by Louise Hawes
I was glad his mind-reading skills had finally kicked in, that I didn’t have to explain he was a few hundred years off the mark. But my heart sank when, instead of leading us away from the Classical section, he moved to another row in the same bin. “Ah,” he said, grinning, holding up a new case. The light glanced off its face and I couldn’t read the title, but I didn’t need to. “Beethoven!” our poet said, triumphant. “Just the ticket!”
An hour and some tough bargaining later, we left the store with two CDs, one I hoped he’d keep to himself and the other that was perfect for our group to write to. The first was a collection of opera arias, and the second was a jumpy, jazzed-up version of Sweet Mon, just reggae enough to keep us grooving, but with those sad strings behind to make us stop and think.
I put the bag with the CDs on the backseat of our poet’s car, then settled into the friendly clutter. I felt proud I’d helped, and proud to be where I was. To savor the warm, musty scent of ancient paper and old leather that permeated the car. The plastic Buddha who smiled at me from the middle of our poet’s dashboard, the paperbacks on the floor, and the fine layer of dust everywhere. “All set,” I announced, expecting to pull out of the store’s lot.
But we didn’t. Our poet sat for a minute, rock still, then lowered that great white mane over the steering wheel. “ ’Fraid not,” he said.
The Buddha kept smiling, but Rufus groaned. “It seems I forgot one thing.” Now he looked up, truly miserable. “How am I going to play this music?”
“On your CD player?” I offered.
His mane shook no.
“Your MP3?”
Another headshake.
I knew better than to ask about a computer or iPad. Rufus Baylor, Poet Laureate, owned none of the above.
“Wait!” I caught him just as he was opening the door. “I think we can solve this without buying anything else.” It wasn’t that I didn’t think our poet had enough money to spring for a player. But he looked different than he had in class somehow. Tired, rumpled. Softer and older in a will-this-day-ever-end sort of way.
I explained that since he was taking me home, and since I owned not one but two MP3 players, I could copy the discs onto one and then show him how to use it. No problemo, as H would say.
“Thank you, Sarah.” Baylor put his key back in the ignition. “I’m not good with gadgets. They break as soon as they see me coming.”
He started up the car, then aimed a new smile my way, younger, more hopeful. “I’m looking forward to meeting your mother.”
BAYLOR’S BEATER
Nnnurum, nnurum,
Ruuuuum—kkchu. Ruuuuuuuuumm—kkchu.
Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu—KKCHU. RUUUUUUUMM.
BUDDHA
Oh, oh.
BAYLOR
Address, please, Miss Wheeler?
ME
(Hushed, biting my tongue)
BUDDHA
Wherever you go, there you are. OHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Why hadn’t I thought of this? Why hadn’t I driven home with H? Why had I gone and doomed Rufus to disaster? How had I managed to arrange things so that he was about to confront the one person he positively, absolutely couldn’t charm into submission?
“Sarah?” The car was idling, but we had nowhere to go. “Where do you live?”
I thought of telling him I was spending the night at a friend’s. I thought of having him let me out down the street because my mother was sick and couldn’t stand excitement. I thought of a lot of excuses, half-truths, and downright lies. And then I told him the truth: “My address is 328 High Court Road.”
“That’s right around the corner from me, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “But my mom, Mr. Baylor? She can be a little difficult.”
“Rufus.”
“Rufus. She can be pretty hard to please.”
Our poet took one hand off the wheel and turned to face me. “Don’t you worry, Sarah,” he said. He looked back to the window, drove out of the lot. “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he added, as we nosed onto Ocean Drive, “I like a challenge.”
I held my breath all the way to my house. I answered our poet’s questions in monosyllables, knowing there was nothing I could do to stop him if he was determined to go mano a mano with Katherine Wheeler, Demolition with a Smile. I braced myself for the shock waves as we pulled into the driveway and parked beside my mom’s car.
Our poet rang the bell, and my mother opened the door. “Mom,” I told her before we’d even come inside, “I’m sorry I’m late. This is Rufus Baylor. He’s the one who . . .”
“I’m the one who’s lucky enough to have your daughter in my poetry class, Mrs. Wheeler.” My mother was doing her throat-holding thing, but Rufus just reached out and took both her hands in his, anyway. She got the double handshake, whether she wanted it or not.
“I hope we didn’t worry you,” he told her. “I’m afraid I kept Sarah after class. I admire her work, and wanted to tell her so.”
“Her work?” My mother stopped, one of her newly released hands on the door, the other just where Rufus had left it in midair. She was already off balance, her expression a cross between Has this man got the wrong house? and My, but isn’t he polite!
“Sarah’s work in class,” Baylor told her. “I mean her poetry, Mrs. Wheeler. Not many new writers, young or old, have such an instinctive feel for the sound and shape of words.” He looked closely at Mom in the very short pause before he asked, “Maybe she comes by that naturally?”
Mom stepped back from the door, made a little gesture that looked like, Come in. But she didn’t say a word, just eye-frisked our visitor from head to toe.
“Sarah tells me you work for a magazine.” Rufus studied the living room while my mother studied him. “Why, that must be it, right there?” There were umptillion copies of Her strewn not so casually across the glass face of the coffee table by our couch, so it was hard to tell which one Baylor pointed to.
Mom smiled. Just a little, just enough. She invited us both to sit down, even though I already had. Would I have preferred to be upstairs in my room, music blaring so I couldn’t hear what they said? Yes. But I had to admit things weren’t going as badly as I’d figured they would.
“I do more selling than writing for this old rag,” my mother told our poet, settling herself on the couch beside him. “But they do let me squeeze in an article now and then.” She smiled again, shyer this time. “This one”—picking up a magazine, turning on the first try to a page she must have memorized—“is a prickly little diatribe on personal trainers and how they aren’t.”
Rufus, who, I was sure, knew less about personal training than he did about MP3s, said nothing. Still, the face he turned to her was curious, alive, and interest was all Mom needed. Like a little girl showing off, she jumped from one issue of Her to the next, from editorials she’d written to sidebars and features, to anything at all with her byline underneath. With each triumph she shoved under his nose, Baylor beamed at her like a proud parent. And with every page, every smile, my mother smiled back.
She didn’t stop. She smiled when Rufus told her how much he liked headlines that spoke in a human voice. She smiled when he said how good it was to meet someone who understood the importance of writing your mind. She smiled when he read every word of her article on perfume as identity. And she smiled when she asked him—no, when she insisted—that he stay for dinner.
* * * *
If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have believed it: I sat next to our poet, and Mom and Aunt Joceyln sat across from us. We ate the same food, sat at the same table in the same stiff chairs we always did, but there was nothing stiff or same about that dinner with Rufus. (After the second time he asked me to call him by his first name, I tried to remember and sometimes managed it, even though it was really hard to do IN FRONT OF MY MOTHER.)
I wanted to leap up from the table, to call Fry. I wanted to tell him how, even with everything that had happened, I couldn’t get h
is poem out of my heart. And because I was too excited to keep it to myself, I also wanted to share the amazing fact that I was breaking bread with The World’s Most Famous Poet. I settled for excusing myself to go to the bathroom and sending a quick twofer text: Your poem is way past wonderful. Guess who came to dinner?
Rufus asked for seconds of everything, and told Aunt J. he had never eaten anything so heartbreaking as her stuffed squab. When Mom talked shop, Rufus listened. When she told stories about her boss, he laughed. Not polite little chuckles, but a kind of falling-apart rumble that grew and grew.
And you know what? Mom’s stories were actually funny. They were things she’d never told me or Jocelyn before, things that had us all laughing. Like the time her whole office nearly starved to death when Her’s editor in chief insisted everyone go on the liquid diet she’d researched for an article on fast beauty fixes.
“And did you let your coworkers expire for fashion, Mrs. Wheeler?” Rufus asked.
“Kate, please,” my mother told him, lowering her eyes over the dessert soufflé. “No, in fact. It seems someone posted an anonymous note above the water cooler proposing that we all meet in heaven for a postmortem weigh-in.” When she looked up, she had that little-girl look back—show-off, yes, but mischievous, too.
“To rabble-rousing for the common good!” Our poet held his wine glass up in a toast.
“As you said, Rufus, there are times we simply have to write our minds.” Mom clinked his glass with hers. And me? I wondered who had taken over my mother’s body. Where had this funny, interesting woman come from? This woman who pulled pranks and laughed like she meant it?
After dinner, I left Mom and Rufus doing dishes. He really wanted to help, and since I had some serious copying to do, I took the CDs we’d chosen up to my room. I was halfway through the first one, when Fry’s ringtone played.
“Sar,” he said as soon as I answered, “you won’t believe who just left here on a D-A-T-E.” He spelled the word like it was X-rated.
“Your mom?”
“Yeah. It looks like Mr. Mustache is stepping up his campaign.” It was clear that Fry wasn’t as happy as his mother that she’d finally found someone she liked. Mr. Mustache was an insurance agent who had handled the family’s claims for years, but who’d only recently become a stepfather candidate.
“Fry . . .” I wanted to tell him everything at once. “Your poem . . . your poem was—”
“But this cloud has a definite silver lining.” Fry’s voice dropped to a whisper, a sexy, secret sound. “The coast is clear for as long as it takes them to eat and watch a flick.” He finished with a happy flourish: “I’ll come get you and I can read you my poem”—he lowered his voice still further—“up close and personal.”
I Call a Friend and Write a Poem by Moonlight
Even on a normal, nothing-new sort of day, a clear coast and two or three hours alone with Fry would have been hard to resist. But now that I’d read his true feelings, his proposition was practically irresistible. Notice I said “practically.” After all, I had a famous poet in my house and a lesson in digital-audio technology to teach. I felt as though I were caught between fairy tales: a handsome, sexy prince on one side, and a wise and famous king on the other. “I can’t, Fry,” I told him. “Rufus Baylor is still here.”
“The Bard of Ancient? What’s he doing there?”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“Yeah. You said you loved the poem.”
“I did. I do.” Why did all the good things have to cluster together? Why couldn’t I spread them out to cover the long, boring times in between? “I also said our poet is eating dinner with us. Mom’s already invited him every week for the rest of the class—Thursdays with Rufus!”
“Rufus?!”
Could I tell him about the music store? “I’ve gotten to know him better.” Without his making me feel wrong, gullible, foolish?
“A lot better, it sounds like.” There was that tone again. The sarcasm, the anger.
“He’s really nice, Fry.” Nice. It wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was brilliant, generous, astonishing.
“Nicer than you and me and no one home?”
“It’s just that—”
“Nicer than you with no bra in my bed?” He paused, gave me time to picture poetry and pillows, a whole bed to ourselves. Without worrying about whether his mother might come home. His arms around me. “No farther,” he purred, sealing the deal. “I promise.”
“I just can’t, Fry.” What he was saying was so different from what he’d written, I felt dizzy, off balance. Where was slow, love-round? “Besides,” I added, remembering the end of his poem, “I thought you were happy with my name on your lips.”
“What?”
“You know. Your poem?”
“Oh, yeah. Come on, Sar, be serious. We don’t get chances like this every night.”
I wanted to tell him about the class he’d missed. I wanted to crow about how Rufus liked my poem. But I knew better now. Instead, I let Fry do the talking. Which meant I heard more than I wanted to about old men and young girls. “Just watch the geezer’s hands under the table, okay?”
“Fry!” I was glad I couldn’t see him, didn’t have to look at the smirk, the tight smile he wore every time he talked about Rufus. “I thought you understood.”
“I understand that kids are all talking about it. I’m not the only one who thinks the old man goes on autodrool whenever you’re around.”
“But—”
“And then you turn around and have the guy to dinner! What’s wrong with this picture, Sarah?” Fry sounded like a father, a scolding parent. “You’re in high school, and he’s . . . he’s barely alive, for Chrissake.”
He paused, lowered his voice, as if finally, he could make me listen to reason. “Hey, it’s not like you’ll even get an A out of this.”
The first CD popped out of my laptop. “I can’t talk now,” I told Fry. I heard my mother laugh, high and girlish, downstairs. “I have to go.”
“Your choice, babe,” Fry said, his voice angry again. “And your loss.”
Was it? My loss? After we’d hung up, I sat down to wait for the second CD. I read the poem Fry had sent again. It was beautiful. Loving words strung together, a rush of passion. My head hurt from trying to figure things out, from wanting to hold Fry and listen to him say those words over and over. Still, the lightness in my neck and shoulders, as I started downstairs to show Rufus how to play the tracks, felt as much like relief as disappointment. As if half of me wanted to steal off to meet Fry, but the other half was only too glad to go on feeling the magic that always happened when Rufus Baylor was around.
As it turned out, my technology lesson was short lived. My mother just wasn’t built to listen and learn, so even though our poet tried his best to follow my lead, Mom was constantly interrupting. “Rufus, if you have a moment,” and “Oh, Rufus, have you seen this?” It was only when Jocelyn dragged her back into the kitchen to help pour coffee that I got to put more than two words together. So while I had the chance, I used the five that mattered most: “How do you do it?”
“I thought that’s what you were supposed to tell me.” Rufus, who seemed to have relaxed a little now that my mother was out of earshot, slipped off his jacket, folded it across his lap, and waited for instructions.
“No,” I told him. “I mean, how do you make poetry that says so much in such a little space?”
You should have seen our poet’s face then. It looked like a switch had been thrown and he’d come to life. “That’s a fine question, Sarah,” he said. “An astonishing one.”
And then he forgot all about the player and how to work it. He almost forgot about me; in fact, he didn’t seem to be looking at me at all when he answered. He was checking with something inside, something deep and sure.
“I guess the key to writing big is feeling big. You have to want and feel and taste more than you can ever get down on paper.” He came up from inside and saw m
e. “That forces you to pay attention, take notes. And choose. Most of all it makes you choose what to put down and what to leave out.”
I nodded. “Like being onstage,” I told him. “There are a billion and one ways to say a line. But only one way you can say it after the lights go up.”
“Exactly,” Rufus said. “But everything you haven’t said, everything you’ve left out, is still there. It echoes and thrums through a reader’s heart.”
“It goes on and on.” I remembered the poem like a bell.
“Want to see how it’s done?” Rufus smiled. “I write morning pages every day. I like to get things on paper before life gets too busy.” I thought of the reporters, the librarians, the groupies.
“You’re more than welcome to join me. I thought I might ask anyone in class who wants to, to try their hand.” He held his head to one side in that way he had. “Though I’m not sure how many takers I’ll have.”
“Morning pages?” My heart sank. Was that how creative types worked? They jumped out of bed inspired? I had enough trouble waking up early for school. And it never felt like my brain turned on until after lunch.
“Eight a.m. sharp.” Another smile. “After coffee, of course. I write without thinking. No editing, no second-guessing. Just notes on what’s here and now, what’s real.”
“Would we have to read what we write?” All the crossings out, the changes I wrote in the margins of my poems before I cleaned them up and turned them in! What if Rufus had heard those lines before they were fixed? Would he still have told my mother I had a feel for poetry?
“No one has to read their morning pages,” Rufus explained. “Not you, not me, not anyone.” He paused. “On the other hand, if you want to share your work, you can. Unless, of course, Carmen objects.”
I laughed. The picture of the Hendricks’ giant feline sitting in on a poetry session was absurd. But Rufus wasn’t smiling.
“It seems my Cat in Residence has an aversion to people taking themselves too seriously.” Our poet sighed. “I invited a friend from Asheville to spend last weekend here, and he’d barely begun reading something from his latest book, when Carmen persuaded him to stop.”