Fiction: A Place of Truth

Eugene O’Neill had gone up the mountain to the tuberculosis clinic and had come down a different man. Ina explained this to the creative-writing students the third time she met with them. She was not a creative type and should never have been assigned this class, even to fill in until the regular professor, who had been in an accident, returned. In the past weeks she’d resorted to exercises from the textbook, but she’d gotten tired of that and saw they had too. She could at least share her expertise concerning the writer who’d changed American theater.

As a young man, Ina said—letting her glance fall on Theodore, the boy who had always chosen to sit directly opposite her— O’Neill had lived a life of reflexive defiance, and squandered all his chances. His first year at Princeton he brought a prostitute to a school function. He was expelled, and that was the end of his college career. A few years later, he got a woman pregnant and married her, but then ran away to work on a steamer ship bound for Buenos Aires. There he got drunk and slept on benches in the port. When he returned to the U.S., he spent his days soused, and lived in a cell-sized room above a dive bar. He tried to commit suicide. Nothing felt worthwhile. Life was crap.

And then he got sick with tuberculosis.

At the clinic he went to, the patients slept outside. It was winter, and freezing cold. Some patients lived, lots died. Ina told them about a photo she’d discovered at the Beinecke library that wasn’t shown in the biographies: a line of men at the sanitorium, many with sensitive faces. Some smiled, a few looked lost, all wore monochrome clothing—all except one, who was clothed in the flashy checked jacket of a bon vivant and who glowered at the camera. He looked like somebody for whom life was a joke that he resented. That was O’Neill. By the time he came down the mountain, he’d changed. He’d survived, and his life was really his own. His life mattered, at least to him.

He immediately enrolled in a playwriting class. He would redefine his father’s melodramatic theater, make it into a place of truth. He lived by the shore and swam out as far as the sharks. The cold had saved his life and he came to need it. She told the students about another photo she’d found at the Beinecke, also not in any biography, of O’Neill in swim trunks on the beach shortly after he’d returned from the sanitorium. He’d penned directly onto the image that the water was 39 degrees, and he’d circled a patch of snow on the sand. It was New Year’s Day, 1914.

“But what if he didn’t have writing and he had to come down the mountain anyway?” asked Theodore, the walleyed boy, always across from her.

Ina raised her eyebrows, a slight tingle that she hadn’t felt in years having swept over her. It was something she’d only experienced in classrooms when someone said something brilliant. It felt like being powdered with electric rain. “That can be our writing prompt! Lots of us have to come down the mountain and live our ordinary lives without that magic thing. What’s it like when you don’t have that special thing but you still have to come down the mountain?”

Her mountain was Jack’s apartment. In that small place, at the top of his building, she was discovering about desire, about beauty, about being looked at. But what she had with Jack was just an affair. She had a good marriage to return to. It would be like returning to sanity, and she both welcomed it and was afraid. “That’s the prompt,” she said. “What’s it like when you don’t have that special thing, but you still have to come down the mountain?”

But the boy who’d asked the question was trembling. He looked very pale. His leg was bouncing. To Ina’s surprise, he abruptly threw his books together, and left.

The class fell quiet. Ina gazed down, stricken. She’d never had a student storm out, not in all her ten years of teaching. She should not have made a writing prompt out of a student’s extremely personal question. Perhaps he thought she was mocking him. She really didn’t know how to teach this course. She opened the textbook, her fingers shaking slightly, to find one of its good, sturdy, classroom-tested prompts.

But hands were moving in notebooks. Several of the students were already at work. They were writing quickly, as if they’d stumbled on something they needed to tell. A girl in a Hello Kitty sweatshirt was bent over her diary, her plumed pink pen creaking. A thin, older man in a yarmulka leaned so close to his page that his gray eyes were almost on par with the lines themselves. Ina too registered an urge to write, but quelled it, thinking about the impossibility of putting words to what went on with Jack.

“I’m going to have to spank you,” he’d said the day before, as they walked to his apartment from the subway.

To Ina’s surprise, these silly, boorish words had made her limp with excitement. How shocking and even mortifying to be aroused by such a thing. But no, it wasn’t aroused: it was momentarily pleasurably paralyzed. Ecstatically subsumed. However, Jack didn’t introduce the notion of spanking again that day.

But the day after the creative writing class, when she was still thinking about Theodore’s prompt (for thus she thought of it), Jack said something that had the same effect as his question about spanking. She’d met him outside the music school where he taught. Giddy, gleeful, she’d interrupted him several times while he was talking. He told her: “I want to clamp my hand over your mouth.”

She turned away and watched the passing traffic. Oh.

And then, a few minutes later, as they were waiting at the bus stop, she said, rather sharply, “I can’t come over again tomorrow. This is an unusual week for me. Get it?”

“Did you say, ‘Get it’?” he replied. “I see I’m going to have to take a firm hand with you.”

Something in her collapsed, swooned. She felt thoroughly wanted and loved. The way a little girl might feel who was cared for by a parent who made her do what was good for her whether she wanted to or not.

That same evening she stood across the room in high heels, a bra and panties, and dark gray pantyhose. There was something mortifying about their opaque girdle-like low crotch. Yet being looked at by him in this shaming garb was puzzlingly erotic. Her knees felt wobbly. What was it about humiliation? She recalled a time when, as a third grader, she’d been changing her clothing in the school bathroom, putting on her costume for a play, and her feet stepped into a cold puddle on the floor, and at that instant the door few open, bringing a gust of laughter from the children in the hall. Indelible! So much shame! She had estranged herself from that little girl. Jack had found her. He’d come back and located her where she was still rigidly stationed decades later, feet chilled in a bathroom puddle that might be urine, chest exposed, the children laughing. He still wanted her, liked her, stepped through her horror at herself and embraced her. How kind!

He sat on his bed; she knelt between his legs. “Your whole job on Earth right now is to do this,” he said. She felt immense relief. There was nothing else she needed to do! She didn’t need to be intelligent or return difficult phone calls or hand in tenure-book chapters or be nice or liked. Her shoulders sank, and she felt she had a new ability to be present exactly where she was on the planet, in this room, doing this. It made no sense, it was probably delusional, but in that moment she felt wanted past any act of volition and therefore fraudulence, wanted in her core self, the way perhaps a parent loves an infant before their first word, for a self beyond even her own knowing.

“Good girl,” said Jack.

“Please say it again.”

“When you earn it.” He drew her up on the bed, and she lay down on her stomach. She was feeling a distracting amount of gratitude. He dragged his hand up her leg toward her crotch and she fantasized about the big supper she would buy him at his favorite restaurant, The Wicked Wolf. He’d order chicken parmigiana with a potato and creamed spinach. Or lasagna! Maybe he’d order that. He stroked her and she parted her legs and she had to suck her lips into her mouth so as not to exclaim, “I want to take you to dinner.” It reassured her to know soon they would stop; it made her anxious to receive so much.

“Can I tell you something about me?” he murmured, after. They lay under his blanket, on their backs. Paraffin scented the air. A neighbor’s door creaked open, followed by a muffled conversation in the hall, and then the voices moved off. “It has to do with something that happened when I was little. It has to do with voyeurism.”

She nodded, and held her breath. She didn’t want to distract by the smallest twitch.

It happened at a beach vacation when he was six. Jack had been put down for a nap when he heard a noise. He opened his eyes and there, behind a curtained-off portion of his bedroom, was his mother’s friend, who was staying with them that week. She was changing out of her swimsuit. A marvelous, extraordinary feeling overcame him.

The next afternoon he purposely lay down on his cot for a nap around the time he thought the woman might be undressing. Through half-shut lids, he gazed. But she sensed something. She turned and their eyes met, and she stiffened and hastily covered herself. Deeply ashamed, he worried she would tell his mother. He never knew if she did. “You can’t imagine the number of hours I’ve spent standing near my window looking out, hoping to see something.”

He clasped her hand, and smiled with relief. “It’s so nice to tell you. It’s weird, standing at the window with binoculars and trying to steal a glimpse of someone who doesn’t want to be seen. I thought for sure any woman I told would think I was a monster.”

“I don’t.” His words brought to mind the lonely minotaur— part bull, part human—in its labyrinth.

He drew close to her. “I feel less like a monster,” he murmured, “telling you.”

She pictured him at the window. What would he see? A person at a table eating with invisible others, door moldings, the poles of floor lamps, a swatch of blue screen facing a vacant- seeming room. It was mostly a world of dead things, unresponsive, that he saw, stationed in his darkened apartment hoping for a glimpse, a visitation, the thrilling sight of a woman’s body. Ina understood he was a troubled person with whom she was falling ever more in love.

He was in class, sitting, as usual, directly opposite her. She dipped her head toward him in salute, but he just sat rigidly. “Thank you for coming back, Theodore,” she said softly.

He shrugged.

In his honor, and perhaps to demonstrate to Theodore the virtue of taking a risk, she decided not to assign a prompt from the textbook but to offer one directly from her own life, even if she were the only one who knew. “Write about a time you surprised yourself,” she said. “When you did something you had no idea you were going to do. You might write about a time you enjoyed something you didn’t think you would ever enjoy. Start right now.”

Many of the students were still looking at her. “Now, please,” she said to Theodore, who seemed to have glazed over with rage, as if he again suspected he was being mocked. Perhaps he thought she was referring to his surprising departure from their last class. But after a moment he too started writing.

For once, Ina decided to jot as well. “First thought, best thought,” she told herself, the mantra of freewriting. She’d never done this before. The words tumbled onto the page, each seeming to extrude the next like segments of a telescope. Ten minutes passed in an instant. “That was nothing,” she announced. “Go another five.”

But something was amiss. She glanced up. Theodore wasn’t writing. “Keep going, please,” she declared.

He sighed heavily, and picked up his pen, which was wide, shaped like a lozenge, and bore the word Prozac. It surprised her that he didn’t mind using this pen although other things, to her less personal, had offended him.

When the time was again up, she was amazed by how little seemed to have landed on her page yet how detailed it was.

“Let’s hear these,” she said, turning to the older woman. “Grace, would you start?”

“I hate to disagree with you, but we don’t usually have to read what we’ve written,” said Theodore.

“Is that true,” Ina asked pleasantly. “Do you hate to disagree with me?”

He stared.

Something ticked in her throat. She never used to get riled by a challenging student. But in the past she’d been more oblivious.

“You’re all going to read. Even though I know that you haven’t in the past.” She half expected Theodore to leave, but he did not. “Grace, please start.”

Grace lifted her paper and described a time she’d fixed a car by herself on a deserted highway. After her, Prudence, who always carried a volume of Emily Dickinson, read about filling in for the star during a community theater production of Hello, Dolly! Aurelia, who again wore a grubby Hello Kitty sweatshirt, read a beautiful piece about once opening the attic window of her grandmother’s house and lying down on the roof when she was depressed, to gaze up at the stars. And Theodore wrote about batting surprisingly well in a baseball game.

“Wonderful,” said Ina. “Thank you. So many good discoveries of what really made you happy. Grace, would you distribute your story?”

“Actually, if Sybille writes, she reads,” muttered Theodore, but then he looked embarrassed, and gazed down. Sybille was their usual professor.

“Does she?”

With an apologetic air, Grace nodded. Ina was about to say that she hadn’t realized this—when it occurred to her that this was exactly the position she’d put Theodore in, being forced to share secret work. Everyone looked at her. She glanced at her paper. A soft roar filled her ears, and behind it came the sound of a chair scraping back—in fact all the sounds in the classroom had gotten very loud. Was there any part she could read? It began with her pleasure at being kissed and then described looking at erotic pictures online with Jack—the ecstasy on the face of the woman in one of the photos, the cheesy cop outfit of one of the men—how it surprised her that she liked that, too.

“You don’t have to,” said Grace. “You’re the substitute.”

Ina glanced at her, grateful. But she didn’t want to take the easy way out. She wanted to show Theodore. Yes, you can be brave in your life! Don’t run out! Don’t hide from risk! “It surprised me how much I liked to be kissed,” she read. Her words were snatched from her throat before she’d half-said them. It seemed to take a long time but finally she was able to reach the paper’s conclusion: “I pushed the button again. The woman had runny cheap fluorescent blue mascara and her tits”— for yes, this was the word on the page, the word that seemed most apt while scribbling under pressure—“held up by her hands, offered to the camera, the viewer, were reminiscent of saddlebags, canvas thermos bottles, suede cylinders with nipples—” Ina was nearly gasping. The students in the back, she noticed, had leaned forward. But she couldn’t speak any louder. Suddenly, dementedly, it seemed important to say: “—of a beautiful rose pink. All this was beautiful. Things you couldn’t imagine beautiful are in fact beautiful.”

She thought she might faint. Thank God the Vietnam vet who read Bukowski wasn’t here today. Was this what groundbreaking artists felt? Her face throbbed.

Silence in the room.

Then, as if stirring herself out of a trance, Grace exclaimed, “Brava! You really anted up!” “You anted up!” said Prudence.

“That’s Sybille’s highest praise.”

Theodore was staring at her, one eye evasive and the other shocked.

“We’ll take a break now,” said Ina.

And so the class dispersed. Ina’s skin felt charged with frigid electricity. On her way to the door a hand grasped her arm. It was the girl in the Hello Kitty sweatshirt, who had crawled out her grandma’s attic window and gazed up at the stars. “Thank you,” she whispered. Ina nodded and rushed away. She walked hastily in the direction of the student center for a coffee. She could not stop trembling.

Bonnie Friedman’s first novel, “Don’t Stop” (excerpted here), will be published by Europa Editions in April 2026.