A Moveable Famine (12 page)

To make money for an occasional night out, I took a job in the journalism department, working Saturdays, keeping track of supplies in the storage room, and doing odd jobs. On my first day I made pads, sitting in front of four stacks of different colored paper and placing them in a sequence of white, pink, blue and yellow. When the pile reached three feet high, I moved it to a huge vice, locked it down and dipped a brush into a bucket of rubber cement, swabbing the side of the paper into an adhesive binding. I came home that first day smelling of glue. Kim said we should splurge so we went to the Best Steakhouse for cube steaks and Texas toast. The way Kim looked at the several policemen there with their families made me realize she longed for a solvent and stable domestic life.

The next week I found a shoebox filled with tissue on the floor next to the bed. Also a plastic bag with a receipt from a department store’s lingerie department. It meant only one thing: Kim had entered another amateur contest at The Dugout. I became angry at her, at the men in The Dugout and at myself. Around midnight, a car dropped her off. We screamed at each other. She thought she would make some money but she didn’t win. I said I would get a third job. I was ashamed of myself for asking who from the workshop had seen her. We ended up as we usually did, making love. She got out of bed and threw the lingerie and tiny shoes into the garbage can. We never mentioned it again but the evening stayed between us. I confided the incident to Ridge, saying it didn’t bother me. I said I was trying to stay less emotionally invested in the relationship. I used the phrase, “selectively apathetic.” Ridge thought for a moment and then asked, “Don’t you have a poem called ‘Apathy’?”

“Two,” I said.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

MARK STRAND—ITCHES AND THIRSTS—TRY TURNING THE PAGE—BECOMING AN RA—A DOG NAMED UNCLE—NOBODY BEATS ARTHUR’S MEAT—GALAHAD—A POETRY READING AND A SICK CAT

W
hen handsome, softly dressed Mark Strand joined the faculty in spring, every thread of his wardrobe was examined, his every syllable recounted. Pryor saw Strand without a tie at nine in the morning but wearing one at noon, and inquired about it. Strand told him his neck was cold. That Lawson and Strand were good friends we had learned from Lawson’s remark in Hamburg Inn No. 3, but no one could imagine it because no one could imagine Lawson having a friend. Lawson was often heard saying in a celebratory way that he was on his way to meet Mark, that Mark was coming to his house, that he and Mark were playing Win, Place & Show, or that he was driving Mark to the Amana colonies. Their relationship made Strand all the more alluring, as if only he could awaken the affection of the teacher McPeak called “our bloodless stalk.” I saw Lawson showing Strand his office, and telling him that when he returned from Syracuse, the drawers held someone else’s files. He said, heatedly, “I’ll tell you all about it!” That there was more to tell about the occupied drawers was the astounding part.

Strand visited Lawson’s workshop and sat across from him and they disagreed at every turn. When Lawson said a poem needed more meat on its bones, Strand said he yearned for even less. Strand complimented a poem that had a nonsense refrain and Lawson thought it weakened the whole. This went on for two hours. I had come to Iowa to learn to write poems, poems of emotional endurance. Now I knew there was no single way, no invisible truth. I felt further liberated by Strand’s remark that “no one really knows what poetry is.”

The last part of the workshop was devoted to the poems of Rafael Alberti, whose book,
The Owl’s Insomnia,
Strand had just translated. Strand read a few surreal poems so different from the usual examples we were given. He ended with:

It was the day when the last cry of a man

     bloodied the wind

when all the angels lost their lives

except for one, and he was left wounded,

     unable to fly.

Charlotte said, “Oh Mark! That poem is so beautiful it makes me cry.”

“You mean it passes the tearstain test,” Lawson said, and all of us turned to him, including Strand. He explained that a poem Byron wrote to his spurned wife was supposed to have been stained with tears. “If so,” he asked, “would that make it a better poem?”

“Haven’t you ever cried over a poem?” someone asked Lawson.

“I think I’ve been close to tears only twice in my life,” Lawson said.

I couldn’t resist asking, “What about Pound saying ‘only emotion endures?’ ”

“Technique may last as long as emotion,” Lawson answered. “And may be the best way to obtain it.”

“Mitch’s emotional about craft,” Strand joked, and he passed Alberti’s book around. It was dedicated to Lawson, with an acknowledgment of Lawson’s dry character, and the replenishment of it through the two men’s bond:

If in your country all hope is lost in the long

     heat of summer,

The snows in my country will help you to get

     it back.

The days of playing the horse race board game lasted only six weeks, as Strand received an invitation from another university offering him something we never had heard of—a global travel allowance—and he left midterm.

Ridge’s first book,
Itches and Thirsts,
was chosen by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, so when Strand left, Ridge taught one of Strand’s courses. Lawson brought Ridge’s book to class and told us that almost all the poems had been workshopped. He flipped through to his favorite, “What Remains,” adding that it would have made a better title for the collection. He read it dramatically, appreciatively and, in the Iowa tradition, he read the last line with full-blown, jowl-shaking emotion:

A wild rose on a coffin.

A quiet moment followed, a quiet in which we were all moved—not by the poem, but by our dreams of winning the prize ourselves, having our books published, ascending to faculty rank, and hearing our lines read in an homage to our pedigree and skill. Lawson’s reading enveloped us in that fog but a voice snapped us out of it.

“Try turning the page, Mitch,” McPeak said.

The poem had begun on the right hand side, and we realized that Lawson had not been familiar with the poem or he would have known it continued. He blushed brightly and read the final stanza. Pryor said that the poem ended better where Lawson stopped.

I had made a fool of myself with Strand. My faux pas came via loudmouth Trotta. He told me that Strand had taken his name from his boyhood on Prince Edward Island, where the fishermen noted the high and low tides by yelling, “Mark Strand!”

“It’s a tradition,” he said. “Like Mark Twain.”

When I was on the elevator with Strand, I asked him what his name was before he called himself Mark Strand. He looked puzzled and said it was his real name. He did not hold that silliness against me. He heard me in the hallway telling Ridge that when I requested Milosz’ anthology,
Postwar Polish Poetry,
at Iowa Book & Supply, the clerk thought it was a Polish joke. Strand quickly went to his office and gave me his extra copy.

A week later, Pam Rhodes, the workshop secretary, stopped me in the hall. She said that Lawson’s RA had left school due to a family emergency and I could take his place. I told Ridge who said he had heard, but wanted me to get the word officially. We met at The Deadwood to celebrate, and when we walked in, Pryor raised his glass, also in the know. I was thrilled but daunted, and daunted even more because the week before there had been a reading by another workshop graduate who recited a long poem composed entirely in heroic couplets. At the reception afterward, Lawson told the poet that one line was short a syllable. The poet said that was impossible and he and Lawson went off to a corner to consult the text. Lawson proved right, and the reputation of his fine ear grew. Ridge saw it as cantankerous and aggressive, saying Lawson couldn’t really have heard the poem, to be so absorbed in syllable counting. On the other hand, I hoped my appointment might get the attention of Belinda Schaeffer who loomed over me, a fantasy like poetry itself. Glimpsing her was like writing a few decent lines that trail away as the muse deserts the page.

I went to see Lawson the next day after visiting the library’s periodical section.
Kayak
had sent me a stinging rejection, a drawing of a man strapped to a surgical table and being trepanned. I wanted to check out the new issue and see why I needed my brain drained. When I left, I had to cover my head with a
Daily Iowan
to avoid the rain and the droppings of hundreds of starlings that had nested in the trees at the entrance. My shoulders were splattered when I got to EPB’s hall of faculty offices.

“Come.”

Lawson sat at his desk in his brown suede jacket and blue knit tie over a tattersall shirt. His horn-rimmed glasses lay on a pile of pages scattered across a calendar. He described the job as making sure the books stayed in alphabetical order, watering the plants, and straightening out the desk at the end of the week. There might be typing. I was disappointed that no research was involved, but then he said Pam was having another key made. I could use his office when it was empty, which meant I could examine his books. We shook hands and he returned to his papers. I felt as if I had troubled him but his dour demeanor did not dampen my delight. Pam gave me a key, and showed me the mailbox, my name above a square wooden grid where Lawson would place any secretarial assignments.

I was on my way back to the library and got on the elevator when Lawson joined me, carrying a beat-up briefcase and an umbrella. He told me he’d be in the office only on Wednesday mornings and for a few minutes before his classes. “So you can spend all the time there you’d like,” he said as we got off. He seemed to have softened outside of the fourth floor, and even looked kindly.

“I’m about to walk my neighbor’s dog,” he said.

I asked the breed.

“All kinds and none,” he said, “but mostly pug and bloodhound.”

The morning rain had halted, and we walked side by side in sunlight. He was smiling as I had never seen him smile, thinking about the dog. As he turned toward his car, I jumped to avoid something ankle high that swept across my path, almost tripping but straightening my tangled feet at the last minute. Lawson stopped and stared, concerned, and then he put on his sunglasses and headed to the parking lot. There had been nothing for me to leap over; it was only the shadow, the sharp silhouette of Lawson’s umbrella, which, in my uneasiness, I had tried to hurdle.

I kept my job as lunchtime supervisor. The kids had gotten to like me. The turning point was my finding them a place to go with their girlfriends. I suggested Black’s Gaslight Village and Mr. Black happily supplied his Tarzan room, the bed veiled with mosquito netting below green ropes painted like vines.

The next week I cut through a clump of MFA students reading the bulletin board to get to my mailbox, aware that some were envious of my new post. Many RAs dramatically shouldered past the others on their way to the sanctum sanctorum, usually making their return with bowed heads, seriously reading their supervisors’ mail, library requests and other orders. My position was easy to understate, as I carried a white watering can in the shape of a swan. In Lawson’s office I stood before the bookcases, almost all poetry. I circled the desk. On the opposite wall was a sign:
Beware the fury of a patient man—John Dryden.
A glass from “The Egg and I” restaurant in Miami held a handful of sharp pencils and a metal ruler. I sat at the manual typewriter next to a ream of that renowned yellow paper. Did I dare open the drawers? No. In a corner of the green blotter was a photograph of a very ugly dog, a dark pushed-in mug, a light tan body with brown spots. The heavy eyelids drooped as if drugged, and uneven bottom teeth jutted from an underslung jaw. The face showed agony tinged with hope, the hope to be rescued from its face. It was the dog Lawson walked. On a shelf next to the desk was a folded length of fabric, with a note pinned to it, addressed
Cher Monsieur Lawson.
The writer told him to enjoy his “smock-frock.” It was from Monique—a long shirt, with pockets in front holding pens and pencils. I put it next to a few small cactus plants and a piece of pink coral in a tray of sand. The plants, the coral and the sand made me feel as if I were at the bottom of a fish tank. Even more surprising were the dozen snow globes. I shook one containing a tiny orchestra, but there was no water in it, no water in any of them, and the white flakes sifted and languished along the bottom. On the windowsill, a row of snake plants abutted a pile of miniature dictionaries. I was sifting through a shoebox of tapes of French singers when someone knocked. It was Harvey Clay who immediately sat down. I remained standing. I couldn’t bring myself to sit behind the desk. “Working for Mitch?” he asked.

I said I had just started. Ridge passed by and joined us.

“I was in Kansas City for a literary festival,” Harvey said. “Arthur Bryant’s barbecue sponsors it. His slogan is
‘Nobody beats Arthur’s meat
!’ ” He giggled and rubbed the coral against his cheek. “I have the poster in my office. You should see us, all overweight.” He curved his hand over his protruding stomach. “Simic, blob! Hugo, blob!” He made the gesture again. “Me, blob! And then in the corner, a little handsome angelic face—Merwin!” He got up “Oh, I’m teaching in a minute!” he said and ran out.