Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

MY LIFE NO POEM.

She lay back as if she had declaimed. I was exhausting her. I said, “Let me. You’re telling me, he, he does things like that ‘glean’d’ and that kind of phony-sounding ‘do sink,’ and you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘He stuck that in for the rhythm of the line. Nobody says “ do sink.”’ Right?” She flapped a wrist. “Right,” I said. “Well, I can’t argue. The ‘do sink’ isn’t his greatest work. It doesn’t sound natural. Of course, you could argue that while poetry comes from a natural impulse — to talk! — it either sounds natural, like us, or it doesn’t. He was writing in 1818. You have to be fair about that. Maybe they talked like that in 1818. I frankly don’t think so. I think he gimmicked it up to make the rhythm work for him. But how about ‘And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!/That I shall never look upon thee more’? Is he talking about his imagination? I mean, that’s what the poem’s about, right? A guy who doesn’t want to die because he wants to get his writing done? Or is this part, the thee part, about, well, love?”

She was sleeping. While she slept, her chest shuddered and sweat poured up from her skin. And she wept. I swore — I swear — I could tell the difference between the perspiration and the tears. Psychoanalysis of suicides induced through poetry by Doctor Farce! Romantic poetry a specialty! I sat back, and in the low aqua-colored plastic chair beside her bed, in the rhythm of her ventilator’s vacuum-and-compression, in the high-pitched beep her IV monitors cried as the clear solution in the sacs ran down through her, I closed my eyes and in the heat of her room I slept.

The tearing sound of her eraser sheet woke me. I leaned forward so quickly, my back hurt. “What?” I said. “What?”

Leslie looked across at me — our heads were almost on a level — and her eyes looked pleased. I reached, automatically, for her Invisible Pad. It said WHAT COLLEGE?

“Oh,” I said — surely shouted—“Wellesley! Vassar! Radcliffe! Let’s think big !”

Her fingers moved, and I replaced her pad in them. It made the tearing sound, and then she wrote.

SHAMPOO NEXT.

“You want me to wash your hair? Sure. How?”

She moved her hand, I gave her the pad, and she added, without tearing, TIME.

“I will. You have them get the stuff, and I will. I’ll talk to you about colleges. I’ll ask some questions, and I’ll tell you. And I’ll — you want me to bring in hair magazines? You know: magazines with pictures of hairdos? I’ll give you a perm.”

She took the pad back and pulled up the sheet. KISS.

So I leaned down into the clicking and hissing and tape and perspiration and her tears, and I kissed her on the cheek and on the eye. Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. I said, “You’re right about the poem. You’re wrong, but you’re also right. Look on the Xerox sheet, and read what I wrote for you about sonnets. About the form. The fourteen lines, the rhyme scheme, you remember. Read the poem again, and we’ll talk about it. All right?”

She waved good-bye with just the fingers on her left hand. Her eyes were closed.

“All right,” I said.

In the corridor, a big clumsiness of briefcase and coat and gloves and forms and pens, I said to a couple of the ICU nurses, “When is she going to be okay?” They watched as I tried to put everything where it should go. I looked up from the floor where I kneeled, my back still aching, and stuffed my briefcase full.

One of them, whose name was May, a slender woman with short legs, said, “Are we talking miracles or medicine here? And would you like the fact or the fiction?”

I stood up slowly and fought my way into my coat.

“How about you?” May said. “How’re you guys, you know, handling it?”

“I’m on my way to the jail right now.”

“You want some leftover lunch? You look lousy.”

“You never said that when we were drinking in the Solsville Hotel,” I said.

She pushed her rimless glasses back up onto her nose and stepped a step closer. She smelled like chewing gum and soap. She put her fingers over the top of my trousers and her thumb around my belt buckle. “Say hello to your wife,” she said, smiling, pulling once, then twice, at the top of my pants. “Take care.”

I stepped back. “I’m shampooing Leslie next week, all right?”

May nodded, and the other one nodded. May let go of my pants. “You’re putting on weight,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Misery must agree with you.” She turned, and then the other one did, and they went along the corridor. I buttoned my coat and went out through the smokeless visitors’ lounge, wishing as I went.

I always kept the jail for last. It was a county jail, where prisoners waited for trials or indictment for minor offenses, or were held if they were being transported from, say, Auburn to the psychiatric hospital in Rome. The jail was in the basement of the county sheriff’s offices, and was across the street from the courthouse, across another street from the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. If you stood on the steps of the elegant Victorian that housed the jail, you could see our public library and a government office building where people made arrangements for food stamps. It seemed like a rather large town, but it was really a very small city, the smallest in the state. In order to qualify for state aid in repairing the streets, our city had to file its street plan. We were found to have too few streets, according to a government rule, so we renamed certain avenues at either end. West Broughton had run, in two blocks, across the main street (a state two-lane) into (unsurprisingly) East Broughton. The town fathers renamed them, and the unsuspecting motorist now drove from West Broughton, across Route 12, and up a street called Samson Drive, never encountering East Broughton or any other Broughton. I nipped the yellow light and drove across 12 onto Samson, which was in the general direction of the jail, but which wouldn’t bring me directly there.

Samson ended at a narrow lane that went up a steep hill toward a small municipal swimming pool named for a phys ed teacher who’d been thought to die in Korea. But he’d come back. The town was embarrassed by its own emotion, I suppose, and the poor fellow was punished — though everyone treated him well in person — by the neglect his pool received — clogged pool drains and a torn umbrella for the lifeguard. The road needed repaving and its potholes were his payment for the municipal embarrassment. My son had worked there in the summer of his sixteenth year. I walked around the pool and looked down into its gray slush growing like a fungus in the shaded end. I climbed up onto the chair where he’d sat and I sat in the cold air and crossed my legs, leaned forward against the weight of my overcoat as if I might declaim. There was nothing, though, to say there, just as there was little to say in jail. As the afternoon darkened, I went there.

At the desk, near the wooden staircase with the tops of its newel posts carved into giant acorns, a deputy sat to log me in and reach to pat my shoulder. I knew where to go — through the heavy wooden door beneath the stairs, and then, on metal rungs, down. Another deputy waited for me and opened the heavy barred gate so that I stood at the open end of a U made of cells. A television set high on the wall showed the cable sports channel. A local physician who doubled as the county’s jail doctor was examining an Oriental man. The doctor, who smiled at me over the new prisoner’s shoulder, said, “You may think a thing like that just heals. Let me tell you: very little ‘just heals.’ You get help, or you get sick. Understand?”