Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  “My name is Penelope,” said a woman with black bangs. “I’m wondering why so many of us thought that woman was troubled, or in trouble.”

  “That’s a rich question for a literary critic,” the Professor said. “The question for the writer is, How should that response from readers inform my choices? Every reader brings a host of inherited stories, as well as a vast array of associations with diction, syntax, and even punctuation. We have to learn how to use all of the material every reader brings—either to confirm that reader’s sense or to unsettle and complicate it.” The Professor paused and nodded ponderously, and Mark knew he was contemplating an impromptu syllabus revision, probably involving a quick Q&A about that woman in the room to dispense with the first writing assignment—which did often produce some tedious stories—and effectively negate Mark’s lesson plans for the next two classes.

  The Professor had done this more than a few times, never to good effect, but even disastrous results had not cured him. It was a tic, doubting Mark, rethinking Mark, attempting to revise Mark—not the Professor’s most endearing quality, but this time Mark was prepared. He slapped one hand on the table, then the other, and then kept this up for a while. He asked the students to close their eyes.

  Mark said, “We’ve all seen this movie.” He continued the slapping. “This is in answer to your question, Penelope. There is a woman walking on a dark city street. Behind her, you hear this—footfalls.” He increased the pace of the slapping. “No one among us thinks, Something wonderful is about to happen to her.” He stood up. “How predictable women are. Such troubling, troubled creatures. Now, open your eyes. How many of you imagined that when the man returned to the room with the open window that the woman had jumped?”

  More than half of the hands in the class went up.

  Mark smiled. “Does that tell us something about this woman or about us?”

  “Don’t answer that,” the Professor said. “Your job is to write her story.”

  Mark said, “It is due on Monday at 8:00 a.m. in my email box.”

  “We’re running late, and it’s only the first day,” the Professor said. “One final note from me. If you decide to drop this class and you are registered or on the official wait list, it will serve your fellow students greatly if you go to StudentServe and delete your name. And only the stories written by the officially registered twelve will receive responses.”

  “On a happier note,” Mark said, “let me read out the Technical Limits for your story.”

  1.No more than 250 words. Along with your name, please put the word count on your story.

  2.Past tense.

  3.Third-person narration. The perspective can be limited or omniscient, and don’t worry if you don’t understand the distinction, which we will review and discuss later in class. The idea is simply to use the convention of a narrator who is not a character in the story.

  He paused just long enough for a few students to cap their pens. “Oh, yes. And one more limit: Use only monosyllabic words.” He paused again. “Really.”

  The predictable moment of stillness and silence gave way to smiles as everyone packed up bags and zippered parkas. The fuse had been lit. A woman said, “Monosyllabic? You mean one syllable? Only one syllable?”

  Another woman said, “That rules out woman.”

  Julio said, “What about window? Or even open?”

  The room exploded with shouted words and moaning and laughter and questions, and above the din, Mark heard Anton yell, “I’m so screwed,” as his yellow sweater flashed by and out the door, and by the time Mark had done what he could to assuage the anxious and reassure the dubious, committed a few more names to memory, promised to meet with eight students who were certain they would not be among the lucky twelve but wanted to write the first story anyway, the Professor had disappeared, so Mark patted the back of his empty chair and said, “Here we go again.”

  5.

  Mark didn’t go back to his office. He headed straight for the garage, skidding across the frozen pond past three young men and a woman, all wearing Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys, who were deeply disappointed that he was not a late-arriving recruit for the Curling Club.

  “Give it a try,” one of them called out. “It’s fun.”

  “Not as much fun as teaching,” he said. It was a reflex, a thoughtless comment that surprised Mark as thoroughly as it confounded the curlers. But he meant it. Which was really why he was avoiding Hum Hall today. He didn’t want to entertain the griping and grousing of colleagues beset by the end of their six-week winter break. Mark sped off campus toward Ipswich to preserve his good mood—and his pride. In the last few years, he’d begun to be embarrassed by the unalloyed joy he felt in the classroom, which he had too often copped to in public. His preference not to sound like an idiot accounted for the dwindling of his social contact with colleagues and his particular efforts to avoid casual conversations with the Professor, who had mentioned after a dinner with alums last semester that Mark’s rapturous description of the workshops had made Mark sound like an idiot.

  About four miles shy of his house, Mark had a dispiriting thought: NEPCAJE. He glanced hopefully at his black bag on the passenger seat, and then turned and hopelessly scanned the back seat, and then he exited off Route 1 North and looped back to Route 1 South toward campus to retrieve the books, which he needed to write a draft of the literature review for the New England Private College Access, Justice, and Excellence initiative. He had four free days ahead, and he knew he’d never get to the task once students started delivering their stories.

  A few miles later, he also knew he wouldn’t get back to Hum Hall through the snarled-up commuter traffic for at least an hour.

  Against his better judgment, he dug out his phone. Safety was not a concern—traffic was barely moving, and the melodramatic Saab coughed and sighed every time he released the clutch, threatening to expire. It was his mood that was at risk again. And when he read the first of many texts from Paul—Finally in Rome!—his spirits wavered.

  He didn’t want to be in Rome, but he didn’t want Paul to be there, either. He didn’t want to crawl back to campus, but he didn’t want to be at home alone, either. So, he slipped the phone into his bag and nosed his car into the breakdown lane, where he sped along to the next exit and pointed his reluctant Saab toward Cambridge, and the spartan luxury of Paul’s condo.

  When Paul was at home, there was little evidence of normal human habitation between the white walls of his one-bedroom condo. But before he’d gone away, he’d even removed his vast collection of unsalted nuts in Mason jars from the counter in the galley kitchen. Where he’d stashed them and the steel-cut oatmeal, quinoa, and flaxseeds was almost as mysterious as why he ingested so much indigestible stuff. After Mark had admired the segregated suits and starched shirts in the bedroom closet and nosed around in the neat stack of new magazines beside the sofa in the living room, he studied the two bathrobes on the hook on the back of the bathroom door and opted not for his Medium but the Large—Paul’s. That helped. Feeling happily at home, he sat in the old club chair Paul kept by the windows in his living room to read through the rest of the text messages from Rome.

  The Paean Project had secured Paul a big studio apartment with a little balcony overlooking the Piazza Navona. This also helped. Years ago, they’d spent a week in Rome and squandered a lot of time together admiring Bernini’s superb Fountain of Four Rivers and everything they ate in the cafés lining that piazza. This made it easy for Mark to eclipse the time until spring break and imagine himself on that wrought iron balcony. And then he read that Paul was flying to Greece in the morning to spend three days at a refugee-processing camp on Lesbos. And then maybe two days in Tunis?

  Mark stopped reading and stared out at the paths winding through the patchy snow on the Cambridge Common and the red taillights of cars winding through Harvard Square. Beyond that, the visible earth tipped out of view but for the gleam of Boston across the Charles River and the very top of the Han
cock Tower, whose weather-predicting spire was blinking blue, promising a sunny tomorrow. But forecasting the future was a dicey proposition. Had Mark ditched his class this semester and gone to Rome to be with Paul, he wouldn’t be with him tomorrow.

  In a final blast of brief messages, Paul let Mark know he wasn’t sure if or when he’d be able to be in touch over the weekend, and his last text was, What have I got myself into?

  Mark wrote, The world, and hit send. It was already nearly midnight in Rome, and he knew Paul would be asleep, so instead of calling, he typed again. And the world is lucky to have you. Call when you can. Wherever you are, you’re here, too.

  Mark’s mood was heading downhill, but it got waylaid by three loud raps on the back door, and then three more. The back door was only two feet from the front door, but Mark knew he didn’t have a visitor. The knocks were a code. He pulled his wool cap from the sleeve of his parka and fished through his bag for a lighter, but came up empty. He climbed up the stairs to the roof, where no one was allowed. The steel door was propped open with a shovel, and a path had been cleared through the snow to the makeshift deck of plywood pallets outfitted with two plastic Adirondack chairs and a bucket of sand.

  Dennis Blake didn’t turn around right away. From the back, he was just a careless wave of blondish hair atop a handsome camel hair coat, a pair of unlaced construction boots, and a couple of bare calves. Dennis billed himself as a real-estate developer, though the only property he owned was this five-story brick building—or a lot of it. Since his wife had inherited it from her father about twenty years ago, Dennis had been slowly selling off the rental units on the first two floors. Paul lived on the top floor, and he and one other long-time renter up there had been allowed to buy their units, but Dennis had combined the other eight apartments on the fifth floor into his home, office, gym, and a projection room from which he monitored the many cameras he’d installed in the lobby, halls, elevator, and stairways. Diana Blake was a child psychologist, which was the best explanation for her enduring attachment to Dennis, who suddenly turned around with his hands in his coat pockets to make it clear he was wearing only boxer shorts and a white hoodie underneath.

  “Professor!”

  Even students rarely addressed Mark by this title, so it always occasioned a momentary confusion.

  “Welcome back!” Dennis backed up two steps and, imitating the quarterback he probably was in high school, tossed a pack of American Spirits to Mark. “Keep them. I quit for the New Year.”

  “So did I,” Mark said. He had sworn off smoking in his house years ago, swore it off on campus last year, and this year he’d added his car to the forbidden list, so he was more often than not not smoking. “Got a light?”

  As he approached, Dennis said, “I thought Paul left for Rome a week ago.”

  “He came to Ipswich for a few days and left—” Mark cupped his hands and would have tipped his head toward the flame in Dennis’s left hand, but Dennis had helpfully placed his right hand on the back of Mark’s head to save him the effort. Mark wasn’t sure if he was being offered a light or what was half hidden beneath Dennis’s boxer shorts, and when he took a long pull on the cigarette and said, “Paul left for Rome from Ipswich this morning,” Dennis didn’t immediately pull away.

  With one hand massaging Mark’s neck, Dennis stuck his other hand into the pocket of Mark’s robe. “Keep the lighter. Until we meet again. Jesus!” He stepped back and wagged his head back and forth. “You smell good. What are you wearing?”

  “Paul’s bathrobe,” Mark said.

  “Figures,” Dennis said as he retreated to his chair. “I meant to give him that book about Teddy Roosevelt before he left. Did he tell you Diana is pregnant? He didn’t leave his car on the street, did he? Get me the keys and I’ll pull it into one of our spaces till he gets back. I’m making a nursery for a goddess downstairs. You guys gotta come see it when it’s done.”

  All of this was well within the normal range in Dennis World. Just when you thought you had a handle on him—illiterate, selfish, bisexual, boor—he said something else that forced you to reconsider. They each smoked two cigarettes, and Mark guessed Dennis’s weight incorrectly (twice—both times too high, which made Dennis question his new diet), and then to make amends, Mark pointed out the Winter Triangle of Sirius, Betelgeuse, and Procyon in the southeastern sky.

  Dennis whistled something that sounded a lot like “Taps.”

  Mark closed his eyes, and after a few moments of silence, he said, “This is like being on a cruise ship.”

  “Yeah, or a drive-in.” Dennis was bent over the bucket of sand, arranging three of their spent filters into a triangle. He flicked the other one toward the Common, and Mark mentioned that Paul had let a friend borrow his car while he was away, and then they went downstairs, back to being nonsmokers.

  After he made a couple of aimless circuits around Paul’s place, Mark found a love letter from Paul in the refrigerator—two half gallons of orange juice, two half gallons of whole milk, and two pounds of Colombian coffee. Toss in the takeout menu from Dumpling Empire and the flat-screen TV in Paul’s bedroom, and you had the recipe for a recluse.

  6.

  By 8:00 a.m. on Monday, Mark had consumed two Peking ducks, more than a dozen home-renovation programs, four orders of sesame noodles, the better parts of six men’s and four women’s tennis matches at small-tournament warm-ups for the imminent Australian Open, eighteen dumplings, a lot of garlicky greens, and with the assistance of a fresh pot brewed from the second pound of Colombian coffee, he’d downloaded the stories students had dutifully delivered to his email box, segregated the submissions from registered students into a file for the Professor, and finally persuaded Paul’s printer to make copies of everything so he could read through the lot before class. He’d ventured outside seven times, if only up and out with Dennis, who had knocked more than a dozen times over the weekend and, instead of acting annoyed or insulted when his rapping was ignored, congratulated Mark on quitting so often.

  Nineteen students turned up for Monday’s class, and after the Professor assured them that the twelve registered students had submitted stories so the enrollment was settled, two guys packed up and left. With his long and unpleasant preview of the grammar lesson Mark was about to conduct “for those of you who missed this in third grade,” the Professor might have scared away two or three others. Mark distrusted his most recent head count, as he’d spotted Anton, Willa, and Julio twice, and Penelope might have been on a windowsill and in the chair below it, and unless there were two women wearing ice-blue headscarves, he’d seen two Rashids, as well.

  “Despite what you may have heard, everything you need to know about English grammar is regular, reliable, and remarkably elegant,” Mark said, turning to the blackboard and urging everyone to take notes. “We’re not going to unravel all of your confusion or anticipate every question that might arise later in the semester, but you are going to leave today knowing absolutely everything you need to know to write perfect and perfectly grammatical sentences for the rest of your lives.” He skipped his usual invitation of interruptions and questions, hoping to speed through the necessaries, hand out the packets of twelve stories he’d printed and collated and stapled, and then get somewhere quiet with a large bottle of fizzy water.

  His entire lecture could be boiled down to two distinctions. The first was a phrase (a series of related words with no specific grammatical function, such as the red hat, last night, or forever and a day) versus a clause (a group of words that included a noun and a related verb). The Professor said, “Subject and predicate.”

  Mark said, “Or in English, a noun and related verb. And you need only worry over two kinds of clauses.” This was the key distinction.

  The Professor said, “Insubordinate and subordinate.”

  Mark said, “Translation? The independent clause and the dependent clause,” and then wrote on the board, The boy cried. The girl left. “Those are both independent—they can stand al
one as complete sentences. In fact, they are perfect sentences. Elegant—the sort of simple, declarative sentences that English is designed to produce. And here’s the thing for every writer to remember: every English sentence must contain one independent clause.”

  When he saw a couple of hands shoot up, he pretended not to notice and wrote, After the boy cried. By the time the girl left. Keeping his back to the class, he said, “These are dependent clauses—dependent on more information. And if you will tolerate a moment’s confusion, we’ll start by defining the dependent clause as an independent clause preceded by a dependent word or phrase. Typically, those are prepositions or prepositional phrases.” He wrote pre-position. “You see? Words or phrases that establish place in time or space.”

  The Professor said, “Prepositions are more complex than just that.”

  “But that’s a proposition we can entertain later in the semester if there is a contingent of aspiring linguists or lexicographers in the group,” said Mark. “For writers, it’s enough to know that, by itself, a dependent clause is a fragment. Perpetually incomplete. And no matter how many dependent clauses you string together, you don’t have a sentence until you write one entirely independent clause.”

  Someone yelled, “Can a sentence have more than one independent clause?”

  “Yes. And right on cue. The trick is coordination.” Mark erased everything on the board and wrote quickly. “For starters, here are two problems you’ve heard about before, I’m sure.” He stepped aside.

  Run-on sentence: The girl laughed the boy cried.

  A run-on, he explained, was not a long sentence or even a too-long sentence. It was simply uncoordinated independent clauses. And putting a comma between independent clauses just created another problem.