Vintage Attraction (13 page)

My heartbeat began to resume the lazy amble of the unprovoked. “Maybe they'll use toilets for spit buckets.”

“That's not a bad idea.”

“Oh, Izzy,” I began, “I'm sorry to get so . . . I don't know . . .”

“Overprotective?”

“Overprotective.”

“Jealous?”

“Let's go with ‘frustrated.'”

She put her arms around me. “I'm sorry. I really am. But the truth is, it helps for me to be there, and another truth is, one more hour I don't have to be here listening to that craziness upstairs is one more hour I don't have to be unhappy.”

“Is it really that bad? You're not getting at all used to it?”

She took a deep breath and exhaled it through her nose. “I . . . am. I guess I am. On some levels. But . . . it's hard.”

“I know. It is for me, too.”

“Well, let's not make this any worse than it has to be. Okay? You and Ishiguro stay here, and I'll go and come back soon.”

The dog's pleading eyes turned to me. It seemed he was in favor of the plan. I was the last holdout. “Fine,” I said.

After Izzy went downstairs and to the taxi she'd called, I cleaned the table. I washed and put away the paella pan. I loaded the dishwasher with our plates and utensils. I turned off the kitchen lights. Then I went in search of the dog, to capture and suit him up.

Ishiguro refused to walk in a slow and orderly fashion once we were outside. He was a bucking calf. He kept darting from one edge of the sidewalk to the other. He sniffed every frozen plant and patch of dead grass and pissed-on rusty fence we passed. His erratic motions were giving me a headache. I gave up on trying to steer our course. I'd planned to take the dog north, to Addams Park, which was our usual evening destination. We began in that direction, but then Ishiguro rerouted us. He had another idea about where we'd go on this particular outing. The pug pushed ahead vigorously. He led me down a strange and seemingly arbitrary series of streets. First we went southwest on diagonal Blue Island Avenue until it spilled into Loomis. Then we went down Loomis to Nineteenth Street. We took a right at Throop, a left at Cullerton. Where were we going? We were blocks and blocks from our building. This was a part of Pilsen that I didn't recall having ever walked. I certainly had never brought Ishiguro here. I couldn't figure out to what he was heading with such unwavering certainty and furry four-legged force.

The dog stopped in front of the door to a narrow apartment house. He was panting. His pastrami tongue unfurled to slice the air. He pulled himself and me closer to the glass and tapped the pane with a paw. A frenzied determination had overtaken him. He wanted to get inside.

“What's in there?” I asked him. Ishiguro now batted the wooden frame. I asked, facetiously, “Is someone expecting you?”

The hysterical way Ishiguro clawed and smacked the old, heavy door could only mean that the pug had gone mad. On occasion I'd witnessed him so eager to return home that he nearly cannonballed through his harness. We clearly weren't standing at the entrance to the Biscuit Factory. It wasn't like cautious Ishiguro to be so adamant about wanting to venture into unfamiliar enclosed spaces. I read down the list of names on the intercom registry.
Talbot/Shrum
3B, Ascarrunz-Ramierez 3A, Carroll/Averill/Kenney 2B, Rosengrant/Zukowski 2A, Dennis 1B, Geller/Smith 1A.

I immediately recalled the name Rosengrant from the conversation I'd had with Izzy the morning after we met. The night before, when I was drunk enough to want to introduce her to my silly conceptualizing, and somehow we ended up back at my place, in my bed, I'd avoided the conversation about whom she'd dated before. With or without alcohol, it was always awkward to talk about past attachments at any point in an involvement. The matter asserting itself at such an early phase, one decidedly inhospitable to honesty, compounded the feeling. It was a time when fear of scaring the other person off necessitated a careful selection of topics. Only those determined to be shiny and hopeful, nothing even remotely imperfect or disquieting, were typically granted admittance to discussion. But would there really have ever been a better time? When she brought it up at brunch the next day, I'd received the information with the unconditional acceptance also crucial to that nascent stage. I veiled my displeasure, not knowing what else to do. That day I catalogued away the name and that for which it stood. One might have suspected—hoped—Izzy had, too. Each month we'd been together had buried the relic deeper and deeper into our romantic archeology. Nothing previous to this buzzer roster had given her words reason to present themselves again to me.

“
My last boyfriend was a sommelier—is a sommelier, I guess. Pacer Rosengrant. We met at the bistro. I've heard he went to Las Vegas to work with this master the Palazzo owns
—”

That motherfucker was back in town, living a half mile from our house. A half mile.

And Izzy, goddamn her, what was she doing here? And why the hell would the dog know this skeezy tenement?

Had the dog been here, too??

As was his want, Ishiguro tarried, but I cajoled mightily to keep him focused and on course so we could get back to the apartment. There, I got on Facebook and found a page for Pacer Rosengrant. I couldn't see much, since we weren't friends. But I could tell, from a previous wall narration, that his network had changed to Chicago, Illinois two weeks ago. How many times had Izzy seen him since then? This was just too much to deal with.

I logged out and keystroked the computer back into its slumber. I sat at the breakfast bar with my head in my hands. I remained in this position until Ishiguro became alarmed. He whimpered and nipped at my black sock. “Fine,” I said, after the dog had wrought persuasive pinching pain on my big toe.

I removed my glasses and lay on the floor in the unfurnished space between the kitchen alcove and the front entrance. Ishiguro, without hesitation, began licking my face. He performed an ethnic cleansing of my large Semitic nose and weak chin with ritualistic, dispassionate precision. Once the pug was complete, he inspected his work. His snout was barely a millimeter from my right eye. Satisfied, he trotted off. I remained where he left me, the wetter for wear. With my face drying in the air, I stared at the new white ceiling and let the austerity transfix me. This was the same game I used to play when I was a child: I'd lie on the shag carpeting in my apartment on Riverside Drive and stare at the ceiling and pretend it was the floor. Beside the oval dining room table, I imagined that my parents had packed up all our belongings and moved off somewhere, without me. Gone were the Hasidic rococo-framed oil paintings, my father's opera records, the leather-bound Shakespeare folios. Gone were my mother's ancestral plastic-covered chairs and the stiff-cushioned couches. Gone were the embroidered pillows. Gone were my older sister and her porcelain dolls. Just a broad expanse of white was left. Except for the chandelier. Inverted, it was a solitary crystal palm tree with a spindly silver trunk, standing on an empty, icy beach. I sometimes lay like this for hours. I had no idea—at seven or thirty-seven—why the simple act of staring at a blank canvas could be so engaging, but it was. In this quasi-self-hypnosis, I reviewed the events of the night. The meditative lull concluded with my shocking discovery that Pacer Rosengrant had returned to Izzy's life—which now meant he was part of my life, too. And Talia. What the fuck had I done to make someone who'd never been anything but coolly equanimous and affectedly coy the entire time we'd known each other suddenly so plainly melodramatic? And atavistic: she, who'd taught me how to text and gotten me on Facebook, was leaving analog-era folded, handwritten, maudlin notes in campus mailboxes? What the fuck was I doing that managed, now, after all this time, to draw out the ludicrousness of her desires—to draw palpable desire of any sort out of her? And, worst of all, why now and not when I would have wanted it? It all worked to vanish any tranquility the trance delivered and replace it with anguish. I couldn't make any sense out of this heartbreaking pileup of so many realities.

The only thing I could do then was drink. I refilled my wineglass, left behind from dinner. I remained in the kitchen until I finished the Albariño and the warm Cabernet I opened after it. The strafe of drunken hunger that came next had me remembering the apple tart. Izzy left it resting in the oven. I paired it with a half pint of Ben and Jerry's Cinnamon Buns and ate everything, to try to defuse the alcohol and keep from throwing up. When I was done, I flung myself onto the couch. Ishiguro, an infirmary heating pad, climbed onto my stomach. I turned on the television and scanned the Comcast video-on-demand listings for a film. None of the offerings appealed to either of us. Shortly, my cell phone trembled. It took a considerable amount of effort to reach it. The front pocket of my jeans had been barricaded by a mass of unyielding, tawny port–colored fur. I read the text message that had been delivered:
wht is yr address im cmng over
and promptly deleted it.

Because I'd passed out before she got home, I didn't know what
time Izzy finally returned last night. I suspected it had been quite late. She'd slept through both alarms this morning. What I did know was that I felt like shit. My brain was still bruised from the evening's bottle-and-a-half bacchanal. Yet I made Izzy some coffee before she left for work. Whether she'd admit it or not, she needed all the help she could get to deal with Chef Dominique and his gauntlet of a production schedule.

Izzy emerged from the bedroom at an intermission in her preparations. She'd shadowed her eyes. Part of her hair was blow-dried. The other part was still in giant bright-red curlers.

“That must have been some meeting.”

“Hapworth, please don't start with me.”

I really wasn't going to. Though my wife had been the one who'd ostensibly physically transgressed, I nevertheless couldn't bring myself to interrogate her. I was guilty, too, in thought, if not in deed. And we were supposed to trust each other. Admitting I knew Pacer Rosengrant was back and that she'd been to his place would betray my fear that she was capable of cheating. If you read the situation through my father's Freudian lens, my largely unfounded suspicion suggested that I was uncertain about my own propensity for betrayal. This was not so much of a reach if you knew about my surreptitious Facebooking while Izzy was away. In my mother's profitable parlance, the wine assignation with Talia was inculpatory evidence. Transference theory and adjudicative implications aside, I didn't like Izzy's and my sleeping apart in the same house.

I rubbed my neck. “I think the couch killed my back,” I said.

“I didn't want to wake you up.”

“Whatever. Do you want coffee?”

She nodded. I ran the French press and presented her with a mug. She inhaled sharply twice, just like Ishiguro did when he uncovered an unfamiliar fragrant spot on the sidewalk. “Dunkin' Donuts?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It's horrible.”

Her rejection stung. “It was all I could find. It was that or nothing.”

“We still have it
because
it's horrible,” she said. She handed the mug back to me and returned to the bedroom to finish dressing.

I tried the coffee. I couldn't fault her for not wanting it. There was something peculiar about the taste. An unpleasant metallic acidity had corrupted the water. I cleaned out the press and started over. She was sitting on the bed, her makeup half done, when I delivered my revised draught. She squinted intently at her BlackBerry screen. It was a tape day, when Izzy filmed her TV show. Accordingly, there were always a lot of e-mails before she even made it to the El. Chef Dominique apparently couldn't wait to begin ordering her around until she'd gotten to the studio.

She took a sip. “It tastes weird,” she said. She looked at me kindly, however. “It's sweet of you to keep trying.”

I tested the sample Izzy's professional tongue deemed completely unpalatable. Now it tasted like Dunkin' Donuts coffee: bold, milky, unctuous, with only a remote tanginess. I was sluiced with nostalgia. It brought me back to the Hyde Park Dunkin' Donuts on Fifty-third Street. I'd spent an entire Saturday reading
The Garden of Eden
there. I was a second-year with a black Members Only jacket and Jewfro to match. I drank fifty cups of coffee over those dozen or so hours. I sat in a chair bolted to the floor. It was an uncomfortable painted-metal seat. I could only turn left or right. I was too engrossed in the novel to care.
The Garden of Eden
was the first book to show up on a syllabus that would become a lifelong favorite of mine.

My cell phone buzzed. A two-page-long text message from Berkal.
Tell Sommelier to dress you up for dept cocktail party. Need not worry abt lunch money. Grad din Greektown after gratis + heavily liquored. In vino veritas, SJB.

“Fuck,” I said aloud.

“What?” Izzy asked.

“I forgot about this thing I'm supposed to do tonight.”

“What is it?”

“A stupid English Department get-together at the Alumni Center. The one time of the year they roll out the open bar and get everyone drunk and stuffed with bacon-wrapped scallops and pathetic conversation about issues in twenty-first-century literature and the dwindling readership.”

“I guess I don't need to put the pork shoulder in the Crock-Pot, then.” She said this almost sadly, like she'd really been looking forward to it.

“A group is going to the Parthenon or something after.”

“Well, have some
baklava
for me.”

“What will you eat?”

“I can have family meal at the bistro before service.” Her eyes turned wistful. “Just like the old days.”

“Don't stay out too late,” I said. “Ishiguro gets sad when we're both gone too long.”

“You either,” she said.

I picked up Izzy's repudiated coffee mug. In the kitchen, I poured out what was left. I watched the coffee spill down the drain in a warm, murky-colored rapid. Atop that rapid, my hope for the day rafted away. I knew what to expect. There were no surprises left. I'd go do what passed for teaching. I'd return to University Hall after class and sit around for office hours. Not a single student would show up. Probably not even my grad student officemate.

There was a gathering of some indeterminate sort in front of University Hall's revolving doors. I read paper signs bearing Sharpie-scrawled indictments and protestations, but the aggrieved students weren't holding them. They ate Subway sandwiches and drank Pepsis and updated their Facebook statuses from their phones. Inside, it was a relief to find the arriving elevator car empty.

Dark mornings seemed even darker from within this building. It was a surprise to find Berkal at his desk. He was reading student stories for his 212. Berkal's lamp was on. He had the overhead fluorescents off. The warmer light made the place look a little more congenial.

“How do you explain to an engineering major that just because something happened in your life doesn't mean it belongs in short fiction?” Berkal asked.

“Don't ask me. Do you realize it's been a year since I got to teach a workshop?”

Berkal stood up. “It hasn't been that long.”

“It has,” I said. “It's been that long since I've even been able to get more than two
comp
classes.”

“Schultz is doing the summer schedule now. You could get in and—”

Hearing the name of the adjunct coordinator and chief departmental course distributor made me wince. “Fuck no,” I said. “I hate teaching summer classes. It's always either too cold or too hot in the building, nobody wants to be there, everyone wants to have class outside, which you say is a bad idea for acoustic and general comportment reasons, but nobody cares. People just see you as the overdressed asshole who won't let them enjoy the weather.”

“I always have class outside,” Berkal offered unhelpfully.

“Of course you do,” I said, “because you're a grad student, and, by definition, brilliant and infallible. The times I've tried it, it's been a disaster.”

“You want me to talk to Schultz? I am lead GPTI.”

“Since when? And no. I'm sure she's already slotted me in for whatever the shittiest fall class is, in the worst room on campus, with the students who won't have even passed the admissions requirements, but will matriculate for the sole purpose of—”

“Of tormenting you,” Berkal interrupted. “Right. It's all for your benefit, or whatever the opposite of benefit is. It all seeks to destroy you.”

“I'm not entirely convinced it isn't. I've been teaching here a long time.”

“And?”

“How much longer do you have?”

“Coursework is done. I'm basically ABD.”

“My advice? Don't rush to terminate that terminal degree. A lot of good an MFA does me.”

“It says you can write, and that at least at some point in your life, you did.”

“It doesn't matter. I'm never going to end up on the tenure track with it.”

“And you think I will? Even with a PhD, I'll be lucky to get a couple of adjunct gigs at the city colleges. I doubt UIC would ever look at me as anything more than a grad student. This, my friend, is about the best I'm gonna get.”

He had a point. The chances of full-time employment for post-grads in English had been bleak even back when I'd finished my
first
master's. Prospects had become further dire in the many years since I was a newly minted MFA. Forget about a full-time job with benefits and security. Now my meager, tenuous role here was actually desirable and possibly even sought-after.

“Hapworth, why do you think you have to have a PhD to get on the tenure track?” Berkal asked. “Because academics can't write and writers can't teach. You choose one or the other. Or one or the other chooses you. It's as simple as that.”

“What's chosen me?”

“The right thing will come along.”

“I think I better not quit my day job in the meantime, as the cliché goes.”

“I'll make you an appointment to see Schultz. How's Friday?” He printed a reminder for me on the blank side of a student's old index card.

I folded it and put it in my back pocket. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem. Maybe it's not too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“To—to—you know, to get a smart room. Have you been in one of them? Computer, Internet, audio, video, dry erase boards with clean erasers. Twenty-first century, dog. You can do a film-as-literature unit and spend a week or two showing the director's cut of
Heaven's Gate
. Is—is—that what you're wearing tonight?”

“I have a tie in my bag. I didn't want to teach in anything too bureaucratic. Scares the kids, you know.”

My officemate turned off his lamp. He packed his messenger bag and put on his coat and hat. I followed him into the hallway. “What about Izzy?” Berkal asked.

“What about her?”

“Haven't you ever thought about doing something with her?”

“Like getting married? We did that. For what it's worth.”

“Like working together.”

I shrugged.

“
Carpe diem.
”

On my way out of University Hall and to the library, my mind was on Izzy and the bad Dunkin' Donuts this morning and
The Garden of Eden
. When I was a grad student teaching assistant and had my own classes, I put several chapters on the reading list. Some students who'd never even read any Hemingway before told me they were “fired up” and “super psyched” by the preview. They wrote outstanding response papers and ran off to the library to check out the entire book. Only then did I ever feel like I was actually accomplishing something in a classroom. The students listened. They took notes. They let themselves be galvanized by the texts. In so doing, they galvanized them in return. It was just as I had experienced my life-changing Modern Lit winter quarter in that musty, heady little lecture room back in Harper Library, on my beloved ivied and gargoyle-adorned first campus. But teaching comp at a commuter school designed with the austerity of a Bergman film, embodying the practicality and earnestness of a Minnesota congressman, it wasn't at all like that. Now I considered it a major accomplishment if I was able to induce a majority of the kids convening for my course to even angle their faces in my direction for an appreciable duration. One early semester at UIC, I tried swapping out the syllabus boilerplate “Hills Like White Elephants” for an excerpt from
Eden
. Few even bothered to read it. Several copies I reeled out of the wastebasket after everyone had left. I still kept them in my desk drawer as a reminder, because it was horrible
.
I swore I'd never again attempt to teach prose that really meant anything to me. What was the point? The remotely insightful were outnumbered. The arrogant and entitled rest just didn't care. I wasn't going to be able to do much to improve things.
If you cannot respect the way you handle your life then certainly respect your trade.

Two minutes before the library classroom clock read the official commencing hour, I dropped myself into the chair at the head of the long conference table. Teaching was just about the last thing I wanted to do right now. I was hungover. I was pissed off at Izzy. Whether or not she actually cheated on me, I couldn't stop feeling I'd been betrayed. I missed Ishiguro. And I had nothing prepared. It was going to take days to get through this class. Even if I started fifteen minutes late, ordered some in-class writing, and then had a generously untimed break afterward, I still would struggle. For the next two and a half hours, I'd have to be here, my knotted brain arteries throbbing, my fingertips slightly numb, my heart chagrined.

As though presaging my mood, the students, shuffling in, looked more despondent than usual. They wordlessly claimed seats, more or less the exact positions they'd staked out on the first day of the semester. My favorites, the grade-favor curriers, the ass-kissers, ambled in first, as always. They took their places around mine at the head of the table. Ordinarily, I appreciated the proximity. Today they just seemed a little too near. I kind of wished they'd go over and sit with the Trench Coat Mafia. I wasn't ever sure why these Goths, burnouts, and militants enrolled in English classes. Weren't they usually business majors? Though the Mafia Midwest chapter members sat with crossed arms, torsos and legs encased in perennially heavy leather, and sneers permanently affixed to their ever-so-unsubtly lipsticked mouths, they were harmless and mostly kept their distance. Even so, a part of me always feared they might beat the shit out of me or blow up Norlin Library when I returned their inarticulate paragraphs stippled with red objections.

The Trio, Lindsay, Lindsey, and Lindsie, sat near each other at the far end of the room. I still considered it a skill worthy of bragging that I could precisely correspond the spelling and girl. AY was beautiful. She styled her long, dark hair in a variety of ways. This afternoon, it curtained her face. Her tresses tumbled down her white open-buttoned shirt and concluded at her breasts. When I first took in her frighteningly alluring eyes, encased in don't-fuck-with-me black mascara, I decided she'd get an A whether or not she chose to do any work in this class. She must have sensed this. She paid me little attention from then on. EY, with her ponytail and Iowa farm-girl freckles and soft eyes, was dim but attentive. Despite her unabashed lack of sophistication, or because of it, she was precociously trenchant. And IE was a hippie with long, dirty dreads. She wore no makeup on her face. Her lips were always cracked. She carried a black handbag with a silver closure that I once believed toted her lunch. She told me later in passing that it actually contained the handmade bongs she sold on campus.