Want

has written five novels, three of them translated into English. She is on her second marriage, has one grown son. She sits next to me at the seminar table as we discuss Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., a novel that has attempted to absence words of their meaning. Before I entered the room, what was I? G. H. asks. Most of the students did not like it. I have told them that like and dislike are not pertinent but they are incapable of not telling everybody whether or not they liked each book we read. It’s a hard novel and it doesn’t give much space for the reader to feel grounded, to get inside it, I say. Why does it do this, though? I ask. I gesture too much when I teach. In the novel, a woman stands at the edge of a room and watches the slow death of the cockroach she’s decapitated with a door, talking with it, before ingesting its entrails.

A female student who wears dark eyeliner and has long curly hair raises her hand close to the end of class and says, of the experience of reading the novel, I felt hit by a truck. Some students laugh, and I say, So, then, she made you feel something. So, then, I say, did she succeed in that?

The Chilean writer stays quiet the whole time. She takes notes. She smiles and nods whenever I look toward her and when the student says the thing about the truck she laughs.

I’m so grateful, she says, after.

I smile at her, not sure how to tell her that she shouldn’t be.

Can I buy you dinner? she says.

I haven’t eaten, and the kids are already in bed sleeping.

Sure, I say.

We agree to split a cheeseburger. She says she can never finish one all by herself and, though I’m starving, haven’t eaten all day, I’m too thrilled by the suggested intimacy to refuse. She serves me, in a clutch, from her plate to mine, half of the French fries and we eat almost all of the food, not saying much, in not very long a time.

We talk at first about books and about teaching. I tell her I wanted to be an academic because books always made more sense to me than people, because words written down couldn’t be refuted later on. I’m always shocked, I tell her, when I see students outside of class and have to talk to them about anything but whatever we’ve read together, when I have to make up the ideas and the questions from scratch.

She says she became a writer because it was the only space in which she ever had control.

I wrote about real people, she tells me. Except I could do things to them, with them; I wasn’t ineffectual in the face of whatever wants or needs they had.

I forgot, she says, that the actual people would still be there, and the same, when I was done.

I like looking at her as she talks. We sit at a small table, in chairs with caned backs and thin red cushions. I want to take my shoes off, to pull my knees up to my chest. The tables are close to one another and when people get up on either side of us they have to hold their coats and bags up over their heads so they don’t brush against us as they walk past. The lighting’s dim and the walls are red to match the cushions. There are booths along both back walls and worn movie posters hung behind the bar, the titles of which are all in French.

I used to listen to my drunk sister, she says, on the phone for hours.

She talked about her awful life, she says, her bipolar, perennially out-of-work husband, her insane, drug-addled, Asperger’s, ADHD kids.

She chews a fry and smiles at me. I took notes, she says.

I eat the last bite of my cheeseburger. It’s too big a bite and I hold my hand over my mouth as she waits for me to speak and then goes on.

I always asked her, she says, if I could use it. Carla, I said, I’m going to use this in my work; is that okay?

The Chilean writer looks past me through the window to the street, where students walk past in clusters, where cabs and large, dark SUVs drive by.

She said yes every time, but she was drunk.

The waiter brings a second round of beers and I hold my thumb over the lip, not eager to drink it. I don’t like beer, really, but when she mentioned that the beer list looked good, I wanted to be like her, so I ordered what she got.

She killed herself, says the Chilean writer.

She sips her beer then and I sip mine right after.

I haven’t written about it yet, she says.

That weekend, I sleep past six. I lie up in bed as my husband makes the children breakfast, reminds them to use the bathroom, asks them if they want to help him knead the biscuits. I’m awake, but I pretend that I’m asleep so I can stay in bed a while longer and just listen. I climb down when he calls to me to say that breakfast is ready and we eat together before he leaves for work.

Don’t forget the birthday party, he says before he leaves, and I say, Oh, fuck before realizing the kids are right there watching and both of them look up and smile at me. The four-year-old whispers something to her sister and they laugh and run into their room.

We have no present for the birthday party and we have no time to buy one, so I have the children pick two books that they don’t like much and a toy they haven’t played with in a while and we make wrapping paper out of computer paper by drawing pictures on it and we wrap all of it up using a stapler because we don’t