Once, the beautiful Dr. Ash, mathematician, stepped outside and stood on the grass alone in her bathrobe, fresh from a shower, her hair tumbling to her shoulders in grapes, and he kept still, on his back in the shadows, beneath a tree deep in leaf, so still she did not see that he was there. He heard her sigh and say aloud: Why am I so sad? It was a thing he had never thought to ask himself. He marveled at this. And ever after he would ask of himself: Why am I so sad?
It is impossible for him to imagine what it must be to live in a house as Dr. Ash does, full of quiet rooms, closets full of clothes, light summer linens and heavy woven wool; clothes for every season. Everything in the house warm and thick and heavy—as if each night it were basted in gravy. These people, he thinks, live like the gods. Forever. Safe from the swift wheels of failure—and destitution.
He watches the stars. He imagines renaming them. Offering them to Asthma freshly minted, freshly imagined. The lost umbrella. The tin spoon. The little molecules. The peacock’s tail. The cherry basket. The falling tears. The wandering souls. The sandman. The lost soul. The turtle’s dilemma. The volcanic eruption. The kiss. Those who lament. The battling dogs. God’s beard. The snail. The tree of life. The outer garment. The boiling pot. The fishhook and the leviathan. The burning rushes. The victim. And those at the heart of the universe: a big black house on fire, the flames dancing in every window, smoke spilling from the cracks. The stolen chicken!
He had once stolen a freshly roasted chicken that had been left to cool on the kitchen counter. The family’s Labrador retriever was scolded and made to spend the night in an ignominious little doghouse he had outgrown years before. No one noticed the missing kitchen towel Stub had used to carry the chicken off, which became his plate, tablecloth, and napkin.
The memory of that chicken makes him aware of just how hungry he is, and he considers breaking his one rule and checking out Blackie’s larder. Asthma, after all, is busy at play, and Blackie and her Rod busy at drink. The little party is in full swing. He can hear Blackie telling Blondie about the book she is writing: The Boy Beamed to Mars. “A Boy Beamed to Mars is better,” Goldie offers; it’s more mysterious. Blackie puzzles this over. “I don’t see what a damned difference it makes,” she snaps, her blood pressure rising. “You have a tin ear,” Goldie says. “That’s why.” “If I had a tin ear,” Blackie hisses, “Brunelleschi would have told me. The Boy Beamed to Mars is exactly . . . it means he’s chosen, goddamnit. He’s the boy, not just any boy. Jesus.” “A boy is more mysterious,” Goldie insists, popping a maraschino cherry between her teeth. “He’s already floating in space. He’s anybody’s boy, not chosen by some dickhead divinity . . . but why do I give a shit?”
“Yeah,” Blackie agrees. “Why?” She stands, barely able to sustain herself. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST . . . JUST NOT GIVE A SHIT?” And she stomps off; the two men watch her leave without much interest.
When Blackie walks in the front door, Stub is standing at the foot of the stairs. “Who the hell?” she barks.
“I’m, uh, a student of Dr. Ash’s,” Stub mutters. “She told me to drop by and pick up some books. She said they’d be here, in the front hall, on a table, but—”
“Wrong house.” Blackie says it vaguely as she weaves her way to the living room, shedding her heels as she goes. “Wrong house,” she mutters and falls, not onto the sofa as she intends, but onto the floor. Stub runs to her, asks her what he can do.
“Go fuck yourself,” says Blackie.
“The boy carries a burden of strangeness.” Goldie’s Rod says dreamily, prodding the ice in his glass with his tongue.
“Poor Timmy,” Goldie agrees. She wonders how Timmy, the son of the Distempers across the street, can possibly grow into a man. And yet he is fifteen, almost a man—such a worrisome thought. “Poor Timmy,” Goldie says again. “Fifteen and yet he moves along the ground like a crab.”
“Like a crab with an ancient woe and an oversized barnacle stuck to his claw,” her Rod agrees.
“When he walks about,” Blackie’s Rod wonders aloud, “I wonder where he goes?”
“Where does such a boy go to find a little comfort?” Goldie ponders.
“Sauerbraten,” Goldie’s Rod says decisively, his nose probing the air around him. “The boy won’t starve.”
“Genius,” says Blackie’s Rod, “needs to be squeezed. In that way it is like toothpaste. It needs . . . what was I getting at?” He sips his rye and frowns.
“I admit I don’t quite follow,” sighs Goldie. “Genius thrives on being cramped. Souls need, souls need . . . what do they need? Oh! I know! Souls need a tight squeeze!” She laughs merrily. “Perhaps Timmy is the one who will save us all.”
“Someone said, someone . . .,” yawns Blackie’s Rod, “that each and every one of us is meant to save the world. Timmy has been squeezed enough to become a cosmologist or one of those rare birds who invents bombs. You know, Little Boys!”
“And Fat Men!” trills Goldie. Faraway sobs can be heard. “That will be Timmy.”
“A galaxy away,” the Rods say together.
“Is it Pea Pod?” Goldie wonders.
“I believe it is Timothy,” her Rod sighs. “Do we have nuts? I am desirous of nuts.”
“In the pantry,” Goldie directs him. “An entire can of cashews with its key. You’ll have to get them yourself. I am unwilling, perhaps unable, to move.”
“As am I,” Goldie’s Rod says, leaning back in his chair. “I’m in an immobilizing mood. Somewhere between contentment and anxiety.”
“Remember when I said if we had a . . . a (what in the devil are they called?) a child, we were not to strike it?” Goldie startles her husband into chewing his ice.
“Better to strike them than paint them in honey and set them down hog-tied beside a hill of fire ants.”
“Oh you bad boy,” Goldie approves quietly into her glass, her tongue cold and pink. “In a little while I’ll fry the three of us some eggs, I mean four, . . . but not just yet.” she decides.
“Sunny-side down?” her Rod wonders. “With a spot of curry, love?”
“You can curry your own goddamned egg,” says Goldie.
Teaching is not Blackie’s Rod’s greatest strength, yet this is what he does—although perhaps not for long, as his tenure is in question. His insufficiencies in that domain plague him. As he nurses his ice and rye he soothes his mind with thoughts of a domain that over the years has grown in holdings and complexities. Somewhere in Jamaica. This Jamaica of his is suspended somehow in a parenthetical time both before and after slavery. His own holdings include a big white colonial house studding a green hill, a lawn extending to the sea, plantations, serviceable natives.
Somewhere in Jamaica . . . those three words are all it takes to evoke a reverie that fits him like a diver’s suit. He grows sugarcane. He makes molasses, sugar, rum. Perched in a town near the clouds, he can see this sugarcane spill like a broad river to the horizon. And his fields of plantain, banana, coconut, lime. He raises sheep for mutton and spring lamb. From where he sits, he can see these sheep munching. Out at sea, fishermen are returning, raising their voices in song. The sun is setting, the sky flushed pink; there will be roast lamb for supper, following the spiny-lobster bisque and, let’s see . . . a pudding set on fire with his very own rum! From time to time he fetches a bottle from his cellar; already he can hear the starched white cotton of the black help crackling behind their knees. How pretty they are, Jamaican women, the color of gingerbread, of dark chocolate, milk chocolate, café au lait, toast, as they move about in the cool shadows of the downstairs rooms, setting out candles, flowers, a freshly pressed linen tablecloth, a Venetian carafe (the only thing he actually owns, inherited from a rich aunt on his mother’s side). He allows himself the leisure to think about what it would be like to tumble into bed with all of them. He thinks it would be like taking a dip in chocolate mousse rich with eggs and cream. How many are there? He has, over the years, named them all after gems: Jade, Ruby, Pearl, Sa
pphire, Opal . . . and the new one, Heart of Mary, ugly, straight from Jehovah God Bible School—she keeps things running smoothly and sometimes rides his knees. Her little churchy clitoris as hot as a toasted raisin on his bare knee. Shameless, droll little Mary, so full of tricks. Speaking of which—has Pea Pod, sent to a corner, had her supper? Dear little Pea Pod. “Goldie!” He calls out as if she was elsewhere, picking orchids at the lawn’s far end, “Goldie?”
“I’m here,” she breathes. “Are we all ready for eggs? Shall I make a move to move? Or . . . maybe in a little while . . .”
Out at sea a large ship approaches. He’s sold his rum for beef, wheat flour; a French baker is onboard, too! A fat Flemish blond. Or Swiss, to milk the cows. To be worth its salt a mousse needs a dollop of whipped cream. Sacks of Italian polenta, Indonesian rice, and bottled mincemeat (where the devil is mincemeat bottled? Wales?).
Oysters. He sends Ruby, her petticoats flashing, down the path to the beach to greet the oystercatchers, the boys who bring in mussels, too. Clams! Abalone. Sweet abalone!
“Sweet abalone . . .,” he says aloud, almost singing.
“Who’s that?” Goldie wonders. “Rod? Are you seeing someone?”
And scallops. The sea appears to boil there are so many scallops. Lobster! And eel . . ., “Sapphire!” he calls out. “Fish stew!”
“Fiddies don’t stew,” says Goldie. “They fwim.”
How wonderful it is in Jamaica. Far in the distance, far out to sea, he hears Goldie’s Rod say dreamily:
“Say, Goldie. How’re you set for bacon?”
“Bacon?” says Goldie. “Wha’s that?”
“Who are you?” Pea Pod asks Stub. She’s wandering around with a can of cashews, its top peeled back and sharp as a razor. “Why are you sitting on my daddy’s grass?”
“I’m from abroad,” Stub tells her. “In my country there’s no private property. I apologize. Say! Look at this . . .” He pulls a toy gyroscope from his pocket.
“What does it do?” Pea Pod eyeballs the thing, intrigued.
“Let me show you.”
Later, stretched out on the sumptuous Boethius sleeping bag he stole from the Sandor Methinks dorms—the classiest on campus—he ponders the nature of his difficulty. What was his difficulty, exactly? Why was it that as far back as he could recall, he had never inhabited his own skin, had always been an outsider to everyone, even himself? Trees he could speak to, relate to—and in this way he was very like a child. Yet this, he thinks, must be, is a good thing because children are good. Even little Pea Pod with her temper and pinched face is good! Yes, he is certain of this, recollecting his own brief moment in the garden when he did fit in his own skin and was good, was happy. If one could—despite all that transpires to undo the infant’s marvelous capacity for joy—continue to live, at one’s core, the life of the child, well then one would never cease to radiate out in all directions! As if . . . as if . . . as if one’s own navel were a sun! A blazing star, forever burning!
Things. He has few. The Boethius sleeping bag, a Swiss Army knife, a duffel (another Boethius, olive green, studded with real brass) that holds his limited, if acceptable, wardrobe. He has toothbrushes, toothpaste, secreted under sinks all over the place—the library, gym, kitchens, Utilities House, cabin in the woods—and there’s a small box of his stuff (galoshes, talcum powder) under the Provost’s porch.
The things belonging to others he considers as objects featured in a vanitas, made of clay, plastic, wood, glass, metal, and so forth; sometimes he comes upon a small thing of jade or cinnabar or lacquer, and in the penumbra of evening, the dawn light of early fall, the sweaty heat of August, takes it up gently and turns it this way and that as if looking at something from another world. He looks at other people’s dining room tables, their bed boards and fire tongs. Once, he stood outside a window gazing at Dr. Ash’s glass of port forgotten on a coffee table, radiating light. Sometimes he gets lost in the spine of a book, a bottle of milk, a scarf of yellow silk.
Yet he is not the only madman about! After all, there is Professor Brunelleschi, mad with pain, speaking to his wife sometimes for over an hour in the evening: Amore. My eye. The eye of my heart, my beloved, my violet button, my tangible rainbow, my exuberance, my youth, my tongue! Noni! I have forgotten how to laugh. I drink tears in the evening’s soup! I piss tears! Without you I become stranger by the day. I swim in my pants . . . And in all the houses, the little radios, now pierced with windows the colors of looming bad weather, percolating with a senator named Ratmutterer: Rabble-rousers! Brooding eggheads! They cook their pernicious rumors in pink, pink casseroles made by Soviets reeking of unwashed—
Stub covers his ears. Runs to the library. It’s a good place, the library. One is left to oneself. It is like you are a tree or a receptacle for cans. Once a professor asked me my major. I was reading beneath the bull’s-eye window in Sciences. Science, I said. He asked why. I thought about it. Then I said: I enjoy knowing why things move. Nothing ever stands still. Things are always rising and falling, growing and shrinking. I began to feel an old fear rising and couldn’t go on. He said: I know exactly what you mean. It’s exhausting. And he wandered off chuckling.
But today. Someone—a Professor Emeritus, I think he said he was—named William Sweetbriar, “Billy,” introduced himself. And when he asked I told him my best lie: I was on a Fulbright from New South Wales, Australia. And I was working on the Vanderloon papers. I got carried away. I hadn’t actually talked to anybody for over six months and suddenly I was a chatterbox!
“All the way from New South Wales to study Loon!” he cried out. “I know Loon, of course. Knew him. As well as he allowed. We were colleagues, of course. And his library! Of course you have access to the library!”
“Well, it’s in boxes, sir. Not yet inventoried . . .,” I said, the merest hint of an Australian accent now coloring my speech. And then he asked me the question I feared.
“You’re working with Harvey? Old Pemble?” He snickered and winked, sharing an obscure joke.
“No.” I smiled as best I could. “The, the new . . . he’s visiting, from . . . Oxford: Welch. He’s here briefly, I gather. Filling in for . . .”
“Pemble! Of course! I’d forgotten he’s abroad. I’m out of touch.” Billy sighed. “With the department I mean. You hit a certain age you’re so busy oiling your joints and calming your rashes, your stomach gasses—you’ve no time for much else. What’s your name, son?” And I said, and I have no idea why I said this, but I said:
“My name is Charter Chase.”
“Entre nous, Charter,” Billy whispered fiercely, “You’re lucky Old Pemble is abroad. Well, I’m off! But . . .” He looked deeply into my eyes as if reading me and said: “But I should make you dinner, lonely scholar that I suppose you are.”
A can is kicked, he sees it rise above the dust and for an instant catch fire in the light of the moon. Asthma is “it.” She stands with her foot on the can in triumph as the others return to the Circle. She closes her marvelous eyes and begins to count. If Vanderloon could see her, he would say that Asthma is currently the “superior principle.” She plays the part of the bird; the others play the fish. And the bird always catches the fish. It is never the other way around.
Somewhere hidden among the darkest of cosmic star houses, Pea Pod weeps. Her tears are just another thread in the fabric of time. Time—that obstinate, irascible persona non grata, a finger in every pie. He looks at the can. There it is, casting a shadow, like a dolmen for an ant. Right at the center of everything.
A shout! Asthma is triumphant! Having caught her first fish, crouching behind the Tutweiler’s orgone box.
Somewhere in the sky the sobbing has silenced, at least for now. The sound of the evening news rises to the stars and like a venomous ink of squids hooked to a rusting respirator, canned laughter oxidizes in the air. Gratified by the vision of Asthma owning the can with her foot, that triumphant stance, the way she tilts her head to one side, her hand over her e
yes as she counts, her short brown hair stirring in the breeze, he decides to call it a day and returns to his current refuge, the spotless Utilities House, where a nice jar of elderberry jam, made by the Provost’s visiting sister-in-law, and a new loaf of Wonder Bread await him.
The next day everything changes . . .
Everything changes. Because Billy, Professor Emeritus, lonely, long in tooth, all angles, all elbows and knees (and he has always been this way, graceful and unwieldy at the same time, his broad shoulders holding it all together), open-faced, of sunny disposition, an optimist, wearing a cotton shirt the color of Dijon mustard, hunts down Charter Chase and finds him.
“There you are!” he says. “I’ve been looking all over. Been prowling the stacks!” He puts out his hand and they shake, like gentlemen. Billy cuts to the chase. “Charter,” he says, “I’ve been wondering about . . . well. About your digs. Are they adequate?”
“Ah . . . well . . .” Charter laughs uncomfortably. “You know what it is like to be a poor student, but—”
“Of course I do!” Billy cries. “Indeed I do! So here’s the thing, son,” and he pats Charter on the shoulder paternally (or so Charter supposes, having never received anything like this from his father). “I live alone,” Billy continues as they make their way together down the steep library steps and into the full light of day. “The house is far too big. I barely enter the upstairs. There’s an entire living space up there, bedroom, bath, study.” They approach Faculty Circle and he points to one of the several gracious faux-Tudor houses with pitched roofs and screened-in porches. The stucco façade is a pleasant shade of sand, the wooden window frames painted a rich chocolate. “The place is shipshape of course. Nicely kept up by buildings and grounds. But I imagine you are familiar with the Circle.”
Charter is not only familiar with the Circle, but with Billy’s house. It was Billy’s countertop that had once provided him with a cooling pie. Charter nods. Says, “Yes. The Provost had a little get-together for the foreign students a while ago—”
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