Boarded Windows (19 page)

“Oh yeah, you’re right. But there’s a
tractor
in there too.”

“Sure, first verse.”

“It’s cool that you know Bolling’s stuff so well.”

“Thanks.”

He took a swig of water and some of it dripped down his chin onto his cowboy shirt. “When transcribing, Martha never noted the poet. She even covered up the poet’s name when she was transcribing, with a coaster or a stapler or anything handy. So she could rarely attribute the poems in her notebook, or even give them a general time or place. Like the Carters sang, ‘You may forget the singer, but don’t forget this song.’ That’s how Martha operated. I was a singer-not-the-song type, so that challenged me.”

“I can’t figure out poetry,” I said.

“You will eventually. I tried to write some in college, and a bit afterwards. For a while I wrote ’em on the insides of matchboxes. That was my hook. On one of my poems, not a matchbox one, a paper one, the prof wrote, ‘You might do more with simile.’ So my next poem started: ‘The lemon languished on the table like a yellow lime.’ ”

I didn’t want to laugh, but did.

“Martha mostly recited out of that notebook, but sometimes she’d set the notebook aside and pick up something else. A lot of times it was Bataille’s
Story of the Eye,
sometimes Verlaine or Rimbaud, or one of their collaborations—she probably read
Sonnet du trou du cul
on my face two dozen times. She’d always announce the title and then start reading silently. The first time, I pushed her partway off me and said, ‘Why don’t you read it aloud?’ ‘Well, you won’t be able to hear with me sitting on your face,’ she said, and then got right back on her perch.” Wade laughed loudly, drawing a pizza chef’s glance. “Martha was an artist. She had no artistic talent as conventionally understood, but she had the spirit of art. She was the one who turned me on to nonart, to the art of living artistically as a nonartist, to the heroism of refusing to make art-art while every minute making nonart, art that has nothing to do with grasping for status or vaulting for glory. She was the one I told you about who claimed to be Jo Hiffernan’s great-great-granddaughter.” Wade got up to buy a couple pieces of baklava, and I stared without focusing at the soda machine. “Martha and I took a short road trip nearly every week,” he suddenly resumed. “She had friends all over the state and in a few bordering ones. Those were fun for a while. She was a relisher and surpriser in bed, and on couches and floors when we stayed with her friends from all over.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She didn’t think that guests should forgo sex just ’cause they’d been billeted in a living room, a living room that one of the hosts might easily peer into en route to the bathroom. Once in Jamestown, at one of her ex-boyfriends’—he was married at the time of the visit—I was sure I heard creaking and a voyeuristic quiet from the hallway. Over breakfast the next morning I looked at the hosts’ faces, from the man’s to the woman’s and back again, trying to figure out who’d spied us the night before. One of them would have seen Martha illuminated by a torchy, sheet-muted lamp, naked except for her socks—they were my socks, in fact, long athletic socks with the stripes. Martha had the most gorgeous, round ass; she would’ve been hovering over me, alternately flopping her tits onto my face like car-wash mops onto a windshield.” He paused. “A lot of those moments with Martha have lingered for over twenty years now in my arsenal of images autoérotique. They’ve degenerated in interesting ways from overuse. They’ll be there forever, I hope, always degenerating, but regenerating too. Sex is a long-term investment in memory, you know; all the smart rich people have mixed portfolios.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Every bed is clothed in securities blankets. It’d be better, after sex, to talk of being saved rather than spent.”

“Are you giving me advice?”

“So Martha made a modest income selling embroidered blouses at shops that took consignment items, and, because she was so persuasive, at shops that didn’t normally take consignment items. She had a bunch of shirts hanging near the dart-board at the Sportsman’s Taproom in Wahpeton, for example. She’d sell them in parking lots before concerts, or out of her car. She was charismatic, modeled the blouses auspiciously—well, on one hand her wearing them made their lapses in craftsmanship more apparent, but on the other it was easy to overlook those flaws with her wearing them, since she was beautiful and looked good in white. They didn’t sell well off the rack, though, sewn as they were with such an unsteady hand and absent mind. She must have had some other source of income, is what I thought. She seemed to have money—I never figured out where she stashed it—but she had it for lamps and books and a beaded seat-cover for her car, driver’s side only. For toilet paper and milk she had less money. She drank inconsiderately large glasses of milk as a soporific, often finishing or all but finishing the carton late at night, then not apologizing the next morning. I remember once how she watched me pour this teasing tablespoon of milk over my Grief-Nuggets, and watched as I grudgingly ate with my fingers before pouring the soggy rest back in the box, spilling lots of them in the process. And as I was sweeping the cereal onto a newspaper, she said—with that sort of hostile sham innocence children use, not sarcasm, something else—she said”—and here Wade assumed a cruel, coquettish voice—“‘Are we out of melk?’”

“Couldn’t you tell there was hardly any milk left when you picked up the carton?”

“Well, I was still waking up.”

“It’s not like you’ve been so great about picking up milk and stuff while you’ve been crashing with Wanda and me.”

“Let’s not derail my narrative with hypocrisy charges, okay? I’m just trying to tell you how I felt. So early on I complained to my friends about these sort of domestic irritants, hamming it up really, ’cause I was proud to have such adult grievances. But after a while I couldn’t keep myself from being sincerely pissed off over her quirks and venial sins. Vis-à-vis the milk, for example, there was her freeloading, her selfishness, but also the fact that she pronounced the word to rhyme with
elk
or
Welk,
as in Lawrence—you may have noticed my unorthodox pronunciation a minute ago. I guess it also rhymed with one of the lowercase
w[h]elks,
like the
welk
that means ‘to droop or wither.’ That shouldn’t have bothered me, the way she pronounced
milk,
but it did. She had this self-belittling yet cunning schoolgirlish voice, cutesy but sharp. It wasn’t a grown woman’s voice. Sometimes it was hard to take her seriously. ‘That’s right, Honey, cry those melky cock-tears right on into me’: something she actually said. I almost lost my hard-on—it nearly welked. Also, she still called lunch ‘dinner’ and dinner ‘supper’—and that’s fine, I’m not snobby about that, maybe even charmed by it, but it was suspicious, because when she wanted to she could subdue her dialect, you know, hammer in prairie shibboleths like they were loose, sock-ripping nails in floorboards, and I thought she sometimes trotted out and accentuated a few rusticisms self-consciously, I mean in a self-conscious way I didn’t like. These were trivialities, obviously; I had bigger complaints. I thought she was getting too selfish and aggressive and masturbatory in bed. One night I told her I didn’t like it when she bit my nipples. She said, ‘I’m not doing it for you.’ She told me there were things I did in bed that she didn’t like, but wouldn’t tell me what those things were. And there was other stuff. When we met, she seemed to share my atheism and my broader skepticism about hocus-pocus of all kinds. But after a while she revealed a sort of syncretic spiritualism, part Eastern, part psychological, the typical stuff for the time. She was intelligent, very intelligent, but had indiscriminate taste, especially in books and ideas.”

“So was Martha the same one who liked Mingus and the Cryan’ Shames?” I said.

“Yeah, you caught me. Earlier that stuff just sort of came up, and I didn’t think you were ready to hear everything right then.”

“So there was no Rae Morgan.”

“Morgenson, Rae Morgenson. No, there was no such person, but wasn’t that good? It took me a sec to come up with a name, but then, wham: Rae Morgenson.” I looked down at the table.

“When I was with Martha, she was into this stupid book of marshmallow psychology by some quickly forgotten member of the blackguard Jungle, some … I can’t remember the name of the book or its author. I only skimmed a few chapters.”

“How do you know it was so stupid, then?”

“Well yeah, yeah, I don’t. When I first met Martha, I idolized her. She was so cool. She’d walked out on Bey’s in that cool way, with the apron on the newspaper box. She seemed so inner-directed. Most of the girls I’d dated before Martha were simple, but Martha was complicated, maybe even a genius, I thought. So I got disillusioned when I figured out she was just like the rest of us smarties, kind of sharp here, kind of a dupe there. The worst was this poet she was into, who wrote confessional and I guess you’d say ecological-vitalist poetry—guy we saw read in St. Paul, D. Michael Tauber.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Back then he was this bandannaed picaro, poet, and odd-jobber, just barely out of his teens. He’d ridden all over North America, had lovers everywhere, Martha among them most likely. Her smudgy copy of his chapbook—
Crossbar—
was inscribed: ‘To my florid nightingale.’ Pretty dumb, huh? I was no great judge of poetry back then, but I could tell Tauber’s poems were false. Martha loved Blake, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Yeats. It wasn’t so hard to see what the Yeats fan might see in D. Michael Tauber—Adonic calves?—but what did the D. Michael Tauber fan see in Yeats?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Kooky spiritualism is one answer, but that wasn’t it. She understood the Yeats poems on many levels, many of them beyond my reach, though of course things like that can’t really be measured, and a lot of Yeats’s poems can’t be understood in any commonplace way. Mandelstam said that when poetry can be paraphrased, the sheets haven’t been rumpled: poetry hasn’t spent the night. Or even taken a nap, I guess. So I’m not talking about understanding in that Boy Scout, hermeneutical way, sucking the juice out of a poem like poison from a snake bite. I’m talking about something mysterious. So finally I told Martha I was surprised to see her so into Tauber’s poetry, since it didn’t seem to meet the standards of the masters she knew so well. It didn’t even wave at those standards from a distance, I said. I was a real prick back then. ‘That’s just your opinion,’ she said. There was nothing to do with that. One of the ways Martha punished me was to ward off debate by playing the naïf. When I confronted her further about Tauber, she swore their relationship was ‘Platonic,’ that its story began and ended with an all-night colloquy after a Crow concert in Grand Forks months before I met her. At the end of the argument, she swept a pop bottle off the table and called me a ‘cliché.’ I was willing to concede that point, though I thought sweeping the bottle off the table was kind of cliché too. And I still thought she was fucking Tauber.”

“Tauber was living in Enswell?”

“No, no, he was a wanderer, but by that time Martha’d started taking road trips on her own, leaving on short notice to storm concerts and festivals in unimaginable Fargos, checking in with her far-flung consignees, whistle-dropping in on old friends, no doubt arriving right around suppertime. I didn’t remember Tauber’s chapbook being part of her shack-up dowry, so I figured she’d met and fucked him while we were together, on one of her solo tours.”

“But maybe just one time, right?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, you said ‘fucking’ like it was a regular thing.”

“It might not have been regular.”

“Where was she living before she moved in with you?”

“In her car, she said. But I don’t know. So she started taking off a lot. In some ways I was relieved when she left. But I got lonely, too, couldn’t concentrate. Then her trips got longer, four or five days instead of two.” Wade shifted in his seat and reached down to unbutton his tight Erizeins. “Finally she took off and never came back. I kept the dozen or so blouses she left behind.”

“You don’t still have any, do you?” I said.

“I wish.”

Some silence.

“I guess it’s good to know … I mean”—I was faltering. “When exactly did you say you were going out?”

He didn’t answer that question. “She didn’t come back to me,” he said, “but she did come back to Enswell, about a year later, the next summer. By then she was married.”

“Married?”

“Yeah.”

“She wasn’t married.”

“Yes she was. And she had a little boy.”

“Me, you’re saying?”

“Right. Once I saw her pushing you through Piggly Wiggly. She told me about her husband. He wrote hyperviolent, pornographic Westerns, had written several of them, she said, kind of rubbing it in, since I could never finish anything beyond a few lousy poems.”

“What was the husband’s name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“But he was a novelist.”

“Well, he sold annuities for Prudential, but yeah, he’d supposedly written novels too. One of them had come out on a small press under a nom de plume.”

“She told you all this at Piggly Wiggly?”

“We talked awhile. And I picked up some stuff via the grapevine.”

“Was she a wreck?”

“Not really. Maybe a bit stressed, new mom stuff.”

“But not strung out?”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“This was summer of ’71 then, right?”

After a pause: “That sounds right.”

“Well, my mom said that Martha was a mess by then, like constantly tripping and doing laced dope and all this shit. Hair a mess, smelly.”

“She wasn’t like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“That just wasn’t where she was at,” Wade said.

“Not even into drugs?”

“Well, she wasn’t a teetotaler. Sure, she did drugs.”

I poked my remaining baklava with a plastic fork.

“What did I look like?” I said.

“What did
you
look like? I don’t know. Like a baby. You looked old enough to have been conceived when Martha and I were together, but that doesn’t say much about paternity, and I’m a poor judge of the sort of ages reckoned in months.”