You sighed. “What about you, Elizabeth?” You relaxed into the velvet armchair, the padded arms shiny with wear and the white stuffing coming out of the ends, like a man in a smoking jacket who has tucked his hands inside his shirt cuffs for a joke.
“I . . .” she started, clearly unsure and trying to feel around for the answer you wanted. “I, I think, with the spiders, Jackson’s telling us that Constance covered up for Merricat . . .” Elizabeth paused, waiting for an indication that she was on the right track. “Because, you know at the tea party, when what’s his name, the uncle, says that Constance cleaned out the sugar bowl, because, you know, that’s where the arsenic was, but the uncle, whatever he’s called, said there was a spider in it.” You stretched out your legs and let her talk until she wound down and came to a stop. Even I was embarrassed for her.
“So?” you said, drawing out the word. We were silent. “How do you interpret that?” You plonked your cup on a sheaf of papers beside you on the desk. The top page was upside down from where I sat, and I couldn’t read it. “Come on, people.” Despairing of us, you ran your hands through your hair—brown but receding—leaving a promontory of curl to flop across your forehead.
“Guy,” you said. “Help your friends out.” I was never sure why you had included Guy in our group of four. I thought he was the weakest writer, someone who liked to string long words together for the sake of it. I’d been sleeping with Guy on and off for the previous year. Off more than on, because although the sex was good, my pale body disturbed him. One time he’d told me it was like “doing it” with a weird deep-sea creature, and also he talked too much and I was tired of listening.
While Guy gave his bombastic speech about what he thought of Jackson’s intentions, I reduced the volume and tried to think of something to say when it came to my turn. Something that would make you sit up in your overstuffed chair and nod in agreement, something you hadn’t even thought of yourself. I had no ideas. Not even a theory we could argue. Really, nothing. When Guy had finished talking, and while my heart was leaping in my throat at the horror of my empty mind, you stretched your arms up behind your head and yawned. It was a yawn so loud and so lengthy that we looked away. Once your mouth finally closed, you leaned forwards and rubbed your eyes with the heels of your hands. When you took them away, the whites had a pinkish tint. I don’t know how much you’d drunk the night before, but the fumes were radiating off you.
I waited with nervous anticipation for you to ask my opinion. You didn’t even turn toward me.
“Look,” you said. “Some of you, especially those tortured souls who like to think they’re poets”—here you stared at Guy, who frowned back at you—“might fantasise about the idea of scribbling away in your garret, unappreciated by the literary world until you’re in your grave. But there really is no fucking point. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line. Have none of you read Barthes or Rosenblatt?” (We scribbled down the names.) “A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader. What do you think happens in the gaps—the unsaid things, everything you don’t write? The reader fills them from their own imagination. But does each reader fill them how you want, or in the same way? Of course not. I asked you what effect those lines have, and you’ve all described what you think Jackson intended, what the lines do, or at least what you believe they do. In some cases you’ve most certainly got even that wrong.” You glanced again at Guy. “But none of you told me what effect they have on you. What they made you, the reader, imagine in here.” You thumped your chest. “You’ve missed the very essence of literature and reading. Who gives a fuck about Jackson and her intentions? She’s dead, literally and metaphorically. This book”—you snatched Elizabeth’s copy from her lap and flapped it in the air—“and all books are created by the reader. And if you haven’t realised that and what it means to your own work, you know shit-all about writing and you’re never going to, so you might as well stop now.”
It was as if I were in my father’s flat again, cowering at one of his rants about his ex-wife, my mother. Guilty by association. You leaned back once more, stretched your legs, and, arching your spine, put your hands behind your head and closed your eyes as if you were reclining in a deck chair on a Sunday afternoon. I watched in fascination as your cardigan rose above the waistband of your jeans and a strip of flat stomach appeared; you weren’t wearing anything underneath, and when I looked at your feet I saw you didn’t have any socks on either. You must have slept on the sofa, had likely still been asleep when Brian, always the first to arrive, had knocked on your office door at two in the afternoon.
“Yep,” you said with your eyes still closed. “You can stop now. Go on, get out.”