Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  “Well, I had my qualms about you dating a writer,” she said, doctoring her coffee with a third creamer. “I don’t know what I’d do if Jake was. We’d kill each other out of sheer competition. And at least you have time to focus on your writing now.” She perked up, remembering: “Did you get any news from Exatrope?”

  “Rejected.”

  “What? But your style is perfect for them.”The sincerity of her surprise at this news endeared me to her forever. “Amy, this is not your week.”

  Everett said, “I’m beginning to think it’s not her decade.”

  Everett had agreed to be my date for the poetry reading that night so I would be with company if Adam showed. The reading was held in the upstairs galleries of the Fuhler Art Building. As a member of the committee that had instituted the reading, I was obliged to attend. Three student performances were to be given simultaneously in three different galleries, the idea being that the audience changed rooms instead of the poets taking turns. I supposed it was meant to be interactive; mostly it reminded me of channel surfing.

  “I can’t stand it,” Everett said.

  We were sitting on folding chairs in gallery two. Fifteen rows up, a tall man with panty hose over his face was reading a sonnet. Behind him, a video montage of war headlines flashed on a projector screen. When it became apparent that the ten-minute recitation was only prelude to a second collection of poems, Everett began to fidget. He preferred rhythm, lyricism. These kinds of readings provoked him to panic, a minor detail I wished I’d remembered before demanding he come with me.

  “Can we leave?”

  “We can’t leave while he’s performing,” I whispered.

  Over our own poet, we heard three others; the walls separating the galleries did not reach all the way to the ceiling.

  “I want to leave,” he whispered back. His voice was petulant, like a child’s.

  “We’ll wait until he’s done.”

  He groaned under his breath, bent over, and started breathing into the program he’d folded into a tube. I noticed he was missing a button on his right cuff. He was typically dressed: old jeans and a white-collared shirt under a tweed jacket. At thirty-two he was completely bald up top. His glasses were horn-rimmed, his one stylish ornamentation. His intelligence eclipsed his social skills. Our friendship still surprised me.

  When the panty hose performance was over, the emcee returned to the microphone. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, please give a warm welcome to Jason Burkie.”

  “It’s one of your students,” Everett said unnecessarily.

  Jason held the microphone, still in its stand, right against his lips. “I’m Jason Burkie,” he said. “Can you all hear me?”

  He held his poems up to his eyes, then paused. He spotted me over the rim of his paper. “This goes out to Ms. Gallagher, bestlooking English teacher in Copenhagen.”

  There was a ripple of laughter. People turned in their seats searching the room. A few applauded, and one wolf-whistled. I nodded, waved tentatively, and slid down in my chair.

  Jason was grinning. “All right!” He punched the air. “Power to the English teachers.”

  “He’s a total moron,” Everett said. “Do you encourage this kind of Neanderthal stupidity in your classroom?”

  Jason read his work with unbridled pride. It was evident that he considered his performance superior to those that had preceded his.

  Everett nudged me halfway through the fifth poem. “Do you know that guy?” He nodded his head toward the right side of the room.

  I turned slowly to follow Everett’s gaze. A tall man stood against the far wall, his arms folded across his chest. Our eyes met. Immediately he looked away.

  “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Well, he’s been staring at you.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

  “Um, yes, well, the performance is up there, and his eyes were here.”

  “Everett, honestly, can you just pay attention for five seconds.”

  I glanced back, but the stranger had disappeared.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Everett as soon as Jason finished.

  “Thank you.”

  We slinked off into the adjoining gallery to listen to a freckled freshman recite her haikus about dirty laundry and a cat named Fiasco. When the punishment was over, we stationed ourselves at the food table to eat Mini Gherkins and Ritz crackers. To my combined relief and disappointment, Adam never showed. It was unfortunate that he couldn’t be there to see how well I was doing without him.

  Everett poured us each a plastic cup of wine, a modest portion for me, a generous portion for himself. Everett thought better when he had something to sip—if not wine then coffee, if not coffee a cigarette. His graying teeth bore proof of this abuse.

  “All I’ve had to eat since yesterday is a severely deficient powdered donut,” Everett said. “And I have to say this spread is a decided disappointment.”

  “Everett,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  He leaned over the table to pick at the platter of chocolatedipped strawberries. “I’m all the proverbial ear, my dear.”

  “Would you write if no one listened?”

  “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “Should we keep producing work if no one ever reads what we write? If I never publish, should I just give up?”

  He frowned, licking melted chocolate from his finger. “You’re suggesting the worth of your work is contingent upon its readership.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “If so, we’re all screwed, honey.” He patted me on the back and drained his cup. “Take my life as an example,” he said. “Let’s say, hypothetically, I write a groundbreaking essay on a previously overlooked line of stage direction given in Shakespeare’s Othello. My work will be printed in Shakespeare Quarterly, where all of fifty academics will dissect it, gleaning from its overwrought prose some halfway singular thought to inspire their own overdue articles. Or worse, they’ll photocopy the essay and assign it to undergrads as homework.” He widened his eyes and dropped his jaw in mock terror.

  “But you’d still be entering a public dialogue,” I countered. “And you wouldn’t have that without being published.”

  “It’s disconcerting for me to hear you say dialogue. It’s like when you say text. I feel as though we’ve tainted you.” He examined a cheese cube. “I think these have jalapeños.”

  He held it up to my lips. I took a bite from the corner.

  “No.” I said. “It’s fine.”

  While we were standing at the food buffet, I noticed the man who had been watching us. He stood in the back of the gallery, arms crossed, talking to Mrs. Haverson, newly appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences. He was dressed in black and wore rings on both hands. The way he pulled his hair from his face and twisted a rubber band around the ponytail was almost effeminate—it was certainly an overly casual gesture for someone talking to the dean. Watching him, I felt something different than attraction. I felt curiosity.

  “You’re being awfully quiet,” Everett said. “Did I upset you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just thinking.”

  To my surprise, Zoë appeared beside the stranger. I felt a twinge of annoyance; had she told me she’d changed her mind about coming, I would not have dragged Everett along.

  “No more talk of publishing and does it matter,” Everett declared, shoving a plastic plate into my hands. “It will throw us into existential crisis. I say let’s eat cheese and be merry.”

  Zoë was whispering something in the man’s ear. I watched them, suspiciously; Zoë was a decided flirt, but she’d kept herself more or less in check since Michael had come along.

  The man scanned the room until his eyes fixed on me. He smiled and waved. Idiotically, I lifted my palm in a brief hello. I sensed I knew him, but couldn’t remember his name.

  Theoretically—ethically—teachers should be like pare
nts, parceling out equal care for all their kids without favoritism. But truth be told, I loved my creative writers best. They came to class in their pajamas and didn’t e-mail me much. On a particularly good day, they even raised their hands to talk in class.

  Friday the students shuffled into class sullen and pale. We had reached the point in the semester where the novelty of being back on campus had worn off and the promise of Christmas break was still too far away to incite hope.

  “The actual act of writing is a very private thing.” I paced the front of the room, hoping the movement would wake them up. “But the private act of writing is only half the life of a story or a book. Its other half is the life it lives for its audience.” On the board I wrote imaginary audience. “Who is it you see in your mind when you sit down to write?” I asked. “What faces—what crowds—do you write for?”

  We discussed the many audiences we saw in our minds when we wrote: editors in offices in great cities, professors with their red pens, peer reviewers, family, friends.

  “Sometimes these people can hinder our voice,” I said. “How many times when you are writing do you hold back for fear of what your mom would say if she read it? Or for fear of what a professor will say about your style? In today’s reading, Lamott points out that you have to free your mind from the burden of that critical audience. To write what it is you need to write.”

  Lillian Finelley, a varsity cheerleader whom I suspected of taking the class for an easy A, raised her hand. “Who’s our audience then?”

  “Yourself. God. Someone kind and forgiving.”

  “But don’t authors write for specific audiences?” Mary Beth asked. She planned to be a poet. It was clear that she resented having to agree with Lillian, but she kept on. “I mean, if you write for children you write for children, not for yourself. Or if you write romance, you write for a certain public.”

  “Of course we all write to audiences,” I agreed. “And, yes, any given genre is compelled to meet its audience’s expectations. But what I’m saying is maybe we get so busy trying to please a target audience that we miss the very story we have worth telling.”

  They were listening intently, but were skeptical.

  “How about this,” I said, regrouping. “Would you keep writing even if no one read your work?”

  I studied each face in turn. One offered a sympathetic smile, another frowned to prove he was thinking. Few met my gaze. Lonnie Weis stared, but Lonnie always stared. Mostly at my breasts.

  “I wouldn’t.” This from Jason Burkie, who only talked if he could be antagonistic.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “What’s the use?”

  His shrug tipped the debate. One after another, the students agreed with him.

  “I think the whole point of writing is to be heard,” said Lillian the cheerleader. “Like you write so you can have a voice in the world. You know, to protest evil and things.”

  Another student: “What good is it if you’re just listening to yourself?”

  And another: “Who cares about voice? If you want to entertain people you have to keep their expectations in mind.”

  On and on it went. One reason after another why an author should burn her pages and step off a ledge if unsuccessful at publication.

  “But don’t we write for more than just entertainment?” I asked. “What about writing for therapy? And doesn’t a person who has been given the passion to make art have an obligation to use that talent no matter what attention he or she receives?”

  Convinced I was now playing the devil’s advocate, and that by opposing me they were doing precisely what I wanted them to do, they completely denounced any such notion. A writer should strive to be read. Writing that was not read was wasted paper. They rarely got this excited, but I didn’t want to hear any more. I said it was Friday and we all needed a break: They were free to go early.

  As they shuffled out of the classroom, I erased the day’s notes from the board. It seemed a monumental task.

  I turned to find Lonnie waiting at the front of the room.

  “Lonnie! I didn’t know you were standing there.”

  “I wanted to turn in my story.”

  “You know it isn’t due for two weeks,” I said.

  His eyes, so intent upon me in class, were now fixed on the floor. “Well, you know, it was getting to me up here. I have deadlines for the paper, and I can only have one story in my head at a time.”

  Lonnie was the assistant editor for the Copenhagen Campus Chronicler, which said all I needed to know about the quality of that publication.

  “I just need to let this one go,” he explained.

  I accepted the manuscript from his badly chapped hands. His mouth was similarly red and chafed above the lip. During class he often ran cherry ChapStick over both his lips and his raw knuckles. He wore windbreakers everyday and never took them off. Altogether, his life seemed one constant battle against a secret gale.

  “I’ll try to read it over on the weekend.”

  “You don’t have to,” he replied, crossing his arms. He glanced up, blushed, looked back down. “I mean if you want to, but whenever is fine with me.”

  I said okay again, and he left the room with a hasty good-bye.

  My feet throbbed. I sat down in one of the student’s desks, having lost the motivation to collect my notes and the day’s papers. Curious, I flipped to the first page of Lonnie’s story:

  Rinaldi: A Story of Love and of Rage

  Beneath a blistering fester of Remus’s third sun the weakened Rinaldi was pacing his way fastly towards the tower. He was thinking one thing: of Roseanne and her hair like a flowing waterfall of ember flame… .

  I cradled my forehead in my hands. I felt a headache coming on.

  4

  Zoë’s latest project was Eli Morretti, the boyfriend of an old college roommate. He lived in Cincinnati where he’d been working as assistant curator for Juxtapose Gallery. Though he never came to see Zoë during his visits to campus where his girlfriend, Jillian, was still a student, Zoë frequently drove downtown to Cincinnati to support one or the other of the many exhibitions he was particularly passionate about. These trips stopped in September when Juxtapose unexpectedly closed its doors, leaving the city without its more adventurous gallery and leaving Eli now three months out of work. This misfortune had been further followed by pestilence: In a matter of weeks his apartment had been overrun with an infestation of bedbugs. Just as quickly, Eli moved from an object of Zoë’s affection to a potential recipient of her militant charity. How we should help him had become a frequent topic of conversation.

  There were many aspects of the Christian faith that Zoë found troubling but the injunction to love your neighbor appealed to her humanitarian sympathies. When she opened our apartment to someone she was more than hospitable, she was downright altruistic. She didn’t keep anything she could find a way to give or share. She had friends over for dinner and sent them out the door with the leftovers and the pots we’d cooked them in. She let people raid her closet for new outfits to wear to parties and never asked to have the clothes back. She gave her books away when she’d read them.

  Having taken the long view on material objects and having found them rather meaningless, she was always baffled when I harped about condensation rings on the coffee table or missing DVDs. They were only things after all. What was mine was hers and what was hers was for everyone else to use. Whenever one of her friends had a crisis, something of mine invariably went missing.

  She relayed the sordid tale of Eli’s bedbug plague while I was writing lesson plans, a project that required my full attention and left me ill-equipped for conversation much less decision-making. She wanted to know if he could stay at our place. He was a good guy, a Christian, very fun to be with, wouldn’t know how to be an intrusion if he tried, and besides it would only be for a few days, maybe a week—maybe over Christmas break to take care of the apartment for us—just until he could
find a new place.

  Unwittingly, I said I didn’t mind.

  It was Saturday and almost the end of the semester. My To Must Do list had grown exponentially since Monday. I forced myself out of bed at six and headed straight for The Brewery, a pile of student essays in hand.

  The owner, Jimmy Barnes, had erected the popular shop from an old bar. The Brewery was so successful he had quickly made enough to open the T-shirt press in the adjoining building. Over the next decade, he systematically bought and renovated an entire section of the downtown strip. He did not own a car and preferred to walk the routes between his many businesses, leaning on the cane that counterbalanced the burden of his three hundred and fifty pounds. On campus he was as familiar and beloved a caricature as a school mascot.

  Despite the cheerful sunlight outside, the shop was dim, lowhanging Tiffany lamps casting cones of light on bowed, working heads. The bar could seat fifteen at a time. Jimmy had kept all the beer dispensers for decorative purposes, replacing the Corona and Bud Light labels with stickers for coffee liqueur flavors. The floors were finished with large black and white checkered tiles on which red and flower-print carpets lay here and there. Paintings from student artists decorated the walls, and the rich aroma of freshly ground coffee beans hung dense in the air.

  I ordered a black coffee and took a table in the far corner. I had promised myself I would plow through the last of the composition essays, but when I opened my folder I found Lonnie Weis’s story on top. I couldn’t resist.

  Rinaldi was an ambassador of the human race sent to negotiate peace with the enemy force of Zorgath. Roseanne was a daughter of a Zorgath lord and loved Rinaldi in return. Fortunately, the consummation of their love was made possible by her humanoid form.