Month: February 2016

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS ABOUT SCALIA

Standard
IMG_1803

Illustration by Tom Bachtell for The New Yorker, February 29, 2016

This week’s issue of The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town” section opens with a stunning comment on the passing of the late Justice Antonin Scalia by Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer, frequent contributor and author of several books on legal issues.  It stuns in the clarity with which it sums up Scalia’s work on the United States Supreme Court. I have not yet read anything like it, and what Toobin writes needs to be said.

It’s all very well not to speak ill of the dead.  But there’s an important difference between not speaking ill and stating the facts.  Now that the time for obsequies and personal encomiums to the late Justice’s wit, love of opera and dedication to his job has passed, it’s time to state plainly what he tried to accomplish during his many years on our country’s highest bench and how nearly he succeeded.

When I was in law school, we used to joke in Constitutional Law classes that the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.  Humorous, but true. With the passing of Justice Scalia, we’re at a hugely important tipping point for our country.  Whether or not our obstructionist Republican-majority Senate succeeds in blocking hearings on the President’s nomination for his replacement, it’s reasonably certain these obstructionist senators are fighting a losing battle.  Here’s Toobin on the subject. (I’ve omitted some of it, for which you’ll have to go to The New Yorker itself. But this is the gist.) He says it much better than I could.

 

LOOKING BACK

by

Jeffrey Toobin

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past. He pioneered “originalism,” a theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners, who ratified it in the late eighteenth century…. [He] spent thousands of words plumbing the psyches of the Framers, to conclude (wrongly, as John Paul Stevens pointed out in his dissent) that they had meant that individuals, not just members of “well-regulated” state militias, had the right to own handguns. Even Scalia’s ideological allies recognized the folly of trying to divine the “intent” of the authors of the Constitution concerning questions that those bewigged worthies could never have anticipated. During the oral argument of a challenge to a California law that required, among other things, warning labels on violent video games, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted Scalia’s harangue of a lawyer by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”

Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama’s climate-change regulations. Scalia’s reputation, like the Supreme Court’s, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was “Get over it.”

Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought. That bubble also helps explain the Republican response to the new vacancy on the Court. Within hours of Scalia’s death, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that the Senate will refuse even to allow a vote on Obama’s nominee, regardless of who he or she turns out to be. Though other Republican senators have indicated that they might be a little more flexible, at least on hearing out a nominee, the chances of a confirmation before the end of Obama’s term appear to be close to nil.

This Republican intransigence is a sign of panic, not of power. The Court now consists of four liberals (Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) and three hard-core conservatives (Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Alito), plus Anthony Kennedy, who usually but not always sides with the conservatives. With Scalia’s death, there is a realistic possibility of a liberal majority for the first time in two generations, since the last days of the Warren Court. A Democratic victory in November will all but assure this transformation. Republicans are heading to the barricades; Democrats were apparently too blindsided to recognize good news when they got it.

…. Scalia won a great deal more than he lost, and he and his allies succeeded in transforming American politics into a cash bazaar, with seats all but put up for bidding. But even though Scalia led a conservative majority on the Court for virtually his entire tenure, he never achieved his fondest hopes—thanks first to O’Connor and then to Kennedy. Roe v. Wade endures. Affirmative action survives. Obamacare lives. Gay rights are ascendant; the death penalty is not. (These positions are contingent, of course, and cases this year may weaken the Court’s resolve.) For all that Presidents shape the Court, the Justices rarely stray too far from public opinion. And, on the social issues where the Court has the final word, the real problem for Scalia’s heirs is that they are out of step with the rest of the nation. The public wants diversity, not intolerance; more marriages and fewer executions; less money in politics, not more. Justice Scalia’s views—passionately felt and pungently expressed though they were—now seem like so many boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

© The New Yorker 2016

REALLY DUMB STORY MAKES SENIOR CITIZENS SOB

Standard

So here’s the story.  (Think early eighteenth century France, big pouffy dresses for the ladies, tight britches for the guys.) In a tavern in Amiens, where carriages change horses, young people are singing and laughing and gambling and drinking.  Enter a party of three:  beautiful young woman of eighteen, destined for the nunnery; her brother (or cousin, depending on whose translation of the libretto you go with), escorting her there at the behest of their father; and rich lustful old geezer (who just happened to share the carriage and immediately hankers for beautiful young woman).

Handsome impoverished (but well born and well dressed) student, name of Des Grieux, disporting himself with friends, spies beautiful young woman and falls instantly in love. “Your name?” he inquires. “Manon Lescaut, mi chiamo,” she replies in Italian, because (despite eighteenth-century France) this is a Puccini opera — with typically glorious Puccini music to less glorious tinkering by Puccini himself with the already somewhat silly story by Abbe Prevost on which the libretto is based.

Meanwhile, lustful old geezer has secretly paid tavern keeper for a swift carriage to Paris for a man and woman.  (No names are mentioned.) He is thinking himself and Manon, whom he plans to abduct. However, he is overheard by a friend of Des Grieux, who promptly informs Des Grieux of the availability of this free transportation.  Des Grieux invites beautiful young Manon to run away with him to Paris. She demurs, but without real conviction.  He tries again.  As between the nunnery and a handsome (though poor) young man of good birth who she’s just met, what do you suppose she chooses this time?  And off they go. End of Act I.

Puccini decided to skip the short period of impecunious happiness shared by the hapless lovers in favor of opening Act II in the luxurious bedroom of lustful old geezer. We learn that between acts, Manon soon tired of Parisian happiness without money and has run off, without a word to Des Grieux, to place herself under the geezer’s “protection.” Now she has gorgeous gowns, a fortune in glittering jewelry, servants galore, but life feels cold without love. After she has sung about that, Des Grieux bursts in. Manon’s brother (or cousin) has tipped him off as to her whereabouts. He is understandably wounded by her preference for worldly wealth.  She assures him she really loves only him, despite the near-irresistible appeal of bling.  They blend their voices in a practically orgasmic duet.  (You can hear it on YouTube, sung by a young passionate Placido Domingo and Renata Scotto, not really able to pass for eighteen any longer but a great singer.)  Lustful old geezer find them together and rushes off for the police. Des Grieux urges Manon to flee with him; she agrees but wastes too much time gathering up her jewels, and is arrested for prostitution — lustful old geezer’s revenge. She is hauled off to jail, to await deportation with other prostitutes to New Orleans.

I will make haste now.  In Act III, we are first at the jail and then at Le Havre, where the police are loading prostitutes one by one onto a transatlantic sailing ship.  When they call Manon’s name and she emerges, still in her expensive pouffy gown, there are gasps from the crowd at her beauty.  Someone explains she was “seduced.” Poverina!  Des Grieux, who has followed Manon, hoping to protect her, can’t stand the idea of never seeing her again and persuades the captain to take him on as cabin boy so that he can sail to America to be with her.

Act IV is just the lovers, alone in the desert outside New Orleans. (Puccini and his four other librettists had a shaky grasp of Louisiana geography.)  They have left New Orleans, where things were difficult for them, to reach a British colony. Don’t ask why. Alas, they didn’t think to bring water with them. Their clothes are in tatters. Manon is fading fast and cannot go farther. She collapses, perhaps of thirst, and urges Des Grieux to leave her while he tries to find help.  He  does go, but returns, unsuccessful.  While he is gone, she regrets her past at some length (despite the thirst). On his return, they sing of their love for each other. You might say it has taken the whole opera to get us to this point, but oh, is it ever worth it!  She sings she doesn’t want to die, he sings he doesn’t want to lose her, their voices blend, she sings there isn’t much time left so he should kiss her, he sings and does kiss her, their lips meet, she yields to death and expires in his arms, he falls upon her body with strangled sobs.

Last Saturday morning, I sat with twenty-three other people sixty and older at a three-hour presentation of all this, with lecture and projections of past performances recorded on DVD.  The presentation was provided by Westminster Choir College in preparation for a trip to New York next Saturday to see a live Met production of Manon Lescaut.  Although we had all been gently chuckling at the absurdities of the plot as it unravelled, by the time the lecturer turned up the lights at the end of Act IV there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, and some of us actually had tears running down our cheeks.

People who don’t like opera don’t seem to understand what it can do for us. Yes, the plots are usually silly.  Yes, it may be an acquired taste. But without pontificating about its power to move us deeply with heart-rending music and fine anguished voices despite story lines that test the limits of belief, I would just ask a few questions about the cathartic power of Manon Lescaut in that roomful of senior citizens last Saturday.  Even when our meaningful world begins to shrink, sometimes (as in the opera) only to you and one other person, who really wants to die?  Who wants to lose a beloved partner? Who are our tears really for?

CHEERY POST

Standard

Perhaps it’s time for something a bit lighter, after the gloom my last piece seems to have engendered in everyone.  (I won’t even summarize what it was about: too much of a downer.  If you’re curious or have already forgot, go read, or reread, it.)

Since it’s too cold for oldies like me to seek much cheer outdoors, let’s try to brighten the day with something indoors.  Furniture, for instance.  My general rule, now there’s no more earned income, is not to buy any.  What we already have is enough. Bill’s general rule, given my general rule, is to cut out pictures of stuff he really likes and squirrel them away in notebooks, where they can be found without too much effort in case of need.

Need?  Yes, occasionally something falls apart.  Some of the pieces I brought to our menage are even older than I am.  When we married, my second husband and I acquired most of our bedroom furniture from used dealers in small towns north of New York at a time when Victorian stripped oak was big.  (And also cheap. It came from the homes of the deceased just across the Canadian border  where it was acquired “for a song.” Even after the labor of stripping away the dark patina of age and restoring the wood’s natural color, it came within our very modest budget.)  Thus, my share of this furniture, when we divided it up at the time of our divorce, included a stripped oak bureau with mirror:

IMG_0282

Bill is a modernist.  His tastes run to expensive Italian designer furniture, chairs from Knoll, gadgets from MoMa (the Museum of Modern Art).  He has had his way with our living room and some of the family room, while we still had a little discretionary money to accommodate his desires.  He is also patient.  He waits.  And sometimes he is rewarded.  Four months ago, the whole top part of my bureau, the part supporting the mirror, pulled away from the base and was found to be hanging by two loose nails. Since the years had already streaked the mirror with black blemishes, it didn’t seem worth it to call in a furniture restorer, especially as Bill sided with the Polish cleaning lady, who wanted us to get rid of the top of it before it collapsed on her.  With some difficulty, we smuggled it out of the house and out to the curb in three big black garbage bags.  (Just in case our condo association might consider it didn’t qualify as collectible refuse, if left there in its uncovered state.)

There is another mirror on the other side of the bedroom, hanging on the wall. It’s full length. (This one dates from the time when it seemed important that I not go off to work with my slip showing — a time when there were such things as slips. )  But it has no table near it.  I can’t use it for hair, or makeup, or deciding which earrings to wear.  (The earrings, and other jewelry, are in the wooden box on the right side of the bureau.)

Bill to the rescue!  Whenever he does this to me, presenting something to buy that would never have crossed my mind otherwise, my knee-jerk reaction is “No!” (A little peek into why other people sometimes think we’re so “cute” together.  Ying and yang all the way.)  I will spare you the details of our interpersonal colloquies concerning the acquisition of the new mirror Bill had already picked out before there was a need.  It took me three months of automatically looking at the blank space above the bureau and not seeing any reflection at all, three months of scouring the internet for something attractive to me that didn’t cost north of $500, three months of measuring and imagining what something would look like above my bureau that I had never before imagined, because it wasn’t Victorian and didn’t “go” — until I decided life was too short and even if it was a big mistake, so what?

And you know, it wasn’t. Big, yes; mistake, no.  A huge orangey-red mirror in the bedroom?  Hey, why not? It sure cheers up the morning, and the evening, and bedtime. What else really matters?

IMG_1789

 

SCARY

Standard

Although most of us nearing old old age don’t often talk about it, even to each other, it’s a time of life that necessarily brings thoughts of what could come next.  As prepared as we may feel ourselves to be, both emotionally and practically — such thoughts begin to impinge more and more frequently on our consciousness because of what we see happening to our contemporaries.

“I just never thought this would happen,” exclaims a woman I know.  She is two years older than I am, with a husband nearing ninety, and two sons in their fifties not living in Princeton or anywhere near it who have children of their own still to educate.  Both she and her husband had been professionals throughout their working lives and seemed to me somewhat better fixed than Bill and I are.  When I met her about five years ago in a reading group, they were living in a free standing, well furnished house with three bedrooms, a study and a finished basement, as well as the requisite living and dining rooms and three full bathrooms.  The house had an attached two-car garage for their two cars and was beautifully landscaped by the condo association to which they belonged.

But she was already losing her vision to macular degeneration that didn’t respond to drops. Soon after we met, she became legally blind and could no longer drive.  They struggled on for about a year with the husband driving wherever they needed to go. Eventually, however, they had to move to a retirement community that provides transportation to doctors, hospitals, supermarkets, shopping centers and, on notice, elsewhere in town.  This was a huge downsizing — to a one bedroom apartment with den.

However, she adjusted.  The other residents were educated, many of them formerly affiliated with Princeton University, and there were activities within the main building to get her out of their small apartment and keep her occupied with lectures, movies (which she could still more or less see), and a small gym with physical trainer. As for reading, first she read with a magnifying glass, and then only books she could obtain on Kindle, where you can increase the type size to 16 or 18.  (It slowed down the reading, but she was determined.) Finally she needed a machine under which you slid the Kindle or iPad to magnify it still further.  She could no longer see well enough to review bills or write checks.  It became hard to communicate with her by email.

A year later, his emphysema took a turn for the worse and he was put on oxygen.  They gave up the remaining car to a grown granddaughter.  He was willing to use the oxygen at night when he slept, but not the portable one to move about the main building — which made it more and more difficult for him to reach the dining room.  He had to stop to catch his breath and rest on benches strategically placed along the corridors, sometimes falling asleep while he sat there.

One Sunday afternoon, when out to lunch with one of their sons, who was visiting, the wife tripped getting out of the car. She had a heart attack and a stroke which left her mind intact but resulted in a useless left arm and leg.  They took her to Philadelphia for cardiac surgery; she then went to a rehabilitation clinic where with hard work, she has managed to recover sufficient use of the left leg to walk slowly (although not too far) and to hang light bags on her left arm but not do much else with it.

She’s now back in their retirement community apartment.  Because of her incapacities, she has to have home help from 9 to 3 every day. It costs $25 an hour, or about $4,500 a month over and above all their other living expenses. After an initial period when it was covered, this cost has been coming out of pocket. Three months ago, her husband’s doctor put him under hospice care.  This means it was then thought he would not survive more than another six months.  Hospice pays for two hours a day of home care (as well as a visit every few days by a registered nurse).  However, his doctor believes he needs round-the-clock assistance, because he keeps trying to get up to reach the commode every other hour of the night and falls. His wife, obviously, can provide no physical help at all.  This means another sixteen hours of home care per day at $25 an hour.

She telephoned me in despair last week.  Money has been flying away at a frightening rate.  She’s had to authorize their broker to liquidate funds they never thought they’d need to touch for such a circumstance — including roll-over IRA funds that are taxed after being distributed (so you have to take out more than you need to keep the amount you want after paying taxes on the whole of the withdrawal).

And the scary part is that her husband is doing well!

“What does that mean?” I asked.  “He’s getting better?”

“No,” she said.  “But he’s stable.  His vital signs are strong.  He eats. His brain seems clear when he’s awake.  Three months of the six are gone, and he’s not any sicker.”

She means he’s probably not going to die in the predicted three months.  The round-the-clock care may go on, and on. She is looking into the possibility of saving some money by replacing the current system of hourly home care with a live-in person; it may be slightly cheaper, but not much. (Moreover, it might not work if he keeps waking so often at night; a single live-in person would get no sleep.) Bottom line: the longer he lives, the more his home care depletes their savings, and the less is left for her own survival afterwards.

Who ever thinks the time will come when you might have to worry someone with whom you’ve lived for sixty-four years won’t die before you run out of money?

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DON (A story) (2 of 2)

Standard

[….continued from previous post.]

Clara switched on the downstairs lights. “Stay and have another cup of coffee,” she urged. Florence didn’t mind if she did. They sat at the kitchen table to consider what had just transpired.

Florence was not the ideal partner for this kind of analysis. Her lack of interest in style and grooming blinded her to the wife’s shortcomings in dress and makeup. Worse, she didn’t find Couteau as attractive as Clara did; his unfavorable report on her work in the Shakespeare seminar had jeopardized her scholarship and she’d had to write two more long papers over the summer to get it reinstated, understandably weakening her susceptibility to his charms. “It can’t be easy being his wife,” she observed. “I bet he’s a difficult man to live with.” Also she didn’t think his drinking out of Clara’s glass was going to lead to anything. She agreed it wasn’t what the typical don would do with the typical donnee’s wine glass, and further agreed he likely found Clara attractive, especially in that sophisticated corduroy outfit, or he wouldn’t have done it. That said, she was inclined to view the sip of wine as an error of judgment.

Here, Clara had to concede, Florence was the expert. Sloven or no, she had lost her virginity to a much older man almost as soon as she’d arrived at college three years before. Clara’s knowledge of her deflowering hardly constituted a confidence; she’d told at least six other people, all of whom had thoroughly discussed it with one another. He’d done it on the floor of his 57th Street art gallery, beneath a Picasso, the Saturday she went to New York to apply for a weekend job. It turned out there was no job. Just instant mutual attraction and a long affair. Even now they still connected from time to time, if their respective schedules permitted. (She checked her diaphragm in a Grand Central locker whenever she went home on school breaks.) Clearly her views on Clara’s future with their mutual don were entitled to deference.

“Look,” she said, “it was only your glass. If he really wanted to go to bed with you, why didn’t he kiss the back of your neck, or put his arm around your waist, or his hand on your tit? He could have done any or all of that while the two of you were looking out that damn window for so long.”

“No, he couldn’t,” Clara insisted. “You were there.”

“He didn’t care about me being there or he wouldn’t have done the thing with the glass. Besides,” she added, “you didn’t exactly encourage him. If you wanted to make something of it, why didn’t you turn around? You just stood there, for God’s sake. He must have thought you’d report him if he went further!”

So now it was Clara’s fault. “You really think nothing more is going to happen?”

“Not before he gets back to school,” opined this woman of the world who owned a diaphragm. “What do you expect him to do? Write you incriminating love letters? Call you on the house phone and explain to someone else why he needs to speak to you?”

“Then what can I do?”

Florence was buttoning her coat to get back to her own off-campus house. Behind as usual, she needed the Thanksgiving break to catch up on assigned reading. “Invite him over to lunch next term, after he’s back. Make hamburgers or something. This is a neat house for stuff like that. You could even serve it in your room. And see what happens then.”

Clara paced restlessly after she had left. Did she really want to steal him away from the wife in socks and become the wife herself – stepmother to his unseen little girl and slavey in his kitchen? Not really. But the delicious unhappiness of an affair with a married faculty member who couldn’t resist her: how could she not yield? Was it too dangerous? Would it jeopardize her degree? What should she do? What could she do? If only it had been a regular don-donnee dinner, without any of these troubling problems! She wished she’d eaten more of the wife’s cooking.

Taking Florence’s advice, Clara invited Couteau to lunch a few days before spring break. He seemed surprised, but accepted. In town, she bought a pound of freshly ground round, lettuce, tomatoes, ketchup, and also a few hard rolls in case he needed bread. Everyone else in the house agreed to stay away for this momentous occasion. Clara cleared off her desk, borrowed a second desk chair from another room and laid out two place settings, napkins, salt and pepper, the ketchup bottle, a basket of the rolls and two glasses. Couteau arrived just as the two half-pound patties of ground round were nearing completion in the frying pan. (A half-pound was what Clara’s mother had always made for her father.) Clara slid the meat onto plates already decorated with lettuce and tomato slices, and led Couteau up the stairs, each of them carrying a plate and an eight-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola. When he saw they were to eat in her room he hesitated momentarily, but then courageously crossed the threshold. Clara left the door open, to reassure him. “Where is everybody?” he asked.

“Why, at lunch!” she laughed gaily.

It was an awkward meal. Clara asked if the meat was sufficiently well done. He said yes, it was very good but a lot of food. Flushing with embarrassment, Clara said she thought that was the amount men ate. (This did not explain why she too had half a pound on her plate.) He said he had a class to teach that afternoon and would fall asleep if he ate it all. Hurriedly, she changed the subject and asked about his wife, his child. He said they were fine. He asked what she thought she might want to do next year. If she were applying to graduate school, he’d be glad to write recommendations, her last paper was really remarkable. She said she was putting grad school on the back burner for a while to see what real life was like. He nodded, and pushed his plate away. Half the hamburger was still there. Clara had finished all hers. He didn’t drink from her glass. He didn’t drink from his own glass either. Maybe he didn’t like Coca-Cola? He thanked her for the home-cooked lunch and got up to go. “We’ll have to do this again,” Clara said. “When you have more time.”

“When do I have more time?” he asked pleasantly.

As soon as he was out the front door, she hurried back upstairs. Damn him. Had he forgotten Thanksgiving, the heavy breathing, the sip of wine? And if he was regretting all that, if he had realized in the interim that a love between them could only come to naught, why did he agree to come to lunch and put her to all this trouble? He hadn’t even offered to help take everything downstairs! Well, of course not, why would he? That slavey of a wife did everything for him. She poured ketchup on the remains of his ground round and ate it angrily before stacking the plates. She had to make two trips because she had no tray, and had just managed to finish cleaning everything up, including the greasy frying pan, when some of her housemates returned from their own lunch in the dining room. “How was it?” they asked, curiously. They didn’t know about the heavy breathing and sip of wine.

“I’m certainly not doing that again,” Clara said, loss and indigestion throbbing in her midsection.

“Bad, huh?”

“Pretty awful.” She laughed hollowly. “And I thought I was being so nice. It just goes to show….”

 

And then it was really over. Parents began arriving for the commencement dinner. They sat on folding chairs on the small lawn in front of Clara’s off-campus house and exchanged polite remarks while waiting for it to be dinnertime. Photos were snapped. Couteau came looking for Clara in the dining room. How gracious he was to her parents, whose conventional views of life he had worked so hard, with only partial success, to eradicate in Clara. Although he sat at their table through the appetizer and entrée, chatting lightly of this and that while she hoped for a private look in her direction, he excused himself before dessert to join Florence and her parents at another table.

Following dessert and coffee Clara’s parents left too – because, said her father, it was a long drive home and they would have to get up early for commencement at eleven. Dutifully she walked them to their new Pontiac and then hurried back to the dining room. By then the dinner was breaking up. Some of the other parents were now calling taxis to go into town for drinks with each other. Clara made her way around clusters of people she didn’t know, past deserted tables littered with dirty cups and crumpled napkins, looking for Florence and Couteau. “Oh, they’ve left,” someone told her. “Her parents weren’t able to come after all, so he took her into town to the Spoon.” The Greasy Spoon was a drinking hangout. Clara had never in all her four college years been there. He took her? On the very last evening they could ever have together? Sloppy disheveled her? She swiped the last four brownies from a tray near the kitchen, wrapped them in two napkins and took them back to her room, where she ate them methodically at the desk which was no longer her desk, brown crumbs falling on her new yellow cotton dress.

The next morning the sun shone. Alphabetically by last name, the graduates lined up in black caps and gowns rented for the occasion, to sit in the first two long rows of folding chairs arranged on the broad front lawn of the administration building. Florence was two seats away. Clara leaned over the girl between them and poked her. She turned. “What happened at the Spoon last night?” Clara whispered.

“Nothing,” Florence whispered back. “He drank a lot. He looked pretty drunk by the time the place closed.”

“And then?”

“What then? I went back to my room.”

“And him?”

“He went home. At least he said he was going to.”

The girl sitting patiently between them suddenly made shushing noises. The faculty, also in caps and gowns, were filing solemnly out of the building to sit on a dais set up on the front portico. Ah, there was the college president, followed by the dean. Clara tried to make out Couteau under one of the black caps. Sour brownie rose up in her mouth, the taste of failure and gastric reflux. She swallowed hard and choked everything down, stomach acid burning her throat. A name was called, a diploma presented, hands shaken. She heard clapping from parents, families and friends of others coming from the seats on the grass in the rows and rows behind her. Another name. And another. The clapping grew slightly less enthusiastic. Too many names. It seemed to go very fast all the same. Soon she tensed. There. Her name. Up she went. Diploma. Handshake. A scattering of claps.

Afterwards there was some milling around, but everyone was anxious to get on the road. Couteau approached. Stay in touch, he said. She nodded. He walked away, out of her life. A few of the others from her senior house waved to her. Goodbye, goodbye. Stay in touch. She nodded again. You too. It was hard to say more without crying.

 

Clara kept the Neilson and Hill, but although Couteau had covered only eight of the plays in class, she never again opened it to read another. At first she feared she wouldn’t be able to duplicate her interpretive success with All’s Well That Ends Well. Later, dipping into Shakespeare slipped further and further down her to-do list. But when she was sixty, her two children grown and gone from the nest, her career as a patent lawyer settling into four unpressured days a week at a small boutique firm, she began to look back at her life and it crossed her mind she’d like to see Couteau again before he died.

Having obtained his present address and telephone number from the college and made arrangements for a visit, she discovered he now lived in a modest two-story house at the top of a very steep hill in Kerhonkson, a small town in the Catskills. Margaret Couteau opened the door with a warm smile. “He’ll be so glad you came,” she said. Although quite wrinkled, she otherwise hadn’t changed much, except for white hair and the extremely thick cataract lenses in her glasses that enormously enlarged her eyes.

Couteau, heavier and looking much older than his wife, sat hunched sourly in an easy chair before a television news channel with the volume turned up high.  Two canes leaned against the chair. He made no effort to get up, but did switch off the television with a remote. Then he stared at Clara for a moment, as if unsure of who she was, before extending a cold gnarled hand.

“His arthritis is very bad,” explained Margaret.

“Hello, Charles,” said Clara, as cheerfully as she could. “You do remember me, don’t you? Clara? From the class of ’52?

He continued to stare. “I remember you used to be angular and sharp,” he snapped suddenly. “What happened?”

Clara said nothing. It had been forty years. I was only angular and sharp for about two weeks as an entering freshman, she thought. Is it my mind he’s remembering?

“Margaret says you’re some kind of big shot lawyer now. So you sold out too.  Like most of the others.”

They had lunch in the adjoining kitchen. He needed the two canes to maneuver himself to the table. It was fillet of sole, peas and carrots. Clara noticed Margaret had actually shelled fresh peas and scraped fresh carrots. Couteau complained the carrots weren’t sweet enough. Clara had brought a good Bordeaux and the most expensive single malt Scotch she could find in her local liquor store. He nodded when Margaret showed him the bottles, but otherwise took no notice. When he had finished eating, he rose with help and stumbled painfully away for a nap on a sleeper sofa in the living room. “He can’t get up the stairs anymore,” explained Margaret when he was out of earshot. “He has to live down here now. We put in a downstairs bathroom.”

Clara helped her clear, wash up and dry. There was no dishwasher. Then they sat down at the kitchen table again. “This must be very hard for you,” said Clara. “Alone here at the top of a mountain. How do you manage?”

It seems Margaret did all the driving up and down – to get groceries, reach the drugstore, fill the tank of their fifteen-year-old Buick. Genevieve, the daughter, lived with another lesbian woman in Western Massachusetts. She did speak with her mother every week, so there was that. “But Charles is very disappointed Genevieve turned out the way she did,” said Margaret. “He feels it was some kind of failure. Unnatural, he calls it. He doesn’t want to talk to her when she calls.”

“How can that be?” exclaimed Clara. “His views about how to live were so liberating!”

“I don’t know about that,” said Margaret. “Charles was always quite a conventional man. He even made me stop working after we married. He didn’t think a wife should go out to earn money. You can see where that landed us.”  Then she noticed the expression on Clara’s face. “He did talk a good game, though,” she added kindly. “You weren’t the only student who found him inspiring.”

“You’ve got to get off this hill,” said Clara. “How much longer can you go on like this?” She wasn’t just thinking of the cataracts.

“Tell that to Charles.”

Couteau woke up in time to see Clara leave. He appeared somewhat anxious for her to be out of the house so he could turn on the television again. There was a program he wanted to watch. Only Margaret seemed sad to see her go. Before she came, Clara had imagined she might make a little joke about that sip of wine on Thanksgiving Day so long ago. All things considered, it was just as well she hadn’t.

 

 

THE DON (A Story) (1 of 2)

Standard

[This story continues in the following post. Ideally, it should be read in one gulp. But a 5,000+ word post  might be pushing my luck.]

Professor Charles Couteau taught the full year Shakespeare seminar at the small experimental college Clara attended. It was tough to get in – especially as he hand-picked the lucky twelve or thirteen juniors and seniors who made it. However, Clara had never worried. As a freshman, she’d done extremely well in his Exploratory Literature course, which he informally called “Meeting the Serpent.” That in itself, she felt, made her a sure thing for the Shakespeare. In fact, she had sobbed in vexation when he refused to let her into it as a sophomore. To ease the year of separation until she became eligible as a junior, she asked him to be her don, a sort of in loco parentis figure established by the college to meet with each student for half an hour or so every other week and keep an eye on how things were going. He seemed pleased at the invitation. Her heart did a little flip-flop of happiness when he accepted.

Judging by the dates of his degrees from Columbia listed in the college catalogue, Couteau was about twenty years older than Clara. He was tall, broad-shouldered, had brush-cut red hair and blue-green eyes, wore rimless glasses, and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes with a slightly shaky freckled hand, exhaling the smoke with audible force. Once he mentioned he had played college football. And he was knowledgeable about so much that wasn’t just literature. The week they discussed Malraux’s Man’s Fate (in translation), Clara confided to her journal she sometimes wished she could be crushed in Couteau’s tweedy arms. Unfortunately he was married, to a woman no student had ever seen on campus, and had a three-year-old daughter named Genevieve.

The Shakespeare, when she was finally allowed to register for it, was no walk in the park. It met once a week for an hour and a half around an oval table where, under Couteau’s Socratic guidance, Clara and ten other young women, smoking heavily, struggled for a whole academic year to identify and analyze the social and psychological underpinnings of the important plays. Although campus gossip had it Couteau was a Marxist, that did not seem relevant to his obfuscations. Instead, what slowly filled the margins of Clara’s heavy Neilson and Hill Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare were despairing pencilled notes about the terms of the culture and dichotomy. She scribbled comments about the impossibility of the human. Many years later, opening the Neilson and Hill, she would also find, in her own college handwriting: Hamlet ½ god, ½ man; Claudius ½ man, ½ fiend; Laertes ½ god, ½ fiend – and even then would have no idea what that had meant. Disjointed notes at the bottom of the last page of The Tempest read: Prospero induces freedom by being conscious of the human limitation. Exists only in relationships with other men. Absolute freedom not freedom. Personal immediate sense of love childish. Why had she written this? Because they were Couteau’s words, as nearly as she could reproduce them.

The less she was able to grasp what Couteau’s perceptions had to do with the stories so familiar to her since childhood from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, the more she admired him. During one of their don-donnee conferences, she declared he should write a book. He smiled his adorable crooked smile. He had begun several times, he admitted. Then life intervened. The unfinished pages were in a drawer.

“Life?” asked Clara.

“Genevieve,” he replied.

Clara became bolder: “Lots of writers have babies. Your wife should encourage you! Doesn’t she understand how much you have to offer?”

The blue-green eyes looked deep into hers for a glorious moment. Then he asked how her term paper on Othello was coming along.

Clara was a fluent writer, but when she finally managed to disgorge the Othello paper just before Christmas it was apparently a disappointment. Couteau returned it with only two “Good!”s in the margins and many more “Develop!”s. Worse, there was no appreciative comment at the top, where at more conventional colleges, a grade might have appeared. She must have not yet sufficiently internalized his analytic vocabulary. As if to punish herself for this failure of devotion, she broke up with her long-time boyfriend during the holiday vacation. Till recently he had been enrolled at a university a safe half-continent away; now finally graduated, he was back in the East demanding payback for his two years of patient fidelity. Compared to Couteau, his personal immediate sense of love was so childish! She therefore had no dates at all during the whole ten days, not even on New Year’s Eve, which made it a relief to return in January to the thickets of iambic pentameter awaiting her in Neilson and Hill.

Couteau had news: he had bought a Victorian house in Bedford. It cost a pretty penny, and was mortgaged to the hilt, but it sat on four acres of land! His domain! He was practically chortling. They’d be moving in over the summer, after certain necessary repairs had been made. Then he’d have the whole following semester to settle in: he was taking a one-term sabbatical.

Her senior year, and he would be away for half of it! “Doesn’t all this lord of the manor stuff undercut your values?” Clara inquired acidly. An apartment dweller all her life, she was unable to share his enthusiasm for wide open spaces.

“How is that?” he asked. “I love uncultivated land in its natural state. The more of it around me the better. Then no one can box me in.”

It’s possible that by May, Clara finally figured out what Couteau wanted to see in a Shakespeare term paper. It’s also possible that the intellectual dichotomy between glorying in ownership of four acres and a big old house on the one hand and, on the other hand, finding the terms of the culture in every Shakespeare play made it impossible to be fully human — had simply eviscerated Couteau’s interpretive standards. Whatever the reason, he could not have written a better comment about her second term paper, on All’s Well That Ends Well:

This is one of the smoothest and tightest jobs I have ever read. “Words and thought” do match, and “feeling,” form and content too. You have made it sound like a fascinating novelette, with no sacrifice of interpretation.

Congratulations! Publish it.

Oh joy! She read these intoxicating words at home, where he had mailed the paper after the school year was over. Of course, she wrote to thank him. He replied that she deserved it. He signed his note “Charles.”

In early November of Clara’s senior year, Couteau telephoned the college switchboard to invite her and his other senior donnee to his new house in Bedford for Thanksgiving. Apprehensively, Clara opened the closet in the off-campus house where she was now living and was glad to discover her green corduroy outfit with full skirt and paisley blouse still fit, sort of, although it had been bought three years before. She did have a few of the freshman fifteen remaining on her hips, and there was a little bulge in her stomach especially evident in profile. But after she moved the waistband hook as far as possible, the bulge was less noticeable. If she ate very little in the week left before Thanksgiving, perhaps it would disappear altogether.

Couteau was picking them up in his car because the trains from their college town to Bedford didn’t run often enough on holidays. Florence, the other donnee, showed up at Clara’s house at the appointed time. Clara knew her but not well; she was rather messy and disorganized. Her preparations for this special occasion seemed to have been minimal: she had unearthed a respectably clean skirt and shapeless sweater, bleached the dark hairs on her upper lip yellow, and applied an unbecomingly purple shade of lipstick. Clara said she looked nice. She said Clara looked elegant and no, not fat at all. Then there was honking from the street, so they bundled up, hurried out, and climbed into the back seat. All the way to Bedford Clara wished she had thought quickly enough to sit in front next to Couteau.

They hadn’t seen him since the end of May. He seemed another man now, relaxed and jovial, as if they hadn’t been his student donnees. While he drove, he told amusing stories about moving into the new house. Florence supplied most of the necessary “And then what?”s while Clara gazed at the back of his neck and tried to decide how she would feel if he fell in love with her. Maybe twenty years was too big an age difference. Although that was exactly what made it so exciting to contemplate.

Too soon they arrived. There was much wiping of feet on the doormat and taking off coats in the front hall. His thin wife came out to greet them, flushed from kitchen heat, carrying a wooden spoon and dressed in a shabby sweater and baggy skirt around which she had wrapped an apron with food stains on it. Margaret was her name. Clara had been speculating about this wife for over three years and was pleasantly gratified to see how far she had, in the words of the ladies’ magazines to which Clara’s mother subscribed, “let herself go.” She wore socks. She hadn’t shaved her legs. Had she cut her hair herself? And no makeup at all: how did she expect to keep him, such a robust man in the prime of life? Clara began to feel very attractive.

The wife returned to her kitchen; Clara and Florence were ushered into the living room. There Couteau poured red wine into three glasses waiting on a tray. No, Margaret would not be joining them; she was still attending to the turkey and and feeding their little girl in the kitchen. Would his little girl appear? Perhaps later, briefly. He didn’t believe small children should have a role at adult social gatherings. There was chat about the college; Couteau shared some confidences about inter-faculty politics. Clara sipped carefully. (How many calories in a glass of red wine?) They toured the ground floor of the house, glasses in hand, while Clara admired this and that because it was clear he was expecting it. The new house had very little furniture in it. Faculty salaries, he explained with a rueful grin. They returned to the living room to stand by a picture window with a panoramic view of his property.

Then it happened. He put his empty glass down on the mantelpiece and came behind Clara. She sensed him close, his body not quite touching hers but almost. He stood perfectly still. She stood perfectly still. She could hear his breathing, feel his exhalations on her neck. He said something about the trees in the distance. Mmm, she agreed, hardly daring to breathe herself. He reached for her glass, took it from her hand, sipped from it, and gave it back to her. He breathed heavily again, two or three times. She sipped from the glass too. From the same place his lips had been. Oh, oh, was she trembling? He mentioned something else about the trees. Was she supposed to turn around? If she did, her breasts would brush against him. Better not. Let him make the next move.

“Dinner must be nearly ready,” he said. “Let’s go find out.” He walked away. Clara looked at Florence. She had seen it all. But there was no time for discussion; dinner was indeed ready. Still shaking, Clara headed to the kitchen offering to help; the wife shooed her away. “No, no, you’re here as a guest,” she insisted. Clara did notice Couteau didn’t get up to help her carry the heavy platters laden with food from the kitchen, but decided it would have been awkward for him to serve his own students. The wife sat down to her own plate only when all the others had been served.

It was a huge, traditional Thanksgiving dinner, prepared from scratch. After turkey noodle soup, there were freshly baked Parker House rolls with pats of butter; salad with homemade “Russian” dressing; a large beautifully browned bird with chestnut stuffing and sherry gravy; candied sweet potatoes, creamed onions, buttered brussels sprouts; and for dessert two kinds of homemade pie – apple and pecan – with store-bought ice cream on top, followed by coffee and brandy. “This must have taken you days,” said Clara. The wife shrugged. “I like to cook. And now we’ll have enough leftovers for quite a while.”

“She is a good cook,” said Couteau.

How Clara would have loved to eat it all! But what if she were on the threshold of romance and might soon need to be naked with her lover? She sipped a little soup, avoiding the noodles, teased the lettuce out from under its generous layer of dressing, ate some sprouts and two thin slices of white meat without gravy, had one taste of the candied sweet potatoes and passed on everything else. Florence was stuffing herself like a pig. Clara had brought saccharin tablets to the table in her skirt pocket and surreptitiously dropped one into her coffee cup. She did permit herself real cream in the coffee because she didn’t want to make trouble by asking for milk. The wife rejected help with clearing, too. “It’s easier by myself,” she said. “I’m so glad you could come. It means a lot to him to be able to do this for his students.”

Suddenly the visit was over. If they left now, Couteau said, they could catch one of the few holiday trains back to the college. He hurried them into their coats and into his car. They reached the station just in time. No meaningful goodbyes. No tender pressure of the hand. “See you next semester,” he said cheerfully. “Be good.” A taxi was waiting at the college station. And then they were back at Clara’s off-campus doorstep. The house was dark. Everyone else was away.

Clara switched on the downstairs lights. “Stay and have another cup of coffee,” she urged. Florence didn’t mind if she did. They sat at the kitchen table to consider what had just transpired.

[To be continued…]

 

 

 

STUBBORN

Standard

IMG_1781

I suspect some not entirely desirable character traits must be genetic. They persist, despite one’s own good sense and determination to bring some moderation to their expression.  Being stubborn is one of mine.  I can’t trace it back very far, being the only child of immigrants.  But my mother was no pushover on any number of issues I would have preferred she be more compromising about when I was growing up. And if anyone said anything with which my father disagreed, don’t think he was willing to discuss it.  I can hear him now:  “I’ve got news for you, mister.”

[Then I married a man as stubborn as I was.  (Two such men, actually, but I only had children with the second one, so it’s him of whom I speak.) Our older son got it in spades. During his adolescence, our dinner table was often where rock met hard place while his father and brother rolled their eyes — me being the rock, he the hard place.  Although his children are still both under ten, I understand that even now neither of them is a piece of cake to persuade. But, like many old people, I digress….]

Getting old does soften you, though.  As your energy level drops, so does the number of things that seem worth taking a stand about.  You begin picking your battles. Why get all worked up about A or B or C and shorten your lifespan?  Which brings me to the real subject of this piece:  a world many of you have probably never heard of unless you’re an American or Canadian aspiring or established writer — the world of the “literary review.” Most, although not all, literary reviews are associated with universities or colleges, appear two or three times a year, can usually be found only in university or college libraries, and offer their select readers poems, short fiction, “literary” non-fiction, and sometimes reviews and/or art work.  They pay little or nothing, but they do offer the writer appearing in their pages publication credits that may open the door to the next publication credit. They are therefore deluged with thousands of unsolicited submissions, otherwise known (but only unofficially) as “the slush pile.”

When young, I always thought I was going to grow up to be a writer.  I grew up to be many things, and wear many hats, but “writer” wasn’t one of them, mostly because I also always seemed to need to be making pesky money. Then I retired from practicing law (the last of my serial paid professions) and had time and a new iMac desktop, and began to write short pieces of non-fiction, and guess where I sent them.  I would send them out two or three at a time, usually by snail mail because that’s what was then required, wait patiently to be rejected, and (because I was stubborn) try again.  And again. And again. This was between 2008 and 2012. Eventually, I had a file drawer full of form rejection slips, or printouts of email form rejections, and only one acceptance — from an online magazine of the arts for women over sixty.  So with the wisdom of age I stopped being stubborn about being printed in a literary review and began to blog instead.

An acquaintance with some experience of literary reviews has observed that each one is like a private club. You need to be a member or to know someone in order to be fished out of the slush pile and read by an editor. So when I met someone else who knew such a someone at one such prestigious literary review and the first someone offered to put in a word for me, I sighed and polished up a new piece to the first someone’s liking. Then the first someone put in his word, and the second someone (at the review) emailed the first someone that they’d be on the lookout for my new piece. And a month (instead of three months) later, I received an anonymous form rejection — not even from the second someone — by email.

The wisdom of age goes just so far. Then the old genes kick in again. The first someone’s second someone didn’t want it, didn’t think it was “right” for his prestigious little review that most people who aren’t writers have never heard of?  Well, I was going to show him! Borrowing a phrase from one of the dingbats seeking the Republican nomination (I forget which), I was going to “carpet-bomb” the literary review world with my piece!

And so, dear blog readers, I have just spent nearly all of the past four days compiling a list of sixty-seven literary reviews and then looking up each one on the internet. That was in order to determine whether they were still up and running (two or three had ceased to exist); whether they accepted electronic submissions (f**k mailing paper copies with cover letters and stamped self-addressed envelopes); whether they print non-fiction; whether they are reading in January and/February (some stopped in December, others won’t begin till April 1, or June 1); whether they accept simultaneous submissions or require you to wait around the five or six months while they consider what you’ve sent before submitting it somewhere else. When I had done all that, there were twenty-four functioning reviews remaining on my list with electronic submission portals still open (plus the one for women over sixty, which I’m saving for later). Some charged $3, but what the hell.  For each, I had to create and record a password, upload the piece, write something in the “comments” section of the submission form, and record what I’d done in a small notebook, so I would have a record of where I’d sent the piece in the extremely unlikely event I get a bite and have to notify all the others that I’m withdrawing the submission.

I know this is nuts, and nothing will come of it, and I shouldn’t have wasted the four days, but I loved the expression “carpet bomb” (as long as the “bombing” is harmless), and I don’t like being pushed around. If I get twenty-four rejections, at least no one can say I didn’t try. It’s not often a person with “old old” on the horizon gets to be so satisfyingly stubborn.  It feels really really good!