42. Only Julia looked up. . .
Only Julia looked up as I entered the seminar room; everyone else had assembled, except for L. D. Langdon, who came in just after me, and Leonard, but the others, apparently, saw tall hairy men carrying tape machines every day. I managed to return Julia’s smile, though my nerves were thoroughly jangled. “Hey, Jonas,” L. D. muttered behind me. “What were you doing in the third floor women’s john?”
The seminar room went abruptly quiet. “Research,” I replied shakily. “I was trying to find out if the Sower can look in the window.” The Sower is a statue atop the Capitol Building in Lincoln, a burly male figure who broadcasts seed from a sack that hangs like an enormous scrotum at his loins. The notion of his peeping into the women’s rest room had not originated with me.
“I thought you were taping us in there,” she said. “I thought maybe that was going to be your presentation.”
By now I’d reached the end of the table and was feeling steadier. “Hmm,” I mused, “‘Farts and Flushing.’ It does sound like the name of a subway station in London.” I set the heavy tape player on the floor and took a chair next to Julia. “I’ll bet old T. S. passed through there sometime, now that you mention it.”
“I’ll bet he did,” L. D. agreed as she slipped past us. “He probably asked the ticket-taker out for tea.”
I arranged my notes and glanced down the table. McKinley, red-faced, continued to look the other way. The Cheryl woman also appeared to be in on the gag, anyway she was hiding a smile and studying her papers harder than necessary. Since I was the second presenter, I had about an hour to recover my composure; if public vengeance was what they were after, they were sure to be disappointed.
The first to give her paper was my Rapunzel, the mild-faced woman with the honey-stranded hair; her real name, inappropriately, was Rachel Sturmer. She spoke on Emily Dickinson, who was considered a Modern by publication date even though she was dead by the time most Moderns were born. Ms. Sturmer had dressed in period costume for the occasion, though with her pleasant figure and blushing pale skin and that uncontrollable richness of golden hair she was remarkably unconvincing as a spinster. In any case she gave a good talk, I suppose, though I was too distracted by my own worries even to gaze at her vapidly as per my usual practice. I did join enthusiastically in the applause at the end.
During the break I set up the player, threading the tape meticulously through its notches. Something about it didn’t seem right, but I put it down to my nervousness, which was making me more sympathetic toward McKinley. As I was arranging my notes for the twenty-third time, I glanced up to find Leonard at the far end of the table, looking at me down a corridor of expectant faces. His black eyes glittered fiercely; I had the weird feeling the old Mongol was suppressing a grin. “Almost ready,” I said to him. “Surprised?”
“When you’ve handed in your paper,” he replied coldly, “you may ask me if I’m surprised.”
Once Julia had arrived and settled herself behind the tape machine, I began. “Folks, my presentation is going to be a bit less scholarly,” I informed the group. “In fact, it may hardly seem scholarly at all. I’ve based my line of research on a feeling, a hunch if you will. . . .” I went on to say that Eliot’s work, powerfully original as it clearly was, might yet have some unacknowledged influences; that, just as Ms. Sturmer had shown us about Emily Dickinson, no poet worked in a vacuum, immune to the spirit of the times (I hoped Ms. Sturmer had shown us that); and that there was evidence in the text of “The Waste Land” that Eliot was alert to, if not exactly enamored of, the popular music of the working class, including blues.
As I talked on in this vein, I watched for their reactions. Among the faces, McKinley’s stood out strikingly. His eyes were wide, and the upper part of his face, especially his cheeks and ears, was bright pink; his lips were clamped in a straight line with such force that they appeared bloodless, while one corner of his mouth twitched violently upward.
Julia was staring at the tape machine in fear and perplexity. Suddenly I felt like a drunk man sitting in a poker game, who’s just bumped fifty dollars on a pair of deuces. “What I plan to do is this,” I went on doggedly. “First, I’m going to read a line or two of ‘The Waste Land.’ Then, we’ll hear from the tape a phrase of something that Eliot might’ve heard in the music halls of his day.”
Julia gave me a pleading look, her soft eyes bright with moisture; I tried to swallow the knot that was grabbing my throat. “Okay,” I croaked, “here goes:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.”
I glanced at Julia and nodded, but instead of mashing down the “play” key, she crooked a trembling finger.
“Jonas,” she whispered, “I can’t find the tabs.”
“Tabs?” I gaped at her stupidly. “A tape player’s not a typewriter. It doesn’t have tabs.”
“The little white markers you spliced into the tape,” she explained. “I don’t see them.”
I stared hard at the tape on the reel. God damn, was I dumb. McKinley and Shemansky had switched the tapes on me, and all the time I’d spent rolling up the wrong tape, I hadn’t noticed that the markers were missing. “You can’t play that,” I said to Julia. “No telling what’s on there.”
“What’ll we do?” she asked, tears in her voice.
I shrugged. “Plead for clemency?” I straightened up to face the class, thinking as I did so how sweet it was of her to take it to heart.
Everyone was looking at me expectantly except McKinley, who was picking with great concentration at a spot on the table. “Well, friends,” I said, “looks like we’re going to implement Plan B. What I intended—” here I shuffled my notes, looking for the lyrics— “was to show the similarity between the way Eliot handles some of these lines and the way certain blues songs are structured. Both use a series of short syllabic lines, followed by a longer line in a more relaxed rhythm. . . .” And so on. I’d begun a shaky reading of “Don’t Advertise Your Man” by Mamie Smith, when something happened that made all gazes shift away from me. A powerful voice at my side, deep, low, feminine, husky, innocent yet impure and tremulous yet certain, took those words away from me and added the tune. Almost whispering at first, then strong enough to rattle windows, Julia Stein sang the blues:
Women be wise,
Keep your mouth shut,
Don’t advertise your man.
Don’t sit around
Gossipin’
Explainin’ all those good things he can do. . . .
“Wow,” someone said softly, once she’d finished and silence returned to the room. Julia—smart, babyish, scared, overweight, full-of-bad-jokes-about-her-own-virginity Julia—possessed some magical quality of voice that was old and sad and corrupt as sex itself.
I glanced at Julia and at my papers, and looked up sheepishly. “What kind of silly-ass point was I trying to make here, anyway?”
“About Eliot’s prosody and blues rhythm,” L. D. reminded me. Somebody snickered, but it was a friendly snicker for once, and I gathered the wreckage of my thoughts and went on with my presentation as we had planned it. Instead of playing segments of tape, Julia belted out the appropriate lyrics, her brawny alto throttled back but still carrying enough wattage to rattle the loose change in our pockets. I gave old T. S. the fairest reading I could manage, but Julia’s voice and the salty lyrics blew his linty poetry right out of the room, showing him up for the anemic guilt-ridden woman-fearing pretentious twerp that he was. I seized the opportunity—I could never have done this on tape—of getting Julia to sing Gentile or Jew, oh you who turn the wheel and look to windward, consider Phlebas who was once handsome and tall as you to the falling last bars of “St. James Infirmary Blues.” It was perfect; I winked at Julia, grinned at Leonard, and sat down, resting my case.
Even McKinley applauded; I turned to Julia and clapped my hands with the rest. She swallowed her assurance—the wise, tough, man-weary blues singer retreating somewhere deep within her—and blushed until the bright tears rolled down her cheeks and she covered them with shaking, elaborately-nail-polished fingers. At last she sprang up, crashed past the backs of our chairs, and bolted from the room.
“Wow,” I said to L. D. as she, too, slid hurriedly past me. “Did you know she could sing like that?”
“No time, Ace,” L. D. snapped. “I have to catch Julia before she hurts herself.”
|