Secret in the Open

by Rigel Madsong

  Late at night he wrote more. Something mysterious made him force himself, sleepy-eyed, unaccustomed to the delayed rewards of writing, to sit in front of his computer well into the wee hours and narrow this complex architecture of emotion and memory into the funnel of words, Words. It gave him such a thrill to see it unfold on the page that he enrolled himself in a creative writing class at the adult education center.

  Writing, who would have thunk it!

  Well, he was addicted. A viable part of being was emerging out of numbness. He was better. He had an outlet but not a solution. His heart was still a bag of longing. Then things started looking up.

  His creative writing teacher suggested he submit work to a writers workshop to be held in the resort town of Snow Boot, Colorado. Immediately, he had the feeling that this was one of those events that was destined to happen. As he gathered and chose samples of his work to send to George Kingfisher, the course director, he felt that a precious avenue to his idol, the person who, in his own estimation was the best living short story writer, had suddenly opened like a personal telephone line. What’s more, Kingfisher would read his work. This would be an opportunity to work with the best, to get away from his problems at home, and to meet, far from his connections to responsibility, new people. It was too good not to happen.

  The letter of acceptance came as casually as the morning sun.

  Perfect, he thought, like the click of a roulette ball dropping in its slot. Months before the mid-summer gathering he was daydreaming workshops, the faces of the nameless, shapeless 49 participants who would assemble there. How many would be women? How good looking? How young?

  It was not a long drive from Rothestown, Mo. to Snow Boot Colorado, and he reasoned the drive would give him time to shift his social operating systems from the hard-driving aggressive edge of the ice cold litigant to that of an open, multi-layered creative person. A change of clothes. A change of town. A change of oxygen. Time to imagine how spending a week at high altitude doing the thing he had come to love most might be like. And to imagine the women from all over the United States come to open themselves to art... it was almost too much to bear.

  George Kingfisher was everything he had imagined - articulate, charismatic, perfectly at ease with himself and his craft. During the introductory session Jonathan hung on his every word: the living quarters, the workshops, the faculty, how everyone was to be respectful of everyone else’s work. We were here not to find fault but to find the perfect path for the life of the story.

  Jonathan let his eyes drift around the room. He estimated that there were about two-thirds women here, mostly young, mostly attractive. He found himself torn between concentrating on Kingfisher’s words and imagining if that woman across the room with moon eyes and moon breasts was as soft and pliable as she seemed. Mendocino, California, she said when it was her turn to say a little bit

  about herself. Sarah. Ran a flower shop. Painted with watercolors. Flowers, California. Perfect, thought Jonathan. A flower child. How excellent!

  His other immediate curiosity was a long tall blond with fine thin legs which she crossed and uncrossed as if to signal judges at a beauty contest. Gazelle, he thought. Grace. Just the suggestion of curves. Supermodel. She’ll be tough. Way above his class. Her voice when she spoke was softer than he imagined, more fragile than her Vogue-perfect appearance might suggest. Less self-confidence than it appeared. Oregon. Portland. Book-store employee. Casey. Owned pedigree Dalmatians. This one is a short story herself.

  The meeting broke. Flower Child drifted another direction. Supermodel was immediately surrounded. Jonathan’s roommate found him and introduced himself: Richard, a Texan already with a growing reputation in the field and a participant in several previous workshops. He was brilliant, knew the genre and its artists well. Had a sensitive side he got from working as a councilor in a mental institute for disadvantaged kids and a no-nonsense tough side he got, Jonathan supposed, just from living in El Paso. Jonathan would learn a lot from this guy.

  Casey was a pervasive presence. Jonathan studied her. He concluded she was only partly aware of the effect she had on men, or maybe because of the outrageous power of enchantment she possessed, chose not to operate from there. Her beauty was unselfconscious. She wore it as naturally as breath. She didn’t dress it, it dressed her.

  Jonathan didn’t try for her. The prospect was too daunting. “What will happen will happen,” he said to himself, and meanwhile, “get to know Flower Child.”

  That turned out to be easy. She was in his first workshop. They quickly discovered they were of like mind that the short story of the day, a eulogy for a departed wife, was better served by placing it in the third person, so as to distance the too-strong emotion from the reader. The conversation between them continued after the workshop and into lunch. She was passionate about development. They spent an hour reworking the elements of the story into a more organized sequence.

  They agreed the new sequence had possibility. They agreed to have dinner.

  Jonathan returned to his room with the afternoon half gone and several writing assignments to do before workshop, next day. He opened the door to find two people, half naked, lying on one of the beds. In the astonished moment when perception is thrown off and struggling for its bearings he flashed on himself there, lying with someone. It stirred the excitement of imitation, of impossible possibility opened by someone leading the way.

  He turned to go but was stopped by one of them. “Jonathan, don’t leave,” it said.

  It was Richard. My god, Richard.

  “Hey, don’t leave. I want you to meet Vicky. She drives here every year from Arizona just for this conference. She’s a professional writer.”

  Vicky was saucy, a little overweight and definitely on the make. She took her time putting on her bra and blouse, enjoying the exposure. She wrote erotic stories, it turned out, and sold them, quite nicely. She was married to a rancher out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Indian reservations but she and Richard had a thing going that renewed itself like the flowering lupine during summers in Snow Boot.

  “How are you doing so far?” asked Richard.

  “Fine. Workshop was great. Nice to be around people who worry about the same things I do: tense, language, point of view...”

  “No, I mean love life. I saw you with Saucer-Eyes.”

  Jonathan laughed the kind of free feeling laugh he’d not let loose in a long time. He was among friends here, writers, members of the over-sexed, under-nourished passionate elite with real honest-to-god longings. And - pinch me awake - an unstated permission to be that way. “Well,” he said, unable to suppress a grin. “Nothing much yet.”

  “Keep it up,” Vicki said. “You can never tell.”

  Jesus, that’s the best, thought Jonathan. A girl urging me onto another girl. I may never give up writing.

  Dinner that evening was not up to expectation. It wasn’t the food, it was Sarah, Miss Moon Eyes. She was there all right, but she was already sitting with that over-bronzed Californian - Redondo Beach or something like that - who everybody knew by now because he announced in his little self-introduction that he had just won the Upchurch Prize for most promising young writer. It’s a good prize. Golly-jeeze, and all that.

  Jonathan had joined this table because Sarah had agreed to have dinner. That turned out to be a mistake. There was conversation enough but it always turned on everything Mr. Redondo Beach had to say. Jonathan didn’t mind so much because he was, after all, celebrated and all that. The problem was that Miss Flower Child practically drooled all over him.

  The talk was about changes in point of view - is it permissible to shift from third person to first person in the middle of a story? Redondo was a formalist. Traditional. No deal, he said. Sarah was on the fence, believing it might be permissible if the situation dictated. Jonathan took the unpopular line, partly for effect,
making up his argument as he went along, about how if the energy of a story needed, at some point - because of action or emotional content, to make a shift toward immediacy, intimacy, personal suffering - that, like moving from past tense to present tense, a certain lift in the language might occur. He got so animated he knocked over a cup of coffee. He resolved to prove his point by incorporating the technique into a story.

  Just before desert, and so as to not miss the opportunity, Sarah reached deliberately across the table and squeezed Mr. Redondo’s hand. It didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to know where this was going. I politely excused myself and left soft eyes to her new lover.

  After that failure it was time to concentrate on the tangible, do the work ... I came here to do and leave speculation to take care of itself.

  Each of us got to present two of our stories during the week. The workshop members changed daily and the faculty rotated so as to get the most varied exposure. My first story came up on the second day, the baseball story. It was a modest success, which was, in my estimation, acceptable for a first-timer and drew favorable comments from Grace, a pert little teen-age looking 25 year-old from Nebraska. Her story, same day, was about how all the men who made love to her rolled off her when they were done. Weird story. I couldn’t tell if my attraction to it (and to her) was academic or psychiatric. To hell with it. She moved me in ways I enjoyed.

  Grace and I decided to do our assignments together the next two days. I was hesitant because she seemed like a child and I didn’t want to be perceived as robbing the cradle. I decided that I was being too wimpy and I planned to rush her, soon.

  The fourth evening had come, the big gathering in which the faculty read their stuff before a wildly appreciative audience. Everybody looked forward to it and we were all in rare moods. Casey was there, as always, like the gentle passing of magic through the rooms. She had been surrounded by potential suitors all week but none took hold. She seemed neither interested nor disinterested.

  I sat by a new person that night, Samantha, a naturalist for the forest service. She was a strident vegetarian, smelled vaguely of garlic and rutabaga. Short, a little homely but with a nice rounded figure, narrow waist and clothes like yards and yards of flowery see-through curtains draped over her body. I had my mind on the infant sex-pot or I might have been more interested. It was, undoubtedly, my disinterest that attracted her most, for she wouldn’t let me go from her conversations about naturalist writers and the fusion of man and nature. She spoke with urgency as if she were trying to convince me of something.

  There was a party after the reading and Grace and I had agreed to meet there. My mind was probably on the conversation by the stream that afternoon when she agreed to a rendezvous. I was a excited. Every time I thought about is my penis quivered.

  The reading finished. Party commenced. I played it cool, thinking not to give to the public evidence of Grace and my covenant together. She must have thought differently because afterward she was pissed that I didn’t pay more attention to her and just wanted to fuck her and not take any public notice. She stormed away. Later that night Lewis borrowed my car to go spend time with Grace. Perfect! Just like always.

  I found Richard on his bunk wrapped around a six-pack of Pearl Beer. Vicky had a surge of conscience, guilty or lonesome or something... called up her hubby and made up. Nothing more for Richard.

  We went out on the balcony. Full moon. It was beer and blues and the two of us. Richard threw back his head and yowled at the moon. I threw back my head and Yowled. We yowled like two jilted members of the tribe, out in the cold and making noise about it.

  The yowls felt good.

  The body trembled with release.

  We were brothers with wolves.

  It was the next to last day. All this conference had done for my sex life was to intensify my sense of depravity. And on top or that my next story was unfinished. It was a tribute to my father whom I had not written about since his death ten years ago. I didn’t have an ending.

  Samantha asked if she could have a ride as far as Denver where she lived when the conference was over. Yes. Well, what do you know. A little light of possibility in the waning twilight. In the car alone with a woman. Just that would be a major success by current standards.

  I had to concentrate on my story. The workshop leader for the next day was none other than Kingfisher himself. I wanted badly to impress him. But try as I may the ending wouldn’t come. Everything I wrote was vapid, meaningless. This went on till 2 AM when Richard insisted I go to bed. “Nothing more will come after 1.” he said.

  I went to sleep in emptiness, no ending, no fucking, no nothing.

  I woke at six. Sat down. Wrote the ending - three flowing paragraphs as if by ease of dictation. Perfect. Why could that not have happened before? I rushed to the workshop media center to add the ending to the manuscript and coasted to workshop.

  Everyone was pleased. George, as he autographed my copy of his book, wrote: “Thanks for your presence and the poetry of the morning’s story.” God what a feeling! It made the whole week, notwithstanding its ups and downs, spectacular.

  I ran into Samantha on the way to the workshop center where everyone was to gather for brief good-byes. She said she had invited a girlfriend to come along with us to Denver, if I didn’t mind. This person had to catch a train and the shuttle wouldn’t get her there in time. She didn’t have much baggage. Would that be OK?

  It meant the end to any hopes for privacy with a woman but what could I say? I said OK. I imagined the acerbic, hawk-eyed crone from Minneapolis. Crone. Curmudgeon. Chaperone. Ah well, I was still high from George’s inscription in my book. At least I had that to take back with me.

  A few good-byes, see you’s next summer perhapses, and I went to round my car up to the loading dock. I had to admit that Samantha was looking pretty good. I decided she was the sleeper of the group. I began to wonder what it would be like...

  Samantha was waiting at the dock with her and her friend’s luggage. When I arrived she called out to a group of people still lingering by the flagpole.

  Then someone broke from the group and came forward. My god, it was Casey. Casey, wearing the shortest pair of short shorts I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe it. I had expected loss by this addition, someone with wizened face and abrasive countenance, but no. Out of all the people she could have invited this was the best. The pinnacle. The supermodel. Maybe my luck was changing.

  We decided to make a shop for food for the trip. On the way we talked about the piece Richard wrote that centered around things about normal human behavior he had learned from working with and watching inmates at the mental institution. The transcendent piece about fantasias during piano practice on a sunny spring day the ballet dancer from Connecticut wrote. How so many couples paired off during the week but none of us had. We laughed at Grace’s piece about the men rolling off her. We were talking as if out of old friendships, in which intimate subjects are as comfortable as kitchen table wisdom in winter. Such a quick advance. Such a short time.

  We stopped at the summit for gas and a little snack to carry us through. I finished first and Casey followed close behind out to the curb where I sat facing the gas pumps, busy with their duty.

  “Tell me the story of your piece and George Kingfisher again,” Casey said. I relished her rapt attention as I recounted my anxiety not being able to finish the story, the magic of the morning write, his luminous eyes hearing it, his comments in my book.

  She was sitting, squatting rather, opposite me and slightly off to one side. Her legs were apart, her extremely short shorts tight as a thin layer of velum pulled over her, squeezing and bracing her. I wondered if she was conscious of her body language, or if it took over, or if it was directed by a subconscious heat... or was this just a god given gift to torment men. I resisted looking at her folds, drawn into vision by the tight stretch made tighter by
the spread of her legs and the slow rocking back and forth of her pelvis to the rhythm of my words. I kept direct eye contact as I recited the story and learned I could see and imagine what I wanted without deflecting my eyes.

  I finished the story and there was a pause and a sigh. She was dreamy. In a gesture that felt in the moment totally natural, I was about to reach out and touch her leg when Samantha came out of the store and sat next to me on the curb, nestling up to my side like she wanted in on whatever we were doing.

  “I made him tell me the story again,” Casey said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  This I didn’t expect. Something about me or my story was the object of attention that came pretty close to adoration. Would have been satisfied with a fraction of that anytime this week and now look what’s happened. I supposed it came more from camaraderie and affection that the merit of the story. If that was true we were getting along.

  We returned to the car. The baggage had filled the trunk and the left side of the back seat in such a manner that I could glance back at Casey’s legs from time to time. She would probably recognize what I was doing it but at this point I, didn’t give a damn. The way she’s been acting lately she might enjoy it.

  “You must be real satisfied how the week turned out,” Casey said.

  It was a statement with many layers - my unplanned celibacy, the story of my father, Kingfisher, frustrations on the friendship front. I chose the high road.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I feel great.”

  Then a sudden urge hit me. A completion of a previous gesture. I decided to go with it.

  I reached back and stroked Casey’s leg. “And with such great company, who wouldn’t be,” I said.