THE POET'S ASSISTANT

I suppose when you finish an English degree and turn to the local newspaper help-wanted ads looking for literary work, you deserve what you get. The classifieds had two listings under “Writing.” One was for a professional résumé service that was called, conveniently, A Professional Résumé Service, the A appended to the company name in the manner of exterminators and locksmiths vying for top billing in the yellow pages. The other was for a poet in need of an assistant. Where I come from, that sort of job opportunity does not often appear in the classifieds. This was like finding a listing for “sorcerer’s apprentice” or “journeyman self-pleasurer.” I called.

The woman on the phone had a name that sounded like a pen name, curly and alliterative, delivered with an accent that was exotic and full of tongue, evoking desert sand and mosques and figs. She lived in a condominium development that I knew was filled with rich people, and she asked me to come by in the evening. I drove there in my secondhand 1980 Chevrolet Citation, a car that had aged so profoundly it looked as though it had wasting disease. It was not even eight years old, but had already been through a clutch, two starters, and a chronic series of brake problems. Discolored blotches had developed in the blue paint of the hood. I’d repaired the broken plastic turn-signal/headlight assembly with sheet-metal screws and Super Glue so it looked like Frankenstein’s bad eye. The windshield leaked badly, and the rainwater that settled under the driver’s seat had caused the floor and seat brackets to rust out. I repaired it with scrap lumber, so my car was slowly beginning to resemble a hay wagon. If you own a crap car long enough, eventually the entire thing becomes homemade.

I arrived at the address and parked the Citation (a car that I’d come to realize was named for a traffic ticket) at the curb, hoping it would look less unflattering from a distance in the dusk. I had brought a copy of my résumé, which I’d padded enough to fill two-thirds of a page, including my ball-boy experience, but mostly listing surveying and landscaping and construction jobs and a stint on a loading dock—jobs I’d loved because they were the sorts of jobs that felt authentic, but at the same time looked entirely unsatisfying on a printed page. I also included the titles of a couple of short stories published in the university’s literary journal and a short essay I’d entered in the local newspaper’s holiday writing contest, which was awarded the same “honorable mention” shared by all the other also-rans. Pretty much, then, I had nothing.

I touched the glowing button next to the front door and heard chimes echo from the other side. She opened the door, a late-­middle-aged woman, well fed, black hair streaked with gray, dressed in a shapeless, layered, silky, multicolored robelike dress that covered her like a set of draperies. She stood there a moment without saying anything, nodded her head, and said, “You look great.”

First of all, women never told me I looked “great.” The best I ever got was “cute.” Mostly I got “nonthreatening.” What I looked was perpetually ten years younger than my real age. I’d put on a pair of khakis that felt entirely like someone else’s pants, which they were because I’d borrowed them from my brother, and I’d buttoned the top button at the collar of my white, thrift-store dress shirt because that look seemed to work for Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, both of whom were gainfully employed. My hair, which I preferred to rub around in a circle until it turned into sort of a bird’s nest, was matted down and touched with gel. I wore big, black-framed glasses that had, on the loading dock, earned me the nickname Elvis Costello, which is not a good nickname to have on a loading dock, and a pair of loafers that looked as if I’d pulled them off a sleeping drunk. Men are almost always willing to believe a woman who pays them a physical compliment and in fact will use it as a launching pad for an exaggeration of what was actually said, but standing there at the doorstep of a mysterious poet who was advertised to be in need of an assistant, I could not avoid the obvious. I did not look great and this woman had a reason other than objectivity for saying I did.

She invited me in. The condominium was lushly decorated, all with the same accent of her diction, something deep and balmy and herby whose origin eluded me entirely, mostly because I’d never been anywhere more exotic than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

We entered the living room and she gestured for me to sit. The chair was deep and plush and I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to spring from it quickly if I had to, which (for some reason was something) I was thinking might happen soon.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” she said, already pouring.

“No, thank you,” I said, as she turned and handed it toward me.

I accepted it and set it on the table beside me. She sat on a couch across from me, crossing her legs at an angle, draping an arm across the couch’s back.

“So,” she said, nodding, and narrowing her eyes, examining me for a long moment before continuing, “Have you heard of me?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer, wasn’t sure why I would have heard of her, and I didn’t like the question because I was sure that no was the wrong answer, but if I lied and said yes, I’d never get away with it, so I responded as carefully as I could.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think I have.”

She told me that she was under contract with a Large Commercial Publisher and that her books were doing very well and that she’d been written about in the local newspaper, although the newspaper she mentioned was not the Beacon Journal but rather a small weekly shopper that mostly carried verbatim press releases and photographs of ribbon cuttings and handshake ceremonies of the presentation of oversize checks. I knew enough about poetry to know that books filled with it were published mostly by small presses run by other poets, whom I imagined as middle-aged idealists with strawlike hair and overtaxed oxfords, who grew their own produce and believed deeply in Ralph Nader. These books weren’t even called books. They were called chapbooks, which made them sound homespun, like something hand-lettered by lamplight at the Ingalls family table, protected by a sheet of horn. They were not generally released by large commercial publishers, and not generally referred to as “doing well.” But I could have been wrong about this and was in no position to challenge.

“First,” she said, “would you read for me?”

I didn’t understand this question either, but before I had a chance to try, she reached over to the table beside the sofa and produced a copy of the university’s literary magazine, the sight of which made me blush hotly and tighten at the sphincter and wonder how in the hell she knew about this.

I had three poems in that issue. That was bad enough. Worse was that their publication was laden with complications of ethics and legitimacy. While serving on the journal’s editorial committee, I had written these poems more or less spontaneously one afternoon in the library when I was supposed to be studying. I thought the poems weren’t bad, but I wasn’t sure because my problem with poetry had always been an inability to distinguish the bad from the good. I loved William Carlos Williams’s poem, “This Is Just to Say,” which sounded like a note to his family about being sorry for eating the plums that were in the icebox but they were delicious. But then someone told me it actually was a note to his family about being sorry for eating delicious plums. So what until then was one of my favorite poems I now believed wasn’t really a poem. Mostly I consumed poetry the way I consumed wine: I liked it all well enough and gladly partook whenever the opportunity arose, but I couldn’t tell the high-end stuff from the low-end stuff, and the quantifiers of quality (metrical complexity, pathos, typicity, appellation) left me nodding my head as though I understood.

Because I couldn’t properly serve on a committee that would be judging my own work, I had submitted these poems under a pseudonym, then sat nervously as the stacks of photocopied student literature were distributed among the three editors. Soon, my two colleagues, who didn’t appear to have any better grasp of poetry than I did, were dispensing the sort of praise on my verse that student editors serve up like cafeteria scoops of mashed potatoes (“I really like the imagery”; “There’s a relatableness there”; etc.). My ego couldn’t stand the idea of not receiving these compliments directly, so I sheepishly admitted the poems were mine.

The woman reached across the void between us, handing the magazine, which she’d already folded open, to me. I accepted it like a subpoena. She half-reclined, leaning her head back, letting her eyelids relax.

“Read the first one,” she said.

I had avoided looking at these words on the page ever since they had found their way there by way of the conference room where three of us somehow decided they should be in the issue but only under my real name and at the expense of my resignation from the editorial board. (Poetry is complicated, but not always in the way you think.) I had never been comfortable reading aloud to begin with, much less reading my own writing, and certainly not reading writing that included ingredients of controversy and shame.

She waited. I realized I had no choice. I began:

Hey, Snakeleg.

Why not we sublimate

The deaf girls

And teach them to dance . . .

I could feel the air draining from my voice. After a long spell of trying, I suddenly was unable to fool myself about these poems. They were really, really bad. And bad poetry is something much worse than bad hair or bad shoes or even a bad stomach. Allowing the world to see your bad poetry is a deliberate act, and all its negative consequences are deserved. Because nobody asked to see it in the first place.

We oughta

Reel in some herringbone

And watchfob his kneecaps

With brickbats and a tommydog . . .

I wanted her to tell me to stop. It would have been worth the humiliation for her to just say this is horrible and I can’t listen to another word, just so I could stop hearing it myself. But she just sat there, bobbing her head.

What the hell is a tommydog? I wondered silently. And how do you “watchfob a kneecap”?

I finished the last line. She took a sip of her wine, reached across to the same table, and produced a hardcover book. Without introduction, she opened and began reading. I assumed this was one of her own poems and soon made out her name on the cover and listened, trying to determine if it was any good, but I’d lost any power of discernment. She finished and set the book aside.

“Well,” she said, “now we know something about one another.”

Not really, I thought. Pretty much the opposite.

She began to tell me about her family and walked me through the condo, showing me around. I was waiting for her to begin to interview me, or to tell me about the job, or even just to mention it, but the longer this went on, the more I began to doubt a job existed. She showed me a framed picture of her son, who looked to be about my age, a black-haired man in green military fatigues. He was pointing an automatic rifle at the camera.

“Very . . . nice?” I said.

I was ready to leave.

“So,” she finally said, “do you want to come work for me?”

“And do what?”

“Editing and filing. Help with the mailing.”

I was no poet, but I couldn’t figure out any possible way this sort of work would require hiring an assistant.

“How many hours a week?”

“Oh, we’ll figure that out as we go along.”

“And can I ask what it pays?”

She offered less than I’d made in my last job, as a construction grunt. I said I didn’t think I could get by on that. She said she thought I’d change my mind once I had a chance to think it over. I eased my way toward an exit and left a quiet, uneasy exhale as I returned down the front walk to my car. I could feel her watching me. I settled into the front seat, the wood frame creaking beneath me, and felt the same tightness return to my throat that I’d felt when she asked me to read.

The next day I called A Professional Résumé Service. I got the job and spent the next few months writing prefab cover letters for people as desperate as I was.