9. In the hallway, no one would look at me . . .
In the hallway, no one would look at me, not even L. D. Langdon. My jacket on, my books under my arm, I made sure Dr. Strange had disappeared into the men’s room and then continued on out the door of Andrews Hall. It was a warm night for November, and the two male students and one of the women were standing on the step, lighting cigarettes. “Hey, I thought you made a good point,” the taller of the two men said to me. “But I bet by next week Dr. Strange can cite a dozen sources to show that giraffes do have stripes.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Making a point actually wasn’t the point, though.”
“You really hate Eliot, don’t you,” the tall one—his name was McKinley—said. “Say, the rumor’s going around that you were in Vietnam. Is that true?” Already in 1969, whenever a man of a certain age did something violent or bizarre, the first thing people thought was that he’d been in Vietnam.
“Must be somebody else.” I stepped past him and, whistling the opening bars of “Drifting Along With The Tumbling Tumbleweed,” walked off toward the library.
Casey’s was almost empty when I got there. Since I could have any seat I wanted, I chose my favorite, a booth about halfway back along the wall, above which hung a picture of a very gloomy Indian riding an equally depressed horse in a snowstorm. Looking at this pair usually made me feel better about my own situation. I ordered a pitcher of draft for myself, and when it came I didn’t wait to pour a glass but took my first drink from the side of the pitcher, thrusting my nose right down into the foam. As I moaned with ecstasy and relief, I had a moment of deja vu, as if I’d heard the exact same sound sometime within the past hour. Impossible. I tilted the pitcher and drank deeply again.
“Use the glass, ya hooligan.” It was Vi, the old Swede waitress, not off work yet. I paid her and gave her a dollar tip; she clutched the money drunkenly. “Thank ya, shweetie,” she said. “Ya’re a nice hooligan. Now, use the damn glass.”
I was halfway through my second pitcher when L. D. and her young friend walked in. L. D. moved quickly to get into her apron; the big girl, whose name was Julia, came over. “You should’ve stayed,” she said breathily. “We had a great discussion after you left. Leonard thinks he owes you an apology.”
“It wouldn’t have been such an elegant discussion if I’d stayed,” I said. “Anyway, I didn’t leave because I was pissed. I left because I was thirsty. Get yourself a glass and sit down. And give me one of those cigarettes, could you?” Julia smoked hand-rolled cigarettes that were perfumed with cloves. It gave her the illusion that everyone thought she was smoking marijuana.
“Anyway,” she continued after she’d returned and had a seat across from me, “Leonard says you were right about Agamemnon according to today’s moral standards, but that Eliot wouldn’t have seen him that way, so your interpretation becomes irrelevant to the poem. Want to hear what he thinks about Eliot’s view of Europe?”
“Sure,” I said. Whatever Julia’s idiosyncracies, she was bright and she paid attention. Also, she didn’t screw herself over by walking out of seminars.
“He thinks,” she said, “that both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were raised in the United States, which in those days was a pretty backward and ignorant kind of place—”
“My kind of place,” I interrupted. She went on.
“—from which they tried to escape mentally by burying themselves in the Classics. So, as young men growing up in America, they had this romanticized idea of Europe that was based on their reading all the finest poetry of the last two or three thousand years. Well, when they actually went there, of course they were disappointed.”
“So?” I said, refilling my own glass and topping hers.
“So, they thought they’d come too late,” she said. “They thought they’d missed it. They spent the rest of their lives writing out of a nostalgia for a time that never was. Europe between the wars,” she said knowingly, “was a pretty sorry place.”
“They spent their lives pissing and moaning because they weren’t aristocrats,” I said. “Pound spent a major part of his kissing Mussolini’s ass.”
“Mussolini to him was like a Roman emperor or something,” Julia said. “He just got his centuries confused, that’s all.”
“Pound’s in an asylum in New York,” I said. “An old, old man. Allen Ginsburg is trying to get him released, can you believe it?”
Julia gave me a quiet look. “Why shouldn’t I believe it?” she asked.
“Because Pound’s a Nazi, and Ginsburg’s a Jew,” I said.
Julia continued to regard me strangely. “As a poet, Ezra Pound is a brilliant man,” she said. “As a Fascist, he was a complete flop and a buffoon. Some things can be forgiven after a time, don’t you think, Jonas?”
“My old man was in Italy during World War Two. He says that when Pound came on the radio, the troops used to laugh at him.”
“Well, you see?” Julia said. “He didn’t do any harm.”
“Through no fault of his own,” I said. “So, I was right about Agamemnon, was I? Damn straight. What a dickhead.”
“Why do you say that?” Julia asked.
“To go and start a war over a woman,” I said. “What could be stupider?”
Julia smoothed her hair and arched her back, emphasizing her Rugby-football-sized breasts. “Helen of Troy,” she said dreamily, “was the sexiest, most beautiful woman who ever lived. She could get anything she wanted; her beauty had that kind of power. Men would do anything for her.” I could see that Eliot and Pound weren’t the only ones who’d escaped into the Classics.
“Damned if I would,” I growled, thinking of sweet Grace, monkey-face, whose beauty wouldn’t even get her a cup of coffee.
“Damned if you’d what?” a voice at my ear asked. It was L. D. Langdon, come over to see if we needed another pitcher.
“Die for love,” I said. “You sure got into your other life in a hurry.”
“I had to,” she said. “Vi gets falling-down drunk by this time of night. She can’t count change, and the customers steal her blind.”
“The boss can afford it,” I said.
“He doesn’t pay,” L. D. said. “If the till is short, it comes out of the waitress’s pocket. You people need anything?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Nothing legal, anyway. Julia?”
“I’ll have a gin-and-tonic,” Julia said. She glanced down and brushed imaginary crumbs off her chest. “Beer has too many calories.”
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