The line was busy.
She did not want to think about her disappointment. She would phone later. There was no more blood, though she could feel it crusted inside her head. So she would stay, she would do the reading, she would collect the fee and use it to pay the rent. What else was possible?
It was dinnertime and she was hungry, but she couldn’t afford another meal. Sometimes they took the poet out for dinner, sometimes they gave a party afterwards where she could fill up on crackers and cheese. Here there was nothing. They picked her up at the airport, that was it. She could tell there had been no posters, no advance publicity. A small audience, nervous because they were there and nobody else was, caught out attending the wrong reading. And she didn’t even look like a poet, she was wearing a neat navy-blue pantsuit, easy for stairs and cars. Maybe a robe would help, something flowing and ethereal. Bangles, a scarf?
She sat on the edge of the straightbacked chair, facing a picture of two dead ducks and an Irish setter. There was time to be filled. No television set. Read the Gideon Bible?
No, nothing too strenuous, she didn’t want to start bleeding again. In half an hour they would come to pick her up. Then the eyes, the polite hands, the fixed smiles. Afterwards everyone would murmur. “Don’t you feel exposed up there?” a young girl had asked her once. “No,” she’d said, and she didn’t, it wasn’t her, she read only her most soothing poems, she didn’t want to disturb anyone. But they distrusted her anyway. At least she never got drunk beforehand the way a lot of the others did. She wanted to be nice, and everyone approved of that.
Except the few hungry ones, the ones who wanted to know the secret, who believed there was a secret. They would straggle up afterwards, she knew, hanging around the edges, behind the murmuring committee members, clutching little packets of poems, extending them to her gingerly, as if the pages were raw flesh they could not bear to have touched. She could remember when she had felt like that. Most of the poems would be dismal, but now and then there would be one that had something, the energy, the thing that could not be defined. Don’t do it, she wanted to tell them, don’t make the mistake I made. But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.
Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that language could seize me by the hair and draw me straight up, out into the free air? But if you stop believing, you can’t do it any longer, you can’t fly. So I’m stuck here on this chair. A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Crisis of faith? Faith in what? Resurrection, that’s what is needed. Up from under. Get rid of these haunts, these fictions, he said, she said, counting up points and grievances; the dialogues of shadows. Otherwise there will be nothing left but the rest of my life. Something is frozen. Bernie, save me. He was so nice this morning, before she left.
The phone again, the voice flies through the darkness of space. Hollow ringing, a click.
“Hi.” A woman’s voice, Marika, she knew who it would be.
“Could I please speak to Bernie?” Stupid to act as though she didn’t recognize the voice.
“Hi, Julia,” Marika said. “Bernie’s not here right now. He had to go away for a couple of days, but he knew you’d be calling tonight so he asked me to come over. So you wouldn’t worry or anything. He said to have a good reading, and don’t forget to water the plant when you get back.”
“Oh, thanks, Marika,” she said. As if she was his secretary, leaving her with messages for the idiot wife while he. … She couldn’t ask where he had gone. She herself went away, why couldn’t he? If he wanted her to know where, he’d tell her. She said goodbye. As she put down the phone, she thought she heard something. A voice, a laugh?
He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s there, in the apartment, I can see it, it must have been going on for weeks, months, down at the gallery, I’ve read your book, checking out the competition. I must be feeble-minded, everyone knew but me. Trotting over to have coffee with me, casing the joint. Hope they have the grace to change the sheets. Didn’t have the guts to talk to me himself, water the plant my ass, it’s dead anyway. Melodrama in a parking lot, long stretches of asphalt with here and there a splotch of crushed animal, is that what my life has become?
Rock bottom in this room among the slagheaps, outer space, on the dead moon, with two slaughtered ducks and a stuffed dog, why did you have to do it that way, when I’m out here, you know it cripples me, these ordeals, walking through the eyes, couldn’t you have waited? You set it up so well, I’ll come back and yell and scream, and you’ll deny it all, you’ll look at me, very cool, and say, What are you talking about? And what will I be talking about, maybe I’m wrong, I’ll never know. Beautiful. It’s almost time.
They will arrive, the two young men who are polite and who do not yet have tenure. She will get into the front seat of their Volvo, and all the way to the reading, as they drive between the snowdrifts piled halfway up the telephone poles, the two young men will discuss the virtues of this car and the relative virtues of the car belonging to the one who is not driving but who is sitting in the back seat with his legs doubled like a grasshopper’s.
She will not be able to say anything at all. She will watch the snow coming at the windshield and being wiped away by the windshield wipers, and it will be red, it will be like a solid red wall. A violation, this is what she hates, they had promised never to lie.
Stomach full of blood, head full of blood, burning red, she can feel it at last, this rage that has been going on for a long time, energy, words swarming behind her eyes like spring bees. Something is hungry, something is coiling itself. A long song coils and uncoils itself just in front of the windshield, where the red snow is falling, bringing everything to life. They park the virtuous car and she is led by the two young men into the auditorium, grey cinderblock, where a gathering of polite faces waits to hear the word. Hands will clap, things will be said about her, nothing astonishing, she is supposed to be good for them, they must open their mouths and take her in, like vitamins, like bland medicine. No. No sweet identity, she will clench herself against it. She will step across the stage, words coiled, she will open her mouth and the room will explode in blood.
Dancing Girls
The first sign of the new man was the knock on the door. It was the landlady, knocking not at Ann’s door, as she’d thought, but on the other door, the one east of the bathroom. Knock, knock, knock; then a pause, soft footsteps, the sound of unlocking. Ann, who had been reading a book on canals, put it down and lit herself a cigarette. It wasn’t that she tried to overhear: in this house you couldn’t help it.
“Hi!” Mrs. Nolan’s voice loud, overly friendly. “I was wondering, my kids would love to see your native costume. You think you could put it on, like, and come down?”
A soft voice, unintelligible.
“Gee, that’s great! We’d sure appreciate it!”
Closing and locking, Mrs. Nolan slip-slopping along the hall in, Ann knew, her mauve terry-cloth scuffles and flowered housecoat, down the stairs, hollering at her two boys. “You get into this room right now!” Her voice came up through Ann’s hot air register as if the grate were a PA system. It isn’t those kids who want to see him, she thought. It’s her. She put out the cigarette, reserving the other half for later, and opened her book again. What costume? Which land, this time?
Unlocking, opening, soft feet down the hall. They sounded bare. Ann closed the book and opened her own door. A white robe, the back of a brown head, moving with a certain stealth or caution toward the stairs. Ann went into the bathroom and turned on the light. They would share it; the person in that room always shared her bathroom. She hoped he would be better than the man before, who always seemed to forget his razor and would knock on the door while Ann was having a bath. You wouldn’t have to worry about getting raped or anything in this house though, that was one good thing. Mrs. Nolan was better than any burglar alarm, and she was always there.