The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [27]
By the middle of June the town seemed stunned by the summer, emptied of nearly half its people, after all, and the livelier half at that. It was hot. Humid. I was idle. Bored. Almost every weekday afternoon I met Ted MacKey at an air-conditioned basement tavern and watched him get drunk. Then we went to our separate dinners.
Sometimes Eloise Sprungl joined us. She was the woman who catered many of the dinners for the Liberal Arts faculty. I’ve described her as the image of Peter Lorre. For some years she’d been tenured faculty in the Art Department and had even done a turn as department chair, but one day she’d simply stopped showing up for work. Tendered her resignation. She painted almost daily now, had a studio in her home, but she didn’t think she was any good. All this and more she told me in the time it took her to smoke a cigarette and down a double schnapps while we waited for Ted to come wobbling down the stairs of Dooley Noodle’s, the basement tavern—the first moment she and I were ever alone together. She revealed that two years before, her husband had died of lymphoma, a complication of AIDS.
At one time or another she claimed to have bombed a power plant in the seventies, to have invented a process used in long-range observatory telescopes, and to have conducted, as a girl of thirteen, a red-hot love affair with Ernest Hemingway that spanned the globe, and she hinted she was the reason he’d ended it all. She liked referring to herself as the Froggy Bitch. “Give the Froggy Bitch a light…” “The Froggy Bitch must excuse herself to pee…” “Even the Froggy Bitch gets hungry, so let’s eat!” Yet with all that had happened to her, she seemed neither sad nor angry. I’m not sure why I bother talking about Eloise except to reflect, for my own benefit, on the kind of people I was drawn to. State-run education was mostly show. She and Ted Mackey were open about that. They were just the type to thrive in these vapors of low-lying cynicism, occasional genius, and small polite terror.
And Ted has, in fact, continued to flourish. So has Eloise Sprungl. And although I see I’m not yet quite finished recording these memories, I might as well tell about some of the others:
Clara Frenow beat the cancer permanently, took early retirement, and either joined the Peace Corps or bought a bed-and-breakfast in Minnesota, so the reports went. Maybe she did both. As for Flower Cannon, I have no idea what’s become of her, but if I ever track her down I’m sure she’ll be up to something quite shocking and also absolutely no surprise. Of course all along I’ve been disingenuous when referring to Tiberius Soames, as I’m sure the name was familiar. Three years ago he and Marcel Delahey shared the Nobel Prize for economics. He’s got a big endowed chair now at the University of Chicago and all day long does whatever he wants. Ted MacKey and I still correspond, or anyway exchange postcards. His last: “I’m pimping a couple co-eds now, and I’ve joined a coven. Marie [his wife] has had a sex change. We never liked you. Keep in touch.” The photo shows a vast field of profoundly green cultivated rows across which he’s scrawled excuse the corny sentiment.
And, of prizes: You may be aware of T. K. Nickerson’s Pulitzer—his second Pulitzer—the year before last. I bought the book, found it unreadable. He followed quickly with another, which I picked up browsing in a store one day and which by that evening I’d devoured in one sitting, and I’ve since read it again with just as much pleasure. So he still knows how to write. He married Kelly Stein, or so I think I heard. And what about J.J.? Two years back this short letter came to me, and I haven’t yet tossed it out:
Dear Michael,
This is going to be a strange little note, Mike, but I can’t shake this annoying ridiculous sense I have that I said something I didn’t finish, but have to get said completely. It’s selfish of me to bother you with this, because you’re no more involved than in the capacity of the chance bystander, poor guy. But I’m not explaining, so I’ll explain. After the