Straight Man

different tack. “Okay, but what are all these clouds obscuring? And don’t say the sky.”
    “I don’t understand your question,” someone makes the mistake of admitting.
    “What happens in this story?” I ask this person. “Give me a plot summary. You remember plot. A causes B causes C causes D. Start with A.”
    Lots of frowns, and not just on the face of the person I’ve asked the question. There is no B, they’ve come to realize. Maybe not even an A. I give them a while, but nobody can find anything that causes anything else. Finally, I turn to Solange. “Okay, kiddo,” I tell her. “It’s your story. Tell us what happens. Literally. Leave out the metaphors.”
    Solange runs her long, artistic fingers through her streaked hair, then tosses it back. “She falls in love. Then she falls out of love. It’s like what happens in real life.”
    The other students have all turned to look at Solange now. This is clearly news to them.
    “Who does she fall in love with?” somebody wants to know.
    “Am I allowed to answer?” Solange inquires, since I normally don’t encourage authorial participation in workshop discussion, except for points of clarification.
    “I insist.”
    “It’s unspecified,” she says. “Love doesn’t require an object. It’s like clouds. When you’re flying through them. You’re just in them, and then you’re not.”
    I’ve just about come to the conclusion that this class can’t get any worse when I look out our ground-level window and see how it can.Leo, head down, is cutting across the lawn, making for the door of the building we’re in, his red hair all aflame.
    “Can this be true?” I ask the others. “Does this square with your experience of love?”
    No one wants to testify on this subject, and who can blame them? They’re all afraid that their experience of love may be too narrow, too limited, and that their testimony will reveal this. Love is one of the many things they’re confused about, and they’re not even talking about being half in love. About finding themselves 61 percent in love, or 77 percent or higher, as Tony Coniglia calibrates these things.
    “Is good fiction more likely to be about clouds or stones?” I ask.
    “I still like the clouds,” one student who senses where I’m headed insists.
    “Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?” I ask.
    “What?”
    “Last week I had a nose the size of two noses,” I remind them. “I was breathing air through it. Which are you tempted to make use of in a story?”
    “I’ve already used your nose,” one student admits. “It’s in my next story.”
    “You used
my
nose?”
    “Sorry,” the student shrugs.
    “Don’t be,” I say.
    As Leo enters the building, I see a campus security car pull up. Lou Steinmetz and an officer I’ve seen around campus quickly get out and trot across the lawn. Which would make a better starting place for a story, I’d like to ask, a frustrated old cop or the need for a safe campus community?
    Leo enters, and by the time he’s apologized and taken a seat, the penny has dropped and my heart along with it. He seems to know that everybody in the class is looking at him, a sad, shunned, pimple-encrusted, red-haired boy, more real than you could possibly make any allegorical figure designed to represent low self-esteem.
    “We’re discussing Solange’s story,” I tell him.
    It takes him a minute to find the story in his backpack, to catch his breath. “I liked the clouds,” he says, having located the manuscript. I seethat he’s tugged another hangnail back from its cuticle and that he leaves a bead of bright red blood on the title page. Seeing this, he quickly smudges it with his wrist, then blots the offending finger on his jeans. “I think that’s the sort of thing my story needed.”
    This is Leo’s conclusion. He needs to cloud his necrophilia.
    Solange is not one to recognize an offered olive branch. Her mean streak hangs down in front of her nose, and she’s examining several long, silver strands through crossed eyes. “What you need is counseling,” she observes.
    The classroom door opens at this moment to reveal Lou Steinmetz and the uniformed officer. Another campus cop, I see, has stationed himself outside our classroom windows. “I’m conducting a class here, Lou,” I tell him.
    “I just need to speak to one of your students, Professor,” he says. “That one there.”
    Leo starts