THE ASSIGNATION
SEPTEMBER 27, 2005, nearing sunset, Amity Street, Arlington A pervasive darkness threatening hope descended upon the land. Forty-year-old Jonah Q. Cincinnatuski, Jr., Esq., stood up from an antique desk chair, stumbled into a small kitchen, and through a backdoor window, glimpsed the northern property line, where a grove of sycamores, standing as still and silent as gravestones in a metropolis of the dead, grew more ashen in the last light of day. He screamed, “I really don’t want to live another goddamn second!”
Into a crystal glass tumbled ice cubes, a measure of Amontillado sherry, two Virginia Gentleman shots, a half-shot of Franklin County moonshine, and the rest water. Inhaling half in one swig, he sat down in the same chair, slammed the heavy bottom glass down, and watched the spilled poison run slowly off the secretary desk’s edge and hit the floor. The central air conditioning had surrendered two hours prior and a small fan near him had just quit a few minutes ago.
Early fall’s persistently humid warm weather, without air circulation inside the duplex, made his scalp feel as if a rabid rat were biting it. He just could not go into the attic to get his other fan. Two unopened letters on the desk “from more goddamn publishers” threatened to sever the only thread of hope he was hanging on to: to reinvent himself as a writer. A river running down his forehead stained one envelope, then smeared his printed name and address on the other.
His eyes, watery and bloodshot from sleep deprivation owing to severe anxiety, stung like rock salt had been ground into them. Leaning quite precariously against a bookcase was his briefcase, monogrammed J.Q.C. in gold Roman-shaded lettering; it was now sunken-in, like a dead sunflower.
The mortgage payment had come due—day before yesterday. Credit cards were maxed out. His uncle, godfather, and occasional benefactor—a wealthy trial judge from Worcester, Massachusetts— refused help he requested to keep creditors from hounding him. Jonah’s crime was that he had swapped legal briefs for sheaves of poetry. He thought, Christ, I hate him. Oh—my—God, I hate that bastard!
His uncle, a stepfather-like figure and exalted jurist who filled the gap left by Jonah’s dysfunctional biological father, steered him to the law – “the finest profession in the world” – and specifically to Washington, D.C. – “the only place to practice law.” What a cruel joke the old man played on me, he thought, as he gulped more booze, only to cough and choke, then wheeze in raspy exhalation. After more than ten years of full-time practice in D.C., so thoroughly fed up was he with the nonstop hypocrisy, lying, backstabbing, cronyism, nepotism, unethicality, gamesmanship, and criminality of obnoxiously arrogant, greedy, jaded, nihilistic, and corrupt lawyers, judges, and lawyer-politicos inside the Beltway, divorce was not what he wanted from his legal mistress, but annulment.
His eyes roamed the space with abandonment, then fixated on his desk’s three inlaid bookshelves, the edges of which were delicately decorated with early American lambs-tongue motif and protected by glass doors locked by a shiny brass key he never removed. These cupboards housed leather bindings and hardbacks, mostly from the Romantic Era tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries— Edgar Allan Poe’s and Emily Dickinson’s works were prominently represented and sacred to him. From the twentieth century—a signed 1st edition of Segal’s Love Story and a VHS videocassette of its movie adaptation were married together by rubber band. To part with any of these treasures—no matter what a sale might fetch and no matter how dire his circumstances became—was unthinkable.
Wiping his eyes with a filthy handkerchief, he turned around to survey, with blurred vision, all the numerous rejected drafts of his own fiction and poetry scattered on the floor near his desk. He also peeked at a few fiction and poetry files saved on the computer. “Is my work really that bad?” he asked himself.
Picking up the letters his fingers had procrastinated opening for days, he walked toward the front door. Dubiously balanced ceiling-high columns of legal and literary books necessitated undertaking a dangerous slalom, anytime he wanted to go from point A to point B.
Since the nasty breakup with a girlfriend six months ago, his abode had devolved into an ungodly obscenity she most certainly would have blurted out if she’d ever seen it. Jettisoning caution—he kicked the clutter, while muttering unspeakable profanities into the room. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, his favorite of all the novels of that generation of writers, dropped on his head. He stared at it on the floor for a few seconds—as if it were a stranger who’d just tried to mug him.
Having reached the duplex’s entryway, Jonah peered through the storm door window. Amity Street’s utter emptiness struck him as a cracked bell’s clapper heading straight for his soul’s jugular: where neighbors smiled and said hello one day but gave each other the finger the next. Too many folks, including many lawyers, were now born-again into a postmodern revival cult, which divinized the God Almighty Buck and put it in the service of the yet higher indefeasible trinity of the Me, Myself, and I. The Law had devolved either into a mere transaction, to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, or into a defenseless damsel, to be raped into submission by the more powerful. Rich demagogues now waited in the proverbial weeds like pre-prandial pythons, ready to strangulate and swallow the sick republic whole. Growing economic inequality engendered resentment, threatening the civil peace and portending future upheaval. Greatness was now measured by wealth, not by nobility of soul. The venomous three-headed snake of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, reared its ugly trifecta visage again, menacing the spirit of equality, community, and democracy itself in America. Love in any sense but the physical was regarded as a fool’s dream. The raging gender war ravaged the tender sentiments men and women once felt toward one another. The best in the American tradition was dying and with it, the American Dream.
With a fingernail, he slit open a letter from The New York Mirror, to which he had submitted several short stories. “Your submission does not meet our current needs,” it read; and from Redfield Press, to which he had sent romantic poems, “Sorry, we don’t publish love poetry anymore. Cheers.” He repeated these words in a nasally sarcastic monotone voice and inquired of the dead air, “Isn’t love poetry the very thing the world needs most now?” These letters—the 101st and 102nd dings of a stillborn writing career—made him rue living in the 21st instead of the 19th century. Screw you all"! he thought. Publishers who had taken time to read his work, had a point, however; both his fiction and poetry yet wanted for a muse to attract a wide readership.
A dog howled eerily, sensing the angel of death approaching. Another yipped. A small band of coyotes yelped and yowled in the distance. A neighborhood crow sat sentinel-reticent on a rusty orange pole of the chain link fence in the small front yard, as if it were waiting for Jonah to fall. Heightening uneasiness cut like a knife edge scraping up and down his spine. His guts tore internally from a feeling of alienation which drink could not numb.
The image of his 9mm flashed suddenly into a shuttled brain. The allure of an easy and final solution to pain drew him to open the drawer of a nearby lamp stand. Covering the gun’s steely blue silencer was a forgotten-about drab hardbound copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson—a birthday gift from Lavinia Bellissimo, a precocious olive-skinned brunette, with unforgettable Mediterranean sherry brown eyes, he called “Vinnie,” “Lavin,” or “Lavinia,” depending on his mood.
Vinnie’s parents had named her after Emily Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia, and their son, Lavinia’s brother, Austin. Jonah traced the handwritten inscription on the flyleaf with a trepid fingertip, like a blind man reading braille: “January 19, 1983, To J.Q.C., with love, Vinnie.” A Mainline Baldwin girl, Vinnie was then a seventeen-year-old freshman English major at Bryn Mawr, whom the eighteen-year-old Jonah, then a sophomore at Penn, believed was the one. He remembered that he, being as love-struck as any fool had ever been, let her pierce his left ear one night at a Penn Phi Delta Theta frat party at 37th and Locust Walk, and that she insisted he wear one of her 1 carat diamond stud earrings for an unspecified period of time, which only she could end. For several months, he complied, despite frequent jeering from frat brothers about his having been so “so damn in love it unmanned him and so it was too pitiful to observe.”
He had thought together forever, until Vinnie told him a year later —in words written seared on the walls of his memory—“No, Jonah, I can’t be your Emily.” So convinced was he that she was the one, he had bought her a magnificent 19th century-style sterling silver, flawless 1 carat diamond ring, which he had never given her, but had kept securely in a safety deposit box should she change her mind—although he knew in his deepest heart she never would. After Vinnie dropped him at the Top of Centre Square, like a charred cannolo, she married an older lawyer and builder named James F. Richards, IV, from a WASP family with ample means on the Main Line; and ten years ago, they had moved their three children to a huge multimillion-dollar mansion in Midlothian, just across the James River from Richmond, VA, where Richards ran several building companies.
Acting on impulse, a despondent Jonah had made a trip by car down I95 earlier in the day to their home in Midlothian to confirm what he already knew. She wasn’t going to leave Richards. On his way home to Arlington, Jonah had wept uncontrollably. He now remembered Vinnie’s WASP mother, married to a wealthy Italian orthopedic surgeon over whom she domineered, saying to her husband, within earshot of Jonah—who had, thirty minutes prior, made passionate love to Vinnie under the family pool table—that her daughter could do much better than a “poor Pole who hadn’t a clue about real life and most certainly would not amount to anything.”
He grabbed the gun, hiding it in the right pocket of beltless, Bugle Boy khaki shorts, and for some unknown reason, perhaps because of his strong extramundane connection to the dead female poet, took Emily’s poetry book tightly in his left hand as well. I’" die holding Emily’s poetry, if I have to die. The outside air bore the faint scent of sewerage. “There’s no escape from hell!” he repeated–-the same words a mean and bitter Polish Catholic nun told him once, when the young elementary school boy dared to correct her erroneous long division on the blackboard in front of the whole class snickering at the sordid affair.
Jonah sat down on the charcoal gray carpet of the porch steps, placed the book on his lap, and reached for a Newport 100: the last cigarette of the self-condemned. There was no neighbor outside or anyone else happening to be walking through the neighborhood. The gun pinched his groin, tempting him to pull the piece out and be done with it. But he did not. Having lit the cigarette, he took several long, puckered drags, while being drawn to study the Zodiac sign of Taurus on the silver, black, and red lighter he had just used.
He released the gun’s safety, and then using the palm of his left hand, pulled the slide with his right hand to its rearmost position and released it, to chamber a round, letting the slide go completely forward. Then he placed the barrel to his right temple with index finger ready on the trigger. Aloud he said what he believed to be Poe’s last words, “Lord help my poor _____.”
Just infinitesimally prior to his saying the terminative word “soul,” a young female voice, screaming something audibly indistinct, but subliminally quite clear “I need help,” entered his right ear, and arrested him. He put the gun down and stood up. “Are you all right?” he asked, with volume enough to carry about a hundred yards to a covered wooden park bench on the W&OD Trail, on the Falls Church-Arlington line, where passengers of forgotten lore used to wait for the (long defunct) Washington & Old Dominion train to Roslyn, on their way into Washington, D.C. No answer.
He went about fifty yards down the street to look for her, but she had disappeared. He returned to sit on the same step. From the same westerly direction the female voice originated, pleasant air blew, unexpectedly, across his fretted and sweating brow. As he inhaled the zephyr, it soothed him. He looked downward upon a large angel-motif brass pot, in which grew a nineteenth century vintage bright orange geranium. Its fresh scent carried him back to childhood when Poe and Dickinson danced together in his imagination, though he knew Fate never enabled Poe and Dickinson actually to meet during their lifetimes. Tears welled.
“Little Joney’s going to be another Edgar Allan Poe someday,” he remembered mother, who had Lenore for a middle name, say many years ago. Poe’s work and life had held a peculiar, at times, obsessive fascination for Jonah, ever since she told him she believed it significant Fate had given him the same birthday as Poe, January 19, and that Jonah, too, had been born in the literary history rich state of Massachusetts, just as Poe had been. She said to him in earnest one day, “You do have Poe’s blue gray eyes.”
For a tenth birthday, mother bought him the 1938 edition of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar A"an Poe, from the old Ephraim’s Bookstore on Franklin Street in Worcester. He wondered whether he still had this book somewhere in the duplex. He felt a strong connection to the short stories, as did mother, but Poe’s poetry written for deceased beautiful women Poe adored, was what most enthralled, even enchanted Jonah.
“Ode to A Thing with Feathers” finished on April 27, 1979 for the late Emily Dickinson by fourteen-year-old Jonah, won first prize in a high school poetry contest his freshman year. This poem, inspired by a school trip to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, had greatly impressed Mr. Novick, an esteemed high school English teacher, if not his mother, who, despite her literary sensibility, was never fond of poetry, much less love poetry, and thought it “quite foolish for a young man to write a love poem to a dead woman.” Since that time, Jonah had had difficulty writing verse as inspired.
The dry necessitous logic of the law hadn’t helped. Working with corrupt and nihilistic lawyers had very nearly destroyed him. His mother too had later in his life gotten in the way of poetry, and the love that inspires it, and probably in more ways than one. He had not yet found a literary companion and had, at this time, given up virtually all hope of ever finding her. Jonah sat back down on the steps with another cigarette and the gun, near his side, pointed away. He opened the book and Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” popped up, his favorite of her poems. He began to read these lines aloud:
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
He stopped there before reading the next stanza, as if Emily herself, like the mother-who-loved-poetry whom he had never had, held him by the scruff of the neck and directed him to read the lines again. Emily, wherever she was, heard his cri de cœur. Her words “Hope… perches in the soul... and never stops at all” impressed him more deeply now than ever before. Emily’s hope – a thing with feathers indeed, hidden deep inside him from childhood and mysteriously resistant to extinction – flew back up as a startled wren into his weary heart. Emily was winning again, as she always had.
After closing the book, he reopened it to find another favorite of her poems, “If I Can Stop.” He read the first line, “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” and paused. Choking back emotion, he read further:
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
With a sudden rush, everything he had been holding back let loose. Tears fell freely onto the steps, like a soft and steady rain the area needed. He thought of his own mother, of an 1847 portrait of Emily as a young woman he used to fantasize about, and, finally, of the desperate voice, minutes before, he had heard coming from the W&OD Trail. The conviction seized him, as if he had taken a dose of nepenthe, that “his Emily” was living in 2005, out there somewhere in Northern Virginia, and suffering like he was. He went inside and put the gun and the book back where they had been in the same drawer.
