Chapter 4

For those who are lucky enough, success in poetry, or in any art for that matter, may come early in one’s career. To stay a successful poet over a lifetime though—that’s the trick. Amanda felt as though she had made a deal with the devil in some unconscious dream, and due to either her negotiating skills with the Lord of the Underworld or just dumb luck, she landed a tenure- track professorship at Seton Hall a week after her twenty-seventh birthday, a year and three months after her divorce from Preston Whitcomb.

She sat at a wobbling table in the student cafeteria, her Styrofoam cup of hazelnut coffee spilling over the edges. She put her foot on one of the legs to keep the table from rocking and sipped the hot coffee slowly to get the most out of its bittersweet flavor. The coffee relaxed her, which was definitely a good thing, because lately she had been nervous in front of her small, sophisticated poetry class.

She wondered how the hell she got so far in such a short period of time. From NYU grad student a few years ago to revered poet just a few years later, she couldn’t explain her success. A bolt of lightning had zapped her, and suddenly she was good at something.

Her talent for poetry arrived by freak accident, something she fell into, and she badly wanted to admit this to someone, to anyone who would believe it, but even she couldn’t believe it. She compared it to being called down as a contestant for the Price Is Right, that initial shock of finding herself a winner after thinking there is no chance in hell she’d nudge close enough to the actual retail price.

She did not feel guilty, however. Since graduate school she knew that someday her talent in poetry would surface, much like it found other great poets. But she never expected it to be so effortless. She remembered all of those nights her ex-husband shut himself up in the attic, labored over lines for days, and destroyed their marriage in the process. She contrasted his recklessness to the small, silent, slow steps she took. Something in the equation didn’t add up, a twist of destiny’s logic that pulled Preston down into the depths of near madness and propelled her to the glory of the literary mountaintop. It didn’t make sense, and she did try to figure it out on several occasions but came to no firm conclusions, only that she had been blessed with a special talent for poetry all along and, through Preston, submitted her work to Don Bluestein who then drooled over every line. What wiped out Preston proved to be Amanda’s stepping stone, and yes, she did wander through forests of pain with the miscarriage and the divorce and all, but good Karma indeed went around the dial and struck when she least expected it. Bad Karma strikes the same way, she figured.

She did not feel guilt over Preston’s failures either. In their short marriage and within the scarred battleground of their South Orange home she had never experienced a cruelty so visceral as their marriage falling apart. Her devotion to Preston came first, above all things. Poetry came a distant second. As Preston became obsessed with his work, she grew scared of him, especially when he descended the creaky stairs to their second floor bedroom and made love to her, as though she were some depersonalized vessel for him to spread his seed, only to wander upstairs a few minutes afterwards and start the same painful cycle all over again, stabbing at the same emptiness while leaving her alone and without a clue on how to end it. She figured poetry turned him into a silent monster ready to explode. He found irritation in the slightest thing she said, a caveman and resident cynic who bugged out on self- imposed stress and pressure. Was it really that hard to find the right word, that hard to rhyme in the face of this pressure as to destroy an entire marriage?

What they had in the beginning was a wonderful and healthy arrangement, back in Manhattan, she remembered, all of that creative energy from many poets at once filling their days and nights with many distracting things to do. Every day was fun for Chrissakes! Remember fun? New York City became their sanitarium, and they lived like two nudes in paradise—dinner parties, friends, nightlife, readings, wine, and the occasional five-act play. She had just graduated from a writing program, and what better way to launch her first sortie into the turbulence of experience than with a man in whom she fell madly in love. Her relationship began so serenely and wrinkle-free as to provide comfort instead of anxiety, security instead of vulnerability, safety instead of danger.

She remembered those days when they walked hand-in-hand to such tourist-saturated enclaves as Rockefeller Center, the breeze fingering her taut hair bunched up at the back as they sipped wine at the sun-drenched café underneath the golden Atlas that lifted a heavy world upon its shoulders. He kissed her sensitive fingers between the knuckles and nails, sending waves of flirtatious love through her body.

She had been living alone, writing stray lines of verse that never needed to be read by anyone. She had little ambition and little sense of how the world worked, and the man kissing her delicate fingers possessed these things and turned them into a career. She didn’t necessarily want what he had but instead mined for love’s possibilities, sharing herself with someone who was interested, not only in her fetching blond looks, but also her mind, which seemed to roam free like a child in a playground.

She didn’t think he was so handsome at first. Rather through knowing him and dating him his good looks developed on her like moss on dry rock. She marveled at his intelligence. He picked up things about her very quickly, almost effortlessly, as though there were certain men who instinctively knew the hidden and well-protected desires of women and molded them to their person with an ease and finesse that presupposed some unique and special quality apart from clumsiness, shyness, or peculiarity. She saw that he wasn’t scared of her as her past boyfriends had been. He didn’t watch his back or protect her like the only pearl in the ocean, and this she found incredibly attractive. He possessed a built-in confidence that said she’d be safe with him, that he wouldn’t hold on too tight when her curiosity perused the other stacks of the masculine library. Not that she was interested in many men at once, but her independence always seemed to be at stake when she had shared herself with past lovers. Her old boyfriends always wanted more of her. Being inside of her wasn’t enough. They wanted a totality she couldn’t give.

And so her other boyfriends fought over her, especially in high school, and when she went to the bar, men hit on her like a venal object, and one-night stands never worked very well with her anyway, so she stopped frequenting New York City bars and late-night hangouts. Instead she sat for hours in the Village coffee shops just west of campus and wrote lines like Emily Dickinson did—guarded and in silence, locked away in a desk drawer. She didn’t care if the invisible hand of the publishing industry passed over her or not.

Back then, publishing didn’t even qualify as a desire. Success with her work didn’t qualify either, and she didn’t think Preston cared much about success either, only cared about her instead. She took her own poetry less seriously than the others at the university, a blithe disregard for it, because she had already matured enough to want the things within her reach—like a normal relationship with a normal guy who didn’t get into bar fights or tremble around her like a sentry protecting a flag. Poetry was more a vehicle for bliss, not a showcase for her vices or her limitations or her woes. Preston, in their first year of marriage, remarked that she was a naturally happy person. Life hadn’t bruised her enough yet.

Another spoke in his wheel of jealousy, she considered, sipping her hazelnut coffee. And she recalled how beautiful it was, sitting in those smoky cafés, watching the pedestrians pass beyond the French doors. They all looked like artists, an elite parade of Beat aristocracy. She sat at this one particular coffee shop for hours, reading Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Dickinson, her favorite, and also Plath, another favorite. She identified with Plath but never shared her afflictions, understood Dickinson’s solitude but never found herself alone. Perhaps it was the blessings of a woman in her youth or maybe women in general who were unable to feel the fiery desire for men as men felt for them. And her former boyfriends’ love always went unrequited, and she found men on the whole crazier than women.

Preston Whitcomb was the contradiction to all of this. He seemed the most balanced man she ever encountered, never moody or explosive or in a desperate need to fill a gaping hole at the center of him. This man had all of his holes filled, and he never leaked. Love’s possibility hovered over them in Rockefeller Center that afternoon way back when. They looked into each other’s eyes and both knew it. Their relationship sparked and ignited from that moment on.

Since they were both poets in the city, they had infinite time to spend with each other. She never noticed how hard Preston worked on his poems and assumed that he cared more about having fun with words, similar to the way she had fun at the Village cafés. She never thought of him as a serious man, but more lighthearted, fun-loving, and life-loving.

One afternoon they met in Central Park and lay out on the Great Lawn with lubed-up sun-worshippers all around them. He brought along books of poetry, and she listened to him read romantic lines that touched the deepest parts of her, parts she had yet to discover, nerves never before stimulated.

The Great Lawn quickly filled with Frisbee-throwing hunks, lazy yellow dogs, and uniformed men stepping through the crowd selling ice cream bars. She lay on a blanket next to him in khaki shorts and a bikini top, her limbs exposed to the rays, sunglasses shading her blue eyes, and she wanted to feel his thick hands all over her, so she asked him to rub tanning oil into her shoulders and exposed back. They hadn’t slept together yet. They had only kissed and held hands. Amanda sensed that the time for further intimacy approached like his oil-soaked palms slipping beneath the strings of her bikini top. Funny how Preston had never mentioned sex before and waited for it with a quiet aplomb. He was interested in making it romantic instead of having it serve a bestial, hormonal need, and his soft touches on her neck soothed her. When he abruptly stopped messaging her, she slapped at him playfully. This man knew what he was doing. He was more dexterous than her average beast, and it thrilled her that he viewed intimacy through a similar romantic lens.

She lived in a three-story walk-up on Carmine Street at a three-way intersection that included both Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue. A trust fund provided for her education, her living arrangements, her travel, and her food. All she had to do was learn, achieve good grades, wave the graduate diploma in front of her family to see, and then return to Connecticut where she grew up. She cared little about money and even less about survival. It all fell into her lap due to her father’s preparedness and industriousness as well as her mother’s keen desire to see her married to a well-off gentleman after graduate school. In fact, her parents originally wanted her to pursue business as a career and were very reluctant to send her off to graduate school for something as silly as poetry.

“Y’know, William Carlos Williams was a doctor,” her father said every time he visited, as if Williams were the only poet on the planet. “Wrote poetry on prescription pads. That’s a fact.”

Of course as an electrical engineer, her father never read much poetry, only unconvincing spy novels and thrillers. Her mother, on the other hand, was more well-read than the both of them combined. She expressed her love for poetry on many occasions, and through her mother Amanda finally found a direction, a pathway through the foreboding forest. Yet they tried to dissuade her from being a poet, probably because one couldn’t earn a living that way, and after she left for the crowded isle of Manhattan, her mother simply worked towards her eventual marriage, hopefully to someone with a bank account and also a Protestant to attend Sunday services with. That’s what her mother wanted most: not for her to be Emily Dickinson all over again but to marry a wealthy Protestant man.

Thanks to her parents, she grew up without knowing the value of a dollar. They kept her on an allowance, unsure if her poetic whims would deliver the treasure of a strong husband. They worried about what New York City might do to her. They had heard the horror story of the sweet, innocent girl who wants to become an actress and instead winds up in porn. Of course it didn’t happen quite that way to young, innocent women-poets, but within the cultural and transgenderal stew of New York, who knew what might happen. Her parents regarded her as sweet and innocent but bright enough to land a well-paying job in the Hartford area. Amanda’s sweet obedience made them love her with even greater protective intensity. She always did what she was told and never in her life rebelled against her parents like most of the other sons and daughters in their suburban Connecticut neighborhood did. Naturally they worried that New York would change her, and they pleaded with her not to go. She did anyway, and it was one tough morning when she told them.

She had been studying at a small, liberal arts college in nearby Hartford when the bulky envelope arrived in her on-campus mailbox. She majored in English as an undergraduate and had just completed a thesis on Eighteenth Century Romantic Poetry when a package from New York University arrived on a warm Thursday. A group of her sorority sisters gathered behind her as she pulled the envelope, as well as other junk mail, from the small, fist-sized postal box in the student center. They huddled around her as she sat on a nearby bench and read the letter aloud. When she said she had been accepted, they wrapped their arms around her and shrieked and giggled in merry congratulations. She had been accepted, and she swooned with the idea of doing graduate work in New York. She badly wanted to get out of Connecticut at the time, spent her entire life there with pent-up frustration, and finally got a ticket to the center of the universe. She celebrated that night by visiting the local college bar and drinking so many sea-breezes and Long Island iced teas that she couldn’t remember getting back to her dorm room the next morning.

She celebrated first and waited until after graduation to break the news to her parents, who would, without doubt, be petrified by the news. After all, her father worked in the manufacturing department over at Pratt & Whitney, about twenty minutes away from campus, and he planned on getting her a desk job working with his executive pals directly after graduation. It would keep his only child close and protected and safe from boys who wanted nothing more than to get into her pants. It would keep her safe from the crime in Hartford too. Her father envisioned a very happy, carefree life for her if only she stuck to his plan. Her mother made matrimonial matches already, as that was her fierce ambition, and she called family friends and arranged summer dinner parties so that her daughter could be introduced to a few young and accomplished suitors who would most likely fall for her quickly.

Her mother even planned for her daughter’s wedding day. She opened the box of her own wedding gown and prepared to hand it down to her daughter. It all seemed so simple to her mother, simple and joyous that they could keep their daughter within their sights, keeping her a child, guessed Amanda. They never wanted her to grow up, and Amanda wanted to cut the umbilical cord and gain worldly experience and move into adulthood with the rest of her peers.

It never occurred to her that a poet could work practically anywhere. For some reason it had to be New York, the citadel of artistic expression where artists created the very literary movements she had read about in her textbooks. She imagined herself rubbing elbows with acclaimed poets and literary gurus. Anything less would be menacing if not downright detrimental to her happiness and satisfaction.

Her parents attended her graduation as a matter of course and also joined her after the main ceremony for a reception in the student center. She packed all of her bags the night before and planned to spend the summer in Manhattan. At the college reception she bumped into one or two of her English professors, and she introduced her parents to them. Her parents were as cheerful as ever, now that the most difficult part of their parenting had come to an end. Her father beamed with delight, while her mother prodded the English professor on the courses he taught. The professor, a quiet, lanky fellow wearing glasses and a corduroy sports jacket, ran down the list for her mother: Shakespeare, Freshman Composition, and a senior seminar in Twentieth Century American Literature where he had the great pleasure of having Amanda in class.

“She was always a good student,” said the professor to the delight of her mother. “We’ll certainly miss her around here.”

Amanda couldn’t imagine why he said these nice things. She was an average student, or at least thought of herself as average, and within the bell curve she fit just about in the middle. She never studied very hard but merely got by on sheer aptitude, a smart cookie when it came to standardized tests.

She probably got into grad school, not because of her college grades, but due to her performance on the GRE’s, which is always a great comfort to admissions offices. She never took academics very seriously and in a way felt a little lucky because of it. She didn’t turn out to be a bookish nerd but instead remained within certain parameters, always acting very normal and feeling very normal. Normal wasn’t boring to her. Rather, in the eyes of other students and her own, it made her more magnetic. She was neither too dumb nor too smart and got along with just about everybody. She never failed at anything and never excelled in anything. She never possessed any gaping flaw that turned people off. On the whole she had balance, like a good psychiatrist during a therapy session. She was the result of generous parental love, solid schools, and dare she think a healthy overall demeanor that came naturally through the genes, she supposed. Which is why it surprised her that this lanky, erudite professor said such nice things about her. He was either lying outright or detecting qualities in her, a potential perhaps, of doing much greater things after she left the college. These comments didn’t necessarily please her so much as strike her as incredibly odd. Perhaps she would go on to do great things as a poet.

Her dormitory stood close to the center of the college, on one of the sides of a flat, verdant quadrangle, that provided a view of the skyscrapers of downtown Hartford. Her parents drove their SUV through one of the arches that connected the outside world to the campus and parked it on the lawn next to the dormitory doorway. Her father helped her cram suitcases, boxes of books, a tower full of compact discs, a stereo system, and a bunch of other knickknacks into the back of the car. Amanda then bid a tearful farewell to her fellow sorority sisters who secretly knew about her acceptance to graduate school before her parents did. She then cruised with her parents towards West Hartford just a few, bumpy minutes away.

She spent the entire ride preparing her speech to be delivered at the dinner table when they got home.

“We’ll spend a large part of the summer in the Vineyard this year,” announced her father while driving, his arms pink from exposure to the sun.

“Yes,” said her mother. “We’ve rented out Fred Davenport’s place.

You’ve always liked the Vineyard, right Amanda?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“It’ll be a great summer this year,” said her father. “All of your old friends will be there, honey.”

“Can’t wait,” said Amanda, eyeing him through the rearview mirror.

She wanted to tell them then, but felt it better to wait until they were more relaxed, until her father, especially her father, had a couple of after-dinner drinks in him. He was the jolly kind of drinker. He took everything in moderation.

“You mean you’re taking off from work this summer?”

“That’s right,” smiled her father. “I’ve got plenty of vacation time saved up. Also, and I didn’t tell you this earlier, but I landed you an interview with management for next Tuesday. You’ll have a job before you know it, way ahead of the pack.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Oh, don’t bother her with work right now,” said her mother. “Let her enjoy the summer.”

“Amanda likes the idea, right Amanda?”

“Sure, Dad.”

He smiled, probably proud of himself for giving her more than his own parents ever gave him. In the car, driving towards West Hartford, nothing could stop him from smiling. They had succeeded as parents by leaps and bounds, a job tougher than the United States presidency, and he deserved that simple celebration, smiling proudly like a man who had just won a bowling tournament.

Guilt finally discovered her. She hid from it for most of her life. When she saw her father smile as gleefully as she had ever seen him smile, it cast a pall of shame over her. The guilt was the net that dragged her in from the ocean, and shame was the end result of getting nabbed, as though she should have had a better plan, should have been a better daughter to both of them. They had made so many sacrifices on her behalf—the money for school, the books, a roof over her head—these things didn’t exactly fall from trees. Her parents worked hard at being good parents and were so close and loving that running off to New York City of all places would be akin to abandoning them just when they needed her.

One school of thought dictated that she must do what satisfies her, what fulfills her, what makes her happy. But she had trouble being that selfish to two people who were so blatantly altruistic. Another school of thought said that she must stick with the family when they needed her most. Now is when they needed her. She thought of her friends at college, her sorority sisters in particular, who seemed so independent from their families, as though they were old women by the time they arrived on campus. She was still a sheltered little girl, she supposed. She exaggerated a bit here, because she wasn’t exactly Goody Two-shoes or anything like that. She had a college boyfriend, for instance. It was a relationship based entirely on sex, a guy from a fraternity that she slept with regularly, so she wasn’t exactly ‘pure as the driven snow.’ But to her parents she was virginal. She never told them about her fuck-buddy or the many nights she boozed until sunrise and smoked pot on the quadrangle. Most daughters wouldn’t.

The fact that her parents wanted her within reach boosted her overall defenses, and soon she didn’t feel that guilty or ashamed anymore. She craved the special freedom New York City would allow. She no longer had to suppress her adulthood in front of them, although for the duration of the car ride she kept silent, her eyes gazing at the single family homes passing by. She kept the acceptance letter in her back pocket and felt at it just to make sure it was still there.

Their SUV meandered through light traffic, and they drove through a bucolic neighborhood within West Hartford. Her family’s estate, perched on top of a steep knoll, featured a well-manicured lawn a couple of acres long and a colonial home sitting upon the knoll like a diamond in an emerald sea. After they unloaded the many suitcases and cartons filled with what were now college memories, she sat out on the patio behind the kitchen and drank a tall glass of iced tea, this time without the alcohol.

“How about we barbecue tonight?” called out her father through the screen door of the kitchen.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

“C’mon. It’ll be fun.”

How could she refuse? He wore that giddy, playful smile of his, and from deep within the home her mother signaled her agreement. It was to be an extension of her graduation party. Her father brought out tins of raw chicken breast and quarter-pound burgers wrapped in plastic along with two-liter bottles of soda. She craved a cold beer just about then, but since they still thought of her in kindergarten terms, she left this small desire hanging. Her father lighted the kerosene grill and donned a red-checkered apron. Her mother soon joined them and lit bug-repellent candles smelling of musk. The yellow disk of the sun set slowly, painting streaks of lavender and orange across a chaotic sky. Beyond the patio, their swimming pool shimmered in the sunset, the squid-like pool cleaner bumping up against the concrete edges of the pool like a blind man in a box. She could definitely spend the entire summer lounging around the pool with her neighborhood friends, but the calling of the big city three hours south sucked her towards its vortex like a tractor beam.

She rarely had a one-track mind about her pursuits. It warped her usually balanced and fair-minded approach. New York, however, waited for her with outstretched arms. She pulled out the acceptance letter from her back pocket as her parents gathered around the table and sorted the grilled chicken from the burgers, tucked oversized spoons into the potato salad and the cole slaw, opened bottles of ketchup, and sliced onions and tomatoes. She would miss this.

“I have something important to tell you,” she announced, pouring herself another glass of iced tea.

“What is it sweetheart?”

She gave the acceptance letter to her mother first. Midway through reading it her jaw dropped. She gasped and held on to her heart, which must have skipped a beat or two. She returned the letter to its envelope and looked at her daughter squarely. Amanda returned the stare, her blue eyes transmitting a solemnity her mother hadn’t encountered before. She sensed anger from her mother for not telling her sooner. The harder task involved telling her father who was by this time basting the chicken breasts on the grill with hot barbecue sauce, licking his fingers and wiping them on his apron.

“Ladies, why so quiet?”

Her mother handed him the letter. He read it quietly and then said:

“So? So what? Amanda’s not going to graduate school in New York.”

“What do you mean by that, Dad?”

“You’re not going. That’s what I mean.”

Her mother looked into her folded hands, not saying a word. She left the difficult decisions to her husband. He earned the money, so he had the final say.

“Mom?” she asked, hoping her mother would take her side.

Her mother remained silent, mulling over her daughter’s future.

“You can’t keep me from going. I want to go.”

Her father shook his head while pacing in front of the grill.

“Nah, I can’t send you to New York. Somewhere I have to draw the line.”

“What are you talking about? Have I ever asked for anything beyond reason?”

“What you’re asking is definitely beyond reason. It’s nuts. You’re whole idea is nuts, and I just won’t allow it. Now eat your dinner before it gets cold.”

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

“Good,” he said as he dumped the hamburger and chicken breasts on the ground. “Don’t eat anything then.”

He returned to the grill and flipped the rest of the burgers. Dense, black smoke billowed towards them, stinging their eyes and filling their nostrils with burnt ash.

“You can’t stop me from going,” she said as the clouds of smoke dissipated.

Her father was nervous, almost edgy, as though all the twilight mosquitoes came after him at once.

“And how do you expect to pay for it?”

“Loans. Work study. I’ll manage somehow.”

“I’ll manage somehow? Sweetheart, let me tell you something. The costs of graduate school plus living in Manhattan won’t all be covered by your student loans. And making French fries in your spare time? No ma’am. You’re going to need a lot more money than that, and since you’ve got no income, no cash flow, you can’t possibly afford graduate school yet. First you have to work, earn some money, and then you can decide.”

The tuition was pretty steep, and certainly she needed deposit money, money for the subway, money for the meal plan. Add these to the high costs of living in Manhattan, and even for those who didn’t even go to school there and labored in skyscrapers all day just to pay their rents on time, the place was unaffordable. The total outstanding balance would be enormous. She had some money tucked away in the form of a trust, and when she had turned twenty-one in the winter of her senior year, she formally claimed the power to use that money however she saw fit. Her parents had fed the trust fund over the years, and with the interest and dividends paid on a variety of investments, she could afford to pay her tuition and housing deposit in one big swoop. This would certainly outrage her father who had used part of those funds to pay for her undergraduate education, and as the trustee of the fund he swore to use the remainder of it only in case of emergency. Now that remainder was hers, and she could easily dissolve the trust and pay off NYU with it. The option to use that money led her to a desperate choice—either wound her parents, maybe even irrevocably, or follow her own heart and her own mind for once in her life.