Blasphemy (45 page)

Corliss and the homeless white man ate in silence. He was too hungry to talk. She didn’t know what to say.

“Thank you,” he said after he’d finished. “Thank you for the acknowledgment of my humanity. A man like me doesn’t get to be human much.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

“You can ask me a human question, yes.”

“How’d you end up homeless? You’re obviously a smart man, talking the way you do. I know smart doesn’t guarantee anything, but still, what happened?”

“I just fell out of love with the world.”

“I understand how that goes. I’m not so sure about the world myself, but was there anything in particular?”

“First of all, I am nuts. Diagnosed and prescribed. But there’s all sorts of nutcases making millions and billions of dollars in this country. That Ted Turner, for example, is a crazy rat living in a gold-plated outhouse. But I got this particular kind of nuts, you know? I got a pathological need for respect.”

“I’ve never heard of that condition.”

“Yeah, ain’t no Jerry Lewis running a telethon for my kind of sickness. The thing is, I should have been getting respect. I was an economics professor at St. Jerome the Second University here in Seattle. A fine institution of higher education.”

“That’s why you’re so smart.”

“Knowing economics only means you know numbers. Doesn’t mean you know people. Anyway, I hated my job. I hated the kids. I hated my colleagues. I hated money. And I felt like none of them respected me, you know? I felt their disrespect growing all around me. I felt suffocated by their disrespect. So one day, I just walked out in the campus center, you know, right there on the green, green Roman Catholic grass, and started shouting.”

Corliss could feel the heat from this man’s mania. It was familiar and warm.

“What did you shout?” she asked.

“I kept shouting, ‘I want some respect! I want some respect!’ I shouted it all day and all night. And nobody gave me any respect. I was asking directly for it, and people just kept walking around me. Avoiding me. Not even looking at me. Not even acknowledging me. Hundreds of people walked by me. Thousands. Then finally, twenty-seven hours after I started, one of my students, a young woman by the name of Melissa, a kind person who was terrible with numbers, came up to me, hugged me very close, and whispered, ‘I respect you, Professor Williams, I respect you.’ I started crying. Weeping. Those tears that start from your bowels and roar up through your stomach and heart and lungs and out of your mouth. Do you know the kind of tears of which I’m speaking?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

“Yes. So I started crying, and I kept crying, and I couldn’t stop crying no matter how hard I tried. They tell me I cried for two weeks straight, but all I remember is that first day. I took a leave of absence from school, sold my house, and spent my money in a year, and now I’m here, relying, as they say, on the kindness of strangers.”

“I am kind because you are kind. Thank you for sharing your story.”

“Thank you for showing me some respect. I need respect.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. She knew this man would talk to her for days. She knew he’d fall in love with her and steal everything she owned if given the chance. And she knew he might be lying to her about everything. He might be an illiterate heroin addict with a gift for gab. But he was also a man who could and would give her directions.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I really have to get moving. Can you tell me where this address is?”

“I’m sorry you have to leave me. But I understand. I was born to be left and bereft. Still, I made a human promise to you, and I will keep it, as a human. This address is on the other side of the Space Needle. Walk directly toward the Space Needle, pass right beneath it, keep walking to the other side of the Seattle Center, and you’ll find this address somewhere close to the McDonald’s over there.”

“You know where all the McDonald’s are?”

“Yes, humans who eat fast food feel very guilty about eating it. And guilty people are more generous with their money and time.”

Corliss bought him a chicken sandwich and another chocolate shake and then left him alone.

She walked toward the Space Needle, beneath it, and beyond it. She wondered if the homeless professor had sent her on a wild-goose chase, or on what her malaproping auntie called a dumb-duck run. But she saw that second McDonald’s and walked along the street until she found the address she was looking for. There, at that address, was a tiny, battered, eighty-year-old house set among recently constructed condominiums and apartment buildings. If Harlan Atwater had kept the same phone number for thirty-three years, Corliss surmised, then he’d probably lived in the same house the whole time, too. She wasn’t searching for a nomad who had disappeared into the wilds. She’d found a man who had stayed in one place and slowly become invisible. If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile? Corliss was afraid of confronting the man in person. What if he was violent? Or worse, what if he was boring? She walked into the second McDonald’s, ordered a Diet Coke, and sat at the window and stared at Harlan Atwater’s house. She studied it.

Love Song

I have loved you during the powwow

And I have loved you during the rodeo.

I have loved you from jail

And I have loved you from Browning, Montana.

I have loved you like a drum and drummer

And I have loved you like a holy man.

I have loved you with my tongue

And I have loved you with my hands.

But I haven’t loved you like a scream.

And I haven’t loved you like a moan.

And I haven’t loved you like a laugh.

And I haven’t loved you like a sigh.

And I haven’t loved you like a cough.

And I haven’t loved you well enough.

After two more Diet Cokes and a baked apple pie, Corliss walked across the street and knocked on the door. A short, fat Indian man answered.

“Who are you?” he asked. He wore thick glasses, and his black hair needed washing. Though he was a dark-skinned Indian, one of the darker Spokanes she’d ever seen, he also managed to look pasty. Dark and pasty, like a chocolate doughnut. Corliss was angry with him for being homely. She’d hoped he would be an indigenous version of Harrison Ford. She’d wanted Indiana Jones and found Seattle Atwater.

“Are you just going to stand there?” he asked. “If you don’t close your mouth, you’re going to catch flies.”

He was fifty or sixty years old, maybe older. Old! Of course he was that age. He’d published his book thirty years ago, but Corliss hadn’t thought much about the passage of time. In her mind, he was young and poetic and beautiful. Now here he was, the Indian sonneteer, the reservation bard, dressed in a Seattle SuperSonics T-shirt and sweatpants.

“Yo, kid,” he said. “I don’t have all day. What do you want?”

“You’re Harlan Atwater,” she said, hoping he wasn’t.

He laughed. “Dang,” he said. “You’re that college kid. You don’t give up, do you?”

“I’m on a vision quest.”

“A vision quest?” he asked and laughed harder. “You flatter me. I’m just a smelly old man.”

“You’re a poet.”

“I used to be a poet.”

“You wrote this book,” she said and held it up for him.

He took it from her and flipped through it. “Man,” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy of this in a long time.”

He remembered. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

“You don’t have one?” she asked.

“No,” he said and silently read one of the sonnets. “Dang, I was young when I wrote these. Too young.”

“You should keep that one.”

“It’s a library book.”

“I’ll pay the fine.”

“This book means more to you than it means to me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have found me. You should keep it and pay the fine.”

He handed the book back to her. He laughed some more.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “I’m not trying to belittle you. But I can’t believe that little book brought you here.”

“I’ve never read a book of Indian poems like that.”

She started to cry and furiously wiped her tears away. She cried too easily, she thought, and hated how feminine and weak it appeared to be. No, it wasn’t feminine and weak to cry, not objectively speaking, but she still hated it.

“Nobody’s cried over me in a long time,” he said.

“You know,” she said, “I came here because I thought you were something special. I read your poems, and some of them are really bad, but some of them are really good, and maybe I can’t always tell the difference between the good and the bad. But I know somebody with a good heart wrote them. Somebody lovely wrote them. And now I look at you, and you look terrible, and you sound terrible, and you smell terrible, and I’m sad. No, I’m not sad. I’m pissed off. You’re not supposed to be like this. You’re supposed to be somebody better. I needed you to be somebody better.”

He shook his head, sighed, and looked as if he might cry with her.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “But I am who I am. And I haven’t written a poem in thirty years, you know? I don’t even remember what it feels like to write a poem.”

“Why did you quit writing poems?” she asked. She knew she sounded desperate, but she was truly desperate, and she couldn’t hide it. “Nobody should ever quit writing poems.”

“Jesus, you’re putting me in a spot here. All right, all right, we’ll have a talk, okay? You’ve come this far, you deserve to hear the truth. But not in my house. Nobody comes in my house. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll meet you over to the McDonald’s.”

“I’ve already been in that McDonald’s.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t like to go to the same place twice in the same day. Especially since I was just there.”

“That’s a little bit crazy.”

“I’m a little bit crazy.”

He liked that.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll meet you down to the used-book store. You can see it there at the corner.”

“You read books?”

“Just because I quit writing doesn’t mean I quit reading. For a smart kid, you’re kind of dumb, you know?”

That pleased her more than she’d expected. He was still a smart-ass, so maybe he was still rowdy enough to write poems. Maybe there was hope for him. She felt evangelical. Maybe she could save him. Maybe she’d pray for him and he’d fall to his knees in the bookstore and beg for salvation and resurrection.

“All right?” he asked. “About fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

He closed the door. For a moment, she wondered if he was tricking her, if he needed a way to close the door on her. Well, he’d have to call the cops to get rid of her. She’d camp on his doorstep until he came out. She’d wait in the bookstore for exactly seventeen minutes, and if he was one second later, she’d break down his front door and interrogate him. He was an out-of-shape loser and she could take him. She’d teach him nineteen different ways to spell matriarchy.

She hurried to the bookstore and walked inside. An elderly woman was crocheting behind the front desk.

“Can I help you?” the yarn woman asked.

“I’m just waiting for somebody,” Corliss said.

“A young man, perhaps?”

Why were young women always supposed to be waiting for young men? Corliss didn’t like young men all that much. Or old men, either. She was no virgin. She’d slept with three boys and heavily petted a dozen more, but she’d also gone to bed with one woman and French-kissed the holy-moly out of another, and hey, maybe that was the way to go. Maybe I’m not exactly a lesbian, Corliss thought, but I might be an inexact lesbian.

“Is there a man waiting at home for you?” Corliss asked and immediately felt like a jerk.

“Oh, no,” the yarn woman said and smiled. “My husband died twenty years ago. If he’s waiting for me, he’s all the way upstairs, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” Corliss said and meant it.

“It’s okay, dear, I shouldn’t have invaded your privacy. You go on ahead and look for what you came for.”

On every mission, there is a time to be strong and a time to be humble.

“Listen, my name is Corliss Joseph, and I’m sorry for being such a bitch. There’s no excuse for it. I’m really angry with the guy I’m supposed to be meeting here soon. He’s not my boyfriend, or even my friend, or anything like that. He’s a stranger, but I thought I knew him. And he disappointed me. I don’t even think I have a right to be angry with him. So I’m really confused about—Well, I’m confused about my whole life right now. So I’m sorry, I really am, and I’m usually a much kinder person than this, you know?”