For the first time in our lives, C. and I socialized. We learned to pick wines, to crack the dress code, to prepare ourselves in advance of an evening with an arsenal of jokes and stories that answered a suite of occasions. The game got easier the more we played. We might have succeeded at it, had we stuck around.
The Midwestern Dinner Party was not, as our B. acquaintances teased us, a contradiction in terms. Once under way, they could even be fun. Getting ready was the torture.
"I'm fat," C. would announce, about an hour before we had to go anywhere.
"Sweetheart, you're a sub-Saharan stalk of desiccated grass. Don't tell yourself you're fat. You'll start to believe it."
I still pretended she hadn't already convinced herself.
"Wear the lamb dress," I'd say. "You'll knock them out."
"That dress makes me look fat."
"Okay. How about the muslin?"
"That one makes me look like I'm trying not to look fat."
Sometimes C. locked herself in the bathroom, throwing up. Or, sobbing, she'd refuse to leave the apartment. But the cloud usually lifted in time. C. would grow radiant and be the dinner's delight. People loved her, and she loved them back. The ones she gave the chance.
Those two repeat years in U. might have been a sterile waste if it weren't for the Taylors. I went to see the old professor not long after we hit town. Taylor welcomed me back with affection. And now, when I teased him about his freshman seminar ruining a promising scientific career, I could point to a turn of events that sweetened the punch line.
After my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind's unreal ability to turn inward upon itself. He changed my life. He changed what I thought life was. But I'd never done more than revere him at a distance, forever the eighteen-year-old student. Now, to my astonishment, we became friends.
Our first dinner invitation to the Taylors' scared C. witless. She'd heard me gush about Taylor so often that when it came to meeting. him, she wanted to flee. "What does he look like?" she asked. As if that would prepare her.
"I don't know. Slight. Arresting. Immaculate. A face ravaged by intelligence."
"You're hopeless, Beau. What color is the man's hair?"
"I'm not sure."
I told her about that rainy September afternoon when I'd first seen him. He arrived at the attic dormer in the English Building where the class met. A dozen of us had assembled in nervous anonymity. In walked this close-cropped, fiftyish man in impeccable summer suit. He placed his grade book and our first text on the desk, sat down in one of those reduced, yellow-wood chairs, removed a pack of cigarettes from an inside suit coat pocket, and asked if anyone objected. He lit up, tilted his head infinitesimally backward, then said, "It defies statistics that I'm the only one in a group this size with an oral fixation."
At eighteen, we kept our fixations to ourselves. At least until the reading began.
"What did you read?" C. wanted to know.
"He started us out on Freud's Introductory Lectures. Then we applied the dream work to fairy tales and lyric poetry. After a while, we went on to the longer stuff — short stories, plays, novels."
"Titles, Beauie. I want titles."
"Let's see. Ten years ago! Gawain and the Green Knight. 'Adam Lay Bound.' 'Patrick Spens.' The Miller's Tale.' The Sonnets."
"You remember them all?"
"Like yesterday. Better. You had to be there. I remember the shape his mouth made when he recited lines. Of course, he could recite the bulk of those pieces verbatim. In the dark."
"Which sonnets?"
"Is this for extra credit? We were each supposed to pick one to present to the group. For some reason, maybe because I'd just broken up with—"
"I don't want to hear that woman's name!"
"I must have been looking for a rebound, because I picked Sonnet 31."
"Which goes?"
"Which goes:
"Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried."
"I thought there are supposed to be fourteen lines."
"I think there were. Before memory got to them."
"Okay. What else?"
" 'The Sick Rose.' 'The Second Coming.' 'The Windhover.' All sorts of Dickinson. 'Prufrock.' Frost, Stevens. Arms and the Man. The Tempest. Hold on. We also spent a lot of time on the Bible, right at the beginning of term."
"Repressed that one?"
"Guess so. The Grave. 'Petrified Man.' 'The Dead.' That was the one that put me over the top. That made me realize I wasn't going to lead the life I thought I was going to lead. Heart of Darkness. Light in August. Lucky Jim. ."
"So what didn't you read?"
"Yeah. It was a real lineup."
"I don't get it, Beau. It sounds like your basic Freshman Survey."
"It wasn't. First of all, this magnificently self-possessed oral fixation sat up in front of the room, telling anecdotes in syntax so decorously Byzantine we didn't even realize that half of them were off-color. The man spoke in complete, perfect paragraphs. It took me almost a whole week between sessions to decode Taylor's suggestion that the speaker in 'Stopping by Woods' was out there in the middle of nowhere relieving himself."
"I'm not going to this dinner," C. decided.
"Sweetheart, you don't understand. The man is grace personified. And his wife is a National Treasure. Together, they're hilarious."
'They'll think I'm an idiot. They'll wonder what you're doing with me."
"Just the opposite. They'll wonder what a sexpot like yourself sees in a ninety-eight-pound aesthetic weakling. C.! Everybody feels like an idiot compared to Taylor."
"I don't need that, thanks. I have enough of that as it is."
"But Taylor also has this way of making you feel smarter than you are. We teenagers used to fumble around with one poem or the other. Precocious and brilliant, but juvenile. I felt like a kid with the training wheels taken off. I'd soar for a hundred meters, then crash to the ground. But whenever I said something particularly stupid, Taylor would credit my misses with so much ingenuity I couldn't even recognize them. 'Your account of the narrator's circumvention of the repressed's return is persuasive in the extreme. But your hints about his real and unconscious motives needn't be so circumspect.' Oh, I wish I could imitate the man!"
"He's bigger than life for you, isn't he?"
"No," I answered her. "No. He's exactly life-sized."
"I'm not going."
She went, and had a good time. "He's just like you said. The suit. The complete paragraphs. Only you forgot the war bond songs."
"I had no idea about those." The evening had, in fact, been a continuous astonishment.
"Tell me again the connection between that long Matthew Arnold quote. ."
". . from a poem no one has read in half a century. ."
". . and the glimpse of Norma Shearer's cleavage that he got in a Colorado valley movie theater at the age of ten?"
"I can't remember. I think the connection was that second bottle of Slovakian wine."
We went with increasing frequency. C. grew as devoted as I. Every visit revealed new amplitude to Taylor. Taylor the inconsolable fan of hopelessly bad sports teams. The shuffler to bluegrass tunes. The consummate organic gardener who'd planted half the fruit trees in U. The collector of questionable jokes no one else would dare tell even in private. The wartime aircraft spotter. The fisherman and naturalist. The mimic of a thousand voices, from Blanche DuBois to a Mexican bush league baseball announcer. The boy who taught himself to read on Tarzan and John Carter, who went on to devour every volume in the rural library long before he made his escape.