Braided Lives (23 page)

The second poet is one of the teaching fellows. He reads dreadfully in a thick mumble poems on obscure points of philosophy, but the committee did not dare leave him out because he is a favorite son of the Resident Critic and is also noted for his acid attacks on everybody else. The knowing audience is still trickling in, many coming late to miss the losers—including of course me.

I stand. For a moment I think I will not be able to hike the last mile to the microphone, gleaming in a shaft of sunlight like a battle pike. I am wearing a dress Donna picked out, a dark burnt orange skirt and pale pink bodice, Grecian-looking I think with the criss-crossed halves of its bodice above a fitted waist and full skirt. She paid for half of it as a birthday present and I paid for the second half. Mike is behind me but I feel as if I am reading to him, for he has not heard this poem. I felt shy about showing it.

Love, I grew up lopsided,

jaded by proxy. Not dis- but merely un-illusioned,

by hearsay and wide reading

made cynical, already without innocence,

only ignorance and fear my dowry.

How can I explain this to me?

My days have shot up

with clutching elevator intensity.

I lean on the hands of clocks

to will you out of buildings….

I read to Donna, who sits still and unblinking as if her concentration sustained me crossing an abyss on a tightrope. In her lap her hands are clutched, washing themselves like her mother’s.

I want to empty myself out for you,

have you swallow my history, memorize my ages.

Hold my desires and small pleasures between your palms

till they glow warm from your body

like beads from a broken amber necklace.

I want to take your will like your tongue

in my mouth and feel it stirring.

The amber necklace is Aunt Riva’s and had been Buhbe’s. I develop enough courage to glance swiftly into the audience. Theo has come in and sits at the back, out of place in dirty tennis shorts with her racquet beside her chair. She sits nodding her head like an old woman, unselfconsciously enjoying the sound. Donaldson never came. Alberta’s purse still perches on the chair.

Love, go slowly.

I am a chandelier suspended by a single wire.

Love, go strongly. If you hesitate

I will constrict violently and crush myself

like an imploding egg….

Suddenly I am done. I flee the microphone. People are applauding, politely I suppose. I can tell from the way the other poets look at me that I am not writing the way you are supposed to, but the glare Mike wears upsets me. He didn’t like the poem? I do not hear the next two because I am still trying to figure out if I did all right and why Mike frowned. I sit shaking like a dish of aspic, sour and quivering. I cannot believe I read my love poem before all these strangers; yet it did not feel personal.

Now Mike seizes the microphone and launches into his first poem. His voice fills the room, deep, resonant but carefully devoid of any emotion except perhaps scorn:

… like maggots crawling through the rotting meat

Pale, omnivorous they ooze along

Behind their busy teeth. The dead are sweet

to them….

That’s about professors. Sometimes I can figure the poems out. The next is about suicide which he considers the most poetic subject. People talk a lot about gratuitous acts. Everybody is reading Camus’s
L’Etranger.
Even if they read it in English, they call it
L’Etranger.
I consider that character a creep, but I don’t dare say so again. Gratuitous is a lovely word. Stealing is gratuitous. Besides there being simply no way I could stay in college without stealing most of my textbooks and supplies and incidental clothing, I am partial to that moment when my skin becomes all eyes.
Years later kids in the antiwar movement will call me bourgeois when I habitually refuse to join their ideologically motivated shoplifting. But I don’t have to do it anymore, I say. I don’t have to anymore. I figure I wore out my luck years ago when I needed it.

Thus the hatchet crashes making hash of mommy,

How it flashes rising like a sun.

How it dongs on bone like a churchbell.

Now the blood leaps up in laughing come.

That’s called “The Triumph of the Familial Ax,” about Lizzie Borden. After Mike reads he stands glaring at the audience. There are two obvious factions, those who applaud and those who ostentatiously do not. I glare at them too.

One of the eight-foot-tall giants reads, a sonnet of impeccably stony address to Saint Sebastian. Gilt-edged security poems on Brancusi, Fragonard and God. Then the pretty senior Kate reads, all her material drawn from fairy tales, mythologizing her life, her lovers. It is strange and foggy but not uninteresting. She reads in a clear slightly affected voice. Mike looks at her with that expression partway between a leer and a sneer that annoys me. He calls her a castrating woman. She has a racy reputation, although as far as I can tell she has done little to deserve it besides write an occasional poem that suggests a knowledge of the other sex. She is not here with anyone; she has not taken any of them as lovers. Perhaps that is her crime. A professor’s daughter, she is at home in Ann Arbor and just a little independent. Grant Stone reads last, a series of sestinas. If anything is more boring than a sestina, it’s several sestinas. A gaggle of geese. A sunday of sestinas. Then he reads some short rhymed poems:

Complaint of the Much Married Woman

I gave myself to various men

but they always gave me back again.

Everyone is so happy to get to laugh that he receives roaring applause. With a leonine grin he stands and drinks it in.

Afterward he strides up to me. “I did so enjoy your reading. It was … hypnotic…. ‘I want to feel your will stirring in my mouth.’ How marvelously phallic.”

I am quite sure I have not been complimented. Mike separates us at once, arm around my waist tugging me back to a fierce argument about whether his work is prosy. One young man quotes Yvor Winters, one Hugh Kenner, one John Crowe Ransom, one plays it safe with Eliot. In a way Mike’s poems mean to irritate and thus their fury validates him.

As we walk out I have to ask, “Did you like my poem?”

“It’s soft, pumpkin. Too soft to waste on those jerks…. Of course it’s formless and silly. It isn’t art, naturally. You ought to have just given it to me. No point pouring it out on assholes.”

Donna waits outside and we head for the dorm together for supper. I take her arm. “How was I?”

“I thought you were terrific,” she says loyally. “You read too fast but with some feeling. At least your poems are about something human.”

“Didn’t I sound naive?”

“Only a little.” She squeezes my arm back.

“Did your parents like Lennie?”

“Oh, they had to go back home. They had a dinner date. They only came up for lunch.”

“They didn’t want to meet him, after all that?”

“Meeting them is hardly a pleasure I’m keeping from him, now, is it? I told them. That’s the big step…. We’ve been getting on so well, Lennie and I. Last night we had an hour alone in the apartment and we were lying in bed just after we made love. He told me I looked like a Modigliani nude.”

“What?” But I heard her. “Er, Donna, this is going to sound weird, but yesterday in the Arb Mike told me I looked like a Modigliani nude.”

We look at each other in disbelief. “Fuck them,” she says. “Do you think they get together over a beer and make up what they’re going to say to us?”

“It was Lennie’s birthday last week. I know Mike gave him a book. You get only one guess what it must have been.”

I am right, I know, they are innocent of collusion and yet we both feel cheated of our compliments.

The round world. The sense of community. We sit in vast overheated amphitheaters where the bald head of the professor shines at the bottom of the toboggan slide distant and cold as the moon while his words move into our ears and out our fingers. With electronically sensitive pencils we mark slots on multiple-choice tests and are issued our ranking. Education? That comes from each other. We go in a fierce noisy knot through exhibits and galleries while Lennie teaches us to see. We dismiss chunks of culture and gobble others. Books unknown to the departments of the university buzz wasplike between us, forming our language. Music is a passion and the structure of darkened rooms. We bang our ideas against each other. Lennie paints us in a red sea leaping like dolphins. None of us like the way we look but we each think Lennie did a fine job capturing the others. For two weeks everything we cook on Lennie’s stove is yellow with curry powder. We discover avocados. We put capers in spaghetti. We make up plays starring us.

The sun hangs like a tangerine in the long-needled boughs of our Arb room. The cupboard is a round cookie tin buried flush with the ground. It contains two saucers from my dorm, two spoons, a salt shaker from the Union, a can opener, a book of matches and an extra packet of condoms. Sometimes we study here. The late light slants a deep smoky red between the poles of the Scotch pines and gilds the eddying gnats. We eat supper of tuna fish with sliced onion and rye bread. The soft dusk liquefies, leaving the sky still milky. Sometimes we hear a couple talking on the road; sometimes headlights brush the shrubs of the slope, but we are safe above. Sex is easy now as talking.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE
W
ORM IN
E
DEN’S
A
PPLE

T
HE TIME I’VE wasted! The sweet term spent and the reckoning of finals due. From my endless literary arguments with Julie I had matter enough on Faulkner to grind out my term paper, but with my back to the wall in the top bunk and my knees drawn up, I devour the Spanish-American War according to Grimes. One fifteen. Smoke hangs just under the ceiling. Whenever I finish a chapter and pause to abstract it, I become aware of Donna making unnecessary excursions to desk or closet, getting up and down with sighs and scrapings. I know she wants to talk but I refuse to meet her overacted restlessness. The spring creaks as she tosses, sits up, flings herself prone again.

What was the damned immigration act called, the first that began the design to keep out people like my grandparents, all the dark-haired and dark-skinned? My mind blanks, gears momentarily locking. Donna hates the way I study, my mad concentration, but without a scholarship I would be back in my dead-end neighborhood like a boxcar stuck broiling on a siding. I view myself as a professional student: not that I mean to go on in academia like Mike but that it is my present work and I study for a living. Below Donna sets up a muffled sobbing. Damn you, let me be! “Is something wrong?”

She sobs louder.

Was it the McCarran-Walter Act? No, that was recent, designed to keep out people like me, subversives, prophets, agitators, wild poets. What was the first act that slammed the golden door? When did Eden forbid the wretched of the earth? Marking my place, I clamber down. “What’s wrong?”

Arching her back she grasps the posts that support the bunk. “I want to die! I want to die, I’m so scared!”

“Come on, you know your stuff. Finals are just con games.”

“Finals?” She sits up, scrubbing her eyes. “I’m eight days overdue.”

“Are you sure?”

“You sound like Lennie! You think I can’t count?”

I hold my own belly. “What a rotten time for it.”

“How can I concentrate?” Her pale lashes are matted. “What will happen to me? He leaves for New York next week. I have to go home to Flint.”

I lean my forehead against the bunk. “Aren’t there lab tests?”

“Lennie’s finding out. I have so little time if it’s true.” She locks her arms around her knees. “If I am, how will we ever get the money?”

“How much do we need? I have twenty-some.”

“Lennie’s roommate knows of a doctor who does them. At least two hundred, he thinks. Maybe two fifty.”

“Mike must have something. What about Lennie?”

“Not much, twenty or so, but he figures he can borrow more and sell books. Stu, I’m scared. Think of it growing inside. Peter has money but Lennie says he’s tight. Peter always thinks everybody’s trying to use him.” She blows her nose hard. “I have twenty-eight and I can get ten from Estelle by telling her I have to see a dentist. She’s big on getting your teeth fixed.”