Сигрид Нуньес - The Friend

I can tell you everything about her, Carter says.

To me, the main character is as thin and gray as this strand of hair I just brushed from my sleeve. But to Carter, the problem is not that she’s too vague, but that she’s all too familiar.

It is his perennial critique: What’s the point in writing stories about the kind of people you meet every day in real life?

Dangerous, Flannery O’Connor called letting students criticize one another’s manuscripts: the blind leading the blind.

Carter’s own literary ambition is to be the next George R. R. Martin. His novel in progress depicts epic clashes between imaginary kingdoms waging never-ending war in pursuit of power, dominance, and revenge. Unlike his idol, though, he can’t be taken to task for scenes of sexual violence. There is no rape or incest in his pages. There is no sex at all, and women are hardly mentioned. When people in class express doubts about a novel that doesn’t include any significant female characters, Carter shrugs and says nothing. But alone in my office he tells me that, in fact, there are women in his novel. And there is sex, he says. Loads of it. Most of it violent. There is rape. There is gang rape. There is incest.

I delete all that for the workshop, he says.

He rolls his eyes when I ask him why.

Are you kidding? You know how people would react. I mean, like, the women? I could get kicked out of school.

When I say I’m sure no such thing would happen, he is not convinced. Today he is wearing his black watch cap (oh what is he watching?) low on his brow, which gives him a Cro-Magnon look. His stretched lobes make his ears resemble the floppy ears of one of his fictional half-humans.

Well, I’m not taking any chances, he says. But trust me, it’s all in there. All the rough stuff, he adds. Which triggers something in me. Which he notices.

But if you wanted to see it, he says, I’d show you.

I don’t think that’s necessary, I stammer, and he gives me a knowing smirk.

Most of my students do it. Some of my fellow teachers do it. People who work in publishing do it. All are more likely to do it if the writer is a woman. But when did it start, this habit of referring to writers you’ve never met by first name.

A book festival event in Brooklyn. I catch the 2 train at Fourteenth Street. The car is full. I see two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, seated near me, but not close enough for me to hear their conversation. Body language suggests that they are friends, or colleagues, rather than a couple. Something tells me they are on their way to the same place I am. A half hour later, at Atlantic Avenue, they get off with me. It’s a Saturday night, the huge station is packed, I soon lose sight of them. The event is in a hall several blocks from the station. When I get there I go straight to the bar, and there they are, the man and woman from the 2 train, in line just ahead of me.

This semester I share an office with another teacher. She is a new hire, in fact this is her first time teaching. As it happens, only a few years ago this young woman was a student of mine. Same program, same school.

She sometimes does meditation in the office, and the air is suffused with the mimosa or orange-blossom scent of the candles she burns.

Because we teach on different days we don’t usually see each other, but we keep in touch through messages and notes, and she sometimes thoughtfully leaves me a treat, a cookie or a chocolate bar or a packet of smoked almonds. Once, for my birthday, she filled the office with flowers.

While she was still a student this woman achieved quite a coup, selling her MFA thesis, a first novel, before it was half finished, along with a second novel before it was even a gleam in her eye. Even before the first book was published she began winning prizes, and after receiving, in quick succession, every literary prize that exists for outstanding promise—a total of almost half a million dollars—she began to be known among us as O.P.

As expected, when it was published, the first novel received excellent reviews. But in spite of this, and in spite of its picking up yet another literary prize, the book did not sell. In our small world O.P. remains famous, she is “that girl who gets everything.” But in the wider world, even among those who pay attention to new fiction, two years after its debut neither the book’s name nor the author’s is likely to ring a bell.

Hardly a new story, and hardly the end of the world. But try telling O.P., who for two years now hasn’t been able to write at all.

She had thought teaching might help, or at least give her something useful to do. As a student, though introverted, she had radiated confidence. But as a teacher she is overwhelmed. She is about the same age as most of her students and even younger than some. She is fully aware how her inexperience shows, how lacking she is in projecting authority. She has a high, thin, naturally quavery voice and a tendency, when anxious, to flush.

She is bitter about her female students, who she senses have it in for her, and from whom she constantly gets the who-do-you-think-you-are vibe women often give off to other women, in particular striving and ambitious women. Among the male students, three have already come on to her. One is so successful at undressing her with his eyes that she finds herself sitting in class with her arms crossed over her breasts. Worse, she finds herself intensely attracted to him.

She sometimes has panic attacks before class. Hence the meditation, sometimes supplemented with benzodiazepine.

O.P. is tormented by the fear not only that she’ll never write again but that her whole life is a lie. Everything she has accomplished so far has been the result of some mistake. Why anyone had wanted to publish her—why anyone thought she could teach—baffling! As for that second novel, no matter how many extensions the publisher grants, she knows she’ll never pull it off.

O.P. lives in terror of being exposed: she is not just a failure, she is a fraud. And would everyone please stop calling her O.P.!

Useless to remind her that identical doubts have bedeviled other writers for all time, including, and perhaps even especially, some of the greatest. Useless to quote Kafka on The Metamorphosis : “Imperfect almost to its very marrow.”

Another teacher, who’s at school on the same days as O.P., reports sometimes hearing her weeping behind her closed door, once because she was hopelessly struggling to write a simple two-page student thesis report.

The day I sit in on one of her classes for a required department observation, I see how the student to whom she has confessed being attracted gazes at her with a tenderly gloating expression. I do not put in my observation report what I believe is the case, that she has started having an affair with this student. If I’m lucky she won’t confide in me, she won’t seek my advice.

I can see this happening one day: I’ll be in a certain place, maybe a store that sells beauty products, or some kind of salon, or the bathroom of a home where I happen to be a guest. I’ll get a whiff of a particular scent, mimosa or orange blossom, but I won’t remember the candles O.P. used to burn in our office, and so I’ll be bewildered by my response: a tremor of alarm, as if I’d just telepathically learned that someone I know is in trouble.

Across from the office I share with O.P. is the office of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, but he is never there. He does not hold office hours and has instructed the program secretary to forward mail to his home rather than use his school mail slot. When he comes in to teach he goes straight to his workshop classroom. Few of his colleagues ever cross paths with him, and when they do he looks right through the person as if they’re not there. Before the semester began he instructed the chair to inform faculty that he does not do book blurbs. He himself informed students on the first day of class: I don’t do letters of recommendation. Don’t even ask.