by Abby Frucht
“What is it, my weight?”
“Stop joking, David. People like fat, they just won’t admit it. And who knows what might have happened if you’d actually done something one of these nights. That’s what Eric keeps saying: when the hell is David going to put the moves on you?”
“Everything you talk about always comes right back around to Eric,” David says when they’ve circled the water. The pale shapes of the sycamores parallel the street, close together like the trees on the edge of a forest, except there isn’t any forest, only darkness and square, damp lawns.
“Sorry,” Mandy says, laughing. It’s her laughter that conceals him when he reaches for her wrist, but she misinterprets, and hands the wine glass over, still half-full. Her door is locked, and she doesn’t have a key. She checks under the mat. Nothing. She knocks on the door. Eric answers, wrapped up in a blanket, bleary-eyed. He gives David a courteous little bow.
“Night,” Mandy calls, as she trips up the steps on her precarious heels, playing drunk, and disappears. In the glass in David’s hand is a yellow star reflected from her bare kitchen bulb, blinking fiercely in the wine. He swallows it fast, before she turns out the light.
Fate and the Poet
He was a poet when she knew him. He carried a tooled leather briefcase containing his manuscripts, wherever he went. On the inside cover of the briefcase was pasted a slip of paper on which he had typed his address and phone number, and beneath that an urgent message: “This briefcase contains valuable manuscripts. Please return promptly. No questions asked. Reward.”
He admitted to some discomfort over the use of the term “valuable,” and later he added a few more lines. “Valuable to me. Not to anyone else. Sentimental Value.”
Of course, the possibility remained that someone, upon finding his treasure, might send the poems to some literary magazines and publish them. He confessed to having nightmares about this. In the dream he would be flipping through the pages of a journal and would come upon one of his poems, imperfected, misspaced, the words he had intended to rearrange still in their original, blundering order. And on the page, of course, the name of the thief, and maybe a photograph, someone lipping a pipe, a wall of dog-eared books rising out of sight behind him. Or worse, an entire book of poems, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. The National Book Award. The American Book Critics Circle Award. The thief would be invited to read from the book on college campuses. Naturally, the poems would be read incorrectly, the stress all wrong, the rhythm, the pace, the meanings altered and destroyed. Her lover would have no recourse. But he enjoyed these dreams. He emerged from them shiny with sweat, his lips moist, the edges of his teeth gleaming with saliva, his entire body flushed with heat and desire. Frequently on these afternoons, in the very midst of lovemaking, he would pause while a look of delight swept over his face, and then when they were finished he would hurry, still naked and dripping, for the typewriter perched on the desk at the foot of the bed, where he would record whatever phrase had occurred to him prior to orgasm.
In public, in restaurants or in parks, sometimes on the sidewalk itself, he might stop what he was doing and open the briefcase to leaf through the layers of onionskin, in search of a particular image or passage whose exact cadence he had forgotten. Light fell through the paper as he held it up to read from it; from behind she could make out the shape of the poem, the way, as he put it, words moved along the page. Some were small and compact, like objects. Others appeared to have been tossed by a careless hand and allowed to sift, word by word, into haphazard place.
“There is no such thing as carelessness,” he would say, offended. “The trick is to make it look, unplanned, like an accident, when really everything matters.”
He would not allow her to read them. A poem needs to be read in print, he insisted, in a book or a magazine. Otherwise, it might appear incomplete, unfinished, raw, undigested, premature. He used all of these words, at one time or another, and when she still failed to understand, he compared the reading of an unpublished poem to those clipped previews of feature films you see in movie theaters before the show—the viewer is left unsatisfied, with conflicting expectations and confused emotions. She once told him she thought he was merely protecting himself, but he got so angry, so silent and mean, that the accusation wasn’t worth pursuing. He did allow her, however, to read from the draft of a novel he was writing. The novel, he said, was a hobby. In the first pages of the book, an outlaw entered a saloon, threw some coins on the bar, downed three shots of whiskey, and complained to the bartender that his woman made him use a rubber all the time and that he never felt anything.
“When does this take place?” she asked him. “I mean, the settings are Old West but the dialogue is modern.”
“It’s a rough draft,” he said. “It’s just something I’m doing in my spare time.”
They were seniors at a university in St. Louis. He was older, having worked two years in New Orleans. Something to do with boats, docks, loading. Also, he had learned how to pilot an airplane. He wore a heavy leather jacket and a frayed silk scarf. If, while they were walking, a private plane flew overhead, he squinted into the sky to follow its path.
She had a husband. He was gentle and intelligent, a graduate student, with an unruly beard that she trimmed now and then with a nail scissors. That was what came to mind when she thought of him—her own, tender ministrations, his chin cupped in the palm of her hand, the curled black hairs falling from between the twin blades of the miniature scissors. When she was done, she patted the front of his flannel shirt so the stray hairs floated to the bathroom floor. Then she swept, and her husband held the dustpan while she whisked the hairs into it.
They lived in married student housing, in an apartment with too few windows. On the walls she had taped a series of botanical illustrations torn month by month from a calendar, each matted on a sheet of construction paper whose color emphasized a hint of color hidden in the drawing. Most often, the color resided in the sexual parts of the flower—the pistil, the anthers, the shadowy recesses where the petals fused.
Her husband had seen the calendar in a bookstore and bought it for her. Very quickly it became her most valued possession. She grew impatient for the end of each month, when she could tear off the preceding page to reveal a new one. The drawings had been made by monks during the nineteenth century; she liked to imagine the silent, balding men in their simple robes, gathering herbs in a forest and then returning to their rooms to sketch them. With a feather pen. By candlelight. Pressing her face to these flowers, she smelled earth, sweat, and incense. She felt close to the monks, as if she knew them by name. Did monks have names? They seemed fatherly and safe, bodiless, untroubled by the excesses of human emotions. In a way, she envied them. Mornings, drinking from a mug of hot coffee, she circled the rooms and examined the drawings for details she might not have noticed—the speck of pollen on the stigma, the bumblebee, the drop of moisture on the underside of a leaf. Each appealed to her with the force of a revelation. She pointed them out to her husband, who seemed genuinely charmed by her enthusiasm. She did not point them out to her lover, who never came to the house and didn’t know about the calendar. In her imagination, the monks had slaved over each drawing for her sake and for the sake of her husband, to cement their marriage, and to compensate for the ordinariness of their lives together. It frightened her that at the end of the year, when the last page had been torn from the calendar, she might not find another to replace it.
Her lover’s name was Larry Oliver. He was proud of this name; it suited his calling. On the top of the pile of poems in his briefcase was a single sheet of onionskin with the name typed in caps in the center of it; it looked melodious and graceful, like a careful arrangement of musical notes. He was a vain man, most eager to please himself. He liked to fluster his superiors, the teachers at the university, by blurting out, mid-lecture, a series of disarming and challenging questions that entertained the other students. Then he would lean back in his seat and s
mile patiently as the lecturer struggled to regain his composure. “You seem to think you have earned the right to be difficult,” one of his professors wrote on a paper. “And the odd thing is, you have.” He tacked the note to the wall in his bedroom. He told her lengendary anecdotes that dramatized the difficult natures of other poets, famous ones. Theodore Roethke, for instance, who was a drunk and a fighter. James Dickey, who blasted obscene comments from the podium every time he gave a reading. Robert Frost, who, legend had it, once set fire to a barn. Most of all, he liked the story of a poet named Frank O’Hara, who lay down on a beach, dozed off, and got run over by a jeep.
“What does that have to do with being difficult?” she said. She was puzzled and horrified. It was late afternoon, November, darkness had fallen. Earlier, she had watched him sprinkle seed on the fire escape, for some blackbirds.
“It’s enigmatic,” he said, pleased with himself. “You don’t think it was an accident, do you?”
“Of course, it must have been,” she argued. “How could he have known the jeep was coming?”
“He knew.”
On the bed was a patchwork quilt that a prior girl friend had made for him. For a little while she marveled over the swirls of minute, even stitching, a pattern so complex as to be nearly invisible. She had seen this girl on campus, a small, pretty, blonde girl in a camel’s hair coat, and she suspected that the poet still loved her in secret.
“You still love Jeanne, don’t you?” she said, because she didn’t want to talk about a man getting run over by a jeep. But the poet didn’t answer. He got up and found her underthings and handed them to her. He would watch her as she dressed. When she was fully clothed, he would still be naked. That was the image she had of him—standing naked and pale in the middle of the room as she zipped up her coat. Nothing ever made him uncomfortable. Sometimes, when she left, he would be picking a piece of lint from the hair on his testicles. Other times, he would follow her out through the kitchen, find himself an orange, and stand naked at the window, peeling it, as she made her way down to the street. He lived in a rotten part of University City, and often she felt frightened walking home. Everything was gray—the sidewalks, the faces of the buildings, the bare trees, even the windowpanes and the automobiles. In her blue jeans she felt conspicuous. What if her husband were to see her? But what would he be doing here? He was not the kind of man who frequented the bars on Delmar Avenue. In fact, he led a marvelously placid and circumscribed existence, leaving the apartment in the mornings, following the ginkgo lined pathways to the laboratory, lunching in the cafeteria with a few other graduate students from his own department, and then, in the evenings, walking home along another path that skirted the road, so he could stop at the corner and buy a newspaper. He never breakfasted. He barely left the confines of the campus. He was loyal to the life that seemed to have been chosen for him, never complaining, never bored, content with the present. In this way, she supposed, he resembled a dog, one of those good-looking dogs that trotted purposefully around and then returned home for its supper. She loved him, sometimes, the way she might love such a dog—affectionately, hopelessly. He was dependable. He worked with methyl salicylate, preparing turtle cells for study under a microscope. At night, he smelled of wintergreen.
The idea of leaving her husband was not an impossible one. She entertained it at times, but it always seemed unlikely and abstract, like the thought of parachuting from an airplane. On Sunday mornings, lounging in bed with the comics, her husband spoke as longingly of their future as if he were reminiscing about their past. He would complete his dissertation, find a job in a college town. They would buy a house, have a child, If the child were a girl they might name her Madeleine, after his mother, who was dead. But what if it were a boy?
“Larry,” she said once, testing him.
“That’s okay,” he said. “But the real name would have to be Lawrence and I don’t like the name Lawrence, do you?”
They would find her a job, maybe something in the library at the college where he worked, and eventually she might return to school to pursue whatever interested her. But she wouldn’t have to, not if she didn’t want to. She might open a boutique or become a caterer who worked privately out of her home and stayed close to the children.
“But I can’t cook,” she said.
“Whatever,” said her husband. “Whatever you want.”
Then he would put the funny pages aside and they would make careful love to one another. What gratified her most was the way their two bodies seemed simply to fuse together, necessarily, like two drops of water on a windowpane. She was on the pill. If she forgot to take one, he reminded her. He seemed somehow to sense her lapses and distractions without needing to know what caused them. He tended to her as if she were a plant that experienced peculiar cycles of flowering and withdrawal.
After lovemaking they showered, separately. Washing, she allowed herself to think of what her life might be like if she were to spend it with the poet. She envisioned her lover careening through space and through time, herself hanging on or charging after him in wild pursuit, her hair uncombed, the bills unpaid, falling breathlessly on top of him in bed after bed in a long line of furnished apartments, burdened only by the weight of his ancient Smith Corona. Where would they live? Africa. France. New Guinea. New Mexico. When they had money they would spend it with abandon. When they didn’t, they wouldn’t miss it. He wouldn’t want children. He needed “to be free.” They would never marry. Well, maybe in old age. But by then he would be dead, she was certain, killed in a small plane crash or during one of his crazy exploits, eaten by a lion, shot by a firing squad in some undeveloped country. She would ship him home to bury him, her suitcase crammed with obituary clippings ringing with praise for his numerous published works. But she would be the only person at the funeral. In the end, she might assemble a small volume of “posthumous poems in progress,” including several disclaimers, apologies, her own well-meant attempts at editing.
The poet got a letter one afternoon. She heard it fall through the mail slot to the floor in his living room—an urgent swish, like an intake of breath. He was sleeping. Asleep, his face assumed the contours of a child’s face, smooth but somehow blurred, as if the features had been filtered through a layer of peace. Just to look at him you wouldn’t guess he was so talented a lover. He was small, delicate, blonde. In bed he was energetic, magnificent really. Maybe he had read that book, that bestseller, How to Make Love to a Woman. She had searched for it once on his shelves but hadn’t found it. There were poetry books, critical anthologies, biographies, journals, and crowding the edges of the shelves a collection of wonderful objects. Shells. Carvings. Small stone pipes and empty bottles. Candles. Restaurant ashtrays. A tray of matchbooks. A ceramic bowl filled with unstrung beads composed of a material that she could not identify—pearly in color, smooth as teeth, but when she scratched one with her fingernail a white, chalky substance appeared underneath it. He was a sensuous man. These were all things you wanted to touch when you looked at them.
She watched him sleep, and listened to the smooth, relaxed pace of his breathing. But she could not dull her awareness of the letter in the other room. Finally she climbed out of bed and went into the living room to look at it, wrapping his robe around her. There it was, the neat white rectangle of paper, lying at an angle on the floor. She picked it up and scanned the address. The handwriting was a woman’s, a precise, looping script. And on the other side, a local address, and the name of the girl who had sewn the quilt.
She did not wake her lover. She dressed in silence, put the letter in her pocket, and left the apartment.
Then, hurrying through the dusky streets, she saw a van drive past and then stop and back up. The driver honked and rolled down the window on the passenger side. Would she like a ride? Barely glancing at him, she shook her head no and kept walking, suddenly nervous. She buried her chin in her coat collar and stared ahead at the sidewalk. Years earlier, as a child, she was approached b
y a man in a large, pale blue car, who offered to drive her the few blocks to her house. She said no, as she had been trained to do. At home, she related this small but important event to her mother, who stood at the window, picking at the fiber of the curtains. Now she thought of all the women murdered by strange men in strange cities, in the backs of vans. Where would he have taken her, to dispose of her? She thought of Forest Park—the bike trail in the woods, abandoned in winter, and of the small ponds shadowed by willows. Maybe they would find her, maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe in the spring: a bicyclist, stopping to admire some ducks in the pond, sees a hand poking out of the water, pale white, muddied, on the third finger the glint of a wedding band. Or maybe the murderer had made off with the ring, had chopped off the finger—after she was dead, of course—removed the ring, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and pawned it. They would find the soggy letter in her pocket, and trace it to her lover, who would become a prime suspect in the case. Traces of his frozen sperm would be discovered inside of her. He would be tried, convicted, imprisoned. Would he have access to a typewriter? But her husband would be satisfied. She imagined him alone in a smaller apartment (no longer eligible for married student housing), fixing his dinner, reading the paper, sleeping, waking, walking to work, walking home, his unvarying habits left intact along with a new one, the habit of grief, which he accepted tamely as he did the others.
Remorsefully, she walked more quickly, eager to be home when he got there. But at the sight of the overpass that would take her to the university she paused, bewildered. She hadn’t looked at the driver, had she? Maybe he was someone she knew, who knew her. After all, that part of the city provided cheap living for students. Maybe the driver had been a student, a graduate student, a graduate student in her husband’s department, a friend of her husband’s, who recognized her, who would mention to her husband that his wife was taking chances, walking alone in the dark in that part of the city, refusing his offer of a safe trip home. At dinner one night, her husband would ask, “But what were you doing there?”