‘Get married again. Have children.’
‘Well, is that so strange? Don’t you know any young man you’d like to marry? Sarah told me she and Tony loved the last man you brought out there; what was his name? Fred something?’
‘Fred Stanley.’ He had come to bore her beyond endurance after a few months; she had taken him to St. Charles only on a whim, because he was so presentable.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Pookie said with a world-weary smile, digging into her cool spaghetti; she had a full set of false teeth now, which greatly improved her smile. ‘It’s none of my business.’ Her business came up later that night, after she’d had too much to drink: it was a grievance Emily had heard many times before. ‘Do you know it’s been more than six months since I was out at St. Charles? Sarah never invites me. Never invites me. And she knows how I love it out there, how I love to spend time with the children. I call up every Sunday and she says “Well, I guess you’d like to talk to the boys now,” and of course I love talking to them, hearing their voices – especially Peter, he’s my favorite – and then when we’re finished she comes back on and says “This is costing you a fortune, Pookie, we’d better think about your phone bill.” And I say “Never mind the phone bill, I want to talk to you,” but she never invites me. And the few times, the very few times I’ve suggested it myself she says “I’m afraid next weekend wouldn’t be convenient, Pookie.” Ha. “Convenient”…’
There was a dribble of spaghetti sauce on her mother’s chin, and Emily had to fight an impulse to get up and wipe it off.
‘… And when I think; when I think of the weeks and weeks I spent out there when Tony was gone in the Navy and all three of those babies were in diapers, how I cooked and scrubbed and the furnace didn’t work half the time or the pump either, and we had to carry water from the main house – did anyone ever ask if that was “convenient” for me?’ To emphasize her point she shook the long ash of her cigarette defiantly on the floor and took another drink of her cloudy, fingerprinted highball. ‘Oh, I suppose I could always call Geoffrey; he understands. He and Edna’d probably invite me, but still—’
‘Why don’t you?’ Emily said, inspecting her watch. ‘Call Geoffrey, and maybe he’ll ask you out for a weekend.’
‘Ah, well, you’re looking at your watch. All right. All right. I know. You have to get back to your job and your parties and your men and whatever else it is you do. I know. Go ahead.’ And Pookie waved her moist cigarette in dismissal. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Go ahead; run along.’
The following spring the job of managing editor on Food Field Observer fell vacant, and for a few days Emily thought she might be promoted, but instead they hired a man of about forty named Jack Flanders. He was very tall and spare with a sad, sensitive face, and Emily found she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. His office was separated from hers by a glass partition: she could watch him frown over his pencil or his typewriter, watch him talk on his telephone, watch him get up and stand gazing out his window as if lost in thought (and he couldn’t have been thinking about the job). He reminded her a little of her father, long ago. Once when he was on the phone she saw his long face break into a smile of such pure delight that he could only have been talking to a woman, and she felt an irrational twinge of jealousy.
He had a deep, resonant voice, and he was very courteous. He always said ‘Thanks, Emily,’ or ‘That’s fine, Emily’ when she brought him something in the line of duty, and once he said ‘That’s a pretty dress,’ but he never seemed to meet her eyes.
On the day of a deadline, when everyone was tired and overworked, she opened a manila envelope to find six glossy photographs, each of what looked like a shallow box or tray made of porous white cardboard. Each box was of different proportions and each picture taken from a different angle, with different lighting, to emphasize a separate aspect of its design. The press release that came with them was breathless with phrases like ‘revolutionary concept’ and ‘bold new approach,’ but she distilled from it the information that this was how fresh cuts of meat might now be packaged for sale in supermarkets. She wrote a story long enough to fill half a column, with a two-column head; then she marked up four of the pictures for single-column cuts, wrote short captions for them and took the finished job to Jack Flanders.
‘Why so many pictures?’ he inquired.
‘They sent six; I only used four.’
‘Mm,’ he said, frowning. ‘Wonder why they didn’t put any meat in ’em? Couple of pork chops or something. Or show a guy’s hand holding the box, so you’d get an idea of the size.’
‘Mm.’
He scrutinized the four photographs for a long time. Then he said ‘You know something, Emily?’ And he looked at her with the beginnings of the same smile she’d seen him submit to on the phone that other day. ‘There are times when a word – one word – is worth a thousand pictures.’
Remembering it later she was able to agree with him that it hadn’t really been all that funny, but at the time – and maybe it was just the way he said it – her laughter was overwhelming. She couldn’t stop; she was weak; she had to lean against his desk for support. When it was over she found him looking at her with a shy, happy face.
‘Emily?’ he said. ‘Think you might come out for a drink with me after work tonight?’
He had been divorced for six years. He had two children who lived with their mother, and he wrote poetry.
‘Published?’ she asked.
‘Three times.’
‘In magazines, you mean?’
‘No, no; books. Three books.’
He lived in one of the drab blocks of the West Twenties, just off Fifth Avenue, where random residential buildings are pressed in among the lofts, and his apartment was what she guessed could be called Spartan – no rug, no curtains, no television.
After their fine first night together, when it seemed abundantly clear that this particular long, skinny man was exactly the kind she had always wanted, she prowled along his bookshelves, wearing his bathrobe, until she came to three slim volumes with the name John Flanders on their spines. He was out in the kitchen making coffee.
‘My God, Jack,’ she called. ‘You were a Yale Younger Poet.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s kind of a lottery,’ he said. ‘They have to give it to somebody every year.’ But his self-effacement didn’t quite ring true: she could tell how pleased he was that she’d found the book – he almost certainly would have showed it to her if she hadn’t.
She turned it over and read one of the endorsements aloud: ‘“In John Flanders we have an authentic new voice, rich in wisdom, passion, and perfect technical control. Let us rejoice in his gift.” Wow.’
‘Yeah,’ he said in the same proud-bashful way. ‘Big deal, huh? You can take that home with you, if you’d like. Fact, I’d like you to. The second book’s okay too; probably not as good as the first. Only for Christ’s sake don’t mess with the third one. It’s lousy. You wouldn’t believe how lousy. Sugar and milk?’
While they sat sipping coffee, looking out at the tan-and-green loft buildings, she said ‘What are you doing on a trade paper?’
‘Got to have some kind of a job. And the point is it’s easy; I can do it with my left hand and forget it when I come home.’
‘Don’t poets usually work in universities?’
‘Ah, I’ve had that. Did it for more years than I can count. Kissing ass with the department chairman, sweating out tenure, fending off hordes of solemn, dense little faces all day and having them haunt you all night – and the worst part is you end up writing academic poetry. No, baby, believe me, Food Field Observer is a better deal.’
‘Why don’t you apply for a whaddyacallit? A Guggenheim?’
‘Had it. Had the Rockefeller, too.’
‘Can you tell me why the third book is lousy?’
‘Ah, my whole life was a mess then. I’d just been divorced, I was drinking too much; guess I thought I knew what I was doing in those poems, but I didn�
��t know my ass from third base. Sentimental, self-indulgent, self-pitying – miserable stuff. The last time I saw Dudley Fitts he barely nodded to me.’
‘And how’s your life now?’
‘Oh, still pretty much of a mess, I guess, except I’ve found that sometimes’ – he worked his hand up inside the sleeve of the bathrobe to her elbow, which he fondled as if it were an erogenous zone – ‘sometimes, if you play your cards right, you get to meet a nice girl.’
For a week they were never apart – they spent the nights either at his place or at hers – and she never had enough solitude to read his first book, until she took a day off from work for that purpose.
It wasn’t easy. She had read a lot of contemporary poetry at Barnard and always done well enough in her ‘explications,’ but she never read it for pleasure. She went through the early poems too quickly, getting only impressions of their ideas; then she had to go back and study each one to appreciate how it was made. The later poems were richer, though they retained the quality of seeming to have been spoken in Jack’s voice, and almost the whole of the final section of the book was devoted to a single long poem, so intricate and containing what she guessed were so many levels of meaning that she had to read it three times. It was almost five o’clock before she was able to call him at the office and say she thought the book was great.
‘Honest to God?’ She could almost see the delight in his face. ‘You wouldn’t bullshit me, would you, Emily? Which ones you like best?’
‘Oh, I liked them all, Jack. Really. Let me think. I loved the one called “A Celebration”; it almost made me cry.’
‘Oh?’ He sounded disappointed. ‘Well, yeah, that’s a pleasant little formal lyric, but it hasn’t got much meat on its bones. What about the war poem, the one called “Hand Grenade”?’
‘Oh, yes, that one too. It has a nice – acidity to it.’
‘Acidity; good word. That’s exactly what it was supposed to have. And of course I guess the only important question is what did you think of the last one. The big one.’
‘I was coming to that. It’s beautiful, Jack. It’s very, very moving. Hurry and come home.’
Early in the summer he was invited to teach for two years in the Writers’ Workshop at the State University of Iowa.
‘You know something, baby?’ he said when they’d both read the letter. ‘Might be kind of a mistake to turn this down.’
‘I thought you hated teaching.’
‘Well, but Iowa’s different. The way I understand it, this “workshop” is wholly separate from the English department. It’s a graduate program, kind of a professional school. The kids are carefully chosen – they’re not really students at all, they’re young writers – and the only “teaching” I’d have to do would be four or five hours a week. Because the idea is, see, the teachers are supposed to produce their own stuff while they’re out there, so they give you plenty of time. And I mean Christ, if I can’t get this book wrapped up in two years there’s something really the matter with me. Besides,’ he said, shyly rubbing his chin with his thumb, and she could tell that this next consideration would be the clincher of his argument. ‘Besides – oh, I know this sounds dumb, but it’s kind of an honor to be invited out there. Must mean somebody doesn’t think my last book sank me forever.’
‘Well, all right, Jack, but the honor’s still there whether you accept the invitation or not. So think about it: do you really want to go to Iowa?’
They were both on their feet and pacing the floor of his apartment, as they’d been doing since he opened the letter. He walked over to her across the bare boards, put his arms around her and bent down to hide his face against her hair. ‘I do want to go,’ he said, ‘but I’ll only go on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you come with me,’ he said huskily, ‘and stay with me, and be my girl.’
In August they both quit their jobs on Food Field Observer, and on the last weekend before they left for Iowa she took him out to St. Charles.
‘… Oh, I like him,’ Sarah said when she and Emily were alone in the sun-shot kitchen. ‘I really like him a lot – and Tony does too, I can tell.’ She paused to lick a fragment of liver paste from her finger. ‘You know what I think you ought to do?’
‘What?’
‘Marry him.’
‘What do you mean, “marry” him? You’re always telling me to “marry” people, Sarah. You say that about every man I bring out here. Is marriage supposed to be the answer to everything?’
Sarah looked hurt. ‘It’s the answer to an awful lot of things.’
And Emily almost said How would you know? but caught herself in time. Instead she said ‘Well, we’ll see,’ and they carried plates of sloppily made hors d’oeuvres back into the living room.
‘Well, of course, my war was a pretty dismal business,’ Jack was saying, ‘crawling around Guam with a radio on my back, but I do remember those sleek little Magnum Navy fighters. I used to wonder what it must be like to be up there in one of them, tooling around.’
‘You ought to see the ones we’re turning out now,’ Tony said. ‘Jet fighters. Strap yourself into one of those jobs and Shoom!’ He made a kind of salute, knifing the upright flat of his hand straight ahead from his temple to suggest the speed of the takeoff.
‘Yeah,’ Jack said. ‘Yeah, I can imagine.’
When the boys came in, out of breath, Emily tried not to be too effusive about how much they’d grown since her last visit, but the changes were remarkable. Tony Junior was fourteen now and big for his age, already built like his father. He was a nice-looking kid but there was something a little vacant about his smile, admitting at least the possibility that he might grow up to be an amiable fool; and Eric, the youngest, had developed a guarded look that was more sullen than shy. Only Peter, the middle one, the one Pookie always called her favorite, held her attention. He was thin and tense as a whippet; he had his mother’s large brown eyes, and he looked intelligent even while chewing bubble gum.
‘Hey, Aunt Emmy?’ he said around his chewing. ‘Remember the Presidents you gave me when I was ten?’
‘The present? What present?’
‘No, the Presidents.’
And finally she did remember. Every Christmas she spent too many hours buying stuff for the boys; she would wade grudgingly through department stores on sore feet, breathing stale air and quarreling with exhausted clerks, and one year she had settled on what she could only hope was a suitable gift for Peter: a flat cardboard box containing white plastic statuettes of every American President through Eisenhower. ‘Oh, the Presidents,’ she said.
‘Right. Anyway, I really enjoyed them.’
‘Oh, did he,’ Sarah said. ‘You know what he did? He made this big excavation out in the yard, like a park, with lawns and groves of trees and a river running through it, and bridges over the river, and he set up all the Presidents in different places, each with a different sized pedestal according to his reputation. He gave Lincoln the highest pedestal because he was the greatest, and he put the ones like Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore very low – oh, and he gave William Howard Taft a very wide pedestal because he was the fattest, and he—’
‘Okay, Mom,’ Peter said.
‘No, but really,’ she went on. ‘I wish you could’ve seen it. And you know what he did with Truman? At first he couldn’t decide what to do with Truman, and then he—’
‘I think you’ve about covered it, dear,’ Tony said with a barely perceptible wink at their guests.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, all right.’ And she quickly took a drink to hide her mouth. That mannerism had never changed: whenever Sarah was embarrassed, after she’d told a joke and was waiting for the laughter, or when she was afraid she’d talked too much, she would go for her mouth as if to cover nakedness – with Cokes or popsicles as a child, with drinks or cigarettes now. Maybe all the years of splayed, protruding teeth, and then of braces, had made her mouth the most vulnerable p
art of her for life.
Later that afternoon the boys began wrestling on the floor until they knocked over a small table, and their father said ‘All right, men. Shape up.’ It was his standard, all-purpose admonition for them; evidently it was something he’d learned in the Navy.
‘There’s nothing for them to do in here, Tony,’ Sarah said.
‘Let them go back outside, then.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ And she turned to Emily. ‘This is something you’ve got to see. Peter? Get the guitars.’
Eric folded his arms across his chest to show he didn’t mind being left out, and the older boys clambered into another room and came back with two cheap guitars. When they were sure their audience was ready they stood in the middle of the floor, filling the small house with sound, and gave an impersonation of the Everly Brothers:
Bye bye, love
Bye bye, happiness…
Tony Junior was only hitting a couple of simple chords and chanting the words; Peter did all the difficult finger-work, and he seemed to be putting his heart into the song.
‘They’re great kids, Sarah,’ Emily said when they’d gone outside again. ‘That Peter’s really something.’
‘Have I told you what he wants to be when he grows up?’
‘What – President?’
‘No,’ Sarah said, as if that might be one of several viable alternatives. ‘No, you’d never guess. He wants to be an Episcopalian priest. I took them to the Easter service at the little church here in town a few years ago, and Peter never got over it. Now he gets me up to take him to church every Sunday, or else he hitch-hikes in.’
‘Oh, well,’ Emily said, ‘I imagine that’s something he’ll probably outgrow.’
‘Not if I know Peter.’
At the dinner table, exhilarated by his afternoon of showing off, Peter interrupted the adults with so many silly remarks that Tony told him to shape up twice. The third time, when he put his napkin on his head, Sarah assumed command. ‘Peter,’ she said. ‘Shape up.’ She glanced quickly at Tony to see if she’d said it right, then at Emily to see if it had sounded funny, and then she hid her mouth in her glass.
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