Anagrams (15 page)

“Writing is a safari, dammit,” exclaimed the teacher. “It means going out there and spotting, nabbing, and bringing home to the cage of the page the most marvelous living stuff of the world.”

Timothy Robinson sat right in front of the teacher. He was doodling scenes from Conan in the margins of his notebook.

“But those cages are small and expensive,” the teacher continued, searched, groped, not knowing quite what she was talking about.

Conan’s pectorals were like concrete slabs and in Timothy Robinson’s margins Conan’s biceps and triceps had begun to make his arms look like large croissants. Now he suddenly was getting sunglasses. Now striped thighs.

“Don’t bring back any dim-witted mooses,” she said. “Don’t put a superfluous dumb cluck of a line in your poem.” She had used her lifeboat simile in the last class: A line is like a lifeboat—only a limited number of words get to go in it and you have to decide which word-lives are most valuable; the rest die.

It was ridiculous, but the only thing she could think of to say.

When no one said anything in response, she stared out into the center of the room and said, “So, Tim. How the fuck is Conan?”

·  ·  ·

The small, dingy P&C by campus is unusually crowded and not just with jean-jacketed students buying beer, bananas, hamburger. There are even families in here, as if from some other neighborhood. Perhaps there’s a sale. The three available shopping carts by the door are gritty with black grease, spangled with lettuce bits like a rabbit’s cage. They are all jammed into each other, a copulation of stainless steel. I unhitch the one with the least grease but the most lettuce and proceed to wheel it into the mayhem. People are crashing into each other in the narrow produce aisle, scrambling zigzag for plastic bags.

“Excuse me,” says a male student in a white turtleneck. He doesn’t have a cart, only a beige knapsack of books over his shoulder. He isn’t interested in produce. “Excuse me,” he says to me again. “I saw you outside and followed you in here because I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to tell you that.”

“Oh, my god,” I say and turn away, suddenly startled into a weird sort of terror. I fumble with the cabbage heads. Who does this guy think he is? I try to glide voicelessly away.

“Are you a student here?” the guy persists.

I can feel myself pale, jittery, glaring at a point slightly to the left of one of his ears. His heart, I know, is all chutzpah and photography. “No, I’m an instructor.” I try to pronounce it like a baroness, but it comes out faltering and wrong. “Excuse me,” I say to the student, then squeeze past him, between a center-aisle mustard display and someone else’s cartload of dog food and frozen orange juice. I cross the aisle to the apples.

The student follows. “I hope I didn’t offend you,” he says. I keep my back to him, studying the apples. “My name is John. I’m an archaeology major,” he says, examining, I can tell, the tweed back of my thrift-shop man’s coat. I examine apple after apple, taking out my reading glasses, putting them on, and then peering out over them, saying, “Hmmmmm.” I pretend
to be an apple scientist. I’m unable to tell him straight out to get lost.

“Well,” says John, finally. “Good-bye,” and he ambles away.

I remain at the apples, counting, counting. I can feel my face splotch with red, my mouth clamp into a hard line. I breathe deeply, run my hand through my hair, return to my cart and quickly wheel it around, head for the checkout line, like someone who needs desperately to be alone, to be in bed, to be taking a bath, somewhere far away, conjugating verbs, memorizing dynasties.

The ants are still trafficking around the place, seemingly undisturbed by the weather’s getting colder. Georgianne keeps singing her own misheard lyrics to a Bob Dylan song: “The ants are my friends / They’re blowing in the wind.” The crack has moved a few more inches, taking a slight upward turn like a kind of graph, an optimistic poll. The plumbing, however, is sluggish, acting up, the toilet slow and undignified, churning the toilet-paper, stewing, shredding things finer. This is what it’s like to live in a house.

Georgie has dinner and a bath, and Mrs. Kimball comes over and I say good night and drive over to Gerard’s apartment. We are going to have drinks there and then go off to the Dome Room at the Holiday Inn where he will play and I will sit in an elegant booth and mark up student poems all evening. And listen.

He is in the kitchen pouring bourbon over ice.

I pace idly about his apartment. Over his bed Gerard has placed a cheap gift-shop placard reading
MISERY LOVES COMPANY
. One of his Greece posters on the same wall is starting to come down. A tack is missing and the tape on the back is fuzzy
with lint. “Hey, Gerard, where do you keep your tape? I’m going to fix your Kythera poster.”

“Try the drawer in the nightstand there,” he calls, making ice cube and glass noises.

I open the drawer. It’s crammed with a jumble of things—old sheet music, dice, masking tape, regular tacks, carpet tacks, unopened packages of condoms. I take out the masking tape. Gerard has come in with drinks and hands me one. I notice he has missed a belt loop. I slip the tape roll over my wrist like a bracelet and push the drawer shut with one hip.

“Cheers,” says Gerard, smiling.

“Go team go,” I say, former alternate cheerleader at Tomaston High. We drink slowly, deliciously. “Tell me, Gerard. Why is it that you keep your
condoms
in the same drawer as your carpet tacks and tape?”

Gerard slurps and swallows. “How else are you supposed to keep them on?” he says.

The Holiday Inn is more brightly lit than most places Gerard plays in. There are pink glassed candles on the tables, but the whole windowless place is a bright amberish yellow and the candles are merely gestures, splots of silly complementary colors, like decorator pillows. Gerard takes his drink, sips, places it on the piano up front. He has arranged for a free glass of chablis for me, and the waitress comes over, places it in front of me, smiles, goes away. I have connections. It’s all small town and rink-a-dink, but I have connections with celebrity.

I pull out student poems from my bag. I think about Gerard wanting to be an opera singer, his hunger to have something grander than this, the arrogance of a hunger.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” It’s Gerard, adjusting the microphone. A spotlight flips on and Gerard squints into it. That, too, wanders around like a searchlight, getting adjusted,
and Gerard, along with Charlie by the speakers who is supposedly in charge of the lights, goes into some five-second Berlin Wall pantomime: expressions of chase and horror, arms thrown in the air. They laugh, then resume a more responsible mien.

“Good evening again, ladles and gentlespoons.” This time he strikes a few chords. “Welcome to the Dome Room”—two more, ascending tonics. “At the”—chord. “Holiday Inn”—big chord and glissando. I’ve seen him do this dozens of times. Usually he launches quickly into a lot of bad lady-cannibal jokes, prefaced by “Where’s the dome in this room? What a dome name.” At least, I console myself, he does this for money. Tonight he introduces himself: “I’m Gerard Maines. I know some of you were expecting Tammy Wynette, but these things happen.” Then he starts in with “Just You, Just Me,” his own jazz rendition, never looking at the keyboard. In front of me I have a poem about an alien. From another solar system. I have forbidden any poems about aliens, but sometimes students beg me—“Please, just
one
alien”—and they slip in. Now Gerard stops to banter with the audience: “What? You’re from
where
? Belittle, New York? You would live in a town with a name like that?” The people up front by the piano are loving it, the good-natured ribbing, they are starved for it. It’s still a weeknight and the place isn’t that full—only every other table has someone at it. Mostly businessmen, some couples, a group of women in their early twenties, smiling hopefully at Gerard then turning and whispering to one another, hands to lips. Gerard often attracts women like this. They come up to him on breaks and at the end of the night to chat and gush and ask him questions about the way he sang a certain song and what he does during the day. Sometimes they come up to him in pairs, stand there, hands in pockets, bodies leaning, sunk into one hip. Other times they come individually, a gesticulative drink in one hand, undulating cigarette in the other. Often, he’s confided, he’s gone home to bed with one of them, both of
them awaking the next day, never in love, not always remembering last names. There was one woman, however, Hermione Miller, only nineteen, who had kept calling him, crying, showing up naked on his doorstep holding lighted candles, breaking into his car and sleeping in the backseat. He would spend whole hours talking to her, calming her down. She insisted she loved him and would go mad without him or at least have a hard time grocery shopping. She would phone him at Carpet Town and keep him on the phone, pretending she was interested in something in a lilac shag. Finally she fell for another musician, someone who worked the Double Bubble Hour at Howard Johnson’s.

“When I was in high school,” said Gerard, “I was moral and virile and sweet and trying to change my name to Buff, and no one would have me. There wasn’t a girl in Queens who would look at me.”

I don’t really believe this. It’s all part of Gerard’s poor-boy-in-Queens mythologizing.

“Now I’m a carpet salesman in an upstate suburb, a rat playing the piano, drunk with operatic aspirations, and people I hardly know say they’re in love with me. Christ.” He paused. “Middle age is dangerous.”

“Middle age? Gerard, you’re a year younger than
I
am.”

“I know,” he said.

Gerard’s still on the first set. He has another drink coming. The waitress leaves it on the piano. Someone near me at the bar is eating Vaseline. He has a jar and a spoon and is just eating. I try not to stare. I try to turn my attention to the stuff I’ve brought. I try to find things to cross out or circle, so I can feel like a teacher, like someone who knows things. This afternoon I was listening to the kids out in front of the house—Isabelle Shubby and some others—playing games, that timeless legacy of hopscotch and jumping rhymes children bring to one another, mysteriously,
without adults, and I wondered, Is there a secret world of knowledge that adults know, that gets passed on from one generation to the next, the way there is with children? I think not. I think you’re blurped out into the world, you get a few jumprope rhymes, and from there on in you’re on your own. Nobody tells you anything. Nobody shows you how.

“Hey, you in the back doing my taxes,” shouts Gerard into the microphone. I look up and he winks. “This is for you.” I wait to hear what it is. “I Want Money.” I nod and smile. I’m now part of Gerard’s act. A few people turn to look at me.

One of them is Maple up near the front. I didn’t see him come in and now we wave enthusiastically. Maple stands, says “Excuse me” to a few people in chairs, and attempts to make his way over to my table. It takes a while before he is sitting next to me.

“So, this is your song?” he says.

“Not really.” Growing up we always said “Not hardly,” and I find myself almost saying it now. We also said “kranz” instead of “crayons,” and began all sentences with “Anyways …”

“How’ve you been? Lots of work, I see.”

“Oh, yeah. How about you?”

“Gotta new job,” he says. “I’m a waiter at a veggie and granola place on Roosevelt. I’ll have more time for my dancing that way.”

“Be careful. You know you can never really trust people who don’t eat meat.”

Maple smiles. “It’s better than clerking at Howland’s.” He turns his profile to me. He has three amethysts in his ear. He combs back his hair with his fingers, eyeing the piano. “I’m worried about Gerard,” he says. “He’s drinking too much.” The music has stopped. Gerard’s on a twenty-minute break. I see him start to wend his way over here but get waylaid by a woman in red slacks.

I try to think. Is Gerard drinking too much? Am I? Have I really noticed? “You think so?” I ask. And the waitress brings over two glasses of white wine.

“This is from Gerard,” she says.

“You know he’s going to audition for opera companies?”

“Yeah, I know,” I sigh, all weariness and concern, and then neither of us says anything. We tap our fingers, gaze down, gaze off. “Do you realize,” I say at last, “that there’s a guy sitting at the bar eating Vaseline?”

In class the teacher was teaching poetic forms. She defined
villanelle, sestina, limerick
. Last night she had looked up
terza rima
in the dictionary; it followed
tertiary syphilis
, something she’d always suspected.

Saturday dinner with Darrel is at the Fitchville Souvlaki House, where Gerard and I first went years ago. There’s a permanent sign on the door that says
CLOSE ON MONDAY
, and I worry that somehow Darrel and I won’t be.

This is where Darrel wants to go. He likes the checked tablecloths, the accents flying around in the kitchen. You can hear them when someone pushes in or out of the door in back. I look around the place and wonder who all here’s on first dates.

We order recklessly. I’m not sure what we’re getting. Darrel tells me that the Greek name for stuffed grape leaves means liar eggplant.

“Personally,” I say, “I’ve never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don’t even pronounce?” I light a cigarette and try to look sophisticated. I am that afraid of the world. Really, I have never gotten out of Tomaston High.

Darrel smiles and says that before he was in Vietnam, he was in Italy for six months, a weird mix of orders, and, on leave
for a week, he went to Greece, island-hopped, learned a few phrases, never slept at all. He describes things: some fishermen he met, a village woman, a disco on the beach.

“What about the Acropolis?” I am into the authentic partaking of foreign countries, not ever having been to one myself, unless marriage counts.

Darrel describes the Acropolis, and, yes, it sounds like marriage: high, stunning, stony, and old with a gift shop at the bottom. He goes on to talk about neolithic architectural sites, the ancient Epidauros amphitheater. I feel ordinary and ungrammatical, and as always blame the trailer, blame growing up in a trailer.