Sometimes anything but cartoons is too real for me.
· · ·
Sunday is always a bad day. A sort of gray purgatory that resembles a bus station with broken vending machines. God is dead, and denied the last word on things, is acting like a real baby. Sunday is some sort of revenge. “And on the Seventh Day he was arrested,” Gerard likes to say.
Before class on Monday the teacher, who smelled of Emeraude and faintly of onions and who felt herself perhaps the sort of woman doomed in middle age to be always taking other people’s children for walks in parks, read a giant stack of student poems. The ones by a black student named Darrel Erni were the most interesting, mostly about women he’d known in Vietnam. The teacher picked at the sweater lint caught in the ragged edge of her fingernail and then stirred her coffee with a knife.
In class she grew dramatic. “You need to ask yourself questions,” she told her students in something that resembled a hiss. “I want you to ask yourself, ‘How is writing a public act? What does poetry owe the world? Are we all vagabonds at a cosmic dump or are we just not paying attention?’ ” Then she stomped around back and forth in front of the class and spoke of nuclear protest, presidential petitions, throwing pies with lots of whipped cream. “Do you know whether this college has investments in South Africa?”
Outside, the leaves that had not blushed or died were doing a dazzling fade, the gold, paper money of pirates.
“I want you to think about the sick luxury of your being,” she said. And then she lit up a cigarette.
Tuesday is a train station with one working vending machine filled with nothing but Mars bars. I meet Gerard for a fast breakfast. I walk in a little later than usual and he looks up from a newspaper and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. He smiles. “Didn’t think you’d be here today.” I climb into the booth, look at him from across the table and gently take his cigarette from his fingers, helping myself to a long drag. Then I too smile. We’re friends. I’m relieved.
I glance at his newspaper. “What’s happening in the world? Do we still exist?”
We don’t talk about Thursday night — another undiscussable, like Darrel’s war, or Gerard’s long ago restaurant: We leave them alone. There’s still something tense between us, but it’s tense like hope.
Gerard folds the newspaper. “Do you suppose this planet is hell and we’ve all been sent here from somewhere else because we fucked up, and we don’t realize it?”
I smile. This is how we talk when we’re happy. When we’re depressed we spout forth irrepressibly about our love lives.
I look at the paper again. The human race is dying. We are all dying and we are sitting up in our beds smoking cigars and making dying jokes, an impressively, compulsively vaudevillian species. Monkeys with spiff.
“The coffee’s like mop water today. I don’t know what happened.” Usually Hank’s serves the kind of coffee that makes you talk real fast and then sends you knocking around the room, breaking things.
“And look at these eggs,” says Gerard. Yolk has bled and dried all over the plate. Gerard always likes his yolks cooked more. “I hate them when they’re all embryonic like this. The waitress is new. The last time she walked by here I said, ‘Excuse me, could I also have some Band-Aids for these?’ and she just walked away.” Yolk has dried into Gerard’s beard like wax.
“Who wants to tell me what a sonnet is?” asked the teacher. “Lucy?”
“No, it’s Joyce.”
“Really? Gee, my seating chart says Lucy. Oh, I see. Lucy Joyce Brondoli. Why are you called by your middle name? Is there a long story to that?”
Lucy Joyce Brondoli shrugged and spoke slowly, in a diffident deadpan. “The dog was named Lucy, so they had to call me Joyce.”
“The dog was there before you and got your name?”
“I forget.”
“I don’t understand. Why did they name both you and the dog Lucy?”
“I guess they liked the name. A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter ending in a couplet and the rhyme scheme before that goes ABAB,CDCD,EFEF. Like that. Shakespeare wrote a lot of them.”
“But why didn’t they just call the dog Joyce? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I get sidetracked,” I tell Eleanor. We slurp coffee together in the lounge. “I get fascinated. I think people spend most of their lives just trying to adjust to their names. When you’re eighteen months old, you learn what it is, one of those huge, immutable abstractions in life, and from there on in it’s all recovery from the shock and indignity of it.” My father had wanted another boy after Louis. He was hoping for a Benjamin. That’s partly how I became Benna. The other part involved my mother who, in looking through a book called Names for Your Child, became very distressed to see that if you were a boy your name usually meant “Almighty One,” and if you were a girl you were probably “a wee, faithful thing of the woods.” My mother didn’t want me hanging around in the woods. “Well, Nick,” she said to my father in the hospital, “looks like we have a little Benna.” Which was the beginning of a lot of confusion. My father sometimes called me Ben, complicating my childhood in the obvious ways. And in the second grade I got thirty valentines, all with my name spelled differently, everything from Bean to Donna. No one could get it right.
“My name was always such a hideosity I finally had to take up yoga to relax,” says Eleanor. I smile, slurp, and accidentally burn my tongue. “You know,” says Eleanor, “if I were to write a book, it would be filled with women sitting around having lunch, talking like this — about God and diaphragms and Middlemarch. After every lunch they’d all take out their compacts at the table and reapply their lipstick together. What yould you write?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’d call it Split Infinitives and load it up with a lot of divorces. Then at the end I’d have it be like To the Lighthouse, where all human life is suddenly lifted up out of the book and vanished, only an old house at the end, with English weeds tapping at the glass.”
Eleanor nods and smiles. “That’s depressing.”
“Yeah, I guess if it was too depressing I’d add a knock-knock joke.”
At night it’s cold and I sit out on the steps of my front porch, listen to the leaves drop, like the beginning of rain. I suck on my cigarette, its false restorative, the dry papery sponge, the sucking finger of love. I exhale in the direction of the streetlight and what I see, what is formed, is a sort of halo, a luminous flower, splayed ghostly starfish! for a moment and then it floats off into the hydrangea. I repeat this, breathing on my cigarette, blowing upward into the light: At night all ghosts, all angels, haloes, luminous flowers are this nicotined dust against the streetlamp.
When I told my husband I hated him, we hadn’t been married long at all. It was when he was taking my picture with his new camera, narrowing his eyes, adjusting the shutter speed, posing me at various angles until my smile felt aching and absurd. We were in the living room. He had asked me to take my shirt off and I’d obliged. I’d been standing there by the mantel awhile and it was getting cold, the hairs on my arms standing on end, my nipples erect. “Got your high beams on,” said my husband, like a college kid, camera to his face. Finally he pulled the camera away from his eyes. “Light’s bad,” he mumbled and walked off without taking the shot. Stunned and topless, I followed him into the dining room where he began taking pictures of the porcelain monkey-head lamp my Aunt Wyn had sent us for our wedding. “The light’s hitting this great,” said my husband. “The reading’s perfect.” His camera was clicking away.