Atheist
Yash Seyedbagheri
The atheists came to fight during our weekly Tuesday night writing group. It was November, just after the 2018 midterms. The atheists were led by their leader, Chuck Addison, who bore a disturbing resemblance to Santa. I was Nancy Botkin, the writer’s tsaritsa, president, whatever you wanted to call me. We were in our little corner of Frank’s Bowling Alley with its pink and purple striped walls.
We’d been meeting at Frank’s for a year. The atheists had been there six months.
I was an associate professor at Evergreen University in Fort Edgar, Colorado. I taught Beginning English Composition, along with Beginning Creative Writing, and a couple other courses, along with my group. Some of the members had been former students, others friends of friends. We’d established the goal of sending stories into the world, and preferably into some big-name magazines, like the Missouri Review and Glimmer Train.
Normally, I’d be in the middle of leading a discussion on characterization or trying to establish “the reason for the telling,” in a student story. The atheists would talk over us with their matter-of-factness as they dissected religious theory. Usually, they paid us little attention, a glance here and there, but tonight it something was up. They were louder, the drinks flowing. They’d been dissecting different denominations with ferocity. Episcopalians, proclaimed Chuck, were wine-guzzling theocrats who tossed scraps to the world by marrying gays and lesbians. Lutherans were obsessed with guilt and donuts, proclaimed another member. Her name was Karin Lindstrom. Tonight, I sensed a stirring in the atheists, a need for something beyond their usual humdrum lives.
In the alley, you had eight rows of lanes and behind the lanes, a series of tables and a long oak counter. It served as a minibar on one side and a space for rentals on the other. The atheists sat at a round stainless-steel table in front of the bar like conspirators, while we crammed into two wobbling tables to the bar’s left. It smelled like stale feet and weed; we called it the writer’s corner.
There was probably seven or eight feet of space between us and the atheists, although it often seemed like only two or three. There were six, three young women, and three older men, two of whom were flaccid, including Chuck.
Chuck’s hair was graying and neatly parted. He often wore a striped Polo shirt, which was unbuttoned at the top. Tonight was no exception. He had bulbous hands and this thick crop of chest hair, reminding me of the byproducts of a Dustbuster.
I’d say Chuck was in his early fifties. You’d think he would have been on the verge of retirement, leaving crusades behind for a world where he could nurse a Pinot or a Merlot and lie awake, staring at the vastness of sky and endless time at night. Then again, having observed Chuck in the six months the atheists had been congregating here, he struck me as someone seeking action. There was something in his gait, his mellifluous voice and in his inflection, which echoed across the alley week after week. On occasions, he’d quote Lenin, looking around, as if expecting a revolution to break out. In that regard, he reminded me of the last guy I’d dated, Phil Simpkins, who’d spoken in dogma and needed every action to be legitimized.
I was now forty-one, single by choice after Phil, who had broken up with me a year ago. My replacement was a flame-haired actress who talked like she was on cocaine and who played Ophelia in a modernized production of Hamlet, Denmark replaced by a Burger King.
We’d dated for two years and by the last year, Phil needed an excuse even to make love. He could fill his spaces with dogma and regimens, but he couldn’t really live. At least I had my writing group, my band of chuckleheads. That was something small and good. So, it seemed.
The night had started out normally. All ten of us were present. We occupied our usual two tables and immersed ourselves in stories and libations, which in my case were White Russians. We started by discussing our published story of the week, in this case, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, by Sherman Alexie. For a solid forty minutes, we’d discussed notions of voice and dark humor. My favorite line, for the record, was about the narrator being a railroad track pizza.
Then we’d gotten into the students’ work. We had three stories up tonight. The students were supposed to read and re-read them so we could discuss strengths and places for revision. Claire Hughes was first.
Her story was about siblings who kidnap a corpse for ransom. Claire had real potential. Her prose was a mélange of short sentences and Nabokovian loquaciousness; her story ideas needed to be nuanced. You could have corpse kidnappings and even flambeed baby consumption, but you needed to convince the reader of the parameters of this world. And the rest of my herd seemed to feel the same way. Besides, we were all getting distracted by the atheists, leaning over to gawk at them from time to time.
“Hey Nancy,” David DiCenzo said. “You know what would be awesome? If we got into a rumble with the atheists. Like West Side Story.”
He proceeded to belt out a few lines from “I Feel Pretty.” I hoped to God he didn’t give up the day job, which in David’s case was dispensing tickets and pouring Fat Tires at the Tempo Theater, the little indie down on College Avenue. David had a kind of spirit that had been drained from me some time ago. I knew that he wanted to attend the MFA at Evergreen University. His sister, was in fact, his mother. No joke. He’d only found out three years ago. He’d told us all this one night, his descriptions methodical and all-too-detailed, as if he were in a confessional. I had to admire David’s ability to be a smartass, even if there seemed to be something else jostling around within his goose-like laugh.
My class laughed, shifting their beer glasses around. Claire shook her head at David, and made a face. She had unruly long blonde hair, smelled like garlic and cigarettes, and wore an oversized striped navy T-shirt and jeans.
Michael Patrick O’Shaughnessy booed David, as he always did when David told bad jokes. Of course, Michael Patrick told his share too, usually involving his native Dublin. He had a precise goatee, jet black hair, and his owl-like eyes which panned over us like a detective. In fact, he reminded me of my little brother Nicky, an up-and-coming jazz pianist. His literary credo was to throw rocks at your characters for full emotional realization.
“All right, David, Michael Patrick,” I said, smiling. “We were discussing Claire’s story. So, what are your thoughts? Are the reasons for the kidnapping fleshed out?”
“I think we should get the atheist perspective,” David said, folding his lanky arms, and leaning back, his jet-black hair long and unruly. He let out another goose-like laugh.
“Let’s cool it, David,” I said. “This girl in Claire’s story has kidnapped a corpse to get back at her ex-boyfriend. What’s the payoff?”
David made another loud joke about the atheists’ group. He had no real sense of what he wanted in the broader scheme of things, which was a shame. David had this genuine ability to write complex characters I’d long given up on creating. Mendacious, foul-mouthed, but secretly kind-hearted husbands and wives. Teenagers whose ideas of love involved calling people motherfuckers. I wish I’d called Phil a motherfucker when he broke up with me, but I’d just replayed the words in my mind. You need passion, you’re too absorbed in yourself. Dr. Fredericks, the head of the English department, often said something similar, guised in a neat smile, especially when I got passed over for some award or another.
Chuck turned around, glancing at us across the space of pink and purple carpeting. He surveyed me with a sort of knowing little smile. I wondered what he saw in me, a pale forty-one-year-old brunette with a long nose. I felt a thrill and a certain revulsion. This was a man who made quick and cold judgments. Chuck had once gotten into an argument with an Episcopal priest. The priest’s sin? Wanting divine luck rolling strikes.
“I don’t know,” David said. “From what I got out of it, she wants some moment of glory, something to hold onto. She’s in this bad place, losing her boyfriend, really having no one else.”
“That’s good, David,” I said, trying not to look at Chuck.
Business was slow in the lanes tonight. The PA system played Pat Boone. Nicky had once said Pat Boone alone could torture suspects. Fuck Bush-league waterboarding. A black-haired woman in a pink tank top had rolled a strike, balls meeting pins with a kind of thwack-whooshing sound. She ambled toward the seats and scoreboards, doing this little victory dance.
“Nancy?” David looked concerned. “Are you all right?”
Chuck ambled over to us with a precise and cold gait. He carried a Fat Tire in his right hand. His fellow atheists looked at us with the same little grins. He smelled like sweat and Polo cologne, the kind Phil had used to wear.
“What’s your name?” He winked at me.
I told him I was in the midst of teaching and we needed to get back to business. He shook his head.
“You can’t tell me your name?” Chuck looked at me, as though I were speaking French. He pretended to frown, as though it conveyed some inner authority. I thought it made him look like someone having a seizure.
“Nancy.”
“Nancy what?”
“Nancy,” I said.
To reveal your surname seemed like stripping yourself naked, exposing something private. Plus Botkin was a name that seemed weighty, awkward, like a sexual disease, even. Congratulations, you have a case of the Botkins!
“Chuck Addison.” Chuck smiled, a knowing little smile.
“Nice to meet you, Chuck.”
Chuck looked at me again and shook his head. He cleared his throat and set his beer down next to me. The PA system had banished Pat Boone and his love letters in the sand. Now the Eagles were singing Hotel California.
“You really believe what you’re doing?” he said, after a long minute. His voice was gruff, like a dog barking. His eyes were bloodshot. “What’s the purpose of your stories?”
“Dude?”
“You heard me,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. He leaned against the table and inhaled. “Tell me what these students have done. Do they even know what it means to work? To achieve?”
“Yes, they do,” I said, trying not to lose my temper. “What about your group? You find three thousand ways to discuss how God doesn’t exist. You congregate every damned week.”
“You know I made it from nothing,” Chuck said. “I’m a lawyer. Put myself through school. I know too many people who fucked around. It’s a sad thing, really. And yet, the world seems to reward them.”
“Great,” I said. “And what are you philosophers doing?”
I did believe in them. I loved reading the stories my students wrote, as lacking as they were in craft techniques like tense or use of interiority. I believed they could thrive, believed with each session, they could grow, even though it was hard to quantify that sort of thing. The publication record in the group was low, but that wasn’t the whole picture. I could read and re-read their work and I longed to have the kind of durable, if less than dependable friends that populated their pages, the kinds of people who could understand you without outward judgment, because they were just as fucked up.
“What we discuss is important,” Chuck said. He took a long swig of his beer, slammed it down on the table. “It has an effect on our politics, on society. Isn’t writing a disguise of sort? A way to look intelligent? To hide behind a guise?”
“Well, fucking good for you,” I said, pretending to clap. “I’ll alert the media.”
An image rose to my mind like a dark creature: Phil was hunched over his notebook writing some treatise or another during one of our movie nights. He’d brushed away my hand, absorbed in the whirl of abstractions, smelling like sweat and misplaced excitement.
David told a joke now. What do you call 2000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start. I shook my head and gave David my iciest stare. But with David, that was impossible.
Chuck breathed, something slow, laborious, and rasping. He squeezed his hands, in and out, and looked at our group.
“So, this is your group,” he said. “Charming.”
This was more than just a group. Alcoholics Anonymous and the atheists were groups. We were one thing I’d managed to hold together, one constant. My group was a great bunch, too old to be children, but not too young to be fully cynical. They were in their mid-twenties, a few in their early thirties. They still had the buffet of confusion and possibilities that beckoned. What credit card offers to take? What apartments could they get within price range? What career possibilities could they shoot for or even fantasize about?
Although, funny as it seemed, I had one thing in common with the atheists. We lacked faith. They lacked faith in theological principles, I in myself. At forty-one, I’d begun to lose faith that I’d break through, find my niche. I can’t say what story it was I wanted to write, only that I wanted something that would distinguish me from the complacent.
Chuck paced around me. I felt the space bubble tightening with each second. His thick eyebrows danced up and down. He coughed and emitted a hacking sound.
“Is that what you think?” he said. “You look smart. Is that all you can say? What does your husband think of all this? Or your wife?”
The PA system played some kind of elevator music. A swarthy man danced around double-fisting White Russians. My students just stared, frozen. David leaned back, watching, mouth gaping. Claire kept staring at her story, as if she expected the night to resume. Michael Patrick stared into his 90 Shilling glass. I truly hated their looks right now.
“You’ve had too many beers,” I said. “And I don’t need a fucking husband. I’ve been published in the New Yorker.”
Chuck leaned in, breath rife with the ghosts of onions past. He inhaled deeply, breath deep and rasping. I wondered if he knew I lied. But the world had stories. Phil had Ophelia. My classmates had vivid corpse kidnappings, psychopathic mothers, divorce in the suburbs, even if the chuckleheads couldn’t seem to revise the pieces just yet.
“Are you happy?” he said. “Is it worth it?”
Claire kept fiddling with her story. David looked down. Michael Patrick took a long swig of his 90 Shilling. I tried to ignore Chuck, took a sip of my drink. This was the sort of tone I heard all too often, telling people that I taught at the university or was single. They’d never been as direct as Chuck, but I could expose these unspoken questions. I was crazy to stay single, to not seek love, a lucrative life. To accept the limitations of certain things
I wanted my group to do anything. Say one small, definitive thing about me, even if it was just about my sense of humor. I wanted them to say I was assiduous, someone who’d held class when she had the flu, someone who talked publication constantly, someone who listened to students’ personal stories. And I’d heard many, including David’s sister-was-his-mother drama, Michael Patrick’s self-proclaimed shithole stories about Dublin, and tales of Claire’s little brother, a hemophiliac.
Phil had called my group “senseless,” but I wouldn’t reveal that to Chuck. My group was better than that.
“I love you, Nancy,” Phil said once. “I want to spend time with you, so why waste it on people who just haven’t the talent? Why waste the emotional energy?”
“Because people can hone their talent,” I’d said. “It’s easy to write dogma. But not easy to really develop a story, a world.”
“Well,” Chuck said now, inhaling. His eyes looked weary. “Is this all you have to say? A hot-shot writer? I bet I know your life. You go home alone and lament about how you’re getting old, or you can’t have this or that guy.”
“At least I don’t drink to escape my shit,” I said.
“Stop lying to yourself,” Chuck said, his voice cold, analytical.
“You’re the one with the problem,” I said. “Why don’t you and your little atheists go fuck yourselves? Go sober up.”
“At least they believe what I’m doing,” Chuck said. “Look at this bunch of kids. You think they even give a shit about what you’re doing? Don’t you think they’d rather be out chasing pussy?”
“And you’re getting plenty, I’m sure,” I said, with a sweet smile. “Big tough guy.”
I wouldn’t tell Chuck that once Phil seemed like a man of ideas, someone you could talk to about socialism, existentialism, and every other kind of ism, really. I wouldn’t tell him that a mellifluous voice can be mistaken for compatibility. That nicknames can be mistaken for true intimacy. Nan, Nanny, Nance.
“Well,” Chuck said, drawing out each word. “At least I’m getting something. I got a nice place, nice life. Can’t complain. What do you have, Nancy?”
The words echoed in my mind, like a stalled tape. What do you have? What do you have? I thought of Phil. It seemed that men were going for those who crafted an all-too fucked-up persona. Maybe they wanted to be benevolent male saviors. Ambition made you hysterical. Cold. Shrill, a word Phil had once bandied about.
I thought of the things being taken and thought of things yet to be taken. My job, my dreams, God forbid, my writers. My lovely band of chuckleheads. There was a precision to Chuck’s words, a precision he must have used as a lawyer, dissecting adversaries, exposing their holes with satisfaction. I thought of Dr. Fredericks and every award I hadn’t received, awards I’d striven for. I thought of trying to arrange things with precision. Things got away anyhow.
With the arm of a pitcher, I swung my bottle full circle toward Chuck. Chuck ducked with swiftness. The bottle missed him by only a few inches and landed with a crash on the carpet, a crash that echoed and reverberated, the sound lingering in my mind for dozens of seconds. It seemed to play over the thwacking, whooshing bowling balls and pins, over the laughter and murmured secrets rising from the lanes. It played over the heads that turned, drawn to the action, drawn to me.
Chuck’s cronies rushed to him, like spectators in a Western movie. I should have been relieved, but a part of me wanted the bottle to strike Chuck, not because I wanted to kill, but because I wanted something to land on target. To land with precision and panache. I wanted proof of it and I wanted people to bear witness to this victory, as idiotic as it seemed.
That was when all hell broke out. David tried to rush Chuck, his face flushed. I didn’t know what the fuck he was trying to do, but Chuck had clearly fought before. He grabbed David by the neck in one swift move, a look of pride lining his face, as he dragged him across the floor, exhibiting his hostage to his cronies.
“Hey guys,” he shouted. “Look. What’s your name, son?”
“Fuck you,” David said, coughing.
Chuck tightened his grip, practically choking him. I saw a look in David’s widened eyes. It was the look of someone who wanted to call out for help but was too ashamed. Someone who’d been knocked down before and was determined to win, to change the trajectory. I knew that look well.
“What’s your name boy?” Chuck said again.
“You’re a chickenfucker,” David gasped, wriggling from Chuck’s grip. He stumbled back to our tables.
There was something broken and infuriating about it. There was an adult stumbling, unable even to walk with dignity and grace. Here was an adult who could create and entertain, yet who couldn’t defend himself, someone whose life had already been turned upside down. After Phil I’d also wandered through a sort of wonderland, slouching across campus, to my apartment, to and from bars. Looking at David now, I felt a deep shame rise and a desire to tell him things would be all right.
I rushed Chuck from behind and shoved him away from his cronies, toward the bar counter. It was just an impulse, something that leaped into my consciousness with deftness. There was no time to react, to think. I just shoved.
Only the sound of Chuck striking the bar counter awakened me, a muffled, but precise thump. Laughter rose from the lanes, a few people observing the spectacle, pointing at Chuck, murmuring veiled comments that I could only imagine and relish.
Chuck slowly comported himself, rubbing his head. The PA system played Kenny Rogers, Just Dropped In. Chuck stared at me for a long moment, balls crashing, rumbling, Kenny’s voice rising to my consciousness as he explored his condition. There was an anger in his eyes, but also a kind of bewilderment. Maybe even a modicum of odd respect.
“You’re out of here. All of you,” Chuck said, frowning quickly. He glared at us, arched his eyebrows. “I’m calling the police.”
David, Claire, Michael Patrick, and the rest of the class surrounded Chuck, giving him their most contemptuous glances. As crazy as it was, I felt a sense of pride rising. I knew that we’d walk away with less than we had, but I felt like I’d gained something. It was something small, that I could keep only to myself. But it was something. I’d been in a situation anyone else would have run from and on the other end of things for once.
David smiled at me, all while pretending to tower over Chuck, stalking him like some animal.
“Thanks, Nancy,” he said. “Seriously. I owe you.”
“You know, David,” I said, smiling. “Next time you might want to keep your fights to your stories. Use that energy for your work.”
“You bet.”
“And David,” I said. “Do me a little favor. Send out some of your stories. Do something, would you?”
David wore a look somewhere between shame and agreement. He nodded vigorously and looked away.
Chuck glared again. But this time, there was something pathetic, desperate in his eyes, in the look he exchanged. It’s as though he were a child, someone trying to play a role for which he wasn’t fully suited. It was almost as if he were asking us to keep some hidden secret. I almost had to pity him, but I thought of the things he’d disrupted, my students, me, all of it.
In about ten minutes, the police had come down there, questioned us all. My writers painted an image of a rabid writer. David used the word “paroxysm,” to describe Chuck’s breathing and Claire called Chuck a “philistine,” to the officers’ annoyance. I told the officers it was about self-defense, omitting the bottle I’d flung.
Chuck, with a carefully affected martyrdom, told his story, making us out to be a violent pack of rowdies, trying to disrupt their sacred First Amendment rights. They talked with the manager, who told his side of things.
We were thrown out of the alley, out of our little space, and it seemed then that my group, our little group was over. We talked of getting back together again, once things settled down, but I think that we knew otherwise.
Three days later, Dr. Fredericks called me into his office. He’d heard about the fracas from a friend who’d been present that night. I was suspended. I was a decent professor, he admitted, but the university could not abide that sort of behavior. He hoped I’d reevaluate my philosophies during my time away.
“You know, I think you can still make something of it,” he said, playing with a little plastic stapler.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, leaning my feet upward. “Thanks for the moving ovation.”
“You know Professor Botkin, you don’t know when to stop,” he said. “You have the talent. But you don’t know how to package it.”
“Thanks,” I said, smirking. “I’ll call UPS if I have packaging issues.”
I thought of Chuck, that cold look in his eyes, that methodical efficacy with which he seemed to pry into my life. I remembered what he’d said, about me being alone, not being able to find anyone. I thought of the odd respect in his eyes after the confrontation. And I wondered now what life he’d lived. I wondered if he was alone or married, what Chuck had wanted to become in his youth. I tried to imagine him reviewing legal briefs at home. Did he once have a different vision of things, watching them slide away?
I walked out on Dr. Fredericks, out into the fall afternoon air, amongst the groves of aspens and old redbrick Georgian and Romanesque buildings. I took the long route home to my apartment and thought of the group. Did I look like a mad fool to them? Had they come to my rescue because they just wanted action? These questions lingered long after I’d gotten home.
I’d spent much of the next week, holed up with HBO and Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, content not to do much but watch Larry stage a Wagner concert on a neighbor’s lawn or get up for an occasional drink. It felt good to not have to have to squeeze in everything I needed or wanted to do. But after a few days, I’d started to feel as if my consciousness were a canvas that needed to be filled. And my mind drifted back to the bowling alley, to Chuck, to the stories I’d told.
On Thursday, I submitted a story to The New Yorker. I knew it didn’t fit their aesthetic, that it still had problems with resolution, but I felt a certain thrill. I was drawing a line in the sand, treading on new and frightening ground. I was treading ground that Dr. Fredericks, that my colleagues had claimed for themselves, that the world had withheld. They’d reject me in ten months, a form email. But for now I could say I’d submitted something. Plus, you could only watch so many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm before you wanted to kill Larry or yourself.
While I’d been doing all this, Chuck rose to my mind again. That look of concealment, that look of revelation. I wondered what Chuck had been thinking right then and what Chuck existed beyond the walls of bowling alleys, atheism, and safe dogma. What was he trying to say?
On Friday, I looked up Chuck in the phone book. I drove to his home over on Custer Street in the north end of town. I didn’t know what I expected to find. I just needed a look. Maybe it was the writer in me, reading things into Chuck that didn’t exist. Or maybe it was the sensation of something else, a need to put everything together as best as I could. We’d been kicked out, Chuck had his victory, but I still knew nothing of him beyond the most basic facts.
Chuck lived in a little two-story sky- blue frame house, with lights glowing in the upper windows. The downstairs windows were drawn shut, covered by heavy beige curtains. Empty flowerpots lined his front porch, along with a couple broken blue bicycles. A chipped porch swing rocked, its creakiness rising in the breeze, and I wondered how long it had been since Chuck sat there with a loved one, a sibling, a wife, a child.
The swing kept creaking, as if whispering too long, too long. The scent of cigarettes drifted from around the house, along with something warm and succulent. Spaghetti? Meatloaf? Was Chuck eating dinner, reviewing another case? Was he planning the atheists’ victory party, having vanquished us? Or was he thinking about something darker, concealing behind curtains?
This wasn’t the sort of home I’d pictured. I’d imagined something more suburban with a neatly manicured lawn, soulless, but sleek beige walls. A two-car garage even, a home befitting a lawyer like Chuck. This seemed like a home one would settle on, a home you’d take when no other options presented themselves. It was a home that conveyed loss, defeat. Once it might have held energy and charm, but now it seemed simply like a place to survive.
After an hour or so, Chuck came out and sat on the porch. I almost didn’t recognize him. Gone was the self-confidence, the cold calmness. He was on his iPhone and he looked almost lost, his mouth drooping as if everything had been deflated since the fight. I’d seen that expression more than once, stalling at the mirror before work every day.
“Damn it,” he said. “We signed that agreement. We divided the property. That’s it. I’m not relinquishing more. I have rights too.”
The person on the other line said something. Chuck gripped the phone as though it were his bulwark against the world.
“You need to legitimize your behavior. I know you, Diane. Going around with all those guys. You expect me to tell you how happy I am for you? Well, I’m not going to. We were married for fifteen years. It’s intimate, special. You want to go play with the fuckaround gang? Fine. But don’t expect me to legitimize it.”
Chuck kept shaking his head, yelling that he couldn’t damn well go from one obligation to the next, the way she did. He actually kept a steady job, and that was more than he could say for her.
“Every one of these cases I take,” he shouted, pacing, “I have to work twice as hard as the rest. These guys will eat me alive. I swear to God. I worked hard for you, and you throw it all away.”
Chuck put the phone down and stared across the street, where my 2003 Subaru Forester was parked. He looked right at me and my heart almost leapt. I expected him to walk over, to taunt, to call the police, to do something. But he just stared, a frown mixed with something else. A small smile, perhaps? A smile that revealed I’d found him? Or maybe, just maybe it was a smile that conveyed respect. Sorrow, even, at my downfall.
I exchanged a smile back, a small, quick nod. I don’t know how my smile looked. I hope it didn’t hold too much pity. Too much sorrow.
Chuck looked for a moment longer, arched an eyebrow, then retreated back into the mysteries of his phone. He walked back into the house with grace. Perhaps a little too much grace, as if he needed to maintain his gait, if nothing else.
Of this much I was certain: All reserve had deflated. We were both people out of confidence, people lunging, trying to hold onto something. And I thought now that Chuck was holding onto the atheists, holding onto ideas. It was easy but soothing to find respite in ideas and concepts people had devised before you. Respite in people, even.
When Phil had left, I’d written a number of emails, mocking his dogma and his new choice of paramours. I’d mocked Ophelia’s hair, her acting, even her voice. I never sent the emails, vitriol still preserved in my drafts section. But at the time I’d felt a kind of cold sensation, a sense that I could do something other than let the world run over me. Looking back at those preserved drafts, the letters glared, wilted reminders of how to be stuck in the past.
As sad as it was now, thinking all this, I felt a weight had been lifted. All the things I’d brooded over were all like lights on the horizon and now I needed to drive down some long and beautiful stretch of highway, open and sweeping and exhilarating. I hoped Dr. Fredericks, Phil, the university might fade off. To be out on an empty expanse with nothing in sight seemed better than to be surrounded by artifacts of failure.
On Saturday night, I ran into Claire and David. I was over at Smokey Joe’s Coffee Shop across from the university. It felt good to be out again. I’d convinced myself that all this held some good. I could make up new lives for myself. The thought of being able to lie, to live excited me.
Nicky had invited me to come stay with him. I thought I might. It would be good to be around him, my little brother, to be around success. Of course, I thought I might take on Dr. Fredericks. Try to appeal my suspension. Of course, I could take up teaching elsewhere, maybe even try for the high-school level. That held real possibility, like you were going back and starting all over, hoping to get it right. Kind of like Billy Madison, where Adam Sandler repeated his academic career, but without Adam Sandler’s annoying laughter and hallucinations of penguins.
I invited them to sit down, asked them if they wanted a drink. They didn’t. They were on their way to a reading, but wanted to stop in.
“David,” I said, smiling. “What’s the news, guys?”
“What a fucked-up month,” David said, laughing.
I had to laugh too.
“Not much,” Claire said. “David has some news, though.”
David told us that he’d had a story published in a respectable magazine, The Ghost Train Review. I was happy for him. It was a sign of something, maybe for all of us. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. It was something small, but something that seemed consequential. It made me happy to see him with that look of pride.
“Right on,” I said. “Congrats, David. You deserve that.”
It was getting dark out, and a plum-colored sky bathed the windows in shadows. A full moon hung over a bank of wisp-covered clouds. There was something open and wonderful about it. It had been so long since I’d noticed these little details, things that had once captivated me as a young writer. I wondered if David or Claire still looked at life this way.
I would have liked to tell them that I didn’t think I’d go back to the university. I wanted to tell them about all the possibilities before me. I wanted to ask them which one I should take or fight for. All of the above? Some? None? On top of everything, I wanted to hear about the group, whom I hadn’t heard from at all. They’d all sort of drifted apart, excuse by excuse. I couldn’t tell them that I’d wished they’d email me, ask me even the simplest questions about writing, so I could still explain something to them. And I would have loved to tell them what I’d seen at Chuck’s the other night. But it felt like a betrayal, of myself and of Chuck in an odd way.
“Nancy?” David looked at me, concern flickering in his hazel-eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, David,” I said, laughing. He wasn’t buying it.
“Confess, Nancy,” he said, doing his best imitation of a priest.
We laughed again, long and hard, our laughter entwining with Taylor Swift on the PA system, the low mix of conversations about mysterious and insignificant things, the rattle of cups and saucers. The possibilities waited for me, demanding, demanding. We laughed, laughed without knowing what we were truly laughing at.
Yash Seyedbagheri
The atheists came to fight during our weekly Tuesday night writing group. It was November, just after the 2018 midterms. The atheists were led by their leader, Chuck Addison, who bore a disturbing resemblance to Santa. I was Nancy Botkin, the writer’s tsaritsa, president, whatever you wanted to call me. We were in our little corner of Frank’s Bowling Alley with its pink and purple striped walls.
We’d been meeting at Frank’s for a year. The atheists had been there six months.
I was an associate professor at Evergreen University in Fort Edgar, Colorado. I taught Beginning English Composition, along with Beginning Creative Writing, and a couple other courses, along with my group. Some of the members had been former students, others friends of friends. We’d established the goal of sending stories into the world, and preferably into some big-name magazines, like the Missouri Review and Glimmer Train.
Normally, I’d be in the middle of leading a discussion on characterization or trying to establish “the reason for the telling,” in a student story. The atheists would talk over us with their matter-of-factness as they dissected religious theory. Usually, they paid us little attention, a glance here and there, but tonight it something was up. They were louder, the drinks flowing. They’d been dissecting different denominations with ferocity. Episcopalians, proclaimed Chuck, were wine-guzzling theocrats who tossed scraps to the world by marrying gays and lesbians. Lutherans were obsessed with guilt and donuts, proclaimed another member. Her name was Karin Lindstrom. Tonight, I sensed a stirring in the atheists, a need for something beyond their usual humdrum lives.
In the alley, you had eight rows of lanes and behind the lanes, a series of tables and a long oak counter. It served as a minibar on one side and a space for rentals on the other. The atheists sat at a round stainless-steel table in front of the bar like conspirators, while we crammed into two wobbling tables to the bar’s left. It smelled like stale feet and weed; we called it the writer’s corner.
There was probably seven or eight feet of space between us and the atheists, although it often seemed like only two or three. There were six, three young women, and three older men, two of whom were flaccid, including Chuck.
Chuck’s hair was graying and neatly parted. He often wore a striped Polo shirt, which was unbuttoned at the top. Tonight was no exception. He had bulbous hands and this thick crop of chest hair, reminding me of the byproducts of a Dustbuster.
I’d say Chuck was in his early fifties. You’d think he would have been on the verge of retirement, leaving crusades behind for a world where he could nurse a Pinot or a Merlot and lie awake, staring at the vastness of sky and endless time at night. Then again, having observed Chuck in the six months the atheists had been congregating here, he struck me as someone seeking action. There was something in his gait, his mellifluous voice and in his inflection, which echoed across the alley week after week. On occasions, he’d quote Lenin, looking around, as if expecting a revolution to break out. In that regard, he reminded me of the last guy I’d dated, Phil Simpkins, who’d spoken in dogma and needed every action to be legitimized.
I was now forty-one, single by choice after Phil, who had broken up with me a year ago. My replacement was a flame-haired actress who talked like she was on cocaine and who played Ophelia in a modernized production of Hamlet, Denmark replaced by a Burger King.
We’d dated for two years and by the last year, Phil needed an excuse even to make love. He could fill his spaces with dogma and regimens, but he couldn’t really live. At least I had my writing group, my band of chuckleheads. That was something small and good. So, it seemed.
The night had started out normally. All ten of us were present. We occupied our usual two tables and immersed ourselves in stories and libations, which in my case were White Russians. We started by discussing our published story of the week, in this case, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, by Sherman Alexie. For a solid forty minutes, we’d discussed notions of voice and dark humor. My favorite line, for the record, was about the narrator being a railroad track pizza.
Then we’d gotten into the students’ work. We had three stories up tonight. The students were supposed to read and re-read them so we could discuss strengths and places for revision. Claire Hughes was first.
Her story was about siblings who kidnap a corpse for ransom. Claire had real potential. Her prose was a mélange of short sentences and Nabokovian loquaciousness; her story ideas needed to be nuanced. You could have corpse kidnappings and even flambeed baby consumption, but you needed to convince the reader of the parameters of this world. And the rest of my herd seemed to feel the same way. Besides, we were all getting distracted by the atheists, leaning over to gawk at them from time to time.
“Hey Nancy,” David DiCenzo said. “You know what would be awesome? If we got into a rumble with the atheists. Like West Side Story.”
He proceeded to belt out a few lines from “I Feel Pretty.” I hoped to God he didn’t give up the day job, which in David’s case was dispensing tickets and pouring Fat Tires at the Tempo Theater, the little indie down on College Avenue. David had a kind of spirit that had been drained from me some time ago. I knew that he wanted to attend the MFA at Evergreen University. His sister, was in fact, his mother. No joke. He’d only found out three years ago. He’d told us all this one night, his descriptions methodical and all-too-detailed, as if he were in a confessional. I had to admire David’s ability to be a smartass, even if there seemed to be something else jostling around within his goose-like laugh.
My class laughed, shifting their beer glasses around. Claire shook her head at David, and made a face. She had unruly long blonde hair, smelled like garlic and cigarettes, and wore an oversized striped navy T-shirt and jeans.
Michael Patrick O’Shaughnessy booed David, as he always did when David told bad jokes. Of course, Michael Patrick told his share too, usually involving his native Dublin. He had a precise goatee, jet black hair, and his owl-like eyes which panned over us like a detective. In fact, he reminded me of my little brother Nicky, an up-and-coming jazz pianist. His literary credo was to throw rocks at your characters for full emotional realization.
“All right, David, Michael Patrick,” I said, smiling. “We were discussing Claire’s story. So, what are your thoughts? Are the reasons for the kidnapping fleshed out?”
“I think we should get the atheist perspective,” David said, folding his lanky arms, and leaning back, his jet-black hair long and unruly. He let out another goose-like laugh.
“Let’s cool it, David,” I said. “This girl in Claire’s story has kidnapped a corpse to get back at her ex-boyfriend. What’s the payoff?”
David made another loud joke about the atheists’ group. He had no real sense of what he wanted in the broader scheme of things, which was a shame. David had this genuine ability to write complex characters I’d long given up on creating. Mendacious, foul-mouthed, but secretly kind-hearted husbands and wives. Teenagers whose ideas of love involved calling people motherfuckers. I wish I’d called Phil a motherfucker when he broke up with me, but I’d just replayed the words in my mind. You need passion, you’re too absorbed in yourself. Dr. Fredericks, the head of the English department, often said something similar, guised in a neat smile, especially when I got passed over for some award or another.
Chuck turned around, glancing at us across the space of pink and purple carpeting. He surveyed me with a sort of knowing little smile. I wondered what he saw in me, a pale forty-one-year-old brunette with a long nose. I felt a thrill and a certain revulsion. This was a man who made quick and cold judgments. Chuck had once gotten into an argument with an Episcopal priest. The priest’s sin? Wanting divine luck rolling strikes.
“I don’t know,” David said. “From what I got out of it, she wants some moment of glory, something to hold onto. She’s in this bad place, losing her boyfriend, really having no one else.”
“That’s good, David,” I said, trying not to look at Chuck.
Business was slow in the lanes tonight. The PA system played Pat Boone. Nicky had once said Pat Boone alone could torture suspects. Fuck Bush-league waterboarding. A black-haired woman in a pink tank top had rolled a strike, balls meeting pins with a kind of thwack-whooshing sound. She ambled toward the seats and scoreboards, doing this little victory dance.
“Nancy?” David looked concerned. “Are you all right?”
Chuck ambled over to us with a precise and cold gait. He carried a Fat Tire in his right hand. His fellow atheists looked at us with the same little grins. He smelled like sweat and Polo cologne, the kind Phil had used to wear.
“What’s your name?” He winked at me.
I told him I was in the midst of teaching and we needed to get back to business. He shook his head.
“You can’t tell me your name?” Chuck looked at me, as though I were speaking French. He pretended to frown, as though it conveyed some inner authority. I thought it made him look like someone having a seizure.
“Nancy.”
“Nancy what?”
“Nancy,” I said.
To reveal your surname seemed like stripping yourself naked, exposing something private. Plus Botkin was a name that seemed weighty, awkward, like a sexual disease, even. Congratulations, you have a case of the Botkins!
“Chuck Addison.” Chuck smiled, a knowing little smile.
“Nice to meet you, Chuck.”
Chuck looked at me again and shook his head. He cleared his throat and set his beer down next to me. The PA system had banished Pat Boone and his love letters in the sand. Now the Eagles were singing Hotel California.
“You really believe what you’re doing?” he said, after a long minute. His voice was gruff, like a dog barking. His eyes were bloodshot. “What’s the purpose of your stories?”
“Dude?”
“You heard me,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. He leaned against the table and inhaled. “Tell me what these students have done. Do they even know what it means to work? To achieve?”
“Yes, they do,” I said, trying not to lose my temper. “What about your group? You find three thousand ways to discuss how God doesn’t exist. You congregate every damned week.”
“You know I made it from nothing,” Chuck said. “I’m a lawyer. Put myself through school. I know too many people who fucked around. It’s a sad thing, really. And yet, the world seems to reward them.”
“Great,” I said. “And what are you philosophers doing?”
I did believe in them. I loved reading the stories my students wrote, as lacking as they were in craft techniques like tense or use of interiority. I believed they could thrive, believed with each session, they could grow, even though it was hard to quantify that sort of thing. The publication record in the group was low, but that wasn’t the whole picture. I could read and re-read their work and I longed to have the kind of durable, if less than dependable friends that populated their pages, the kinds of people who could understand you without outward judgment, because they were just as fucked up.
“What we discuss is important,” Chuck said. He took a long swig of his beer, slammed it down on the table. “It has an effect on our politics, on society. Isn’t writing a disguise of sort? A way to look intelligent? To hide behind a guise?”
“Well, fucking good for you,” I said, pretending to clap. “I’ll alert the media.”
An image rose to my mind like a dark creature: Phil was hunched over his notebook writing some treatise or another during one of our movie nights. He’d brushed away my hand, absorbed in the whirl of abstractions, smelling like sweat and misplaced excitement.
David told a joke now. What do you call 2000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start. I shook my head and gave David my iciest stare. But with David, that was impossible.
Chuck breathed, something slow, laborious, and rasping. He squeezed his hands, in and out, and looked at our group.
“So, this is your group,” he said. “Charming.”
This was more than just a group. Alcoholics Anonymous and the atheists were groups. We were one thing I’d managed to hold together, one constant. My group was a great bunch, too old to be children, but not too young to be fully cynical. They were in their mid-twenties, a few in their early thirties. They still had the buffet of confusion and possibilities that beckoned. What credit card offers to take? What apartments could they get within price range? What career possibilities could they shoot for or even fantasize about?
Although, funny as it seemed, I had one thing in common with the atheists. We lacked faith. They lacked faith in theological principles, I in myself. At forty-one, I’d begun to lose faith that I’d break through, find my niche. I can’t say what story it was I wanted to write, only that I wanted something that would distinguish me from the complacent.
Chuck paced around me. I felt the space bubble tightening with each second. His thick eyebrows danced up and down. He coughed and emitted a hacking sound.
“Is that what you think?” he said. “You look smart. Is that all you can say? What does your husband think of all this? Or your wife?”
The PA system played some kind of elevator music. A swarthy man danced around double-fisting White Russians. My students just stared, frozen. David leaned back, watching, mouth gaping. Claire kept staring at her story, as if she expected the night to resume. Michael Patrick stared into his 90 Shilling glass. I truly hated their looks right now.
“You’ve had too many beers,” I said. “And I don’t need a fucking husband. I’ve been published in the New Yorker.”
Chuck leaned in, breath rife with the ghosts of onions past. He inhaled deeply, breath deep and rasping. I wondered if he knew I lied. But the world had stories. Phil had Ophelia. My classmates had vivid corpse kidnappings, psychopathic mothers, divorce in the suburbs, even if the chuckleheads couldn’t seem to revise the pieces just yet.
“Are you happy?” he said. “Is it worth it?”
Claire kept fiddling with her story. David looked down. Michael Patrick took a long swig of his 90 Shilling. I tried to ignore Chuck, took a sip of my drink. This was the sort of tone I heard all too often, telling people that I taught at the university or was single. They’d never been as direct as Chuck, but I could expose these unspoken questions. I was crazy to stay single, to not seek love, a lucrative life. To accept the limitations of certain things
I wanted my group to do anything. Say one small, definitive thing about me, even if it was just about my sense of humor. I wanted them to say I was assiduous, someone who’d held class when she had the flu, someone who talked publication constantly, someone who listened to students’ personal stories. And I’d heard many, including David’s sister-was-his-mother drama, Michael Patrick’s self-proclaimed shithole stories about Dublin, and tales of Claire’s little brother, a hemophiliac.
Phil had called my group “senseless,” but I wouldn’t reveal that to Chuck. My group was better than that.
“I love you, Nancy,” Phil said once. “I want to spend time with you, so why waste it on people who just haven’t the talent? Why waste the emotional energy?”
“Because people can hone their talent,” I’d said. “It’s easy to write dogma. But not easy to really develop a story, a world.”
“Well,” Chuck said now, inhaling. His eyes looked weary. “Is this all you have to say? A hot-shot writer? I bet I know your life. You go home alone and lament about how you’re getting old, or you can’t have this or that guy.”
“At least I don’t drink to escape my shit,” I said.
“Stop lying to yourself,” Chuck said, his voice cold, analytical.
“You’re the one with the problem,” I said. “Why don’t you and your little atheists go fuck yourselves? Go sober up.”
“At least they believe what I’m doing,” Chuck said. “Look at this bunch of kids. You think they even give a shit about what you’re doing? Don’t you think they’d rather be out chasing pussy?”
“And you’re getting plenty, I’m sure,” I said, with a sweet smile. “Big tough guy.”
I wouldn’t tell Chuck that once Phil seemed like a man of ideas, someone you could talk to about socialism, existentialism, and every other kind of ism, really. I wouldn’t tell him that a mellifluous voice can be mistaken for compatibility. That nicknames can be mistaken for true intimacy. Nan, Nanny, Nance.
“Well,” Chuck said, drawing out each word. “At least I’m getting something. I got a nice place, nice life. Can’t complain. What do you have, Nancy?”
The words echoed in my mind, like a stalled tape. What do you have? What do you have? I thought of Phil. It seemed that men were going for those who crafted an all-too fucked-up persona. Maybe they wanted to be benevolent male saviors. Ambition made you hysterical. Cold. Shrill, a word Phil had once bandied about.
I thought of the things being taken and thought of things yet to be taken. My job, my dreams, God forbid, my writers. My lovely band of chuckleheads. There was a precision to Chuck’s words, a precision he must have used as a lawyer, dissecting adversaries, exposing their holes with satisfaction. I thought of Dr. Fredericks and every award I hadn’t received, awards I’d striven for. I thought of trying to arrange things with precision. Things got away anyhow.
With the arm of a pitcher, I swung my bottle full circle toward Chuck. Chuck ducked with swiftness. The bottle missed him by only a few inches and landed with a crash on the carpet, a crash that echoed and reverberated, the sound lingering in my mind for dozens of seconds. It seemed to play over the thwacking, whooshing bowling balls and pins, over the laughter and murmured secrets rising from the lanes. It played over the heads that turned, drawn to the action, drawn to me.
Chuck’s cronies rushed to him, like spectators in a Western movie. I should have been relieved, but a part of me wanted the bottle to strike Chuck, not because I wanted to kill, but because I wanted something to land on target. To land with precision and panache. I wanted proof of it and I wanted people to bear witness to this victory, as idiotic as it seemed.
That was when all hell broke out. David tried to rush Chuck, his face flushed. I didn’t know what the fuck he was trying to do, but Chuck had clearly fought before. He grabbed David by the neck in one swift move, a look of pride lining his face, as he dragged him across the floor, exhibiting his hostage to his cronies.
“Hey guys,” he shouted. “Look. What’s your name, son?”
“Fuck you,” David said, coughing.
Chuck tightened his grip, practically choking him. I saw a look in David’s widened eyes. It was the look of someone who wanted to call out for help but was too ashamed. Someone who’d been knocked down before and was determined to win, to change the trajectory. I knew that look well.
“What’s your name boy?” Chuck said again.
“You’re a chickenfucker,” David gasped, wriggling from Chuck’s grip. He stumbled back to our tables.
There was something broken and infuriating about it. There was an adult stumbling, unable even to walk with dignity and grace. Here was an adult who could create and entertain, yet who couldn’t defend himself, someone whose life had already been turned upside down. After Phil I’d also wandered through a sort of wonderland, slouching across campus, to my apartment, to and from bars. Looking at David now, I felt a deep shame rise and a desire to tell him things would be all right.
I rushed Chuck from behind and shoved him away from his cronies, toward the bar counter. It was just an impulse, something that leaped into my consciousness with deftness. There was no time to react, to think. I just shoved.
Only the sound of Chuck striking the bar counter awakened me, a muffled, but precise thump. Laughter rose from the lanes, a few people observing the spectacle, pointing at Chuck, murmuring veiled comments that I could only imagine and relish.
Chuck slowly comported himself, rubbing his head. The PA system played Kenny Rogers, Just Dropped In. Chuck stared at me for a long moment, balls crashing, rumbling, Kenny’s voice rising to my consciousness as he explored his condition. There was an anger in his eyes, but also a kind of bewilderment. Maybe even a modicum of odd respect.
“You’re out of here. All of you,” Chuck said, frowning quickly. He glared at us, arched his eyebrows. “I’m calling the police.”
David, Claire, Michael Patrick, and the rest of the class surrounded Chuck, giving him their most contemptuous glances. As crazy as it was, I felt a sense of pride rising. I knew that we’d walk away with less than we had, but I felt like I’d gained something. It was something small, that I could keep only to myself. But it was something. I’d been in a situation anyone else would have run from and on the other end of things for once.
David smiled at me, all while pretending to tower over Chuck, stalking him like some animal.
“Thanks, Nancy,” he said. “Seriously. I owe you.”
“You know, David,” I said, smiling. “Next time you might want to keep your fights to your stories. Use that energy for your work.”
“You bet.”
“And David,” I said. “Do me a little favor. Send out some of your stories. Do something, would you?”
David wore a look somewhere between shame and agreement. He nodded vigorously and looked away.
Chuck glared again. But this time, there was something pathetic, desperate in his eyes, in the look he exchanged. It’s as though he were a child, someone trying to play a role for which he wasn’t fully suited. It was almost as if he were asking us to keep some hidden secret. I almost had to pity him, but I thought of the things he’d disrupted, my students, me, all of it.
In about ten minutes, the police had come down there, questioned us all. My writers painted an image of a rabid writer. David used the word “paroxysm,” to describe Chuck’s breathing and Claire called Chuck a “philistine,” to the officers’ annoyance. I told the officers it was about self-defense, omitting the bottle I’d flung.
Chuck, with a carefully affected martyrdom, told his story, making us out to be a violent pack of rowdies, trying to disrupt their sacred First Amendment rights. They talked with the manager, who told his side of things.
We were thrown out of the alley, out of our little space, and it seemed then that my group, our little group was over. We talked of getting back together again, once things settled down, but I think that we knew otherwise.
Three days later, Dr. Fredericks called me into his office. He’d heard about the fracas from a friend who’d been present that night. I was suspended. I was a decent professor, he admitted, but the university could not abide that sort of behavior. He hoped I’d reevaluate my philosophies during my time away.
“You know, I think you can still make something of it,” he said, playing with a little plastic stapler.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, leaning my feet upward. “Thanks for the moving ovation.”
“You know Professor Botkin, you don’t know when to stop,” he said. “You have the talent. But you don’t know how to package it.”
“Thanks,” I said, smirking. “I’ll call UPS if I have packaging issues.”
I thought of Chuck, that cold look in his eyes, that methodical efficacy with which he seemed to pry into my life. I remembered what he’d said, about me being alone, not being able to find anyone. I thought of the odd respect in his eyes after the confrontation. And I wondered now what life he’d lived. I wondered if he was alone or married, what Chuck had wanted to become in his youth. I tried to imagine him reviewing legal briefs at home. Did he once have a different vision of things, watching them slide away?
I walked out on Dr. Fredericks, out into the fall afternoon air, amongst the groves of aspens and old redbrick Georgian and Romanesque buildings. I took the long route home to my apartment and thought of the group. Did I look like a mad fool to them? Had they come to my rescue because they just wanted action? These questions lingered long after I’d gotten home.
I’d spent much of the next week, holed up with HBO and Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, content not to do much but watch Larry stage a Wagner concert on a neighbor’s lawn or get up for an occasional drink. It felt good to not have to have to squeeze in everything I needed or wanted to do. But after a few days, I’d started to feel as if my consciousness were a canvas that needed to be filled. And my mind drifted back to the bowling alley, to Chuck, to the stories I’d told.
On Thursday, I submitted a story to The New Yorker. I knew it didn’t fit their aesthetic, that it still had problems with resolution, but I felt a certain thrill. I was drawing a line in the sand, treading on new and frightening ground. I was treading ground that Dr. Fredericks, that my colleagues had claimed for themselves, that the world had withheld. They’d reject me in ten months, a form email. But for now I could say I’d submitted something. Plus, you could only watch so many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm before you wanted to kill Larry or yourself.
While I’d been doing all this, Chuck rose to my mind again. That look of concealment, that look of revelation. I wondered what Chuck had been thinking right then and what Chuck existed beyond the walls of bowling alleys, atheism, and safe dogma. What was he trying to say?
On Friday, I looked up Chuck in the phone book. I drove to his home over on Custer Street in the north end of town. I didn’t know what I expected to find. I just needed a look. Maybe it was the writer in me, reading things into Chuck that didn’t exist. Or maybe it was the sensation of something else, a need to put everything together as best as I could. We’d been kicked out, Chuck had his victory, but I still knew nothing of him beyond the most basic facts.
Chuck lived in a little two-story sky- blue frame house, with lights glowing in the upper windows. The downstairs windows were drawn shut, covered by heavy beige curtains. Empty flowerpots lined his front porch, along with a couple broken blue bicycles. A chipped porch swing rocked, its creakiness rising in the breeze, and I wondered how long it had been since Chuck sat there with a loved one, a sibling, a wife, a child.
The swing kept creaking, as if whispering too long, too long. The scent of cigarettes drifted from around the house, along with something warm and succulent. Spaghetti? Meatloaf? Was Chuck eating dinner, reviewing another case? Was he planning the atheists’ victory party, having vanquished us? Or was he thinking about something darker, concealing behind curtains?
This wasn’t the sort of home I’d pictured. I’d imagined something more suburban with a neatly manicured lawn, soulless, but sleek beige walls. A two-car garage even, a home befitting a lawyer like Chuck. This seemed like a home one would settle on, a home you’d take when no other options presented themselves. It was a home that conveyed loss, defeat. Once it might have held energy and charm, but now it seemed simply like a place to survive.
After an hour or so, Chuck came out and sat on the porch. I almost didn’t recognize him. Gone was the self-confidence, the cold calmness. He was on his iPhone and he looked almost lost, his mouth drooping as if everything had been deflated since the fight. I’d seen that expression more than once, stalling at the mirror before work every day.
“Damn it,” he said. “We signed that agreement. We divided the property. That’s it. I’m not relinquishing more. I have rights too.”
The person on the other line said something. Chuck gripped the phone as though it were his bulwark against the world.
“You need to legitimize your behavior. I know you, Diane. Going around with all those guys. You expect me to tell you how happy I am for you? Well, I’m not going to. We were married for fifteen years. It’s intimate, special. You want to go play with the fuckaround gang? Fine. But don’t expect me to legitimize it.”
Chuck kept shaking his head, yelling that he couldn’t damn well go from one obligation to the next, the way she did. He actually kept a steady job, and that was more than he could say for her.
“Every one of these cases I take,” he shouted, pacing, “I have to work twice as hard as the rest. These guys will eat me alive. I swear to God. I worked hard for you, and you throw it all away.”
Chuck put the phone down and stared across the street, where my 2003 Subaru Forester was parked. He looked right at me and my heart almost leapt. I expected him to walk over, to taunt, to call the police, to do something. But he just stared, a frown mixed with something else. A small smile, perhaps? A smile that revealed I’d found him? Or maybe, just maybe it was a smile that conveyed respect. Sorrow, even, at my downfall.
I exchanged a smile back, a small, quick nod. I don’t know how my smile looked. I hope it didn’t hold too much pity. Too much sorrow.
Chuck looked for a moment longer, arched an eyebrow, then retreated back into the mysteries of his phone. He walked back into the house with grace. Perhaps a little too much grace, as if he needed to maintain his gait, if nothing else.
Of this much I was certain: All reserve had deflated. We were both people out of confidence, people lunging, trying to hold onto something. And I thought now that Chuck was holding onto the atheists, holding onto ideas. It was easy but soothing to find respite in ideas and concepts people had devised before you. Respite in people, even.
When Phil had left, I’d written a number of emails, mocking his dogma and his new choice of paramours. I’d mocked Ophelia’s hair, her acting, even her voice. I never sent the emails, vitriol still preserved in my drafts section. But at the time I’d felt a kind of cold sensation, a sense that I could do something other than let the world run over me. Looking back at those preserved drafts, the letters glared, wilted reminders of how to be stuck in the past.
As sad as it was now, thinking all this, I felt a weight had been lifted. All the things I’d brooded over were all like lights on the horizon and now I needed to drive down some long and beautiful stretch of highway, open and sweeping and exhilarating. I hoped Dr. Fredericks, Phil, the university might fade off. To be out on an empty expanse with nothing in sight seemed better than to be surrounded by artifacts of failure.
On Saturday night, I ran into Claire and David. I was over at Smokey Joe’s Coffee Shop across from the university. It felt good to be out again. I’d convinced myself that all this held some good. I could make up new lives for myself. The thought of being able to lie, to live excited me.
Nicky had invited me to come stay with him. I thought I might. It would be good to be around him, my little brother, to be around success. Of course, I thought I might take on Dr. Fredericks. Try to appeal my suspension. Of course, I could take up teaching elsewhere, maybe even try for the high-school level. That held real possibility, like you were going back and starting all over, hoping to get it right. Kind of like Billy Madison, where Adam Sandler repeated his academic career, but without Adam Sandler’s annoying laughter and hallucinations of penguins.
I invited them to sit down, asked them if they wanted a drink. They didn’t. They were on their way to a reading, but wanted to stop in.
“David,” I said, smiling. “What’s the news, guys?”
“What a fucked-up month,” David said, laughing.
I had to laugh too.
“Not much,” Claire said. “David has some news, though.”
David told us that he’d had a story published in a respectable magazine, The Ghost Train Review. I was happy for him. It was a sign of something, maybe for all of us. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. It was something small, but something that seemed consequential. It made me happy to see him with that look of pride.
“Right on,” I said. “Congrats, David. You deserve that.”
It was getting dark out, and a plum-colored sky bathed the windows in shadows. A full moon hung over a bank of wisp-covered clouds. There was something open and wonderful about it. It had been so long since I’d noticed these little details, things that had once captivated me as a young writer. I wondered if David or Claire still looked at life this way.
I would have liked to tell them that I didn’t think I’d go back to the university. I wanted to tell them about all the possibilities before me. I wanted to ask them which one I should take or fight for. All of the above? Some? None? On top of everything, I wanted to hear about the group, whom I hadn’t heard from at all. They’d all sort of drifted apart, excuse by excuse. I couldn’t tell them that I’d wished they’d email me, ask me even the simplest questions about writing, so I could still explain something to them. And I would have loved to tell them what I’d seen at Chuck’s the other night. But it felt like a betrayal, of myself and of Chuck in an odd way.
“Nancy?” David looked at me, concern flickering in his hazel-eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, David,” I said, laughing. He wasn’t buying it.
“Confess, Nancy,” he said, doing his best imitation of a priest.
We laughed again, long and hard, our laughter entwining with Taylor Swift on the PA system, the low mix of conversations about mysterious and insignificant things, the rattle of cups and saucers. The possibilities waited for me, demanding, demanding. We laughed, laughed without knowing what we were truly laughing at.