‘Bill Krueger, you mean?’
‘Yeah, yeah, “Bill.” The cutesy-poo little bastard with the dimpled chin and the charming wife and the three cutesy-poo little girls.’ And that was all he said until he’d made himself a drink and finished half of it. Then, with one thumb at his temple and his hand spanning his brow, as if he were afraid to let her see his eyes, he said ‘Here’s the thing, baby. Try to understand. I’m what the kids here call “traditional.” I like Keats and Yeats and Hopkins and – shit, you know what I like. And Krueger’s what they call “experimental” – he’s thrown everything overboard. His favorite critical adjective is “audacious.” Some kid’ll get stoned on pot and scribble out the first thing that comes into his head, and Krueger’ll say “Mm, that’s a very audacious line.” His students are all alike, the snottiest, most irresponsible kids in town. They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page. Krueger’s published three books, got another one coming out this year, and he’s in all the fucking magazines all the fucking time. You can’t even pick up a magazine without finding William Fucking Krueger, and baby here’s the kicker – here’s the punch line: the little cocksucker is nine years younger than me.’
‘Oh. Well, so anyway, what happened?’
‘Shit. This afternoon was what they call Valentine’s Day. That means they pass out “preference sheets” and the kids all write down which teacher they want for next semester; then the teachers get together afterwards and sort them out. You’re not supposed to care about it, of course, and everybody acts very nonchalant, but my God you ought to see the red faces and the trembling hands. Anyway, I lost four of my kids to Krueger. Four. And one of them was Harvey Klein.’ ‘Oh.’ She didn’t know who Harvey Klein was – there were evenings when she didn’t listen very carefully – but this was plainly an occasion for solace. ‘Well, Jack, I can certainly see how that would make you feel bad, but the point is it shouldn’t. If I were a student in a place like this, I’d want to work with as many different teachers as I could. Doesn’t that sound logical?’
‘Not very.’
‘And besides, you didn’t come out here to waste your energy hating Krueger – or even teaching Harvey Klein. You came here to get your own work done.’
He took his hand away from his forehead, squeezed it into a fist and socked the table, which made her jump. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Emily, you are absolutely right about that. The damn book is all that ought to concern me, every day. Even at this very minute, if I have half an hour before dinner I ought to be over there at the desk working, instead of bleeding on you with a lot of trivial, invidious shit like this. You’re right, baby; you’re right. I want to thank you for bringing it to my attention.’
But he spent the rest of the evening in a silent, impenetrable gloom. It was either that night or a very few nights later that she woke up at three to find him gone from the bed. Then she heard him moving around in the kitchen, dropping ice cubes into a glass. The air around the bed was heavy with smoke, as if he’d lain here smoking for hours.
‘Jack?’ she called.
‘Yeah. Sorry I woke you up.’
‘That’s all right. Come on back to bed.’
And he did, but he didn’t get in. He sat slumped in his bathrobe in the darkness, drinking, and for a long time the only sound in the house was his occasional hacking cough.
‘Oh, this isn’t me, baby,’ he said at last. ‘This isn’t me.’
‘What do you mean, it isn’t you? It seems pretty much like you to me.’
‘I mean I wish to God you could’ve known me when I was working on my first book, or even my second. That was me. I was stronger then. I knew what the hell I was doing and I did it, and everything else fell into place around that. I didn’t snivel and snarl and shout and retch and puke all the time. I didn’t walk around like a man without skin, without flesh, worrying about what people thought of me. I wasn’t –’ he lowered his voice to show that this next point would be the most telling and damning of all – ‘I wasn’t forty-three years old.’
The coming of spring made everything a little better. For many days there was a warm, deep blue sky; the snow shriveled on the fields and even in the woods, and one morning on his way to school Jack came bursting back into the house to announce that he’d found a crocus in the yard.
They began taking long walks every afternoon, down the dirt road, out across the meadows and under the big trees. They didn’t talk much – Jack usually walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, brooding – but their time outdoors soon became the high point of Emily’s day. She looked forward to it as eagerly as Jack looked forward to the drinks they had when they got home. Each afternoon she waited with growing impatience for the hour when she could put on her suede jacket, go over to his desk and say ‘Want to take a walk?’
‘A walk,’ he would say, throwing down his pencil as if delighted to be rid of it. ‘By God, that’s a great idea.’
And the walks were even better after they inherited a dog from some neighbors down the road, a tan-and-white mongrel terrier named Cindy. She would lope along beside them or prance in circles around them, showing off, or go racing into the fields to burrow.
‘Look, Jack,’ Emily said once, clutching his arm. ‘She’s going into that pipe under the road – she wants to go through the whole thing and come out the other side.’ And when the dog emerged muddy and trembling from the far end of the pipe she called ‘Wonderful, Cindy! Oh, good dog! Good dog!’ She clapped her hands. ‘Wasn’t that neat, Jack?’
‘Yeah. Sure was.’
Their most memorable walk was on a breezy afternoon in April. They had gone farther than usual that day, and heading home across a great rutted field, tired but invigorated, they came to a solitary oak tree that seemed to reach into the sky like an enormous wrist and hand. It compelled them to silence as they stood in its shadow looking up through its branches, and they would both remember that Emily got the idea first. She took off her suede jacket and dropped it on the ground. Then she smiled at him – she thought he looked quite handsome with the wind blowing his hair flat against his forehead – and began unfastening the buttons of her blouse.
In no time at all they were naked and embracing on their knees; then he helped her to lie back on the moist earth, saying ‘Oh, baby; oh, baby…’ And they both knew that Cindy would almost certainly begin to bark if anyone dared to approach this sacred place.
Half an hour later, back in the house, he looked up bashfully from his whiskey and said ‘Wow. Oh, wow. That was really – that was really something.’
‘Well,’ she said, lowering her eyes, and she could feel herself blushing, ‘what’s the point of living in the country if you can’t do things like that occasionally?’
It rained almost steadily for the next month. Dead earthworms littered the muddy walk from the door to the car, and last year’s leaves were blown flat against the picture window to slide down in its streams. Emily took to spending hours at that window, sometimes reading but more often not, staring out into the rain.
‘What do you see out there, anyway?’ Jack asked her.
‘Nothing much. Just thinking, I guess.’
‘What’re you thinking about?’
‘I don’t know. I ought to take the laundry in.’
‘Ah, come on; the laundry can wait. All I mean is, if something’s troubling you I’d like to know about it.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s troubling me.’ And she went to get the laundry together.
When she passed his desk again on her way to the door, hauling the heavy denim bag, he looked up and said ‘Emily?’
‘Mm?’
He was forty-three years old, but at that moment his half-smiling face looked as helpless as a child’s. ‘You still like me?’ he asked.
‘Oh, of course,’ she told him, and busied herself with her raincoat.
Near the end of the spring semester he said he thought his book was substan
tially finished. But it wasn’t a triumphant announcement, or even a happy one. ‘The thing is,’ he explained, ‘I don’t feel ready to send it off yet. The important work is done, I think, but it needs cutting and pruning and fixing. I think it might be smart to hold it back for the summer. Set a deadline for myself in September and have the whole summer to go over it.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Good. You’ll have three months without classes.’
‘I know; but I don’t want to stay here. It’ll get hot as a bitch and it’ll be dead. Besides, do you realize how much money we’ve got in the bank? We could go damn near anywhere.’
She had two quick visions – one of heavy surf crashing on rocks and white sand, East Coast or West, and one of purple, cloud-hung mountain ranges. Would love on a beach or love in the mountains be better than this? ‘Well,’ she said, ‘where do you want to go?’
‘That’s what I’ve been leading up to, baby.’ And the way he looked now reminded her of her father long ago on Christmas morning, when she and Sarah would tear into the wrappings of gifts that turned out to be exactly what they wanted. ‘How’d you like to go to Europe?’
They flew well ahead of the earth’s turning; Heathrow Airport caught them dazed and trembling and gritty-eyed from lack of sleep at seven o’clock in the morning. There wasn’t much to see on the ride into London – it seemed not very different than riding into New York from St. Charles – and the cheap hotel recommended by the travel agency was filled with wary, disoriented tourists like themselves.
Jack Flanders had lived in London with his wife soon after the war, and now he kept remarking on how much everything had changed. ‘The whole town’s so American-looking,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll find that pretty much all over.’ But he insisted that the Underground was great – ‘Wait’ll you see how much better it is than the subways in New York’ – and took her out to what he called his old neighborhood, where South Kensington and Chelsea are divided by the Fulham Road.
The bartender at his old pub failed to recognize him, until after Jack had spoken his name and shaken his hand; then he became very hearty, but it was clear from the way he didn’t quite meet Jack’s eyes that he was pretending.
‘The point is I’m too old to care whether some half-assed bartender remembers me,’ Jack said as they drank warm beer at a corner table, well away from the dart game. ‘And besides, I’ve always hated Americans who come back from England with corny stories about marvelous little pubs. Let’s get out of here.’
He took her up a side street to the darkened house whose basement flat he had once occupied, and he drew away from her to stare at it, slumped and brooding, for a very long time. Emily stood near the curb looking idly up and down the street, which was so quiet she could hear the whir and click of the mechanism for changing the traffic light on the corner. She knew it was silly to be impatient – he might be working on an idea for a poem – but that didn’t help increase her patience.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he said quietly on turning away from the building at last. ‘Memories, memories. This was a mistake, baby, coming to this house; it’s really shot me down. Let’s get a drink. A real drink, I mean.’
But the pubs were closed. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her. ‘There’s a little club around this next corner called the Apron Strings; I used to be a member; I think they’ll let us in. Might even run into some people I used to know.’ Instead they ran into a stone-faced West Indian doorman who denied them admission; the club had changed management since Jack’s time.
They got into a taxicab and Jack leaned earnestly forward to address the driver. ‘Can you take us someplace where we can get a drink? I don’t mean some clip joint; I mean a decent place where we can get a drink.’ And when he’d settled back beside Emily for the ride he said ‘I know you think this is dumb, baby, but if I don’t get some whiskey in me tonight I’ll never get to sleep.’
They were greeted in an anteroom by a man in a tuxedo who looked Egyptian or Lebanese. ‘Is very expensive here,’ he told them with a kindly, confidential smile. ‘I would not recommend it.’ But Jack’s thirst won out, and they sat in a dim carpeted cellar where an effeminate young Negro played sloppy cocktail piano, and where the bill for two drinks came to twenty-two dollars.
‘Probably one of the all-time dumbest things I’ve ever done in my life,’ Jack said as they rode back to the hotel, and when they walked into the lobby they found the bar very much open for business. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, smiting his temple with the heel of his hand, ‘that’s right – I’d forgotten. Hotel bars stay open late too. Isn’t this the God damnedest thing? Well; guess we might as well have a nightcap.’
Sipping whiskey she didn’t want, hearing the strident dissonance of British and American voices – one handsome young Englishman at the bar reminded her of the way Tony Wilson had looked in 1941 – Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before – pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat – but it was no use.
‘You okay, baby?’ Jack inquired. ‘You look— Oh, Jesus, you look like you’re just about to— Wait. Wait’ll I pay the check, and we’ll— Can you hold it till we get upstairs?’
In their room she cried and cried, while he put his arms around her and stroked her and kissed her shuddering head, saying ‘Oh, baby, come on, now. I know it was awful, but it was all my fault; besides, it’s only twenty-two dollars.’
‘It isn’t the twenty-two dollars,’ she said.
‘Well, the whole lousy evening, then. The way I dragged you out to see that house and went into one of my big self-indulgent depressions; the way I—’
‘It isn’t you; why do you always think everything’s you? It’s just – it’s just that this is my first night in a foreign country and it’s made me feel so – vulnerable.’ And that was true enough, she decided as she got up from the bed to blow her nose and wash her face, but it was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that she didn’t want to travel with a man she didn’t love.
Paris was better: everything looked just like the photographs of Paris she had studied all her life, and she wanted to walk for hours. ‘Aren’t you getting tired?’ Jack would say, lagging behind. He had lived here too, in the old days, but now as he trudged along with a look of petulant bewilderment in his eyes he was the picture of a bumbling American tourist. When they walked into the vast silence of Notre Dame she had to thrust two fingers in the back of his belt to restrain him from walking right into the little cluster of chairs where people were praying.
They had planned on an extended stay in Cannes, so that Jack could work. He said he’d done some of the best work of his life in Cannes; it held a sentimental attraction for him. Besides, it would be practical: she could be out at the beach all day while he secluded himself.
And she did enjoy the beach. She loved to swim, and she was willing to admit she liked the stares of approval she received from suntanned Frenchmen at the way she looked in her bikini. Thin, yes, they seemed to say; small-breasted, certainly; but nice. Very nice.
When her day was over she would go back to the hotel and find their room blue and acrid with cigarette smoke. ‘How’d it go?’ she would ask.
‘Terrible.’ He’d be up and pacing, looking haggard. ‘You know something? A book of poems is no stronger than its weakest poem. And some of these – five or six of them – are so weak they’re going to drag the others down. The whole damn book’s going to sink like a stone.’
‘Take a day off. Come to the beach tomorrow.’
‘No, no; that won’t help.’
Nothing would help, and for days he fussed and grumbled. At last he said ‘It’s too expensive here anyway; we’re spending a fortune. We could try Italy, or Spain.’
And they tried both.
She liked the architecture and sculpture of Florence – she kept seei
ng things she’d learned about in art-history classes long ago – and in the shops and stalls around the covered bridge she bought small gifts for Pookie and Sarah and the boys; but Rome was hot enough to melt your eyeballs. She almost fainted on her way to visit the Sistine Chapel: she had to sway and stagger into an unfriendly cafe for a glass of water; she had to sit staring into a Coca-Cola for a long time before she gathered strength to go back to the stifling hotel, where Jack was waiting with a pencil behind his ear and another one clamped in his teeth.
They both insisted they liked Barcelona – it had trees and sea breezes; they found a cool room within their price range, and there were good places to sit and have a beer in the afternoons – but Madrid was as inscrutable and unyielding as London. The only good thing about Madrid, Jack said, was the bar at their hotel, where you always got a generous shot-and-a-half in your glass when you ordered ‘whiskey escoso.’
Then they were in Lisbon, and it was time to go home.
Nothing had changed in Iowa City. The sight of their little house, and then of the big room inside it, called up vivid memories of the year before: it was as if they had never been away.
Emily drove off to pick up Cindy from the house where they’d boarded her, and when the dog recognized her, wagging and quivering and showing her teeth, she realized she’d been looking forward to this moment all summer.
In October Jack said ‘Remember I said I’d set a September deadline for myself? That ought to teach you to trust me and my half-assed deadlines.’
‘Why don’t you send it off the way it is?’ she said. ‘A good editor could help you weed out the weak poems; maybe he could even help you make them better.’
‘Nah, nah, no editor’s that good. Anyway it isn’t just a few poems that’re weak; the whole book has a sickly, neurotic cast to it. If I had the guts to let you read it you’d see what I mean. I’m going to do one thing you suggested, though. I’m going to move my stuff into the little room, and work there.’
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