The Inexorable Logic of Metaphor
Carla Karolak lived in a huge gray house on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Amy knew the sea was close by because she could hear the surf thundering not too far away, and the salt smell almost knocked her over. The house itself was clearly visible, spotlit from stem to stern by an elaborate network of security lights. Carla’s nickname for it—The Birdhouse—had led Amy to expect some sort of multilevel structure with multiple doors and little windows, like one of those elaborate purple martin motels people build back East. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The center of the house was a round structure, a tower, going up a full four stories, topped by a conical hat. As a child, Amy had longed to live in a house with round rooms. The tower was of a modest diameter, but from each side swept long curving wings, symmetrical, double-to-single-story, each tapering to a point. The entire house, end to end, was as long as a passenger train. It suddenly occurred to Amy that from above, in the daytime, the house must look like a huge stone bird in flight. The Birdhouse.
There were at least ten cars in the roundabout driveway and easily room for ten more. The northern wing was lit from inside, and through a long oval window she could make out Chuck, Ginger, Harry B., and Carla standing in front of a fireplace, sipping what looked like wine. They looked happy. Far to the right, through a smaller window, Marvy and Syl Reyes crouched before an open refrigerator, apparently very much at home.
Amy rang the bell. Nothing happened, and she was about to ring again when it was opened by a gaunt older woman Amy had never seen before, standing in a pale silk dressing gown, gazing at Amy with disdain. “You’re the teacher,” she said. Amy, still fumbling for a response, was reminded of Mrs. Danvers, the gargoyle of Manderley.
Suddenly she got it. “You’re Carla’s mother,” Amy said. “How do you do—”
“Go back to bed, Ma,” said Carla, and then, to Amy, “I’m sorry, I thought I left the door open.”
“You probably did.” Amy didn’t barge into people’s houses, whether the doors were open or not. Barging was a California thing.
“She rang the bell,” said Mrs. Danvers to her daughter, making it sound as though Amy had left a flaming bag of dog poop on the step.
Carla ignored her and pushed Amy on ahead, down a curving hallway into what had to be her section of the house. The dark wing was Mother’s.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Amy called back, but there was no response.
“She’ll be fine,” said Carla. “Here’s Amy!”
They had come around the curve into a huge red room full of sofas, pillows, and people, all of whom seemed inordinately pleased to see her. The fire in the fireplace was even more welcoming here than it had been through the window, there were open wine bottles and platters of fruit and cheese, and they had saved the nicest seat in the room, a huge high-backed comfy chair and a huge comfy ottoman on which to rest her feet, all upholstered in maroon paisley, like a giant necktie. The entire room looked as though Carla had decorated it when she was twelve and under the spell of the Arabian Nights. There were keyhole shapes everywhere, alcoves stocked with candles, stuffed animals, statuary, and the walls were flocked in deep red velvet.
“Hideous, isn’t it?” Carla handed Amy a huge goblet of red wine. “Drives Ma batshit. You should see her side of the house.”
“Minimalist? All-white?”
“And not just any old white. ‘Bleached bone.’”
Amy was counting heads. She had twelve. “Who’s missing?”
“Dot.”
“So she’s dropped?”
Carla shrugged and stared down into her wine. “I guess so. I keep leaving messages.”
Edna approached. She was dressed oddly, for Edna: bundled up in an oversized sweater, evidently hand-knit, and gray sweatpants. She carried a box of tissues. “Would you mind if we got started soon?” she asked, her voice quite nasal. “As I’m sure you can tell, I’ve got a cold, and I’d like to get to bed at a reasonable hour.”
“Of course,” Amy said. “Why didn’t you stay home? I could have mailed you the stories for next week.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Edna, actually patting Amy’s knee. Then she straightened up and clapped her hands. “We’re starting now,” she announced, in what had to be her public high school voice, and immediately people took their seats.
They were arrayed around her, their faces ruddy and expectant. Ruddy with wine, some of them, but also with cheer. Dr. Surtees, who had been chatting with Frank Waasted, was the last to take a seat, and he didn’t hold himself apart from the others as usual. He had, for now, dropped his class pretenses, and seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about tonight,” said Amy. “But before we start, I wonder if we ought to talk about why we’re here. You must have questions, and it’s probably best that we get everything out in the open.”
“Oh, let’s not,” said Harry Blasbalg.
“Yay, Harry,” said Tiffany, raising her glass.
“Seriously,” said Harry. “We’ve already talked about it. That’s what we did last week.”
“Well, you didn’t talk about it with me.”
“What’s to talk about?” asked Frank. “We all know the deal.”
“One of us,” said Chuck, “has a screw loose.”
“You make it sound so benign,” said Amy. “You weren’t in that parking lot the other night.”
“No, but I was,” said Tiffany, “and I’m with Harry. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Come on!” Amy was stunned. Nothing to talk about? “Look at all of us sitting here, convivial as all get-out. Hail-fellow-well-met—”
“—and all the other hyphens,” said Chuck.
“And all the other hyphens. Except that chances are one of us has, as Chuck says, a screw loose.”
“And the rest of us do not.” Edna blew her nose and regarded Amy censoriously. “Which story are we discussing first?”
“Ricky Buzza’s,” said Amy. “And we’ll get to it in one minute, I promise you.” They were all giggly and chummy and full of what looked to her like bravado, and it made her very uneasy. They were acting like it was some kind of game, or worse, as though they were in one of those stupid haunted-house movies, where a criminal mastermind with nothing better to do orchestrates thrills on cue. “Look, there’s something wrong here.”
“We’re all adults, Amy,” said Dr. Surtees, smiling fatuously. He had never called her by name before. “We can take care of ourselves.”
How do you know? “Do you have any idea,” she said, beginning to feel desperate, “what’s going to happen next?”
He shrugged, an elaborate, pretentious, European-style shrug.
“Just do me one favor,” said Amy, looking around the room. “Humor me. Turn to the person to your right and ask yourself the obvious question.”
Chuck turned to Ginger. “Would you please pass the cheese?”
Amy waited until the laughter died down. “How do you know the Sniper isn’t Ginger?” she asked him.
“I don’t. And she doesn’t know it isn’t me. Look, we really have gone through this already. We’ve got the picture. One of us is a homicidal maniac. Mwa-ah-ah-ah.”
Frank said something under his breath, and Carla shushed him. Apparently others around him had heard what he said, because the room was suddenly quiet.
“What did you say, Frank?” asked Amy.
“I said, ‘And one of us isn’t here.’” Frank looked straight at her.
“Ah,” said Amy.
Now it made sense. They were all so jolly and relaxed because they’d apparently decided who it probably was: the only class member who hadn’t shown her face since Halloween. Case closed, then. Nothing to worry about. Amy tried to figure out how she felt about this, and as she did she gazed out over their heads, and at the oval window opposite. Sometimes, thought Amy, there’s God so quickly. And she raised her right hand and waved at Dot Hieronymus, standing there framed in the white light, peering in at everyone. “You’d better head her off,” she said to Carla, “before she rings the bell.”
“Who?” asked Carla, and then turned to see. “Oh, jeez.”
As it turned out, Dot did ring the bell before Carla got to her, and in a minute they could all hear Carla’s mother complaining bitterly. “I can’t have this,” she was saying, over Dot’s and Carla’s greetings, and she followed the two of them into the living room. “Are you all here now?” she asked the group. “Is anyone else coming?”
“We’re very sorry,” said Amy.
“Good night, Ma,” said Carla, and her mother stalked off. “Don’t pay any attention to her,” she said, and then fell silent, regarding Dot.
Dot, formerly a tasteful taupe and ivory gal, was swathed this evening in shades of turquoise and aquamarine, some kind of flowing lounge outfit, and wearing lots of orange makeup. “Did I miss anything?” she asked. She had sprayed herself with industrial-strength Youth Dew. Dot seemed to have turned some kind of corner, socially.
The rest were wonderfully subdued. They made more room for Dot on the center sofa than was actually necessary and looked to Amy for guidance. Serves you right, she thought. “Where were we?” she asked, to deep silence. “Frank? Chuck? You were saying—”
“Could we start now?” asked Ricky Buzza.
“Yeah,” said Chuck. “‘Crystal Night.’”
“‘Crystal Night’ it is,” said Amy.
Herk Romano had a face as wide open as the grilled tuna sandwich at Chumpy’s and a deceptively slender physique, and he had always looked younger than his twenty-seven years. People liked him, but they also thought he was a lightweight. He looked like the proverbial college kid, everybody’s favorite nephew. So they were usually caught off guard when, in the middle of a random conversation, he suddenly flashed them the contents of his wallet.
Herk Romano had the best arrest record on the Trona City Vice Squad.
Whistling tunelessly he swung his japaleño green Mini Cooper into a visitor parking space in front of KUSP Studios, and catapulted out of the driver’s seat in one fluid motion. In no time he exited the fourth-floor elevator, a dozen yellow roses in one hand, and two Ani DiFranco concert tickets in the other. From the end of the hallway, where the studios were, he could just hear Crystal signing off for the day with her memorable catch phrase “Tomorrow is another day!”
Yeah, and today isn’t so bad either, Herk thought to himself as he watched her walk toward him. She wafted his way like a sunbeam on an endless afternoon, slim hips swaying like waves on an angry sea, causing Herk to think, for the thousandth time, that the sun literally rose and sat on that amazing derriere. Today was the day he was finally going to finally ask Crystal Molloy for a date.
Dot raised her hand. “May I begin? I just want to say that I enjoyed this story from start to finish. I read it in one sitting. And I also want to compliment this writer on his use of metaphor. This is definitely one of the best stories we’ve seen so far.”
“Thank you, Dot,” said Amy. “Who else?” Dot always complimented everybody on their “use of metaphor.”
It was really pretty amusing how they all sat there, mute, the ones who liked the story (there must be one or two) and the ones who didn’t, all of them afraid to speak. “Come on, people. Okay, you asked for it. You know how much I hate calling on you.” Pete Purvis had taken his billfold out of his pants pocket and was studying its contents intently. “Pete!” said Amy.
“What?”
“Do you agree with Dot?”
She expected some lame delaying action, but Pete surprised her. He was a surprising guy. “Actually I was looking at the contents of my wallet.” He leaned around Syl and addressed Ricky directly. “When you said, ‘flashed the contents of his wallet,’ were you—”
“Gong!” yelled Carla.
“Yeah,” said Syl. “You’re breaking the rules. He doesn’t get to speak until we’re all through.”
“Okay, what I’m getting at is, the natural thing to say is ‘flashed his badge,’ not ‘flashed the contents of his wallet.’ I mean, I’m looking at my wallet, and if I flashed it at anybody they’d just see my Visa card and this picture of my girlfriend.” Marv and Chuck inspected the picture of Pete’s girlfriend.
“But if you had a police badge,” said Dot, “they’d see it, instead of your Visa card.”
“Maybe, but it still sounds wrong.”
“Flashing the badge is a cliché,” said Dr. Richard Surtees. “Obviously, Rick was trying to get around it.”
“So,” said Amy. “The moral is what?”
“Better the devil you know,” said Ginger Nicklow.
“Would someone tell me,” said Amy, “what happens in this story?” She always had to ask this, because no one ever willingly committed to a simple summary. It was so much easier to blather on about the use of metaphor, and whether the names of two characters were sufficiently distinguishable, and other trivial matters, than to think about the thing as a whole. “Someone besides Edna,” she added. Edna was her mainstay.
“There’s this guy. Herk,” said Chuck. Frank Waasted snorted, and quickly looked down at his shoes. “He’s a vice squad cop, and he’s in love with this TV newswoman. She gets kidnapped by the, I don’t know, pimp mafia, and he rescues her. That’s it.”
“Yeah,” said Syl. “It’s like a cop show.”
“Is that good?” asked Amy.
Syl stood up for Ricky. It’s probably not supposed to be, he said, but what’s wrong with a good story? “Crystal Night” was “a real page-turner.”
“Does everybody agree with Syl?” asked Amy.
There followed the uncomfortable silence that usually preceded a negative feeler. Harry B. cleared his throat and mentioned that the story was “kind of long.” This gave them something to talk about for a while, as Ricky’s story was almost forty pages in length, twice as long as Amy’s suggested page limit for group critiques. Dot, Surtees, and Syl defended its length. For one thing, it was forty pages of slam-bang action, involving a car chase, a gun battle, a plummeting elevator, and a lot of heavy breathing. “Also,” said Surtees accurately, “it’s really the only finished piece that anybody’s handed in so far. It’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it’s over, you know it’s over. We’re not left with a lot of unanswered questions.”
“And that’s good?” Amy was prodding more than usual, partly because it was fun to watch them squirm, and also if they didn’t stop pussyfooting around one another the class would founder. She gave them a full minute, and sighed. “All righty,” she said. “Now, Dot has complimented the author on his use of metaphor. Would anyone care to discuss the author’s style?”
Ginger raised her hand. “Could we talk about the title?”
“Why?”
“Yes,” said Carla. “Was anybody but me a little bothered by it?”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. “We’ll get to the title in a minute. Right now I want to talk about—”
“Actually,” said Harry B., “it’s borderline offensive.” He had the grace to look embarrassed, but he persevered anyway. “It’s an obvious play on words. Crystal Night? Kristallnacht?”
“Yeah, right,” said Syl.
“What’s wrong with a play on words? Obvious or otherwise?” Carla started to answer. “Let Syl explain,” said Amy, who was willing to bet a thousand dollars she didn’t have that Syl had no idea what Kristallnacht actually meant.
Syl thought hard. “It’s German?”
“Some words really shouldn’t be fooled with,” said Carla. “You said so yourself. Remember? Three years ago, when that surfer dude passed around that disgusting Nazi story—”
“Carla,” said Amy. “Do you agree with Dot? About the author’s use of metaphor?”
Carla locked eyes with Amy and nodded, almost imperceptibly, in Dot’s direction.
“Dot,” said Amy, ignoring the nod. “I’m afraid it’s up to you. Could you give us an example or two of the metaphorical turns you most admire?”
Now Dot looked almost as luckless as Syl. She began to shuffle through the story, pausing occasionally, only to shuffle on.
“As I’ve advised you all, fifty thousand times,” said Amy, “you’re supposed to be marking up these manuscripts like crazy. I happen to know that most of them return to their authors in pristine condition. Dot, if you really liked something on the page, you should have written something in the margin—”
“Here’s one!” Dot held out a single page, triumphantly. The rest of “Crystal Night” had cascaded around her dyed turquoise shoes. “‘Herk’s devotion to Crystal went far beyond the physical. Even more than her delectable physique and her impish grin, he adored her mind, which leaped and gleamed like the rainbows in Silver Creek.’” She looked up and out over the class. “Isn’t that just lovely?”
“No,” said Tiffany. Everybody froze except Ricky Buzza, who blushed and hung his head. “She’s got a mind like a fish. What’s lovely about that?” Tiffany, the obvious inspiration for Crystal Malloy, was apparently more annoyed about this than she was worried about setting Dot off. “Not to mention the sun sitting, as opposed to setting, on her legendary buttocks.” Tiffany was basically a nice person, but like most pretty girls she wasn’t sentimental about unwanted attendees.
With this, the group shifted free of its paralysis, some rainbowing all over poor Ricky’s metaphors, some (all guys) springing to his defense, while Dot complained to anyone who would listen that the metaphor had nothing to do with fish, it was about rainbows, and nobody bothered to explain that they were rainbow trout, until Edna finally spoke up. “If we’re going to talk about metaphor,” she said, “could we please address the logic of ‘wafting like a sunbeam’ while at the same time ‘swaying like waves on an angry sea’?”
Amy, happy to comply, launched into her Extended Metaphor lecture, pausing midway through to fish the battered copy of Fowler’s out of her briefcase, and then regaled them for fifteen minutes with some of her favorite passages. This shut down everybody but Dot, who valiantly rose to Ricky’s defense. It wasn’t right, she said. Metaphorical language makes us free. If you’re going to impose all these rules, then what’s the point?
“No one’s imposing rules,” said Amy. “It’s not like deciding where to put the salad fork. Metaphors dictate their own logic. People notice when this logic is violated. They laugh at lines like ‘rising out of the ashes like a burst bubble,’ not to show off, but because of the silly picture it creates.”
Dot opened her mouth to argue, but left it open, apparently distracted by thought, and Amy used the opportunity to steer the discussion back toward the substance of the story which, though clichéd, wasn’t as vulnerable to attack as its style. Ricky had endured enough abuse. After another half hour, during which Marv and Syl and Dot stood fast in defense of “Crystal Night,” Amy closed discussion and announced a break. Ricky Buzza, given a chance to speak, said nothing. He just got up and went outside and stood with his back to the window and his hands in his pockets. He was soon joined by a few others, but he didn’t seem to be talking to any of them, and they were kind enough to leave him alone.
During break, people formed small groups outside in front and all around the huge room, leaving Dot conspicuously alone on the couch. Amy sat down across from her. “Carla had trouble reaching you by phone,” she said. “We were all worried that you’d left us.”
Dot was belting into a plate of tortilla chips and guacamole, with a side of chipotle dip. Ricky’s story still covered her feet. She seemed disinclined to move, or gather up the story, or do anything more complicated than scoop and crunch. “I’ve been away,” she said, not quite meeting Amy’s eyes. If she was aware of the group’s attitude toward her, she didn’t seem bothered. She was a bit more vacant than usual, but happy enough. Contented, like a cow, and ruminating. This close, the Estée Lauder was overwhelming, and heat rose from her expansive bosom, which had been dusted with, Amy guessed, Youth Dew Bath Powder. “Are you working on anything new?” Amy asked.
Dot smiled a secret smile and nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m trying something completely different.” She smeared the chipotle on a long chip, snapping it in two, then made a sandwich out of the halves, fastidiously, her little fingers arched out as though she were sipping tea. She was absolutely absorbed in the food and paying as little attention to Amy as she could without being outright rude.
Amy was beginning to think the group was onto something here. She cleared her throat. “Dot,” she said, and this time waited for the woman to stop her damn crunching and look at her. “Is there anything you want to ask me about this Sniper business? I realize it must be of some concern, and—”
Dot smiled so widely and so suddenly and so inappropriately that Amy almost shrank from her. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said, one plump hand on her chest.
“Well, that’s not the word I’d have chosen—”
“My husband and I did two murder cruises, and this is much better than either of them. This is real.”
Amy wanted to ask Dot about her husband. She realized that she had been assuming, based on Dot’s story, that her husband actually ran off with a younger woman. She knew better than to do this, but something about Dot Hieronymus just brought out cliché expectations in everybody. Now she was going to have to ask some lame question about the guy, ostensibly out of friendly curiosity, but really to find out if he was still in the picture. She was still working on it when Dot stopped crunching and licked her lips.
“Harrison loves murder cruises,” said Dot. “As do I.”
“Really.”
“So much so that I’m working on a mystery-cruise script right now. There’s this contest. I entered it last year and got some really good comments on my script. This time I’m going to win. Especially if you help me out. And the others, too, of course.” Dot seldom made eye contact when she talked, and when she did, immediately afterward she glanced away and fluttered her lashes. It looked involuntary, an old girlish habit. Beneath the makeup and the affectation Amy could see the young woman Dot had been, lustrous-eyed, sensuous, confident of male attention. Spoiled by it, probably, so that now, in middle age, she had no resources. Except Harrison.
“We don’t usually do scripts,” Amy said.
“Here’s my idea,” said Dot, leaning into Amy. “I could pass out the scripts, and there’d probably be parts for almost everybody. We could read through it and—” The rest was drowned out by a burst of laughter from Marvy, Syl, and Dr. Surtees, huddled near the entrance to the hallway, and then another more raucous burst as they continued to crack one another up. One more time and they’d wake the old Kraken next door.
Amy stood up. “Sounds fine,” she said. Then, because she’d stood so abruptly, she added, “Is there a part for me?”
Dot smiled and fluttered and deftly flicked tortilla crumbs out of her cleavage. “Of course,” she said. “There’s a great part for you.”
Tonight, for a number of reasons, Amy had a hard time starting up again after break. One problem was that all the wine and Dos Equis, combined with general nerves over the presence of Dot “Madman” Hieronymus, unfocused the group, and even though Amy gathered them all together and sat them down, she had trouble commanding their full attention.
Another problem was Tiffany herself, who disavowed the piece before Amy could start discussion, apologizing to everyone for “dumping it” on them. Just two weeks before, she had been happy for having written “anything at all.” Amy debated whether to call her on it. Tiffany’s piece was unfinished, untitled, self-indulgent, plotless, and rambling, but intelligent too, and likable in spite of its flaws, like Tiffany herself.
Before she could say a word, though, Ricky Buzza cleared his throat. “So we all, what? Wasted our time reading it?” His copy of “Untitled” was rolled up in his fist like a bat. Ricky Buzza was the third problem.
Tiffany glanced around at him, perched on the arm of Edna’s comfy chair, looming over her. She looked shocked, as well she might.
“I don’t know about the rest of you folks,” he went on, “but I spent an hour on this story. I read it twice.” “Folks” was an odd word for someone so young to use, but then Ricky was in an odd mood. He was paler than usual, with spots of color on his high cheekbones. “So I’d like to spend at least five minutes talking about it.”
“I didn’t mean—” said Tiffany.
“Terrific. If nobody minds, I’d like to read the first paragraph.” Amy opened her mouth to stop him, but Ricky was too quick.
“6:15 a.m. The sun slants in on Maggie’s eyelids, prying her awake, and there’s nothing to do, no snooze alarm, no suit hanging ready on her open closet door, no open closet door, no water running in the shower, no NPR echoing from the bathroom, no Jake. Maggie rolls onto her stomach, burrows back into the dream, the small white boat on the water, and someone was helping her on board, someone with arms outstretched, but no, no more, and who it was in the boat she doesn’t know, and now the boat is gone, and she’s awake, and alone, and she’s lost her job, and Jake is gone. Today is the worst day of the rest of her life.”
Ricky looked up from the curled page. “Two things,” he said. “One, it’s very rhythmic, like poetry. That’s why I wanted to read it out loud. Two, it’s very economical. She’s just lying there in bed, waking up, but look at how much we learn about her.” Behind him, Edna Wentworth smiled broadly, as though Ricky were her own pupil.
“Like what?” This from Harry B. “That she likes to feel sorry for herself? Because that’s pretty much what she does for fifteen pages.”
“We learn,” said Ricky, “that she had a boyfriend, or a husband, named Jake, and that he left her, probably the day or night before. We also get that she’s lost her job, probably recently.”
“And,” said Carla, energized, “we learn that whatever Jake does for a living, he wears a suit, and he listens to NPR in the bathroom, so he’s probably educated, and so is she. We learn her social class.”
“We get all this,” said Ricky, “in five hundred words. I just wanted to mention that.” He handed his marked-up copy to Tiffany, then sat back, obviously finished.
“So,” said Marvy, “educated people listen to NPR in the bathroom?”
“What’s NPR?” asked Syl.
Dr. Surtees laughed. “You a Limbaugh man, Syl?”
At the mention of Rush Limbaugh, Ginger and Carla made identical faces, and Amy knew that she ought to say something to keep them from becoming fractious, to settle them back on track, but she was still puzzling over Ricky Buzza, his sudden, bitter blossoming this evening, his articulate defense of Tiffany’s piece. She’d long ago written him off as an earnest kid, the juvenile lead. He’d been lying doggo. Still, how could he have written something as bad as “Crystal Night” and be so perceptive a critic? And when did Surtees start clapping guys on the back and calling them by their first name? Dot wasn’t the only one who had turned a corner tonight.
Now Ginger was speaking up, holding forth at some length. Ginger was usually pretty terse. She was agreeing with Ricky about Tiffany’s stylistic skills. “On the other hand,” she said, “you can’t get around the fact that fifteen pages later, the point-of-view character, Maggie, is still in bed. She hasn’t done or said anything, or interacted with anybody. She hasn’t even taken a shower. Nothing happens here. Nothing outside her head, anyway.”
They wrangled for fifteen minutes over whether Maggie had an epiphany (she hadn’t), and for another ten over whether “Untitled” was really a story at all or a vignette, and Amy didn’t need to explain the difference between the two because Carla did so neatly, from memory. With one notable exception, everybody got into the act. Edna offered measured praise for the piece’s linguistic cleverness, Chuck and Frank backed her up, and the slackers—Harry, Marv, Syl—whom Amy could usually count on to say nothing unless they liked a story, complained that if nothing happens, it isn’t finished. Only Dot was silent. Apparently she was unimpressed by this writer’s use of metaphor, or by anything else Tiffany had accomplished.
Amy didn’t have to do a thing. She marveled at the group’s new focus and energy. They were functioning on a college level now, not merely an extension level. They were thinking and talking like scholars-in-waiting. She stopped paying close attention to the discussion—clearly they didn’t need her—and just watched them. Ginger and Chuck were particularly animated, backing up their praises with examples from the piece, but Syl stood up to them. “All I know,” he was saying, “is, say, I’m riding on a bus, and the guy next to me strikes up a conversation, and it’s going to be a long ride, you know? So this could be a good thing. But then he says, I woke up this morning, and my alarm clock was on the fritz, and my girlfriend left me, and then I had two slices of French toast, and the phone rang, and—”
“—and it was a wrong number,” said Marvy.
“—it was a wrong number, and I went out and bought a newspaper, and the Iraqi death toll—”
“—yeah, what’s with the Iraqi death toll?”
“It’s an NPR thing,” said Dr. Surtees, making a lot of people laugh, including Amy.
Tiffany was laughing too. When Syl finally ran out of gas, she raised her hand and spoke up. She thanked everybody, and apologized, too, for “pretending that this piece didn’t matter. It matters a lot,” she said. “Thanks for taking it so seriously.”
“So finish it already,” said Syl, and Tiffany promised she would.
The evening was suddenly over, and all Amy had to do was get everyone to pass critiques back to Tiffany and Ricky, and then ask Syl and Ginger to pass out stories for the following week. Syl and Ginger demurred, claiming that they were putting on the finishing touches, and promising to mail them out to everybody in a day or two. The class would meet at Syl’s condo in La Mesa, the directions to which he’d Xeroxed and passed out.
Amy stood with Carla in the circular driveway, watching as the last two cars drove away. Carla was jazzed. “I thought they’d never leave,” she said. Amy, too, had noticed a general reluctance to leave such a welcoming, comfortable spot. Carla’s half, anyway. “Did you catch the deal between Ricky and Tiffany? What was that all about? Where did that come from? And how about old Dot?”
Carla wanted Amy to come back inside for coffee and a post mortem on the evening, but Amy begged off. She was too tired, and she wanted to concentrate on the strides this group had made, not on its social intricacies and certainly not on the Sniper, whose importance had receded considerably, at least for now. Apologize to your mother for me, she said, and pulled away, leaving Carla standing square in a spotlight, waving at her with both hands. She looked a shade thinner, around the middle and in the face, and Amy tried to recall what she’d seen her eat. Was Carla on a diet? Was everybody turning some sort of corner, socially?
Well, not moi, thought Amy. She put in her CD of Gould playing the Bach French Suites, and coasted home to the Fifth, the one with the amazing gigue that sounded like hunters tantivying in counterpoint, turning their tunes inside out and upside down, cracking beautiful jokes. She tried to focus on the evening’s events, but the music was too wonderful. What a happy man Bach must have been. All the way home she pretended to play.