“Thank you,” I said. And then I said, although I had only read one of her books and it hadn’t made much of an impression on me, “I’ve long been an admirer of your work.” She smiled with only the left side of her mouth in a way that doubted the statement; I found the expression winning.
“Do you have a brain tumor?” she asked. I was impressed less with her frankness than with the fact that it appeared she’d actually read the story.
“Not that I know of.”
“Is it part of a longer work?”
“Maybe. I think I might try to make it into a novel. A novel in which the author tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters — mainly e-mails — from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library. That idea was the origin of the story.”
“Why does he need the money? Or is the money what he wants?”
“I think it’s more a response to his own mortality — like he’s trying to time-travel, to throw his voice, now that he’s dealing with his own fragility. It starts off as a kind of fraud but I imagine he might really get into it, might really feel like he and the dead are corresponding. Like he’s a medium. But you wouldn’t know, even at the novel’s end, if he really planned to sell the letters or if he was just working on an epistolary novel of some sort. And he could meditate on all the ways that time is monetized — archival time, a lifetime, etc.” I was trying to sound excited about the project I was describing, but felt, despite the wine, dispirited: another novel about fraudulence, no matter the bruised idealism at its core.
I ordered an appetizer of charred shrimp with puntarelle, whatever that was, and seared scallops for my main course. I was told by the waiter that my choices were excellent. The distinguished female author said she’d also have the scallops, and that felt somehow like a gesture of fellowship.
The graduate student asked the distinguished female author what she was working on. “Absolutely nothing,” she said, with utter seriousness, and, after a brief interval of silence, we all laughed. Then she said to me, “Whom would he correspond with, what dead people?” The frustrated graduate student — he didn’t want to hear more about me — and the bored husband tried to make conversation. I could hear the distinguished male author droning on in the distance.
“Primarily poets, I guess. Poets I corresponded with a little — mainly for the magazine I used to edit and that the protagonist will have edited — and whose tone I know how to imitate. Robert Creeley comes to mind.”
“I used to know Creeley pretty well.” She sipped her wine. “Would you include real correspondence, too — I mean, do you have actual letters you received that you’ll insert into the fiction?”
“No,” I said. “Almost all the correspondence about the magazine was e-mail, and I had a different e-mail account for much of that time. I never printed anything. What I do have is boring, logistical.”
“I could write you a letter for it — he could falsify one from me but I could write it.”
“That would be great.” I loved the idea.
“You should really try it.” I thought she meant try to write the novel, but: “You should try to pass off letters you’ve written to an archivist. That’s how you’d know if the fiction was plausible.” I laughed.
“I’m serious. I can put you in touch with the appraiser I worked with when I thought about selling my papers to the Beinecke.”
“I don’t have the courage,” I said. Was she serious? One waiter materialized to refill our wine, another placed my appetizer before me. Puntarella was a green with dandelion-shaped leaves.
“Well, put the stuff about the shuttle in there somehow. I liked that. When you talked about the kids watching the explosion, the nervous laughter — that reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for a long time, but that I used to think about constantly.”
“These are amazing,” I said, referring to the shrimp, which were. “You’ve got to try a bite,” I said, and she reached across the table with her fork.
“When I was in the first year many centuries ago, our teacher, Mrs. Meacham, lost her daughter.” I guessed first grade was called “first year” in Britain. “Nobody told us, of course. We had a substitute for a few days, were informed that Mrs. Meacham was mildly ill, and then there she was again, maybe a little more distant than usual, but basically unchanged. It must have been a week or two after she’d been back, we were doing recitation exercises, and she called on me to read a passage from the textbook — I remember it as a passage from the Bible, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, she called on me and I read a few lines and then she stopped me. She looked straight at me and she said, her voice frighteningly calm: ‘You look just like my daughter, Mary.’ I remember the name clearly. The class was completely silent, we’d never heard Mrs. Meacham say anything off script. Then she said, slowly: ‘My dead daughter, Mary. You look just like my daughter, who is dead.’ She said it like it was some sort of grammatical demonstration.” The graduate student was trying to listen while still facing the husband, who was talking about a recent trip to India. Our glasses were unobtrusively refilled. “We were all shocked,” she continued. “I remember looking down at my book and feeling tremendous shame, as though I’d been reprimanded. Then I looked up at Mrs. Meacham, who was staring at me, and I heard this terrible laughter.”
“Laughter?”
“My laughter. I heard it before I recognized it as issuing from my body. It was completely involuntary. It was a profoundly nervous response. For a few seconds only I was laughing, and then everybody started laughing. Everybody in the classroom erupted into loud, hysterical laughter, and Mrs. Meacham, in tears, fled the room. And as soon as she fled the room, the laughter stopped. It stopped all at once, like a disciplined orchestra that has received a sign from the conductor. And we just sat there in silence, ashamed and confused.” She took another bite of my appetizer, which I hadn’t touched while she’d been speaking.
“And then Mrs. Meacham came back into the classroom,” she said when she’d swallowed the food, chasing it with wine, “and resumed her position at the front of the class, and called on me again to read the passage. And I read the passage and the school day continued, and then the school year, as if nothing had happened. I thought of it because you mentioned both the nervous laughter and the jokes, I suppose. Children trying to process a death.”
We drank in silence for a minute and I ate the last shrimp and asked, “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Did you want them?” I tried to check in with myself about whether I was mistaking my mild inebriation for an easy sympathy between us.
“At times I have, but most times I haven’t.”
“You never tried?” I’d decided I didn’t care about the sympathy-and-wine calculus.
“I had a surgery to remove a fibroid when I was in my twenties and the scarring made it impossible. That used to happen more in those days.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “I think on balance I didn’t want kids anyway. Do you have children?”
“No, but my best friend wants me to help her get pregnant. I mean, we’re thinking of doing IUI. But”—and this was certainly only sayable because of the wine—“my sperm is a little abnormal.” The graduate student involuntarily turned and faced me.
The distinguished female author laughed, not at all unkindly, and asked, “How so?”
“Apparently, every man has a lot of abnormal sperm — sperm that are shaped wrong or something and so aren’t going to fertilize an egg. But I have more abnormal sperm than is normal, so they said it might be harder for me to get someone pregnant.”