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Charles Rammelkamp |
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Super Sunday January - the month that began with bowl games - Orange, Sugar, Cotton, Rose - and ended with a bowl - Super. In Baltimore, everybody talked about the Ravens, last year's champs. Could they do it again? Would they make it into the playoffs? On the last day of the season, they limped in. How would they do against the Dolphins in Miami? A week of speculation amounted to a week of agony and anticipation. The team just didn't seem to have the same chemistry they did a year ago, everybody lamented. January was also the month of intensive mini-mester courses at the college, classes that met for four weeks, five days a week, six hours a day. The people who enrolled in these classes were usually trying to knock off a required course in as short a time as possible. They came to class like people going to work, carrying backpacks and briefcases, lunch bags, water bottles, cell phones, paperback novels, newspapers, steaming Styrofoam coffee mugs, bags with bagels, Danish, croissants. They came like they were settling in for the day, and they were. Roger Castleman had a January mini-mester English 102 class, Introduction to Literature, a week and a day, more or less, devoted to poetry, to drama and to fiction. No sooner were the students sitting with pens poised over notebooks than Castleman was telling them about the ten-page paper they had to turn in twenty-five days from then on some topic of poetry or fiction and the final exam they would take the same day, how they would develop an appreciation and an understanding of the various literary genres and traditions, and develop critical approaches to their analysis and explication. Privately, Castleman thought they'd have enough trouble just reading all the stuff he'd assigned, let alone write lengthy arguments about what they'd read and thought about. Castleman also had a poetry reading at a bar in New York scheduled for a Sunday in the middle of the month. It was something he'd been looking forward to for half a year, and it took more of his attention than the class did. Originally he'd set it up in June for October, but the bar was only a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center towers had stood, and the October reading had to be postponed. Always nervous about east coast blizzards, Castleman had only reluctantly agreed to the rescheduling. He was planning to take a train up and back the same day. It was costing him money to do the reading, but he thought of it as a little vacation. You always spend money when you go on a vacation. "Okay. 'To His Coy Mistress,' anyone?" Nervous silence reigned in the chilly classroom. Outside the bank of classroom windows, the sky was blue, the trees were bare, and the parking lot was full. The classrooms were jam-packed with people engaged in the complex activity known as "education." "Andrew Marvell lived in the Seventeenth Century. Almost nothing's known about him until he became the tutor of a Yorkshire nobleman's daughter at mid-century when he was about thirty years old. Most of his poems seem to have been written when he was in his early thirties. He was Milton's assistant for a while, and he served his hometown of Hull in Parliament for about twenty years, up until he died. "Marvell was a Metaphysical Poet. Metaphysical poems are brief, intense meditations, usually stating an argument about love or God or time or some heavy metaphysical abstraction. They're often witty, too, which you can see in 'To His Coy Mistress.' What's Marvell's argument here, in 'To His Coy Mistress?'" "Mister Castleman?" a girl in the third row raised her hand. Castleman looked down at the roster to pinpoint her name. Two days into the class and he was still having difficulty distinguishing one student from the other. "Sylvia?" "It's about love." Castleman waited for her to go on but when she didn't, he asked, "What about love?" "It's not easy to get or hang onto and when you have it, or have an opportunity to get it, then you should go for it." "Okay, yeah, sure, that's accurate. Anything else? Anybody else?" he looked up from Sylvia to see if anybody else's hand was raised. In the back of the room, two boys were huddled together in whispered conversation. Castleman looked at his roster. "Jason? Mike?" The two looked up, guilty, as if caught shoplifting. There was a moment's awkward confusion, and then Mike (or was it Jason?) said, "We were just talking about the Ravens." "You think they'll beat Miami?" Castleman asked amid the laughter, trying to show them he was just a regular guy, as interested in the local sports teams as the next person. "We ought to," Jason said, personalizing the relationship in a way Castleman hadn't. "You think the guy's going to get the girl?" Jason looked confused. "In the poem." Somebody else's hand shot up in the air. "Time!" the owner of the hand cried, a blond woman. Castleman glanced down at his roster. "Time's important." "Barbara." Castleman caught himself talking to himself. "What do you mean? How do you mean, Barbara? How's time important?" "Well, like - she - was saying," Barbara said, gesturing toward Sylvia. "Sylvia." "Time's short, you have to grab for it." "That's the guy's argument. Do you think he gets the girl?" "How could we ever know?" "Well, what do you think?" "Is this what poetry's supposed to be about?" Jason blurted, puzzled. "What do you mean?" "I thought it was about rhyme and meter and not whether somebody gets laid." A few nervous laughs. "Okay, what's the rhyme scheme and what's the meter?" "I thought that's why we're taking this class. To find out." "Well," Castleman sighed, "it looks to me like it's rhymed couplets. Time-crime, way-day, side-tide. And the meter's iambic quatrameter, if that's how you say it. Four iambic units, eight syllables, duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah. Anybody disagree?" "I'd say it all depends on what the guy looks like," Barbara said. "If he's repulsive, no amount of 'arguing' is going to make a difference to the lady." "Good point. But is there any indication she's predisposed to him? Does 'coyness' suggest she's flirting in a way that might give him hope? She's identified as his 'mistress' in the title." "It's not really like he's 'arguing,' either," Sylvia said to Barbara, engaging the other student, Castleman noted with satisfaction. It was becoming a real classroom discussion, not one-sided lecturing. "He's more playful than like you know." "Strident?" Castleman supplied a word. "What's 'vegetable love' supposed to mean?" Mike said. "It says she's a virgin," another boy pointed out. "Tetrameter," Castleman said, remembering. "Iambic tetrameter. Four feet to the line. Pentameter's five, tetrameter's four." '…then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity:/And your quaint honour turn to dust," the boy continued. "A virgin." "Interesting word, 'quaint,'" Castleman said. "A pun, double entendre. Nowadays 'quaint' generally means 'old-fashioned,' but it has a prior meaning of 'skilled' and then 'beautiful' or 'elegant.' Comes from the Latin cognitus, the past participle of cognoscere, for 'knowing' or 'cognition.'" He hoped somebody else would pick up on the connection between "quaint" and "cunt," but nobody did. Instead, there was another, similar observation. "'My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires…' What's that supposed to mean?" Mike repeated his question. Castleman always thought it meant that he was getting an erection but didn't like to say it out loud. "I don't know, what do you think? What do the notes say?" ********** "Oh, it was okay," Castleman answered his wife, Jodie. "We had a pretty lively discussion about Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress.' I tried to get them to see how sexy it was, but I'm not sure I succeeded. I overheard Troy telling Barbara I had a dirty mind and he wondered if I wasn't getting any at home." "What did Barbara say?" "She just giggled. In the afternoon everybody picked a poem and read it, described its meter and rhyme scheme and explained the metaphors. They were pretty nervous about the paper they've got to do, and we talked about that some. MLA standards versus footnotes and so on. I said they could go to the library to do some research next week. Some of the boys only wanted to talk about the football playoffs. They argued about it during the breaks." "Nothing wrong with that, is there?" Jodie was a big football fan, though she preferred the Redskins to the Ravens. Her family came from Montana and were all huge football fans. Her father had been to about half a dozen Super Bowls, and Jodie had been to couple herself. Her dad was too ill to go to a Super Bowl now, however. "I guess not, but I wish they'd show a little more enthusiasm for the class. 'The Ravens just haven't got the chemistry this year they had last,'" he said, shaking his head and mimicking the passion he'd overheard Jason expressing out in the hallway. "A poem's just not as exciting as a touchdown. Besides, the Ravens are named after a poem." "Poe's poem has about as much to do with the football team as football has to do with my class." "Anybody'd rather see Ray Lewis cream the quarterback than listen to a stuffy poet. You don't expect to fill a stadium at your reading in New York next week, do you? It's not on the same scale." "It's not the same thing; besides, we're talking about my class, not my reading." Jodie's teasing made Castleman look at her more closely. A kind of tail-lifting challenge and response. Her thick auburn hair made him think of a cheerleader gone into retirement, still sexy but more subtle. "Come here, you," he said, opening his arms. "I'll show you how to score a touchdown." Jodie put her arms around him. ********** "This may be it. They may be peaking now. Allen ran for over a hundred yards yesterday." "He's still got his legs. The Ravens were the only team to win on the road. The Raiders, the Packers, the Eagles -- they all won at home." "Next week, you watch. The Pittsburgh game will be like the Tennessee game last year. The Steelers are the clear favorites, and if we can get past them, that'll really build our confidence. Remember how we went into Oakland and crushed the Raiders last year?" "It's going to be a battle of the defenses. I think we're better than the Steelers, but I'm so glad they Trent Dilferized Grbac." "Okay," Castleman said, feeling as though he were interrupting a more important conversation with his trivial concerns. It was Monday morning, after the first round of NFL playoff action. "We'll wrap up poetry this morning and move on to drama. Everybody get a chance to read Death of a Salesman over the weekend?" ********** Castleman watched nervously while the drunk stumbled around the urinals in the train station restroom, fearing the man might piss on his shoes. Ten in the morning and already three sheets to the wind! A custodian was sweeping the floor around the man, not wanting to get involved. Castleman used the urinal quickly, zipped his fly and washed his hands while the drunk continued to stagger around the restroom. The sight of the drunk had spoiled his memory of the morning. He and Jodie had been fooling around in bed when they heard a crash in the bathroom followed by a scream. Jodie leaped from the bed, rushing to their daughter Lily's rescue. Some bottles had fallen from the medicine chest. Castleman lay in bed as his vast swollen empire shrank to the size of an unrequited, neglected province. When Jodie finally returned to their room, it was already time to get ready for the train. She stood over him as he sat on the edge of the bed, her breasts swaying in the loose pajama shirt, his coy mistress, and whispered a promise for the hero's triumphant return from New York that evening, a promise she whispered again when they kissed at the train station and she drove away. Back in the lobby there was an announcement that the Metroliner to New York was arriving on track six and would be boarding passengers. Castleman carried a satchel containing the "mid-term" exams - the semester had the accelerated lifespan of a 17-year cicada - and the poems he would be reading. He'd also bought a copy of the newspaper. Today was the showdown between the Steelers and the Ravens. "Well, the game's in Pittsburgh and the Steelers are picked by five and a half, last I saw, so it's not going to be easy," one man was saying to another as Castleman headed to the gate. On the train, Castleman was able to get a seat all to himself, and he put his belongings on the seat next to him and started to go through the exams, but he found he couldn't concentrate and he put them back into his satchel and looked over the poems he would be reading instead. Outside the sky had begun to darken, getting murkier, like a vegetable soup made from beef stock. A storm of some sort was predicted, though nobody seemed to be sure if it would be snow, rain, or a mixture, or if there'd be any accumulation ********** "Any idea who's winning the football game?" "Well, it isn't the Giants." Castleman's college friend, Kenyon Pines, had come to meet him at Penn Station. An attorney, Kenyon had lived in Manhattan for nearly thirty years now, a self-styled Romantic, a chronic bachelor. Already he was trying to talk Castleman into staying the night and cruising for women. Castleman begged off, explaining he had to teach in the morning. "It's all my students can think about, the football game." "Any good-looking coeds?" A devilish leer, meant to be comic. "They're way too young for me. You, too, Kenyon." Castleman had noticed how the crow's feet around Kenyon's eyes had lengthened, like tendrils, how his hairline had receded and the furrows at the sides of his nose had dug in like trenches. "Let me be the judge of that. Sure you can't stay? It's starting to look pretty nasty. By the time your reading's over, it could be pretty bad." "Thanks, but if I miss a day of class, it's like a week of a regular semester." "You should try missing two or three." "You should try marriage, Kenyon." "And you should try getting laid, Rodge." The bar where Castleman was reading was on Murray Street, only a few blocks from where the World Trade Center had stood. Kenyon led Roger to the subway and guided him to the correct trains. When they emerged into daylight, the snow was already settling on the ground. People were milling around by the site of the terrorist attack; there was still a smell of smoke or fire in the air, four months later. The steadily falling snow reinforced the tomblike silence, the tomblike solemnity. Kenyon told Roger about witnessing the World Trade Center collapse from his office on 53rd Street. "I had to look away," he said. "I couldn't watch." Of course, later it was shown over and over and over again on television. It was after two, and they stopped at a cafe for a sandwich. "Steelers by 20 to 3 at the half," somebody said in answer to somebody else's question. ********** "Roger," Tom Catterson greeted him when he and Kenyon entered the Orange Bear, the bar where the poetry reading was taking place. Tom hosted the reading series. Castleman had known him for years. The bar had an old-timey feel to it, with a long mahogany bar along one side, a painting of a reclining odalisque over the bar, and a broken-down pool table on one side of the room. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like a cloud, city ordinances prohibiting smoking be damned. "Glad you could make it. I just hope you'll be able to get back home." He glanced out the window. Castleman threw back a scotch, neat, and nervously waited his turn. There were some open-microphone readers, and then the featured poets read. Castleman was second, behind a man who'd been a humanitarian activist in Central America for decades and read poetry about tortured children, raped women and cruel military thugs. It seemed to fit in with the World Trade Center atmosphere, and Castleman's reading, too, a series of dramatic monologues about a serial killer, likewise seemed appropriate. Savage as a football game. It was a good-sized crowd for a poetry reading, several dozen people in attendance, and to Castleman their applause when he concluded sounded genuine and appreciative, to his thinking as thundering as the roar at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, where the hometown Steelers were drubbing last year's Super Bowl champs. He went to the bar and ordered a beer, savoring his success, even as the snow thrashed against the windows outside. It didn't take long for the glow to fade and his nervousness and doubt to come back, but he knew, too, that he'd feel the satisfaction again. He drank the beer quickly and waved to Tom, who was introducing another poet. Kenyon was chatting up a woman at the bar. From the way she had her leg inserted between his on their stools, Castleman guessed this was no coy mistress who would refuse until the conversion of the Jews. Castleman squeezed Kenyon's arm on his way out. "Give me a call if you get stranded," Kenyon said, looking out the window. "Good to see you, man. Great reading!" ********** The train pulled out of Penn Station two hours late, in what was now looking like a blizzard. Castleman sat next to a young man from Philadelphia who'd just been visiting his girlfriend, a grad. student at NYU. He told Castleman he worked for a company that installed doors. They'd done the doors at the Pentagon, he said, on the side where the airplane had struck, and they'd just prepared the proposal for their re-installation. They'd had to wlk around the destruction in protective gear, with oxygen masks, surveying the damage. "You're from Baltimore? Too bad about the Ravens. At least the Eagles won yesterday. It'll be cool if we have an all-Pennsylvania Super Bowl." When the train pulled into Trenton, the conductor announced there would be a delay while the tracks were cleared further south. He couldn't say when the train would arrive at its various destinations but to expect a long delay. Everybody groaned, and Castleman began to panic. How would he get home, once he'd got to the station? But then he remembered the reading and seeing his friends, and he still felt as though it were worth it, after all. Besides, school would surely be canceled tomorrow. There'd be taxis at the station to take him home. Jodie and the children would be there when he got home, awake or asleep. He remembered Jodie's promise that morning. There was world enough, and it looked like there would be plenty of time before he got to Baltimore. |