“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
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.
“So I’ll be taking it back,” the blond guy said, doing just that. The two faculty members watched in silence: again, that back turned, middling height, middling blond, broad shouldered, stalking away, bottle opener brandished in triumph.
“Well, there’s a charmer.” Alice spoke first.
The guy stalked off to one of the other tables, which was packed to capacity, people sidesaddle at the ends of the benches and seated in dragged-over lawn chairs. The very first night of the session and this group of brand-new students had clearly established itself as an alpha-clique, and judging from the hero’s welcome the blond guy with the bottle opener was receiving from his table-mates, their censorious friend was its obvious epicenter.
“Hope he doesn’t turn out to be a poet,” Alice said with a sigh.
Not much chance of that, Jake thought. Everything about the guy screamed FICTION WRITER, though the species itself broke down more or less evenly into the subcategories:
1. Great American Novelist
2.
Or that highly rare hybrid …
3.
The triumphant savior of the abducted bottle opener might want to be Jonathan Franzen, in other words, or he might want to be James Patterson, but from a practical standpoint it made no difference. Ripley did not divide the literary pretentious from the journeyman storyteller, which meant that one way or another this legend in his own mind was very likely going to walk into Jake’s own seminar the following morning. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
