JD (19 page)

“I mean, you're not going to start telling him what you do in the tearooms.”

“Touché. But I wish we were in a world where I could do that.”

“No, you don't,” Willis said.

September 13, 1966

Martha's mother is having an operation. If I were the consultant I'd recommend a laryngectomy, but it's just her gall bladder. So Martha's down looking after her father, which I suspect pretty much consists of making sure the ice cube trays are filled, and Mickey and I are in the paradise of bachelors. Which would be a tad more blissful if I didn't have to stay home with him every night. The kid's fourteen years old, I'm sure he gets into plenty of trouble outside the apartment. Why should I have to babysit him? But I do, so my only opportunity for fooling around is in the daytime, when he's off at school.

Yesterday I called Robert, Villard's guy. We haven't been together in a while because he doesn't usually bring tricks to Villa Villard, and of course I can't bring them to the Ascher abode when the census of Aschers is greater than one.

“I can't,” Robert said. “We're just on our way to London. As soon as Edgar finishes with his hatboxes and steamer trunks.”

“London,” I said.

“Yeah, Edgar goes to buy shoes.”

“Oh, of course, where else?”

“He's very particular about his shoes.” He chuckled. “Anyway, wish you'd called sooner. You're a good lay.”

This meant more to me than anything the
Saturday Review
could have said about me. “Maybe we'll figure out some time when you get back.”

“Yeah, Edgar keeps me on a pretty tight leash when we're over there. I'll be pretty horny when I get back. Unless I find a little something on the
Queen Mary
.”

“You're sailing? I would have thought Edgar could afford the jet.”

“We're just sailing on the way back. Edgar says the
Queen Mary
's for sale and it might be our last chance for--what did he say? A grand crossing. Like I ain't spent enough time on ships. So anyway, you got a rain check.”

Which I will certainly cash. But it wasn't going to get me laid yesterday. I called Louis, an adequate fuck whose cardinal virtue is that he is almost always available. “Hey, Louis, Jonathan,” I said. He said, “Hey,” and then, softly drawling: “What you up to?” Something in his inflection made those the four nastiest words in the English language. I panted, “Just wondered if you wanted to come over.” “Half an hour,” he said--always says, no matter what time of day it is. “Half an hour.”

I asked him once what he did for a living that left him free to drop his pants day or night on thirty minutes' notice. All he would say was, “I got me some deals going.” This gave me a momentary thrill, as if he were tied somehow to the underworld. But then so is the guy who picks up our garbage, and the guy who runs the Dubois. In this town the underworld is about as humdrum as … Louis's lovemaking.

As usual, he arrived on time and came early. But this once, instead of dressing in ten seconds flat and, mercifully, taking his leave, he fell asleep. I thought what the hell, put an arm around him, and felt myself dozing. When I opened my eyes I glanced at the clock and, sweet fuck, it was 3:15 in the afternoon. I shook Louis awake and told
him to get dressed quick, Mickey might be coming home from school.

Louis hadn't been gone two minutes when Mickey came in. Long enough that they probably didn't pass on the stairs. But I bet Mickey saw him coming out of the building. Me, I was standing in the living room in my underwear and socks, in the middle of the afternoon. Mickey eyed me, face perfectly blank. Did he put one and one together? Does he even know one and one do this sort of thing? I have no idea. It is easier to decipher the emotions of a goldfish than to read Mickey when he does not wish to be read.

To explain my dishabille, I said, “I was feeling sick, some kind of bug, so I went back to bed.”

“Oh. Um … can I fix you something?” This said so solemnly that I had to swallow hard to keep from bawling right in front of him.

“Why don't you--listen, how about you run down to Beppi's and get us each a slice? Let me get my wallet. Get three slices, you have two, whatever you want. I want pepperoni.”

When he was gone I did cry. Such a close call, seconds away from breaking his heart. Imagine! That my very being could break his heart, as if I were something foul.

This is what Willis was talking about. And of course all of a piece with our joint inability to acknowledge that Mickey has a dick and plays with it. We can't talk about that, we can't talk about my dick and what I like to do with it, Ham can't see his father naked or vice versa.

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah awoke from his
wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

Sometimes just typing out a text, feeling it under your fingers, helps you to understand it. It's the only way to read Rilke, for example. But it sure doesn't help with Genesis. What the hell is this Ham story about?

September 14, 1966

I was heading for the SLS library to read up on Ham and Noah, but as I turned the corner at 9th Street a cop stopped me. “Mister, this is off limits right now.”

“How come?”

“There was a call about a sniper. Probably crap, but just in case …”

This was about that crazy guy in Texas a few weeks ago. The guy who went up in the tower at the university in Austin and shot a bunch of people.

We all looked at that story and it just seemed so very Texan, of a piece with Oswald and the Impeach Earl Warren people and H. L. Hunt. But I guess we're all in Texas now. Probably the call was crap. Still, I don't doubt that there are, in Manhattan as much as anywhere else, guys with automatic rifles and an ember of nihilism in their bellies waiting to be fanned into massacre.

I remember: the Texas shooter was named Whitman--I am large, I contain multitudes, then I gun ‘em down--and he was a marine. Like Dennis O'Grady. Whatever they do to those gyrenes, somehow they come out mass murderers or poets, if there's a difference. But of course Dennis O'Grady served in peacetime; he wasn't off slaughtering uppity Asians. I expect the current generation of marines will come back a little less inclined to write free verse.

Anyway, I headed up to Bryant Park, figuring I could do my research at the main library and also, long as the kid's in school, do a little extra credit research in the men's lounge
of one of the theaters on 42nd Street. When I emerged from the movie palace, I was blinking--not at the light, so much, rather at the way the crowd went about its diverse purposes, when I had just been in a room where everyone had the same purpose, a place as communal and full of ritual as a shul. I found myself looking up, like a gawking tourist, at all the towers on Sixth Avenue. Seeing how many windows were open, figuring possible lines of fire. A surpassingly dense and complex spiderweb, death aimed at me from so many matrices.

We've lived--half my adult life I have lived, his whole goddamn life Mickey has lived--with the knowledge that the thermonuclear war could start any minute, and then the cockroaches would take over. I made so much of this in JD, all the stuff about kids growing up in a world whose absurdity is highlighted by the constant threat of annihilation. But I was wrong.

We have had knowledge but not belief. Was it Freud who said that no one
really
believes in the possibility of his own extinction? For a few years we dutifully read the books and watched the movies:
On the Beach
,
Dr. Strangelove
,
Fail-Safe
; we all shivered during the Cuban thing; we gave our money to the SANE committee while sniggering a little at the goo-goo Bertrand Russell naïveté of it all. But we didn't believe it. Even during the Cuban thing, we didn't really look up into the skies for the incoming missile. Somehow the apprehension that the whole species could be vaporized Tuesday afternoon never sat so heavily on my heart as this new fear of the unpredictable thing some loony down the block might or might not be getting ready to do.

Meanwhile I've learned a few things about Ham. In the Talmud, a couple of rabbis argue about just what Ham's awful crime was--figuring that all of his generations wouldn't have been condemned to slavery just because he happened to catch a glimpse of his daddy's bare ass. One rabbi thinks Ham fucked his dad; the other thinks he castrated the old drunk. There's a lot of playing with words and reading backward from the punishment to the crime and all the other clever
stuff rabbis do. Imagine! Two millennia ago they were showing off like bright sophomores.

But after slogging through all this, I think the Bible means just what it says. Seeing your father is the crime. And so is the father's letting himself be seen: if he hadn't been drunk out of his mind, he wouldn't have been lying around with his cloak undone.

I know we can never get past that dead world of Genesis, we'll never break through to the new life, until Mickey and I can see one another in the light.

September 21, 1966

I tried to take a shower this morning, even though I didn't have to get ready for work till noon. Nothing today except afternoon office hours, and the mob that used to show up for office hours at the start of the term has already thinned considerably, most of the crowd having discovered that I couldn't be relied on to dispense wisdom like a bubble gum machine.

The bathroom door was locked, Mickey was in there. I went to my study and stared for a while at the accusatory ziggurat of unanswered fan mail. After, perhaps, ten minutes, I tried the door again. Still locked. Either the kid had dysentery or …

I called through the door. “Why don't you do it in your bed and let me take a shower?”

A few seconds silence. Through which I could hear the iron gate clanging shut, Mickey and I confined forever in our separate cells--in that cellblock with a billion solitaries they call manhood. Then, dear God, he laughed. “Why don't you cool it a couple minutes?”

“Scoot. I promise I won't interrupt you.”

The door unlocked. He was wearing his underpants, his hard-on forcing them straight out like a bowsprit. As instructed, he scooted to his room. I looked at him. His slender back, with a solitary pimple. His butt in his underpants.

September 26, 1966

Martha is back from Baltimore. While Mickey lugged her bags up the stairs, I asked her how her mother was. I think I did a fair imitation of someone who gave a damn. She just shook her head, didn't say a word. And didn't say a word most of the afternoon. Probably, after a few days of failing to interrupt her mother's unceasing flow of content-free utterance, she forgot how to talk.

She recovered her power of speech when we sat down to dinner. It's funny, I hadn't even noticed: these last couple of weeks, when Mickey and I sat down to eat--take-out Chinese a few nights, pizza, a couple of breakfasts at Rappaport's--we didn't say a word. I write in here about talking to each other, but we didn't do it when we had a chance. Now we are back to listening to Martha.

Soon only I was left listening to Martha. Mickey, under the new rules, left the table as soon as he had, tornado-like, swept through his plate.

Martha washed dishes and I dried. She cleared her throat. “Daddy isn't looking very good.” This is like saying the sky is blue, but I managed a Hmm. “He's tired all the time, he isn't eating, and he can hardly walk, his feet are so swollen. I had to beg and beg to get him to a doctor, and it turns out his kidneys are failing.”

“What are they going to do about it?”

“Nothing. They say there's this machine now, they hook you up to it and it works like a kidney. But there's only a couple of them, and they're in Seattle or somewhere.”

“So take him to Seattle. He can afford it.”

“No, they have a waiting list. And this committee of citizens that decides who can get it, who's more … valuable to society.”

“There's a
committee
?” I said.

“Uh-huh. And I don't guess there's much chance they'll put a seventy-year-old man with a little drinking problem at the head of the list.”

Well, the old bastard wouldn't have much chance if I were on the committee. Except of course I would never be on such a committee. Never be asked, for one thing, but wouldn't do it, either. What kind of person would accept that awful job? Still, I bet there are people who line up for it.

“So there's nothing else they can do?” I said.

“No. At some point, his kidneys are just going to shut down and he's going to die. Maybe a couple more months. They say it isn't painful, he's just going to kind of drift away.”

I almost didn't say, but did: “You seem calm about it.”

“I … if there were even a little bit of hope, then I'd be hoping, I'd probably be agitated. But there isn't; they're not going to magically build a hundred more machines next week. And if there's no hope, then it's just a fact, like the weather. You make your plans around it. I'm already thinking--this is awful, but it's what I'm thinking-will it be over soon, or is it going to spoil Christmas?”

I decided I was supposed to hug her. She let me, then murmured, “I'm not sure what to do about my mother.”

In my head an awful blare of sirens, like an air-raid warning. “What about your mother?”