I Regret Everything (10 page)

My sleep was broken. I had the dream I dreamt the night before I met Spaulding. Again I was on the beach at Montauk attacked by the Minotaur and as before I fought back and beat the monster to death. But when I woke up this time the operative emotion was not guilt. It was rage. At the world. At myself.

There is a school of thought that says every character in a dream is another facet of the dreamer. The Minotaur dwelt at the center of a labyrinth where he was eventually slain by the hero, Theseus. Was I Theseus or the Minotaur? And if I was the Minotaur, was I trying to kill some part of me over and over?

T
hree mornings a week I rode the train into the city with my father. The train car was as quiet as Dr. Margaret's waiting room. Edward P was either working or buried in the
Wall Street Journal
. After Did you get a good night's sleep? and Are you taking your meds? we didn't talk much. At the office I would sort mail, go on caffeine runs for the attorneys and summer associates, and spend endless hours in the copy room sacrificing entire forests to bound volumes of briefs.

The other summer interns were all super-ambitious college kids so I mostly kept to myself, ate lunch alone, and whenever possible snuck away to read
Middlemarch
—Why couldn't Dorothea Brooke leave that horrible marriage? I know it was the 19th century, but still!—or scribble and revise poems. When I would walk past Mr. Best's office, I'd say hello the rare times the door was open and he'd wave when he saw me but I didn't go in and he didn't invite me. He seemed preoccupied with something and I wasn't going to ask.

In Connecticut Marshall was my sole distraction and ally since Cody was away at sports camp. He was in rehearsals for a local summer theater production of a play about global warming and when he was around I helped him learn his lines. Sometimes we'd work in his garden. Under the pounding sun, flowers were planted and weeds pulled. My fingernails were a mess and my neck got sunburned because I would forget to put sunscreen on, but the time outdoors with Marshall made the trees seem less forbidding until finally I could sit in a chair by myself in the backyard and read and write like a person.

The poem Mr. Best sent me was . . . what can I say . . . intimidating? I printed a copy and carried it in my wallet. At the office, when I told him what I thought about it, he thanked me and nodded. I didn't want to be too forward. It was enough that I forced him to take me up to Westchester that rainy day, so after giving his contact information to Professor Davenport I decided to temporarily back off.

That weekend in Connecticut, I baked a white cake. All of us had dinner together on Sunday night and we ate my cake for dessert. Katrina only had one bite because she was about to start a cleanse and was convinced the sugar would aggravate her system but my effort was appreciated. To my surprise (I can admit when I'm a bitch), she was not the termagant my crazed boarding school imagination had turned her into. She made sure the refrigerator had stuff I liked (stinky cheese, edamame, ginger ale), took me to get a cut and color at her place with her guy, and was not remotely an ogre.

The lower doses seemed to be working. Lines, fragments, half-formed ideas poured out of me and filled notebooks. The workshop met just before the July Fourth weekend and I wanted to read. The story of getting locked up in a psych ward was oversharing and I needed to send a signal that while I might not be the most fun person, I wasn't mental either. To accomplish this I read a couple of new poems. One, about sailing with my brother Gully when a wildly flapping mainsail knocked me off the boat, was actually kind of goofy. Another was about being surrounded by walls covered with the faces of popes. Everyone was surprised to learn I wasn't Catholic but intrigued when I said the poem was about male privilege. And then there was “Addicted to Beauty.”

 

Beauty in the Rue Morgue,

Beauty in the Cathedral

Beauty, She Wrote

The Simple Art of Beauty

Beauty on the Orient Express

Why are we addicted to Beauty?

 

The latter one got a gratifying response, particularly from the girls.

The classroom wasn't air-conditioned and we baked like croquettes. All of the windows were open and a fan that could barely be bothered to swivel lobbed dust motes lazily in our direction. Mr. Davenport was eviscerating a short story Lucas had written about a family vacation to Howe Caverns when Mr. Best strolled in and nodded deferentially to the class. This was as welcome as a sea breeze. We had been told there was going to be a special guest that day but Mr. Best and I hadn't exchanged more than a few Good mornings in the past week. He looked at me with that smile that takes you in and comforts but at the same time creates an invisible barrier. His summer suit was freshly pressed, his tasteful tie carefully knotted, shoes buffed. The entire presentation reflected a dignified cool to which the rest of us could only aspire.

Mr. Davenport concluded his demolition of Lucas then invited Mr. Best to preside from a chair next to his at the front of the room. When he settled in Professor Davenport announced:

—We are very honored to have a famous poet with us today. Mr. Best laughed when he heard that and said Hardly.
Hardly.
It was the perfect response.

—My name is Jeremy Best, he said. I publish under the name Jinx Bell.

The class nodded like this was the coolest thing they'd ever heard. A couple of them probably started to come up with pen names of their own. The professor wanted to talk about “The Valley of Akbar.”

—What drew you to the subject matter?

—There was a time when a poet was publicly engaged in the life of his nation, Mr. Best said. When people paid attention, when poetry was relevant. By writing about subjects like terrorism, torture, militancy, militarism, and America's role in the post-9/11 world I'm trying to connect the art form to our time. Actually, that's bull. I just write about what interests me. I don't know that poets will ever have a public role again but for me poetry is something that must be read closely because the finest work demands a radical empathy. What do I mean by that? Because a poem is a distillation of what the poet thinks about a particular subject it requires the reader to engage with it in the deepest way possible and to locate the aspect of the poem that speaks to her in the deepest way. This takes a degree of awareness that some people aren't willing to commit to. That's modern life. There are probably apps that can help them. But if we can get people to read poetry at all it can have an effect on how they communicate, make them more conscious of what they think and say. That part's not bull.

Mr. Davenport nodded. The workshop nodded collectively. What else do aspiring artists want to hear but that their efforts have meaning?

—Look at Abraham Lincoln. He thought like a poet. Mr. Best stepped to the whiteboard at the front of the room and quickly wrote,

 

That from these honored dead we take

Increased devotion to that cause for which

They gave the last full measure of

Devotion.

That with determination we resolve

That these dead shall not have died in vain

That this nation under God will be

Born anew

And on this day we vow that government of the

People by the people for the people

Shall not perish from

The Earth.

 

He timed the words by clapping his hands and the rhythm in which he read them to us made them physically penetrate our bodies the way a good song will. The hushed classroom had become a secular church. No one thought about how hot it was or that no air was circulating. Mr. Davenport stared at Mr. Best. The kids stared at him. The words were Lincoln's but Mr. Best's rendering took wing and with him we were airborne.

—I don't know if anyone noticed, but I did a little rewriting. Lincoln's words are better, but I'm making it more consistently rhythmic. You see, he continued, it's not a poem but it scans like one and these are some of the most familiar words in all of American history. But if Lincoln really understood meter, he wouldn't have dropped the word “and” into “of the people by the people and for the people” since it ruins it. That extra word takes you out of the rhythm. See, “people—by the—people—for the—people” is perfect iambic pentameter with an enjambment that rolls into Shall Not Perish From The Earth. Do you know what enjambment is?

No one breathed. If Mr. Best was really rewriting President Lincoln the class didn't have the slightest problem with it.

—It's when the thought of a line of poetry doesn't end with the line but continues to the next line, all right? You don't need me to tell you that that's gorgeous, poetical language. Or look at the Second Inaugural.

Here Lucas piped up:

—With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right . . .

The frayed tee shirt he wore heightened the effect of the words. Lucas blushed but when he finished the class broke into applause and Mr. Best clapped the most enthusiastically of all. In that moment, Mr. Best looked more comfortable than I'd ever seen him. His face radiant with Lincoln's language, at the response to it in the classroom, at the pure pleasure that words could elicit. When he looked at me and grinned, I was done.

—President Lincoln is all well and good, Mr. Davenport said, but what about your own work. What are you working on now? Anything you'd care to share?

Mr. Best hesitated. The class leaned forward as if tugged by an invisible thread. It was easy to see how much everyone respected him. He hadn't been there more than twenty minutes and already the room was crowded with disciples. Everyone waited. The only sound was the quiet whirring of the balky fan.

—These are notes, he said. This isn't a poem, just shards of language that might coalesce into something. Or not.

Maybe I imagined it but I thought Mr. Best looked at me before he began to read.

—Sylphlike sign from swirling stars. Nubile harbinger of exaltation. Sanguine tigress. Devilish herald of destruction. Dawn of my demise. You fueled my filaments with a concatenation of bad thoughts, bad behavior, and bad tidings. And a jiving jazz quartet.

He paused for a moment and then looked at Mr. Davenport.

—I'm not exactly Abe Lincoln, he said. The class laughed. Everyone was wishing Mr. Best were the teacher.

—Fueled my filaments is excellent, Mr. Davenport remarked.

—Those are some lines I've been playing around with. It's like an artist's sketch. And then I'll refine it. I have no idea what “jiving jazz quartet” is doing there. It's an anachronism but I like the way the words flow.

Dylan asked what concatenation meant.

—It's a series of interdependent things or events, Mr. Best said. And you bring up a good point. Ten-dollar words. SAT words. Some people think they're pretentious but an unexpected word choice is a good way to pull the reader's attention in. They're fun to play with. And the people who think they're ostentatious can go fuck themselves.

When the laughter died down, Mr. Davenport asked if Mr. Best had one piece of advice for everyone in this room. Mr. Best thought a moment.

—Buddhists have a ceremony called Life Release, he said. They'll go down to a dock, buy a bucket of baitfish, and release them into the water. They do this to earn merit, to have good karma. Now picture a fish releasing a bucketful of Buddhists. That's what a good writer does. Avoids clichés. Perceives the familiar in new ways. Makes you see the little Buddhists swimming.

Mr. Best left before the class was over and we went back to critiquing student work. It was impossible to pay attention. That fragmentary poem . . . Sanguine tigress? I
loved
the phrase and only wished it was about me. A sanguine tigress was something to aspire to if you were a medicated minx. A sanguine tigress with talent enough to summon a bucketful of Buddhists.

When the workshop concluded, I approached Lucas and Dylan and asked if they wanted to go out drinking that night. Getting a buzz on would put a glow on the train ride back to Stonehaven. To my amazement, they were up for it. We headed for a bar in the East Village with Yoshi, this other girl from the class they hung out with. The guys had bogus IDs, so they were drinking beer, Yoshi got a Diet Coke, and I had orange juice. There was a vintage video game in the back and when Dylan and Lucas got up to play I asked Yoshi what the deal was with Lucas and her. They were just friends, she told me, Did I like him? He seems all right, I said. His poems are okay. You should get with him, she said. He likes you.

I'm horrible at small talk and wasn't sure how long I could keep it up. Meanwhile, Yoshi fiddled with her iPhone, texting, Tweeting, showing me a new app she was “totally in love with.” I glanced toward where the guys were playing the video game. Lucas looked inviting in his skinny jeans, his tight tee shirt, and his black Vans. The lean muscles under his tee shirt (at least a size too small) twitched as he manipulated the joystick. His hair was light brown bordering on blond and had grown so long in front that he periodically flicked his head to keep it out of his green eyes. He reminded me of a guy from some nineties band. Although I wasn't convinced Lucas liked girls it was easy to picture having sex with him, but harder to figure out how to care about it since the only guy I could think about was Mr. Best.

Yoshi was working as an intern at an art gallery in SoHo and was keen to tell me about it. She laughed easily and her manner invited confidence. She'd been seeing some guy, an electronic musician, and there was a story about him trying to teach her how to run a music software program during one of his sets and her being too drunk to remember the cues because an hour before the performance she had put a tampon soaked with vodka in her vagina. But at the point of the conversation where I was supposed to share some personal information, I froze up. It wasn't like I could talk to her about this older lawyer guy I was obsessing about. She had just seen him in the classroom. Would she have thought it was wrong? Or gotten wet? Either way, I didn't want to know.