A Moveable Famine (19 page)

“I’ve had it with you two,” Vince said, finishing his drink and walking out.

Post-Elliot and I sat in silence and considered our wavering reflections in the window.

“You know, John,” he said. “There’s a reason why so many of us end up here in P’town.”

And the lights came on.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

THAT’S P’TOWN—THE MEAT RACK—FAWC—EVERYONE BUT HESTER—A FREE FALL INTO RELATIVITY—THE VICTIM WAS ALONE—THE DROP-IN CENTER—CORSO ARRIVES

T
here are two main streets in Provincetown: Commercial Street, along the water, and Bradford, parallel to it, once simply called Front and Back Streets. Porter and I walked past Town Hall’s little rectangle of benches known as “The Meat Rack,” an after-hours cruising place. He told me that when the bars close in summer, it filled with hundreds of men. Although it was October, tourists still paraded the streets, mixing with gay couples and fishermen in rubber boots on their way to the wharf. We passed the library where the housepainter, still wobbly, shook his tarp over the grass next to the building and wandered through his truck looking for brushes. A library official stood on the steps, arms folded. “No ladders today!” he said, “today, no ladders!”

It was then that Porter spoke the slogan, the short anthem of the area that I heard for the first time—“That’s P’town.”

At Tip for Tops’n, we had a breakfast of coffee and flippers—fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. The menu explained the restaurant’s name—The Tip of the Cape for The Tops in Food. I thought Vince’s acronym might win after all.

A sign on Pearl Street read
A Winter Community of Artists and Writers.
The Fine Arts Work Center, FAWC for short, was a converted lumberyard, and the rickety, worn façade looked more like a set for a western than a forge of artistic activity. It consisted of a long two-story wooden building, unheated coal bins, a shed once housing lobster traps, and a barn. Raised windows showed the studios of the visual artists who worked and slept in the same space. We ducked under a white oar painted with the word
Office
nailed to a doorframe tangled in wisteria.

Bonnie, the secretary, handed me my stipend check of a hundred fifty dollars across her IBM Selectric, and said to Porter, “Would you talk to Case about keeping the shower curtain
inside
the stall! This is the third time.” She pointed to a full bucket.

“Sorry!” A voice came through the ceiling. Exposed wires and pipes crisscrossed the rafters, dangling with tags written in shaky cursive.

“Thank you, Case,” Bonnie yelled, and we could hear his footfalls creak. She answered the phone and, when she got off, she said it was the new pastor of the Universalist Church who wanted the name of a carpenter. “He said all the windows stick and he has trouble opening them.”

“He better get used to it,” Porter said. “There’s not a right angle in town.”

Porter took me down a narrow hall crowded with books, paintings, and cartons leading to two wooden crates that served as steps to the sunken common room. A pay phone hung between a row of wooden mailboxes and a tilted metal bookcase. Jeanne East, a second-year writing fellow, entered through a sliding glass door facing the parking lot. A short broad-shouldered brunette, she carried herself with authority. In New York, I had received a copy of
Shankpainter,
FAWC’s literary magazine, and remembered her lines:

When you come, leave your bones

in the hallway. I like you soft.

She introduced her husband, Wayne, as a carpenter and “bedfellow.” A visual artist named Les carried a huge cone of twine, his heavily callused fingers rubbing the fiber as he asked Porter in a worried way about the 250 bikers he heard were coming to town.

“That’s the Entre Nous Motorcycle Club,” Porter said. “Two hundred and fifty members, and not a bike among them.”

“They just like to dress up,” Jeanne explained.

Les joined the artists who were meeting in the trap shed. I recognized Jack Tworkov, a well-known abstract expressionist, walking in the parking lot, a small, compact man, his bald head like a fist. Porter said that Les was a fiber artist who made huge towers of rope on display in the gallery next to the office.

Two second-year poets took seats. Stephen Greene huddled in a dark raincoat. Barry Mengas wore black jeans, black T-shirt and a black zippered jacket. I recognized them, they were familiar to me from the way Hemingway described such figures: poets marked by death. Others entered, including first-year fellow Ted Page from Tucson, blond and handsome, with Gail, his blonde wife. A ring of keys dangled from Ted’s belt, and Porter warned him that keys on your right side meant you were gay, and submissive. Ted grimaced and Gail jangled the ring to unfasten it.

Alan Dugan and Stanley Kunitz arrived. They were united in their generosity toward young writers, but opposites in every other way. Dugan lived a solitary life in nearby Truro. His drinking binges had given him a poor reputation and invitations to teach or to read were few. He wrote, smoked and drank in his house overlooking Cape Cod Bay. His first book,
Poems,
which he published at thirty-nine, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the Pulitzer, the Prix de Rome and the National Book Award. Each book that followed was dedicated to his wife, Judy, and each book was titled the same,
Poems 2, Poems 3
and
Poems 4.
In Provincetown’s west end, Stanley’s house was renowned for its exquisite garden and many visitors. He was active in New York poetry circles, judged contests, served on the boards of foundations and taught at Columbia. Everyone referred to him as Stanley and to Alan Dugan as Dugan, just as we had done with Lawson and Harvey, but there the similarities ended. Dugan and Kunitz, both Pulitzer winners, had eclipsed the Iowa hierarchy, but you wouldn’t have known it. They had formed a peerless community in Provincetown.

Dugan pulled two thick envelopes from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed them to the poets marked by death. They thanked him and he sat down and began writing in a legal pad. Although in his early fifties, Dugan’s face was cracked and lined, his fingers brown from chain-smoking Pall Malls. The poets marked by death opened Dugan’s envelopes and removed pages filled with Dugan’s looping scrawl. He had also line-edited their poems in pencil. They thanked him again and he said, “You’re welcome,” in a deep Brooklyn accent that banged the walls. He went through his mail, which included a cookbook of poets’ recipes to which he had contributed. The collection of rhapsodies by sensitive males involved bib lettuce, sautéed endive and pea tendrils, but Dugan’s entry began, “Take two hot dogs and throw them into a frying pan until they turn black . . .”

Stanley sang his sentences, bounding from fellow to fellow, introducing himself. He knew something about each of us. He grasped my forearm and asked after Ridge. When Page said he missed the desert, Stanley waved toward the water and said, “You’ll love the ocean even more!” He took a chair next to Dugan and they discussed a former fellow who had just died. Stanley said, “It was a relief, he was so sick.” Kurt Becker, a poet and secretary of the committee, explained that the fellow had become paranoid and believed The Red Inn, a restaurant near Stanley’s house, was run by communists. I hadn’t noticed Kurt. He had blended into the shoddy armchair with his thrift-shop clothes and glasses held together by brown pipe cleaners.

“How’d he die?” someone asked.

“A car crash in Boston,” Porter said.

Dugan stabbed the air with his finger, accusing Detroit and Madison Avenue at once, saying, “The ads say the car goes from zero to sixty in five seconds. They don’t tell you it goes from sixty to zero in twenty seconds.”

“And that’s when the pole gets in the way,” Stanley said.

Dugan took a drag on his cigarette, flicked ash into a hubcap of cigarette butts and said, “That makes what, three fellows who went nuts now? What happened to that guy from Alaska, the one who left wearing spoons on his head?”

Stanley clapped his hands, trying to brighten the meeting. “Welcome, everyone, welcome! I think everyone’s here but Hester.” He told us we had no responsibilities except to do our own work and that members of the committee would look at manuscripts any time. He asked for suggestions for visiting writers and we decided on John Updike, Robert Bly, Mark Strand and Bernard Malamud.

Jay Hankard, another new poetry fellow, swished his ponytail and jutted his square jaw forward. “Why only writers?” he asked. “How about radical lawyers or religious leaders?” His buck teeth helped push his words across the room. Everyone was silent. He continued, “Farmers? Gurus? People who break the mold!”

Stanley said, “Some of these names have distinguished themselves in ways you mention. Let’s see how this first round goes.” When Stanley spoke, a gentle smile peeked from his lips, and he often ended his sentence by making a little hum of finality. While Stanley was talking, Hankard caught Gail staring at his hand, and he brought his ring close to her eyes and said, “Bone of Tibetan Monk!”

Page said he was satisfied with the list, and Hankard threw his arms over his head, saying, “I’m just trying to save us from a freefall into relativity!”

Kurt would write the invitations on a manual typewriter in the office, on a Formica table which served as his desk. The letters I had received from him were pounded hard into the paper because of a worn ribbon, and the frayed words had to be puzzled out.

Hankard said, “The fishes live in water but they do not see the water.”

Porter announced that Robert Creeley was arriving in a week and that Hester would be hosting a brunch in his honor.

“You won’t want to miss that,” Stanley said. “She’s quite a cook.”

“Stanley! Stanley!” Dugan said so urgently the whole room turned. “Is Hester making beignets?” Dugan’s cracked brow, combined with his deep monotone, made even this trivial question seem grave.

“I guarantee it,” Stanley said.

Porter said the date would be posted above our mailboxes.

I imagined Hester again, the sultry New Orleans poet with a domestic touch. Part cat on a hot tin roof and part plantation hostess. I had read her poems in
Shankpainter
about municipal statuary in the French Quarter, which added another dimension to her portrait.

Porter took us to the gallery to see the work of the visual fellows. The walls hung with paintings similar to de Kooning and others to Kline. Les’s coils of heavy hemp dominated the space. On the way out, I stopped at a stand displaying a manuscript. The typeface was faded; it was impossible to read but interesting to try, and I could see the outline of poems, the shapes of stanzas. I deciphered a few titles and then a few more. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was in front of me—McPeak’s bleached thesis. I found the artist’s name: Stavrula Pallas. Her fellowship had come, in part, for obliterating
The Fifth Season.

Although it was only eleven o’clock, Dugan suggested the Fo’c’sle and we followed Stanley, who trotted at the head of the pack, the sun angling off the shiny brim of his fisherman’s cap. The late morning light hit the street, flaring the asphalt, but the Fo’c’sle remained a shroud. We shielded our eyes as we navigated through the benches to the bar where everyone ordered Narragansett, the only thing on tap. Hankard asked for Perrier but the bartender’s stare transformed his order, like alchemy, into beer.

Post-Elliot was at the bar. “I wasn’t entirely truthful with you last night,” he said while I waited for my drink. “I haven’t written whole poems for a while. I’m into titles.”

“He has notebooks of them,” the bartender said. “Yesterday he wrote the title of his autobiography.” He raised his eyebrows in appreciation.

“The Victim Was Alone.
It’s one of my mystery titles,” Post-Elliot said. He asked if I was going to sit with Stanley Kunitz. I said I was, and I noticed a dog at Post-Elliot’s feet, a tiny brown dog with three legs and one bulging eye.

“That’s Major,” he said. “He was buried alive for two days, but dug his way out.” The bartender handed Post-Elliot a brass ship’s clock and a long screwdriver, and Post-Elliot left the bar for a bench under a lantern where he started dismantling the face.

I joined the table where Stanley held the bar’s orange cat in his lap. One of the patrons came in and he and Dugan saluted each other. I asked who it was, and Dugan said it was an old army buddy. He smoked and stared out the window. Stanley served in World War II as well, but as a conscientious objector, refusing to bear arms. Jeanne said she had a cat, and could tell Stanley was a cat person. Stanley said he’d never been without one. Jeanne asked Dugan if he liked cats. Dugan turned from the window and said, “I like animals in the wild where they belong.”

Stanley said, “When I was in high school, I found a cat near our house in Worcester. My mother loved him and he kept growing and growing. Then I went to Harvard, and I missed him.”

“Oh, that’s so sad,” Jeanne said. Her eyes also said she was not used to drinking beer in the morning and she had finished the tall glass as if it were orange juice. “What was his name?”