CHAPTER ONE: The Poet

He thought she was beautiful the very first time he saw her. Even before she took off her clothes. Even before she performed magic—this woman named Yolanda, who makes impossible flowers grow high as the north-facing eaves in a single day, compels cats to leap six feet in the air, persuades wild birds and timid rodents to nestle in her hand like domestic pets.

He’s been watching her for weeks from the turret of that cold, gray stone mansion. It perches vulture-like on a hill two blocks behind her modest bungalow offering him a perfect vista of her courtyard. It hissed his name as he walked by, the ugly stone bird, and he knew it would be his next sentinel. He’s done this before you see—taken occupancy of a house while the owners are off somewhere.

When he moves in, he immediately sets up his telescope for star gazing, at least that is his ruse. What he really does is borrow other people’s lives. This is what you do when you haven’t one of your own. He calls it ‘life by proxy.’ There’s nothing untoward about this, he tells himself. Lots of people do the very same thing, only they call it ‘Reality TV.’ He just happens to employ another kind of technology. He used to use binoculars, but his hands would tremble as he peered through them. And so he uses a telescope on a tripod and hides all but the lens behind the folds of the curtains or the leaves of the oak tree just outside the window. He is the hunter behind his blind; she the elegant, oblivious gazelle.

Right now she is his singular obsession, but he has in times past borrowed whole families—happy little nuclear families with a mother and father and a couple of little kids and a dog. It is like that computer game called Sims. He observes these little people, these little families, going about their lives; and he learns what it is that makes them tick. He makes it his business to know their favorite color, their favorite food, their fears, their hopes, their dreams. And when that is not enough (and it never is), he surreptitiously inserts himself into their lives.

He sends them unsigned cards on their birthdays and occasionally small gifts. He sends cards and letters to himself as well pretending they come from the family—his family now. He leaves anonymous notes at their doorstep or messages on their answering machine or he speaks directly to them from untraceable public phone booths…. and sometimes he whispers subliminal messages in their ear as they sleep. He never means to harm them; that is never his intention. But it always ends up the same way—he wanting more of them than they would ever willingly choose to give him—rejecting him merely because he is the child of a lesser god.

He watches her mainly in the very early morning and again in the late afternoon when he returns from his classes at the university. Between those hours, he knows nothing of her life. In the evening, when the rooms are lit, he can see her clearly through the windows; and although she rambles about in that old house by herself, she seems to have quite a few friends as he observes her talking frequently on the phone. It is a cordless, and she often brings it out to the stair at her backdoor. Believing she is unseen in that cloistered courtyard, she sits on the third step under the porch light (often immodestly) like a thespian in a Broadway play, and he can see her perfectly—the soft hills of her moon-lit breasts, and when her gown creeps above her knees, the pale mauve velvet of her inner thighs.

He learns the tenor of the phone call by the expression on her face. She laughs and cries easily. When she laughs, she throws her head back and opens her mouth very wide to expose a marvelous set of teeth. And sometimes she laughs so hard tears roll down her cheeks and settle like jewels in the laugh lines around her mouth. The color or her hair changes with the quality of the light from pale auburn to golden brown to almost at times a bronzy metallic gray on overcast days.

He has tried to describe her, but he fears his poetry has been inadequate, even though the professor who reads the poems has written accolades in the margins of his papers with neon red ink. If the professor could see the woman, he would surely understand how unsatisfactory the poems really are. Words in the vast lexicon of man’s language are not worthy of her beauty. He finds her breathtaking. She is so lovely he worries he may simply have made her up, except the satin underwear he slides between his fingers redolent of her pheromones informs him she is real.

CHAPTER TWO: The Professor

Think of Gregory Peck as Atecas Finch in To Kill a Mocking Bird, and you will have a close likeness of Professor Matt Alden—tall, dark, lean but well-built with a rakish, unkempt mane of silvered, blue-black hair. He is the child of a more magnanimous god, (not the poet’s lesser god,) but he is no less tortured—and, it is (perhaps unfairly so) the very quality that renders him even more attractive than he already is.

Today as he gathers his notes and retrieves the silver thermos behind the podium, a flock of coeds hang back as the other students exit the lecture hall. It is not unusual to see the gorgeous professor lead a gaggle of geese across the green lawn of the campus. In the student union, it is not unusual to see them scrabble for the seat next to his like children playing musical chairs. He used to enjoy this, but after more than a decade of groupie airheads with interchangeable parts, it’s suddenly not enough.

“Not today, ladies,” he says and waves them out of the room.

They whine in tandem. Adeline, wearing cherry-red lipstick and smoky eyeliner, stamps her foot like a spoiled child. She is in fact spoiled. Daddy has a shit-load of money (owns a chain of fancy hotels,) and she has shit for brains. She is much too beautiful for the vacuous head she carries around, the professor thinks.

At every lecture, she perches on a chair directly in front of the podium wearing a tight, low-cut cashmere sweater—a different color every day. She swings her leg and plays with a gold bracelet at her wrist. On her left ankle is a tattoo of Eve’s serpent. Years ago, in his early professorship, another Adeline could have successfully bartered for an A. He is chagrined by the actions of his youth. He is trying to be a better man.

“I’d do anything to have what you have, buddy,” said a tipsy colleague elbowing him at a faculty party. “Coeds fawning over you—making actual propositions, buttering your bagel in the student union.”

This from a man who has a gorgeous wife and three beautiful children waiting for him when he goes home each afternoon.

He merely shook his head. “The grass in the mirror is not as green as it appears,” he tells his friend.

"Yeah right,” says the colleague.

When he’s certain the geese are no longer loitering in the hall, he exits a little-used door off limits to students. He follows the grass-bald path that leads to the quaint, fieldstone building that houses the offices of the English department. He glimpses it between the ancient trees and is reminded of the old monasteries he saw on his tour of Ireland—thinks about how they mixed blood in the mortar and shivers.

The forecast is for rain later in the day; but at this early hour the morning sun pulls dampness from the ground. Plumes of mist like ghosts of bygone faculty and students drift amid the tall oaks. Students, living today, loll among the poltergeists or sit against trees, an open book in their laps, their jackets beneath them a barrier to the damp ground. They’re a common sight that barely registers any more.

But today, his gaze at the quaint stone building is diverted by a couple hoarsely whispering in the shadows. He assumes they’re drama students in route to a dress rehearsal because they wear period clothes—the man, a long black coat with a cowl, the young woman, a shapeless empire-waist gown in a morbid hue except for a shock of color at her breast. It appears to him through the veil of fog as some sort of corsage fashioned from a single exotic flower—an orchid perhaps.

He leaves the trail to approach them.

“We can’t do this any more, Hester. It’s immoral,” the young man says in a guttural whisper.

They do not see the professor until he is almost upon them. When they look up, they are alarmed. The young woman brings her small, pale hands to her bosom to cover the emblem, but not before Prof sees that it is the capital letter A.

The prof laughs, “Of course, The Scarlet letter!” he says aloud.

The student, playing the part of Hester, cries out and hurries away. The minister runs too, but in another direction. Mystified, the professor hurries along the path to the monastery, enters through the heavy, oak-paneled doors, and mounts the steps to the second floor. He passes the drama professor on her way down.

“I see you’re doing the Scarlet Letter this year,” he says.

She will not meet his eyes (has heard the rumors he surmises) and hurries faster down the steps, her footsteps sounding like a tap dance. “The Scarlet Letter?” she echoes. He stands looking down at her from the second floor landing.

“Yes, I just now saw two of your drama students in costume for the play. I assume you’re having a dress rehearsal today.”

“I can’t imagine what you saw,” she calls without turning. “Perhaps they were literature students in route to class to complete some sort of assignment. We’re doing The Glass Menagerie this semester.”

She exits the building. The massive double doors bang shut like an explosion.

He is stopped cold. Another hallucination, he thinks but shakes loose the dread. He hurries to his office, hangs a Do Not Disturb sign on his door and to be doubly sure, locks it after him. The two north-facing windows in the room offer a vista of the woods at the hem of the campus. His is the only office with this envied view, but perhaps not so enviable on this day. The sky over the woods is clotting with molten pewter determined to keep its promise of rain later in the afternoon. He draws the flesh-colored shades to the sill, and the windows appear to him like heavy-lidded eyes.

He drops into his chair, flips the switch on his gooseneck lamp and tries to write…. something, anything--a simple, four-line poem. He ought to be able to manage that. But nothing comes of it. Hours pass. He glances at the clock on the metal file cabinet ticking the minutes away like impatient fingernails.

He stares at the blank page and clutches his hair so that when he lets go, he is a wolf-eared man. He wraps the heckling clock in the cardigan hanging from his chair, tosses it in a drawer and slams it shut. Still he hears it—Edgar’s pendulum. He pours a mug of inspiration—espresso from his thermos—and gulps it down. Pours another and another.

And then it happens. His hand holding the pen trembles and, by its own volition, begins to loop and arc. It moves so quickly, he’s barely able to turn the pages fast enough. He’s heard of the phenomenon of automatic writing, but has never experienced it himself—until now. To write with such alacrity had to mean he wasn’t an empty vessel after all—a beautiful vacuous vase. He whoops with joy. He has cracked the pig-headed skull of his writer’s block.

And then the copious words become alarmingly familiar. Every semester he delivers to his freshman composition class a scathing lecture on plagiarism, and now he himself has committed the writer’s cardinal sin. It seems to give further credence to the dread that he is a hollow man.

The beautiful words, the compelling metaphors and similes belong to the student who writes poems about a woman named Yolanda and slips them under the professor’s door. Sickened and horrified, he thinks about Rubin in the back row of the lecture hall hiding his unfortunate face behind a yellow tablet: The ugly man writes beautiful poetry. The handsome professor can’t seem to write at all.

CHAPTER THREE

Think of Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good as it Gets. Stanley is that sort of man. There is the glimmer of a once handsome face; but he is at the threshold of middle age now, his hair threaded with gray and steadily losing ground. He also has a slight paunch, but only slight—just a little pooch at his beltline.

In clothes it’s hardly noticeable. Even in clingier, form-fitting shirts, he can still suck it in when a pretty girl comes around.

He blames his belly on Martha’s penchant for cooking. She watches the food channel, still believing she can reach her husband’s heart through his stomach. She is forever experimenting with new recipes crammed with saturated fats and refined carbohydrates, that have played havoc with her waistline as well except that she doesn’t seem to care.

She seems to have settled into middle age so comfortably, so resignedly really. Stanley finds this irksome. Song lyrics play in Stanley’s head: I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.

Like his mid-drift, his jowls and eyelids have begun to crepe and droop like a post-celebration balloon waning in enthusiasm and leaking air; and when he complains about this, his wife insists he is adorable like a basset hound. He knows she means this as a compliment. “I love your face. You have the face of a salesman,” she’s said more than once patting his cheeks and sometimes giving them an affectionate squeeze. This used to make him smile. Lately, he finds it annoying.

While he may resemble Jack Nicholson in appearance, he’s begun to see himself as Bill Murray—Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. He sees his life that way. His alarm clock rings at 6:15 every morning, has been ringing at precisely that time for nearly twenty years now. The alarm rings at 6:15 on this morning as well; and, according to habit, he hits the snooze button five or six times before rousing himself to a sitting position at the edge of the bed. He cannot face another day that will only be a replay of all the empty ones that have gone before.

Through the metal grate in the bedroom floor, he can hear the predictable sounds of his waking day—the shuff and scuffle of his wife’s rubber-soled slippers dragging across the linoleum, the clink and clatter of silverware and dishes as she places them on the table, the snap crackle as she separates the sports section from the morning newspaper and sets it at his place—all the sounds that used to bring him comfort, that used to make him smile have become irksome.

When he arrives in the kitchen, Martha is waiting for him. She is sitting where she always sits—in the green vinyl chair, the one with the split in the seat—the one that makes that god-awful vrrumpfff sound whenever she sits down on it. She is facing the stove, her back to the kitchen sink, sipping coffee oh so demurely from a blue cup, always a blue cup.

She has already poured him a cup and set out his breakfast. She is wearing her uniform—a generous shirt over a pair of denim Capri’s, orange and white high-top tennis shoes. Her white socks sag at her ankles—droop over the top of her sneakers like loose skin. Her permed hair, which always frizzes on warm humid days, is pulled back with a scrunchie. Her cheeks are flushed from the flurry of making breakfast. She is singing along softly to a ditty in her head, a show tune from Mary Poppins he thinks, and when she sees him, she says, “Good Morning, Dear. Did you sleep well last night?”

It is Groundhog Day and he is Bill Murray. He knows the script by now. “I slept just fine and dandy…fine and dandy.”

"Is your coffee hot enough?” she asks on cue. “I can heat it up for you if you like.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he says too loudly.

He rakes his fingers through his hair, fidgets with the paper, shifts in his chair. His jaw begins to clench and pulse involuntarily and a pain radiates down his left arm. His heart clutches, and he has the sensation of being dragged underwater. He white knuckles the seat of his chair. He can’t seem to catch his breath.

Oh God, he thinks. This is it. This is the BIG ONE. The big HA—HEART ATTACK! Oh God, Oh God, I’m dying. He’s trying to get Martha’s attention, but he can’t speak. He thinks how she took that CPR course just last winter.

But for some reason, through all this, Martha doesn’t seem to notice. And this is so unlike her really. She is adding another mound of butter to her oatmeal, another scoop of honey. She stirs it in thoroughly with her spoon, watches the butter as it pools in the center of the oatmeal, sticks the spoon in her mouth. He watches her do these things completely oblivious that, less than three feet across the table from her, he’s dying! Eyes bulging, still unable to speak, he screams at her in his head: MARTHA! MARRRRRRTHA!

By the time she finally looks up, it’s over. The pain in his chest has abated. He feels silly now. He over-reacted. He’s done this in the past, talked himself into all manner of terminal illnesses, reads about a disease and begins to imagine all the symptoms. Lately, it’s been coronary heart disease. How many times has he gone to the doctor and been told it’s nothing.

But Martha sees now that he doesn’t look well. She notices the film of perspiration on his forehead, the ashen color of his skin, the way his lips have suddenly gone all dry and blue.

“Are you okay, Stanley? You don’t look well.”

She watches as the color slowly returns to his face.

"It was nothing, nothing. Just a little episode of heartburn.”

Neither speaks for long minutes. Martha continues to stare at him.

“Are you sure you’re alright? You still look ashen to me.”

“I said I was fine Goddamnit.”

Someone has thrown a very cold pie in her face. Her head jerks oddly. She clams up. She dips her spoon in her oatmeal, swallows another mouthful, this time without pleasure.

He sees that he’s upset her. Speaks to her more gently now. “Are you perfectly satisfied with our life, Martha?”

She looks at him and blinks. He has veered from the script of their lives, uttered a line of dialogue she hasn’t heard from him before. Somewhere off stage a prompter will tell her what to say next, but the prompter shrugs his shoulders and holds up a blank cue card. She’ll have to improvise.

“I don’t know what you mean, Stanley. I’m happy; most of the time I’m happy?”

“You don’t ever feel like something’s missing?”

“Missing?”

“It just seems our life runs along on automatic pilot. It’s like someone pressed a rewind button, and the same damn stuff just plays over and over. Nothing much new ever happens. The sameness of it all…”

“The sameness?”

He watches her bring her cup of coffee to her lips, watches as she sets it down again without taking a sip.

“Take these blue cups for example. Are these the only ones we own? Couldn’t we drink from different cups once in a while? And why do we always have oatmeal for breakfast?”

“You say it keeps you regular to have oatmeal every morning. It’s supposed to be good for your heart. You’re the one who told me that. And when I make something else, you tell me you’d just as soon have your usual fare.” She says nothing about the blue cups.

“I could make you something else if you like,” she continues, “What would you like me to make, Stanley? I’ll make anything you want me to.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know what it is I want. Can’t you think of something—something besides oatmeal every morning? You know, just for a change, just for something different.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Stanley is caught in a bottleneck of rush-hour traffic, affording him too much time to contemplate the clotting of his own life. This morning after the episode at the kitchen table, he decided to stop by Emergency Care at the clinic just to be on the safe side. They ran a couple of tests and said everything looked good—probably just a little heartburn or maybe a panic attack. Told him to try breathing into a paper bag if it happens again. He felt a little foolish then. Even so, he’s thinking now how it might have been a warning—a wake up call. He isn’t going to live forever; no one lives forever. Maybe he ought to grab a little gusto before someone turns out the lights for good.

He’s on his way to his favorite haunt, ‘The Happy Hour Bar,’ ‘where everyone knows your name’—it says on the marquee, like that song from ‘Cheers.’ He’s been hanging there more and more after work lately, not wishing to go directly home, salving his malaise with liquid balm. But it isn’t working.

He used to enjoy the camaraderie of his pals, but lately their joviality seems more like a mockery, like when you’re feeling like crap and the weather should be empathetic—dreary and overcast like your own dull mood; but instead it’s a splendid day and the damn sun is smiling away completely insensitive to your troubles.

The traffic begins to move again; but Stanley’s rust-scabbed Buick station wagon, circa 1984, sputters and stalls. He presses the gas pedal to restart the engine. Barney (the kids named the car Barney in honor of the purple dinosaur) belches a cloud of black smoke; and the car behind him, honks its horn. “Get a horse, you dumb, old fart,” the driver yells.

There was a time his hecklers would have left the word ‘old’ out of it. At one time he’d been just a ‘dumb fart,’ he mused.

“I’m not that damn old,” he wanted to tell them. “Forty-five’s not old. Haven’t you heard? Life begins at forty. Hell, if that’s true I should just be starting kindergarten.” He laughs at his own wit, lifts his hand in a backward wave and smiles at the jerk via his rear view mirror.

They’d inherited the station wagon from Martha’s mother who ‘crossed over’ eight years ago. ‘Crossed over’ being Martha’s words for it, well not Martha’s exactly. She watches this psychic on television who claims to speak to dead people, only the psychic refers to them as those who have ‘crossed over,’ no more than a convenient euphemism as far as he’s concerned. But it seems to bring Martha a measure of comfort—the idea that the dearly departed hang around from time to time and can be ‘channeled.’ Well, if it brings her comfort, what the hell. It creeps him out though. I mean what if they hang around when what you really want is a little privacy—like when you’re wiping your bum.

He tried again to start the engine. This time it took hold. He drove a few blocks and stopped at a traffic light. A red mustang convertible pulled up next to him in the right-hand lane. The driver was a cocky young upstart. He looked at Stanley’s piece of shit station wagon and grinned. He gunned his engine, and the girls in the backseat tossed their feathery heads and laughed. He gunned his engine again and looked over at Stanley. “Wanna drag, old man. Vroom, Vroom.”

Stanley smiled and waved. How come some assholes get red Mustang Convertibles and all I get is an old beat up station wagon? he thought.

He looked at the saucy little blonde who sat next to the young upstart and thought, How come some lucky sons of a bitches get beautiful, sexy women and all I get is…Martha. Ashamed and mortified at denigrating his wife like that, he hit the steering wheel hard with the palm of his hand. Damn it, that’s not fair, he thought—blaming his melancholy on Martha. So what if she’d put on a few miles, a few pounds. So had he. Besides, a man ought be responsible for his own happiness.

And then it struck him: What if he finally took charge of his life? What if he began to change little things and those things bumped into other things until his whole freakin’ life took on new direction, new meaning? What if doing things as seemingly inconsequential as eating an English muffin with jelly for breakfast instead of hot oatmeal or drinking his morning coffee out of a green cup instead of a blue one could change the entire course of his life? The notion didn’t seem that far fetched to him. Maybe he’d mention these changes to Martha.

And, what if he proceeded straight through the intersection instead of turning left like he usually did? What if tonight he found a nice little bar near the university district instead of going to his normal haunt after work? Maybe he needed to go somewhere nobody knows his name. And so, when the light turned green, he crossed the intersection instead of turning left, and that small amendment to his former routine made all the difference.

CHAPTER FIVE

Still unhinged by the episode of automatic writing, the professor passes the pub on the opposite side of the street as he does every afternoon on his trek home from the university. The weathered cedar building, oxidized to a gun metal gray, always reminds him of a fish shanty someone has hauled from the docks and transplanted there. He’d been vaguely curious about the place, but never enough to cross over. Once he saw a cur lift his leg to piss on the corner of the building and later a man, sights that dampened any enthusiasm he might have had to take a closer look.

For weeks now, a realtor’s ‘For Sale’ sign stabbed the scruffy front lawn. Today another that reads ‘Under New Management’ replaces it. A fancy new door, oak with raised panels and a beveled glass window completely at odds with the comeliness of the structure, replaces the old aluminum door. It sits bent and dejected at the curb waiting for the men who collect the recyclables.

As though meant for a select fraternity of men, words no larger than the middle line of an eye chart whisper across the new door’s beveled glass window like a dirty secret. He crosses the street to learn the establishment’s new name. Painted in metallic gold in a font too elegant for the joint it names are the words ‘The Cheatin’Bar.’

He peers through the glass to see the inside. It is as he’s always imagined it—a long, dank, low-ceilinged room choking with blue smoke and shambling characters—men cheated out of something it seems, not the kind of fraternity you’d care to join. Any one of the men slumped over his drink at the bar could be Willy Loman or Francis Phelan. He shook his head. Every man in there probably has his own sad story to tell.

It began to rain, the pewter sky keeping its promise. He snugged his jacket across his chest, turned from the window and hurried on. He’d walked perhaps a half dozen steps when the thought provoked him a second time, yanked him by the collar and made him stumble over a cleft in the sidewalk: Every man in there probably has his own sad story to tell. EVERY MAN IN THERE PROBABLY HAS HIS OWN SAD STORY TO TELL!!!!

That was it! The reason he couldn’t write! Weren’t all the really great novels peopled with tragic heroes? What he needed was inspiration. He backed up and peered through the window again. He saw a chap, his broad, denim-clad ass spilling over the sides of the bar stool, his elbows propped on the counter, honking his nose in a large, yellow hanky. The man’s tortured face was reflected in the mirror at the back bar. The tavern keeper was swabbing the counter and nodding his head at the chap’s sad story, pretending to care, nodding his head like one of those bobble-headed dogs people set in the back windows of their cars.

Well, he could do better than that. He wouldn’t just pretend to listen. He’d borrow trouble if that’s what it takes. He slapped his briefcase against his thigh and fingered the pen he carried in his pocket, the pen that would write the next great American novel. Believing now that the cosmos had conspired to bring him here on this particular day, he took a deep breath and marched into real world.

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