City Boy (5 page)

Many weeks later Jack would write his own poem about her. It said that the human eye was like a seed that sent its roots through light, that at the sight of her face something had grown up inside him, a living, restless tree with blood for sap and a constellation of singing leaves. He didn’t turn the poem in for class. It was too formal, he decided, too much a working out of a conceit, and besides, he was afraid that someone would bring up potatoes and the fact that they also had sprouting eyes.

That first day the professor went through the roll. Jack didn’t have long to wait to learn her name. She was a
C
. Ms. Chase. Ms. Chase opened a green notebook and began tracing elegant spirals across the blank page as the professor gave his up-and-at-’em speech. He did this at the beginning of every semester. The professor was one of those melancholy men who compensated for it by being especially antic and vivacious. He talked about observation, how poets must be passionate, accurate observers of the world. Yes, passionate, by God. How they were to make use of technique, but they were not to become a slave to it. How they should each strive to find their own true, unique voice. How they should be honest with each other in their criticism, even though this might be painful, and that honesty, both of feeling and of expression, was to be the primary aim of their writing.

Ms. Chase raised her hand. This was unusual, it caused a mild stir. The professor’s speech was not meant to be interrupted. You were not really even meant to listen to it. The professor said, “Yes?” in an over-polite tone that indicated he was a little pissed off.

Ms. Chase had a sweet, rather dusky voice. “I was just wondering … can you really assign a value like honesty to language?”

“I would certainly hope so. I hope, at least, that we could all agree there’s such a thing as dishonest language, and that it has no place in poetry.”

This was a rebuke of sorts and Ms. Chase’s lovely profile flushed, but she carried on. “I mean, you’re assuming that language has these fixed and immutable values …”

“Instead of … ?”

“You can’t assume anymore that language is merely representational.It’s a self-referential system with its own burden of social and political constructs. Assigning values to it isn’t just subjective, it’s naive.”

The class gaped. Such talk was like an evil spell. None of them was entirely sure what it meant but they knew it was an attack. They looked at the professor, who had turned stone-faced. Jack, dismayed, wondered if he was going to be forced to hate her, if she was like one of those cursed fairy-tale princesses who spat out snakes and toads.

After a moment the professor said, “I guess I’d begin by asking you if everything you just said is unreliable and has an arbitrary meaning, or are you exempt from all that?”

“You have to use language to investigate language,” said Ms. Chase, still sweet voiced, but with an edge of stubbornness. Jack had to admire the way she was able to carry on an argument even as those fishnet stockings did their thing.

“Which theory class did you take? This all sounds very familiar. This,” he nodded to the rest of the class, including them as he excluded Ms. Chase, “is the way academics tell us that poetry doesn’t matter. The currently fashionable way.”

“I just don’t think you can write without an informed self-awareness.” Her pen was moving across the notebook page even as she spoke, the spirals coming faster and tighter.

“Critical theory’s a virus. It sends out legions of little jargon-spouting spores that infect everything they touch. How did you get into this course anyway? Did you take the beginning workshop?”

“No, but I’ve written—”

“If you had, you would have learned that poems aren’t logs that exist just so they can be gnawed down into little piles of toothpicks.”

The class sensed something new and dangerous, a situation that might get genuinely out of control, and not for any of the usual reasons, such as students sneering at each other’s poems. The professor was no longer acting like their Scout troop leader, breaking up quarrels and leading sing-alongs; he was actually being mean.

Jack raised his hand. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he couldn’t let things go on any longer in this unbearable fashion. “Jack,” the professor said promptly.

“I just wanted to say …” He filled his lungs with air as if this would fill his head with brilliant thought. “I’m thinking about why people write poetry in the first place, or at least why I write it. And it’s not really about language, even though language is the medium and it’s what we’re always arguing about. You write a poem because you want to communicate something with absolute clarity. All the nuances and contradictions and complexities, the whole nine yards. I have to believe you can do that. I have to believe that two different people can read a poem and come to the same understanding. That people can understand each other.”

He stopped, feeling like an idiot. But what he’d said had been just vapid and heartfelt enough to calm the room down and bathe it in a wash of good feeling, a warm soup of good intentions. Understanding and communication, they were all for that. They were once more united. The professor, no doubt embarrassed by letting himself carry on so, began talking briskly about deadlines and reading lists.

Ms. Chase was silent for the rest of the hour. She closed her notebook and gazed out the window at the gray clouds dropping ice on the empty sidewalks and lawns. She had the sullen expression of someone who knew she was being watched. Jack swore at himself for being so obvious. He was communicating with perfect clarity all right.

He was going to say something to her after class, explain himself or apologize, but as soon as the bell rang she positioned her oversized shoulder bag, rose, and stepped out the door. A girl Jack knew from
last semester claimed his attention and kept him from following. By the time he left the classroom with that girl and another friend, she was gone. “What was all that about?” the friend wondered, and Jack said he didn’t know, he guessed the professor had just gone off because of some professor thing. “Who’s that girl anyway?” he asked, but his friend didn’t know. No one remembered seeing her before.

Ms. Chase was not in class the next time it met, nor the time after that, nor any other time, and the workshop closed seamlessly around her absence. The professor returned to his usual merry self. Jack looked her up in the student directory. She was Chloe Chase. C.C. There was a campus address and a phone number and the information that she was a graduate student. That seemed to explain something; only a graduate student would pick such a dauntingly wordy fight with a professor. He dialed her phone number twice and hung up before anyone answered. She seemed entirely beyond his reach. He told himself to just forget it.

Then a couple of months later he went to a party at somebody’s apartment, somebody he didn’t know. You didn’t need an invitation for such parties, you only had to know where they were. There was blasting music, and people jamming the balcony in spite of the cold. By the time Jack and his friends arrived, most people were drunk and getting drunker. It was the kind of party where the next day the hosts were obliged to go through the rooms to make sure that strangers weren’t still passed out on the furniture.

The keg was in the kitchen. Jack rinsed out a plastic cup and filled it, then stood around wondering if there was something wrong with him for not having a good time at parties anymore. He said hello to a few people he knew, but it was too loud for much talking. The idea was to drink a lot and stumble around in an alcohol-induced blur and hope you came across a willing girl or some other adventure. He had just broken up with a girl he’d met at another such party. They’d had a spotty few months together before deciding that the convenience of sleeping with each other wasn’t worth the mutual boredom and irritation. Now it seemed to Jack in his gloomy state that his only options were to call his old girlfriend, who would probably let him come over
in spite of everything they’d said about being through with each other, or to go home to his own solitary and miserable bed.

People were dancing in the living room. Jack stood in the doorway, a nondancer trying to strike a pose of being too serious and preoccupied for noticing anyone hopping around to amplified music. Which would have served him well, if Chloe Chase hadn’t been one of the dancers.

He didn’t know how he’d missed seeing her before. She was dancing with a guy Jack couldn’t take seriously, a skinny kid with buzzed hair and a white shirt and narrow black tie, like a parody of a Mormon missionary. Chloe Chase was dancing up a storm. She rocked and sweated. She was an entirely different being from the postmodern princess of the classroom. Her black hair was loose and it whipped across her shoulders. A strand of it caught in her open mouth and she teased it back and forth with her lips. The sight of this caused Jack actual physical pain.

If only, if only this were a ’30s movie and he was Fred Astaire but better looking, and she was Ginger Rogers in one of those filmy movie star dresses, and he could cut in on her partner because everyone in the audience knew they were supposed to end up together. Since it wasn’t a movie, he had to stand there for another fifteen minutes watching her and the missionary carrying on. Jack didn’t think he was her date, just one of those weird-looking guys that beautiful girls palled around with sometimes.

Finally they stopped and Chloe leaned into the missionary and said something in his ear and turned toward the kitchen. Jack followed her. She was taller than he remembered. The black fishnet stockings were not in evidence, but she was wearing a pair of high-cut leather boots that led the eye upward to the crotch of her jeans, well, his eyes would have ended up there in any case. In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator, pondered, and retrieved a bottle of water, which she drank greedily.

Now or never. Jack stepped in front of her. She regarded him over the upended bottle. “Hi, I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Oh God, you’re from that awful class.”

She didn’t say it in any making-a-joke way. He guessed the good
news was that she remembered him. He said, “Yeah, sorry about that, things got a little—”

The music took another jump in volume and she shook her head, meaning she couldn’t hear him. Jack bent closer, realized he’d run out of things to say. She was staring up at him as if looking for another reason to dislike him. He said, “Your eyes are blue.”

“What?”

“I thought they were but I wasn’t sure.”

She said something he couldn’t catch, pointed to her ear. He positioned his mouth over it. “I said, I quit writing poems and I’m changing my major to landscape architecture.”

She didn’t want to smile at that but she did. Jack asked God for just another couple of sentences, enough to let him continue impersonating somebody clever and winning. She spoke next. “Who are you any-way?”

“I’m Jack.”

“Chloe.” She didn’t offer her hand. “I mean, who are you, one of those guys who works on the literary magazine and wishes
On the Road
didn’t exist so you could write it yourself?”

Jack fell backward, clutching his heart in mock dismay in order to hide his actual dismay. He did, in fact, envy
On the Road
. “That’s me,” he said. “Callow to the core.”

“I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s just, the writers I’ve met here can be so predictable. The same books, the same tired old poses. Always responding to past forms instead of creating new ones. Art has to be a revolutionary process, it can’t be content with stasis. That’s what I was trying to say in class when that asshole mugged me.”

Jack noted that she must not have drunk much, to be able to jump right into an argument this way. He could have volunteered his own thought, that new forms were always a response to past forms, but that really wasn’t the direction in which he wanted to steer things. “I felt bad about that. He shouldn’t have lit into you. It was pretty hostile.”

“I thought about staying in the class, just to force him to confront his totally regressive thinking, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. He’s obviously happy there in the poetry museum.”

“Actually, it’s a pretty good class. But it would have been even better if you’d stayed.”

It was the first mildly flirtatious thing he’d said to her, or at least the first one she’d heard. She didn’t answer, just flattened her lips in a perfunctory smile. Jack reminded himself that she was a girl who heard her share of come-ons and cheesy lines. He felt he’d lost ground and didn’t know how to regain it. The party still surged around them with its noise and commotion. He was trying to think of a way to ask her if she wanted to go somewhere quiet and talk, without actually using those words.

The Mormon missionary guy came bounding up then. “God, it’s getting ugly here. There’s a girl in the bathroom trying to scrub off a tattoo with Comet.”

“What did the tattoo look like?” asked Jack, but the missionary had decided to ignore him.

“So if you’ve had enough fun for one night—”

“It could also be kind of important just where the tattoo is. Because there’s some body parts you really don’t want to treat with Comet.”

Chloe said, “Dex, this is Jack. Jack, Dex.”

“How ya doin,” said Dex, indifferently.

“Mucho gusto.”

“I’ll get the coats, meet you at the front door.”

“It was a genuine pleasure,” Jack called to his retreating back, then, turning to Chloe, “Who’s he?”

“A friend.”

“Uh-huh.” Dead end. Jack watched her getting ready to take her leave, and just as she said “Well … ,” he said, “how about I give you a ride?”

“To where?”

“Wherever you’re going. Dex too. I wouldn’t want him to feel left out or anything.”

He waited while she made up her mind. He tried to see himself in her eyes. This tall boy with the hopeful, foolish smile, willing himself to be brave. Yes, brave, he’d forced himself to be so, as if this was his true self at last and she had called it forth. She could just as easily dismiss
him and send that self back to where it came from but she didn’t, she said, “Sure, thanks, we could use a ride.”