Undaunted, the character retreats to his dorm to write a story about yet another character who is much like the first character who is much like the author, with the idea that a female character who is much like the first female character who is much like the girl in the workshop will read the story and understand that this literary version of himself represents his real self and that he is in love with her.
In the final scene, the girl suddenly understands—during workshop, no less—that the boy is in love with her, and she is powerfully moved by this knowledge. Everyone in the real workshop knows that the real girl would have to be blind and deaf and witless not to understand that this boy was in love with her, but this public declaration—this tender, ridiculous, marginally grammatical, potentially humiliating public declaration—nonetheless moves us.
The girl in the story is described as dark and astonishingly beautiful, while the actual girl is dark and pleasantly ordinary. But her youth holds to her powerfully and perhaps also holds an inclination to embrace men willing to make fools of themselves for that passing vitality—willing to punch people or write absurd stories—and wouldn’t she be a fool herself not to let them fight over her while she has the skin and the light in her eyes that distinguishes her for such a brief time (in this case, just twelve and a half double-spaced pages)?
We workshop witnesses like the story. Sort of. We’re interested, anyway, but we’re unable to have much of a conversation about craft or other such trivial matters, waiting until the girl decides to comment. When she raises her hand to speak, we grow quiet, the only noise the spring wind beyond the windows. Finally, she says, “The character is convincing . . . but kind of pathetic.”
Our hearts drop. We cannot help it. We are rooting for the boy. We hold our collective breath while she pauses, and it seems that even the weather outside the window ceases.
Then she adds, “But it’s hard not to like him.” She smiles at the young man, and the class relaxes. We even offer a trickle of laughter.
But the young man isn’t laughing, and his smile is sad, as if he understands that he is now entering the remainder of his life and it will be an effort to live up to the gesture that started him on this path. Not that he could ever articulate this, at least not for years, and only then if he continues to take creative writing. All he knows at the moment is that he will not, after all, have to live without the girl.
Everyone in the class is happy that he gets to indulge his foolish love at the expense of the punching boy and to the possible detriment of the smiling girl, who is smarter and a better writer, and who will be young and irresistible exactly once.
Why are we drawn to stories about people falling in love? There are likely a host of reasons, but here’s a good one: marriage, when observed from a place of solitude, has the power of dream. Solitary people fall in love with couples, imagining their own lives transformed by such a union. And once the transformation finally happens, people need to talk about it, telling not only their families, friends, and strangers on the bus but also themselves—repeating it to make it real, to investigate the mystery of marital metamorphosis. And they get good at the telling. People who cannot otherwise put together an adequately coherent narrative to get you to the neighborhood grocery will nonetheless have a beautifully shaped tale of how he met she (or he met he, or she met she) and became we.
by Robert Boswell, Tin House | Read more:
Image Marcellus Hall via:
