ELSE
ARIA
ODE
ERR
EVE
ADO
ETNA
IDEA
ASEA
EEL
ASH
END
ANTI
ANT
EAR
APE
ARI
ACRE
ETAL
EST
That was just the short list. There were a thousand or more common answers. They were the building blocks of crossword puzzles. But the quality — the comedy and tragedy — of a puzzle often had less to do with the answers than with the clues. A great solver understood the poetry of the clues. The most difficult puzzles used puns, misdirection, verb-noun elision, and camouflage in their clueing.
Sherwin believed himself to be a great solver, so he traveled to the American Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, Connecticut.
When he stepped into the conference room, crowded with solvers who all seemed to know one another, Sherwin was nervous and vaguely ashamed of himself. Was this what his life had come to? He’d been flying first class to Hollywood, and now he was paying too much for a king bed nonsmoking in a Hilton in Connecticut? Yes, it was a wealthy, lovely, and privileged part of the state, but it still felt like a descent.
But wait, Sherwin thought, stop judging people. These solvers were a group of people who had to be clever. These people were thinkers. Yes, there had to be plenty of eccentrics — compulsive hand-washers, functioning autistics, encyclopedia readers, and compulsive cat collectors — but didn’t that actually make them a highly attractive group of people? When had Sherwin been anything other than a weird fucker? Didn’t he get paid to be a weird fucker?
“Hello,” he said to the woman at the registration desk. She wore a name tag with her name, Sue, spelled out on a crossword grid.
“Hello,” Sue said. “Welcome to the tournament. Are you a contestant or a journalist?”
“A contestant.”
“So this must be your first time here?” she asked.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, this is a family, really, a highly dysfunctional family.” She laughed. “I know everybody. But I don’t know you. So that makes you new.”
“You’ve got me.”
“Okay, I’ll sign you up for the C Group.”
“C? What’s that?”
“It’s for new solvers.”
“I’m new,” Sherwin said, “but I’m good.”
“Oh, first-timers are always C Group. If you do well enough on the first few puzzles, they’ll consider moving you up right away, but that rarely happens.”
“Why not?”
“Because the puzzles are always more difficult than you’d expect. And because the pressure — well, first-timers have no idea how much pressure there is. And — well, they tend to choke a bit.”
Sue laughed again.
“Are you laughing at me?” Sherwin asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m laughing at myself. I’ve been coming to this tournament for seventeen years and I’m still a C Group. I keep choking year after year.”
“I’m used to pressure.”
“Oh, I’m not judging you. It’s all supposed to be fun. It is fun. Just sign up with the C Group and have fun. This is your first time. You have years of fun ahead of you.”
Years of fun? When had anybody ever said such a thing and meant it? Sue meant it. Sherwin shrugged and signed up for C Group.
Later that afternoon, he sat at a long table in a room filled with long tables. He had four pencils and a good eraser. He sat beside an elderly Korean woman who looked as if she’d been born in her sweater.
“Hello,” she said. “You must be new?”
She had a slight accent, so she was probably a first-generation immigrant. She’d probably been in the United States for twenty-five years. She’d been here long enough to become a crossword solver. Sherwin realized that he had no idea if crossword puzzles were written in other languages. Were other languages flexible enough?
“Are you new?” the Korean woman asked again. She was missing a lower front tooth. This made her look somehow younger, even impish. Don’t be condescending, Sherwin chastised himself.
“Yes, I’m new,” he said. “C Group.”
“Welcome, welcome,” she said. “We’re like a family here.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Yes, just like a family. Like my family. My big sister is a legendary bitch. Just like that bitch over there.”
She pointed a pencil at another elderly woman, a white woman wearing thick glasses. Didn’t she know that one could purchase plastic lenses these days?
“Why is she a bitch?” Sherwin asked.
“Because she always beats me. And because she always apologizes for beating me. Young man, you must never apologize for being good. It makes the rest of us feel worse about ourselves.”
“Okay, good advice,” Sherwin said. “So I guess I should tell you that I really don’t belong in Group C. I’m better than that.”
“So you think you can beat me?”
“I’ve timed myself with puzzles. I’m fast.”
“I’m sure you are.”
A volunteer set the first puzzle — freshly printed on fine cotton paper — facedown on the table in front of Sherwin.
“So what happens now?” Sherwin asked.
“When they say go, you turn over the paper and do your puzzle. When you’re finished, raise your hand, and somebody will mark your time, and then they’ll collect your puzzle and check it for accuracy. And they’ll measure your score against all the other C Group puzzlers.”
“The woman said they’d move me up to B if I did well enough.”
“Why don’t you just do the first puzzle and see what happens? What’s your name anyway?”
“Sherwin.”
“I’m Mai. What do you do when you aren’t solving puzzles?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh. Have you written anything I might have heard of?”
“Doubtful. I wrote poems and short stories. I never sold much. And never won any awards. I wrote a couple of movies, too. But they never got made.”
“What are you working on now?”
“Oh, I don’t write anymore.”
“Why not?”
“My talent dried up and blew away in the wind,” Sherwin said. “I am the Dust Bowl.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m sorry to say it.”
Sherwin had never before confessed aloud his fears that his talent was gone forever. And now that he had, he realized that he would never write again. Not like he had. Was that so bad? He’d written two decent books and two bad ones. How many people in the world had written and published anything? Because he’d stopped writing, Sherwin had been thinking of himself as a failure. But perhaps that wasn’t it. Perhaps he had only been destined to be a writer for that brief period of time. After all, there must be at least one person in the world who had loved his books — who still loved his work — so perhaps that made it all worthwhile. Wasn’t everything temporary anyway?
“Okay, wait, Sherwin, enough of the biography,” the Korean woman said. “Here we go.”
“Puzzlers,” the emcee said, “start your puzzles.”
Sherwin and the Korean woman, and a few hundred other puzzlers, flipped over their papers and started working. Sherwin quickly filled three Across answers and one Down, but then stalled. He read through the clues and found that he didn’t know any of them offhand. He was stuck already. Thirty seconds into his first puzzle and he was frozen. Words were failing him. Again and again, they failed him. He stared blankly at his mostly empty grid for one minute and three seconds and was shocked when the Korean woman raised her hand.
“You’re done?” he asked.
“You’re not supposed to talk,” she said.
“But you’re really done that fast?”