The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (15 page)

He brightened. “I’d love to.”

“Don’t tell them that I’m back here, okay?”

“They know already, Lucy,” he said, not really smiling. “Everyone saw you stumble toward the bathroom.”

“Are you capable of lying?” Lucy asked.

“Are you okay?” He was no longer attracted to her, she could see that. His attraction had fluttered out of the room as soon as she’d begun speaking full sentences for the first time all night. He asked if she were okay because he was a good person and because he had to, not because, after they left that laundry room, he would want to explore the issue further.

“Is Judith gone?”

“Who?”

“My friend who was with the guy with the platinum page-boy.”

“Yes.”

“Can you just go away?” Lucy asked. She was not going to bite his cheek. She was not someone who could create a heroic drama out of a brief encounter with a strange man. She was not that selfish. Or gifted.

“Wow,” he said. But he turned and left.

She had to work fast. In a little while the host would come looking for her—
everyone saw you stumble toward the bathroom
. How, she wondered, did we all grow up and become so goddamned lame? So goddamned safe! Where was she when they were giving lessons on portion control? Where was the big poet with the Scottish or Welsh or Yiddish accent? Tom was probably eating take-out burritos and watching
Inside the Actors Studio
for the eight-hundredth time.

Eight hundred. Perhaps that would be the final accounting of a fact she had stopped caring about after he couldn’t get the answer right the first time.

She walked briskly to the double-hung window, opened it smoothly—no soap needed to grease the slide—and felt the chilled air slam against her waist and hips. Her shoes were always flats—she could wear one pair of precious Cole Haans for five years with occasional repair. She straddled the window frame and with her hands braced in front of her steadying her body, she ducked her head and chest outside the window. Looking up, she’d spied what she’d wanted ever since she’d seen Judith’s face across the room. A way out of this place that didn’t include going back through the same door they’d all come in through. There they were, three iron rungs that had been a part of this building for over a hundred years. Freedom was only moments away.

Modern Times

Young’un, do you know it used to take Pa six hours to make a hearth broom, but with the machine he got last year he can make over a dozen in a day?

—MARC PARENT,
Believing It All

THE SQUAD WORE FATIGUES and scrambled through a scene that might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, if that man had been fortunate enough to visit a contemporary junkyard. The doomy landscape of burned-out cars was seeded with human skulls. The group was led by a bald woman in a black leather coat that swept the ground as she ran. The guns of the pursuing robots blazed like Mag-Lites and chirped like the gizmo used to unlock a Ford Taurus.
She’ll step on that coat and
fall,
he thought, but he was the one who caught his foot and went down. The androids were on him in a flash. They threw a quilt over his head and were ringing to each other. This seemed a signal to close in for the kill. He struck out violently with arms and legs. The ringing sounded . . . well, actually it sounded like an alarm clock.

Now he could feel the heat from her body. He could see her naked flank beside him under the covers. By the time he got his head free of the bedclothes, the ringing had stopped. He could smell smoke.

She was already sitting up, with a Marlboro going.

“I didn’t figure you for an alarm clock,” she said.

“It’s antique,” he said. “It was my father’s clock. No batteries. You wind it.”

“I don’t care if it has batteries,” she said. “I hate machines. The clock is the alpha of machines.”

“Wait a minute,” Marc said, shaking his head as if to clear the reception. “An hour ago you said that
I
was a machine. Was that code? Should I have been offended?”

“Not code,” she said and smiled. “I like you. I like you so much that I almost forgive you for having kicked me in the belly just now. That was some nightmare you were having.”

“It was the opening of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
” he said. “With Cassandra Benjamin playing the John Connors part, leading the war against the machines. My dreams are often taken from movies.”

“Too much trouble to invent your own?” she asked.

Marc shrugged. “Why bother?”

Alice didn’t speak. He wondered who produced and directed her unconscious. “If the clock went off, then it’s six,” he said. “If we’re going to make it to the dining hall before the kitchen closes, we’d best put the pedal to the metal.”

“First scootch up here beside me,” she said, tapping the maple headboard against which she was sitting. His maple headboard. The red and white box of Marlboros and the glass ashtray he’d filched from the Holiday Inn were spread out in front of her on the bed. She had the blue quilt pulled up against the cold of the dorm room. This covered her breasts. It looked to him as if she were wearing a formal gown. She inhaled deeply and the coal on the end of the cigarette glowed.

“Today was your first class with the legendary Cassandra Benjamin. That’s supposed to be a life-altering experience. I guess you’re not going to be one of those artists who lose interest in sex,” she said.

“Who knows?” he said, sliding up beside her. “I’ve only had the one class.” Marc reached back and switched on the reading light. The bulb flared brilliantly and then went out.

“Shit,” he said.

Alice spoke as if none of this had happened. “What’s that noise?” she asked.

“Which noise?”

“Sounds like an electric motor.”

“Some ears,” he said. “Probably the fridge. You going to offer me one of those cigarettes?”

“Take,” she said. “You’ve already plundered me.”

“I guess it’s the same performance every year,” he said, once he had his own cigarette going. He drew deeply and then exhaled through his nose. “That’s good,” he said, holding the cigarette out and to the side so that he could admire it at full length. “These aren’t bad for you, are they?”

“Only if you’re mortal.”

He nodded thoughtfully, but didn’t speak.

“I want to hear about the class,” she said.

Marc readjusted the pillow behind his back, and while doing so he glanced covertly at the woman beside him
.
She was far too good to be true.
Lovely bones,
he thought
. Small head; small
brainpan?
He’d once owned an Irish setter with a narrow skull and almost nothing inside.
But hasn’t phrenology been completely
discredited?
he thought.
She sure is good to look at. Curly blond
hair cut so short it isn’t supposed to be any trouble. Did her father
buy that nose? Does it matter?

“When do I get to see you again?” he asked.

Alice shrugged. “Anytime you want,” she said. “I’m in the directory. Call right after you hear the siren at noon. My blood sugar is so low at that time of day that I can’t do anything important.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“And so,” she said, “do you want to be a great writer?”

“I’d like to be famous after death.”

“Tell me about the class.”

“I don’t want to bore you,” he said.

The woman turned and gave him a flash of her deep blue eyes. “You keep forgetting,” she said. “I’m in marketing. I don’t know the story.”

“Cassandra Benjamin was on the cover of
Esquire,
” he said. “Everybody knows the story.”

Alice leaned over, holding the quilt in place, and chastely kissed him on the cheek. “I know what everybody knows. I know that she shot her husband in the head. I know that she drives an antique Land Rover. Tunes and maintains it herself. I want to learn what everybody doesn’t know.”

“All right then,” he said, “it’s supposed to be an hour-long class from eleven-fifteen until twelve-fifteen. Once a week on Mondays. There are twenty of us this year. By eleven a.m. we were all at our desks and peering around. Seeing who else made the cut. Maybe three hundred applied.”

“I heard about that,” she said. “The woman makes Harvard’s process look like open admissions. How’d
you
get in?”

“I write like an angel,” he said.

“Anything else?”

“Well, also, I’ve been through the seminary. I was once a fully ordained Catholic priest. That probably had something to do with my getting in. A priest named Marc Schwartz. I’m a curiosity. ”

“Why’d you give it up?” she said.

“You don’t have any muscle memory at all, do you?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said and smiled. “But that is an unusual career path.”

“I’m all over the map,” he said. “I never put my foot into the same river twice. I majored in psychology as an undergraduate. Then I was a tree surgeon and an auto mechanic before the seminary.”

“You rich?” she asked.

“Not rich. Just confused.”

“All right then,” she said. “Tell me all about the class.”

“There are thirty chairs,” he said. “One year she let in six students. Pompous Wallace—”

“Pompous?” she asked, interrupting.

“The president,” he said.

“I thought they called him ‘the Walrus.’ ”

“Pompous. The Walrus. Same guy. Anyway, Franklin Wallace, the president of St. Francis College, he took her aside. Asked her why only six students. She said, ‘I didn’t admire the work.’ ”

“She can’t be firing on all eight cylinders,” said Alice. “You’ve got thirty chairs, you want thirty students.”

“You business types are impossible,” he said. “You think numbers are the one true thing. Eccentricity is a big part of the draw. Outside of the postgraduate work done in marketing— that’s your department, isn’t it?—nobody ever heard of St. Francis College before she arrived. Enrollment’s up. Endowment’s up.” He tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette.

“Anyway,” he said, “there we all sat. Looking each other over. Rosie Slater didn’t make it. You know she’s already published one story in
The New Yorker
. A good story too.” Marc resettled himself and took another drag on his cigarette. “She has this theory that in great writing, every sentence is alive. I guess there must have been one dead sentence in Rosie’s story. I didn’t see it.”

“But tell me about the class.”

“First we hear boots in the hallway. Everybody stops whispering. The door creaks open. You know she’s tiny?”

Alice shook her head. “Pretend I don’t know anything.”

“Okay, then. She’s tiny. She’s wearing that belted coat you’ve probably seen her in. The style once favored by the Gestapo.”

“Have I seen her?”

“Black leather coat that sweeps the ground,” he said. “Shaved head. One dangling silver earring. Goes right to the front of the line.”

Alice nodded. “I guess I saw her in the bookstore. I thought it was a guy.”

“Definitely not a guy,” he said. “Actually, she’s stacked. Under the coat she’s wearing a ribbed turtleneck, red, and a skirt made of the same buttery leather the coat is made of. She starts talking while she’s hanging up the coat. Still had her back to the class. Now tell me you don’t know what came next.”

Alice shrugged. “Like I said, I’m in marketing. I did my undergraduate work at Berkeley.”

“Okay, then. I’ll tell you. She said: ‘I trust you’re not here because you want to be writers.’ Nobody bit, so she went on. Came around in front of the desk. She’s holding a copy of her first novel,
The Fish in Water
. ‘Maybe you want to be the person who wrote
The Fish in Water
.’ She paused and nodded her head. ‘Why can’t you be that person?’ There was a beautiful, expectant silence, and then I raised my hand.”

Alice looked at Marc with new interest. “Did you really?”

He nodded. “We all knew the answer; somebody had to speak. It’s a catechism. Who made me? God made me. Who made the world? God made the world.”

“So what did you say,” she asked.

“Boy,” he said. “You
are
in marketing.”

“Cut that out,” she said.

“It’s just that everybody in the humanities knows this speech.”

She scowled prettily, which Marc thought accentuated her beauty.
No ugly girl would do that to her face. She’s better looking
than I am.
He considered his own, narrow, hairless body.
Tall,
stooped. Like the lapsed priest I am,
he thought.
In the seminary we
used to joke that we all looked like moles who had been out in the sun
once and would never get over the experience. Or repeat it.

“All right,” she said. “Give this poor ignorant girl a chance. The speech.”

“Well, I said what I was supposed to say. I said, ‘Because I’m not the person who wrote
The Fish in Water
.’ So she said: ‘Correct,’ as in I was correct. Then she said, ‘You’re not that person. And neither am I.’ ”

Marc settled back against the headboard.

“But she
is
that person,” said Alice.

“Nope,” said Marc. “Not according to herself. Then we got the paragraph that even you can recite. The writer as Ouija board, lightning rod, FM antenna. Cassandra Benjamin does not manipulate images, she receives them. She’s an oracle, a medium, a length of copper wire—grounded.”

“Do you believe it all?”

Marc shrugged.

“It’s bullshit,” said Alice, mashing out her cigarette, putting the ashtray beside the clock on the night table, and slipping off the bed. She walked to the leather armchair on which she’d draped her clothes. Keeping her narrow back to the bed, she put on the white panties first, then the bra, which she fastened quickly. Marc had been hoping she’d ask for help.

“That’s nonsense,” Alice said, turning to face him as she pulled on her jeans. “She accepted the National Book Award. I bet she cashes her own royalty checks.” Alice stopped talking to pull on her crewneck sweater.

“Grill closes at six-twenty,” Marc said, standing and reaching for his own clothes. “We have eleven minutes.”

THE SUBJECT OF postcoital debate was across campus and wondering about dinner herself. Cassandra Benjamin was sitting alone in darkness in her office in the Castle of Assisi. The mansion built for railroad baron Connelly McCracken in the 1890s had only been left standing because the McCracken heirs had required this when they deeded the entire estate to the college in 1954.

Much of the great stone pile was boarded up. Two of the downstairs rooms were used for seminars and a suite in the top floor had been refurbished for the school’s celebrity teacher.

The building was sited high on a hill. The drive up had the sort of treacherous switchbacks common in Tuscany. “The downside,” Franklin Wallace had once said, in rare burst of humor, “is that the roads are impossible to keep plowed. The upside is that if the Pope should arrive unexpectedly in McCracken, Pennsylvania, at the head of an army, we can hold the castle with a handful of bowmen.”

High up and at the terminus of a circular staircase, excellent for defensive swordplay, Cassandra’s room had been furnished with the same unwillingness to fall into line that had marked her personal and literary life. A valuable Oriental rug had been folded in half so that the underside and skidproof mat were all that was visible. Centered in the discolored section of wooden floor thus exposed stood a stainless-steel table with a glass top. This had the obligatory computer and printer—Dell and Hew-lett Packard. The rest of the big table was heaped with papers, held down with a copy of Aimee Bender’s
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
. There was a coffee cup, of course, and one small rubber-tree plant—quite dead—in a terra-cotta pot.

The woman famously referred to in
The New York Review of
Books
as “Virgina Woolf with a Glock” had kicked off her boots but was still in her leather skirt and crimson turtleneck. She had slumped forward and was cradling her naked head in her arms.

Concluding finally that she was more tired than hungry, Cassandra switched on a standing lamp, rose and surveyed the pile of books she insisted that her publisher send her free. “So that I can keep my ear to the great heart of reading America.” Her hand passed over Anna Quindlen’s
Blessings,
Sebastian Junger’s
Fire,
and
Claire Marvel
by John Burnham Schwartz. She picked up Ray Kurzweil’s
The Age of Spiritual Machines:
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
. Cassandra sat on the edge of her bed and read quickly for several minutes, pausing to lick her index finger before turning the pages. Then she went into the bathroom, closed the door, and vomited violently three times. She brushed her teeth, returned to the main room, settled on the bed, and in five minutes she was fast, fast asleep.