9. Cape Town
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Karl Geary on Writing and Acting
As told to Kathryn Buckley
From a very young age I would replay conversations to my
advantage which I realize now is what I do as a writer. Part of the reason I
used to do it was because I think in our lives we can feel very powerless, and
when I would recreate the scenes without the intention of writing I would
readjust things so that we were all a little bit more heroic. I specifically
remember being given an assignment at school to write. I couldn’t stop rolling
it around in my head and it was the same tool I was using to reinvent the
conversations. So instead of using conversations in life, now I was using
fictional characters and having them come to various outcomes. That was really
it for me.
In terms of conflict as a writer, I think I find it
extremely difficult to take myself seriously because I don’t have an academic
background, if that makes sense at all. Writing was a vehicle for expression
that was useful and I still find this useful. The more isolated I was the more
authentic my writing felt. Not because I was necessarily writing about isolated
characters but because in some way I was channeling something I didn’t know I
had access to or wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. So initially it was a
way for me to bring that stuff out of myself. And in terms of craft or
satisfaction with craft or with my work in general I feel mostly quite
disappointed. I feel like there’s something I’m surrounding all the time but can’t
quite get to; there are moments I sense I am getting to them but not really. Maybe
that’s just the way it goes. I think I’ve gotten better though and I’m fairly
judicious when it comes to editing.
I’m quite lucky because I don’t put pressure on myself to
write. I never have. If I’m writing something I’m writing something. It always
starts with a character and then the world builds around him. Once I can get a
couple of lines in that character’s voice then I have something to work with and
it just keeps kind of rolling around. I’m not impatient with the time frame and
I think that helps a lot.
If you’re being lofty about it when you talk about a good
story you are talking about good art. Certain technical attributes make the
thing work, make it stand up but then there’s something else, that other aspect
that makes us respond to it as humans. And I think that’s the part where when a
line is correct, we feel something. It moves us in whatever direction it’s supposed
to. It’s very powerful when that happens and I don’t think it can really be
denied. I know for myself I care a lot about dialogue being honest and yet if
not done right it’s the quickest way for something to sound false. If dialogue
is not authentic it falls down, flat. We all have our pet peeves and I think
I’ve read some technically brilliant lines but have just not cared. There has
to be something at stake.
I’ve been fascinated lately with very ordinary things and
how in these almost microscopic snapshots of people and situations we can
really read the world through them. My characters are humble people for the
most part. If someone can read something I’ve written and come back from that
with a sense of something greater then I feel like I have achieved something. There
have been interpretations of my work that have puzzled me but my stuff isn’t
for everybody. It’s not supposed to be. I remember hearing something and I’d
love to take credit for it but it’s not mine. This writer John McGahern talks
about the idea that even though we write it is not until the work goes and has
its own life that we understand what it even was. I believe that you don’t
write in a vacuum; it is designed to be read so that others can have their own
experience with it.
Whether or not my work is based on my own personal
experience is a subject that has come up before. It’s manipulated in such a way
that it should feel that it is me to someone else. I have some horrific things
happening in Eve in Dublin, the novel
I’m working on now, but thank God it’s not about anything that’s ever happened
to me. The logistics and the plot points are pure fiction but you have to find
your way into that. I like to have death in my writing. It seems to work. Most
of my stories start with a funeral.
I’m genuinely fond of Eve
in Dublin. Now in six months I’m sure I’ll hate it, but right now I’m
enjoying it. It is a love story of sorts. There is a random beauty and cruelty in young Sonny’s life. He wants to escape Dublin in the 1980’s and the narrow future that awaits him there when he finds Eve, an older woman, who seems to be everything that he has wanted. But Eve has a dark past and many secrets that will eventually test Sonny, dividing him from his community, his family, and finally Eve.
My career as a writer has been narrow for someone my age and
I would like that to change. When you are doing anything outside of the norm
you are the vehicle that perpetuates the thing. It’s self motivated work. I have to get up at
five to write but that works for me; I’m actually a morning person. So most
mornings, like this morning, I wake up at five, work for a couple of hours and
then start my day. The point is that you get up every day and you go to work. Times
where I have not done that, work didn’t get produced. It’s as simple as that.
I’m rewriting Eve in
Dublin now and it’s a bit easier. My work schedule is also different than
when I was writing it. What I would do then was work on it at about nine. I
started off at the library, but then I found it was better to actually sit in
the car outside of the library. Then the cops started looking at me like I was
this weird guy for doing that, so I would ask myself where I could park each
day so that wouldn’t happen. I would write eight hundred words daily at that
time, but now that I’m rewriting I’m working on a chapter a day from home either
at my kitchen table, or if it’s winter, beside a fire. There are fifty small
chapters in the novel and I complete a full cycle of rewrites per month. Someone
actually once said to me that writing is like a boxer or athlete getting into
shape. I thought to myself, “Well, I’m neither of those types but I do get that
idea.” I know that if I haven’t written
for awhile the first day back is sluggish. It’s really after a week back that I
feel like I’m doing some work.
My writing is good old fashioned fiction. I wish it was more
specifically genre driven because it would probably be easier to find a home
for it, like The Hunger Games which I
won’t read but am not knocking. I haven’t tried multiple genres and have no
interest. I know people talk about it in terms of publishing but at that price
I couldn’t.
When I’m reading something one of the worst things I can say
– and this applies to not just writing but also art, painting and music – is
that it’s clever because it just says to me that it’s all cloak and mirrors. There’s
nothing authentic about it. I also think a lot of clever writing doesn’t
sustain itself. It doesn’t last; it has an expiration date. I like work that I
can pick up in x amount of years and still find something in it.
I’m reading James Salter’s new book now. I’m a huge fan of
his as well as the writer I mentioned, John McGahern. I think when he died it
was a huge loss to Irish Fiction- no one in the last two hundred years has been
in the same class as he was. I enjoy the classics and think American fiction
from the twenties and thirties is unbelievably good as well. Tender Is the Night cut me in two and continued
to for days afterwards, and a book called All
the Living by C.E. Morgan was just gorgeous writing. It’s the most dark,
simple and beautiful book. I think what’s great about the south where it was
set is that you can still be eccentric down there and they’re the people we
like to read about.
I’d never belonged to an established writing group, so I
took some writing classes. After that a few of us broke off and met up for a while.
It was fantastic but then it got real social, which I didn’t have a problem
with, but people wouldn’t talk about the work until about an hour in, and when
they weren’t even reading it anymore I stopped going. What I liked about the
gathering initially was that it had started off as a writing group. We didn’t
know each other. And then of course people get more familiar and we fell apart,
but it was a shame because we were a good writing group. I don’t think that
happens often.
I don’t really have a picture of myself as a writer. I’m
deeply committed to my work at the moment, and I want to know how Eve in Dublin will read as a completed
piece. I know how it ends, and the rewrite is so different than what I set out
to produce, which is great. There are these constant little surprises that keep
me interested. I knocked out a whole chapter this morning; it’s all gone but
that’s fine. To set myself up for grandeur wouldn’t work for me, but if I’m
writing simple stories then hopefully they’re all grand in their own little
way.
I got my start as an actor after I came to New York from
Ireland in 1989. Michael Almereyda was making a black and white film in the
early nineties called Nadja that was
being produced by David Lynch. It was a vampire story and he wanted to pay
homage to Bram Stoker, which is a nice old tie into some literary Irish world. His
way of doing that was trying to find a Renfield character who was Irish, and I
might have been the only Irish guy knocking around his neighborhood then. I was
running a café on St. Mark’s Place called Sin-é and he asked me to be in the
film. Until then acting was completely outside of my field.
I’ve done theater on Broadway and this sounds pretentious,
but I didn’t like it. I don’t like live performances. What I like about acting
on film is that there’s a technical aspect that I respond to; I think visually,
and I can mold myself into a visual understanding of a character. Put me on a
stage for two hours and I am lost. I’m naked but not in the way I would like to
be. A lot of the contemporary plays are unbearable, and I think they’re written
for a narrow audience who can afford them, whereas what I like about film is
that there’s socialism to it: we all have access and we should have access to
art. And I think that’s what is nice about writing as well; we still have our
secondhand bookstores.
I recently had an experience in Dublin where I worked with the
director Ken Loch whom I adore and admire. I think he’s one of the great icons
of contemporary cinema. I love his ethos, his goals, his political views,
everything, and so to spend two minutes in his company was golden for me. The
man is seventy eight years old and he bounces around like Leonard Cohen. He’s
amazing. If I have the opportunity to work in independent cinema with someone
like that, I grab it.
I’ve done scenes in cinema where I’ve felt a tremendous
amount and watched it afterwards and the camera didn’t pick up on any of it. And
vice versa as well. Once I was thinking about whether or not I washed the
dishes before I left the house while filming. When I watched the film I
thought, “Wow, that’s such an emotional scene.” I think men don’t become
interesting until they get a little older and have more baggage on their face
that they can bring to the part, and that’s just pure aesthetic. What I mean is
that a John Hurt type can say hello to you and you’re in tears. A lot of acting
is about that. I, unfortunately, have a face closer to a Justin Bieber’s than to
a John Hurt’s, so I’m waiting for my face to catch up with me. I think when I
am decent as an actor I can bring stillness to a piece, and I can ground it,
but not every piece requires or wants that. I have to be in the right part for
it to work.
My all-time favorite role was my gig in Morocco on the second
day of the war in Iraq. America had just invaded Iraq and Morocco is a
progressive Muslim country. However, there was a very strong anti-American
sentiment present at the time and my character, Deecy was his name, was a drag
queen. I had to walk around Morocco under less than friendly circumstances in a
mini-skirt and heels. It was a road trip movie and I really got a lot out of
doing that, not so much for the tiny part but because I insisted on staying in
drag for the duration. Oh, it was a learning experience.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Among Those Characters: Gary Guinn
My great-great-grandfather, a second
lieutenant in the 1st Kentucky Mounted Rifles, CSA, brought his
family to the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas following the Civil War. His
solemn photograph, taken in his later years, hangs at the head of a family collage
on the dining room wall. But even in the old man, without the uniform, with his
stark face and white beard, you cannot miss the Confederate officer. The long
thread of history that precedes him—the Protestant Rebellion in England, the
Plantation of Ulster in Northern Ireland, the long struggle with poverty ending
in the potato famine and the long voyage to the hard scrabble of a new start in
Appalachia—is of little consequence compared to that moment when the young
second lieutenant rode away from his Kentucky home. Or so it seems to me as I
look at the photo. His shadow lies over my sense of family, even though all the
other photos hanging on that dining room wall are cast in a very different
shadow, the shadow of the Ozark Mountains. There is the second lieutenant’s
son, my great-grandfather, who developed a process for melding metal that made
him a blacksmith of some renown in the region, and who ended his days in the state
hospital for the insane. And below him, there is his son, my grandfather, who
built up a mercantile business, lost it in the Depression, and became an
alcoholic.
On various branches of the family tree hang
distillers, horse traders, thieves, preachers, and teachers. Especially
teachers. In the first half of the twentieth century, my father’s generation—the
Guinns, the Faubuses, the Bucks, and the Gages—was fertile ground for teachers,
men and women who, in the 1920s and 1930s taught in one room or two room
schoolhouses in small rural communities like Delaney or Crosses or Greasy Creek,
after finishing their own high school education at the county seat in
Huntsville. They were readers, all of them, and it surely must have been they
who turned me and my cousins to books and gave us a love of language. The thick
hillbilly accent of the rural Ozarks prior to World War II, the language of the
novels of the late Donald Harrington, was mostly absent in my family. I cannot
remember an aunt, uncle, or cousin who sounded as if he or she was raised in
rural Arkansas. A product of the Great Depression, they had recognized the
value of speaking and writing well and had cultivated the skills thoroughly. When
they left the hills for the economic opportunities of the larger towns and
cities, they became businessmen, bankers, and even a governor of the state.
And they were storytellers. At family
reunions, over a plate of fried chicken, they became animated: the six hungry
boys of the Delaney basketball team on mules, returning from a game on the
other side of the mountain, fed cracklings and cornbread by a family of
strangers along the way who were slaughtering hogs; the shell shocked veteran
of World War I, putting his big Radiola Grand, powered by a car battery, on the
front porch and playing it so loud every evening that the road crew from
Fayetteville, camping down by the White River, poked a screwdriver through the
speaker; the philanderer whose wife locked him in the outhouse and left him
there all night to stall an escapade; the local bootlegger, shot in the leg,
fed by a committee of local women while he lay recuperating in the local jail,
and the fear and trembling of my aunt Lake, ten years old, who was sent all
alone to carry his lunch to him. The dirt basketball court on the Delaney
square, the cannery whistle that called people to seasonal work, the train that
came down the Frisco line from Fayetteville in the morning on its way to
Pettigrew and returned in the afternoon, the swimming hole at the old mill dam,
the swinging bridge. Story after story. The little hamlets that populated the
White River in the early twentieth century are almost as real to me as my memory
of my home town when I was a child. If writing is a process of self-discovery,
then my writing has been an attempt to find myself in those places, among those
characters.
Robert K. Gilmore says in the preface to
his book Ozark Baptizings, Hangings,
and Other Diversions that the people of the Ozarks have always had
a strong sense of belonging to a particular place. They are suspicious of
strangers, fiercely independent, and cherishers of solitude. The land of the
Ozarks, “the hills, the gullies, the hardwood, the rivers, the small
communities,” has formed the character of the people who live here. And it
forms the characters in my work. When Sherwood Anderson advised William
Faulkner to go back to Mississippi and write about that little patch of ground
Faulkner knew so well, Anderson understood the power that a place can have over
a writer’s imagination. The Ozarks are that for me—a patch of ground and the characters
who are grown from it.
I’m a little embarrassed to confess that,
having grown up in this fertile story-telling ground, I did not know, as so
many writers seem to have known, at the age of six, or eight, or ten, that I
would become a writer, and that the desire to write burned in me from that
early age. I do, in fact, remember, after having seen the movie Bambi, at about the age of ten, sitting
down that very evening and writing a long tale about a young deer, a story that
was, I’m sure, to my parents indistinguishable from the movie. And that was the
extent of my burning passion to write at that age. More like a little spark
than a burning flame. The truth is that I was, as my uncle used to say, a lost
ball in high weeds for most of my youth. Like many other young men, I began
writing poetry in college—vague, romantic, anti-war, anti-social. It was
terrible poetry, but it felt good to write it and to share the praise of other
dreamy young men and women who were also writing bad poetry. The compulsion to
write fiction didn’t strike me until I had been teaching literature in a small
college for several years. I was immersing myself and my students in the usual
suspects from Southern literature—Faulkner, O’Connor, and their progeny—when
the long recessive family story-telling gene began to reassert itself. Early
on, I leaned a bit too heavily on the great-great-grandfather, and I will
always be thankful to Alan Cheuse, who in a writing workshop at Peugeot Sound
advised me to put the old soldier on the closet shelf, and let all of that
material be a hidden reservoir to the real stories that would come. There is,
after all, in most of our lives, plenty of material. For me, the alcoholics,
the quiet women who end their lives with pistols, the disappointed ambitions,
the unfaithful husbands, the jealousy, the bitterness. And, of course, the few
grand successes and the many simple, long lives of work and pleasure.
I frequently discover stories in
small-town or area newspapers. I’m not likely to find high crimes and felonies there
as much as the petty thefts and audacious accidents that are part of most of
our lives. A story about a pickup truck crashing into a small country church,
reported a few years ago in the local county paper, gave me the idea for a
story titled “The Scar” that ultimately found its way into the Editions
Bibliotekos anthology Puzzles of Faith
and Patterns of Doubt. The obituary section of the local paper is a
treasure of names that seem to carry a heavy weight of story.
For most of my adult life, I have been
deeply involved in theater, both acting and directing. As an actor, “creating”
a character from the script of a play has always come naturally to me, developing
a personality with a particular voice and way of moving, a strong yearning. I
have often thought that acting was that other career that I might have pursued,
that other road I might have taken. Some writers have discovered that acting is
a first cousin to creating fictional characters. Charles Dickens, as a young
man, considered a career in acting. Throughout his career, he acted in and
directed a traveling troupe that raised money for the families of stricken
writers and that once played before the Queen. When he gave public readings, he
acted the characters so powerfully—Bill Sykes killing Nancy in Oliver Twist—that women in the audience
fainted. My fiction typically begins with a character—a face, a voice, an
attitude to life. When I write that character into a piece of fiction, sitting
at my desk, I “get into character,” as I do when acting, so I can feel and
think like the character. I have been somewhat surprised to find that some of
my best characters are women, though I have never played a female role on stage.
A good friend and fiction writer, Roger
Hart, once told a room full of students that he thought of story ideas as
pictures that hung a little crooked on the wall. Something is not quite right, is
a little crooked. It suggests a setting and a few characters, and the story
becomes an exploration of what that dislocated something is and how the
characters find their way through it. I like that image of the crooked picture.
Desire is at the heart of all tension. Characters yearn for something. If the yearning
is wrongly placed or frustrated—sometimes even when it is satisfied—the result
is pain. Most people will do whatever it takes to make the pain go away. I have
to wonder what good happiness and success in fiction are if they do not spring
from suffering and failure. And what good are suffering and failure if they do
not offer a chance of redemption? All of my stories look for that redemption.
It can be hard to come by in this world, and it doesn’t always look like
happiness. But the world being a place that is both awful and beautiful,
redemption must always be a possibility, whether or not it is realized in the
story. When I discovered the work of Lewis Nordan, I felt a shock of
recognition and a refreshing sense of something new and true and wonderful.
After reading his novel Sharpshooter
Blues, I spent the following year reading all the fiction he had published.
His is a violent, magico-realist world populated by weird and wonderful
characters looking for love in all the wrong ways. But it’s a redemptive world
for all that.
The only kind of fiction I’m interested
in writing is realism. I admire genre fiction, such as science fiction or
fantasy, when it is well written, but I have little interest in writing it
myself. I admire genre fiction that uses the tools of realism, when it does so
in a literary way, as is often the case in crime fiction or western fiction.
Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a
favorite summer read. A few years ago I began reading the Belgian crime fiction
writer George Simenon, both his Maigret detective series and his roman durs, the hard novels that are a
match for Camus and Sartre in tone and style. McMurtry and Simenon are writers
who have transcended their genre. Over the past few months I have begun to read
Scandinavian crime fiction, writers such as Kerstin Ekman, Arnold Indridison,
and Lars Kepler, but especially the Swedish writer Hakan Nesser, whose
Inspector VanVeeteren reminds me of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse.
Scandinavian writers are highly influenced by their environment—long periods of
dark, cold, and wet, opposed by short bursts of summer. Place is an abiding
power in their work. Darkness pervades their treatment of humanity in the same
way it pervades Camus and Sartre, and the better writers among them seem to be
influenced by the mid-20th century existentialists.
Influence for a writer is a sticky
question. When I’m asked which writers influenced me, I hesitate. Everything a
writer reads influences how he/she writes. But the question of discernible
influence gets at a complex issue. Having a PhD in 19th-century
British literature and being steeped in that period, I struggled, when I began
to write fiction, to silence those ponderous Romantic and Victorian voices and
find the contemporary voices that ultimately reproduced themselves in my
fiction. Out with Dickens (though surely not quite totally absolutely) and out
with Thomas Hardy, and in with Louise Erdrich, Lewis Nordan, and Cormac
McCarthy. I would like to claim kinship
with Faulkner and O’Connor, and any writer raised in the South could make that
claim, but in fact, those writers, whom Lewis Nordan calls “the family,” are
surely the outer verge of style for contemporary writers, are in fact, as they
are called, the “gothic” of southern style. I admire the minimalism of Raymond
Carver, and I love the rich, layered prose of James Joyce. But exactly how have
these very different styles affected my work?
I confess to being one of those writers
who struggle to establish a disciplined schedule of writing. I’ve always been
able to blame my teaching, scholarly work, raising kids. But I’m running out of
excuses. Charles Dickens sat down at his desk at 9:00 in the morning and worked
until 2:00 in the afternoon, regardless of whether he wrote one page or twenty.
Writing fiction does take a block of time, enough time for the writer to move himself
or herself into the world of the work, to crack open the characters’ hearts
again. It takes time to step out of the real world and into the fictive. So
creating some kind of schedule that allows you to do that becomes a fundamental
decision about whether you are able to write or not. I tend to be streaky—when
a story is working, I ignore other things and stay with the story.
A colleague of mine at the university
teases me for being old fashion in my writing method. I write with a pen on a
lined pad of paper until I have finished a chapter or a story, revising
whenever I start a new writing session. Then the chapter/story is transferred
to the word processor, and revised again. I tend to do a lot of revising as I
go, until the story or novel is complete, at which time I look at the bigger
structural revision questions. At that point, the word processor is a great
help, especially in the ability to move material around and to save deleted
material unchanged or simply delete it altogether. In the initial writing of
the piece, I like the feel of the pen on the paper. My colleague laughs when I
say it, but I have a heightened sense of physicality in the writing, a sense of
carving the images and lines out of nothing onto a piece of highly processed
wood. I like that feeling, and I go so far as to believe it makes me more
physical, more concrete, in my writing. I’m an Episcopalian, and so I have no
problem at all with that idea. Episcopalians are very incarnational in their
view of the world. We bring our physical bodies into our worship—kneeling,
bowing, crossing ourselves, focusing on the Eucharist, the body and the blood.
I am currently trying to finish the
revisions on the second novel of a projected Ozark trilogy. The first novel was
set at the beginning of the 20th century, this second during the
Depression era, and the third will be set in the late 20th century. Daniel
Woodrell’s highly successful novel Winter’s
Bone, and the movie made from it, project the dark side of life in the
Ozarks, a vision of meth labs and gratuitous violence, but that subculture is
not representative of the broader life in the region. The southern Ozarks are
populated mostly by hard working rural and small town people, whose lives are
governed largely by the forces of nature and of social and religious
strictures. Their roots go back through Appalachia to Good King Billy, William
of Orange, and his Protestant army. And overwhelmingly Protestant they remain.
Their religious sentiment still runs deep, with their sense of moral rectitude.
My family has been shaped through five generations by this ethos. My writing abrades
constantly against it, like a knife blade against the whetstone. With deep
religious sentiment and a strong sense of moral rectitude come the potential
for both great love and terrible abuse, both grace and judgment, gentleness and
violence, sacrifice and manipulation. These are the poles between which my
characters move and between which I seek to place myself and my work.
In spite of writing so much bad poetry in
college, I never gave up writing it. It still excites me, as one poet has put
it, to write a novel in a few lines. I spend part of my writing time on poetry.
I love the poetry of William Stafford, his Buddhist view of the simplicity of
life. The intensity of poetic language, and its concreteness, make the reading
and writing of poetry a good exercise for a fiction writer. The caveat there
for me is that I have to be careful of getting bogged down in beautiful
language and stifling the plot.
As I think about what I really want to
communicate in my work, I remember a course I taught in Modernist literature a
couple of years ago. Our only texts were Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses.
One of my objectives was for the students to see that what seems to be darkness
can sometimes be light. Another objective was that students understand that
great literature creates highly complex characters who can be both despicable
and sympathetic. Enter Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Ulysses. Working slowly through that difficult text, most of the
students came to see that we are all Leopold Bloom, all outcasts, all keeping a
tight lid on our deepest self, all noble in the little ways that make us human.
Leopold Bloom is Everyman/woman. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character Satan, when asked about Hell, says,
“Where e’er I go is Hell, myself am Hell.” After teaching Ulysses, that line became for me, “Where e’er I go is Bloom, myself
am Bloom.” The great humanistic objective of great literature, after all, is to
communicate vividly our common humanity. I hope my own work does that.
Visit Gary’s website: http://garyguinn.info/
Visit Gary’s website: http://garyguinn.info/
Copyright©2013
by Gary Guinn
Thursday, May 2, 2013
M
I C H I G A N
a
novel by
Jeff
Vande Zande
[opening
chapter]
Beyond the cyclone fencing and down the
slope rippling with big bluestem and switchgrass, I-696 drones with five
o’clock traffic escaping Detroit. The sky is overcast and threatens rain. Robby
Cooper stands outside an apartment door and studies the drivers racing westward
on the interstate down the hill. Looking at the marbled cloud cover
stretched gray to the horizon, he scratches feverishly at his upper arm. A raggedy-looking
robin lands on top of the fence and just as quickly flies away. He follows it
until it’s out of sight and then reads the address on the piece of paper
trembling in his hand. He checks that the number matches the number on the
apartment door. He checks it again. Fingercombing his bangs away from his face,
he tucks the longer strands behind his ear. He inhales a long breath through
his nose and looks up into the underside of the second floor walkway. Exhaling
a sigh between his teeth, he watches his fist reach out to knock on the door.
He dries his palms against his
jeans. A young, blonde woman opens the door. Her face blanches when she sees
him.
Robby looks down and his bangs fall
across his face. He sweeps them aside again. His smile is tight-lipped. “Hi,
Tif,” he whispers, glancing at her rounded belly.
She watches him for a moment as
though he is an apparition that might disappear, that hopefully will. She wears
a long, blue maternity dress. Her hair is pulled back from her pretty face in a
ponytail. One hand on the doorknob, her other hand moves to her abdomen and
rubs gentle circles there. “You shouldn’t have come here,” she says. “You
should have called.” Her hand leaves her belly and goes to the door, moving as
though to close it. “Who gave you the address?”
“Your mom.” He shrugs. “She said it
was good that I come see you face to face.”
Tiffany sniffs a scornful little
laugh and shakes her head. “She was wrong.”
Robby jams his hands into his pockets and
hunches his shoulders towards his ears. “I just wanted to talk.”
“I really don’t think we have anything
to talk about,” she says. She crosses her arms between her belly and breasts. “I
don’t expect anything from you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not worried...” He shrugs
again. “I just thought that we could talk.”
Rain starts to fall, dinging on the
hoods of the cars behind him.
Tiffany hugs her arms tighter
against her. “Is this something you have to do for your program? Are you
supposed to talk to people that you might have—”
Robby shakes his head. “No, I’m
not—”
“Because I’m not hurt. I’m not mad
at you, not anymore. That night was a mistake, and it’s over.” Her hand goes to
her belly and rubs. “I really don’t expect anything from you or want anything.
You’ve got your own problems. This one’s mine, and it’s not even a problem,
okay? I’m fine.”
As though being turned up on a
volume knob, the rain drums down in a sudden torrent.
Robby looks over his shoulder at all
the water pouring over the cars and asphalt. “We can’t even just talk, just for
a minute?” he says, raising his voice above the racket of the rain.
She studies his face for a moment.
“You’re tan.”
He nods.
“The place was in Florida, wasn’t
it?”
“Yes.”
“It was a cold winter here.” She
shakes her head. “Almost seems like you were being rewarded.”
He shivers. “Can we, though? Can we
talk?”
“Aren’t we talking now?”
“Tif.”
She combs her fingers into her hair,
squeezing her palms against the side of her head. “What, then? What do you want
to say?”
He looks back at the rain coming in
at an angle, soaking his hoodie. He looks at her and his bangs sweep across his
face again. He shrugs a shoulder. “Can I come in?”
The rain pours down.
Tiffany sighs and then steps back,
opening the door wider. “I don’t have much time. I need to get ready for work
soon. I’m covering for someone this afternoon.” When he doesn’t move, she
motions with her hand, gesturing him inside with her fingers in a movement that
might be used to swat away an insect. “Come on. Just don’t plan to stay for
very long.”
Sheepishly, he slips in past her,
and she closes the door behind him.
The apartment’s kitchen, living
room, and dining area are all in the same space. The chair, coffee table, and
sofa look worn and ready for replacement. There’s no dining room table. Tiffany
walks past Robby and sits in the chair. Her hands go to her belly and rub
circles, as though trying to predict a future from a crystal ball.
“I just moved in last month,” she
says. “I’m just starting to put the place together.” She smooths her hand over
the arm of the chair.
“It’s nice,” Robby says.
“No it isn’t, but it’s mine.”
He nods, stuffing his hands into the
pockets of his hoodie. “Are you still at the dealership?”
She looks at him. “You can sit
down.”
Robby smiles. “Okay. Thanks.” He unzips
his hoodie, takes it off, and holds it in his hand. He bends toward his laces.
“You don’t have to take off your
shoes. You’re not going to hurt this carpet.”
He walks over to the couch and sits.
He drapes the wet hoodie across his legs. “Are you still at Shuette’s?” he asks,
watching her circling hands.
She nods. “Still at the reception
desk, but not for much longer. Dan said that he’ll start training me for a
title clerk position after the baby is born.”
Robby flips his bangs away with a snap
of his head. “That a good deal?”
“Better than what I have. It’s high
stress, but a lot better pay.”
He looks up at the sound of
footsteps coming from the upstairs apartment.
“What about you?” Tiffany says. “Are
you working?”
He shakes his head, rubbing his hand
up and down his arm. “I just got back yesterday.” He shrugs. “I’m going to talk
to Ty, but not about working. I don’t think he’d give me my job back.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
He looks at the floor. “I need to
talk to him, too.”
They don’t say anything for a
moment. The muffled sound of the rain fills the room.
Tiffany pushes her hands against the
arms of the chair and raises the leg rest on the recliner. Her hands go back to
her belly.
Robby watches them. “Does it kick?”
She glances at him and then back to her
hands. “Not exactly. He moves, though. I can feel him moving.”
His face changes. “Him? It’s a boy?”
“What did you want to talk about, Robby?”
A small sound vibrates from his
pants pocket. He takes out his cell phone and looks at the screen. It reads Mom. He presses a button, sending it to
voicemail. He looks at Tiffany and stuffs the phone back into his pocket. “I
don’t know, Tif… everything, I guess.”
“Is there an everything?”
He scoots forward on the cushion,
rubbing his palms over his knees. “I think so. Don’t you think so?”
She looks into his eyes. Her head
shakes back and forth. “No. I don’t.”
“It’s mine, though, right? I’d
heard, and then your mom said—”
Tiffany pulls up on the lever and
slams the leg rest back into the recliner. “Yes, it’s yours. It’s yours because
you showed up to party high and started telling me how much you loved me. You
found me down in the basement drunk, and you lied to me, and then you fucked
me.” Tears well in her eyes and she brushes them away. “I didn’t hear anything
from you after, and when I finally heard something, I heard that you were gone
and in rehab.” She takes a deep breath and exhales it slowly.
Robby’s fingers pick at a loose
thread on the couch. “You weren’t that drunk,” he mutters.
“What?”
“I didn’t lie.” He looks across at
her and into her eyes. “I’ve had feelings for you since high school. I always—”
She crosses her arms. “Shut up,
Robby. Just shut up, okay? I don’t want to hear about any of this. I wish you
wouldn’t have even come here. Why’d you come here?”
He looks toward the window at the
rain coming down the glass in wormy lines. He squeezes his forearm in his
fingers. “You talk about things when you’re in, things you want to make right. That’s
what they get you to talk about. My mom told me about you.” He looks at her. “I
would have called, you know. I was only allowed to talk to one person, though.
That was part of the deal. I got to talk to my mom once every two weeks. That’s
it.”
Tiffany looks at him, almost through
him.
“For the last three months, you’re
who I talked about. In group, in one-on-one. I talked about you… you and the
baby. I just want to do something right. I want to play some kind of part—”
“No.”
He looks at her, his face startled.
She shakes her head. “We’re not part
of your recovery. We’re not going to be the thing that makes you feel better
about yourself, okay? You’re just going to have to—”
“I don’t mean it that way,” he says,
holding his head between his hands. “It’s not about my recovery or… I just want
to help. I want to be involved in some way.”
“That’s fine, but I’m saying no. I
don’t need any help from my mom, and I don’t need any help from you...
especially not you.”
Robby closes his eyes and squeezes
his forehead in his hand. “Why? I don’t understand. I just want to do something…”
A tear breaks from his eye and he smears it across his cheeks. “I mean, he’s my
son, too. Like it or not—”
“I want you to leave.”
He looks at her. “Tif—”
Using the arms of the chair, she
pushes herself to standing. “I know what you’re thinking. A boy should have his
father in his life.” She looks toward the window. “That’s probably true most of
the time. But you’re an addict and a liar and a thief. I don’t want that in my
life.” She looks at him. “I just want you to stay the hell away from me, okay?”
She glowers at him with stony eyes. “I should have never let you come in here.”
He drops his face into his hands.
His body shakes, and he releases a choked sob. Then, he stops himself,
breathing in a strained breath through his teeth and exhaling its heat into his
palms. “Jesus Christ, Tif,” he nearly whispers. “You won’t let me be any part
of this? You’re really saying that you won’t let—”
“Robby, just go,” she says. “That’s
what I’m saying. Just go.” She walks to the door and opens it. The sound of the
rain is like colossal radio static.
He looks out at the cold, wet world
waiting for him. Standing, he puts on his hoodie, zips it up, and slouches past
her.
Outside her apartment, he turns back.
“Could you call me, at least? Or, call my mom? Would you at least do that?”
“Call you? What are you—”
“When he’s born.” His voice cracks. “Could
you just call me when he’s born?”
She looks down at the ground. Her
hand rubs her belly. “I don’t know,” she says, pushing the door toward him. Her
hand stops rubbing. “I don’t think so,” she says and closes the door.
He stands on the welcome mat with tears
streaming down his face. “You weren’t that drunk!” he shouts above the noise of
the rain. He turns, flips up his hood, and runs through the downpour to his
car.
Sitting in the driver’s seat with
the engine running, he turns on the radio. Bruce Springsteen sings something
about time slipping away and leaving you with nothing. Robby turns the radio
off.
He fishes the cell phone out of his
pocket and listens to his voicemail:
“Robby, it’s Mom. Your Grandpa Otto
wants you to stop out to his place when you get a chance. He just called. I
tried to give him your number, but he said that he wants to see you in person.
Soon as you can, okay? Don’t keep him waiting too long. Call me, too. I want to
know how things went with Tiffany. Okay? Okay. Well, bye. I’ll talk to you
soon. I love you, and I’m so proud of you. You’re doing great. Everything just
keeps getting better from here, okay? You just need to—”
He tosses the phone onto the
passenger seat. It bounces once and lands down in the passenger seat footwell.
His mother’s voice keeps talking faintly.
Robby gives it the middle finger.
Shivering, he turns on the heater.
The vents blow cold air over him.
Outside, the world undulates through
the rain-wrecked windshield. Blurred brakes light glow red in front of him,
then white shifting into reverse. Reaching to shift into drive, he slumps
forward and buries his face in his arms against the steering wheel.
He sobs.
Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Vande Zande
All Rights Reserved
Cannot be reproduced or republished in any form whatsoever
without express permission of the author
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