“Teddy was terrific in that play.” They were referring, of course, to Puss in Boots the musical, put on by the University of Michigan. The girl had bright pink hair and sparkly blue fingernails. The guy wore a clean white T-shirt and a Palestinian scarf. There were lines on either side of the table and conversations going on all around me. Earlier this morning, someone explained, a German television crew had arrived to do a piece on Tom McLaughlin, as part of a series on American writers.
“Dearest friend of my life,” said a man with salt-and-pepper hair. A woman handed him a coffee. Something dreaded and illicit passed between them. Down the line a conversation turned to last night’s dinner, which had been vegetarian, raw and inedible. People openly complained. Last year’s breakfast of bagels and cream cheese had been replaced by cooked grains and bricks of rock-hard Irish soda bread, which we sawed at as if it were a tree limb with a knife that wasn’t up to the task. And there’d been a fight about the air-conditioning in the dorm between a woman in a Pucci dress and her roommate, who insisted on sleeping in flannel, while a party had raged outside someone else’s door at two A.M. A woman in a pretty turquoise blouse told a skinny guy with tattoos, “It’s a new poem, dedicated to my future ex-husband’s fiancée. I call it ‘Stay the Fuck Away from My Kids, You Whore.’?” There was some kind of heated, inordinate bonding that happened among grown-ups, forced out of their decorous privacy into visceral closeness, that had the feeling of an open-air loony bin.
I carried my toast and coffee and a single hard-boiled egg, rolling loosely in a white plastic bowl, past Professor Michnick, seated with Alicia H. R. and my newfound, foot-tall, walleyed tongue-wagging interplanetary soul mate; past Carl, who gave me a listless wave, in the wrinkled yellow linen shirt he’d worn to last night’s fundraiser and appeared to have slept in; past a table of black actors, black poets and writers. They tended to congregate at meals, triggering my jealousy, curiosity, and involuntary anxiety. Herschel Davies, the playwright, was a buddy of mine. He taught at SMU. His play about coming of age in Cleveland in the sixties was very good; it had been performed here and later ran on Broadway. He’d nicknamed me “the hamster,” in recognition of my scrappy defense in our Ping-Pong matches. Their table was full.
I finally arrived without incident at a nearly empty table. Seated alone there was Angel Solito, which I didn’t notice until I’d already put down my plate. He glanced up, frowning, and didn’t appear to recognize me, but then did, but didn’t look any happier, reaching for his books and papers and pulling them to him as I sat, trying to think of something to say.
“Doing okay?”
“Yup.” It was like some idiotic cartoonist conspiracy.
“Ready for class?”
“We’re learning how to tell a story.” His head drooped, from annoyance or exhaustion, or some attempt to commiserate. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say about teaching, even though I’d planned my lecture and class was starting in five minutes. “Can’t teach the story,” he said. “That’s in you. That has to come out.” He had pages of notes and lesson plans, textbooks and anthologies. We agreed on the impossibility of teaching, can’t teach talent, all the old clichés. I needed to eat. I took a sip of scalding coffee and started to choke. Winston Doyoyo, the old lion, arose from the table of black people, circled us, and landed at Solito’s shoulder, placed a hand on his neck and said something as Solito nodded politely. Doyoyo ducked stiffly out of the tent. Solito went back to his notes.
“Theory won’t do a fucking thing for you,” he said.
“Nope.”
“Still, Aristotle knew what a story was.” He mentioned Shakespeare. I needed ketchup. Freytag had mapped it out, but apparently that was just an exhaustive examination of the mechanics of Greek drama. Then he mentioned the Aristotelian three-act structure of Star Wars, then Gilgamesh. “Although technically that’s Eastern.”
“Wait, what’s Eastern?” I couldn’t function in this dialectic.
“Gilgamesh.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday how much I like your stuff.” His eyes were steady. I figured my praise was suspect. “I meant to tell you.” His teeth went in different directions. He needed orthodontia. I asked where he’d been before this.
“Seattle and Vancouver.”
“You’re staying in the dorms here on campus?”
He nodded. I asked where. Stewart, the moldy, stinko dorm by the water. Small hands, narrow yellow wrists, darker skin at the knuckles, narrow face, shining hair, fine features. I felt everything about him, all at once. We discussed the smelly carpets, ugly bunk beds made of logs painted brown. At age four, he was pulled off a bus and dumped in a government facility in Chiapas. Smugglers ditched toddlers at the first sign of trouble. He didn’t know his full name. At age eight, his little legs were still too short to allow him to hop the train. Other kids fell off and were cut in half. He’d been born into a brutal world, and had made a journey like the ocean crossing my orphaned grandfather had made, all alone, back in 1911—if my grandfather had been forced to swim the Atlantic. I wished him luck on the book tour in Europe. He stared at me, twisting his brow.
“I know your work,” he said, looking away, then straightening his notes, “Suspicious Package Number 4 came out while I was in grad school.” He looked up. “And Number 5. Almost everyone in my program made comics on the side. Not everyone was as dedicated as I was, but we were all tuned in.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of the indie cartoonists who’d broken through, the more successful ones making long, serious comics, no one was more talked about than you.”
I thanked him. For a second I thought he’d said something nice. Then I realized he hadn’t. Something flashed across his face that I chose to ignore. He didn’t say anything else. Had he actually insulted me? Or had he only meant to say that my work provoked strong reactions? I felt a sudden pride of my own, a compact thing with jagged stuff inside it. The jagged stuff started hacking its way out. I picked off some eggshell, putting it in the bowl, ignoring his insult, letting him have his little dig.
“Well,” I said. “I hope you enjoy your success. I hope it never ends.” He nodded, waiting for more. “I hope it brings attention to the issue of immigration,” I said. “Children crossing borders, whatever. It’s important.” I needed salt.
“It’s the story of my life,” he said. “And that’s what people are expecting from me. But is that what I expect from myself?”
“Is it?” Who gives a crap.
“I’m sick of it.”
I banged my toast on the table and stuck it in the coffee.
“I have to tell you,” he said. “When that story came out in the Times.”