The Magician's Girl (20 page)

‘All right, Dr. Roman,' she said to her husband without bothering to look over at him. ‘We'll stop for a bit. I think I'm getting absentminded. Next thing you know, I'll drive into somebody's barn, kill a pig or something and end up in jail. I'll be fined some outlandish amount. It'll have been a prize boar he was raising for the Illinois State Fair.' She laughed foolishly, drove into the first driveway she came to and pulled up in front of a Donut Shoppe.

That night Minna stayed in Rock Island, a little more than an hour from Iowa City. She was too weary to drive farther. The place she found to stay was close to the river. After a supper of chow mein that made her feel queasy even as she ate, she found a place along the waterfront that was not blocked by parking lots or restaurants. Easing herself down on the rough, stained pier, she took off her shoes and put her feet into the water. It was green with scum, in which floated metal can tops, foam cups, straws and condoms. ‘So I greet the mighty Mississippi,' she said aloud to the slowly eddying, thick water at her feet.

Next morning, feeling grateful that she was almost at the end of the terrible trek, she rose at six, had some instant coffee and a Danish pastry, what the motel called a ‘Continental breakfast.' After she had turned in her key at the desk and come outside to breathe the fresh early-morning air, she noticed the sign over the entrance to the place:
DE LUXE BUDGET MOTEL
, it read. ‘An oxymoron,' she thought. ‘Well, hardly, or maybe, or perhaps both, or nothing,' she said to Richard, who had returned to the seat beside her, silent, as if he were waiting for her to continue her monologue. It seemed to her he was smoking his pipe. ‘Still here, are you? Well, you picked the better place to sleep. That bed was hardly big enough for two of us to share.' When he failed to comment, she was caught up again in her conversation with him. ‘
Share
. A good place to start. We believed in it. Share the wealth, share the driveway, share the bed, the responsibility. We bought shares. Everything seemed so safe. Our money was safe. Our retirements, not so far away now, all safe. We have a safe-deposit box and safe investments. Safety in privacy and double locks and sometimes in numbers, in three,' she reminded Richard. ‘In three we thought and then when that uncrowded number failed, when we buried our broken-up son, you said, “We'll be all right, we'll manage. Other people do. We'll make out all right.” And I said, I remember saying when you held my hand and while we waited for the hired black limousine to take us home from the cemetery, “You think we'll get over this, don't you? Well, today I think neither of us will.” You said, “I don't understand what you mean.” And I said, under my breath, “You'll see.”'

The light now sat upon the low hills and draws of the Iowa landscape, beautiful because the cornfields, in various states of growth, made abstract patterns on the gentle rises. The odors from the fields were wet and heavy, vetivernal and lush. The Bug moved more heavily than at the start of its journey, as though it were tired of its burdens and people. To the man sitting jammed between cardboard boxes Minna said, ‘It's unusual for me to talk like this. For you to listen so patiently is unusual too. We may have survived, as you said that day, but we failed. We failed slowly, not all at once. Our marriage suffered a sluggish, torpid disintegration. Love went first, it always does—isn't that true? How could it possibly endure for almost four decades? Custom, service, duty, ritual set in, and worst of all, irrational disappointment that the bright light had gone out. We each blamed the other. Next to go was that terrible sidekick of love, jealously. No longer did it plague—or enliven—our passion. Did this happen to us both at once? I cannot remember. My friend Liz used to claim that nothing comes out even, nothing in this life, and she was right, of course. What happened next? Concern, that was it. I grew concerned about everything, like my mother used to be. Except for one thing: when you were sick I felt an odd sort of relief. You were mortal. Someday, I thought, I may be free. I know I didn't want you to die. I loved you in my way, in my loss-flooded way, but I wanted to be free. When
I
was sick, you seemed concerned, but, I thought, not deeply. You saw such bad pain where you worked that mine seemed to you exaggerated. Our mutual and constant concern was for Grant. Every one of his illnesses seemed at first to be life-threatening. We always felt we might lose him, we ached at the thought. You saw all possible complications, I saw only one, the possibility he might die. The bond between us weakened under the pressures of my love for him. I tried to hold it in check. But I must have revealed it to you with my concern for his every move and fever and cough. (Didn't we all read too much Freud, and then fear for the objects of our love?) Mine was true love for that lovely redheaded boy, his blue eyes full of questions and early despair. It came hand in hand with my passionate dislike of his silly, pretty-faced girl-love.'

Richard may have nodded, she thought, but she could not turn her head away from the road to find out. She felt herself growing empty. She thought she might as well go on until there was nothing more left to say. ‘We have, I admit, had one very good thing. We had all the varied and curious and satisfying pleasures of sex. Almost nightly, all those years, because you brought your medical school instruction to bear on the subject and taught me to believe that long intervals between sexual acts depleted the source, that the more often we “did it,” as you said, the greater would be our pleasure, and the longer our desire would last. It was true. You were right. It did get better, it did last. We accepted no excuses from each other, even the imminence of Grant's birth, even a short time after his birth. We were at it regularly, it served as our Sominex and our muscle relaxant. After it, I always slept well. Intercourse was the one bond that did not wither: we kept our marriage alive in the pleasures of its variety. I was a wonder to myself and to my friends, who had to listen to my boasting. After menopause, which came, I thought, rather late to me—was I fifty-four, or fifty-five? It was long use of the pill, they said—we went on practicing our private craft with new delight, it seemed to me. You never questioned the success of our marriage. Sex for you was the keystone and core; if it was there and was good, everything held. Now at sixty, during this blessed, long semester's “leave without pay,” as my college calls it, and after, when it is clear that I have left you (for that is what I am planning to do when this academic stint is over), what I will miss most will be our enduring sexual accomplishments, our mutual enjoyment during four decades of gratification. I suppose that, more than anything, it was a source of pride. I
am
proud.…'

N
EXT TWO EXITS U. OF IOWA.
‘Which one? Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'll take the first and see where that gets me.' Minna looked at the map of the city sent to her by the chairman of the department, and figured out a route into the city and to the place called Iowa House in which a room had been rented for her. After some wrong turns and rerouting because the map did not show one-way streets and even this small town seemed to have a plethora of them, she parked in front of the brick building that sat stolidly on the bank of a river. ‘I've made it. I'm here. This begins a new term, the short term, the term of my change into a single person. I'm on my own.'

Minna turned to her silent rider and said, ‘This is where you get off, friend-husband. No further. Have you listened to my long tirade? Do you know what I am trying to tell you? Probably not. I'm not sure I am clear about it all myself.' She took two suitcases from the VW. When she looked for Richard, he was gone. She thought she could still smell the tang of his pipe tobacco.

The room the department chairman had reserved for her in Iowa House, a campus hotel for visitors, was pleasant, cool, very clean and somewhat monastic, especially after the steam-heated overfurnishing of her New York apartment. Two large uncurtained windows looked out to grass and the narrow Iowa River. The bathroom was large and very white, the closet so cool that Minna stored her half-gallon of Beefeater on the floor and needed no ice when it came time for her drink before dinner. She pulled the leatherette chair to the window, put her papers, books and portable Royal typewriter on the large round table beside it. Her clothes and shoes filled half the closet; her luggage and packing cases were piled in the other half. Over the double bed, covered with a chaste white chenille spread, there was a good light; a solid-looking black telephone stood on the stand beside it. There was a low, ample clothes chest, and a long mirror above it. The walls were white and bare of hotel art. The door locked with a key and a chain. Furnished in this way, the room felt spare, almost careful, about itself and its single occupant.

Minna took her dinner at restaurants in town, and then walked back in the dusk to her room. Sometimes she was too tired to make the trip up and then down the hill to the center of town, so she had supper in the cafeteria downstairs in Iowa House. She found this restful. The room was filled with students and junior faculty, not one of whom knew her. She sat near a window, watching the river ducks come home to their nests under the trees for the night. She thought of her extraordinary freedom from domestic chores and human relationships. With the morning's copy of
The Daily Iowan
propped up beside her cup of coffee, she surrendered to long periods of solitary pleasure, congratulating herself on having achieved such eremetic quiet, this sense of reclusiveness. For the first time in her long life she was entirely alone, living alone, eating alone. She was astonished to find she was not in the least lonely.

In her office mailbox when she first arrived was an invitation from someone in the department of English, asking her to talk to a class in contemporary poetry. ‘You are welcome to come to any class that is convenient for you. We meet Mondays and Thursdays at one. The students are reading
Poems Returned from Saint Elizabeth's
now. Anything you could tell them about Maud Noon would be most welcome. Perhaps you may know that I did my doctoral thesis on Noon, so of course
I
shall be delighted.…'

The assistant professor, a thin, energetic, loquacious woman named Janice Sinatra (‘Before you ask, let me assure you, I'm
no
relation') hustled her into the classroom and sat beside her behind a table. She began an elaborate introduction, in which Minna's academic past was quickly reduced to her college and her title. A long peroration followed. Minna appeared in it as the friend and confidante of the celebrated American poet who died tragically so young. The introduction took a long time and was designed to demonstrate Professor Sinatra's knowledge of Maud's life and work. ‘Tell us first, Dr. Roman, how you came to know Noon.' ‘We had rooms next to each other in Hewitt, at Barnard College.' Minna hesitated, looking at a redheaded blue-eyed child in a T-shirt that read
HARVARD
. ‘It was, um, in 1939.' ‘Tell us what she was like then,' said Professor Sinatra. ‘Well, first let me say that although we lived close together, I never got to know her as well as … as I might have. She studied hard, and went out very little. I was closer to the photographer Liz Becker, who lived on the other side of Maud in our senior year—' Professor Sinatra broke in to say to the class, ‘Elizabeth Becker, you remember, took that wonderful picture of Otto Mile when he was dying in a mental hospital. It was she—I'm right, am I not, Dr. Roman?—who rescued the poems that form the body of this book we're now studying.' ‘Yes,' said Minna. There was a long silence brought about by the curtness of Minna's response. Then a boy in the back of the room said, ‘Did she think about death a lot, the way she does in all these poems?' Minna said, ‘No. I don't think so. I never heard her talk about death. But I knew her years before she … died, and saw her very little after we graduated. I went away to graduate school, she stayed in New York and went to Columbia. We married, but you know, different sorts of men who did different sorts of things. So we only met a few times, when Elizabeth Becker instigated a sort of reunion now and then.' ‘What was she like when you all got together?' asked Professor Sinatra, seeming avid for anything that Minna might say. ‘The same. The same as she had been in college. Quiet and rather secretive about herself, but always very interested in what everyone else was doing. She asked a lot of questions about my area of research, she always wanted to know everything about what shows Liz was having, in what magazines she was publishing her photographs. The last time I saw her, was, I think after the children had gone to live with her mother. We had lunch together up near Columbia. She seemed sad. I asked to read some of her poems and she gave me a large sheaf of carbon copies of them and said not to bother returning them. I took them home and read them and thought them quite wonderful. After she … was dead I realized she had burned a lot of her work and that I had the only copies of some things.' ‘So you are responsible for having them published, like Max Brod with Franz Kafka's work, and Robert Bridges for Gerard Manley Hopkins?' ‘No, nothing so elevated as all that. I knew a man in publishing, Jay Laughlin, who was a patient of my husband's. He came to dinner one night, and I showed them to him. That's the only part I had in it all.' A girl sitting at the side of the room said, ‘Did you like her? As a person, I mean.' Minna hesitated. Poor Maud, she thought, did I like her, her with her vast, unattractive person and self-absorbed brilliant self? ‘Yes, I think I liked her. Why do you ask?' The girl twisted her long hair in one hand and looked embarrassed. ‘Because, well, she seems, from all the biographies, a person it would be hard to like. Now that she's dead, and the way she died, well, it might be easier to like her now.' The class laughed. Professor Sinatra looked stern and disapproving of the note of levity in the question. Minna said, ‘She is, was and is, a very good poet. But I didn't know it then. Now I do. And the older I get, the more I think about her, the more present and real she seems to me, more than she was when we lived next door to each other in Hewitt Hall. That,' she added lamely, ‘says something about the force of art.'