His own story was praised for the occasional good sentence and criticized for its lack of structure. The best part of it was a description that Joe copied from memory, a late evening with Daisy. "Don't hold back," she had said. He had begun to shake in her arms, deep uncontrollable shaking that took him all the way back to some wordless time when he was a baby. Daisy held him until he was reborn as a man, clean as the sun, beyond fear. No one in the group mentioned this scene, but several of the women looked at him thoughtfully.
One night Joe heard voices in the living room and stumbled out half asleep to see what was happening. Eugenie and Jamie were close together on the couch. He excused himself and went back to bed. Two days later, he came back after a reading, and there was Jamie in the center of the living room, weaving slightly, holding a tennis racquet. "You have to—feel it," he said, flexing his wrist. "Like a friend."
"Oh, I understand," Eugenie said, her face flushed and happy. "Like my cello." Joe slipped by, closed his bedroom door, and put his head between two pillows.
The days blurred together. Jamie was more and more out of it. When it came time to leave, Walter and Eva, a cheerful recovering alcoholic who had been in Joe's workshop, helped scrape Jamie's stuff together. After a tearful farewell from Eugenie, they assisted Jamie into the rental car.
"Eugenie is facing major heartbreak, the stuff of literature," Eva said.
"Eugenie thinks I'm Joseph Conrad," Jamie explained apologetically, sprawled against the side window. As they passed Eglin Air Force Base, two F-16's thundered up, up, and away. "Looka those beauties, pulling 6 g's," he said.
When they parted at the terminal, Eva surprised Joe with a kiss. She had a long-time lover in Vermont. Or didn't she? It was too late for Joe to figure it out. He boarded his plane feeling that, in his single-minded pursuit of fiction, he had missed a good person.
Roland had assigned him a long reading list of contemporary stories and French criticism. "Some of this is a little esoteric. You can handle it," he said. Roland was impressed that Joe had made a living as an independent computer programmer. Joe was to mail in a criticism of each book along with short stories of his own.
There was a lot to sort through. Cleo, who had written about the gay woman, had impressed him. She had short black hair, deep brown eyes that were intelligent and sympathetic, and a clear spirit. She reminded him of Maxie's arrowhead in its Kauri wood box. "Am I missing something here?" Eva had said in Joe's ear one afternoon. "Is she friggin beautiful, or what?"
"Friggin beautiful," Joe said. "Like her writing."