What’s also noticeably different about the circle this time round is that each of us have come armed: a plastic shopping bag, a binder, a sealed envelope, two file folders, a leather-bound journal, and a single paper clip used to contain our first written offerings. Our work trembles on our laps like nervous cats.
Conrad White welcomes us, reminds us of the way the circle will work. As his accentless voice goes on, I try to match the elderly man speaking to us with the literary bad boy of forty years ago. If it was anger that motivated his exile, I can’t detect any of it in his face today. Instead, there’s only a shopworn sadness, which may be what anger becomes eventually, if it shows itself early enough.
Tonight’s game plan calls for each of us to read what we’ve brought with us aloud for no more than fifteen minutes, then the other members will have a chance to comment for another fifteen. Interruption of responses is permitted, but not of the readers themselves. Our minds should be open as wide as possible when listening to others, so that their words are free from comparison to anything that has come before.
"You are the children in the Garden,” Conrad White tells us. "Innocent of experience or history or shame. There is only the story you bring. And we shall hear it as though it is the first ever told."
With that, we’re off.
The first readers are mostly reassuring. With each new voice trying their words out for size, the insecurities I have about my own tortured scribbles are relieved, albeit only slightly. By the halfway point (when Conrad White calls a smoke break) I am emboldened by the confirmation that there are no undiscovered Nabokovs, Fitzgeralds or Munros—nor a Le Carré or Rowling or King—among us. And there are few surprises, in terms of subject matter. Petra has a bit of As the World Turns meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? husband-and-wife dialogue that captures certain verbal cruelties in such detail I assume they are taken straight from a loop of memory. Ivan, the subway driver, tells a tale of a man who awakens to find he’s been transformed into a rat, and must find a way into the sewers beneath the city that he intuitively knows is his new home of pestilence and filth. (When, after his reading, I compliment him on his re-working of Kafka, Ivan looks at me quizzically and says, "I’m sorry. Kafka?"). Though Len feels that only the opening paragraph of a proposed "epic horror trilogy” is ready for presentation, it nevertheless goes on forever, a description of night that is a long walk through the thesaurus entry for "dark". And Evelyn promisingly starts her story with a female grad student being screwed by her thesis advisor on the floor of his office while she daydreams about her father teaching her how to skip stones on the lake at the family cottage.
Over the smoke break, those not slipping on their coats get up to stretch. We shuffle around the room without looking at each other or being the first to start up a conversation. All of us steal glances, however. And note where William stands at all times, so we know what corner to avoid.
It’s over these awkward minutes of feeling others’ eyes on me that I ask myself: How does the rest of the circle see me? Most favourably, how I see myself on the best of days, I suppose: an endearingly rumpled Preppie that Time Forgot. Most unfavourably, how I see myself on the worst of days: a dandruffy channel flipper fast approaching the point of no return. Beyond debate are the wide shoulders that lend the illusion of one-time athleticism. And good teeth. A set of ivory chompers that always impress when encountered in Say Cheese! snaps.
Once the smokers return, we get started on the readers who remain.
And this is where things get a little foggy.
I must have read the page I brought with me, as I remember bits of what the other members said afterwards. (Evelyn found the first-person mode "captures your character’s sense of being trapped in himself", and Petra could detect a "hidden suffering"). William requested a pass on reading his own work, or I think he did, as I only recall the sound of his voice and not its words. A low grinding, like air forced through wet sand.
But all I really preserve from the second half of the meeting is Angela.
My first thought, as she opens the cracked leather journal on her knees and lifts it slowly, even reluctantly to her eyes, is that she appears younger than I’d guessed the week before. What I took to be the indistinct features of an adult may instead be the unblemished, baby fat smoothness of a girl coming out of her teens.
And yet, even as she reads, this impression of girlish youth turns into something else. Her face is difficult to describe, to remember, to see, because it’s not a face at all. It is a mask. One that never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.
These considerations of Angela’s appearance come and go within seconds. Soon, all of my attention is on what she reads. We listen without shifting in our seats, without crossing or uncrossing our legs. Even our breathing is calmed to the smallest sips.
It’s not the virtuosity of her writing that dazzles us, as her style is simple as a child’s. Indeed, the overall effect is that of a strange sort of fairy tale. One that lulls for a time, then breaks its spell with the suggestion of an awaiting threat. It is the voice of youth taking its final turn into the world of adult corruption, of foul, grown-up desire.
I have been playing with the dictaphone in my pocket this meeting as I had at the last, clicking the Record button on and off. Unthinkingly, a nervous tic. Now I press it down and leave it running.
Once she begins her reading I have no other thoughts except for one: I will not attempt to write again. There will be what I do for the newspaper, of course. And I can always force out a page here and there, whatever it takes to bluff my way through the next four sessions. But Angela’s story blots out whatever creative light that might have shown itself from within.
It’s not envy that makes me so sure of this. It’s not the poor sport’s refusal to play if he can’t win. I know I won’t try to write for the circle again because until Angela’s journal comes to its end, I am only a reader.
After the meeting, I have a drink with Len at The Fukhouse. That is, I’m the first to nip into the bar below Conrad White’s apartment, and Len follows me a moment later. He takes the stool two over from mine, as if we are going to entertain the pretence of not knowing who the other is. A couple minutes after our facially tattooed bartender delivers our drinks—beer for me, orange juice for Len—the space between us becomes too ridiculous to maintain.
"You enjoying the class so far?” I ask.
"Oh yeah. I think this might turn out to be the best."
"You’ve done a writing workshop before?"
"Plenty. Like, a lot."
"You’re an old pro then."
"Never had anything published, though. Not like you."
This takes me by surprise. It does every time someone recognizes me, before I remember that my Prime Time Picks of the Week column on Fridays has a tiny picture of me next to the by-line. A pixillated smirk.
"There’s published, and then there’s published," I say.
I’m thinking that’s about it. Politeness has been maintained, my beer almost guzzled. I’m about to throw my coat on and steel myself for the cold walk home when Len ventures a question of his own.
"That guy’s pretty weird, don’t you think?"
He could be speaking of Conrad White, or Ivan, or the bartender with a lizard inked into his cheek, or the leader of the free world warning of nerve gas delivered in briefcases on the TV over the bar, but he isn’t.
"William’s quite a character, alright."
"I bet he’s done time. Prison, I mean."
"Looks like the sort."
"He scares me a bit.” Len shifts his gaze from his orange juice to me. "What about you?"
"Me?"