A Moveable Famine (16 page)

The next time I went to 405, I shifted magazines to the lowest shelf and moved the dozen snow globes. I shook one containing an owl, forgetting they held no water. I turned it over and saw a little plug. The tip of the swan watering can would fit perfectly. Half an hour later, I had snow in the air.

Ridge had gone out with many of the students in Kim Merker’s class, The Hand Printed Book, and three of them printed his poems on broadsides. His latest girlfriend didn’t want to be part of that group so, for her final project, she printed a leaflet of my poems,
The Sadness of Music,
on beautiful, thick paper, letterpress, a jacket with folders around it. Now I had a “book,” something to give friends. Without telling anyone, I placed a copy in Belinda Schaeffer’s mailbox, and signed it

To Belinda
,

Love, John
.

With this exquisite, minute publication, I vaulted into another dimension. I joined those with poems “between covers,” a phrase used often in the workshop. “I can’t wait to have those poems
between covers
,” we would say to each other. It was as if our poems had been wandering the streets, insomniac, and had finally been put out of their restless, wide-eyed misery by lying down, tucked into a bed from which they would rise and shake the world.

Pryor published his own book,
Tightrope Walking in the Rain,
fifty poems bound expensively “between boards,” meaning in hardcover. The lush and delicate paper looked like silk strands ran through it, so it seemed a defilement to turn the pages. Pryor pointed out the colophon, which named the typeface and paper stock, a poem in itself. He numbered and dated each book, with a line drawn through his name on the first page and signed again. Instead of Iowa City, it said Poet City. I was shocked to see the book was not dedicated to Wendy, but to Barkhausen. When I mentioned this to Ridge, he said, “If I was trying to keep Artie from fucking my wife, I’d dedicate my book to him too.”

One night when I opened the door to 405, I jumped when I found Lawson there in the near dark. It looked like he’d been crying. Cabaret music played from the small cassette recorder.

“They gave him to a cousin in Council Bluffs,” he said.

It took me a second to realize he referred to Uncle. I went behind the desk and put my hand on his bony shoulder.

“They said the cousin has a farm, but I think they euthanized him,” he said. “This voice,” he said, referring to the music. There was something about the vocal just like Uncle, a quavering, otherworldly keening. “It’s like him talking from beyond the grave,” he said, as if daring me to disagree. I went to get him a glass of water and when I came back, the music was louder.

“Thanks,” he said. “Please leave us alone.”

I closed the door and heard him wail, an Uncle-like sound, a cry for only the third time in his life, floating through that hall of callow pangs, those rows of cubbyholes holding our poems etched in blue Thermo-Faxed ink.

My mailbox held a large manila envelope with Belinda Schaeffer’s name on the return address. I couldn’t bear to open it in the elevator or on the street. I rushed to my apartment and put my books away, sat at the kitchen table, and cleared off a wide space. I opened the clip, sliding out a book. I hoped to find a letter. I shook the envelope, but it was empty. The front page had an inscription:

For John,

With thanks for The Sadness.

Warmest personal regards,

Belinda

Warmest Personal Regards. Warmest Personal Regards!
Not
Love
, and nothing “personal” about it. In my rush to see if there was a letter, I hadn’t noticed the book’s title—it was used, from Epstein’s, Galway Kinnell’s
The Book of Nightmares.
I already owned a copy.

I called Ridge and told him about the dog. When I hung up, I felt closer to Lawson. He loved so little that I hated to see him lose the one thing that seemed to fill his trim, well-metered world with a cockeyed delight. I realized how many of his poems were about loss:

The missed train, the platform empty

except for petals from a dropped bouquet.

The mirror displays a lost reflection,

the no-man, the no-body,

the nothing

that means everything.

The child has lost his ball,

the grandfather his memory.

The years have lost their months.

The months, their weeks . . .

English departments solicited Ridge because of his Yale prize, and he accepted a job as assistant professor at McGuire University in Dallas. This irritated Pryor who was rejected from everything and was flying at his own expense to an interview at a community college in the same state, right near the Alamo. I took him to the airport and wished him luck, but he was bitter about fate casting him toward the landmark of annihilation. The next morning Kim and I drove out of town early to apply for jobs grading high school seniors’ exams at the American College Testing program. Afterward, we stopped at a remote diner for breakfast and saw Barkhausen sitting with Wendy on the same side of a booth, both with wet hair. Wendy waved. Barkhausen came over. He was revved up, from coffee or from romance, and he talked nonstop, madly, recommending the diner’s freshly
squozen
orange juice. He said he was in love with Wendy and that Pryor should see the “right thing on the wall.” He called our waitress by her first name, so we guessed he and Wendy had been coming there for a while.

In the parking lot, I said to Kim, “I wonder if Pryor knows.”

“Where is he?” Kim asked.

“I put him on a plane last night. To the Alamo.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

STANLEY KUNITZ ON TWELFTH STREET—A FIGHT WITH KIM—THE FIFTH SEASON—KANE IS ABLE—ANTHROPOMORPHIC DOORKNOBS—THE HABIT OF ANALYSIS—LEFT IN THE DARK

I
flew with Ridge to New York where he was giving a reading at the Poetry Society of America while I was going to Queens to celebrate my mother’s birthday. He stayed at our apartment, but when my parents and I came back from dinner, he called to say he had met a girl, and wondered if my mother would be upset if he didn’t return that night. She didn’t care, but my father said he must be a real operator. The next day I met him outside Stanley Kunitz’s Twelfth Street brownstone. Stanley’s wife, the painter Elise Asher, short, lithe, and wrapped in a silk robe with prints of red and green parrots, opened the door. A fat cat twisted around her ankles, and she pushed it away with her sandals. She saw us gawking at the hefty pet and said, “Twenty-eight pounds. Celia won the fat cat contest in Provincetown last year.”

Elise had a way of welcoming and appraising. The taut skin on her face seemed freshened in the light that broke through the back of the apartment, traveling from the garden, which burst with green even in midwinter. Stanley ran down the stairs, a youthful seventy-four, wearing a flannel shirt and an ancient sport coat with wide lapels. Ridge introduced me and he took my hands in his, his lively eyes peering out from above two sacks like tea bags.

“Helloooo! Helloooo! Let me get you some coffee!” He sang his greeting. Elise went to her studio. Stanley darted to the kitchen, as if we were the distinguished poets and he the one paying homage. When we settled in armchairs, Stanley pumped us with questions about our work, our loves, our plans. At the first syllable of each reply, he hummed a little, as if he already knew the answer. Ridge had separated from a girl he had raved about in a letter to Stanley, and he hoped Stanley had forgotten his earlier, effusive account. I hadn’t admitted to myself that Kim and I might be about to part ways, but Stanley brought out the truth in me. It was like being in confession, except I felt a real unburdening. Stanley was surprised by little, seemed to understand everything, and yet lived for surprise. His responses were optimistic and heartening, as if nothing was really wrong, everything
could
change, and in fact,
would
change for the better.

When we talked about our work, I told Stanley that I had been revising my poems overly, and that when I finished a poem, it was so far from the first draft that I felt I had wasted a lot of time.

“Try making two poems,” Stanley said.

“Suppose one of them’s lousy?” Ridge asked.

“Better average than most,” Stanley said.

He was translating Anna Akhmatova and not using exact rhymes. He said prosody came from the way we breathe and speak. And as he spoke, his speech seemed both colloquial and incantatory. An hour later, he saw us to the door. In the vestibule, he asked Ridge about the girl. Ridge said the affair was over and Stanley asked if he was sure, as his letter waxed so romantically about her.

Ridge said, “I’m certain.”

Stanley said, “When we are uncertain, that’s when we are most alive.”

Kim had two more years of course work before her dissertation. I didn’t want to join the Iowa City hangers-on so we agreed I’d find a job in New York, visit often, and be together when she received her degree, an understanding that immediately led to warring accusations. When she came home from the police department wearing an officer’s windbreaker, I charged her with having an affair. Her doctor, known as “the workshop doctor” because he freely dispensed painkillers, phoned one night to check on her sore throat. I had never heard of a doctor calling a patient for something so trivial, and another fight began. To smooth things over, we drove to Celebration, an out-of-town restaurant. We crossed Old River Road and New River Road, Beverly Park and Beverly Gardens, getting lost and confused. We turned back after a dispute about whether she had said “parallel” or “perpendicular” when she read the map. That summarized our relationship at its disintegrating point, but a particular episode defined it further. Kim said she would pick me up at Epstein’s after work. I ran into McPeak and we went for a drink. Just before five, I realized she’d be on her way, so I left and walked in the street, along the row of parked cars facing the traffic so I could flag her down. In front of Epstein’s, a taxi arrived and a woman who was waiting on the sidewalk got in. As she did, she dropped her newspaper. I tapped her window. She smiled and I opened the door, handing it over. Just as I turned, there was Kim, in front of the bookstore, arms crossed, saying, “Who was that woman? And why were you riding in that cab with her?” My laughter enraged her further. What were the chances I’d be closing the door to a taxi, a taxi with a woman in the back seat who just dropped a newspaper on the street? When things are going bad, the chances are good.

Every thesis had to be signed by Chair and Reader, either Lawson and Harvey or Harvey and Lawson, then submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies. McPeak worried how they would react to his actualist influences. He fretted over poems like:

Okay, will do.

Yeah, me too.

Good-bye.

and:

I don’t want no ptomaine pussy.

I don’t want no po’ man’s pussy.

Who do?

McPeak’s fears were needless. I had brought mine to Harvey’s office early, and he signed his name without turning a page, and the same would go for McPeak’s. I met Jen Thacker in the hall on the day they were due. She showed me the vertical black stripes on the left and right margins. “I hope they’ll accept it,” she said. “I used a new ribbon, and it smeared on the rollers and the rollers smeared the pages.”