Collected Stories

His side trips to the Newbury, his “research,” assure me the New Manuscript is going slowly—and that means badly. Research is a postponement, as I’ve heard Max say a dozen times. A novel is a whole world; there’s so much to get right, but you don’t get it right from reading encyclopedia articles. Sonnets, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, those little sounds.

I work on my sonnets at a small keyhole desk in a corner of our blue-and-gray bedroom. I actually work with real paper, lined paper from a thick tablet, and a ballpoint pen, with a great many crossings-out and dozens of arrows and question marks and sometimes such marginal scribblings as “No!” or “saccharine” or “derivative,” or else I present myself with that bold command: “Make fresher?” Freshness is the most demanding task one faces when dealing with a traditional meter, no matter how forgiving that meter is.

The first several pages are a mess, but I like to allow the mess to flow and flower. I make it move, sitting back in my chair, rotating my shoulders every half hour or so; I try to unknot my muscles, go, go, go—as long as it is forward. Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy. Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; think of Leonardo and his sage wisdom: “Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.” Or the problems that accrue from the “weight of too much liberty” (Wordsworth). Drown out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that’s being brought into being—a handball court, or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls—between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. Think of that rectangle, perfect in its proportions, that plastic cutlery tray in your kitchen drawer, with its sharp divisions for forks, knives, spoons. Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited. I believe that humans are meant to live about a hundred years—after that the cells stop wanting to divide and replicate themselves. Chickens, if left alone, will live for thirty years. I wrote a sonnet once about a chicken in great old age, screeching into its decayed wing feathers. Every species has a probable life span, and this observation offers me a verification of sorts for my fourteen-line creations.

From week to week, the subject of my ongoing sonnet suggests itself. It’s as though there’s a small thread clinging to my sweater’s sleeve, always there, waiting to be picked off. I look up from my desk at the framed poster of Rilke’s “Sonnet to Orpheus no. 14” that’s fixed to the wall, and think: this is me. This is I—getting more grammatical, now—my surroundings being a fine-furred extension of myself. These moments of mental vacancy are mine too, and the smothering way, according to Max, I have of signing my letters with amities and my poems with the turn in point of view at about—more or less—the eighth line. Me, always me. My inescapable self with its slightly off-balanced packaging, benignly decentered by an altered view. When I announce my name, Jane Sexton, to new acquaintances, in circumstances formal or informal, my attempt at musical elusion is also part of me, riding up the “a” in Jane, as though a twinkly uncertainty waited, then plunging down into the plainness of Sexton, with its embedded salute to hard churchly labor—the sexton being only a sort of janitor, and wouldn’t I rather have a name like Bishop or Deacon? No, I would not want to lose my bell-ringing, steeple-climbing, altar-dusting self, unconditioned for awe, broken-tongued on the subject of reverence.

My aging is me too, as well as the subject of my current sonnet. Only two years ago the idea of aging belonged to the whole world. It was background. I hadn’t been touched by it then. Now I am. Because I’m tall and thin, I am conscious of my bones, especially my hips, which are so shallowly buried, and also conscious of their curvature and sharpness. Often I feel like a walking ossuary. Shouldn’t the exercise of staring at my body involve a little veneration? Well, yes. My knuckles have grown elaborate and curious, white and blue knobs in a setting of stringy flesh. I’ve learned to curl my hands in my lap, one inside the other, so that no one can see the wonder of their structure, no one but me.

I am more and more solitary, and so is my poor Max. Are we then starting to take responsibility for our own dying bodies? It seems that each of us will have to do this on our own.

For a long time I have been perfectly happy to chair the twice-monthly meetings of the Sonnet Society, known since 1988 as the Sonnet Revival. Every second Monday, noon to one-thirty. The time is manageable—an hour and a half every other week, and our location in Clark House behind the SUD Building is an easy walk for me. The other members of the society find their parking on the street, which they do happily, since parking rarely presents a problem on Mondays.

Until recently we had the wide, broad-beamed Clark House room on the ground floor to ourselves, our massive oak conference table and the files where we keep our archives, but a year ago the Oulipian Society became aware of our privileged location, and applied for the use of our official meeting room on alternate Mondays, which seemed only fair to me and not a great inconvenience. Several of our members, though, felt our space had been compromised. Those upstarts!

I tried to reason with my colleagues, explaining that there should be no conflict if we planned our calendar carefully. But, in fact, the sharing of the room has caused occasional confusion, since many of our ranks are getting forgetful with age. I made the mistake once myself not too long ago. I can’t imagine how I had mixed up the weeks except that Max and I had been away to Jamaica. In any case I arrived at the Oulipian Society meeting with my latest sonnet and bag lunch to find them in the midst of what they called their “combinatorial stratagems.” On that particular Monday they were doing poems in which every line was to contain two words with double consonants. Their chair, Douglas Pome, asked me to stay for their “workshop” (as an “honored guest,” he said) and I did, feeling a little awkward about being thought a forgetful type who mixes up the weeks, and not so much enjoying the session as thinking it would make a good story to tell Max over coffee, something new for a change—my ever-present itch of compunction.

The Oulipians were younger than our group and more raffish, especially Doug Pome, with his careful midlife beard and his joke of a name. (He does write a nice fleet line.) I noticed they had catered sandwiches instead of doing the brown-bag thing as we’ve done for years. Most of their poems had a kind of tumbling, jesting humor, which they richly enjoyed. Humor is something sonnet-makers do badly, if at all.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Oulipians. I understand that, at first glance, they might seem to resemble the sonnet revivalists in that they set up constrictive forms for their literary production. But—whether they pursue their experiments and practice under the ever-anxious gaze of consciousness or whether they use anagram or linguistic transplant or number series—they suffer the disadvantage that they can never repeat their forays.

A sonnet, on the other hand, comes with its coat of varnish. As Flaubert says, the words are like hair; they shine with combing. We can do what we want with a sonnet. It is a container ever reusable, ever willing to be refurbished, retouched, regilded and reobjectified.

“Congratulations,” I said to Victor Glantz today as I handed over the gavel and welcomed him to the head of the table, where I always sit. For the next three years he will take charge of the society meetings and newsletter, and after that he may earn himself another term. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)

“I promise,” he said formally, in his irritating way, “to carry on the mandate of our society and to bring the sonnet into greater and greater public usage.” (I do cherish my association with Sonnet Revival, but I sometimes wish we had fewer loonies among us, and not quite so much enthusiastic mediocrity.)

Because the meeting broke up earlier than usual, and because time is more and more a problem for me, I took a different route home, doubling the distance between Clark House and our apartment building. After all these years I know our Andersonville area well, but the darkening skies, or else the glare of city lights, confused me for a moment. I felt my hands trembling in my pockets. One of the familiar old buildings had been razed; that was what was confusing me, something as simple as that.

Nevertheless I recognized later that I had, in fact, panicked. Fear spread rapidly through my body and went with a rush to my head, so that I thought I might faint. What was the matter with me? I had simply turned right when I should have turned left. There was a coffee shop on the corner. I had seen it many times, but had never entered. Now I went in, sat down at a small table by the window and ordered a cup of hot tea. Here I am, I said to myself two or three times, here I am, here I am, sipping at the edge of the plastic cup. I am five blocks from home, an aging woman who has lost her bearings. But now it’s all right. In fifteen minutes I’ll be home.

I didn’t tell Max about getting lost, but I did tell him what Victor Glantz had said when taking over the meeting, his hopes that the sonnet would gain in public usage. Max laughed at that, laughed harder than I had expected. I gave him a small smile in return. He stopped laughing then and gulped his coffee, struggling to straighten his face. We have to be terribly careful after forty years together. We are both so easily injured.

On Mondays, even on Sonnet Revival days, I try to get one or two lines down. Today I did what I do every day, exactly the same. I start at the beginning, the first line, the first word, and then work my way through to the end, thinking: this is familiar, oh yes. This—if it is to mean anything—must be familiar; familiarity is the point, after all. Spring and counter-spring. April, May, June, July. Then August, then September, straight through the tunnel of the chilly calendar. I am not thinking, in this early stage, of octave-sestet divisions.

Everything I need is within reach—my notes, my dictionary and thesaurus, my Leonardo quote taped to my desk, and, in fact, except for the steady accompaniment of good light, what else am I likely to require as I move from space to space, other than this tough little pad of paper and the stub of my pen?

But there will come a moment, possibly today—I came close early this morning—when my faith in my miniature art collapses. I can count on that; everything will be going well, the words adding themselves up, gorging on themselves, and saluting the friendly gathering of half-rhymes (which is what I favor these days), then the slow sexual stroke of the iamb arrives, and then, for reasons undisclosed to me, I will be stopped in my working tracks, unable to complete more than six lines. For the first week, the sonnet lives underground, where delay and containment are my chief concerns. It is as though I am looking at it with one eye squeezed shut. And then—this can happen quickly—by the second Monday, I have, mostly, managed to set up my scaffolding for all of the fourteen lines, but it is a scaffolding with several bits unnailed, and nothing yet committed. There are pressures working on particular words, but mostly I try to silence what I think of as a foot pedal of a piano, which is ever ready to stomp and shout and take an easy ride home. I want space for strangeness to enter—not obscurities or avoidances, but idiosyncrasies of grammar or lexicon, so that the sound is harsh, even hurtful.

Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me, so temptingly, a few feet out of sight, suspended on the other side of the desk lamp. Or else they are unwilling to freeze themselves in the particular posture I have prepared for them. I refuse, possessing as I do a kind of preternatural sprezzatura, and this presents another hurdle, to invert the structure of ordinary spoken English, attaching adjectives to the end of a line for the sake of rhyme. Here’s an example from the literature of sonnets: “With strange new hopes and fears and fancies wild.” “Wild” to rhyme with “smil’d” (Wilmon Brewer, a ferocious old sonnet-writer, whose book, awful, was published in 1937, Sonnets and Sestinas). If I were at the helm, Wilmot Brewer’s line would have to go “With strange new hopes and fears and wild fancies,” and where would you find a rhyme for fancies? In any case, I don’t believe fancies is a word I’ve ever used in a sonnet.

And I want, also, that short introductory beat, the primary iamb, followed by the heavier second beat, and I won’t have it any other way, though many sonnet-makers give in at this early point, as though they are inserting a trumpet into the verse and daring it to blow.

My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit/purl engaged, and is so close to matching the rhythm of my breath that I don’t even think of it. Its motor hums in the joints of my shoulders and wrists, knit/purl, knit/purl, ten items arranged on each clean glass shelf, though I don’t like to be overly prescriptive when it comes to meter.

Sometimes I look around whatever room I happen to be in as a way of steadying my thoughts. It is seven o’clock now. After our coffee ceremony I moved from the living room to the kitchen, with its fused aroma of afternoon coffee and tonight’s roasting chicken and fresh pepper. My little notepad occupies the clean edge of the corner table, and I have just heard a woman on the radio say to her interviewer, about a local celebrity murderer, “There was something about that man that made the hair on my spine stand up.”

After a minute I pick up a pencil and jot down the word spine. Then spinal. No, spinal is an anapest. I turn the radio off. Color in its array of tints moves forward in my mind, but not the words I need. Spinal fluid. Not quite.

It is my aging body I want to write about, this oiled goatskin I live inside of. The body that rises now, a little creakily, though I attempt to disguise this lack of limberness with an effort of will. I lean over from the waist as smartly as I can (as though a witness were standing next to me taking notes) and check the chicken in the oven and the pair of baking potatoes, darkening in their hides. Max is reading the newspaper. I hear him turning over the pages in the living room and think how he has deprived himself all day of this pleasure. He’s always been strict about the avoidance of the newspaper earlier in the day, he is like a puritan in that way: first he must perform his daily task, getting down onto hard disk or paper his own five hundred words, which tomorrow he may or may not delete. In ten minutes we will sit down at the dinner table, just the two of us. Are we to share the future or no? I’ve never made a fuss of things—why would I begin now?

Oh, these duo dinners! They’ve grown so hard for us. We’ll be talking about the Middle East tonight, the two of us. Or else the obscenity of CEO salaries in America. We already know each other’s views on these subjects; we speak in order to keep the silence away. It’s as though we reheat these issues in our very dear little copper saucepan—so battered and beloved—hoping by accident to stir in something new. But we are inoculated against surprise. We can no longer make each other laugh. We can’t even startle one another. We are both abashed at this imposed duty at the end of every day, even though we’ve done it for years: each of us is obliged to eat a meal in the presence of a stranger, and yet each is determined to be a self, a singular self. Music helps; this is something we’ve both noticed in the last year, and I can hear Max now, rising and shuffling among CDs on the shelf where we keep them. What’s it to be tonight? Ah, Mozart. Good!

After dinner, which includes a single glass of red wine, sipped slowly, grape-sized sips, I will phone our daughter in Oak Park to see how she got through her day, to try to gauge from her voice her level of vitality. I can hear myself being distractingly glib in order to blunt all that I resist. Is she bearing up? Will she manage another day of effort as she tries to see through her life’s obscuring clutter? I have to know before I can tuck myself into our queen-size water bed, where I will read for an hour or more, while Max in another room watches a documentary on television. I am reading a short, bleak Irish novel and he is watching something to do with elephant tusks, needless slaughter and corruption in the international market.

Sleep arrives early, and my arm lifts, as though under hypnosis, to switch off the bedside lamp. My last thought before drifting off collapses into a kind of formula of information directed to the center of my cortex, where a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?

The reply comes promptly, mocking my tone of high seriousness: if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.

Various Miracles

Various Miracles

SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded.

Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily.

Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People.

On March 30 a lathe operator in a Moroccan mountain village dreamed that a lemon fell from a tree into his open mouth, causing him to choke and die. He opened his eyes, overjoyed at being still alive, and embraced his wife, who was snoring steadily by his side. She scarcely stirred, being reluctant to let go of a dream she was dreaming, which was that a lemon tree had taken root in her stomach, sending its pliant new shoots upward into her limbs. Leaves, blossoms and finally fruit fluttered in her every vein until she began to tremble in her sleep with happiness and intoxication. Her husband got up quietly and lit an oil lamp so that he could watch her face. It seemed to him he’d never really looked at her before, and he felt how utterly ignorant he was of the spring that nourished her life. Now she lay sleeping, dreaming, her face radiant. What he saw was a mask of happiness so intense it made him fear for his life.

On May 11, in the city of Exeter in the south of England, five girls (aged fifteen to seventeen) were running across a playing field at ten o’clock in the morning as part of their physical education program. They stopped short when they saw, lying on the broad gravel path, a dead parrot. He was grassy green in color with a yellow nape and head, and was later identified by the girl’s science mistress as Amazona ochrocephala. The police were notified of the find, and it was later discovered that the parrot had escaped from the open window of a house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who claimed, while weeping openly, that they had owned the parrot (Miguel by name) for twenty-two years. The parrot, in fact, was twenty-five years old, one of a pair of birds sold in an open market in Marseilles in the spring of 1958. Miguel’s twin brother was sold to an Italian soprano who kept it for ten years, then gave it to her niece Francesca, a violinist who played first with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and later with the Chicago Symphony. On May 11 Francesca was wakened in her River Forest home by the sound of her parrot (Pete, or sometimes Pietro) coughing. She gave him a dish of condensed milk instead of his usual whole-oats-and-peanut mixture, and then phoned to say she would not be able to attend rehearsal that day. The coughing grew worse. She looked up the name of a vet in the Yellow Pages and was about to dial when the parrot fell over, dead in his cage. A moment earlier Francesca had heard him open his beak and pronounce what she believed were the words “Ça ne fait rien.”

On August 26 a man named Carl Hallsbury of Billings, Montana, was wakened by a loud noise. “My God, we’re being burgled,” his wife, Marjorie, said. They listened, but when there were no further noises, they drifted back to sleep. In the morning they found that their favorite little watercolor—a pale rural scene depicting trees and a winding road and the usual arched bridge—had fallen off the living-room wall. It appeared that it had bounced onto the cast-iron radiator and then ricocheted to a safe place in the middle of the living-room rug. When Carl investigated, he found that the hook had worked loose in the wall. He patched the plaster methodically, allowed it to dry, and then installed a new hook. While he worked he remembered how the picture had come into his possession. He had come across it hanging in an emptied-out house in the French city of St. Brieuc, where he and the others of his platoon had been quartered during the last months of the war. The picture appealed to him, its simple lines and the pale tentativeness of the colors. In particular, the stone bridge caught his attention since he had been trained as a civil engineer (Purdue, 1939). When the orders came to vacate the house late in 1944, he popped the little watercolor into his knapsack; it was a snug fit, and the snugness seemed to condone his theft. He was not a natural thief, but already he knew that life was mainly a matter of improvisation. Other returning soldiers brought home German helmets, strings of cartridge shells and flags of various sorts, but the little painting was Carl’s only souvenir. And his wife, Marjorie, is the only one in the world who knows it to be stolen goods; she and Carl belong to a generation that believes there should be no secrets between married couples. Both of them, Marjorie as much as Carl, have a deep sentimental attachment to the picture, though they no longer believe it to be the work of a skilled artist.

It was, in fact, painted by a twelve-year-old boy named Pierre Renaud, who until 1943 had lived in the St. Brieuc house. It was said that as a child he had a gift for painting and drawing; in fact, he had a gift merely for imitation. His little painting of the bridge was copied from a postcard his father had sent him from Burgundy, where he’d gone to conduct some business. Pierre had been puzzled and ecstatic at receiving a card from his parent, a cold, resolute man with little time for his son. The recopying of the postcard in watercolors—later Pierre saw all this clearly—was an act of pathetic homage, almost a way of petitioning his father’s love.

He grew up to become not an artist but a partner in the family leather-goods business. In the late summer he liked to go south in pursuit of sunshine and good wine, and one evening, August 26 it was, he and Jean-Louis, his companion of many years, found themselves on a small stone bridge not far from Tournus. “This is it,” he announced excitedly, spreading his arms like a boy, and not feeling at all sure what he meant when he said the words, “This is it.” Jean-Louis gave him a fond smile; everyone knew Pierre had a large capacity for nostalgia. “But I thought you said you’d never been here before,” he said. “That’s true,” Pierre said. “You are right. But I feel, here”—he pointed to his heart—“that I’ve stood here before.” Jean-Louis teased him by saying, “Perhaps it was in another life.” Pierre shook his head, “No, no, no,” and then, “Well, perhaps.” After that the two of them stood on the bridge for some minutes regarding the water and thinking their separate thoughts.

On October 31 Camilla LaPorta, a Cuban-born writer, now a Canadian citizen, was taking the manuscript of her new novel to her Toronto publisher on Front Street. She was nervous; the publisher had been critical of her first draft, telling her it relied too heavily on the artifice of coincidence. Camilla had spent many months on revision, plucking apart the faulty tissue that joined one episode to another, and then, delicately, with the pains of a neurosurgeon, making new connections. The novel now rested on its own complex microcircuitry. Wherever fate, chance or happenstance had ruled, there was now logic, causality and science.

As she stood waiting for her bus on the corner of College and Spadina that fall day, a gust of wind tore the manuscript from her hands. In seconds the yellow typed sheets were tossed into a whirling dance across the busy intersection. Traffic became confused. A bus skittered on an angle. Passersby were surprisingly helpful, stopping and chasing the blowing papers. Several sheets were picked up from the gutter, where they lay on a heap of soaked yellow leaves. One sheet was found plastered against the windshield of a parked Pontiac half a block away; another adhered to the top of a lamppost; another was run over by a taxi and bore the black herringbone of tire prints. From all directions, ducking the wind, people came running up to Camilla, bringing her the scattered pages. “Oh this is crazy, this is crazy,” she cried into the screaming wind.

When she got to the publisher’s office, he took one look at her manuscript and said, “Good God Almighty, don’t tell me, Camilla, that you of all people have become a post-modernist and no longer believe in the logic of page numbers.”

Camilla explained about the blast of wind, and then the two of them began to put the pages in their proper order. Astonishingly, only one page was missing, but it was a page Camilla insisted was pivotal, a keystone page, the page that explained everything else. She would have to try to reconstruct it as best she could. “Hmmmmm,” the publisher said—this was late in the afternoon of the same day and they sat in the office sipping tea—“I truly believe, Camilla, that your novel stands up without the missing page. Sometimes it’s better to let things be strange and to represent nothing but themselves.”

The missing page—it happened to be page 46—had blown around the corner of College Street and through the open doorway of a fresh fruit and vegetable stand, where a young woman in a red coat was buying a kilo of zucchini. She was very beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and she was also talented, an actress, who for some months had been out of work. To give herself courage and cheer herself up she had decided to make a batch of zucchini-oatmeal muffins, and she was just counting out the change on the counter when the sheet of yellow paper blew through the doorway and landed at her feet.

She was the kind of young woman who reads everything, South American novels, Russian folk tales, Persian poetry, the advertisements on the subway, the personal column in the Globe and Mail, even the instructions and precautions on public fire extinguishers. Print is her way of entering and escaping the world. It was only natural for her to bend over and pick up the yellow sheet and begin to read.

She read: A woman in a red coat is standing in a grocery store buying a kilo of zucchini. She is beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and it happens that she is an actress who—