Dear Otto

By Christopher Brookhouse

The second novel by the author of Passing Game, a story set in a privately funded workshop in an isolated Amish village.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504012379

Christopher Brookhouse

Christopher Brookhouse is the author of numerous short stories, works of fiction, and poetry. His early novel Running Out was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, Fog: The Jeffrey Stories won New Hampshire’s biennial fiction award. Brookhouse lives in Asheville, NC.

Book preview

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Dear Otto, At this moment you feel very close to me. I confessed once, didn’t I, my fantasy about sitting beside you on a plane, pretending to sleep, pretending you were a stranger, letting you touch me, working your fingers under the blanket I had draped over us because the air in the cabin was cold, then under my clothes, opening my legs just a little to let your hand slide between them. Yes, I told you. I remember your reaction. Surprise to pleasure to curiosity, the way you always reacted when my needs caught you off guard. Yes, I remember—your little smile, as you passed curiosity, became a frown. You couldn’t hide your reluctance. I wanted to answer you, to say I’m not a bad person. Of course you couldn’t hide your desires either.…

Jean is flying over Tennessee. She puts down the letter and picks up the earphones to listen to a recording of Chopin’s Preludes. She is on the evening Delta flight from Ft. Myers to Cincinnati. She is brown from her week of afternoon walks on the beach. Each morning she drove from her father-in-law’s condominium on Sanibel to visit him in a nursing home at Shell Point, a retirement village between Ft. Myers and the causeway to the island.

Jean, taking up the letter again, writes … two hours a day. That’s more time than Sloan has spent with his father in the six months since the stroke. So I’m not such a bad person, am I, Otto? Not totally selfish.…

Jean stops writing again, thinking of Sloan now, their argument over his avoiding his father. What good does it do to see him, Sloan had asked. I mean my father can’t hear me or see me. He mumbles to the wall. I’m not there.

While Sloan explained himself, he had been sitting on the deck at their house in Ohio. Beyond the shaggy spruce trees some workmen were building a platform from logs to float in the lake. The hills behind the house are steep and the sun was sinking, the deck cooling in the shadows. Jean had thought, maybe Sloan’s not talking about his father, maybe he’s talking about me. I can’t carry on a conversation either.

Sloan is the talker. Jean is the listener. Sloan is a story person. In this way, Jean acknowledges, he is like her own father, now dead for several years, who had been a physician, a large man who loved to sip whiskey and tell stories about the mountains where he had grown up. He weighed over three hundred pounds when he died. He had a thick brown beard with streaks of white in it, which children loved to tug. He enjoyed their squeals as much as they enjoyed his own baritone laughter in return. Sloan tells stories about the past that mostly concentrate on himself and include his recollections of famous people, usually actors or writers. Distractions, his novel about an undergraduate’s drug experiments and renouncing the cautious fifties, which Sloan wrote after he finished at Harvard, has stayed in print. He receives several invitations a year to lecture at colleges on how America’s children escaped their fathers’ gray flannel shadows and set off into the light of their own psychedelic worlds. Jean thinks of those worlds as anomie. She prefers order and rules. Even passion needs rules to shape its flame. As far as Sloan’s writing career goes, he’s been more successful as an editor, moving among prestigious quarterlies, and even as a teacher, something he never intended to become.

The flight attendant, wearing a brown apron over her blouse and skirt, and ready to serve supper, taps Jean’s shoulder. Jean lays the unfinished letter on the seat beside hers and slips off her earphones, adjusting them around her throat, the way a doctor might arrange a stethoscope. Do you care for a beverage? the attendant asks. Two gin martinis, Jean answers. In one glass. The attendant adorns the lap table in front of Jean with a white cloth.

Sloan doesn’t like to spend the money to fly first class. Once Sloan asked Jean why she likes first class. The free drinks?

Sloan isn’t a drinker. To his credit, Jean thinks. The attendant returns from the galley carrying Jean’s cocktail. There are only two other passengers in the compartment. I like the space, Jean explained. The last time she had travelled tourist, she was pressed against a man who didn’t use deodorant and spent the two hours of the flight engrossed in a photographic history of the German tank corps.

But space also means the distance from the earth. Jean adores flying. She loves the cold, clear blue that has given way to amber and purple. Soon the plane will be over the spine of the Smokies. She could have booked an earlier flight direct to Columbus, her destination, but then she would have missed watching twilight shining on the rivers and mountain-tops while darkness fills the valleys. Her father’s family had emigrated from England and settled in these mountains. There are two towns, one in Tennessee and one in North Carolina, named after her father’s people. Although she has never visited either town, Jean feels pleasure flying over the mountains, a connection to a community where her name might be familiar to strangers and if she came there they would welcome her and take her in.

Jean thinks maybe she’ll order wine with her meal. That won’t be too much to drink. Not if she doesn’t have anything during the wait in Cincinnati to board the Columbus plane. She has an hour drive from the Columbus airport to home. Narrow, country roads that rise and dip and turn unexpectedly. Jean wonders if the first stage of becoming aware of drinking too much is the fear of having an accident, being arrested. Exposed. No, Sloan isn’t the drinker, she is. The line between what’s reasonable and what isn’t is difficult to determine. She would grant from a medical point of view more than two ounces of alcohol a day is bad and she’s crossed that line, but it’s the other one she doesn’t think she’s violated. She doesn’t neglect her responsibilities. When the attendant brings the meal, Jean asks for wine and coffee.

The roll and salad are adequate, the meat is overcooked, but the glazed carrots are tasty. Jean is careful about her diet. She believes in vitamins. She uses extra garlic and onions to trigger her immune system. It appalls her to think that several times each day a normal cell mutates into a cancerous one. Maybe her body won’t betray her. It’s destroying the mutant cells before they grow uncontrollably into tumors. She eats meat once a week. The chicken she serves is skinless. She puts a lot of spinach in her salads and steams her vegetables. She walks or swims. Does fifty sit-ups a day. Has an exercise bike. She nags Sloan into finding handball partners and he’s given up the designer ice creams he loves, the kinds loaded with butterfat. At least he says he’s taken her advice. Sloan spends every other week in Boston teaching his writing seminar, part of a program for continuing education cosponsored by Boston University and the Hopkins Foundation. Teaching is fairly new for Sloan, who always wanted to keep his distance from academics, although the quarterlies he’s edited over the years have been affiliated with colleges. He was a writer, he proclaimed. Editing paid the bills. Gradually, though, students sought him out and he agreed to discuss their fiction one night a week at home. He felt great pride and usefulness when one of them sold a story to Esquire. The motorcycle story. Originally the author had written about the adventures of two men. Make them women, Sloan had suggested. Skeptical, the author rewrote the story. When it sold he thought Sloan was a genius. Over the years Sloan’s writers have done well and Sloan has been in demand at Breadloaf and La Jolla and other writing conferences. Sloan’s connection with his sister, a literary agent, hasn’t hurt his credentials either.

So far none of his older writers in the Boston seminar have sold anything. Sloan says the older students have read more and take advice well, but they don’t take chances. They want to write something perfect before sending it out. They have high standards. They always remember a famous writer who’s written a story like theirs and written it better. They’re easily discouraged. One or two had only one story in them and have finished it and dropped out. Jean remembers her first piano teacher, who gave lessons to a woman who must have been seventy. She only wanted to learn enough to play her favorite hymn. When she played it, all the notes right, she was happy. She never played the piece again nor desired to learn another.

The time Jean told Sloan about the woman, he had smiled wistfully, his lower lip pulling down the top of his mouth, an expression that made Jean think of a child on the verge of tears. The woman knew when to quit, he remarked. Jean guessed he was referring to himself, the failure of the two manuscripts he’d written after Distractions. Neither of them had found a publisher. He still kept them, on the shelf above his desk in his office, in their black spring binders, lined up between a first printing of Distractions and Ask Not, a short, trashy (Sloan’s word) book about a love affair in academe. Claire, Sloan’s sister, had just begun her career as a literary agent when she sold the manuscript for him, now a dozen years ago. Sloan made his comment about the hymn player before Ask Not had found a publisher. Jean was happy for Sloan. The failure of the other manuscripts had trimmed his arrogance and tempered him and she thought he would be content with the success of publishing another novel regardless of its reception. The reviews were generally good. The reviewers found the work a witty, sometimes mordant, satire on an idealistic, academic sort who is completely taken in by a wealthy, ruthless coed. The novel was compared to Malamud’s A New Life and Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution. In Jean’s mind, however, the book raised certain questions. The coed was remarkably like Claire, certain mannerisms in particular, but especially in a devotion to fashion, to clothes, to the latest styles. Claire spent thousands of dollars a year on what she wore.

Claire was in love with buying power. She had money. Sloan did not. As siblings both were descendants of Thomas Hopkins, an enormously successful fur trader and speculator; the Hopkins fortune, by the time it reached Claire’s mother, was settled largely in the Hopkins Foundation. The rest was bequeathed to any and all surviving female children. A meager sum remained for any male children. Claire was always destined to have a permanent seat on the Foundation’s board of directors. In Jean’s opinion, Claire acquired a partnership in a literary agency to expand her buying power. Her little projects using Foundation money weren’t enough.

Jean read Sloan’s novel this way: Sloan had written a story, a kind of Freudian fiction, about a young woman who dominates and eventually humiliates a professor whom she seduced. Her power over him, disregarding the age difference, was a comment on the power of Sloan’s mother over his father. At the same time Sloan was the professor and the young woman was Claire. Intellectual incest. He was peeling off the designs of Chanel and Dior, laying bare the destructive soul underneath.

How aware Sloan might be of such interpretations, Jean didn’t know. Nor did she understand what convinced Sloan to let Claire handle the manuscript. The first time she had asked him to be his agent, he had declined on the basis of his two previous failures and his belief that he had enough friends in the publishing world from his several years as an editor to permit him to submit the book himself. He would call in some favors. Jean didn’t know when he changed his mind. She was aware of two rejections. Claire, however, found a publisher right away. Had Sloan thought Ask Not was going to be another work forever doomed to the confinement of black spring binders and the dust of his shelf? Had he handed over the manuscript to Claire to teach her a lesson, thereby gaining for himself satisfaction from her failure? Claire could turn anyone’s life upside down.

Jean finishes her wine and coffee. She closes her eyes, momentarily content, but that changes. The other question suggested by Ask Not had been voiced by Claire, although she assumed Jean had considered it already since the question was so immediately obvious. Jean hadn’t though, hadn’t wondered if Sloan was faithful. No, I really never did, Jean had said. Claire and Jean were drinking iced tea, Jean cross-legged on the exercise mat, dressed in her damp leotard, having finished her sit-ups, and Claire in black tights, with slashes of blue and purple, perched on the exercise bike that Jean dragged from the house every April so she could firm up and look across the green Virginia countryside at the same time. Sloan had been working in Charlottesville then. Claire was visiting on business, wowing Sloan’s protégés with her clothes and her stories about editors and contracts and the secret quirks of writers’ lives. She had just taken on a graduate student Sloan had