I was just giving myself a narrative, back when the disease was deemed tragic, but Perry had survived it and thrived. He’d put on weight, napped when he felt like it, enjoyed life, and I was the midcentury equivalent of a nun out of time. An MTV nun staring at worldly pop icons. I had missed the entire downtown punk orgy because I’d been too wimpy and middle-class about money to risk moving to New York. By the time Perry and I had gotten there after Paris, the city was vacuumed-up, re-cemented, and glassed-over—and the party had moved over to Brooklyn.
I went to the town cemetery and followed a group of schoolchildren who found a plaque on the black iron fence that identified the plot as containing the grave of the Poetess. The stone identified her as no such thing, only gave the dates of her birth and death (“Called Back”). Many of the goodly womenfolk buried there had virtuous first names like Felicity, Hope, or Constance. Perry’s nutritionist in New York was called Amity Huhn—and she was strictly food-puritanical.
Because I could not stop for sex,
he kindly stopped for me.
The liv’ry cab held just ourselves
and Immorality.
Amity Huhn’s system was a call to eliminate fried foods and red meat from your diet and replace them with whole grains, lean meats like poultry and fish, and fresh fruit and vegetables—unsurprising stuff. Bread and pasta were an occasional treat, processed sugar was verboten, and when you got a yen for sweets it was better, and more satisfying, to enjoy a modest piece of dark Belgian chocolate over a gooey ultra-fattening pastry. Perry had followed the system for a while, then gotten bored. Amity Huhn had referred him to a daily meal delivery service fitting perfectly into her plan, then when invitations for dinners out picked up, the little prepared plastic boxes had stacked up and gone bad in the fridge. They were replaced by deli cuts and runny cheeses, and I couldn’t blame him. If you said you liked cooking you were either a chef or lying. To cook well and nutritiously was hard, athletic work—and Perry had always been the chef in our household.
When people at literary parties asked me how I could have let Perry get so overweight, I (excusing my own indulgences, which were not so evident in a living room just then) told them to imagine a life like Perry’s post-AIDS without booze or cigarettes. He’d dropped both vices then moved to Paris, not exactly the most timely of restraints then and there. He’d given them up for sex, in exchange for sex, but I didn’t tell them that. I said, what was left but food? If they’d had the curiosity I would have told them for me food was uninteresting. I like smoking and drinking. Sex: who could be bothered at my age to go trolling for it online, the way Perry did routinely?
I left the cemetery and stopped at the ATM for money for drinks following workshop.
At lunch, I got in line for the buffet behind Meredith and Clarissa. As usual there was a nice spread, beef and chicken options, as well as an appetizing vegetarian dish of vegetables and thinly sliced, beige-sauced tofu that might have made Amity Huhn sniff with reserved approval.
On the cover of her bestselling diet book, Amity Huhn was photographed with skillfully chopped, frozen-out dark hair, the face work she’d had done conservatively made-up heaviest on the eyes and lips. She was wearing a dark slimming pants suit and she had a hand cocked on her possibly photoshopped bony hip. She was confident and she commanded you, not without some arch felicity, to get real about your eating. Her practice was on Park Avenue. Her book had an audio edition, while none of Perry’s twenty-five books had been recorded for the reading-averse.
“We think we eat sugar,” ran her best line (regarding insulin release), “but sugar eats us.”
Meredith and Clarissa, both slender and gorgeous, seemed to follow her plan to the letter. They were each enjoying a small cube of fish, generous salad, asparagus, and no rice or pasta.
Meredith said, “Did you meet John? He’s a really amazing poet. I mean, he just is.”
Clarissa nodded importantly, and I shook the hand of the youngish man standing next to me in line. We all held square plates—square plates meant you were in the presence of an artful cuisine—and I said, “Hi, John. So are you a poet, too?”
Clarissa snickered, saying, “Not just any poet, a poet about the war.”
“Which war?”
John laughed quickly and said, countryishly, “That’s all right. The Second Gulf War.”
“He was a corporal and has amazing things to say,” said Meredith. “No, really.”
We all sat together. Corporal John said that he’d been in the Marines. He began to break down what all was involved in using artillery. He’d been in a Howitzer unit. I’m not even sure I can say that with confidence. He’d overseen the loading of the Howitzers, big fuckers as he said, and the trick was to decide on the load and the fuse. I’m not conventional for a writer in that I’d write off somebody because they’d been to war. No, in fact his expertise in a field that calls for a lot of training only fascinated me. The literary world is necessarily liberal. War, bad. No excuse for being in a war. But I didn’t feel that way. I was interested to hear about different fuses. The decision about what fuse to use was made after the range and purpose of the artillery load for the Howitzer was determined, all of it done through computer contact. Legendary Howitzers. It was all a quiet process at first. The unit moved in and set up, say, on the side of the hill. It depended on whether you wanted to knock a hole in a building’s wall or smoke people out. Corporal John wasn’t cynical. He explained things scientifically. I pictured several of my friends in New York already judging him, turning their backs and walking away with their vodkas or white wines.
Also, I was glad that I wasn’t attracted to him, but his were the first words of any interest for me all week. I imagined an entire book of poems told from the Howitzer’s point of view.
“The only problem I ever had,” he said, “was when the decision was handed down to use white phosphorus. You know white phosphorus? When it gets on you you can’t get it off. It just keeps on burning. Somebody gets hit with it, it doesn’t go out until they burn completely up.”
“Jesus,” said Meredith, “and you’re getting that all through infrared field glasses, right?”
“Right,” said Clarissa, “through your night-vision goggles, from a safe remove? Jesus.”
“Something like that,” he said.
I went to workshop, and Deepika said, “How’ve you been? I saw you having lunch with that John guy, the Marine? God! I got stuck with him at lunch yesterday. He’s so—military.”
“Well. But how was the sex?” I said. “Good?”
“Fuck you. I was going to tell you—no, I’ll tell you anyway. I went home last night and saw on my shelf a book by Perry Knight, Paris Wanderings. Damn thing’s dedicated to you.”
“Most of his friends had died by that point. He didn’t have anyone else to dedicate it to.”
“Asshole.”
After workshop, no one was up at the University Club except Corporal John. We thought that maybe everyone had convened to the library or gone back to the dorm to write assignments.
I said, “Me, I’m looking at this as a vacation. I’m a housewife in search of a vacation.”
“I get you.”
He told me that he’d had a good workshop. He’d put up a poem the Mean Girls had liked but it wasn’t about Howitzers or the military. It was about home, and it was painful to write.
There was something puny and not obviously military about him. His arms were skinny and not very long. His face seemed dwarfed by something congenital, as he drank his big beer.
He said, “My parents divorced when I was in high school. I was a classic military brat. I was in high school and my father came home in uniform and told me. I was the oldest. It freaked me out because I was the next down in rank, so I had to tell the others. Mom like a lot of military moms was classically checked-out. I don’t know if you ever saw that movie, based on that book, The Great Santini. That was us basically. We moved out with our mom. I was always way more wor
ried about my younger brother Jeremy. He’s now a design consultant for Pottery Barn.”
“And gay?”
“And gay. He says he wants an older daddy to take care of him. He lives with our dad.”
We smiled, although at first this alarmed me: my old heterophobic, antimilitary notions, which I’d thought I’d overcome. They were coming out through a dimly hidden gay wormhole.
“But is your father okay with him being gay and being a designer who wants a daddy?”
“Dad’s retired and loosened up quite a bit. He just wants Jeremy to meet someone, too.”
“What a great dad.”
“But I do write about the old dad, before. Actually, it’s half of what I write still. Dad’s a recovering alcoholic. You might say a re-recovering alcoholic, but he tries. He’s a good dad.”
We looked at each other and nodded, waiting a bit. Then we decided to get more drinks.
Dinners were on us, and at an Asian bistro in town we sat at a large table. It was the evening before the final one, when there would be farewell workshop drinks and a buffet at the UC.
Toby said, “Well, my father’s gone. He worked in a nuclear plant three miles from where I grew up. My brother got leukemia; it was worse to watch than with my mom. She was great.”
“Unfuckingbelievable,” said Meredith.
Clarissa said, “And now it’s just you, all alone?”
“Me and my boyfriend Clay, and now Clay’s mom for a while.”
Toby seemed a little more resigned to cohabiting with Clay’s mom already.
Meredith slid her chopsticks out of their paper sheath like two slender cigarettes.
“What is going on?” said Clarissa. “I’m not apocalyptic or anything, but still.”
“What about you guys?” Toby said. “Everybody still have their parents?”
Clarissa replied, “Oh and then some, if you count the stepmom and the stepdad.”
“My father’s a bartender,” said Meredith. “He was supposedly this brilliant logician and was at Stanford for it, then one day he freaked out. My mom is just a frenetic claims adjuster.”
“Yeah, insurance,” said Toby. “Try that one on for size.”
I was the only one ordering a starter and I ate my soup.
“Stan!” said Clarissa. “Where’ve you been?”
“Yeah, Stan. Tell!”
Stanley was sheepish and said, moving toward the table, “Can I sit with you guys?”
“Are you insane?” Meredith then said, and I moved over a place to make room for Stanley.
“We went to see that movie,” he said. “It was all right. John liked it more than I did.”
“Where’s John?” said Clarissa. “Is he coming, the doof? Should we text him?”
“He said he was going home to do some work. He has to order the poems for his thesis.”
“Right,” said Clarissa, “because he’s going back to Norfolk to defend his thesis.”
Meredith tightened her puffy mouth, but it wouldn’t stow. She raised both eyebrows, put her hand on nerdy Stan’s, and looked at him, saying, “What did you think of ‘Real Admiral’?”
Always growing up I’d wished that my parents would divorce, but this had not solved any of Corporal John’s problems. He was still working his out. By the time my brother and I were in high school my father had stopped hitting us, knocking us against walls, grabbing for his belt and yanking it out of his pants loops to fold it in half and crack it menacingly then wield it and let the hot licks fall senselessly on us wherever. I don’t know if our getting bigger and more athletic by then had frightened or intimidated him or if he was tired. The four of us were already starting to dissipate as a unit. My mother and father let us try their beer or wine every time they got a fresh can or glass in their hands. They had stopped flinching and getting bent out of shape because we cussed, which we’d learned in the school hallways in imitation of an outside world they couldn’t do anything about. They started cussing and we knew they’d always cussed, probably since high school, too. We loosened up together and laughed a lot, or more than before. We were tense and we unwound under the same roof, and when we got out from the knot of us after my brother and I grew up, the roof just fell in. This had something to do with the fact that, now, I wanted someone much younger and more beautiful than I had ever been to beat my ass and legs with a belt while I was naked and feeling fat and flabby—then bawl me out and remind me I was worthless flesh.
Corporal John had read me “Rear Admiral” that night and now Stanley, wide-eyed, said, “I was blown away. I didn’t grow up like that, but I just love John, like my brother! I have to trust what he says. Why wouldn’t I? But how could you go through that and ever be the same?”
We waited and then Meredith said, “Well, I guess he’s not the same.”
Clarissa pouted then said, “I’m lucky my dad’s an idiot, too self-involved to be violent.”
Our meals came and we ate talking about Stanley and John’s movie, which sounded idiotic.
Right at the end Deepika came in and said, “Looks like everybody’s just getting done.”
Everyone was anxious to get to a famous novelist’s reading, the last conference biggie.
To Deepika I said, frowning with kindness, “I’ll stay, you can order and I’ll have coffee.”
“You’d do that for me?” said Deepika. “Then let me pay for your coffee.”
Later, I called home. Beau had gone straight to bed after his internet-arranged sex date in our neighborhood of Chelsea—Chelsea, where anything could happen. But then you just got used to the possibility of it. The trick—it seemed as you aged—was finding somebody wanting a daddy. Or you could go without. Or you could settle down with somebody who wanted to garden. Whichever way, you didn’t have anything up on straight people. You still had to deal with the bodily issues.
“We had a lovely, quiet day,” said Perry. “We walked a block and I got tired and we went home. But on the way I had to stop and rest, so we ate lunch at that new vegetarian Indian place. But do you know what I was thinking, besides missing you? I was thinking how horrible it’ll be, not knowing when it’s the last time I’ll be saying hello or goodbye again—how horrible that is.”
“You mean hello or goodbye again to me?”
“Well, to anyone—much as I miss you. Saying goodbye to anyone, whomever, on earth.”
We said good night and hung up. I turned off my lamp and got into bed and pulled up the covers. In less than a week they’d lost some of their stiffness and starch. Then I thought of older Perry’s courage— anyone older’s courage. You had to keep going. Then eventually I fell asleep.
avenging angel
Across the inlet, only a few lights burned against the char-black ridge line of East Blue Hill. They were writers and boatbuilders over there—all of them, or nearly all of them, young, happy, and attractive. Their children were blond and played on steep lawns. How those lawns got mowed was a mystery. The summer was coming to a close and bedtime was early. Drive the streets and you’d not meet a lot of oncoming cars, pairs of headlights coming toward you as rare as tropical foliage in Maine, where we were—but then there was nothing to do after say ten p.m. It was a snug community. The days of summer so far north were long, and by the time the dinner dishes were washed, it was time to turn in. Or so my imagination had it. On the deck in front of my little plumbingless cabin, in a Chinese-manufactured adirondack, I had a front-row seat. We were renting the place. We did it every August. We were solitary, each a little bit lonely. My job was to shop and cook and clean, and his was to create. He was paying many thousands of dollars to finish his new novel here, going at quite the clip in his older age. He sat in the main house (it was paces from the cabin where I slept and read and stepped out occasionally onto the deck for a drink of wine and a smoke), and he wrote in the notebooks he’d brought from New York. Every year I was making progress knocking out titles by a different author: Naipaul, DeLillo, Faulkner. I was having trouble con
centrating on Faulkner but knew he was obligatory for any Southerner. I was amanuensis, driver, and helpmeet. I typed when necessary. I edited. I proofed whenever a manuscript was ready to go to the publisher. He complained that he was tired, but then the days were so long. We were so far out on Newbury Neck that there was no internet, no cable, only the one TV station coming in, PBS. Each morning after breakfast we’d drive into town, and I’d leave him at a coffee shop before driving to Hannaford, the good supermarket. Before turning the key in the ignition in the downtown public lot I’d check my own email; the signal was that powerful. I had so few messages, but this was his time to unwind and sip a latte and do all his business and mine to listen to the radio. It would not be a good thing in our New York milieu to admit to, but sometimes I’d then drive to Walmart for staples. In Walmart I was a kid again. This was such an agreeably lonely place, Hancock County, rich and poor rubbing up against each other, though apparently not in Walmart, where I saw more evidence of my own people, still buying CDs in the age of downloads, scouring through racks of reduced rock T-shirts, and buying their megaportions of cooking oil, flour, potatoes, white rice. In the twenty-first-century retail warehouse of Walmart I heard one woman say to her husband, “Because I’m afraid, Dale,” and I was home again. Home again meant sales and bargains. It meant people just making do or thinking in their imaginations apocalyptic thoughts when never was there an apocalypse about to happen. It was Christian and put-upon. It was numberless victimhood. It was frightened, and I still felt some of that ambient fear, although what did I have to fear? Among them I was privileged. I’d gotten an education to do my job, fill the role that I now enjoyed. Enjoyed is a strong word. Strong is masculine and part of me felt emasculated, as did so many of these ovoids, my word for them—a hateful word I know, but said in love because I couldn’t put myself above them. I’d been a pear-shaped teen, in a spot. I’d felt I had no future. I’d had some luck and met him. I’d met him in Paris, an accident because I was just there and had written him a fan note, a fan note that had gotten his attention. I was still young then. Whatever little I inherited, I’d gotten young genes. He’d said, “You are the perfect mate for me because you look so young I can indulge my pedophile fantasies, yet I’m not a pedophile.” In my family, our hair didn’t turn gray quickly. We wrinkled slowly. I had studied English at a state university and could do the job. I’d been doing it for some time. It was a job, but a job that came with some, many, pleasures. And I was still the kid, that rock fanboy. I wanted my life to resemble rock and roll and in many senses it did, the freedom, the parties. And then came the silences. They were long and breathed deeply with the quiet act of his writing.
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 24
