A Moveable Famine (17 page)

Grad studies was ticklish about format. Numbers in the upper right corner had to line up exactly on each piece of twenty-pound bond. A crinkly librarian held the pages to the light. Jen’s thesis was sure to be refused. I asked her the title.

“Death’s Dark Kiss and Kaboodle.”

I was absorbing this nutty bleakness when McPeak trotted toward us with his book in a box and Jen asked him his title. Instead of answering, McPeak pushed it at her. He couldn’t bear to say it since Barkhausen told him
The Fifth Season
was the name of the bar in the Cedar Rapids airport, and Ridge said it referred to Indian summer.

She paged through it. “Is this a joke?” she said.

“I know, I know,” he said. “It’s the name of the airport bar.”

“No,” she said. “I mean . . .” She pointed to a poem.

McPeak looked at lines that were pale, unreadable. He flipped through page after page, each one blank with the faintest lettering. I found out later that he had broken up with Stavrula the week before and, in a furious fight at dinner, he threw her collection of slides into the sink, poured lighter fluid over them and struck a match. When he went to apologize the next day, he found his belongings on the steps, including the boxed thesis he had been proudly reading to her by candlelight before the flames hit the slides. It was only at the moment with Jen that he learned Stavrula had wiped each poem with a bleachsoaked sponge.
The Fifth Season
had become one huge snowstorm, a whiteout, but it was signed by Harvey, just as he had signed mine, without a glance.

Lawson had diligently reviewed my manuscript, but I needed his signature. When I handed him the approval page, he said, “Harvey’s out of town. How did you get his name?” I explained that I had gotten it weeks ago, disappointed he would think me a forger. He seemed unsettled that he had reverted to his usual suspicions, and he forced that smile to banish displeasure. He picked out his favorite poem, and said, “I’m glad you cut all the adjectives and adverbs—they were like sexy cheerleaders distracting from the game.” Then he did something extraordinary—he invited me to dinner the next night at Marino’s, his favorite restaurant in Cedar Rapids. At that moment, Monique appeared arm in arm with Falcon Namiki, and followed by Tim Kane, a hippie student running for sheriff. The three of them were posting placards around campus for Tim’s campaign. Since the student body numbered forty thousand, Kane hoped to overwhelm the resident populace. The signs showed him in shoulder-length hair, with the slogan: KANE IS ABLE. Monique returned books I had loaned her. After she left, I thumbed through the Paul Carroll anthology, looking for Strand’s poem, “The Marriage.” I wanted Lawson’s opinion, as it was the poem’s minimal emotional display that helped me break away from the New York School. A photo of each poet prefaced his poems, but Monique had sliced out Strand’s photograph, which made Lawson chuckle as he snapped his case shut and went home.

My left eye burned. The corneal erosion came and went, but made me very sensitive to light. I had run out of the sample erythromycin. I sat at Lawson’s desk, turned off the overhead, and covered my eye with my hand, which gave some relief. I noticed a tube on a bookshelf, Uncle’s eye medicine. A dab of the GenTeal Gel stopped the tears from running down my cheek.

Pavese’s statement, “Give company to a lonely man, and he’ll talk more than anyone,” proved true the night Lawson took me to Marino’s. We met at 405, where we packed two boxes of books he wanted to bring home after dinner. He opened one of the desk drawers, which I had never looked into, and showed me his collection of antique doorknobs. He lifted a knob with a lion’s face, and another made of crystal. He pointed to his favorite, called “broken leaf knob,” the carving of an urn on brass. He weighed another in his palm, a hand holding a scepter. Turning the scepter opened the door.

“Do you like this?” he said. “If you do, you can have it. I’m getting rid of my anthropomorphic knobs.” He held it out. I jiggled its heft, imagining turning the handle. “Thank you,” I said, “but I’m moving. And I don’t know where I’ll be. So I don’t, I don’t really have a door.” I gave it back.

Lawson blushed as he was greeted as “Il Professore” by Gianni Marino who served us what he called the best bottle of wine in Iowa. Lawson looked like a different man against the restaurant’s maroon wallpaper and deep wood—as if he had always been there, a comfortable expatriate of the academy slouching in the round booth, his arm over the soft leather, twirling his wine glass. He thanked me for my work with him.

“Especially for your help with Uncle,” he said, and looked away.

“He’ll be happy on that farm,” I said.

“John Stuart Mill could read Greek when he was three,” he said. “After a nervous breakdown, he wrote that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.” He paused. “I felt that was happening to me, but Uncle somehow got me past analysis. He was so bumptious, so wrong, he just couldn’t be dissected.”

“That’s what people like about dogs,” I said.

“Something changed in me when I saw him. He was not of this world because he didn’t enjoy the world. I recognized something of myself in him.” He ordered for both of us. And he ordered enormously. Appetizers of calamari, scungilli, and octopus, followed by steak pizzaiola, side dishes of linguine, salads, a second bottle of wine and rum baba for dessert. He ate just a bit of everything while I ate everything. When he got the bill, he made that grimacesmile to cheer the brain.

It was raining, and we dashed to my car. Lawson talked all the way home, an elliptical monologue expressing his hatred of Dan Cook, his disappointment in the Iowa administration, and even the football coach. He had spoken rarely about his poems, but he said he felt good about
The Science of Goodbye.
I pulled into his driveway and he was about to get out when I reminded him of the books. We grabbed the boxes and headed toward his front door in the downpour, covering the contents with our arms, crossing a lawn of deep puddles and divots.

“Thank god the outside light is on,” he yelled.

In the hall, I put my box on top of his. We were both soaked and laughing. He held out his hand and said to stay in touch. He closed the door behind me and I stood on the porch planning my route around the deep troughs. I took my first step when the porch light went off, leaving me in the dark as I slipped and twisted in the ditches, almost falling. Once inside the car, I leaned on the steering wheel and laughed, my shoes and socks saturated, covered in mud.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

A FURIOUS MAN—COOK’S BIG PLANS—ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER I

I
had lunch with Ridge at the Hamburg Inn No. 3 the day before I left Iowa City. We sat beneath a poster advertising the actualists’ evening of Double Croakers:

“This meat is hard to chew,” Tom beefed jerkily.

and:

“I hate reading Victor Hugo,” said Les miserably.

Ridge told me that Lawson was on the warpath against Uncle’s owners. He was certain the dog was dead, but wanted the name of the cousin with the farm and the neighbor wouldn’t give it to him. Ridge passed Lawson’s office just as Mitch slammed down the phone. Embarrassed, Lawson smiled and quoted the Dryden line he had posted on his office wall,
Beware the fury of a patient man,
but Ridge said he misquoted it, saying,
Beware the patience of a furious man
.

He told me about his dinner with Dan Cook at Lum’s in Coralville. At the end of the meal, Ridge said Cook got very serious, stared into his cup of coffee and told him that NYU was about to offer him a full professorship and a named chair. That’s what Dan’s novelist friend in New York had told him, that he was at the top of the short list. When Ridge congratulated him, Cook said if took the job, he would have to leave Nora. As his former student, she wouldn’t be happy in the New York literary world, she’d be over her head. Ridge told him that being young meant she could grow, that she was charming and attractive and that he should think twice, but Cook’s mind was made up. He planned to build an addition onto their house and had already ordered the river stone. He was making an apartment, a bedroom, a bath and kitchen. Ridge couldn’t get the point, but Cook said it would be a source of income for Nora when he was gone. “Who knows?” he said. “She might fall in love with the tenant, someone her own age, and be better off.” He talked about the New York novelists he hoped to meet, like Vonnegut, as well as editors, and all the career opportunities this position would bring.

Ridge said to me, “It’s weird to think of Iowa without Cook chasing women.”

“You should know,” I said.

“You could have done better,” he said.

Ridge said, “I have something to tell you. I’ve been nominated for the National Book Award.”

I congratulated him and we clinked glasses.

“I got a postcard from Porter Reed, who runs Provincetown’s writing program,” he said. “He wrote, ‘I hope you win the fucker.’ That’s what they’re like out there—writing
fucker
on an open-face postcard!”

Ridge had his mail with him. He’d heard from other poets and received invitations to read. An airmail envelope with a return address in Ethiopia turned out to be from Abe Gubegna, saying the novel they worked on together was being published in England. It also contained his new poem:

Every day in Africa a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun

the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you better be running.

Ridge recalled how Barkhausen encouraged Gubegna to mobilize an insurrection against Halie Selassie and fight with street weapons, such as “Mazel tov cocktails.”

“And he said to him, ‘One day tyranny will seize and desist!’ ” I said.

After lunch, we passed the university band marching along Jefferson Street and then dispersing. The musicians went their own ways, instruments under their arms. Each wore a black windbreaker emblazoned with a large gold
I
on the back. We turned to each other and said, at the same time, “Which I is
I
?”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

SKELETON JANGLE—THE ALHAMBRA—P’TOWN—THE BULL RING WHARF—ANCIENT AGE—MOCHAHAGTDI!—BLACKOUT—A NOBODY

I
visited McPeak on my way to Queens. Despite his house’s wide porches and airy rooms, he spent the summer in the dim finished basement, listening to jazz, reading biographies of musicians and drinking Scotch. His wife sat across from him smoking marijuana. Every so often, he rattled the ice in his tumbler, saying, “Nancy,” who sighed, got up and tilted Johnny Walker into his glass from a bottle with a metal spout. No time wasted unscrewing a cap. After a day in his cellar, I mentioned the music had a common thread. Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck: all white. He said most of his collection came from his racist father who used to watch the Chicago Bulls on TV, but didn’t root for them. Instead, he tracked the scoring of white players versus black, telling McPeak at the end of the game, “how we did.”

Having gotten his degree, McPeak lost his excuse to carouse in Iowa City, so he flirted with his high school students, waited until they graduated, and tried to seduce them at their colleges. He told me this new strategy on our way to lunch at Auntie’s Road House outside of Moline, where we were meeting Didi, his new love. We reminisced about the workshop and I told him I missed Kim and he said he missed Stavrula in spite of their battles. He had hoped to reconcile, but she refused. He had gone to her house with a fresh copy of his thesis, which he now dedicated to her. She accepted it, and asked for the bleached version as well—she said she wanted a record of their vanishing. He mailed her the whited-out copy and never saw her again.

McPeak led me through Auntie’s bar, out the back door and into a barren yard with one picnic table and two weary sunflowers. We were soon joined by Didi, a blonde and childlike college freshman. A waitress brought beers and hamburgers and Didi excitedly told me that this was their secret rendezvous, that the table we sat at was special, as it belonged to Auntie, who allowed them to sit there, hidden from the view of the bar as the bar was hidden from town. When Didi smiled, her tiny rows of white teeth looked like kernels of baby corn, and that’s what she was, a baby. I felt McPeak and Didi had misunderstood their relationship with Auntie, a wrinkled woman in a wrinkled apron who came out several times, frowned, and banged the door closed as she returned to the bar. Didi was talking excitedly about an upcoming ABBA concert when Auntie tossed a pile of tablecloths onto the patio and shook them, sending ash and crumbs in our direction.