Four New Messages

THE COLLEGE BOROUGH

I helped build the Flatiron Building, though I’ve never been to New York — though Dem and I had never been before indulging our daughter Veri’s desire to visit New York University — on my one week off this year and Veri’s junior year springbreak — despite our hope that she, our only child, would choose to stay in-state.

The decision is hers — but we keep telling her, In-state was good enough for us.

After all, that’s where we met.

Dem and I had four classes together prior to applying to Professor Greener’s workshop — it was competitive certainly, but he accepted us both for what reasons we years ago came to terms with — this in the days when Dem was still doing poetry, not yet motherhood and the career of a freelance interior designer, the days when I was writing fiction as if literature were life.

And here was Veri, rebelling against our rebellion — she was bent on studying some profane concatenation of finance and psychology — she wanted to be employable, while all I wanted was to avoid the Flatiron.

And because I did, I insisted we do everything downtown: we’d sleep downtown at the Wall Street W (the hotel I’m writing from now, by midnight on W stationery with a W pen), we’d eat downtown (Dem an unreconstructed gastrophile when traveling, a compulsive cuisiniste who keeps files on restaurants, docs and.xls spreadsheets of what dishes and deals can be had on what days where) — we’d tour and enjoy exclusively downtown: historic-districting around Trinity Church, the Exchange, the new Trade Center being built, going up slowly, slowly, after a decade of stagnancy, SoHo art galleries and Village bebop she’bam clubs (Dem had downloaded discount admissions), struggling improvisational comedy cellars (she’d scanned vouchers for three late sets free), and, Wednesday, if we can fit it in, one or two interactive museums.

Downtown’s also where the school is, or rather the school is downtown, having taken everything over. The streets are the classrooms not in some ridiculously wistful sense but legitimately, or rather illegitimately — privately owned, zoned for children only.

Beat, footsore, inadequately caffeinated, Dem and I stood with our daughter at the front of the tour group led by a girl named like a corruption of a Dutch cheese — Goudla? Dougla? this cheerfully chubby checker of any survey’s Pacific Islander box, majoring in — I wasn’t paying attention — let’s say postcolonial beading or basketry as therapy. She was very kind to Veri, very patient and always touching — Dem and even me, with a bit to the cuticle fingernail graze of my elbow, a hennaed palm to my shoulder, tender but then she’d think nothing of reaching out with a surprisingly firm grip and turning Veri’s head to direct her attention: there the library, there the center for university life, here the freshman dorms (where you’ll be living next year — what a presumptuous girl) …

I told Dem I wasn’t impressed and she shushed me but I could tell from the side of her smile, she agreed. I’m saying the physical plant wasn’t much. Prefab. Incapacitated by its overcapacity. Smogged. Now I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater. A city university just doesn’t have the space, no matter how big the endowment, no matter what sums of R&D cash are banking around — Manhattan Island is only so large and it’s telling that about half of its lower half is landfill. Back home we have more chlorinated pools, more recreation facilities with more stationary bikes and stairmasters, treadmills and the latest in weight machinery — hell, we even have the Flatiron, if you want to forgo the elevators and walk up it — the Fauxiron, Professor Greener once called it, whose roof I laid about twenty years ago, with Veri turning 18 this September.

I did a fine job on that building, finer workmanship than anything we saw on our tour save for a few of the older buildings — I’m talking the stolid stuff actually of the 1900s, those tiles and carvings from when we still cared about craft, those noble columns and colonnades and ornamental gutters — all the fineries I learned to duplicate, the techniques that usurped my writing to give me a destiny with salary and benefits.

You want Peterson’s Roofing to do up your house, but first you want to looksee our standard? Go down to auxiliary field #3—incongruous, isn’t it? insane, perhaps? jutting from amidst sports pitch and prairie, a skyscraper visible from the Mississippi, as the meeker, more Mormon guides claim when you take the tour of that campus. That slight wedge of trouble that has us wedged south of City Hall, that was Dem, that was me — clients call impressed, I do well for myself. Veri would thrive, twenty floors below that turbid eclipsing—1,750 miles away from 175 Fifth Avenue.

Professor Maury Greener was invited out to our flyover square state to be Writer in Residence for the 1992–1993 academic year on the merit of his recently published and only book, a novel about its author’s formative years so searing, so bridgeandtunnelburning and explicitly realistic that we couldn’t resist ravishing it for autobiographical fact (an interpretive approach that Greener both practiced and abhorred). So art reconstitutes biography — or better, biography like iron can make art like steel, but then the art can be heated again and the iron reseparated, the biography flowing molten all on its own — what a significant simile! such a suitable image! He — like his hero who shared his initials, height, weight, eye and hair color, wardrobe preference for wry denims, and predilection for deli — was born on the Brooklyn-Queens border, at the conjunction of those two potent, across-the-water boroughs so fetishized for having provided the nativity of so much authentic, impactful culture of the century past: Irish, Italian, Jewish, and he was the lattermost, he wouldn’t let you forget it. Greener was the first Jew I ever met. Now I was a student of literature, not a student of the study of literature but of the making of literature (already there was the vocational calling: the desire to be trained to task, to do, to make), and though I was a voracious reader of the right writers — the lustier ethnics, the WASP authoritarians — practically speaking, my experience was nil. Jews were in the Bible, they were of the Bible. They weren’t on my TV or in the movies I borrowed, but they made the TV and movies. I didn’t expect him to have horns or anything — it was Dem’s family (typically exasperating inlaws, but also bison ranchers) who’d passed along that stereotype and when Dem mentioned it to me after reading up on Greener before he arrived, I immediately imagined a man with airhorns, or megaphones, grown out of his head — and it wasn’t like I was expecting a version of Shylock or Fagin, but I was not prepared for the irony, that fuck you and fuck your mother cynicism. This was because — memoir, self-writing again — he was raised without a father and had to toughen up fast. He had to learn — he taught himself, as his protagonist, M. Groonik, had taught himself — how to fight, how to stand up for what was his. What was his was Stuyvesant, followed by climbing the Ivy, uptown — rungs above the college Veri and Dem and I were touring, eons — humanities educationwise — beyond our own peonic undergraduate and graduate careers. And of course he had his book, which followed this titular Groonik, “amateur erector cum semiprofessional ventilation inspector,” through myriad ménages à trois and quatre in downtown New York of the mid-1980s. What that book earned him: low advance on low sales, hysterical acclaim, and, once remaindered, once out of print, this sinecure stint in the provinces teaching us hicks to rite good.

It seems that the ’80s — the decade of my adolescence spent lurching dazed between milking and collecting eggs at my parents’ dairy farm and videogaming after homework — was the last tolerable decade in New York, despite the city going broke, despite the crime: it was Greener, who had eight years on me, who taught me to qualify. For him it was the decade of punk rock, hip hop, rap, graffiti as art, heroin and coke, a scene where everyone became millionaires at their mixed media before dying of AIDS or, as Greener wrote, “wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read” (though, he once recommended, the hardcovers’ dustjackets were useful for cutting up lines) — the last decade before the encroachment of the rest of the country, before the suburbs moved into the urbis. All that pseudoculture that Greener hated: the chainstores, the megamalls, the ATMized shopfronts unmanned but anyway lit and heated and airconditioned 24/7/365—he hadn’t been around any of that before it began coming to New York (downtown definitely has all the familiar logos by now), and just when it came he decamped to its source. He came to our state, our city, our cow college town — the world capital of bad depressing homogenous capital. We had — we still have, unupdated, unredone — an airport, then a strip of consumer options, then, up the hill, the College on the Hill and, when he first arrived, his second night with us — arrived unaccompanied at 35, balding and fattened like a species of livestock new to us who knew our livestock, but still recognizable as ready for slaughter — he invited Dem and me out to dinner along with a half dozen fellow students, but not because he wanted to bond.

He said, Don’t think I want to bond, it’s just that your girlfriend’s too pretty, which for him passed for a compliment.

He stood us a round of dollar margaritas.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him, my fiancée (that character still sounded too foreign).

All throughout dinner we were introduced to that hilariously raw style of metro complaint, the perpetual bitching of the provincial Manhattanite: could the food be any worse? could the service be any worse? could the fluorescents be more industrially fierce? which were cornier, the corn tortillas or the restaurant’s muzak and decor (the decorations were stapled sombreros and hefty husks of lacquered maize, a burro mural in dishwater pastels below dishsized speakers blatting juvescent pop top-40)? could the conversation at the surrounding tables be any stupider? could the people tabled around him be any stupider? He was caustic. Could he get a new knife? He’d drunkenly clunked his last to the floor.

The food was nominally Mexican (his request) — did we take him to Taco John’s or Casa Agave? I’m not sure which chains we had then — pre-Chi-Chi’s, ante-Chipotle — Chili’s?

About as Mexican as Hitler, he said, As Mexican as spätzle, he said, then, after the flan, wiped his mouth with the zarape that served as tablecloth and said:

Here’s your first assignment.

And then took a shot of tequila and said, Margarine-flavored tequila.

For our virgin workshop in this burg, I want you to write a story about our dinner tonight, but make me out to be the biggest asshole possible — I want to be fictionalized, hyperfictionalized, let your imagination graze free on the range — have me robbing this joint, have me taking a shit in the rice and beans, out me as this pretentious pinko kikeabilly snob, though still deigning to rape your wives, he looked at Dem then looked at me, winked.

Hand that in, he said, or else.

Or else?

(It was like the entire waitstaff asked that too.)

Bring me anything you want.

Staggering out of the restaurant he was slurring, But I’ll only read a story if it’s finished.

The first story I brought Greener was my own original creation I barely remember save that it involved a young man who went away to war — which war? did I specify which or even have a certain war in mind? who came home with medals bandaging his wounds to find some things different, not drastically different, just slightly different, like his wife has a name that sounds like her old name or what he thought her old name was, or his daughter’s just as beautiful as he’d remembered but instead of having green eyes and blond hair she has blue eyes and brown hair and this destabilizes him, this youthful veteran, who begins behaving differently himself, indulging in violent outbursts he and everyone around him regard as wholly uncharacteristic (unable to give this unrecognizable family affection or hold down a job, he blots his days trying to throttle a motorbike engine) — the reader has to wonder how sane he is and, if he’s not sane, how that loss of sanity will end: with murdering his family? with murdering himself (the vet was based partially on my grandfather, WWII, partially on my father, Vietnam — I’ve never served and that and the double models for the protag were probably why I kept the exact date and location of the conflict vague, though current events conspired to turn a few references Arab)?

Greener didn’t like it, he didn’t like: fiction about war, fiction about animals and farming (the ancient pastoral was fine but the modern rural, verboten), fiction about or narrated by children (who were the same as animals to him). Essentially he didn’t like any writing by anyone living not him — here was a man at war with himself — though he did grudge me praise for the second story I gave him, which was the purposefully stilted, nearly dialogueless telling of an English professor, an expert at translating anacreontics, visiting this college far out in the stix to deliver a paper at a conference, fumbling through his presentation, stumbling into an unrecommended, ostensibly Vietnamese frytrap and getting so drunk at its incongruously tikified bar that he falls asleep on his stool and has to be woken and driven home by a waitressing doctoral student he offers “to put in a story”—or was it “to write into the next novel”?—if she sleeps with him, but she doesn’t and instead leaves him sprawled in the rear lot of his motel, where delirious through the night he apostrophizes squirting skunks, revived only when he’s hit in the head by the proprietor’s newspaper delivery, that local paper Greener refused to read (incidentally the only paper that pubbed a positive obituary).

Apparently no other student had taken Greener up on his suggestion to turn him into lit and, when he cornered me after that inaugural class that left approximately half the roster in tears — its surprise subject was how if you intended to succeed as a writer it was necessary to move to New York — I could tell he was struggling with a reaction: whether to treat me like a fool for taking him so seriously, or to treat me like a prick for taking him so seriously (Greener was very attuned to prickishness, and to pretension, except in himself, except in his description of “a city so personal, it’s as if it existed solely in dialogue”).

Your traducing of me, he said, it’s salvageable.

It is?

More so than most of the crap getting published.

He waited for a lesson in timing.

Then said, Which isn’t saying much.

Greener turned to erase from the blackboard the map he’d scribbled, not showing but telling the locations of the better bookmarts of Manhattan (ten of which, Dem tells me, have since closed), then had me accompany him to his office and then, following farther — out.

He’d been in town — what? two weeks at that point? Calendrically it was still late summer, Indian summer, but, like the Indians, faded, failed. No one had welcomed him, I don’t mean officially — the English department assisterati had requisitioned an ID card, dealt with the bursar in the matter of his tax forms, dealt with housing’s sophomoric supernumeraries in the matter of his housing — I mean, by his own slyly pathetic admission, no one had just casually shown him around, given him the gossipy lay: what Dem and I and Veri were getting at NYU — e.g. this is the library, where you can basically make camp with an open fire and live in the stacks (Greener’s class spent most of the fall doing that), the maths and sciences department, art, architecture, & design, journalism school, law school, center for experimental veterinary medicine. Greener was shocked by this greeting, honestly shocked, though what he interpreted as dereliction was merely the native reserve. Teaching being such a social activity — professors all day interacting, during office hours, in the hallways and restrooms with whomever they came across — that when their classes were over, they went home to stay home. They nested, our school mascot being an indigenously endangered nestbuilding bird. They projected documentaries and Scrabbled, chefed around elaborately, identified hobbies, attempted a baby. Certainly the school hadn’t hired Greener only to ridicule him (they were pleased to have a minority: not someone Semitic, but someone who’d once been reviewed), certainly his agent hadn’t arranged this appointment expressly to ruin him, as he maintained — though that suspicion, maybe, that paranoid loneliness revealed in his rage (what’s the administration doing on weekend nights more entertaining than entertaining me? how many cold Sundays can I spend jerkingoff to the Hudson?), was why we, the two of us, were walking, or maybe it was that he wanted to use me to get closer to Dem, who’d returned to our apartment from workshop to dry her eyes and dry our laundry. Other faculty had tried to get to her before: Horniak, Rutter, and BJ, her poetry thesis adviser, whose plywood cubicle was adjacent to Greener’s. Whenever he wasn’t meeting with a female student, he, BJ — that bald bold unit postured like an italicized questionmark — was seated in front of the computer the school had just given him, trying to figure out which slot the discs went in, grouching that his monitor was busted when it wasn’t plugged in.

I invoke this confusion to remind that when Greener was in residence, daily web use — campuswide internet access — was still a decade away. If our alma mater would’ve imported him just after the millennium, who knows if he would’ve felt so forsaken? who knows if he would’ve even dreamed of this gest?

As we roamed upper quad to lower, Greener became, by steps, progressively glummer until he was saying, You want to know the truth? New York’s flunked me. Why else am I here? I’ve been suspended, I’ve been expelled.

I said, You seem to be doing OK.

Not compared to how I’d be doing if publishing weren’t over, with the money gone and editors not editing, my generation’s screwed — we’re not the immigrant experience, we’re not the assimilation experience — we’re the first nothing generation, we’ve got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

Greener paused.

The conversation had taken an unpromising path. And we had too — leading down the hill to the labs.

Still we’re better off than you are, he said — before you or your girl would even belong to a generation, you’d have to intern in midtown, where generations matter.

You’re being unfair, I said, they matter here — your lineages and pedigrees — much more than on the coasts with all that transience.

I bummed a cigarette off him. Because he smoked, I smoked too.

I said, My family settled here before statehood — did I tell you I’m 1/16th Sioux?

He said, Intro to Identity. Multiculti Polyethnic 101. My parents survived Europe just so I’d write about it, they survived Europe just so I wouldn’t.

Greener was the type who’d give you a cig but not a light.

I said, I was born here, completed every school here, Future Farmers of America central district secretary, which might not mean a lot to you but.

Greener interrupted to ask, What conceivably could have made you a writer?

The prairie grasses, the wheaty wilds, the good solid old-style people.

Bullshit.

Bullshit’s a valuable fertilizer.

We’d walked into an unfertile field. A disused roughly triangular or sideways conical in its footprint pitch at the ragged edge of campus, which the baseball team—Ra, Ra, Bara Cara, Hep Hep, Don’t You Dare-A—had used for practice before the new stadium was built.

A pitch outgrown with weed, rutted with deep mud troughs where the dean’s tractor had rusted. Haybales, scattered silage troughs, hose. A pecked senseless scarecrow, straw packed into the uniform of last season’s starting pitcher from a rival team one state over.

Greener and I stood next to each other along the lip of the outfield, dividing what was collegiate from pure nature.

He asked to feel my hands.

When we clocked in for the next week’s workshop, a group of sincere and avidly morose shufflers, the room door had a slice of notepaper taped to its window at a reckless angle, pat will bring you down to the field—the handwriting that schoolboyish amalgamation of broad block and cramped cursive we’d become pros at deciphering — as for Pat, that’s still me, and though Greener hadn’t cleared this responsibility with me in advance, I led.

Trust me. Mind the foul lines. This way toward the margin. Rounding third base, second base, first.

Incredulous backpackers with mss., citrus pop going flat in our canteens.

We were twelve in that class assembled on a cooling day down at the rubbled heel of the pasture.

I was going to give a speech, Greener said.

But I won’t.

He was standing on a haybale atop the pitcher’s mound, then realized it was teetering shaky and stepped down to what remained of the dirt, a curveball’s slogged mire.

Can everyone hear me?

He rocked for warmth — his suede breaker too light, it was just for style — clapped frayed Knicks cap over his ears, noosed tighter the unraveling knit scarf.

People are going to say I was homesick, he said, but that’s just not true. Let me dispel. Allow me my disabuse. It’s just that I can’t in any way intuit how you all can write out here, with so much air and sky, with such openness, no disruptions, no disturbances.

Chiefly, nothing to compel ambition.

No opposition, no shadow, no shade for your toil.

We had no notion what he was saying.

Here, and he dug a sneaker toe into earth, we’re going to build a sanctuary, a monument to our own publishability. Can everyone hear me? How many of you have been to the city?

The answers were: we all could hear him and only one or two warily raised hands — Rog and Bau, who’d won partial scholarships to a summer writing program (indeed at the very school I’m checking out).

On this pyramidal plot, he said, on this decaying diamond, we’re going to make ourselves a culture — just for us and for whoever might suffer this school after, so that they might know what it’s like to live in a culture, what it’s like to be in a culture, to have culture, not just this organized sports frattery and hayseed academe.

In the grass grown wild at his feet was a shovel, a rusticated bluefaced tool he bent to and picked up and kicked into earth, breaking ground.

Broadway’s a difficult street, it’s touchy, temperamental, a diva — Greener tossing a shovelful of soil into the wind, the silty loam gusting back into his face and so he stalled, not to brush but to swallow — Broadway’s historic, taking time to find its bearings.

Dig deep into your thesauri for this: slithery, serpentine, anguiform even: you see that in how it winds up from the Battery and Wall Street (Greener dramatizing by digging the path with the shovel from his groundbreaking up toward the mound), how it swerves shyly to avoid Washington Square (he reached to a back pocket for a pair of mittens, dropped them), then suddenly cuts off (he took off his cap), at Union Square (dropped the cap), in preparation for its regeneration, regrowing itself in realignment when it crosses Fifth Avenue (the perimeter of the mound itself heading toward the bale), taking the central action of town and reorienting it to the westside.

That’s where downtown grew up — on the westside — is this making sense?

We nodded.

Don’t forget I’m speaking as a pedestrian, as a weekend cartographer in comfortable shoes — I was walking you through the thoroughfare north, though the traffic, I have to say, flows south.

Nodding.

But we’re particularly concerned with that intersection, where Broadway walks all over Fifth — one to become the snobby society money boulevard, that ignorant lilywhite stretch, the other to become that concourse of dirty miscegenation, a corridor potholed, poorly sidewalked and stuck with gums, obscurely tenanted — Broadway, the broad way, the wrecked wide and embracing inclusive anything goes way, the name almost unpacks itself.

A breeze blew in, autumn hinting at winter.

We shivered.

And we’re going to remake that here, he said, rather its landmark.

His hands described a structure in air, cold lines of cold air.

From now on all classes will be held out here under the clouds, both semesters regardless of weather — I’ve managed to persuade the school to approve our use of this field.

There will be a dress code.

He was calibrating, calculating.

There will be forms to sign, insurance waivers.

He steeled himself to say, You won’t be handing in writing for the rest of the year.

Which is how we began building, began rebuilding, the Flatiron. Built in 1902 and originally known as the Fuller Building — after the pioneer of the modern skyscraper and inventor of the system of “contracting,” G. A. Fuller, *1851–†1900, whose firm went on to build Penn Station, Macy’s Department Store, the Plaza Hotel, and the original New York Times Building, all of which are too uptown for our itinerary — the Flatiron was “the first great skyscraper in New York,” though it was “built in the style of Chicago” (its architect was a Chicagoan called Burnham) — all this according to the infopacket Greener passed around along with photocopies of the original blueprints illegally reproduced from the archives of the New York Historical Society (an exgirlfriend librarianed there, he’d said, Greener was always mentioning exgirlfriends — one who’d starred in a blaxploitation flick he forbade us from mentioning, another who’d had her own let’s meet our panel of nymphomaniacal nannies talkshow — I often had the feeling he’d come out to our crop only to avoid the famous feminine back east).

Also included in the packet were photos: souvenir posters and postcards, antique panoramic exposures and aerial snaps, in color and, why not, black & white (which Greener declared the only colors worth building for). The building looks different in every shot. Seen from the front it resembles a single column, as upright as Classicism, as upright as Neoclassicism, a spine straight up and down, but seen from the side it’s a monstrous wall, like a cursorless screen, or that virtually blank page that’d directed us down to its rising. Greener quoted numerous writers — of fiction and poetry of the period of the building’s initial erection — comparing that frontview to a steamship steaming its prow up the avenues, and the sideviews, both starboard and port, to a sailboat’s sail or the blade of a knife — Greener remarking, however, that since it was built on an island, was built on a traffic island, if the building was a boat, it was beached. Though the Flatiron was among the first genuine skyscrapers to be constructed of steel — previously steel wasn’t considered entirely reliable, its properties not yet understood — it didn’t get its name from the metal that made that material. Rather the name that branded the building and district as enduringly as the building itself branded the city, predates construction, deriving from a resemblance — evident to the nineteenth century, aka the century Greener thought we were from — between the Flatiron’s future plot and a clothes iron. (I’m writing this not on the W’s room’s desk, which is filled with Veri’s purse and cosmetics, but on the ironingboard retrieved from the closet, remembering Dem pressing our pleats, cooking soufflé buffets with truffles. Remembering myself walking fantasy crossroads with Greener, talking plans, talking tenants — Greener pointing out how the Flatiron separates downtown, which creates the art, from midtown, which rapaciously profits from it, how the building itself points north toward the agents and publishers, toward the magazines too, who’ll be so interested in this project, they’ll send photographers, glossy journalists with expense accounts equivalent to a year’s pay for my freshman comp adjuncting — grandiosity!)

Beneath the Flatiron’s fancy cladding, undergirding the swooping loops and oriels — the limestone base and glazed terra cotta facade are in no way loadbearing — is that metal, the steel, which was Rog Reardon’s assignment. From that second week of class he began spending a lot of time at a foundry just outside town that was closed when the company that had owned it was bought by another company that was bought by another company that moved to Mexico. As the foundry had fired Rog’s father and uncles, it was Rog’s pleasure to rehire them and refire the works. These metalworkers, family and those unrelated but friends and acquaintances, were happy to be employed, less happy to be so on the condition that Rog apprentice as mill supervisor. But Rog proved adept, a swift learner. Greener, it should be understood, had a phenomenal sense for assignments, and besides the useful fortuity of Rog coming from a steelmaking family, it also helped that the novel he’d been neglecting since junior year was imprecise about its narrator’s identity, relationships, and ambitions, abstract in its philosophy, sloppy with flashback and dream, and what it needed, what Rog needed, was nothing more than dense hard verbs, relentlessly accurate adjectives, and the active immediacy of the present tense. By midterm, Rog had become an expert, rallying the townie workers to their largest job in decades. Today Mr. Reardon serves as foreman and half owner, with the university, of the foundry, and is arguably the best, most successful steelman in the state (his daughter — Raina? Raisa? has been in every one of Veri’s classes through high school, though I don’t know why they never got along — Veri says she’s spoiled).

Moreton did the foundation work and now has a prospering cement business of his own out of the county seat (he also owns part interest in a quarry). He set our house and has become a good, thorough, methodical, even plodding man, which every time I bump into him — in line at the hardware emporia, at the gas stations by the Route 70 onramp — unsettles me, given that the problem with his writing was that it’d lacked what he now supplies so well: the groundsill, the footings, a bottom. He, a poet, used to be a sound guy, a line freak, just making weak beams of pretty and pretty shocking words to tickle the ear (he’d mix metaphors too), but there’d be no formal structure, no prosodic meter, just stray vowels and consonants, snippets he’d heard and read in Eagle Avenue cafés floating as moments — occasions — without anchor or ballast. Greener — I think, I have to think though he never said anything about his selections — intuited this and sent him delving into bedrock, wood pilings, concrete, rebar. This was his specialty, Greener’s, countering a writer’s faults — supposed faults because Greener had read only one submission by each student — with a physical, practical correction.

Sora, who’d overwrite and overcharacterize and overdetermine and overexplain and just spoonfeed you, the reader, everything — she’d tell you what clothes a character was wearing only when it had no bearing on her story, she’d cite exactly what kind of meals her villain was munching when it had precisely nothing to do with advancing her arc or deepening characterization (why should it matter that her Alaskan psychic lesbian spy preferred spotted jumpers belted with appliqué flowers, pink pigskin gloves, and purplestriped, kneehigh galoshes, a strict diet of turkey chili and fries?) — Greener, with his genius, turned her transparent, light and free and freely pertinent. He made her our glazier, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s become our own home’s window woman, and is even developing an exclusive make of energysaving window that reduces heating costs, has a screen that can be raised only from the top sash as a child safety feature, and, I remember, Dem was just telling me — Dem’s in touch with her from the gym and PTA — that it recently won some national design award. Congrats, Sora! Let’s catch up sometime!

As Bau’s poems were always scatological — clogged to their brims with sex, piss, and shit — Greener, as if imparting a moral lesson, put him on plumbing, while Lo — whose poems and ersatz fairy and folktales, in contemporary settings, were so precious and vapidly schematic — was assigned to electrical. Of course they’re married now, Bau and Lo, and in business together and, though Dem and I don’t get together with them more than once a year since they transferred west to tend to Lo’s mother when she stroked herself into dementia, we still think of them often and fondly. Two kids, boys: Maury, a hapless pick, after the prof, and don’t quote me on this, Billy Jr.

As for Dem, to Greener’s mind — and to ours as well, though it took time and the necessity of dual incomes for us to countenance this — her poems were all surface gaiety, superficially stunning in their detail but emotionally empty: no amount of technique, and Dem had tons, could compensate for her being so private and timid, withdrawn. But how to teach emotion? How to teach the turning of the insides out? Greener had a solution (to get inside her he had to extrovert her first, that was my reaction). He put her in charge of interior decoration, her brief being not to duplicate the interior of the building as it was at the time of its construction — we weren’t getting into any period furniture, anyway how to find such records, if there were any such records — neither to duplicate the interior at present, or at the present of the century’s turn, rather to create a new interior, “one conducive,” Greener handwrote in a memo Dem typed for herself on a computer afforded her by the engineering department (its only cooperation), “to conducting literature classes & writing workshops &c.”

“Show me comfort.”

“Make for me an ideal.”

Being the only position with any modicum of creative control, this was a major honor and Dem knew it but also knew it meant that she and Greener would be spending hours of overtime together, alone, poring over that ratty portfolio she hauled to the site daily — crammed with paint swatches (the multiple offs: the laces, pearls, ivoire), fabric samples (tanned durables), clippings of any pattern wallpaper that caught fancy — though he tried to kiss her only once.

It was then — Dem coming home blushing sunset — that I flipped, showed up on the lawn of his faculty bungalow an hour later, screaming into the dark, Come on out, motherfucker, I will scalp you of your fucking testicles, and out Greener came in his tightywhities with a red, yellow, and green stoplight plaid robe blown loosely around him, wielding only a scroll of blueprints like a scopic spear, saying, That’s right, Pat, that’s what’s wrong with your work — it’s all impulse, it’s all energy, it’s good impulse, sure, it’s good energy, fine, the right true spirit, but still that’s not enough, it goes nowhere, you have nothing planned (waving the cyanotypes into blackness), nothing kept in reserve (stamping his feet, one bare, the other fuzzy, sheepishly slippered).

What the hell’s wrong with my work?

What were you going to do, kill me? What were you thinking?

I don’t know.

Bingo. You have no forethought — you just start a sentence without knowing how it ends, without knowing where or when it ends. Capital letter, then you skimp on anything that comes before the closing punctuation — if there’s any punctuation.

I was panting, snuffle, mucus.

Put commas between your instincts, parse reflexes into clauses — the same goes for your personal life.

I attended this lecture — I always had perfect attendance.

So I made a move on Dem — so what? she rebuffed me. You’re too much the idiot to recognize what’s essential: she doesn’t want me, she wants you.

That’s what she said.

He scowled.

I said, She told me not to do this — she said if I came over here I couldn’t ever come home.

Pat, you need to calm, keep the passions controlled — why else did I make you my roofer?

Greener shambled to the door of his tickytacky ramshackler, held it open for me.

Give Dem time to chill — she’ll take you back in the morning.

How sorry is it that writing about that evening with Greener is no easier now than it was then — years ago, the summer after that evening, when the media called? Predictably late. Nonfiction, they asked for. Journalism, they demanded. Editors, installed floors above realism, interested not in a crew of yokels and their architectural success, but in sensationalizing a former peer’s failure. Dem was furious I’d even considered their offers — that spat ruined our honeymoon, Canada — though it’s not like I would’ve been able to complete any “article,” any “piece.” I declined by maintaining I was too biased by hurt, but, full disclosure: I couldn’t write anymore, I wasn’t a writer.

I’d never been inside Greener’s bungalow before and I didn’t want to be there then — I wanted to demolish him, but I’d never been in a home so depressing. Not even those small poor places Dem and I would rent when Dem was still diligently sewing and gluing her verses together by day and then, once she had a job too and we were less poor, by night — not even that condemned chapel that leaked, or that dingy duplex downwind from the rendering plant I patched up nice but the toxic mold mucked in just when Veri was born — not even those could compare.

Greener had no furniture, no possessions. He had only this expression: mad, insomniac, grim.

He didn’t even have any literature on the nonexistent shelves, just how-to’s piled on the floor, stacked in the cupboards and pantry.

No manuscripts in the microwave unplugged, just diagrams, bank statements.

I’ve sold everything I shipped out with, he said. School’s only put up $100K, I’m funding the rest.

From your royalties? from your foreign rights and options?

By the grace of my mother’s estate and with loans, I’m buying myself a borough.

You’re in debt?

And did I mention my publisher rejected my new book last week? More of the same, they said.

More of what?

It’s a novel that revises my previous novel — do you honestly care?

Why do this to yourself?

I’m a teacher, I’m teaching.

We’re learning (I winced from my lameness).

And I’m going for broke on your education — though it’s incredible what you can get done with free labor.

You’re counting on this class to support your retirement?

(A jest as uncomfortable as lounging on his shack’s sloppy planks.)

The end of the semester’s the end of me.

And then what?

Rewhiskeying my mason jar, lighting two Camels, handing me one — And then we’d better be finished.

Tub was the only one of our class to leave town, the county, the state (as far as Dem and I are aware). He was always smart, too smart to be a writer it occasionally felt, Tub the brainiac always so analytical, so literal. I knew him, as I knew most of my fellow classmates, from prior workshops — those with hypertext experimentalist Grazinski, whose avant lacked only a garde, those immersed in the bucolic bardics of BJ, whose eclogues insisted on rhyme — and so I knew that if a character in some student’s story went somewhere, like New York City, say, on a certain date at a certain time, Tub would research that date and time and quiz the author on trivia like the weather (drizzle in the morning? leading to an afternoon of scattered thunder?), or how might your character react to the news that the Monday before the Jets holocausted the Eagles? or that two girls, braided black twins, died in a house fire in Harlem? He was a stickler, a looming, hovering pain, so Greener, surprise, surprise, promoted him to contractor (elevating Greener, I guess, to the role of contractor’s contractor).

Tub kept us on time, managed the workflows, made sure everybody made their right contributions in the right order and that when it was too early to do the plumbing or electric, for example, Bau and Lo weren’t allowed to just hump away at the edge of the lot — the field had been referred to as “the lot,” or “the site,” then gradually Greener’s appellation spread, I spread it: “the college borough”—but were instead redirected to help with unloading trucks, or putting up scaffolding, aiding — meaning following and learning from — Mesh and the region’s most skilled masons on their facadework. (Mesh was assigned the facade, that intricate, fripperant facade, only because the surfaces of his literary work were so terribly transpicuous, so banally boring — simple declaratives rife with simple vocabulary. Plain. Unadorned. Also it’d be shabby not to note that at this juncture, the unions — Locals 5, 15, 35, and 86—were pitching in for nothing, in a recruitment initiative, whenever they had shifts to spare.)

Tub himself wasn’t exempt from this diversification and though his primary talent was obviously organizational — he was a frail, wan guy — Greener insisted that he assist on the grunt jobs too, and so not only did he learn, as we all learned, something of every discipline, he also built up his chest and arms and successfully overcame chronic asthma. And Greener, it should be said, wasn’t exempt either: out straining among the elements, stooped for lift over pallets, it was as if he too would be receiving a grade. A fountain of sweat. Tanned in even his creases. He never cleaned his workboots or helmet. He looked wonderful (no, no: he looked like he was wonderfully dying).

It was late in the afternoon, about an hour after we’d returned to the hotel from the NYU tour, in the middle of the brief nap we’d scheduled before beginning to plan which of Dem’s tapas reservations to honor—

My phone rang a strange (212) number, but I answered it anyway, figuring it was the airline or an autoconfirmation of our visit tomorrow early to Liberty Island.

It’s Tub, he said, Tub Deminty — why didn’t you tell me you two were in town?

How did you know?

Reardon emailed with your number, it’s been forever, I hope you’re not avoiding me.

It’s not you I’m avoiding, I thought but only repeated, Damn straight, forever.

And I’m told you have a girl doing the rounds of our fair borough’s higher ed?

You’re on top of it.

Dem sat up in bed.

I know this is rushed, but will you make time for me tonight? I fly tomorrow for Frankfurt.

Dem cocked an ear.

I’ll get you tickets to Witties, that play that just won the Pulitzer — I’m friendly with the producers. Three tickets at Will Call (I have a meeting) — you’ll see the show then after we’ll eat, when the restaurants aren’t so crowded. Sound good? You in the mood for Turkish?

Dem snatched the phone from me, yelled, Have you heard of this taverna on East 66th?

And hello to you too — Tub had heard of it. He said that tables were scarce but he’d try. If that was a bust, he knew an exquisite rawfood trattoria.

He’d be the man with the olive umbrella, waiting just up the block from the theater.

Tub — why had I wanted to steer clear of The Tub, who used to write minuscule essays of sublime erudition but of no argument, no sway or opinion, just compressed paragraphicules of unremitting fact? Did I think he’d outgrown me, transcended our Midwestern muddle, advantaging his expertise, relocating to New York to do architecture, still scrupulously unmarried, still no children, if I had to pry gay, on staff at the Landmarks Commission — impeccably preserved himself — responsible for approving all reconstructions and refurbishments, all additions and subtractions, to the city’s historic buildings?

Nope, it wasn’t anything that petty, nothing that begrudging — it didn’t pique that he was the only one of us who’d published (though it was only an academic monograph on the history of brick) — no, my problem, getting down to street level, was just that he was the closest of our classmates to the edifice itself, a New Yorker who probably passed that prototype daily and was probably solely responsible for its welfare. How could he take that? how lucky can you get with your education?

Now just like the professionals we become after we graduate aren’t constructed merely from our student experiences, literature isn’t built merely of words — instead both require an extra material, whatever quantity of indefinable spirit that sent Tub to parts east, me up to the roof, and Dem to designing and decorating even after, especially after, what happened with Greener.

A writer, or a couple of exwriters, staying in this city at the W Hotel, might express their room’s bed and chair and desk by just repeating the words bed and chair and desk—while any deepening of a reader’s appreciation would depend on deepening the descriptions.

Would depend on, inspiration.

Following Greener, however, Dem preferred to choose a room’s furnishings rather than choose the verbiage that furnished their details.

A writer can write “the room had a couch,” or a writer can just give up writing, go out and drag a couch back into the room, having selected the appropriate model — it’s this total specificity, this absolute precision, that allowed Dem, having left the arts, to once again keep her exterior flawless and her interior private, her own.

By early evening, Dem had become particularly obsessed with the W’s room’s curtains — while I shaved twice, fussed with a suit, and pretended to worry about being late, this was her attempt to distract me.

On our way out she stopped at reception to ask, Where did you source it? that gorgeous microruffled white muslin?

The concierge didn’t know but said he’d do research, And, Madam, you have excellent taste.

He was a boy with a face from home, which he bowed to his tie, to repolish his accent.

I piled the family into a taxi, instructing the driver — Iranian? Iraqi? allow me to claim I’m too bumpkiny for such distinctions — to head uptown, but to take the West Side Highway (I should’ve subwayed, though which train’s a mystery).

Dem — vacillating between nervousness at traveling to an unknown, possibly even undatabased restaurant, and guilty joy at finally gaining the island’s northern latitudes — suppressed those sentiments out of concern: she was staring out the window then canting back in my direction, fixing me with her big blue salty puddles.

Veri wasn’t privy to any of this — didn’t know about that past, not even rumor. Inevitably she knew I’d roofed that dilapidated campus building modeled on another dim building dimly in New York — but how was that remarkable when I’d also roofed her friends’ houses, our neighbors’, our own barn and stables and four-bedroom, five-bathroom mock Colonial Revival, Mesh’s manse, and every home ever mortgaged by Bau and Lo from starter rancher to condo? She was gorging on the trailmix Dem passed her. She was very excited for her first Broadway show.

At Canal Street the darkling driver said, Too much the traffic is, an accident must be, as he swerved to continue north on — Bowery.

I asked, Can’t I choose the route?

The cabbie said, Bowery is best.

My phone rang a txt from Tub, No Greek or Ital, Yes Tk meze korean bbq v. delish.

I return txted, Whever?

As the avenues split I cried, No, stop, but Dem turned to mouthbreathe, No, you stop.

Dad? Veri said.

Sirs? said the cabbie.

Enough, Dem said, you’re a man.

I slouched, resigned — I’m the roofer.

The avenue gave way to Park.

Tub wasn’t there at the end, I mean the very end.

He was away doing what Veri was doing now, checking out schools, for him architectural school, not just touring but having his interview, “his intellectual texts” (that was his terminology) — like pot or hallucinogens — a twentysomething hobby.

Not just him, nobody was there at the finish — they were all in their dorms, cramming the New York City building code of the era, or out at the library studying the Beaux-Arts.

Ultimately there was just me.

The roof is, by default, the last.

Can’t build the ceiling before the floor.

I went up after a fierce spring storm to check the coping — the balustrades, that overbearing cornice (unnerving resemblance to Greener’s chin) — ensure all my work had withstood its final exam.

Topside was wet, slick. Ponds sloshed across the verdigrine tar, drowning the ducts.

Greener stood, trembling.

We all knew he’d been living in the Fauxiron for a few weeks, but nobody had dared to say anything beyond, If you need a shower or are peckish, don’t hesitate, drop by. Dem had outfitted him with a decent penthouse suite replete with foldout sofa, stocked minifridge, full bath, but mostly he slept — as evidenced by the Baby Ruth and straw wrappers, the Coke cans and bourbon fifths and butts and last week’s bundled socks — in the halls or in random other studios. Or up on the roof come April and May, with the term almost over — he had no summer plans (he’d been using his rejected manuscript as pillow until, over springbreak, with us away at Dem’s parents’, he burnt it in his suite’s trashcan to test the alarms, or so he’d told the authorities — the alarms worked, the sprinklers worked, did damage).

The taxi approached the intersection — I was sitting on its west side, was fated to that side.

On the roof I reached a hand out — reached a hand out the cab’s window too — pointing a finger at the air.

The wind the smoothest traffic.

Dem held my knee and Veri, bright with recognizance, shouted, Hey, where are we?

The intersection of voids, the corner of nothing and nothing.

I turned to the rear window.

A laugh.

There it was in its rude sedate slant, there it was in its glory.

The height from which he jumped.