A Moveable Famine (14 page)

Lawson moved like a scarecrow dragged by a farmer to its post in the field. It was tough enough to follow Harvey’s transformation and final dramatic subject, but the botched preface challenged Lawson to both obliterate the introduction and rise to it. If before he seemed a man awaiting the firing squad, now he looked as if a few bullets had grazed him at the knees. He winced his way toward the lectern and calmly removed the tie, as if it had caused the commotion. He walked over to Harvey and handed it to him, the way a teacher returns a forbidden object to a student at the end of the day.

When Lawson again faced the audience, he said, “Tonight I’m reading all the poems in my books no one’s ever liked.” With those words, he had us on his side. He read flatly, his index finger following the list he had compiled for the evening, and his wistful tone permeated the room. Many poems described his own character: the invisible man, empty mirror, skeletal heart. By giving us his negative persona, a three-dimensional human being appeared. He sometimes shifted his shoulder, as if to lean away from a blow or an arrow he had dared someone to aim at him. He was both archer and target, and the only sounds in the hall were his lines across the air. When he finished, the quiet man was met with noisy approval.

Workshop students who never frequented The Deadwood filled booths. Ridge, McPeak, Pryor and I discussed the reading over a pitcher. We fell into different camps. Ridge and I loved Lawson’s flat delivery. Pryor, who had gained weight and grown a goatee, praised Harvey’s showmanship, but criticized Lawson for being as stiff as a mannequin. McPeak said they couldn’t hold a candle to the best actualists. He quoted a poem by Robert Slater called “Crazy Lady.”

Look at that

Crazy lady shopping

In a night shirt.

Hey
crazy lady.

A cheer went up near the bar, and Pryor craned around and announced Harvey’s arrival. He went from table to table, shaking hands, nodding and smiling. He lifted a chair from a stack, sat at our booth and asked Brandy for a glass.

“Mitch’s a riot, isn’t he?” Harvey said, laughing. “That calm demeanor, but he goes right for the jugular.” He lifted his beard and grabbed his throat.

“But you were spontaneous,” Pryor said, shaking his head in admiration.

“I had a list,” Harvey said.

“It looked like you were picking poems at random,” I said.

“That’s what it’s supposed to look like,” Harvey said. He turned to Ridge. “Was Charlotte there?”

“I think so,” Ridge said.

“She liked that poem I threw away,” Harvey said. “I did that to tease her.”

“You planned that?” Pryor asked, leaning forward.

Harvey winked.

I was waiting for McPeak to pounce, but his eyes were drifting to a table of workshop girls here for their first time. Even Pryor seemed stunned, maybe by the magician revealing his tricks, maybe from the effort of learning them for himself. Charlotte walked past with Monique, and Harvey reached out and tugged Charlotte’s sleeve.

“How’d you like it?” Harvey asked.

“I wish I could have been there,” she said. “My cat’s sick.”

Monique said, “Sheba puked and shit all over the rugs. It’s a mess.” They took a table in the back.

“I don’t believe it,” Harvey said to us.

“Come on, Harvey,” Pryor said. “She dotes on that cat.”

Harvey pushed his beer away as if he didn’t deserve it.

“Hey,” Pryor said, “Lots a laughs you got tonight.”

“Laughs? Thanks, David.”

Pryor lowered his head. “I thought it was a good response. They appreciated the humor.”

“Please,” Harvey said, and got up. He put his chair on the stack against the wall and said good night. Pryor said he would walk him home since they lived near each other.

“Pryor is becoming a little Harvey, don’t you think?” McPeak said.

“And you’re a little Lawson,” Ridge said to me. “In fact, you’re looking like him!”

Ridge had a few books with him and one was by Merwin, which I’d lent him.

“Are you finished with that?” I asked.

He handed it to me, saying he liked the way Merwin abandoned punctuation halfway through. I noticed a girl’s name and number written on the inside cover. I showed it to him.

“Sorry!” he said.

In the men’s room, I saw what Ridge meant. Thinning hair, the beginning of jowls, I was starting to look like the great craftsman, but without the craft.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

CORNEAL EROSION—SAMSARA—HELLO? HELLO? IT’S ME! IT’S ME!—GROOMING UNCLE—THE GREAT LOVE OF THE THIN MAN

I
met Lawson walking Uncle on South Governor. Students joked about never seeing him on the street, in a store or outside at all, and McPeak referred to him as an air fern. But now he came toward me, a stick figure pulled by a hunk of muscle. I petted Uncle whose red eyes matched his coat and seemed to reach from the depths of hell. Lawson said he thought the dog should be gaining more weight and he worried about his diet. The next day he came to 405 and said the neighbor told him that Uncle wasn’t eating because the vitamins they mixed into his dinner tainted the taste. He asked me to type almost twenty pages of material, and I finished it right before his class, when he thanked me distractedly. As I straightened out the desk, I found a revision of his rhymed poem about visiting a dying friend. He had changed a line from:

Blood drained from his face

to:

His father said he lost his place

The rewrite brought another person into the poem. The next time I saw him, I mentioned it and he seemed pleased, saying he had published the original in a quarterly, but was never happy with it.

One day he complained of an error I had made typing a student poem.

“John,” he said, calling me by my name, which he did rarely. “Please proof the stencils!”

“I did,” I said. “I must have missed something.”

He pointed out the line, “I keep my bong in the closet.”

“
Bongo
!” he said. “It should be
bongo
!”

I was sitting at his desk as he lurched over my shoulder. I defined
bong.
He put his hands on his hips, but instead of getting into a snit, he laughed, as much with relief that his worksheet was flawless as with the new word.

I was embarrassed when Dan Cook stuck his head into 405 because I was looking in the mirror. My drinker’s/reader’s eye had worsened into corneal erosion, a condition that tore the thin membrane when I woke up, feeling like someone was scratching my pupil with a pencil point. The doctor at the infirmary had given me a tube of erythromycin, which I hid in my pocket.

“Hello? Hello?” he said. “It’s me! It’s me!” He grinned from the doorway. “Don’t you recognize an actualist poem?” He walked to the pile of new books sent by publishers, discarding them like playing cards. “There’s not one here I’d want to read,” he said. “I understand you’re the lucky man who squires Kim Costigan around.”

He inspected the shelves and stopped at the music books.

“Mitch wanted to be a composer, did you know that? He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.”

“He writes a lot about musicians,” I said.

“What are they saying about me?”

“Who?”

“People have been talking about me, haven’t they? About me and Nora.”

I said that students talk about faculty all the time.

“I know, but they’re critical.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, in a resigned, unhappy way. “They’re talking about us.” He stood and tried to shake off his mood, saying at the door, “That reminds me of the fortune I got at Fong’s last week. It said, ‘Good luck in love, and a better position!’ ”

I mentioned this conversation to Ridge and McPeak in The Deadwood. Like me, neither knew what he meant, but Ridge said Dan had been complaining about
Esquire
rejecting his new stories.

“Why would he talk about something like that?” McPeak said.

“By mentioning
Esquire,
he shows he’s a member of a club we might never be admitted to. Even if he was rejected this time, he’s still in the club.”

“You read too much into things,” I said. “Like you did with Harvey and heaven.”

“Buddhists call it samsara. He only thinks of getting, and so he’s always disappointed. He complains magazines reject his stories. Then they take some. He collects them in a book and complains he doesn’t get reviewed. Then he gets reviewed. He says, okay, I get reviewed, but the
Times
doesn’t review me. Then the
Times
reviews him. And he says, oh yeah, but it was a bad review.”

And so we began talking about Cook talking about people talking about him critically, and then we talked about him critically.

Lawson asked me to help him trim Uncle’s claws. He arrived winded from carrying the dog because Uncle zigzagged unexpectedly on the leash and had hurt Lawson’s shoulder.

“They’re neglecting him,” he said, putting Uncle on the desk. “Look at his nails, turning in and curling.” I wrapped my arms around him as Lawson plucked a pair of canine scissors from his sport coat with shaking hands. Uncle leapt sideways, as if trying to dismount a rider, veering left and right. Lawson lifted a paw, but his hands continued to shake and then Uncle started to shake, as if an electric current passed between them.

“I used to clip my dog’s claws,” I said.

We changed positions and I took the hind leg and, as I had been taught, didn’t let Uncle see what I was doing. I didn’t hurt him, but with each snip, he made a sharp cry, otherworldly, neither animal nor human, but like a fingernail flicking the rim of a glass. I felt I didn’t hold a paw, but the palm of a fairy creature and, when I finished, standing in the office of a man who had been such a stranger to me, a man whose poetry I revered, a poet known for his great attention to art, the room shrunk and expanded, as if the walls inhaled and exhaled. Lawson thanked me and lowered Uncle to the floor. He had brought some eye medicine, but put it on a shelf for another day. Uncle looked at both of us and then he turned, facing the door and sitting like a rock, like something timeless and enduring, a boulder in the sea, immobile to everything crashing around it, even over it. Yet he seemed almost thoughtful.

Neil Clarke approached, saying, “At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon began.”

“Shrinking from the weight of primary noon,” Lawson replied, and continued down the corridor, shrinking from more than the weight of that metaphor, a thin man walking a bocce ball on a leash. He called out to no one, “He’ll be fine!” My hands smelled like Uncle, who smelled like burning rubber.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

HOT IRIS—THE BLACK ANGEL—INCREASED DUTIES—THE LEOPARD SPEAKS—CAFÉ WHA?—COOK DISGUSTS LAWSON—THE TWIST TIE, THE FLAT BOTTOM BAG AND THE JOLLY RANCHER—CITY LIMITS

I
ris Mendes, a Brazilian student with red hair and pale skin, was having an affair with Dan Cook that went beyond the usual fling. Sexy and daring, playful and saucy, she punched the shoulder of anyone who made a witty remark, throwing her head back in laughter as if catching a rain shower in her mouth. Her straight features were perfect, as were her white teeth, which were often exposed from her habit of dropping her jaw when listening to a conversation, and seeming to pant. She held a part-time secretarial job in the workshop and her desk was always surrounded by men. Ridge spent one night with her and said she was literally hot to the touch. She told him her normal body temperature was 100.6—two degrees above normal. When she smiled, her beautiful face displaced that stuporous, overheated look, although her lipstick looked like it could melt.

Cook usually visited his student lovers in their apartments, dates made in the day and followed up in the dark. They had an understanding; they passed each other in the halls, at parties and in bars with nothing but a nod. He reinforced this conduct in public by constantly mentioning Nora and their two-year-old daughter, so he seemed a perfect family man. With Iris, he was different. He was smitten, besotted, mad. He couldn’t keep himself from quoting her translations of Drummond de Andrade in class when they seemed pertinent, and because Iris so dominated his thoughts, everything she did seemed pertinent. Once they met in the back of The Deadwood. The booth in front of them was empty and Dan asked Ridge and me to move there, so other students wouldn’t be privy to their words. We heard nothing but whispers, his voice occasionally followed by her long and lovely laugh. He gave Brandy money to keep the jukebox going. In “Hearts,” there’s a moment when the song seems over and, in a lull before the singer says, “Is everything all right?” we heard Iris ask in her bewitching accent, “Okay, Dan, if you just had three days to live, what would you want to tell me about how you feel about me?”