The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [29]
Maria had come easily, but Marcus (prophetically) with painful difficulty. By then they were living in a house in Belmont that challenged Vincent at every corner with its banal design and shoddy workmanship. (Vincent, the son of a contractor, was a man who knew improperly mitered trim when he saw it.) Linda wasn’t teaching, and Vincent had started an architectural practice of his own, sinking whatever money he made back into the business (as was right, she thought), leaving them little at home; and if they had any stressful times together, it was then, when babies and unpaid bills stole their good tempers. But mostly, she remembered those early years as good ones. Sitting in their small backyard in Belmont (the grill, the swing set, the plastic turtle pool), and watching Vincent plant tomatoes with the children, she would be filled with amazement that, against all the odds, this had been given to her, that she and Vincent had made this family. She could not imagine what would have become of her had she not, for she saw the alternative as only a long, throbbing headache from which there would have been little relief.
One morning, when Marcus was sleeping and Maria was at Montessori, Linda sat down at the kitchen table and wrote not a letter to herself, but a poem, another kind of letter. The poem was about windows and children and panes of glass and small muffled voices, and she found over the next few days that when she wrote and reworked the images and phrases, time passed differently, lurching ahead, so that she was often startled to look up at the clock and realize she was late to pick up Maria or that Marcus had slept too long. Her imagination began to hum, and even when she was not writing, she found herself jotting down metered lines and strange word pairings; and in general she was preoccupied. So much so that Vincent noticed and said so, and she, who for months had written in secret, got out her sheaf of papers and showed them to him. She was shredded with worry while he read them, for they revealed a side of Linda that Vincent was not familiar with and might not want to know (worse still, he might be curious about who had known this Linda, for some of the poems were about Thomas, even when they seemingly weren’t). But Vincent didn’t ask, and instead said he thought they were very fine; and he seemed genuinely impressed that his wife had secretly harbored this talent he’d known nothing about. All of which was a gift to her, for she wrote with redoubled energy, and not just when the children were away or asleep, but late into the night, pouring words onto paper and reshaping them into small objects one could hold in the mind. And Vincent never said, Don’t write these words about another man (or even later, about himself), thus freeing her from the most potent censorship there is, the fear of hurting others.
She joined a poetry workshop at night and was stupefied (and secretly heartened) by the dull and overly confessional work of those around her. Emboldened by this, she sent out her first contributions to small literary journals, all of which, in the early months, rejected her work (once misdirecting another’s letter to her, so that she was able to quip that they’d started rejecting poems she hadn’t even written). To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose to see not as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. Until one afternoon she received a letter from an editor who liked a poem and said he would publish it. He couldn’t pay her anything, he added, but he hoped she would give him the honor of being the first to put that particular verse into print. Far from minding the lack of payment,