Chris said, Is this the fucking course?
That required me to dislodge from Radha and look.
Yeah, I said. That’s the one.
It made me feel bitter just acknowledging it.
Chris read the professor’s bio. That guy’s ancient. Is he the be-all and end-all?
He’s kind of famous, I said. Mordecai Richler called him the Balzac of the Maritimes.
Chris flipped more pages while I tried to resume my grindy, grabby position with Radha.
A few seconds later, Chris interrupted again.
What about this guy? Did you apply to this one too?
I hung off the couch to read.
Crafting the Powerful Narrative. The truth was, I hadn’t noticed the course, but an embarrassed part of me didn’t want to admit it. It was in the creative writing department, offered by someone named Professor Delmore Rivers. He was an assistant professor, I noticed, nothing special.
I’ve seen him, Chris said. He’s a young dude, and he seems pretty fucking all right. He came into my English class to invite people to submit for the school literary journal. This is the guy you want.
The course did have a portfolio requirement, so that meant it was at least exclusive. But it had the same deadline as the other course, already passed, so what difference did that make?
Too late, I said.
How’s that? Chris asked.
Susan showed him the date.
Oh, fuck that shit. Where’s the phone?
He went upstairs into the kitchen. He was gone for ten minutes. When he came back down, he had a grin on his face, like he’d just fucked the maid.
It took me three calls, he said, but I finally talked to this old bat in the department. She said the class isn’t full and if you get your stuff in by 9:00 a.m. Monday, the professor will consider it. That’s when the packages are getting handed to him.
It was two o’clock Friday afternoon.
Cool, I said, and felt hopeful for a change. I’ll deliver it personally.
But use that crazy beach story, Chris said. I’m telling you. Nothing else you’ve written so far even comes close.
What’s the beach story about? Susan asked. She met me with her academic stare, the clear-eyed, emotionally neutral, but intellectually curious expression she seemed to reserve for me.
The beach where you and I almost made out, I wanted to say, but shrugged instead.
Does it involve sex? Radha asked.
Dirty, nasty sex, Chris said, and started tickling Susan. Radha jumped on to pull him off. I jumped on Radha to complete the pile and managed to tickle Susan a little in the process.
Chris had read almost everything I’d ever written, so in that sense, he was pretty much the only person with the credentials to make any judgment about my work. But the crazy beach story wasn’t ready. When the contortions on the carpet calmed down, I told him the story needed cleaning up. It needed tightening. It needed a beginning and an ending. It would take me days. My face was flushed, and I probably sounded more desperate than usual.
Well, Chris said, you’ve got about two and a half. Come on, girls, we’re out of here. Get your boots and coats. Let’s hit the road.
He slapped Susan on the bottom. He pulled Radha to her feet.
What are you doing? they asked.
Chris, who met all urgent deadlines with blithe indifference, was like a man possessed.
We’re giving him space. You heard him, he needs a few days to get his story ready, so that’s what he’s getting. Let’s go. Come on. We can watch a video at my place.
And just like that, they were gone.
It was, perhaps, my first bitter taste of the loneliness of the writer’s life.
I
wasted a night even getting started. I was distracted. I was horny. I was exhausted. I masturbated twice. I felt sick about the story. It wasn’t good enough. It was a mess. Chris was wrong. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever, or even the greatest I’d ever written; it was bullshit.
Chris called me from his lunch break at Canadian Tire the next day to see how it was coming. I wanted to lie and say, Great, but he’d gotten me into this mess and I felt petulant.
Fucking brutal, I said.
What do you mean?
I can’t get it right.
Bullshit.
It’s never going to work.
Silence. The airlessness of disappointment.
I think you’ll figure it out. You just got to torture yourself for a while.
He hung up.
That night, still no words. It was Saturday night. I hadn’t spent Saturday night at home in years. My dad asked if I was sick. I told him I had a story to work on. He didn’t seem to hear. My mom asked me if Radha and I had already broken up. No, I said. I didn’t even know she knew we were going out. Was it that obvious? Had there been fewer cum stains on my sheets?
Around nine o’clock, I got called to the phone again, and picked up the one in my room.
How’s it going now? Chris asked.
No better, I said.
Radha wants to say hi.
A pause.
Hi, she said.
Hi, I answered.
I miss you, she said.
I miss you too, I said. And I did. I was miserable.
If you get your story done on time, I’ll do something to you you’ll never, ever forget.
I wondered if I’d heard her right.
What would that be? I managed to ask.
You’ll have to imagine, she said, and giggled.
The phone got dropped. Was she drunk? Was she making fun of me? Voices echoed into the mouthpiece, questions, instructions, laughter. Finally, it was picked up again. Chris spoke.
There, that motivate you enough?
As if a call and a promise like that would suddenly boost my concentration. I asked them what they were up to. Then we said goodbye and I jerked off again.
This brings me to an important point. I knew at some level writers never jerked off. Not the successful ones. Instead, they channelled their sperm into bullets of supreme hardness that machine-gunned the page and left nothing but wondrous words. Failed writers, like yours truly, dribbled all their creative genius out in wasted days, pointless frustrations, self-pity, and weariness.
And then on Sunday morning, as the hopelessness peaked, something happened. I read the story again, angrily, ready to
tear it to pieces, and this time, I saw a crack of light, an opening, and I pulled and clawed my way in, and when I stood there, on the other side of something, I had a sentence to start it all off.
A dead frog on its back, stuck in the oily muck, the white belly so much larger than the limbs, paunched slightly to one side.
Is this it? I thought. That’s the way some sentences are supposed to feel. You react to them like jolts. Not just strings of words used to describe a person, place, or thing; instead, they are mood-setters and tone-makers. They contain the magic of poetry within the push of prose. And for the writer, they are pure freedom, even as they compel you to march forward. I knew I’d be forever grateful to that frog. He died for my sins that I might live.
My story was about Leah at the pier. And, to my amazement, it turned out to be from her point of view. I don’t mean to say that I was Leah, and Chris fucked me. In one version, the version Chris had read, yes, I had described that sex scene in detail from a third-person omniscient perspective. But while the tension in that version was palpable, as they say, and the description evocative, the story itself had no reason for being. Who, except a perverted voyeur, actually cared? But when I wrote about what happened from Leah’s point of view, I suffused every moment with some emotion inside her. The innocence of calling out to us on a perfect summer day. The unspoken tensions between her and Susan. The beauty of the lake, touched deftly and sweetly by a certain foreboding inherent in all water and what it contains, not in any malevolent sense but in terms of the immensity of life, of all lives, and the endless lifelessness beyond, the timeless emptiness of the universe. Then the pier, and the way pain and
need and temptation got embodied and became irresistible, and you succumbed willingly, the instigator of your own destruction and shame.
But the moment of brilliance, the insight given to me in the delirious hours of my dream state, was to understand for the first time the power of absence. I ruthlessly severed some of my best paragraphs, including the ones, ironically, that had delivered me into the story in the first place, and I cut any mention or even hint of the sex scene that had anchored the original draft. I scrubbed it from the story and left the reader only with the knowledge that two people had departed the pier, and two people were left behind. And in that reading, the vagueness took on many possibilities. Tilt the story one way, and you understood that a murder was coming. Or sex. Or suicide. Or maybe nothing at all, the roiling emotions just so much darkness, like silt on the bottom of the lake.
It was, if I say so myself, very Hills Like White Elephants.
By the time Chris called to check up on me on Sunday evening, I was surging with energy and almost too wired to talk. I need to keep going, I said.
Go go go, he answered.
So I worked all night, and around three in the morning, I had perfection, and such a blissful sense of power and accomplishment that, when I sank back on my bed, exhausted, I didn’t even feel like tossing one off. That’s when you know you’ve really done something worthy.
Then I overslept the next morning.
I
woke at 8:10. Under normal circumstances, it might have been okay. When you’re eighteen, what does a little tardiness mean? But I had my 9:00 deadline, and if I didn’t get my story in by then, I didn’t have a chance of getting into the class. And I needed to get into that class or else I knew my writing life was over.
I rang Chris, risking a pre-noon phone call, but his mother, who was a night nurse, answered blearily and said, He’s not home. Meaning, probably, he had never come home. What a trooper. I’m slaving away on a story. He’s out on the town.
My own parents were already out, and there was not a car around. I emerged from the house with my boots unlaced and looked around for a neighbour with a car warming up, any ride I could beg, borrow, or steal. Then I thought of the bus.
We never took the bus. The damn thing never, ever stuck to any kind of schedule. Sometimes you could walk the whole route without a bus sneaking up behind you. But what choice did I have? If God wanted me to get into the writing program, God would supply a bus. And lo, verily, He did.
I ran for half a block to cut it off at the stop, and barely got on, bodychecking the chrome door when I threw my way inside. The driver was not amused and waited for me to count out the right change in my shaking hands before resuming his route. I sat, grateful for the rest, and checked my watch. I had thirty-five minutes. It was conceivable that I might make it. But when the bus reached the harbour, instead of turning right and heading for the bridge, it turned left and headed for the depot. This bus did not go to Halifax—it was terminating!
I broke out and ran for the ferry. Two ferries crossed the
harbour every half hour. It took twenty minutes for the ferry to make a single passage. Twenty-five minutes was all I had left. When I reached the ferry terminal, bus transfer in hand, I saw that the barrier had closed, and the ferry was revving up for its surge away from the dock. I felt a giant
No
screaming out of my chest and threw myself forward. I ran through the turnstiles, down the concrete incline, and leaped.
The ferry, by the time I was in the air, had separated itself from the dock by a foot and a half. If I slipped, I would be churned into pink foam in the water below, like a hapless bad guy in a James Bond film.
Instead, I landed on the slick deck, slipped under the barrier, and walked shakily past disapproving clucks and shocked stares from fellow commuters who did not know what it meant to be on a mission of genuine importance.
When I arrived at the English department office, eighteen minutes late, sweat was streaming down my face. They pointed down the hall when I asked for the creative writing reception. I chugged farther down, checking door signs, before finding an opaque glass door with
Creative Writing
written on it, like a dental office.
The door was closed. A tragic sign, I believed. I rapped, heard nothing, rapped again, and a voice called out, It’s open.
So I opened.
I didn’t even look up as I strode across the carpet. I was already in full explanation mode, apologizing for my lateness, inquiring whether there was still time, trying to talk or fling my way through the next set of barriers.
Hey, you!
The words, as I remember them, sounded accusatory, but it was a pleasant, sweet, and altogether familiar voice calling to me. I focused and saw Leah sitting behind the desk.
Her hair had been newly permed and her lipstick was brown, but I should have recognized her nevertheless. Still, I couldn’t grasp that it was her for another ten seconds because I had no reason to expect her there. My brain did not compute. She guessed this, because she offered an explanation.
One of the receptionists is on maternity leave, and I’m temping for a few months. Whatcha got?
I held out the manila envelope that contained my form and story.
This, I said. I needed to gulp and pause and catch my breath again.
Oh, are you applying? she asked. Great, because I’m supposed to sort them this morning.
Professor Rivers isn’t here yet? I asked. I was hopeful.
Oh, no, she said. He’s on vacation. Back after break.
How’s he going to know whether we deserve to get in or not? He needs to read our applications, right?
Leah was trying to straighten out my envelope—I’d gripped it so tight I’d left a sweaty, crinkly handprint on it. She gave up, pulled another envelope from her desk drawer, and exchanged it for mine.
I think everyone who wants to is getting in, she said. They don’t have that many applicants or something.
I must have looked sick, because she asked me if I needed a drink of water.
No, I said, just some sleep.
Okay, she said. But it’s really great to see you. How’s Chris?