A Moveable Famine

by John Skoyles

  At the end of the two-hour shift, I retrieved my jacket from the faculty room, spending a few minutes with the sheriff who was always there first, sweating heavily into his wilted coat. He said he couldn’t work weekends anymore and I took his place as fire marshal, standing at the rear exit of the auditorium and watching Our Town and The Music Man. I was glad for the ten dollars a night because Kim had been fired from several jobs. At the Lark Supper Club, she clanged a tray of corn chowder into the temple of Mr. Lark himself as he leaned back in his chair. She worked as a nurse’s aide at the university hospital, but one night at dinner she told me she had forgotten to remove a rectal thermometer from a toddler.

  McPeak brought Stavrula to The Deadwood for her birthday, joining Ridge and me in a booth. After a pitcher of beer, he took out a small wooden crate, and from a bed of straw, lifted a lifelike yellow canary. He placed it on the table, touching its breast so the head bobbed as it trilled sweet notes that soared and dipped. We marveled at this strange mechanical creation. Stavrula kissed him and kissed him. McPeak pressed it again and we listened again to its beautiful tune.

  “It’s an American Singer. The shape, the feathers, it’s exact in every way,” he said. “An artist in Moline does one a month.”

  Loudmouth Trotta left his barstool and seemed captivated by the bird, the first time he showed any quality besides scorn and vulgarity. “That’s a great song,” he said.

  “I’m calling it Maria, after Maria Callas,” Stavrula said.

  “Only the males sing,” I said. “You need a male name.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ridge said. “It’s not real. What’s the difference?”

  “No, John’s right,” Stavrula said. “I’ll call him ‘Caruso.’ ”

  Trotta asked if he could see the bird. He turned it over, blew on its tail feathers, and said, “Yes, it’s definitely a male.” He took a seat in a nearby booth.

  Stavrula asked him to make the bird sing again, and McPeak touched the switch. Ridge left to have a manuscript conference with Abe Gubegna, an Ethiopian novelist attending the international workshop whose book he was translating. Ridge said that Abe always embraced him when they met and he could feel the writer’s .45, which he carried everywhere, fearing assassination by Haile Selassie’s men. McPeak and Stavrula went to play pinball. I sat at the table with the American Singer. I ordered another pitcher. Then I couldn’t help myself—I lifted Caruso. I turned him over and blew on the feathers. It was neither male nor was it female. I returned it to its place near Stavrula’s drink with all the dignity I could muster, but Loudmouth across the way was giggling and shaking his head at my having fallen for his joke.

  Ridge introduced me to Tracy Kidder who was in John Cheever’s workshop. He invited me to dinner at his house with Cheever, Raymond Carver and Dick Florsheim, a star fiction student who imitated Nabokov. Tracy wrote short stories, but was working on a nonfiction book about Juan Corona, the mass murderer of migrant workers in California, and had published part of it in the Atlantic. A former second lieutenant in Vietnam, he had gone from Harvard to the army, to the arms of Fran, his beautiful wife. He rated workshop stories by the number of laughs. “This story has twenty laughs,” he’d say enthusiastically.

  On the night of the dinner, Cheever arrived by cab, the way he got around everywhere, except for when he rode in Carver’s car with the bullet hole in the windshield. Cheever was sixty-four, ruddy but grim, frail and thin. He wore a three-piece suit and exuded a strong fragrance—as if he had been “slapped with cologne,” was how Ridge put it. He handed Fran a bouquet of dwarf roses. Florsheim was already there, in puttees and a white sailor hat, going through Tracy’s records, trying to find a replacement for Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which he detested.

  While we waited for Ray, Cheever had a martini he insisted on mixing himself. He recounted going to an American literature professor’s house the night before where he was served a black martini, called a “Nevermore,” after Poe’s raven. “He put a drop of ink in it,” he said. “Ghastly! And the professor’s little daughter was named Daisy, after Daisy Miller.” He gave a fake shudder with his narrow shoulders.

  Tracy and Fran were from Long Island’s Oyster Bay, and talk turned to summers in the Hamptons. Cheever used the expression “on island,” referring to Nantucket. Florsheim said he preferred Paris for outdoor activities like playing dominoes in the sidewalk cafes. I mentioned going fishing on a party boat with my father, out of Sheepshead Bay. For some reason, Cheever thought I meant Cape Cod and asked if I had summered there. Tracy answered for me, “He didn’t even two-week in Rockaway!”

  “Tweak?” Cheever said. “Tweak?”

  Fran filled glasses with burgundy. Cheever was on his third martini but accepted the wine. He ranted against the other fiction writers on the faculty as “flat tires.” He asked for some big-band music and then embraced Fran and they twirled around the room. At the end of the song, Cheever removed his coat and danced alone to the next cut. Our eyes widened when he put his hand over his heart, but he marched back and forth in the same place on the rug until the music stopped.

  When Ray failed to appear, Tracy called Joe Cleary, Ray’s friend. Cleary said Ray was in California, teaching at USC. He held simultaneous appointments and neither university knew. United Airlines provided him with twelve roundtrips, on the promise of an article for their in-flight magazine, Mainliner, which Ray never wrote.

  After dinner, Cheever complained about his bad luck with Iowa women. I could guess why. Sitting in The Deadwood one Monday night, I noticed a female graduate student at his table who had an obvious crush on him. Talk turned to football and Cheever wondered if the Giants were winning. Since The Deadwood had no television, Cheever loudly asked her to go to George’s to get the score. She never returned.

  Florsheim gave Cheever a ride home, and I stopped at The Deadwood. Ridge and McPeak were there and I described the night. McPeak said, “The most famous guy to come to Iowa City and he can’t get laid!” As he said this, Belinda Schaeffer walked in on the arm of a middle-aged man decked out in a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons and white linen pants. With her was a faculty member in fiction, Fred Exley, and another attractive girl.

  “Jesus,” Ridge said, “look at Belinda with the old guy.”

  I muffled my sorrow as McPeak continued about Cheever. “You know Beth?” he asked. “Beth of the bee-stung lips?” We knew.

  “She went back to Cheever’s room at the Iowa House the other night. They had a drink and he sat on the bed and stared at the wall. He started a monologue about wallpaper, that wallpaper ruined his marriage. Finally, he propped a pillow against the headboard and asked her to sit next to him. When she did, he said, ‘Would you like to lie down?’ She said she didn’t think so, and then he went back to the issue of wallpaper and started singing a song from his childhood, but he could only remember the first two lines, ‘When father papered the parlor, you couldn’t tell Pa from paste.’ Beth said he sang it again and again, trying to jog his memory. Giving up, he patted the bed and said, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to lie down?’ She again said no. He sang the lines over and over until he nodded off, humming. The next day she got the lyrics from a reference librarian:

  When Father papered the parlor

  You couldn’t tell Pa from paste

  Dabbing it here and dabbing it there!

  Paste and paper everywhere

  Mother was stuck to the ceiling

  The kids were stuck to the floor

  You never saw such a family so stuck up before.

  “Three drunken girls sang it for Cheever in The Deadwood, arms locked and legs kicking. Cheever was puzzled but pleased,” McPeak told us. He said Cheever became wistful, and said, “That’s a song from my youth that I thought was long forgotten.”

  The next morning the front page of the Daily Iowan had a photo of the man in The Deadwood with Belinda Schaeffer, and the caption, “Celebrated Writer William Styron to Give Reading.”

>   CHAPTER EIGHT

  JOHN BERRYMAN JUMPS—DINNER WITH CARVER—SMALL BEER—POOR EVERYONE—AN AFTERNOON WITH BELINDA SCHAEFFER—FATHER IGNATIUS—THE MAID-RITE

  When John Berryman leapt from a bridge in Minneapolis, Pryor was the first of us to hear. Malcolm Gee had sent him a telegram that Pryor carried from office to faculty office, unfolding it, reading it aloud and returning it to its envelope. It said:

  “The high ones die. He chose the frozen Mississippi.”

  A former Iowa faculty member, Berryman had taught Lawson and Coulette. Ridge told me the first sentence was a quote from the Dream Songs. He said there was something proprietary, melodramatic, pious and finally pathetically peripheral about Gee’s note. It firmly established a hierarchy—the high ones—and pitched the life of poetry as a competitive sport. This made Pryor, he said, a messenger from the gods.

  Harvey and Pryor walked around Iowa City together, went to movies together and Pryor sometimes met visiting poets at the Cedar Rapids airport and brought them to their hotels, joining the poet and Harvey for dinner. He applied for jobs by the dozen. I ran into him one day as he walked to the post office carrying applications to renowned Ivies as well as to Mountain Empire Community College and Marion Military Institute. He fanned them out for me, also showing letters to the poets he continued to write, complimenting their poems.

  “Why are you writing to Lucien Stryk?” I asked.

  “To thank him for his book.”

  “He sent you his book?”

  “No, to thank him for writing it,” he said, twitching the corner of his mouth, as if I were really stupid.

  Ridge advised me not to bother applying, as I had no book. He said to wait until I had a chance at a good job instead of a lousy one.

  I mentioned this to Pryor who said, “I have to. I have a wife.”

  I walked into The Deadwood with Ridge as Joe Cleary roared out for another drink. “Beam ditch!” Jim Beam and water. Cleary, who resembled a toothsome bulldog, introduced me to Ray Carver. Ray furrowed his brow and made sure to get my name and what I did. This was one of his qualities people loved. He and Cleary were arguing about Wallace Stegner, Carver’s teacher at Stanford. When Ray liked a writer, he called him “a dandy,” and when Cleary scoffed at Stegner, Ray moved on to Lawrence Durrell, another of his favorites. He quoted, “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind,” saying, “That line sings, it sings!” Cleary said, “It stinks, it stinks!” I couldn’t reconcile Ray’s love for high rhetoric with his own spare style.

  When the bars closed, I often rode with Ray in his old car, empty bottles rattling on the floor. One morning, he called to ask if we had hit anything the night before. I said we hadn’t, and he said, “I don’t know what could have happened, but the whole side of my car is smashed.” Then he chuckled, saying, “This morning, it was all Cheever and I could do to hail a cab to the liquor store.”

  Ray asked me to have dinner with him at the restaurant faculty went to for special occasions, the Hoover House in West Branch, named for Herbert Hoover, Iowa’s only president. We were served by girls in black dresses with white aprons and hats. Our waitress told us that we should be sure to come back in summer for Hooverfest, a day of singing, fireworks and softball. Ray expressed sincere interest, and then ordered two house concoctions made with coconut that Lawson had recommended. When we finished, the waitress asked if we were ready to order. Ray said we wanted to have a drink first, and she said, “You just had a drink.”

  “That was a drink?” Ray said.

  We began many rounds of Jack Daniel’s while Ray told stories of bad restaurants. He particularly hated a place in Oregon. After he and his friend had each ordered a whole chicken, the friend pulled out a bottle of George Dickel and filled their glasses. The waitress said they had to get their whiskey from the bar. She told them again when she brought their dinners. She finally called the manager who stood next to the table and told them to put the bottle away and order from the waitress. Ray said that his friend got angry and threw his chicken right onto the manager’s shoes. The man walked away, and Ray ended his story with the words, “You know, the chicken stayed on the rug all night. That’s the kind of place it was.”

  Ray said he was flush from beating Lawson at poker. “Drink up! Drink up,” he said, lifting glass after glass to his glowing face. We had the specialty of the house, grilled turkey legs, and our plates were piled with tiny long bones, like games of pick-up sticks. After coffee and several cognacs, the check arrived and Ray made a grave expression, saying, “John, looks like we’ll have to walk this one.” Then his face contorted with drunken laughter, his eyes disappearing into folds of skin. “You go to the men’s room and wait a few minutes. By that time I’ll be in the car.” Before I had a chance to respond, Ray was gone. For a big man, he moved fast. I had a sick feeling as I went to the restroom and read the front page of the West Branch Times pinned above the urinal, a story about a man named John Doe who hung himself in the home he shared with his sister on Avenue Street. When I finished, I peered into the bar as if looking for someone, then slithered out the door. Ray pulled away with that serious face, as if he were escaping a great wrong. I felt, crazily, that if we were caught, he could give a credible excuse to the police, the manager, or anyone in authority, a feeling that being with Ray imparted, a feeling helped considerably by enormous amounts of alcohol.

  One afternoon, I found the thrift shop Ridge mentioned and bought a black shirt for fifty cents. I put it on and tossed my old flannel into the bin for donations. The shiny cloth gave me a new feeling, a feeling of being almost cool. Passing Donnelly’s, a dark bar in the center of downtown, I stopped in. I asked for an Olympia beer. It had just arrived from the northwest and ads for Oly, as it was called, constantly floated out of radios, accompanied by the sound of gushing Washington state rivers. Two farm hands at the bar heard my order, and one said to the other, “Oly, Oly, Oly. I say just set a glass of water in front of him and he won’t know the difference.”

  Charlie, the bartender, called out, “One democrat!” and Harold Donnelly poured. That was their name for a regular beer. They called short beers republicans.

  As he placed the glass down, Charlie said, “Hippies and heebs, hippies and heebs. That’s all we get anymore. Here come two now.”

  Two professorial-looking men took stools near me. One had shoulder-length hair and tiny, rectangular glasses. A scanty goatee wisped around the other’s chin.

  “Two small beers.”

  “What did I tell you?” Charlie whispered to me before calling for two republicans.

  I was starting to realize why no one from the workshop came there, when a truck driver my age sat next to me and ordered a vodka tonic. He had come from York, Pennsylvania, the barbell capital of the world, and his payload held tons of weightlifting equipment. He asked me what kind of work I did. I said I was in school. He asked what I was studying. I said poetry. He asked why, a smile on his lips. I said I wanted to learn to write it. He asked a good question—then what? I said that if I were lucky I might be able to publish a book. I had O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in my pocket and showed it to him. He held it as if it were the Rosetta stone and a poem I had been working on fell out.

  “ ‘Blank Street Murmur,’ ” he said. “Is this a real poem, or did you just make it up?”

  I said I made it up and it was a real poem, but maybe not a good one.

  “If it’s real, why didn’t you use a real street name?”

  Another good question. I had poeticized the title to a fare-thee-well. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “I don’t see how you can get this,” and he held the white page, “into this,” and he bounced the book in the air.

  “I know,” I said. “It does seem impossible.”

  A voice from behind me said, “I know you’re in the workshop, but we haven’t met.” I turned to see Belinda Schaeffer holding a couple of books to her chest like a schoolgirl. I put out my hand and introduced myself
.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The truck driver stared at my good luck.

  She said, “I liked the poem about your neighborhood. Especially the title, ‘Poor Everyone.’ ” She sat next to me, indifferently placing her books on the puddles and wet streaks along the bar.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Ridge thinks I should make it my thesis title.”

  The two professors began laughing hysterically. The bearded one said, “How about Suicide Pact?” I spun toward them.

  The other said, “That’s great! What do you think of End It All?”

  “Puddle-Jumper!” the bearded one yelled.

  Belinda said, “Those morons. Always inventing names for cocktails. And they hardly drink.” I recovered from thinking they were mocking my thesis title.

  Charlie knew Belinda and, in a courtly manner, he put a glass of white wine before her.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” she said, and she said it delicately. Everything she did was refined, calm and graceful, but the careless way she placed her books on the bar, almost recklessly, gave me hope that perfection was not something she demanded from others. She might tolerate someone like me, common as well as harmless, like a water stain.

  Charlie beamed at Belinda and hovered across the bar for a few seconds. One of the field-workers cursed and complained loudly about the large head on his beer, sending Charlie to the pages of the Press-Citizen, and causing the truck driver to leave.

  Belinda drank nonstop and talked nonstop, unlike in class where she was completely reserved. Her father was an entrepreneur who bought tainted wholesale food products unfit for humans, and sold them to farmers to feed livestock. She agreed with me that this was not great, but she said he was a good father. She took a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and insisted on buying. She started gesturing with her hands, but the wilder her gestures, the softer her voice, a paradoxical combination. Sometimes she stopped talking, resting her hands in the lap of her dress and staring at the ceiling, so that her eyes rolled up in her head. After four drinks, she told me how unhappy she was and how lonely. She said she usually had affairs with married men, and had just realized this kept her from true emotional investment. She said she had deprived herself of real love in this way, and now she was ready to find an honest guy. I knew right then I was that guy. I knew she picked me because she was ready for someone trustworthy and responsible. I would be faithful and guard her delicate bearing from the crass and shallow world, the workshop world, the world of Donnelly’s and beyond. If she stayed with me for the afternoon, her feelings could very well carry over into the night, the next morning, the day after, and the day after that. And through her inspiration, my poetry might grow and possibly rise to match her beauty.