Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (14 page)

“What does your father do to support all this?”

“All this what?” Holly asked me.

“This life,” I said.

“Art. He’s in art.”

“That’s all? Just art?”

“For now.”

This news encouraged me. I was only a sophomore; I could still switch majors. I could still learn to paint and cast bronze sculptures. Then again, Truman, whose apartment was probably just like this one, authored novels—and not particularly long ones, either, to judge by the glimpses of them I’d had in libraries. What’s more, he’d succeeded despite his problems with drugs, suggesting that fiction was a forgiving industry.

I sat with my back against the cushioned headboard, scheming. Holly lay on her stomach on the sheet and drizzled a crumbly pyramid of coke onto a makeup mirror between my legs. The key, I decided, was labor. Don’t withhold it. Button. Flush. Wait for green before entering the crosswalk. The revolution that Barry was predicting seemed to me impossibly far off. In the meantime, I’d place my bets on continuity. Eventually the socialists would have bragging rights, but until then the prudent seemed likely to prevail.

“He must be talented,” I said to Holly, taking the mirror from her trembling hands. Someday she, too, I imagined, would go on pilgrimages, and the husband who’d finance them would be I, perhaps.

“My father doesn’t produce,” she said. “He
deals
.”
‘

My spirits sank. The coke went up my nose. They met in a small explosion of emotion. Disappointment crashed into euphoria, yielding a third state: delirium. I walked around for a minute to clear my thoughts.

“The dealers make the artists rich,” I said, peering into the mirror world of dresses. They weren’t identical, I saw. Every other one was white.

“My father’s not that sort of dealer. He sells Old Masters. Italian. Flemish. Like that little Vermeer above the sofa.”

“I didn’t notice it. A real Vermeer?” I dug in one of my nostrils with a pinkie nail and tried to dislodge a coke crumb that was hanging there, intending to crush and reuse it.

“It’s invisible where they put it. It needs rehanging. A piece can appraise for all the black in Africa, but if it’s too small in the context of its space, it may as well not exist,” said Holly.

“I’m thinking you should call down and get your Jaguar.”

“You’re bolting,” said Holly. “You’re sick of me. I bore you.”

“I want to drive out to the ocean.”

“But it’s winter.”

“Not to swim in it, just to walk,” I said.

“How spiritual. How literary. I forget all you bookish types aren’t fun like Truman.”

“Truman has problems, Holly. He has ghosts.”

“Fun
ghosts.”

“You don’t want to go?”

“If you do. Sure.”

Holly phoned for her car and fetched a coat and gloves. I wondered how she knew the weather had changed; it felt like we hadn’t left the tower for days. We summoned the elevator to the living room and as we stepped into it, she said, “Truman thinks I’m named after the Holly in the book he wrote. I said I was. Sometimes I’m such a liar around old men.”

“Which book?”

She stared at me. “You’re kidding?”

“A book I should know?”

“If you study English, yes.”

“English isn’t only about books now.”

“What else is it about?”

I couldn’t tell her.

Down on the street, out front, the car was waiting, waxed and shining, its motor softly roaring. A doorman let Holly into the driver’s seat as I walked around to my side. My door was locked. I knocked on the window. Holly didn’t glance over. She settled a hand on the shift knob, engaged the gears, and glided off into a stream of uptown traffic, slowing for a red light, then surging forward and disappearing between two vans.

I dug in my pockets for money to buy a bus ticket, found some change and some crumpled dollar bills, and walked away from the cold shadow of the UN.

O
NE NIGHT, ANOTHER BAD NIGHT
—
I COULDN’T SEEM TO
stop heaping them on myself—the eyes of a dead Irish poet preserved my soul.

I was attending a Joy Division gathering in the filthy kitchen of a house where some architecture students lived. Suspended inside a mound of orange Jell-O were dozens of plastic army men. They brandished bayonets and hurled grenades. Now and then a party guest would fork a hunk of Jell-O into his mouth and spit out a figurine onto the floor. I stepped on one of them in my stocking feet and thought I’d been bitten by a rat. The Jell-O was made with vodka, I learned, not water, and laced with a substance called MDA. People poked at the mound to make it wobble and the rest of the kitchen wobbled with it.

“I don’t understand the toy soldiers,” I said to somebody.

“They’re a statement on militarism.”

“Opposing it?”

“Why? Do you support it?” asked the architect.

“I don’t think anyone supports it.”

“Aside from the majority.”

“Right. Them.”

Fearing exposure as a latent reactionary, I hustled upstairs and hid out in a bedroom. It was still hard for me to be against things that I’d grown up being for. Though the point of my high-school social-studies classes had seemed to be that our nation had its faults—racism, poverty, and so on—we’d been led to think that they were temporary. They’d be remedied someday by young people like us, by applying the lessons we’d learned in social studies.

I shivered as the bedroom changed shape around me. The walls and windows rotated and buckled—cubism coming true. The shrinkage of space into confining rectangles forced me to tuck my arms against my sides, press my legs together, and lie down flat. Then a new plane pushed down against my brow.

I turned my head to the side and there it was:
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
. The photograph on its cover, old and silvery, showed a sorrowful, consoling face wearing a modest pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The face had an infinitely layered humanity. I wished it belonged to an ancestor. It loved me. It loved me as part of everything else it loved. The face reminded me of Uncle Admiral’s, and I spoke to it out loud.

“Help get me out of this,” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything. Tell me what to do.”

Yeats’s answer was: “Try to sing, my son.”

I
was enrolled then in a poetry workshop taught by the editor of the anthology that had introduced me to “free verse” back in Taylors Falls. Professor Birch had the sort of curly hair that seems to indicate a curly mind. He was a few years too young to be my father and a few years too old to be my friend. For the girls he was just the right age, though. They adored him.

Birch’s fondest admirer was Tessa Marchman, the trim blond daughter of two neurologists. Tessa and I were Birch’s favorites, the students he called on to settle standoffs over the value of other students’ poetry. Our own work couldn’t have been more different. Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions—grief, self-loathing, panic—while mine were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced I grew that I’d borrowed it. I invented an alter ego, “Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of mechanization and macroeconomics. In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque,” but I could tell she didn’t like them. She clearly preferred Professor Birch’s work, which dealt with death and sex and feelings and left out the politics and negativity.

One day after class I walked Tessa to her room, determined to win her over to my cause. Without being pressured, she invited me up, but I found her manner impenetrable. Perhaps the invitation was mere politeness.

“Herbal tea or black?” she asked me, holding out a tray. Her room, unlike mine, was orderly and welcoming.

“Herbal tea isn’t tea,” I said. “It’s herbs.”

“Which means you want black.”

“Not really. I just want tea.”

“You’re prickly,” said Tessa.

It was true. Her crush on Birch annoyed me. The man was a weakling, I felt, a soft romantic whose work didn’t venture beyond his own five senses. But I didn’t trust my senses anymore, let alone their depiction of the world. To me, an aspiring deconstructionist, the world was an orchestrated deception devised to soothe and numb. It resembled Tessa’s dorm room. Stuffed animals paraded on her windowsills. Cheerful fabrics draped the chairs. The books were arranged on their shelves by height and color. And yet, at the center of all this lively neatness, lived a sad and frightened child of doctors whose poetry spoke of wounds and storms and chains. I saw right through the girl.

I let her know this over tea.

“I’m dark in my writing,” she explained, “so I can look on the bright side in my real life.”

“Your writing is a lie, in other words.” I had no right to say this. If I’d lived according to the sentiments that dominated my Bittman poems, I wouldn’t be in college but in Alaska, tucked away in a cabin with guns and canned goods. I was trying to sing, but my songs were bleak and paranoid.

“I think we both know why you’re here,” said Tessa. “To take me. To possess your rival.” Keeping her cup and saucer on her lap, she leaned forward to make the conquest easier.

I moved ahead, but not robustly. I didn’t appreciate being so swiftly fathomed. Our tea-flavored mouths barely mingled before they parted. Tessa tried to gaze into my eyes after our kiss, but I looked down. We hadn’t connected. I gathered my wits and ventured another kiss. She tolerated it briefly, then left her chair and picked up a stuffed zebra.

“You’re saying my work is a game. It’s inauthentic.”

“Come back here,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t even know why I’m saying it. Just kiss me.”

“Who wants to kiss an inauthentic poet? Or sleep with one? Or see one naked?”

“Come over here. I’ll show you. Please.”

Tessa stayed put. She stroked her fuzzy toy. It had become a grudge match, our encounter, and the charges she’d leveled at herself had actually been aimed at me, I feared.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m sorry all this happened.”

Tessa shuddered and started sobbing. Fake, I decided. Overplayed. I considered calling her bluff by wrapping my arms around her and sinking my teeth into her neck. As I dragged her toward the bed, she’d probably try to pull away or kick me, but I’d renew my assault and she’d give up. Then what? My hunch was she’d slay me with a snicker in the middle of my triumph.

“I’ll see you in the workshop” was how I left it.

“Come back.”

But I couldn’t. Someone had to win this.

“
I
t’s the best thing I’ve written so far this year,” I said, crossing my legs and unfolding a sheet of paper. “Of course, I’m open to comments and suggestions.” Then I recited my sonnet on militarism.

“That was Bittman again?” somebody asked me. This was a common maneuver in the workshop: dismissing a poem by feigning inattention.

“It’s part of a series, so I didn’t name him, but, yes, it’s Bittman. Or a simulacra.”

“Simulacrum,” said Birch, a real professor after all.

With one drop of blood, the workshop became a hunt. It opened with a few potshots, a few “reactions,” but soon my classmates were firing on automatic, using the force discharged by each critique to slam new rounds into their chambers. Tessa fluttered an earlobe with an index finger, pretending to be above the fray. Birch adopted the same attitude. It was hard for me not to view them as conspirators. Or were they lovers? It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Another poetry teacher, a pal of Birch’s, had been run off the campus a couple of months earlier after seducing an unknown number of students, one of whom had squealed to Nassau Hall.

“To me, your main trouble, Walter,” someone said, “is Bittman’s supposed nemesis. He’s up against
something—
the government? the system?—but you never tell us who or what. And it’s not an equal fight. The world just rolls over him. He’s
passive
.”
‘

“Overpowered,” I said, “isn’t passive. I hear you, though. Maybe if I sharpened up my verbs—”

“Or gave him a personality,” said someone.

“Or any traits at all,” said someone else.

“My gripe against Bittman,” announced a third voice, “is that he seems incapable of love.”

“He also refuses to take responsibility.”

“He’s a cipher.”

“A device.”

I held up a hand. “Can I handle those in order?”

Chuckles broke out. The abandonment felt absolute when I looked at Birch for help and caught him with his eyes shut, leaning back, absently clicking the button on a ballpoint protruding from a front pocket of his jeans. In a poetry workshop, conspicuous detachment didn’t mean neutrality, I’d learned, but agreement with the prevailing line of criticism.

“I think we’ve been unfair,” said Tessa. “Walter had it right. He had a point. Bittman’s not passive at all. He’s overwhelmed.”

I tightened my stomach, waiting for the jab.

“And
of course
he knows how to love. It’s in the
form”’

“Explain,” someone said. I was curious myself.

“The
sonnet
form. Sonnets are love songs,” Tessa said. “I’m surprised no one got that.”

“I am, too,” said Birch, leading me to think he hadn’t slept with her but was still in the process of wooing her. Why else support her in this silliness?

Afterward, over pizza in the student center, I asked Tessa why she’d been so charitable. She credited her “good Midwestern upbringing.” I’d had one of these upbringings myself, but it was gone, it seemed. If it had been Tessa’s poem the class was slaughtering, I knew I wouldn’t have intervened. Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the Norton anthologies. Then I humbled myself further by disclosing that militarism didn’t bother me. Maintaining an army, a navy, and an air force was America’s right, I said. Our nation had enemies.

“I want us to make love,” I added. “Now.”

Tessa laid a napkin on her pizza slice to sop up the red grease.

“You don’t want to? I thought you wanted to,” I said.

She lifted the napkin by one corner and set it beside her paper plate.

“But I just bared my soul to you. I practically admitted I’m a
Republican
.”
‘

“Are
you?”

“Not really.”

“Then why pretend to be?”

“Because I get tired of pretending I’m a communist.”

“So why not just stop pretending altogether?”

I thought about this for a while. “You first,” I said.

“We’re just too different. Our styles. Our approaches. Plus, I suspect your motives, I’m afraid. This is all about competition, not attraction.”

“Let’s make it about sex, then.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Because you’re in love with Birch?”

“His sensibility.”

“Well, I’m in love with Yeats’s sensibility. That doesn’t mean I want to go to bed with him.”

Tessa sprinkled garlic on her slice and raised it to her tidy mouth. I folded my empty plate in half and headed off to dump it in a trash can. Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man
invented
the sword.

Week in and week out, Birch’s workshop proved me right. We sang and we fought. We fought over our songs. Finally, by the end of the semester, all we could sing about were our scars, our wounds.