Read Online You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood - Free Book Online Page A

media) to see his life, however satirically imagined, in print. My mother became an avid reader of memoirs and began to send me clippings about books by writers who had also written about their families, more than once with a handwritten note that said, “Oh, what you did to me is nothing compared to this one.”
    Over the years she would refer to the time she first met Marge in that Chinese restaurant. It does no good to say, “Ma, we never went to a Chinese restaurant. It never happened. I made it all up.”
    I have taken pains since to avoid using my parents as characters, a situation that explains my mother’s lack of interest in my subsequent books.
    â€œI don’t know if you want me to be honest or not,” she once began by way of explanation. I knew it didn’t matter what I wanted. “I liked them better when I was in them.”

MR. NAPPY, THE ARTIST
    I n my first semester of college, teaching seemed to me in all ways superior to working for a living. Academics had to grade papers, it was true, but only had to show up for classes twice a week, took long summer vacations, never had to wear a tie, and got paid to lecture a muster of scruffy adolescents who never listened to a word they said. Then I attended a sherry party thrown by the chairman of the English department.
    It was held in his office after the campus appearance of a writer who had been his mentor at Harvard, a formalist poet of staggering critical accomplishment whose public reading made me ponder mortality for the first time. As an admittedly callow 18-year-old from the Long Island suburbs, I had never seriously contemplated my death, but his sonnets about Europe’s monumental past, delivered in a resolute and dilatory baritone, were so dull that they seemed to suck the very oxygen from the auditorium and had me imagining what it might feel like to be buried alive.

    I ended up at the party for the poet because my girlfriend was taking a class with the department chair. In those days faculty didn’t mind students being around when they drank and in fact encouraged us to come along. In some sense we were like children, tolerated and ignored while the grown-ups gossiped, a kind of mirror of their importance. But in retrospect it seems to have been part of an older tradition of the academy: students were not to be treated as consumers but molded, exposed to the subtle lessons that could only be taught outside the classroom. How else were we expected to absorb the opinions, the hierarchy, the faux-British accents, the costumes? No one in my family had ever worn a Harris Tweed sports coat with leather patches on the elbows. To me sherry was a song by the Four Seasons; I didn’t know you could drink it.
    From the office party we went to a French restaurant where I had the first classic soupe à l’oignon of my life. Waiters kept refilling our glasses with red wine and the cigarette smoke was as opaque as the conversation. The major poet sat at the head of a long table, a high priest in a thick wool turtleneck surrounded by acolytes. As they praised him he nodded at their well-meaning na-ïveté, squeezed his eyes and touched his forehead with a weary condescending smile; they would never know what he endured. He was doomed to be the “other” New England poet, he tried to make them understand, the second-rate Frost. “They love my work or hate it.” He sighed and shook his great gray mane. “But not one of
the important critics truly engages it, not one addresses what it means.”
    At the other end of the table, the less important, less populated end, where the light seemed dimmer and the waiters didn’t bother to whisk away the dirty ashtrays, a young instructor had tears streaming down his cheeks. It wasn’t easy to understand him, his speech was garbled with drink, and I had no idea what he was talking about, something called tenure, and that he’d never get it. All I