Rereading The Golden Bowl after Thirty Years, and: Ending the Semester in Am Lit, and: The Morning after Our Second Ecopoetry Class

Rereading The Golden Bowl after Thirty Years

I’d rather carry my grandmother’s iridescent    Tiffany vase across six rutted parking lots while rollingmy briefcase and gripping my lunch than teach this    book. When it comes to the Master, I want to keep himto myself, thread my own way through    polished drawing rooms and twisting garden paths. I’drather feel that if I’m hanging fire, speechless    in the middle of class, musing over Maggie’s ruminationsto Fanny—all those suspicions about her    husband and her father’s wife—I can pause as long asI’d like. When Grandma’s vase crashed    from the table, I was never sure whether the neighbor’selbow had jostled it or my German shepherd’s    tail. Two months after I’d rescued it from my cousin’sgarage sale, potter friends explained    what the etched L.C.T. on the bottom meant, and then,the next day, it shattered. We live our    lives through objects, I’ve heard an artist say. I gluedthe fragments, a crude joining, but    the best I could do. All the flaws, visible and invisible,within marriages. Friends of a woman I love    keep urging her to dump her imperious husband of fortyyears. But once, when I dropped her off after    a Woody Allen movie, before I pulled out of the drive,I saw her through the front door’s oval glass    with that potbellied man, an embrace so tender, so rapt,I wanted to stay right there in my car in the dark,    absorb some of that closeness. How do we ever knowwhat goes on between any couple? Why    people stay, or wriggle free, or bolt? Maggie’s husband seems every inch a prince, though we begin    to wonder. Then we question our wondering. I’m finallyhaving Grandma’s vase restored, by a woman    who understands glass. She says when she’s finishedwe’ll barely see the gaps missing their    minuscule shards. Favrile—its color shifts as you turn itin the light, violet to green to blue and    rose. A technique Tiffany patented in 1884, ten yearsbefore the novel. It’s not that    Maggie really lied, but that her subtle phrasings mendedher marriage—in the end, everyone was    “magnificent.” For Henry James, broadcasting nakedtruths would rip the webbing that holds    the world in place. I’ll never teach The Golden Bowl—even grad students might insist on finding    a single culprit, or demand an outburst, somewherein those labyrinthine paragraphs    of uncorseted, unchaperoned emotion. Despite myawkward gluing job, the fluted edges    of that vase lifted for all those years like petals, satinyas the hems fluttering around    Grandma’s nylon-stockinged legs that tottered underthe weight of far too many whiskeys    while she held my hand, stroked my hair, and called meprecious. Melting together various colors    of glass causes the opalescence of favrile. There’s anexercise I like to give in writing    workshops: Imagine you’re holding an heirloom vasein your hands. Turn it around, feel its shape,    its smooth or grainy, pebbly texture. Now look downinto it, where, at the bottom you’ll see    a wisp of thread or a hairline crack. Which is it? Whathappens next? Maybe in time    one student will find a tattered copy of the book, willopen it with a careful hand, so    the pages won’t crumble, the spine doesn’t break.

Ending the Semester in Am Lit

The guy who served as a lighthouse    when discussions had grown so foggy I couldn’t        steer us back on course, the one who never misseda class, who camped in my office every    Wednesday afternoon obsessed with Bartleby and        Ahab, who made all As and wrote a dynamite final,still hasn’t turned in his long essay. Is he    bleeding on a gurney in the ER, or moaning        by the freeway in a pile of smashed glass and mangledchrome...