A Moveable Famine (31 page)

“A paean to the imagination!” Glazer seconded.

“Unfair!” Binky said in my defense. “That’s not poetry!” In the silence that followed, we noticed that Ricky had retreated to a corner where he could be heard weeping.

“Poetry can do this,” Norbert said.

Binky whispered to me, “And so can finding your wife balancing another guy’s checkbook,” and she started to laugh, shaking her big shoulders.

“Let’s call it a day,” Norbert said.

As we got up to go, I saw Granville struggling to leave the kitchen. I thought he must have been really blasted from the gin, dragging himself with difficulty out of the doorway, but then I saw that Browning had attached himself to Granville’s shin and was humping away. The dapper professor could not shake him, so they entered the living room together, Lane rising from his seat to swat the excited dog from his colleague’s leg.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

A THANK YOU CAKE—PENDEMONIUM—TUTORING ALEX—MY OWN MONT BLANC—TELEPATHY—WEE MARIE—A MOCKINGBIRD SHOWS THE WAY

A
t our final department meeting of the year, Dr. Ramsey asked, “What do we do with someone like Pope?” His question was answered with a familiar question. “Is Pope an age or a man?”

I handed in my grades in mid-December, my appointment over. If I ever got another job, I could name a place I’d taught. With nowhere to go, and my lease running through the summer, I decided to stay in Dallas, reading and writing, until August when I’d leave for Yaddo.

In late spring I sat in my apartment ordering my poems into a book, surprised at just noticing most were love poems, or really, anti-love poems, as forced as Holly’s anti-jingle bells—they protested too much. I went into despair, the despair of being blind to my longings and shortcomings as well as recognizing its “Johnny One Note” quality. I looked into the courtyard at the magnolia tree that stayed green all winter, thinking I should throw out the manuscript and start over. A loud siren pierced the walls and windows. I opened my door and saw an extension cord running from the door of the apartment across the hall and down the stairs to the outside. I guessed the racket was caused by my neighbor attaching a powerful vacuum to his car. To get away from my book, I went for a drive. Lemmon Avenue was empty, the sky a greenish dark. A cruiser pulled next to me at a stoplight and the policeman yelled out his window, asking why I was ignoring the sirens, a tornado warning, and he ordered me home. I sat at my desk, feeling like neither a man nor an age, waiting for a tornado that never reached ground.

On one of my walks through the city, I found a stationery store called Pendemonium. Behind the counter was Mary Murray, a student from my Idea of America class, whose parents owned the shop. She was an atypical McGuire undergraduate, apart from privilege and prejudice. On the last day of class, I was presented with a sheet cake, and I felt she was behind the gift. It said, “Thanks for the knowledge, especially about slurs and spoons.” Two things I had successfully taught: ethnic derision and a coupling act. Mary introduced me to her mother and father and, since I didn’t want to leave empty-handed, I bought a padded envelope and a notebook, the cheapest things in the shop. The next day Mary’s mother called. She needed help for her son, Alex, a high school junior at risk of dropping out. He wrote poems and songs, but was disillusioned with school. She asked me to tutor him, and said she would pay the going rate.

Alex came to my apartment, his long hair flowing over a baseball jersey on which he had scrawled the name “Dock Ellis,” a pitcher famous for throwing a no-hitter under the influence of LSD. He handed me a dozen envelopes. We sat in my living room and we talked about Ellis. I had gotten a kick out of Ellis’s recent shenanigans—he had worn hair curlers in the locker room—and Alex seemed pleased that I knew he had just been traded to the Texas Rangers. He read me a poem and a song. He told me that he liked literature but that everything else in school was irrelevant. I told him he was probably right, that most everything was irrelevant. I suggested he do what he loved and live with the rest. Alex came every Sunday for an hour. I refused payment and looked forward to the meetings. He was angry at his school because he had been impeached as class vice president for forgetting to string leprechauns across the basketball court for the Saint Patrick’s Day dance. He didn’t plan to go to college, his mother’s concern. I said that since he was writing poems anyway, why not hand them in and get credit. Since he was reading, why not write about it. I told him he would meet some boring teachers, but some great ones too, and we both laughed at the question of whether Shakespeare was an age or a man.

We went to a Ranger game and Alex spotted Dock Ellis leaning over the bullpen railing, talking to a girl in the stands, and spitting long streams of tobacco juice onto the field. The girl’s date kept winding around her to get in on the conversation, but Ellis looked straight ahead, talking and spitting. The boyfriend began spitting onto the field as well, but without tobacco, the poor guy strained to muster any juice.

“They’re dogs marking territory,” Alex said.

“Aristotle believed the sign of a poet is the ability to make metaphors,” I said.

“Then maybe I’m a poet,” he said.

I told him I was sure of it.

The week before I left, at the end of July, Mrs. Murray called and thanked me, saying that Alex seemed happier, and had decided to go to college. She said, “No one ever told him school is really bullshit.”

“Is that what I said?”

“Yes!” she laughed, “and now that he knows, he can deal with it.”

A few days later, I received a package from Mrs. Murray. The box contained a giant black fountain pen, a Mont Blanc 149, just like the one Jay Hankard displayed in the Fo’c’sle.

Mont Blanc.
I pronounced it out loud. It was hard to say the name without honking like a goose.
Mont Blanc.

I packed my few belongings, discarding student poems, handouts and syllabi, and found the poem by the lobbyist. I had brought it home and forgotten it. I sat on the couch and read,
The time has come when few must host the many
. . . The lines seemed meaningful, all the more because I had let him down. I was reading the poem again when the phone rang.

It was him, it was Lincoln Jenkins.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but someone just phoned and hung up and it sounded like your voice.”

I said it wasn’t me and we said goodnight. Some telepathy had taken place, which Stanley once told me was the real beginning of poetry. I felt not only guilty, but convicted by his call. I had not been the host he needed.

I mopped the floors and was wiping the counters when the phone rang again. I answered with a whisper. It was Jack saying he had a feeling I was alone and wanted company. We went to Lily Langtree’s where I told him about Lincoln.

“That’s weird because I had an intuition about you too,” Jack said. “That’s why I called. You’re sending out signals of some kind.” He said he wished he could make the trip with me to New York, especially because I was stopping by Iowa City.

When the bar closed, I said good-bye to Jack and made the unwise decision to leave town immediately instead of waiting for morning. I carried my suitcase, boxes and typewriter to the car and drove off. After a few blocks, I felt the car tilting to the left, as if I had gotten two flats on the driver’s side. I stopped and saw I had been driving with my two right tires on the curb. I couldn’t find Mockingbird Lane, my route to the highway. I blared the radio to the
Open Road Show
where Bill Mack played an hour of Ernest Tubb. His sidekick, Wee Marie, spoke in squeaky, almost inaudible monosyllables. Straining to hear her kept me awake. A squirrel cut in front of my car, attacked by a mockingbird, and followed the center of the road, followed by the bird, followed by me, driving very slowly, listening for Wee Marie. The squirrel turned left onto Mockingbird Lane and the bird and I followed him out of town.

I spent the night in Lawrence, Kansas, at the Navajo Motel where the shower ran into a hole in the floor and the worn sheets were thin as tissue. I ate breakfast at the counter of the diner next door. The middle-aged waitress asked me where I was going and I said Iowa City. She said that many poets lived there, and I said that was true. She asked if I knew William Stafford.

“I don’t know him,” I said, “but I’ve heard him read.”

“He was born here, you know, in Lawrence.”

I said I knew.

“He’s a pacifist,” she said. She leaned over, looking at me, her hand on her chin.

“Yes,” I said. “I like his poems.”

“He went out with my girlfriend,” she said. “For a long time.”

She left to get more coffee for another customer. When she came back, she said, “Yeah, he went out with her for a long time. Never married her though.”

I couldn’t tell if she was hurt for her girlfriend, or had been interested in Stafford herself. She said she guessed he loved poetry more. Although she did not sing the sentence in Stanley’s lilt, I heard his voice.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

GOLD STARS AND BUTTERBALLS—M’EDITOR—A COUNTDOWN AT EIGHTY—THE NEXT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD—A RUMP MAN MEETS A COCK WOMAN—A BAT COMES TO THE PARTY—SARAH LAWRENCE—BOOK NEWS—GOOD-BYE TO YADDO

I
drove through Yaddo’s tall iron gates and onto the four hundred acre estate once owned by the Trask family. I passed the mansion and arrived at the office. A staff member showed me to West House, formerly servant quarters. I had a bedroom with two desks, and a study with two more desks. He told me quiet hours were from nine to four, and overnight guests forbidden. On my way to dinner that evening, I met an old man tending a patch of tuberous begonias. George Vincent, the retired gardener, had worked at Yaddo all his life. He walked me toward the mansion, and described Elizabeth Ames, the first director, praising her sense of decorum. She wouldn’t allow politics to be discussed at dinner after James T. Farrell had started so many arguments forty years ago. George was devoted to Yaddo as well as to Mrs. Trask.

“When Miss Ames died,” he said, “I was the only one who knew where she wanted to be buried.”

I asked where that was.

“Ten feet from the madam,” he said. He pointed in the direction of their graves and said good-bye.

Everyone entered the dining room from having cocktails on the terrace. I stood in line for a napkin ring labeled with my name, along with a glass of iced tea and fresh mint. I took a tall-backed chair between the composer, Ned Rorem, and Tobias Schneebaum, a writer. Three visual artists joined us. We were served roast chicken, new potatoes and string beans while Rorem conducted the conversation as if it were a salon. He asked me what I wrote about, as he passed me a bowl of small grooved yellow globes.

“I have a hard time answering that question,” I said, wondering at the little balls before handing them to the artist next to me.

“Then,” he nodded, “you should
learn
to answer.”

Turning to a sculptor, Rorem asked, “What are
your
subjects?”

“Love and death,” he said, biting a drumstick. He had learned to answer.

Schneebaum said, “I hope everyone will come to my studio tonight. I’m showing slides about both.” He took a piece of bread, dabbed his knife into the mysterious bowl and spread one of the balls of butter across the crust.

When melon was served for dessert, Rorem said, “I’m going to lodge a complaint.” He stared at the pale slice. “Fruit every night. I need a dark pleasure like chocolate. I have no lover. I don’t use foul language. I don’t drink or smoke. I wait all day for dessert and then it’s melon.”

“Yes, and I hear these can play the devil with your foreskin,” Schneebaum said.

After dinner, the composers took turns at the piano in the chapel, while Rorem walked up and down the hallway on his hands. He was a trim fifty-year-old, his full head of dark hair giving him the look of a much younger man.

That night I went to Schneebaum’s studio. His thick eyebrows pointed down like two deep diacritical marks accentuating a big twisted nose, large eyes and ears. He had made a name for himself as an unconventional anthropologist for his book about living with cannibals,
Keep the River on Your Right.