A Moveable Famine (6 page)

I adjusted to workshop life, and continued long days in the library. Someone in class mentioned the poets Dickey and Wright, but by the time I arrived at the stacks, I found many Dickeys and many Wrights. James, Charles, and Jay. I confused James, Ralph and R. P. Dickey, but I read them all.

I had also come to understand the jargon of the workshop, the phrases that said one thing but meant another:

I admire the poem’s ambition.

It sucks.

I see what it’s trying to do.

But it doesn’t do it.

I like the even tone.

It’s boring.

A tour de force.

It sucks.

Send it to the
New Yorker
immediately.

You don’t listen to anyone, so why not get a professional opinion?

Have you read X?

You stole from X!

Have you tried writing in form?

You have nothing to lose.

Don’t listen to what anyone says.

You’re hopeless anyway.

Toward the end of that first term, I found Ridge and Pryor in deep discussion at The Deadwood. McPeak, indifferent to their talk, looked over his shoulder and called to other tables. I guessed the subject was writing or teaching and it was both. Two students who had received fellowships were graduating. The debate was over who would get their funding.

“Dane Hill could get the TWF,” Pryor said, ripping a napkin neatly into quarters.

“Not after he read with the actualists,” Ridge said.

“Think they’ll consider me?” Pryor said, peering up from his bowed head as if asking for mercy.

“You have an outside shot,” Ridge said. “You’re a good poet and they like you.”

Ridge looked at me. “We’re talking about aid,” he said. He turned to Pryor. “But there are other things to consider, like Anne Graff . . .”

“Don’t tell me that, Ridge!” Pryor said. “Things better not work that way.” His lower teeth jutted out from his beard when he spoke, looking more like a wolf than a man, a wolf about to tear into the carcass of Anne Graff.

“It could happen, that’s all I’m saying,” Ridge said. “And if one of the faculty’s girlfriends gets it, think of how John would feel. He’s got nothing.”

“I know,” Pryor said, calmer. “What matters is the instate tuition.”

“I could use that,” I said.

“These appointments will go to those who already have aid,” Ridge said.

“But John could get a research thing if one of the teaching assistants got a fellowship,” Pryor said. “Now that he’s published.”

“I don’t know how it works,” I said.

“And you and I never will,” McPeak said, getting up and corralling a girl by the pinball machine.

“There’s Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants,” Ridge said. “And Teaching Writing Fellows. RAs, TAs and TWFs,” Ridge said. He pronounced TWF as
Twif.

“Ridge’s a TWF,” Pryor said. “I’m a TA.”

Ridge said. “TAs teach comp and TWFs teach Creative Writing. The RAs do clerical work for the profs.”

“The TWFs get the most money,” Pryor said.

“The RAs want to become TAs and the TAs TWFs,” Ridge said.

“But an RA will never be a TWF,” Pryor said.

“I don’t know,” Ridge said. “Gus Dessler went from RA to TWF, didn’t he?”

“He was a TA one summer.”

“That’s right,” Ridge said. “But it’s rare. Most TWFs come in as TWFs.”

“You could get an RA,” Pryor said. “Now that you’re published.”

“And you’re smart. If a spot opens, you could be a TA,” Ridge said.

“I hope they think I’m worth the TWF,” Pryor said, stammering. “I’m as good as Harvey. I mean, I’m as good as Harvey was. I mean, when he was my age.”

McPeak held Brandy’s hips as she stood on a footstool, straightening photos of the Dalton gang.

“They better not make that bimbo Anne Graff a TWF!” Pryor said. “It would make a mockery of the system!”

I passed Pryor in the hall when January classes started, and he shook his head negatively on his way to Lawson’s office. I stopped by to see Ridge and he told me that Pryor didn’t get the TWF. He was not the only one disappointed. The TWF and the TA could have gone to Anne Graff, a faculty favorite, or Roy Napoli, whose minute, curtailed couplets of no more than four words imitated not Lawson, but Lawson’s translations of the French poet, Guillevic, which everyone thought was a clever, sideways form of flattery. The disappointed students were upset because the appointments were indisputable. The TWF went to Denis Johnson who had published his first book, and wrote a short story that appeared in the
Atlantic.
On that basis, he had a contract for a novel. Denis had a true insouciance, was a dedicated habitué of the most dissolute bar in town, The Vine, and coursed through the halls barefoot. Sam Silva got the TA, a quiet student with a poem in the
New Yorker.
Pryor raged, but it was only with himself he could argue, and his complaints flared behind Lawson’s closed door. We could even catch sentences about his having a wife to support.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

READING ASHBERY TO MY MOTHER—DAPPER DAN COOK—BARKHAUSEN AND WENDY’S TÊTE-À-TÊTE—DRINKING TO CONCENTRATE, DRINKING TO FORGET—LOUDMOUTH GETS SOAKED—MODIFIED LAWSON

W
hen Lawson brought a poet to campus for a reading, he made it clear that only those who attended were welcome at the after-party. He was grateful to Pryor and his wife, Wendy, for hosting Henri Coulette, his former Iowa classmate from Los Angeles. Suspecting Coulette might not be a big draw, Lawson left a reminder of this policy on the bulletin board. His messages were unmistakable. He typed them on rough yellow paper, and signed them simply
ML.
By the paper alone, the author’s identity stood out like the sun. Each visit by a star graduate turned the workshop into a version of Bede’s banquet hall, but instead of a sparrow flying in one end and out the other, the visiting poet, hatched here like us, circled above our heads, shielded in flight by a bevy of faculty friends.

The audience was thin; the party packed. Ridge and I brought quart bottles of Pickett’s of Dubuque. Wendy placed a Van Morrison record on the turntable and bowls of popcorn around the living room. I was happy to be with friends after a reading, so unlike my solitary forays around the village and to Saint Mark’s where I once saw my favorite poet John Ashbery read and had no one to discuss it with afterward. Ashbery’s clean-shaven face shone among the stubbled and long-haired. He wore a houndstooth jacket with a tie and moved through the crowd surrounded by a few well-dressed friends who formed an elegant uptown aura around him. Ashbery’s arrival was like the coming of an ambassador from a wealthier nation, revered for his sympathy to upstart colonies. He took the lectern and said he’d be reading only one poem. The church went silent. He said it was a long one. He added that he had forgotten to bring the last page. After a pause, he said it didn’t make any difference. Everyone laughed. We loved the man who dismissed the linear narrative. The next morning, I sat in my bedroom paging through
Some Trees.
I was bursting to share his poems with someone, with anyone, so I approached my mother who was washing the breakfast dishes. While she soaped an eggy plate, I read her the ending of “Le Livre Est Sur La Table”:

                                                   Are there

Collisions, communications on the shore

Or did all secrets vanish when

The woman left? Is the bird mentioned

In the waves’ minutes, or did the land advance?

Without turning from the sink, my mother placed a saucer onto the wire drainer, lifted a cup from the sudsy water and said, “The land advanced.”

Lawson leaned against the refrigerator door, speaking softly with Coulette. Pryor stared up at the taller men and asked what they thought about pseudonyms. Coulette looked over Pryor’s head and out the window, saying to Lawson, “Things have changed. What’s the defunct restaurant chain you miss the most?”

Barkhausen charged into the kitchen imitating the strumming of a guitar player in the living room. He told Coulette how much he admired his poems, especially “The Telephone Club,” about a bar with a phone on each table. He mentioned the line, “The blonde has all our numbers.” The poet was pleased and so was Lawson, who pointed at Ridge and me and asked if we were at the reading. We said we were. Feeling defensive, I said, “I liked the lines about the friend ‘who turned to games/and made a game of boredom.’ ” Lawson looked stricken and I realized the poem was about him. Ridge rescued me by asking Coulette what poem influenced him the most. Lawson was still staring at me as Barkhausen interrupted, “Easy for me. ‘Give Me a Hoax by the Side of the Road.’ ” Coulette burst into laughter and held out his hand.

“Yours too?” Barkhausen asked as they shook.

“No,” Coulette said. “I like your parody.” Lawson continued to lean against the refrigerator, blockading the beer. “Mine would be, I think, ‘Lycidas,’ ” Coulette said. He bent over, sniffed the tiny window box on the sill, and said, “Have you ever thought of growing your own parsley, Mitch?”

Maggie Boyer began a conversation with Ridge. Everyone flattered her because her Magpie Press printed nationally known poets. Her black hair looked dyed, and she had plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them badly, as if she had done so on a bumpy bus ride. She had published a few TWFs, in pages as fragile as butterfly wings with beautiful, swirling covers. She already had a reputation as a fine bookmaker, her art entirely opposed to her appearance.

McPeak arrived from Illinois and his red face showed he had been drinking all the way. His forearms dangled in front of him as he walked, his brain telling his body to reach for a glass of something, anything, and all the better if two glasses were available. I heard him loudly pushing past Lawson’s block on the refrigerator, and then Lawson asking if he’d been to the reading. I leaned into the kitchen as McPeak, annoyed, grabbed two beers, faced Lawson, and said, “What?”

Lawson stiffened. “Henri came a long way to be with us,” he said.

“I don’t care for French poetry,” McPeak said, and buzzed out.

Ridge admired Maggie’s books, and told her how much he liked her latest edition. Maggie said, “Don’t try to be nice to me, Ridge, just so I’ll publish you.”

“I wouldn’t insult you like that, Maggie,” Ridge said. “And please don’t insult me by thinking I would want my first book to come out with a small press.”

She went off to find her husband. Ridge made more than the usual noise with his Wellingtons when he walked past Trotta. We had just workshopped Ridge’s mournful poem whose closing line was, “The years add up to one long lack.” Trotta said to his friends, “Here comes our Chinese poet,
One Long Lack
!” Whenever a female passed, he’d pretend to end his sentence, with “Period!”, “Colon!” or “
Cunt
-tact!”

Ridge muttered to me that he had fucked Maggie once and she was mad that it was only once. I was shocked because she was married.

“And there’s always a wrinkle,” he said, sipping his Pickett’s.

When I asked what he meant, he said that when Maggie was aroused, she exhaled through puckered lips. “Like’s she’s cooling soup,” he said. I went to the kitchen for another beer, feeling ready to be eaten by the world.

Dan Cook arrived with his wife, Nora. The other fiction faculty members were at least twenty years older, so students, especially women, flocked to Cook. He had been raised in Manhattan and taught by an English governess, so his real accent seemed false. In The Deadwood, his luxuriant hair and broad mustache made him look like a living wanted poster. Ridge said Nora had been Cook’s student at his last teaching job out west. She had suffered from a bad case of chicken pox in her youth, which plastic surgeons attempted to smooth, but they had made her cheeks and forehead uniformly rough. She was extremely pretty despite her skin, especially when she smiled, and she was smiling.

Barkhausen helped Wendy shake more popcorn. He ransacked the spice rack, tossing oregano, paprika and basil into the pot while Wendy giggled. After they served the bowls, they walked onto the porch and I saw their silhouetted faces almost touching. Pryor swigged from a bottle of Ouzo and smacked his lips. He told everyone he had been reading Greek poetry. McPeak and Bear were locked in an arm wrestling match on the wobbly dining room table, which shook, sending popcorn and a vase of dried flowers to the rug.

Cook bent a female student backward over the couch, lifting her blouse and placing a can of cold beer on her bare stomach, yelling, “Let’s initiate the new girl!” A few others joined in applying the freezing metal as she squealed. This was one of the pitfalls of being pretty and arriving for the spring term. When Dan returned to Nora, she turned away. He tried to kiss her neck, but she gave him a good push and he stumbled. Dan took a look around and walked out, slamming the door. The slamming door was entrée for the ex-priest, who didn’t know who Nora was, and he took her to the couch where the new girl had endured the cold cans.

I sat on the stairs to the second floor, moving aside occasionally for those using the bathroom. Kim Costigan, a sexy blonde, went past me, followed a few minutes later by the loudmouth Trotta. I heard the bathroom door creak open as Kim left, then Trotta’s voice, “The problem with you is you pee out your pussy.” Kim said over her shoulder, “And the problem with you is you come out your pee-hole.”