Good Trouble Read online

  If we grant Russell’s words a merely provisional validity, we can ask: What is a verse petition if not fallacious eloquence? What is poetry if not a riposte to the forces of fallaciousness? What are these forces if not power’s language?

  Mark wondered if he should explain that, by “fallacy,” Locke meant “deception.” He decided not to. The reader would connect the dots.

  Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.

  He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? To write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.

  Mark wrote:

  How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.

  Then:

  Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of…bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.

  He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:

  It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.

  Now it was dark out. Usually the poet would read a book, but tonight he lacked the wherewithal. He opened a can of beer and went online. For a while he skipped from one site to another. Everything was either about the election or not about the election. He checked his e-mail. Nothing new. Then he went onto Facebook, then back to skipping around the Internet. He found himself reading, without interest but with close attention, about persimmon farmers in Florida. He rechecked his e-mail. Hello, Merrill had written him again.

  * * *

  —

  Actually, Merrill had written Merrill—Mark had been bcc’d. The e-mail brought “exciting news”: funding had been secured (from whom, Merrill didn’t say) to buy half a page in the Times for the poetition. This moves the needle, Merrill stated.

  Mark’s reaction involved three thoughts. One: “Move the needle”? Two: What an operator Merrill Jensen was. What a maestro of fallacy. Mark knew for a fact that Merrill not only disliked Bob Dylan’s lyrics but also disliked Bob Dylan’s songs, which he’d once sneeringly characterized to Mark, who did like them, as “Pops’ music.” But sure enough, the minute the Nobel was announced, the prick was at the forefront of the congratulators and imprimatur-givers, arguing that Bob Dylan was an unacknowledged legislator of the world; ergo, Bob Dylan was a poet. It made Mark want to puke: the pseudo-reasoning, so right-wing in its dishonesty; and the big lie that Dylan somehow lacked acknowledgment. The big truth, not that anyone dared to speak it, was that Shelley’s dictum needed to be revised. Poets were the unacknowledged poets of the world.

  Had Mark been among the scores of writers contacted by the media for their reaction to the prize—which he hadn’t been—he would have spoken up for his comrades in verse. He would have faced down the wrathful online barbarians who vilified any perceived anti-Dylanite. (Their favorite disparagement, tellingly, was to accuse one of being a “nobody.”) He would have stated:

  The status of poet is not to be worn like one of those fine ceremonial gowns sported by recipients of honorary degrees for a single, sunny, glorious afternoon. Not even by Bob Dylan. If there is such a thing as a poet’s mantle, it is a $4.99 plastic poncho: useless for fashion but good in the rain and the cold. And in an emergency.

  His third thought about Merrill’s e-mail was that his name had never appeared in the Times and that if he signed the poetition it would.

  His apartment was on the third floor of a Victorian only minimally maintained by its owner. There was a bedroom and a kitchen–living room equipped with an armchair, a desk, a desk lamp, a small sofa, and bookcases that entirely covered two walls. No television. The kitchen-living room had two windows. When Mark wanted to pace about the apartment, his one option was to walk to and from these windows. This he now did.

  It was a journey that he’d made thousands of times, and thousands of times he had viewed the shingled rooftops of the houses across the street, and beyond them, in the town’s small business district, two brown glassy towers. At night, you couldn’t see much beyond the glare of the streetlight directly in front of the window. And yet evidently there was an inextinguishable need to approach an opening built into a wall for air and light, and to look through it.

  Somebody down there was walking a dog. That was a poem, right there: the master, the leash, the joyful dog, etc. But the territory had been covered. There was that Nemerov poem, just for starters; and the one by Heather McHugh with that all-time-great dog line—doctor of crotches. A poem by Mark McCain would be water poured into a vessel that was already full: superfluous.

  He kept looking, which was another poem—a poem about the peculiar percipience of the one who gazes out a window. The poem would do for the window what theorists had done for the threshold: it would offer the idea of the fenestral as a consort to the idea of the liminal. He wouldn’t write it. The automatic metaphoric associativity of “the window” was just too much. He could always play with the associations, of course. But surely there had to be better things to do than play with the associations of “the window.”

  He returned to his chair and wrote, in less than half an hour, a poem that deviated from his previous work. The poem masqueraded as notes for a possible poem. It was titled “Meditation on What It Means to Write?” It read:

  Problem: “meditation on” is a cliché. “What it means to” is a cliché.

  The very notion of a problem, colon, is a cliché.

  “The very notion of” is a cliché.

  “Cliché” strikes one as a cliché.

  As does “strikes one.”

  And “As does.”

  Ditto inverted commas.

  Ditto “ditto.”

  He did not write Merrill back. He did not put his name to the poetition.

  As soon as he had not done these things, he rose up from his chair. He went not to the window but to the area between the chair and sofa. He stood there with hands balled into shaking fists. Silently and exultantly he roared, Never give in. Never not resist.

  The Trusted Traveler

  ◇

  For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he e-mails to invite himself over, I reply that “our traditional dinner” can “alas” no longer take place: six months ago, Christine and I moved to Nova Scotia.

  Jack Bail writes back:

  Nova Scotia? Canada’s Ocean Playground? I’m there, Doc. Just say when and where.

  “Oh no,” Chris says. “I’m so sorry, love.”

  It’s I who should say sorry to Chris. Not only will she have to cook for Jack Bail but she will also have to handle Jack Bail, because, even though I’m supposedly the one who’s Jack Bail’s friend, it’s Chris who retains the details of Jack Bail’s life story and the details of what transpired in the course of our meals with him, and who is able to follow what Jack Bail is saying or feeling. For some reason, almost anything that has to do with Jack Bail is beyond my grasp. I can’t even remember having taught anybody named Jack Bail.

  “And I guess Chris will be coming,” Chris says, confusingly. “His wife,” Chris says.

  Of course—Jack Bail’s wife, like my Chris, is a Chris by way of Christine. Which is irritatin
g.

  I say, “You never know. Maybe he won’t be able to make it.”

  Chris laughs, as well she might. Jack Bail always turns up. Without fail he marks the end of the tax season by eating at our table. It is always a strangely fictional few hours. Only after Jack Bail has left does our life again feel factual.

  Chris’s long-standing opinion on the Jack Bail situation is that I should effectively communicate to him that I don’t wish to see him. It’s not her suggestion that I socially fire him in writing—as she acknowledges, “That’s pretty much psychologically impossible”—but that I make use of the well-understood convention of e-mail silence.

  I’ve tried it. E-mail silence only prompts Jack Bail to switch to pushy text messages. For example:

  Hi about this dinner thing. Just let me know details as soon as you have them, no rush.

  This obdurate memorandum and others like it—

  Dinner this month? Next month? All good :)

  —weigh on me so heavily that in the end it’s just easier to spend an evening with the guy. The truth isn’t so much that Jack Bail is a terrible or unbearable fellow but that Jack Bail falls squarely into the category of people whom Chris and I really don’t want to see anymore as we hit our mid-sixties and apprehend the finitude and irreversibility of human time as an all-too-vivid personal actuality and not as a literary theme to be discussed in high school classes devoted to The Count of Monte Cristo or The Old Man and the Sea. A central purpose of moving to this Canadian coastal hilltop has been to shed our skins as New Yorkers and finally rid ourselves of the purely dutiful associations that, it seemed to me especially, overcrowded our day-to-day existences, which, even discounting work, apparently amounted to one interaction after another with individuals who demanded that we transfer our time to them, often for no better reason than that our paths had once crossed or, would you believe it, that their very demand for our time constituted such a crossing of paths.

  (Illustration: A, who claims to be a friend of a friend, informs me by e-mail that he’s thinking of applying for a job at the school where Chris and I teach. Could he pick my brains over coffee? Further illustration: B writes to Chris to say that her child once attended the school. Could Chris help B get an overseas research fellowship? Exercising what is, I believe, a universally accepted right to reasonable personal autonomy, we choose not to answer these approaches; whereupon, we find out, both A and B tell people that we’re rude, selfish, full of ourselves, etc. In A’s and B’s minds, their making unilateral contact with us means that we, the contactees, are somehow in their debt. The difference between Chris and me is that she doesn’t let this stuff get to her, whereas I stupidly waste a lot of time and emotion being bothered by the ridiculous injustice and hostility of it all.)

  I won’t even begin to describe how many hours and years we devoted to the parental body—the Hydra, as Chris named it. You cannot defeat the Hydra. You can only flee it. None of this is to say that we’re refugees; but it can’t be denied that we’ve retired, and that to retire means to draw back, as if from battle.

  * * *

  —

  The good news is Jack and Chris Bail will not be sleeping over. My Chris took it upon herself to warn Jack Bail and his Chris that there was no room at our inn, so to speak, to which Jack Bail responded:

  No worries.

  We’ll take him at his word. The other good news is that Ed and Fran Joyce, new Nova Scotia acquaintances, will join us for the dinner in order to absorb the Bails, although of course the Joyces aren’t aware that this is part of their function. We don’t know the Joyces at all well, but they strike us as good sports. Also, they hosted a kind of welcome event for us, and so we owe them dinner, arguably: one day soon after we arrived, a hamper filled with good things was left at our front door, together with an invitation to join members of “the community” for drinks and nibbles. We freely accepted the invitation—we hadn’t come here to be recluses, after all—and enjoyed the occasion, although we were, and still are, a little wary of and astonished by and ironical about the prospect of joining a retiree crowd. Our plan is to have a year of contemplative idleness, after which we’ll have a better idea of what to next get up to. We’re far from elderly, after all. Time is not yet a victorious enemy.

  Shortly before everyone is due to turn up, Chris and I take to the deck and get a head start on the wine, which is white and cold. “I wonder what Jack will have to say about this place,” Chris says. “Yes,” I say. “That’s something to look forward to.” She has reminded me of Jack Bail’s chronic amazement at our old apartment in Hudson Heights. Every time he came over, from Brooklyn, he would say something like, Hudson Heights? Who knew this neighborhood even existed? Who lives up here? Oboe players? It’s like I’m in Bucharest or something. Should I buy here?

  This kind of thing is all fine, needless to say, and absolutely within my tolerance levels in relation to schoolchildren, although of course Jack Bail, who must be in his late thirties, and if memory serves is balding, is no longer a schoolboy. But his personal qualities are beside the point. The point is that Jack Bail is uncalled-for.

  It’s a mild, semi-sunny, slightly windy June evening. “Just look at that,” I declare for about the millionth time since we moved into our cottage, which offers a panorama of a pond, green seaside hills, a semicircular bay, and a sandbar—or spit, perhaps. To the south, there’s a wooded headland that may or may not be a tombolo. It’s my intention to investigate this vista systematically, since it feels strange to look out every day and basically not understand what I’m looking at. Right now, for example, I’m observing an extraordinary horizontal triplex: in the offing, a distinctly ultramarine strip of ocean water is topped by a dull-blue band of unclassifiable vapor, itself topped by a purely white stratum of cloud. Then comes sky-blue air and, almost on top of our own hill, an enormous hovering gray cloud. This outlandish hydroatmospheric pileup, which is surely not unknown to science, leaves me at a terminological and informational loss that’s only intensified when I look at the bay itself, where the migrant and moody skylight, together with the action of the wind and current, I suppose, and maybe differences in the water’s depth and salinity, constantly pattern and texture and streak the aquatic surface. It’s unpredictable and beautiful. Sometimes the bay, usually blue or gray, is thoroughly brown, other times it has Caribbean swirls of aquamarine or is colorlessly pale, and invariably there are areas where the water is ruffled, and there are smooth or smoother areas of water, and areas that are relatively dark and light, and dull and brilliant, and so forth, ever more complexly. There must be some field of learning that can help me to better appreciate these phenomena.

  “The Salty Rose,” Chris says. “For the Lunenburg whaling years.”

  “Not bad at all,” I say.

  This is one of our favorite running jokes: Chris suggests titles for the memoirs that I am not writing about the lives that we have not led. In this subjunctive world we are adventurers, spies, honorary consuls, nomads, millionaires. The Hammocks of Chilmark describes our summers on the Vineyard. Our Corfu stint is the subject of a trilogy: The Owl in the Jasmine; A Pamplemousse for the Captain; and Who Shall Water the Bougainvillea?

  We have never set foot on Corfu or Martha’s Vineyard. Other than a four-year spell in Athens, Ohio, our thirty-one-year-old marriage and thirty-two-year teaching careers, and almost all of our vacations, have unfolded in and around the schools and streets of New York, New York. Jack Bail claims to have been in my class at Athens High, which is confounding. I have a pretty good recall of those Athens kids.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Chris: “Leg-bug?”

  I pick it off my ankle and, because these lentil-sized spider-like little fuckers are tough, I crush and recrush it between the bottom of my glass and my armrest. I call them leg-bugs because these last couple of weeks every time I’ve set foot outdoors I’ve c
aught them crawling up my legs—to what end, I don’t know; they’re up to no good, you can bet—and because I can’t entomologically identify them. They’re certainly maddening. Often my shin prickles when there’s nothing there.

  “Here they are,” Chris says.

  Our guests have arrived simultaneously, in two cars. Fran and Ed get out of their red pickup and Jack Bail gets out of his rented Hyundai. There’s no sign of his Chris.

  Dispensing with the steps, Jack Bail strides directly onto the deck. He’s extraordinarily tall, maybe six foot six. Has he grown?

  “Adirondack chairs,” Jack Bail says. “Of course.”

  * * *

  —

  As the young visitor who has gone to great lengths, Jack Bail is the object of solicitousness. There’s no way around this: once Jack Bail has traveled all the way from New York, he must be received with proportionate hospitality. “Jack first,” Fran says, when I try to pour her a glass of wine. “He deserves it, after his voyage.”

  “The flight was great,” Jack Bail says. “Newark airport—less so.” Ed says, “You might want to think about the Trusted Traveler program. Might speed things along.” “I am a Trusted Traveler,” Jack Bail says. “It did me no good. Not at Newark.” “What happens if you’re a Trusted Traveler?” Chris says. Ed says, “You don’t have to take your shoes off.” We all laugh. Jack Bail exclaims, “They made me take my shoes off!” We all laugh again. Ed asks Jack Bail, “Which program you with? NEXUS?” “Global Entry,” Jack Bail says. Looking at Fran, Ed says, “That’s what I’m all about. Global entry.” That gets the biggest, or the politest, laugh of all.

  Soon we’re eating grilled haddock, asparagus, and field greens. “Delicious,” Jack Bail is the first to say. “Thank you, Jack,” Chris says, with what seems like real gratitude. Jack Bail inspects the ocean, parts of which are ruddy and other parts dark blue. “That’s some view, Doc,” Jack Bail says. “Well, it’s not Hudson Heights,” I say. “I thought you lived in Manhattan?” Fran says. “Hudson Heights is in Manhattan,” I say. Ed says, “ ‘Doc,’ eh? You’re a dark horse.” “That’s what they called me,” I declare heartily. I didn’t invent the custom of recognizing a teacher’s academic title. Ed continues, “How about you, Jack? You a doc, too?” Jack laughs. “No way, man. I’m just a CPA.” “ ‘Just’?” Fran says, as if outraged. “You must be very proud of this young man,” she tells me, and this is a tiny bit infuriating, because I don’t like to receive instruction on how I ought to feel. How proud I am or am not of Jack Bail is for me to decide. “Certainly,” I say, Mr. Very Hearty all over again. Fran says, “How was he in the classroom? A rascal, I’ll bet.” I make a sort of ho-ho-ho, and Jack Bail says to Fran, “Hey, don’t blow my cover!” He adds, “Doc was a great teacher.” I say, “Well, we’ve come a long way from Ohio,” and Ed says, “We’ve all come a long way, eh?” and he tells Jack Bail that he’s from B.C. but that Fran is a Maritimer and Maritimer women always return home eventually and you’d have to be crazy to stand in the way of a Maritimer woman.