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The writers gathered at Le Café Livre two weeks after their first meeting. Outside, a family of gypsies—mother, father, and three small black-haired children under the age of five—sat on a mattress on the sidewalk and held out their hands to passersby, within two feet of people sitting and eating outdoors.
Philippe gave them a few coins. He’d heard that gypsy beggars gave a portion of their take to some sort of Mafia. This family didn’t need a few coins, they needed a meal and a roof. Well, he did, too, and he didn’t have enough for both. You’re quite a Christian, he thought. I wish I could do loaves and fishes, but I haven’t learned that one yet.
Standing under the awning, the waiter smiled upon the writers congenially and cleared away debris.
“Could I see a menu, please?” Carol asked with a sweet smile.
“Bonjour, Madame!” he corrected her pointedly.
Carol didn’t understand, not being from Paris but from London by way of New York City, with time served in Los Angeles, and then she remembered. She had forgotten to say “Bonjour” first, which was the French definition of good manners.
“Bonjour,” she answered a bit sourly. My goodness! What was the fuss about bonjour? Couldn’t she get one break? This waiter and Gregoire were both on her back. Louise was recalcitrant and withdrawn, in mourning over Jeffrey, Carol knew, and rightly so, he had been good to her. How could men treat the little girls with kindness and then turn on the grown women with sarcasm? And why had she chosen that sort of bloke—again?
Once she had the menu in her hand, she lingered over it. A pavé de saumon (why did they call it a pavé, wasn’t that a cobblestone? Not too appetizing sounding, she critiqued the menu-writer) with lemon butter sauce, served with rice and ratatouille. That sounded weird—tomato sauce on the veg and lemon butter on the fish? Wasn’t she in France, where the cuisine was always exquisite? Or she could have a pavé de veau grand cru avec crème de morilles, purée. Carol decided on the salmon. Whatever strength they had to swim upstream against river currents she needed tonight.
John eyed the menu and ran his free hand over his chin. He had dined in the city’s finest restaurants and brasseries constantly in his two years in Paris and had enjoyed it. But tonight he felt homesick for the States. Americans, at least in New York, his hometown, were teeming with ideas, energy, and optimism. He found the French to be quite pessimistic. When he asked for assistance from any Parisian clerk, the first answer without fail was ce n'est pas possible.
Here in France, he’d heard, the education system was so rigid, the teachers so mean, that people emerged scared to express a single thought that the teacher might mock them for. In honor of the States, where teachers hadn’t stamped out the fertile weirdness of the population, tonight he would order a hamburger. And it wasn’t too expensive. He felt so stupid, that this had to be a consideration now.
When the waiter had taken their orders (Philippe and Anjali picking the cheapest item again, the croque monsieur, ten euros), Philippe heaved a big sigh.
“What’s wrong?” John asked. ”The sky cave in?” Of course, he wasn’t about to tell the group about his own last two weeks.
“Well, to be honest, my wife and I kicked our twenty-two-year-old alcoholic daughter out of the house a few days ago.”
Everybody in the group was silent.
“She went to live with a friend, for what that’s worth. We don’t really know where she is, or what’s happening to her.” He kept turning his knife—blade up, blade down, scoring and shredding his paper serviette.
“I’m so sorry,” Anjali said in her crisp Indian-yet-British accent.
John thought, his daughter possibly out on the street? Now there’s someone with worse problems than me. With this cataclysm in my finances, I might end up like her...will I have even a mattress like that family on the sidewalk?...and he closed the door firmly on that thought.
“Oh my God, that’s awful.” Carol pictured her little Louise wandering the streets.
“Well, at least I’m writing.” Or weeping, he thought but didn’t say.
“How can you write?” Carol said. “I’d be distraught.”
“I am distraught. I write so I won’t go crazy.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Carol said. “My parents kicked my younger brother out. It took three years, but he did straighten up.”
What could happen to Meredith in three years on the streets? Philippe thought. He made a deep crease in the napkin with the knife he had been twirling. His deepest fear was that she’d be drunk and sexually assaulted in every corner of Paris. And its suburbs.
“Wow,” John said. He thought of Emily. He missed her skeptical little presence. He had closed the door to her empty bedroom because he couldn’t bear to look in as he went down the hall. The image of Emily on the Grey Skies, sitting on the upwind side, her hair in braids but blonde wisps flying every which way, and the sun catching them on fire, came to his mind. He wanted his little girl near him, with a weight of longing that staggered him even though he was seated.
Everyone’s plat arrived. John looked at his meal, described on the menu as a “Genuine American Hamburger.” He had come to writers’ group tonight in order to distract himself from his financial and marital problems. Usually he could compartmentalize brilliantly. But today he wished he hadn’t ordered the hamburger with two slices of bacon glistening with evil on it. And a mound of pommes frites next to it.
Everybody sat and looked at their plates, not picking up their forks and knives out of respect for Philippe. He didn’t notice at first, staring at his baguette piled with dripping cheese and ham. He sighed again and looked up.
“Please, everybody, enjoy your dinner. I didn’t mean to say anything. I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”
“No, we’re glad you told us,” Carol said. She thought, the meal is quite ruined, isn’t it? But there is a bright side. I can’t wait to get home to Louise. My sleeping child’s temple will smell so good to kiss.
Anjali picked at her croque monsieur. She liked a glass of wine now and then. May I never have the problems with alcohol that Philippe’s daughter has, she breathed. She wondered if Carol had read her screenplay yet. And life at the little table went on.
John picked at his French fries but didn’t feel much like eating them or the hamburger, nor did he think he’d feel like eating them at home later.
“Would you like to take this home with you?” he asked Anjali. Paris was an expensive place to live, he knew. To give his assistant a little boost in the form of a free hamburger would help Anjali. Or, as the French would say if somebody helped them, “Tu m’as retiré une épine du pied,” or, “you’ve pulled the thorn out of my foot.” The French expression sounded so painful...
“I’m Hindu,” Anjali said, “I don’t eat beef.”
“I’m so sorry, I forgot,” John said. He hailed the waiter. “Would you please wrap this in a doggy bag?”
“Monsieur?” The waiter was puzzled.
“I want to take it home, á la maison,” John said. He mimed wrapping the hamburger in imaginary paper and tucking it into his pocket. The waiter was looking from one to the other of them desperately. John had just read an article in a free newspaper handed out in the Metro about the French slowly adopting the doggy bag. This man hadn’t read it, apparently.
“S’il vous plait, est ce que vous voulez bien m'emballer les restes pour qu’il les prenne avec lui,” Carol rattled off in her Brit-inflected French.
“Oo-là!” The waiter thought it a very strange idea, obviously.
“Moi aussi,” Philippe said.
“Me, too,” Anjali added.
“As you wish,” the waiter said in his limited English. Most of the food he had served tonight was going home with people, instead of being enjoyed in the ambience of this nice café on the edge of Le Marais. A very strange turn of events, but that was the influence of the American culture for you. The tall, debonair man had started it, and he looked and sounded very American. Pffffff! The waiter exhaled through his lips in the classic French expression of frustration and trotted off with all the plates.
“Okay, let’s get started,” John said, taking the lead since Philippe was obviously in even worse shape tonight than he was. Each person dug their work out of a pocket or handbag. Anjali handed John the copies of his masterwork she had made for him.
With their pages in front of them, they each looked at the other, all wanting to go first but not wanting to appear selfish. Then they each decided they didn’t want to go first, in case their work wasn’t good enough.
“All right, you twisted my arm, I’ll go first,” John said.
He had revised the first chapter along the lines that they had suggested two weeks before. His protagonist, Chuck, was still investigating a shady phosphate mine in the wastes of Nevada. Chuck still had plenty of machismo and swagger, and he still relished sinking his fist into the gut of a bad guy. But the bad guy now had a hobby—haute cuisine. When he exhaled in a woosh of breath, with Chuck’s fist lodged deep in his diaphragm, Chuck smelled garlic. The fact that he could identify it as such rather pleased Chuck, who walked away from the fistfight—leaving the bad guy rolling his corpulent body on the ground—to find his dinner.
“This is better,” said Philippe. He hated it. He couldn’t think of a thing to say in its favor.
“Sir, your protagonist could probably use a hobby, too, to make him a more rounded character,” Anjali said.
“Lacemaking?” said John, who had trouble accepting criticism, especially from his own assistant, all of twenty-two years old.
“Men like to needlepoint,” said Carol, “I know several—one or two—who do.” She couldn’t resist taking just a tiny dig.
John didn’t notice, but Philippe did. “I think your protagonist needs more depth,” Philippe said. “Something he really wants, something he needs on a gut—” maybe that was an unfortunate choice of words— “level.”
“Okay, got it,” John said and gathered his chapter back from the group. Geesh! He’d thought they’d love it.
“I worked on my screenplay,” said Anjali, who began handing out copies. It was scary, and also thrilling, to show the group her work. How much would their critique hurt? They chose roles and read out loud, dramatizing with relish. When her ten pages of script were done, there was a pause.
The waiter stepped back to their table with four bundles wrapped in previously used plastic food shopping bags. He distributed them carefully. Anjali wanted to ask for one more plastic bag, to make sure cheesy grease wouldn’t leak onto things in her handbag, but she looked at the waiter’s face and thought it wouldn’t work. It just wasn’t done in Paris.
Nobody wanted coffee, so they got on with it.
“This is coming along nicely,” Philippe said. He thought the ideas about God the characters had discussed briefly were unorthodox, which meant misleading. A shame. But he was too exhausted to think about it much more.
“I really enjoyed your script,” Carol said briskly, and Anjali’s face brightened. “But I think you need to differentiate each character’s voice more. The actors will do a lot with that, but to get your screenplay sold, before the actors get their hands on the script, the characters have to sound different from each other on the page.”
That phrase, “on the page,” and the condescending way Carol said it, annoyed Anjali no end, but she nodded and took notes, eyes down. Carol was so preachy. But knowledgeable.
“And this is not a novel. You can’t go on and on when you write movie dialog—or any dialog. Each character’s bit should be like haiku—or shorter. That’s why I write haiku, to practice getting the essence of things into just a few words. Watch Kandahar, a world-famous film. Everything’s conveyed by the pictures and the expressions on people’s faces. There’s hardly any words.”
Anjali felt there was no hope for her future in moviemaking at this point. Carol was a professional, and she was spotting all sorts of weaknesses in her writing. And being so annoying while she was at it.
John tapped the script in front of him. “This is quite good, Anjali. I’m interested in what will happen to these characters. You had me gasping with that twist you put in.”
Anjali was not sure that John was qualified to say what was good or bad writing, but then again, he was a human being, and he was interested in her characters, and he had gasped. That was something to cling to.
She’d write John’s reaction down and tape it to her closet door. Any encouragement at all was like rain falling on the desert and should be stored up for the long droughts.
She gathered up her papers, and Philippe handed out his.
When everyone was ready—John had his Mont Blanc pen in hand again, Philippe noticed with covetousness, because he loved good pens, and a Mont Blanc was 900 times more expensive than his current tool, a fine-point rollerball—Philippe began to read his short story aloud, rather slowly because he was exhausted with grief.
She had been a great student, a classical pianist who could make her family’s grand piano shake when she made music. She was tri-lingual: English, French, and German.
And she loved a glass of wine. Or two and a half, these days going on three, more like four.
“I’ll put the knife down,” she said to Jim, “when you leave.”
“Put it down, sweetie, I won’t hurt you.”
Tamara took a step toward him and waved the knife.
“Get out,” she said softly.
At the tone of her voice, the hairs pricked on Jim’s neck.
“Okay, okay. I’m backing up, see? Just be careful with that knife.”
He kept his eyes on her while he reached behind him for the knob of the door, his leather jacket creaking.
“It’s to your left,” she said. “I mean, to my left, your right since you’re facing away from the door.”
Carol put a big red circle around that sentence. “Comedy or tragedy?” she wrote in the margin.
“Thank you,” Jim said. “Bye, babe, call me anytime,” and he left.
Tamara stared in horror at the shiny knife in her hand, just as Macbeth had gazed at the bloody knives in his. She missed Jeffrey’s haphazard company already. Could she have physically hurt him? No, she hoped not. But what if? She needed a drink. And to make love. The tune to Dave Western’s song, “Let’s Get Drunk and Screw,” went through her head. She poured another glass of wine. Her cell service had been discontinued a month ago, so she couldn’t call anyone in her cast of characters to keep her company. Everything in her life was awry, and she felt so alone, as if the walls were sucking the life out of her. This little bit of wine might help.
Stumbling a bit, she walked to her bedroom. Things weren’t going well, she thought. The lights would be turned out in a week if she didn’t come up with some money. She’d check and see if she had candles around after this drink. Rent was due in two weeks, and she had been fired last week. She thought of who could help her, and her mother’s face, and then her father’s, came to her. No, she wouldn’t give those self-righteous prigs the satisfaction.
She sat on her bed and smoked and drank. She passed out later, a cigarette smoldering in the filthy ashtray beside her. Its filter burned and stank. Finally the fire went out.
The group was silent for a moment, thinking. John capped his formidable pen. Carol poured water from the carafe.
“That’s as far as I got.” Philippe coughed. He, at least, had taken risks and been honest in his writing. Of course church ladies would be scandalized by what he’d written. Sorry, dears, he thought. This is the way rowdy drunk people talk.
“You’re so brave to write about this while you’re going through it,” Carol said. She hated stories about alcoholics.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Philippe replied. “I’m consumed with worry about her. I know I’m not supposed to, but I just can’t help it. I feel that God has let me down terribly. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this when I can’t even admit that to my wife.”
“What was it you said you did for a living?” asked John. “I don’t think I heard you say.”
“I’m a pastor. Of a start-up church.”
The table was silent.
“Let’s get back to the text.” Carol jerked her papers, shoving one page quickly under all the others. She was thinking of the guy she had sex with while she was with Jeffrey.
“Number one,” she said. “‘I’ll put down the knife when you leave’ should be your first line, not that dead information about playing piano.” Duh, she thought. It was so obvious. “Stupid to bury a great line like that.
“And you have a comic line in the middle of this tragic story—I mean, tragic so far.”
“Oh? I didn’t notice,” Philippe said, smarting at the word “stupid.” Was he going to have to “say something” to Carol? He fervently hoped not.
“It happens in the doorknob scene,” Carol said. “‘Your right and my left, no, your left and my right.’ A bit of vaudeville, like ‘Who’s on first?’ You might want to think about that.”
Philippe asked her what she least wanted to be asked.
“What do you suggest?”
Carol wasn’t sure what to say. Constructive critiquing was difficult.
Anjali piped in.
“It gives comic relief. Isn’t that important in a tragic story? Shakespeare did it.”
“Well, we aren’t Shakespeare, are we,” Carol said. She had read the first half of the screenplay Anjali had emailed to her. It was quite good, better than she had done at Anjali’s age, she suspected.
“I kind of liked it,” John said.
You would, Carol thought.
“Isn’t it all about artistic freedom?” Philippe asked. “We can write from the heart. If it’s funny and then tragic, that’s okay, isn’t it?”
“But as a Christian, don’t you have lots of taboos?” John asked. He couldn’t wait to get his own first chapter fixed, and some more real-life financial decisions made, so he could focus on the sex scene he envisioned for Chapter Two. Wouldn’t it be great if this book sold like hotcakes! Come on, John, don’t kid yourself. That’s a pipedream. “You are a Christian priest, am I right? Or some other religion?”
“I follow Jesus,” Philippe replied. “Not perfectly.”
“But you have a daughter—you’re married?”
“Oh! I’m a Protestant pastor,” Philippe said. Catholic, Protestant. Thank God we aren’t killing each other over those differences any more. “I admit, I do have an aversion to offending God with what I write. But I’m not convinced that that limits me as an artist. Jane Austen was terrified of offending God, and look at the stories she wrote. They’ll live long after the work of people who don’t care disappears.”
“Maybe,” Carol said. She didn’t at all care.
“I also have a deathly fear of offending church ladies.” Philippe laughed.
“How can you write a sex scene, then?” John asked. “Especially between unmarried people?” His protagonist was going to meet a waitress in a diner, where he’d eat after knocking the air out of the bad guy with garlic breath. They’d be exchanging intimacies in bed together within an hour. Wasn’t that real life?
“I don’t believe in throwing in a sex scene for the sake of titillation.” Philippe poured himself another glass of water from la carafe d’eau. “I don’t believe in being explicit. That’s not art. When we write or paint or make movies, I believe we need to ask, ‘What if a child found this? What example am I setting?’”
“Think of the classic movies,” Anjali said, “that fade to white after the man and woman kiss.” She had been a self-taught student of the classics, having so far watched eighty-six of the American Film Institute’s “Best 100 American Films.” She had found the list online while in Mumbai.
“I truly think that artful suggestion is more powerful,” Philippe said. He wished with all his heart that American culture wasn’t so saturated with explicitly violent and sexual films, books, TV shows, and video games. They went to every corner of the globe. He especially hated the ones that melded violence and sex. It made him fear for his someday granddaughters. And for Meredith.
“That’s not in style today,” Carol said. “You might have trouble finding a publisher.”
“I know,” Philippe said. He hated to think about that. Once he was invested in something, he was wired to seek “success.” It felt to him that writing stories but never getting them chosen by a publisher and printed between the covers of a book would be a black failure. But sometimes—not so much lately—he was hopeful. At least he wasn’t trying to get poetry published. That was truly impossible.
“I read an interview with a writer,” he said, “who believed that if you tell an excellent story, it will find its way to the right audience.”
“That’s a bit New Age, isn’t it?” Carol said with a sly smile.
Philippe laughed. “You may be right.”
Carol began handing out pages from a screenplay she was working on for Gregoire. The group chose parts and read it out loud.
“Critiques?” Philippe said, falling again into his leadership role.
John went first. Even though he faced personal calamities, he was pleased to see that he still had the ability to see holes in scripts. “I’m interested in all these characters. But something’s missing. You need a catalyst event to start your character on her journey.”
Carol answered. “I thought I did that for the girl when the telephone rang and her mother told her that her sister had been in an accident.”
“I think you need to give the young girl more time to react,” John said. “Maybe she could race around her room, distraught, trying to dress to go to the hospital but getting her blouse on backwards”—Philippe flinched, thinking of Meredith—“or maybe she could get all wound up and smash something. Maybe her wall TV.”
As he said that, John relived smashing Cassandra’s Baccarat lamp on his parquet floor.
Anjali said, “I like the man she’s dating, but I’d like to see him squirm a little under life’s tough hand. I think something bad has to happen to him. Maybe he gets fired and loses his apartment.” Anjali looked sideways at John, who was listening intently. She didn’t sense that she would be fired anytime soon, in spite of the downturn in her boss’s fortunes. “Maybe his father, that he’s close to, gets sick.”
Carol busily wrote down all the ideas.
“Thanks, everyone,” she said. “I’m sorry, I have to run, the babysitter’s probably getting anxious for me to arrive.” Actually, Carol thought, I’m anxious to see what the new babysitter’s up to.
“Shall we do a writing exercise?” Philippe asked.
“I love those!” Anjali wiggled in her wicker café chair. “It’s great seeing how differently everybody thinks. I vote yes.”
“I can’t resist,” Carol said.
“Okay, I have a first line for you,” Philippe continued. “Three lines, actually. Ready?”
People flipped their papers over and scribbled a bit to warm up their pens. John looked at his Mont Blanc and thought he’d better not lose it because replacing it was out of his league now.
“Here it is—from Rilke’s Book of Hours:
“I circle about God, sweep far and high
on through milleniums.
Am I a bird that skims the clouds along,
or am I a wild storm, or a great song?
Anjali and Philippe thought for a few minutes, while John and Carol scratched away furiously. After ten minutes, Philippe interrupted.
“It’s getting late. We can finish at home. But who would like to read what they’ve got?”
“I’ll go,” said John. He flicked his paper. He was proud of this one.
“I circled you like a falcon
a storm
a great song. Then you disappeared
in morning mist.
I was left
empty
a black man with no center.”
“That’s racist,” said Carol.
John’s head whipped up, and he stared at her.
“Well, look at it. Black men don’t have a center?”
“The poem’s personal, about me, not black men.”
“The way it’s written sounds racist,” Carol insisted. She just couldn’t back off. “And ‘morning mist’ is a cliché.”
John wondered how he’d get revenge on her.
Philippe wondered if he was going to have to say something to Carol about her critique style. People needed to feel safe to speak the truth about themselves. The stakes were high in writers’ groups. Only the truth can set people free.
“Folks, let’s speak in ‘I’ statements,” he said.
“I’ll go,” said Carol tartly, thinking that was a fine “I” statement, “and then I literally have to go. I’d love to hear everybody’s work, but...” She cleared her throat.
“I circle like a falcon,
hunt the wildest storm,
then dive into the tumult.
“You wouldn’t believe how many scratch-outs I have for those three lines, she said.” Laughing, she held up her paper: four versions, words blacked out, words inserted and crossed out again.
John unfortunately didn’t see an opportunity for a snide comment.
“Well, changed my mind,” Carol said, “I have to stay and see what Philippe and Anjali wrote.”
Anjali said she’d read. “It’s not very good, somehow I know it, but it has a great last line—just kidding:
“A young man
smiling
offers a type of happiness.
I circle him like a falcon, a storm.
“We all chose ‘falcon’ instead of ‘bird.’ Interesting,” Anjali said. “I wrote this poem from the bottom up.” Funny how creativity works, she thought.
“It’s not very good,” Carol said.
The table was silent.
“Well, I think it’s dumb,” she continued. “Rilke gave us great words to start with, and yours goes right down the old trap, “I wish I could get married.’” She said it in a whiney voice.
Anjali felt as though she’d been chopped into quarters, and each quarter sent to the far ends of India. Wow, that hurt.
Philippe thought, I can’t speak to Carol in front of the group. But looks like it’s got to be done. Definitely don’t feel up to it tonight.
Anjali thought, when is Carol, the writing expert, going to read my screenplay? Should I remind her? How many pieces will she chop me into if I do?
Philippe sat forward to bring the evening to a close. “I’m last,” he said. “Here goes:
I circle her like a falcon
crying great tears.
When she gives the signal
I’ll return
in spite of the storm
to rest on her gloved hand.”
He was suddenly choked up, wishing Meredith would return sane and sober. He glanced up, ashamed of the tears in his eyes, especially in front of John.
“It’s okay,” John muttered, sitting next to him.
Meredith is so not okay, Philippe thought, but he appreciated John’s attempt to comfort him.
“Well, until next time,” Philippe said, his voice under a better control.
Everyone stood and gathered their papers.
“I hope we do that writing prompt thing again,” Anjali said.
