JD (11 page)

I complied with this practical suggestion, he started, he finished, he withdrew. At once he was on his feet, pulling his shorts back up; he had never removed the socks. “I got to take a leak,” he said.

He opened the door, found his way to the bathroom without asking--having cased the joint. A trapezoid of light washed over my abashed body. Shamed, used. No, that isn't right; here it is, just a couple of hours later, and already something is slipping away. I really should try to articulate what I felt those few seconds, looking down at myself in the light while I listened to Robert pissing.

Used is almost there. Not abused or misused, but
put to use
, like a faithful workhorse or a tool congenial to the hand. And then put down, the business being done.

I had let a few guys do it before. Simply as a favor, or once or twice just a way of getting somebody off when I didn't have the energy to go on ministering to him. It was just a physical act, just a convexity meeting a concavity, it didn't define me in some way. But in Robert's mind--I suppose from the moment he set eyes on me--this is what I was on the planet for. He had formed an intention, carried it out, and was now back in the room dressing without looking at me. He wasn't contemptuous, he was just done. He sat down next to me to lace his shoes, looked at me at last. “Ain't you getting up?”

“Yeah, in a second.”

He patted my thigh, smiled, stood up. “I guess I will go get a glass of water. Unless you got a beer.”

“Maybe, in the icebox. I thought you were in a hurry.”

“Yeah, well.” He grinned. “I was.”

He went off to the kitchen.

I was almost dizzy. Still am, at the thought that for a few minutes somebody--not I, but somebody--had a clear idea of what I was on the planet for and was happy I had been put
here. As though I had been pulled, just for a second, into the present tense. And as I write this I long to have him back here, his weight on me.

I have heard Edgar Villard say, more than once, that he has never been fucked by anyone. I rarely see Villard, if even I have heard this more than once he must say it very often indeed. But I'm sure now it isn't true. Edgar has to have felt the same way I did: taken, and wanting to be taken again.

I pulled my shorts on, went out, and found Robert, beer in hand, looking again at Mickey's picture. “How old's your boy?” he said.

“Twelve.”

“Oh, same age as mine.”

“You have a son?”

“Yeah, lives with his mother in Jersey City.” He got a distant look--well, distant as Jersey City, anyway. “A shortstop,” he said.

He waited for me to name my son's position. “Um … my kid plays basketball some.”

“Ah,” he said, dismissively. Back to his boy: “I'm starting to see a little more of Tony, now he's old enough his mother lets him take the Hudson Tubes into town. We'll meet at Thirty-Third Street, maybe every couple weeks. I'll take him to Gimbel's or wherever, maybe buy him some clothes his mother doesn't like. You see the kids are wearing these kinda white jeans that stop three inches above their ankles? And then we'll have lunch at the Automat, he still loves the Automat.”

“Does he ever stay over?”

“You mean at the Villa? With Edgar?”

We both chuckled. He wet his lips with his tongue, deciding whether to tell me this next: “I don't know what--what she told him about me. I mean, I hope nothing, he never acts like he knows nothing. But I … I'm happy to be with Edgar, you know? I don't want you thinking I'm there just because he, you know, pays for stuff.”

Which I had been thinking.

“Hell, I got my workmen's comp, I could make it. I'm there because I … I like the guy.” He sighed. “I'm me, I live the way I do. I wish I had a life I could let my kid see. A kid ought to be able to see his father.”

I didn't register this, I was wondering what work Robert had done and what injury he was being compensated for.

He shrugged and put his beer down. He had been, I guess, expecting some kind of answer. Since he had told me something he'd probably never told Edgar.

As he headed to the door I heard myself saying, “Hey, you don't have my number.”

He wheeled around, grinning. “I don't. How much longer is your family away?”

“About a month.”

“Yeah, I'll take your number.”

He stood behind me as I wrote the number down. He didn't touch me, but I felt as though my whole body was vibrating to his presence, a few inches away.

When he was gone, I found myself thinking about Ham, who saw his father. Saw Noah drunk and naked, and was cursed for it, he and all his generations.

I couldn't at first pinpoint just why Jonathan's little conceit, about being used like a tool congenial to the hand, caused me to shiver in revulsion. Then I understood. Obviously what he stopped himself from writing was: used like a woman. Maybe he even did write this, then effaced it on the magic Corrasable Bond. Deciding that, whomever this journal was meant for, it wouldn't do for the reader to discover that Jonathan for one instant felt like a woman. And of course he didn't. Women—or at least this woman—may have felt used now and then, but I never felt it was what I was put on the planet for. That is a man's idea of how a woman feels: it justifies everything.

July 17, 1964

I had assumed that, if even I was included on Villard's guest list for last night, it had to be very long. But
there was just a handful of people--Dennis O'Grady and his postulant, the architect with the enormous glasses, Willis and his Cro-Magnon dancer friend. Villard had rearranged his divans and hassocks so we could all sit in a semicircle facing the TV. He said, heavily, to me: “I'm afraid Robert couldn't be here. So I shall be fetching your cocktail.”

“Oh. Is he okay?”

“Yes. Actually he could have been here, but since I'm monopolizing the television receiver and he wishes to see a baseball game, he has adjourned to Clancy's on Second Avenue.”

I was tempted to adjourn myself. But I joined the others gathered around the (for God's sake)
receiver
. It was, as promised, color, which I have never seen outside a store window. Living color, they call it in the ads. This would be accurate if one lived in a community where everyone had jaundice and all the rooms were painted cerulean blue.

Dennis O'Grady said, “Edgar, I don't think you've got this tuned in right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Isn't there some way to fix the color? Or is this how it's supposed to be?”

“I should imagine this is how it is supposed to be. It was installed by a burly young man who fairly exuded technical competence and electronic savoir faire.”

It turned out the show was in color only for the commercials. Once they went to the live feed from the hall, the picture was black and white. Goldwater wasn't on yet. Various lesser luminaries took the podium; while they brayed, the TV showed reporters wandering through the hall interviewing delegates, or sometimes two men who were suspended above the floor, as in the gondola of a dirigible, surveying the puny creatures below them. Villard knew their names--Hunter and Brinker, something like that--one sepulchral, the other with the wry look of a reporter on the police beat who's seen it all.

They chatted. One would read something--a statement just issued by pathetic Governor Scranton, a list of other important events that had happened there in the San Francisco Cow Palace (presumably hosed down for this occasion), a snippet about the youngest and oldest delegates. Then the other would make some comment, the two would chuckle. So this is what happens on television! Like a minstrel show, Interlocutor and Bones, but without the subtle wit. I would rather have heard the old-fashioned speakers on the podium, with their flat Midwestern voices and their encomia to the great state of Bontana.

Willis turned to O'Grady and said, “I did one of your poems last night.”

“Did? You tricked with one of my poems?”

Stolid Willis didn't get this. “I mean I taught it. To my class.”

“Jeez. I didn't even know I was dead. Which poem?”

“Well, it's … called ‘Poem.' I mean, they're kind of all called ‘Poem,' aren't they?”

O'Grady giggled. “Yeah. Titles--I think giving titles to poems is like giving them to people. Reverend. Professor.” He winked at me. “It tells you what to think about them before you have a chance to get to know them.”

“Hm,” Willis said, not unimpressed. “Anyway, it's the one that starts out with the patterns the shadows of the fire escapes make on the sidewalk.”

“What? I've never written about that.”

“Really? I was sure--”

Heh. I may not be a rising young poet--I am none of those three things, I guess--but anybody reading my little
arbeits
can be pretty sure whether I am or am not talking about fire escapes. Am I philistine to think this is a virtue?

“So how did your class like the poem?” O'Grady yawned, to make plain that it didn't matter. Except it mattered enough for him to ask.

“They--well, they don't seem to like poems.”

“Ah.” O'Grady shrugged. “Me either, some days.” His little minion looked at him wonderingly. The child probably imagined that artists are artists every waking hour. That O'Grady denies this is a clue that he may be an authentic artist.

“Hush, now, I want to listen,” Villard said.

We all turned dutifully back to the TV, even Willis and his dancer. The dancer tried to look serious, a miscalculation.

Goldwater was at the podium, waiting for the clapping and cheering to end. He smiled and performed the required little gestures, Oh, this is embarrassing, please stop so I can speak. We demand this self-deprecation by a man who is receiving the ovation that is the climax of his life. In the old newsreels, even Hitler at his enormous rallies sometimes managed to look surprised and abashed by the thundering crowds.

The architect said, “You have to give him this. He's kind of a handsome guy.”

True enough, I guess--especially if you compare him to the basset-eared hick we call the leader of the Free World. (I am the actual leader of the Free World, at least until Martha gets back to town.) I don't like handsome men. Is this merely envy?

I know I'm a homely guy. Profoundly: ears the size of bread-and-butter plates, a huge but squashed canine nose, a chin that has failed to report for duty. I thrust my mug out into the world, but I have no illusions about it, and of course I wish it were an asset instead of a liability I must make up for with fast talk or my charming willingness to abase myself.

Not just envy, no: it is their innocence I despise. If, your whole life, you walk into rooms and people are gratified to see you, simply as a physical object, you must develop the delusion that people are glad to see
you
, personally.
That they love your soul and not just your face. And it's only a step from that to imagining that your soul is not, like others' souls, a cesspool of barbarity and infantile greed. When Jesus declaimed, “Let him who is without sin, etc.” I bet it was some Pharisee with a cleft chin and wavy hair who cast the first stone.

I went for another drink. As I came back, Goldwater was saying, “And I needn't remind you--but I will--it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.”

O'Grady's catamite looked perplexed. “Is that true?” O'Grady just smiled at him, as one might at an especially goofy puppy.

The architect said, “Arguably.”

“Of course you'd think that, you old Nazi,” Villard said. “What I especially like is, ‘I needn't remind you--but I will.'”

“Yes,” I said. “There must be a Greek name for that little rhetorical turn.”

“Ah, there's a Greek name for everything. As Robert will, perhaps, have taught you.”

I said, “Oh, I already knew those names.”

O'Grady looked over at me … alertly. I wonder if he has also received a little language instruction from Robert.

Goldwater was still expostulating about the coming liberation of Europe. “Now, this is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.”

O'Grady drawled: “Oh, Mary! Step away from the podium and give us the moon shot!”

Everyone laughed--even Villard--so I refused to. Not that it wasn't a little clever, in a juvenile way. I had, still have this morning, some uninvestigated sore spot about O'Grady.

My mind wandered--or rather, it headed quite happily, tail wagging, toward the recollection of various Greek
things Robert had taught me. By the time I turned back to the TV, Goldwater was saying, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And--”

The crowd erupted; he couldn't get through the next sentence, but was left inanely murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank …”

Villard sneered. “There, you see, he positively revels in it. He--”

I put in, “It's true, isn't it?” I said this just to torment, but it is true.

O'Grady said, “Well, if it's not a vice I want no part of it.”

Goldwater could at last go on: “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The rhythm had been spoiled, but the crowd went crazy again: it was their chance to spit on Rockefeller and Scranton and the like. All those fancy-pants Easterners who lived in states full of snobs and Greeks.

Goldwater finished up pretty soon, and then there were the usual balloons and the embrace of the vice-presidential candidate, some obscure schmuck from Long Island, and a conga line of the promised Goldwaterettes. The girls looked like cheerleaders, the boys like Hitlerjugend.

I went to the Venetian Powder Room to take a leak. When I got back to the living room, the famous architect was saying, “All this politics is pointless, we'll have blown ourselves up one way or another soon enough.”