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  “I’ll start,” says Steinway, whose name is Muriel Kingsworthy. She’s raised four children, outlived three husbands, was a social director on a cruise ship where she met the late Captain Kingsworthy—“the best of the three” and wrote a newsletter that everybody’s just loved and is now in charge of social activities at an old people’s home. She’s had a Ripley’s believe-it-or-not life, she confides, which she wants to put into a novel with a lot of lust. At this last word she pulls out a fan from her carpetbag of a pocketbook, unpleats it, and waves it against her chin. She bats her eyelashes, like a middle-aged Madame Butterfly, over the top of the fan, which is pale pink with a border of twirling parasols. “Would one of you kind gentlemen mind opening the window the teeniest bit?”

  The man with the tattoos is the first up. His biceps bulge alarmingly while he struggles to raise a window that has probably been varnished shut since 1888. After a few grunts he gets it open. A cold gust of air blasts in and lifts Seamus’ syllabus, blowing it around like a paper airplane tossed from a movie house balcony. The man makes a tackle and a dive, intercepts it and brings it back to me. “Well done,” I say and tuck it under a corner of the Best American Short Stories anthology.

  “Edward Horgan, friends call me Eddie,” he says. “I drive a cab. Gives me time to make up stories in my head. Hope to get some down on paper.”

  “I’m India Germaine,” says the ethereal creature in the turtleneck, “and I’m freezing.” She’s hugging herself. Her lips are turning blue.

  There follows a lengthy meteorological discussion with a lot of raising and lowering of the window and the measuring of various apertures. Finally a consensus is reached at about a crack and a half.

  India Germaine puts on her coat. “I’m really susceptible to colds,” she explains. “I’ve had mono. And pneumonia twice.”That’s how she came to writing, she confides, being laid up in bed. She’s a junior at Harvard majoring in psychology. She used to write poems as a child. She hopes to put what she’s learned about people into “the fictional mode.”

  “I’m a junior here, too,” admits the sweet-faced black student. “I need another English credit, and this class fits my schedule perfectly. My name’s Jonathan Marshall, and I wouldn’t be all that adverse to seeing it in print. So far my writing has mostly consisted of term papers and letters to my girlfriend back home. Term papers about C plus, letters rated X.”

  “Very funny, Jonathan,”says Fireplug with a withering look. “Some of us are serious about writing. I’m a senior here, Rebecca Luscombe. Gloria Steinem sends me personal rejections. “Dear Rebecca,’ she writes. I feel I’m getting somewhere since the earlier ones were addressed to Ms. Luscombe. I’ve published two essays in the feminist press. Last summer I quit my waitress job—they made us wear these demeaning skirts and push-up bras—and peddled my writing in Harvard Square. Some times I cleared fifty-sixty bucks a week!”

  Immediately I tuck this tidbit in a corner of my head in its already crowded something-to-fall-back-on-if-all-else-fails category.

  “Well, I have not published anything yet,” admits the owner of the ballpoints. He speaks slowly with pauses between words. “My name is Russell MacQuillen, Junior. I work in a computer company along 128. There’s a lot that happens there—you know, between management and personnel. Stuff that would really be revealing. Unbelievable.” He gulps and his Adam’s apple jiggles above his undershirt. He has wide bulging eyes that don’t seem to blink.

  “This certainly seems like a good group, a real diversity,” I say. “Let’s get to work.”

  “Wait,” says India Germaine, “there’s one more.” She points to Louie.

  “How could I forget Louie,” I say. If only I could forget Louie, I think. “Why don’t you introduce yourself.”

  “Louie Cappetti. I’m a mailman. I spend so much time reading the covers of magazines I figure maybe I can get inside. I’ve started writing a bit.”

  “You have?” I ask, stunned. I who know your toes, your mother’s name, your penis in living color and 3-D, don’t know this.

  “You are?” asks Rebecca Luscombe. “Are you the teacher’s mailman?” she says, though from her tone it sounds as if what she means is teacher’s pet.

  “Professor O’Toole’s.”

  “Which one? A woman can be professor, too, of course.”

  “Seamus,” he says, and I’m relieved.

  “Now that that’s settled, let’s get to work,” I say. “Has anybody brought something in to read in class.”

  “I didn’t know we were supposed to,” says India, already anxious over being unprepared.

  “It was in the catalogue, dear—please bring a story or novel chapter to the first class,” Muriel instructs. “I personally don’t have anything that’s half ready to show.”

  “I haven’t written a word,” admits Eddie.

  “My stuff ’s too rough yet,” Jonathan explains.

  “I wanted to see what the class was like first,” Rebecca says, “so I could select the appropriate piece of my work.”

  “No matter.” I grab one of the story collections and open it randomly. “I’ll read you Andre Dubus.”

  “I’ve brought something,” Louie whispers.

  His voice is so low that if I wanted I could ignore him, start reading “The Fat Girl” as if all I’ve heard is the hiss of the radiator. I’m tempted. That Louie is a mailman, that Louie is my lover, I’ve accepted. I don’t want to know what kind of writer Louie is. Even if he’s been doing it on the side since the age of two. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Hallmark card writers don’t become Nabokov after ten years. I figure Louie’s not a good writer. If he were, he wouldn’t be a mailman.

  But it’s only my mother’s snobby voice rattling round in my head. After all, Conrad went to sea. Wallace Stevens worked in an insurance company. Other writers have scaled fish and polished rich people’s gold-plated bathroom taps though their names escape me at this moment. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Louie turned out to be a great writer?

  I look at Louie. Terror maps his face. His eyes are expectant as if it’s only seconds to a Psycho stabbing scene. I empathize. Even we published writers have felt those knives. “That’s money in the bank,” I say to Louie. “Shall I read it now?” I check my watch dramatically. “Or I could rush through Andre Dubus and hold you over till when we’d have more time next week.”

  Louie’s relief is that of a drowning man swept ashore. “Next week.”

  Later I lie in bed after Louie has fallen asleep. After class we had taken separate icy paths to outside the Harvard gate and had come together with an urgency that obliterated all memory of the writing group. Now I slip out of bed and take Louie’s story out of the briefcase I’ve dumped on the hall table. I bring it into the bathroom and read it, shivering slightly on the cold toilet seat:

  High School Dropout

  Michael Leone was seventeen and pretty cool. He was a part of a close Italian family in the North End. He went to mass on Sunday. He played in his church’s basketball league. He was great-looking. Tall with a great body and great hair which his father tried to trim too short in his barber shop.

  The girls in the girls’ part of the parochial school—Saint Anthony’s was the boys, Saint Margaret’s was the girls—really liked him. They figured he was as cool as he was trying to act. Especially Brenda Morelli who was the prettiest in her class. She had curly blond hair and whopper breasts and legs that wouldn’t stop.

  Michael was pretty smart. His teachers said if he really applied himself he might have a chance at BC. His mother thought it would be a step up for the family to have a son at BC. His father thought college was a way to keep a boy from growing up and to fill him with fancy ideas that he was better than anyone else, like his father for example.

  But Michael had ambition. He wanted a car and nice clothes and a classy girlfriend like some of the women who came from the colleges around Boston to have coffee in the North End with scarves draped around their shoulde
rs and voices that sounded almost like the ones in English movies he had seen.

  But Brenda had these whopper breasts. And Michael had these Trojans he’s carried around in his wallet from day one even though some of the older kids warned him it was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. They only did it twice, two times and there went his future.

  “I’m pregnant, Michael,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  “I’ll marry you,” he said with tears in his own eyes.

  “My father wants something better for me,” she whispered, “than the son of a Sicilian who works in a barber shop.”

  “That’s okay,” he said because Brenda wasn’t looking that good, her hair kinda flat and her eyes all red from crying and all and he kept thinking about those cool-looking women, college kids, in the Cafe Paradisio.

  But then he decided he’d keep the baby, that it would be a kid that looked like him and would be good at basketball. “Have the baby,” he said, wiping his tears. “I’ll get a job and my mother can take care of it while I’m at work.”

  “Michael, you’re a real good person,” Brenda sobbed.

  Then she went and had an abortion without telling him.

  I skim the rest. There’s more about how his life fell apart, how he drank beer and watched TV. Not absolutely terrible, I think. A familiar story not just in its generic sense. But of course Louie has already told me this story. Write what you know is standard advice. Though what you know doesn’t have to sound like something you’ve memorized. When I was ten I was pronounced artistic and was given a series of expensive art lessons. Over and over again I used to draw ballerinas at their barre. My teachers would heap praise. Then a real artist visited who had taught children’s classes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When I held up my ballerina, this teacher shook her head. “I can tell you’ve done this hundreds of times,” she said. “Let’s try something fresh.”

  What did I expect, I think now, as I get back into bed. If I looked at my own earliest scribblings I’d probably throw up. I fit my body to Louie’s. Along the march to improvement, there are compensations.

  7

  The following Thursday I’m sitting at my desk filling in my social calendar. It’s the Women’s Writers desk calendar which I buy each year thinking it will cheer me or inspire me. It doesn’t do either. The women writers, even the ones of a certain age, look so young and happy—and why not since they’re successful enough to have their photographs sell a calendar—that I can only find myself wanting.

  Still, things are looking up. This February’s page compared to last year’s is practically an illuminated manuscript. Last year’s was so blank—week after week of white space like a deadly metaphor for writer’s block—that I took to filling up the pages with my grocery list. Mushrooms, one pint of yogurt, bananas crowded out the lone Tom, Dick, or Harry.

  But now my weekends, and weekdays, are chockablock with not only items from the fruit family, but also individuals from the family of man. Louie’s name snakes all over the calendar—Friday, Sunday, Thursday, Tuesday, like a set of embroidered underpants. Then come my students, whom I need to schedule for individual conferences. And then there is Jake Barnes. I’m having dinner with him, Zenobia, and Harriman in Harvard Square tomorrow night. When Jake invited me, my first instinct was to say no. I’ve moved so quickly from famine to feast that I feel as glutted as a Strasbourg goose. And confused. When you think of it, there I was this fall empty of calendar, pounding out one rejected story after another, the light hardly ever blinking on my answering machine, the high-point of the day a chat with the super or a trip to the store. Now I’m orchestrating two men (though Jake Barnes’s more the variation on a theme in a minor key), a mother no longer safely stashed in Old Town, a tableful of students, a story accepted for publication, a potential sibling, a potential surrogate child, an improved menu, real dates, and reasons to buy new shoes and a dress.

  “I’d love to,” I told Jake with my mother in mind. Keep your options open, I heard her whispering in my ear. I can’t help but agree. If Cheryl is Louie’s option, mine will be Jake. Mad money for the piggy bank. I also don’t want to risk turning down Zenobia in case one day she and I will be breaking bread at my mother’s on her mother’s Spode ironstone plates.

  “Maybe next time, you’ll let me cook for you,” Jake added.

  If I can fit you in, I think now as I write down my mother and Arthur and Russell MacQuillen, Junior, who needs an appointment to discuss his state of crisis over page five.

  I’m in a state of crisis over my life. Arthur and my mother come home Sunday. I’m picking them up at the airport since, according to my mother, “Zenobia and Harriman have too much work.” Perhaps I should tote along this calendar—exhibit A—the proof there’s more than one busy daughter here. Then when Arthur and my mother are back and overhead, what do I do with Louie? Keep him hidden or bring him out as exhibit B, to account for some of my newfound busyness. I could produce him in his Shetland sweater and preppy corduroys. I could tell my mother he’s a Harvard student—how could she complain?—that he’s writing the great American novel while delivering mail on the side like those waiters and waitresses in New York who ladle out soup between auditions for Broadway.

  Now I put my calendar aside and pick up the syllabus for my writing class. I’ve scribbled so many notes on top of Seamus’ and Georgette’s that the syllabus is starting to look like one of those paintings in which the artist, probably stuck in a garret with no money for canvas, paints over somebody else’s work. It’s time I make up my own syllabus since I’ve already taught one class and haven’t yet been fired. Perhaps I will start to like my class, to feel almost comfortable. I imagine myself smiling at Rebecca Luscombe’s fiery feminism, ready to raise a fist for sisterhood. Or getting to count on the steady breeze from Muriel Kingsworthy’s fan.

  The spanner in the works is Louie. I keep wishing he were Seamus’ student instead of mine. Why aren’t I proud he’s taking a class? That he has intellectual aspirations. That his writing, with work, could show promise. That he and I are ending up having more in common than I ever thought? I have no answers, only that his being in my class makes me uncomfortable, that I dread discussing his story. In class the balance between us shifts. How to account for it—that it’s simply the student-teacher relationship, that I’m pushed into the role of dominatrix? In bed, we’re equals. In Sever Hall, though, I know he’s uncomfortable, too. It’s not something he and I have talked about.

  But we should talk about it. Before class tonight, maybe Louie and I can clear the air. I check my watch. It’s not yet eleven. Time enough to corner him in the vestibule, to communicate among the letters and the magazines. In the terminology of self-help books, “to work on our relationship.” I shudder at the impoverishment of language which, by reducing complicated actions to catch phrases, trivializes them. In writing, how you get there is as important as where you end. In relationships maybe it’s only how you end that counts.

  I run a comb through my hair. Outside it looks as if all Cambridge should be hunkering down in the nearest groundhog hole. Snow powders the windowpane. Ice frosts the corners. On the street in front of our building cars spin their wheels. My keyboard rattles as the big DPW trucks roll by with their heavy loads of salt and sand. When the weather’s bad like this, Louie is usually late. Everything takes longer, he explains, the mail, the traffic, his route. When I was married to Seamus, the gentlest April shower would cancel our mail let alone a smattering of snow. Back then I wasn’t so obsessed by mail or its deliverer. Later, bitten by the writing bug, made into a mail junkie as its side effect, I would call the Central Square post office to rant and rave when an occasional storm turned our street into the Donner Pass and thus prevented even a solicitation for life insurance from getting through. “Whattya expect, lady, an Eskimo?” the postal clerk would sigh.

  Louie, however, could be the model for “neither rain nor sleet nor snow …” He is dauntless. He’s a hero. He�
��s my deliverer. I open the door to the hall a crack so I don’t miss the heroic sound of his dauntless delivery.

  I’ve done a lot of revision of the syllabus by the time I realize Louie’s really late. My watch says after twelve. I look out the window where the sidewalk has turned into a skating rink. A toddler layered like an onion in a yellow snowsuit slides along his bottom. The first prickles of worry start to form. Then I hear him. A creak of the front door. A heavy shoe.

  I run out into the vestibule.

  But it’s not Louie, trim of hip and sleek of head. It’s an inter-loper in a gray beard and a hefty-sized uniform hoisting his bag like a blue-clad Santa Claus. One not about to burst into a “Ho, Ho, Ho” I sense when I look at his face. “Damn, Damn, Damn,” he grunts. He’s just dropped a stack of letters, which lie fanned out at his feet.

  “Pardon my French,” he apologizes when he catches sight of me.

  “Where’s Louie?” I ask.

  “Who’s Louie?”

  “The regular mailman.”

  “Slipped on the ice. Been took off to emergency.” He smiles.

  I gasp. “My God!”

  “Damn right, miss.” He nods. “Ten mailmen’s off to emergency already. It’s treacherous out there. Called me up on my day off. Should be getting hazard pay.” He pats his Santa’s belly. “’Course some of these young guys is so skinny a little snow would knock ’em off the curb.”

  I lean against a row of mailboxes. I hold on to the narrow shelf piled with menus from the neighborhood Chinese take-out. “Where is he?”

  “I just told you, miss.”

  “I mean, what hospital?”

  With a grunt he picks up an envelope from the floor. “Cambridge City or Mt. Auburn’s the likeliest. I’ll need you to move, miss, I got a letter for 20B.”

  I rush back into my apartment and pick up the phone. I dial Cambridge City. They have three mailmen, the receptionist explains, but Louie Cappetti’s not among them. Fate, the gods, the weather are all conspiring against me, I moan. A malevolent power is refusing to allow me to keep the pieces of my life separate. Some hostile takeover in the sky has installed my mother in my building, Louie in my class, and no doubt my mailman/lover in the extra bed in Seamus’ hospital room.