Straight Man

mean streak, as I’ve come to think of it—was in the process of observing that the reason Leo always writes about pussy is that he is one. He pretends to be some kind of Hemingway, but the truth is he’s a wimp, a wanna-be, a case of arrested development. Trouble has been brewing between these two all semester. For the last couple weeks she’s been saying things under her breath, and I’ve made the mistake of ignoring them. But there was no way to ignore this. When I asked Solange if she was finished, if we could begin our workshop of Leo’s story, she replied that she would be happy to begin it herself. The story, in her view, was more of this author’s incessant, sexist nonsense. Trash, without a single redeeming feature. She could see no use for it beyond kindling.
    Such remarks seldom stimulate discussion, and they have not done so here. Leo, his cheeks aflame, tried to summon his usual smug grin but failed. As the semester has progressed, it’s become more and more difficult for Leo to maintain his public posture, which is that he and I are, after a fashion, team-teaching the course. He’s the only student taking the workshop a second time, and he’s intimated to his classmates that, of course, I hold him to a higher standard and that we have an unspoken understanding. Since he’s the only student on campus who’s properly obsessed with becoming a writer, I see it as my duty to push him harder than the others, to make sure he’s not ruined by too much praise. From the author interviews Leo devours, he has learned that about the worst thing that can happen to a talented young writer is to be given too much praise, so Leo is grateful to me for protecting him. I don’t know whether he’s grateful to the other students in the workshop, who have been even more determined than their instructor not to ruin him with too much praise. Or any praise.
    Right now, with the exception of Solange, they are all looking to me for guidance, aware that I don’t, as a rule, encourage the kind of in-your-face dismissal of someone’s labors that Solange has accorded Leo. There are two rules in my workshop, and most of the time these head off trouble. The first rule is that all comments and criticisms are to be directed at the manuscript and not its author. In return for this consideration, the author is not permitted to speak in defense of the manuscript.
    These are excellent, though fundamentally flawed, rules. The problem with the first is that what’s wrong with any given manuscript is often easily located in the personality or character of its author, as is the case with Leo’s story. Leo needs more than aesthetic and technical advice in short story writing. Leo needs, among other things, to get laid. His grim young face bears eloquent testimony to the fact that no young woman has ever been kind to him. His stories are a revenge on the lot of them. At this particular moment, having been branded a wimp, he’s a study in scarlet. In addition to his red hair and flushed face and long, pimply neck, two of the fingers of his right hand are bleeding at the cuticles. Throughout the winter his raw fingers have been full of hangnails. The tiny deltas of skin are always peeled back, like tomato skins, revealing the tender pulp beneath. I see that today it’s the index finger of his right hand he’s been excavating, and there are several bright pinpoints of blood at the cuticle for him to suck at, then examine secretly, as if he suspects the truth of his nature—that he’s red to the core.
    Although they have been chafing each other all semester, Leo and Solange are not so different. Both are friendless, so far as I can tell. Neither seems to have discovered a way to exist in the world. Solange fancies herself a poet, and to her this has less to do with writing poetry than it does with adopting a superior attitude. She dresses in black, eschews makeup, smokes dope, feigns a kind of exhausted boredom. She’d like to think she’s smart (she is) but fears she isn’t, at least not smart enough to justify her superiority. She’s pale-skinned and bony, and this, I suspect, is partly why she objects so strongly to Leo’s lurid adolescent fantasies. In his stories girls like Solange don’t rate notice, much less ravishing. To attract the attention of one of Leo’s vengeful ghosts, a girl has to have big breasts, not a protruding breastbone. Last fall, Solange fled Gracie’s poetry seminar, I suspect, because Gracie