The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  He looks up to find the waiter hovering over him with his food, so he folds the paper and lays it aside.

  Along with almost everybody else in Fresno, a city that seethed because the Sun had blackened its limelit moment, he watched that championship game. He viewed it in the safety of his own living room, with the curtains closed—not because he had much, if anything, to fear but because he was watching it with Maria, who’d seen trash strewn across her yard, found graffiti painted on her car, and just the week before received several death threats. She’d spent the previous couple of nights at his place, sleeping in the bed occupied until recently by Franek.

  The game started badly for UCC. They trailed by fourteen at the end of the first quarter, twenty-four at the half. The final score, 45-7, could have been a lot worse had LSU not pulled most of its starters early in the final period. “Well,” Maria said from the opposite end of the couch, “so much for a national title, huh? I guess that’s my fault too.”

  A few weeks earlier, they’d watched Nick Major stand behind a podium while flashbulbs popped and the largest press contingent he’d ever faced scribbled furiously as he admitted that the Sun’s allegations were true: he’d conducted a “brief but improper relationship” with a woman whose name he never mentioned, and a member of the police department had subjected him to blackmail. His family stood behind him. His wife looked drugged, his son seemed excited to be onstage, and his daughter’s face resembled nothing so much as a piece of raw meat. She’d clearly been crying for days. Following Major’s brief statement, the athletic director announced that because of the coach’s lapse in judgment, he would be suspended for the final two games of the regular season, contests against Air Force and San Jose State that the team stood no chance of losing. They would address the postseason, he said, at the proper time.

  Maria was still Maria. True, at the press conference, where Richard hadn’t sat next to her but kept his eye on her, she’d swallowed hard every time she’d glanced at Major’s daughter. But she’d shown no adverse effects at the arraignments of Joe and Cloris Garcia. There, she’d looked quite pleased, her vilification notwithstanding.

  After the game ended, he got up and switched off the TV. “You want another beer?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. You don’t happen to have any cigarettes, do you?”

  “Afraid not. I didn’t know you smoked anything except weed.”

  “Normally, I don’t. You wouldn’t have any of that, would you?”

  “As it so happens,” he said, “I do.”

  He went into the kitchen, opened the drawer where he kept the silverware, and removed one of the joints Franek had had the presence of mind to turn over in the airport parking lot the day he’d flown home. Richard didn’t know why he’d held on to them or why he’d hidden them in the same spot where Maria kept her own.

  He walked back into the living room and handed her the joint. She lit it and offered it to him.

  He declined. “It doesn’t agree with me.”

  “Seems like a lot of things don’t.”

  Until a couple of days ago, he hadn’t seen much of her since she’d broken her story. In the aftermath, she’d understandably stayed busy. ESPN had interviewed her several times, her photo had appeared in Sports Illustrated, and she’d been quoted in pieces that ran in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today. He’d quoted her himself, in a bland article that made no mention of his own role. She hadn’t acknowledged it either, but then, he’d asked her not to.

  She brought it up that night, though, after three or four deep drags on the joint. She still hadn’t quite disengaged, though she would because she would have to. He’d seen to that.

  “You know you’re not going to be able to keep doing this, don’t you?” she asked.

  He considered pretending that he didn’t know what “this” was. Maybe she’d choose not to spell it out, thereby saving both of them the embarrassment. On the other hand, why should she feel any embarrassment? She hadn’t done anything embarrassing.

  “I could probably keep getting by for a while,” he said.

  “You probably could. But you shouldn’t. It’s not . . .”

  “It’s not what, Maria?”

  She drew her legs up under her. He thought she was probably the last woman he’d ever make love to, if you could call what they’d done at her place making love, and maybe you could. He’d enjoyed holding her after she fell asleep, the warmth of her body against his own. The next morning, he’d stood at the foot of her bed a long time, looking at her placid face, her red hair spread out on a sky-blue pillow. Then he’d walked into the kitchen, made coffee, and prepared to wreck their chances.

  “It’s not worthy of you,” she said. “You ought to step aside and let somebody do the job right. If it had been strictly up to you, this story might not have gotten told.”

  “That’s true. And then we wouldn’t have seen Major’s wife and daughter standing up there looking gut-shot, and Cloris Garcia would still be taking care of sick children, and Jacinta Aguilera and her whole family would still be dead.”

  Before the last words were out of his mouth, he knew that for the rest of his life, however long that slog might take, he’d regret having spoken them. Things should not end the way they would now have to.

  She dropped the joint into her beer bottle, put her shoes on, stood up, and grabbed her coat. “I’m going home,” she said. “If somebody shoots me in my sleep, better call one of your younger colleagues to come up and write the story. Unless, of course, your paper will agree to ignore it.”

  Three months later, at the age of fifty-one, he took the buyout, joining the ranks of the unemployed.

  He had enough money to make it for a good while, so he hired a gardener to look after the lawn, then locked the house and drove away. Normally, he would have given the key to Bob Lyons, but both Bob and Sue were angry at him for letting Franek break Sandy’s heart. He did his best to explain, telling them that during his brother-in-law’s gall bladder operation, the surgeon had noticed lesions on his liver that turned out to be malignant, and that his son had to go home. But Bob would not be mollified. “If a kid showed up next door, broke your daughter’s heart, and then hightailed it,” he said, “you wouldn’t give a shit about the whys or wherefores.”

  When he left, he drove up the coast, with no particular destination in mind. He stopped for one night in Lincoln, Oregon, where they’d rented a cottage near the beach the year Anna started school. Then he found himself in Anacortes and took the ferry to Orcas Island. They’d stayed there for ten days in the summer of 2001. To his surprise, he could not locate the house. Things looked the same, but he knew where nothing was.

  He wandered through Idaho and Montana. In Butte, once among the most polluted towns anywhere and home to the world’s tallest slag heap, he stumbled across something that piqued his interest: the Butte Academy of Beauty Culture, Where Students Learn to Earn. He wrote a travel piece of sorts—gently mocking but not without uplift—that plumbed the incongruities. It ran in the Guardian and served as a template.

  Over the next couple of years, he drove from one small town to another, staying in motels and B&Bs, eating in diners, seldom remaining anyplace very long, returning home only occasionally and rarely for more than a week. He kept himself busy writing colorful articles. For the New Yorker, he wrote a funny one called “The Mores of Moore County” about the dry county in Tennessee where Jack Daniels is distilled. He explored new beer-canning technologies, the use of skimmers in ATMs, the disappearance of independently owned truck stops, Elvis’s eating habits. For Boston Magazine, he wrote about a fretted instrument shop in his hometown where the owner wore earplugs to muffle the sounds produced by inept guitarists.

  It was on a trip to Massachusetts, one of several he made to visit his father before his death, that his old BU classmate Alex Veranakis called and invited him out for a drink. They met in a bar in
Framingham, about halfway between his dad’s place on the North Shore and Alex’s home in Worcester. Each of them could barely recognize the other. Alex, who’d been darkly handsome in college, was bald and rotund, his vast belly making it impossible to tell if he wore a belt or not. Richard still had plenty of hair, but he weighed at least thirty pounds less than he had in school.

  The conversation began, as he’d feared it might, with a question about Maria. Did Richard know she’d gotten married? He did, though he pretended not to. By that time, she’d been at the Post for eighteen months, and he’d read most if not all of her articles. He knew where she lived, the name of her husband.

  “She’s done all right, hasn’t she?” Alex said.

  “She’s done better than all right.”

  “She told me a little bit about her time out there.”

  “Yeah. Well . . .”

  “I’m not trying to butt in. But I know she’d be happy to hear from you if you ever wanted to get in touch. She gives you a lot of credit. That story about the football coach really made her career take off, and she says you handed it to her.”

  “That’s not exactly right.”

  Alex stirred his drink. He’d ordered something called a Bourbon Daisy. “It’s not exactly what I wanted to talk to you about either.” He told Richard that, like him, he was quitting the newspaper business. Any day now, the Morning Journal would be sold, he said, and he didn’t intend to stick around waiting to be let go. He asked if Richard had ever heard of Aarden College.

  He had, but he didn’t know precisely where it was, just that it was one of those slightly odd schools that artsy misfits used to think of attending back in the late ’70s. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “Well, they don’t have anything resembling a journalism department. They don’t have an English department either, or a drama department. They’ve got something called the Institute of Narrative Arts, which packs all kinds of ‘storytelling’ under the same colorful umbrella. They once offered a course called ‘Transgressive Writing’ that wasn’t a thing in the world but porn. The school’s got three thousand students, and seven hundred of them major in Narration. I shit you not—that’s what it’ll say on their diplomas. You ever heard of anything like that?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “Me either.” He said that the director of the Institute had just retired and that he’d been hired to replace her. “The school’s got a new president who wants to move in a little more practical direction, so rather than an academic, the board chose me. I’m going to revamp their journalism and mass comm offerings. We’ll have courses in media entrepreneurship, blogging, fashion writing, foody writing, music writing, and so on. You see where this is going, right?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Sure, you’re sure. If I can turn you into a stone, I can kill a lot of birds. Since you started this magazine stuff, you’ve become versatile. It’s pretty damn impressive, the way you’ve adapted.”

  The idea that anyone would think he’d adapted to anything was so much at odds with how he saw himself that he downed his Bushmills and signaled for a second. When he recovered the power of speech, he said, “Alex, I don’t even have a graduate degree.”

  Alex laughed. “Richard, they’ve got people teaching at this school who probably don’t even have a high school degree. But here’s the thing: most of them are plenty damn accomplished. Journalism and mass comm are wrecks right now, but they’ve got a poet who won the National Book Award and a social historian who was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Most of the students score high enough to go to Ivy League schools if they wanted, but they don’t want to, bless their iconoclastic little hearts. I met a bunch of them when I went there for my interview, and to my surprise, I fucking loved them. There’s plenty to be said for hanging around young people when you start to get old.”

  He said the school didn’t operate on the traditional tenure model. It gave faculty four-year contracts, perpetually renewable pending satisfactory performance. The pay wasn’t bad, and you got full health and dental coverage as well as membership in a gym. “It also offers tuition to the children of faculty, but of course, that wouldn’t pertain in your case. You’d have to fill out an application, but they’ve given me carte blanche to hire whoever the hell I want to. You wouldn’t even need to interview. So what do you say, Richard? Interested?”

  He promised to think it over, but initially the idea held scant appeal. He ranked academics somewhere slightly below copy editors and just above the extended news desks that had sprung up in the digital era to rewrite reporters’ articles off and on all day.

  That night, he woke at three a.m. to the smell of frying fish. His father followed nothing even resembling a schedule. It had probably been that way ever since he was widowed. When he got hungry, he ate. When he got tired, he went to bed, though how much he slept was open to question. All his friends were dead. The only person he saw on a regular basis was the woman who brought him groceries each Friday.

  This was the logical end, Richard knew, of the way he himself had been living. Unlike his dad, he had some choice in the matter. He could keep driving around the country, doing freelance work, until his eyesight grew so poor he couldn’t drive anymore, or the publications he sold his articles to went out of business, or taste changed even more than it already had, or he grew more and more confused so that he didn’t know if it was three a.m. or three p.m. and didn’t care either. Or he could accept the offer and see if he couldn’t put his time to fruitful use. He still knew a few things that might be worth passing on to younger writers, and they might show him a thing or two themselves.

  The next morning, he called Alex and told him he wanted the job. A couple of days later, he began the long drive across country, making the trip west for the final time.

  The house sold the first day it was on the market. Rather than hold a yard sale, he boxed up a few of Anna’s things and a few of Julia’s, carried them to UPS, and shipped them to Aarden College, then called the Salvation Army to come get the rest. When it was otherwise empty, he loaded his own stuff, locked the door, and got in the car. He sat in the driveway for a couple of minutes, staring at the house. It hadn’t been home for years. It would never be home again. He backed out and drove away, reaching Grand Junction, Colorado, before he finally stopped.

  He stayed with the Veranakises while he searched for a place. Since he rose earlier than Alex, he ate breakfast with his wife those first few mornings, and because she was a good conversationalist, he started to look forward to it. But he soon found an old nineteenth-century townhouse near the rail station for a reasonable rent, and then he was on his own once again.

  The ease with which he adapted to life as a college instructor came as a pleasant surprise. From the beginning, he felt comfortable in the classroom. The classes were small, limited to twelve students, and they were always conducted around seminar tables. No blackboards, no overhead projectors, none of the things he hadn’t liked at BU. Aarden eschewed rank and title, so nobody called anybody “professor.” Everyone knew him as Richard.

  He came up with catchy titles for classes, like “How to Help a Story Tell Itself.” During the first session, he quoted a Rodney Crowell line about learning to listen to the sound of the sun going down. If they wanted to help the story tell itself, he said, they needed to learn how to listen, especially for those things they never expected to hear, because those were nearly always the most interesting.

  He taught them to record the smallest details. He told them how in the fall of ’89 he’d noticed several people walking around Warsaw with hoops of twine suspended from their necks. “I didn’t know what it meant,” he said. “Before I got around to asking anybody, here comes a shipment of toilet paper, which had been unavailable for two months due to the consumer shortages plaguing the country, and suddenly people are leaving stores with twenty or thirty rolls hanging off their bodies. That’s what the hoops were for.”

  Nobody took note
s, but everybody took note. In one of the classes he taught his second semester, a twenty-year-old junior wrote a piece about the mysterious disappearance of her high school math teacher in a north Texas town. The most gripping thing he’d read in a good while, it needed only minor revisions, which she performed overnight. The editor he sent it to at the New Yorker rejected it with an admiring note and a request to see more, but Harper’s accepted it. The following year, even before she graduated, she had a book contract. She was the first but not the last of his students to experience that kind of success.

  Taking stock, which he did from time to time, he concluded that this was the second-best period of his life. In conversation, he would not have chosen the word “happy” to describe himself, because the awareness of loss that hung over his days was sometimes so heavy that it leadened his legs, as if he’d been outfitted with a set of the ankle weights sprinters wore during training. The word he would have used if he’d been queried by one of his new friends, like the poet he often had drinks with, was “engaged.” He’d found something worthwhile to do. Several times a week, he walked into a small room and sat down at a table where he was surrounded by bright, talented young people who were nearly always eager to learn what he knew.

  This morning, after finishing his ham and cheese crepes at the Main Street café, he pays for his breakfast and sets off toward campus. While he walks, he thinks about the note in the Times and wonders where Nick Major’s daughter is today. She would be twenty-one and must be about to graduate from college. A couple of years ago, he started to check to see what he might learn about her online, but he talked himself out of it. It seems strange now, but for most of his life, he didn’t worry that the stories he wrote or helped develop might hurt someone else. The only thing that mattered was whether they were true. He shamed drunken drivers, politicians major and minor, an allergist who sedated his female patients, then removed their clothes and photographed their naked bodies; countless drug dealers, crooked financiers, tax cheats; purveyors of child pornography; wife beaters, child molesters, gangbangers, rapists; even one deranged UCC animal husbandry major who sexually assaulted a sheep. If it pained their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons, or daughters to read about them—well, too bad. Somebody has to do it: he’d never deny that. It just won’t be him anymore. He still writes the occasional magazine piece and recently published an article about the saxophonist Charles Lloyd, but he’s through inflicting collateral damage.