His Daughter’s Poetry Is His Midlife Crisis
“Phillip Whitney” by Anna Reeser
His life as Phillip Whitney began with a stitch in his chest the night Charlotte said she wanted to focus on her poetry. There she was, his daughter, in a silky button-down shirt and long earrings, sitting across the dinner table. A froth of something around her—youth?—as she talked through a mouthful of pound cake.
“I wake up every morning with ideas for poems, but by the end of the day I’m tired, and it’s like they evaporate. I need space for them.”
Denise poured tea and seemed unfazed. “Are you thinking an MFA program?” She asked neutrally, because everyone’s kids were in graduate school, and it was a thing you had to plan for.
“That’s the idea,” Charlotte said, looking up at the ceiling. “But it’s competitive. I heard it’s better to get published first, to show you’re serious. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”
He nodded; the nod was firm, not revealing his feeling of dread.
It was not about money. Two summers before, she had graduated with honors and a scholarship from UC Berkeley—a fact he abused when talking to coworkers—and now she had an entry-level social media marketing job that she claimed to hate. The finances would be okay, and anyway he’d set aside some funds with her advanced degree in mind. It was poetry specifically. The word gave him a full-body cringe. Poetry. It was a vocation with no middle ground. You either wrote the words spoken at weddings and funerals, or you wrote unpunctuated nonsense that nobody read.
He had been a poet in his youth, an English major with Whitman quotations pinned to his dorm corkboard. When he met Denise at UC Santa Barbara in the 80s, he’d written spontaneous verse in notebooks on the beach. An intellectual among surfers. Then, sophomore year, drawn by the obtuse allure of computers, and because he couldn’t get into the juried writing workshops, he’d switched majors. His grasp of code had been more unique than his Ginsberg-inspired poems, and life went on. He’d become a web coder and tried to provide his family with a comfortable life in Walnut Creek, stable as sedans, lawns, and wooden bedframes. But Charlotte, his brilliant girl, she had a way of seeing that seemed to him observant and insightful, and the things she wrote (at least, the few he had read) were good.
“That’s great,” said Denise. “You’re sending out your poems?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said. A sigh bloomed out of her then, and he could see the door opening into her mind, the regression he always anticipated around eight hours into her visits, when she let the scaffolding of her new adulthood fall away and became their child again. He enjoyed these moments of emotional loosening because—even though she was mostly talking to Denise—he got to witness the big imagination and endearing anxieties he recognized from her younger years. But that night, the stitch in his chest worsened when his daughter continued:
“It’s just that I keep getting rejected.”
His name was actually Jeremy Stapleton, and he wasn’t a coder anymore. He had begun his career making bespoke websites, writing HTML that blossomed into elegant front-end interfaces; his current job was a distant version of that work. Now, he led a team of many coders, talked to marketing people, to product and brand teams, and translated their demands into action items to be implemented on a cloud software company’s website.
The morning after Charlotte’s confession, he walked across the back lawn to the detached garage he had converted into an office with windows and an in-swing door. Inside, his calendar pinged with meeting reminders, a frantic Tuesday after Labor Day, but he ignored them while conducting an elaborate routine involving strainers and an electric kettle to prepare his Darjeeling tea.
The word failure was a dull shadow in his mind. Charlotte had said her best free-verse poem, the one praised by teachers, had been rejected by literary journals 47 times over the past year. Forty-seven times, and she felt like a failure. She was convinced that she was being ignored because of her lack of existing writing credits. And if his daughter failed, didn’t he? It meant he had raised his child in a way that made her susceptible to failure.
Weeks before, Denise had reported that Charlotte called, sobbing, about a bad interaction with a project manager. She felt undervalued, she was bored by repetitive tasks. She feared she would be stuck writing a SaaS company’s social media posts forever. He wished Charlotte would call him sometimes, too. Why was their relationship so curt and detached? Twenty-four years on, it was still a continuation of the way she used to burrow into Denise’s arms when she got upset.
Jeremy did not want to consider the odds of success in poetry. He wanted Charlotte to feel confident and accomplished, to not experience a drawn-out string of disappointments. He rubbed his temples in thought. It was a good problem; he felt it in his teeth. He missed problem-solving in his work—finding order in chaos, the way a solution formed like a wave rising in the distance.
He sipped his Darjeeling, led a team meeting over Zoom, assigned tickets, discussed the timing and cadence of future meetings, overextended his shoulder using his TheraCane back massager, and, around 11, noted a shift in temperature—a gentle brightening of the day. Then a sparrow appeared at the windowsill. A sparrow? He didn’t know. He flipped around the field guide he kept at his desk for moments like these, however rare. Pacific-slope flycatcher. Olive and yellow with a peaked crown. It stayed for several more seconds, hopping from side to side.
Then the idea alighted in his mind. That was the exact feeling—a bird landing. Pacific Slope Review.
It took a single workday to build the website. He drew the logo on his tablet—a wing-like swoopy line—and paired it with the kind of chunky 1970s serif that reminded him of his mother’s lifestyle magazines. Minimal research told him he needed an about page, a masthead, and a page that described how to send a submission. These were easily created. He built the whole thing from scratch, delighting in cascading style sheets. It had been years since he’d touched code.
He wrote a crisp description, noting that Pacific Slope “is proud to publish new writers.” On an adrenaline high, he added that their authors had gone on to publish books and win awards. For the masthead, he derived mashups of names he remembered from high school. And Phillip Whitney—composed of the first names of a guy with a punk band and a theater girl on whom Jeremy once had a crush—became the Editor-in-Chief.
He just needed to convince Charlotte to send her poems.
By five in the afternoon, he had constructed an email advertisement: a call for submissions for Pacific Slope Review. “Send us your poems and stories by November 15!” He even included, at the bottom, a tiny disclaimer noting that she was receiving the email because she had submitted to their “sister publication,” and named one of the rejecting outlets Charlotte had mentioned. He took care—of course—to omit this detail from the public website.
The submissions system was simply an email address; setting it up gave him a sensation of true elation. The inbox was empty and clean, full of possibility.
Denise appeared at the office door. “Thoughts on dinner?”
“Whatever you feel like,” he said, staring into the screen, his finger hovering on the send button. Should he tell her? She was unlikely to approve.
Denise walked inside, and he frantically minimized the window.
“What were you doing, watching porn?”
“No,” he coughed. “Is that what you think I do in here?”
“You’re not working,” she laughed. She was a county librarian, a profession with straightforwardness he envied.
“Fine,” he said. He did not like to keep Denise in the dark about anything because if he did, he worried that she would harbor her own secrets. The intrusive thought was a tryst with some bookish asshole in the fiction aisle. He pictured a professorial man in tweed who had opinions on the new titles Denise had read and the old ones she hadn’t. A man who had taken several juried writing workshops. Who had a PhD in Classics.
He opened the browser window and cleared his throat. “I’m going to get Charlotte published.”
She didn’t seem to understand. “What—because of the MFA? I think she’s just looking for something because her friends have boyfriends now. She’s in this searching phase. Besides, Honey, you can’t get her published.”
“No, look. It’s a literary magazine.”
“Okay. I don’t—”
“I made it.”
Her eyes got wide with alarm, then a visceral kind of glee. “You’re crazy. You’re not serious.” She leaned closer to the monitor, put on her glasses, laughed. “The logo! It’s very convincing.”
“I thought so.” He clicked around the pages.
“But wait—there aren’t any articles.”
“What?”
“Poems, stories, whatever. You haven’t published anything.”
Of course! Denise, Denise. He shook his head, cracked his knuckles. “Good catch. I was about to start the targeted email campaign.”
She patted his shoulder, rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to do all this. The poetry interest, it’s not going to last. Charlotte has her job, she’s personable—she is going to be fine.”
That night, he couldn’t sleep. The logistics of the project swirled in his mind. He needed poems and stories. Would he write them? No. They would not be good enough, and it would be obvious. Meanwhile, Charlotte had driven back to her moldy San Francisco rental. She posted on Instagram and her face looked sullen, uninspired. She deserved the world, but had described her day-to-day tasks as “busywork,” her office as “soul sucking.” And soon, The Atlantic kept saying, jobs like hers would be replaced with chatbots. There it was again! The glistening chaos. The next wave. He rose from bed, heart pounding, and folded the covers back gently to avoid waking Denise.
In the middle of the night, his office felt different. The air had a bite, the desk lamp cast shadows around the space. His chest tightened as he sat down at the desk. How had he managed to do it before, the brash intensity of the pen and the paper, a torrent of syllables in messy half-cursive?
He opened ChatGPT, which he’d last used to aggregate ideas for a golf vacation.
“Hello,” he typed. Fingers poised on the keys, an image flashed into his mind. His father had passed two years ago, and he still regretted his rambling, unfocused eulogy. His hands sweated now, just thinking about that day. “Write a poem about dad’s old yellow station wagon after funeral in the style of Raymond Carver.”
The result came seconds later. It unsettled him to watch the lines appear one by one, as if produced by a ghost. The poem was bad. It was full of cliches and had a halting quality that was close to human, but not quite. The chatbot used a cloying rhyming pentameter and instead of adopting the style of Carver, it had inserted a weird reference to Carver’s shadow looming. It was painful, and yet, it was something.
He copied the text into a document and moved things around, got rid of the rhyme scheme but kept the description of rust on the hood of the car, which his father’s car really had. The line “grief rides shotgun” was maybe corny, but also he recalled driving the Volvo to the gas station around the corner from his parents’ house in Foster City after the funeral, buying a PayDay at the minimart and stashing it in the glove compartment not because he wanted to eat it (he couldn’t then, he felt too nauseous) but because it was the kind of thing his father would have done. Soon, the poem was a sparse account of that afternoon and contained the melancholy and bluntness he remembered.
He asked for more pieces, delighting in the raw material they provided. The hubris you needed to open a blank document and write was the purview of Charlotte and her peers. But this—culling and editing the chatbot’s drivel—felt like candy for his brain. He became an authority figure, a delegator for an enterprise of his own design. As he went, his prompts became increasingly specific:
“Write a prose eulogy of the fish tank that saw my transition out of childhood.”
“Give me a five-paragraph vignette about getting heatstroke while playing soccer, revived by orange wedges, sliver of mortality.”
It was thrilling to work at night, the way he used to when he was freelancing, high on deadlines, learning more every day, feeling invincible.
Limbs trembling with energy, he prepared green tea. He wouldn’t sleep. He slashed similes and clusters of melodramatic-sounding metaphors, whittling the language to simulate the running commentary in his head. He added details. The scum on the sides of the fish tank that had been impossible to clean, the fish staring helplessly from plastic bags of water. The funk and warmth of the orange wedges after having been stored in Tupperware for several hours. It was thrilling to work at night, the way he used to when he was freelancing, high on deadlines, learning more every day, feeling invincible, like an architect building skyscrapers in this invisible medium, internet, that nobody else understood. Words were malleable as lines of code. He could bend them in his hands.
By five in the morning, he had uploaded four issues of Pacific Slope, spanning two fictitious years. They were typeset in crisp serif, decorated with tasteful stock photos from his work account, and graced with punchy author bios full of publications and quirky-sounding pets.
He felt high, absolutely high. It was exactly what his daughter wanted. He sent the email advertisement to Charlotte and sank back into his chair.
It took days to recover from the all-nighter. Jeremy was dehydrated and unfocused at a week’s worth of project kickoff meetings and sluggish in his ping responses. Refreshing the tab with Pacific Slope’s email inbox kept him going with small hits of adrenaline. But nothing. It was always empty. Why had he set the submission deadline so far into the future? An oversight.
“People forget. You would have to email her again and again,” said Denise over a fibrous breakfast cereal.
“I don’t want the magazine to seem desperate,” he said.
She chewed and considered this. “Pacific Slope could start an Instagram.”
He nodded, told her it was smart marketing.
She held up her hands. “You didn’t hear it from me, okay? You know I think this is insane.”
Jeremy did not plan to fritter away his workdays on social media, but here he was, in late middle age, making posts. He found a slightly suspicious companion app that allowed him to backdate his posts to the launch of the magazine two years ago. He made clean graphics of choice quotations from the stories and poems. A few stock photos. Even a handful from his own camera reel—hills in Briones catching afternoon light. The grid was curated and pleasant. He followed 500 literary accounts, including several writers from Charlotte’s following list. Then, over the next couple weeks, Pacific Slope accrued enough followers to get reasonable user engagement.
During those weeks, while Jeremy kept tabs on the magazine’s Instagram account statistics, his company’s stock dropped significantly. At the end of September, tension was palpable at the virtual all-hands. Groups huddled around long conference tables in some of the video chat squares. The rest were single faces illuminated by desk lamps. Ring lights for the C-suite. Someone mentioned a troubling lack of in-office participation from upper management, and he felt targeted, since he was one of the old guys still working from home post-pandemic. He loved his remote office, his tea, his view of the bunch grasses by the fence. Would he be forced to return to his commute to Redwood City, an endless drive across the Bay? And how would the magazine continue with coworkers walking behind his desk in the open-plan space? He answered work pings with unhappy urgency that made his body ache. He heard secondhand from Denise that Charlotte had gone out with a graphic designer from her office.
“She sounded optimistic,” Denise reported.
“How’s her poetry going? Is she sending out her work?”
Denise shrugged. “She didn’t mention that. She’s busy going on dates.”
He pictured his daughter in the glow of a restaurant tea light, not writing, and a knot formed in his back.
In mid-October, Charlotte followed the Instagram account. The ding of the alert interrupted his slow pouring of boiling water into a strainer of Oolong, and he nearly burned his hand.
Should he follow her back? Ignoring her would signal the publication’s prestige. But to follow back would indicate that the publication respected her as a poet, and this would increase her confidence. After all, Charlotte had the words “poet, thinker, dreamer” in her Instagram bio. Skimming blog posts on social media etiquette offered a solution: Pacific Slope Review followed her but did not like any of her posts.
The workday flew by. He emerged from a tense one-on-one with the chief operating officer, who called in from the office in Redwood City and mentioned lagging metrics in the web department. Projects were behind schedule and needed hands-on leadership. He was empowered to make hard decisions if necessary. Jeremy nodded and fiddled with his ballpoint pen, pretending to take notes.
Over Denise’s root vegetable and farro salad, he shared the news about Charlotte.
“You know, it makes sense. She broke things off with that guy,” Denise said. “I bet she’s getting back into her writing to self-soothe.”
“Perfect. Time to ramp up the campaign.”
“Why don’t you just call her?” Denise asked.
“She doesn’t need to talk. She needs a win. What should this email say?”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Come on, you’re good at this, what should it say?”
Over glasses of wine, they composed a second email, a reminder that the submission deadline was fast approaching. Denise admitted that devious as it was, she was having fun. She rested her hand on his back, a warmth that felt good. He pictured himself striding into her library, running his fingers along the spines of novels, catching her eye as she saw him. Decisive in his opinions, his name at the top of the masthead—tall, he felt tall. He was tall. And she saw that he was.
That night, he intercepted Denise as she stepped from the ensuite bathroom toward her dresser in a towel. It had been a while. At first, his kiss was met with a surprised half-laugh, but then she got the idea, and let the towel fall.
The next morning, Pacific Slope’s inbox showed one unread message. He inhaled sharply, anticipating Charlotte’s name. But it was not his daughter. There was a cover letter—a guy named Adam, an English teacher in Texas. The PDF attachment contained a story about a childhood dog, ending in the animal’s death in a car accident, which seemed then to be a metaphor for loss of innocence. It had never occurred to him that other people would send their work. The story was violent and not exactly to his taste, but it felt honest and striking—he could save it for the upcoming issue.
With a thrill of goosebumps, he replied as Editor-in-Chief Phillip Whitney. “Congratulations, Adam,” he wrote. “Pacific Slope Review would be delighted to publish your work in Issue Five. While we can’t offer honorarium payments at this time, we will enthusiastically promote your work on social channels.”
The reply came immediately. The guy’s tone was effusive, with exclamation points. He thanked Phillip for responding so quickly, for believing in his writing, and said that he loved the work Pacific Slope was publishing. A swell rose in Jeremy’s chest reading this.
As the weeks went by, more submissions came in, and he found himself reading with interest. The pieces that hit him hardest were about parenthood. There was a story about a father who had to move across the country from his children, who tore up a photograph of them with their mother because it was too painful to see their faces flattened onto paper. It was strange, because Charlotte had never gone far, but he understood that feeling, like he presided from a tower of economic responsibility, distant from the intimate grit of motherhood that pushed Denise to tears. He tried to break through, suggesting family hikes, advising on operating system upgrades for Charlotte’s laptop, but she always seemed removed, divulging her deep fears and sorrows to Denise, allowing him to overhear, but not expecting him to respond. Maybe their bond would deepen through poetry—a shared language, milestones and successes they could celebrate together.
As he read, he felt his blood pounding through his chest, his gut, his throat. Certain sentences felt so true and big that he sat still for long minutes, blinking. He printed pieces out and arranged them on the desk, creating an arc of emotional movements, in the same way he’d made mixtapes in high school. He was inundated with real minds—imperfect, strange, glistening—and eventually had to stop sending out acceptance letters. With 10 pieces, the issue was filling up, and he had to save space for Charlotte’s work.
“Why won’t she send her poems?” He said. “I’ve been posting deadline reminders on Instagram.”
“She deleted the app,” Denise sighed, sipping her morning coffee. “She told me it’s bad for her mental health.”
He rubbed his temples and briefly closed his eyes. “Then we need a blast of emails. One for the next three days until the deadline.”
“More emails?”
“You said it yourself, people forget. If she’s going to send in her poems—”
“The chances of that are unbelievably slim. It’s not worth—”
“I have some ideas,” he said. “Here, take a look.”
Now his wife held up her hands.
“Just skim through these before work.”
“Nope. This is all you.”
He thundered out to his office and channeled his frustration into persuasive subject lines, then scheduled the sends.
Pacific Slope wants your words!
DON’T MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY!
Still keyed up, he muted his work notifications and opened the magazine’s inbox. His polo shirt and slacks felt dissonant as he pored over another wave of submissions. He returned to the house and combed through the back of his closet. A vintage sport coat he’d worn to a wedding years ago. An old pair of glasses—not his current prescription—with a rounder, more educated vibe. He tried them on and was pleased with how they augmented his sartorial style. In the mirror he saw the coat’s earthy hues, the tasteful soft focus of the old lenses.
The morning of the submission deadline, Denise reported that things had improved at Charlotte’s job. Her ideas in a brainstorming meeting had been well received, and her mood seemed better overall. There had been a bar meetup with some people from college, a promising conversation with a guy. Denise thought she was on an upswing. This should have been a relief, but he found himself disappointed. He dashed off an urgent email. Your last chance! Why was she giving up already? There was a nugget of success right in front of her, if only she could see it.
He begrudgingly expressed this to Denise.
“I thought the magazine was clever. Brilliant.” She kissed his forehead, a patronizing little nip. “But don’t push it anymore, okay? It’s better if she’s able to self-regulate. Besides—it’s kind of a joke, is it not?”
“It’s not a joke,” he said, his voice hardening. But he stopped himself from saying more and shrugged his shoulders, forcing a smile. Denise did not understand.
It happened while they rewatched The Americans in bed. With hours left until the deadline, he’d given up hope. But there it was, an email from Charlotte Eve Stapleton.
Her bio was spare, as though edited self-consciously hundreds of times. She did not mention the winning entry in her high school poetry contest, which he and Denise had bragged about for years. The line “lives and works in San Francisco” was chillingly adult. But he did not dwell long on the cover letter.
There was a single three-stanza poem in her attachment. Reading it made his eyes dampen, but not in the same way as the other submissions. Charlotte seemed to pine for her childhood. There was a line about how her bedroom door was left ajar at night, creating a column of light from the hallway. No hard grief, no real blows—she was young. Maybe it was just difficult to evaluate his daughter’s words. Maybe they were objectively strong. It was impossible to know.
Denise read it, too. She wept.
“Charlotte is so sensitive,” Denise said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Was there subtext aimed at Denise that went over his head? He felt a melancholy tug that left him dry-mouthed, but he had to admit that the language was vague and soft.
“I’m surprised this is all she sent,” he said. “I specified up to three poems in one document. But if she considers this her best work, I will publish it—”
“I didn’t believe she was going to send a poem.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said, mock hurt.
“She’d be devastated if she found out. Please don’t reply to her. Stop with the Instagram. Let it fizzle.”
“She won’t find out,” he said. “This will be her first publication. I’m giving her a foot in the door of the literary world, and she’ll move on to bigger things.”
Denise’s eyes widened as he spoke. She did not respond, just got out of bed and took a tablet of Excedrin Migraine. A new feeling gathered in his body. Not tension exactly, but tightening around his ribs. He took a deep breath that he passed off as irritation with his wife.
He waited two weeks to send the acceptance email, hoping that Charlotte would send something better. In that time, he edited the message until he’d settled on a tone of detached praise. Wearing his round glasses and sport coat, letting his beard grow into a wisdom of gray, he felt like a benevolent god. On a work call, one of the younger coders said, “Nice frames.”
By now, he had filled out an issue of 12 works of prose and poetry, complete with Charlotte’s. Hers felt the least finished, the least mature. She might regret having these early experiments on the internet for the rest of time. But this was what she wanted, and he wanted her wishes granted, within reason.
He reviewed the acceptance email one more time. He was careful to sound like Phillip Whitney, who was both bookish and hip, not a whiff of his suburban dad self. Phillip was an important man, a sophisticated man. Phillip had a comprehensive understanding of the classics. Phillip was generous, wise, and willing to help young writers succeed.
He was careful to sound like Phillip Whitney, who was both bookish and hip, not a whiff of his suburban dad self.
“Our editorial team is impressed with your nuanced observations,” he wrote to Charlotte. “We would be delighted to publish your poem in Issue Five, which will go live on January 15.” He signed off with “Sincerely” and sent it. A surge of power rushed through his hands as he did this. It was incredible to be the arbiter of yeses.
As with most of his editorial acquisitions, her reply came within 10 minutes. Ecstatic tone, barely controlled use of punctuation. “Thank you so much!!”
Denise opened the door to the garage without knocking. Her voice was panicked, high. “Charlotte just texted me saying she got her first acceptance. There were star-eyes emojis. And she said something about their high-profile sister publication?”
He smiled at this. His daughter, reading the email disclaimers, detail-oriented just like him. “That’s wonderful news. A hearty congratulations to her.”
Denise sighed hard and rubbed her eyes, leaning in the doorway. “For the record, Honey, if she finds out about your scheme, it’s on you. She would never speak to me again. You have at least some moral wiggle room as a dad.”
“What does that mean?”
“Forget it. Just leave me out. I was never a part of this.”
He assured her with managerial confidence that he would take responsibility in such an event. But she shouldn’t worry; he was taking precautions. Denise’s pinched mouth did not soften.
“I’m ordering one of those thin crust pizzas,” she said, and returned to the house.
“I’d prefer the calzone,” he called after her. The exchange was unusually heated, but their marriage had survived for decades on a mutual hatred of fighting. It would smooth over.
“Excellent,” he wrote back to his daughter. “We look forward to publishing your strong work.”
January felt cool and heady. They’d made it smoothly through the holidays, though his bonus had been withheld, possibly because of the stock decrease. Charlotte had mentioned happily, but humbly, her upcoming poetry publication at the extended-family gatherings. Holding a glass of wine and wearing a long-sleeved dress, she performed maturity. For the new year, Charlotte had gone out with friends, all of them wearing sequins in an Instagram post. Her mental health had improved, and she was back online.
Denise took up lap swimming and left early most weekday mornings, giving him many sustained hours with his thoughts. Now he made a habit of walking the smooth streets around his house before signing into his company’s chat program. On these walks, he felt like Phillip Whitney, percolating with ideas. He noticed the arch of sycamore trees, the curve of a cul-de-sac. Back in his office, he further probed his mind by re-reading his old modern poetry anthologies, noting themes in the margins. Denise’s evening reports on their daughter waned. Maybe Charlotte had become distant with her mother, too. She was busy with her creative writing, he figured, and busy was good.
One night, while Denise was in the shower, he heard her phone ring. Charlotte’s name lit up on the screen, and he picked up.
“Hey,” he said quickly. “It’s Dad. Mom’s in the bathroom.”
“Oh, hi Dad.” She sounded caught off guard, took a moment to clear her throat. “I’m glad you picked up. I have writing news.”
His heart raced. Here it was, her cresting success, catalyzed by her acceptance at his magazine.
Charlotte inhaled sharply; she sounded midway up a steep hill in wind. “My poem goes live in Pacific Slope Review next weekend, and I was thinking I would come visit, if that’s okay? Some people from high school want to go out and celebrate my first publication.”
This caused his face to flush. It was true—the 15th of January was almost here.
“That’s excellent,” he said, then realized that this vocabulary belonged to Phillip Whitney. He paused.
“Dad?”
He rubbed his forehead and rushed to a tone of breezy disinterest. “Of course, come visit! I’ll tell Mom.”
Charlotte arrived home the morning of the 15th, a Saturday. She wore thick-soled boots that gave an artsy, gutsy impression. She acted more polite than usual, offering to unload the dishwasher. After Denise’s spinach quiche, the three of them sat in the living room sipping coffee.
“I’m nervous,” Charlotte sighed. “My poem will be online. Just, like, there. Anyone could read it. You guys could read it.”
“It’s brave to put your work into the world,” said Denise. There was a spike of anxiety in her voice.
He took a long pull of coffee, but this only increased his jitters. He wasn’t prepared for the launch. Work had been a nightmare. Rumors of layoffs were circulating. In his latest one-on-one with the CEO, he’d mixed up the names of two of his direct reports and was reprimanded. The C-suite wanted people in the office for the board of directors meeting, to make it seem bustling. Lunch orders had been requested, but he hadn’t replied. Instead, he had designed Issue Five announcement posts for Pacific Slope’s Instagram, which were still not done. And he had committed to giving each piece a thorough proofread to avoid errors.
“Well, ladies,” he said, rising from his chair. “I’ll be out in the office catching up on work.”
The two women nodded, their identically-shaped faces bobbing in unison.
On his desk, papers were strewn. He put on the sport coat and round glasses; it was chilly even with the space heater, and the outfit helped him focus. He sat down and fed a sheet of printer paper into the vintage Royal typewriter he’d purchased on eBay, then dashed off a three-minute freewrite to clear the cobwebs.
He spread out the printed proofs of the stories and poems for Pacific Slope. His first submission about the dog had three typos, which he marked with a red pen. He composed a quick email to Adam about the fixes, then he corrected the errors in the HTML view, satisfied by his ability to scan the page and differentiate live text from code. After a couple of hours, he arrived at Charlotte’s proof. He had dreaded this, because if he found typos, he would have to email her, and every direct communication brought some risk. He squinted over the lines, pen in hand. So far, they were clean. But his heart raced.
A scene took shape in his mind in vivid detail. As he traced a finger over her words, it became clear that this should be the natural moment of his discovery, hunched in his office in the corduroy coat. Charlotte would barge in, asking for the new Wi-Fi password. It would unfold cinematically. The backend of Pacific Slope visible on his computer screen! His flushed face framed by the round glasses! Her poem splayed on the desk, immediately readable from feet away, since he had printed the proof in a 14-point font, easier on his eyes.
Meet Phillip Whitney, he would say with a sheepish smile.
But Charlotte’s face would turn pink. Is that my poem? Shouting. What the fuck, Dad? Tears. What is this, some kind of prank?
Just imagining the exchange, his palms began to sweat. If his own father had done a thing like this, he would have yelled at him—really let him have it. He would’ve been livid over the assumption that he needed help. But his father would have never done something this big, this committed, this loving.
Through her rage, Charlotte would cry. Calmly, but with a trembling voice, he would explain his motivations. That it was not a prank, no, but a thing he made for her. It had become as real as anything—but he would shut it down if that’s what she wanted. She would slam the door then, almost certainly. But she would understand—maybe not immediately, but later on—how much he cared for her.
Through the window, he watched the sun yellow over the lawn, then slip into dusk, and Charlotte did not come. It was almost dinnertime. The new issue was proofed, loaded, and ready to publish to the web, and yet he waited in the darkening room, half hoping to be discovered. A sinkhole opened in his body, a feeling of falling through the floor. Finally, hearing Denise yell for him to come inside, he clicked the button.
At the dinner table, Charlotte was already curled over her phone, giddy, composing a social media post. Denise forced her cringe into a smile, passing around bowls.
He said, “Is the poem up already?”
When she said yes, he congratulated her with a detached nod. He felt nauseous, then starving. It was too easy. He cleared his throat and dug into his food like a man who was tired from work. Then, for the next 15 minutes, and what felt increasingly like the rest of his life, he ate under-salted quinoa in his over-warm house, head ringing, deprived of a climactic end to his literary enterprise.
In the weeks following the release of Pacific Slope Review’s fifth issue, he was fired from the software company. It happened over a virtual call, the news delivered by one of his higher-ups from a conference room in the office, the view zoomed out to the point where he could barely see the other man’s expression. In a difficult year for the company, they needed team players. They felt that Jeremy hadn’t been present for the past two quarters. A bitter taste materialized in his mouth, but he nodded because it was true.
The call ended, and as he minimized the meeting window, his tech career receded, replaced by the sound of birds through the half-open door. The thought of finding another job—the exhaustion, the humiliation—filled him with dread. He had his retirement savings. And Charlotte seemed to have lost interest in MFA programs, which would alleviate some financial strain. So, as the days rolled by, he continued to work on the magazine.
On his morning walks, he looked up at the sky, the overwhelming blue. It was nearly spring, and below his heart, the sinkhole was still there. He hadn’t spoken to Charlotte since January; she’d been too busy to visit home, and he lacked reasons to call her on the phone. The night of her publication, over dessert, he’d mentioned his own poetic attempts during college, that he wished he’d taken his writing more seriously back then. But she only smiled, gave a quick nod of commiseration, and didn’t ask follow-up questions.
Denise felt distant, too. She seemed to regard him with removed skepticism, more like a colleague than a spouse. She disappeared to swimming in the morning and now aerobics classes at dinnertime, so he ate store-bought grain bowls alone. The last time she’d asked about his “fake magazine,” he’d scoffed that it was ancient history, not looking up from a copy of The Waste Land. It was not productive to mention the change in his employment, so he didn’t. An early retirement in the coming months was not out of the question. The lies droned in his body, sometimes appearing as nasal congestion, as tension in his chest or stabs in his gut. Not intolerable, just persistent.
But he loved the work. The editorial responsibility was a thrumming reason to prepare his tea in the morning. Feels good to make things, his father had said to Jeremy once, squinting at a recent two-story house he’d remodeled. It was true. More than anything else in his life, Pacific Slope Review felt like a real space he’d built in the world.
Now, in the late morning, he set out into the neighborhood, laptop tucked in his messenger bag. He found that his work benefitted from changes in scenery. Bulbs bloomed out of people’s cracked driveways, and the observation pleased him as it arrived in his mind. He walked a mile to the nearest cafe, a Starbucks in a shopping center. He ordered a matcha latte. At the window bar, he opened his laptop. Recently he had secured a modest local arts grant to support Pacific Slope. Money trickled in through the sales of tote bags branded with the journal’s logo, and he’d begun to charge a three-dollar reading fee. He scanned the inbox, skimmed a few poetry submissions, and filed them into his Yes, Maybe, and Unlikely folders. He’d developed an intuition for when a piece should be declined: when it failed to stir an immediate feeling; when the writer had not fully given over to the task. Still, he lingered over the rejection letters. The magazine’s fiscal survival required repeat submitters, so he needed to compose tactful messages declining the current work while encouraging people to send work again.
People, but not Charlotte. According to Denise, their daughter had interviewed for a new marketing role, in-house at one of the tech giants. Her debut in Pacific Slope would not be followed by a string of poetry publications or flurry of graduate school applications. It was a moment of creative recognition, and he reasoned that it had boosted her confidence enough to accept the trappings of her life. She liked the city, she liked to eat at restaurants, she liked her steady paycheck. She was apparently dating someone new, a software engineer who enjoyed hiking with his dog, a detail, Denise emphasized, that signaled an ability to commit.
The Starbucks was nearly empty, but he enjoyed the sounds of the coffee machines, the smells and whirrs. Recalling the driveway bulbs from earlier, he composed a quick email to one of the authors in his next issue, suggesting more visual description of a front yard. Lately, he’d taken a stronger editorial hand, and his authors mostly took the notes well. He noticed the soft comings and goings of cars in the parking lot. People getting in and out, hefting bags, fumbling with purses and keys. Any of them could be the people sending their work to his magazine, how would he know? Anyone, everyone, their lies, their existential crises, their cliches. And he read them.
It had become clear after losing his job that the magazine should continue on like fatherhood. After all, it was a foundation for his daughter’s sense of self. She had been chosen by a real publication, and this success would underpin her confidence throughout her life, he was sure. Pacific Slope was his responsibility to carry forward in service of all young poets. If there was a gulf between himself and his daughter, perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps this was his parental sacrifice. He could see that now from his near-almighty vantage point, looking on from a café barstool, a beacon of acceptance, calmly reviewing the submissions that drifted into his inbox.
A barista called, “Order for Phillip!”
He turned toward the counter. His beard, now extending far below his chin, flowed with cedarwood balm. He wore an olive-green newsboy cap that harmonized with his tortoiseshell glasses, herringbone coat, and brown leather boots.
“Excellent,” he said, lightness in his voice, rising at the ring of his name.
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