Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

The office was empty. Book conference. Nancy sat with her back to the window, leaving me to squint against the glare, which I feared gave my face an attitude of incredulity, which ironically I was — incredulous, and hiding it well, save for the squint. She was thin, small shouldered, with bright red hair. I didn’t see the family resemblance.

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me what? Want some coffee?”

“The conference, I mean…Yes, thank you.”

“There’s a machine by the front desk. Help yourself.”

I walked back the way I’d just come in, past floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. There was even a rolling ladder, and I climbed onto the first rung.

“It won’t roll if you’re standing on it,” Nancy said. “I just had other work to do. Besides, they’re a drag.”

The coffee had clearly been sitting all day and smelled burnt. I added two packets of sugar and a creamer and stirred with my finger for lack of a spoon. Drinking more coffee was probably a terrible idea, since I was nervous enough already, but it would give me something to do besides fiddle. I came back to her desk and sat.

“I’m fine,” Nancy said, “but thanks for offering.”

“Shit, I’m sorry. Would you like—”

“I’m pulling your chain. Your solipsism is cute, really. So Mitch tells me you’re a writer. Why do you write?”

“I’m working on a kind of fabulist novel about—”

“Not what, why.”

She was toying with me, but she seemed serious, too, and of all the questions I’d prepared answers for, this hadn’t been one of them. Who sits around wondering this? My pause was too long.

“And don’t tell me it’s because you have to . I don’t buy that crap. Authors like to pretend there’s some deep, urgent need that amazingly points them to the computer and forces their fingers around. Please tell me you’re not one of them. Please tell me—”

“I started writing to impress girls,” I blurted out. “Well, one girl in particular.”

This was bad. I watched Nancy’s face contort into a sneer, but then quickly relax, the smile becoming genuine. She nodded. “There we go. Thank God. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I don’t know why I write,” I said, trying not to lose the momentum. “It’s not to impress girls anymore, at least not exclusively. People, maybe. To communicate. Um…”

“Fiction, you said? Bit of advice: fiction’s dead. You’re just starting, right? Switch gears. Memoir. Any incest in the family? Drug abuse? Alien abduction? Or popular nonfiction. Pick an ordinary object and show how it’s connected to everything else. Salt sold. Cod sold. The surprising history of milk. The importance of belt loops in the evolution of modern warfare. Whatever. But not fiction. Why make something up when there’s so much great, you-can’t-make-this-shit-up material around you already?”

It seemed to me that I myself had been thinking something along these lines the night before in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. But it also seemed irrelevant, an argument about as likely to change my behavior as the awareness of global warming had.

“No aliens, I’m afraid.”

“Not that you remember, anyway. Don’t sell your family short. There’s probably some juicy pathos lurking right below the surface. All the best shit gets sublimated. I’m not offending you, am I?”

“No, I know what you mean. It’s just that I’m in the middle of this thing, and I’m pretty sure I want to see where it takes me.”

Nancy gave me an exasperated look. It seemed like something she’d practiced. “Another writer trope I loathe. The idea a book is ‘taking its author’ somewhere. C’mon, you know? Own it. Take responsibility.”

Writing isn’t about taking responsibility, I thought, it’s about avoiding it. What I said was, “Yeah.”

I sipped my coffee, now lukewarm and nearly undrinkable. The sunlight slammed into the side of my face in the air-conditioned room. Across the street was a nightclub, and through the window I could see a large man holding open the door for three women teetering out on heels. There was doubtless more than one memoir between the three of them. Hidden pathos is one thing. How far would I be willing to dig? And couldn’t that energy be better spent creating a new world with instructive pathos of its own?

“Anyway,” said Nancy, “send it to me when you’re done.”

We shook hands. I said I would. She seemed to think there was a wealth of independent presses putting out just about everything being written, which sounded both promising and discouraging. I wasn’t ready for that conversation anyway, so I tried not to think about it.

I flagged down a cab out front, and the moment I got in the door across from me opened and a pan-faced woman leaned in and asked if I was going downtown. I said I was, but before I could voice an opinion about sharing the cab my phone rang and I answered it without thinking. Sure enough, when my brother’s low voice burst through the line I immediately regretted not letting it go to voicemail.

“You’ve got to talk to Mom,” he said.

“I talked to her this morning.”

“Well, not enough.”

A long, bare white leg stretched in front of me, followed quickly by a long, angular body and finally a head, long, bleached blond hair spilling from it like water from a pail.

“What do you mean?”

Another woman began to enter the cab, and her elbow knocked the phone from my hands. I retrieved it from the floor and quickly stepped out. The first woman craned her neck out of the cab, frowning. I motioned to the phone, and she closed the door. Cars had begun to pile up behind the cab, and the street suddenly filled with impatient honks.

“Sorry,” I said, walking up the street. “What’s going on?”

“She had a bad test.”

“I knew it! Fuck. Why didn’t she say anything?”

“She said you sounded busy.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Well, that’s Mom.”

“Yeah.”

“It looks really bad.”

“Lumpectomy?”

“They put mastectomy on the table.”

“ What? ”

“I told you. Bad.”

“I don’t fucking believe this. Why didn’t she say something?”

This was bullshit and my brother probably knew it — I’d been avoiding any real conversation with her for weeks, not the other way around. I walked out of a shadow, and feeling the sun on my face I squinted up into it, closed my eyes.

“Just call her, okay?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Well.”

“Well, what? It’s hard to know what’s happening from here.”

“I’ll let that statement go without comment. What are you doing, anyway? Are you not at work?”

My hand dropped to my side. I was being judged, and it felt appropriate. I experienced a rush of something like envy. Here I’d been talking about art and meanwhile my brother was back home, protective, judgmental, righteous. My mother dying, or something like it. I began walking. I could hear Kent calling my name through the phone I’d failed to hang up — it felt, in my hand, like a stone.

MITCH KNOCKED ON MY door at 9 p.m., and fifteen minutes later we were driving toward the Lincoln Tunnel. I wasn’t sure how this had happened, but as had become a pattern with Mitch, I went along with it. He was silent, and I thought he might be annoyed about the night before. But he may simply have been focused. I didn’t ask. I enjoyed the silence. After hearing from Kent I’d barhopped from the Flatiron to the Meatpacking District. The whiskey wore off and I’d lain in my bed with the heat and the noise from the street and I’d felt the guilt growing inside of me, settling in, roaring in my ears the way white noise grows louder and louder until it disappears and you with it. I’d lain like that through the night and then called in sick again and lain like that through the day, and when Mitch had shown up I’d dragged myself downstairs and out onto the curb and climbed into his waiting car. The distraction was nice. The silence was nice. Being in a car heading into the dusk was nice. We were on our way to a nice little town in New Jersey called West Milford, and on the far side of the Lincoln Tunnel, with the city behind us, Mitch seemed to relax.