Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  The heiress looked away, as did Drum, neither interested in my existential fashion dilemma. Then she lifted her pale beringed right hand heavenward as if she were bearing witness to something.

  “I want you to remember what I’m saying.”

  “There’s no forgetting,” said Drum.

  She frowned. She couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic—and neither could I. Then Drum patted my hand again, and I understood that he was putting her on.

  I stole a glance at her as I ate my chicken. She was gilded with the roseate glow of the spa devotee. Her creamy breasts gleamed, and her hair, which I admired, was twisted lengths of glossy chestnut held by glittering combs. I rarely noticed jewelry, but tonight I was struck by how her fingers and neck and bosom were engemmed and how the gems imprisoned the light. Jewels were her theme.

  She swallowed her wine and smiled dreamily at Drum. I found myself smiling dreamily back at her, though it was clear that her affection was not for me. I had no interest in the fact of her wealth (though I was fairly sure she assumed that her wealth drew people to her). I stared at her, charmed by her elegance, her aura of romance, the graceful attitudes she assumed, unself-consciously. She was lovely and utterly at home in her body.

  So far I’d found the cultivation of beauty embarrassing. The female body, adorned, simpering, suspended helpless in the male gaze—I’d refused all that. So why was I now, briefly, stupidly, transfixed? Was it because I spent so much of my life wishing to be invisible? Here was visibility, here was a woman who liked to be seen.

  She continued to smile luminously, at Drum.

  “Do you know that when we were out on the terrace, looking down on Fifth and then over to Madison—I had a poetic moment?”

  Drum’s arm brushed mine.

  “I looked down at the traffic moving uptown and downtown—coming and going—and I said to myself: Look! Diamonds coming toward me, rubies going away!”

  She nodded twice, satisfied, and held out her glass, and Drum lifted a bottle of Bordeaux near his glass (a very good year, and a good buy, I’d heard someone next to me observe) and replenished hers. Then he leaned toward me and refilled my glass.

  “‘Diamonds coming toward me, rubies going away.’ So painterly,” he murmured.

  “Well, I have these moments.”

  “And you share them.”

  “I’m going to visit the powder room,” she said.

  While she was gone, Drum quoted the diamonds-approaching, rubies-receding line more than once—deadpan—with cruelly accelerating relish.

  “Okay, Drum,” I said. “I got it. A taste of the poète-manquée.”

  A fluted green glass dish bearing a pear poached and gleaming in liqueur appeared before me. Drum was often vicious, but he was also often right—therefore I knew he’d give me some version of the truth. There was something I had to know. I began by telling him that I’d been working in a women’s prison and had started teaching a poetry workshop there.

  “Stop right there,” he said. “You’re teaching poetry where?”

  “Rikers Island. The Women’s House of Detention.”

  He laughed loudly, pushing his poached pear away with a flick of his wrist. He looked down into his wineglass, swirled the dregs, and smiled slowly.

  “I’ll bet you’re getting some killer literary work out there.” He laughed again, nudging me to be sure I got the play on words.

  “Better than the diamonds-and-rubies reference.”

  “She should be prosecuted just for coming up with that line.”

  We both laughed, though I didn’t think much was funny. Then I set my wineglass down, carefully. I felt a little drunk.

  “I smuggle in…things,” I said. “I take in a magazine called On the Barricade and instead of reading the political articles, the women like the personals. They believe that there’s someone out there—an SWM or SBM or GWF or GBF—who will fall for an ex-offender female, an XOFF FEM, who needs TLC.

  “Most of them want to write romantic or rhetorical poems,” I added. “With a couple of exceptions. And there are real exceptions. I mean, of course, no works of genius, but…”

  “But that’s the question one has to ask oneself, isn’t it, my dear?” His tone was very amused. “How good are these poems?”

  “They’re not what you yourself might call good. Though I’m not sure,” I said. “But there’s one I can’t get off my mind. It’s…”

  “I sense that you have a copy—am I right? Read it to me now?” he asked, as I’d known he would.

  I was indeed carrying Billie Dee’s poem in my bag. I’d read it over and over, until the middle fold was a little frayed. I wanted Baylor Drummond’s reaction to the poem, but I also didn’t want it. I wanted him to be stunned into silence, I wanted him to be confused by the poem’s simple dramatic power. And then I wanted him to—what? Offer to lend a hand teaching in prison? Sister, how naïve can you get?

  I reached down and pulled the folded piece of tablet paper from my bag. I cleared my throat twice. I could see the heiress talking to Sam Glass at the other end of the table. She’d be back in her position across from us soon.

  I felt uncertain for a moment, as if I might be betraying Billie Dee’s trust, but I decided that having a great poet’s thoughts outweighed the question of violating confidence. Drum lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair.

  I read the poem aloud, quickly, trying to do justice to the words.

  When I finished, I put the poem down on the table and looked over at him. He sat up suddenly, blew smoke through his nostrils, then winked at me, waving away smoke, shaking with laughter.

  “Terrible,” he gasped. “Just goddam awful.”

  At the door, after dinner was over, Sam Glass kissed me and asked if I wanted to go with him and a couple of others to hear Mabel Mercer at the St. Regis. Her voice, he said, was like blackstrap molasses over gravel. He croaked out a few bars of “All the Sad Young Men.” Sam Glass always dressed entirely in black, and his great ram’s head was covered with wild curly hair. He was a renegade kisser, but he couldn’t sing for shit. He was in his twenties, like me, but he seemed older.

  “It’s the Age of Aquarius.” I backed away from him. “The rest of the world is listening to Jimi Hendrix.”

  I looked into his half-lidded hazel eyes, trying to gauge how drunk he was.

  “See, you’ve got that frozen-steppes look on your face again,” he said. “Try not to concentrate so hard. You look like you’ve spent too much time milking reindeer. The problem with you, Heidi, is that you fail to appreciate the diamond of decadence.”

  “Anyone who comes up with a phrase like ‘diamond of decadence, ’” I shot back, stung, “has his own problems, specifically Catholic or Jewish. Too bad you just can’t be convincing as a Bad Boy.”

  “The diamond of decadence,” he repeated, and moved in to kiss me again. I backed quickly out the door and turned toward the elevator.

  “Ask your devoted patroness,” I said. “About the diamonds, I mean. And the rubies. The diamonds moving toward us and the rubies going away.”

  He shook his head at me. “Wait—what the hell are you talking about?”

  It occurred to me, as the elevator doors closed on his confused face, that that question was fast becoming my personal anthem. What the hell are you talking about? Sam Glass, I’m talking about prison. All of our cramped migraine-bright cells in the day-to-day House of Detention. Diamonds coming toward me, rubies going away. Uptown, downtown. Midnight/dawn. “How I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world,” quoth the tired king. Then, too, I’d wanted to be one of what Lear called God’s spies, seeing it for myself: I longed to perceive how the ordinary boring suffering world turned into a story, a poem, from which I could learn. Describe this chair, class. Then, please—describe the light on its wings as it ascends. Describe the real and unreal worlds in their Minute Particulars. The last thing you want here is an alert pimp. Two Dead Boys. You way too cute, Mattox. Fro
m Helegat, bright passage, to Hell Gate, sinister waters. Is that Missoni? Describe the faces of the dead, who are with us always. The chair opens its wings, rises. A revolution is not a dinner party.

  What was it that I actually aspired to make of myself, I wondered. A poet or a so-called revolutionary? Someone intent on restructuring society or a word-dreamer, reseeing, reimagining beauty or truth—from a prison cell or the back of a motorcycle? “Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth,” the poet said. Why then did they seem so far apart to me? Worlds apart. Perhaps, I thought, I was just trying to do what everyone else was doing, struggling to make sense of each stumble, each loss of the gradually disappointed heart. I had experienced that in the Bail Fund meeting as well as at Sam Glass’s table—how it felt almost to be able to express, then to lose irrevocably, a precious insight—sudden illumination flashing up into rhetoric or social cliché. “SBCB,” Sam Glass sometimes called me—Serious Blonde in a Che Beret.

  But Sam Glass, I knew, did not really understand my conflicted heart. It was true—I was an idealist, I was of my generation. I thought one could work toward what we termed the healing of class and economic wounds. And so what if, along with this, I wanted occasional romance? Not fashion-magazine romance, not an heiress’s Diamonds Coming Toward Me, et cetera, versus fucking in the shadow of the barricade—rather, the sudden rightness of knowing how to love, let go my ruinous anger. No, I didn’t like the way the world had been treating me: I was not some shiny accessory—but I was readily lumped into that category. The way I appeared to be drew unwanted assumptions about the way I was. Finally what I wanted was to come from Somewhere Else, some dream country, capital of reinvention, the fun-house mirror rippling me into a true reflection.

  A little bit of The Ballad of Reading Gaol popped into my head as I walked toward a cab parked at the corner: “I never saw a man who looked / with such a wistful eye / Upon that little tent of blue / which prisoners call the sky.”

  Dear Oscar Wilde: I’m just a wee bit fried.

  I looked up at the sky over Manhattan, pitch-black except for one lonely star. It was time to go home.

  Taneesha

  I say to you how my baby

  Could fly. Two year old

  And I seen her go way up

  At my cousin’s. When they

  All in the kitchen. She go up

  On the ceiling all by herself.

  My neighbor on the 12th floor

  Told me I was a lie. I told her

  That Taneesha could fly any day.

  They come to spray roaches and I

  Put Taneesha out the window for

  Good air. She could set fly, but

  This old woman scare her, stickin’

  Her head out. Taneesha went step by

  Step screamin’ Mama where I put her

  On the ledge. I told her, Fly! fly!

  But she kept on screamin’ till she

  Took a step out down. See I say that

  Bitch next door, There she go. But

  Taneesha didn’t fly that time.

  —BILLIE DEE BOYD, POET

  three

  The cab took me home to the West Village, to Kenneth Brown Severn, my husband—also known as K.B. K.B. and I had been married for just over a year, but we hadn’t announced our wedded state to the world at large.

  We’d been married in Minnesota, on impulse, during a visit to my family. In two weeks, we’d put together a hippie wedding ceremony that featured Handel’s Water Music and (as if to ensure lifelong embarrassment) “Morning Has Broken” by Cat Stevens. We recited poem-vows taken from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”(“Because I do not hope to turn again”) looking into each other’s eyes. We did “construct something upon which to rejoice.” K.B.’s father and stepmother flew in from San Francisco. We pledged our love, we were declared man and wife.

  We were the closest of friends—so close that we’d mistaken our sweet intimacy for grown-up committed love, or a reason for marriage. We just wanted to be together, the world be damned. We didn’t need to tell anyone about marrying each other, it was nobody else’s business, we said. Still, it gave our lives a kind of mystery, a mystery I hadn’t lived long enough to recognize as pure unarticulated doubt.

  K.B. was a doctor completing his training. He was a brain specialist, a resident in neurology at Columbia-Presbyterian. His “areas”—ataxia, aphasia, coma, and stroke—were a chain of horrors, yet he made his work in his threatening specialties somehow full of hope. His interest in stroke and coma took him uptown to Harlem Hospital, where he ran a weekday clinic.

  K.B. was the noblest person I had ever known in my life—I adored him. I adored him the way people who believe they see angels adore each manifestation of winged travel and light. I’d once accompanied K.B. to Harlem, on the way to his clinic. As we climbed up out of the subway, heading toward 135th and Lenox, an elderly black woman approached us.

  “Say, Dr. Severn,” she cried. “I been walkin’ out here, waitin’ for you. I got something here to show you.”

  She parted the gray frizz on top of her head, then ran her fingers along her scalp, describing the pain. K.B. reached out and put his hands on her head.

  “Okay, Mrs. Turner, you need to get this checked out. Come by the clinic later and we’ll X-ray. And, Mrs. Turner? You have nothing to worry about, okay? We’ll take care of you.”

  I watched him, his hands on her, blessing her, and I thought: There is some good in the world and K.B. is that good. I knew there were so many doctors in the world whose hands would never have opened in that way over her bowed troubled head. And so many people who would never know a doctor like K.B.—hands like his held above their heads: a halo made of healing.

  He was the one who had gotten me the job in the prison—he himself worked (whenever he could find the time) as a physician at C-76, the Men’s House on Rikers, where he had been working on improving basic medical care through his organization, Radical Health Watch.

  How would I explain my feelings for K.B. to the Women’s Bail Fund? They didn’t respect anyone who worked in the System. It was true, we struggled against Patriarchy—there was a poster of Gloria Steinem on the wall of the apartment where the meeting had been held, up there next to wailing oversexed Janis. Beautiful Gloria with her square jaw, flashing aviator glasses, and long frosted hair, an arm thrown up in the feminist solidarity salute. Beneath her image was her famous quote (which much later I’d learned had originated with an Australian feminist): “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  Right on, I thought. Those words had been my motto—until my impulsive marriage. But when I was honest about my own situation, I realized that I did need K.B. I needed K.B. because he was true to himself. K.B. was a bicycle, like other guys, but he was what he was. Unlike me, the unreliable fish-on-land, fish-on-wheels. I was unreliable, I thought again—because although Sam Glass ridiculed me, I realized finally that I had secretly acquired a taste for the Diamond after all. I longed for the literary life. I felt that I was ruined for the life K.B. represented. The literary world asked, it seemed to me, exactly what K.B.’s world would never ask: that everything be fuel for the fire of the imagination. That the imagination be the god of the self.

  Still, if it was true that I was ruined for a life of political action—I thought a little drunkenly, fumbling with my keys at the door of our apartment on West Twelfth Street—then I was ruined for the inward-turning life of letters as well. I was, quite simply, fucked up.

  The lights were on inside the apartment and Procol Harum wafted from the stereo: Her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale. Unbelievable—K.B. was home early from the hospital. His schedule was so demanding that he sometimes had to crash in one of the hospital beds.

  “Is that you?” he called from the bathroom. I could hear the shower.

  “I’m fucked up,” I called out, by way of hello.

  He told me later as we sat eating Frosted Flakes and drinking hot cocoa with marshmall
ows that it had been a slow night, not too many admissions. Even the terminal patients were sleeping calmly. Even the babies with Tay-Sachs disease and the grandmothers with dementia—the No Cures. As a resident, he didn’t have to do what the interns were required to do—he wasn’t obligated to stay all night.

  Still, he looked exhausted as he sat there in his boxer shorts and faded sky-blue scrubs-top eating cereal. He was tall and thin and pale with medium-length reddish-blond Prince Valiant hair and a smile left over from childhood. His hairline was just beginning to recede. A striped towel was draped over his head and occasionally he rubbed his damp hair with it. He smelled clean, like the bright green soap in the red plastic frog dish in the shower.

  I told him about the Women’s Bail Fund meeting at some length. I didn’t go into my dinner party experience at all. K.B. knew a certain amount about Sam Glass and hadn’t much enthusiasm for him, so I didn’t spend time there—certainly I didn’t go into Sam’s random kissing style.

  “Corinna Firestone got after me because I want to move on from doing all the actual bailing out.”

  I put my spoon down and stared into his eyes, eager for his approval.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” I said. “It’s so random, you know? I can do a lot more good working in AfterCare.”

  I heard the defensiveness in my voice, and I realized that I really had felt lonely on my forays to the Island. I did want the others to know what it was like—riding the bus, facing the bail window all alone, piping up with the names. Having to repeat them, again and again, as the surly shaded presence behind the tinted glass claimed not to have heard correctly.

  “I go out there, I’m carrying dollar bills and quarters and dimes in a brown paper lunch bag or whatever they’ve collected the funds in. I end up in front of the window and I read off the names and they check them off. It takes hours for the women I’ve bailed out to be processed. So I always have to leave finally—without ever seeing one of them.” I laughed ruefully, and he smiled back at me. I thought for a minute.