Classics Department again. Once upon a time, business weenies had infested the Public Policy building. Now they had a bigger, newer, spiffier one all their own: the Anderson School of Management. Classics got some of their leftovers-or their sloppy seconds, if you were feeling uncommonly cynical.
Susan called the North Campus Center Maxim’s. Maybe that was a History Department in-joke; Bryce had never heard it before he started hanging out with her. She sat at one of the big tables outside. Unusually in this winter of the earth’s discontent, it wasn’t raining. She got up as he drew near. “Are you official?”
“I’m done, all right-like a roast,” he answered.
“Hey, you did something special,” she said. “How do you want to celebrate?”
“People would talk if we did that right here,” Bryce said.
Susan made a face at him. “How about coffee and a danish instead?”
“Talk about second prizes!” he said mournfully. She poked him in the ribs. That didn’t do much-she was far more ticklish than he was. They walked into Maxim’s together.
Susan did get coffee and a danish. Bryce got a danish and a Coke instead. Susan bought. “You just turned in your diss,” she said. “How awesome is that?”
“I don’t have a job. I don’t have much chance for a job. I was just talking with my chairperson about what I was gonna do. He didn’t have any terrific ideas, either. How awesome is that?” One more reason for Bryce to let Susan buy.
“Something will turn up for you,” she said. “Something will turn up for me when I finish, too. Would you have put all that time and effort into it if you really thought you’d never get the chance to use it?”
They sat down at a couple of chairs facing the brickwork around a circular gas fire. The warmth was welcome. No doubt Susan had meant the question rhetorically. Bryce gave it serious consideration all the same. At last, he said, “You know, I think I would. What else would I have been doing instead? Retail? Real estate? I might have made more money in real estate-”
“The way the roller coaster goes, you might not have, too,” Susan broke in.
“You’ve got that right,” Bryce said. “Whatever I did, I wouldn’t have had much fun doing it. Here I am, close to thirty, and I’ve got away with not working for a living yet. Can’t go on forever, not unless you inherit or something, but I’ve had a pretty good run.”
One of the reasons he’d got away with not working for a living was that Vanessa had dropped out and did work. Add her real salary to the dribs and drabs he brought in, and they’d done tolerably well. He’d had more trouble staying afloat since the breakup. But he didn’t want to remember Vanessa now.
“You’re-not practical,” Susan said. Vanessa had told him the same thing. He seemed to have to remember her, like it or not. She’d said it with intent to wound, though, if not with intent to condemn. With Susan, it was just a statement of fact.
“Guilty,” he said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know it himself. “I’m afraid nobody who writes poems modeled after ancient pastorals will get a lot of ink in the Wall Street Journal.”
“That nevot what I meant. You’ve published them. I think that’s wonderful,” Susan said.
Bryce thought it was wonderful, too. Of course, he’d made exactly no money from any of them. And here, out of the blue, Vanessa’s brother sold-really sold-a story. If that made Bryce jealous (and it did), he was sure it drove Vanessa nuts. He said, “But no one should hang out with me because she expects to get rich doing it. Or even eat, necessarily.”
“I’m hanging out with you because I want to, silly,” Susan said. “One way or another, we’ll make ends meet. Who needs more than that?”
Plenty of people did, or thought they did. Vanessa had always had filet mignon tastes, even when the budget yelled for ground chuck. She was never happy with what she had. He sometimes thought, especially toward the end, that she couldn’t be happy without something to be unhappy about.
Susan wasn’t like that. For a while, Bryce had wondered if something was missing in his relationship with her. Before long, he’d figured out what it was: tension. Once he realized that, he quit missing it.
“I wonder what’s out there in the big, wide world,” he said. The big, wide, ugly world, he thought, but he didn’t come out with that. “I don’t have any excuses left now. I’ve got to find out.”
Selling his story gave Marshall fifteen McLuhan minutes of fame at UCSB. Because of paper shortages, the campus rag was down to a weekly, but it ran a story about him. The photographer who snapped him holding up a printout of “Well, Why Not?” was seriously cute. She seemed impressed with him, too: impressed enough to let him have her cell number, with the air of an aid worker handing out sacks of wheat to pipe-cleaner-legged famine victims in Zimbabwe or somewhere like that. But when he tried it, it turned out to be bogus. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all.
Professor Bolger gave him an A in the course, which he was glad to have, and advice, which he found as welcome as the phony phone number. “Congratulations. You’ve sold to a market I’d-mm, maybe not kill, but commit armed robbery, anyway-to break into,” Bolger said. “Now you have to figure out where you go from here.”
Where Marshall wanted to go was away from the prof’s journal-crowded office. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem practical for the next few minutes. “Uh-huh,” he said, and tried to keep looking interested while he tuned out.
“If you’ve got anything else you like, you should send it to the editor there right away,” Bolger went on. “Anybody-well, lots of people, anyhow-can get lucky once. Being able to do it over and over is what marks the difference between a writer and somebody who just writes, if you know what I mean.” He waited expectantly.
Thus prompted, Marshall nodded and went “Uh-huh” again, for all the world as if he’d been listening.
“The other side of the coin is, you don’t want to get a swelled head because somebody sent you a check,” Bolger said. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine sold two stories to a magazine that’s long since gone under. He decided he knew everything there was to know, the way you can when you’re that age. He dropped out of the University of Washington halfway through his freshman year to become a writer, and he sold a couple of novels, too. But he’s made his living moving stuff from here to there at Sears ever since.” Another pregnant pause.
“I’m not gonna drop out now,” waitid, “not with my degree right around the corner.” He’d avoided it as long as he could, but they were going to pitch him out into the real world no matter how little he liked it.
“I should hope not,” Professor Bolger said, politely horrified at the mere idea. “If you work hard at it, and if you don’t expect too much, writing is a good trade in difficult times. There’s not much overhead-hardly any. And you can do it part-time, to add to your income from a more ordinary job. I’ve been doing that for a long time now.”
“Right. Makes sense,” Marshall said. Of course, the prof was bound to have some fancy degree piled on top of his bachelor’s. You didn’t get to teach at a university without one; Marshall was sure of that. One sold story, or even several sold stories, wouldn’t win him possession of the office next door here.
“Students in my classes don’t often place pieces. It happens, but not every quarter. Nowhere near,” Bolger said. “You have a right to be proud of yourself.” He glanced at the clock on the wall across from his desk. “And do keep writing. I always hate it when people who have the ability don’t use it.”
That had to be Okay, I’ve used up as much office time on you as I’m going to. Marshall said his good-byes and got out. It was late afternoon. The sun was sinking in one of those ridiculously over-the-top sunsets people had started taking for granted since the supervolcano erupted. Oranges, reds, purples, sometimes greens… The light show usually started a good hour and a half before actual sundown. You didn’t even have to be loaded to enjoy it, though that sure didn’t hurt.
As Marshall walked to the bike rack, somebody behind him said, “Hey, isn’t that the guy who-?”
He walked a little taller, a little straighter, for a few steps. After all, he was the guy who. He was right this minute, anyhow. Before long, somebody else would do something worth noticing. Then, for a little while, he’d be the guy who.
Marshall unlocked his bike and climbed aboard. How did you keep it going once you weren’t the guy who any more? How did you keep it going when you never got to be the guy who? His brother’s band had always had to deal with that. More hype stuck to the third runner-up from American Idol, who was only almost the guy who, than Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had seen in their whole career.
