“You got the paper and the pencils?” said Morales.
“Paper and pencils?”
“You spose to bring them,” said Morales. “How else we gonna write?”
No pens. Goddamn Joel. “My mistake,” Ivy said. She started to get up.
“Hey,” said Morales. “Where you goin’?”
“I’ll see if Mr. Moffitt can help out.”
Perkins laughed his rumbly laugh. “Mister Moffitt?”
El-Hassam reached into his pocket, pulled out a pen; a ballpoint, same make of Bic as the two confiscated from Ivy’s purse. “We could take turns with this,” he said.
Ivy sat down. El-Hassam had a pen. Pens were forbidden. Therefore? Should she call Moffitt in? Would there be any teaching after that? No. Gig over. Plus El-Hassam’s pen was just a pen, unsharpened, unweaponized. And El-Hassam had such a calm air about him, almost like a spiritual leader. She was aware of their gazes on her. “What about paper?” she said.
Morales got up, picked a random book off the shelves, tore out one of the blank end pages.
“We’ll try one of those chain poems,” El-Hassam said.
“Chain poems?” said Ivy.
“Joel had us doing chain poems,” said El-Hassam. “You know Joel?”
Ivy nodded.
“He’s a fag, right?” said Morales.
This was a word Ivy would never use, except maybe coming from the mouth of some beyond-the-pale character in one of her stories. She had a lot of gay friends, had marched in the Gay Pride parade one year, believed in gay marriage.
“Right,” she said. And immediately felt like a criminal herself. It wasn’t all bad.
El-Hassam pushed the pen and paper in front of Perkins. “You start,” he said.
Perkins hunched over the blank page, stuck his tongue between his lips. The pen—like a toothpick in his huge hand—hovered over the paper, then came down and began moving quickly. In a minute or two he was done, shoved the page across the table to Morales. Why not Felix, Ivy thought, who was beside him?
Morales didn’t even read what Perkins had written. He closed his eyes tight, held on to the pen tight, just sat there, eyelids twitching a little. No one got impatient: El-Hassam closed his eyes, too, went completely still; Perkins’s eyes glazed over; only Felix Balaban seemed wakeful, his eyes darting around. They met Ivy’s, shifted quickly away, then came back. Should she say she knew who he was, mention the Danny Weinberg connection?
At that moment, Morales groaned, opened his eyes, started writing. He wrote more slowly than Perkins and in much bigger letters. The more he wrote, the more his body came alive, feet tapping, head bobbing, and that pulse, going wild in his forearm.
“A little time factor,” Felix said.
Morales’s pencil came to an abrupt halt. El-Hassam opened his eyes, and Perkins’s unglazed.
Morales stared right at Felix. “What you say, amigo?”
Felix looked down, mumbled something about time that Ivy didn’t catch.
“I don’ hear you,” Morales said.
“It’s nothing,” Felix said. “Nothing at all. Sorry.”
“Sorry?” said Morales.
Felix nodded.
Morales glanced at El-Hassam and Perkins. “He sorry.”
“Then that’s settled,” Ivy said. “Let’s get back to work.”
Perkins stifled a laugh. El-Hassam gave her a look, one elegant eyebrow raised. “Yes,” he said.
Morales gazed down at the paper. “Lost my fuckin’ concentration,” he said, and passed it to El-Hassam. El-Hassam sent it on to Felix.
“I really don’t have anything today,” Felix said.
“Felix don’ have nothin’ today,” Morales said.
The page went back to El-Hassam. He read what was already there, then started writing. There was a lot of pausing, a lot of scratching out.
“Gonna be real baaaaaaad if I’m blocked,” Morales said.
“I’m sure that’s not the case,” Felix said.
El-Hassam kept writing. Ivy remembered a documentary she’d seen about the Tuareg, the blue men of the desert. El-Hassam’s hands reminded her of those people. For a moment they could have been somewhere else, a mud village in the Sahara or a caravan stop. Then Moffitt was in the doorway.
“Time’s up,” he said.
Ivy glanced at El-Hassam. The pen was gone.
The men rose, filed out, Morales, Perkins, Felix, and El-Hassam last. He handed Ivy the paper. “Needs a title,” he said.
“We’ll do that next week,” Ivy said. “See you then.”
El-Hassam was about to say something, but Moffitt beat him to it. “Unless they all get pardoned,” he said.
Taneesha led her out: down a wide corridor, across the open space to the gate, where new guards were on duty. They shone the infrared torch on the back of her hand. VISITOR showed up in blue and they returned her license, keys, pens, cell phone.
“Coming back?” Taneesha said.
“Of course,” said Ivy, surprised.
“Lots don’t,” said Taneesha.
Ivy found her own way out of the administration building, out into the sunshine. All at once, she felt immensely powerful, completely free of worry and striving, at the tip-top of life. She crossed the street, walked up to a little park at the top of the hill. From there, she could look down, over the prison, across a broad golden flatland all the way to Lake Champlain, sparkling blue in the distance. That reminded her of the Great Salt Lake, which she had never actually seen, and those few lines liked by The New Yorker. She was going to get better than that, way better.
Ivy leaned against a tree, read the chain poem. None of them could spell at all, and El-Hassam was the worst. Many of Morales’s letters were backwards and so were some of Perkins’s. Also Perkins did a lot of capitalizing.
Corrected for spelling and those backwards letters, Perkins had written:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and Tomorrow
Creeps in this Petty Pace from day to day
To the Last syllable of recorded Time
And All our yesterdays Have lighted Fools
The way to Dusty Death.
Somehow memorizing the whole thing just from hearing her say it once.
Morales:
I had wheels man! Bright orange Camaro! like a
firebomb with a 427! and mag rims me and my
homey stole off a jew in Trenton! Zoom! Took two
hos on a cookout! Carmen and the one with the tits!
That one do what I want all the way home! Ooooo! Not
all the way, cause of we getting wrecked by this
eighteen-wheeler off of exit 79!
And he’d signed it, Hector Luis Morales, in big letters with lots of flourishes, not unlike John Hancock except for the backwards letters.
And El-Hassam:
Last night a man dream of a knife in a drawer
Very sharp knife ground sharp sharp on the stone
With a twelve inch blade gently curve and a handle
Made of mother pearl
Sharp sharp for sticking in like nothings there
No sound or friction nothing
Last night a knife in the drawer
The very very sharp sharp knife
Dream of a man.
Ivy drove home. She stopped shaking somewhere on the Northway.
Four
Friday night at Verlaine’s, and it was jumping.
“Who are all these cretins?” said Bruce Verlaine. “I’ve never even seen half of them.”
“Paying customers,” Ivy said.
Bruce snorted and sat some new arrivals at the very worst table, between the digital jukebox and the dank corridor to the bathrooms. They thanked him effusively, as if that would help their cause.
Danny Weinberg came in with a date, ordered Veuve Clicquot. “Aurore,” he said, or at least that was what it sounded like, “this is Ivy.”
“Hi,” said Ivy, filling her glass.
Aurore gave a tiny
nod. She was a knockout.
“Salut,” said Danny. They drank. “Ivy’s a writer,” Danny said.
“Rilly,” said Aurore, setting her glass on the bar with distaste and looking around the room, in time to catch Bruce ripping the jukebox plug out of the wall. That meant someone had programmed a song Bruce had just decided he’d heard once too often.
“Right now she’s teaching inmates at a prison upstate,” Danny said.
“I have an excruciating headache,” Aurore said.
Danny looked alarmed. “You do?” he said.
“Blinding,” said Aurore.
Stroke, maybe? Ivy thought. “Would you like some Advil?” she said.
“Advil?” said Aurore, as though Ivy had suggested something lower class, and then she was on her way out, Danny following.
He came back alone about an hour later, wearing jeans and a T-shirt now instead of a suit, and ordered a beer. “She’s been stressed lately,” he said.
“What does she do?” said Ivy.
“They hit a coral head off Martinique,” Danny said, “could have drowned.”
“I meant for a living,” said Ivy.
“Never stops,” said Danny. “Charities, openings, appearances. She’s in the Sunday Styles section practically every week.”
Bruce came by, dropped Danny’s tab in front of him.
“Mind settling this?”
Danny paid his bill at irregular times, maybe every few weeks, but he was a good customer, lived in the neighborhood and tipped well. He riffled through the pages, his eyes hooding slightly, then pulled out a platinum card.
“I wouldn’t set foot in this dump,” he said, “if it wasn’t…” He finished his beer, ordered another. “How was the class?”
“Your friend came.”
“Felix?”
Ivy nodded.
“We’re not friends, exactly. He was a client. How’s his writing?”
“He didn’t actually do any that day.”
“I’m not surprised,” Danny said. “Felix is a numbers guy, strictly left-brained. But a brilliant numbers guy. He invented a kind of counterderivative that maybe three people in the world understand.”
“Is that what got him in jail?”
“Not directly. Some temporary offshore options arrangement did the damage, the irony being that that little scheme was just a form of insurance to protect the investors. But the jury was too stupid to see it.”
“Who were the investors?”
Danny shrugged. “Some pension fund,” he said. “Nobody.”
“What happened to the pension money?”
“The pension money?” said Danny. “Oh, that was the sixty mill. If you’re interested, I could tell you the whole story over a late dinner.” He shifted his hand on the bar, close to hers, but not touching.
Danny’s hands were nice, except for the bitten fingernails. Danny was nice, too; threw his money around too much, but basically nice, and he liked her. Plus she was interested in Felix Balaban’s crime. So, a late dinner with Danny: How bad could it be? At that moment a thought came in, kind of from a strange angle: Danny’s hands weren’t nearly as nice as El-Hassam’s. And a follow-up: Danny had lean, muscular arms, but they were like a child’s next to Hector Luis Morales’s. Meaning? Ivy didn’t know.
“When are you off?” Danny said.
Were they—El-Hassam and Morales—somehow more manly than Danny? What a crazy idea! Crazy, and Danny was basically nice, but Ivy replied, “Not until two,” which was a lie.
She left alone at 12:30, Dragan holding the door open for you.
“I am soon ready for showing you my novel,” he said.
“That was quick,” said Ivy.
“Oh, yes,” said Dragan. “So much easier than dishwashing, this writing business, fifty, sixty pages from opening kickoff to final whistle.”
“You watch football while you write?”
“NFL on TiVo, every game,” said Dragan. “Fantastic. You, too, are a lover of football?”
“Not really.”
Dragan looked surprised. “I am the true American,” he said.
“Congratulations,” said Ivy.
He laughed an uncertain little laugh. Ivy started walking away.
“I am labeling the title of my novel All-American Woman,” he called after her. “Or should this Woman be Girl, in the normal speech?”
Ivy walked up to her fifth-floor room. T. S. Eliot wrote standing up, Poe had laudanum, Dragan relied on the NFL.
Her message light was blinking in the dark.
“This is Sergeant Tocco up at Dannemora. Got another inmate cleared to join the class. Name of Harrow. We always run it by the teacher first. If you can handle one more, give me a call.”
One more, why not? Ivy left a message in his voice mail: “Yes.”
Then she sat down at her laptop, had another look at “Caveman.” Vladek felt strong. So she said, but as she read through, she found nothing that made him seem strong, or particularly Neanderthaly either. In fact, Vladek was more like a typical twenty-first-century boor, commonplace and, what was worse, kind of lifeless, too. Lifeless. Ivy force-marched herself through a slow reread. She saw nothing but the effort that had gone into it. The art, Horace had said, was in hiding the art, although many contemporary writers believed the opposite. “Caveman” was dead on the page. Dragan’s novel, with cell-phone relays and the collective Neanderthal unconscious, was probably better. And if not, he could write another one on his day off.
“God damn it,” she said. She pictured herself as she was, in this tiny box on top of four other slightly bigger boxes and all around way too many other boxes containing lone people just running through their thoughts. In what way, exactly, was this preferable to a late dinner with Danny Weinberg? An image flashed through her mind, fast, like a subliminal message: nice suburb, big house, ease. She slumped forward on her table.
Sometime later, Ivy found herself thinking of Hector Morales’s arms. Huge, heavy, rippling, the tattoos never still. And then there was his slicked-back hair.
She sat up, switched on the laptop, opened a new file: Caveman, Take 2. She typed a new first sentence: Vladek oiled his body.
Ivy was still writing when the sun came up. This was pretty good. Wasn’t it? She changed the last line from The surgeon made some joke Vladek didn’t understand to “This won’t hurt a bit,” the surgeon said. Then, before any doubts could arise, she wrote a cover letter to The New Yorker thanking them for their kind words about “Live Entertainment”—craven, yes, but just look around—folded it in an envelope with the new “Caveman” and went downstairs to the nearest mailbox.
Ivy rented another subcompact—getting a slightly better deal this time, although the numbers still didn’t make sense—and drove up to Dannemora for her second class. She parked at the top of the big hill, above the administration building. Cooler today, but the air was even clearer than before, details jumping out at her in high definition: red, white and blue bunting in a cemetery across the town; a glint of silver as a tower guard raised a mug to his lips; and all around an ocean of red, yellow and gold, calm but not still.
Ivy took her bag, walked down to the administration entrance. The doors opened and dozens of guards came out, some of them with lunch pails. Ivy stepped aside. They looked tired, and she could smell their sweat. Getting off now probably meant they’d been working most of the—
“Hey!” Taneesha, at the end of the line, stopped. “What’s happenin’?”
“I told you I was coming back,” Ivy said.
“Not today, you ain’t.”
Oh God. Had she gotten the day wrong? “Isn’t it Tuesday? The class meets—”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Taneesha, “but didn’t no one tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Aw, damn,” said Taneesha. “You drove all the way?”
“What?”
“We’re in lockdown. Been in lockdown since Sunday night.”
“And
that means?”
“Meaning no visitors, no programs, inmates in cells except for chow.”
“How long does it last?”
“No telling.”
“Any chance of it ending later today?”
“Maybe,” said Taneesha. “But visitors and programs wouldn’t start till tomorrow.”
Ivy glanced up beyond the administration building to those walls, like some monument of the ancient world designed to say no in a big way.
“Tell you what,” said Taneesha. “I’ll buy you a beer.”
Ivy never drank at this time of day, wasn’t a big drinker in any case; at Verlaine’s she’d had the chance to observe many big drinkers in action. “Sounds good,” she said.
Five or six guards were already at the bar at Lulu’s by the Gate. A hand-lettered sign on the mirror read NO OUT OF STATE CHECKS, NO IN STATE CHECKS, NO CREDIT CARDS. FOR CREDIT, SEE LULU. NO CREDIT. Ivy and Taneesha took a table near the dartboard. The view out the front window was prison wall, nothing but.
Taneesha clinked Ivy’s glass. “Here’s to retirement,” she said. Taneesha looked about thirty. She lit a cigarette, took a long deep drag, blew it out, sipped her beer and said, “Ah.”
“Hey, Taneesha,” called one of the guards at the bar. “No smoking.” But he was smoking, too; so were most of them, including the bartender. Everybody laughed.
“Just sucks you drivin’ all this way for nothing,” Taneesha said.
“I don’t mind,” Ivy said. “It’s so beautiful up here.”
“Huh?”
“The scenery,” said Ivy.
“Scenery?”
“Maybe you get used to it.”
“Had to move to Plattsburgh to take this job,” Taneesha said. “Plattsburgh.”
“Where are you from originally?”
“Queens. Sing Sing was my first choice. Whoever heard of not getting Sing Sing?” She drained her glass, held her hand up to the bartender.
“This one’s on me,” Ivy said.
“What does that tell you, when you can’t even get Sing Sing?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said.
Taneesha took another deep drag. “Don’t listen to me. I’m in a bad mood, that’s all. Enriquez does that to me.”
End of Story Page 3
