“Oh?”
“I go with Wade. Did you meet him? We’ve been going out about a year.”
“A marriage,” Jimmy said.
“How’s that?”
“Nothing. I’m teasing, but I’m not very good at it.”
She pointed at his notebook. “Are you writing? What are you writing?”
“I’m just paddling around, taking notes. Do you keep a journal?”
She looked at him seriously, and he saw that this was what she’d come to talk about. “I do. It’s just something I do. I’m not sure of it. What should it be?”
“What is it?”
She shook her head and smiled. “It’s everything, a mess. It’s what I see and what I do and sometimes what I feel.”
“And sometimes all three.”
“Yes.”
“Like three guys trying to get through a door?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Except five and in a rush.” She met his smile and asked, “What do I do about that?”
“Take your time. Don’t push. Let each idea enter the room and find a chair. Give them half a page and then a page. Can you do it? Am I making sense? We’re really talking here.”
“I know what you mean, and I can do it sometimes. But what I get is nothing like what you write.” She lifted one of his novels in both of her hands. “It’s not like this. It’s not clear like this.”
“You read the books?”
“I loved these books. It’s like something I’ve never read before.” She sat back, embarrassed to have spoken so freely, and then she looked up again. “I never read a book about Oakpine before. I knew a lot of the places. The mountain, the reservoir, the town. It hasn’t changed very much.”
“Right, sometimes a book about a familiar place can seem—”
“No.” She stopped him. “I know what you’re going to say. I don’t mean that. It’s not the town. Because I feel the same way about this.” She held up the second book. “And this.” She held up the third. “And I’ve never been to New York. I don’t know what it is. That’s why I’ve come over. I didn’t tell Larry or Wade or anyone, but I wanted to talk to you.” She had come forward in her chair, her face a serious thing. Jimmy felt as awake as he had since returning. “How do you know what I’m feeling?” she said. “How’d you write it?”
He’d had a thousand discussions about writing with people, at conferences and on the radio, some on television, so many in person after dinner somewhere with Daniel, and Jimmy had been appreciated, celebrated at times for his work, but he’d never had someone ask him this way about what he’d done. He’d had all the workaday questions, and the social impact questions, and the courage questions and the risk questions and the syntactical questions, and he’d worked at answering them all with true honesty, but that wasn’t this. He’d never really taught, though he had spoken at seminars on fiction and on reviewing, and there he’d met students who were always earnest and smart, but their questions were practical in the main, not really artistic, not really personal. Now he felt relocated, found, and he saw Wendy’s questions as real things, his heart suddenly thudding in his wrists as he took the questions on the way you might lift a load, a book, or a box of personal effects. The sunlight rocketing around the room pleased him, and he looked at this young woman, her hair edged with the white light and measured his words. His vision was going, and he knew he would be sleeping in minutes.