One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (12 page)

At night, while my attendant helped me to bathe, undress, lie down in the bed I carried from state to state, she would wait in her car in the parking lot of the football stadium. When my attendant left, I’d call her cell phone and then she’d drive to my apartment, letting herself in with a spare key.

She never turned on a light. She would slip from her clothes, and crawl into the narrow twin bed, where we’d lie, naked until the morning.

Once, on a freezing night, when she wore to bed an old T-shirt, I kissed her breasts through the worn fabric.

“I don’t see why you do that,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t feel like anything.”

And so I turned away, pressing against the bed’s metal rail.

One night, when I had planned to grade a stack of papers and work on a new poem, I found myself babysitting an eight-year-old boy. Seated on my couch, he announced, “I can use my penis for a bookmark.”

He was the only son of the woman who had suggested I come to Tuscaloosa. He was reading a children’s book. I looked up from my computer, wincing slightly, trying not to give any indication I’d heard. I did not want to be doing this. I had not asked.

He would climb over me, setting his shoes in the recesses of my wheelchair, reaching around my shoulders, lifting himself up into my lap. The scabby knobs of his knees dug into my legs. I would try to talk him down.

It began with Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Needing papers signed, I went to Dana’s office where she was grading. Her son was seated on the floor, watching a faded videotape. I made the mistake of identifying the dog, engaging the boy, and identifying myself as someone familiar with children. She looked up.

“Would you mind sitting with Calvin for a while?” she asked, tired. “I need to make some copies downstairs and I just can’t take him.”

Dana was up, already leaving. In reply, all I made was a noise.

Calvin came over, poking me with a finger, wordless.

“Let’s not do that,” I said. “Let’s not poke each other.”

He climbed up my leg and into my lap, where he watched
Clifford
for an hour. When his mother returned, she scooped him up, distracted. I left, annoyed. No signature.

After that afternoon, every other week or so, Dana would find me wherever I was. In my office. In the mailroom. Going home. I was too young, too inexperienced to say no. I’d ruefully agree to look after the boy, drop whatever I was doing, offer up my wheelchair and body as a platform for his climbing.

The night he claimed his penis would fit into the pages of his book left me livid, disturbed. I wanted no more of what amounted to harassment, despite the mother’s saccharine disingenuousness:
Calvin just loves you. And I know you love him
.

I resolved to say no the next time, to be free of it.

Spring had arrived early and the sky was a faded denim vault. Done for the day, I felt good. I whistled.

A block from home, at the edge of campus, where the road ran downhill to a freshwater spring, I crossed with the light. Then a car horn bleated.

I turned around. A car I didn’t recognize had stopped in the road. Bright sunlight painted its windshield a solid coat of sun. I squinted, trying to see who the driver was. I moved closer to the curb, peering.

Before my eyes had adjusted, Dana was pulling Calvin from the car, dragging him by his twig of an arm to the sidewalk. I hadn’t even recognized her, or her menace of a son, before she was climbing back into her car, calling over her shoulder she was late for a meeting and would be back in an hour.

And then Dana was gone. The boy and I looked each other over. Across the street was a Starbucks, first in the state of Alabama, it crowed. Sighing, I led Calvin in and bought him chocolate milk.

For a while, I thought we were the only ones there. An Eric Clapton album played throughout the store. I hated the boy a little more every moment.

Then a ragged woman sidled over, her jeans patched and patched and patched again. She sat down with something rolled up under her meaty arm.

It was a leather chessboard. As she unrolled it, she began to describe the foundation she had created for teaching underprivileged children how to play. Calvin, half feral, looked like he was ready to pounce on her.

Each time she shifted her plump frame in the seat, she groaned. She looked to me knowingly, as if pain were our bond, and by it we already knew one another.

Her teeth were horrors, used-up stumps, stained, broken.

“I’ve got lupus,” she blurted. “Doctors are no good. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

I mumbled something noncommittal.

Calvin was a chess prodigy. He luxuriated in each match
with the woman, who seemed impressed at first, then indifferent and sour.

The day was gone and outside everything was dark. Through the long wall of glass, I could see cars disappearing around the curve, I could see the square of my apartment’s one window, a low bronze light that was my desk lamp. When the Starbucks employees began to push vacuums around and look at us, his mother ran up, arms splayed out. I left, saying nothing. If I stayed, I might say some dire thing to any of them, to all of them, something black and regrettable.

The poems I wrote were sad, quieter than any I’d written before. Gone was any nod to slapstick. Monsters shrugged through them. Love was an unspoken ruin.

But they came quickly. Each day, I waited on one. At my keyboard, I read the news and dashed fragmentary e-mails to scattered friends.

I wrote about the invisible man. About Godzilla and Alice the Goon.

One night, having left her lab long enough to eat something, Ivy glanced at the computer screen, at first intrigued by the lines I’d written.

As she read further, her face soured.

“Why don’t you just write about suicide, if that’s what you want to do?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, angry.

She had thrown herself on my bed, staring up at the dropped ceiling, the fluorescent lights humming.

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t mean anything. I just wish you would write something happy. For once. Something I’d like.”

We barely understood one another. We hardly spoke the same language, it seemed sometimes. I turned back to the screen, to the poem, and closed it.

Eliot and I had become good friends. The sort to spot loose change on the ground, to pluck coins from a pay phone, Eliot had scavenger’s eyes and the quick hands of a thief. He carried with him keys he found on campus, lost by custodians.

We were assembling manuscripts from new poems and old alike. I was obsessive: I printed new copies after the slightest changes, carrying them everywhere. When Eliot found a lab that printed out the university’s paychecks and was otherwise dormant the entire month, when he discovered they’d print our manuscripts on the huge printers in seconds, we were regulars. An old man would hand them to us, wrapped in clear plastic, and warm, like white loaves of bread.

When Eliot no longer taught at the university, his nontenure, nonrenewable contract expired, he found a lock mated to a key he had carried for years. Ten feet high and solid wood, on the third floor of a building that been an army barracks during the Civil War, rebuilt from rubble after Sherman burned the campus, the door pulled open, protesting.

Inside, a cavernous suite filled with junk, broken things, old printers, the slough and detritus of a university. It had started as storage space, progressed to trash heap, and was then forgotten.

Eliot whistled. I thought there was no way the space was usable.

A week’s clearing out freed the space from the years. Ordered from a local print shop, a plate with his name and title and a made-up room number claimed it for his own. A call to the campus technology office finished the job.

Before the day was done, the place was furnished with a new computer, wired for Internet access. No one asked whether he taught there.

We spread our poems out on long tables, shuffling their order, adding new ones, pulling older ones from the mix. Eliot kept an electric putting green in the corner, practicing when stuck, unsure. Cheap wine chilled in a braying refrigerator. There were old couches. Vintage lamps lighting it all up. Some
times at dusk we’d assemble balsa wood gliders and wind the rubber-band-powered propellers, launching them from the balcony, rooting for their rickety flight across the green grass below. Bats and moth wings swooped through the air.

From there we sent out into the world what we hoped were books.

When the call came, an instant nausea roiled inside me: the editor of New Issues Press, an imprint of Western Michigan University Press, wanted to publish my manuscript. A few months had passed since the day Eliot had walked with me to the campus post office, fat envelopes containing our manuscripts in his arms. Listening to the editor’s gruff voice, I felt lightheaded, shocked even: assembling the manuscript, sending it out, and waiting by the mailbox every day for word, good or bad, to return had been processes separate from the writing of the poems, and though I’d hoped for this for years, I’d never allowed myself to think it might happen. Now that it had, I struggled to believe I wasn’t dreaming. A year from then my book would come to be, an amazement. We hung up, and when I left my apartment, the February air was warm, and in it I laughed and laughed.

That October I woke up on a Wednesday morning in the emergency room with no idea why I was there. I remem
bered going to bed and seeing Ivy step into the bathroom. And then nothing, like tidal sleep had washed over me.

I’d had a grand mal seizure, my body shaking violently. When I was twenty-two, I’d suffered the first, reading poems at my desk. In intermittent years, a few seizures had followed. No neurologist could say much for certain, except that they weren’t epileptic in nature and weren’t the result of a tumor or other ailment. One suggested that maybe, when I broke my neck, I had suffered undiagnosed head trauma as well. Brain damage. All that was left to do was take medication and hope no more came.

By the time I was discharged, the sun was boiling up at the horizon’s pink rim. Instead of going to bed, I ate a waffle at a diner near campus and left for my first class. I taught twice that day, as I did on Thursday and Friday as well. In the mailroom, friends and colleagues scolded me for even coming in. I finished the week, then left for my parents’ home, where I stayed a week, resting, seeing my doctors. Eliot covered my classes while I was gone.

When I returned, Dana summoned me to her office. Her son was nowhere.

“We understand that you were away last week.” She spoke in the plural.

At first, I was too fixated on this to reply. “Seeing my doctors,” I finally said. “My neurologist.”

“And who covered your classes?”

“Eliot covered them,” I said. “Is there a problem?”

Dana looked out her window for a moment before turning back to me.

“We may not allow you to return to the classroom.” She smiled blandly. “We may not even ask you to return next semester. To be determined.”

I was stunned. I didn’t say anything.

“And we understand you want to put yourself on the job market,” Dana continued.

This was the crux of things, I thought, that I hadn’t sought her help. I had applied for a handful of teaching jobs. So had Eliot. So had everyone who was not a student there.

“That’s true,” I replied.

“There are those of us—” Dana paused, letting the air punctuate, “who are concerned about your fitness for academia.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It can be grueling,” she imparted, crossing her arms, leaning back.

I stayed silent. Anger was not an emotion that came easily to me. Not after my injury. But sitting there, I felt it.

“Have you ever considered career alternatives?”

“Like what?” I spat back.

“Like being a tutor,” she said with relish. “A substitute teacher.”

She leaned a little forward, to see the barb’s sting. I sat back, mute.

“Is there anything you’d like to say?” she asked, a little crestfallen, robbed of something irreplaceably sweet.

“I think it’s best that I say nothing.”

An end comes in stages, an accumulation of failures or misfirings or injuries of every sort. Leaving that meeting, spattered by insult, any question in my mind was gone: I was leaving, whether I had a job or not. I stopped by Eliot’s home, not far from my apartment. We sat at the base of his steps, plotting our exits.

He was optimistic, cheerful for my part, but looking down the car-lined street toward campus, I knew the remaining months would pass by quickly. And that would be the end of this. Not our friendship, but the romance of writing against something, the romance of contest, of opposition. We’d find new hindrances, I knew, but there had been something blessed and golden and hidden in that crummy town.

Soon, I would leave the town, and my friends, with no clear path ahead. The future like a pinhole seemed to wind in on itself, with little passage left for anything. Each day, on the way home, I practiced the hard words left between me and Ivy, who had fallen even more deeply into her work. Weeks
and months had passed without the spark of affection we once had shared. All that was left was her exhaustion and my sense of failure. Though I had written the poems that soon would be my first book, I was leaving another town, with love like a vexing riddle in my mind.

When I found her waiting for me in the lamplight, I sighed, stopping in the open doorway. It was time to end things, to begin saying good-bye.

“Don’t you want—” she said. “Do you want—We could go get an ice cream. Down the street. That place just opened.”

“You have to give that test,” I said, knowing she had to proctor an examination. “There’s no way. No time.”

“I could call someone,” she said, unsure, I think, she meant it. “Get them to do it for me. We could go out one last time.”

There it was. The words fell into the solution of the air.

“No, it’s better this way.”