Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  Penelope had revised all three Technical Exercises, which Mark read aloud and annotated with just a few questions about motive. The syntax was spot-on, and Penelope enthusiastically endorsed Mark’s reservations and suggestions, so the meeting would have taken only ten minutes but for the hurricane that was unleashed each time she dove into her bag to find a sheet of paper or a pen. After an especially big blow, she ducked down and plucked a car key off the floor that she’d reported stolen last semester. In between the storms, she filled Mark in on the progress on her senior thesis, which both she and Nina agreed could never have happened if they hadn’t taken the creative-writing course. And had she told Mark how much she loved the course? Nina, too. Nina said it was the best course on campus, and Penelope was telling everyone in her lab to take it.

  “Somewhere in here I also have copies of my story if you want them,” she said, bent over, her head halfway inside her bag.

  “Oh, please, just hand them out in class today,” Mark said, hoping to avoid another tempest. “Your workshop is on Wednesday, right?”

  “So that’s my other question.” Penelope dropped her bag and shoveled in the mess she’d made. “On that next Monday after spring break, I might not make it back in time for class.”

  Not exactly a question, but Mark now understood that the compliments had been a sort of down payment. “Thanks for letting me know,” Mark said.

  “I can email my comments to Charles and Isaac if I miss their workshops.”

  “And Julio,” Mark said. “Great.”

  “So it won’t count against my grade or anything, my not being there?”

  “Well, you won’t get credit for not being there, of course.”

  “No, of course.” Penelope was toying with that key, as if she might be able to trade it for some special consideration.

  “My family rented a house in Saint John,” she said.

  “That sounds terrific,” Mark said.

  “But I won’t get, like, points off.”

  “You won’t get anything,” Mark said. “Listen, Penelope, I think you’re a great member of the workshop, and the stories are getting stronger with every revision. On Monday after break, I won’t think less of you. I’ll just know you chose not to be in class.”

  “I could have made up an excuse, a better one.” This wasn’t a complaint. She seemed to be really thinking about her options.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Mark said. “But I’m not handing out points for honesty, either.”

  “I don’t wish I lied to you,” she said as she stood up, “but it’s complicated, all this currency business.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “Thanks for your help with those stories. Really.”

  “You’re welcome,” Mark said, and as she paused in the doorway, he added, “honestly.”

  Jane had been hovering for a while, and she was not pleased that Mark hadn’t responded to her pacing and sighing in the hall. Now, she had “less than seven minutes and counting,” and she needed Mark to spell out the requirements for the rest of the semester “more clearly than you do in class when you allow everyone else to ask irrelevant questions that make it impossible to concentrate.” Plus, she wanted to change the date of her workshop, but she instructed him not to think about that until he had cleared up the schedule confusion.

  It occurred to him that Jane might be one of the two students the dean had mentioned who had not declared to him their learning challenges or cognitive quirks. “Tell me if I’m speaking too quickly,” he said. He explained that her final portfolio had to include one, two, or all three of the Technical Exercises, both original short stories she’d be writing for the rest of the semester, and revisions of all of these had to be shown to the whole class at least once. Mark would respond to as many revisions as Jane produced. “And on Wednesday, I’ll assign you one final Technical Exercise that must be in your portfolio, which I will not read or review in advance.”

  “Or even talk to me about,” Jane said, as she wrote. “Go on, go on. I’m all caught up.”

  “That’s it. You have a workshop date for both original stories, and you can bring in copies of revisions to the class whenever you’re ready to hear what the others have to say about them.”

  “That would be approximately never,” Jane said. “And I need to change my workshop to the Monday after spring break instead of that Wednesday. Do I have to come up with a reason for that?”

  “You just need to be in touch with Charles, Isaac, and Julio and hope one of them is willing to delay his workshop and trade.”

  “You’re saying it’s up to me?”

  Mark said, “I think I’m saying exactly what it says on the syllabus.”

  She was already packing up. “I have a midterm later today, so if I’m not as good as usual in class, at least you’ll know why.”

  On her way out, Jane brushed past Rita Jebdi, who was either later than ever for the Romantics or not holding class today. “Did Althea speak to you?”

  “I saw her earlier, but we haven’t spoken.” Mark stood up. “You look elegant today.”

  “Althea wants you to stop by her office before you leave campus. Maybe this is about our next chair?” Rita spun around. “My sister sent me this crazy tunic thing from Nepal, and I sort of love it. My class is taking a midterm, so I’m celebrating. Also campaigning, to be honest. I put my name in the running for chair.”

  “You have my vote. You have my endorsement. You have my eternal gratitude.”

  “Really? I was afraid we might be competing against each other. Oh, my gravy, you have yet another student-in-waiting.” As she rippled down the hall, she called out, “Thanks, Mark.”

  Leo wanted to discuss two sentences in two Technical Exercises, which took about two minutes. He looked disappointed that Mark had nothing more on offer.

  “Is there something else you want to talk about, Leo?”

  “Not really,” he said, but he didn’t move.

  Mark said, “Midterms?”

  Leo said, “None this semester.”

  Mark said, “Going away for spring break?”

  Leo nodded, but he didn’t offer up a destination.

  This was more dentistry than discussion. Mark steadied his aim and pointed his pliers. “How is the photography project getting on?

  Leo extracted a contact sheet from his notebook. “If you really want to see them, these are the pictures I took of our classroom.”

  There were twelve little squares, each from a different position around the table. Mark couldn’t discern a pattern or a sequence. “They are elegant. The light is especially strange.”

  “Sort of sad, I think,” Leo said. “I ended up liking these better than the color prints.” He wasn’t offering any other hints.

  Mark stood up and handed the sheet to Leo. “Hold them up for me.” As he backed away, he saw what Leo had done. “It’s your chair—where you usually sit—from twelve different perspectives.”

  “It’s how people see me or don’t see me,” Leo said. “I think you’re the only one who can always see everyone.”

  That seemed truer than ever soon after Leo left, as Mark stared past the open door into the quiet hallway, mindful of Anton, and his mother, and the dean, who were all trying to figure out how to do their jobs under the worst of circumstances. He pulled the form from his bag a few times, but he didn’t fill in any of the blanks. At some point, his Sisyphean paper shuffle was interrupted by Althea Morgan, who sat in the alumni chair and pulled the plastic chair away from the door to use as a footrest.

  She was disappointed that Mark would not agree to run the department, largely because she correctly guessed that Rita would lay waste to her impeccable office and military-grade filing system. “I suppose it won’t bother anyone when she’s half an hour late to departmental meetings,” she added.

  “It’s why I’m voting for her,” Mark said. By then, the door had slowly swung shut. He fixed his gaze on Althea.

  “At least she’s smart,” Althe
a said.

  “And good-hearted.”

  “Loyal,” Althea said.

  “Stylish,” Mark said.

  “Honestly, you think she’ll be all right as chair?”

  Mark said, “Train wreck.”

  “Yup,” Althea said. “Oh, well, you can always lean on Norman Chester, if you can pry him out of that ridiculous chair. He told me he’s staying on for another year—with private accommodations, no less.”

  “I’m surprised the administration relented on the office-sharing,” Mark said.

  “Not for nothing. They’re forcing him to teach a course.”

  Mark straightened up in his chair. “Housman?”

  “No, no. Not a real course. He’s doing an Independent Study of some kind. He was in my office for about an hour this morning, forcing me to print out all the forms he’d need, including a final-grade sheet, as he refuses to go online for anything.”

  Mark was staring at Anton’s coat. “Why does he need a final-grade form now?”

  Althea shrugged off that question. “It’s always hard to tell whether he’s sneaky or senile. Take your pick.”

  “That’s one mystery solved,” Mark said. He was remembering Chester’s odd parting shot in the library—just so there’s no ill will between us.

  “What mystery is that?”

  “Norman Chester is not crazy,” Mark said.

  5.

  Althea walked in companionable silence with Mark halfway around the pond, which prevented his taking a detour to dump Norman Chester out of his Morris chair on the way to class. When he got to the classroom, he had only a few minutes before the workshops for Dorothy, Max, and Rashid got underway, which he used to spell out the portfolio requirements one more time. Everyone took notes except Jane, who covered her ears with her hands. He asked Penelope, Virginia, and Leo to pass around copies of their stories, which would be under discussion on Wednesday, and then called out, “Charles, Isaac, Julio—next time?” Each of them nodded, acknowledging that copies were due on Wednesday for reading over spring break. Dorothy, Willa, Max, and Virginia passed around copies of oft-revised Technical Exercises they were ready to show to their classmates.

  Julio said, “Where’s Anton?”

  “Not here,” the Professor said. “Fortunately, the prose in all three of the stories under consideration today is well-made. I’ll say more about each one in sequence, but I want to take a few minutes to address the problem of the ending, a problem which inheres in all three of these estimable first drafts.”

  Leo said, “We haven’t talked about endings very much.”

  The Professor said, “Evidently not often enough.”

  Max said, “Are you really going to tell everyone what the three of us should have done before the workshops?”

  The Professor said, “Do you seriously think that speech from the brother-in-law is the end of the profound story you had going up to that moment?”

  Max cocked his head to the side, like a bird responding to an unfamiliar song.

  “That speech does seem sort of canned, Max, like you imported it from somewhere else,” Dorothy said.

  The Professor turned to Dorothy and said, “And why does the friend of the narrator get the last word in your story?”

  “It was meant to be ironic,” Dorothy said.

  The Professor said, “Why?”

  Penelope said, “But it is ironic.”

  “He gets that,” Rashid said. “He means why was she aiming for irony? I did the same thing, I think.”

  “Yes and no,” the Professor said. “You did it, Rashid, to avoid having to untangle the very real trauma that bereaved mother has occasioned in her neighborhood and her marriage by doling out those secondhand baked goods. I think Dorothy can’t decide whether her narrator’s rage about being betrayed was justified or not, so she let the friend at least halfway off the hook with that ironic little joke, which leaves us with no confident sense of the writer’s point of view.”

  Charles said, “This is going well.”

  “And he said these are good stories,” Julio said. “I am so screwed.”

  “The beginning of your story contains the ending,” the Professor said. “That’s not a Zen koan, that’s advice.”

  Mark scanned the room. No one had moved. “A pen and paper might be in order,” he said.

  “The ending has to be a possibility that is present from the start,” the Professor said. “We often imagine our characters as actors on a stage while we are writing, but you don’t want readers to feel that the story simply stops when you pull the curtain and turn on the house lights. You have to find ways throughout the story to generate a sense of ongoing life, a future beyond the frame of the immediate story. And you have to craft an ending that allows readers to imagine that life for your characters after the last word. And, finally, for now, one additional piece of advice. Do not give your characters the last word. It’s your story, not theirs, and though it can work, a character given the last word is too often reductive or—well—”

  “Ironic,” said Dorothy and Rashid, almost in unison.

  “Or just embarrassing,” Max said.

  “Dorothy wrote a story,” the Professor said. He waited until everyone had shuffled their piles of paper. “She titled it ‘The Sleeping Porch.’ It is given in the past tense in a very intimate third-person voice, limited to Lena. There are two secondary characters. The story is set in the 1940s in a suburb of Oakland, so history bears on the choices made by these young women. I want to frame our analysis with three questions,” which he rattled off in quick succession. “Now, where should we begin?”

  Mark scanned the room. Eleven of the twelve windowsills were occupied. Leo’s camera equipment and Willa’s big blue coat and cowboy hat were sharing Anton’s chair. It wasn’t a happy ending, but it had been a possibility from the start.

  6.

  On Tuesday, it snowed half-heartedly all day in Ipswich and came to nothing. Mark divided his time between that final-grade form he didn’t fill out and the new stories from Leo, Penelope, and Virginia. Paul was on a two-day tour of rural clinics in Bulgaria, so Mark wrote him an exhaustive account of his dilemma with the dean. Hours later, Paul texted back: A+. Mark didn’t know if this was an endorsement of his principled stand or Paul’s suggested final grade for Anton.

  On Wednesday morning, Mark woke to a lot of emails and texts from people who’d read the morning newspaper before he had made coffee. Paul’s said, NYTimes! Read all about it!

  After swiping through the rest of his morning mail, Mark texted back, While the students are sunbathing in the Caribbean, I’ll be selecting ties I’ll later regret for appearances on MSNBC and FOX. He saw two new emails with subject lines referencing the op-ed, so he shut off his phone. He sat at the dining room table to write a story to fulfill the limits of the final Technical Exercise of the semester. Although it was not due until the very last class of the semester, Mark knew he would ignore his novel and squander his spring break on the exercise if he didn’t get it done this morning. After an hour of sitting that more nearly approximated Zen meditation than creative writing, he closed his laptop, stuck it in his bag with a vow not to leave campus later today until he had a decent draft written, and then took a long shower.

  When he got to campus, most of the faculty spaces in the garage were unoccupied, and as he crossed the Common he had to stand aside to make room for waves of joy-blind students rolling their suitcases away from their last classes on their way to the airport. He figured he wouldn’t have any visitors for office hours, so he stopped at Althea Morgan’s office to let her boast about her plans for spring break in Jamaica, but when she opened her door, he caught a glimpse of Rita Jebdi beside Althea’s desk, pawing through a pile of folders. Althea promised to call him before she left town and then gave him the finger before she shut her door.

  When he got to the third floor, he saw Julio sitting outside his office, bowed over an open textbook. He didn’t say anything. He opened the d
oor, and Julio collected his stuff and sat in the alumni chair. Mark hung his parka over the longer red one on the back of his door, hoping to prevent any questions about Anton’s absence.

  Julio said, “Have you ever had that dream where you have to take an exam and you suddenly realize you didn’t ever go to class?”

  “I do know that dream,” Mark said as he sat down. “It’s unnerving.”

  “I know.” Julio shoved the textbook into his bag and pulled out a stack of paper. “But it’s worse if you’re me, and you really didn’t go to Statistics for like two weeks and you have the midterm tomorrow.”

  Mark said, “Were you sick?”

  “I am now,” Julio said, and he handed Mark two revised Technical Exercises.

  He had improved both drafts, and after he reviewed Mark’s questions and suggestions, he asked Mark to look over a checklist of writing tips he’d translated from his class notes so he could use it from now on. Mark offered a few corrections to the checklist—Julio was still stingy with his commas, and the conventions for punctuating conversations were a revelation to him. Mark assured him that dialogue was especially tricky for second-language speakers. “Isn’t it entirely different in Spanish?”

  “Probably,” Julio said, “but I honestly never paid much attention to it,” and then he asked Mark to look at a couple of his essays for other classes. The first was a draft for Comp Lit due before spring break, and Mark underlined a few problematic sentences on the first page and then suggested Julio use his checklist to identify other problems and correct them. Next was a seven-page essay that had already been graded—B+—with a total of six marginal comments from Julio’s history professor, the longest of which was wow! now you’re talking.

  Mark underlined several problematic clauses on the first page.

  Julio cross-checked them with his chart. “I guess he gives extra credit for comma splices,” he said.

  “This is the real work, Julio—being better than people expect you to be.”

  “I’m really trying. You know, in my defense, I didn’t start off expecting to have to learn anything in creative writing,” Julio said. He didn’t sound entirely grateful. “Would you mind if I came back sometimes just to double-check other things I write? Just on the first page, so I know how I’m doing?”