Chapter I
Dr. Gastrell does not conceal how taken he is with Yash.
Yash illuminates him. When he speaks, Gastrell shimmers with energy.
They spar and parry about Platonic forms, Aristotelian ontology, and Homeric divinations versus human agency.
Gastrell makes attempts to include the rest of us, and several of the others work hard for his attention, but the real conversation is between him and Yash while the rest of us listen and take notes.
Their most heated dispute is over the definition of ‘hamartia,’ which Gastrell says is a tragic flaw.
Yash corrects him, saying that the word in ancient Greek, as Aristotle was using it, meant a random error of judgement.
From there it escalates quickly. Gastrell claims that nothing in Greek drama is random and that Greek drama wouldn’t have survived at all without this tragic irony that they invented.
Yash insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake, that we are all vulnerable to tragedy because we are human.
The argument leaves Gastrell with a red neck and a moist hairline, and Yash looking like he slayed a small dragon.
For my thesis, I’m assigned an advisor I’ve never heard of and I meet with her every week.
If there’s any place I can point to where my writing life actually began, it is here with Dr. Felske on Thursdays at one p.m. I come in each week with two copies of a new story and have to read the whole thing out loud while she follows along on her copy, circling words, squiggling a line under sentences, slashing whole paragraphs.
Very occasionally there is a tiny check in the margin.
I write for these tiny checks. I get more and more of them as the semester goes on.
She quickly understands how limited my reading has been, and how male.
She feeds me Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid.
By mid-November I’ve written twelve stories.
We choose five for the thesis and begin to revise.
Revision for me in the past has been some light polishing.
This is more like a root canal on every paragraph.
The writing professors I’ve had before often spoke in generalities, in quotes by famous writers.
Chekhov said. Beckett said. And we scribbled down those pearls.
Dr. Felske only talks about what she sees on the page.
She taps her silver mechanical pencil on a passage.
What is truer here? She steers me away from the Southern gothic plots I was enamored with last year and encourages me to write from my own emotions.
I start to understand the power of fiction, the reason we make things up.
My best story is about my father. It’s not autobiographical.
It’s about the manager of a shoe store and the high school boy who gets a job there—but it is about my father, about my rage and shame and love for him.
These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did.
‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said.
Professor Felske shows me what that really means.
Madame Trèves, the owner of Chantal, comes slowly to like and trust me.
It has taken four months. Once she starts telling you about her family, you’re in, the bartender told me.
On a slow night in late September, we are standing together in the little nook in back and she points to an old man she just seated.
He resembles my uncle, she says, and I ask how and she says not his features, an energy, a goodness, and she tells me what I already knew from the bartender, that this uncle, her mother’s sister’s husband, hid her whole family in the hay shed on his farm for the last three years of the war.
The next week she gives me three more dinner shifts. I quit High Five and Bubble Time and start raking it in. Over a hundred dollars a night. I begin putting real money in the bank.
I bring home my tips and we count the cash on Yash’s bed.
I take a shower and when it gets cold I put on these red long johns I find in his closet.
Your little red suit, he calls it, like in the Talking Heads song.
We count my tips and roll around on the bed until the red suit is down at my ankles and never ever have I been so happy.
Every few weeks Sam comes to town and disturbs that happiness.
He stays with Yash and I can’t go to any of the parties they go to.
My name is verboten. When they are together, I don’t exist, Yash tells me.
All their friends know not to mention my name.
When Yash returns to me after the weekend, he doesn’t want to talk about what they did or where they went or what they said.
I hate Sam for this, the way he takes Yash away from me for days at a time and brings him back sullen and petulant and conflicted, the way I used to return to my mother after a weekend at my father’s.
I hate the smell of the room after Sam has been there.
I hate the box of my things that Yash’s housemate lets us store under his bed and that I retrieve once Sam has gone.
Once, in November, after one of Sam’s visits, I don’t go to Yash’s on Sunday night after work and he doesn’t come to Pye Street.
The next morning I decide to do a little test, to see how long it will take him to come to me.
I go to class, work on a story for my thesis in the library.
Chantal is closed Monday nights. Yash and I usually get pizza.
But he doesn’t come or call. I don’t hear from him Tuesday either.
Or all day Wednesday. Gastrell’s seminar is that night.
If I don’t see him before then, if I walk alone to the Breach and take my place beside him on the striped couch I will start to cry and not be able to stop.
I skip my other class that day. I wasn’t able to do the work. I know Yash has class till four.
I walk over to his house. I knock on the door even though I have a key. I feel like I’ve had a pot of coffee. My heart is going so fast. I’m barely in my body.
He opens the door. ‘Hey, Hink!’ It’s confusing. He hugs me tight. ‘Mmmm.’ He presses his nose behind my ear. ‘God, you smell good.’
We go into his room. He’s gotten my box and put everything back where it belongs: my book on the bedside table, my brush on the dresser. He’s been doing a lot of reading. There are at least a dozen books on my side of the bed. I’m trying so hard not to cry.
He opens the closet door and points to the long johns on their hook.
‘I left the red suit out by mistake and Sam held it up and teased me and I thought for a minute he was going to put it on, so I grabbed it out of his hand and he said I’d turned into an asshole.
It was kind of a bad visit. We saw at least five of your friends Saturday night. It was a minefield.’
He hugs me and kisses me and I can’t speak and he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘I’ve missed you. Have you eaten? They had that cheddar you like at Kroger’s.’
He goes to the kitchen and I have a cry in the bathroom.
I want to tell him how I’m feeling, ask him if he noticed that we haven’t seen each other since last Friday.
This is what my old boyfriend Jay meant when he said I bottled things up.
But I’m not good at saying that I feel hurt or forgotten or rejected.
There had been no room for that growing up.
I’m more skilled at burying those emotions. Or hiding them in my fiction.
I go back to his room and he brings me a sandwich and I can’t stop the tears and he says, ‘Oh, Hink, what is it?’
‘I don’t like it when Sam comes here,’ is all I can manage.
He agrees that it’s a tough situation and we lie down on his bed until we have to walk over to the Breach.
In December, when Madame Trèves helps me set the tables, I know something is wrong.
She only helps when she wants to reprimand you.
I’m not sure what I’ve done. She likes me.
She and her husband had Yash and me over for Thanksgiving.
We told her we wanted to write books and live in Paris, and she brought out boxes of photographs and told us about every arrondissement she’d lived in.
‘You know you’re my favorite,’ she says to me, straightening the napkins I have just carefully placed.
‘I am?’
She scowls at me. ‘Of course you know that. And I don’t want to lose you.
I don’t. But I make sacrifices. Not often.
But I do. I have a niece in France. My sister’s daughter.
Two kids, no husband, and her girl just quit.
Why she would employ a German I do not know.
But she is in need. And you want a job in Paris.
So there you go. A match made in heaven with me the only loser.
You can write while the children are at school.
Middle of January you go. You leave me.’ She flicks me away with her fingers, insulted. As if it were all my idea.
On the way home to Yash’s I think about Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris.
I remember Dr. Gastrell saying that Ezra Pound invited James Joyce to stay with him in Paris for a week and Joyce stayed in the city for twenty years and wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
I think about how Dr. Felske is always talking about the two things that bring perspective and revelation to a character: time and distance. I think I have to go.
Yash is up reading. I tell him as soon as I’m through the door.
He is as surprised as I am. He wonders if I’ll get paid enough, and if not, how I will defer my student loans.
I tell him I don’t care about my student loans. ‘How will they even track me down?’