After the Workshop (26 page)

I quickly flipped through the pages, hoping Jedediah might slip his hand under her bra, or she might unzip his fly. But no: We learned even more about the Amish. Amish foods, Amish ceremonies, Amish vehicles.

I leaned back and put my feet up onto my coffee table. I was about to forge ahead when I lowered the book and examined the space around my feet. It was empty.

“Why, you son of a bitch,” I said, standing up and searching the apartment for my novel. I looked under the phone books; I checked the bathroom; I scanned the tops of bookcases.

It was gone.

I went out into the breezeway and pounded on M. Cat’s door. At first I heard nothing, but during my second round of knocking, M. Cat yelled for me to open the door. A bed sheet was wrapped around him, as though he were getting ready to go to a toga party.

“What’s
this
?” I asked, smiling, but before I could say another word, Lauren Castle came out from the bedroom, also swathed in a sheet. The look she gave me was that of a boss dealing with an incompetent employee.

“I hope you’re here because you found Vanessa,” Lauren said. “Otherwise . . .” She raised her eyebrows.

“Have either of you seen S. S.?” I asked.

Without another word, Lauren headed back toward M. Cat’s bedroom. M. Cat said, “Dude, can this, like, wait?”

“So you haven’t seen him,” I said.

“Well, yeah, we saw him maybe twenty minutes ago,” M. Cat said. “He gave me a message to give to you.” M. Cat glanced toward the bedroom. He reached up with a bandaged hand, as if to say,
Hold on!

“And?”

“And he told me to tell you that he was sorry but that it was all for the best, and that if you couldn’t see that right now, you would eventually.” M. Cat said, “Sorry, dude, but I need to go.” With his foot, he shut the door.

I stood there until an overwhelming exhaustion blanketed me. Nothing seemed particularly real. My head felt as though it had been carefully packed in cotton. For a moment, I couldn’t fathom why I had spent so much of my life in Iowa, of all places. The sensation was like waking from a bad dream, only to realize that things were worse in real life than they had been when sound asleep.

I drifted back into my apartment, locked the door, put up the security chain for the first time in years, and crawled into bed.

—JAMES FREY

T
HOUGH I LIKED most of my classmates at Iowa, there were still the liars and the lunatics to contend with, like Tom O’Malley, who did his undergrad at Bowdoin, one of the most expensive private colleges in the country, but was a kleptomaniac (he’d ask you for a quarter for the parking meter and then slip the coin into his pocket, or he’d steal the tips off the bar when no one was looking), or Christopher Le Grand, whose father was a psychotherapist to Hollywood’s A-listers but who, whose father was a psychotherapist to Hollywood’s A-listers but who, one night at my apartment when I went to the bathroom, turned up all the knobs of my gas stove, filling the apartment with poison. Chris and I went to the Foxhead that night and drank hard, and then I slept the next day until 5:00 PM. What finally forced me out of bed and into the hallway was a burning desire to check my mail for the daily batch of rejection slips, and it was only after groggily returning to my apartment with
Missouri Review
and
Shenandoah
rejections in hand that I heard the hissing stove and saw what Christopher had done.

In truth, I could deal with the Toms and the Christophers of the Workshop better than I could deal with the whiners, the ones who couldn’t take criticism. Each of us had been the star writer at our undergraduate college, but now we were just one of many. Some of my classmates couldn’t stomach this sad reality, and none took it worse than Brian Albrecht.

Brian was a forty-something student who dressed like a janitor and wore a three-foot wallet chain that scraped the floor when he sat down, and on the first day of Peter Stark’s workshop, Brian volunteered to turn in the first eighty pages of his novel for the following week’s workshop. Stark was a famous magazine editor, notorious for sending cutting rejections to writers like John Updike and Eudora Welty, and this was the first time he’d stepped foot in a classroom as teacher.

That next week, we students talked diligently about Brian’s novel as though we were discussing
The Grapes of Wrath
. Stark sat at the head of the table, remaining silent but smiling as we prattled on. When we were done, Brian Albrecht, pleased with our comments, turned to Stark and said, “Well?”

Stark said, “Starting on page sixty-three, you’ve got two good pages, but the rest of it is maudlin and melodramatic. I’d take a good look at those two pages but throw the rest of it away.”

Brian, who was sitting next to Stark at the long conference table, said nothing. When Stark asked for volunteers for the following week, Brian’s arm shot up.

Stark, grinning, probably trying not to laugh, said, “Are you sure?”

Brian nodded. When he sat up straighter, his chain dragged across the tile, clanging against the chair’s legs.

The next week, the scene repeated itself almost verbatim. We, Brian’s classmates, diligently praised the subsequent seventy pages of his novel while raising the occasional question about character motivation or plot convenience; Stark remained silent, but the look on his face was that of a man who was thinking of a funny incident from his past.

When we were finally done patting Brian on the back for a novel that, in all honesty, was horseshit, Stark said, “I want to congratulate Brian. I mean, after last week and all, I certainly wouldn’t have turned in another installment. But I’m glad you did.”

Brian was grinning now, waiting for vindication.

“Remember how last week I said there were two pages worth saving?” Stark said. “Well, I’ve reconsidered that. I think you should throw
all
of it away.”

Brian, who was still seated directly to Stark’s right, sat up and said, “What’s your problem, man?”

“No problem,” Stark said. “This just isn’t working. Last week I was
trying
to find something good to say, which is why I cited those two pages, but
this
week I realized that I’d done a disservice. Just throw it in the trash, Brian. All of it.”

Brian stood up, fists clenched. “Come on,” he said.

“What?” Stark asked, smiling but looking around the table at all of us now. We remained frozen in place, waiting to see how this was going to play out.

“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Brian said.

“Brian,” Stark said calmly. “Sit down. No one’s fighting anyone. Go on now,” he said in the reassuring voice of a hostage negotiator. “Just sit down so that I can continue. Okay?”

Brian finally sat down, slumping so far in his chair that his wallet chain coiled up beside him like a snake.

Stark stared at Brian for a minute, then reached over and squeezed his shoulder.

Brian didn’t workshop another word but continued to show up, even though he said nothing. As for Stark, he left Iowa at the end of the semester with the reputation of having been the worst teacher the Workshop had ever seen—an unfair but predictable assessment.

Witnessing so many other writers pout taught me one thing: Never sulk. Or, rather, never sulk in public. Public sulking wasn’t pleasant to watch. Most of the time, after a particularly brutal workshop that left the writer under scrutiny sulking and defensive, I would walk away
embarrassed for him. Brian Albrecht’s semester-long silent treatment, even during discussions of his classmates’ stories, sent a clear message that he thought he was better than all of us: Since his own work wasn’t greeted with the fanatical enthusiasm that he felt it deserved, he wouldn’t waste his time reading and responding to our crap. By semester’s end, I wanted to strangle him with his own wallet chain.

I had been dreaming about the Stark-Albrecht workshop when a ringing phone woke me. I had no idea what time it was, or even what day. For that matter, I wasn’t even sure at what point in my life I had woken. I could have been back in the Workshop, Gordon Grimes could still have been alive, and I might have had a new short story due this week.

“Jack?” the voice said. “Jack, is that you?”

“Who is this?” I asked, blinking, reaching for the light switch. It was extraordinarily dark in my room, but I was still wearing my shoes.

“It’s S. S., Jack,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” I said, and the day came back into sharp focus: the B&B, the drinking, the Iowa River, Paul Revere’s Pizza, roofies, my novel. The key to making the most out of a dull life was to pack it all into about six or seven hours.

“Please don’t sound so disappointed,” S. S. said. “You’re breaking an old man’s heart.”

“You stole my novel,” I said, flipping on the light.

“That I can’t deny,” S. S. said. “But I want to convince you that I’m doing this more for you than for me.”

“You’re in denial then,” I said. “You’re doing this for yourself.”

“Perhaps,” S. S. said. “But this novel . . . it’s killing you, my friend. It’s given you terminal writer’s block. You’re suffering. By cutting this tumor of a book out of your life, I’m saving you.”

“Very poetic,” I said. “Good use of the extended metaphor. Very nice.”

“Thank you,” S. S. said. “But do listen to me—”

“No, you listen to
me
. I’m going to find you, you son of a bitch.”

Someone knocked on my door.

“I need to go,” I said.

“I beg of you,” S. S. began, “there’s something I need to tell you first,” but I hung up.

The knock came again. I knew it wasn’t M. Cat; his hands were bandaged. I doubted it was Lauren Castle; the knocks weren’t hard enough. Vanessa, perhaps? But how would she have known where I lived? Vince Belecheck would have kicked open the door with his work boots, whereas Tate Rinehart, knowing what I now knew about his journal, wouldn’t have dared track me down.

I eased open the door. A woman stood in the hallway, holding a small suitcase and smiling up at me.

“Jack Sheahan?” she said.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was six thirty.

“Do you know what time of the morning it is, lady?” I asked.

She examined her watch. “It’s six thirty,” she said, “in the evening.”

“Oh,” I said, and there was something about the way this woman looked at me, a commingling of hope and pity, that brought who she was into sharp focus.

“Lucy?” I asked. “Lucy Rogan?”

She was shorter than I had remembered, and she had a gray swath of hair that looked more purposeful than the ravages of age, but I could see it now in her eyes, this same woman who had sat in my car and made herself so vulnerable to me all those years ago.

She nodded. “May I?” she asked and stepped over the threshold into my apartment.

“Sure, sure,” I said, moving out of her way. I glanced at my coffee table to see if Lucy’s novel was still there—I didn’t want her to know
that I had been reading it—but, along with my own novel, it too was gone.

“Have a seat,” I said, motioning toward the couch. “Can I get you something to drink? Diet Coke? Diet Cherry 7-Up? Mug Root Beer? Sprite Zero?”

“Do you have water?” she asked.

“Bottle?” I asked.

“Tap’s fine,” she said. “With an ice cube?”

I opened the freezer, making sure I could fulfill her request. There was only one tray of cubes that hadn’t yet given up the ghost.

“One tap water with a single cube coming up!” I called out.

When I brought it to her, I could tell that she was reading the spines of the books in my bookcase, but unlike most people I knew, who would shout out an author’s name with glee (“Dan McCall! Oh, my God. I thought I was the only person who read Dan McCall,” or “I can’t believe you own Rick Demarinis’s first novel! I’ve never even seen a copy of it”), Lucy regarded my collection with suspicion.

“A lot of interesting books,” she said.

I nodded. I sat in a chair across from her. I said, “Wow, it’s good to see you again.”

Lucy smiled but said nothing.

I said, “It’s been, what, five years? Six?”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, setting her water down on Vanessa’s book, something a book collector, fearful of ruining the book’s dust jacket, would never have done. “Do we know each other?”

I stared at the ever-growing ring of condensation on Vanessa’s book.
Did we know each other?

“Have we met before?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you came here because . . .” I stopped. I realized just how creepy what I was about to say would sound,
that she had come here because she had been thinking of me the way I had been thinking of her. “So,
why
are you here again?” I asked.

“I was hired,” Lucy said, “by a writer named S. S. Pitzer to come here and help you. He said you’d be expecting me.”

“To help me what?”

“He told me you’re starting a new book and need help getting going on it.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “And, what, you flew in this morning?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I live in Cedar Rapids.”

“You
moved
here?”

“About three years ago,” she said.

“Let me get this straight. S. S.
hired
you?” I asked.

“I’m a writing coach on the side,” she said. “He must have seen my website.”

I reached down, removed Lucy’s drinking glass from the book, and then picked up the book and wiped it on my pants leg, setting it on top of a stack of books by writers I had escorted last month, writers who, given these last few days, I barely remembered now. And if I could barely remember the authors I’d escorted, how could I have expected Lucy to remember me? It was foolish to think she would. She had published dozens of novels, and for each one, she had been sent to a dozen cities. In the past five years alone, she had probably met over a hundred author escorts.