The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  I gathered these thoughts, and a few scattered others, into an email to Maria—they seemed too urgent for a letter—and as a P.S. typed out Woolf’s passage on biographies as magic tanks; and thus began the electronic correspondence that would soon become so important to me. At first we exchanged emails every one or two days. Words on screens weren’t real, plus they gave me headaches, so from the start I printed out Maria’s emails and read them with pen or pencil in hand. I have them here in front of me, stacked two inches tall, messages from another world. Who wrote these sad and hopeful confessions? What do they tell us? What do they mean? Their author-protagonists are strangers to me, and also strangely familiar. I knew them once.

  In the beginning they talk almost exclusively about books, aware, at least intermittently, that talking about books is always more than just talking about books. They embark on a highly subjective, non-comprehensive study of the manifold connections between Berryman and Crane. They agree that The Dream Songs is the epic of our time, and Henry, its gentle, stricken protagonist, our age’s exemplary antihero. They mock the term “confessional poetry”—as if a poem as deeply strange as The Dream Songs were any more or less confessional than, say, Paradise Lost. (He still hasn’t read most of The Dream Songs, so he orders it from Powell’s.) Maria is interested in everything and passionate about her preferences. Her taste, like his (who can tell them apart?), runs toward the smooth-surfaced dreamlike narrative that quietly crystallizes strange but familiar moments of consciousness or sensation. The best realism is also experimentalism, they agree. The best criticism acknowledges its own contingency. Books should not go down like warm milk. Literature is worthwhile precisely to the degree that it conditions you to live more fully, to see more. Their co-enthusiasm expresses itself most purely in quotation, which they turn to with ever-increasing frequency, a way of speaking in code. “All these things happen in one second and last forever.” “The long, waning whiteness of the afternoon stained towards sunset.” If they are showing off, or at least establishing their credentials, they are also building, and populating, a common world in which they might begin to feel at home.

  The Dream Songs flew in from the Pacific Northwest and I sat down with it on the living-room floor. “Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry,” I read, “still less to the author, but to the title of the work.” John was John, Henry was Henry, the songs were dreams—what could be more clear? I turned the page. The first few songs passed through my mind without depositing much residual meaning, so I started over, this time reading aloud. I hadn’t read anything aloud for a long time, maybe not since the early days with Ashwini, when we used to read aloud to each other in bed (why did we stop doing that?), and now the sound of my voice in the empty house was making me self-conscious. But then I reminded myself I was alone and soon settled into the poems’ strange rhythms, splintered one moment, honeyed the next, and felt through these rhythms meaning starting to ease forth. Henry sulked, complained, lusted, lectured, raged, remembered, comforted, loved (That is our ’pointed task. Love & die), mourned the death of friends, his father’s death, his own (celebrated, a little, his own death, too), came back to life, traveled, broke limbs, brooded, thrilled, pushed his daughter on a swing, walked at the funeral of tenderness, fell out of a tree, repeated himself, suffered, played tennis, sighed, the whole implausible necessary thing. There was another character in the poem: the World, sometimes called “God,” sometimes “they,” sometimes “mail”—a shape-shifting incomprehensible cruel figure who from time to time shows up at Henry’s door with bad news. Henry hates him. God’s Henry’s enemy….The world is lunatic….What the world to Henry did will not bear thought. The sun went down, I skipped dinner, kept reading, and my voice was Henry’s was Berryman’s was everyone’s, childlike and quavering and brave and in the dark. It rose through the floorboards of Maria’s room.

  * * *

  —

  I picked up Jess and we drove to Jordan Creek Mall to watch in 3D a Werner Herzog documentary about prehistoric art. When Jess offered to share her enormous box of Whoppers, I declined, affecting repulsion, for no reason. The lights dimmed to black and the eminent Bavarian descended into the unknown. We saw through our glasses woolly rhinos, cave bears, a horse whose eight legs suggested movement, a woman with grotesquely inflated sex organs, ibex, the former president of the Société Française des Parfumeurs, stalactite shadows edging across red handprints, white dots arrayed in a significant pattern (but what, exactly, was its significance?), an ex–professional unicycler whose dreams were filled with peaceable lions and other large cats, a fleshy man dressed in animal skins and playing a bird-bone flute. “These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams. Is this their heartbeat or ours?” Walls can talk. Men can become animals or trees, and vice versa. This was what the expert meant by fluidity and permeability. But which came first, love or beauty? Language or music? Love. Music. What was art for? Art was for communicating human truths across expanses of time and space.

  Statues of Lincoln and Reagan flanked the exit: Jess took a selfie with them on her phone and posted it for semi-public viewing. Then we drove to Tasty Tacos, where we discussed the film over a plastic basket of their famous flour nachos.

  “You found it pretentious and gratuitously gloomy,” I accused the woman I barely knew.

  “And you found it…profound?”

  “Exactly.”

  In fact, Jess said, she’d almost liked it. The cave art itself, she admitted, was amazing, and she liked the albino alligators at the end. But Herzog was so proud of gaining access to the cave; half the movie was an advertisement of his own importance. And didn’t I think there was a cruelty to his gaze? How he kept the camera trained on his subjects for such a long time after they’d finished speaking? It was like he just wanted to make people uncomfortable, she said. I disagreed, just to be contrary, maybe, and when Jess very reasonably countered my argument I reasserted it with a vehemence so ridiculous we both couldn’t help but laugh. Her bangs hung exactly halfway down her eyes. All our fingers were drenched in cheese.

  I don’t remember which of us suggested we go to the Hessen Haus, a German bar just outside downtown, in keeping with the evening’s theme—“Cavemen?” Jess said. “Paleoanthropology?”—nor do I remember what we talked about there, only the sweaty, crazy-eyed hordes drinking from big glass boots and yelling and pounding the long communal tables with their hairy cavemen fists. And I remember feeling that I was one of these people, that I was a member of the hordes, the nameless hordes, which allowed me, along with the two pints of beer, to speak to Jess as though I were another person, one for whom nights like this were all I needed to fend off life’s bad and boring parts. As we danced the first of our three or four polkas I couldn’t stop thinking, You look like a princess.

  Then we were walking in hooded coats through the empty streets of downtown Des Moines. Downtown Des Moines is always empty, even at five o’clock on a weekday, or seven o’clock on a Saturday evening—the skywalk system allows pedestrians to traverse many blocks without stepping outside—but at this hour, maybe 1:30 a.m., it seemed even emptier than usual. A fine snow fell, almost invisible, and the air seemed almost warm. We walked through countless abandoned lots and barren corporate plazas, sobering up, past rows of brick buildings of mysterious purpose, through the shadows of featureless, unreal skyscrapers, ridiculous in their modesty, their lack of grandeur, the Equitable Building and 501 Grand and the EMC Insurance Building. Des Moines, city built on ethanol and insurance! As we walked past the Ruan Center, Des Moines’s second tallest skyscraper, I found myself telling Jess about the summer I worked as a temp in a cubicle on its thirty-second floor. My job—as mysterious to me now as it was then—was to type up birth certificates for children born out of wedlock. (Why were they separated from other birth certificates?) I was eighteen and had just graduated from high school and hadn’t known time cou
ld pass so slowly. At the end of that summer, I told Jess, I promised myself two things: first, that I’d never work in an office again, and second, that once I left for college I’d never come back to Des Moines to live. She laughed, and after a longish silence said she’d once had a similar job. Temping, data entry. She’d just turned sixteen. It was the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school. The job was at the national headquarters of the Church of the Open Bible, a Pentecostal denomination whose members could speak directly to God.

  From eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, five days a week, for almost three months, she entered addresses and phone numbers into an online directory. It was work a first-grader could’ve done, Jess said—an unusually patient first-grader. And no one in the office so much as acknowledged her existence, which made her feel that the work she was doing had been assigned for the express purpose of occupying her time. She’d been granted two ten-minute breaks per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and she used to stretch them into fifteen-minute breaks, twenty minutes, half an hour, just to see if anyone would notice, and of course no one did. Or if they did they didn’t say anything. A lot of that time she spent reading the Bible, copies of which were everywhere in the office. She’d barely glanced at it before that summer, though of course she was vaguely familiar with a lot of the stories, and she remembered reading Jonah over and over, she told me, each time feeling she’d just missed its lesson.

  The other big thing in her life that summer was that she was getting into music in a serious way. Before then she’d listened, without much enthusiasm, to whatever her friends happened to be listening to, but now she started seeking out music on her own, music that felt like hers and no one else’s. This was a familiar rite of passage, of course, but what made her process especially exciting was that she was under the belief that her parents didn’t allow music in the house. Which wasn’t true! She couldn’t explain now why she thought it was, except to say that not once in her life had she heard her parents listening to music by choice, whether at home or in the car. As unlikely as that sounds, she said, it was true. But it’s not like they were at all conservative or strict; they weren’t against music, they just didn’t choose to listen to it.

  “What kind of music were you listening to?” I asked.

  “Alt-country?” Jess said, and we both broke out laughing. We’d reached the lawn of the capitol building, its golden façade and copper domes, modeled after the Hôtel des Invalides, lit by floodlights whose beams were given shape by the now more thickly falling snow. We admired the imitative magnificence for a moment, then headed back toward our car.

  And so by day, Jess continued, I was entering data and reading the Bible, and by night I was listening to music in secret and reading about my favorite bands on the Internet. I went to a few shows in Des Moines, always alone—to have shared my passion with my friends would’ve killed it—and then I found out that my favorite band (she gave the name, but I didn’t know it) was about to go on tour. But the closest they were coming to Des Moines was St. Louis, five and a half hours away. I really, really wanted to go, Jess said, but A) I’d never driven that far, B) I’d have to leave work early to make it in time, and C) I had a midnight curfew. So I think I just decided it was impossible and told myself not to think about it.

  So the day of the show arrives, and I’m typing away, just making sure all these people get their monthly Bible newsletter or whatever, and out of nowhere I think, I’m going. I’m going to that show. And I get up from my desk and very calmly and purposefully walk past my quote unquote colleagues and out of the building, knowing as I do so I’m never coming back, even though my job is supposed to last a few more weeks. I drive to St. Louis in my parents’ car, feeling more free, more adult, I guess, than I’ve ever felt in my life, and at the same time—maybe this was part of that feeling—terrified a semi will swerve into me and crush me. How long would it take my parents to find out? Well, that doesn’t happen, I get to the concert just as it’s starting, and somehow I maneuver my way to the front. And I know I must be imagining it but ten or twelve times over the course of the show, often during super emotional moments, the lead singer looks right into my eyes, and holds his gaze, as if he’s singing just for me. I don’t know, I don’t have words for what I felt. It was the most transcendent experience of my life.

  Afterward I’m in a sort of trance. I’m dimly aware of my parents now, who are probably starting to get concerned, but I just think, I’ll explain it all later. They’ll understand. Nothing bad will happen. Nothing bad will happen anymore. I’ve seen the face of God, you know? And I’m heading toward the exit, full of love for the world, when I feel a hand grip my shoulder, hard. And I think: They’ve found me. They’re taking me in. They’re locking me up. It’s all over. Fuck. And I turn around and this man, this security guard’s looming over me. He’s enormous, a giant, maybe six-ten. And the giant says in his giant voice, Something from the band, sweetheart. And he hands me a folded-up sheet of notebook paper, and I unfold it, and there’s a very short note, two words, super scrawly, I can barely make them out. But I’m pretty sure they say, Stick around. Stick around.

  Well, you can imagine the sorts of fantasies that sprung up in my sixteen-year-old mind at that moment. I’d be invited backstage, hang out in the dressing room, share a bottle of whiskey with the band, listen to records, we’d hit it off, and next thing I know I’m on tour with them, maybe playing tambourine or something, maybe singing backup. Drugs, sex, and scandal ensue. Maybe I’d write a book about it. I never saw that movie Almost Famous, but I imagine it’s something like that, or no, in Almost Famous, it’s a teenage boy, right? It doesn’t matter. The point is I was beside myself. And yeah, it was like I was in a movie, and I was both on-screen and in the audience, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Well what happens is the bass player reappears and invites me to hang out with the band backstage. And I’m thinking, It’s just like I imagined….A lot of what went down after that is lost to me. I remember bare lightbulbs, plastic red cups, the smell of cigarettes, acoustic guitars, yellow foam bulging out of a couch cushion, laughter, a purple hamster, harmonicas. There were probably about twenty-five people in the room, the five band members and a bunch of other randos—groupies or roadies or friends of the band, I couldn’t figure out the nature of the relationships—but everyone seemed to know everyone else, except of course for me. I remember I got into a conversation about Sting with a woman wearing a rhinestone dress. Then at some point I’m talking to the bass player, who to me is just, you know, this legend, and he’s asking me all sorts of questions about myself and all I’m thinking is God, your eyes. Your blue eyes. His eyes were that whitish, silverish blue that I’ve always associated with wolves. Beautiful eyes. And next thing I know we’re in a smaller room, alone, at first just talking but then making out, and I remember he asked me to go down on him but I don’t remember if I did.

  “Jesus. This guy’s what, twice your age?” Suddenly I felt twice Jess’s age.

  “Probably not quite but almost. Yeah.”

  We’d reached the parking lot. We got in the car. “So did you make it home by midnight?” I asked after I’d turned onto the street.

  “Ha. I woke up in a hotel room with like six other people at like four or five a.m., and then I caught a cab back to the performance venue and got some coffee and drove home. I got back maybe around eleven-thirty, noon. Apparently at some point in the night I’d texted my parents, so they were angry but they weren’t, like, overly concerned.” After a pause, Jess said, “The crazy thing? I got paid for another month of work. No one in the office even noticed I was gone.”

  Streetlamps spread their light across the road, gleaming from filled potholes and tire tracks worn into the macadam. I sensed Jess was looking out the passenger-side window, and I stole a quick glance in her direction. Dim houses slid past her half-turned face, which was ful
l and alive with remembered intensities.

  I hadn’t realized there was more to her story. “The bass player—his name was Brett—texted me the day after the show, thanking me: Thanks for a lovely night. I still have it. And I texted back, No, thank you! But the more I thought about it over the next few days, the more disturbed I became about what happened. I didn’t use words like consent or minor in my mind, but I suspected I’d been taken advantage of. And yet a part of me was also reveling in it. I mean, the bass player for my favorite band! I think that’s what kept me from telling anyone what happened. Anyway, maybe a few weeks later, I text Brett and ask for his email address, and he sends it and I write him this long, meandering email, trying to explain what I’ve been thinking and feeling, not really expecting him to write back, I don’t think, just trying to get some closure, something. But a few days later he does write back, and he says, you know, God, I’m so sorry, you’re right, I did an awful thing, I’m a monster. I’m so sorry. And then he goes into this whole long story about how his dad left his mom when he was two, he never had a father figure in his life, he never knew how men were supposed to act, all this really deep stuff about his childhood, so that by the time I finished the email I felt genuinely bad for the guy. It was almost as if I were the one who’d done him wrong. All his life, he wrote, his only sources of solace had been music, alcohol, drugs, and women, and now when I listened to his music, his band’s music, all the songs seemed to be about him.”