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Page 7.

Jon Harney, alias Charles Egeny, was mowing the lawn one day around the Beechcroft Building, one of innumerable Yale University structures in New Haven done in ostentatious and timeless somewhat-Gothic.

The seasons in New England are extreme and final statements. It was spring—and talk about April showers. Gone were Chaucer’s deep snows of February, and the agues of March. Like water dripping in a pot through tendered tea leaves, a gentle April rain sieved itself through the newly bright-green trees. The brown earth was soaked, and the first tender grass sprouted in thin, tall clumps over the tea-like deposits. The very air seemed to glow bright green, and was fragrant with emerging blossoms.

Far down along the concrete expanse of Whitney Avenue, high up over the banked tree crowns newly dense with fresh leaves, reared the damp red shafts of East Rock and Indian Head. The twin mountains were a tribute to the city, a statement of its small borders, an ultimate point beyond which the soul toiled to comprehend the goodness of the Divine giving anew each year this present of Spring.

Jon Harney stopped, turned off his evilly smoking lawnmower, and took off his rain-damp baseball cap to wipe off sweat.

He was twenty-three, and employed by the university in this manual capacity. Owing to his fledgling degree in English from a smaller, less well-known university, someone in the Yale employment offices had promised him this job as a starter, pending some more important and interesting assignment. Could he put up with the drudgery of mowing lawns for that long? Sure, he told them, what the hell—it was better than no job at all. Besides, having just finished his degree, he relished the thought of some relaxed summer time, innocently spent mowing lawns. He was tired from years of school, and not sure he wanted to continue in English. Through much of his undergraduate time he had faked it, reading few of the assigned materials, and writing (like running) for his life. He knew there were holes in his understanding of the standard Great Authors. He had preferred to read less well-known but more modern poets and writers of his choice—the cool jazz of writing, blue beats unknown in the bleach of academe; in whose tone and modality he wrote his own verse (free in more senses than one) that could connect with no safe, mediocre publisher. He hoped to have time, living in his rented room in Hamden not far from Lake Whitney—where, a hundred years earlier, the famed inventor had toiled in a small red factory that still stood there on an island amid moss-colored, marbled waters—to read all the authors and works he should have read for courses.

Meanwhile, he wrote poetry under the nom de plume of Charles Egeny. He’d published a few scattered items. Fame, however, was not yet at hand, and should it come, he would relegate it to the mysterious Charles Egeny, since he felt he should never succumb to some emboldening and inflated public image of himself. He preferred the freshness and early morning innocence of being forever an outsider; every day was thus a fresh beginning full of idealism and dreams. Confident in the eventual success of Charles Egeny, Jon Harney wiped his forehead and continued to mow Yale lawns with his blue-smoking lawn mower in the tinged and tea-dripping green half-light of a spring day in New Haven.

In the early mornings, a truck took the members of the lawn-mowing team around to their various work spots. Thus left to himself, Jon Harney took a craftsmanlike, artisan pride in conquering the upstart legions of newly sprouting grass. He had worked his way up a slope around the side of a building fronting on St. Ronan Street, and was just pausing to wipe sweat from under his cap.

Then and there, he saw Merile Doherty for the first time. Her footsteps, in half-heels, sounded muffled on the drenched and green-covered sidewalk above. Clad in a white dress that reached from her neck down to mid-thigh, she walked airily, innocently, in an elegant swish of slender limbs. She was blonde, and had that fresh, athletic, long face, blue eyes, and pink cheekbones of which advertisements are made. Her skin had a smooth, creamy tan like a flan pudding. She didn’t notice him, and perhaps was indeed not conscious of being watched. For this reason, her walk and her facial expression were plain and unassuming, but to Jon Harney she was a goddess, and he frantically resumed his mowing.

Later, he went inside for a soda. Bending down in the wood-paneled darkness of the austere break room, to remove a cola he had just bought, he was startled by the whiteness of her dress as she came in.

“Oh, hi,” she said. It was the obligatory greeting between people working for a long time in the same office building, who never get to know each other but eventually learn the contents of one another’s clothes closets just from the daily variation among similar themes.

He backed away from the machine, removing the pop top from his cola can. She sidled past and inserted her quarter. He felt awkward, sweaty, and caught a whiff of some subtle perfume, some air of freshness about her.

Her coin slid easily down the innards of the machine, but her pressing of various buttons with a glossy fingernail produced no result. At last, seeing her blush of frustration, he excused himself. “Allow me…” Groaning with effort, he bent down on his knees, inserted a grubby hand into the machine’s cool guts, and fished about until he felt a ledge high up in its intestines. On that ledge, his stretching fingers just barely touched the convex, crimped bottom edge of an aluminum can. “I have it now…” he gasped, and with a final effort (his shoulder being in the way) he freed the can and brought it down, balancing in a juggling act on his fingertips.

She smiled at his effort.

He rose, leaving the can for her. It lay in the slot where it should have fallen in the first place. They faced each other briefly before the machine. She was nestled up against the machine, her slender body hunched in a motion of preparing to retrieve the can, and her eyes darted full of pent-in sentiments from a glance at his dirty hands to the dully gleaming can and back to the muscles of his legs.

He stood transfixed as she bent close past him to seize the can. He inhaled deeply the scent of her fresh skin, the disintegration of perfume atoms in the warmth between her roused breasts. He stood back, soaking in the gentle but enveloping ambience of her faint smile. His breath—rattling with heartbeats—caught in his throat.

Around her eyes were the earliest of faint wrinkles, as if caused by the intense and mysterious and subtle melting effect of her smile. She must be about thirty, seven years past his own age.

Rising, she appeared startled by his attentive stare. She seemed utterly surprised, and then a bit cool and disenchanted by his hard, hungry look.

“Excuse me,” he stammered, and the smile blossomed out again, crinkling the corners of her mouth and illuminating her skin pores.

They shared that dull, tea-green soaking glow in the gloomy basement room. Perhaps there is some springtime hormone that sets cells ablaze with new hope and yearning.

Their eyes met, engaged, and would not let loose. There arced between them a lightning of emotion. As she once said later, she could have turned away, and as he agreed, that would have been the end of it. He noticed the veiled, dull-faceted diamond, the glimmering platinum ring on her finger in that tea-soaked light—a green ambience flooding the dark wood-paneled basement room.

He yearned to reach out a fingertip and touch her cheek. She looked so open and glowing and helpless in that moment. But his fingers were grimy from the work outside and he hid his hands behind his back because of the proximity of her white dress. She later admitted she would have gone back to her office, where she had a heavy typing assignment. Instead, she sat in one of the billowy, plush old dark brown easy chairs in the lounge.

Jon Harney—fresh from combat with presumptuous spring grass fed by soaking rains—relinquished his battle and sank into the airy comfort of a parallel chair. She crossed her naked legs, pointing the toe of a white shoe at him. From the first, they laughed easily together. Every time their eyes met, there was that flash of empathy. She uncrossed her legs and modestly pointed her chiseled knees away.

“Do you mind the rain?” Her voice was plainly tremulous. Her lips quivered as she spoke. Her voice was high and exposed and uncertain, girlish and falsely devoid of strategy.

He knotted his hands around the cola can between his knees. Literary innuendo emerged. “Actually I’m enjoying myself. Every blade of grass is a challenge.” He detected a quaver in his own voice. Had he been confronted with a canyon to jump across, his stomach pit could not have been more tense. He sat on the edge of the chair, ready to spring.

He thought, What am I getting into?

“I might enjoy escaping from the office too,” she admitted, and in so saying conveyed a sense about her whole life. He sensed this and clutched the can more tightly, smiling nervously.

Her fingers fluttered, trembling, up around the watch she wore on a chain around her neck. “Almost time to go back,” she said.

He looked at the floor, feeling a leaden weight of green light upon his back, and said sharply, “Stay a moment longer.”

She feigned incredulousness. “Whatever for?”

He stared at the floor, noting the pale outline of her legs in the periphery of his vision. “Because I enjoy talking to you.” Scared of what he’d said, he stared at her, and she sat back (imprisoned but willingly) by his look. She said: “You don’t want to hurt me.” It was a wish and a question.

“No, of course not,” he said, swigging at the cola. “I saw you on the sidewalk before.”

“I saw you too,” she said.

There it is—door open.

He shook his head. “I didn’t think so. You shocked me.”

Her frown relaxed from worry into an intrigued smile. “Oh? How is that?” Still, her knees pointed away. She hadn’t taken a single sip from her cola.

His truthful words, effortfully disgorged, ballooned leadenly around his head in the enclosed atmosphere. “I find you very beautiful.”

At this her smile melted away into gratification, while her voice took on a mournful weight. “I don’t look thirty and married, do I?”

“You sure don’t,” he told her. He was glad that her knees remained pointed away. “I would like to meet you.” He had never spoken this way to a married woman before.

“A date?” she asked incredulously but not unkindly.

“If you want to call it that.” He felt a panic rise inside. What about her husband? What about this job? What about…

She stretched her wrist so the cola can tilted in the direction of her gaze. She stared into the cola can. He watched her nervously as she deliberated. He almost wished he could run from the room.

She wriggled the cola can in her hand and regarded him thoughtfully. “You have nothing to do with Yale, do you? I mean, aside from your summer job or whatever?”

He shook his head.

She looked again at her cola can. “My husband is on the faculty. He’s an assistant professor of archeology. We aren’t doing too well. You aren’t married, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Wouldn’t help much to cry on your shoulder.”

He started out of his chair, approached hers, and put his hand on her wrist, which rested on the armrest. “I’m afraid I only know about marriage in theory. I can’t do much to help you.” He’d only had one long-term girlfriend during his college years, along with a string of flirtations and a confetti storm of gratifications with young women.

She gave him an intense look, quickened by impulse. “You don’t just mow lawns, do you?” she said, alluding to his humble occupation.

He told her his secret, “Under the name of Charles Egeny, supposedly a Russian émigré, I write poetry. Fits the void left by Nabokov.”

She put down her cola and put her hand on his. “You’ll make it someday.”

He talked jive, “I read the Beats and the Audens. I compose word-o-fone like Coltrane or Stan Jets play sax.”

Does she get who I am? What Charles Egeny does?

“You play with language,” she said appreciatively. She was thirty but looked younger. The long, elegant cast of her cultured face betrayed a lifetime’s pursuit of social directions, including tennis courts, cocktail parties, and lawn club debuts—in short, of the wealthy.

“I type my manuscripts at night,” he confessed while moving intimately to kneel by her chair, lithe as a panther.

She reached out and absently stroked his hair. “You’ll have your success,” she said encouragingly. He saw, in her look, a habit of being (in his disdainful view) associated with intelligent and aggressive but weak men. He held back, proudly, when he saw men like her husband. They were shadows of conformity; weak in their all-consuming need for recognition. Such powerful arrogant and sweaty men filled her world. He radiated his refusal to be like them—now or ever.

“I don’t need success!” he protested, rising. “I don’t care about recognition. All I want to do is write poetry. I want to mow lawns, conquer grass—and find someone like you to adore.”

Upon this confession she regarded him with confusion and admiration.

I would write poetry about you in adoration.

They bent their faces close together, and their lips brushed. It was the electric connection they both needed at that moment. He pulled away breathlessly from her moist, cool, soft lips. The directioning of her chiseled knees was in disarray. One pointed to him, the other to the slatted narrow basement window. He noted the cool pliancy of a pale inner thigh, momentarily exposed.

She reached out to touch his hair.

She rushed from that undersea cavern.

He wiped his hands on a paper towel, and slowly got ready to return to his blue smoking mower in the soaking green light outside.