Circle of Grace, page 22
Tess frowned. What a juvenile stunt, impersonating a faculty member. She’d been led to believe that students at the workshop took their education seriously. Well, when Professor Hopkins finally did arrive, this clown would get his comeuppance.
He leaned over the left side of the desk, retrieved a tan leather briefcase that had been propped against the trash can, and snapped it open. “Let’s see who’s here.” He pulled out what was unmistakably a teacher’s attendance book. “I am, as some of you already know, Dr. Harold Hopkins.” He made a face. “But ‘doctor’ is too stuffy, and Harold was my father’s name, so please call me Hal.” He looked around the room and grinned.
Tess sat back in her chair, blinking hard, her brain clouded with disbelief as Dr. Harold Hopkins—Hal—read off a list of ten or twelve names in alphabetical order. When he got to “Contessa Jean Riley,” he had to call the name twice before she answered.
“Here,” she said, raising her hand timidly. “It’s Tess.”
“Tess,” he repeated. He gazed at her with a curious stare, as if trying to probe the depths of her soul. “Well, that’s a relief. I’m afraid I don’t have much experience dealing with royalty.”
The class laughed, and Tess felt her ears redden.
Two more names, and he was done. He flung the grade book back into his briefcase and closed the lid. “That’s the last time I’ll be using that,” he said. “I don’t take roll in my classes. You can attend or not attend as you wish. Your grades will be based on what you produce, so let me assure you that if you’re deep into writing, by all means do not—I repeat, do not lose your momentum by stopping to come to class.” He shrugged. “And if I’m the only one who shows up, I’ll go to the grill, get a cup of coffee, and enjoy an hour and a half of my own company.”
He paused and let his gaze roam over the upturned faces. “OK, circle up. We want to be able to see each other.”
Desks scraped across the wooden floor as the students got up and rearranged the furniture into a rough semicircle around the professor’s desk. Having lost the protective barrier of the rows in front of her, Tess tried to situate her seat so that she wouldn’t feel so exposed, but it was a futile effort. Her choice of the back row now put her clearly in Hopkins’s sight line, directly across the circle from him. She busied herself with pretending to look for something in her book bag.
“All right, let’s talk about what we’ll be doing here,” he said. “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is not primarily about academic achievement or competition or who you know. It’s about writing—in your case, fiction. Short stories, novellas, novels. It’s about the passion and the process. If you have thin skin, I suggest you consult your dermatologist and deal with the condition immediately, because you need to be able to take criticism in order to improve. Most of our class time will be taken up with reading what you have written and listening to comments and suggestions from your peers—and myself.”
A few students groaned anxiously, and Tess exhaled a pent-up breath. At least she wasn’t the only one who was dreading the evaluations to come.
Hopkins ignored the murmuring. “Writing is both gift and skill,” he went on. “I have no power whatsoever to impart the gift—that comes from an entirely different source—God, fate, genetics—take your pick.” He looked directly at Tess, and she felt herself flinch and withdraw a little. After a moment his eyes moved on, stopping on one face, then another. “But you can learn the skills, the techniques—things like plot development and focus, effective characterization and viewpoint, dialogue and pacing. And you can develop the self-editing eye that enables you to become the best writer you can possibly be.”
He stopped briefly and smiled as if to himself. “I’m sure most of you have taken creative writing courses at some point in your education. What principles have your previous teachers imparted to you about the process of writing?”
A hand went up on his left.
“This isn’t grade school; you don’t have to raise your hand,” Hal said mildly. “Yes? Miss Reed, isn’t it? Elizabeth Reed?” He pointed to a young woman whose jet-black hair fell in a thick braid nearly to her waist.
She nodded. “Most teachers tell you to write what you know.”
“Ah, yes. Write what you know. A bit limiting, don’t you think? Especially if you’re a Star Trek fan. Or”—his gaze swept over the class—“if you’re only twenty-something and don’t know much yet.”
A wave of laughter flitted around the room, leaves rustling in a sudden breeze.
“Let’s make a slight alteration to the principle, shall we?” Hal jumped off the desk, went to the blackboard, and scrawled in two-inch letters WRITE WHO YOU ARE.
“Surely that doesn’t mean that all our fiction should be autobiographical,” said a slouchy-looking guy who wore faded blue jeans and a moss-colored T-shirt.
“Surely not,” Hopkins agreed, returning to his perch and bracing his hands on his knees. “It means that in order to create fiction that moves people, that compels them to suspend their disbelief and enter into the world and the characters you have created, you have to be vulnerable.”
“Right. You have to slit yourself open, neck to navel,” suggested a blonde girl a few seats down from Tess. “You have to let your guts spill out.” She didn’t seem the type to come up with such a gory image, but then Tess supposed that Agatha Christie and P. D. James also looked like nice, normal ladies at the tea shoppe.
Hal raised an eyebrow. “Quite a vivid metaphor. But yes. You have to open up, to pour yourself heart, mind, and soul into your fiction. Become your characters—good or evil, stable or insane, flawed or—” He broke off with a shrug. “Well, we’re all flawed, aren’t we?”
Several students were scribbling notes, but the majority were simply listening as if entranced.
“And how do we begin to open up, to write who we are?”
The black-haired girl, Elizabeth, started to raise her hand, then apparently had second thoughts and withdrew it again. “It seems to me that in order to write who we are,” she said, “we first have to know who we are.”
“Precisely.” Hal pointed at her and gave her a thumbs-up. “There will be times you’ll feel as if this is Therapy 101 rather than a fiction seminar,” he warned. “Many of you will go through some difficult times, coming to the place of understanding and accepting yourself. The process of writing can turn over some pretty moldy rocks, and you’re not likely to appreciate what you find crawling underneath them. But until you acknowledge and come to grips with your own dark side, you’ll probably never produce the kind of fiction you aspire to.”
“To which you aspire,” muttered a voice to Tess’s immediate right.
“Ah, yes,” Hal said with a grin. “We have a grammarian among us. Mr. Cage, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. Jack Cage.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Sorry.”
Tess didn’t think he sounded sorry at all. And he certainly didn’t look apologetic. He had a surly air about him, a defiant, challenging demeanor.
“It’s all right,” Hal went on, ignoring Cage’s glare. “We’ll get into the proper use of the English language later on. But for now, here’s something to think about: Real people don’t.”
“Real people don’t what?” Cage asked.
“Don’t use proper grammar. This is not to say, of course, that the rules that govern coherent writing do not apply to fiction. It’s simply a reminder that each character has his or her own peculiar voice and thinking pattern, and you need to be true to the character’s viewpoint.”
Hopkins went on talking about what they could expect from his class and from the workshop curriculum as a whole. He talked about voice and passion and the difference between calling and ambition. At last he paused and craned around to look at the clock. To Tess’s astonishment, almost an hour and a half had passed.
“Well, I’ve gone on a bit too long. We’ll come back to these questions as the semester progresses. In the meantime, I have some exercises I’d like you to do before we meet again.” He rummaged in his briefcase, retrieved a sheaf of photocopied papers, and divided the stack between the students on his right and left, each of whom took one and passed them on.
Tess was the last to leave, since she had been sitting in the middle of the circle and it took a few minutes for the assignment to come around to her. She moved toward the front of the classroom, laid the remaining pages on Dr. Hopkins’s desk, and sidled around him, her eyes on her feet.
“It’s no good, you realize,” he said as she reached the door.
She turned. “What’s no good?”
“Trying to be invisible. You’re going to be far too conspicuous for comfort before this class is over.”
“I know,” she said, feeling a bit sheepish. “Reading my work, listening to criticism. Spilling my guts, and all that.”
“All that, certainly.” He stood behind the desk now, and surveyed her over the top of his open briefcase. “But not only that.”
“I—I’m not sure I understand.”
“You’ll understand eventually.” He narrowed his eyes, and his intense gaze made her feel as if her mind were being probed. “I read your entrance papers, the stories you submitted with your application.”
He headed toward the door, and she stood aside to let him out into the hallway. “I was wrong about you, Contessa Jean Riley,” he said. “Completely wrong.”
Tess’s heart thudded into the lower regions of her stomach. It had been a mistake. She hadn’t really been accepted to this program. She’d be on her way back to North Carolina before the sun had set on her first day.
Tess stared at him. She opened her mouth to respond, to apologize, to beg for a second chance. But his next words stunned her into utter speechlessness.
“I made a joke about your name back there in class. But in terms of your talent, your gift, you are royalty. You may try to fade into the woodwork, stay invisible, hide your light under a bushel. But trust me, invisibility is not an option.”
He gave a jaunty salute and moved off down the hall, swinging his briefcase. “Sooner or later, the publishing world is going to know about you,” he called over his shoulder. “And unless I miss my guess, it’ll be sooner rather than later.”
-27-
RACHEL’S WILDERNESS
Two years to the day after Tess Riley had finished her residency at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received her M.F.A., she married Dr. Hal Hopkins in a quaint little Episcopal chapel with her father the bishop presiding.
Her family adored Hal. They had been hearing Tess rave about him for years—how he had believed in her, mentored her, made some publishing contacts for her, even spoke to the dean on behalf of her application to teach part-time. She had brought him home to North Carolina last Christmas to announce their engagement, and they had endured a week of informal premarital counseling during which her parents assumed a kind of tag-team analysis, with Daddy fielding the spiritual issues and Mother taking on the role of benevolent counselor.
At the end of the week both Mother and Daddy declared them “perfect for each other,” and immediately adopted Hal as the son they’d never had.
About three years in, however, their “perfect” marriage flew into a turbulent storm. It wasn’t a question of being in love—Tess and Hal were completely devoted to each other and rarely argued. But they both wanted children, and after two years of trying and a year of fertility tests, the final evaluation came: Tess was unable to conceive.
Hal took the news philosophically enough. His desire to be a father had little to do with male ego or biological parenthood. “We can adopt,” he tried to assure her. “There are plenty of children in the world who need loving parents.”
But Tess would not be consoled by the prospect of adoption. As she neared thirty, her hormones had been going haywire, her biological clock ticking double time. And now, without warning, it had shuddered to a halt completely.
Hal couldn’t possibly understand how it made her feel to be told she was…
Barren. Sterile. Empty. Fruitless.
She deliberately used the cruel and antiquated words to describe her condition, the way a self-mutilator will hide in secret and carve up tender flesh with the shattered shards of a bathroom mirror.
Tess didn’t want someone else’s child. She wanted her own. She desperately wanted the experience of carrying that tiny, squirming burden, sharing her body’s nourishment with the growing life inside her, feeding her baby with warm milk from her own distended breasts.
Having a child was like…like writing. Holding the idea inside, nurturing it, feeling it grow until it was ready to break forth painfully into the world, herself and not herself, separate and independent from her, and yet joined to her forever by heart and blood and mind.
The realization dawned upon her as the metaphors moving inside her brain dovetailed into a single shocking truth. She was fruitless not only in body, but in spirit as well. Void of creativity. Soul-barren.
Hal had told her, years ago, that she wouldn’t be able to stay invisible forever, that the publishing world would know about her. And to some extent, his prophecy had proved true. Several of her stories and articles had appeared in some fairly prestigious journals, to the applause and affirmation of her colleagues. In the publish-or-perish world of academia, she was one of the lucky ones.
But it wasn’t enough, any more than mothering another woman’s baby was enough. What were a few obscure short stories in comparison with a novel? And not just any novel. A great novel. A monumental novel. The Novel. The book that would turn the literary world on its ear.
Anything less was unthinkable.
She recalled with perfect clarity Lovey’s toast at their graduation dinner: “To Tess Riley, future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.” And although at the time she had feigned humility, deep inside she could envision herself flying to Stockholm for the ceremonies, shaking the hand of the Swedish king, and tucking the bronze medal and diploma under her arm. Her name would be engraved on the golden tablets of literary history, along with the likes of Faulkner and Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda.
Tess’s early workshop experiences had called that dream into question, certainly. At first she had felt displaced, insecure. But gradually she had regained her footing and come to embrace Hal’s confidence in her as her own. And even if the Nobel laureate stretched as far above her as a distant star, she nevertheless clung to the dream of being Somebody. Of being Known.
The next Great American Novel was inside her—she felt it, a seed, an idea germinating in the darkness, waiting for its time to be born.
And yet the wanting, the longing—both for the Child and for the Novel—produced only increasing frustration and self-recrimination, bordering on despair.
“I know this isn’t what you expected out of life,” Duck said when Tess called yet again. “And I sympathize, truly I do. You want Hal’s baby, a child created from the love between you. But Tess, it isn’t going to happen. You’ve got to make a choice—you can let it go, or you can let it destroy you.”
Silence stretched between them, a static tautness over the telephone lines. And then Duck uttered the mystical incantation that made all the pieces fall into place. “You’re a writer, Tess. For God’s sake, write about it.”
It was the answer Tess had been waiting for, the word of redemption from On High. Lance the boil. Open a vein. Bleed out all the pain and desolation and misery and anguish onto the page. Water the desert with your tears. Make the wilderness bloom again.
Out of the depths of her woundedness flowed some hidden source of courage and determination. Tess began to write—frantically, furiously. She could do this. She would do it. She would write a book so exquisitely crafted that the mountains would shake and the heavens would weep and the stones of the earth would cry out and shudder with ecstasy….
Day after day she pounded away at her hulking red typewriter, and the stack of rough-draft pages on her desk grew. She turned down the offer to teach fiction workshops again, and while Hal led his classes at the university, she holed herself away, slipping into her character’s mind and heart so thoroughly that she found it difficult to surface again at day’s end.
Hal was patient, encouraging, understanding. He prepared dinners, massaged her aching back and shoulders, soothed her with conversation that did not require her full attention—his students, the lives of friends and colleagues, a New Yorker article he had come across, lamenting the deplorable lack of originality in contemporary American fiction.
He did not ask to read what she had written, did not violate her inner, unspoken need for emotional and intellectual seclusion. When she wanted intimacy, he took her into his arms and loved her. When she wanted privacy, he left her to her thoughts without complaint.
And then one spring evening, when the first draft was nearly done, Hal looked at her across the dinner table and said, “Your father called me today.”
Tess’s head shot up. “Did he?” A bolt of guilt sliced through her. She hadn’t seen her parents and sister in nearly nine months, had barely even spoken to them, and when she did, the conversations had been brief, distracted exchanges of trivial information.
“He—” Hal paused, obviously uncertain how to proceed. “There’s a child—”
Tess blinked, feeling as if she’d just emerged from a cave into blinding sunlight. “What?”
“A little girl, nearly four. She went into foster care when she was a baby, and the foster family applied for adoption. But there was some kind of problem in the foster home, apparently, and she was removed, and then got shuffled around while they were trying to sort it all out.” He paused and swallowed hard. “Now the red tape is cleared up, and she’s ready.”
“Ready for—?” Tess still couldn’t comprehend what he was getting at. Her brain wasn’t operating properly.
“The child services supervisor has worked with your father before,” Hal persisted, laying down his fork and staring into her eyes as if willing her to understand. “She trusts him. If we wanted to take this child, she would expedite the paperwork.”
