A Moveable Famine (15 page)

Ridge said, “Oh boy . . .”

Iris lived with her cousin from Rio, so her dates with Cook took place at the Burlington House, an old hotel next to the cemetery. He had written a story about making love to her near the Black Angel, a florid tombstone, and he showed it to Ridge, who said fucking in a graveyard would only bring bad luck.

Lawson increased my small responsibilities, asking me to write notes refusing invitations to campus events, and to open his mail, throwing out the junk. A square envelope arrived, pale blue, addressed in schoolgirl script, a woman’s name in the return address. I placed it unopened with his other letters. It was still there a few days later, the flap torn. The next week, his phone rang and a woman asked for him, saying she had mailed a poem. I mentioned it to him, and he acknowledged it, lifting the envelope as if it weighed a pound. She phoned the following week and I said I would make sure he returned her call, but again he forgot. She called once more, when we were both there, and he answered. He still hadn’t read the poem and he fumbled with the envelope, the phone under his chin. Before he had it out, he was saying it was very good.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite good.” He read the handwritten lines as he spoke. She must have asked for advice because he said, “Well, when you have feelings like this, you might soften the language.” He continued, “Violent feelings don’t have to be expressed with violent imagery,” and he hung up and shook his head.

“I wish I’d read it earlier,” he said. “What could I do? At this point I had to say it was good. It’s my fault for being rude.” He handed it to me and I glanced at the careful script:

I bite your neck, digging my teeth in

for a deeper taste.

I tear the skin from your back with my nails

and we swim in the blood that flows over both of us

As you try to escape this devouring mouth . . .

“Good god,” I said.

“Wait till I show Harvey,” he said.

I was returning the poem when I noticed the title. I pointed to it and he blushed saying, “What did she expect? Why do people send me these things?” He walked out, leaving me with the woman’s poem, “The Leopard Speaks.”

I enjoyed finding the scraps of paper Lawson copied from his reading and placed on his desk. At night he took them home and entered them into a commonplace book:

“To the French, an amorous relationship is more than friendship, less than love.”

“Youth is a disease which time cures.”

He kept a folder of newspaper stories: a female highwire walker called “The Tottering Angel”; strongman Siegmund Breitbart hammering a railroad spike with his bare hands through a five-inch board, and the result of a study concluding that smiling can actually arouse happiness. This piece was underlined and asterisked.

I typed my poems in 405, sometimes using that yellow paper which made my words seem like his. Lawson dropped in occasionally, then made it a habit. He would knock lightly and rush around saying he was going downtown to get new soles on his shoes, or place an order at the butcher. He was both domestic and cerebral, and I watched him in admiration, often asking about a book that intrigued me. His answers were succinct and enlightening. He felt Wallace Stevens was an intimate poet, not at all abstract or distant. He flipped open
Harmonium
and read a few lines aloud:

The wind shifts like this:

Like humans approaching proudly,

Like humans approaching angrily.

This is how the wind shifts:

Like a human, heavy and heavy,

Who does not care.

He looked at the cover, a formal photograph showing Stevens in jacket and tie, and yet a wayward lock of hair rose from the back of his head. Lawson stroked the paper, as if trying to groom it into place. And then he left. I started to feel comfortable calling him by his first name. On occasion, he inquired after other students, curiously, but without gossiping. He knew I was from New York, and asked if I had ever gone to the Café Wha? I told him I had spent many Saturdays there, drinking glasses of limeade, called “Green Tigers,” and listening to a group called “Them,” whose first album was “The Angry Young Them.” He said he was surprised that the Wha? was named after W. H. Auden’s initials. When I laughed at what I thought was a joke, he shook his head seriously, putting his chin to his chest, which he did when he was embarrassed by another’s ignorance. He said Barkhausen had written a poem about it, that I was mistaken, that Auden lived in the East Village and Barkhausen had the facts. He smiled a forced smile I hadn’t seen before, more a grimace than a grin and I realized he was using the information from the article to summon happiness.

Lawson’s
The Science of Goodbye
was nominated for the National Book Award. Many of the poems showed the influence of César Vallejo and Rafael Alberti, a big change. At The Deadwood, overly enthused about his book, I bet my friends a night of beer that Lawson would win. I had to pay for my wager by working overtime in the journalism department making pads.

One morning as I entered EPB, Iris ran out in a raincoat though it wasn’t raining. She held it closed by the collar, as if protecting herself. When I got off the elevator, I heard Cook and Lawson arguing. Lawson, red-faced, furious, stood close to Cook, who kept asking for a chance to explain. Ridge tried to make peace, but Lawson stamped around the hall.

“Murderer!” he yelled. “You’re no better than a murderer!”

Students came to listen and catch a glimpse. Realizing the audience, Lawson went to his office and Ridge escorted Cook from the building.

Ridge told me later that someone had sent a letter to Nora about Iris, and Dan broke up with her in the hotel. The heat of her body reflected the heat of her temper, and Iris walked into the bathroom, removed the lid from the toilet tank and hurled it out the window. The heavy porcelain rectangle fell through a trellis and into the courtyard. The police arrived, Iris left, and Dan settled with the hotel and authorities. When I had seen her earlier, Iris was leaving Dan’s office where she had exposed her breasts, which she had cut with a razor. She screamed at him while blood ran down her chest. Lawson walked in and saw her wounds. He tried to calm her, but she ran off. Then he let Dan have it, while Dan pleaded that it was a misunderstanding, as if that word could cover what he had done, not only to Iris, but to dozens before her. Iris, whose wounds turned out to be superficial, left her work-study job, but was hired as a translator by the International Writing Program, through Lawson’s influence. Dan canceled classes for the week and left an excerpt of a poem by Theodore Roethke on his door:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is
I
?

McPeak and I parked at the Eagle supermarket where we saw Lawson talking with another teacher. He had let Uncle out and tied his leash to the handle of the car door. As we passed, we heard a terrible squeal coming from Lawson’s engine, like a fan belt screeching, about to break. We went to help but, when we arrived, we couldn’t detect the source of the sound.

“Is something wrong with your car, Mitch?” McPeak asked.

“No,” he said, curtly, and unclipped the leash, hoisting the dog into the back seat.

As we walked away, I said to McPeak, “It was coming from Uncle.”

Lawson’s concern about his neighbor’s pet continued to distract him. He talked frequently about Uncle and said he was considering asking the neighbor if he could adopt the dog. One day on the stairs he looked at Ridge and me as if we were strangers. He paused, confused, and said, “Hello. Both.”

A brown bag full of Jolly Rancher sour candy was crammed into Lawson’s mailbox with a card that read, “Sweets for the sweet” and was signed “Love, Monique.” A few days later, he poured the candy into a crystal ashtray he brought from home, and insisted I try one. He sorted through the bright cubes, choosing two cherries, his favorite. His face was grinning with the irrepressible delight of a man with a crush. We sat across from each other, sucking on the hard squares, but Lawson beamed as if he were swallowing Monique.

“Her father makes these. I mean, he owns the company,” he said, his cheek bulging. “But not here, in France. When she was a kid, she lived for a summer in the Versailles palace.”

I said I didn’t know that.

“Her family was close to de Gaulle. She says that not many people are aware of it, but his wife was an octoroon.”

I said, “Mitch, I think Monique makes up a lot of stories. She told me her father invented the twist tie and the flat bottom paper bag.”

He looked like I had slapped him. And he looked at me in such a way that I felt immediately guilty, as if I were trying to harm a rival.

“I think you’re mistaken,” he said, his chin to his chest. “I’ve never heard that from her. Why would you say such a thing?”

We continued to suck on the sour candies. “It’s not called Jolly Rancher in France,” he said, sifting through the bowl to look at a label but, not finding it in French, he put it back. “It’s
‘Rancheur de Joie.’
She’s a good kid. She said she was uncomfortable being so wealthy, that she identified with the servants.”

I could feel my face fall at the sight of my mentor collapsing for the fake charms of cheap Monique. But pronouncing the name “
Rancheur de Joie
” must have ignited the tiniest spark of doubt, and he coughed and scratched his neck. He stood, walked past me to the window and looked out, hands on hips. I wondered if he had an “amorous relationship” with Monique.

“She’s a nice person,” I said, “but she exaggerates at times.”

Lawson was reviewing Monique’s claims.

“You could be right. You may be right,” he said, not facing me. “She has said a few odd things.” When he turned, I could see he had been making that forced smile, and an echo of it remained. He left without saying anything else.

I was glad I did not have to mention, “With a name like Smucker’s . . .”

Cook came to Ridge’s office when we were discussing my new poems. Two lollipop sticks protruded from his lips.

“I’ve changed,” he said, the words garbled. He removed the lollipops. “I want everyone to know. I made a promise to Nora and to myself. Our marriage isn’t perfect, but I won’t cheat on her in town.”

Dan had found a compromise. He would be unfaithful only beyond city limits.

Ridge shook his head.

“What’s the matter?” Dan said. “This way I’ll keep all private business far away.”

We didn’t say anything, so he added, “Ah ha! You don’t believe I can do it, but I can!” He smiled as if accepting a challenge. He pointed at us. “You’ll see!” He put the two lollipops in his mouth, turned, took them out and waved them. “Giving up smoking too!” he said.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

40 REGULAR—SNOW GLOBES—BETWEEN COVERS—THE END OF UNCLE—RIDGE LANDS A JOB—THE ALAMO

A
note in my box from Lawson said to come to his office. It was on the usual yellow paper, but signed Mitch, not typed ML. I wondered if it was about Monique, but when I entered 405 he leapt from his chair, showing me a tan sport coat.

“This doesn’t fit anymore. You’re a 40 regular, right?” He stepped back to gauge my size and helped me try it on. “Looks good,” he said. “Now you can get rid of the other one.”

I realized I had been wearing a high school jacket without even noticing. Everyone else did. I was more touched by the gift than embarrassed by my need of it and I thanked him. He said it was Mongolian camel hair, and eased me into the hall, insisting I check it out in the men’s room. When I saw my reflection—glasses, narrow shoulders, waning hairline and long arms—I looked even more like Lawson. I told him how much I liked it, and he smiled a real smile, not the smile that tricked the brain. Seeing
Iowa City
on the label made me believe it was a poet’s coat, or at the very least the coat of a student of poetry, and beyond that, a student of Lawson who resembled Lawson.

I met Ridge on the street.

“What’s this?” he asked, tweaking the lapel.

“Lawson gave it to me.”

“He gave it to you? It looked familiar. Weird!”

“I know,” I said. “I feel strange wearing it.”

“You can’t win. To wear it means ridicule and to wear your old one means ridicule.”

Lawson ordered expensive books from France, and didn’t want his wife to know. As he spoke about this secret vice, he rubbed his hands together, gleeful, expectant. It was nearly comic to see a man who prized integrity relishing these covert purchases. Boxes arrived from Paris, pasted with colorful stamps and crushed at the corners. A note told me to come during office hours. He handed me his long brass letter opener and said to be careful. The books were packed in pages from
Le Monde.
I removed ten or so thin books from each carton. The pages had to be torn, and Lawson said he would do that himself with a special blade. I knew some of the authors before I came to Iowa: Apollinaire, Valéry, Claudel, but most were new. I found his favorite, Eugène Guillevic, which he grasped with both hands. He piled them on the desk and I knew to leave him alone. It was the only thing I had seen him romantic about, and a kind of cheating on his wife as well. He said he would have to get rid of some books to make space. I said things could be arranged without that and he nodded. As I was leaving, I saw him holding Guillevic to his nose and inhaling.