Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

“What’s your rush, Vivi?” Hillary keeps asking. “Aren’t you like a post-doc wizard of universal knowledge by now?”

I wish I held a remote-control to my life and could fast-forward as though I were watching a video tape.

By then, a grown man might watch from a distance, maybe sitting on the steps of the Met, as I tie my hair, miraculously smooth, in a knot. He might approach me and ask, “What’s your name?” in English or French or possibly in Russian. We could wander the museum and talk about paintings, artists and books, sculpture and pastry, economies and planets and after-lifes.

Peter Breznik isn’t a boy, though. He isn’t a too-grown man, either. He has sharp adult angles and serious blue eyes that you can tell have read volumes and seen remote places; but his hair spikes up at odd angles at the crown of his head, like a boy who has been wrestling over a soccer ball at recess. And the scruff on his cheeks doesn’t seem too robust yet.

“Vivienne Lebrun?” He called my name with a perfect French accent, though he is not French. Apparently, he could tell my name is.

He is a PhD candidate in History, soon to complete his dissertation on something to do with Eastern Europe and World War II, but he publishes poems and holds an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine.

I am not dropping my 9 a.m. class.

I keep feeling that if I were in New York, where my life is, nothing could change or ever go wrong, because I’d be aware of everything and everyone I love, and you can only be surprised to the same degree as your ignorance.

I try to ignore the sting. Sandra-my-New-York-therapist said that to dwell on the origin of pain is to become trapped in a loop—to circle the trauma as if in a semi-truck, until the tire grooves grow so deep, you can’t turn out to drive forward.

I should shut my journal right now. I should have shut it eight paragraphs ago.

And it is a fact, though I cannot cite statistics, that most people who die did not actually plan on it.

But I also lie to myself every time I try to insist in my head that moving away was best for me—the ideal path to independence and freedom from all our mistrust and grief.

A few students called out other possible countries, but Peter Breznik (he says we can call him Peter, but even saying his name in my head renders the roof of my mouth numb) had returned to perusing his anthology. “Yugoslavia,” he said, and conversation halted, as though he had just said “Saturn.” Clearly, no one had expected the easygoing poet-historian to be from a country known mainly, if at all, for being wedged within a hotbed of communist and post-communist countries.

“Wasn’t Yugoslavia part of the Eastern Bloc?” “Is Yugoslavia communist?” “Did you have to escape?” And then Julie asked, “Are you a communist, Peter?” “Oh, wow.” Peter Breznik bit his bottom lip as though he were afraid for us. “You guys are obviously English majors.”

“To answer simply”—Peter Breznik lowered his book—“no. Yugoslavia has never been part of the unraveling Soviet Union, or the Eastern Bloc of communist countries that existed, until recently, behind the Iron Curtain. Yugoslavia is made up of six of its own republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina—one republic”—he held up the forefinger of his free hand—“Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

“A poet is a sort of cartographer, wouldn’t you say?”

He so faintly inhaled before addressing the class. “A cartographer of emotional landscapes. What do you all think about that?”

When he called on me later, he watched me as intently as he had before—Papa always says one listens with one’s eyes, and I thought of that as I looked at Peter Breznik: I pictured my words sinking through the pools of his irises to his brain, and I felt like I was going to drown.

It must guide readers to what feels like a shared experience. He says a poem can bind both strangers and enemies, like capitalists and communists. It can resist and revolutionize. “But how?” he asked. That’s when I risked raising my hand, watched his eyes watching mine as he called on me, and I offered what would be the second answer I regretted in one class period, “Through metaphor.”

I felt my head nod as a girl in the back of the classroom sighed like she’d just been blown a kiss by Pierce Brosnan. Actually, Pierce Brosnan has nothing on Peter Breznik, which is probably why the universe saw to it that both men were christened with the same initials.

Dear Miss Dickinson, Your life was sadder than mine. But hope only flies so far.

“Yes. That stroke of luck has enabled me to earn almost three degrees here. I’ve lived in the U.S. for so long now, I’m not sure anymore where home is.”

Some females might inspire a self-bet on what they will wear dancing, or how long it will take to kiss her; I rouse men to bet themselves on what poem I’ll write about in essays.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t claim anything. I shape memories as poems and trust that a reader will take larger ideas from them.”

“Right now, at this moment, I’m your friend, Vivienne, not your instructor. You’ve had a tough morning, and you say you’re fine, but I can tell you might be unsteady.

Peter’s sweatshirt smells like Dove soap and peppermint. It might be easier to give my parents space if I had regular access to a caring man’s sweatshirt.

But after the cancer, her tenderness abated—not because she didn’t feel it, I think, but because she couldn’t bear its ache. She had to detach in palpable ways to believe the rest of us could survive if we lost her.

it is, many things go as I predict, but some things fly up in my face out of nowhere, like bees (or closet ledges) which can sting you or give you honey. Or I guess they can sting you and give you honey. So: Painful things can be sweet and sweet things can be painful. I kind of hate that metaphor.

He said, “Consider the idea of happiness for a moment. What things convey happiness for you? Make a list in your notebooks.” The first thing I wrote down was strawberries, because they are bright and cool and sweet, and every May until Maman had cancer, we would drive to Connecticut to pick them. After that, I wrote down lime truffles at Michel’s on my family’s street. And then I described our street in June when petunias burst from their flowerpots. And then I saw, as clear as Peter Breznik’s blue eyes, Maman crossing the street to our apartment, carrying warm bread and balsamic. “What about ‘grief’?” Peter asked. Seated at a desk, he was crossing out words on a single sheet of lined paper.

“You’re not easy, are you, Lebrun?” Robert interrupted with a voice that didn’t sound ironic or rhetorical. “Not usually,” I answered honestly. “Well, lucky for us, I’m a strategic genius.” “And I’m an everyday genius.” I didn’t think before voicing the words. “I know,” Robert said. “That’s what makes you so challenging.”

If I Am Not Who I Thought I Was I would not catch the bus to Manhattan. I would un-bake the bread, unbraid my hair. You and I could sail a patched raft to Alaska. If I fell off, a humpback would save me. If I slept till tomorrow, you would lie down beside me. When enough days had passed, you would pull me to shore by my wrist, the night so quiet, we could hear the stars ringing.

A.J. glimpsed the length of it, waited for Peter to pass by, and could not refrain from lowering his thin lips toward my head. “If your poems require that much ink to correct, you should probably settle for an office-assistant job, Poetgirl.”

How could he not have mentioned his sweatshirt?

“It was full of sophisticated little chocolate chip cookies.”

For example, the way a man can so obviously communicate a private message, such as, “I got my sweatshirt and liked your cookies,” to an introvert, while at the same time speaking so nonchalantly and directly with an extrovert like Julie, made me want to privately kiss Peter Breznik speechless. That is, at a later date, perhaps when I have had more practice kissing.

When you eat someone’s bread or read someone’s poem, you walk the roads inside them—their memories, their joys, their sadnesses.

“Resemblance?” I think I was rocking a little. Julie swiped up her pen to point at me. “You’re a baby-doll Sophia Loren, Vivienne! But French!” Sophia Loren was an exuberant comparison. I looked down at my padded A-cups: The baby-doll part was right.

I folded my arms around myself, as I tend to do more and more often now. “I need to be more aware.” Julie stood up with a laugh. “The unawareness is probably part of the appeal.”

“You could have washed it yourself.”

But even if Peter does like apples and cookies, he still must wonder if I’m some sort of gutter rat

I shouldn’t even miss him now. But I do. I miss where he is and whom he is with and everything he can see that I can’t.

And I thought Peter and I had been making connections. In class. In the library. Between the lines of my poems and his notes on them. In the soft blue threads of his sweatshirt.

He dropped his pencil into the green glass vase. “I mentioned that I’m traveling to Ljubljana in May—” “I have to think.” I stood up. “Vivienne.” Peter rose to his feet across from me. “I’m not sure what’s happening inside your head right now—I’d pay money to see a visual rendering—but I don’t think we’ve been on the same page since you left class yesterday, and I wonder—have you read the response I left for you recently? You weren’t there, so I—”

And so I did, Vivienne. I read you. Not as an instructor reads a student, or as a critic reads a poet. I read you as a boy reads the girl whose mere presence and voice spark sudden fire in his chest. Afterward, I knew that I could not return your journal until I had written you.

Again I remember how the soul leaves the body

think “my” in this case is lifted from a kind of metaphor—it is the “my” of “my heart’s desire.” I leave you to work out how you fit in that metaphor, and then decide if it resonates.

might as well cleave off my left hand than try to resist writing back.

And if between the time you wrote to me and are reading this, you have pledged yourself to the debonair future medical student I watched in slow-motion lift your hair from your neck to clasp the necklace he presented you at Arugula, I would be desolate to hear it, but would wish you great happiness and many vivid flashbacks of our brief, extraordinary acquaintance.

Peter p.s. I’m sorry about my eyes. I don’t know that they’ve ever affected anyone in quite the way you describe. I’d close them or look away if I could live with the thought of not seeing you.

He said, “I worried you wouldn’t come back,” quieting some of my heartstrings and stirring some others.