by John Skoyles
Dalton pointed to the ceiling where a bat dipped and soared.
Henry said, “They’ll go right for your hair!” and many women ran out to the bridge, covering their heads. Giorgio took off his Hawaiian shirt and flailed at the diving bat, circling the circumference of the room, jumping and flinging it against the wall. We all huddled in the middle of the floor as Giorgio and the bat went round and round.
Giorgio swatted the bat when it landed on a protruding brick. The bat and the shirt fell together and the guests moved into a tighter circle. Dalton and I tried to help Giorgio, who bent over the pile of color. Instead of grabbing the bat through the shirt, he inexplicably put his bare hand under it and grabbed its neck between his thumb and forefinger. When he carried it through the crowd, all we could see were two big ears as it went by, squeaking.
A scream came from the doorway. The bat had bitten Giorgio just before he threw it into the night sky. Bradbury ran over, took a handkerchief from his pocket and stanched the blood’s flow. The women returned from the bridge and Giorgio walked around with his girlfriend on his arm, holding a beer in his wrapped hand, telling everyone he was fine.
Henry called Brezini’s favorite poet, James Merrill, “a toe-dancer.” Brezini replied, “Your bits of knowledge came to you like change dropped through a boardwalk. You gathered a dime here, a nickel there . . .”
Henry pointed his cane at Brezini, and said, “You haven’t the brains to understand the epic.”
People started to leave. It was dark, and difficult to see over the bridge, so Giorgio grabbed a lantern and escorted his guests across the moat. Someone walked a drunken Henry to the mansion because I was too drunk. Giorgio asked me to take over the boom box and I fumbled with the tapes, inserting the wrong sides and pressing the wrong buttons. A song finally played just as there was a big fuss at the door because Giorgio had fallen off the bridge. Dalton, Bradbury and I ran out and pulled Giorgio from the moat. He had hurt his ankle and lost the lantern.
Giorgio sat next to his girlfriend, both of them devastated. He had told Dalton that he was looking forward to a big romantic time at the Adolphus Hotel since he had been without sex for the past month, but now his swollen foot rested in an ice bucket and a bloody kerchief covered his hand.
The next night at dinner everyone dressed in white, at the forceful command of a conceptual artist, who wanted to document it. I had forgotten her notion announced earlier in the week, and walked toward the balcony in my blue shirt and jeans. The crowd looked more like a cloud, a gathering of souls, wash on the clothesline, figures from the heavens. Melissa announced to the room that Giorgio had broken his ankle and was in the hospital.
“He missed his nuit d’amour and he’ll also miss the performance,” Melissa told us.
During my last week, vitreous floaters danced on the white wall above my desk and my corneal erosion returned. My throat clicked when I swallowed. I thought about making an appointment with an eye doctor and throat doctor. Paramecium-shaped figures in paisley patterns slid across my updated résumé. One image particularly troubled me. It looked like a question mark, and I kept following it across the page, trying to get a better look and, as I did, I swallowed, and my throat clicked. I was closing one eye and then the other when Jean Valentine knocked. She sat on the bed and asked if I wanted to replace her colleague at Sarah Lawrence, Jane Cooper, who had fallen ill. Classes started in a week. Jean and I left the next day for my interview.
The quarter-acre campus was set on a hill. Some students had already arrived, and one stood under a tree wearing a beret and dabbing at a French easel. I met with the advisory council in the office of its chair, pianist Kenneth Newman, who was discussing his standing order for Birkenstocks. Cold autumn light burnished the pine paneling, illuminating the teapot into which Newman scooped chamomile. Bill Park and Bob Wagner of literature joined us, along with Verna Serrini-Smith, a darkly beautiful historian with an Italian accent and a crimson scarf around her forehead. I recognized Bill Park as the editor of my college poetry text. He said that in the year of its publication, he took his family to France, but then a devastating thing happened. He looked to the sky, and said, “The Norton,” referring to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which replaced all others.
We sat in armchairs around a dank fireplace and Newman filled our cups. He wore a beard with no mustache and as he lighted his pipe in front of a portholeshaped window, I felt I was on a ship.
I handed out my vita, but they put it aside and asked about my favorite poets, what I was reading, what part of my education I thought lacking. We discussed the use of slang in Auden and the influence of Auden on Ashbery. The hour flew by and ended with Ken telling me there was no rank at the college, all teachers were equal members of the writing faculty. As we stood, Verna casually asked about my outside interests as she undid her scarf and shook out her raven hair. I didn’t have any, and I knew I was supposed to. I used to watch the Friday night fights on television with my father, so I said, “Boxing.” Everyone turned, looking again at their poet turned pugilist. When I added, “On TV,” the room relaxed, except for Verna, who squinted.
Jean brought me into the office of Dean Ilya Wachs, who had combed his long white hair over his bald spot, but the unwilling lock fell in the other direction, a scythe-like flip. He smoked and talked about his specialty, Flaubert, and about French poetry. Afterward, I waited for Jean in the snack bar, surrounded by posters advertising coming lectures: Is There Rape in the Animal Kingdom? and Problems Facing Women Rabbis. Jean walked in and said I got the job.
On the drive back, she mentioned that if I were to publish a book, my appointment could be renewed. And if I taught well, it could be renewed again and again. She warned how hard it was to publish a book, with all the competition from students in writing programs, and repeated what Ridge had told me, that you needed luck.
We arrived in Saratoga Springs just before dinner and on the mail table I found a letter from Barkhausen and a note to call the editor of Midwestern University Press. Jean went into the dining room while I phoned. He was effusive about my manuscript. Unlike other editors, he said the love poems got to him, that some really broke him up. I kept thanking him although I found it hard to thank someone who was complimenting me for making him weep. He said again and again, “This is my book. This is my book.” After a silence, I asked what he meant.
“Don’t you know?” he said. “My wife died six months ago of pancreatic cancer. This is my book.” He shouted the words.
Jean had saved me a seat and put her arm around my shoulder when I told her the news. That night I called Ridge. He said, “I told you. You need luck. If his wife hadn’t died . . .”
Barkhausen’s letter contained poems and the news that he would succeed Kurt as Chair of the Work Center’s Writing Committee.
Dalton left, others arrived, and Melissa and Bill returned from Brooklyn. At dinner, Bill explained that his cat, Purr-Mew, was terrified of Melissa’s rat terrier, Pal, and he felt they would never get along. He had devised a test: they would put the animals in the car and drive around the block. Melissa’s dog was in the back, and she drove while Bill held Purr-Mew, but Pal kept barking and climbing over the seat, and the cat scratched Bill badly. He showed the marks on his wrists and arms.
“We’ve decided to let them know each other a little better before we make a move,” he said.
Melissa rose from the table and said, “It goes deeper than that!” She threw down her napkin ring and ran from the dining room.
My stay and Henry’s ended on the same Saturday. I took a last walk through the rose garden, the only part of Yaddo open to the public, and passed a young woman holding a baby. She stepped in front of me.
“Are you a guest?” she asked. I said I was.
“I was born in Saratoga,” she said. “My husband and I used to walk here. He wanted to be a writer. He dreamed of staying in the mansion. That was his goal, but he died last year in a car crash.”
I said I
was sorry.
“We have a tradition in my family,” she said. “We come here when someone dies, and remember them in this rose garden, but I never thought I’d be remembering my husband.” She rocked the child in her arms and said she hoped he’d be able to be a guest one day.
“I hope he will too,” I said, and I left her on that path shouldered with roses.
I loaded my car and drove by the mansion for the last time. I saw Henry and Melissa talking, so I pulled over. Henry stood in front of his ancient Volvo. As I approached, I could hear Melissa ticking off the places she was giving readings over the winter.
“How do you arrange such things?” Henry asked.
Melissa whispered her answer. “M’agent,” she said.
She told us that she was leaving early, a week ahead of time, because she couldn’t bear being around Bill. They had broken up.
“I was hoping to have a normal life,” she said. “Anyway, I just got into MacDowell!” She clapped her hands and lifted herself on her toes. “I guess I’ll go on living grant-to-mouth!”
We said good-bye, and Henry put on leather driving gloves and settled behind the wooden steering wheel. I got in my car and waited for him, but the Volvo sputtered. He tried again and again, but the empty groans continued. I walked over.
“Luckily we’re on a hill,” he said. “Just give me a shove.”
I pushed hard on the bumper and the car began to roll. Henry furiously turned the key and finally the engine caught. He waved his arm out the window in thanks and a few moments later I followed him through the stately gates.
EPILOGUE
We were hell-bent to become poets. Many dodged hell, others were singed by its flames, and a few went up in them. The extracurricular activities at poetry’s finishing school had long-term effects: Alcoholics Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous, loss of life and limb. Some counted the hours without a drink and some the days without accosting strangers or the partners of friends. I recalled my abstemious Iowa classmate, Denise Graves, saying, “After Thanksgiving, everyone in my workshop had taken up with the person on his left.” To counter that atmosphere, she threw a party, her invitation on the bulletin board proclaiming “No Booze! No Smoking! No Dope!” McPeak whipped out his pen and wrote, “No Fun!”
Frank Ridge’s flourishing career featured appearances in the New Yorker, a reading at the Library of Congress, and a Yale appointment. Within a year, sexual harassment charges brought by several students forced him to resign. He said this ultimately saved his life, as he joined SAA, became a sponsor and wrote a memoir about his addiction and recovery. I hadn’t thought of his past as problematic. That his girlfriends far outnumbered mine I attributed to his doggedness and good fortune. Now I remembered the many times he leered at an overweight clerk or dowdy cashier, referring to each as a “sex goddess.” And that he had often said with great assurance that a woman we passed in a supermarket or hallway was flirting with him. I used to think he was lucky. Now I knew, as he did, that he had been out of his mind.
Pryor and Wendy bought a house near the Alamo and Pryor started a journal called Cards that Fell from the Deck. His mission was to right the wrongs of the publishing industry, and his editorial standard demanded that all submissions be rejected by at least a dozen magazines. Belinda Schaeffer taught comparative literature at Vassar and married a French diplomat, spending half the year in Paris. She turned from poetry to criticism and then vanished into theory. Monique and Falcon Namiki married and moved to Tokyo. Newsweek featured an article on the couple, doing business as Namique, whose entrepreneurial skills had made them wealthy. The caption under their photograph read, “They Brought the Croissant to Japan.” Despite running every day of his life and carrying that big .45, Abe Gubegna was murdered in 1986 by Haile Selassie’s men, as he predicted.
Joe Cleary and loudmouth Trotta were banned from The Deadwood after one too many brawls. They divided their time between the Lazy Leopard Lounge and The Depot, two bars by the railroad tracks at the city’s edge. After last call, they continued drinking near the Rock Island Line’s mesmerizing stream of boxcars. One night, a train hit them both. Cleary lost an arm and Trotta a leg. They could be seen downtown afterward, holding brown bags on benches, like victims of an Islamic punishment.
Dan Cook never went to NYU. Upon getting the call to interview, he separated in his mind from Nora and they began to bicker. He insisted she make an independent life for herself instead of being a wife and mother, and urged her to learn photography. By day, she was seen focusing her Nikon on the swing sets and monkey bars of playgrounds; in the evening, at nighthawks dive-bombing the Capitol building. A few months later, someone did move into that river stone apartment, just as Cook planned, but Nora did not fall in love with him. In fact, she fell wholly out of love with her husband, who became her new tenant, banned from their house and her bed. Cook railed that someone at NYU torpedoed him, someone sandbagged him, and now Nora had exiled him to the cell of his own making.
Mike McPeak got up from a table in a Chicago restaurant after a large Italian dinner and died of a heart attack that followed a weeklong binge. His wife sent me a poem she found among his papers:
DEAR JOHN SKOYLES
You and I are not unlike
The morning and evening stars—
Apart by space and time, we never meet.
It’s raining here.
All the rivers are rising again.
I read letters you wrote years ago.
And what are you feeling, my friend?
Since I saw you last,
I’ve not been able to drink like a man.
What was I feeling? I missed my friend. The simile, “like a man,” always seemed to come at the end of sentences dealing with violence. McPeak had given that phrase a new dimension. I recalled the night a state trooper stopped us, when we were drunk and speeding on Interstate 80, McPeak’s greasy hands on the wheel and boxes of Howard Johnson’s fried clams in our laps. The trooper asked him if he’d been drinking, and the question and the clarity bestowed by the beam from his flashlight made me notice that one lens of my friend’s cockeyed glasses was nowhere near his eye.
“To tell you the truth, officer,” he said. “I have had a couple of beers.”
“Okay,” the trooper said. “I want you to park by the side of the road for an hour, then take it easy going home.” As soon as the cruiser’s taillights faded, McPeak floored the gas pedal and we were quickly on our way, and that way had an end, and he had come to it.
Hester returned to New Orleans for her mother’s funeral, but when she arrived, her mother had come back to life. A nurse, Elppa, claimed credit, saying she had unhexed the corpse through voodoo. Hester not only fell under Elppa’s spell, but started calling her poems “charms,” and worked in the nurse’s shop selling statues, potions and oils. Elppa promised to give Hester a juju name over time, just as Elppa’s was Apple in reverse.
Jeanne and Wayne stayed together, a stake and a tetherball. Jeanne continued to manage the Bull Ring and Wayne invented ways to make money during tourist season. I received an invitation from him to subscribe to his wine cooler newsletter. At Jeanne’s insistence, Wayne limited his dope smoking to Herring Cove at sundown, but even then, on his walk home one evening, he wound up receiving stitches at the Drop-In Center from gashing his forehead on a stop sign.
Stanley Kunitz devoted himself to giving poets the chances he never had. He founded Poet’s House, affording space to writers and showcasing every volume of poetry published each year.
My editor asked me to provide a blurb for my book, and I wrote to Dugan, unaware he was undergoing major eye surgery. Nevertheless, he fought to read the manuscript, and Judy mailed his paragraph printed in huge block letters on a fourteen-by-seventeen-inch sketchpad. Dugan, following the example of William Blake, looked through his eye and not with it.
Mitchell Lawson sent me a form letter, saying he was guest-editing an issue of the Iowa Review and asking to include one of my poems. H
e began cordially, saying he remembered the piece and wanted to print it. Out of hundreds of pages of student work, this one had made an impression, and the issue would contain only twenty choices. I should send the poem and permission agreement within the week. I should not send any other poems. He wanted only this one. Any others would not be considered. In fact, if I sent any additional work, or substituted another poem, he would not publish anything at all. I should follow the rules of publication and editorial etiquette, and he failed to see why that was so difficult. He hoped to be able to use my contribution, but if not, he had a second tier of poets just as accomplished. He concluded with the hope that I would be as pleased to be invited, as he was pleased to include me. ML.
McPeak, roused from the grave by this letter, pulled out his pen and wrote on the bottom, “No!”
Out of respect for the dead, I didn’t send the poem.
I moved back to Queens, living with my parents and commuting to Sarah Lawrence, happy with the job and its $8,600 salary. Jean Valentine did not have to take me to lunch during my first weeks because every Tuesday we laughed through the noon hour in the faculty dining room with Grace Paley, Allan Gurganus and Tom Lux. We were often joined by classicist Sam Seigle, whose overstuffed shopping bags spilled small volumes of Hesiod and Theocritus in a breadcrumb-like trail to his office.
Among my students was seventeen-year-old freshman Lucy Grealy who, at our first conference, kept her head down, her blonde hair covering her face. She hardly spoke, which made me babble and joke until she finally looked at me. She was missing most of her jaw, the result of multiple surgeries for cancer. We became close, regularly eating dinners of Chinese takeout in my office. She told me Halloween was her favorite day, the only time she looked like everyone else. Her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, would recount her struggle with the disease. Then there was Becca Schwan, who shaved half her head and wrote poems about Boy George and Fendi furs, and who wore hose clamps on her wrists and biceps. She was well-read, with a great imagination—when I asked her why she had missed an appointment, she said, “My twin fell off a high wire.” One day in my office she kept wriggling in her chair. She eventually opened her shirt and pulled out a white rat named Andy Warhol. At lunch afterward, I told my colleagues. Grace wondered how I responded.