A Moveable Famine (9 page)

We went from watching Taryn dance to hearing Stavrula lecture. McPeak basked in her cutting-edge conceptualism the night she gave a talk describing how the patrons of the Detroit Institute of Arts appreciated her piece where she sat in a booth and invited confessions. As I was leaving the auditorium, a tall blonde nudged me, saying, “When was the last time
you
went to confession?” I recognized Kim Costigan who had made that sharp comeback to loudmouth Trotta at the Coulette party, and who had dated almost everyone in the workshop, both poetry and fiction. She wore a short skirt and her large breasts pushed against her blouse.

“Admit it,” she said, smiling. “You were staring at me!”

I confessed. I passed the time of Stavrula’s talk watching Kim cross and uncross her legs. Here I was in Iowa, the hotbed of hotbeds and still a paralyzed voyeur, like Dickie, the janitor’s helper at Fairfield, an idiot savant who swabbed the cafeteria floor and could name the day you were born if you told him the date. Whenever a woman entered, Dickie pushed his broom in her direction. One night I sat with my favorite teacher, the Joyce scholar Lou Berrone, and Nina, his teenage daughter, in the campus snack bar, and Dickie swept his way toward us. Lou gave him her date of birth.

“June 9, 1953,” Lou said again and again, but Dickie just stared, fixed on Nina’s thighs as he pressed the broom. “Dickie!” Lou said.

Dickie’s eyes focused on the nylon stockings, the bristles moving closer and closer until he touched Nina’s toe.

“What day was she born?” I asked, but he continued to push, a little white spittle at the edge of his mouth.

“Daddy!” Nina whispered, covering the side of her reddening face with her hand. Lou took Dickie by the arm, escorting him to an empty table by the window where Dickie returned to his routine.

Berrone said, “It’s my fault. I didn’t realize he’d get like that. And maybe I somehow forgot that he’s a man.” I could have stared at Nina all day myself. Being marooned on a few acres with only men had turned us all slightly mad. The insistent broom, the helpless, ignited eyes of the idiot savant losing his slender hold on the world, and Berrone’s apologetic words, brought back phrases from my reading:

He is a man, therefore nothing human is alien to him

Take it like a man

As a man, therefore he came to all these sufferings

A Man’s a Man for all that

Lou might have forgotten that Dickie was a man, but I never doubted it, or that I was a man, or Lou—but I didn’t know it could mean to become hypnotized, to forget everything, to repeat yourself fruitlessly in the face of beauty. And now that beauty was nudging me as we walked out of a lecture hall.

Ridge had told me that Kim had recently won a hundred dollars at The Dugout’s Amateur Striptease Night.

“Congratulations on the prize,” I said.

“I knew I’d win if I just flashed my beaver at the jukebox a few times,” she said.

“Want to get a beer?”

Two weeks later, we decided to move in together, and interviewed for an apartment over a garage owned by an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Alva Yoder. Pretending we were married, we sat in their living room with Mr. Yoder in his honest overalls, and Mrs. Yoder, who sewed a quilt draped across her lap. As I looked at Kim, wearing her shortest skirt yet, I felt less married by the minute. After half an hour of conversation, homemade donuts and buttermilk, they let us have the apartment. Mrs. Yoder said a lot of students had been interested, but she preferred a man and wife.

Mr. Yoder handed me the keys and said, “We’ve been married fifty years. I still remember the day. It was raining. They say that when it rains on your wedding day, you’ll have good luck. And we had good luck.” He paused for a moment and added, “And we had bad luck too.”

Kim and I were happy in our little place. Our desks in front of a picture window overlooked the gravel driveway. Because I kept a photo of Neruda’s studio on the Pacific taped to the wall, Ridge started calling me, “the poor man’s Neruda,” and confirmed the wisdom of my move with Kim. “You got the best deal in town,” he said, letting me know he had gone out with her too. To pay the higher rent and the upkeep of Kim’s aged car, I took a job as lunchtime supervisor at Iowa City High School, patrolling the halls with the retired county sheriff who wore a greasy double-breasted blue raincoat. We pushed our way through the crowd, stopping kids from hurling clots of wet toilet paper or aiming jelly donuts at each other. I cornered a boy who rode a unicycle down the main hall, but he simply spun around me and zipped to the other end, as I plodded behind him amid laughter. Lacking all authority, I realized it was probably best I was not given charge of a freshman class.

At the end of the two-hour shift, I retrieved my jacket from the faculty room, spending a few minutes with the sheriff who was always there first, sweating heavily into his wilted coat. He said he couldn’t work weekends anymore and I took his place as fire marshal, standing at the rear exit of the auditorium and watching
Our Town
and
The Music Man.
I was glad for the ten dollars a night because Kim had been fired from several jobs. At the Lark Supper Club, she clanged a tray of corn chowder into the temple of Mr. Lark himself as he leaned back in his chair. She worked as a nurse’s aide at the university hospital, but one night at dinner she told me she had forgotten to remove a rectal thermometer from a toddler.

McPeak brought Stavrula to The Deadwood for her birthday, joining Ridge and me in a booth. After a pitcher of beer, he took out a small wooden crate, and from a bed of straw, lifted a lifelike yellow canary. He placed it on the table, touching its breast so the head bobbed as it trilled sweet notes that soared and dipped. We marveled at this strange mechanical creation. Stavrula kissed him and kissed him. McPeak pressed it again and we listened again to its beautiful tune.

“It’s an American Singer. The shape, the feathers, it’s exact in every way,” he said. “An artist in Moline does one a month.”

Loudmouth Trotta left his barstool and seemed captivated by the bird, the first time he showed any quality besides scorn and vulgarity. “That’s a great song,” he said.

“I’m calling it Maria, after Maria Callas,” Stavrula said.

“Only the males sing,” I said. “You need a male name.”

“Oh, come on,” Ridge said. “It’s not real. What’s the difference?”

“No, John’s right,” Stavrula said. “I’ll call him ‘Caruso.’ ”

Trotta asked if he could see the bird. He turned it over, blew on its tail feathers, and said, “Yes, it’s definitely a male.” He took a seat in a nearby booth.

Stavrula asked him to make the bird sing again, and McPeak touched the switch. Ridge left to have a manuscript conference with Abe Gubegna, an Ethiopian novelist attending the international workshop whose book he was translating. Ridge said that Abe always embraced him when they met and he could feel the writer’s .45, which he carried everywhere, fearing assassination by Haile Selassie’s men. McPeak and Stavrula went to play pinball. I sat at the table with the American Singer. I ordered another pitcher. Then I couldn’t help myself—I lifted Caruso. I turned him over and blew on the feathers. It was neither male nor was it female. I returned it to its place near Stavrula’s drink with all the dignity I could muster, but Loudmouth across the way was giggling and shaking his head at my having fallen for his joke.

Ridge introduced me to Tracy Kidder who was in John Cheever’s workshop. He invited me to dinner at his house with Cheever, Raymond Carver and Dick Florsheim, a star fiction student who imitated Nabokov. Tracy wrote short stories, but was working on a nonfiction book about Juan Corona, the mass murderer of migrant workers in California, and had published part of it in the
Atlantic.
A former second lieutenant in Vietnam, he had gone from Harvard to the army, to the arms of Fran, his beautiful wife. He rated workshop stories by the number of laughs. “This story has twenty laughs,” he’d say enthusiastically.

On the night of the dinner, Cheever arrived by cab, the way he got around everywhere, except for when he rode in Carver’s car with the bullet hole in the windshield. Cheever was sixty-four, ruddy but grim, frail and thin. He wore a three-piece suit and exuded a strong fragrance—as if he had been “slapped with cologne,” was how Ridge put it. He handed Fran a bouquet of dwarf roses. Florsheim was already there, in puttees and a white sailor hat, going through Tracy’s records, trying to find a replacement for Pachelbel’s
Canon in D,
which he detested.

While we waited for Ray, Cheever had a martini he insisted on mixing himself. He recounted going to an American literature professor’s house the night before where he was served a black martini, called a “Nevermore,” after Poe’s raven. “He put a drop of ink in it,” he said. “Ghastly! And the professor’s little daughter was named Daisy, after Daisy Miller.” He gave a fake shudder with his narrow shoulders.

Tracy and Fran were from Long Island’s Oyster Bay, and talk turned to summers in the Hamptons. Cheever used the expression “on island,” referring to Nantucket. Florsheim said he preferred Paris for outdoor activities like playing dominoes in the sidewalk cafes. I mentioned going fishing on a party boat with my father, out of Sheepshead Bay. For some reason, Cheever thought I meant Cape Cod and asked if I had summered there. Tracy answered for me, “He didn’t even
two-week
in Rockaway!”

“Tweak?” Cheever said. “Tweak?”

Fran filled glasses with burgundy. Cheever was on his third martini but accepted the wine. He ranted against the other fiction writers on the faculty as “flat tires.” He asked for some big-band music and then embraced Fran and they twirled around the room. At the end of the song, Cheever removed his coat and danced alone to the next cut. Our eyes widened when he put his hand over his heart, but he marched back and forth in the same place on the rug until the music stopped.

When Ray failed to appear, Tracy called Joe Cleary, Ray’s friend. Cleary said Ray was in California, teaching at USC. He held simultaneous appointments and neither university knew. United Airlines provided him with twelve roundtrips, on the promise of an article for their in-flight magazine,
Mainliner,
which Ray never wrote.

After dinner, Cheever complained about his bad luck with Iowa women. I could guess why. Sitting in The Deadwood one Monday night, I noticed a female graduate student at his table who had an obvious crush on him. Talk turned to football and Cheever wondered if the Giants were winning. Since The Deadwood had no television, Cheever loudly asked her to go to George’s to get the score. She never returned.

Florsheim gave Cheever a ride home, and I stopped at The Deadwood. Ridge and McPeak were there and I described the night. McPeak said, “The most famous guy to come to Iowa City and he can’t get laid!” As he said this, Belinda Schaeffer walked in on the arm of a middle-aged man decked out in a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons and white linen pants. With her was a faculty member in fiction, Fred Exley, and another attractive girl.

“Jesus,” Ridge said, “look at Belinda with the old guy.”

I muffled my sorrow as McPeak continued about Cheever. “You know Beth?” he asked. “Beth of the bee-stung lips?” We knew.

“She went back to Cheever’s room at the Iowa House the other night. They had a drink and he sat on the bed and stared at the wall. He started a monologue about wallpaper, that wallpaper ruined his marriage. Finally, he propped a pillow against the headboard and asked her to sit next to him. When she did, he said, ‘Would you like to lie down?’ She said she didn’t think so, and then he went back to the issue of wallpaper and started singing a song from his childhood, but he could only remember the first two lines, ‘When father papered the parlor, you couldn’t tell Pa from paste.’ Beth said he sang it again and again, trying to jog his memory. Giving up, he patted the bed and said, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to lie down?’ She again said no. He sang the lines over and over until he nodded off, humming. The next day she got the lyrics from a reference librarian:

When Father papered the parlor

You couldn’t tell Pa from paste

Dabbing it here and dabbing it there!

Paste and paper everywhere

Mother was stuck to the ceiling

The kids were stuck to the floor

You never saw such a family so stuck up before.

“Three drunken girls sang it for Cheever in The Deadwood, arms locked and legs kicking. Cheever was puzzled but pleased,” McPeak told us. He said Cheever became wistful, and said, “That’s a song from my youth that I thought was long forgotten.”

The next morning the front page of the
Daily Iowan
had a photo of the man in The Deadwood with Belinda Schaeffer, and the caption, “Celebrated Writer William Styron to Give Reading.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

JOHN BERRYMAN JUMPS—DINNER WITH CARVER—SMALL BEER—POOR EVERYONE—AN AFTERNOON WITH BELINDA SCHAEFFER—FATHER IGNATIUS—THE MAID-RITE

W
hen John Berryman leapt from a bridge in Minneapolis, Pryor was the first of us to hear. Malcolm Gee had sent him a telegram that Pryor carried from office to faculty office, unfolding it, reading it aloud and returning it to its envelope. It said: