Free the Writing Circle (2010) by Corinne Demas Page A

After graduation he got a job in engineering but completed a low-residency MFA program in creative writing as well. The longer he continued at his job, the more alien it felt to him. He carried his new novel around in his head with him at all times, working on it whenever he was free from thinking of something else. It was his alternate, secret life. Sometimes it seemed like the only life he really had.
    After he’d been orphaned in the Leopardi Circle at the death of Helene, Adam had been taken under the wing of Virginia. Her maternal instincts, Adam noticed, were juiced up anytime she was in the proximity of anyone under forty. When he had first joined them, he thought Virginia might be someone who wrote romance or science fiction, not what he considered a serious writer. She was portly and wore pants with elastic waistbands, and she had a grandmotherly manner. But as soon as he first heard her read from her manuscript, he realized he had misjudged her and, embarrassed, he read all her previously published books. It was a sobering venture. He felt he was not even remotely in her league. He felt that way about all the Leopardis—especially Gillian. Gillian above all. As for Chris, Adam didn’t exactly respect what he did, but he recognized that Chris was good at it, and he couldn’t ignore the fact that Chris not only made a living as a writer but made enough money to buy the kind of sports car Adam could only dream of, while Adam made nothing from his writing. Absolutely nothing at all.
    THE FIRE HAD GONE OUT. The wall was cold against his naked back. When Adam turned his head to the left, a muscle twanged in his neck, no doubt from sleeping on his side in this narrow bed. He could tell from the absolute quiet that he was alone in the room. There was a purple hair elastic biting into his wrist. He pulled it away from his skin, then let it snap back against his wrist bone.
    He did not need to close his eyes to see Gillian’s naked back, the long inward curve of her spine leading down to her smooth buttocks, the surprising black curls of her pubic hair as she turned towards him, that small hill, like a child’s head, the dab of pink in the cleft.
    Morning sunlight made its way through the windows on one side and fell on the quilt. The colored triangles of fabric were bleached almost as pale as the white background, but it was not this morning’s sun that had accomplished it, it had taken decades; the quilt looked a hundred years old. The glass in the windowpanes was antique, too, imperfect, like ice on the pond just after a night’s freeze. He sat up in bed and squinted in the sunlight. Through the front windows of the room he could see the marsh, and his car and Gillian’s truck parked at the edge of the rough lawn. He sat up farther.
    There was a figure in the distance, someone walking along the edge of the marsh: Gillian. Her back was towards him, the hood of her grey sweater pulled up over her head. He wanted to reach across the distance between them and pull the hood back, freeing her hair. He wanted to see what the wind would do with it.
    Adam found his clothes in a pile on the floor and got dressed. He could not decide what he should do. He didn’t know what Gillian expected of him, didn’t know what she wanted, and he was afraid of doing the wrong thing. He sat on the footstool and looked at the wide floorboards beneath his bare feet. They had been painted once, he could tell, then later stripped so the honey-colored pine was once again open to the light. But that had been years before; the surface was dull now. He traced a curve of grain with his big toe, circled a knothole. He felt certain, though, that Gillian didn’t want him sticking around. He guessed that she would hope he was gone before she returned from her walk, so she could sit in the study and work on whatever poem she was beginning right now—he was sure she was working on a poem as she walked—but he also could not bear to leave without