single mother, want with my son? He’s seen her picture on the inner flap of her book. A glamour shot: half-parted mouth, a smart, but plainly sexual look in her eyes. She looks a little wounded, sexually wounded, actually, but there’s hauteur there, too: she is not someone to be messed with. She’s been places, if not literal places. She has the face of an actress, and perhaps that’s why he steps right over me, without apology or acknowledgment, to retrieve some file about the proposed condo project he’s been fighting across the lagoon from our summerhouse.
I’m not sure why I’m not fazed by his gruffness. Maybe it’s simply because I like his den, the no-nonsense masculinity of it: the hard edges, the solid desk, the metal lamp with its dark bronze hood. No pictures on the walls but a serene-spooky Jesus, with a dog-like face, and a band of thorns twisting into a sore, liver-colored heart. I dreamed of this Jesus as a child. I was sitting before him, listening to his mellifluous voice, when a man sprang out of the crowd and shot him in that holy heart. I woke up panting with two hands covering my own heart, and minutes must have gone by before I was back to myself again.
Not long before she dies, Denise mentions that she was always afraid to stay on the line whenever my father picked up the phone. And she laughs when she tells me that. She was afraid he’d be harsh with her, interrogate her. The deadly seriousness of that voice. And I’m amazed to think she had the nerve to keep calling.
Tonight she’s reading to me from the New Novel. She’s been working on the New Novel since not long after the Good Deeds pub party. This book is a lot different from that book: longer, more elaborate sentences. The central character is a writer of children’s books named Emily. Emily has a very young daughter named Lizzie. The husband, Peter, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. And most important, there’s a playwright. This playwright, Gene, rents the second floor of Emily’s house, on a beach block in a beach town based on Ocean City, after coming upon an ad she’d put up in the supermarket. The playwright takes an interest in Emily’s work. The playwright gets to know Emily; he takes an interest in Lizzie. You know where this leads.
The book pivots on one line: “sometimes relationships that didn’t happen are worse than the ones that did.”
I listen to a new page of the book every night. I try to get as many freshman comp papers graded as I can before Denise calls, but if I’m not done by the time she calls, I don’t mind. So I’ll wake up an hour earlier in the morning, so what? Listening to Denise is my real education. And besides, Denise is much more interesting than writing EXAMPLE? or CLARITY? in the margin of some comparison-contrast essay.
At first I am startled by what a terrible listener I am. It isn’t like watching a movie. And it is certainly not like reading. When I read, I’m so prone to stopping midsentence; my attention pools in empty space, and the floaters in my eyes drift down the wall until the next sentence pulls me back in. Denise doesn’t know it, but it can sometimes take me five minutes to get through a single page. Over the phone, her sentences speed past me like meteors, and I can feel Denise listening to me as I’m listening to her. By that I mean she is listening for laughs, pauses, silences after lines that are supposed to be jokes. She is listening for changes in my breathing. The enormity of this responsibility wipes me out sometimes. I stare fixedly at the paperweight on my father’s desk so I won’t get distracted, to anchor my attention.
The book starts, stalls, starts again, as all books do. Should it be in first person? Third? How many points of view? Denise seems determined to develop the language. She wants multifaceted sentences, rich with description and sound, that echo the books she loves: Tender Is the Night, The Stranger, Madame Bovary, Ghost Dance.
I
I’m not sure why I’m not fazed by his gruffness. Maybe it’s simply because I like his den, the no-nonsense masculinity of it: the hard edges, the solid desk, the metal lamp with its dark bronze hood. No pictures on the walls but a serene-spooky Jesus, with a dog-like face, and a band of thorns twisting into a sore, liver-colored heart. I dreamed of this Jesus as a child. I was sitting before him, listening to his mellifluous voice, when a man sprang out of the crowd and shot him in that holy heart. I woke up panting with two hands covering my own heart, and minutes must have gone by before I was back to myself again.
Not long before she dies, Denise mentions that she was always afraid to stay on the line whenever my father picked up the phone. And she laughs when she tells me that. She was afraid he’d be harsh with her, interrogate her. The deadly seriousness of that voice. And I’m amazed to think she had the nerve to keep calling.
Tonight she’s reading to me from the New Novel. She’s been working on the New Novel since not long after the Good Deeds pub party. This book is a lot different from that book: longer, more elaborate sentences. The central character is a writer of children’s books named Emily. Emily has a very young daughter named Lizzie. The husband, Peter, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. And most important, there’s a playwright. This playwright, Gene, rents the second floor of Emily’s house, on a beach block in a beach town based on Ocean City, after coming upon an ad she’d put up in the supermarket. The playwright takes an interest in Emily’s work. The playwright gets to know Emily; he takes an interest in Lizzie. You know where this leads.
The book pivots on one line: “sometimes relationships that didn’t happen are worse than the ones that did.”
I listen to a new page of the book every night. I try to get as many freshman comp papers graded as I can before Denise calls, but if I’m not done by the time she calls, I don’t mind. So I’ll wake up an hour earlier in the morning, so what? Listening to Denise is my real education. And besides, Denise is much more interesting than writing EXAMPLE? or CLARITY? in the margin of some comparison-contrast essay.
At first I am startled by what a terrible listener I am. It isn’t like watching a movie. And it is certainly not like reading. When I read, I’m so prone to stopping midsentence; my attention pools in empty space, and the floaters in my eyes drift down the wall until the next sentence pulls me back in. Denise doesn’t know it, but it can sometimes take me five minutes to get through a single page. Over the phone, her sentences speed past me like meteors, and I can feel Denise listening to me as I’m listening to her. By that I mean she is listening for laughs, pauses, silences after lines that are supposed to be jokes. She is listening for changes in my breathing. The enormity of this responsibility wipes me out sometimes. I stare fixedly at the paperweight on my father’s desk so I won’t get distracted, to anchor my attention.
The book starts, stalls, starts again, as all books do. Should it be in first person? Third? How many points of view? Denise seems determined to develop the language. She wants multifaceted sentences, rich with description and sound, that echo the books she loves: Tender Is the Night, The Stranger, Madame Bovary, Ghost Dance.
I
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