“Marvelous idea!” he yelled into the line so that Helena, lying beside him, plunked her pillow over her head and groaned. “Hold the wire, let me take it in my study,” he said. But he left the bedroom line off the hook, and later he wondered if Helena had listened in on the conversation. For days afterwards she was berating the girl for spending long distance money for therapy from a man who couldn’t get his own life together.
Graduate school was a marvelous idea for Miss García. He had discouraged her preoccupation with “creative writing,” a soft field to say the least. One could always write on the side if one wished, but one had to be trained in something substantial. She would do well to specialize in the Romantics or perhaps modern American literature since she was so partial to Stevens and Eliot and Frost. “I always thought your analyses and papers were graduate school material. As for the past, it’s over. We all make mistakes. The challenge is to keep moving. ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’” he concluded, quoting Tennyson.
“‘I will drink life to the lees,’” she agreed. The echo on the wire made the quoted lines sound all the more sententious. “‘To follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’”
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought, the echo came back.
After the call, he could not sleep. The rousing lines from Tennyson, the voice of a special student, the bright young faces lost to him every year at graduation, the book on the Victorian discovery of the epic in diminished form he had never written—all of these ghosts taunted him in the small downstairs study below the room where his estranged wife of thirty years lay sleeping. What was a life about, anyhow? A struggle to find one’s way under the cold impartial stars—who had said that? He thought of the unhappy woman upstairs in bed. I strove to love you in that old, high way of love, and yet we’d grown, as weary-hearted as that hollow moon. How did those lines go?
To quiet the turmoil, he sat down at his desk, and he penned then and there his second letter of recommendation in support of Yolanda García. To the Graduate Studies Program of the English Department of Harvard University. Once in a career there comes a student. A month later, she called to say she was back in the States, her application was completed, could he send his letter out? By all means. Months went by, a couple of conversations transpired, including the elated one in which she delivered the news that she had been accepted with a T.A. Marvelous! Then, silence. No note on Harvard letterhead, no postcard of the Cambridge quad with a scribbled greeting or promise of a letter later when things calmed down. Finally, he heard from a returning alum—their third-year reunion already!—that Yolanda García had gone back to the Dominican Republic and gotten involved in a revolution or something. Hadn’t he seen her picture in Newsweek along with some Peace Corps kids? On the way home, Garfield stopped by the library and looked up the old issue—and sure enough, there she was, arm in arm with a handful of fair-haired young men and women and surrounded by guardias on the steps of a pink national palace. So that’s where the men got their taste for suit color.
Garfield was both downcast and exhilarated by the Newsweek photo. He was sorry Miss García had let the brilliant opportunity of the Harvard T.A. go. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but admire her gutsiness. Maybe she would be a Maud Gonne, somebody a young Yeats would write poems about.
He didn’t hear from Miss García for the next two years—though he thought of her now and then, wondering what had come of her rabble-rousing on the island. During that time, his own life took what looked like a nose dive but really was a surfacing into clearer, happier waters. Helena ran off to Rutgers with that nincompoop from sociology. Given the years of disaffection and her final betrayal, the divorce was relatively amicable. His two boys wavered as to whom to side with, and then sighed with relief, realizing there was no contest here. “This is the best thing for your mother and me,” Garfield told them. But he spared them the rest. We were never meant for each other. That would have been too brutal, to deny them the fantasy of a once happy parental past.
Still, after thirty years of shared living, the solitude was difficult. To fill the long evenings and weekends, he began inviting his junior faculty members over, young colleagues in need of mentoring, whom he would not automatically lose in four years. That’s how Matthews came into this life. The new Renaissance fellow was outspoken, in need of seasoning, but decidedly brilliant, albeit with a little earring in his ear. Harder to ignore were the powerful feelings the young man stirred up in Garfield. At this late stage to find his heart inclining towards another man! Could he have been so blind? I stumbled when I saw. Who had said that? These days, it seemed, the glue of language was coming undone; the world as he had known it was falling apart. Still, his lifelong habits of self-control persisted. Garfield kept his secret to himself until one evening when Matthews confronted him after a student performance of Oscar Wilde.
The importance of being honest. Well, it had been their secret. Matthews had eventually gone on to UC, San Diego, unable to bear the repressed little New England campus of Commodore. It was during Matthews’s time at Commodore, while he was living in Garfield’s own house under the status of “boarder,” that Yolanda García finally called and left a message on that horrid machine Matthews had hooked up and then taken along with him to California. It was the only thing Garfield had been glad to see go.
Hi, Mr. Garfield, wow, a machine! You, who used to hate all newfangled things! Well, I guess we’ve all been through some changes. I’m back in the States, in Tennessee of all places—I love it! I’m working with prisoners and senior citizens and schoolchildren. I’ll write you a long letter, promise. I just wanted to say hi and see how you were doing. Please say hello to Mrs. Garfield. And sorry about the Harvard mess. Okay? Oh yeah, this is Yolanda García and let’s see, I think it’s Tuesday and it’s ten o’clock in the morning here. Bye!
Prisoners, senior citizens, school children. So, she had finally decided on social work. What a pity. Well, at least she had settled down and was happy.
“Who is this Yolanda García?” Matthews had asked him.
“Once in a career there comes a student,” Garfield began—and stopped himself.
But Matthews was nodding. “Yep, I’ve had one of those.” His first year out of graduate school, there was a young woman who had flipped over him. It got to be quite a problem: she would follow him home, stand outside his apartment building, gazing up at his window. Matthews thought he could cut off the crush just by informing her of his sexual orientation, but when he called her in and confessed, she didn’t bat an eye. “So? I don’t care.” Matthews still got birthday and Christmas cards from the young woman, who had since married but continued to sign her letters, Love always.
“Oh, this situation is not personal in that way,” Garfield informed him.
Matthews had looked at him with those kind but sharp, blue eyes of his, and in his soft Louisiana drawl that was like butter on bread, he’d said, “Jordan, it’s always personal. You know that.”
Too soon, Matthews was gone—San Diego, the other tip of the continent!—and the days were long and the nights were longer. But the promised letter from Miss García did arrive. She was working on a project with the National Endowment for the Arts in prisons and schools and senior-citizen homes teaching creative writing. (Oh dear. Better that than sociology, he supposed.) Furthermore she had fallen in love with a British man and they were planning to get married, and this time she thought she was making a smart choice. What did he think?
As a whole the British are a fine people, he wanted to tell her. Consider how, even in far colonies and dim outposts, they maintain their impeccable manners. And so on. But as he read her letter he was struck by how, after extolling this British man, she had asked for Garfield’s opinion. Wasn’t the doubt already an indication of something? But how could he ruin her peace of mind with Macbeth-like doubts. Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! He was available for any academic advice she
might need, but affairs of the heart, in that arena he had to agree with Helena’s estimation of him, he was not one to talk. Hadn’t it taken him most of his life to figure out who it was he could love?
And so he wrote, I am glad you have found a suitable companion for yourself, Miss García. As he scribbled congratulations, it was Matthews he imagined, the long aristocratic hands, the slender hips, the bony martyr’s face cocked playfully to one side, saying, “‘Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove . . .’”
“Impossible,” Garfield had told him when Matthews proposed in quoted verse from San Diego. “I’ve got a thirty-four-year career to think of, Matthews. If you had wanted to live with me, why didn’t you stay here? Commodore was only too happy to have you.”
“Sure, Jordan, and die a slow, painful death”—and then the unforgivable words that made Garfield place the receiver calmly and furiously in its cradle—“just like you have.”
Over the course of the next few years, he heard from her often. Her calls were no longer requests for recommendation letters or advice, but friendly chats. How are you, Mr. Garfield? Where’d your machine go? What are you doing over the summer? Are you working on a book or something?
He supposed that she had found out about his divorce and was calling up, in part, out of concern, thinking that the lonely twang in his voice was due to his missing Helena. After his heart attack the first fall Matthews was gone, she called every few weeks, always on Sundays like his sons. “How you doin’, Mr. Garfield?” Her voice resounded as she paced through the rooms on the other end of the line. She was living in a big, old house in San Francisco. (Five hundred miles north of San Diego!) The Englishman was well-to-do, it seemed, traveling all over the globe. “He’s one of the ones who runs things,” she laughed. He could hear it in her voice, too, a hankering for something else. “Is it okay if I send you some stuff I’m writing,” she asked. “I know you don’t believe in creative writing, but I need some feedback.”
“Absolutely! I’d love to read what you’re writing,” he lied. What he really wanted to say was, now that you’re settled down, Miss García (she had kept her name this time), why don’t you visit the nearby Stanford campus and consider that doctorate? Think of it, you’ll have your own focus in life, since obviously, this jet-age Brit isn’t providing it for you.
The poems came typed but already worried with penciled-in revisions as if she couldn’t stop herself from her endless perfecting of the lines. And they were quite good. Oh, the world weariness in them got old, and he could have done with a lot less of those female poems about the discovery of her own body, but the control was there in the lines, the mastery or near mastery of form. The stories were less compelling but the understanding of character and the eye for the telling detail showed promise, as he told her in his long letter back. He could not help adding, “And now, Miss García, this is my unasked-for advice. You are quite near the Stanford campus. Look up my old Harvard classmate, Clarence Wenford, the Wenford who edited our Modern Poetry text—I’m penning him a note right off.”
Next time she called, she reported that she had gone to visit Professor Wenford and had sat in on his classes all day. “But I don’t know, Mr. Garfield. I’m just not cut out for the nitty-gritty academic stuff—”
“Of course, you are,” he interrupted. “‘The fascination of what’s difficult,’” he quoted.
“Yeats was writing about writing poetry, not about going to grad school.”
“You have to think of your future.” Garfield himself had not had the goods for a brilliant career and so could never trade his post at Commodore for one at UC, San Diego. “You’ve got what it takes, Miss García. It would be a waste not to use it.”
There was a worried silence at the other end. Then, rather vaguely, she said, “Well, I’ll see, Mr. Garfield.”
The poems kept coming and the stories. Faithfully, he wrote back his letters of evaluation: You might consider using the sonnet structure in your love poems to provide some control over such difficult material. Excellent use of stream of consciousness to convey confusion of your protagonist. Kill all your darlings, to quote Faulkner. Then, after two years of frequent contact, the calls and letters and packets of poems and stories stopped. Weeks and months went by. Once or twice, Garfield tried reaching her. But all he got was the British husband’s canned, civilized voice encouraging him to leave a message. Finally, the tearful call came that he was not all that surprised to receive. She was in the Dominican Republic again. “I’m getting a divorce. We’re just not meant for each other, you know? Though, he’s a good man. And it’s so hard to make any real connection on this earth. I keep wondering if I’m all wrong, you know, everyone here thinks I’m making a big mistake.”
She was crying now. “Let’s not get carried away, Miss García,” Garfield soothed her.
“Ay, Mr. Garfield. What do you think, eh?”
He looked into the dim outposts and far reaches of his heart and took a deep breath. Damn the proprieties that kept him in chains. “I think you should follow your heart, Miss García,” he said at last. When they hung up, he stood awhile with his hand on the receiver as if he were still calming the distraught young woman over the wires. And then, he picked up the phone and dialed the number the department secretary had given him months ago for Professor Timothy Matthews.
Perhaps because he took the following year off, renting out his house to the new woman in classics and writing up a leave proposal to research the collapse of the stanza “as we know it” in contemporary poetry, he lost touch with Miss García. He had not left an address with the department, asking instead that his mail be forwarded to his sister in Minnesota. To his dear sister, he confessed everything with firm instructions not to give out his whereabouts. The year was a glorious interlude in sunny California. And it turned out his stay was quite a help to Matthews, who was undergoing his tenure review. The young hothead was suddenly a bundle of nerves.
“Fait accompli,” Garfield kept reminding him. “For heaven’s sake, you’ve already got a book out from Cambridge and you’re a first-rate teacher. What more could they want?”
“Garfield, hombre, don’t take away my suffering,” Matthews sassed back.
Of course, Matthews was awarded tenure, and during their week of celebration in Acapulco, the couple began to make their plans. Garfield would have to go back for at least a year of teaching after his paid leave. “It’s the honorable thing to do,” he argued when Matthews insisted he could just “blow Commodore.”
“Oh, Jordan.” The young man laid his head on the older man’s shoulder. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Love me always,” Garfield suggested.
“‘Until the seas ’gan dry, mee love, until the seas ‘gan dry,’” Matthews recited grandly. But he kept muttering, “Honorable thing,” as if he couldn’t quite make sense of that combination of words.
After that first year of separation, Garfield’s sense of dutifulness prevailed again. Why not complete the final two years of his tenure and retire with what Matthews called “your gold watch and pat on the butt”? With long vacations together and the telephone to keep them in close contact, they could wait. But it was Garfield who could wait, accustomed as he was to maintaining control over the unruly feelings in the far reaches of his heart. Matthews, on the other hand, could not. One early fall morning of their second year of separation, the devastating call came.
“I’ve got some bad news, mee love.” Matthews’ voice was shaky on the other end of the line though he was trying to sound his usual cocky self. Garfield had been outside where he was putting away his tomato cages for the season—his old Minnesota farm-boy past had not completely disappeared. Oddly, as he raced inside to get the phone, it was the face of Yolanda García that had flashed through his mind. It was far too early in California for Matthews to be up on a Saturday morning.
“What is it, Matthews, where are you?” Garfield demanded. In the background, he co
uld hear an intercom making its self-important announcements.
“I’m at the hospital. Garfield, listen. I . . . I . . . picked up something and it doesn’t look good.”
He did not have to say much more. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Garfield advised, his heart beating wildly in his mouth.
“Garfield, let’s face it. Mouth’s full of sores, lungs sound like Paradise Lost, blotches all over the old corpus delicti. I’m a dead man.”
“We’ll get through this, we will!” Garfield could hear an unfamiliar edge of hysteria in his voice—he struggled for control. The semester had already started. How was he going to tend to Matthews long distance and teach his classes?
“Get yourself checked,” Matthews was saying. And then he himself solved Garfield’s quandry about how to be in two places at once. “Can I come die with you?”
“Yes, yes,” he whispered fiercely into the line. As if in mockery, the memoried lines came to mind. After the final no, there comes a yes. He quoted them now to Matthews.
There was that naughty chuckle he knew so well on the other end of the line. And then, the heartwrenching sob, “Oh, God, I thought we had a lifetime.”
“No more of that kind of talk,” Garfield scolded, with no conviction in his voice. When he finally hung up, he found he had crushed the tomato cage he had carried in under his arm.
Out in the garden he plowed under the spent stalks of corn and dug up the last of the leeks and onions to bring in. He fixed up the boys’ bedroom, putting down fresh sheets on Eliot’s bed. He checked the supply of towels in the linen closet. Made an appointment for an HIV test in Boston, where he could be checked discreetly before meeting Matthews’s plane. Then there was the batch of Restoration drama papers to correct. Anything to keep sorrow at bay, anything. If Garfield had developed one fine talent in his life it was that one. In a few days, Matthews would be coming home to die by his side.
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