Page 59 - WTP Vol. XII #2

didn’t open from inside. Someone had to go around or else you could roll the window down and reach
to open it yourself. What would have happened if
it catapulted over a bridge and you couldn’t get the door open? Not impossible, the way she drove. She always gave me lifts downtown and we’d be talking about school or books. She often brought up “Bartle- by the Scrivener,” a favorite of hers, Melville’s story about the man who prefers most of all “not to,” not to do what he’s employed to do, copy letters, in the end not to eat, not to leave his place of employment or live apart from it, not really to live. He thins and flattens like a dead letter. Maris usually passed my street, forgetting to let me off, or maybe like Bartleby she just preferred not to. I’d walk back from wher- ever she stopped.
She had a mouth that turned down when she laughed. She would hold the laughter in, her cheeks filled up with it. When we went to department par- ties together, they were held at the house of one
of the regular faculty, she was always taking down someone’s address or someone was taking down hers. She stationed herself by the spiked punch bowl, usually a huge glass vat brought out of storage for the occasion. Sometimes she’d seem to disappear and I’d find her talking earnestly about her academic future to some prominent scholar she had maybe heard of but neither of us had actually met. She’d tell me later this person was “a possible contact.” She came to see me read my poems twice, once in a synagogue, once in a bookstore. The first time I had finished before she got there. She became a good friend of the poet I was reading with and of a member of the audience, who I think had to leave early, someone she admired. She came the other time in what was for her an extraordinary outfit, a skin-tight white T-shirt and bright red skirt. Mostly, I remember her in the brown boots that were like mine and a pale red plaid cotton dress, restrained and childlike. Like Raggedy Ann. I was sure I didn’t know her own real taste in anything.
When we talked about books she didn’t say if she thought they were good or bad. What she noted was the author’s period and orientation or oddities in
a character’s behavior, and mostly, what so and so critic said about them. I remember quick lunches in the cafeteria or meeting at a South Street deli. She’d order meat and vegetables, light on sauces, bread
on the side. And coffee, black and lots of it. Why did
I think this was her one meal of the day? She never complained about her stomach or her energy. Her health seemed fine. The dentist she found that some- one else recommended was a block away from where I lived and I’d bump into her coming from there. She
had her hair done by my hairdresser, not infrequently. You could tell because it would be almost glowing and shaped around her head like a helmet.
Sometimes I felt from her this kind of relentless at- tention. I’d turn and see her driving slowly behind me when I was walking home from the library, for instance. There’d be times I wanted to free myself of her. And it seemed okay with her if at a conference
or lecture we’d gone to together I pulled away. She’d find people, she’d drift off with them. In a roomful
of strangers, I’d likely be the one alone. People were important to us both, though not in the same way. What we talked of most was people. “He got married because it got him a job,” she’d speculate. Of someone else, “He likes me now. When we talk, I try to exagger- ate everything that happens to him to make him feel important.” It wasn’t calculated. She liked to figure people out, like a mystery, like literature. She never complained of anyone being mean or treating her like a pest. And truly most people saw her as vulnerable and tried to help her and didn’t mind her latching onto them like lost old friends. You wanted to give her what she asked for. You knew she could never have too much. She’d tell me, without telling me, to save her a chair at a seminar with Susan Sontag who was Visiting Writer in the department. I usually did. It was important that there be a place for her, even if it meant crowding in.
~
Out of the blue, Maris wants to ask Sontag to have lunch with the two of us, and I say, thinking of course she’ll say no, “O.K.” But Sontag mysteriously agrees. She appears at the Faculty Club with her striking streak of white in coal black hair (which was natural, which dyed ?), hair like a skunk’s pelt, and a con- fidence one could die for. What did we talk about? She and Maris discussing illness, Sontag had written
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