Vernon Downs

by Jaime Clarke

  The end of Charlie’s time at Camden was marked with turmoil. As he stood in Tishman, the subterranean lecture hall, barely looking up from the lectern, he was unable to measure the audience’s enthusiasm for his selection for the recreational after-dinner readings. Most read selections from authors that had made them want to become writers, and Charlie was enamored of the idea of lineage. He became obsessed with publicly sharing what had led him to Camden, associating himself with Downs in the minds of others.

  Vernon Downs was by far one of the most successful writers in Camden’s history, but his name was whispered in the halls with a mix of shame and admiration. By comparison, students talked loudly about Bernard Malamud, who had taught at Camden for decades; or Robert Frost, who had lived in a house on campus and was buried nearby; or Jamaica Kincaid, who lived in a beautiful wood house behind the campus. But no one ever spoke openly about Downs. Charlie silently dedicated the reading to Olivia, then began, immediately recognizing that he’d started reading the wrong page. He’d intended to read a comic scene involving business cards but had inexplicably opened the book to a scene that included one of the most violent passages in The Vegetable King. As he neared the conclusion of the reading, he gazed out awkwardly and smiled at the applause. He was aware that some had walked in late—the lecture hall doors had swung open and shut loudly during the reading.

  Mike Conway, who occupied the suite opposite his and with whom he’d exchanged pleasantries, approached. “Did you hear those people walking out?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

  “When you started reading the part about the rat, a bunch of women got up and walked out.”

  Mike approached him again at breakfast the next morning. “There’s something on the bulletin board in Commons you might want to read,” he said solemnly. Previously, the bulletin board had served as a collage of cartoons cut from the pages of the New Yorker or anonymous diatribes about laundry room etiquette, so the sober note Mike struck was troubling.

  Charlie followed him to Commons, and they waited for the group of students clustered around the bulletin board to disperse before stepping up. Charlie scanned the letter tacked in the center of the board.

  I am deeply offended by Charlie Martens’s public reading of Vernon Downs’s work. Downs has the right to write what he chooses, Martens has the right (in the privacy of his own mind) to read what he chooses. I also have the right not to fill my mind with graphic depictions of sexualized violence against women. To be subjected to such images out of the blue (images I may never be able to erase from my thoughts) is a violation.

  As writers, we are all concerned with freedom of speech, but Martens crossed the line—his action was disrespectful and unacceptable. I, for one, take issue with what he did—I protest.

  The note had been annotated by others, the addendums written in different-colored inks:

  I agree (and I had previously read the passage out of choice).

  It would have been nice to have had the option to leave the room (or go read the passage myself if I wanted) before this gratuitous reading. It was nothing less than mental rape.

  I agree. What was the point?

  Mike told Charlie not to worry about it. Mike’s dismissive attitude comforted him, though for the rest of the day Charlie felt like others were staring at him. He assuaged his discomfort by telling himself the letter was a stunt that would die by lunch, an idea he believed until a follow-up letter was posted:

  1. Charlie Martens could have offered a handout of the VDD passage, then any consequent debate would have been, as it should have been, about it, not about his method of presentation.

  2. This debate isn’t about censorship, but about courtesy, specifically about ways of demonstrating respect for others’ sensibilities.

  3. Providing those of “tender sensibilities” an opportunity to leave would not have been a good solution. The image of women rising + leaving raises attendant images of women withdrawing from men after dinner—to the (with)drawing room. A solution that literally separated us would be no solution at all. Isn’t common ground a precondition of community?

  Followed by another:

  The material of Vernon David Downs is strong, unpleasant, and to my mind, not very important, which is why I chose not to attend. But should what is presented here be shaped to the most vulnerable among us? With all respect for the sensitivities of those who find the material offensive, as a woman I find it ironic that we seem on the verge of returning to the time when someone else decided, “The material is a bit rough. Perhaps the ladies would like to step outside,” or even worse, to a time when in the back rooms others would say, “This material is something that might be important to hear, but in deference to the ladies, we can’t even consider it.”

  I didn’t come here to be protected, thank you.

  Charlie’s reading and the bulletin board postings were the rage in the dorms and on campus. His paranoia about being gawked at was validated as his peers averted their eyes whenever he attempted to make eye contact in lecture. He began skipping lectures in favor of camping out in his room. The cafeteria became an arena of liability too when an older woman he’d never seen before accosted him, leaning in so that her face nearly grazed his. “I think you’re disgusting,” she said. She waited for a reaction of some kind, but he just shrugged, knowing he could not convince her otherwise.

  Charlie considered vanishing, but he had begun scratching out notes for a story based on his relationship with Olivia and wondered if workshopping the story might bring some clarity about his situation. So for the rest of the conference, Charlie attached himself to various groups revolving through campus, trickling into pools of conversation, mostly unnoticed, though he affected an agreeable tone when included in whatever was being discussed. It seemed that while everyone had heard about the public outcry over his reading of Downs’s work, very few people actually knew Charlie by sight. Right when the controversy threatened to wane, the soap-operatic narrative folding in on itself—where people stood on the issue boiled down to whether or not they were fans of Downs’s work—Mike knocked on his door.

  “There’s something you should see,” he said.

  Charlie read over the shoulders of the group gathered around the bulletin board:

  Dear Charlie,

  It may please you to know that Vernon David Downs went down fighting. As I fed the first page of The Vegetable King into the fire, a cluster of flames leaped out from beneath the paper and scalded my thumb. He went down like the condemned man before the firing squad, spitting in the soldiers’ faces. What else can they do to him? Vernon did not beg or bribe or whimper. He took his punishment like a man.

  But we burned him like women. Gently. Not like Nazis burned books, with the false and grandiose notion that we can actually eradicate the text, the idea, the memory. No, we burned him the way a woman burns the letters of an ex-lover. The way a woman burns the letters of an ex-lover when she has lost him to violence—his. She burns them gently, grieving for her lost innocence. She knows now that loving can be dangerous. Just as listening can be dangerous. Trusting the words of your soft mouth not to harden like a hand that once caressed hardens into a fist.

  We cannot unbruise our ears from this or any other unwanted intrusion. Vernon David Downs has carved his initials into us like the trunks of trees. But we burned the pages and called the names of women. Strangers, women we know, women we love, women in our families, who have been raped or beaten or brutalized. Real women, not the inexhaustible legions of women in fiction who offer themselves up willingly. Real women.

  I am lucky. I have a voice that tells me everything important. Shortly after your reading began, it told me to leave. Now, I was comfortable, and it was humid out. But one of my favorite gospel songs says, “I’m gonna do what the Spirit say do.” Spirit said leave, so I did. I didn’t hear the passages you read, but I saw them in the distressed faces of the women who are my friends and colleagues.

  Is
that why the flames chose my hand as we sacrificed Vernon into the fire? Was it because I had been unscathed by the words? Maybe it was a reminder that although we are right, the element of fire does not prefer Vernon’s flesh over mine. Perhaps it was to remind me that burning Vernon wasn’t without danger.

  After we finished, one of my friends gave me a clear plastic cup of ice water. As I rewound the tape in my cassette player, I stuck my thumb into the cup to soothe the burn. Then we played Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” and danced.

  We won this little battle, but not because we burned The Vegetable King. We won because despite the infinite number of tortures real women experience every day, we are also real women, and we were with each other, and we were making ritual, and we were dancing.

  It didn’t take long for news of the ritualistic burning to sweep across campus. Conversations were held in muted tones. There were those among the population who were appalled by the act and expressed their opinion vocally; others were equally appalled by Charlie’s presence, and their silent glaring communicated their disgust. The entire student body was enveloped in a foul stink. The reactions were too extreme for Charlie to register them as anything other than self-aggrandizing, though he secretly relished the episode as the twinning of his narrative with Vernon’s.

  Charlie thought to review his questions in the cab, but he’d memorized them—even their order—and didn’t want to sully the reporter’s notebook he’d charged at the stationery store in Union Square as a backup to the mini recorder he intended to return with the receipt to the electronics store near Grand Central Station. As the hands on his watch moved toward ten, he was seized with worry: Were his loafers too weathered? Was his haircut cool enough? Did he look like a poor student on financial aid, or could he somehow pass as the sort of hipster Downs wrote about and probably socialized exclusively with? Don’t come off as too eager, he admonished himself, knowing a misstep could halt the forward progress he’d made since leaving Phoenix. He ducked under the green and white awning of Summit Terrace, the doorman nodding as he pushed through the etched glass door.

  “Yes?” the doorman asked, balancing a copy of the Village Voice on his lap.

  “I’m here to see Vernon Downs,” Charlie said carefully.

  “Name?” the doorman asked.

  “Vernon Downs,” Charlie repeated.

  “No,” the doorman said sourly. “Your name.”

  He gave his name and the doorman announced his arrival in the receiver of the white phone on the desk. “Okay,” the doorman said into the mouthpiece. “Okay.” He hung up. “He’s not ready for you yet. Be five minutes.”

  Charlie paced the octagonal brick and glass lobby, the strong urge to urinate visiting him. “Do you have a bathroom?” he asked.

  “Basement,” the doorman said. “Door by the elevator.”

  He followed the passageway to the maintenance room but was so paranoid that Vernon would descend and find the lobby empty that the emergency abandoned him and he retreated. “You can go up,” the doorman said without looking at him.

  The ride to the fourth floor was short, and Charlie nearly fainted as he raised a tremulous fist to knock on Vernon’s door. The journey from Phoenix to New York to Camden to Summit Terrace had been longer than he had expected, riddled with setbacks he could never have anticipated on the bus from Vermont. His previous foray into Manhattan had in no way prepared him for life on the East Coast. He didn’t possess the skills to procure the kind of job necessitated by astronomical rent and utility payments, a riddle that vexed him as he ambled the city streets, down skyscraper-lined Fifth Avenue, to the South Street Seaport, over to Wall Street, and back up the West Side, cutting over to Central Park and looping through the Great Lawn. He avoided the subway, certain that it was a death sentence based on the wild rumors he’d heard growing up in the West about murder after murder being committed on the tracks, until he counted up the colossal sums he was spending on cab fare and forced himself to take public transportation. The roar of the hot subway was more exhilarating than expected, and once he effected his first successful transfer at Times Square, he felt he was mastering the art of life in New York.

  His living situation had finally stabilized too. A brief stay at the Holiday Inn in Midtown maxed out one of his MasterCards and he checked out, leaving the cut-up plastic remains in the wastebasket. Charlie traipsed around Manhattan, realizing quickly that if he wanted a place to live, he’d be relegated to one of the less fashionable boroughs, either Queens or the Bronx, maybe Staten Island. He rode the N train to Astoria, a heavily Greek neighborhood in Queens, and spent an afternoon climbing the stairs in prewar apartment buildings to look at all there was for rent. Astoria’s proximity to Manhattan had corrupted rent prices, so that renters were being shuttled deeper into Long Island City, or to New Jersey. Dismayed, Charlie boarded the N train back into the city, hatching a fallback plan wherein he’d ride the subway all night with the other homeless if it should come to that.

  A stopgap solution revealed itself in the form of the night front desk position at the Yale Club, but he was fired after two days when the day manager caught him sleeping in one of the well-appointed guest rooms, a sleep mask and white-noise machine Charlie had purloined from Guest Services obscuring the day manager’s footfalls. A suite of embarrassments followed: the older woman he’d met at a bar in Greenwich Village forcibly asking him to leave her apartment when she returned early from a trip to Paris, angry that he’d let himself back in, after they’d said their good-byes, by tricking her aging doorman; being rousted by the Pakistani teenager whose bed he’d stolen at the Big Apple Hostel in Times Square; the waitress threatening to call the police if he didn’t pay up and leave; the security guard discovering him camped out in the accidentally unlocked first-editions room of the New York Public Library.

  The miracle that stabilized his living situation first appeared to him a mirage. A heat-induced chimera in Shelleyan’s likeness sauntered down Minetta Lane one particularly airless afternoon, checking her hair in the reflection of the Black Rabbit, a wood-paneled bar on the corner.

  Charlie peered at her, overtaken by serendipity. Surely her presence was an omen that he was treading the right path, that the hazy journey from Arizona to Vermont to New York would bring him back to Olivia. He straightened his back, shifting his dirty duffel bag to obscure his meager possessions. Perhaps Shelleyan would even act as the conduit.

  “It is you!” Shelleyan cried. “I thought it was. How are you?” She looked exactly the same, as if the Arizona Shelleyan had a twin living in New York City, save for the stylish haircut that gave her the air of working in an office.

  “Fine,” he answered, “I’m fine.” She lunged at him for a quick hug. “I’ve been in Vermont.”

  “What have you been doing in Vermont?” she asked.

  “Studying writing at Camden,” he said, baiting her. Would she remember Camden as the school Downs had made famous? He regretted it instantly, the scene where Shelleyan taunted him about his ignorance of Olivia’s penchant for the works of Vernon Downs was still fresh. If she asked him what he was working on, or what he’d written, he knew he’d blank, incapable of even devising a fake title to offer as proof of his new phantom identity.

  Shelleyan nodded. The clue eluded her, which convinced him that what she had professed to know about Vernon Downs she’d aped from Olivia’s interest only to harangue him, and he hated her for it anew.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I live here,” she answered.

  “Where?” he asked. Had she seen him living on the streets, working up the courage to approach him, maybe at Olivia’s insistence, from whatever safe roof housed her?

  “Williamsburg,” she told him. “Or East Manhattan, as we say in Billyburg.”

  Charlie was baffled by what she was talking about, but nodded nonetheless.

  “I transferred to Parsons,” she continued. “Where are you staying?”

  “East Vil
lage,” he lied. It was the only neighborhood he could convincingly speak of.

  “Very cool,” Shelleyan said.

  A cab lurched down the lane and they both watched as it rolled to a stop at the entrance to the shuttered Minetta Lane Theatre. An athletic cabbie with shoulder-length hair braided against the heat shook the locked theater doors and then drove off.

  “Have you heard from Olivia?” she asked, as if intuiting the thought that had dried on his lips.

  His nerves jangled at the sound of her name. He felt the sudden need to confide his ploy to impress Olivia with his connection to Vernon Downs, but all there was to disclose was his objective and its unsuccessful execution. “You guys stay in touch?” He winced as the question landed. The answer would tell him how much she knew about what had been said between them during that last phone call.

  “She doesn’t have my new address,” Shelleyan admitted. “I need to write her.”

  Charlie clenched his bag. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, baffled at why Shelleyan had engaged him in such friendly conversation, if not at Olivia’s bidding. The concept that he and Shelleyan would be friends so far from home seemed improbable. Their roles had been cast back in Phoenix, their relationship previously defined. “Hey, I’ve got to run. I’m meeting someone… .” He motioned in the direction of the Black Rabbit.

  “Is this your regular?” she asked, appraising the bar.

  “It’s just a bar,” he said. “Great to see you.”

  “Okay,” Shelleyan said, and he rushed past her, touching her on the shoulder to evade the good-bye hug he sensed was imminent. “Wait!”

  He turned around, his dirty duffel swinging violently.

  “Let me get your number.” She rummaged in her bag. “Be fun to have old home week, huh?”