Julip Page 20

  During all of this I had begun to study Ballard’s feet, which he had propped up on the corner of the desk. His suit was decently tailored but his feet were adorned with large, thuggish hiking boots as if he intended to launch himself into the wilds of the village park at lunchtime. I wondered if he had worn these selfsame boots into the Chicago jazz club with the girl in question. Rather than smell the true pungency of the rat, I simply asked him with mock sophistication what kind of deal could be made. He wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it expertly into a distant wastebasket. The gesture was a bit Oriental for my taste, so he spelled it out by saying that if I saw Elizabeth through her thesis difficulties, it was at his discretion to expunge my record. He had no such powers but the wadded-up paper meant that he’d simply destroy the record in question.

  I wanted to delay my decision but he insisted it be made instantly. I said, “Oh, very well.” We shook hands and I left.

  My grossest error was in not immediately sharing my dilemma with Bob, who would have offered cautionary advice. I hate to be a bother to anyone and also I was ashamed to be involved in a mess which, after the fact, turned out to be an unprovable triple blackmail engineered by Reed, with the more than tacit cooperation of Ballard, who was saving his own skin.

  *

  Once as a youngster I was blowing bubbles. This irked my mother, Florence, who thought the burst bubbles would stain the furniture and walls. But I could blow bubbles with impunity, as my father, Ike, had forbidden her to strike me because he had been roughed up badly as a child in Kentucky. The soap mixture was just right and the bubbles were grand indeed, floating around the living room catching a shaft of sunlight through the south window. I asked my mother why I could see my reflection in the bubble and she replied irritably that I could see myself because I was trapped within the bubble and always would be.

  *

  Elizabeth, you among others are evil, and I write this to be shut of absolutely everything I have experienced up until the day I finish — that is, if the disease does not thieve my lucidity. Before I forget, I had a fine supper of fried fish and salad with Lillian. Verdugo wasn’t due back from Tucson until late and she took advantage of the situation to cook fish which Verdugo refuses to eat. She said he was born and raised down on the Sonoran coast of the Sea of Cortés, ate fish every day as a child, and now refuses to touch it, which seems reasonable. I stood next to Lillian at the stove to learn the process and she said I turned the fillets rather nicely. Before I left she admitted that she would call Deirdre in Chicago to tell her she had gotten me outdoors.

  But Elizabeth. When Bob did find out I had chosen to help her, he thought I was stark ravers, though I didn’t admit the whole deal. Elizabeth fairly waltzed into my office without a specific appointment, carrying a book bag of notes, the odd paragraph, and a stack of musings, as it were. Despite her dinginess she was a woman of the world and had traveled widely, however literarily naive. It seemed odd that her boyfriend, Reed, was a penniless sophomore, but then I had recently read that older women currently favored younger men. Deirdre liked to say that I was middle-aged by thirty, which would make me old indeed at the present date.

  The true bone of contention with the classicist was that Elizabeth wanted to call her paper “Sexism in Yeats” instead of the more restrained “Women in the Poetry of William Butler Yeats” that had been strongly advised. The two of them never advanced much past this battle in eight months, and the base of the quarrel gave me ugly tremors. Of what purpose was it to attack Yeats using values that were unknown to his culture? I tried to lighten the mood by saying, “This is like attacking Jesus for not flossing,” which passed through her head with the speed of a neutron. She was dour in a sweatshirt and jeans, the crumpled notes spread out on my desk with all the charm of parking tickets. But then I had already compromised myself, so I acceded to her title.

  “I guess what I want to say is that Yeats’s creepy values are repulsive to today’s women,” she said, offering a tentative smile.

  It was at this point I began to develop a sense of suffocation, as if I were in a dentist’s chair to get wisdom teeth pulled, the gas mask strapped to my face but nothing in the tank, nothing at all that could be drawn by the breath. The problem had nothing to do with feminism (I had lived with two brilliant and shrewd examples in my wife and daughter) but with simple stupidity, also the profoundest sense that I was betraying a code of values, a tradition. Of course, I teased myself cynically, how could I think I was defending a tradition of learning when no one was attacking it? The tradition had become utterly ignored and here I was in the middle of life’s journey, suddenly lost, unable to catch my breath or remove the lump or whatever in my throat and beneath my breastbone.

  Department regulations against smoking were strict and had been in effect for a year. I was the only smoker left after an old colleague, a Howells scholar (William Dean), retired with terminal emphysema. I was also the only department member who didn’t own or know how to use a word processor. I only mention these two facts because it was impossible to work with Elizabeth in my office while I frantically chewed stick after stick of Dentyne, dashing down to the back entrance to smoke with a janitor with an unsightly goiter who would wink at me as we puffed in common anguish.

  So Reed would drop Elizabeth off at my apartment every afternoon at three, then drive away in her car, the poet manqué in the new Mustang convertible. We’d plunge immediately into the project with Elizabeth at her expensive word processor, a laptop model called, of all things, the Word Book, which the lovely dunce could work with expertise. We dispensed with the more elaborate variorum edition of Yeats and worked out of M. L. Rosenthal’s excellent Selected Poems and Three Plays.

  Unfortunately Elizabeth had an attention span on the order of a politician’s, so I ended up dictating much of the paper which, though it had to pass a committee of three, mostly only needed the advisor’s unqualified approval. In the mad rush to finish the vile chore I lost some of my hesitancy about making connections, spinning metaphors, twiddling similes. One warm afternoon while waiting for Elizabeth on the porch I even waved at Reed when they arrived. The next day he stopped to chat, saying that it was time to “throw in the towel” on the matter of the department’s non-funding of his febrile magazine, Openings. The nasty little lago referred to Yeats as an “old, outworn enormity,” as if I didn’t know the phrase had been coined by that fabulous brat Rimbaud.

  The day of doom was a hot one and my hands tremble in the remembrance. I had wondered idly why Reed had kept sending Elizabeth to her chores in the same dowdy outfits throughout the ten-day duration of our project — one of her blue work shirts still contained a slight tincture of kerosene, a memory of working folks in Toledo so long ago. Predictably (if I had thought it over), she arrived the last day in a deep V-neck T-shirt, short skirt, and sandals, dropped off this time by two sorority sisters who sped off in her car. Ever so slightly to her credit, she seemed nervous that day as the plot thickened to its grand finale. She sped blithely through my dictated conclusion, adding her own bons mots so that the paper could be identified as clearly her own. We had our last spat about “For Anne Gregory” and its incendiary last lines:

  I heard an old religious man

  But yesternight declare

  That he had found a text to prove

  That only God, my dear,

  Could love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair.

  “What if she got cancer and lost her hair because of chemo?” Elizabeth had asked, bending over my notes so that I could not help but note her bare pert breasts under the T-shirt, then flouncing off to change one of the cache of Deirdre’s old phonograph records she had discovered.

  “I’m confident that doctors hadn’t discovered chemo at that time,” I said, noting with discomfort that Elizabeth had sprawled on her stomach on the floor, her rear in the scant skirt seemingly aimed at me. It may not have been devious on her part but I sped back to the kitchen and
washed my face with cold water. I tried to reassure myself that the girl was barking up the wrong tree. In the ten years since my divorce I had tried to make love twice but found myself ineffective and have abandoned the habit. There was one pleasant goodbye session with Marilyn the day our divorce became final and that was that.

  I headed back to the desk, trying to pass Elizabeth in the hall. She was heading, I presume, for the bathroom. She blocked my way and embraced me and I nearly fainted with the odor of lilac on her neck. I allowed myself a single passionate kiss, a clutch and a fondle, staring out the window at a bird Marilyn referred to as a grackle in the flowering lilac bush, certainly an unattractive name for so striking a bird. Elizabeth hiked up her little skirt and fumbled at my fly.

  Somewhat to my surprise I was indeed ready to deliver the goods. What stopped me? I don’t know. I pushed her away and fled back to the living room, and there stood Elizabeth’s two sorority sisters who chirped, as if on cue, “What have you done to her?” From back in the hall we could hear Elizabeth begin to screech and sob, and at that moment it didn’t take any prescience on my part to realize my goose was cooked.

  II

  I WAS KEPT awake quite late by the howls and yipes of the dogs which seemed to be circling the property with great energy in the night. I meant to question Verdugo on the matter, as during the entirety of my first week here the animals hadn’t made a peep after dark. Then, soon after first light I heard Mrs. Verdugo call out and ring the dinner bell near the back door, our agreed-upon signal for a phone call, of which I had had none to that point.

  I correctly assumed it was Deirdre calling from Chicago. The smiling Verdugos left the kitchen to give me privacy except for Grandma, who had reappeared after a day’s absence and who also had given no sign she understood English. Still, I sensed tension in the household. Verdugo had returned very late without the immense truck which I assumed he had rented. While I talked with Deirdre I noted out the window that their late-model Ford had a crumpled front fender and Verdugo’s face had looked a bit bloated when he was bent over his steaming coffee. Miles beyond the car, the top of a mountain glistened with snow. Our own particular canyon didn’t get any sun until mid-morning.

  It was difficult to steer Deirdre away from the therapeutic chitchat that is part of her profession. She wanted to know my plans for the day and whether they contained any activity beyond brooding. I said I was in the middle of a full-fledged campaign to learn the standard shift, after which I was going to take the dogs for both a ride and a walk. This pleased her, as part of her innovative work in group therapy is taking a gaggle of woebegone patients on long walks under the assumption that physical exhaustion lightens the mental load. There were other questions flirting around the edge of my “anxiety attack” at the Desert Museum. I was dangerously close to asking her about the sensation of my brain melting the day before, but I didn’t understand the experience well enough to describe it, and also I didn’t want to alarm her in case the melting was a further symptom of some dire mental disease, such as Alzheimer’s.

  Part of my hesitancy with Deirdre was due to Marilyn’s addiction to oodles of mental self-help books of every imaginable discipline, from self-hypnosis to cranial massage. Years ago she had returned from her est week notably the same person. Deirdre concluded our conversation by trying to get me to promise to come to Chicago for Christmas, and failing that, asked if I had been reading the nature books she had bought for me. Of course, I said, but then was stumped when she asked what birds I’d seen. Fumbling around, I came up with a grackle, which made her shriek with laughter as there are no grackles hereabouts. I said it looked like a grackle, only with a bluish head. This stumped the expert and we said goodbye. I did, in fact, see the bird staring at me on the way to the phone, perched on the barbecue machine.

  The Verdugos were disappointed when I announced I didn’t feel up to the Saturday shopping trip. I actually surprised myself when I said no, and asked them only to get me a variety of canned soups. I suspected they were upset because on that particular day their marriage needed a buffer zone and I was to be it. There was also the glum prospect of the pre-Christmas shopping gaiety some fifty miles away in Nogales, though I hadn’t been there. To change the subject I asked Verdugo about the shrill barking of the dogs in the night and he said it was just the coyotes chasing dinner, which gave me a new regard for my immediate surroundings. It was doubtless time to take a look at Deirdre’s nature books, not that I was entering totally strange country — beginning in his childhood John Clare had been a relentlessly curious amateur naturalist, a part of his work I tended to ignore.

  “Are you sure you’re fine?” Mrs. Verdugo had followed me out in the yard and took my arm. “You’re looking a little peculiar.”

  I insisted I felt okay and rushed to my cabin as if it were a refuge. In fact, I felt interior tremors, perhaps a coordinate to the liquefying brain of the day before. At least Lillian used “peculiar” rather than such psychologisms as “depression” or “nervous breakdown,” which are pathetic euphemisms for the profoundest of life processes.

  Oddly, the cabin seemed to have shrunk in size, although I could only focus on parts of it at once. I put on my borrowed coat and recalled one of Deirdre’s trick questions: “Imagine you are in an empty house and quickly open a closed door. What do you see?” Out flows the gray extrudate of our culture and my life within it which suffocates me. I was pleased with my current answer, and yet the cabin continued to visibly shrink. I escaped outside, and not a moment too soon, circling around to the far side where I discovered that by looking in a window, through the cabin, and out another window I could watch the Verdugos’ adobe unobserved. My aim was to practice the standard shift without any interference.

  I stood there like a statue for over an hour. It was at this point that I made the odd connection between the muddied corpse of the construction worker I had seen in the medical center last May and the death of my own father during my twelfth summer. The crane he had been operating had slid backward into a deep culvert full of water and he had been trapped there. I wasn’t allowed to see the body but I’m confident that it was muddy indeed. My thoughts turned again to the desperate exploits of Thelma and Louise, and my childish urge to help them out. After the movie I had stood outside a Mexican restaurant for quite some time, quarreling with myself about whether I should go in. Instead, I ate a foul hamburger at the bus station. Unlike Thelma and Louise, Deirdre and Marilyn had never needed any help that I could remember.

  Eventually the Verdugos left and I hurriedly made my way to the Jeep, finding the keys under the seat where I had seen Lillian secrete them. The two cowboys were gone, evidently for the weekend. The horses in the corral lined up to watch my Jeep practice as if I were the moment’s entertainment, and the three dogs appeared from nowhere, jumping in the back. I turned on the ignition and the vehicle that had won World War II chugged to life.

  My first efforts to back the Jeep away from the granary failed with a jerky stall when I was precipitous with the clutch. Finally this was accomplished, and I paused to re-study the indented rubrics on the shift knob, which seemed obvious enough, progressing from 1 to 3. I was on the verge of success, easing the vehicle out of the barnyard, when the grandma trotted out and handed me a paper bag and the Jeep stalled again. She tousled my hair with unwelcome familiarity, but then I thought, Why get upset at the etiquette of this old lady who had given me a sack lunch? I said “gracias,” gave her a winning smile, restarted the vehicle, and was off for the mountains, or wherever whichever road took me, with a tremor in my heart rather than a song.

  *

  Perhaps in the years to come I will regard that day as the signal day of my life, but for the present I am terribly frightened, if a little thankful. The first hour I drove tentatively, then noted the dogs barked when I slowed down. So I drove faster, for want of anything better to do than please dogs. It beat the hell out of pleasing students, or more particularly Marilyn in the last few years of ou
r marriage. Unfaithful wives are great fault finders because it fuels their sense of self-justification, or so Bob told me. It is not the sort of observation I’m capable of making. This came after I confessed to Bob that I had caught Marilyn with her elbows neatly arranged on the washer and dryer, catching it from behind from a visiting California poet. Marilyn loved giving parties for visiting poets, finding companionship, I suppose, in their extravagant personalities. I usually went to bed early and it was only by happenstance that I discovered Marilyn, thinking I heard an odd racket at two A.M. I backed away stealthily and she never knew I was aware of this indiscretion, only the prolonged affair with Ballard which, it seems, was public knowledge throughout our academic community before I knew it. Her unfaithfulness was too fundamental for me to be much surprised at the actual series of events.

  I drove past what appeared to be a prosperous ranch with immense cattle owning a peculiar hump on their backs, similar to photos one sees of cattle in India. I headed back up a road leading into the mountains, deciding that I wanted to see snow at close range. The dogs seemed to agree, preferring the smells of the forested slopes to the pastures of the lowlands. We went up and up for nearly an hour and I was thankful that I wore the warm coat, noticing for the first time that it smelled like horses and cows. The dogs would dash from one side of the compartment to the other, barking at the passing sights and odors.

  Finally snow began to appear on the narrow roadside, and quickly enough it covered the forest floor. I pulled off into a smallish clearing to walk for a while. The images of Marilyn, Ballard, and the college arose again but my mind lacked the energy to maintain their presence. They simply disappeared and I wondered if that meant I utterly did not care anymore. I experimented with images of Deirdre and Bob — pleasant enough, but they also drifted away.