One More Theory About Happiness

by Paul Guest

  I looked at the entry a second time. I’d misread hole—the real meaning was bile. Black bile. At first, all I could think of were dark bodily secrets, the gall bladder impacted with strange, salty stones. An acid stream in the mouth.

  My disappointment faded as that error in reading took on its own loveliness, its own allusive possibilities. This is the poem, I thought. Lines were already lying down in rows in my mind. I could see them, almost.

  I hurried out of the office and out of the building. I feared I’d lose the poem if I couldn’t type it out, that I’d never find it again. Failed poems came to mind, ones I had thought about in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and with no ability to reach for a notebook and pen or a laptop glowing warmly. As much as was possible I rushed home, trying to hold it all in, past friends and past buildings I saw every day and past trees I often stopped beneath for a little while when it was too hot to walk anywhere.

  The automatic entrance to my building worked only half the time, often leaving me stuck outside, waiting for someone to exit, to hold the door. With the poem still uncoiling, I prayed the door would open for me. It did. Inside, at my computer, I began to type what I already had written, nine or ten lines, and after I had, the rest was easy.

  The poem, titled “Melancholia,” seemed to me to be all blue, pewter specked with cloud white. Flash Gordon rocketed about, and Petrarch was name-checked, and behind it all thrummed a new sort of love, a new competence, a deeper engagement with the world and my own feelings. This was different, better, truer than all the poems I’d written before. Looking at the screen, rereading the lines, I felt changed.

  New as well was teaching. Throughout graduate school, I’d avoided the pressed labor of the teaching assistantship, awarded a fellowship which gave me all the time I could have wanted but none of the experience. I was nervous going into my first class, which met in an all-glass room beside a bathroom. Toilets flushed and flushed, sounding like arrhythmic surf. Battered metal blinds half-hid the constant procession but the seepage of cell phone talk was without end.

  My students came from places like Montgomery and Mobile and Birmingham and Opelika and Sylacauga. They seemed to have little sense of the history which had broiled around them for decades. When I announced one morning that the Alabama State Legislature had voted to repeal laws barring miscegenation, older than any of them and older than me, it was hard not to see them for the children they still were. Bright but still unformed. One boy, bluff and soft everywhere, little eyes swallowed up by his face, confided in me his difficulties: he’d had to learn how to operate an alarm clock, wake himself up every morning, that his mama had always done this.

  Small, quiet, draped in the echoes of bad history, Tuscaloosa never felt like it could be a home for me. I would travel in my chair from the campus into town, which looked deserted at night, newly abandoned, the staging ground of the Rapture, when Jesus is said to return, lifting believers up into the air. More than one car in Tuscaloosa bore bumper stickers about the Rapture, and in the heavy, humid nights, while I searched side streets limned by massive magnolias, I thought about the Rapture. About being called up into the air, in an instant, all the cars assured me. About the new body that was promised to believers, as soon as check-in in Heaven began. Whenever that was. I thought of my own body.

  I think I was never so alone as those nights in Tuscaloosa, where I tried to find my way. From campus to a grocery store. To anywhere. The dark would unfurl and choirs of cicadas would begin to sing out. Their noise was like a second night.

  The first time I heard Eliot Khalil Wilson read, I loved him, I felt I’d found an older brother, with hair that refused a comb, glasses that thickened each year. His wardrobe wasn’t so much vintage as it was reclaimed from Goodwill. He was tall, and a near-constant profusion of sweat beaded his forehead.

  The English department held readings in a natural science museum auditorium down the street. Its elevator was walled off behind glass, sequestered, and no one could use it without the proper codes. The night Eliot read, no one who knew those codes was around. I waited in the marble lobby, exasperated. I thought about going home. Upstairs, I heard the readers begin. I wanted to leave then, in limp protest, but outside, rain whipped the sidewalks and tore limbs from the trees. At last, the bearer of codes arrived, soaked and foul-tempered, stabbing at the keys with her damp finger.

  I tried to sneak into the auditorium. The audience, with its hive mind, turned toward me. I smiled, nodded, willed invisibility.

  At the podium, Eliot and a woman stood, alternately reading passages from an essay about food. He spoke of his diabetes, the dangers to his health, and of what he often dreamed at night: an undulant river of chocolate, his body falling from a great height into it, sinking into sugared coma like a millstone.

  It was deadpan virtuosity, and little of the crowd seemed to get it. The effect was baroque and madcap and bracing, all at once. I thought of syringes and blood and an ever-deepening blindness. And I laughed.

  Walking home after the reading, when the rain had passed on, toward Birmingham and then Atlanta, I thought, I will be crushed if we aren’t friends.

  I clung to that hope, that wish for friendship, connection, anything.

  The humid weather of my apartment drove me from it. I would see any movie, no matter how bad, at a nearby theater. I needed out, away.

  Late autumn in Tuscaloosa was still warm, with a giant slab sky overhead and stars that seemed to run like butter in a pan. One night, I went my slow way down the sidewalks and past the parking lots and up a long ramp into the theater.

  Slumped down beside me, a green jacket pulled tightly around her, was a girl I’d seen in the company of English graduate students. Her name was Ivy. She taught in the biology department, working on a Ph.D. in genetics. I said hello. We chatted until the lights went down. Before long, the film caught in the projector’s gate, melting. Slowly, everyone filed out but us.

  We stayed a long while, talking about mutual friends, campus politics, movies, or books we’d recently read. When it was late and the building closed, I went with her to her car. She paused.

  “Let me give you a hug,” she said, sweetly.

  That night at home, I was uncertain of how I felt. Nothing about the encounter was galvanic, charged. I wondered if I should contact her again. After a few days had passed, I searched out her e-mail address and suggested we get together again. She agreed, answering from the lab she rarely left.

  Ivy was shy and often intractable, sensitive and sullen, working fifteen-hour days culturing unicellular organisms, swabbing petri dishes, ruining her green eyes. I delivered lunch to her, salads, sandwiches, then returned to my classes.

  More dates followed. Rented movies, ordered pizza. I tried to nurse her exhaustion. I wrote my poems.

  After several weeks, we had only kissed—she was Catholic, devout, a virgin, and our relationship never grew urgent with the imperative of sex. I told myself I was respecting her beliefs, and this was true, but the truth I couldn’t face was my own disengagement, the last, lingering effects of heartbreak, carried there from Illinois.

  At night, while my attendant helped me to bathe, undress, lie down in the bed I carried from state to state, she would wait in her car in the parking lot of the football stadium. When my attendant left, I’d call her cell phone and then she’d drive to my apartment, letting herself in with a spare key.

  She never turned on a light. She would slip from her clothes, and crawl into the narrow twin bed, where we’d lie, naked until the morning.

  Once, on a freezing night, when she wore to bed an old T-shirt, I kissed her breasts through the worn fabric.

  “I don’t see why you do that,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t feel like anything.”

  And so I turned away, pressing against the bed’s metal rail.

  One night, when I had planned to grade a stack of papers and work on a new poem, I found myself babysitting an eight-year-old boy. Seated on my couch, he anno
unced, “I can use my penis for a bookmark.”

  He was the only son of the woman who had suggested I come to Tuscaloosa. He was reading a children’s book. I looked up from my computer, wincing slightly, trying not to give any indication I’d heard. I did not want to be doing this. I had not asked.

  He would climb over me, setting his shoes in the recesses of my wheelchair, reaching around my shoulders, lifting himself up into my lap. The scabby knobs of his knees dug into my legs. I would try to talk him down.

  It began with Clifford the Big Red Dog.

  Needing papers signed, I went to Dana’s office where she was grading. Her son was seated on the floor, watching a faded videotape. I made the mistake of identifying the dog, engaging the boy, and identifying myself as someone familiar with children. She looked up.

  “Would you mind sitting with Calvin for a while?” she asked, tired. “I need to make some copies downstairs and I just can’t take him.”

  Dana was up, already leaving. In reply, all I made was a noise.

  Calvin came over, poking me with a finger, wordless.

  “Let’s not do that,” I said. “Let’s not poke each other.”

  He climbed up my leg and into my lap, where he watched Clifford for an hour. When his mother returned, she scooped him up, distracted. I left, annoyed. No signature.

  After that afternoon, every other week or so, Dana would find me wherever I was. In my office. In the mailroom. Going home. I was too young, too inexperienced to say no. I’d ruefully agree to look after the boy, drop whatever I was doing, offer up my wheelchair and body as a platform for his climbing.

  The night he claimed his penis would fit into the pages of his book left me livid, disturbed. I wanted no more of what amounted to harassment, despite the mother’s saccharine disingenuousness: Calvin just loves you. And I know you love him.

  I resolved to say no the next time, to be free of it.

  Spring had arrived early and the sky was a faded denim vault. Done for the day, I felt good. I whistled.

  A block from home, at the edge of campus, where the road ran downhill to a freshwater spring, I crossed with the light. Then a car horn bleated.

  I turned around. A car I didn’t recognize had stopped in the road. Bright sunlight painted its windshield a solid coat of sun. I squinted, trying to see who the driver was. I moved closer to the curb, peering.

  Before my eyes had adjusted, Dana was pulling Calvin from the car, dragging him by his twig of an arm to the sidewalk. I hadn’t even recognized her, or her menace of a son, before she was climbing back into her car, calling over her shoulder she was late for a meeting and would be back in an hour.

  And then Dana was gone. The boy and I looked each other over. Across the street was a Starbucks, first in the state of Alabama, it crowed. Sighing, I led Calvin in and bought him chocolate milk.

  For a while, I thought we were the only ones there. An Eric Clapton album played throughout the store. I hated the boy a little more every moment.

  Then a ragged woman sidled over, her jeans patched and patched and patched again. She sat down with something rolled up under her meaty arm.

  It was a leather chessboard. As she unrolled it, she began to describe the foundation she had created for teaching underprivileged children how to play. Calvin, half feral, looked like he was ready to pounce on her.

  Each time she shifted her plump frame in the seat, she groaned. She looked to me knowingly, as if pain were our bond, and by it we already knew one another.

  Her teeth were horrors, used-up stumps, stained, broken.

  “I’ve got lupus,” she blurted. “Doctors are no good. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

  I mumbled something noncommittal.

  Calvin was a chess prodigy. He luxuriated in each match with the woman, who seemed impressed at first, then indifferent and sour.

  The day was gone and outside everything was dark. Through the long wall of glass, I could see cars disappearing around the curve, I could see the square of my apartment’s one window, a low bronze light that was my desk lamp. When the Starbucks employees began to push vacuums around and look at us, his mother ran up, arms splayed out. I left, saying nothing. If I stayed, I might say some dire thing to any of them, to all of them, something black and regrettable.

  The poems I wrote were sad, quieter than any I’d written before. Gone was any nod to slapstick. Monsters shrugged through them. Love was an unspoken ruin.

  But they came quickly. Each day, I waited on one. At my keyboard, I read the news and dashed fragmentary e-mails to scattered friends.

  I wrote about the invisible man. About Godzilla and Alice the Goon.

  One night, having left her lab long enough to eat something, Ivy glanced at the computer screen, at first intrigued by the lines I’d written.

  As she read further, her face soured.

  “Why don’t you just write about suicide, if that’s what you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, angry.

  She had thrown herself on my bed, staring up at the dropped ceiling, the fluorescent lights humming.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t mean anything. I just wish you would write something happy. For once. Something I’d like.”

  We barely understood one another. We hardly spoke the same language, it seemed sometimes. I turned back to the screen, to the poem, and closed it.

  Eliot and I had become good friends. The sort to spot loose change on the ground, to pluck coins from a pay phone, Eliot had scavenger’s eyes and the quick hands of a thief. He carried with him keys he found on campus, lost by custodians.

  We were assembling manuscripts from new poems and old alike. I was obsessive: I printed new copies after the slightest changes, carrying them everywhere. When Eliot found a lab that printed out the university’s paychecks and was otherwise dormant the entire month, when he discovered they’d print our manuscripts on the huge printers in seconds, we were regulars. An old man would hand them to us, wrapped in clear plastic, and warm, like white loaves of bread.

  When Eliot no longer taught at the university, his nontenure, nonrenewable contract expired, he found a lock mated to a key he had carried for years. Ten feet high and solid wood, on the third floor of a building that been an army barracks during the Civil War, rebuilt from rubble after Sherman burned the campus, the door pulled open, protesting.

  Inside, a cavernous suite filled with junk, broken things, old printers, the slough and detritus of a university. It had started as storage space, progressed to trash heap, and was then forgotten.

  Eliot whistled. I thought there was no way the space was usable.

  A week’s clearing out freed the space from the years. Ordered from a local print shop, a plate with his name and title and a made-up room number claimed it for his own. A call to the campus technology office finished the job.

  Before the day was done, the place was furnished with a new computer, wired for Internet access. No one asked whether he taught there.

  We spread our poems out on long tables, shuffling their order, adding new ones, pulling older ones from the mix. Eliot kept an electric putting green in the corner, practicing when stuck, unsure. Cheap wine chilled in a braying refrigerator. There were old couches. Vintage lamps lighting it all up. Sometimes at dusk we’d assemble balsa wood gliders and wind the rubber-band-powered propellers, launching them from the balcony, rooting for their rickety flight across the green grass below. Bats and moth wings swooped through the air.

  From there we sent out into the world what we hoped were books.

  When the call came, an instant nausea roiled inside me: the editor of New Issues Press, an imprint of Western Michigan University Press, wanted to publish my manuscript. A few months had passed since the day Eliot had walked with me to the campus post office, fat envelopes containing our manuscripts in his arms. Listening to the editor’s gruff voice, I felt lightheaded, shocked even: assembling the manuscript, sending it out, and waiting by the mailbox every
day for word, good or bad, to return had been processes separate from the writing of the poems, and though I’d hoped for this for years, I’d never allowed myself to think it might happen. Now that it had, I struggled to believe I wasn’t dreaming. A year from then my book would come to be, an amazement. We hung up, and when I left my apartment, the February air was warm, and in it I laughed and laughed.

  That October I woke up on a Wednesday morning in the emergency room with no idea why I was there. I remembered going to bed and seeing Ivy step into the bathroom. And then nothing, like tidal sleep had washed over me.

  I’d had a grand mal seizure, my body shaking violently. When I was twenty-two, I’d suffered the first, reading poems at my desk. In intermittent years, a few seizures had followed. No neurologist could say much for certain, except that they weren’t epileptic in nature and weren’t the result of a tumor or other ailment. One suggested that maybe, when I broke my neck, I had suffered undiagnosed head trauma as well. Brain damage. All that was left to do was take medication and hope no more came.

  By the time I was discharged, the sun was boiling up at the horizon’s pink rim. Instead of going to bed, I ate a waffle at a diner near campus and left for my first class. I taught twice that day, as I did on Thursday and Friday as well. In the mailroom, friends and colleagues scolded me for even coming in. I finished the week, then left for my parents’ home, where I stayed a week, resting, seeing my doctors. Eliot covered my classes while I was gone.

  When I returned, Dana summoned me to her office. Her son was nowhere.

  “We understand that you were away last week.” She spoke in the plural.

  At first, I was too fixated on this to reply. “Seeing my doctors,” I finally said. “My neurologist.”