Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Which reminded me to ask if Cleome was coming. She was one of the stars Moss marked to join his constellation, and she gave up an excellent career as a nutritionist when he brought her out to the island to study and gave her the idea that the only place of honor on earth was his inner circle, that one was either a poet or a failure—but she flickered out somehow and now she cooks at the hospice and runs a hand-dipped candle shop on the wharf, while the other brilliant, sensitive women in his fold go on to fresh triumphs every week—they’d be stepping off the ferry the day of the party just across from her place.

  “She’s not on the list,” Peregrine said.

  “You’ve got to invite her…,” I insisted, and somehow we found ourselves arguing about grade inflation in the universities, the empty “self-esteem” that leaves students feeling proud, proud of themselves without all the bother of accomplishing anything. “There has to be a willingness, somewhere, to step on toes!” he inveighed.

  “Cleome’s toes?” I asked, but a Puritan has his responsibilities. I’d just put the twins down for their nap and was feeling as strong and honest and virtuous as only a woman who has just rocked two children to sleep in her arms can, when the phone rang. I put a finger to my lips when his voice began to rise, but when I saw his face I retreated—it had taken on the exact likeness of his grandfather, the Reverend Sawyer.

  “Certainly not,” he was saying. “This is a private party, not a society event.” (Who could it have been, who would dare link Peregrine Whittington with a society event?) “No, no … no,” he said, with the icy amusement he always turns on solicitors. “I do not think that would be appropriate, and I have no way to help you.” He hung up, looking very deeply satisfied.

  “Who was that?”

  “The New Yorker.”

  I sat down on the landing. “What do you mean?”

  “They want someone to write up the party.”

  He found the idea revolting, but not surprising; I thought it was utterly incredible.

  “Is nothing happening in New York?”

  “Well, I told them absolutely not.”

  “Because they’re not old friends of Moss?”

  “Because I’m not in the business of that kind of procurement.”

  “But Peregrine…” My life was passing before my eyes, and what a sorry procession—the book, the “promise,” the students who in their search for anything consequential read wisdom into my every word, the sense that as a teacher of creative writing I was part of a metaphysical Ponzi scheme that created comfortable employment for those of us at the top by milking the benighted souls at the bottom, who were no more than boat people fleeing the poststructuralists in the literature departments where they would otherwise have been happily, obliviously at work. The guilt! The shame! The desperate need for further publications …

  “Peregrine, I would have written the party up for The New Yorker,” I said.

  He looked at me as if I’d offered to jump out of Moss’s cake.

  “I’d do a great job of it, Peregrine,” I said. “I really know Moss, I could show why people love him, what his example has meant…”

  Because suddenly I couldn’t help thinking how beautiful the world would look from Kit’s deck as it sagged under the weight of all the greatest living poets … the terns diving, the light in the crystal glasses, the bay full of sails … I knew exactly how I’d describe it, Moss as a legend among his successors, looking out to the far horizon, standing amidst the abundance of life on the threshold of the unknown … how inspiring he was and how selfless, nourishing all these young poets … Why, I loved Moss, and a shudder passed over me as I remembered asking him, when he was only seventy-eight, whether he thought he’d ever win a Nobel Prize, and hearing him explain and explain and explain the way my college boyfriend used to patiently enumerate for me all the reasons he was only wait-listed at Yale.

  “They don’t want you; they want Mullins,” Peregrine said.

  “Mullins?” Park Mullins was the poet, just then. His poems were intelligent, deeply felt, tinged with the kind of self-satisfaction a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male can only feel when he has been purified of the colonialist/genocidal taint by virtue of his homosexuality. He lived up the street from us with his boyfriend—I’d asked them over for dinner once and he’d said they’d love to come if nothing better turned up, but apparently something had. “Was he invited?”

  “Why would he be invited?” Peregrine asked me.

  * * *

  “Peregrine Whittington hung up on The New Yorker?” We were at the beach, and my friend Sinead she was laughing so hard the woman beside us peered over her sunglasses in furious disapproval, which caused Sinead to laugh louder, at which the woman lifted her book over her face like a shield. It was Under the Table, Patsy Grue’s memoir of her childhood sexual abuse and the adult substance abuse it led to, with the giant words “Gripping! Darkly, disturbingly erotic!—The New York Times Book Review” splashed in neon orange across the jacket.

  “And, of course, we have to invite her,” I said. “I loathe Patsy Grue.”

  “For God’s sake, be quiet!” Sinead beseeched, snorting horribly as she tried to rein herself in. “You don’t think she’d be reading that if she wasn’t a friend of Patsy’s, do you?”

  This sobered me.

  “We won’t say Patsy,” Sinead said. “Call her Georgina.”

  “I loathe Georgina!” I cried. “It’s not that I oppose pretension per se, but to be haughty because your father raped you—more-victimized-than-thou! That’s where I draw the line!”

  “Well, the advance…,” Sinead said. “For a poem they’ll give you six copies; for a memoir six figures…”

  “It’s not the money, I don’t care about the money…”

  “With me, it’s always the money,” Sinead said.

  “With me, it’s the goddamned zinnias!”

  “Don’t say zinnias!” she hissed, as everyone knows Patsy takes absurd pride in her zinnias while mine mildew and die every year. “Say hydrangeas,” she suggested kindly.

  “Georgina’s hydrangeas! And then to complain about censorship when the publisher wouldn’t have a big throbbing penis on the jacket—”

  “—as if representations of big throbbing penises weren’t common as potted rubber plants these days—”

  “Exactly! Fortunately I don’t think she can come to the party—she’s on tour in Australia.”

  “Australia!” Sinead said. “I mean, it’s an awful book, but exile…”

  “The wanton murder of defenseless trees…”

  “All sins can be forgiven,” she replied. “Look, Peregrine hung up on The New Yorker, and you’re not mad at him.”

  “Of course I’m mad at him,” I said. “He’s my husband.”

  * * *

  At Moss’s eightieth birthday I’d been Peregrine’s child bride. I wore a crimson sundress, a William Morris print, and I remember drifting across a wide lawn toward the Hudson feeling, like a blossom carried along by the breeze. Upstairs in this mansion, whose owner was shaving a truffle over the risotto on the buffet, I opened one door after another, to see paintings that would have amazed me in a museum: a Rembrandt, a Corot, two Picassos glaring at each other across a double bed … Here it was, the House of Art, exactly as I had imagined—an immense solid structure with an infinite number of rooms, large enough to encompass the great contradictions, so bright as to illuminate the finest distinctions, resting on a foundation neither history nor geology could shake. The oriental carpet lay thick as new-fallen snow in the hallway, and when I reached the library I saw shelves that rose two dizzying stories, with an oak ladder on which it seemed one might glide straight to the Truth. I remember wanting to kneel down there and thank the gods for Peregrine, who had ushered me out of the dark, into the knowledgeable world.

  What possessed me to think I might ever do more than sneak around in that mansion, I don’t know. As I was about to leave the library I met a woman entering, whose
still, spare beauty was more perfect than the paintings—she was like a stone you’d pick up on the beach. It was clear she belonged to the house somehow, and I began to make excuses for myself—I was looking for a bathroom, had taken a wrong turn … She looked at me wonderingly and said that she was just trying to escape—she was Cal Lowell’s daughter and so had sat on Moss’s lap as a child, but she had to get out of this party. Of course, she was fleeing—it was her world, only a daydream to me. And Peregrine? He was comfortable there as Ahab would have been if he’d landed in The Golden Bowl.

  * * *

  The day before Moss’s ninetieth dawned a deep aquarium green. Two oil tankers and a cruise ship had taken refuge in the harbor. The halyards rang against the masts—Peregrine looked fit to lash himself to one.

  “A gale,” he said, through his teeth. “Moss flying in through a gale. And what if it’s still raining tomorrow?”

  “Aren’t we supposed to go over and help Kit clean house?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I talked to her last night and she said she’d take care of it—it’s not a big job, she lives by herself.…”

  “But the cats—” Kit is philosophically opposed to neutering cats and owns five, all male, who follow each other around staking claim to the furniture all day.

  “This is a party of intellectuals,” he told me with infinite condescension. “They are not going to be checking for perfect cleanliness and criticizing the décor.”

  I came very near informing him that the Pottery Barn catalog shows Park Mullins’s books scattered artfully around the Mendocino bedroom collection, but I didn’t want to break his heart, and I had to reserve my strength to argue for tablecloths and cocktail napkins and other bourgeois indulgences that a party of intellectuals would necessarily disdain.

  “We do have to think about parking,” I said.

  “We don’t need parking,” he said. “Francis Drake walked two miles through the dunes every night after the bars closed, his whole life! He lived by foraging for years! He has a mushroom named after him!”

  “I’m not questioning his manliness, but he just had a stroke!”

  “He would be appalled to hear we were making special arrangements just for him.”

  The subject was as closed as the airport. Cleome was dispatched to pick Moss up in Boston. They didn’t get back until ten, but Moss was twinkling all over and took the porch steps like a mountain goat, joyful to see us, shocked the twins were already in bed. He knows nothing of children—what would be the point? Do they give prizes, or write reviews? No, they can’t even read! I’d assumed he’d want some rest himself, but he was famished and thought we should go straight to Les Sables. Les Sables used to be a cod-salting shed, then a kind of flophouse in the sixties—Peregrine got kicked out of an orgy there—but now it’s got three Michelin stars: it’s the only place in town to get really decent bouillabaisse (though it costs the earth, of course, because the fish have to be flown in from Maine—it’s a long time since anything worth eating swam in this bay). I begged Sinead to baby-sit and put on a black dress, but we had no reservations, and to Peregrine’s stupefaction the name Moss Genthner had no effect on the maître d’. So we tried Porcini, the Sea Street Café, and Barbarella’s, but there was no room even at the bar. Finally I told Moss to come back to our house for an omelette.

  “Hmmmm,” he said, in his old man’s oracular warble. “Do you have any salad?”

  “It’s iceberg,” said Peregrine, as if this were illegal. Moss turned to Cleome.

  “I think I have some mâche, but it’s kind of old,” she said.

  “Let’s go over and take a look,” Moss answered, with the patience of a man who’s willing to search months for a right word. “We can take it back to Peregrine’s.” Cleome lives in Spinnaker, four miles away. “Now, what about bread?” Moss asked happily. “And wine?”

  “I’ve got some white,” Cleome said, though Moss looked alarmed. Cleome of the jasmine and frangipani candles could not be trusted on wine. “And rolls,” she added, glad to be a part of things. “Whole wheat!”

  “What kind of seeds?” Moss asked. “Sesame, or—”

  “No seeds,” she admitted. Like her poems, the rolls were missing something.

  But Moss’s inspiration never fails: “You must have some poppy seeds, eh, Jane?” he asked me.

  “Which are poppy seeds?” Peregrine asked, “those little black ones? I think Kit has some.”

  “Kit is sitting in on drums at the Clamshell!” I said.

  “Well, that’s just down the block,” Moss said. “You can run in and ask her, Jane—”

  “No!”

  “I have soup,” Cleome said in a small voice. “I mean, it’s not Les Sables, but I have soup and rolls and the mâche” (she glanced over at me: her lettuce had surpassed mine) “and wine.…”

  “And all in one place. Perfect, Cleome,” I said. “West, Peregrine!” There came a muffled grunt as if Moss had been punched in the gut, but I ignored it.

  “The Lundgrens have sniffed out the party,” he said, when we had climbed the steps up the hillside and were settled at Cleome’s table. Spinnaker hasn’t been papered over with money like the rest of the island, not yet—the houses are still crooked and peculiar, angled to take in the north light for painting or catch the odd glimpse of the bay. The winds had switched around, and we heard the tankers sound their horns as they left the harbor—maybe there was hope for the party.

  “What party?” Cleome asked.

  “Communist,” I said, and diverted her attention to Under the Table, which was sitting on her sideboard, while Moss and Peregrine got off on Kissinger. “Well, it’s … gripping?” she said. “… It’s … erotic? It’s kind of disturbing. But some of her adjective-noun combinations are just so good.…”

  “The Lundgrens don’t have to come if you don’t want them,” I heard Peregrine say.

  “Yes, they do,” Moss said, shaking his head over the immutable laws of the universe. The Lundgrens teach at Harvard; even Peregrine can’t cross them. “They do. This must be very healthful, Cleome,” he said sorrowfully, tasting the soup.

  “It’s good, don’t you think?” she asked. “It’s a California minestrone.”

  “It’s very nutritious, I can tell,” he replied.

  * * *

  It was nearly time for the party, but Peregrine had pressed the wrong key on his computer, and his poem came out in columns like an account book. At first I pretended not to hear him, but as his sighs increased my heart softened.

  “When you have a minute…,” he said sheepishly, and I went over to press REVEAL CODES. As I scanned for his error my eye caught on the text: his poem was about women, many, many women, and not one of them was me. I skimmed to the bottom and onto the next page.… Every shopgirl in town was seen to turn up her pretty behind.

  “Peregrine, what is this?” I asked.

  “It’s just about—it’s about—well, the narrator—”

  “The narrator?” I said, “the narrator! I have never once seen you write anything that wasn’t absolutely something that happened to you the day before! And now we have a narrator? How dare you?… How could you write this, and having done both those things you have the nerve to ask me to come fix your columns? You hypocrite! You wolf in narrator’s clothing! I’ll fix your goddamned columns, you … you narrator.”

  Whereupon he turned into the Reverend Sawyer and informed me that I was making him late for the party.

  * * *

  Now the curious thing about the young women whose talent Moss has fostered is that their great insight, their gripping and disturbing eroticism, their very unique and original spirits have somehow caused them all to look very much alike. I don’t know why this should be, but it’s just true that poets now are willowy and soulful and have thick hair growing like ivy out of their extremely fertile heads. There’s none of this Emily Dickinson homeliness, nothing raw and clutching, no Sylvia Plath sea-urchin spininess or Elizab
eth Bishop scraggle—no, when you look at them you can tell instantly you’re seeing a lovely soft poet, someone you can plunge both arms into right up to the elbows. And they greet you with such warmth and generosity—it is amazing how kind they are, how careless of their prestige, willing to embrace you almost as if you were one of them.

  “Jane! Oh, Jane, it’s been years!” cried Marietta Brunelle (formerly Mary Brown). She leaned in to embrace me in a great swirl of perfume. “I got your book, by the way, thanks, I mean I haven’t read it, but what a great jacket, and wow, the blurbs!” And seeing Park Mullins over my shoulder she sang, “There you are!” and tried to step through me.

  “Your new poems,” he said, in a sacred hush, and their gazes (very intense gazes, his contacts being blue, hers green) locked—it frightened me to know they weren’t acting on sexual attraction. The day was hot; the bay and sky turned their brilliances to each other to make just the dazzling backdrop we’d always imagined for ourselves. Moss had chosen us, The New Yorker was covering us; we would be studied, anthologized, and in the afterlife Moss would introduce us to Lowell. Here I was—I, whose father owned a Midas muffler franchise—among the grand old literary and artistic world of Milliken Island: Francis Drake, Trotskyite and discoverer of a mushroom; Rann Slivka, patterned after Monet down to the girth and hat, an ebullient lecher who made women writhe and glow; Celine someone, whose translations of Akhmatova would not easily be surpassed, who had married one of the lesser Nabokovs and one of the lesser Rothschilds, whose beauty Moss and Peregrine swore they could still see flashes of, even now, though, of course, her generation was nearly forgotten, overtaken by Peregrine’s and then by Park’s and Marietta’s and mine.