In Between Days Page 6

  “Maybe you could elaborate, Richard,” Dr. Michelson says.

  Richard pauses, looks at the men. “I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really see the point of going to grad school to learn how to write. I mean, William Carlos Williams never went to grad school, right? Plenty of poets didn’t.”

  He is making an argument he doesn’t really believe, and perhaps Dr. Michelson senses this because he stops him after a moment and smiles.

  “It’s okay to be nervous, Richard. Anytime you put your work up for evaluation, you run the risk of being rejected, and that’s a difficult thing to stomach for any of us. Believe me, I know.”

  Richard doesn’t say anything to this. He tries to imagine the last time Dr. Michelson got rejected from anything.

  “I was rejected forty-seven times before I ever published a poem,” Elan adds.

  Elan says this smugly, as if his own remarkable success should be evidence enough to Richard that these things are possible. But still, Richard wonders, what type of success has Elan really had?

  Earlier that night he had sat in a small parlor on the Rice campus and listened to Elan as he read his poetry to a small group of Rice students. Afterward, Elan had signed copies of his book and answered questions from the group. The room had been set up for a much larger occasion, complete with a fully catered hors d’oeuvres table, and the whole time Michelson had just stood there, shaking his head, wondering what had happened. I sent out an e-mail, he said. Put up some flyers. Maybe people got lost trying to find this place. Or maybe they got the dates wrong. Strangely, Elan himself hadn’t seemed nearly as distressed as Michelson by the poor turnout. In fact, he said he’d half expected it. And besides, he said, it wasn’t about the quantity of the audience members, but the quality, and he had been very impressed by the overall quality of the Rice students. Richard had wondered, even then, if this was just lip service, a lame excuse for what had happened. He’d driven all the way down from El Paso, after all, just for the reading, and how many books had he sold? Three?

  Afterward, they had driven to the café, and all through dinner Michelson and Elan had gossiped about people they knew, various poets and editors, various luminaries and high officials of the literary world, going on and on about who had slept with who, who had won what, who was publishing where. After a while, Elan had started talking about his own book and how difficult it had been to publish, and how the literary establishment wasn’t accustomed to truly innovative work these days. He spoke as if he truly believed that the depth of his genius wouldn’t be discovered until after his death.

  Richard had only half listened to his story, thinking instead about Beto’s and how much he’d rather be there instead of here. For the past several days he had been practically living at Beto’s. He and about eight or nine other guys who seemed to camp out there in the evenings after work. Discovering Beto’s house had been like discovering a lost oasis in the middle of a drought, a place that he had often dreamed about but never believed existed. A place where young people, just like him, could stay indefinitely. A place where no one asked you who you were or what you wanted to do. A place where there was endless booze and food and drugs. A place where you could lose yourself for hours on end, for days, for weeks, maybe even for years.

  This is where he wishes he were right now, but instead he is sitting here with Michelson and Elan, talking about himself, which is the last thing he wants to be talking about.

  “What I’m saying, Richard, is that the public side of being a poet, putting your work out there for people to read and evaluate, is just as important as the private side.”

  Richard nods.

  “Look at Elan,” Michelson continues. “I’m sure he wasn’t too thrilled by the turnout tonight, but he didn’t let it bother him, did he? No, he stood up there and he read his poems and he sold a few books.”

  Elan looks at Michelson, pulls out a cigarette from his pack. “I didn’t think it was that bad,” he says.

  “Well, come on, Elan. It wasn’t great,” Michelson says and laughs.

  Elan looks away and lights his cigarette.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Richard says finally. “It’s just that I’m not sure that I even want to get anywhere. I mean, I don’t walk around like you guys, thinking I’m a poet. I just like writing poems, you know. And I like going to those workshops you have. That’s all I really want to be doing right now.”

  The truth is, Richard isn’t really sure what he wants to be doing right now. A part of him wants very badly to believe that what Michelson is telling him is true, that he has the ability to be a great poet, that he has the ability to go off to some distant city and study poetry writing among other great poets, but another part of him realizes that on the flip side of that is another very real possibility, the very real possibility of failing miserably and having to come back to Houston with nothing, with a worthless degree and a few thousand dollars of debt. He imagines having to explain this to his father, his friends. He imagines having to start over again at twenty-six or twenty-seven, having to reevaluate his life, having to reassess his situation.

  A moment later, the waiter appears at their table with the bill, and Richard sees his opportunity to leave. As Michelson fumbles with his wallet, he stands up slowly and pushes his chair under the table. “I think I should actually be heading out,” he says finally.

  “You’re kidding,” Michelson says.

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “But it’s still early,” he protests. “We have the whole night ahead of us.”

  “I have to meet my father,” Richard says, which isn’t really true. His father had called him earlier that day to set up a contretemps, a little meeting to discuss his sister, but he’d declined. “It was great to meet you, sir,” he says to Elan, who smiles vaguely, still sulking.

  “I’m going to be calling you next week,” Michelson says. “You’re not going to be getting out of this that easily.”

  “Okay.” Richard smiles. Then he thanks them again and starts across the patio.

  On the way home that night, he thinks about how different his life had been only a year before, how different everything had been. Only a few months shy of his graduation, he had had his whole future ahead of him. A degree from a prestigious school, a boyfriend who loved him, a family that was still functioning, a sister who was happily in college. And now, twelve months later, what did he have? What had happened? Marcus had gone off to Korea to study cooking, claiming it was only temporary but then breaking up with him a few weeks later; Chloe had gotten herself expelled from college; his parents had divorced; and his degree, as it turned out, wasn’t as valuable as he’d thought. Working for six dollars an hour at Café Brasil wasn’t exactly his idea of a promising life.

  So now, armed with a worthless degree in English and no marketable skills to speak of, he wonders what he will do, what possibilities lie before him. According to his father he should be applying to graduate school in something practical, like business or marketing; according to his mother, he should be using his degree to teach English, to embrace what she calls “the noblest profession”; and according to Michelson, he should be pursuing a degree in creative writing, going off to graduate school and beginning what he refers to as his “career as a poet.” And it is this last prospect, the uncertainty of it, but also the strange temptation of it, that most unsettles him.

  Back when he first started writing poetry, his junior year in college, he had thought of it only as an idle hobby, a casual pastime, a temporary distraction from his other courses. But somewhere along the way, something changed. He’d become drawn into it, seduced by the idea of writing poems that other people might want to read, entranced by the daily pleasure of putting words together with other words. It had become the part of his day he most looked forward to, the escape he most cherished. Still, what he couldn’t explain to Michelson or to Brandon or even to his sister was that the thought of leaving Houston to actually pursue a career in it wa
s utterly terrifying to him. Not because he feared rejection, not because he didn’t think he could handle the graduate-level coursework of an MFA program, but because he knew that once he left, once he defined himself as a poet, once he made that commitment, he’d never again be able to pretend he didn’t care. He’d have to acknowledge that on some level this was who he was. He’d have to acknowledge to the world, and to himself, that he had something to say, and that he had something to say that he wanted other people to hear. For so long now, not caring had been his mantra. It had been the thing that defined him, the thing that had allowed him to work at Café Brasil for minimum wage, to date boys he knew he’d never love, to waste away his evenings at places like Beto’s house. In so many ways, it would be so much easier to just continue the life he’d been living, to lose himself each night in a haze of alcohol and drugs, to spend his evenings passed out on other people’s lawns, to continue writing poetry only as a casual hobby, an idle distraction, to tell people he was Richard Harding, a recent Rice graduate with no job prospects and no cares. He couldn’t live this way forever, of course, but he could live this way for a while, at least for the next few years, and in the meantime, he could enjoy the comfort of not caring, the anesthetizing freedom that came along with a life defined by excess.

  With this in mind, he turns the corner away from his apartment, away from the apartment where right now his roommate Clayton is waiting for him to return his car, and heads north toward River Oaks, toward Beto’s house, where he is sure, even now, the party is starting.

  4

  MURDER. His daughter had actually used that word. She had actually mentioned that as a possibility. If the boy they had hurt didn’t come through, if he ended up dying, this boy she had gotten involved with could be tried for murder, and she for conspiracy, for conspiracy after the fact, simply for knowing him, simply for being his girlfriend and for not reporting what she knew. It was a remote possibility, of course, highly unlikely, but still, just the idea of his daughter even mentioning this word to him, of her using it in a sentence involving her future, it was almost too much to bear.

  Since Tuesday, when they’d met, he had been going over it in his mind, trying to figure out the best possible scenario, the best possible plan. He had talked it over with his lawyer, Albert Dunn, and Albert had told him that the best thing to do right now was to lay low and wait it out, to wait and see what happened. In all probability, he said, they were simply trying to scare her, trying to put her on edge, threatening her with prosecution as a way of getting her to testify against her boyfriend. To do anything too aggressive at this point, Albert thought, would only arouse suspicion. After all, Chloe hadn’t even been questioned yet. Not officially. She had been asked a few questions about her boyfriend, about his friend, and about their involvement, but not about her own. As far as they knew, she had been home in her dorm room studying, which is exactly where Chloe said she was. But still, Elson had known when he’d talked to his daughter earlier that week that she’d been lying, or at least not telling the whole truth, that she was covering something up. She had that look in her eye that she used to get back in high school whenever she’d come home from a party with the smell of alcohol on her breath, claiming to have been at the mall. Back then, he used to laugh it off, smile or shake his head, but this was a different type of situation altogether. There were dire consequences here, dire stakes.

  When he’d talked to Cadence about it earlier that week, she’d told him to keep his nose out of it, that there was a reason Chloe had waited so long to tell him. “She’s afraid you’ll muck it up,” she’d said, “start making phone calls and inquiries like you usually do.”

  “Well, aren’t you even worried?” Elson had asked.

  “Of course, I’m worried. Do you think there’s a minute that goes by when I’m not thinking about this?”

  “I don’t know,” Elson said. “It’s hard to say.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said. It’s hard to tell if you’re worried or not.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “I’m getting off the phone,” she’d said and hung up.

  He’d regretted that conversation, just as he’d regretted almost every conversation he’d had with Cadence in the past year. He’d wanted to tell her, first and foremost, that he was happy she’d stopped by the hospital to see him, that Lorna had told him that she’d stopped by, and that it had meant a lot to him that she’d done this. But, as usual, there seemed to be an enormous gap between what he wanted to say to Cadence and what he actually said.

  And now, as he sits at the Ginger Man Pub, waiting for his friend Dave Millhauser to return from the john, he considers the extent to which his own family has cut him off. Even his eldest child, Richard, had refused to meet with him earlier that day when he’d called him up to set up a meeting. What had he done, he wonders, what had he done to warrant this type of mistreatment, this type of contempt?

  All around him students from the university are sitting at tables, drinking beer and laughing. The pub itself is warmly lit, welcoming, a place where he has been coming now for almost a year, a place where he and Dave used to come to eat after their weekly tennis matches, but where they now just come to drink. Ever since Dave was denied tenure at Rice, he has lost his privileges at the tennis courts, but he still likes to come here to the Ginger Man to drink, still likes to hang out around the campus, still likes to believe, in his weaker moments, that he’s still a professor.

  Earlier that night, Elson had helped Dave move the last of the boxes from his old house into his new apartment, the new apartment that he and his wife, Cheryl, had been living in since they’d moved out of their house. A small dingy duplex on the west side of Houston. Afterward, on the way out to the Ginger Man, Dave had confessed to him that things were a little tight right now, that ever since he’d been denied tenure at Rice, they’d been having a little trouble financially. As soon as he finished his book, of course, things would change, things would get better, but for now, he said, they’d just have to endure. Endure? Elson wondered who else he knew who was still enduring at forty-six. And what about that book of his? Dave had been working on that book for more years than Elson could count, and yet he seemed no closer to finishing it now than he’d ever been. According to Dave, this had been the main reason he’d been denied tenure at Rice, but Elson knew there were other factors: his poor teaching record for one, his run-ins with the chair, his propensity to miss meetings and cancel class. These were all things that Dave had alluded to at one time or another, and yet Elson couldn’t help wondering whether there was also something else, something Dave hadn’t told him.

  As he leans back in his seat at the bar, he hears a group of students behind him shouting something, chanting. There’s a loud grunt, and then a few of them stand up and raise their glasses above their heads in a toast. Elson has to smile, a wave of nostalgia filling him up. He turns back to the bartender to order another beer, and just then, just as he’s reaching into his wallet, he feels a heavy hand on his shoulder and turns to see Dave sliding onto the bar stool beside him.

  “I thought of a way I could help,” Dave says, bellying up to the bar. “Can’t make any promises, of course, but I just remembered that I know a guy up there at Stratham, a professor in the art history department. Very nice guy. Did my master’s with him up at Cornell. Haven’t talked to him in years, of course, but I could make a couple inquiries if you’d like. Name’s Jeff O’Connor.”

  Elson considers this. Ever since they arrived at the Ginger Man, he has been talking to Dave about Chloe, about her case, breaking his one promise to her and Cadence.

  “I don’t know,” Elson says finally. “I don’t really see what he could do.”

  Dave shrugs. “Me neither. Maybe nothing. Just thought he might be able to poke around a little. You know, make some inquiries. See if he can get an inside perspective on things.”

  Elson lights a ci
garette and nods. “That could be good,” he says, smiling. “Yeah, actually, that could be very good.”

  “Look,” Dave says. “When I was at Hastings—that school I taught at straight out of grad school—they had a similar thing happen. Kid got caught with firearms in his dorm room. A whole bunch of antique rifles and stuff. Said he was a collector, but the administration didn’t buy it. They expelled him a few weeks later, and then a few weeks after that he was being brought up on criminal charges.”

  “Chloe didn’t have firearms,” Elson says.

  “I’m not saying she did.”

  “She might not have even been involved. In fact, I don’t think she was.”

  “I know. I’m just saying you can never be too cautious about these types of things. They can escalate. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Elson nods again. “My lawyer says we should take it easy, lay low, hope it all blows over.”

  “Yeah,” Dave says. “Well, that’s another way to approach it, I guess. I’m just saying that if it was my daughter I’d want to know everything I could, you know?”

  Elson sips his beer, and then draws on his cigarette. He imagines what Cadence would say if she were here, sitting beside him, listening to him take advice from a man she’d always despised. Finally, he turns back to Dave. “All right,” he says, quietly. “Why don’t you just go ahead and call up your friend then.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Just don’t go saying anything about this to anyone else, all right?”