Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

That’s what she said.

He scowled.

I said, She told me not to do this — she said if I came over here I couldn’t ever come home.

Pat, you need to calm, keep the passions controlled — why else did I make you my roofer?

Greener shambled to the door of his tickytacky ramshackler, held it open for me.

Give Dem time to chill — she’ll take you back in the morning.

How sorry is it that writing about that evening with Greener is no easier now than it was then — years ago, the summer after that evening, when the media called? Predictably late. Nonfiction, they asked for. Journalism, they demanded. Editors, installed floors above realism, interested not in a crew of yokels and their architectural success, but in sensationalizing a former peer’s failure. Dem was furious I’d even considered their offers — that spat ruined our honeymoon, Canada — though it’s not like I would’ve been able to complete any “article,” any “piece.” I declined by maintaining I was too biased by hurt, but, full disclosure: I couldn’t write anymore, I wasn’t a writer.

I’d never been inside Greener’s bungalow before and I didn’t want to be there then — I wanted to demolish him, but I’d never been in a home so depressing. Not even those small poor places Dem and I would rent when Dem was still diligently sewing and gluing her verses together by day and then, once she had a job too and we were less poor, by night — not even that condemned chapel that leaked, or that dingy duplex downwind from the rendering plant I patched up nice but the toxic mold mucked in just when Veri was born — not even those could compare.

Greener had no furniture, no possessions. He had only this expression: mad, insomniac, grim.

He didn’t even have any literature on the nonexistent shelves, just how-to’s piled on the floor, stacked in the cupboards and pantry.

No manuscripts in the microwave unplugged, just diagrams, bank statements.

I’ve sold everything I shipped out with, he said. School’s only put up $100K, I’m funding the rest.

From your royalties? from your foreign rights and options?

By the grace of my mother’s estate and with loans, I’m buying myself a borough.

You’re in debt?

And did I mention my publisher rejected my new book last week? More of the same, they said.

More of what?

It’s a novel that revises my previous novel — do you honestly care?

Why do this to yourself?

I’m a teacher, I’m teaching.

We’re learning (I winced from my lameness).

And I’m going for broke on your education — though it’s incredible what you can get done with free labor.

You’re counting on this class to support your retirement?

(A jest as uncomfortable as lounging on his shack’s sloppy planks.)

The end of the semester’s the end of me.

And then what?

Rewhiskeying my mason jar, lighting two Camels, handing me one — And then we’d better be finished.

Tub was the only one of our class to leave town, the county, the state (as far as Dem and I are aware). He was always smart, too smart to be a writer it occasionally felt, Tub the brainiac always so analytical, so literal. I knew him, as I knew most of my fellow classmates, from prior workshops — those with hypertext experimentalist Grazinski, whose avant lacked only a garde, those immersed in the bucolic bardics of BJ, whose eclogues insisted on rhyme — and so I knew that if a character in some student’s story went somewhere, like New York City, say, on a certain date at a certain time, Tub would research that date and time and quiz the author on trivia like the weather (drizzle in the morning? leading to an afternoon of scattered thunder?), or how might your character react to the news that the Monday before the Jets holocausted the Eagles? or that two girls, braided black twins, died in a house fire in Harlem? He was a stickler, a looming, hovering pain, so Greener, surprise, surprise, promoted him to contractor (elevating Greener, I guess, to the role of contractor’s contractor).

Tub kept us on time, managed the workflows, made sure everybody made their right contributions in the right order and that when it was too early to do the plumbing or electric, for example, Bau and Lo weren’t allowed to just hump away at the edge of the lot — the field had been referred to as “the lot,” or “the site,” then gradually Greener’s appellation spread, I spread it: “the college borough”—but were instead redirected to help with unloading trucks, or putting up scaffolding, aiding — meaning following and learning from — Mesh and the region’s most skilled masons on their facadework. (Mesh was assigned the facade, that intricate, fripperant facade, only because the surfaces of his literary work were so terribly transpicuous, so banally boring — simple declaratives rife with simple vocabulary. Plain. Unadorned. Also it’d be shabby not to note that at this juncture, the unions — Locals 5, 15, 35, and 86—were pitching in for nothing, in a recruitment initiative, whenever they had shifts to spare.)

Tub himself wasn’t exempt from this diversification and though his primary talent was obviously organizational — he was a frail, wan guy — Greener insisted that he assist on the grunt jobs too, and so not only did he learn, as we all learned, something of every discipline, he also built up his chest and arms and successfully overcame chronic asthma. And Greener, it should be said, wasn’t exempt either: out straining among the elements, stooped for lift over pallets, it was as if he too would be receiving a grade. A fountain of sweat. Tanned in even his creases. He never cleaned his workboots or helmet. He looked wonderful (no, no: he looked like he was wonderfully dying).

It was late in the afternoon, about an hour after we’d returned to the hotel from the NYU tour, in the middle of the brief nap we’d scheduled before beginning to plan which of Dem’s tapas reservations to honor—

My phone rang a strange (212) number, but I answered it anyway, figuring it was the airline or an autoconfirmation of our visit tomorrow early to Liberty Island.

It’s Tub, he said, Tub Deminty — why didn’t you tell me you two were in town?

How did you know?

Reardon emailed with your number, it’s been forever, I hope you’re not avoiding me.

It’s not you I’m avoiding, I thought but only repeated, Damn straight, forever.

And I’m told you have a girl doing the rounds of our fair borough’s higher ed?

You’re on top of it.

Dem sat up in bed.

I know this is rushed, but will you make time for me tonight? I fly tomorrow for Frankfurt.

Dem cocked an ear.

I’ll get you tickets to Witties, that play that just won the Pulitzer — I’m friendly with the producers. Three tickets at Will Call (I have a meeting) — you’ll see the show then after we’ll eat, when the restaurants aren’t so crowded. Sound good? You in the mood for Turkish?

Dem snatched the phone from me, yelled, Have you heard of this taverna on East 66th?

And hello to you too — Tub had heard of it. He said that tables were scarce but he’d try. If that was a bust, he knew an exquisite rawfood trattoria.

He’d be the man with the olive umbrella, waiting just up the block from the theater.

Tub — why had I wanted to steer clear of The Tub, who used to write minuscule essays of sublime erudition but of no argument, no sway or opinion, just compressed paragraphicules of unremitting fact? Did I think he’d outgrown me, transcended our Midwestern muddle, advantaging his expertise, relocating to New York to do architecture, still scrupulously unmarried, still no children, if I had to pry gay, on staff at the Landmarks Commission — impeccably preserved himself — responsible for approving all reconstructions and refurbishments, all additions and subtractions, to the city’s historic buildings?