Just Friends

by Robyn Sisman

  Now that little fantasy was under threat. Jack glanced at Candace, sitting right down the other end of the table, uncharacteristically silent and demure, and felt a twinge of exasperation at her blatant overacting. Without mentioning the note, Jack had told her that they must be more discreet; but not that she should impersonate a nun. Everyone must have noticed that she hadn’t opened her mouth all evening. Feeling his eyes on her, Candace glanced up, bit her lip, and blushed deeply. Jesus!

  Nathan and Lester, meanwhile, were approaching danger-level in their argument about whether character was an outmoded concept in contemporary fiction. Jack wished he had never set this assignment. Write a story about love, he’d said—any kind of love. The results had been depressing. Terrified of being accused by their peers of writing mush, his students had subverted the brief in the most perverse ways they could think of: love of drugs, love of killing, love in the Holocaust, love that turned to rape, and of course incest, tiresome hallmark of the beginner. The one shining exception had been a story about the friendship between two misfits at school, and its betrayal—a piece of writing so tender and subtle that Jack was half tempted to steal it. He might as well. Carlos, the author, was an obsessional rewriter; he would never send the story to a magazine because it would never, in his view, be “finished.” Carlos definitely wouldn’t have written the note. Would he?

  Jack smoothed back his hair. Relax. What did it matter if he lost this job? It was only money. The academic world wasn’t so wonderful that he needed to join the scrabble for positions, especially if that meant tailoring his personal life—and his intellect—to some moronic standard of “correctness.” Why the hell shouldn’t he form a relationship with a consenting adult of twenty-two?

  Reentering the discussion, Jack steered it deftly onward until the class concluded that “Big Mack,” despite its imaginative strengths and some impressive turns of phrase, hadn’t quite “worked.”

  “Why not?” Jack prompted.

  Silence.

  A hesitant voice spoke up. “I know this is probably my fault—Lester’s a better writer than I’ll ever be—but I didn’t really feel anything.”

  “Feel!” scoffed Lester.

  “Girls’ stuff,” agreed Nathan.

  The woman who had spoken, fortyish and frumpy, turned fiery red. Jack remembered that she worked in a day-care center, and had never graduated from high school.

  “That’s very perceptive of you, Lisa,” he said warmly. “You’ve hit on a key point.”

  He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “All right. What’s the most important thing you need to do as a writer?”

  “Get yourself a shit-hot agent,” Nathan shot back.

  The class laughed.

  Jack acknowledged the joke with a smile and waited for the class to settle. “The most important thing a writer can do is to be truthful. I’m talking here about emotional truth. That means that you don’t try to bullshit your readers. Don’t tell me how shocked I must be, or how sad or happy: make me feel it.”

  “Is that what you do? Sir?” Nathan’s tone was offensive.

  “I try to.”

  “We’re all real eager to see that novel you’ve been working on.”

  Jack refused to be distracted. “Forget my work. Choose someone you admire, anyone you like, and see how they do it.”

  “You mean, like Carson McGuire?” asked Mona. “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?”

  “Anyone you like.” Jack repeated. “Remember, in order to make your reader feel, you’ve got to feel, too. So far in this course we’ve been concentrating on techniques—imagery, dialogue, point of view. These are all important, but it’s no good hiding under a glittering surface. Come out. Show yourselves. Tonight I want to see you naked.”

  “Not me.” Rita gave a raucous chuckle.

  “Yes, all of you.” Jack looked at his watch. There was an hour left of the three-hour session. He wanted to put a lid on Nathan’s aggression before it got out of hand. “Okay. Exercise time.”

  The class groaned.

  “I want you to spend the next forty minutes writing a scene that moves me.”

  Nathan folded his arms. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “ ‘You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club’: Jack London. Anyone failing to attempt this assignment will be graded accordingly.” Jack looked carefully around the circle of faces. “They certainly won’t get an A.”

  “I can’t do it!” Carlos’s voice was anguished. “There isn’t enough time.”

  “Try. The difference between a would-be writer and a real writer is finishing. Now: any questions?”

  After a certain amount of fuss the students settled to their task. A pleasing, concentrated stillness fell on the room. Through the high windows, streetlights glowed in the night sky. Jack looked around the high, square room with its institutional blue paint and its tickle of chalk in the nose, and contemplated his class—his twelve disciples—slouching, doodling, writing, chewing their pens, occasionally gazing hopefully at him as if he might impart the trick of turning water into wine. Jack felt his heart expand. He did like teaching. He liked the combination of pure ideas and muddled humanity. He liked the arguments and the jokes, and the intense satisfaction when a student’s comprehension opened like a flower. He didn’t want to lose this job, or the chance of others like it. He wondered which of the twelve was Judas.

  There was a rustle of paper as Rita turned over her page and raced to set down the words that spilled from her brain. Jack was amazed by the confidence of some of his students. His own desire to be a writer had been slow and stealthy. Sometimes he felt a fraud, that he couldn’t be a “real” writer because he hadn’t written obsessively from childhood. His had not been a literary household. His father read the stock-market pages; his mother had liked fat, floppy magazines with pictures of other people’s homes and other people’s clothes. But Jack had observed. As stepmothers and stepfathers came and went, and he shuttled from one home to another, he had learned to read the emotional temperature and to record it in his head. If the life he was living seemed imperfect, he fantasized a different one.

  When Jack was ten, his father had remarried. Lauren had gusted into their lives, bringing with her trunkfuls of books and the fresh, tantalizing whiff of a different world. Jack discovered that reading could be a serious, even an admired pursuit. Lauren bought him books, read aloud to him, explained new words and concepts, listened to his opinions. Jack’s relationship with her had survived the inevitable divorce some years later, and Lauren had encouraged him when he began, tentatively and in secret, to commit some of his imaginings to words. He had dedicated Big Sky to her.

  For Jack, writing was a liberation, like discovering an extra limb or a new dimension. He liked the process that went on in his head: first, the open, instinctive rush of words, then the gritty, cerebral tussle of revision. He loved the notion that a good writer could create anything he liked, and make the reader believe it.

  Except he was blocked. He remembered with a flicker of anxiety that it was this weekend that his father was flying up to New York for a series of business meetings the following week. There had been the usual two-line letter, typed by his secretary, informing Jack of this fact and stating that he would be free to see his son some time on Sunday. It irritated the hell out of Jack the way his father always assumed that Jack himself would be free. Dad didn’t rate writing as “work.” They’d had many bitter struggles, starting way back when Jack had dropped out of the school football team to concentrate on his studies. (“Hell, son, who needs to study when they’re going to inherit Madison Paper?”) At last the day had come when Jack had proudly presented his father with a copy of his book, the first fruits of his labors. His father had merely flipped through the pages and commented with a chuckle that Jack could have produced a million of these by now if he’d been working at Madison Paper. Jack was sure he’d never read it. Maybe if he got onto the bestseller list—or won
the Pulitzer!—his father would finally stop jeering.

  At the end of the session Jack collected up the students’ efforts and distributed copies of a piece for next week’s discussion. When Candace handed him her paper she surreptitiously showed him the palm of one hand, on which she had written, “See you Saturday!” with a smiley face underneath. As Jack rattled homeward on the subway, he realized that he was relieved not to have her chattering at his side, even though he was warmed by her girlish affection. Candace was a doll, but sometimes he needed to relax and think his own thoughts. Like why he couldn’t write, for example. The question became more agonized and urgent each day, but there was no one he could talk to about it. Be honest, he’d told his students. Look into your heart and write. But he couldn’t do it. Something blocked his view.

  As he emerged from the subway station, he caught the eye of a woman walking toward him—stylish, self-possessed, maybe forty-five, very attractive. As she passed, she gave him a look of cool amusement, as if to say, “Yes, I’m marvelous. Thanks for noticing. Now get lost.” Jack loved women like that. He wondered where she was going, whether she was married, what she liked to talk about. He began to compose a scene in his head: a dusky summer’s evening, two people in a restaurant, both attractive and intelligent—himself, say (a little thinner), and the mystery woman (a little younger). They would be arguing—an intellectual argument, not a domestic squabble, but with an undertow of intimacy. She would be married, or unavailable for some reason, but the reader wouldn’t know that yet. He could see the woman leaning toward him, her face beautiful and fierce, her expressive hands cutting the air as she—

  Wait. Here was the pizza place. Jack pushed the door open and sniffed appreciatively. He was starving. As he debated what to choose, his thoughts turned to Freya, wondering if she’d be in the apartment when he got back. Probably. She didn’t seem to be having much of a social life at the moment. Poor old Freya. Her attempts to find Mr. Perfect weren’t working out; they never did. No wonder she was so bad-tempered; it must be frustration. She should just dip in and out of the sexual smorgasbord, as he did.

  Suddenly Jack had a marvelous idea: why didn’t he buy Freya a pizza, too. He knew what she liked: no mushrooms, no pepperoni, double anchovies, and lots of olives—black not green. It would be a peace offering. He’d played a mean trick on her, but the Bernard thing was only a joke. She was a good sport; she’d get over it. Jack pictured his arrival at the apartment. She’d be washing her hair or watching TV; she wouldn’t have bothered to eat, so she’d be hungry, and grateful. They’d sit outside and talk. He’d tell her about Candace’s cloak-and-dagger act in class tonight, and make her laugh. It would be like old times.

  CHAPTER 15

  Freya could bear it no longer. She shifted her weight off one numbed buttock, uncrossed her legs, and recrossed them the other way. The seat beneath her let out a loud creak, and the guy in front of her twisted his head to glare. The ring through his eyebrow gave him a particularly malevolent look.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed.

  She returned her attention to the stage, where an actor dressed as a Buddhist monk had been standing in the same spotlit position for the last twenty minutes, eyes lowered, palms pressed together. So far nothing else had happened. Freya wasn’t sure whether this was very meaningful or if something had gone wrong backstage. This was off-off Broadway, after all.

  Wait, she could hear something: a low, rhythmic hum like a fridge in the night. Very gradually, body parts began to emerge from the darkness of the wings—one hand, a bare foot, a flexed elbow, a head penitently bowed. Over the next ten minutes or so they inched onstage in a series of agonized tai chi movements, eventually revealing a group of very solemn young American men and women dressed in sarongs and shifts made of drab sacking. Brett was not among them. Freya curbed her impatience; perhaps they were saving him for a special role—a naked god, for example. She had asked Brett about his part, but all he’d said, with that shy half-smile that seemed to sock her about four inches below her belly button, was, “We’re opening Tuesday night. Why don’t you come?”

  Freya’s fingers tightened on her rolled-up program as her mind drifted back to last Saturday and the image of Brett’s back view cycling ahead of her—rather fast, frankly; it had taken some effort to summon a breezy smile when he looked back at her, and find breath in her lungs to answer his shouted remarks. But there had been ample opportunity to take in the athletic, pumping legs and the broad back, with its peekaboo strip of bare flesh, flaring out from taut, slim hips. Once they were in the park he had slowed his pace and started to do tricks for her—riding no-handed, slaloming along the track with a graceful weave of his body, turning back with a grin to check that she was watching, while the wind flipped up his hair. Freya laughed and began to copy him, and soon they were playing follow-my-leader. Overtaking him, Freya lifted her feet from the pedals and stuck her legs out sideways; she flapped her elbows like a funky chicken; and for a brief, wobbly moment let go of the handlebars and stretched her arms wide with a whoop of triumph. Then it was Brett’s turn again. Passersby paused to watch them, and smiled. It was fun, flirtatious, exhilarating. She realized what she’d been missing with Michael, whom she could not imagine on a bicycle, unless equipped with a safety helmet, military-style shorts and a rucksack. By the time they stopped, breathless with laughter, they were halfway to intimacy.

  “Come on, you crazy girl. I’ll buy you an orange juice.”

  “No way. I’m buying.”

  And they’d fought about it; and that was fun, too. Once they were in the juice bar, there didn’t seem much to say. Freya liked it that way. Sitting opposite each other, he smiled at her and she smiled at him as they sucked frothy, fruity slush through straws. She discovered that he came from Denver and was one-eighth Iroquois, which explained the angled planes of his face and the slanted eyes set under straight, black eyebrows. Physically, he was the human equivalent of a T-bone steak; looking at him made her hungry. Of course, he was ridiculously young. But did age really matter? In her heart, Freya felt no older than twenty-three. It was a relief to jettison all that baggage of career and family and failed relationships to be—well, just a “crazy girl.”

  Freya blinked and refocused her vacant gaze on the stage. She really must concentrate. The humming had now been enlivened by a random warble from an unseen flutelike instrument, while the actors (pilgrims? peasants? nameless husks of humanity) separated into groups to enact slow-motion pantomimes—tilling soil, drawing water, scattering seeds. Center stage, a couple appeared to be copulating joylessly; on one side of them, a woman was making heavy weather of childbirth; on the other, a tubby man lay on the floor, arms outflung, head back—presumably dead: the cycle of life, Freya deduced. She had been to art shows like this, except the crowd was better dressed. Probably it was very good, if you were in the right mood. The audience seemed rapt. When the “dead” man suddenly sneezed, they politely ignored him.

  A slow drumbeat began. Bong. Bong. Bong. The actors stopped what they were doing—all but the monk, who was still praying—and turned their faces wonderingly upward. Was it going to rain? The drumbeat speeded, the harsh lighting turned soft and golden, and grains of rice—real rice—showered onto the stage. Oh, right: the harvest. Released from their sluggish trance, the actors began to whirl and leap and stamp in a frenzied dance, while falling rice caught the light and sparkled like golden rain. Sarongs flew and shifts twirled as the drum built up to an ecstatic crescendo. After a good five minutes of this the actors catapulted themselves offstage and into the wings, one by one, until only the monk remained, impassive under a final trickle of rice that pinged onto his pate. Freya remembered now that the play was called Grains of Truth. Aha!

  The drum stopped abruptly. In the stark silence that followed, Freya could hear the blood in her ears. The audience held its breath. Into this silence stepped Brett, dressed in a saffron-yellow loincloth and carrying a long wooden rake over one shoulder. Freya leaned forwa
rd. He walked with slow solemnity to the center of the stage, lowered his rake to the floor in a graceful curve, and began to draw the piles of fallen rice, slowly and rhythmically, into a pattern, while the unseen flute recommenced its husky drone. Brett’s head was bowed, his expression concentrated and inward. His body had been covered with gleaming makeup that emphasized every bone and muscle. Now this part of the show was very effective, Freya thought approvingly. Brett circled the stage with his rake, around and around, sweeping the rice into a pleasing spiral pattern. When at length he reached the front he straightened up and lifted the rake back onto his shoulder. There was a final bong! from the drum, then the rest of the cast emerged from the wings in a dignified procession and lined up on either side of him. It was the end.

  The small theater erupted in generous applause, surprising the actors into smiles that instantly took ten years off their age. Freya let go her program and clapped enthusiastically, sitting tall in her seat, her eyes on Brett. When he caught sight of her, he lost his composure and had to hide his face by bowing prematurely. Freya laughed aloud with delight.

  The stage emptied, the lights dimmed, the theater filled with the bustle of departure and a rising roar of chatter. Freya joined the shuffling exodus. The audience was mainly young, probably friends and rivals of the cast, with a smattering of older luvvies and professionals and a few overdressed couples whom Freya took to be parents in various stages of pride or bemusement. When she reached the foyer, she ducked into the ladies’ room to check herself out in the mirror: ripped, faded jeans teamed with an immaculate white T-shirt and minimal makeup. She had opted for the dressed-down look, one of the kids rather than the glamorous older woman. Was this right? She caught her reflection grinning at her, goofy as a teenager, and turned away, embarrassed by her own excitement. He was only a man, for God’s sake.