For a long moment, no one spoke. More than a few of the students seemed newly distracted by the stapled writing samples before them. Finally, Jake said: “I’m glad to hear you’re well along on your project, and I hope we can be a resource for you, and a support system. One thing we do know is that writers have always helped other writers, whether or not they’re in a formal program together. We all understand that writing is a solitary activity. We do our work in private—no conference calls or brainstorming meetings, no team-building exercises, just us in a room, alone. Maybe that’s why our tradition of sharing our work with fellow writers has evolved the way it has. There’ve always been groups of us coming together, reading work aloud or sharing manuscripts. And not even just for the company or the sense of community, but because we actually need other eyes on our writing. We need to know what’s working and, even more important, what’s not working, and most of the time we can’t trust ourselves to know. No matter how successful an author is, by whatever metric you measure success, I’m willing to bet they have a reader they trust who sees the work before the agent or publisher does. And just to add a layer of practicality to this, we now have a publishing industry in which the traditional role of ‘editor’ is diminished. Today, editors want a book that can go straight into production, or as close to that as possible, so if you think Maxwell Perkins is waiting for your manuscript-in-progress to arrive on his desk, so he can roll up his sleeves and transform it into The Great Gatsby, that hasn’t been true for a long time.”

He saw, to his sadness but not his surprise, that the name “Maxwell Perkins” was not familiar to them.

“So in other words, if we’re wise we’ll seek out those readers and invite them into our process, which is what we’re all doing here at Ripley. You can make that as formal or informal as you like, but I think our role in this group is to add what we can to the work of our fellow writers, and open ourselves to their guidance as much as possible. And that includes me, by the way. I don’t plan on taking up the class’s time with my own work, but I do expect to learn a great deal from the writers in this room, both from the work you’re doing on your own projects and from the eyes and ears and insights you bring to your classmates’ work.”

Evan Parker/Parker Evan had not stopped grinning once during this semi-impassioned speech. Now he added a head shake to underscore his great amusement. “I’m happy to give my opinion on everyone’s writing,” he said. “But don’t expect me to change what I’m doing for anyone else’s eyes or ears or noses, for that matter. I know what I’ve got here. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet, no matter how lousy a writer he is, who could mess up a plot like mine. And that’s about all I’m going to say.”

And with that he folded his arms and shut tight his mouth, as if to ensure that no further morsel of his wisdom might slip past his lips. The great novel underway from Evan Parker/Parker Evan was safe from the lesser eyes, ears, and noses of the Ripley Symposia’s first-year prose fiction workshop.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Sure Thing

The mother and the daughter in the old house: that was his writing sample. And if ever a work of prose pointed less to a stupendous, surefire, can’t-douse-its-fire plot it could only be something along the lines of an exposé on the drying of paint. Jake took extra time with the piece before his first one-on-one meeting with its author, just to make sure he wasn’t missing a buried Raiders of the Lost Ark springboard or the seeds of some epic Lord of the Rings quest, but if they were there, in the quotidian descriptions of the daughter’s homework practices, or the mother’s way of cooking creamed corn from a can, or the descriptions of the house itself, Jake couldn’t see it.

At the same time, it sort of annoyed him to note that the writing itself wasn’t terrible. Evan Parker—and Evan Parker he would be, unless and until he actually succeeded in publishing his threatened masterwork and requiring a privacy-saving pen name—might have dwelt upon his supposedly spectacular plot in the workshop but Jake’s obnoxious student had produced eight pages of entirely inoffensive sentences without obvious defects or even the usual writerly indulgences. The bald fact of it was: this asshole appeared to be a natural writer with the kind of relaxed and appreciative relationship with language even those writing programs far higher up the prestige scale than Ripley’s were incapable of teaching, and which Jake himself had never once imparted to a student (as he, himself, had never once received it from a teacher). Parker wrote with an eye for detail and an ear for the way the words wove into sequence. He conjured his two apparent protagonists (a mother named Diandra and her teenage daughter, Ruby) and their home, a very old house in some unnamed part of the country where snow was general in winter, with an economy of description that somehow conveyed these people in their setting, as well as the obvious and even alarming level of tension between them. Ruby, the daughter, was studious and sullen, and she came up out of the page as a closely observed and even textured character. Diandra, the mother, was a less defined but heavy presence at the edges of the daughter’s perspective, as Jake supposed one might expect in a capacious old house with only two people in it. But even at opposite ends of the home they shared, their mutual loathing was radiant.

He had been through the piece twice, already; once a few nights earlier in the course of his all-nighter, and again the night after his first class, when sheer curiosity had driven him back to the folders, hoping to learn a bit more about this jerk. When Parker made such sensational claims for his plot Jake had thought inevitably of that body discovered in the sand, aggressively decaying while still illogically in possession of “honeymelon” breasts, and he’d been more than a little surprised to discover that this memorable incongruity had sprung from the fertile mind of his student Chris, a hospital administrator from Roanoke and the mother of three daughters. A few moments later, when he realized that Evan Parker was the author of these particular pages—well written, to be sure, but utterly devoid of any plot, let alone a plot so scintillating even a “lousy writer” couldn’t mess it up—Jake had wanted to laugh.

Now, with the author himself about to arrive for his first student-teacher conference, he sat down with the excerpt for a third and hopefully final time.

Ruby could hear her mother, all the way upstairs in her bedroom and on the phone. She couldn’t hear the actual words, but she knew when Diandra was on one of her Psychic Hotline calls because the voice went up and got billowy, as if Diandra (or at least her psychic alias, Sister Dee Dee) were floating overhead, looking down at everything in the poor caller’s life and seeing all. When her mother’s voice was mid-range and her tone flat, Ruby could tell that Diandra was working for one of the off-site customer service lines she logged in to. And when it got low and breathy, it was the porn chat line that had been the soundtrack of most of the last couple of years of Ruby’s life.

Ruby was downstairs in the kitchen, retaking an at-home history test by her own special request to her teacher. The test had been on the Civil War up through the postwar reconstruction, and she’d gotten an answer wrong about what a carpetbagger was, and where the word came from. It was only a little thing, but it had been enough to kick her out of her usual spot at the top of the class. Naturally she’d asked for another fifteen questions.

Mr. Brown had tried to tell her the 94 on her original test wasn’t going to hurt her grade, but she refused to let it go.

“Ruby, you missed a question. It’s not the end of the world. Besides, for the rest of your life you’re going to remember what a carpetbagger is. That’s the whole point.”

It wasn’t the whole point. It wasn’t any part of the point. The point was to get an A in the class so she could argue her way out of the so-called Advanced American History junior spring class and take history at the community college instead, because that would help her get out of here and into college—hopefully with a scholarship, hopefully far, far away from this house. Not that she felt the least inclination to explain any of this to Mr. Brown. But she pleaded, and eventually he gave in.

“Okay. But a take-home test. Do it on your own time. Look stuff up.”

“I’ll do it tonight. And I promise, I absolutely will not look stuff up.”

He sighed and sat down to write another fifteen questions, just for her.

She was writing a longer than necessary response about the Ku Klux Klan when her mother came down the stairs and padded into the kitchen, phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, already reaching for the refrigerator door.

“Honey, she’s close by. Right now. I can feel her.”

There was a pause. Her mother, apparently, was gathering information. Ruby tried to return to the Ku Klux Klan.

“Yes, she misses you, too. She’s watching over you. She wanted me to say something about … what is it, honey?”

Diandra was now standing before the open refrigerator. After a moment, she reached for a can of Diet Dr Pepper.

“A cat? Does a cat mean anything to you?”

Silence. Ruby looked down at her test sheet. She still had nine answers to go, but not with the psychic world filling the little kitchen.

“Yes, she said it was a tabby cat. She used the word ‘tabby.’ How’s the cat doing, honey?”

Ruby sat up straight against the little banquette. She was hungry, but she’d promised herself not to make any dinner until she’d done what she needed to do, and finished proving to him what she needed to prove. It was the tail end of their grocery week, and not a whole lot in the fridge, she’d checked, but there was a frozen pizza, and some green beans.