A Moveable Famine (27 page)

P
orter asked to use my place for a fund-raising, friend-raising event. He was inviting a couple of local writers who did not usually come to the Center and a few wealthy people from town. Dugan would read beforehand as an added attraction. I once asked Dugan what poet meant the most to him and he said William Carlos Williams. He recited “El Hombre”:

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part.

A fitting poem for a man who shunned celebrity, but, on this night, he was in the spotlight, giving a reading in the art gallery under life-sized bandaged figures swinging from the ceiling on wire trapezes. Dugan sat at a table, hunched over his manuscript, a pack of Pall Malls, an ashtray and three cans of Bud. I took a seat next to Barkhausen, who was introducing him, and pointed out Marge Piercy and Robert Boles. The chair of the Work Center’s board escorted a wealthy couple, Bernard and Elizabeth Gildroy, and several of their friends. Hester came in with Claire Fontaine. There were no seats, so they leaned against the wall. I tried to get Hester’s attention, but she wouldn’t look my way.

Barkhausen’s tide of critical superlatives washed over Dugan. He read a page and was on the next when Dugan interrupted, saying, “Okay, thank you!” in a voice that seemed to rise from the bottom of a well. A few sentences later, Dugan said, “Enough!” Everyone laughed. Was there the start of a smile across Dugan’s Mt. Rushmore face? No. He ignited his cigarette lighter, aiming the flame at Barkhausen’s introduction. The room laughed harder because it seemed a rehearsed routine, and Barkhausen continued.

Mindless of trend
. . .

At these words, Dugan jumped up and his chair fell backward. He lurched toward Barkhausen whose last words tripped from his lips even as Dugan seized his throat with both hands and drove him across the room. Dugan was not only serious, he was enraged. His red face grew redder from the effort of pinning the younger man to the wall, where Barkhausen dropped his papers, trying to pry Dugan’s bony fingers from his windpipe. Dugan let go and returned to the table while Barkhausen left the gallery.

“Graduate student-ese,” Dugan said.

Major, the one-eyed, three-legged dog who had been buried alive, wandered in and flopped at Dugan’s feet. Dugan began to read, but whenever someone caught the dog’s eye, he wagged his tail heartily, slapping the floor. Claire Fontaine snapped her fingers for Major’s attention, enjoying the back-from-the-dead dog looking at her and thumping. Hester moved Claire’s hair from her ear and whispered something that made her hysterical. A moment later, they opened the side door to Pearl Street and left. When the reading was over, the chair of the trustees apologized to Dugan for the noisy dog and Dugan said, “I’ve been places where the academics are worse than dogs.”

I raced to my apartment wondering about Hester. Why was she with Claire Fontaine? Would she bring her to the party? I decided to be done with Hester for good as I put out the beer, chips and clam dip Porter brought earlier. There would be no photos. Post-Elliot complained that at the last party he couldn’t get a clear shot without booze. The new brochure showed us starry-eyed, every hand cropped at the wrist.

Stanley arrived with Elise, which was unusual; she skipped social events, but on this night they hoped to win friends for the Center. Jeanne came with Wayne and we glanced at each other but didn’t speak except when she asked for a knife to cut bread. Hester walked in alone and helped Jeanne, whom she caught looking at her earring—two dangling pink babies, a male and female. The female had holes in three places and the male a stiff penis. Hester told Jeanne she fit them together according to her mood. Barkhausen introduced himself to Marge Piercy, saying, “It’s nice to meet you, Margin.” The trustee chair arrived with the Gildroys. Their friends had fled after Dugan’s pugnacious display.

Dugan and Barkhausen patched things up and were in deep discussion over a bottle of Heaven Hill, trading shot for shot. Barkhausen said, “I want to write a poem that is there and not there.” Dugan didn’t understand. Barkhausen clarified, “A poem conceived in a dim light.” A poet from town with a crush on Hester followed her around. She had shown me a poem he wrote about her called, “Ice Sculpture in a Snowdrift.”

Mr. Gildroy said in a loud voice to Stanley and Elise, “Last week, two college presidents came by. They want my art collection! The question is, where do they house it?” Stanley spoke softly and then Mr. Gildroy burst forth again so their conversation was like the sound of a crashing wave followed by the receding tide.

One of the fellows sneezed and someone asked if he had a head cold. He said it was a face cold. Wayne strummed and sang, “The Night They Brought Old Dixie Down,” but Dugan stopped him, saying the chorus went “No No No” and not “Na Na Na,” insisting it was a refusal to capitulate. Considering what happened at the reading, Wayne revised the refrain. I told Mrs. Gildroy I was a writing fellow. She poured herself more wine and asked what I liked to read. I told her poetry. She clapped her hands, an ounce of burgundy flying to the rug. It was her love too, especially Emily Dickinson. She grasped the stem of her glass with both hands, and recited:

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Mr. Gildroy surged toward Stanley. “I gave them a hundred shares of IBM and got a thank you for a golf cart! That’s the last they’ll hear from me!”

A female fellow said the guys at the fish market were cute, and a fellow who liked her tried to discourage her by saying they can never get that smell off their hands. An artist had given me a painting of a mackerel on a dish, the oil still wet, and Kurt shouldered into it, smearing it to abstraction. Porter passed around a plate of oysters. Stanley said they were an aphrodisiac because they were shaped like testicles. Dugan said his testicles were not shaped like oysters and the Gildroys left along with Marge Piercy.

At midnight Judy and Dugan said good-bye but Judy ran back, poked her head in, and said Dugan had fallen on the lower deck. Porter and I grabbed flashlights, but by the time we arrived, Dugan was on his feet staring at the dead seagull he had tripped over. Jeanne joined us.

“It must have crashed into one of the windows,” Porter said, nudging it with his foot.

With Dugan gone, everyone surrounded Stanley and Elise. Stanley talked of his love of birds, even seagulls, and described the time he brought singing finches to New York from the Canary Islands. Customs officials confiscated his cages, but the chief inspector, who also loved birds, admired Stanley’s exotic collection, and allowed him to enter. Stanley said as a boy he had read that an owl couldn’t be tamed, so he made it a point to go into the forest every day after school. “One of the greatest moments of my life was walking out of those Worcester woods with six owls. Three on each arm,” he said, flinging those arms open and knocking over his martini.

Jeanne was commiserating with Kurt, having seen him under his car at the Center taping his dangling muffler with a roll of Tiger Patch. Stanley said his car, loaded with rare books, once died in the Mojave Desert. Each time someone offered a ride, he refused. “I couldn’t leave my books!” he said, shaking a fist. “Three days passed,” he continued. A Fuller Brush salesman, who also loved books, stopped and Stanley showed him the first editions and signed copies. The man threw away his sample cases to make room for Stanley’s library. Stanley’s stories had a similar mythical pattern. He always seemed to meet a man who loved what he loved and that person saved him. And in a way, he was a man who saved us.

Elise stood up to leave, but not before saying, “Now he’s in the desert for
three
nights. Used to be two.” Porter drove her home.

Hester suggested we reveal something we regretted, something we were ashamed of having done. Barkhausen went first. He thought a cat and a mouse were playing together in the common room, but then the cat killed the mouse. Jeanne had heard a rumor that the Holiday Inn was interested in buying the Bull Ring and, when a letter from the chain arrived for the owner, she threw it out. Hester didn’t stop for a boy hitchhiker in Louisiana who was later kidnapped. Porter returned and said one of the fellows had a crow named Charlie that pounced onto the head of anyone riding a bicycle. Porter tempted him into a car and drove him off Cape. Hester looked at me and asked directly, incriminatingly, “You’ve gone to confession your whole life. You’ve legion sins to share.”

“I told a woman I loved her,” I said.

I was sorry to see Jeanne flinch. I meant to hurt Hester, another thing I immediately regretted. Hester straightened her shoulders and said, “After the final no there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends.”

Stanley said he had an experience that combined ours. He loved a woman who was also a poet, and they lived together. One day, alone in their apartment, he read a letter she had received from a mutual female friend, and learned she was having an affair with that woman.

“Jean Garrigue,” Hester whispered and Stanley nodded.

At dawn, the party ended. Barkhausen was hugging me and hugging everyone. Porter said to him, “Tell me, Artie, did I hear you right tonight? Did you call Marge Piercy
Margin
?”

“Yes, Porter,” he said. “I didn’t think I knew her well enough to call her Marge.”

Porter was telling Stanley that he should write about Jean Garrigue. Stanley said, “I don’t want poems that tell secrets, I want poems that are full of them.” Porter followed Stanley out, along with the others, except for Hester, Jeanne and Wayne.

Wayne had fallen asleep in the bedroom and Jeanne helped me straighten up. Hester pitched in and we dumped the ashtrays, poured dregs down the drain, and stacked the empties on the deck. In the clean room, which the sun had brightened, Hester said, “The three of us have a lot in common.”

“I don’t think so,” Jeanne said.

Hester moved to the couch and Jeanne and I leaned against the kitchen counter.

“The more varnish you apply, the more the grain shows,” Hester said in her Stanley rhythm.

Jeanne said, “You don’t know what you’re saying, Hester. I’m making my marriage work.”

“Face it, Jeanne, Wayne’s a loser.”

“I’m leaving,” Jeanne said, and walked to the bedroom to get her husband.

“So am I,” Hester said. I watched her put on her sunglasses before she descended the stairs. She stopped, looked over and said, “Self-swindler!”

“And other poems!” It was Barkhausen, rushing right past her with two cups of coffee and the Boston Globe. Jeanne and Wayne came out a few seconds later. Artie handed me a coffee, went in, fiddled the radio to the news station and started paging through the paper.

When they reached the first floor, Jeanne yelled, “John, that gull’s not dead!” I ran down to find Wayne vomiting over the railing. Jeanne and I stood by the broken bird. It lay on its side, blinking.

“In the dark, it must have looked dead,” I said.

“You stink,” Jeanne said to Wayne who had joined us. She pointed to the front of his shirt.

I knelt by the bird, and saw no wound, no sign of injury. I touched its wing and it didn’t move.

“I think it’s dead now,” I said, and went upstairs.

“On my way here I saw a dog holding two balls in its mouth,” Barkhausen said. “What happened to your Gal-Alleluia?”

“Over,” I said.

“I told you she was weird,” he said. “I liked Dugan’s new poems, I don’t care that he strangled me. Are those stories of Stanley’s true?”

“I think so,” I said. “Though he does say poets must turn their lives into legend.”

“You know what I like about this place?” he said. “You arrive needing a flashlight and you leave wearing sunglasses.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
IVE

VD—GOING FOR THE JOCULAR—A DONALD DUCK, STRAIGHT UP—THE SICK ONE—THE DOCTOR AND THE PLUMBER—BUSTER & ZOOMER—YOU MUST LOVE POETRY MORE

I
took the bus to Brewster to see the urologist, Paul McGovern. As soon as I stood in front of his office on Route 6A, I wished I had gone to the Drop-In Center. The road was lined with pristine antique shops, nurseries, taverns and restaurants. A yellow school bus deposited healthy children every hundred feet. It all seemed the opposite of my life.