The branch has no money, say the deans, to send participants to the Modern Language Association annual meeting in New Orleans this year. They suggest that those who were invited to serve on panels pay their own way. Colleges look for, indeed need, the prestige their faculty members can bring to the institutions by participating in such conferences. The deans press faculty to present papers, and some of the faculty need to present papers to stay in the struggle for promotion and / or tenure. It’s all extra work for the faculty as well as extra expense. But they do it. Colleges get puffed and professors get a blurb in the annual report.
3
“Honey! Pick up the phone, will you! It’s Roye Yearing!”
I stared at her and wondered why she was shouting. She stared back. I felt like a stranger who had stumbled into this corner of our bedroom and seated himself in this chair before the typewriter and a sawed-off, propped-up door that was a desktop. I forgot, and it bothered me, what I was doing. “Who?”
Yes, I thought. The phone; it was sitting right next to the typewriter. I had heard a sound.
“Roye Year-ing! Who’d you think, one of those bitches?”
I wondered again why she was shouting and looking at me so strangely. “You don’t have to shout,” I said. What bitches?
Allis backed away. “What’s wrong?”
But I was on the phone. “Roye. Hi. Can you do it?”
He said he could. Allis eased out of the room.
Roye had published three very good novels between, I’d heard, drinking himself into oblivion and drying out. They had cast him, nevertheless, into that special literary purgatory where, while highly esteemed, he was ignored.
He was saying that he could join the Writing Festival the university was allowing me to plan in an attempt to make it look more like a college than a factory.
“What do you want me to do, Cate?”
“The usual. Read something already published or in progress. ‘In progress’ makes people think they’re in on the delivery—”
“Oh, shit, I got something. I’ve always got something.”
There seemed to be some great distance between us, a void over which our voices carried in echoes, like one of those coast-to-coast calls where your voice seems to bound out against the Kennelly-Heaviside layer and drift languidly back. It wasn’t the connection. “We can give you four bills,” I said. “None of that high-brow, low-brow shit; everybody gets the same.”
“Okay by me. You want something back?”
“No. Hell no.”
“Just asking. You know how it goes sometimes. Hey, what do you get these days? You mind my asking? I know we’re starting to sound like a couple of whores—”
“Aren’t we?” I didn’t want to tell him, though, nothing was that great anymore. During the Rebellions the honoraria were ridiculous, often more for my two hours (or less) than my father earned in half a year. They had fallen to realistic levels. “I get about the same,” I said, “and expenses.”
“I don’t suppose your buddy Cummings’ll be there. Must be drinking with another crowd. Who else you got?”
“You’re the first, Roye.”
“Okay. You’ll send me a letter, like official, huh, and let me know who else’ll be there?”
“Why? So you can back out if you don’t like somebody?”
“Naw. I wouldn’t do that. I know people do it all the time, but I wouldn’t.” He laughed. “Shit, I don’t get invited to do this too often. I can’t be fuckin’ choosy.”
I hung up and tried to remember what I’d been doing. I knew what it was, but I couldn’t get my head to say it. I had tilted my head back in exasperation when I became aware of Allis behind me, and, strangely, as soon as I saw her, I smelled dinner cooking. I turned.
“How’s he?”
“Sounded okay,” I said.
She came closer and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure. Why do you keep asking?”
She had never sat so straight. “The phone, honey. It’s right under your nose—”
And then I heard myself, again like an echo. “I don’t have time anymore. I forget things. I don’t listen to things. I didn’t used to be like this. I don’t know what happened or what’s happening. I can’t believe I didn’t hear the phone or pick it up—”
“Take a leave from classes.”
“What?”
“Take a—”
“Yes! Why the hell didn’t I think of that? Jesus Christ, I’m not locked physically into the goddamn place. I could finish Pushkin and start on this other thing—”
“What other thing? You didn’t tell me—”
“Something running around in my head with the name Unmarked Graves …”
The ideas, at first benign as butterflies, monarchs perhaps, having come such a long way, such delicate things that their migratory patterns are disbelieved, and then they become as insistent as gnats, but they are only that, and in the solitudes the ideas come like anopheles, singing through darkness, yet solitude often equals vulnerability, and the ideas become little nudgings, small impacts, meteorites on an uncharted spatial body, but the impacts leave craters, shape, form, dimension, out of which some clumsy thing evolves and then becomes a myriad of furiously growing fetuses, demanding, within their term, form, voice, and they force themselves through the head, that enclosure wherein reside a trillion neurons, and there they swell, bloat, kick against the sacs of confining time and form of expression; they surge, insist that they must be set free, must be let out, and some, of course, surge more powerfully than others and their language can almost be heard, their color can almost be seen, their histories almost documented, as they clamor and clamor, like children wishing to help; here comes one bearing plot, another returning because motivation has been found wanting, here one rushes with characterization well-honed, while still another shouts, “Why not have me do this? Why not have her do that?” And others cry, “Yes, but first she must do this or say that …” And they keep coming without regard for time, sometimes early in the morning, masquerading as an urgent need to urinate, but they simply wish to test the purity of their being, and at the most unconscionable moments they send the mass of protoplasm in which they reside reeling through gazetteers, biographical dictionaries, atlases, all kinds of books, novels, even, having cunningly and finally triggered—
“CATE! Listen.” She was on her knees beside me, the lovely swell of her thighs showing. “You have to take a break—”
“Yes, but if I can just hold together until the end of the school year—”
“What do you mean, ‘hold together’? What are you saying? Listen, honey, there’s Pop’s money, and we never use what I earn—”
“It’s not the money—”
“I know that, but it’s there. Honey, you simply cannot do it all.”
I did not know why there was suddenly a small, hard frown in the middle of her forehead. Precisely in the middle. “Dinner’s ready. Shall I get you a drink?”
Mack had gone off to sleep quickly, as though escaping from something. Allis had collapsed in front of the television set. I didn’t think she was watching Channel 13. Mack thought that was the only channel we watched. I stood hunched over the desk. What? I asked myself. Papers? Get a lesson together? Pushkin? Unmarked Graves? More notes on the branch? Pay bills? Do nothing? How often had that thought cropped up. How does one do nothing? A poem, perhaps? Was there something we should be talking about? Were there meetings scheduled for tomorrow? It would be nice to take a leave. Marvelous.
“What’s the matter, honey?”
I had not heard her coming through the halls.
“Nothing. Just trying to decide what to do now.”
“Do you know how long you’ve been standing there?”
“Sure. I just got here.” Jesus.
She said softly, “It’s been an hour, Cate.”
Then I had done it. Nothing. For an entire hour. I looked at her; she seemed cautious about
approaching me.
“An hour?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” I sat down. “You made that up.”
Now she came closer. “Look at your watch, honey.”
She was right.
Something was wrong with me, but I did not know what. I mean, I thought I knew, though I did not know precisely. What I mean to write is that I thought I knew precisely, but did not know how to translate it into the only language I knew well. Mal au coeur? Mal de siècle?
I needed a langage, a “deep talk,” to explain it; I knew none even though I felt I did. It simply would not come. Blues. An inexplicable exhaustion. An icterus like a veil over everything.
My family, the world, and sometimes even I, stood at a distance from me, separated by some force field through which neither I nor they could pass. They seemed not to notice; I was, however, fearfully aware of the partition and wondered what it meant.
4
My Writers Conference goes well. How could it not? Instead of ice water, I had had vodka placed in the pitchers. Maxine Culp—who, though still agenting (and apparently doing less and less—she is seldom in her office when I phone, and writers get restless when their agents are not around), has just published one of the new breed books, The Sex Life of Senior Citizens—agreed to come. She looks like a slightly aging vamp just redone for the new tits-and-ass shows that are beginning to bombard television. She is a great counterpart to Selena Merritt, who came, as I correctly calculated, because her publicity had fallen off a little. She’s dressed in a style somewhere between the latest rock things and the newest fashion craze, disco. Behind the large place card for Paul Cummings the chair is empty. I guess I am still recovering from the telegram advising me that he couldn’t come. There’s something final, sinister, in his not calling me. I don’t think I wanted it to be like this. Roye Yearing looks the same—gray and the way he would look, I suppose, emerging from a five-day drunk. We are displayed, all in a row like talking dolls. We first chat for the people. Then Maxine reads (“I am also a poet”) some very bad poetry with a great deal of vodka-inspired fire and draws great applause. Roye lurches to the mike, gurgling and gargling in his throat as if on the verge of puking clear to the last row and reads from his fiction a biting, snapping section about an old woman being murdered in a corner of a subway station while a transit cop a hundred yards away, around a corner, prays that there will not be any action on his shift. Selena gives a solid performance, sliding to the lectern as applause dies for Roye. She should have been on the stage. Her pauses are chasms across which you are suspended until, almost whispering, as if in afterclimax, she brings you on across and lands you gently on the other side. Too much. She gets a rousing ovation. And I have to follow her. I read from The Pushkin Papers. Usually I do not read very well, feeling reticent about speaking words that are intended for inner ears. Some violation there, if you were not a poet, it seemed to me. But I confess to being completely drawn to the performances. Oh, I was not into the thunder-whisper routine of Selena, nor the cutesy-poo act of Maxine (who, I hoped, would not forget that it was I who gave her her first opportunity to read in public) nor a deadly serious, slightly nervous imitation of Roye. I don’t know in fact what I did, but at one point my words seem to leap clear out across the audience, unencumbered by nasty little inattentions or anti-vibrations. Politicians and stage actors know the feeling; it is, I supposed, addictive. The audience is mine for moments; I own it perhaps even as Pushkin might have.
I hate to lose students. Some I see struggling with the work, sitting, or trying to sit, aloof from the class. I ask them to come around to the office—I have seen in their work perhaps a little blaze being buffeted by strong winds. But they don’t come. I encourage: give them C’s when they should have had D’s, and D’s when they should have had F’s, but that doesn’t work. Often I am angered by students. I digress to tell them about the real world and how it really does expect them to fail and how they are programmed to fail, and I try to explain that we are both accidents and that we’d better do something about it. Most often, nothing works and one day they simply are no longer in class, and I stare over at the empty seat—and feel very, very tired.
A large number of my colleagues, rushing through the halls or, if they are males concentrating on what they are doing at the urinals, see only my color and, thinking I am a student, rush by or finish pissing. Perhaps I am being charitable. One whom I will call Shorty, however, never uses a urinal if I am using one. He curls away into one of the stalls, often breaking off in the middle of a piss to do so. Maybe he’s afraid that I will, like the field judge in a professional football game, call for a measurement.
The year approaches its end. We are all exhausted. We scream at each other at meetings. We dash to the nearest bar for triple martinis, which are gulped like cold beer on a hot day. A few people have been fired: the poet who one day taught his class in the nude, the fine young playwright who was functionally illiterate when it came to teaching, the four teachers caught in a daisy chain in the rear of the theater. There are exit exams to make sure the remedial students know what they were supposedly taught.
A couple of walls fell down during Della K.’s class yesterday. Fortunately they are made of cheap wallboard, so, though people were startled, they were unhurt.
It is the time of the year when students roam the halls and campuses looking for their teachers. They wait on long lines to get into their offices. They have suddenly realized that they are flunking a course. The student con is heavy. Plagiarized papers inundate the office. But there are some good ones, too.
Happy seniors roam the halls. I know most of them. They think they are ready; they have been led to believe that they are ready for graduate schools, work, whatever. They have accumulated grade points, yes, but they have not accumulated knowledge, for the most part, and much of that is our fault and some of it is theirs. The world will either devour them or absorb them; if they are absorbed, then they will not count on those coming after having much education either. Either way, we all lose.
When I was a kid and had a good teacher, I assumed that the world I would enter had to be like her or him, just plain good. Of course, I had been misled. After those good teachers they must’ve turned all bad. Most of them are here. They are broken down into cliques; they drift through the halls into one another’s office to gossip, plot, connive. They vote in blocs, rejecting and accepting on whim, it seems, voting naturally for what they want, even to the extent of calling in people who are on sabbatical to give them strength. Ditto when voting for what they will not have. They stand astride the paths to promotion and tenure like a collective monster. We are not educating; we are exercising power or fending it off, just like everyone else. We pretend, however, that we are not like everyone else; we are scholars, educators, etc.
There is shock on the campus today. I know what has caused it. I heard it on the radio. Mabel was murdered by her husband last night. Then he dismembered her—he was Set to her Osiris—with a chain saw and scattered her into the East River. He was caught doing it. Mabel might have been a fair poet, the kind who always has lines ready at community functions. She would not have been exceptional. What really mattered, though, was that she had the soul of a poet. I think now her soul is free. When she trills now over the heads of the oozing, multicolored swamp, over the heads of the turgid South American river, we will hear her only in our minds.
Some of my colleagues are talking about the murder. One laughs and says, “What else did you expect from these animals?”
5
I want to go away from it all, the branch, the books, the bullshit. I feel myself drowning in it, but I have no place to go to, no Israel, and I have been to Africa. I feel a great pain in a painless limbo—and this strange, demeaning exhaustion. I don’t understand it. (But I do, I do.)
“There’s no book in it,” I said to Allis. “What could I say? How would I write it? And
who would give a damn about a thirty-year-old woman who was black and wanted to be a poet?”
It was a week after Mabel’s murder and we were sitting in the living room, the paper and a magazine opened to profiles of Paul Cummings.
Mack came in. He was uncomfortable with silences. “What’s the matter?” His asking was cautious: Don’t tell me if it’s too bad.
“Nothing,” I said.
He peered at me. “You look tired, Dad. You look tired all the time. Right, Mom?”
“Well … yes and no …”
“So nothing’s the matter?” Mack said without waiting for an answer, and left the room.
Allis said, “You need to slow down, rest, honey.”
“I’m all right.”
“You may think so. You haven’t been giving Mack a lot of time, either—”
“There’s only so much goddamn time I can give to anyone—”
“—and you’re always shouting at something or someone—”
“What is this?”
“I’m saying you need a break! Take a leave from school!”
“I keep telling you I am all right!”
She leaped to her feet and swept the paper and the magazine to the floor and remained there, crouched over, daring me to do or say anything about it. In measured tones she said, “Cate, you cannot see yourself; you cannot see how you are, and I am serious, damn serious, about you slowing down.”
“Well, Allis, I just don’t see—”
“For one thing, those nightmares of yours are coming more and more often. And Mack’s right. You look like hell …”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Lemme think about it.”
So I bought a small peace for the rest of the evening, but I was also suspicious that Allis was right. If so, I wished to conceal from her what I considered to be a weakness. How could I have let all this shit get to me, eh?
I was still wondering about it when, later, Mack in bed, the doorbell gave off its harsh sound somewhere between a ring and buzz. We looked quickly at each other, wondering who it could be, which neighbor, which stranger from the street ringing at the wrong doorbell, which tenant gathering signatures for a petition not to go or to go co-op.
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