Chapter 7

Amanda sat at her desk and thought out her next poem. She had written dozens of them in the dim light of her living room, a hot cup of hazelnut coffee her only companion along with a terrible chill of loneliness that had at one time been so enjoyable but was now close to deadly.

‘It’s part of the territory,’ she thought as she struggled to pen a good first line.

Lately she had been on auto-pilot. Sure she wrote almost every night, but she couldn’t explain the extreme hollowness of her soul, pleasures that wound up missing, and a loneliness so visceral that poetry no longer provided its usual exuberance of spirit. She could have written thousands upon thousands of poems, good ones too, but nothing removed the onslaught of emptiness. She guessed a night out with Claude Carolina would be a good thing. He may have been the cure she’d been searching for—a person who would show her a different side to poetry, and she certainly needed more people in her life.

Lately it had all been a never-ending routine, and although she connected with her poetry class for the first time since its awkward beginnings, she still hungered for more than just time to write and an estranged relationship with her students. Inspiration used to gush from every tributary, but lately it only trickled down from the muses who hoarded it for the few they favored. Perhaps the Gods sent Claude Carolina instead: a strong, handsome black man who probably knew more about what it meant to be a poet than all of the poets she had met over the years combined.

There was a rawness to him, something untamed about him, and yet she touched a tender and beatific side of him when she asked him to see his homework. So tough and street-smart on the outside, yet so shy and childlike when it came to sharing his own work. Men, after all, were such children, even the toughest and most aggressive ones, and when Claude asked her out, she couldn’t tell if it was a child she spoke with or a grown man courting her. Regardless, she wasn’t about to get romantically involved with one of her students. She had already crossed certain boundaries by letting him audit the class, so she wasn’t about to expose herself to even greater risk.

She crumpled up the poem she had been working on after a line or two, the hard chair she sat on a source of irritation, and she fought discomfort by taking her work to her bedroom, lying down, and writing with her lean body propped on two pillows. This worked for a limited time. She drifted in and out of an exhaustion that felt like a thick fog engulfing her and diminishing the quality of her work. She tried her desk again, but nothing came, and she fought fits of frustration when her pen reluctantly surrendered tired words, boring lines, and vacant and hollow stanzas. It should have come a lot easier now that she was at the height of her career, but the pain involved in writing even the lightest, most innocuous verse proved too great a task. Sometimes it came, and sometimes it didn’t. Her willingness to learn and be inspired by other people’s work felt like mining for minerals that never materialized, or at least digging into coarse, rocky soil if only to build muscle and stamina but not much else. She felt as desiccated as an autumn leaf, no inspiration anywhere. She finally lay down her pen and rolled onto her back, her notebook and pen an inch from her head and her thoughts searching for anything substantive to chew on. Once again she confronted a dull fatigue, and when she did decide to stumble out of bed, she headed straight for the kitchen and poured herself a glass of red wine hoping it would liberate her regimented mindset.

She had a couple of glasses of it and turned on the stereo. Smooth jazz played, and like a sponge her body absorbed the wine and left her a little giddy. She tried reading an uncorrected proof of poems a colleague had given her. She couldn’t read very well with the wine in her blood. She held the book open, reading aloud and dancing simultaneously, taking breaks to gulp down more of the wine, the smooth jazz flowing through her. If only she had someone to dance with, she kept thinking, and she imagined strong hands holding the small of her back, her body melting, the nape of her neck tongued with soft, wet kisses, her breasts rubbing up against a man’s firm chest, who exactly, she wasn’t sure, only that he was white and handsome and unafraid to twirl her under the glow of the lights, the crowd cheering and whistling, the dance floor alive with hot coals of color, the mirrored ball radiating strips of light like a tickertape parade, her ecstatic heart swooning.

She twirled so hard that she collapsed on the living room sofa in a fit of laughter still managing to balance the glass of red wine, her body temperature hot as if a fever overtook it. She looked around the room, and reality slowly regained its prosaic form. She didn’t want the feeling to end, but her notebook, sprawled out on her bed, immediately returned her to the drudgery of writing another meaningless poem.

She decided to take a break for a while, and perhaps for a simple second she saw what her ex-husband saw or at least recognized how easily poetry could drag anyone into the depths of a self-inflicted madness. She wasn’t about to make the same mistake. She wrote for the love of poetry, and she figured that the moment it became uncomfortable, she should stop and do something else, which is what she did.

She undressed and donned a silk bathrobe. She ran hot water in the tub and added a few of the luxury bath beads the platinum-haired secretary had given her as a gift. The tub soon filled with silky bubbles. She disrobed and stepped into the warm bath, the glass of wine within reach and the hot water flooding the tight pores of her delicate skin. This felt much better than writing all the time, and like another person altogether her stiff body unglued and loosened, her tired muscles unfurled, her eyes hung heavy, and her mind drifted into another territory...

She hears a knock at the door, but she doesn’t answer. Beyond the door of the bathroom there is movement—the jangling of keys, footsteps, the smooth jazz on the radio, and the distant, imperceptible sound of a man humming softly to the saxophone, this same man who danced with her and made her feel special. He is tall and slim and muscular in the right places. He opens the door and unravels his bathrobe. He doesn’t say anything, only hums as though underneath his humming looms a rhapsody of intense longing, all for her. He has dark hair and walnut skin, espresso eyes and a dimpled chin, and she wonders where she had seen him before. He yearns for nothing more than to climb into the bath with her, which he does, his bathrobe doffed on the wet tile, his body sinking deep into the bubbles as she unwinds her legs around his shoulders and invites him into her.

... And then the phone rang. She let the answering machine take it. She was too relaxed to move, the hot water a sedative and the vanishing bubbles a veil that soon revealed her soft, thin body. She worried that her solitude was getting in the way of her livelihood, making her too sensitive to the presence of others, or it at least extended her mind to a point where she shared very little in common with anyone else, and yet she sensed people staring at her or at least knowing her while knowing nothing about them. She suddenly longed for anyone to understand her. It had been too long since anyone took a chance. Claude Carolina certainly did, but he was a student, and he didn’t count. Besides, she would never belong in his world, and her parents would refuse to see her if she pursued him. She didn’t have the same freedoms afforded to movie stars and celebrities, and for a few moments she imagined being married to him and what a difficulty that would be.

Up in West Hartford, the land of her youth, there were certain things that just weren’t accepted, and people liked to think they were liberated enough to tolerate it, but most didn’t. She wasn’t about to get into any trouble. It may have indeed been the twenty-first century, but the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other, and for each swing a different paradigm for society presented itself. Garbage in, garbage out. It just so happened that everything swung to the hard right, and racial ideology swung with it, casting many single women into doubt with the same tired reasoning that like belongs with like, similar belongs with similar, certain groups belong with certain groups, a tribe belongs unto its own tribe.

Hard to imagine she would think this way after so many years of avoiding it. A fierce ideology emanated from the government and their cultural brokers and gurus, who then handed it down through the media and straight into her mind where it festered and finally recaptured whatever gray matter the old power structure had once called theirs. If genetic memory served her correctly, this is how it had always worked, forcing people to reinvent themselves if only to survive. There was a time for every purpose no matter how dastardly its manipulation.

While she couldn’t understand how a society functioned when it was constantly at war with itself, she did understand her place within the society—and that was neither to care nor to pay attention to whatever contention made it to the front page of the newspapers—stuff like war and joblessness and serial killers she did without. Her life, she reasoned, was a separate journey altogether, as if angels guarded poets like herself so that she could churn out stuff that touched people’s personal lives but never took a side or veered into opinion. There were still certain boundaries she wouldn’t cross. A few of her colleagues at the university certainly took sharper stances on the current issues of the day, but she stayed away, smiled politely, and lately wrote poems about loneliness and loss and disillusionment. Most of her work celebrated life, but now it hinted at its devastation. Being a realist was never her forte, but lately her views had turned on her, and what was once a magical, idyllic existence evaporated like the fog that strangled the dark seedy streets of the city next door.

And that’s what Claude’s poetry represented, and it would be a total departure for her to become intimately involved with it or with him. Just because she considered herself to be a free spirit didn’t mean she should tempt fate.

She felt a little ashamed of herself as she slipped on her silk bathrobe, the water on her wet skin bleeding through the fabric. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to go out with him. She considered what kind of impact street poetry may have on her academic approach, and she couldn’t think of anything the two styles had in common, even though she knew very little about Claude’s poetry. She had never been to a poetry slam either. She had little room to judge.

She checked her messages while drying herself off. Claude had called, and her heart jumped.

“I’m really looking forward to Friday night,” he said on the machine. “You’ll like slammin’, I guarantee it...”

Amanda rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to lead him on or anything like that. She would go as his professor, like a teacher hanging out with a student, and it could be dangerous, because it was a date for the evening without it really being a date. They had agreed it wasn’t romantic, as though the context of the night-out had to be cleared as field research before the two could travel together.

One of the qualities about Claude she couldn’t shake, however, was his handsomeness—a strong, lean body, a chiseled face, a nice smile, but yet so introverted and shy he was, and bold enough to ask her out. This man was not as simple as, let’s say, Preston was or these English professors were who hit on her at the faculty club. He was, after all, quite beautiful when the light hit him right, quite reserved while wild underneath, and if she could teach him how to channel his wildness into poetry suitable for publication, why, she’d do anything.

But again, she didn’t want to get too close. Her conservative attitudes resurfaced just in time, the pendulum swinging right, and she no longer had a need for the seventies melting pot motif, because all races didn’t necessarily blend, and the attempt to engineer her world came from some other place and not from her. As far as she was concerned, she did not control her own mind—someone else did—and she refused to go along with whatever attempts to control her mind reigned down from above. A refusal, it was, to think a certain way about anyone—red, brown, black, pink, yellow—it didn’t fucking matter, because her thoughts were free and not tied to anything she didn’t want to think despite the intense pressures from above, and suddenly it became important that she cross over or at least learn about slam poetry, learn a language other than the shoptalk of an elite group of writers deciding on and controlling what’s best for all.

Claude’s stuff, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t pass through the academy gates, and perhaps he was gifted for that exact reason—an unwillingness to bend. She saw that in him. His work had to be good enough to pass through this same elite, like censors they were, before a reader even knew it existed.

She decided to convince him that slam poetry, even though she never experienced it before, was detrimental, and that he should cross over to her rather than meeting him at some muddy, mediocre, middle ground that compromised the high pedigree of art she had been used to, because really, everything belonged in its own place, and maybe slam poetry was good for giving the disadvantaged something to do other than rob convenience stores, but among serious poets it had no place. She would be strong in that regard, strong and unshakable, and she shouldn’t think about his handsome dark face or any shyness that gave her a reason to dote upon him further.

‘Ridiculous,’ she thought about how things worked.

She wouldn’t budge and would make it a point to show Claude the difference between the two worlds. It saddened her, because for some reason it was never one world but always separate worlds, it seemed, as any human mind naturally divides and rarely integrates nature’s most divisive elements. Or maybe that was her experience alone and not anyone else’s. Too much private schooling, she figured, or too much time spent in the affluent West Hartford suburb which abutted a dangerous city where things were clearly separate and unequal and rife with terror. She was happy to have escaped all of that and lucky to have discovered New York instead of becoming the quintessential American New Englander wearing plaid skirts and duck shoes, driving a Saab, cooking dinner for a tall white boyfriend who worked for Pratt & Whitney, going to church on Sundays with her parents, weddings every weekend, and a bridal shower every month. Her past life seemed so distant, and how she wound up in New Jersey she had no idea, and soon she would attend a poetry slam.

Things usually moved very slowly for poets. There was endless university time to contemplate shit and expand the mind. Perhaps she had moved too quickly and fiercely away from her old Connecticut roots. She saw her parents every few months, and they always tried to fix her up. She had always refused. She didn’t want to get married again. It had been so horrible the first time around. Her time alone, however, pushed her into a man’s hands. She hoped for dear life that it wasn’t Claude.

Friday soon rolled around on the first days of a warm Indian summer. She heard over the radio that the temperature would drop dramatically during the weekend. Before meeting Claude she traveled to the nearby Short Hills Mall and bought a new outfit, not for the night out with Claude, but more for ushering in the new season. She hadn’t visited Manhattan in a long time, maybe six months since, and although she wasn’t too excited about returning to the land of her past transgressions, she did recognize the need for stylish clothing to compliment the evening. If she at least tried to have fun instead of being so nervous about going with Claude, it may make the evening run smoother. But she couldn’t hide her nervousness.

She set up the meeting with him very clinically. On the phone with him she referred to their meeting as ‘an appointment,’ and made sure to meet him at the college instead of either of their homes. She would drive, she insisted, and they would leave the slam early to avoid the nocturnal slew of drunk drivers who traversed in and out of Manhattan on the weekends. Plus she had somewhere to go on Saturday morning—”up to Connecticut,” she lied, for a university-sponsored conference on early Anglo-Saxon poetry. She decided not to wear any makeup for the slam, and the dress she bought at the mall might as well have been purchased at the local mission—a brown, ruffled arrangement from a bygone era. It was sure to turn any man off, no matter how horny, and she wouldn’t say much on the way there, only concentrate on the bizarre tangle of New Jersey highways if only to get back to South Orange in one piece. She’d also discuss things like wanting children and her allegiance to the Church, and how her favorite book was the Bible, and how her father was a stern minister. She’d bring along tapes of Christian Revival Music, Anne Murray, Ethel Merman, the Osmond Brothers, anything to make a bizarre, time-warped impression. She hoped to create the image of a middle- aged spinster whom no one wanted. She tied her blonde hair back into a thick and foreboding bun, and without the makeup she looked like someone from another planet visiting earth by time machine.

After she prepared her costume for the evening, she hopped into her SUV and drove to the university. She headed directly for the student cafeteria and ordered a cup of hazelnut coffee there. She waited patiently for Claude. Maybe he wouldn’t show up, and silently she hoped he wouldn’t. The whole idea seemed a bit absurd to her, and maybe she had been thinking about it the wrong way all along—that it wasn’t necessarily a date, since nothing romantic or sexual had ever been implied. She looked down the length of her dress to the ruffles at the chest of her brown outfit. Yes, this certainly was an absurd idea, and suddenly she wanted to rush home and change into normal clothes. But it was too late. Claude Carolina arrived looking as dashing as she imagined him to be. He wore a blue woolen suit with a matching fedora, a silk tie with tie clip, and polished black shoes that glimmered underneath the track lighting of the cafeteria.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand.

“I hope I’m not too late,” said Claude.

“No. I just got here myself.”

“You look lovely this evening.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry,” he laughed, “I guess some people don’t take my compliments too well.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m glad you like my dress. This is how I usually look when I’m not in class.”

“It’s a change, but I like it.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” he said. “A woman has many different sides to her. This, I take it, is your Amish side.”

“It’s not Amish, Claude. Besides, the Amish wear black.”

“How about Colonial?”

“You’re getting closer.”

“Well, if you keep me guessing any more, we’ll be late for the slam.”

She hated the awkward silence that accompanied their walk from the cafeteria to the faculty parking lot.

“I like your car,” he said. “What is it? A Lexus?”

“Yes. It’s actually my husband’s.”

“You mean you’re married?”

“In a way, yes.”

“What do you mean ‘in a way?’”

“I’m married to God.”

“Come again?”

“I’m married to the church.”

“Oh. Like a nun?”

“Sort of. I’m a nun’s apprentice, meaning that I plan to be a nun.” They climbed into the car, and Amanda started the engine.

“Y’know, I never pegged you out to be a nun before.”

“Well, now you know.”

She plugged in the Christian revival tape for effect. Claude sighed and then turned down the volume to conversational level.

“I take it you don’t like the music?” she asked.

“It’s not that. It’s just that we’re going to a poetry slam. Maybe we could listen to something more—”

“Up to date?”

“Y’know, more hip-hop, more rap, more rhythm and blues, more jazz.”

“Oh, you mean like your people’s music.”

“It’s not just my people’s music,” he sighed. “It’s a lot more than just black music. It’s music for everyone. Would you mind if I changed the station?”

“Go ahead,” she said as she headed towards the Turnpike.

He tuned the radio to a song that she had heard many times before. It was a popular hip-hop tune.

“See? Now this is hip-hop. You like?”

“It’s ... well, it’s certainly urban. I’m more of a rural person myself.”

“You live in South Orange. That ain’t rural.”

“That isn’t rural, Claude. I insist that you use correct grammar or not talk at all.”

“Damn. When was the last time you had any fun?”

“Just because my idea of having fun and your idea of having fun don’t correlate, doesn’t mean that we can’t respect each other’s music,” she said, turning down the volume.

“Damn. I’m riding down the New Jersey Turnpike, heading to a poetry slam with the Church Lady of all people. Just my luck. Hey, Church is on Sunday. It’s not on Friday night.”

“You’d be surprised. I attend Church every night.”

“Girl, you crazy.”

“Woman, Claude. Woman.”

“Okay, look, let’s start this evening over.”

“Fine,” she giggled. “How do you do? My name is Amanda Larson. I’m your poetry teacher.”

“There. That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” She plugged in the Anne Murray tape. “I love her. I have all her albums.”

“Who’s this?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I tell you, out of all the music I’ve listened to in my life time—white music, black music, Ravi Shankar even, I have never, and I mean never heard this music before.”

“Do you like it? ‘ Killing me softly with his song, killing me softly—’”

“Yeah, I like it, but do you have to sing to it too?”

“It’s one of my favorites.”

“I guess your last relationship didn’t go so well.”

“What makes you think that?”

“This song. You know, the lyrics. You can hear them yourself.” She ejected the tape.

“Hey! I was listening to that.”

“Not if you’re going to investigate my personal life with it.”

“Damn. You sure are sensitive to every little thing.”

“People are very sensitive when it comes to their personal lives. And in many cases you’ll find that poetry can be an intimate exploration of a person’s life, say, a failed relationship, or a death in the family, or even a new romance.”

“Who’s your favorite poet by the way? I never got around to asking you that.”

“I’d say Sylvia Plath.”

“I’ve heard of her. Never listened to her, though.”

“Some things are meant to be read. ‘ I didn’t want any flowers. I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.’“

“What’s free? Ain’t nothing around here for free.”

“What did I say about grammar, Claude?”

“Okay, okay. I apologize. The poem sounds like a funeral. Very depressing.”

“That’s Sylvia Plath.”

“No shit?”

“Yes.”

“Well it sounds to me like she wasn’t too happy. Almost like she’s trapped.”

She was amazed at how quickly Claude picked up on the imagery, how easily he discovered the metaphor. She had loved those lines in college. Claude was good, maybe even a little too good. He was more intelligent than she originally thought.

“You like some depressing shit, Amanda. Well I say there’s no room in this life for any of that. Anger, maybe. Taking over the government, maybe. But death? We’re still young, you and me.”

“You and I are still young. How would you like to read some of her poems?”

“What? By the depressed woman?”

“She happens to be one of the greatest American poets, or at least in my

mind she is. Some may disagree.”

“Not on your life,” he laughed.

“No, I mean it. How would you like to write an essay about a few poems she wrote?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I didn’t drag you to a poetry slam to talk about depressing shit, alright? Life is not that bad, and it is for free up to a point. See, you’ve got too much of that Sylvia Plath in your head. No wonder you go to church every day. You need to express yourself a little more—sing the gospel like the sisters in the choir do:

‘ I bel-ieve

I believe

In the Lord In the Lord

I bel-ieve I believe

In the Lor-or-ord,

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for!’”

She teetered on the edge of singing the last line with him. She had loved that song. She hadn’t played it in years. It returned her to a time when she was happiest. And when she witnessed Claude dancing in his seat, she realized she had found a man beneath the mere color of his skin or what his skin color merely signified. He was a lot more than the ghetto or the dangerous city streets of nearby Newark. She couldn’t help but giggle again, hiding her smile behind her hand as the crowded Turnpike gave way to the Lincoln Tunnel, the old and familiar curve that bent and descended into the antiquated toll plazas, and meanwhile this strange man in the next seat refusing to let life’s devastation gain any more ground. He sang as though nothing earthly could silence him.

Although Claude made her laugh, she kept a second self at bay that wasn’t entirely convinced. She should be serious with him. Life wasn’t about fun, far from it in fact, more about the things that are taken away, the loss when they are taken, and some stupid, unnerving will to continue despite having been left with nothing but a dim wit, a dull mood, and the drudgery of being in the same place for too long. She wanted Claude to understand, to reach inside her skull and identify with her newfound devastation. Every poet faced it, and with Claude it was only a matter of time before the muses sucked up the happiness with their vacuums of cruelty and left the same hollowness in its place. She immediately turned up the stereo, the Anne Murray song warbling above Claude’s ridiculous dance.

“Hey, turn off this Sylvia Plath stuff.”

“This is Anne Murray, Claude. Anne Murray. It is not Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is a poet.”

“Well, you can stick with all the Anne Murray, Sylvia Plath gloom and doom, because right now we’re headed into the city, and we are going to slam tonight—all night long:

‘ All Night Long,

All Night, All Night, All Night,

All Night Long,

All Night,

Yeeass.‘

And again with his strange and awkward dance to a Lionel Ritchie tune she hadn’t heard in years, his upper body sliding from one quadrant to the next, and she couldn’t help but break out in girlish laughter as the tunnel ended and the tall buildings towered above them and refracted a patchwork of lights.

“You’re going to cause an accident in a minute, Claude.”

“Sorry,” as he put his hand on her arm, his palm smooth and a little cold. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she said.

When they arrived at the poetry club, a long line of people hugged the walls of the buildings down the street. The bouncer let Claude and Amanda inside before the crowd. Already a Charlie Parker jazz tune blared from overhead speakers, the narrow hallway opening to a stage area where Claude’s former teammates turned their heads in shock and bewilderment.

“How y’all doing!” said Claude with Amanda behind him.

Only Amanda sensed their shock. They didn’t smile with Claude, only gave him reluctant hellos. One member of the team even shook his head disapprovingly. He said:

“I take it you’re not slammin’ tonight?”

“Nah, man,” said Claude. “I’m through with that. You know, last week

was my last.”

“Y’know you could have given us more time to find someone else. And now you show up in here, sportin’ your new white girlfriend, thinking that you’re all welcome and shit in here. It doesn’t fly that way, Claude.”

“Is that so? And I take it your sorry ass speaks for the rest of the team, right? Or are you jealous of what I’m doing now?”

“Oh, please. I don’t speak just for myself. You ran out just when we’re heading to Chicago, man. And to tell you the truth, none of us could give a shit about your new girlfriend anyways.”

“You better watch your mouth, cousin, before I put my fist through it.”

“Claude, maybe we’d better go,” said Amanda quietly.

“She’s right,” said another teammate, a woman with her hair tied in a kinte scarf. “Maybe you better go. What you did is unforgivable. And by coming in here you’re disgracing yourself.”

“After all the shit I’ve done for this team? No, I think your ugly ass should get the hell out of the club, because this is my club, and next to what I’ve done all year, you guys haven’t done shit. You wouldn’t even be going to Chicago if it wasn’t for me.”

“Why don’t you just get the hell outta here,” said a third teammate.

“You’ve done enough damage already.”

“Maybe we better leave, Claude,” said Amanda, tugging at his arm.