The Other (31 page)

I turned a page in
Chronic Obsessions
and read “First Words”:

After my grandmother went earthward

In unflattering regalia

I spied in the distance

The man who would be my husband.

Why did I pretend to have an errand?

The cups by the cut-glass bowl of lemonade needed

Straightening and I straightened them

While the Negro at the

Serving ladle didn’t watch.

He kept his hands behind his back and looked into

The middle distance. “Just ignore me,” I said, and

In reply he dipped his head to one side.

Around the back of the gazebo I “bumped” into

The man who would become my husband.

He cupped a hand over my shoulder in an effort to

Hold me upright. Chevrons were stitched

On the arm of his summer dress jacket.

I slipped my shoulder free

But his raised hand stayed as if to signal

Pure intentions. He raised it further, as if taking an

Oath. He raised the other, like a fugitive at

Gunpoint. He did these things humorlessly. Then he

Stood in a posture of obeisance that was a little

Reminiscent of my current lover,

Male couchant,
with his eyes rolled back in his head.

My husband-to-be now began to

Teeter. His five o’clock shadow was a matrix of

Tiny pinholes. He seemed to have a pointed

Breastbone, like a bird. His manner included no detectable irony.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to touch you.”

Those were my husband’s first words.

I wasn’t much impressed by Robert Leventhal, partly because I couldn’t hear his music, and partly because he read like soap opera. But I knew from other chapbooks I’d opened through the years that there might be a gem where it wasn’t expected. So I read, next, “I Torture Myself”:

For fun. This must be said: for fun.

And when I am done for the moment with

Torturing myself

I torture him as a sacrifice to the

Goddess of resentment.

I like to pin him to his altar.

My shame at this is worse than

My husband reading the paper

After work. He folds each section,

Feet crossed at the ankles,

And wonders, because he has to, about

Eisenhower’s health.

There are fine forms of

Torture. A subtle art, and nuanced,

Rooted in the beginning of time,

Torture is Eros. One form of torture

Demands doing nothing while another demands

All. Let your victim weep

Both ways. Let your victim

Bleed: never staunch a fresh wound.

If you hear him crying, for no reason,

From his chamber, be happy

Because it was so easy, this

Torture via absence, this torture in not doing.

Let him torture himself.

The days are long this way.

This torturer knows ennui.

I need to be doing the

Work that has chosen me—

The incitement of pain.

But since this prison is for

Both of us he stuffs my ears with

Agony. How do I tell him that

My choices are bad

In this era of limitation?

That the lonely torturer behind the

Mask hates him so much it

Feels like love?

Baby—please don’t blame me.

Hurt for my sake, be Christ-like,

And suffer as I suffered when you

Tore through my womb.

I would have slid
Chronic Obsessions
back in among the other chapbooks if I hadn’t happened to notice, in its table of contents, the title “Alki, 1851,” which was also the title of the poem I’d read twenty-six years before, in Ginnie Barry’s study, after smoking weed there with John William—the poem Ginnie’d had printed as a broadside and then displayed, framed, with her name on it as poet, behind her writing table:

They oared ashore through rain,

And though they were egregious in their long-distance purpose,

Kamogwa didn’t suck them under in his gyre,

And Thunderbird, on high, watched.

Their friends hanged Bad Jim.

At the Mad House, Sawdust Women plied for coin.

Eskimo Joe cut timber in a union shirt.

Ikt papa ikt sockala Tiee
—one pope and one God—or so it was proclaimed.

Next came the box-houses and lectures on phrenology,

Faro and Little Egypt, dancing nude,

Bunco, vaudeville, nickelodeons, ragtime,

Pantages, jugglers, graft.

Then donkey engines turned bull teams to beef.

The wool dogs of the Squaxin went quietly extinct.

It rained on the tree farms and on the monuments to loggers,

And the Utopian Socialists surrendered.

The
Minuteman:
they built it.

The engineers in the football stadium:

It’s they who dreamed up Dyna-Soar,

Awake beside sleeping wives.

So I cast this prayer on the Ocean of Compassion:

O rising phallus on the plain above the waters,

Be as you are, germ seed of the future,

Help me to count what cannot be counted,

World after world,

And anchor me in Anchorless Mind,

Until I cease.

This same poem was in “Robert Leventhal’s” chapbook. In other words, John William’s mother had a pen name.

I
SAW
V
IRGINIA
B
ARRY
twice after her son disappeared. The first time, a middle-school art teacher we know invited Jamie and me to an opening at a gallery in Pioneer Square that was exhibiting his work, and so we went, and milled uncomfortably, and drank wine, and looked very closely at my colleague’s oil paintings, most of them done on modest canvases. This gallery was only a little wider than a hallway, so it was impossible to linger over the art without having someone pass between us and it every few seconds. It was shoulder to shoulder in there, and loud, because a lot of people clearly knew each other; there were dozens of conversations under way, and a lot of light striking wineglasses. In short, our brick-walled vault felt cramped and chaotic. Since our friend had drawn an overflow crowd, I was able to speak to him only briefly before it was someone else’s turn to greet the artist. After that I wanted to leave, but instead I found Jamie again, and we made a second jostling circuit of the paintings. “I’m not sure this is me,” she observed.

Later, someone silenced the crowd with an insistent fork and wineglass. It took me a while to realize that it was John William’s mother who wanted to address us. Her hair was black and silver now, and she wore it pulled so tightly back it seemed to lift her forehead. On the other hand, she hadn’t gained a pound since I’d seen her, thirteen years before, standing near the doorway of Lucy Hatch’s office with her fist against her mouth, trying not to laugh after I’d said, about John William, “He’s a good guy. You raised him well.” If anything, Ginnie looked even more sleek. She’d aged in a glamorous and enviable style and was striking the way women in their sixties can be striking. Ginnie handed off her wineglass and opened her palms as if to bless the gathered art-lovers. “Welcome,” she said. “Many of you know me, but for those who don’t, I’m Virginia Worthington, owner of this gallery, which is so remarkably managed by my friend Nora Friedman.” Applause, plus a smile and a wave from Nora Friedman. While this was unfolding, Ginnie reached back and took the measure of her chignon, turning her head slightly down and leftward. In profile, under track lights, wearing an embroidered bolero jacket and leather pants, she looked, I thought, self-possessed.

We heard about my colleague’s work—how his oil paintings evoked “discrete units of entablature and, at the same time, stained glass.” We heard about the “mandala motif in many of these paintings and the recurrent theme of the Uroborus as seen in Mexican calendar stones.” Ginnie mentioned some pamphlets on a table, urged all of us to enjoy the Chenin Blanc provided by a vintner from the Yakima Valley, and then, with spread hands, turned us loose once more “to look deeply into these glorious works of art.” Afterward, I told Jamie who’d just spoken—that Virginia Worthington, as she called herself, reclaiming her locally respected maiden name, was John William’s mother. Jamie said, “She looks like a matador in that two-million-dollar jacket.” And she did look like a matador. That was the right image. Ginnie looked flamboyant, if economical, making small talk. Once, in that packed gallery, I drew close enough to see her tiny earrings, and to hear her say, as I passed voyeuristically, to a man and two women, “The Arias Peace Plan for Central America would certainly be a boon for the arts.” Surprisingly, I felt no urge to tell Ginnie what had happened to her son. She left me, I suppose the word is, numb.

The second time I saw Ginnie was in 2002—four years after I’d bought
Chronic Obsessions
for $5 at Shorey’s. She was now an octogenarian and had endowed, at the University of Washington, the Virginia Worthington Poetry Series, designed to bring three poets a year to Kane Hall for readings and lectures. On the night I went, with my colleague the classicist, to hear Joseph Powell read, Ginnie was introduced by the dean of arts and sciences as “a true friend to the university and a lover of the arts whose generosity, grace, and philanthropic vision now bring to our campus the gift of fine poetry.” He preemptively took Ginnie’s hand and touched the padded shoulder of her suit; then Ginnie went to the podium, bent the microphone toward her brightly painted lips, pulled her jacket smartly down, and rubbed her palms together while we applauded. Reaching back to touch her hair, as she had fifteen years earlier, in her art gallery, she thanked us for “that kind and heartfelt greeting” and acknowledged the dean’s “words of praise.” My classicist friend leaned toward me and said, “It’s a Worthington Worthington, as in money,” and later, “Quintessential harridan.” Ginnie had become regal in her advanced years and carried herself like a dowager, leading with her chin, and addressed her audience with icy beneficence. She looked, I thought, like a film star at dusk—like someone loath to move out of the spotlight. “I am gratified to share fine poetry with you,” and “The stellar constellation of poets this inaugural season bodes well for the future of the Virginia Worthington Series,” and “I have insisted on reasonable ticket prices in perpetuity,” and “At lunch today with Joseph Powell, I let him know just how entirely pleased I am that he has joined us for this debut.” When Powell came forward, wearing a droopy mustache and cowboy boots, she called our attention to him with the open hands of a magician who has just produced something implausible.

Of course I thought, seeing her this way—so aged but indomitable and so self-reverential—of
Chronic Obsessions.
I didn’t see the benefactor with deep pockets and a love of poetry the dean of arts and sciences had proposed; instead, I saw a woman who’d poeticized badly. I saw Robert Leventhal. I saw someone who felt that torture is Eros. I’ve more than once, for a variety of reasons, had to impress on my students that “you can’t tell by looking.” I’m there in my sweater vest, cleaning my glasses in front of the blackboard, sweaty with my passion for Basho or Shakespeare, chalk on my fingers and squinting at the clock, and I know they don’t know, for example, who Neil Countryman is. Dickinson hardly published, I might say, by way of an example. Most of her neighbors had no inkling she wrote poems. Robert Frost was notoriously enigmatic with biographers. The amiable New Englander, the laureate and sage, was also his secretary’s sadistically charged lover. How wonderful that the hoary and sinewy Virginia Worthington had endowed this promising poetry series. She seemed so remarkably clearheaded, even wise, and entirely in command of her moment at the podium. She seemed so worthy of our praise.

H
ERE’S WHAT HAPPENED.

One day this spring, I read, in the
Seattle Times,
an article called
HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK
. This sort of thing gets reported sometimes—a hiker or climber will go missing for years, and then a femur is found, or a skull and some plastic, and two or three paragraphs will appear in the local section with the words “unidentified” and “investigation” and a description like “twelve miles west of Quilcene” or “seven hundred feet below the summit of Mount Constance.” The article this spring, though, was more thorough. It used the term “federal law enforcement officers” and the phrase “in a remote area of the park near the Hoh River.” I showed this to Jamie, and she said, “I think you might be busted, Neil,” and, “Don’t worry—I’ll visit.” In other words, she didn’t believe, after twenty-two years, that this article had anything to do with us, and neither did I.