The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  It was hard work digging out the ice cream, and when he jammed in his spoon to extract a piece, the ice cream flew out and landed on the floor. He got down to pick it up. The floor was so clean that he called out “five-second rule!” and popped the chunk into his mouth. He was still on his hands and knees when he heard the doorbell ring. He hadn’t heard a car drive up the driveway, and was surprised. He raced for the door, grabbing it open so whoever was ringing wouldn’t hit the doorbell again. The outside light wasn’t on. He could barely make out the woman standing there. He opened the door wider, illuminating the front entrance.

  “Kim!” he exclaimed. She was wearing a dark sweatshirt, the hood circling her face. She had come out of nowhere, a fantasy suddenly turned actual. He had not seen her for months, not since the Christmas party Adam had brought her to, but he thought about her all the time—barely daring to fantasize doing more with her than just hang out, talk. He kept trying to capture her in his drawings, but he’d never been able to get her quite right.

  “I want to talk to Adam,” she said.

  “What?” asked Paul.

  Kim pulled the hood back off her head, and her long white-blond hair burst out, like an exploding dandelion.

  “Adam. He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “No,” said Paul, trying to keep his voice low. His father would give him hell if Gillian were disturbed. “Why would he be here?”

  “I thought he might be,” said Kim. She looked as if she were going to cry.

  “Well, he isn’t,” said Paul.

  “You’re not just lying to me?” asked Kim.

  “No. I wouldn’t lie to you,” said Paul. “Where’s your car?” he asked. He didn’t see anything there in the driveway.

  “I parked out on the road,” said Kim. “I walked up the driveway.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Paul.

  Kim pulled in her bottom lip and shut her eyes. She’d obviously been crying for a while. Either that or she had a cold.

  “Come on in,” said Paul. “But we’ve got to go downstairs. We can’t talk here.”

  He closed the door behind Kim and led the way down to his room. For a second he saw it through her eyes: the bed strewn with papers and clothes, the dirty plates and cutlery stacked precariously on the desk. She was definitely crying now. Little, burpy sobs. He closed the door behind them and pushed some clothes off a chair so she’d have a place to sit down. He sat on the bed across from her.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Kim shook her head.

  “Can I get you something?” asked Paul. “Something to drink or eat? I could run upstairs to the kitchen and be back in a minute.”

  Kim was still looking down at her lap.

  “Hey, you can talk to me,” said Paul. “I mean, I’d like to help you, if I could.”

  “Adam broke up with me,” said Kim. She looked up at him now.

  The idea that anyone who had achieved the acquisition of someone as unattainable as Kim as a girlfriend would ditch her seemed so preposterous to Paul that it took him a moment to say anything. He had never had a girl sitting in his room before. Never had a girl in his room, with the door shut, just the two of them. And this was Kim! At the Christmas party, when he’d shown her around the house and brought her down here, they’d stood briefly at the door and she’d looked in. “Cool,” she’d said, but he had guessed she just said that to be nice. Standing close beside her then, he’d seen the edge of her white bra strap, the metal clasp that adjusted its length. The skin over her collarbone was pulled tight, and he would have given anything then to be able to touch her there, touch her with just a single finger.

  “Why would he do that?” asked Paul.

  “He’s been seeing someone else,” said Kim. “He told me he was in love with her.”

  “He’s nuts,” said Paul. “But why did you come here?”

  “I just found out who it was. I thought Adam might be over here. I wanted to tell him how sick I thought it all was.” She was animated now. The blood under her skin had inundated her face unevenly, continents of red on the white skin. Still, she was beautiful. God, she was beautiful!

  “But why would he be here?” asked Paul again. He felt there was some essential thing that he must have missed.

  “Because,” Kim said, “it’s Gillian.”

  “Jesus,” said Paul. It was quite wonderful, this news, something he would never have imagined. If his father found out, that would finish things between him and Gillian, or would it? Or did his father already know? It seemed suddenly unbearably sad that his father might love Gillian so much he was willing to put up with anything she did, even something like this.

  “He told you that?”

  “No,” said Kim. “He wouldn’t tell me who it was. I would never have guessed her—I mean, she’s old.”

  “Then how did you find out?”

  “I couldn’t stand it any longer. Not knowing. I still had the key to his apartment. I went over there when he was at work. He leaves his laptop at home. I went through his files. He writes about everything.”

  Paul remembered now that Kim was a computer person. She’d be able to access Adam’s stuff without much trouble.

  “But why would you think he’d be over here now?”

  “I was going to catch him after work in the parking lot, when he came out. But he didn’t come out. This guy I know who works in his office told me he’d said he was leaving early to meet with someone in his writing group.”

  “It must have been someone else,” said Paul. “Gillian’s here, upstairs. Do you want to say something to her?”

  “Oh no!” Kim looked frightened. “I just want to find Adam,” she said. “I want to tell him what I think of him.”

  “I could get you something to eat first,” said Paul. “There’s some more pizza.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. She stood up. “Look, I’ve got to go.” She pulled her sweatshirt down on her hips and pulled the hood up over her head. Her hair was pushed forward and stuck out on both sides. Paul wanted to tuck it back in, smooth it against her head. “This whole thing was pretty stupid,” she said. “Pretty pointless.”

  There was no way he could get her to stay longer. He could see that.

  “You can leave from down here,” said Paul. He pointed to the sliding glass doors that went straight outside.

  “Okay,” she said. He opened the slider and stepped outside with her.

  “Want me to walk to your car with you? It’s a long way out to the road,” he said. He was wearing only a T-shirt and the night was cold, but he didn’t consider going back into his room to grab something warmer.

  “No, that’s okay,” she said. She turned towards him now. “Thanks, though,” she said. “And thanks for listening to me.”

  “Sure,” he said. He reached to touch her. The tips of three fingers brushed the sleeve of her sweatshirt. He could have held them there forever.

  “Bye,” she said, and she set off, cutting down the hillside to the curving driveway. He could barely make her out in the darkness, with her black hood up. The black absorbed the black, absorbed her. Made it as if she had never come.

  THE GARAGE WAS ON THE FAR SIDE of the house, so Paul had not heard the garage door open. And he did not hear the engine until Gillian’s pickup truck came around the side of the house. Gillian had not turned the headlights on. It took Paul a second to note this. He figured Gillian must have guessed that Jerry had asked Paul to call him if she left, so she was trying to drive off without being detected.

  Paul had a split-second vision of Kim, invisible in the dark driveway. He took it all in, in an instant; factored in speed and time and consequence. His body acted instinctively. He flew down the hillside, crying out Kim’s name. He plunged out into the driveway, just below the curve, where no driver would have been able to see him, even if they had had their headlights on, and even if they had been able to see him, would not have been able to stop in time.

  Gillian


  THERE WAS NO TIME TO TAKE THE BACK ROADS NOW. Gillian pulled onto the highway without glancing in her rearview mirror, without giving herself a chance to think. Semitrailers thundered around her, and she sped along, caught in their wake. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel, and, although her fingers were icy, the steering wheel was slick with sweat. She had no idea how fast she was driving—certainly faster than she had ever driven before—and only when she looked down and saw that the orange needle was pointing straight up, noon on a clock face, did she realize that she was going well over eighty. I can’t do this, she thought, I can’t do this. But there was nothing else she could do. Trapped in a center lane with traffic on either flank, she was a small fish in a school of fish in a rushing stream. She dared herself to shut her eyes, and then, she shut them. She drove straight ahead, sightless, for a minute—was it a full minute?—her hands on either side of the steering wheel, her foot steady on the accelerator. She forced herself to open her eyes, and she bit on the inside of her mouth, hard enough to make it bleed, so she could steady herself with the pain.

  At last she reached the Cape Cod Canal. A sign on the side of the Bourne Bridge read “Desperate? Call the Samaritans.” It was ironic that she’d hardly noticed it in the past, yet it seemed prominently displayed right now. Surely it was intended for people who were walking across the bridge, not driving, or did it include everyone? It seemed unlikely there was a sufficiency of desperation among travelers to the Cape to warrant such a sign. Desperate, she thought, no doubt from the Latin desperare, “to despair.” She played with the word in her head, worked to dull its sting.

  When she had crossed over the canal and headed out on Route 6, she finally eased her grip on the steering wheel and allowed herself to breathe. Her breath came in quick gasps at first, like the breath of someone who had nearly drowned, and then, finally, it slowed.

  It must have been a deer she hit. What else could it have been? It was not a tree branch or a rock—she was sure of that—it was something softer, something alive that had darted out in front of her. But she could not stop the truck and get out to look; she could not bear to see a creature injured, possibly even killed. Surely there was nothing she could have done to help it. She was desperate to get away from the house, and even if there had been something she might have done, she could not have stopped. She could not wait around for Jerry. And she did not want Jerry with her at all. She did not want his kindness, his sympathy, his understanding. Once, early in their relationship, he’d said, “I understand how you feel” about something that had happened to her, and she had snapped at him, “No one, not even you, can understand me.” He’d never used the word again. Jerry was quick that way.

  At last she made it around the rotary in Orleans and headed north, the last segment of the journey, where her little house, Button, awaited her, where her marsh and the night air from the sea awaited her. She ticked off the towns in her mind: Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro. Beyond lay Provincetown, the end of the road, the last town before the ocean, the dead end of the Cape. Truro was safely one town farther back. A town on the way to somewhere else, a town most of the traffic on Route 6 would pass by.

  When Gillian got to the end of her dirt driveway, she parked the truck farther than usual from the house, its front end nearly buried in a thicket of blackberry bushes. She got out and closed the door behind her but did not slam it. She walked quickly to the house and did not look back at the truck. She did not want to check to see if her bumper had been dented, if there was anything there, any mark from the creature she had hit.

  Gillian had brought nothing with her except the key to her house. She could not see the lock in the dark, but she could work the key by feel alone. She leaned against the door, and it opened, forgiving. She entered her house’s embrace. The electricity had been left on from her last visit. She ran her hand along the wall beside the door and found the light switches for the small yellow outside light and the wall sconce in the front hall. She looked out towards the marsh before she shut the door. She had parked the truck at a distance from the house, but she could still see it now, a dark shape, a speck of light glinting on a curve of chrome. It was not she who had hit the deer but this dark shape, this intermediary. Intermediary, she thought. She let the word loose, and a poem began forming itself in her head. She closed the door and went back into the house, turning on lights as she walked room to room, letting the poem grow, undisciplined, in her mind as she went about her tasks: turning on the heat, removing the spread from her bed in the studio, finding a box of unopened crackers in the pantry, pouring herself a glass of sherry, getting out a pad of unlined paper from her desk, selecting a pencil with a decent point. She circled the downstairs again, this time extinguishing the lights, leaving on only the standing lamp by her armchair in the study. She curled up there and began to lay the words on the page. Intermediary: something between two other things, something that connected. Driver and animal. Person and person. Man and nature? Man and God? The fenders caressed by the blackberry leaves, pricked by the thorns. The light glinting on the edge of the chrome around the taillight, as if a match had been struck there.

  A flash of something like light. A flash of something moving. Not the white tail of the deer—not snout, or flank, but something like a limb flung up, the whiteness of a hand.

  But what she had seen—that flash—had been off to the side; it was not what she had hit. It could not be. Two deer perhaps? But even as she phrased this in her mind, a reckless thought broke through that it had not been a deer, but something else. What it was, was too terrible to imagine, and so she shoved it away. She took a sip of the sweet sherry, held it in her mouth, and pulled herself back to the poem flickering on the page in front of her.

  Intermediary: the air between the cry and the ear that heard it.

  But there hadn’t been a cry, or if there had, she had not heard it. The windows had been up, and all she’d heard was the truck’s engine. If there had been a cry, surely if there had been a cry, she would have stopped. Even if she had not wanted to, she would have stopped.

  Intermediary: a mediator, an agent of compromise. The marsh between the sea and the land. The diurnal swelling. Land becoming sea. Sea distorting land.

  When the phone rang, she moved towards it numbly. It took her a moment to recognize the voice of her lawyer, an old friend. She listened to what she was being told. She did not say anything, she just listened. She did not cry. She did not make any sound at all. When he was done, she said simply, “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here.” She hung the phone up. It did not look like it would ring again.

  It was not leaving the scene of an accident, was it, if you thought that what you’d hit was just a deer? If your headlights were not on because you needed to drive away without being spotted, that might be negligent, but it was not criminal. The law recognized the difference. People forgot to turn on their headlights all the time.

  She had lost Jerry. She was certain of that. He had given up too much for her already, accommodated too much. This was beyond even his foolish devotion. She would have to make her way without him, without his unflagging support and praise and patience. She’d done fine on her own before Jerry, and she’d do fine without him now. She’d live here, and she would never have to see Jerry again. She would not play with the possibility that he was still so in love with her that even now, with this, he could not give her up. She’d live here in Button. She would not have to return to that other house.

  She stumbled back to her chair and lifted the pad to her lap. She would write. No matter what happened, she always had her poetry to write. Her poem now would take it, turn it, so it would become the way she wanted it to be. She could change anything with her poems.

  Intermediary. The hand between the leaf, the mind that knows the leaf, its intricacies, predictable, its fierce, green will.

  It was that girl, who had seen the truck, who, it seemed, had been a witness to what happened. That girlfriend of Adam’s, wit
h her shining white-blond hair, her high forehead. Gillian remembered her name: Kim. If she hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t told, no one would have known. Gillian would be safe in Button, and whatever tragedy had happened would be far away.

  “I love your house!” Kim had said that night at Gillian’s Christmas party. “Adam, don’t you just love their house?” and she had taken Adam’s arm. She was young, so young.

  And Paul, young and foolish, had rushed out into the darkness to pull her back to safety. Gillian did not love Paul—she did not love anyone—but Paul was someone she had come quite close to loving.

  Paul! It was impossible now to wall off the thought of what had happened to him, the thought of what she had done. She worked to keep herself from imagining it, but she could not escape the images: darkness and a flash of white.

  Paul.

  Gillian squared the pad of paper on her lap. She clenched her pencil. She stared at what she had written at the top of the page: Intermediary. She did not know what more to do with it. There was nothing left about the poem. It had never failed her before, but now, she had nothing to write. The poem was nothing, just an exercise in words.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to many brilliant and generous people who were instrumental in the making of this book, including my editor, Sarah Landis; my agent, Rebecca Strauss; fellow writers Betsy Hartmann, Karen Osborn, Stefan Petruchka, Robert Redick, and, especially, Anita Shreve; my friend Elaine Lasker von Bruns; my family members Artemis Demas Roehrig, Austin Bliss, Gary Van Deurse, and, as always, Matthew Roehrig.

  My thanks to Mount Holyoke College for a faculty fellowship, to the writing groups who have nurtured me, and to my current writing circle: Barbara Diamond Goldin, Anna Kirwan, Patricia MacLachlan, Lesléa Newman, Ann Turner, Ellen Wittlinger, and Jane Yolen, who lived with this other writing circle, chapter by chapter.