PULL
DOWN VANITY!
369
And behind it all, there was Judith Somers, a kind of
agent
provocateur,
who would cue and sustain the hum of admiration with
a whispered comment, a sigh or simple look, coming
breathl~
into
class every day between her two jobs as waitress and part-time secre–
tary to Chuck Bligh. Edging down the side of the room to the back
row after I had already begun to talk, she would keep her eyes on
me in such frank adoration that I could scarcely keep from writhing
in pride, embarrassment and rage.
After class, my poets would follow me to the dormitory room
where I held my conferences, wait patiently in the corridor, chattering
excitedly in groups of three or four, until the moment when they
could sit and watch me across the littered desk and beside the neatly
made bed. There would always be a "problem" to begin with, a
question of metrics or vocabulary, then some banal confidence, and
at last the moment of silence in which they would gaze at me with
the flattering tenderness that I despised myself for enjoying. In these
intervals of quiet I would sometimes hear from next door the creaking
of the floor, or the rustling of cloth against wood, and I would know
that Fenton, who was my neighbor, was listening at the connecting
door. I should have sympathized with him, I know, but I was capable
then only of feeling flattered because he was jealous of me and old
and aware of being unloved.
He was constantly wooing the conferees, at first only the hand–
ful of younger poets, but later even the biddies themselves, to sit with
him over a beer and be shocked by him a little
in
those unbreathable
evenings that brought neither coolness nor the possibility of sleep.
But somehow they would not come, or sat dully in their transparent
boredom, so that finally he was driven back on the company of the
Staff: Chuck Bligh who listened to nothing in his undefined general
pleasure in Good Conversation; Miss Manfred, who had come to
teach the "commercial" short story, and who seemed at first simply
mad, though it turned out that she was only acting frantically some
provincial version of the flapper maintained for thirty years; and
Fleetwood Demby, author of that sensitive first novel,
Death's Other
Kingdom,
whose purple eyes would watch Fenton with horror from
behind his bangs.
I met all three one night just outside of the Campus Grille,
Fenton apparently quite drunk and hanging for support between
