the Writing Circle (2010) (25 page)

“I ended things with Kim,” he said. “I told her I couldn’t see her anymore.”

Gillian waited as if she expected him to say something additional. “What does that have to do with me?” she asked.

Adam leaned towards her, his arm on the glass table. “Everything,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” said Gillian, “but I’m not following you.”

“When I read
Restitution,
when I saw what you’d done, I realized why everyone in the group was going crazy. I wanted to be here for you, entirely. And I couldn’t do that if I was, in any way, still involved with Kim.”

“What do you mean by what I’d done?” asked Gillian. Her voice was sharp.

“What you’d done to Nancy,” said Adam. “They’re all up in arms about it. But I’m with you. I’m with you all the way.”

“What have I done to Nancy?” asked Gillian.

Adam pulled back a little. For the first time he actually took a breath. “The book,” he said. “Her book.”

“What about her book?” asked Gillian.

“That first chapter that you took from her.”

“Took from her? Is that what you think?”

“I mean, I know what you were doing, artistically, that is. But naturally Nancy didn’t, I mean—”

“Nancy’s novel was self-indulgent and myopic and unpublishable. I gave Nancy the entire plot of my novel, but she refused it, and she refused all my advice about how to shape hers into something publishable. I didn’t take her first chapter. I used what I remembered of it, and brought it to a new place. Are you telling me you think there’s anything wrong with that?”

Adam closed his eyes for a second and ran his tongue over his bottom lip.

“I’m not judging you,” he said softly. “They’ve judged you, and they’re all up in arms. But I love you, Gillian. It doesn’t matter what you do. That’s how I knew that it wasn’t just some casual infatuation thing I felt but something with”—Adam held his hands out, as if holding an invisible loaf of bread—“with substance,” he said, “with longevity. And I realized as long as I was involved with Kim—involved with anyone else—you’d never take me seriously.”

“You expect me to take you seriously?” asked Gillian.

Adam couldn’t tell from her tone exactly what she meant. He felt he was blundering but didn’t know how to rescue the situation.

“I thought you might need me now,” said Adam. “To stand up for you.”

“Stand up for me?” cried Gillian. “Am I on trial now?”

“Not exactly,” said Adam. Everything was going so wrong, he didn’t know how to save it, any of it.

“You judgmental little prick,” said Gillian.

Adam blinked. “I love you,” he said. It was the only thing he was clear about. Nothing else quite made sense.

“Get out of here,” said Gillian, and she stood up.

Adam looked up at her. “I love you,” he said again, his voice close to a whimper.

“You are such a bore,” said Gillian. “I was a fool to ever be nice to you.”

Adam stood up slowly. He thought he might puke. He leaned on the glass table. Through the clear surface he saw the shiny chrome base of the table and Gillian’s bony toes, two ridges of blue veins across the top of her foot.

There was no way any of this could be undone. Even if she hadn’t meant what she said, had said it only in a moment of anger. But she had meant it. He was pretty sure of that.

T
HE CLUES THAT NANCY GOT FROM VIRGINIA WERE SIMPLY
these: a college literary magazine,
Ailanthus,
and a Russian exchange student. Virginia didn’t say where she got her information from, and Nancy, sensing that Virginia preferred to keep her source secret, did not ask. But Nancy guessed that it was Bernard. She had no idea that he would never have provided the information if Virginia hadn’t wrested it from him. She wondered if the clues were slender because it was all Bernard had been able to come up with or if, in his perverse way, he didn’t want to make it too easy for her.

When Adam called to offer his assistance, Nancy was surprised and a little suspicious. He’d gone to Virginia first, he said, and she had explained what Nancy was trying to do.

“I don’t really need your help,” Nancy said. “It’s just a matter of me tracking down that publication—I’m assuming it’s a literary magazine at Gillian’s college—then hunting for a Russian-sounding name.”

“But once you find it, you’ll need someone like me,” said Adam. “I know all of Gillian’s poetry. I’ll be able to spot anything familiar.”

This was true. Nancy had been daunted by the size of Gillian’s new collection, which included not just a section of new poems but selections from her six previous ones.

“I thought he was in love with Gillian,” Oates said when Nancy told him Adam wanted to join her on her trip to Bolton College.

“He was—at least he said he was—but I guess he isn’t anymore.”

“It’s hard to love a plagiarist,” said Oates.

“No,” said Nancy. “That’s not true. People love plagiarists in spite of the fact that they are plagiarists.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “But something’s changed. Adam’s all fired up about this. He said he wanted to ‘bring her down.’ ”

“Whoa!” said Oates. “In that case, I’d say it was a lovers’ quarrel.”

“I don’t think they were lovers,” said Nancy. “I can’t imagine that Gillian would sleep with anyone as insignificant as Adam.”

“He’s young, he’s handsome.”

Nancy shook her head. “No. Gillian is too calculating to go simply for youth and looks. I’m sure it was all unrequited love on Adam’s part.”

“So why would he turn against her now?”

“Because of what she did.”

“But you yourself said people love plagiarists in spite of what they do. So it must be a case of him finally wanting his revenge.”

“Revenge?” asked Nancy. She thought for a moment. “Is that what I’m doing, Oates, seeking my revenge?”

“No, not revenge,” said Oates. “What you’re seeking, to use your champion Chris’s word, is justice.”

“Thank you,” said Nancy.

“Wait a second, sweetheart,” said Oates, and he caught her by the arm. “What’s so wrong with revenge?”

“It’s just not who I am,” said Nancy.

AS THEY STARTED OUT ON THE CAR TRIP,
Nancy felt a rush of excitement. It was the thrill of the hunt, the exhilaration she always felt when she was tracking down something for her newsletter, when she went after any scrap of information. But maybe there was something more now. Maybe I
am
seeking revenge, she thought, and it upset her to realize this about herself. Is this what I’m becoming? she wondered. Is this what Gillian’s turning me into?

Adam had wanted to drive, but Nancy was too wound up to be a passenger. She gave Adam the AAA map and asked him to navigate. Adam threw his briefcase on the backseat of the car. He’d brought several of Gillian’s poetry collections along for reference. As they drove, he seemed no more relaxed than she. He chewed on his cuticle the way a girl would.

“Have you ever been to Bolton?” Nancy asked.

“Once, a while back,” he said.

“Friends who went there?”

“No,” said Adam. “I just wanted to see Gillian’s college. I wanted to picture her there.”

It was the first reference he’d made to Gillian since they’d started out.

“A bad crush,” said Nancy.

“I guess you could call it that,” said Adam.

Nancy had a desire to reach out and touch his arm, a Virginia gesture, but she kept her hands on the steering wheel, gave it squeeze to keep them rooted there.

“How is Sonia doing these days?” she asked him.

“Sonia?”

“Your character,” said Nancy. “Your novel.”

“I haven’t been writing,” said Adam. “Not for a long time.”

“How come?”

“Too much shit going on,” said Adam.

Nancy took her eyes off the road a moment to look at him.

“I broke up with my girlfriend, Kim,” said Adam.

“That’s too bad,” said Nancy. “I met her at that Christmas party. She seemed very nice.”

“She is nice,” said Adam.

Nancy was tempted to ask what had happened but guessed that Adam had already revealed more than he was comfortable with.

“If you’re available for dating now, I have a lovely daughter,” said Nancy. “She’ll be home from college for vacation. Of course she’d be mortified if she knew I was fixing her up with anyone.”

“Sure,” said Adam.

Nancy was immediately angry with herself for offering up Aliki this way. It was difficult talking to Adam. She steered the conversation into safer territory.

“You should get back to your novel,” she said. “It’s worth working on.”

“Yeah,” said Adam. “I know.”

They drove for a while without talking, and then Adam turned to her.

“Here’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “How come you gave a copy of the manuscript of your novel to Gillian? We haven’t been doing that in the Leopardi Circle, we’ve just been reading.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then how did she get the manuscript?”

“She never had the manuscript.”

“Then how did she copy your first chapter?”

“She must have remembered it from when I read it.”

“But she got it almost exactly.”

“It’s very close,” said Nancy, “but it’s not exact.”

“You think she ran home after the meeting and quickly wrote it all down?”

“I don’t think so,” said Nancy. “I don’t think she decided to write a novel herself until months later.”

“That means she remembered your first chapter all that time,” said Adam. “That’s pretty remarkable.”

It was pretty remarkable, Nancy thought, though she hated conceding any compliment to Gillian. Adam, she could tell, was struggling with his admiration.

“She’s pretty extraordinary,” he said, but then, to Nancy’s relief, he added, “But what a bitch.”

NANCY KNEW HER WAY
around college libraries, and, as the editor of her newsletter, she had access to any collection she wanted. Nowadays she did almost all her research online, but there had been a time when she relied on actual journals. She loved libraries, the smell and heft of books. She loved the feeling of mystery each time she entered the stacks, their profound quiet and stillness, the sense that there were secrets—ideas, information—that had been buried there for years.

The Bolton College library had been renovated recently, years after Gillian had graduated. The main reading room, part of the original 1850s building, still had the aura of a church, with stained-glass windows and a vaulted ceiling, but half of the reading tables had been taken over by computer terminals, and the current periodicals were now arranged alphabetically on severe grey metal shelves.

The online catalog turned up nothing for
Ailanthus,
but Nancy found that the college literary magazine,
The White Mountain Review,
went back to Gillian’s day.

“Maybe Virginia got the name wrong,” said Adam.

“Virginia wouldn’t get it wrong,” said Nancy, “but maybe her source did.”

“Who do you think her source was?” asked Adam.

“No idea,” said Nancy. “Virginia knows a lot of people.” She did not mention her hunch that it was Bernard, wanting to shelter him if he were the source—though her instinct to protect Bernard puzzled her. What was it about Bernard that called for her protection?

The bound back issues of
The White Mountain Review
were in the most subterranean level of the stacks, on rolling shelf units that were sandwiched together. When Nancy had located the right shelf, she and Adam had to move seven of the units to the side to make an access corridor. The overhead light was on a timer that clicked out the seconds, measuring the time before they would be left in darkness.

“Chris could use this as a crime scene,” said Adam.

Nancy shuddered. When the shelves were pressed together, someone could easily be crushed between them. It looked as if no one had ventured into this part of the library for years.

They carted the volumes to a table at the end of the room. A gooseneck lamp gave them a circle of light to read by. The timer on the light in the stacks counted off the minutes as they worked through the tables of contents. It reminded Nancy of the sound of crickets in her basement.

“I haven’t seen anything remotely Russian,” said Nancy when she was nearly through her half of the pile.

“No Russian names here either,” said Adam.

When the timer reached its final moment, the overhead light snapped off.

“I’ll get that,” said Adam.

Nancy watched him make his way to the shelves, a dark, ursine shape. He wound the timer fully clockwise, then returned to his seat, and Nancy was aware of his smell—a comforting fragrance of wool and bacon—in contrast to the odor of the stacks: concrete floors and forgotten books. She turned back to the volume she was studying. It was the last one. Her finger stopped midway down the table of contents.

“This may be it!” she cried. “Minsky. That’s Russian. Something called ‘Homilies.’ ”

Adam got up and came behind her to look on. But when Nancy turned to the pages, they weren’t poems but dreary lithographs of womblike shapes.

“Fuck,” said Adam.

“Have you been through all of yours?” asked Nancy.

Adam gave the stack of bound volumes a nudge. “Nothing here. So now what?” he asked.

Nancy smiled at him. “You didn’t expect it to be that easy, did you?”

Adam shrugged. “We’ve been here all morning,” he said.

“Let’s put these back and get some lunch,” suggested Nancy. She was beginning to wonder whether it had been a good idea to have Adam along. Nancy was used to the slow pace of research, and she didn’t want to be influenced by his quick discouragement. She had trained herself to believe that all information was there, somewhere, and it was just a matter of meticulous searching until you finally uncovered it. She had never let herself entertain the thought that the information didn’t exist. She explored in an almost dreamlike state of investigation, and uncovered clues that would never reveal themselves if she didn’t allow herself time to meander. She loved handling printed matter, the feel of the edges of the paper, like touching the wing tips of birds.

But what if the clues she had been given were false? What if there were no
Ailanthus,
no Russian exchange student?

“Let’s go eat,” she said.

THE DELI ACROSS THE STREET
from campus had a menu board posted over the counter. Every sandwich had a cute name—some insider reference, no doubt.

There were some fresh-baked cookies on a serving dish by the register. “Want one?” Nancy asked.

“Trying to cheer me up?” asked Adam.

“You bet,” said Nancy. Adam actually smiled.

They ate at a table by the window. Bolton was one of the Seven Sisters that was still all women. Outside, students ran back and forth across the street, some waiting for the crossing light, others darting out between bursts of traffic. Adam was watching them as if he were searching for Gillian among them.

“So,” said Nancy, “what do you think our next step should be?”

Adam turned his attention back to her. He shrugged and licked some mustard from his lip. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Talk to a reference librarian, for one,” said Nancy. “Look through the old card catalog. Check the yearbooks from when Gillian was here.”

“Sounds good,” said Adam. The food had improved his disposition.

The old card catalog had turned up no
Ailanthus,
and the reference librarian had never heard of it. In the yearbook they found a photograph of the staff of
The White Mountain Review
but no
Ailanthus
among the pages of campus organizations. Adam was clearly disappointed that Gillian’s photograph was not included. The listing for her on a page in the back offered no information beyond her home address. Nancy was not surprised. It seemed quite like Gillian to feel disdain for the yearbook mentality. She probably had had contempt for the entire world of undergraduates and had slipped through Bolton without belonging to any organizations, without anyone knowing her. While other student writers were vying to get their work published by
The White Mountain Review
—or, if it existed, the mysterious
Ailanthus
—Gillian was submitting to
Poetry
magazine and
The New Yorker,
not getting published yet but collecting handwritten notes of encouragement.