Bargaining

A long story about a short story

This piece is part of the Fiction Symposium at the Soaring Twenties Social Club, “the home of the 2020’s artistic renaissance,” founded by Thomas J. Bevan.

It is a short story, appended by still-shorter stories about the story. Some may say that this is an essay disguised as a short story and that I am cheating. To that I say, “Pfffft.” Every word is still about the craft, and about that mythical goal we call authenticity. Thus, it remains a phantasm, through and through.

You can read another, less-meta version of this story over at Short Édition, and I’d really love it if you gave that a click. It’ll add to your appreciation of everything below, too, I think.

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I’m shivering in the woods hoping to make good on a bargain. Cold wind eats under my scarf, a loose-knit thing my wife made me years ago.¹ 

Late wife. I wear it because I miss her, and because tokens like this endear you to other broken² people. They say we’re not trying to take anyone’s place. They get us off the hook of being anything beyond enough.³

“Enough” isn’t romantic, but I’ve been on guard against forever-and-always since I first fell head-over-heels. Literally. I watched Allison⁴ in the audience during my big eight-grade clarinet solo, bowed in her direction and swan-dived off the stage, four feet onto buffed linoleum. When I watched her from the floor, shooting to her feet and touching her lips, I figured I hadn’t totally botched.⁵ 

I gave her the letter after, creased neat and sharp like always, full of homeroom memories and too many metaphors for her eyes. She avoided me for a week. Then, bunching her skirt and smiling at me while looking somewhere else, she said, “Shaun, if we’re both still alone when we’re forty, come find me. Deal?” 

People say that, right?⁶

Even if they don’t, I’m still out here over twenty years later, in this big, stupid-looking coat.

I feel a gum wrapper in my pocket, fidget and fold until it’s thick as the old letters. Come high school I always carried one in my wallet, like a salve for reckless wounds; how many people could say at sixteen they knew they wouldn’t end up alone?⁷ 

It still hurt when I got my heart broken; I still cried into cups of burnt coffee—iced and over-sugared like I deserved. Allison clutched my fingers and reminded me we still had twenty-three years and counting for screw-ups. I miss that thrum, then, in my teenage pulse—before horny and caffeinated became different feelings.

By college we were taking our coffee black and, since Ryan the fullback hadn’t moved on her yet, she was going to press the issue. I gave her my hand to squeeze and promised I’d be there on the other side of forty.

“If things don’t work out,” she said. I nodded.

Sometimes things work out. Sometimes there’s a last letter from the person who gave you permission to fail, to fall back on being enough. I crush the gum wrapper back into my pocket. I blow warm air into my hands, blink at the baby-blue sky, and bounce on my toes. 

I wonder how people would react to what I’m doing out here. I imagine them scoffing when I touch the still-pale flesh on my ring finger, this last mark of someone who shouldered all my doubts. Can’t I be angry that she drew out every promise I thought I’d never make, then disappeared? Can’t that be the explanation?⁸ I clutch her scarf, press it to my chapping lips; the knitting’s still too wide to help.⁹ 

I think she’s forgiving¹⁰ me as I tumble inside out, back to last resorts and origami letters. At this stage of my mourning (testing-and-acceptance, or depression-and-testing?), my dreams hurl me into bed with all my maybes and might-have-beens. Before I know it, I’m achy, swollen, lifting my head as though from the cold gym floor, and one shocked and tender face emerges from all the rest.¹¹ She called me months ago about Ryan, grief-addled just like me. 

All I want is for the first half of my life to take me back, tuck me in, say it’s glad I’m home.¹² 

So I’m here in the woods, still waiting for Allison, wondering if we might take a twenty-year promise too seriously. 

Because I’m sure—sure as the peeling birches, as the feeling I’ve lost in my fingers—that I’m supposed to be here. On days like this, when Allison and I were kids, we’d stare at each other under the glaring midwinter sun, thinking we might go blind. My pale green and her hazel were preferable to the sun’s tyrant yellow. We didn’t need reasons beyond that. 

If I wander east, I’ll find the leaning willow where she’d droop into my lap on summer nights and blame it on the hike. One blazing day as we waded in the lake, the current pulled her tiny frame and she reached for me to steady her. The thrill of small dangers meant she forgave me when I accidentally touched her chest. When we entered our sweltering teens, she filled out her first bikini and we made fewer mistakes,¹³ though our hands were furtive as ever. 

We’ve spent all our summers since with other people. Now back in winter, in the middle of the woods, will we each put an arm around the other and pretend we’re trying to keep warm?

I turn when I hear a car door slam. She appears from behind the tree line, crunching her way across frost-glazed ground. She waves, giving me that brilliant, full-lipped smile that hasn’t changed since we were twelve, her brown hair braided in familiar pigtails. She blinks her beacon eyes, makes me feel like I’m on the floor again. She wraps her arms around my neck and a soft kiss lands on my cheek with a happy, “It’s so good to see you.” Her touch is oddly cold just below my ear, so I take her hand in mine: she, too, is broken people. 

“You’re still wearing your ring,” I say, knowing it isn’t strange to start like this. 

She smiles at me while looking at the cold, clear band. I see the gray in her hair, the deepened laugh-lines. She is here before me, not behind; my reveries peel like paper bark. My fingers flush as the scarf warms my breath, and I’m sure of why I’m here: to learn to live with lost time.¹⁴ 

We walk for more than an hour, a three-mile circuit around the preserve. She remembers Ryan to me, to the tune of dead leaves, and I do not say a word.¹⁵ 

1. When is a story finished?

When it goes on submission? When it’s published?

When, as Paul Valéry famously said, it is by some act or accident “merely abandoned”?

“Bargaining” is the first short story I was ever paid for, 5 cents on the word, making me—by the esoteric industry standards of the time—a “professional”. I had written it on a whim in 2018, as a little exercise for a monthly creative challenge. Yet as the idea bloomed on the page, it kept plumbing deeper parts of me. I knew I had something special when, though the story was little better than a first draft with spit and polish, I had the audacity to send it off to the New Yorker and was surprised by a very kind, personalized rejection letter about a week later.

That “No” with my first name on it lit a fire in me. I was determined this thing would sell.

Yet, several more rejections later, I wondered. Did this thing really have as much potential as I thought? Up to this point, I’d probably have counted it the best thing I ever wrote. Yet I opened it back up to scrutiny, and began a long, strange process of losing myself and finding myself, ceding and claiming my voice, asking—as if for the first time—what made me me as a fiction writer.

The endnotes here are memories of that process, and of finally abandoning this story.

2. The original word here was “riven”, which I like better. A couple readers commented that “riven” wasn’t as clear or intuitive as “broken”, but neither was “broken” evocative or specific enough for what I meant. What I meant is capture in a Christian Wiman poem that relies on the word.

This choice, it turns out, would stick with me. It would be one of my first experiences with knowing I was “right”, yet bending to another’s ear anyway. This was the beginning of my realization that weaknesses in my writing had less to do with technique than with my trust in myself. The more I revised, the more specificity I ceded to a quickly-flattening general “reader”. The more I pursued publication, the more of myself I gave away to achieve it.

This one word—“riven”—indexes so much of that.

3. As above, I revised several lines here for clarity and simplicity—to get the character’s stakes and mental state on the page a little quicker. I’m very good at hiding stakes and relying on subtext, but often it’s too much of a good thing. This revision shows me becoming conscious of the problem while also remaining limited in my understanding of it.

4. So, this is where things get uncomfortable, because they get autobiographical.

In the original draft, I used the name Rowan. This is awkward, because that name now belongs to my son in my head. At the time, though, it referred rather directly to a real person from my past, and about all the feelings their memory still evoked in me. Across all my drafts, until this one, that name represents a plurality of relationships, experiences, and infatuations from the first twenty years of my life.

Maybe there’s real poetry in the way my son has redeemed the name “Rowan”. It now names a new kind of obsession, while in this story it represents a form of cope.

On another note, the name didn’t test well with readers, on account of being gender neutral and thus creating confusion about the relationship.

5. This still makes me laugh, because it’s an exaggerated real-life event. My then-crush was in the audience during my clarinet solo and, when I bowed while looking at them, I plowed my head right into a music stand.

Ah, youth, &c &c.

6. I heard these words a lot, even as feedback. To some readers, the device felt contrived, a little childish and unbelievable. But that’s the thing about art imitating life and truth being stranger than fiction: this did happen to me. We did take it not-not-seriously for several years.

It took me a long time to realize that this moment lived rent-free in my head as a kind of stake, a secret belief that I could turn back time, change decisions, erase regrets. Writing this story very much involved confronting that idea, digging it up and discarding it.

It’s one of the many reasons why this story’s name is inspired by the “stages of grief.”

7. A reader said I needed more sense details between the narrator’s reveries. I like them. I wish they’d made it into the “canonical” version.

8. I was told that the phantom “wife” in the old versions of this story didn’t have enough of a presence, making the narrator seem like a bit of an ass. This always bothered me, because it was true, and I’m not sure I fixed that problem here. So much complexity and so many motives get left out when you’re trying to keep things under 1000 words. Just like in real life, subtext can be a bitch.

9. I love this detail, and the many things it might mean. What is says about the physical scarf, the wornness of the object, and what its presence in this scene means about ambivalent human hearts. There’s a boldness to this character I respect; he is willing to take the memory of his wife with him into his new attempt at love. He has the courage to believe she’d hope this for him. He comes to believe something different, by the end, but there’s still an optimism in the whole comportment that I don’t naturally share with these characters.

10. I don’t actually know if I meant “forgiving” or “forgiven” here. I like the present-tense. The emphasis on process. On her accompanying him, even out here into the snowy woods. This story could be about that, as much as it could be about anything else.

11. My influences really shine in these lines. I was heavily listening to The National while writing this. In fact, the whole story is inspired by one line off their song, “Demons”: I am secretly in love with / everyone that I grew up with. More on that in n14.

12. One of the best, most honest lines I think I’ve written.

13. These were awkward passages to write, yet they’re still very meaningful to me. There’s a feeling I still feel very in-tune with across my boyhood, something different from a “sexual awakening” though probably still part of it. Between innocence and desire, there is a carelessness which is also a kind of intimacy, a prelude to romance that doesn’t really understand itself. I don’t think I’m describing it well here, or in the original lines. They remain as awkward and adolescent as the feeling itself.

14. The narrator’s insight here is the biggest change I made to the last version of this story. The other versions end much more abruptly, and one of my best readers wanted a bit more closure.

Here, the narrator accepts that he is moving too quickly through the grieving process, and relents in his pursuit of Allison so that they can both grieve together. The possibility of rekindled romance is left on the table, but it isn’t the point. And because it’s not the point, I retain a real affection and preference for the old ending—though this one, I’ll admit, has a lot going for it. For one, it makes it harder to interpret Allison as a “villain” stringing the narrator along, a reading of the old version which was common enough to surprise me.

The point of this story has always been, to me, the rude awakening that your past isn’t actually waiting for you to go back to it. All those things have moved on without you. I may be “secretly in love with / everyone that I grew up with,” but they are not who they were, and my desires are not for them but for something else. The only way out is forward, and this lucidity can only come if the past properly explodes, which it does so with a kind of cold suddenness in the published version. It’s gentler in this version, and the narrator faces it with more dignity than dumbness. There’s much to love in both, I think.

In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it.

15. We’ve all, I’m sure, heard the bold part of this quote, perhaps attributed to someone other than Valéry. I had to hunt up the original source. It’s eerily apt for this story, and what ultimately came of it.

The version above is the most recent version, finished in the summer of 2020 while the original draft was under review at Short Édition. After relentless revision and reimagination, a dozen more rounds of critique from half a dozen more readers, I prepared to ask the editors if I might withdraw the old submission and sub in this one.

That same day I got an email. They loved the story.

The original. The first draft.

They wanted to print it.

“A sort of accident,” Valéry says, “comparable to a letting-go.”

The story of this story sticks with me, not just because the elation of my first professionally-paid piece of fiction lives in my mind forever.

I tore myself open for these revisions, after all, and until now only a handful of people have seen them. I undertook a real audit of myself and my craft to get this version of the story. I learned to ask what it really means to trust myself as an artist, to have standards only I can judge. I also learned that I didn’t have those standards, and didn’t really know how to have them. I did not yet know how to “be myself” as a writer. I still don’t, to be honest, though I think I’m getting closer.

It is a gentle irony that the rawest and realest version of this story got published. It is the version I “understand” the least, that has the least artifictional distance between my being and its pages. To some of you, that might validate your own ideas about poetic genius. To others, it might show you just what a crap shoot the publishing game is, frustrating or liberating you accordingly.

To me, it remains a mystery. A mystery so deep that, two years after I got paid for this story, I am still pulling it off the shelf and wondering what makes it tick. Success, it turns out, does not guarantee that we will close the book on anything, least of all our doubts, our questions, our unfinished business.

Of this, we can only let go.

“In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned.”