Middle Age (57 page)

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that winks like a perverse little eye. When Beatrice introduces Abigail, Croom peers at her rudely. His nostrils sniff like an aroused dog’s. He’s hardly more than Abigail’s height: has he shrunken? He gives off a faintly sour odor, mixed with a fresher scent of toothpaste and cologne. He looks as if he hasn’t shaved for a day or more, nor has he combed through his snarled hair. Abigail hears herself laughing giddily. “Mr. Croom, you called me ‘Abrigail,’ once. A long time ago.” Croom says in a booming voice,

“Good! That calls for a pre-luncheon drink, ‘Abrigail’.” He steers her away from Beatrice Archer and several other smiling women waiting to be introduced to the famous poet, and leads her into the dimly lit “tap room” off the lobby. It’s only just twelve noon, there’s no one behind the bar. “Bartender!” Donegal Croom bares his teeth in a grimace of a smile and pounds on the bar with his fist. “This is an emergency.” Abigail, mortified, stands by his side; he’s holding her wrist, as if keeping her hostage. Croom says, “Salt-hill. A suburb of New York City? Have I been here before, dear?

You’re very beautiful but you all look alike.” Abigail tries to explain that Salthill-on-Hudson isn’t a suburb really, it’s a village dating back to the early s, but Croom, distracted by his quest for a bartender, isn’t listening. She wants to tell him how powerful his poetry is; how much it has meant to her, over the years; what a solace poetry is, as one experiences the turmoil of life . . . At last a moustached black man in a crisp white coat emerges, polite if unsmiling, and takes drink orders. “Two single malt whiskeys. Straight.” Abigail isn’t clear whether one of these is for her, or whether both are for the poet; she won’t touch any drink that contains alcohol, she vows. Quickly Donegal Croom swallows down half his whiskey, with a sigh of satisfaction. He’s sitting now on one of the bar stools, his head in his hands. At his feet is a battered canvas suitcase; he’d come to Salthill directly from La Guardia, and hasn’t yet checked into his room at the Inn, where he’s staying the night. He seems to have forgotten that Abigail is with him, raising the whiskey glass to his mouth, rocking a little on the bar stool, shoulders hunched. He’s murmuring to himself—what?

Abigail imagines Gaelic words, potent and mysterious. At such close quarters Abigail can see how thin Donegal’s hair is at the back of his head; it looks as if his hair is sliding down, exposing his pale-pink scalp. Donegal finishes the second whiskey and calls for a third, but Abigail daringly in-tercedes: “No more for Mr. Croom, please! We have to leave now.”

Croom turns to Abigail, scowling. He seems, for a moment, not to know who she is. Then, sighing, he says, “Good. You’re quite right, dear.

Middle Age: A Romance

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Always, you’re right.” He lays an unexpectedly gentle hand on Abigail’s slender shoulder. His fingers crinkle the beautiful raw silk. “They’ve sent you to me, eh? My muse. Good.” Swaying on his bar stool, Donegal leans in Abigail’s direction as if he’s about to kiss her; Abigail stands unmoving, as if hypnotized. What is happening? What does Croom mean by calling her his muse? In the doorway, Beatrice Archer and several other commit-tee members are signaling anxiously. Abigail says softly, “Mr. Croom, excuse me? I think we must leave now. Will you come with me?”

“Anywhere, dear. With you.
La belle dame de merci
.”

Croom takes Abigail’s hand and kisses the palm, in a gesture so sudden and so intimate, Abigail feels faint.
And my friends saw!
For the moment, Abigail Des Pres can’t be happier.

L  , ungainly fish on its tail Donegal Croom is led by Abigail into the noisy ballroom. Everywhere are banks of flowers, a giddy paradise of flowers, some fresh-cut and others in attractive pots. And there are pyr-amids of Donegal Croom’s books, to be sold after the luncheon, and signed by the poet. What an elegant, festive occasion! Croom stares, like a man waking with difficulty from a dream. “Gaelic” music is being piped into the cavernous space, and Croom seems to be looking about for its source. “I
must
be dead.
Dead
would explain all.” Abigail leads Croom through the maze of lavishly decorated tables, determined to get him to the speakers’

platform. He’s leaning rather heavily on her. He’s breathing rather heavily.

His hair is falling into his face, his skin is flushed. He stumbles on the steps to the platform, but Abigail steadies him, like an old, dependable wife. Abigail pulls out his chair for him, and sits beside him, smiling. Oh, smiling! Her friends gaze up at her, admiring the black straw hat, the gleaming helmet of hair beneath, the striking Hermès suit; possibly they’re envious of Abigail Des Pres, for the first time in years. Abigail likes the feeling. Except she’s very nervous. She has no more appetite than Donegal Croom for the luncheon, cream of asparagus soup dribbled with parsley and puff pastries stuffed with seafood, “baby salad greens” dribbled with low-caloric vinaigrette and fresh raspberries for dessert. And meager serv-ings of a very dry, not terribly good chardonnay. (Seeing that Abigail isn’t drinking, Donegal Croom unobtrusively appropriates her glass as his own.) Abigail gazes out into the enormous flower-festooned space through the poet’s bloodshot eyes: she sees the tables of petal-faced,

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colorfully costumed women, so many tables, so many women, chattering like birds. What a din! And everywhere clusters of roses, lilies, irises, orchids, gardenias . . . Abigail sees the women of Salthill, her sisters: all of them beautiful. Strange, that all are beautiful. The plain have been transformed into beauties by the magic of affluence. And there are no longer

“ugly” women, at all. Meringue hair, glaring cosmetic faces, piranha smiles, jewels that wink like semaphore signals. That commingled drunken smell of myriad perfumes. “Help me, dear. Oh, Chri-ist. I think I might be leaking.” Donegal Croom mutters in Abigail’s ear, she can’t determine if he’s serious or joking, his flushed cobweb-face drawn into a grimace of—what?

Anticipation, dread? Acknowledgment of the Salthill women’s girlish-thrilled applause? But Abigail Des Pres must precede him, and now Beatrice Archer introduces her. In her high-heeled Gucci pumps she’s standing at the podium. Trembling visibly. Oh, so frightened! Her friends gaze up at her, willing her to do well. Yet not too well, so that they might envy her even more. “I am deeply honored. I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . .” In a dream the introduction passes, and suddenly Abigail is returning to her seat, blushing fiercely, wanting to think that the girlish-thrilled applause is at least partly for her. Donegal Croom stands at the podium, nudging his protuberant belly against it. He has put on reading glasses that give him a mock-grandfatherly air, even as the gold stud glitters lewdly in his ear. In Salthill, no men of Croom’s generation wear earrings: earrings are worn by gay waiters, and there are not many of these.

Behind the podium Croom looms large, sighing improvidently into the microphone, with a sound as of distant thunder. He frowns as he leafs through much-thumbed paperback books with no air of great urgency.

Hasn’t he prepared his reading? Is he taking this occasion so lightly, that means so much to the Friends of the Salthill Medical Center? Eventually Croom begins speaking, his voice near-inaudible at first and then stronger, and more melodic, like a music box that has been cranked up. In an oracu-lar tone he proclaims to the more than three hundred women in the ballroom, each staring avidly at him, that poetry is a “mystical revelation”—it is “anarchic”—it is “Dionysian”—it is “divination.” He confides in them, that poetry has “saved my life.” Poetry has “given my life its singular meaning.” And that one must, to comprehend poetry as well as to create it, “succumb to the demon within. And have faith!” At this there’s a flurry of applause. Croom’s bloodshot eyes scan the room, the vertiginous flower-space before him, the rapt uplifted female faces, and begins at last to read,
Middle Age: A Romance

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in a voice that rises to passion, or its convincing simulacrum. “The Gyrfalcon”—“The Dying Jaguar”—“The Old Man of the Bog”—“Young Lust”—“Festering Wounds”—“The Feathered Serpent”—“The Bullfight.” There’s a collective, delicious shudder through the ballroom. What will the genteel women of Salthill-on-Hudson tell their husbands that evening, of the Irish-American poet Donegal Croom’s reading? How can they convey the frisson of illicit, brutal pleasure provoked by the man’s sensuous words, the subtly erotic forward-thrusting of his pelvis as he drives his lines home? How to speak of the “anarchic-Dionysian” joy in pain; the

“rough divination” that touches them at the core of their being, with an adulterous thrill? If the women’s sharp eyes have observed that the Donegal Croom who stands before them is a battered-looking wreck in his fifties who bears only a fleeting resemblance to his handsome publicity photos, they are too tactful to acknowledge it; these are women accustomed to not-seeing imperfections in men, though anxiously aware of the smallest imperfections in themselves. Perhaps it gratifies some of the Salthill women to realize that Croom is no more manly or attractive than their own husbands, though assuredly he’s a great poet. Hasn’t he been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and numerous other prizes besides?
What wonderful poetry
.
So inspiring
.
I bought all of his books! The Festival is such a
worthy cause
.

As Donegal Croom reads his perversely sensuous, incantatory poems, Abigail half-shuts her eyes to summon back the Donegal Croom of her youth. A man with whom she’d fallen in love, if at a distance. A gyrfalcon of a man, exuding tenderness, strength, sexual confidence; hinting at mysterious wounds, failures, “losses of the race, and of the soul.” In 8, Croom had recited poems instead of merely reading them, with an air of excitement and discovery. Abigail tries too to summon back her nineteen-year-old self, the naively idealistic virgin with hippie-style hair, who believed she “wanted more than anything in the world” to be a dancer, in the style of the great Balanchine. Of course, by the age of nineteen Abigail Des Pres was already much too old. And she’d lacked, fatally, whatever it is that true dancers possess, that unnameable blend of talent, determination, and audacity. “No. I was a coward. I’m so ashamed!” It’s to Adam Berendt she makes this confession, for she understands that, in her moments of most extreme folly, Adam watches over her.

With gusto Donegal Croom launches into what he describes as his most controversial, and most personal poem, “The Dark Muse: A

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Sestina.” There’s an apprehensive air in the ballroom as Croom recites in a hushed, incantatory voice what seems to be homage to, or repugnance for, the “female mouth lacking teeth only/ as Death lacks teeth.” Abigail feels her face burn. Is she the only woman who knows what Croom is speaking of? The others are smiling vaguely, encouragingly. Abigail is grateful for a noisy clicking-on of the air-conditioning unit, which muffles Croom’s words. Her attention is drawn to uniformed waiters moving with gigantic trays through the flower-festooned ballroom, expressionless and mechanical as robots. Mostly young males, of varying skin tones. Caucasian, Asian, black. There’s a thin dark-haired boy who resembles Jared except his face is more mature and he carries himself with more manly dignity than Jared could in such circumstances. Abigail can sense the contempt these waiters feel, forced by economics to serve the Salthill women; she notes how pointedly they ignore the ranting poetry of Donegal Croom, as if it were of no more consequence than the vibrating hum of the air conditioner.
Don’t judge us harshly! We were once your age
.

Croom cuts off his reading abruptly as if he’s tired, or bored; or maybe his audience has annoyed him, listening in primly shocked silence to what was intended to be, Abigail guesses, a “savagely funny” poem. Croom has read less than a half-hour (though he’d contracted for forty minutes, for a $5,000 fee and all expenses) and now declines, with a dismissive wave of his hand, to “take questions” from the audience. Just as well, Abigail thinks. Abigail is on her feet, resplendent in her Hermès suit and black straw hat, leading the applause. Smiling her happiest smile. Her Salthill friends and neighbors applaud generously, for these are generous women, and the strained interlude comes to an end.

As the luncheon breaks up, there comes bronze-highlighted Beatrice Archer to hug Abigail and kiss her warmly on the cheek, smearing lipstick. Beatrice’s eyes are damp, dilated. “You were wonderful, Abigail!

We’re all so proud of
you
.”

A reason to live? Why not?

D  D C’ ambiguous performance, a respectable number of his books are purchased, profits going to the Salthill Medical Center, and after a laconic book-signing session Croom insists that Abigail accompany him to his room. He’s scheduled to spend the night in Salthill—“Recovering and recrudescing.” He tells Abigail that
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he’s “feeling shaky”—“on the brink of depressed”—which often happens when he reads his work before audiences “hostile to poetry.” Abigail protests, “Oh, Mr. Croom! That audience wasn’t hostile to poetry, they adored you.” Croom laughs in a wistful-angry-adolescent way that reminds Abigail of Jared, and she feels a tug of sympathy for the man.

Croom looks genuinely disappointed. Though he’s signed a fair number of books, it isn’t enough; no amount of books sold and signed in Croom’s sweeping, florid hand will ever be enough. Abigail perceives that Croom is one of those men—invariably, such individuals have been men, in her experience—who take for granted the adulation of others, and are crestfallen when the adulation isn’t so lavish as they expect. Her ex-husband Harrison Tierney was one of these men. Though despising others, he wanted their admiration; he’d been infuriated when it was withheld.

Only Adam Berendt was different. So different! Adam was always surprised when anyone liked him.