He said, “Called up.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Sure.”
“No, it isn’t.”
When we woke up in the morning, he checked his phone. He switched it off and said, “That’s it. We’re divorced. I’m going to be sleeping in a ditch.”
I was sitting on the side of the bed, buckling my shoe. He said, “Wait.” I turned and looked at him. He said, “Let me see your underwear again.” I flipped my skirt up. I believed he wanted something to jerk off to when I left. I got up and put my back against Lee’s wall, facing him, and slid along it toward the door, watching him.
He said, “Wait, let me get your number or something.”
“You already have it,” I said. It was a lie.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
* * *
I had my computer on my lap in the back room of Starbucks. I got an email in my junk mail saying that I had a message from Wartime82. I figured it was some Third World salesman, but I was bored and so I logged on to read it. The subject heading of the message was “Sleuth.” In the body the drummer wrote: “Hey, found you here. I’m in London right now, sleeping off a Xanax buzz. La-la-la, one of the summer crowd, taking pleasure in the English sun. I hope this day brings you many pleasant moments.”
I wrote him back, describing my shoes, which I had gotten free at work. I said I’d asked my coworker about them, and he’d become grave, looked me in the eye, and said, “They’re cool.”
I need to tell you I was crazy. I was crazy at the time.
After about ten days, I wrote to him again. I described the pit bulls that were up for adoption on my street, how they were leashed to the iron poles of the scaffolding, like a gauntlet of wild dogs, and how each one wore an orange vest that said, “Adopt me.”
He wrote back: “I’m here at Radio France HQ and a Frenchman, wearing a pirate-y-looking shirt, is pulling me away from the computer. Bye for now.”
* * *
My psychiatrist was an overweight woman who specialized in eating disorders. She worked out of the bedroom of a ground-floor Union Square apartment. The bedroom had one window on the floor of the windshaft. It got a diffused gray light. She had Victorian figurines on her bookshelves, and a bunch of books about food. They took different approaches—scientific, clinical, mystical, experiential. She also had baskets of toys on the floor and on the dirty velvet couch.
At the beginning of each meeting I had to fill out a form. One of the questions was “Have you been having any strange thoughts?”
I always wrote, “No.”
She had monochrome auburn hair and wore turtlenecks under unbuttoned shirts. She was always asking me if I did late-night snacking. I had the impression that she was convinced I snacked at night. Sometimes I would get frustrated and say, “Do you mean, have I ever eaten after dark?” I would force her to explain she meant waking up in the middle of the night and going to the refrigerator half asleep to eat. “No, I don’t do that.” She’d make a note and, the next time we saw each other, ask the question again. She kept her patient files piled on her desk. She had them piled uniformly about a foot and a half high, so she created a writing surface out of them, but she had to raise her arms to write.
She recommended some medication. She described the pill she recommended. She said it was known to cause weight loss, a side effect. I was open to that. She warned that it had some unusual side effects, including word loss and lethargy. I thought that would be all right. She advised me to let her know if I experienced anything more unusual than that.
That night I wrote to the priest. “You were right. I met another one. He likes me, I think, but I am afraid he will tear me apart.”
He wrote: “Of course he will. Being torn apart is what a relationship is. So don’t be afraid. Play the game.”
* * *
I met one of my friends for dinner, and we walked to a bar. The leaves were making a dry clicking sound. They were gray in the streetlight, and moving with the wind, which was changing direction, making the leaves look like schools of fish. I saw the drummer coming toward me and my friend. He was talking on his cell phone. I bent forward at the waist to catch his eye, and he frowned. As we came closer, I noticed that he was gasping for air and dripping with sweat. He extended his hand like an iron rail at my friend, and he said in a loud, manly voice, “I’m Elliot.”
My friend mumbled his name.
I said, “Are you late or something?”
The drummer said, “Yes. Do you know where the Tea Lounge is? The Tea Lounge?”
My friend pointed it out, and the drummer crossed the street at a diagonal. He ran to get away from us. I asked my friend what he thought of it, after about a block, and he said, “Nothin’.”
When I got home I described it all to the priest. He wrote back, “COME ON you are thinking too much.”
I wrote: “I love him. I think maybe he loves me. Please tell me.”
The next afternoon at Starbucks I got his answer: “Yes, he does, but he is afraid.”
I stood up and went walking on the street. I hugged my computer to my chest. I had walked about a block when I realized that the priest didn’t know how the drummer felt.
* * *
I was at a sushi restaurant. The sushi chef was missing the tip of his pointer finger. It was recent and looked like he’d cut it three-quarters off and just torn off the tip and gone back to work. I watched him slicing salmon. I ordered another small pitcher of sake.
I wrote to the priest on my phone: “I thought maybe I should just tell him how I feel. I thought maybe I should even just email it.”
He wrote back: “Yes, say it.”
I tried, but I couldn’t do it. Writing “I” into the message body field made me shake violently. I wrote: “I was wondering if you could come over sometime,” and sent that.
A fat businessman started up a conversation with me about fresh wasabi. Then I wrote to the priest. I said, “I can’t. Is that enough? There’s time, isn’t there?”
* * *
That night around 2 a.m. I woke up to the sound of thunder. Half sleeping, I thought God was communicating with me through the weather. I said, “Not now. Not now.” The thunder redoubled.
I sat up in bed and waited. After a few minutes I went to the window. The sky was full of light. Missiles were falling to the ground. I envisioned a brief, bleak, postapocalyptic future—wolves, yellow light, rags. I really believed that I was going to die, and then my mind went to the drummer, and I was sorry I hadn’t told him how I felt. It wasn’t because it mattered. It was because it didn’t matter.
I went outside, and then I could tell it was a storm. It was a summer storm, heat lightning, and the lightning was that strange kind that comes in plumes. I’d mistaken it for missiles. So I wrote an email to the drummer. “I woke up to the sound of thunder. I went to the window and thought the lightning was missiles. I thought I was going to die, and I felt sad I never told you that I love you. I came outside and it was clearly a storm. A homeless man who looked like Bob Marley was running down the street. He stopped in front of me, did a jig, held up two peace signs and ran.”
* * *
The drummer came to my apartment a month later. He held his palm to his chest, bent over. He rested with his hands on his knees in the doorway. Then he started taking off his shoes. He said, “Do you have any water?”
“You don’t have to take your shoes off,” I said.
“I always take my shoes off.”
After he had taken his shoes off, he sat against the wall with his knees folded into his chest and his arms wrapped around them.
I got up and opened the oven. I tapped the quiche, took it out, and cut two pieces. When we had eaten, the drummer said, “I would have a second piece, but I’m on the baseball diet. You don’t have to clean your plate, but then, every night, like clockwork, you have a scoop of vanilla ice cream.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t have ice cream. Anyway, you don’t need to lose weight.”
“For a while I was getting a little heavy. I was turning into one of those skinny guys with a potbelly.”
“I think that’s kind of cute,” I said. He frowned, so I said, “But you don’t have to.”
I brought the plates into the kitchen. We went outside and sat on my steps. The drummer asked me what a normal week was like, and I didn’t know how to say, “I’m alone all the time.” I had it in my head that his life was full of glamour. I said something about work and friends.
“That sounds nice,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s okay.”
He told me about being in Dallas. He said their waitress drew a diagram to show the path of the bullet that shot Kennedy in the head. He wasn’t a very good storyteller, and I could see he was trying to say there was some kind of magic in the moment, but to me it just sounded like a thing a waitress told people.
“I can’t explain it,” he said, noticing my expression. “Having all this shown to you by a Texas girl.”
I said, “I’m from Texas.”
I told a story about my aunt. She had been in the Bolshoi Ballet, and then she got a degree in quantum mechanics from Rice. Then she tried to run her husband over in a parking lot, and she was fired, and years went by, and she was arrested for disorderly conduct in Houston. She was in the drunk tank with her boyfriend and my mom picked her up. When she came out, she said, “Patty, I think that police officer raped me,” and her boyfriend, who was still in the tank, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Both of ’em did, baby.”
I laughed at the story, but I could tell it made the drummer uneasy. He asked me if I had any history of mania in my family, and I said, “Well, obviously, her.” I was pretty sure he was leading us toward a so-called healthy discussion about the end of our communication, so I was surprised when he said, “What should we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could go out.”
“Do you want to?”
“Well, do you have any wine?”
“I do. I didn’t bring it out with dinner because I thought you didn’t drink.”
“Ha, right.”
“You asked for water.”
“I was thirsty.”
We went into the kitchen. I held up a cut-crystal glass with a stem and a simple crystal sake glass.
“For wine? I think that one.” He pointed to the one with the stem. “It’s more elegant.” He laid emphasis on the word “elegant” in the uncomfortable way that he did with words he liked.
He had a sip of wine and I handed him a fig. He took my hand and said, “Let me see your nails.” There was purple fig peel under two nails. He thought it was dirt and he grimaced. Then he gave me my hand back and looked into my eyes for a long time.
“So … what else can we talk about?” he said.
“I don’t know. I don’t mind being quiet with people. Do you?”
“No.”
We started talking again. We sat on the floor in front of the bay window. It was summer, and the sun set late. The drummer said that, in Europe, his brother had gone through customs with marijuana in his carry-on.
“Why?”
“He said he forgot it was there. I told him that was so stupid. I don’t know. I think he just wanted it.”
We were quiet. I looked at the open windows. I said, “Do you think people can hear us?”
“Who?”
“Well, the windows are open.”
“No one can hear us. My voice is incredibly soft.”
“Mine, too.”
“I have the world’s softest voice.”
“No, I do.”
I stood up to get the wine, and he said, “You’re so attractive to me. Does everyone think so?”
I wanted to say no, but instead I just looked at him.
He said, “I bet weird guys fall at your feet.”
I said, “I have one beer in the fridge. We can share it.” I came back to sit with him. He said, “Can I touch your legs?” He was sitting Indian-style, and I put my legs between his knee and arm. He put both hands on me and said, “I feel guilty.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know I’m married.”
“I think you’ll always be married.”
“I love her.”
I sat on top of him. Without thinking about how you do it, I mean, without thinking about how other people do it, I touched him.
“Can you take my shorts off?” I said.
He took them off. I had a dress tucked into them. It came to my mid-thighs. He said, “What’s this?”
“Some weird— It was an impulse buy. It’s from India.”
What happened next was languorous and slow. We were like cats. We got into my bed. The drummer was lying on his back, and I was sitting on his lap with my knees bent. I leaned back and lay on his shins, and took his feet in my hands.
“You have a wet spot,” he said. “Is that from arousal?”
I lifted myself up and lay on top of him. I said, “Have you done this before?”
* * *
He went back on tour the next morning. He drove to Canada. He texted me a few nights later. I was already asleep, and I woke up to a string of them. In the first he was describing the people outside the venue when his show was over—a man in a Corvette and a streetwalker. Then later he wrote: “Everything comes crashing down in the back of a cab in Toronto listening to stupid jazz.” I knew it didn’t mean anything, but at the same time, I thought it meant his wife was pregnant and I’d never see him again. I wrote: “What do you mean?” A few days later he answered, “Ignore last text.”
From Canada he went to Europe, on a tour that ended in Russia. I can remember that I came undone, but not how or why. I wrote too often. Once, when he was in France, I woke up and he had answered twenty of my emails. It was strange. I was relieved. On the subway into work, I fell out of love, like I was the one who was being smothered. And by noon, I was terrified that I would lose him.
I went to lunch alone and drank. I came back from lunch and wrote to the drummer. I wrote, “This isn’t working,” and he wrote back immediately, “Okay you’re right.” Then for years, mostly what I did was email him, and try not to email him. I would count the days, and sometimes make it to a week. I would get drunk and text-message him about my mystical experiences and my homeless friends. He wrote me to describe a bar in Russia with shrines to Lenin and murals of Putin doing karate. He said the street dogs knew their stops, and he met a guy from a magazine who could not drink because he had been bitten by a rabid dog, and he was taking “dog pills.” When he got home, sometimes he would call me. It was always when he was blacked out and I was asleep. I never caught the calls. I then sent him a long email about the acorn lady and her barren three-million-dollar apartment. I described lawyers I overheard, monkeys I saw. Other drummers I had sex with. I told him a tree of plum blossoms fell on me and I saw some young men wearing outfits. I described the man at the wine store. I always wish there was a point to all those emails. Maybe there was. I don’t know. I do know. There was.
Finally I went to see his band perform live. By that time they were famous. My stepdaughters owned his albums. Before they played a song with the refrain “my head is wrong,” he seemed to get my eye. That was the last time we looked at each other.
Mynahs
“Last year, the visiting teachers got up and said something about themselves.”
“That was because you were all new,” Greer said. “You’d just gotten here.”
“But I don’t know who they are, I mean.” The student looked at Donald Burdon.
“Well, why not. Professor Burdon? Would you mind?”
Donald started. He was shivering and sweating. It was the middle of January, but he didn’t have an overcoat.
“Maybe you could say a little bit about your workshop?” Greer said helpfully.
“I’m going to do the ordinary thing.”
>
“Maybe you could turn and face them?”
Professor Burdon jerked up halfway out of his chair.
“I’m going to do the ordinary thing,” he said. “It’s going to be a workshop. I won’t deviate from the norm, of what you’ve come to expect.”
Professor Burdon sat down.
“Thank you, Professor Burdon,” Greer said. “What about you, Guillermo?”
Guillermo Silva stood decorously and made eye contact with the MFA students. He said, “My first instinct is to tell you to take workshop with Donald here. In fact, I’m going to teach Donald’s memoir in the spring. But you’ll think I’m being a lazy professor if I don’t encourage you to join my class. So, let’s see. I’m from the South, so I favor courtesy. I tend to like to work on novel excerpts for reasons I won’t get into right now. Beyond that, what can I say? You’re all here because you’re good. My hope is to help you write the story.”
Professor Burdon shot his cuffs. It sounded like he said, “Cocksucker.”
* * *
Donald Burdon and Benjamin Greer had met two decades earlier, in John Berryman’s poetry workshop. It was a two-year program, but Donald was in his fifth year, because he’d had to leave several times.
Berryman asked his twelve students to show up on the first day with an unsigned, typewritten poem. He collected the pages, shuffled them, and passed them around. Then the students went in a circle, reading one another’s work.
Greer’s poem was read third. It was the first time he heard his work read by somebody else. He realized, after a few words, that his poem was purple. It was self-aggrandizing. It pandered to John Berryman. But he wondered if it just seemed that way in the context of all these other student poems. He regretted his decision to get an MFA. “Poet school,” he murmured.
After the break, when each anonymous poem had been read, Berryman spoke a little. He asked the students what they thought of the experience, and said, “It’s easier to be honest when a piece is unsigned. Of course, there are some things we can never say, because they are secrets, but we can show our hearts.”
The students went in a circle praising lines and images from one another’s poems. When it was his turn, Greer looked squarely at Berryman and praised a prose poem about two Jewish men sharing a cup of tea. He said, “I love the image it evokes.”
You Are Having a Good Time Page 12