Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Monody for a Forgotten Man, story by Tim Tomlinson.
- Bernstein
I had a friend, the name is not important. We shared an office at the university. His shelves sagged with classical music CDs and opera lps in boxes. Handel’s Acis and Galatea, the Mahler cycle conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
–Were you aware that Leonard was homosexual?
I was but I said I wasn’t. He wanted to tell the story—he’d told it before. It involved the gym at the West Side Y. What he remembered most was Bernstein’s calves.
–Those leaps that he made on the podium?
I nodded.
–You saw those calves, you wonder how he didn’t hit the ceiling.
They met over the several weeks when Bernstein composed Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra.
–The O’Hara and the Stein, he said, those were my ideas. But we didn’t just write.
He allowed a moment for his meaning to sink in, he was a great practitioner of the conversational caesura. Caesuras and ellipses.
–You know everyone called him Maestro?
–Of course.
–Well, he said archly, he called me Master. He left our trysts with raw knees, I can promise you.
- Crepuscular
Everything to this friend was art: music, drama, film, painting.
–I should have been a painting, he said, and often it appeared as though he were posing for one. The flamboyance! The red satin tunic, the over-puffed berets, the yellow pajamas. The capes. Or, I should say, the accessories. He had them all, in triplicate. On his hat rack, hats on top of hats. Sometimes I’d meet him, we’d go out, and he’d insist on my wearing one, no matter that it came down over my eyes and ears.
–We don’t need to see, he’d explain, we need to be seen.
His vocabulary was similarly accessorized. Grisaille, he might say, correctly, you’d learn, later, when you looked it up. Chiaroscuro was a favorite word. Crepuscular. Intervallic. The kinds of words you didn’t need, but wished you had.
- La Parade de cirque
Above his desk hung a framed reproduction of La Parade de cirque, by Georges Seurat, a pointillist masterpiece on which he’d based a monograph, his only significant publication. It depicts an audience in the lower foreground watching a performance of four musicians. The circus ringmaster—rigid, formal, severe—appears in profile near the painting’s right edge. Under his arm is tucked a stiff riding crop. The face and the expression bear an uncanny resemblance to my friend.
–Oh, he said, obviously pleased. Do you think so?
–Think so? I said. He’s a dead ringer.
He leaned in, looking more closely.
–I don’t think that I’ve ever noticed, he said, intrigued by the possibility.
- Mexican on University Place
He was a bit of a shape-shifter, my friend. With a mustache he resembled James Joyce. Sometimes he went bald as Sibelius. He liked to lunch at a Mexican restaurant on University Place where the busboys came from Peru and not one of them over five feet.
–Can you imagine their mothers, he said. The serapes. And those ridiculous black bowlers.
His derision was performative, a conversational exercise as easily removed as a scarf.
The busboys placed the salsa and chips.
–You do that so well, he marveled. Tell us, is that what they mean by le service francais?
The way they’d back away, carefully, smiling, apologizing. Their English was poor to non-existent.
–Not at all, he assured them. But we’re teachers. We can teach you. English or French. Would you like that?
Eventually he got one over to his place.
–Oh, but that boy broke my heart, he said, positively shivering with the recollection. A young Incan god. Seventeen. Nothing breaks your heart like a seventeen year old boy.
–Did you improve his English, I asked.
–I wonder, he said, looking ruefully through the restaurant window. We barely spoke…
- Man in Polyester Suit
Once I observed his seminar. He was in the midst of a unit that he called Chroma, Bravura, and Presque-vu. Onto a whiteboard, he projected the image of Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit, a photo-portrait of a faceless Black man, his enormous uncut cock hanging through the open fly of his trousers like the handle of a bullwhip.
–Not to see, he told the roomful of undergraduates, but to be seen.
The class appeared stunned. Speechless. Which was, apparently, the desired effect.
- Rain Tree Sketch
He spent his mornings working things out at the piano. He’d record bits on my voice mail.
–I’m getting closer, he’d say. Tell me what you think.
Long tinny passages followed. Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Takemitsu’s “Rain Tree Sketch.”
When he had the pieces sufficiently down, he’d invite me over for a recital. Him, the piano, and the din of two-way traffic on Houston Street ten stories below. And just when I might be hypnotized by the beauty and the virtuosity, he’d cover the keyboard and stand.
–Off to the club, he’d announce. Adding, mischievously, Want to come?
The club he frequented was on Chrystie Street, just south of Houston. From below the piano he pulled a duffel bag filled with paraphernalia. Clamps, ropes, masks, gags.
–Fucking chainsaws, he snickered, searching my face for a reaction, which, resolutely, was not there. You truly do not judge, he said, do you? I’m not sure I’m persuaded.
- Rocco
My side of the office was movies. VHS tapes, DVDs. The boxed Cassavetes, British New Wave. Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers.
–Such a long sit, he said, studying the Rocco case. But that brother.
–Simone?
–Exactly. What a brute! Of course the girl went for him.
–She went for Rocco, too.
–Did she, he said. I must have drifted off…
- Evaluations
One late afternoon I saw him at the corner of Washington Square Park and West 4th, students and professors streaming by. He stood over a wire-mesh trash basket removing papers from a folder, looking at each, returning some to the folder, letting others drop into the trash.
–What are you doing? I asked him.
–Oh, he said, as if I’d been there all along, I’m evaluating my evaluations.
–Those are student evaluations?
–Some of them will be, he said, then, smiling at me as another casualty of his scrutiny floated into the bin, and some of them won’t.
–Aren’t we supposed to leave the room when students fill those out?
–Oh, are we?
–I think so, and then ask a volunteer to submit them to the office.
–Hmm…, he said. Maybe next semester.
- Sotto voce
He couldn’t speak without making allusions, most of which he assumed you knew. In my case he was being generous. Edith Wharton, of course. Maybe Catullus. But for my friend, a walk through the park could trigger references to Milton’s Lycidas, The Pillow Book, Fernando Pessoa, Achaeus of Eretria. As if the cultural history of the world scrolled by on his eyelids. He’d never been happier than when he was a student in Chicago.
–Except, he mused, perhaps on those five glorious days with my Incan god.
–But afterwards, I asked him in reference to his Incan god, once the loving, once the fucking is done, don’t you sometimes find that you want them gone?
He took my arm with great solemnity.
–I want them beheaded.
Once he volunteered what he missed most by living alone.
–There’s no one to hear my soliloquies, the sotto voce fruits that fall, the unfolding fecundity of fifty-five years.
I said he could share them with me.
–I do, he said, but I’m afraid they go wasted.
–Oh, I said.
–No, he said, hastening to add, not that way. You appreciate them, you get them—some of them—but you don’t live them, do you. We speak on the phone, or across a tablecloth stained with guacamole…
- Onset
It was hard to pinpoint when the Alzheimer’s began. The range of reference remained, but it took on an aggressive, an acidic edge with just about everyone but me. Although once, when I hadn’t seen him for awhile, he showed up in the office a bit disheveled. It seemed like he’d been out in high wind.
–Come, he said, I’ll take you for lunch at the Mexican’s.
–Give me fifteen minutes, I told him. I needed to meet briefly with the Dean.
But when I returned he was gone, and so were my blazer and raincoat.
It took me nearly fifteen minutes to locate the blazer—he’d thrown it in the garbage bin. He died a year later, well before I found the raincoat buried in one of his file drawers beneath a row of pornographic videocassettes.
- The Side Show
You google him now, he’s gone. Like he never existed. But years after his death I have a dream. He’s watching the performance of a play he’s written and directed. And though I’m watching it, too, I’m also onstage. A character called The Ringmaster directs a line at me. It’s meant to humiliate, and it succeeds.
–How can you suggest that, I hiss at him offstage, softly so as not to disturb the performance.
He dismisses my umbrage with a limp wave.
–You’ve never gone all the way, he says with a self-satisfied smirk, have you?
–All the way with what? I say. How would you know?
Again he waves me off.
I awaken deeply disturbed. I open a manuscript he’d left behind, dedicated to me. On its cover, an orange post-it on which he’d scribbled “a failed novella.” Its title: The Side Show (suggested by the painting La Parade de cirque, by Georges Seurat). The frontispiece features a color reproduction of the painting. The opening page renders in prose the humiliating scene I’d dreamed from his play.
I put down the manuscript and begin writing this.
© Tim Tomlinson
Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You, and, most recently, Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World. Recent work appears in The Bangalore Literary Magazine, EKL Review, Flash Boulevard, and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing. Tim is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.
Brilliant. Bit Melancholy.
Love the bullet- point sub- headings . Giving you Distinction mark A+ , dear TIM