Mean Boy (20 page)

Schofield, meanwhile, had used the eternity of Slaughter’s mirth to get himself together. He gazed straight back at Mrs. Dacey and assured her she had said nothing funny at all. Then he even managed to apologize for the laughter without being accusatory toward Slaughter—as if Schofield himself was somehow responsible. Then he answered her question.

He didn’t turn red. He seemed to be still, slightly, in the world of his reading. Not an awkward, blushing fat man who hadn’t taken a shower in the past twelve hours, but a humble
sage, infinitely gracious and wise. I sat with my fists clenched, rooting for him.

“For many people,” spoke Schofield, “love and the act of love are inexorably entwined.”

“I know that,” huffed Mrs. Dacey, apparently ready to meet his argument point for point. Schofield held up a hand.

“If I may,” he said, and Mrs. Dacey sat back.

“Absolutely, the two can exist in exclusivity to one another. Filial love, fraternal love …”

“The love of a pet,” offered Mrs. Dacey, and I was afraid Slaughter might start up again.

“Of course,” agreed Schofield in haste. “And some of the most celebrated literary and historical examples of romantic love have been platonic, so to speak. Dante and Beatrice, to cite just one example.”

“Love that is
pure
,“ Mrs. Dacey insisted.

“Absolutely,” said Schofield. “But surely you’ll agree, there are far more examples of romantic love that are … erotic.” This time Schofield actually stopped and waited for Mrs. Dacey to interrupt. She just sat there for a moment.

“Well—I’m not so sure about that,” she said at last.

Schofield nodded. “Well, I’m afraid I have to insist on this point. Tristan and Isolde. Héloïse and Abelard. Romeo and Juliet.”

At this point Mrs. Dacey regained her vigour. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I believe you’re talking about Shakespeare again. But Shakespeare doesn’t talk about breasts and thighs and … 
sweat
and what have you.”

Up went Schofield’s big mitt again. “You’ll forgive me, but he speaks of all that and more.”

There was a short pause.

“Well, I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare, frankly,” said Mrs. Dacey.

Schofield deflated a little at this.

“Well,” he mumbled, seeming to back down just when I felt he had scored some points off old lady Dacey, “what other writers do is beside the point, I suppose.”

“Exactly!” pounced Mrs. Dacey. “That’s exactly my point.”

“What you’re really asking is about me, about what I write, what I’ve read this evening.”

“Well, yes,” admitted Mrs. Dacey with a bit less certainty. “You as a representative, I suppose. Of all you types. You art people. Your generation.”

It occurred to me at this point to stare a few daggers across the room at Cousin Janet for hauling this battle-axe to the reading, the reading I had nearly killed myself over. But Janet had been in thumb-twiddling mode since the inquisition began.

Schofield took a breath, nodding and pursing at
you types
.

“You can’t answer, can you,” demanded Mrs. Dacey, sniffing blood, sensing victory.

“No, I can,” argued Schofield, “but surely you understand this is a difficult topic. It’s immensely—” (he looked around at the group of us as if in appeal) “—
personal
, of course.”

I nodded when Schofield’s gaze passed over. To help—to let him know he wasn’t alone. Mrs. Dacey folded her arms. “Once again, you’re just adding to my point. That’s what I’m saying: it’s personal, what you’re talking about. It’s
too
personal.”

“But the very act of writing poetry is personal,” said Schofield.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t be writing it, then,” rejoined Dacey.

Holy crap, I thought. Is this what it’s like? When you’re a poet? Old dames who’ve spent the past sixty years reading nothing but
Ladies Home Journal
and
The Farmers’ Almanac
come forward and put you on the rack?

“All right,” said Jim, unfurling his limbs abruptly and standing to his full six-foot-something height. “It
is
getting very late, people have to drive home—”

“Jim,” said Schofield. Jim glanced over, opened then closed his mouth, and finally sat down again.

“I have been in love,” said Schofield.

Outside, the wind screamed, cracking the iced-over windowpanes. Everyone in the lounge seemed to gulp in unison.

“I am still in love,” added Schofield after surveying the room for a moment. “It was, and is, the most transcendent thing that could happen to a man like myself. I am a person who thought such an experience would always be beyond my reach.”

Schofield took a breath and glanced, briefly, down at himself in a gesture of disbelief, as if flowers had sprouted from his chest.
Oh no
, the gesture seemed to say,
what’s happening now?

“What I’ve just said is a very bald statement—it has little art or poetry to it, but, I think you will agree, it has weight. It has strength. It’s a powerful thing to say: ‘I have love. I who thought I would never have love.’ ”

It was a powerful thing to say, all right. Behind me, I could hear Sherrie’s breath catch in her throat. My own tightened.

Schofield continued, pinkening only a bit. “Surely everyone has had occasion to doubt, has found themselves alone, asking of the universe: Will there be love for me? Ever? Anywhere? If no one here has had occasion to ask this question, I’d ask that you speak up, just so I know I’m not on the wrong track here. It’s the kind of thing you always assume about other people but rarely ask, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing we usually speak about.”

Not only did no one speak up, no one so much as breathed. It was awful but fascinating—Schofield up there,
forced to say what no one ever said, like someone being made to dance at gunpoint.

He took another breath as if on our behalves, nodding without the pursing. “Okay,” he said, “I was pretty sure that would be the response. So you’ll notice some of you are very young, and already it would seem you’ve asked yourself this question. It goes to show, I think, how universal this experience is. It’s not a comfortable moment, is it, the moment that question arises? Your body feels like this huge, hollow cavern with your soul bouncing around inside, bashing against your ribs, trying to get out. Just trying to make contact with someone, any other living, thinking, commiserating being. Most of you, I’m sure, will recall this feeling, this misery of isolation, and I am hoping that for most of you, that feeling has passed. Even if it has, however, its memory resides within you somewhere—and it’s a cold spot, isn’t it? It can’t be warmed up. It’s a fear that can never be completely expelled. Yes?”

Schofield paused to look around the room. As the glint of his glasses shifted toward me, I felt my mouth close, my tongue gluing itself to the roof of my mouth. My jaw had been hanging open for who knew how long.

“All right,” sighed Schofield, now very much showing signs of fatigue from his hours on the bus, his battle with the elements, his time with me. The colour and consistency of his face reminded me of swollen bread dough, listing on the counter after the first deflating punch from my mother’s fist. Only then did it occur to me the poor guy didn’t even have a lectern to hide behind. That’s what was missing, why he came across as so vulnerable and alone up there. We should have found him a lectern from downstairs, he shouldn’t have had to stand here before us, naked but for a sheaf of paper he didn’t even look at.

“All I want you to know is,” he continued, “I have lived with this feeling I’ve been describing for approximately thirty
or so years. I had almost given up hope of being loved. Please just imagine that for a moment, the desolation, the hollowness of it—day in and day out.”

Sniffles from somewhere behind me.

“But, ladies and gentlemen, I’m now in love, as I said earlier. Now imagine the, um,
beauty
of that, after so many years. How it would be like emerging from life underground. It
is
, and it may be private, but I want to express it. I’d like you to know. When you wonder about love, about your own worthiness, maybe you’ll read a poem I’ve written about it. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in there. I want to evoke my feelings, my ragged faith, my desolation, and my subsequent salvation so completely, so perfectly, that for you there will be no mistaking what we have in common. At least—that’s part of what I’m trying to do. And sometimes, when I’m doing this,” and here he nodded toward Mrs. Dacey, “I have to be explicit. Because I know that my experience is human, and the more palpable I can make it, through the writing, the more you will know, as a reader, that I am telling you a kind of truth. A truth we don’t talk about, and maybe even can’t. That, I hope, is the value of what I’m doing—assuming we can speak of poetry in such a way. I mean, assuming we even
should—”

That line from the Acorn poem above my typewriter.
It is truth, the word I am not
. Schofield’s face contorted and he groped with one hand, as if the words were revolving around his head faster than he was able to organize them into speech.

“I am trying to,” groped Schofield, “communicate as best I can. I want to
help
. I want you to know.” He looked around. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know how else to say it.”

And then he shrugged like a wince, smiled like pain, and moved slightly away from the mantelpiece, looking to Jim. The Schofield reading was over.

“WHAT A PILE OF CRAP
that was,” says Todd, slouched against yet another wall, waiting for me when I emerge from the Dekkers’ upstairs bathroom. The bathroom is full of art as well, but not Ruth’s. Pictures of paintings and of photographs—cut out from magazines—are taped all over the walls, and tiny African sculptures have been placed on every available surface alongside of the cans of shaving cream and bottles of toilet water.

“What?” I say.

“The crap Schofield was talking before.”

“After the reading?”

“Yeah. Poetry is about love and—and
communication
, oh my fucking God.”

Todd is making it sound stupid, what Schofield said, and it incenses me. I feel protective after seeing him blush and stutter all alone up there.

“You gotta like the way he shut the old lady up, though,” I say, being offhand and, in order to emphasize my offhandedness, slouching against the wall along with Todd.

Todd smirks, eyebrows bouncing. “Yeah, but you can tell he believes that crap.”

“Well, okay, maybe it’s a simplification,” I allow. Because, let’s be honest, what Schofield said was embarrassing. It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say if you’re a guy, and a poet, and standing in front of an assemblage of people. I can’t be caught defending it outright.

“Is it
ever
,“ agrees Todd.

“But, then,” I say, attempting to switch tracks, “what
is
poetry about, anyway? I don’t know. Who can say?”

“It’s not about fuckin’ beauty,” says Todd. “If anything, it’s about dredging up all the shit.”

“Dredging up all the shit,” I repeat. “All what shit? From where?”

“From wherever it comes from.”

“It comes from your colon,” I say.

“What I mean is,” says Todd, “buddy is up there saying that poetry has to be beautiful, and I think that’s fucking dangerous. Sometimes it’s gotta be ugly, or even, even
banal
or obtuse. Maybe, sometimes, it doesn’t even have to be about anything. But it’s not about ‘the human soul,’ for Christ’s sake. Sometimes it isn’t going to be pretty. People aren’t going to
like
it necessarily. That’s what I would have told that old bag if it was me standing up there.”

“But you’re still talking about communication, just like Schofield was saying,” I argue.

“I have been in love,”
quotes Todd, ignoring my point, tucking in his face to give himself a Schofield-esque double chin. “Jesus. Poetry is about pain—suffering it and inflicting it, not telling the world you finally got laid at the age of thirty-five or whatever. That’s just sad. It’s about breaking bones—breaking and then re-setting them so they grow in a completely different way.”

What, I marvel to myself, has Todd been reading? “Where did you get that?” I demand, assuming it’s a stolen quotation.

Todd shrugs. “It’s just something I came up with.” He looks around, as if to check for spies. “I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation lately.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. “No more cave-ins and pit ponies?”

Todd’s blue eyes flicker up at me. “It’s not that I’m not interested in those stories anymore, it’s just that I’m becoming more and more taken up with
form
itself. There are people in this country who would laugh their asses off at the kind of shit Schofield was spouting tonight. There are people for whom poetry is an end in itself, it’s not about
meaning
.“ Todd utters the word
meaning
as if he was saying “little girls’ dresses.”

“It’s about getting underneath meaning, it’s about bypassing meaning.”

“Bypassing meaning?” I say. “So what does that leave you with? Gobble-de-gook?”

“Yes,” answers Todd, folding his arms, “in some instances, it leaves you with gobble-de-gook.”

“Who?” I want to know. “Who’s doing this sort of stuff? And where?”

“Claude is,” answers Todd. “And Vancouver.”

Claude? Vancouver? I don’t know where to begin.

“Claude writes villanelles!”

“That’s only part of what he does. He experiments with form in general, so you know, he tries out villanelles. He’s tried sestinas, sonnets, haikus.”

Haikus?
Is it supposed to be
haikus
, with an
s?
I rack my brain for the plural of
haiku
. I thought it was just
haiku
. How I long to make Todd look like an idiot by pointing out such a fundamental mistake, but I can’t remember which it is. I’m not sure. Frustration churns behind my eyes and I switch tracks yet again.

“What does Claude know about Vancouver?” I do my best to imbue the word
Vancouver
with the girly-dresses quality Todd evoked before.