3 CHAPTER THREE

Counterpointed Plotting

A lot of fictional stories are battlegrounds.

Indebted to the melodramatic imagination, literary stories often involve dynamics of power: who has control over whom; who abuses it; who uses it wisely. Stories of victimization grip us. We know that abuse from those in authority (teachers over children; a coach over players; a mother over a son) does all too often happen. When I was twelve years old the story “The Test” by Angelica Gibbs had a profound impact on me. A twenty-seven year-old African American woman needs to get her driver’s license for the job she has with a privileged white family. During the road test, the examiner “tests” her, making a series of derogatory remarks such as, “Old enough to have quite a flock of pickaninnies, eh?” The commentary escalates, until Marian, no longer able to take the degradation, pushes back with a “damn you,” and the examiner fails her, “[making] four very black crosses at random in the squares on Marian’s application blank.”

This story was originally published in the pages of The New Yorker in 1940 and I don’t think a month goes by where I don’t think about that story. It was a game changer for me. The extent of that kind of meanness, that kind of abuse of power, and racial targeting I was not aware existed until Gibbs showed the way.

Years later Sandra Cisneros does her own variation on this theme in the powerfully poignant “Eleven” where a white teacher, Mrs. Price, singles out a Latina girl, Rachel, on her birthday, making her claim ownership of a red sweater, “all raggedy and old” that clearly isn’t hers and has a “sleeve that smells like cottage cheese.” The teacher’s assumptions are based on class: this sweater “all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope” must belong to one of her not-so-well-off kids. She embarrasses Rachel, and when the truth is revealed that it’s not Rachel’s sweater, Mrs Price fails to apologize.

That narrative loose string still haunts me everytime I re-read “Eleven,” the failure of an authority figure to acknowledge and empathize with one of the students in the classroom.

Perhaps American writers, because we are a relatively young country, often tell stories of lost idealism, the veil of innocence being lifted to reveal what’s underneath: corruption, decay, unkindness.

But battleground stories aren’t the only stories to tell.

Charles Baxter, inspired by the work of the American stage, champions, in Burning Down the House, narratives of counterpointed characterization. Here the focus isn’t on some kind of end game: who’s going to triumph, who’s going to lose? Who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist? But instead these narratives spin around the connections and disconnects between two people, and ultimately we’re asked what’s emerging here? What’s leaking free from the armor almost all characters wear?

In theater, acting is often seen as structured improvisation. Actors have a script, but how they say what they say changes moment-to-moment depending on what their scene partner is giving them. Similarly in counterpointed character stories, the writer needs to follow the impulses of what each character puts forward, and that will form the basis of the story’s narrative arc. The end game isn’t so much to win, but to be understood. Life isn’t always a contest.

I love these kinds of stories.

In Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night (1967) the narrative has its fill of high-octane melodrama: a businessman, promising to bring a much-needed factory to Sparta, Mississippi, is murdered; a group of rednecks with a Confederate symbol on their car track and plan to possibly murder Virgil Tibbs; a white man Endicott (a plantation owner and resident bigot) slaps Tibbs in the face and Tibbs slaps him back; and a final arrest and shooting occurs on the pre-dawn streets. But underneath these pyrotechnics is a character-driven story as two men (one Black, one white; one big city Northerner, one rural country southerner; one college educated and nuanced with forensics, the other two-fisted and full of street smarts) tangle with each other, argue, but find connections among all their moments of disconnect, discovering a common humanity.

Sheriff Gillespie begrudgingly learns to lean on Virgil’s talent to help save the town and the promise of a new factory; and Virgil, in his pursuit of the bigoted Endicott, becomes painfully aware of his own prejudices and biases. In the end the men admire one another, and in a wonderful flipping of the Pullman conductor archetype, the white sheriff (played by Rod Steiger) carries the bags of the Black detective (played by Sidney Poitier) to the train.

A perfect ending to what the true journey of the characters within the larger plot is all about.

Case Study #3: “Garbage Night at the Opera”

Valerie Fioravanti’s “Garbage Night at the Opera” is a beautifully crafted tale of counterpointed characterization. It’s a rite of passage story. Massimo, an immigrant from Italy and a single parent, wants to educate his daughter Franca on an aspect of his cultural heritage: they’re going to see a production of La Bohème at the Metropolitan.

The narration informs us of Massimo’s other attempts to keep his past alive: To recapture the beauty of Ventozza, the town he hails from, Massimo ran “a creeping vine along his fire escape to introduce some green,” but “[T]he firemen brought ladders and chopped it away with their axes. They said it was a safety violation, wrote him a ticket, and warned him not to do it again.”

Sadly, further attempts to acculturate his daughter to Italy are also thwarted. When they arrive at the Met they discover the show’s sold out and can’t purchase a ticket.

Fioravanti then flips the traditional dynamics between a father and a daughter. Franca protects him from having “security” called in. Massimo isn’t happy about it: “He doesn’t like it when she has to speak for him, but strangers often misunderstand him.”

So where’s the story going to go next, what else is going to emerge? What might it pull out from the shadows, the hiding places between these two characters?

After witnessing a so-so puppet performance in Central Park, Massimo gets lost on his way home. The “outing” for his daughter appears to be going all awry. But then two treasures are found: a discarded mahogany dresser and a thrown away bicycle with a busted rim. Franca wants the bike and Dad fights an obstreperous neighbor for her right to keep it. In a final, double-voiced moment Fioravanti writes, “They have both chosen well.”

How so? Dad plans to fix the bicycle for his daughter so that she will be able to more fully participate in childhood and become Americanized. By contrast, Franca, in carrying the bike herself, allows Dad to keep the dresser so that he can fix it, sell it, and perhaps pre-order tickets for the opera, and thus pass down some of his cultural heritage.

Case Study #4: “The Capsule”

Joseph Helmreich’s “The Capsule” is a tight little story that deals with a different kind of counterpoint, the shadow shelf. Our protagonist is suddenly pushed back into, what we later will learn to be, an irretrievable past. A time capsule has been retrieved from the Downsville Dam’s spillway.

It’s Quinn’s capsule and years ago she died in a fire that killed her and eleven other classmates. The media wants to open the capsule and our protagonist is asked to do the honors. The dramatics of the situation places him in two spaces at once: “I feel guilty talking about this to Sheila. I know that’s ridiculous; it’s twelve-year-old me and a twelve-year-old-girl. Yet sometimes I wonder if that fact itself isn’t why I try not to think about Quinn. It feels inappropriate. I was so powerfully drawn to her and when I remember her, that power returns and, as a married father of two, it feels shameful. I remind myself that I’m not perceiving her through my adult eyes, but through the eyes of myself as a child and that the feelings, too, are just being borrowed from him. But it does little to ease the discomfort. Maybe what I’m really hiding from is something more inscrutable: that I’m in love with a ghost.”

He exists in a state of doubleness. And the counterpoints are doubled: the protagonist vis-a-vis himself and vis-a-vis his memories of Quinn.

Prior to the opening of the capsule he has several retrospective backstories, remembering Quinn scraping a chalk outline with a small rock of a dead deer. She’s an enigma, eyes “radiant with mischief”; he’s trying to understand her and his attraction to her; but this isn’t going to be a simple story of coming to terms. Instead of understanding the present through the past, Helmreich, in a stunning reversal, leaves us with more questions than answers.

“The Capsule” is a powerful thwarted quest story. Sometimes the most interesting characters we can write are those that can’t find what they most want.