A Moveable Famine (25 page)

Jeanne invited me to dinner, for the promised carbonara. I walked across the parking lot with a bottle of wine and we talked about life in the Bull Ring. Spooner had been taken to the hospital for breaking one of her beautiful ankles at a polka lesson. Jeanne asked if the noisy weekend visitors bothered me and I said no, but the truth was that on Saturdays and Sundays I heard the sounds of hetero sex on one side, gay sex on the other, and most mornings, the artist Jackson Lambert above me purging the previous night’s binge. I saw the table set for two and asked about Wayne. They had separated. She thought he had crossed from eccentricity into madness. She went in the other room and returned with a cigar box containing hundreds of tiny white twigs.

“They’re clay-pipe stems. Wayne’s obsession. He finds them on the beach. From early Dutch settlers.”

“That seems harmless enough,” I said.

“He has about twenty boxes like this,” she said, and sighed. “He combs the flats at every low tide.”

Jeanne’s managerial duties took a lot of time, particularly on weekends when she checked in guests. I helped her by painting rooms and sanding and staining railings. She wrote from six until nine every morning, and whenever I spent the night there, I left at dawn after a cup of coffee. In the evenings we compared what we had done.

Jeanne’s job put her in touch with the town. One night in her study I asked about the tall Infant of Prague statue wearing his many slips and ornate gown. She said it was a gift from the owner of the Glorified Grocer who told her that if she kept a penny under it, she’d never go broke. I admired the friends and acquaintances she’d made in such a short time. I told her about my first weeks, spent unwisely but with an accomplished writer like Vince.

“Have you read Vince’s books?” she asked.

“No, I’ve been meaning to.”

She went to her shelf. “He’s a friend of Wayne,” she said, handing me
The Complete Guide to Wood Finishes; How to Turn an Orange Crate into an End Table
and
Tips from a Flea Market Maven.

“That’s not what I expected,” I said.

She walked over to the infant, lifted his dress, and said, “I just realized maybe I’ll never go broke because I’ll always have the penny.”

I read Stanley’s suggestions—Hopkins, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and unknowns like Hyam Plutzik. From Dugan, I got Oppen and Cavafy. I sent my new poems to Ridge and he said I had forgotten the importance of craft. His being a finalist for the National Book Award made his criticism sting even more. I applied for a second year, wondering what outside judges would think.

The painter Janet Fish gave a slide show of her elaborately colored water glasses set on mirrors, work that had made her reputation. Then she showed paintings of packaged apples, tomatoes and oranges, complete with green corrugation and plastic wrap. She said her gallery disapproved of this new take on the still life, formerly favorable critics panned her, and she even lost friends. But she said she found another gallery, different critics, new friends.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

NEAR THE HOPPER HOUSE—STALIN’S SPERM—PAJAMAS—THE WORK—ASK ME IF I’M A DOCTOR—THREE IDS—TIME TO LEAVE

I
n March, Porter asked me to accompany him to pick up Stanley at the airport. The writing committee was convening to choose the fellows for the coming year. We had dinner at the Mayflower. Stanley mentioned a favorite applicant from Columbia, a former student like Hester, who was about to have a great breakthrough. He said he found one manuscript that had a passion like a “burning wheel.” When we asked what he meant, he said, “They’re angry poems, and angry poets are best.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” Stanley said, taking out a notebook. “Number seventy-three. Barkhausen.” Stanley’s blessing of Barkhausen made me wonder if I had him wrong. I wished I had kept copies of
La Huerta.
Barkhausen wasn’t on Porter’s list. I was pulling for Artie, always interesting to be around, to get another look at his work.

Page and I were chosen for the second year. Hankard did not want to return and sneered whenever we were in the same room. I spent most nights with Jeanne and we rued the coming of May, when my stay ended. I would have no choice but to return to Queens. We weren’t ready to move in together, so I was happy to get a call on the Bull Ring’s pay phone from a local writer I had seen at openings and readings. I didn’t recognize the name, but when Jeanne handed me the receiver, I recognized the voice of Phyllis Sherwood by her heavy lisp. She was a sixty-year-old writer who needed an assistant for the summer to help her with a new project. She had a spare room in her Truro house for the right person, and invited me to dinner to discuss it. Phyllis had recently discovered she was part Iroquois and had given a talk about it at the Wellfleet library. Posters showed her in full Native American dress, a white leather blouse and skirt, beads and a headband. Her gray hair was done in a pageboy, popular in the fifties, and revived in the sixties by English rock groups, putting Phyllis twice behind the times.

I took the bus and she met me at the grocery store and post office that comprised downtown Truro, eight miles from P’town. Her place was near Edward Hopper’s and overlooked the bay. She told me the other guests would be Arturo Vivante, the Italian fiction writer who was a member of the writing committee; his wife, Nancy, and J. D. Harrell, the translator of Lorca whose work she knew I admired. I also admired Arturo, a big, gentle man with a large soul who seemed to walk through life as through a dream, wistfully gazing at the beauty around him, especially when that beauty took the form of women. He had published nearly a hundred stories in the
New Yorker
and was well outside the Wellfleet circle of psychiatrists and remittance men who on weekends traded their expensive suits for frayed shirts and drawstring pants. Stanley called them cases of arrested development. Porter called them upper crustaceans. Dugan called them the white wine swillers.

I had to duck under the doorframe to enter the antique house, which opened into a kitchen with a cast-iron gas stove surrounded by heavy oak hutches. Phyllis showed me the view of rolling hills of bayberry and bearberry and her path to the beach. I stared at the landscape and at the house where Hopper had painted, but my reverie was broken by Phyllis, who spun through the kitchen and started toward a flight of stairs, unbuttoning her blouse and saying over her shoulder, “I’m getting changed. If they arrive, fix them a drink!” As I looked at the bottles of gin, Scotch, and vodka, I felt transformed into an intimate or a houseboy, I couldn’t tell which. I called for a jigger. She yelled from the landing that I would have to estimate. I had failed my first test for the summer position, and walked around the dining room’s wall-to-wall bookshelves. I found her novels and her recent book of nonfiction,
The Heirs of Stalin,
which contained clippings of rave reviews from the
New York Times
and the
New York Review of Books.
She had tracked the lives of the dictator’s children. I could hear water running upstairs and her stepping across the floorboards. A few minutes later, she descended the stairs exuding Shalimar, my mother’s scent. She removed a large pot from the oven, stirred it and asked me to take the pie off the stove. I stood above the burners, facing a deep dish of berries, and said, “What pie?”

“The pie!” she said, pointing.

“That’s a pie?” I said.

Arturo and his wife arrived. Nancy wore a pageboy like Phyllis’s. Arturo’s hair flew in many directions.

“You need a haircut, Arturo,” Phyllis said, kissing him.

“I told him to get a haircut or get a cello,” Nancy said, looking over the booze.

Harrell, thin as a string of bones, shook my hand but focused on the rug. I made martinis and poured wine while Phyllis sat with her guests and criticized Princess Nina Georgievna’s house in Wellfleet. She asked me for the bowl of peanuts on the counter. I joined them with a Scotch, and tried to draw Harrell into a conversation about Lorca, but he put me off. After drinks, Phyllis served kale soup with bread and salad. Harrell hardly touched his food and I hardly spoke, having nothing to add to the discussion of pond algae and the architecture of the new police station. I followed Phyllis’s orders and asked everyone to go back to the living room while I cleared the table and she brought pie and coffee to the guests who seemed accustomed to frugal dinners.

Harrell left, and Arturo told me in his soft voice that Harrell and Phyllis had just ended an affair, and he was jealous of me. Arturo, looking for an excuse to get to Provincetown, asked if I would like a ride. I didn’t want to impose on him so I said I didn’t need a ride. His eyes widened. He thought I was spending the night with Phyllis, and I wondered if he was right.

When we were alone, Phyllis escorted me to an armchair by the fire. My houseboy role had ended and I again became a guest. She tossed the newspaper and
The Heirs of Stalin
on a brocade-covered footstool and went to do the few dishes.

I leafed through her book again. “The title’s from Yevtushenko,” she said, arriving with two glasses of brandy.

“I know,” I said. “The translation I have says,
Stalin’s Sperm
.”

“Well, I couldn’t call it that, could I?” she said, and shifted in her chair. She placed her feet on the stool, and her dress ran up her legs.

“You read a lot of poetry?” she asked.

“That’s almost all I read,” I said.

“Do you know Leger Leger?”

I said I didn’t.

“Oh, that’s right, only his friends call him that. You probably know him as Saint John Perse. He used to visit here. He wrote wonderful poems, but some awful lines. I recall ‘the vulva smell of low waters,’ about Blackfish Creek.” She closed her eyes while she spoke, opening them at the end of each monologue. It was like watching a canoe that had capsized, and I wondered if it would ever right itself again.

She poured more brandy, and nodded to the door behind me. “That would be your room,” she said. “Take a look.” I opened the door onto a single bed, dresser and rolltop desk. The white wooden floor had been stippled with red and orange paint.

“My new book’s a memoir about my first marriage to a satyr,” she said. “But it involves all the people we knew in the sixties who have now became famous. I need fact-checking, that kind of thing.” The shutting and opening of her eyes added tension to our conversation.

“I’m sure I could do that,” I said.

“Too bad we didn’t have any time today to see if you liked the work.”

“I think I understand. Editorial and research.”

“That’s right, but more. Like helping with dinner and driving me around.” A breeze kept opening and nudging shut the bedroom door.

“I wish you had brought your pajamas,” she said. “Then tomorrow you could see if you liked the work.”

“I didn’t expect to stay,” I said.

“But you can. And tomorrow you can get an idea of what I do.”

“But even if I liked the work, I’m not sure this would be the right thing for me.”

“I think you might like it,” she said.

“Maybe another time,” I said.

“Well, down the hatch,” she said, tossing off the brandy.

Phyllis chattered nervously in the car, pointing out the houses of writers and painters I would meet. All the while, I hoped her eyes weren’t continuing to close. She dropped me at the Bull Ring, and we said good-bye like those who leave a failed date. Jeanne didn’t answer her door, so I walked downtown. I sat at the bar of the Governor Bradford, wondering about “the work,” and unhappy to be returning to my parents’ apartment, when I heard a voice from a table behind me.

“Ask me if he’s a doctor!”

I turned to see Hester, very drunk, with three women, one of them Zoe. I also recognized beautiful blonde Claire Fontaine, slayer of men and women. They were laughing. I smiled and turned back to the bar, my receding hairline in the mirror above the bottles.

“Go ahead,” Hester continued. “Ask me if he’s a doctor!”

“Is he a doctor?” someone said.

“No!” Hester said, and burst with laughter, the table joining in. A momentary silence occurred as they sipped their drinks, and Hester said again, “No, really, ask me if he’s a doctor.”

“Cut it out, Hester,” Zoe said.

“Please,” she said. “Ask me.”

“Is he a doctor?” Claire Fontaine said.

“No!” Hester yelled, and the table roared.

I faced them once more, and Hester said, “This time, I’m serious. I’ll tell you the truth. Ask me, go ahead. Ask me if he’s a doctor.”

“No way,” Claire Fontaine said, and the others muttered they were through with the game. Hester pleaded, and finally someone whispered, “Is he a doctor?”

“No!” Hester shouted. Against their wills but pushed forward by alcohol, they laughed all over again. I finished my bourbon and turned to leave, when Hester rose from the table and came toward me. Too drunk to walk, she tried to steady herself by leaning against a wooden column. She put her hands against it to move forward, but slid very gently, almost gracefully, to the floor where she came to rest on her beautiful rear end, twisting off one pink shoe.