The Writing Circle Read online

  “But tell me more,” said Virginia, gently. “I lost track of you after you left Columbia.”

  “When my father died, someone had to take over the business. There’s money in mattresses, not just under them; that’s what he used to say. Eventually I partnered with a British company. We made all-natural latex mattresses with wool toppings from sheep who ate only organic hay. Still, they were just mattresses.”

  Joe reached forward and lifted his wineglass. He took a long sip.

  “After you got married—you see, I followed what you were up to—I eventually married, too. I had two sons. My wife died when the boys were in college. Recently I sold the business and retired. Now I read. I travel and I read. Mostly, I read.”

  Joe had been looking down at the table. He looked up now. “I knew you were divorced, and I thought about trying to get together with you, but—”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Not brave enough, I guess. I didn’t think you’d be interested.” Joe gave a little laugh, then he paused before he spoke again. “I’ve never stopped being in love with you, Ginny,” he said.

  Virginia put her hand on his arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  As they were ducking out of the restaurant, a heavyset man with a tuft of hair on either side of his otherwise bald head was just coming in. He grabbed Joe by the shoulders.

  “Joey Sussman!” he cried. “I bet I’m right!”

  Joe removed one of the man’s hands from his shoulder, gave it a vigorous shake, and clapped him on the back.

  “You’re on!” he said. “Gotta go, though,” and without giving the man a chance to recover, he pushed Virginia out ahead of him. They fled down the steps. He grabbed her hand, and they ran down the sidewalk to the corner, catching their breath while they waited for the light to change.

  “Who was that?” asked Virginia.

  “I think it was Barry—what was his name? The kid who was allergic to everything.”

  “Barry Din-something. Dinsdale?”

  “Dinsdorf?”

  “That’s it!” said Virginia. She looked back towards the restaurant. “God, he looked old,” she said. “We don’t look that old, do we?”

  “I don’t know about us,” said Joe, “but you look just the same.”

  Virginia was about to say something joking, but the light changed, and as they crossed the street they held hands tighter. They were walking north, and a wind was coming along the avenue. Virginia shivered, and Joe released her hand and put his arm around her. She ducked her head and leaned closer against him.

  It was a Sunday evening and the street was nearly deserted. Halfway down the block they stepped into the entranceway of an office building so they were blocked from the wind. Virginia leaned back against the granite wall.

  The last time they had kissed, it had been spin the bottle at a birthday party. For a second Virginia was back there, standing close to Joe in the dark of her parents’ bedroom while the other kids were in the living room, sitting in a circle on the floor. But then she was here, with Joe, in a sheltered corner next to glass revolving doors stilled for the night, the wind sweeping up the avenue, tossing pages of an old newspaper along the sidewalk. She closed her eyes.

  JOE PULLED UP INTO A SPACE by a fire hydrant in front of Adam’s house. He had never mastered parallel parking, and he nosed into the space, the tail of his car sticking out farther than it should have.

  “I’ll be here to pick you up around five,” he told Virginia. “Unless you call me if you get a ride.”

  “Thank you, darling,” said Virginia. She had her hand on the car door handle and turned so that she could kiss Joe good-bye. The kiss, which had begun as a brief touch of lips to lips, slowed into a real kiss. Virginia let go of the door handle and put her arms around Joe’s neck. His hands slid up under the back of her hair and held her head close against his.

  “That’s better,” he said, when he released her.

  Virginia gave him a quick kiss of farewell and got out of the car. She closed the door and stood on the curb watching until Joe had backed out into the street. He gave a toot of the horn as he drove away. Then she turned towards Adam’s house and started up the front stairs.

  There was a woman waiting on the front porch. She was in her forties, Virginia guessed, with blond hair cut just below her ears. She looked at Virginia questioningly.

  In an instant Virginia realized who she must be. “Are you trying to get to the meeting at Adam’s place?” she asked.

  “Oh, thanks, yes,” the woman said. “I was supposed to be meeting Bernard here at three, but I don’t think he’s come.”

  Virginia laughed. “Bernard is never on time,” she said. She held out her hand. “I’m Virginia,” she said. “I was married to Bernard for twenty years. And you must be Nancy. He said he was bringing you today.”

  “Yes.” Nancy took Virginia’s hand. They clasped rather than shook. Virginia remembered Bernard telling her that Nancy wasn’t married but had a relationship with someone who traveled a lot. Gillian won’t like her, she thought, but Chris will.

  “Stay right here,” said Virginia. “I’ll go rap on Adam’s window so he can let us in. The buzzer doesn’t work.”

  Virginia disappeared down the steps and around the side of the building. She was back in a moment. And soon the door was unlocked and Adam held it open. He was a tall, solid young man with a lot of hair and heavy-framed glasses, which might have been either entirely out of date or highly in style.

  “This is Nancy,” said Virginia. “Bernie’s late as usual and she was left standing here waiting for him.”

  “It wasn’t long,” said Nancy. “And then you came to my rescue.”

  “I’m Adam,” said the young man. He didn’t hold out his hand. “Come on in.”

  Adam’s apartment was half of the first floor of a house that had once been an elegant single-family residence. It had suffered numerous indignities since, including the partitioning off of its larger rooms to divide into apartments, the removal of its stained-glass windows (sold to an antiques dealer), and the covering of its beautiful painted ceilings with acoustical tiles. Nancy followed Virginia back to the living room while Adam went to put a piece of wood in the outside door to prop it open till everyone had arrived.

  The living room looked, at first glance, like a typical graduate student’s lair, but the two armchairs were Stickley. Virginia wasn’t a fan of Mission furniture, but she knew that it had no doubt cost Adam a big chunk of his salary. He came from a working-class family; this was not stuff he would have inherited.

  Virginia led Nancy towards the window, where Gillian was standing, wineglass in hand, looking out. Her braid of hair reached far below her waist, and Virginia resisted an urge to give it a tug. Gillian turned as she heard them approach.

  “Gillian, this is Nancy, Bernard’s new recruit,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Gillian. “I’m Gillian Coit. Pleased to meet you.”

  “We’ve already met,” said Nancy. “At the Achesons’, last Christmas.”

  “Oh,” said Gillian. She looked perplexed.

  Virginia hadn’t expected they would hit it off. Now she was sure of it.

  “In fact, we’d actually met once years before that,” said Nancy. “We were both guests at a writing festival at the University of Michigan.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gillian. “I chose not to remember much about that time. I got caught in a snowstorm on my way home and had to spend a night in the Atlanta airport.”

  “The perils of holding writing festivals in the winter,” said Virginia. “Is Chris here yet?” she asked Gillian in an attempt to change the subject.

  “He’s back in the kitchen, I think,” she said.

  “That’s where the drinks are,” said Virginia. “Why don’t we go get something?”

  “Sure,” said Nancy.

  In the kitchen, Chris was wrestling with a corkscrew. He put the bottle down on the counter to shake Nancy’
s hand. He was a man many women found attractive, though Virginia didn’t. He was tan and smooth shaven, and smelled like a cologne that was advertised in a scented strip inserted in an issue of The New Yorker. Virginia had called the magazine to complain.

  “So, you’re the replacement candidate for Helene,” he said.

  “Helene?” asked Nancy. “Who’s Helene?”

  Virginia tried to give Chris a look, but he refused to make eye contact with her. “Helene Spivack,” she said. “She had been a member.”

  “She died,” said Chris, bluntly. “Lung cancer.”

  “I see,” said Nancy.

  “Bernie didn’t tell you?” asked Virginia.

  Nancy shook her head.

  “I’m sorry,” said Virginia. She would have to talk to Bernie about this. She wondered what else he hadn’t told Nancy.

  “Wine?” asked Chris, holding up a bottle.

  “There’s coffee and tea,” said Virginia.

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,” said Nancy.

  “Help yourself,” said Virginia. She gestured towards the electric kettle, some boxes of tea bags, and a collection of mugs sitting on the counter. They were all injured in some way, chipped or stained. Nancy selected one with an image of Charlie Chaplin and made herself a cup of tea.

  “I hear Bernard,” said Virginia. “I guess we’ll be able to start.”

  They headed back into the living room. Bernard greeted Virginia with a kiss on the cheek. He took Nancy’s hand and clasped his other over it.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for my tardiness,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Nancy.

  “It’s all right, Bernie,” said Virginia. “Nobody expects you to be on time. Nancy will learn like the rest of us.”

  Bernard seemed genuinely surprised. “I didn’t realize it was perceived as a chronic flaw,” he said.

  “Don’t look so sorrowful,” said Virginia, and she slipped her arm into his. “We love you just the same.”

  And she did love Bernard. Not the way she loved Joe, and not the way she’d loved Bernard when they were young and newly married. Then, she had loved him fiercely. She’d loved him, but she’d also been infuriated by him. He had been verbally passionate, but in bed he was lethargic. He was pompous, babyish about basic things, impractical, slovenly, and selectively unworldly. Oh—the list went on. But now that she was no longer married to him, now that she was happily married to Joe, the love she felt for Bernard was undamaged by frustration. Everything she didn’t like about Bernard was Aimee’s to deal with. No marriage counseling could have ironed out all their difficulties as a couple as neatly, as successfully as their divorce and realignment had done.

  In the living room Bernard sat on the sofa with Nancy, Virginia took the chair beside him, and Gillian positioned herself across from them. Adam pulled two more chairs up to the circle.

  “Perhaps it’s time for us to get going,” said Gillian. “Chris,” she called into the kitchen, “could you honor us with your presence?”

  Chris came into the room and took the chair next to Gillian’s, sliding it close so the wooden arms touched. “Here I am,” he said.

  Virginia looked at Nancy’s face to see her reaction, but Nancy had her eyes on Bernard.

  Nancy

  NANCY SETTLED BACK INTO ADAM’S SOFA AND SET HER CUP on the table at the side. The sofa was covered in a paisley print spread that looked like a remnant from the seventies. She could almost smell the marijuana of her youth in the fabric.

  Nancy had brought part of the manuscript of her novel, but she immediately realized it was a mistake: she was not going to be asked to read any of it. She tucked the tote bag in close against her feet. She didn’t want anyone to know how presumptuous she’d been. This was the first time any part of the novel had been out of her house, and it seemed defenseless, vulnerable. She pressed her calves against the tote bag, sheltered the pages inside between her legs and the skirt of the sofa.

  She wished now that she had taken a glass of wine. The warmth of the tea was comforting in her hands, but seeing Gillian in the chair across from her, her long fingers banding the stem of her wineglass, made Nancy feel like a kid in comparison, clutching her clunky mug.

  Bernard might have explained to Nancy how things worked, how they took turns in a particular order, presenting their work, but he hadn’t. One more thing he had failed to do. He passed around copies of his manuscript, a chapter from a biography he was writing on George Frideric Handel. Handel was, Nancy thought, a perfect subject for Bernard, an anglophile who liked the Baroque period so much he once tried to learn (without great success) the viola da gamba. The pages were not clipped, and there was a general flurry of papers.

  “Good God, Bernie,” said Virginia, “it would be nice if you gave us something more manageable.” On the opposite side of the paper was what was obviously a draft of another manuscript of Bernard’s, so that the words of one were soaking into the words of the other. Stereo Bernard. Bernard had won acclaim, though not enormous financial compensation, for two previous biographies. Nancy admired his writing, though she would never have read either by choice. The study of John Donne was sufferable, but a ponderous tome on the philosopher Hegel?—please!

  Bernard began reading aloud from his chapter while people scribbled in the margins. His voice had the timbre of a voice-over on a radio commercial. It could make anything sound better, being read with that authority.

  Though it is unquestionably logical to consider deafness as the sensory loss of greatest tragic dimension for a composer—and how could we not, with the image so imprinted on us all of Beethoven, in a near rage of desperation, churning out a torrent of music while struggling with his deafness?—for a composer artist like Handel, the loss of vision had a profound effect. We can hear his anguish in a note entered on the score of his oratorio Jephtha while he was immersed in composition: “Got as far as this on Wednesday, 13th February, 1751, unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye.”

  Bernard paused in his reading and looked around at the group. He leaned forward and took in an unnecessarily large breath. “Unable to go on!” he repeated, emphasizing the words even more dramatically than when he first read them, his freckled, high forehead shiny with the sweat of his exertion. “Think of that!” he implored them, before turning back to his manuscript.

  Enforced separation from the visual world would be an impairment of serious consequence for any musician, but to a composer like Handel, so connected to and inspired by his observations of the world, it could be catastrophic. Think for a moment of the visual necessity behind one of the most admired of his works, Music for the Royal Fireworks (written only several years before the impending blindness), music written to accompany a display that was created specifically as an entertainment for the eyes.

  “If we had this ahead of time,” said Gillian when Bernard was finally done, “we’d be able to give it more than a cursory reading.”

  “Nobody’s got that kind of time, Gillian,” said Chris. “Maybe you do, but I sure as hell don’t.” He was a man who was just short of being handsome, Nancy thought. A bit too heavy in the face.

  “You’d make the time,” said Gillian.

  “We’ve discussed this ad nauseam,” said Virginia. “We’re not going to change things now. Can we just move ahead for the moment?” She looked around for confirmation. It was obvious to Nancy that Adam was the least important one of them. He nodded, but nobody looked at him.

  “Of course, let’s go on,” said Gillian. “We always do.”

  Nancy could see Virginia begin a retort, then stop herself.

  “Before we do,” said Bernard, “I beg your indulgence for a moment. Adam, if I may make use of your equipment—” Bernard had produced a CD from his bag and was making his way over to Adam’s bookcase. “I want you all to be able to fully appreciate the significance of the theory I’ve been developing.”

  “What is this?” asked Gillian. “Show-and-
tell time?”

  Bernard held up his palm. “Two minutes, just the fourth movement, ‘La Réjouissance,’ from the Fireworks Music is all I ask you to listen to,” said Bernard.

  “Please,” said Gillian. “I’m sure we’ve all heard it before.”

  “But not in this context,” said Bernard.

  “Speak for yourself, Gillian,” said Chris. “Why don’t you just get on with it?” he asked Bernard. Which Bernard tried to do. It did not surprise Nancy that Bernard had difficulty working Adam’s CD player and, after finally succeeding in inserting his disk, was unable to decipher, even with his reading glasses, the buttons on the remote. Adam came to his rescue and started the track. Bernard leaned back in his chair and, with an expression of beatific rapture, conducted with his two forefingers.

  When the demonstration was over, Virginia flipped through Bernard’s manuscript and began to comment. Chris followed, then Gillian, then Adam. They all started with some words of praise—that seemed to be the acknowledged format—before taking stabs at the manuscript. When they were through they turned, almost in unison, to Nancy.

  She hadn’t been sure she actually would be participating in the discussion, that they would ask her opinion this first time, but she had made some notes. She began as they had, with some general words of praise. “I wonder, though, about that line about Beethoven,” she said. “It’s, perhaps, a touch hyperbolic, but more important, I think it draws our attention away from Handel. Beethoven sort of eclipses him here.” She said this cautiously, watching Bernard’s face as she spoke. She was afraid he might be affronted. In fact, it was quite the opposite; he looked around at the others as if he were the proud parent of a child who had just said something clever, as if she had lived up to his recommendation.