I had come here to test my commitment. Literature had a metaphysical power over me.
The workshop I’d chosen to be in was full of younger people, too. But these young folks, all in their twenties, listened to the teacher and took notes and did not seem at all cynical. I tried to hold my tongue, but then again I wanted to be popular. I didn’t criticize their work. I pointed out what I loved—and gradually, in workshop at least, I’d become the overenthusiastic nerd that was the exact opposite of the snide, self-assured (but self-loathing) jerk I’d manifested in school.
If I said something nice, after something else nice I’d said, they smiled warmly at me.
“Aw, but that’s so lovely,” they said, or, “But isn’t he great? Let’s all take Scott home!”
There was a cute Native American named Toby in my dorm suite. He was working on a memoir about being a gay Navajo. I think he was Navajo, unless he was Hopi. Over coffee one morning he told a Hopi legend but I do think he was Navajo. I don’t remember the legend. But I do remember that he was from New Mexico. Wildfires were plaguing the west just then. Toby’s boyfriend’s mom had just lost her home to one in Colorado Springs. He and I were sitting in the University Club drinking our morning coffee (I offered to buy his coffee because he was a waiter and an undergrad with a partial scholarship and otherwise no means to attend), and on CNN they were showing round-the-clock footage of the fires out west—like the apocalypse, these fires.
“Yeah, shit,” he said, his easy, wry consternation a source of attraction for me. “I talked to my boyfriend last night …,” and it took a while for him to get out the full story. I hoped that his memoir told the story with a bit less self-interruption, a bit less elliptical fill-in-the-blank.
“What?” I said, smirking expectantly.
“Clay’s mom’s in Colorado Springs,” he said, oversugaring his coffee like the recovering alcoholic I later discovered, from him, that Toby was. “My boyfriend Clay’s mom’s in that …”
He had hipster glasses, which originally had made him seem fierce. He looked smart and menacing. I knew that his memoir would expose everything wrong with white people. It wasn’t enough to be gay anymore. You had to be a gay minority, angry on behalf of non-whites and also gays who weren’t white. In my twenties, I’d often announced this as just fitting and inevitable.
Now I was just white. I rarely had sex and when I did, it was with one white guy: myself.
“… and now she’s coming to fucking live with us,” Toby finally finished, looking off.
I waited then said, “But do you like Clay’s mother?”
“Oh yeah, I love her. I love Reba. Reba’s great. But she’s going to come live with us.”
“It’ll be all right,” I said, perkily sipping my second black coffee. “Don’t you think?”
When he smiled, it was dazzle white. He smiled and said, “Little Miss Mary Sunshine!”
I lived in New York and had lost all gift of gab. You had to guard it carefully there. You were always worried about what you’d said and how it would be matched against something you had said earlier, or against someone else’s story about you. My partner Perry was somewhat yet not completely famous. His position was tenuous. And he’d recently had a stroke and had gone under the radar and people were wondering if Perry would pull through. Our friend Beau, which was just a nickname for his real name, Robert, was taking care of Perry while I was away for this week, and when I called home everything seemed cozy but temporarily so. Meanwhile, this was my vacation. I’d come stag, so to speak, and did not want to act too knowing or cosmopolitan. I thought about Toby and how far away from life, despite his gayness, he must have felt from me.
“I’m just trying to get everything out of this thing I can,” Toby was eventually able to say. “Some of these kids are from big pricey schools, but I’m smarter—my work’s better than theirs.”
“I’m sure it’s a lot more interesting,” I said, then I wondered if this didn’t sound racist.
“What about you?” he said. “What are you doing here? Heard you have shit going on.”
“Well,” I said, trying to sound alluring, “my partner had a stroke and this is my vacation. I just meant that some of these people are so young is all.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Twenty-three,” I said, adjusting for his gay sensibility. He looked pretty beat-up, rugged and ready for anything, but probably no less than thirty. “Twenty-three or maybe even younger.”
“Thirty-one,” he said and gave me the smile for the second time. “But it’s a good thing. I’m smarter and have more experience, and my writing’s better than most of these youngies’.”
We didn’t play the same game about my age, and I said, “But welcome to my vacation.”
“Right, and that’s cool. Before I came I decided not to do anything I didn’t want to.”
“Me, too. Although, I have to say, I find myself falling into old please-like-me! patterns.”
“Seriously, you, Mr. Popular? Everybody’s like, ‘What’s he think?’ But I’m not like that.”
I think this was because he’d seen me sitting with the Mean Girls, which suited me fine.
“I’m here to listen and learn,” I said, and he nodded and put down his coffee cup, done.
He checked his iPhone and said we’d be late to craft and got up without me.
Craft, in the mornings, was like finger paints but with words. It was fun because nothing was expected of you. Nothing but your twelve hundred dollars and a good collegial attitude was expected of you. There were people there older than me and so I decided to have a good time, as though none of it mattered, which it didn’t. I had acted like this in high school and look where it had gotten me: going to a writing workshop in the Berkshires where nothing was expected of me.
After lunch in the University Club I’d call home and usually Beau would pick up.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said. “What are you guys up to?”
“Well, I walked Perry and that was good. Then we went to lunch for sushi. He’s doing well, although I wish he’d walk twice a day. Tonight we’re having Tyler and Devon for dinner.”
“Those are nice guys,” I said and thought of those two precious homosexuals I disliked.
“I understand they’re cute, although they’re both taken. By each other.”
“When it suits. Hello?”
“Oh!” said Beau. “I’m so worried about these wildfires. It just seems so prescient, it just seems so foreboding.” He was always reaching for the ten-dollar word, usually a Latinate. “And what is going on with the federal government? What are they doing? I like how it’s all about the haves waiting for the next move by the have-nots. We’re going into early Roman Empire here.”
“How’s Perry’s diet? Is he eating all the healthy food I left for him in the freezer?”
“More or less. Oh, I miss you! Are you having a good time? Is it like vacation, I hope?”
“It is, but I’m just relieved to hear things are going okay there, too.”
Stanley and I just then were crossing paths, and he called out, “Hey, man.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s cool, man.”
Today he was wearing an Izod with the collar flipped up, as though the Mean Girls had gotten to him and were maybe playing a little joke on him, but it was appealing. He walked with longer strides and as we passed he gave me the thumbs-up.
“Who was that?” said Beau.
“One of my classmates.”
“Oh! I hope you’re having a good time. I hope it’s, you know, remunerative for you.”
Beau looked like a teenager but was already a professor at Tulane. He’d glided through Yale then Harvard and was now an expert on the influence of Greek drama on Eugene O’Neill—whom he now confessed to hate. Nothing American since 1950 or so was good enough. We’d ceded all power in the world cultural market shortly after winning the Second World War. I would not listen too carefully to hi
s plaints, to use one of his words, because I was postwar, too.
I said, “Miss you.”
“Is there anybody up there?” he suddenly said. “Any cuties? Any hotties?”
“Duh, but not who are interested in me.”
I no longer wanted to discuss sex with Beau. I’d been in love with him a while ago but it hadn’t worked out, and it was better for him to talk about sex with Perry, who’d introduced us.
“Oh!” he said. “Don’t tell me it’s postindustrial, late-Empire, mid-postmodern malaise.”
“Well,” I said and—words again—laughed. “It just might be.”
I got to workshop and sat next to Deepika, who was my age and who taught at the kind of liberal arts college I never could have afforded to attend. I had asked Deepika if her name wasn’t Indian (she was pretty with blandly exotic features), and she’d said, “Naw, it’s just a name.” She never brought up her background, and I guessed that this made her post-postmodern.
Our teacher was a beautiful blonde woman about our age who’d said on the first day that she never wanted to hear in here the phrase, “Grab the reader.” She had low affect but when she got going, hitting a sentence she loved, or a reference, she got passionate, saying, “Marvelous!”
All during workshop, in which I wasn’t writing, only reading others, commenting in some positive way on their work, and listening, I thought only of drinks later at the University Club.
An earlier evening at the UC, Deepika had said to me, “My job is unbelievably bad.”
(I’d heard Beau—who pulled in seventy grand a year—say this many, many times.)
I liked when people with job security, especially tenured faculty types, said stuff like this. All literature to me was in the sentence—the well-placed phrase or whatever that drew hushes. I had worked some pretty bad jobs before I met Perry. To me there was romance in this career, the type of which anybody in my family would die to get, making you swoon with boredom without sweating or waking up five days a week before dawn. Literature is a sop to the lazies. It makes you feel good about doing nothing but reading, sitting around committing no compassionate acts, watching your surroundings get dirty and disorderly, getting more and more useless as a “mind.”
Deepika said that between committee meetings and grading papers, there was no time for her own writing. She wanted to write a novel about the Tamil Tigers and make them sympathetic for the average disengaged, ignorant American. I nodded at the phrase Tamil Tigers, but Deepika had been mutely seraphic. Today, our teacher told Deepika that her writing was too smart.
The teacher got Deepika in her sights and said, “You know what I mean? Too knowing.”
After workshop I sat with Deepika at the bar at the University Club. Each of us ordered a glass of white wine and she said, “And what the fuck does that mean? Too smart, too knowing?”
“I know, right?” I said, imitating the younger ones, thinking of the Mean Girls. “Right?”
I was more interested in whether or not she was related to any Tamil Tigers, but I’d have to wait until her novel came out if it ever did. I wanted to say she needed more dialogue. In real life, Deepika had no shortage of things to say, but her characters did more thinking than acting. I wanted to know not so much about her sexual life as her personal life. She referred to the person she lived with alternately as “partner” and “spouse,” but what was the person’s gender? Deepika said she was a deep structuralist and that her field straddled political science and philosophy, and that she’d been asking herself a lot of questions lately about the language of our imperialist wars.
“It just seems that we as Americans aren’t asking all the tough questions,” she said, “you know, about all the hegemonies,” and she got me in her sights the way the teacher had done her.
I knew, too, that academics pluralized otherwise singular abstract nouns like hegemony.
I said, “It’s so funny that thing you bring up about questions, because not you—you’re an academic so it’s your job to—but fiction writers, if you read the jacket copy on their books, when the publisher doesn’t know what else to say about their own book that’s puzzling and dense, they inevitably defer to this question strategy describing their book: ‘a novel that mordantly raises questions of postmodern identity.’ But all that says to me is they haven’t actually read that book, or they have, but they can’t make heads or tails out of it. You know?” and I watched her freeze.
“Uh-huh.”
I knew I’d insulted her because after all we’d been talking about her fiction all along.
Our barstools were turned toward each other, and we each took a drink and blinked.
“Maybe that’s too vague,” I said. “I thought she was harsh on you. I like your ideas.”
“But I’m too much of an academic.”
“Nope,” I said, taking a proud next sip. “Not at all.” I raised my chin defiantly.
“Then what?” she said, and she set her look on me and would not dislodge it.
My mind shuffled for an answer but then a bunch of the other workshoppers came in.
“More later,” I said, “but I will tell you what my boyfriend’s always telling me …”
“What’s he always telling you?”
“Well, only,” I said, feeling that first grateful glass, “only that you’ll make your way.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “You’re a real BS-meister, aren’t you? Gift of the Irish gab?”
Perry said, “Do you like your teacher?” and I knew that he was asking if she liked me. It was important for him to know that others thought I had some talent, too. “And is she terribly nice?”
“Yes, but I get the feeling she doesn’t want to play favorites. She’s nobody’s fool.”
“Huh! Beau and I thawed some of the sausage and lentils. It was really delicious.”
“Did he make you walk?”
“I could only get to the corner and turn around and hobble staggering back.”
We’d been together seventeen years, but things had only begun to get bad in the last two. After a while you wondered. Sex was one thing, love and affection another, and then you were a childish team, a pair of ids afloat in tandem with too much freedom. And then what?
Before the stroke, his doctor had been after him to lose weight for a good while.
I said, “I feel like a lot of this is my fault. If I’d insisted harder, pushed you harder …”
“This is my fault, darling. There were plenty of voices, plenty of warning signs.”
This was perfunctory, in my mind. As long as he’d been able to have tricks, I was happy. I wasn’t going to be responsible for somebody else’s sexual contentment—least of all mine.
Soon Perry put Beau on the line and Beau said, “We’re having a good time, Boo!”
I wondered if Perry hadn’t bought Beau a bottle of gin. Beau sounded less classical now.
Everywhere was happy hour. I was on my way back to the dorm. The University Club’s last call was ten-thirty and then there was nothing else to do unless you walked to town, then the walk back to the dorm would be twice as long. I dreamed about sleeping with the teacher. Half-undressed, she faced away, extending her arm, letting her black bra hang, saying, “Nope, fella!”
She wasn’t teasing me. Somehow in the dream I knew that she was saying she knew that I wanted to be her, not have her. Still, when I was waking up on the crackly mattress beneath the stiff, scratchy sheets, I was just getting my face in her tits, her small apricot tits more potent than words. But then I realized where the dream had gone wrong. The teacher never wore a bra. I’d had the dream because I was in love with her male opposite number, Beau, with similar coloring.
I was looking for another place to have breakfast. A hotel in the middle of campus, where Perry and I were originally supposed to stay, resembled my mother’s old electric hair-curling appliance she’d gotten one Christmas, but bigger and substituting cement for plastic. The hotel looked self-contained and was about
twelve stories tall. It was like something post-Mussolini in Italy, where Perry would prefer to be over anywhere else, but where we couldn’t afford to go anymore due to the strong Euro. An international firm had won a competition designing it. Each room’s window reminded me of a half-closed eye— from which, in my exhaustion and homesickness, I imagined the heat and steam of my mom’s electric curling appliance escaping. The sun was already hot at nine in the morning. I hurried, as though pursued, into the ugly air-conditioned basement café.
I was eating more than usual, as though I were a student, and drinking at the usual rate.
I got scrambled eggs on an english muffin and dispensed myself a coffee. There was no one there from my writing program, in fact no other customers, only a cashier and a line cook. I thought about mid-week afternoon malls when I’d cut my last two high school classes, during the early part of the Reagan administration. My dashed hopes, none of them Reagan’s fault. Then I finished my food, grabbed my coffee, and went out. I took a long sweaty walk, skipping craft. I wasn’t at all disabused of craft, I’d merely paid for the privilege of choosing to go or not to go.
In one craft class, the teacher, a spoken-word artist, wanted us to access our inner ham or show-off. Her performances were apparently fiercely political, but I was gratified to see that she wasn’t beyond appreciating and drawing out our silliest, most superficial selves. She got us into pairs by first getting us into a circle. This was on a patio in the hot sun. We had to jump up and down and shake our limbs and loosen up. Then one by one we ran across the circle and selected a partner and stared at each other. “Now scream, but don’t stop looking at each other! Scream!”
We were there to indulge our creative sides; it was the primordial equivalent of jet-skiing in Mykonos. In the mid-eighties not long after Reagan’s second election, I would worry that my fucking around had gotten me infected. I flattered myself that when it was clear that I was close to the end, say when I had black tumors all over me, Kaposi sarcoma, I’d fly to Greece wearing dark sunglasses, check into a hotel near the water, and fling myself off a cliff into the deep blue. I wouldn’t even need much money for it. I could max out my credit cards getting there. It’s not like I was planning to pay the hotel bill. This was how thoughtless and insensitive I was then. I tested negative time and again, however. And then I decided I was going to live and be a writer.
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 23