It Is Solved By Walking

by Catherine Banks

  MARGARET walks on.

  The male doctoral candidate is also territorial.

  MARGARET stops.

  She walks on.

  The male English literature doctoral candidate establishes his territory by taking down his competition. If it is a male competitor he eats him while whirling his inferior’s entrails over his head. Of course, if it is a female competitor he fucks her.

  MARGARET gasps.

  Thus the competition is eliminated and his territory is established.

  MARGARET is unable to speak.

  The candidacy exams just successfully completed, his, and the research trip, tomorrow, hers.

  MARGARET walks on more quickly.

  I was of three minds,

  Like a tree

  In which there are three blackbirds.

  Throughout, WALLACE will use his binoculars and make notes exactly as though he is observing in the field.

  MARGARET longs to escape her mind/memory.

  Seven forty-two a.m. The male wakes at the ready. Immediately he wants the female to engage in sexual relations. The female goes to the bathroom and carefully applies spermicidal jelly to her diaphragm and tucks it inside. There must not be a baby Magpie.

  The male waits patiently, chirping from the bed that to have his candidacy exams behind him is amazing. He can’t imagine being her with that near-death experience still ahead.

  Seven forty-two a.m. The female is still only one set of candidacy exams behind the male. They make I’m-done-my-exams-but-you-are-not whoopee.

  Ten thirty-six a.m. The male doctoral candidate…

  MARGARET does not want this conversation in her head. She gazes out over the water. Slowly she begins to walk.

  Ten thirty-six a.m. The John reads from the letter inviting the Margaret to Hartford, Connecticut, to interview a dear friend of Wallace Stevens. John declares the man gay and a bitter failed poet because he mentions taking Margaret to a tea room for “elevenses” when she arrives and that he may have some surprising information on one Mr. Wallace Stevens, Esquire. They make I’m-so-glad-I-am-not-a-gay-failed-poet-living-in-Hartford-Connecticut-and-eating-out-on-Wallace-Stevens-stories whoopee.

  One fifty-one p.m.

  One fifty-one p.m. Where is she?

  MARGARET groans.

  The groan is involuntarily, as one does when a difficult memory surfaces. WALLACE holds up the binoculars.

  Ah there Margaret is, at her desk working. John stands behind Margaret’s desk chair as she checks through all her notes she is to take on the research trip. He begins the I’m-so-bored-Magpie-when-you’re-so-busy ritual. He hints. He sings a little of “Sexual Healing.” She laughs. He says, Please? They do (pause) it.

  MARGARET has reached the far point.

  Five thirteen p.m.

  MARGARET: No!

  WALLACE: Five thirteen p.m. On the kitchen floor. Unbelievable but duly recorded. She is to leave in eleven hours. There is something she will need but she doesn’t know what it is, of course, she is in the act of forgetting. At this moment the female’s private parts must be rather (delicately) raw?

  MARGARET: On fire.

  WALLACE: Eleven oh-nine p.m. She leaves in five hours. What, again?

  MARGARET walks past him and crawls into the bed.

  The male makes the plaintive call so familiar in the bedroom before parting.

  WALLACE speaks these lines like a bird call.

  Will you miss me? Will you miss me? Will you miss me?

  He curls behind her. He is cocksure, isn’t he? She lifts her knee, genitals aflame. He slides in.

  What is she thinking? What is she thinking? What, Magpie?

  MARGARET: Now he will know that I love him.

  WALLACE: John, Magpie, love, up a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

  WALLACE folds up the chair.

  MARGARET: It was love.

  WALLACE stops.

  WALLACE: And the crucial notes for the interview? Hours later on the dark road, the road black slick with rain, you remembered.

  MARGARET sits up.

  MARGARET: It wasn’t raining… you and your embellishing poetics.

  WALLACE turns towards her, slowly shakes his head.

  WALLACE: Too late to turn back, you remembered.

  MARGARET: I didn’t ask you to be my…

  WALLACE: …imaginary friend?

  MARGARET: Enemy. Your fan club is called the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

  WALLACE: Yes, I never strove to be beloved by all or even one.

  In those five couplings the female doctoral candidate falls one full year behind the male doctoral candidate.

  MARGARET: Why did you choose that moment of no possibility of turning back to take up residence here?

  MARGARET taps her head.

  John, Margaret, and black-hearted Wallace Stevens up a tree.

  WALLACE: Because as any birder knows, blackbirds and academics cannot mate.

  MARGARET: Then you should have left me years ago.

  The light leaks away from WALLACE.

  …What? Now? Are you leaving me now?

  The light grows around him.

  WALLACE: I am here at your pleasure.

  MARGARET: You are here at my pain.

  stanza iii

  pantomimes

  WALLACE lies shrouded in a sheet on the bed.

  WALLACE: The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

  It was a small part of the pantomime.

  Pause.

  The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

  It was a small part of the pantomime.

  He sighs deeply.

  MARGARET enters. She takes off the raincoat, shaking it out. Under her raincoat is a black silk nightie. It is short and revealing but not in a sexy way, rather in an exposed way.

  Lovely walking attire.

  MARGARET wraps herself in John’s housecoat.

  MARGARET: I couldn’t sleep.

  WALLACE retrieves an orange from the bed.

  I wanted to be her.

  WALLACE: Who?

  MARGARET: Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

  WALLACE: Ahhhhh. “Sunday Morning.”

  MARGARET: Dr. Killam read it to us in my third year American Poets seminar.

  WALLACE: The “What a splendid romp with words, Margaret, A+” Dr. Killam?

  MARGARET: I used to like you.

  WALLACE: The poem is not about a woman who keeps a bowl of oranges in her bedroom.

  MARGARET changes the topic.

  MARGARET: I had a dream last night.

  WALLACE: Well?

  Tell me what it was about. You know you’re dying to. Sorry.

  Three guesses?

  One. It is your defence, everyone in the room is clothed? Nude? You are nude? Clothed?

  Two. You’re on an airplane that won’t leave the ground? The air?

  MARGARET: Once I thought you’d come to anoint me.

  WALLACE: You insist on these roles, brute/martyr, that’s the bore, and we were never married.

  MARGARET: I would have divorced you.

  WALLACE: Oh I know, years ago.

  MARGARET: But you’re a Catholic… Ha.

  WALLACE: There you go again trying to make this about me.

  She withdraws to recover.

  MARGARET: In my dream he said, “I want to come back.”

  WALLACE: Three. It was John from beyond…

  So he wanted to come back. So?

  MARGARET: It’s metaphysical.

  WALLACE: Define, Magpie.

  MARGARET: Metaphysical, an uncommon noun, a type of nose clip used by Himalayan sheep farmers to prevent the stench of rutting males from entering their left nasal passage.

  WALLACE: Ahhh, the self-mocking bird.

  MARGARET: Fuck you.

  WALLACE: You can, you know.

  MARGARET: Fuck a dead poet?

  WALLACE: Dredge it all up. Go a
head, make the poem be about sex.

  MARGARET: How can I when you never got any?

  WALLACE: I have evidence of married sex my dear, a child.

  MARGARET is stricken. WALLACE gets up from the bed. He is wearing the upper half of a wedding dress.

  The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

  It was a small part of the pantomime.

  The pantomime! The anti-hero puppet Punch and his wife Judy evolved out of the “pantomime.”

  The large shadows of Punch and Judy loom above them.

  MARGARET: Punch and Judy… the blueprint of conjugal rights.

  WALLACE: Lovely j sound, “j” (He smiles.) as in “J”ohn.

  MARGARET walks, gazing into the eye of the matrimonial bed.

  MARGARET: A week after the wedding John said, “What about my conjugals?” “Fuck your conjugals,” I laughed back. Conjugal rights, ridiculous. We were in our twenties, it was the 1980s not the 1580s. It made us giggle, that word. Imagine that, daring to giggle! It is unbearable really, how naive we were… how we thought… I thought we’d escaped all that because for our wedding reception we went to hear the raucous lesbian rocker Carole Pope. That we were not entering that oldest of stories, that we too were not bit players in our anti-wedding wedding clothes, that the pantomime whirling around us was not binding us in as securely as it had bound our parents, whose marriages we laughed at too.

  She musses the bed as though two people have been making love. She walks on.

  We had really beautiful sex five times in our eighteen years together.

  The morning after our wedding was one of those five.

  We moved together oh…

  MARGARET becomes lost in the memory.

  WALLACE makes a small sound to call her back.

  The details are indescribable even if I were the poet…

  WALLACE: …you were sure then, you would become?

  MARGARET wretchedly nods.

  In the dream, is that what he asks to come back to, that pure moment of beginning?

  MARGARET: Yes, when we didn’t yet know that without eyes without ears we had backed our way into—

  WALLACE: —the Punch and Judy show!

  Starring as Judy—

  MARGARET: —me.

  Judy shadow bows.

  WALLACE: Punch—?

  MARGARET: —You know.

  WALLACE waits.

  John.

  The shadow Punch bows.

  WALLACE: The crocodile?

  The crocodile appears.

  The crocodile, John’s tenure.

  Punch holds up a stick.

  The STICK, time ticking out on Magpie’s Ph.D.

  The crocodile retrieves the baby, holding it in its vicious mouth.

  And the baby is…

  MARGARET: Wait.

  Words were the stick.

  WALLACE: Words?

  MARGARET: His words. He was through the hoop of fire, his words. His words had Doctor, always Doctor in front of them. Blackbirds were only a small part of the pantomime.

  WALLACE: Yes.

  MARGARET: You, Wallace Stevens, were, are still, the relentlessly grinning crocodile.

  Snap. Snap.

  And the baby is…… the babies.

  There is the crying sound of two babies from the space above. MARGARET is hungry for that sound. She is pulled towards it.

  MARGARET circles beneath the spiral staircase.

  stanza iv

  the promise

  WALLACE slowly gets out of the wedding gear and the Punch and Judy shadows fade away.

  WALLACE: A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman are one.

  A man and a woman

  Are one.

  A man and a woman and a blackbird

  Are one.

  MARGARET quickly grabs what she needs for a walk and heads out the door. She is walking away from a demon.

  MARGARET: The best orgasms of the marriage were during my (it is hard to say this in plural) pregnancies… My body shimmered with them. Every nerve ending leapt up, vibrating like a blind earthworm coming out of the earth to feel the sun for the first time.

  The first time, the sound that broke out of me could not be contained within the bedroom… it travelled through the ceiling… shot through the roof peak and sang its note all the way into the dark bed of stars… That sound…

  WALLACE: …was most un-Magpie like.

  MARGARET: Yes.

  She tests a sound.

  Not anything like that. Not guttural, not smutty, not weak.

  From that sound on I’m not Magpie anymore.

  She pauses, looking out at the ocean.

  I was only weeks pregnant. We had gone to the cottage to consider the… consequences of her, no, not of her… of me being so stupid as to get pregnant at the wrong time. The most wonderful sex of our marriage happened that night between John and me and Ladybird. It is as pure as what? a promise? yes oh yes. But he can’t, doesn’t feel her presence so really it is between the two of us… Ladybird, me.

  My skin is charged… humming with the essence of our beings entwining… She asks for the promise and I answer her with that sound I couldn’t have held back, even if I had known it was coming.

  The points he makes during the weekend, and every point his eyes look, I answer with nothing. Ladybird chirps, “I am here, I am here, I hear.”

  The morning of the last day we stand in the bedroom and he asks, “So, what will you do?” and I answer,

  A man and a woman

  Are one.

  A man and a woman and a blackbird

  Are one.

  He says…

  MARGARET cannot go on.

  WALLACE: You’ll never finish now.

  MARGARET: He leaves the bedroom, the cottage. I watch from the dormer as he flings himself down the path and this time it is raining… a heavy, drenching grey rain. He’s gone for hours.

  We are planning to be back in the city early but the afternoon is almost gone. Something tips, some ballast that I have been sure of shifts and I am suddenly afraid.

  A message drops into my head… if I have this child he will leave me. A second message rolls at the feet of the first: if I don’t have this child, he will leave me. But I nudge that thought out of sight… for years.

  His mother calls up the stairs, “John are you up there?” She needs him to check the crawl space before he leaves. She thinks in the night she heard some animal cry out. “We can’t have an animal nesting in the place, Margaret.”

  MARGARET touches her face, which reddens with the memory of those words.

  I say, (calling) “John’s not here but I will tell him to check when he gets back.”

  My answer a fissure, a tiny tear… a wound. “I am here,” Ladybird chirps, “I am here, I hear.”

  Do you want to know the most painful human experience?

  WALLACE: The undoing of something entwined in blood and bone?

  MARGARET: The most painful human experience is to feel oneself—

  WALLACE: —name things, my dear—

  MARGARET: —to feel Margaret moving through the world and to see every consequence of Margaret’s actions.

  (louder) “John’s not here but I will tell him to check when he gets back.”

  WALLACE: It was hardly a betrayal of Judas’s proportions.

  MARGARET: When is a promise a promise?

  WALLACE: When it stops an action?

  MARGARET: I hold the ladder as John, half disappeared into the attic crawl space, shines the flashlight into the womb-dark hole. There is no pretense in his jawline as he assures his mother that he can’t see the animal that our… my actions are bringing forth into the world instead of…

  WALLACE: (tenderly) …a baby.

  MARGARET: From that moment on Ladybird cannot find her breath in my womb. Before we reach the city the blood stains.

  ……John?

  WALLACE: You’ve lost something hardly begun. We�
��ll wait now until you’ve finished your Ph.D., Margaret.

  MARGARET: Sex. Yes. But not to get pregnant again… No. No.

  Well, yes again, but far too late.

  Long after all things body and soul are unbearable.

  stanza v

  inflections piled on innuendoes

  MARGARET: Sexual drought does not mean there is no sex, it means there is absolutely no memorable sex. How did it go on for so long? So long, slang for goodbye.

  (thinking aloud) What word? The word. That sound. That word.

  Cosmo Girl, while counting the calories in my grocery cart, has all the answers of how to turn it up, turn him on. Hot sex on the count of five.

  WALLACE: There is something pathetic or terribly beautiful, you choose, about a long line of frazzled, panicked wives furtively reading Cosmo’s sex tips in the grocery line.

  MARGARET: Hey, want to hear something funny? There is something pathetic or terribly beautiful, you choose, about a long line of frazzled, panicked poets furtively reading Cosmo’s sex tips in the grocery line.