19. Correspondence Course

Lana got home from shopping in town. She had two more days of Scott-free life. She put her bags down, and flopped on the couch to check her email. There were two, one from a person named Julian Gray, a stranger who’d commented on one of the “Connections” posts, and the other from Lisa, who she’d just seen at a café a few hours ago. She peeked at Lisa first:
“Hey sweetness. Have you looked at Facebook lately? You might want to check it out. Amy’s getting quite the like volume. Also, it might be a good idea to get a stat counter on that blog.”
Obeying instructions, she aimed her browser at Facebook. Nothing seemed amiss. There was nothing to see. A few messages from old friends and new, but other than that, she had no idea what Lisa was talking about. As luck would have it, nobody, except now for Lisa, had thought to share Amy with Lana.
Lana emailed Lisa back,
“Nothing out of the ordinary on Facebook. What are you seeing that I’m not seeing?”
She then turned her attention to this Gray dude.

Oh. My. God. Her god had blessed her with an intelligent, even intellectual fan, an actual Professor of Literature, the very embodiment of her favorite fantasy. Yikes! Yippee. She got up from the couch and paced. For a moment she wasn’t thinking straight. She had to come back with a nice, warm, welcoming reply. She automatically smoothed her dress. She went to a mirror in the hall and looked at herself. She was grinning from ear to ear. She floated into her kitchen and hit the booze locker. This called for a martini, for sure. As she poured and mixed, she composed a reply to her off duty professor. Since her Amy blog didn’t permit commenting, it was something of a novelty to be hearing from her readership. Her feedback had been coming from her enthusiastic, but relatively narrow circle of friends. Her father was a big fan, but maybe he didn’t count. (Though certainly, she amended the thought, he counted a great deal.) Her friends were smart people, certainly, but they were not literary people. Scott was not a reader of literature. His relationship to the Arts was one of out and out animosity. He considered artists to be blights on society, pathological cases of those who had compulsions and worse. Her longing for some sort of acknowledgement had been long thwarted. Every endeavor she whole-heartedly approached had been frustrated or denied. Now, with this attempt to reach out on a blog, to expand the blogging activity in a more civic dimension, she had hook a… She was going to say “fish,” but hit the pause button. Who was this guy? Well, whoever he was, the comment had to be rewarded and a conversation proffered. The truth would work its way out from that.

Drink at hand, back on the couch, she set to work. Unlike Julian, Lana needed just the one draft to tempt the professor:

“Oh my! Thank you so much for the kind words, sir.

I have never been as at a loss for them as I am right now. I am honored to have been the subject of a classroom discussion. I hope the students were not put off that I am as salty as any whale, ordinary or extraordinary.

I nurture my own small gifts in any way I can, but I would welcome a dialogue. If you write, and if your writing is available, please be so kind as to share. Send a link, or a PDF, or what have you.

Looking forward to getting to know you,
Amylisciously yours,
Lana Andersen, aka:
Amy Lissa.”

In an instant, this message was sent to the Professor’s email address, as provided by the “Connections” subscription. Lana replied to some comments in a threaded fashion in the comments area. Julian Gray she was keeping to herself, at least for the moment.

Back at “Harper’s,” still toiling away in the break room in humiliation, Ralph the intern tried once again to discover the mystery of Amy’s identity. As had Julian, he Googled her. His result netted Lana. Triumphantly, and well ahead of any deadlines, he had the requisite info. He trotted down the hall with it.

Julian was still mentally wrestling with the implications of what he bagan to think of as ‘Amy’s’ mistake. Two issues arose in his mind concerning this. First of all, her readership far from Parkersburg expected these hyper-intimate, breathy and breathless pieces about the gory details, whether true or not, of her personal life. They might find shopping or barhopping adventures in the Parkersburg vicinity boring or irrelevant to their interest. Second, and more significant, he thought, by abandoning her anonymity, anyone could find her and batter her with commentary. By abandoning her anonymity, the firewall behind which her ‘bird in a gilded cage’ had lived in tremulous fear of the swatting cat was now breached. Out in the light of day, faced with a potentially increasing public, could Lana keep her stunt alive? Was it, in fact, a stunt? Now that he had a name and an email address, he was able to Google and Spokeo down some information. He knew, for instance, that the woman’s full name was Lana Marietta Anderson Andrews. It was interesting that her middle name was the same as the nearby Parkersburg area township. There were plenty of naming coincidences, and were the tale a fiction, he would force himself to fix it. He could imagine for instance, making passionate love to this young woman and mistakenly calling her ‘Dana’ in the heat of the moment. There was no walling off his imagination in this regard any longer. The warmth of her reply made him respond to her physically. He could decline to act and feel ashamed of himself, but this was the fact of the matter. He learned also that her age was actually 27, not 25, and that she was born in the summer. She was listed as a Leo. So the ‘bird among the cats’ was feline herself. Her occupation was listed as paralegal. Her husband’s name was listed as Scott Cyrus Andrews, aged 34. His occupation was “salesman.” If he was a ‘flyboy,’ no mention was made of it in Spokeo. But with a name… Julian Googled “Scott Andrews Parkersburg WV,” helpless now in his pursuit of any and all information he could gather. Scott popped right up Scott owned a business called “Aviation Synergies.” Apparently, they sold aircraft parts nationwide. The business was located at Scott Field. Mystery solved. Mum’s the word. He was sitting on a powder keg of way too much information. With the two names, it was possible to obtain and address and a landline phone number. This was information he dared not use. There was etiquette, there were ethics; still, in a few moments, he was looking down at Dana and Scott’s rooftop in Google Earth.

By evening, two days before Christmas, he received her email. To the urging for a response, he responded.

“It is marvelous to hear back from you. I had no idea if you were “real.” There has been much speculation that you are a dude on account of all the aviation material. The many photos of you make it seem that if you are a male, you have gone to incredible effort to deceive.

I have never fallen for that theory. “As for me and Grandma, we believe.” (Sorry. ‘Tis the season.) I enjoyed you ‘bird among the cats’ poem enormously. Perhaps that should be e-nor-mouse-ly! You see? You’re breezy sentences have infected me. The bit about the off duty professor made my hair stand up. I am almost exactly as you describe the character. I’m probably fatter and not as sexy. Oh well, what can you do? I always took courage in the fact that Bukowski bedded many a maiden despite his potbelly. One critic went so far as to say that he accomplished this because of his gut. In any case, you made an older man feel young again, sort of. I stopped feeling like a loser in classes. You gave me my joi de vivre back.

You ask if I write. That reminds me of the story of how we “met.” I had just finished a novel. I was totally wiped out by the process, and I knew I’d written another unsellable book. I was looking around for some self-help, and somehow or other, likely via a series of links that emanated from J. A. Konrath, the dean of ebookers and blogelists, I found “Amy Tells All.” I became kind of obsessed with it. I read it top to bottom. As I say, I also used it in class once. My peers made me stop. They also made me hide my personal blog. Here’s the link to the anonymous version: http://andresamos.wordpress.com/

So, Lana, that’s a fair sample of my first drafty blather. I wish you the best of holidays, and hope that you keep writing that wonderful blog of yours.
Best,
John Julian Gray.”

He had to throw his first name in there. She’d used it, after all, in her piece! He’d be Jonathan if she preferred. The rush of first contact made him think that he’d be Mickey Mouse if she preferred. He worried that he’d been to forward. He always fretted about that. He also prepared himself for the endless wait for a response that would never come. The young do not feel obliged to respond to any stray incoming. Julian was of the generation that scrupulously answered any fan mail. In his case, it might have been because he’d never gotten any.

By now it was evening, and it was time to descend the stairs, leaving behind the bedroom where he’d been surreptitiously been plinking away to Lana/Amy, and go see what had become of Dana. The smell of schweinebraten was working its way up the stairwell.
“Hey babe, what’s up?”
“I’m cooking us up something. We can’t live on rum alone forever, you know.”
“Excellent. I’m in favor of it. Schweinebraten seems ambitious, though.”
“Eh. Not really. You just prep it while heating the oven and pop it in.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“So what have you been up to? You seem a bit distracted.”
“Oh… I was just making notes for another book.”
“Wow. You’ve had a productive year. But perhaps you, you know, might edit the last one? You never sent anything to that agent. It’s not everybody who’s willing to read a manuscript.”
“As usual, Dana, you’re right. I should at least try to read what I wrote.”
This was true. He had blown a gasket writing that damned book. It might be a good idea over the winter break, to actually see if it was any good. It might even be salvageable. He went in search of laptop. The files were all there for the opening. Over the next few days, he’d occupy himself with that.