Good on Paper (6 page)

Benny led me to the back of the store, where he found the folding table and opened it in front of the section marked Victimization Manuals (books you and I might call Self-Help).

She’s a graphic artist, he said, still whispering. Works exclusively on billboards.

Must not bring in a lot, I said, trying not to smile.

She’s between grants, he said. The neck of his Rainbow Gathering T-shirt was frayed; he had a spot of dried tomato on his cheek, above his beard. So! Shira! he said. Nice to see you! What’ve you been up to?

Temping in Jersey. I’m too slow to type in Manhattan! I said, laughing.

Your parents must be proud!

I stared.

It’s been a while. Sorry! Really! I forgot!

How long has it been? I asked, though I knew.

A year? he asked, as if astonished.

Did he resent being dumped? No, Benny wasn’t a hider. Everything he thought, everything he felt was writ large on his face: he was a billboard artist of the heart.

He asked about Andi. She was about to start third grade, I said. Her current ambition: to be a White House intern, so she too could be on TV every night.

Benny looked at me blankly: he wasn’t one for the evening news, apparently.

I see Ahmad now and then, he said. He single-handedly sustains my Nancy Drew section.

I laughed.

He’s greatly interested in the mystery of things, I said.

I assume you’re here because …

Yes! I said. He called!

•

Just a sec, he said, returning a kitten to Marla, who lay regal and sleepy-eyed in her Simon & Schuster box. She stood, and arched her back, and kissed Benny’s hand, apparently uninterested in her prodigal chick, then followed him to his seat and leapt onto his lap. Her purr was prodigious.

Benny asked for the skinny. I gave it to him,
Reader’s Digest
–style:
Vita Nuova
, Romei’s strange requirement that I finish by the end of the year.

Shira, that’s amazing! he said when I was done, looking at me in wonder, as if he thought this miracle somehow my doing. Which, given his belief in karma, he probably did. We must drink to your success! Ginger beer?

He put Marla gently on the ground. Offended, she returned to her box.

Libations! he exclaimed when he returned.

L’chaim
, I added gamely.

I assume Romei is paying you?

A lot! I said.

Good! You can sponsor
Son of Gilgul
! It’s reincarnating: next issue by Y2K.

I hadn’t realized
Gilgul
was dead!

You’d know if you were still sending me stories,
ma cherie
.

I didn’t bother explaining that I’d stopped writing. Ahmad had despised my last story (“Domino Effect,” about Jonah); Jonah’s sister Jeanette stopped talking to me because of it. I asked instead about the magazine. Benny clasped his hands behind his head and extended his long, jean-clad legs into the aisle.

I had a few lean years. My board forced me to close.

That’s the fate of the gilgul, right? The soul eternally reincarnating?

Until we get it right. Some of us are going to be here a very long time.

I’m sure your gilgul’s in great shape.

Humph, he said. So Romei’s an interesting guy, huh?

I accepted the change of subject.

Imagine, I said, giving up your homeland and language to write
terza rima
in Roma!

Exactly! Benny said. Prose writers change languages all the time—Nabokov, Conrad …

Ionesco, Tristan Tzara, if we stick to his countrymen. But poets? It isn’t done!

Except by Romei.

I assume he was fleeing censorship and communism, I said.

Or the country that killed his parents, Benny said pensively, staring into the middle distance, which at People of the Book meant the shelf for Games People Play.

Of course, I said, remembering. Benny’s father had been a Russian POW who’d ended up hunting down Nazis after the war. He wasn’t a nice man, may he rest in peace. Benny’s mother had escaped to the U.S. in 1939 after the murder of her first husband, whom she hadn’t particularly liked. She’d been a dancer; in America she kept books for her brother-in-law’s
schmatta
business. The family she left behind died, like most families left behind.

It makes sense he doesn’t write in Romanian, I said. He would have been an imperialist poet
non grata
in Romania. No one would have published his books there. Who’s going to read poetry in Romanian, if Romanians in Romania can’t?

Paul Celan wrote in German, Benny added, but German was his mother tongue.

Right! I said.

But still, he said, imagine!

We sipped our drinks, imagining.

So what do you know about his project? This would be his first since, what?

Nonsense Syllables
.

And his first “story.”

Yes, I said.

What is this
Vita Nuova
business?

Early work of Dante, I said. Written in 1294, before the
Comedy
, before his exile from Florence. Really, you don’t know it?

Benny laughed. Not my cup of tea, exactly.

Vita Nuova
traces the evolution of Dante’s love for Beatrice and his poetic response to that love. He includes relevant poems, which he explicates ad nauseum.

For example?

For example: I was thinking of the blessed Beatrice when I swooned and had a vision of the blessed Beatrice and out popped a sonnet about the blessed Beatrice, this one here, in which I swoon, have a vision, and write a sonnet about the blessed Beatrice. Story, poem, explication.

Benny laughed again.

My case is resting, he said. But it’s not just poems and explication—you said it’s a story?

After a fashion, I said. Not quite as gripping as the
Divine Comedy
, but it has something of a “hero’s journey” structure.

I described to Benny what I considered to be
Vita Nuova
’s mythic structure (but refrained from offering a copy of the essay in which I elaborated this theory): Call, Threshold, Deception, Muse, Death, Test, and Return. The call identifies Dante as the ur-hero of all story: Adam called by Eve to taste; Sam Spade called by the blonde to solve a mystery. Sometimes the hero is reluctant: happy in his easy chair, he tries to avoid the call, he hides out or runs away. Odysseus feigns madness to avoid the draft; Rick tells Ilsa he’s a sideliner.

The hero eventually has to come around, though, or there can be no story. He makes his commitment, crosses the threshold, and thrusts himself into story, where, aided by mentors, inspired by beauties, deceived by tricksters, challenged by opponents, he makes allies, surmounts obstacles, faces death, and is reborn to face his final test. Victorious, he returns to Kansas bringing exactly what his people need—the elixir, the golden crown. Sometimes he also gets the girl. Not something I made up, I added.

But eccentric when applied to Dante, Benny said.

Not commonplace, I agreed. Especially when you consider that Dante’s hero battles sin, not dragons.

What kind of sin? Something juicy?

Just your garden variety, live-your-life-you’re-bound-to-sin kind of thing.

So young Mr. Dante is a hero in this book about poetry. Can a book about poetry have a hero?

He
is
a hero, in his own mind! He’s called by love to be a poet, though of course he loves from afar. He writes poems, which of course come up short because nothing is good enough for Beatrice. He tries to contemplate her perfections, can’t always manage it, gets advice, the advice changes—then Beatrice dies, and he’s thrown off course—maybe he even despairs. He finally has a vision of Beatrice in heaven—an ineffable vision—that sets him up for life—aesthetically and, we assume, spiritually. That’s enough to make him a hero, right? A man on a lonely journey toward the good, trying to live his life right? A pilgrim hero!

Coming soon to a theater near you!

Hah! Though his victory is just as inevitable as that of any dragon slayer. Redemption is always the light at the end of the tunnel, isn’t it? Even when Dante strays, you know his narrative will keep him on the straight and narrow …

Sadly, we no longer believe in such a thing, Benny replied.

The straight-line narrative to salvation has been discredited, yes.

By Romei, among others. So what’s Romei want with it? He doesn’t go in much for story.

Or tradition. And now he’s taking on the Big Guy.

If you take on a Big Guy, you take on his Big Work, no?

Right, I said, the
Divine Comedy
. You admit you’ve reached the middle of your life’s journey, and you survey the terrain.

Romei’s hardly at the middle of his life’s journey! What is he, seventy by now?

At least seventy-five! I said.

So he’s reached the end of his life’s journey, Benny said. You say
Vita Nuova
was written by a young man about recent events, but Romei, being old, writes about
temps perdus
.

Yes! I said. Dante writes with pre-exilic promise, Romei from the
perspective of been-there-done-that. Another thing: Dante is nothing if not certain—life has meaning and he knows what it is.

Lucky man! Benny said.

But Romei’s made a career out of ridiculing nostalgia for meaning. What will he do now? Stick to his guns, reject Dante’s straight-line narrative to salvation? Or has age placed him in the trenches, where all sinners cry out to be saved?

Silence.

Benny?

Do you believe in forgiveness? he asked. What do you think it is?

Forgiveness? I said. No idea!

Not your favorite subject.

You could say that.

We sipped our ginger beer.

Why do you think Romei’s going public? Benny asked. He’s always been so private.

We talked about this for a while. Okay, more than a while. We wondered about the same things, then found additional things to wonder about.

At one point, Benny sent Marie to get vegan donuts from Cuppa Joe’s; she came back empty-handed: all out, she said, lacking the resources, apparently, to find an alternative.

We didn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion about the mysteries of Romei, but our discussion had been more than satisfactory. When I left, I promised to stay in touch. Benny bowed low to kiss me goodbye, his long beard tickling my neck.

I must be a freak, I thought as I started crossing the street: I’d found our conversation arousing. Had Benny felt it too, the bodily effect of two minds meeting?

Wait! he cried, and waved me back to the store. I blushed as he had Marie credit my card thirty percent.
Gilgul
alumna, he explained to Marie, whose fingernails, I noticed, were speckled green to match her hair and her eyes, which were empty and flat. She was not as young as I’d thought—in her mid-thirties, at least. I found myself wondering if Benny was seeing her, much as I’d wondered about Gilda, the tapestry artist who’d stolen his stock of erotica and the contents of his
cash register when she’d left, or Yasmeen, the daughter of a sheikh, who wore a veil, though she hoped for a career on the stage.

I decided no, he couldn’t be involved with a sullen, drugged-out fraud of an artist. Who dressed like a child. And was willing to deface books. Could he?

9

Y2K POETRY

We always dressed for Friday Night Dinner: on this evening, Ahmad wore the smoking jacket I’d gotten him at Goodwill, while Andi wore her Pretty Princess backpack and tutu. For my part, I’d brushed my hair and put on some Docksiders. Tonight, because we were celebrating, we went out. Andi requested the China Doll: she enjoyed practicing the Chinese she’d learned at Chinese-Spanish-French quadrilingual preschool. She also knew she could make an entire meal there out of pancakes.

You’re looking radiant, my dear, Ahmad said, as we walked over. I think the absence of Aurora-driving, gold-toothpick-toting flavor salesmen agrees with you.

That was six jobs ago, I said.

Still, he said.

It’s the glow of clean living, I said.

It’s a shtupping glow, he replied. Who is it?

Andi was a few steps ahead of us, skipping and singing a science song.

No one! I said. I’m not shtupping anyone!

Shira Greene, it is not acceptable to keep things from your oldest friend. You know I live vicariously through your adventures.

Ahmad sometimes said outrageous things, and sometimes he believed them: I had few adventures these days and rarely discussed them, whereas he had adventures galore.

No adventure, I said, but I did see Benny today—and I told him with increasing animation about the Great Wall of Poetry, the numb-nut salesgirl who couldn’t buy donuts, Benny’s incisive commentary, how fun it was to talk about books, and didn’t he think Benny cute in his own rabbinical way, for a guy with long legs and gray, patchy eyebrows?

Benny? he asked. Bookstore Benny? Careful!—and he grabbed my arm to stop me walking into traffic.

Oops, I said. Andi, of course, had crossed safely and was staring into the window of Cohn’s Cones.