Tin found it touching that Jorrie was so excited by these poems. He hadn’t seen much of her that season. She had, to put it mildly, a hyperactive social life, due no doubt to the alacrity with which she flung herself into bed, whereas he’d been living in a two-roomer over a barbershop on Dundas and having a quiet sexual identity crisis while toiling away at his doctoral thesis.
This was a solid enough but not honestly very inspired re-examination of the cleaner and more presentable epigrams of Martial, though what really drew him to Martial was his no-nonsense attitude towards sex, so much less complicated than that of Tin’s own era. For Martial, there was no romantic *-footing, no idealization of Woman as having a higher spiritual calling: Martial would have laughed his head off at that! And no taboos: everyone did everything with everyone: slaves, boys, girls, whores, gay, straight, pornography, scatology, wives, young, middle-aged, old, front, back, mouth, hand, cock, beautiful, ugly, and downright repulsive. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. Chastity was not the primary virtue, for men or for women either, but certain forms of friendship and generosity and tenderness did get top marks. His contemporaries labelled Martial as unusually sunny and good-natured, nor did his scathing, acerbic wit do anything to diminish that perception. His criticisms were not directed at individuals, he claimed, but at types; though Tin had his doubts about that.
But a thesis was not about why you appreciated your subject: in academia, he’d come to understand, that kind of thing should be reserved for social chit-chat. You had to cook up something more focused. Tin’s central hypothesis revolved around the difficulties of satire in an age lacking in shared moral standards, which Martial’s age did, in spades: he’d moved to Rome when Nero was in power. Indeed, was Martial a true satirist or just a smutty gossip, as some commentators had claimed? Tin intended to defend his hero against this charge: there was so much more to Martial, he would say, than cocks and boy-fucking and sluts and fart jokes! Though he would not of course use those crude vernacular terms in his thesis. And he’d do his own translations, updating the diction to fit Martial’s well-crafted slang, though the filthiest of the epigrams were prudently to be avoided: their time had not yet come.
“You imitate youth, Laetinus, by dyeing your hair. Presto! Yesterday a swan, you’re now a raven. But you can’t fool everyone: Proserpina spots your grey hair. And she’ll yank your stupid disguise right off your head!” This was the tone he sought in his translations – contemporary, punchy, not stilted. He used to spend a week over one or two lines. But he doesn’t do that any more, because who cares?
He’d received a grant for his doctoral studies, though it wasn’t large. Jorrie told him Classics was surely going to disappear very soon, and then how would he earn his living? He should have gone into Design, because he would have made a killing. But, said Tin, a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.
“Money talks,” said Jorrie, who despite her bohemian leanings wanted to have lots of it. She had no intention of toiling away in some tedious, soul-grinding factotum job, overworked and underpaid and a prey to oafs and thugs, the way their mother had. Her nascent vision involved flashy cars and vacations in the Caribbean and a closetful of figure-hugging fabrics. She hadn’t articulated that vision yet, not out loud, but Tin could see it coming.
“Yes,” said Tin. “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.” Martial could have said that. Possibly Martial did say it. He would have to check. Aureo hamo piscari. To fish with a golden hook.
The barbers on the ground floor of Tin’s building were three elderly misanthropic Italian brothers who did not know what the world was coming to except that it was bad. The shop had a rack of girlie magazines featuring police stories and pictures of hookers with enormous bosoms, which was what men were supposed to like. These magazines made Tin feel queasy – the spectre of Mother Maeve hovered rakishly above anything to do with black brassieres – but he got his hair cut there anyway as a goodwill gesture and leafed through the magazines while he waited. It didn’t do to be too openly gay then, and anyway he was still deciding; and the Italian barbers were his landlords and needed to be buttered up.
He’d had to make it clear to them, however, that Jorrie was his twin sister, not a girlfriend of loose character. Despite their stash of lurid magazines, which they probably viewed as professional equipment, they were puritanical about any unsanctioned goings-on in their rental accommodations. They thought Tin was a fine, upstanding scholarly youth, called him The Professor, and kept asking him when he was going to get married. “I’m too poor,” Tin would say. Or “I’m waiting for the right girl.” Sage nods from the barbershop trio: both excuses were acceptable to them.
So when Jorrie would arrive on her infrequent visits, the Italian barbers would wave to her through the window and smile in their triste way. How nice that The Professor had such an exemplary sister. It was what a family should be like.
When the Dark Lady issue of The Dirt came out, Jorrie could hardly wait to share her Musehood with Tin. She’d galloped up the stairs, waving her hot-off-the-mimeo Dirt, and plumped herself down in his wicker basket chair.
“Look at this!” she’d said, thrusting the stapled pages at him while sweeping back her long dark hair with one hand. She had a swatch of red-and-ochre block-printed cloth wound around her trim waist, and a necklace of – What were those? Cow’s teeth? – dangling over her scoop-necked peasant blouse. Her eyes were shining, her bangles were jangling. “Seven poems! About me!”
She was so guileless. She was so avid. If Tin hadn’t been her brother, if he’d been straight, he would have run a mile; but away from her or towards her? She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.
“You can’t be in a poem,” he’d said, crossly, because this infatuation of hers was worrying him. She was bound to cut herself on it: she was a clumsy girl, not skilful with edged tools. “Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.”
“Nitpicker. You know what I mean.”
Tin sighed, and at her insistence he sat down at his rickety third-hand pedestal table with the mug of tea he’d just made for himself and read the poems. “Jorrie,” he said. “These poems are not about you.”
Her face fell. “Yes, they are! They have to be! It’s definitely my …”
“They’re only about part of you.” The lower part, he did not say.
“What?”
He sighed again. “You’re more than this. You’re better than this.” How could he put it? You’re not just a piece of cheap tail? No, too hurtful. “He’s left out your, your … your mind.”
“It’s you who keeps on about mens sana in corpore sano,” she said. “Sane mind in a sound body, both together. I know what you’re thinking: that this is just about the sex. But that’s the point! I represent – I mean, she, the Dark Lady, she represents a healthy, down-to-earth rejection of the false, wispy, sentimental … It’s like D. H. Lawrence, that’s what he says. That’s what Gav loves about me!” And on she went.
“So, in Venus veritas?” said Tin.
“What?”
Oh, Jorrie, he thought. You don’t understand. Men like that get tired of you once they’ve had you. You’re in for a fall. Martial, VII: 76: It’s only pleasure, it isn’t love.
He was right about the fall. It was fast, and it was hard. Jorrie didn’t go into the details – she was too stunned – but what he pieced together at the time was that there was a live-in girlfriend, and she’d walked in on Jorrie and the Earthy Poet while they were disporting themselves on the sacrosanct domestic mattress.
“I shouldn’t have laughed,” said Jorrie. “That was rude. But it was such a farce! And she looked so shocked! It must have seemed really mean to her, me laughing. I just couldn’t help it.”
The girlfriend, whose name was Constance (“How prissy!” Jorrie snorted) and who was the embodiment of that very same wispiness and sentimentality so despised by the Poetaster – this Constance had gone white as a sheet, even whiter than she already was, and had said something about the rent money. Then she’d turned and walked out. Not even stomped: scuttled, like a mouse. Which just went to show how wispy she was. Jorrie herself would have done some hair-pulling and slapping at the very least, she claimed.
She had felt the departure of Constance ought to be a cause for celebration – the forces of vitality and life and the truths of the flesh had triumphed over those of abstractness and stagnation – but that had not been the outcome. No sooner had the Half-Rhymer been barred from the moon-maiden’s chamber than he began caterwauling to get back in: he yowled for his vaporous Truelove like an infant deprived of its nipple.
Jorrie was less than tactful about this excess of whimpering and regret – the words *-whipped and limp prick were thrown about by her with perhaps too much abandon – so her expulsion was inevitable. According to Mr. Poetaster, the imbroglio was suddenly all her fault. She’d tempted him. She’d seduced him. She was the viper in the orchard.
There was something to that, Tin supposed; Jorrie had been the huntress, not the hunted. But still, it takes two to tango. The Minor Minnesinger could have said no.
Short form, Jorrie had told him to shut up about Constance, and they’d had a fight about it, and Jorrie had been flung down onto the sewer grating of life like a used condom. No one had ever treated her like that before! His own heart wrenched with pity, Tin had tried to distract her – a movie, a drink, not that he could afford many of either – but she was not to be placated. There were no hysterics, no visible tears, but moping set in, followed by an ill-concealed, smouldering rage.
Would she step over the edge? Would she confront the poet in public, scream, hit? She was angry enough for that. A cruel joke had been played on her, since her Musehood, once a source of pride and joy, had become a torment: the Dark Lady non-sonnets were now enshrined in Gavin’s first thin collection, Heavy Moonlight, and they sneered at Jorrie from its pages, mockingly, reproachfully.
Worse, these poems accumulated gravitas as Gavin clambered up the ladder of acclaim, collecting the first in what was to be a string of minor but nonetheless career-enhancing prizes. Those early poems had been augmented by others, different in tenor: the lover recognized the mere fleshliness, indeed the grossness and fickleness of the Dark Lady, and returned to the pursuit of his pallidly glowing Truelove. But that ice-eyed paragon had declined to forgive the heartbroken lover, despite his overcrafted and bathos-heavy and subsequently published pleas.
These later poems did not reflect well on Jorrie. She’d had to look up the word trull in Tin’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. It was wounding.
Jorrie went on a retaliatory stud-gathering riff, plucking lovers like daisies from every wayside ditch and parking lot, then casting them carelessly aside. Not that such behaviour ever has any effect on the one who’s spurned you, as Tin knows from his own experience: if it’s gone as far as that, they don’t care how much you debase yourself to get back at them. You could fuck a headless goat and it would make no earthly difference.
But then the wheels of the seasons turned, and tender-fingered Dawn chalked up three hundred and sixty-two pink morning entrances, and then another year’s worth of them, and another; and the moon of desire rose and set and rose again, and so on and so forth; and the Poet of the Sprightly Prick receded into the dim and misty distance. Or so Tin hoped, for Jorrie’s sake.
Though it seems he has not receded. All you have to do is kick the bucket and you’re right back in the memory spotlight, thinks Tin. He hopes the lingering shade of Gavin Putnam will prove a friendly one, supposing it is indeed lingering.