The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

  Long before the meal was done, she began to feel it was high time to return to the Meany and kick off her shoes and curl up with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She and Lota had always had such wonderful New Year’s celebrations, either quiet ones at Cabo Frio looking at the stars or else big, raucous dinners in Rio or Samambaia. She remembered one year in particular, when they’d had to move all the furniture out of the living room in the Rio apartment to make one enormous table seating thirty people. She and Lota had sat at either end, while between them had been all the people who mattered in that maddening, lovable country—Carlos, Rosinha, Luiz, Roberto, Mary, Flavio, and so many others. Somehow Lota had even lassoed a famous soap opera star into joining them, and she’d brought the French heart-throb Jean Paul Belmondo, who was in Brazil making a movie. Who at this table tonight would have pictured Elizabeth comparing impressions of Brasilia with an international movie star right there in her own home? Just another day in her glamorous South American life. After the meal, they’d crowded onto the veranda as fireworks exploded over Copacabana. The beach had glowed with the many thousands of revelers in white gowns wading into the water with their offerings to the sea goddess Yemanja.

  “You and Lota are perfectly matched,” she remembered Luiz saying beside her. “You are the north to Lota’s south.” Even Luiz was prone to poetics after a few glasses of champagne.

  “But look down there,” she said. “The south sure knows how to have more fun.”

  “But without the north, it does not know what it is.”

  “WAS THAT COMPLETE torture?” The young woman had slipped into the seat recently vacated by the painter.

  “You mean the sermon on Jackson Pollock?”

  “That was my husband sitting here, boring you to tears. I felt terrible I couldn’t save you.”

  “There you go again, seeking my salvation.”

  “Yes, I have faith we can help you find the light, Elizabeth.” The moment stretched out as they continued smiling at one another. Then the girl spoke again. “Actually, it’s my husband who’s the religious nut. Pollock is his God. He thinks putting random lines on a canvas makes him an abstract painter and a genius, but between you and me, he couldn’t paint a still life to save his ass.”

  The vulgarity on those lips was oddly titillating. “At least he is passionate about the work,” Elizabeth said carefully.

  “I much prefer his subject matter.” The young woman indicated a lean, bearded man wearing a plaid jacket. “He paints ducks. That’s all. He just loves ducks.”

  “Well, who doesn’t?”

  “The cretin who doesn’t love ducks probably hates kittens!”

  Her eyes were really the most extraordinary color. Elizabeth held them until the young woman’s cheeks reddened. “You must think I’m silly,” she said, looking away.

  “Not at all. I think you’re refreshing.”

  The party began counting down from ten. Midnight was upon them. There was shouting and cheering and blowing horns all around. “Happy New Year,” Elizabeth said softly.

  “Happy New Year to you,” her new friend said. The long graceful neck curved like a giraffe’s or a gazelle’s, Elizabeth observed, as she bent close. Then she closed her eyes to receive the young woman’s kiss.

  Elizabeth pulled back and glanced about at the immediate company. The husband was thumping the painter of ducks on the back. She moved to tap her champagne glass to the young woman’s and noticed that the young woman was drinking water. “Aren’t you celebrating?”

  “In a private way. I’ll tell you a secret. I just found out I’m going to have a baby.” She spoke with the barely contained effusiveness with which she seemed to say everything.

  “Well, congratulations,” Elizabeth said. She was surprised at first, and then was overcome by a profound weariness. Yes, it was certainly time to be heading home.

  The young woman continued to look at her. She bent close and spoke in Elizabeth’s ear. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

  My word! Could a married, pregnant girl thirty years her junior actually be flirting with her?

  EVERY DAY THERE was a letter, sometimes two or three. How Lota found the time to write them, Elizabeth could not fathom; she’d rarely been free for so much as a conversation before Elizabeth left Brazil. Most were funny, sharp descriptions of daily life—meetings with their friends, the animals at Samambaia, and of course the latest tribulations regarding the park. She didn’t complain or scold Elizabeth too much—it was obvious she was trying hard to win her back. You haven’t lost me, Elizabeth thought as she read, I still adore you.

  AND THEN Miss Bishop was a teacher.

  For the first few meetings, she stood before her students in such a paroxysm of anxiety she was almost unable to speak. They slouched there, staring at her, so much more informal in their beards and their beads than she ever would have dreamed of being when she herself was a college student.

  And to them, she must have appeared like one of their grandmothers, hopelessly old fashioned, practically from the Middle Ages.

  Yet almost immediately she began to dread her classes less. In all her worries about teaching, it had never occurred to Elizabeth that what would become quickly apparent was the fact that she actually knew a great deal more than her students did. Her students knew nothing! There were one or two bright lights, fortunately, but on the whole she had really expected them to be more advanced. When handing back their early assignments, it was only through a supreme effort of will that Elizabeth prevailed upon herself not to explain to one student and then the next why he or she was her most hopeless pupil.

  You never learned how to spell.

  You have a vocabulary limited to eight monosyllables. And that is a generous assessment.

  You are addicted to comma splices.

  You are as sloppy in language as you are in personal hygiene.

  You couldn’t punctuate a road sign.

  There was learning of her own to be done, of course. She greatly appreciated her students’ attempts to cross the generational gap and help her along into the modern era. One girl complimented Elizabeth’s eye shadow and within minutes was discussing the use of birth control among her contemporaries. Not infrequently, in the middle of speaking to the class, Elizabeth found herself struggling to articulate her thoughts about writing in a way that might teach these young people something they could actually use.

  “Some of your lines are just atrocious,” she said. “I could spend the entire semester giving you grammar lessons, but that’s not why we’re here.You can do that on your own, and truly I urge you to. What I keep seeing in your poems is that you’re all trying very hard to tackle weighty subject matter—war and social inequality and God and the question of whether or not we’re all living in a dream. Ambition is good, and praiseworthy. But it doesn’t generally serve you, and frankly, it’s a little taxing to the reader, to use material that is too far beyond your experience. From what I’ve read of your poems, it looks as though half of you have spent your adolescence in the madhouse. If you really had, you’d probably be writing about something else altogether, flowers or skunks. Madness isn’t romantic, and in itself it’s no more meaningful than this pen in my hand. Writing should be about observing your own experience, taking a magnifying glass to your immediate world. You can make anything into a poem, but it’s your observations of the subject that invest the poem with meaning, with depth and layers, just as they give life meaning. Do you understand the difference?”

  They looked at her in silence, their eyes big and glistening with a hint of angry desire, like cats waiting to be fed.

  “Today we’ll do an exercise to illustrate my point. I’ve brought several different objects, and I want you to choose one and write a poem about it during class. In fact, I’ll write one too. What I want you to keep in mind is that the more closely you observe, the more distinct and interesting, the more meaningful, your words are going to be.”

  From
a paper grocery sack she drew a fork, a packet of seeds, a potato, and one of the scuffed black shoes she’d worn on New Year’s. That morning she’d swept into the bag whatever lay in immediate sight, as she’d been running extremely late.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER poetry teacher Elizabeth took to, a handsome, acerbic Englishman who called on the phone frequently to report on his exercise regimen. He read from his students’ work the most blundering offenses to the tradition of poetry, until they both nearly died of hysterical laughter. At social gatherings, he always aimed directly for the bar and put a drink in her hand, then spoke in snide terms about nearly everyone else present. He might bring out the worst in her, but he certainly helped to pass the time. He encouraged Elizabeth to think of students as kin to parasites that had to be periodically purged or poisoned, like tapeworm. To her own surprise, she did not agree. She’d come to feel quite fond of the young people in her classes. For the most part, she found them touchingly sweet if a bit rambunctious, more like goats. They called out Miss Bishop from across the campus lawn, and on her birthday they brought her flowers and cupcakes. The show-off in class turned shy when he asked her to sign his copy of Questions of Travel. On some days, Elizabeth noticed she looked forward to meeting them in the classroom.

  On other days, nothing could convince her to go. Different city, but the same old story. Some undermatter in her being seemed to be in a state of decay, the kind of precarious feeling that most often led to a binge; she could not leave the hotel room until it passed. That was why, one February afternoon of furious rain, she found that class time was approaching and she had not yet gotten out of bed. By then, Antabuse was a thing of the past. She’d used it erratically for some time, then run out completely months ago and had no intention of getting more. It was scientifically proven to cause despondency—she’d seen this in a magazine article and cut it out to send to Lota. But neither did Elizabeth wish to get roaring drunk; the close observation of that personal experience she preferred to leave behind as well. It would help to have some company, she decided, some talk, and so she called one of her students and asked him to come by. He was an older boy who had once invited her to tea, named Wesley. She’d been impressed by his impeccable manners. He was a painter.

  Surprised by her invitation, he nevertheless said he’d dash over in the rain. He also brought what she’d asked for: a six-pack of beer. Beer in conversation was much healthier than gin by oneself. Elizabeth met him at the door in her housecoat.

  “Please pull up that chair,” she said as she settled back under the bedclothes. He was plainly uncomfortable with the arrangement, but there was really no other choice. There was the one armchair, with the bed affording the only other seating option. “I know this is unconventional,” Elizabeth said, “but accommodations at the Hotel Meany are far from luxurious.” Then she almost laughed to think Wesley might suspect he’d been invited to the scene of a seduction. She opened a beer and drank from the can. “Now tell me, how do you think the class is going?”

  Wesley’s eyes roamed all over the room. “It seems to be going all right,” he finally said.

  “From what I can tell, the real problem is that none of you seems ever to have heard of iambic pentameter. I’m going to begin assigning sonnets and sestinas, I think. You need to learn these forms, it’s very important. You young people think of traditional forms as a constraint. You all want to write free verse, whatever you think that means, but what you don’t understand is that form, and working within those structures, that’s what can truly free you. And what is all this about Buddhism? Everyone is turning in haikus.”

  Wesley laughed, beginning to relax. “You have to remember we’re on the Pacific coast. The Far East is our point of reference.”

  “How fascinating. Sometimes I haven’t a clue how to talk to you all.”

  “Well, some of the students might not really get where you’re coming from, but I think there are four or five in the class who would listen to just about anything you have to say.”

  “That’s very sweet of you, but I know I’m hardly the most talented teacher. Teaching takes a lot of time, effort, and character, things I don’t have any of. Here’s my advice:You should be reading all day long, from the moment you wake up until you go to bed, everything good you can get your hands on. That’s the best teacher. It was mine.”

  They sipped their beers. The rain beat at the window.

  “Thank you for coming by on such short notice,” she said. “I wasn’t feeling well at all, and now I’m much better.”

  “I brought some of my paintings,” Wesley said. “Would you like to see them?”

  He opened his briefcase and removed a handful of pictures hardly bigger than playing cards, leaning forward to lay them out upon the bedspread like a game of solitaire. All were landscapes, scenes of the Pacific coastline in various seasons, viewed from a great distance. Elizabeth felt as though she were on a faraway hilltop, watching the line of surf through binoculars, and the effect was extraordinarily private and peaceful. Looking at these closely observed miniatures was the strongest antidote to that decaying thing inside her. She almost asked if she might keep one. “These are truly lovely,” she said, setting down her beer. “Wesley, they’re so good. What a pleasure to see really small paintings.”

  Blushing, he gathered them up and whisked them back into his briefcase. “Someday I’d like to carry a whole exhibition in my pockets.”

  WHENEVER THEY MET for tea, the young woman promised to take Elizabeth to the botanical garden as soon as there was a break in the weather. The first afternoon the rains let up, there she was, waiting in the lobby of the Hotel Meany when Elizabeth returned from class.

  “I enjoy men,” the young woman said as they strolled beneath trees still dripping with moisture, brilliant green moss covering their trunks. “I’ve always enjoyed sex with men.”

  Elizabeth admired the dogwood in flower. Apparently, the fad of open confessionalism was hardly limited to the younger American poets; it had become a way of life for the entire country. For some reason, she wasn’t offended by this quality in the girl. “I suppose it’s the pregnancy,” her young friend went on, “but lately I can’t really bear for my husband to touch me. It’s as though my body wants something else, another kind of touch or excitement. It’s trying to tell me something new but doesn’t know how. It doesn’t recognize this hunger.”

  Elizabeth was happy to listen but had no intention of participating equally in this style of conversation. It would have been the height of disrespect to begin speaking of Lota. To tell this young woman how it felt to be separated from a companion of fifteen years, how at times she craved Lota’s physical closeness, her touch, the feel and the smell of her, with every cell of her being. And how strange to discover that even so, at this moment she could imagine nothing more pleasant than being here on this forest trail, hand in hand with a fresh young woman, the air cool and moist on her skin. No, these were private thoughts not to be discussed.

  “I read that it was the son of Olmsted, the man responsible for Central Park in New York, who designed these gardens,” Elizabeth remarked.

  The young woman laughed in surprise and squeezed Elizabeth’s hand. “You know just how to put a girl in her place, don’t you?” she said. “You’re a sly one. No one suspects it, and that’s why it’s such a delight to discover. I hope you won’t be offended if I say that your company these last few weeks has been the thing I most look forward to, Elizabeth.”

  “Thank you. Yours is dear to me, too.”

  And then the sweet moment was spoiled. Elizabeth was so susceptible to poison oak that she had merely to walk near the plant, and it was like passing through the mist of perfume sprayed by a girl in a department store. The effects were instantaneous. A mild burning and then a fiery itching spread across her nose and cheeks.

  The young woman knew exactly what to do. In five minutes she found a pharmacy nearby, rushed inside, and returned with a vial. There on the street, she fanned her
hands over Elizabeth’s face and used her thumbs to rub in the calamine lotion. It cooled the itching instantly. The young woman’s touch reminded Elizabeth of how her grandmother had rubbed her icy hands in the winter, so vigorously she’d shaken Elizabeth’s small body like a rag doll’s.

  As they drew near the Hotel Meany, the young woman gave her an even more pleasurable surprise. Anticipating their parting, Elizabeth felt a familiar lonely ache. She did not want to go inside alone; in fact, she did not want to go inside the Meany ever again. Then the young woman asked, as if she had read Elizabeth’s mind, “How would you like to leave this hotel for good? I think I may have found you a home.”

  ELIZABETH DIDN’T HAVE to lift a finger. The young woman sent her off to the beauty parlor while she, Wesley, and another of Elizabeth’s favorite students checked her out of the Hotel Meany forever and installed her in the new apartment. It wasn’t spacious, but it wasn’t mean. Best of all, even on a rainy day, light streamed in through windows in every room. The young woman had found it near the university and had pulled together furniture and kitchenware. Wesley donated one or two of his own paintings to make it not so spare. That evening, the four of them had a little party to celebrate. Elizabeth cooked dinner for the first time since she’d been back in the States. As they cleared the table to make room for the meal, she noticed a packet of Lota’s letters among the odds and ends. She swept them into a box, then put on a samba record she had brought from Rio, just in case a situation like this arose.