After the Workshop (15 page)

“No, sir,” the man at the front desk said. “She has not checked back in.” He studied my book a bit longer and then said, “I’ve heard of that book.”

“
The Outhouse?
” I asked, showing him the front cover.

“Yeah,” he said. “Isn’t it about a brother and sister, uh, doing it?”

I nodded. That was, more or less, the gist of it.

“Sick,” he said.

“And the book’s not that good, either,” I said. “Or so I’ve been told.”

Behind me, I heard, “There you are, you s.o.b.!” It was Vince Belecheck. He draped his heavy arm aggressively over my shoulder. “I think you have something that belongs to my friend,” he said.

I turned around, and there stood Tate, master of the coded prose, glaring at me with his spider-veined eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, slipping the messenger bag off my shoulder. “I had to be somewhere, and I didn’t want to leave it on the floor of the Foxhead. I was just dropping it off for you here, in fact. Where it would be safe.” I returned the bag to Tate, who shook it a few times, as if determining its weight.

Vince leaned into me. He said, “You should have waited for us.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I couldn’t. I had to go.”

Tate opened the bag, casually checking the contents. He looked satisfied and was about to close it when he started feeling around in a kind of panic, unzipping the inside pocket where he’d been keeping his notes about me.

“Everything there?” Vince asked, squeezing me even tighter. “Missing anything?”

Tate looked up at me. His face was flushed. He knew that I knew what he had written about me. He also knew that I knew that he had been contemplating lifting my life for a book. But Tate knew, too, that he couldn’t say anything. This was between him and me now.

He looked over at Vince and said, “Everything’s here.”

“Good!” Vince said, letting me go. “Tate here needs to check into the hotel. Don’t you, Tate?” To me, he said, “I think one night at Chez Belecheck was all he could handle. Yo, Tate,” he yelled. “Make sure you get two beds. Just in case we, you know, bag some more lonely poets tonight.”

The entire hotel staff behind the counter looked up.

Vince noticed them but didn’t care. He said, “I don’t want to belabor my point about these poet chicks, but I’m telling you, Jack, you should carve out some time to memorize a few Seamus Heaney poems—they eat that Irish shit up—or maybe some, what’s his name . . . oh, you know . . . his name sounds like ‘cole slaw’?”

A woman behind the counter said, “Czeslaw Milosz.” According to the tag pinned to her black jacket, her name was Rhonda.

Vince smiled at her. “Yeah, that’s the guy. Hey, are you a poet?” he asked.

Rhonda nodded. I could see that she wanted to gouge his eyes out, but Vince seemed unable to read her.

“Let me guess,” Vince said. “You’re a big Heaney fan, aren’t you? What about Plath and Sexton? Do you like them?”

“Actually,” Rhonda said, “I prefer Adrienne Rich.”

“Who?” Vince asked.

“And Lucille Clifton,” Rhonda added.

Vince shrugged. “Never heard of them. Me? I write fiction. So does
this
fella.” He pointed at Tate, then leaned over and cracked him on the back, causing Tate’s signature on the check-in form to leave the page. “Maybe you’ve heard of our books,” Vince said. “My most recent one is—”

“I don’t care,” Rhonda said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I’m not interested.”

“Oh. I see,” Vince said. To the person helping Tate, Vince said, “Do you have a business card for the manager?”

“Just drop it,” I said quietly.

“Drop it?” Vince yelled. “
Drop it?
”

“Let it go,” I said.

Vince turned sharply toward me, his nose almost touching my nose, and said, “Stay out of this. This doesn’t concern you.”

“Fine,” I muttered.

Tate wheeled around and said, “He’s right, Vince. Just let it go.”

Vince took a deep breath through his nose, clearing his congestion, and then wagged his head, flicking his eyes from me to Tate and then back to me. He put up both hands, as if at gunpoint, and started walking backward. “All right,” he said. To Tate, he said, “See you tonight? At the reading? If you still want me to come?”

“Of course I want you there,” Tate said.

After Vince had gone, I turned to leave, but Tate stopped me.

“We need to talk,” he said.

I looked down at his messenger bag, now safely strapped over his shoulder. “Maybe later,” I said. “I’ve got a few more pressing things right now.”

Outside, I walked past Vince. He was smoking a cigarette at the curb, where guests usually unloaded their cars, but no one was parked there. By the time I reached the parking structure, Vince began calling my name. “Yo, Jack,” he yelled. “Yo, Sheahan!” But I marched on. When I rounded the corner, I slipped on a patch of hard-packed snow and almost fell. Holding my arms out, as though walking across a tight-rope, I regained my balance. The entire walk back to my apartment was treacherous, and by the time I reached my front steps, I was relieved that I hadn’t cracked open my skull or slid in front of a car that wouldn’t have been able to stop before running me over.

I walked up the steps softly in case M. Cat had returned home, which, by now, he must surely have done. I unlocked my door and opened it slowly. Even so, the door creaked on its hinges, and I heard, at the first squeak, someone inside my apartment moan. It was S. S., sound asleep on my couch. When I shut the door and locked it, S. S. turned over onto his side, his arm with the bandaged hand dangling off the sofa. On the coffee table lay my spare key, which I had given to M. Cat years
ago in the event I ever locked myself out. I wasn’t sure what disturbed me more—that S. S. had invited himself back inside my apartment while I was away, or that M. Cat had freely given up the key to the first person who’d asked him.

I walked to my bedroom, shut all the mini-blinds, and crawled into bed, even though the day was still young and Vanessa Roberts, whose book I now owned in duplicate, remained missing.

—T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

T
HE FIRST TIME S. S. Pitzer came to town, Gordon Grimes was still alive and I was still engaged to Alice. By then, though, I wasn’t seeing as much of Grimes as I used to, and I had quit playing poker with him altogether.

During my first year in the Workshop, a few of us would straggle from the Foxhead to Gordon’s house, while his wife and child slept (or tried to sleep) upstairs. We crept into the house like burglars, keeping our voices to whispers and turning on only the necessary lights, but after his wife started to complain about these late-night intrusions, we moved the games from one student’s apartment to another, eventually landing at my place since I owned a kitchen table large enough to accommodate all the willing participants. The table had belonged to my parents, but it had been given to me after my mother died and my father let the bank repossess the house. It was a long, solid table from the mid-1970s with six gloriously overstuffed chairs.

“The pot’s light,” Grimes would say. “Who didn’t ante up?”

We played several variations of poker, all with a dollar ante and half the pot limit. Pennies stood in for dollar bills. In a single game, it was possible to lose hundreds of dollars, money that we were required to pay in full by the end of the week. I supposed there were ethical issues
with the director of the Workshop and the occasional visiting writer playing high stakes poker (high stakes to me, at least) with students who were living on monthly stipends that barely covered rent and groceries, but these were choices we made as adults. No one was putting a gun to my head.

I lost far more money than I won, and when I went to bed, usually around the time that the sun was rising, I dreamed about playing poker—dreams in which I played endless games and lost each one. In some of these dreams, I would sit out a hand to take a bathroom break, only to discover that someone had been betting for me, playing out my hand, and pushing my money to the center of the table without my permission. Poker dreams: Few things in life were more debilitating. I would wake up feverish and exhausted, the sheets damp from my own sweat. That year, I lost hundreds of dollars to my classmates, to an editor visiting from one of the glossy magazines, to the writers-in-residence. I lost to everyone, except to Gordon Grimes. After one grueling week, in which we had played every day, from eleven at night until eight in the morning, Gordon Grimes lost over $2,000 to me.

“I’m in,” he’d say each time he got up to go to the bathroom. And when it was clearly time to call it quits, when birds were landing on my window air-conditioning unit to look in at us and chirp loudly, when it was just the two of us left, playing head to head, Gordon would say, “One more hand, Jack. And then I’ll go.”

I knew that one more hand meant four or five more hands, maybe even another two hours of playing, as Gordon’s tab doubled and then doubled again. It was the week that he owed me $2,400 that he called the editor at
The New Yorker
and told him about my short story, “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp.” At his insistence, I sat in his office as he made the call. Slumped down in his chair, talking in that peculiar W. C. Fields-by-way-of-Manhattan dialect of his, Gordon said, “You’ve got
to read this boy’s work. It’s like reading a young Salinger, or a young Cheever. You see the same spark there, the same raw talent.” Gordon raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say,
They’re interested
.

In the end, I decided not to collect the $2,400 from Gordon, and two weeks after Gordon made the phone call, my story was accepted by
The New Yorker
. Several months later, when he owed me nearly $3,000 after a particularly long streak of bad luck, a letter from Houghton Mifflin arrived informing me that Gordon Grimes had chosen my story, “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,” for inclusion in
The Best American Short Stories
, which he was guest-editing that year. I didn’t mention the three grand to him, and he didn’t offer to pay me.

I never told anyone about these arrangements, our unspoken quid pro quo, maybe because I’d hoped that Grimes’s support of my work wasn’t connected to the money he owed me, and I continued to fool myself for the next several years, convinced that one thing had nothing whatsoever to do with the other. I distanced myself from Gordon Grimes, and after receiving the letter from him about my story in
Best American
, I quit hosting poker games at my apartment. In time, I rarely saw Grimes at all, except on the pedestrian mall or in a restaurant, situations that called for little more than a “Hello, how are you doing?”

It was shortly after I’d earned my MFA that I met Alice. We both worked for a terrible company that scored standardized tests, and for two weeks we sat side by side, barely a word passed between us, reading semi-literate essays written by high school seniors.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I said one day and walked out of the building, handing my name tag to the receptionist on my way out. A few minutes later, Alice joined me outside.

“I was waiting for someone else to leave,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do it on my own.”

“Well, good for us,” I said. “We should celebrate.”

We walked over to Carlos O’Kelly’s and drank margaritas, and then, too drunk to drive, we took a cab back to my place, where I played old Motown songs too loud and encouraged Alice to dance on my coffee table. She was working on a master’s degree in Chemistry, but her undergraduate degree had been English, and whenever she was drunk, she would recite the first thirty or so lines of the
Canterbury Tales
in Old English and then take a bow. Two years into our cohabitation, I began media escorting for the bookstore, and my second job was to pick up S. S. Pitzer and take him to a local bed-and-breakfast. The day before Pitzer was to arrive, Alice informed me that she was pregnant.

“No,” I said.

“Oh, but yes,” Alice said. “The big prego!”

“Really?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Without a doubt.”

Too often, I had mused about the kind of advance I might get for my novel,
After the Fall
, especially given my
New Yorker
publication and subsequent appearance in
Best American Short Stories
, and I had led Alice to believe that it might be the kind of money to set us up in a meaningful way—a new house, perhaps, or a year or two without having to do any menial work. But I’d been working on the novel at a devastatingly slow pace. On a good day, I managed to write a sentence or two; most days, however, were spent laboring over the next word, or not doing anything at all. I took long walks, telling Alice that I needed fresh air in order to solve a problem with the book’s plot, or that a trip to the used bookstore might inspire one of my characters to act in an unexpected way and take the novel in a much-needed new direction. What I didn’t tell Alice were the dubious circumstances surrounding my publications, or my deeper suspicion that I had no talent at all. The book that I had been working on—the much-anticipated novel that Alice and
I had been banking on—was gasping for air, but I was the only one who heard its rasping breaths.

I reached out and felt Alice’s belly with the tentativeness that one touches the burner on a stove.

“So,” I said. “This is good? Isn’t it?”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Why?” But I wasn’t convincing. I was almost never convincing.