Stave-Off

For Jeanne, the life of a college student presented itself with innumerable difficulties. First of all, there was the matter of grades, and second of all, was the matter of friends, and third of all, was the matter of future plans. In the first two, she succeeded. In the third, she was not alone, being clueless. Still, she reminded herself that if she took things one step at a time, if she focused on what she needed to focus on at the present moment, the future would land exactly as she hoped. That is to say, she would be affluent, but professional herself. She hoped that in the course of things, she would meet someone who could match her idea of the life she imagined. Now of course, this Monday night, she was doing what she did every Monday night—studying alone in the library.
Her study this evening was poetry. T.S. Eliot. This wasn’t an agreeable pursuit to her. She did it, because she needed to prove that she could do whatever was necessary, but the idea of academically studying poetry, even if it were T.S. Eliot, made her thoroughly frustrated with the current academic advisory board. She was supposed to pick up on all of the references made to the specific time in history that Eliot wrote. She was supposed to look deeply into his abstract words and find the concrete images which would have propelled him. She was asked to look inside his mind. However, her teachers had told her never to try to elucidate the author’s own position. Interpretation and theory were what she needed. She was 19.
She became fed up, reading Eliot for the academic position, and not for pleasure. And she found the poetry class difficult in general, for whenever she took it upon herself to visit the library, to sit alone, and to open up such a terribly removed scenario such as Eliot’s, she could only think of herself, and what she would write, and how she would do it differently, and so when she was supposed to be reading, after about an hour or so, she would begin absently doodling in her notebook pages. She then moved on to writing song lyrics that popped into her head. Finally, she would commit to full-blown verse by its end. But it was not the sort of poetry that would ever be studied in schools. “Never forget,” she reminded herself, “If you place yourself above the rest, there you will stay, and there you will be inscrutable, and there nobody will understand you. If you place yourself below the rest, they can only look down on you in pity or compassion.”
She got out of her chair she was slumped over in, now doodling poetic platitudes, and decided she needed a snack. She went to the vending machines four floors below and pressed C6 and received a small bag of Sun Chips. She also bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine next to it. Because she didn’t want to disturb the other students four floors above, she had her snack in the relative commonality of the vending machine room, which had strewn a few boys and girls throughout, sticking their mouths in their beverages, talking frantically and anxiously on their cell phones about how hard their classes were, and generally looking around absently, consuming, thinking to themselves. Of course Jeanne was amongst these latter types. What she did not realize was that Marcus was one of these types as well, and there he was, just out of her view, drinking a Dr. Pepper and walking over towards her.
“Boo” he said, tapping her on the shoulder.
She was frightened initially, for roughly a half-second, until she turned around hurriedly and said, “Oh hey, what are you doing here?”
“Studying totalitarianism, you?”
“Poetry.”
“Do you think they go hand-in-hand?”
“Well, wasn’t Ezra Pound a fascist?”
“Nonsense. It just goes to show how muddled writers can become in their thinking. They’ll take any position as long as it’s extreme and sounds cool.”
This cut-off the conversation.
“How much longer are you going to stay here?” Marcus asked
“As long as it takes. Another hour? Have you ever read T.S. Eliot?”
“I read “The Wasteland” but I couldn’t tell you what it was about.”
“Right, right.”
“Well, do you want to sit together at least?”
“So we can distract each other?” Jeanne sarcastically admitted.
“Exactly.” Marcus laughed.
“Sure.”
They took the elevator up together and sat down, and they resumed.