I let her know this over tea.
“I’m dark in my writing,” she explained, “so I can look on the bright side in my real life.”
“Your writing is a lie, in other words.” I had no right to say this. If I’d lived according to the sentiments that dominated my Bittman poems, I wouldn’t be in college but in Alaska, tucked away in a cabin with guns and canned goods. I was trying to sing, but my songs were bleak and paranoid.
“I think we both know why you’re here,” said Tessa. “To take me. To possess your rival.” Keeping her cup and saucer on her lap, she leaned forward to make the conquest easier.
I moved ahead, but not robustly. I didn’t appreciate being so swiftly fathomed. Our tea-flavored mouths barely mingled before they parted. Tessa tried to gaze into my eyes after our kiss, but I looked down. We hadn’t connected. I gathered my wits and ventured another kiss. She tolerated it briefly, then left her chair and picked up a stuffed zebra.
“You’re saying my work is a game. It’s inauthentic.”
“Come back here,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t even know why I’m saying it. Just kiss me.”
“Who wants to kiss an inauthentic poet? Or sleep with one? Or see one naked?”
“Come over here. I’ll show you. Please.”
Tessa stayed put. She stroked her fuzzy toy. It had become a grudge match, our encounter, and the charges she’d leveled at herself had actually been aimed at me, I feared.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m sorry all this happened.”
Tessa shuddered and started sobbing. Fake, I decided. Overplayed. I considered calling her bluff by wrapping my arms around her and sinking my teeth into her neck. As I dragged her toward the bed, she’d probably try to pull away or kick me, but I’d renew my assault and she’d give up. Then what? My hunch was she’d slay me with a snicker in the middle of my triumph.
“I’ll see you in the workshop” was how I left it.
“Come back.”
But I couldn’t. Someone had to win this.
“It’s the best thing I’ve written so far this year,” I said, crossing my legs and unfolding a sheet of paper. “Of course, I’m open to comments and suggestions.” Then I recited my sonnet on militarism.
“That was Bittman again?” somebody asked me. This was a common maneuver in the workshop: dismissing a poem by feigning inattention.
“It’s part of a series, so I didn’t name him, but, yes, it’s Bittman. Or a simulacra.”
“Simulacrum,” said Birch, a real professor after all.
With one drop of blood, the workshop became a hunt. It opened with a few potshots, a few “reactions,” but soon my classmates were firing on automatic, using the force discharged by each critique to slam new rounds into their chambers. Tessa fluttered an earlobe with an index finger, pretending to be above the fray. Birch adopted the same attitude. It was hard for me not to view them as conspirators. Or were they lovers? It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Another poetry teacher, a pal of Birch’s, had been run off the campus a couple of months earlier after seducing an unknown number of students, one of whom had squealed to Nassau Hall.
“To me, your main trouble, Walter,” someone said, “is Bittman’s supposed nemesis. He’s up against something—the government? the system?—but you never tell us who or what. And it’s not an equal fight. The world just rolls over him. He’s passive.”‘
“Overpowered,” I said, “isn’t passive. I hear you, though. Maybe if I sharpened up my verbs—”
“Or gave him a personality,” said someone.
“Or any traits at all,” said someone else.
“My gripe against Bittman,” announced a third voice, “is that he seems incapable of love.”
“He also refuses to take responsibility.”
“He’s a cipher.”
“A device.”
I held up a hand. “Can I handle those in order?”
Chuckles broke out. The abandonment felt absolute when I looked at Birch for help and caught him with his eyes shut, leaning back, absently clicking the button on a ballpoint protruding from a front pocket of his jeans. In a poetry workshop, conspicuous detachment didn’t mean neutrality, I’d learned, but agreement with the prevailing line of criticism.
“I think we’ve been unfair,” said Tessa. “Walter had it right. He had a point. Bittman’s not passive at all. He’s overwhelmed.”
I tightened my stomach, waiting for the jab.
“And of course he knows how to love. It’s in the form”’
“Explain,” someone said. I was curious myself.
“The sonnet form. Sonnets are love songs,” Tessa said. “I’m surprised no one got that.”
“I am, too,” said Birch, leading me to think he hadn’t slept with her but was still in the process of wooing her. Why else support her in this silliness?
Afterward, over pizza in the student center, I asked Tessa why she’d been so charitable. She credited her “good Midwestern upbringing.” I’d had one of these upbringings myself, but it was gone, it seemed. If it had been Tessa’s poem the class was slaughtering, I knew I wouldn’t have intervened. Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the Norton anthologies. Then I humbled myself further by disclosing that militarism didn’t bother me. Maintaining an army, a navy, and an air force was America’s right, I said. Our nation had enemies.
“I want us to make love,” I added. “Now.”
Tessa laid a napkin on her pizza slice to sop up the red grease.
“You don’t want to? I thought you wanted to,” I said.
She lifted the napkin by one corner and set it beside her paper plate.
“But I just bared my soul to you. I practically admitted I’m a Republican.”‘
“Are you?”
“Not really.”
“Then why pretend to be?”
“Because I get tired of pretending I’m a communist.”
“So why not just stop pretending altogether?”
I thought about this for a while. “You first,” I said.
“We’re just too different. Our styles. Our approaches. Plus, I suspect your motives, I’m afraid. This is all about competition, not attraction.”
“Let’s make it about sex, then.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Because you’re in love with Birch?”
“His sensibility.”
“Well, I’m in love with Yeats’s sensibility. That doesn’t mean I want to go to bed with him.”
Tessa sprinkled garlic on her slice and raised it to her tidy mouth. I folded my empty plate in half and headed off to dump it in a trash can. Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.
Week in and week out, Birch’s workshop proved me right. We sang and we fought. We fought over our songs. Finally, by the end of the semester, all we could sing about were our scars, our wounds.
NANTUCKET, THE ISLAND, THE CAPE, THE VINEYARD—I couldn’t distinguish among the seaside getaways where so many of my classmates said they intended to spend the summer vacation. When they spoke of visiting these spots, they used the preposition “on,” as in “I’ll be on the Cape for August.” When referring to Minnesota, I used “in,” which didn’t sound as good, I thought. But there was no other way to say it.
Then, in late May, my father called with news. While on a business trip in Munich, Germany, he’d landed me a summer job, he said, working at what he described over the phone as an “internationally famous nightspot” w
here “various Hemingway types” hung out. He said he’d been drinking in the place one night and struck up a conversation with its owner, Herr Blick, an American expatriate, about my ambitions as a writer. Herr Blick, whom my father lauded as “a true gentleman,” had agreed right away to fly me over and pay me to help out behind the bar. I told my father I’d do it. Though I’d learned through the years to fear the consequences of his impulsive decisions (“We’ll farm these fields with horses!”), I feared going home even more. They might not like me there.
Herr Blick met me at the Munich airport. The first impression he made was that of a master at making first impressions. His handshake had a practiced-feeling sincerity and was augmented by a hearty shoulder squeeze that lasted awhile and almost became a rub. His muscular body seemed younger and better maintained than his square and sunburned fortyish face. He insisted on carrying both of my duffel bags for me, hoisting them off the luggage carousel with what looked like a weight-lifter’s concern for minimizing back strain.
Instead of dropping me at the fraternity house where one of my father’s German lawyer colleagues had arranged to rent a room for me, Herr Blick parked his sporty Mercedes near his bar and gave me a walking tour of central Munich. The two historical figures he kept citing as he pointed out various ornate buildings were Adolf Hitler and Mad King Ludwig. Hitler, he told me, had gotten his public start here, and Ludwig had kept his harem here. Herr Blick passed lightly over this detail, not mentioning that the harem consisted of boys.
The fraternity building was near the bar, wedged into the middle of a block. It appeared to be vacant for the season. On my way up the narrow staircase to my room I passed an alcove sheltering a pedestal bearing a marble bust of Julius Caesar. The art in the hallways featured shields and eagles and down one dim corridor I caught a glimpse of a spacious torture chamber. On hooks on the walls above a bare wood floor hung a macabre array of masks and weapons. I tiptoed closer: fencing gear.
My room was a cell, austere and cramped. I vowed to stay out of it except to sleep. I doubted I’d get much sleep, however. According to Herr Blick, my shifts at the bar would run from seven at night until three in the morning, six nights a week. I contemplated this schedule and my surroundings and determined that learning German that summer would not be among my primary ambitions. I set myself a more vital task: survival. That, and reading the only book I’d brought: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel about the final day on earth of a drunken, lovelorn British diplomat living in Mexico during World War II. I’d opened it somewhere over the Atlantic, been seized by its tone of clotted doom, and pushed ahead through its dense, allusive paragraphs, hoping that the myths and master-works floating out of my reach behind its pages would somehow drift into my reach if I persisted. From the preface, I’d learned that the novel drew on Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, and other immortals, which raised the tantalizing prospect of obtaining sweeping erudition by reading a single book.
My job at the bar required no German, luckily. It demanded almost no speech at all. My immediate boss—to whom I handed clean glasses that had been briefly dunked in soapy water and partially dried with a thin towel—was a local celebrity named Wilhelm who specialized in multilayered cocktails of luminous coloration. Against the unspotted whiteness of his starched jacket, his crinkly gray hair and sinewy, tanned face were savagely vivid and alluring. I was in awe of him, as were the customers. After a couple of weeks of watching him carrying on behind the bar like a six-armed pagan god, producing lighted matches from unseen pockets, juggling tumblers in the air, and sailing coasters into distant trash cans, I no longer saw the point of going back to college in the fall. This was true fame I was witnessing, true mastery. I should stay and learn from it. Even Herr Blick deferred to Wilhelm, terrified, surely, of losing his bar’s chief draw.
After counting the cash and bundling the receipts, I turned out the lights and locked the building’s front door. Outside, on the street, strange men accosted me, asking “Where now?” or “What next?” in muttered German that even I could translate. I learned to brush past them with my head down. Sealed in a jar and wrapped in a brown bag was my nightly ration of stolen schnapps, which I drank deeply from once I’d run the gauntlet, as a toast to myself for reaching safety. By the time I passed Caesar’s head on the dark stairway, I was feeling tight and tipsy. Then I lay down with Under the Volcano and finished off the jar. The book had begun to seriously haunt me. Its references to Dante still eluded me, but I empathized with its crumbling protagonist.
One night Herr Blick dispatched me to the kitchen to make croque monsieurs and espressos for his tablemates. The little spouts on the coffee machine clogged up. To clear them, I had to kneel down on the floor and poke at their openings with a twisted dishrag. I felt a presence behind me as I worked. Then I heard a belt unbuckling. I didn’t move. I didn’t turn around. I prayed that the presence, which wore Herr Blick’s cologne, would reconsider its intentions.
“Hot weather makes me horny.”
I held position, facing the machine. “I’m not a homosexual,” I said.
“Horny’s horny. Who said it was gay? Is that what you Princeton boys think? That horny’s gay?”
“I’m sorry, Herr Blick. That isn’t what I meant.”
“You got that from your perverted prep school, probably.”
“I didn’t go to prep school.”
“Then why the attitude?”
“I didn’t realize it was attitude.”
“To me—to an army brat—it’s attitude.”
I heard a zipper I hadn’t known was down being zipped back up. The presence retreated. Ten minutes later, pretending nothing had happened, I delivered the food and coffee to Herr Blick’s table, fussing over the placement of plates and silverware. A German girl at the table, early twenties, ample chest, high cheekbones, reddish hair, appraised me as I stumbled through my duties. Later, when I was back behind the bar, she came up and introduced herself as Hannah, but I assumed she was addressing Wilhelm, who was pouring a whip of shining Blue Curaçao into a silver cocktail shaker.
“This is my number,” Hannah said in English, pushing a paper napkin toward me. “Ring me on Saturday. We’ll discuss Herr Blick. I’ll show you my squat and we can see a play that’s being performed by my collective. Do you admire the work of Dario Fo?”
It was Europe. Why not be honest? “I don’t know him.”
“Super,” said Hannah. “Soon you’ll know him well.”
But my father made other plans for me that Saturday. He accepted an invitation on my behalf from Dr. Frisch, the German attorney who’d gotten me my tiny room. The invitation, which I couldn’t decline, was to a festival way out in the countryside. It celebrated the wedding anniversary of a medieval Bavarian princess.
Dr. Frisch picked me up at seven in the morning and drove at high speeds in his sedan deep into what he termed “the land itself.”
“How are you liking it at the Corps?” he asked me. He meant the sinister fraternity, and the pride in his voice suggested he’d once belonged to it. So did the fencing scar on one of his cheeks. “Have you conversed yet with any of the brothers?”
I explained that my schedule prevented any such contacts. The young men conducted their sword fights in the mornings and were gone by the time that I woke up. “That is a shame,” Dr. Frisch said. He seemed angry. “I warned your father that your job would isolate you from the true German society. To labor on a good dairy would be much preferable.”
The route into the village hosting the festival was barricaded from motor traffic. We parked in a mucky field and walked to town. Dr. Frisch had the strongest walk I’d ever witnessed. His heels chopped into the sod and flung chunks back at me. While I tried to keep pace, he vented his contempt for the decadent Munich nightclub scene, asserting that it was filled with prostitutes and political subversives. “This is the wrong introduction. Corrupt. Absurd. Today will prove an antidote, I hope.”
We entered a throng of costumed
revelers who may or may not have had roles in the parade. Some of the ladies had flowers in their hair and some of the men carried daggers on their belts. The warm, midday air felt thick with ancient kinship. I’d discovered during my time in Germany that I had a high tolerance for foreignness, thanks, perhaps, to my first year at Princeton, but here, among the damsels and the knights, as the buglers and string players tuned their instruments and little girls dressed as fairies went dancing by, I suddenly felt so smothered by the exotic that my esophagus closed up and bouncing black dots appeared before my eyes. The problem wasn’t the pageantry itself, which wasn’t so different from American pageantry—also based on hats and horns—but the solemn comportment of the spectators. In the States, we grinned at dress-up holidays, but here the crowd was sober, worshipful.
We watched the procession from a balcony. A waiter circulated with a tray laden with rolled-up cold cuts and cubes of sausage. I was among some wealthy people, I sensed, but I couldn’t gauge how educated they were. They licked their fingers when they ate. They drank from beer glasses with napkins stuck to them. The clues about class that I’d picked up at Princeton were useless to me here.
Beneath the terrace, ranks of heavy horses trudged through drifts of manure and flower petals, drawing old carriages filled with storybook characters. I gathered from Dr. Frisch’s shifting responses—outbursts of clapping, pauses for meditation, gleams of high amusement—that the profusion of huntsmen, ladies-in-waiting, falconers, peasants, and royalty spoke to his soul in distinctive, varied ways.
“Hers is a beauty uniquely German,” he said. He was waving at someone.
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