The Name of the World (8 page)

“Oh, my friends and foes! That night! Later! You have no idea how violently I masturbated!”

Let that be the last word of any description of the conversations among our Department members.

But no, I couldn’t let it. A few minutes later I trailed Clara Frenow into the hallway and called her name as she struggled with her office door.

“I’m surprised I even feel irritated with you,” I told her.

She looked surprised herself, then unsurprised, then incapable of surprise. “You want to come in?” she said.

It was visible and plain, the oppressiveness stealing back over her life. And all she had was her blue beret. She looked prehistoric. I could see her in the rags of animals, lifting up a small harpoon against the storm.

“Nah,” I said, “forget it, no.”

Tiberius hadn’t had his last word, either. He turned up beside me now and put both hands on my arm: “Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life. Nothing matters but that we get out of here.”

He walked away toward the hallway’s end. He hadn’t even glanced at Clara. In the stairwell he became a swaying silhouette and disappeared six inches at a time, descending.

“Clara, I thought we had an understanding.” But I might as well have been saying, I understood we had a thought.

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Then I guess we didn’t. It’s probably silly of me to be talking about it. Anyway—come on. What happened?”

“The position’s gone tenure track. It was kind of sudden, Mike.”

We both knew I’d done nothing to build a case for getting tenure.

“We assumed it was coming, but it came without warning,” she explained. “The fact is Marty blessed us suddenly with the tenured slot when Tiberius got all that publicity. Look, we’ve got to move Tiberius over to a tenure track. In fact we’d better give him tenure right away or we’re going to lose him.”

“If you haven’t already.”

“He’s not as around-the-bend as he acts. He’s just lighting a fire under us. And having fun at it, too, I might add.”

Marty Peele was the Dean of Liberal Arts (and the man at whose house Tiberius had been so pleased to meet Kelly Stein). The History Department was barely on Marty’s radar, but apparently he’d been galvanized by a series of interviews Tiberius had done with somebody on PBS. Soames had been brilliant. That which excellent teaching couldn’t do for him, the impression that he’d become famous had managed to do. And good for him.

“Good for him. And, really: good for the Department. And good for the whole institution. It just comes kind of abruptly—as you say.”

“I would have shuffled you over to Tibby’s position for a year, but the truth is, we had to restructure the budget, too. In effect his line isn’t there, not for a year or two anyway.”

“You mean it isn’t there at all?”

“Well, it’s sort of there. There just isn’t much money for
it.” Tiberius had probably gotten a whopping raise, in other words.

“I could maybe do with that. Just for the one year.”

“Well, of course, Mike. If you want the position—uh.” She finished off by saying, nearly wailing, “Oh, Mike!”

“Oh, Clara!” It was impossible. I’d been wrong to ask. “All right. I feel like a fool. I know you’ve done whatever you could. I’m out of line. I owe you thanks, and that’s all.”

“You’ve been wonderful here,” she said.

“It’s been good for me.” I was sincere in saying it.

I took the stairs to the parking-lot entrance. When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.

Not a lot happened. The following day I carried a cardboard box to the office and emptied my desk into it. Over the next two weeks I brought several such boxes into the house I rented. Slowly I packed, as yet without a destination. I watched the weather turn.

Just before the end of the academic year I took a trip to upstate New York to attend the Conference on Emerging Democracies. I flew by jet to New York City, and from there I rode a train. I had no preparations to make, no real role to play at the Conference, a gathering sponsored by the Giddings Policy Studies Foundation and an annual tradition since the days when “democracy” had meant “socialism,” a roundup of intellectuals currently undertaking a project of cool-headed, not to say bald-faced, retrenchment. I spent a
very long three-day weekend among a lot of people who, I was sort of glad to see, had no intention of abandoning their earliest and most hopeful assumptions. Sixteen weeks before, the Berlin Wall had come down. Nobody mentioned this. The term “Marxist” flew all around the place, but none of the speakers ever referred to The Left or The Revolution or The People. On panels, behind podiums—so tiny in nearly empty auditoriums—they displayed the vivid, liberated staunchness of spinsters in old novels. What they’d mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense. This didn’t preclude a certain shift in personal style. The men no longer smoked pipes of tobacco, and the women no longer drank sherry or wore bright lipstick inexpertly applied. I don’t know why I went. I think I wanted something to happen to me there but nothing did.

Except that I spent a couple of days in the city and was struck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And the grafitti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign
ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda—is that the word I want?—not include me. I don’t want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all.

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don’t know, but I have to say the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of persective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her—not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn’t take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter—yes, and for a while she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

The picture I’ve been giving here is that of the most circumscribed and uneventful period of my life. In the last few weeks, more had happened to me than I’d experienced in years—developing a small but impossible crush on a student, getting socked in the head, losing my job a year earlier than I’d expected, taking a pointless journey. I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.

The final event on my calendar would be the expiration of my lease at the end of June. I should get out of town before
then. I had no summer classes, no business here, no people keeping me—my time was up. But when classes ended in the spring, I didn’t go.

By the middle of June the town seemed stunned by the summer, emptied of nearly half its people, after all, and the livelier half at that. It was hot. Humid. I was idle. Bored. Almost every weekday afternoon I met Ted MacKey at an air-conditioned basement tavern and watched him get drunk. Then we went to our separate dinners.

Sometimes Eloise Sprungl joined us. She was the woman who catered many of the dinners for the Liberal Arts faculty. I’ve described her as the image of Peter Lorre. For some years she’d been tenured faculty in the Art Department and had even done a turn as department chair, but one day she’d simply stopped showing up for work. Tendered her resignation. She painted almost daily now, had a studio in her home, but she didn’t think she was any good. All this and more she told me in the time it took her to smoke a cigarette and down a double schnapps while we waited for Ted to come wobbling down the stairs of Dooley Noodle’s, the basement tavern—the first moment she and I were ever alone together. She revealed that two years before, her husband had died of lymphoma, a complication of AIDS.

At one time or another she claimed to have bombed a power plant in the seventies, to have invented a process used in long-range observatory telescopes, and to have conducted, as a girl of thirteen, a red-hot love affair with Ernest Hemingway
that spanned the globe, and she hinted she was the reason he’d ended it all. She liked referring to herself as the Froggy Bitch. “Give the Froggy Bitch a light…” “The Froggy Bitch must excuse herself to pee…” “Even the Froggy Bitch gets hungry, so let’s eat!” Yet with all that had happened to her, she seemed neither sad nor angry. I’m not sure why I bother talking about Eloise except to reflect, for my own benefit, on the kind of people I was drawn to. State-run education was mostly show. She and Ted Mackey were open about that. They were just the type to thrive in these vapors of low-lying cynicism, occasional genius, and small polite terror.

And Ted has, in fact, continued to flourish. So has Eloise Sprungl. And although I see I’m not yet quite finished recording these memories, I might as well tell about some of the others:

Clara Frenow beat the cancer permanently, took early retirement, and either joined the Peace Corps or bought a bed-and-breakfast in Minnesota, so the reports went. Maybe she did both. As for Flower Cannon, I have no idea what’s become of her, but if I ever track her down I’m sure she’ll be up to something quite shocking and also absolutely no surprise. Of course all along I’ve been disingenuous when referring to Tiberius Soames, as I’m sure the name was familiar. Three years ago he and Marcel Delahey shared the Nobel Prize for economics. He’s got a big endowed chair now at the University of Chicago and all day long does whatever he wants. Ted MacKey and I still correspond, or anyway exchange postcards.
His last: “I’m pimping a couple co-eds now, and I’ve joined a coven. Marie [his wife] has had a sex change. We never liked you. Keep in touch.” The photo shows a vast field of profoundly green cultivated rows across which he’s scrawled
excuse the corny sentiment.

And, of prizes: You may be aware of T. K. Nickerson’s Pulitzer—his second Pulitzer—the year before last. I bought the book, found it unreadable. He followed quickly with another, which I picked up browsing in a store one day and which by that evening I’d devoured in one sitting, and I’ve since read it again with just as much pleasure. So he still knows how to write. He married Kelly Stein, or so I think I heard. And what about J.J.? Two years back this short letter came to me, and I haven’t yet tossed it out:

J.J. goes on to say he’s seen a piece of mine in
Men’s Journal
. “What a coup!” he says. I don’t hold the sarcasm against him.

Otherwise I’ve had nothing from any of that bunch, except, as I’ve said, the occasional card from Ted MacKey, whom I invite you to imagine facing me in a booth those several years ago in a basement tavern, our hands around cold drinks, while outside the Midwest pounded in a heat wave. Eloise was with us too. She didn’t talk much today. Ted leaned toward me, drunk, huddled around some inner upright and saying only, “You don’t know. You don’t. You just don’t know.” He’d fed some dollars to the jukebox and set it to play “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney infinitely. After a few drinks Ted conversed very little. He mostly sang.

he was singing now (while the jukebox played Paul McCartney).

he sang, throwing wide his arms.

By wrecking the rhythm, he braided the old spiritual together with the McCartney tune coming out of the jukebox, and made an odd duet.

“Reed,” he said, “Reed. Just, man—bury me where the corn don’t grow.”

Eloise laughed and hacked. She had the smashed sinuses of an English bulldog.

Here I’ve let my memory veer down the stairs and float alongside the bar and hover in the light of the jukebox, when actually there’s no point. Nothing worth telling about happened down there. Or up in the world, for that matter. I’d packed my few belongings in boxes and was ready to move to a motel until I found a reason to depart—until I had a destination. Other than that, the whole month of June had barely managed to occur. But it went out with a lot of noise.