The Undertaking Read online

  At first, both of the Nugents were calling me weekly, daily sometimes, sometimes twice a day. I reckoned I owed them both. Both of them had been willing to listen to me ten years before when my own ruined marriage was unraveling. So I listened back, tendered free advice, along with the disclaimer that you get what you pay for. She stopped calling when I broached the topic of conciliation. She wanted no part of that. But he kept calling. He was angry, heartwracked, crazy with love and hate. I was not always sympathetic. I felt as I supposed their boys did: divided and confused, utterly powerless. And oddly at risk since divorce has, like romance and suicide, its own contagion.

  As these miseries were unfolding in Ohio, my friend and editor, the poet Robin Robertson, was tidying up loose ends in his office at Jonathan Cape Publishers in London. He had applied for and been granted a month-long residency at Annaghmakerrig, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts in Newbliss, Co. Monaghan. His usual duties of publishing the novels and slim volumes of other writers was to be suspended while he prepared his own first manuscript for publication.

  It was June in Newbliss. The rhododendron that surround the mansion were ablaze with blooms. Bernard Loughlin, the resident director, was working as always in the formal gardens. To the roses and other perennials, a few rows of bell-peppers, aubergine, tomatoes, and artichoke had been added. Robin Robertson sat at the desk in the bay window of Tyrone Guthrie’s study.

  They always put poets in Guthrie’s study. The old theater man had given Annaghmakerrig to the Arts Councils of both Northern Ireland and the Republic in hopes they would put it to some peaceful use, poised as it is three miles from the border among drumlins and lakes. They put musicians in the refurbished stables, artists and sculptors in the barns. The writers go in the big house—novelists and playwrights upstairs and poets, always and only poets, on the first floor in Tyrone Guthrie’s study. It is a large room conducive to larger themes. Even with a bed and armoire, there is plentiful floor space good for pacing. A huge fireplace, high ceilings, and the desk in the lengthy bay windows overlooking the gardens are all suggestive of epic and magnum opus.

  What’s more, Bernard Loughlin, who only smokes the cigarettes he can borrow or barter for, has found that poets are the most prolific smokers.

  Leaning in through the open window that June mid-morning, Bernard tendered in trade, for one of the poet’s carefully hand-rolled cigarettes, “a greeny specimen from me humble garden.” Robin approved the transaction with a nod, setting the artichoke on the desk.

  Robin Robertson gazed out the bay window in search of a theme befitting his surroundings. In black ink centered on the blank page before him he wrote down “Artichoke” and began to work from the memory of the first meal he’d prepared for the woman who would later marry him.

  He had steamed them. He’d prepared a side dressing of clarified butter and cilantro.

  As they pealed the artichokes they grew contemplative. The table kept them out of reach except for their eyes, which met at intervals then returned to the vegetable duties before them.

  Their hands grew wet and warm with the pealing. The slow ceremony of food kept them wordless and full of wonder. The leaves had the texture of secret and private parts, the penetralia of life, where thistle and fuzz and folds give way to pleasure, where touch and taste become the one sensation. He watched her work her tongue and then her teeth and then her lips around the plump, pulpy base of the leaves. And she watched him watching her.

  “There now,” the woman said, finishing first, the heart exposed. She licked it first, pursing her lips against it, looking at him all the while, and consumed it with the slightest appreciative noise and her eyes closed. He let his fingers work deep into the hairs until the cleanly dampness seemed permanent and the room was filled with the warm aroma of the Mediterranean.

  “The rubbed leaves,” he wrote, “come away in a tease of green, thinning down to the membrane.”

  This utterance he divided into four lines, thereby replicating by the pause at each line end, the sacramental pace of the chore the words describe. The reader, he reckoned, should have the facts and the time to savor them.

  By mid-summer, the ink on Nugent v. Nugent was dry. She got the house and house payments, the car and custody, less of his pension than she had hoped for, and quittance of their marriage bed. He got visitation rights, a schedule of child support payments, most of his dead mother’s furniture back, and boxes of his first three volumes of poetry, which had suffered some water damage during the pendency of the matter. “Deal with it,” is what his former spouse told him when he wondered aloud at what had happened to the books. Not mentioned in the court documents, but just as certainly his, were the bitter idioms of pain that began to inform his patois and poetry.

  Robin Robertson was preparing clean copy of some poems he was submitting to the poetry editor of The New Yorker. The magazine, which bills itself as “possibly the best magazine in the world” is irrefutably among the best possible magazines for poets to publish in. Of the tens of thousands of poems she is sent every year, the editor will publish a hundred or a hundred and twenty. Poets from all over the English-speaking world have tried to nail down what it is, apart from excellence, she responds to in a poem. Her tastes are eclectic, international, utterly unpredictable. But to have a poem in The New Yorker guarantees an audience beyond the ordinary pale of poetry. In the best of the “little magazines” and literary quarterlies, a poem’s readership is limited to the thousands, or more likely, hundreds of subscribers. But hundreds of thousands across the civilized planet read The New Yorker, as they browse in the waiting rooms of stockbrokers, attorneys, gynecologists, and ad agents. It is seen by anthologists, awards committee members, old flames, and perfect strangers. Its shelf life extends to L.A. and London, Hong Kong and Paris, Sydney and Dublin.

  Thus, in preparing his manuscript, little wonder Robin Robertson tinkered with revisions of “Artichoke.” He changed the last two lines of the first stanza, then changed them back to read “the quick, purpled, beginnings of the male” and replaced the dash after “membrane” with a colon. He wanted, whatever he sent her, to send her excellence.

  She took it immediately. She called to thank him for sending it. In due course, a rather generous check came in the mail and page proofs were faxed to his London office.

  “Artichoke” appeared in one of the December issues between Henry Nugent’s forty-seventh birthday and Christmas Day, both events observed in the company of boxes—books and records not yet unpacked—in the two-bedroom townhouse he had moved into. Whether he or his now distant former wife read “Artichoke” that December cannot be ascertained.

  As for Robertson, celebrating the first of several appearances in The New Yorker, he retained a reputable child-minder and took his wife out for Lebanese food at Al Hamra in Shepherd Market, where among the menu items are lamb’s testicles and, of course, artichoke. They did not, as he told it later, have the balls.

  The normal courtesies of copyright prevent my supplying a full text of the poem: fifty-three words in all, deftly distributed between two sextets—twelve lines only, halved by a stanza break. But let me hazard, say, the first three lines of the last stanza so that you might get a feel for the spare language, its flavor. “Then the slow hairs of the heart:” the poet records, “the choke that guards its trophy,” and to put a finer point on it he adds, “its vegetable goblet.”

  If you hold the page at arm’s length and squint, it looks like a brief note left on the fridge for a housemate saying what’s for dinner, the children are at their grandmother’s, don’t forget the wine. Or maybe a short list for the market. In a way, it is both. It is an intimate text with plenty of white space and margin. The words are guileless and entirely straightforward in their description of an artichoke being peeled, readied for human consumption.

  It is the poem’s unfailing penchant for whetting the reader’s most private and primary appetites that accounts for its power and, I daresay, its appeal. What is more,
this effect upon the reader—the excitement of nerve ends and intentions known only to one’s heart of hearts—is uniform, uninhibited by gender or racial or age predictors. You may try this in the comfort of your own home. Try it with friends and passersby. They will blush and grin and ask for a copy.

  My friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, went looking for the geographic cure. Ohio had become too painful. Seeing the boys hurt his heart. And seeing their mother, whom he stilled loved and mistrusted, was too frequent a reminder of what it was he had lost. “Like going to a wake,” he said, “that’s never over. The dead need to get buried, eventually.” He bought a house. Moved the boxes from the townhouse to the new house, which still didn’t feel like home. The boys came over with videos, slept on futons, ate Chicken McNuggets, tried to cope.

  He took a sabbatical leave, asked if he could use my cottage in West Clare, flew to Ireland, where he found it, unremarkable for February, cold and damp. The answer, he figured, remarkably, was to drive north: Galway, Sligo, Belfast, the ferry to the lake district, then back in late March to West Clare where I saw him briefly. The weather hadn’t much improved.

  He seemed terribly agitated. He couldn’t sit still. His mission seemed desperate. He was in search of love.

  In the months since his marriage ended, he’d had plenty of sex. This is an incumbency known to all of the divorced. Having failed at what is, among other things, a sexual treaty, it is important for men and women alike to demonstrate for anyone who will tolerate it, that It Was Not a Sexual Performance Problem that occasioned the breakup. Thus the comfortable if uninspired sexual patterns of the happily married are replaced by the erotic aerobics of the freshly unwed. New undergarments are purchased, sit-ups are done. They bathe more eagerly, clip their nails, invest in creams and lotions and emollients. Fresh bed linens, bathrobes, the elements of style and ambience—every encounter is a kind of audition. This is the stuff that memories are made of.

  But after a year or so of such encounters, Henry Nugent was hungry for love: that unencumbered approval by another of your species for your presence in their lives.

  When he left me in West Clare, he was heading west. He flew back to Ohio, bought a new car with five speeds and bucket seats, drove westward, north, then west again. In April there were postcards from a college town where he’d been booked to do workshops and a poetry reading. Among the people who stood in line after his reading to have him sign their copies of Good Counsel was a young poet on the creative writing faculty who touched his arm as she thanked him for his poems, especially the one about a night in a hotel room with his sick son in Cleveland.

  May and June brought postcards from Idaho and Montana, Oregon and California. “These hills,” he wrote on one, “remind me of Calabria—the sweet foot of Italy—where all beauty is.” I didn’t know what to make of it.

  In July the postcards stopped coming. In mid-August a note came with a snapshot of himself and a striking young woman in a print skirt hugging alongside a river. In the background were mountains. Their bodies had the look of bodies accustomed to one another. The Calabrian references began to make sense.

  They had made plans for dinner. The rooms had the well-worn feel of home to him—shelves full of books, tables piled with correspondences and magazines, postcard likenesses of poets and writers, dead but remembered, thumbtacked to the vertical surfaces. Even the kitchen enjoyed the bookish clutter of a woman who cooked to savor rather than to survive and who read over her dinner. Colanders and beakers of olive oil shared cupboard space with review copies of new poetry, her own first volume, and well-worn cookbooks with a regional Italian bias.

  And on the refrigerator, held there by kitchen magnets, an aging page out of The New Yorker with a poem on it.

  “He’s my friend’s London editor you know.”

  “Robertson? Really? It’s a lovely poem.”

  Henry considered the penultimate lines of the second stanza: “the meat of it lies, displayed, upended, al dente;”.

  “It was such a gift in the dead of winter,” she said. “When everything is gray and cold and growth seems hopeless.”

  “‘The stub-root aching in its oil,’” he read aloud.

  He had never been so hungry.

  “Do you like artichoke?” the woman asked.

  In September a card came that said they’d been married. Henry, approaching his birthday this December, calls to say, “It was all your man Robertson’s fault, that poem, that ‘Artichoke’.” Over the phone lines I can feel him grinning.

  I tell Robin a version of what the old doctor, William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that men die everyday for what they miss in poetry. I tell him people are born, and reborn, everyday, who owe their very beings to poems.

  Some days I’m sure of God, some days I’m not. Most days I side with the French oddsmaker, Blaise Pascal, whose gambit instructs that it is better to believe in something that isn’t than to disbelieve in something that is. And of all God’s gifts, the best one is language—the power to name and proclaim and identify, to fashion from the noisy void our lexicons for birds of the air, fishes in the seas, what grows in the greensward; and for contempt and affection, pleasure and pain, beauty and order and their absences. In a world where Someone’s in Charge, all of the endings are not happy ones. Nor is every utterance a benediction. But for every death there’s some redemption; for every loss an Easter out there with our name on it, for every woe, a return to wooing.

  In such a world, my friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, the vocabulary of joy restored to his word horde, writes a poem he entitles “Nines”. It is an epithalamium—an ancient form, “upon a bridal chamber”—a wedding poem. “The Song of Solomon” is one—“thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.” And the ancient Greek Sappho deftly joins references to Hymen, the god of marriage, to those of Ares, the god of war, in her remarkably modern Fragment. There is much coaxing to “raise the ridge-pole higher, higher” because the husband is “taller by far than a tall man” and the builders are exhorted to “pitch the roof-beam, higher, higher” so that your man can “get it through the door.”

  In his, Henry Nugent enunciates first an understandable caution about the public institution of marriage and, finally, his hope that their “forever” lasts at least thirty years and that the private passions of their wedding night—outside any common law or custom—attend the long nights of their lives together, the math of which he cannot resist calculating in the poem.

  There are two stanzas, nine lines each, in loose iambics—the sound of hearts—daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum. Think of Shakespeare: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!/For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

  Perhaps it is this traffic in irony, audibly accomplished, among the numbers and the syllables, where form and function co-conspire toward their common end, that nudges the poetry editor of The New Yorker toward the acceptance of Mr. Nugent’s poem. She sends him the check and page proofs and her eminent thanks.

  My friend and editor, the poet, Robin Robertson, will grin from his office in London. A man well versed in the power of language, he will cut the page from the magazine, take it home and affix it to the refrigerator, where it will move his wife of nine years in ways that are none of our business.

  In the fullness of time, however, she will make known her special fondness for the shape and sound of it, the courtesies of copyright do not deter me from sharing here:

  Thus we proclaim our fond affirmatives:

  I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let’s

  eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is

  the public spectacle of private parts:

  cheque-books and genitals, housewares, fainthearts,

  all doubts becalmed by kissing aunts, a priest’s

  safe homily, those tinkling glasses

  tightening those ties that truly bind

  us together forever, dressed to the nines.

  Darling, I reckon maybe
thirty years,

  given our ages and expectancies.

  Barring the tragic or untimely, say,

  ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings,

  please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this,

  when, mindless of these vows, our opposites,

  nonetheless, attract. Thus, love’s subtraction:

  the timeless from the ordinary times—

  nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine.

  The Golfatorium

  Write, read, sing, sigh, keep silence, pray, bear thy crosses manfully; eternal life is worthy of all these, and greater combats.

  —THOMAS À KEMPIS

  It came to me high over California. I was flying across the country to read poems in L.A. I had gigs at the Huntington Library, UCLA, San Bernardino, and Pomona College. And between engagements, four days free to wander at will in Southern California. It was a beautiful blue end of September, the year I quit drinking and my mother died. Crisp and cloudless, from my window seat the nation’s geography lay below me. The spacious skies, the fruited plane, the purple mountains’ majesty.