JD (24 page)

“You didn't care about Grandpa,” Mickey said at last. “You didn't even go see him.”

“Jeez, is that it? He didn't want to see me. He never liked me.”

“He didn't? How come?”

Of course Norman had a million reasons for not liking me, including my politics and my looks and maybe some suspicions about what I did on my knees. “Because I--” I was going to give the simplest answer, because I'm a kike, but I realized just in time how much that would hurt Mickey. Being half a kike himself, having to wonder what his beloved Grandpa felt about that. “Why do you think?” I said.

He stopped walking. From his glance I guessed that he required a Pall Mall as an aid to meditation. This being supplied, he said, “I guess you guys had different ways of living.”

“That's for damned sure.” As Keats said of Milton: life to him would be death to me.

Mickey grinned, but only for a second. “He kind of thought I should live his way. You know, the normal way.” This said blandly, with no apparent insinuation about my particular brand of abnormality.

“Is that how you think you should live?”

“I don't know. I guess Mom wants it, too.”

“She wants you to be like your grandfather?” I'm afraid my tone made him reel a little.

“She just means go to Warwick and stuff. Maybe be a lawyer.”

That sounded like his grandfather to me. All he'd have to add would be the little drinking problem, which I'm sure counselor Mickey could acquire easily enough. “Well, whatever you want,” I said. Forgetting for a second that we were talking about what Martha wanted.

“You don't want me to be like you?”

“You think the world needs two of me?” I said.

We laughed. I was so happy to have made him laugh that I didn't think--not till just now--that maybe he did want to be like me, needed to know how.

What does it even mean, to be like me? Myopic bookworm, grass-stained cocksucker … But
awake
, anyway.

I don't know how to teach him to be awake, if he isn't already. I sidestepped. “You could be a doctor, like your Uncle Bernie.”

“Yuck. I can't even stand to make a hamburger patty. How am I going to cut up people?”

“Well, I can't tell you what to do.” He looked over at me--just for an instant the lost look I used to see on the faces of the JDs. If there wasn't any grown-up to tell him what to do, how would he ever grow up himself? I deflected his imploring gaze with an inanity: “You look good in that suit.”

“Yeah?” He sucked in his lips, proud.

“Probably have to take it back to Barney's pretty soon and get the cuffs let out. You're really shooting up.”

He grinned. I can hardly remember being so young, when growing another inch is an accomplishment. What other accomplishments does he need? Certainly not to be a goddamned lawyer. But what else? Pretty soon he'll be a big tall boy in a suit, men's department next time, headed off to Warwick. Off, with Martha's connivance, to life as an Axelrod.

I said in
JD
that grown-ups couldn't answer the kids' questions, that the only way to overturn the grinding
gerontocracy we live in was for kids to find their own answers. I know I can't tell Mickey how to live. And at the same time I feel so strongly that I need to get him out of that suit.

But then what would he wear?

Guilty, I guess. Certainly not of contriving to turn Mickey into an Axelrod. But he
was
half an Axelrod, as surely as he was half a kike. Perhaps I did nudge him in the direction of Warwick, as Daddy had always planned for him. Jonathan pushed just as hard for him to go to SLS, because faculty kids went for free in those days. But Daddy had left enough to pay most of the tuition, and Mickey said he had sworn to Daddy on his deathbed, et cetera.

I'm sure this didn't really matter; Mickey was ready to go off to Sing Sing rather than spend his college years in our apartment, staring out his window at the same old ailanthus tree. None of it meant he had to follow through on the rest of Daddy's dreams and become a lawyer. If I'd wanted another lawyer in the family I could have married one. But he had to do something. What wonderful plan did Jonathan have for him, that he should wind up as a JD? Or a George?

If Jonathan wasn't going to change the world, what was wrong with standing back and watching Mickey turn into a normal grown-up who could live in the world he was given? There is that famous remark of Freud's: that his job was to help his patients find their way to ordinary unhappiness. What was so reprehensible about that project? Why couldn't we just have made Mickey unhappy?

November 5, 1966

Last night, Mickey emerged from his room wearing the damned suit and a little beauty spot of Clearasil on the left side of his patrician nose. I said, “What's with the suit on a Friday night?”

He was busy admiring his hunk self in the mirror in the foyer. Martha answered for him. “He's going to the Sadie Hawkins dance.”

“What's that?”

Mickey said, “It's like … the girls ask the boys out.”

Not fair. Boys are supposed to be humiliated by being picked last for the team. They shouldn't, on top of that, have to worry about whether they'll be asked to a dance. “So: a girl asked you?”

“A couple girls. I'm going with this one Sarah because she asked me first and I already said okay. Which is too bad because I like Nancy better.”

This is about as much information as he has ever voluntarily furnished about any event or activity. He is impressing on me that he is still a normal boy, not … whatever he has decided I am. Or maybe he's just bragging that girls stand in line for him.

Martha went to bed with a mystery novel and I waited up. He got home around eleven, sweaty and disheveled. Sweaty from the calisthenic dancing--do the kids know they're doing the same dances as Dennis O'Grady and Edouard? Disheveled perhaps from some off-the-floor maneuvers with Sarah or, if he got lucky, Nancy.

He answered my questions in monosyllables: taut ones, meaning he was in a hurry to get to his room. To meditate about how he got his hand under Sarah's bra, or almost to the top of Nancy's thigh. I guess other fathers would say, “That's my boy, chip off the old block!” I guess other fathers wouldn't be jealous.

I was a little uncertain just whom I was jealous of. Mickey, because he is young and probably unquestioningly heterosexual and undoubtedly getting ready to rub one out in about three minutes flat? Or Nancy, who felt his urgent, postulant hand creeping up her thigh?

He escaped from me. His door closed, I imagined him behind it. Jacket off first, and tie. The shirt, a little damp. The clunky dress shoes, the trousers. He hung the suit and the shirt up carefully; the socks and at last the briefs he flung into the bottom dresser drawer. From the same drawer he got the towel and whatever he uses for grease. He turned out the light.

It was all I could do to keep myself from going to him, flinging open his door. Not to score another glance at his
dick, but to see in the stele of light from the hallway behind me his sweet face: Mickey abandoned, mouth open perhaps, eyes half closed. I wanted to see Mickey giving himself up to pleasure. I wanted to hear his sharp breath.

November 9, 1966

At Faherty's last night there was a debate over whether to watch wrestling or the election returns. I thought of pointing out that both spectacles were equally rigged but kept my mouth shut. I have learned that it is profitless to try to be witty at Faherty's. Not to mention that half the patrons, those who have trouble drinking and breathing at the same time, probably don't realize wrestling is rigged. This half prevailed, so we didn't turn to the elections until the last blond-maned ape had taken his scheduled dive.

The Republicans have captured a lot of seats in the Congress. We were informed--by that vaudevillian pair of reporters I saw once at Villard's--that this meant the Great Society was probably over. What with smaller majorities, plus all the money being sucked up by the war, Johnson won't be able to finish national health insurance, college for everybody, all his other grand plans. All this will have to wait for his next term, assuming he can beat George Romney. Meanwhile, the sunbaked electorate of California has selected
Ronald Reagan
as governor. If we were going to start picking our leaders according to how they look with their shirts off, I would have gone with Buster Crabbe.

November 19, 1966

Martha went to the movies.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I decided to skip it: why pay two bucks to witness a lousy marriage when I get to have one at home for free? And Mickey had seen it already, with Sarah or Nancy. Not my idea of a make-out movie, but there's no telling. I got pretty far once with a girl in the balcony of the Luxor, watching Lon Chaney play the Phantom of the Opera.

Anyway, Mickey stayed in and, because it wasn't a school night, he could have an hour of TV. I kept him company on the sofa and tried to read the new Styron book. Not because I wanted to very much, but because
not
reading the new William Styron would amount to confessing how life-cloudingly jealous I am of all his honors. Anyway-interesting, has anyone noticed this?--if the TV is on in a room, it's very hard not to look at it.

The show was called
Mission Impossible
. There was a Negro and a blonde lady with complicated hair and a strange guy with bulging eyes, as if he had a thyroid problem. Mickey explained the premise. These people were the Impossible Mission Force, and each week they get a tape-recorded message about their next impossible mission. Who is this tape from? Mickey wasn't sure. That sort of sums things up in this country: teams of operatives scuttling around, and no one knowing who the hell they're working for.

Anyway, tonight's mission turned out to be possible after all. A lot of actors pretended to shoot other actors, the Negro and the blonde lady exchanged some carefully non-flirtatious jokes, the show was over--and with it Mickey's allotted hour. He looked over at me. I don't really give a damn about the TV; the one-hour rule is Martha's. If he could stand an hour of this pap, depriving him of a second hour wasn't likely to send him to Dostoyevsky on the rebound. And at least he'd be with me, not locked in his room.

Mickey was wearing what he calls a ringer T-shirt, gray but with dark blue bands tight around his slender biceps-making him somehow childlike and virile at the same time. I had to look away.

The next show was called
Gunsmoke
, with a looming sheriff and a comic sidekick and a bar wench with a heart of gold. They haven't changed this stuff since I watched it at the Luxor as a kid. All they've done is added sound. And commercials. I don't think even Mickey was enjoying it much. Or he was enjoying it just because we have made TV a sinful
indulgence; he would have sat rapt before a test pattern. I don't know if Martha and I are unusually clumsy at this childrearing racket or if everybody's stratagems backfire the same way.

Our thighs were touching, just barely, on the sofa.

I remember--this must have been in the early thirties, me fresh out of college and on a bus to Detroit, I think. Yes, an overnight to Detroit and then connecting for an interview in Ann Arbor. Where--unshaven, pretty rank, and very Jewish--I was inexplicably not offered the fellowship I was trying for. Next to me all night was a soldier going home on leave. This was long before the war, you didn't run into soldiers very much. There was just a tiny peacetime army, full of palookas and rubes, charged with vital assignments like breaking up Hoovervilles and extending the empire of United Fruit.

The soldier was a beauty, black hair and hazel eyes, sad eyes but a shy smile as we talked a little. After a while he dozed, then our thighs were touching. I was sleepy, too, but for an hour or more my whole being was focused on that tiny spot where our legs pressed against each other. I wasn't horny, not exactly, I felt an ecstatic hopelessness that was more like longing for God than longing for dick.

There's a line in Hopkins, I can't quote it exactly now because Hopkins is in the H-R section, in Mickey's room, and I don't dare visit Mickey this morning. But he's talking about seeing beautiful men and, though his eye can follow them,
Be in at the end I cannot
. I can touch a man, I can suck him, I can be inside him the way they mean “be inside” in trashy novels. But that night I wanted to be in that soldier, to feel the blood racing through his veins. When he swallowed, his boyish Adam's apple dancing, taste the spit flowing down his throat. I wanted to see his dreams, if he had any. I wanted to feel, through the nerves of his thigh, the gentle but unrelenting pressure of my own.

After a while he stirred, shifted, we weren't touching anymore and I didn't have the nerve to press close again.
And it didn't matter, if we'd gone on touching forever I would never have gotten any further inside him. I have carried that hour of rapture and loss with me my whole life.

Last night, Mickey's thigh and mine touched. I should have left it at that, I guess, just dwelt in the futile sweetness of that electric bond. But I put a hand on his thigh. He paid no attention: it isn't uncommon, never has been, for me to put an arm around him or pet his head or hold his hand. I closed my eyes, tried to shut out the inane banter between the marshal and his sidekick. I think it is possible my fingers grazed the little bud of denim at Mickey's crotch. Maybe so, but I have no idea if I actually touched Mickey or just a fold in his jeans.

Suddenly he stood up. “I gotta whiz,” he said. When he came back he didn't rejoin me on the sofa, took the easy chair. I guess arguably it's at a better angle for the TV.

I was miffed, that he should punish me for maybe having accidentally ventured in the vicinity of his dick for a split second. I thought of saying that TV time was over, but that would have been to admit that something had happened.