Joyce

In 1976 Doctor Wheeler taught Joyce for the last time. He had sworn never to teach it again but the graduate students begged and pleaded and the dean cajoled and finally, one Sunday morning at breakfast at The Station, with the graduate students all around him and a piece of pumpkin pie topping off his scrambled eggs, he gave in and said yes.

“I will teach it,” he said. “If you will read it. I won’t lecture if no one reads the books. My notes are not the works of James Joyce. Don’t take it unless you’re going to read the books.”

“We will,” they swore. “You can count on us.” And all around the long table of young writers and graduate students a great sigh of determination took place and moved from one to the other and rose like a cloud and joined the smoke from Doctor Wheeler’s cigarette. Nothing is free. To be in the presence of so much brilliance was also to be in the presence of cigarette smoke. Doctor Wheeler chain-smoked. He smoked because he liked to smoke. He smoked until the very last minute of the clock that ticked away his life. After all, how much oxygen does a man with one leg need?

One of the students at the table was a woman named Rhoda Manning. She was a housewife from New Orleans who was trying to learn to write poetry. All morning every morning she sat at a Royal portable typewriter in a small apartment near the campus and tried to turn everything she saw or experienced into metaphor. She was forty years old and she considered this the time of her life. She had this one semester to be a student in a writing program, with other students all around her and people like Doctor Wheeler to adore. She knew about Joyce. She had tried to read Joyce. She had an old recording of Siobhan McKenna reading Joyce. Now she was going to study Joyce. She stood up. She raised her glass. “Champagne,” she said. “Let’s order champagne. This demands a celebration. He’s going to teach the Joyce seminar. We will read Ulysses.”

Also at the table was a tall unhappy man named Ketch McSweeney. He had been in Vietnam and had brought his wife and daughter to Fayetteville to learn how to write a book about the war. He couldn’t stop thinking about the war. He couldn’t stop dreaming about the war, so he thought he might as well make some money writing about the war. Not that he had much in the way of alternatives being offered to him at the moment. He was from Pennsylvania and had come to school to find a way to begin to make a stand. His wife had a job teaching second grade and his daughter was in a cheap Montessori school. He was making twelve thousand dollars a year being a graduate student in the writing program and teaching semiliterate freshmen to read and write the language that they spoke. He didn’t mind. He was a good-looking man and the young girls all made eyes at him and he was sure that sooner or later he would make a killing of some kind in the writing business. Meanwhile, he was determined to make the best of it and have all the fun he could while he waited.

“I will teach it in the fall,” Doctor Wheeler said. “Sign up now because I’ll limit the size of the class.”

The next afternoon Ketch McSweeney and Rhoda Manning met at the registrar’s office. “You too?” she said. “Jesus, we’re lucky. I can’t believe he’s teaching it.”

“I thought you were going back to New Orleans after this semester. You decided to come back?”

“I will now. I can’t miss this.”

“What about your husband? He’s going to let you do this?”

“I’m doing it. I’m going to be a poet if it takes the rest of my life.”

“That’s how I feel. Only I want to make some dough. There’s got to be a way to make some money writing books.”

“Well, I’ll see you in class then, won’t I? If not before.”

They didn’t see each other again until the fall. But they were thinking about it. Both of them had been on the make most of their lives. Not to feed off other people or do intentional harm. Just to sample the wares of the world, to trade at the fair, to know the mornings, evenings, afternoons and not to hesitate when something fine or plump or juicy was at stake. They both liked excitement and they both knew how to generate it.

Doctor Wheeler thought about them too. He read over the list of writers and graduate students who were signed up for the course and as he read he knew much of what would transpire. He had taught this class too many times not to know its generative power and its dangers. He had taught it the year Amanda McCamey showed up on campus. He had taught it to Barry Hannah and Frank Stanford. He had taught it the year Carolyn Forche was the poet in residence and would come and sit in on his classes and look at him with her wide, beautiful, Eastern European eyes.

He walked out into his garden and thought about it. His garden overlooked the Confederate Cemetery. In it he had planted all the flowers he remembered from his youth. Hollyhocks and morning glories, pansies, delphiniums, foxglove and four o’clocks and bachelor’s buttons.

“Virag speaks,” he said out loud. “(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower, Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. . . .”

The first meeting of the class took place on a warm September night. A new moon was in the sky. A thin silver curve deep in the dark sky. Eight o’clock. The students had gathered in the hall, they milled around and talked about their summer adventures, they looked each other over, they overcame their egos and were kind. “Let’s go in,” Ketch said. “He’ll be here in a minute.” Rhoda went inside and found a seat in the middle of the room. He came and sat beside her and propped his legs on the rungs of an empty chair. She laid a notebook on the desktop and turned and smiled at him. Good, there wasn’t going to be any pretense. He wasn’t going to be coy.

Doctor Wheeler came into the room and sat down behind the desk and lit a cigarette. He adjusted his artificial leg so that it rested against one of the legs of the desk. He looked out across the thirty-two faces waiting to be filled. He took a drag on the Camel and began. “We will begin with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is Stephen’s story, the young Stephen who later will be the lover in Ulysses, and Leopold’s foil. His name is Stephen Daedalus. ‘The archaic Greek mind ascribed all things cunningly wrought, whether a belt with a busy design, the rigging of a ship, or an extensive palace, to the art of the craftsman Daedalus, whose name first appears in the Iliad. Homer, describing the shield Hephaistos makes for Achilles, says that the dancing floor depicted on it was as elaborate as that which Daedalus designed for Ariadne in Crete. This dancing floor is perhaps what Homer understood the Labyrinth to be. Joyce did, for the ground on which he places all his figures is clearly meant to be a labyrinth.’ This from Guy Davenport. The book’s on the desk. You can look at it when we take a break.

“Now, you won’t have to wander into that labyrinth so soon in the fall. Read the first two hundred pages of the Portrait for next week. How many of you have a copy already?” He waited while fifteen or twenty students held up their hands.

“Good. How many have it with you?” The same twenty or so held up their hands. Ketch and Rhoda were among these good students.

“Fine; and here are seven or eight copies I brought along from the library. The rest of you can share them.” He sat back. Nodded his head. Rhoda opened her fresh new copy of the book and beside her Ketch opened his. “What are you doing after class?” he asked. “Let’s go and have a glass of wine.”

“Fine. I’d love it. We can go to my house. I have some wine I brought back from New Orleans. Better than anything you can get around here.” She smiled and looked him in the eye. Good, better, best, no hesitation, no fooling around or wasting time. She scooted her chair an infinitesimal bit closer to his.

“Take the role of Aristotle,” Doctor Wheeler was saying. “He plays in the minds of the characters. He appears over and over. Stephen Daedalus in ‘Proteus’ is conversant with Aristotle and ponders and tests his ideas. Bloom in ‘Lestrogonians’ is interested, perhaps unwittingly, in many of the same matters that interested Aristotle, and Molly knows or probably cares so little about him that she turns his name into Aristocrat. Many streams like this flow between the minds of the characters. You can get an A in here if you find one I haven’t seen. . . .”

Ketch looked at Rhoda. Watched as her dress slid up her silk stockings when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. He sighed. She turned her head and acknowledged it.

They left the building by the wide front door and walked out onto the main street of the campus. “I wish we could walk,” she said. “It’s such a pretty night. It’s only a few blocks to my house. Want to leave the cars and walk?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“We can walk home through the old cemetery on Spring Street. Have you ever been there?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

“It’s nice. The old families that built the town are buried there. I used to go up there with a photographer friend of mine and try to make art photos.” She shifted her notebook and bag to her other arm and began to walk briskly down the street. “What do you think? Do you think it’s going to be good? I think he’s a genius. I love to watch him smoke. Sometimes he has two cigarettes going at once.”

“I need the credits. I want to get out of here as soon as I can. All I want is a novel and an MFA and I’m gone. I’ve got to earn a living.”

“I don’t have to worry about that right now. We can go up there and take the path through the cemetery if you want. Are you ready?” She was walking very fast, and he quickened his pace and caught up with her. They went up a gravel road and came out at the top of a small old cemetery with huge maple trees hiding the sky and walked in darkness past the massive tombstones. “This will put it in perspective, won’t it,” Rhoda dropped the notebook and the bag on the ground and let him kiss her. Then she took his arm and they walked more slowly down the hill and across the street to her apartment building.

They opened wine and lit candles and then Rhoda went into her bedroom and put on a long blue silk kimono and they took the wine into the bedroom and made love with the window open and the thin moon, now brilliant in a cloudless sky, making their skin luminous and white. They made love out of curiosity and greed, without passion or tenderness or joy. They made love to prove they were mean enough to do it. When it was over he got up and put on his clothes and went home to his wife.

It became a ritual. They went to the Joyce class and listened to Doctor Wheeler explicate the material which they usually had not read, since the semester had heated up and they were busy writing and exploring the world. Rhoda would read the assignment in the car as she drove to class, get there half an hour early, take a seat and read very fast until Doctor Wheeler came in the door. When she met him on the campus she would tell him about it. “I’m behind,” she would say. “But your lectures are brilliant. I want to hear them.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he would answer. “Just read as much as you can.”

And every Wednesday night after class Rhoda and Ketch would go to her apartment and make love and drink wine and talk about their work and where they were submitting it and what had been accepted where. As the semester wore on they became thinner and meaner. The anxiety of writing and not being published began to wear on them.

“I’m writing a short story,” she told him one night. “I know it won’t be any good. I’m just writing it to please Randolph. He said I have to write one to get an MFA.”

“Oh, what’s it about?” Ketch sat up. This wasn’t right. She was a poet. He was a fiction writer. On this basis they fucked each other. No, it wasn’t right. “I wouldn’t waste my time on that if I was you,” he said. “You’re publishing poems. Fuck Randolph.”

“Well, I just want to try. It’s pretty funny really. It’s set in New Orleans.”

“Oh.”

“Well, that’s where I live. Where else would it be set?”

“I’d like to see it when it’s finished.”

“Sure. It would be nice if you’d read it.” But Rhoda had seen the jealousy. She knew she would never show him a line she wrote after that. Fuck him, she was thinking. His stories aren’t that good. They’re too violent. No one’s ever going to want to read them.

In the middle of November they had come to the “Sirens” in Ulysses. “A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the gold pinnacled hair. A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille. Trilling, trilling; Idolores. . . .” Rhoda’s plans had changed. She was going to have to go home to New Orleans and finish the semester by correspondence. Her youngest son was in trouble and her husband had demanded she return. She was glad to go. She was bored with being a graduate student in a writing program and living in an apartment and doing her own laundry. She was tired of going to classes and writing papers and waiting for her poetry to be published. She was bored with fucking Ketch on Wednesday nights. It was so cold, so pointless, so rude. The week before she had been menstruating, bleeding like a stuck pig from her Lippes Loop. They had gotten drunk and made love anyway. In the morning there was blood everywhere, on the carpet, on the sofa, on the lining of her blue silk kimono. She never threw the kimono away. After being cleaned six times it still showed the bloodstains on the hem. She kept it anyway, out of some sort of abandoned rebellion, to remember how bad she had been and how free.

“This is a fugue,” Doctor Wheeler was saying. “The sirens sit on a meadow on the bones of sailors. The music is a flight of song. The barmaids are the sirens. Twin sirens, they sing and dance and draw the sailors in. It is one of the most intense parts of the book. Joyce believed he should leave behind him a burnt-out field. . . .”

“I have to go home Friday,” Rhoda was whispering. “For good. To see about my son.”

“This Friday?”

“As soon as class is out. He’s making bad grades, driving my husband crazy. He’s sixteen. I shouldn’t have left him to begin with.”

“What about your classes? How can you leave?”

“I’ll do them by mail. Everyone is going to let me. Well, I haven’t asked him yet.” She looked toward Doctor Wheeler, who was lighting one Camel from another. He was leaned over his desk, his artificial leg propped against the desk leg, papers spread out before him on the desk.

“He’ll let you. He’s crazy about you.”

“Joyce’s mother was a pianist,” Doctor Wheeler was saying. “His father was a tenor. Joyce himself was both a pianist and a tenor. Everywhere in this chapter, which is a small inset in ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ of course, are references to preludes, overtures, fugues. Fugue means flight, by the way. Pound disapproved of this episode, wanted it out of the manuscript, but Joyce insisted on it. As the sailors are taken in by the sirens, likewise the sirens are enchanted by the sailors’ voices. It is like a prelude stuck in the middle of ‘Scylla and Charybdis.’ There are so many nice touches. The piano brings in Bloom, for example. In music you can play two themes at once, of course. And everywhere is blue and white, the Virgin’s colors. . . .”

“My short story was accepted by Intro,” she said. “So that’s nice. I didn’t tell you that, did I?”

“What?”

“Randolph sent it to Intro and they took it. It’s going to be the lead piece.”

“Intro?”

“What’s wrong?”

“We better be quiet.”

She watched him seethe. Intro was the epitome for a writer in a writing program in 1976. It was the springboard. New York agents read it. Intro could be the start of a real career. Ketch had five stories on his desk right now that had been turned down by Intro.

“This is a song from an opera,” Doctor Wheeler was saying. “Oh, my Delores. Later they will toast the thirty-two counties of Ireland. Joyce hated Rome and thought it inhospitable. Rift in the lute. Well, it’s getting late. Be sure and get up to page four hundred for next week.” He stood up, began to gather his papers, laid a cigarette down on the edge of the desk where it teetered precariously, messily smoking. Rhoda went up to him and began to have a conversation about her leaving and he shook his head from side to side and up and down and agreed that she should go home and take care of her son. “I’ll miss you,” he said. “I was looking forward to your paper.”

“Oh, I’ll write it. I can’t wait to write it. I can’t tell you how much I’ve loved this. I’ll always feel like something passionate and critical was interrupted in my life. Something important.” She looked into his thin sweet face, his clear good face. Ketch was behind her, standing near the door. The other students were gone. There were only the three of them. I want to follow you home, she felt like saying. I want to sit up all night and talk to you.

Ulysses had himself tied to the mast not to miss their singing, Doctor Wheeler was thinking. Sound of the sirens, sound of the sea.

“Mail it to me when you write it,” he said. “What episode would you like?”

“Oh, ‘Penelope.’”

“Of course. You’ve finished the book then?”

“No. I’ve always known it. I had a recording of it by Siobhan McKenna when I was young. I may know it by heart.”

“Then do that. I’ll look forward to reading it.” He waited.

“Come on,” Ketch said. “We better go.”

They went out the door and down the long hall and the marble stairs and out into the parking lot. “Let’s walk to my house,” she said. “For old times’ sake and go up to the cemetery. I can walk to school tomorrow. I like to.”

“Okay. If you like.” They began to walk down the sidewalk in the direction of the gravel road behind the buildings. It was a cloudy night. A waning moon rode the spaces between the clouds. It was cool but not too cold. Ten o’clock on a Wednesday night. The campus was deserted. They walked without talking up to the cemetery and stopped under a maple tree by a large granite tombstone with a kneeling angel and lay down upon the grave, upon his coat, and fucked each other without mercy.

When it was over he got up and buttoned his pants and stood leaning on the tombstone waiting while she stood up and shook off his coat and gave it back to him. He put it on. She took his arm and they walked down the hill to her apartment.

“Why does this remind me of the poets versus the fiction writers baseball game?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Well, I’ve got to be going now. Joanne’s waiting for me.” He left her then and she went inside and sat down at her typewriter and went back to work on a poem she had started that morning.

At any moment you may meet the child you were

There, by the Sweet Olive tree.

If you turn the corner by the faucet

He will come around the other way

Carrying your old sandbucket

And your shovel

You may notice the displeasure in his eyes,

A sidelong glance, then he’ll be gone,

Leaving you holding your umbrella

With a puzzled look, while the spring day

Drops like a curtain between the clocks

And the dialogue you rely on stops.

Doctor Wheeler walked up the dark steps to his house. His cats were waiting beside the door. “Darlings,” he cooed. “Simonedes. Dave. Well, wait a second. Let me find the key.” He laid his papers on the wooden porch floor, found the key in the pocket of his jacket, turned it in the latch, and went into the darkened room. The cats followed him. He walked back out onto the porch to collect his papers. Above the house the maple trees stood guard. Doctor Wheeler knew them in every weather. Had seen them bent double by wind. Had known them in lightning, rain, snow, or when fall turned them saffron and gold, as they had been only a week ago. They were fading now. Winter was coming on.

He went back into the house and lit the fire and fed the cats and sat down in his armchair. Homer was on the table by the chair. He picked up the book and held it to his chest, patting it as though it were a child. Finally, when he had almost fallen asleep, he reached up above him and turned on a lamp and opened the book at random.

The old nurse went upstairs exalting,

with knees toiling, and patter of slapping feet,

to tell the mistress of her lord’s return,

and cried out by the lady’s pillow;

“Wake,

wake up, dear child! Penelope, come down,

see with your own eyes what all these years you longed for!

Odysseus is here! Oh, in the end he came!

And he has killed your suitors, killed them all

who made his house a bordel and ate his cattle

and raised their hands against his son!”

He closed the book and pressed it back into his chest. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a crumpled package of cigarettes and turned off the lamp and lit the cigarette and sat in the dark looking into the fire and smoking.