“Leonard?” I asked, ignoring the question.
“Hasn’t changed except for the worse. The story?”
“I’m doing an anthology for Ilium. I’d like to use it.”
“Can we gather for a drink, man?”
“Tomorrow. Why don’t you and Claire come here? Be good to see you.”
“When did you change publishers?”
“It’s just a one-shot deal. I’m on a streak, that’s all.”
“The new book?”
“Almost finished. Yours?”
“Just about, just about. Okay, we’ll see you tomorrow. When?”
Rupert had of course grumbled when I told him about Sandra Queensbury’s offer. “They don’t sell the way novels do,” he said. “Not even Martha Foley’s collections. Maybe Sandra’s got something up her sleeve, and Cate, I sure hope it’s not you.”
I hoped my laugh was strong enough to be convincing. “I need the money, Rupert, and besides, I’ll be finished with Clarissa soon.”
“Well, I certainly feel better. You know, I can get you some money—”
“I’m okay, now.”
He understood. But what he did not understand, nor I, was that I wasn’t happy about how having money made me feel. It was strange, because I didn’t mean a lot of money, just money where before there had been none. Having it made my spirits lift, and a certain serenity mixed with some cockiness pervaded my being. Perspective, while not lost, became a little blurred. It had been a long, long time since a skill in growing food or finding it, or fishing or hunting, was the only way to avoid sliding down into the abyss; now it was money; the skills had become hobbies or anachronisms.
My profit margin could be increased only at the expense of the contributors, by getting permission to reprint stories, poems and articles cheaply. The less money I paid out, the more I kept for myself. That often meant lying and cheating. Properly priced material required a diligent search; works that were not always good, but had been written by well-known authors, were what most editors wanted in their anthologies. Of course, these always cost more.
I offered Paul a hundred dollars for a seven-thousand-word story. He threw up his hands in mock distress and said, “I’ll take it, I’ll take it. I don’t have a name yet, even though I made the cover of a national magazine.”
Satisfied, I bounced against the back of my canvas sling chair. Sling chairs were stylish and inexpensive.
Claire looked very well. “Paul has finished his book four times, Cate,” she said, playing with her hair and looking at the ceiling with the air of one close to boredom.
“Naw,” Paul said. His glance at her was slow lightning. “I’m just not pleased with the ending.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, whipping her legs over an angle of the chair, momentarily displaying powerful thighs, a view Paul shared with me through his embarrassment. “You don’t really want it out there where people can criticize it—”
“What crud!” Paul shouted.
I thought there was more pleading than anger in his voice. He extended his hands, palms up. “It’s just not finished …”
“Why don’t you let Cate read it and—”
I said quickly, “I think we’ve outgrown that, Claire. But what does Alex say?”
“He’s a fucking agent!” she screamed. “What does he know? He sells.”
“I’m sure that simply going through the process of reading so many scripts, he’s developed some taste through osmosis,” I said. Her judgment made me think hard about things I had not wished to think about at all.
“I don’t work like Cate,” Paul said. “Never did. Different styles, honey.”
“I can see that, Paul,” she said. Her tone was patronizing. “That’s why I thought it was a good idea.”
I said, “Listen. Do you want me to get Rupert to look at your book?”
I could feel Claire holding her breath. I heard Mr. Storto downstairs talking loudly to someone.
“All I can say, honey, is that it works or it doesn’t,” Claire said. Her voice was soft but firm. Perhaps she was beginning to understand that Paul could not accept “no” in his life when it came to writing.
He said, “I’ll let Alex be the judge.”
I shrugged.
Claire brushed back her hair. She knew.
“When do I get my dough?” Paul asked.
I handed him permissions forms. “Sign both, keep one.”
“It’s really good seeing you again, Cate,” Claire said. “Have you got used to being back?”
“No, not yet.”
“When you do me in contributor notes, put down that I spent some time in England and France, okay? Jazz it up a little.”
“When was this?” Claire asked. She was puzzled.
Paul glanced at me sheepishly.
“In the army,” I said. “I don’t mind, man. Paris, Left Bank?”
“But of course,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Claire muttered.
“You don’t understand,” he said sharply.
“The hell I don’t.”
“How’s your father?” My timing was good. The heat went out of them. I sensed that Claire was more interested in his response than I was.
Paul hunched his shoulders. “Don’t know. Last I heard, he was all right.”
Claire added, “We never hear from him.”
Paul said nothing. He looked very tired and pale, and while Claire was in the bathroom, he said softly, quickly, “I think I goofed. I don’t think I should’ve married her.”
The evening bent under its own weight and finally, reluctantly, it seemed to me, they said goodbye. After I closed my door, I could hear them talking sharply on the way down.
7
Route 129 flows black, asphalt softening, the power lines beside it singing in midsummer, through the center of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus on the western slope of the Green Mountains. The buildings were white trimmed in green, and set gently back into the landscape, as though not to disturb it. I had not told Paul about my coming here.
A year had passed and I had buried myself in work, completing Sandra’s anthology and compiling notes for another novel. There had been of course the visits with Glenn, the dinners with Paul and Claire and two or three less than satisfactory affairs, all ended by mutual agreement. Mostly, I had worked and had been satisfied. It was time to take a break now.
All through our time in college Paul and I had been advised by writers’ magazines and bulletin-board notices that here at Bread Loaf, summer after summer, the crème de la crème of the literary world gathered to exchange ideas, relax and enjoy the scenery, all this overseen by Mr. Robert Frost in nearby Ripton. Wait, I thought. Wait until I get back and drop this on ole Paul.
I shared a room in the cottage with Ike Plunkett. I supposed this discreet arrangement had been made because we were black. Ike was tall and lean. He had cool, almost innocent eyes, but he also possessed a pattern of speech that held a wide range of insinuation.
If for a moment I had been jarred by our segregation, even though it may have been intended to put us at ease, I was ultimately glad. The others in the cottage were petty, often dull and self-centered. Roye Yearing was an exception.
He was a hulking, gray-skinned man who seemed to be both haunted and driven by ghosts the rest of us couldn’t see, let alone understand. Roye was quiet, almost reticent, until he had had a few drinks. It was his car we used nearly every morning to drive into Vergennes, arriving at precisely the time the state liquor store opened.
The women fellows and scholars lived in cottages across the road. Among them was Selena Merritt. She kissed me on the cheek when we met, but from that moment on said little either to Ike or to me, even during those periods in the afternoon when we worked our way toward one hangover after the other, having discovered within the first few days that not much of substance was to be expected from the staff of lecturers or the workshop leaders.
Instead
of attending the sessions, we played tennis, went swimming, sunbathed, went into Vergennes for more booze.
Invariably, while the schoolteachers and literary groupies rushed to breakfast over grass still thick with dew, we slept late, staggered up for lunch and the games or the trip into town; at three, the sessions ending, the herding instinct brought us together, where, once again, we began the day’s drinking until five.
At that hour the staff, scholars and fellows gathered in the staff cottage for drinks and literary gossip. It was traditional that a scholar or fellow serve drinks to the staff. A tradition, I supposed, that was designed to keep people in their places.
Tonight it was Ike’s turn to serve, but he remained seated, licking his lips exaggeratedly over a huge drink he’d made for himself. The staff turned its collective gaze on him—and on me and Selena as well—though it seemed gentler when it fell on her. They shuffled about, hands in their pockets or tightly gripping their pocketbooks, trying not to stare at Ike.
One of the staff, clearing his throat, said, “Plunkett, I believe you’re doing the honors this afternoon, hummmmm?”
“No, Plunkett ain’t,” Ike said. The “ain’t” was loud. “Marse Lincum done freed us slaves.”
For a second Selena went from black (or somewhat so) to ashen white. Someone chuckled. Someone else jogged in breathing heavily, looking for a Coke. Roye Yearing, already deep into the wind, thrust his head forward and shifted his glance from the staff member to Ike and back again, trying to understand what was happening.
The director sighed and led the way to the bar to fix his own drink. God, he seemed to be thinking, why did we let these niggers come?
“Tradition, my ass,” Ike muttered to me as, one by one, the staff helped themselves to the booze. The people of our cottage surreptitiously slapped Ike’s back, but an unspoken threat was framed by the staff’s glances at Ike.
Curiously, no one had minded the tradition of servitude until Ike mutinied, and later that night, as though to celebrate that mutiny, we gathered in a field not far from the cottage and built a fire. As we lay in the cooling grass under the spectacular sky, I wondered why the heavens seemed to be so much more dazzling in Vermont than anywhere else.
Roye Yearing, now quite drunk, was proclaiming yet again that he was the best fucking writer in the world, the very fucking best. Fuck everybody. Hic!
Ike, making that affricative, clicked sound so many black people make when exasperated, said, “Roye, goddamn it, I’m tired of hearing how good you are—”
“Right, Ike. The fucking best.”
There was always a lingering, desperate quality in Roye’s voice when he talked that way; we heard it within ourselves and came to like Yearing for daring to voice what we could not.
Ike snarled in disgust and we laughed softly. Sounds were coming from the cottages, through whose windows shone wan lights, small picture screens across which figures moved, giving off disembodied laughter and drunken yelps. Our group began to break up.
“Night, Selena!” Ike called. She was easing off with a fellow who was in the cottage next to ours.
“This afternoon,” Ike said when we were alone, moving closer to the dying fire, “I ran into Selena. She was very friendly. We talked and walked, and she looked that way. We peeled off on a trail and found a spot where we could, you know, sit and be alone. You know how a woman will be with you, smiling and carrying on, obviously waiting for you to say the right words or to do the right thing?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“We talked about writing, family problems and so on. We held hands. We kissed. I started to ease up her dress and lay her down and, man, she went suddenly stiff. Begged me to stop. You know, you get to that point and your dick’s as hard as times in ’twenty-nine, and here the woman’s closin’ the door and screechin’ for you to stop knockin’ on it. Well! Is that a come-on? Is that what gives her her kicks, like pretending rape or somethin’? You don’t know. You just keep on.
“Her eyes went outa focus. Rolled up, and she starts foamin’ at the mouth. So she ain’t foolin’. I fixed her clothes and sat her up. Joint’s limp as wet macaroni anyway. I held her until she seemed to be okay.”
I said, “I thought she had problems but I didn’t know they were that bad.”
Ike took a long pull from the bottle of gin and passed it to me. “And that silly Roye,” he said. “Why does he have to get so drunk every day? We’re the ones who ought to be falling-down drunk behind this jive literary scene.”
I passed back the bottle; it was almost empty. I thought of what Mr. Johnson had said about writers being in the bottle.
“Shit,” I said, “I’m not going to let them do that to me. I’m not going to pickle my liver, dick or brains.”
“It’s the soul you really got to watch,” Ike said. He turned up the bottle and finished it.
We got up and started for the cottage. Bread Loaf had so far been a bust for me, more illusion than substance. I was not sure I wanted to stay until the end of the period. I wondered how Paul would have liked it. He would not have felt an outsider, as I did, as Ike did. The things that were said during the lectures might have had appeal for him; I didn’t know.
Around ten the next morning, my thoughts turned to leaving, I walked slowly through the woods. I had come because for Paul and me Bread Loaf had been such a special symbol during our college days. Maybe it had changed. Maybe I had changed.
Ike was definitely going to stay. “New York isn’t going anywhere,” he had said. He had had a conference with one of the staff, who told him that he should always put into his work something about how much Negroes hated whites.
“Oh,” Ike responded. “Why should I?”
“It’s the truth and it sells.”
“Okay,” Ike said. “Would your magazine buy this story?”
The staff person said, “No. We don’t handle race-related material.”
“You’re fulla shit,” Ike told him. He had not returned for additional conferences.
Now I was following a footpath, walking slowly, watching blades of grass spring upright, released from the weight of the dew. It was pleasant, moving through the mottled shadows cast by the climbing, warming sun. I smelled wild mint as I paused by a brook to look for trout. I moved closer to the water, peering in, listening to the sounds it made when it flowed between crannies, sucking and foaming.
I remained motionless, hearing the water, the bird cries and, in the distance, the voices of the people over near the cottages.
She must have seen me before I saw her.
I had noticed her before, walking through the campus alone, always carrying a yellow folder. It lay beside her now, warped and twisted. It was easy to see that this woman was angry.
“Hullo,” I said.
“Hi.” She tried to smile, but it went as quickly as it had come. She flicked at her eyes with her fingers.
“Anything wrong?” I asked.
“No. Everything.”
The folder looked as though she’d tried to tear it.
I hunkered down near her. “Cigarette?”
She took one and I lighted it for her. I had one too. “How’s it going?”
“Terrible.”
“Oh.” I tried to recall what someone had said about her, but couldn’t. “You’re in the poetry seminar?”
“Wrong. I was. But I’m going home today. I think.”
“Uh-huh. Have they helped you? Hey, look at that trout.” I pointed.
“Yes, I see it.”
“Have they?”
“Oh, why do you ask?”
“Because they can’t help everybody. Some of us are not capable of helping anybody.” I picked up the folder and tried to straighten it out. “May I look?”
“No!” She snatched it out of my hand, and I was rising, going, fuck it. “That bastard!” she shouted, but the woods gave her nothing back. She said less loudly, “To tell someone that they had wasted time and money coming here, that I’d never be
a poet!” I stopped.
“They think they have to say something,” I said. “They get paid.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a poet and have to associate with such heartless, crude, backbiting people—”
“Yeah, it’s a strain. I’ve been thinking about going home, too.”
“But you’ve published. You’re a novelist.”
It warmed me that she knew something about me.
“What can they teach you?” she asked.
“Nothing. I don’t know that I came to be taught, but maybe there was something. What did you think they could teach you—the words, the feeling, the form? Those are individual things, you know. Uh, what’s your name?”
“Allis.”
“Allis. You know, they can talk about them or show you how other poets use those things, but you teach yourself, really, the way a housewife teaches herself to cook and bake without the recipes. Anyway, maybe you shouldn’t leave until old Frost puts in an appearance.”
“In only one lousy hour,” she said, “I’ve come to hate and despise his lovely, dark and deep woods.”
We finished the cigarettes.
“Well, you shouldn’t let them run you out,” I said.
“Why are you going?”
I watched the water splay out over a flat rock. “Because I keep discovering that I have to teach myself. If I hadn’t come, though, I’d always think I missed a lot. Something I know, yet don’t want to know, was reinforced for me. I was out here thinking about it.” I asked, “Want to walk?”
She nodded and got up.
“You forgot your folder.”
“I didn’t forget it. Could you tear it up for me? I don’t want someone to find and return it to me.”
“How many poems in there?”
“Eighteen.”
“You have copies?”
“No. I don’t want copies.”
“You sure about this?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure.”
I picked it up. “Tell you what. I’ll start it for you, but you finish it.”
She studied my face for a long time, then said, “Oh, all right.”
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