Lost in the Meritocracy Part 8

I couldn't tell her.

Down on the street, out front, the car was waiting, waxed and s.h.i.+ning, its motor softly roaring. A doorman let Holly into the driver's seat as I walked around to my side. My door was locked. I knocked on the window. Holly didn't glance over. She settled a hand on the s.h.i.+ft k.n.o.b, engaged the gears, and glided off into a stream of uptown traffic, slowing for a red light, then surging forward and disappearing between two vans.

I dug in my pockets for money to buy a bus ticket, found some change and some crumpled dollar bills, and walked away from the cold shadow of the UN.

ONE NIGHT, ANOTHER BAD NIGHT-I COULDN'T SEEM TO stop heaping them on myself-the eyes of a dead Irish poet preserved my soul. stop heaping them on myself-the eyes of a dead Irish poet preserved my soul.

I was attending a Joy Division gathering in the filthy kitchen of a house where some architecture students lived. Suspended inside a mound of orange Jell-O were dozens of plastic army men. They brandished bayonets and hurled grenades. Now and then a party guest would fork a hunk of Jell-O into his mouth and spit out a figurine onto the floor. I stepped on one of them in my stocking feet and thought I'd been bitten by a rat. The Jell-O was made with vodka, I learned, not water, and laced with a substance called MDA. People poked at the mound to make it wobble and the rest of the kitchen wobbled with it.

"I don't understand the toy soldiers," I said to somebody.

"They're a statement on militarism."

"Opposing it?"

"Why? Do you support it?" asked the architect.

"I don't think anyone supports it."

"Aside from the majority."

"Right. Them."

Fearing exposure as a latent reactionary, I hustled upstairs and hid out in a bedroom. It was still hard for me to be against things that I'd grown up being for. Though the point of my high-school social-studies cla.s.ses had seemed to be that our nation had its faults-racism, poverty, and so on-we'd been led to think that they were temporary. They'd be remedied someday by young people like us, by applying the lessons we'd learned in social studies.

I s.h.i.+vered as the bedroom changed shape around me. The walls and windows rotated and buckled-cubism coming true. The shrinkage of s.p.a.ce into confining rectangles forced me to tuck my arms against my sides, press my legs together, and lie down flat. Then a new plane pushed down against my brow.

I turned my head to the side and there it was: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. The photograph on its cover, old and silvery, showed a sorrowful, consoling face wearing a modest pair of wire-rimmed gla.s.ses. The face had an infinitely layered humanity. I wished it belonged to an ancestor. It loved me. It loved me as part of everything else it loved. The face reminded me of Uncle Admiral's, and I spoke to it out loud.

"Help get me out of this," I pleaded. "I'll do anything. Tell me what to do."

Yeats's answer was: "Try to sing, my son."

I was enrolled then in a poetry workshop taught by the editor of the anthology that had introduced me to "free verse" back in Taylors Falls. Professor Birch had the sort of curly hair that seems to indicate a curly mind. He was a few years too young to be my father and a few years too old to be my friend. For the girls he was just the right age, though. They adored him. was enrolled then in a poetry workshop taught by the editor of the anthology that had introduced me to "free verse" back in Taylors Falls. Professor Birch had the sort of curly hair that seems to indicate a curly mind. He was a few years too young to be my father and a few years too old to be my friend. For the girls he was just the right age, though. They adored him.

Birch's fondest admirer was Tessa Marchman, the trim blond daughter of two neurologists. Tessa and I were Birch's favorites, the students he called on to settle standoffs over the value of other students' poetry. Our own work couldn't have been more different. Tessa's poems focused on harrowing emotions-grief, self-loathing, panic-while mine were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of "personhood" in an era of technological change. How I'd hit on this theme I wasn't sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced I grew that I'd borrowed it. I invented an alter ego, "Bittman," and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of mechanization and macroeconomics. In cla.s.s, Tessa praised my poems as "Kafkaesque," but I could tell she didn't like them. She clearly preferred Professor Birch's work, which dealt with death and s.e.x and feelings and left out the politics and negativity.

One day after cla.s.s I walked Tessa to her room, determined to win her over to my cause. Without being pressured, she invited me up, but I found her manner impenetrable. Perhaps the invitation was mere politeness.

"Herbal tea or black?" she asked me, holding out a tray. Her room, unlike mine, was orderly and welcoming.

"Herbal tea isn't tea," I said. "It's herbs."

"Which means you want black."

"Not really. I just want tea."

"You're p.r.i.c.kly," said Tessa.

It was true. Her crush on Birch annoyed me. The man was a weakling, I felt, a soft romantic whose work didn't venture beyond his own five senses. But I didn't trust my senses anymore, let alone their depiction of the world. To me, an aspiring deconstructionist, the world was an orchestrated deception devised to soothe and numb. It resembled Tessa's dorm room. Stuffed animals paraded on her windowsills. Cheerful fabrics draped the chairs. The books were arranged on their shelves by height and color. And yet, at the center of all this lively neatness, lived a sad and frightened child of doctors whose poetry spoke of wounds and storms and chains. I saw right through the girl.

I let her know this over tea.

"I'm dark in my writing," she explained, "so I can look on the bright side in my real life."

"Your writing is a lie, in other words." I had no right to say this. If I'd lived according to the sentiments that dominated my Bittman poems, I wouldn't be in college but in Alaska, tucked away in a cabin with guns and canned goods. I was trying to sing, but my songs were bleak and paranoid.

"I think we both know why you're here," said Tessa. "To take me. To possess your rival." Keeping her cup and saucer on her lap, she leaned forward to make the conquest easier.

I moved ahead, but not robustly. I didn't appreciate being so swiftly fathomed. Our tea-flavored mouths barely mingled before they parted. Tessa tried to gaze into my eyes after our kiss, but I looked down. We hadn't connected. I gathered my wits and ventured another kiss. She tolerated it briefly, then left her chair and picked up a stuffed zebra.

"You're saying my work is a game. It's inauthentic."

"Come back here," I said. "I don't know what I'm saying. I don't even know why I'm saying it. Just kiss me."

"Who wants to kiss an inauthentic poet? Or sleep with one? Or see one naked?"

"Come over here. I'll show you. Please."

Tessa stayed put. She stroked her fuzzy toy. It had become a grudge match, our encounter, and the charges she'd leveled at herself had actually been aimed at me, I feared.

"I'll go," I said. "I'm sorry all this happened."

Tessa shuddered and started sobbing. Fake, I decided. Overplayed. I considered calling her bluff by wrapping my arms around her and sinking my teeth into her neck. As I dragged her toward the bed, she'd probably try to pull away or kick me, but I'd renew my a.s.sault and she'd give up. Then what? My hunch was she'd slay me with a snicker in the middle of my triumph.

"I'll see you in the workshop" was how I left it.

"Come back."

But I couldn't. Someone had to win this.

"It's the best thing I've written so far this year," I said, crossing my legs and unfolding a sheet of paper. "Of course, I'm open to comments and suggestions." Then I recited my sonnet on militarism.

"That was Bittman again?" somebody asked me. This was a common maneuver in the workshop: dismissing a poem by feigning inattention.

"It's part of a series, so I didn't name him, but, yes, it's Bittman. Or a simulacra."

"Simulacrum," said Birch, a real professor after all.

With one drop of blood, the workshop became a hunt. It opened with a few potshots, a few "reactions," but soon my cla.s.smates were firing on automatic, using the force discharged by each critique to slam new rounds into their chambers. Tessa fluttered an earlobe with an index finger, pretending to be above the fray. Birch adopted the same att.i.tude. It was hard for me not to view them as conspirators. Or were they lovers? It wouldn't be unprecedented. Another poetry teacher, a pal of Birch's, had been run off the campus a couple of months earlier after seducing an unknown number of students, one of whom had squealed to Na.s.sau Hall.

"To me, your main trouble, Walter," someone said, "is Bittman's supposed nemesis. He's up against something- something-the government? the system?-but you never tell us who or what. And it's not an equal fight. The world just rolls over him. He's pa.s.sive pa.s.sive."'

"Overpowered," I said, "isn't pa.s.sive. I hear you, though. Maybe if I sharpened up my verbs-"

"Or gave him a personality," said someone.

"Or any traits at all," said someone else.

"My gripe against Bittman," announced a third voice, "is that he seems incapable of love."

"He also refuses to take responsibility."

"He's a cipher."

"A device."

I held up a hand. "Can I handle those in order?"

Chuckles broke out. The abandonment felt absolute when I looked at Birch for help and caught him with his eyes shut, leaning back, absently clicking the b.u.t.ton on a ballpoint protruding from a front pocket of his jeans. In a poetry workshop, conspicuous detachment didn't mean neutrality, I'd learned, but agreement with the prevailing line of criticism.

"I think we've been unfair," said Tessa. "Walter had it right. He had a point. Bittman's not pa.s.sive at all. He's overwhelmed."

I tightened my stomach, waiting for the jab.

"And of course of course he knows how to love. It's in the he knows how to love. It's in the form"' form"'

"Explain," someone said. I was curious myself.

"The sonnet sonnet form. Sonnets are love songs," Tessa said. "I'm surprised no one got that." form. Sonnets are love songs," Tessa said. "I'm surprised no one got that."

"I am, too," said Birch, leading me to think he hadn't slept with her but was still in the process of wooing her. Why else support her in this silliness?

Afterward, over pizza in the student center, I asked Tessa why she'd been so charitable. She credited her "good Midwestern upbringing." I'd had one of these upbringings myself, but it was gone, it seemed. If it had been Tessa's poem the cla.s.s was slaughtering, I knew I wouldn't have intervened. Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Eliot's Prufrock and Berryman's Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the Norton anthologies. Then I humbled myself further by disclosing that militarism didn't bother me. Maintaining an army, a navy, and an air force was America's right, I said. Our nation had enemies.

"I want us to make love," I added. "Now."

Tessa laid a napkin on her pizza slice to sop up the red grease.

"You don't want to? I thought you wanted to," I said.

She lifted the napkin by one corner and set it beside her paper plate.

"But I just bared my soul to you. I practically admitted I'm a Republican Republican."'

"Are you?" you?"

"Not really."

"Then why pretend to be?"

"Because I get tired of pretending I'm a communist."

"So why not just stop pretending altogether?"

I thought about this for a while. "You first," I said.

"We're just too different. Our styles. Our approaches. Plus, I suspect your motives, I'm afraid. This is all about compet.i.tion, not attraction."

"Let's make it about s.e.x, then."

"Can't be done."

"Because you're in love with Birch?"

"His sensibility."

"Well, I'm in love with Yeats's sensibility. That doesn't mean I want to go to bed with him."

Tessa sprinkled garlic on her slice and raised it to her tidy mouth. I folded my empty plate in half and headed off to dump it in a trash can. Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented invented the sword. the sword.

Week in and week out, Birch's workshop proved me right. We sang and we fought. We fought over our songs. Finally, by the end of the semester, all we could sing about were our scars, our wounds.

NANTUCKET, THE ISLAND, THE CAPE, THE VINEYARD-I couldn't distinguish among the seaside getaways where so many of my cla.s.smates said they intended to spend the summer vacation. When they spoke of visiting these spots, they used the preposition "on," as in "I'll be couldn't distinguish among the seaside getaways where so many of my cla.s.smates said they intended to spend the summer vacation. When they spoke of visiting these spots, they used the preposition "on," as in "I'll be on on the Cape for August." When referring to Minnesota, I used "in," which didn't sound as good, I thought. But there was no other way to say it. the Cape for August." When referring to Minnesota, I used "in," which didn't sound as good, I thought. But there was no other way to say it.

Then, in late May, my father called with news. While on a business trip in Munich, Germany, he'd landed me a summer job, he said, working at what he described over the phone as an "internationally famous nightspot" where "various Hemingway types" hung out. He said he'd been drinking in the place one night and struck up a conversation with its owner, Herr Blick, an American expatriate, about my ambitions as a writer. Herr Blick, whom my father lauded as "a true gentleman," had agreed right away to fly me over and pay me to help out behind the bar. I told my father I'd do it. Though I'd learned through the years to fear the consequences of his impulsive decisions ("We'll farm these fields with horses!"), I feared going home even more. They might not like me there.

Herr Blick met me at the Munich airport. The first impression he made was that of a master at making first impressions. His handshake had a practiced-feeling sincerity and was augmented by a hearty shoulder squeeze that lasted awhile and almost became a rub. His muscular body seemed younger and better maintained than his square and sunburned fortyish face. He insisted on carrying both of my duffel bags for me, hoisting them off the luggage carousel with what looked like a weight-lifter's concern for minimizing back strain.

Instead of dropping me at the fraternity house where one of my father's German lawyer colleagues had arranged to rent a room for me, Herr Blick parked his sporty Mercedes near his bar and gave me a walking tour of central Munich. The two historical figures he kept citing as he pointed out various ornate buildings were Adolf Hitler and Mad King Ludwig. Hitler, he told me, had gotten his public start here, and Ludwig had kept his harem here. Herr Blick pa.s.sed lightly over this detail, not mentioning that the harem consisted of boys.

The fraternity building was near the bar, wedged into the middle of a block. It appeared to be vacant for the season. On my way up the narrow staircase to my room I pa.s.sed an alcove sheltering a pedestal bearing a marble bust of Julius Caesar. The art in the hallways featured s.h.i.+elds and eagles and down one dim corridor I caught a glimpse of a s.p.a.cious torture chamber. On hooks on the walls above a bare wood floor hung a macabre array of masks and weapons. I tiptoed closer: fencing gear.

My room was a cell, austere and cramped. I vowed to stay out of it except to sleep. I doubted I'd get much sleep, however. According to Herr Blick, my s.h.i.+fts at the bar would run from seven at night until three in the morning, six nights a week. I contemplated this schedule and my surroundings and determined that learning German that summer would not be among my primary ambitions. I set myself a more vital task: survival. That, and reading the only book I'd brought: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano Under the Volcano, a novel about the final day on earth of a drunken, lovelorn British diplomat living in Mexico during World War II. I'd opened it somewhere over the Atlantic, been seized by its tone of clotted doom, and pushed ahead through its dense, allusive paragraphs, hoping that the myths and master-works floating out of my reach behind its pages would somehow drift into my reach if I persisted. From the preface, I'd learned that the novel drew on Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, and other immortals, which raised the tantalizing prospect of obtaining sweeping erudition by reading a single book.

My job at the bar required no German, luckily. It demanded almost no speech at all. My immediate boss-to whom I handed clean gla.s.ses that had been briefly dunked in soapy water and partially dried with a thin towel-was a local celebrity named Wilhelm who specialized in multilayered c.o.c.ktails of luminous coloration. Against the unspotted whiteness of his starched jacket, his crinkly gray hair and sinewy, tanned face were savagely vivid and alluring. I was in awe of him, as were the customers. After a couple of weeks of watching him carrying on behind the bar like a six-armed pagan G.o.d, producing lighted matches from unseen pockets, juggling tumblers in the air, and sailing coasters into distant trash cans, I no longer saw the point of going back to college in the fall. This was true fame I was witnessing, true mastery. I should stay and learn from it. Even Herr Blick deferred to Wilhelm, terrified, surely, of losing his bar's chief draw.

After counting the cash and bundling the receipts, I turned out the lights and locked the building's front door. Outside, on the street, strange men accosted me, asking "Where now?" or "What next?" in muttered German that even I could translate. I learned to brush past them with my head down. Sealed in a jar and wrapped in a brown bag was my nightly ration of stolen schnapps, which I drank deeply from once I'd run the gauntlet, as a toast to myself for reaching safety. By the time I pa.s.sed Caesar's head on the dark stairway, I was feeling tight and tipsy. Then I lay down with Under the Volcano Under the Volcano and finished off the jar. The book had begun to seriously haunt me. Its references to Dante still eluded me, but I empathized with its crumbling protagonist. and finished off the jar. The book had begun to seriously haunt me. Its references to Dante still eluded me, but I empathized with its crumbling protagonist.

One night Herr Blick dispatched me to the kitchen to make croque monsieurs and espressos for his tablemates. The little spouts on the coffee machine clogged up. To clear them, I had to kneel down on the floor and poke at their openings with a twisted dishrag. I felt a presence behind me as I worked. Then I heard a belt unbuckling. I didn't move. I didn't turn around. I prayed that the presence, which wore Herr Blick's cologne, would reconsider its intentions.

"Hot weather makes me h.o.r.n.y."

I held position, facing the machine. "I'm not a h.o.m.os.e.xual," I said.

"h.o.r.n.y's h.o.r.n.y. Who said it was gay? Is that what you Princeton boys think? That h.o.r.n.y's gay?"

"I'm sorry, Herr Blick. That isn't what I meant."

"You got that from your perverted prep school, probably."