Here’s what we’re gonna do,” said Carla.

It was first thing in the morning, the morning after the blossoming horror, and Amy, having just managed to fall asleep at daybreak, had stumbled over Alphonse to get to the telephone. “What?” She was on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor, cradling the cordless receiver with her shoulder, while Alphonse regarded her with doleful mistrust. “Carla? What time is it?”

“It’s after nine,” said Carla, as though this excused her. “And thanks so much for taking that thing off my hands. I got my first good night’s sleep in four days.”

“Carla? Did you put a houseplant on my car?”

“Of course not. You hate plants. Why, did somebody give you—”

“How do you know I hate plants?”

“You say so all the time.”

Amy couldn’t recall saying it once, not in class. Surely she didn’t go on and on about her pet peeves to captive strangers. Did she? And why would Carla remember something this boring? Alphonse followed Amy into the kitchen, to remind her of his morning brunch. She always had to toss a slice of whole-wheat bread into the backyard to get him out of the house.

“Plants aren’t like us,” Carla said.

“Yeah. Yes, that’s it exactly.” Amy didn’t know anyone else thought this.

“I’m just quoting you.”

Lord, had the woman been taking down every foolish thing Amy said? Amy closed her burning eyes, propped herself against the refrigerator, and waited for the coffeemaker to cycle through. She hadn’t seriously thought Carla had given her the plant, but it really would have been nice if she had. Amy was not at the moment worried about the cactus, or even the poisonous letter. It was morning, and nothing frightened Amy in the morning, because her will to live never kicked in until after lunch. While Carla chattered on about her latest story (“I’ll never show it to you even, it’s too pathetic, but here’s the first paragraph…”), Amy conceived, plotted out, and discarded a story idea of her own, in which a homicidal maniac chainsaws into the bedroom of a woman at six in the morning and fails to terrorize her. The story would have been titled “Kill Me Now.” “Carla,” Amy said.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you calling me?”

“Sorry about that, Chief. You know how I get carried away. Well, I was thinking about our next move.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You know. How should we go about it?”

“About what?”

“Finding out who wrote that letter.”

Amy was stunned. She had spent a rotten night obsessing about it, the letter and the plant both, back and forth, trying to understand the connection between them, if in fact there was one, rationalizing the outlandishly unnerving effect the blooming flower had had upon her. It was almost five in the morning before it occurred to her that the plant had most likely been a gift, not a threat; that it was probably expensive; and that in any event the giver, however green-thumbed, couldn’t have caused the awful thing to go off in her car when it did. And she hadn’t been able to deal with the letter at all.

“Carla,” she said, “I’m not sure I want to know who wrote that thing.”

Carla didn’t say anything.

“Think about it,” said Amy. “What would you do if you did find out? Challenge the jerk to pistols at dawn? T.P. his car?”

When Carla spoke her voice was small. “I guess I thought you’d want to do something.”

Amy sighed. “I’ll call you back. Let me wake up.”

 

It took Amy the better part of the morning to figure out why she didn’t want to deal with the letter. At first she thought her reasons were practical, however weasely. If she knew who it was she’d have to act, and what social horrors would that entail? Asking the culprit to leave class? Amy’s position with the university extension people was tenuous enough: her classes barely filled and didn’t make them much money, and they would probably welcome an excuse not to use her again. All the ejected student would have to do is complain. Student complaints were customer complaints, and the customer was always right.

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was.

Carla can just wait, Amy thought, and spent midday slogging through scut work. Amy derived most of her income from online editing, mostly for a huge reference book company that specialized in annually collecting and printing curricula vitarum of the famous, quasi-famous, marginally famous, and profoundly obscure. They called it “sketch-writing,” as though what she composed, at a dollar a sketch, were brief lives, natty little Hirschfeldian cameos, whereas all she did, hundreds of times a day, was plug information into data fields, fascinating details like d.o.b., year of m., first name(s) of c., prin. works, d.o.d.

The nadir of her editing career had come in the previous year, when she had accidentally been assigned to update her own sketch. The people she worked for had no idea she was in their books, which was just fine with Amy.

GALLUP, Amy. B. Augusta, ME, June 30, 1948. BA in Philosophy Colby Coll., Waterville, ME, 1969. M. Max Winston, 1972 (dec. 1988); m. Robert Johanssen, 1989 (div. 1992). Author books, including Monstrous Women, 1971, Everything Handsome, 1975, The Ambassador of Loss, 1978, A Fiercer Hell, 1981.

In the year 2006 there had been nothing to update. Why they continued to include her in American Writers and Composers was a mystery, but some day she would open a brand-new edition and find herself gone, which would be even more depressing than confronting this sorry list of accomplishments.

Amy churned out one hundred sketches in two hours, a personal best, but when she had wrapped up all the batches and switched off the computer she still had no idea what to tell Carla, or what do about her class. She felt paralyzed. It was late afternoon and she hadn’t even cleansed her car of that horrible vegetable.

She had to back out of the carport to extract the plant from the front seat. She had expected that it would be smaller than she had remembered, but it wasn’t, except that the flower had wilted into a great sullen pout. She placed the plant in the grass beside her front steps and stared at it in the deep yellow afternoon light. What were the odds that the same person who wrote to Carla gave her this gift? If you looked at it rationally, what did they have in common, besides anonymity? Amy needed a second opinion. Against almost two decades of enforced solitude and every instinct she had, she called Carla back and invited her up north for a drink.

 

By the time Carla came to the front door, the sun was down and Amy was halfway through the bottle of red she had uncorked for the occasion. And it was quite an occasion: the first time in twelve years that Amy would admit someone into her home besides a furniture mover, plumber, or electrician. Carla pulled up in a silver Infiniti, no doubt her mother’s car, and waved at Amy before unbuckling her seat belt and heaving herself out on the pavement. “This is just so cool,” she said, grinning, and Amy agreed that yes, it sure was.

Carla exclaimed over the number and breadth of Amy’s books, the ingenious homemade wall shelf fixed seven feet off the floor, separated from the ceiling by the length of a trade paperback’s spine, which snaked through all five rooms of Amy’s house. “I couldn’t bear to throw away all my paperbacks,” Amy said. “They go back to my youth, childhood even, but I had to get them out of the way. So there they are, out of reach, covered with dust, in alphabetical order.”

She had been proud of the shelves when she put them up, back in the early nineties. The shelves were rickety, and made of unfinished wood, the whole effect pleasantly improvisational, something you might find in a grad student’s digs. Her second marriage had not yet ended, and she was, she allowed herself to imagine, working on her fifth novel, as yet untitled. This tiny house, these bookshelves, this not so hot marriage, it was all stopgap, and some day soon she would move back to New England, to a big house in the Berkshires, or maybe the Kennebec Valley, maybe teach in Orono. Anything was possible, and the future lay ahead.

“Seriously,” Carla was saying, “have you read all of these books?”

“All the paperbacks. About half the hard stuff. For instance, I have yet to read Proust, but I have of course read The Adventurers.”

Carla nodded. “Joseph Conrad, right?”

“Harold Robbins. See?” Amy pointed directly above Carla’s head, where the Rs were. “I have also read The Carpetbaggers and Where Love Has Gone, and I cannot bear to part with any of them.”

“Wow. They must be really good.”

“Why do you want to write?”

Carla put down her wine. “I don’t know.”

“That’s a fine answer. Have you noticed that half my students just ‘have’ to write, that they’re just ‘bursting’ with stories? It drives me insane.”

“Remember that Gretchen person, the girl from Atlanta, who just couldn’t sleep at night unless she had committed to paper the events of her working day?”

“Was that creepy or what?”

Carla gasped and laughed. “You told her it was a wonderful habit.”

“Well, what was I supposed to say? ‘Are you nuts?’ ‘Get a life’?”

Carla smiled and stared into her wine. Today she was wearing jeans and an oversized white shirt and no makeup, and her bright red hair was pulled back with a denim scrunchie. For the first time Amy could see the pretty young woman in Carla’s plump unlined face. “I don’t know what to do besides write,” Carla finally said. “I tried everything else. Real estate. Art galleries. Venture capitalism. Acting.”

“No kidding. Were you in anything?”

“Oh, sure. After my father ran off with that starlet—I told you about that, right?—Mom got a huge pile of money in the settlement, plus she had way too much time on her hands, and she thought, why not put the kid to work?”

“That’s what we call a non sequitur,” Amy said. “If she had so much money, why not spend it on you?”

“Oh, she did. Acting classes, agents, head shots. I did a ton of commercials in 1983, when I was cute. Mostly local stuff. I was Judy Garland in the Pulgas Carwash commercials, and the annoying kid running through Corky Bean’s used car lot, and actually I was pretty effective as a leukemia victim in some hospital spots.”

“Jesus.”

“And I was an extra in one national ad, which ran for years. I was the white kid in the back row of the Cheezy Chews spot, the musical extravaganza on the space ship.”

“Did you like doing this stuff?”

Carla laughed. “You can’t imagine how much I hated it. But I couldn’t reason with my mother. She kept sending me out, and they kept using me, and in the end I had to make myself unemployable. Do you know how much I had to eat to get this fat?”

This was interesting, even intriguing, but it didn’t explain why she wanted to be a writer.

“You really want the truth?” asked Carla. “I never wrote a line before I took that first class with you.”

“But you said…you were working on a novel, I remember distinctly, you were five hundred pages into your second novel. You brought it with you in a canvas bag, and you took it out and brandished it. It was one of the scariest things I ever saw.” The longest of Amy’s novels had barely broken two hundred pages.

“I was brandishing my crazy Aunt Mae’s failed PhD thesis on ‘Jeane Dixon, Sooth or Truth.’”

“But then why—”

“Because you knocked me out. I’d taken a million of these courses, sculpting, computer programming, Sanskrit, and you were the only one that didn’t stand up there and bore me to death or lie to me or insult my intelligence.”

Amy brushed the compliment aside and focused on Carla herself, who was at this moment a lovely reminder of why Amy had wanted to write in the first place, and why she had kept at it, more or less, as long as she had. Carla was a shining example of what Amy had called, in her pretentious twenties, the “mystery of personality.” Only in art were there clichés; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with a surprise inside. Amy’s great ambition had once been to make a three-dimensional person out of nothing but her own imagination, like Athena from the forehead of her own father. That no writer had ever managed this was in the beginning no deterrent and in the end no consolation. And in the years after she stopped pretending to write, she had begun, she now realized, to deal with actual people as though they were puny fictional replicas, with hot and cold buttons, favorite books, overused sayings, and typical outfits.

“Let’s think about this,” she said, emptying the bottle into Carla’s glass. “What sort of person writes a letter like that?”

“A scumbag.”

“No. Think like a writer, Carla. Think from the writer’s point of view.”

“The poison pen letter writer?”

“Yes.”

Carla looked thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she said, “if I want to go there.”

“Then why do you want to know who it is?”

Carla looked at her, confused, as thought she couldn’t see what one had to do with the other. Amy couldn’t either, really.

“Look,” said Amy, “they’re paying me to take care of you, all of you, to make sure that you get the appropriate experience out of this class, which certainly doesn’t include being stalked by post, and you’re absolutely right, it’s my job to take care of this. If you want me to stand up next Wednesday and demand to know who wrote the thing, I’ll do it. As it stands, I have to ask them about the plant, anyway. I figure, if no one admits to leaving it on my car, then it’s probably the same person who sent your letter. Although I can’t understand the connection. The plant is a nice thing. Isn’t it? The giver couldn’t have known I was going to have a phobic reaction.”

“You did?”

Amy had shown the cereus to Carla, without elaborating on it. “What was your idea, anyway?” Amy asked. “When you called me up this morning, I mean. You said you had a plan.”

“It was stupid. I was just thinking that if we broke it down, the poem, and paid minute attention to phrases, punctuation, word choice, and all that…that by the end of the semester we’d know who it probably was.”

“That’s not stupid at all.”

“I mean, I already ruled out Marvy. He doesn’t have the mind for a line like, you know, bootlicker, toady, whatever.” Carla’s gaze fell when she said this, and she looked away from Amy. “And he can’t spell, even with spell-check. Plus he’s just too much of a doofus.”

Amy agreed with her about the wit but argued anyway. Somewhere in the universe, she said, there’s a doofus with an intuitive Machiavellian streak, and why the hell not?

“If you say so,” said Carla, “but actually I’ve already picked out my candidate. I really hope it’s—”

“Dr. Richard—”

“Surtees!” they both sang at once, laughing. “I think you’re wrong, though,” said Amy.

“You think it’s a woman, don’t you?”

“I’d bet on it.”

Amy had found the language feminine, and the lancing nastiness, too. It was a relief to hear the same argument from Carla. This was, Amy reflected, the second opinion she had really been searching for. It had not been a mistake to invite Carla here. Amy uncorked a second bottle, of older and tastier wine, and they debated whether it was Edna, Ginger, Dot, or the redoubtable Tiffany, and in no time they were just gossiping about the writing group, sniping, in a not too nasty way, at the various personalities and nonpersonalities (“What’s the deal with Pete Purvis, Blob of Mystery?” said Carla) in it, which was terribly unprofessional of Amy, but fun.

Carla talked some more about her childhood and told hilarious stories about an art gallery she had run in La Jolla “for about eight minutes.” Amy talked about her books, not the ones she had written but the ones she loved, and she almost talked about herself but pulled back at the last minute. She was amazed that she retained still the impulse to do this. Especially with Carla. Or, why not with Carla, Carla was all right, but no.

In the end she filled Carla up with black coffee and packed her off home with the night-blooming cereus, which Carla had volunteered to take in exchange for the letter. “Hey,” Carla shouted out her car window as she backed down the driveway. Amy made a shushing gesture from the front steps; it was almost midnight. “I forgot,” Carla stage-whispered. “Wait’ll you read Edna’s story. It’s a knockout.”

Well then, Amy thought, let’s hope the creep isn’t our Edna.

She let in Alphonse and rinsed out the wineglasses, pausing to notice how odd it was to see two of them in the sink, but it was all right. She had actually enjoyed the evening. Of course, she was half in the bag, and she’d have to rethink the whole thing tomorrow, but still. Anyway she’d sleep tonight.

And she would have, if she hadn’t remembered, just as she was drifting off, the opposite-sex p.o.v. exercise she’d given them. The only one who tried it was Chuck, and he’d been good at it, feminine language and all. Amy remembered being disappointed that no one else had had a go. Well, be careful what you wish for, she thought, whatever the hell that means, and in a short while she padded out to her computer and fired it up. If she wasn’t going to sleep, she could earn. First, she checked Go Away.

Over the years she’d come up with more blog ideas—lists of bad novels and bad poems, unfortunate sentences from her own published novels, particularly idiotic newspaper clichés, ugly flowers, ant species, old lovers. She’d pasted in her own failed stories, annotating them sentence by sentence. She’d made a list of those story ideas in her last notebook, including the ones she still couldn’t decipher, like “wommitty—catastrophic misunderstanding—sloms.” She enjoyed these entries for a while, but they didn’t scare up any response from the kibbitzers, and they filled up quickly anyway. The only open-ended lists were the original three.

Stephen Meyer, Tom Hartley, Kristin Nielsen, Carl Hammond, Marvin Gardens, Casper M. Toast, Absalom E. Sandwich, Bayer Bottomley, and Hymen Payne had offered additions to Novel Hybrids, including Hey Jude the Obscure, Lord of the Rings of the Nibelung, and The Picture of Dorian Gray’s Anatomy. And for the first time, there was a dig, from someone calling himself Herman U. Ticks, advising her to “grow up.” She almost deleted the note, but that would be censorship, and also be too close to a riposte, and ripostes were a form of engagement. Instead she invented three hybrids on the spot:

The Bell Jarhead

We are at war with terrorism, racism, and clinically depressed adolescents.

Gone With the Windows for Dummies

Starting the Civil War; Customizing Your Decimated Plantation; That Scary General Sherman.

Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot the Piano Player

A dimwitted cop meets a timid musician with a mysterious past, and together they push Estelle Getty out a window.

She did too have a life, unlike the ultravigorous H. U. Ticks, beavering away at his Nobel Prize–nominated formula for extracting AIDS vaccine and alternative fuel out of his own ass. She had a Life of the Mind.