by Peter Orner
I studied the sparse audience, ten or twelve of us. Parents, a few professors, five or six old ladies from town here to pass the time with some free music, all of us sitting on rusty folding chairs that squeaked if you moved an inch. One lone professor type, a couple of chairs away from me, couldn’t help it and began to squirm in his noisy seat. He was bald, fiftyish, and wearing an ill-fitting cable-knit sweater. I watched him trying in vain to silence his chair, and I thought of Maggie Brown’s hands on my throat, her knees on my chest, and how once she sent me naked into the kitchen for a glass of water and then locked me out and laughed from the other side of the door as I stood there on the cold linoleum, my balls shriveling to peanuts. My great-great-great-great-grandpappy owned slaves, but none of them were related to Rosa Parks! That’s what you tell your hairball fucker of a roommate? Liar! Falsifier! I backed up and charged at the door with the full intent to break it down, and even as I bounced off it, I had a premonition that my life would always, one way or another, feature me trying ineffectually to break down doors I’d only just been locked out of. My bald neighbor? Professor Sweater? Even if he’d known I existed, that we were kinsmen, he didn’t have any comfort to spare. His forearms tightened as he gripped the bottom of his chair as if he worried he might float away. I wanted to jump in his lap to weigh him down. To feel that rough sweater on my cheek. Maybe only the stranger we will become can save us from ourselves. But we never meet. We remain separate in our squeaky chairs as the music, Maggie Brown’s music, moans slower now, slower, slower, never stopping.
The Roommate
Spring semester, sophomore year, I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment on South Forest with Eliot Birnbaum. I hadn’t known him very long. I envied the books he read. He was an English major who refused out of principle to read a single assigned text. I’m going to let these clods choose my books? On his own, he’d read Ulysses twice and now read only work in translation. It was Eliot who urged me to read Sartre’s essay on masturbation in order to liberate myself from the tyranny of sorority girls. And it was Eliot who told me to copy. To take a great piece of work and write it out, word for word, in my own hand. Thereby, Eliot said, I might dupe my brain into the fantasy that creating such a work was, physically, at least, within the realm of the possible. Muscle memory fools the brain. He said, of course, the idea took, as its point of departure, Borges’s “Pierre Menard.”
Who?
Dude wrote Don Quixote, again.
I’ve got no idea where Eliot Birnbaum is today, or even if he’s alive. I’ve tried the usual ways to find him. If he’s out there, he’s not making himself known to people who once knew him. Even back then he mostly wanted to be left alone. About a month after I moved in, Eliot holed himself up in his room for two weeks with Finnegans Wake. He’d surface, holy text in hand, only to go to the bathroom or slurp cereal or open a can of corn, pour it into a bowl, add some butter, and shove it in the microwave. He’d stand there for two minutes and read until the ding. Then he’d disappear back into his room. A week in, I knocked on his door and said, Finnegans Wake isn’t a translation.
Through the door, Eliot said, “You think rendering sleep into English isn’t translation?”
“Even Borges called it obtuse and totally unreadable.”
“I’m over Borges.”
“You want to get a pizza?”
One afternoon when I came home from classes, Eliot accused me, with cause, of eating his Raisin Bran.
He was a small, muscular guy with curly black hair and long, also curly eyelashes. Lurking under the lashes, two unblinking bloodshot eyes. In another era he might have been one of those matinee idols with a serious, pouty look. Smart girls, especially, threw themselves at Eliot.
Another night, when I came home late, he said I’d used his mouthwash, that I’d sucked his Scope straight out of the bottle, which was also factually true.
“Who’d do that?” Eliot said.
No, I hadn’t known him very long, but in the little time I had, he hadn’t been greedy about his stuff. In fact, in the beginning, he often gave me things, and not just books. He gave me a new backpack because he didn’t like the color. He gave me quaaludes. He gave me a weight-lifting belt. I’d heard that he was rich, that his maternal grandfather had founded Wieboldt’s, a defunct department store everybody, for some reason, remembers. He let me drive his Saab whenever I wanted to, which was often. He was the kind of new friend who trusts you right away on a hunch. I didn’t deserve it, obviously, but I was happy to take his stuff and drive his car. And his apartment beat the dorm.
“Seriously, what kind of person uses someone else’s mouthwash?”
I shrugged.
“Are you drunk?” he said.
“Drunk?” I said.
There was more to it than that he was merely mad (and he was definitely mad); he was also completely incredulous. He’d thought I was one person, and now here I was being somebody else. The sort of person who’d swig someone else’s mouthwash right out of the bottle. And yet at the same time, the whole thing seemed to go beyond me, as if Eliot were staring in disbelief not only at an intoxicated roommate but at an entire human race capable of such atrocities.
“You need to get a grip,” I said.
That’s when Eliot smiled at me, his normal smile when he hid his teeth, and bowed at me. Not knowing what else to do, I bowed back. He bowed again; I bowed back. This went on for a while. Like we’d become a couple of Oompa Loompas. Then Eliot withdrew, slowly, back into his room.
I didn’t sleep much that night. Eventually, I got up and crept to his door. His light was on; Eliot’s light was always on.
“I’ll replace the Scope, all right? I’ll run over to CVS right now. Okay? You need anything else? Pack of condoms? Detergent? Halloween candy?”
In my screwball memory, which, as always, is egged on by an equivocal sense of guilt, as well as mournful impatience to get to the sad crux of any story, it happened directly after the mouthwash incident. But it had to have been at least a few weeks, maybe a month, after, because I remember that, at last, Ann Arbor was getting warmer. Girls had finally begun to emerge from the cocoons of their thick coats. And during those weeks, Eliot and I must have existed in the loud and unique silence that is shared only by people who live together but are no longer speaking. When every door closing, every pot lid clattering, every ping of the microwave, is amplified deep in your skull. I can’t quite remember. I just know that the days must have passed. And in those weeks, we must have slept, ate, and sometimes gone to class, or at least I did.
So it had to have been into May when Eliot swallowed a bottle of pills and had to have his stomach pumped. He checked himself into the hospital. He never told me one way or the other, but he must have changed his mind. Some vision caught his sleepy eyes before it was too late?
By the time I went to see him, they’d already moved him upstairs from the ER and into a regular room. He looked older, more distinguished, even more brilliant, because he hadn’t shaved in days. He was sitting in one of the two visitors’ chairs and had his feet on the other one. His bed was made. He wasn’t reading. He didn’t take his feet off the other chair when he saw me.
“You must be tired,” I said.
“That’s actually funny,” he said.
I stood there. The only available place was the bed, and sitting on it didn’t feel right.
“Need any books?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Malcolm Lowry? I got a nice Under the Volcano at Shaman Drum—”
“No books.”
I lived in Eliot’s apartment until after finals. I remember now that our building had a name, Rockwell Gardens. The words were chiseled above the front doorway arch. A touch of grandeur for a place that had no grandeur left. Before they chopped it up into student apartments, it must have been a desirable address. It was partially hidden by straggles of ivy and reminded me of the House of Usher. Poe’s story was one of the ones I’d copied out by h
and. Most houses and apartment buildings don’t, as a result of the weight of their own stories, implode into incestuous dust. Poe’s do, bless that drunk lunatic. No, most buildings, unless somebody comes along with a crane, just sit there. For decades, no matter what happens or doesn’t happen inside, they just sit there. Drive by Rockwell Gardens today, and it will still be there on South Forest in Ann Arbor, students rushing in, students rushing out.
And there will still be a garden out back. When I lived there, the garden was overgrown but retained some of its old beauty. There were once carefully manicured shrubs, still holding their shape, and the remnants of a stone walkway beneath the dirt. And I remember there was also a defunct fountain with a little boy standing in the middle. That he was aiming his little wiener at the pond actually seemed natural. Water must have flowed through it into the pond back in the day. A sculptor with a sense of humor or a creep, who knows? The garden was separated by an alley from the sorority parking lot, and when the weather was good, after Eliot left, I sat out there with my fellow penis holder and half studied for exams, half listened to the Tri Delt girls as they laughed and got into and out of their cars. The laughter of spring and warmth and newly bared legs. What is it about sorority girls and laughing? Who told them the world is such a party?
Allston
We were still in our twenties. She was already married, a weird novelty. My first clash with that specter: husband. Society’s great, dull bulwark. We met, of course, at someone’s wedding. She was a friend of the bride’s. I was an old roommate of the groom’s. The husband hadn’t joined her. I’d come alone also. We were both in the wedding party and had been assigned to walk down the aisle together, arm in arm. She wore a lemon-yellow dress. It was my first time in a tuxedo. We got drunk and happy and a lot drunker and a lot happier.
As you do at a Chicago wedding in July, we ended up in Lake Michigan. I think of the dark water, that glorious floating, her dress like a little parachute blooming. Stumbled back to someone’s room, hers or mine, I wasn’t sure. Woke up to the open blinds, afternoon light. On the floor, the sandy wreckage of our respective uniforms. We’d missed breakfast. We’d missed brunch. We’d missed the bride-family-versus-groom-family softball game. The bride’s mother was pounding on the door. Bridesmaids are indentured servants, serfs. Groomsmen get drunk. She needed to be in more pictures. Day-after pictures, married pictures! More door pounding. Didn’t she have the schedule? Didn’t she know they were taking the day-after pictures at three sharp? The photographer’s on the clock. Must have been her room. Easy to say now that we were in our twenties and didn’t have a clue. Fact is we were already making plans.
“Remain here,” she said.
“I’m rooted to these sheets,” I said. “Where are the sheets?”
I slept. She came back a couple of hours later and fell asleep next to me in her clothes. At some point I woke up and gave an impassioned speech about fate and destiny to the hotel-room ceiling. I toasted Mr. Conrad Hilton for bringing us together. She slept through it. She was small and blond and wore big glasses. When she was awake, she laughed a lot. She already had a master’s degree. She spoke Basque to her grandmother. She subscribed to the Utne Reader.
I lived in Boston. She lived in St. Louis. She worked for an accounting firm and traveled a lot. Three months later she came to Massachusetts for work. I remember this. Walking very slowly, as slowly as possible, down the corridor toward her hotel room. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled. She must have felt my presence because she opened the door and saw me and laughed and got down on her hands and knees and crawled my way. Had it not been for a startled maid and her big cart of sundries, we’d have torn each other to nothing out there in the corridor.
Things get hazier. The single bed in my dog-meat apartment in Allston. Her putting lotion on her feet. A walk in Boston Common. Couple of milkshakes at J.P. Licks? A rented car and a drive down the Cape to a bed-and-breakfast. How easily she laughed. A kindness in her always-wet eyes. Tears waiting all the time, though I never saw them drop. Her braininess. The fact that she paid with her corporate credit card because she knew I had no money.
I was working at the Cambridge YMCA on Mass Ave, in the after-school program. I played Ping-Pong and yelled at kids. And I was writing short stories. She read a couple of them and laughed, though I can’t imagine I was trying to be funny. My aim was extreme solemnity. I wanted everything, even then, to be a dirge. Everything delighted her. The clam shack by the Bourne Bridge. Boiled clams were fucking hilarious. Drinkable embryos! At one point, in the Common, I showed her the statue Robert Lowell wrote about in “For the Union Dead.” I stood in front of Colonel Shaw on his steed, his men marching beside him, and announced: “Come and live with me.” I watched myself gallant. So I worked in day care. Did this mean I couldn’t be a tragic hero?
“In Boston?” she said.
“Technically I live in Allston, which is an independent entity.”
“So, it’s a neighborhood?”
“Yeah, but sort of more. It’s hard to explain. It’s a little like Kosovo.”
“Or Vatican City.”
“Exactly. Allston’s just like Vatican City. Only we got more liquor stores.”
We walked on, hand in hand, swinging arms. I wasn’t going to press the issue; what was obvious was obvious. I remember the silence of the drive back from the Cape. I remember milkshakes. I remember walking backward, again, doing a little backward shimmy, down the same hotel corridor as she stood at her door like an actress, wagging at me with her index finger. A beckoning and goodbye at the same time.
Two weeks later she called. Her husband, she told me, was on the line as well. They both had something to say. She wanted to make clear that there wasn’t going to be any more to this. That we’d had our time together. She had no regrets. Did I understand? No more phone calls at work, no more letters. The husband spoke up: “You all right with this?” His voice was pleasant and considerate. “Look, it’s cool. I know she’s awesome.” She laughed a quick laugh but stopped. She asked if I wanted to say anything. I said I didn’t think I did.
Part of me wants this to be a sad recounting, not a pathetic one, but I see I’m failing. I’m trying to stay close to the facts as best as I can remember them, but facts disintegrate. For days, weeks, I mourned around the city. I rode the T and read. I went to work. I shouted at kids to line up for snack. “If you guys don’t line up, there will be no snack, period.” At night, in Allston, I considered the nature of self-pity, how it’s not unlike masturbation in the sense of how satisfying it can be in the short term. And the long term is just a linked chain of short term after short term. Then I’d die.
A few years ago I found myself teaching, briefly, in St. Louis. This was at Washington University. (It’s neither here nor there, but my mother had long thought that my life would have turned out better if only I’d been accepted to Wash U for college. She was quite proud that I’d made it there at last as a contract lecturer without health insurance.) I thought about calling or sending a message. All I had to do was reach out to my old friends and ask how to get ahold of her. But it felt more like an obligation to a defunct emotion than something I actually wanted to do.
Still, I thought, maybe I would run into her buying groceries, or we’d both be pumping gas on the same island. We’d go to a café and I’d sit across the table and listen to her talk. I’m always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences.
Ineffectual Tribute to Len
After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it. I didn’t hate the job. I’d sit in the Kroger parking lot and read. If the dispatcher radioed and I liked the sound of the call, I took it. If I didn’t, I went on reading. My indifference didn’t make me popular with Ovid Demanaris. I once asked him, over the radio, if he’d ever read
Ovid, and he said he didn’t answer personal questions. “He’s got some real smutty stuff,” I said. Dead air. I didn’t have to drive a cab. I was broke, and the only money I had was the play money left over from my student loans. Now I can’t pay them off with real money. Still, I wasn’t a cabdriver. I was a grad student, an ex–grad student, pretending. I’d sit in the parking lot and read. Occasionally, I’d drive somewhere, pick somebody up, and drive them somewhere else.
In front of the Deadwood one late night, 2:30 a.m., I earned a few chops picking up blitzed undergrads. When one of them puked in the back of the cab, I hit the brakes and ordered them all the fuck out.
“But it’s fucking February, man, it’s fucking Iowa.”
“Out.”
That made me feel like a cabbie. And I used to take calls out to an encampment along the river west of town. People there didn’t live in tents or refrigerator boxes but in full-on shacks constructed of scrap wood and sometimes even a few bricks— it was a small, functioning village. Nearly impossible to find. It wasn’t on any map. You had to bumble along a series of rutty dirt roads south, then head north again, before you could go west that close to the river. It may have been a derelict property, or maybe it was a kind of no-man’s-land in a flood zone. Ovid would put out a general call. “Anybody want to pick up some ancient freak out by the river?” If nobody took it, he’d recue his mic and say, “Ornery? How about getting off your pampered ass?” The freaks weren’t that ancient, maybe in their mid-fifties, but most of them had lived so many years outdoors—in Iowa. Their faces were perpetually red from frostbite. In winter, the tall bare trees hid nothing and blocked no wind. I’d trek out there and stop in the center of that scattering of hunkered, makeshift houses and wait and see who jumped into the cab. More often than not it was a grocery run. A woman who called herself Birdy once squeezed my forearm—Birdy always sat in the front seat alongside me—and invited me to shop with her at the Kroger. Nobody had requested my presence in a long time. We were both in need of company. I remember she bought a single loaf of bread, cottage cheese, and some chocolate. The fare must have been double the cost of the food.
