Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  He rolls down his window. “After you convinced me to drive away.” His eyes are bloodshot.

  “What?”

  “It’s a dependent clause. Unfinished.” Anton slams down the plow blade, revealing his pickup’s mangled front end.

  A neighbor’s porch light flips on.

  * * *

  1.

  It was nearly noon on Wednesday when Mark finally finished revising his story to conform to the limits of Technical Exercise 2. This was the Professor’s favorite of all the exercises Mark had dreamed up, and it was a safe bet he wouldn’t alter the scenario before class, so Mark printed out copies of the assignment for the workshop and then topped off his coffee, lit a cigarette, and settled back into his perch at the edge of the kitchen counter.

  Along with the assignment for this new story, the students would receive the comments from the Professor on their first stories in class today, and Mark worried as he did at the start of every semester that the sting of the Professor’s remarks about those open-window stories wouldn’t fade. They probably wouldn’t, but surely neither would his praise. Everything meant so much to the Professor.

  Mark knew his use of Anton in the new story was a risk. And he was confident the Professor would have something snide to say about the suggestion of seduction. But he wasn’t sure how the Professor would respond to the story’s suggestion that excluding Anton from the workshop on the basis of an arbitrary numerical limit could have unforeseen and dire consequences.

  Mark had devoted four hours to his Anton story, and he’d meticulously observed the assignment’s Technical Limits, but until he read the Professor’s comments, he wouldn’t really know what he had done.

  Outside, the sun silvered the weather-beaten deck boards, promising an early spring, which promised Paul’s return, which promised another summer, and as his spirits rose, so did the smoke, which accumulated like clouds on the ceiling and soon drifted down as fog, dragging Mark’s mood with it.

  How quickly he’d adjusted to Paul being gone, how thoughtlessly he’d lifted the in-house smoking ban, how readily he’d adapted to the expectation that Paul would not come sniffing around tonight or tomorrow. He ran some cold water and doused the cigarette, watching the wormy remains droop and disintegrate into the porcelain sink. To that squalid mess, he added the bowl of sodden cereal he’d abandoned hours earlier, and as the mound of flaccid flakes and swollen raisins drooled toward the drain he reminded himself that his sink, unlike Paul’s, was not equipped with a garbage disposal. So, while Paul pulled North African refugees onshore to safety, Mark plucked raisins from the basket and strainer in his kitchen sink.

  The Saab complained all the way to campus, something about its front end and potholes. Mark countered that noise with a radio broadcast of a White House press briefing staged to retract and reiterate the lies tweeted out overnight by the president. The emotional effort required to believe the country could survive Trump was just about equal to the self-deception involved in speeding down Route 1 in a collection of aftermarket parts slapped onto a rusty chassis manufactured by a car company that had gone bust.

  Mark was already twenty minutes late for office hours when he got to the garage, so he left the recycling box full of NEPCAJE books in the back seat and vowed to devote Thursday and Friday, and the better part of the weekend, to those antimagnetic tomes about teaching. When he got to the second floor of Hum Hall, three guys in parkas and gym shorts were huddling beside his office door. Before Mark said a word, the nearest one unfolded a Drop-Add form and said they were all seniors and had been trying to get into the workshop for four years.

  Mark stuck his key in the door. “I didn’t see you at the first two class meetings.”

  “I can explain.” This was the shortest of the three, and he patted his pockets in search of something.

  The third guy tipped his headphones off his ears. “We’re desperate.”

  The thumping music got a nod of approval from the first guy, who was clearly in charge. “We’re basically here to beg.”

  The short one said, “We’re at your mercy, sir.” He’d started to pump his fists like pistons in time with the music. Soon, the beat got to the hips and heads of the other two.

  Mark said, “You’re not getting into the class, but you’d make a great boy band.”

  “We can do that.” This was the first guy, who sprang to attention. “We’ll be your opening act for every class. Please, Professor? We’ve heard great stuff about you.”

  Mark opened his office door. “You can come in and finish your pitch, but the class is full. And the waitlist is full. And more than a dozen seniors who have attended both class meetings are already not getting in.”

  They did persist. After a round of introductions and a rambling complaint about the lack of creative outlets on campus, the lead guy finally explained their plight in two words. “Restoration Comedy.” All three of them had signed up for that class to complete their Humanities requirement. “Not funny.”

  The short kid added his two cents. “Tragic mistake.”

  “Nice try,” Mark said. “Not happening.”

  The music man flipped his headphones back into place.

  The group spokesman said, “Foiled again,” and led the other two down the hall to the next office door.

  As Mark sat at his desk, a young woman poked her head in. He recognized her from class and ventured a guess. “Wendy?”

  “Yes! Hello. Are you free?” She was wearing an ankle-length blue coat and a cowboy hat, and she immediately shrugged off a backpack that banged down like an anvil. “How are you?” She flipped off the hat and kicked it under the unoccupied chair next to Mark’s desk.

  Mark said, “I’m happy to see you.”

  This seemed to confuse her. She reached up and tugged at her hair, as if it were a curtain she could pull down over her shoulders. “I guess I’ll just sit here? I don’t know why I cut my hair. I’m in your creative-writing class. Is this an okay time to talk?”

  “It’s perfect,” Mark said. She wasn’t making much sense, but her voice had a flat Midwestern plainness that made everything she said seem reasonable.

  “I guess I just wanted to say how much I am enjoying the course.” She was still standing, still worrying at the ripples of brown hair that seemed to be pasted to her head and neck. “That’s lame—exactly what I didn’t want to say. One of my housemates gave me this creme to stop my hair from springing out, and now I feel like one of those ducklings. You know, the ones you see after an oil spill? I’m Willa, by the way. I’m usually not like this.” She waved her hands around to make it clear she wasn’t just talking about her hair.

  Mark said, “I’m really happy to know the course is making sense to you.”

  By the time Willa sat down, she’d told Mark she was pre-med, had early acceptance to Johns Hopkins for the fall, was an only child, lived with five other seniors in a three-bedroom apartment with no stove, wasn’t sure she wanted to be a doctor, her parents were divorced and both taught biology at the University of Kansas, and a chemistry professor had given her two electric hotplates to use until that no-good stove was repaired or replaced, which is why her bag was so heavy. “I guess I wanted to know if you think it’s something about me, or it might be something else, like that instead of using traditional books, we just read what other kids in the class write for our assigned reading, maybe? Also, I guess I was wondering, do other kids talk to you about this? I mean, is this normal?”

  Mark smiled. He had no idea what Willa was trying to ask.

  “I’m sure they do.” Willa performed a quick hair check. Verdict: not great. “It’s just I want to be sure it’s not just me, that I’m, you know, not freaking out or something. Like just now. I see myself saying, It’s not just me, and I wonder why she—why I—didn’t say, It’s not just I. Because I is correct, right? Even though it sounds odd? But the point is—who is that looking at me and thinking about what I just said? The whole time I worked on my first story, it
was just like that—that’s what I wanted to ask you about. It’s like I’m reading over my own shoulder. Do you think that’s, I don’t know, pretty normal for someone who hasn’t done anything creative before?”

  “I think medicine is creative,” Mark said.

  “Well, thanks, but not really. It’s mostly been memorizing so far. Writing that first story felt much more—well, not the same.”

  “That’s great.” This seemed to relax her, so Mark carried on. “You’re feeling what you’re meant to feel. That was the spirit of the monosyllabic limit. To make you self-conscious, to make you think about every word you write. Does that make sense?”

  Willa nodded. “Self-consciousness—but doubled. Right? I mean, literally times two. Or, squared, maybe.”

  Mark didn’t say anything. He was recalling her first story, which they would talk about in class today. In Willa’s imagination, the woman who’d been instructed not to open the window was a trainee at a fast-food restaurant, stuck in a tiny glass booth. “Here’s what I know. You wrote a superb first story. I love that she opens that window, and all those cars zip into line before the manager has anyone at the grill to fill the orders.”

  “And mic was okay? I mean, would you consider that natural language? Am I loving the limits like you said we had to love them? Or would you say I was gaming the limits with a word like that?”

  “People refer to microphones as mics all the time.” To Mark’s surprise, this seemed to satisfy Willa. She really was worried about one word. “Mic is a standard noun—as familiar as, say, phone. Right?”

  A loud knock at the door brought Willa to her feet. “Telephone,” she said. “Right. I mean, no one would say, ‘Stop checking your telephone while I’m talking to you.’” As if she were at home, Willa opened the door and ushered in another student from the workshop.

  “I can come back,” he mumbled. He was memorable—a somber towhead who always pushed his chair back a few feet from the table, keeping his distance from most of what went on in class. He was wearing a puffy white ski parka bedizened with about $5,000 worth of lift tickets.

  Before Mark could speak, Willa had shoved her backpack into the hall. “Your turn in the chair,” she said as she returned to collect her hat and coat, and then she hollered, “See you both in class,” and slammed the door.

  “She’s in our class?” The somber guy didn’t move. “I’m Mark.”

  Mark said, “So am I.” This didn’t impress the kid. “Have a seat.”

  He ignored the invitation. “You probably heard about what happened. Which is why I might not make it to class today.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about you.”

  “You will. It’s all over campus. There was an incident. Last night.” He was staring past Mark, out the window, over the pond, and deep into the rocky hills of the reservation land. “My car was stolen.”

  Mark said, “On campus?”

  “Yeah. Well, nearby. Two guys from not around here, but they come around a lot, selling—they deal. Drugs, I guess. That’s what I’m hearing anyway.”

  Mark said, “So they’ve been caught?”

  “No, but we have witnesses.” He sounded like someone who’d already talked to his father and his father’s lawyer.

  “Listen, you don’t owe me any details. I’m just glad you weren’t hurt. Let’s talk about what this means for you in the workshop.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” He unzipped his parka halfway. “Me and a buddy wanted to go snowshoeing in the Breakheart hills while there was still snow, but there wasn’t much. But anyway, I’d said I’d give a few other guys a ride out there, and those two black guys showed up with them, but for some reason the other kids decided they weren’t in the mood, so those two black guys said they’d go with us for the hell of it. There was a big mix-up about what to do next, and I guess they ended up stealing the Audi.”

  Mark sincerely hoped this kid was a good skier because his story was going downhill really fast. “So you won’t be in class today?”

  He narrowed his gaze. It was the first time he seemed to be genuinely thinking before he spoke. “Probably not. Probably never again.” He looked directly at Mark. “I am so fucked. Sorry.”

  “Is there some way I could be of use?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. I gotta go Skype with my parents again.”

  Mark said, “Send me an email when you feel up to it. We can meet to talk about your status in the class.”

  He zipped up his jacket, but it was too late. All the air had already gone out of him. “I can do that,” he said, though it was obvious that neither Mark believed him.

  2.

  An ominous little eyelet of black water glistened in the middle of the pond, forcing Mark to follow the longer, circuitous path to class. He resented the detour. His bag was not especially heavy. He had his packet of the monosyllabic stories for today’s workshops, the printed copies of the Professor’s comments to hand out at the end of class, and fifteen copies of Technical Exercise 2, the hit-and-run story that would be due on Monday. But this Wednesday afternoon, he also carried Paul, and the other Mark, and those soggy bran flakes he should not have flushed down the drain, and Trump, and the Saab’s rusty struts and axles. He carried them all the way up and into the Arts Building until the door of the Stanhope Forbes Seminar Room swung shut behind him, when he was unburdened, unbothered, unmindful of anything beyond the twelve faces turned toward him.

  The room was silent, and Mark didn’t say anything as he emptied out his bag. He did a quick recount. Only twelve, at last. Anton looked sheepishly pleased to have a seat at the table, and Mark knew that the other Mark would never be back to claim it. The Professor had not yet turned up. He often arrived in the middle of a class. Sometimes, if he’d done a round of radio interviews or a TV appearance, Mark couldn’t rouse him for a couple of days. The Professor actually had a productive life as a writer. But his being late to class today and every Wednesday for the next few weeks of the semester was unrelated to his literary ambitions.

  The Professor could not tolerate the first ten minutes of the Wednesday classes. He objected to Mark’s habit of interviewing the students about their general impressions of the stories before beginning the workshops. The Professor thought this promoted generalization and encouraged the students to talk too much, which inevitably turned each five-minute workshop for a Technical Exercise into a seven-or ten-minute affair, which meant that the class work that could otherwise be completed on Wednesday reliably spilled over into the following Monday.

  And those were the very reasons Mark refused to relent. Who didn’t speak in generalizations about even the greatest novels, the most profound stories? I loved that book. I didn’t get the ending. It’s really well written, but it was slow-going. Why should students be expected to squelch that impulse? Of course, after that, there was more to say about each story—which often made it impossible to say all of it in five minutes.

  Mark stood up. “Thanks for turning up again. We have three things on the docket. I want to do a quick review of any questions about the grammar and syntax material from last class. And then we’ll start the workshops—they’re our priority. We only have five or ten minutes for each story. When you are writing longer stories, we’ll give them more time. For now, we’ll talk fast. And we won’t get to all of the stories today. But we have an open day on Monday, so everyone will get a full complement of comments.”

  “No pun intended.” This was the small guy with the little ponytail. “Complement, compliment.”

  Willa said, “Why is that a pun, Max?”

  Mark said, “It’s wasn’t quite.”

  Max tightened the elastic around his ponytail and said, “Well, it’s a compliment that she knows my name.”

  Mark said, “Can you return the compliment?”

  Max said, “Virginia?”

  A young woman with almond eyes, a white headband, and two long braids said, “I’m Virginia.”

&n
bsp; Mark said, “I’m Mark, and I’m even worse at names than Max is, so let’s try to say our names again today when we speak. We also want to preserve ten minutes near the end of class for the next story assignment. But I want to begin with your impressions of the stories you read for today.”

  “Good—oh, my name is Rashid.” Her headscarf was emerald green.

  Mark said, “Good?”

  “Good. Not great. Mine included. Most of our stories didn’t feel complete.”

  “Totally. Julio here.” He was sporting a severe new crew cut, and the small patch of shiny black bristles made him seem massive, but because he never took off his parka, it was hard to tell if his bigness owed more to dumbbells or doughnuts. “Most of the stories were sort of abstract.”

  Mark said, “Intentionally so?”

  Julio shrugged.

  “No, not mine anyway. I’m Penelope.”

  Mark said, “Penelope?” He recovered quickly enough to add, “Why do you say the abstract quality wasn’t intentional?” Her name was at odds with her appearance. She had short dark hair and bangs, and a broad, flat face with tiny features, like a pug. If he had to guess her ethnic roots—and he didn’t have to, but he did—Mark would have wavered between Asian and Andean.

  “I think a lot of us didn’t make it clear who the people were, or why they were in a room together. And there were a lot of pronouns—so it was hard sorting out which he or she was doing what.” Penelope raised her hands, as if fending off criticism. “I’m sorry, but in three or four of the stories, I couldn’t even tell if the woman was dead or alive.”

  “That’s not abstraction. That’s a problem.” The Professor had arrived. “I’ve met a lot of people, but I’ve never met anyone whose parents were so stupid or so forgetful that they didn’t give their children names. Name your characters. Give them roles. In a few of these stories, we meet a nurse or a fry cook and—Presto!—we not only have real and memorable people, but a location, and a specific relationship between the man and the woman. Names, roles, location.”