Epiphany
Of the ten remaining class members, Carla turned out to be the hardest sell. Though she clearly planned to perpetuate a relationship with Amy, whether Amy wanted it or not, she seemed genuinely shocked at the suggestion of a Last Class. Eventually she allowed that a smaller hand-picked group might be okay—Chuck and Edna and Harry B. and Marvy, but that was all, not even Pete and Ricky, who were really nice guys. “You realize, don’t you, that I actually hosted a murder? I hate to even walk through my own living room now. I can’t sleep without a buttload of Xanax.” Amy stood fast. It had to be everybody, and it had to be Wednesday, at her house. In the end, Carla got on board, so enthusiastically that she threatened to capsize the boat. She wanted to arrange for catering and cleanup afterwards, money was “no object,” and she’d send up some extra chairs, because Amy’s house was, you know, pretty cozy, and besides she didn’t want Amy to lift a finger. “Absolutely not,” said Amy. “No food, and especially no drinks, unless people want to bring their own. Think about it, Carla. What happened the last time we passed the bottle?” Carla thought about it. “Jesus,” she said, “this is serious, isn’t it?” Yes, it was.
Carla was right about the “cozyness” of Amy’s tiny house: in its present cluttered state, there was no way she could fit eleven people in the living room. Amy basically dwelled in her bedroom and dining area, which she had made into an office. The living room had been for years a way station between the two—a convenient place to drop laundered clothes, shopping bags, junk mail, and all the books that wouldn’t fit in her bookcases. Amy spent a full day emptying it of everything but furniture. She piled loose books on the already jammed shelves lining the walls, and when they threatened to break, she moved the rest into what was supposed to be her spare bedroom, a de facto attic (Californians didn’t believe in those) that contained table lamps, mirrors, two yet-to-be assembled twin beds and half a truckload of unpacked cartons from her move west with “Bob.”
Once she settled into the work, it was almost fun to come across titles she’d forgotten she had—the two-volume history of the world by H. G. Wells, Max’s gardening books, the works of Saki, Stephen Leacock, Coppard, and Chesterton. Then there were armfuls of books she had never even opened, written by authors who had once blurbed Amy’s books in anticipation of return blurbs from her. Those she glimpsed now as she stacked the piles—promising readers illumination, delight, “unpretentious wit” (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean)—had been, like all her blurbs, carefully written so as to avoid bald-faced lying. The “If…then…” construction had served her well. If you long for a languid, sensuous trip down the Ancient Nile, this book is for you! On the other hand, if you’d rather have your gums scraped than time-travel down a croc-infested river, you should read Flaubert. For all those readers still mourning the death of the locked room mystery…. She stopped to stare at a somber book jacket for something called Christmas Tremens. “A must-read for the adult grandchildren of alcoholics.” She had to have qualified this goofy claim in some way, but the publisher had cut her short and she hadn’t even noticed. What a lazy, angry writer she had been. They’d stopped asking her for blurbs at some point—probably right after Christmas Tremens—but she’d kept all these stupid books, because the blurbs themselves were her only published work since Fiercer Hell.
She set aside the mound of blurbage, and when the room had been sufficiently compacted to allow for more overflow from the living room, she carted these books back in there and piled them by the fireplace. Wednesday night was supposed to be cold. She wouldn’t have to buy kindling.
On Wednesday morning she signed on to her e-mail account to broadcast directions to her house, and there was something in her inbox from Sniper4758, with an attachment.
Since we’re doing “my work,” I thought you should have more. I attach excerpts from my most recent journal entries. Feel free to distribute them to the kiddies, or keep them to yourself. You may treat them either as fact or fiction. I thrive on criticism. Especially from asskissing wannabes. Especially from you you big fat vicious washed-up no-talent bitch
Attached was a rambling document, but with subheadings: one was “The Fat Broad” and the other three were undated diary entries. “The Fat Broad” had apparently been spewed during First Class. Amy caught her breath: only a few class members had brought laptops with them. But as she continued reading, she noticed an increasing number of typos and missing words; by the last page, there was an entire line of alphabet soup, where the Sniper’s fingers had been on the wrong keys and he hadn’t even noticed, or bothered to correct. This was a transcription, probably typed in one sitting, probably very recently, and the Sniper had become angrier and less controlled with each page, you big fat vicious washed-up no-talent bitch. The originals, Amy figured, were handwritten.
Amy now forwarded the Sniper’s attachments to the rest of the class (subject line: Last Minute Reading). Then she made enough hard copies to pass around tonight, along with copies of the Sniper’s letter.
One hour before class was to begin, Amy started up a fire in the fireplace and sat down in her newly habitable living room with a cup of hot tea. She tried to focus on how she was going to conduct tonight’s critique, a problem she’d been putting off ever since throwing down the gauntlet to the Sniper. Her hope was that magically, with the whole class focused on these pages, a coherent portrait of their author might shimmer into common view. Amy had been teaching long enough to have seen something like this actually happen.
A student would submit a piece for class discussion that was shockingly incoherent. The student would have sat quietly through classes, hanging back noticeably reserved but otherwise apparently normal, only to pass out some full-blown psychotic world view for class critique. Madness would rise from the page like swamp gas: nameless characters would begin to connect and then drift askew into rhyme and repetition. There would be eyes and mouths and many jagged edges, and literally nothing to talk about except pathology, and of course Amy couldn’t allow that. The first time this happened, she considered calling class members ahead of time, to warn them against being too honest in their responses, but she couldn’t think of a way to do this that wouldn’t insult their intelligence, and so she approached next class with great dread. But a small miracle happened: One class member talked about the parts she “liked,” the characters or metaphors or events that worked for her. When she stopped, another took up the thread of criticism, elaborating about what the first had said, and adding to it, and then another, and another, and gradually the class fabricated a sort of ghost text, woven on the spot from the threads of social desperation, the weave eventually so tight and even that latecomers could jump in gamely and embroider the edges. And when they were done, the crazy guy was actually smiling. He told the class, “You all really got what I was trying to do,” went home happy and, to everyone’s relief, never returned.
This happened three separate times over the years, and in pretty much the same way. The most striking part of the whole phenomenon was the untouched purity of the ghost text, each contributor laboring alone, with no idea what the literal text meant. United in a common purpose—to propitiate the mad—they were wonderfully, intuitively creative. Unlike the six blind men of Indostan, they could not only describe the elephant from trunk to tail, but will the beast into life right on the spot. Carla had been in one of these classes. “Jeez,” she had said privately to Amy, after class was over, “I must be an idiot. Everybody understood that piece but me! Between you and I,” she had whispered, “I was just winging it.”
Winging it: the key to creative inspiration. Maybe what writers really needed wasn’t encouragement, mentoring, or even stern deadlines, but immediate, ratcheting anxiety. Make something up and make it work, or you’ll be sorry. Perhaps tonight they could do the same thing with the real Sniper text—the narrative behind these hateful scraps and wadded-up spitballs. And then what? Amy had no idea.
Syl and Pete were the first to arrive, standing green and somber beneath her porch light, Syl with his collar turned up like Sam Spade. “Mind if I look around the back?” he asked.
“Sure, but what for? The only thing you’re going to find is—” Syl had disappeared around the corner. “Dog poop,” she said to Pete Purvis. “Did you two come together?” They both lived in La Mesa and sometimes shared rides.
“I wanted to, but he wasn’t up for it. I think he’s kind of paranoid.” Amy led him into the living room. “Wow,” said Pete. “Look at all those books.” He walked over to the bookcases and began to check out her library, running his fingertips lightly over the spines. “You’ve got Once and Future King,” he exclaimed. “I love that book!”
“You love books, period. I can tell by the way you touch them.” He was a sweet boy, even younger up close than sitting in class, and there was no way he could deliberately hurt anybody. Pete had been tough to convince about Last Class, because of Dot. I just don’t have the heart for any more of this, he had told her, and she thought, Good for you. But she’d leaned on him anyway, and here he was, thumbing through her ancient inherited copy of Girl of the Limberlost.
Syl banged on the back door. “It’s clear,” he said.
“Clear of what, Syl? What were you looking for?”
Syl shucked his coat onto Amy’s computer chair. “You never know,” he said. “He could have gotten here early. Ahead of the pack.”
“Like you?” asked Amy, and was heartened to hear Pete laugh. Outside her front windows she could see the other cars arriving, as if in deliberate caravan or funeral cortege. She stepped out onto her porch and counted them. Ten people, ten cars: nobody trusted anybody. Across and down the street her neighbors came to their windows. Amy never had visitors, and now she had a parade of them, parking halfway up the hill, scurrying silently toward her in the dark. She found herself wishing she could have cooked for them, picked out wine and beer—planned for a bright evening, as she had once done with Max, in the days their house was full of funny, odd people, all with appetites and stories to tell. In those days, she had never stopped to feel affection for any of them (except for Max); she was too busy trying to top her previous menu or steer conversation or arrange meetings between potential couples—what Max called introducing Tab A to Slot B.
She was gripped now, if not by affection, at least by a rush of sentiment. She didn’t want the Sniper to be any of these people, not even Dr. Creepy Surtees, who had gone up a tick in Amy’s estimation when he played that stupid pizza joke on Carla. Sure, he was an arrogant jackass, but not too arrogant for a Prince-Albert-in-the-Can moment with his new public-golf-course buddies. And not Harry B., walking thoughtfully behind Tiffany, taking care not to come abreast and spook her. Tiffany’s shoulders were rounded, her arms folded tightly in a shield, and she walked with her head down, an anxious child on her way to catechism. Ricky walked beside her without speaking, and in back of this pack was Chuck, and behind him was Marvy, and someone else. He’d brought his wife, whom Amy hadn’t seen since the night of the Halloween masks. Carla, bringing up the rear, caught up with them and started chatting with Mrs. Marvy, who was apparently beyond suspicion. Amy couldn’t think why.
When she’d gotten them seated there was a long, incredibly awkward pause, broken, of course, by Carla. “Here’s the plan,” she said.
What had Amy ever done without Carla and her plans? Tonight, Amy was winging it, and up stepped Carla with a plan.
“You know how on First Class we always go around the room and introduce ourselves? Well, we’ll go around the room now and explain why we’re not the Sniper. I’ll go first.” She waited for somebody—Amy—to object, but no one did. “Okay,” she said. And after awhile, “I’m blanking here.”
“Just start the sentence,” suggested Amy, “and see what happens. This is how we write.”
“But we’re not writing now,” said Marvy. “This is real.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re not writing,” said Amy. “You know how I’m always trying to get you people to think about the difference between fiction and reality? Now is as good a time as any to take that question seriously.” Amy snapped her fingers twice. “Come on, people.”
“I’m not the Sniper,” said Carla, “because…I’m not an angry person. The Sniper is the angriest person in the universe. I haven’t lost my temper since eighth grade. Plus if I were going to kill anybody, it’d be Ma.”
“Why is it good,” asked Ricky, “that you haven’t lost your temper since eighth grade? That sounds dangerous.”
“And you’re not the Sniper because…,” said Amy.
“Because I’m not a creative writer. No, it’s true,” said Ricky, as though someone had rushed to contradict him. “I took this class because I write for a living, and I thought it would be supereasy for me, being a pro and all. But my fiction sucks. The Sniper is a real writer,” he said.
“You haven’t written enough,” said Edna, “to know whether or not you suck. Also, should you be the Sniper, you might be affecting amateur status in class.” Edna, regarding Ricky kindly, clearly didn’t think this was likely. She turned to address everyone else. “I’m not the Sniper, because I’m old.” This time, people did protest, but she waved them away. “I’m in reasonably good shape for my age, but still, I can’t be running around in the dark with houseplants and masks, pushing people off cliffs.”
“My husband is not the Sniper,” announced Mrs. Marvy. “He was home with me when Frank died, and then after that woman died, he came home and stayed in bed all the next day.” Marvy was tugging on her sleeve like a little boy, trying to speak up for himself, but she ignored him. Mrs. Marvy (Cindy, Amy remembered now) was indignant: the game, pleasant gal who had come to sixth class in Bozo the Clown getup was here to protect her man, not so much from the Sniper as from Amy and the others. “…the very idea,” she was saying, “means that you don’t know my husband at all. It’s bad enough that he had to go through this stuff, these deaths, but this is the last straw! To be put under suspicion, as though he were anything but an innocent victim—”
Harry B. cut her off. “He’s not being treated any differently from the rest of us,” he said.
“I tried to explain that,” said Marvy. He leaned toward Amy and whispered, “She’s just very upset.”
“Who else isn’t the Sniper?” asked Chuck.
“Me,” said Syl.
“Me neither,” said Pete. “And here’s why.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carla. “Syl can’t get away with that. You have to give a reason.”
Syl rummaged through the papers he’d rolled in his jacket pocket. It took him awhile to scan through them and find what he was looking for. “This is from that thing you sent out today. ‘Well.’” he read slowly, stumbling over many words, “‘I wrote them a letter, and then I tore it up and wrote them another, and then another, and the letters got longer and longer, and I tore them all up. I tried high dudgeon, I tried low dudgeon, I tried blasphemy, profanity, and scatology, separately and at once.’” Syl looked up. “I’m not dumb, and this is just, what, three sentences, and you can’t even understand them. There’s four words here that nobody knows what they mean, or maybe they do, but not me. What’s a dudgeon? I hate this kind of shit.” Syl was getting as worked up as Mrs. Marvy. “This is the way people write when they want to make you feel stupid.”
“Syl,” said Pete, “nobody wants you to feel stupid.”
“I think you may be wrong,” said Amy, delighted. “Actually, Syl’s on to something.”
“And you’re what—surprised?” asked Syl, quite steamed.
Amy regarded Syl directly, giving him her full attention, realizing that she hadn’t done this before. None of them had. “I’m pleased,” she said. “What you just did is what I’ve been trying to get you to do all semester—read with your own eyes, listen with your own ears. That was a genuine critical response to the reading, Syl.”
“Hear, hear,” said Dr. Surtees, clapping a hand on Syl’s shoulder. “And while we’re at it, I’m not the Sniper, either. I’m much too busy. I have a full practice, a busy social life—my wife sees to that—and in my off-moments, during the last nine weeks, I’ve revised two thirds of Code Black.” He reached into his briefcase and drew out a manuscript which looked to have doubled in size.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Tiffany.
Harry B. spoke up. “None of what’s been said—nothing anyone could say tonight—proves anything one way or the other. That’s not the point.”
“Well then, what is the point?” asked Cindy Stokes. “I mean this is ridiculous.”
“The point is,” said Amy, “that everyone in this room, with the exception of you, wants to be a writer.” Cindy wasn’t helping. “Some want it more than others, but everyone who comes to a writing workshop believes that he has a story worth telling: that he knows something that no one else knows or will ever know, unless he tells that story and does it right. The Sniper is one of us. The Sniper, like the rest of us, wants to be taken seriously.”
“And that’s what we’re doing tonight,” said Chuck.
“Why aren’t you the Sniper, Chuck?” asked Amy.
Chuck looked away, toward the dark fireplace. “Why don’t we have a fire.”
“Not until you’ve—”
“A fine idea,” said Amy. She watched Chuck arrange five small logs just so, allowing just the right vertical and horizontal space between them to nurture the flames. When he asked for kindling, Amy pointed to the blurbage.
“No!” shouted Carla and Tiffany at once. “Are those your books? You’re burning your own books?” Carla looked for a moment as though she were about to throw herself in the flames ahead of the books; then her expression shifted radically, as though she were about to say “Cool!” Either she winked at Amy or she experienced some facial tic. Carla must be on something tonight. Tiffany was just horrified, jolted out of whatever lugubrious state she had arrived in.
Amy assured them that the books were not her own and explained about the blurbs. “This isn’t tragic,” she told Tiffany. “I’m cleaning house. As you may have noticed, I don’t do that very often.”
“But it’s a sin,” said Pete, “to burn a book.”
“Pete, this is not the Reichstag fire. Look at these titles. Read them and weep.”
Cindy Stokes thought she’d read something by the author of the Nefertiti whodunit, but when pressed admitted that it couldn’t have been very good or she’d remember it for sure.
“But they’re books,” said Pete. “How can you do this to books? Don’t you love them?” Pete looked like he was going to cry, if not soon, then later on tonight, when he was alone. Pete Purvis was a melancholy boy. Amy was willing to bet that his best friends were girls, smart girls, but that he’d never had a girlfriend in his life. If he didn’t move out on his own, away from home, he’d become a middle-aged boy and then an old boy. Or was she just making him up? “How would you like it,” he asked her now, “if someone burned your books?”
“Here’s the thing,” said Chuck. “You can’t just set them on fire. First, you’d have to take the covers off, because they’re full of toxins, and you don’t want to gag everybody. Plus they’ll really gunk up your flue. And if you try to light the book as is, it won’t catch, because there’s no air between the pages. What you could do,” he continued, taking The Marchpane Cicatrix off the top of the pile and laying it out flat on the hearth, “is rip them out a few at a—”
“Stop!” Marvy’s voice now joined in the chorus, and she thought she heard Harry B. as well. Did the majority rule here? How sentimental they all were about the printed word. If Amy ever taught again, she would devote an entire class to the journey of a novel from Platonic ideal to its shimmering manifestation, first in the subconscious and then the right frontal lobe, then in notebooks or computer screens, then in manuscript copy, in proofs, in hard cover and soft, on retail and library shelves, on remainder tables and in bins, and ultimately, with the exception of a handful of copies whose accidental survival would give them spurious value, in the great maw of the pulping machine.
“Surely,” said Dr. Surtees, “we are all united here in our love of the printed word.”
Oh, you ass, thought Amy, and was about to squash him flat when Ricky Buzza saved her the trouble.
“Hey, you all recycle your newspapers, right? Well, those are full of printed words, and some of them are mine. I don’t see any of you getting all worked up about that.”
“Newspapers,” said Edna, “are designed to be ephemeral. Books are not.”
Amy remembered that on the night of First Class she had inadvertently banded them together in shared enjoyment at her awkwardness with names, her mispronunciations and misapprehensions, the slapstick of the wobbly fan in the back of the classroom and the deafening silence when she’d had the thing turned off. She had known then that this would be a good group; and here, after all they’d been through, they were reunited now, armed against her and her Philistine book-burning ways. She would miss them. It was nice to forget, just for the moment, why they were all gathered here.
She sighed and told Chuck to put the book back in the pile, and sent Syl to the store room for some newspapers. Everybody leaned back in relief. But Amy was on a roll. She would have none of that. “When they pulp them,” she said, “they wash them with caustic soda. It’s called ‘de-inking.’”
“That’s terrible.”
“For God’s sake,” said Amy, “they’re not boiling puppies.”
On cue, Syl returned with a stack of the North County Times and Alphonse, who had been so quiet in the back of the house that Amy had forgotten about him. Everyone exclaimed over him, as he nosed happily among their feet, purses, and backpacks. People meant food. Alphonse loved people. Amy grabbed him by the collar and began to drag him away, to a chorus of protests. They all liked dogs, probably more than they liked Amy at this moment, except that one of them did not, and she couldn’t be watching him all the time. The Sniper could slip him poison in a hunk of cheese, hamburger, brownie (she’d imagined them all), and she couldn’t trust the rest of them to watch him every minute.
“They wash what used to be the books with caustic soda and ash,” Amy continued, taking her seat, “and after a while the ink lifts off and floats to the top like black silk. And is sluiced down the drain. They recycle the paper, but not the ink. This is what happens,” she said, looking straight at Dr. Surtees, “to all our wonderful words.”
“And you know this how?” asked Harry B.
She knew, because when her last book got remaindered, her publisher offered her five hundred copies at a buck apiece. It was either that or the pulp machine. “I told them to pulp them, as long as I could watch.” Edna said that must have been distressing. “They pulp them at a factory in Newark. It was instructive,” said Amy. “It smelled awful.”
For a long minute they all listened to the crackle of the fire Chuck and Syl had made, and the impatient clicking of Alphonse’s nails behind the closed door. Into this silence, Carla rose and advanced on the fireplace, holding out a copy of the Sniper’s manuscript. What on earth was she doing?
“So what you’re saying,” said Chuck, “is that even if hell freezes over and we get published, in the end it’s pointless, because—”
Carla smiled at Amy, as if sharing some private joke, and chucked the manuscript onto the log pile, where it flared up instantly and began to curl into ash. Then, very much on stage, she turned and faced the class. “It will hurt like hell,” she said, “and the burning will take forever.” She peered at her audience, panning deliberately from face to face. Everyone regarded her with identical expressions of alarm, and no wonder. Carla seemed to hold her breath for a minute and then slumped a little. “Oh, well,” she said, “it was worth a try.”
As she resumed her seat, Chuck wondered, on behalf of the group, exactly what was worth a try. “I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” Carla said, glancing at Amy for verification. Amy kept her own expression blank, while she tried to imagine what Carla was up to. “You all know that the Sniper wrote a mean parody of my poem, the one I read in Second Class, but only Amy, me, and one other person here knows what it says.” She extracted a wrinkled sheet of paper from her backpack and cleared her throat. “The wood must be seasoned,” she read,
Or all bets are off
Unseasoned wood is green and wet
Bark clings to it like a hanger-on
(votary, bootlicker, sycophant, toady)
Bottom line,
Kiddo,
A whole lotta steam
A whole lotta nothing
And in the end
It just won’t stay lit
It’ll hurt like hell
And the burning will take forever
“And then he added, at the bottom, ‘you could try kindling…manuscript paper might work!’ When you started on the book-burning thing, I almost didn’t get what you were doing,” she said to Amy, rolling her eyes at her own lack of acuity. “But then, of course, I got it. It was a great idea!”
Chuck didn’t think so. “Did you honestly think that the Sniper would lunge into the fire after a bunch of Xerox copies?”
“Well, as Carla said, I thought it was worth a try. I was looking for what they call a tell.” This was pretty ironic, as anyone who actually played poker would know Amy wasn’t doing anything of the kind. She’d completely forgotten the poem until now. She’d read it through only a couple of times and filed away in memory its nasty tone without holding on to its content. The kindling idea had been her own, a coincidence. At least she thought so.
“And?” Chuck seemed genuinely cross.
“And, to get back to what we were saying, one of the instructive differences between fiction and real life is that in real life the curtain only comes down once, and almost never when it should. Of course it’s lovely to get published, especially the first time: to get that acceptance letter, that formal, you should pardon the expression, validation; to watch the book take form and color; to hold it in your hands.
“But there’s no space break in the real world. Life goes on. The thing sells or doesn’t, gets reviewed or not, lasts one year or twenty. You become a better writer or you don’t, you keep writing or you stop. Chances are excellent you’ll live long enough to be out of print but not long enough to know if what you wrote was any good. All you can be sure of is that it’s an artifact, like an hourglass or an arrowhead, and just about as likely as any other artifact to be stumbled across and appreciated. Or totally misunderstood. Robert Nathan wrote this terrific book—”
“We understand,” said Carla, getting her second wind. “You’re pretending to talk to all of us, but you’re really talking to the Sniper.”
Actually, no, but judging from the sullen faces before her, this was as good a time as any to switch gears. “Who wants to start?” she asked. She reached underneath the pile of blurbage and pulled out the Sniper’s work, paper-clipped as neatly as any other student manuscript. She scanned their faces as she did this: she had placed it there, in the mound of kindling, as a deliberate insult. But the insult paled in comparison to Carla’s dramatic gesture, and of course they were all busy dutifully retrieving their own printouts. There were no tells.
“We need to talk about the dominant male thing,” said Chuck. “It’s interesting.”
“I don’t get it,” said Syl.
“The Sniper is threatened by Amy,” said Edna, “and sees her as a dominant male, which implies, to me, that the Sniper wants to challenge for dominance.”
“It’s so typical,” said Tiffany, roused, at least momentarily, from her funk. “If she’s a threat, then she must be essentially male.”
“That’s assuming that the Sniper is a guy,” said Harry B., “which, as I recall, is exactly what you don’t want us to do.”
“Thank you so much for reminding me.” Tiffany leaned forward as if about to stand up and then slumped back in her seat. “I need to say something. I haven’t slept since the night Dot died. I keep hearing my own ugly voice in my head, taunting her. I was so angry at Dot, and that’s no excuse, but she just pushed all my buttons, and she was a sweet woman, I know that, and I’m just a hopeless bitch.”
Amy promised herself that if she and Tiffany remained in touch, she would tell her some day about her own final conversation with Dot, who was anything but a sweet woman, at least not by the time she died. Right this minute, though, she felt no need to reassure Tiffany, who thought she knew just how tiresome she was being right now, and who was wrong about that. Tiffany felt bad, all right, but there was a smidgen of pleasure in this exploration of her own guilt. She was on stage now, and where there’s drama, there’s crap. As Dot would say, Tiffany didn’t know shit.
“Anyway,” said Chuck, “the Sniper’s first encounter with the group, with Amy, and she’s this dominant lowland gorilla. What’s up with that?”
“Baboon,” said Harry B.
“‘Terrible baboon god,’” quoted Ricky.
“Actually,” said Pete Purvis, “that’s pretty good.”
“I must agree,” said Amy, “since the phrase apparently resonated with most of you. Now, I’m going to throw out a question that under normal circumstances I would never ask. Is this person a good writer?”
“Just wondering,” said Marvy, “but why would you never ask this question?” Marvy’s face was guarded. His wife nodded, as if to encourage him.
“Because in all the years I’ve taught, I’ve never once had a student ask me, publicly or privately, if he was a good writer. They’ll ask about their chances of getting published, but never if they’re worth publishing. No one wants to hear the answer to that question. I certainly don’t.”
Carla said, “It’s like, ‘Do these pants make me look fat?’”
Nobody said anything, probably because Carla was wearing wide-ribbed Christmas-red stretch pants, and besides, people asked that sort of question all the time.
Dr. Surtees cleared his throat and thumbed ostentatiously through the Sniper’s pages. “He obviously knows his way around a sentence,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Ricky might have still been chafing about the doctor’s professed adoration of everything in print, or maybe he was worried about Tiffany, or even fed up with her. “He uses ten-dollar words. He’s in love with his own verbal smarts. Listen to this: ‘I might as well have wished for the moon; for despite an early flurry of promises from The Atlantic, from Harper’s, blah, blah, blah…despite tantalizing, eyelash-batting, come-hither, personally composed, and actually hand-signed rejection letters, recounting agonized blah blah blah,’ I mean, come on, it’s precious as hell. Number one, I don’t believe this guy just barely lost out to Updike, whales or no whales. I don’t believe he was ever considered seriously in the first place. He’s just jerking off here. Pardon my language.”
This was great—a direct hit, and the Sniper must be outraged. Amy scanned their faces intently, but except for Ricky himself, who was really exercised, they all wore the same closed-off expressions as Marvy. When one spoke, they looked at the speaker, but not at her. They were, she slowly realized, closed off to her. What had she done? She had to get them back.
“Or how about here,” said Marvy, “where he tells about Frank’s death. The description is spooky and you can really see it in your head, Frank blending in with the leaves and flowers.”
“It’s horrible,” said his wife.
“Yeah, but what I mean is, it’s too horrible. I mean it’s perfect. Is that what you mean by ‘precious’?” he asked Ricky. “I mean, if I killed somebody and then tried to write about it, I’d be all over the place.” Nobody said, Yes, but you’re not a writer.
Chuck poked the fire, causing the thinnest avocado log to roll off and rest against the spark screen. While he located the right fireplace tool to pick it up with, the class watched silently. There was something about a fire. During that last Augusta winter, when Max got too weak to stand easily, Amy took over this chore, and noted that gatherings always hushed while she attended to it. There was something primal about this shared attention, this impersonal automatic focus that transcended intellect and age and station in life. Writers and grad students and their toddlers and “Bob” would watch intently, their heads idly swiveling as one. We are hard-wired for it, Amy decided; and when Max stopped watching, she knew he was pulling away for good. There was a story in it somewhere. Fire-watchers.
“Let’s talk,” Amy said, “about authorial intent.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” asked Syl.
The bathroom was in the closed-off part of the house, with Alphonse, which posed a problem Amy hadn’t considered. She couldn’t very well walk Syl to the bathroom. It would be socially odd. Amy had always been fascinated with the equivalence between risking one’s life and risking social suicide. She had once kept a file on real life people who had literally died to avoid embarrassment, like the man who wouldn’t take his pants off in public even though they were on fire. Surely his was not a heroic death, and yet she couldn’t help respecting his choice. Syl opened the hallway door and Alphonse once again plunged into the room, resuming his earlier quest. What to do? “Doughnut,” she whispered, luring him first into the kitchen, where she gathered up half a loaf of stale bread and then broadcast the slices out into the backyard, slamming the door behind him. He wouldn’t like it out there, but he’d be safe, and it was easier to explain than walking Syl or anyone else to the bathroom.
“Here’s what strikes me,” said Harry B., “about the Sniper’s writing. Some of this is private stuff, a journal or diary, and some of it is communication, with you, with the group. But there’s no difference in what you call the “voice,” is there? It’s all the same. My point is, he always writes as if somebody’s going to read it.”
“Is this part of a critique,” asked Amy, “or are you playing detective? What we’re doing here is assessing the work, not trying to identify the writer.”
Harry looked confused. This was not the way to get them back. She was way off her stride, she was losing them; this would have been a bad teaching night even if lives hadn’t hung in the balance. Book-burning had been a horrible idea, along with the forced march to the pulping machine. “Sorry,” Harry said, “I didn’t make myself clear. I think I’m on the same page as Ricky. This is show-offy stuff, from beginning to end. Even when he’s all alone, writing for himself, he’s showing off.”
For a while the class argued with Harry, Ricky, and Syl, who were united in their disdain for the Sniper’s talent. Alphonse interrupted at regular intervals, woofing deeply at the back door, and Amy, worried about upsetting the neighbors, was about to let him in when he finally settled down. Carla defended the parody of her own poem, saying that there was “truth” in it, because the original poem was pretty lame. Marvy was impressed by the Sniper’s ability to sound “educated and flowery” in the journals and letters and like a high school thug when ripping on Marvy’s own story. Chuck surprised Amy by praising his description of Frank’s last moments in the hibiscus bush. “I know, this is going to sound cold. But that’s a great scene.”
Chuck was right: it did sound pretty cold, and Amy was reminded right then that Chuck had never explained why he wasn’t the Sniper. He’d just changed the subject. The only piece Chuck had ever submitted to the group was that in-class exercise he did during second class. Point-of-view female. “The Sniper,” said Amy, “is a gifted mimic. A chameleon, and while that’s a helpful talent to have, it’s a minor one. Helpful in the sense that you might create minor characters, what Forster called flat characters, with ease, but of no help at all in creating one with depth.”
The mere mention of Forster, whom Amy revered, put the kibosh on what little energy the group had managed to recover. They were mugged by torpor, and in the ensuing silence the firewood popped, lobbing a spark over the top of the screen. Amy, only a few feet away, sat still and watched it burn a hole the diameter of a pencil eraser in the carpet she and Max had picked out at Jordan Marsh and which she had made some effort, over the years, to keep in decent condition. It was a good wool rug in the Aubusson style, and Amy had loved it right away and prevailed upon Max to buy it with her, even though he hated blue. “It’s a warm blue,” she had claimed, to the nodding enthusiasm of the salesman, and Max had continued to twit her with this phrase for years. She’d be chatting or refilling drinks and she’d hear, “Yes, but it’s a warm blue,” to a new conquest, or somebody’s wife or husband. She’d lugged it all the way to California, she’d tended to it while everything else in the house slipped beneath archeological layers of dust, and now she just watched it burn.
And so did they. Thanks to her ineptitude, not one of them gave a damn. First she’d bullied them into coming, then did this foolish tough-love thing in class, and now they were too defeated, confused, and bored to stir. It was over. When she suggested they call it a night, not one of them argued with her. Not even Carla.
I’m sorry, she almost said, as they roused themselves and began to gather their stuff together, for dragging you all the way out here for nothing, but she didn’t trust her own voice, and Edna saved her from it, leaning close and saying, “This was a good idea,” as though she could read Amy’s mind. Could they all? Was she really that pathetic?
“Yes, it was,” said Pete. “I didn’t think so in the beginning, but I’m glad we all got together again. I’m really gonna miss you guys.”
“No, you won’t,” said Carla, “because there’s no way this is the last class.” She was wrong, but Amy was not about to argue with her. She wanted them all out as quickly as possible. All the while she had planned for this evening, she had dreaded its close, the fear which was sure to follow. The only thing she was afraid of now was bursting into tears in front of them. Amy, who never cried, was undone—by a tiny burn hole; by the echo of her own foolish, droning voice; by the feeble fellowship of kind souls (all but one) in her cheerless little house. “Can we see that basset again?” asked Carla. “Just once?”
Anything to get her out of there, and Amy grabbed the leash from its hook. She’d keep him right by her, where he’d be safe. She opened the back door and scanned the yard. “Come on in,” she yelled. Amy never called him by name; they were too close for that. She listened for the jingle of his collar in the dark, but nothing. “Doughnut!” she announced, and when he didn’t come, she said it again. She’d never had to repeat this magic word. Something was wrong.
The back floodlight had burned out long ago, and it took her forever to find a working flashlight. Carla asked her what was going on, but she ignored her as she hunted through every kitchen drawer for batteries, and by then they had all caught on, and they spilled out into the backyard with her, calling his name. He didn’t know his name. He was the Great I Am. Doughnut, yelled Carla, and Ricky, and Tiffany, they were chorusing the secret word, Doughnut, here boy, Doughnut. She played the light over the overgrown shrubs and eucalyptus that lined the fence, where Alphonse went to do his business and check out passersby.
Everybody in the neighborhood knew Alphonse, and half of them fed him treats—why else would he bother hanging around the fence?—so why hadn’t she seen the danger? The Sniper must have set it up before class, before they even came to her house, while they were walking down the hill, yes, the bastard had tossed a poisoned tidbit over the chain-link, and just waited. A perfect setup: simplicity itself. What difference would it make whether he ate it tonight or tomorrow? Sooner or later, he’d find it. The Sniper was like God the Clock winder, he didn’t have to see the looks on people’s faces when they opened up obscene boxfuls of teeth, or witness that poor nameless woman jumping out a window. He didn’t need to see her good dog convulsing in agony. It was enough to set the gears in motion, and she’d been crazy to hold this class, and she’d gotten Alphonse murdered.
Chuck grabbed the flashlight from her hand and climbed into the oleander, along with Carla and Pete. She watched the light dart back and forth over the leaves and dirt like a hound on the scent, her own stalwart hound, and listened to them calling to each other and stumbling over roots and sprinkler heads, and waited for the silence that would come when they found him. “I don’t think he’s here,” said Chuck.
Of course he was there, but she needed to find him herself. It was the least she could do. She was competent enough to find a dead dog in her own backyard. In the dark, someone took her arm. “Amy, I’m so sorry,” said Syl.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Amy. “Everybody! Come down from there, you’re going to hurt yourselves. Sorry for the bum’s rush, but it’s time to go home.”
“Come on, Marvy,” said Cindy Stokes.
“Amy, listen,” said Syl.
“There’s no way we’re going to leave you alone now,” Carla said, and Amy feared this was true. She was frantic now with the need to be alone.
Edna emerged from the dark, brushing leaf debris off her jacket. “What would you like us to do?” she asked Amy.
Amy made sure she could trust her voice, and then opened her mouth to tell them to please leave, when, from far away, she heard a low unmistakable woof, and then another.
“Amy,” said Syl, “I messed up. I left the gate open earlier, when I was looking around.”
And sure enough he had, wide open, and the fact that Alphonse was still alive was all that kept her from screaming at him. Get out, you idiot, all of you, get away from me.
“We’ll help you get him,” said Chuck.
“No, you won’t.” Amy took the flashlight from him; she was herself again. “If you want to help,” she said, “you’ll leave now. I know the neighborhood; I can find him myself. I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” said Syl.
Amy was the one who owed apologies, but they’d need to come later, if at all. “I’ll see you all out,” she said.
And she did. She stood on her front porch and counted heads as they walked back uphill to their cars, Cindy berating her poor husband (“Well, that was a lot of fun!”) and not bothering to lower her voice, and counted the cars as they drove away. When the rear lights from the tenth car disappeared around the corner, she locked up front and back and set out to get Alphonse.
Over their seven years together, he’d escaped twice, both times ending up in the Hallorans’ backyard, jumping down into it from a two-foot-high rock wall and then, unable to make the climb out, standing still and barking his head off until somebody let him out. The Hallorans were old and deaf, which was a good thing given the lateness of the hour and the fact that she had to trespass on their property in order to rescue him. There he was in the moonlight, stoically waiting, neither surprised nor especially grateful to see her, but at least he shut up. She grabbed his hindquarters and boosted him up the wall, and together they walked back home. On the way she felt nothing but the chill night air, and she grasped the moment tightly, singing him the basset hound song.
She’d be all right for the night, she thought, as she deadbolted the front door. Tomorrow morning she’d scout out the backyard before letting him out. How she’d actually manage this—literally turning over every leaf on the ground—would just have to wait until then, along with trying to make sense out of the evening. Determined not to think and again court the anxiety that had assaulted her just a half hour ago, she poured herself a deep glass of wine to achieve just this end, knocking it back as she straightened up the living room chairs, and pouring out another. “Go to bed, you boob,” she told Alphonse, who kept tripping her up, sniffing out circuitous paths on the ruined carpet. Half the class must have pets at home, and now he browsed methodically through the room, each trail as packed with information as a library shelf. She should have people over more often—more often, anyway, than once every twenty years.
She’d shooed them out in such a hurry that they’d left stuff behind: three copies of the Sniper’s manuscript remained on the coffee table. There were no names on any of them, and they were hardly marked up at all. Amy sat down on the couch and gathered them up into a pile to be tossed away, and as she shuffled through them one last time she noticed, in the middle of the pile, a sheet of paper that didn’t fit—it was just slightly longer and wider than the other sheets, and whiter, too. She grasped the edge between her nails and pulled it out, that ugly drawing of Edna, naked: the original, in pen and ink, that had been photocopied and inserted into one of the student copies of her story at the end of Fourth Class. Had the Sniper seen her slip it out when Edna wasn’t looking, crumple it up, and throw it away? It was the only part of the Sniper’s oeuvre that she had left out of tonight’s discussion, so of course he’d left it for her, as a kind of reproach.
Quickly she flipped it over, but there was no blinking away the proof that the Sniper had, in fact, been in her house, which of course she knew, that was the whole idea, except that she hadn’t really faced it until now, and then, from beneath the cushion on which she sat, came the opening measures of “Memories,” from Cats, apparently played by a music box on steroids. She lifted the cushion to find a tangerine-colored cell phone which, when she flipped it open, sported a picture of Betty Boop and the dialing number “Pay Phone.” At least it wasn’t Private Caller. She put it to her ear and listened.
“Who is this?” asked Carla.
Amy stared at the phone in her hand, then held it to her ear again. She heard Carla announce, “They’re not saying.”
“Carla? What’s going on?”
“Amy? Oh my god! It was at Amy’s house! Oh, I’m so sorry!”
“What’s at my house?”
“My phone!”
Amy hung up and, without allowing a conscious thought, drained her glass. Amy had never done well with sensory overload and did not plan, at this stage of her life, to learn how. The sight of Edna degraded, the echo of that stupid song, Carla’s non sequiturs, all instantly evoked competing emotions. Dread, confusion, amusement, fatigue bobbed around her head like circus balloons. What was at her house? If I have one more glass of wine, she told herself, I won’t give a damn.
The phone went off again, only because she couldn’t figure out how to silence it. “We got dropped,” said Carla. “Listen, what happened was, I lost my phone and I figured I must have put it in the wrong bag or something, so I was calling to find out who had it, but I never stopped to think it might be you, but since it is, would it be okay if I just swung by to pick it up?” Swung by from La Jolla in the middle of the night? She should be home, or almost home, by now. “I’m not far away, it’ll only take a couple of minutes.”
“Where are you?”
“Applebees. Harry and Edna and me ended up here, because we were worried about you.”
“And people who worry about me go to Applebees?” Amy sat very still and tried to think. “Whose idea was this?” she asked.
“You mean Applebees, or calling you? Well, actually, they were both my idea, and I wasn’t really calling you, I was calling the phone.” In the background, Harry B. said, An interesting distinction.
Maybe, thought Amy, you were doing both. Maybe you knew where the phone was, because you left it here on purpose. This thought was both seductive and sickening, and all at once she wanted more than anything to let Carla in, to see her as she was, not as that annoying-but-lovable cluster of behaviors, but as the mysterious, unknowable creature she must be, because she was not a cartoon, and Amy should have known that. But she mustn’t be alone with her.
“I know what you’re thinking!” said Carla. “And I’m way ahead of you! We’ll come together, in a bunch—right, guys? So you won’t be alone. With, you know, anybody. Well, me.” She laughed, either appropriately or inappropriately.
“Put Edna on the phone.”
For the second time that evening, Edna asked, “What would you like us to do?” What a refreshing question.
“I’d like you to come back, of course.”
“We won’t even come in!” yelled Carla. “We’ll just stand on the stoop!”
Amy assured her that this wasn’t necessary. She had just opened a bottle of cabernet, and they were welcome to join her.
“Righto,” said Edna. Carla added that this was “incredibly cool.”
It was close to midnight by the time they’d settled in before the dying fire, Carla and Edna on the couch, Amy pillowed on the floor, with Alphonse. Harry B., Carla said, had to run to Kinko’s, and would be along in a minute. Amy was neither completely sober nor in the bag, and she measured her sips to maintain just this level of Dutch courage: enough to keep the jeebies at bay, not enough to make her reckless. Carla pointed out to Edna the bookshelves Amy had fixed to the wall near the ceiling. “She can’t even bear to throw out junky old paperbacks,” she told Edna. “Which was my first clue about that book-burning stunt.” She was proud to show Edna that she’d been here before, that she was familiar with the place. Her color was high, and she was perspiring, although even with the fire the house was none too warm.
Edna asked Amy how long she’d had Alphonse, and before Amy could answer, Carla said, “Eleven years.” Amy and Edna exchanged glances. Amy must have told Carla this at some point, but why would she commit such an inconsequential fact to memory? Then again, she’d done this sort of thing before.
Amy tried to steer the conversation away from herself, her house, her dog, into a rehash of the evening’s events and non-events, but Carla would not settle down. Why had Amy moved out to California, and who was her second husband, and what was she working on now?
“Nothing,” Amy finally said, in exasperation. “I haven’t written anything in years.” Carla demanded, on behalf of a heartbroken reading public, to know why. “Because I have nothing to say. When you have nothing to say, you should keep quiet.”
“Precisely,” said Edna.
“He died, didn’t he?” asked Carla. “Your first husband. That must have been so awful. And then…you never wrote again.”
“Carla, what is wrong with you?”
Carla giggled and lowered her eyes. “Oh, man,” she said, and began to fiddle with a loose thread in her red stretch pants, yanking on it until a dime-sized hole blossomed on her thigh. “Do you have any nail polish?” she asked.
The two adult women in the room now regarded Carla closely, neither of them making any attempt to hide her frank inspection. Amy tried to remember everything she knew about Carla—her childhood, her various short-lived careers, her bright, histrionic poetry—and imagine that behind all the drama and jollitude lurked the Sniper’s ruthless persona. It made no sense, unless, like Norman Bates, she somehow became the Sniper from time to time, and that was just silly—but no sillier than her present, out-of-the-blue behavior, which went far beyond irrepressible and off into the realm of full-blown mania. Amy wished she hadn’t thought of Norman Bates, because now she recollected her brief in-person encounter with Mother Massengill, at the beginning of Sixth Class. Amy had spoken to her, she was pretty sure, but had the old battle-axe answered? Still, she’d definitely moved; she wasn’t stuffed. On the other hand, Amy had only heard the woman’s voice on the phone, or yelling out the window, or from the next room. And what exactly did that mean? Amy needed to sober up fast.
“I’m sorry, guys,” said Carla, with a deep, catching sigh, like an infant who’s cried herself out. “Vino, por favor.”
If anything, wine might make her more tractable. At Edna’s suggestion, Amy brewed a pot of tea for the two of them, and handed over the rest of her bottle to Carla, who proceeded, despite the proffered goblet, to nurse at it for what seemed like a full minute, although the level of the wine didn’t go down much. After setting the bottle on the coffee table with exaggerated care, she closed her eyes and leaned back on the couch. “I messed up,” she whispered.
Amy held her breath, waiting for the rest of it. “Everyone messes up,” she said finally, exchanging a meaningful glance with Edna.
“Not like me,” Carla sang, in a child’s voice.
“Talk to us, Carla.”
“I just wanted…” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, smearing mascara, and yawned mightily. “Easy for you to say,” she said.
“What’s easy for me to say?”
“Everybody messes up. You don’t.” She opened one eye. “I know all about you,” she said. “You’re my hero.”
Everything knowable about Amy was summed up in three lines in American Composers and Writers. Her novels had been out of print for over a decade, and the last time she’d Googled herself she’d found 123 hits, from 113 used booksellers and nine amateur genealogists, plus her blog. “Carla,” Amy said. “I’ve done nothing heroic with my life.”
“I know, you don’t think it’s a big deal that you’re a writer, that you got published. But that’s just it. That’s what’s so cool about you. You don’t care about any of it.”
“I can remember a time,” said Edna, “when that description was anything but a compliment. Perhaps you should have some tea.”
“You’re not needy. You’re not the NEEDIEST HUMAN IN THE UNIVERSE.” She said this in a voice not her own.
“Carla,” said Amy, “what have you done?”
“No clue, Chief.” Carla’s eyes sprang open and she focused tightly on Amy. “You’re my only friend in the whole wide world and you can just almost not quite put up with me, plus I have to pay you. How sad is that.” Her gaze slid from Amy’s face down to her knees and then slantways all the way down to the floor, like a pinball’s lazy glide past the flippers, and then she slumped forward in a heap, a great unstrung puppet. If Amy hadn’t grabbed her, she would have ended up on the floor.
Propping Carla up on the couch necessitated embracing and rolling her dead weight backward. Her body was boneless, comically so: it needed to be balanced, delicately, section by section, and the head was particularly intractable, wanting to roll off, now to the left, now the right, as Amy grappled, her own unwieldy body off balance. Carla was as warm as risen dough and smelled of yeast and peppermint and sweat. Amy couldn’t remember the last time she had touched another human being so intimately, or for that matter at all. She braced herself for revulsion and was blindsided by tenderness. She could have had a child, she could have had just this, and there yawned before her instantly, from a dizzying height, the landscape of everything she had rejected in her lifelong flight from pain. How sad was that. Carla’s head at last came to rest straight back, facing the ceiling, her eyes rolled up beneath half-closed lids. She was out cold. Her breathing seemed very shallow, though steady. Amy brushed strands of red hair off her forehead. She didn’t want to stop touching her. “What on earth,” she finally said, “is wrong with her?”
“Grievous bodily harm,” said Edna.
Amy sat down next to Carla. “You think she must have been molested, in some way?”
“In some way, surely,” said Edna.
Amy nodded, then caught herself, disappointed in Edna for suggesting such a trite explanation, in herself for being so anxious to excuse Carla. “Well,” she said, “we’re all molested, one way or another, and we don’t all…”
“Georgia home boy,” said Edna.
Amy glanced up. Edna had pushed back the sleeve of her Pendleton jacket and was frowning at her watch. Of course—they should check Carla’s pulse, and Amy began to fumble with her wrist. “I can’t find it,” she said. “Actually, I can hardly ever find my own. You should probably—”
“GHB,” said Edna.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Also known as the ‘date rape drug,’” said Edna, still regarding her watch.
“How can we be sure? Why would she take a date rape drug?”
Edna glanced quickly up at Amy, then returned to her watch. “Three minutes even,” she said.
Amy gave up. “What are we counting?”
“The time it takes,” Edna said, “for you to realize where you are.”
“Where am I,” asked Amy.
“Alone with me,” said Edna.