Man. Woman. Iamb.
Note: I wrote the following essay in 2010 or 11. It was first published, in a less-edited form, in the June 2013 issue of Spittoon. I thought it was my most brilliant essay ever, but they stuck it in the back of very, very long online issue with very, very small print.
Peter was four years younger, a recovering alcoholic, and I could not for several weeks remember his name. Or rather, I knew his name, but it floated in my brain with other, equally insistent, names. Tom because of his match.com alias. Inexplicably, Josh. Daniel. Peter emailed me a list of Daniels: the prophet, the karate kid, the timid tiger who lives in a clock and wears a watch. Which Daniel am I?
Peter spent night shift at a hotel desk revising poems and stories into iambic lines. He called the job his Guggenheim. Peter: Apostle of the Arts, I thought.
This is what I knew about Peter. He’d finished his Bachelor’s in English the previous year, twelve years after quitting school in Ohio to move to New Zealand with his girlfriend. He’d moved to Pennsylvania three years ago with a different girlfriend. I didn’t know much about the years in between, the years of his alcoholism. He said he would tell me someday. I knew Peter had been sober for two years and that two years, recovery-wise, is not long. Perhaps I should have taken this as a red flag, but his list of Daniels, his experiments with vegan butternut squash soup, and his love of cemeteries caught and held me. He drew me to him like a myth, a sign. Peter, I repeated. Peter. We saw each other every day for a month, and then he disappeared.
Cock Crow #1
When did the cock first crow denial? When did I first refuse to hear it? When Peter plied me with talk of poets and writers, assessing my education? When he began to examine my bookshelves? “The test,” he called it, and I failed: too pedestrian (Anne Lamott, Stephen Dunn); too trendy (Robert Olin Butler, Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace); too undisciplined (Charles Simic, Louise Gluck); too popular (Jane Austen, Barbara Kingsolver).
He approved of Annie Dillard and Eudora Welty. He admitted a fondness for Charles Dickens, but curled his lip at Faulkner. He scorned (in his blank, expressionless way) all of my poetry except Larry Levis. He tabbed through some of the books, and I remembered, with horror, that many of them contained my penciled notes for class.
When I sat for hours with a big eraser labeled “Shit,” rubbing out my marginalia? When I moved in a daze afterward, head pounding, neck and arm numb, and sticky eraser debris all over my clothes, the table, the floor, the pages of the books? I couldn’t finish. It was too much. I stashed the still-marked books in a closet.
Pumpkin Eater
On Wednesday night, two days after we’ve met, Peter makes butternut squash soup. I meet Teflon the Cat, and we listen to some kind of jazz. Teflon eats turkey, raw, with canned pumpkin. All black and small, she sits and studies me with somber eyes as I fling and dangle the ribbon on the stick.
Is Teflon Peter?
Peter likes me most so far for a pun. The name Teflon is Biblical, he had written. The Gnostic Gospels? I asked. Or no, I mean Nonstick? How long can one pun linger? How long can it fuel a Sagittarean fire?
Peter stretches his jaw wide, and Teflon reaches her head into that dark cavern, sniffs. When Peter’s mouth gapes, his eyes look wild: part fiend, part horse gagged by the bit. His four front teeth stand apart, ample space between for food, tongue, soup sipped from a spoon.
“It’s a way for her to know me.” He looks at me peripherally, with his mercurial grin. He’s gauging something. How strange I’ll think him?
Teflon’s testing, too. Is Peter Teflon? She gazes at me, and I am not unaware she might be pondering a claw across my face. Her eyes look like an old oil painting, green paint chipped into small pieces, revealing bits of cream-colored canvas beneath. When Peter leaves the room, she stares at me, then leaps at the orange chair, frantic attack.
“She likes you,” Peter says, when she settles against my hip. I suspect she’s acting as chaperone, keeping us apart. Peter gnaws at her belly. She stares at me with fractured eyes.
“Shall we make dessert?” Peter asks. Movement, a reprieve. In the kitchen, he cuts up apples and mixes them with raisins, walnuts, peanut butter, and honey. I watch, fascinated by his tall lankiness, his pale face. Peter’s eyes are green from the front, amber from the side. I like the gaps between his teeth, the jawline he jokingly compares to Joseph Fiennes’. His forehead is wide, his dark hair cut high and straight across the brow, strangely monk-like. I could curl with Teflon on the couch and look at Peter’s face for hours.
Cock Crow #2
At 12:30am, he walks me home. We walk quickly against the chill. Peter stuffs his hands in his pockets. Over his head fits a knit hat; it changes his face, and I remember, suddenly, that I don’t know this man. At my door, I move to hug him, and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me, lightly and quickly, on the lips. I smile (did I smile? I worry about this afterward), we say goodbye, and then before I pull away he takes my face again, and our kiss is brief and sweet.
I am too giddy to sleep right away, but later, in the wee hours, half-conscious, I’ll see his white face leaning in, his hat-flattened skull, his intent look, and feel inexplicably frightened and repulsed. Trembling, I’ll wend my way back toward delight.
The Peter Principle
A compass by which to gauge my mediocrity, Peter became. He tapped into the vein of fear that appeared during my MFA years: the fear of cliche. A small but pervasive pack of the avant-garde among us sought it out like inquisitors, and my writing shrunk with terror. A formless predator, cliche; I could walk up to it and greet it before the steel trap snapped on my ankle. Just give me a catalogue, I silently pled. Tell me what to avoid, what to admire. I’m a good girl; I’ll study it; I’ll carry the pocket-sized edition in my purse.
Peter scorned the avant-garde, choosing to prostrate himself before the altar of formal poetry. For Peter: meter, rhyme, the perfect scan. Yet anyone dedicated to scorn balances on the same misty apex. Here, the avant-garde meets the formalist, where they can stand and gaze on the rest of us creeping through our tiny, cliche lives below them.
Still, I can’t help myself. I decide, finally, to show him a poem. “Peter,” I will say. “I will recite for you now, with great courage, one of my poems, with full awareness that William Logan would hate it.”
But the next night, my preface falters, and the poem echoes into silence. Peter’s face is unreadable. He asks me to repeat it. Then, he considers. “I liked some of the sounds in the beginning,” he says.
“Do you feel better now?” he asks.
Pecks of pickled peppers
Peter could kiss for hours. A tongue twister he was too with The Knight’s Tale, his Middle English curling and galumphing merrily along as he read to me. A-long-geh. Kuh-neek-teh. I curled beside him on the couch, watching the words as he said them, hoping I laughed in the right places.
Cock Crow #3
I called Peter one night with renewed resolve to talk about something other than writers I didn’t know. I sprawled on my couch and chattered about my visit home: the phantom tea party with my nephew, my brother-in-law’s impression of a seagull. Peter laughed, asked for details, talked about
his childhood. He suggested we spend the next day together, perhaps scavenge the thrift store and go out to dinner. A real date.
I called Peter the next day at 2:30, left a message.
My sick feeling began around 6 p.m. I ate dinner at 6:30, not knowing what to do. A time to act and a time to wait. Add up all the minutes I’ve spent waiting for men and you have a small child, thin and ghastly pale.
Enough, I told myself. Enough. Waiting is a red flag, a sea of red. Waiting marks, always, the beginning of the end.
Still, the brain churns out hope. He’s tired, I told myself; he worked all night. He should have set an alarm, I countered. I tried reading Eudora Welty out loud.
He called, finally, at 9:30, his voice low and quiet. I let him apologize without explaining, let him invite himself over. He walked in talking on the phone to his AA sponsee, handed me a book by Diane Ackerman, and went upstairs. His voice sounded animated and comfortable. If I were an alcoholic, would Peter talk to me more easily?
He came down at 10:15 and sat next to me on the couch. I held still, not wanting to scold but not wanting to let it go, not without knowing why. But my history with men is one of silence, of withholding objections and disappointments for fear of appearing unreasonable, of being the cliché nag on the rooftop.
He started to kiss me, then took my hand and walked me upstairs. Later, I leaned my head on his chest. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Yes,” I said.
He left at 1:00 a.m. He looked back at me in the doorway, his face curious, sad, distant. I went to bed and cried.
But then two days later he called, cheerful and teasing, and said he wanted to cook dinner for me on Wednesday: a red curry, with tofu and without ghee.
A Petering
Why must dying take so long? Why must we deny thirty times three? On Wednesday he was unshaven, uncombed, wearing a ratty sweatshirt; he shrugged hello and returned to the stove. When we moved to the couch after dinner, I leaned against him and absent-mindedly caressed his stomach. “Oh, I see where you’re going with this,” he said, when I lifted his shirt a little to finger his bare belly. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I didn’t protest. We made out, talked about inconsequential things. In the days afterward, he shrunk from physical contact. He was entering a “tired phase,” he said. Then he didn’t call back. Then he sent the email saying that he’s no longer interested.
And the Wolf
1: “A sexy beast, aren’t you?” he says, and licks my stomach.
2: “I like your hands,” he says, and kisses one.
3: “You can meet my parents in May, if you play your cards right.”
I play back the cries like evidence, listen to the echoes, desperate for clues. What could I have missed?
If I had read Chekov? If I had identified the jazz? If my poem had followed a perfect iambic pentameter? If I had touched him as often as I’d wanted to? If fear hadn’t gathered like jackals between us?
The jury looks at me and shakes its head, not without sadness.
He put her in a pumpkin shell
I walk the streets near the graveyard where he broods, but I don’t see him. We live in the same small town, but he has disappeared.
I will be your editor, he’d said, after I’d recited my poem. I questioned in the end not only my desirability but also my intellect, my devotion to the craft. Peter sounded the siren call of perfection, and I strained toward it.
Peter showed me one short poem he’d written, the only thing he’d finished in years. It rhymed, subtly, and followed an iambic meter. He promised to show me more but never did.
My grief for Peter is the grief of cliche thwarted. Instead of loving in a cottage by the sea, reading to each other by the fire, I’m sitting in a pumpkin shell alone, nursing my trap-bitten ankle. What was the fucking point, I screech at the dark stringy walls. Contentious woman. It was only a month. Hardly worth months of recovery, a lengthy essay.
Peter (Daniel, Tom, Josh): a sign to whom a signifier would not attach, a being without context. I had no access to his family, his friends, his AA group, his history. I never saw him in a public place. I never knew how to describe him to inquiring friends. He always wore the same shoes.
Peter was the person I never thought I’d meet. He was the best literature, both dream and substance; he would not free me from my cloistered world but join me there, create with me our own world, where we would choose to live together out of context, sequestered in imagination, language, and art. I would read more classics. I would say smart things about them.
But the world we created was too much his own. I had thought that the sign, when it came, would signify new life, a new world, with new access to intimacy, the routine made fresh. Cliche, cliche. I don’t want Peter and myself to be a cliché. But it seems we’re one or more of several old stories: alcoholism, depression, one person simply tiring of another.
Peter could encompass or abandon me, and he did both. It happened so quickly that I was left stunned, reeling, cast out of his world yet not able to re-enter the atmosphere of my own.
A Rock and a Hard Place
A year after Peter left and walked back up into the mist from which he had come, I found out from a friend who’s in AA (when I finally had the courage to ask) that Peter moved to Delaware to teach high school. “I liked Peter. He was kind of crazy,” my friend said.
In the afterward, I’ve returned to my soft spot between the hard summits of aspiration and art. Sitting on fragrant grass, I lean against the rock and project movies with cliché plots onto the hard place. Sometimes I read poems. If I like a poem, I think to myself, “That was a good poem.”
Here I soothe myself with tea, with lively dime-store novels, with family. Sometimes breezes from the mountaintops brush my ears with promises I take with grains of salt. Someday, perhaps, I’ll climb; the view, they say, will take your breath.
Peter was four years younger, a recovering alcoholic, and I could not for several weeks remember his name. Or rather, I knew his name, but it floated in my brain with other, equally insistent, names. Tom because of his match.com alias. Inexplicably, Josh. Daniel. Peter emailed me a list of Daniels: the prophet, the karate kid, the timid tiger who lives in a clock and wears a watch. Which Daniel am I?
Peter spent night shift at a hotel desk revising poems and stories into iambic lines. He called the job his Guggenheim. Peter: Apostle of the Arts, I thought.
This is what I knew about Peter. He’d finished his Bachelor’s in English the previous year, twelve years after quitting school in Ohio to move to New Zealand with his girlfriend. He’d moved to Pennsylvania three years ago with a different girlfriend. I didn’t know much about the years in between, the years of his alcoholism. He said he would tell me someday. I knew Peter had been sober for two years and that two years, recovery-wise, is not long. Perhaps I should have taken this as a red flag, but his list of Daniels, his experiments with vegan butternut squash soup, and his love of cemeteries caught and held me. He drew me to him like a myth, a sign. Peter, I repeated. Peter. We saw each other every day for a month, and then he disappeared.
Cock Crow #1
When did the cock first crow denial? When did I first refuse to hear it? When Peter plied me with talk of poets and writers, assessing my education? When he began to examine my bookshelves? “The test,” he called it, and I failed: too pedestrian (Anne Lamott, Stephen Dunn); too trendy (Robert Olin Butler, Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace); too undisciplined (Charles Simic, Louise Gluck); too popular (Jane Austen, Barbara Kingsolver).
He approved of Annie Dillard and Eudora Welty. He admitted a fondness for Charles Dickens, but curled his lip at Faulkner. He scorned (in his blank, expressionless way) all of my poetry except Larry Levis. He tabbed through some of the books, and I remembered, with horror, that many of them contained my penciled notes for class.
When I sat for hours with a big eraser labeled “Shit,” rubbing out my marginalia? When I moved in a daze afterward, head pounding, neck and arm numb, and sticky eraser debris all over my clothes, the table, the floor, the pages of the books? I couldn’t finish. It was too much. I stashed the still-marked books in a closet.
Pumpkin Eater
On Wednesday night, two days after we’ve met, Peter makes butternut squash soup. I meet Teflon the Cat, and we listen to some kind of jazz. Teflon eats turkey, raw, with canned pumpkin. All black and small, she sits and studies me with somber eyes as I fling and dangle the ribbon on the stick.
Is Teflon Peter?
Peter likes me most so far for a pun. The name Teflon is Biblical, he had written. The Gnostic Gospels? I asked. Or no, I mean Nonstick? How long can one pun linger? How long can it fuel a Sagittarean fire?
Peter stretches his jaw wide, and Teflon reaches her head into that dark cavern, sniffs. When Peter’s mouth gapes, his eyes look wild: part fiend, part horse gagged by the bit. His four front teeth stand apart, ample space between for food, tongue, soup sipped from a spoon.
“It’s a way for her to know me.” He looks at me peripherally, with his mercurial grin. He’s gauging something. How strange I’ll think him?
Teflon’s testing, too. Is Peter Teflon? She gazes at me, and I am not unaware she might be pondering a claw across my face. Her eyes look like an old oil painting, green paint chipped into small pieces, revealing bits of cream-colored canvas beneath. When Peter leaves the room, she stares at me, then leaps at the orange chair, frantic attack.
“She likes you,” Peter says, when she settles against my hip. I suspect she’s acting as chaperone, keeping us apart. Peter gnaws at her belly. She stares at me with fractured eyes.
“Shall we make dessert?” Peter asks. Movement, a reprieve. In the kitchen, he cuts up apples and mixes them with raisins, walnuts, peanut butter, and honey. I watch, fascinated by his tall lankiness, his pale face. Peter’s eyes are green from the front, amber from the side. I like the gaps between his teeth, the jawline he jokingly compares to Joseph Fiennes’. His forehead is wide, his dark hair cut high and straight across the brow, strangely monk-like. I could curl with Teflon on the couch and look at Peter’s face for hours.
Cock Crow #2
At 12:30am, he walks me home. We walk quickly against the chill. Peter stuffs his hands in his pockets. Over his head fits a knit hat; it changes his face, and I remember, suddenly, that I don’t know this man. At my door, I move to hug him, and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me, lightly and quickly, on the lips. I smile (did I smile? I worry about this afterward), we say goodbye, and then before I pull away he takes my face again, and our kiss is brief and sweet.
I am too giddy to sleep right away, but later, in the wee hours, half-conscious, I’ll see his white face leaning in, his hat-flattened skull, his intent look, and feel inexplicably frightened and repulsed. Trembling, I’ll wend my way back toward delight.
The Peter Principle
A compass by which to gauge my mediocrity, Peter became. He tapped into the vein of fear that appeared during my MFA years: the fear of cliche. A small but pervasive pack of the avant-garde among us sought it out like inquisitors, and my writing shrunk with terror. A formless predator, cliche; I could walk up to it and greet it before the steel trap snapped on my ankle. Just give me a catalogue, I silently pled. Tell me what to avoid, what to admire. I’m a good girl; I’ll study it; I’ll carry the pocket-sized edition in my purse.
Peter scorned the avant-garde, choosing to prostrate himself before the altar of formal poetry. For Peter: meter, rhyme, the perfect scan. Yet anyone dedicated to scorn balances on the same misty apex. Here, the avant-garde meets the formalist, where they can stand and gaze on the rest of us creeping through our tiny, cliche lives below them.
Still, I can’t help myself. I decide, finally, to show him a poem. “Peter,” I will say. “I will recite for you now, with great courage, one of my poems, with full awareness that William Logan would hate it.”
But the next night, my preface falters, and the poem echoes into silence. Peter’s face is unreadable. He asks me to repeat it. Then, he considers. “I liked some of the sounds in the beginning,” he says.
“Do you feel better now?” he asks.
Pecks of pickled peppers
Peter could kiss for hours. A tongue twister he was too with The Knight’s Tale, his Middle English curling and galumphing merrily along as he read to me. A-long-geh. Kuh-neek-teh. I curled beside him on the couch, watching the words as he said them, hoping I laughed in the right places.
Cock Crow #3
I called Peter one night with renewed resolve to talk about something other than writers I didn’t know. I sprawled on my couch and chattered about my visit home: the phantom tea party with my nephew, my brother-in-law’s impression of a seagull. Peter laughed, asked for details, talked about
his childhood. He suggested we spend the next day together, perhaps scavenge the thrift store and go out to dinner. A real date.
I called Peter the next day at 2:30, left a message.
My sick feeling began around 6 p.m. I ate dinner at 6:30, not knowing what to do. A time to act and a time to wait. Add up all the minutes I’ve spent waiting for men and you have a small child, thin and ghastly pale.
Enough, I told myself. Enough. Waiting is a red flag, a sea of red. Waiting marks, always, the beginning of the end.
Still, the brain churns out hope. He’s tired, I told myself; he worked all night. He should have set an alarm, I countered. I tried reading Eudora Welty out loud.
He called, finally, at 9:30, his voice low and quiet. I let him apologize without explaining, let him invite himself over. He walked in talking on the phone to his AA sponsee, handed me a book by Diane Ackerman, and went upstairs. His voice sounded animated and comfortable. If I were an alcoholic, would Peter talk to me more easily?
He came down at 10:15 and sat next to me on the couch. I held still, not wanting to scold but not wanting to let it go, not without knowing why. But my history with men is one of silence, of withholding objections and disappointments for fear of appearing unreasonable, of being the cliché nag on the rooftop.
He started to kiss me, then took my hand and walked me upstairs. Later, I leaned my head on his chest. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Yes,” I said.
He left at 1:00 a.m. He looked back at me in the doorway, his face curious, sad, distant. I went to bed and cried.
But then two days later he called, cheerful and teasing, and said he wanted to cook dinner for me on Wednesday: a red curry, with tofu and without ghee.
A Petering
Why must dying take so long? Why must we deny thirty times three? On Wednesday he was unshaven, uncombed, wearing a ratty sweatshirt; he shrugged hello and returned to the stove. When we moved to the couch after dinner, I leaned against him and absent-mindedly caressed his stomach. “Oh, I see where you’re going with this,” he said, when I lifted his shirt a little to finger his bare belly. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I didn’t protest. We made out, talked about inconsequential things. In the days afterward, he shrunk from physical contact. He was entering a “tired phase,” he said. Then he didn’t call back. Then he sent the email saying that he’s no longer interested.
And the Wolf
1: “A sexy beast, aren’t you?” he says, and licks my stomach.
2: “I like your hands,” he says, and kisses one.
3: “You can meet my parents in May, if you play your cards right.”
I play back the cries like evidence, listen to the echoes, desperate for clues. What could I have missed?
If I had read Chekov? If I had identified the jazz? If my poem had followed a perfect iambic pentameter? If I had touched him as often as I’d wanted to? If fear hadn’t gathered like jackals between us?
The jury looks at me and shakes its head, not without sadness.
He put her in a pumpkin shell
I walk the streets near the graveyard where he broods, but I don’t see him. We live in the same small town, but he has disappeared.
I will be your editor, he’d said, after I’d recited my poem. I questioned in the end not only my desirability but also my intellect, my devotion to the craft. Peter sounded the siren call of perfection, and I strained toward it.
Peter showed me one short poem he’d written, the only thing he’d finished in years. It rhymed, subtly, and followed an iambic meter. He promised to show me more but never did.
My grief for Peter is the grief of cliche thwarted. Instead of loving in a cottage by the sea, reading to each other by the fire, I’m sitting in a pumpkin shell alone, nursing my trap-bitten ankle. What was the fucking point, I screech at the dark stringy walls. Contentious woman. It was only a month. Hardly worth months of recovery, a lengthy essay.
Peter (Daniel, Tom, Josh): a sign to whom a signifier would not attach, a being without context. I had no access to his family, his friends, his AA group, his history. I never saw him in a public place. I never knew how to describe him to inquiring friends. He always wore the same shoes.
Peter was the person I never thought I’d meet. He was the best literature, both dream and substance; he would not free me from my cloistered world but join me there, create with me our own world, where we would choose to live together out of context, sequestered in imagination, language, and art. I would read more classics. I would say smart things about them.
But the world we created was too much his own. I had thought that the sign, when it came, would signify new life, a new world, with new access to intimacy, the routine made fresh. Cliche, cliche. I don’t want Peter and myself to be a cliché. But it seems we’re one or more of several old stories: alcoholism, depression, one person simply tiring of another.
Peter could encompass or abandon me, and he did both. It happened so quickly that I was left stunned, reeling, cast out of his world yet not able to re-enter the atmosphere of my own.
A Rock and a Hard Place
A year after Peter left and walked back up into the mist from which he had come, I found out from a friend who’s in AA (when I finally had the courage to ask) that Peter moved to Delaware to teach high school. “I liked Peter. He was kind of crazy,” my friend said.
In the afterward, I’ve returned to my soft spot between the hard summits of aspiration and art. Sitting on fragrant grass, I lean against the rock and project movies with cliché plots onto the hard place. Sometimes I read poems. If I like a poem, I think to myself, “That was a good poem.”
Here I soothe myself with tea, with lively dime-store novels, with family. Sometimes breezes from the mountaintops brush my ears with promises I take with grains of salt. Someday, perhaps, I’ll climb; the view, they say, will take your breath.
