Matthew Goodwin's pencil hovered over the blank page like the spear of some angry god ready to strike down from the heavens and forever leave its mark on the world of mortal men.
If only, the much more human Matthew hadn't been experiencing a king-sized case of writer's block at that moment. He might have been leaving just as indelible a mark on the literary world.
"Brenda...Brenda...What? Shouted? Screamed? Cried? Jesus! The bitch needs to do something. Her freaking boat is sinking!"
Matthew scooped up the offending page and crumpled it into a ball in his fist, hurling it at the wastebasket ten feet away. To his disgust, he missed by a good ten inches.
"Crappy writer and even worse basketball player," he mumbled, swatting the pencil on his desk away and onto the floor. He decided it was a good thing he did his rough drafts the old-fashioned way, knocking a laptop off on the floor when he got frustrated would have been expensive.
"I take it the play isn't going so well?" said a voice from the door to his office.
"You could say that. I'm just off to a slow start. The ideas will come...eventually."
Matthew swiveled around in his chair to lock eyes with his eighteen-year-old son, Ryan.
The younger Goodwin reminded him of himself at that age. They both had the same straight, dark-brown hair that dropped over their ears and formed into bangs across their broad foreheads, though Ryan's hair fell longer, down to his shoulders while Matthew kept his at a more responsible, adult length, the hair stopping at the nape of his neck. Ryan had his father's eyes, piercing hazel-green orbs that tended to mirror his moods, seeming to darken when he was unhappy.
"The eyes are the windows to the soul..."
"Huh?"
"Nothing, Ryan. Just waxing poetic."
Ryan shrugged.
His dad was always doing that, quoting verse, reciting passages of Shakespeare or some other play, spitting out lines from classic Hollywood movies. It was his way of commenting on the world around him.
Matthew stood and stretched, his back cracking loudly. He was roughly the same height as his son, both of them just grazing the six-foot mark, but unlike Ryan's slender young build, Matthew was broader across the chest and shoulders from working out.
Ryan waited patiently for his father to stifle a yawn.
"Did you need something?"
"You were going to give me a ride to school this morning. I have to take my guitar for theater, remember?"
"Right! Sorry. I got distracted."
"Clearly," agreed Ryan, noting the pile of crumpled paper balls in front of the wastebasket.
"Slow, as I said."
"This is just a community theater playhouse. You don't have to write the next big Broadway production."
"I know that, but I still don't want to embarrass myself. I do have a reputation to uphold," replied Matthew with a chuckle.
Ryan nodded and smiled. His dad had been an aspiring novelist when he had met Ryan's mother, Jane, twenty years earlier. He had written a couple of well-received plays, one had even been produced off-Broadway, quite an accomplishment for a twenty-year-old. The elder Goodwin had been working on his first novel while taking university classes when he ran into the raven-haired Jane Wellman at the student union. The two had hit it off from the word go and started dating a short time after. It was all good fun, at first, but after a wild night with too much wine involved, Jane had turned up pregnant. Being far too Catholic even to consider any alternative short of marriage, Jane had pressured Matthew into hasty nuptials that quickly turned out to be a mistake.
Once living together, the pair discovered that outside of a keen interest in literature, they didn't have nearly as much in common as they first believed.
By the time Ryan came along seven months later, the relationship was already strained and adding a child did nothing to turn down the pressure in their small household.
Matthew was forced to put his novel on hold and get a job while struggling in night school to finish his teaching degree. The two years that followed were difficult for both him and Jane. Eventually, he had graduated, and things slowly improved, at least economically. They were able, with the help of Jane's parents, to secure a modest starter home in the suburbs of Richmond Heights in their home city of Turlington, Michigan, pop. 67,000.
Unfortunately, the scars of their shaky beginning never fully healed.
Matthew and Jane had fought more than once, arguments that amounted to a channeling of the disappointments they both felt for having their lives disrupted even if the source of those mistakes had been themselves. Looking for someone to blame, it was easier to blame each other than the person in the mirror.
The affair blindsided Matthew, though, in retrospect, he should have seen it coming a mile away. Jane had been dissatisfied with things for a long while, and given how far they had drifted apart by then, her turning to someone new was not all that surprising.
The divorce had been quite amicable, given the circumstances, and young Ryan, being just four at the time, hardly seemed to notice that his parents were no longer living together. As time had passed, Ryan seemed to gravitate naturally to spending more time with his father. Some might have seen this as a consequence of his mother's tendency to go off jet-setting with whatever well-off young stud she happened to be enamored of that week, but, in truth, he and Matthew got along better anyway. The pair were two peas in a pod, with similar tastes in music, books, and movies.
When Ryan reached high-school age, his mother had abruptly remarried to a wealthy British aristocrat and moved to London. They still kept in touch by phone and the Internet, with Ryan going to visit when time permitted. Deep down, he felt guilty that he didn't miss his mother more.
"Just let me fetch my keys..." said Matthew, rifling his desk and patting at his pockets.
Ryan held up a finger, his father's car keys dangling by the silver ring that kept them together.
"What would I do without you?" quipped his dad as he walked by and grabbed the keys.
"You would be in trouble."
"I have no doubt. Come on. I can't have you being late. It would reflect badly on my parenting skills."
The drive over to the high school was a short one. Matthew didn't usually have to bother, Ryan preferred to walk most of the time, but lugging his guitar the whole way would have been difficult. He helped his son remove it from the trunk while Ryan slipped his backpack over his shoulders.
"Do you ever use your locker? That thing looks like it's going to explode," said Matthew eying the bulging backpack.
"No time. I can never get there and back between classes. I'll see you later."
Matthew contented himself patting his son on the shoulder, not wanting to embarrass him by going for a hug.
He was on his way to the driver's door of his car when a short, bald man in an ill-fitting suit came walking briskly in his direction.
"Excuse me! Mr. Goodwin? I'm sorry to bother you. I'm Principal Mathers. I don't know if you recall, but we met at the Drama Department fundraiser last year?"
"Of course, Principal Mathers. It's good to see you again," lied Matthew.
He had actually found the Principal to be a colossal bore, able to carry on for hours about his love of bird photography.
"If you have a moment? We could use your help."
"With what exactly?"
"It might be easier to explain in my office."
