Four New Messages (12 page)

Beneath the Flatiron’s fancy cladding, undergirding the swooping loops and oriels—the limestone base and glazed terra cotta facade are in no way loadbearing—is that metal, the steel, which was Rog Reardon’s assignment. From that second week of class he began spending a lot of time at a foundry just outside town that was closed when the company that had owned it was bought by another company that was bought by another company that moved to Mexico. As the foundry had fired Rog’s father and uncles, it was Rog’s pleasure to rehire them and refire the works. These metalworkers, family and those unrelated but friends and acquaintances, were happy to be employed, less happy to be so on the condition that Rog apprentice as mill supervisor. But Rog proved adept, a swift learner. Greener, it should be understood, had a phenomenal sense for assignments, and besides the useful fortuity of Rog coming from a steelmaking family, it also helped that the novel he’d been neglecting since junior year was imprecise about its narrator’s identity, relationships, and ambitions, abstract in its philosophy, sloppy with flashback and dream, and what it needed, what Rog needed, was nothing more than dense hard verbs, relentlessly accurate adjectives, and the active immediacy of the present tense. By midterm, Rog had become an expert, rallying the townie workers to their largest job in decades. Today Mr. Reardon serves as foreman and half owner, with the university, of the foundry, and is arguably the best, most successful steelman in the state (his daughter—Raina? Raisa? has been in every one of Veri’s classes through high school, though I don’t know why they never got along—Veri says she’s spoiled).

Moreton did the foundation work and now has a prospering cement business of his own out of the county seat (he also owns part interest in a quarry). He set our house and has become a good, thorough, methodical, even plodding man, which every time I bump into him—in line at the hardware emporia, at the gas stations by the Route 70 onramp—unsettles me, given that the problem with his writing was that it’d lacked what he now supplies so well: the groundsill, the footings, a bottom. He, a poet, used to be a sound guy, a line freak, just making weak beams of pretty and pretty shocking words to tickle the ear (he’d mix metaphors too), but there’d be no formal structure, no prosodic meter, just stray vowels and consonants, snippets he’d heard and read in Eagle Avenue cafés floating as moments—occasions—without anchor or ballast. Greener—I think, I have to think though he never said anything about his selections—intuited this and sent him delving into bedrock, wood pilings, concrete, rebar. This was his specialty, Greener’s, countering a writer’s faults—supposed faults because Greener had read only one submission by each student—with a physical, practical correction.

Sora, who’d overwrite and overcharacterize and overdetermine and overexplain and just spoonfeed you, the reader, everything—she’d tell you what clothes a character was wearing only when it had no bearing on her story, she’d cite exactly what kind of meals her villain was munching when it had precisely nothing to do with advancing her arc or deepening characterization (why should it matter that her Alaskan psychic lesbian spy preferred spotted jumpers belted with appliqué flowers, pink pigskin gloves, and purplestriped, kneehigh galoshes, a strict diet of turkey chili and fries?)—Greener, with his genius, turned her transparent, light and free and freely pertinent. He made her our glazier, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s become our own home’s window woman, and is even developing an exclusive make of energysaving window that reduces heating costs, has a screen that can be raised only from the top sash as a child safety feature, and, I remember, Dem was just telling me—Dem’s in touch with her from the gym and PTA—that it recently won some national design award. Congrats, Sora! Let’s catch up sometime!

As Bau’s poems were always scatological—clogged to their brims with sex, piss, and shit—Greener, as if imparting a moral lesson, put him on plumbing, while Lo—whose poems and ersatz fairy and folktales, in contemporary settings, were so precious and vapidly schematic—was assigned to electrical. Of course they’re married now, Bau and Lo, and in business together and, though Dem and I don’t get together with them more than once a year since they transferred west to tend to Lo’s mother when she stroked herself into dementia, we still think of them often and fondly. Two kids, boys: Maury, a hapless pick, after the prof, and don’t quote me on this, Billy Jr.

As for Dem, to Greener’s mind—and to ours as well, though it took time and the necessity of dual incomes for us to countenance this—her poems were all surface gaiety, superficially stunning in their detail but emotionally empty: no amount of technique, and Dem had tons, could compensate for her being so private and timid, withdrawn. But how to teach emotion? How to teach the turning of the insides out? Greener had a solution (to get inside her he had to extrovert her first, that was my reaction). He put her in charge of interior decoration, her brief being not to duplicate the interior of the building as it was at the time of its construction—we weren’t getting into any period furniture, anyway how to find such records, if there were any such records—neither to duplicate the interior at present, or at the present of the century’s turn, rather to create a new interior, “one conducive,” Greener handwrote in a memo Dem typed for herself on a computer afforded her by the engineering department (its only cooperation), “to conducting literature classes & writing workshops &c.”

“Show me comfort.”

“Make for me an ideal.”

Being the only position with any modicum of creative control, this was a major honor and Dem knew it but also knew it meant that she and Greener would be spending hours of overtime together, alone, poring over that ratty portfolio she hauled to the site daily—crammed with paint swatches (the multiple offs: the laces, pearls, ivoire), fabric samples (tanned durables), clippings of any pattern wallpaper that caught fancy—though he tried to kiss her only once.

It was then—Dem coming home blushing sunset—that I flipped, showed up on the lawn of his faculty bungalow an hour later, screaming into the dark, Come on out, motherfucker, I will scalp you of your fucking testicles, and out Greener came in his tightywhities with a red, yellow, and green stoplight plaid robe blown loosely around him, wielding only a scroll of blueprints like a scopic spear, saying, That’s right, Pat, that’s what’s wrong with your work—it’s all impulse, it’s all energy, it’s good impulse, sure, it’s good energy, fine, the right true spirit, but still that’s not enough, it goes nowhere, you have nothing planned (waving the cyanotypes into blackness), nothing kept in reserve (stamping his feet, one bare, the other fuzzy, sheepishly slippered).

What the hell’s wrong with my work?

What were you going to do, kill me? What were you thinking?

I don’t know.

Bingo. You have no forethought—you just start a sentence without knowing how it ends, without knowing where or when it ends. Capital letter, then you skimp on anything that comes before the closing punctuation—if there’s any punctuation.

I was panting, snuffle, mucus.

Put commas between your instincts, parse reflexes into clauses—the same goes for your personal life.

I attended this lecture—I always had perfect attendance. 

So I made a move on Dem—so what? she rebuffed me. You’re too much the idiot to recognize what’s essential: she doesn’t want me, she wants you.

That’s what she said.

He scowled.

I said, She told me not to do this—she said if I came over here I couldn’t ever come home.

Pat, you need to calm, keep the passions controlled—why else did I make you my roofer?

Greener shambled to the door of his tickytacky ramshackler, held it open for me.

Give Dem time to chill—she’ll take you back in the morning.

How sorry is it that writing about that evening with Greener is no easier now than it was then—years ago, the summer after that evening, when the media called? Predictably late. Nonfiction, they asked for. Journalism, they demanded. Editors, installed floors above realism, interested not in a crew of yokels and their architectural success, but in sensationalizing a former peer’s failure. Dem was furious I’d even considered their offers—that spat ruined our honeymoon, Canada—though it’s not like I would’ve been able to complete any “article,” any “piece.” I declined by maintaining I was too biased by hurt, but, full disclosure: I couldn’t write anymore, I wasn’t a writer.

I’d never been inside Greener’s bungalow before and I didn’t want to be there then—I wanted to demolish him, but I’d never been in a home so depressing. Not even those small poor places Dem and I would rent when Dem was still diligently sewing and gluing her verses together by day and then, once she had a job too and we were less poor, by night—not even that condemned chapel that leaked, or that dingy duplex downwind from the rendering plant I patched up nice but the toxic mold mucked in just when Veri was born—not even those could compare.

Greener had no furniture, no possessions. He had only this expression: mad, insomniac, grim.

He didn’t even have any literature on the nonexistent shelves, just how-to’s piled on the floor, stacked in the cupboards and pantry.

No manuscripts in the microwave unplugged, just diagrams, bank statements.

I’ve sold everything I shipped out with, he said. School’s only put up $100K, I’m funding the rest.

From your royalties? from your foreign rights and options?

By the grace of my mother’s estate and with loans, I’m buying myself a borough.

You’re in debt?

And did I mention my publisher rejected my new book last week? More of the same, they said.

More of what?

It’s a novel that revises my previous novel—do you honestly care?

Why do this to yourself?

I’m a teacher, I’m teaching.

We’re learning (I winced from my lameness).

And I’m going for broke on your education—though it’s incredible what you can get done with free labor.

You’re counting on this class to support your retirement?

(A jest as uncomfortable as lounging on his shack’s sloppy planks.)

The end of the semester’s the end of me.

And then what?

Rewhiskeying my mason jar, lighting two Camels, handing me one—And then we’d better be finished.

Tub was the only one of our class to leave town, the county, the state (as far as Dem and I are aware). He was always smart, too smart to be a writer it occasionally felt, Tub the brainiac always so analytical, so literal. I knew him, as I knew most of my fellow classmates, from prior workshops—those with hypertext experimentalist Grazinski, whose avant lacked only a garde, those immersed in the bucolic bardics of BJ, whose eclogues insisted on rhyme—and so I knew that if a character in some student’s story went somewhere, like New York City, say, on a certain date at a certain time, Tub would research that date and time and quiz the author on trivia like the weather (drizzle in the morning? leading to an afternoon of scattered thunder?), or how might your character react to the news that the Monday before the Jets holocausted the Eagles? or that two girls, braided black twins, died in a house fire in Harlem? He was a stickler, a looming, hovering pain, so Greener, surprise, surprise, promoted him to contractor (elevating Greener, I guess, to the role of contractor’s contractor).

Tub kept us on time, managed the workflows, made sure everybody made their right contributions in the right order and that when it was too early to do the plumbing or electric, for example, Bau and Lo weren’t allowed to just hump away at the edge of the lot—the field had been referred to as “the lot,” or “the site,” then gradually Greener’s appellation spread, I spread it: “the college borough”—but were instead redirected to help with unloading trucks, or putting up scaffolding, aiding—meaning following and learning from—Mesh and the region’s most skilled masons on their facadework. (Mesh was assigned the facade, that intricate, fripperant facade, only because the surfaces of his literary work were so terribly transpicuous, so banally boring—simple declaratives rife with simple vocabulary. Plain. Unadorned. Also it’d be shabby not to note that at this juncture, the unions—Locals 5, 15, 35, and 86—were pitching in for nothing, in a recruitment initiative, whenever they had shifts to spare.)

Tub himself wasn’t exempt from this diversification and though his primary talent was obviously organizational—he was a frail, wan guy—Greener insisted that he assist on the grunt jobs too, and so not only did he learn, as we all learned, something of every discipline, he also built up his chest and arms and successfully overcame chronic asthma. And Greener, it should be said, wasn’t exempt either: out straining among the elements, stooped for lift over pallets, it was as if he too would be receiving a grade. A fountain of sweat. Tanned in even his creases. He never cleaned his workboots or helmet. He looked wonderful (no, no: he looked like he was wonderfully dying).

It was late in the afternoon, about an hour after we’d returned to the hotel from the NYU tour, in the middle of the brief nap we’d scheduled before beginning to plan which of Dem’s tapas reservations to honor—

My phone rang a strange (212) number, but I answered it anyway, figuring it was the airline or an autoconfirmation of our visit tomorrow early to Liberty Island.

It’s Tub, he said, Tub Deminty—why didn’t you tell me you two were in town?

How did you know?

Reardon emailed with your number, it’s been forever, I hope you’re not avoiding me.

It’s not you I’m avoiding, I thought but only repeated, Damn straight, forever.

And I’m told you have a girl doing the rounds of our fair borough’s higher ed?

You’re on top of it.

Dem sat up in bed.

I know this is rushed, but will you make time for me tonight? I fly tomorrow for Frankfurt.

Dem cocked an ear.

I’ll get you tickets to
Witties,
that play that just won the Pulitzer—I’m friendly with the producers. Three tickets at Will Call (I have a meeting)—you’ll see the show then after we’ll eat, when the restaurants aren’t so crowded. Sound good? You in the mood for Turkish?