Darling? (25 page)

It’s the kind of thing no one in Purmort would think of. You can’t concentrate like that when necessity has a knife at your throat. I wanted to escape that place so badly I’d have run the hundred miles to Vassar in my bare feet—but now I thought of the way Butch used to hold me, like he wanted to tear me open and get his hands on my heart.

“And, good-bye,” I said, and walked away without looking over my shoulder, because the natural thing, the right thing it seemed, would have been to swing myself up into Frank’s passenger seat and say, “Take me home. I never meant to leave my own people behind.”

Six Figures in Search of an Author

“He can’t be ninety! My God, he just turned eighty!”

I was speaking of Moss Genthner,
the
Moss Genthner, who would be Auden’s contemporary if only Auden were alive, whose other associates have long since committed their suicides, so that Moss is all that’s left, now, of his time. He floats around like a Chagall figure, talking in a hallowed poetic voice about Halley’s comet and the conversion of the gas streetlamps, already commanding a reverence no one is supposed to get until they’re dead. His eightieth birthday celebrations had lasted most of a year, with parties in Boston and New York, interviews on PBS, and the conversion of his childhood home into a small museum.

And, of course, readings by his former students, who form the backbone of the poetry community, teaching each other’s work in the universities until almost every creative writing student in this great nation of creative writing students has felt the thrill of knowing that he, or usually she, is studying under a poet who studied under Moss Genthner—it’s as if one had visited Berryman in the asylum, or taken Marianne Moore to Ebbets Field. I felt certain we’d been given a guarantee, that having attended all the eightieth birthday parties, readings, testimonials, and dedications, we were excused from further celebrations. Now I wished I’d asked for it in writing.

“He’s a marvel,” Peregrine said, assuming I’d spoken in admiration—how else did one speak of Moss? “Still teaching … writing, and a three-book contract…” He swept his hand into a fist around some imaginary brass ring. “Inspiring, that’s what it is,” he said. Peregrine’s forebears were Puritans, and like them he is sternly religious—difficult for him because he can find no God to believe in. He believes in Moss.

Who was already looking immortal in so many ways it seemed dangerous to encourage him with another party, but Peregrine was not to be swayed. He began to prepare as if he were bringing Zeus down from Olympus, which meant at least that the party could not be held at our house. Our house faces a seasonal parking lot and the most interesting natural phenomenon we’ve sighted there was a woman who assumed that since she was squatting behind her van she must be relieving herself in privacy. Zeus, and Moss, must look out over brimming seas toward the spouts of the leviathans.

Kit DeLoup’s house is directly on the bay, and Kit is fond of Peregrine, although (or perhaps because) she has never slept with him. Times have changed, but while I was learning to diagram sentences, Peregrine was living in the dunes, drinking Bloody Marys poured from the slit throats of sheep, and sleeping with women. That’s what art
was
then! When I married him I had to understand that almost every woman of roughly my mother’s age in town had once had physical relations with my husband. They’re all very sweet, solicitous of me when I bump into them in the post office and the pharmacy and the library and the liquor store and the A&P, grandmotherly toward the twins, but it can make for awkwardness, and I have to watch my tongue. Kit only likes black men, jazz guys, so her relationship with Peregrine is easy and calm and she said she’d be happy to let him use her place as long as a couple of friends who were staying with her could come.

Peregrine said no. Easy sociability is not a Puritan virtue. This would be the party of the year on the island, he said, and everyone would want an invitation. We would have to be ruthless if we were going to keep it an intimate gathering of Moss’s dearest friends, and
nobody else at all.

Did I really think, Kit asked when she found me evaluating sunscreens at the Wharf General Store, that it was a good idea to let Peregrine do this party thing all on his own? She sounded offhand and confidential, but she always does; she has the voice of someone who sidles up and offers to sell you a pack of pornographic playing cards.

“I know you’re stretched awfully thin,” she said, nodding her gray dreadlocks toward Ruby and Jade, who were crawling toward a low shelf of jelly jars, turning every few seconds to be sure I gave their naughtiness its due. “But it might mean less work in the long run, if you…”

She knows what to leave unsaid, and I nodded. I’m officious by nature, but in any case my time of leaving Peregrine to his own devices would have ended the day I found him trying to “clean out” the electrical outlets with a screwdriver, and no one can hope to be an author, a Visiting Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing, and a mother, and still have the time and patience necessary to translate the basic rules of etiquette into language recognizable to a Puritan.

“It’s not possible,” I said, just as the jars came tumbling, and by the time I had gathered them, and the twins, up, Kit had gone her way.

So she had to act as Peregrine’s helpmeet. I eavesdropped on his end of their conversations, careful to hold my tongue. It was going to be a magnificent spread, Peregrine said; everyone would want to bring their best dish in Moss’s honor. Marsha Sewall (widow of Sewall the abstract impressionist, who’d planned to be buried beside Moss, but at the last minute, feeling Moss had given his work short shrift, took the plot by the Motherwells instead) was donating two cases of peach champagne. As for the cake, Kit knew a healer who did baking for special occasions.…

“Eddie makes a nice cake,” I said, and wished I hadn’t. Peregrine had not approved of the double replica of Scarlett O’Hara’s hoop-skirted picnic dress—with layers of marzipan and vanilla cream—that Eddie made for the twins’ birthday.

“I’m sure Kit knows best,” Peregrine said stiffly. “People are still talking about the party she gave when she married Piero.”

“We’re not having electric Kool-Aid this time, are we?” I asked him. Kit and Piero have been divorced for twenty years, but certain decades have pancaked in Peregrine’s memory, like so many floors of a high-rise in an earthquake. Bits of the sixties turn up fossilized—his rage at Richard Nixon is still fresh as the dew, and he is shocked, shocked at my shallow understanding of the Bay of Pigs and the Tet Offensive, no matter that I was five or ten years old at the time.

It’s true that the great international movements have taken place outside my consciousness, but I feel a really good historian ought to try to understand the general nature of time and space, and maybe electricity. I know that if one once trysted with a woman who was suckling a babe, and one meets that babe twenty years later in a bar downtown, the babe, no matter how well-licensed, is still something like your own child and you should not try to drink it under the table or seduce it. I know that art has made a desperate leap out of the bars and into therapy—writers these days brag about all the drugs they
used
to take and which of their friends have AIDS. Peregrine’s still drinking like Hemingway and talking like Mailer, which would be all very well if we were at war, but an epidemic demands a different vocabulary.

Which reminded me to ask if Cleome was coming. She was one of the stars Moss marked to join his constellation, and she gave up an excellent career as a nutritionist when he brought her out to the island to study and gave her the idea that the only place of honor on earth was his inner circle, that one was either a poet or a failure—but she flickered out somehow and now she cooks at the hospice and runs a hand-dipped candle shop on the wharf, while the other brilliant, sensitive women in his fold go on to fresh triumphs every week—they’d be stepping off the ferry the day of the party just across from her place.

“She’s not on the list,” Peregrine said.

“You’ve got to invite her…,” I insisted, and somehow we found ourselves arguing about grade inflation in the universities, the empty “self-esteem” that leaves students feeling proud, proud of themselves without all the bother of accomplishing anything. “There has to be a willingness,
somewhere,
to step on toes!” he inveighed.

“Cleome’s toes?” I asked, but a Puritan has his responsibilities. I’d just put the twins down for their nap and was feeling as strong and honest and virtuous as only a woman who has just rocked two children to sleep in her arms can, when the phone rang. I put a finger to my lips when his voice began to rise, but when I saw his face I retreated—it had taken on the exact likeness of his grandfather, the Reverend Sawyer.

“Certainly not,” he was saying. “This is a
private
party, not a society event.” (Who could it have been, who would dare link Peregrine Whittington with a society event?) “No, no … no,” he said, with the icy amusement he always turns on solicitors. “I do not think that would be appropriate, and I have no way to help you.” He hung up, looking very deeply satisfied.

“Who
was
that?”

“The New Yorker.”

I sat down on the landing. “What do you mean?”

“They want someone to write up the party.”

He found the idea revolting, but not surprising; I thought it was utterly incredible.

“Is nothing happening in New York?”

“Well, I told them absolutely not.”

“Because they’re not old friends of Moss?”

“Because I’m not in the business of that kind of procurement.”

“But Peregrine…” My life was passing before my eyes, and what a sorry procession—the book, the “promise,” the students who in their search for anything consequential read wisdom into my every word, the sense that as a teacher of creative writing I was part of a metaphysical Ponzi scheme that created comfortable employment for those of us at the top by milking the benighted souls at the bottom, who were no more than boat people fleeing the poststructuralists in the literature departments where they would otherwise have been happily, obliviously at work. The guilt! The shame! The desperate need for further publications …

“Peregrine, I would have written the party up for
The New Yorker,
” I said.

He looked at me as if I’d offered to jump out of Moss’s cake.

“I’d do a great job of it, Peregrine,” I said. “I really
know
Moss, I could show why people love him, what his example has meant…”

Because suddenly I couldn’t help thinking how beautiful the world would look from Kit’s deck as it sagged under the weight of all the greatest living poets … the terns diving, the light in the crystal glasses, the bay full of sails … I knew exactly how I’d describe it, Moss as a legend among his successors, looking out to the far horizon, standing amidst the abundance of life on the threshold of the unknown … how inspiring he was and how selfless, nourishing all these young poets … Why, I
loved
Moss, and a shudder passed over me as I remembered asking him, when he was only seventy-eight, whether he thought he’d ever win a Nobel Prize, and hearing him explain and explain and explain the way my college boyfriend used to patiently enumerate for me all the reasons he was only wait-listed at Yale.

“They don’t want you; they want Mullins,” Peregrine said.

“Mullins?” Park Mullins was
the
poet, just then. His poems were intelligent, deeply felt, tinged with the kind of self-satisfaction a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male can only feel when he has been purified of the colonialist/genocidal taint by virtue of his homosexuality. He lived up the street from us with his boyfriend—I’d asked them over for dinner once and he’d said they’d love to come if nothing better turned up, but apparently something had. “Was he invited?”

“Why would he be invited?” Peregrine asked me.

*   *   *

“Peregrine Whittington hung up on
The New Yorker?
” We were at the beach, and my friend Sinead she was laughing so hard the woman beside us peered over her sunglasses in furious disapproval, which caused Sinead to laugh louder, at which the woman lifted her book over her face like a shield. It was
Under the Table,
Patsy Grue’s memoir of her childhood sexual abuse and the adult substance abuse it led to, with the giant words
“Gripping! Darkly, disturbingly erotic!—The New York Times Book Review”
splashed in neon orange across the jacket.

“And, of course, we have to invite
her,
” I said. “I
loathe
Patsy Grue.”

“For God’s sake, be quiet!” Sinead beseeched, snorting horribly as she tried to rein herself in. “You don’t think she’d be reading that if she wasn’t a friend of Patsy’s, do you?”

This sobered me.

“We won’t say Patsy,” Sinead said. “Call her Georgina.”

“I
loathe
Georgina!” I cried. “It’s not that I oppose pretension per se, but to be haughty because your father raped you—more-victimized-than-thou! That’s where I draw the line!”

“Well, the advance…,” Sinead said. “For a poem they’ll give you six copies; for a memoir six figures…”

“It’s not the money, I don’t care about the money…”

“With me, it’s always the money,” Sinead said.

“With me, it’s the goddamned zinnias!”

“Don’t say zinnias!”
she hissed, as everyone knows Patsy takes absurd pride in her zinnias while mine mildew and die every year. “Say
hydrangeas,
” she suggested kindly.

“Georgina’s hydrangeas! And then to complain about censorship when the publisher wouldn’t have a big throbbing penis on the jacket—”

“—as if representations of big throbbing penises weren’t common as potted rubber plants these days—”

“Exactly! Fortunately I don’t think she can come to the party—she’s on tour in Australia.”

“Australia!” Sinead said. “I mean, it’s an awful book, but exile…”