Elizabeth O’Brien

The Study and Care of Perishable Things

for Conor

In the months after I get the news about you, I split my time between the John Berryman archive and the bakery where I work part-time. I busy myself in the study and care of perishable things.

The archives are kept in subterranean caverns, deep underground, and the archivists travel back and forth from the archives up to the library by elevator, the temperature dropping degree by degree the further you go underground. The room where Berryman’s things are kept is enormous—a room that feels like a warehouse—with a maze of shelves that tower high overhead. It’s chilly so far below the ground, and when you step off the elevator you will wish for your coat, which has been left upstairs in a small borrowed locker. The caverns are heated, though, kept at 62 degrees rather than their natural temperature of 57, and Berryman’s books and papers span 57 feet, one for each year he lived, although this, the archivists will tell you, is a coincidence.

At the archive you can't stop time, so much as translate it into organized space. The archive preserves and organizes a person’s things into numbered, quantified boxes, measured in finite space.

Conor, I should say that this year you killed yourself in California—you already know this—with a gun.

I first came to the archives with a friend to collate a library exhibit on Berryman’s work, part of an assistantship we’d been awarded in grad school, but since then, I’ve been coming back alone.

Berryman wrote The Dispossessed, and Delusions, etc. He wrote The Dream Songs, and a novel he called Recovery.

Conor, I should say that this year you killed yourself in California—you already know this—with a gun.

Cakes can be decorated to order with fondant or buttercream. At the bakery, we generally recommend buttercream, because it tastes better—fondant tastes like sweetened paper—and because we charge less for it. Fondant is more time consuming for the decorators, but if you care more about looks than taste, it’s the better option. It can be shaped like clay, or flattened and cut like soft paper, and fondant cakes are polished, sculptural, in a way that buttercream can’t compete with.

Fondant also holds up well at room temperature. In a warm space, buttercream will start to sweat, and piped buttercream people are bulbous and gaudy, their smiles grotesque as they sweat and, shining, finally melt. Pastries will sag. The fruit on the tarts begins to slide and bleed. Eventually, it turns brown. At the bakery, you can't stop time so much as wet it down, hold it still awhile with a pastry brush dipped in apricot glaze.

Once, you made morbid scenes out of French fries at a table in the McDonald’s in Davis Square. I remember how we laughed—your French fry man lay prone in a paper cup bath of bright ketchup, it seemed so funny.

You will not remember anymore, Conor, but I first met you on the steps of a church, very late at night or early-morning. You wore a black trench coat cinched into your body, and hunched yourself small. You were sad—forlorn. In the years that followed, you hid this sadness so well, I often forgot it was there. For most of our friendship I forgot it was there. Because you were funny—always funny. You joked about monkeys, pants, sex, love, death, made absurdist jokes and scathing ones. You made a series of animated cartoons you called Stick Figure Death Theater. Once, you made morbid scenes out of French fries at a table in the McDonald’s in Davis Square. I remember how we laughed—your French fry man lay prone in a paper cup bath of bright ketchup, it seemed so funny.

The phone call from a mutual friend was unexpected, one night as I rode in a car at Christmas-time up the steeply winding hill to my parents’ new house. I hardly expected that he would say you, say it was about you. You were midnight Rocky Horror Picture Shows and two a.m. after parties, weekend trips to Montreal, you were calls from California saying, you guys should come out. You were getting us all tickets to see the Mooney Suzuki, The Red Elvises, The Cramps; you were sawing tree limbs, cutting back brush in the yard with a scythe, all know-how and quickness. The phone in my lap buzzed in the dark: “Hey. I’m sorry to call. I’ve got bad news. Conor—”

I have discovered I actually don’t enjoy Berryman’s poetry much. It oscillates from contemplation to a sort of embarrassed despair. It has a gruffish humor but also a self-consciousness that somehow speaks to my own self-consciousness, which I dislike when losing sight of myself is my main reason for reading. But Berryman’s scholarship—his books and extensive notes, and his never-ending lists of readings and syllabi—these interest me, and ostensibly they're what I keep returning to see.

What I think I'm looking for, really, is marginalia: the asides and edits Berryman scrawled on the edges of pages, moments of careless life and aside thought. On a syllabus: “no desk copies have come.” Inserted via caret into the draft of a poem: “The tearful phone-calls fail.”

Berryman also killed himself. John Berryman and his father before him, John Smith, both did. You would not have known this.

There is a box in the archive that the archivists call his “death box.” Around it, the other papers and manila folders and cards and letters, all of the other boxes, can seem almost like a scaffolding for all of the interest his death arouses, though the archive is, of course, an affirmation of his life and his life’s work. Somehow, I find I keep ordering up neat parcels of Berryman’s life, one by one. I keep returning, to lock my coat and my bag in a locker, and sign in and back out of the reading room, I can’t seem to stop myself.

There are letters, Christmas cards from other poets. Lists of books, mythology, religion, classic literature. I browse slowly, taking notes with a borrowed pencil.

What I think I'm looking for, really, is marginalia: the asides and edits Berryman scrawled on the edges of pages, moments of careless life and aside thought. On a syllabus: “no desk copies have come.” Inserted via caret into the draft of a poem: “The tearful phone-calls fail.”

An archivist labeled everything Berryman carried on his body. The Herbert Tareyton cigarette packet, partially smoked. His wristwatch. His brown glasses, snapped in halves. The coins that surely jangled in his pocket when he put them there. At the archive, they are all kept in one cardboard box, and you can just order it. The things his body carried will be wheeled out on a cart in this box, and you can touch them all.

People sometimes order custom cakes, and they know exactly what they want. But most people want suggestions: flowers for a wedding, balloons for birthdays. They need to be asked, what is your child’s favorite color? How many people are in your family? A nine-inch cake serves 10- 15 people. A 12x16 inch sheet cake serves 24 to 48 people. It all depends on how much cake you want each guest to receive. The bakery organizes time by codifying celebrations through cakes.

An archivist labeled everything Berryman carried on his body. The Herbert Tareyton cigarette packet, partially smoked. His wristwatch. His brown glasses, snapped in halves. The coins that surely jangled in his pocket when he put them there. At the archive, they are all kept in one cardboard box, and you can just order it. The things his body carried will be wheeled out on a cart in this box, and you can touch them all.

Berryman was 57.

You were 36.

People traipse in all day long, and it's another kind of archive, an unending parade of graduations, birthdays, weddings, where they all order cakes with flaccid buttercream people, or the same insipid flowers. Piped gardens droop on cake after cake after cake.

I was there when you turned 21. I made you eat sweets. You remembered this the last time we spoke, that we had been out walking around town, and later I sang you Happy Birthday over tequila shots with candy pieces dropped in them and chocolate mini-cupcakes from the grocery store.

The bakery where I work is a pastel bizarro-world—buttercream greases the lens—and it isn’t even a very good bakery. The cakes at this bakery are not necessarily fresh. Many are made in advance and then frozen. The goods are all cranked out of another location across town and driven here, and the donuts sometimes arrive crushed, everything slunk together at the back corners of the trays, and we eat or throw out the worst and salvage the rest, fixing the frosting when we can. All of the cakes are goofily decorated in bright, airbrushy cartoons, and you would have enjoyed them, I think.

People traipse in all day long, and it's another kind of archive, an unending parade of graduations, birthdays, weddings, where they all order cakes with flaccid buttercream people, or the same insipid flowers. Piped gardens droop on cake after cake after cake.

When there are no customers, I fold pastry bags and practice writing with buttercream: Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Conor, everything won't fit on a cake. Life just plays out over and over and over, and in practice what time will not let us keep is enormous, unwieldy.

I knew you for 16, 17 years. Visited you when you lived in New York, lived with you briefly in California and we were never close friends, but continuous, in touch sporadically through romantic partners and moves, jobs and the slow work of growing up. All I have are some CD's you burned. A few papers and ticket stubs from shows and some photos, of you and your ex-wife, of us, friends, all of us smiling. Nothing to capture the long afternoons sprawled on the carpet watching movies, The Sting and Johnny Suede, weird things we picked out from the quirky little video store nearby, or the long nights, leaving parties and then staying up together, talking and drinking until dawn. The quarter-sway of your shoulders and hips when you walked, or the deep intonation and dark-bright vigor of your voice, the moody valleys when you endured but didn't really want cheering up, and I’m unequal to this: empty calories and seas of boxed papers cannot do enough.

Conor, everything won't fit on a cake. Life just plays out over and over and over, and in practice what time will not let us keep is enormous, unwieldy.

The glass display cases constantly pump cool air, but the cakes inside still sweat. The buttercream faces piped on them are garish, ghoulish. They’re hysterical. I eat cupcakes in the back, shoving them in my mouth, taking them in two bites apiece; I eat cupcakes and bread and donuts and muffins in between helping people, until I go home, sweaty, sickened, feeling coated—under my nails, the tops of my thighs, my lips and mouth—in cheap sugar.

I go home thinking about occasions that mark time, and all the marginalia that will not be saved.