The Will Doing the Work of the Imagination
Of course, none of us chickens had given her the plant. Despite Amy’s professed delight with the gift, the class heard about it with expressions ranging from vacancy to mild surprise, not including, in any instance, a flicker of private satisfaction or amusement. For the first time this semester there were absences, Tiffany and Marvy, which was too bad, because it was a small class, and because Edna Wentworth deserved everyone’s full attention.
On the other hand, there was Harold Blasbalg. Amy started off the night with “Blood Sky: A Vampire Tale.”
Far off in the night woods Paul Gratiano could hear the ripping howl of carnivorous dogs, feral coyotes, the hooting of predatory owls, the helpless scream of a fat white rabbit. He shivered in his hiding spot, even though the night was hot and moist.
Why had he agreed to meet her here, of all places, and now, of all times?
Why was he here, within this lonely clump of maples, in Central Park at midnight?
Young Pete Purvis loved “Blood Sky,” as did Ricky Buzza and Dot Hieronymus who apparently was going to love everything. Pete claimed to have had the bejesus scared out of him by the story’s surprise ending, in which the vampire turned out to be Paul Gratiano himself, rather than the sinister mystery gal who finally glided onstage on page nine, only to be eviscerated on page eleven.
“The rest of you are being awfully quiet here,” said Amy. “Do I assume that you were each shocked and sickened by the surprise ending?”
Only Carla spoke up. “To be honest, it wasn’t that big a surprise to me,” she said. “Everything in the story pointed to it. He sits there in the pitch dark, scared out of his wits, waiting for this woman, and that’s all that happens until the end. Only the buildup is such a big deal that at some point, around the middle of the story, you begin to suspect that you’re being pointed in the wrong direction.”
“Exactly in the middle of the story,” Amy said. “Can anyone pinpoint the moment?”
Dr. Surtees did that languid waiter-summoning thing with his index finger. Or maybe he was bidding at auction. Christie’s, no doubt. Dr. Surtees wasn’t a police auction kind of guy. “Page six,” he said.
Paul knew this was dangerous, every instinct in his being decried trusting her. When had such creatures ever been worthy of trust? In all of human history, had they once failed to disappoint? If only, he mourned, she weren’t so damnably beautiful…
“But wait,” said Ricky. “That’s explained in the story. He’s had a lot of trouble with women, two busted marriages. He’s scared to let himself go with her.”
Ginger Nicklow said, “That’s what you’re supposed to think. But the language here just doesn’t sound right. Why ‘creatures’? And ‘human history’?”
“And ‘damnably beautiful,’” said Chuck, “when, on page three, he said she was ‘really hot.’”
“Exactly,” said Carla. “It’s a cover-your-butt sentence. It’s there so that, after the mind-blowing surprise ending, the reader can go back to it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, why didn’t I catch that?’”
“Except that we did,” said Chuck.
Dot Hieronymus, looking pretty miffed, wanted to know how you can ever manage a surprise ending if they’re so easy to give away.
“You might ask yourself,” Amy said, “why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in sudden blinding light of their own living rooms, but I don’t think most of us do.
“We’re talking here about the mechanical surprise. The other kind, the organic kind, is another matter.” Amy was thinking about little Carla, running through a televised used car lot, screaming “You guys, come on down to Corky’s WIGHT THIS MINUTE!” “We get surprised in real life because we can’t know everything there is to know. For one thing, we’re stuck in our own heads, in a single point of view.
“In Harold’s story, we’re also limited to one point of view, Paul Gratiano’s. But Paul knows why he’s waiting in the bushes in Central Park. He just doesn’t think once about his plans before he acts on them, which is pretty artificial. The writer deliberately withholds information from us in order to achieve his surprise. That’s why it’s called mechanical, and that’s why at least some of us didn’t care for it.”
“I like surprise endings,” said Dot.
“Let’s talk about something else,” said Amy. “Harold has tried to tell us a scary story. We know that’s his intent, because he told us first class that he likes horror fiction, and that’s what he wants to write, and his favorite writer is Stephen King. So, ending aside, is this a scary story?”
Now no one spoke up for Harry. Frank Waasted said the story should have been frightening, because it had all the elements, but that somehow it wasn’t. Amy encouraged the class to list the elements, and they did: There was darkness, solitude, hooting owls, sudden noises, as when a mugger burst from the underbrush close to Gratiano and attacked a strolling couple. There were dutiful observations of ill winds, and icy fingers, and Paul’s retracting scrotum, and viscous pools of blood. The pro-Blasbalg faction defended all these details, except the scrotum, which Dot really hadn’t liked. Chuck said that he kind of liked it, although it probably shouldn’t have been mentioned twice.
“We spoke last week,” Amy finally said, “about telling and showing, and in this story the writer has done a great deal of showing, and yet we aren’t scared. This is not necessarily because, as some of you have suggested, many of the shown details are hackneyed. What we’re missing here is the sensation of fright, a feeling which we all know to be contagious. If the writer were afraid, then we would be too. What you need to do in this story—a story that aims to provoke a particular response—is imagine, as fully as possible, what it would be like to be Paul Gratiano. To be shivering alone in the woods, planning to kill the woman you love. That’s the hard work of writing. The imagining.”
“Or not,” said Chuck. “I mean, what if you don’t have to imagine at all? What if you really are a murderer? Then, according to you, you could write on the side, and make the big bucks.”
Carla and Amy locked eyes for a moment. What an interesting remark. “Only if you have access to your own feelings and can articulate them. But yes, I suppose you’re right.”
Amy wrapped up with a short lecture on William Butler Yeats’s description of rhetoric as “the will doing the work of the imagination.” “All the details in this story, what Frank calls the ‘elements,’ are rhetorical devices, designed to force the reader into a state of fear, and that’s why they don’t work so well. As Edna put it the other night, we’d rather be seduced.” This got a tiny smile from Edna Wentworth, and on that triumphant note Amy told everybody to pass their critiques in to Harold and take a break.
Harold lingered with Amy to discuss a possible rewrite. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I thought this horror stuff was going to be easy.”
“Scary is hard,” Amy said. “The only thing harder is funny. You probably thought it was easy because Stephen King is so prolific. But I’ll bet you anything he scares hell out of himself every time he sits down to write. That’s why he’s so good.”
“Do you really think this is worth working on?” Harold was serious. Students almost never asked this question. They’d ask, Do you think I could get this published? Safe question, easy answer: I have no idea.
“I think you can do better,” Amy said. “If I were you I’d forget the supernatural stuff and concentrate on the psychological. People are creepy enough without tarting them up with batwings and fangs. In my experience.”
Harold laughed. “Mine too. I’m a criminal lawyer, you know.”
She hadn’t. She’d assumed he did civil work.
“I don’t usually mention it to strangers. It’s my guilty secret.” Amy’s cell phone went off, and Harold smiled, waved, went out for coffee. Harry was okay.
It was Marvy on the phone, apologizing all over himself, and Amy assured him that it was all right to miss a class or two, as long is it wasn’t the class your critique was scheduled for, and Marvy said no, that wasn’t it, he was so sorry, because he really liked the class and the way she was running it, but he was going to have to drop.
This had happened to Amy before. She was instantly furious. “Marvy, you got a good go-round with the others. Everybody read your story and spent time thinking about it, and you just said you got a lot out of the experience. And now you’re dropping? Before you can do the rest the same favor? Do you know what this looks like? It’s horrible for morale.”
“Yes,” said Marvy, “of course I do, that’s why I called you. It isn’t that at all.” In the pause that followed, Amy could hear the rustle of paper. “It’s just that I got this, you know, critique, and it was really out there, you know?”
“You’re talking about the written critiques on the returned manuscripts? Marvy, a lot of beginners have no idea what they’re doing at first.” Or ever. “They rewrite your sentences, they dump on your name choices—”
“Actually, I got a lot of helpful comments.”
“There you go.”
“But this…this is just gross. And they didn’t even sign it, so I don’t know who it was.”
Amy leaned back and closed her eyes. “Give me an example.”
“I really don’t want to.”
“Why? Look, this is my job. Please give me at least some idea of what you’re talking about.”
Marvy sighed and cleared his throat. “Hey, Asswipe,” he said.
“I beg your—what?”
“That’s how it starts. He also exes out my name at the top of every page and puts in ‘Dickwad.’”
To her consternation, Amy had to bury the cell phone in her midriff to blow off the giggles, which had descended upon her with no warning. It soon became obvious that they weren’t going to go away. “Lord, Marvy, I’m so sorry,” she said, snorting, “it isn’t a bit funny, I don’t know why—”
“Don’t worry about it. My wife’s over here laughing her brains out. I would be too.”
“If it hadn’t happened to you.”
“Exactly. And then, remember the part where Bill Mansfield figures out the thing with the dog biscuits? Well, here he puts in, ‘You don’t know one fucking thing about crystal meth, loser.’”
“This is in handwriting?”
“More like printing, With pencil. And then he gives me—”
“Marvy, is there a comma between ‘meth’ and ‘loser’?”
“No. Then he gives me this printed sheet, the one that starts off ‘Hey, Asswipe,’ and I’m sorry, Amy, I can’t read the whole thing to you, it’s just porno.”
“You mean it’s sexual?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“You’re talking about profanity.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it. He just tells me what I can do with the story, if you know what I mean, plus I must have grown up on a pig farm, because yada yada yada, and then finally I should just go jump off the Coronado Bridge.” Marvy started to laugh. “You know, it is pretty funny, now that I’m looking at it.”
“Marvy, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’ve been doing these classes a long time, and nothing like this ever happened before.”
Amy’s apology continued at length until Marvy was mollified, which hadn’t been her intention. She had already given up on getting him back, but by the end of the conversation he promised to return the following week. “I guess,” he said, “it takes all kinds.”
I’ll say, thought Amy. “Marvy, I’m assuming this person didn’t sign his work. How many critiques did you get back?”
“Thirteen.”
“Including mine?”
More rustling paper. “No, yours makes fourteen.”
“But that doesn’t add up. We’ve got thirteen in the class, and you didn’t critique yourself.”
“No, but somebody must have done it twice. And if I ever figure out who, I’m going to deck the guy.”
Amy almost asked him what she had asked Carla, and herself: did he really want to know who it was. But of course he did. Marvy wasn’t the greatest writer in the world, but his take on life was refreshingly direct. “I’m not going to knock myself out finding out, but if I do, then I’ll deal with it.”
Amy asked him to bring in all his critiques next Wednesday and promised to mail him the two new stories, by Dot Hieronymus and Pete Purvis. After he hung up, Amy made a note to herself to mail copies of the new stuff to Marvy and Tiffany, at which point the class began to file in, with Tiffany herself in the lead.
Tiffany leaned over Amy’s desk. “I just couldn’t deal with the sexism in that stupid story,” she whispered. “And I get a real strong feeling from you that you don’t want to go there.”
“Actually,” said Amy.
“And I can respect that. I know you can’t pick and choose, you have to let everybody in, and I wouldn’t want your job. Anyway, I’m here. I wanted to be here for Edna.”
“Thank you,” said Amy. Amy wanted to defend Harold, whose work wasn’t well enough thought through to be sexist. Tiffany was like Thurber’s Miss Groby, the English teacher who combed through every book for unusual figures of speech. “I see by my schedule that you’re supposed to bring something in week after next. Are you still going to make it?”
Tiffany nodded and took her seat along with the rest, and the second half began.
Edna Wentworth’s story, “The Good Woman,” was one of the better stories Amy had received in a workshop. It was told from the point of view of a young married woman who suddenly, without meaning to, has an affair with a cable television installer. The affair is deduced by Miss Hestevold, a retired teacher, a spinster, who lives high on a hill above the young woman’s family and notes the too-frequent visits from the cable truck. There was an excellent scene in which the young woman, unaware of being spied upon, drags her little boy up the hill to apologize to Miss Hestevold for having called her a name.
“My son has something to tell you.”
Miss Hestevold, unsurprised, only nodded. Up close she was remarkably ugly. The lower half of her face was long and equine, not exactly deformed but still so extreme that it was hard not to stare, and there was white down on her chin and upper lip. She had the large brown eyes of a once pretty woman, which cruelly heightened her ugliness, for she surely had never been pretty. Alice doubted that she had ever even been plain. Miss Hestevold regarded Dougie now with a kind of brutal reserve.
Dougie, wide eyes fixed on the old lady’s beard, cried soundlessly, his mouth wide open. Alice squeezed his hand. He was so young and lived so purely in each moment. The immediate and the eternal were one and the same to him, and now he twisted in a universe of shame, without limit or perspective. Alice squeezed and squeezed but said nothing, and neither did Miss Hestevold. Finally he got it out. “I’m sorry, lady,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.” Then he could cry out loud. The tension left his body, and he hung his head, and Alice moved behind him, her hands gentle on his shoulders. She smiled at Miss Hestevold, whose expression did not alter.
“Why are you sorry?” Miss Hestevold asked her son.
Dougie looked up. “Because,” he said. Miss Hestevold stared. “Because I called you names.” Miss Hestevold waited. “Because I called you poopy pants and—” Humiliated, Dougie started crying again.
“But why,” asked Miss Hestevold, “are you sorry for that?”
Why, you vicious old bat. “He’s sorry,” Alice said, “because he was rude to you and used bad language. He knows better.”
Miss Hestevold did not look away from Dougie. “Is that why you’re sorry?”
Dougie nodded. “It’s wrong to say bad words.”
Miss Hestevold nodded too, in his solemn rhythm. “Why is it wrong?”
Alice drew her son back against her body. Dougie twisted his head around and looked up at her in dazed inquiry. “Because it just is,” Alice said.
“Because it just is,” said Dougie.
Alice opened her mouth to say good-bye, but the old woman sighed and pinned her with disgust, a look that transformed Alice into a powerless child, as unworthy as her son. “It’s just wrong! What do you want him to say?” she said, shaming herself with her own whining voice.
Miss Hestevold knelt down then in front of Dougie and smiled at him and took his hands in her own gnarled ones. “Shall I tell you why?” she asked him. Dougie nodded rapidly, in just the way that he would nod to Big Bird on the TV. Though she couldn’t see his face, Alice could picture it, mesmerized by the old woman’s sudden kind attention. “Because when you call people nasty names, even in fun, you often hurt them. Not always. For instance, you did not hurt me. But this is a risk you run: of making someone else feel foolish, ugly, or sad. Of causing pain without meaning to.”
Alice had an absurd impulse to raise her hand and yell, “I knew that!” Obviously Miss Hestevold thought she had Alice’s number. Alice was yet another shallow young person who couldn’t tell manners from morals. Alice hated to be misunderstood.
“Do you know what ‘dignity’ means?” asked Miss Hestevold. Dougie shook his head. “Well, you don’t have to know. Just remember this. It is always wrong to treat other people as though they were dolls, or toys. It is always terribly wrong to be cruel. Do you understand now?” Dougie nodded slowly. She stroked back his shiny hair with a strong liver-spotted hand. “It was nice meeting you,” she said.
Amy liked this scene so much that she wanted to start off by reading it aloud. First of all, old Edna could write up a storm, on top of which the last paragraph could have been composed especially for the moral edification of the creature she was beginning to think of as the Workshop Sniper. But this would have tipped the group off too early about her own feelings, which she liked to reserve until discussion had run its course.
Tiffany led off praising Edna’s language, her creative attention to detail, the precision of her phrases. When Amy asked for examples, Tiffany cited the passage where Alice, the brand-new adulteress, confronts her guilt after her absurd new lover has driven off. [S]he sat up stiffly, like a marionette, and stared down at her good old ordinary pink body, which had just turned on her like a family dog suddenly rabid, and thought that now she must be capable of anything. “The writer,” said Tiffany, “shows us this woman’s body as it appears to her, not as it might look to a Penthouse photographer.” Take that, Blasbalg, Reyes, and Surtees. In back of Tiffany, over her left shoulder, Chuck waggled his eyebrows at Amy, and then actually made rabbit ears on Tiffany’s head with his middle and index fingers. What a card. “And a little farther down,” continued Tiffany, “her description of the cable man, how his skin is ‘poreless, and moist, his body big and sleek, he was simple, tactile, irresistible, like a bath toy, and strong, and hers to do with as she wished.’” Tiffany looked up from the page. “That’s sensuous writing!”
“I agree,” said Frank Waasted, “although I’m not sure I like being objectified like that.”
Tiffany whirled around, almost catching Chuck’s rabbit ears. “Oh, come on,” she said.
“No, seriously,” said Harold, “how would you like to be compared to a rubber ducky?”
Ricky Buzza leapt to Tiffany’s defense, immediately pissing her off, and Amy moved to stop it. “Tiffany’s right, and you guys are wrong,” she said, to a chorus of boos. “Does anyone else want to talk about the language, before we move on to the story itself?”
Just about everyone praised Edna’s way with words, including Dr. Surtees, who hadn’t deigned to join in earlier discussions. Pete Purvis, bless his heart, timidly complained about a line in Amy’s favorite passage, which by this time Amy had read aloud. “I got messed up,” Pete said, “by the sentence, ‘She had the large brown eyes of a once pretty woman, which cruelly heightened her ugliness, for she surely had never been pretty.’ Well, was she ever pretty or not?”
Pete had a point. Technically, Amy said, the sentence could stand: you could coherently say She had the large brown eyes of a basset hound without implying that she had ever been a basset hound, or had ever blinded one for that matter. But it was a tad confusing, and Amy thanked him for pointing it out. Now, she said, she wanted to discuss the story as a whole, as a story. What actually happens here, and does the story satisfy?
There were big problems with “The Good Woman,” which began so assuredly and then pulled back in the end. The Hestevold woman actually saves Alice’s bacon one day, when Alice and the cable guy are going at it and Alice’s husband comes home early. The old lady calls out to him and beckons him up the hill, and occupies him long enough for Alice to dress herself and push the cable guy out the back door. Afterward, Alice renounces her lover and rededicates herself to her family, and to gaining the old lady’s respect. But she doesn’t achieve it. Instead, Miss Hestevold plays pied piper to Alice’s two children, so that they spend more and more time at her place, and even Alice’s husband is seduced, chastely, by the charming old bag. The story ends with Alice sitting alone on Christmas afternoon, making peace with her lot. “‘Alice had finally lost the need to confess and simply shared her family with this wise woman who hated her.’”
Ginger Nicklow raised her hand. “There’s more to Miss Hestevold than meets the eye,” she said, “and I’d like to know what it is. I think the story ends too soon. It’s a sad ending, even stark, but it didn’t satisfy me. Something’s missing.”
This was a gratifying moment for Amy. Ginger, who had been holding back, now revealed her analytical intelligence. Amy couldn’t have put it better herself.
“I don’t think it ends too soon,” said Tiffany, “although I do think the last paragraph is maybe too subtle.”
“In what way?” asked Amy.
“Well, Alice has finally lost it, right? She’s so repressed about sex, and the witch has done such a guilt trip on her, she’s lost it completely. And I appreciate the fact that it isn’t all spelled out, but I think some readers might miss this. The fact that she’s crazy at the end.”
“Wait a minute.”
Everyone spoke up at once. Thank God, no one but Tiffany had interpreted the story this way. Amy locked eyes with Edna Wentworth, who shrugged her shoulders and smiled, as if to say, Well, what do you expect from a Tiffany? Except that Amy had begun to entertain hopes for Tiffany and hated to see them dashed. “I take it that you read this as an impaired perception story?” Amy explained that impaired perception stories, which are fun to write and even more fun to read if you keep your wits about you, are those in which the point-of-view character misinterprets key events, so that there are really two stories, the one the p.o.v. character tells and the one the alert reader watches unfold behind his back. “You take it that Alice is wrong all along to feel so guilty? And that Miss Hestevold is a malevolent creature?”
“Like The Scarlet Letter. Yeah.”
“Oh,” said Amy.
For the last half hour Amy earned her measly wages, guiding them all down the overgrown pathways of authorial intent. Whether Tiffany was on to something or not was not simply, as Ricky argued, a matter of opinion. There was evidence to be sifted and analyzed. In the case of “The Good Woman,” nowhere could anyone find proof, or even suggestion, of Alice’s irrationality, or of the author’s concept of her as in any way delusional. Alice, Amy said, was presented as a more or less ordinary young woman whose feelings of guilt seemed pretty rational. “This is not to say that we want to burn her at the stake,” Amy said, and took a breath. And the burning will take forever. “Or that we necessarily find her behavior with Calvin Hoving as reprehensible as she does. Well, some of us will and some won’t. The point is, this is Alice’s story.”
“But,” said Ricky, “isn’t it open to different interpretations?”
“Yes, but you’ve got to be careful. We each bring to our reading everything we know and believe, about human nature, and psychological and physical laws, about right and wrong, and so forth. About the way the world works. And what we believe shades what we read, and that’s as it should be. My Great Expectations isn’t the same book as Edna’s Great Expectations, or Ginger’s. But you have to be careful. You have to meet the writer on his own terms, and you can’t look away from those parts that mess up your interpretation. Here, Tiffany is arguing that Alice is censoring herself into a kind of madness, but I don’t see that in, for instance, this passage:
“And worst of all were the sickening waves of gross carnality that didn’t go away with Calvin Hoving, that got worse and would never go away, no matter how old or ugly Alice got. She was afraid, not of giving in, but of enduring it forever. Charlie, who had once been too much, was not enough for her now. No two men or two hundred would be enough. There was not enough of anything in the world to fill her up…
“Isn’t she facing up, here, to her own sexuality? Isn’t she really mourning, not the fact that she cheated on her husband, but that, no matter how well behaved she is, she is literally insatiable?”
“It’s sad, all right,” said Chuck, “but it ain’t mad.”
Edna thanked the class and said that she agreed with Ginger and Amy. “I don’t care for the ending, either,” she said, and promised a rewrite before the end of the semester.
Amy passed out the stories for next week, Halloween, and then, just as they were gathering up their things to go, she asked Edna and Harold to stay for just a few minutes. She was worried about the critiques, considering what had happened to Marvy.
“I want to try something new,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to look through your critiques, the ones that just got passed back to you, before you take them home. Just for a second. I want to see if everyone’s doing his job.” In the past, Amy told them, not altogether untruthfully, students had complained that half their critiques were just unmarked manuscripts. This is what Amy wanted to check on, she told them.
There were just eleven manuscripts in Harold’s pile, which made sense, as the class was down one, and sure enough half of them hadn’t been marked up. Chuck, Ginger, Surtees, and Syl Reyes had all written something and signed their names, Tiffany had signed hers at the top and written nothing at all, and there were two other unsigned manuscripts with “Good!” and “Nice!” written in the margins in various inappropriate places, and that was it. No “Hey, Asswipe,” no snide verse.
Edna Wentworth’s pile contained twelve copies. “Have you looked through these yet?” Amy asked brightly, and Edna said she hadn’t gotten the chance. Amy tilted the pile toward her chest and flipped through it, shielding the contents from Edna’s eyes. It was like playing poker with a hundred cards. I just can’t stand it, Amy thought, if he wrote something nasty to Edna Wentworth. Edna could obviously take care of herself, but enough was enough, and besides, Amy was determined to rescue her class from this creep. She flipped past Tiffany, Chuck, Frank, Pete, Surtees, and there it was, smack in the middle, an unmarked manuscript with a single half-sheet of paper inserted just before the final page, and on it a crude but effective pencil drawing of a naked old woman, masturbating with what looked like a quill pen, and pasted underneath in block letters E. W., and underneath that, EEEEWWWWW.
“Guess what!” Amy said to Edna. “There’s an extra one here, and it isn’t marked up at all. Would you mind if I kept it? I’m giving my own copy back to you, with my writeup, and I’d really like to keep this for my files. If it’s all right with you.” If it wasn’t all right with Edna, Amy was going to feign, or actually experience, a heart attack.
But it was. “Cheerio,” said Edna, and she and Harold left together.
Son of a bitch. What was she going to do?