Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. This week, we’ll conclude our serialization of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint. Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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Jessica thought herself an age where the actual and affected carapace ought to be discarded—there was something past independence to be had that it shielded against—but it still engaged, involuntarily, in response to honesty, if not in response to compliment or leer or condescension. His gaze was not that gaze, or not only. She wanted to see him again. It was supposed to be the year of firsts.
Jason drove this time and they got dinner in Culver City, afterwards driving to a bluff south of the marina where the coast stretches north and the silent sprawling city and the boats navigate east into the harbor and the planes land west, disappearing over their shoulders to grip the unseen runway before the Pacific.
Do you find it rewarding, he asked her, meaning her work.
I do, she answered, but then, there’s something to be said for doing difficult things. Do you ever worry you are no longer becoming something?
There’s some kind of bad pun a quicker man would deploy here.
I’m serious.
I do, he said after a pause. I mean I understand what you mean, that is. You mean that you feel you have some responsibility, for your patients? For your profession?
No. For myself. For my…I don’t know. For my position. Is that totally pompous?
I don’t think so. You feel that you have to keep evolving.
Maybe. But I asked you if you feel that way, she said.
Do I feel like I have to keep becoming something? I have never thought of it in exactly those terms, but I do think one has to take the opportunities that come along. Or that it would be a missed opportunity if you didn’t.
I think what I am saying is that I hate the feeling like this is all chance and that there were too many things that fell in my favor and that if I had to do it again, I would fail. I know this sounds dramatic, I’m not at the end of my rope or crazy, don’t worry.
What do you mean do it again?
I mean. What if you lost everything. If you had no money, no possessions, basically living on the street level. Destitute. And had to hack your way back. Do you think you could do it?
Like an adventure race but in real life.
Yes. You have no money, no job, no place to live. Prove you can get back to where you are from there. That’s what I feel I should be able to do.
You want to prove to yourself that it wasn’t a fluke, he said.
Exactly.
Except you can’t. You have friends, you have an education, you have knowledge about the way the world works that the person begging for change outside of the 7-Eleven doesn’t have. You’re not on drugs.
I’m not a psychopath.
I’m convinced, I’m convinced, he said, smiling. You know how the game works.
Why do I feel like this conversation makes me sound like a spoiled teenager who hasn’t read enough books?
I don’t think it’s that at all, he said. I think you are just being honest with how you feel.
Dusk pushed them back to the car and they drove, talking and she was there. She was there in the car with him. They drove along PCH and stopped to walk on the beach.
Creation is intentional, she said. I mean, for people, not in some cosmic sense, because in that case who knows. I mean art, literature, science. These things are willed into being.
I agree, Jason said.
It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not some magical ether, she said, although she was not sure she believed it.
You may be right, he said, and they walked in silence for a full minute. The immensity of the ocean, which always calmed her, was one of two poles then as they leaned into each other. There’s the chance, Jason said, that what we’re doing is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. She wasn’t sure if this was rebuttal or affirmation, but in that moment she had no instinct to deny it.
