Professor X (26 page)

I hear the creak of my wife's step upstairs. I don't go immediately up there, and she doesn't come down. Our life has altered what it was. I hope we can go back to how we were.

I am addicted to her presence, as sad as it makes me at times. I have never loved another adult the way I love her, and so—it has to be—I've threatened to leave, barked the word “divorce” at her (Did I really mean it? Or was I just angry, the way everybody in a couple gets angry sometimes?), shouted and screamed, hammered dresser tops with my fists, thrown things, jumped up and down in frustration like a little kid, as though I could break the bonds of Earth's gravity, and that would make me feel better.

It's not easy to argue with the children in the house. One tries very hard to be undetected. We argue in whispers. We argue in bursts no more than ten seconds long. We have gone out to the driveway and argued in the car, as though we were listening to the last minutes of a compelling report on the radio. But often, we can find a vacant room in which to fight. The house is big enough for that. How's that for an irony? In the Cape Cod, there was no room to fight—there was no room to swing a cat—but we had thankfully little to fight about. This house, vast and dark, can seem to possess a malevolent spirit. I think of
The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House—
thank you, Shirley Jackson.

“Why are we arguing?” I say. “It's not like we're fighting about doing anything. We're not going to sell the house. We won't uproot the kids. We're just fighting about how we got here. It's all just—literary analysis. I don't care how we got here.”

“I want to make a better decision next time,” she says.

With one wrong move, one misstep, life can change forever. I tend toward the obsessive-compulsive. I'm always checking running toilets to make sure they don't overflow. I try not to do it around the children. My anxiety might be contagious. I don't want them to be nervous. I don't want them to live in constant fear. But maybe my approach is wrong. Maybe they
should
know what I didn't in my bones: that with one misstep, life can change forever.

We shouldn't have gone to the closing, my wife and I. We should have blown it off, left all the vultures sitting there in the bank office with their reams of unsigned documents. We should have gone out to lunch. That would have been more productive. We were wonderfully unencumbered, with a check for more than a hundred thousand dollars in our pocket. We could have packed everyone in the car and headed west. Lit out for the coast. Like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty—with the kids, of course.

Life can't be edited, really. My wife and I view each other now through veils of argument. Our collective landscape is littered with the rubble of past quarrels. You can't erase hurt. Can't just delete it or drag it to the trash. We've been through a lot, the two of us. We can say the rich experience has been good. We can say our love is deeper. I know that it's sadder.

S
OME OF MY STUDENTS have had a rough time of it. They have suffered fractured home lives and job losses, unwanted pregnancies and galloping diabetes, turns of life that could bring a person to tears. But many of them are still young, and haven't been beaten down completely. The literature we read in English 102 does not resonate for them. It bores them, and how I envy them their boredom. For them, the living of life still seems something separate from the sorrows and tragedies portrayed in literature.

And I understand, for though I have always loved literature and writing and have thought of myself as someone thoroughly embroiled in the written word, my studies of literature remained for a long time just that: studies. I may have swooned at the beauties of a novel, chewed over the characters in a short story, reached mightily for those ideas in the greatest poems that seemed just to elude me. But it was not until I felt my life falling apart that texts began glowing for me with the warmth of personal meaning.

I suppose the first classic I taught that seemed to resonate for me was D. H. Lawrence's “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” I'd read it in early high school, and remembered it only dimly; I seemed to recall that the protagonist, a young boy named Paul, was able to go into some sort of trance on his rocking horse, which enabled him to pick the winners at the big horse races.

But I didn't remember, until I had reread it, what had driven him to develop such a skill. I didn't remember the bitter worries about money that ruled the house, the fact that the house itself seemed to whisper, “There
must
be more money!” Of course I didn't. The occult aspects of the story, which don't interest me at all today, will loom large in the mind of a teenager; the other stuff, the household economics, just seem like narrative setup. I didn't see the significance. I was the sort of teenager who never imagined he wouldn't have enough money. Growing up, all the families I knew, including my own, seemed solvent enough without breaking much of a sweat about it. But I wasn't privy to the whole story. I couldn't tell who had a good or bad job, who had wealthy parents, whose life was an unrelenting string of small, futile economies. I didn't know that having enough money was not life's default state, that having resources sufficient to navigate the shoals of life without anxiety takes some planning and doing.

The lack of tenderness in Paul's household in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is heartbreaking, and money lies at the root of the problem. Paul is aware of the money issues swirling about—the walls and wainscoting fairly scream them out to him—and as I taught the story to a class for the first time I found my academic distance from the text shrinking. As I stood at the chalkboard, things seemed hopeless to me. Did my children understand why I was out working two and sometimes three nights a week? I would not let fatigue wear me down. I would not make my suffering apparent. I vowed to be, above all else, hearty. I returned from class each night full of vigor, and mischief, as though I had been out buying secret presents for everyone in the house, perhaps a shade too ebullient, rather more happy and empty-headed than actually I am, like a male incarnation of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. But it worked. The children may have known that something was up, but they would never hear the smallest trickle of misery from my lips. I would not be short-tempered, or anguished, or desperate.

The truth dawned on me that I was in fact a very lucky man. I was not waiting tables, or working security, or tending bar, or stacking inventory in Wal-Mart. I was fortunate enough to be teaching school, an occupation about which I could be very upfront with the children. This was a world they understood completely, and they joined me in it.

I brought my work home joyously. I left my textbooks around for all to examine. Poetry and short stories bubbled up at the dinner table. My son has always been interested in mythology. And so together we read bits of Tennyson's “Ulysses,” with its haunting valedictory on the dignity possible in middle age.

These lines never fail to revive and hearten me, even as I return home exhausted, like one of the narcotized tars in “The Lotos-Eaters,” from working and teaching. There is dignity possible for a hardworking man in the second half of his forties, and though the merest shell of myself, I will not yield—though tomorrow, I must ascend the ladder and clear the leaves from the gutters. When I am tired, I cannot resist the cruel conceit that I am engaged in the same work as Ulysses and Telemachus, only I bring the glories of literature to my rough and reluctant classes to “fulfill / This labor, by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people. . . .” And then, as the family watches a documentary on the Kennedys, the tear-rattled voice of one brother eulogizing at another's funeral (I don't remember if it was Bobby at Jack's or Teddy at Bobby's) sounds through our home, saying the lines: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The children squeal with the delight of recognition. We are in a house dripping with art and literature, the walls draped with British poetry, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is as palpable a figure to us as Martha Stewart or Manny Ramirez. Poetry matters.

Other poems capture the household's imagination. William Carlos Williams's “This Is Just to Say” winds up transcribed onto a piece of loose-leaf and affixed as a joke, with a magnet, to the icebox.

We love this poem, but of course make lots of fun of it, and our own notes to one another start to be parodies of it. The poem opens us all up to the idea of plums, and we can't wait for them to come in season. They turn out to be something of a disappointment, or maybe we just never get a good one. The children are learning subliminal lessons about the need for civility in relationships, always; and the absolute requirement that we communicate. I love the idea of this polite little poem, this veiled ode to desire, the quenching of desire, and the regret that inevitably follows, burbling through our home like a Zen koan.

We also love Yeats's “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” How timely, how contemporary seem these musings of the alienated aviator, who fights not because of “law” or “duty” or the exhortations of “public men” and “cheering crowds,” but simply because of his profound love of flying. He has achieved the self-actualization we all strive for.

It is good for the children to imbibe a healthy dose of antijingoism, coupled with the marvelous evocation of all that man is capable of. Here is a man who has followed his dreams and freed himself, as nearly as one can, from the bonds and boundaries of the world. His passion may well lead to his doom, but following his heart is the means to achieve lasting happiness. I followed my heart and wrote my fiction, but my mistake was to abandon the dream and jump into real estate. I should have been content with my surroundings and written more; those reams of unpublished pages, in an odd way, were a key to satisfaction. I might never have succeeded as a writer, most likely wouldn't have, but my dreams at least kept my life grounded. It was only when I abandoned the dreams that I felt the gnawing, the nothingness, that I tried to fill with a house. I hope that my children have large dreams, and I hope they approach them more thoughtfully, with more self-awareness, than I did.

Other poems have come to be part of the shared language of the household. “It is better to produce one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works,” wrote Ezra Pound; does any poet encapsulate this more than Robert Hayden? A great many poets never come with anything as devastatingly true and ringing as the money phrase from “Those Winter Sundays,” his hit out of the ballpark: “love's austere and lonely offices.” I joke around with the children about the phrase; making a peanut butter sandwich becomes one of life's austere and lonely offices; the phrase heartens me, and gives me the strength to proceed with my own evening offices. On the Little League field and the school basketball court, my wife and I watch with great fervor; there is no more total escape from workaday cares, as James Wright well knows, than youth sports. I see myself among the disappointed souls in his 1963 poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” the “Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,” the “ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,” the “proud fathers” who are “ashamed to go home.” (Why? Are their mortgages too big?) And why do their wives “cluck like starved pullets, / Dying for love”? Have the cares of life extinguished all hope of sexual ardor? In the end, there is almost no joy to be had
but
the youth sports, and they take on a heft they would not have otherwise had: “Therefore, / Their sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.” After the basketball game, we leave the hot gym and step into the freezing night; shivering in the quiet, our breath steaming, the still world somehow seems bereft, and I would give anything for the game to begin again.

From the abyss of despair comes the light of literature. Few things have been as comforting to me in the long middle of my life.

W
HEN I THINK OF MYSELF TEACHING, in my mind's eye I see a composite class of all the students I have taught. The faces looking out at me are not particularly eager. I see nursing students and EMTs, education students on the road to becoming teachers, midlife career changers, state and local government workers, military types and civilians who labor on military bases. I see a part-time high school coach looking to grab a certificate and get tenure. I see hopeful police officers, court officers, sheriffs, marshals, correctional officers, parole and probation officers—representatives in training, in short, from all stages of the criminal justice cycle, from pursuit to apprehension to release.

I can't say that I've been particularly successful as a writing instructor, but I teach in the way that comes most naturally to me. My goal is to demonstrate for my students the way a writer thinks.

I present myself to the class less as a writing instructor than as a writer. I emphasize what is, I believe, the greatest strength of the adjunct. As one writer has put it rather elegantly, adjuncts “possess something that regular, full-time faculty members essentially lack: authenticity.” Adjuncts are, as the title of this article puts it, “emissaries from the world beyond.”
¹
I know the craft of writing. I tend to think of my students as apprentices. I would pass on what I knew to them, like a stonemason or potter or auto mechanic. Writing is an art and a craft and a knack that can, with time and long effort—longer than we really have, unfortunately—be mastered.