Returning to Earth (21 page)

Vernice came over to my Iowa City motel shortly after my arrival at midafternoon. For the first time in more than a decade she looked truly healthy. She was at her nadir a year and a half ago when I met her in Florence, Italy, for the purpose of seeing a retired doctor who had been a specialist in tropical medicine. She had been on a year's fellowship in Glasgow, Scotland, and was cold, weak, and utterly miserable. It was in mid-March and I was in Zacatecas at the time but her voice sounded so small and remote that I decided to meet her. I flew from Mexico City to Rome, which was a not altogether pleasant reminder of an earlier trip to France in search of Vernice. Most of us know that medicine is scarcely a precise science but Vernice had been lucky to meet a doctor in Glasgow who had been a colleague of the Italian doctor when they had both worked for the United Nations in Arusha in Tanzania. The Italian doctor was a sprightly old man who looked like Sigmund Freud. The first few days we stayed in an inexpensive
pensione
where if I leaned precariously out the window I could see a half inch of the Arno River. When the doctor put Vernice in the hospital for tests I moved to a nice hotel where I could get room service. Vernice had been treated previously for liver flukes she'd encountered on a budget trip to Morocco when she was living in the south of France with her lesbian partner. The Italian doctor, however, determined that she has two
additional parasites, including one she had caught walking barefoot on a Jamaican beach; the third was of indeterminate tropical origin and the doctor explained to me that such parasites, though anyone can get them, are more typical in those on budget travel funds. After Florence Vernice was on the road back to health continuing her treatment with a specialist at the medical school in Ames, Iowa. Always a leftist bully she insisted I fly to Rome tourist class but after ten days in Florence and a night in Rome, when she was safely on a flight back to Glasgow, I changed my ticket to business class, proving, I suppose, that there was some of my parents left in me. Understandably in Florence our only physical contact was holding hands and it was like holding hands with a wraith.

Now in Iowa City she sipped a scant inch of a nice wine I had bought and then we were off on an arduous walk in a hilly area north of town, a densely wooded few hundred acres not at all like my preconception of Iowa. We sat down near a lovely pond with a used prophylactic in clear view and rather than being her usual schoolmarmish self telling me what to read Vernice talked about university parking problems and the iffy question of whether she was on a “tenure track,” which would mean a lifetime sinecure. She was in her early forties and was fatigued with traveling between “lesser universities” as a temporary poet-in-residence.

I still felt light-headed and pleasant though I had read enough about pheromones to understand that none were present there by the pond. The feeling wasn't really similar to Polly's brisk good-bye but it was hard to see clearly the nature of the curious bond I had with Vernice, which had
never recovered its original sexual intensity. Cynthia had chided me a number of times of late about my “appearance” so I had put on a clean (but old) shirt and combed my hair before Vernice had arrived at the motel. Her single night at the cabin in July on her drive from Iowa to a summer-school place in Vermont called Bread Loaf had been pathetically chaste despite my wheedling. When we stood up at the pond she allowed me to embrace her and when I slid my hand down on her buttocks she wordlessly pushed it away. On the hike back to the car I remembered when I lived near Patagonia, Arizona, near the border six years before and misdirected myself on a hike ending up in a ranch yard where a chained-up dog was barking into the distance with his back turned to me. The rancher came out of the house and gave me directions to my car and I asked him about the dog. He said that the other cow dogs were off rounding up some heifers but this dog was worthless and was always left behind. Of course it was after the rancher explained about the dog, but I felt there was an eerie sense of longing in its voice.

At Vernice's pleasant rented bungalow she told me to take my usual nap because a small group of poet friends and graduate students always came over late Sunday afternoons for an hour. Meanwhile she would put on a big capon to roast, which was my favorite, and I could take the leftover fowl on the road in the morning. I lay down on the couch in her writing room with a glass of red wine and looked at the photos above her desk thinking I hadn't really planned on leaving in the morning but then Vernice has always fixed the itinerary when we've been together. After a passing
glance I averted my eyes from a photo of Carla and me at the cabin and then I fixed on it. Was I ever that young?

I felt pleasant seeing one of the last rays of the afternoon sun collide with my half glass of red wine. I closed my eyes and saw Vera getting out of the car across the street from the Emporio Hotel in Veracruz. She really said nothing except to tell me to please go away. She had my father's child. Who are the children of raped mothers? Two weeks after Donald's death Cynthia and I walked half the night in Marquette under the light of a full moon. There was a trace of madness in her talk. We were out by the ore dock near the power plant studying what the moon was doing to the water. She was saying that Clarence and Jesse were the best parts of our childhood, the only adults we truly loved. Clarence gave her his son Donald and they had had a fine life. Our father destroyed the life of Jesse's daughter. Her life became predetermined by our father's act. Cynthia walked into the water up to her knees, wriggling the moon around her. She was doing fractions with our lives. She turned to me with her face shadowed by the moon behind her and said she was sure that I had spent all of that time in Mexico the past five years because Mexico was Vera even though I didn't see her. I was probably rescuing Vera over and over trying to help people survive. I walked out in the water and put my arm around Cynthia and said, “I don't know.”

Now in Vernice's writing room I felt that it was comical that I'd probably stay at the cabin the year around except that winter brought a couple of hundred inches of snow and many twenty-below-zero nights. I stay in a place because it seizes me. I go to a place because it seizes me. I doubt
if there are as many turns, corners, crossroads in our lives as we think there are.

“Where are you?” Vernice is standing in the doorway as if invisible. She laughs so I do too. “Come in. I can't remember that poem you gave me.”

They were all sitting around the dining room table, seven of them, and they certainly weren't discussing business. Of the three young women one named Dora was terribly attractive, something I always feel in my tummy. None of the poets they were talking about were authors of the books of high quality that Vernice had given me (she was pleased with my fascination with Wallace Stevens, whose poems like good paintings made me want to live inside them). Instead they were discussing, mostly scornfully, colleagues in other MFA programs around the country. I made the mistake of saying that when Vernice was being doctored in Florence and on our last day she was strong enough to walk around the Uffizi for a couple of hours she had said, “It seems cheeky for us to give a master of fine arts in America.”

Six of them looked stricken by my story but it was applauded by a scruffy young gay man who seemed the brightest of the lot. Vernice promptly changed the subject by getting me to quote from a Mexican poet, well known down there but unheard of in the U.S. and the only author I had ever suggested to Vernice who passed her implacable muster. His name is Francisco Hernández and he wrote of the madness of Schumann, Hölderlin, and Trakl.

Estoy harto de todo, Robert Schumann
,

de edta urbe pesarosa de torrentes plomizos

de este bello país de pordiorseros y ladrones

donte el amor es mierda de perros policías

y la piedad un tiro en parietal de niño

That was the only portion of the very long poem I could quote and I translated:

I'm tired of everything, Robert Schumann

of this mournful city of leaden rains

of this beautiful country of beggars and thieves

where love is the shit of police dogs

and pity a kid with a bullet in his brains
.

That ended the little party and I was pleased when Dora gave me a not entirely chaste hug. I basically ate the capon and roasted vegetables solo because Vernice insisted the chicken was overdone, a small matter for a citizen of the northern Midwest, where the chicken is always overdone. She did, however, drink a lot of wine, which was untypical of her, right to the point where her voice slurred like Judy Garland's on talk shows. My parents absolutely hated it when Cynthia mimicked their voices slurred with alcohol and, in my mother's case, pills. For unclear reasons Vernice rehearsed the history of what she called our “friendship,” another indication that we weren't going to make love. She made coffee but barely touched hers, and couldn't stop rattling on about her career and the likelihood of getting academic tenure. She failed to ask a single question about me or my family when usually she wants to hear about Cynthia. I ascribed the narrowness of her concerns to alcohol and the
job worries, Vernice having taught at seven colleges and universities in ten years. She now feared that having published her little quasi-pornographic novel with a small press years before in an effort to make some money had jinxed her. She kept repeating that this was a period of political correctness in American universities, a matter I had no familiarity with except from reading newspaper items. I was relieved when by ten she showed me to her small guest bedroom with twin beds. I had had enough to drink that I didn't want to chance driving across town to my motel. The room was far too warm and she came back in her bra and panties and helped me struggle with a stuck window. Her figure was truly full for the first time in a decade but her attitude reduced me to thinking of her as a sexy photo in a magazine, the kind my friend Glenn pasted to the walls of his room with perfect knowledge that never in his life would he get to touch such a woman. She slumped down on the other bed and I tried to turn off the very modern bed lamp, which was evidently faulty because I couldn't get the light to go off. I gave up at four a.m. to Vernice's not unpleasant snores and cold wind coming through the window blowing the curtains apart. I went downstairs for a glass of water and then took a chicken leg from the fridge. I sat on the bed eating the chicken leg and feeling my dick stiffen at the sight of Vernice's sprawled body, but then her eyes opened.

“What are you doing?” she snapped, sitting up and trying to cover herself.

“I'm eating a chicken leg,” I said.

She huffed out of the room so I dressed and left, driving altogether too many miles without taking a nap to Dalhart
in the Texas Panhandle, arriving in a bleak twilight. I ate a mediocre Mexican supper reflecting that it was like eating in a French bistro in Missouri. If you spend a long time in Mexico you become a food critic elsewhere. I was utterly jangled from the long drive and thinking about Vera so I bought a pint of whiskey anticipating a long night. There was a wild and stupid urge to backtrack a bit and drive south to Brownsville and down the coast of Mexico to Veracruz. What stopped me, of course, was the brooding and dread I intermittently felt over what I might have to confront in Tucson to further the life of my survival-kit project. I'm the rare bird who finds Nebraska and Kansas fascinating so most of the time my worries were drawn away by the landscape and I would whistle along to doleful country music on the radio, most of the contents of which were laments over aborted love.

It's appalling on a road trip when you fall asleep shortly after seven in the evening and are wide awake at two a.m., still in your clothes and twiddling your thumbs. On the wall there was the same print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers that I had seen in a half dozen other motel rooms. On the other side of the room a new one presented itself that I hadn't noticed when I'd arrived: a sappy longhorn bull on an aqua-greenish promontory surveying the sunset, naturally, and a valley full of cows.

The room was cool but I was sweating from jumbled dreams that centered in the thickets behind the cabin. A big mother bear was concealing herself but I could only see her baby flouncing in the yard near my bird feeder. This had happened three times in twenty years and only once did I
see the mother peeking from behind the pump shed. In the dream the moon was my mother's face and though it was dark I could see the baby bear crying because it couldn't locate its mother. In actuality a baby bear crying sounds like a human baby. Somehow in the dream the baby bear was Vera and the invisible mother bear was Donald.

I was utterly disoriented so I poured a drink of whiskey and turned on the television to escape the dream. By happenstance the only movie on was one of my father's favorites with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope somewhere in the tropics. He owned a copy of this movie and I can remember on several warm summer evenings him playing it on a rented projector in the backyard. There were always drinking adults but Cynthia and I loved the occasion because the movie made my father laugh a full-throated nonironic belly laugh.

I turned the television off and sat there on the bed's edge, then went to the desk, where there was no room for my legs. I got out my journal and turned on the clock radio to a Mexican station that was playing
corridos
, the contemporary peasant folk songs of the border mostly dealing with love and death and the drug trade. The music conflicted garishly with my memory of standing outside Dante's house in Florence with Vernice. It was the next to the last day of our stay there and I celebrated her diagnosis by having four glasses of prosecco for lunch. She was wobbly for health reasons but happy and I was wobbly from wine. Vernice has always loved discussing the more grotesque and furtive aspects of sex and I've never hesitated to amuse her with my own tales. Anyway, back in college I had taken an advanced course in world literature and written my term paper on Dante. Standing
there in front of his house I babbled on about Dante and his beloved Beatrice and how at the time I was writing the paper I was living with Polly in married housing at Michigan State. It was midwinter and I was having the usual depression and though I was after Polly a couple of times a day for sex I had difficulty coming off. What worked was if I imagined Polly was Vera and then I could ejaculate. Naturally I was ashamed of myself and also more than a bit puzzled. Vernice was delighted with the half-drunken story and stood there laughing in the shady, ancient alley. Vernice knew everything about my Vera obsession minus this story and when she finished laughing she put me through a silly quiz.