The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  Keaton could have related. The speculation is that he worked so much in the last decade of his life, never turning anything down, because he wanted to provide for his much younger third wife, who was as good for him as his second wife had been bad. As for Keaton’s first wife, Natalie Talmadge, she had basically compensated for the lack of a film career rivalling those of her famous sisters by spending Buster’s money as fast as he could earn it. She often spent nine hundred dollars a week, and the Italian villa itself, the large mansion she so desired, cost $250,000, as much as it cost Alexander Pantages to build the lavish vaudeville theatre in Edmonton. All this wealth and spending couldn’t save the marriage, especially once Keaton wound up miserable, his creativity fettered, at MGM. Natalie Keaton’s bitterness toward her ex-husband remains one of the great mysteries in Keaton’s biography. She so loathed him that she wouldn’t let him see his two sons for most of their childhoods. In the last decades of her life, she wouldn’t even let Buster’s name be spoken in her presence, and died in 1969 just as bitter as she’d been at the time of the divorce in 1932. Not a single one of Keaton’s biographers, and certainly not Keaton himself, ever adequately explained Natalie’s gargantuan hostility, except to suggest that her controlling and interfering stage mother poisoned Natalie against Buster. But such a suggestion seems an inadequate explanation. One point remains clear about the marriage, though – Natalie loved to spend, and Buster, as he admitted many times, wasn’t interested in money.

  But he became interested. And I had become interested, too, more and more as I stumbled into mid-career and found that, as my imagination flourished and my skills increased, recognition became a scarcer commodity. At the same time, living expenses, the basics required to raise a family, increased. Where once I happily made do on little and the eternal promise for more, I now found the cold winds of the world blowing through my empty billfold. The romantic faith that I would be sufficiently rewarded materially if I did good work had been shaken to its foundation. I stood on Jasper Avenue, like Keaton on the dusty street in Steamboat Bill, Jr., and waited for the front of the house to crash over my head. For Keaton, everything in the film had been measured to inches, and he survived the dangerous stunt when the open window of the house front passed right over him. For me, the house with all its unpaid mortgage payments crushed me, and the blood that ran out of my skull had no poetry in it; it was just blood. Hemingway claimed that the world breaks everyone, and that if you don’t break, the world will simply kill you. “It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially,” according to Papa, who added that if you are none of these, the world will still kill you but with no particular hurry.

  My goodness and bravery were, admittedly, small scale, but I possessed them. I had tried to be true to my artistic vision by living on my wits, and now I was sitting on the set of a bad studio comedy, miscast, and weeping for the minor triumphs of my youth. The world was in a hurry to crush me, as it was in a hurry to crush everyone. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t famous like Keaton, or that I’d never been wealthy. I had published a few good books, and I wanted to build on them. But what I had done could not save me from the chill intimations of mortality, the painful knowledge that I couldn’t protect my children or anyone else’s from the hard truths of the human condition. Provide! Provide! If Robert Frost was such a wise old soul, why couldn’t his poem help me? Why did the image of Keaton as a cigar-store Indian in a 1960s beach movie drive such a sharp dagger into the base of my cerebral cortex? I didn’t even have to sing to the passing commuters, “Don’t cry for me, bourgeois Canada.” Who would cry? Most of my fellow citizens would sneer, hurl abuse or look away in perplexed embarrassment. My plight would be unrecognizable to them, but no less real for that – oh no, it was all too real, and the isolation only deepened the coldness of the reality.

  I moved my chilled body towards the chill in the risen late summer sun. Frost’s “Provide! Provide!” dredged Henry David Thoreau’s advice up from my memory banks, the only banks that had ever been kind to me. In Walden, Thoreau urged his fellow citizens to slow down and live less complicated lives. He wrote, “Simplify, simplify.” And Keaton, the discarded waxwork in Sunset Boulevard, muttered, “Pass. Pass.” I simply did not know what to do.

  How cold was I then? Colder than I’d ever been in my life, but not as cold as the body of Delmore Schwartz lying unclaimed in the morgue for three days. No, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s fire, there’s hope for warmth. I decided to let the day unfold. I would cancel my first class, I would find a pay phone and call my elderly mother, and then I would conduct my curious entourage to my own little streetcar named Desire and, with all my spirit and imagination, shout silently from the middle of the High Level Bridge, “Bus – ter! Bus – ter!” As plans go, it had the virtue of difference, and difference means what metaphor means in a poem: surprise. There was no surprise for Delmore Schwartz’s corpse. I pointed my heavy compass to campus.

  And the heavy bear named Delmore stirred his big black flour bag of tears and came with me, mumbling through his sobs a few lines from the poem that kept him, and his creator, alive: “That heavy bear who sleeps with me . . . / Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope / Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.”

  “Never mind, Delmore,” I consoled, knowing how terrified he was. Then it occurred to me that I should include another viewing of Sherlock Jr. somewhere in my day. After all, Keaton had made his homage to film because he deeply appreciated the power of film to hide the darkness beneath. And Delmore Schwartz had depended on film’s ability to do just that. As he wrote in another short story, “Screeno,” which takes place almost entirely in a theatre: “Drenched by such a tasteless, colorless mood, there was only one refuge, one sanctuary: the movies.”

  WE SLEEPWALKED the ten minutes to Grant MacEwan University, though I did note the large grey towers on the horizon, an architectural anomaly that always made me think of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. But I rarely felt a sense of magic or fantastic escape as I approached. This morning was no different. The bodies and the faces, as usual, grew younger as we neared the campus; it was as if the falling autumn leaves had burst into spring life on the way down off the branches. Youth! How much promise and time and hope – yet who is more woe-laden than the young? Their strong, vital bodies so often house the hearts of marble statues. I looked away from their faces. I had none of that vampiric desire some teachers have to suck on the jugular of youth’s spirit. In fact, I had always been extremely careful to maintain a strict professional distance with my students – the importance of the comma splice, not the vastness of the darkness beneath, was what I taught. I could help with the former; with the latter, they were, along with the rest of us, mostly on their own.

  Even so, I felt the atmosphere lighten around me as the concentration of the franchises gave way to a single small food court selling fat and sugar to the stressed-out scholars. But it was early September, and there was still more optimism for the beginning term in the air than anxiety. Delmore chuckled. “Shall I part my bare behind?” I shushed him, but smiled despite myself.

  Not at all to my surprise, he wasn’t about to let me off the hook.

  “You’re laying it on just a bit thick, you know. Try being a Jew in an Ivy League college. Those bastards really had it in for me.” He grimaced, and I could see the slobber hanging off his fangs. “Besides, what exactly are you falling from? I had letters of praise from Eliot before I was thirty. I was featured in Vogue for Chrissakes. I looked exactly like Apollo, too. Everyone said so.” Breathing hard, he tilted his great ursine head towards the sun, as if he was Hamlet holding Yorick’s remains aloft. “The nobility of my head, that’s what did it. Why do you think I exist in the afterlife as a goddamned bear?”

  I blinked at him, not sure if he was serious. “Because of your poem. The heavy bear who goes with you, et cetera.”

  “No.” He extended and retracted his claws. “Because of th
e impressiveness of my head. And because of my power and fame. The Jewish Robert Frost, that’s what I was. Though it’s more accurate to call him the Gentile Delmore Schwartz.”

  We had reached the hallway outside my classroom, and reality rushed in again: the lecturing to indifferent faces, the terrible faux-god marking and grading, the desperate stand-up act under the scalding administrative lights. By the time I stepped through the door to my windowless classroom with its bare walls, all the stultifying weight of the institution had crashed over me. Delmore, who had refused to pass through the door, held his great shaggy head in his hands and cried, “No no no no no.”

  I turned back to see him with his paws over his eyes.

  He wailed, “The stage fright, the stage fright! I was a grotesque before every class. Worse than a polka clown, a burlesque queen. No no no no.”

  His behaviour didn’t help, nor did Randall Jarrell’s claim that the gods who had taken away a poet’s readers had given him students. Jarrell meant this to be a cause of some celebration. But then, he and his second wife liked to dress up in costumes and act out parts of their favourite fairy tales. I stepped into the room and glanced at the seats rising in a half-ring, like a Greek or even a vaudeville theatre, and sighed with relief that I would not be performing the next show. With a coloured marker, I began to write, but had managed only CLASS CANCE when an excited voice stopped me short.

  “Professor! Hey, Professor!”

  I whirled around, my heart in my mouth. No one – no one real, that is – had spoken to me since Charles Sleep had said goodbye, and he had looked so much like Fatty Arbuckle that I didn’t even feel as if the twenty-first century had been a part of his dialogue. At first, I couldn’t locate the source of the cry. It had seemed to come from directly behind me, but no one was there. I must have rubbed my glasses or somehow looked confused, because the voice – which I had recognized as female – now cried, “Up here!” Sure enough, in a corner of the highest row, tucked in against the blank taupe wall, sat a blurred shape that slowly assumed the form of a young woman.

  “I’m way early,” she said, and plucked the earbuds from her ears as if her head was a switchboard and she was about to leave on her 1956 lunch hour. When she descended the rows towards me, I couldn’t shake the disturbing impression that she was about to widen her eyes, turn dramatically sideways to make a prow of one shoulder and announce, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” From the doorway, Delmore whispered, “Teaching is vaudeville,” and I saw the ghost of Keaton, just beyond, framing the classroom with his index finger and thumb over one eye. I looked back to the young woman, and it seemed that the film had jumped, for she already stood at ground level. There was a quality of rushing water to her, and I flinched, as if about to be knocked hard to the railroad tracks of Sherlock Jr.

  “I’m totally into this course,” she said, and I thought she referred to her own watery motion. “English is my best subject. Well, so’s home ec. I love to cook, but I love to read even more. Maybe I should read more cookbooks. But I don’t think there’s an English teacher anywhere who’d assign a cookbook.” She laughed.

  The young woman was just like all young women to me – so close to my daughter’s age that I had to fight the urge to say, “Hi, kiddo.” It wasn’t a matter of disrespect; I simply couldn’t lose sight of the age gap between me and my students. They were all starting the day shift as I was punching the night clock. Out of courtesy, I forced myself to look at this young woman. Caucasian, round-faced, light red hair pulled back into a short ponytail. Her face had a filmic quality, but not an archival one from the silent film era. This girl was too present to be anywhere but the exact moment that we inhabited together. Yet why did I feel as if we were suddenly cut adrift on an abandoned ocean liner headed for 1924?

  Her voice – clear and cheerful but with a decided streetwise edge – returned me to the world. “I’m Chelsea. Chels. Everyone calls me Chels. Hey, what’s up with the horse?”

  I looked at the desk where I had placed the Dumpster-bin toys.

  “Oh . . . uh . . . I just bought them this morning.” My voice trailed off.

  She narrowed her eyes at me, and the sharp blast of her confident intelligence almost made me gasp. It was so direct and honest and . . . well . . . genuine. I felt that I had just swallowed an intellectual breath mint.

  Delmore, who had lumbered up behind me, shoved his snout into my neck. “Intellectual breath mint. That’s not half bad.”

  “This morning?” the girl asked. “Really? Where do you get your morning coffee? The Timmy’s where I go doesn’t sell transparent horses or . . . what is this, a bank?”

  The heavy bear’s mulchy breath crept up my nape to my scalp. He growled, “Not half bad. All bad.”

  Chelsea touched the magician’s top hat and clucked delightedly. With every second that passed, I grew more and more uncomfortable. I stood there, a full container of toxins on the shore of a salmon-spawning stream.

  “It’s jammed,” I said softly, happy to ignore Delmore and to avoid the subject of where I’d purchased the toys.

  She nodded, then turned her attention to the horse. She held it on its side, in both hands, and I could feel the intensity of her gaze pouring like smoke off her mind. “I used to ride horses. Well, I did for a while, when my mom had the money. But I never thought about what was inside of them.”

  “No,” I said stupidly, for want of anything else to say. For what could I say to this girl’s quick, inquiring spirit, except “Flee!” There ought to have been a skull and crossbones on my face.

  Delmore sighed. “Ah, yes, they flee from us who sometime did us seek.”

  “Shut up,” I hissed out of the side of my mouth. “She’s a child. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  He just shrugged, which I hadn’t known a bear could even do.

  The girl placed the horse down gently on its four legs, and smiled. “I’ve read some of the essays on the syllabus already. I thought I should before things got too crazy.”

  Too crazy? Child, I thought, you have no idea. In an effort to avoid her piercing eyes, I dropped my own. Doing so, I noticed her clothes. She wore a cardigan, of all things, a tan, brown-buttoned cardigan about a size too large for her. Even though I understood it was a matter of style, the tectonic shift in chronology intensified my disorientation.

  “That’s very sensible,” I said, loathing my professor voice, feeling the cold sweat form on my brow. “Term does get busy pretty fast.”

  Fast? Medicine shows to vaudeville to silent film to sound film to TV – that was fast. Vinyl discs and gramophones to cassettes to CDs to iTunes – that was fast. My father alive to my father dead – everything was a cyclone blowing everyone’s Piqua, Kansas, right off the map. We stand in it, and shiver, but do not move, except in the inexorable motion of age.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s what I figure,” the girl said. “And because I’m working a couple of jobs, too, I figure I need to read ahead. Well, to be honest, I sometimes read on the job when it’s slow. But that’s a different kind of reading, you know? I mean, I can’t exactly get some of these essays at work. It’s hard to concentrate at a Wendy’s even on your break.”

  I treaded the pulling waters of memory, struggling to stay afloat in the present. “A couple of jobs? What else do you do?”

  She rolled her eyes. I noticed, then, the incongruity of her presence: though delicate in the face, Chelsea wasn’t a small person. Her shoulders were surprisingly broad, and her hands looked large enough to grip a regulation-size football. Perhaps her mother had been a cheerleader who had married a linebacker.

  Delmore sniggered. “Maybe her mother was the linebacker. I knew this one dame at Wellesley . . .”

  I glared at him, and he just grinned in return, his sharp teeth surprisingly white.

  “Oh, just shit jobs,” she replied. “Minimum wage service stuff. Nothing interesting.”

  My legs pumped furiously in the dark vortex. Come on! Co
me on! “And you like to read? What sort of –”

  “Tons of stuff. Fantasy’s my favourite.When I was a kid, I read all the Harry Potter books about . . . oh, I don’t know . . . at least ten times. And Susan Cooper. You know, Dark is Rising, that whole series.”

  I didn’t know. But it certainly didn’t surprise me that the darkness beneath would rise. What else could it do? This kid, who thought she had stopped being a kid – my God! – was on a journey, a lonely journey. Books would help, a little. Even Harry Potter. I glanced at the magician bank, hoping that some vaudevillian ta-da would transport me from the dreary world of muggles or, as humans are called in another series my own kids enjoyed, Children of the Lamp, mundanes. Mundanes is better – I think I would hit it off more with that author than with J. K. Rowling.