Ms. Taken Identity

by Dan Begley

“Need a hand?” I ask.

  “Nah, she’s got it covered. Her studio friends are helping.”

  “Her what?”

  “Studio friends.” He pauses. “Apparently, she takes dance lessons and these are her ballroom buddies. I just hope someone with a little muscle tone shows up so I don’t get a hernia.”

  Much later, back at our apartment, I lie in bed, alone, worried I won’t be able to fall asleep. If something’s bothering me, this is when my mind spins and whirls and nags me with thoughts, and I’m wondering if it’s going to do that tonight, get fixated on what happened with Hannah, and suddenly I’ll get panicky and sweaty and realize I’ve made the greatest mistake of my life, leaving her crying on the bathroom floor, not begging her to forgive me and take me back, and how could I be so stupid, and will I ever be happy again? But before I actually get to those thoughts, I start thinking about margaritas, because I watched a woman at the bar sip on one, and when was the last time I had a margarita, and have I ever had one without salt, and what’s that brand of salt with the girl on the label carrying a container and spilling some, and isn’t she also holding an umbrella? And then I fall asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I teach an Intro to Comp and Lit class at the university. I had my choice of something less basic—American Transcendentalism, The Age of Dryden and Pope—but I passed; I figure it’s hypocritical to complain about the planet’s general tendency toward bad grammar and foggy thinking and not try to do something about it while these kids are still freshmen. Fortunately, two weeks into the semester, I think it’s a solid group; they show up on time (noon, so how hard can it be?), don’t crunch their chip bags, do good work. In fact, I see no foreseeable problems with the bunch. Except with Molly.

  Molly is a knockout blonde (think Scarlett Johansson), extremely bright, and an excellent writer. In most cases, such a combination of qualities would make her the anti-problem. But for each of those favorable traits, there’s an evil twin-sister one that not only cancels the good ones out, it puts her in the red. Deeply. She’s pretty, but flaunts it. As in the T-shirts she wears (the very, very tight T-shirts she wears), with messages like Yes, They’re Real, Stop Gawking; Bad Girls Suck; Future Trophy Wife. Subtle, eh? She’s smart, but likes to rub your nose in it. Sometimes you have to delete your favorite bits of writing because they just don’t work, and I told the class this is what Hemingway called “killing your darlings,” but Molly blurted out, “It wasn’t Hemingway, it was Faulkner,” and I said, “You know, you might be right, but let’s discuss it later”; so next class, apropos of nothing, not even bothering to raise her hand, she announces to the class that, yes, it was Faulkner, and goes on to read the entire quote, and ask me if I’d like a copy for future reference. She’s an excellent writer, but thinks she has nothing to learn from me. She asked me where I’d been published, and I gave her the name of a magazine she’d never heard of, and she shrugged and said, “Is that it?” She’s the fly in my ointment, the banana peel on my stage, the pain in my ass.

  Case in point: Today we’re talking about an Updike story in which a grocery clerk quits on the spot after his manager embarrasses a trio of young girls who came into the store in their swimsuits. I want to focus on the final line: “My stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Why does he say this, and how will his world be hard? But Molly has other ideas.

  “What’s the big deal about wearing a swimsuit into a store?” She cracks her gum. “I don’t get it.”

  Of course not. This from the girl wearing a shirt that says Ball Handler.

  “It’s against the rules.” So says stocky Pete.

  “So? The rule is dumb. They just went in there to grab a jar of herring snacks. For her mother.”

  “Doesn’t matter why they’re there, or who they’re there for. Rules is rules, and they broke them.” Pete winks at me to let me know the verb conjugation was no accident.

  “Then I guess if there’s a rule that black people can’t use the same water fountain as whites, we should just accept that. Or if there’s a law that says women can’t vote, that’s okay too. Since, as you say, ‘rules is rules.’”

  Pete looks at me again, this time not so cocky. Donna piles on. “Yeah, exactly. I mean, men probably made those store rules. They’re the ones who decided what everyone should wear. They’ve brainwashed women to be ashamed of their bodies.”

  Thomas: “But if guys are making the rules, wouldn’t they say swimsuits are okay, since they’d want to see girls in swimsuits?”

  Pam: “Not necessarily. Not everyone’s a pervert.”

  Thomas: “So I’m a pervert, just because I like to see a little skin?”

  Pam: “No. Just a man.”

  Molly, shrugging: “The bottom line is, some people just can’t handle in-their-face sexuality. Look at the Janet Jackson Nipplegate flap...”

  And then we’re off, swept away, everyone worked up into a lather about sexism, ageism, the fashion industry, plastic surgery, women as priests, wardrobe malfunctions, Justin Timberlake, and whether Britney would’ve turned into Britney if she’d stayed with him. And I find myself jumping in, on Molly’s side, not so much about Nipplegate or Justin but more on rules not always being rules, and before I know it, class is over and I dismiss them, but I still have to collect their essays, so I’m scrambling around in the hallway trying to track them down, and forget about a homework assignment or the last line in Updike or my entire lesson plan that’s been hijacked. And Molly? Molly’s just yakking away on her cell phone, making plans for god knows what.

  When I get back to the apartment, I give Brandon Suarez a call. Brandon works for a small literary press in Minnesota, and he’s the guy who’s going to publish my novel. He’s also a former student. I thought I’d have to shoot a tranquilizer dart through the phone when I sent him the manuscript—“You want me to publish your novel? Really? Are you kidding? Unbelievable! This is great! Yippee! I can fly!”—but once we got past the hyperventilating and down to business, he told me to give him a couple weeks to look things over, which I have. Enough’s enough. But I don’t get Brandon when I call, I get his machine, so I leave a message, telling him I’d like to get the ball rolling on this, take care of any revisions, if there are any, while the semester’s still young.

  My novel is called Henley Farm. It’s a sweeping saga about America that spans several generations of the Henley family and their relationship to the land: think The Grapes of Wrath meets The Good Earth, with bits of King Lear and A Thousand Acres sprinkled in. Seven years and seven hundred pages to get it just the way I want it, and I won’t lie to you: it hasn’t been an easy ride. You may have the impression that writing is all about sitting at Pottery Barn–style desks with scented candles and ocean views and breezes gently rustling the curtains, or it’s hobnobbing at charming European cafés where the intelligentsia discuss philosophy and beautiful women gather and you write poetry on the back of a naked lover. It’s not. Remember Jack Nicholson in The Shining, running around with that ax and whacking through bathroom doors and screaming “Heeeere’s Johnny” and trying to kill people? He was a writer.

  But as if writing the novel weren’t hard enough, the last six months have been worse. Trying to find an agent or publisher or anyone who’s interested, sending out manuscript after manuscript, just to get them thrown right back in my face, sometimes half a dozen before I’ve even had lunch. It’s been rejection on an epic scale, like going into a bar filled with a thousand single women, in my best clothes with a bouquet of flowers, even wearing a splash of expensive cologne, and having them all turn their backs, no peck on the cheek, no smiling hello, not even a second look. Talk about your dating disasters.

  Finally, I shipped it off to Brandon. I hated calling in a favor like that, especially from a former student, and I know he doesn’t have much of a budget and the first printing won’t be very large. But what else could I do? I need to believe the last seven years of my life, and all the
things I may have ruined in the process (relationships, mainly, with Hannah, as you know, but also with women named Chloe and Laura and Xiang, a cellist, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever slept with), have all been worth it. Otherwise, I may start looking for an ax of my own.

  Thursday afternoon, I go to Hannah’s to pick up my stuff. She isn’t around, which is good, and I don’t have much to pack (which is even better, since I’m riding the bus), and in no time at all, the place looks like I was never there. My presence here, it would seem, as Keats said of himself in his epitaph, was “writ in water.”

  My brother Scott calls after dinner. Dad’s birthday is this weekend, and Leah—my stepmother of fourteen years—is having her usual get-together. She let Scott know she’d like me to swing by.

  “Have I ever?” I grunt.

  “There’s always a first. I thought it’d be a nice gesture if you went shopping with Kyle and me and helped him pick out a birthday gift for his grandpa. And I’ll spring for lunch, since I know money’s tight for you.”

  Son of a bitch. “I’ve got a gesture for you right here, Scott.”

  He sighs. “That’s real mature.”

  This is how it’s been for Scott and me the last few years when it comes to my father. Now that Scott’s a dad, he wants Kyle to know his grandfather and have a relationship with him. So he’s made his peace with the old man, forgiven him for that whole dumping us, buying a golf course, getting remarried, and having more kids thing. Bravo. Wonderful. My hero. But don’t expect me to show up for your lovefest.

  “So I’ll take that as a no,” he says.

  “Wrong. It’s a fuck no.”

  “It must be tough holding all that anger inside. How long do you plan to keep it?”

  “You tell me, lawyer man. What’s the sentence for what he did?”

  “I seem to have gotten over it.”

  I’d hit him if I could. “Don’t compare us. It’s different and you know it.”

  Another heavy sigh on his part. What kind of lawyer does that, sighs all the time? An annoying one, I’ll tell you.

  “All right, brother, if you change your mind, give me a call,” he says.

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Here’s the thing about my brother: he’s a good guy, I like him, and on most days—any other day—we get along fine. But what he always seems to forget is that when he was fourteen, he couldn’t stand our dad and was glad to see him go. Not me, not by a long shot. When I was a kid, he played baseball with me, took me to games, even drove me up to church to serve Mass (my Jewish father waiting an hour for his Catholic son out in the parking lot, in winter, at six am—imagine that). In fact, not that I’d ever tell Scott or my mom or anyone else, but the first person who broke my heart wasn’t the first girl I kissed, or slept with, or Sharon Manus, or any type of female at all. It was him. My old man. So go ahead, take a moment, think about the first person who broke your heart. Get a good image of that person, remember the happy days. Now, be honest: are you over it yet? Completely? I didn’t think so.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I finish grading the essays Friday morning (topic: critique some aspect of American culture that you find absurd). Later, in class, I read excerpts from the best ones aloud, then start handing all of them back, calling out the various names: Napoleon Dynamite, Beyoncé, Joe the Plumber… (No, really, those are the names on them: I make everyone use an alias so I won’t let my impression of a student color my reading of an essay, especially if said student has, oh, I don’t know, a habit of wearing obnoxious T-shirts; plus, when they have a mask to hide behind, they’re not so inhibited and self-conscious.) As each Borat and Kelly Kapowski comes forward to claim a paper, I finally get to see who wrote what and write the grade in my book, next to the student’s real name.

  When I call out Dr. Ruth, there’s snickering—everyone got a kick out of that one, the best of the bunch by far, a wicked, sly, edgy piece about sex, the rules of attraction, and the American diet. But when Dr. Ruth steps forth to claim her paper, there’s no snickering from me, not even a chuckle or cracked smile or grin, because what to my wondering eyes should appear but a girl in a tight black T-shirt that says Remove in Case of Party. Molly. She stands there with her hand out, waiting, staring at me, almost daring me to say something, and I don’t want to give it to her because I don’t want it to be hers, but in the end I do, because I have to, hopefully without creating too much of a scene. But it already is. She takes it with a smirk and saunters back to her seat, and I’m in danger of squeezing all the ink from my pen as I mark her grade in my book: A.

  “Oh, by the way. I e-mailed it to Cosmo. They want to publish it.” She tilts her head, gives me a smile. “Guess I’m in the club now, too.”

  Jesus. Is it too late to cancel my membership?

  I’m writing about The Canterbury Tales for my dissertation—or more precisely, “The semantics of ecclesiastical iconography as it relates to Chaucer’s portrait of medieval England’s moral landscape”—and most days when I’m researching it, there’s something about monks or merchants or madames, or a recently discovered letter by Chaucer, or maybe just the poetry itself, that jumps off the page and grabs me by the scruff of the neck and gives me a lift. Not today. It’s all an effort and chore, every inch of slogging a cartload of bricks, up a hill, in the mud, and by six o’clock, I’m pedaling my way home from the library. It hasn’t been a banner week: I’ve been dumped by Hannah, guilt-tripped by Scott, and Molly and I now share the same number of publishing credits. What I need is a hot shower, a Cardinals win on the tube, maybe some QT with a pretty young lady at the pub who’ll let me buy her a drink. Three out of three would be great, but I’ll settle for one, which should be a lock, since how hard can it be to turn a knob in the shower?

  Then I open the vestibule door.

  When Scott and I were kids, every Christmas morning we tore out to the tree before dawn and pawed and shook everything, to guess what was what. (Emily never got the chance; she died when she was two.) But one package I never had to poke or prod or lay a finger on, no matter the wrapping paper or size of the bow, was the length of a shoebox and half as wide, but not so tall: the entire set of Topps baseball cards, pristine, glossy, mine.

  There’s another package whose size and shape and heft I’ve come to know with as much certainty, but for all the wrong reasons. Because each time I see it—the 10 x 13 tear-/-water-proof manila envelope, stuffed with seven hundred double-spaced manuscript pages, weighing fifty-seven ounces—it means I’ve been rejected. I’ve seen it a lot these past few months lying on the vestibule steps, along with the other mail too big for our slots. That’s why I mailed it to Brandon in Minnesota and his independent press, so I’d never have to see it on those fucking steps again.

  It’s on those fucking steps again.

  I lean my bike against the wall and my ears start to ring. Maybe there’s been a mistake; maybe it’s not from Minnesota at all; maybe there’s another of my manuscripts out there, one I lost track of, and it’s just now coming back. I check the postmark: Minnesota. Now the ring is a buzz. But maybe it’s not my manuscript. Maybe the wrong one got stuffed in an envelope addressed to me, and won’t we all have a good laugh when it turns out I got the rejected pages of a romance novel meant for someone in Des Moines. But it’s mine, Henley Farm, all seven hundred pages. The buzz becomes a throb. But Brandon must have a different system: he sends the manuscript back, even when it has been accepted. I race through the cover letter: “Dear writer: Thank you for the chance to read your work. Unfortunately, we are not enthusiastic enough about it to publish it at this time....” A fucking form letter. Now I can’t hear at all.

  I’ve been rejected. By Brandon. I’ve. Been. Rejected. By. Brandon. I’ve been rejected by fucking Brandon!

  I breathe.

  I breathe.

  I breathe.

  Then I rip and tear and shred and twist and throw and stomp and kick, and I do it not only to the pages of my manuscript
but also to the cover letter and envelope it came in, and not only to those items belonging to me but to the other mail lying on the stoop—a People, a Vogue—which are certainly not mine, but have the misfortune of being in my reach, so their pages, too, are ripped and torn and shredded and twisted and thrown and stomped and kicked, with venom and gusto and rage, so that by the time I’m finished, the entire floor is wall-papered, after a fashion, and I’m panting and wheezing and hoarse (was I cursing? grunting? screaming?). And that’s where I find myself, standing atop the tickertape remnants of my tantrum, when the front door opens.

  It’s our neighbor from across the hall—Rhonda or Rhoda or Randi. She sees me and the mess, and probably the sweat on my face, and utters an embarrassed, “Oh, pardon me,” like she’s intruding and shouldn’t be here, and starts to back away. But then you see her mind catch: Hey, I live here. But then you see her mind catch again: But this guy’s crazy. You can tell she’s weighing this against that, and she decides to take her chances. She drops her gaze and steps inside, moving briskly.

  “I got some bad news,” I try to explain.

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  She keeps her gaze low and far from mine and scoots over the mess in her heels and prim little business suit and laptop carry case, and almost makes it to the steps free and clear. But her eyes flick at something on the pile and register surprise, displeasure, then she flashes a look at me to see if I saw her, which I did, which makes her gasp, as if now that she’s seen what’s there, I’ll be forced to do the same to her.

  “Are they yours?” I say.

  “Are what mine?” she says too quickly, her back to me.

  “Those magazines.”

  “What magazines?”

  “People, Vogue.”

  “Oh, were they there?”

  Her little act is starting to tick me off. “Don’t play games. I know you saw them. Just admit it.”