Augusta Played (26 page)

Finally, feeling the need for saying something, Gus said, “They ought to hand out some guidelines for people like us. A kind of Emily Post to the etiquette of assassination. I don't know how to react anymore.”

“You don't
know!
Jesus Christ, how do you feel?”

“I feel the same way you do. That's not what I meant. It's just that—” She hesitated. Norman's face looked like the victim of his feelings; it seemed to be collapsing under the weight of anger, panic, grief and more grief; it was being overcome by anguish. She wanted to reach out and touch it.

“Tell that goddamn canary to shut up,” he said.

“Don't take it out on Tweetie. It's not his fault.”

“I know whose fault it was. The fault of an Arab.”

“You can't blame all the Arabs, Norman. It's an isolated instance of a crazy man.”

“It was a crazy
Arab
, and it's hardly an isolated instance.”

“You mean his brother?”

“And King.”

“King wasn't killed by an Arab. Neither was Jack Kennedy.”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Because I'm Gentile?”

“And Southern.”

Gus carried the dishes back out to the kitchen and dumped them into the sink. “You're being unfair,” she said, returning. “I'm sorry about Bobby, I know how you felt about him. I felt the same way.”

“You may have felt similar. You could not feel the same thing I felt.” Norman knew he was being unfair, but he couldn't stop—he had to rail at someone, and Sirhan Sirhan was not available. It felt to Norman almost as if he had been programmed to say these things, and there was no way he could not say them. Input X resulted in Output Y. What Norman wished he could have conveyed to Gus was that this compulsion was as painful for him as it was bewildering to her.

“You think nobody else knows what it's like to be the underdog,” she said. “You forget that the South was defeated. You forget the carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.” As she conjured up these bygones, she realized she herself had not remembered them since high school. “There were years of some of the ugliest and dirtiest fighting in history, followed by years and
years
of hypocritical self-serving righteous moralizing on the part of the North. If you think the North was fighting for high ideals, you don't know as much history as you think you do. And if you think the South lost because it was morally inferior and deserved to, you don't know the first thing about military strategy!”

“What do you know about it?”

Gus couldn't answer. She knew nothing about it. She had no idea where these words had come from; they had simply materialized out of nowhere in answer to his, but as she said them, she realized they were a protest against being lectured to by him as well as by the North. Instantly, she shut up.

Norman caught it—the self-realization and the clamping down on it. “What I want you to tell me, Gus, is how come you're acting like Scarlett O'Hara? You know perfectly well that it was a damn good thing the South
didn't
win. Where would we be if you had? Lester Maddox could be eating turtle soup in the White House.”

“I don't know why you're so angry with me.”

“I'm not angry with you,” he said. “It just happens to be a lousy stinking morning!”

“Don't shout at me!”

“I'll shout as much as I feel like it and right now I feel like it!”

“Tom and Cyril will hear you. You'll wake them up.”

“Somebody should wake them up,” Norman said. “Somebody should wake them up and inform them that in the middle of the night a fucking Arab madman blew the brains out of the only hope this country had!”

“From what you told me,” Gus said, “the country still has your father to look forward to.”

51

A
FTER
the quarrel wore off, dissipating into the general heat and noise of a New York summer, this particular summer being overlaid by a heightened sensitivity of national proportions, a harplike quivering of highstrung nerves, a shimmering of the spirit as it stretched like a transparent but luminous trampoline across the land from sea to shining sea, Gus and Norman felt closer than ever. They
were
closer, sitting side by side on the dark red and blue comforter. The television, which had always been there as background, source of late movies, afternoon talk shows, and falsified body counts, became the instrument of their mutuality, became the way they communicated with each other. Even Tweetie felt neglected, and sometimes squawked off-key. In fact, for the rest of the summer, Gus and Norman lived in front of the television set. In the daytime, Gus practiced and Norman worked on his dissertation, but in the evenings and on into night, they watched the country fall apart on an eighteen-inch screen.

It drew them together, the sense of being besieged. They felt that they agreed on a number of important things and that this agreement differentiated them from many of the people they saw on television, in the streets, or at other people's apartments. Dinky Ledbetter, whom Gus had seen only once or twice since their wedding “reception” at Max's Kansas City, called to ask if she could stash some acid at their place until Phil got back from L.A., where he was meeting with a sales rep, and could pick it up, and Gus said no almost automatically, knowing that Norman would have said no. “Hey,” Dinky said, “I didn't mean to offend you. I didn't know you were straight. Straight like a strait.”

Looking at the blank wall over the desk, Gus had a clear image of Dinky's delicately bulging eyeballs and wet lips. She must be high now, Gus thought. “It's all right,” Gus said. “I didn't realize it either.”

But hanging up, Gus whispered to Tweetie that it was really Norman who was the straight one. Norman wouldn't tolerate drugs on the premises. He had tried grass once at blood-brother Phil's instigation and flipped out for about five hours. “It was the most horrible time of my life,” Norman reported—and that was grass, not acid. Phil said it was an extreme reaction and the problem was Norman's love of rationality and fear of not being in control. Norman said that was a lot of shit. Either way, it was of no concern to Gus. She wouldn't have objected to holding the stuff for Dinky, but she wouldn't touch it herself. Gus had never smoked. Anything. It was hell on your lungs and a flutist could get away with it only if he was somebody like Kincaid, a man and a man with a large chest. Even Kincaid had confined his smoking to the summers, when he wasn't giving concerts and was swimming daily. He quit every fall.

On the whole, then, Gus and Norman were aligned with the counterculture in some respects, and with the establishment in others, and because of this they belonged to the very large class of people in the industrialized world, East and West, who do not belong to any of the traditionally defined classes and who therefore have no institutions or organized methods for making their feelings and opinions known even to one another, much less to the other classes. They were not, properly speaking, bourgeoisie, since they employed no one and had no capital, nor as yet qualified academicians; they were members neither of the ruling class nor the working class. They were not part of the Silent Majority or the People, because these groups always had very vocal spokesmen who quite frequently said things Norman and Augusta disagreed with. Gus and Norman were, in fact, part of a large and much neglected class, the
silent
silent majority, that group of people for whom the only reasonable political platform is one which can encompass all the many ambivalences of any honest person's attitudes to life, and who therefore have no merit in the eyes of political philosophers and no theory. The only party that ever attempts to speak for them is the multipartisan party, Music.

In August, Gus and Norman watched the Democratic convention. This time it was at night that the world reversed itself in front of their eyes, turned upside down and left them feeling they had fallen off. They felt weightless, unreal, as though they had lost all link to any specific time and place and would merely float forever through a universe of whirling events.

Gus scrunched her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, nibbling on her fingernail.

“Fucking Fascists,” Norman said. He put his arm around Gus and she leaned her head on his shoulder.

He kissed her hair, the black-and-white images from the television screen flickering over it. “Hush,” he said, calming her. “Things have to get better someday.”

52

I
T
WAS
September. Sidney called Richard and told him that if he knew what was good for him he would deliver the goods to Birdie. Richard found his hands shaking and his heart leaping, two things not easily accomplished at once. Birdie was not sleeping with Gussie's husband! He could restake his claim, as it were!

“You set up that dance recital for her,” Sidney said, “or everything you don't know about an M4, you are going to learn from looking into the barrel. Do I make myself clear?” Sidney had no intention of doing anything even semiserious, but he figured Hacking was just unversed enough in the ways of the real world to fancy that the loss of his life would make a difference to it. All conductors had egos as big as kettledrums. The man would enjoy thinking somebody was after his tail. Besides, Sidney was still furious, when he thought how miserable Hacking had made Birdie by doing exactly what she so often said men did, jumping to conclusions.

“This is the best news I've had all day, Mr. Gold,” Richard said. “For my wife as well. You may not understand this, Mr. Gold, but my wife is really unhappy when I'm not cheating on her. It's been a long, hot summer.”

“Personally, Hacking, I could care less what makes your Hacking, I could care less what makes your wife happy. My concern is for Birdie. Does your wife know you and Birdie got a thing going?”

“Well, not precisely.”

“What, pray tell, is imprecisely?”

But at this point, Richard began to realize that he didn't have to tell Sidney Gold his life story. “Look here,” he said, “I don't have to tell you my life story.”

“By which I give infinite thanks, believe me.”

Richard felt wounded. “It's not an uninteresting life story,” he said. “But I've only just turned forty. You of all people will appreciate that I have a lot of time to go yet.” Remembering his father's heart attack, he looked around for wood to knock on. “With any luck, I could have an extremely lengthy life story.”

“Not if you don't get Birdie that concert date she wants, you won't. Just try not coming through for her, and we'll see how deliriously cheerful your wife is when I tell her what you've been up to. My guess is, she'll be most interested in my guns. I hung on to some shells too.”

53

N
ORMAN
DID
NOT
CALL
Richard Hacking in September. He decided to wait. After all, there had been a summer. A summer for everybody in the northern hemisphere. To Norman, it had been a summer like the
then
clause in an
if-then
statement: if 1967, then a subsequent season of unraveling, riots fizzling into streetfights, aims into their contraries. Something about the way things had turned out satisfied Norman arcanely—not the way they had developed, but that it was the way he had foreseen. But why shouldn't this satisfy him? Noah would have felt like a fool, boarding his ark, if the sun had kept shining.

It seemed to Norman that there was no need to borrow trouble—it would come sooner or later anyway. Meanwhile, who knew what difference this summer of television might not have made to everyone? Gus was practicing—or said she was practicing. Norman found it difficult to believe that so much work could go into a two-hour debut, but he was willing to believe it was necessary. What did he know from flutes? If playing the flute on stage was such a complicated business, maybe Gus had given up her extracurricular pastime. Norman watched her polishing her flute with the soft rag, ironing her white blouses, washing dishes, and he knew he loved her very much, though perhaps not as much as he had when he married her. And as he thought about it, he began to feel that perhaps he did not love her even as much as he was currently under the impression that he did, that how he felt and how he told himself he felt were not necessarily in this instance more than in any other the same thing.

That there was no pain associated with this realization embarrassed him; he felt somehow ashamed before his conscience, but of course, this was ludicrous, since his conscience was only an internalized value structure, and, he should ask himself, internalized from what or whom? Modes of thought (or non-thought) which were excusable when you were five, say, were absurd, even comic, when you had hit thirty and were well aware that your old man was not only not God but was an old lech…because that was undeniably what he was, however much sympathy he might feel for his father's itch.

Norman now saw that one by one he had been letting go the lines of emotive affect that linked him to Augusta, and that, furthermore, many of the lines had operated as connectives only on a superficial level, surface to surface. The need to remove himself from the pain that Gus's infidelity threatened him with had made it impossible to feel pain now. And some pain would have been proper, he thought—until he convinced himself that in feeling such a need he was only giving in to a certain set of social expectations—namely, that failing to love someone (your father) was punishable (by castration)—and he was on a guilt trip that would get him nowhere. This, at any rate, is how it looked to Norman. What he was totally unprepared for and failed to analyze was the effect the Onassis marriage had on him.

Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on the island of Skorpios on October 20, 1968, three days after Augusta's birthday, and unwittingly plunged Norman into fresh and angry gloom. So much for the memory of the Kennedy brothers. Bobby had not been dead six months. That Jackie had not been married to Bobby didn't mitigate the main fact: women's sexual loyalties were as easily shifted by chance as the fumes from an exhaust pipe by the wind off the Hudson.