Split (35 page)

I sat down at a card table in the living room and faced the typewriter, a gift from my father. It was a Smith Corona, a die-hard machine that made it through four years of term papers pounded out at the eleventh hour. It made a rattling sound when you flipped it on, and I soon came to dread that rattle: it was the sound of beginning to write, an awful, beggared state. But that night, swollen up with my commission, I managed to peck out half a page of moody surrealism. Half a page: that was my limit. After that I stalled out.

Strange to be able to look back and say that's where writing started, while my patron sat by and necked with a willowy glam-rocker. I didn't write stories in high school, nor had I been a childhood diarist. People might have said that I was an imaginative kid, but though I had some of the trappings of this type —the books, the love of gnomes and underworlds, the private games—I was not particularly creative. I loved to read but rarely wrote anything. I made hand-lettered signs for the hillside across the river and stuck them into the dirt—The Badlands, The Misty Wood—but I never pretended to play in a hexed kingdom. I was dull as a surveyor, pounding my stakes into the mud and moving on. This is something I shared with my mother: the love of naming
how it was.
A very different thing from imagining how it might have been.

 

It seemed I'd found a happy middle ground in academia: it required writing but not art; it was political but didn't require action. In my senior year, I began to lean toward anthropology and enrolled in a seminar on economic development. The class was led by one Professor Hudson, a rather handsome and laconic man in his middle fifties, with bushy white eyebrows and Southern drawl.

Our mission in Anthro 127A was to look at development strategies in Third World countries (though first the term
Third World
had to be examined gingerly). But the course quickly broke down to the most basic human questions: Can one person help another person in a lasting way? Do we all share the same ideas about what makes up a good life? Is happiness relative?

The discussions were fierce. References to outside sources quickly flew out the window. We all came into the class knowing what we believed about the world; little of those beliefs would be changed in the process. There was a wide range of students fanned around the long conference table. A Mormon economics major who had great faith in the International Monetary Fund and made frequent references to his upcoming mission. Manuel, an officer in student government, who wore La Raza T-shirts and had the smooth voice of a radio announcer. "Population control is always pushed on Africans, Indians, Latinos," Manuel said. "What about the Mormons? Haven't we got enough white people already?"

I often found myself seated beside Ferdinand, an intense, stocky young man who had a habit of sucking air through his lips before he spoke, as if he were sipping hot tea. He found the class very upsetting, and often started confrontations with other students. At these points, Professor Hudson would interject and try to direct the conversation toward more neutral ground.

One day, when things rose to their usual boil, Ferdinand slapped the table in frustration, shocking the class into silence. When the hour was over, I saw Professor Hudson take him aside. The older man appeared kindly but firm, one hand tucked into the pocket of his slacks, the other turning over and over in the air between them as if demonstrating the two sides of a problem. Ferdinand looked sullen and squinted at something down the hall.

The next week, Professor Hudson opened the class with a discussion about academic research. "Some of you have great passion for your studies." He didn't look at Ferdinand, but we all understood he was addressing the furor of the previous session. "Passion is essential, but it must not be foregrounded in your work. You must strive to be objective. Objectivity requires rigor. If love for your subject serves as fuel for this rigor, that's a good thing. But you must never let your passion become the subject."

As he spoke, Professor Hudson placed both forearms down on the conference table in a kinglike gesture and stared at them, as if the key to this objectivity was in his tennis-honed wrists and manicured nails. I didn't think Professor Hudson's caveat was out of line. In the context of the classroom, I was grateful to him for preventing further scenes. But at the same time, something in me reared up against his patrician reserve. I was afraid I couldn't manage his beloved rigor. I told myself I was more interested in what was going on in Ferdinand's loopy head than I was in social stratification in Togo.

I took Ferdinand's part, the madman over the man of reason, but this was a careful hedging of my bets. I was just miserable enough in those days to think I might go mad, and I wanted to reserve some sympathy for the mad in case I ended up among them. Now I can see that I was in no danger of losing my mind; I suffered from garden-variety malaise, but it made me feel sufficiently cut off from myself that I didn't know my own mind or its limits. That dislocation seemed to forebode some greater dislocation, and so I often felt, with a kind of fatalism, that I would not last out my days as a contented woman, that at some point I would "go away." That was the phrase that popped into my head: whether to a mental ward or a monastery I wasn't sure. This inevitable journey away from myself, from dailiness, was a future I looked forward to with a wistful regret, as if it couldn't be helped. Of course, I never became that person. I remained myself, and when I got sufficiently sick of my own morbid nature I tried to improve my outlook in tiny ways.

 

As often as we could, Mau and I drove his truck into the Santa Barbara mountains, where we'd spend a few days hiking through the dry hills, desperate for water and often lost, and the nights huddled around a fire, talking in a rambling way, checking our blisters and eating Top Ramen. Those trips were good for us. Mau got noticeably more relaxed the farther we got from smog and traffic and meter maids—three facts of city life that drove him into a sputtering rage—and he loved to snap branches over his knee and tinker with the propane stove. The stove came with a tiny needle tool, which seemed brilliant when you were in a clearing of twigs and blunt stones, miles from the nearest safety pin, and the only thing between you and hot dinner was a dust plug the size of a pepper grain. What I came to love was Mau's primal satisfaction when that ring of blue flame leapt reliably up from his match, the way he'd say under his breath, "Best thing I ever bought," as if it had just occurred to him. But on the rides out to the woods, stuck into the cab together, I often got on his nerves. I talked as if we might never see each other again, amped up by the view, and the pleasure of being on the road, and his profile, chopped out of the blue of the far window.

He would catch hold now and then, but for longer periods he was quiet, watching the road, so I started to see my effusiveness as a kind of curse. The more he brooded, the more I aimed to be winning. A bad habit, and an old one, learned on those drives of long ago with my father. I was full of outsize moods, outsize expectations—for feedback and affection, someone to ground me. When I was a girl, I used to think that getting older was in part about getting quieter. That I would become more reticent as I aged. Ten years later, I was still talking. On those rides, I tried to take my cue from Mau, tried to see what pleasures he found in keeping mum.

 

During my senior year, browsing through the course catalog, I saw a poetry workshop offered through the English department. The class was to be taught by Carolyn Forché. Her name, at the time, meant nothing to me, but the idea of writing poems instead of papers greatly appealed. I typed up some of my scribblings, hitting the carriage return now and then so they had the look of poems, and typed my name on each page. I considered writing a cover letter but didn't know what to say; I hadn't published anything, nor had I studied with anyone of note. I was an absolute beginner, and I disguised my shame at this with a bit of preemptive defiance: the work, I told myself, should speak for itself. (Alas, it would.) On the way to mail my submission, the poems fell onto the floor of my car and accumulated a few muddy footprints. This pained me, but I was too lazy to type them over again. I wiped at the tread marks, slipped the poems in the envelope, and sent them off.

The list of those selected for the workshop was to be posted on the classroom door. You had to show up for the first day of class and discover in front of the other petitioners whether you had been chosen. When I arrived, a group of students was already gathered at the door. A few of them found their names on the list and went in. One woman, who had been craning over their shoulders, took a quick inbreath and walked away down the hall. I read the list twice, in case there had been a mistake, and then followed her.

Out on the granite steps, I paused for a moment in the face of a free hour. I ticked off my options. A cup of coffee at LuVal Commons on an unforgiving metal chair, listening to black-clad film students argue over Fellini. A nap in the sculpture garden. Some much overdue reading on the Jacobins.

I turned around and went back to the classroom.

Most of the students were turned toward each other in their chairs, making small talk and sizing each other up. I slipped past them and took a seat in the back. Ms. Forché stepped in a few minutes later, making such a quiet entrance that no one much noticed at first. She looked pale and more staid than she appeared in her jacket photos, in a long wool skirt and a simple blouse. She looked sensible. While people turned toward her and the chatter died down, she smiled mildly from the front of the classroom.

"Hello. I'm Carolyn Forché. I've been told we've been given a smaller room in another building—I've asked for a round table instead of these chairs—and we'll meet there next week." Drab as she looked, her voice was surprising, low and musical and clear. "To begin, why don't we go around the room and introduce ourselves?"

One by one the students said a few words about what they were up to. Most were graduate students in literature: "I'm doing my thesis on Proust. I've published a few poems here and there." All of them looked terrifically poised, or at least able to breathe and converse naturally in front of a group. At their feet were worn leather satchels bulging with books.

My heart flipped like a dying fish. I had no idea what to say when my turn came. It struck me that coming back had been a terrible idea, and that the only sensible thing would be to grab my backpack and make a run for it.

"And you?" Suddenly Ms. Forché was there, leaning her head around the row of students ahead of me. It was my turn. One or two people turned in their seats.

"Actually I wasn't selected to be part of the class." No one said anything, so I went on. "I very much want to learn how to write better poems; I'm sure the ones I sent in were terrible, but I don't have any idea how to make them better. I was wondering if I might audit the class." A woman near me cast her eyes down in embarrassment.

Too earnest, I thought. Nothing like bald pleas from the uninvited. Ms. Forché advanced down the aisle. "Well, I think poets sometimes cultivate mystery about the form. And it's not useful." She paused for a moment and looked around the room with a keen eye. I could feel that the classroom, the whole atmosphere of the university, was alien to her, that she was looking at us from a remove. She turned toward me. "I'd be happy to have you join us."

Later, when the class had dispersed, I went to the front to have her sign my enrollment form. "Listen, I really appreciate the chance to sit in."

"Why do you want to audit?" she asked. "Do you want to participate or not?"

I was taken aback. "Of course, I would love to enroll. I just didn't think—"

She signed the form and handed it to me. "Enroll then. I'll see you next week."

I'm sure there were many times when my fellow classmates wished they had piped up that first day and objected to my intrusion. The poems that I submitted over the quarter were appalling. They weren't grounded in anything real. Once, I brought in a poem that began with my feeling the pulse in my neck and went on to describe a kind of fish—
bloodfish,
I coined them—that swam through my veins. I had written it at my typewriter at the anatomy department, while Benny sawed off arms and legs across the hall.

When I read the poem out loud in class, a heavy silence fell over the group. I had hope that this was the long inbreath of appreciation. But then a man named Bruce, an accomplished poet, took up my poem, fingering the corners gently as if their sharpness might lend him words. "
Are
there such things as bloodfish?" he finally asked, clearing his throat.

"Well, no," I said, feeling scalded. "I made them up."

Bruce nodded politely. It all made sense to him now.

Years later, I would come across a line from Wallace Stevens that made clear the trouble with my poems. "The imagination," Stevens wrote, "loses vitality when it ceases to adhere to what is real." My real life seemed dull, and I was desperate to make something vivid. To what purpose, I had no idea.

***

Carolyn, as she insisted we call her, didn't seem well, though I couldn't say in what way. Even in the sunshine, her hair gave off little light, and she winced quickly now and then, as if at some internal pain. When I saw her walking across campus with the professor who acted as her patron, an association that he clearly seemed to think reflected well on him, she carried herself with the deliberate gait of someone who has been ill.

I imagined it might have been an illness picked up on one of her far-flung journeys. She had been on a tour of some of the world's war zones—El Salvador, South Africa, Beirut—and she seemed steeped in their desperate moods. Now and then she'd let a story slip out: while in Soweto, her husband, a photojournalist, saw a man tied up by a rival faction, ringed by old tires, and set on fire. This friend had been tortured, that one jailed.

Her poems took up these stories, and it was something she'd taken flack for—writing of material not her own. But what I took away from her poetry was not politics but language, the shapeliness of her phrases.