The Paris Review - Fall 2016

a week for an exhibition of his drawings at a local gallery. (Well, “exhibition,”
“gallery”—his work was being featured in the basement of the camera
store in downtown Missoula.) She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be
worried about running into her, that she no longer had any loose feelings
about the breakup, that she thought it would be nice to have a drink even, if
he found himself with some time on his hands. But these thoughts wouldn’t
form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she
wasn’t sure they were true. She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their
final months together, and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for
a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass.
Her newish man, a mannish boy, was named Cal, for the baseball player,
he claimed, though Cal Ripken would have only been in his second season
when he was born, so it was probably a lie, like Hillary Clinton naming
herself after the Everest climber. Anyway, he was from Baltimore originally,
or so he claimed. Like many of the men she knew in Missoula, he was a dog
trainer, novelist, and organic-grocery-store employee. His sweaters had moth
holes in them. He rolled his own cigarettes. His novels weren’t technically
self-published, but only because one of his friends in town printed and distributed
them. His friend’s service fee was mostly offset by the handful of
sales Cal made at his readings, which were attended with shrugging obligation
by his friends and the town’s mostly elderly patrons of the arts. There
was, in fact, a reading that night at Marlowe’s Books for his latest opus, a
four-hundred-page novel set in Butte on New Year’s Eve, 1899.
It wasn’t ideal to date a bad—or, okay, flagrantly mediocre—writer, but
it wasn’t as terrible as she’d worried it might be. Cal had decent, if very male,
taste in books (Bolaño, Roth, David Foster Wallace) and wasn’t aggressively
dumb about things most of the time. He also, blessedly, lacked ambition;
he didn’t seem too stressed out during the composition of his books, and
he didn’t outwardly worry about the fact that no one outside of Montana,
and few people within it, would ever read them. He was smart enough not
to push it, and that counted for something. And frankly, she wasn’t in a
great position to judge his work or his choices, given her own life situation
(a polite euphemism for depressed and barely employed, that), but she did
know what was good and what wasn’t. This hadn’t blossomed into an ethical
dilemma yet, she didn’t think. Politeness and desire and taste did not all
have to be mutually exclusive. And maybe it was his lack of anxiety about
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