Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  I went on talking until I ran out. I took roll. One older man there was someone whose submission I’d rejected. “Carl?” I said. “You’re not ah, listed on my roster.”

  Carl was chewing gum. He said, “No bearing on the quality of your rejection, ma’am. The competition was considerable. I regret I’m unable to accept. I’m here.”

  The third class meeting, Dr. Gil from West Virginia said, “Here’s a confession. I wrote a new program for my p.c. It wrote both efforts you’ve seen from me. I haven’t contributed one verb, one article.”

  Dr. Gil’s colleagues very much liked this confession. There was delighted supportive applause.

  “Your poems, though—well, I mean, not yours but these—they’re much better than other machined works I’ve seen,” I said.

  “Sure, I’m a computer scientist,” Dr. Gil said. “Mine was an amazing program.”

  Raf would talk with me or go dancing in the evenings, but dawns, before I awoke, he’d be off running through the Fifth Ward.

  From my borrowed office, over the phone I told him, “The cicadas sound more Cuban for some reason. Now I’ve got Cuban ‘Bug-bug-bug.’ ”

  My thoughts on him were like thin clear fish swirling through oil; they were polluted, slippery, transfixing.

  “For tomorrow, I’d like you to choose one small thing to talk about that deals with prosody,” I said. “And I want you to write a canzone. Seventeen lines with the syllables occurring in six stanzas and repeated in the same order. They’re from French troubadours. Or you could try a provençal. They’re unrhymed, and in praise of love or beauty.”

  I liked to have Barny in during office hours to talk about quark confinement.

  “Tell me the flavors again,” I said.

  “ ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ ” Barny said, “were two of the first. And ‘Strange.’ Then ‘Charm,’ and next came ‘Beautiful.’ Last one was ‘True.’ ”

  I read aloud to the class a homework poem by Dr. Mali. I said, “Huh. Notice the one foot that isn’t metrical. That’s a terminal trochee. It calls attention to itself, so it’s typically used for satire. Although not here.”

  During a meeting with Dr. Gil, I said, “Well, Dr. Gil. I think—don’t you?—enough of your machine’s poems. You fed it some Wallace Stevens, didn’t you.”

  “Among others,” he said.

  There was a cicada corpse on my desk.

  Across from me, Dr. Gil had the big chair with the revolving anatomy. Anyone who sat in this chair spun musingly left and right.

  “Interestingly,” he said, “that particular poem will be published in the Little Summer magazine. The editor over there, Debbie, tells me she finds it free of debris.”

  “That’s because Debbie mostly sees poems about kittens or sunrises or sometimes there’s a poem on how energetic the poet’s grandparent is.”

  “Those’re all good things,” said Dr. Gil.

  “Inarguably. But topics that have been addressed, you see.”

  “My grandmother is a hundred and eight years old,” he said. “She deserves a poem.”

  “She deserves a great poem, by you.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” Dr. Gil said. “If I’m permitted to write about Grandmother, to blazes with the computer. May I tell you a little about her life in the West Virginia Gorge?”

  “Rhyme and meter are lulling, anesthetizing,” I said to the class. “Their uses, for hypnotic effect, are antediluvian.”

  Barny said, “Well hell, professor.”

  “Paige.”

  “Professor Paige,” he said. “I always thought scientists were more poetic than other people, in the Aristotelian sense. But in truth, as poets, we’re weenies. I won’t be coming to class anymore.”

  Wynton, a big-bellied man, agreed. “I’m baffled. I was willing to give it a try and I have, but enough,” Wynton said.

  “It seems such a wispy endeavor,” said Harry, a young man from Oregon. Harry’s head was terribly large.

  “Count me out as well,” Dr. Mali said. “At first I found poetry an exquisite puzzle, fully distracting to me. It involved a pleasant stress—avoiding sentiment, using finesse—trying to say what would seem unsayable. Now each night I dread the half hour at my word processor.”

  “But if you’re all quitting, I’m out of a goddamn job!” I said. “People, please reconsider.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” someone said, and several of the class members shrugged.

  I flumped into my chair seat, causing my briefcase to tip over. It disgorged papers, reference texts, index cards. I let them spill.

  Harry said, “Paige, since this is our last meeting together, why don’t you tell us a story.”

  I gave them some of the Gilgamesh epic. I told how Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, had a second self created by the gods and this being was a man called Enkidu.

  “Enki Denki Doo,” Carl said.

  “This is an old story,” Wynton said.

  “It’s third millennium,” I said. “B.C., Archaic Sumerian . . .”

  “Tell me, Paige. How am I different from the women you teach at Harvard?” asked Dr. Mali.

  “They’re all named Elizabeth,” I said.

  “My grandmother’s name,” said Dr. Gil.

  Our bedroom in the rental house had soft warped wooden floors with runnels and gouges. On the plaster walls, cracks traced the shapes of states, continents.

  I was in bed under a sheet, propped up with a pillow against the carved headboard. The carving was an Italian farm-life scene—animals and men, haymows, a wheelbarrow.

  My heart banged.

  The dream I’d just had said there was no death, that nothing was terminable. Everything kept existing in a big all and all.

  Rain lashed the window now. Traffic on the wet street made surf sounds.

  I watched the ceiling, which Raf had swabbed with marigold paint.

  Something drew me from the bed to the window. A fellow stood in the yellow side yard beside the liquid-oxygen company. His breath was like steam. The summer rain weighted his old suit and bubbled on his face and hands and the lenses of his eyeglasses. He was any age, bald, still as a table lamp.

  I needed a drink of water but I waited for the figure to move. A shrug or nod or a head twitch would’ve satisfied me, as long as the man did not dissolve.

  It was always the walk-ons who gave me the shivers— the woman at the end of the subway platform; the boy planted at the exit door I had to get through; the lady asleep or dead on the restroom floor.

  The man in the yard moved.

  I stumbled to the stairs wanting water. Raf sat at the base, lacing up his shoes for his morning run. I told him about the dream. My heart was still whamming.

  “Damn it, I need one of those,” he said.

  “Just a synaptical shortout probably, like a hiccup or a muscle spasm. But in it I had memory, every thought I’ve ever had. . . . Do I look any different to you?”

  “Only because of the pentagram on your forehead,” Raf said.

  For the rest of the day the dream lingered with me.

  That evening, on the porch, Raf told me there are five billion people on the planet—about eighty-six for each square mile.

  Dusk and rain had turned everything olive green and shiny.

  I said writing poetry would be impossible, knowing such statistics.

  “Or the other way: why not write?” he said.

  I thought for a minute. “The turkey facility,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “What happened to Raymond?” I asked. “He’s been by only once.”

  “Haven’t talked to him. You want me to?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re suggesting we should see other people?”

  I said, “Raf, sometimes your mentality’s straight from Teen Beat. This morning I see God, tonight I’m in some sock-hop situation.”
/>   “That is the variety of the life experience,” he said.

  From here I could see into the strange house, into the dining room, where there were four chairs now, and a round-topped table, a corner cupboard with a stack of brown-patterned plates, a pewter coffee service Raf had bought secondhand. There were floor lamps flanking the table, their bulbs burning gold under manila paper shades.

  “I’ll call Raymond,” he said. He gazed off at the boat docked in our driveway.

  Raymond had his wicker chair tipped on its hind legs; his boots resting on a vacant seat. With a bone-handled knife he was skinning a green apple. He said, “At Princeton, everybody took Raf’s low moods serious ’cause he was a philosophy major. So if you were havin’ a good day and you forgot all about your ontological center, he could make you feel like a bunny-fucking moron.”

  The restaurant was sunny, done in whites and reds. Paco’s Cantina, it was called.

  “Spreads joy, don’t he,” Raymond said.

  “Like a stain,” I said.

  Raymond wore a frayed denim shirt and, against the room’s brightness, his dark glasses.

  I said, “It’s why he left Oxford, why he never finished his dissertation. He thinks recorded philosophy has no value because the act of composing a text or an essay or tractus means the philosopher wasn’t deranged and despairing enough.”

  “Whoa, big catch-twenty-two,” Raymond said.

  Of the apple peel he was making an unbroken coil, a perfect spiral.

  “Are you going to eat that when you’re finished?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” Raymond said, and looked as though perhaps he should apologize. He said, “Raf stopped laying any of that on me. Must’ve seen how it was spoiling my program. He knows better ’n to bring it up.”

  “Still does with me,” I said.

  “You two are weird,” Raymond said. “Though I wish you both well. I honestly do.”

  Our waiter delivered our lunch orders—chimichangas and spiced corn.

  “You want this necklace, amigo?” Raymond asked the waiter. “Give it to your girl?” He was offering the coil of apple peel.

  All afternoon we rode around in Raymond’s green convertible. He showed me the downtown—Louisiana Street, the Interfirst Bank Building, which Hurricane Alicia had smashed into; a Dubuffet sculpture titled “Monument to The Phantom” in the plaza; on Milan, the Tex Comm Tower with its (Miró) sculpture, a steel work called “Personage with Birds.”

  We angled on one-way streets—past Tranquility Park, built for the first moon landing; past Sam Houston Park, where, Raymond said, there used to be a zoo.

  He said, “Oil wasn’t all, don’t think that. We’re still the leader on mineral products. Sulfur, helium, graphite, other stuff, clay . . . There’s plenty to do, and deserted mansions you can rent. I don’t know why Raf’s got you living over in the Mother Teresa district.

  “Look at that palm. That’s a Coco Plumoso. I wanted to name our daughter Coco Plumoso but Luisa said no. See the dead part on top, looks like the skirt on a hula girl? There’s rats in there. You got a queen palm, you better keep it trimmed back or you get rats.”

  We drove the Southwest Freeway and veered off to ride alongside the Brazos River. Raymond said, “Oldest story’s that it was named Brazos de Dios—Arms of God—by Coronado. Him and his men was about to die of thirst when some of our Indians guided ’em to water.”

  “What kind of Indians?” I asked.

  “Ah, they’d have been Comanch, mainly,” he said. “And littler tribes too, like the Tawakoni. But Chickasaw, Apache, Cherokee. You name it, they was here, and I mean here here.”

  Raf once told me that at the zoo where he worked as a teenager, when rainstorms broke, the big cats would copulate—the leopards, the lions. I asked him, “Really?” And he said, “Well, it’s what I remember,” as if his remembering were enough.

  He was seated at the round-top dining table over a copy of The Schopenhauer Reader. Its jacket was cracked and curled.

  “Well, what happened?” he asked me. “How’d it go? Why didn’t Raymond come in?”

  “He went to take Luisa and the baby to the pediatric clinic. Nothing happened.”

  “What all’d you talk about?”

  “Not anything in particular,” I said. “You know. A lot of stuff. And we rode around.”

  The light was spooky, coming through the window as if aiming at Raf; contained around him, and not spread over the depths of the dark room.

  He said, “You don’t really need me anymore, do you, Paige?”

  “It’s what I remember,” I said.

  Raf’s look now was piercing. He said, “You mean you have just a kind of shadow need for me.”

  “No no,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “You troll,” I said to Schopenhauer.

  A blonde and her brunette sister had their punched-in pickup behind the boat in our drive. A sign, stickered to the driver’s door, read: WE NEED BILINGUAL HELP—CALL 629-7071.

  I led the two women inside.

  They were neighbors from a block down and they were including me in their weekly card game.

  “Del will be coming,” the blonde said.

  The brunette was an overstuffed woman with a careworn face, deep wrinkles, bristling hair glinting with gray.

  The blonde wore black shorts and a black tank top. She looked young enough to be the brunette’s child.

  They got seated at the table. The blonde riffled a deck of Bicycle-brand playing cards.

  The brunette splashed coins onto the table, shoved them into roughly sorted piles. She put out a few dollar bills as well.

  “Watch that and make sure she don’t steal it,” she told each of us about the other.

  She wandered out to the truck and brought back Mexican beer, which she pushed into the refrigerator. She served us uncapped bottles and popped open a cellophane bag of peanuts.

  “Those salted in the shell?” the blonde asked.

  We shucked shells and ate peanuts. I drank my beer from the bottle and scratched at its label just as they were doing.

  “That’s right,” the blonde said, eyeing me. “You get that off in one straight tear, it means you’re a virgin.”

  “Goddamn Del,” said the brunette. “She ruins every game.”

  “Just late,” the blonde said. “She’s always late. Resign yourself.”

  An ice-cream truck with a tinkling bell was swerving around in the street.

  The brunette said, “I always pictured a Harvard teach with a tight hair bun and a shawl.”

  “Yeah, a shawl she knitted herself, ’cause that’s her entertainment,” the blonde said.

  “If you want to think that,” I said. “It’s still America.”

  “Ain’t it just,” the brunette said.

  A redhead arrived—Del. She was thick-haunched and slow-walking. She wore a housedress and had five glass- stone rings on her left hand.

  “In a dress yet,” the brunette said.

  “I gotta work,” the redhead said. “You all can go around in your bathing suits, that’s fine. But I’m a working girl.”

  The redhead’s job, the sisters explained, was as entry guard at the Magnolia City dump.

  “What she calls a ‘landfill project,’ ” the brunette said.

  “Could I have a bigger chair please?” the redhead asked me. “Chrissakes,” I heard her whisper.

  “Yeah, Paige,” the blonde said. “Drag in your sofa for Del’s bottom.”

  After we’d played four hands, the brunette said, “I’m about wiped out. I got twenty-five, forty, a dollar. A dollar and a dime.”

  The redhead—whose game was furious, with no wasted moves and a sense of time running out—told the blonde, “Lend your sister twenty.”

  “Right, I’ll do that, sweet thing,” the blonde said. “The same day I eat tin.”

  “Deal,” she said to me.

  “Come on, come on,
” said the redhead.

  “I quit anyway, with this hand,” the brunette said. “With what I got dealt?” She fanned her cards. “Forget about it.”

  “Anybody? Or is this my pot already?” asked the redhead. She scraped up the bills. She scooped change into her ringed hands and in four trips plunged it all into the patch pockets of her housedress. “Well, ladies,” she said to us.

  “Look at her gloat. Can you stand it?” the brunette asked.

  “I can stand it,” said the blonde.

  “You lose your three dollars?” the brunette said. “Our hearts bleed. I lost grocery money.”

  “Listen to her whining. Who stole the violins?” said the redhead.

  Across the road, kids erupted from the elementary school and a few dogs arrived to bark the children aboard their navy-blue bus.

  The blonde said, “So, potatoes. Where you goin’ next?”

  “Call me potatoes, sure,” the redhead said. “But I jingle when I walk, lady, and it’s your dough. What do I owe for the beer?” she asked.

  “Hundred and ten dollars,” said the blonde.

  “A thousand dollars,” the brunette said.

  The redhead dabbed her thumb on her tongue and wiped two bills from the stash in her pocket. “Schlitz beer was it?”

  When she was gone, the blonde said, “God, I hate Del. I hate men more, though. Any and all men, including Robert.”

  “Then you’re pig stupid,” the brunette said.

  “No, it’s that I’m sick of pricks,” said the blonde. “Especially the men nowadays. Blah.”

  “You lez,” the brunette said.

  “You tell me, then. What are they after? First they hit you, then they cry. They got me in more trouble in my life and kept me more broke than everything else all put together.”

  “They’ve messed me up,” I said, and surprised myself a little. I squinted at my Mazatlán beer.

  The brunette, shuffling cards, nodded and shook her head alternately. Now and then she peered over at me, measuring whether or not I was serious. Finally she said, “I guess it’s true for me too.” Her lined face was all concern, though. She said, “But I still like my old man.”