Theocritus

Isaac Simonson once had a fairly large group of academic friends, but the older ones had died, and all the others had been drawn to the coasts by professional success. There’d been a bit of interest in his various applications over the years, six interviews, and one campus visit. But it became clear that he would finish his career in situ.

Winnie had retained the ethic of social engagement that had animated them both when they met. She gamely continued, even now, trying to get him out of the house. He even suspected that, through their occasional dinner engagements, she was attempting to set him up in various arranged, late-middle age, male friendships. Tonight, it was Marty.

“Can I get you a drink?” asked Marty, a red-cheeked, plumpish man of middle height. He was a counselor or something. Winnie had told him, but he could not now remember all the details. He wanted to ask, but he figured that Marty would be offended, since everybody knew that therapists without PhDs were little more than amateurs, acceptable, perhaps, as guides to high schoolers and housewives, but insufficient to the needs of the intellectual class.

“Sure, I’ll have a drink.” He looked at his wife. “A drink sounds good.”

Marty opened the door to his little beer fridge, tucked under a counter next to the main one. Isaac surveyed the rack inside for the least colorful, most inconspicuous bottle or can, and selected an anonymous looking green bottle. Since one green glass bottle was indistinguishable from another, it would be easier to get really drunk without anybody noticing.

“I ran into Sonny the other day,” said Marty. Kyle Sonnenstein, one of Isaac’s younger colleagues. They did not get along.

“Oh?”

“He’s definitely an interesting guy. He was saying that he just got a big pedagogy award to re-design one of the core Classics requirements?”

“Yeah, Greek Civ. I know about it.”

“It sounds like he’s reinvigorating the major, single-handedly.”

“Oh, is that what he said?”

Marty sang the praises of his younger colleague, and Isaac’s attention drifted toward the wives speaking animatedly in front of the remodeled gable windows. They had left the porch alone, at least. It had a broad, wooden entablature, painted tan like its columns. The cornice was ornamented with dentil molding, stretched atop a broad frieze, decorated with a pattern of interlocking meanders.

Anders and Laura walked through the door. He found it depleting. Time and energy were like disposable income for these people. They spent it just to spend it. Isaac wanted to be back home, with his books, with his poets. With Homer, Virgil, with Theocritus. He’d spent all his life trying to cultivate his garden. People like Marty tramped through and shook all the fruit from the trees. He took all the energy that Theocritus bestowed. Isaac’s visits with the poet were infrequent, but they touched everything, even if only briefly.

“She’s asking for trouble in that skirt.” Marty stood up.

“I’m sorry?” Isaac said.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m here for it.” 

Anders and Laura, and Marty and Tina, too, were all kissers and huggers, and now there was a cluster of kissing and hugging by the front door, from which Isaac stood well back, and there were whines of gratitude from all, to be hosted and to be hosting. He retreated to the kitchen, where he grabbed another green bottle of beer without anybody seeing and shoved his empty deep into the garbage.

The day that Isaac first saw the ancient Greek poet Theocritus was not unlike many spring afternoons in Kansas City. A window-clattering thunderstorm had ended suddenly, and the sky had gone from evil dark to yellow bright in the space of a few seconds. Isaac had rushed outside with excitement to see the light catch the tiny droplets still floating through the heavy green air.

The saucer magnolia, of which in twenty years he had taken no notice, seemed to Isaac strangely radiant, as if it were edging toward him through the haze, unsettled from its proper position in space, perhaps even in time. Its thin bark had been soaked nearly black, and the flesh of its branches was steaming in the unusual spring warmth. Its leaves were still flicking down and up, battered by the leftover rain, the pink and white flowers of the tree bruised and mangled by the wind and water, petals scattered across the sparse grass and black earth below. He walked straight toward this tree, compelled to touch it. The water droplets ran cool down his bare forearm. The late afternoon sun was warm on his skin. And as his hand reached toward one of the broad new blossoms of the tree, there was a branching, extending, reaching path of light, running between bright nodes in the dark, though whether neurons or suns, it was impossible to tell. And for a few moments, the nodes were all connected, and his own presence was joined by that of Theocritus.

The poet was not present in his own shape, exactly, but there was an added thickness to the air, a palpability. The sunlight was cupped in the drops clinging to the undersides of the petals and leaves. It was precisely that captured luminescence that contained the presence of the poet, his gratitude at being awakened, his amazement at being joined to a few fragments of day. Isaac turned his face up toward the warmth above him, basking in the sense of familiarity with the shade of the long dead man. In the dozens of tiny droplets dangling precariously from the branch before him were an infinite number of impulses and inklings, not his own, he was certain, but of the poet, who longed to stay with him. The wind blew, battering his ears. The drops fell from the branch, replaced in an instant by new ones. The shade was gone.

“Oh, I forgot the green onion,” Tina said.

Winnie was in the crisper of the refrigerator before anybody even noticed, and she found the cutting board on the second drawer she tried. She was the type of person who could help without getting in the way.

“How many?” she asked, pulling a knife from the magnetic strip under the cabinets.

“Two or three,” said Tina.

Tina didn’t notice, but Winnie chopped all six, knowing better than Tina what Tina would need for the meal that Tina was cooking. Isaac adored his wife for moments like this. Small magic. Unpretentious, instinctual understanding. If beauty was a version of harmony, her actions, the content of her days, the movements of her hands and will, were beautiful. Winnie could make dinner for eight neighbors in 20 minutes.

“You should do a big birthday party at our house,” Isaac said to Winne as she minced garlic for Tina’s salad dressing. “With the girls.”

“I’m not sure we have a chance of getting the girls into town for that, honey,” said Winnie, sounding mildly, almost pleasantly, even satisfyingly disappointed. He wanted that, what Winnie had, that cleanliness of mind, that severe good sense that disdained anything beyond one’s immediate control, but also saw clearly what good things could be brought within reach.

They were called to table in a large dining room that was pleasantly cozy, in part because the grey-green walls were lined with plants and books. The result was that the room had a dark, brown and green, organic feel. Isaac thought he could even smell the books and the dust collected on the shelves, a lovely, yellow-brown, moldering smell, which reminded him of his grandparents.

Tina could cook, and Isaac lost himself in the food. She unveiled and served the dish, which was still steaming, and the room was thickened with warm vapor and spice—chicken and sumac and tomato and onion and dates and plums—and Winnie, God bless her, was pouring red wine, an ox-blood Shiraz, which seemed perfectly suitable to the meal, and which only deepened the feeling of warmth in the room. Into this warmth he disappeared, and he did not need to listen much to what was going on around him but could sit by Winnie’s side and feel drunk and grateful to be near her.

He looked up after Winnie pressed his thigh with her own, when he realized Marty was trying to speak to him.

“Sorry, I’ve disappeared into the food. Tina—it’s splendid!”

“I was just saying,” continued Marty, “just telling everybody, or everybody else, I guess—” This shook Isaac out of the depths of his good mood, but he might get back there yet. “I was just telling them about the most wonderful thing, the most wonderful object that somebody brought into the shop the other day.” Tina ran a kind of luxury goods store in the Crossroads district. She sold anything that might go on a rich person’s shelf or coffee table or nightstand. Marty spoke about the shop like it was his own, but Isaac knew he didn’t do any of the work. “I don’t know how they got it. They must be Greeks of one kind or another—” and here Marty smirked, “—they probably ran a diner, I suppose. But in any event, this young woman had a New Testament—and you’d never guess, but it was in Greek.”

“It’s supposed to be in Greek. It was written in Greek,” Isaac said.

“Well, in any event, it’s a beautiful object, a wonderful piece, and very valuable.”

“When is it from?” asked Winne. But Marty ignored her.

“It’s just so exotic looking. I mean, just by looking through the pages you can absorb the age of it, the wisdom of it…”

“What do you mean, absorb?” asked Isaac. He wasn’t exactly angry, but he had switched into professor mode. His voice was low and authoritative. Marty had mentioned a topic within his specialty, and it would be impossible now to reverse course.

“I just mean that the thing of it, the way it is, the script, the curlicues, the angles—you can get a sense of the culture like that, absorb something true about it, even without reading, even—”

“Ah.” Isaac’s tone was utterly dismissive. His smile the sharp, exhausted smile of one man who had pinned the other to the ground.

There was a moment of trepidatious silence in the room. Then the clinking of dishware resumed.

Isaac had despaired of seeing the poet again, and he had told himself that he had given it up. To please Winnie, and in the hope of pleasing himself, he did resume the translation, begun so long ago as a way to love the poems themselves instead of merely studying them. He was surprised to find how easily he enjoyed this difficult, adoring task that he had feared for so long.

In recent years, he had taken to working in his office at the University, on a windowless interior hall. It was cheerful in its way, stacked floor to ceiling with good books and plenty of earnest books seeking to understand the good ones, and to be there was to be virtuous, to be present in case he should be needed, if someone had a question regarding the Greek, or if one of his colleagues should wish to gossip, a ritual ablution integral to the office of Professor. But it had been gloomier now that the language requirement had been done away with, emptying his Latin and Greek classes of students, and the Classics Department itself was being allowed to wither on the vine. His younger, more promising colleagues always made their way to more prominent institutions, their lines reabsorbed and distributed to the departments of sociology, business management, and communications. The offices of his older colleagues, who had been his main stock of friends in town besides Winnie, had been emptied of books and filled by the loud and abrasively tolerant legion of adjuncts who turned the millwheel of English in exchange for negligible pay and no benefits, teaching moderately popular seminars on the culture of print advertising in the punk zines of the Bay Area from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s and the dynamics of race and gender in online fan fiction chat forums.

But Winnie asked him to spend more time at home. He hardly needed to be in the office, she reasoned. He could do his office hours online and by appointment only, and just go to campus for the two half-days per week he was in class. He barely had to prep to teach anymore, and so he should use his time as he pleased. She set up a desk for him in her study in the fourth-floor loft, which extended from gable to gable beneath the entire ridge of the roof. Her desk was by the set of large twin windows beneath the east-facing gable, and his was at the twin windows beneath the other, looking west, with a view over two rows of houses and all the way to the park that had been built into the old quarry and limestone bluffs a few blocks away. It was drafty and cold in the winter (they had to leave the bathroom door open so the pipes wouldn’t freeze), and burning hot in the summer, but Winnie liked to feel the seasons. They had not spent time like this since graduate school, working concentratedly together. Once the children had come, it had always been a balancing act, and he had spent many of his hours at the office, partly to escape the stresses and distractions of parenting and marriage. But now once again they worked back-to-back, turning occasionally to read something of interest across the comfortable brown air, or to walk across the creaky oak planks to search for a volume from the disorganized ranks of books that lined the walls.

It was wonderful up there. Anything he did up there counted as work. That was Winnie—broad-minded, nothing wasted. Just keep the labor in view, and everything becomes relevant to the labor. It wasn’t a burden, it was a trick to enliven the present, to free oneself from the insidious despair of wrong turns and wasted time. When Winnie was writing, she might really be doing anything at all, looking out the window, reading about the lifecycle of the cicada, translating, texting the kids. It all worked in her favor. He followed her example, keeping his lexicon open and the text of the Idylls at all times before him, his pen and notebook at the ready, but also opening the door to Winnie’s version of productivity: scanning the pages of the New York Review of Books, googling old Classics colleagues, watching poetry readings and years-old baseball highlights on YouTube, googling his children.

But he did translate, too, sometimes in little snippets, sometimes for hours on end without realizing, only stopping when he surprised himself by being too excited or frustrated or exhausted to continue. That fatigue was itself exhilarating—he had not felt exhausted by his actual work in a long, long time. Sometimes, that feeling was enough, it was sufficient satisfaction for the day, and he’d leave Winnie alone and go on a walk or do the shopping or call one of the children. But sometimes, he felt there was something more left in him—a kind of thrill beneath his shoulder blades that needed to escape—and he’d go make a sandwich and dump the leftover coffee in a huge mug. He’d ascend the four flights of stairs with his tuna in a vague state of concentration, eat in silence, and drink the coffee all at once in anticipation of being struck with inspiration and refreshment. Then, if nothing came yet, he’d let his mind pretend it was wasting time, watching Dances with Wolves in pieces, or going down a rabbit hole about Buffalo Bill’s Grand Buffalo Hunt, pouring over the Wikipedia page and then ordering more books about it than he would ever read. And sometimes, after an hour or two of this, an idea would sneak up on him, and the phrase he’d been trying to untangle would untangle itself, and his hand would reach for the pen and loosen the knot.

If Isaac was pleased, he would read his work aloud to Winnie, like he used to when they first met. He intended it as a touching and nostalgic act—they had first read their own poems to each other as a mode of seduction. At the end of January, Isaac read to Winnie from his notebook about poets longing to sing with dead poets who longed to sing with their vanished beloveds, and of the saving good fortune of the dreams of those poets, so sweet that it could only be compared to the eating of the honeycomb.

Winnie was careful not to comment on what she heard—she did not want to interfere with his thinking. But it brought tears to her eyes to hear him read from a poem that he had translated over and over and over in the years that she had known him, that he had been reading to her since before they had children, before they were married, before they had ever slept in the same bed. She heard it, and with a grievous joy, she brought Isaac by his beautiful, hairy hand away from his desk and over to the old couch, and they made love, quickly and simply but productively. Afterward, they made dinner, cod and tomato and olive stew, and they ate together at the counter, splitting a bottle of wine left over from New Year’s, saying hardly anything at all. 

Isaac knew there must have been a time when just the authoritative timbre of his voice, together with the titles of PhD, Professor, Classicist, and Philologist, were enough to silence the striving theories of idiot acquaintances with whom he had to share the table. But Marty took it up again.

“So, Isaac, are you taking the early retirement package?”

“What?”

“Sonny was telling me. He was saying that older faculty were being encouraged to sign up. He said it was an extra payday for underperformers…” Marty let that linger in the air before adding, “or just people in senior positions who are ready to move on.” 

“I’ve got a few good years in me yet, Marty.”

“There’s no shame in it, Isaac.” As he spoke, Marty was staring intently at the pile of arugula and parmesan on his plate, trying and failing to get the salad and cheese into his mouth at the same time. It kept falling to his plate, and he kept stacking it up again with the tip of his finger. “Education has changed. Values have changed. It’s not enough to be in the canon. There has to be a professional reason for it.”

Winnie interjected, with sincere feeling, “Why should the great works be the preserve of the elites, Marty? I mean, shouldn’t nursing and accounting students get the same chance to study the best stuff, like the private school kids?”

Isaac would have agreed, but he was angry that his wife was making his points for him. “Winnie,” he said, “I can do it myself.”

“Yeah, he’s a big boy, Winnie.”

“Shut up, Marty,” said Winnie. She sounded pitifully defensive. Isaac wondered if she always sounded like that or this was new.

“It’s unfair,” said Marty, adopting an abstract, professional tone. “I see it all the time in couples counseling. It’s terribly difficult to deal with, when couples age asymmetrically. I mean, Winnie, it’s not everybody who can maintain a professional life the way you have.”

“So, Anders…” Tina began, trying desperately to change the subject. But Marty continued.

“Especially since you’ve got what is effectively an elder-care situation on your hands.”

“Marty, that’s enough,” said Tina, so quietly that her effort to be tactful became even more obtrusive. Marty pretended not to hear her.

“I’m a big advocate for laying things out on the table. Professionally, I mean. From a wellness perspective. The worst thing you can do is to foster a culture of shame.”

There was an argument at the tip of Isaac’s tongue, a catalogue of elegant rejoinders. But all he could manage was, “I still teach two days a week.” 

“So Sonny tells me.” He finally got a forkful of arugula and a shaving of parmesan into his mouth at the same time. He narrowed his eyes in bitter, mirthless victory. “Even two days can be overtaxing past retirement age.”

“I’m going for a walk,” said Isaac.

“Wait, Isaac, it’s a long way home—” 

“I know the way home, Winnie.”

“I know, I just mean…Do you have your wallet? Do you have your phone?”

Isaac walked north.

There was a bridge at the top of the hill, where you could see all the big buildings of Downtown, completely unimpeded, but also look out toward Kansas, out over the lights of a disused industrial area called the West Bottoms. He was planning on walking all the way downtown, maybe even as far as the river, but he wandered first into the park just past the bridge, perched up on a bluff, where there was a baseball diamond, a little playground, and, in the middle of an overgrown field, a 20-foot-long fiberglass and steel statue of a Hereford bull, perched atop an 80-foot concrete pylon. The park was deserted, no children on the playground, padlock on the chain-link fence around the baseball diamond. President Eisenhower had supposedly attended the dedication of the statue of the bull. Isaac liked the idea of the President staring up at this strange idol of fiberglass, looking so gloomily out into the plains.

He was partway into the brown, winter grass of the trash-strewn field before he realized what was attracting him. The base of the bull’s enormous plinth was on fire. He had seen soot stains on the structure before. There was a door at the base of the pillar. Vagrants broke in from time to time and made fires to keep warm on the colder days. But this was different. The whole of the concrete structure was encircled by flame, a great column of smoke pouring straight up into the sky. The bull itself was sometimes veiled in smoke and darkness, but sometimes visible, the fiberglass eerily aglow, vacillating with different shades of orange, the steel frame beneath the fiberglass brightly illuminated. He spun around—still nobody else in the park. He listened for sirens; there were none. The pillar of flame was well in view of the apartment and office buildings on the western edge of Downtown. He could hear plenty of traffic on the interstate below. A fire so high ought to have been visible clear across the plains. He backed away from the tower, stunned, very pleased indeed to have such a wonderful and strange spectacle all to himself, an enormous, wondrous secret in plain view of all, a signal of selection, visible, perhaps, only to him.

Isaac went on with his walk, taking his secret with him, making his way north. The bluff was high here, and the whole activity of the evening and all its luscious convolutions lay itself out before him, in the sparkling lights of the city below. He turned and stopped and stared out at the Kansas, curling around Kaw Point, where Lewis and Clark had camped, and pouring with the force of a hundred fifty miles into the Missouri, a continent’s worth of water. Below him ran I-35, drivers careening south along the old cowboy trails atop the old Native traces toward Texas and eternity. The fiery bull sending its pillar of smoke and flame into the heavens seemed to draw the attention of none but himself. Here the land now broke itself apart for him, separated itself into its layers, for Isaac, so that he could see each one, from the moment that the first human footprints cut trails through the valley from the north or west, to the laying of the first track, to that final moment, long in the future, after the great flood will have scoured the city to its bones, and the singer confined to his ark will have nothing to save him but the honey of his own song. He could feel it, all this creation, yielding to his terrible desire, the land gathering itself to jump up and meet him, the voices of all the dead getting ready to howl. 

A siren whipped past his head, screaming in the direction of the burning bull, and the world of Isaac’s present restored itself. The two rivers still lay before him, Kaw and Missouri, penned behind their levies and into fixed channels by the army engineers, untroubled by their floods.

It was four miles on foot back home, a stretch he’d run or walked countless times, and that he loved dearly, back down the big Summit hill, then to the right past the enormous lightbulbs on the Royal Liquor sign, past the taco shops and the brewery, up the old flats along what would have been Turkey Creek, before they blasted a tunnel through the bluffs and forced it early into the Kaw, drying out the old valley to make way for the railroad tracks and workshops and towering silos of grain. Both these things could be, he supposed, the two of those stories side by side in his mind, the stream there and not there, the tracks and silos both glorious and non-existent.

He was tired after walking the mile-long hill to get back up from the Turkey Creek flats. It was getting late, and he’d expected to hear the TV. But the house was still and quiet. Immediately Isaac began to pout that Winnie wasn’t here to greet him, but he caught it and kept his mood from cracking. He was spoiled, he told himself, and lucky. He walked through the dark front hall, past the dark living room with its dark TV, and into the kitchen, where the light above the stove was the only one burning. 

“Hello?” he called, beginning to worry. Winnie was loud, and the house was too quiet. He flopped his keys noisily on the tiles of the counter. “Hello?” he called again, this time with a touch of deep-voiced anxiety.

“Out here!” She was on the back porch. He walked around the corner, through the dining room and towards the door. It was good to see her. He stayed there a moment, gazing at her through the glass-paneled door, a cheerful sight. She had opened a bottle of Veuve and was drinking it solo in the February cold, under the amber glow of the heat lamps. Here they were, in this place, right now.

Winnie turned to him, impatiently, excitedly, like she had been waiting all her life to see him and to tell him: “Isaac, look—it’s the strangest thing!” The magnolia was in full blossom.