1
THE CLIFF DWELLERS' CLUB
The teacher-student relationship will forever remain just that: the one who knows and the one who learns. Though friendships and love affairs test these limits, they are truly tests; and the one who used to grade the papers, pass or fail the student, and bestow honors when so inclined will always settle back into that disposition, while the ex-student-turned-friend will always feel overcome with a sense of inadequacy and desire for approval. Usually such students will achieve a sense of equality, if not superiority, to their adolescent instructors, but, as in any family, they will fall back into their amateur role when in the presence of the one who first taught what was not known. Resident Poet Joanne Mueller and poetry mogul Vivian Reape were anything but an exception to this rule. When Joanne first met Vivian, in the 1970s at the University of Missouri in Columbia, it was across a desk where Vivian sat on one side and Joanne nervously stood, too afraid to ask if she could be seated. In the course of twelve years, their relationship had barely progressed from that dynamic.
It was a humid September afternoon in Vivian's un-air-conditioned office on the third floor of the University of Missouri English department, and Joanne still vividly remembered how the simple cotton dress she wore had hung on her like a damp sheet in an airless laundry. Vivian, if pressed, could probably offer no memory of the sounds and smells of that late Missouri summer, for Joanne was merely one of fifty students hoping for admittance into her exclusive poetry class, a market Vivian proudly owned as there was no other class available in the three-state region where a student could read and write poetry for university credit. In front of Vivian was a smattering of sentimental and formless verse Joanne had pulled from various scrapbooks, letters, and journals as an offering to the statuesque instructor—statuesque, because Vivian barely moved. She was an overweight woman in her late forties on the third floor of a tower somewhere in the middle of a prairie, suffering from what was hoped to be the last heat wave of the season. She had learned to sit perfectly still in her high-backed chair, occasionally fanning herself with an academic journal or reaching for her tall glass of iced tea, which a department secretary obediently refilled every hour. The environment only added to Vivian's appearance of queenly nonchalance to the slight girl who stood across from her, nervously shifting her weight from foot to foot.
But Vivian was very interested and pleased by what she saw. The empty vessel politely asking to be filled is perhaps the most common source of all mankind's greatest endeavors, and twentyyear-old Joanne Mueller could not have been more empty or polite. The bad poetry in front of her was actually her best attribute in the eyes of a teacher not exactly looking to teach but to impress; to form without argument a new generation of poetry, written and read, and, most importantly, overseen, by Vivian Reape herself. Vivian was the end of the line of the now extinct breed of creative writing instructors who taught how to write without writing themselves. She used to write, all through her twenties, but her classically formed sonnets and rigid elegies were more in tribute to the old masters and thought to be an unnecessary footnote to the scores of anthologies that had remained in print for centuries. It was an assessment Vivian herself had made as she began to focus more on the academic faculty games that had started her on her cross-country tour of campuses, remaining just long enough at each one to establish the right relationships with the right heads and upcoming heads of the appropriate departments. Not to mention that Vivian's poetry was as unfashionable and impractical as dryclean-only wool in an era of polyester. The confessional and beat poets of the sixties had seized center stage, daring not only to publish in the respectable journals once reserved for the dry intellectual musings of Vivian and her like, but to actually sell books. The apparent fashion for this kind of poetry, which had forever exiled Vivian from the poetry shelf to that of criticism (should a bookstore actually have one), inspired her quest for whatever powers the art of letters had to offer; and many universities, anxious to explore this new market for creative writing but afraid of turning their departments over to suicidal hippies who wrote about their own orgasms, found in Vivian a safe compromise, a compromise she would successfully exploit all the way to being named head of the National Institute of Poetry a decade later.
For Joanne Mueller, a small-town girl from Missouri, all underlying political intrigue was lost, and she desperately promised to work very hard, read every book referred to in class, and put all other competing course work second to Vivian's great adventure. It appeared to be the chance of a lifetime, and a lifetime was what Joanne committed. Long after Vivian had moved on from her year of shaking hands in the heartland, Joanne stayed in constant touch, sending her poems, revisions of poems, revisions of revisions of poems, until it was subtly suggested to her that she should send them on to Vivian's "dear" colleague Mr. So-and-So at IQ: Indiana Quarterly, or Mrs. So-and-So at the Allentown Review, and ultimately, to Mr. Daniel Kirby at Poem, the seventyfive-year-old poetry magazine based in Chicago. All of these initial submissions were accepted long before Joanne ever wrote out her self-addressed, stamped envelopes, just as her interview for a poetry residence at Lake Bluff College near Chicago ten years later was hardly an interview at all but a polite tea where Joanne and Douglas Skidmore, the ten-year chairman of the English department, spent an hour discussing the virtues of Vivian Reape, newly appointed head of NIP, the National Institute of Poetry.
After eight years teaching poetry at Lake Bluff College, Joanne had most definitely become a member of the club. And she was reminded of this privilege as she was escorted to the penthouse of Chicago's Root Tower and into the Cliff Dwellers' Club, a hundred-year-old gentlemen's-agreement private fraternity for the city's architects, authors, and painters and their philistine keepers. How Vivian Reape, who as far as Joanne knew rarely came to this midwestern Paris, was able to secure a table in such society Joanne could not imagine. In fact, she was cruelly reminded that it was she, Joanne, who should be treating her old mentor to such hospitality and not the other way around. Joanne had never even heard of the Cliff Dwellers' existence until a message had appeared in her department mailbox slot "inviting" her to meet Vivian there promptly at seven that evening. Edith, the ancient secretary of the department, was kind enough to enlighten Joanne as to its importance.
"Frank Lloyd Wright used to belong," Edith said, while Joanne puzzled over the note. "What I'd give for such an evening as you have before you."
Edith Hall was Chicago to Joanne. Chicago with all its ashesto-glory history, a history Edith had worked alongside of, never gaining access to the prizes of the lakeshore, but an ardent admirer of such castles nonetheless. From Joanne's first day at the college Edith had been all too happy to take the girl from Missouri under her wing and tell her all she'd need to know about the overemphasized surroundings she had landed in. A kind of keeper for Sister Carrie.
"Dress up, dear," Edith whispered. Joanne smiled appreciatively, cramming the note, which carefully bore the precise address and cross streets (courtesy of Edith) into her pocket.
When Joanne entered the club at 6:55, dressed in her only suit, a gray pin-striped coat and knee-length skirt she had paid too much for on a trip to New York nearly five years before, she had her name checked off the last of the lists and was graciously led in. She looked down as she walked by the other tables, smoothing her skirt with her hands and admiring how well expensive clothes lasted, or perhaps how someone with little money took such extra care of the few costly items they possessed. Later that night she would wrap this suit up again like a wedding dress. Now she tried to remind herself to walk in it as if it were one, proud and radiant. When she looked up, she was struck dumb by the skyline surrounding the room. The January sun had been dispersed by the million glass stars up and down the magnificent towers along the lakefront, precisely lit grids of man's triumph over prairie, walls that only the select were allowed to look over, as she did now. It was only the voice of Vivian Reape that could instantly pull her back down from this uppermost tree limb, like the dreaded falconer himself, keeping her firmly planted on his thick leather glove.
"Joanne, how lovely you look!" Vivian exclaimed, making no move to rise as Joanne approached the table. Vivian had already secured the best of the two seats, the one with the most expanse of skyline before her and enough of the room facing her should she need to see or be seen.
"Vivian, it was so kind of you to invite me," Joanne said, a pathetic attempt at being the first to announce her own deficiencies in social spheres, a midwestern pride that someone like Vivian Reape could only compare to that of a Willa Lather heroine.
"Well, I'll confess, I'm only able to invite you due to the good graces of various faculty at the University of Chicago." Vivian leaned over the elaborately laid-out table while she said this, as if her words could possibly get them evicted. "A few years back when I was out here presenting various grants and endowments to the university's linguistics department, we came here for a late dinner, and Professor Gray, a brilliant man, noted how I took to the magnificence of the room and its views and managed to squire me an honorary membership. I'm only in Chicago every five years or so, and this rather exclusive nest realizes that various artistic dignitaries from the East may come through every few years or so, and thus, without crowding the true local membership, they can distinguish the club all the more with us passing luminaries."
Joanne was amazed by this statement. Though it contained the usual amount of self-congratulation common to a Vivian Reape sermon, its very presentation offered a kind of humility in the face of Joanne's five-year-old pin-striped suit. Joanne for the first time realized the strangeness of the occasion. Indeed, why would Vivian waste a night at the palace with a lowly ex-student who taught at a midwestern city's other university?
"I'm sure, my dear," Vivian continued, "that you will belong to all of this someday. And I can only hope that when you do, and when my gracious absentee membership comes up for renewal, you will remember our night here and vote favorably for your old friend."
Of course, Joanne incredulously realized as she agreed to the martini Vivian ordered for her, Vivian needed something from her, but what? What could Joanne possibly be connected to that in any way could tempt Vivian to lift her up to such heights? Joanne started to relax, convinced that the question wouldn't be answered until well into the main course, or, perhaps, would even be held off for after-dinner coffee, a civility even this poor girl from Missouri had picked up from Edith Wharton novels.
They talked of local authors and magazines, the shrinking of art budgets, and the difficulties in selecting candidates for the various programs that Joanne applied for and Vivian judged. Vivian even asked about her home life, though Joanne could not remember whether Vivian knew of her impending divorce and was certain she did not know all the reasons behind it. Again Vivian praised Joanne's suit, and by the end of the second martini Joanne found herself joking that she was glad Vivian liked it as it was the only thing Vivian had probably ever seen her in over the past five years. Vivian roared at this admission, though she quickly caught herself and landed with a hand on Joanne's. "My dear, you work very hard, and that is what I notice, not one or even one thousand pretty suits." Joanne accepted these motherly words with a slight smile and blush, and racked her brain for a time when she had ever seen Vivian dressed in the same suit twice.
By the time their steaks arrived, Vivian was pointing out various local intellectuals, names Joanne was glad she knew, though she was mortified because she could not recognize their faces. The only famous face Joanne found was the Herald's film critic, who had made a name for himself with the first movie review television show and was known nationwide. Cruising comfortably on martinis, Joanne started then stopped herself from pointing him out to Vivian's critical eye.
It was at this point that Vivian's face took on its more serious lines. Her eyes seemed to dim as she looked out the window, not with the appreciation that had gained her entrance into the club, but in distraction, as she began collecting her thoughts, moving in for the attack. The magnitude of what Vivian was about to say became clear to Joanne, who felt her own appetite falling, wishing she had skipped that second martini as she pushed her wineglass a little farther out of reach.
"I don't suppose you've ever been to Nevada?" Vivian finally said, shifting her gaze from the office towers outside to her companion across from her.
"Nevada?" Joanne almost laughed. "Yes, of course I've been there."
"I don't mean Vegas, my dear."
"Oh, of course not," Joanne replied, setting down her knife and fork and grabbing for the wineglass.
"I'm talking about Yucca Mountain, a very old and sacred site for various Native American tribes. You have heard of Yucca Mountain? Recently?"
Joanne stared blankly back at her old teacher, who studied her like a pitcher having just thrown the ball. Only Joanne was never given the bat. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Oh Joanne, really. There's no need to be shy about your husband's success. Unless what I'm asking has already been entrusted to someone else."
"Jon? Jon's success?" Joanne set the nearly empty glass down. "Vivian, I'm afraid Jon and I have been separated for over a year. Why I haven't spoken to him in months."
Vivian's hand massaged the front of her neck, a gesture Joanne remembered as one of disappointment. Grave disappointment.
"I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. Of course I wish you had confided in me earlier," Vivian neatly replied. So as not to have dragged you all the way up to the Cliff Dwellers' Club for nothing, Joanne translated. The waiter approached, offering more wine, and Vivian quickly shifted them to coffee. Business had begun.
"Your husband has recently enjoyed a most extraordinary success. Do not be ashamed. Though I've never married, I've witnessed various marital behaviors for a lot longer than you have, and this is nothing to be ashamed of." Joanne could only stare down at the sugar she poured in her coffee. "The important thing here is your husband's success. I only wish I had had the privilege of seeing some of his art, something you were able to inspire and nurture in your many years together. Ten years, I believe?" Joanne looked up and nodded. "You haven't signed any papers yet, have you?"
"Look, Vivian, I'm not comfortable talking about this with people. I'm surprised by this ‘success' you keep referring to as I haven't seen him work on his paintings for years."
Vivian laughed. "Well, work is only part of the equation here. Isn't his uncle some kind of nuclear diplomat?"
"Vivian, please, what exactly is going on?"
"The Nuclear Waste Depository Plant at the base of Yucca Mountain, dear. Or, more for our purposes, the ‘Doomsday designs' recently commissioned by the federal government. One of the reasons I'm here in Chicago is to meet with friends of friends who head the scientific panels planning this site."
"What could any of this possibly have to do with Jon?"
"He's been selected as the official painter. Along with an architect, a sculptor, a landscape designer, and a composer, he has been chosen to create the images that will warn people away from the site thousands of years from now. You see, they plan to deposit a vast quantity of nuclear waste and warheads into the base of this poor mountain and seal it up for, hopefully, the ten thousand years it will take for the plutonium to break down and no longer be so toxic. Now obviously our present-day civilization cannot very well look into a crystal ball and know just what kind of people may stumble upon this site. What nationality, what language, what form of intelligence. Why they might not even be humans as we know them. So they've formed this team of artists to create modern-day cave paintings, if you will, that can convey the danger lurking behind the locked doors. Doors that may very well have withered away by the time someone stumbles upon them a thousand years from now. This is the greatest of artistic achievements, Joanne. To literally be the creative mind that, through architecture, sculpture, plant life, and paintings, will warn of the immense danger that awaits the poor innocent who arrives on the scene. A danger that could completely destroy any civilization there exists to destroy."
"My Jon?" was the only thing Joanne could say to this.
"I think we need some brandy," Vivian replied, again placing her hand on Joanne's and motioning for a waiter.
"But Jon hasn't worked in years. In fact, he's back at school, a community college, starting all over from what I can tell."
"Don't forget who his uncle is, darling. You see, I am in agreement with you. This entire project, one with the very lives of millions of people thousands of years from now in its hands, and one with an immense amount of federal dollars behind it, is being thrown together by bureaucrats and scientists who have, perhaps, less knowledge of the arts than anyone. Now apparently your husband has a particular interest in aboriginal art?" Joanne nodded, not taking her lips off the rim of her brandy glass. "Well, they're smart enough to realize the need for artists who have some grasp upon the past in order to create the road signs for the future. Other than that, I'd say the scientists are looking for the easiest way to placate public opinion by involving elements of the artistic community whose reputation is a bit more, shall we say, liberal. Now they don't want to risk all their work and funds by involving some high-profile art world ego or Marxist radical, so why not bestow the honor on someone who hasn't even painted in years and would certainly be willing to work just for the money and opportunity within whatever parameters they establish? So, they hand it to a relative of someone big in Washington to guarantee their control: like an inheritance, keep it in the family."
Joanne smiled at this and quickly thought about those "papers" Vivian had alluded to earlier. Papers she hadn't signed, hadn't even had drawn up, though Joanne was now certain she'd find them in her mailbox this evening.
"Joanne, look at us, a couple of girls sitting in the boys' club enjoying the view." Vivan beamed and sat back, taking in the entire room and skyline at once, like someone tasting a wine in one gulp and deciding to take the rest of the bottle.
"I don't follow you."
"What has been left out?" Vivian continued. "What very important element has been left out of this historic plan? What very important element, which you and I live in service to?"
Joanne was flabbergasted by the question. Vivian Reape and Joanne Mueller arm and arm in something? Her head seemed to spin from this very remote possibility.
"Poetry," Vivian finally said, flatly and with an edge of impatience. "Don't you see? Language, and not just any particular language, but language with form, metaphor, imagery. Language that can defy the odds of time, politics, and fashion. What is lacking is the Beowulf of the next century. The words, which may not be the easiest to be initially understood, but with the proper study and appreciation can warn of the impending doom behind the doors breaking down behind them."
1
THE CLIFF DWELLERS' CLUB
The teacher-student relationship will forever remain just that: the one who knows and the one who learns. Though friendships and love affairs test these limits, they are truly tests; and the one who used to grade the papers, pass or fail the student, and bestow honors when so inclined will always settle back into that disposition, while the ex-student-turned-friend will always feel overcome with a sense of inadequacy and desire for approval. Usually such students will achieve a sense of equality, if not superiority, to their adolescent instructors, but, as in any family, they will fall back into their amateur role when in the presence of the one who first taught what was not known. Resident Poet Joanne Mueller and poetry mogul Vivian Reape were anything but an exception to this rule. When Joanne first met Vivian, in the 1970s at the University of Missouri in Columbia, it was across a desk where Vivian sat on one side and Joanne nervously stood, too afraid to ask if she could be seated. In the course of twelve years, their relationship had barely progressed from that dynamic.
It was a humid September afternoon in Vivian's un-air-conditioned office on the third floor of the University of Missouri English department, and Joanne still vividly remembered how the simple cotton dress she wore had hung on her like a damp sheet in an airless laundry. Vivian, if pressed, could probably offer no memory of the sounds and smells of that late Missouri summer, for Joanne was merely one of fifty students hoping for admittance into her exclusive poetry class, a market Vivian proudly owned as there was no other class available in the three-state region where a student could read and write poetry for university credit. In front of Vivian was a smattering of sentimental and formless verse Joanne had pulled from various scrapbooks, letters, and journals as an offering to the statuesque instructor—statuesque, because Vivian barely moved. She was an overweight woman in her late forties on the third floor of a tower somewhere in the middle of a prairie, suffering from what was hoped to be the last heat wave of the season. She had learned to sit perfectly still in her high-backed chair, occasionally fanning herself with an academic journal or reaching for her tall glass of iced tea, which a department secretary obediently refilled every hour. The environment only added to Vivian's appearance of queenly nonchalance to the slight girl who stood across from her, nervously shifting her weight from foot to foot.
But Vivian was very interested and pleased by what she saw. The empty vessel politely asking to be filled is perhaps the most common source of all mankind's greatest endeavors, and twentyyear-old Joanne Mueller could not have been more empty or polite. The bad poetry in front of her was actually her best attribute in the eyes of a teacher not exactly looking to teach but to impress; to form without argument a new generation of poetry, written and read, and, most importantly, overseen, by Vivian Reape herself. Vivian was the end of the line of the now extinct breed of creative writing instructors who taught how to write without writing themselves. She used to write, all through her twenties, but her classically formed sonnets and rigid elegies were more in tribute to the old masters and thought to be an unnecessary footnote to the scores of anthologies that had remained in print for centuries. It was an assessment Vivian herself had made as she began to focus more on the academic faculty games that had started her on her cross-country tour of campuses, remaining just long enough at each one to establish the right relationships with the right heads and upcoming heads of the appropriate departments. Not to mention that Vivian's poetry was as unfashionable and impractical as dryclean-only wool in an era of polyester. The confessional and beat poets of the sixties had seized center stage, daring not only to publish in the respectable journals once reserved for the dry intellectual musings of Vivian and her like, but to actually sell books. The apparent fashion for this kind of poetry, which had forever exiled Vivian from the poetry shelf to that of criticism (should a bookstore actually have one), inspired her quest for whatever powers the art of letters had to offer; and many universities, anxious to explore this new market for creative writing but afraid of turning their departments over to suicidal hippies who wrote about their own orgasms, found in Vivian a safe compromise, a compromise she would successfully exploit all the way to being named head of the National Institute of Poetry a decade later.
For Joanne Mueller, a small-town girl from Missouri, all underlying political intrigue was lost, and she desperately promised to work very hard, read every book referred to in class, and put all other competing course work second to Vivian's great adventure. It appeared to be the chance of a lifetime, and a lifetime was what Joanne committed. Long after Vivian had moved on from her year of shaking hands in the heartland, Joanne stayed in constant touch, sending her poems, revisions of poems, revisions of revisions of poems, until it was subtly suggested to her that she should send them on to Vivian's "dear" colleague Mr. So-and-So at IQ: Indiana Quarterly, or Mrs. So-and-So at the Allentown Review, and ultimately, to Mr. Daniel Kirby at Poem, the seventyfive-year-old poetry magazine based in Chicago. All of these initial submissions were accepted long before Joanne ever wrote out her self-addressed, stamped envelopes, just as her interview for a poetry residence at Lake Bluff College near Chicago ten years later was hardly an interview at all but a polite tea where Joanne and Douglas Skidmore, the ten-year chairman of the English department, spent an hour discussing the virtues of Vivian Reape, newly appointed head of NIP, the National Institute of Poetry.
After eight years teaching poetry at Lake Bluff College, Joanne had most definitely become a member of the club. And she was reminded of this privilege as she was escorted to the penthouse of Chicago's Root Tower and into the Cliff Dwellers' Club, a hundred-year-old gentlemen's-agreement private fraternity for the city's architects, authors, and painters and their philistine keepers. How Vivian Reape, who as far as Joanne knew rarely came to this midwestern Paris, was able to secure a table in such society Joanne could not imagine. In fact, she was cruelly reminded that it was she, Joanne, who should be treating her old mentor to such hospitality and not the other way around. Joanne had never even heard of the Cliff Dwellers' existence until a message had appeared in her department mailbox slot "inviting" her to meet Vivian there promptly at seven that evening. Edith, the ancient secretary of the department, was kind enough to enlighten Joanne as to its importance.
"Frank Lloyd Wright used to belong," Edith said, while Joanne puzzled over the note. "What I'd give for such an evening as you have before you."
Edith Hall was Chicago to Joanne. Chicago with all its ashesto-glory history, a history Edith had worked alongside of, never gaining access to the prizes of the lakeshore, but an ardent admirer of such castles nonetheless. From Joanne's first day at the college Edith had been all too happy to take the girl from Missouri under her wing and tell her all she'd need to know about the overemphasized surroundings she had landed in. A kind of keeper for Sister Carrie.
"Dress up, dear," Edith whispered. Joanne smiled appreciatively, cramming the note, which carefully bore the precise address and cross streets (courtesy of Edith) into her pocket.
When Joanne entered the club at 6:55, dressed in her only suit, a gray pin-striped coat and knee-length skirt she had paid too much for on a trip to New York nearly five years before, she had her name checked off the last of the lists and was graciously led in. She looked down as she walked by the other tables, smoothing her skirt with her hands and admiring how well expensive clothes lasted, or perhaps how someone with little money took such extra care of the few costly items they possessed. Later that night she would wrap this suit up again like a wedding dress. Now she tried to remind herself to walk in it as if it were one, proud and radiant. When she looked up, she was struck dumb by the skyline surrounding the room. The January sun had been dispersed by the million glass stars up and down the magnificent towers along the lakefront, precisely lit grids of man's triumph over prairie, walls that only the select were allowed to look over, as she did now. It was only the voice of Vivian Reape that could instantly pull her back down from this uppermost tree limb, like the dreaded falconer himself, keeping her firmly planted on his thick leather glove.
"Joanne, how lovely you look!" Vivian exclaimed, making no move to rise as Joanne approached the table. Vivian had already secured the best of the two seats, the one with the most expanse of skyline before her and enough of the room facing her should she need to see or be seen.
"Vivian, it was so kind of you to invite me," Joanne said, a pathetic attempt at being the first to announce her own deficiencies in social spheres, a midwestern pride that someone like Vivian Reape could only compare to that of a Willa Lather heroine.
"Well, I'll confess, I'm only able to invite you due to the good graces of various faculty at the University of Chicago." Vivian leaned over the elaborately laid-out table while she said this, as if her words could possibly get them evicted. "A few years back when I was out here presenting various grants and endowments to the university's linguistics department, we came here for a late dinner, and Professor Gray, a brilliant man, noted how I took to the magnificence of the room and its views and managed to squire me an honorary membership. I'm only in Chicago every five years or so, and this rather exclusive nest realizes that various artistic dignitaries from the East may come through every few years or so, and thus, without crowding the true local membership, they can distinguish the club all the more with us passing luminaries."
Joanne was amazed by this statement. Though it contained the usual amount of self-congratulation common to a Vivian Reape sermon, its very presentation offered a kind of humility in the face of Joanne's five-year-old pin-striped suit. Joanne for the first time realized the strangeness of the occasion. Indeed, why would Vivian waste a night at the palace with a lowly ex-student who taught at a midwestern city's other university?
"I'm sure, my dear," Vivian continued, "that you will belong to all of this someday. And I can only hope that when you do, and when my gracious absentee membership comes up for renewal, you will remember our night here and vote favorably for your old friend."
Of course, Joanne incredulously realized as she agreed to the martini Vivian ordered for her, Vivian needed something from her, but what? What could Joanne possibly be connected to that in any way could tempt Vivian to lift her up to such heights? Joanne started to relax, convinced that the question wouldn't be answered until well into the main course, or, perhaps, would even be held off for after-dinner coffee, a civility even this poor girl from Missouri had picked up from Edith Wharton novels.
They talked of local authors and magazines, the shrinking of art budgets, and the difficulties in selecting candidates for the various programs that Joanne applied for and Vivian judged. Vivian even asked about her home life, though Joanne could not remember whether Vivian knew of her impending divorce and was certain she did not know all the reasons behind it. Again Vivian praised Joanne's suit, and by the end of the second martini Joanne found herself joking that she was glad Vivian liked it as it was the only thing Vivian had probably ever seen her in over the past five years. Vivian roared at this admission, though she quickly caught herself and landed with a hand on Joanne's. "My dear, you work very hard, and that is what I notice, not one or even one thousand pretty suits." Joanne accepted these motherly words with a slight smile and blush, and racked her brain for a time when she had ever seen Vivian dressed in the same suit twice.
By the time their steaks arrived, Vivian was pointing out various local intellectuals, names Joanne was glad she knew, though she was mortified because she could not recognize their faces. The only famous face Joanne found was the Herald's film critic, who had made a name for himself with the first movie review television show and was known nationwide. Cruising comfortably on martinis, Joanne started then stopped herself from pointing him out to Vivian's critical eye.
It was at this point that Vivian's face took on its more serious lines. Her eyes seemed to dim as she looked out the window, not with the appreciation that had gained her entrance into the club, but in distraction, as she began collecting her thoughts, moving in for the attack. The magnitude of what Vivian was about to say became clear to Joanne, who felt her own appetite falling, wishing she had skipped that second martini as she pushed her wineglass a little farther out of reach.
"I don't suppose you've ever been to Nevada?" Vivian finally said, shifting her gaze from the office towers outside to her companion across from her.
"Nevada?" Joanne almost laughed. "Yes, of course I've been there."
"I don't mean Vegas, my dear."
"Oh, of course not," Joanne replied, setting down her knife and fork and grabbing for the wineglass.
"I'm talking about Yucca Mountain, a very old and sacred site for various Native American tribes. You have heard of Yucca Mountain? Recently?"
Joanne stared blankly back at her old teacher, who studied her like a pitcher having just thrown the ball. Only Joanne was never given the bat. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Oh Joanne, really. There's no need to be shy about your husband's success. Unless what I'm asking has already been entrusted to someone else."
"Jon? Jon's success?" Joanne set the nearly empty glass down. "Vivian, I'm afraid Jon and I have been separated for over a year. Why I haven't spoken to him in months."
Vivian's hand massaged the front of her neck, a gesture Joanne remembered as one of disappointment. Grave disappointment.
"I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. Of course I wish you had confided in me earlier," Vivian neatly replied. So as not to have dragged you all the way up to the Cliff Dwellers' Club for nothing, Joanne translated. The waiter approached, offering more wine, and Vivian quickly shifted them to coffee. Business had begun.
"Your husband has recently enjoyed a most extraordinary success. Do not be ashamed. Though I've never married, I've witnessed various marital behaviors for a lot longer than you have, and this is nothing to be ashamed of." Joanne could only stare down at the sugar she poured in her coffee. "The important thing here is your husband's success. I only wish I had had the privilege of seeing some of his art, something you were able to inspire and nurture in your many years together. Ten years, I believe?" Joanne looked up and nodded. "You haven't signed any papers yet, have you?"
"Look, Vivian, I'm not comfortable talking about this with people. I'm surprised by this ‘success' you keep referring to as I haven't seen him work on his paintings for years."
Vivian laughed. "Well, work is only part of the equation here. Isn't his uncle some kind of nuclear diplomat?"
"Vivian, please, what exactly is going on?"
"The Nuclear Waste Depository Plant at the base of Yucca Mountain, dear. Or, more for our purposes, the ‘Doomsday designs' recently commissioned by the federal government. One of the reasons I'm here in Chicago is to meet with friends of friends who head the scientific panels planning this site."
"What could any of this possibly have to do with Jon?"
"He's been selected as the official painter. Along with an architect, a sculptor, a landscape designer, and a composer, he has been chosen to create the images that will warn people away from the site thousands of years from now. You see, they plan to deposit a vast quantity of nuclear waste and warheads into the base of this poor mountain and seal it up for, hopefully, the ten thousand years it will take for the plutonium to break down and no longer be so toxic. Now obviously our present-day civilization cannot very well look into a crystal ball and know just what kind of people may stumble upon this site. What nationality, what language, what form of intelligence. Why they might not even be humans as we know them. So they've formed this team of artists to create modern-day cave paintings, if you will, that can convey the danger lurking behind the locked doors. Doors that may very well have withered away by the time someone stumbles upon them a thousand years from now. This is the greatest of artistic achievements, Joanne. To literally be the creative mind that, through architecture, sculpture, plant life, and paintings, will warn of the immense danger that awaits the poor innocent who arrives on the scene. A danger that could completely destroy any civilization there exists to destroy."
"My Jon?" was the only thing Joanne could say to this.
"I think we need some brandy," Vivian replied, again placing her hand on Joanne's and motioning for a waiter.
"But Jon hasn't worked in years. In fact, he's back at school, a community college, starting all over from what I can tell."
"Don't forget who his uncle is, darling. You see, I am in agreement with you. This entire project, one with the very lives of millions of people thousands of years from now in its hands, and one with an immense amount of federal dollars behind it, is being thrown together by bureaucrats and scientists who have, perhaps, less knowledge of the arts than anyone. Now apparently your husband has a particular interest in aboriginal art?" Joanne nodded, not taking her lips off the rim of her brandy glass. "Well, they're smart enough to realize the need for artists who have some grasp upon the past in order to create the road signs for the future. Other than that, I'd say the scientists are looking for the easiest way to placate public opinion by involving elements of the artistic community whose reputation is a bit more, shall we say, liberal. Now they don't want to risk all their work and funds by involving some high-profile art world ego or Marxist radical, so why not bestow the honor on someone who hasn't even painted in years and would certainly be willing to work just for the money and opportunity within whatever parameters they establish? So, they hand it to a relative of someone big in Washington to guarantee their control: like an inheritance, keep it in the family."
Joanne smiled at this and quickly thought about those "papers" Vivian had alluded to earlier. Papers she hadn't signed, hadn't even had drawn up, though Joanne was now certain she'd find them in her mailbox this evening.
"Joanne, look at us, a couple of girls sitting in the boys' club enjoying the view." Vivan beamed and sat back, taking in the entire room and skyline at once, like someone tasting a wine in one gulp and deciding to take the rest of the bottle.
"I don't follow you."
"What has been left out?" Vivian continued. "What very important element has been left out of this historic plan? What very important element, which you and I live in service to?"
Joanne was flabbergasted by the question. Vivian Reape and Joanne Mueller arm and arm in something? Her head seemed to spin from this very remote possibility.
"Poetry," Vivian finally said, flatly and with an edge of impatience. "Don't you see? Language, and not just any particular language, but language with form, metaphor, imagery. Language that can defy the odds of time, politics, and fashion. What is lacking is the Beowulf of the next century. The words, which may not be the easiest to be initially understood, but with the proper study and appreciation can warn of the impending doom behind the doors breaking down behind them."