a contagious disease. She starts to warm to her subject, gesturing emotively and making expressive faces, only vaguely aware of the women in front of her, the voices around her, the waiters sidling past.
No one ever looks at the waiters at this kind of thing, but Beth doesn’t know that and while she talks her eyes move from Taffeta and Mo Linger to the young man standing behind them, who is proffering a silver tray, but looking at her.
Beth stops mid-word, staring back at him as if he’s holding not a platter of miniature Thai spring rolls, but a very large and fiery sword.
Taffeta clears her throat. “Gabriela? Gabriela? You were saying?”
“That’s him!” cries Beth, pointing over Taffeta’s shoulder. “Ms Mackenzie, that’s him!”
The polite smile vanishes from Taffeta’s face. “Excuse me?”
The others look to where Beth is pointing, but now there is no one there, just a white-coated back gliding effortlessly through the clusters of guests.
“It’s him!” Beth points towards the retreating waiter. “It’s the man who’s been following me!”
“Gabriela.” Taffeta’s voice is low but urgent. It sounds as if her teeth have been cemented together. “Gabriela, not now.”
“But it is! It’s him! I’ll prove it!”
It is Beth’s intention to charge after the waiter; to stop and confront him; to make him face her once and for all. The only thing wrong with this plan is that she’s forgotten that one of the reasons she’s been propped against a wall all evening is because she is balanced on her shoes like a book on a bottle.
There have been times in Professor Gryck’s life, as there are in the lives of all of us, when she has said things she didn’t mean and made threats she never intended to keep, just because she was angry or wanted to seem as if she was in control. But this is not one of those times. This afternoon, Professor Gryck is as good as her word and sticks as close to Gabriela as a pair of tights.
“No, no, Ms Beeby!” she calls as Gabriela prepares to take the empty seat next to Delila on the bus. “You’ll be sitting up front with me.”
Oh, goody.
And so, as the shadows slowly lengthen over the City of Angels, the Tomorrow’s Writers Today group makes its way to yet another repository of human culture. The others can all surreptitiously send texts or emails or play games while Professor Gryck reads from her guidebook, but Gabriela – wedged in between the shatterproof glass of the window and the sturdy, unyielding form of Cybelline Gryck – has no choice but to keep her eyes open and focused on the good professor and not on the more interesting sight of the city outside the bus. But though she looks as if she’s paying attention, her mind wanders off on its own.
As the bus creeps through the traffic-choked streets, Gabriela finds herself thinking not about herself, for a change, but about Beth. Now that she has some small idea of what it’s like to be Beth, Gabriela has stopped thinking of her as some alien life form and started thinking of her as a real person. Like the girl in the painting. Like whoever wore the jewellery or ate from the clay bowls that they saw. Like Gabriela herself. Someone with longings and fears. Someone with dreams. That Beth’s longings, fears and dreams are very different to Gabriela’s doesn’t seem to matter any more. And if Gabriela often feels lonely, then how lonely must Beth feel? Competing with girls like Aricely, Esmeralda and Jayne; bossed around by people like Professor Gryck; fussed over and controlled by her mother; terrorized by even the air she breathes. Beth is no match for any of them. And at that thought, Gabriela sits up a little straighter, and the determined look she had when she successfully put in her first zipper comes into her eyes. So far today she’s done no more than complain, sulk, systematically destroy everything Beth’s worked so hard for and come close to getting arrested. What she needs now is to repair some of the damage she’s done. And not cause any more. Which can’t be as difficult as it sounds. All she has to do is not do anything and say even less. The day is half over. How can she fail?
Because they lost so much time what with “one thing and another”, as Professor Gryck put it (clearly meaning Beth), they have to adjust their itinerary and spend the afternoon in the contemporary art museum, which is much nearer the restaurant and the theatre than the museum Professor Gryck originally chose. Gabriela would have preferred an afternoon of Etruscan relics – anything so long as you can tell what it is – but she walks demurely beside Professor Gryck, keeping her face expressionless and her mouth shut tight, without so much as a sigh. Even when Jayne becomes almost lyrical over a model house made entirely from garbage, Gabriela merely smiles vaguely and says nothing. When Aricely decides she likes the hillock of dolls’ heads even more than the pickled pig they’d seen in the morning, Gabriela simply nods as though carefully weighing the merits of each. And when Esmeralda talks for five minutes and forty-five seconds about how the black canvas with the purple stripe down one side is a moving meditation on the relationship between hope and fear, Gabriela refuses to catch Delila’s eye.
None of this brings an actual smile to Professor Gryck’s face, but at least she isn’t shouting. So far, so good.
But not that far, and not for long, as things turn out.
For, as both Otto and Remedios would be quick to point out, good intentions pave the road to Hell, and despite Gabriela’s efforts to have as low a profile as a hem stitch so that all her mistakes can be forgotten and forgiven, things take a turn for the worse at dinner. The entire group sits at a long line of tables in the middle of the restaurant, Gabriela and Delila on either side of Professor Gryck. The conversation is all about writing and who the greatest American writers of the last hundred-and-fifty years are. Gabriela keeps her eyes on her plate and her expression blank. If she could, she wouldn’t listen, but because this is less a discussion than a duel of strongly held opinions, it is impossible to turn it into background noise. Munchmunchmunchmunch…
And then, just when the dinner plates have been cleared and the ordeal is almost over, Professor Gryck turns to her and says, in the tone of someone daring you to throw a stone at that very large window, “I must say, Beth, that I’m surprised you have nothing to contribute to this discussion. After all, you hope to write a novel yourself some day, don’t you?”
Gabriela looks up from the dessert menu. “Excuse me?”
Everyone nearby is looking at her; especially Professor Gryck with her know-it-all smile. The woman really is the human equivalent of a hangnail.
“I said I’m surprised you haven’t contributed anything to our discussion.” If Professor Gryck’s smile were a dress it would be a severely cut sheath, something futuristic and angular, and possibly made out of sheet metal. A dress to disguise not flatter. “I was under the impression that you know as much about literary criticism as you do about novels.” This definitely sounds like a challenge.
One to which Gabriela rises with a smile of her own. “I do.” And that much, of course, is true. She knows little about novels, and equally little about literary criticism. But Professor Gryck’s expression is so insincere that it makes Gabriela wonder why she’s baiting Beth this way – like a matador waving his cape at the unsuspecting bull. Especially after the arguments the two of them have had today; you’d think she’d be grateful Beth finally shut up. And it is because of that that she forgets she’s meant to do nothing and say less. “I do have one question.” Gabriela pushes the dessert menu aside. It seems that in some small corner of the closet that is her brain (possibly on a high shelf, right at the back), part of Gabriela has actually been paying attention, and this is the part that speaks now. “I was just kind of wondering why all the writers you’ve been talking about are men. Every one of them.”
Professor Gryck’s smile hovers on her lips as if looking for a safe place to land.
“Excuse me, Ms Beeby?”
“I mean, women write literature too, right? It’s not like it’s a college fraternity or anything like that. They’re allowed to join.”
Everyone else stops talking, drinking, chewing and even swallowing. It’s possible that one or two of the contestants are holding their breath. Someone clears his throat.
That someone is Mr Solman, who looks as if he is either about to laugh or cough. “Well, of course they are,” he says, with the positive joviality you’d expect from a representative of a powerful corporation. “There’s nothing excluding women from the great community of the written word. Not nowadays. And they do.” Because Gabriela is staring at him with a face less blank than stony, Mr Solman’s words are slowing down and his eyes keep darting to
