Four New Messages (11 page)

Greener didn’t like it, he didn’t like: fiction about war, fiction about animals and farming (the ancient pastoral was fine but the modern rural, verboten), fiction about or narrated by children (who were the same as animals to him). Essentially he didn’t like any writing by anyone living not him—here was a man at war with himself—though he did grudge me praise for the second story I gave him, which was the purposefully stilted, nearly dialogueless telling of an English professor, an expert at translating anacreontics, visiting this college far out in the stix to deliver a paper at a conference, fumbling through his presentation, stumbling into an unrecommended, ostensibly Vietnamese frytrap and getting so drunk at its incongruously tikified bar that he falls asleep on his stool and has to be woken and driven home by a waitressing doctoral student he offers “to put in a story”—or was it “to write into the next novel”?—if she sleeps with him, but she doesn’t and instead leaves him sprawled in the rear lot of his motel, where delirious through the night he apostrophizes squirting skunks, revived only when he’s hit in the head by the proprietor’s newspaper delivery, that local paper Greener refused to read (incidentally the only paper that pubbed a positive obituary).

Apparently no other student had taken Greener up on his suggestion to turn him into lit and, when he cornered me after that inaugural class that left approximately half the roster in tears—its surprise subject was how if you intended to succeed as a writer it was necessary to move to New York—I could tell he was struggling with a reaction: whether to treat me like a fool for taking him so seriously, or to treat me like a prick for taking him so seriously (Greener was very attuned to prickishness, and to pretension, except in himself, except in his description of “a city so personal, it’s as if it existed solely in dialogue”).

Your traducing of me, he said, it’s salvageable.

It is?

More so than most of the crap getting published.

He waited for a lesson in timing.

Then said, Which isn’t saying much.

Greener turned to erase from the blackboard the map he’d scribbled, not showing but telling the locations of the better bookmarts of Manhattan (ten of which, Dem tells me, have since closed), then had me accompany him to his office and then, following farther—out.

He’d been in town—what? two weeks at that point? Calendrically it was still late summer, Indian summer, but, like the Indians, faded, failed. No one had welcomed him, I don’t mean officially—the English department assisterati had requisitioned an ID card, dealt with the bursar in the matter of his tax forms, dealt with housing’s sophomoric supernumeraries in the matter of his housing—I mean, by his own slyly pathetic admission, no one had just casually shown him around, given him the gossipy lay: what Dem and I and Veri were getting at NYU—e.g. this is the library, where you can basically make camp with an open fire and live in the stacks (Greener’s class spent most of the fall doing that), the maths and sciences department, art, architecture, & design, journalism school, law school, center for experimental veterinary medicine. Greener was shocked by this greeting, honestly shocked, though what he interpreted as dereliction was merely the native reserve. Teaching being such a social activity—professors all day interacting, during office hours, in the hallways and restrooms with whomever they came across—that when their classes were over, they went home to stay home. They nested, our school mascot being an indigenously endangered nestbuilding bird. They projected documentaries and Scrabbled, chefed around elaborately, identified hobbies, attempted a baby. Certainly the school hadn’t hired Greener only to ridicule him (they were pleased to have a minority: not someone Semitic, but someone who’d once been reviewed), certainly his agent hadn’t arranged this appointment expressly to ruin him, as he maintained—though that suspicion, maybe, that paranoid loneliness revealed in his rage (what’s the administration doing on weekend nights more entertaining than entertaining me? how many cold Sundays can I spend jerkingoff to the Hudson?), was why we, the two of us, were walking, or maybe it was that he wanted to use me to get closer to Dem, who’d returned to our apartment from workshop to dry her eyes and dry our laundry. Other faculty had tried to get to her before: Horniak, Rutter, and BJ, her poetry thesis adviser, whose plywood cubicle was adjacent to Greener’s. Whenever he wasn’t meeting with a female student, he, BJ—that bald bold unit postured like an italicized questionmark—was seated in front of the computer the school had just given him, trying to figure out which slot the discs went in, grouching that his monitor was busted when it wasn’t plugged in.

I invoke this confusion to remind that when Greener was in residence, daily web use—campuswide internet access—was still a decade away. If our alma mater would’ve imported him just after the millennium, who knows if he would’ve felt so forsaken? who knows if he would’ve even dreamed of this gest?

As we roamed upper quad to lower, Greener became, by steps, progressively glummer until he was saying, You want to know the truth? New York’s flunked me. Why else am I here? I’ve been suspended, I’ve been expelled.

I said, You seem to be doing OK.

Not compared to how I’d be doing if publishing weren’t over, with the money gone and editors not editing, my generation’s screwed—we’re not the immigrant experience, we’re not the assimilation experience—we’re the first nothing generation, we’ve got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

Greener paused.

The conversation had taken an unpromising path. And we had too—leading down the hill to the labs.

Still we’re better off than you are, he said—before you or your girl would even belong to a generation, you’d have to intern in midtown, where generations matter.

You’re being unfair, I said, they matter here—your lineages and pedigrees—much more than on the coasts with all that transience.

I bummed a cigarette off him. Because he smoked, I smoked too.

I said, My family settled here before statehood—did I tell you I’m 1/16th Sioux?

He said, Intro to Identity. Multiculti Polyethnic 101. My parents survived Europe just so I’d write about it, they survived Europe just so I wouldn’t.

Greener was the type who’d give you a cig but not a light.

I said, I was born here, completed every school here, Future Farmers of America central district secretary, which might not mean a lot to you but.

Greener interrupted to ask, What conceivably could have made you a writer?

The prairie grasses, the wheaty wilds, the good solid old-style people.

Bullshit.

Bullshit’s a valuable fertilizer.

We’d walked into an unfertile field. A disused roughly triangular or sideways conical in its footprint pitch at the ragged edge of campus, which the baseball team—
Ra, Ra, Bara Cara, Hep Hep, Don’t You Dare-A
—had used for practice before the new stadium was built.

A pitch outgrown with weed, rutted with deep mud troughs where the dean’s tractor had rusted. Haybales, scattered silage troughs, hose. A pecked senseless scarecrow, straw packed into the uniform of last season’s starting pitcher from a rival team one state over.

Greener and I stood next to each other along the lip of the outfield, dividing what was collegiate from pure nature.

He asked to feel my hands.

When we clocked in for the next week’s workshop, a group of sincere and avidly morose shufflers, the room door had a slice of notepaper taped to its window at a reckless angle,
pat will bring you down to the field
—the handwriting that schoolboyish amalgamation of broad block and cramped cursive we’d become pros at deciphering—as for Pat, that’s still me, and though Greener hadn’t cleared this responsibility with me in advance, I led.

Trust me. Mind the foul lines. This way toward the margin. Rounding third base, second base, first.

Incredulous backpackers with mss., citrus pop going flat in our canteens.

We were twelve in that class assembled on a cooling day down at the rubbled heel of the pasture.

I was going to give a speech, Greener said.

But I won’t.

He was standing on a haybale atop the pitcher’s mound, then realized it was teetering shaky and stepped down to what remained of the dirt, a curveball’s slogged mire.

Can everyone hear me?

He rocked for warmth—his suede breaker too light, it was just for style—clapped frayed Knicks cap over his ears, noosed tighter the unraveling knit scarf.

People are going to say I was homesick, he said, but that’s just not true. Let me dispel. Allow me my disabuse. It’s just that I can’t in any way intuit how you all can write out here, with so much air and sky, with such openness, no disruptions, no disturbances.

Chiefly, nothing to compel ambition.

No opposition, no shadow, no shade for your toil.

We had no notion what he was saying.

Here, and he dug a sneaker toe into earth, we’re going to build a sanctuary, a monument to our own publishability. Can everyone hear me? How many of you have been to the city?

The answers were: we all could hear him and only one or two warily raised hands—Rog and Bau, who’d won partial scholarships to a summer writing program (indeed at the very school I’m checking out).

On this pyramidal plot, he said, on this decaying diamond, we’re going to make ourselves a culture—just for us and for whoever might suffer this school after, so that they might know what it’s like to live in a culture, what it’s like to be in a culture, to have culture, not just this organized sports frattery and hayseed academe.

In the grass grown wild at his feet was a shovel, a rusticated bluefaced tool he bent to and picked up and kicked into earth, breaking ground.

Broadway’s a difficult street, it’s touchy, temperamental, a diva—Greener tossing a shovelful of soil into the wind, the silty loam gusting back into his face and so he stalled, not to brush but to swallow—Broadway’s historic, taking time to find its bearings.

Dig deep into your thesauri for this:
slithery, serpentine, anguiform
even: you see that in how it winds up from the Battery and Wall Street (Greener dramatizing by digging the path with the shovel from his groundbreaking up toward the mound), how it swerves shyly to avoid Washington Square (he reached to a back pocket for a pair of mittens, dropped them), then suddenly cuts off (he took off his cap), at Union Square (dropped the cap), in preparation for its regeneration, regrowing itself in realignment when it crosses Fifth Avenue (the perimeter of the mound itself heading toward the bale), taking the central action of town and reorienting it to the westside.

That’s where downtown grew up—on the westside—is this making sense?

We nodded.

Don’t forget I’m speaking as a pedestrian, as a weekend cartographer in comfortable shoes—I was walking you through the thoroughfare north, though the traffic, I have to say, flows south.

Nodding.

But we’re particularly concerned with that intersection, where Broadway walks all over Fifth—one to become the snobby society money boulevard, that ignorant lilywhite stretch, the other to become that concourse of dirty miscegenation, a corridor potholed, poorly sidewalked and stuck with gums, obscurely tenanted—Broadway, the broad way, the wrecked wide and embracing inclusive anything goes way, the name almost unpacks itself.

A breeze blew in, autumn hinting at winter.

We shivered.

And we’re going to remake that here, he said, rather its landmark.

His hands described a structure in air, cold lines of cold air.

From now on all classes will be held out here under the clouds, both semesters regardless of weather—I’ve managed to persuade the school to approve our use of this field.

There will be a dress code.

He was calibrating, calculating.

There will be forms to sign, insurance waivers.

He steeled himself to say, You won’t be handing in writing for the rest of the year.

Which is how we began building, began rebuilding, the Flatiron. Built in 1902 and originally known as the Fuller Building—after the pioneer of the modern skyscraper and inventor of the system of “contracting,” G. A. Fuller, *1851–†1900, whose firm went on to build Penn Station, Macy’s Department Store, the Plaza Hotel, and the original New York Times Building, all of which are too uptown for our itinerary—the Flatiron was “the first great skyscraper in New York,” though it was “built in the style of Chicago” (its architect was a Chicagoan called Burnham)—all this according to the infopacket Greener passed around along with photocopies of the original blueprints illegally reproduced from the archives of the New York Historical Society (an exgirlfriend librarianed there, he’d said, Greener was always mentioning exgirlfriends—one who’d starred in a blaxploitation flick he forbade us from mentioning, another who’d had her own let’s meet our panel of nymphomaniacal nannies talkshow—I often had the feeling he’d come out to our crop only to avoid the famous feminine back east).

Also included in the packet were photos: souvenir posters and postcards, antique panoramic exposures and aerial snaps, in color and, why not, black & white (which Greener declared the only colors worth building for). The building looks different in every shot. Seen from the front it resembles a single column, as upright as Classicism, as upright as Neoclassicism, a spine straight up and down, but seen from the side it’s a monstrous wall, like a cursorless screen, or that virtually blank page that’d directed us down to its rising. Greener quoted numerous writers—of fiction and poetry of the period of the building’s initial erection—comparing that frontview to a steamship steaming its prow up the avenues, and the sideviews, both starboard and port, to a sailboat’s sail or the blade of a knife—Greener remarking, however, that since it was built on an island, was built on a traffic island, if the building was a boat, it was beached. Though the Flatiron was among the first genuine skyscrapers to be constructed of steel—previously steel wasn’t considered entirely reliable, its properties not yet understood—it didn’t get its name from the metal that made that material. Rather the name that branded the building and district as enduringly as the building itself branded the city, predates construction, deriving from a resemblance—evident to the nineteenth century, aka the century Greener thought we were from—between the Flatiron’s future plot and a clothes iron. (I’m writing this not on the W’s room’s desk, which is filled with Veri’s purse and cosmetics, but on the ironingboard retrieved from the closet, remembering Dem pressing our pleats, cooking soufflé buffets with truffles. Remembering myself walking fantasy crossroads with Greener, talking plans, talking tenants—Greener pointing out how the Flatiron separates downtown, which creates the art, from midtown, which rapaciously profits from it, how the building itself points north toward the agents and publishers, toward the magazines too, who’ll be so interested in this project, they’ll send photographers, glossy journalists with expense accounts equivalent to a year’s pay for my freshman comp adjuncting—grandiosity!)