The collected stories (16 page)

That evening Bloodworth told his wife Ralph's extraordinary story. Shelley was fearful, but Bloodworth said, 'After what he's done to us? Thrown us out of his house - and we went over there with the best of intentions. I tell you, he deserves what's coming to him.'

'I didn't like the look of that Ralph. He's probably wrong.'

'Probably,' said Bloodworth. 'But think of the manuscripts, work sheets! Shelley, they're gold! And what if he's right?'

Ralph was not in The King's Arms the next day. Bloodworth stopped in at lunchtime, then returned at six-thirty and stayed until closing. He watched an interminable darts game, he made himself ill on cider, and briefly he wondered if the whole affair might not be the blunder Shelley feared it was. But the critic's rules were not the poet's, and what the poet called ruthlessness the critic might give another name. Bloodworth sympathized with Ralph, the odd-job man; he saw the similarity in his tasks and the critic's: they received orders from the man whose poetry had earned him privileges, and stood at the margins of the poet's world, listening for a shout, waiting for a poem. But what critic had marched forward and snatched a poem from under the poet's nose? None had dared - until now. Bloodworth saw himself on the frontier of criticism, where there was danger, and not the usual taet required, but elaborate deceits and stratagems, odd ways of doing odd jobs. He went

THE ODD-JOB MAN

to bed with these thoughts, though Shelley woke him throughout the night with her coughing.

'It's not like Ralph to miss a day,' said Sid, the landlord, the next day.

Bloodworth said, 'It's not important.' He wondered if Ralph had betrayed him to Bellamy, and he knew a full minute of panic.

He met Ralph after closing time on the road. Ralph said, 'Running away, are you?'

'I thought you weren't coming.'

'It's all in here,' said Ralph. He slapped his shirtfront. Blood-worth heard the sound of paper wrinkling at the stomach of the shirt. He was excited. His Introduction would be definitive. The book would be boxed. It might cost twenty dollars. Ralph said, 'Let's go somewhere private.'

They chose the churchyard, a shield of gravestones. Ralph said, 'My wife was off yesterday. She gets these depressions. I might as well be frank. It's her tits, see. I don't understand women. I keep telling her they're not supposed to stick out. Look around, I says, lots of women have the same thing. But she-'

'What about the poems?' Bloodworth said.

'Don't rush me,' said Ralph. 'You don't care about anybody's problems but your own, do you? Just like old Bellamy.'

'We're taking the evening train.'

'First the money.'

Bloodworth peeled off five five-pound notes and counted five more ones into Ralph's dirty hand.

Ralph said, 'Why not make it forty? You're rolling in it.'

'We agreed on thirty.' Bloodworth hated the odd-job man for putting him through this.

'Have it your way.' Ralph undid the buttons on his shirt and took out a creased brown envelope. 'I hope you appreciate all the work I put into this. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to, but I said to Doris, "Thirty quid is thirty quid."' He handed the envelope to Bloodworth.

'I'm glad you're a man of your word,' said Bloodworth.

'Well, you seemed to want them awful bad.'

Bloodworth shook the hand of the odd-job man and hurried to 'Batcombe' to tell Shelley. But partly from fear, and partly from superstition, he did not open the envelope until he was on the train and rolling through the Kent hopfields. At first he thought he had

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been swindled; the folded sheets, about ten of them, looked blank. But they were only blank on one side. On the other side were the collapsing rectangles of typed stanzas, lines which broke and sloped, words so badly typed they had humps and troughs. And there was a letter: / hope you apreciate all the work I put into this but a deals a deal altho it take me a whole day to type up this stuff and any time you want some more lets see the colour of your money! Yours faithfully, R. Tunnel. PS I enclosed herewith one I wrote meself so you can compare.

But the drunken typing and misspelling that made them valueless to Bloodworth did not disguise the beauty of the lines. Reading them made his eyes hurt. He turned quickly to Ralph's own poem, which began,

The odd-job man thats me Messing around in my bear feat Can make a stie from some tree Raise up pigs for the meat.

The polecat, he thought, and his anger stayed with him for four English days. But back in Amherst he recovered himself, and when the department met for drinks and showed their trophies - Water-ford crystal, a Daniell engraving of Wick, a first edition of Howards End - Bloodworth brought out his folder and said, 'I've got some unpublished Bellamy variants in here, and the work of a new poet; he's terribly regional but quite exciting.' Prizeman squinted; Margoulies smirked; the others stared. He shuffled the summer's result, but as he passed the poems around to convince the men, it struck him that he had the oddest job of all.

Portrait of a Lady

A hundred times, Harper had said to himself: / am in Paris. At first he had whispered it with excitement, but as the days passed he began mouthing it in a discouraged way, almost in disbelief, in the humiliated tones of a woman who realizes that her lover is not ever going to turn up. His doubt of the city made him doubt himself.

He was in Paris waiting for a sum of money in cash to be handed to him. He was expected to carry this bundle back to the States. That was the whole of his job: he was a courier. The age of technology demanded this simple human service, a return to romance: he tucked his business under his arm - the money, the message - as men had a century ago. It was a delicate matter; also, it was illegal.

Harper had been hired for his loyalty and resourcefulness. His employer demanded honesty, but implied that cunning would be required of him. He had impressed his employer because he wasn't hungry and wasn't looking for work. And, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, Harper was passionate about real estate investment. Afterward he discovered that real estate investment was carrying a flat briefcase with eighty-five thousand dollars in used hundreds from an Iranian in Paris to an office in Boston, to invest in an Arizona supermarket or a chain of hamburger joints. They probably didn't even eat hamburgers, the Iranians - probably against their religion; so much was. Money (he, from Harvard Business School, had to be told this) shows up in a luggage x-ray at an airport security check as innocently as laundry, like so many folded hankies.

/ am in Paris. But his first sight of the place gave him the only impression that stayed with him: there were parts of Paris that resembled Harvard Square.

He had told his wife that he would be back by the following weekend, and had flown to Paris on Sunday believing that he could pick up the cash on Monday. A day to loaf, then home on

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Wednesday, and his surprised wife seeing him grinning in the doorway would say, 'So soon?'

He had not known that Monday was a holiday; this he spent furiously walking, wishing the day away. On Tuesday, he found Undershaw's office closed - Undershaw was the Iranian's agent, British: everyone got a slice. Harper's briefcase felt ridiculously light. That afternoon he tried the telephone. The line was busy; that made him hopeful. He took a taxi to the office but found it as he had that morning, locked, with no message on the dusty glass. On Wednesday he canceled his flight and tried again. This time there was a secretary in the outer office. She did not know Undershaw's name; she was temporary, she explained. Harper left a message, marked it Urgent and returned to his hotel near Les Invalides and waited for the phone to ring. Then he regretted that he had left his number, because it obliged him to stay in his room for the call. There was no call. He tried to ring his wife, but failed; he wondered if the phone was broken. Thursday he wasted on three trips to the office. Each time, the secretary smiled at him and he thought he saw pity in her eyes. He became awkward under her gaze, aware that a certain frenzy showed in his rumpled clothes.

'I will take your briefcase,' she said. She was French, a bit buck-toothed and angular, not what he had expected.

Harper handed it over. Not realizing its lightness until it was too late, she juggled it and almost dropped it. Harper wondered whether he had betrayed his errand by disclosing the secret of its emptiness. A man with an empty briefcase must have a shady scheme.

The street door opened and a man entered. Harper guessed this might be Undershaw; but no, the fellow was young and a moment later Harper knew he was American - something about the tortoise-shell frames, the new raincoat, the wide-open face, the way he sat with his feet apart, his shoes and the way he tapped them. Brisk apology and innocent arrogance inhabited the same body. Still sitting, he spoke to the secretary in French. She replied in English. He gave her his name - it sounded to Harper like 'Bnmgarner.' He turned to Harper and said, 'Great city/

Harper guessed that he himself had been appraised. He said, 'Very nice."

Bumgarner looked at his watch, did a calculation on his fingers,

no

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

and said, 'I was hoping to get to the Louvre this afternoon.'

He is going to say, You can spend a week there and still not see everything.

But Bumgarner said, 'What part of the States are you from?'

Harper told him: Boston. It required less explanation than Melrose.

'I'm from Denver,' Bumgarner said, and before Harper could praise it, Bumgarner went on, 'I'm over here on a poetry grant. National Endowment for the Arts.'

'You write poems?' But Harper thought of his taxes, paying for this boy's poems, the glasses, the new raincoat.

Bumgarner smiled. 'I've published quite a number. I'll have enough for a collection soon.'

The secretary stared at them, seeing them rattling away in their own language. Bumgarner seemed to be addressing her as well as Harper.

'I've been working on a long poem ever since I got here. It was going to be simple, but it's become the history of Europe, and in a way kind of autobiographical.'

'How long have you been in Paris?'

'Two semesters.'

Harper thought: Doesn't that just sum it up.

'Are you interested in poetry?' Bumgarner asked.

'I read the usual things at college. Yeats, Pound, Eliot. "April is the cruellest month.'" Bumgarner appeared to be waiting for him to say something more. Harper said, 'There's a lot of naive economic theory in Pound.'

'I mean modern poetry.'

'Isn't that modern? Pound? Eliot?'

Bumgarner said, 'Eliot's kind of a back number.'

And Harper was offended. He had liked Eliot and found it a relief from marketing and accountancy courses; even a solace.

'What do you think of Europe?' Bumgarner asked.

'That's a tough one, like, "Is science good?'" But seeing that Bumgarner looked mocked and wary, Harper added, 'I haven't seen much more than my hotel and this office. I can't say.'

'Old Europe,' said Bumgarner. 'James thought it corrupted you - Daisy Miller, Lambert Strether. I've been trying to figure it out. But it does do something to you. The freedom. All the history. The outlook.'

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Harper said, 'I can't imagine any place that has more freedom than the States.'

'Ever been to Colorado?'

'No,' said Harper. 'But I'll bet Europeans go. And for the same reason that characters in Henry James used to come here. To escape, find freedom, live a different life. Listen, this is a pretty stuffy place.'

'Depends,' Bumgarner said. 'I met a French girl. We're living together. That's why I'm here. I mean, I have to see this lawyer. My wife and I have decided to go our separate ways.'

'Sorry to hear it.' He will go home, thought Harper, and he will regret his folly here.

'It's not like that. We're going to make a clean break. We'll still be friends. We'll sell the house in Boulder. We don't have any kids.'

Harper said, 'Is this a lawyer's office?'

'Sure. Are you in the wrong place?'

'Anywhere away from home is the wrong place,' said Harper. 'I'm in brokerage. I haven't fallen in love yet. As a matter of fact, I'm dying to leave. Is Undershaw your lawyer?'

'I don't know Undershaw. Mine's Haebler - Swiss. Friend of a friend.' Then Bumgarner said, 'Give Paris a chance.'

'Paris is an idea, but not a new one,' said Harper, i tried to call my wife. The phones don't work. Where do these people park? The restaurants cost an arm and a leg. Call this a city?'

Bumgarner laughed in a patronizing way; he didn't argue. It interested Harper to discover that there were still Americans -poets - finding Paris magical. But this poet was getting a free ride: who was paying? Only businessmen and subsidized students could afford the place. Harper had had a meal at a small restaurant the previous day. The portions were tiny, the waiter was rude, the tables were jammed together, his knees ached from the forced confinement. The meal had cost him forty-seven dollars, with wine. No wonder poets had credit cards. It was a world he understood, but not one that he had expected.

Soon after, a tall man entered: Bumgarner's lawyer. Recognizing him, Bumgarner galloped after him. Harper was annoyed that the poet had shown so little interest in him, and Eliot's kind of a back number had stung him. The divorce: he would make it into a poem, deal with it like a specimen in a box and ask to be excused. But

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

the other things - the dead phones, the restaurants, the bathtubs that couldn't take your big end, the pillow bolster that was hard as a log, the expense account, the credit card - they couldn't be poems. Too messy; tney didn't rhyme. Go homel Harper wanted to scream at Bumgarner. Europe's more boring than Canada).

The secretary made a sorrowful click of her tongue when Harper rose to go. She had to remind him that he had left his briefcase; empty, it hardly seemed to matter. He was thinking about his wife.