by Louis Bayard
“Would you mind writing them down? Just above this one?”
He complied at once, scratching away without a single falter until the top half of the paper lay submerged in ink. Then he sat himself back down.
I studied the paper for a time. I studied him for an even longer time.
“What is it?” he asked, his eyes getting larger.
“Just as I expected,” I said. “The whole thing is an allegory of your mind. A bad dream, that’s all, dressed up in meter.”
I let the paper slip from my hand. It rocked back and forth in the air, I remember, like a toy boat riding a trough of water, and even after it landed on the bed, it seemed to pulse for a second more.
“Of course,” I said, “speaking strictly as a reader now, I do think a few editorial changes might improve the thing. Provided your mother doesn’t object.”
“Editorial changes?” he answered, half laughing.
“Well, this ‘ill at heart’ business, for instance. What does that mean? Heartburn? Indigestion?”
“ To a—to a literalist, perhaps.”
“And this other phrase of yours, ‘harrowed hard.’ Strikes me as bit of piling on, if you know what I mean.”
“Piling on?”
“Oh, and please defend, if you can, this name. This Leonore. Honestly, what sort of name is that?”
“It is . . . mellifluous. It is anapestic.”
“No, I’ll tell you what it is, it’s the kind of name that exists only in poems. If you’d like to know why a fellow like me reads so damned little verse, it’s because of names like Leonore.”
Jaw awry, he snatched the paper from the bed, and jammed it into his coat pocket. There was a steam rising from him now—like a mangle touching wet trousers.
“You continue to surprise me, Landor. I had never supposed you to be such an authority on language.”
“Come, now.”
“I had thought you had no time for such trifles. Now I see that your intellect encompasses everything. There is no end of improvement to be found in your company, it seems.”
“I was only throwing off a few—”
“You have—you have thrown quite enough, thank you,” he said, patting the paper where it lay against his bosom. “I shan’t trouble you any further. In the future, you may be sure, I shall take care to keep my verses to myself.”
He didn’t stalk out. Not right away. Stayed another hour, if I recall aright, but it was almost as if he had left. And I now think that’s why I never told him of my encounter in Artemus’ closet. Because why bother pouring such news into a deaf ear?
(Or else there was something else at work in me. Something that wanted him to stay just a little bit in the dark.)
Very quickly, we fell into a thick deep silence, and I was thinking, with a spark of irritation, that I needn’t have come all the way to West Point to be alone, I might have just stayed in Buttermilk Falls . . . when, out of nowhere, he rose and, without a word, strode from the room.
Didn’t slam the door, I’ll say that for him, but left it half open. It was still open when he came back, an hour or so later. His chest was shivering, his nose was clicking from congestion, his bare head was pearled with sleet. He stepped softly, almost on tiptoe, as if he were afraid of waking me. And then gave me that pickled smile and, with a lordly twirl of fingers, said:
“It galls me, Landor, but it appears I must apologize twice in one evening.”
I told him there was no need. I told him it was all my fault, I had no business intruding on what was a perfectly delightful little poem—well, not delightful, that was the wrong word, but . . . highly poetical . . . oh, he took my meaning, didn’t he?
Well, he let me go on a bit, it was probably not unpleasing to him, but it wasn’t (to my surprise) what he was after. Nor was he after another tumbler of Monongahela—that he turned down with the barest flick of his wrist. Sat himself on the floor, didn’t he, with his hands wrapped round his knees. Stared into the cotton rug, with its swirling gold and green fleur-de-lis, and said, soft as could be:
“Confound it, Landor, if I lose you, I might as well lose everything.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling, “you’d still have plenty of reasons to live, Poe. Plenty of admirers.”
“But not one who has been as good to me as you have,” he said. “No, it’s true! Here you are, a distinguished man, a man of substance, yes! And you’ve—you’ve let me drone on for hours on end on all conceivable subjects. I’ve spilled out every last content of my heart and mind and soul, and you’ve”—he cupped his hands—“kept it all in your safekeeping. You’ve been kinder than any father, and you’ve treated me like a man. I shall never forget that.”
He gave his knees one last embrace, then sprang to his feet and made for the window.
“I will spare you more mawkishness,” he said. “I know you don’t care for it. I will only make a vow: never again will I suffer jealousy or—or pride to imperil our friendship. It is too precious a gift. Next to Lea’s love, it is the most precious gift I have received since coming to this accursed place.”
The wages of decency, I thought. I knew then that if I were ever to shake him off me, I would have to do much worse than criticize his mother’s poetry. I would have to find something unpardonable.
Before he left that night, I said:
“One more thing, Poe.”
“Yes?”
“While I was upstairs with Dr. Marquis, did Artemus ever leave the parlor?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “ To check on his mother.”
“And how long was he gone for?”
“No more than a few minutes. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”
“Did he look any different when he got back?”
“A bit flustered, yes. He said his mother had been beastly and he’d had to step outside to clear his head. Yes, that’s right, he was still wiping the snow from his brow when he got back.”
“You saw snow on him?”
“Well, he was wiping something. Although . . . yes, that was curious. . . .”
“What?”
“There was no snow on his boots. Come to think of it, Landor, he looked much the same as you did when you came down.”
Narrative of Gus Landor
28
December 7th
Having spent far too many hours confined in one hotel room, Poe and I agreed one night to something rash. We would meet under cover of darkness at Benny Havens’. Weeks had gone by since I’d last been to Benny’s, but such is the way of the place that nobody shows much surprise when you stop in, no matter how long it’s been. Benny’s jaw muscles may betray a faint tremor, Jasper Magoon may especially want you to read to him from the New York Gazette & General Advertiser, Jack de Windt may, in the midst of planning his assault on the Northwest Passage, raise his chin in your direction, but otherwise, there’s no fuss made, no questions asked, come in, Landor, let’s forget you were ever gone.
I was the only one who’d felt my absence, probably. All the familiar things seemed new again. The colony of mice living in the alcove just by the dartboard—I couldn’t remember their making such a racket before. And the bargemen’s wet boots on the flagstone floor, had they always scraped like that? And all the dank smells—mold and candle wax and things secretly fermenting on floors and walls—rushed in on me now, as though I were dipping my head down an unused well.
And there was Patsy, swiping the remains of some ham hocks into her apron and quietly finishing off a mechanic’s hard cider for him. I could almost believe I was watching her for the very first time.
“Evening, Gus,” she said, evenly.
“Evening, Patsy.”
“Landor!” cried Benny, leaning over the counter. “Have I told you the one about the fly? Which lands in the three gentlemen’s drinks? Well, mind you, the first gentleman is English, so he just pushes his drink away, being a priggish sort of fellow. . . .”
Benny’s voice, too, that felt new. Or else it was working on me in a d
ifferent way, not through my ears but through my skin, a sort of razzing prickle.
“Now the Irishman, why, he just shrugs his shoulders and drinks the beer anyway, doesn’t he? What does he care if it had a fly in it?”
I tried to hold his eyes, but I couldn’t, they were too hot. So I stared down at the counter, and I waited, with a dire patience.
“But the Scotsman,” cried Benny in his grave raucous voice, “why, he picks up that fly, and he screams, ‘Spit it out, you bastard!’”
Jasper Magoon roared so hard he coughed up a finger of gin, and a bargeman caught the laugh and threw it to the outer part of the room, where it was taken up by the Reverend Asher Lippard and passed round, from hostler to drayman. The tin ceiling and the flagstone floor rang, and the laughter spread until it was a weave of sound, flawed only by a single off-color thread, a high thin squiggly laugh that burst through the others like the call of a famished turkey. A laugh I spent some time trying to identify before realizing it was mine.
Poe and I had planned to meet as if by accident, so when he got there, at some twenty minutes to midnight, it was all “Why, Mr. Poe!” and “Why, Mr. Landor!” and looking back, I’m not sure why we bothered. Patsy already knew he was working for me, and the rest of them wouldn’t have cared. Indeed, they would have been hard pressed to distinguish Poe from all the other sodden, red-eyed cadets who rolled in night after night. No, the only person who could have troubled us would have been another cadet, and Poe was, fortunately enough, the only one to stop by that evening. Which meant that instead of lurking in some dark corner with a snuffed-out lantern, he and I could sit by the fire and help ourselves to Benny’s pot of flip, and we could approach the feeling we enjoyed in my hotel room: the mutual ease of two old bachelors living out their term.
That night, Poe chose to talk of Mr. Allan. The inspiration for this, I believe, was a recent letter in which Mr. Allan had made mention of visiting—provided, of course, he could find a boat to take him up the river and a boatman who wouldn’t skin him of half his fortune.
“Do you see?” Poe cried. “It’s always been like this, from the time I was a child. Every expense to be spared. Or if not spared, then scrutinized and—and interrogated and begrudged for the remainder of time.”
From the day he had taken Poe into his house, Allan had refused to clothe or educate him in the manner of a gentleman. In a million ways, large and small, Allan had denied him, and when Poe had needed help publishing his first volume of verse, hadn’t Allan been the one to say, “Men of genius ought not to apply to my aid,” and when he’d had needed fifty dollars to pay his Army replacement, hadn’t Allan balked and hedged for so long that to this day, Sergeant Bully Graves was demanding payment (as relentless as any creditor, was Bully), and it wasn’t right, it wasn’t just, that a sensitive young man should be plagued in such a way.
Said Poe, taking another taste of flip:
“I tell you, Landor, there is no consistency in the man. He teaches me to aspire to eminence, then sets about blasting my every hope of advancement. Oh, yes, it’s always ‘Stand on your own two feet’ and ‘Never fail to your duty,’ but really, Landor, really, it’s ‘Why should you get what I did not?’ Do you know, Landor, when he sent me to the University of Virginia, he left me so impoverished I was forced to leave after only eight months!”
“Eight months,” I said, smiling thinly. “You said you’d studied there three years.”
“I did not.”
“You did, Poe.”
“Landor, please! How could I have been there three years, when the man was already squeezing me from the moment I arrived? Do you see this drink in my hand? I tell you, if Mr. Allan had been the one to buy me this, he would now be demanding it back in the form of urine.”
I thought then of Benny’s Scotsman, trying to get his beer back from the fly, and I had some idea of repeating the joke to Poe, but he was already standing and, with a boy’s smirk, announcing that he had to excuse himself. “ To add my bit,” he said, “to the river tide.”
He tittered then and took a long stride toward the door, nearly colliding with Patsy, to whom he apologized at great length and to whom he made to tip his hat before remembering he had no hat. Patsy, ignoring him, made straight for our table and, after a moment’s pause, began clearing away the thousands of crumbs and small puddles that had piled up in the short time Poe and I had been there. She wiped with long placid strokes, the same industrial precision she had shown in my kitchen. I had forgot what an enchantment it was.
“You’re quiet tonight,” I said.
“I hear better that way.”
“Oh,” I said, “why bother with hearing when you can”—my hand groped under the table—“when you can feel. . . .”
I was stopped by her arm. Not the piece of her I was seeking, and yet it was enough—just the one square of skin—to set me aching from toe to ear. The memory of our last time came over me . . . her ripe white fullness . . . her cedar scent, never to be mistaken. I will know it a thousand years on, if I still have a nose. I sometimes think that what people—people like Poe—call a soul comes down to nothing more than this. A smell. A cluster of atoms.
“Christ,” I said, under my breath.
“Sorry, Gus, I can’t stay, there’s . . . the kitchen’s a terror tonight. . . .”
“Could you at least look at me?”
She raised those lovely chocolate irises toward mine. In a second, she drew them away again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Her shoulders formed a ridge against her neck. “I don’t think you should have taken that job,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I answered. “It’s a job, that’s all. Like any other.”
“No,” she said, half turning away. “It’s not.” She cast a look at the bar. “It’s changed you. I can see it in your eyes, you’re not there anymore.”
The quiet came over us like a wind, and there we were, and you see how it can be, don’t you Reader? You think something has settled into a certain position, and then it turns out it was never in that position at all. . . .
“Well, then,” I said. “The change must lie in you, not me. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I can—”
“No,” she insisted. “It’s not me.”
I studied her averted head. “I suppose that’s why you haven’t sent for me.”
“I’ve had my hands full with my sister, you know that.”
“And your cadets, Patsy. Have they had their hands full, too?”
She didn’t flinch. In a voice so soft I could scarcely hear, she said:
“I would have figured you for being too busy yourself, Gus.”
I half rose in my chair. “Never so busy I can’t—”
And that was as far as I got before Poe sprang on us. Giggling with cold and burning with spirits, heedless of everything and everyone beyond himself. He straddled the back of his chair and rubbed his hands together and groaned, “Good Lord! My Virginia blood shall never be thick enough for these winters. Praise God for flip. And praise God—just a splash or two, many thanks—praise God for you, Patsy! How you brighten these dreary, wasted hours. I must write you a sestina sometime.”
“Somebody should,” I said.
“Somebody,” she agreed. “You’re right. That would be lovely, Mr. Poe.”
He watched her go with a long whistling sigh. Then he bent his face over his glass and muttered:
“It’s no good. Every female I meet, no matter how—how pulchritudinous, only sends me spiraling back to Lea. I can think of no one but her, I can live for no one but her.” He let the liquid bubble for a moment in his throat. “Oh, Landor, I look back on the poor benighted creature I was before I met her, and I see a dead man. Marching in all the right directions, answering when spoken to, fulfilling all his appointed rounds, but dead all the same. And now this woman has awakened me, and I am alive at last, and at what cost! What pain it is to be among the living!”
He
lowered his head into the cradle of his hands.
“Would I ever conceive of returning, though, Landor? Never! Better to have this agony multiplied a thousandfold than to be led back to the land of the dead. I cannot go back, I will not. And yet . . . oh, God, Landor, what am I to do?”
I emptied my glass. Set it on the table and pushed it away.
“Stop loving,” I said. “Don’t love anyone.”
He would have been insulted if he’d been soberer, or if he’d had more time to answer. But it was at that moment that the Reverend Asher Lippard came bursting through the back door.
“Officer! Landward!”
With that, Benny Havens’ establishment . . . I was going to say erupted, but that wouldn’t convey the orderliness of it. This was at least a weekly event at Benny’s. One of Thayer’s “blues” would swing by on a surprise raid, and whoever was stationed closest to the door—tonight it was Asher— would sound the alarm, and whichever cadets had chosen that night to “run it” would be bundled out the front door and herded straight up the riverbank. So it was with Poe on this night. Patsy threw him his cloak and hauled him to his feet, Benny dragged him from the fireplace to the door, and Mrs. Havens gave him one final push and slammed the door after him. He was borne along like a stone skipping over water.