“Wait!” he says. “Before everyone leaves. Whose story are we doing next week?”
Carlos hands over a manuscript. “One for the crapper,” he says.
“Oh, I doubt it,” Swenson says. “Thank you, my man!”
From the corner of his eye, Swenson sees Angela stand up. Is she getting ready to leave? Was he wrong about their wordless agreement? “Angela?” His voice cracks. Carlos gives him a funny look. “Since we’re ending early, if you want to stay, we can talk about your manuscript….”
Angela says, “I was counting on it. If it’s all right with you. I was just standing up to stretch. I mean, if you want to, if you have the time. I’d hate to bother you….”
“Of course I do,” says Swenson. “That’s why I suggested it. Should we stay here and talk, or should we go to my office?” Who’s in charge here? Why is he asking her?
“Your office. I mean, it’s more comfortable there. It’s not, like, you know, a classroom. I mean, if that’s all right with you.” Angela can hardly speak.
“We’re on our way,” Swenson says. “See the rest of you guys next week.”
Swenson finds it trying to walk anywhere with a student. Conversation’s tough enough when everyone stands in one place. Forward movement creates so many chances for awkward stalls and collisions, decisions about who goes first, right or left, minicrises that make one conscious of authority and position. Does the student respectfully stand aside and usher Swenson through the doorway, or does Swenson, in loco parentis, hold the door for the kid? And is everything different depending on whether the student is male or female?
You bet it’s different if the student is female. Crossing the quad with Angela, Swenson’s acutely aware that he might walk one inch too close and someone will report them for holding hands. At least the quad’s nearly empty. Another advantage of ending class early is that they’re spared the traffic jam between classes, the saying hello to everyone just in case you happen to know them. Looking up at the high windows of granite Claymore, Thackeray, Comstock Hall, he wonders who’s looking down.
Angela says, “Doesn’t it creep you out to think about everyone watching? You could be, you know, just like walking, and, like, Lee Harvey Oswald could be drawing a bead on you. Probably some psycho you gave a crummy grade to—”
“Relax,” Swenson says. “My courses are pass-fail. Everyone passes.”
“That’s good.” Angela smiles. They’re moving much too slowly. It’s his job to set the pace. But his legs feel bizarrely wooden. Last week, waiting for Sherrie to finish at the clinic, he read an article about a woman who had a stroke preceded by this same trudging-through-water sensation. The woman was younger than Swenson.
Angela says, “That was a pretty good class.”
“Thank you,” Swenson says.
She says, “Actually, it was a miracle. Considering how Courtney’s story sucked.”
Students don’t tell teachers that another student’s story sucked. They’re supposed to show solidarity; the teacher is management, they’re labor. And the teacher has a professional (a parental) responsibility not to let students (the siblings) be nasty about each other.
“Ouch,” says Swenson.
“You know it did,” Angela says.
“Courtney will get better.” Is Angela a colleague with whom he’s discussing a student’s potential? Shouldn’t Swenson remind her what the protocol is?
He doesn’t. And now his punishment comes barreling toward them down the path. He feels like a bowling pin watching a strike roll in. But how can he call it a punishment to run into the only colleague he actually likes? Because for some reason he just doesn’t feel like seeing Magda right now.
Swenson and Magda Moynahan kiss on the cheek, warmly, decorously, as they do when they meet for lunch, though it’s not exactly natural with Angela Argo watching, but more of a performance. They may look like teachers, but they’re humans, they have friends. A swatch of Magda’s wavy black hair sticks between Swenson’s lips. Getting it loose takes some doing with both women watching.
“We’re on break,” says Magda. “I forgot some poems in my office.” Magda’s always breathless, always forgetting something, her flyaway beauty torqued by panic and distraction. The author of two well-received books of poems, she’s divorced from a more famous poet, Sean Moynahan, who has recently remarried a young female poet with a growing reputation, a pretty girl who could be Magda’s twin, minus twenty years. Swenson and Magda have lunch every few weeks and exchange Euston gossip.
“We got out early,” Swenson explains. “Angela and I are going off to have a conference about her novel.”
“Angela,” says Magda. “How are you?”
“Oh, hi! I’m fine!” says Angela, sweetly.
“Let’s have lunch, Ted,” says Magda.
“Next week?” Swenson says.
“Call me,” says Magda.
“Beautiful,” says Swenson. Everyone smiles and walks on.
“Did you take…” Swenson’s unsure how to go on. What do Magda’s students call her? “The Beginning Poetry Workshop?”
“Freshman seminar,” Angela says. “My poetry ate it.”
“I doubt it.”
“Trust me. It did. I was writing all this weird sexual stuff.”
Swenson makes a mental note to ask Magda about Angela’s poems.
“The class wasn’t so great,” says Angela. “Magda was sort of…stiff. I felt like my work made her nervous. Like on a…personal level.”
It’s one thing for Angela to trash a classmate’s story, or to be snide about Lauren Healy’s class, but it’s quite another for this twit to criticize his best—his only—friend at Euston. Swenson isn’t going to touch the question of what sexual stuff Angela wrote that made Magda nervous on a “personal level.” Besides, he has to admit that some infantile part of his pyche is pleased. You want your students to love you best….
At the entrance to Mather Hall, Swenson says, “Go on up. I’ll get my mail and be there in a minute.” He’d rather not follow her up four flights in that face-to-ass configuration. Obligingly, his mail box produces a few party-colored flyers for him to wave at Angela, who is watching from the top of the stairs. Stepping aside as he unlocks the door, she stumbles only slightly. This time, at least, she finds the chair and manages to twist her legs into the yogic contortion she seems to require for comfort. Swenson paws through his briefcase, and after a scary moment finds the orange envelope and hands it across the desk.
“I assume you got my phone message,” he says.
“I saved the message tape,” says Angela. “I played it a million times. Gosh. I can’t believe I just told you that? Can we forget I said that about replaying your message? Was I supposed to call you back? I was too embarrassed. I thought you’d think I was trying to make you say even more nice stuff about my work.”
“I didn’t expect you to call,” says Swenson. “Wasn’t that Robert Johnson on your answering machine?”
“I can’t believe you recognized him. Wasn’t he the best? Did you know he died when he was, like, sixteen? His girlfriend got jealous and poisoned him with a glass of wine?”
“I do know,” Swenson says. “Well…I don’t have much more to say beyond what I told your machine.”
“Did you find the typos?” she asks.
“Most, I guess. I marked them. I made a few marks on the page. Otherwise…just keep writing. Be careful whom you show it to. For God’s sake, don’t bring it to workshop. Don’t let anybody tell you anything. I mean no one. Not even me.”
“Oh my God,” says Angela thickly. Swenson watches, mildly horrified, as her eyes film with tears. “This makes me so happy.” She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s not just because you’re the teacher. It’s ’cause I really admire your work. Phoenix Time is like my favorite book in the universe.”
“I thought Jane Eyre was,” says Swenson.
“This is different,” Angela says. “Your book saved my
life.”
“Thank you.” Swenson doesn’t want to know why. He’s afraid he already does. When he used to give readings from Phoenix Time, listeners would come up afterward to say that his book was exactly like their lives. Their dads were crazy, too. At first he’d encouraged them to tell him their stories, he’d felt it was his duty to listen to the grisly tales of alcoholics, alimony deadbeats, emotionally distant workaholics. As if that were what he’d written. Hadn’t they read the chapter in which the boy sees his father incinerate himself on the TV evening news? Were they saying that happened to them? He learned to say, solemnly, “Thank you.” A simple thank you was enough.
But not, it seems, for Angela. “All the time I was in high school, my dad was determined to kill himself. And I didn’t know anyone else—not in my school, that’s for sure, not in middle-class nowhere New Jersey—I’d never heard of anyone who went through anything like it. After my dad finally did it, I got kind of…weird. That’s when my therapist gave me your book. I read it a million times. It made me realize that people survive stuff like that. It really helped me. It saved me. Plus it’s a great book. I mean, it’s right up there with Charlotte Brontë and Stendhal.”
“Thank you,” says Swenson. “I’m flattered.”
It’s true. Swenson feels terrific. It’s gratifying to think that his novel helped this girl. When interviewers used to ask him how he pictured his ideal reader, he said he wrote books for nervous people to take with them on airplanes. Now he thinks his answer should have been: schoolchildren in middle-class nowhere New Jersey, girls who think that theirs is the only life scarred by grief.
Angela says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away,” says Swenson.
“Did that stuff in your novel, like, really happen?”
“I thought we talked about that in class. About not asking that question—”
“This isn’t class,” says Angela.
“It isn’t,” Swenson agrees. “That’s really how my father died….My mother and I really did see it on TV. It was sort of a celebrity death. For about fifteen minutes. And that scene in the Quaker Meeting House, when the old man comes up to the kid and says his life is going to rise from the ashes of his father’s. That really happened, too.” Swenson’s said this too many times for it to qualify as a confession. In fact, it’s the prepackaged betrayal of his own painful past—lines he’d robotically delivered to interviewers when Phoenix Time came out. “You do know about Vietnam, right? And the antiwar movement?”
Angela flinches, then rolls her eyes. “Please,” she says. “I’m not retarded.”
Regretting his condescension, Swenson searches for some fresh detail that he hasn’t recycled again and again. “I’ll tell you a funny thing. It’s gotten to where I sometimes can’t remember what happened and what I made up for the novel.”
“I’d remember,” Angela says.
“You’re still young. What about the stuff in your novel? How much of that is true?”
Angela recoils. “Oh, man.”
Her discomfort is contagious. But would someone tell him why that question was perfectly fine for her to ask him, but a violation—prying—when he turned it around?
“Of course not,” Angela says. “I just made it up. I mean…well, I did have this friend who hatched eggs for her science project. But I invented the rest.”
“Well, that’s good,” says Swenson.
“So, fine…I was just wondering if there was anything you think I should do to fix those pages I gave you.”
Hasn’t he just told her not to ask for advice? “Let’s see it again.” Angela hands back the manuscript, and he skims through it. It really is good. He was right about that. If only its author weren’t quite so draining.
“This last sentence,” he says. “You could lose it, and the piece would be stronger. You’ve made all that clear already.”
“Which sentence?” Angela scoots her chair forward so their foreheads are practically touching over the desk.
“This one.” Swenson reads: “‘I had a gigantic crush on my high school music teacher, and I spent every minute, outside of his class, thinking about him.’ We know that from the previous sentence. You could end the chapter with: ‘The other half was wondering what Mr. Reynaud would say if I got to tell him about this tomorrow after orchestra practice.’”
Swenson finally gets it. How could he have read the manuscript—twice—and somehow never noticed that it’s about a student with a crush on her teacher? Why? Because he didn’t want to know. This conference has been exhausting enough without his having to deal with that.
“When did you start writing this…novel?”
“Early last summer. I was staying with my mom again and having a nervous breakdown.” Angela takes a pen out of her backpack and draws a line through the final sentence, looping jauntily at the end, with a pig’s-tail curl. “Anything else?”
“No,” says Swenson. “That’ll do it.”
“Can I give you another few pages?” She’s already got out a fresh orange envelope and is handing it to Swenson.
“Thanks,” he says. “We’ll talk about it next week after class? Like this…again?”
“Cool,” says Angela. “See you then. Have fun!”
Leaving, she slams the door by accident and calls from the other side, “Oh, man, sorry! Thanks. See you!” Swenson listens to her footsteps running down the stairs. Then he takes out her manuscript and reads the opening paragraph.
Mr. Reynaud said, “A little-known fact about eggs. During the equinox and solstice you can balance an egg on its end.” This information struck me as more meaningful than anything I was learning about incubation and hatching. Everything Mr. Reynaud said soared above our high school class to something as large as the universe, the equinox and the solstice.
Swenson counts four pages—all he’ll see this week. He reads slower, as he does when he’s getting near the end of a book he likes. What the hell’s going on here? This is a student novel. He reaches for the phone and dials.
A young man with a clipped British accent says, “Len Currie’s line. May I help you?”
“Is Len there?”
“He’s in a meeting,” says the young Brit. “May I take a message?”
“I’ll try later.” Swenson hangs up. What exactly was he planning to say to Len? He can thank his lucky stars that the assistant blew him off.
Well, that’s enough for one day. Swenson’s earned a rest. Sherrie’s waiting at the clinic. It’s time to pick up his wife.
Dinner’s a celebration. Of sorts. Sherrie’s car’s been fixed. Swenson’s attention drifts while she explains what the problem was. The garage only charged them—he can focus on that—half as much as they’d feared. So that’s what they’re celebrating: painless car repair. Tonight, all over America, writers are toasting works of genius, six-figure advances, successes and romances, new friendships and BMWs. While Swenson, on his desert island, clinks glasses with his wife because the Civic only needed a two-hundred-dollar alternator.
What’s so bad about that? They’re drinking a nice Montepulciano, tied with a grapevine twig that’s traveled all the way from Abruzzo to amuse them in Vermont. They’re eating chicken with garlic, white wine, and fennel fresh from Sherrie’s garden. In the salad are the last tomatoes, ripened on the windowsill, because Swenson has the good luck to be married to a woman who can work all day at a clinic and still have enough consciousness about the small pleasures of daily life to leave the tomatoes on the sill—just to make his salad. Earlier, when Sherrie was cooking, Swenson came up behind her, pressed his hips against hers, and she’d arched her back against him…. Not bad for forty-seven years old, twenty-one years of marriage. Good wine, good food, dinner in a state of mild arousal. Swenson’s not a lunatic. The world is a vale of tears. He’s got nothing to complain about. Nor is he complaining. Exactly.
Sherrie gazes out toward her garden, though it’s already too dark to see. No doubt she’s thinking of
all the things that need to be done before winter. But what about Swenson? Hello, I’m over here, a few steps higher up the food chain than some plants that will survive or not, regardless of what Sherrie does.
After a while she says, “You know what, Ted? I feel weird sitting here eating fennel when the rest of the fennel patch can watch us through the window.”
For a few seconds Swenson’s charmed. Then he thinks, She’s making sure I remember she grew the goddamn fennel.
He says, “Relax. Nothing can see in. If the vegetables were watching.”
“Jo-oke,” trills Sherrie. “Sorry.”
“The fennel’s great,” says Swenson.
Sherrie throws her whole self into mopping up sauce with bread. Swenson loves to watch her eat. But tonight he makes the mistake of glancing past her, at the wall. On top of the flowered wallpaper that was here when they moved in, with its spreading fissures and sugary brown blotches, Sherrie’s hung a row of holy pictures that she inherited from a great aunt. She’d put them up ironically, but they’ve stayed up in earnest, clasping their hands, some in ecstasy, some in torment, one crucified upside down.
Swenson thinks of Jonathan Edwards looming over the dean’s head. Why does religion make people want to put scary images on the walls? So they’ll know what they’re doing in church, what they’re putting in time to avoid. Give him the old Quaker Meeting House, nothing on the walls, nothing terribly frightening unless you were Swenson’s father, who had the scary pictures inside of him, and was encouraged by his religion to spend an hour every Sunday touring his inner chamber of horrors. One morning after Meeting, when Swenson was twelve, his father took him out for breakfast at the Malden Diner and calmly explained that he’d come to believe that everything wrong with the world was his personal fault. As he said this, Swenson’s skinny father ate three consecutive full breakfasts. It wasn’t very long after that he set himself on fire on the State House steps.
Sherrie wheels around, then turns back. “Christ, Ted, the way you were looking at that wall, I thought one of those saints had started weeping.”
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