Sketch № 4: Round Table Salon and Saviors
One year ago this week, an article appeared in The Applewood Timber that began:
The rest of the world is moving from the Information Age into the Experience Age, even as we actually experience less and less and leave more encounters and interactions to our avatars, screen names, and online personas. But Applewood, as always, is different. With the recent boom of artist collectives, live music venues, and salons for the new generation of political and academic intelligentsia, our town is reveling in its own age — its Imagination Age. The creative and the cutting edge, the inventive and innovative, the good, the bad, the utterly confusing: as long as it’s interesting and authentic, all of it is welcome these days in Applewood’s heart.
Then four weeks ago, little Applewood, Connecticut, was rocked by an unprecedented 7.2 earthquake, which was nothing compared to the strange occurrences that have been popping up like weeds since. Aside from cracked streets and damaged utilities, there are unexplained illnesses, rumors of supernatural events, and the “rot”: lawns dried to straw overnight; most houses and businesses, inside and out, showed decay within hours, their paint peeling, their wood molding, as though a plague of sorts consumed them.
Applewood’s Imagination Age has withered into a base Survival Age.
Except for Roscoe Belesprit’s writing salon.
Ever since I arrived in town and started a vigilant watch at the Café Confictura for all things Quake related, Roscoe’s salon is one of the main groups I’ve wanted to observe. Each Wednesday, they go into the back room, the Riverview Room, and sit at a round table, like a half-pint version of King Arthur’s. I’m told that before the Quake, the seven salon members Roscoe had assembled over the past few years fell into the “academic intelligentsia” the Timber article mentioned, and in fact were the intelligentsia-est of them all.
Beginning the day after the Quake, though, these young men and women went from quoting poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and obscure lines of Shakespeare to hardly being able to properly spell Renaissance and Shakespeare. Over the last few weeks, Dr. Graham Teek — who, I’ve since learned, seems to be the only doctor in town taking the “Quake illnesses” seriously as their own new breed of ailment — has studied the salon’s apparent brain fog. He is as alarmed about it as he is about Syndrome 43: another Quake illness that has killed half a dozen people so far, and afflicted about a dozen more, including the owner of the Café Confictura, Mrs. Creaverton.
So far, the brain fog seems to have only affected Roscoe’s salon members. Not Roscoe, and not anyone else in town.
This past Wednesday evening at seven sharp, I settled with my raspberry latte in the Riverview Room off to the side of the salon’s round table. Roscoe gave me hard-earned permission to observe the discussion, but I didn’t want to press my luck by assuming to sit among the circle. The group filtered in a little at a time: Clarke, Brandon, and Allie on their own, then Portia and Miguel together, and finally Kaiya and Samantha. Some gave shy glances to my wave, others gave me unsure once-overs. Allie and Clarke both smiled.
“Right,” said Roscoe, sweeping in after everyone had sat down and pulled out various notebooks or tablets. He whisked his soft attaché case onto the table and took his own seat. “Portia? Shall we begin with you?” he asked as he took out his own materials.
Portia is about twenty-three, she wears her jet hair in chin-length natural twists, and she’s got a bone structure that looks like it was chiseled by Michelangelo. At the moment, her striking face was turned toward the vast picture window that overlooks the Housatonic. It rushes on the other side of the café’s backyard and makes for a mesmerizing scene.
Following Portia’s gaze, Roscoe raised his voice a touch and tried to reach her literary side: “A lit hearth feels warmer when, just beyond, there thrashes the cold of nature’s current. Dichotomy adds dimension to any experience, and more dimension is always the writer’s pursuit.”
My guess is he wanted some equally deep thought about the rush of the river in response. But all he got from Portia was a blank look. “Huh?” she said, and a flash of sadness crossed Roscoe’s face.
“How about you just share your work?” he asked.
“I didn’t have time to do it,” she said.
“What work?” I couldn’t help asking.
Roscoe sighed at me, possibly for my disruption, possibly because I exist. He’s not fond of bloggers, and I’ve earned only a modicum of respect from him. He replied, “We’ve gone back to Writing 101, hoping that a refresher in the basics will clear this brain fog. This week, the salon has taken inspiration from the old Reader’s Digest ‘Most Unforgettable Character’ series to create both a character and the essayist learning about that character.”
Blond-haired, black-eyed Brandon (actually, his brown eyes are so dark they just seem black) leaned his chair back precariously on its two hind legs. “Portia’s too good for us,” he said with sarcasm. “She doesn’t have to keep deadlines like the rest of us lowly humans.”
“Well, I did publish in Ploughshares at sixteen years old,” she sneered. “So there’s that.”
“Spell Ploughshares for me, please, Portia,” said Roscoe.
“P-l-o-w-shares,” she rattled off. Roscoe stared at her. With more humility, she said, “That’s not right, is it?”
“No,” he said. “Why didn’t you have time to write anything? Did you even start brainstorming about a character? Anything?”
“Pastor Sweeney said I need to spend all my extra time helping my family pay for repairs from the rot,” she said. “We got the quote from the contractor. Mom and Dad both got laid off after the Quake.” She shrugged. “It’s still my house too, and obviously my literary career’s on hold, so I picked up work with the contractor.”
This deepened the ever-present furrow in Roscoe’s brow. “And you have no down time anymore?”
“I mean, I do, but I’m so tired. All I could do when I got home was watch reruns of The Price Is Right on Pluto TV,” she said. “I’m a pretty good bidder, too. I won a sewing machine, a hope chest, the ugliest pair of recliners you’ve ever seen, and a Cadillac. There was this lady, Althea. I was playing along with her. She was, like, I don’t know, eighty years old or something, and she was on her honeymoon, and she was so nervous she couldn’t remember the name of the dog she had spayed in Bob Barker’s honor.”
Roscoe’s hands shot out to her like a precious jewel had just appeared for him to grasp. “Why didn’t you write about her?”
“Oh,” said Portia. “Well, this was, like, 1984, so I don’t think Althea’s with us anymore.”
“That’s not . . .” he started, then said, “She could have lived on through your essay.”
“Maybe,” she said distantly, and she looked out the window again. “I missed it,” she said. “I wanted to write. Even if it was bad . . .” She turned to Roscoe. “‘Were’ bad?”
He said, “‘Had been’ bad, in that case, but we’ll review the subjunctive mood this week. And I’d advise you to heed your inclination to write.”
“But I’m on the schedule for overtime again next week.”
“Portia . . . Everyone.
The pressure to put immediate profit before enduring art has always been constant and severe,”
said Roscoe. As he spoke, his gaze, travelling around the table, rested on each member in turn. “In times of crisis, it is more so. I don’t know if this town will survive the fallout of the Quake. I do know that if it does, it will be in no small part due to the role you, and those like you, will contribute. Not as assistants, or physical laborers, but as the equally essential artists and thinkers. You will inspire the better angels of beauty and civility, you will record this history through the nuanced emotions of the people, you will hold those liable to account.
You will salve the wounds of damaged souls.”
Once more, he focused on Portia. “If ever my words rang true for you, hear them cry out now.”
Her eyes damp, she nodded fiercely at him, and a broad grin broke out. “I will,” she said, and she lifted her chin. “And I’ll tell Pastor Sweeney tomorrow that my skills are needed elsewhere.”
Roscoe gave a nod of approval, and he moved on to Clarke’s Most Unforgettable Character.
Two days later, a young man came by the café with a bunch of fliers, and he asked Mrs. Creaverton if he could leave them at the counter for her customers.
“Neighborhood meeting,” she read, Violet peering over her shoulder. “Sweeney’s church. Tuesday. ‘To address the crises of the Quake and the apathetic youth refusing to help our hardworking Applewoodians during this difficult time.’”
“My, my,” Mrs. C said. “Sounds like Pastor Sweeney has found a new enemy.”
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This and any related blog posts are works of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any reference to living or dead public figures, entities, places, events, and the like, are of a fictional, opinioned, and/or parodic nature. No healthcare professionals have been consulted in writing this. Any advice given or inferred is anecdotal and used at your own risk. Consult your doctor in all healthcare matters.
Clarissa J. Markiewicz is the author of Christmas In Whimsy — a heartwarming, fun novel readers compare to Hallmark Christmas movies, and recipient of Readers’ Favorite 5-star Seal — and the genre-bending new-age mystery The Paramour Pawn.
