Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (30 page)

I know where that bleeper parks his car, where that bleeper lives, but I don’t know yet how to make his horn stick. To learn how to blare a horn will take research. Isn’t it sort of dangerous, I said, tinkering with the fellow’s car. Your intentions might be misunderstood. Chance you take, Luther said briskly. Maybe marshmallow will work. It works on boom boxes. Remember the Tylenol scare? Can’t risk random damage or even inconvenience.
Not fair. Have to pinpoint the particular. Have to balance the account. Have to carry it out promptly. Otherwise, he waved the list at me, you get backlogged and overwhelmed. You could stay home more, I offered, to lessen the chances of receiving slights.

A shadow—yes—as from a passing cloud on a summer day—passed over Luther Penner’s face, and I feared my insufficiently serious suggestion had offended him and got me on the list. Then he said: television insults the intelligence. It is so obviously true, and we’ve been told it so often, that repeating the proposition is another insult. He began tightly pleating his paper until it was very small and then he put it away in his shirt pocket. Girls who paint their toes … I almost exclaimed, had he noticed?girls?paint?toes? Those toes affront anyone with discrimination. Well, I said, after a pause, perhaps they’re not aimed at you. Another cloud. Another shadow. People who pierce their ears, he went on finally. People who wear string ties, silver buckles, boots; people who bleach or tease or dye their hair; women who walk about in curlers; people who paint their house purple, keep noisy dogs, don’t scoop their poop; people who try to run cyclists off the road; noisy bikers, nosey landlords, pushy people … This was a mood I hadn’t seen him in: wholly petty, consumed by trivial and commonplace complaints. Yet Penner was dreamy-eyed. All those false product choices we’re offered, the silly ads, the promises, the lotteries and sweepstakes … We are treated, you know, treated … like children … like fools … all the time … It’s not just this or that assumption about us that offends. It’s the entire atmosphere of life. One drop does not make a downpour. It’s the constant con. The torrent of lies. Coming from every corner. Molesting every sense. How to resist?

Despite living in a society made of insult and shame, Penner
was a fountain of data during those days. He was no longer working at wretched little jobs; he was back in school studying poetry, and planned to take a master’s, if he could, after catching up at the community college. What do you suppose Proust was up to, he asked me in mock-heroic tones. What crime had he committed so serious it required all those froggy words to obscure? I remember looking nonplussed … because I was nonplussed. Proust confessed to his desk, not to a priest. He knew his novel would console him, and his art forgive.

Confession. Penner made as if to bare his breast. Confession. What a sweet revenge it can be. Honesty and openness. Isn’t it lovely how honesty hides the wickedest of intentions? If I mention Proust, I should mention Gide. What does the rascal do, this Gide? He discovers his homosexual leanings. Like many a Frenchman, he goes to the Islamites in North Africa to verify the diagnosis. Knowing how much he loves boys, Gide nevertheless marries his cousin Madeleine. Then what? After a proper time has passed—to make matters most bitter—he writes
Corydon
, and confesses to the world his so-called wound. But who’s been wounded?

Luther Penner stages a wail. The woman … the wife … the woman … the wife … Ah, Gide and his Protestant conscience. The bounder can’t admire Proust’s book because the fags in it give buggery—all boy-and-baby-love—a bad name. Proust’s people are all perverts of power and pain. Well … isn’t the world wonderful. Wait … it gets better. Gide scoots off to Africa again with his fourteen-year-old concubine Marc … Marc Allégret. How is his wife to understand this? Easy. Gide has gonads for brains, and they tell him to separate lust from love, and having done so, he can confer his love, pure as perfumed fingers, on his cousin, Mme. Gide, while directing his licentiousness safely toward Marc of the lithe thighs.

Despite a past as checkered as the game, Luther was getting
on splendidly at school. He was impressing his professors. He was doing the work, keeping up, managing to stay out of trouble. Well, most of the time. Once, he regressed, and everything he’d been aiming at was almost lost. Claude Hoch … Claude Hoch … that instructorless instructor of mine … you know what he said, Penner said to me … no, first … you know what he did? I went to see him about a paper … OK?… and the whole time I was standing there at his desk … standing, mind you, not invited to sit down … Hoch was laying out a solitaire … he looked to put a six on a seven … then … then he says, somewhat apropos of my project, yes, admittedly … doesn’t matter … Hoch maintains to my face that Hopkins … Gerard Manley Hopkins, mind, the priest … was a homo. He said Hopkins was a homo. This man … with a name which sounds like a cleared throat … In mid-my-sentence! I said I was seeing sprung rhythm as a kind of revenge, you know, against the practices of the past, a move against previously ruling meters. And he said, right after that, Hopkins is a homo, he says. Well, the Higher Powers helped me. In the middle of everything, just after he has said that Hopkins is a homo, he says he has to answer a call of nature, and he puts … he slaps a card down on a run of reds, gets up and goes out past me into the hall as if I were invisible … invisible … as if I had no feelings, no soul … so … taking my cue from Claude the Sod, I answered a call of nature too: I pissed in his desk drawer. Copiously. I simply pulled it open and let his clips and bands and pencils and notecards and stamps have it. Then I shut the drawer, zipped up my fly, and lit out. I said to myself: that winsome wee widdle was for Hopkins. I was on air. High there! But now I know … I have touchdown … Now I am ashamed at how far back through childhood I’ve regressed, how little control I have over my lower nature.

Luther went into mourning over the character of his crude
kidney-shaped backslid soul, and I didn’t see him for about a month. During that month there was quite a to-do at the community college. Claude Hoch hadn’t immediately discovered Penner’s little prank, but when he did so it was the smell which alerted him. He must have relived the hours which lay between the drawer’s condition of dry and ordered normalcy and its withdrawal into one of smelly contamination—perhaps he even appreciated the pretty pun the act involved—in order to select a couple of likely culprits—those with opportunity, maybe motive, and malicious wit. It was a matter of access, most likely. It was not easy, however, to confront a suspect or broadcast the bad news, given its odoriferous and shameful character. There was a similar quality of embarrassment in the revenge which, earlier, had made Syph shut up. So a memo was sent out advising the innocent, warning the predisposed, and threatening the perpetrator of this unspecified yet jejeune bit of cheapjack lowjinks with exposure, dishonor, and suspension. Luther Penner’s posture, as I’ve pointed out, was normally so passive and humble and servantlike, so modest and discreet, that it made people uncomfortable (its intent, of course); consequently it was difficult for Hoch to believe Luther would have the vulgar gumption which he imagined the deed required; however Penner had been about during the likely time, and so Hoch had Luther in for a little chat. There was no card game in progress, Luther noted with some satisfaction. The desk drawer had been removed to receive some healing rays and enjoy the cleansing air, he supposed. He wondered how much of his urine had leaked from the drawer, and how much had puddled, rusting clips and soaking cards.

This was the real revenge, Luther told me, the happy occasion: listening to the man squirm and turn a pusillanimous phrase, hinting and hiding and hating his own caution, while
Luther played deferentially dumb, and dutifully though ignorantly concerned. As their interview was about to conclude, Luther remarked, after a slight shy laugh, that he’d thought Professor Hoch had asked to see him in order to take back his remark about Gerard Manley Hopkins. Penner proudly confessed that he couldn’t help himself. Now Hoch knew. Knew why and who. And was helpless as a pinned bug.

Luther collared me at the college cafeteria, after the month of mourning was up, and kept me cornered for an entire afternoon to talk about literary revenges; not just the kind that occur in movies, plays, and stories as the basis of the plot, but rather about the way women writers in particular wrote their former lovers and ex-husbands into fictions that skewered them, showed them up, righted old wrongs, evened scores, and squared, quite literally, accounts. Not much of that is done by poets, I ventured, perhaps the medium isn’t agreeable. Oh you’re wrong, Penner responded warmly. How about—just to consult a recent instance—how about Lowell’s
Dolphin
sonnets, the ones in which he actually quotes passages from his wife’s letters? Kids embarrass their parents by failing, by doing stupid things and getting caught. Poets do that too. Dylan Thomas was an expert at it. Until Caitlin no longer felt any dismay for him when he fell in the street or sympathized when he vomited, compelling him to fall and vomit where she could hear and see and smell and suffer. Afterward, he puked for any public. Lowell wrote to the world of his titled English mistress while his wife took nips from his hidden whiskey I suppose. He shamelessly pursued women as if he had a right—as a poet—to be a penis.

Lowell has this manuscript that’s full of purloined lines and indecent endearments, which he shows about as if it were a pet pony. To Stanley Kunitz, for instance. You know Stanley Kunitz?
No? You
have
learned. Well, he’s also a poet. And Kunitz writes Lowell. Tells him some of the poems are repellent. They are—hey—heartless—cruel, he says. Lowell, of course, has been pretending all along to be as morally concerned as all get out about this. What does the dear man do? He offers to dedicate a book to Kunitz, not
The Dolphin
of course—not Lowell’s banquet of confessional ingredients in some self-serving stew—that dedication goes to Lady Caroline, where it belongs—but another called
History
—a maneuver to ponder and praise—well, Kunitz accepts with polite pleasure, thank you, and, I presume, calms down, as disarmed as a defeated nation. “Cal” for Caligula, some say, but a “Calvin” all the same. Maybe he was my true precursor. Though a Calvin can’t precede a Luther, can he?

Luther is radiant. He is swimming in an ocean of proof. It is clear that, while his language might not seem to support the feeling, he actually admires Gide’s morally merdish cruelty, and Lowell’s arty hypocrisies. And who, Luther asks, is this Marc? this Allégret? He is the son of a Calvinist pastor, Gide’s tutor for a time, think of that, and the best man at Gide’s wedding. Gide debauches the boy. Gide. Gide. Wonderful Gide. Lowell … Lowell … Cal again … lovely. Penner grasps my arm. A final note. I am startled by his touch. Touching is not customary. What next, he wonders, then what? Gide’s wife burns all of his precious letters to her, letters which go back through his youth to the summers they first, as relatives, met; letters which describe his spiritual, high-minded, mustn’t-touch love for her; and Gide weeps for a week when he learns of her revenge. Penner applauds. What a beautiful affair, eh? Not the Medici or the Borgias, but pretty good in its minor way.

My smile was genuine, but it was for Penner’s appreciation of his own antics rather than the case itself. Proust too, Penner says. Proust was busy justifying his queer ways to his queer friends and their queer world: his sycophancy, his snobbery, his
sadism, his sickness, his shyness too, his dependency, his jealousies. The spoon, now stainless, made a right turn. Suddenly I remembered flying toy planes when I was a kid. The feeling and the flight path were the same.

I want to call attention to this episode and these remarks of Luther Penner’s because doing so should defuse the charges of misogyny planted on my friend. Over and over again, I heard him take the woman’s side. Catherine de’ Medici, Medea, Charlotte Corday … And the slander that he was queer is certainly far from true. He didn’t like fairies much. But he did believe every homosexual was getting even with a parent or two. The gay guy has got his father’s balls in a basket and is carrying them to grandmother’s house to wait for the wolf, he said.

He spoke glowingly of widows who censored their husbands’ letters after their death, thereby misguiding the future, and those who sequestered documents or trashed laboratories or burned papers or hacked apart works of art. It’s also true that he admired such people only because they proved his point. He liked to cite the ungrateful children of presidents and other VIPs, who wrote character assassinations and crippled dadmum careers with their exposés. Maybe it’s the way we raise them, but kids in our society seem required to disappoint their parents by failing to “live up” to this or that expectation, by going off in an undesired direction, or by embracing obnoxious values and opinions.

So many Chattertons, so many Romeos and Juliets, Penner said, youngsters in our society love suicide. Daily, dozens do themselves in. But what a revenge—as a penalty it is perfect. Penner made a gesture I couldn’t understand and allowed his spoon simply to sit still and glint. Penner talked to the table as if mesmerized by the shine. You’d have to dream about doing it—dream and redream—in order to receive death’s pleasure. Have a plan … Luther had a limited repertoire of gestures. The
spoon took off. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazilian lover, Lota, flies all the way to New York to overdose herself in Elizabeth’s fotch-on apartment. Comas herself practically on the front stoop. Dies in due course, causing Bishop not only the pain of her loss and the guilt of her going, but the gossip of friends. Penner looks up, meets my eye, fixes his gaze to my face as though fastened by paste. Neat, eh?

We then began to meet rather regularly in cafés and occasionally had dinner in some modest Italian bistro. But he wouldn’t eat meatballs because you never knew what had been hidden in them. Pretending he was merely mixing in the Parmesan, he’d totally retoss his bowl of pasta. I don’t like my food “filled” or my rice “hilled” or my potatoes “piled.” With his fork he’d lift up lettuce leaves before proceeding. It was discreetly done, but done, nevertheless. I seriously considered introducing Penner into my circle of friends, since I took him to be lonely and in search of an audience, but he refused my initial invitation. I don’t want to complicate our relationship, he said. I didn’t quite understand what that meant, or how his joining us would complicate anything, but Penner had a plot afoot, and didn’t wish to dilute his attention. He was writing “An Immodest Proposal.”