Mean Boy (14 page)

Stop saying
very excited
. Stop saying
very exciting
. Stop saying
very
. Stop it.

“Lawrence,” Sparrow interrupts. “Yes. Absolutely. A young man—a Canadian boy like yourself would of course be interested in the poetry of his time and place. It’s laudable. But, I wonder, have you ever heard the expression, one must know the rules before one can break them?”

“It’s not that I, that I, um,
disdain
literary history!” I explain in a high-voiced panic set off by the awfulness of the words
Canadian boy
.

Sparrow looks away, clears more smoke, embarrassed for us both. “No, no, no, no, of course not.”

“It’s just that I’ve already read—like—
everything.”

And this wins me my first look of reproach from Doctor Sparrow.

“Now, Lawrence,” he admonishes, mouth disappearing behind his beard. “Everything?”

At this juncture, I opt to sit back and shut up.

“Marvell? Spenser? My goodness, but there’s so much, Lawrence. Aside from the poets themselves, so many great thinkers who’ve informed the tradition. Virgilius Ferm?”

Virgilius Ferm?

“Coleridge? Johnson? Milton?”

“I’ve read some Milton.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But English literature, Lawrence, is a vast canopy, stretching back over centuries. To aspire to contribute to it without attempting even a rudimentary grasp of what’s come before you is to—well, is to insult that tradition, I’m afraid.”

There is something about the British manner of phrasing
that fascinates me. The effect seems to be to terrify and soothe you all at once.

“Doctor Sparrow,” I speak, deeply, “I
love
English literature. Probably more than anyone in this department. I would be the last person in the world to insult it, let me assure you.”

I think it is the first time I’ve ever used the expression
let me assure you
, and I’m pleased with the way it turns out, like one of my mother’s Duncan Hines cakes, gold and quivering with perfection. Didn’t stick to the pan, as it were. The fact is, I’m falling into the rhythms of Sparrow’s own rarified speech as I sit here. Sparrow is looking at me. He is looking at me with approval, I would venture to say. If I were feeling bold, I might even identify his gaze as one of admiration.

“I,” says Doctor Sparrow, once we’ve passed a couple of cozy, appraising moments, “could tell that just from looking at you, my boy.” He smiles, places his hands on his desk, and stands as if about to hug me.

Which he doesn’t do, even though in a sort of daze I’ve half risen to meet him. He goes to the window instead, framing himself in the approaching, darkening stormfront. He spends the next thirty minutes telling me about Oxford, his alma mater.
Ancient Oxford
, he calls it, and he rhymes off names. Name after name of the great scholars and poets who have roamed its halls through the ages. More. Erasmus. Sir Walter Raleigh. I had no idea. Doctor Johnson. Donne. It’s as if he’s unfurling the history of English literature before me like an endless, gilded carpet. So many great writers came from Oxford. Over actual centuries. We don’t even really have centuries in Canada.

Great scholars like you, Lawrence. Such as you’ve already shown yourself to be. Great poets like the poet you no doubt have within you. Young men like yourself are the inheritors of that tradition
.

The sun is starting to set, and the clouds have taken on
untamed hues of pain orange, broken-nosed red and black-eyed purple. Fiery and otherwise indescribable. Doctor Sparrow crosses back to his desk at one point, and a long white hand disappears into its oaken depths. He has pamphlets, brochures in there.

THE STORM HITS
smack in the middle of Jim’s seminar on the last day of classes. We’re reviewing another poem by Todd, a brand-new poem, and you know how it goes? It goes like this:

The title being, “The Harvest Excursion.” He beat me to it. I think it’s the worst thing he’s written yet. Where’s the rhyming couplet? Where are the maimed steel workers, the exploding blast furnaces?

“Okay, come on now, if you write it all out as a sentence it’s completely—banal,” I blurt. I know. I shouldn’t use “banal” yet a second time when it comes to Todd’s poetry. I felt what it did to him last time. But Jesus Christ.

“I’m not sure I agree,” remarks Claude. I look at him. He smiles at me.

“Like,” I say, “if you just scatter the words around on the page, is this supposed to imbue them with some kind of supplementary
depth?
Does just sprinkling them around like that make a sentence
poetry?
”

“I think that’s a very traditionalist approach,” says Claude. I hear Todd gulp somewhere behind me. We’re supposed to do our best not to speak when our poems are being discussed. No doubt he was gulping back an infuriated “Yeah!”

“Oh, come on!” I yell, because Claude does not believe a word of what he’s saying and everyone in the room knows it.

“Larry,” interrupts Jim, “make your case, if you have a case to make.”

“West we wind on the endless trek away in hopes of harvest,” I say, rapid-fire. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think it’s a poem. It’s a—it’s an offhand remark at best.”

“I’m surprised at you, Larry,” says Jim. A branch slams against the window, yanked from a tree. We all jump and look outside. It’s a blank white page out there.

“Looks like Christmas is coming,” Jim remarks. He’s mighty jocular today, considering his nemesis Schofield arrives in two hours. After complimenting Todd on his “adventuresome” new approach, Jim extols us all to remember the Schofield reading at seven and lets us go early. He tosses me his car keys and tells me to be careful on my way to the bus stop to pick up the man himself.

“You want Todd to go with you?” he asks before I can leave. But Todd can’t come with me, because Todd was the first out the door.

How would I feel if I were Todd? I’d be ecstatic to have Jim’s approval. I wouldn’t care what a fuckwit like me had to say
about his adventuresome new style, but he’s clearly pissed. I’m pissed myself. I clutch Jim’s keys, pressing the metal into the pads of my fingers, wondering why I should be feeling as pissed off as I am. It’s Jim. And Todd. Jim called Todd’s poem “muscular,” is the problem, which I thought was what my poems were. “Deadwood,” for example.
Cock your dead wood at some other sucker
. Okay, perhaps it was as much an offhand remark as Todd’s. Perhaps I did write it when I was blind drunk. Perhaps I haven’t been able to come up with anything as “muscular” since.

The question that’s really bothering me: Are both Todd’s and my poems good or are they bad? I think Todd’s was bad, Jim thought it was good. And Jim thought mine were good, too.

How do you ever know for sure? And how does Jim decide, anyway? What criteria does he use? Does he have some kind of chart?

Another problem. I have read and enjoyed the work of Dermot Schofield. I wanted to be able to have something to talk about with him when I picked him up and brought him to check in at the Crowfeather, and so, confident I would find much to disdain within its pages, I checked out a copy of
Malignant Cove
from the library. Much to my chagrin, I thought it was great. A little bit like Al Purdy, but more lonely and slowed-down, without as much storytelling. I got lost in it. Maybe not every single poem—not like
Blinding White
, but then, what is? There were some incredible lines.

One poem was just this list of words, and Schofield stating whether or not he felt they were “man” words or “woman” words. Not feminine or masculine, he emphasized, like in the French, but man and woman. But it was clear the poem was about something more than that—not about man and woman in general but about a certain man and a specific woman, together and separate. He made it feel intimate
somehow, this list of words. Like a peek into someone’s bedroom.
Basket
was a woman word, he said—although that seems obvious enough.
Stone
was also a woman word, but
rock
, he said, was a man word.
Sleet
was a man word, he said, and
deaf. Road
was a woman word, “counter to expectation,” the poem said, and
frame
. And then it ended with words that couldn’t be categorized, according to Schofield.
Rib
, he said, and
water
couldn’t be categorized. They were all so weirdly arbitrary that it was beautiful, the poem. And it all lined up somehow—it made sense. I want to ask him how he did that.

And then she turns
, the poem ended in a strange, two-line stanza.
And when she turns, it falls to dream
.

Of course, I had to keep reminding myself that
Malignant Cove
is, as Jim says in his review, “a mucus-like sheen of mendacity, glossing over the fundamental bad faith at the centre of the poet’s existence.” Lies, okay, but lies well told—I’ll give Schofield that. Beautiful lies, in some instances.

In any event, Jim has cautioned me to steel myself for an encounter with a complete and total asshole, and that I have.

Driving downtown, I’m depressed to see that all the posters it took me an entire day to staple to every telephone pole in Timperly are in the process of being ripped to shreds by the wind. The snow is too dry and falling too fast to melt them off, but if it turns to freezing rain, as the weathermen warn it might, they’ll all degrade into pulp. They’ve been up a week, but the problem is they contain directions to the Social Sciences building, where the reading is being held. Anyone coming from outside of town won’t have any idea where to go.

All week I’ve been carrying posters in my satchel, shoving handfuls of them at every warm body I came across, even
those who protested I’d already given them a bunch. At one point, Slaughter threatened to shove them all down my throat and up my ass simultaneously if I brought another poster anywhere near him. Sherrie nicely offered to help, so I gave her half to post in the girls’ residences and bathrooms. Todd, however, never offered to help at all—it could be because he was miffed that Jim had bestowed upon me sole responsibility for promoting the Schofield reading.

Anyway, as big a pain in the ass as it was, the posters were useful in a couple of ways. It gave me an excuse to talk to Brenda L. (I gave her two posters, one to put up at Carl’s and one to take home and consider “a personal invitation”), and it gave me an excuse, at long last, to get in touch with cousin Janet.

The much-avoided encounter went thus: Ring, ring. Hi, Janet! It’s your long-lost cousin Lawrence here. Larry! How’s your year going? I was going to call to see if you wanted to head home on the ferry together. Why, that sounds great, Janet, what a coincidence. I was just calling to find out when you were planning on leaving, as a matter of fact. Since you’ll be here, I’d like to invite you to the literary reading of the century … and so forth. The upshot of our little talk was that Janet invited me over for tea. On the same day I had to put up posters. It would be, I thought, a good way to take a break from putting up the posters. And having to put up the posters would be a good excuse not to have to stay at Janet’s too long.

Janet answered the door, filling the frame. Plump, pink, and aglow with impending motherhood. I hadn’t expected it to be so manifest, her situation. She hugged me, to my horror. The Campbells and Humphrieses are not known for public displays of affection. Her breasts pillowed against me. Her stomach too.

“Here’s some posters,” I said, shoving them at her.

“It has been way too long,” said Janet. “This is stupid, with the two of us living in a town of this size.”

“I know,” I said.

“I have beets for you that have been sitting here since September!”

“Beets?”

“Yes, beets. Mom and Dad brought me over a shitload of beets from the garden and told me to give you a bunch … I’m so sorry, they’re out in the porch.”

“Don’t worry about it, Janet,” I called, but she’d disappeared out the back with the handful of posters. Janet has what must be the greatest student apartment in town. I’ve always hoped to inherit it once she graduates. It’s the main floor of a small house with a front and a back yard. Her little old landlady lives in a bigger house next door and charges Janet next to nothing. They are dear friends, reportedly. The little old landlady bakes for Janet every week.

“Here you go.” Janet emerged, now posterless but with a plastic Co-op bag of beets from three months ago.

“Thanks,” I said, taking it.

“I guess your folks are worried you’re not eating your vegetables.”

“Like I’m going to start with beets,” I said.

Janet furrowed her brow, near-insulted. “You can always pickle them.”

“Oh, right,” I replied in all sincerity. I dutifully imagined myself standing in my bachelor’s kitchen stirring a cauldron of purple, bubbling gore, pickling jars lined up across the counter. Shades of my mother and Grandma Lydia in their ruffly white aprons at summer’s end.

It wasn’t too bad a time overall. Janet made tea and served me butter tarts, oat cakes, and raisin pie, all courtesy of her landlady.
I sucked it all up the way underfed college boys will. Janet did too. She got up and ran to get ice cream to put on everything at one point. Afterward, I’m buzzing on sugar, and the posters seemed to fly up onto the telephone poles all by themselves.

While it never occurred to me that I might have anything in common with Janet, it did occur to me that afternoon that I probably had more in common with her than with anyone else in my family. We made giddy fun of Grandma Lydia for a while—which is kind of a conversational autopilot we fall into whenever we get thrown together—and then mocked Cousin Wayne, who has been managing the Hollywood Horrors since last year and apparently fancies himself a real businessman these days. Nothing was said about the contents of Janet’s uterus, but I did convince her to come to the reading and bring as many people with her as she could. We made a plan to hop a bus and catch the noon ferry from Cape Tormentine a week from tomorrow. I called my parents that night to let them know how diligent I had been, looking in on my cousin at such a busy time of year.