Heart the Lover (21)
He gets up and goes back into the building and out to the street and disappears. His clothes are still swishing around in the washer. I leave them there when my shift is over.
At home my bedroom door is closed and there’s a note on the nail.
I’m in your bed. Wake me up so I can apologize all night.
— (the real) Heart the Lover
Classes start. Dr. Gastrell’s seminar is held not in 1B of Tate Hall as listed in the course catalogue but at his house. Every Wednesday night Yash and I walk together to the Breach, through the gate, up the little path, and ring the bell whose sound, to me, means the arrival of pizzas. We go through the hallway with the wobbly table and the notepad and the silhouettes on the wall. Yash and I sit together on the striped couch and a grad student named Vinga sits on my other side. Randy, a fawning junior, takes one armchair and high-strung Ned takes the other, his long, nervous legs stretched through the underside of the coffee table. Others bring in chairs from the dining room. Dr. Gastrell sits in the spot where Yash stood and acted out his date. Gastrell is fond of reading aloud. When we read The Aeneid he pauses on a line then reads it again: ‘Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.’
Dr. Gastrell does not conceal how taken he is with Yash. Yash illuminates him. When he speaks, Gastrell shimmers with energy. They spar and parry about Platonic forms, Aristotelian ontology, and Homeric divinations versus human agency. Gastrell makes attempts to include the rest of us, and several of the others work hard for his attention, but the real conversation is between him and Yash while the rest of us listen and take notes. Their most heated dispute is over the definition of ‘hamartia,’ which Gastrell says is a tragic flaw. Yash corrects him, saying that the word in ancient Greek, as Aristotle was using it, meant a random error of judgement. From there it escalates quickly. Gastrell claims that nothing in Greek drama is random and that Greek drama wouldn’t have survived at all without this tragic irony that they invented. Yash insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake, that we are all vulnerable to tragedy because we are human.
The argument leaves Gastrell with a red neck and a moist hairline, and Yash looking like he slayed a small dragon.
For my thesis, I’m assigned an advisor I’ve never heard of and I meet with her every week. If there’s any place I can point to where my writing life actually began, it is here with Dr. Felske on Thursdays at one p.m. I come in each week with two copies of a new story and have to read the whole thing out loud while she follows along on her copy, circling words, squiggling a line under sentences, slashing whole paragraphs. Very occasionally there is a tiny check in the margin. I write for these tiny checks. I get more and more of them as the semester goes on. She quickly understands how limited my reading has been, and how male. She feeds me Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid. By mid-November I’ve written twelve stories. We choose five for the thesis and begin to revise. Revision for me in the past has been some light polishing. This is more like a root canal on every paragraph. The writing professors I’ve had before often spoke in generalities, in quotes by famous writers. Chekhov said. Beckett said. And we scribbled down those pearls. Dr. Felske only talks about what she sees on the page. She taps her silver mechanical pencil on a passage. What is truer here? She steers me away from the Southern gothic plots I was enamored with last year and encourages me to write from my own emotions. I start to understand the power of fiction, the reason we make things up. My best story is about my father. It’s not autobiographical. It’s about the manager of a shoe store and the high school boy who gets a job there—but it is about my father, about my rage and shame and love for him. These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did. ‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said. Professor Felske shows me what that really means.
Madame Trèves, the owner of Chantal, comes slowly to like and trust me. It has taken four months. Once she starts telling you about her family, you’re in, the bartender told me. On a slow night in late September, we are standing together in the little nook in back and she points to an old man she just seated. He resembles my uncle, she says, and I ask how and she says not his features, an energy, a goodness, and she tells me what I already knew from the bartender, that this uncle, her mother’s sister’s husband, hid her whole family in the hay shed on his farm for the last three years of the war.
The next week she gives me three more dinner shifts. I quit High Five and Bubble Time and start raking it in. Over a hundred dollars a night. I begin putting real money in the bank.
I bring home my tips and we count the cash on Yash’s bed. I take a shower and when it gets cold I put on these red long johns I find in his closet. Your little red suit, he calls it, like in the Talking Heads song. We count my tips and roll around on the bed until the red suit is down at my ankles and never ever have I been so happy.
Every few weeks Sam comes to town and disturbs that happiness. He stays with Yash and I can’t go to any of the parties they go to. My name is verboten. When they are together, I don’t exist, Yash tells me. All their friends know not to mention my name. When Yash returns to me after the weekend, he doesn’t want to talk about what they did or where they went or what they said. I hate Sam for this, the way he takes Yash away from me for days at a time and brings him back sullen and petulant and conflicted, the way I used to return to my mother after a weekend at my father’s. I hate the smell of the room after Sam has been there. I hate the box of my things that Yash’s housemate lets us store under his bed and that I retrieve once Sam has gone.