‘That’s not really heartbreak then, is it?’
The road and the houses with their big backyards grow blurry. ‘He just blasted me apart. I don’t even know where to find the bolts and screws. I always thought that if ever there came a time when I didn’t hold anything back and just laid my heart on the table—’ I have to squeak out the rest. ‘Which I did. I did that this time. And it still wasn’t enough.’
She wraps an arm around me and pulls me in tight. ‘I know how you feel. You know I do. It’s good to get whacked open at least once, though,’ she says. ‘You can’t really love from inside a big thick shell.’
She turns onto a small lane lined with cars. The party is at the end on the left, a massive house: bow windows, three stories, mansard roof. The doorway is jammed. We stand on the threshold, unable to enter. The other guests are mostly older by twenty or thirty years, the women in stockings and heels, the men in sports jackets. The air smells like a cocktail party from the seventies, aftershave and martini onions.
The party is for a writer who leads a fiction workshop at his house near the Square on Wednesday nights. Muriel’s been urging me to join it, but the idea of showing anyone any part of my novel is too painful to consider right now. I can’t look back at it. I have to keep moving forward. She insists I won’t have to show my work, that I can just check out the scene there, meet some other people who don’t make you feel crazy for all your life choices. The writer had been a professor at BU until three years ago when his wife died, and he left teaching to write full-time and be home for his kids. But he’d missed teaching and started the workshop. He doesn’t teach exactly, Muriel says. He has people read their work aloud, but he rarely speaks when they’re done. They’ve come to understand that if he likes what he’s hearing, his hands will move to his knees. And if he doesn’t, his arms remain crossed over his chest. And if he really loves it, his fingers will be laced together in his lap by the end.
Muriel brought me to two other literary events earlier this summer: a reading in someone’s basement apartment almost as small as the potting shed during which people read out of notebooks in the dark in quavering voices, and the release of a poetry chapbook called Shit and Fuck at a convenience store in Central Square. So this is definitely a step up. We inch our way through the vestibule into a living room, which is slightly less jammed. It’s a big room, with floral sofas and end tables, furniture with brass-handled drawers, and large oil paintings, contemporary, abstract, the paint balled like nubs on an old sweater.
Muriel grabs my arm and pulls me through an archway into a smaller room lined with books. There’s a guy alone in there, looking at the shelves.
‘Hey there,’ she says, and I can tell she barely knows him because of the pause before they hug. Usually Muriel mauls people. ‘Our newest workshop victim.’
‘Silas,’ he says to me. He’s tall and bent like he’s loping, even though he’s standing still.
‘Casey.’ I put out my hand.
He shifts a book from one hand to the other to shake it. His eyes are dark brown and hooded.
Muriel points to the book. ‘You got a copy already?’
‘I kinda had to. I was one of the first to arrive and he was sitting at the dining room table with a huge stack of books next to him.’ He shows it to us. ‘He didn’t know who I was. From last week. I said my name, but he didn’t get it quite right.’ He flips to the title page.
Carry on, Alice, it says above the signature.
We laugh.
Two women are waving from the far side of the other room, trying to squeeze their way toward us. Muriel sees them and presses back into the crowd to meet them halfway.
I take the book from Silas’s hand. My calves tingle like they do when I’m in a bookstore or stationery shop. It’s a beautiful cover, abstract, navy blue with ivory streaks of light. The paper is rough, old-fashioned, like heavy typewriter paper. Thunder Road it’s called. By Oscar Kolton. I haven’t read him. Paco had one of his books I think, and I didn’t much like the writers Paco did, men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.
I hold the book and imagine I’ve written it, imagine I’m holding my own book.
‘You think he knows the title’s already been used?’ I say, hoping Silas hasn’t seen my hunger.
‘Maybe you should go tell him.’
‘Set it to music, dude,’ I pretend to call toward the dining room. ‘It’ll be a hit.’
We read the blurb on the front: ‘Kolton has always delivered truth and beauty in spades, but here he gives us glimpses of the sublime.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a few glimpses of the sublime,’ Silas says.
I flip to the back flap to see what Oscar Kolton looks like. Silas studies the photo with me. It was taken from the side, one of his shoulders in the foreground, elbow to knee, bicep flexed. He’s bearing down on the lens with a menacing look. The contrast between black and white is so extreme his face looks carved out like an Ansel Adams rock face and the backlighting has turned his pupils to pinpricks.
‘Why do men always want to look like that in their author photos?’
‘My deep thoughts hurt me,’ Silas says in a scratchy voice.
‘Exactly. Or’—I try to mimic him—‘I might have to murder you if you don’t read this.’
He laughs.
‘Whereas with women’—I take a book off the shelf by a writer I admire—‘they have to be pleasing.’ The photo backs up my argument perfectly. She has a big apologetic smile on her face. I bounce the photo in front of Silas. ‘Please like me. Even though I’m an award-winning novelist, I really am a nice, unthreatening person.’
We pull a few more from the bookcase, and they all support my gender theory.
‘So how would you pose?’ Silas says.
I sneer and flip him two birds.
He laughs again. He has a chipped front tooth, a clean diagonal cut off one corner.
Muriel is bringing her friends toward us.
‘Did you read last Wednesday, to the group?’ I say.
‘I did.’
‘What’d he do with his hands?’
‘It was bad I think. Behind his back.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘No one could tell me. They hadn’t seen it before.’ He flashes his tooth again. He doesn’t seem to care much about Oscar’s verdict. ‘So what are you working on?’
‘I’m a waitress.’
He squints. ‘What are you writing?’
‘A novel.’
‘Impressive.’
‘I’ve been working on it for six years and still don’t have a full draft or a title. So maybe not so impressive. Are you going back next week?’
‘I don’t know. It might be too religious for me. A lot of verbal genuflecting.’
‘Really?’ Muriel hasn’t depicted it this way.
Silas hesitates. ‘It’s not really a free and open exchange of ideas. People just take down everything he says.’ He hunches over and pretends to scribble in a tiny notebook. ‘And, like, it was this small thing, but at one point he said that every line of dialogue had to have at least two ulterior motives, and I said what if the character just wants to know what time it is. People gasped. And then silence. I like a little more debate. Or maybe I just don’t like a lot of rules.’