Stephen pulled the car into the parking lot of a tall, narrow building that had clearly once been a church and was now converted into a temple to the arts. The crowd there, like gatherings at the shopping mall, was much younger than Maternus and his companions. Shen said this spot was popular with college students from nearby Denver University, a gaggle of whom were standing outside the building’s main entrance, smoking herbal cigarettes before the main feature began. Maternus was not surprised when he observed that several of the black-clad young men positioned on the sidewalk had tattoos on their forearms and metal studs in their lips and earlobes, and he was still less surprised a couple of them recognized Shen and shouted: “You the man!” when the poet lifted his chin to them. Maternus had never been in an enclosed theater before. The long black drapes on the four interior walls of the cinema house blocking out exterior light and hiding the stained glass windows certainly made the place resemble a conventional small theater, albeit one that had wooden pews instead of fold-out, padded seats. As it was an art house, and not merely a conventional venue one might find in the suburbs, and because the quality of the motion pictures shown there were not always the best, the audience was free to contribute (loudly) to whatever they saw and heard on the screen in front of them. Shen and Stephen explained to Maternus that mocking a bad movie from your seat was “ironic.”
“I might have anticipated that would be so,” said the Roman.
The by-now-old movie they watched that Sunday morning was an epic and oddly cartoonish retelling of the battle of Thermopylae. The three hundred Spartans in the center of the story — Maternus took them to be the heroes of the tale, but he was not overly certain — fought a huge Persian army, as they had in Herodotus’s telling of the battle. In the version they were watching on the screen the Spartans dressed in scanty red loincloths rather than heavy bronze armor, and they articulated their words at the backs of their mouths instead of on their tongues and lips. The Persians — Maternus could not help but think of them as the ancestors of the accursed Parthians — were a collection of humanoid aliens who rode rhinos and elephants that were five storeys tall. King Xerxes was an eight-foot-tall hermaphrodite who observed the fighting from a throne indistinguishable from a Rose Bowl Parade float. Everyone on the screen shouted their lines.
From the relatively few comments the scruffy audience members made, Maternus deduced the performance was meant to be serious. The Roman therefore decided he, too, should treat the film as serious. Such would be the polite action to take. Thus he remained composed. Until the combat began. Then Maternus was the one to make noise. The prancing choreography of the supposed warriors on the screen, the absurd way they slashed at one another rather than stabbing as real soldiers would do, the ridiculously ornate weapons they carried, and the fifty-foot leaps the Spartans could make at will: all of these were so preposterous to the veteran of a hundred battles he laughed aloud despite his usual dour self. Several of the tattooed students seated in front of Maternus’s group turned about and gave the Roman nasty looks, which caused Maternus to cover his mouth. Regrettably, his great, flat hand turned his guffaws into muffled eruptions which sounded much like the noise a pig makes while eating dry corn, and he continued to draw angry glares from serious viewers around him.
“Are you alright, Matt?” Lucy leaned over to ask him.
“Just a tickle in my throat,” said the Roman. “I think I have it under control now.”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes to save himself from any more of the movie. Maternus thought pleasant thoughts of the garden and the sundry plants he and Maria would plant there. The discovery of new lands that had taken place since he and she had last been together gave them hundreds of new species to cultivate: vegetables from the Western Hemisphere like maize, potatoes, and tomatoes; bright, vigorous tulips from the South Seas; plump marigolds from the Asian highlands; purple Mexican sunflowers and red and blue hollyhocks as tall as Maria’s head. He imagined how she and he would dig the black, fertile earth of Heaven and plant their wondrous crops one seed and one bulb at a time. He then asked himself what sort of name Maria was. He had heard of women in the Palatine with that name, Jewish women. Was Maria a Jew? Would she accept him as her husband if she were?
He was thinking these things when Lucy nudged his arm and said the movie was over.
“You went to sleep,” she teased him. “You mustn’t have liked it very much.”
“I figured none of it could be better than the part I had already seen,” said Maternus.
In the car on the ride back to Aurora, Jerry pronounced the movie “faggoty horse shit,” and “the Spartans didn’t wear much more than some Trojans,” he added. Cecilia opined there was a lot of artistry in every frame; the movie had really been a series of paintings, she said, however, there had been too much violence to please her. Shen said he thought it was “high camp,” not meant to be good in the sense of conventionally good. Stephen said he could not remember if it was a Darius or a Xerxes that Alexander the Great had killed.
“Alexander did not kill him,” said Maternus. “He attempted to take Darius captive. The Persian emperor was killed by members of his own court. The story is in Plutarch.”
“Pardon?” said Cecilia.
“Plutarch,” repeated Maternus. “He wrote The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. It is in the library. His biography of King Leonidas and Herodotus’s History of the Persian Wars provided the storyline for the movie we just saw.”
All of the other people in the car — save for Jerry — allowed they had heard the names before. They also admitted they had never read the books Maternus mentioned.
“Did you not attend university?” asked Maternus.
Yes, everyone, except Jerry again, had been to college. Cecilia explained that in university a student reads books about books like the ones Plutarch and Herodotus wrote. Undergraduate students usually did not have the proper training or the credentials to read primary texts from other historic eras.
“I read them this past summer,” said Maternus.
No doubt he did, explained the librarian patiently, and she sincerely hoped he had enjoyed them. But his enjoyment did not change the fact that since he had read the books through the biased lens of his own experiences rather than in the light of what qualified scholars have to say about the books, his opinions on what he had read would be skewed in an idiosyncratic fashion. As a novice reader, Maternus did not even have a governing theory to guide him. That was why, she said, it was better for a lot of books to be left to the experts.
“I don’t even like to read Shakespeare unless he’s really annotated,” Shen added.
Maternus recalled what Mr. Worthy had told him on his first day in Aurora about modern words sometimes having no meaning, and he realized the librarian’s explanation was probably an example of that type of verbiage. As befitted the kinder man he was becoming, he chose not to argue with her.
Rather he said, “You may be right, Miss Roberts. I was of the opinion the entertainment we saw today was terrible. Perhaps I need to read some books about cinema before I make judgments.”
“Nah,” said Shen, “you only need to see more movies. Then when you compare this one to most, you’d see it’s not that bad.”
Back at the women’s home, the women continued to fawn over Shen. Jerry kept up the unpleasant front he used to hide his truly repulsive personality, and Stephen remained to one side, gazing wistfully upon Cecilia. Stephen spoke only when he saw an opening in the conversation and he would then insert some vaguely relevant item he had seen on the internet or read in the newspaper.
“There are a hundred million itinerant industrial workers in China today,” he said upon hearing Cecilia mention some Chinese screens she had seen at a shop in the Cherry Wood Mall. “They’re the poorest of the poor. A lot of them camp out wherever they go.”
“You lose, on average, six degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet you climb in elevation,” he noted when Shen said he wa
s considering going hiking in the mountains.
Shen decided when it was time to return to the boardinghouse. Stephen said that would be okay and walked out the condominium door, his hands still in his pockets, after he took one last look over his shoulder at the indifferent librarian.
“Was this exercise for my benefit?” Maternus asked Shen when the two of them had bid good afternoon to the others and they were alone on the boardinghouse’s front porch.
“I don’t want to be cruel to Stevie,” said Shen, leaning against the awning post and sounding as caring as he could manage. “He’s probably my best friend in the entire world, strange dude that he is. I thought you needed to see how it is with him — pretty much hopeless. I mean, I’ll go along with this crazy scheme of yours if that’s what you want to do, but you shouldn’t expect any success. I’ll do it ‘cause I like him.”
“Do you have any idea how we should proceed?” asked Maternus.
“I was thinking maybe I ought to give Stevie what TV calls a make over. Turn him into a bad boy. As much as he can be, I mean. Women go for that sort of thing. What we can’t do, maybe we can fake.”
“I am not following you entirely,” said Maternus. “Are you saying Stephen must become an evil man in order to appeal to Miss Roberts?”
“I’m not saying bad in the sense of evil,” said Shen. “I’m talking bad in the sense of b-a-d. I mean outside the law. Not a nine-to-five guy. An adventurer, a risk taker, a rebel. Look, I don’t want to brag or anything, but this is why women come on to me. I know there are a lot better looking guys than me.”
“Not many,” said Maternus.
“Thanks. There are sure a lot more richer guys. What I’ve got to offer the ladies is something new. They know when they’re with me, I’m going to take them to wild new places they’ve never been before.”
“I did not realize this dynamic existed,” confessed Maternus. “I have long assumed women find dangerous men to be merely dangerous.”
“That’s why you need to turn this thing over to me,” proposed Shen. “I’ll train Stevie for a couple days. We’ll change his way of carrying himself, how he talks. I think we’ll maybe get him a motorcycle, borrow one from a friend of mine. Cecilia won’t know what hit her, maybe. This Tuesday morning, I’ll bring the new Stevie around to the library and you can watch him hook up with Cecilia, or not. I swear I’ll give him my best shot.”
Maternus recalled the angel had told him he would know to whom he could turn when he needed advice. The Roman, being no wiser than any other man, decided Shen had to be the advisor Mr. Worthy had foretold. Therefore he put Stephen into Shen’s hands and went to bed that evening believing he was on the road to his third and final triumph. Heaven and Maria — the two had become one in his imagination — were now indeed within his reach. Shen may have disconcerting qualities, yet Maternus had to confess he had never known a man more loved by women than the winsome poet, and as the wealthiest man must know something of finance and the beggar must understand want, Maternus concluded Shen must know more about females than other men. In his desire to believe, the Roman forgot the wealthy and the poor and the comely are often born the way they are, and often do not comprehend the circumstances of their existence any more than rain knows why it falls to the ground.
On the appointed Tuesday Maternus was seated at his table in the branch library, reading pleasant Miss Austen’s Northanger Abby, a novel he was certain one could find in Heaven, when Shen and Stephen entered the building and walked up the long ramp to the circulation desk. To the Roman’s horror, Stephen was dressed in black leather pants and jacket. On the would-be lover’s head was a black baseball cap, worn backwards, making Stephen’s fine blond hair stick out like wisps of straw over his forehead and the tops of his ears. In his heavy motorcycle boots and shiny pants, he moved with the stiff-legged grace one would expect of a lobster walking on its hinders. On his thin face was an expression like the one Caesar must have worn when Brutus and other conspirators gathered around him on the senate floor. A comet falling from the sky at that very moment, a ball of fire powerful enough to reduce Stephen to insensate ashes and spare him the catastrophe he was about to suffer, would have been a thoughtful gesture for Providence to make on Stephen’s behalf.
Shen did most of the talking. Stephen remained to one side of the circulation desk and, after considerable effort, managed to stick both his hands into the pockets of the tight-fitting leather pants. Maternus was too far from the monologue Shen was delivering to Cecilia to catch everything the poet said. The Roman took in only snatches of the backward praise the poet was heaping upon his friend for the librarian’s sake. “Stevie’s quite a motorcycle freak,” he heard. He also caught “wild man” and “flat-track champion.” Maternus found it easier to hear Stephen when that embarrassed, foolish man announced, “The first motorcycle was invented by Sylvester Page of Massachusetts. In 1868 he attached a steam engine to a bicycle he made a year earlier.” This was audible because Stephen remained removed from the circulation desk and addressed the library in general rather than the librarian specifically. Cecilia Roberts did not once turn toward Stephen during the span of Shen’s discourse; she busied herself with volumes from the return books bin. From her expression, Maternus guessed she was on this occasion as irritated by the talkative poet as she was by the forty-eight-year-old slacker standing a grenade toss away from her.
The Roman had withstood attacks of barbarian hordes in the gloom of the German woods and had remained stoically at attention while members of his legion’s execution squad nailed screaming convicts to wooden crosses. Watching Stephen’s humiliation was somehow more painful than any of his past experiences, and Maternus had to leave his table and escape into the open air outside the library before the scene reached its terrible denouement. That Shen could endure the event and actually participate in it while maintaining a calm expression caused the poet to fall still farther in Maternus’s estimation of him.
“Stevie didn’t interact with her,” Shen told Maternus that Tuesday night at the boardinghouse. “I laid the groundwork. He stood over there with a goofy look on his mug and talked about ancient history. No woman wants to hear about that stuff.”
“He spoke of a nineteenth-century inventor,” said Maternus. “The nineteenth century is not a part of ancient history.”
“Yeah, every day you meet somebody from that time or earlier,” said Shen. “My point is: it wasn’t my fault. She froze up. Only Stevie could have brought her out of it. Then he froze up. I felt like I was the only living man at the top of the North Pole. She wouldn’t talk to me, so I took Stevie out of there. What else could I have done?”
Shen said this while maintaining the nonplussed, marginally amused demeanor he presented to the world during the majority of his conscious moments. Only when he was on the stage at the Great Blue Heron, when performing for a crowd, had Shen betrayed a different set of emotions. Maternus at last understood that on that evening in the coffeehouse, the poet had been acting; the self-contained, self-glorifying narcissist who gloried in the praise of others, and found entertainment in the failings of the same, was nearly the whole of the real Shen. Only his friendship with the down and out Stephen connected him to normal human sentiments, and sometimes Shen did not cling to that connection very tightly.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he told Maternus.
“Nothing ever is.”
“Now you’re getting pissy with me,” said Shen. “You forget I was doing this as a favor to you.”
In answer to Shen’s pique the old Maternus would have felt the cloud of wrath rising from his chest, and his fist might have powered forward to a point beyond the poet’s delicate cheek bones. The new Maternus had more pity than wrath for Shen. He heard himself sigh as he had previously heard others do in anxious moments, and instead of acting he reflected upon what he should say.
“You and Stephen live in what is an unusual place in your society,” said the Roman. “In a land of enormous wealth, y
ou two have chosen to dwell in poverty, on the margin of this city. You and he are the only inhabitants of this place you have made.”
“‘Your society?’” said Shen. “What are you? Some visitor from outer space? You live here too, don’t you?”
“In one sense of outer space, you are not incorrect,” said the Roman. “As I was saying, I might have thought because you and he are necessarily dependent upon one another, you would be more sympathetic to Stephen. He worships you, and would certainly never speak of you as you do of him.”
Shen was at a loss for words, for as long it took him to inhale.
“I didn’t chose to live like this, Matt,” he said. “I’m an artist. I would rather have a penthouse on the Sixteenth Street Mall. This pile of shit I’m in is where I have to be. That’s not my fault, either. In olden times, I would have a patron and lived like I should. I’d have a garden and a horse and stuff. And you can’t judge an artist like you would other people. Sure, I make fun of Stevie now and then. I’ve also written a couple of poems about him. Good poems. Stevie knows I balance things out for him, morally, I mean.”
Hell Can Wait Page 23
