JD (25 page)

Mickey said, “Did I miss anything?”

November 21, 1966

Two days now I've been waiting for some sign from Mickey. Does he think something happened? How exactly would this manifest itself, how could he be any more silent and withholding than he is already?

This morning, Mickey came out of his bedroom as I sat at the breakfast table smoking and reading the paper. He was shirtless, he scratched his smooth chest. “Where's Mom?”

“Drugstore, I think.”

“Oh.” He frowned and clasped his arms around his chest, I suppose because it was a little chilly. But it seemed as though he were fending me off. Don't touch me.

So: am I now not supposed to touch him, not anywhere, not even as a father? After a lifetime am I to turn into my
own father, as undemonstrative as he? How would that be better for Mickey? Then he would surely think there was something wrong, and our perfect innocence would have been tainted by
me
, I would be the withholding one. So really I almost have an obligation to go on touching him. And what? Trying not to feel what I feel, as if that too were wrong? Or just trying not to let on, until every time he thinks he's getting a paternal kiss I will be stealing an erotic one? An imposture from some clumsy comedy of errors.

Here is why I can't touch him. Because I am terrified that he has understood something, however indistinctly. And that one day I will try to hold him and he will pull away from me as if I were something vile. So I am the one who must pull away.

It's like an affair ending. As if we were lovers and it ended and now we're stuck in the same house, with the same blood. Lovers no more and stuck. Maybe the old stern laws were just practical, maybe the tribesmen in the desert knew how these loves turn out, and how once they are over it is impossible for the estranged ones to stay in the same tent.

Mickey said, “Pop, I--”

“What?”

“Nothing.” And he was gone.

M
rs.
Asch
er! Hel
lo
!” Somehow I knew even before I picked up the phone that it would be Philip Marks. Well, I don't get so many phone calls. But it seems time. August already, almost four months since we met. I would have expected him to be pushier, nudging. Why, because he's Jewish, a Jew on the make? Of course I feel guilty even having this thought. But I am awfully familiar with Jews on the make.

“Philip, I—I haven't made up my mind.”

“What?”

“Isn't that what you were calling about? Your book?”

“Oh!” As if he's forgotten he was writing a book. “Oh, no. I just wanted to tell you I happened to be coming into town on business next week, Thursday the fourteenth. I wondered if you'd like to get together.”

Right. Not just pushy but patronizing, speaking to me as if I were a fool. An old widow lady who couldn't possibly have plans and who'd be grateful for the company.

All of which is true. We agree to meet at a Starbucks on Sixth.

I
haven't made up my mind, in all these weeks. Because I can't make up my mind about Jonathan. I finished the journals from 1964 and 1966 and then stopped. I had every intention of reading the other three, but this and that came up and then … Nonsense. I haven't had a cookbook job in months, I have nothing but time. So why have I stayed away from the library? Because I'm afraid to read the rest?

Not exactly; Willis's suggestion that maybe I shouldn't read any more of the journals was like handing Pandora the key to the box. I'm not afraid of what I might learn, I'm afraid of being even more puzzled than I am. As confused as Jonathan about whether anything had really happened, and what I ought to feel about it.

Of course my immediate thought was that Jonathan was sick, that his feelings toward Mickey were pathological, that his acting on them was vicious. There we are, everything nicely wrapped up: I was married to a monster for twenty-one years, let Philip Marks write a book about a monster, serve the bastard right.

I was not married to a monster. I don't say this just because it would be pitiful for me to have dwelt in the castle of a monster for so long, though that would indeed be pitiful. I say it because Jonathan, egotistical, selfish, oblivious, blundering Jonathan was as full of love as anyone I have ever known. He touched our son the wrong way, for just a second.

What does that even mean? That he was feeling the wrong things, while—when I held the baby Mickey in my arms for ecstatic hours—I was feeling the right things? When you touch someone, what makes it right or wrong isn't what
you
are feeling. It is what the
touched one feels:
safe, comforted, threatened, soiled. That is all that matters: what did Mickey feel at the instant Jonathan grazed his little bud, what did he feel then and later? And Mickey didn't leave any answers, just one scrawled entry in a leatherette diary.

I
have never been in a Starbucks. No, I stepped into one once, looked at the prices, and staggered out. Philip has secured an overstuffed sofa; he is pecking away at a laptop computer and doesn't see me until I am standing over him. He is confused for a moment—who's this old biddy?—then pulls himself together. He stands up, holding his still-open laptop in his hands like a tea tray. When he realizes that he can't take my hand he folds the computer up and stuffs it into his silver and blue knapsack. When did fifty-year-old men start toting around knapsacks like schoolchildren? Then he takes my hand ceremoniously—if he were Prussian his heels would click—and says, “Mrs. Ascher, it's so good to see you.”

“You, too,” I say. A little surprised to find that I mean it.

“Now you just sit right down. What can I get you?”

“Just a small coffee. Black.”

“A small coffee? I'm not sure they even have this concept. Be right back.”

He is wearing a very tight red T-shirt. As he turns around I see that it has black panels of some stretchy fabric, cleverly placed to emphasize the hard-earned vee of his back. Just below his buttocks there is a long, horizontal tear in his aged blue jeans. Whatever his “business” is in town, he probably hasn't come to see his investment banker. Or even me.

It seems a little pathetic that a middle-aged college professor should strut around New York in this come-hither regalia. Maybe worse than pathetic, almost evil: he is sick, after all, if this plumage attracts anyone, he might … Or maybe they just do it together, the sick boys, or maybe they are “safe.” If Jonathan and I had been safe, there wouldn't have been a Mickey. If Philip had been safe he wouldn't be sick. I suppose nothing ever happens to safe people.

He returns with my small coffee; for himself he has procured some enormous beverage with foam on the top and a piece of poppy seed cake wrapped in cellophane. He waves it. “Would you like a little of this?”

“No, thank you.”

“I really shouldn't be having it myself,” he says. Coquettishly, like a matinee lady about to dig into a slice of Boston cream pie at Schrafft's.

Would I have noticed this, suppressed a little shudder of disdain, if a heterosexual had said it? Probably not: ordinary men go on diets. They may even fold their paper napkins in two and gently dab at the stray cake crumbs on their lips. What did I expect him to do, wipe the crumbs off with the back of his hairy forearm? Having classified him, I am making his smallest gesture fit the label. But knowing I am doing this doesn't mean I can stop.

He freezes; probably I have been staring like a naturalist observing the feeding habits of an exotic species. “So,” I say. “Have you been enjoying your vacation?”

“Didn't have much,” he said. “I teach summers to make a little money.”

“Oh, Jonathan did that.”

“I know. Until the mid-sixties sometime.” How odd, to sit with a stranger who knows things like that about my husband, as if I were visiting a clairvoyant. “Actually, it's not for the money, it's … just to do something, not just be by myself all summer.”

“Are you by yourself?”

“Last few years, yeah.” He has lost someone, then, maybe someone he took care of; now he is sick by himself. While I am wondering if it would be polite to inquire about this, he goes on. “Anyway, summer's almost over. The eager students will be back in two weeks.”

“So early?”

“There are schools that start in the middle of August now. Practically through the first term by Thanksgiving.”

“My. I gather you're not … eager.”

“To teach, you mean? I am, a little. It's funny, I can still get kind of juiced up at the start of the year. Lasts a few classes, until I find out what I'm saddled with.”

“The students, you mean.”

“Uh-huh. You know they … they're not stupid, exactly, some of them can even read a poem all the way to the end. But even for the best of them, I'm just a hurdle, something they have to get past on the way to their degree in marketing management or whatever.”

“If it's any consolation, Jonathan wasn't too thrilled with his students, either.”

“He complained about them?”

“No, it's funny, he never did. But he wrote about it in …”

He doesn't say anything for a minute, just looks at me. Who could fail to guess what the object of that foolishly blurted “in” might be? Then, as if casually: “You know, I wondered if Dr. Ascher had ever kept, um, a diary or something.”

“Just a few jottings. But he did write about his students. He didn't think they were stupid, either. Or I suppose he did, but he mostly felt that he was failing
them
somehow.”

Philip gave a one-sided smile. “You throw a mean curve.”

“What?” Oh! He thinks I am talking about him.

He shrugs. “Maybe it's both. They're stupid and I'm lousy. Maybe my students and I deserve one another.”

“I wasn't—”

“Hey, we all wound up at Bairdsville.”

“Oh, now I'm sure …”

“No, I'm lucky. I have an office all my own, I get to teach two courses a year that I think up by myself, in between the freshman comp and Modern Poetry. Half the guys I went to grad school with never landed anywhere. They drive from school to school, a course here, a course there, minimum wage nomads. I landed, just not on the peak. Or even the middle.”

“Where nobody's any happier,” I say, hoping to shut off the whining.

“I'm sure not. It's just … I know I'm boring you,” he says. “I understood a long time ago that I wasn't going to get what I set out for. I wasn't going to get an appointment at Yale or Stanford, I wasn't going to publish something that would make me a star. The only way I was going to hobnob with the famous would be when we paid some guest speaker to schlep to Bairdsville and I could come to the dinner after and watch him get drunk.

“I understood this, and I had this amazing roster of rationalizations: it was about luck or the stars or connections or homophobia or being on the losing end of affirmative action or a million other things. Until finally one day all of that fell away and I accepted the stone fact: I'm not good enough. I'm not clever enough, I haven't read enough, I don't have the energy or the drive or maybe just the sheer neediness that makes big people big. And it's funny, but—”

He screwed up his face in a schoolboy pantomime of deep thought, then nodded. “It's like coming out. You have a million explanations for why you're looking at men, or not looking at women, and one day you finally say: okay, I'm gay. And you feel for a minute or two—I mean, just that long, a minute—like you've lost a big fight. Then this enormous relief: the fight is over, the bell has rung on the last round, you can go ahead and live now. This was the same way. I came out as second-rate. I am as immutably second-rate as I am immutably gay.”

Am I supposed to argue? I hear myself saying, “Jonathan never came out.”

“He never—?”

“As second-rate. He could talk about being neglected, or misunderstood, and I guess he was those things. But I'm not sure he ever
stopped imagining that the phone might ring one day, and it would be long distance from Stockholm.”

The lights in the coffee shop go out. “Oh, they're closing,” I say.

“They can't be closing, it's just after four.”

At the counter an angry girl whines, “Can you just take my money, I need to run.”

The cashier says, “The register's dead. I guess the power's off.”

Someone near the window says, “Look, it's off all up and down the street.”

The sidewalks are suddenly crowded: people are pouring out of stores and office buildings. Philip grabs his knapsack and we join the throng.

“Looks like the whole neighborhood,” someone says. Someone answers, “I heard from my wife on the Upper East Side, the phone still works but they're out of power, too. Must be the whole island.” A small voice says what most of us are thinking: “Maybe the terrorists did this, shut everything down.”

On the street there is gridlock now. None of the traffic signals are working, all the intersections are clotted with drivers who thought they could thread their way through and are stuck. A block or two away, a futile ambulance siren; someone may die in a traffic jam. At 14th Street, sweaty, grimy people emerge from the subway stop; they were stuck in the L train and had to be guided through the tunnel, braving the rats and the alligators.

“I'll walk you home,” Philip says.

“I can manage.” But he has grasped me by the elbow, like a Boy Scout helping an old lady across the street. A Boy Scout with a knapsack.

When we have gotten off the avenue and things are a little quieter, he says, “What were we talking about?”

“Being second-rate.”

“Oh, right.” As neither of us has anything further to say on this subject, we are silent until we reach my building.

“I'd ask you up,” I say. “But I guess there isn't any air conditioning.”