Still in Love Read online

  In December, however, Mark made two mistakes. During a roundtable discussion, when a dean from Amherst rhetorically asked how many of the assigned books anyone could be expected to read, Mark had answered “All of them. I did.” And then the clutch on his Saab went, and instead of having it repaired, he commuted by train from Paul’s apartment to campus for the last week of the semester, and he opted to skip a NEPCAJE meeting in Burlington rather than driving to Vermont in first gear. He was nominated in absentia to write the conference’s literature review by that dean from Amherst, a draft of which was due at the end of March, one week after spring break.

  Mark’s phone pinged with a text. a favor and a question—whats so bad about the forbes seminar room?

  Althea Morgan was retiring at the end of the spring semester, and having devoted the last decade of her career to chairing the English Department, she was calling in all of her chits. Since October, she’d also been calling in most days from the beachfront house in Jamaica she was renovating.

  Mark wrote, Stanhope or Elizabeth? All of the classrooms and lecture halls in the old barn-board buildings were named for Newlyn School painters, and the only thing wrong with being assigned to teach in the Forbes room was that there were two, in two different buildings, named for the husband and wife painters. He added, It snowed here this morning, in case you were feeling nostalgic.

  i wish. am on campus & feeling too f—ing cold to type. am standing in STANHOPE forbes rm & open window is too high to reach w/out risk to bum hip. can i switch your class to here and give your rm to annoying new adjunct teaching poetry?

  Mark hesitated. The Professor had specifically requested a classroom in the Hum building so he wouldn’t have to put on a hat and coat to commute across the Common to class.

  Althea wrote, correct answer is yes

  Mark relented, but he reminded her that his class met in about twenty minutes. Can you have someone put up signs for students?

  they know—made switch this morning on StudentServe

  Mark didn’t respond. He did let the Professor know about the switch, and a few minutes after he’d logged in and out of StudentServe to confirm that Althea had anticipated his capitulation hours earlier, he received a revised version of the first assignment. As usual, the Professor had decided to change a couple of words and had utterly altered the assignment.

  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 We’ll be with you in a few minutes. Please don’t 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.

  The Professor had nullified Mark’s literary effort from this morning. Try as he might, Mark could not imagine Paul or any normal adult adopting the Royal We to address a spouse. The only other way to accommodate that “we” would be to add a second man alongside Paul at his bedroom door at eight o’clock in the morning, and that would be another story altogether. No, that change of pronoun and the deleted Please effectively shifted the scenario from the familiar to the formal, from the domestic to the professional.

  Mark had just enough time to revise the assignment on his master file, print new copies for the students, and then run across the Common—and he’d already forgotten which Forbes room was his.

  4.

  It was exactly three o’clock when Mark rushed into the Elizabeth Stanhope Seminar Room, and there was exactly one student there to greet him, a thin young man with a shaved head sitting cross-legged on the floor, who scrambled to his feet and looked around apologetically. “I could try to find you a chair.” His face was alarmingly red, either from the exertion of standing up or the absurdity of his surroundings. There was not a desk or chair in sight. There were dozens of primary-colored yoga mats arranged around a white canvas tepee. “I got here early so I could talk to you about leaving class early today. Is this Creative Writing?”

  “Yes and no,” Mark said, anticipating the delight of enduring the Professor’s opening-day lecture about promptness. “Grab your coat and follow me. I’m Mark Sternum.”

  “I’m Anton.” He tugged at the waistband of his yellow V-neck. “This is my coat.”

  “That’s creative writing.” Mark headed into the hall toward the exit, but Anton sped past him in time to hold open the front door. “Thank you. We’re going left.”

  “I have an appointment. I tried to change it.” Anton sped ahead and slid along a patch of ice that ran out as the walkway curved toward their destination. He was panting when he said, “I don’t want you to think I’m that guy.”

  “Which guy?” Mark held open the front door of the Arts Building.

  “It’s with a doctor is all I mean. Wow.” He pointed to the open door of the Stanhope Forbes Seminar Room. “Are they all in our class?”

  “Not for long. After your appointment, email me and ask for today’s assignment. I won’t remember to send it along. I’m that guy.” Mark waved Anton in ahead of him. “Now, try to look like we were talking about something literary.”

  Anton said, “Good luck finding a chair,” and slid toward the back of the room.

  Mark stood in the doorway for a few seconds as the buzz of conversation fizzled out. “My name is Mark Sternum, and as you may have heard by now, this is Creative Writing.” He paused, but the Professor said nothing, something of a surprise. “If that doesn’t tally with your expectations, please leave.” He dropped his bag on one of the chairs at the head of the vast conference table, pulled out the stack of syllabi he’d printed, and slid it halfway down the table. “Everyone else, read through the syllabus, and in a few minutes, we’ll try to figure out exactly who’s here and what we think we’re going to do this semester.”

  The room was charming—a ten-by-twenty box of pickled barn board, with six tall nine-over-nine paned windows set so deep into either side that the generous sills could be used as seats, which with the six black armchairs at either side of the table gave almost everyone a place to sit. Mark’s initial count was twenty-six students, though the seating arrangements kept shifting, and at least two latecomers had drifted in. There were two black alumni chairs and plenty of space for him and the Professor at the front of the class, but the other end of the too-long table was shoved right up against the far wall, dead-ending anyone searching the back of the room for an unoccupied place to land.

  Just before Mark made a stab at taking attendance, the Professor suggested it might make sense to have the twelve registered students take the seats at the table, but Mark thought that was more punitive than productive and simply called out the first names of the registered students, then the six on the wait list, two of whom were not present, and then he wrote down phonetic approximations of the names cheerfully called out by the additional thirteen hopefuls. “It’s a bother, I know,” he said as he finished his list, “but it matters, as the final enrollment will include only people here for the first class. So, well done for turning up today.”

  “But only twelve will be enrolled,” said the Professor. He paused, and then using his voice like a gavel he said, “Twelve. Twelve. No matter how committed or eager or talented others may be, regardless of how long anyone else hangs around during the Drop-Add period, only twelve of you will be extended the extraordinary privilege of having a ready audience of intellectuals to read and respond to your original work. And just in case I haven’t yet entirely extinguished the spirit of enthusiasm in the room, I’ll review the requirements. After that, if you find your expectations defeated and your creative temperament offended, you should probably stick around. The rest should leave. In short, the rules are these: Be present. Be productive. In practice, here’s how that happens.”

  The Professor opened with a word about phones and other electronic devices—“No.”—fo
llowed by no extensions, no excuses, no letter grades on work in progress, and “I will have no interest whatsoever in why you were not in class, where you were, or who else was involved in your absence. Will I ever consider anything more important than our time together? No.” Mark had heard this speech dozens of times, and he’d also translated it into more positive terms for the syllabus. He knew what was coming. During their first few years together, he’d often interrupted the naysaying with explanations—You can always come to my office to ask about your standing in the course, but the goal is not to have grades be the principal currency between us in the classroom.—and interpretations—Of course, you are adults with complicated lives, so you’ll simply email me in the event of an emergency involving you or a loved one. But instead of reassuring students, Mark’s comments unnerved them and provoked endless questions and speculation. Stepparent, housemate, dog, tennis partner—which qualified as a loved one? If I email my story before 8:00 a.m. on Monday, but the Hellman system bounces it back to me for some reason and I have to resend it, will it count? You said we don’t have to include every story in our final portfolio, and we do have to revise every story we do include, but you didn’t say how many times we should revise the stories we are including and whether including only one or two will lower our grade when we finally get it, when it will be too late to do anything about it.

  So Mark had learned to smile through the negativity and not miss his cues. The few students who were genuinely upset by what they heard would come to Mark’s office before the next class to confess their fears and anxieties. If they ever wanted to talk to the Professor, Mark never heard about it. They were peers in rank, and age, and pretty evenly matched physically, too, but it seemed to Mark that time had been a little greedier with the Professor. He still had his hair, but it was lighter brown, silvered at the edges and almost translucent in bright light. His body sometimes seemed more frame than flesh lately, especially when he took off his jacket and his uniform Levi jeans swagged like a hammock from his hip bones. And every year, students seemed to find it harder to tell if the Professor was amused or annoyed as his gaze narrowed and his face became an aggrieved etching of itself, but maybe that was just as true of Mark, just as true of everyone over fifty, when so many amusements seem more intrusive than inviting, more annoying than alluring.

  When would the Professor want to discuss ideas for stories? Never. When would it be useful to disclose the autobiographical basis of a story? Never. How much time will we spend brainstorming and writing in class? None. “I will never be interested in anything except every word you write,” the Professor said, pausing for the first time in a while. “And no one will ever be more engaged by your choices, more alert to your intentions, more mindful of the gap between your reach and your grasp, more fascinated by every word on the page, the syntax of every sentence, the intentional allusions and the many fortuitous suggestions present in your text. Oh, and what did he say about extensions?”

  Mark said, “He doesn’t believe in them.”

  “What did he say was the only mistake you can make in this class?”

  Mark said, “Not doing the work.”

  “What if you know your story isn’t great?”

  Mark said, “That’s progress.”

  “What if it is really embarrassingly bad?”

  Mark said, “That’s real progress.”

  “This class is about making art,” the Professor said. “It’s not designed to help you feel good about yourself. It’s not yoga. It’s not psychotherapy. In fact, you won’t be allowed to speak when the rest of us talk about what you’ve written—and we will talk about every word you write. We will ignore you. We will refer to you not by name but as The Writer. In effect, you will not be here. You will be present solely in the words on your page. Just like real writers.”

  The time for dropping the class had come, and though several students picked up their coats and bags, they were only shopping for open spaces on the windowsills or the arm of someone else’s chair. The Professor did take this opportunity to let Mark know he’d slightly altered the scenario for the first assignment yet again, so instead of distributing the second batch of thirty copies he’d typed up and printed, Mark found a pen to annotate as the Professor told the students to take careful notes.

  There is a man woman in a room. There is a door, a window, and a chair in the room. Another man comes to the door. He says, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes. Don’t open the window.” He leaves. He returns. The window is open.

  “Who is this woman?” the Professor asked. “Where is she?”

  These were, by Mark’s count, the first genuine questions the Professor had uttered. He wasn’t surprised by the confusion they engendered. While half the students pretended to be still carefully writing out the scenario, the others were smiling politely, clearly expecting the Professor to bark out the answers to his own questions.

  “It’s not a riddle,” Mark said. “There is no singular solution. She is a woman. Knowing only what you’ve been told, just tell the rest of us what her story is.”

  Someone at the back of the room said, “She’s a patient of some kind.”

  Mark said, “I can hear you, but I can’t see you. Do you have a name?”

  The young woman knelt straight up. “I’m Willa.” She tried to tuck her too-short brown hair behind her ears. “She’s obviously a patient.”

  “I thought the guy was a doctor, too.”

  “Great,” Mark said. “Do you come with a name?”

  “Max.” He was a lithe little white guy with a blond ponytail. He was wearing an expensive, oversized white shirt and a smirk.

  “I think she’s having an abortion.” This was a small girl, her face mottled with freckles or acne.

  Willa said, “That would make her a patient.”

  “She’s a mental patient.” This was a big guy with dark hair in the chair nearest Mark’s. “I’m Julio. That’s why there’s no furniture in there, right?”

  Another guy said, “There’s a chair.”

  “I bet she jumps.” This young man was a silhouette in one of the bright windows. “That’s what the guy was afraid of, the doctor, why he told her not to open it.”

  Willa said, “Then why put her in a room with a window in the first place?”

  “He could be a dentist.” This was Anton.

  A woman next to him said, “He could be a nurse.”

  Mark said, “Show of hands. How many people imagine this woman is in a medical or psychiatric facility of some kind—that she is in some kind of trouble and needs help?”

  All but two of the students raised a hand. One young man thought she was applying for a job, another was still pretending to be occupied with writing out the assignment.

  The Professor said, “Based on what? I said nothing about doctors or hospitals or illness. So what about the scenario suggested what you imagined? And why did so many of you all have the same associations with that woman and that room?”

  After a few silent seconds, Mark stood up and said, “It’s a genuine question.” He turned to the blackboard behind his chair and picked up a piece of chalk. “Somebody start.”

  When the flood of responses finally died down, Mark stepped away from the board and admired what they had done.

  Room

  bare/impersonal/clinical/cold/no decorations/no amenities

  Man

  gives orders/can come and go as he pleases/uses Royal We/speaks in short sentences/doesn’t say please/offers no explanations

  Woman

  alone/given orders/forced to wait/never speaks/no name/disobedient

  Literal Text

  short sentences/simple vocabulary/staccato rhythm/no extraneous details/all facts, no feelings/no adverbs/no adjectives

  The Professor said, “Every word matters.” This was the fundamental lesson of the day. He pointed out how that single pronoun—we—altered our sense of a man, his role, and an entire situation. Syntax—the structure of sent
ences, their length, and their relative complexity or simplicity—affected not only the pace and tone of the literal text but the atmosphere and mood of the setting and relationships. Details apparently as insignificant as furniture—items that were named, and those that were not—assumed suggestive significance. “So each one must be chosen, and each chosen one must be a telling detail. You haven’t the time or space to furnish an entire room for readers. Leave to the reader what the reader can do for herself. But be specific enough to lead the reader. One detail changes everything. How different your impressions of this woman would be if I had put her in a recliner. Or a throne.” He paused to let that sink in.

  Willa said, “The man would become her servant.”

  Some guy at the back said, “You wish.”

  “He could be her financial adviser.” This was a woman wearing a sage-green headscarf. “Or her husband, or—I’m Rashid, by the way, or are we not still doing that?”

  The Professor said, “Rashid. So noted.”

  “The point is,” Rashid said, a little tartly, “he could be anyone.”

  “But he must not be,” the Professor said. “In your story, he must be someone.” He enumerated several basic techniques for establishing a character’s identity and role, along with a few of the common ways opening paragraphs mislead readers. Typically, Mark would have been outlining all of this on the blackboard, but he’d noticed there was a student perched on the arm of every chair, in addition to the students in those chairs, and the twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen crammed into the windowsills, and there were at least half a dozen more on the floor. He doubted his math and started again, but when he saw Anton in a chair and on a windowsill, and then counted two sage-scarved women, he stopped, sat down and closed his eyes for a moment.