Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes Page B

Ginny showered, he made the bed. By 9:00 a.m., he was off to the library towork on freelance articles, so that his afternoons could be devoted to poetry. He was a man who had never been handed a single thing.
    “You work so hard,” she said one night while she was reading census data. He sat in the corner, typing away on his laptop, working on an article for Technology Today . “You need to give yourself a little time off.”
    “Ginger, I’m under a lot of pressure from my family.” He craned his neck. “To make money, to send money home. The ones who get out, we have responsibility. And with the Internet, oh, I hate the Internet. My uncle came to America years ago, and we would wait to hear from him by mail. Maybe once a month, on birthdays and holidays, he might call. Now my father goes to the Internet café every day to e-mail me. ‘Ratu, what are you doing? How much are you earning? Your grandmother’s kidney is failing.’ That I have chosen to be a poet is not their dream. My father thinks I should drive a taxicab. He’s never owned a car and he thinks any job that gives you a car to drive is the jackpot. That is his favorite word: jackpot .”
    “Ratu, I’ll give you money. Don’t waste your time writing reviews of noise-canceling headphones.”
    “I couldn’t ask that of you, Ginger.”
    “You didn’t ask, I offered.”
    Sending off the money allowed Ratu to relax. The summer was a delight. Mornings they each went off to write, but by day’s end they’d meet at the market and buy fruit and bread and wine and spend the evening sprawled on a blanket in Madison Square Park, reading poetry to each other.
    By August, he showed Ginny a one-act play he had written in the voice of his father; she thought it was quite good.
    “Good? Not excellent?”
    “I’m no expert in plays. Why don’t you send it out and see what people say?”
    “You say that like it’s so easy. If you wrote a play, you’re Ginger Olson, people will look at it! You are a respected academic. I don’t even have my MFA!”
    Ginny showed it to Ari Edleson, a college friend who had spent years directing theater in Japan and London and who had just moved back to New York.
    “Gin, it lags in the middle, the end, and the beginning. Fishing is not inherently dramatic, and certainly not to the New York theater crowd.”
    “He’s the voice of Fiji, Ari. The first Fijian poet/playwright. You can market him. Fuck, tell people Fijian drama is all about lagging, it’ll be authentic lagging, like the long, slow days in the South Pacific.”
    “You’re in love,” Ari said.
    The play went nowhere, and Ratu began work on a novel about a young Fijian moving to Manhattan. He believed this had market potential. But he confided in Ginny another pressure. Once he got his MFA, his student visa would expire. The only way he could stay in the country was to get an Aliens of Extraordinary Ability visa, nearly impossible for an unpublished writer.
    The thought of losing Ratu set off a disturbance deep inside Ginny.
    She asked her department chair, Mark Stevens, to write on his behalf; she contacted two writers’ organizations. She had made a few poet friends, and asked them to sign a petition to the departments of immigration.
    “Ginger, you are doing too much for me.”
    “I’ll hold a goddamned bake sale if I have to. You’re not getting kicked out of the country.”
    “All this help, people will wonder about us.”
    Actually, she’d successfully kept their relationship private, despite bringing Ratu to a university mixer—Ginny didn’t know what she’d been thinking with that. Maybe she was tired of all the gray-haired department secretaries asking her when she was going to settle down. Maybe she was tired of the tenured bores in their tweed jackets wondering if she was a lesbian. Maybe she was embarrassed that she’d shown up with a dud at the last university function, a man who managed to devour an entire platter of smoked salmon while