Julip

  *

  But, oh God, how did I get here from there? I’m about to tell you, and I better hurry because I’m losing interest in myself. During my extended crisis it occurred to me that it must be my personality that makes life disappointing. It’s essentially the same life that others have, but they don’t find it disappointing. Besides, when you take away the livelihood a man has practiced for thirty years there is suddenly a hiatus wherein it is natural to try to figure out what’s left; in short, how much of our being has depended on our occupation for its existence? This sort of thing has become a daily banality in the newspapers but I assure you it’s quite different when you’re sitting in the lap of the vacuum.

  Just now I noticed the three cow dogs sitting outside the cabin window waiting for their morning biscuit. Their names are Diana, Cody, and Gert, but I don’t know which is which. They can hear Verdugo’s cattle truck when it turns off the main road over a half-dozen miles down the canyon. They set up a racket then, and do little spins like ice skaters, though Verdugo is not overly pleasant to them. They were rather nasty to me until I bought a large bag of dog biscuits at the feed store in town last Saturday. Already they have learned that they get one each morning and that the biscuits will be tossed out the window in lieu of my initial attempt to feed them by hand, during which I felt close to losing fingers. Verdugo tells me that these dogs are known as blue heelers (God knows why!) and are functional animals rather than pets. The landscape is so tortured and geologically rumpled here in southeastern Arizona that dogs must be used to round up the cattle so that they may be trucked their miserable way to auction and their eventual deaths. With a bow to ancient alchemy, both dogs and cattle may be considered prima materia—though also dogs and cattle.

  *

  Frankly, it’s my fiftieth birthday. It will go uncelebrated by me, and others who may have noted the date are over fifteen hundred miles distant. Little did I know last May, when I saw Thelma and Louise, that I would be joining their ghosts in the southwestern landscape. In fact, I had never been west of that dank, alluvial glut the Mississippi, which, according to my environmentalist daughter, is so laden with filth it makes the dread Ganges look like Perrier.

  My office mate Bob was a leveling influence during my prolonged trauma, the aftereffect being the virtual exile on this ranch owned by my daughter’s in-laws, who, according to Verdugo, have not visited the property in five years. The day after my aborted trip for medical tests last May I told Bob (Howard University B.A., Harvard University M.A. and Ph.D., with a concentration in all things Elizabethan) about the movie and he was intrigued by the thematics. Neither of us could remember our last movie, short of the Disney farragoes I took my daughter to in her childhood. Before that it was Orson Welles’s Othello which Bob hadn’t cared for. There was also the unpleasant memory of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which Marilyn dragged me along to when we were in graduate school at University of Michigan. I stalked out of this mudbath after a mere half hour, not being able to countenance a parody of my profession. Now that I no longer have the profession I might well enjoy the movie, though sitting in a darkened theater having one’s nerves peeled is not my idea of pleasure.

  This ranch is said to be rather large, but then the word “acre” is an abstraction for most, and thousands of them side by side are quite beyond a flatlander’s ken. The main house is bundled up in the master’s absence as if an invisible sheet had been thrown over it. Between my small cabin and the sprawling main house is the neat-as-a-pin adobe of the foreman and his wife, the Verdugos. Out behind the barnyard are the corrals, tack shed, bunkhouse, and all manner of inscrutable ranching equipment sitting in the weeds as if waiting their metallic judgment day. They remind me of my youth when all unknown machinery was referred to as gizmos.

  *

  Lunchtime and once again I’m having sardines and tortillas. I really don’t know how to cook, and here I am twenty miles from the nearest restaurant of any sort. There is an open Jeep available to me but I don’t know how to handle a standard shift. When Mrs. Verdugo said I was welcome to take my meals with them — her husband’s aged mother does most of the cooking for the family and two ranch hands — I told her I knew how to cook well. There doesn’t seem to be reason behind my gratuitous fib. She seemed delighted at this news and said perhaps one day I might cook them a “gourmet dinner from back east.” I readily agreed, compounding my lie.

  Right now it has begun snowing in Arizona and I have packed only summery clothes out of ignorance. The ranch is at an altitude of over six thousand feet which has an effect on the weather for reasons that aren’t clear to me. One grows accustomed to seeing pictures of mountains covered with snow and now I’m sitting here watching the process for the first time! Marilyn used to tease me over the way I ignored the weather, wearing the same things each season, and switching wardrobe according to dates rather than “reality,” her favorite catchword.

  I’m dragging something and I’m not sure whether it’s my feet, mind, heart, or soul. Allow me to race through the frayed details while my memory is still relatively clear of disease. Until last summer I was a full professor at a college in southern Michigan which thinks of itself as “the Swarthmore of the Midwest.” This notion is repeated by members of the Athletics Department and citizens of the small town that encloses the campus, who have no perception of the Swarthmore of the East, the original one, just as children are unaware of the true nature of the song lyrics they sing. When my daughter was young and taking part in a school pageant she skipped around the house singing “Give My Regards to Broadway” without the vaguest idea what “Broadway” or “Herald Square” meant.

  I stray. I taught English literature, a subject to which there is no longer a noticeable inclination. I was granted tenure because of my early success at age thirty, when a university press published a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, called The Economics of Madness in English Poetry, which considered in depth the lives of Christopher Smart and John Clare. In fact, my mother was an English war bride, from Helpton in Northamptonshire, and a distant descendant of Clare himself, plausibly a fearsome detail if you put much faith in genetics. The greater public loves insanity, starvation, and suicide in its poets and my book was widely reviewed not only in scholarly journals but the larger press, including a third-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, with a photograph where I appeared properly anguished and quizzical. Historically, of course, England treated her poets no better than it did the Irish during the potato famine. Neither Smart nor Clare need have been institutionalized had their collective admirers offered nominal support. This is a far cry from today, when thousands of M.F.A. poets circulate the nation’s universities carrying expensive briefcases while it is the scholars who are scorned as non-creative. But more on that later.

  I was a full professor by thirty-five, living near the outskirts of town in a fine house on three acres, a delayed dowry from my in-laws, who were not initially pleased with Marilyn’s choice. There were employment offers from Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Texas but I chose to stay put out of timidity — I did not have another book idea to keep pace in the upper reaches of the academic world and, as Marilyn elegantly stated, I was better off being a big frog in a small pond. It was also better not to move our daughter Deirdre (not my choice of name) away from the security of small-town life. Naturally I did not know at the time that Marilyn was already in love with our department chairman, whom I shall call Ballard, and who later became Dean of Science and Arts.

  Life passed on rather sleepily for years. Each summer I was given a travel grant and spent two months of research in London and elsewhere in England. Marilyn and Deirdre would go up to Harbor Springs, a haven for plutocrats in northern Michigan, and spend the hot months at her parents’ summer home. It was there that Marilyn would have her assignations with Ballard, who as a faux outdoorsman lived during the summer in a log cabin some fifty miles away. I know because I checked the map.

  Ballard
always thought his sentimentality about the natural world was heroic. Once earlier in my career I had gone with him and several other professors up to his cabin for a long weekend. Our wives gave us a dinner party the night before as if we were Lewis and Clark headed for terra incognita. We jammed into Ballard’s huge Suburban, the de rigueur vehicle for this sort of nonsense, the back stuffed with food and gear. I was the only one not in possession of a flannel shirt. It was a cold, rainy weekend shot through with false heartiness and beery camaraderie. Because of my late father’s alcoholism I limit myself strictly to six bottles of Watney ale on Saturdays. It is an unwobbling pivot and I watched the others get puking drunk, read dirty magazines, fumble their cards at poker, make forays out on a laughably small lake to fish, from which they’d return cold, sodden, and empty-handed. The only fish we ate was tuna.

  Back to the nightmare that lasted a late spring, summer, early fall, and which led me to this place. Rather, I was led by my daughter, who is conveniently a psychiatric social worker in Chicago and married to a pediatrician. They are a hauntingly non-venal couple and work together in a clinic, in a ghetto that I find so frightening I have only visited them there once.

  It all started on the first fine day in early April when I errantly went into my Milton class and said, “Good morning, you ladies are looking lovely today,” to a group of a half-dozen senior girls who had shed the usual outer garments they habitually bought at used-clothing stores in a nearby city. I will not comment on the irony of rich girls aping the clothing of the poor. The upshot was they reported me to Dean Ballard and I was called in that afternoon to explain my sexist comment. Now, Marilyn was married to Ballard right after she divorced me, her visit to the lawyer coming the day after Deirdre’s high school graduation. During the past ten years, Ballard and I have spoken only when necessary, although he has attempted to become chummy, especially right after Marilyn left him at the end of a scant four years of marriage. Since then the town has become too small for her and she can best be described as at large in the world of the arts. Marilyn has always explained away her bad behavior as being part of her “journey.” I was not inclined to be sympathetic with Ballard, though his wife went daffy when he left her for Marilyn, and he is now stuck with three unruly teenagers caroming drunkenly around town dressed in hiking clothes.

  The meeting was brief and melancholy with Ballard saying he was obligated to record the grievance because of college rules, making a slight reference to a problem in February when a student named Elizabeth filed a complaint over comments I had made in my course called English Poetics: From Beowulf to Auden. She had stormed out of class when I quoted Ezra Pound, who, though an admitted fool and anti-Semite, had some wise things to say about poetry. My sin here had become leavened by the fact that Elizabeth, a rich girl from Shaker Heights, had spent the school year pretending to be Jewish and observing Jewish holidays. The year before, she had become a Native American. Bob said the black students were cringing over the idea that they might be next on her schedule of adoptions. This, and the fact that she was the girlfriend of Reed, the arch troublemaker and editor of the student literary magazine Openings, made Ballard take the problem with a grain of salt. Reed had called me a twit to my face outside the student union after I had cast the deciding vote to withdraw department funding from his magazine over an anonymous short story he had published, “A Girl and Her Dog,” with somewhat explicit line drawings. Everyone knew he had written the story himself.

  All of this in itself would have passed if it hadn’t been for the Earth Day assault charge. The students were staging a massive eco-circus on the commons for the weekend, with rock bands, costumery, modern dances, speakers and poets who were advocates of the American wilderness, recycling, and whatever. I tried to pass by unobtrusively in the shrubbery to fetch some forgotten books from my office but it was sprinkling and the bushes were wetting my trousers and the high bushes were hard to negotiate with my umbrella. On emerging, I was spotted by the student mime troupe, who had painted their faces green and were dressed up ostensibly as trees. They surrounded me and attempted to mime my continued path to my office. I’m a bit of a claustrophobe and when they got so close that I could smell their breath, I attempted to shield myself with the umbrella, the point of which supposedly struck one of the mimes, who collapsed screaming. Another mime summoned a nearby campus policewoman and I was duly charged. The charges were dropped the following week when the injured party went off to New York City to further her ancient art form.

  *

  I must interrupt, partly because my heart no longer aches — I did not expect the anger to pass so quickly with the change in surroundings — and in part because I am watching something interesting. Before daybreak I was awakened by a generalized roaring. As I leapt from bed I thought it might be a tornado but it turned out to be an immense cattle truck, far larger than the one Verdugo normally used. The lights were directed at my window and I had to duck out of the way, not wanting to look foolish in my pajamas. After the commotion settled I decided to make coffee and read rather than go back to bed, although it was only six A.M. It was slim pickings as the several trunks of books I had packed hadn’t arrived in the week I had been here. There was only a stack of Arizona Highways plus a half-dozen books Deirdre had purchased for me on our visit to the Desert Museum, an unpleasant event ending in a quarrel. We had made a dawn flight for Tucson out of Chicago’s O’Hare, picked up our luggage and a rental car, and it still wasn’t lunchtime. We drove to this museum under Deirdre’s insistence that it would introduce me to the area.

  The upshot was that the place, including the drive there, gave me a terrible case of vertigo and Deirdre asked me if I had taken my pills that morning and I admitted that I hadn’t. “Jesus, Dad, but you’re an asshole,” she said. I agreed, but that didn’t diminish the absolutely terrifying foreignness of the flora and fauna that surrounded us. The so-called museum was alive. As my eyes tried to refocus from the sunlight, I stood in a dark hall until I discovered I was face to face with an immense rattlesnake. Out on the paths through gardens of cacti there were all manner of alien creatures in cages. Of course I had seen them in books but their density, their otherness, had never recorded on me. I made a hasty retreat to the bookstore off the lobby, with Deirdre no doubt wishing that someone else had fathered her.

  *

  I certainly can’t control my mind. After his before-dawn arrival in the huge truck Verdugo had gone back inside his adobe, perhaps for breakfast, then reemerged at first light with his two young cowboys. I turned off my lamp in the cabin so as not to be seen watching them as they saddled up their horses and headed off into the cold mountains. I felt an odd tinge of envy — I had been on a pony only once as a child. My father had rather flippantly promised a horse when I reached twelve, but I knew this was unlikely because we lived in a suburb of Toledo. I busied myself sending away the form on his packets of pipe tobacco which promised a horse of high quality to the winner. Most of our spare money at the time went to my father’s drinking habit. My twelfth birthday came and went with a used bicycle for my Toledo Blade paper route but no sign of a horse. At the nether end of my route, at the edge of town and country, I often stood back in the trees and watched a girl from our school ride a roan horse. My pathetic little heart thumped for both the horse and the girl with the long black hair.

  *

  Verdugo and the cowboys returned at about one P.M., driving at least a hundred cattle before them. I put on my Harris tweed sport coat and rushed outside to watch this maelstrom of beasts as they were channeled into the largest corral. They resembled wild animals compared to the well-groomed dairy cows of southern Michigan and Ohio. When I walked out the gate of the stone fence that surrounded my cabin Verdugo and the cowboys, who were Mexican, began to shout at me incoherently. I cupped my ears but I couldn’t understand them until I noted a stray cow coming around from the path to the adobe, crossing the yard at top speed with the dogs giving chase. The beast was headed toward me an
d I waved my arms to no avail. I jumped up on the stone wall, thanking whatever gods may be that I had played handball every Saturday morning with Bob — a dreary game indeed — or I might not have made the jump. It dawned on me as the beast roared past into the cabin yard that this was not a cow but a bull, its balloonish pink testicles flopping around as it swung back toward me, the dogs yipping at its heels. I turned to see Verdugo and the cowboys riding toward me with Verdugo yelling, “Close the back gate!” I jumped down and headed off at a dead run and barely beat the bull. He glared as I closed the gate, rattling it fearfully with his horns, then opened his great mouth a scant few feet from my face and bellowed mightily, covering me with spittle, his red eyes full of hate. I admit I shuddered.

  “Thanks. Looks like you got yourself a yard pet,” said Verdugo as he rode up. “That old baloney bull’s a pain in the ass.” He noted my confusion. “Too old to cover many cows. Too tough for good meat. They’ll turn him into baloney, so he’s a baloney bull.”

  Verdugo’s crone of a mother brought out beer and I accepted one despite the fact it was Friday. My father had been dead thirty-eight years and the danger of my becoming an alcoholic could be thought receding. Verdugo and the Mexican cowboys were rehearsing the event in Spanish and one slapped me on the back. I admit I felt a twinge of pride for being of some use for the first time since my tormented school year passed into history (what history?) last June.

  I was invited into the house for late lunch and saw no reason to refuse. Verdugo’s wife was still off at the country school down the road where she taught grades kindergarten through six. In their kitchen I was pleased to solve the mystery of local fireplaces, as there was no grate in my own in the cabin. They tilt the logs upright against the back and do not use grates. I meant to light a fire myself when I returned after lunch. The adobe was smallish but neat as a pin and I wondered at the fact that Verdugo and his wife had no children.