the Writing Circle (2010) (26 page)

There was no point in checking out students with Russian-sounding names. An exchange student wouldn’t have been in the yearbook; she’d been at Bolton for only that one year she was in the United States.

Adam flipped back to the page where Gillian Coit’s photograph would have appeared, ran his fingers over the white space between Mary Beth Cochrane, a serious-looking young woman who had chosen to be photographed against a brick wall, and Judith Cole, who peered down at the photographer from the branches of a tree.

“Didn’t they have color photography back then?” asked Adam.

“Of course they did,” said Nancy, “but black and white was considered more artsy.”

“This one is so artsy,” said Adam, pointing at the bottom of the page, “she’s entirely in shadow.”

Elenah Cooper was, indeed, practically obscured, except for a bit of illumination on the side of one eye. She was, not, however, an obscure undergraduate, and had several lines of activities listed under her name, including the Gold Cup Society, the Drama Club, and
Ailanthus,
editor.

Adam’s forefinger tapped the spot. “We found it!” he cried. “This is phenomenal.”

“We didn’t find it,” said Nancy, “but at least we know it exists.”

“Do you need a cookie?” asked Adam.

Nancy laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “This is great.”

Knowing that
Ailanthus
existed, however, was quite a different matter from finding it. It was nowhere in the archives of the library, and aside from spotting that one mention in the yearbook, they weren’t able to uncover a reference to it anywhere else.

“You might try the English Department,” the reference librarian suggested. “Someone there might know something.”

They made it to the English Department office only fifteen minutes before closing time. The department secretary had never heard of
Ailanthus
but told them old literary magazines might be found in the reading lounge upstairs. “No one has cleaned that place out for years,” she said.

The reading lounge was deserted except for a lone student stretched out in a chair, listening to something on earphones. She wore argyle-patterned tights and a skirt much shorter than any Nancy had dared to wear when she was in college. She barely noticed Nancy, but took in Adam and repositioned her legs on the coffee table. Not long afterwards, she left. Nancy was relieved to have the room to themselves. It wasn’t as if they were doing anything illegal, but it was more comfortable working without worrying that someone might question them. Even so, Nancy couldn’t shake the feeling that Gillian herself would appear at the door and ask, “What do you think you’re doing?” But Nancy was fired up now. She’d confront Gillian. She’d stand her ground.

The bookcase-lined room was two stories high, with a library ladder for access to the upper shelves. At one end was a stone fireplace worthy of an English manor house. It looked as if it had never been used. Ceramic ashtrays, back from the days when smoking had been allowed, were stacked on the mantel. Nancy and Adam divided the room and worked towards each other. The shelves housed a hodgepodge of discarded books, periodicals, old student newspapers, and bound student theses. There was no order to the collection; critical studies on now-unfashionable writers were shelved beside out-of-date bestsellers. It didn’t look as if anyone had consulted any of the books for years. When it started getting dark, Nancy found the light panel and turned on the overhead lights that dangled from metal chains. A janitor poked her head in and emptied a wastebasket by the door.

“How late is this room open?” Nancy asked.

“We lock the building at ten,” said the janitor.

“Are you getting hungry?” Nancy asked Adam.

“Getting there,” he said.

They found a pizza place near campus. The front window was steamed up, and the neon letters spelling out “Apollo Pizza” had a mysterious glow.

They sat in a booth along the wall. The pizza had so much melted cheese it resembled a lunar surface. Adam bit into his without waiting for it to cool. A web of cheese connected the piece in his hand with the one on the plate. He went through three pieces of pizza before looking up at her.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said.

“Yes?”

“At Gillian’s book party, when you went up to Gillian . . . remember?”

Nancy waited. She hadn’t expected Adam would remind her of that evening.

“I overheard you say something about your father. What was that about?”

“Oh,” said Nancy. She hadn’t been thinking about her father; she had tucked him away in a safe place in her mind, far from any taint of revenge. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this to anyone—except Oates. But in this pizza place, miles from home, on this hunt that Adam had teamed up with her for, it seemed she might as well.

“The doctor in my novel was inspired by my father,” she said. “He decided to stop practicing medicine because he felt inadequate. It wasn’t his lack of skill as a doctor, but the profession as a whole. Gillian took him and turned him into an incompetent—a doctor convicted of malpractice.”

Adam was listening intently. Nancy leaned toward him across the table. “She sensationalized him, she maligned him. She
used
him.”

Nancy hadn’t realized it, but while she had been speaking, her hands had tightened into fists. Adam’s hands covered them now. His warm palms encompassed her knuckles.

“She used me, too,” he said.

WHEN THEY RETURNED
to the reading lounge, they picked up where they had left off. They worked for two hours more. They were in the middle section of the main bookcase, Adam on the ladder, Nancy on her knees going through a low shelf, when someone from campus security came by. He was an older man in a grey uniform that looked a size too small for him.

“Building closes in half an hour,” he said. He took another look at Nancy. “Mind if I ask what you folks are doing here?”

Nancy stood up and smiled at him. “I’m a visiting scholar, and this is my research assistant,” she said. “Would you like me to show you some identification?”

“Nah,” he said. “Nothing worth stealing in this place.”

After he left, Adam came down the ladder. “Your research assistant is done up here,” he said.

“I’m done, too,” said Nancy. She sank down on the sofa facing the fireplace. Adam sat down beside her.

“I guess we might as well head home now,” she said. “I don’t know where to go from here. I was so sure we’d find something in this place.”

“We’ve still got half an hour,” said Adam.

“But we’ve been through every shelf,” said Nancy.

“What about those cabinets?” asked Adam.

“Where?”

“Beside the fireplace,” said Adam.

Nancy looked where he pointed. There were leaded-glass windows on either side of the fireplace, and below the windowsills were wooden panels with barely visible knobs. She hadn’t noticed before that they were cabinet doors.

Adam took the cabinet on the left, Nancy the one on the right. She opened the door and squatted to peer inside. The cabinet was deep, and there was no light. The upper shelf was packed with old journals. She lifted out an armful. They were all back issues of
The White Mountain Review
.

“Anything there?” she asked Adam.

“So far it looks like there’s nothing but old course catalogs,” said Adam.

Nancy wrestled out a cardboard box that was wedged into the lower shelf. It was filled with ancient course handouts of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Behind it was a stack of pamphlets. She reached in and pulled it out. When she set the pile on the floor, it slipped sideways and fanned across the carpet. She lifted the top pamphlet.
Ailanthus
was printed in Bookman Old Style in the center of the cover, and beneath the title was the black profile of a tree. It was nothing more than a slender sheaf of mimeographed paper with an off-white cover, two staples, their prongs now rusty, holding it together. Inside it was all student poems.

“We got it!” she said.

They grabbed all the pamphlets from the cabinet and spread them out on the floor.
Ailanthus
had been published biannually and had survived for several years. There were multiple copies of some issues, only one or two for others.

“We’ve got only about twenty minutes,” said Adam.

They snatched up the issues for the years Gillian had been at Bolton. The year that Gillian was a sophomore Nancy found poems by a student named Anya Kuznetsov listed in the table of contents. She handed the copy to Adam.

“You look,” she said.

She watched him read through the poems. The paper snapped as he turned the pages. Suddenly he paused. His head didn’t move; his fingers froze. “Bingo!” he cried.

He tilted the page to show Nancy. His finger pointed to the spot. “Translucence is not transcendence,” he read aloud. “They come at different times.” He shut his eyes and recited: “Translucence, not transcendence. Nor time allows, nor years.” He opened his eyes. “Gillian’s poem goes off in a different way,” he said. Then he added, sadly, “It’s one of her best poems.”

BEFORE THEY LEFT FOR THE DRIVE BACK,
Nancy went down the hall to use the bathroom. The floor was covered with black and white octagonal tiles, an optical illusion; as she moved her head, it was a white floor with black, or a black floor with white. The bathroom was all hard surfaces, and sounds were magnified: the Niagara-sized flush, the metal stall door swinging back into place, the pressing of the plunger of the soap dispenser on the wall.

The hot water felt good on Nancy’s hands. She splashed water on her face and blotted it with a paper towel. Her face, in the mirror over the sink, looked like that of a woman who’d been up all night. She started to take out her makeup, but decided she didn’t really care enough. It really didn’t matter what she looked like, it didn’t matter at all. She stepped out into the hallway, the bathroom door closing slowly behind her. Gillian had walked down this hallway when she’d been a student here. She’d sat in these classrooms, wandered into the lounge.

“I’ve got you,” Nancy wanted to crow at her—through time. “I’ve got you at last!”

NANCY WAS SO TIRED
she considered asking Adam if he wanted to drive back, but he was so keyed up she was afraid he would suddenly collapse. He chose a radio station that had rock music she would never listen to on her own and hummed along, poorly, out of tune, tapping a beat on the armrest.

When they were getting close to his house, Nancy turned off the radio.

“You know, Adam,” she began, “we do need to be a little realistic here. A few words—that’s all we really have—it might not be enough.”

“It’s not just those few words,” said Adam. “We’ve got something more.”

“But there was only that one poem.”

“Yes, but there are about fifty in Anya Kuznetsov’s thesis.”

“Her thesis?” asked Nancy.

“When you were in the bathroom, I checked out those bound theses in the bookcase. I found hers and glanced through it. I spotted some other stuff. I have it, right here, with those copies of
Ailanthus,
” said Adam, and he patted his briefcase on the floor between his feet.

“You took it?” asked Nancy. “You just took it from the shelf?”

“Don’t worry,” said Adam. “You have nothing more to do with this now. I’m delivering all this to Chris myself.”

C
HRIS HAD HIS FRIEND, BUT GILLIAN HAD HER FRIEND, TOO.
He wasn’t able to rescue the prize for her, but he did leak to her what had happened. The Pulitzer Committee saw her as a potential liability—those few echoes of lines from the poems of another student many years before were insignificant in themselves, but everyone was nervous there might be something more. A Pulitzer Prize winner was high-profile, a choice target for the jealous and resentful. They’d go after those skeletons, they’d deconstruct the closet itself.

Gillian was upstairs at her desk when the call came. She had been expecting very different news. She was so astonished she was barely able to respond, to protest. She sat for a moment, running the words over again in her head, trying to find some opening in them, some contradiction that would render them untrue, but the fact they conveyed was irrefutable. Her wrists felt cold against the edge of the desk, and the cold spread upwards through her arms, to her shoulders. She reached for the sweater that was usually slung over the back of her desk chair, but it wasn’t there.

She got up and walked to the door. Jerry was downstairs in the kitchen. When she opened the door to call out to him to come up to her, she heard him talking to Paul. She hadn’t realized Paul was home. She closed the door and looked out the window at the darkening meadow. A blue jay coasted across the open expanse, seeking refuge in the woods beyond.

Anya Kuznetsov. She had not thought of the name for so many years, had pushed it away, cleaned her mind of it. She worked to remember what Anya had looked like. Lank, blond hair tucked behind her ears. Big ears, and a narrow face. She’d never read Anya’s poems—she saw no point in reading student magazines, pretentious, shallow stuff—but she had once heard her read them. It was at the department’s poetry competition, which Gillian had entered only because there was a hundred-dollar prize. That was a lot of money for her then, and when she won she’d used it to buy course books and one frivolous luxury, an Indian silk scarf, lapis blue, with a pattern of swirls and leaves in red and violet and green. It was long enough to circle her neck and flutter to her waist. She’d bought it in Harvard Square when she was visiting a boyfriend there. The shop smelled of incense and teak and brass. The scarf had been the most exotic thing she had owned, proof of a world she was determined to visit someday, far beyond the stark New England landscape. She hadn’t worn it for years—if she wore a scarf at all it was a solid black or the green-blue-grey of her eyes—but she was fairly sure she still had it. She found it in a drawer, under the pile of perfectly folded scarves, and pulled it out. The silk in her hand felt thin and light, almost not there at all.

It was two years later when her thesis advisor, Professor Jacobson, accused her of copying Anya’s poems. But she hadn’t copied them. Some phrases from them had gotten caught in her unconscious—the way the eelgrass at the edge of the bay catches the detritus of the rising tide—and ended up in the poems in her senior thesis. She had been reading so much poetry then, scooping it up like someone starved for words. First, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Then Eliot, Pound, and Wallace Stevens. And, finally, Yeats. She had memorized most of his poems, and would recite them to herself for an hour without pause. She had learned from all these poets: their rhythms, their cadences, their density. But she had never copied them.

Towards the end of the semester, after she turned in the final copy of her poetry manuscript, Professor Jacobson had invited her to meet him for lunch. She assumed they were celebrating the completion of her thesis. The honors committee was meeting the next week, and Professor Jacobson had hinted that she could expect to be awarded a summa.

They ate at the Dorset Hotel, in the restaurant behind the bar. During commencement weekend, the hotel would be packed, even though it lacked the amenities of the two newer hotels closer to campus, but it was quiet now. Professor Jacobson’s house was far out in the country, and he sometimes rented a room at the Dorset, he told her, so he wouldn’t have to drive home when he worked late on campus.

They sat in a curved booth in the back of the restaurant. At dinnertime the table would be covered with a tablecloth, but now it was a half circle of black Formica, shiny as patent leather. Even so, it had seemed like elegant dining to her. The silverware came rolled up in a white linen napkin. Gillian unrolled hers carefully; Professor Jacobson yanked at the corner of his napkin, his silverware clattering on the tabletop.

They had finished their lobster bisque and sandwiches, and were waiting for their blueberry cobbler when Professor Jacobson explained that the reason for this meeting was to discuss a problem that had arisen with her thesis. He told Gillian that a line in one of her poems had struck him as familiar, and he had finally hunted down the thesis of a student whom he had worked with two years before and compared the poems side by side. Gillian insisted she had never read Anya’s poetry, only heard it that one time, but he made it clear he didn’t believe her. When he showed Gillian Anya’s poem for proof, she was surprised but unapologetic. She had no reason to apologize, and would not have apologized even if she had done something wrong. She never apologized for anything. Professor Jacobson suggested she resubmit her thesis and remove the poem in question. But she argued that her poem was a different poem entirely, and even Professor Jacobson had to admit it was better than the original.

THE ELEVATOR WAS
small and creaky and gave a little bump when it landed on the fourth floor, jostling them closer together. He took her hand as he led her down the corridor, which turned the corner twice before they reached the door of his room.

It was the first time she had made love with someone who was this much older than she. Naked, under the covers, she had watched while he shed his shirt and took off his pants and his undershorts. He’d kept his eye on her while he massaged his penis back and forth. He pulled the blankets back off the bed and looked at her.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, “so beautiful.” Her skin had pebbled with cold, but he hadn’t noticed. He knelt beside her on the bed, and she rolled towards him as the mattress sloped under his weight. He touched her small, flat breasts. He parted her legs with his fingers, then parted her labia with his tongue. It was the first time anyone had sucked her there. She closed her eyes. She heard the sound of him ripping a condom wrapper with his teeth. She lifted her knees, and he lumbered on top of her. Her arms went around him, and she could feel the hair on his shoulders.

“I want you to come,” he told her, and she tried to keep herself from coming just because that was what he wanted. But she lost the power to do so. Her body shook loose on its own.

“Blanche, my princess,” he said. “My beautiful white princess.”

THE SCARF LAY ON HER DESK,
a swath of vivid color across the plain wood surface. The label, held by a single blue thread, stared up at her. handwoven pure silk made in india. She crumpled the scarf and pushed it off the side of the desk, to the floor.