JD (27 page)

I can't look anymore, this is why I haven't had the album out. “Your toast must be ready.”

He follows me into the kitchen, takes his pill, nibbles on the toast. “You know I sometimes think—reading Dr. Ascher's work, that it's all about Mickey somehow.”

“Hmm.” It certainly isn't about me.

“JD
especially. It's sort of about making a world fit for his son.”

“He didn't even make an apartment fit for his son.”

Philip chewed on this with his toast. “You mean he was … difficult.”

As if he were an examination, or a crossword puzzle. “Sometimes.” Just when he was awake.

Philip follows me back to the living room.

I begin: “May I ask you—” No, I won't. I will. “The pills you take, are they for …”

“Yes.”

“Do you have to take a lot?”

“Not as many as ten years ago. But of course I'd take a hundred a day if I had to.”

“So you've had … it a long time.”

“It, yeah. A long time. After Matt went, I thought I was going pretty soon, too. That was 1991. Shit, in those days I went to funerals about as often as I went to the movies, and I just figured mine was somewhere on the list of coming attractions. So I stopped writing, pretty much ad-libbed when I was teaching, what was the use? And then the pills came along.”

“Matt?”

“Matt. If he'd made it just a couple more years he might still be here. Probably not with me, but he'd be here.” He looked down at the floor. “Anyway, I'm here. And … it took a long time, but I finally decided I needed to start living like I was maybe going to be living for a while. So …”

“So?”

“So I thought I might write this book.” There. We've been together almost a full day, how patiently he has waited to bring it up. “You never did say what happened when you talked to … the other biographer.”

“The other—? Oh, you mean Willis.”

“Willis. So it was Willis Kern?”

“Yes. How would you guess Willis Kern?”

“He wrote a couple articles with Dr. Ascher.”

“My, you know a lot,” I say, fatuously.

“You're kind of supposed to. So you talked to him and …”

“He didn't care, he's never going to write about Jonathan.” Philip stares. Thinking, I am sure: how many more months before the old bitch was planning to tell me? He doesn't say anything, and I add, “He did think I should look through some of the material myself, so I've been doing that.”

“Uh-huh.” He takes another bite or two of the dry toast. “To see if there was anything you didn't want me to look at.”

“That's right.”

“Well, you know, if you could let me see the stuff that's okay to look at, then I'd be farther than I am now. And then if there's other stuff I shouldn't see, then so be it.”

“That isn't—”

“You know, I've already lost the summer.”

“Yes, I know you deserve an answer. But it isn't … it isn't about some stuff you can see and some you can't.” What is it about? I have to tell him something. “I have to find out who Jonathan was.”

“I see,” he says. Not seeing. He sighs and walks out to the living room. Stuffs his pill bottles into the knapsack. “Thanks so much for letting me stay over. Why don't you call and let me know when you …” He lets his voice drift off rather than repeat my facile excuse.

He is almost out the door when I say, “You could start with the 1964 journal. It's all about how he got the idea for
JD
. I could let you see that.”

I
go to SLS and ask to see Miss Busch, the librarian whom I have come to think of as having joint custody of Jonathan. I wonder if she, or anyone else here, has read any of the papers. Do they do that, librarians? Or do they just incuriously shelve things?

While I wait I look again at the painting above the main desk. It still withholds itself, the vast gray field, the single red line, but something in me vibrates to it now. Today the red line seems to have a futile nobility about it, as if it were struggling to hold itself in place against the gray encroachment.

“Mrs. Ascher. It's been some time.”

“Yes, I … I've been rather busy.”

“I wish you had called ahead. You see, since you stopped coming, everything's back in the Annex.”

“Oh.” I think for a second of saying, “Oh, too bad,” and just leaving. Everything's back in the Annex, everything I'm not sure I want to know is hidden in faraway Elizabeth.

“But we can have whatever you want here tomorrow morning. Did you need to look at the inventory again?”

“No, I left off in the journals. I think I was ready for 1970.” Or not ready, as 1970 was the year things happened. I mean, things I already know about. The year things started to go wrong.

I'm not in the mood to go home, I'd planned to spend the whole morning here. So I stroll over to Washington Square, thinking I'll sit a
while and look at the crowd. Not as colorful as it used to be, it seems to me that nothing in the Village is as colorful as it used to be.

When I get there, I see that I've stumbled on the fall art exhibit. All these hopeful people, sitting on their camp stools in front of their paintings of cisterns on rooftops or bowls of oranges. I could pay the entrance fee and hang my own stuff here. I bet there's actually a market for eggplants or artichokes—maybe tiny paintings in brushed gold frames that would fit in the most diminutive of apartment kitchens. Perhaps I—

If I work hard and paint lots of vegetables I can be hung in a pay-to-exhibit art show and sit here on my very own camp stool. Sit in the autumn sun and ruminate about how I never did anything I meant to.

May 6, 197O

The undergraduates are on strike. Take that, Richard Nixon! The School for Liberal Studies, the very home base of the effete corps of impudent snobs, is closed for business! We will defy the fascists by making our timid professors cancel all the classes that our parents, optimistic and bewildered dentists and accountants, paid for!

I am being too hard on them. The world seems crazy these last few days: the war spreading into Cambodia, students gunned down by the National Guard (that is, working-class kids shooting middle-class kids, a grim parody of the proletarian uprising). I can see why the students felt they had to do something. But they could have done something actual: shut down a Selective Service office, freed the youngest kids at Rikers Island, something. Of course then they would have been arrested, maybe done time, maybe lost their student deferments from the draft. So much safer just to racket around the halls of SLS, confident that no one will call the cops.

All they've accomplished so far is to scare the daylights out of some of the older faculty--German and Austrian refugees with sharp and unhappy memories of civil disorder. The
kids have camped out in some offices and managed to ignite-probably inadvertently--the contents of Ignaz Gruenthal's file cabinet. Luckily it turns out that Ignaz does his real work at home and the papers in his cabinet were mostly the last five years of the
Times
crossword. All neatly solved and retained--why? My own office they've left alone, probably because it's too far from the vending machines.

This afternoon a student appeared at my office doorway and said, “You're Jonathan Ascher?” I would have snidely directed his attention to the plaque next to the door, except that my own attention was captured by the way his body filled his T-shirt. (“Nixon Pull Out Like Your Father Should Have.”) Muscles are not a common sight at SLS. I wonder how this boy escaped my notice; maybe I should start teaching undergraduates again.

He said there's a meeting tomorrow morning in the Lubitz Auditorium and wondered if I wanted to speak. I asked who else they'd invited. He chuckled--sensing, I guess, the vanity behind this question. “Just you,” he said. I shouldn't be so flattered. But maybe a few of the students have read
JD
, or at least the dust jacket. Or maybe they've just heard I used to be on television.

“I'll think about it,” I said. “If I show up, I show up.”

“Cool.”

I think maybe I will. And I think maybe they will regret having asked me.

I remember this—and remember being surprised that Jonathan even had to think about it. He had taken to the spotlight; he would happily have delivered a lecture to a platter of smoked fish. But there was something that didn't click between Jonathan and the kids of those years. Perhaps because, his TV stardom notwithstanding, he was last year's brand by then, not quite what they wanted. As they were not quite what he wanted.

When the flower children first appeared, popping up like sudden blooms on MacDougal Street or in Washington Square, Jonathan was entranced. Especially by the boys, of course: he said they looked
to him like figures from a Caravaggio, those mirthful youths who hovered between hooligan and angel. They just looked lost to me, those unwashed seraphs, and even more lost the drug-addled baby girls who hung around with them and whom they treated with un-flowery contempt.

It was a year or two before hippies stopped being colorful street accessories and descended on the SLS in the form of long-haired freshmen from Massapequa and South Orange. In their dorm rooms they had Che Guevara posters and costly stereo systems and hookahs. These kids, too, Jonathan welcomed at first. What a happy contrast to the previous generation of SLS students, who wore corduroy jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, and who tried to smoke pipes while they prattled nasally about C. Wright Mills!

Jonathan's enchantment wore off soon enough. First he discovered that his little Mannerist princes didn't read anything except pornographic comic books and maybe that old charlatan Hermann Hesse. Then—I am guessing—he discovered that they wouldn't put out. Last he found out that they had no politics. Slogans, things they wanted to tear down, but nowhere they wanted to get to.

So Jonathan was encouraged, that spring of 1970, that the shutdown was about the Cambodian incursion and the shootings at Kent State, instead of something like No! More! Foreign! Language! Requirement! I assumed that was why he agreed to speak at the meeting, and I tagged along just to see what the children were up to.

I can picture the Lubitz Auditorium clearly enough, after being dragged to so many lectures there—or dutifully dragging myself, during one of my cultural enrichment spells, to endless recitals of twelve-tone music. It was an ovoid room walled with even slats of costly third-world hardwoods, interrupted here and there by strange rhomboid projections that were meant to improve the acoustics. They did not: the voices of the speakers at the front of the room that morning were lost in the general hubbub. Half the kids weren't even facing the podium, the room had a dozen or more little huddles, cells, clots of students arguing passionately about—what? Whether they ought to be focusing on the war or on the Black Panther trials in New Haven. Whether everybody should just go back home to New Jersey or stay here and have seminars on Frantz Fanon. Whether—

All so young: less a political meeting than the junior prom if the chaperones left. I think the only grown-ups were Jonathan and I, hovering at the edge of the room. Jonathan was looking around for whoever it was that invited him; his lips tightened the way they did when he was about to insist that we leave a party I was enjoying.

At last a tall boy with the neck of a wrestler arrived at the podium and, amazingly, the room grew silent, everyone turned to him. This must have been the boy Jonathan wrote about: he had shoulder-length hair and a sparse beard, wore the same raggedy jeans and faded shirt as all the other kids, but the uniform seemed different on him. If the other students were mock-proletarians, he was like a banker who wears an out-at-the-elbows jacket at his country place.

“Hey guys,” he began, languidly. “We're going to try to get our act together now.” I think maybe that was the first time I ever heard that phrase; I was a little confused by it, the apparent confession that what was going on was a performance.

I picture him so clearly, that boy. I remember thinking: he should be hanging out at the Deke house in New Haven, not calling to order a room full of anarchic Jewish kids. Of course, they were on strike at Yale, too, that week. Even at Smith—going to their rallies and then coming back for afternoon tea with the housemother.

I remember thinking: I wish Mickey were like this boy.

No, nothing so definite. Even near the end, when Mickey had turned into the pallid, shaky creature whom the army gathered up and carted away like a refuse collector picking up an empty bottle: even near the end I never wanted him to be anyone but Mickey. And that day in 1970 I didn't see the end. Mickey was a senior in high school, no longer the toddler I once adored but still quite Mickey-like.

More and more, over the next couple of years, I would look at some other woman's boy and feel a twinge of something. Nothing definite, I couldn't even form a thought because a reflexive wave of guilt would make me turn away at once, focus on anything else. Before the little dark cloud in my head could shape itself into some articulate treason: he's better than Mickey, he's happier than Mickey, handsomer, smarter. Or into some fatuity: my, his mother must be proud!

If I recall that blond boy so clearly, perhaps it is because he was the first to raise that little cloud in me, the tiny nip of remorse I dared not examine. Or maybe I thought for the first time that day, only a couple of years prematurely: he is alive and Mickey is not. Because I already felt, I think, even that early—Mickey was broken somehow, Jonathan and I had already broken him. The way Mickey would sometimes break one of his gifts before we even got to the Christmas breakfast table. And I would be stern, even on Christmas: you broke it, you're not getting another.

The blond boy said, “We have … uh … Professor Ascher to say a couple words.” Jonathan didn't move; of course he was expecting some recitation of his achievements, some expression of gratitude for his appearing without compensation. After a moment, the boy nodded impatiently; that was all the introduction Jonathan was going to get.