My Life Among the Apes by Cary Fagan Page A

believe that. I’m worried about your safety. You could get mugged or worse, God forbid.”
    God forbid
? She sounded like her late grandmother. “New York is safe these days, honey. And maybe you forgot about the home invasion around the corner from you? Or that pervert they haven’t caught who goes through open windows and steals girls’ underwear. I think we can manage a little separation for a while, Sarah. Your father was gone on his buying trips all the time.”
    “Okay, fine. If it’s not about safety, then it’s about your plan to see that woman. That’s perverse. I know what Dad did was awful. I mean, if Gary ever tried, I’d run him over with the van. But Dad is gone. You don’t need to demean yourself.”
    I looked out the window and saw two people carrying a rolled-up rug, like in
The Godfather
. “Sarah, you worry too much. I shouldn’t have told you about it; that was a weak moment. I’m not going to demean myself. But I want to meet the woman who was part of your father’s life for almost ten years. Who was expecting his next visit when he died.”
    “He never left you, Mom. Not in all that time.”
    “I wish he had,” I said.
    AFTER I HAD BEEN IN New York for a couple of weeks, and had filled one notebook with poems and then another with revisions, I passed a lamp post that someone had painted to look like an erect penis and noticed a flyer taped up. It was for an open writing workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I knew about the project, which had been run out of St. Mark’s Church just over on Tenth Street since the sixties. The idea of attending intimidated me, but I was sixty-one years old. Nobody would expect much of me.
    Wednesday night, as I walked over, I could feel my pulse throbbing. The desire to be noticed and praised never dies, I thought. Hand-drawn signs led me to a basement room where five women and three men sat at a table under fluorescent lights with their manuscripts in front of them. One of the men was the workshop leader. I figured myself to be the oldest by a good twelve years. I sat down and listened. Most of the poems weren’t very good, but there was a line or stanza here and there that had something, that caught the ear. When my turn came, I opened my notebook and read three poems one after the other. They were shorter than everyone else’s. They rhymed. They didn’t sound anything like me and they weren’t beautiful.
    “To be honest, they kind of freak me out,” said a black woman with dreadlocks.
    “Really,” said the youngest woman in the room, the beautiful girl with a round face and green eyes. “You’re pretty dark for a grandmother.”
    Jackson, the workshop leader, had a North Carolina accent and a voice so quiet I had to lean in to hear. “Maybe it’s a good thing, to be freaked out once in a while.” Painfully fair-skinned, he had freckles lighter than most people’s complexions. I guessed him to be in his late thirties, despite the prematurely old face, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, the hollow cobbler’s chest. The workshop was supposed to be free for only the first session, but the next week and the week after he didn’t ask me for money. It was after the third class that I asked him out for a drink.
    He was reluctant to talk about himself, but after a couple of beers he told me that his father sold farm machinery and his mother bred dogs. That he’d gone to a state college, married his hometown sweetheart, taught high school, divorced and moved to New York. He had published two novels, now out of print, and had been working on a third for seven years. His job, as a copy editor for a legal publisher, he claimed not to mind. He had managed to get a small apartment in a massive subsidized artist complex on the west side.
    Me, I was happy to talk. I filled him in, right down to the box of scented sex-talk letters. “I keep putting off going to see her. I’m just savouring the moment a little longer.”
    “Whatever