Now he realizes his students would be indifferent. They prefer books bound with glue that dissolves and composite paper of inferior substances that yellow and shred. A writer can anticipate outliving his books; he had planned to note this and pause, allowing his senior seminar to consider the implications, the irony and tragedy.
His students don’t expect books to alter the orbit of worlds or be memorized. They don’t believe a book can change a single molecule of their lives or give them one second thought. The shoddy construction of modern books asserts they’re of the moment and don’t need glass cases for protection. They aren’t distillations of personality or character in the monumental chaos of unforeseen events and complex ambiguous circumstances. They won’t be reread or gifted to children. In fact, his students donate or discard them. They leave them on beaches and in airport terminals. They toss them in trash cans. His students share an aversion for trash and they’re careful not to litter.
It’s the first tentative knocking on the door of his official office hour’s morning. Professor Malcolm McCarty glances at the door. He relishes the ritual of this, the sound of a hand against wood, uncertain but determined. It’s a gesture ancient as fertility dances, bare feet on mud under a full moon, and men drumming. He knows his assigned part, walks to the door and stops. It’s the arrested moment of expectation before the grotesque tedium of student indifference and obfuscation. This pause is like a signature in pencil on a lithograph or a single voice reciting on stage. It’s an intimacy that demands obedience and complicity. As he opens the door, he senses spring in the ice under Hadley Hall, differentiating and assembling itself.
“It’s Cindy Carlson. Candy’s sister,” the stranger says. She calls herself it. “You know. C.C,” it says.
“Yes?” Malcolm feels an imminent irritation.
He knows C.C. She’s one of the middle-aged locals they’ve rounded-up to enroll. She’s what they term a returnee. C.C is fifty-one and working on an undergraduate English degree. She’s been a sophomore for three years. They choose English because they suffer from the delusion that they speak the language. They believe it’s easier than that compendium of border wars called history. Or the math you need a protractor for. That’s called geometry. But they can read headlines in scandal sheets, recipes and satellite TV schedules. They assume Conrad and Melville will be similar. Words. More words. Many pages of words.
Obviously, C.C. sent her sister to deliver the inevitable excuse. She’s been in a car crash. A limb was unexpectedly amputated. Thieves stole her purse at gunpoint. As fate would have it, her final exam was in it. Or one of her wayward spawn is in an institution and the police, social workers and doctors have mandated her presence.
“She can’t come no more.” The woman takes a breath. “She got the pneumonia. Got put in the hospital.”
Malcolm McCarty must adjust his vision to clarify this current generation. He sorts through piercings and tattoos, noting how white they all are, the boys tall and the girls soft and heavy. They have pale skin like porcelain that accentuates their vicious out-breakings of acne. They wear the universal uniform of blue jeans and bulky navy sweatshirts with attached hoods concealing much of their faces.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm McCarty says. He leaves the office door wide open.
His secretary glances up from the computer she doesn’t know how to use. He spent six hundred dollars of his dwindling Visiting Lecturer funds to enroll this perpetual sophomore English major in computer classes and she can’t put headers on documents. Cut and paste is a dangerous wilderness she won’t enter. It’s her version of Hawthorne’s dark forest.
“Sit down.” Malcolm indicates the one chair in front of his desk. “Please.”
He remembers Candy Carlson. C.C. lives in Harmony Hollow. It’s six miles from campus as the crow flies. And that’s the one thing that does fly in Allegheny Hills.
He’d been there once before at the request of the enrollment committee and Women’s Club. Patricia had repeatedly requested he visit. Then finally and officially, in her capacity as secretary of Women’s Club, she had insisted. Patricia, liaison to the perpetually unfortunate.
His wife collects what crawls out of the hills and hollows — the disabled, amputees, women born with legs of different lengths, and schizophrenics. Her last project was an Iraq vet tractor repairman with a limp and stutter. Patty was stirred by the man’s momentary desire to acquire sufficient grammar to procure a contractor’s license.
“Is that a dream?” Malcolm inquired. “Do we differentiate inspiration from banal aspiration?” Not even an aspiration, he decided, but an impulse such as the severed arm feels. A few random neurons flicker and spasm, and his wife was sharpening pencils and baking pies, her face alert and prepared for her latest squalid enormity.
“Chris has PTSD,” Patty informed him.
The vet, in dirty jeans and a wildly stained Sex Pistols T-shirt, reveals a shabby impulse to improve the self he doesn’t have. He borrows money and doesn’t return it. He offers to do Patty’s grocery shopping in Wood’s End and skids into a ditch. One side of the car collapses like smashed tin and oak branches crack the windshield. He doesn’t call but hitchhikes home instead. He schedules lessons and doesn’t come. He has to bail out his ex-brother-in-law. His girlfriend’s in a diabetic coma. His grandfather has Parkinson’s. A horse stepped on his stepson’s foot.
Patricia waits with her posture adjusted, her hair just washed and brushed, and pencils ready. Malcolm assumes her tutoring missions will continue indefinitely. One summer night when rosehips have infiltrated the air with the unmistakable scent of cinnamon, Chris honks from a pick-up. He’s drunk and high on meth, and drives up and down Maple Ridge Road, shooting out their windows with a deer rifle.
Malcolm McCarty telephones Sherriff Murphy in Wood’s End. Patricia protests, pulls at his arms, moans and falls to the floor screaming, “Hang up. O god. Hang up.”
“She’s improving the world one hillbilly felon at a time,” Malcolm says.
The sheriff laughs. He’s amiable, a sturdy man, tan, with an athlete’s build. He moves with graceful assurance, comfortable within his body. Probably ex-military. Women are no doubt drawn to him. He has the quiet certainty of a man who has been tested and recognizes his capacities and limitations. A straight shooter, Malcolm decides, unhurried and attentive.
“Your wife’s a nice lady. But she can’t treat country folk same as faculty. They’re accustomed to abuse. If they don’t get it, they’re suspicious and resentful,” the sheriff explains.
Malcolm is surprised when the sheriff accepts tea in a floral porcelain cup. Patricia has gone to bed.
Sheriff Murphy, casually taking inventory of their living room — the piano with a silver candelabra Patricia found in the flea market at Clignancourt is beside a bluish art nouveau vase with yesterday’s roses. The walls are decorated with scrolls of muted Yangtze River landscapes — fishing boats, huts at the sides of rice paddies and bridges in fog.
The sheriff glances at the carpets. Malcolm carried the rugs back from Kashmir in rolls like twin boa constrictors around his neck. He went to the Philadelphia airport to retrieve the cobalt blue chandelier Patricia bought in Prague. It was rush hour and custom agents interrogated him for three hours and threatened a full body search. He brought the box home and the directions were in Russian. He remembers. It took him an entire weekend to hang it.
“This all insured?” Jim Murphy asks.
“Yes, of course,” Malcolm says.
Sheriff Murphy stands up. He’s wearing black polished boots. He takes a small notebook from his pocket. “Want to make a formal complaint?”
Malcolm says no.
“I’ll arrest him anyway,” the sheriff decides. Then he extends his card. “You may want to call me.”
“Why?” Malcolm is puzzled.
“Can’t insure the future,” Sheriff Murphy observes. “You might need a hand some time. I’m a good person to know.”
Malcolm
McCarty entertains the notion that Jim Murphy is threatening him. Maybe it’s the prologue of a shakedown. There’s something wrong but he can’t quite determine what it is. He dismisses the idea and lets it drift into the night.
Patricia’s new project is a farmer’s wife who can’t read. She’s dyslexic and somewhat deaf. Her father considered her too retarded for school. Her stupidity enraged him and he took out her two front teeth. She’s been at River’s Nest Motel in Belleview since she was 11. She has attention deficit disorder and they make her do all the laundry. Patty lists a litany — misogamy, physical and verbal abuse, and predatory lawyers. Malcolm nods and excuses himself.
Her current pupil cancels lessons, naturally, claiming car problems. Her boyfriend demonstrates his rage at her uppity disrespect by breaking her arm in three places. But she’s persisted and become Patricia’s triumph. The woman can now awkwardly sound out rumors about movie stars with morning sickness and divorces.
Malcolm McCarty objected to the forced visit to her residence. C.C. in her natural state, so to speak. In situ. Then he relents. He drives a staff car, listening to the wind and remembering Patricia in graduate school. She’s crossing Strawberry Creek at Sather Gate carrying sequined bags of strawberries and miniature sunflowers. At this precise moment, thousands of women are crossing bridges carrying parasols and net bags of fruits and breads, orchids and pastries called moon-lit doe and spring angel. Women walk on riverbanks beneath redwoods, frangipani and palm trees. He was studying Chinese poetry, and realized all constellations are in alliances, haunting and elusive — Afternoon of the Woman Lost at Sea, Night of the Burned Boy, Squall Morning after Falling Stones, Feast of Old Man Feeding Demons.
Candy Carlson waits outside. She’s a washed-out blond with a manipulative whine and a hallucinatory sense of her poetry and its place in human consciousness.
“I’m better than Plath,” C.C. informs him, hand on her hip. “I got more experience. I’m wiser.”
Sometimes a monosyllable is unnecessary. In fact, it would be excessive. Malcolm nods his head.
Her trailer rests uncertainly on a low muddy rise surrounded by rusting bicycle and appliance parts. Gutted mattresses and plastic bags of rags decorate the yard. It’s returned to its original condition, reedy weeds and shoulder high thorny thistle cover the scarred metal remains of what might have been a playground. She wears a mini skirt, red stiletto heels, lipstick and perfume. Chickens pass blindly near her right foot.
“Free range,” C.C. says, laughing heartily.
Chickens poke through the corroded swingset tilting above punctured car tires, rusting wires and pieces of children’s toys. Afternoon is like dusk. It’s an unusual demarcation of the day and it contains an austere gravity. C.C. leans against a slat of barn, smoking, and beckoning him into the trailer with her fingers.
“Beer?” She studies him. It’s abstract, but not entirely impersonal. “No. You’re a coffee man. And you’re on duty.”
She produces an inappropriate smile. Her lips are distorted from Botox injections and emphasize her sullen pout. Despite decades of cynicism and disappointment, real and imagined, her mouth is prepared for the kiss that isn’t coming.
She puts a spoon of instant coffee in a Star Wars mug and fills it with warm tap water. He places her application form on the table. The Women’s Club secretary has filled out the difficult areas, like social security number, date of birth and address. All C.C. needs to do is sign. Yellow post-its are attached to the signature lines.
“My ship’s come in,” C.C. says, immediately turning to the financial aid package page.
Yes, it’s your ship, dear, Malcolm thinks. But it hasn’t anchored. It’s on the horizon. Contagion stalled it at sea. It’s abandoned but for caskets in rows like April Hyacinths.
C.C. applies her signature and recites her list of difficulties. She must be transported to and from campus by car. There’s no bus service in the hollows. She doesn’t have a phone and her electricity is shut off. Naturally, it was someone else’s mistake. She uses her hands for emphasis as she speaks. Malcolm notices her fingernails. They’re broken and discolored.
Some women are like old lamps, stained, discarded in thrift stores and attics. Two bucks. Professor Malcolm McCarty knows these women. They have insomnia, run red lights drunk and collect divorces and abuse. They’re bad swimmers with a diabetic’s thirst. They swallow bilge, oily kelp, and a colossus of salt. Bloat shuts them up. He wants to stitch her lips closed.
“I got books of poems already done,” C.C. informs him. She points to a stack of three-hole binders. Eight, Malcolm guesses, maybe more.
“Patricia told me. Women’s Club is sponsoring you.” He takes a symbolic sip of tepid coffee. “Proudly. Everyone is delighted to have you on board.” Malcolm replaces his mug on the table and stands up.
“You don’t look all that pleased,” C.C. notes, stabbing out her cigarette and lighting another.
She drinks beer from the bottle. Typical aggressive confrontational tilt of the hip. Too much noise in the eyes. She falls asleep with the TV on. She never turns it off. It’s her sole companion, the one pal who doesn’t let her down.
Some women scar everyone like radiation. Husbands. Neighbors. Infants. Failure makes them narrow and raw. Some women smell like cancer. Their skin is the texture of disaster. Rashes. Lice. That’s what Patricia brought home from her volunteer year at Wood’s End Hospital. But there was something intangible that couldn’t be scrubbed off — a sense of ruined linoleum, of trailer park faux wood plastic paneling, and food from a can like a dog.
“See, you don’t know me like Women’s Club,” C.C. begins, voice simultaneously a rebuff and a plea. “I was married up to a soldier twelve years. I lived in Okinawa. Texas. Germany. I’ve seen things.”
“Yes, of course you have.” Malcolm is almost at the car. He keeps walking.
“Hey, mister professor,” C.C. calls. “I was global from the jump. Think the bang’s in Bangkok? Wrong. They got porn in Berlin you wouldn’t believe. Think Plath knew that?”
It’s a rhetorical question, he decides. He drives recklessly fast and Harmony Hollow is behind him.
Professor McCarty is holding office hours. C.C.’s sister extends four more notebooks. “She wanted me to give you this,” the sister says. “It’s her final paper.” The sister pauses. “Women’s Club’s coming to visit. They sent a real big flower arrangement. You know, real flowers, not plastic. She’d sure appreciate you visiting.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll be out of town.” Malcolm picks up his calendar and manufactures an obstacle. “A conference in Chicago.”
He rides his bike home to Maple Ridge Road. Afternoon settles on him like a soiled blanket. He isn’t prepared for Patricia. How could he be? Patricia is suddenly agitated and abrasive. He’s twice repeated the story of Candy Carlson’s epic journey to campus. She was walking in snowdrifts with her Norton’s Anthology in a plastic bag and her grade school rhymes printed in pencil. She doesn’t know cursive or how to type. He feels cold. His hands. Perhaps he should start wearing gloves.
“C.C.’s in the hospital?” Patricia is stricken.
“Yes, C.C.,” Malcolm McCarty clarifies, wondering how well his wife knows her and the extent of her misguided emotional involvement. Good old C.C. She expected him to drive her to campus, as if he were a bus service or butler. Her condition was so exceptional it necessitated private squiring. This after the Lieberman affair, when no male faculty would even have a brief conference with a female unless a secretary was stationed on watch.
“These women feel themselves coming apart like the landscape,” Patricia informs him. “They have a capacity for lyricism”
Malcolm nods his head. The table is set for tea. He sits down.
“C.C. was transcending her circumstances,” his wife says.
“Transcending her circumstances? I think not. In point of fact, she was walking an icy road in high heels. Smoking, no doubt.” He replaces his teacup carefully i
n the saucer’s floral center. Another domestic bull’s eye.
“She was hiking to your class. She was carrying your books,” Patricia raises her voice and glares at him.
“Transcending her circumstances,” Malcolm repeats, annoyed. “That’s a soundbite. Her situation required decades. It’s a process, for Christ’s sake.” All at once he’s unexpectedly frightened.
Malcolm walks into his study. C.C. needs more than decades. She needs divine intervention and electric shock. He’s unsteady and angry. This is the new order. One wishes to be a singer, a TV show hostess, an architect or engineer, and the whole mechanism of struggle and revelation is extinguished. The planet is succumbing to magical thinking. He’s seen the global village. It’s a millennial cargo cult under an atrocity of lurid neon.
“You were born with a stick for a spine,” Patricia says, pushing his study door open without knocking. “That stick is up your ass. Don’t mistake it for a backbone.”
Malcolm is stunned. He hasn’t heard Patty say ‘ass’ before. He thought her genetic code precluded forming a certain strata of words. The inexplicable vulgarity was shouted with intensity.
“Is it focus, Malcolm? Or are you blind?” Patricia positions herself next to his desk and leans into the wall. She’s obviously prepared to stay.
Malcolm McCarty remembers graduate school, the books, the eyestrain in libraries with inadequate light, and the relentless deprivation. How hungry he was, filling his pockets with crackers and packets of ketchup from cafeterias. He ate this later, reading, underlining and memorizing. What did he fail to notice?
His mother was in the hospital that last semester. Each weekend he drove a borrowed car to San Diego. He underlined passages while she slept. He was revising his dissertation. His mother was hideous. Choking and sobbing sounds released themselves from her body, as if she were already buried and now lived underground. His mother, with her feline mews and growls. Then the weeks of strangling, as if the individual events of her life had coalesced and formed a rope. In the act of breathing, she was hanging herself.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 18
