to report you to the authorities!” Lenore said. “Now bring them back immediately!”
It’s compost. Either you have it or you don’t. If you don’t then they ride clodhop. Take your clothes and get you pregnant. But if you do they bring your clothes back. Hand you your dress while they turn their heads away in the light. Like a gentleman.
“It’s my mother’s,” Buzbie said. “She’ll be home soon. I promise!”
It’s what they tell themselves when they don’t know anything. They’ve come back crust-in-the-head so you have to be kind.
The dress fit badly. Lenore tugged it and tugged and it would have to do. Silly things. She was just trying for a skinny-dip. Before the stitches went all wrong.
“It’s not my fault,” she said.
9
T he phone didn’t ring. Bob flipped through the evening television news, a forgettable blur of murders, fires, earthquakes, and football scores, and one oddball story of a man so upset about cockroaches that he started throwing furniture out the window of his twelfth-floor apartment onto the street below. Bob turned it off as the camera was panning the crowd on the sidewalk chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” He skimmed the conference binder. Tonight he was missing the ritual reading of “The Cask of Amontillado” and the Alfred J. Kiddleton memorial lecture entitled “Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King: The Confluxes and Divergences of Cultural Sub-Texts.” Tomorrow morning Yamada was speaking on “The Doomed Writer: Poe’s Shadow in the Twenty-first Century,” and later there would be a panel discussion on Poe’s controversial place as critic and promoter of early American letters.
Bob opened his
Complete Tales and Poems
at random and read, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself,as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” How many times had he lectured on that particular opening sentence? The relentless repetition of tone in elegant, haunting variations:
dull, dark, dreary, oppressively low, alone, in the autumn, shades of evening
, finally leading to the culmination of despair, the
melancholy House of Usher
. Bob read the sentence again and again. The rest of the story was almost superfluous; it flowed entirely from the ache of that beginning.
The phone still did not ring.
He was very good. He reread “The Poetic Principle” and “The Rationale of Verse” in the small stuffed chair by the phone under a mediocre light. He started to read a graduate paper somehow connecting James Fenimore Cooper to the Transcendentalists but stopped himself after a few pages, his cynicism rising. Anyone who could bear to read large tracts of Cooper’s tortured, incompetent prose was obviously cursed with a second-rate mind; and yet that too was the famous dismissal of people too interested in Poe, whose prose was usually far finer but whose life was a disaster.
He paced the little room. The night sky pressed against the window, which wouldn’t open. The fan rattled annoyingly, not a loud noise, but whining, like a dentist’s drill that became more annoying as the evening wore on. He turned off the fan and the air hung dead. No matter how he fiddled, the lights were either too dull or too bright.
He ordered a bottle of Scotch from room service. He didn’t ask the price. It would be outrageous. Helen would find a way to hide it on the expense account.
Incidentals
perhaps.
Necessities
more like it.
The phone still didn’t ring.
The Scotch came and Bob poured himself a glass too quicklythen didn’t drink it, just looked. Sienna’s poems were in his broken briefcase. He took them out and fell to reading one of them, called “Decision 21”:
He read it again, out loud, the words falling into one another, pure sound, little
It’s compost. Either you have it or you don’t. If you don’t then they ride clodhop. Take your clothes and get you pregnant. But if you do they bring your clothes back. Hand you your dress while they turn their heads away in the light. Like a gentleman.
“It’s my mother’s,” Buzbie said. “She’ll be home soon. I promise!”
It’s what they tell themselves when they don’t know anything. They’ve come back crust-in-the-head so you have to be kind.
The dress fit badly. Lenore tugged it and tugged and it would have to do. Silly things. She was just trying for a skinny-dip. Before the stitches went all wrong.
“It’s not my fault,” she said.
9
T he phone didn’t ring. Bob flipped through the evening television news, a forgettable blur of murders, fires, earthquakes, and football scores, and one oddball story of a man so upset about cockroaches that he started throwing furniture out the window of his twelfth-floor apartment onto the street below. Bob turned it off as the camera was panning the crowd on the sidewalk chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” He skimmed the conference binder. Tonight he was missing the ritual reading of “The Cask of Amontillado” and the Alfred J. Kiddleton memorial lecture entitled “Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King: The Confluxes and Divergences of Cultural Sub-Texts.” Tomorrow morning Yamada was speaking on “The Doomed Writer: Poe’s Shadow in the Twenty-first Century,” and later there would be a panel discussion on Poe’s controversial place as critic and promoter of early American letters.
Bob opened his
Complete Tales and Poems
at random and read, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself,as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” How many times had he lectured on that particular opening sentence? The relentless repetition of tone in elegant, haunting variations:
dull, dark, dreary, oppressively low, alone, in the autumn, shades of evening
, finally leading to the culmination of despair, the
melancholy House of Usher
. Bob read the sentence again and again. The rest of the story was almost superfluous; it flowed entirely from the ache of that beginning.
The phone still did not ring.
He was very good. He reread “The Poetic Principle” and “The Rationale of Verse” in the small stuffed chair by the phone under a mediocre light. He started to read a graduate paper somehow connecting James Fenimore Cooper to the Transcendentalists but stopped himself after a few pages, his cynicism rising. Anyone who could bear to read large tracts of Cooper’s tortured, incompetent prose was obviously cursed with a second-rate mind; and yet that too was the famous dismissal of people too interested in Poe, whose prose was usually far finer but whose life was a disaster.
He paced the little room. The night sky pressed against the window, which wouldn’t open. The fan rattled annoyingly, not a loud noise, but whining, like a dentist’s drill that became more annoying as the evening wore on. He turned off the fan and the air hung dead. No matter how he fiddled, the lights were either too dull or too bright.
He ordered a bottle of Scotch from room service. He didn’t ask the price. It would be outrageous. Helen would find a way to hide it on the expense account.
Incidentals
perhaps.
Necessities
more like it.
The phone still didn’t ring.
The Scotch came and Bob poured himself a glass too quicklythen didn’t drink it, just looked. Sienna’s poems were in his broken briefcase. He took them out and fell to reading one of them, called “Decision 21”:
He read it again, out loud, the words falling into one another, pure sound, little
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