JD (10 page)

Yes, she did sometimes sit on the arm of my chair at a party and watch me being smart. And I felt smart. So I wonder: all the ways we've grown apart, did it start with the day she figured out I wasn't so smart? And did I start failing that day?

Did I ever adore Jonathan? Did I ever even love him?

When I married him I was just relieved to have my little lab report problem so neatly solved. I don't think I even asked myself whether I was in love with Jonathan Ascher. And if I ask it now: did I love Jonathan that night at the Café Lucien or ever, did I ever?

There was a boy in Baltimore—I didn't even know him, he cut in one night at a high school prom and held me in his arms for perhaps two minutes, almost sixty years ago. I remember the dimple in his chin and the feel of his hand on my daringly bare shoulder blade and the way, for a couple of minutes, he made me feel graceful. And my heart leaps, as I cannot think it ever did for Jonathan. But I had no ever after with that boy, nothing to mar that moment, and so very, very much
after
with Jonathan. Maybe there was something before the after, some instant I've forgotten?

I don't think I'm lying when I tell myself it wasn't just because I was in trouble. I felt ready—would have been ready without my predicament, except the subject might never have come up—to spend my life with him. Or, more accurately, to spend
his
life with him. Signing on to be Milton's wife, or Tolstoy's, or—if Jonathan wasn't destined for any such glory—to be Dorothea Brooke to his Casaubon.

I was twenty-two, just a year out of Smith. He was almost forty. His black hair had a little white in it. I mean a very little, just here and there, isolated white hairs scattered in the brush cut he didn't change until the day he died. So in ordinary light it could look like his hair was black but glistening. While, under the moderne fluorescent lights at SLS or some of the galleries we went to, he looked like an old man.

Peggy, a friend from school who met Jonathan and me once for drinks, said in the powder room that I was just another sophomore with a crush. “This is just Mr. Rountree again.” I denied ever having a crush on Mr. Rountree, who taught Romantic Poetry. Maybe I was sometimes at the fringes of the tittering crowd that would gather around him after a lecture. But I was there because I actually had a question about Coleridge's cosmology, not because Mr. Rountree looked like Walter Pidgeon.

Oh, very well, I had a crush on Mr. Rountree. Even though he could have been my father. Or because he could have been, for me and the rest of his gaggle, our fathers apotheosized. He had read,
unlike our fathers, everything, not just the Great Books in 101–102 but also every one of the optional supplemental readings. He inhabited Western Civilization, and so had about him a maturity that made senators and admirals seem like Boy Scouts. Yet he had stayed slim, somehow, and young: he stepped into the classroom with a buoyancy ever so different from the way our gray fathers stepped off the evening train in Lake Forest or Bronxville. As if poetry kept his arteries unobstructed. And maybe it did: maybe if our fathers had, just once or twice a year, been startled awake by a line of verse they wouldn't have turned into the sweet, broken men who had helped us get our trunks to Railway Express and kissed us good-bye at the station and then went back to their lifetime reading lists of newspapers and interrogatories and ticker tapes.

So was that all Jonathan was? A perfected Rountree, Rountree if he'd published two novels by then and had met Alfred Kazin and Dwight Macdonald, Rountree with a little bohemian edge, but still Professor Daddy?

No: I can't quite put my finger on it, and surely couldn't have then. But something about Rountree—about all the Rountrees at Smith and, I'd guess, at the other Six Sisters—was dead, no matter how youthful their step. Some afternoons I'd walk by and see him in his office, with the tardy New England spring shut out by a window that had carelessly been painted closed. He was just like our fathers, but a slower learner. What he knew was just what our fathers knew, except it didn't rhyme when our fathers knew it. He only carried himself a little more youthfully because, unlike our fathers, he spent his days surrounded by girls who didn't know it yet.

I don't say I was grown-up enough to see all this. It was only a whiff of something that I somehow caught and that kept me aloof. And the whole point is: there was no death about Jonathan. He was thirty-nine when we married; his brow already had furrows the depth of Alpine valleys, already sometimes he stopped in mid-sentence and never recovered, like some old coot. But he hadn't failed yet. Words hadn't failed him yet.

July 1O, 1964

I called the number Robert had written down and--Robert's
promise to the contrary--found myself talking to Edgar Villard. I could have hung up, but I decided to brazen it out. “Edgar, this is Jonathan Ascher. I was trying to get Robert.”

“Jonathan Ascher! My. You know, a good many of my friends try to get Robert.”

“Is he hard to get?”

“Evidently not.” He called out, “Robert! A suitor!” Back on the line: “You know, I'm having a few people in to watch the end of the Republican convention next Thursday, perhaps you'd come.”

“I don't--”

“Of course you will. I've capitulated at last and bought a color television, just so I can see the dear red, white, and blue Goldwaterettes or whatever those captivating children are called. Ah, here's Robert. Eightish, then.”

Robert was on the line before I could say neverish. “Hey, buddy.”

“I thought her highness never answered the phone.”

“Heh, right. Except I was taking a crap.”

This vulgarity seems to me, a day later, to have been calculated. Partly to impress on me that he was a real guy, even if he roosted in Edgar's gilded cage. But something more, something at my expense? With, undoubtedly, Edgar still listening.

Whatever the subtext, I was annoyed. Not enough to deter me from my--purpose, I was about to write, but what was my
purpose
in calling Robert Last-name-I-don't-even-know? Well, to get laid, obviously. But for that objective I have a drawer full of scrawled phone numbers.

Did I set out to steal something from Edgar Villard? Except he practically gave Robert away, like the father of the bride.

Robert said Monday night would be good, but I have class, so I suggested Tuesday afternoon.

“I don't …” Robert hesitated. “I don't usually, you know …”

I knew. “We have heavy drapes,” I said. “Cause there's this bar across the street with neon. So it stays dark in the room, even in the daytime.”

“Oh, that's okay, then. I don't know, it's just a thing I got.”

He and half the working stiffs I've known. It wasn't about being ashamed of fucking a guy. The proletariat won't fuck man, woman, or beast with the lights on or all their clothes off.

So I have a date. I'm not sure I've ever had exactly this sort of assignation before. This isn't Let's meet for a drink (meaning, let's fuck) or Let's go to the movies (meaning, let's fuck). Just, baldly, come over and I will pull the curtains tight and …

Of course I am inclined to say this is the way things ought to be: healthy, forthright. But that is a political view. It is not what I feel, exactly. Even bugs do some kind of little dance first. They don't just pull the damn curtains.

July 14, 1964

Last night Genet.
Our Lady of the Flowers
.

I mentioned to Willis that I was going to teach Genet, and he said, “Oh, you want to shake them up?”

“No, they're unshakeable. I bet the only thing that really offends them is that
Our Lady
isn't in paperback yet. So they had to shell out $6.5O.”

“Wow. My Germans would be really unhappy.”

Of course I wanted to shake them up. To make them read about what the translator calls, for some reason, “homoseckshuals.”

In class I brandished the April issue of
Playboy
, the cover of which showed, bizarrely, Peter Sellers in some kind of sheik costume, along with a kneeling houri suggestively nuzzling the hilt of his sword. There was a little contented tittering, from both genders.
Playboy
is safely racy, in a clean American way, not like that weird explosive French
stuff, full of queenly thugs and blasphemy. The
Playboy
interview that month was with Genet, and I read aloud one passage: “I now think that if my books arouse readers sexually, they're badly written, because the poetic emotion should be so strong that no reader is moved sexually. In so far as my books are pornographic, I don't reject them. I simply say that I lacked grace.”

“So what do you think?” I said. “Is the poetic emotion so strong that none of you was moved sexually?”

Stolid Glover answered, perhaps too promptly, “Hell, I sure wasn't moved sexually.” There were some approving murmurs. Of course no one would want it thought that all those fantastic degeneracies excited them.

Then, astoundingly, the one Negro in the class spoke for the first time all summer. What is his name? Bentley, I think. “I don't know there's much difference between poetry and sex.”

Glover rolled his eyes. Bentley was behind him but must have intuited his expression. He said emphatically, orating to the back of Glover's neck: “I mean they both--they make sense of things for just a little while. They take you out of the world for a minute. And then it's over.”

I started to say, “Yes, I see--”

He cut me off. “But what happens, see, what happens in this Genet stuff, is people go out of the world and don't come back. Like he's saying you shouldn't come back, you got to find a way of staying out there. Or …” That was all. He subsided.

All the other students looked down at their desks, apparently embarrassed for him. As if any of them would ever, for one instant of their lives, have a thought half as clear as Bentley's.

“You can reread a poem,” I said. “You can have the sensation again and again.”

Bentley shrugged. Not an oh-you-got-me-there shrug, but a this-square-will-never-get-it shrug.

I said, “Why don't we take our coffee break now.” There's not supposed to be a coffee break, but I can't hurl myself against the wall of their incomprehension for ninety uninterrupted minutes. A few of us filed downstairs to the vending machines. I got a Coke. It comes in one of those new cans with a doohickey I can never pry open. Glover helped, giving me a pitying look. Poor unworldly prof, when I just can't open it because I bite my nails.

Bentley didn't buy anything, looked out the window for a while. At last he turned and said, “Reading a poem twice isn't the same at all, any more than making it with the same chick twice.” Then he left the break room and, I knew, was headed downstairs and out the front door. He didn't come back after the break, I wonder if he'll be back again. If not, that was the last flash of insight that will trouble Mr. Ascher's Twentieth Century Fiction class in the summer session of 1964. Or the rest of the century, for that matter.

I've been turning it over since last night. You got to find a way of staying out there.

This afternoon is my “date” with Robert. I find I am rather dreading it, earlier this morning I even thought for a moment of calling it off. I didn't. Partly because I didn't want to call and risk talking to Edgar Villard again. Partly because I need to find a way of staying out there.

July 15, 1964

I couldn't buzz Robert in because the landlord still hasn't fixed the goddamn thing, after all these months. So I went downstairs. Robert had traded his Upper East Side costume for coarse twill pants and a broad-striped jersey; I half wondered where his longshoreman's hook was.

As he trudged up behind me, he said, “Jeez, no wonder you stay so skinny. Them's some stairs.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“It's okay, when I was a kid in Plainfield we was six flights up. Just got kinda spoiled in Villa Villard.”

“Is that what he calls it?”

“No, I do. It's Italian.”

“Like you?”

“Me? No, I'm Greek.”

When we got upstairs, he looked around. I don't mean glanced, I mean he practically cased the joint, eyeing everything. Including the picture of Mickey. “Your kid?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You still with his mother?”

“Uh-huh. They're away, though. At the beach.”

“I got it. So you get a little summer fun. Like that movie, the guy and Marilyn Monroe.”

“Yeah,
The Seven Year Itch
,” I said. “I'm getting close to a fourteen-year itch. You want something to drink?”

“Nah. Turns out I'm in kind of a hurry, me and Edgar are going to some party I forgot about, and I gotta get back.” He was already peeling off his jersey, revealing an oddly delicate Orthodox crucifix, with the extra bar, glittering from a forest of black hair. Before I could cross the room to him, he had found his way to my bedroom and was pulling the drapes closed.

I was a little put off by his kind-of-a-hurry, even if there was no other business on the agenda. I said, “Well, I think I could use a glass of water,” and headed to the kitchen. I heard him chuckle.

I loitered a good seven or eight seconds before joining him. He still had his shorts on, and his socks--silk and calf-high, in odd contrast to the working man's costume scattered on the floor. He closed the door behind me, and the bedroom was almost as dark as I had promised.

We sat on the edge of the bed. I put an arm around his damp back and moved in to kiss him, but he eluded me, so my lips just grazed stubble. I sat a minute, wondering how to proceed--wondering if I wanted to. He looked at me with, as best I could make out, a mix of amusement and perplexity.
Finally he said, in what I can only characterize as a commanding whisper, “Why don't you get undressed and lie on your belly?”