but instead find advantage in
putting my stock in richness of thought—
not wasting my thoughts on riches.
I neither treasure the lovely lustre
that proves but the spoil of age,
nor covet wealth of counterfeit coinage;
thinking it far better, by my lights,
to set aside the vanities of life
than spend a whole life in vain.
STONE GUEST
11 Feb [1993 Calgary]
HE’S STARTING TO TAKE CHANCES. Dinner for two. In public. Even in the back, in a booth. Even in a French restaurant on a Thursday night. Not that people looking at us—at me—would assume, not automatically. But then he takes my hand and it’s so obvious for anyone walking past …
Starched white tablecloth, peach polyester napkins folded in fans. Reflections smear in the cutlery. I sit there like a stone. I can’t help it, can’t move.
Cat got my tongue?—he didn’t think he’d ever seen me looking nervous. I wasn’t going to sit there like that all night was I? All these people—nonsense, he smiles the winning smile, nobody was looking at us way back here. A little wine wouldn’t hurt tonight for once would it? And where the hell is the waiter?
Ayez l’obligeance de nous apporter une bouteille du Griotte-Chambertin. Le ’92, Monsieur? Non, le ’91—bien evidemment. Ah oui, Monsieur.
See that? sly prick tried to unload their ’92 on us. At the same price.
See brave Doctor Gregory working so hard over the corpse of his statue—plug the nose, seal the lips, puff.
Not to worry: he and Madeleine never came down here, never left their neverland, northwest Calgary. She liked to call herself a northerner … their little joke. Yes, good one, Doctor. Sorry bad storyform to talk about her. How was the research going?
He doesn’t want to know. Yes he did—no really. Mr. Sincerity. Well … just questions mostly. Questions were good, a very good sign. Such as? Such as what her confessor is like….
Yes? Go on, he was here to help—the brawny scholar paw reaches out. Okay, she wrote poetry in Nahuatl too, so isn’t she just possibly the greatest Nahuatl poet—her time’s greatest living writer in two languages? I need to understand better what Isis means to her, and her poetry was full of Greek and Egyptian myths yet only rarely Mexican, and what is it to be consumed by knowledge—or need—or Mind—
Okayokay whoa slow down a bit. Now. Listen, there was something we absolutely had to talk about. Absolutely, Don, then let’s. I knew, didn’t I, that I could write just about anything for him—and yes we were only talking about an honour’s thesis—and I still had two months to cook something up for grad school, but the time had come—pause for drrrummrollll—to say this was getting worrisome. What is? I surely had to know I hadn’t presented him with a single topic even close to suitable. Unsuitable how? Don’t be disingenuous. Be genuous then, Don, and tell me. Well for one thing, I knew purrfectly well none of this was what was meant by American literature. So Mexico is not America? or Mexico is just not literate. Very funny—but no one in the department was qualified to sit on my thesis committee. They didn’t even read Spanish. But he does. Painfully, yes—which most certainly did not make him qualified to supervise on just any topic I could come up with.
No wait—I am studying under one of the leading authorities on early American literature but can’t do research on the greatest American poet of the 16th, 17th, 18th—I don’t know, Doctor Gregory, you tell me when to stop—Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost? Or is she better than everybody on the approved list of any American century? What is she then, un-American?
Come off it—fucking around with semantics wasn’t going to make the rules go away. Okay semantics don’t matter so what possible difference should the language make—it’s all literature, after all. Maybe so, but this was still very plainly a project for romance studies or comparative lit—wake-up time, Beulah. The deadline for grad applications was the end of February, and here it was the eleventh already.
Yes happy Valentine’s, Profe. A toast to our cupidity—don’t be mean, Doctor Don, order us another beaujolly at eighty a bottle.
Be reasonable. He didn’t make the rules. They just didn’t have the resources anymore within the department for cross-disciplinary research or whatever this was to be. Christ, Beulah—you’re up there every day. We cut to the bone five years ago. Anyway the kind of thing I seemed to be planning, if I could pull it off at all, needs to be under big names in big schools, not backwaters in the colonies. Go east, go south, go overseas, but go.
So why then is he back on the farm after gay Paris? Yes but, you see, at least he’d gone. A job, Beulah. That was all it was now. This little, he could do anywhere, even here. I should be thinking about my career.
Oh that—break new ground carpe diem, gut the fat bottom-feeding carp called opportunity. Like I give a fuck about jobs.
Yes well, that made two of us but I was about to lose a year. Which for a working sell-out like him or even a pure searcher like Beulah Limosneros was still twelve long months. And anyway one could score all the points one wanted for my Sor Juana by making comparisons with someone like Anne Bradstreet—
Anne Bradstreet—are you kidding?—hello, class, my research paper is on Milton and Milton Acorn.
They aren’t even in the same galaxy. And why does it only get to be his Pilgrim America? Quakers and shakers holding down the creaky palisade—Verily neighbours, let the dark night descend but not on our watch! We are the rock. Let the casements crack in this casamatta, house of godchild and lambslaughter, let the chasms yawn but we stand firm against the chaos—The greatest period in English literature is the Baroque, Don. Spenser Marlowe Shakespeare Donne Milton Marvell Jonson Dryden. Metaphysical?—why is it so hard to call a spade a mongrel? It’s all myths and togas and fairies and fallen angels and ghosts and witches for almost two hundred years. Puritan and cavalier and metaphysical—the Baroque.
But that’s why he took up early American lit in the first place, isn’t it, Professor. The English can try to deny it—Mr. Bones in the closet—but Americans don’t have to—right? Not with Dr. Donald J. Gregory holding down the fort. But if and only if we leave out Latin America. Then it’s just Bradstreet and John Q-Fucking Smith’s Pocahontas. Then Hawkeye and Chingachgook, soon Old Shatterhand—and on down the steep slippery slope to the joke.
If you can fix it, it ain’t baroque.
The professorial smirk. Very good, Beulah, not to forget Tonto and Winnetou. And no he didn’t think this whole thing was a joke, but weren’t we supposed to be having a good time tonight?—and yes, Valentine’s was nigh. Here try some of this fresh bread, come on eat while it was still warm, this was my fourth glass. Thought I said I never drank much….
Turn on the charm, doctor Donald. Hot tap to the left cold to the right. Smile Don, feel the cheeks dimple, the laugh lines crinkle the intelligent eyes—oh yes, so blue, can’t he just imagine the candlelight dancing in them now.
Sure she can, she can do this—flutter to his hand, smile perch and warble. We are not babybirds anymore. A little bread? Yes please. Bread on sideplate, spread napkin over lap, wedge baggie between thighs, no butter thanks. There. Just like she practised. Break off a piece, gently chew, wipe lips with napkin, dainty girl. Pretty bird. Palm wad into baggie, replace napkin, smile. Smile and repeat. As needed ad infinitum add nauseam.
Was that a smile?—we should have ordered appetizers right off. Okay, then, not Anne Bradstreet but how about Aphra Behn?
So living in Surinam for two years makes her American—but not Sor Juana?
Comparative lit, Beulah, not American. Ah. Think about it. Behn wasn’t in her ballpark as a thinker, but she was versatile and prolific and gutsy and broke new ground for people like Dafoe—seminal in prose.
Did he say Seminole in pose, Cherokee in cheek and cheer, Delaware in all she did?
No really, consider it. Serially. Two famous women. Trailblazers. One goes from spying for King Jam
es to the poorhouse gates to woman of scandal. The other goes from palace to convent to living legend—forgotten five years after her death. Different choices, different lives, yet—
Bravo Don. But he’s forgetting to mention the best part. Oh, what was that? With Aphra Bent in the picture, he won’t have to be my thesis adviser. Beulah … try Stanwyck, she had her fingers in everyone’s pie. This paleo-feminist white hat black hat stuff—making the world safe for the wailing eirenes of matriarchy—it just didn’t cut it anymore, if it ever did. It was a ghetto now. It wasn’t his fight, not his thing.
Not his thing—look at him—sandy ponytail white-water rafting gourmet cook / five years too young for the sixties, touches up his beard to bring out the grey in his gayParee soixante-huit goatee, tickly between my knees.
This is just women’s work, is that it? Sappho, Sor Juana, St. Catherine—only a woman could be interested?
When he offered to be my thesis adviser … surely I could see this wasn’t what he—look here was the waiter better get some food in us.
The waiting, the wine—I want to scream jets of spit spurting in the back of my mouth a tingling aching needling under each ear. Would I let him order for us both? See the garce’s greasy smile. Something light, please, I’m not too—Nonsense. Let’s see says the grand host connoisseur of the world of the senses and the mind. Hurry.
The Chateaubriand for two. Oh god, meat. Rare … the only way to have Chateaubriand.
Couldn’t I see I didn’t need him for a thesis adviser? I needed Erasmus, Leonardo maybe. Whole lifetimes were spent on a fraction of what I’d pretend to cover in two years. This was an exercise in anti-scholarship. To finish even in five I’d have to ransack the sources. Intellectual cannibalism the worst kind of dilettantism a vandal loose in the library.
So fucking what
So I had to understand this stuff went out of style with Blake—hell, Beulah, he was never in. Don’t kid yourself this was the fashion business—you’d be rewriting the dead sea scrolls here. Another thing … Yes, mein Overseer? I could call this micro-history or social history or whatever but it was starting to smell like fiction—where was I getting all this data?
Call it thick description.
He’d had the distinct impression I was interested in scholarship. Discipline. No Don—just a spanking once in a while.
Seriously—right this minute I should please please assure him I didn’t want to do fiction. Literary bodice rippers, windswept Heathcliffs, highbrow harlequins—kitchen sink Histories for entrepreneurial college gals.
Ah harlequins—harlequins?—what the fuck is philosophy, Doctor Don? but Muttonchop Realism, Victorian Self-Congratulation. All the learned societies shrinking into their starchy chastey labcotes—all the chesty strutting / the teenytiny cabinets of Sophiphiliac specialization / the pasty balding fratboys playing hide and seek in the haunty house of paradox. He isn’t going to start calling literary criticism a science now? Not seriously.
So this was what he’d been sweating to save me from these past months? Kitsch of the past—the lisping diction, ye aulde oak-aged accents and lexical curiositie shoppes, the phony ironies.
Kitsch?—what is his transcendent truth of History but the kitsch of a bogus objectivity? And does he mean phony like Richard III or kitschy like poor anachronistic Coriolanus or the eh-historical Iliad?
And if you truly must have a justificayshun, Masta-Don—long in the tooth, yellow in the tusk—for all the pidgin dickshun, call it a translayshun.5
And who is he to be so highhorsed about lying—why didn’t I say it then, why didn’t I say it to his face?—Donald Gregory, the modern worlds leading expert on the taxidermies of fable and heartless fibrelations. The wily stuffed fox, the walking liar’s paradox. Gamekeeper gatekeeper Vegas liontamer on the American lit game farm. All to protect us from the wilderness inside. So hard you try, expert on the literary lie. You’re more baroque than Donne, Don. Is that why you hate it so? Poor conflicted Donny playing po-mo mummy off against positivist daddy Popper, sownz like a rapper.
What was his po’pomo but the baroque with its heart torn out.
More wine, Beulah?
Stop playing the holy host, fucker.
Say, Beulah why not do this research of yours on the side?—sure, some of his best work comes on the side—right? Any more great ideas?
Is it Latin America he loathes? Why has he never once written about Poe and Faulkner who’d marked Latin America most, why is that, professor? praisesinger of Whitman and Hawthorne at Melville’s expense, and always mentioning the Moby and the Mohican in the same tar-breath. And never once penning on Poe in all that time. Is it the Private, Donny’s worst nightmare? Sticky private truths and private parts—my Professor wants us to all go live in a quaker colony.
Sssh, Beulah, hold it down. I am fucker, I am—but just. Alright yes, he found it annoying, all the fascinating heroines called Laura, all the fancified butterflies, all the Borges cheap as borscht—So yeah, rooting out the lie down South meant going house to house. Was I satisfied? Sorry but surely I must see now how he could never effectively advise me. Oh but I could trust him. He wouldn’t let me down. He’d have a word with the boys in Comp. Lit. for me. Or even Stanwyck, there was still time.
Promise, Don?
He promised—warm smile, takes my hands so cold so chilly—Beulah don’t worry, just get a half-assed application in, plenty of time the whole summer to work everything out, to hammer away at this—hammer away at me you mean. Now could we please talk about something else?
Ahem … yes Sunday was Valentine’s and yes he and Madeleine had plans—but how about Easter Break getting away for a day or two….
All night long I sit for this just sitting there surrounded—stuffed faces chewing cud chaws of meat, the greasy smell of Prime Alberta Beef all night long sucking sucking—sucking up but not smiling at his little jokes afraid he’d see my teeth. Meat. My mouth filling with slick spit, the cologne smell from his perfect beard. God I hate your fucking face the arched brows—the playful sceptic eyes, blue complacent ruins—so co-conspiratorial.
Oh yes we share a special secret just you and me. He thinks they’re his best feature. So sure of himself. Above any judgement but his own—how can he be so sure his good is good enough his bad is not too bad how can he be so sure his next fuck won’t be his last.
Homo rectus the upright man.
Food the food finally comes. And do we need ground pepper, um, Miss? and I know I can’t I couldn’t eat could never swallowchoke this down with everyone watching. Him right there, watching my throat bobbing up and down a thick rat running down a hole.
Chew the meat. Chew the meat palm the wad into the napkin / slip the wad inside the bag don’t ever let the rat down the hole. Chew the meat feel the greasy baggy swelling. Chew the meat feel the queasy gorge uplifting—chew the meat. Swallow swallow just the slickety spit / just keep it down keep from spewing out wide across the whole fucking ROOM.
Excuse m—no no fine, be right back—lunge humpbacked bent over the baggie shamble for the toilet / throat bobbing up bobbing down. They stop chewing to watch, jaws go slackstill drop, see the mashy topple inside their holes. Feel their filmy white eyes following. Mouth cheeks filling tingling with slippery spit. DON’T yet—
Ladies—welcome home / feel the cool still porcelain all around now, like marble, a tomb.
Old bag of skin mummy’s age rinses little lady paws in sink. Startled eyes, still she hangs around washes each bony finger gleaming clean, watching. Out cunt. Out hurry up. OUT. Pick a stall / press warm meat-bag against the eyes / behind the neck smear it cross the throat the heart hope to die / cross the chest the face the hair—cram it cram it all jam the little wads of mush / cuds of chaw into the yawing hole. No slow. Slow down stupid cow swallow don’t chew swallow it whole hog—hog it all down hog it. Suck it swallow suck it—no teeth—don’t chew—SWALLOW THE WORLD get it all down.
Coming. So come closer then. Don’t rush no
w let it come cram don’t chew / no hands look no ma—suck don’t chew love this suckguzzle this all down almost—on your knees bitchdown feel the cold enamel still the fat throat / not yet don’t rush too late too long oh god—help it up/come fingers down just a bit not too far not too much. Don’t push let it come to shove—farther—now now shove all the way down push till it comes. AND IT COMES a gut-heaving clearing voiding heave—again a beautiful wave she spills she jets her bilious guts up through a teary grin—and out and up and ALL ACROSS THE SKY—
In ribbons.
Waves wider-spaced wait for it pass the time join the last to the next a tiny thread don’t ever let it end fill the time—how long has it been? will he ask will he see? is it all ruined now—think think of tonight. Fix it, fix it, make everything all right.
It’s not all ruined—think.
The couple enters the Night clerk looks up they ask for one with two double beds he doesn’t automatically assume. Room 327. Just watch her make everything all right. Watch her make him promise. He’ll say anything. Promise. Make him say it. He does anything she says, he does nothing unless she says. He says Nobody ever fucks me like this. Say it again. He fumbles at her straps. She looks down—the body he loves the one she hates spills out like garbage splitting a bag. He turns down the sheets. From the bed she watches him undress pressed bluejeans folded over the chair sportscoat hung on the back. Clean white shorts thin legs knee-high black socks. Through a crack in the curtains light catches lunar pocks on his round hairy back a hairy golf ball—she finds this cute she finds this adorable—shorts off in one swift wriggle and kick he turns back to the bed. He is already excited. Everything is going to be all right. He walks like a man with a trophy, holding it out, a man bringing flowers. She is calm now. Calm and happy. She does not worry, everything will be all right. She will make him promise, her holy host on her tongue. Push it back through the gag in her gullet, fill her chest her lungs with it, feel the sweet storm of grain slap her crop, warm her belly, pluck her up.
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