by Ben Lerner
We shook hands and said our names, but I was too overwhelmed by contact with the former to catch the latter, and before I could ask her to repeat it, she was taken away from me by a man, a distinguished professor of something, who wanted to introduce her to the distinguished writer. For the rest of the evening I milled around the reception waiting for an opportunity to insinuate myself back into her company, but somehow it never came, or I never had the nerve to act. Every time I heard her laugh or succeeded in picking out her voice from the general din or saw her move gracefully through a room, my whole body started, then I felt as if I were falling, a sensation akin to the myoclonic twitch that, just as you are drifting off to sleep, wakes you violently; standing there among the first editions, I was convinced it was the shudder of fate.
I found myself before the glass cases of curios and sculptures that lined one of the dining room walls and discovered that there was a small line drawing of the daughter in a silver frame, vaguely reminiscent of Modigliani in its elongation; I wondered if Bernard had composed the little unsigned portrait. By this point I’d outlasted most of the crowd. The wine gave me the courage to have another glass of wine, which in turn gave me the courage to take one of the now-available chairs in the living room and to listen along with the others to Bernard. He was telling the story, pausing every few minutes to stir the fire he was sitting beside, of a French author who, hard up for money, had fabricated letters to himself from famous interlocutors, then attempted to sell them to a university library. I glanced at Bernard’s daughter furtively; in the firelight, she was dusky gold.
I did not say another word to her that evening. She would not, it appeared, be sleeping at the house. Soon after Bernard had finished his story—the forger was caught, but then published the letters as an epistolary novel to critical acclaim—the professor yawned to indicate his imminent departure and the daughter asked if she could have a ride. When they stood, everyone else in the living room stood, and I was fortunate enough to receive a kiss on my cheek from her, after she had kissed Bernard and Natali and one or two others goodbye. She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.
I spent the next few months going to every reception and looking for the daughter, never having the guts to ask after her directly, or, that first year, to say much of anything to Bernard and Natali, although in their presence I was growing incrementally more relaxed, and whom now, more than ever, I wanted to impress. She would often appear in my dreams, at least one of which resulted in nocturnal emission, the last time I would experience that phenomenon, although most of them were chaste, clichéd—exploring Paris hand in hand, etc. She became a present absence, the phantom I measured the actual against while taking bong hits with my roommate; I thought I saw her in passing cars, disappearing around corners, walking down a jetway at the airport when I was heading home for winter break.
Finally I asked Bernard her name, her whereabouts, probably betraying desperation, at which point he gave me a quizzical look and explained: I have no daughter. I felt the world rearrange itself around me, that there had been a death. But the woman I had met with the distinguished professor, the one who said she’d grown up in the house, the one in the drawing, etc.? He had trouble recalling whom I meant. She must have intended “grown up here” in some other sense; perhaps, it occurred to me, she meant it was the place where she’d absorbed her education. He asked me to bring him the drawing and when he saw it he explained he’d found it at a garage sale in Michigan; tears, at least in my memory, started in my eyes.
Fifteen years had elapsed between my learning they were childless—of course they were childless; the house had no traces of a nuclear family’s present or past—and my reading the message from Natali about Bernard’s fall. Now, as I called Natali’s cell phone, I again saw their daughter’s face, felt the echo of desire, wanted to call her and talk about Bernard. In those fifteen years, I’d published Natali’s and Bernard’s work in magazines I’d edited, written essays about them, visited them frequently. Only recently had I come to Providence—at Natali’s request—and been asked to become their literary executor, a great honor and responsibility, a proposal to which, after reminding them in a long and wine-soaked speech about my myriad insufficiencies, and noting my diagnosis, I agreed.
Natali picked up the phone, although “picked up” is an anachronistic phrase; she sounded the same as ever. I asked what I could do. The answer was basically nothing, though I was welcome to visit as soon as tomorrow morning. Perhaps I could bring some poems, as she was reading a little to Bernard when he wasn’t sleeping.
I took the 5 train back to Brooklyn, undercooked and ate spaghetti, and then started to pace my apartment, trying to decide what poetry to bring. Four hours later it looked as though my apartment had been ransacked or had endured a seismic event. I’d pulled dozens of books from the unfinished pine shelves, stirring up dust, and then discarded them in piles on the floor, either because the book in question was a gift from Bernard or Natali, or a book they had published, or a book they’d written, and so it seemed a failure of imagination to select it, or because I knew or feared it was a poet they didn’t like, or because the poems were too elegiac, or too long to be read to Bernard in his condition. I was growing increasingly desperate, my worry about Bernard now compounded by the ridiculous worry that bringing the wrong book would somehow invalidate their trust in me as their executor, expose me as unworthy. Added to that was the shame I began to feel when I realized that, if I were in Bernard’s position, I wouldn’t even think about literature, would just be asking for morphine and distracting myself, if possible, with reality TV, a line of thought that then led me to imagine recovering, or failing to recover, from open-heart surgery.
I lay on the floor and watched the slow rotation of the ceiling fan and found it a little difficult to breathe as all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable—I couldn’t find, in my apartment full of books, a single page of it to bring to the same hospital where they’d measured my limbs and, depending on insurance, might inseminate my friend.
Then out of nowhere, as if descending from the ceiling, the right poet came to me: William Bronk. I remembered how Bernard had told me he’d met Bronk just once, and neither had said much; they’d had lunch or coffee in congenial if mildly awkward silence. Bernard believed Bronk was one of the great and underappreciated poets of the second half of the twentieth century. A decade later, after Bronk’s death, Bernard had told me, he met a graduate student who had been a distant relation or family friend of Bronk’s and had gotten to know the poet in his later years. The graduate student was always talking about Bronk as if Bernard and Bronk were dear friends, as if they’d known each other since childhood, which Bernard found a little puzzling. After the fifth or sixth conversation in which the student tried to reminisce with Bernard about Bronk, about the kind of man he was, Bernard felt it necessary to explain to the student that, while he admired the poetry tremendously, he’d only met Bronk once, and briefly, that he had no sense of him as a person. The student was shocked: But he always spoke about you, he said to Bernard, about how you’d sought him out, about how well you got along, the understanding between you, etc. One of the main reasons I came
here to study with you was because of your relationship. I imagine Bernard saw the world rearrange itself around the student.
Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraced Stevens’s lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk’s poetry was suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I’d read all his books out of a sense of duty, but I was usually bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity. But now, when I found Bronk’s selected poems on one of the shelves and opened the book at random, the power of it was all finally there, finally real for me:
MIDSUMMER
A green world, a scene of green deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.
This was what I brought to the hospital the next morning, along with some quinoa salad and dried mangoes for Natali. I just caught the elevator as the doors closed, and hit the button for the seventh floor, but the number didn’t light up. Still, the elevator started to ascend, stopping on every floor. I was the only one in the elevator and its erratic behavior was making me nervous, so I got out on the fourth floor and walked. Later I would learn that this was a Sabbath elevator—an elevator that operates automatically in order to circumvent the Jewish law requiring observers to abstain from operating electric switches on Shabbat.
Bernard looked tiny in the hospital bed, his neck in a brace, but he also seemed like himself; the first thing he said to me, his voice raspy because of damage to his larynx, was that he was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to read my novel, but he’d been detained. It smelled like a hospital room smells, like sanitizer and urine, but it was otherwise okay. A paper curtain offered privacy to or from the other patient in the room, who must have been asleep.
I entertained Natali and Bernard, trying to ignore the beeping of the machines to which he was attached, by recounting in comical terms my anxiety about what to bring, how I knew this had all been arranged as a secret test for me. When I presented them with the Bronk, I believed that Natali was touched, that it was exactly the right book, that it proved I had been listening with care all these years, but I might have imagined that response. Bernard started to retell the story about the graduate student, but it required too much effort, and he let it go. I changed the topic to their “daughter”—only now did I really feel the kinship between the stories—but Bernard didn’t seem to remember what I was talking about, even though we’d laughed about it together many times before.
Despite the bright hospital lighting, emerging onto the street felt like crossing from night into day, or from a darkened theater, a matinee, into sunlight, or, I imagined, like surfacing in a submarine—the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds, between media. Have you seen people pause in revolving doors like divers decompressing, transitioning slowly so as to prevent nitrogen bubbles from forming in the blood, or noticed the puzzled look that many people wear—I found a bench across Fifth Avenue and sat and watched—when they step onto the sidewalk, as if they’ve suddenly forgotten something important, but aren’t sure what: their keys, their phone, the particulars of their loss? Terrible to see them recall it a second later; as I observed the hospital from a safe distance, I thought back to the weeks I’d spent sleeping on the futon at Alex’s after an SUV struck a friend of hers in Chelsea, how some mornings Alex, who tended to get out of bed before she was fully awake, would be halfway to the kitchen to put on the water for her tea before she remembered that Candice was dead. (I don’t know how I knew she briefly didn’t know, or how I could tell when the fact returned to her consciousness.) If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight—a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.
“Ground speed”—I sat, my back to the park, waiting for the city to reabsorb me, holding my breath until the exhaust from a passing bus dissipated. The beeping of a reversing FedEx truck became Bernard’s heart monitor. I began to say the words aloud, joining the thousands of people in the city talking to themselves at that moment, repeating the phrase until ground began to sound like the past participle of grind—as if velocity could be powdered, pulverized. It made me think of instant coffee.
* * *
There were still piles of books on my apartment floor when the protester arrived the following week to use my shower. He was a few years younger than I and taller, so much taller—easily six-foot-three—that he made the building feel smaller; he had to duck so as not to hit his head on the landing as he followed me up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. Was he Marfanoid? He set his oversized climbing backpack beside the door and sat on the top stair to take his shoes off before entering although I told him it wasn’t necessary, and while he did so I could smell a variety of odors: sweat, tobacco, dog, the must of his socks. I asked him how long he had been sleeping in the park and he said a week, but that he’d been at one encampment or another across the country for more than six weeks. He’d been picked up at his door in Akron—he had been living in his parents’ basement—by a caravan of protesters he’d made contact with on craigslist, just as craigslist was being used to connect protesters with people in the city who would let them use their bathrooms. He smiled his disarming smile without interruption. Did I go to Zuccotti a lot? he asked me.
It was eight or so, the time I normally had dinner, and I asked if he was hungry, explained that I couldn’t really cook, but was going to make some sort of stir-fry, and he said sure. It was only when I got the towels that I’d washed for him out of the dryer—my apartment had a small washer-and-dryer unit in the closet—that I thought to ask, a little embarrassed by the luxury, if he wanted to wash any clothes. Definitely, he said, and I showed him how it worked; he got his backpack and emptied the clothes it contained into the washer, but wore what he had on into the bathroom.
When I started chopping vegetables I realized I wasn’t really hungry, had probably thought to cook just to have something to offer and because I wanted some activity to undertake while my bathroom was occupied. I opened a bottle of the lawyer’s wine; Alex had given me several. I put on red quinoa to boil and found some tofu in the back of the fridge that looked okay and added it to the broccoli and squash while the garlic and onions simmered in the oil. From the kitchen I could see steam escaping from the bathroom door. I put my phone into the little speaker dock and instructed it to play The Very Best of Nina Simone—I wanted to drown out any sounds he might make before showering that could embarrass us.
While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person—I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so. I’d cooked with people plenty, usually acting as a dazzling
ly incompetent sous chef for Alex or Jon or other friends or family. On various occasions I’d said to a woman I was interested in, “I would invite you to dinner, but I can’t cook,” at which point I would hope she’d say, “I’m a great cook,” so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything. Excepting the sandwiches I had made for Alex when she had mono—and even those I tended to buy and not prepare—I simply could not recall a single instance in which I had by myself constructed a meal, however rudimentary, for another human being. The closest memory I could summon was of scrambling eggs on Mother’s or Father’s Day as a child, but the uncelebrated parent, as well as my brother, always assisted me. Conversely, there was simply no end to the number of meals I could recall other people making for me, thousands upon thousands of meals, a quantity of food that would have to be measured in tons, dating from my mother’s milk to the present; just that week Aaron had roasted a chicken for our monthly dinner to catch up and discuss Roberto; Alena had made some kind of delicious trio of Middle Eastern salads the night before; in neither meal had I lent a hand, although I’d cursorily offered. Typically my contribution was just wine, itself the carefully aged work of others. Surely there were instances I was forgetting, but even assuming there were, they were exceedingly rare.
I would like to say my recognition of this asymmetry led me to meditate—as I added soy sauce and pepper to what was destined to be a meal of prodigious blandness—on the pleasure I was taking in cooking for my fellow man as he bathed, but I was aware at that point of no pleasure. I would like to say that, at the very least, I resolved to cook henceforth for my friends, to be a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community. I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn’s boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity? The fact is that realizing my selfishness just led to more selfishness; that is, I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. “Don’t leave me,” Nina Simone begged in French, and, for the first time I could remember—whether or not the desire was a non sequitur—I wanted a child, wanted one badly.