Losing It (10 page)

He was indeed falling off track. Sienna’s legs were now tightly wound together, and as she rocked, so slightly, she seemed to be, discreetly, massaging her right nipple. Every so often she closed her eyes for longer than necessary and ran her tongue lightly over her bottom lip.

“The letter I have come to talk about –
ghnihhr
,” Bob said, and cleared his throat, then took time to sip more water and stare blankly at his notes. Sienna stopped rocking. Perhaps her fingers were just lightly resting on her bosom. It was hard to tell through the haze. “The letter I have come to talk about, of course, is the Whitman letter dated January 2, 1849, long believed to be lost, which I, through good fortune, managed to find -” Bob almost said twelve years ago – “in a box of mis-filed Rufus Griswold papers in the archives of the Boston Public Library. Griswold, of course, was Poe’s literary executor and, as has been amply shown, a rival and sometime enemy. You will recall -”

At that moment Bob could not recall anything much because Sienna separated then recrossed her legs, leaned forward a little and squeezed her leg muscles together, then released them and closed her eyes. Her breathing, though nearly silent, became deeper.

“You will recall,” Bob said, trying to concentrate, “Poe’s first meeting with Helen at her house in Providence. Both Poe and Helen were nervous. Her hand trembled when he grasped it; her voice faltered. She had a domineering mother who strongly objected to Poe’s advances. And what mother wouldn’t? He was notorious by then for his drunkenness, his temper and vindictiveness, his constant lack of money. And yet they talked, Poe and Helen, of past grievances and disappointments, of writers
and poets, literature and learning. Then on a long walk in the Swan Point cemetery he declared his love – ‘now – for the first and only time -’ possibly kissed her, and proposed marriage, after having known her in person for only two days.”

There was a titter in the audience, a nodding of heads from the more experienced scholars. This was an old story, Poe drowning and desperate. But for the first time while telling it, Bob himself felt something of the same throbbing incoherence. The words were leaving his mouth but he didn’t seem sure, beforehand, what he was going to say. And then for periods of time he wasn’t sure what he
was
saying. Sienna was looking at him, her eyes were demanding something of him, he didn’t know what. She seemed to be beaming a message of longing and need and invitation. Bob looked everywhere else in the room, at the cinder-block walls painted grey, at the rows of auditorium seats, the screen to the side – What about my slides? he thought. He had brought slides of the Whitman letter.

But he wasn’t talking about the Whitman letter. Try as he might to approach the subject, the wind of his rhetoric pulled him further off topic. He was telling the story of Poe and Helen’s conditional engagement, how Helen’s mother had forced him to sign away any right to property or money from the marriage, how Poe had agreed never to taste wine or spirits again, then broke that condition almost immediately. How Poe continued to court Annie even while swearing his love for Helen, how he seemed to desperately want out of the marriage even while doing his damnedest to secure it for himself. Then Bob got caught on a long and convoluted tangent regarding Poe’s later rantings about the cosmological world, his Eureka lectures on the origins and fate of the universe. The audience shifted nervously. People in the back started consulting their programs and sliding away.

“At any rate,” Bob said, checking his watch. What time was he supposed to finish? He looked up at the auditorium clock and then down at his watch again and failed to register the time. He was panicking. He felt dizzy. Not enough to fall over, but when he looked at his notes, just for a moment, he couldn’t make out the words. He knew the words were there, could see them, but it was as if he’d entered a dream in which everyone was speaking a foreign language close to English but not quite right. None of the connections were making sense.

“Maybe you could show us your slides, Bob,” Professor Windower said. The conference organizer was thin and ramrod straight, white-haired, his face red from some condition. Alcoholism? Not likely; perhaps just a too-earnest approach to life.

Bob said, “Yes, of course. How much time have I got?” and checked his watch again. Once more, the oddest feeling, seeing the numbers and the hands but not being able to collect it all into meaning.

“If you could wrap it up in a few minutes,” Professor Windower said, not unkindly. His hands were open, as if apologizing that so little time could be afforded such an important lecture.

Bob stepped over to the machine. He had given the technician his carousel of slides. But where was the operator now?

“Just click the first slide,” Professor Windower said. Bob looked at the buttons. In his present state he could barely manage to get his shaking hand to try any of the buttons. But he stabbed at one blindly. The first slide appeared – upside down. There was laughter, and Bob shook his head briskly as if to clear the cobwebs. Sienna appeared at his side. She touched his shoulder and said, “I’ll help. You’re doing fine.”

So Bob backed off. In an instant Sienna had the slide right way round. Page one of the Whitman letter. The closely packed words, the careful, nervous hand. “
My Dearest Edgar. I am writing you now to confirm what I am sure you must know in your heart of hearts, that there can be no union between us …”

“If you could just sum up, perhaps,” Professor Windower said, gently, looking at his watch again. Bob took a deep breath. Such a strange disorientation. He thought, Have I had a stroke? A mild heart attack? But here he was, still standing. Many eyes remained on him. He’d been safely on the rails one moment, badly off them the next. He skipped ahead in his notes to the final page and read, word for word, what was there in the last paragraph, relieved that the words at least were filtering into his brain and out of his mouth.

A strange case of nerves, he thought.

And also this: she unbalances me.

There was perfunctory applause at the end. Bob hurried to gather his notes, wanted to leave quickly. His brain felt, suddenly, crystal clear and achingly sensitive, aware of every nuance of this unfolding failure. He heard Hindle, awake and climbing the stairs, say, “Bloody unfocused!” to a colleague, loud enough so that everyone could hear.

“That’s too bad. You ran out of time,” Sienna said. “I thought you were doing very well.” Saddle-something, the young Oxford guy, was right beside her. He had a goatee and bushy eyebrows and in the English academic tradition looked like he’d bought his tweed jacket at a garage sale in the rain. He was obviously smitten with Sienna.

“Fascinating about the letter,” Saddle-something said. “Would you have your lecture notes, by any chance? Maybe you could e-mail me?” He held out his card. Bob took it hesitantly.

“I published my findings, and the letter in its entirety, in
American Literature
,” Bob said, trying not to sound stiff and off-balance.

“Excellent! Perhaps you could send me the reference.”

“
Ewan Suddle-Smythe
,” the card read. “
D.Phil., English Literature, Oxford University
.”

“Volume 63, number 3,” Bob said. “September 1991.”

“Very good!” Suddle-Smythe said. “Yes, excellent!” He had longish hair and his eyes were too big and watery and green, they shed too much light and seemed excessively full of laughter. “Would you care to come for a libation of sorts?” he asked, not of Bob but of Sienna, in a voice only slightly lowered.

“Well,” she said uncertainly. “You’ll come with us? Bob?”

“Yes, of course!” Suddle-Smythe said then, too hospitably, too effusively. “There must be a British pub somewhere in New York. You’ll come?”

“No,” Bob said, falling on his sword. “You two go ahead.”

They had to hurry out of the hall because the next speaker, a professor from the University of Chicago, was ready to start. She was to speak on “Poe and the Worship of Death” and looked white-faced and ghoulish, as if she’d spent weeks buried alive in a tomb as part of her research. Already more people were streaming in than had attended Bob’s muddled effort.

Sienna was up ahead, nearly out the door, when she looked around at him. Sorry, her look said, and he forgave her – of course he forgave her, as age must give way to youth. A dark beer would go nicely now, he thought. Warm, heavy beer in large quantities, but not with a dazzling young woman, not in competition with some English charmer. Did she notice Suddle-Smythe’s wedding band? Bob felt somewhat fatherly in his concern.

Outside the auditorium he remembered his slides and went back for them. The University of Chicago ghoul had already set them aside as she loaded her own. Bob collected his apologetically. Professor Windower caught him on the stairs near the exit and shook his hand too warmly, a gesture of pity and concern rather than appreciation. “Perhaps something fuller on the Eureka lectures next time, Bob? Is that what you’re working on?”

Bob wasn’t, but he nodded and gave Windower the impression that he was, in fact, putting together a full treatment of Poe’s warped and misguided view of the cosmos, and that was why his lecture on the Whitman letter had run off course. It was one of the last things Poe worked on, when he was falling in and out of coherence and suffering a grandiose delusion regarding his ability to piece together universal laws based not on observation and experiment but on intuition and instinct. It might be an interesting project. But then again, it might be best left to the historical dustbin.

“Maybe we could post your notes on the conference Web site?” Windower suggested, in consolation, it seemed, for Bob having fumbled his lecture.

“Yes,” Bob agreed. “I’ll just have to do them up … properly.”

“Oh, of course!” Windower said. “You can e-mail me later. Isn’t this a
fantastic
era we’re living in?”

“Fantastic,” Bob said, taking his leave, smiling bravely but feeling old and left out, shabby and entirely unfantastic.

There was a message from Julia on the telephone in his hotel room.

“Hi, Bob,” she said. “Listen, I don’t know when you’ll get this. And I’m not even sure if there’s anything you can do. But
I needed to talk to you. Mom has disappeared. If you can believe it. Those idiots at Fallowfields let her out somehow. I had to get there myself before they realized she was gone. I’m just … 
beside myself
. I don’t know … I’m sorry to call. There’s nothing you can do. I’m sorry to worry you. Just – call if you can. Bye.”

There was a second message. Julia again: “I’m sorry. I just – I hope the lecture went well. I
wish
you were here. Bye.”

Bob phoned immediately but got himself on the answering machine. He wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s me, I’m at the hotel,” he said. “You can call me, I won’t go out. I’m sorry I’m not there. Do you want me to come home?”

He put the phone down and sat on the bed.

He turned on the television and flicked through the channels. He was feeling thick-headed, defeated. It was late afternoon and three outlandish transvestites were telling a talk-show host why they had chosen to live as women. “I was trapped!” one of them said, a black she-male in a blonde wig, dressed, like the others, as a hooker in skimpy, gaudy clothing ratcheted tight, folds of flesh bulging wherever it was unrestrained. “I was a man trapped in a woman’s body!”

Bob turned it off. Another tiny bottle of Scotch had appeared in the courtesy cabinet of the hotel room. He poured it into a glass and drank it down as slowly as he could.

The phone failed to ring.

It was strange to be scrambled like this. He thought again of the feeling in front of everyone of being suddenly lost in fog, especially of looking at his watch and at the auditorium clock and then back at his watch, and not having it register. Chilling, how quickly it can all fall apart.

Bob ordered room service. Filet mignon with mushroom
sauce, bleeding rare, with green beans and baby roasted potatoes and a proper red wine, a French Merlot that would not leave a headache. He cleaned his plate, drank the better part of the bottle, and still the phone didn’t ring. He called Julia again but got the machine once more. He said, “My lecture was fine. I ran out of time, but I think it went over -” and he hesitated. He was going to say he thought it went over well, but really, it hadn’t, and while it wasn’t a disaster – well, not an unqualified disaster, as academic lectures go. Some of the droners he’d attended over the years …

The thought got lost and he hung up. He waited, and still the phone didn’t ring. It wasn’t that he was concerned about his mother-in-law. She’d always been a bit batty, in Trevor’s shadow. Trevor was a flinty old bastard. He could argue about anything, about whether it was raining right now where you stood. Bob never got along well with him, except when they were drinking; then things were bearable. Otherwise, Bob was the married older professor who’d abandoned his wife and taken up with their precious daughter. They couldn’t see beyond that: it was pure scandal for them, dirty and shameful.