He didn’t, actually, but he wished he wished he read more poetry, which ought to count for something.
“I wish I could write a novel.”
“Well, maybe you can.”
She shook her head. She seemed … it was ridiculous, but was this wan poet actually flirting with him? What on earth for?
“I wouldn’t know how. I mean, I love reading novels, but I’m exhausted just writing a line. I can’t imagine, pages and pages of writing, not to mention characters that have to feel real and a story that needs to surprise you. It’s absurd, that people can actually do that. And more than once! I mean, you wrote a second one, didn’t you?”
And a third and a fourth, he thought. A fifth if you counted the one currently on his laptop, which he’d been too disheartened to even look at for nearly a year. He nodded.
“Well, when I got this job you were the only person on faculty I knew. I mean, whose work I knew. I figured it was probably okay if you were here.”
Jake took a careful bite of his cornbread: predictably dry. He hadn’t encountered this degree of writerly approbation for a couple of years, and it was incredible how quickly all of the narcotically warm feelings came rushing back. This was what it was to be admired, and thoughtfully admired at that, by someone who knew exactly how hard it was to write a good and transcendent sentence of prose! He had once thought his life would be crowded with encounters just like this, not just with fellow writers and devoted readers (of his ever-growing, ever-deepening oeuvre) but with students (perhaps, ultimately, at much better programs) thrilled to have been assigned Jacob Finch Bonner, the rising young novelist, as their supervising writer/instructor. The kind of teacher you could grab a beer with after the workshop ended!
Not that Jake had ever grabbed a beer with one of his students.
“Well, that’s kind of you to say,” he told Alice with studied modesty.
“I’m starting as an adjunct at Hopkins this fall, but I’ve never taught. I might be in pretty far over my head.”
He looked at her, his reserve of goodwill, already small, now swiftly draining away. Adjunct at Johns Hopkins was nothing to sneeze at. It probably meant a fellowship for which she’d had to beat a few hundred other poets. The university press publication was likely also the result of a prize, it occurred to him now, and just about everyone coming out of an MFA program with a manuscript went in for every one of those. This girl, Alice, was quite possibly some version of a big deal, or at least what passed for a big deal in the poetry world. The thought of that deflated him utterly.
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said. “When in doubt just encourage them. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.” He went for a grin. It felt horribly awkward.
Alice, after a moment, produced her own grin, and looked just as uncomfortable as he was.
“Hey, you using that?” said a voice.
Jake looked up. He might not have recognized the face—long and narrow, blond hair flopping forward into hooded eyes—but he recognized that arm. He followed it to its point of termination: a rather sharp fingernail on an extended index finger. There was a bottle opener on the picnic table’s red check plastic table covering.
“What?” said Jake. “Oh, no.”
“Because people are looking for it. It’s supposed to be over by the beers.”
The accusation was plain: Jake and Alice, two obviously unimportant people, had deprived this throbbing talent at the heart of the Ripley Symposia, and his friends, of access to the crucial bottle-opening tool, which in turn deprived these obviously talented students access to their beverage of choice.
Neither Alice nor Jake responded.