The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Now, a picnic. Tonight they’ll have a catered meal, but the food will be a lukewarm, sauce-covered mess o’ mystery supplied by the cafeteria in one of the college commons. Possibly chicken, possibly fish, it’s always hard to tell. Beige food is what Pauline calls it. Visiting poet-food is always beige, and in any case it won’t be served until eight o’clock. With some cheap yellowish-white wine seemingly created to saw at the guts of semiretired alcohol abusers such as themselves. This meal is nicer, and iced tea is fine. Phil even indulges the fantasy of leading her by the hand to the high grass behind the bathrooms once they have finished eating, like in that old Van Morrison song, and—

Ah, but no. Elderly poets whose sex drives are now permanently stuck in first gear should not chance such a potentially ludicrous site of assignation. Especially poets of long, rich, and varied experience, who now know that each time is apt to be largely unsatisfactory, and each time may well be the last time. Besides, Phil thinks, I have already had two heart attacks. Who knows what’s up with her?

Pauline thinks, Not after sandwiches and potato salad, not to mention custard pie. But perhaps tonight. It is not out of the question. She smiles at him and takes the last item from the hamper. It is a New York Times, bought at the same Augusta convenience store where she got the rest of the picnic things, checked cloth and iced-tea bottle included. As in the old days, they flip for the Arts & Leisure section. In the old days, Phil – who won the National Book Award for Burning Elephants in 1970 – always called tails and won far more times than the odds said he should. Today he calls heads … and wins again.

‘Why, you snot!’ she cries, and hands it over.

They eat. They read the divided paper. At one point she looks at him over a forkful of potato salad and says, ‘I still love you, you old fraud.’

Phil smiles. The wind blows the gone-to-seed dandelion puff of his hair. His scalp shines gauzily through. He’s not the young man who once came roistering out of Brooklyn, broad-shouldered as a longshoreman (and just as foul-mouthed), but Pauline can still see the shadow of that man, who was so full of anger, despair, and hilarity.

‘Why, I love you, too, Paulie,’ he says.

‘We’re a couple of old crocks,’ she says, and bursts into laughter. Once she had sex with a king and a movie star at pretty much the same time on a balcony while ‘Maggie May’ played on the gramophone, Rod Stewart singing in French. Now the woman The New York Times once called America’s greatest living female poet lives in a walk-up in Queens. ‘Doing poetry readings in tank towns for dishonorable honorariums and eating alfresco in rest areas.’

‘We’re not old,’ he says, ‘we’re young, bébé.’

‘What in the world are you talking about?’

‘Look at this,’ he says, and holds out the first page of the Arts section. She takes it and sees a photograph. It’s a dried-up string of a man wearing a straw hat and a smile.

Nonagenarian Wouk to Publish New Book

By Motoko Rich

By the time they reach the age of ninety-five – if they do – most writers have retired long ago. Not Herman Wouk, author of such famous novels as The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Marjorie Morningstar (1955). Many of those who remember the TV miniseries presentations of his exhaustive World War II novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), are now drawing Social Security themselves. It’s a retirement premium Wouk became eligible for in 1980.

Wouk, however, is not done. He published a well-reviewed surprise novel, A Hole in Texas, a year shy of his ninetieth birthday, and expects to publish a book-length essay called The Language God Talks later this year. Is it his final word?

‘I’m not prepared to speak on that subject, one way or the other,’ Wouk said with a smile. ‘The ideas don’t stop just because one is old. The body weakens, but the words never do.’ When asked about his

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As she looks at that old, seamed face beneath the rakishly tilted straw hat, Pauline feels the sudden sting of tears. ‘The body weakens, but the words never do,’ she says. ‘That’s beautiful.’

‘Have you ever read him?’ Phil asks.

‘Marjorie Morningstar, in my youth. It’s an annoying hymn to virginity, but I was swept away in spite of myself. Have you?’