Pagan Heaven

by Ruth Rouff

  It wasn’t a coincidence that John was my freshman year English instructor. I had signed up for his section of English 105 based on its description in the list of intro courses I had been sent over the summer. The theme of John’s section was “The Isolato” in literature. According to Dictionary.com, an isolato is a person who is “out of sympathy” with his or her time. The books and short stories to be read in John’s section were Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s Light in August, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” “The Open Boat,” and “The Blue Hotel” by Stephen Crane, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. All were about people out of sympathy with their time, or any time, for that matter. The term isolato certainly described me. Although I didn’t know it at the time (or didn’t want to know it), I was a lesbian. I lived in a household with my chronically depressed mother; my father had died of a heart attack when I was eleven . . . just keeled over one night at the dining room table. I was a brainy girl who was growing up in a blue collar subdivision in southern New Jersey. You had to have a car to get anywhere, and I didn’t have a car. Living there was so stultifying, it felt like chewing lead.

  Fortunately, I scored a 780 on the verbal section of the SAT and won a full, or nearly full scholarship to an elite college. Going to college was a whole ’nuther ball game. The bright-eyed young people, the lovely campus were an embarrassment of riches. Besides, it didn’t take me long to view John Fredericks with awe. I had never met anyone like him, probably because living out in rural South Jersey, I had never met anyone. John was broad-chested, and muscular, having been a wrestler in prep school and college, with springy hair the color of a copper penny, a strong jaw, and piercing blue eyes. He was unlike all the other men in the English department. I wouldn’t call them “effete” Easterners because that’s way too much of a stereotype, but it’s unlikely they would have been at home on a ranch.

  In addition to the fact that I found John pleasing to look at, it seemed we shared a taste in literature. As I was soon to find out, we both liked Herman Melville’s and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Raymond Chandler’s novels, and Norman Mailer’s political writing. John was also a fiction writer, and encouraged his students to write creatively. “You are a writer,” he wrote on the first creative nonfiction paper I wrote for him. I wasn’t used to getting praise from anyone, especially not a man like John. I lapped up his praise like whiskey. I was delighted when I got a note telling me I had been accepted into Narrative Writing for my sophomore year. One had to compete against other students to get in. They didn’t accept just anyone. John Fredericks taught the class.

  Autumn was a beautiful time of year at college. The fall foliage was vivid along the Hudson, the air crisp and electric. The campus was like how F. Scott Fitzgerald described Princeton in This Side of Paradise: romantic and gothic, only with more hills and taller pine trees. Screw spring: I have always found autumn to be the most romantic time of year. Perhaps it’s the contrast between the dying year and the demands of the flesh. Van Morrison’s “Moondance” was a song of the moment. As the days grew shorter and fall meandered into the holiday season, I felt myself becoming more and more infatuated with John Fredericks.

  During our last narrative writing class before Christmas break, John brought a jug of red wine to class. My townhouse mates and I had already downed a celebratory screwdriver or two before I came to class. When I drank the wine, the walls of our classroom started spinning. Just as John was handing out the course evaluation forms, I heaved the contents of my stomach onto the conference table in front of me. My classmates must have been shocked. John later joked that this was my commentary on his teaching. Later, after two classmates, Karen and Marissa, assisted me in getting cleaned up in the ladies’ room, I walked back to class. It sounds corny to say, but I looked at John and he looked at me. The ice had been broken. We went out to a roadhouse after class in the company of another writing student, Todd Ashton. I don’t know exactly how or why, but both of us wound up spending the night at John’s apartment. Although nothing happened beyond lots of boozy talk, a tacit understanding had been reached between John and me. That was the beginning of our “affair,” if you could even call it that.

  As I later learned, I was one of several of John’s student and faculty girlfriends. He phoned me sometimes when he was going on a binge. He’d get drunk and couldn’t stop. He worried a lot about getting tenure . . . it was a difficult thing to do at an elite college. One night he called me at the off-campus house I shared with four other students and asked me to take a cab over to his place. He also instructed me to pick up a bottle of gin at a liquor store that was on the way. This was back when the drinking age was eighteen in New York State. I did as instructed. I had never bought a bottle of hard liquor before. I was happy to, although I knew that John’s drinking was self-destructive. He had hinted on several occasions that alcoholism ran in his family.

  On one particularly memorable Sunday afternoon in the spring, I saw John arrested for drunk driving. A few minutes earlier, I had been in the car with him, but I had insisted on getting out when I saw the car weave over the white medial strip. I hadn’t wanted to see myself smashed against the dash board or wrapped around a telephone pole. As I trudged down the road, I saw the cops pick John up a little way up the road and put him in their patrol car. John saw me watching him. He frowned at me with his boozy, bloodshot eyes, as if I had betrayed him.

  Evidently the college administration was understanding, since John wound up getting tenure despite this misadventure. They hadn’t known a student had been involved, since I hadn’t told them. Things were pretty lax back then, as far as instructors having relationships with students went. Perhaps instructors who were creative writers were given a little more leeway. Consider: John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Cheever, and other literary maniacs were au courant. Then again, John wound up marrying another of his student girlfriends, so even now, I can’t say that faculty/student relationships are all bad.

  As I said before, John liked country music, and, encouraged by him, I developed a taste for it. I liked Waylon Jennings, Bill Monroe, and Loretta Lynn. I even liked Tammy Wynette, though even then I took that crap about standing by your man with a grain of salt. A little later on, I became intrigued by the work of storyteller Tom T. Hall, who wrote the song “Harper Valley PTA” for Jeannie C. Riley. I fancied that I might be a popular writer too one day. That was before I realized that writing poetry was my strong suit. The words popular and poet don’t exactly go hand in hand.

  My relationship with John ended predictably enough. One day, in my junior year, I found out from another student that John wasn’t going to be at school next year, and that he was, in fact, going to be teaching at another college. He hadn’t even bothered to tell me. On the other hand, from his point of view, why should he? We weren’t really going together. I was just someone he liked to have around once in a while to assuage his loneliness, like a pet dog or cat. I came in handy when another of his women dumped him. In that, I was sort of like a utility player on a baseball team. I allowed myself to get into this situation because I was naïve and didn’t ask questions. I was grateful for John’s attention. I was trying very hard not to be a lesbian. You might say I had very little self-esteem. Nonetheless, I took John’s apparent lack of interest in me hard. Not that the sex, the few times that we had it, was ever right for me. How could it have been? I was a lesbian.

  All this happened over thirty years ago. But a recent visit to my niece’s house in Nashville brought it all back home. After attending a blue grass concert and touring the Hank Williams exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, I reflected on what knowing John Fredericks had meant to me in terms of clarifying what I value. Like John, I value people who are able to give a voice to loneliness, as Hank Williams had done. I value connection with the land, and wish I lived somewhere other than southern New Jersey. I have respect for hard-working people and a
mistrust of technology. People who can’t be alone, who constantly manipulate their smart phones in public give me the creeps.

  I also appreciate conciseness of expression. Poets like Robert Frost and Kay Ryan, who put things simply and profoundly, move me. If I could, I would own land out west somewhere. I would live in some place with a beautiful view of mountains and enough room to keep horses. In the early 1990s, I attended a writers’ conference in western Montana, near Flathead Lake, and I thought it was heaven. “It would be fine to die,” I thought while gazing at mountains like strong shoulders, “if I could merge into this.”

  However, getting such a place seems unlikely. I would have to earn much, much more from my writing than I have hitherto done. But hope, as they say, springs eternal. By way of goading myself to work harder, I sometimes go on the computer and check out what John Frederick’s been up to. He’s published three fairly well-received novels and edited a couple of nonfiction books. He’s retired from teaching now and is probably set for life. I have to keep working. My consolation is that I know I am a better poet and nonfiction writer than John is a novelist. One day in his office in the English department, he told me that I had major league literary talent. About that, at least, he was right.

  Romance

  Recently I was walking through “Bargain Book Warehouse,” a store filled with discounted books located in a nearby strip mall. The books were publisher’s overstocks: the unwanted stepchildren of the publishing industry. When I passed by the tables heavily laden with discounted paperback romances, I recalled how I used to heave armfuls of these books into stinking trash compactors in Kmarts throughout southern New Jersey.

  This was back when I was working for the Reader’s Market, a division of the now-defunct Waldenbooks, which was in turn a subsidiary of Kmart. In addition to managing an expanded book department at the Clementon Kmart, I would go around to other Kmarts and service their smaller paperback book sections. Servicing their book departments invariably meant tearing the covers off of all the paperbacks that hadn’t sold after a period of a month or so and throwing the books out to make room for the new titles that were shipped every week. Since very few of the titles sold all that well, this amounted to heaps of books. I had to sort the torn covers and return them to the publishers, so the store could get credit for all the books that didn’t sell. During the two years I worked for Reader’s Market, I must have thrown out thousands of paperbacks.

  A large percentage of the books I put on shelves and later trashed were romances. Working with this merchandise was very alienating for me as a lesbian. I had absolutely no interest in Harlequin romances or those titles known as bodice rippers featuring scantily clad men and women in period costume. In truth, I rather despised the women who bought them. I knew it was wrong for me to despise them. But did their desire have to take such cheesy form? All pinks and purples, the book covers throbbed like engorged genitalia. And the prose was so hackneyed, so devoid of literary value, it made Stephen King sound like Proust. I guess the woman who bought these books weren’t satisfied with their mates, if they had any. Then again, when is anyone ever completely satisfied with one’s mate? I mean sexually. The wives read romance novels while the husbands whacked off to Playboy (this was before streaming Internet porn). Freud had it right: civilization is discontent.

  Not that lesbians are much better. But at least with lesbians, you know that both parties tend to be romantic. Are there lesbian romances? Yes, there are. In fact, they’re a growing market segment, although you’ll probably never find them on Kmart shelves. From what I’ve seen, they’re escapist nonsense too. They have titles like Passion’s Bright Fury and Wasted Heart. I don’t read them. Through bitter experience, I’ve come to believe that desire is the opiate of the people.

  Let me tell you—in one of the Kmarts I serviced, I became attracted to a woman who worked in receiving. She was a big-boned, lusty-looking brunette with a Southern drawl and an air of vulnerability that belied her Junoesque stature. Her name was Jeannie. After repeated trips to this store, I got to know Jeannie a little. She used to scrawl “Book Lady” with a flourish on all the incoming cartons of books meant for me. She was originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. Her sad tale was that she had been married twice, both times to disappointing men. She had kids—two nice-looking teenagers who worked part-time for Kmart while attending high school—but was now divorced.

  One day as I pushed a shopping cart full of paperbacks through receiving to the trash compactor, I heard Jeannie singing along with the song that was playing over the store intercom, “Hungry Eyes.”

  “I’ve got hungry eyes.” Jeannie was looking at me as she sang this, slightly off key. I could feel that she was mildly attracted to me. Or maybe she was just whiling away the monotony of her job with a fleeting sexual fantasy. As things turned out, not long after I first set eyes on her, Jeannie and I both transferred to the newly opened Plum Hill Kmart—she in receiving and I as a sporting goods/automotive manager. Ever hopeful, I took this as a sign that we were meant to be together.

  Dave Tilden—a district manager for Kmart at the time—had unintentionally aided and abetted our relationship by recruiting me to be a departmental manager at the new store.

  “You’re doing a very good job as Reader’s Market manager,” he told me as we sat at an orange plastic table in the Kmart grill. “So which department at Plum Hill would you like to manage?”

  “Sports/auto,” I said, even though I knew this position meant working a forty-eight-hour week instead of a forty-hour one. Selling fishing rods and spark plugs paid better than selling paperbacks.

  The new job did prove to be a lot of hard work. I wasn’t naturally an organized person, and it took me a while to get the hang of managing two stockrooms full of everything from automotive batteries to deer urine. But I was happy that Jeannie was back there in receiving. Although she for the most part was indifferent to my efforts to get to know her better, we did go out to dinner a few times at Mikey’s—a restaurant and bar across the street from the store. This was when we both had to work until ten pm—closing time. With the Phillies game on in the background at Mikey’s, Jeannie told me about her mom.

  “She used to feed us beans while she ate steak,” Jeannie said with disgust. Hers sounded like a very rough childhood. “I guess that’s why I like food and kitchen stuff so much,” she added. Jeannie knew good pots and pans when she saw them. Not cheap Kmart stuff.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked her. She looked at me as if I had two heads.

  “Good pots and pans cook better,” she said. “And they last longer.”

  Since we were on the topic of cooking, I told Jeannie about the time Martha Stewart autographed one of her cookbooks for me and about fifty other Reader’s Market managers. The book signing occurred at a Reader’s Market managers’ meeting in Westchester, New York. This was back when Martha was just making a name for herself as a doyenne of domesticity. I told Jeannie what Martha had written in my copy of Martha Stewart’s Quick Cook book: “To Ruth, Be entertaining, always. Martha Stewart.” This was before Martha got convicted of insider trading and sent to prison.

  Jeannie was mildly impressed by my name-dropping Martha, but not enough to be interested in me. She did tell me an interesting thing, though. She said that Paul, one of the assistant managers at our store, had propositioned her.

  “Paul? He’s engaged!” I replied. Not only that, I thought to myself, but he’s twenty years younger than you.

  Again Jeannie looked at me as if I had two heads.

  “That don’t mean much these days,” she opined.

  I had actually met Paul’s fiancée. He had introduced her to me one day while I was putting up a new fishing display. Her name was Karla. It was clear that she had stars in her eyes when she looked at Paul. She seemed like a very nice young woman. Now that I knew what a dog Paul was, I felt sorry for her. She didn’t know what she was getting into.

  Secretly, I was rather pleased that
Paul considered Jeannie attractive. It proved to me that I didn’t have poor taste in being attracted to her. However, she had no romantic use for either Paul or me. She had her heart set on a butch woman who worked as a computer systems trainer for Kmart. As things turned out, a few months later she and this woman went off to Phoenix together when Kmart transferred the woman out there. A year after that, they broke up, and Jeannie moved back to South Jersey and once again started working at the Plum Hill Kmart. This time she settled in Bordentown, New Jersey, about forty-five minutes north of Plum Hill, off of Rt. 295. A few nights, when we both had to work until ten pm and then come in at eight the next morning, Jeannie stayed over my apartment rather than commute back home. Nothing happened. She slept on my sofa bed in the living room, while I slept in my bed in the bedroom. I was disappointed, but at least it was nice having someone with whom to watch the crimes, fires, and accidents on the eleven o’clock news.

  So Jeannie and I never did get together. She just didn’t like me that much, physically. Although she was a tall, Amazonian woman who could probably knock you into next week if she tried, she took the sheets in bed. A few months later, the Plum Hill Kmart went out of business. I remember the day that Dave Tilden called the management team into his office.

  “This store has never made a nickel in profit,” Dave told us. I admired the fact that he was forthright. It seemed that the Plum Hill Kmart was somewhat off the beaten track. Rather than being located on a major thoroughfare such as Rt. 70 or Rt. 38, it sat at the end of a road that not everyone was familiar with. In fact, many Plum Hill residents hadn’t realized there was a Plum Hill Kmart until they noticed our going-out-of-business ad in the local papers. By now Dave held a jaundiced view of Kmart Corporation.