Suss: another literary journal

This was the fourth straight day that Jenny Engle had failed to make her two-page min­i­mum, but only sec­onds after she’d con­fessed that her fail­ure was the rea­son for the crank­i­ness that had led to the argu­ment that had, in turn, led to the round of make-up sex she and Andi had just enjoyed, and Jenny couldn’t get over how flip­pant her part­ner was toward her tribulation.

“You don’t get it. There’s some­thing called rou­tine. I’m a crea­ture of it. I’ve had the same one for six years now. Three hours a day, three days a week if not four or five, and now, all of sud­den, I hit a dry spell? I’m ner­vous. I need to work to be happy. I need my productivity.”

Andi curled at her side, cat-like, and blew gen­tly on her cheek. “You need a break. A vaca­tion. Take me to Bermuda and we can recharge our batteries.”

“You had to go there, didn’t you?” Jenny frowned. In their cir­cle recharg­ing one’s bat­ter­ies was a tired old joke.

“Get snippy on me and I’ll leave you to your insom­nia. It can’t be that hard to get going again. Just crank some­thing out. What were you work­ing on? Maybe if you put it aside and start some­thing else, you could get your rou­tine back on route.”

“The story was about a wash­er­woman in Brazil I saw once. A girl, really. I was an exchange stu­dent there when I was six­teen. Have I ever told you that?”

“There’s a lot of things you’ve never told me. The plot of this story, for example.”

“Maybe that’s the prob­lem. I’m not sure there is one. The girl is the charge of an old doc­tor who arranges for her to cook for his ene­mies, all of whom want to seduce her, of course. That’s the twist—the doc­tor has her under strict orders not to, because it’s his way of tor­tur­ing the men. But that’s just the premise; I can’t find the build-up, the cli­max. Mostly I’ve been in the girl’s head, try­ing to get her rhythm down, a ‘Melanctha’ sort of thing.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. It’s just an old story I was rip­ping off. Usually it helps me get going to have an ana­logue in mind. I don’t talk about it because it seems pre­ten­tious. You know, this is my ‘Flowering Judas,’ my ‘Red Convertible.’”

“Well, I can see how a Brazilian wash­er­woman could stymie you. Is think­ing about her what’s got you doing that?”

Unconsciously, Jenny had been cir­cling a fin­ger around Andi’s left areola.

“You’re sup­posed to like that,” Jenny said. “Intimacy and all.”

“I do like intimacy—just not when we’re talk­ing about your writ­ing. When you do that it’s obvi­ous you’re think­ing about it, not me. Call me self­ish, but I’d like to be on your mind when we’re not wear­ing clothes.… Ooh, here’s a thought.” She rolled over so her dim­pled chin rested on Jenny’s shoul­der. “Write a story about me. How you can’t resist me because I’m … hot. Make it a 9½ Weeks type thing. There’s never been a gay 9½ Weeks, has there?” She took a play­ful lick at her lover’s ear and slipped into the but­tery coo of a chanteuse: You can leave your hat on...

Jenny lay par­a­lyzed, appalled.

“That was a joke,” Andi grunted. “A lit­tle irony, por favor? See, that’s me sup­port­ing you. I’m speak­ing Spanish to help you think about Brazilian washerwomen.”

“They don’t speak Spanish in Brazil. They speak Portuguese.”

Jenny said it so quickly she didn’t real­ize how huffy she sounded. Andi let out another grunt, this one word­less, and flopped to her other side. Jenny wanted to tell her that she didn’t like girls who grunted like men, but she thought bet­ter of it. She knew Andi well enough to know what she was going to say:

“I’m going to hug my pil­low now. It doesn’t squirm when I touch it.”

§

The real­ity was that writ­ing was eas­ier before Jenny was pub­lished. Back then she told her­self she was young enough that there’d be plenty of time to pur­sue get­ting into print. Instead, she pre­ferred to think of her rou­tine as a hobby, as exer­cise. It made her feel fit­ter than if she jogged or did yoga or golfed. Her goal was never to get read but to get smarter, which was why she picked top­ics she knew noth­ing about: the work was her way of learn­ing. That was how she’d ended up with a foot­locker of sto­ries about modern-day boot­leg­ging, SEC foot­ball scan­dals, the love life of the les­bian poet Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle, and surf­ing in 1962… not to men­tion a half-finished novel about the siege of Madrid dur­ing the Spanish Civil War. Some of it was good, a lot of it was bad, but all of it, she’d con­vinced her­self, had been use­ful. It had taught her dis­ci­pline and given her seri­ous things to think about.

That all changed when Andi moved in. Immediately, Jenny’s rou­tine became an issue. Andi didn’t like Jenny get­ting up at 5:30 a.m. to get on the com­puter, the dis­tracted way at the din­ner table she worked out plot improb­a­bil­i­ties, or the books she left lying around while research­ing a sub­ject. Most of all, she didn’t like Jenny not show­ing her stuff to her. What was the point of writ­ing if you refused to share it with the most impor­tant per­son in your life?

One after­noon while Jenny was at a busi­ness meeting—her day job was as a free­lance copy­ed­i­tor and web­site designer—Andi fished around Jenny’s lap­top until she came across a draft called “Rendezvous Beneath the Blue.” She’d hoped the story was about her, but instead it was about Jenny’s par­ents, who, in their weird beat­nik way, enjoyed boast­ing about how they’d first slept together some­where along Highway 80 dur­ing the Selma-to-Montgomery march. After read­ing it, Andi faxed a copy to Jenny’s dad. He was so proud he showed it off to a woman at his Unitarian church whose cousin hap­pened to be the pub­lic­ity man­ager at the newly estab­lished Kennesaw State University Press. The cousin liked it enough to ask Jenny’s father for more, which sent Andi sneak­ing back to the lap­top. Up to the day the book con­tract was offered, Jenny never knew what was going on. Suddenly, with­out even trying—without nec­es­sar­ily want­ing to—she’d become an author.

A year later, the thought of some­one read­ing her work con­tin­ued to ter­rify her.

§

“Here’s what you do,” Andi told her the next night. “‘Choose a memory—any mem­ory, though a vague one works best. You can do this by select­ing one detail and writ­ing down every­thing that comes to mind asso­ci­ated with it. Continue writ­ing for fif­teen min­utes with­out stop­ping. Try not to lift your pen from the pa—’”

“What are you read­ing from?”

Andi looked at the spine of the book she’d cracked. “It’s a how-to-thing. Practical advice on writer’s block. I went by the library on my lunch break. It’s my way of telling you I’m sup­port­ing you in your time of cri­sis. That and that it’s time for you to get back to being happy.”

Jenny sank onto a kitchen barstool, try­ing to hide her frus­tra­tion. She’d only man­aged two hun­dred and twelve words that day—barely two para­graphs, and maybe a sentence’s worth of it was any good. She wasn’t look­ing for­ward to see­ing those para­graphs come morning.

“That’s sweet and all, but books like that aren’t meant for me. They’re for begin­ning writ­ers. You know, peo­ple who’ve never writ­ten any­thing yet. It’s not the get­ting going that’s got me ham­pered. It’s the keep­ing going.”

Andi’s face turned nearly as red as her maroon scrubs.

“Pardon me, Agatha Christie. I didn’t real­ize the prob­lem was more com­pli­cated when you’re not a ‘begin­ner.’” She set the book on the counter and briskly poured her­self a Chardonnay. “Seems to me you’re not doing any­thing dif­fer­ent than what that advice says. The Brazil woman—she was a mem­ory, right? Perfect. Instead of jump­ing into the part about the doc­tor, go write down details about her for fif­teen min­utes. That should give you some ideas.”

“I gave up on Brazil. It didn’t seem to have a point. I’m mov­ing on.”

“Really? Good. I wasn’t sold on the wash­er­woman thing any­way. What’s this one about? I liked my 9½ Weeks idea, you know.”

As she spoke, Andi undid the draw­string on her scrubs and slid them down her thighs. She worked for a vet­eri­nar­ian and came home every­day cov­ered in dog hair, which Jenny was for­ever mop­ping up. She had to wait for Andi to return from the laun­dry room, where she’d traded the scrubs for check­ered pajama bottoms.

“Your story will have to wait. The one I’m on now is about a wreck on the highway—a big one, maybe a half-dozen cars. Only the crash comes at the end. Most of it’s about the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters’ lives. They’re all left won­der­ing whether fate really exists or whether things occur out of hap­pen­stance. There’s the awk­ward cou­ple on their first date, the cou­ple where the hus­band has his wife locked up in the trunk, even a gay couple—I’m putting them in it for you, so don’t say I don’t write about us. All these lives inter­sect before they lit­er­ally inter­sect, you see.”

Andi stopped ham­mer­ing at the bag of frozen veg­eta­bles she was prepar­ing to defrost.

“I think I saw a movie like that once...I know I did. A TV-movie. I think it was Irwin Allen. You know, the guy who did The Towering Inferno and Earthquake. Yeah.…” She returned to bang­ing the bag on the counter. “It was called Wreck on Highway 40 or something.”

Jenny felt her­self shake like the bag of veg­gies. She counted to twenty, speak­ing only when she real­ized Andi wasn’t going to ask her what was wrong.

“You just sab­o­taged me.…”

“What?” Andi couldn’t hear for all the noise the bash­ing made.

“You just ruined that idea for me! Shot it right between the eyes! I spent all day work­ing it out in my head.…”

It took Andi a minute to real­ize her girl­friend wasn’t jok­ing. Still, she had to ask if Jenny was seri­ous, which only irri­tated Jenny more.

“Of course I’m seri­ous! The worst thing you can do is tell a writer her story’s already been done. Do I tell you that somebody’s already cooked your din­ner bet­ter than you ever will?”

“I never said ‘bet­ter.’ Jesus, you’re defen­sive. Defensive and exaggerating.”

“I’m not either. Do you think you could be a lit­tle more sup­port­ive? I’m not say­ing tell me I’m great, but for God’s sake don’t tell me you’ve heard it all before—especially not now, not when I’m stranded in this drought.”

Andi blinked a few times. “I didn’t real­ize it was a big deal, okay?”

“It’s not okay. Maybe think a bit more about what you’re say­ing before you say it, how about that? This rela­tion­ship might go a lot smoother for both of us if you gave that a shot.”

Andi tossed the bag of veg­eta­bles in the sink, where the frozen broc­coli clanked loudly.

“How about this for an orig­i­nal idea? Make your own dinner.”

She stormed out the door, still in her check­ered paja­mas. Much later, Jenny found an empty Burger King bag aban­doned on the counter, dap­pled with fin­ger­prints and ketchup stains. She made a point of not throw­ing it away.

Three days later, the sack was still there.

§

Jenny’s dad took Andi’s side:

“There are only so many sto­ries in the world, baby. The odds of you com­ing up with one that’s never been done before are pretty remote—not to men­tion pretty vain, don’t you think? Maybe Andi could’ve been a lit­tle less blunt in point­ing out the com­par­i­son, but my guess is you could put your piece alongside—what’s his name? Irving Allen?—and nobody would notice the premise is the same.”

Mr. Engle was sit­ting behind the grand mahogany desk that dom­i­nated his oth­er­wise unadorned office, stroking the long Solzhenitsyn-style beard that Jenny had always assumed was his way of let­ting peo­ple know he wasn’t a mere lawyer but a civil-rights lit­i­ga­tor. Jenny was drop­ping off a brief she’d proofed for him. Her father was her best client, and she needed his $300 to pay this month’s elec­tric bill, which she was con­vinced Andi had run up by turn­ing the air con­di­tioner down to 72°.

“You shouldn’t let the sim­i­lar­ity scare you away from fin­ish­ing it. The story sounds interesting.”

“Too late. The idea’s ruined. I looked that movie up on imdb​.com, and it hit me what a melo­dra­matic gim­mick it was. Strangers’ lives inter­sect­ing...geesh. I mean, how totally inor­ganic. Characters would be yakking about sen­ti­men­tal­i­ties and the reader would see the crash com­ing from a mile away. You know why? It’s a for­mula, Dad.”

“Can’t you find some­thing for­mu­laic in any story if you look hard enough? Seems to me that’s what sto­ry­telling is all about: for­mu­lat­ing things.”

“Being for­mu­laic isn’t a good thing, no mat­ter how you define the word. It’s espe­cially bad when you real­ize where the for­mula came from. You know where I got this idea? Imdb made me real­ize it: Arthur Hailey.”

“Who?”

“The guy who wrote Airport and Hotel. He was Mom’s beach read years back. All his books have the same plot: stranger’s lives inter­sect­ing. Only the set­tings are dif­fer­ent.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do bet­ter than Airport. At best I’d be doing Airport ’75.”

Her agi­ta­tion shocked her father.

“You’re being pretty tough on your­self.… The only way a reader would con­nect your story to those nov­els was if you named a char­ac­ter Arthur Hailey. Even then, that’d be a funny joke. You should do it. Name a char­ac­ter Irving Hailey. Better yet, name a woman Hailey Irving.”

Jenny dug a fin­ger­nail into her thumb. “It’s Irwin Allen, okay? Not Irving, but Ir-win.”

“You’re really psych­ing your­self out, aren’t you? A lot of writ­ers do that after they come out of the box. Writing used to be a pri­vate thing, but now you’re pub­lished, and so you’ve got to think of your read­ers. You stall your­self wor­ry­ing whether they’ll like your new stuff.”

“If that were the case then you’d be right to tell me I was being vain. My book wasn’t a big enough deal to blame the prob­lem on get­ting published.”

“What do you mean? I saw Jean at church and she said Kennesaw was happy with how well it’s done.”

Jean was the cousin of the pub­lic­ity direc­tor who’d talked the press into pub­lish­ing Rendezvous Beneath the Blue.

“You think she’s going to tell you that Kennesaw’s not happy? She goes to church with you! Let’s put this in per­spec­tive: I sold four hun­dred copies. Big poop.”

“You’re not count­ing the libraries. Jean says it’s in a hun­dred and eighty of them so far.”

“Another big poop. Have I lost Kennesaw money? Maybe, maybe not. When I asked Jean’s cousin she said not to worry—university presses aren’t out to make money. They’re sub­si­dized. And that’s my point: who cares? Six hun­dred copies doesn’t mean you have that many readers—it means you have that many friends. Or at least your par­ents do.”

Jenny knew from Jean that her mom and dad alone had bought a hun­dred Rendezvous, which they’d given to friends as Christmas gifts. They hadn’t even bought the book at retail; Kennesaw sold it to them at a forty-percent dis­count, the same one Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million would get if the mega-chains chose to stock her book.

Which, Jenny reminded her father, they hadn’t.

Mr. Engle didn’t know what to say. “Maybe the rea­son you’re blocked isn’t impor­tant. It’s the solu­tion we need to worry about. Maybe if your mom and I gave you some ideas you’d stop think­ing about Arthur Hailey. We had lots of other adven­tures besides the Selma-to-Montgomery march.”

Jenny tried to con­vince her­self it wasn’t a ridicu­lous sug­ges­tion. She told her father to give her a plot. They blinked at each other for sev­eral dead sec­onds as Mr. Engle took a men­tal dash through his forty years of case files.

“Okay, here’s a sure­fire one. You prob­a­bly don’t remem­ber it because you were barely ten. But there was this black fel­low I defended, Will Orton. He was accused of assault­ing a white girl. Only he was inno­cent. Nobody wanted to believe it. The prej­u­dice was amaz­ing. I mean, here it was almost twenty years after Selma, and I was los­ing friends over Will. I even got a death threat. Your mother was wait­ing for a bomb to go off on the porch. I used to come home all kinked up over whether I could get this kid a fair trial, and you’d crawl into my lap and tell me not to be sad. I’m not say­ing make me the pro­tag­o­nist, but the father-daughter angle could be your hook: the child can’t under­stand why peo­ple don’t see her dad as a hero because she sure does. It could be one of those—what do they call them?—ini­ti­a­tion sto­ries...”

Jenny thought the nail in her thumb would draw blood. She only quit dig­ging it in to snap her fin­gers, sarcastically.

“That’s a great idea for a story, Dad! I’ve even got a great title to go along with it: To Kill a Mockingbird. Because that’s the plot you just gave me to write.…”

§

It might’ve been eas­ier if the ideas just dried up. Then Jenny could’ve made peace with her­self. She could give up writ­ing: one and done, she would explain when asked why more books weren’t forth­com­ing. Then she could devote her­self to grow­ing her busi­ness, mak­ing enough money to pay her debts, find­ing a new can­vas of a hobby to stretch across the frame of her need for rou­tine. Why not yoga instead of writ­ing? Print-making? Sewing even? Those things might even make her happy.

Instead, inspi­ra­tion was unre­lent­ing. She began to dread leav­ing the house for fear of what might plant the hint of a plot. There was the man she saw split­ting grape bub­blegum with his son at the pack ‘n’ sack; the cou­ple who sipped mar­gar­i­tas at the Mexican restau­rant so they didn’t have to speak to each other; the reformed alco­holic whose parole required him to preach against the dan­gers of dri­ving drunk. The prob­lem wasn’t that these sce­nar­ios weren’t weighty enough to break Jenny’s block. Far from it. The sto­ry­lines came to her instantly, fully formed. The prob­lem was that there was noth­ing orig­i­nal about them. Each time she had an idea she could imme­di­ately name the book or movie she remem­bered it from. It was as if the fab­ric of her imag­i­na­tion had all along been cut whole­sale from some­one else’s cloth.

“I’m a pla­gia­rist,” she blurted to Andi one lack­adaisi­cal night. “I’m being pun­ished for not rec­og­niz­ing it before now. All these titles swamp­ing me—they’re God’s way of telling me all I’ve done is pil­fer other people’s cre­ativ­ity. I’m a faker.”

“No, you’re just a whiner. You act like you’re the first per­son to ever get writer’s block. A lot of the greats got sti­fled, too.”

“You’ve just made my point: I’m not even orig­i­nal in my suffering.”

“Oh, Good Lord. I wasn’t telling you that so you could drive a new nail in your palm. My point is that you could learn from oth­ers’ exam­ple. You know what Keats said about it?” Andi plucked a note­book from the cof­fee table and read a tran­scribed pas­sage: “Whenever I feel myself grow­ing vapour­ish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe­strings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out—then all clean and com­fort­able I sit down to write.” She clapped the book shut and smiled. “That’s what you need to do: adonize, girl­friend, adonize.”

Under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances Jenny would’ve admit­ted that she didn’t know what adonize meant. Instead, she was dis­tracted by the notebook.

“What is that?”

“What do you think it is? It’s a note­book. Barnes & Noble, $4.95. I’ve been doing some research—to help you.”

“Research?”

“Yeah. I’ve been read­ing up on the his­tory of writer’s block. It’s really quite inter­est­ing. Did you know it’s a fairly mod­ern con­di­tion? Before the nine­teenth cen­tury, nobody really seems to have been plagued by it.”

Jenny was still stuck on the first part of the sen­tence. “You’re study­ing me?”

Andi tucked the note­book back in a table cubby. “I’m study­ing it. That’s what you do when you love some­one: you edu­cate your­self on her prob­lems so you’re a help and not a hin­drance. If you were an alco­holic, I’d be read­ing about alco­holism. That’s sup­posed to reas­sure you. You should be reas­sured and flattered.”

Jenny was nei­ther. “I don’t want you writ­ing about me.… I don’t want you writ­ing period.”

“You’re the only one who’s allowed to pick up a pen around here? If you weren’t so defen­sive about not being able to write, you might learn some­thing valu­able from the expe­ri­ence. You know why it’s become more and more com­mon nowa­days? Why it wasn’t even really an issue until a cou­ple of cen­turies ago?”

Jenny didn’t answer, which didn’t seem to bother Andi. She always answered her own ques­tions, even the rhetor­i­cal ones.

“See, before then, writ­ing was a job. You had to crank it out on Grub Street or fin­ish that com­mis­sioned poem about your patron’s rose bush if you wanted to eat. Then lo and behold here come guys like Coleridge and Wordsworth, the Romantics, and to them the sen­tence is sul­lied if there’s a dol­lar value attached to it. The mean­ing had to be, like, eter­nal and all. Say it fast enough and it’s as fun as a tongue-twister: for Wordsworth’s words to have any worth they had to come from some other world. Thanks to him and Coleridge and Lord Byron, peo­ple started think­ing of the imag­i­na­tion as a con­duit to the divine, not a human instru­ment at all, and so sud­denly writ­ers had an excuse not to get their juices flowing—they had some­thing other than them­selves to blame. It was the faulty con­nec­tion to the sub­lime that was fail­ing them, not lazi­ness or procrastination.”

“You’re not read­ing this book—you’re mem­o­riz­ing it!”

“Like I said, be happy I give a shit. So a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions after those guys come French sym­bol­ists like Marmalade or what­ever the dude’s name was. They amp up the oppor­tu­nity for agony by decid­ing that every word has to be golden. Le bon­bon mot or some shit like that, and thanks to them guys promptly went about wast­ing decades pulling their hair out over whether a comma or a semi-colon would ruin a pre­cious paragraph.”

“It’s like you’re speak­ing in tongues all of a sud­den.… These words aren’t even yours.…”

“After World War II was when it really went epi­demic. That’s when the head­shrinkers got involved. Would it sur­prise you to know that a head­shrinker coined the term ‘writer’s block’? Probably not, but this guy Edmund Bergler was the one who did. His kind glam­or­ized it by say­ing true artists are nuts and any­body who doesn’t suf­fer isn’t really one, so now if you hap­pened to be able to fin­ish a page in less time than it takes an ele­phant to ges­tate it must not be worth its ink. That’s all a round­about way of say­ing that if you had a rea­son to be productive—you know, like you actu­ally made money from your writing—you wouldn’t be wast­ing time say­ing you can’t do it any­more. You’d have to. I mean, there are days I don’t feel like going to work, but I can’t stay home com­plain­ing I’m not inspired enough.”

“Yeah, but you.…”

As Jenny’s voiced trailed off, Andi’s lips curled into a scowl.

“Finish the thought. I what?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m not dumb. I know ‘what’: I work for a vet­eri­nar­ian, so what would I need with inspi­ra­tion, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you’re think­ing it. Do you know how stuck-up you are? Why is work­ing for a vet any less cre­ative than sit­ting in front of a com­puter all day?”

Jenny stared at the note­book in the cubby. When her girl­friend finally stopped talk­ing, she lunged for it, but Andi was too quick. She jammed the ball of her heel at the cof­fee table, catch­ing Jenny on the wrist. As Jenny writhed, Andi grabbed the book and leaped up.

“Stay out of my things!” she yelled, appar­ently for­get­ting it was thanks to an act of her snoop­ing on Jenny’s com­puter that Jenny was in this predicament.

“I want to know what you say about me in there! I have a right to know!”

“A ‘right’? You bet­ter re-read the Constitution, honey bunny. Nothing says you get a peek into my pri­vate thoughts.” She should’ve left it at that, but there was no such as thing as leav­ing it at that with Andi. “I’d like to say, ‘Now you know how it feels,’ only you don’t know how it feels! Because you not only won’t share your writing—you won’t even write about me!”

With a flour­ish she spun and stomped to the bed­room, leav­ing Jenny to scream at the wall.

“This is your fault! Admit it—you’ve hexed me! You want me blocked! You’d love it if I never wrote another word! Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you!”

§

This time her father and her mother both took Andi’s side.

“Demanding to read her jour­nal is no way to care­take a rela­tion­ship,” Mrs. Engle told her. “It under­mines Andi’s abil­ity to feel trusted. Look at the sit­u­a­tion from her point of view: the house is in your name, you make more money and your time is your own, plus now you’re a pub­lished author. I’m sure Andi is intimidated—who wouldn’t be? But invad­ing her space only infan­tilizes her more. If you’re not care­ful, she’s going to play that role to the hilt and rebel against you.”

“Reading her jour­nal isn’t just uneth­i­cal,” Mr. Engle piled on. “It could be action­able. People sue at the drop of a hat nowa­days. I bet­ter check out the case law, just to be safe.”

If Jenny father’s resem­bled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, her mother was a dead ringer for Hannah Arendt, which only made din­ners like this all the more inter­minable. She hadn’t even wanted to meet them tonight at their favorite Ruby Tuesday’s. No sooner were they seated than they told her an inter­ven­tion was nec­es­sary. They promptly ordered her a double-decker mush­room ham­burger, even though she warned them she wasn’t hun­gry. To prove what a waste of money it was, Jenny allowed her­self exactly two bites and then pushed away her food.

“She shouldn’t be writ­ing. I was the writer. If she cared about me she’d under­stand what a slap in the face tak­ing up writ­ing is to me.”

“She’s writ­ing a diary,” her father pointed out.

“It’s still theft. She’s steal­ing my iden­tity. Why wouldn’t she? What did she ever bring to this rela­tion­ship? Melodrama and dog hair—big poop. She’s always been jeal­ous. I had a tal­ent, after all. It wasn’t that I was a genius or even halfway cre­ative; I just worked. That was my tal­ent: I could get down to brass tacks and accom­plish some­thing. What did she ever accom­plish? Nothing. I gave her some­thing to fix­ate on. If it wasn’t for me, she’d never have heard of writer’s block.”

“Maybe a ther­a­pist could help you,” her mother sighed. Jenny clucked.

“I don’t want to talk about Andi any­more. I want to play my new game. Humor me.”

She’d asked her folks to bring ten index cards a piece, each list­ing an idea for a story she might write. Because Mr. and Mrs. Engle were wor­ried that their daugh­ter was depressed, they’d made a con­sci­en­tious effort to come up with what to them felt like solid plot­lines. The wait­ress hadn’t even poured their water before Jenny asked for the cards, which she made a dra­matic point of seal­ing in twenty sep­a­rate envelopes. “It’s a Carnac thing,” she’d smirked. Now, as the gluey taste of the envelopes’ seals min­gled with the mush­room of her two burger bites, she spread the envelopes in front of her and ordered her mother to pick a card, any card.

“If you’re upset with us,” Mrs. Engle said, push­ing a swoop of black hair from her creased fore­head, “there are bet­ter ways of mak­ing your point. It hon­estly never entered our minds that you wouldn’t want your book pub­lished. It’s painful to see you this dis­tressed. I’m not sure this exer­cise or game or what­ever you want to call it will do you any good. It strikes me as you salt­ing your own wound.”

“Hey, I like the sound of that: Salted Wound. I’d save it for a title if I thought I had any need for titles any­more. Would Salting the Wound be bet­ter, though? Gerunds always make for bet­ter titles than nouns. Like Sexing the Cherry. That’s way bet­ter than Sexed Cherry. Now hop to, Mom. I’ve got twenty oppor­tu­ni­ties to daz­zle you with this new­found tal­ent of mine.”

Mrs. Engle reluc­tantly pointed at a ran­dom enve­lope. Jenny tore it open and read what was writ­ten inside: A group of 1960s’ col­lege stu­dents reunites years later to dis­cover their dreams and ideals have been com­pro­mised.

“Sweet Jesus.… Was The Big Chill on HBO this week? You guys can’t be this pre­dictable. Your turn, Dad. Give me your best shot.”

Her father combed his beard with his fin­gers, stalling. When he real­ized there was no get­ting out of it, he made his choice: A group of child­hood friends reunites to redis­cover the ties that bind as they share their expe­ri­ences with mar­riage, moth­er­hood, divorce, and breast can­cer. Jenny dropped her face into her palms.

“This isn’t as cathar­tic as I thought it’d be.” The groan she let out didn’t stop her from reel­ing off a list of titles: The Group by Mary McCarthy, Jack Heifner’s play Vanities, the movie Now and Then star­ring Demi Moore and Melanie Griffith, Wendy Wasserstein’s first hit, Uncommon Women and Others, Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons, Sharon Mitchell’s Nothing But the Rent, Cassandra King’s Sweet Same Girls, Sally John’s The Beach House, the movie Everything Relative (“A Lesbian Big Chill”), Lee Smith’s The Last Girls, Judy Wall’s A Good Man...

“Etc., etc.,” Jenny snidely concluded.

Her mother told her she was being ungen­er­ous. “I’ve seen Uncommon Women and I’ve read The Group and I would never think of them as inter­change­able. You’re just cre­at­ing mean­ing­less cat­e­gories and lump­ing sto­ries into them.”

“I’m not cre­at­ing these categories—they’re inhab­it­ing me. I’m being over­taken by them! It’s like I inhaled an alien spore and it’s blos­somed in me. One morn­ing I’ll wake up and I won’t be able to speak in any­thing but titles. It’s so Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Shit! See what I mean? Dammit, I can’t con­trol it.…”

Glumly, she plucked an enve­lope from her pile and tore it open: A father and mother watch help­lessly as the daugh­ter they love denies her­self the plea­sure of writ­ing, which used to sat­isfy her more than any­thing else in the world...

Jenny burst into tears. “Deny? You think I’m deny­ing myself? That I’m falling apart like this because I want to? Don’t you get it? I can’t write any­more because I can’t find a plot that I can enjoy! If I could, do you think I’d make a spec­ta­cle of myself like this? No—I’d be home writ­ing up a big­ger storm than even Andi is right now!”

Mrs. Engle leaned over to com­fort Jenny, but before she could embrace her, her hus­band blurted some­thing that shocked the table into a help­less silence. The entire fam­ily was par­a­lyzed except for their eyes, which danced fran­ti­cally back and forth among each other. Could what Jenny said about that spore be true? It struck them as pos­si­ble. Mr. Engle cer­tainly seemed infected.

“That sounds just like Kafka!” he’d blurted. “I know it’s Kafka: If I had found some­thing that could make me happy, believe me, I should have made no fuss and I’d have been as con­tent as you or any­one else...That’s the end­ing of ‘A Hunger Artist’!”

§

Only one thing could dis­tract her from the oppres­sion of plot­lines. When Andi left for work in the morn­ings Jenny scoured the house for her jour­nal. She emp­tied each shoe­box stacked in the closet, pat­ted down the remote cran­nies of cab­i­nets, turned over dining-room chairs to check the under­sides of seats. She even peeked behind reg­is­ters to the dusty innards of the heat­ing ducts.

At first she thought her part­ner was just clever in her hid­ing. Then she began to sus­pect Andi of taunt­ing her with red her­rings. Odd notes with what Jenny inter­preted as abstruse clues appeared on the gro­cery list on the refrig­er­a­tor, the dry-erase cal­en­dar propped to the back­splash. Little scraps showed up ran­domly tucked among the pages of the phone book and the index cards in the recipe box. The backs of unopened bills bore illeg­i­ble scrib­bles. The jot­tings made about as much sense as a dead lan­guage. Nevertheless, they prompted wild goose chases. A ref­er­ence to gra­nola drove Jenny to empty the cereal box in a large bowl and sift through the clumps of rolled oats like a child look­ing for a toy sur­prise. Mention of spiral-shank nails sent her to the tool drawer, where she rifled through the users’ man­u­als to the stove and microwave, even though nei­ther was any­where near thick enough to cam­ou­flage a 3×4” cloth­bound hard­back. Finally, when a pil­low­case cir­cled in a Linens ’N Things cat­a­logue had her furi­ously unfurl­ing the spare bed­ding in the hall, Jenny knew with cer­tainty that Andi intended to drive her crazy.

Of course, in her more lucid moments, she could come up with a ratio­nal expla­na­tion for why she shouldn’t find the note­book: Andi took it with her to work. On reflec­tion, how­ever, tak­ing it to work was too easy—too safe even. There was no sport in that. Andi was vin­dic­tive; she’d love the fact that the per­fect hid­ing spot was so per­fect it sat right under Jenny’s nose, out in the open, in plain sight, as obvi­ous as a dot­ted i. Maybe it’s in the freezer, Jenny thought, dis­guised as a steak wrapped in butcher paper.

And then she would go check—again.

Always at night she’d get exactly one tan­ta­liz­ing glimpse of the thing. Andi would come home, cov­ered in dog hair as usual, and head straight to the shower. As the water ran Jenny would peek into her purse—as unob­tru­sively as pos­si­ble, because she wouldn’t put it past Andi to rig the bag in some con­niv­ing way designed to tar her in the act of snoop­ing: one of those explod­ing dye packs, for exam­ple, the kind used to catch bank rob­bers. The jour­nal was never there, though, only con­firm­ing that Andi hadn’t taken it to the vet’s office. But then Andi would slink out of the shower in her bathrobe, pour a wine and microwave a frozen din­ner, and when Jenny least expected it—bam!—the note­book would sud­denly be in her free hand, as if con­jured up out of dis­carded cork rind and plas­tic packaging.

As she ate, Andi would flip through the pages, review­ing what she’d writ­ten, occa­sion­ally look­ing up to see if Jenny was try­ing to spy. And Jenny always was. So Andi would smile mali­ciously and prop the book up on its bot­tom edge so there was no see­ing the white of her paper. Then when she fin­ished her meal she retired to the liv­ing room with her pen, and she would labor over the jour­nal while Jenny pre­tended to watch TV.

After an hour or so, Andi would set the note­book on the cof­fee table and announce, very the­atri­cally, that she had to pee. She never traipsed more than ten paces toward the restroom before she’d let out a fake gasp and rush back to swipe the jour­nal off the spotty wal­nut sur­face. “I almost for­got,” she’d say, full of faux inno­cence. “How’s that wrist of yours? It’s not still hurt­ing is it? I really didn’t mean to stomp it so hard, you know. I’m a pri­vate per­son, that’s all. I need my space...”

To cope with her frus­tra­tion Jenny tried to start a new story. It would be about the manic lengths the aver­age per­son might go to peer into some­body else’s pri­vate writ­ing. It would be about obses­sion. About exor­cis­ing obses­sion. About how writ­ing about exor­cis­ing obses­sion might, with a lit­tle des­per­ate luck, exor­cise obsession.

Jenny dashed off 1,187 words before she real­ized that the story had already been done.

It was called The Aspern Papers by Henry James.

It was called The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth.

It was called Possession by A. S. Byatt.

Only those were books about actual writ­ers, which Andi wasn’t. Jenny was the writer in this relationship.

§

Finally one night the pat­tern broke. This time when Andi came home she didn’t take her usual shower. Instead she went to the couch, trailed by pet hair, of course, and flipped one of Jenny’s accent pil­lows face­down. As Jenny watched, she drew back the zip­per, stuffed her hand under the che­nille cover, and retrieved the jour­nal with all the showi­ness of a magi­cian pulling a rab­bit from his hat.

“A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do for pri­vacy,” she smirked, twid­dling a felt-tip between her fin­gers. Then she plopped down and went to work. Writing.

Jenny retreated to the kitchen sink to douse her face in hot water. She took two Excedrin and waited for the pair of words ham­mer­ing her tem­ples to dis­solve: accent pil­low. Of course. It was obvi­ous. In plain sight the whole time. Jenny sat at the kitchen table and tried not to cry.

“I’ll do any­thing you want,” she repeated to her­self, rehears­ing the line she thought was her only way of restor­ing her peace of mind. “Just let me peek, please. One look is all. No mat­ter what you’ve writ­ten, I won’t say a thing. I’ll just read and keep my mouth shut. I just want to know how you can write so freely.”

When she gath­ered the courage to return to the liv­ing room, how­ever, Andi was gone. Jenny heard a toi­let flush. The jour­nal was still on the cof­fee table.

The mem­ory of an old sum­mer camp prank took pos­ses­sion of her. Jenny raced to the junk tub under the kitchen sink and fished out a roll of twine. As she scram­bled to the bed­room the shower kicked on. Andi was singing to her­self: I’m just a girl / Livin’ in cap­tiv­ity. Quietly, Jenny shut the bath­room door. She tied the twine to the knob and then unspooled just enough length to reach the closet knob on the far side of the room. Another granny knot and the two doors were bound together with­out a twitch of slack. Jenny threw the roll to the floor. “Enjoy your pri­vacy,” she thought. She ran back to the cof­fee table.

Her first thought was that Andi must’ve suf­fered from hyper­graphia. There was hardly a blank spot in the jour­nal. She didn’t even write between the lines. Words col­lided with words at every imag­in­able angle—diagonal, side­ways and upside down, per­pen­dic­u­lar. Some were under­lined three or four times; oth­ers were cir­cled, boxed, sur­rounded by bub­bles like a car­toon character’s unspo­ken thoughts. They were writ­ten in every pos­si­ble color, too, from red to pur­ple to green. And there were num­bers, aster­isks, giant excla­ma­tion points as big as light­ning bolts. Andi, Jenny was shocked to dis­cover, was a pro­lific doodler.

The pages were so gar­bled she had trou­ble mak­ing sense of what the words said. She flipped through the pages try­ing to find a com­plete sen­tence. There was only a sin­gle one: “Whenever I feel myself grow­ing vapour­ish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe­strings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out—then all clean and com­fort­able I sit down to write.” The rest was a col­lage of song lyrics, lit­tle pearls of wis­dom and inspi­ra­tional say­ings, even an occa­sional line of Scripture.

Plus lots of notes about writer’s block.

After sev­eral min­utes the shower went silent. Jenny’s eyes were locked on a rec­tan­gle high­lighted in pink: Breakfast: banana and yogurt, 200 cal—Lunch: baked potato, skin w/salt, 278 cal—Dinner: Stoffer’s Spaghetti, 326 cal Total: 804 cal. Tues weight: 126 lbs ↓ 2, only 8 2Go—Yea, me!!

The Waterpik whirred. Andi wasn’t singing now, just hum­ming. Jenny read a list of likes and dis­likes. Hugging scrib­bled in one col­umn, directly across from bad breath in the other. Honesty oppo­site Avoiding prob­lems. Sawyer Brown, yes. / Rascal Flatts, not so much.

As the hair dryer blasted, Jenny stud­ied a week-old To Do List. Number one: Get wine, fol­lowed by a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion: Tonight we get drunky-skunky.

“Hey!”

Andi had dis­cov­ered the door was noosed tight. Short of cut­ting the twine, there’d be no get­ting out of the bath­room. Jenny stared at yet another page: Andi “Cougar” Vanderkamp, it said in the mar­gin. Ha!ha!ha!

“Let me out!”

A whole quar­ter page, noth­ing but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

“You can’t lock me in here! It’s ille­gal! I’ll have you arrested!”

As she went page by page Jenny was every bit as appalled as she’d fig­ured she’d be. Only not for the rea­sons she pre­sumed. She’d expected to open the note­book and dis­cover her girl­friend had noth­ing but inani­ties to offer. Instead she was taken aback by her own self-absorption. Really, what was the dif­fer­ence between Andi’s jour­nal and Rendezvous Beneath the Blue? Both had been writ­ten in pri­vate, with­out any regard for a reader, with­out any inter­est even in reach­ing out to some­one who hadn’t authored their Niagara of words. Jenny thought of all the hours—hell, years—she’d spent at her lap­top churn­ing out sen­tences that had piled into para­graphs and para­graphs into plots. She’d writ­ten them for her­self, for her per­sonal plea­sure. Now she had the nau­seous feel­ing that the smile she’d derived from her daily two-page rou­tine was no less smug and self-satisfied than what she’d seen on Andi’s face when she cocked up her jour­nal to keep Jenny from peer­ing past the cover. You don’t belong here, Andi’s expres­sion had said. You wouldn’t under­stand what I’m say­ing. Was Jenny any less guilty of that solip­sism just because she knew how to use syn­tax and didn’t drop her apostrophes?

She heard the bath­room door rat­tle in its frame. It was cheap wood, and Andi was strong. Any minute now, she’d real­ize she could kick out one of its raised pan­els. With a lit­tle elbow dex­ter­ity she could reach through the hole and undo the granny knot. Jenny went to the dining-room hutch and fished for the thick­est per­ma­nent marker she could find.

Several min­utes later she heard a crash. “You tied me in? You tied me in? Are you plan­ning to dip my hand a pan of warm water while I’m sleep­ing, too? You won’t get the chance—I’m out of here! As of tonight. As of now!”

Andi only stopped yelling when she made it to the liv­ing room. By that time Jenny had marked through nearly ten full pages, every one as solid black as her partner’s sud­den silence.

§

Some months later Andi received a let­ter from the Kennesaw State University Press. Dear Author, it read. In an attempt to man­age our inven­tory in order to con­tinue our pub­lish­ing pro­gram, we have made the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to sell the over­stock of your title “Rhapsody in Blue” to Book Bargains, Inc., of Chicago, Illinois, one of the nation’s lead­ing book remain­der com­pa­nies. Before we final­ize the deal, how­ever, we wish to offer you the author the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase as many copies of your title as you would like at the low price of $4.00 per copy. You are, of course, free to resell any you buy at the list price of $23.95 at any future read­ings or pre­sen­ta­tions. In our expe­ri­ence, this is an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity for authors to recoup their per­sonal invest­ment in their work...

Jenny didn’t take them up on the offer. She wasn’t dis­ap­pointed that Rendezvous Beneath the Blue was going out of print; it didn’t even par­tic­u­larly bother her that her pub­lisher mis­quoted her title—in a small way, it was flat­ter­ing to be mis­taken for Gershwin. She only owned one copy of her book, and she kept it hid­den away, never tak­ing it out. That whole part of her life was in the past. “One and done,” she told her par­ents and their friends when they asked when they might expect a sec­ond book from her.

She still wrote, of course, but only the free­lance web­site stuff, not her own fic­tion. Letting sto­ries go was a bless­ing. When she sat down at the com­puter now she could deal with words pro­fes­sion­ally and impersonally—they were sim­ply tools of a trade from which she could derive a rea­son­able liv­ing. Plots quit plagu­ing her, too. Now she could see a man split a stick of grape bub­blegum with his son at a pack ‘n’ sack with­out her imag­i­na­tion invei­gling itself in their drama; that cou­ple sip­ping their mar­gar­i­tas at the Mexican restau­rant so they didn’t have to speak to each other were on their own. Instead, Jenny found new things to occupy her time. She vol­un­teered as a radio reader for the blind at her local NPR affil­i­ate; she tutored kids at the Presbyterian church that accepted gay mem­bers; once in a while she even went down to the Humane Society to help mop the dog hair from the ken­nels. There were so many new things in the world to expe­ri­ence that she took every oppor­tu­nity that came her way. Routines, she thought, were pris­ons for peo­ple who lacked the resolve to be more spontaneous.

She even had a new girl­friend. Her name was Marci, and about the only thing she had in com­mon with Andi was the long e of that final syl­la­ble. Jenny was so enam­ored with her that she some­times wor­ried she came off too clingy and needy. “Let’s take a vaca­tion,” she found her­self resist­ing the urge to plead. “Let’s go to Bermuda and recharge our batteries.”

One night after mak­ing love on the living-room couch, Jenny repaired to the bath­room to freshen up. Marci was grate­ful for a moment to her­self. She was falling in love with this woman, but sex on a sofa wasn’t for her. It was too cramped, espe­cially with such uncom­fort­able cush­ions. The whole time they’d been caress­ing and kiss­ing Marci had been dis­tracted by some­thing hard and pointy pok­ing her shoul­der. The minute Jenny left she shook the accent pil­lows she’d lain atop. She pulled the zip­per back on a chenille-covered one and peeked inside. What she saw was unusual enough to feed, if only momen­tar­ily, her mis­giv­ings about this relationship.

Because there had to be a story to why some­one would do some­thing as odd as stow a book in a pillow—especially when this some­one was the book’s author. And Marci had been around the block enough to know that no story ever comes with­out complications.