Gulag One — that I got a short story out of. For a while its working title was ‘Gulag Four,’ but then I didn’t think I should keep it — I wanted the story to stand on its own.” “May I ask a naïve question? ‘Naïve’ because one’s probably not supposed to ask a writer this. But what’s it about? Something to do with that period in Soviet history? From what you’ve said about your work — I think it was you — it doesn’t seem you write historical fiction.” By now they were probably in the drugstore. He pictures himself holding open the door for her and following her inside. “Is this okay with you,” he remembers her saying, “sitting at the counter? If you want to sit at a table, we could always go elsewhere.” “No, we’re already here. And no other customers, so it’s quiet and we can talk.” At some point — outside or in; most likely in — he started telling her what his story was about. “A man, through some see-through ruse he should have seen through, is snared off a city street by two elderly women and held captive in an apartment — handcuffed, most of the time shackled and locked in a windowless cell of a room — for reasons never clear to him or adequately explained and which keep changing. I know. Sounds more Kafkaesque than Solzhenitsynian. But it becomes more Gulagy when his imprisonment, always just as they say they’re about to release him, gets extended a few months or a year for made-up-at-the-moment reasons — he forgot to flush the toilet, for instance, or couldn’t stop sneezing after they ordered him to. Anyway, that’s something of what it’s about, and they do eventually let him go.” “Why did they keep him?” and he said “Same as why they abducted him: no reason. Just to play with him. Something like that, though nothing sexual.” “What happens to the two women?” and he said “Nothing. They’re sweet old ladies who couldn’t possibly have done the harm to him he said. All the criminal evidence against them is gone and his cell’s been turned into a library and now has windows and brilliant sunlight.” “And you finished it?” and he said “Why? You don’t think it’s a good idea for a short story?” “I’d have to read it to determine that,” and he said “It’s out now and I’m keeping my fingers crossed — I could use a good sale.” She asked where he sent it to and he told her and she said “You aim high. They must be tough to break in to,” and he said “I’ve had two in the first one since ’73 and about fifty rejections from the second since ’64. Maybe stupid of me to keep sending to it, I guess, and maybe to the first one too, since they have a new editor there who doesn’t seem to like my work. Calls it idiosyncratic. But long as I have a box of nine-by-twelve envelopes and stamps and a postage scale, why not? There are so few serious places that pay well, and you never know.” “What if they both take it?” and he said “Chances of that happening on the same day — just the chance of either of them taking…well, I hate to sound shrewd and unscrupulous, but I’m a good liar when it comes to something like that, so it’s a chance I’ll take. Did I just say the wrong thing?” “You tell me. You know your business, but there is the moral question to consider. I was thinking of the editor’s wasted reading efforts for the magazine you’d withdraw the story from if the other one took it. That is, if you didn’t tell them you were multiply submitting it,” and he said “I didn’t.” “I know I would never do it with an academic journal. I could lose my job and jeopardize any future teaching position I’d apply for and be forever blackballed by a journal that’s probably pretty important in my field. You choose one to send to and stick with it till a yes or no decision’s made.” “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve thought of it before but it never hit me as hard as when you just said it. And I’m not kidding you on this — I must sound like I am, my choice of words and the rest of it, but I’m not — or saying it to get in good with you. I won’t do it again, I think, or certainly not with a magazine that’s previously published me and that I don’t ever expect to place a story in again.” When she didn’t smile and in fact bit her bottom lip a little but didn’t say anything to what he said: “No, you’re really right; it’s wrong. I won’t do it from now on, period.” “That’s up to you.” But she still didn’t smile. He said “Please say you believe me and that you’re not entirely dissatisfied with me.” “Why would it matter?” and he said “It does. I don’t want you to think I’m what I’m not.” “All right, I’m not dissatisfied, as you said.” “And you believe me?” and she said “I won’t go that far,” and smiled. He thinks this is how some of the conversation went that day. They talked about the woman who gave the party they met at. “She was the one who originally steered me to Camus.” “And you can say if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be talking to you.” Some of the books assigned to her humanities courses. “To me they’re all still great to read, even the third or fourth time around in the space of two years. Of the six or so books she mentioned, he’d read two. “I won’t lie to you that I read the others and then get them from the library and quickly read them so I won’t get caught lying the next time we talk about them, if there is a next time and we do. I’m actually a bad liar in everything but my dealings with editors, and now that’s stopped. Though don’t tell me the other books your classes were assigned. I’m already chagrined, knowing you now know how unread I am. I mean, I’m always reading, and always have a book with me, and always serious literature, or what I think as such, but not the ancient classics.” “Of the ones you haven’t read, read The Divine Comedy first,” she said. “Oh, I shouldn’t be telling you what to read. Read what you like, but if you do read it, get what a couple of Dante scholars have told me is the best translation for each of them, and unlike what I said about the Gulag trio, try to read all three.” He said “I loved the first two lines of the opening tercet of the first terza rima of The Inferno, if I got all that right. But then I could never get past — and I tried — the first ten pages, maybe the first five. One of the lesser translations, maybe? In other words, not my fault? I have read Metamorphosis, but the other one, several times.” “They’re spelled differently,” she said, “but that’s okay,” and he said “Are they? Which one did I get right? Anyway, Homer, of course, both books twice and in the original Portuguese.” “Boy, you sure keep them coming,” and he said “You don’t like it? I could always put in the plug,” and she said “As I think I told you, I like jokes and punning and laughing and the like, and I know that’s not the only side to you. Incidentally, my Divine Comedy pitch? Three in a row, or even in one season, no matter how good the translations, could be a bit much. They might be better read broken up, or the first two and then a break. It’s not like Proust’s Remembrances,” and he said “Oh, God, I’m going to get in more trouble with you, but there’s another one I couldn’t stick with. At least they don’t have to be translated,” and she said “Do you reach French?” and he said “Not well,” and she said “Then I’ll have to think about your remark,” and he thinks he said “Don’t. It didn’t come out at all the way I wanted it to, and if you think about it I’ll just appear silly to you.” She said “Don’t worry. I’m so bad at being funny and making people laugh, I don’t even try,” and he said “I can’t believe that,” and she said “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s true.” She was smiling and seemed pleased about something and looked over her teacup at him as she drank and he thinks it was around then he thought they might be hitting it off and that he no longer feels he’s in over his head with her. Gwen later said — weeks, months; “It’s even in my journal,” which he’s been unable to find; looked everywhere; not with the others, which he hasn’t read any of but probably will one day; asked his daughters and her two best friends if they knew where her ’78 and ’79 journals might be, the years he was most interested in because he still hadn’t moved in with her and he wanted to know what she thought of him and their sex and being together and stuff like that early on but kept it a secret in her journals; he even suspected, after her first stroke, she gave them to one of the friends to hold so he wouldn’t read them because there were some things about him he wouldn’t like — that she started thinking of him then in a possible-mate-sort-of-way, and more than anything at the time because of his sense of humor, honesty, way his mind works and that he makes her laugh. He knows he likes her, he thought at the drugstore — a lot — and that she’s everything he thought she’d be, and pretty too and a nice body. Don’t, don’t, don’t, whatever you do, he thinks he told himself, seated on the stool next to her, listening to her talk or watching her sip her tea, fuck it up. He can do that and has with other women he was interested in, but he doesn’t think any of them came near to matching her. Maybe already too many jokes, though don’t get falsely serious. If this is working, do what you’ve been doing; otherwise, you’ll come out a fake. She asked if he does any kind of work now but his writing. “What I’m saying,” she said, “and maybe this is too personal a question—” and he said “It isn’t,” and she said “How do you know what I was going to ask?” and he said “It just seemed what was coming next. I’m still living off an old small book advance and the hope of a new one. Didn’t I speak about this in our phone call?” and she said “If you did, I’m sorry but that was a while ago and it isn’t that I wasn’t listening.” “Also the occasional sale of a short story to a literary magazine, which doesn’t amount to much but helps. My rent is fairly cheap and I’m on a tight budget, which doesn’t mean I can’t spring for your tea and our English muffin. Oh, yeah. I cashed in a few months ago a two-thousand-dollar insurance policy my mother took out on me when I was ten. I could never get her to explain why she did. I wasn’t prematurely old or diagnosed with a fatal illness and I didn’t become the family breadwinner till I was twelve. I remember salespeople of various kinds coming to the apartment and setting their sample cases and paperwork on the dining table — Fuller Brush man, Electrolux lady, someone for cosmetics, etcetera — so the insurance agent, who came regularly, must have talked her into this unusual policy for such a healthy kid. Thirty years later I benefitted from it. But if nothing comes my way in a month or two, I’ll have to go job hunting. This time for something more lucrative than bookstore salesman, which I did last year for six months till the store closed. Big Apple Books, on Columbus between 73rd and 74th?” and she shook her head. “I thought maybe you might have gone there and it was my day off. Good literary bookshop. Just the owner and I, but she refused to sell bestsellers. Or something less mind-numbing than bartending, which I did the two years before last, and also less dangerous because of all the cigarette smoke blowing my way. You don’t smoke, do you?” and she said no. “Neither do I and never have. You might think this is narrow-minded, and that I’m also limiting myself because of it, but I couldn’t go out with a woman if I knew she smoked, even if she didn’t smoke around me,” and she said “I can understand. I don’t like it either, but it’s never stopped me from going out with a man or even getting serious with one. Cigars might, but I never dated a cigar smoker. My former husband took up the habit after we were married. He liked one about once a week, always in the evening when he was watching a sports event on TV, but you put up with such things in a marriage and he kept the door closed.” “So you were married. How long?” and she said “Two years, though technically three, when we were both going for our Ph.D.s.” “I never was. My guess, because of my age, you might have thought I had been,” and she said “No, I didn’t think of it.” “Got close, in my early twenties. But the woman — she hated the word fiancée — even younger than I and already divorced, did the smart thing and disengaged us.” “Any reason you want to give?” and he said “You?” and she said “Not really.” “We were too compatible and having too much fun. I’m not kidding. It still mystifies me. We went to bed happy and had just got up and she said ‘You’re not going to like this, Martin…’ She even denied we’d ever been engaged, though the wedding was tentatively scheduled to take place at her folks’ house a short time before she called it and us off. I didn’t argue with her — I was too angry and sad — and only have seen her once since, other than for the times I moved my things out of her apartment. That was at the Natural History Museum here, when she was with her two young sons and I was on my way to having a drink with a friend under the giant stuffed whale. We said hello and she introduced her kids to me and that was that. No, I saw her twice. The first time when I came back from Europe in ’64. No, I actually saw her a number of times. But regarding a job, maybe you can advise me. Eventually, I’d like to teach fiction writing. Four books, we’ll say, seventy to eighty published stories — maybe even a hundred. I’ve lost count…but that ought to qualify me for at least an adjunct position in some college in the area or a continuing ed program.” She said “One would think so, and I wish I could help. I took creative writing courses in college, but I don’t know how my instructors got their jobs. I guess you just apply. You do know that adjunct work at any level — even if you’ve been doing it at the same school for ten years and they’ve given you the grandiose title of Visiting Associate Professor — pays piss-poorly, as they say,” and he might have said — he knows he concealed his surprise at her saying “piss-poorly”; she might not like him calling attention to it as if he thought she was above or beyond the expression or it didn’t seem quite natural her using it and it in fact sounded a bit artificial—“It’s a start, though. Which may, after only a year, give me the teaching credentials, plus my published work, and there’d likely be more by then, and availability and just that I’ve been writing without let-up for twenty years, for a contracted position someplace, or whatever it’s called,” and she said “Tenure track?” and he said “Yes, but there’s another word I’m thinking of for an academic hiring agreement that isn’t tenure track but could lead to it after a couple of years if they really like you and want to keep you on, but I’ll take tenure if it’s only that.” She said “Non-adjunct positions are hard to get around here. Too many respected professional writers live in the city and academics with multiple degrees who can’t get permanent English department appointments but can teach creative writing. But as you said, you never know. Though to be honest — and I’m not trying to discourage you — your age for an assistant professorship, which is what you’d ultimately want to go for, doesn’t help you.” “Too young?” and she said “That’s right. If you had only started later,” and he said “I tried, but the latest I could get my first book published was when I was forty. Hey, that was good.” Did he mention that when they got to the counter but before they sat down she said “This okay for you?” Yes, he did. Meaning, sitting on stools at a counter rather than chairs a