Early Decision (14 page)

Anne picked up the phone. A small voice rapidly explained the rather convoluted reason for the call, which was, as best she could work out, to ask a few questions relating to a course Anne had once taken with Toni Morrison at Princeton. The reporter sounded young. He was calling from the East Coast, some paper whose name made sense to Anne but which she then immediately forgot. The
Rahway Review
. The
Hopewell Sentinel
.

“Who is it?” repeated Martin.

Anne cupped the phone in her palm. “Just someone who wants to talk about Toni Morrison.”

He leaned back, letting his muscles tighten further, and gave her a deep nod of approval. She took the phone into the kitchen to get a Diet Coke, and because it would keep his curiosity aroused.

“How can I help you?” she asked the caller.

“You studied with Professor Morrison, is that right?”

So, yes, she'd been accepted into a class with Toni Morrison. A small writing seminar. It was the sort of point of pride that had a sell-by date, being more about promise than achievement, and lately it made her wince to remember. That spring had followed the awarding of the Nobel, and when Professor Morrison sailed across campus, students found themselves at their windows looking out before they knew what had drawn them there. All semester Anne had sat, mostly terrified, and studied the writer's dreadlocks—those gorgeous silver ropes—which had had a kind of Medusa effect. She'd never worked up the courage to ask her first question: how were you supposed to pronounce
Sethe
?

“I did,” Anne answered the reporter. It sounded like a confession.

“Creative writing, is that right?” asked the reporter.

“Yes. Long fiction.”

Martin had followed her into the kitchen and was sitting, in his boxer shorts, on one of two tall kitchen stools. He shook out a cigarette but made a show of waiting to light it until they were outside, a courtesy he extended when he felt Anne deserved respect.

“That's great,” said the caller. “Amazing. Could you tell me a bit about what she was like? As a professor?”

As teachers went, Toni Morrison was not nice, but she'd been honest, and—hell—she was
Toni Morrison
. Sitting there with their sheaves of short fiction in her lap while the late-Friday light fell across Nassau Street. This was why you went to the top colleges, right? To get in front of the big guns. Such an excess of opportunity, it was almost alarming. Princeton hitting its high notes. Though every campus had its stars—you could swing a paperback and hit a great writer anywhere in higher education, really, and in some ways, the grander the grandee, the less learned. Nobody was fool enough to think they were writing the next
Beloved
. Anne and her classmates just wanted to hear Toni Morrison talk. As a teacher, she had resisted the oracular but had on occasion given out life advice, which they'd cherished so fiercely they repeated it only to each other.

One afternoon a junior, a lovely Indian woman, had come in stifling sobs. Morrison observed her for a long moment and then proclaimed, “When a man says he doesn't deserve you, he's right.”

Martin had never said this, incidentally. Anne had been listening for it since the day they'd met.

To the reporter, Anne said, “She was great. She was Toni Morrison. What do you want to know?”

“Tell him she gave you an A,” whispered Martin. She shook him off.

“Well, maybe a bit about what you worked on with her, and where you are with your work now?” said the reporter. “Something about how she helped you get your start?”

“Tell him!” Martin hissed.

She took her drink and turned away.

“Oh, it was just a sophomore story,” Anne explained, hoping to sound as modest as she felt. “You know how that stuff is. I don't even remember it now.” And she was pretty sure everyone had gotten an A. It was creative writing, for heaven's sake. Not that she'd tell that to Martin.

“You don't write anymore, then?”

“Not really, no.”

“Oh,” he said, deflated. She heard him shuffling through some pages. God, this is why I quit public radio, she thought smugly. The earnest rookie tones were making her cringe.

Martin had come round to face her and set his hands on her hips, pressing himself against her, in part to distract her from her focus on something other than him, and in part because he was radically excited by the sort of attention Anne was receiving now. She bobbed away from his nuzzling.

“So let's see . . .” the reporter said, buying time. “There were six of you in that class, is that correct?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“And what can you tell me about your classmates? They're, let's see . . . Nina Gupta. She's a writer.”

Postcolonial novelist. Long-listed for the Orange Prize. “Yep, she is,” Anne said.

“Right.” He shuffled again. Anne imagined a short, overweight hack, some would-be book critic for a dogpatch New Jersey paper. “Okay. And Seth Gantrim? Also a writer.”

Anne recalled a monster book, the size and weight of a cinder block, called
Block
—thirteen hundred pages of experimental fiction she had no intention of facing. The publisher had designed the book to look like a cinder block, too, so when it had come out, to mostly puzzled reviews, the front table at the Barnes & Noble looked at first glance like they were doing some patch-up work to the wall behind. Among other things, Gantrim was interested in the ability of words to take up space.

“He is, yes,” she answered. Martin had hooked one finger under her waistband and was running another across her belly.

“Right. And, let's see, Amelia Jenkins, she's teaching at Yale—”

“African American studies, I think, yes.”

“Right, and Emily Bruton is a district attorney . . .”

“What's the question?” Anne asked, growing suddenly hot. Thank God Martin couldn't hear this guy. So everyone else had taken flight. So what? Did they have a man like Martin in their living rooms? An actor and real-live playwright, just on the cusp of landing big in L.A.? Someone with those amazing little hollows at the base of his hipbones, where the elastic from his shorts sat light as a touch? Anne gulped soda and pulled away, cradling the phone. Over her shoulder she gave Martin a big smile that she hoped looked conspiratorial.

“No, just, it's just that your class was, is, full of people who are pretty amazingly successful,” said the caller. “And pretty young, I mean, not even thirty. So I was just wondering, you know, what Toni Morrison did or said that helped people, or whether it was just the power of her course, or just luck?”

Anne was quiet. This was unbelievable. Well, it was totally believable, given her attitude of late, but what made it unbelievable was that Martin was there, so she couldn't just hang up and cry.

“Have you talked to Professor Morrison?” she asked the reporter.

There was a pause.

“Well, no. She's not been available for comment as of yet.”

“Have you talked to anyone else? From my class?”

“Ah. No.”

Anne shook her head and frowned. “Sorry, who did you say you wrote for, again?”

He cleared his throat. “The
Metuchen H. S. Quarterly
.”

“I don't think I know . . .” Anne stumbled.

“Right,” replied the reporter. “Well, technically, it's the
Bulldog's Bark
. It's a high school paper. I'm in high school.”

“Now?” Anne squeaked.

“No, right now I'm outside,” answered the kid. “I have a second period free.”

Martin, seeing her eyes grow big, chased round to face her and grinned. “Is it the
New York Times
?” he whispered. “The
Atlantic
?” His eyes were wild. “Print or glossy? Give me a clue.”

“Sorry, do you need a moment?” continued the kid.

“I'm good,” Anne said. “That was just my dog.”

“Ah. Because, actually, I was going to ask your help with that. The others. Your number was the only one I could find. And hey, what did you say your job was now—tutoring, is that right?”

“I didn't say,” she stalled. Then something occurred to her. “I can help you with the others,” she offered, quickly shifting to her desk chair. It was easy enough to find everyone through the alumni network. “Tell me which numbers you want. Or do you prefer e-mail?”

“Oh, really?” said the kid. “So you all keep in touch? That's wonderful. Yeah, I suppose you would. Wow. Because a lot were hard to get, you know, from the people who are authors or whatever. So that'd be cool.”

He rattled off names. Anne typed. Their profiles popped up, trailing accolades. Four women and one man. Anne smiled to see the name of the one person she'd befriended a bit in that chilly class, a screenwriter named Kellie Walker. Now she lied: “Sorry, there's nothing listed for Kellie Walker. She was always very introverted. She must want real privacy.”

The kid let out a stream of profuse thanks.

Anne interrupted him. “How did you get my number?”

“Oh,” he said, at his most sheepish. “My aunt? She lives in Short Hills? And she knows a woman on her street whose daughter worked with an independent college counselor who studied with Toni Morrison. So, yeah. So that was you, I guess.”

“Guess so,” said Anne. “Bye-bye.”

Martin, exhausted by the exercise of patience, had opened a window to the cold morning and lit up. He exhaled toward the frosty air. “What was that all about?” he asked. “You didn't give him any good quotes.”

“Just someone writing about Toni Morrison. Happy to help,” she said.

“Writing for who?”

“I don't remember. New York local.”

“The
Post
?
Village Voice
?”

“Something like that.”

“And what's the deal with Kellie Walker? You don't mean
Kellie Walker
? The real one?”

“Are there fake ones?”

“She's brilliant. You didn't tell me you knew her. Do you know her?”

“I used to, sure.”

“My God. You should call her. Let's have dinner next time you're out.”

Next time?

Anne was struggling. Her apartment was filling with smoke, but she couldn't blame that for the ache in her chest. She decided to be bold.

“Martin,” she said, sitting down across from him. “I'm actually kind of sad. This hurts. All these other people in that class, they're kicking ass now. I hadn't thought about it before now, but I just had to hear all about what they're up to, and it's all this cool stuff. And I'm . . .”

She didn't want to damn herself completely. She raised her shoulders in a shrug and was quiet. He could finish the sentence, of course, any way he wanted; they both saw his opportunity. They waited.

Martin exhaled again, forgetting the window and sending a cloud toward her face. “The thing is,” he said, “it was her first full-length script, the one they nominated last year. I heard she just wrote it and sent it to an agent. No wonder, though. I've read it. It's like the plot points just float to the surface, totally inevitable. You can't see the ropes. A wizard.”

Anne waved smoke from her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“I was at a party with her not long ago,” he continued. “She's a tiny little thing. I was going to go up and say something.”

“Martin, please.”

“Annie, what.” It was not a question. He brought his eyes back down to her, as if lowering himself, by force, to the level of her feelings. He said, “Don't dwell on that stuff.”

“Don't dwell?”

“No. Just get on with your own business.”

“That's my point, exactly, though,” she said, and now she did begin to cry. Fucking kid. Standing there on his cell phone in a high school parking lot. He'd unraveled her. And when Martin was in town. And when she had only a few hours to pull herself together before joining Gideon Blanchard, of all people, for lunch at a fancy place downtown.

“What's your point?” Martin prompted, softening some.

“That I don't know what job I want. I just don't know.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer and sat back, looking at her. She watched him enjoy being watched. Don't give me the actor, she thought; give me the playwright. I need you to be smart and wise. Make something happen. I need help here.

He reached forward and took her glass from her hand, gently, and then drained it—the last, ice-cold gulps, perfectly citrusy. He set it down.

“I think,” he answered, “by this point in your life, you don't need a job so much as you need a career.”

She felt pitched into the deep. She was exhausted. How many times could a person fail to be kind before you concluded that he was cruel?

The morning was getting late. “I need to walk the dog,” she said.

COMMON APPLICATION SHORT ANSWER

Anne this is supposed to be 150 words but I have 162 and can't figure out what to take out. Thanks, Hunter

Other than spending time with my friends, probably, tennis is the most important activity in my life. During the season and summer training I practice up to four hours a day and although my body gets tired, I never really get tired of playing the game. Tennis is the perfect sport because unlike in so many sports, where something happens and then it's over, like a race, with tennis you have so many chances to make it perfect. The ball is always coming back. (Unless you hit a winner). Also it's perfect because you can play with other people but you are still solely responsible for your own wins and losses. They like to say, “There's no “I” in “Team” but to them I reply, “There is an “I” in “Tennis”. I like the responsibility of chalking up the W – L for my own day, and contributing to my team in that way, by giving it my very best on the court.