A Moveable Famine (7 page)

Cook returned and tried talking to Nora again. Ignoring him, she asked the ex-priest to get her a beer, and Dan stormed out, slamming the door with even less effect.

Pryor sat next to me, offering a sip of Ouzo.

“It’s great that you’re published,” he said. He was happy. He wanted his friends to succeed. He had a vision of each of us sailing on separate ships, off to establish poetry colonies around the world, emissaries to the hinterlands, who would visit each other, bringing their work to the great unschooled, just as his former teachers and their classmates had done. “It’s ridiculous you don’t have aid,” he said, shaking his head.

“I’m getting by,” I said. “You have a piece of popcorn in your beard.” I flicked it away.

Belinda Schaeffer told Coulette she had discovered some famous stories by Maupassant that were not written by him. Coulette said that Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower so much he ate there frequently because it was the one place he didn’t have to see it.

“I feel that way about my face,” Nora said.

Lawson heard her and ran over, saying, “You’re a very pretty woman!” He shook his jowls as he spoke, seriously concerned.

“It’s okay, Mitch,” she said and touched his arm.

“I mean it, Nora. You have classic looks.”

Everyone agreed that Nora was beautiful and her face turned red, except for a dozen white dots impervious to blood flow. At that, everyone stared, and she ran into Pryor’s study where she inspected the bookcases.

McPeak had lost the wrestling match to Bear and took a bill out of his wallet. A girl who liked him walked to the table and whispered in his ear.

“I drink to concentrate,” McPeak roared, “and then I drink to forget what I’m concentrating on!” He laughed and looked at us. She placed her small hand on his wide red-haired wrist and whispered again.

“I drink to turn the people I’m with into the people I wish I was with! Where’d that French poet go, by the way?” The girl returned to her friends.

Pryor said, “Harvey’s out of town tonight, but when he comes back, make it a point to know him. Believe me, you’ll get aid next fall.”

“I’d feel funny about that,” I said.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Tell him his last book reminds you of Merwin. I mean it, just say that and you’ll be golden.”

“But it’s nothing like Merwin,” I said.

“So what?” His bloodshot eyes pleaded with me.

Wendy and Barkhausen flipped through the records. Wendy grabbed her earlobe and said to Barkhausen, “Oh, I lost my earring!” She got an impish look on her face and said, “Probably on the porch.” They left the living room, as Barkhausen said, “I think I’ve lost some of my hearing too.”

Dan Cook returned, talked to Nora again, and left again, again slamming the door. By now it had all the drama of a toilet flushing. She stood with some female poets who discussed the difference between
kitty-corner
and
catty-corner
. Loudmouth Trotta listened from his place on the floor among a fleet of empty bottles and yelled, “I prefer
pussy-corner
!” Nora walked over and poured her full glass of beer onto his head. It seemed to flow from the rim in slow motion as the loudmouth unsuccessfully scrambled to haul his quivering mass from the rug, drunkenly sprawling and sliding in the suds. Nora grabbed her purse, yelled thank you to Wendy and, as she opened the door to leave, her husband entered. She kept going and so did he, straight for Havana Jones, the only black girl at the party.

Coulette and Lawson said good night, and when they reached the door, Barkhausen, drunk, screamed, “The locusts have no king!”

“You have a nut on your hands,” Coulette said to Lawson.

“Maybe and maybe not,” Lawson said.

“The locusts have no king!”

“What the hell does that mean?” McPeak asked Barkhausen. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“He’s full of arcane quotes,” Lawson said to Coulette. He looked at McPeak and explained, “It’s from the bible. The locusts have no king, and yet they go forward in ranks. It means we are equals, all here to write poi-ems.”

“There are no greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” Coulette said, quoting Blake.

McPeak shook his curly red head.

“Mitch, I miss Iowa City,” Coulette said, as Lawson held the door for him. “Do you know where I can get a rubber stamp of an ear of corn?”

Squealing and laughing came from a corner where Havana stood topless and Cook faced the room, pretending to auction off her breasts.

“Gimme one dollar, two dollar, three dollar, four dollar . . .” he sang, strumming his lips with his finger so it sounded like an astronomically rising sum. Havana’s friends were yelling, “Do me! Auction me next!”

Ridge and I decided to go for coffee in the donut shop of the all-night Kroger supermarket. On our way out, Ridge paused at an end table, frowning as he lifted a stack of envelopes Pryor had addressed to known poets. Wendy stood at the window, looking onto Governor Street. When we got outside, Barkhausen was talking to Lawson about leather jackets. Coulette’s mind was elsewhere and maybe he was also feeling the liquor, because he interrupted and said, “What do you think is the most used letter of the alphabet, Mitch?” Lawson ignored this question as he had the others. He knew Barkhausen’s father was a furrier and complained to Barkhausen that his suede jacket was losing its shape. Barkhausen asked the cost and when Lawson told him, Artie said, “That’s why!” Coulette couldn’t contain his laughter and even Lawson smiled. I said to Ridge that “e” must be the most used letter, but Ridge thought it was “i.”

“Did anyone there really know who I am?” Coulette asked Lawson. Barkhausen put his arm around both their shoulders and started to walk between them, but Lawson turned and said something about not needing an escort. They crossed the dark street and Coulette stepped over something, a dead cat, hit by a car. Everyone was silent until Barkhausen yelled, “Me-ouch!”

“That kid’s a riot,” Coulette said as they walked away.

McPeak stood on the porch with his arm around the new girl. “To think Coulette came all the way from France,” he said.

“He’s from California,” the girl said.

“Lawson told me he came from France. That’s what he said, ‘all the way from France,’ ” and he took a long drink.

At Kroger’s, Ridge brought the coffees to our table and told me how he thought Lawson was a real poet in spite of his finicky personality. As he talked, I noticed a girl in the fiction workshop pushing a grocery cart. Ridge saw me staring, and said, “Forget it. It’s like sticking a pin into a marshmallow.” He went back to Lawson, saying that Lawson wrote too conservatively, too carefully, too timidly to be great. “Everything about him is modified,” he said. “Everything about him is
ly
.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

OPEN MARRIAGE—ESSENTIAL FEMINISM—A SECRET LONGING—FAKE MONIQUE—THE DUGOUT—LAWSON COMES TO HAMBURG INN NO. 3—BUBBLE OF NEGLECT

T
he front window of Iowa Book & Supply displayed dozens of copies of
Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples,
a best seller disputing the virtues of fidelity. The showcase next to it contained
Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings.
This reflected the tone for what went on in the classroom and beyond. Teachers dated students and a TA had intercourse with his girlfriend on the desk in front of his freshmen class to illustrate a point, which no one could recall. At the same time, feminism was on the rise and a female student complained about Harvey teaching Roethke’s “The Geranium” because the poem described the maid who threw out the speaker’s beloved plant as “that presumptuous hag.” In this climate where sexual liberation and women’s liberation crossed, I tried to find a girlfriend.

McPeak’s forays from Illinois into the arms of any willing woman and Ridge’s ability to pick up girls at random affected me the same way as good poems in the workshop—I tried to learn from them. Ridge had a sixth sense. In pizza parlors and luncheonettes, he would conclude that a waitress who had stood at our table for no more than thirty seconds wanted to go to bed with him. By the time the bill arrived, he’d be meeting her after work.

I had walked under the trees along the Iowa River with Mandy Thompson, gathering autumn leaves for her Dickinson essay, but my lack of enthusiasm for the project put her off. Now it was spring, and dry leaf gathering had been my only Iowa date.

One afternoon by the bulletin board, Jen Thacker and I laughed at the notice by Falcon Namiki, a dashing Japanese poet in the international workshop who was also an MFA student. It said, “Sign up below for my lecture on Karate/Writing.” She laughed harder when I pointed out McPeak’s posting next to it, “Sign up below for my lecture on Good Old Fashioned Punch-in-the-Nose/Writing.” Jen seldom spoke in workshop, but when she did, she reduced long-winded discussions to the very nub of the matter. Otherwise, she kept to herself, smirking the workshop hours away, a plain figure, limp hair in a Buster Brown cut. She suggested we get a cup of coffee and, in a half hour at The Hamburg Inn No. 2, she told me she was divorced, with two young children. Her schedule was difficult: kids, school, part-time job with UPS, and AA meetings. She had to steal time to write, and her children knew not to disturb her when she sat at the kitchen table wearing a tall paper cone on her head. “Like a dunce cap,” she said.

“Think of it as a wizard’s hat,” I said.

The next morning there was a knock on my door, something that never happened. It was Jen. She brisked right in, brushing me roughly with her elbow. I had been trying to write and my desk was covered with books and pages.

“Working?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

She sat at the kitchen table. I made her a cup of instant coffee. She said she had just dropped her kids at school. We talked about the frigid weather, hoping it would get warmer. She said she came over to ask me if I was serious about what I had said the day before. I asked her what she meant.

“When you said that people who love art should be together, that we’re different from the rest.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s what
you
mean!” she said. “Did you mean what I think you meant?”

“I just meant community’s important,” I said. I looked at her closely, at the tiny pimples flecking her chin, the dark hair along her upper lip, her weary eyes. She gave me her workshop smirk and said nothing. I said, “I meant, in a world where art is neglected, artists have to support each other.”

She said, “I’d be just another easy lay for you, wouldn’t I?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, what are you talking about?”

“I’m finished talking,” she said, pushing her chair from the table. “You’re just like the rest.” She ran out and left the door open behind her.

I told Ridge the next day, and he offered to fix me up with one of his ex-girlfriends, but I declined. I nursed my crush on Belinda Schaeffer. Not only was she a TWF, but with a PhD, and in French, and from Yale. In workshop, she was thoughtful and kind, untouched by jealousy or need, and passed through us like a fragrance. Only those at the top of the workshop hierarchy approached her—the teachers and her fellow TWFs. The rest of us looked at her like groundbirds admiring the flight of an eagle.

One of the workshop’s stars, Jonathan Reynolds, although married, had an affair with Belinda. When it ended, he wrote a poem called “The Cunt,” that he submitted to class, but he was afraid to title it that so he typed an
e
over the
u
, so it could be read as “The Cent.” His first book came out a month later and included a long love poem entitled, “Letter to X,” which Barkhausen had seen in draft. Since Belinda was the subject, I rushed to buy it. The poem described nipples as big as ginger snaps as well as her trimmed pubic hair. Reynolds couldn’t resist associating himself with the magic of her name, and the acknowledgments at the back of the book included the note,
“Letter to X
is for Belinda Schaeffer.” There were also two poems “to
B
.”

I was ashamed to tell anyone, even Ridge, of my longing for Belinda, since it was so passionate and so common. Instead, I asked Monique of the charades and pantomimes for a beer. She was also blonde, with a master’s in French. Unlike the rest of the class, she wore tailored clothes and simple strands of pearls. I guessed she was rich. I had overheard her saying that her father invented the twist tie. On occasion, she affected an accent, and it was in full force the afternoon I brought her to The Deadwood. Ridge asked her if she was born in France.

“No.” She paused. “Conceived in France.”

After a second beer, Monique’s accent disappeared. Aware of its vanishing, she began tossing French phrases into her sentences to evoke Parisian charm. A third beer brought it back with a vengeance, and when she repeated, “How you say?” for the fourth time, McPeak barked at her to knock it off.

Talk turned to fathers, initiated by McPeak’s poem about his father, which we had just discussed in class. A brakeman on the Rock Island Line, he lost a bet on the Cubs and almost choked to death trying to swallow his pocket watch. My father was an envelope salesman for a company in Harlem and he hoped I’d take over his accounts. Monique said her father invented the flat-bottom paper bag, but by now no one believed anything she said. Ridge didn’t say a word about his father, who died when he was in high school.