Sometimes the talk in the lounge on our floor the twelfth consists of nothing but You pig fucker you shut yer trap! and sometimes the talk strays into the sound and the fury at which point someone yells, Get Naughton, and someone else gets Naughton, and lean Naughton comes in from leaning against the building where he reliably takes a cigarette on the hour, and he hushes the room and says from heart, I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Naughton is famous for this speech and infamous for his fake id which is labeled straight-facedly, Quentin Compson. He sends it around the room with Edward Said’s Orientalism — dense and contested-hated required reading for some class — and suddenly Orientalism is on the floor and Naughton and the boys are stomping it out as if it were fire, yelling Die! Die! Die! The next morning the Spec headlines blare, Edward Said Is Dead In His Bed. Meanwhile, the boys across the street set off firecrackers at all hours until finally I cannot bear it and lean out my window, grinding my elbows in the sill’s grit, and holler, Quit it, this isn’t Beirut!, and they hush.
Schneider, who lives down the hall in a room he calls Valhalla, tells me that I exude peasantness, and should not be allowed to vote. Married people begin to resemble each other in roundness is another of his maxims. My bearded beloved writes in September on a stranger’s door-board, Life is an adventure if you can bear the sheep. By May the stranger is my sister, and we have drawn up documents to prove it. Her name is Havilah which means little Eve, but she is allergic to apples. She tells me of one Mario who is so taken with Borges that the professor gives him the reins one day, and Mario teaches the class so beautifully with parables and unaverted eyes, that the professor confides in Havilah afterwards that Mario can have both her daughters if he likes. I recollect the day a boy came into the elevator with a black bag slung over his shoulder and I asked him, Been thieving again? and he said yes. That boy was Mario.
So I write to him about that day and further, but he does not recollect it nor does he believe that I exist and so he does not write back. I brand him Zaccharius, who was struck silent by an angel in the New Testament because he did not believe that his wife could bear a child at her advanced age. I start for Mario's room a hundred times aiming to introduce myself and a hundred times I turn back; passing the spot where he leans against the building taking a rare cigarette, I avert my eyes. I write to Havilah; to Tom, our Sir Knight Off-Standish; to Pitr, who spells his name P-i-t-r. They write back. I call them my word-harem and skim for further apostles. Meanwhile I skip Mass every Sunday. With Havilah I invent a witches’ sabbath. It is a daily affair that involves spinning in gyspy skirts on the grass, skirts we bought from a man who enchanted a flock of butterflies to sell as wares in a bazaar. Boys yell from their windows that hippies are rampant. Schneider, returning, gives them the middle finger for us.
My mother calls me repeatedly throughout the winter to tell me that I should close my window at night; what she doesn’t know is that I sleep in the daytime now, in my coat like Raskolnikov, dreaming that my grandmother has sent my father a letter-opening sword, and that our friend Eugene is unwilling to steal back the Macbeth sword that unrelated boys have stolen from him until said boys have cut off each other’s heads. Outside of my dreams, Eugene is wistful about a sculpture of a kneeling woman he saw in an advertisement in the Paris metro one summer; in a fit of mad samaritan I hunt online for the name of a fit Paris metro official; I write to him in vague schoolgirl French and he writes back. Against all hope and science, a photograph of the sculpture is attached to the e-mail. Mario does not write back.
In class I tinker with Cyrillic letters; at work I lay white tablecloths and take empty clinking wine bottles by the scruffs of their collars. One weekend I accompany my bearded beloved to his brother’s wedding in Boston; in the car he tells me we’ll have four sons, three twins and one quadruplet, and gives me Na-po-le-on, the world’s loveliest dessert whose ingredients are listed as eggs, sugar, cream, and if nuts, walnuts. I pocket the label. At a rest station outside New Haven, somebody asks the uniformed gentleman behind the counter about the shrubbery; he answers, These plants belong to the state, sir. I rejoice that I did not go to Yale.
Summer prepares to scatter my word-harem, while back home in Queens, the Huns move out from next door, quitting and quieting the block. But I would not change anything. My beloved leaves me messages that say, Don’t forget to call Il’ya, for he does really very much love you very very much, really. I find out that the dorm I inadvertently chose used to belong to Garcia Lorca. The little one I babysit calls me Rapunzel. The editor of the New Yorker scrawls on my form rejection slip, P.S. Best wish. Someone asks my Russian professor what is the Russian equivalent for Life sucks, and she answers that you can’t say that, because it isn’t true.
Naughton is famous for this speech and infamous for his fake id which is labeled straight-facedly, Quentin Compson. He sends it around the room with Edward Said’s Orientalism — dense and contested-hated required reading for some class — and suddenly Orientalism is on the floor and Naughton and the boys are stomping it out as if it were fire, yelling Die! Die! Die! The next morning the Spec headlines blare, Edward Said Is Dead In His Bed. Meanwhile, the boys across the street set off firecrackers at all hours until finally I cannot bear it and lean out my window, grinding my elbows in the sill’s grit, and holler, Quit it, this isn’t Beirut!, and they hush.
Schneider, who lives down the hall in a room he calls Valhalla, tells me that I exude peasantness, and should not be allowed to vote. Married people begin to resemble each other in roundness is another of his maxims. My bearded beloved writes in September on a stranger’s door-board, Life is an adventure if you can bear the sheep. By May the stranger is my sister, and we have drawn up documents to prove it. Her name is Havilah which means little Eve, but she is allergic to apples. She tells me of one Mario who is so taken with Borges that the professor gives him the reins one day, and Mario teaches the class so beautifully with parables and unaverted eyes, that the professor confides in Havilah afterwards that Mario can have both her daughters if he likes. I recollect the day a boy came into the elevator with a black bag slung over his shoulder and I asked him, Been thieving again? and he said yes. That boy was Mario.
So I write to him about that day and further, but he does not recollect it nor does he believe that I exist and so he does not write back. I brand him Zaccharius, who was struck silent by an angel in the New Testament because he did not believe that his wife could bear a child at her advanced age. I start for Mario's room a hundred times aiming to introduce myself and a hundred times I turn back; passing the spot where he leans against the building taking a rare cigarette, I avert my eyes. I write to Havilah; to Tom, our Sir Knight Off-Standish; to Pitr, who spells his name P-i-t-r. They write back. I call them my word-harem and skim for further apostles. Meanwhile I skip Mass every Sunday. With Havilah I invent a witches’ sabbath. It is a daily affair that involves spinning in gyspy skirts on the grass, skirts we bought from a man who enchanted a flock of butterflies to sell as wares in a bazaar. Boys yell from their windows that hippies are rampant. Schneider, returning, gives them the middle finger for us.
My mother calls me repeatedly throughout the winter to tell me that I should close my window at night; what she doesn’t know is that I sleep in the daytime now, in my coat like Raskolnikov, dreaming that my grandmother has sent my father a letter-opening sword, and that our friend Eugene is unwilling to steal back the Macbeth sword that unrelated boys have stolen from him until said boys have cut off each other’s heads. Outside of my dreams, Eugene is wistful about a sculpture of a kneeling woman he saw in an advertisement in the Paris metro one summer; in a fit of mad samaritan I hunt online for the name of a fit Paris metro official; I write to him in vague schoolgirl French and he writes back. Against all hope and science, a photograph of the sculpture is attached to the e-mail. Mario does not write back.
In class I tinker with Cyrillic letters; at work I lay white tablecloths and take empty clinking wine bottles by the scruffs of their collars. One weekend I accompany my bearded beloved to his brother’s wedding in Boston; in the car he tells me we’ll have four sons, three twins and one quadruplet, and gives me Na-po-le-on, the world’s loveliest dessert whose ingredients are listed as eggs, sugar, cream, and if nuts, walnuts. I pocket the label. At a rest station outside New Haven, somebody asks the uniformed gentleman behind the counter about the shrubbery; he answers, These plants belong to the state, sir. I rejoice that I did not go to Yale.
Summer prepares to scatter my word-harem, while back home in Queens, the Huns move out from next door, quitting and quieting the block. But I would not change anything. My beloved leaves me messages that say, Don’t forget to call Il’ya, for he does really very much love you very very much, really. I find out that the dorm I inadvertently chose used to belong to Garcia Lorca. The little one I babysit calls me Rapunzel. The editor of the New Yorker scrawls on my form rejection slip, P.S. Best wish. Someone asks my Russian professor what is the Russian equivalent for Life sucks, and she answers that you can’t say that, because it isn’t true.
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