Lit: A Memoir - Mary Karr

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on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be happy.

      Setting her spoon down, she said, Don’t worry, she said, You don’t have that choice—which either knighted or blighted me, I’ll never know which.

       Flashdance

       “So, Papa, are you feeling good now that you’re in my hands?”

       “No,” Papa said, “I’m feeling bad.”

       Then Semyon asked him, “And my brother Fyodor, when you were hacking him to pieces, did he feel good in your hands?”

       “No,” Papa said, “Fyodor was feeling bad.”

       Then Semyon asked him, “And did you think, Papa, that someday you might be feeling bad?”

       “No,” Papa said, “I didn’t think I might be feeling bad.”

      —Isaac Babel, “The Church in Novgorod”

       Inheritance Tax Summer

       We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Lafe’s sack. Because I said will I or wont I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack was full when we get to the woods it wont be me. … If the sack is full, I cannot help it.

      —William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

      The young poet I’ll wind up marrying tours my grad school for a week. Rumor has it, he’d been the star of genius Robert Lowell’s last class at Harvard. Drawn by his shy smile and decorous bearing, I right off start getting to the cafeteria early so as to slide my tray next to his and sit in the scent of detergent he gives off.

      Afternoons, we walk through the woods to a sandy stretch of beach alongside a green river, and one day we find inner tubes impressed in the sand as if placed there by wood nymphs. Given the golden aura of ease Warren moves in, I figure this kind of crap must happen to him all the time. His quiet formality counteracts the grungy, drunkenly proffered offers from pierced boys I’ve shrugged off in various punk bars of late—waiters and turnstile-jumping musicians.

      Do you think it’s okay if we borrow them?

      The hot rubber is warm in my hand as he asks, for I’m greedily rolling what I instantly decided was my inner tube to the water’s edge.

      We’ll bring them right back, I say, impressed to have met such a stand-up citizen.

      The inner tubes plop into the green swirl, and we wade in behind. Arms and knees hanging over, we let the current take us. Occasionally, deliciously, my foot brushes his muscled calf, which makes me go all creamy in my center like a stuffed chocolate.

      He seems vaguely stirred by my blue-collar credentials, that I paid my way through schools with all manner of unsavory tasks and now hold down community teaching jobs.

      That night I call my sister to make my crush official.

      Well, he’s Ivy-educated, so he’s not an idiot, she says. What does he look like?

      Superman.

      Her silence on the phone is passive doubt.

      I swear, like that actor. Very patrician-looking, cheekbones out to here, square jaw. Also those long dimples, very fetching—deep enough to hold a dime.

      Is he short?

      Six-five, I say.

      Height—ours and our boyfriends’—is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she’s liable to say, I’m five-nine and hang up.

      You’ll have to stand on a step to kiss him.

      He rowed crew, I tell her. (Not really his sport.) Plus, he can recite more Shakespeare than anybody not paid to learn it.

      Shakespeare meets Superman? He might as well walk out with his hands up.

      A few nights before the residency ends, he asks where I’d like to have our first solo dinner, and I say—provocatively, I hope—Montreal.

      I hope you don’t mind chipping in on gas, he says.

      Among young poets, this is standard, even on a date—is this a date? I gnaw my thumbnail.

      Before we hit the freeway, Warren stops for an oil check, though his car—a recent graduation gift—still has the dealer’s sticker on the rear window.

      What’s your dad do? I ask as Warren squeegees off the windshield.

      He’s a lawyer, Warren says. I don’t ask what kind of law because who knew there was more than one.

      Buckled into the driver’s seat, he adjusts the rearview with microscopic precision before even cranking the ignition—a care that opposes my haphazard plowing around in an uninspected Vega, its heater pumping out enough monoxide to give passengers a metallic-tasting headache.

      The mountain road hairpins under us, and the green valleys that open up in the windows can’t stop my fixation on his regal profile. Trying to impress him, I quote a new translation from Swede Tomas Tranströmer.

      Warren counters with “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …” And watching his unkissed mouth shaping those plush syllables is the libidinal equivalent of a studly crooner mouthing a love song.

      Wordsworth? I say.

      Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.”

      Dang, I say with a Gomer Pyle grin—my mask in grad school, where I’d posed as a redneck aborigine just to warn everybody up front how far behind I was before it blatted out like a fart. Once there, I started burrowing nightly into the library to look up references everybody else nodded in recognition over.

      As a result, I’ve taken in a gnat’s portion of American and European poetry, but our banter—Warren’s and mine—includes his modestly correcting me on the English tradition. By the time we cross over into Quebec, I’ve scrawled a long list of books to wade through, impressed he can teach me so much. There’s a low-slung fingernail of moon in the orange sky, and I pretend to interpret the local license plate slogan—Je me souviens, I remember—as I am a souvenir.

      He smiles. You’re kidding, right?

      Not even I am that primitive.

      You’re not at all primitive, he says.

      Don’t lie, I say. But I secretly hope to pass for a girl he maybe went to prep school with, though I could’ve impersonated a baboon closer.

      In the restaurant, we give our names as Wally and Holly Stevens, a poet and his editor daughter. At a tiny candlelit table, I smell the red wine on Warren’s breath. As he passes over my menu, his hand touches mine, and the pulse in my chest grows so thunderous I fear he’ll make it out. This has to be a date, dammit. When he starts to quote Yeats’s famous love poem, When you are old and gray and full of sleep / And nodding by the fire take down this book …

      I leap in to finish: And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep …

      And if there’d been a chaise longue nearby to land on, I might have stood up and swooned.

      The night before I graduate,

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