Free the Writing Circle (2010) by Corinne Demas

imperfection to fasten on, some way to reduce her, and her eyes had fastened on Nancy’s ears. Nancy had attached earlobes, and they seemed to slide off the sides of her face. They made you think of flesh, in an unpleasant way, a clitoris that had been stunted in growth or, worse, amputated. Obtusely—or was it brazenly?—Nancy wore stud earrings and tucked her hair behind her ears, calling attention to them. If Gillian had had ears like that, she would have kept them covered by her hair.
    “Affable, I’ll buy that,” said Gillian. “But please, Adam, she may seem affable, but you of all of us need to be a little wary of her.”
    “Why me?”
    “Because you’re the only other novelist.”
    “And Chris is what?”
    “Correction, the only other literary novelist.”
    “So why should that matter?”
    “You’re young, you have a glittering future. First novels generate the kind of excitement that third novels never do.”
    “Soooo.” Adam drew the word out. “Why should I be wary?”
    “Because writers are inherently competitive. We’re not supposed to be, we pretend we aren’t, but we’re actually vicious. Poets are the worst, of course, because we have to fight over the very few people in the world who read poetry, but serious novelists are just as bad. Nancy can’t help but be jealous of you. She’ll pretend to support you—she may even believe that she wants to support you—but she really can’t bear to see you succeed.”
    Adam looked at Gillian. He laughed a little. “You make her sound ruthless.”
    “Not ruthless, just protecting her own work from the threat of competition. You just can’t trust her, that’s all.”
    “Can I trust you?” Adam asked.
    “I’ll leave you to decide that,” said Gillian, smiling.
    “Can I kiss you? Or rather, may I kiss you?”
    “Do you ordinarily ask women if you can kiss them before you do so?”
    “You’re not an ordinary woman,” said Adam.
    “No,” said Gillian, “I suppose not.” She leaned forward a little in her chair so her long braid of hair was freed from the weight of her back and pulled it over her shoulder. She undid the elastic that was coiled around the end and took Adam’s hand and slipped the elastic onto his wrist. She slowly unbraided her hair, leaning towards the fire as if she were opening the braid up for the fire, as if she were revealing its secret interior to the flames. When it was all loose, she ran her fingers through the rippled hair, then stood up and shook it out behind her. She watched Adam’s face. He looked as if he was afraid to breathe.

Adam
    A DAM’S FIRST NOVEL WEIGHED FIVE POUNDS, SEVEN ounces (not including the manuscript box) and covered three generations of a prosperous Wyoming ranch family. Adam had visited Wyoming only once in his life and knew no one who had ever lived there, but he’d read everything he could get his hands on that had to do with the area. He couldn’t interest any publisher or agent in the novel, but it did fulfill the thesis requirement for his MFA. His mentor, Helene, had never produced a novel that weighed more than two pounds. Although she hadn’t succeeded in curing Adam of his verbosity, she had managed to steer him to write about something more familiar for his second try. His new novel included a scene set in Moscow, even farther from home, but at least he’d spent his junior year of college there, and the narrator (involved in a knotty relationship with a Russian woman) was a young American male, not unlike himself.
    In high school Adam had been a victim of competing talents. He was a natural in math and science but harbored literary pretensions (he was editor of the literary magazine) and was serious enough about the viola that he considered applying to a conservatory. In college—where he majored in engineering—the viola lay forgotten under his lofted dorm room bed, but he submitted more than three times as many pages as anyone else in his fiction writing workshop.