Ironically, she often dissuades her students from describing a protagonist in too fine of detail. Readers only need a few telling clues:

“The countess possesses a shock of white hair.”

“The farmer’s mouth is a shriveled ax wound.”

The only distinguishing characteristics Salinger gives Holden Caulfield are his height and that little patch of gray hair at the side of his head. If you do your authorial job correctly your reader will create the rest of the character.

And in going against her own professorial mandate she describes this woman to said audience of strangers.

Beyond her somewhat forgiving brown eyes, your narrator could be described as unremarkable. In that thorny subjective bureau of classification known as the Looks Department, if she’s being brutally honest with herself, she’d say she’s perhaps four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as “sneakily attractive.”

She is the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted to a wall.

*

BELLA

Autumns in New Haven, where the temperature drops so fast it’s as if God is hoarding something; as if he’s keeping a piece of this world for himself. Yes, my God is a man. He’s selfish and smokes a pipe and looks like a perverted eighteenth-century French novelist. My God is a fat man with money who can still get it up. His penis is short and stout and stiff as an old book. My God has gamy breath and gout. My God is basically Honoré de Balzac.

So this is now. Right now. It’s the late fall. There has been early snow, nearly a foot of it, in fact. Records have been broken. One barely remembers the leaves changing.

I’m standing in the center of the New Haven Green, a public park near campus. It’s very cold. There is no wind. The naked trees look palsied and arthritic. It’s that hour of the night when even the most mundane objects seem to possess thought. A guilt-ridden park bench. The serpentine wickedness hiding in a lost scarf.

That lamppost over there knows more about me than most of my students.

I come to this park when I can’t sleep. I talk things out. I use long, heavily embroidered, figurative sentences; the kind of sentences I urge my students to avoid. In this park I’m a Creative Writing hypocrite. I imagine my purple prose evaporating in the cold air above me. Thousands of words disappearing …

So let’s go back in time a bit.

Shortly after the beginning of my tenth tenured year at Yale, sharp stomach pains drove me to the emergency room where I sustained a rupture in my lower intestine. At home I had been sitting in my favorite chair—an overstuffed plaid recliner—rereading James Salter’s Light Years. It’s a book I read every year, often in the fall; that rare work of fiction that continues to reveal new things with each reading. Salter’s meditation on infidelity and love and loneliness … and divorce … and the suburbs and dogs and wine … I don’t even teach the book because, well, because quite honestly it’s so good that it sort of enrages me. Anyway, I was about forty pages into it when I got up to go to the bathroom and was suddenly doubled over in pain. It felt as if I’d been stabbed in the stomach with a hunting knife. Fortunately my cell phone was within arm’s reach and I was able to dial 911. I lost consciousness shortly thereafter. I don’t even remember the paramedics.