Blues if You Want (And Can Afford Them)

“For the record, I did not sleep with Bill Matthews. Which is not to say that I didn’t have my chances…”

My two breakfast companions in the Red Mill at the Vermont Studio Center, the famous poet, Stanley Plumly, the less famous novelist and my dear friend, Christine Lehner, erupted into raucous laughter. It was not the sort of thing they expected to hear over bowls of granola from VSC’s Grants and Publicity Manager.

“That would put you in the minority of women he was friends with,” Stan Plumly said, chuckling and smoothing back a strand of snow-white hair. His hair was amazing. Thick as the mane on a Shetland pony, white as bleached bones, it looked as if it had been blow-dried that morning. I considered complimenting him on it, and then thought he might take it the wrong way.

“To say we were friends would be pushing it,” I said. “I met him at Breadloaf in the eighties. Bill was a Visiting Writer, very much the big man on campus, dispensing wisdom and ministering to a gaggle of female groupies. He read an essay about Bellagio, not the resort in Vegas but the artist’s retreat funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, in the first century, A.D., was inhabited by Pliny the Younger.

I approached Matthews afterward and told him how much I admired his essay, explained how my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, had applied to Bellagio and been turned down, how the rejection was hard, because Len adored Lake Como and would have thrilled to the princely routines—elegant meals, scintillating conversation, walks along ancient cobbled paths—that Matthews so winningly described.

“I was younger and prettier then,” I continued, to which Plumly interjected something sweetly complimentary to the effect that I hadn’t lost my charm, “and Bill and I ended up hanging out together. He got me into Treman Cottage, that house on the Breadloaf campus that you cannot enter unless you are a fellow or above…something I didn’t know until I arrived, which appalled me, though not enough to boycott it, which I should have done if I had had any integrity…”

“O.K., O.K., spare us the lecture,” Christine said, “and cut to the chase. How did you almost end up in Bill Matthews’ bed?”

“Well, we had spent most of the night drinking martinis in front of the fireplace at Treman, and Bill offered to walk me back to my dorm, which was just down the dirt road. It was a warm, moonlit night and you could see the Big and Little Dipper and Orion and a bunch of other constellations that he could name and I couldn’t. We started talking about our lives; he was between wives and I was between husbands, and next thing I know we were going at it in the hallway outside my room and he was murmuring into my hair, 'We could really get this thing right this time…'

“It was the sort of line he must have used dozens of times with other women, but I remember thinking, This famous poet wants ME!”

“And then,” Christine interjected. "Que Pasa?”

“I don’t know, I guess my guardian angel was looking out for me because, after kissing him back, and I will say this for him, drunk as he was, he was a good kisser. Anyway, sirens went off in my brain and something screamed, ‘Stop! This guy is gonna break your heart.'”

“So that’s it?” Christine asked.

“Not exactly. We kept in touch over the next few months. He moved to a tiny place on the Upper West Side that he later wrote about in BLUES IF YOU WANT. I moved from Illinois to D.C. to go to graduate school.

“He was a great letter writer—this was well before e-mail. He always wrote back within a few days and his sentences were eloquent and polished. I remember he once said that a writer is someone who loves sentences, and you could see that that was true for him, that he loved sentences.

“We met again here at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 1993. We had lunch at a little restaurant in a nearly village that backed onto a river. It was mid-November and we were the only people in the restaurant and Bill was turning on his usual wit and charm, flirting with the waitress, with the owner, with me. I don’t know how many times he had been married and divorced; how many affairs he’d had, but I was still dazzled by him…

“Four years later, I was scanning the obits in The New York Times and read that he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 55.”

“Getting ready to go to the opera,” Plumly said, shaking his head. Plumly explained that Matthews had begun, at his doctor’s urging, to cut back on his drinking and smoking, but it was too little too late.

We were quiet for a while, sifting through our raisins and sunflower seeds, each lost in our reveries on why we were here instead of not here, musing wordlessly upon the strange bedfellows of art and death. I thought of Bill’s eloquence, the lines that I remembered either from his poems or from his conversation—one that has always haunted me about how “the work of the body becomes the body of work.’

Years later, I was walking to my mailbox in front of the ramshackle Victorian house that I’d just moved into after my divorce from my second husband, and came upon a letter from Bill’s son, Sebastian, on Vermont Studio Center stationary, asking me to donate money for a room in the new Maverick Writers' Studios building that was to be named in honor of Bill. It was a long and heartfelt plea, a writer son’s eloquent tribute to his eloquent dad.

Had I but world enough and funds, I mused, had I been as famous as Bill—president of the Poetry Society, tenured professor at CUNY, a regular at Breadloaf and Bellagio, I would have been delighted to dig deep into my checkbook, but I had not reached even a modicum of his acclaim. I was poor and underemployed, with little disposable cash. Across my mind, like a plane of light in an Italian quattrocentro painting, fell a line from one of Bill’s poems from TIME AND MONEY about "how the rich are marrying each other.”

I wasn’t rich, and yet I was rich in remembrance of Bill. Sebastian asked me to give what I could, and so I did, and here it is, my gift to the tall, long-limbed seducer who loved sentences.
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