In the Country of the Young by Daniel Stern

Author:Daniel Stern [Stern, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4414-0
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-16T01:11:00+00:00

The Exchange

IT WAS THE SUMMER of the sweating streets, the summer of the silent computer, of the broken sentences, of the anxious sense of a permanent silence impending. At least that was Mizener’s summer. And into this summer she had come, to organize, to help, to distract, to save—Mizener hoped for all of these. After she had organized some of Mizener’s traditional chaos, lost drafts, misfiled letters and contracts—after he could find a paper path leading from the confused past to the anxious present, after all this, it turned out she had an urgent request of her own.

He held her off with vagueness and postponements for a week, but she was on her way out of his life and needed an answer. The Saturday before her last week she nailed him.

“So, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Mizener said. “It’s a strange idea.”

“Not really,” she said. “A lot of people in Seattle and Port Townsend are doing this.”

“Are they?”

“Mentors are a big thing in the Pacific Northwest.”

Tamar had come to Mizener from Port Arthur, through a series of exotic maneuvers—poor Jack Lash’s wife had known her ex-husband, and her sudden need for a three-month job meshed exactly with his need for an assistant. She was a touch exotic, herself. For example, leotards though she had to be at least thirty. Purple, tan, and gold leotards, eyes that slanted for no apparent reason, a cupid’s mouth sucking ceaselessly on a bottle of Gatorade. She used to play the lute—she proudly showed him the lute-callous on her index finger. And there was her name: Tamar, chosen, she told him carefully, from a poem. It was not clear if it was parent-chosen or self-chosen. Or if she knew that Tamar had lived in the Bible before arriving in a poem.

She finished labeling a file and slid it into the drawer. The file drawer hissed shut.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s your current stories file. You’re up to date.”

“Thanks.” He was stalling.

“So what do you think?” She closed the space between them and stood shifting her weight, not all that much of it. Mizener, who was always careful to tell the reader details like his characters’ height and weight, would have guessed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. She reached up on tiptoe to replace a book on the shelf next to Mizener’s face; a mix of sweat and perfume arrived in the hot, humid air.

“Look, I don’t want to push you,” Tamar said. “But I’ve saved some money from these secretarial gigs—and my fiction writing is important to me. I must have spent two thousand dollars on workshops this year. I’m workshopped up to here. I’d rather spend my money this way—and I think you’d be a terrific mentor.”

“It’s the idea of being paid to be a mentor …”

“It would be a favor to me, actually.” She was relentless.

“Well,” Mizener said. “That’s sort of my problem. Money attached to favors—you see what I mean.”

She shut her eyes suddenly. He’d noticed that when doing frustrating tasks,

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