Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  Incredulous backpackers with mss., citrus pop going flat in our canteens.

  We were twelve in that class assembled on a cooling day down at the rubbled heel of the pasture.

  I was going to give a speech, Greener said.

  But I won’t.

  He was standing on a haybale atop the pitcher’s mound, then realized it was teetering shaky and stepped down to what remained of the dirt, a curveball’s slogged mire.

  Can everyone hear me?

  He rocked for warmth—his suede breaker too light, it was just for style—clapped frayed Knicks cap over his ears, noosed tighter the unraveling knit scarf.

  People are going to say I was homesick, he said, but that’s just not true. Let me dispel. Allow me my disabuse. It’s just that I can’t in any way intuit how you all can write out here, with so much air and sky, with such openness, no disruptions, no disturbances.

  Chiefly, nothing to compel ambition.

  No opposition, no shadow, no shade for your toil.

  We had no notion what he was saying.

  Here, and he dug a sneaker toe into earth, we’re going to build a sanctuary, a monument to our own publishability. Can everyone hear me? How many of you have been to the city?

  The answers were: we all could hear him and only one or two warily raised hands—Rog and Bau, who’d won partial scholarships to a summer writing program (indeed at the very school I’m checking out).

  On this pyramidal plot, he said, on this decaying diamond, we’re going to make ourselves a culture—just for us and for whoever might suffer this school after, so that they might know what it’s like to live in a culture, what it’s like to be in a culture, to have culture, not just this organized sports frattery and hayseed academe.

  In the grass grown wild at his feet was a shovel, a rusticated bluefaced tool he bent to and picked up and kicked into earth, breaking ground.

  Broadway’s a difficult street, it’s touchy, temperamental, a diva—Greener tossing a shovelful of soil into the wind, the silty loam gusting back into his face and so he stalled, not to brush but to swallow—Broadway’s historic, taking time to find its bearings.

  Dig deep into your thesauri for this: slithery, serpentine, anguiform even: you see that in how it winds up from the Battery and Wall Street (Greener dramatizing by digging the path with the shovel from his groundbreaking up toward the mound), how it swerves shyly to avoid Washington Square (he reached to a back pocket for a pair of mittens, dropped them), then suddenly cuts off (he took off his cap), at Union Square (dropped the cap), in preparation for its regeneration, regrowing itself in realignment when it crosses Fifth Avenue (the perimeter of the mound itself heading toward the bale), taking the central action of town and reorienting it to the westside.

  That’s where downtown grew up—on the westside—is this making sense?

  We nodded.

  Don’t forget I’m speaking as a pedestrian, as a weekend cartographer in comfortable shoes—I was walking you through the thoroughfare north, though the traffic, I have to say, flows south.

  Nodding.

  But we’re particularly concerned with that intersection, where Broadway walks all over Fifth—one to become the snobby society money boulevard, that ignorant lilywhite stretch, the other to become that concourse of dirty miscegenation, a corridor potholed, poorly sidewalked and stuck with gums, obscurely tenanted—Broadway, the broad way, the wrecked wide and embracing inclusive anything goes way, the name almost unpacks itself.

  A breeze blew in, autumn hinting at winter.

  We shivered.

  And we’re going to remake that here, he said, rather its landmark.

  His hands described a structure in air, cold lines of cold air.

  From now on all classes will be held out here under the clouds, both semesters regardless of weather—I’ve managed to persuade the school to approve our use of this field.

  There will be a dress code.

  He was calibrating, calculating.

  There will be forms to sign, insurance waivers.

  He steeled himself to say, You won’t be handing in writing for the rest of the year.

  Which is how we began building, began rebuilding, the Flatiron. Built in 1902 and originally known as the Fuller Building—after the pioneer of the modern skyscraper and inventor of the system of “contracting,” G. A. Fuller, *1851–†1900, whose firm went on to build Penn Station, Macy’s Department Store, the Plaza Hotel, and the original New York Times Building, all of which are too uptown for our itinerary—the Flatiron was “the first great skyscraper in New York,” though it was “built in the style of Chicago” (its architect was a Chicagoan called Burnham)—all this according to the infopacket Greener passed around along with photocopies of the original blueprints illegally reproduced from the archives of the New York Historical Society (an exgirlfriend librarianed there, he’d said, Greener was always mentioning exgirlfriends—one who’d starred in a blaxploitation flick he forbade us from mentioning, another who’d had her own let’s meet our panel of nymphomaniacal nannies talkshow—I often had the feeling he’d come out to our crop only to avoid the famous feminine back east).

  Also included in the packet were photos: souvenir posters and postcards, antique panoramic exposures and aerial snaps, in color and, why not, black & white (which Greener declared the only colors worth building for). The building looks different in every shot. Seen from the front it resembles a single column, as upright as Classicism, as upright as Neoclassicism, a spine straight up and down, but seen from the side it’s a monstrous wall, like a cursorless screen, or that virtually blank page that’d directed us down to its rising. Greener quoted numerous writers—of fiction and poetry of the period of the building’s initial erection—comparing that frontview to a steamship steaming its prow up the avenues, and the sideviews, both starboard and port, to a sailboat’s sail or the blade of a knife—Greener remarking, however, that since it was built on an island, was built on a traffic island, if the building was a boat, it was beached. Though the Flatiron was among the first genuine skyscrapers to be constructed of steel—previously steel wasn’t considered entirely reliable, its properties not yet understood—it didn’t get its name from the metal that made that material. Rather the name that branded the building and district as enduringly as the building itself branded the city, predates construction, deriving from a resemblance—evident to the nineteenth century, aka the century Greener thought we were from—between the Flatiron’s future plot and a clothes iron. (I’m writing this not on the W’s room’s desk, which is filled with Veri’s purse and cosmetics, but on the ironingboard retrieved from the closet, remembering Dem pressing our pleats, cooking soufflé buffets with truffles. Remembering myself walking fantasy crossroads with Greener, talking plans, talking tenants—Greener pointing out how the Flatiron separates downtown, which creates the art, from midtown, which rapaciously profits from it, how the building itself points north toward the agents and publishers, toward the magazines too, who’ll be so interested in this project, they’ll send photographers, glossy journalists with expense accounts equivalent to a year’s pay for my freshman comp adjuncting—grandiosity!)

  Beneath the Flatiron’s fancy cladding, undergirding the swooping loops and oriels—the limestone base and glazed terra cotta facade are in no way loadbearing—is that metal, the steel, which was Rog Reardon’s assignment. From that second week of class he began spending a lot of time at a foundry just outside town that was closed when the company that had owned it was bought by another company that was bought by another company that moved to Mexico. As the foundry had fired Rog’s father and uncles, it was Rog’s pleasure to rehire them and refire the works. These metalworkers, family and those unrelated but friends and acquaintances, were happy to be employed, less happy to be so on the condition that Rog apprentice as mill supervisor. But Rog proved adept, a swift learner. Greener, it should be understood, had a phenomenal sense for assignments, and besides the useful fortuity of Rog coming
from a steelmaking family, it also helped that the novel he’d been neglecting since junior year was imprecise about its narrator’s identity, relationships, and ambitions, abstract in its philosophy, sloppy with flashback and dream, and what it needed, what Rog needed, was nothing more than dense hard verbs, relentlessly accurate adjectives, and the active immediacy of the present tense. By midterm, Rog had become an expert, rallying the townie workers to their largest job in decades. Today Mr. Reardon serves as foreman and half owner, with the university, of the foundry, and is arguably the best, most successful steelman in the state (his daughter—Raina? Raisa? has been in every one of Veri’s classes through high school, though I don’t know why they never got along—Veri says she’s spoiled).

  Moreton did the foundation work and now has a prospering cement business of his own out of the county seat (he also owns part interest in a quarry). He set our house and has become a good, thorough, methodical, even plodding man, which every time I bump into him—in line at the hardware emporia, at the gas stations by the Route 70 onramp—unsettles me, given that the problem with his writing was that it’d lacked what he now supplies so well: the groundsill, the footings, a bottom. He, a poet, used to be a sound guy, a line freak, just making weak beams of pretty and pretty shocking words to tickle the ear (he’d mix metaphors too), but there’d be no formal structure, no prosodic meter, just stray vowels and consonants, snippets he’d heard and read in Eagle Avenue cafés floating as moments—occasions—without anchor or ballast. Greener—I think, I have to think though he never said anything about his selections—intuited this and sent him delving into bedrock, wood pilings, concrete, rebar. This was his specialty, Greener’s, countering a writer’s faults—supposed faults because Greener had read only one submission by each student—with a physical, practical correction.

  Sora, who’d overwrite and overcharacterize and overdetermine and overexplain and just spoonfeed you, the reader, everything—she’d tell you what clothes a character was wearing only when it had no bearing on her story, she’d cite exactly what kind of meals her villain was munching when it had precisely nothing to do with advancing her arc or deepening characterization (why should it matter that her Alaskan psychic lesbian spy preferred spotted jumpers belted with appliqué flowers, pink pigskin gloves, and purplestriped, kneehigh galoshes, a strict diet of turkey chili and fries?)—Greener, with his genius, turned her transparent, light and free and freely pertinent. He made her our glazier, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s become our own home’s window woman, and is even developing an exclusive make of energysaving window that reduces heating costs, has a screen that can be raised only from the top sash as a child safety feature, and, I remember, Dem was just telling me—Dem’s in touch with her from the gym and PTA—that it recently won some national design award. Congrats, Sora! Let’s catch up sometime!

  As Bau’s poems were always scatological—clogged to their brims with sex, piss, and shit—Greener, as if imparting a moral lesson, put him on plumbing, while Lo—whose poems and ersatz fairy and folktales, in contemporary settings, were so precious and vapidly schematic—was assigned to electrical. Of course they’re married now, Bau and Lo, and in business together and, though Dem and I don’t get together with them more than once a year since they transferred west to tend to Lo’s mother when she stroked herself into dementia, we still think of them often and fondly. Two kids, boys: Maury, a hapless pick, after the prof, and don’t quote me on this, Billy Jr.

  As for Dem, to Greener’s mind—and to ours as well, though it took time and the necessity of dual incomes for us to countenance this—her poems were all surface gaiety, superficially stunning in their detail but emotionally empty: no amount of technique, and Dem had tons, could compensate for her being so private and timid, withdrawn. But how to teach emotion? How to teach the turning of the insides out? Greener had a solution (to get inside her he had to extrovert her first, that was my reaction). He put her in charge of interior decoration, her brief being not to duplicate the interior of the building as it was at the time of its construction—we weren’t getting into any period furniture, anyway how to find such records, if there were any such records—neither to duplicate the interior at present, or at the present of the century’s turn, rather to create a new interior, “one conducive,” Greener handwrote in a memo Dem typed for herself on a computer afforded her by the engineering department (its only cooperation), “to conducting literature classes & writing workshops &c.”

  “Show me comfort.”

  “Make for me an ideal.”

  Being the only position with any modicum of creative control, this was a major honor and Dem knew it but also knew it meant that she and Greener would be spending hours of overtime together, alone, poring over that ratty portfolio she hauled to the site daily—crammed with paint swatches (the multiple offs: the laces, pearls, ivoire), fabric samples (tanned durables), clippings of any pattern wallpaper that caught fancy—though he tried to kiss her only once.

  It was then—Dem coming home blushing sunset—that I flipped, showed up on the lawn of his faculty bungalow an hour later, screaming into the dark, Come on out, motherfucker, I will scalp you of your fucking testicles, and out Greener came in his tightywhities with a red, yellow, and green stoplight plaid robe blown loosely around him, wielding only a scroll of blueprints like a scopic spear, saying, That’s right, Pat, that’s what’s wrong with your work—it’s all impulse, it’s all energy, it’s good impulse, sure, it’s good energy, fine, the right true spirit, but still that’s not enough, it goes nowhere, you have nothing planned (waving the cyanotypes into blackness), nothing kept in reserve (stamping his feet, one bare, the other fuzzy, sheepishly slippered).

  What the hell’s wrong with my work?

  What were you going to do, kill me? What were you thinking?

  I don’t know.

  Bingo. You have no forethought—you just start a sentence without knowing how it ends, without knowing where or when it ends. Capital letter, then you skimp on anything that comes before the closing punctuation—if there’s any punctuation.

  I was panting, snuffle, mucus.

  Put commas between your instincts, parse reflexes into clauses—the same goes for your personal life.

  I attended this lecture—I always had perfect attendance.

  So I made a move on Dem—so what? she rebuffed me. You’re too much the idiot to recognize what’s essential: she doesn’t want me, she wants you.

  That’s what she said.

  He scowled.

  I said, She told me not to do this—she said if I came over here I couldn’t ever come home.

  Pat, you need to calm, keep the passions controlled—why else did I make you my roofer?

  Greener shambled to the door of his tickytacky ramshackler, held it open for me.

  Give Dem time to chill—she’ll take you back in the morning.

  How sorry is it that writing about that evening with Greener is no easier now than it was then—years ago, the summer after that evening, when the media called? Predictably late. Nonfiction, they asked for. Journalism, they demanded. Editors, installed floors above realism, interested not in a crew of yokels and their architectural success, but in sensationalizing a former peer’s failure. Dem was furious I’d even considered their offers—that spat ruined our honeymoon, Canada—though it’s not like I would’ve been able to complete any “article,” any “piece.” I declined by maintaining I was too biased by hurt, but, full disclosure: I couldn’t write anymore, I wasn’t a writer.

  I’d never been inside Greener’s bungalow before and I didn’t want to be there then—I wanted to demolish him, but I’d never been in a home so depressing. Not even those small poor places Dem and I would rent when Dem was still diligently sewing and gluing her verses together by day and then, once she had a job too and we were less poor, by night—not even that condemned chapel that leaked, or that dingy duplex downwind from the rendering plant I patched up nice but the toxic mold mucked in just
when Veri was born—not even those could compare.

  Greener had no furniture, no possessions. He had only this expression: mad, insomniac, grim.

  He didn’t even have any literature on the nonexistent shelves, just how-to’s piled on the floor, stacked in the cupboards and pantry.

  No manuscripts in the microwave unplugged, just diagrams, bank statements.

  I’ve sold everything I shipped out with, he said. School’s only put up $100K, I’m funding the rest.

  From your royalties? from your foreign rights and options?

  By the grace of my mother’s estate and with loans, I’m buying myself a borough.

  You’re in debt?

  And did I mention my publisher rejected my new book last week? More of the same, they said.

  More of what?

  It’s a novel that revises my previous novel—do you honestly care?

  Why do this to yourself?

  I’m a teacher, I’m teaching.

  We’re learning (I winced from my lameness).

  And I’m going for broke on your education—though it’s incredible what you can get done with free labor.

  You’re counting on this class to support your retirement?

  (A jest as uncomfortable as lounging on his shack’s sloppy planks.)

  The end of the semester’s the end of me.

  And then what?

  Rewhiskeying my mason jar, lighting two Camels, handing me one—And then we’d better be finished.

  Tub was the only one of our class to leave town, the county, the state (as far as Dem and I are aware). He was always smart, too smart to be a writer it occasionally felt, Tub the brainiac always so analytical, so literal. I knew him, as I knew most of my fellow classmates, from prior workshops—those with hypertext experimentalist Grazinski, whose avant lacked only a garde, those immersed in the bucolic bardics of BJ, whose eclogues insisted on rhyme—and so I knew that if a character in some student’s story went somewhere, like New York City, say, on a certain date at a certain time, Tub would research that date and time and quiz the author on trivia like the weather (drizzle in the morning? leading to an afternoon of scattered thunder?), or how might your character react to the news that the Monday before the Jets holocausted the Eagles? or that two girls, braided black twins, died in a house fire in Harlem? He was a stickler, a looming, hovering pain, so Greener, surprise, surprise, promoted him to contractor (elevating Greener, I guess, to the role of contractor’s contractor).