by John Skoyles
“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, write articles or books to order, write forewords or introductions, make statements for publicity purposes, do any kind of editorial work, judge literary contests, give interviews, take part in writers’ conferences, answer questionnaires, contribute to or take part in symposiums or ‘panels’ of any kind, contribute manuscripts for sales, donate copies of his books to libraries, autograph works for strangers, allow his name to be used on letterheads, supply personal information about himself, or supply opinions on literary or other subjects.”
Henry then showed the card, with Wilson’s answer to his letter scrawled over it in big black letters, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
He read from his book, A Countdown at Eighty, and then “A Narrative Poem of the Norse Discoveries of America.” Spear cheered him on from the front row, calling him “brother.” Next to her, the poet Sally Elgin, wrapped in scarves and appearing much older than her sixty years, drank from a flask.
Rorem stopped me on the way out and said, “You look like a man who’s been waiting a long time for a bus.” I could feel he was getting ready to give me a bad grade.
Lewis Abolia, known for his sonnets, invited everyone to his room at the top of the mansion to toast the poets with port. Dalton, who liked Henry, brought several blueberry pies, with help from his girl in the kitchen, and everyone held slices on sagging paper plates. After a glass of wine, Henry fell asleep in a rocking chair, the pie on his lap, his chin lost in his beard, looking like one of the Norsemen he described. Sally whirled through the room, commending the blueberries at the top of her lungs so loudly that even Spear shuddered. I talked with a woman in her late twenties, a fiction writer, who told me she had published stories in the New Yorker. Her name was Melissa Owen, and I thought we were hitting it off when she excused herself, saying she had to make a call. And yet she stayed. And mentioned again that she had to make a call. There was only one phone in the mansion, and a line usually formed to use it. I finally realized she was trying to get me to ask who she was calling.
“Your boyfriend?”
“No,” she whispered, “M’editor.”
“Who?”
She said it again, a breathy word I couldn’t understand.
“M’editor.” She closed her eyes when she spoke it. “M’editor at the New Yorker.”
“Oh,” I laughed, “Your editor!”
“We have to discuss changes.”
Sally had overheard us, and pointed a finger at Melissa, shouting, “I must make a call myself!” She asked Dalton to put another piece of pie on her plate and unsteadily rushed out the door. Melissa did not seem to care that she would have to wait.
“He thinks it’s the best thing I’ve done.”
We were interrupted by Abolia yelling at two other poets, “I’m not bitter! I am not bitter!” Leaded windows surrounded Abolia’s bed, and I recognized the room as Stanley’s, the room in the tower he had told me about. Henry opened his eyes and asked if I would escort him to West House. I said I would, and waited while he lectured the young poets for five minutes on contemporary poetry’s neglect of the amulet as a fecund image.
Dalton told me the kitchen girl asked him for a reference to art school. Melissa repeated, “m’editor,” to a leftist novelist from the village, who turned away, saying, “New Yorker, New Schmorker!”
When I thought Henry had run out of steam, he pulled a piece of paper from his overstuffed wallet and read a poem clipped from the take-out menu of Hattie’s Chicken Shack in downtown Saratoga. The room quieted. “It’s called ‘Woman,’ ” he said, and read:
She’s an angel in truth, a demon in fiction.
A woman’s the greatest of all contradiction.
She’ll scream at a cockroach and faint at a mouse,
then tackle a husband as big as a house.
She’ll take him for better, she’ll take him for worse.
She’ll split his head open, and then be his nurse.
And when he is well and can get out of bed,
she’ll pick up a teapot to throw at his head.
You fancy she’s this, but you find that she’s that
for she plays like a kitten and fights like a cat.
In the evenings she will, in the mornings she won’t
and you’re always expecting that she does when she don’t.
Some women in the room began to hiss at the third line, but Henry persisted until the end, which had Abolia applauding and Spear puzzled.
“Let’s go, Henry,” I said, and we went down the staircase arm in arm.
Melissa was waiting for the phone, stamping her red shoes. She said, “You’re not supposed to stay on that long. Sally knows that!”
I leaned Henry against the wall and tapped the solid oak door of the booth.
“Maybe it’s empty,” I said, listening.
“No, she’s in there,” Melissa said. “I heard her.”
When there was no sound, I knocked loudly, wondering if Sally might be hard of hearing.
“Let me take a look,” I said, and when I turned the knob, Sally, who had fallen asleep against the door, tumbled out and crashed her plate, pie and fork onto my feet, yelling, “This isn’t my stop!”
Melissa and I picked her up and Melissa guided her to her room.
Henry said, “She has nice legs.”
As we crossed the grounds, he said he didn’t want to be boastful in public, but he had received letters from two well-known poets in response to A Countdown at Eighty.
“Here they are,” he said, handing me a flashlight and paper strips from his wallet. “Read the underlinings.”
I focused the beam. You’ve outdone yourself, Henry.
“Nice, isn’t it?”
“Very nice,” I said.
“Someday I’ll tell you who they are. Read the other.”
I found the sentence circled in blue ink. I always know a poem by Henry Chapin!
“I didn’t want to brag,” he said.
Two poets, Sandro Brezini and James Dorwin, invited me for a drink downtown. Dorwin was a gaunt Midwesterner who had the odd habit of scratching his head with the hand opposite to the itch, so his right fingers circled over his head and above his left ear in a simian gesture. His grandfather invented Shredded Wheat, which, he said, changed the way Americans ate breakfast in the morning. Brezini was powerfully built, but dainty. After Del Tredici played the piano after dinner, he called, “Oh David, how I love to watch your fingers fly!” He began a series of poems, a dialogue between the black and white keys on the piano.
The bar, The Neutral Corner, was outside Saratoga proper, in the woods behind the Grand Union, far from the touristy Triple Crown, Winner’s Circle, and Thoroughbred’s. Dorwin said that famous boxers used to hang out there, and that the place was filled with autographed photos. Brezini asked what the name meant and Dorwin explained that when you floor an opponent, you have to retreat to the farthest neutral corner before the referee can start his count.
As we were getting into the car, the English critic Malcolm Bradbury leapt from a hydrangea. Since he didn’t have transportation, he hung around the parking lot, hitching rides. Bradbury had founded a renowned creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. He smoked a pipe and his wiry long hair sprung from his head in all directions. We drove through the main streets of Saratoga, past the supermarket and onto a dirt road that led to the bar.
“How’d you find this place?” I asked.
“The bartender at the Winner’s Circle said his brother owned it,” Dorwin said.
“I also got the feeling his brother was a loser,” Brezini added.
The bar was packed with tradesmen in work clothes who looked us over. We paraded past them in our khaki pants and white button downs and sat in a booth in the back room, which had a pool table. The waitress took our drink order and also gave us menus of Chinese food. The
Neutral Corner was both bar and a Chinese restaurant. I
went to see the photos. Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano—all signed to Bill. I guessed Saratoga drew them here in its prime, and then I noticed each name was scrawled in the same handwriting. I told Dorwin about the fake autographs and he picked up a cue, walked into the bar and darted it toward several photos.
“You got a problem?” the bartender said.
“These are all signed by the same person.”
“Asshole!” the bartender said, pumping glasses into the soapy sink.
We were explaining the ruse to Bradbury and Brezini when a young woman entered through a rear door. She wore a tight blouse, short skirt and high heels and approached a three-foot square platform. A table of her friends cheered and one played “Midnight at the Oasis” on the jukebox. The Neutral Corner was a bar, a Chinese restaurant, and a strip club. The girl danced very awkwardly and self-consciously. She removed her blouse, all elbows and forearms. Then she swiveled out of her skirt and fought it off, as if she were undressing in her apartment, solitary and sorrowful. A minute into the song, she stepped from the little square, put her hands to her face, and ran from the room. Two women from her table followed with her clothes.
“I feel sorry for her,” Dorwin said, “but it was erotic.”
“You call a little girl from the sticks standing on a pallet in a cheap bar-cum-Chinese restaurant erotic?” Bradbury asked, puffing hard on his pipe.
The bartender had left his station and stood by our table, looking down at Dorwin.
“You think you know something about boxing, wise guy? I’ll tell you something, and you can bet on this.” He pointed his finger at Dorwin who listened with his mouth open.
“Next heavyweight champion of the world,” and he paused so we could grasp the enormity of the information. “Beau Williford!”
We had another round, and Brezini asked the waitress what happened to the dancer.
“She’s new,” the waitress said. “She didn’t do too bad.”
We were enthusiastically agreeing when the dancer, fully dressed, returned and sat at the table with her friends.
Brezini said, “We should tell her she was good.”
Dorwin added, “Should we tell her we’re poets?” When no one answered, he asked again, “Shall we tell her we’re poets?” He was grinning uncontrollably at the thought that the dancer would be impressed with the quality of her audience. We managed to curb his notion but when we left, Dorwin couldn’t help himself from approaching the would-be dancer’s table as a professional dancer gyrated. Outside, he said, “I told her to keep at it, that it was an art, like ours. Like poetry.”
Barkhausen wrote me from The Institute of Living, a mental hospital in Hartford, where he had checked himself in. Many sentences of his ten-page letter were missing prepositions and conjunctions and I wondered if Artie was on medication. He said he needed to stay calm because he had been seeing everything from the window of a train traveling a million miles an hour. He spent his days reading, but the books he asked for were not delivered. He wanted Marguerite Duras and got Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Irony Mask. Was the “irony” intentional? He wanted Black Sun, the life of Harry Crosby, but got The Black Son, about a boy whose father was a slave and mother a plantation owner. He was working on a novel and said he might use a “Guy de Plume.”
Melissa was in a great mood. Her agent sold her book of stories and she had fallen in love with William Still, a conceptual artist who signed his work “B. Still.” They walked the grounds hand in hand, drove around Saratoga, ate together. By now, many guests had bonded and, when the door for dinner opened, friends claimed tables by setting their drinks next to their plates and then retrieving their napkins from the sideboard. I sat mostly with the poets, Jean Valentine my favorite. She had a quiet demeanor, hushed voice, and a smoky laugh that filled the room. Melissa approached each new arrival, introducing herself and saying, “You’ll do great work here. I have. My book is coming out next year.” Then she nodded, whispering, Simon and Schuster. Her words were perfectly timed to the bowing of her head, just as the nuns in my grammar school had taught us to do at the name of Jesus. At the name of her publisher, all the muscles in Melissa’s neck went limp. Melissa and Bill had decided to live together, but there was a stumbling block—she had a dog and he a cat, and they wondered how the pets would get along. They planned to drive to Brooklyn to introduce them. Melissa would forgo her stay at the Virginia Center for the Arts to be with Bill. “I’ve already had a long year of colonyhopping,” she said.
The composer Giorgio Visconti stood at the front of the dining room, tapped his glass with a spoon and announced that everyone was invited to his composer’s tower for a bash on Thursday. It was a celebration for a performance of his latest piano concerto at Amherst College and he was leaving for it the following day. Henry asked if I would escort him to the party. His back was hurting him and he had a harder time getting in and out of his chair. I said I would, as the tower was a long walk from West House. Dalton said he’d seen Giorgio earlier that afternoon with a woman driving a silver Jaguar, the girlfriend who was taking him to Amherst.
“She’s beautiful, dark hair, black dress, very New York,” he said.
“Big boobs?” Henry asked.
“She was pretty, Henry. I really didn’t check her out that much,” Dalton said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m a rump man myself,” Henry grinned.
“I’m a cock woman myself!” screamed a feminist artist at our table, famous for her sculpture of Emma Goldman made of tampon applicators she found on Jones Beach.
Henry blushed and said, “What a lovely girl.”
It was time for dessert, and everyone rose to the sideboard. As I got up, Henry gave me a pained look and asked, “John, would you bring me a black coffee and a piece of cake? My spine feels like broken glass.”
The artist stared when I placed the plate and cup in front of Henry. He thanked me, saying, “Serving those who cannot serve themselves is humanity at its best,” looking at everyone, so it seemed we formed a brotherhood, a bond, between two rump men.
The night of the party I found Henry in his room reading Death Starts in the Colon. We made our way out of West House and down the pine-needle path. A little moat surrounded the tower. We crossed a rickety bridge, about ten feet long, with rope handrails and I held Henry tightly. The planks swayed. We were talking about Giorgio’s music, which we had heard in the chapel after dinner.
“It sounded like God having a nervous breakdown,” Henry said.
The cock woman was leaning against the tower entrance, smoking with a friend, and she smirked when we approached. We did seem a strange pair. Henry, out of another time, with his beard, long gray hair and woolen coat, and me holding him, his preppie nephew. We continued talking about Giorgio, but just as we got in front of the two women, Henry said loudly, “I like his chamber music, but I’m particularly fond of his SYMPHONY IN G—SPOT!” And then he laughed, twisting away from me and prancing into the tower, balletic and youthful.
The artist glared at me and said, “You’re such an asshole!”
“What did I do?” I said. I could see Henry in the tower, waving his cane at the wine, asking someone to get him a glass of red.
The round tower was three stories tall and made of brick. A boom box played and everyone drank from the full bar. Giorgio wore a Hawaiian shirt and introduced his girlfriend. She was as pretty as Dalton had reported, all in black. Most of the guests brought guests of their own, so it was crowded and noisy. I got in the spirit and drank shots of Old Grand-Dad with beer chasers. Dalton told me the girl from the kitchen had broken up with him as soon as he submitted his reference. Henry joined us, his gray beard stained with burgundy. Dalton brought the bottle of bourbon from the bar and filled my glass again. When I told him I had already had enough, Henry held out his wine glass for a taste and said, “Each stage of the rocket needs fuel!” He began a discourse on varieties of zinfandel and Dalton sneaked off.
I excused my
self from Henry to talk to Jean Valentine. I tried to tell her how much I liked her poems, but my sincere feelings seemed like tipsy flattery. Jean asked how my own work went. I meant to say I felt fortunate to be here, even though I might be poor, but the word portunate came out which evoked her long hearty laugh before she quit me for a cigarette. I had another bourbon, leaned against the wall and watched Dalton dancing with the cock woman. She was a great dancer, and I suddenly noticed how attractive she was. I couldn’t stop myself from watching her slim body zip around the floor. My drunken scrutiny led me to observe a yellow stain, a smudge, but heavier, something three-dimensional on the back pocket of her jeans. I kept staring as she spun this way and that.
Jean returned and said, “She’s quite a dancer,” raising her eyebrows.
“Yes, she is,” I whispered, “but she has a stain or something on the seat of her pants.”
“You’ve been paying close attention.”
“Look!” I said, pointing.
The song ended and, as the artist walked away from Dalton, I followed. I saw it close up. The blotch was sticky and familiar—I was certain it was, yes, it was a butterball!
I tapped her shoulder, and she turned, surprised.
I decided it would be gentlemanly to whisper for the sake of discretion, but when I began to speak, I found myself yelling to be heard above the music.
“I think you sat on a butterball.”
“What?” she said.
I repeated it, but she shook her head.
I turned her by the shoulder and pointed to the smudge. She twisted her neck, saw it, and said, “You are one fucking jerk.”
I walked back to Jean. “I thought she should know,” I said. “I would like to know if I sat on one of those butterballs!” Jean just stroked my elbow.