Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  Her stride had become faster, then morphed into a sprint. She bolted down the sidewalk, sloshing through puddles on the ground, avoiding placards set up along the sidewalk to promote dinner specials at the noodle shops along the street. Then she heard the screaming again; it wasn’t as high-pitched as in her dream, but a deep, burning moan that cut through the sound of the taxis rushing down the street. It was right beside her, in her ears, in her head. Hiromi looked to either side, but no one was there, so she ran faster to escape it but she could still hear it. When she dashed past a wall with a rectangular mirror reflecting the passing traffic, she saw her hair plastered across her forehead and her mouth wide open. She was the one who was screaming.

  Hiromi ran up the stairs to the second level of their complex and fumbled through her pockets to retrieve her keys, but they fell from her fingers when she brought them up to the locked door. Snatching them up quickly, she finally opened the door, and the wind and the rain sucked it shut behind her like the crash of the gate at the station. She crept through the dark room, feeling along the wall by the pink light of the pachinko parlor across the street. A faint jingling noise whispered to her through a crack in the window that sounded like a faraway jackpot, men making fortunes on the other side of the street. She thrust her hands in front of her until she felt the molding around the closet door. She approached Kimi’s crib. It was silent. She reached inside and grabbed one of Kimi’s tiny arms.

  Verisimilitude

  DEIRDRE CROSSED OUT the sentence several times, stabbing her pen through the pages behind it as if she could gut the very words out of existence:

  Even in her best of moods, Molly had always found it hard to work up the enthusiasm that seemed to be required of her to give good oral sex. And with no arms now, she was clearly at a logistical disadvantage as well.

  Two hours before, when she’d first written the sentence down, right after coming home from Jim’s house following a marathon of sexual calisthenics while his wife was in Burlington getting chemotherapy, she had thought it was some good, clear prose. Ironic, without being sarcastic (a known crutch of hers). A touch of her trademark humor without her outright laughing at the character. Empathy: a quality she’d been accused of lacking in the past.

  She even liked what the sentence said about her main character, Molly, a recent double-arm amputee, depressed, and near suicidal. A woman being given a second chance at love with a fellow patient in a remote recovery center in the Catskills. Deirdre’s impulse had been to grant Molly more agency in her life right at the moment it seemed she had lost all control. The woman, after all, had no arms: there were literally hundreds of ways in which a writer could push her through the world.

  But when she read the sentence again, this time with a more critical eye, the entire conceit of the story seemed up for debate. Who was Molly before the accident? Was she even someone who wanted to give blowjobs? What did her willingness, her eagerness even, to give them say about her as a character? As a person? As a woman?

  These were questions that Raquel, another professor in the creative writing department at Middlebury College, had raised with Deirdre while fleshing out the story with her over coffee a couple of weeks before. Raquel’s albino-looking daughter, Starla, had been crawling underneath the wicker table at the café in Frog Hollow like a monkey, grabbing hold of Deirdre’s ankles with a vice-like grip she’d found frightening coming from such a small child.

  “Why exactly is Molly so enamored of this man? Shouldn’t she be more focused on her own recovery? I mean, where is Molly in this story?” Raquel had asked.

  Deirdre felt annoyed having to answer to a colleague, not that Raquel had even left an appropriate space after any of her questions for her to provide an answer. She’d simply rattled them off as Deirdre imagined she must do in her own workshops, with a sort of rhetorical flourish Deirdre would feel pompous and fake if she were to attempt it in her own classroom.

  But, really, what favors was she doing for herself, giving her reader the image of an armless woman giving a blowjob—in sterile, mesh, standard-issue hospital scrubs no less—to a man with only half a face, the beige ligaments that crisscrossed his cheekbones in a horror-show fashion that in no way could be called human?

  “And, honestly, Deirdre…” Raquel had trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you kind of written this story before?”

  Deirdre ripped the page off of her legal pad and threw it in the trash can by her desk.

  These were mistakes she would’ve chided her own students for making: oversexualizing characters for shock value; setting scenes in remote places she’d never visited or even researched and, therefore, had zero authority in describing; giving in to what she often called in her class the “last chance for happiness” impulse, a trope where a character down on their luck encounters the one thing or person that will save them. It was all just so trite. Raquel was unfortunately right: it was also only a cheap variation on a story she’d definitely already written.

  When the college had hired her as a visiting professor at the tail end of the summer, this was not the kind of paint-by-numbers fiction for which she had been known. In fact, only four years before, she had been singled out by The New Yorker as one of their “20 Under 40” writers based almost solely on a short story she had published in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “My Sometimes Sister.” The main character of the story was a paraplegic woman living in the 1970s confined to a remote country house. She is hopelessly in love with her own brother (from whose viewpoint the story is told), who is her sole caregiver and also the person directly responsible for the accident that caused her condition. It was such a heavy premise, but somehow she had managed to pull it off, mainly because of the affinity she had felt for the woman, paralyzed not only in her own body, but by the fear of the feelings she had for her own sibling. After a tender seduction scene Deirdre had somehow crossed a very precarious tightrope in writing successfully, the sister ends up hitching a ride with a young female farmhand, lighting out for a destination unknown. Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” had appeared on the opposite page in the issue. Donna Tartt was overheard at a party stating that the story “could be instantly anthologized.” T.C. Boyle sent her a note telling her that it was “canon fodder, the American Canon.” One reviewer for Publishers Weekly had gone so far as to compare her to Flannery O’Connor, which she thought was a bit generous if not, she had privately acknowledged, close to the mark. Her thesis advisor from grad school told her that she had finally “arrived.” When her collection came out, in which “My Sometimes Sister” was prominently positioned as the final story, Michiko Kakutani stated in her New York Times review that “Deirdre Kirkendoll manages to elevate her mangled women to near beatific heights, limning entire lives in just a handful of pages. This collection soars.”

  But now there was always this question of what she was working on now. “What are you working on now, Deirdre?” “How are you going to follow up ‘My Sometimes Sister’?” “Can I hear a little bit of your newest piece, Deirdre?” For several weeks, she had deconstructed, rewritten, revised, and obsessed over this new Molly story. She’d replace a verb for another here, switch pronouns there, eliminate the passive voice, then suddenly decide that it brought just the right tone and needed to be reinstated. And those pages, now marked up in red and pink ink like a weave of never-ending capillaries running through a heart on life support didn’t qualify her for even the position she had at Middlebury. It wasn’t just a writer’s block; it was a writer’s paralysis.

  Deirdre looked at her clock radio. It was almost past three. She’d be late to meet her thesis advisee, Ian, if she didn’t hurry. After leaving Jim’s house, she’d been so driven to write that she hadn’t even taken the time to shower.

  She looked at the crumpled page in the trash can. The curling edges of the rest of the Molly story sat on her desk underneath a paperweight Jim had given her after offering her the visiting professorship. It was a
mermaid perched on a rock in shiny pewter, her cold vacant eyes staring off into the distance at some sailor she imagined would rescue her from the confines of the sea. Or whom she might drag down to his watery death with song.

  Although she hadn’t thought much of the paperweight, she felt it looking at her now with judging eyes. It had been enclosed with the college’s official offer letter to join the staff of the creative writing department as a visiting “writer-in-residence.” She had packed the mermaid paperweight alongside her dog-eared copies of Beloved and Bad Behavior, nestling it in a spot near the corner of one of her many boxes of books.

  At the fall faculty mixer, when she’d had more time to observe Jim in action, his intentions towards her felt more dangerously obvious. She had arrived early and parked her beat-up Le Car next to a couple of similarly used vehicles in a turnaround at the foot of the large hill upon which his house stood, an old Victorian that had once housed part of the women’s college. Once inside, she noticed that only a few professors were there, including Raquel who she’d met briefly when Raquel had popped into her small office down the hall. Raquel was wearing a silk blouse that revealed a large motherly bosom and was downing what looked to Deirdre like her second or possibly third drink judging from the splotchy flush that spotted her exposed chest.

  No one else had thought to bring children, yet there was Raquel’s small daughter, Starla, running around in circles, darting through the groups of conversational hives that had begun to formulate around an area of the kitchen that had been fashioned into a makeshift bar. Card tables set up in the living room held an array of New England-style appetizers. Deirdre quickly accepted a cocktail from one of the students, Ian, an ice hockey player who was studying American Literature and creative writing on a hockey scholarship. A sweet, bland, and bovine-looking girl with one eye that seemed larger than the other was also serving at the party.

  “They’re…Vermonters,” Raquel said, nodding towards Ian and his girlfriend who were both wearing white button-down shirts and black pants, passing around drinks and working the bar. Deirdre would say that the girl was improperly matched with the strapping Ian.

  “He’s from Montpelier and she’s from Barre,” Raquel continued. “Even in a school this good, there’s a certain hierarchy. The Vermonters think they have to try harder than the kids from out of state. To prove themselves.”

  “Deirdre, I’m glad you could make it,” Jim said as he came over to the two women. He wore a vest over his flannel shirt, reminding Deirdre of her middle school woodshop teacher. “I hope you’re meeting people.” His eyes lingered on her chest.

  “Yes, I am. I’ve mostly been chatting with Raquel here,” she answered.

  “Excuse me, please. I see Starla has gotten into your bookshelf again!” Raquel said.

  As she hurried over to her daughter, Deirdre could see the little girl was already paging through The Collected Works of Dorothy Parker before she then tossed it into a pile of other books. It looked like she was planning to burn them all in a toddler bonfire.

  “I’ve said this to you already, Deirdre, but it really does bear repeating. I was enraptured by ‘My Sometimes Sister.’ There was a certain…hunger you captured so magnificently. I would venture to say it’s one of the more important stories to have come out in the last decade. And it almost single-handedly put you on our radar.” Jim took another sip from his drink.

  “Thank you, Professor McNulty.”

  “Jim. Please. Call me Jim.”

  “Jim.”

  “Tell me. What are you working on at the moment?”

  And there it was, Deirdre thought. The Question.

  “A new piece, something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

  “Well, I hope you end up sharing it at the faculty reading later this semester,” he said, placing his hand on the small of her back. “If I had rested on the laurels of that first Skipper book, I would never have been shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner for Skipper at Sea, now would I have?”

  As the evening progressed, Deirdre kept noticing a pale woman in a silk head-scarf who kind of floated along the periphery of the groups of professors. She’d be listening in on whatever story was being told and then, if there was a punch line or a clever quip, she’d look to Jim’s reaction before offering a muted facsimile.

  “That’s Jim’s wife,” Raquel whispered in her ear as if she were a stage manager, darting from the wings as if to impart some crucial knowledge to a leading lady suddenly stricken with amnesia. “She has breast cancer. Already a double mastectomy and now chemo. Poor thing. She’s not even fifty yet. It’s just awful.”

  She could see Jim laughing, surrounded by a group of professors. He leaned his head back to let out a bellow, the sparse beard covering half of his neck. When he took a sip from his drink, he caught Deirdre’s eye from across the room and smiled at her.

  “What’s her name? The wife?” Deirdre asked Raquel.

  “Nan.”

  Deirdre thought Nan looked like a ghost, like half a woman in her flat shift dress, wandering in and out of rooms, quietly haunting the guests. Not a thing to say, really, just a woman hovering at the edges of conversations. She was the physical embodiment of those brief bursts of cold air that sometimes appear out of nowhere in these old New England houses and then, just as quickly, are gone.

  “Well, when is it?” Raquel asked her. She realized that she had completely checked out of what Raquel was saying, so utterly transfixed was she by Nan’s ghostliness.

  “When is what?” she asked, switching her plate of food to the other hand so that she could take a quick sip of wine.

  “Your deadline for the short story you were working on? I heard you mention something about it earlier.”

  “Oh, well, the editor wanted it sometime before Thanksgiving. I’m not really worrying about it at the moment,” she said, trying to deflect Raquel’s attention. She was not one of those writers who can’t get enough talking about their own work at cocktail parties. She hated those kinds of people. No one cares. Seriously, no one. Although, she was the first to admit that she naturally liked people more if they complimented her on her writing.

  “To be directly approached though to submit, that’s pretty fantastic. No pressure, I hope,” said Raquel.

  “No pressure,” Deirdre said, turning her attention back to tracking Nan, who had disappeared once again, perhaps into the kitchen to retrieve another plate of hors d’oeuvres.

  “I mean, I’m trying my hand at fiction for the first time and I’ve already landed a book deal based on a couple chapters, one of which was published in The New Yorker. You never can tell who’s getting what out there among us all,” Raquel said. Deirdre was baffled as to how this related at all to what they had been speaking about. It was a ham-handed segue. It was amazing how Raquel was able to bring conversations back around to herself with such ease. “After you’re published in The New Yorker, well, no one really gives a shit about any of the other piddling little journals you were in before that,” Raquel said. “Being published in The New Yorker is like when Jesus was crucified: there is only before and after the event.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure it’s great,” Deirdre answered, half-heartedly. Until she’d actually read any of Raquel’s work, she’d assume it was as simple and boring as Raquel herself. Raquel regularly spoke to people about her first book—a non-fiction exposé that had become a moderate New York Times bestseller for a few weeks—in this way, as if they’d already read it and were now poised and ready to discuss it with the author.

  Raquel embodied everything Deirdre truly loathed about fellow writers: the narcissistic belief that they were writing anything that hadn’t already been written, the laborious self-promotion that now seemed to go with being surrounded by others who practice the same craft, the constant one-upmanship, and need to find fault. The joke was really on her though—no one took her seriously. Even her own daughter, as young as she was, seemed to always be looking at her with suspicious ey
es and an inimitable scowl, the knowledge of which Deirdre secretly found thrilling.

  After that faculty party, Deirdre began running into Jim around campus with an alarming frequency. He took her out to lunch at the Crest Room on campus, introduced her to professors in other departments and offered to read anything that she was working on. Even though she had very little to show him, she appreciated the offer. The affair that commenced soon afterwards wasn’t just about getting closer to Nan, not at first. Nan came later.

  The first time that Deirdre and Jim had sex in his office, she hadn’t really thought much of it at all. She’d focused on the books on his bookshelf, the large Brown University pennant he had hanging over his desk, the first edition collection of his “Skipper” series which sat on display on a mantle over an unused fireplace like a shrine. He was definitely on the larger side, but had a thick penis which Deirdre would always be the first to say mattered much more than most women let on.

  There was a picture of Nan on the mantelpiece as well. Deirdre noticed it when she’d first been in the office, but had only made the connection that it was actually Nan once they were in the middle of sex. The woman in the photograph could have been Nan’s younger, more buxom sister, the difference between the two of them was that stark. As they were getting dressed, Deirdre asked about her lover’s spouse.

  “Do you have sex with your wife anymore?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not attracted to her. And I doubt she’d want to anyway,” he said.

  “All women need love. Even the sick ones.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to love her, in that way, anymore. I don’t think I’d even be able to get aroused. I used to love my wife’s breasts. I’m a tits guy.”

  She could see the story evolving almost instantly. But she did away with missing breasts and turned them into missing arms. She wanted more, though. She needed to be as close to Nan as she could get. She wanted the authentic Nan, missing limbs and all. There was something so much more gruesome about the image of her this way. Like she was a bowling pin that one could knock over. Deirdre was reminded of Barbies in the basement of her friend Janice’s house growing up and how many of the dolls had their arms missing. But they’d still dress them up and make-believe they were going to a ball, waddling about like little Oscars.