The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer

while jogging around the campus, so we were both sweaty and breathless before we’d even exchanged any words. I thought his opening gambit, “Do you run here often?” was kind of cute. It was the mid-1970s, when jogging was just becoming a national craze, and we earnestly compared our speed and stamina and the buoyancy of our sneakers. What else did we talk about? I’m not sure, but it must have been something pleasant and provocative because we arranged to meet for a drink later.
    He was fair-skinned, with sandy blond hair, and by the end of the evening I’d had the shockingly inappropriate thought that our children would have to wear sunscreen. So I suppose there was an immediate physical attraction, and it was exciting to get to know someone outside the incestuous world of the workshop. Everything we did there revolved around our writing, around the worlds of our imaginations and ambitions. The fiction writers didn’t even mingle that much with the poets and playwrights, as if there were a danger of cross-pollination.
    Arthur’s education was far more grueling and wide ranging and concrete than mine. He had memorized the Table of Elements and Newton’s Laws of Physics, and he could name every bone in the human body, from the cranium to the metatarsals. I listened with rapt appreciation for the beauty and logic of the language. If my father had discussed the humerus or the scapula at dinner, I probably would have been bored to tears, but when Arthur did it, it became a kind of poetry.
    I understood that part of my pleasure in him was an echo of my parents’ pleasure. When my father heard that I was dating a medical student, he expressed his instant, enthusiastic approval. “Now your head’s out of the clouds,” he said, with an oblique reference to my previous boyfriend, a double major in meteorology and Victorian literature. And in a telephone call from my mother, when she was still feeling reasonably well, she asked if things were “getting serious” between Arthur and me and I said, “sort of,” with complicit coyness. She sighed, with what I took to be contentment.
    Arthur and I had already talked dreamily of a future together, like collaborators outlining a novel about our own lives. He would doctor and I would write; it sounded so sane and so safely familiar. Best of all, he loved my stories, which I read aloud to him in bed, our version of the postcoital cigarette. Looking back, his unconditional admiration seems unsurprising. He was still flushed with sexual happiness whenever I read to him, and I mostly wrote about us, in a thoroughly idealized fashion. Things didn’t always end happily, but even tragedy, in my hands, had a kind of romantic appeal, at least for Arthur.
    Everett Carroll, on the other hand, was my literary nemesis, and I, in turn, was his. The trouble with my stories, he pronounced in the workshop, was that too much happened in them, without any credible foundation for what he termed “all that
sturm und drang.
” His own stories, usually written in the popular and annoying present tense, were so minimal they were barely there, and I observed that he was stingy with language, and much too reserved emotionally. Besides,
nothing
ever seemed to happen in his fiction.
    In the middle of the wintry spring semester, I presented a story to the group only a day or two after Arthur had declared it sublime. Ev was the first one to comment in class, as usual, with almost a knee-jerk reaction. “What’s missing for me,” he began, with a surreptitious glance in my direction, “is true cause and effect. The guy only dies because the author
authorizes
it.”
    “And you don’t believe in randomness,” I said mockingly.
    “Hold it, Alice,” our instructor, Phil, said. “Let Everett finish.”
    “This is a
story,
” Ev continued, as if there’d been no interruption. “It’s supposed to give random events a meaningful
shape.
” I couldn’t stand the way he emphasized certain words, in