On Sunday, 11-27-05, made these notes and sketches for an ongoing story.

Sylvia Regine Newman is an English teacher writing an interminable novel-in-progress. For her PhD thesis, Newman is studying Mortimer Messing, an obscure third-tier Victorian writer. She is fifty, but looks older. Is a fairly powerful swimmer, and has intermittent phases of getting up early to swim laps in a pool. As the story opens, though, she is not in one of her swimming phases, which have grown farther and farther apart as she ages.

Pauline Therese Rehmer, known as Polly to her friends, is in some ways the antithesis to Newman's thesis -- where Newman is hefty, Rehmer is slight; where N. is brunette, R. is blonde; where N. is invisible to men (except as a mother figure), R. is desirable prey. But R. does not let herself be preyed upon; she's a canny ironist, a wisecracking veteran of the gender wars, over forty but still quite attractive. Dresses stylishly. Decidedly single and wants to stay that way. Repels male advances with ease and impatience. She teaches French and art. She is forty-eight, but looks younger. Was a ballet dancer in her youth, of some success, and goes on to practice ballet weekly as a lifelong routine. Her ex-husband, Jonathan Madden, a succesful restauranteur who owns several bistros, left her ten years ago for his hostess, a much younger woman. They now have three children. Rehmer dropped his last name in the acrimonious divorce.

In the faculty lounge, Newman's female colleagues are agog over the imminent arrival of Robert Kingsley, poet, translator and critic, who'll be a visiting lecturer. French is his strongest language. He is handsome and distinguished looking. Never married, so of course they think he is gay, but he is not. Kingsley and Rehmer will become good friends due to their mutual interest in French, but since they have no romantic interest in each other, Rehmer will be a loyal confidante to Newman on her crooked path toward Kingsley. People will think K. is interested in R., when actually he is secretly drawn to N. His mother died when he was fourteen, his father emotionally abused him (a brute of a man with a red neck, something like Kafka's father, a military man), and he may have a form of DID, and/or be subject to fugue states.

Signal is the nickname of a young French graffiti artist of North African heritage. He grew up in one of the places which recently had the race/class riots in France, but he came to the US on an arts scholarship and has been studying with Rehmer, so he wasn't there when the riots broke out. However, he has a strong emotional reaction to them and is considering going back there in a gesture of solidarity and worry about his younger brother.

No news yet on Erik Noyes, but he is the plot hinge.

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