Pages from a Cold Island (35 page)

“
A deal?
”

“
A bargain. I
’
ll make a bargain with you.
”

“
Okay,
”
I said, and might have added,
‘‘
anything, any
thing
, ANYTHING!
”

Rolling over on my side to face her, so she wouldn
’
t be cognizant of the embarrassing rise beginning to lift the bedcovers into a miniature tent, I lighted us both cigarettes, lay my head back and in utter incredulity listened to this Lolita
’
s, this innocent
’
s, this Miss Middle America
’
s, this angel of the plains
’
s
“
deal.
”
April shared an apartment with three other coeds, two of whom had boyfriends who by agreement among the four girls came over afternoons, and afternoons only,
“
to fuck,
”
and April was weary unto death of trying to study in the outer room with the raucous moans and groans of sex emanating from the bedrooms; even wearier of waiting to get into the bathroom and, worse, on once getting there of finding dirty skivvies, both female and male, all over the bathroom floor, of vile rings in the bath tub, of great globs of toothpaste dried on the mirror of the medicine cabinet. Oh, there were days when April wanted to scream, or puke, or both! April paused pensively and wet her lips. Her gray-green eyes avoiding mine, she said,
“
I saw one of your cute s
igns—you know, those corny clip
pings of yours?—in a bar a few weeks ago and since then I
’
ve studied your habits.
”

“
You
’
ve what?
”
I cried.

April said that daily she knew I went late mornings to Joe
’
s Place at the top of the hill, drank there for a while, then walked round to Donnelly
’
s on Dubuque, drank some more, went then to The Vine on Clinton Street, and finally ended up next-door to The Vine at The Deadwood, the hangout for The Workshop students, where I drank with the Epstein brothers, the owners of the bookstore, until four or four-thirty, at which time I repaired to Iowa House and wasn
’
t seen again until late at night when I went back up the hill and made the same circle of bars until closing time.

“
That
’
s every day except Tuesday and Wednesday,
”
April added.
“
On those days you go directly from The Deadwood to your four-thirty classes, and when they
’
re over you come back to The Deadwood and drink with your students.
”

“
Jesus, April, you
’
ve been following me! Do you know what that could do to a paranoic like me? Had I caught you I might have strangled you where you stood!
”

April thrust the palm of her hand abruptly upwards, the traffic cop admonishing the eager motorist, and demanded my indulgence that she might finish. April wanted a key to my room. Mornings before starting out for classes she could pack her book bag with fresh panties, with her shampoo and her toothbrush, and while I was up the hill drinking she could come and make her toilet in my
“
cool bathroom
”
with its roaring shower, immaculate mirror, clean towels, and so forth, after which she
’
d study until I came down the hill at four-thirty at which time we could
“
fuck or whatever you want to do.
”
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the days I held my seminars, she
’
d stay as long as she had to or until I called and told her I was tied up. We could work out a code so she
’
d know when to answer the telephone, say, I could r
ing twice, hang up, then immedi
ately phone back. She promised she
’
d never be around the room nights in case I had other
“
guests.
”
Friday through Sunday was out of the q
uestion because on Friday after
noons April hitchhiked over to the state university at Ames and spent the weekend abed with her
“
sort of
fiancé
, a really groovy dude
”
who was as impoverished as she but who at least had his own pad where
“
we can fuck in pri
vacy.
”

April paused, pondered her words, then offered her hope that if she pleased me I could perhaps throw her
“
a couple bucks a day
”
so she could get something to eat in the downstairs cafeteria when she was leaving. April didn
’
t need much, a couple cheeseburgers, a Coke and a scoop of chocolate ice cream—butter pecan if they had it. Everyone who picked her up hitchhiking to and from Ames tried to fuck her and with the money saved on the food she could buy round-trip bus tickets. Too, April wanted to use my telephone to call her
“
sort of
fiancé
”
one afternoon a week, Thursdays, to give him her arrival time in Ames of Friday and she promised—she raised her right hand as one swearing allegiance—that she
’
d t
alk only the allotted three min
utes.

“
Look, I know I look about eleven and a fucking half. You
’
d feel foolish being seen in public with me and I
’
d be embarrassed to be seen with you. But this way nobody
’
d even have to know we knew each other. And let
’
s level with each other: you have your—uh—needs and I have mine.
”

The abrupt delicacy with which April delivered needs made it sound a word she
’
d picked up in a high school course in sex education, as indeed she probably had. At this point I began to roar, wildly, helplessly, unrestrainedly at the unabashedly shameless and calculating mercenariness of this whory angel of the prairie, this Miss Middle-America trollop, this harlot of the hog farms, and between wild howls I breathlessly shouted,
“
It
’
s a deal! It
’
s a
fucking
deal!
”
Whereupon I reached over, yanked the towel from her, pulled her into bed, and for the next two hours fucked her as though I were a depraved playboy who
’
d just presented a fifty-thousand-dollar pearl necklace to the most beautiful and sluttish courtesan-starlet in Hollywood and were extracting payment in kind, none of which bothered or unnerved my darling April in the least, and all of which she seemed not only adept at but to relish immensely.

From that day on April honored her bargain, and I honored mine, though from that very night when I picked up another girl in The Deadwood on my late evening rounds a strange phenomenon began occurring. Whereas for three weeks it appeared I couldn
’
t have bought a fuck with that fantasized pearl n
ecklace, after April I found my
self smack in the middle of what the dopey sociologists call
“
the new permissiveness
”
and greedily relishing every mo
ment of it. Girls seemed to be coming out the woodwork and there were days when, leaving April her two dollars, I
’
d write her a note to the effect that she
’
d have to be out of the room by four as I was expecting another
“
guest
”
—all of which, I must say, April took in great good stride, at least for a time.

A week before returning to the island, I was drinking at The Deadwood with Glenn and Harry Epstein and their aide-de-camp in the bo
okstore, Danny Farber, and with
out mentioning April by name I told them of my early sexual drought and how after April I couldn
’
t seem to han
dle what was there for the plucking. In that they read and knew the books on their shelves, as did Danny Farber, the Epsteins were among the most literate booksellers I
’
d ever met. To pay the rent they stocked Jacqueline Susann and Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins, but I could never, without giggling idiotically, hang around the store and watch them hawk such wares. For The
Love Machine
they
’
d accept their money with a straight enough face, but to the purchaser, and speaking around their cigars, they could never resist an observation.

“
You
’
ve got yourself a helluva book there. Solid stuff, solid. You
’
re in for a real
heavy
read.
Heavy, man, heavy.
”

Harry and Glenn and Dan were all on the short side.

They had wild mustaches and equally wild heads of hair. As the autumn progressed and the cold set in, and with it the heart-stopping winds sweeping across the Iowa plains, the three of them took to sporting outsized wool greatcoats that fell almost to their shoe tops; and I never drank with them in The Deadwood without an uncomfortable feeling of being in a clandestine cellar in turn-of-the-century Moscow making elaborate
“
revolutionary
”
schemes and belting back vodka with Marxist bomb
throwers. The three of them lis
tened with great interest and solemnity to my tale of April and the subsequent turn of sexual events in my life. When I finished, Harry, the top
of whose head came to my shoul
ders, looked up, removed the cigar from his mouth, focused his great baby eyes on me, and said:

“
Broads can smell it when you
’
re getting in. Then they all want some of the action.
”

15

In October a letter from Rosalind Baker Wilson arrived at Iowa House, offering me one of EW
’
s walking sticks. Alas, there was a rather formidable condition. Although I don
’
t remember the note in detail, it seems that Rosalind Baker Wilson was planning on doing some traveling and if my mother agreed to take off her hands four tomcats, a stray mongrel and a bike-riding chimpanzee, or some such thing, Rosalind Baker Wilson would throw in six cases of dog biscuit, fifty-two hundred tins of cat food, six old T-bones, a bunch of bananas, or some such thing, and into the bargain would present me with one of her father
’
s walking sticks. I never answered her. In the first place my mother
’
s health didn
’
t allow for her to take on that kind or responsibility, and as I was already yearnin
g to return to the island, drag
ging stray felines (which I loathe in any event) was out of the question. For another thing, I had taken my great grandfather Champ
’
s silver-handled walking stick with me to Iowa City and for a time I had foisted it off as Wilson
’
s, thinking that by using it as a memento of him I might try to convey to the kids what he had meant to me and what I thought they might learn by his example.

But I hadn
’
t the heart or the guile to continue the deceit of the walking stick; it seemed so much an uppity denial of my great-grandfather Champ and my own un distinguished heritage. Aligning myself with Wilson at the expense of my own blood seemed so much not my kind of thing.

John Champ was born in 1832 in Wantage, England, a hamlet about midway between London and Bristol, on the Bristol Channel of the Irish Sea. On my map Wantage appears to be within a reasonable taxi fare a few miles south of Oxford. As a very young man John Champ entered the military, became a batman, little more than a glorified valet and horse groom, to a cavalry officer in th
e light bri
gade; and in England
’
s war with Russia over the rightful site of the Holy Sepulchre (
“
Even for an eggshell … but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor
’
s at stake,
”
the Bard says) he was in the Crimea and from the heights above Balaklava watched the famous or infamous charge and saw the six hundred and how
“
bravely they rode and well.
”
Later in life he would claim that what he saw in
“
Lord Raglan
’
s War
”
so abhorred him that on the troops
’
return to England he deserted on the spot, on the docks of Liverpool, and boarded a steamer to Canada. As in his old age he drew modest pensions from both The Crown and from our own government, this part of his tale could hardly have been accurate.

In any event, he made his way to Kingston, Ontario, across the St. Lawrence from Cape Vincent, and after some difficulty (he did
“
time
”
in the prison in Kingston) he forded the river border to Watertown and the Thousand Islands area. Hardly had he been settled in his
“
new land
”
than our own Civil War began. He volunteered his services to the
10
^th
Heavy Artillery, then being made up of upstate New York recruits, and was
assigned to Company E, in I sus
pect a lowly or noncommissioned capacity. Although he saw
“
sharp
”
action in a number of battles against General Lee
’
s armies, he would later say he saw nothing in our monstrously bloody and internecine war that could compare with the glory and the madness, the courage and the foolhardiness, the resoluteness and the stupidity, the heroism and the slaughter of the British troops at Balaklava.

On returning to Watertown from the Civil War, he married a widow, Mrs. Fanny Smith, and by her sired a son John and a daughter Nellie (with a fucking
i
and a fucking
e
, as with one
’
s mare!), my mother
’
s mother and my grandmother. The maiden name of John Champ
’
s wife, Fanny Smith, was McGuire. To flee the potato famines she had emigrated from Blarney in County Cork, had made her way to Canada, thence across the river to America. Barely literate, I
’
d guess, she made her living as a domestic for a time, then as a cook at the various hotels which began sprouting up in the last third of the century, turning our part of America into a resort area. After her marriage to John Champ, she continued to work, for on his return from the Civil War he never held a job for more than a few months at a time (I know
from whom I inherited my lacka
daisical and ironical view of our
“
work ethic
”
). He became a kind of ne
’
er-do-well
“
country squire
”
with a silver
-
handled walking stick, an incredibly handsome man with a magnificent mane of snow-white hair and a great gray beard, and lived out his life with his memories of blood and thunder, carnage and cannon, and died in his sleep at his Massey Street home in Watertown in 1909, age 77, the same age at which Wilson had died.

So this, then, is my heritage on my mother
’
s side (on my father
’
s it is, if possible, somewhat meaner), and yet one of the dreams of my life has been to make a pilgrimage to Wantage, England, in search of the boy John Champ (one of my relatives went and discovered the family thought him long dead and buried in the Crimea; they were
“
shocked
”
on learning of their
“
American family
”
), thence to County Cork in search of that never-known, never-seen (I can un cover no picture of her) colleen, Miss Fanny McGuire. Can one imagine Exley, middle-aged and sporting his youth-seeking faded Levis, walking stick in hand, great vodka tears in his eyes, his voice aquiver, strolling into the Bureau of Records in Blarney (
and how about that
!
), in the County of Cork, the Republic of Ireland, and demanding, pleading for information about that long-ago Fanny McGuire?

Be that as it may, I found I had no gift for continuing the charade of passing the walking stick off as Wilson
’
s, of seeking to align myself with princes, even literary princes. Unlike Ms. Steinem, whose father, by her own admission, had been a kind of itinerant or gypsy antique-junk dealer, I hadn
’
t the capacity to scorn one who
“
should have been a sports reporter for the
Daily News
,
”
least of all scorning grant-grandparents. But even without the walking stick I had mementoes enough of Wilson. In my bosom, as hot and as pestilential as a rotting and stricken heart, I carried the tears of Mary Pcolar and the awesome grief of Rosalind Baker Wilson. Constantly recurring behind my eyelids, as a picture flashing intermittently on a film screen, I carried visions of Wilson
’
s stone house and something of what I thought it had meant to him. I carried—but enough. Oh, I had, I thought, plenty to give my kids!

My Tuesday afternoon class caused me the most distress and anxiety. In this section one or two students typed onto mimeographed paper a twenty-or thirty-page short story or novel segment, had it run off in the mimeograph room, saw to it that the various members of the class got copies in advance, and we
spent ninety minutes or so dis
cussing the pages. I seldom said anything (what I did offer was invariably kind), set
ting myself up more as a modera
tor, a role I know some of my students took to mean I hadn
’
t read them carefully. The truth was something quite else. Although in the entire fall I saw nothing I deemed publishable, I saw stuff that was damned close to being so; and even above that, I read not a single manuscript that I would have been capable of writing at the age of these kids and I therefore had no inclination to discourage. I held my peace, fearful of causing the slightest hurt.

My moderation or decency, I must say, did not in the least restrain the students from commenting on one an other
’
s work. At our very first session, I laid out my ground rules, saying I was going to go from student to student around the seminar table, let each offer his opinion and criticism, and then afterwards see if we couldn
’
t reach some accord as to how the writer might make his pages more successful. As Jon Jackson, my lumberjack-intellectual drinking companion, was in this group, and I of course knew his name, I went to him first. Jon was rocking back and forth on the heels of the rear legs of his straight-backed chair. He held and was rat
her grimly poring over the mime
ographed pages in his left hand. In his right hand he held and with no little gravity was sucking on his pipe. Now he let the front legs of his chair settle jarringly to the floor. He nonchalantly flung his copy of the manuscript onto the seminar table. With great an
d theatrical deliberation he re
moved his pipe from his mouth. He slowly raised the bridge of his horn-rims farther up on his nose. Now he looked at and addressed the student who had written the pages.

“
This is a bunch of shit. They never should have let you in The Workshop.
”

Jesus H.
Keerist
!
And I had an entire fucking autumn to go! Enraged at Jon, I angrily stuttered something to the effect that I
’
d brook no more of that kind of nonsense masking itself as criticism, that
never
for the remainder of the fall did I again expect to hear any comment like that But I must say that my passing rage did paltry good, and as the autumn progressed there were days when I felt t
he stu
dents
’
capacity to hurt on
e another bordered on the shame
lessly boundless, other days when I literally thought I was going to have to break up fistfights! Then one day I recalled myself as I had been at these kids
’
ages and remembered my own insecurities and with what rage and contempt I
’
d often read even published books hailed by reviewers as
“
master pieces.
”
As the fall continued, I found that at The Deadwood I had to belt back a half-dozen double vodkas before even going down the hill to confront this group.

My Wednesday section was a good deal pleasanter but not, in its own way, without a certain amount of uneasiness. For this we read and disc
ussed each week one of my previ
ously selected
“
modern
”
novels, and I did my best to see to it that the student talked about the novel the author had written. For example, I didn
’
t give one good shit what Lionel Trilling had to say about
Lolita
, I wanted to know what the student had to say about it; and there was one day—with an American novel I hold
particularly
dear, Robert Penn Warren
’
s
All the King
’
s Men
—that I disal
lowed any discussion whatever and instead spent the entire session reading aloud from
the book. I read first Jack Bur
den
’
s poignant accou
nt of first love with Anne Stan
ton, then his sad and hilarious description of his marriage to the
“
Georgia peach
”
Lois; I read, as it were,
The Dream of Love
and
The Reality of Love
; and after these two parts I read the entire concluding section which, along with the conclusion of
The Great Gatsby
, I hold to be the best ending in American fiction.

When I finished, I solemnly closed the book, picked it up, looked at the students, rose from my chair, and with furious joy hurled the book against the wall, the way I
’
d always imagined Red Warren must have kicked up his heels on writing his last paragraph.

“
I understand that book cost Warren seven fucking years of his life and I utterly refuse to let our pale words decimate it as though we were talking about the trick endings of a corn pone like O. Henry! In Warren
’
s own introduction to the Modern Library edition he invokes the great Louis Armstrong. When somebody asked Satchmo what jazz was about, Warren quotes him something to the effect
‘
that there
’
s some folks that if they don
’
t already know, you can
’
t tell
‘
em.
’
And that
’
s how I feel about the novels we
’
ve been reading. Do you fucking guys know what I
’
m telling you?
”

To a man, and very gravely, they nodded, by way of assuring me that they did.

Admittedly, for the rather handsome salary I was receiving for a few weeks
’
work, this didn
’
t seem an awfully lot to give the student. But beyond all this I did try to tell him something of Edmund Wilson and his stone house, and how Wilson had been sui generis to the end. I agreed that the student
’
s two years at Iowa City was better spent than selling snowmobiles, that he was reading, getting some healthy fucking, and drinking beer among people
“
into books
”
and hence was unable to avoid the vibrations and the emanations, that he was coming of age in an idyllically conducive milieu; but that he must understand that for everyone of him there were two, three, four hundred young guys somewhere out there in the Republic, locked up, apart, confused, putting down words, trying to bring order out of that confusion, the way books are born, getting on with it in other words; and that I didn
’
t much trust the insecurity that had brought him to Iowa City in search of his peers
’
laudations. As provocation, I said, I
’
d much pre
fer the student
’
s invoking the image of those four hundred guys already working out there than listening to me, or anyone else in the room, or of resting smugly with the knowledge of having been good enough academically, which to a writer doesn
’
t mean doodly-squat, to have been admitted to The Workshop.