Bleak College Days
Part One
I chose Bleak College because of its library, or actually because of a story about its library. It had been rebuilt, I heard, in the middle of the twentieth century, with money from the shipping magnate Werner Hamacher. According to the student who led campus tours, Hamacher gave the money to Bleak in memory of his son, who drowned 150 yards from the island of Naxos, in the Aegean. He, Hamacher, wanted the college to build a swimming pool 150 yards long, so the undergraduates could learn to swim that distance without resting. Bleak took the money, but they had no intention of building the pool -- they had a swimming pool already, and besides, a 150-yard pool would be monstrous, unswimmable, impossible to maintain. Reasoning that Hamacher was old and unwell, and that it was only a matter of time before he died and the money could be used for anything they liked, the trustees told the shipping magnate one story after another. First they were having trouble locating an architect who would do justice to the magnificence of the magnate's vision; although they could build the pool easily enough, they said, the idea (and the college) deserved something grander, a Palace of Natation, like a railroad station from the nineteenth century, with a glass-paned barrel roof, an artificial waterfall and various smaller pools for the use of children and the elderly. Then they had an architect, but there were engineering problems to be solved: the water required to fill the pool would weigh so much that, unless special measures were taken, the bottom would crack, or the entire pool would sink into the earth. Hamacher was impatient; he threatened to take his money back and give it to Stanford, which was then soliciting funds to dig itself an artificial lake. The trustees had to engage an architect, then an engineer, and even a contractor.
And still Hamacher didn't die. The day came when they had to break ground for the monstrous swimming pool; and the old magnate was there with a shovel, assisting the President of the College, who looked around uneasily, hoping all this would prove to be a dream. The workers dug the foundation; the trustees writhed with unhappiness. They tried to think of things they could do with the pool -- could they use it for the sailing team? Could sea battles be staged in it, as they were in the amphitheaters of old? Could marine biology be brought into it somehow? Just as the workers finished sinking iron columns in the earth, Hamacher died. The trustees immediately commissioned an architect to redraw all the plans, and Werner Hamacher Jr. Library was built in the existing excavation. The iron columns, my tour guide concluded, now support the stacks, which, with their 4.5 million volumes, weigh about 2,250 metric tons, or roughly as much as the water that would have filled the swimming pool.
When it was too late, and I was already settled in the Old Building where the freshmen lived, I learned that the story about Hamacher was a fiction. I found this out at a party, when I repeated the history of Hamacher to a girl named Susan Chapin, who was one of those weary, crinkly-haired beauties I had imagined meeting at Bleak, before I got there. Someone -- a redheaded boy with glasses -- interrupted, "You fell for that?" I shook my head. Go away, I meant to say; but he kept talking, and told us about Momus, the tour guide, who was apparently famous for misleading prospective students, and who had, if the redhead was to be believed, once convinced a group of visitors that the college had been founded by Vikings in the eleventh century C.E. Momus was a campus legend, the redhead said; he had directed a play, last spring, where all the actors were naked, and the dean of the whole college had to close the production down on account of the things that happened after each performance -- students grabbing at each other, bodies moving on the darkened stage. He, the redhead, knew the guy who had done the lights, and the stories were all true. "Really?" Susan said. "Really," said the redhead. I never saw him again, but I ran into Susan countless times before we graduated, and even afterwards, in San Francisco, where, she told me, she had grown up -- she was still beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than she'd been before, but I was married to Theresa by then, and besides, Momus' story about the library had made it impossible for anything ever to happen between us.
I didn't go back to Hamacher for weeks; even months later, I found myself getting angry when I was there, especially when I had to go down into the stacks, which were, in fact, supported by iron columns. I couldn't help thinking of all the things I didn't like about Bleak: the rain, the barely edible food, the tiny dorm rooms with cracked walls that were painted over every August, but never fixed; all the things I had agreed to put up with for the sake of this library, which had turned out to be just a library, which had nothing more fantastic or original to it than what was contained in its books. I wasn't angry at Momus -- how could I have been angry at him? It would have been like getting angry at Rumplestiltskin, or at the binomial theorem. Even though I saw him from time to time -- blond, wearing a red scarf that flew from his neck like a flag, or drinking with his actors at the Anchor Bar on Chapel Street -- Momus was so far out of my orbit that he didn't seem like a real person, and in fact, the more I learned about him, the harder it was for me to believe that he was the same person who had given me a tour of the Bleak campus only the year before. He had become smaller than life, like the photograph of the author at the back of a book, or a statue on top of a building, which you can never see close up.
When I became the editor of Tsurrus, two years later, I wanted to make my own legend, or at least to make a reputation for myself in Bleak's artistic circles. I went to house parties where too many people ground their cigarettes into the carpet; I attended, and, very infrequently, hosted poetry readings at which boys compared the heavens to manmade objects, while girls compared the heavens to objects formed by nature. Did people know me? I put up wry posters, begging undergraduates not to give their writing to Tsurrus, while hoping in secret that they really wouldn't give us their work, because it was terrible, their work, and I wanted not to read it. I dreamed of writing the whole magazine myself, under various assumed names, but didn't dare. Was I known? Nothing that happened at those parties, or anywhere else, suggested it. To give myself color, to make myself seen, I bought a midnight-blue velvet sportscoat and a pair of red embroidered slippers, which I planned to wear to class, to dinner, etc.. But it was already November, and the winter rain had begun. William Shawn wouldn't go around in a pair of wet slippers, I thought. Even Gerard de Nerval, who had a pet lobster that he used to walk on the streets of Paris, wouldn't have walked his lobster in wet slippers. The costume stayed in my closet; although I put the slippers on sometimes when I was alone, and sat in the armchair I'd bought for thirty dollars from the Salvation Army, imagining myself surrounded by acolytes whose eyes rarely rose above the gold stitching on my feet.
That was the year I lived in New East House, a low limestone-faced fortlet that was built in the 1930s with the idea of keeping people out, and refitted in the 1970s with the idea of keeping people in. It was traditionally inhabited by mid-year transfers, graduate students from the former Soviet bloc, and people who, for one reason or another, found the company of other humans abhorrent. I was there because I'd drawn a bad number in the housing lottery, and I didn't have the energy or the desire to follow my friends into their co-operative houses off campus, houses that were more often than not organized around alarmingly specific activities, for example the study of French culture in a vegan context (crudités, anyone?). Because no one else wanted to live in New East, I had a double room under the eaves, with a small window through which you could watch the gargoyles on the roof spitting rainwater into the moat. What was more, I had two beds, which I pushed together and covered with one sheet -- a useful arrangement, except that sometimes a visitor would slip into the crack between the mattresses and bruise her shoulder.
I say "a visitor," but really only one person did this, a sophomore named Gabby Furst who had joined the staff of Tsurrus, primarily, I thought, in order to prevent us from reaching a unanimous decision about anything. Gabby was short, dark, and electric; her thin brown hair stood out from her head in all weathers; she wore a bright blue wool coat and the round-collared rayon blouses you find mostly on grandmothers and people who answer the phone for a living. Gabby believed that fiction should tell the truth, and that poetry should come out and say what it meant, which meant that she was always arguing with the rest of us, championing a terse unmetrical verselet about a dying grandmother, or taking apart a story that I wanted to publish about spies in Tangiers, or spies on the moon, or children who were secretly spies. Even when the meeting was over and the two of us stood outside in the bitter cold, smoking, she didn't relent. "See," she said, sucking on the end of a Camel Light as though she hoped it would dissolve in her mouth, "you have to communicate." Gabby was very big on communication. She had learned Esperanto in high school, and corresponded with a boy in the Netherlands, until he started calling her on the phone, in the middle of the night, to ask questions she couldn't answer about the personal lives of American rock musicians. Her parents were Christian Scientists, and although she didn't believe in their religion, she abstained from alcohol and medicine, because, she said, she wanted to be clear. In retrospect the two of us seem unnatural together, like one of those elements that exist only in particle accelerators; at the time it seemed as easy to be together as it did to be silent when we had run out of things to say. We never talked about it, or thought about our future together, because how could you talk about a silence? What was the future of a silence? She came over on Tuesday nights, after Tsurrus; we were quiet until she slipped between the mattresses and bruised her shoulder again.
Momus also lived in New East, for reasons that he shared with no one. He might have thought it was original to take up residence among the foreigners and the despised, or he might have liked the sound his hollow-heeled boots made on the polished concrete floor of the lobby; he might have moved there for a smell -- although the smells in New East were mostly from the chemicals used to clean the bathrooms -- or for the way the setting sun picked out the roofline of the old Bleak Chapel and cast its shadow against New East's façade. It was hard to tell why he did anything, but his presence there made me feel original, even sans velvet coat and slippers.
Part Two
First snow in New Haven. There was a tradition, I suppose it was a tradition, although each time it happened we felt as though we were the ones who had invented it, that all work ceased as soon as there was enough snow on the ground to cover the bent brown grass, and that everyone who had been working came outside, to the quad at the center of the campus, and assaulted each other with snowballs and handfuls of snow. All the fear we had built up in months of work -- fear that the paper would never be finished, the equations never solved, that we would never be done with what we had set out to do, lightheartedly, in the warm weeks at the beginning of the fall -- was let out in an hour-long explosion of violence and yelling and snow-chafed skin. The snow distracted us from our work, but without the snow, the work would never have got finished. It was only on that December afternoon -- the first snow always came in December, and always in the afternoon -- that we could see past it, to a life that wasn't consumed by our private inward efforts, a life with people in it, and moving around, and sound, human sound, which was all the more distinct because the snow had silenced everything else.
When we had fought enough, we ran to the top of the hill behind the engineering building, where other people had already stolen trays from the dining hall, and were sledding on them, down the hill, almost into the parked snow-covered cars at the bottom, and running up again, their faces flushed. Somehow we found trays -- the fact that there were enough trays for everyone, even though the number of actual tray-thieves was certainly small, and they could only carry so many trays each, seemed to me at the time, and still seems, evidence that the world is still capable of producing miracles -- and we fell downhill, feet-first, head-first, ass-first, watching the ground rush towards us and rush away behind us, like a train that doesn't stop in the station where you wait. We flew toward the cars but never hit them; we slowed; we stopped and stood up, shaking our hands, looking around as though it was amazing that everything could move so quickly and then stop. It was almost dark, and the snow was still falling, orange in the streetlights at the foot of the hill, white in the college lights at the top.
It was on one of those afternoons, during one of those first snows, that... no. I want to leave the snow as it is, falling, covering all our footprints, making it seem as though no one had been here. I want to imagine a world without people, or at least without individuals, for a moment. In this world -- which is, I think, the only one where miracles might happen -- there's nothing but weather, and the sound of voices, of people who are no longer afraid raising their voices.
I met Momus, actually met him I mean, not long after the first snow of the year. I came home with Gabby Furst -- it might have been one of those exceptional evenings when we'd seen each other without Tsurrus to bring us together -- I had pushed her into the snow; she had pushed me; then we fell together. Our coats were piebald with snow, and the cuffs of my jeans were soaking wet. We staggered into the lobby of New East, arm in arm; we might have kissed, or been about to kiss. A lock of Gabby's hair had frozen several inches above her head, like a horn.
"Richard."
Momus was lying on one of the sofas in the little social area, a square of carpet with several pieces of vinyl furniture arranged around a television in the hope of attracting a gathering, although, given who lived in New East, no one ever gathered, and in fact I don't know if the television even worked. I hadn't known that Momus knew my name, either.
"I've been waiting for you," he said. This was almost certainly not true. How could he have known that I would come in, or when? But it might be true, I thought; and for a moment I imagined myself in the alien psychology that would make him wait for me.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to bed," I said.
"I was thinking of driving to Boston for pancakes."
"Aren't there pancakes here?"
"Not like they have in Boston."
"It's snowing."
"So?" Momus blew on the tips of his fingers, as though to launch a kiss or an eyelash in my direction. "Do you want to go?"
I looked at Gabby, her horn dripping little by little onto her forehead. "I'm going to bed."
"Then can I borrow your car?"
"I don't have a car."
"Oh."
"Good night, Momus."
"Good night, Richard." He closed his eyes. Gabby and I went upstairs and removed our wet clothing, our intermediately wet clothing, our still-dry clothing. We lay in my makeshift double bed, looking at the orange pattern the streetlights made through the window's mullions. "What a freak," I said.
"Who, Momus?"
"No, you. Yes. Momus."
Gabby sniffed. "He's one of those people who won't ever do anything."
"You think?"
"Wait and see." She rolled towards me and put a chilly hand on my chest. "I'm sleepy." We closed our eyes. I wanted to turn out the light, but it was already off; the room was still bright with streetlight reflected by the snow.
So -- inconspicuously, almost imperceptibly -- the season of Momus began. I ran into him at the Café Oblique, where he was reading a catalog of woodworking tools. "To learn the words," he said. "Auger, adze. Doesn't that sound Persian? The great god Adze?" He had a way of making everything sound mythical. "What are you doing for dinner?" I didn't understand why he had chosen me as a companion; I hoped that it had something to do with my new status as a literary person, with my weekly editorial meetings, my posters requesting fiction and poetry from all persons capable of providing it. I imagined that Momus was going to give me a story -- I want you to have this, he would say, because I think you'll know what to do with it. At least he'd give us a poem, or a drawing. But this did not happen. We went out to dinner; we went to Hungarian movies at the Bleak Film Society; we drank cocktails at the Anchor in the middle of the afternoon, but the reason we were doing these things was never discussed, any more than Momus gave reasons for anything. I speculated with Gabby about why Momus, why me and Momus, and we advanced various hypotheses -- mine involved spies; hers, women -- but we didn't consider what now seems like the most likely explanation of all, that Momus didn't have very many friends. Was I his friend? I thought so; but it was hard to know where you stood with Momus.
The name printed on his checks was William Momsen. He had spent his childhood in a farrago of American Schools that erased all markers of locality from his character, and left him a pale universal, a human being built in the International Style. When asked why he called himself Momus, he said it was because of his secular humanism; he cited Erasmus, Linnaeus, Gustavus Adolphus -- though the print on his wall of a picture by Balthazar Klossowski, aka Balthus, of a girl in erotic repose, suggested a more modern derivation. "Richard, you can't analyze everything," Momus protested. Even though he was going out with a girl from Hamden High School, a senior, he pointed out, only four years younger than him, a difference of age that you could find in practically any marriage in America. Momus wasn't ashamed of her. He didn't seem to be ashamed of anything. Momus with his very white teeth and his good posture boasted that he'd never read Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or Nabokov, or Nabokov! Because he was already too European, he said. "Richard, you think too much about what you should be doing," he told me. "Why not think about what you want?" It sounded easy when he said it, but afterwards, when I was alone, I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do that wasn't, in some sense, a thing I should be doing -- except to see Momus again. He was a play with intermissions but no ending. He wanted us to speak Latin, even though neither of us really spoke Latin. "Quid agistis, Ricardus?" He gave everyone and everything a new name. Momus claimed he'd driven across America by himself in two and a half days, and that he'd eaten possum in a diner off I-50. "Sum, esse, possum, come on, Richard, join in." And I did: Momus had a way of making everything sound possible.
There was an announcement in Bleak Week, LIBRARY TO PURCHASE AUTHOR'S ARCHIVE. Hamacher Library has agreed to buy the electronic archives of novelist Kurt MacMahon, whose novels "Aghmoogenegamook" and "Wittequergaugam" won National Book Awards in blah and blah blah. Mr. MacMahon's work has been called big and gnarled as the state of Maine, a reminder that even in this world which is, seemingly, without place or history, our lives are shaped by what we feel, or what we touch, or words to that effect. Mr. MacMahon to appear in person in Schliemann Auditorium on blah blah, and I thought, I'm going to get a story from him. I had it all worked out in my mind: after the lecture I would wait by the back door to the auditorium, smoking, even though I hardly smoked in those days, and when I did smoke it made me feel as though I had just stepped off a slowly rocking ship whose motion I had not yet forgotten, and when Kurt came out, accompanied, in my mind, by a beautiful woman, I would say, Kurt, or no, Mr. MacMahon, my name is Richard Rowland and I'm the editor of Tsurrus... Tsurrus, hey? MacMahon would look at me fondly, remembering, doubtless, his own involvement with undergraduate literary magazines, and how much he had wanted to be him, when he was me; and now that he was him, he'd invite me for a drink with his beautiful wife. He would ask me about undergraduate literary life, and I would tell him what a desert it was, and how hard you had to work to make the desert bloom, but without complaining; and I might tell him a story I had heard from Gabby, about how there were dialects of Esperanto, now, in China, that other Esperanto speakers could not understand, which showed you what a difficult thing it was, communication, in general, and how it was a desert everywhere, but you had to make it bloom, right, Kurt? Kurt? While I spoke, his beautiful wife would be looking at me, and I have to admit that sometimes the story had a second episode, in which MacMahon was called away to a literary function and his wife remained with me in the booth at the back of the Anchor, where she confided in me how lonely it was, being married to a great man, and got drunker and drunker, and kissed me openmouthed while placing the flat of her hand on my chest. Even in my imagination we went no farther than that.
Schliemann Auditorium, which was named not for the famous archeologist but for another, unrelated man by the same name, who had been, I think, a toilet paper magnate, was full by the time I arrived, and I had to stand in the back, next to a black man in a tweed overcoat which smelled of his own sweat, and who I saw sometimes in the Café Oblique, playing chess with the owner. You're here to see the man? he said. I didn't answer. He repeated, Are you here to see the man? I nodded. People were looking at us. Hell, he said, you don't have to be ashamed of it. I pushed away from him, through the crowd, as far as I could go, and stood there, shaking, my face hot with shame, both because I had been marked in the eyes of the crowd as a café person, in other words, a person with no ambition and no future; and because I had offended the chess player, who looked at me with real sorrow, then looked away. I couldn't stop thinking about him, even when a representative from the Board of Trustees stood up and invited us to welcome Kurt MacMahon, whose work we all surely et cetera, and MacMahon himself took the stage, a very tall man in blue jeans and a blue work shirt, like a prisoner, I thought. MacMahon spoke, but all I could think was, what right did I have not to speak to the chess player, and what might he have told me, if I had? What did he know, where had he been, what did he keep in his room, I wondered, because I would never know; I would never be his friend now, and his secrets were as lost to me as the library of Atlantis, or, closer to hand, the swimming pool that had never been planned for the spot where we now stood. Kurt MacMahon finished his lecture to thunderous applause; I have no idea what he said, except that writing stories was very hard -- which of course it would be, I thought, for someone so tall.
I thought there would be a crowd at the side door of the auditorium, but in fact I was the only person waiting, and I would have been sure that I'd made a mistake, and that MacMahon would exit by some other door, if it weren't for the hired car waiting by the curb, its engine idling. I waited for maybe three-quarters of an hour, while undergraduates less clever than I mobbed MacMahon inside; I watched the winter stars and warmed myself with thoughts of my own resourcefulness. My hands were frozen, my knees were stiff, but finally the door opened and Kurt MacMahon came out, accompanied, just as I'd imagined, by a woman, not the wife I'd given him, but a teaching assistant in the English department whose beauty was a thing of legend. "Mr. MacMahon?" I said. He recoiled, and, as I kept speaking, backed away from me, as though I might attack him at any moment. "My name is Richard, I'm the editor of Tsurrus, and I really enjoyed your reading" -- it hadn't been a reading -- "and I wanted to ask you, I mean, I edit this magazine, Tsurrus, and it's pretty rocky, I mean, fiction-wise, Bleak College is kind of a desert..." I listened to myself with horror, as I brought forth, in jumbled form, the phrases I'd imagined saying, up to, and, alas, including the one about making the desert bloom, and all the while brandishing the back issues of the magazine as though they really were a weapon, an illusion in which MacMahon seemed to participate. The English teaching assistant looked at me with pity. When I was finished speaking, and it was clear that I posed no immediate threat, MacMahon nodded reflexively, over and over, as though I'd spoken in a language he had learned in school but didn't really speak. Finally he tapped the magazines I held towards him. "This Tsurrus," he said, "it's a Jewish magazine?"
"No, sir. It's a literary magazine, of all denominations."
"But Tsurrus is a Jewish name? It's a Jewish word, isn't it?"
"I think so, sir."
"You don't know? It's the name of your magazine." He grabbed the copies of Tsurrus by one end, while I, paralyzed, continued to hold them by the other, and shook them, causing my arm to pump up and down. "Give them to me!" he said, and I let go. He let go of them at the same time, and the magazines fell into the snow. I picked them up. MacMahon looked at me -- looked down at me -- and clucked his tongue.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Kurt, the car is waiting," said the beautiful teaching assistant.
I handed the now-damp back issues of Tsurrus to MacMahon, who held them away from his body, as though they might soil him. He shook his head, opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, then, abruptly, turned away, and folded his body with difficulty into the hired car. The English teaching assistant got in beside him and they drove off. I went back to New East and found Momus and told him what had happened. "So you did it," he said, not understanding at all. "Good for you."
Part Three
How surprised I was, when an envelope arrived in the mail, containing a note from Mr. Tatsuo Ito, the curator of electronic collections at Hamacher Library, asking me please to acknowledge the library and the generous gift of Mr. Longman Hyle '52 when the enclosed story was published, and a thin sheaf of laser-printed pages with the title, "The Wiscasset Home." I felt like an amnesiac confronted by his adoring family. What had I done to deserve this gift? I called Gabby Furst, and told her what had happened. She wasn't as impressed as I would have liked her to be; she asked whether the story was good? Of course it's good, I said. What was it about? she wanted to know. "Gabby, if this is going to be another of your lectures about communication..."
"I just asked what it was about, Richard."
"Maine."
"That's all? Just Maine?"
"It's about..." I flipped through the pages. "There's an orphanage. And... someone writing letters. A woman. To a man. Gabby, the point is that this is big."
"Hm," Gabby said.
"You can read it when I'm done," I said. "Will that make you happy?"
"I didn't say I was unhappy."
We ended the conversation. For the first time since we began our arrangement, I wondered if Gabby was right for me. Shouldn't I be seeing someone who didn't always disagree with me? Were there not women, beautiful women, at Bleak, whose opinions were closer to my own?
I settled in my $30 chair and read. "The Wiscasset Home" was about an English professor named Walter MacDougall who fought a war, got himself an education, married, and ended up teaching poetry at a college in Maine. There he was bewitched by a teaching assistant named Rebecca Ascher, a New Yorker with bottle-black hair "and the expensive beauty of her people." Oh, shit, I thought. MacDougall and Ascher had an affair; Ascher got pregnant; MacDougall convinced her to keep the child. She wasn't going to raise the child, and MacDougall was married, so they put the baby in the Wiscasset Home for Boys, an orphanage from the gloomy attic of the nineteenth century. Years passed. Ascher moved back to New York, but from time to time she wrote to MacDougall, asking him for a favor: a letter of recommendation, a phone call to an editor. MacDougall did as he was asked. With his help, Ascher became a critic, an essayist, a novelist; her star eclipsed MacDougall's own.
He found himself thinking more and more often of the boy in the Wiscasset Home; soon he could think of nothing else. What was his boy like? What was he doing? As his mind was taken over by thoughts of this gloomy place, MacDougall lost his ability to make things; his articles went unpublished, his poems unwritten, his lectures more often than not broke off halfway through. He drank. Often, in the evening, he drove to Wiscasset and parked his car across the street from the Home. He watched the lights go on and off in the little rooms, and listened to the voices of children raised in song, in play, in suffering. He slumped down in his car as the Home across the street went dark, and followed the pinpoint flashlights of the wardens as they made their evening rounds.
Gradually it became clear to MacDougall that he would have to claim the boy and suffer the consequences of that. One November night he drank a great deal, even for him, drove back to Wiscasset, pounded on the door of the Home and demanded his child, his child, his child! When he was calm enough to explain the situation and to have the situation explained to him, MacDougall learned that the boy had died in infancy, of a fever. MacDougall drove straight to New York, where he found Rebecca Ascher at a cocktail party given by one famous writer for another famous writer. He seized a cake knife and stuck it into her heart, shouting that it was "no better than the Jewish bitch deserved." Shit, and shit again.
Afternoon at the Café Oblique. Green in the elms on Broadway suggests spring. I am folding a napkin into sixteenths and tearing it along the folds. "This is not going to happen, Momus."
"Quid?"
"Be serious. This story is hateful."
"So change it," Momus said. "Make him a Jew. Make her a WASP."
"Wouldn't help."
"Make them both Greek. No one knows anything about the Greeks."
"Momus."
"Richard."
"I can't change the story. I can't print the story."
"Does this have something to do with the fact that you're Jewish?"
"It has to do with the fact that the story is unpublishable. And I'm not Jewish."
"Your father, whatever."
"It's the magazine! He thinks it's a Jewish magazine!"
"You can see why."
"Momus, this is spite! It's spite, Momus!" I finished tearing up the napkin. "Momus, I--"
The only person I knew who owned a car was Jenny, Momus's high-school girlfriend. One afternoon in April she drove me and Momus to Hamden, to pick up the copies of Tsurrus. The printer was on a service road at the edge of town, between a bedding superstore and a discount beverage warehouse. I liked the printer's shop, with the sweet, carcinogenic reek of inks and solvents that pervaded even the office. I liked the contraptions on the shop floor, the automatic collators and folders and binders and staplers, big, ugly devices that had resisted the tendency of machines to become smaller and more hermetic. I liked seeing the pages before they were cut, with their columns of upside-down text; I liked the bundles of finished magazines, bundled with plastic ribbon, which were heavy and solid in a way that a single printed object was not. Sometimes I thought that my editorial activity was only an excuse to come to the printer's, to remind myself of what books were before they were books: danger and noise and bad smells. I wrote the woman in the office a check for twenty-five hundred dollars while Momus read informational pamphlets ("Are You A Four-Color Business?" "Preparing Transparencies," etc.) and Jenny smoked a cigarette outside. We loaded bundles of Tsurrus into the trunk of her car and drove back toward New Haven. I freed a copy of the magazine and put it in my lap.
"The Wiscasset Home" was announced on the cover, over an extremely beautiful photograph by a man named Randy Davis, of what appeared to be a boy fleeing into what appeared to be woods. Davis lived in Tennessee, but the photograph suggested Maine to me, or what I imagined Maine to represent: an overgrown darkness that whispered of evil done long ago. I was afraid to look at the story, but I looked anyway, and I was relieved to find it less atrocious than I remembered. You could choke on certain phrases -- but maybe MacMahon hadn't meant them seriously; after all it was the characters speaking, and not the writer. In other respects the story was at worst ordinary. It had a murder: what story didn't have a murder? It had a child in a locked room: you could publish an anthology of stories about children in rooms that were more or less locked.
"Richard," Momus said. "How much do you know about Hamden?"
"Nothing."
"Did you know there were witch trials here?"
"Really?"
"My great great et cetera grandmother was a witch," Jenny said.
"Was she burned at the stake?"
"No. They were going to burn her, but then they decided it would give the town a bad image."
"How modern."
"They didn't want to be the next Salem," Momus said.
"She really was a witch, though. She put spells on people."
"What kind of spells?"
"Look." Jenny pointed. "That's her house."
I turned to watch a grey house go by. It didn't look witchy, or even especially old. A pair of bicycles leaned against the garage. I tried to imagine villagers standing around the house at night, holding torches. Give us the witch!
"Who lives there now?"
"Just people." We turned a corner and the house disappeared.
"Jenny inherited her powers," Momus said. "Isn't that right?"
"All the women in my family have them."
"Does that make you a witch?" I asked.
Jenny snorted. "I don't practice."
Almost immediately Gabby Furst was on the phone. Her voice was so small and choked with anger you would have thought she was calling from another country. "You absolute bastard."
"Gabby?"
"How could you do that?"
"You knew I was doing it."
"I didn't see the story."
Did I not mention that I hadn't shown the story to anyone? Even Gabby knew nothing more than the title and that it was about Maine. "You'll read it when the issue comes out," I told the staff. It seemed important that I give them a reason, so I said, "I don't want to give it away." Later, when I couldn't pretend, even to myself, that it was a good idea to keep the story a secret, I reasoned that it was too late. We had already set the pages aside; we had nothing else to fill them with. I did the layout for the entire issue by myself, edited the proofs and made corrections, in a three-day sleepless jag, which left my head empty of all thought except the rallying cry of a cartoon mouse -- or was it a dog? -- I'd seen on television as a child. "Up and... atom!" I raised my right fist in the air and imagined myself following it, up and up. "And... atom!" I was whispering when I fell asleep at last.
"You could have seen it," I said.
"How?"
"You could have insisted. Gabby, I know how you feel."
"This is not forgivable, Richard. There is simply no way I can forgive you for this."
Gabby, I feel the same way. Gabby?
The Bleak Record ran a page-three article naming the groups who decried the publication of "The Wiscasset Home" in Tsurrus. They included the Bleak College Interfaith Alliance, the Bleak Hillel, the Miracle Fish Gospel Choir, the Bleak Antinomian Reading Circle, the Bleak Student Activities Council, which promised not to fund the magazine in the future; our rival the Bleak Literary Magazine (secretly jealous!), the Bleak Listeners in Person, and even, out of solidarity, or for reasons I could not comprehend, the Bleak Musicological Society, the Bleak Latin American Studies Department, the Bleak Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Society, and the Bleak Libertarians, who, although they approved in principle of Tsurrus' right to print whatever stupid nonsense it liked, wished that the magazine had given priority to the current undergraduates, who had, god knew, no shortage of stupid nonsense to get off their chests, and not to an old man who could publish his stupid nonsense anywhere he liked. In the same issue of the paper, Gabby Furst let the Record's readers know that I was the only person who had seen the story before it was printed. She used an adjective to describe me, power-hungry, I think, or power-mad, which didn't fit me at all.
I went back to New East House and lay on my bed. After a certain amount of time, the phone rang. I didn't answer. I'm a monster, I thought. The fact that I would at some point have to leave my room again was imaginable only as an abstraction, like the extinguishment of the sun. I have made myself into a monster. I wondered how long I could stay in my room, if someone came to bring me food and to remove my wastes. Weeks, months. Until the semester was over and I could leave the campus unobserved, and go on to my next home, in Newfoundland, at the bottom of a fjord -- did they have fjords in Newfoundland? -- that the ocean sucked at like a rotten tooth. Although by the end of the semester I might have come to like it here, in which case I would stay on, and haunt the basement and the attic. Years from now students would hear me pacing over their heads, and ask, What's that? Oh, the monster.
When it was dark, though, I thought it might be safe to go down to the Anchor and get drunk. I checked the message on my machine, hoping for a call from Momus, and got Kurt MacMahon, shouting, "Rowland? Rowland, what the hell did you do to my story? Rowland, you bitch, what did you do?" What had I done? I looked at the issue of Tsurrus that I had kicked under my bed. I had, somehow in the course of that last night, up and, I had transposed the last two sections of the story, so that MacDougall goes to New York first and then to the Home, and atom!
Part Four
It was as though I had removed a link from the chain of my own life, and everything that happened to me subsequently would be out of sequence. I ate in restaurants on Temple Street, far from campus, alone or with Momus, who still believed in me. "These people don't have any perspective," Momus said. "Give them ten years, twenty years." Jenny drove us to the cineplex in Orange and we watched whatever was playing. The earth was destroyed, the earth was not destroyed. Animals spoke and did not speak. Crimes were committed by clever people, by stupid people, and by lovers. "Ars longa, vita brevis est," Momus said.
"What?" said Jenny.
"It's Latin for cheer up."
We stopped for ice cream on the way back to New Haven. "You need a girlfriend," said Jenny. "I can set you up with my friend Claire." I demurred. "She's not a baby," Jenny said. "She went out with a guy from Princeton last summer." I didn't want to go out with a high school girl, I thought, or did I? Anything could happen now that I was a monster. I lay awake listening to water drip from the mouths of New East's gargoyles into the moat. Life no longer seemed to me like a single thing with a beginning and an end, and only one line connecting them; in the blank space over my head, what I can only describe as other versions of my life appeared, like the drafts of a story that hasn't yet reached its final form. In some of them I hadn't made the mistake; in others I had made it and I was forgiven by Gabby Furst, by the editors of the Bleak Record, by Kurt MacMahon, and even by my mother, whom I hadn't even told about "The Wiscasset Home." I could have told you something like this would happen, she whispered in the darkness. You aren't a responsible person, Richard, she said, and that's always been true about you! Shut up! I told the darkness. But it was too late to make the darkness be quiet. Once it had awakened to its new power over me, the air filled with old voices, welcoming me back to the self I thought I had given up when I came to Bleak. Richie! So good to see you, Richie! How the hell have you been, you old loser, you? Hug! The past was back, or rather, it had been there all along, the way you can hear the whisper of an earlier version of a story even when it has been entirely rewritten.
Momus had been putting off a paper on what he called "his Italians" -- the poets of the Renaissance -- and the time came when he couldn't put it off any longer. One weekend, while he shut himself in his room and fathomed the infinitely tiny vagaries of the Italian sonnet, Jenny and I went driving on small roads that took us into a part of Connecticut whose existence I had not previously suspected, a rich green labyrinth of small hills and stands of trees, over which white barns and farmhouses occasionally raised their heads. I listened while Jenny unveiled her plans for the summer, and for a future that seemed to consist of nothing but summers: this year a job at the public library; next year Momus was going to take her to Italy. "I'm going to study art," she said, "and learn what all the ruins were before they were ruins." Then came New York City, painting lessons at the Art Students' League, and afternoons on a fire escape, looking down on the people of New York, learning their faces, which ought, Jenny thought, to give her a pretty good idea of what the whole world was like. And then... I approved of all her projects, although in fact they seemed manifestly improbable to me, and the fact that Jenny didn't know this sometimes made me so sad that I had to roll down the window and breathe in cool, pollen-rich Connecticut air until my eyes were red and my nose ran. I told her that I would do anything to help her, anything at all, and I meant it; but she said that Momus was going to take care of everything. "He really loves me," she said. "I've never met anyone who loves me so much." In return for her stories, I told her about my father, Richard Ente, whose first name I inherited but not his last. "He and my mother split up before I was born," I explained. "Apparently he was kind of a jerk."
"Apparently?"
"I never met him."
"Where is he now?"
"Who knows?"
"That's sad," Jenny said. She rolled down her window and we drove on in silence, letting spring coat the top of the dashboard with green dust.
We stopped at a lake Jenny knew about, a place where you could swim at night if you didn't make too much noise. We swam naked -- forgot bathing suits -- in the still icy water, hauled ourselves gasping onto the shore and lay on the grass, studying the shapes the trees cut out of the sky.
"Richard?"
"Yes?"
"I thought you were Jewish."
Wasn't she supposed to be looking at the trees? "Not technically. On my father's side."
"Oh."
"On the other side I'm Catholic."
"Oh."
"If you go back far enough." I put my hands behind my head and pressed my back into the ground. The stars were coming out, or rather, the sky was giving way to them. The stars had been there all along. Everything is like that, I thought. Everything is there all the time, but you have these layers of opacity in the way and you forget what's behind them. I closed my eyes.
"Richard?"
"Mm?"
"I think it's terrible, what happened to you."
"We don't have to talk about it."
"We won't." She put her hand on my shoulder. "But I think it was his fault."
"You do?"
"He sent you the story. You couldn't refuse."
"Sure I could."
"You couldn't."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"All right." Jenny sighed. "I wish there was something I could do to make you happy."
"Toilet paper Kurt MacMahon's trees," I said.
"All right."
"Every single fucking tree on his property."
"That's a good idea."
"And his house."
"And his garage."
"And his dog."
"Especially the dog."
"We'll mummify the dog."
"All right. Where does he live?"
"Maine somewhere."
"You have his address?"
"Jenny, we aren't actually going to go."
She squeezed my arm. "Richard? In sixty million years the stars will all be iron. Right?"
"Longer than that."
"It doesn't matter, you'll be dead anyway. Why not do this?" I turned towards her. Jenny lay on her side, watching me. Her breasts made little U's of shadow on the white of her torso. I agreed with her in principle, and then, suddenly, in practice. We would be dead soon and we could do anything. Momus would agree, I was certain. I felt more like Momus than I ever had as we put on our clothes and walked back to the car.
The state of Maine was covered by a dense fog that came down almost to the road, as though you were not supposed to see what was happening there. When we reached Wiscasset, the fog turned to rain. The town wasn't large: a string of motels, an old mill or factory with bricked-up windows, a convenience store (closed) and an antique shop; a pair of side streets that led into an unpromising assortment of white houses. We arrived at seven in the morning and stopped at the Lovelace Motor Inn. The desk clerk told us check-in wasn't until eleven, so we drove back out of town, found a diner that served dense, dry pancakes, and watched water streak the plate glass windows that overlooked a parking lot, the highway, a dense forest beyond. We went back to the motel and Jenny took off her shirt. "I hope you don't mind," she said. "I've wanted to do this for months." The bed creaked like the timbers of a ship. I lay on my back, looking at a long crack in the ceiling and thinking, I could go to jail for this. Roar of the bathroom exhaust fan; hiss of the shower. I called the desk clerk and asked him where we could buy toilet paper in bulk. "Price Chopper," he said, "out on Route 212 past the Jiffy Lube."
"Thanks."
"You're not doing anything dirty in there, are you?"
"Just stocking up."
Jenny came out of the bathroom in sweatpants and a grey HAMDEN BASKETBALL T-shirt. "Your turn." I stood in the shower, rubbing my body with a sliver of soap that smelled like disinfectant. I brushed my teeth with Jenny's toothpaste and my finger. When I came out, she was on the phone. "I told you, in Maine." She stuck out her tongue at me. "With Claire." I felt dizzy from not sleeping and drinking too much of the diner's bad coffee. My small desire to revenge myself on Kurt MacMahon was gone. It was a ridiculous idea, a childish idea; we'd probably be arrested for it, and even if we weren't it would give me no satisfaction. What I needed to do, I thought, was to write a story in which I paid him back, and that was what I'd do, I thought, rubbing the almost threadbare towel between my legs, I would write this all down and the story would be my revenge. I lay next to Jenny on the creaky bed. "I'll call when I get back," she said. "Mmbye." She hung up. "Bill is so suspicious." Who? Then I remembered that was what she called Momus.
"Did he believe you?"
Jenny nodded. "Hey. What are you doing?"
"What do you think I'm doing?"
"I thought we were going someplace?"
We slept until six and went back to the diner for dense, dry steak. Afterward Jenny was in the mood to see a movie -- "something with real aliens" -- so we drove up and down the local roads looking for a theater. "Wait," I said. "Stop here."
"This isn't a theater."
"Just stop."
We got out of the car. I pointed across the street. "Look at that."
"Is that where he lives?"
"No."
"Because there's no way we're going to get enough toilet paper."
The building faced the road, with wings behind that reached into the black woods. The windows were boarded over, but the structure was almost intact; the slate gables were interrupted here and there by towers capped with cupolas and lookouts; the façade was brick, its internal articulation marked by thin stripes of limestone. A cyclone fence ringed the place, cutting off the driveway.
"What do you think it was?"
"I don't know. A mansion or a hospital."
"It looks totally haunted."
"That shouldn't bother you, right? As a witch."
Jenny wrinkled her nose. "It's not the same thing. You don't want to go in, do you?"
I thought about it. "No."
"Good. I'm not into ghosts."
"Me either."
"You want to go?"
"In a minute."
"I'll wait in the car."
I studied the Wiscasset Home in the fading light. How could a place like that really exist? I had been sure it was a story -- if MacMahon had invented anything, I would have bet money he invented that. It looked just as I had imagined it: turned in on itself, hunched around some inner secret like a man hugging something to his chest. I wondered if the rest of the story could be true, also, that MacDougall -- MacMahon -- had a child, and left it here. In which case I had understood everything wrong. It seemed impossible, but there was the Home, rebutting me, offering itself as proof. I got back in Jenny's car and told her I was ready to go. "Check this out, though," she said. She pointed to the sign that belonged to the lot where we were parked. The Dolores Schulman Jewish Home for the Elderly. Reading Club Tues 5pm. "I didn't even know there were Jews in Maine," Jenny said.
We drove back to the Lovelace Motor Inn, where we watched a television program about people who were training to become deep-sea divers. "It's the pressure that worries me," said a woman with curly red hair. Jenny put her chin on my ribs. "Maybe I want to do that," she said; then she fell asleep.
The next morning the man at the desk asked if we had found our toilet paper. "We decided not to get it," I said, and he seemed relieved, as though the idea that anyone would drive so far for something so insignificant had troubled his whole idea of the world and how it worked.
Part Five
There was a new season working its way through New Haven; after the gloom of Wiscasset I couldn't imagine locking himself up any longer. I walked up Prospect Street, past the college's laboratories, the mansions still occupied by rich New Haveners, and a single abandoned house which could easily have been haunted. It was surrounded by a fence now, and in the mud beyond the fence bulldozers and piles of lumber waited, either to shore the house up or to take it down altogether. I circled the fence and returned to New East House. A letter was waiting for me, from the Office of Student Activities, informing me that Tsurrus' budget of $5,000 for the coming year had been approved, and asking me to write a paragraph about the magazine's contribution to student life at Bleak for the benefit of incoming freshpeople.
I was still afraid to be seen on campus, needlessly, as it turned out. Who could keep track of every article in the Record, when there was so much happening at Bleak? A professor in the economics department confessed that he had falsified his college transcripts, and that his only legitimate degree was a certificate in hospitality management; the men's tennis team made it to regionals; it was discovered that the pipes in many college buildings were made of lead, which prompted endless jokes about sterility and brain damage. And the weather was good, finally, blissfully good. You could lie on the grass and watch people with naked arms play frisbee, or sit outside at the Café Oblique and smoke cigarettes until evening, when the wind reminded you that this was New England and not California, please, and didn't you have work to do? Besides, the truth was that hardly anyone read Tsurrus. Despite the magazine's brief infamy, the copies that I had placed outside the dining halls of Bleak's various dormitories and classrooms remained practically untouched. At the end of April, with exams at hand and graduation, reunions and other end-of-the-year business ahead, the maintenance staff cleared the magazines away, along with flyers for a production of "The Cherry Orchard" and postcards that said "Lonely? Depressed? Don't Know Where to Turn?" on one side, and nothing on the other -- some kind of undergraduate prank.
At the end of April I made an appointment to see Mr. Tatsuo Ito, the curator in charge of electronic collections at Hamacher Library. His office was almost at the middle of the library; it looked out on a courtyard I'd never seen before, where a couple of blossoming trees dropped their white petals into a stone fountain. The fountain looked so old, I couldn't believe it had only been there since the thirties; I asked Mr. Ito about it and he said it was the same fountain that had stood at the middle of the old library, and that it had been moved here when Hamacher was built. In fact, he said, this fountain gave the architect no end of trouble, because Werner Hamacher Senior, who had also been an undergraduate at Bleak, loved the fountain, and stipulated that it had to occupy an equivalent position in the new library, and, what was more, that it had to be exposed to the elements, so that rainwater could collect in its basin the way it had in Hamacher's day. The architect's plans for a tower had to be curtailed to accommodate this fountain, which would have been twice as tall otherwise -- a real eyesore. Whatever you think of Hamacher Library, Mr. Ito concluded, you have to be grateful for this fountain. Now what can I do for you?
I told him about the story I'd published in Tsurrus. Since "The Wiscasset Home" came from the archives, I wondered if he couldtell me anything about how Mr. MacMahon had written it. Were there any notes for the story, any drafts? Mr. Ito said that he understood my curiosity. Unfortunately, he said, my question was difficult to answer, because Mr. MacMahon didn't save the drafts of his stories; he typed new versions into the same computer file, erasing as he went, until the earlier version was entirely replaced. "Between you and me," Mr. Ito said, "I'm afraid the archive is not all we thought it would be." Still, he said, if I wasn't in a hurry, we could take a look. He let me come with him to a small cold room with cream colored walls and a linoleum floor. An old computer terminal sat on a table by the far wall, trailing thick black cables that coiled on the floor before disappearing under a glass-paneled door into another room. "This is a dinosaur," Mr. Ito said, "but it's our only machine that supports Mr. MacMahon's files." He typed search terms on the keyboard. "I want to convert the data to another format, but no one seems to know how." Green columns of text came and went on the small glass screen. "There, you see? All we have is the story I sent you."
I asked if Mr. MacMahon's notes were in the archive also. "We can look," Mr. Ito said. As he typed, Mr. Ito told me that he worried about the information that was being lost now that people wrote their documents on the computer: all the hesitations, all the false starts, all the second thoughts. Not to mention the problem of tapes demagnetizing, and compact discs decaying, and file formats becoming unreadable as computers went obsolete. At this rate, there would soon be nothing left; the inner lives of men like Kurt MacMahon would be as unknowable as the lives of people who had lived hundreds of years ago. "Just think, from the point of view of the future, our whole history may be a blank." Mr. Ito stopped typing and shook his head ruefully. "There's a file on 'The Wiscasset Home,' but I don't know that it will be much help. All it says is, story about last visits with Mother." "Mother?" "That's what it says." Mr. Ito tapped the screen. "It's interesting," he said. "I don't remember that story having a mother in it. Unless you count that poor teaching assistant." I said that I didn't think that was what Kurt MacMahon was writing about. I thought of the Dolores Schulman Jewish Home For The Elderly, and MacMahon sitting in his car in the parking lot, looking across the street at the Wiscasset Home. Writing that story -- God, what had his mother been like? -- and being sure that no one in the world would ever publish it, but wanting it to be published anyway. It seemed to me that I had failed to understand everything. "Do you want to search for something else?" Mr. Ito asked. I said no, that was all.
Mr. Ito led me back to his office. I thanked him for his time and asked if I could go into the courtyard? Alas no, he said, the doors were all locked, and although he was supposed to have a key, he had loaned it to someone long ago, and had never got it back, which was, he said, usually what happened to his keys, so that he was afraid to lock the doors to his own house, because he might lose that key also and be unable to go home.
My affair with Jenny, if you could even call it an affair, didn't survive the trip to Wiscasset. For weeks I didn't see Momus, either; he wasn't in his room in New East, or in the Café Oblique, or anywhere else on campus, as far as I could tell. For once there were no rumors about him. Momus had vanished the way a song vanishes when it's not being sung, the way a story vanishes when you close the book in which it's printed. Then, a few days before the school year ended, he was back, strutting around campus in a long gold coat, telling everyone that he had been in jail, that jail was fantastic, he had written a play about it and some people in New York were going to make it happen. Everyone should go to jail! Momus said. It gives you this fantastic sense of time. No one believed him; after four years of these stories, not a single person at Bleak was left to be taken in. The consensus among the skeptics was that Momus had gone away to finish his papers so that he could graduate. And graduate he did, I heard, with a degree in English -- a strangely undistinguished subject for someone as remarkable as he had been. I saw him only once. I was in the Café Oblique with Gabby Furst, who had forgiven me my various sins, and, in fact, seemed almost more attracted to me now that I had come through what I thought of as my "Wiscasset ordeal." She told me I had a maudit air to me now -- it would not have been possible to please me more with a single adjective, I think. I wondered if there was a wardrobe that went with being maudit, accursed; then I decided that it would be very un-maudit to worry about clothes, and simply wore what I had, with perhaps a little less attention to their colors and patterns, so that, on the afternoon when we saw Momus, I was in a purple t-shirt and olive green shorts, and looked, in point of fact, like one of the graduate students in the Forestry School, whose appearance I had always made fun of up until that point. My elbow was on the café table, and Gabby was holding my hand in both of hers, as though she were trying to wrestle it to the ground. I was explaining something to her about America -- I was full of explanations that season -- when Momus passed by, resplendent in his gold coat. I pretended to be unmoved, and stood up to greet him. "Momus, what ho?" But he walked past me without turning his head, and went to talk to someone in the back of the café -- an old man intent on a game of chess. I sat down next to Gabby and took her hand back in mine. "What a flake," I said. "You say that now," said Gabby.
I ran into Jenny the next fall, on Broadway. She was holding the arm of an impossibly tall and thin man whom she introduced as Paolo. I told her that we should have coffee some time -- Gabby and I had broken up over the summer, and I still remembered how Jenny had felt, the extremely soft but not unmuscular curve of her hips, the smell of her hair. She said she would like to see me again, too, and that she had something to tell me, something that she thought might upset me, but that I needed to hear. Would I give her my number? I gave her my number. She said she would call me right away, because she and Paolo were going on a trip -- to Italy, in fact, just the way she'd predicted, did I remember? Or not the way she'd predicted, exactly, but wasn't that how the future was, she said, and waved to me, goodbye, struggling to look back in my direction as skinny Paolo wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her along.
