The Writing Circle Read online

  “You’re really way out here,” he said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Adam followed Gillian through the front hall into the study. She laid the folder on the desk beneath the window and smiled at him. “Thank you for bringing this,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” said Adam. It obviously was. If she’d had any doubt about how Adam felt about her, she didn’t now. The muscles in his neck tightened as he swallowed. A streak of sweat glistened along the side of his face.

  “You’re still willing to help out with the little problem in the kitchen?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s no big deal. You want me to get rid of a dead mouse in a trap?”

  Gillian shuddered. “It’s in the garbage can,” she said. “Under the sink. It died there. It must have fallen in and then not been able to climb out.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Adam. He had placed his hand on her shoulder, as if to steady her. “Just sit right here and it will be gone before you know it.”

  “The kitchen is around there,” she said, pointing. “I closed the door.”

  He pushed her gently, and she sat on the footstool by the armchair. She felt a flicker of fear again when he left the room, wanted his hand back on her shoulder.

  A few minutes later he called from the kitchen. “Can I go out through the back door?” he asked. “That way I won’t have to come through the house.”

  “Yes!” she cried. “Do that.”

  “Is there a flashlight somewhere around here?” he asked.

  “In the drawer to the right of the stove.”

  It seemed as if he was gone for a long time. She was glad the windows in the study didn’t face behind the house so she couldn’t see him carrying the mouse off. She heard him running water in the kitchen when he came back into the house. Washing the garbage can out, she thought, washing his hands.

  When he returned to the study, he squatted beside her. “All done,” he said.

  “Did you bury it?”

  “Not exactly. I dumped it back in the woods.”

  “Dumped it?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s far away from the house and you’ll never find it.”

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “Promise,” he said. She allowed him to take her head and press it against his chest. She allowed him to stroke her hair.

  After a while he stood up. “Have you had any dinner yet?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I couldn’t go into the kitchen.”

  “Do you have any food in the house?”

  “I brought some.”

  “Would you like me to cook some dinner for you? I’m a great cook.”

  “Who says so?” Her voice was different now. Still soft as a child’s, but with a hint of irony.

  “Everyone says so,” said Adam. “My girlfriend, my friends.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not all that serious really. She doesn’t live with me, and . . .”

  Gillian smiled. “It’s all right for you to have a girlfriend, Adam,” she said. But she could tell from his face that he felt apologetic, as if this in some way compromised his presence here in her house.

  “Come, let’s go into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll show you where things are and you’ll cook for me. For us. I’d like that.” She got up and started walking towards the kitchen, but she hesitated at the doorway.

  “It’s all right,” said Adam. “There’s nothing here.” He opened the cabinet under the sink and tilted the garbage can to show her. She flinched.

  “Please, close that,” she cried.

  Adam closed the door and patted it twice to show it was firm. He unpacked the food from the shopping bag. He put the rigatoni in a pot to boil, chopped vegetables, and sautéed them in olive oil. He made a salad. Gillian opened a bottle of wine and selected two glasses from the ceiling rack. She rinsed the dust off and set them on the counter so their rims touched. While Adam watched, she poured wine into both of them so they were exactly level. She lifted hers and took a sip.

  “I don’t believe in toasts,” she said. When the Leopardi Circle met, Adam drank coffee rather than wine, but she guessed he would drink wine now. Neither of them said anything about him driving anywhere later that night.

  The telephone’s ring startled them both. Again, Gillian assumed it had to be Pete, but it was a woman’s voice.

  “Mrs. Coit?” she asked. “This is Marie Ambrose, Pete’s wife. He’s out of town until Thursday, but I can give you the number of somebody else to call if there’s a problem with the house.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Gillian. “But it’s been taken care of. It was very considerate of you to call.”

  She hung up and smiled at Adam. “The handyman is out of town,” she said. “I must have been prescient when I left that folder at your house.”

  Adam grinned. He seemed more sure of himself now. The cooking. Or maybe the glass of wine.

  “Tell me about your girlfriend,” Gillian said.

  “What’s to tell?”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s a senior, in college, going into comp sci.” He noticed the question on Gillian’s face. “Sorry, computer science.”

  “And her name?”

  “Kim. Kimberly.”

  Gillian smiled. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a time, not so long ago, when every baby girl was named Kimberly.”

  Adam poked at the slices of squash in the frying pan, flipped them so their browned sides were up.

  “What does she look like, this Kim?”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a writer, Adam,” said Gillian, leaning towards him. “You wouldn’t say that about your character, Sonia.”

  “Hey, novels are different.”

  “Dark hair or blond?”

  “Blond, I guess.”

  Gillian shook her head and laughed. “Hopeless,” she said, and she rested her hand on his arm for a second. She went to set the table in the dining room. For some reason, the word blond had made her think of Nancy, and this was disquieting, just as the idea of Adam’s girlfriend had been, though she wasn’t sure why.

  There was no electricity in the dining room, just candles, which she stored in a tin box to keep safe from mice. Mice would eat anything once winter came. For a moment she paused, silverware in her hand, fighting off the image of the small, still body in the bottom of the garbage can. Still. There was that intriguing word. The poem hardly begun. She’d gotten off track, allowed Adam to interrupt her. But she couldn’t have been at peace in the house with something dead, right there in the kitchen. She inhaled the aroma of garlic. She needed a good dinner. She’d start fresh in the morning.

  AFTER DINNER they brought their wineglasses and the bottle into the study. Adam rekindled the fire, and they sat by it in the armchairs, sharing the footstool between them. Adam’s socks were red, woolly, with a handmade look. Gillian wondered if his girlfriend had made them, but she didn’t ask.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What do you think of the new addition?”

  “Nancy?”

  Gillian nodded. Then she laughed. “You’re still used to thinking of yourself as the newest member, aren’t you? But now you’re one of us old-timers.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Adam, and he laughed, too. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. Still, she’s published two novels and I haven’t published any.”

  “You’ve published short stories,” said Gillian. “And as for Nancy, she hasn’t published a novel for a long time.”

  “Yeah, well, so far my total earnings from my career as a short story writer are less than a hundred dollars, oh yes, and a few contributors’ copies of some literary magazines.”

  “Writing isn’t about making money,” said Gillian. “As if you didn’t know.” She tapped the side of her foot against Adam’s. Her so
cks were black cashmere. Ordinary wool made her toes itch.

  “Designing sports shoes is about making money. And let me tell you, it sucks.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you think about Nancy,” said Gillian.

  It was Bernard who had proposed Nancy to the Leopardis. Gillian would have preferred a man to a woman—she always got along better with men—but the two men proposed had been poets, and Gillian didn’t like poets. She didn’t like their desperate intensity, the impossibility of their dreams. She didn’t want a poet less successful than herself because she didn’t want to be resented. But she also didn’t want a poet more successful (though there were very few who were) because she didn’t want to feel jealousy. Jealousy sapped her emotion, took it away from her poetry. She’d gone along with Nancy as a gift to Bernard, and she made sure he knew it. Everyone had gone along with Nancy, except for Chris. Chris had nominated a friend of his who was a poet—not a real poet, more of a songwriter, guitar-strumming coffeehouse figure—but no one else supported him. Chris opposed Nancy, claiming she was “not a good fit,” but Gillian thought it was out of pique, though in the end he bowed to the wishes of the others.

  “Nancy seems nice,” said Adam.

  “Nice?” she asked. “Is that all you can say about her?”

  “Okay,” said Adam, smiling. “How’s this: She’s an agile critic, a keen observer, and a refreshing counter to Chris’s self-importance. I found her affable.”

  As soon as Nancy had turned up at the meeting on Sunday, Gillian realized she’d made a mistake, but it was already too late. Nancy was small and tidy, and Gillian felt, as she often did in the presence of petite women, too tall; her feet felt too big. She studied Nancy, seeking some imperfection to fasten on, some way to reduce her, and her eyes had fastened on Nancy’s ears. Nancy had attached earlobes, and they seemed to slide off the sides of her face. They made you think of flesh, in an unpleasant way, a clitoris that had been stunted in growth or, worse, amputated. Obtusely—or was it brazenly?—Nancy wore stud earrings and tucked her hair behind her ears, calling attention to them. If Gillian had had ears like that, she would have kept them covered by her hair.

  “Affable, I’ll buy that,” said Gillian. “But please, Adam, she may seem affable, but you of all of us need to be a little wary of her.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the only other novelist.”

  “And Chris is what?”

  “Correction, the only other literary novelist.”

  “So why should that matter?”

  “You’re young, you have a glittering future. First novels generate the kind of excitement that third novels never do.”

  “Soooo.” Adam drew the word out. “Why should I be wary?”

  “Because writers are inherently competitive. We’re not supposed to be, we pretend we aren’t, but we’re actually vicious. Poets are the worst, of course, because we have to fight over the very few people in the world who read poetry, but serious novelists are just as bad. Nancy can’t help but be jealous of you. She’ll pretend to support you—she may even believe that she wants to support you—but she really can’t bear to see you succeed.”

  Adam looked at Gillian. He laughed a little. “You make her sound ruthless.”

  “Not ruthless, just protecting her own work from the threat of competition. You just can’t trust her, that’s all.”

  “Can I trust you?” Adam asked.

  “I’ll leave you to decide that,” said Gillian, smiling.

  “Can I kiss you? Or rather, may I kiss you?”

  “Do you ordinarily ask women if you can kiss them before you do so?”

  “You’re not an ordinary woman,” said Adam.

  “No,” said Gillian, “I suppose not.” She leaned forward a little in her chair so her long braid of hair was freed from the weight of her back and pulled it over her shoulder. She undid the elastic that was coiled around the end and took Adam’s hand and slipped the elastic onto his wrist. She slowly unbraided her hair, leaning towards the fire as if she were opening the braid up for the fire, as if she were revealing its secret interior to the flames. When it was all loose, she ran her fingers through the rippled hair, then stood up and shook it out behind her. She watched Adam’s face. He looked as if he was afraid to breathe.

  Adam

  ADAM’S FIRST NOVEL WEIGHED FIVE POUNDS, SEVEN ounces (not including the manuscript box) and covered three generations of a prosperous Wyoming ranch family. Adam had visited Wyoming only once in his life and knew no one who had ever lived there, but he’d read everything he could get his hands on that had to do with the area. He couldn’t interest any publisher or agent in the novel, but it did fulfill the thesis requirement for his MFA. His mentor, Helene, had never produced a novel that weighed more than two pounds. Although she hadn’t succeeded in curing Adam of his verbosity, she had managed to steer him to write about something more familiar for his second try. His new novel included a scene set in Moscow, even farther from home, but at least he’d spent his junior year of college there, and the narrator (involved in a knotty relationship with a Russian woman) was a young American male, not unlike himself.

  In high school Adam had been a victim of competing talents. He was a natural in math and science but harbored literary pretensions (he was editor of the literary magazine) and was serious enough about the viola that he considered applying to a conservatory. In college—where he majored in engineering—the viola lay forgotten under his lofted dorm room bed, but he submitted more than three times as many pages as anyone else in his fiction writing workshop. After graduation he got a job in engineering but completed a low-residency MFA program in creative writing as well. The longer he continued at his job, the more alien it felt to him. He carried his new novel around in his head with him at all times, working on it whenever he was free from thinking of something else. It was his alternate, secret life. Sometimes it seemed like the only life he really had.

  After he’d been orphaned in the Leopardi Circle at the death of Helene, Adam had been taken under the wing of Virginia. Her maternal instincts, Adam noticed, were juiced up anytime she was in the proximity of anyone under forty. When he had first joined them, he thought Virginia might be someone who wrote romance or science fiction, not what he considered a serious writer. She was portly and wore pants with elastic waistbands, and she had a grandmotherly manner. But as soon as he first heard her read from her manuscript, he realized he had misjudged her and, embarrassed, he read all her previously published books. It was a sobering venture. He felt he was not even remotely in her league. He felt that way about all the Leopardis—especially Gillian. Gillian above all. As for Chris, Adam didn’t exactly respect what he did, but he recognized that Chris was good at it, and he couldn’t ignore the fact that Chris not only made a living as a writer but made enough money to buy the kind of sports car Adam could only dream of, while Adam made nothing from his writing. Absolutely nothing at all.

  THE FIRE HAD GONE OUT. The wall was cold against his naked back. When Adam turned his head to the left, a muscle twanged in his neck, no doubt from sleeping on his side in this narrow bed. He could tell from the absolute quiet that he was alone in the room. There was a purple hair elastic biting into his wrist. He pulled it away from his skin, then let it snap back against his wrist bone.

  He did not need to close his eyes to see Gillian’s naked back, the long inward curve of her spine leading down to her smooth buttocks, the surprising black curls of her pubic hair as she turned towards him, that small hill, like a child’s head, the dab of pink in the cleft.

  Morning sunlight made its way through the windows on one side and fell on the quilt. The colored triangles of fabric were bleached almost as pale as the white background, but it was not this morning’s sun that had accomplished it, it had taken decades; the quilt looked a hundred years old. The glass in the windowpanes was antique, too, imperfect, like ice on the pond just after a night’s freeze. He sat up in bed and squinted
in the sunlight. Through the front windows of the room he could see the marsh, and his car and Gillian’s truck parked at the edge of the rough lawn. He sat up farther.

  There was a figure in the distance, someone walking along the edge of the marsh: Gillian. Her back was towards him, the hood of her grey sweater pulled up over her head. He wanted to reach across the distance between them and pull the hood back, freeing her hair. He wanted to see what the wind would do with it.

  Adam found his clothes in a pile on the floor and got dressed. He could not decide what he should do. He didn’t know what Gillian expected of him, didn’t know what she wanted, and he was afraid of doing the wrong thing. He sat on the footstool and looked at the wide floorboards beneath his bare feet. They had been painted once, he could tell, then later stripped so the honey-colored pine was once again open to the light. But that had been years before; the surface was dull now. He traced a curve of grain with his big toe, circled a knothole. He felt certain, though, that Gillian didn’t want him sticking around. He guessed that she would hope he was gone before she returned from her walk, so she could sit in the study and work on whatever poem she was beginning right now—he was sure she was working on a poem as she walked—but he also could not bear to leave without seeing her. He would not kiss her good-bye—he wasn’t so foolish—but he would just touch her: her hair, her arm, anything. Surely she would grant him that. He thought, fleetingly, about writing Gillian a note, leaving it out on the counter, but he couldn’t imagine what to say, nor what tone he should take. Something cute about his gratitude towards the mouse? No, all wrong. Something about the quality of light in the study when he awoke, the narrow bed where they had slept, her head so close against him that her hair covered his mouth? No, wrong, too. Here he was a writer and he had nothing to say, or so much to say he couldn’t say anything at all.

  In the kitchen Adam found a bagel from the grocery bag he’d unpacked the night before. He put it in his pocket. He would pick up a cup of coffee when he stopped for gas along the road. The dishes from their dinner the night before were stacked, still, by the sink. He thought about washing them, but he didn’t want to remove the evidence of that dinner; he wanted to leave something behind of himself so she might think of him after he was gone.