Oliver seemed to be doing okay. Distracted more than anything else. Jumpy sometimes. What was more bothersome was how eager he was to use his newfound grief to reach into Jacob’s. “Now that my father’s gone,” he’d said once, as they showered together one Sunday, “I feel like I have the chance to really sum up what we meant to each other. You must know what I’m talking about.” Or the night after, going through the magazines for recycling, Oliver had fondled a bit of the rough twine and said, “The funniest things remind me of him. What is it for you?”
Jacob supposed he could have answered truthfully: girls in red coats, Spanish-language television, hot tubs, almond croissants, that stupid Plain White T’s song, the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art (which he hadn’t been back to). Jacob resented the implication that these things were equivalent to Oliver’s twine. Fine if he legitimately missed his father, but it wasn’t the same. Like when Oliver recalled little racist things his dad had said when he was a boy. “Well, he wasn’t perfect! Makes it worse, in a way, remembering all his flaws. You know what I mean.”
Jacob thought of Irene’s compulsion for girls who treated her like shit. How she’d loved getting wasted on champagne and spending Midas amounts of money on vintage clothes and how she’d been notoriously bad about paying people back what they’d loaned her. She’d been fierce about her secrets, as if believing that without them they’d have long ago gotten bored with her. None of them even knew where she’d come from or how she’d ended up in Ithaca. It felt like a lack of faith in them, when you came right down to it. But everyone had dumb flaws when they were twenty-six years old. Oliver’s father had had fifty years to climb beyond those early shortcomings. He’d had decades to regret his bad choices and outgrow his habits.
And what would Jacob regret if his bus were to sail over a guardrail the next day? He didn’t think more time watching Oliver “processing” would be on the list. No, what he’d regret was not being there when Ella’s thirty days were up. Oliver he couldn’t help, but Ella — well, he had begun to formulate a plan. If she couldn’t get to her summer session, then he could bring it to her. After work he holed himself up in Oliver’s study, ostensibly working on some new poems but actually quietly climbing up and down the swanky bookshelf ladder, digging through his green Time-Life poetry volumes. Working carefully, using a ruler and half a scissor, he sliced out one poem after another.
Once, he’d gone up looking for Elizabeth Bishop. “The Fish” was one of those poems he’d remembered reading, around Ella’s age, that had just turned his blood cold. While his gills were breathing in / the terrible oxygen. Who knew you could rhyme things like that? Slice went that page, and he watched it flutter down to the floor. Then he’d spotted Blake just after it. (Oliver’s books were alphabetized within an inch of their lives.) He guessed that Ella had probably read “The Tyger” in high school, in some tissue-paper-paged Norton Anthology, but had she ever read “London”? Probably not. Had she ever been to London? he wondered. Jacob had done Europe in high school on a class trip: the Jewish quarters of Rome, Paris, London, Madrid — with bonus stops in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. He’d always meant to go back without chaperones, but what poet could afford the jet fuel these days to cross the ocean? Ooh! Wordsworth. “Daffodils” was good stuff, but was it the right thing? It was tricky.
On the day Ella finally came up to Ward III, Jacob was all set. Barely acknowledging her presence in the group sessions or the art room, each morning he would find his way over to the closet library and slip one poem into the middle of whichever book he’d seen her reading the day before. Then in the afternoon, when she went over to reclaim her book, he’d watch from the windowsill as she found the poem tucked inside. Anne Sexton one day, Keats the next. He tried to avoid any chronology. “Is there a W theme?” she wrote on the inside cover of one book after the first few days, when she’d gotten William Carlos Williams, Wislawa Szymborska, and Wallace Stevens. The next day she got Wang Wei and a note that said, “Theme = Poems That Do Not Suck.”
At first he’d been wary of writing on the poems, because anyone who found one lying around her room was bound to get the wrong idea. But then he realized it wasn’t like anyone would recognize his handwriting, except maybe Oliver, and what was he going to do about it? Anyone else would just assume it was a by-product of some interpatient romance (which were just about always going on). Teenagers were teenagers, especially crazy ones.
After one week, Ella wrote a poem back. He found it folded up under the edge of the chessboard during Dr. Feingold’s group. While the patients went around discussing their relationships with their parents in advance of that afternoon’s visitation, Jacob quietly unfolded the neatly hand-printed page. “The Whole Ball of Wax” described a ten-year-old girl who eats every crayon in a box of sixty-four, vividly imagining the flavors of Brick Red (“too salty by a mile”) and Caribbean Green (“like pea soup turned up the dial”) and “Outer Space” which “vanishes between my teeth / refusing to exist in me.” After the final crayon, a Yellow Orange, sets her “intestines roiling” (not bad, for a rhyme with orange), the girl eases her own belly button open with two fingers and extracts the titular ball of wax—“a lump / indigestible and indefensible. / A Crayola cortex / slick with slime / my parents shriek / and jam it down the disposal / with two ounces of vegetable oil. // They hit the switch. / Colors fly into the air / settling like snowflakes / in their shirt collars / and hair.”
He could feel her eyes on him, searching for approval. Without supplying any visual cues, he took his pen and began circling weaker words, underlining a few tremendously good ones. There needed to be another syllable here, one removed there. Rhymes weren’t really in vogue anymore, but they were tolerable until you turned into Dr. Seuss. He noted this in the margin and slipped the poem back beside the chessboard and listened to the group’s discussion again.
“My parents are both so in love with themselves, it’s disgusting,” Anne Marie was saying. “When they look at me, they’re just seeing themselves, and if I’m not doing a good job with their half, they get pissed.”
“Mine are divorced,” John agreed. “So they each just see the shit they can’t stand about the other.”
Dr. Feingold nodded. “There is a mirror effect there, yes, but it goes two ways. Parents see their own faults in us. We see our own fears in them.”
Jacob didn’t think this was particularly true, as a rule, at least not in his case.
A prim girl, Karen, announced, “My parents think the president was born in Kenya.”
Dr. Feingold was trying hard not to smile as she continued.
“Last Christmas my dad bought everyone in the family guns. Mine and my brother’s they’re going to keep in the attic until we’re older, but he said he can’t wait until because by then the government will have outlawed the Second Commandment.”