8. Good luck and good behavior stayed with me . . .
Good luck and good behavior stayed with me for most of that week. I slept well enough; I read; I kept out of the bars and caught up on my homework; I even managed to show some interest in my Comp students. The life of a graduate student didn’t seem so bad when compared to other things I was qualified to do, like breaking concrete or whipping cattle up the chute at a stockyards. There was Grace, for instance, a smart-enough woman, on a treadmill of waitressing with no alternative in sight. And if graduate school was tough, it was temporary; a University professor, I figured, could get away with murder. Dr. Leonard Strange, who taught my Thursday night Modern Poetry seminar, assigned more outside reading than any human could’ve possibly kept up with, and he apparently knew every paragraph of it by heart. But confront him in class with a question he hadn’t prepared an answer for, and he could fail to show enough brains to hang a birdhouse. Only hand me that diploma, I told myself, and I can do his job standing in a tub.
I’d signed up for Modern Poetry in the first place because I thought (and what a fool I was) that “Modern” referred to poets who weren’t dead yet. No notion of mine was ever farther from the truth. The course began with Emily Dickinson, and when, after five weeks, we’d barely gotten through Edwin Arlington Robinson (I couldn’t read lines like “We go no more to Calverly’s” without launching into parody: “We loan no mowers to Melba Luehrs” was a phrase that came unbidden and lodged itself in my head) I had made up my mind to kill either Leonard Strange or myself. This, like most of my resolutions, passed without effect; now we were deeply mired in T. S. Eliot and the lecture part of the course was nearly at an end. The last “modern,” Ezra Pound, still lived, mourning his Mussolini in some loony bin, but it appeared that we weren’t going to get to him. When I looked ahead to my intimate evening with Leonard, I knew my week of good behavior would go for nothing. Even so, I spent all of Thursday reading Eliot, gripped with dread. I had a bland but anxious supper at the Student Union (promising my stomach a visit to Casey’s after class, to make amends by dosing it with hops) and arrived back in Andrews Hall, Room 102, by 6:55.
Of nine other grad students in Len’s seminar, seven were women, and five of these were already present, along with my two male peers, one tall, one short, both well-dressed, clean-shaven, and far ahead of me on the road to wisdom. They already had the choice seats (that is, the seats next to the choice women) leaving me a chilly spot with my back to the window. It had the advantage of being as far as I could get from Leonard, but it was also one of the farthest seats from the door; four large tables had been pushed to the center of the narrow room, leaving an inadequate space cluttered with unused chairs, so that in order to reach one of the remaining seats I had to squeeze awkwardly between the backs of my colleagues and the chairs lining the wall. The rattling chairs were unembarrassed by my poor standing in the class, but as I passed each back, its owner leaned forward to avoid contact with me. A spirited discussion was going on concerning some English Department matter beyond my ken, which my presence seemed to stimulate further, making it inconvenient for anyone to greet me by word or gesture. Other times, other Thursdays, the room had fallen silent upon my entering. I couldn’t have said which was worse.
Leonard came in with the two remaining women, one of whom I liked. She was little and pushy, a loud-talking no-nonsense divorcee, with straight brown hair that always looked as if it could use a shampoo. She had direct gray eyes, a fragile beak of a nose, and no chin at all; aggressively sexual in her walk and dress, she was said to be living with one of the Philosophy Department faculty. She wore the shortest miniskirts of anyone in Lincoln. Her name was Loreen, but at Casey’s, where she waited tables, she evaded this working-class tag by going by her initials, “L. D.” The other woman was extremely buxom and on the heavy side, with hip-length ebony-colored hair; she liked Navajo bracelets and other Southwestern jewelry. She imitated her friend’s tough manner, but she was too young for the part and her eyes looked scared.
Leonard took his seat at the head of the table, and the two women made their way down toward me, the younger one clearly flustered by the narrowness of the passage. As she passed behind me, L. D. greeted me under her breath. “Hello, Ace. Don’t ask him any questions tonight, OK?”
“Hey,” I said as she settled in beside me. “I’m prepared for once. I’ve been hitting the books.”
“In your case, that only makes it worse,” she said. “I wondered if you were sick; haven’t seen you downtown.”
“I’m cleaning up my act,” I said.
“You? Shit. What happened, did you meet somebody?”
“I just felt like studying, for a change,” I said guiltily.
L. D. gave me a look with those penetrating eyes. “Sounds like the old mid-term survival instinct is kicking in at last,” she said finally. “Well, it is time you discovered the library like the rest of us, Jonas.”
As always, Leonard Strange was eager to begin; he had a way of smacking his lips to get the class’s attention, though only God could tell if he did this deliberately. A seminar is supposed to be a discussion group, but when it came to T. S. Eliot, the man held forth at length like a Russian premier. In appearance, he resembled some old Politburo hack; he had coarse, greasy-looking black hair which he wore wino-style, combed straight back over the top and shaggy at the collar, and his black Asiatic eyes glittered in a pale, narrow face. His large yellow hands rested on his beloved books as he talked, while his gaze shifted uneasily around the room, avoiding prolonged eye contact with anyone, especially the adoring female audience grouped at his end of the table. Since he wouldn’t look at these carefully-got-up women, I did, letting his prepared lecture slip behind me and escape like Dracula-smoke through a gap at the bottom of the window.
One in particular held my interest. If I cast Leonard as Count Dracula (plausible, at least until he opened his mouth) then this nice little Republican would’ve made the perfect Nina. A rosy-cheeked, white-skinned blonde with one of those wide-browed open faces on which you see no traces of any bad experience, she was smooth and modest and married; she wore dresses as frilly as the fashion of the day would permit, and if she spoke up in class it was usually to ask something that would help the professor elucidate his point. I did not watch her for her blushing face, which was oval and lovely and tame and domestic and charming, nor for her blue eyes nor for her pretty lips that were shaped to be the home of baby-kisses and smiles. I watched her for her exhuberant wealth of hair, a bursting fountain of thick-spun gold that sprang from her chaste head like a nymphomaniac sister leaping from a second-story window. Oh it was a rich cascade, of a color between honey and good Manila rope; waved and weighty and glowing, it divided as it fell into opposite-swirling liquid torrents that dashed side by side past her tightly-collared little neck, roiled over her glass-smooth shoulders and crashed in a surf of cooling foam at the level of her shoulder-blades. The more old Len droned on about his pal T. S., the more I lost myself in her wheaten Niagara of hair, until I ached with an abstracted lust that was bound up inextricably with the imagined taste of and strong desire for beer.
A hot pain stung me in the side; L. D. Langdon was pinching my ribs. At the same moment I became aware of Leonard Strange’s coal-black eyes, regarding me with bitter curiosity.
“—Jones? Did you have a question?”
“Smith,” I said, stalling for time. I tried to moisten my lips. The hot water squeaked and trickled in the heating pipes, and the beer-thirst grew in my mouth and throat until I thought my esophagus might sear itself together and I might never be able to speak or swallow again. “Uh— In the poem ‘Sweeney and the Nightingales’—”
“‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales,’“ Len dutifully corrected me. “Go on.”
“—Where it says, ‘The zebra stripes along his neck swell to maculate giraffe—’“
“Along his jaw. Zebra stripes along his jaw.”
“Well, um—” I pushed on, though my saliva had turned to mucilage. “A giraffe doesn’t have stripes, exactly—”
Len blinked coldly, like a cat watching a beetle; the women at his end of the room shared glances of bored amusement. “What I think I’m having trouble with here,” I continued painfully, “is that if you try to look at this stuff, these images— They don’t really work out, you know?” I opened my copy of Eliot’s collected horse puckey and fumbled desperately for the page. “I mean—”
Dr. Strange held up his hand palm outward like a traffic cop, as if to stop me from reading anything to him. “Exactly,” he said. “That visual ambiguity is part of his technique.”
“Beg pardon?” I felt my ears burning. “A giraffe with stripes is part of his technique?” L. D.’s small hand, covering a slip of paper, appeared on the tabletop at my elbow. The hand retreated, leaving a message. JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP, it said.
“The poem,” said Len contemptuously, “has very little to do with African wildlife, I should think.”
A sharp kick under the table prevented me from attempting a reply, but it was too late; chaos in the form of doubt had already been introduced. My innocent Manila-haired beauty at the other end spoke up. “I have a related question,” she said shyly. “I’ve always thought Orion was just the loveliest constellation, but here it’s described as ‘gloomy.’ And who is ‘the man with heavy eyes’? We haven’t seen that person in the poem before.”
“Orion is the hunter,” Len snarled. “Hunters are grim.”
“But—” A blush passed across her rosy cheek. “My father and brothers all like to hunt—”
“You’re bringing personal associations to the text.” Leonard smiled benificently, having regained his equilibrium, and expanded, or expounded, as he was wont to do. “These personal associations don’t belong in your reading of the poem. Associations here are literary, not personal; Sirius, the Dog Star, for instance, was thought by the ancient Greeks to bring ill fortune—”
“Which one is Sirius, anyway?” a quiet voice asked. Leonard turned to confront the new offender; I heard a choking sound coming from L. D. on my right. “It’s near Orion,” someone else answered. “It’s Orion’s hunting dog.”
Dr. Leonard Strange followed this conversation in wonder. Then he turned his obsidian gaze on me. “I suppose you’re going to inquire,” he joked icily, “whether the dog is a pointer or a retriever.”
I flushed with anger as the tolerant chuckle of the initiated filled the room. L. D. Langdon had gotten hold of the flesh of my ribs and was twisting a cat-bite-sized piece out of me, but the imagined flavor of malt, the anticipated tang of hops sang along my desiccated throat and tongue, and I no longer cared who knew what I thought, that T. S. Eliot was a plagiarizing anti-Semitic tabulator of other people’s money. “I can identify the constellation Canis Major,” I said, leaning forward. “I can name the adjacent constellations, which are Puppis, Monoceros, Orion, Lepus, and Columba, and a good many more in both northern and southern hemispheres, and I know where they are in the sky at different times of the year. There’s no constellation called Death that I ever heard of. I agree with you that none of this is important, so let’s put it aside. What happens to Sweeney? Are these people going to roll him? I don’t get it.”
Len bristled. “Sweeney? He’s absolutely unimportant. It’s Agamemnon you should think about. You know who Agamemnon was, don’t you?”
“The big promoter of the Trojan War,” I replied. “He got all the Greeks together to help him get his brother’s wife back, even though she wasn’t exactly kidnapped at gunpoint. I’m sure it was a noble cause, especially if they took home a lot of loot.”
Leonard Strange glanced around angrily. “Agamemnon,” he said with exaggerated patience, “was a king.” He thumped the text with a stiff forefinger. “A murdered king. Don’t you find something moving, something terribly, terribly wrong, in the idea of a king’s assassination?” He glared at me with his small black eyes, the incipient wattles under his chin quivering, as the rest of the class waited for my capitulation.
“What the hell,” I said, “the dude comes home ten years late, with Helen of Troy under his arm; you can’t blame his old lady for being a tad pissed. If this soap opera happened a half block down the street from your house, you wouldn’t think it was all that kingly.” Len’s face darkened, and his lips turned down in disgust. “Anyway,” I went on, grinning, “how many times have you heard of a king resigning? Suppose the people wanted a new king, how else would they get rid of the old one?”
“Facetiousness is out of place here,” Leonard said huskily, his voice shaking with professorial fury. “The murder of Agamemnon represents the deterioration and collapse of Western culture. In what way is this amusing to you?” At the phrase Western culture, a Sons of the Pioneers tune began running through my brain. I met Leonard’s gaze, then bowed my head, saving my retort for the tavern. Along with the beer, it was going to take a nice fat doober of a J to get me through the evening.
“We’ll take a break now,” Leonard said. “The second half of the class will be devoted to ‘The Waste Land’, with emphasis on a discussion of the Fisher King. We’ll resume in ten minutes.” As the rest of the class stretched and stood up, I surreptitiously gathered my books, knowing I wouldn’t be back.
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