by Douglas Gray
“What’s the name?” Tatyana asks.
“James. James McKenna. M-C-K-E-N-N-A.”
“I’ll drive into town,” Tatyana says. “I need supplies, anyway. Where can I reach you?”
I give her the commune’s number. “Ask for Garrett, or Andrew, or Cindy. Really, you can talk to anybody who answers. It’s not my phone.”
“Of course it’s not! Hell, I knew that already. But it’s nice to hear your voice again. I’ve missed you, a lot.”
“I’ve missed you, too. How are the goat girls?”
“The girls miss you, too. Come back for a visit as soon as you can. Tell your friends I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”
“She’ll call back,” I announce, setting the receiver back in its cradle with profound relief. I never want to do that again.
“Idiot!” Joan says. “Fucking idiot. It’s a good thing North Carolina doesn’t have a death penalty, because I plan to murder James with my bare hands when he gets back here.”
Garrett is zipping up his coat. It’s chilly outside.
“Where are you going?” Andrew asks.
“I need to see Claprood. Maybe he can do something for James.”
“Who the hell are the goat girls?’” Cindy inquires after he’s left.
“Tatyana raises goats,” I explain.
“Your goat cheese friend?” Joan asks.
“One and the same.”
~ ~ ~
Tuesday, March 21
“Oh, Mr. Medway,” Dr. Goodleigh laments. I’m at my table, with Herodotus. She’s carrying the stencil for her Greek Sculpture exam I typed this morning by one corner, arm’s length in front of her, as if it’s somehow offensive. “Short Discussion Question #2,” she says. “Please read it aloud.”
“Typo?”
“I’m hoping so.”
“’How did Archaic-era trade with Egypt benetit the development of the kore figure on the Greek mainland?’”
I glance up at her. “Egyptian artistic influence inspired the Greek sculptors to make the breasts perkier and more rounded?” I hazard. “Okay, I’ll fix it.”
“We can’t let your Freudian slips bring disrepute upon the department. I need your head in the game. You need to find a girlfriend, or at least a night with a professional in Memphis.”
“I’m scandalized.”
“If you’re short on funds,” she continues, “I have a job for you.”
“Painting?”
“No. Taking care of the cats over spring break. I’m going to Boston.”
~ ~ ~
Wednesday, March 22
Dr. Giordano is leading his troupe of grad students to the cafeteria when he spots me outside Bondurant. “We never see you at lunch anymore,” he says.
“I’m trying to save my money for alcohol, drugs and women – you know, the important things.”
“Poor Anglo-Saxon,” he laments. “Poor poet. You come with us. I’ll buy your lunch.”
“It’s all right to spend your money on alcohol and drugs,” he advises, once we’ve emerged from the cafeteria line and are settling in at his customary table. “But stay away from the women, eh? They bring a man nothing but sorrow.”
“I always imagined that was their purpose in nature,” I reply, thereby unwittingly sparking a debate among the grad students concerning the merits of teleology and Hegelianism.
Giordano interrupts to recount the story (how many times have I heard it?) of his chance encounter with Benedetto Croce, and is interrupted in turn by the arrival of Edward Alcott.
“The food at this so-called college ought to be condemned as a crime against humanity,” he complains, setting down a tray that nonetheless seems to be crammed with every item available this noon.
“Would you say that it’s immoral?” I hazard.
He notices me for the first time. “Ah, it’s you – the punk. Not eating with your hands, I see. Nice job, pretending to be civilized. Just stay upwind of me, okay? I don’t want the stench to spoil my appetite.”
“The stench?” Giordano asks.
“Hippie stench. All these punk kids reek of it – combination of unwashed armpits, lice-ridden crotches, filth and cowardice.”
“I showered just this morning.”
“Maybe you did. But you can’t wash away the stink of being a Commie-loving little piece of shit.”
“I smell nothing,” Dr. Giordano remarks. “For all his faults, this particular Anglo Saxon seems to observe higher standards of personal hygiene than others of his race.”
“Really, doctor? With a nose as big as yours, you ought to be able to detect odors better.”
“You have a remarkable gift for making friends, wherever you go,” I say.
“I’m not here to make friends.”
“You’re doing a wonderful job of that.”
Alcott points a fork with a hunk of pork chop dangling from the tines. “Not another word. If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.”
~ ~ ~
Thursday, March 23
A plea bargain has been reached for James. A bunch of us – Clamor, Joan, Andrew, Dottie, me – have gathered at the Ohm to learn the details.
James will serve two month’s jail time at Chapel Hill on an aggravated misdemeanor charge. He’ll be physically incarcerated 18 hours a day but released for six hour stretches to perform community service.
“It might have gone a lot worse for him, except for Claprood,” Garrett explains. “He made the call for me – you know, one college-town sheriff to another, two good old boys joshing about having soft spots for their local hippies.”
“What’s Claprood getting in return?” I ask.
“He’s getting me. I’ve agreed to serve as his chief strategist in the recall election. Sub rosa, of course. He credits me with certain Machiavellian skills that might come in handy.” Garrett opens a display case and distributes a half dozen Déesse chocolate bars to celebrate James’ narrow escape from serving prison time.
Joan has never seen one. She peels the wrapper away and stares at the nude. “You boys and your fetishes,” she declares.
I agree. “It’s more than a little perverse.”
“Daniel says he knows this girl from somewhere,” Garrett mocks.
Joan doesn’t answer at first. She stares at the bar, squints, then reaches into her purse for her eyeglasses. “I think you do,” she says to me.
“Do what?”
“Know her. Look close. Don’t you see?”
I look. Yes . . . I know this woman! But who is she?
“She was my roommate for two years,” Joan prompts. “And she was your lover. Don’t you see? It’s Melissa. The model was Melissa!”
I’m momentarily struck dumb. She’s right. Garrett has already bitten off the head, but spits the as-yet unchewed bit into his hand. Everyone except Dottie puts the candy bar down. She holds hers up to the light from the window, admiring.
“Oh, my. She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Dottie asks, and takes a nibble off Melissa’s feet.
~ ~ ~
Friday, March 24
Dr. Goodleigh has already left for Boston, a few days ahead of spring break, and Herodotus is in need of a little sunlight. So I close the Museum early and take him with me to the Grove, where we sit back against my favorite oak and chat about Xerxes’ design for a canal at Mount Athos.
Bathed in warmth and wind, we sit until our conversation ends and our eyelids close. We nap, we dream a bit, and then we wake to a field dotted with couples. They amble about, hand in hand. They lie together on sunlit blankets. They nuzzle on park benches. It’s spring, it’s Friday, love fills the air, and I am alone with an old Greek historian, both of us feeling ancient.
I close the book, rise to my feet and am dusting pine straw off my jeans when someone calls my name. My heart lifts in recognition of Becky’s voice, but then is dashed when I turn to discover her approaching arm-in-arm with a boy.
“I was wondering where you might be,” she say
s. “We dropped by the Museum, but it was closed.”
“Too pretty a day to stay inside,” I confess. “Don’t tell Dr. Goodleigh.”
Becky’s young man steps forward, hand outstretched. “Mark Renfrew,” he says. “Pleasure.”
Firm grip, cool palm. He’s a head taller than me, athletically built, smile full of perfect teeth. His self-important poise pegs him as an upperclassman, likely a senior majoring in Economics or pre-Law. He wears a Sigma Chi pin on his perfectly pressed Brook Brothers shirt. This I don’t like. Where could Becky have found him? Or (maybe a better question) where did he find her?
“Daniel,” I say.
“The poet, I know. Becky’s been telling me all about you.”
“Becky’s the poet,” I say, “not me. I’m just a humble Greek scholar.”
“You’re in the Classics department, right? Just one question: what will you do for a living after you finish?”
“Mostly hang out in soup lines and huddle around trash can fires under bridges with other Greek scholars, learnedly discussing Isocrates. My goal in life is not to leave the world a better place than the way I found it.”
“Daniel is being cynical,” Becky reassures Mark. “He’s probably been reading W.H. Auden again.”
Mark grins, as if in admission that he doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. Actually, he seems like a nice enough guy, appearances to the contrary. “Say something in ancient Greek,” he prompts.
“Ego phone boontos en te eremo,” I say.
“What does it mean?”
“It means ‘I don’t take shit from nobody.’”
Mark likes that. I teach him the words, and he repeats the phrase a few times to be sure he’s got it right.
“Wait till the guys at the house hear this,” he says.
“Go forth and spread the word, brother!”
Becky and Mark stroll away, young sweethearts on a late March afternoon. I watch their backs, a little wistful. A little jealous. A little . . . what? What is this other emotion?
A little relieved. Becky has a boyfriend. And fortunately, it’s not Keith. And I’m now off the hook of having to make a play for her.
~ ~ ~
Saturday, March 25
“So, do you like what you do for a living?” I ask.
Septic System Man ponders the question a moment and nods. “It’s good, steady work,” he says. “One thing you can count on, people always gotta shit.”
“I hear you, man,” I agree.
We’re in his truck with the waste water tank on it, what Duck call the Shit Chariot. It’s just after sunup. As Septic System Man hangs a hard left by a battered wood fence with three mailboxes at the corner, I finally begin to get my bearings. We’re back on Campground Road. It’s another five minutes to the trailer park.
Mr. Duck is on his front porch enjoying the morning with a cigarette and a cup of coffee when we arrive. Septic System Man stops long enough to let me out and holler over the noise of the engine.
“I spotted this fool over on Happy Valley, sitting in a tree!”
The Duck eyes me critically. I’m wet, mud-spattered up to my knees, a cut over my left eye.
“Go pour yourself a cup of coffee. Looks like you could use one.”
“I must have been sleepwalking,” I say. “Woke up, not knowing where I was. It was dark. I could hear dogs around, so I decided just to climb up and wait things out until light.”
“Not judging you, boy,” Mr. Duck says. “No need to explain.”
~ ~ ~
Sunday, March 26
Garrett said that the crew would be leaving for North Carolina at 10:00, but Andrew has the bus almost fully packed as I arrive at Tyler Avenue at 9:00, amidst a tintinnabulation of church bells summoning the good people of Oxford to prayer.
I’ve brought a copy of Wolfe’s Orlando to send along with them – a gift for Tatyana, who’s invited them to crash at the farm while they visit James in jail.
They’ve asked me to join them in the journey, but I must stay behind to tend Dr. Goodleigh’s cats while she’s in Boston. Besides, as I’ve explained to Garrett and Andrew and Cindy, I wouldn’t travel as far as Batesville to see James, even if he were facing execution in the morning.
“I don’t understand why those candy bars so upset you,” Andrew says, returning to the debate we had last night over what he interprets as my irrational reaction to the candy bar epiphany “Melissa posed for Nick any number of times,” he argues. “There’s even that bronze of her on permanent display in Bryant Hall. What’s the difference?”
“I am not,” I repeat, “in the least bothered by Melissa posing for artists. But I draw the line at candy bars. Sculptures are art. Candy bars are food. You don’t see people walk into Bryant Hall and start sucking on Melissa’s feet, or gnawing on her torso.”
Garrett steps onto the porch dragging a plastic cooler behind him just in time to hear my rebuttal. “I believe the curators would discourage such behavior. We must, as civilized men and women, draw a clear distinction between an aesthetic experience and digestion.”
“Right,” I say as we carry the cooler to the bus and load it in the back. “Eating the image of a person, however lovely that image may be, is akin to cannibalism. The fact that it’s someone I know only makes it personal. If I passed someone on the sidewalk eating you,” I add, for Andrew’s benefit, “I’d try to stop it. As a friend.”
Andrew’s hyper-logical brain has already parsed out a reply. “Your distinction between aesthetics and digestion is a false dilemma, old man. Simply consider the art of haute cuisine. An elegant meal can be both deeply pleasing aesthetically and provide nourishment to the body.”
I’m getting irritated. I wish he’d just let the subject drop. “But you have to draw the line at the human form,” I say. “Find me a respectable sous chef anywhere who’s going to create a dish in the shape of a person. Or picture going to a christening festivity where a goose liver pate in the shape of a baby is being served.”
“I suspect most of the guests would recoil in horror,” Garrett observes.
“But don’t you Roman Catholics believe that the Eucharist – the consumption of the Lord’s flesh – is the highest of all sacramental acts?”
“First of all, I’m no more a Catholic than you. I attended church and took religious instruction only to please my sainted mother. And, second, I may not have been inside a church since the Johnson administration, but unless the liturgy has changed significantly, I don’t think the priest hands out little cookies in the actual shape of Jesus for the congregation to munch on.”
“At my brother-in-law’s bachelor party last year, his friends had a cake shaped like a naked girl,” Garrett adds. “Red velvet. Very tasty.”
“No stripper?” I ask.
“No. A stripper would have been better, for sure.”
“Real girls. Accept no substitutes.” I hand Orlando to Garrett. “Give my love to Tatyana. Tell her I’ll try to drive out this summer. By the way,” I add, to Andrew, “you’re not going to be able to sleep with Cindy while you’re Tatyana’s guests. Men are housed in separate quarters, and under no circumstances are allowed to pass the night in the farmhouse.”
“That’s rather disappointing,” he says.
“House rules. Ya’ll have fun.”
~ ~ ~
Monday, March 27
Blake’s been at sitting at the kitchen table for almost 24 hours now. He types a sentence or two between long spells of staring, glaze-eyed at the wall opposite him. He periodically takes a sip of gin from a plastic drinking cup, but he seems to have lost his old joy for drinking since the demons stole his Flintstones glass
“I’m going to town,” I say. “You want to come along? Do you good to get out.”
He lifts his face, turns slowly toward the direction of my voice and squints. “Who’s that?” His hand trembles as he lifts the cup for another sip. He’s forgotten about me again by the time he sets it down. He turns his at
tention back to his work and begins to type a new sentence, index finger only, one letter at a time.
It’s a beautiful day outside. Spring. The kudzu in the ravine has started to turn green, and I pause on the rise by the road to admire it.
Todd Rundgren comes on the radio, “Hello, It’s Me,” as I hang a left off Campground onto 30, followed by “Layla” as I’m proceeding down Highway 7.
Eric Clapton, Duane Allman and Jim Gordon jam on guitar and piano all my way into town, and I decide that this is the music I want played at my funeral.
As I head down Lamar toward the Square, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band comes on with their version of “Living without You.”
I park in the Episcopal lot and leave the windows rolled down. Nothing worth stealing inside. The air is even finer here in town, the sunlight sweeter, my heart brightening. All these songs about heartbreak have left me in a splendid mood. I dig my hands in my pockets and beam a smile at everyone I meet on my stroll up Van Buren.
It’s been almost four months since I was last with a woman, and I’m doing just fine.
I can, I think, learn to do without them entirely, temper my nature, tame the beast within. How much better, really, to live like a monk itinerant. Robe, sandals, rice bowl, a chaste pallet for one strapped across my shoulders. Hell, I’m halfway there already. Just abstain henceforth from women. No more striving, no more worries.
As I turn left onto the Square, I catch sight of Jenny Tyson on the balcony of the Rural Legal Services office over Sneed’s Hardware, her hands resting on the rail as her body stretches out into space like the figurehead of some whaling ship – all that bosom, tangled mass of hair, classic profile. My resolve crumples.
I can’t do without them. Women. I’ll spend my life falling in love with some woman or other – a lawyer on a balcony, a housewife wandering an aisle of the Jitney Jungle, a model in a magazine advertising Ivory Soap, a girl in a pickup at the Shell station, a dippy coed in the Grove on the arm of some frat boy, a waitress at the Rebel Buddha – every 10 minutes.
I’m love’s fool. I’m Dante Alighieri, constantly hanging out around the Arno, spotting Beatrice in every female who passes by, singing,
“Oh, baby, baby,
You’re such a sweet child.
Oh, baby, baby,
Come dig my sweet new style.”
I catch Jenny’s attention and improvise a little soft shoe by a parking meter, to impress her.