they’d been written up in the “Vows” column of the Times’s “Sunday Styles.” Vanessa still remembered the story Louise workshopped with the class in 1996, about a CIA spy living in a suburban neighborhood who began leaving a slimy trail when he walked, like a snail, until, after being forced to retire, he jumped off the Memorial Bridge, turning the Potomac River silver. Vanessa had written a careful critique that she considered encouraging while basically suggesting that the whole thing be scrapped. “Who do you think you are, Kafka?” she stopped herself from writing. The class pretty much ripped apart the story. But the teacher passed it to his editor at the New Yorker, where it was published, along with a full-page photo of Louise posing barefoot next to a dry fountain filled with autumn leaves. Right after that she got a two-book deal for a collection of stories and a novel. The novel made it to the best-seller list—at least only up to number eight and only for two weeks.

  “This is ridiculous,” Louise called, not explaining what was ridiculous as she expertly threaded her stack of luggage through Joy’s and Vanessa’s battered black suitcases and computer bags. She released the handle of her suitcase and thrust the Styrofoam cup into Joy’s hand and locked Vanessa in a hug before she could react. “I was so sorry to hear,” she murmured in Vanessa’s ear, “and you’re such a good soldier to come,” the words tickling and buzzing; like Emily Dickinson’s fly, Vanessa thought. She didn’t even like Louise, and something in her wanted to say so, directly, putting an end to this uncomfortable sympathy.

  “I heard a fly–,” Vanessa said out loud, meaning only to think the words, which sounded off somehow. Louise stepped back; she appeared not to hear, though that was hardly possible. One hand remained pressed on Vanessa’s arm.

  Joy extended her arm for a handshake, but Louise was still staring at Vanessa and made no sign of acknowledging Joy.

  “Sorrow becomes you,” Louise said. “You look saintly. Beautiful.”

  “A dead husband isn’t a Vogue beauty tip,” Vanessa said.

  Joy soldiered on: “I’m Joy Ruby-Vargha, and I loved Where We Are When We’re Lost. I teach it to all my undergrads. Such a tour de force, that story in particular, the way you pretend to blur fact and fiction, and how you explode boundaries. So uncomfortable for the reader!”

  Of course. Of everything that Louise had written, writers mentioned that book first, always. It was that title story. Inescapable. Famous, if a story can be such a thing.

  “I’m going to take care of you,” Louise said to Vanessa. Louise often ignored what people said. There was a well-circulated story about Louise’s editor demanding she cut a three-line epilogue to the novel, and Louise added instead, ballooning the epilogue to forty pages, hardly an epilogue, though that’s what it was called in the table of contents. The reviewer in the Times loved it.

  “I don’t want to be taken care of,” Vanessa said.

  Louise’s eyes were a startling, deep blue, very dramatic with that black hair. She might be hated for those eyes alone. “You know you do.” She spoke with such authority that Vanessa almost nodded.

  “This cup is hot,” Joy said.

  “It’s coffee,” Louise remarked, but she didn’t reach for it. Then she spoke as if Joy had asked a question: “We go way back.”

  “Louise knows all my secrets,” Vanessa said.

  Louise smiled slightly and pulled a silver flask from a side pocket of one of the leopard bags. She unscrewed the top slowly and took a quick slug.

  “Sounds dangerous,” Joy said, pushing herself into the conversation. She shifted the cup to her other hand, and Vanessa was amused she wouldn’t simply set it on the floor. That was how everyone started: going out of their way to do exactly what Louise wanted.

  “Vanessa is a notorious liar,” Louise said. “All fiction writers lie, but Vanessa especially. Don’t believe one word she says. I doubt her name is really Vanessa.”

  “Actually, Vanessa is my middle name,” Vanessa said, startled that Louise would remember that tiny detail all these years later.


  “What’d I tell you?” Louise took another go at her flask then capped it and tucked it into her duffel.

  “Do you remember my first name?” Vanessa asked.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Vanessa didn’t know what Louise was thinking, but she was remembering Louise was the one who flipped the tarot cards, telling her unhappiness would be a fog shadowing her life. Mostly she remembered Louise slept with Michael on that night he and Vanessa were feuding about whose fault it was they got lost hiking in the woods, missing the conference director’s reading; people said he remarked on their absence from the podium, not jokingly calling it “career suicide.” Louise had come up to her at breakfast the next morning and made a little checkmark in the air with her pinkie, then sashayed away. Michael denied and denied—“you know what she’s like,” and he twirled circles with his index finger around his temple—and so for years, Vanessa chose to believe him. Then she found out the whole truth when Louise published her famous story, the “tour de force” Joy had gushed over. She had called the man in the story “Michael,” with quotation marks. It shouldn’t have been a surprise—Louise had slept with plenty of people during those two weeks—and yet it was. Michael apologized, and she said she forgave him for the years of lying and for all the rest of it, but she knew he didn’t believe her, and he was right not to. She didn’t believe herself. Now he was dead.

  Joy looked from one to the other and shifted the coffee to her other hand. “I don’t get it,” she said to Louise. “Is this one of those games?”

  Louise finally turned and looked at Joy. “You’re a perky little America’s sweetheart, aren’t you? Damn.”