A Moveable Famine (10 page)

“The high ones die. He chose the frozen Mississippi.”

A former Iowa faculty member, Berryman had taught Lawson and Coulette. Ridge told me the first sentence was a quote from the
Dream Songs.
He said there was something proprietary, melodramatic, pious and finally pathetically peripheral about Gee’s note. It firmly established a hierarchy—the high ones—and pitched the life of poetry as a competitive sport. This made Pryor, he said, a messenger from the gods.

Harvey and Pryor walked around Iowa City together, went to movies together and Pryor sometimes met visiting poets at the Cedar Rapids airport and brought them to their hotels, joining the poet and Harvey for dinner. He applied for jobs by the dozen. I ran into him one day as he walked to the post office carrying applications to renowned Ivies as well as to Mountain Empire Community College and Marion Military Institute. He fanned them out for me, also showing letters to the poets he continued to write, complimenting their poems.

“Why are you writing to Lucien Stryk?” I asked.

“To thank him for his book.”

“He sent you his book?”

“No, to thank him for writing it,” he said, twitching the corner of his mouth, as if I were really stupid.

Ridge advised me not to bother applying, as I had no book. He said to wait until I had a chance at a good job instead of a lousy one.

I mentioned this to Pryor who said, “I have to. I have a wife.”

I walked into The Deadwood with Ridge as Joe Cleary roared out for another drink. “Beam ditch!” Jim Beam and water. Cleary, who resembled a toothsome bulldog, introduced me to Ray Carver. Ray furrowed his brow and made sure to get my name and what I did. This was one of his qualities people loved. He and Cleary were arguing about Wallace Stegner, Carver’s teacher at Stanford. When Ray liked a writer, he called him “a dandy,” and when Cleary scoffed at Stegner, Ray moved on to Lawrence Durrell, another of his favorites. He quoted, “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind,” saying, “That line sings, it sings!” Cleary said, “It stinks, it stinks!” I couldn’t reconcile Ray’s love for high rhetoric with his own spare style.

When the bars closed, I often rode with Ray in his old car, empty bottles rattling on the floor. One morning, he called to ask if we had hit anything the night before. I said we hadn’t, and he said, “I don’t know what could have happened, but the whole side of my car is smashed.” Then he chuckled, saying, “This morning, it was all Cheever and I could do to hail a cab to the liquor store.”

Ray asked me to have dinner with him at the restaurant faculty went to for special occasions, the Hoover House in West Branch, named for Herbert Hoover, Iowa’s only president. We were served by girls in black dresses with white aprons and hats. Our waitress told us that we should be sure to come back in summer for Hooverfest, a day of singing, fireworks and softball. Ray expressed sincere interest, and then ordered two house concoctions made with coconut that Lawson had recommended. When we finished, the waitress asked if we were ready to order. Ray said we wanted to have a drink first, and she said, “You just had a drink.”

“That was a drink?” Ray said.

We began many rounds of Jack Daniel’s while Ray told stories of bad restaurants. He particularly hated a place in Oregon. After he and his friend had each ordered a whole chicken, the friend pulled out a bottle of George Dickel and filled their glasses. The waitress said they had to get their whiskey from the bar. She told them again when she brought their dinners. She finally called the manager who stood next to the table and told them to put the bottle away and order from the waitress. Ray said that his friend got angry and threw his chicken right onto the manager’s shoes. The man walked away, and Ray ended his story with the words, “You know, the chicken stayed on the rug all night. That’s the kind of place it was.”

Ray said he was flush from beating Lawson at poker. “Drink up! Drink up,” he said, lifting glass after glass to his glowing face. We had the specialty of the house, grilled turkey legs, and our plates were piled with tiny long bones, like games of pick-up sticks. After coffee and several cognacs, the check arrived and Ray made a grave expression, saying, “John, looks like we’ll have to walk this one.” Then his face contorted with drunken laughter, his eyes disappearing into folds of skin. “You go to the men’s room and wait a few minutes. By that time I’ll be in the car.” Before I had a chance to respond, Ray was gone. For a big man, he moved fast. I had a sick feeling as I went to the restroom and read the front page of the
West Branch Times
pinned above the urinal, a story about a man named John Doe who hung himself in the home he shared with his sister on Avenue Street. When I finished, I peered into the bar as if looking for someone, then slithered out the door. Ray pulled away with that serious face, as if he were escaping a great wrong. I felt, crazily, that if we were caught, he could give a credible excuse to the police, the manager, or anyone in authority, a feeling that being with Ray imparted, a feeling helped considerably by enormous amounts of alcohol.

One afternoon, I found the thrift shop Ridge mentioned and bought a black shirt for fifty cents. I put it on and tossed my old flannel into the bin for donations. The shiny cloth gave me a new feeling, a feeling of being almost cool. Passing Donnelly’s, a dark bar in the center of downtown, I stopped in. I asked for an Olympia beer. It had just arrived from the northwest and ads for
Oly,
as it was called, constantly floated out of radios, accompanied by the sound of gushing Washington state rivers. Two farm hands at the bar heard my order, and one said to the other, “Oly, Oly, Oly. I say just set a glass of water in front of him and he won’t know the difference.”

Charlie, the bartender, called out, “One democrat!” and Harold Donnelly poured. That was their name for a regular beer. They called short beers republicans.

As he placed the glass down, Charlie said, “Hippies and heebs, hippies and heebs. That’s all we get anymore. Here come two now.”

Two professorial-looking men took stools near me. One had shoulder-length hair and tiny, rectangular glasses. A scanty goatee wisped around the other’s chin.

“Two small beers.”

“What did I tell you?” Charlie whispered to me before calling for two republicans.

I was starting to realize why no one from the workshop came there, when a truck driver my age sat next to me and ordered a vodka tonic. He had come from York, Pennsylvania, the barbell capital of the world, and his payload held tons of weightlifting equipment. He asked me what kind of work I did. I said I was in school. He asked what I was studying. I said poetry. He asked why, a smile on his lips. I said I wanted to learn to write it. He asked a good question—then what? I said that if I were lucky I might be able to publish a book. I had O’Hara’s
Lunch Poems
in my pocket and showed it to him. He held it as if it were the Rosetta stone and a poem I had been working on fell out.

“ ‘Blank Street Murmur,’ ” he said. “Is this a real poem, or did you just make it up?”

I said I made it up and it was a real poem, but maybe not a good one.

“If it’s real, why didn’t you use a real street name?”

Another good question. I had poeticized the title to a fare-thee-well. “I’m not sure,” I said.

“I don’t see how you can get this,” and he held the white page, “into this,” and he bounced the book in the air.

“I know,” I said. “It does seem impossible.”

A voice from behind me said, “I know you’re in the workshop, but we haven’t met.” I turned to see Belinda Schaeffer holding a couple of books to her chest like a schoolgirl. I put out my hand and introduced myself.

“Mind if I join you?”

The truck driver stared at my good luck.

She said, “I liked the poem about your neighborhood. Especially the title, ‘Poor Everyone.’ ” She sat next to me, indifferently placing her books on the puddles and wet streaks along the bar.

“Thank you,” I said. “Ridge thinks I should make it my thesis title.”

The two professors began laughing hysterically. The bearded one said, “How about
Suicide Pact
?” I spun toward them.

The other said, “That’s great! What do you think of
End It All
?”

“Puddle-Jumper
!” the bearded one yelled.

Belinda said, “Those morons. Always inventing names for cocktails. And they hardly drink.” I recovered from thinking they were mocking my thesis title.

Charlie knew Belinda and, in a courtly manner, he put a glass of white wine before her.

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said, and she said it delicately. Everything she did was refined, calm and graceful, but the careless way she placed her books on the bar, almost recklessly, gave me hope that perfection was not something she demanded from others. She might tolerate someone like me, common as well as harmless, like a water stain.

Charlie beamed at Belinda and hovered across the bar for a few seconds. One of the field-workers cursed and complained loudly about the large head on his beer, sending Charlie to the pages of the
Press-Citizen,
and causing the truck driver to leave.

Belinda drank nonstop and talked nonstop, unlike in class where she was completely reserved. Her father was an entrepreneur who bought tainted wholesale food products unfit for humans, and sold them to farmers to feed livestock. She agreed with me that this was not great, but she said he was a good father. She took a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and insisted on buying. She started gesturing with her hands, but the wilder her gestures, the softer her voice, a paradoxical combination. Sometimes she stopped talking, resting her hands in the lap of her dress and staring at the ceiling, so that her eyes rolled up in her head. After four drinks, she told me how unhappy she was and how lonely. She said she usually had affairs with married men, and had just realized this kept her from true emotional investment. She said she had deprived herself of real love in this way, and now she was ready to find an honest guy. I knew right then I was that guy. I knew she picked me because she was ready for someone trustworthy and responsible. I would be faithful and guard her delicate bearing from the crass and shallow world, the workshop world, the world of Donnelly’s and beyond. If she stayed with me for the afternoon, her feelings could very well carry over into the night, the next morning, the day after, and the day after that. And through her inspiration, my poetry might grow and possibly rise to match her beauty.

I hardly listened as she went on about her romantic woes, her mistakes and lessons learned. I was preparing for our life together, when she shook me from my reverie by turning and almost shouting, “But why am I telling you all this?” Then she leaned back on her stool as if to get a better, clearer perspective on me, and stared for a few long seconds before saying, “Because you look like a
priest,
that’s why!”

At that moment, I felt like a priest, and I might as well have been a priest, as Belinda rose, left our little confessional and walked into the sunshine without another word.

“Out of Order
!” The professors were still at it, and I was totally drunk, and not from the beer alone. Charlie came over and said, “She’s a beauty. And a real lady too.” He poured me another, rapping his knuckles on the bar to signal it was on the house.

Donnelly yelled, “Beautiful is as beautiful does!”

“You got that right,” Charlie said.

“How about
Dog Bite
?” the bearded professor asked his colleague as they called for two more republicans.

“No,
Fang
! I’ll have a
Fang
!”

I staggered out and walked home to Kim and, as I walked, I repeated the first words that came to my mind. They were from Keats:

I have been half in love with easeful death . . .

I was slurring them aloud. I felt I could cry, but crying would be too easy. This was an ache that nothing could erase, except lying down, and not on a bed, but under the earth. I said Keats’s line again and again along Clinton Street until I started to mock those words, until I was laughing hysterically, trying to stop when I passed other students, but still smiling, and then I thought of Belinda, remembered our time together, and beamed with the frail hope that a life with her might still be possible.

Kim had made a chocolate cake to celebrate our first month together. I leaned against the doorframe.

“Where were you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I am,” I said. “I went to Donnelly’s.”

“Nobody goes there,” Kim said. “It’s an old man’s bar.” She dabbed a knife at the cake, frosting a bald spot.

“I must be getting old then,” I said, and went to the bathroom and vomited.

Kim helped me undress and into bed. When I woke in the evening, she was in the chair next to me, reading
Narrative Intellection in the Decameron.
On the stand were the latest copy of
Playboy,
and a cup of chicken soup.

“My mother always got my father the new issue and made him soup when he was sick. Of course, this is from a can,” she said.

I finished the soup, guilty about Belinda. I hoisted myself up and said, “How about we get some dinner at the Maid-Rite?”

“Then we can come back and have the cake!” Kim said brightly.

I lifted my black shirt from the chair, and noticed a little white label sewn into the collar. I squinted at the tiny print that spelled out the name of the previous owner,
Father Ignatius.
Kim asked about the shirt and I told her I got it at the thrift shop, but as we went on our way toward the Maid-Rite’s loose meat sandwiches, the shirt, the label, and Belinda Schaeffer’s remark returned me once more to my anxious and average self.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

KIM JOINS THE FORCE—A CYLINDER WITH A CONE—POWER FAILURE—POEM IN THREE PARTS—A BIG DREAM—APATHY