THE MFA STORY
by Andrea Gregory
Julian reads from his manuscript. The pages aren’t stapled together, and he throws each one to the floor when he’s done with it. He paces in front of the television, a muted showing of The Breakfast Club. His living room has a bunch of writers hanging out, drinking, smoking pot. All of them are used to Julian doing this sort of thing. It’s mostly second-year students. The ones who take it seriously. The ones who are good. Julian knows he’s not alone, desperate to be published. He’s got a few things out on submission. These damn places take so long to respond. And he thinks he’s just starting to find his voice. He wants good news before graduation.
“Stop writing about her,” says Mandy, standing up to hit Julian in the face with the only and maroon throw pillow in the room. Julian doesn’t even know where that thing came from. Someone must have left it here. “Seriously, it’s too early for this shit.”
It’s early afternoon on a Thursday. No one has class on Thursday. Julian had to TA in the morning. Early. Eight o’clock class. He was late as he is for most things that start really early and blamed it on traffic. No one else was up at that time.
“I’m not writing about anyone,” he says a little more defensive than he probably has to be. He gets weird looks. “It’s not about Rochelle.”
Rochelle is the prettiest girl in the MFA program. A first-year fiction candidate who came off the waitlist, and it shows a little in her work. Still, she is probably the prettiest girl to have ever been in an MFA program anywhere. She has big teeth and tiny wrists. Julian thinks she’s amazing. Or his muse. He’s been making her love him back in a lot of his fiction.
In fact, Julian has rewritten his thesis into a weird sort of tribute to Rochelle. He just dropped the whole thing off in his advisor’s mailbox. He thinks this new stuff is his really his best.
“Why then do all your female characters all of a sudden have big teeth and small wrists and fall for the bad boy?” says Mandy. She retrieves the maroon throw pillow after it bounces off Julian’s head and lands at the far end of his Ikea carpet. “And you’re far from the bad boy you think you are.” She laughs like a bitch, but it’s supposed to be a joke.
“Even if it’s not about Rochelle, your style’s a little different lately,” says Dan. “I’m not sure it’s working.”
Dan is forty and married. His wife’s letting him chase a dream. He never misses anything when the MFA kids plan something. He’s a long-standing member of the group that meets up every week at Julian’s place. He tries to be insightful and dresses like a hipster. He’s got on dark-rimmed glasses that aren’t prescription, skinny jeans, and a t-shirt of Gertrude Stein’s face. The glasses are new. He’s trying something different.
“I liked it,” says Pete. Pete is published. Everyone is quiet and questioning their original thoughts.
The story is about a girl with big teeth and small wrists who comes from Salem, Massachusetts, where they burned the witches. She works in a bakery and lacks complexity and internal struggle. She naively ends up at a sex party. Uncomfortable. Out of place. A rugged man comes to her rescue. In the end, they leave together and do it in the closed bakery just after she puts a batch of something in the oven.
“So, Julian’s got a muse,” says Pete. “If we forget we know Rochelle and that Julian has a warped self image, it’s a good story.”
Pete likes to wear baggy jeans and gold chains like he’s in the rap scene of the 1990s. If he really likes something, he’ll tell you it’s “fly.”
Jenna likes it, too. Jenna is the star of the program. She is the great granddaughter of a very well known but now deceased writer. She doesn’t like to talk about it. She believes her talent comes from her brain, not her bloodline. But she’s a humble twenty-six year old with nothing on submission. She thinks it will happen eventually, but she’s more likely to go through her family connections than the slush pile. Still, she never brags, and, really she doesn’t like to talk about it. Her best friend is Sarah. She passes the joint to her.
Lately, Sarah has been writing poems about Julian. Jenna says it’s a bad idea to share them with the group. Sarah’s got a few of them in her bag. She brought them just in case. She’s taking poetry this semester to get out of writing a term paper.
“If he says it’s not about Rochelle, it’s not about Rochelle,” Sarah says with lungs full of pot smoke. Then she blows it all out. “She’s into Anthony, anyway.”
Anthony’s not happy that Sarah just brought this up. He’s a little confused about his sexuality and has somewhat of a crush on Pete. Pete has a long-term girlfriend living a few states away. Anthony runs his fingers through his hair. It’s dark and thick. He looks like an Italian Jesus. He, like Rochelle, might just be too pretty to be a writer.
Anthony says, “Sorry, dude,” to Julian. “It was just a one-time thing.”
It happened after everyone’s favorite professor’s book signing. Drinks at the bar down the street from the bookstore. A little too much gin. Rochelle and her gin. This sort of thing was bound to happen once they were the only ones left. And Julian wasn’t even there that night.
“I don’t give a shit about Rochelle,” Julian says again. “She can fuck the whole program and all the faculty for all I care.”
“She just might,” says Anthony. “She’s kind of a slut.”
But she’s never a slut in Julian’s stories. He likes her a little less than he used to after hearing rumors about her and Anthony, but you can’t tell from the way he writes about her. “Can we just get back to the story?” he says with a sigh and some aggravation. It’s Julian’s apartment. It’s Julian’s weed. Everyone spends a little more time on his work because of those things.
“I would like to know if she’s happy working at the bakery. You really don’t tap into how she views her mundane life,” says Jenna.
Jenna has always had interesting jobs with no real need to work. Still, a quest for living as a common person has brought with it life experience. Just before coming to the program, she was a park ranger for a few years in Arizona. She knows all about the different kinds of snakes out there. She knows how to kill one if she has to. She says when you cut one in half both sides of the body continue to wiggle for a while almost like there’s a hope of reconnecting. But she doesn’t like killing anything. She’s a vegetarian. She told Sarah the other night that she thinks she’s a lesbian. Sarah said cool. They both know people experiment at their age, and it really wouldn’t matter either way to Sarah.
Jenna went to a gay bar by herself and met a girl name Terri. Terri is in her apartment right now. Their one-night stand has turned into a few nights. Terri made omelets this morning, and they were delicious. Jenna wonders if she’s falling in love.
Julian, like a typical man, never gave much thought to the happiness of the girl in his story.
“I mean,” says Jenna who then takes a few seconds to say anything else. “If she takes this guy back to the bakery, what does that say about her? I’m only talking about the character. Who really cares about Rochelle?”
“It says she is a mild risk taker,” says Pete, who rarely has any women in his fiction. He writes mostly about an old mill town he grew up in, but the stories take place before his time. He’s managed to capture a nostalgia he has no first-hand knowledge of. “The sex party was still her sexual awakening.”
Mandy rolls her eyes. She says it’s not realistic to have some meek character stay for as long as she does at a sex party or to even end up there in the first place. And who has sex parties, anyway? Julian’s character watches a threesome on the couch. She sits in a chair and watches. She’s invited to join. She doesn’t. And no one cares that she seems to be there just to watch.
It’s two guys and a girl going at it on the couch. And it’s a little graphic for literary fiction. Everyone wonders if Julian has had a similar threesome, but no one says anything about that.
“Does he really love her?” Sarah asks. She will write a poem about him writing about Rochelle. It’s starting to form in her head. She should really write this one down but, of course, doesn’t.
“I don’t know,” says Julian.
“Of course, he doesn’t love her. If he loved her even slightly or thought there was potential to love her, he would have taken her home. At no time does he invite her into his life, his world,” says Pete. “They do it at her work. You don’t fuck people you love at work.”
Anthony says he doesn’t care where he fucks. He argues that going to the bakery means nothing and that Pete is reading too much into it. Anthony says he can easily see himself having sex in a bakery. Then he pictures it and thinks of Rochelle.
“Then what would happen? What would follow the bakery scene?” asks Jenna.
Pete says the story ends in a good place with the smell of tomorrow’s muffins drifting out from the kitchen. Going on any longer could kill the story the whole story.
Jenna thinks Terri’s the start of a great story. But she doesn’t think she’s a character or anything like that. She’s a real person without a job or an apartment, but she says she has plenty of friends she can stay with. Jenna doesn't want her to go anywhere, though. She thinks about Terri in her apartment. In her bedroom. She imagines her smelling the sheets like they’re tomorrow’s muffins. Jenna wants to kiss her again and again. She wants to do it so many times that the future becomes more important than the past. She wants Sarah to meet her. She wants everyone to meet her. She wants to keep her and feels lucky to think she might be able to. But there’s such a false sense of security when instant infatuation feels reciprocated.
“I’ll tell you what would happen,” says Sarah. “He would get bored of her. She’s not his type.”
Dan tells everyone that his real-life wife was not his type. She grew on him, he tells the group. No one has ever met her, and they probably won’t. Different interests, Dan could call it. Bored with her, he would never say. It sounds bad. They’ve been married for five years, and he thinks they are still in love. He hopes so. And she doesn’t mind supporting him while he’s in grad school. She’s ten years younger than him but already has a master’s in social work. She has a job at a residential home for troubled teens. She tells Dan about the kids like they’re her children. The two of them have never discussed having kids. Dan’s hoping they will run out of time before this comes up.
Dan’s real type is more like Sarah. He likes the way her cheeks get flushed in the cold and the knee-high boots she wears over legging. Sarah has long legs. Dan’s wife is five feet tall. Short body. Short legs. But he really tries to love her more than anything else. He’s already promised to dedicate his first book to her, a novel he writes when he just can’t fall asleep next to her.
Sarah follows Jenna into the kitchen to get more wine. Jenna pulls out a new bottle of chardonnay from the fridge. It’s one of those double-size bottles. “Do you see the opener?” she asks Sarah.
Sarah doesn’t even look. She just says she thinks she loves him. Julian has a wild man’s beard and plans for a road trip after graduation. “I want him to write stories like that about me,” she tells Jenna.
“No you don’t,” says Jenna. “He’s a dick.”
“I think I’m going to read one of my poems to the group.”
“Don’t,” says Jenna. “No one is drunk enough for that shit yet.”
Jenna finds the corkscrew. It was right in front of her on the counter, but sometimes we don’t see the things right in front of us.
Jenna takes the open bottle and tells Sarah to chill out. She wants to tell Sarah about Terri. She wants to tell her about Terri in a way that sounds just like the way a great love story starts, but she knows it probably won’t come across the right way. Jenna knows she’s happy and that something like that is fragile. She thinks it’s best to probably wait and see what happens when Terri leaves her apartment. Make sure she’s going to come back. Please let her come back.
Everyone handed their marked-up copies of Julian’s story back to him while the girls were in the kitchen. Mandy is already reading her piece. Everyone’s heard this story before. And one other time before that. She keeps on revising the same story. Her advisor told her this one wasn’t her best. Leave it out of the thesis. But Mandy has daddy issues and wants to fuck her advisor as she wins his approval. She is very transparent about it in this story.
Her story is about a graduate student having an affair with her professor. Everyone knows it’s based on Professor Mason, a married professor whom all the girls have a slight crush on. With silver hair tied in a ponytail and a long publishing history, the girls are extra attentive in his classes. Julian hates him.
In Mandy’s story, the professor’s wife dies and this one graduate student goes to the funeral. The only physical contact between the graduate student and the professor comes at the end when she strokes his arm and tells him that his wife must have had a wonderful life. Professor Mason says it’s just not coming off the page for him.
“Can we see something new from you, Mandy?” says Anthony.
“But the whole middle is different,” she says. “I took out the part about the cell phone ringing during the eulogy.”
No one remembers that part. And Mandy gets pretty much the same feedback she got last time. Maybe she should let this one go or let it sit and come back to it later. Shut up, Pete. Who cares that you’re publishing?
“I’ll go next,” says Sarah. “I’ve got a poem this time. A sestina.”
Sarah didn’t bring copies for everyone. She’s just been carrying around with her this sestina and a few others just in case there was someone to read it to. She’s not trying to be a poet really, but if she was, it might impress Julian.
Everyone’s got a full glass of wine and is pretty buzzed. It’s around three in the afternoon by now. Jenna gives Sarah a look. She sucks on her bottom lip and tilts her head. Sarah really should have listened to her. But now everyone is going to listen to Sarah’s sestina.
It’s about a bridge and a woman who throws herself off it after being turned down by her love interest. It’s 39 lines of bad poetry about rejection. No one thinks it has anything to do with Julian. Jenna knows how to keep a secret.
Julian is the first to respond. He says the diction is off and the syntax doesn’t flow. It’s not really working for him. Then others agree. Pete says to stick with fiction. He says Sarah will probably be the next to get published if she just sticks to what she’s good at. No one wants to hear that except Sarah. When did Pete become the authority on the publishing order?
“There’s just not much here to discuss,” says Pete. “And who writes sestinas? Why are you limiting yourself to such an outdated form?”
The joint reaches Sarah again. Or it’s a new joint Julian rolled while she was in the kitchen. She hits it twice in a row and then one more time before giving it to Anthony. No one picks up that this poem is about how crazy in love she is with Julian. And later Jenna will tell Sarah that it was for the best and just because you think you love someone doesn’t mean everyone has to know about it.
Sarah pounds her glass of wine. She folds her poem up into a tiny square and puts it back in her purse. Her heart’s still racing just as it was when she started to read. She looks at Julian, but he’s looking somewhere else, perhaps at a bakery that’s not there. Sarah wants to tell him she can smell tomorrow’s muffins when she is close to him. She says nothing. He finally looks at her still looking at him.
“It was a nice try,” he says to her.
