“Don’t bring back any dim-witted mooses,” she said. “Don’t put a superfluous dumb cluck of a line in your poem.” She had used her lifeboat simile in the last class: A line is like a lifeboat—only a limited number of words get to go in it and you have to decide which word-lives are most valuable; the rest die.
It was ridiculous, but the only thing she could think of to say.
When no one said anything in response, she stared out into the center of the room and said, “So, Tim. How the fuck is Conan?”
· · ·
The small, dingy P&C by campus is unusually crowded and not just with jean-jacketed students buying beer, bananas, hamburger. There are even families in here, as if from some other neighborhood. Perhaps there’s a sale. The three available shopping carts by the door are gritty with black grease, spangled with lettuce bits like a rabbit’s cage. They are all jammed into each other, a copulation of stainless steel. I unhitch the one with the least grease but the most lettuce and proceed to wheel it into the mayhem. People are crashing into each other in the narrow produce aisle, scrambling zigzag for plastic bags.
“Excuse me,” says a male student in a white turtleneck. He doesn’t have a cart, only a beige knapsack of books over his shoulder. He isn’t interested in produce. “Excuse me,” he says to me again. “I saw you outside and followed you in here because I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to tell you that.”
“Oh, my god,” I say and turn away, suddenly startled into a weird sort of terror. I fumble with the cabbage heads. Who does this guy think he is? I try to glide voicelessly away.
“Are you a student here?” the guy persists.
I can feel myself pale, jittery, glaring at a point slightly to the left of one of his ears. His heart, I know, is all chutzpah and photography. “No, I’m an instructor.” I try to pronounce it like a baroness, but it comes out faltering and wrong. “Excuse me,” I say to the student, then squeeze past him, between a center-aisle mustard display and someone else’s cartload of dog food and frozen orange juice. I cross the aisle to the apples.
The student follows. “I hope I didn’t offend you,” he says. I keep my back to him, studying the apples. “My name is John. I’m an archaeology major,” he says, examining, I can tell, the tweed back of my thrift-shop man’s coat. I examine apple after apple, taking out my reading glasses, putting them on, and then peering out over them, saying, “Hmmmmm.” I pretend to be an apple scientist. I’m unable to tell him straight out to get lost.
“Well,” says John, finally. “Good-bye,” and he ambles away.
I remain at the apples, counting, counting. I can feel my face splotch with red, my mouth clamp into a hard line. I breathe deeply, run my hand through my hair, return to my cart and quickly wheel it around, head for the checkout line, like someone who needs desperately to be alone, to be in bed, to be taking a bath, somewhere far away, conjugating verbs, memorizing dynasties.
The ants are still trafficking around the place, seemingly undisturbed by the weather’s getting colder. Georgianne keeps singing her own misheard lyrics to a Bob Dylan song: “The ants are my friends / They’re blowing in the wind.” The crack has moved a few more inches, taking a slight upward turn like a kind of graph, an optimistic poll. The plumbing, however, is sluggish, acting up, the toilet slow and undignified, churning the toilet-paper, stewing, shredding things finer. This is what it’s like to live in a house.
Georgie has dinner and a bath, and Mrs. Kimball comes over and I say good night and drive over to Gerard’s apartment. We are going to have drinks there and then go off to the Dome Room at the Holiday Inn where he will play and I will sit in an elegant booth and mark up student poems all evening. And listen.
He is in the kitchen pouring bourbon over ice.
I pace idly about his apartment. Over his bed Gerard has placed a cheap gift-shop placard reading MISERY LOVES COMPANY. One of his Greece posters on the same wall is starting to come down. A tack is missing and the tape on the back is fuzzy with lint. “Hey, Gerard, where do you keep your tape? I’m going to fix your Kythera poster.”
“Try the drawer in the nightstand there,” he calls, making ice cube and glass noises.
I open the drawer. It’s crammed with a jumble of things—old sheet music, dice, masking tape, regular tacks, carpet tacks, unopened packages of condoms. I take out the masking tape. Gerard has come in with drinks and hands me one. I notice he has missed a belt loop. I slip the tape roll over my wrist like a bracelet and push the drawer shut with one hip.
“Cheers,” says Gerard, smiling.
“Go team go,” I say, former alternate cheerleader at Tomaston High. We drink slowly, deliciously. “Tell me, Gerard. Why is it that you keep your condoms in the same drawer as your carpet tacks and tape?”
Gerard slurps and swallows. “How else are you supposed to keep them on?” he says.
The Holiday Inn is more brightly lit than most places Gerard plays in. There are pink glassed candles on the tables, but the whole windowless place is a bright amberish yellow and the candles are merely gestures, splots of silly complementary colors, like decorator pillows. Gerard takes his drink, sips, places it on the piano up front. He has arranged for a free glass of chablis for me, and the waitress comes over, places it in front of me, smiles, goes away. I have connections. It’s all small town and rink-a-dink, but I have connections with celebrity.
I pull out student poems from my bag. I think about Gerard wanting to be an opera singer, his hunger to have something grander than this, the arrogance of a hunger.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” It’s Gerard, adjusting the microphone. A spotlight flips on and Gerard squints into it. That, too, wanders around like a searchlight, getting adjusted, and Gerard, along with Charlie by the speakers who is supposedly in charge of the lights, goes into some five-second Berlin Wall pantomime: expressions of chase and horror, arms thrown in the air. They laugh, then resume a more responsible mien.
“Good evening again, ladles and gentlespoons.” This time he strikes a few chords. “Welcome to the Dome Room”—two more, ascending tonics. “At the”—chord. “Holiday Inn”—big chord and glissando. I’ve seen him do this dozens of times. Usually he launches quickly into a lot of bad lady-cannibal jokes, prefaced by “Where’s the dome in this room? What a dome name.” At least, I console myself, he does this for money. Tonight he introduces himself: “I’m Gerard Maines. I know some of you were expecting Tammy Wynette, but these things happen.” Then he starts in with “Just You, Just Me,” his own jazz rendition, never looking at the keyboard. In front of me I have a poem about an alien. From another solar system. I have forbidden any poems about aliens, but sometimes students beg me—“Please, just one alien”—and they slip in. Now Gerard stops to banter with the audience: “What? You’re from where? Belittle, New York? You would live in a town with a name like that?” The people up front by the piano are loving it, the good-natured ribbing, they are starved for it. It’s still a weeknight and the place isn’t that full—only every other table has someone at it. Mostly businessmen, some couples, a group of women in their early twenties, smiling hopefully at Gerard then turning and whispering to one another, hands to lips. Gerard often attracts women like this. They come up to him on breaks and at the end of the night to chat and gush and ask him questions about the way he sang a certain song and what he does during the day. Sometimes they come up to him in pairs, stand there, hands in pockets, bodies leaning, sunk into one hip. Other times they come individually, a gesticulative drink in one hand, undulating cigarette in the other. Often, he’s confided, he’s gone home to bed with one of them, both of them awaking the next day, never in love, not always remembering last names. There was one woman, however, Hermione Miller, only nineteen, who had kept calling him, crying, showing up naked on his doorstep holding lighted candles, breaking into his car and sleeping in the backseat. He would spend whole hours talking to her, calming her down. She insisted she loved him and would go mad without him
or at least have a hard time grocery shopping. She would phone him at Carpet Town and keep him on the phone, pretending she was interested in something in a lilac shag. Finally she fell for another musician, someone who worked the Double Bubble Hour at Howard Johnson’s.
“When I was in high school,” said Gerard, “I was moral and virile and sweet and trying to change my name to Buff, and no one would have me. There wasn’t a girl in Queens who would look at me.”
I don’t really believe this. It’s all part of Gerard’s poor-boy-in-Queens mythologizing.
“Now I’m a carpet salesman in an upstate suburb, a rat playing the piano, drunk with operatic aspirations, and people I hardly know say they’re in love with me. Christ.” He paused. “Middle age is dangerous.”
“Middle age? Gerard, you’re a year younger than I am.”
“I know,” he said.
Gerard’s still on the first set. He has another drink coming. The waitress leaves it on the piano. Someone near me at the bar is eating Vaseline. He has a jar and a spoon and is just eating. I try not to stare. I try to turn my attention to the stuff I’ve brought. I try to find things to cross out or circle, so I can feel like a teacher, like someone who knows things. This afternoon I was listening to the kids out in front of the house—Isabelle Shubby and some others—playing games, that timeless legacy of hopscotch and jumping rhymes children bring to one another, mysteriously, without adults, and I wondered, Is there a secret world of knowledge that adults know, that gets passed on from one generation to the next, the way there is with children? I think not. I think you’re blurped out into the world, you get a few jumprope rhymes, and from there on in you’re on your own. Nobody tells you anything. Nobody shows you how.
“Hey, you in the back doing my taxes,” shouts Gerard into the microphone. I look up and he winks. “This is for you.” I wait to hear what it is. “I Want Money.” I nod and smile. I’m now part of Gerard’s act. A few people turn to look at me.
One of them is Maple up near the front. I didn’t see him come in and now we wave enthusiastically. Maple stands, says “Excuse me” to a few people in chairs, and attempts to make his way over to my table. It takes a while before he is sitting next to me.
“So, this is your song?” he says.
“Not really.” Growing up we always said “Not hardly,” and I find myself almost saying it now. We also said “kranz” instead of “crayons,” and began all sentences with “Anyways …”
“How’ve you been? Lots of work, I see.”
“Oh, yeah. How about you?”
“Gotta new job,” he says. “I’m a waiter at a veggie and granola place on Roosevelt. I’ll have more time for my dancing that way.”
“Be careful. You know you can never really trust people who don’t eat meat.”
Maple smiles. “It’s better than clerking at Howland’s.” He turns his profile to me. He has three amethysts in his ear. He combs back his hair with his fingers, eyeing the piano. “I’m worried about Gerard,” he says. “He’s drinking too much.” The music has stopped. Gerard’s on a twenty-minute break. I see him start to wend his way over here but get waylaid by a woman in red slacks.
I try to think. Is Gerard drinking too much? Am I? Have I really noticed? “You think so?” I ask. And the waitress brings over two glasses of white wine.
“This is from Gerard,” she says.
“You know he’s going to audition for opera companies?”
“Yeah, I know,” I sigh, all weariness and concern, and then neither of us says anything. We tap our fingers, gaze down, gaze off. “Do you realize,” I say at last, “that there’s a guy sitting at the bar eating Vaseline?”
In class the teacher was teaching poetic forms. She defined villanelle, sestina, limerick. Last night she had looked up terza rima in the dictionary; it followed tertiary syphilis, something she’d always suspected.
Saturday dinner with Darrel is at the Fitchville Souvlaki House, where Gerard and I first went years ago. There’s a permanent sign on the door that says CLOSE ON MONDAY, and I worry that somehow Darrel and I won’t be.
This is where Darrel wants to go. He likes the checked tablecloths, the accents flying around in the kitchen. You can hear them when someone pushes in or out of the door in back. I look around the place and wonder who all here’s on first dates.
We order recklessly. I’m not sure what we’re getting. Darrel tells me that the Greek name for stuffed grape leaves means liar eggplant.
“Personally,” I say, “I’ve never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don’t even pronounce?” I light a cigarette and try to look sophisticated. I am that afraid of the world. Really, I have never gotten out of Tomaston High.
Darrel smiles and says that before he was in Vietnam, he was in Italy for six months, a weird mix of orders, and, on leave for a week, he went to Greece, island-hopped, learned a few phrases, never slept at all. He describes things: some fishermen he met, a village woman, a disco on the beach.
“What about the Acropolis?” I am into the authentic partaking of foreign countries, not ever having been to one myself, unless marriage counts.
Darrel describes the Acropolis, and, yes, it sounds like marriage: high, stunning, stony, and old with a gift shop at the bottom. He goes on to talk about neolithic architectural sites, the ancient Epidauros amphitheater. I feel ordinary and ungrammatical, and as always blame the trailer, blame growing up in a trailer.
When dinner comes we eat it. I’m not concentrating. Why is it that I can’t quite describe or picture Darrel? I close my eyes for two seconds and try. Is it that I’m not paying attention? I think of him as tall and strong, but perhaps he’s not really. Does he have a mustache? I open my eyes quickly to check. No, he doesn’t.
“Do you feel okay?” asks Darrel.
“It’s the liar eggplant,” I say cryptically.
Darrel is looking at my teeth. “You have nice teeth,” he says.
Afterward, at home in my living room, we drink wine, but we don’t kiss. Behind him, like a movie screen, I see the war, the muck of the paddies, swoop of helicopters, the hollers and cries. I suppose that is why we do not kiss.
But perhaps the reasons are not large and public but small and personal. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m too unattractive, older, perhaps my body has forgotten how to do things, my lips no longer firm or flip, my nipples no longer pink as calamine, my tongue no longer newly, nimbly amphibious but a thick, thrashing fish-muscle. Now I’m middle-aged: hairs sprout, skin sags, my mouth grows stupid as a boot. How can I make it work? I try to think about Congress and about polyps: how they make currents with their lips in order to receive food.
Darrel is talking aesthetics, poetry, voice, my thesis, and at the mention of the last all I can think of is how my whole life all I’ve ever really wanted was for my small, bug-bite breasts to heave seductively up over the neckline of my shirt, like a scientific wonder. Perhaps one might learn it with practice, discipline, commands: Heave! Heave-ho! “Do you like Joan Baez?” Darrel is saying. “I think her voice is more beautiful than any other singer I can think of.” I burst into a medley of all the Joan Baez songs I know. Darrel sings an old army thing about Nixon, set to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven’t kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it’s like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we’ve both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! perhaps like Agnes DeMille’s Oklahoma! something like that. It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seems to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.
“You know, I’m probably old enough to be—” but here I stop for a second. “I’m old enough to be older than you,??
? I whisper. “Don’t look at my body. Don’t say anything about it.”
Darrel smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of bringing it up at a time like this.”
And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accommodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums—something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can’t stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I’ll be okay, if I can feel like this I’m not dead, I won’t die. Life is sad. Here is someone.
The next three Saturday nights we sleep together. They are full of chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders. They are sweet and gentle, not at all like my marriage, where my husband used to laugh and slap me on the back after I’d had an orgasm, like a buddy, like I’d just hit this crazy home run. I don’t remember feeling such relief at the start of an affair: I’m not afraid. It’s like the joy of meeting someone who knows your favorite cousin—everything proceeds from this momentous, bridging fact. Like two Maine license plates honking and waving on a California freeway: the warmth of shared exile; two ugly step-siblings meeting at a ball, smiling and waltzing and, having no fairy godmother, not having to rush off in a tizzy like Cinderella who was all jitters and economics, foot small as her bank account. We don’t have to rush home, we can dance all night, curfewless and happy, our feet warty and huge as skateboards.
“You’re out of your mind,” says Eleanor, not smiling. “Your professional position is precarious enough. Why jeopardize things further with another affair with another one of your students?”
“What do you mean, another?” I ask warily. She has said it twice. I’ve noticed. “It’s not like I sleep around with my students. Look, you don’t know Darrel. He’s great. He’s the sort of guy who tells you just the edge of his whole tragic life story, then smiles and leans over and sniffs your hair.”