Richard Russo: That Old CapeMagic

That Claudia planned to remain gone for a good long while was obvious since she’d taken all her clothes, not just enough for a short trip. She took everything, in fact, except the materials she’d assembled, with his help, for her dissertation. These she left stacked impressively in the center of the dining room table, along with a sparse outline he briefly studied before wadding it up. In another man this gesture might have suggested he was through with her, that he’d seen and understood both the muddled writing on the page and the clearer writing on the wall. Unfortunately, all Griffin’s father had seen was a more sensible approach to the research and writing of his fiancée’s dissertation, so he took out a legal pad and started sketching out how things would proceed if the project were his and not Claudia’s. That way, he reasoned, when she returned in a week or two (he still hadn’t drawn the necessary inference from the empty clothes closet), she’d find that instead of having fallen behind, she was actually ahead. The once murky, bloated purpose statement was now a detailed, workable template, thoughtfully divided into manageable segments and subdivided into bite-sized pieces that required only mastication, a series of cuds that even the bovine Claudia could chew. Granted, this was something she should’ve been able to do for herself, but so what? It could be their secret. She’d be so grateful her frozen pussy would thaw.

This, according to Griffin ’s mother, was how the whole nightmare had begun, as an intellectual exercise in avoidance. That first night, when he’d come home, found her gone and substituted his own outline for hers, he’d have been mortified if anyone had suggested he might actually write any part of his fiancée’s dissertation. But a week went by and she hadn’t returned, and then another, and the materials still sat there on the table (though he’d moved them to one side to make room for his take-out meals), and he just hated for her to fall further and further behind. Of course Claudia, again according to Griffin ’s mother, had predicted all of this. She might be dumb as a plastic Jesus, but she was shrewd. After all, how smart did a woman have to be to get the best of a man so ruled by his pecker? Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would have tossed her dissertation stuff right into the fireplace, or at least shoved it into a dark closet. Instead Griffin’s father had allowed it to sit there accusingly-yes, accusing him , not her-until one day, over mu shu pork eaten directly from the carton, a thought occurred to him, as of course it would: Maybe just a short intro. Where’s the harm?

Because he’d been complicit, if only subconsciously, from the start. Hadn’t he made sure that the subject of Claudia’s dissertation was one that also greatly interested him? Hadn’t he known all along that he’d have to hold her hand through every last page? How different was actually writing the thing? Wasn’t it really just a question of efficiency? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how your father’s mind works, how he rationalizes,” his mother warned when Griffin objected. She understood all too well. Once he’d started down that slippery slope, he was a lost man. Writing the intro, he reconnected to the source material, making long, excited notes on cards for the body of the essay, its principal thrust and supporting arguments, until sometime during the holidays he slipped a fresh piece of paper into his IBM Selectric and typed: Chapter One .

Then an interesting thing happened. Whereas before he’d been anxiously awaiting Claudia’s return, he now hoped she’d stay away. He’d always believed this would be-what?-a collaboration, in the best sense. She’d do the actual writing, of course, but he’d be right there to share notes and ideas, to make sure she didn’t lose her focus. And wasn’t that what all dissertations really were, collaborations? Otherwise, why have an adviser? But now he thought, Fuckit . He was making good progress, staying up late at night, neglecting, truth be told, his own teaching responsibilities. He’d hit his scholarly stride, and Claudia’s return would break it. Maybe he’d surprise her in Atlanta during spring break, he told himself. But when the break came he decided to work through it (just as well, Griffin’s mother said, since Claudia wasn’t in Atlanta anyway and never had been), figuring that if all went well, he’d have a draft before the end-of-semester crunch. She could help him revise it while familiarizing herself with his conclusions and methods, because of course she was the one who’d have to defend them (though he’d be there to throw her a rope if she needed one).

All might have been well, except in April he’d come down with a toxic dose of the flu. At one point he awakened shivering and curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor with no memory of how he’d gotten there, though the commode testified eloquently as to why he’d needed to. Was he hallucinating or had Claudia called the day before, wondering how the dissertation was coming along? Had she laughed at him when he reported it was almost done?

Eventually the flu ran its course, but he never fully recovered his strength or the weight he’d lost as a result of vomiting and skipping meals, but guess what? He’d finished, and wasn’t he proud ? Only when Claudia actually returned in late August, just when he’d concluded she was gone for good, did the enormity of what he’d done come down on him like an anvil. Not so much the dishonesty of it, but rather that this could have been his book . It was quite possibly the best thing he’d ever written. Any good university press would be happy to have it, maybe even a mainstream trade publisher. It was possible that real money, as opposed to the bogus scrip universities routinely printed, redeemable only in the academic commissary, might change hands. But there was an obvious problem. How could he claim the work as his own when it was supposed to be Claudia’s? He could argue she hadn’t written any of it, and everyone who’d ever taught her would believe him, but that would mean he’d stolen her idea. He’d already signed off on the fact that it was her idea when he and two other colleagues approved the proposal.

“Mom,” Griffin had protested at this point, “you can’t know all this. And don’t tell me Dad confided it, either. They aren’t the kind of things he’d admit to anybody, especially not you.” After all, he’d just spent the last twenty-four hours with his father, who hadn’t dropped a single hint, even an oblique one, about any of this.

Another woman might have taken umbrage at his especially not you , but his mother didn’t even slow down. “Pipe down,” she said gleefully. “I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. Claudia was blackmailing him.

“Well, not in the conventional sense,” she conceded. “It’s more like emotional blackmail.” Since they’d returned from Amherst, Claudia had taken to wondering out loud what his colleagues would think if they knew what he’d done. Had he always been so dishonest, she wanted to know, or was this something new? Was what he’d done a firing offense? Would the scandal make the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education ?

“But that’s an absurd threat,” Griffin felt compelled to inject. “She couldn’t expose him without exposing herself.”

“True,” she said, “but he’s terrified anyway.”

“He didn’t look scared to me.”

“Trust me.”

“But Mom, the story doesn’t track. Any undergraduate fiction workshop would tear it apart.” Well, okay, maybe not completely. It was more disjointed and inconsistent than unbelievable, and Griffin suspected he knew why. The academy was a small world, and his mother had friends, and friends of friends, everywhere. She’d no doubt been following her ex-husband’s year at UMass, or trying to, through half a dozen spies. She’d glean small bits of information from a wide variety of sources and stitch these into a single narrative as best she could, drawing inferences, pretending, as she always did, to be privy to everything.