When her husband called, as he did almost every day, she told him, laughing, the latest of the maid’s comical tales of family feuding and inbreeding, and said that she had decided to polish the Bible college chapter as a story and send it around and abandon the rest. He heard the panic in her voice, hired a plane for the weekend and flew home. He gently dragged her out of the trash heap that her study had become, first opening the windows to let out the sickening miasma of stale cigarette smoke, and led her into the bedroom, undressed her, and made love to her in a profoundly affectionate way of the sort rarely shown and then generally only after a punishing evening with his friends in the Chamber, leaving her crying softly on the pillow while he crafted a mushroom risotto with shaved truffles and cheese-flavored croutons in the kitchen. He tossed a green salad with garlic and lemon juice, opened a Barbaresco that even she with her nicotine-stunned palate could recognize as a serious wine, and put string quartets on the stereo system. Brahms? Mozart? She wasn’t sure, her musical education only just beginning. She started to explain herself; he put his finger to his lips. “Just listen to the music,” he said with a smile. After dinner he replaced the string quartets with big band music from the swing era and they danced for a while like lovers in an old movie and then went back to bed for another round of sex — slow, almost meditative in nature. “You’re really good at this,” she said, as he studied her from within and from above. “It’s like a skill you have. I suppose you could do it equally well with old crones or chimpanzees or trained seals.” “Probably,” he said, smiling down on her. Appreciatively, she thought. “I do have quite a lot of sex. But only rarely the opportunity to make love.”
She woke to find breakfast awaiting her and her study locked from the inside. Which frightened her. Perhaps, fearing for her sanity, he was destroying it all. She raised her fist to bang on the door, thought better of it, returned to her breakfast, hit the on-switch on the coffee-maker. Eventually he joined her, kissed her gently on that nice place behind the ear (she rather hoped he’d nip her lobe, but he didn’t; what he might call consistency of style), and said he’d spent some time with her typescript, he hoped she didn’t mind. She did, but at this moment she was too fond of him to say so. He praised it, found it “vivid, provocative, dark yet funny,” etc. He had something else to say. She could wait for it. “I especially loved the high school beer party and the flagellation scenes.”
“You would. But I’ve taken them out.”
“Really? Also, I didn’t find the cemetery story.”
“It’s gone, too. It didn’t seem to fit in anywhere and I’d have had to explain too much if I used it.”
“A pity. When you told me the story I remember laughing a lot and at the same time feeling a gathering anxiety, not so much because of the setting, but because of increasing apprehension about the blond boy. He seemed quietly and dangerously crazed. Not someone you’d want to be alone with in a cemetery or anywhere else. I think it would make a good first chapter. It sums everything up while keeping it all intriguingly mysterious.”
“I have a first chapter.” He smiled, sipped coffee, said nothing. “You don’t think I have a first chapter.”
“You have a kind of foreword. Or afterword, maybe. Not in the voice of ‘the girl,’ as you call her, but in your own. It is too argumentative for a novel chapter, but it works as a way of explaining how you got involved with this story and why you decided to write it. It’s a place where you can summarize the cult history as you came to know it and comment on it in your own voice, and that saves you having to do that inside the novel itself. You’re going to want to end the novel much like you ended the story, and you can use the afterword to fill in the rest of what happened that day and to report on the trials and sentences that resulted, which are part of the book’s motivations. Also, in our very first conversation at the writers’ colony, you unleashed some of your pet theories about cognitive dissonance and collective effervescence, and the afterword would give you the opportunity to indulge yourself a bit.”
“Not my theories, I’m afraid.”
“I know that. But they fit. Credit them if you think you must. But help us see what you see.”
“This is going to take forever.”
“Won’t be easy, but you may be further along than you think.” By now they had their coats and boots on, caps and gloves, and were entering the woods on a winter walk. About a mile further on, she knew, having been there before on her own, the land fell away and he or someone had built a rustic outlook with rough-hewn picnic tables for the summer. Always a surprise when one got there because neither the overlook nor the valley could be seen from the house. On the way, as they shuffled through the snow, stirring up creatures on either side of them, he pointed out that she already had enough for a book, though only half was probably worth keeping, and he encouraged her to rethink her removal of the flagellation and rape scene, because she probably wanted the boys with their alternating points of view to think more about Young Abner. When she protested he wasn’t her character, Darren and Billy Don were, and besides he was totally unattractive, a stupid, sullen boy, he reminded her that Young Abner was the one on death row and said maybe she could try to make sullenness and stupidity interesting. “Make room for plain, ordinary ugliness. The everyday tragic drama of the impoverished spirit.” She was thinking about this. She was resisting it. But he may be right, she was thinking. He is right, damn him. They emerged from the woods and reached the overlook. The air was exhilaratingly cold and clean. As they talked, the book settled into its new shape. It was as if she were gazing out upon it, metamorphosing before her eyes down in the snowy sunlit valley: the cemetery openers, the Bible college cafeteria meeting with some background bits cannibalized from the high school chapter, the two friends drawing together during their travels and establishment of the camp, their falling apart after the attempted seduction scenes of her short story, Darren moving toward the Baxterites, Billy Don staying loyal to the Clara Collins people. The cult schism: way to talk about that.
“Sounds good,” he said. “What’s left?”
“The end of their relationship. The murder.” Six chapters, counting the afterword, three of them more or less written. She took off one of her gloves to pull out a cigarette, but he also took a glove off and held her hand and that was better. She felt spectacularly healthy.
Before her husband returned to the Capitol, he had one night with his friends in what he called the “library,” but by then she was beavering away in her study once more, earphones on to stifle any sounds that might leak from the Chamber. The front two and back two chapters, she foresaw, would more or less write themselves; the middle two would be more difficult, but now that they were defined as coming-together and falling-apart chapters, all the peripheral material dropped away into the background, and her two characters rose to the fore. She was having fun writing again.