April is not the cruellest month.
The cruellest month is July,
Bringer of drought or deluge,
Gray rainy afternoons when brothers leave.
A startled look crossed Ernest’ face. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that during all those weeks, the long drama of Mark’ exile, his younger son might actually have been listening; taking in every word.
Ben read on. The poem is very long, and divided into four sections, the first concerning (mostly) Southern California summer, and rainlessness, and “my father’ hose nosing soil / The thirst of which is never slaked.” Much metaphorical fuss is made, in the second section, over the Datsun’ lack of a reverse gear:
As if in kidnapping him
It was promising a one-way journey
From which he would never come back.
In another line, Ben writes that “Assuming there were no delays / They would arrive in Vancouver on time.” (That sort of redundancy, I am sorry to say, was typical of his poetry.) Part three brings the travelers to San Francisco, where they stop for the night, and encounter some rather ill-tempered mermen off of Aquatic Park. It turns out that they are suicides who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge:
We are the dead, we are the lost,
We are the mer-people of San Francisco Bay!
Entwined by seaweed, scales climb up our arms.
We watch for the next body to fall, always eager
To add another to our tribe!
At last, in part four, the travelers arrive in Vancouver. That Ben had at this point never visited the city, and knew nothing of its geography, seems not to have been any kind of deterrent to him in describing a rather fantastic landscape of hills and lakes and bridges, the sole occupants of which, apparently, are draft dodgers who spend their days staring through telescopes across the border at an America going about its business without regard to the suffering of its exiled sons:
In the supermarket, the housewives
Load their carts with canned cranberry sauce,
Canned pumpkin, canned gravy, frozen turkeys,
At school the children cut turkeys
Out of construction paper,
Make turkeys from clay,
Turkeys from papier-mache . . .
The poem concludes with a scene of such bathos that even the memory of its being read makes me grimace: In a bizarre ceremony that defies all laws of realism, brothers shake hands across a national frontier as clearly demarcated as a child’ drawing of the Berlin wall:
Ignoring the frowning guards,
He holds out his arm
And I take his hand, and in that squeeze there is Defiance of unjust laws, and a refusal to weaken.
I wish I could pull him across to me, but I know
That if I did, he would be shot.
And so I stay where I am,
Until he lets go, and walks
Sadly back into Vancouver.
Behind me Mother weeps.
We stay until he is out of sight,
And then we go home.
Ben stepped back. “Thank you,” he said. I looked around myself. To my amazement, Jonah Boyd began to applaud. And then Nancy applauded too, furiously, and Ernest, and Daphne, and then everyone else. I don’t know whether they were simply following Boyd’ lead, or responding to some imaginative vigor that the poem revealed, a vigor of which, curiously enough, its imprecision and ragged sentimentality and obliviousness to all rules of structure and concerns about accuracy might have been the ultimate proof. For there is this to be said about “Vancouver": Bombastic though it is, there is life in the thing. Alas Ben’ refusal, as always, to accept (much less contend with) the interfering laws imposed by logic, form, and the real world in the end shipwrecks him, rendering the poem, like all his poems, unpublishable and probably unreadable. But that didn’t matter to his audience on Thanksgiving eve 1969. After all, he was only fifteen. What they saw was an unsuspected promise, albeit one which it would take him many long years to fulfill.
The applause died out—and then, to my surprise, Anne was the first to stand. “Ben, that was wonderful, just wonderful,” she said, stumbling up to him and taking him in an embrace that opened Nancy’ mouth, as there was in it more than a touch of salaciousness. Anne’ breasts were squashed flat against his chest; she might have been grinding her hips. I wasn’t sure. In any case, Boyd saved the day. “Yes, wasn’t it?” he echoed, taking his wife’ hand and leading her back to the daybed, away from Ben. “Very exciting. Have you sent it to your brother?”
“No.”
“I think you should,” Nancy said. “Mark will be thrilled.
Moved.”
“I don’t want him to read it until it’ published,” Ben said. “I’ve sent it to The New Yorker.”
“Oh, The New Yorkerl If there’ one thing I admire in a young writer, it’ gumption. I myself stopped sending stories to The New Yorker fifteen years ago. I figured, after Bill Maxwell had turned down thirty-five of them, what was the point in wasting any more postage?”
“Oh, Jonah, don’t worry, Ben doesn’t really expect The New Yorker to publish his poem,” Nancy said.
“Yes, I do.”
“No matter . . . If they do, it’ll be wonderful, and if they don’t, it’ll be even more wonderful.” She clapped her hands together, apparently unfazed by the utter pointlessness of this remark. “Well, hasn’t this been a wonderful evening? And now who’ ready for more pie?”
“I thought maybe I could read a second poem,” Ben said.
“Now, Ben, one’ enough. We don’t want to tire Mr. Boyd. After all, he and Anne have had a very long day. They had to get up very early in the morning on the East Coast, which is the middle of the night here.”
“But I only want to read one more!”
Unfortunately for Ben the crowd was already dispersing, moving back toward the kitchen. “Sorry, honey,” Nancy said, and rested her hand on her son’ head.
He flinched it away. “It’ not fair,” he said.
“What’ not? You had your chance.”
“But I only read half as long as he did.”
“Well, Mr. Boyd’ a famous novelist. When you’re a famous poet, you can read twice as long, how about that?”
“I’ll tell you what, Ben,” Boyd interjected. “How about if we go off somewhere and I listen to some more of your poems?”
“Oh, Jonah, you don’t have to do that . . .”
“But I want to. Really, I think it’ my duty, as an old gorgon of a writer, to impart what wisdom I possess to this young acolyte.”
“But you must be tired . . .”
“I’m not.”
“Let them,” Anne said.
Ben looked pleadingly into Nancy’ eyes. She hesitated. “Are you sure?”
Boyd rested a hand on Ben’ shoulder. “I’m absolutely sure.”
“Okay . . . But Ben, you have to promise not to keep Mr. Boyd longer than he feels like listening.”
“Let’ go to your room.”
“What about your room?”
“Ben, you have to promise.”
“I promise, okay?” And he led Boyd off. Chin cupped in hand, Nancy watched them recede, until Anne touched her on the shoulder. She turned. Anne smiled at her friend, for the first time that evening, with what looked like affection.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” she said.
“Have you? I’m so glad!”
Anne leaned in closer, so close that Nancy must have been able to smell the gin on her breath. “Listen, I know it’ late . . . but what would you say to a little Mozart?”
Nancy’ eyes brightened. “Really?”
“Really.”
“May we listen?” asked Phil Perry.
“You will hear in any case,” Anne said. “Whether you choose to listen is up to you.”
Phil took the cue, and followed them into the living room, where he sat down on the sofa. I sat next to him. And so the reading was followed by a recit
al the decided mediocrity and unmusicality of which, I was gratified to hear, was not to be explained away by mere lack of practice. Magical harmonies indeed! Another small, if private, victory for me, on that night that was to be marked by so many losses.
85
Seven
EVEN TODAY I don’t like to think about Phil Perry. But he plays a role in this story, and so I suppose I don’t have any choice. What have I said so far? That he was one of Ernest’ Ph.D. students, that he was scrawny, that he ate a lot. To which I can add: He was prone to intense, one-sided crushes on girls whom he would persist in bothering long after they had told him to get lost. (In modern parlance, a stalker.) He liked to boast that his IQ was 180, and that he was a member of MENSA—mostly, he claimed, because it was a good place to meet girls. Glenn often made fun of him. Although in theory they were friends, and worked together under Ernest on a number of projects, I always suspected that in his heart Phil hated Glenn, and envied him, since Glenn had so much more success with women. Also academically, Glenn was the more successful of the pair. Phil was a kind of genius, possessed of a rare instinct and passion for his subject, but he lacked Glenn’ self-discipline and savoir-faire. He didn’t know how to dress or smile. Nor had he mastered the art, as Glenn had, of giving little Christmas gifts to the wife of the boss, or flirting with his secretary. His papers were inspired and chaotic and might have been great, had he been able to finish them. But he never could, and so his transcript was full of incompletes. We all liked Phil, and felt sorry for him. But we adored Glenn.
Glenn was handsome. He had curly auburn hair that bleached blond in the summer, and wide eyes that he set off by wearing tiny wire-rimmed glasses. No one knows this, but I had an affair with him in the months just after Daphne left him, when he had been turned down for tenure at Wellspring but had yet to find another job. As a lover he displayed the same qualities of flash and eagerness to please, as well as the slight whiff of pandering, that marked his academic career. Such an appeal, however, gets dull in a fairly short order. I think what galled Phil was the impression, personified in Glenn, that the slick and the mediocre will always win out over the clumsy and the brilliant. Glenn’ failure to get tenure was an intellectual vindication from which Phil might have taken comfort, had he only shown a little more patience.
Whenever Phil and Glenn were in the house together with Ernest, there was a palpable tension in the air. This was because Ernest played them off each other—for their own good, he insisted. I suppose he imagined that by flaunting his preference for Glenn, he might ignite in Phil some healthy competitive spirit, induce him to pull up his bootstraps and develop a manner to match his talents. But it never happened. Phil continued to stumble along, no doubt vexed by the favoritism that Ernest showed Glenn—for example, by confiding in him, that Thanksgiving, the fascinating episode of Jonah Boyd “misplacing” his notebooks. Ernest and Glenn worked together in interrogating Boyd, they made a spectacle of their alliance as mentor and disciple, which Phil was forced to witness, all the while trying to fill in the blanks for himself. Had I been more observant, I might have seen early signs of the envy that would erupt so many years later in violence—but at the time there was so much else to keep track of, I ended up more or less ignoring Phil. As I usually did. As everyone usually did.
Two hours after the readings ended—the kitchen cleaned, Glenn and Phil gone, and the Boyds put to bed—I climbed into my notoriously bad-tempered Dodge Dart, turned the key in the ignition, and found that it would not start.
Cursing, I returned to the kitchen. Nancy was sitting at the tulip table in her bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and thumbing rather listlessly through the recipe pages of Sunset.
She looked up. “What are you doing back here?” she asked.
“The car won’t start.”
“Oh, how annoying. Ernest!”
He too was in his bathrobe. Together, we went outside to look under the hood.
“Nothing wrong that I can see,” Ernest said, slipping his hand down the back of my skirt. “But then again, I’m no mechanic.”
“I’ll call a taxi.”
“No need for a taxi. I can drive you home.” He started to kiss me.
“Wouldn’t it be simpler if Denny just stayed the night here?” Nancy called from the kitchen door. “She can sleep with Daphne on the fold-out bed in the study. And that way she’ll be here in the morning when the tow truck comes.”
Ernest withdrew his hand. In the dark, had she seen?
“That’ probably a better plan,” he said, moving away from me into the moonlight.
Back indoors, Nancy led me to the study, the door to which she simultaneously rapped on and pushed open. “Daphne, Denny’ car’ broken down, so she’ going to bunk with you . . . Oh.” Daphne was not in bed; she was sitting at the table near the window, in jeans and a sweater set, putting on makeup.
“Can’t you wait for a person to say ‘Come in’?” she asked.
“Sorry,” Nancy said. “Listen, I’m exhausted. Be a sweetheart and show Denny where the extra towels are, will you?” As if in compensation for her earlier brusqueness, she patted Daphne’ head rather as she might have Little Hans’. “Well, good night, girls. And thanks again for all your help today.”
“Nancy—”
“What?”
“Are you happy how things turned out? I mean, seeing Anne?”
“Oh, delighted, delighted.” But her smile was weary. “Of course, I have to admit, the drinking worries me . . . Well, no need to think about that now. Try and get a good night’ sleep.”
She left, closing the door softly.
I sat on the daybed. “So,” I said to Daphne, “I’ll bet you weren’t expecting to have a roommate tonight, were you?”
Daphne had resumed her makeup. “I wasn’t, actually.”
I took off one shoe. “Going out?”
She turned to face me. “Can I trust you? You’re younger than my parents. I hope I can trust you.”
“Of course you can.”
She leaned closer. “The fact is, I do have plans tonight—only they’re ones I don’t want anyone to find out about. You see, for some time now—a few months—I’ve been involved with someone, and for all sorts of reasons, for the time being at least, we need to keep it quiet—”
“You mean Glenn.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You mean you knew?”
“Well, if you’ll pardon my saying so, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist—”
“Oh, but do you think that means my parents have guessed? Because if my dad found out, it could be awful for Glenn. Dad wouldn’t approve. The age difference and all, and the fact that Glenn’ his sort of, you know, protege.”
“I don’t think your father knows. You mother, on the other hand—well, you may have noticed that she didn’t even ask you why you were putting on makeup at eleven o’clock at night.”
“Dear mother. She can be so—well, you know, difficult sometimes, and then sometimes she can sense something, and be totally cool without even saying a word.” Suddenly Daphne jumped up and sat next to me on the daybed. “Oh, Denny, I had no idea you were so cool! Do you have a boyfriend? I hope you don’t mind my asking.”
“I’ve had several. At the moment . . . No, not at the moment.”
“That’ too bad. But here’ the thing. Your having to stay here tonight—it’ put me in sort of an awkward position.”
“Why? Is Glenn coming over?”
“God, no! I couldn’t ever—you know—right here in the house, with Mother and Father on the other side of the wall. Yuck! No, the plan is, he’ going to pick me up at midnight, across the street. And we’re going back to his apartment. And then at five, before anyone’ up, he’ll drop me off, and I’ll get into bed. Oh, you will help us out, won’t you, and not say anything?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The last thing I’d want to do is interrupt the course of young love.” I patted her hand. “Go. Have fun. I won’t say a wo
rd.”
Relief filled Daphne’ eyes. “Oh, Denny, you really are wonderful. I never would have thought you could be that cool!” She removed my hand from hers. “Listen, I’d better scoot. And when I get back, don’t scream or anything. I’ll be as quiet as I can.”
“No problem.”
She opened the door. “Oh, and you can borrow my nightgown if you want. It’ clean. Bye.”
She tiptoed out, shutting the door behind her so slowly that it groaned—a louder noise by far than the click of quick closure. From the kitchen where he was sleeping, Little Hans gave a yelp. There was a whispered curse. Another door opened, and shut again.
I took off my other shoe. I listened for—and thought I heard, very far off—the sound of a car turning the curve.
Then I was alone.
I looked around. Never before in the years I’d known them had I slept in the Wrights’ house. Now, rubbing my stocking feet into the carpet, I marveled at a certain quality of cushioned silence that it radiated, a warm, dozing purr, as if somewhere in the midst of that rich layering of rugs and books and paintings and mirrors a cat lay hidden, and was taking pleasure in cleaning itself. This was the sound—the protective, lulling melody—of affluence, and perhaps only those, like me, whom affluence admits only as visitors can name it. It was hard to believe that just a few feet away, just on the other side of a none-too-thick wall, Nancy and Ernest were going through their bedtime rituals. And what did those rituals consist of? Did Nancy wear curlers? Did Ernest stuff his ears with cotton? Did they make love? The last seemed unlikely. Even so, as I took off my clothes, I made a little striptease out of my disrobing, swinging my stockings in the air, imagining as my audience . . . who? Ernest? Nancy?
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