Still in Love Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL DOWNING

  The Chapel

  Life with Sudden Death

  Spring Forward

  Shoes Outside the Door

  Breakfast with Scot

  Perfect Agreement

  Mother of God

  A Narrow Time

  Still in Love

  Copyright © 2019 by Michael Downing

  First hardcover edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Downing, Michael, 1958– author.

  Title: Still in love : a novel / Michael Downing.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018018897 | ISBN 9781640091474

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.O9346 S85 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018897

  Jacket design by Kelly Winton

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  for Peter Bryant

  Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

  EDGAR DEGAS

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Technical Exercise 5: Last Class

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  1.

  By midmorning, a steady wind was sweeping the last of the snow showers north of Mark Sternum’s house in Ipswich. He glanced out his kitchen window and nodded, grateful for the improving conditions. For most people in New England, this blustery Wednesday in January was just another winter day. But for Mark and the other adherents of the Hellman College academic calendar, it was the first day of the spring semester. He turned his gaze back to his computer screen and checked his word count for the zillionth time. He’d spent the last hour reading and rereading the short story he had written, lopping off words to pare it down to size. As far as he knew, the Professor had not concocted a revised version of the assignment, and Mark hoped his colleague wouldn’t come up with any last-minute inspirations.

  Although they’d co-taught the creative-writing workshop for ten years and were both tenured, Mark still deferred to the Professor in almost all substantive matters. Details were Mark’s domain. He clicked through his Creative Writing files and printed thirty copies of the assignment for today’s class, the first of the new semester.

  TECHNICAL EXERCISE 1

  The challenge is to write a story that fulfills the premise outlined in the scenario.

  Scenario

  There is a man in a room. There is a door, a window, and a chair in the room. Another man comes to the door. He says, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes. Please don’t open the window.” He leaves. He returns. The window is open. Assume that readers know nothing. Your story begins as the second man returns and sees that the window is open, but readers will need to understand that he had previously told the man in the room not to open the window.

  Technical Limits

  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.)

  There was one additional Technical Limit in Mark’s version of this assignment, but the Professor wasn’t convinced it served the story, so, much as Mark loved it, he decided to drop it. For now. He could always change his mind and add it back in later.

  Mark had written the original version of this and every assignment, as well as the syllabus, and he’d selected the readings, prepared the handouts, and scheduled the sequence of workshops. Mark alone would bother to learn the names of the students, ask them about their previous experiences as writers and their expectations for the course, squander a few minutes before class talking to them about the latest horror or hilarity that had streamed onto campus via YouTube, and spend hours every week with them in his office reviewing the finer points of syntax and grammar and discussing the tentative revisions they made to the first and second and eleventh draft of stories they were not eager to resubmit to the public workshop process until they were confident the new draft would be welcome news to the Professor. All of this—in fact, everything except the completed stories students wrote—was minutiae, trivia, inadmissible evidence in the court of the Professor. Mark didn’t know if their division of labor was fair, or if the Professor’s insistence on the strict separation of writing from writer was revolutionary or reactionary. But each of them seemed to think he’d got the better of the bargain.

  It was the Professor who’d persuaded Mark to join the creative-writing program at Hellman when it was launched a decade ago. Enrollment in each workshop would be capped at twelve, and they’d be dividing the workload. Even so, the prospect was not initially appealing. Mark had spent almost twenty years at McClintock College in Boston not teaching creative writing. In fact, he’d voluntarily taught four sections of Basic Skills and Composition every semester just to avoid the inane task of reading original short stories written by students who reliably asked if the novels on the reading list were fiction or nonfiction. His one interview at Hellman was conducted by Althea Morgan, the diminutive chair of English, whose speech was inflected with a mild Jamaican lilt that made everything she said sound offhand, including her admission that she was counting on the new content-free writing courses to raise her department’s sagging popularity.

  Having written his doctoral dissertation on metaphoricity in Melville, Mark felt eminently qualified to teach nothing. But wasn’t the job of teaching young people how to make something of nothing better left to the world’s great religions?

  Althea reminded him that he’d be required to teach only two courses per semester. And the Professor had promised to provide the ballast if Mark would simply design a course resembling a party boat that would attract hordes of unsuspecting students looking for a fun cruise around the shoals of the short story. Mark signed on.

  The Hellman spring semester reliably opened on the third Wednesday of January. So, after the first meeting of the workshop today, Mark had nothing to do until Monday morning at 8:00 a.m., when he would happily spend a few hours collecting and collating the stories students wrote in response to their first assignment, make reading copies to be distributed at the second class meeting, and prepare an electronic version of the whole mess for the Professor, including the 250-word story he’d dutifully written to satisfy his belief that you shouldn’t expect students to do something you couldn’t do in the time allotted for any assignment. That was the limit of Mark’s commitment.

  For his part, the Professor would read and annotate each page of student prose with typed textual comments and questio
ns keyed to marginal footnotes, and he would provide a separate narrative response, often twice as long as the story itself. This was better than what any published writer got from an editor or the New York Times Book Review. Mark could not imagine how he did it. But the Professor could not imagine why Mark bothered to write a new story for each Technical Exercise every semester, so according to the peculiar math of their relationship, they were even.

  * * *

  Technical Exercise 1.

  (Mark Sternum / 250 words)

  The door hinge creaked. Paul leaned in, grabbed his coat from the old club chair. “It’s eight.”

  Mark groaned from the bed. “Come here.”

  “I’m late,” Paul said.

  “I said I’d make poached eggs.”

  “That was at six.” Cold air streamed toward Paul like a tide.

  Mark watched the tails of Paul’s tweed coat fly by the bed.

  Paul reached for the pane Mark had raised. “I told you to keep this closed.”

  “I told you not to take the gig in Rome.”

  Paul’s hands drooped to the sill. “You said you’d take this spring term off.”

  “Did I?”

  “Don’t start.” Paul turned to Mark. “Don’t you teach soon?”

  “Not till three.”

  “I should have stayed at my place.” Paul pulled a Swiss knife from his coat, aimed the blade at the track.

  Mark sat up. “I’ll close that.”

  “It takes two—the track’s bent.” Paul huffed out a sigh. “I hate to rouse you, but my ride is here.”

  Mark joined Paul, saw the sleek black cab by the snow bank.

  Paul said, “Grab the frame. On three, shut it. One, two—”

  “Five months?”

  “Three.” Paul pulled the knife out, but Mark failed to slam down the pane.

  The cab beeped twice.

  They watched it drive off down the street.

  “My bad,” Mark said. “Spring break in Rome?”

  “It’s too late for this.”

  “I mean it.”

  Paul said, “So do I,” and shoved Mark out, watched him fall to the ground. Mark just could not keep it closed.

  * * *

  2.

  The morning’s banked-up gray and purple clouds were spent, and the silvery, distant mid-January sun was doing its best to melt the remainder of the snow squalls from Mark’s front steps and the windshield of his admirable and unreliable green Saab. Paul had texted from the security line at the airport and again when he reached his gate. They hadn’t really spent their last morning together arguing about a window, but Mark really had overslept, and he had so often raised the possibility of taking a leave this semester that someone less patient with his dithering might have murdered him. And now, Mark wished he were in Rome, where Paul would be temporarily installed as the executive director of the first international outpost of the Paean Project, a research and training consortium of Boston teaching hospitals devoted to the study and management of public-health issues associated with homeless, migrant, and exiled populations.

  There was a window in Mark’s house that didn’t shut properly, but it was not in the bedroom. It was in the kitchen, and Paul had pointed it out repeatedly, which was his idea of being handy. Mark had repeatedly feigned surprise, his way of protecting Paul from the knowledge that the entire house was constantly on the verge of collapse.

  They’d lived together for thirty happy years, a feat they achieved by never quite living together. Paul kept a one-bedroom condo in a plain and sturdy brick building in Harvard Square and paid a monthly fee to keep things in operating order. Mark’s tiny old house in Ipswich was a work in progress, and the most successful projects lately were the slow and steady crowning of the center beam that made the floor boards sink in the middle of every room, and the spread of a mysterious disease that was working like leprosy on the horsehair plaster walls, some of which had begun to resemble topographical maps veined with mighty rivers.

  After he’d dressed and packed up his bag for school, Mark was still feeling bad about reneging on his poached-eggs promise, so he climbed up on the kitchen counter, boots in the sink, and shoved up the window. The track was bent, but it was made of ancient lead that could be pushed around like putty. The actual problem was a screw that he’d tightened once—once too often—which had bored a hole too big for itself in the wormy old wood and now stuck out, preventing the frame from dropping to the sill. With a couple of brass brads, Mark hammered the lead track back to where it belonged, and the offending loose screw obligingly popped out and landed somewhere in that dark continent between the wall and the kitchen counter. There was another window that didn’t like to open or close in the tiny dining room Mark had turned into his study, but he decided to save it for summer, so Paul could have the pleasure of misdiagnosing that problem.

  3.

  The Hellman campus was nineteen miles southwest of Mark’s house in Ipswich and seventeen miles north of Paul’s place in Cambridge. Hellman occupied one hundred handsome rural acres in the tony commuter village of Manning, Massachusetts, a former farming community wedged in between Wakefield and Saugus, one-time factory and tobacco towns. The college was founded in 1891 as the Hellman School of the Arts by the notable English plein–air painter Samuel Hellman. Hellman was well into his sixties when he landed in Boston in 1890, and the idea for his school was inspired by the efforts of his former colleagues in England, who were busy establishing the famous Newlyn School and art colony when Hellman took off—a sudden departure inspired by his socially dicey second marriage to the fantastically wealthy Esha Goswami, the sixteen-year-old daughter of an Indian diplomat.

  Esha’s fortune funded the purchase of one hundred acres in Manning when the town was selling off a vast parcel of land known as Breakheart Reservation. That reservation land had a rich and wild history that began more than ten thousand years ago, when the paleo-americans hunted and farmed there and, more recently, included a sizable seventeenth-century ironworks, eighteenth-century sawmills, nineteenth-century sailcloth manufacturers, and a recurring snuff-making operation. All of the commercial ventures eventually failed, and the acreage abutting the campus was reforested and turned over to the Metropolitan Parks System of Greater Boston.

  Hellman’s school survived, as did the controversial marriage of its founder. By 1895, Esha had organized a wide-ranging program of classes in language and domestic arts taught by enterprising young women who’d found their way to Boston from all over the world and were eager to land somewhere safe. In 1899, the thriving Hellman School of International Culture and Art hired the entire faculty of a nearby boarding school destroyed by fire and emerged in the twentieth century as Hellman College.

  These days, its arts and language programs reliably ranked in the Top Ten in the country according to the influential annual lists published by failing magazines that could no longer afford to distribute printed copies of their publications. Sixteen hundred undergraduates shelled out more than $60,000 a year to live in twin-bedded rooms within walking distance of Breakheart Reservation’s two man-made lakes and the fossilized and rusty remains of ten thousand years of failed agricultural and industrial enterprises.

  And yet, higher education in America was allegedly in crisis.

  This was difficult to discern if you drove, as Mark did, through the stately stands of Italian pines and leathery green rhododendrons braving swales of snow on the lower campus, past the midcentury brick theater, concert hall, three gymnasiums, and the cascading lines of dorms that resembled high-end motels with their French doors, iron balconies, and views to Breakheart Hill. A sharp left or right led to acres of free underground parking, and after a brief elevator ride, Mark emerged on the edge of the large Common, a collection of handsome five-story, white-brick classroom and administration buildings surrounding the preserved barn-board houses and meeting halls that constituted Hellman’s original campus, and a knee-deep pond, presently occupied by three unsta
ble ice-skaters holding hands.

  Mark’s office was on the second floor of Humanities Hall—Hum Hall to faculty, Hmmm Hall according to undergraduates. His was one of dozens of eight-by-twelve white rectangles with a window, a Scandinavian teak desk, chair, and bookshelves lining an entire wall, and a black Hellman alumni chair for student visitors, all standard-issue for full-time faculty. In the fall, Mark had agreed to share his office with a member of the adjunct faculty, most of whom were traditionally crowded into fifth-floor offices with four or five other part-timers. The redistribution of the non-tenured faculty was part of a pitiful stew of last-minute concessions cooked up by the administration when a national service-employees union began to circulate organizing materials to the adjuncts in the fall. However, Mark’s new office mate didn’t merit a second suite of Scandinavian teak. Instead, a white plywood desk and a plastic chair on casters from IKEA had been shoved under the window for the highly regarded translator and half-time Italian instructor Karen Cole.

  Mark didn’t mind sharing, especially this semester, as he was teaching only one workshop in the spring, having received a course release to act as Hellman’s representative to the New England Private College Access, Justice, and Excellence (NEPCAJE) initiative. He did mind that his ancient, floppy, coffee-stained copies of the collected stories of Anton Chekov and Alice Munro had to share shelf space with the NEPCAJE reading list, whose contrarian titles sounded like teasers for upcoming exposés on competing cable-news channels: Is College Worth It?; The End of College; The Future of College; The Rise of the All-Administrative University; Professors and the Demise of Education; Academically Adrift; College (Un)Bound; The Miseducation of the American Elite; Why Does College Cost so Much?

  Since September, Mark had commuted to seven of New England’s premier private colleges and universities for NEPCAJE conferences and panel discussions. The sessions had yielded no solution to the alleged crisis in higher education, but the combined $75 billion in endowment funds at those nonprofit institutions was annually yielding about 12 percent. Right through November, Mark had played the part of a Hellman representative perfectly—arriving at events a few minutes late in jeans and one of Paul’s venerable flannel shirts and proceeding to take copious notes, simply for the pleasure of watching his exemplary student behavior spread among his better-dressed Ivy League colleagues, inveterate grade-grubbers every one.