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After the last one, Billy had promised herself not to get involved with another writer. But it was hard, living in Iowa City. There was the famous writing school and it was a small town.
She fell in love with Ham from afar. She started to attend poetry readings though she hated them. His poems, she could tell, were bad. She listened intently, however, her ears straining for any hint of voluptuousness or sensuality. But as far as she could tell, his poems were about buildings: concrete, and tarp blowing in the wind, and steel and construction. The word “steel” excited her whenever he said it. She wondered if, underneath it all, it could be about love. Poetry seemed to be terribly unsuccessful when it wasn’t. Like clothing not meant to be worn.
She spoke to him for the first time that spring.
“I’ve seen you around,” he said. They were ordering a drink at the counter at George’s.
She smiled up into his face.
The sex was fine. He was not completely selfish, nor was he scarily eager to do anything to her, as her previous writer had been. Ham performed like a jock, like he would be called a pussy from abstaining from giving oral sex. He performed, in fact, like people were cheering him on from the sidelines. Once or twice, he gave these audiences a nod to the left and to the right. There was, however, a decided lack of passion in his amorous movements. He attacked a steak with more intention and relish, for example.
Steaks she cooked for him in her large studio apartment, scenting all the soft furniture and her clothes with the smell of fat and ash. The steaks were their major bond. She cooked them just how he liked them. And though she explained the two steps to him—two minutes on each side, and a minute to render the fat—he claimed that they didn’t come out right when he made them.
She even gave him free dental work. She was a dentist and she had her own little practice in a beautiful brownstone she owned downtown. He didn’t think of paying. He just opened his mouth wide, after having his fill of nitrous oxide.
But the worst part of dating Ham was the way he bent over his little notebook, scribbling nonsense. It would have been so much better if he used a laptop. Sitting across from him at a café while he slid his large hand across his tiny notebook humiliated her. It would be one thing if he were writing masterpieces. But he was still writing poems about buildings. He explained it to her as a metaphor for the construction and deconstruction of the self. Whenever he did this, she blinked at him like a goldfish, trying to convey how much she didn’t care. But he was merciless in trying to get her to understand. If only she could understand, she would like it.
It was a brutally hot summer. By September, Billy had nearly lost her mind. She couldn’t sleep. She felt like she was no longer a body but a dripping, amorphous pile, like the gunk in the kitchen drain. She even thought of going back to her parents’ in their gloriously cold building, in New York, but didn’t, because she hated them. Instead, she turned her fury towards Ham. If she couldn’t escape the heat, she would escape him.
She’d wait for him to finish his latest cycle of poems, a series of linked sonnets that he said would become his first book. “Last one,” he would say, looking up from his tiny notebook. But she saw that it was never-ending, and that she could wait an entire lifetime without him finishing. There was a big reading coming up. A literary agent was going to be there, a big one from New York. And though she knew that she was coming for the fiction writers—Poetry was dead—she would humor him. She didn’t want Ham to be able to say that she had ruined his chances.
The writing school, it seemed, put together a fairly respectable affair for the agent. It wasn’t at a bar, like usual. It happened at the school, in a brightly lit library. The teachers at the school introduced the student writers with embarrassing gusto. The fiction writer who went first read a story about a man in love with a horse. The poetess after him rhymed and had beautiful metaphors about love. Then walked up a man Billy had never seen before: an exotic, tanned vixen with a leather jacket. He had an accent. International, she thought. From Argentina? Spain? Egypt? She couldn’t tell.
Billy and Ham walked home together. He had nearly moved into her place. He kept his stack of tiny notebooks on the bedside table that he now called his own. The night was temperate and perfect. Ham pat his stomach. “I’m hungry,” he said.
She had waited for him to talk to the agent, who kept touching him on the arm. Billy refrained from telling him that she only wanted to sleep with him.
Now Ham was trying to tell Billy that this literary agent told him to send her more of his work. She turned to him, her face simpering with kindness.
“Don’t write for that, sweetie, you’ll ruin yourself.”
“Of course,” Ham said. But he was nearly floating off the ground with hope.
“Does she take on poets?”
“She said my style was a perfect fit.”
“I’m sure she did,” Billy muttered. “But does she publish any poetry?”
“Mmhmm.”
She saw him slide his tiny notebook from his pocket. She put on a single steak and looked at him leaning over his lap, scribbling. “I wanted to say,” she said, “listen to me.”
He grimaced and went on writing. She took the steak off and let it rest on her wooden chopping board. She poked it with her finger and licked the salt off. “This isn’t working anymore,” she said.
“I was thinking we could visit your parents for Thanksgiving,” he said. “I want to meet them. And I could deliver my manuscript to the agent in person.”
Billy smiled. Sooner or later, they all wanted to meet her parents. The whole town knew who her parents were. That’s why she got invited to the parties, even though she wasn’t a writer.
“You’re not listening to me, honey. I’m breaking up with you.”
She tried to be patient as he packed. He hopelessly fingered her sweaters in the closet, hoping to find his own. But she had already stored his beneath the bed.
“I’ll find them and give them to you,” she said, with a tone that made him straighten up and go towards the door. “Don’t you want to take your little poem books?”
“I can’t carry them all now. I’ll get them soon,” he said.
Billy shrugged. As she was closing the door, Ham stuck his hand through. “Billy,” he said, “won’t you give my manuscript to your mother? I mean, she’s gotten the goddamned Pulitzer Prize in poetry for god’s sakes.”
Through the sliver of door, she could see his bright blue eye shining. He had not retracted his arm. It was quite brazen, the way they all said it, as if they were the first to think of it. They were all the same at the end of the day—writers. Helpless and conniving and self-centered, just like her mother, who was famous and awful.
“She doesn’t read anyone living, actually.”
She pressed on the door until he withdrew his hand.
“Just send her the little book! The one on top,” he shouted through the door.
The next day she canceled all her appointments and took up her court in the fancy tobacco shop, where all the writers ended up. Around two, the international writer from the night before slunk into a table, with a stack of books under his arm. Billy was delighted to see him take out a laptop. He ordered his coffee and cigarettes with a delicious accent. She caught his eye and smiled.
“You look familiar,” he said. “You were at the reading last night, right?”
“You were amazing,” she said.
“Yes, I saw you with that tall poet. He was very good. He’ll be someone one day.”
“Him?” Billy smiled her dazzling white smile. When she smiled, she looked like a shark, a New York shark, baring its teeth before opening wide. “Oh, he’s not talented like you,” she said. With glacial calm, she made her way towards his table. You had to take things slow in Iowa.
Christine Kwon is the author of A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue (Southeast Missouri State University Press 2023), which won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, Louisiana Literature, and X-R-A-Y. She lives in New Orleans. Read more at christinekwonwrites.com.