After a while, the calendar becomes a minefield. I had to skirt so many anniversaries that autumn that I found it hard to take a step without detonating one. Taylor's seminar met in an attic room of the English Building, that fall when, at eighteen, I found my first map of the world. I taught my first course, the one C. took, three falls later. Fall at twenty-two, I passed my Master's Comps, and moved as far away from U. as I could get.
I could not see how I'd gotten from one fall to another, or from any of those falls to this one. Age lurches in fits and starts, like a failing refrigerator compressor. Like a gawky, grand mal-adroit adolescent on ancient roller skates, navigating a stretch of worn sidewalk in a subduction zone. It holes up awhile, stock-still, then slams out one afternoon to play catch-up ball.
Time is not a wave. It is discrete, particulate. I came to class one day, that class where I pretended I was Taylor, unlocking the self's intricacies to a horrified and enthralled audience. I arrived that morning at eight to announce that I wasn't up to teaching that day, or the session after. I gave an assignment for the following week and watched my fold file out, subdued.
All but C. She stayed on, by tacit pact knowing it was time to come forward. We stood alone in the emptied room. She asked, "Want to sit somewhere for a minute?"
I did. We wandered out of the English Building onto the Quad. What quads were for: for generations of student sadness to lie down on, in the crisp blue of the first week of year's end. Everything we saw as we staked our spot said, last November ever. The first of an almost endless list of lasts.
C. sat Indian style. I lay on my side, head propped on an elbowed arm. On all sides of us ran the ring of collegiate buildings — Chemistry, Math, English. Each had been the setting for a thousand and one urgencies and embarrassments. I would be glad to be gone.
But gone where? The rub. I hadn't a clue, and felt good about even that. Very few job openings for the thing I wanted to do. I'd be lucky to be busing tables for a portion of the tips, this time next fall.
My father had foreseen that, of course. The man had known everything, except how to go on living. He never said word one when his son told him he planned to transfer out of physics, trash the stellar career. He didn't need to say anything. I could read the verdict in his face: Do what you need to. But what a colossal waste of talent and investment.
"Poetry, Rick? What does that mean, exactly?" It means you haven't the faintest idea what you want to do. Burned out on problem sets. Isn't that right?
I never got the chance to defend myself. The man took off to Alaska to his sister's. Dad timed his disappearance so no one had to watch him go. And as a result, I've had to watch the immortally wasted body pace through a decade and a. half of accusing dreams.
A packet would reach me three days after the news. A small bundle of chapbooks — the poems of Robert Service. The Spell of the Yukon. Rhymes of a Rolling Stone. Dad's favorite poet, and more beloved because the academics — his son — no longer even bothered to despise the rhymer. "The Cremation of Sam McGee": Dad's gloss on his own choice of exit. A slap in the face. A last, belated blessing. A request that if you are going to waste your life studying poetry, at least waste it on the good stuff.
I lay on the Quad, thinking over this goodbye gift, this student of mine sitting across from me. I shifted to my back. I saw myself staring up into the most unlikely azure. How many ghosts did life involve pleasing?
"Are you all right?" C. intervened.
My "Of course" didn't even convince itself.
"You were… I thought. ."
"I'm fine," I explained.
"Tell me," she said. Anonymity is best. Who do you ever know, after all? Tell me, while I'm still a blank slate. Before you make me over in the habit of knowledge.
"My father just died."
I winced then, and annually in remembering. So bleeding what? Fathers and the deaths of fathers. How many children half my age lost parents to any of the world's ingenious violences in the time it took me to speak those words? I had no right. No one did. My own sorrow sickened me.
I spoke without looking at her, at least. It helped later on, to say that her cow-eyed, trusting complicity played no role in my impulse confession. I came to her sight unseen. I had no idea yet how heartstoppingly plain she could look. I fell in love with a voice, with two words.
"I'm so sorry," she said. As if McGee had been cremated through her own carelessness. And yet her each pitch denied its own need to exist as anything at all but compassionate sound. The lone condolence ever allotted. Only the saying mattered. The words meant little, if anything.
"I'm sorry," she said, serene where she should have been scared off. "Would you like to be by yourself?"
I looked up at her. What do we need to piece her back? Do we need five foot four? Do we need brownish-black, pageboy hair? Aggressively shy, nervously innocent? Could we create her whole, conjure her up again intact on one detail, say, a face denying ever having known anything but astonishment?
I said, "I'd like to sit with you awhile."
She settled onto the grass, decorously distant. Years later, in a dark bed, I told her. How startled I was — she, a perfect unknown, no sense of me except my classroom act. Why was she here, sitting beside her grieving teaching assistant? Because she'd torn that picture from the family album, and felt obliged to see mine. Because she liked how I looked, poor poet-in-training with the ripped shirts and no mender near. Because my silence sounded so much like need.
She toyed with a blue canvas backpack filled with books. She held it between her legs, a child that might at any minute struggle to its feet and toddle off. Her hair, too short to be pulled back, was pulled back and rubber-banded around a pencil.
I laid it out, on no grounds at all. I told her all about McGee. Everything. Truths I'd never so much as hinted at to my closest friends. Facts never broached even with my brothers and sisters, except in bitter euphemism.
I told her in one clean rush, as only a twenty-one-year-old still can. Of my father's slow-burn suicide, stretched out over fifteen years. The man's long, accreting addiction that made every day a sine wave of new hope crushed. How hope, beaten to a stump, never died. How it always dragged back, like an amputated pet, its hindquarters rigged up in a makeshift wagon.
She listened with the simplest urgency. Nothing more ordinary in the world. She was still the age when one could make a go of compassion. At double that age, I'd duck down emergency exits rather than talk to acquaintances, and the thought of making a friend felt like dying.
"Tell me," she said. And became a part of me always. Daily, somewhere, even if she just as quickly dissolved. You trade your own aloneness. You place yourself in the path of any invitation to come clean. You give up your script completely, on a sudden hunch. Or you never give it at all.
I told her for no reason. Because she sat and asked. Because she, too, seemed so alone in all this collegiate autumn, there on the vacated Quad with her blue backpack and her hair pulled back around a pencil. And because I told her, she would always have something over me. Forever, if she remembered. If she cared to use it.
I relived for her the Powers family dead drop from middle class to Grapes of Wrath. The silent, unspeakable impact, without the least tug of restraint from any shoulder harness. I made her listen to the man's keen intelligence, slurred impenetrably. His gross motor skills, stunted like a pithed lab rat's. I told her all my teenage desperate acts: balancing open fifths upside down on the countertop. X-ing off the calendar, to make him think the lost days had lasted weeks. I showed her his puffy, dazed face.