It was not to be. The last evening of class it rained rather ferociously and Penner pedaled home through the downpour tented in a dark tarp like a waning ghost himself with hardly the sort of lengthy adieu I’d hoped for. I got goodby but no address, no “it’s been good,” no “let’s get together sometime,” no number for a phone. Upon reflection, I realized I hadn’t given him my address or phone number either, or said it’s been a pleasure, let’s get together, cuddle up to a cup of java in a cozy dark place I know … no, I had ridden away in the watermelon weather, watching the ground, hunched in my slicker like someone homeless, as, in a way, I was.
I had time to ponder Penner’s incipient Manichaeanism, but I mainly wondered why anyone would be rehashing such an ancient heresy in our time. It also seemed to me easily misunderstood and mistaken for Satanism. This was a feeling which proved unhappily prophetic. If anyone had overheard him say (and it would have been easy) “God hated Lucifer’s intelligence; He always preferred faith”: what would they have thought? And I’d had hints of Penner’s growing fear of women. He simply would not talk to or look at them.
Which is perhaps why he got in such trouble with his landlady, Mrs. Ollie Sowers. Luther, at this time, was living in three attic rooms of Mrs. Sowers’ tall bluff-built house on Peak Street. When I went to visit him I had a lot of steps to climb. There was a wide wood-railed stairway which led to the front door, since the main floor was already half a story in the air. The stairs to the second were naturally narrower but commodious enough. However, Luther was obliged to use the former servants’ staircase all the way to the attic, which he didn’t mind, privacy was important to him, although the passage was narrow and dark, the steps steep, and Mrs. Sowers had the annoying habit of stashing cleaning equipment and stacks of mags on various treads, pretty much catch-as-catch, so you couldn’t even predict where obstacles might be and prepare to avoid them. Luther pointed out to Mrs. Sowers that when he was carrying a fat package or a sack of groceries he couldn’t see his feet or spot the dangers, and that it would be better all round if she could find another place to put the mop bucket or her out-of-date Woman’s Days.
Luther said he spoke most politely to her about it, and I believe him, since he wasn’t a forceful sort, but Mrs. Sowers got snappish, and continued to clutter his climb with her cleaning compounds. So Luther kicked a stack of Liberty Magazines into a slither. Unfortunately, they simply stayed where they’d slid, making the stairway even more treacherous. “Watch where you’re going and you’ll get by,” she told him, using a haughty contemptuous tone which simply asked to be repaid. Penner, with the simplicity of solution, and the self-sacrifice characteristic of genius, fearlessly flung himself from a top step one morning, a buttered English muffin in his fist—what an inspired touch—and lay on the first floor landing in broken-legged pain an hour before his howls were heard.
It was, oddly enough, because of this feat that I saw him again, for there was a small note about the accident and the ensuing lawsuit in the neighborhood freebie sheet which mentioned the hospital where Luther was recuperating. I took myself, as they say, to his side. He was surprised and not undelighted to see me, and soon we were talking as freely as before. Penner had repeated one of his previous mistakes: failing to consider all the consequences. He had not counted on having quite so many injuries: a cracked rib, a cracked—was it?—shin, lots of bruises, and a swollen nose. Not to worry, even though he’d been let go by his most recent employers the day before, because he had been given the customary ten days’ notice and was therefore still covered by the company’s insurance, which certainly served them right.
My area of study enabled me to counsel him on a few legal matters, and I did a bit of fact checking for his case. The Widow Sowers told me she couldn’t bear the boy, as she called him, because he was untidy and smelled bad and stood sideways to her when she talked to him. Odd as last apples, she said he was. Luther had at least one leg to stand on, and that should have been sufficient. The Widow Sowers hadn’t that much, so her insurance company paid up pretty promptly, though Penner wouldn’t tell me to the penny how much. It was still enough to install him in a building with an elevator—he had to use a cane for quite a while—though Luther did regret losing the widow’s bluffside view, which gave him a long look over the tracks to a ribbon of river he could occasionally see between the leaves of a few scrubby trees.
While on the mend, with me seated by his bed, Luther spoke bitterly about his behavior. Revenge ruled the world. That he knew. That was his creed. Alas, he had not been able to live up to his ideal, partly because it wasn’t formulated yet. Mrs. Ollie Sowers suspected something, he was sure, and he’d had to pay a price in pain and disability he shouldn’t have had to pay if he’d played his cards right.
During his hospital stay, Penner had apparently decided to let his beard grow. He sported (if I dare use so predictable a word) a small though poorly trimmed moustache and an equally modest and badly barbered goatee. These were joined to one another by a thin line of hair along the sides of his mouth, so that it was now surrounded by a gentle growth of whisker—a den in which his teeth lay like a heap of wet stones.
After Penner had gotten installed in his new apartment, he invited me over—yes—it was for coffee. We sat in his kitchenette at a little enamel-topped table whose dropped ends he’d awkwardly lift to make room for my knees. He appeared tired, in an interior sort of way. There was so much to do, he said, every day. At the bicycle shop, where he’d taken his tires once again to be repaired, a young lad had sneered at their condition. At the Healthy Harvest store where he’d stopped to purchase some organic and unchemical’d pretzels, an elderly woman had held up the line of customers who were checking out by examining every fold in her purse with nearshot eyes, searching for those pennies which would provide her with exact change, thereby placing her nerdy little need over the patience of others. And the checkout girl (for a girl she was) had assumed he—Penner—was a vegetarian. What an unnecessary insult. And in the mail this morning he’d received a dun for a debt only one week overdue! While Luther was crossing the street, a mere moment behind the light, one of the local yokels had honked at him. He had the car’s description. Penner held up a list. It was long, I could see that much, and was written on paper taken from a roll of cash register tape. Some items had been crossed out. This is just one week’s worth of slights and requitals. The tape, it turned out, was one of the latter.
I know where that bleeper parks his car, where that bleeper lives, but I don’t know yet how to make his horn stick. To learn how to blare a horn will take research. Isn’t it sort of dangerous, I said, tinkering with the fellow’s car. Your intentions might be misunderstood. Chance you take, Luther said briskly. Maybe marshmallow will work. It works on boom boxes. Remember the Tylenol scare? Can’t risk random damage or even inconvenience. Not fair. Have to pinpoint the particular. Have to balance the account. Have to carry it out promptly. Otherwise, he waved the list at me, you get backlogged and overwhelmed. You could stay home more, I offered, to lessen the chances of receiving slights.
A shadow—yes—as from a passing cloud on a summer day—passed over Luther Penner’s face, and I feared my insufficiently serious suggestion had offended him and got me on the list. Then he said: television insults the intelligence. It is so obviously true, and we’ve been told it so often, that repeating the proposition is another insult. He began tightly pleating his paper until it was very small and then he put it away in his shirt pocket. Girls who paint their toes … I almost exclaimed, had he noticed?girls?paint?toes? Those toes affront anyone with discrimination. Well, I said, after a pause, perhaps they’re not aimed at you. Another cloud. Another shadow. People who pierce their ears, he went on finally. People who wear string ties, silver buckles, boots; people who bleach or tease or dye their hair; women who walk about in curlers; people who paint their house purple, keep noisy dogs, don’t scoop their poop; people who try to run cyclists off the road; noisy bikers, nosey landl
ords, pushy people … This was a mood I hadn’t seen him in: wholly petty, consumed by trivial and commonplace complaints. Yet Penner was dreamy-eyed. All those false product choices we’re offered, the silly ads, the promises, the lotteries and sweepstakes … We are treated, you know, treated … like children … like fools … all the time … It’s not just this or that assumption about us that offends. It’s the entire atmosphere of life. One drop does not make a downpour. It’s the constant con. The torrent of lies. Coming from every corner. Molesting every sense. How to resist?
Despite living in a society made of insult and shame, Penner was a fountain of data during those days. He was no longer working at wretched little jobs; he was back in school studying poetry, and planned to take a master’s, if he could, after catching up at the community college. What do you suppose Proust was up to, he asked me in mock-heroic tones. What crime had he committed so serious it required all those froggy words to obscure? I remember looking nonplussed … because I was nonplussed. Proust confessed to his desk, not to a priest. He knew his novel would console him, and his art forgive.
Confession. Penner made as if to bare his breast. Confession. What a sweet revenge it can be. Honesty and openness. Isn’t it lovely how honesty hides the wickedest of intentions? If I mention Proust, I should mention Gide. What does the rascal do, this Gide? He discovers his homosexual leanings. Like many a Frenchman, he goes to the Islamites in North Africa to verify the diagnosis. Knowing how much he loves boys, Gide nevertheless marries his cousin Madeleine. Then what? After a proper time has passed—to make matters most bitter—he writes Corydon, and confesses to the world his so-called wound. But who’s been wounded?
Luther Penner stages a wail. The woman … the wife … the woman … the wife … Ah, Gide and his Protestant conscience. The bounder can’t admire Proust’s book because the fags in it give buggery—all boy-and-baby-love—a bad name. Proust’s people are all perverts of power and pain. Well … isn’t the world wonderful. Wait … it gets better. Gide scoots off to Africa again with his fourteen-year-old concubine Marc … Marc Allégret. How is his wife to understand this? Easy. Gide has gonads for brains, and they tell him to separate lust from love, and having done so, he can confer his love, pure as perfumed fingers, on his cousin, Mme. Gide, while directing his licentiousness safely toward Marc of the lithe thighs.
Despite a past as checkered as the game, Luther was getting on splendidly at school. He was impressing his professors. He was doing the work, keeping up, managing to stay out of trouble. Well, most of the time. Once, he regressed, and everything he’d been aiming at was almost lost. Claude Hoch … Claude Hoch … that instructorless instructor of mine … you know what he said, Penner said to me … no, first … you know what he did? I went to see him about a paper … OK?… and the whole time I was standing there at his desk … standing, mind you, not invited to sit down … Hoch was laying out a solitaire … he looked to put a six on a seven … then … then he says, somewhat apropos of my project, yes, admittedly … doesn’t matter … Hoch maintains to my face that Hopkins … Gerard Manley Hopkins, mind, the priest … was a homo. He said Hopkins was a homo. This man … with a name which sounds like a cleared throat … In mid-my-sentence! I said I was seeing sprung rhythm as a kind of revenge, you know, against the practices of the past, a move against previously ruling meters. And he said, right after that, Hopkins is a homo, he says. Well, the Higher Powers helped me. In the middle of everything, just after he has said that Hopkins is a homo, he says he has to answer a call of nature, and he puts … he slaps a card down on a run of reds, gets up and goes out past me into the hall as if I were invisible … invisible … as if I had no feelings, no soul … so … taking my cue from Claude the Sod, I answered a call of nature too: I pissed in his desk drawer. Copiously. I simply pulled it open and let his clips and bands and pencils and notecards and stamps have it. Then I shut the drawer, zipped up my fly, and lit out. I said to myself: that winsome wee widdle was for Hopkins. I was on air. High there! But now I know … I have touchdown … Now I am ashamed at how far back through childhood I’ve regressed, how little control I have over my lower nature.
Luther went into mourning over the character of his crude kidney-shaped backslid soul, and I didn’t see him for about a month. During that month there was quite a to-do at the community college. Claude Hoch hadn’t immediately discovered Penner’s little prank, but when he did so it was the smell which alerted him. He must have relived the hours which lay between the drawer’s condition of dry and ordered normalcy and its withdrawal into one of smelly contamination—perhaps he even appreciated the pretty pun the act involved—in order to select a couple of likely culprits—those with opportunity, maybe motive, and malicious wit. It was a matter of access, most likely. It was not easy, however, to confront a suspect or broadcast the bad news, given its odoriferous and shameful character. There was a similar quality of embarrassment in the revenge which, earlier, had made Syph shut up. So a memo was sent out advising the innocent, warning the predisposed, and threatening the perpetrator of this unspecified yet jejeune bit of cheapjack lowjinks with exposure, dishonor, and suspension. Luther Penner’s posture, as I’ve pointed out, was normally so passive and humble and servantlike, so modest and discreet, that it made people uncomfortable (its intent, of course); consequently it was difficult for Hoch to believe Luther would have the vulgar gumption which he imagined the deed required; however Penner had been about during the likely time, and so Hoch had Luther in for a little chat. There was no card game in progress, Luther noted with some satisfaction. The desk drawer had been removed to receive some healing rays and enjoy the cleansing air, he supposed. He wondered how much of his urine had leaked from the drawer, and how much had puddled, rusting clips and soaking cards.
This was the real revenge, Luther told me, the happy occasion: listening to the man squirm and turn a pusillanimous phrase, hinting and hiding and hating his own caution, while Luther played deferentially dumb, and dutifully though ignorantly concerned. As their interview was about to conclude, Luther remarked, after a slight shy laugh, that he’d thought Professor Hoch had asked to see him in order to take back his remark about Gerard Manley Hopkins. Penner proudly confessed that he couldn’t help himself. Now Hoch knew. Knew why and who. And was helpless as a pinned bug.
Luther collared me at the college cafeteria, after the month of mourning was up, and kept me cornered for an entire afternoon to talk about literary revenges; not just the kind that occur in movies, plays, and stories as the basis of the plot, but rather about the way women writers in particular wrote their former lovers and ex-husbands into fictions that skewered them, showed them up, righted old wrongs, evened scores, and squared, quite literally, accounts. Not much of that is done by poets, I ventured, perhaps the medium isn’t agreeable. Oh you’re wrong, Penner responded warmly. How about—just to consult a recent instance—how about Lowell’s Dolphin sonnets, the ones in which he actually quotes passages from his wife’s letters? Kids embarrass their parents by failing, by doing stupid things and getting caught. Poets do that too. Dylan Thomas was an expert at it. Until Caitlin no longer felt any dismay for him when he fell in the street or sympathized when he vomited, compelling him to fall and vomit where she could hear and see and smell and suffer. Afterward, he puked for any public. Lowell wrote to the world of his titled English mistress while his wife took nips from his hidden whiskey I suppose. He shamelessly pursued women as if he had a right—as a poet—to be a penis.
Lowell has this manuscript that’s full of purloined lines and indecent endearments, which he shows about as if it were a pet pony. To Stanley Kunitz, for instance. You know Stanley Kunitz? No? You have learned. Well, he’s also a poet. And Kunitz writes Lowell. Tells him some of the poems are repellent. They are—hey—heartless—cruel, he says. Lowell, of course, has been pretending all along to be as morally concerned as all get out about this. What does the dear man do? He offers to dedicate a book to Kunitz, not The Dolphin of course—n
ot Lowell’s banquet of confessional ingredients in some self-serving stew—that dedication goes to Lady Caroline, where it belongs—but another called History—a maneuver to ponder and praise—well, Kunitz accepts with polite pleasure, thank you, and, I presume, calms down, as disarmed as a defeated nation. “Cal” for Caligula, some say, but a “Calvin” all the same. Maybe he was my true precursor. Though a Calvin can’t precede a Luther, can he?
Luther is radiant. He is swimming in an ocean of proof. It is clear that, while his language might not seem to support the feeling, he actually admires Gide’s morally merdish cruelty, and Lowell’s arty hypocrisies. And who, Luther asks, is this Marc? this Allégret? He is the son of a Calvinist pastor, Gide’s tutor for a time, think of that, and the best man at Gide’s wedding. Gide debauches the boy. Gide. Gide. Wonderful Gide. Lowell … Lowell … Cal again … lovely. Penner grasps my arm. A final note. I am startled by his touch. Touching is not customary. What next, he wonders, then what? Gide’s wife burns all of his precious letters to her, letters which go back through his youth to the summers they first, as relatives, met; letters which describe his spiritual, high-minded, mustn’t-touch love for her; and Gide weeps for a week when he learns of her revenge. Penner applauds. What a beautiful affair, eh? Not the Medici or the Borgias, but pretty good in its minor way.
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 23