The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  I told Laura I found it hard to assimilate all the elements of Maria’s story. I was disturbed almost to the point of nausea by the thought of a caterpillar laying its eggs inside her, troubled by the news of her father’s apparent degenerative disease, and equally troubled that Maria had abandoned him in his vulnerable state. And yet the moment I heard her voice, I felt the same tenderness I’d felt before she’d fallen out of touch, as though the events of the past month and a half had never really happened—the concert with Jess and Amanda and friends; the retirement party back in Des Moines; my move to House Above the Morning Clouds; my fling with Sadie that had, behind my back, developed into something more. All the affection and fellow feeling was still there, the sense of being intimately and inextricably—and happily—bound up in her thoughts and feelings. I’d told Maria I was falling in love with her, it was on the page, there could be no question of taking it back. I asked Laura what she thought I should do.

  “Ugh. You’re really in love with both of them?”

  “I don’t know—in love, falling in love…”

  “I’d start by trying to figure that out.”

  “How do I figure that out?”

  It worried her, Laura said, that I hadn’t told her about Maria until now. It was like I was trying to keep her secret; it suggested I was ashamed. I told her the whole thing had taken me by surprise. Everything was happening so fast, I said.

  “And Sadie,” Laura said—“I don’t know, she’s an adult. And she lives in New York. You live in California.”

  “We’re adults. And I don’t live here.”

  “Tell me this: How much do Sadie and Maria know about each other?”

  I felt unfairly cornered. “I mean…”

  “Okay, right, well. I wish I were surprised. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

  It took me a moment to understand she was referring to Ellen, the coworker at Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch I’d kissed while Laura and I were still together. But I’d told Laura about the kiss immediately afterward, and Ellen knew all about Laura, as I remembered, so I didn’t see how that situation had much in common with my current one. Also, by the time Sadie and I got together I assumed I’d never hear from Maria again, so I hadn’t felt the need to explain to Sadie everything about her. Even as I defended myself against Laura, though—“Can we not relitigate the Ellen thing?”—a part of me trusted her judgment so completely that I wondered if I had fallen prey to a pattern that was destined to play out again and again in my life, to the detriment of those closest to me, and to my discredit and shame.

  “Anyway, shouldn’t you still be getting over Ashwini?” Laura asked.

  “Who?” I was trying to make a joke.

  Laura stifled a sort of admonitory sigh. “You ask a lot of me, you know.”

  “You have answers.”

  “Not all of them, friend.”

  “Almost all.”

  “If you say so.”

  I began to feel a creeping desperation. “So, no consolation? No advice?”

  “Meditate. Do yoga. Listen to music.”

  I told Laura I was already listening to music and had tried yoga and meditation many times.

  “Jesus, I don’t know. Date them both.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “Marry them both. That’s legal in some places. Move to Utah or Afghanistan or wherever.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “Look, you know I love you—”

  “No no no, it’s fine. It’s fine. I understand. I’m sorry I missed your sister’s wedding.”

  “What? That’s not what this is—whatever, it’s fine.”

  “It sounds like I missed out on quite a performance.”

  “My mom’s life has been quite a performance. There’ll be more. I’ll make sure to invite you to my wedding.”

  “With Dan?”

  “Things are going really well!”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “You don’t seem glad.”

  “I’ve never been good at expressing my emotions.”

  “They get expressed. Just not always in speech.”

  “I’m glad, okay. I’m glad!”

  “All right, well.”

  “Well,” I said. Ending the call meant I’d have to return to the solitude of my big glass house.

  “Here’s my advice,” said Laura. “Be honest. With yourself, and with Sadie and Maria.”

  I said I’d try.

  * * *

  —

  It was June and Berryman was back in New York, pondering glory, looking for jobs. He wanted to make enough money to move out of his mother’s upper Manhattan apartment, and to provide for his future wife, in spite of her stubborn insistence that she was capable of providing for herself. He was rejected from positions at Princeton and Queens College, but set up an interview for a teaching position at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He inquired about reviewing opportunities at the New York Herald Tribune, but was turned away. He tried Time magazine even though it was beneath him, but even Time wouldn’t hire him. It was the Depression and the job market was pinched. “The city is killing me,” he wrote Mark Van Doren: “heat, strain, anxiety, loneliness.” He was, he said, “at absolute ebb.” Van Doren invited him to spend a weekend in the Connecticut countryside, where Berryman wrote poems and Van Doren praised them. Privately, though, Van Doren wondered what had become of the Berryman that had left two years ago; this new version spoke with an English accent, and affected aristocratic mannerisms, and had a beard. Maybe that explained why he couldn’t get a job.

  The interview with St. John’s seemed to go well, but a few weeks later Berryman was rejected. He tried interviewing with some of his mother’s contacts in the business world, but they were all “stupid” and “parasitic” and “vain,” possessing “a kind of practical shrewdness and self-absorption hideous to see.” He considered trying to get in touch with Orson Welles—maybe he could work as some sort of assistant—but the impulse passed and he brooded his days away at his suffocating mother’s little apartment, lamenting “the whole complicated business of my return: mental adjustment, a terrible strain, which was unavoidable but which I had in no way foreseen.” The separation from Beryl compounded his nervous exhaustion. “But,” he wrote, “in any case I should be thankful: the energy released has given me half a dozen poems.” Already, then, so early, he was moving toward the theory he would articulate most memorably in a 1970 interview. “My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

  The sadder your story, Berryman believed, the better your chances at winning the whole thing.

  * * *

  —

  Dave hadn’t installed a printer in his house, and so, until I finally bought one myself, I had to read Maria’s emails on my laptop, doubling the font size and closing my eyes once in a while to stave off headaches and floaters. Our correspondence that early spring was much the same as it had been before—warm, enthusiastic, mutually appreciative—and yet it felt subtly different. There was a new softness to Maria, I thought, a new vulnerability, a meekness almost. I connected it rightly or wrongly with her convalescence, whose progress she reported on regularly. She still felt, she wrote, not quite herself. She oscillated between periods of not unpleasant fatigue, during which she flickered in and out of sleep, in bed or on the couch or living-room floor, and a sort of heightened wakefulness that made the world seem incandescent. “You never told me how lovely Des Moines is!” she wrote. The snow melted except for a few rogue clumps (armored with thick layers of dirt and dead leaves), birdsong woke her before dawn most mornings, green had begun to infiltrate lawns, little red flowers were pushing forth from the outermost branches of silver maples. More t
han anything, though, what she noticed and loved was the silence and the space. People moved about quietly in Des Moines, as if not wanting to disturb even the air. “That’s because they’re ghosts,” I wrote, but Maria saw in their uncertain movements, and in their abstracted, unreal faces, a resignation indistinguishable from contentment, which held within it some ineffable saintliness.

  And so we kept asking each other what we were doing and thinking and reading and writing. I told her about my Berryman biography, an idea she enthusiastically supported. I presented it as a project I could begin to ease into as I finished “Grandpa.” At this point I was still in the very early stages, the preliminary stages, as I put it in an email, establishing an intimate knowledge of Berryman’s work, making plans to visit the places he’d lived, or at least those in New York and Minneapolis. Also Tampa. Rereading the biography Maria and I had hated, the biography Maria had taught me to hate, I began to wonder if it might be possible that Berryman’s father actually didn’t kill himself, if in reality it was Berryman’s mother or stepfather who had killed him. Berryman himself entertained this hypothesis in a late journal entry. Plus, there were all kinds of holes in the various accounts, most of which in any case came from Berryman’s mother, and I wondered if a little sleuthing in Tampa might uncover the truth. Oh yes, wrote Maria, you must go to Tampa. We must get to the bottom of that.

  She decided to stay in Des Moines for at least a few more months; it wasn’t hard to find a downtown sublet, she said. Also, she’d started writing poetry again: reworkings of poems she’d translated from the Finnish, filled out with new material and stitched together into an ever-expanding narrative poem, the Finnish-Midwestern epic the world was waiting for, she joked, though I could tell she was only sort of joking. It was just such inventions, Maria never stopped believing, that the world needed above all else. For such beliefs, I loved her. Did I love her? In those days, as in these, it was so hard to separate what I said from what I felt.

  Meanwhile, Sadie’s letters seemed increasingly full of bad news. “I’m in the ER with my son and husband,” she wrote, “who’s being treated for severe intestinal pain likely caused by a new medication he’s been trying. It’s 2 a.m., I’m tired, Ethan is also sick (just a cold, we’re hoping, but it seems to be getting worse), and all I can think is I wish I were with you. I know this must make me sound like a monster.”

  “It makes you sound like a person dealing with some difficult things,” I wrote, grateful for an opportunity to demonstrate wisdom and compassion and maybe a certain stoicism that I hoped stood in for my lack of life experience in the face of Sadie’s excess of it. So often my life felt small next to hers. I wondered if to Sadie that was part of my appeal, if to her I was a sort of refuge of relative uncomplicatedness. The thought of her sitting there in the hospital with her son and husband, thinking of me, moved me. It made me want to be worthy of her love. But it also scared me: was I? “You shouldn’t feel guilty for a feeling,” I wrote. “And it makes me happy that you’re thinking of me.”

  But she was also thinking of other things. For example: the earthquake and tsunami that had taken so many lives in Japan the previous month, and that, along with the subsequent Fukushima meltdown, had made refugees of so many families. A friend of hers, an artist who lived in Tokyo, was hosting a mother and her two young sons who’d fled their home in a Fukushima prefecture village when the nuclear reactors began to explode, Sadie wrote. The mother’s parents, who’d lived closer to the coast, had been swept away by the tsunami. Her husband, risking nuclear contamination, had stayed behind to take care of the house and tend the small farm and apiary that were the family’s only sources of income. In the days after the earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government had repressed information about the extent of the fallout, and the family had at first fled directly into the path of the most potent radioactive cloud. Now the mother blamed herself for the thyroid cancer she was sure would afflict her children in time. The family had lived just outside the so-called Exclusion Zone surrounding the nuclear reactors, so it seemed unlikely they’d get anything from the energy company or the government. Their village was practically deserted, they couldn’t go back, and yet remaining in Tokyo indefinitely seemed impossible.

  What was most appalling about the whole thing, Sadie wrote, was that Japan wouldn’t even be so dependent on nuclear power if it hadn’t been for the active encouragement of the American government. As part of its attempt to restore relations with Japan in the years immediately following World War II, Eisenhower had initiated a secret plan—did I know?—later pursued by the CIA, to help build the Japanese a nuclear reactor. In this way the Japanese people, it was surmised, would come to see nuclear power as a creative, rather than a destructive, force. “Now, instead, it’s like we’ve dropped another bomb on them, half a century after the war ended,” Sadie wrote.

  It could all seem very far away, she continued, until we remembered the hundred-plus nuclear reactors scattered throughout our country, most if not all of them as unprepared for natural disaster as Fukushima’s had proven to be. The Indian Point plant, for example, twenty-five miles north of New York City, had recently been discovered to lie at the intersection of two very active seismic zones, one of undoubtedly countless crucial facts unknown at the time of its construction. If its reactors melted down, Sadie wrote, the fallout would make a ghost town of New York City and likely kill tens of thousands of people. Even the U.S. government acknowledged this internally. And so she’d started volunteering for an advocacy group that opposed the plant’s imminent bid for relicensing, even though she suspected her efforts were doomed to failure.

  I didn’t know what to do with that. What was I supposed to do?

  * * *

  —

  Decent, patient, passionate Beryl was lonely in her friend’s old rambling house. “Dearest heart,” she wrote her fiancé, “I am lying in a little white bed beneath a pink coverlet. On my right is another bed exactly like the one I am in, only no one will sleep in it. And inside and outside the little room is space and stillness.”

  For the past year and a half she and Berryman had been together or at least in close proximity; letters seemed “unreal, such poor substitute for your dear presence.” Alone in a strange, unfamiliar place, she began to experience others’ pain as her own. “The suffering cannot be believed, John,” she wrote. “That men should be turned penniless into the streets, thrown into concentration camps, beaten—often to death, turned out of cinemas, starved by financial restrictions, and degraded in every horrible way, because they believe in Socialism or happen to be Jews is unbelievable enough. But I heard things so agonising that only by causing myself physical suffering can I find ease from prayer.”

  A young socialist couple from Vienna had passed through the house and told their story. The husband, foreign editor of the Daily Herald, had been forced out of Austria by the Nazis that spring. His wife stayed at home to care for their eighteen-month-old baby. Soon after her husband left, though, an informant warned her a Nazi official would be coming at any moment to apprehend her. She fled immediately, leaving her child in care of her grandmother, and made her way to England to join her husband. Now the couple couldn’t go back to Austria, and couldn’t risk having anyone bring them their baby, since in that event the Nazis had threatened, plausibly, to cut off the grandmother’s already meager pension and send all remaining male family members to camps. “Yet this couple,” Beryl wrote Berryman, “knowing they cannot hope to see their child again except at the expense of the lives of almost all their relations still alive in Vienna, consider themselves fortunate and less deserving of pity than almost any of their fellows. I cannot understand how any man can cause such suffering.”

  Berryman, meanwhile, resigned to unemployment, burrowed deep into his poetry. He wrote a poem based on his reading of Herodotus, one dedicated to his brother about “the violent world our fathers bought,” one called “Accide
nt” inspired by a news item about a window washer who’d fallen from a skyscraper to his death. “I am beginning to feel in me a kind of authority which I trust and must follow,” he wrote. His poems were rejected by The New Yorker and The New Republic, but New Directions accepted a few. When Berryman sent in edits to them, though, he was told they’d already gone to press. “I’ve no readers,” he wrote Van Doren, “but I feel as if I’ve betrayed them all.” The episode compounded his general melancholy. His relationship with his mother went from strained to confrontational; he escaped for a few weeks to Allen Tate’s house in Connecticut. There, he continued to work on his poetry, and wrote his mother several letters. “Fortunately I miss [Beryl] less here than I did there, though I become daily more convinced of her value as a wife.”

  By this time Beryl had left England for Cortina, a resort town in the Italian Alps, where she hunted and fished and went on long walks and picked flowers and “fascinating beard plants” that reminded her of Berryman. She promised him she’d come to New York as soon as possible, maybe sometime around Christmas, maybe earlier. She cursed “the tyranny of time and space” and gazed up at the surrounding mountains, “great projecting masses of black and tawny rock that seem engaged in a desperate struggle to defy the limits of the earth, and indeed to have defeated the sky when they prevail upon the clouds to cover their passionate longing….Hour after hour I can stand and watch them, for they are never the same from one moment to another, and never acceptable as real.”

  * * *

  —

  The gun club halfway down the mountain inaugurated its season toward the end of April, around the same time the winds I’d been warned about by the Drutherses began to blow. The shooting typically began late in the morning and lasted through late afternoon or early evening. Weekdays often brought long stretches of silence, but weekends the noise was almost continuous. Each gunshot produced three distinct echoes, so that at times of high activity the valley rang with braided thunder. Once in a while the racket gathered itself into a rhythm that could’ve been mistaken for intentional, and after some time these random orderings were all I heard, the general cacophony having worked its way beyond hearing into my nerves and bones.