Anagrams (26 page)

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On Thursday I get a note in my department mailbox. It is what I was afraid of: I no longer have a job. It has been necessary to cut down on the number of writing courses. The Reading and Writing of Poetry is being eliminated entirely. There’s an additional informal note about my “questionable personal conduct”—it says that although that is not the reason I’m being laid off, I should be more aware of this in conjunction with future academic employment. It’s signed by the department chairman, Standish Massie, a Marxist with a hilltop Tudor house that has a great view of the Fitchville proletariat.

I get out of the mailroom fast. I get out to think, to walk, to head for my car.

I’m looking forward to the unemployment checks. What is teaching, anyway? Nothing more than babysitting, like some failed, old wet nurse. You eat too much, snoop and poke around the kitchen, see what’s there. Soon the parents come home. And they catch you, always, napping on the sofa in a snore and a ring of cookie crumbs.

I try to think of the proper, dignified way to depart: Shake hands with the department chairman, hug the secretary, give some books to the faculty library. The upstairs faculty library, I’ve always been told, is where teachers donate their books when they leave.

And so right then and there I go home, pack up a box of old paperbacks I don’t want, and bring them back to campus, march them upstairs to the faculty library. The librarian sees me coming down the corridor and stands, slowly, behind her desk, like a sheriff in a western.

I set the box down on her desk and look around: The place is small, in need of books. “Here are some faculty books,” I tell the librarian. The titles include
Sheena, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla
, and
How to Make Love Without Really Trying
. “Looks like you could use a few.”

Close up the librarian is young and sexy as a starlet. “This is a library for books
written
by faculty members, not simply owned by them at one time.”

I look at her, look toward the window, look back at her, her perfectly lashed eyes and blink. “Oh my god,” I whisper. It is, after all, a library. “I’m sorry. I thought it was like a summer cottage, you know, like after you’ve read something you leave it for the next person.”

“This isn’t a summer cottage.”

“Right. God. You are so right.” And I take the books back up into my arms, like a mother, like a mother of books, and I turn and clunk back down the three flights of stairs, my coat over one arm, the metal fire door slamming behind me. Out in the parking lot the sky is dark and spitting snow. I stand by my car for a second, out of breath, lean the books onto the hood, and struggle with my coat. When I get it on, when I am in the car with my coat on and my books, I look up through the windshield at the square fluorescent eyes of the library. “You’re damn right this is no summer cottage,” I practically shout. I practically shout in my car! And without warming up I tear home through two yellow lights and a stop sign.

When I pull into the driveway, I can hear noise from a party over at the Shubbys’. It leaks out at me through the windows of their turquoise home like a fume. The Shubbys are good people, I have to remind myself. They have probably never hurt a soul in their lives. They are generous. They love life. They have a beautiful daughter. And when I get inside and can still hear their party noise I phone the police and register a public nuisance complaint—“I can’t sleep,” I say, “I can’t think!”—and then I hang up and a minute later phone again; this time I change my voice, high and a bit southern, like a different neighbor. “They’re disturbing the entire block,” I say, and then I sit in the living room, with the lights out and my coat on, waiting for the police,
for the flashing red lights, for the sergeant who will put them all in handcuffs, gruffly issue summonses, slap Isabelle up against the wall in a frisk, though she is only seven.

Gerard has seemed in good spirits except for today. He’s no longer in traction, and they had taken him off the tubes, but he complained about the food (“the spit-pee soup”) and then threw up, so they put him back on. He has gotten thin, even in just the past few days. Today he’s griping more than usual about the ineptitudes and barbarisms of the medical staff. “What a medieval place this is,” he says. “I’m telling you, it’s like the nineteenth century in here.” I wonder if this is one of Gerard’s big problems, that he has a confused sense of history.

Gerard’s head hurts worse. He feels feverish and nauseated.

“Merrilee’s gone to California for Christmas,” says Gerard. He looks gray like a prisoner of war, like mangled grade-school clay. I worry that something’s wrong. He should be looking better than this. “And Maple phoned and wasn’t able to come today. My back is mush from lying here. Sometimes I think I’m going to die.” His eyes are off doing independent things. One eye is fixed on me, like something snapped to attention, and the other is lost and fatigued, floating toward the outside of his face like a crazy moon. He blinks, and the eyes switch, trade places.

“Shut up, Gerard. You’re not going to die. Everyone says you’ll be out of here soon.” Though something, it’s true, is wrong. I sit on the edge of the bed. Life is sad; here is someone. “I’ll take care of you,” I say. “I mean, Gerard, you’re like a brother to me. You’re like the closest brother I ever had.” Gerard closes his eyes and begins to cry. I lean over and he presses his face into my breasts, the chenille of his eyebrows against my blouse. I kiss his wet eyelids and his lips shift into a sad smile. “Oh, well,” he says. “Thank you, my carpenter aunt, toppler of buildings.”

I don’t say anything.

“You’re okay, Benna,” Gerard continues tiredly, though opening his eyes. “Look at you. There you are. You’re okay.” He is making amends. I can see him begin to drift off but fight it, the P.O.W. shadows deepening. I want to hold him, tight, but I don’t. Instead, not thinking he’ll hear me, I murmur to myself, “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” and suddenly one of his puppeted arms flies upward in the air, finger pointing. “
That
, my dear,” he says, “is a supreme compliment.” His eyes are still closed and his arm begins to drop back down, slow like a ballet of a dead bird. He smiles feebly. “That is a Diana Ross and the Supremes compliment.”

And that’s the last thing he says. He has fallen asleep with his mouth open. The nurse comes in and, worried, I ask her if Gerard’s all right, that he just sort of drifted off, and she smiles and says he’s only taking a nap, not to worry, just come back tomorrow, he might be more rested. Then she gives him an injection, and I just stand there with my coat in my arms and squeak out “ ’Bye,” like a mouse in a movie.

The next day is December eighteenth, a week before Christmas, and I’ve bought Gerard a beautiful new bathrobe from an import store. It has indecipherable Oriental lettering on the back, and I will tell him that it says “Howard Johnson’s” in Korean, which is probably what it does say. I’ve also brought him Christmas candy, little sugar stockings and bells, in case he’s off the tubes. I’m trying to feel hopeful, but today for some reason it seems hard, like a song you don’t really know but fake by coming in on the last word of every line.

Maple’s in the lobby by the elevator, sitting on a vinyl padded bench. He rises, walks toward me, dangerously slow, the swim of a nightmare. Something’s wrong. I’ve done something wrong. Maple stops about four feet from me. The corridor
slows down. I stop too. He glares at me. He hates me, why does he hate me?

“He was in love with you, you know. You should know that. He told me that once.”

“Maple, what the hell are you talking about?” Maple’s face is wincing and withering and looking away.

“The fucking bastards! They were killing him!” And here Maple’s face crumples from hate to grief and rain pours out of his eyes.

“What? Maple, what do you mean?” Gerard! Gerard! I have candies! “Where is Gerard?”

Maple steps toward me, puts his arms around me, around my packages, his albino face trying to find my shoulder, the faint smell of patchouli everywhere on his clothes. I kick him, step backward, jerk away from him, almost lose my balance. The corridor flies up and down, deserted, undulating, a roller coaster in Lebanon. “Dammit, Maple, what are you saying?” I try to swallow, but I choke. “I mean, hold on here. Where is Gerard?” I’ve brought candies for him! I bought Christmas candy for him! and I step further away and begin digging, all alone, through one of the bags.

“There’s going to be an investigation,” says Maple quietly, standing off to one side, all leotard and amethyst; part Horatio, part swizzle stick; and then he brings his hands to his face, turns toward the wall, and sobs.

The teacher’s packages slip, and her boots stumble, twisting her ankle. Little stockings and bells have spilled to the floor and are rolling around there. She grabs hold of a table, of a sofa arm—hold on here, hold on here—anything could fly away now. Where on earth does everybody go?

Maple is harder and harder to see; he is bleeding into the wall. “Maple,” she cries out. “We’ll sue!” This is finally all she can speak: the words of a lawyer’s widow. “We’ll sue for everything
…” but then she is at some door, brow against glass, a small friendless girl, standing in candy and vomiting into an ashtray with sand in it.

Sometimes all life felt like this: a choice between Greyhound and Rent-A-Wreck. It reminded her of a joke she’d heard once about two shipwrecked sailors who land on an island of heartless primitives. “You have a choice,” says the island king to the first sailor. “Instantaneous Death or Chee-Chee.” The first sailor gulps. “I guess I’ll go with Chee-Chee,” he says. There is a loud gong. “You have chosen Chee-Chee,” announces the king, and two huge men appear and cut off the sailor’s arms and legs, disembowel him, skin him, then leave him in a steaming heap to die. “
You
have a choice,” says the king turning to the second sailor. “Instantaneous Death or Chee-Chee.” The second sailor is pale and sweating. “I guess I’ll take Instantaneous Death,” he says. There is another loud gong. “You have chosen Instantaneous Death,” says the king like a Las Vegas emcee. “But first—Chee-Chee!”

Benna opted for the bus, and found herself staring out the film of the window, at houses, trees, signs, as if she were starving for something. Perhaps it was all that motion within the single frame of the window, or the desire to be out and beyond the odors here, the smokey, not quite disinfected smell from the bus’s hindquarters, but her eyes felt lidless, unquenchable. She pulled things in, as she had her whole life, and then didn’t know quite what to do with them: the jagged eczema of snow along the river; the parsley-fur of tamaracks and pines; the clouds, which, without the anchoring ache of their dark bellies, looked as if they would wisp away. A Holiday Inn signboard on the highway read
RELAX ETHEL AND DRESSER: YOU’VE MADE IT!
The parking lot was full. Benna wondered if Ethel and Dresser were happy or whether they even thought about it. In a town called Bluewaters she misread a billboard that said
CARPENTER’S: YOUR OWN PERSONAL WAREHOUSE
, thinking at first that it said “whorehouse,” which broke her stare, turned her attention inward for a moment to her knees, to her magazine, to the empty seat beside her spread with someone else’s
Times
, to the old woman across the aisle who had just taken out a nectarine from a paper bag and bit and slurped and, napkinless, dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the edge of the paper bag. Benna looked back at her knees feeling that she’d been made, forever and for now, like her marriage vows, stupid with loneliness, bereft of any truth or wisdom or flicker of poetry, possessed only of the wild glaze of a person who spends entire days making things up.

The river raced alongside them, a dog barking and chasing.

Ah,
warehouse
. It said
warehouse
.

Her brother Louis lived in Queens. He’d been there for two years now and she’d never visited. She was going to stay at his apartment overnight and then catch a cab to Kennedy the next morning. Her plane left at nine-thirty a.m., a silly charter flight dubbed “Carefree.” A close friend of hers had died and she was getting away. She was going to the Caribbean, a package tour of desert islands, all rimmed in glitz: casinos, discos, dancing girls at the Americana. She would step off the plane and the heat and sun would hit her like a hallucination. She would eat one native tomatoey-banana dish per island; she would dance with men who spoke a halting English; she would eat canapés that looked like the asses of gibbons; she’d drink piña coladas on the rumrunner cruise; she would feed the starving, gunk-eyed cats that came rubbing around her chair legs in the cafés—she would drop them bits of roast beef. When fellow tourists confided doubtful
things, she would say, “Don’t make my shoes laugh,” an island idiom. She would watch her purse. She would get a tan.

She slept and dreamed of a man who poked paper clips through his bottom lip.

The bus coughed and rumbled into Port Authority. She opened her eyes. The nectarine woman smiled at her and said, “Wasn’t the skyline coming in just beautiful?” Benna smiled back, nodded, then heaved her bag off the overhead shelf and bumped her way off the bus. The bus driver winked and told her to have a Merry Christmas. She’d almost forgotten: Tomorrow was Christmas.

She followed signs and escalators up to Eighth Avenue, then walked the one block to the RR, the air cold and acidic. Taxis whizzed by in the slush. She had once lived in New York, not far from here, before the terminal had been renovated, and she could still remember the same half-tourist, half-resident feeling she’d had even when she’d lived here. She’d had two love affairs and had, with each of them, gone to the top of the World Trade Center for drinks.

She waited on the subway platform with two men, one of them reading a paper with a headline that said
BRAIN-DAMAGED JFK HELD CAPTIVE IN SOUTH
AMERICA
, the other one pacing down at the opposite end, his steps echoing. Benna could hear other trains shuddering in the distance, above, but soon there was silence and only the man’s echoing steps. She stared at the tracks, glanced up once in a while at the Broadway show posters.