Ruth cleared her throat for attention and then she read my poem aloud to the class. It sounded a little better than I’d expected. Her reading, in a low intense voice, gave it some authority. Still, my face burned and my cold hands clutched one another and writhed. When she was finished, no one said anything. It was like those moments of silent prayer in high school before chaos erupted again. Ruth looked around the room. “Who’s ready to start?” she said. Nobody answered—nobody even made eye contact with her, which had to be a bad sign.
“All right,” she said. “You seem to be in a collective coma tonight, so I’ll get things going. We’ve had several poems in the first person this semester. What is the effect here of the plural, the ‘we’?”
A young woman named Lisa said, “It makes it seem as if everyone leads boring lives, not just Paulie.”
“In other words,” Ruth said, “it makes it more universal, more of a philosophical argument than a personal complaint.”
“Yeah,” Lisa said, “I guess, but didn’t you say the ‘I’ voice is more immediate?” All of Lisa’s poems were in the first person and were explicitly sexual. I remembered one line: “He touched my vagina, the gateway to my heart,” and the man next to me whispering, “Boy, she must be really short.”
I had a pen poised over my copy of my poem, ready to take notes on the criticism, and now I wrote in the margin: “We universal, I immediate.” It looked like something Tarzan would say. Then I began to doodle boxes inside boxes until I’d covered what I’d just written and a few words of the poem, too.
“Maybe Paulie wants this distance from the reader,” Ruth said. She looked at me with an encouraging little smile, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to speak. The writer’s comments were always reserved for the end of the critique, so I merely smiled back—mysteriously, I hoped—and continued to doodle.
Tim, who looked something like John Travolta, and was probably the best writer in the class, said, “I like the irony at the end, although it might be a little too neat.”
“What’s actually happening in this poem?” Ruth asked. “How did she reach that ending?”
“Well,” Lisa said. “We go through life, dah dah dah, and have a kind of midlife crisis in the middle …” Everyone laughed.
An elderly woman named Rose said, “But I can’t tell if the dream changes the way she feels.”
“Ah,” Ruth said. “That’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it? If she dreams a new, tough dream, why does she come back to wanting more than was promised?”
“I think you’re being too rational, Ruth,” Tim said. “Everyone wants more than they get,” and I drew a row of tiny hearts in his direction across the top of the page.
“What do you think are the strongest parts of this poem, and what are the weakest?” Ruth asked.
“I love ‘our breath drugged with ink,’” Tim said. “I could practically taste it.”
Rose said, “I like ‘Truth plus fiction make the best story,’ but the line breaks seem predictable …”
“Which line breaks would you change?”
“Well, the one after line 10 is good because we pause and think of her dreaming a long time—is that enjambment?”
“Sort of,” Ruth said. “What if we raised ‘The dustcover’ to the next-to-last line? Tim, do you think that would make the ending seem less pat, less gimmicky?”
“Yes,” Tim said, and I drew a circle around “The dustcover,” and attached a little upraised arrow.
A woman who always brought her supper to class in a plastic container poked at her salad with a plastic fork. “I’d like to know where the energy is in this poem,” she said. She’d said that about every poem presented so far, and now everyone ignored her. Instead, they discussed my use of language, the absence of adjectives, and any possible influences on my work. “Have you ever read Mark Strand’s The Story of Our Lives?” Ruth asked, and I shook my head and wrote that in the margin, too.
“What about a title?” Lisa said, when there seemed to be nothing left to say. “I hate poems without titles.”
“What would you call it if it were yours?” Ruth said.
“‘Dustcovers’?”
“That sounds like a poem about upholstery,” Ruth said. “We’ll have to let Paulie ponder the title herself—it’s her poem. What I like best about it is how well the central metaphor is controlled. It isn’t strained or forced, although it easily could have been. I hope you’ll think about the line breaks, Paulie, and about your diction, in certain places. I’ve marked my copy for you. And I’d like to see more development, especially in the middle. But the tone is quite compelling. Maybe you should all try a poem in the ‘we’ voice.” She asked me if I had anything to say now in response, before we took a break. I only said what everyone always said, that many of the comments were useful and I was grateful for their help.
It was over, and I’d survived! I clutched my scribbled-over poem. And I looked past the bustle in the room, at Ruth, with a tremor of feeling that was close to love.
28
I WALKED MY TAIL off looking for Jason. Phone calls wouldn’t have worked, I knew, because it’s so much easier to lie on the phone than it is in person. Still, I felt like a bill collector or a cop, the way people’s faces closed against me when I asked if they’d seen Jason Flax, or flashed his photograph at them. It was a wallet-sized print of his high-school yearbook portrait, and it was five years old, but it was the only decent head shot we had of him. In all his pictures onstage, his face is contorted with the concentration and ecstasy of playing. Lots of musicians grimace like that when they play, as if they’re in pain delivering the music. I do it myself, and Paulie once said that I made some of the same faces during sex. Most of the kids I went to see, like Iggy and the other members of Blood Pudding, lived the way Jason and Sara did—close to the poverty level. Whenever they had some extra dough, they’d blow it on a few snorts, or on equipment or fancy duds from the thrift shops. Their parents tended to give them food instead of money, to make sure they were eating right. They were all waiting to “make it” with a recording, to be discovered by some entrepreneur or deejay, and then the world. While they waited, they crashed together in tenements that should have been condemned. I suppose I didn’t live much better when I was a young musician. My band was on the road a lot, and we’d flop in crummy hotels, so strung out after a long gig that we could have slept anywhere. Jason’s musician friends looked much weirder than we ever did, maybe because their appearance was such an important part of their act. Not that we didn’t have a dress code of our own. We always performed in tuxedos at weddings and bar mitzvahs, although we had a more casual look at the clubs—sport shirts, pegged pants, wing-tipped shoes. Horn men wore fancy pinky rings that caught the lights, and shades were almost obligatory. At my own wedding, Paulie’s mother thought that most of my friends were blind.
But these kids either had shaved heads or more hair than a Neanderthal. They wore paper clips for earrings, like Iggy, or heavy crucifixes that made me wonder how they held their heads up. And they weren’t much help in my search. “Jason? Is he that curly-haired dude hangs out with a fox name of Flame? Hey, he looks like you a little? Nah, I ain’t seen him.”
Some people said they had seen him somewhere, but when I followed through, it always turned out to be a false alarm. I’d put ads in The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, carefully worded so as not to embarrass him or scare him off. J.D.F. Call M or D. We can work it out together. Once it was in print, it looked a little kinky, but who cared? The J.D. was for Jason David, picked from that long string of names we’d played with before he was born. Paulie would have given him six or seven of them, like the Crown Prince of England, if I hadn’t stopped her. M and D, for Mom and Dad, of course, were his and Annie’s early “code” names for us. Once, after one of Jason’s tantrums, Paulie discovered that he’d written I hate M and D with a crayon inside his closet. “Well, at least he spelled it right,” I said, in an effort to console her.
&nbs
p; I ran the ads for three consecutive weeks, without any luck. In the meantime I made the rounds of rock clubs in the East Village and uptown, places called Drag Race (where the performers and most of the audience were in drag), Broken Arms, and the Incest Cafe. Their America, I thought, in the dazzle of noise and strobe lights, an expression my father always used when someone of my generation confounded or frightened him. But how innocent we seemed now in comparison, with our daring, duck-assed hair, and all of those lovesick songs with women’s names in the titles.
One day, when I was checking some of Jason’s Brooklyn hangouts, I stopped in to see Paulie’s mother. She was disappointed that I wasn’t bringing good news about Jason or about Paulie and me, but she was still glad to see me. I did a few things for her—got a box down from one of the high shelves in her bedroom closet, interpreted a letter from Medicare, and changed a washer in her kitchen faucet. She made me stay for lunch, shoveling food onto my plate until I had to beg her to stop. I kept assuring her that nothing terrible had happened to Jason, that he’d gone off on his own, and I was going to find him. She sat near me, knitting while I drank my coffee, clicking her needles and counting stitches in a cozy whisper. It seemed strange that she had once been my mortal enemy, the one who’d tried to talk Paulie out of having anything to do with me.
A couple of her neighbors, elderly widows like herself, came in to visit while I was there. “You know my daughter’s husband he has a music studio on Long Island,” she said breathlessly, by way of introduction. I wished then for her sake that I was a dentist or a lawyer, professions that would have had more clout with her crowd. She seemed proud of me, anyway, and I could tell that she’d never told them about the separation. “Give my love to everybody,” she called after me as I left.
The next day, when I was talking to Paulie on the phone, she had a brainstorm about Jason. “Leila!” she cried, as if we’d both been struggling to come up with her name.
Leila had been Jason’s high-school girlfriend, the one we guessed he’d lost his virginity with, the one we suspected of supplying him and his friends with dope. “What about her?” I asked, trying to conjure up the sulky, pretty face that was always half hidden by a mess of dark hair. Paulie had privately dubbed her Leila the Wolf Girl, because of her wild behavior, the rare glint of teeth when she smiled. I hadn’t thought of her in years. As far as I knew, Jason hadn’t, either. She used to come to our house and go directly to his room and close the door behind her. The continuous blast of music in there covered everything they may have said or done. Paulie was terribly worried about it. “They’re only sixteen,” she reminded me. “And we’re responsible, because he’s our son and they’re in our house.”
I was a little worried myself—but I tried to make a joke out of it. “Well, then send them to her house, and let her parents worry,” I said.
Paulie wasn’t amused. “By not saying anything,” she said, “we’re giving them permission, Howard, we’re in collusion.” But she couldn’t bring herself to interfere. Jason, who’d been so unhappy, was suddenly blissful, and nicer to everybody, even his sister and mother. Maybe being in love with a girl made him more generous to all females. Paulie tiptoed around him, still worried, but afraid of jinxing the peace. Finally, she talked me into knocking on his bedroom door one day just to see what was going on in there, and to let them know we were aware of them. “Be casual,” Paulie hissed after she’d worked me into a frenzy, and then she retreated to the safety of our own bedroom. I knocked and knocked. Jesus, they had more than enough time to get dressed, to throw anything illegal out the window, and themselves after it. When my fist was starting to get sore, Jason opened the door a crack, and I tried to think of something casual to say—“What’s new, kid? How’s tricks? Would you like some milk and cookies?”—when I really wanted to push the door open wide and shout that they were in mortal danger, playing at being adults like that. It was the year of Jason’s greatest growth spurt, and we were on eye level with one another, the first time I’d noticed that. His eyes were slitted and cold, his mouth was curled with contempt. The stink of incense seeped out into the hallway, and I thought I glimpsed Leila lounging brazenly on Jason’s bed. The main horror was my sense of their freedom. They probably could go to Leila’s house—her parents didn’t seem to know or care much what she did—or they could just pool their fat allowances and drive to a motel. “Can you keep the music down a little?” I said at last, chickening out. “Mom has a headache.”
On another occasion, Paulie conned me into talking with Jason about his behavior, and about contraception. “They study it in school, for God’s sake,” I protested at first, and then I went upstairs and knocked again. He was alone this time, and the incense was as thick and sickening as ever. I remembered with wonder that my father once beat the hell out of me for lighting matches in the bathroom. I felt like a jerk—Ward Cleaver going upstairs to have a heart-to-heart with Beaver about the birds and the bees. When I asked if I could come in, Jason glanced behind him, as if he was checking it out with some invisible companions, before he shrugged and let me by. As soon as I began talking, his face became a mask of pity and disdain. I stumbled through the whole thing, anyway. “What I mean,” I said, at the end of some tortured sentence about true sexual maturity, “is that I know how you feel.”
Oh, yeah, sure, his face said. He kept fiddling with a ballpoint pen while I spoke, clicking it open and shut.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I shouted, “Put that damn thing down!” It was the way we’d always handled bad moments between us. Jason would do some small, repetitive thing to annoy me, and I would jump on him for it. As soon as he got me good and angry, he’d become infuriatingly calm, so I’d pick on him until he found another tic—blinking, sucking his teeth, kicking his foot against my chair—that set me off again. I saw it happening with a kind of detached amazement, amazed, too, that I couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to stop it. “Listen, you don’t know everything,” I said, “even if you think you do. If you knock that girl up, the world’s going to close down on you, mister.” Cleaver never spoke to Beaver or Wally between his teeth that way, with the vengeance of age and experience. And they never smirked at their dad the way Jason did that day at me. “Swell, thanks,” he muttered, and the wall was back up between us.
As usual, Paulie was waiting in our bedroom for the results of the talk she’d instigated, and as usual I lied, or varnished the truth, to please her. “I scared the shit out of him,” I reported with simulated pride, and Paulie wailed, “That wasn’t what you were supposed to do!” But maybe I had actually scared Jason a little. Something happened between him and Leila soon after that, and they stopped seeing one another as often. He got more into his music, opening the way for a temporary truce with me.
“Leila?” I said to Paulie on the phone. “The Wolf Girl? What made you think of her?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “Intuition, maybe. I’ve been trying to trace Jason back a little, to figure him out, and I just came up with Leila. Do you remember how happy he was when he began going out with her?”
“You mean when he began staying home with her. And you were so worried she’d get pregnant.”
“Well, somebody did.”
“So you think he’s with Leila? But they’ve been out of high school for years, and I haven’t heard him mention her in ages. Where is she, anyway?”
“Connecticut or someplace. She got married, I think, although maybe that’s over by now. I know her parents moved to the city a few years ago.”
“Can you find out?” I said. “Jesus, we’re like Nick and Nora Charles, aren’t we?”
“I’ll try,” Paulie said. “Katherine might be able to help.”
“Yeah, she might. Listen, how’s Sara doing?”
“Fine, considering everything. She’s being introspective, concentrating on what’s happening to her.”
“That’s good,” I said, “if it takes her mind off Jason.”
“I di
d that, too,” Paulie said, “and I wasn’t trying to forget anybody. It’s the state of being pregnant, as if you’re weaving a house for your child out of your own body, and it takes all your energy, all your attention.”
“You were beautiful, pregnant,” I said. I didn’t say it with any secret motive; it was simply the truth.
“Sara is, too,” Paulie said, “and Jason is missing everything.”
“Check out Leila Stark,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. And by the way, your mother sends her love.”
Paulie was right—Katherine was able to help us find Leila, through some school records for one of her younger brothers. He’d transferred to a prep school in Manhattan, and they gave Katherine a current telephone number for Leila’s parents. Her mother answered the phone when I called. I told her I was one of Leila’s old classmates from Port Washington High, and that we were planning a fifth reunion. I thought of asking if Leila was still married, as a sort of casual, survey-type question, and then decided against it. Unsuspecting as ever, her mother gave me Leila’s address in Westport. By a strange coincidence, that was where Sara’s parents lived, too. I looked them up in the phone book at a gas station near Leila’s, and decided to drive past their house later just to see how they lived. First I had to see Leila, though, and find out if Jason was with her, or if she knew where he was.
It was a bleak Saturday afternoon and there were only a few children and dogs on the quiet suburban streets. Leila’s house—she was Leila Catalfano now—was modest for that area, a weathered-looking saltbox on a small plot of land. I rang the doorbell and waited, listening to a dog’s hoarse barking inside. When the door opened at last, a young guy was standing there holding the big, barking dog back by a choke collar. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t prepared to see Leila’s husband. I’d pictured her coming to the door herself, puzzled at first and then suddenly recognizing me. I thought I’d catch her off-guard, so that she’d spill anything she knew about Jason before she could think. Now I needed a different approach, and fast. The dog, lunging and strangling on his collar, gave me a few seconds. “Stay, Bozo, stay!” Leila’s husband commanded, and he kept slapping the crazed dog across the muzzle.
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