Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  THE CONTEMPORARY

  ART OF THE NOVELLA

  LUCINELLA

  FIRST PUBLISHED BY FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 1976

  © 1970, 1972, 1975, 1976, 2009 LORE SEGAL

  FIRST MELVILLE HOUSE PRINTING: AUGUST 2009

  MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

  145 PLYMOUTH STREET

  BROOKLYN, NY 11201

  WWW.MHPBOOKS.COM

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PAPERBACK EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  SEGAL, LORE GROSZMANN.

  LUCINELLA / LORE SEGAL.

  P. CM.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-258-1

  1. WOMEN POETS—FICTION. 2. JEWS—NEW YORK (STATE)—NEW YORK—FICTION. I. TITLE.

  PS3569.E425L83 2009

  813′.54—DC22

  2009016783

  v3.1

  Still and again

  David

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Lucinella Apologizes to the World for Using It

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Other Titles in The Art of the Novella Series

  Lucinella

  Apologizes

  to the World

  for Using It

  “What’s the matter, Maurie?”

  Maurie says a week ago he slept with a poet who kept her sharpened pencil underneath the pillow. At breakfast she stuck it behind her ear. Today she sent him the poem.

  (He can’t mean me, I know. I’ve never slept with Maurie and keep my pencil in my pocket at all times.)

  “Isn’t that a shabby thing to do by a friend?” he asks.

  “But, Maurie, what’s a poor poet to do with her excitements? Take them back to bed? Paste them in her album? Eat them? When all she wants is to be writing!”

  “About the literary scene again!” says Maurie.

  I ask him if he recognized himself.

  “No,” he says. “The man in the poem must be three other lovers.”

  “Did you recognize her?”

  “Only the left rib out of which she’d fashioned a whole new woman.”

  “Will you publish it in The Magazine?”

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s a good poem. But why won’t the girl invent?”

  “And don’t you think she would, if she knew how? Pity her, Maurie. She’d prefer to write about sorcerers, ghosts, gods, heroes, but all she knows is you.”

  In the middle of the night I wake and know Maurie meant me. I call him on the telephone and say, “I use you too, and I know that is indefensible in friendship and as art.”

  Maurie waits for me to say, “And I’ll never do it again,” but I am silent a night and a day. For one month I cannot write a word. The following Monday I sit down, sharpen my pencil, and invent a story about Maurie and me having this conversation, which has taken root in a corner of my mind where it will henceforward sprout a small but perennial despair.

  I put the story in an envelope and send it to Maurie.

  I

  Lucinella is my name. I wear glasses. It’s my first visit here and I’m in love with all five poets, four men, one woman, and an obese dog called Winifred.

  Winterneet’s doctor has ordered exercise—yes, imagine! J. D. Winterneet is one of my fellow guests! He and I have fallen into the habit of walking round the lake, in the first white light before breakfast. I like Winterneet tremendously. He’s older than the rest of us. We are people who write poetry, but Winterneet is a famous poet. His fame is very attractive. His head is bald and noble; everything below seems mere appendage. His feet, I’m sure, are baby pink. I keep thinking he will discover that half the time I don’t know the half of what I’m saying. I tell him this, but Winterneet turns out to be a mensh. I think he just said he’s read my poems, but a cloud stooped over my faculties and the moment is gone forever. No, it’s not! Winterneet is saying what he enjoys is the way I squeeze the last drop out of my meaning before I disintegrate it. I don’t particularly recognize myself in this, but it sounds good. He says sometimes I’m very witty. In my chest, where I’m expecting pleasure, there’s a hollow. I tell Winterneet this. He says, yes, praise never yields the promised pleasure, though every slight gives a full measure of pain, and being ignored is insupportable.

  “Even you!” I say.

  “Are you kidding!” he says.

  He tells me stories about all the poets who’ve stayed here, at Yaddo. This Winterneet walking beside me has walked beside Roethke, breakfasted with Snodgrass and Jarrell—with Auden! Frost is his second cousin; he went to school with Pound, traveled all the way to Ireland once, to have tea with Yeats, and spent the weekend with the Matthew Arnolds. He remembers the time Keats threw up on his way home from anatomy; Winterneet says he admires Wordsworth’s poetry, but couldn’t stand the man. He loved Johnson and he won’t read Boswell’s final volume. He knew Stella well, he says, and hints he knows if she slept with the Dean or not.

  He likes to hear my stories too and makes a space in his attention in which I blossom. He stands still and, turning to me with exactly the right tone of astonishment, says, “You are bright!” I’m pleased, and disappointed he didn’t say I’m beautiful. I tell Winterneet my theory that we live on a seesaw between arrogance and abjection. His understanding what I mean turns me on.

  I’m rubbing the spot one and one fourth of an inch above Winifred’s tail, which makes him stretch his neck and, with his eyes closed, move his head infinitesimally side to side; the rest of us do not have our spots so handy.

  Because Winifred is a real dog I have changed his sex to protect his privacy. The poets, Meyers, Winterneet, Betterwheatling, Pavlovenka, and Bert, and more as needed, I will make up from scratch. No, that’s not true. My invention needs a body to get it going, but I will set my own head on it. I will make up an eye here, borrow a nose or two there, and a mustache and something funny someone said and a pea-green sweater, so it’s no use your fitting your keys into my keyholes, to try and figure out who’s who.

  I myself am a younger poet, twentyish going on forty. You haven’t heard of me as yet. (Lucinella is the name.) In town I tend to be the introverted, intellectual type, but here I’m turning into a Russian novel. “I’m in love with all of you,” I tell the poets. Poets understand this, and go on eating their breakfasts.

  On my left, that’s Meyers, putting brown sugar on his porridge. (You’ve read his latest, which won the Pulitzer five years ago—all about his fear that he is going crazy.) Across from us sits Betterwheatling, the English critic. (You see his name a lot in The New York Review of Books.) He’s pouring coffee into Pavlovenka’s teacup. Pavlovenka giggles. (You haven’t heard of her, and probably won’t.) She’s forty, five foot by four by four, and a genuine Russian. Her passionate and happy eyes embrace us all. I can’t take too much of Pavlovenka, but I do like her, and I really like Betterwheatling. (That’s the English critic. Try to tell my poets apart, I know how hard it is.) Betterwheatling’s wit is oblique and his dimensions are commodious (I like bulk), and I like his being English. Meyers I love. His face is white, his blue eyes are rimmed with pink, his great blond mustache droops. Meyers tells wonderful, funny stories. Also I like his Pulitzer.

  I’m telling him my problem. Take this great, dark-paneled, sun-filled dining room, I say, in which we sit on nineteenth-century English chairs carved in imitation of medieval settles, with mild-faced, short-waisted warriors in high relief, poking thei
r spears and sabers into our backs; or this great silver bowl full of roses in the center of the table: even when we don’t focus on our physical surroundings they seep into our awareness. How can they seep into my poem, and without sneaking? I abhor tricks.

  Because I know this has no relevance to Meyers’s writing, I ask what he is working on. He says on a longer line with alternate end stops that’s got him tied in knots.

  He says, “Didn’t Roethke use to come to Yaddo?”

  Winterneet tells us about the time he drove Roethke up from the sanatorium. On the way, he says, Roethke spoke only once, to ask who else was staying. People frightened him, but it was late in the season—just about this time of year. The summer crowd had gone; it was a small, quiet bunch. Winterneet says he recalls the morning he and Roethke were walking behind the vegetable gardens and discovered the root cellar. (Root cellar. I’m going to write a poem called “Euphoria in the Root Cellar,” all about some poets who visit a root cellar in a Roethke poem.)

  “What is a root cellar?” I ask Meyers. Meyers is staring at Winterneet, who’s saying, “Roethke used to work well at Yaddo, but some have come up and promptly gone to pieces.”

  “Who? What happened?” I ask. I love stories. But J. D. Winterneet has finished breakfast. He says he’ll tell me on our walk tomorrow morning. He leaves.

  Bert, the red-haired poet from New Jersey (no, I never heard of him either before this), comes late to breakfast and says moodily, “Morning all.” I never quite believe in red-haired men, but Bert I like. We’ve been having lunch together, at noon, on the terrace.

  Day after day the weather has been spectacular. The contour of every nearest leaf and farthest range of mountain is equally sharp. Winifred sinks his teeth into a mole’s skull and shakes. The crisp snap of vertebra carries clear across the lake. The stone bench is hot to the touch; an old-fashioned scent of late roses weighs upon the air like the sentimental Virtues that willed this Property to the pursuit of Art.

  In the poem I am going to write, my protagonist, made out of a left rib of Lucinella’s, will walk in the rose garden looking for someone to be with and meet Pavlovenka (she’s better than nobody). Pavlovenka will say come and look what she has found, she’s not telling what! Lucinella will follow her past the vegetable garden, round the greenhouses, through the tall grass by the woodpile where there’s a red roof set like a circumflex into the earth. At the other end it’s higher and accommodates a door. Lucinella and Pavlovenka remove the soft, warmly, damply moldering detritus of half a dozen autumns and draw the door outward, bend down together, and stick their heads inside Poetry. Light filters through the purple dust turning the earth rose. Look! Shards from a figured urn, and there, in that corner, glows an enormous, ruined spiderweb made of such filament as Rumpelstiltskin spun to sneak the miller’s daughter into the king’s bed and have a royal baby fathered upon her for himself, poor evil, wizened, hunchbacked Rumpelstiltskin! In my poem the two women gasp and exclaim and take each other by the hand.

  Those neat figures moving round the fountain at the bottom of the great lawn are from the village. They look up. They never point. They’re saying, “Up there, on the terrace in the sun—one of the poets!” But really it’s only me! Or maybe they haven’t noticed me. Nobody sees me. I’ll run and write my poem, I’ll sign it Lucinella. A magazine will publish it, the magazine will lie on the newsstand. You will pick it up, and read me, and the hollow in my chest will be filled up.

  Now Bert leans out of the round turret where he has his study. He sees me and waves. Here he comes across the terrace, carrying a thermos and his lunch box, like a small black sarcophagus.

  “What’s up?” I say.

  “Need you ask,” says he. Bert and I have fallen hopelessly into obscenities with one another. It isn’t clear yet what we intend. The full moon, which turns me back into a virgin, reseals for him the mystery of how to get a woman from the joke on the terrace, up two flights of stairs, and into bed. It makes him moody. “Hot,” he says.

  “Take it off,” I say.

  “Unilaterally?” says he.

  “Go ahead then and be unilaterally cross.”

  His fleshy, brutal shoulders hulk inside a turquoise sweatshirt trimmed with white and orange braid. How did he fall into poetry, I ask him. He says it’s a dull story. I say there are no dull stories. Glowering, Bert recalls how he discovered Milton in the Public Library at fifteen. He says he looked around at the librarian fishing a tissue out of her patent-leather pocketbook; at the girl taking notes from Consumers’ Research. The ubiquitous old man who naps in libraries napped on. Bert wondered: This Milton has been around three hundred years and nobody knows it except me! Truth turns me on, and Bert’s is not the New York kind that slides too easily from too much practice. He doesn’t have the habit of autobiography, and steps awkwardly from one to another of the modest events that brought him from there to here. The revelation at boot camp, where that boy, who was later killed, wrote poems all about himself—not very good poems. With the GI Bill, Bert came to New York. His wife got a job at Macy’s. He took a class with Lowell. Once Lowell said to him, “That’s just what I’m trying to do.” Lowell got him translating. “Rilke,” Bert says. His blunt orange profile broods over the parapet. He has forgotten me.

  “Sometime,” I say, “let me see some of your stuff.” Why am I asking to see it? What will I do if he is terrible, which is statistically much more probable than that he’s any good? Or if he’s marvelous, what will I say then? “You don’t want to see it,” Bert says. He’s upset. Like our old friend, the drowning man whose life is run backward at a speed that turns every voice into Donald Duck, Bert is reviewing his poems through my eyes, which are about to see his heart, his liver, and his lights, and that probably pompous couplet about the Bomb, which he should take out, except it might be the finest two lines he has ever written, and there’s the poem he did yesterday, about the time he loosened his shoe and untied ecstasy between the loop and the knot; maybe I will be so good as to see an irony he didn’t intend, and will I hear the howling vowels of the spectacular conclusion? In two seconds Bert’s stomach lurches from arrogance to abjection, and ascends to fall and ascend again. He can’t leave the manuscript for me on the table where we collect our mail and tack the little folded notes asking each other to tennis at four or drinks at 5:15. He doesn’t trust the pages to lie still and contain him. How is he to achieve the unspeakably indelicate transfer of his work into my hands? He’ll bring it around, he says, to my room, when I go up to change for dinner. “And slip it to me,” I relentlessly, helplessly say.

  One after another we find we’re done with breakfast and fade out of the dining room. (Pavlovenka stays to keep Bert company, which will drive him up the wall.) We congregate again in the back rooms, where they have put out The New York Times. Winterneet’s got the book section. I review the week’s crises calmly: there’s no explosion that can cross two hundred miles of upstate New York. I’m turning Republican!

  Even after we have picked our lunch boxes off the shelf, we linger, reluctant to commit ourselves, till Winterneet slams down the Times and goes upstairs.

  My study is some way along the drive. Betterwheatling’s is further into the woods. We saunter in desultory talk, our minds already half on our work, where we do not entertain one another.

  I sharpen my pencil and sit looking out the window. Pavlovenka walks by on her way to the woods. She likes to write her poems in the out-of-doors.

  Pavlovenka’s gone. A car drives by on muted tires and leaves the scene empty. Trees sparkle in the morning sun. Later two of the gardeners will pass with their equipment. Even Winifred, who has been brainwashed to believe poetry matters and poets should be cherished, goes about his business on silent paws. The staid, middle-aged housemaid in white linen looks in my door, sees me at my desk, and withdraws, but she can come in. I need to walk awhile.

  A distant lawnmower hums like a summer insect; the smell of cut green grass makes my breasts sprout;
the five live poets wrapped in cigarette paper and inhaled with the admixture of the breath of wild thyme which grows in patches on the great sloping lawn fill my lungs with euphoria. What I need is to be with someone.

  I look into the mailroom. Meyers is sitting in the wicker armchair. “Did you see Max Peters’s brutal review of Winterneet’s new poems in the Times Book Review? It must be Sunday,” he says. “Tomorrow I go home, and they’ll fold all this away.” He says he cannot bear it, and neither can I. We confess to each other that we can’t bear to be parted for a minute and come to a decision: We won’t work today! Meyers and I, who write day in day out, seven mornings every week, and have for years and will for as long as we can think ahead, are going to play hooky together this sunny September Sunday. Guilty elation makes us lightheaded; we giggle over the Times crossword. Later we walk into the village, lean our heads over the dusty glass case in the local museum to see the doll’s pewter tea set; a lot of fans; here’s a pair of real Chinese shoes, impossibly small, that once bound the feet of a real Chinese lady; and a letter Teddy Roosevelt wrote in 1906 to the local actor who made good. Hilariously we burst back into sunlight.

  The rest of the afternoon we sit in the bar and drink beer. “Did you see Winterneet acting like an infant who’s lost a game of dominoes?” I say. “Winterneet on the wane,” says Meyers. Not out of malice but from desire for communion, we chew up the other poets and offer them to one another. Meyers watches the ball game over my head. I eat peanuts. We tell each other things. Yesterday, he says, he changed a comma to a period-capital-A and copied the whole poem over and saw it should have been a comma, changed it back, and copied it over, and changed it back to a period. All day, for a week, for months, he has been changing this same comma and can’t go on until he gets it right. Meyers touches trembling fingers to his drooping blond mustache. I keep eating peanuts.