Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  So full of light and cheer was The Great on this occasion, one hardly noticed the surly brunette who seemingly was soldered to his side. She had bulbous black hair and the face of a Fascist but without the beliefs; and though half The Great’s age (of who knows? Fifty?) she seemed to have been through more than one mill. A Leica dangled from her neck.

  “This is Sandy, my photographer,” said The Great, at last recalling her presence, as if everyone had his own photographer. In any case, from that day forward at Beet, the definition of a photographer expanded considerably. Following her subject at three or four paces, Sandy said not a word as The Great do-si-doed from fan to fan, pausing at only the choicest breasts on his trips to the bar.

  “Bushmills, barkeep, if you please!” he cried, gulping his second drink, this time a double. “You can have your fuckin’ Dewar’s. And your malt shit too, as far as I’m concerned. It’s Irish for me! And the only Irish worth a warm fart is Bushmills!” Everyone thought he was right, a few expressing their support by slapping him on his fleshy shoulders.

  When Peace stood in the parlor with Livi on his arm, he looked disoriented, as if he had blundered into the wrong party. This was his society. They were his colleagues and their wives and husbands or partners or special friends, his people. Why then did he feel as if he had come upon some Russian bath or Turkish church, a place with strange customs, floral dishes piled with unrecognizable food, samovars, bejeweled troikas, people speaking a language that sounded like none he knew (and he knew several)? The men were spinning like dervishes; a wonder they did not dizzy themselves and crash to the floor. The women tilted from side to side, their faces gleaming under pellets of sweat. Every trail of sound, no matter how loud, seemed to conclude at the word “exactly.” All anyone seemed to be saying was “exactly,” which struck him as funny because he was feeling peculiarly inexact, out of focus.

  “Professor Porterfield?” He looked down to his left upon a head of brilliantine.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Ferritt.”

  “It’s Lawrence. Ferritt Lawrence,” said the reporter darkly. Peace wasn’t the only one to make that mistake, though he was the first to make it unintentionally. “I’m still hoping for an interview with you,” said the nineteen-year-old in a robotlike voice that he hoped sounded menacing.

  “I’ll be glad to talk with you,” said Peace, “and with everyone, when the committee is ready.”

  “I should tell you,” Lawrence drawled, as if harboring a secret no one wanted to know, “I’ve had off-the-record conversations with several committee members already. They say that you’re not open to new ideas.”

  Examining Lawrence as though he were an uninteresting virus, Livi said: “We’d love to stop and chat with you, Mr. Ferritt. But you know how it is—so much time, so little to do.” She guided her husband away by the forearm.

  The Great, having progressed from two Bushmills to many, stuck his head playfully into the maw of the ice crocodile, while giving Matha the once-over for the third time, thus drawing a steady glower from his personal photographer. When Matha responded and ushered her breasts in his direction, Sandy swung an elbow like a bad-boy NBA forward, catching her opponent on the collarbone.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Matha, contemplating throwing a punch. The women squared off and sized each other up. Observing the play-let, Ada Smythe rushed over, stood between them like a ref, and offered both a Cosmopolitan.

  Quoted lines of the poet were bouncing off the walls as though the room had turned into a squash court. It appeared everyone had a favorite line or phrase or couplet or quatrain, which required reciting at high volume. An oral Bartlett’s was created on the spot, with The Great joining in and quoting his own lines, more and more of them, louder and louder, until he remained the only one speaking, and all were standing about him in numinous wonder. At one point he spoke for three minutes straight, then looked around with a bewildered expression. “Someone’s boring me,” he said. “I think it’s me!”

  Much laughter followed, rising higher when he added that was the one line he did not write; it belonged to Dylan Thomas, his drunken muse. Max Byrd wondered why poets, even the better ones, had to play clichés. Peace watched his student watch The Great, knowing what the boy was thinking. Max and students like him were his reason for teaching, he reminded himself, discouraged that a reminder was necessary.

  But everyone could not have been merrier, and in that state they left Smythe’s house at the appointed hour and gathered themselves into a street pageant, worming down the blustery, leaf-blown pathways into the college, their shoes clacking toward Lapham Auditorium. Smythe took one of The Great’s arms, Matha the other. The photographer trailed the revelers, clicking her Leica ratatatat.

  As Peace took in the parade of his colleagues from the rear, lagging back and increasing the distance between them and himself, a short story of John Updike’s came to mind out of the blue. It was about an old man who keeps a piece of land deep in the sticks, principally so that his extended and unwieldy family will have a spot for their annual reunion picnics. The story involved the latest picnic, and Updike describes the scruffy crew in detail—the sneaky cousins, the dim-witted in-laws, the drug-snorting children, a coarse stewardess brought as a date by the married ne’er-do-well nephew, and so on. While the rest of them play softball on his little piece of land, the old man takes a walk to the top of a nearby hill, from which he looks back and surveys his family. A word comes to him: “Sell, sell.”

  “Where are you?” Livi studied him. Peace shook it off.

  The auditorium was swaying and murmuring like a synagogue in full daven. Not a seat was empty except for the two rows up front reserved for the English faculty and some selected students. With a magician’s flourish, Smythe unhooked the red felt cord from its stanchion, and the professors and students took their seats.

  Peace saw Manning a few rows behind him. “What are you doing here? This is literature”—pronounced with Manning’s derisive emphasis.

  “I’m doing what professors do. Stand and sit. Tonight I sit.”

  Onstage, The Great fumbled with the arms of a green leather wing chair, turning the chair this way and that, and finally figuring out how to sit in it. Matha walked to the lectern and began her introduction of him as “one of the few male poets who really understood the female temperament.” Heilbrun whispered to Kramer that not only did he understand it, he incurred it. They shook with soundless chuckles.

  Matha continued—one minute, four, five—evidently having decided beforehand that this would be an opportune occasion not only to detail The Great’s place in the scheme of American poetry, but also to rail against the countless injustices at Beet College and call for the resignation of President Huey and the board of trustees as well as the immediate dissolution of the Committee on Curricular Reform, which was “illegitimate.”

  “Close the college!” she said, hoping it would spark a chant. It did not, perhaps because the audience detected a logical contradiction in closing the college and sitting at the poetry reading.

  But her remarks were met by the approving outcries of her radical band, along with the intense, noncommittal stares of most of the students and faculty. The bloodshot eyes of The Great rolled from side to side with impatience and Bushmills, as the rest of him tottered in his chair like a beach ball.

  So worked up did Matha become, she began to lapse into her southern dialect.

  “Ahm disgusted with this College! Ahm fed up! Bring the school down, Ah say! Bring it down!”

  When she finally finished her introduction, she neglected to announce The Great’s name, ending instead on a call to arms. As a result, there was no applause until the poet stood shakily, kicked off one of his woolly bedroom slippers, and with one good foot and the gouty one bare and pink-purple, limped and wobbled to the lectern, from which he cast a longing and sodden look at Matha’s departing bottom.

  “Thank you so very much, Mary,” he blurted into the mic
, the blast causing several people to jump in their seats, his eyes never straying. “Your introduction was ferry vlattering.” He hiccoughed and wheezed asthmatically. “I felt like a real big shot. But you know,” he said, leaning forward and taking the audience into his confidence, “I’m really known as Fuckface to my friends.” Smythe laughed raucously. Others found their own ways to indicate their appreciation.

  The Great opened three slim volumes before him, and began the reading. It was an effectively planned sequence of poems. Peace cast off the earlier shadows of the evening, and he—and Livi, too, to her surprise—relaxed in the pleasure of good poetry read well, indeed beautifully. For twenty minutes or so, the audience seemed blown into by a verbal afflatus (afflatus being the word many would have used), each one, including Max Byrd, hoisted away from the banality of the occasion—a poet, a reading, a college—to that moment of the release of the poem itself, when the lines, long considered, hit the air for the first time. It was a particular treat for Max, who took to poetry less naturally than to his Apple, and thanked Peace for broadening his world. None of them suspected that The Great, drunk as he was, had been operating on automatic and was about to become creative.

  For then, in mid-sonnet—a Petrarchan piece about love and loss that engendered tears in half the audience—The Great stopped cold, his bloodshot eyes searching the first rows and alighting at last on the idolatrous face of Matha Polite.

  “I’m going to pause here,” he told the throng. “And instead of reading something old, I’m going to compose something new and original, right here, on the spot.” In the audience, frisson mixed with terror. “This will be a poem,” he continued, “no, an ode, no, a paean, no, an encomium, no, an epithalamion, no, a hymeneal to the young lady who introduced me this evening in so lovely a way, and who, incidentally, is a poet herself!” Matha broke into the widest smile in Dixie, showing every one of her teeth. Sandy also showed her teeth, though not in a smile. “For Mary, then,” said The Great to not a sound in the hall, not a clap, not a cough.

  “An Ode to Mary’s Ass,” he announced, and the gasps had not dissipated before he began to recite.

  I don’t think I shall ever cast

  An eye on anything like Mary’s ass.

  An ass to bump, an ass to grind.

  O may I mount it from behind?

  Poems are made by me, alas.

  But only God can make an ass.

  “Amen to that,” said Livi, who stood at once and stalked out of the auditorium. Peace was right behind her. And a dozen students and teachers did the same, including Manning. Livi saw him shaking his head.

  “Hey, Manning,” she called out. “How’d you like his bottom line?”

  Most of the crowd remained dead still, like bank clerks told to drop to the floor by a robber in a ski mask swinging a tommy gun, everyone expecting something even worse. The Great now clung to the lectern, which swayed under his weight, as though he were steering a ship in a typhoon. Matha was torn. On the one hand, he had treated her like a piece of meat in public, and got her name wrong to boot. On the other, the most honored poet in America had just composed a poem to little ol’ her. She sat and stared. Everyone sat and stared, eyes swelling in their sockets. It may be said of that moment, with the possible exception of what remained of Nathaniel Beet himself, nothing in the history of Beet College had ever been so completely, definitely, quiet.

  Outside, Livi stopped in her tracks, listening for something.

  “What are you doing?” asked Peace.

  And then she heard it. At that moment, as he did so often in his life, and with success assured by practice and virtuosity, Keelye Smythe rose to his feet, extending his arms in an incomplete circle, and the night exploded in a standing O.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHILE NEARLY EVERYONE WHO WAS ANYONE AT BEET COLLEGE had been sitting in the thrall of The Great in Lapham Auditorium, Akim Ben Laden was trudging across campus, about to put the final touches on furnishing and decorating his cave. Over the past two weeks he had scavenged in the trash bins of the school, which mainly yielded the books of scholars, inscribed copies thrown out by Beet faculty who were sent them by the authors as gifts and who had sent back complimentary notes including a phrase or two from the text to suggest they’d read the book before tossing it. There was little of value to Akim. Better hunting was available in the town of Beet, from whose castoffs he had garnered a ladder-back chair with three missing rungs; an orange Barcalounger circa 1965, whose color remained unfaded; a standing lamp made from a harpoon; a child’s roll-top desk from F.A.O. Schwarz; and the lower berth of a trundle bed with a decal of Apollo 11 on the side.

  For decor, he took a few favorite possessions from his room in Fordyce—a photograph of Charles van Doren as he had appeared on the TV show Twenty-One, a plaster bust of Batman, a lute, a red scimitar he’d made of cardboard, and a computer-generated photo of his father the rabbi, sitting before a chessboard with his white king toppled and his hands raised in surrender. Generally Akim eschewed material goods. His prize good he kept in his wallet. It was a Matha Polite villanelle, published in the radical broad-sheet Scream, with the repeating lines, “My phone is ringing off the hook / My cunt will not answer.”

  Peace was leaving Lapham Auditorium with Livi when he noticed Akim, which was not difficult given the boy’s outfit and the fact that he was both carrying and pushing a small mountain of stuff. Before him he rolled a grocery cart laden with books and pictures, an Etch-a-Sketch and a large stuffed panda, a childhood gift from his mother. He bore a backpack so overloaded, it spilled part of its contents every few steps. Under his left arm he tucked a laptop. And around his right shoulder coiled a great many extension cords, two hundred if one were counting, trailing behind him like a long tail and stretching back to Fordyce and up the stairs to his room.

  “Wait a second, Liv. I see a student I know. I’m worried about him.”

  “I can see why. How long will it take?”

  “You go on ahead. Cindy has to get home.” They kissed, but she could tell he was still sore at her for her evaluation of his colleagues. She hoped it was because he suspected she was right.

  Something about a New England college at night—the buildings blazing but deserted, the gaunt trees, the shadows, the puddles of light from the streetlamps covered with rime, the slap of the wind. If a murder or two did not occur in such a place at such a time—preferably by dagger—it would seem a waste.

  “What have you got there?” Peace approached Akim as breezily as possible. He pointed to the boy’s shoulder.

  “Extension cords. I need to connect them to my room. There’s no electricity in the cave.”

  “You’re living in a cave?”

  “I’m moving in tonight. If it’s good enough for Osama, it’s good enough for me.”

  “You admire Osama bin Laden.” It interested Peace how crazy people always dictated the terms of their conversations.

  “Not the killings part. But the hat and the beard are awesome.”

  “How’s Homeland Security coming along?”

  “Don’t speak of it, Professor Porterfield. I’m taking three online courses, all taught by Billy Pinto, whom I’ve yet to lay eyes on.” He held up his laptop. “If I were still speaking to my father—may piranhas chew on his liver—I’d tell him what he was paying tuition for. Would you like to hear my fall line-up? A course called ‘Emergency Management: What If They Come by Sea?’ Another called ‘Tunnel of Love or Death?’ And a seminar called ‘If You’re My Mother, Where’s Your ID?’ I can’t even get through to the department by e-mail.

  “Did you know,” he asked Peace, “that Pinto teaches a class called ‘Police Brutality—Is It Always Wrong’?”

  He tripped over the straps of his talaria and lay spread-eagled on the ground, forcing him to cry out in, and then upbraid himself for, a Yiddish curse. Peace picked him up by the shoulders.

  “The brochure calls the department ‘asynchronous,’ meaning that students are not
required to be in a particular place at a particular time,” said Akim. “Trouble is, I am in a particular place at a particular time. But who cares?”

  Of course, Peace had not been privy to the conversations of the previous summer that put the Homeland Security Department in place. Not only had Bollovate and Huey made the virtual classrooms available to undergraduates, they also opened them to outsiders, for $5,000 apiece. When the revenue started pouring in, Bollovate squealed, “It’s a cash cow!” Then he said, “A cash pig!” delighting himself with this singular example of wit. He’d asked, “Why couldn’t we run the whole college online? From one building! From a Quonset hut! From a lean-to, for chrissake! An outhouse!” He was on a roll.

  “You mean, no regular classes?” said Huey.

  “No classes, no offices, no food, no services, no Pens, no overhead,” said Bollovate.

  “There are schools like that now, Joel. But they’re sort of low class. No college of Beet’s reputation has ever gone online.”

  “Ah! That’s just the point, Lewis. Who wants an online degree from Podunk? Beet, on the other hand…Not only that. Let Beet actually prepare you for a job! Shorten the time it takes to get a degree! Get on the fast track!” Bollovate was approaching ecstasy. “The top of the line online. And money in your pocket, too! What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, there’s tradition,” said Huey, in whose oubliette of a mind a taper of decency could occasionally flicker before he snuffed it out himself.

  “Tradition,” said Bollovate. “Oh, I see. The tradition of going under.” They had been sitting in Huey’s office, with Bollovate stuffed into the president’s chair behind the desk, and the president, hands in lap, on the visitors’ side.

  “It’s hard to imagine,” said Huey. “Beet College without Beet College.”

  “Isn’t it!” said Bollovate. “What a shame! What ever would we do without the sniveling, complaining, lily-livered faculty, and that—what’s it called?—dither of deans, and those darling children chasing their hormones until they graduate and drain the economy? What would we do?”