A Moveable Famine

by John Skoyles

  Creeley asked him, “How many had lobster first?”

  As Dugan flipped the page, he flipped his glass over as well and everyone tried to lean out of the way, but no one moved. A puddle formed on the pad, which Dugan bent into a crease, pouring the alcohol into his glass. He took a swig of the now blue vodka and smoothed the blotted pages. Kurt stumbled over and showed him the poems on paper plates. They had written circle poems that could start anywhere in the sentence. Porter showed me Dugan’s:

  You do what you can do and I’ll do what I can do

  Dugan turned Kurt’s plate in front of his eyes like a steering wheel and read:

  I was giving blood to soldiers who were giving blood

  “Nice work, Kurt,” he said and lit a cigarette. “Hester, do you have any buttermilk?”

  “No, Dugan, she doesn’t,” Judy answered.

  Hester spun the dial on a large radio, bending close to read the numbers and soon the room filled with Souza’s marching music.

  “I know the DJ,” she said. “He’s very well-spoken.” She took my hand and pressed my palm to the polished mahogany. “It was my father’s,” she said. “A Jackson Bell from the thirties.”

  “It has a warm sound,” I said.

  There was a break in the music, and the disc jockey read copy, inviting listeners to a benefit for the Drop-In Center. He said, “Come on, come all!”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘come one?’ ” I said. Hester might not have heard me, because she raced over to the pan where linguica fried.

  Creeley asked Wayne what he did, and Wayne said he was a carpenter.

  “You sure picked a poor place to stack sticks,” Creeley said.

  Jeanne tried to change the subject, and found a baseball on the floor and rolled it at Pepe, but she threw it hard and the dog yelped. She said to Kurt, “I’d like a big dog like yours.”

  “Why do you want a dog?” Dugan asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jeanne said. “For protection, and a big furry thing’s nice to hug on cold nights . . .” She smiled crookedly and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Isn’t that why you got married?” Creeley asked, and then he began a story about his friend Bill Glover who lived in Clarksville, and his friend, Jack Clark, who lived in Gloversville.

  I stood near the kitchen with Judy and Hester. Ted rose from his chair with difficulty. He cupped his hand to my ear and said, “I saw Creeley’s missing eye. I saw under his eyelid when he turned toward the bay. There’s a tiny black dot in there.” He raised his forefinger to his thumb. “A dark marble!”

  Hester was saying to Judy, “It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath,” as she sprinkled powdered sugar over a tray of beignets.

  Dugan called to Judy, “Is there any buttermilk?”

  “No, Dugan. There is no buttermilk. Shut up!”

  Page said to Stanley, “Have you read What’s O’Clock?”

  Stanley said, “Okay, just one more,” and held out his glass.

  Creeley tilted a candle, pouring hot wax into his palm. “Statues and statuettes,” he said as the wax solidified and we watched the gathering tallow. Jeanne leaned toward his hand, closer and closer to the flame until it snaked up and caught her hair, spurred on by hairspray and perfume. Kurt leapt from his chair, paper plates flying, and slapped his palm against the side of Jeanne’s head as she laughed drunkenly, hysterically and, when the fire was out, she was bald at the temple but not burned.

  Stanley said, “You’re lucky. You’re very, very lucky,” and his words were echoed by Kurt, Gail and Ted, who all chimed in about her good fortune.

  From the kitchen, Hester said, “True love is friendship caught afire.”

  Creeley spoke about how much Provincetown meant to him, that he had lived here with his first wife. He motioned toward Pearl Street and said the first poem in For Love is dedicated to Slater Brown, a friend of Hart Crane. He said he sat in Brown’s studio, now part of the Work Center, and listened to his stories about poets. Then Creeley grimaced about his marriage, working the wax and getting tearful. He sipped his Bloody Mary and composed himself.

  “Did something happen to your wife, Bob?” Stanley asked. We sat in wonder, guessing illness or death.

  Creeley squinted. “It was terrible,” he said. “Munchies, pasta, chocolate, day and night. She gained fifty pounds.”

  Hester set the tray of her specialty on the table. “My mother used to say, eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”

  “Easy for a skinny malink like you,” Creeley said, looking Hester over and at the same moment each of us stared, admiring her shape under the apron.

  She pointed at me and said, “I need help in the kitchen.”

  “Look!” Creeley said. On his palm stood a horse he had sculpted out of wax. He combed its neck with a toothpick, making a mane. “Funny how it looks more real without eyes or mouth,” he said, and placed it on the table.

  Judy served eggs and everyone praised the beignets. Hester did not seem interested in the food. I was hungry but hungrier to be alone with the strange hostess who spoke strangely. She opened a slider onto the bay, and we stood on a small deck looking at the lighthouse on Long Point.

  Judy was scolding Dugan for drinking so much.

  “Why, Dugan? Why?” she said.

  “Hester, is there any buttermilk?” Dugan called to the deck.

  “Dugan, there is no buttermilk. Shut up!” Judy yelled.

  Dugan poised a fork before his lips. The trembling mound of scrambled eggs on the silver tines seemed strangely more alive than the man holding it.

  Wayne looked at Jeanne, pointed to his bullshot and said, “What is this I’ve been drinking?”

  Creeley praised the eggs and explained that he left Cape Cod in 1946 and raised chickens in New Hampshire. He became very animated describing their mating rituals saying, “The cockerels are tempted . . .”

  “You mean the cocks, Bob? Don’t you mean the cocks?” Dugan asked.

  “The cockerel, Alan, is what a young rooster is called, an immature bird.”

  Stanley had also raised chickens, and talked about losing his entire brood of leghorns to disease. “They had to be given cyanide by a county agent to make sure it didn’t spread,” he said. “I’ve written about it.” He spoke as if long finished with both the chickens and the poem.

  “ ‘ Not one of them was spared the cyanide,’ ” Porter said, quoting him.

  Hester said to me, “This talk makes me sick on my stomach.”

  “I like your poems,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m only here because of Stanley. He was my teacher at Columbia and fought for me.” She tossed her wild hair to get it out of her eyes but it also had a touch of glamorous self-righteousness and I was hit full in the face with a tsunami of patchouli.

  “That’s nice that he supports your work,” I said. A second wave of fragrance arrived as I spoke.

  “Yes, it is, because unlike everyone here, I eschew the autobiographical.”

  “Like the others, I embrace the autobiographical,” I said.

  “To do so, you must first know who you are,” she said.

  Ted was telling Creeley about his zebra finches. “If I had a permanent address, I’d have a large cage,” he said.

  Gail thought for a moment and then burst into tears at the remark.

  Creeley was back to Glover from Clarksville and Clark from Gloversville. He lamented a trip that Glover took to see friends in Gloversville where he got very drunk. His hosts did not look out for him and he spent the night in jail. Creeley said it was Gloversville’s responsibility to take care of Glover.

  Hester answered the phone, describing the brunch to a friend. “It is a spectacle to be witnessed,” she said.

  Stanley clapped his hands and everyone rose as best he could.

  “The beignets were superb as always,” Stanley said, embracing her. Stanley’s balding head disappeared in her cyclone of h
air.

  “See you at your reading tomorrow, Bob,” Stanley said.

  I was about to ask Hester if I could help clean up, when Creeley began to stack the plates. She smiled at him with feeling.

  We trailed out, and I overheard Hester say, “I retire early.”

  Dugan walked behind me on the stairs. He said, “Skoyles, what do you think about that cockerel/cock distinction Creeley made?”

  Porter answered, again quoting Stanley, “They indulge their taste for chicken from behind.”

  Kurt slipped and had to grab the railing with both hands, sending his morning’s work, several paper plates, careening down the stairs, and rolling to the beach where they blew away.

  That night I listened to the Sports Huddle on the radio and drank a glass of milk with a piece of Portuguese bread. I nursed my pang for Hester and wrote all the words I could think of describing white. When I finished, I felt very dark. My fixation with Hester kept me from eating anything at the brunch, and I opened the bag of potatoes I’d bought at the food co-op, which was housed in the Center’s coal bin. I dropped one into a pot of boiling water and was standing over it when there was a tap on my door. I lifted the long shade and saw Hester with a picnic basket, her hair like cotton candy from the fog. She noticed the steam and pushed past me, right to the stove. “What are you doing?” she asked, peering into the pot. “Boiling a potato?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why?” She seemed incredulous, and poked the water with a fork. Her white finger looked like a lily petal next to the misshapen globe.

  I usually went into contortions to avoid an embarrassing truth, but there was nothing else to say when faced with the boiling potato. “Because I was hungry,” I said.

  “Beignets were left over, and linguica.” She put the basket on the counter and looked around. “Cozy,” she said, sitting and wrapping her coat around her. I turned up the thermostat.

  “That was fun today,” I said.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.” She sighed. “It took me a while to get rid of Creeley.”

  “For Love is one of the few books I brought,” I said, nodding to the shelf above the fireplace.

  “He passed out on my couch whereupon he almost crushed Pepe. When he awakened, I served coffee, but that drove him to more statues. He made a very accurate hurricane lamp.”

  “Are you glad to be here?” I asked. “I mean, away from New Orleans?”

  “I like the north, but I’d prefer it if it were in the south,” she said, going into the kitchen.

  “Your potato is ready,” she said.

  Why those words gave me the impulse to put my arms around her I don’t know. Maybe two hungers merging, maybe the pot of cloudy water stirred by her genteel hand. I kissed her by the stove, holding the back of her neck to make sure I reached the chalk face camouflaged by hair. It was like leaving a forest and entering a field, a field covered in snow.

  “Let’s go to my place,” she said and moved toward the door.

  “Why not stay here?” I said. “The heat’s starting to come on.” I touched the baseboard.

  “Short the way,” she said, “but pitiless the need to walk it.” I spun around. She had spoken in Stanley’s quavering lilt.

  I put on my jacket and we left to the ticking pipes.

  Hester’s apartment smelled like pastry and hairspray. She handed Pepe to me. He was eagerly licking my hands when she poured two glasses of wine from a bottle with the label, Laughing Bride/Weeping Wife, and set them next to a plate of beignets. With the lights off, we could see the moon brightening the moored boats in the harbor.

  “I forgot to feed him,” she said, and poured kibble into a bowl. We sat on the couch and kissed again, then refilled our glasses. A few minutes later she got up and called me to her bedroom. A picture window faced the ignited harbor and Hester looked ghostly, even whiter in a black slip. I undressed and got in bed.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said, leaning on her elbow. “I’m demanding.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, moving closer. “Don’t worry.”

  “You have to be gentle.”

  “There’s nothing stronger than gentleness,” I said.

  “Repeat?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  “You have to follow my instructions,” she said.

  I lay on my back and breathed upward as if exhaling smoke.

  “Did you have sex education in school?” she asked.

  “No, it was a Catholic school.”

  “I did, and the teacher, Miss Louise, said on the last day we should bring in our questions about sex on index cards. She read them and answered them.”

  “Did you bring one?”

  “Yes, but I was afraid she’d recognize my handwriting, so I went to the typing room and typed it out.” Hester was laughing, laughing hard, which got me laughing.

  “I typed, What is considered unnatural between a man and a woman?”

  “Uh oh. What did Miss Louise say?”

  “She skipped it! She shuffled through all of them and she didn’t read mine!”

  “There’s a finite number of combinations.”

  “Stanley says that man gets his greatest gain by going against what comes naturally to him.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, and turned to get my arms around her.

  She put her lips together in a child’s imitation of a kiss. She was even prettier like that, her snub nose, her crazy hair on the pillow.

  “Things that take place without effort are rarely remembered with pleasure.” She sang the line in Stanley’s knowing, mischievous voice as my face leaned over hers. It was creepy enough so that I asked, “Is this your idea of foreplay?”

  “Be patient, doctor.”

  The combination of coquettish sayings and non sequiturs in Stanley’s voice was keeping me off balance, and this last remark confused me entirely. She had a strange locution, but I could make even less sense out of the patient and doctor wordplay.

  “I’m not a doctor,” I said, imagining all the guys in Columbia’s doctoral program who had gone to bed with her.

  “Yes, you are,” she said, yanking the sheet off and saying, “I like to lie very still.” She was rigid, arms at her sides and legs closed. Her taut slim body seemed made of plaster, or clay into which god had not yet breathed life. She ordered me to massage her, to pinch her, to mouth her, all the time calling me doctor.

  “Put your whole hand in, doctor,” she said, writhing and sighing. Doctor, doctor, doctor . . .

  When we finished, she brought a bottle of brandy into bed, and two crystal liqueur glasses.

  “That was okay, wasn’t it? Not too weird?” she asked.

  “It was great,” I said. Weird did not describe making love to Hester.

  “If I’m screwy, blame my breeding,” she said. “When I was a girl, my mother sent me to our doctor to teach me the facts of life. He described fucking through hand gestures like charades, he kept pushing a pencil into his closed fist very violently. It was like he molested me via finger puppetry.”

  “Everyone learns those things in odd ways.”

  “Do you think so? What about you?”

  “By watching dogs mount a bitch in turn.”

  “Don’t quote Yesenin’s worst line,” she said in Stanley’s tremor. “Tell me the truth.”

  “My father used to kneel by my bed and read from a book called, Listen, Son, which he kept in his sock drawer.”

  She turned very earnest and said, “Our doctor told me that many men would want to have anal sex, but I should never do it. He was insistent. Of course, that made me wonder.” We had another brandy and she put the bottle in the hutch. She went to the bathroom and came out with a jar of Pond’s cold cream flat on her palm.

  “I’m all set,” she said. “You just have to do yourself.”

  She lay face down on the bed and I pushed into her. She turned her head, and said, “You’re in my asshole, doctor,” an
d closed her eyes.

  Afterward we took a shower together. “I think sex is a sad thought danced, don’t you?” she said, soaping herself.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it that way.”

  “Stanley thinks like that. That’s why he’s so great. A really great poet.”

  “Yes, he is,” I said.

  She got into bed and leaned against the headboard.

  “If only he weren’t so old, but even so, he’s with Elise,” she said.

  “He’s over seventy,” I said.

  “You know what he told me once,” she said. “After a few? He said, ‘Just because the head of the leek is white doesn’t mean the tail isn’t green.’ ”

  “He is a great poet,” I said.

  “I retire early,” she said. “You can stay if you like, but I’ve got to get some sleep. It’s my turn to work the food co-op tomorrow.” She lifted a brush from the nightstand and dragged it through her hair, which filled the room with a boisterous fragrance.

  She slid under the covers and in a few minutes breathed deeply. I looked out the window and at the odd woman next to me. As I was daydreaming, Hester got up and drew the heavy opaque drapes, so the room went black.

  “The moonlight was erasing my dreams,” she said, collapsing into bed and falling asleep.

  My stomach rumbled. I went to the table and ate a beignet. Powder drifted along the front of my chest and glittered in the moonlight. Hester called from the bedroom. I said I wanted to look out the window for a moment and stuffed an entire donut in my mouth and drank some Laughing Bride before returning. When Hester drifted off once more, I raided the plate again, this time bringing two beignets to bed. The two I chose were hard and I tore them into pieces. Hester rolled over, facing me, eyes shut. I leaned off the side of the bed and felt Pepe at my fingers trying for one of the beignets. I broke off an inch. He took it and raced, nails clicking, to his round cushion. The sound of his little crunching teeth made me laugh, and I wanted to hear it again. I flung a crust. The room, silent except for the foghorns, came to life with the sounds of Pepe’s scrambling claws, sniffing in the dark, and then the happy victory of his minute mouthfuls. I tossed another piece, and another. The sniffing followed by the chewing turned me into a chuckling fool. I was happy, thrilled to be in a bed by the bay with a pretty woman, a strange one, yes, but a fellow poet and protégé of a famous poet, casting pieces of Louisiana pastry into the air, and sharing them with a mouse-like dog.