Joan Miro’s The Poetess

Stephanie Yue Duhem (Steff) was a poet of the highest ability but treated her circle of friends like she were an alpine sheepdog: mean, vigilant, superior. August wrote to me frantically a few weeks ago that he couldn’t take it anymore. His text read, “She’s a monster. I’ve got to light out for the territory.”

“Har har, Huck Finn,” I texted back

He called me up and we talked through the situation.

“Just come up here,” I said. “I’ll put you up in my drinking shed. Not thrilled by the idea, but this strikes me as something of an emergency.”

“No, man. I can’t. She’s got eyes on the roads, all up and down I-35.”

“And the airport is out of the question still, yes?”

I imagined August, trembling in his apartment, surrounded by paintings Steff had forced him to buy and potted plants she had given him over the years, which had become impositions, the care they required, the treatment for mites and scale costing several hundred dollars per annum. She dressed August in wool trousers in spite of the heat, saying, You need to look smart if you’re to be a member of this set, the Steff set.

“Can you?” I asked him. “Find an excuse to go to Chicago?”

“Maybe. But she’ll insist I stay at the Drake Hotel, where she has people.”

“Good god.”

“I know!”

“Sorry about the Huck Finn jibe. You’ve really got to get the fuck out of there. I can try to intercept you at the airport direct.” 

“No, she’ll be expecting something like that. I’ve got to check in at the Drake Hotel. Any ideas?” 

I lit a cigarette. “I’m thinking,” I said. “I’ve just lit a cigarette. I don’t know if you can hear.” 

“No, I can’t.” 

“Well that’s what this situation demands. And three fingers of the MacLeod’s Twelve.” 

“You can’t run to the Fifteen? I’m in serious trouble here!” 

August went up to Chicago, with Steff’s blessing, along with written instructions to check in at the Drake Hotel, as well as a schedule of his meals and what they were to be comprised of, down to the grain of rice. He was to send her photographs of his stool while he was away. Steff was fiber conscious. I remember when we met in Baltimore she asked about my intake of fiber, to which I answered that I ate six pounds of saag a week. 

She whistled and said, “I’m impressed. No need then for an Artemis in your life? We have a book club!” 

“No, thanks,” I said. “Thanks for the offer.” I went to get another drink and, in that time, she stole my jacket to set it on fire in the alleyway. When I complained, she appeared surprised. She claimed she set the fire so a passing transient had warmth for the night, but that if this offended me I could come down to her atelier in Austin, Texas and she would gladly make me a new jacket with added pockets. 

“For victuals, pocket cheese.” 

“No, that’s okay.” 

“Protein is good for you. You’ll need lots of protein if you are to be part of my set.” 

“I don’t want to be part of your set.” 

Steff chucked a beer can at my head, wounding me badly. Then she gathered up all her new friends which she had made from old friends—Nora and Jen and Scott and Timothy—and I never heard from any of them ever again, except Tim who told me at his father’s wake what a fool I had been to reject Steff’s offer of admission into her set. I asked if I could buy him a drink.

“No, I’m on a tight schedule. I have to be back in Austin tonight for Steff’s book club. If you miss a meeting, you receive a demerit” 

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?” 

“A demerit! I already have two against me. One more and I don’t get to go to Dollywood!” 

In fact, Tim didn’t even stay for the entire wake and he missed the funeral. So it was just me and his lumbering Irish Catholic family, passing around a bottle of Teeling’s. His mother asked me about Steff and who was Steff and why was her eldest son in her unshakeable thrall and I couldn’t explain. 

“I guess she is just a real cool person. She is a poet of the first water. She can pull off bangs.” 

“Ah, the language arts,” said Tim’s mother dreamily. She, too, went into the trance and seemed suddenly very dissatisfied with the lumbering nature of her family. She became aghast that we were drinking Teeling’s and demanded I furnish her with a bottle of Rioja. What’s more, I was to deliver the eulogy, and she told me for god’s sake to enunciate. Steff had said much the same to me in Baltimore, that I tongue each note.

By the time the men dressed as paramedics got to August it would have been too late, technically, had he actually attempted to take his own life with pills and whiskey. They were not adept at speed and first went to the wrong floor of the hotel. But the ploy was successful. They’d gotten August away from Steff’s people at the Drake Hotel. They were actors I had hired on the cheap from Second City, and we’d gotten the ambulance at a government surplus auction. August had cashed in his 401K to finance his escape. 

He was driven to Saint Louis, where he stayed a week in a safe house, and a good thing too because when Steff made it up to Chicago to assess what had happened and realized the deception she knew immediately that I was involved and called on me at my home in Lincoln, Nebraska. The first thing she did was rearrange my liquor cabinet, then she rifled through my closet, pulling out two suits she said I should donate to Goodwill. She demanded that I cook her dinner. 

“A korma would do nicely. And a bottle of Rioja.” 

“I really don’t have time for this. You should visit the National Roller Skating Museum since you’re in town. It’s just down the road.” 

Steff took a book from the shelf and sat down at the kitchen table. She repeated, “A korma would do nicely. And a bottle of Rioja.” 

I said a number of things to her about the delusional and terrifying and ungodly manner in which she conducted herself and treated her friends, but she was impenetrable and must have read a third of Lowry’s Under the Volcano until I relented finally and started cooking dinner. Steff said, “I will find August. Why have you deprived August of me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Put that Korma in a tupperware when you’re finished. I don’t have time for your prevarications. My smart, hip set and I are due at Dollywood this weekend.” 

They went every few months. Steff loved Dolly Parton. 

So she left. The house across the street was vacant, and within a day a young couple had moved in. A tall, striking blonde fellow and a fashionable middle-eastern woman, the kind of hip, smart, fashionable goddamn people that were part of Steff’s circle of friends. I had been put under surveillance. 

I used the telephone at Jake’s Bar, where I am a regular, to call the safe house in St. Louis and speak to August. He had reservations about what I was telling him, understandably so. “It’s our only play, I’m afraid. Now listen carefully.” 

I told him how to do it and the next day he showed up in Lincoln. As promised, I installed August in my drinking shed. I’d put a spare cot in there with some good bedding. “Nice to have a place to myself. That lady who ran the safe house tried to sleep with me.” 

“Well, that’s fantastic!” 

“She said we don’t have much time on this planet and that I was a good man and not many who used the safe house offered to cook and clean up and make tea and recommend podcasts and she could imagine a version of herself happy and satisfied if she invited me to share her bed.” 

I poured us two scotches and clapped August on the back. “Well? And?” 

“I couldn’t do it. I have a girlfriend that Steff set me up with. She isn’t a very nice lady, and makes cutting remarks after my DJ sets, and her and Steff whisper about me all the time. She is always telling on me. Still, I could not humiliate her.” 

“August, how the hell did you fall in with Steff?” 

“She said she liked one of my poems. And then another. And then another. It was an addiction.” 

“Here’s to addiction,” I said. I finished my drink and poured another. “You’re a broken man, but I can help. Don’t waste this.” 

It was a fine week or so I spent with August. He had truly wonderful taste in podcasts and such, books, films, television. He turned me onto the wonders of analogue techno. I had misjudged the form. I taught him how to cook a decent korma. We visited the National Roller Skating Museum. I took him to Jake’s Bar. Lincoln is a quiet little city, but a good place to restore oneself. I asked August if I could send his girlfriend a get fucked, so long text and he asked if I wouldn’t mind softening the language and tone because, who knew, perhaps she had been a decent person before meeting Steff. I told her August would have nothing further to do with her, and then I invited the safe house lady to dinner from St. Louis. August had cooked a wonderful korma, and the two of them made love in the guest bedroom. By the time I got back from the bar they were having a sort of retrospective on the films of Peter Watkins. She left the next day, though they parted on such good terms. 

Every night he went out to the drinking shed to have a nightcap and fall asleep. I had dissolved barbiturates into the bottle of Macleod’s 12 on the very night the neighbors across the street cleared out, an unmistakable sign that Steff had arrived back in town. Sure, there was an eerie feeling predominant that day as well, and I thought I saw a figure moving in the alley behind the shed, drifting in an impossible gait-less sort of way, the way the ghost of, say, Fred Perry might glide across the lawn at Wimbledon. 

“Tonight is the night,” I said to August, and he looked up at me. Very briefly, I could see how he was as a child, full of hope, such a buoyant manner, to hit a ball with a stick, to talk confidently with girls, to play the bass guitar. Suddenly a foul dream had seized him, the idea of being a reputable artist, of moving within smart, hip circles, with the Poetess firmly at its center, a woman like her had once razed Camelot as easily as lifting a veil. Perhaps it was her. I, too, have been called many names over the years. 

“Thank you, thank you for this week,” August said to me. 

He went out as usual to the drinking shed that night and drank dutifully. For a long time I have believed sincerely that the occupant of the drinking shed can convert scotch to psychic goodwill energy and transmit this hundreds, thousands of miles, to undiscovered countries even. I felt the wind rise and the trees flutter and I imagined that tomorrow the world would be at peace. Steff set fire to the drinking shed, though August had already gone. 

In the morning Steff sat by my side, refusing coffee, she would only drink espresso, and wept at her own piteous nature.