Hutch heard the self-introduction calmly with no sense that Wade meant to cause a stir. As for the students, Hutch thought only All right, they claim they’re adults; let’s see them take this.
But in fact only Mait and two of the women had heard Wade’s words, and only Malt had taken the next step—This man’s got the plague. He looked to Hutch.
Hutch told him “Read, Mait.”
Whenever Mait read his rough drafts aloud, his voice was still subject to the woozy pitch of adolescence—steep climbs and plunges, hilarious yodels—but he’d long since mastered a way to read blank verse and make it sound like the pulse of a curious heart, a life that was not quite human but benign and entirely reliable. Though he’d only finished the lines last night, Mait already all but knew them by heart; and in a situation where most young poets read like whipped dogs—head down, avoiding eye contact—Mait read fairly straight at Wade’s face.
What he’d brought today was the weirder of his two unfinished poems, one that had started four months ago as a kind of Browningesque dramatic monologue—the first-person and unintentionally comic account of a young husband’s first adultery. In Seattle on a business trip, and exhausted at midnight, the husband goes to his hotel bar. There he meets a friendly and mildly exotic woman, whom he winds up taking back to his room. Only at the end of lengthy foreplay does the errant husband detect two faint crescent-scars beneath the woman’s breasts. He politely asks if she’s had breast cancer. She says “Guess again.” He says “Implants?” The woman then gives an account of her sex change five years ago. As a man she’d been a successful yacht builder with a wife and two daughters; as a woman, she goes on building yachts but is very much alone. Tonight is the first time she’s dared herself to find a man, and her success quickly reduces her to sobs which the husband is powerless to console, though he goes on trying throughout the long night. It was an allegedly true story that a young computer salesman had unloaded on Maitlanci, in urgent confession, on an airplane high over south Georgia last winter.
But before Mait had forged far ahead with his latest draft, the class lost its professional composure and collapsed in mirth. More than half of them were exquisitely trained in the taboos of political and social correctness, but till now they’d never been challenged by a story so fraught with the heartbreak of various minorities—men-made-women by courtesy of knives and chemicals, adulterous but sensitive husbands, the vagabonds of business life in contemporary America, the unseen but surely downcast wife and whomever the man/woman had abandoned in his quest for fulfillment.
After two minutes of restraint, however, the whole class took a genuine dive into helpless laughter. The dive included Hutch as well, a teacher who always tried to obey Ben Jonson’s advice never to tell a young poet all his faults. Finally he managed to sober himself. Then he calmed the group and asked Mait how conscious he was of the laughter implicit in any such tale when told in a such a flat-footed fashion.
At the first hilarity, Mait had been stunned—irony was not his strongest suit—but in twenty seconds he’d seen the point and joined the laughter. Then he literally ripped the pages apart in the class’s presence and promised them better. The promise amounted—on the spot—to the final installment of another slow but quite different confession, one doled out in pieces through the term, of a fact he’d kept to himself till now—that he was both a virgin at twenty-one and “queer as a pink hairnet” (it was Mait’s own simile; he dodged the demeaning label gay by saying he felt far more nearly glum and that queer was something he was glad to be if the world was normal). And the final pages he took from his notebook and read to the class now were cast as a letter from Mait to his father, a career marine who’d died in Vietnam the year the boy was born.
Right off, Hutch heard the resemblance to a poem that he himself had written for his own father Rob, thirty-seven years ago, as Hutch left America after Rob’s funeral and flew back to England and his graduate studies.
At the end of Mait’s second poem, three of the students tried valiantly to feel their own way into its naked heart. The lines more or less conveyed a child’s awareness, at the age of seven, that men were the magnetic pole of his mind and would always be—mind and body eventually. All three of the well-intentioned students failed in their try at understanding (they’d have bedded with wolves quicker than their own gender, though they didn’t quite say so). One of the law students was repulsed, though he managed to hide it in a rambling attack on iambic verse as being un-American—one of the oldest critical chestnuts and one that Hutch demolished in a sentence: “The only American line, if there were one, would be in the rhythm of an Indian heartbeat, whatever that was four centuries ago.”
One student, Nan Benedict, had made her own version of Mait’s discovery in her freshman year and had yet to tell anyone but the roommate who’d accepted her love as a mildly pleasant matter of course, due to end now that both would graduate next month—the roommate called herself “a four-year dyke.” As Nan responded warmly to Mait’s lines, she unloaded her own brisk confession onto this last class as a kind of tribute to their four-months’ closeness in the crowded dinghy of a writing class.
The others heard mainly, in Mait’s lines, a single message—nothing to do with eros or oddness and nothing that meant to be proud or cruel. Both Nan’s lean confession and the sound of Mait’s lines, in his frail voice, joined to tell the talentless watchers that We can do all we want with these words while the rest of you’ll fall further and further behind as you choke, in untold feeling, through the rest of your lives.
It was only toward the end of Mait’s poem, however, that a genuine strength broke through to Wade. In mildly archaic but dead-earnest lines, Maitland’s hand reached toward his own father who’d fallen, shot through the temple, at the edge of a boatbuilder’s hut he’d burned in the mouth of the Mekong River near Vung Tau.
“Sir, this untried unused hand has traveled
Worlds, or half this Earth, and guards you now.
Replay the fatal moment for me. My innocence
Can helmet, shield and glove your life—that
Life which gave me mine and which, even here,
I taste by night in dreams, your fleecy pelt.”
When the word pelt brought a hush behind it, and no one spoke, Wade jerked upright to his feet and said “Christ-in-a-rowboat! Thank this man.” His eyes were dry but the skin of his face contorted in pain when, still, no one spoke.
Hutch waited, then chose not to break the standoff.
Mait finally said “Thank you, Wade.”
Wade stood on in place by his rock, a little rickety. He was suddenly baffled—where was he, why this crowd of voices, who were these blank faces? Then he found what seemed to be the head of his father, a head that seemed to be facing him knowingly; so he said to Hutch “I dreamed about you, old handsome sir, most nights of my life” as though his life was far behind him. Then he sat again on the sunny rock.
Hutch said “Thanks, Maitland. I share Wade’s feeling—you’ve come so far in four months, I’m pleased. All of you know I almost never push anybody to try publishing anything, verse or prose, till it’s smoking on the desk with sullen impatience or felonious narcissism at least; but I think Mait Moses has an actual poem that—once he’s let it lie awhile to purify its diction, which is still a little crusty—others should read. Mait, plan by late summer to send it to Poetry magazine in Chicago—they might well take it. If not, whatever you do, keep it moving.”
Mait flushed scarlet and his eyes had a life he’d hid till today.
A few others murmured “Excellent,” “Write-on”; “Good luck, man.”
Wade said “I’m just glad I lasted to hear it.” By then the late light had deepened in tone, and Wade’s eyes just barely registered the change. All the air around him this minute was a rich brown as deep and virtually narcotic as the shadows prevailing at the edges of late Rembrandt self-portraits. Slowly the shade was mounting round Wade like a strange welcome fluid in which he could brea
the with a freedom he’d seldom known till this moment. He even turned his head through a long arc, hunting for west and the sinking sun. He discovered it finally and fixed on its brightness, then lifted his chin toward the vanishing disc. It hadn’t crossed his mind that others were watching him; the light and warmth felt like a brief health, for eight or ten seconds as his eyes dimmed again even further toward blindness.
Hutch was watching though and, to him. Wade looked like one appalled face in a Rodin bronze of teeming Hell or like a rescued drowner. From eighteen or nineteen till two years ago, Wade had struck Hutch as one of the three great stunners he’d known, among men at least—that handsomely formed and carefully tended and moved by an open generous heart. Much of the beauty survived here today but only as the fragile planes and struts of a crumbling building, struggling to hold off a barely arrested downward fall. To change the present feeling, Hutch was compelled to stand and speak. “I need volunteers please to help with the food. It’s all in the kitchen, thanks to the caterer, waiting to be spread.”
Wade said “Wait.” When everybody faced him for final orders, Wade said “Nobody’s asked to hear my poem.”
Most of the students exchanged doubtful glances.
But Hutch sat again and said “Tell us, Son.” In adolescence Wade had written some genuinely likable short poems; so Hutch was curious and, for the first time since they’d left New York, he smelled again the elation he’d known when he found Wade willing to come back south. This boy is going to surprise us yet.
At first it seemed Wade had only been joking; his face was tranquil again but empty.
Hutch finally moved to stand.
Wade motioned him down and laughed. “Lost my mind for a minute—” No poem came though and finally Wade noticed the circle’s discomfort. He rigged a broad grin. “Anybody want to ask me a question?” When no one spoke, he said “I hope you’re not scared; I’m not contagious, not in formal relations.” He laughed a dry note.
It dawned on Hutch that Wade might want to tell his own story, some part of it anyhow. He said “Wade, these are very thoughtful people. I’ve trusted my own new poems with them; they were smart and too kind. Want to tell them about what you’re living through?”
Wade took the suggestion like a starved man, snagging at the word Yes fiercely with his chin. Then he found a voice much like his old voice, deep and affable. “I’m thirty-two years old and almost surely can’t hope to make it to thirty-three. Once I completed my apprenticeship, I worked six years as a licensed architect; so I have some feeling for what you people try to make in poems—there’s a sturdy serviceable building in Brooklyn, a three-story brick night-college for immigrants; it’s got my name on the cornerstone. Barring nuclear war, that’ll probably last somewhere between fifty and a hundred years till some real-estate mogul in the twenty-first century tears it down or blows it up. Who gets much more, when it comes to lasting? What killed me though was not hard work—” Wade stopped, looked straight in Maitland’s direction and laughed. “This sounds more like a bad song from the forties than anything else, but I died for love.” He stopped there; it seemed to be all he meant to give.
Hutch said “You’re alive; don’t use the past tense. It’s hard on your pa, not to speak of the poor old English language.”
Wade smiled. “I stand corrected. Doctor. No, all I’m meaning to say to you people—all I know now with my brain ruined—is that I represent a few hundred thousand Americans of a certain breed who’re dead or dying or doomed but don’t know it yet for no better reason than the fact they trusted their bodies with each other when nobody guessed that love or rut could kill you. For a short thirty years there, starting in the forties, penicillin cured the clap and syphilis. A vaccine fixed you for hepatitis B, they had killer lotions for crabs and fleas, and other drugs killed off intestinal amoebas. That didn’t leave much but herpes and murder to worry about in the love bazaars, whatever your pick of species or gender.
“Since I never went with more than two men—honest to God, I never had sex with but three women and two other men; and the men were plainly not psychopaths—I knew I was safe. Turned out I was wrong. What you’re seeing, this minute, is a young man that ought to weigh 175 and be looking at least as presentable as anybody here and who ought to be ready to build good buildings for forty more years. And what this fucked-up poem of mine says is not that you should prowl around sex, scared cold to death, or not to have sex unless you’re wrapped in some stainless steel condom. No, what I mean is, if any of you wind up being writers or even just competent witnesses, then tell the world what it means now to live—till some cure’s found, if a cure exists—in a whole new world where, for the first time since penicillin dawned, the acts of love and the best kind of pleasure, the only good acts most humans get to do, can kill you dead in this slow dreadful way.” By then, though Wade hadn’t seen himself clearly for some four months, he knew he stood as his own best example, in the students’ eyes at least—his broad flayed skull in setting sunlight. In that many words he’d burned all his strength but the last few traces which let him say “I better lie down.”
Hutch looked to Maitland.
Mait stood, and together they walked Wade in to his bed.
4
FROM his decades of teaching. Hutch well knew that American students never leave a party of their own free will. Even self-possessed graduate students must be given strong hints that it’s time to leave; most undergraduates won’t think of budging before sunrise unless the host specifically orders them out. Tonight though—once they’d ravaged the spread of sandwich makings, baked beans, wine and deep-dish pies—they trailed off quietly into the evening. Some parted with the classic student vow to stay in contact through the years when Hutch understood he’d likely never hear their names again and would never miss them individually, despite his pleasure in their brief company and the things he learned in their presence still, after so much time.
WHEN the last car had gone down the drive. Hutch thought he’d check on Wade first—the students had pretty well cleared the mess and washed the few dishes. Wade’s light was out, his door was open. Hutch stood at the threshold long enough to hear his son breathing slow and raucous as if each breath was a separate achievement. For an instant Hutch felt his own heart shut, a desperate fist; and a wild thought racketed through him in words. I’ll get Rob’s pistol and finish this—he meant Wade and him both. But Ann would find us. Hutch almost grinned to think that would stop him if nothing else could. Did he mainly want to spare Ann the shock or deprive her of a grisly moment she’d dine out on the rest of her life? You’re not this vicious, Hutch. Go do some harmless work.
As Hutch turned toward his study, Wade spoke from where he lay flat on his bed. “You ashamed?”
“No more than usual. Did I do so badly?” Hutch walked to the bed and switched on the lamp.
Wade turned, with open eyes, to face him. “You were smart as ever, smart and the soul of Dixie hospitality. No, I meant me—are you shamed by me?”
Hutch sat on the edge of the mattress and laid a hand on Wade. “I’m as proud of you as I ever was.”
Wade waited so long he seemed unconscious; then he laughed two notes. “That’s begging the question, Doc—how proud of me have you ever been?”
“Son, that’s one rap I really won’t take. You well know what you’ve meant to me.”
“Tell me again—I must have forgot.”
Hutch said “You’re my beloved son, you’re a good human being, a superb architect, you’ve carried our family’s line on in style.”
Wade shook his head. “I’m crashing with it now.” His right hand imitated an airplane crashing to Earth; and for the first time since he’d been home, his eyes were full.
Hutch couldn’t speak either.
Finally Wade said “No, what I really meant was, I’m sorry I gave that lecture to your class—that and my sizzling true confession.”
“They’re certified grown-ups, legally at least. They to
ok it in stride.”
Wade said “That’s a lie.”
Hutch said “I watched them; maybe two or three flinched. But it did them good—welcome to life.”
“Amen to that. Now say you forgive me.”
Hutch said “‘You forgive me.’”
“I’m serious.”
“Forgive what?” Hutch truly knew of no grievance to pardon, not here in this room.
Wade’s eyes focused so precisely on Hutch that anyone watching would have sworn they could see as keenly as a condor’s. “Pardon me for running my life in the ground—” Again Wade gave his little airplane gesture.
“You haven’t done that. And anyhow, if this monster virus had been around four decades ago, I might very well be sicker than you.” That was an opening he’d never quite offered to Wade before.
But Wade was fixed on his own rail. He put up a hushing finger; Let me finish. “Pardon me for choosing and loving forever—you’ve got to know I’ll love Wyatt Bondurant forever: a man that flat-out hated you.”
Hutch said “There are whole broad pieces of me anybody in his right mind would hate.”
Wade said “Amen” and waited.
Hutch wouldn’t object but he wouldn’t ask for clarification. What does he hate in me? Hutch still couldn’t ask.
So Wade pointed past him. “Just say the word pardon. It’s a good English word.”
“Pardon. Pardon.”
Wade’s hand fished around, found Hutch’s and pressed it.
Hutch said “You say it too. Say it to me.”
Wade’s lips barely parted and made the motions that might have been pardon if he’d found the strength. In a moment he’d slid into sleep like a week-old infant. Sleep closed around him.
Hutch sat for two minutes, then quietly rose, switched off the light and was halfway toward his study again to read a few last papers from his seventeenth-century seminar when he thought he heard the front door close. They’d had several break-ins out here in the seventies, but he didn’t feel scared. He quietly walked toward the hall to investigate.
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