“No.”
“Well, what’s your favorite inking tool? And what kind of ink, and which nibs, and how do you hold and use the nib? Can I get a demo tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever used a toothbrush for texture?”
The problem of walking and talking on a hilly, shifting terrain presented itself.
“Do you like to use a smooth paper or something more grainy?” He thought I knew the secrets and could lay them out for him like coconut macaroons. I told him we’d discuss it in class.
At the beginning of class he’d corrected my pronunciation of his name: “Not Veeshnu. Vishnu.” At the end of class he’d asked if I planned to cover self-publishing and self-promotion, and if I had advice on how to get his self-published work into circulation. I said no, but I only said it because I felt that a person who showed up with a stack of sophisticated mini comics to a class advertised for beginners could go fuck himself.
For the rest of class he’d just sat there, though when I asked if he had an idea to work on, he seemed to nod toward his massive accomplishment, his minis, and said he was deciding between a few possibilities, then asked if I had a pub date for my next comic, to draw a comparison I guess, that I wasn’t producing anything at the moment, either. When you’re the new guy, with a new book out, they treat you one way. When you’re the same guy six years later, it’s something else.
In the main office, a blond kid had me sign a tax form so I could get paid. He told me without smiling that they needed people after lunch for softball. According to the contract, teachers were expected to play.
In order to reach this place I’d crossed several state lines, mounted several bridges, exited highways, and ridden others until they ended. I eventually headed down a coveted stretch of land, surrounded by water on three sides, known by painters for its light, somewhat unto itself most of the year but overrun in July and August, and finally reached my destination.
Everybody knows a spot like this, a fishing village turned tourist trap, with pornographic sunsets and the Sea Breeze Motel. Out of respect for the powerful emotional attachments people form to such places, I’d rather not say exactly where I went, in the event that the detailing of my location causes even more congestion on the streets of that nicely preserved, remote southern New England coastal town.
A Dutch windmill stood at the highest point on campus, a replica or maybe the real thing, brass plates screwed to its siding from an ongoing fundraiser to repair it. On the distant practice fields, yellowing in the heat, the college held a lacrosse camp for high school boys and girls. It sat along some quaint national seashore, amid a high number of colonial-era buildings, among shifting mountains of sand, speckled with dune grass. A frolicsome place, a remote place, a place I’d barely heard of before coming here to teach. We arrived by bus or ferry or train or car, or airplane service direct from Boston. Because of its location, the conference had an easy time attracting artists, oil painters, memoirists, old guys, skitterish teenagers in search of illicit pleasures, driftwood sculptors, printmakers, actors, and playwrights.
They offered a filmmaking workshop. They taught all kinds of crafts. In the afternoon there were shuttles to the beach and a Ping-Pong table in the main building and shows in the gallery and staged readings of plays in the auditorium every night. The writers took classes in red brick buildings with white shutters. Other buildings were crumbling or had been condemned and were barricaded behind tall metal fences with posted signs. The actors camped out in the auditorium. The studios were over the hill, on the far side of the windmill, in what had once been a shipyard. Fine Arts occupied a long, skinny two-story wooden structure that creaked like a sailboat, shingled and faded, and there were cinder-block dorms where they’d put me the first two years, and a wharfy, flaking cottage where they stuck the gang of interns.
This year they’d put me in the Barn; it really was a barn, chopped into apartments for staff during the year, and still partly unfinished. The door to the top-floor apartment wasn’t locked, it didn’t even close, it thunked against the doorframe, swollen from the seacoast weather. It was one big open room with the angled walls of an attic, rusted skylights and a windowed cupola in the peak, and a narrow swath running down the middle of the room where you could stand up straight. There was a kitchen, frying pans whose handles fell off when you touched them, a coffee table and dresser, a white plastic fan, a filthy plaid couch, and two twin beds crammed in along the eaves.
I’d arrived on Friday at five and hung up my shirts, my head at an angle, hitting it once hard enough on a beam that I expected my skull to crack open and my brain to fall out. I stood on the bed and with some effort cranked open the skylight, stuck my head through, and looked out across campus. I heard a seagull bark like a dog. Over the rooftops of the little town I saw blue water, the harbor jetty, and a dinky lighthouse I’d never noticed before. I felt like I’d shimmied up the mast of a ship.
No humidity, no horrifying summer heat, no buses banging down the avenue, no garbage trucks, no marital rancor, just a clean white mattress on a low metal frame, and nobody to wake me up in the middle of the night by punching me in the head, or barfing down my neck, or giving me a heart attack every two hours with his bloodcurdling screams. Nobody else yelling “Daddy!” through the shower door. When I tell her to stop she begins kissing the door, because that’s how much she loves me.
I loved them, too. What would I do without them? All last week, I’d had moments of fear and excitement, waking up with a stomachache, worrying how they’d live without me, while peeling Kaya’s carrots, packing Beanie’s diaper bag, but also feeling less owned by them and maybe cocky and probably gloating, unintentionally ignoring Robin, and she’d noticed it, shaking her head and muttering how I’d already checked out or was too lazy to marinate the fish, rolling her eyes when I forgot to put ice in her water, not wanting it when I came back with the ice tray. Kaya picked up on it too, woke up in the night and needed to pee, wondering if she could have some potatoes, telling me about Louis, the turtle at camp, as we walked back from the bathroom and I tucked her into bed. Maybe it was all in my mind.
We shared our babysitter with the family of a girl named Molly. Robin had picked them up from Molly’s on her way home from work on Friday. I’d called them from the highway in the last hour of my drive. Her mom and stepdad were coming for dinner if they could get it together. I heard Beanie, grunting and sucking, and Kaya going, “Horsey horsey,” which meant Beanie was on Robin’s boob and Kaya was on Robin’s knee.
“Maybe they won’t come,” she’d said.
Her mom was in the late stages of dementia, and her stepfather was attempting to drink himself to death. Her sister lived three thousand miles away and never called. Her brother had faded into myth.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Make your frittata.”
“All right,” she said to Kaya. “Knock it off.”
“Kaya,” I said, knowing she could hear, “get off Mommy so Beanie can eat.”
“She used to make jokes: ‘When I’m drooling in the corner, smother me with a pillow.’”
“She’s not drooling.”
“Yet. But maybe this is when I’m supposed to kill her.”
“Don’t kill her
