Free A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles Page A

relieved to be outside this laying on of hands. I felt the latitude of enjoying that freedom, but a few hours later, I realized I could be laboring in a simple bubble of neglect.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    THE IDIOT SAVANT—LIKE A MAN—MOVING IN WITH KIM—McPEAK FALLS IN LOVE—A MECHANICAL CANARY—RUDDY JOHN CHEEVER—RAYMOND CARVER IS MISSING

    U nlike most of his explosive Iowa City romances, McPeak’s affair with the feminist Stavrula Pallas seemed like it might endure. He had broken up with Maud Deering and sold his sports car. He said that having sex with her was like building a geodesic dome. Stavrula was his age, thirty, with a faculty appointment in both sociology and art. She was a conceptual artist who wrote about the reception of her work among various social classes. They met when he parked at EPB and noticed a party in the adjacent field among haystacks and bundles of corn. He got in line for a cup of hot cider, which he intended to spike with his flask. Stavrula approached him, thinking he was a new, older student, possibly lost. When he told her he was a poet, she was charmed, and inquired about his interest in sociology. He quoted Auden, “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians, nor commit a social science.” She saw his trip from the parking lot as a social act, an opinion solidified by his supplementing her own glass of cider with a splash of bourbon.
    We went from watching Taryn dance to hearing Stavrula lecture. McPeak basked in her cutting-edge conceptualism the night she gave a talk describing how the patrons of the Detroit Institute of Arts appreciated her piece where she sat in a booth and invited confessions. As I was leaving the auditorium, a tall blonde nudged me, saying, “When was the last time you went to confession?” I recognized Kim Costigan who had made that sharp comeback to loudmouth Trotta at the Coulette party, and who had dated almost everyone in the workshop, both poetry and fiction. She wore a short skirt and her large breasts pushed against her blouse.
    “Admit it,” she said, smiling. “You were staring at me!”
    I confessed. I passed the time of Stavrula’s talk watching Kim cross and uncross her legs. Here I was in Iowa, the hotbed of hotbeds and still a paralyzed voyeur, like Dickie, the janitor’s helper at Fairfield, an idiot savant who swabbed the cafeteria floor and could name the day you were born if you told him the date. Whenever a woman entered, Dickie pushed his broom in her direction. One night I sat with my favorite teacher, the Joyce scholar Lou Berrone, and Nina, his teenage daughter, in the campus snack bar, and Dickie swept his way toward us. Lou gave him her date of birth.
    “June 9, 1953,” Lou said again and again, but Dickie just stared, fixed on Nina’s thighs as he pressed the broom. “Dickie!” Lou said.
    Dickie’s eyes focused on the nylon stockings, the bristles moving closer and closer until he touched Nina’s toe.
    “What day was she born?” I asked, but he continued to push, a little white spittle at the edge of his mouth.
    “Daddy!” Nina whispered, covering the side of her reddening face with her hand. Lou took Dickie by the arm, escorting him to an empty table by the window where Dickie returned to his routine.
    Berrone said, “It’s my fault. I didn’t realize he’d get like that. And maybe I somehow forgot that he’s a man.” I could have stared at Nina all day myself. Being marooned on a few acres with only men had turned us all slightly mad. The insistent broom, the helpless, ignited eyes of the idiot savant losing his slender hold on the world, and Berrone’s apologetic words, brought back phrases from my reading:
    He is a man, therefore nothing human is alien to him
    Take it like a man
    As a man, therefore he came to all these sufferings
    A Man’s a Man for all that
    Lou might have forgotten that Dickie was a man, but I never doubted it, or that I was a man, or Lou—but I didn’t know it could mean to become hypnotized,