With the advent of the fall semester, things in the Martin household settled down–if, in a place where everyone was sleeping with everyone else, it could ever be said that things were settling down. The bedroom arrangements were getting increasingly complicated, at least as far as Vanessa–the one most in demand by all three of the others–was concerned. Eventually a system was worked out whereby she was with Jack for three nights a week and Joanna and Eileen for two nights each. Jack had Joanna for two nights and (with his ex’s grudging permission) Eileen for one night.
As she began her senior year, Vanessa felt increasingly confident that she would pass with flying colors and be able to get a good job afterwards, even if English majors were a dime a dozen in the working world. Jack, Joanna, and Eileen made sure not to tire her out too much with their demands for intimacy, lest her classwork suffer; but it was difficult to restrain Jack from doing at least a bit of cuddling in the nights he had her.
Early in the semester she found herself wandering into the student union for a snack before her next class. For some reason her attention fell on a boy–sorry, young man–sitting at a table in the cafeteria. He was not actually eating anything, although he did have a cup of coffee or tea in front of him. What he was doing was scribbling furiously in a notebook, his nose bent down almost to the sheet of paper he was working on, as if he couldn’t see very well. It was in fact pretty dark in the cafeteria, and Vanessa thought to herself that this wasn’t exactly the ideal place to be doing homework or working on a term paper.
All of a sudden the young man uttered an oath, tore up the piece of paper from his notebook, crumpled it up, and threw it down to the floor near his feet.
Vanessa scowled. Hey! What’s the idea of littering like that? Maybe the guy intended to clean up after he was finished, but she had to be sure.
She stalked over to him, picked up the paper from the floor, and, sitting down next to the guy, held up the paper in her hand and said, “What’s the meaning of this?”
The guy hadn’t noticed Vanessa sitting down at his table, so intent was he at his work. He gave her a startled stare and stammered, “What? What?”
“You need to be a little more tidy,” she said severely.
“Give me that,” he said rudely, and made an effort to snatch the paper away from her.
“No, you don’t!” she cried, holding the paper away from him. Her interest piqued, she smoothed out the sheet and gave it a glance. Now it was her turn to be startled.
“What is this?” she asked. “Are you writing poetry?”
A look of something close to terror came over the guy’s face. “Please,” he said. “Don’t read that. It’s awful. Total rubbish. Please…”
The guy seemed on the verge of tears. Vanessa now felt she’d been rude in trying to read something that really didn’t belong to her. She handed the paper back to the guy.
“You’re a poet?” she said.
The guy laughed derisively at himself. “If I am, I’m a really bad one.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. You have something else I can read? Something you don’t intend to throw away?”
The guy gazed upon Vanessa with a mixture of alarm and anticipation. His face seemed to be getting flushed. Muttering incoherently, he fished through his notebook and tore out a page and handed it to her.
This was also handwritten, but it was neat and without revisions. She interpreted it as a “fair copy”–something that the author had copied over after making all the revisions he wanted to make.
She read the poem. It was in free verse, but intense, tormented, a bit harsh, even faintly misanthropic. It reminded her a bit of Sylvia Plath.
One line of the poem was so unexpectedly poignant that she suddenly teared up. Blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, she said, “This is incredible–really moving.”
“It’s not that good,” the guy said.
“It is!” Vanessa cried, almost offended that the guy couldn’t see the value of his own work. “You need to send this to the Forun.” The Forum was the college’s student-run literary magazine.
The guy chortled cynically. “They’d never take anything like that.”
“How do you know?”
“They just won’t.”
“Well, you’ll never know unless you submit it. And if you’re not going to submit it, then I am!”
Again that look of dread. “No, please…”
As he made an attempt to take the sheet back from her, Vanessa responded with the age-old female tactic of folding up the paper and stuffing it into her bra.
The guy stopped abruptly. Vanessa realized he was too well-bred to do any harm to a woman.
“I’ll type it up and send it in,” she said with determination.
“Don’t put my name on it,” the guy said bitterly. “You can put your name on it, for all I care.”
“I’m going to put your name on it whether you like it or not. What is your name, anyway?”
It took the guy a while to say, “Sullivan.”
“What’s your first name?”
“That is my first name. I’m Sullivan James. My ditzy parents stuck me with this moniker.”
Vanessa considered for a moment. “I like it. It’s very unusual.” She got up abruptly. “Well, I’m going to submit this. You’d better give me your cellphone number so I can let you know if they take it.”
With very bad grace, Sullivan passed on his number to Vanessa.
“See ya later!” she cried happily as she rushed out of the cafeteria.
Sure enough, when she typed up the poem and sent it in, the Forum accepted it immediately. She called Sullivan at once and told him the good news.
“You have any other poems I can read?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he muttered.
“Well, can I read them or not?”
“I guess so.”
“I figure you haven’t typed them up. So maybe I could… come by your place and look them over?”
There was a dead silence on the phone, and she wondered whether she’d been too “forward.” Well, for God’s sake, this was 2021! And she wasn’t even asking the guy for a date.
At long last he gave her his address–a rooming house just off campus. They set up an appointment for her to come over the next evening.
When she got to the romming house that night, Vanessa got a better look at Sullivan and a better idea of what kind of person he was.
As he shyly let her in, she saw that he was of moderate height (five foot eight), but quite stocky–not exactly the image of the starving poet! He had shaggy black hair that seemed resistent to combing, and beneath his superficially aggressive and brooding exterior she sensed a tenderness and sensitivity that he might have been reluctant to reveal except on paper. She learned that he was, like her, a senior–and, interestingly enough, not majoring in English (he professed great disdain for the English Department) but in history. He was leaning toward going to graduate school, although perhaps with a year or two off to get a taste of “real life,” as he called it.
As she talked to him, she wondered how much “real life” he had really experienced. His parents lived in Pasadena, but he didn’t seem all that close to them. In fact, he didn’t seem all that close to anyone: he put on an act of being a crusty old recluse (at the age of twenty-one!), but Vanessa felt that that was just a cover for extreme sensitivity. He didn’t want to associate with people because he was afraid of being hurt by them.
After some idle chatter, Vanessa got down to business, asking Sullivan to show her more of his poetry. He adopted his usual air of sullen self-contempt and shuffled over to a little two-drawer file cabinet. Pulling out a thick file folder, he dumped it on the tiny desk situated along one wall of his room.
When Vanessa opened the file folder, she gasped at what she saw.
“Good Lord!” she cried, flipping through what looked like an entire ream of paper containing impeccably neat handwriting. “There must be hundreds of poems here!”
“Yeah, but most of them are rubbish,” he said lugubriously.
Vanessa was now getting angry. She actually punched him in the arm and cried, “Don’t say that! They’re probably all really good!”
Sullivan was taken aback at her physical violence, gaping at her open-mouthed. But of course he was too much of a gentleman to respond in kind. All he did was to mutter, “They’re not all good.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have taken the effort to write them out so carefully if you yourself didn’t think they were worth keeping. But why haven’t you typed them up?”
Sullivn shrugged and made a sour face. “Poetry and computers don’t mix.”
Vanessa nodded briefly. “Okay, I get that. Writing them out in longhand first is probably for the best. But if you’re going to submit them somewhere, you’ll have to type them up.”
“I’m not submitting them anywhere,” he said in glum defiance.
She looked at him keenly. “Well,” she said with intense determination, “if you’re not going to, I am.”
Another gape. “What?”
“There’s a whole book’s worth of stuff here–maybe several books. We’re going to get these ready to send out to some publisher if it kills me.”
“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard!”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “That is what we’re going to do. I’m going to read all these, and I’ll hand over to you the ones I think are really good. You’re going to arrange them in some fashion or other–you know, by theme, subject-matter, whatever. Then I’ll type them up and get them ready to submit.”