A Moveable Famine (33 page)

“You got a problem?” the bartender said.

“These are all signed by the same person.”

“Asshole!” the bartender said, pumping glasses into the soapy sink.

We were explaining the ruse to Bradbury and Brezini when a young woman entered through a rear door. She wore a tight blouse, short skirt and high heels and approached a three-foot square platform. A table of her friends cheered and one played “Midnight at the Oasis” on the jukebox. The Neutral Corner was a bar, a Chinese restaurant, and a strip club. The girl danced very awkwardly and self-consciously. She removed her blouse, all elbows and forearms. Then she swiveled out of her skirt and fought it off, as if she were undressing in her apartment, solitary and sorrowful. A minute into the song, she stepped from the little square, put her hands to her face, and ran from the room. Two women from her table followed with her clothes.

“I feel sorry for her,” Dorwin said, “but it was erotic.”

“You call a little girl from the sticks standing on a pallet in a cheap bar-cum-Chinese restaurant
erotic
?” Bradbury asked, puffing hard on his pipe.

The bartender had left his station and stood by our table, looking down at Dorwin.

“You think you know something about boxing, wise guy? I’ll tell you something, and you can bet on this.” He pointed his finger at Dorwin who listened with his mouth open.

“Next heavyweight champion of the world,” and he paused so we could grasp the enormity of the information. “Beau Williford!”

We had another round, and Brezini asked the waitress what happened to the dancer.

“She’s new,” the waitress said. “She didn’t do too bad.”

We were enthusiastically agreeing when the dancer, fully dressed, returned and sat at the table with her friends.

Brezini said, “We should tell her she was good.”

Dorwin added, “Should we tell her we’re poets?” When no one answered, he asked again, “Shall we tell her we’re poets?” He was grinning uncontrollably at the thought that the dancer would be impressed with the quality of her audience. We managed to curb his notion but when we left, Dorwin couldn’t help himself from approaching the would-be dancer’s table as a professional dancer gyrated. Outside, he said, “I told her to keep at it, that it was an art, like ours. Like poetry.”

Barkhausen wrote me from The Institute of Living, a mental hospital in Hartford, where he had checked himself in. Many sentences of his ten-page letter were missing prepositions and conjunctions and I wondered if Artie was on medication. He said he needed to stay calm because he had been seeing everything from the window of a train traveling a million miles an hour. He spent his days reading, but the books he asked for were not delivered. He wanted Marguerite Duras and got Alexandre Dumas’s
The Man in the Irony Mask.
Was the “irony” intentional? He wanted
Black Sun,
the life of Harry Crosby, but got
The Black Son,
about a boy whose father was a slave and mother a plantation owner. He was working on a novel and said he might use a “Guy de Plume.”

Melissa was in a great mood. Her agent sold her book of stories and she had fallen in love with William Still, a conceptual artist who signed his work “B. Still.” They walked the grounds hand in hand, drove around Saratoga, ate together. By now, many guests had bonded and, when the door for dinner opened, friends claimed tables by setting their drinks next to their plates and then retrieving their napkins from the sideboard. I sat mostly with the poets, Jean Valentine my favorite. She had a quiet demeanor, hushed voice, and a smoky laugh that filled the room. Melissa approached each new arrival, introducing herself and saying, “You’ll do great work here. I have. My book is coming out next year.” Then she nodded, whispering,
Simon and Schuster.
Her words were perfectly timed to the bowing of her head, just as the nuns in my grammar school had taught us to do at the name of Jesus. At the name of her publisher, all the muscles in Melissa’s neck went limp. Melissa and Bill had decided to live together, but there was a stumbling block—she had a dog and he a cat, and they wondered how the pets would get along. They planned to drive to Brooklyn to introduce them. Melissa would forgo her stay at the Virginia Center for the Arts to be with Bill. “I’ve already had a long year of colonyhopping,” she said.

The composer Giorgio Visconti stood at the front of the dining room, tapped his glass with a spoon and announced that everyone was invited to his composer’s tower for a bash on Thursday. It was a celebration for a performance of his latest piano concerto at Amherst College and he was leaving for it the following day. Henry asked if I would escort him to the party. His back was hurting him and he had a harder time getting in and out of his chair. I said I would, as the tower was a long walk from West House. Dalton said he’d seen Giorgio earlier that afternoon with a woman driving a silver Jaguar, the girlfriend who was taking him to Amherst.

“She’s beautiful, dark hair, black dress, very New York,” he said.

“Big boobs?” Henry asked.

“She was pretty, Henry. I really didn’t check her out that much,” Dalton said.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m a
rump
man myself,” Henry grinned.

“I’m a
cock
woman myself!” screamed a feminist artist at our table, famous for her sculpture of Emma Goldman made of tampon applicators she found on Jones Beach.

Henry blushed and said, “What a lovely girl.”

It was time for dessert, and everyone rose to the sideboard. As I got up, Henry gave me a pained look and asked, “John, would you bring me a black coffee and a piece of cake? My spine feels like broken glass.”

The artist stared when I placed the plate and cup in front of Henry. He thanked me, saying, “Serving those who cannot serve themselves is humanity at its best,” looking at everyone, so it seemed we formed a brotherhood, a bond, between two rump men.

The night of the party I found Henry in his room reading
Death Starts in the Colon.
We made our way out of West House and down the pine-needle path. A little moat surrounded the tower. We crossed a rickety bridge, about ten feet long, with rope handrails and I held Henry tightly. The planks swayed. We were talking about Giorgio’s music, which we had heard in the chapel after dinner.

“It sounded like God having a nervous breakdown,” Henry said.

The cock woman was leaning against the tower entrance, smoking with a friend, and she smirked when we approached. We did seem a strange pair. Henry, out of another time, with his beard, long gray hair and woolen coat, and me holding him, his preppie nephew. We continued talking about Giorgio, but just as we got in front of the two women, Henry said loudly, “I like his chamber music, but I’m particularly fond of his SYMPHONY IN G—SPOT!” And then he laughed, twisting away from me and prancing into the tower, balletic and youthful.

The artist glared at me and said, “You’re such an asshole!”

“What did I do?” I said. I could see Henry in the tower, waving his cane at the wine, asking someone to get him a glass of red.

The round tower was three stories tall and made of brick. A boom box played and everyone drank from the full bar. Giorgio wore a Hawaiian shirt and introduced his girlfriend. She was as pretty as Dalton had reported, all in black. Most of the guests brought guests of their own, so it was crowded and noisy. I got in the spirit and drank shots of Old Grand-Dad with beer chasers. Dalton told me the girl from the kitchen had broken up with him as soon as he submitted his reference. Henry joined us, his gray beard stained with burgundy. Dalton brought the bottle of bourbon from the bar and filled my glass again. When I told him I had already had enough, Henry held out his wine glass for a taste and said, “Each stage of the rocket needs fuel!” He began a discourse on varieties of zinfandel and Dalton sneaked off.

I excused myself from Henry to talk to Jean Valentine. I tried to tell her how much I liked her poems, but my sincere feelings seemed like tipsy flattery. Jean asked how my own work went. I meant to say I felt fortunate to be here, even though I might be poor, but the word
portunate
came out which evoked her long hearty laugh before she quit me for a cigarette. I had another bourbon, leaned against the wall and watched Dalton dancing with the cock woman. She was a great dancer, and I suddenly noticed how attractive she was. I couldn’t stop myself from watching her slim body zip around the floor. My drunken scrutiny led me to observe a yellow stain, a smudge, but heavier, something three-dimensional on the back pocket of her jeans. I kept staring as she spun this way and that.

Jean returned and said, “She’s quite a dancer,” raising her eyebrows.

“Yes, she is,” I whispered, “but she has a stain or something on the seat of her pants.”

“You’ve been paying close attention.”

“Look!” I said, pointing.

The song ended and, as the artist walked away from Dalton, I followed. I saw it close up. The blotch was sticky and familiar—I was certain it was, yes, it was a butterball!

I tapped her shoulder, and she turned, surprised.

I decided it would be gentlemanly to whisper for the sake of discretion, but when I began to speak, I found myself yelling to be heard above the music.

“I think you sat on a butterball.”

“What?” she said.

I repeated it, but she shook her head.

I turned her by the shoulder and pointed to the smudge. She twisted her neck, saw it, and said, “You are one fucking jerk.”

I walked back to Jean. “I thought she should know,” I said. “I would like to know if I sat on one of those butterballs!” Jean just stroked my elbow.

Dalton pointed to the ceiling where a bat dipped and soared.

Henry said, “They’ll go right for your hair!” and many women ran out to the bridge, covering their heads. Giorgio took off his Hawaiian shirt and flailed at the diving bat, circling the circumference of the room, jumping and flinging it against the wall. We all huddled in the middle of the floor as Giorgio and the bat went round and round.

Giorgio swatted the bat when it landed on a protruding brick. The bat and the shirt fell together and the guests moved into a tighter circle. Dalton and I tried to help Giorgio, who bent over the pile of color. Instead of grabbing the bat through the shirt, he inexplicably put his bare hand under it and grabbed its neck between his thumb and forefinger. When he carried it through the crowd, all we could see were two big ears as it went by, squeaking.

A scream came from the doorway. The bat had bitten Giorgio just before he threw it into the night sky. Bradbury ran over, took a handkerchief from his pocket and stanched the blood’s flow. The women returned from the bridge and Giorgio walked around with his girlfriend on his arm, holding a beer in his wrapped hand, telling everyone he was fine.

Henry called Brezini’s favorite poet, James Merrill, “a toe-dancer.” Brezini replied, “Your bits of knowledge came to you like change dropped through a boardwalk. You gathered a dime here, a nickel there . . .”

Henry pointed his cane at Brezini, and said, “You haven’t the brains to understand the epic.”

People started to leave. It was dark, and difficult to see over the bridge, so Giorgio grabbed a lantern and escorted his guests across the moat. Someone walked a drunken Henry to the mansion because I was too drunk. Giorgio asked me to take over the boom box and I fumbled with the tapes, inserting the wrong sides and pressing the wrong buttons. A song finally played just as there was a big fuss at the door because Giorgio had fallen off the bridge. Dalton, Bradbury and I ran out and pulled Giorgio from the moat. He had hurt his ankle and lost the lantern.

Giorgio sat next to his girlfriend, both of them devastated. He had told Dalton that he was looking forward to a big romantic time at the Adolphus Hotel since he had been without sex for the past month, but now his swollen foot rested in an ice bucket and a bloody kerchief covered his hand.

The next night at dinner everyone dressed in white, at the forceful command of a conceptual artist, who wanted to document it. I had forgotten her notion announced earlier in the week, and walked toward the balcony in my blue shirt and jeans. The crowd looked more like a cloud, a gathering of souls, wash on the clothesline, figures from the heavens. Melissa announced to the room that Giorgio had broken his ankle and was in the hospital.

“He missed his
nuit d’amour
and he’ll also miss the performance,” Melissa told us.

During my last week, vitreous floaters danced on the white wall above my desk and my corneal erosion returned. My throat clicked when I swallowed. I thought about making an appointment with an eye doctor and throat doctor. Paramecium-shaped figures in paisley patterns slid across my updated résumé. One image particularly troubled me. It looked like a question mark, and I kept following it across the page, trying to get a better look and, as I did, I swallowed, and my throat clicked. I was closing one eye and then the other when Jean Valentine knocked. She sat on the bed and asked if I wanted to replace her colleague at Sarah Lawrence, Jane Cooper, who had fallen ill. Classes started in a week. Jean and I left the next day for my interview.

The quarter-acre campus was set on a hill. Some students had already arrived, and one stood under a tree wearing a beret and dabbing at a French easel. I met with the advisory council in the office of its chair, pianist Kenneth Newman, who was discussing his standing order for Birkenstocks. Cold autumn light burnished the pine paneling, illuminating the teapot into which Newman scooped chamomile. Bill Park and Bob Wagner of literature joined us, along with Verna Serrini-Smith, a darkly beautiful historian with an Italian accent and a crimson scarf around her forehead. I recognized Bill Park as the editor of my college poetry text. He said that in the year of its publication, he took his family to France, but then a devastating thing happened. He looked to the sky, and said, “The Norton,” referring to the
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry,
which replaced all others.

We sat in armchairs around a dank fireplace and Newman filled our cups. He wore a beard with no mustache and as he lighted his pipe in front of a portholeshaped window, I felt I was on a ship.