Greg Gerke
The literary season had grown rough and isolating. Few had ever read the new Nobel Prize winner, but that would change. Translators feverishly checked their dictionaries in order to get the Icelandic man's novel, essay collection, and radio play done for Christmas. Elsewhere, the two literary novels everyone should read were discovered to be not so good. People had bought them and read fifty pages and thought, Oh, well, back to the internet. Yet many of the critics agreed they were both brilliant, assured, and certainly the best work the authors had produced in years, though one of them had only that book to their credit. An agent went to lunch with a few other agents and asked after business. One said, Everybody's writing the same story that sold five years ago. If it was five years ago, I could afford that house on Long Island. Another said, This guy from Bay Ridge sends me a new novel every week, in typescript—I mean by typewriter. Finally, after ten weeks, I opened one. It was The Sound and the Fury. Then came other novels, Forster, Bellow . . . all typed out. No shit. I emailed him from my fake email saying, You know the publishers of these books could easily sue you, and he said, Oh, that's fine—I like meeting new people. Near Pratt University, a young man sat in a cafe working on a play in the style of Shakespeare, complete with his language, syntax, stage directions, five-act structure—all of it in pentameter, though it was set in a bar in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. In a sublet with a view of Tompkins Square Park on Avenue A, a young woman asked herself if she really wanted to be a writer as she took many pictures of her face with a camera anchored on a pole. They were everywhere. A young man in Tokyo taught himself English by reading Melville and was regarded as an outsider for his many whaling references when attending an English language meetup group. An older woman from Colorado had gone to Cuba to live the life of Hemingway, telling a friend that she supposed she'd have to write for an hour every day, just like Papa. She posted what she wrote on a blog, often checking how many Fuckface friends clicked in to read her thoughts on Cuba, the food of Cuba, and how she felt about living in Cuba. Not many. Americans really did hate Cuba.
And so, the party celebrating the 100th Anniversary of The Waste Land began with someone quoting "Prufrock," thinking it the former and saying how the poem had meant the world to him, almost as much as his favorite video game and that gave him an idea—Why not "The Waste Land": The Video Game, with coffee spoons, peaches, a table, and the Sistine Chapel? He knew someone in media in London. Tomorrow he'd make a phone call, though a Greenpoint entrepreneur was setting up the console for the game with the mostly correct content a few hundred yards away. It might be ready to debut in an hour.
The common wisdom held that Eliot met Pound in London at the Vienna Cafe in 1910, but Wyndham Lewis might have been in the background, as well as the Englishman Rich Wingo, whom fewer and fewer people talk about. No one really knows when The Waste Land was written because Eliot spent many years composing and editing it and when he didn't consciously write, his subconscious did. London had its own muted celebration, since he lived there and it was first published in The Criterion, an English journal edited by Eliot. Eliot never called New York "home," but despite the English accent he was as American as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals. He never lived in Brooklyn either, but that didn't stop the organizers from reserving the main floor of the old Williamsburg Savings Bank, or 1 Hanson Place, as it was lazily renamed, for the event. The Art Deco interior would have been something during Eliot's heyday. Manhattan had become passé for literary events. Film, fine arts, and theater, yes—but literary culture had migrated to Brooklyn, especially to Fort Greene and Park Slope, where, in a one-mile radius just west of the Park, sixty percent of all New York literary agents worth knowing lived. One disgruntled older writer, who had yet to secure one (he was fifty and lived in Baltimore), threatened via Fuckface to "bomb the fuckin' brownstones to hell" and destroy what he saw as insolvent aesthetic opprobrium fostered by gatekeepers who mooned about the best brunch in the hood rather than reading Gass, Gaddis, or any other name, to make a trio of avant-garde white male writers sound like a struggling law-firm.
Rhoda St. Johnstone, a curvaceous woman from Sante Fe, who'd written acclaimed memoirs about growing up on a hacienda and riding horses and older male members of her extended family, had been paid some thousands to deliver the keynote. Nearly seventy-five, she wore knee-length boots and an unthrilling triad of red, white, and blue necklaces swinging close to and getting stuck in her wrinkled and lifted over-tan cleavage whenever she took a tottering step on the overly waxed parquet floor. Accentuating her bust and wide hips was an oversize maroon sash, with a curious design of lines stenciled into the leather and surrounded by studs, creating something resembling calligraphy, yet a few strokes short of the Chinese for "toilet," whose circumference rivaled the heavyweight boxing belt. St. Johnstone kept her stomach trim by not eating cheese or drinking carbonation and chain-smoking, which crusted up a voice already deepened by hard country living, drinking, record amounts of fellatio, and the high desert dust renowned for decimating vocal cords. Her eyes were like two glimmering dark buttons, all iris, and on alert to know the men and women who looked, whether it was for her body, outfit, or best-selling output.
An angry freelancer, relegated to the short TLS reviews, whispered to his date that her essay on The Waste Land was informative but trite, listing many other people they could have gotten to speak, though most were dead. They stood near colonnades of food: cheeses, crackers, carrots, celery, cheap dips, pepperoni, prosciutto, and grapes, impressed how no one touched any of it, except a solitary man with a London Review of Books tote bag, who grabbed a stack of crackers and a block of brie. A $100 ticket for networking—though people drank their share. For every ten people the freelancer didn't know there was one he did by reputation, pique, or some other infamy. By the bar stood the editor of the New York Review of Books, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, and the therapist of the Paris Review's chief. A short distance from them stood the slim man who'd written a book on Eliot twenty years before claiming the Anti-semitism was bad, but not as bad as Pound's, a view which had him thrown out of the American Academy and into the Freemasons. Nearby was the head of the T.S. Eliot society, an indefatigable sort who wore the same wire-rimmed glasses and bow-tied suits in remembrance of his master, his dream being to come up with something as striking as "Geronation." He spent quiet nights in Riverdale, where he bent words and shifted phrases to create his own poesy. Birds and insects abounded in his verse and friends told him reading it reminded them of a lost world where time stood still on or about 1914. When he couldn't write any more, he opened his computer to his French porn, though this never made an appearance in his verse and it wouldn't. Some things were not made for verse, he believed staunchly, though, on reflection he knew he was utterly wrong; and a scary ghost, in the guise of a high school English teacher he hated, whispered, This is why you will never be a good writer.
Two young Columbia students stood with their mild Chardonnays, peering at people in hope and horror of recognition. They each wanted to be famous but they were concerned it might take too long and so rarely showed their work since they hadn't decided if they would stay in the game or go into the business sector. What did you think of that McCarthy link? one said. What link? You didn't get it? When did you send it? A few minutes ago. I don't know—I just don't like opening links too much; it makes me seem bored and gullible—and I don't want to give any writers page views to delude themselves that they are being read. Did I tell you about that guy in Charlotte who contacted me about my Auden piece? He claimed to be getting thousands of views for each article he posted and he detailed the stats in query letters to agents and some young assistant just out of Dartmouth emailed him an article showing that bots make up about half the hits registered on the internet every day. Now he's crushed. He can't get off of vanity presses and he sends mass emails about how he doesn't want to just have his mom giving him on-line reviews, and could people please please review his books. It's so pitiful. I unfucked him. Woah, I guess I'll have to unfuck him, too.
A famous poet who lived in Dutchess County, but kept an old family-held apartment in Brooklyn Heights, stood talking with his agent, a woman called Mary Mallen, who wanted to leave the business for the last thirty years, and a semi-retired critic, Roman Clef. Paul Sheer had been married three times, but had won the National Book Critics Circle Award four times—twice for poetry, once for criticism, and once for memoir. At sixty-four he held an enviable health, aided by three miles of jogging a day. His much touted "Giving Up My Car" poem, commissioned by the Sierra Club, had become legendary, though it seemed to be at odds with everything else he wrote about, mainly desire, and for the last thirty years, high bourgeoisie living. Life was good, but his young mistress had just flown to San Francisco to be with her other lover, a twenty-eight-year-old Adonis who could orgasm without coming, a being deeply involved in the Bay Area's overripe and always rich polyamory movement. Due to his chemistry, this man had dozens of lovers, though he wouldn't name one "primary" in the spirit of equanimity. They were all "secondary" but above all else, equal—an attitude flummoxing Paul. He continued to ponder this while Roman Clef and Paul's agent, both residents of Bronxville, spoke of local politicians. Clef, steely and implacable, with a world class wart on his forehead, had once had a factious dispute with Sheer over the lyric poem's worth versus the more mannered schools of the language poets. The two hadn't spoken in many years until Paul invited Roman to be on the National Book Award committee, the only major poetry prize still eluding the former, and the infraction had been forgiven, though distancing would keep. Paul knew Roman's wife had died of breast cancer during the second Gulf War, and Roman, one woman his whole life, would enjoy keeping to himself rather than reengaging with someone like Paul. Paul was a poet of the body, content to be naked with as many women as possible—on occasion men. And though he didn't like to keep numbers, his conquests were staggering and certainly never to be revealed. Roman was all mind and rigor and Paul felt this as he shook his ignoble hand, soft as velvet, and he desired to say something cruel about those body parts, a mood arising from too much concentration on the San Franciscan's kung fu black belt in sexuality, but checked himself—he'd had an audience with the former Dalai Lama, he had to stop thinking such mendacity.
For some time, he'd noted a young woman glaring at him with a filthy, but electric morbidness. Lithe and very erect with a pixie haircut, she evinced her post-graduate sadness in her aura better than any neophyte he'd had the pleasure to ogle in years. Her skin hummed and he thought of great art, the best art—over the ocean in Paris, Rome, and Florence. London, too. She had that pose, her bloodlines—Dutch and Spanish (Oh, yes captain . . . legs in repose like the water of the sun made to stay in place . . .) maybe Portuguese—showed. He honored her incandescence of descant and saw the sneaky slurry Jack O'Lantern aesthetic igniting her succubus spirit, asking him to take her, she was ready . . . And he immediately laughed at something Roman said about Blake, even though it wasn't meant to be funny, because he could not look at her but only display his academically-appointed noblesse, for he transited in another realm she longed to fork around in. How to avail herself of café-life juvenilia as she pined to be in fine restaurants showing much older people how beautiful she was and how willing she would be to share youth's efflorescence with the correct god. Her recipe for snatching the imaginary Casanova: tuck away her melancholy with each smile for or against the masculinity she sought to conquer, ignore all their compliments, and invent a stingy counterpoise against everything an accomplished and suave man could give and teach.
Why is that funny? Roman asked bitterly.
Well, Blake. It's Blake. He's been crucified and resurrected so many times it would take the lives of thirty cats—
Don't speak to me of religiosity, the Pope's a sham. The transmigration of souls—not with the new Dalai Lama on this thing, this Fuckface.
The fraught willow didn't move, but everything around them moved. Sass, gossip, flattery, disunion, lies, equivocations, exaggerations, faint praise, and fantasy. She kept looking at him and only because she was unthinkably beautiful did the other fifteen men and eight women who tracked her think she was not crazy, just in some trance. No. She was one of those persons, akin to them, bothered at too little love or too much.
A man and a woman who ran a vanity press that only published all the books they'd written in their lives—works that they brought out, year in and year out, under different names—stood fomenting at all the literary royalty they'd never be a part of. They had been live-in lovers and many of the books were veiled accounts of their sexual years together and subsequent breakups and reunions, with each writing a novel from the perspective of the other gender, in the first person, filled with the Schadenfreude they felt at causing the other person pain, and in writing their counterpart, they made them as weak, co-dependent, and artistically failed—one as a writer, one a painter—as possible. Incredibly, out of the twenty works each had made, they thought these singular novels the other's best work. Recently, they'd gotten back together and spent a large part of the summer in Fire Island, trying to brainstorm new features for their website, using a more aggressive advertising campaign, but they'd only made love, argued about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ate exorbitant seafood dishes, as the man gained seven pounds in his fifty-first summer on the planet. He said, Maybe I should write that Roland Barthes blurbed my new book before he died, though I've held it for publication until certain other people passed on.
What? You would have been only fifteen when you wrote it.
Well, it will be by someone in their seventies, of course. It'll be by John Graywell or Jeffrey Johns.
The first, certainly. She finished her cup of wine with alacrity and thought that would be a good verb (or was that an adjective?) to use in her next character study. Then she said, I still think we should go to the Sante Fe Institute. The first book he's ever blurbed—
It would be the third or fourth.
Still—we need him. The sales. I think I know his weakness. The man looked at her. Crazy red-headed women. I could get Lee to throw herself at him.
Someone said, Yeah, I got the Times delivered but it's a pain in the ass. Someone always steals it or it's not delivered. Then I have to call and when I do that the shitstorm starts and all these random numbers keep calling me all day: Did you get it yet? Did you get it yet? How's our service? An hour goes by. How's our service now? And I'm like, How would I know if I fucking got it, I'm at work. I needed it in the morning and it wasn't there—so, you know, what's the use? It's subway stuffer. When I get home at six-thirty, the world is all fucking different anyway. Some new bomb or bombshell, new shooting.
Yeah, that's why I just buy it direct if I want, cause often when I'd get it, it would come and I really wouldn't want it. So if I'm not tempted and don't have it, I'll want it more and I'll just have to buy it. It's perfect.
I don't follow. What's perfect?
I'm dealing with my news addiction and spending less. I play these little games with myself that only I understand. It's fun.
Rhoda walked by Paul Sheer and when she recognized the man she'd had an affair with twenty-five years before, she slipped, and Taylor Jaffe dropped his wine and snagged her by the left shoulder and breast so she would fall into him instead of the hard floor. He swung her old country mass up as if they'd just completed the tango and soon Taylor realized, yes, they'd had an affair fifteen years before in order for him to get into Best American Poetry, though Rhoda didn't remember him at all and thanked him with a down home laugh, looking at his fancy shoes. You have taste young man, she said, but have you tasted enough nectar? And he laughed falsely, but she was back to remembering why she fell. The Lothario she'd spent a fortune on to keep him with her in Marin. The abortion. Oh, well. Then she saw the astonishing young woman gawking and she told her handlers to help her go that way, toward the cute nut, but when she'd arrived, the woman, Pre-Raphaelite to the core, continued to look through her to Paul. I have only one thing to say, Rhoda announced in a crinkly voice. Never tell them you came.
An editor at Penguin nudged an editorial assistant at Knopf and said, She's marrying some tiny-looking guy from Iowa?
Really, Iowa?
The first woman looked at her. Iowa is not the important part of that story.
Someone told someone else about the Park Slope Food Coop: And the price of broccoli is really good.
Yeah, and how many days a week—
No, it's once a month. Two and a half hours.
Can I get people to work for me?
Sure, there's shift swap.
No, can I pay people to work my shifts? I could give some guy on the street fifty, that's over minimum—
They have to be a member.
Well, can I pay the members?
In another circle, someone asked about the Official Spanish Language versus Delta Airlines lawsuit, but a man with wire-rimmed spectacles said, Hey, can someone sue me for saying Fuck you to them? Everyone looked at him. I'm not kidding, somebody is suing me for saying that to them. Someone almost hit me with their car when they went through a red light. I said Fuck you, and they followed me home and somehow got my name. They are claiming my hand was raised in a menacing motion like I had a broom. Not— I was holding my phone. They are claiming I threatened to sodomize her. Yes, full disclosure, she's a woman. I looked her up. She's emotionally scarred. She's a writer, so goddamn right she's emotionally scarred. Do your neighbors like you? someone asked the man. Well, we don't talk much, and he moved his finger at him, So what? Saying Fuck you isn't against the law, right? Not unless it's part of a credible threat. I said it and walked on. I didn't even say it in an angry tone—it was a regular I live in New York City, fuck you, not the intense Bensonhurst-blooded style, I haven't learned about life, fuck you.
Hey, I'm from Bensonhurst.
Andrews? Yes, very Italian name. Please someone, level with me.
Is an Italian suing you?
No, it's the woman who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year.
One emerging writer said, I wrote two-thousand words before eight a.m. And another said, I haven't written two-thousand words all year.
The actor who wrote fiction showed up and everyone started taking pictures and instantly posting them to Fuckface. He kept smiling like he was about to receive an award, but one of his entourage told him this wasn't the New York Film Critics Circle awards, that was in a few weeks, and the actor told his assistant he didn't want to sit next to the chairperson, he didn't care if he was getting a special citation as the best actor who wrote a full-length book. Plus, he thought the award should be refigured as the best writer who was also an actor. Okay, okay, his assistant said, storing this away as proof that she should get a raise. A book critic for the Dallas Morning News smiled askewly at him. He'd panned it, using "treacly" twice. It was about an actor who goes to graduate school for his MFA and falls in love with his female instructor, who never respected his acting ability until she got a load of him in the bedroom. Then she blurbs his book, but he leaves her. She sues to have the blurb back, but she gets outed by another actor she did the same thing to. On the brink of suicide, she sees one of the first actor's latest films and her life is saved by the compelling story of triumph overcoming tragedy. She lets the blurb stand. They marry and have kids.
Paul Sheer's and Roman Clef's agents went into the hallway together in an attempt to prank the President of Sarah Lawrence. Afterward, Roman started to lecture a young critic who'd asked advice. Stay out of Europe, he said. It's a dead zone. Keep American friends, play their little childish games. Many have complexes that eat at them, making it hard to talk to strangers—and when they know they owe someone, it's worse. The European is a cold, calculating fish. Different league.
Paul walked directly to the young woman, who'd legally changed her name to Rainer. She recited the final lines of the Bard's thirty-first sonnet: Their images I loved I view in thee, / And thou, all they, hast all the all of me. Then she recited a one-hundred line poem of Paul's called, "The Lights of This, My Rapier."
People in Maine were so nice, someone said.
Really? I thought they kind of drive weird.
No, not in the north, by Acadia, that park.
Wait, you said Maine? Oh, I thought you said, South Dakota.
Someone said, Get the book called Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy.
Oh, I read that.
For advice?
No, I reviewed it. There were a lot of typos, so I couldn't take what the author said seriously.
Someone asked, What works go into the public domain next year? I need some new notoriety.
Paul Sheer and Rainer went into the basement, trotting through various hallways, as Paul paid off a guard so they could have privacy in a storage room with chairs and a large desk where a high-end AA group met on Thursday nights. The lights were bright flourescents so Paul only left on one switch's worth, those near the door. Rainer walked into the semi darkness, sat on the desk, and undid her blouse. With the buzz of the lights as the only music, Paul danced one-half of a cha-cha-cha over to her, expecting such aplomb to loosen her up for their communion—though he didn't know her inverted nipples already pointed at him. This woman had no strange synthetic perfumes—she didn't need to wear makeup because nature had already delivered her face made. Instantly, he knew his preening served no purpose and felt enormously surprised that someone born during Bush II could carry the allure of Liv Ullmann, Plath, Colette, back through Cleopatra. Good, he celebrated. People could still give birth to things like her.
She offered her breasts to him, which he kissed as the famous aria from Carmen played in his head. For some moments they were a Klimt painting, all eros, all repose, and then quickly they were Egon Schiele's viperous pair, the succubus succubizing, the man consumed enough to cum, with their fornication becoming a peeling bliss, worse than fictive—she stretched herself on the table and pulled his penis into her mouth, sucking so tempestuously there would be scars. It progressed grindingly and awkwardly, as two strangers who don't know enough and accelerate when they are on a downslope. The keynote, suddenly begun, piped into their room. Rhoda St. Johnstone futzed with the mic, yelling Is this damn thing on? while Paul savored a virgin cunt for the first time in a few decades. How could he know? Absolutely no tampon. Absolutely not. And the blood he saw when seeing his piece go in and out was unmistakeable. After, he sent his finger to lap up the liquid. Warm, so warm. These fruity byways of a woman's relation to love he desired more than a mind, more than a meaningful chat about love, death, and Wordsworth—he could have that anytime with the Roman Clefs of the world. St. Johnstone started to cackle and Paul tried to eradicate the throaty noise of yore and zero in on Rainer's breathing, her pulse, and her stammering three Oui's (French she was?) courtesy of his "plié method," as he dubbed it, but St. Johnstone's deep strains began to talk of Eliot and Eliotics and Paul had spoken to her about Eliot and Wordsworth when her breasts were higher, in his Taos and Marin days (and hers), and he recalled crazy nights (and days) and absolute nuttiness with a woman who had her finger on a salient point of metaphor in the Sonnets one minute before gouging his asshole for the g-spot the next, showing him what she'd learned at that weird Hot Spring community east of the Bay.
St. Johnstone said, Now, listen y'all, in her obsequious way, and Paul, on top, pivoted in a very tender pain, as if the Southerner had somehow ensconced herself in Rainer's vagina and indeed some atavistic conditioning began to work in the median person, and a white but transgressive energy began to buck him up and around as if Rainer had a horsepower rarely touching women who weren't Russian powerlifters, just as St. Johnstone and her hard country strength had once leveled him, breaking a rib. And the older woman kept talking about The Waste Land as if she had been the Pound that cut down into its airy verse, scissorings which made great sense. The world worked the wrong way and that reminded Paul to hope she was ovulating. Pull out? he thought alimonyizingly. Was it worth? Worth what? It?
Rainer felt a flutter-by of the reputed famous vaginal orgasm and as she tried to grasp it, it whipped out of reach. Then another. Then another. It hurt, but hurt like the shooting of heroin, her once favored clip at eighteen, the age at which she really tried to act French and had been tossed out by her Lyon host family after an unconsummated affair with the Algerian bike delivery boy. Then she lived with him on the streets, in cars and abandoned houses, doing everything but what could seed her eggs, learning French at such an accelerated rate she could have taught it to post grads at NYU. The flutter-bys were getting closer and she wanted them more than anything, she wanted his baby more than anything and kept adding a little English to everything her puckered patch could burnish, because now, to any impartial observer, it seemed Paul Sheer got fucked from below. She's not a virgin, he thought. She's probably ovulating. No one could do this, even if St. Johnstone could throw her Geist into her. And then he decided he should invite Rainer to live with him in the country for a few weeks, maybe more.
In the last ten minutes of the keynote, St. Johnstone had strayed from talk of T.S. and spoke about her East Texas upbringing and a small affair with Cousin Jack when fifteen, who taught her how to take her orgasms like a man. I thought she was six years sober, a blogger for The Kenyon Review said. Then she told people about her first poem, "Unforgiven," written at age sixteen, and began to read it.
Diane, a woman from Poetry Magazine, found an old friend, Agnes, from the University of Michigan. Through various people in their circles, both heard each had become a lesbian in the years after graduation, when they'd fallen away from each other after moving to different coasts. They were both 5'9" and blond, but neither could believe that the other had become what they'd become. Still, they smiled and picked up the last conversation they'd had ten years before about how long poems got short shrift. Well, nothing's changed, Diane said, who'd recently relocated to New York, newly positioned in her job. So true, so true, Agnes replied, and they quickly decided their lives were much more interesting than anything in the poetry world, silently trusting they could confide in the other because they each recalled some tireless days of studying side by side followed by long nights speaking of feelings, what they held in common, and what intrigued them about the life to come; moving to new cities or countries, rectifying or stretching thin their relationship with their parents, and finding in Louise Gluck's poetry more and more of what they hoped they would never find in partnership, though were probably apt to. Currently, they were both in varying states of relationship, but the other woman, Agnes, who worked for an organ donation non-profit, seemed to be in a type of quandary she couldn't have expected to encounter years before when imitating Elizabeth Bishop, though with no sense of the poetess's sexuality, only an acute interest in her clipped though rooted sensibility. At the time she breathily dismissed a famous writer's attempt to insert this Bishop sensibility into a novella about an Iowa farmgirl who'd become enamored with her in the 1930's. Agnes found all writers not female most deplorable and mettlesome, claiming the beacons Stein, Woolf, Arendt, and some of Barnes for herself. Now, unequivocally homosexual, she enjoyed writers no matter their gender, rereading that once detestable novella and rejoicing in the burly masculinity of the line A tractor was his honey—a sentence for the ages. Currently, she tried to extract herself from a relationship with a woman a decade older. They'd taken many switchbacks in the course of defining a preferred reciprocity for their fate. The older partner insisted the two put aside money for their leisure and entertainment activities, file it into a separate bank account so each of them equally contributed in order to make the inevitable accounting of the relationship's expenses easier and worked out prior, pre-fuss. And so, even if the money wasn't to be an issue, it certainly was, though Agnes at first agreed, being initially not so worried or concerned as slightly bothered, like the presence of a hornet hovering above one's plate of food or cup of Coke. The months went on and her girlfriend faithfully requested the suggested amount promptly on or near the first of the month (they'd eventually agreed to hold it in a piggy bank) and at times, Agnes felt her paramour cared more about this than kisses after or before the deed, as the monetary exchange always took precedence, even when either was famished for flesh. Agnes had finally said something exactingly critical, but jokey, just a week before. Her lover warded off the inquiry as methodically as a slow hand during a Tai Chi sparring exercise, a practice which she'd unsuccessfully tried to get Agnes into, leaving its own trail of resentment. She said, We've already agreed sweetie, if it's too much we'll just have to cut out concerts or the fine dinners we both seem to enjoy, and Diane, the woman from Poetry Magazine, tilted her head, her face flushing a shade darker because her blood reacted to another's discomfort, and she said, Elders have a hard time bending. More years equals more experiences equals more circumspection. Yes, Agnes replied, I see that—if only I were older to make me believe it, and they laughed lightly like they made butterflies out of fingers and danced them around on each other's skin, and Diane squeezed Agnes's shoulder the same way she'd done years earlier in Ann Arbor—the same hand, the same pressure, the same sentiment communicated clearly. Diane wanted to reveal something similar, some untowardness in life, but gratefully had little—though she did owe the NYPL $55 in fines already. No, she wouldn't dish, just listen, and blinked slowly a few times, a newly hatched habit reminding one of an active listener or therapist type, and she thought, to hell with poetry, this is real life, this is what poetry can't do—even if poetry must be read aloud and silence descends or it coheres and then dominates or dissipates while the listeners dissect, ununderstand, or try to forget. The seconds slowly passed like distant boats over water, and the downtrodden Agnes smiled through the pain her eyes couldn't belie before drinking what was left of her wine. They looked into each other for a few, sharing something more than incredible, until the flash of an official photographer's camera cried Cut and they blinked in shock, eyeing the dapper man who smirked at them, but began to develop a slight regret for the intrusion. Hey dikes, this is my job, he thought. Diane tried to get the afterimage of the flash out of her left eye, blinking in some upsettedness, though trying not to traduce the warmth established. Oh god, Agnes said. If my lover sees that . . . Don't worry, Diane said. I'll get him to delete it. After all, we're one of the sponsors. Do you even like Eliot anymore? Agnes said. I'm not sure, Diane said, but she wanted to get back to where they were, though Agnes acted happy to have the diversion and Diane offered her email and said they should talk sometime and Agnes said, Talk? in an abrupt tone. Well, Diane said, We can talk, right? Of course, we can—that's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all, really. But Agnes couldn't say more, couldn't continue with the I'm so lonely for someone to talk to—I need it so much, though it hurt to not pronounce what Agnes needed to, and what difference? She'd been doing the same thing all her life. That was why she was in an equally unappeaseable relationship now. Soon they separated. Diane briefly considered not telling the photographer to delete the pic, but in the end she did.
After grudgingly deleting the photo, the photographer spoke to another photographer who showed him pictures of two people having sex in a storage room less than an hour ago. He said, She cried out Dance the orange, dance the orange—fucking weirdest shit. These poetry people are nuts.
The Prufrocks, a pop rock band from St. Louis, took the stage and started to sing "Teenage Wasteland" at the same moment the Penguin subsumed T.S. Eliot's American publisher in a merger finalized in an office just across the East River.
More lying, more drinking, more drama. More pop rock from the Prufocks, more misremembered lines, more conversations reminding people of something they had or hadn't done, like one between someone who worked at Oxford University Press and someone who had gone to Oxford, but they spoke about health issues and an acquaintance who'd gotten gout. The way he eats. It's rich—it's the rich sauces. Then desserts. Every time it's desserts with him—he'd go to a dessert place after ordering dessert at the restaurant.
Jesus.
That's what I'm talking about.
One day he'll wish he'd been broke. And now that day might have come. And the man who'd worked for the press, Josh, smiled jaggedly at this, checking his phone to see a text from his girlfriend and it's single punctuation jerk interrogation: ? He shook it off as a little joke, thought it wasn't. She wanted to know if they were meeting up, but he didn't know yet. There were so many beautiful women who liked poetry.
So, the other said, are you in touch with Barry?
But Josh didn't answer. His face dissolved and he kept going to fetch his phone only to let it slide back in his pocket. It's so, kind a . . . funny, he said. Something just reminded me. I have to send this text. Please excuse me. It's sort of important. Be right back. He went ten feet away, then ten feet more, thinking of the words. As he drew his phone to compose, a couple in stunning evening apparel walked past. The woman Chinese, the man white and fairly young. Josh texted back Sonya: Sorry I forgot, but last night I think the condom broke. I was pretty out of it as you may remember and thought it was a dream. Oops—not. I'm sure you weren't near your period: for some reason I'm kind of up on those things. He thought about that colon. Then sent it. He waited some more, then texted: Tonight is hard. Met an old friend. Dinner in the village demain soir?
Sonya was already furiously replying before she received the second text. Are you kidding you giant asshole? Now I have to run and get the pill, and she did run, or at least fast jog, to the Duane Reade by her apartment, sending multiple belligerent texts as she weaved through droves of coughing, bugeyed, and odd people buying up flu and cold medicine, antacids, and pain relievers, as well as texting her friends what many thought already, that she slept with a fucking douchebag. She was twenty-six and never pregnant and wanted to keep it that way. Lots of places she needed to see and her family had many florabundant fertile women in its Ukrainian genealogy—how fucked she could be! She might be all wrong for kids and certainly now would be a single mother, suing the hell out of that shithead and his father's East Hampton bullshit estate. Josh—fucking joke and fucking joke of a name.
Josh felt the texts come in like bullets as they rattled his leg. He'd set her messages on "earthquake vibrate," but just this afternoon fantasized about giving her a false error message so she could have a hard time finding him. She was combative, that Russkie blood brio, and sorta vindictive—maybe a trace of Cossack?—tearing at him each time they met up, saying he should shave more often or learn her language or lift some weights. Wasn't it enough that they liked how each other moved in the world, liked enough to doff the clothes and for her to take him thick within? She had luster, had those eyes, the fit frame, but she could worry too much. She was the one who wanted to do ecstasy on a weeknight when he had to get up early and read manuscripts, conferencing at ten. Why didn't she take responsibility? All she had to do was sit around all day and write a thesis for a year and a half. She could work from the house and be fine. And what was he? German? Historically their tribes were enemies, so like, why bother? He should have someone his speed, not a belligerent bolshevik who texted him ninety times a day. He deserved better after having to grow up without a mother, raised by an Aunt he didn't really like, and afterward a nanny who drove him hard. Give me a break. I'm twenty-eight, life doesn't need to be like this. Went to Cornell but, like, does that still mean something? Even if I do make only $35,000. I'll get into Harper's soon—Dad just gifted them how much? He grabbed for the phone. Attack of the texts. She had said so much, texts hundreds of words long—how could she have time? He would have gotten her the pill if need be, but he didn't reply because he firmly looked into the eyes of the pleasing poetess who'd recently won the Yale Younger Poet's Prize.
Sonya communicated with many of her friends throughout the ordeal of buying and immediately swallowing the pill and most of them suggested confronting the shit right away at his big poetry event and she delightedly composed a text she didn't intend to send, but in the end, couldn't resist, altering the time of sending by a trick a friend taught her—One day I will get you—and she took a taxi to Brooklyn.
Rhoda St. Johnstone finished off her eighteenth cup of wine and spoke with a young woman who wanted her to judge a contest. Darling, St. Johnstone said, Where are you from?
Detroit.
De-troit. Well, what a wonderful town. Now darling, I can't judge a contest without the matter of the generous generosity of the income being discussed.
Well, it's a small—
Small is not a good word in this business, nor in any business.
Sonya arrived and grabbed for the penis of the guard when he badgered about a ticket. There's a terrorist in there, she said, and jogged in. As she expected, they were all uppity people, so it was hard to distinguish between them and Josh the fuckwad. She texted a friend that she would never find him and then she saw him, but it was just another fey prick like him, and she admitted she might be angry at all men except her father for a little while and called her therapist to make an emergency appointment.
The party planners had not foreseen all of the wine being drunk so fast, but they were about a half hour from that and there was still ninety minutes before people and poets would be asked to leave. Someone said to someone, I'm going to publish The Waste Land again. My press in Philly, Cakewalk, is going to publish "The Waste Land," but I'm going to edit it my way—and I'll edit it better than Ezra, yah-ha. Go back to Philly, someone said to him.
Sonya came back into the crowd after arguing with her female therapist: a neo-Jungian, who had initially demanded she read Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul, but Sonya had enough of white European males, and her therapist was from Dallas—why would she be so attached to Jung? But the therapist wouldn't tell Sonya she'd studied under James Hillman, another white male Jungian. I don't want to have to read any more, she had yelled. Isn't there a short Youtube video or podcast? Can you understand I'm writing a thesis on Stalin's purge? I can't add any more books to that pile. Just listen to me cry and get on with it. She took a drink, even though the pill directions said not to use alcohol. She wished she had a better zoom lens on her phone's camera and kept eyeing every tall, preppy-seeming schlub there, which equaled many schlubs, but none were Josh. Soon, she found herself next to a man with fancy Italian shoes, who turned from someone, saw her, and smiled. Hello, he said, you look like you're looking for someone?
Yes, I am. Do you know him? His name is Josh Taylor.
The man shook his head. I don't believe so, but he has my name. Or his last name is my first.
If you knew what he did you wouldn't be happy to share anything with him.
Oh, that bad? Some men—
Are you married?
Why do you ask that?
Because you look like you're married, though no ring.
How does someone like that look?
Loose, but untried.
You must be a poet.
I revile poetry. I loathe it more than a gargantuan yeast infection.
A man said to another, My therapist said I'm clearly seeking male friendship.
Well, are you?
So, that's why I'm asking you. Do you think I am?
I don't know, how is your relationship with your father?
We don't speak. Not since the 90s.
Are you upset about that?
Sometimes I cry.
Then your therapist is right.
Oh, man. Do you want to go out and get a drink?
Not tonight.
Is that because of what I just said?
What did you just say?
About my father . . .
That he died . . . ?
Have you been listening?
Hey, loneliness isn't attractive.
People started to dismantle The Waste Land: The Video Game console and the band played on, doing an acoustic version of "I Am the Walrus." As more people left, Sonya kept searching and texting, because she could see from a bot she'd implanted on his phone where he was and he was still at 1 Hanson Place.
A first reader at Knopf drunkenly related a story from her Jersey shore weekend in the summer, And this guy was nuttering around the beach holding up his phone and pointing into the waves. I think my girlfriend is drowning, he said to us, and then he, ha-ha-ha-ha, then he said, Do you know the number for 911?
No, he didn't say that.
He surely did. We didn't know whether to laugh or save the drowning girl.
What did you do?
About to answer, she twisted about, seemingly ready to vomit, but her head sprung up. No, not yet, and she giggled. What, love? Oh, the 911 guy. We didn't worry. We dialed 911 for him, though I didn't—she hiccuped—tell him the number—what it really was. Some people shouldn't know the truth.
Was she saved?
What? It was the lifeguard we were talking to. The lifeguard asked us the number.
Shut up, drunko.
I'm not lying. New Jersey hires people to be lifeguards who can't swim and who play video games on their phones while people die, even if it's their girlfriend.
Josh stood with a large-breasted woman who was in an avant-garde acting troupe. He kept smiling and telling himself not to look at them, but at the same time he wondered if guilt concerning his mother's lack would slay this relationship before he even got to play Newton's Cradle with them. Being in the theatre, she was dramatic, sarcastic, cunning, and competitive. He could see in her black curly locks, handed down by a curvy Greek mother, locks she consistently flipped and fondled, the dank gleam of his past relationship—the crazy Sonya—yet rooted to the islands of Greece. Should he abandon the dark ladies and maybe go to the colder-hearted Asians who smiled so as not to offend or maybe the American Californians—not so attacking, but in free flight, hugging all those old boyfriends, being nice to the poor, while tending toward dominance in the bedroom? The woman before him had renamed herself Ninotchka—wasn't Garbo Swedish? Anyway . . . it was good to be around a different woman, someone who wanted him if for no other reason than that he was attractive. No chance of co-dependence, but projection galore. So what? Projection is the basis of all human sympathy. If we're projecting on each other it's cool because we are getting sympathetic to the need to fuck different people. An actress knows that better than anyone else. But I really don't want to wear a condom. She might be adventurous and let it slide. I'll pull out and soak her pubes. Who invented the condom? They break anyway . . .
Found you, fucker.
Sonya . . . this is Ninotchka.
Yeah, are her breasts big enough for you?
I think it's more about what's inside—heart center, and he tapped his chest.
Ninotchka, will you and your breasts please leave us alone. I might be pregnant with a child of his, so . . .
It's all good, Ninotchka said.
Rhoda St. Johnstone walked out with a friend who asked her how The Waste Land ends, the last line.
I don't know. I haven't read it in forty years. Eliot's too anti-Semitic. My second to last husband was Jewish. Anyway, are you going to that yoga class tomorrow?