Love and Glory

Chapter Five

We were in the spa drinking coffee and smoking and I was explaining a poem.

“Think about it,” I said. “Why worms?”

“Which line is that,” Billy Murphy said.

“Down here,” I said, “line twenty-seven.”

“My echoing song then worms shall try that long preserved virginity,” Nick Taylor said, running the words and lines together without pause or comprehension.

“A worm’s gonna screw her?” Guze said.

“Screw who?” Billy said.

“I don’t know, this is some sick poem, Boonie. A worm screwing a virgin?”

“It’s about you. You’d screw a worm, Guze, if someone would hold it.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t no virgin.”

“So you say.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You want to pass this fucking test or not?”

“Yeah. How much time we got?”

“Hour and a half.”

I saw Jennifer across the spa. She was barely visible talking with three girls in another booth. The ripe thrust of her lower lip and part of her chin were all that showed among the other heads in the booth. I shifted a little and caught her eye. She smiled. I winked at her. There were six of us crowded into my booth and the smoke was thick. It is hard to think of that time now without seeing it through the glower of cigarette smoke that hung in hot, crowded places.

“C’mon, Boonie, explain the goddamn poem, will you?”

“He’s saying if you wait too long to come across, you’ll die and then the worms will eat you in the grave.”

“Jeez, what a nice poem,” Billy Murphy said.

I shrugged. “And he says worms, rather than, say, ants, which also eat corpses, because a worm is like a schwantz, you know. It’s an appropriate image.”

Nick Taylor said, “Wait a minute. Wait just a fucking minute. I know what that is. That’s a goddamned phallic symbol.”

I nodded.

“Sym-bo-lism,” Guze said, dragging the word out. “Symbo-fucking-lism.”

“Terrific, Guze. Put that down on your exam.”

“Are you shitting? In the exam I’m going to cheat off of Boonie.”

“You better.”

Jennifer was looking at us. Nick Taylor, I suppose. She could hear most of the talk because she was close. But everyone knew she wasn’t bothered by swearing.

“Before that,” Billy Murphy said, “what’s this shit about a chariot?”

Jennifer took her cigarette from her mouth and flicked the ashes onto the floor outside her booth with a shake of her hand. There was a wonderful carelessness about her. A kind of arrogant disinterest in some of the most elementary proprieties, the way I always imagined a princess might act, first in line to the throne, adored by the king and queen, worshipped by the people, she could shake the ash from her cigarette without looking where it would land. She could do whatever she wanted. Her wanting it made it right. And yet she was very polite, she always called professors sir. She dressed exactly the way she should; she was always a complete expression of the received look at Colby in 1950. Exactly sloppy enough, exactly enough makeup, exactly right roll in the cuffs of her jeans. It would have confused me in someone else, this seeming discontinuity, both careless and careful, but I applied no mortal categories to her. I saw her in great detail, and clearly, but I saw her as if through a projected overlay, which imposed upon the real contours of her attraction, the ornate illuminations of my dream. It was as if a real person had walked in the path of a movie projector. My imagination played upon her face until the reality was neither she nor the projection, but the fusion of both. In those days, just turned eighteen, her carelessness seemed to me, breathless in adoration, the identifying gesture of breeding and style. She was never careless with me.

“Boonie, what’s this fucking chariot? If I flunk this test, they’ll draft my ass.”

“In a lot of classical myths and stuff the sun was seen to ride across the sky in a chariot,” I said. “And so Marvell uses it to suggest time.”

“What’s time got to do with the sun?”

“The sun is the basis of time. Why the Christ do you think there’s twenty-four hours in a day?”

“Oh, yeah. Why the hell doesn’t he just say it?”

I shrugged. “The idea of a chariot bearing down on the two lovers is also threatening, you know, like a war chariot.”

Billy Murphy said, “Guze, don’t try to figure it out, just remember it.”

“Whyn’t they have us read stuff we can understand?”

“If you understood it, what would the fucking English teachers do every day in class?” I said.

“I’m going to work the meat counter at my old man’s market when I graduate,” Billy Murphy said. “I wonder what good Crosbie thinks this will do me.”

“Liberalize your views of life,” I said. “Make you a better human.”

“Like Crosbie?”

“Yeah. That’d be good in the market, huh?” I put on a fruity accent. “Perhaps a slice of boiled ham, madam?”

The laughter rolled around the table. In the booth behind us I saw Jennifer smile. Her mouth was wide and bright when she smiled, making a broad crimson slash across her face. Her front teeth were white and slightly uneven, one of the canines barely out of line. The effect of the laughter on her face was to emphasize her cheekbones.

Nick Taylor said, “Come on, come on, we only got an hour left. How about this next poem? How do you pronounce the guy’s name?”

“Donne,” I said, “rhymes with gun.”

“Jesus, why doesn’t he spell it right?”

“Never went to Colby,” I said. “Doesn’t know shit.”