JD (3 page)

Of course there were plenty of people writing, all through the fifties and sixties, about masscult and organization men and status
seekers. But all those other books seemed somehow like products of the very gray, mechanical Ike-world they were talking about: they had no prescription to offer, no alternative, and they were full of statistics that had been spat out by some UNIVAC. Well,
JD
didn't really have a prescription either, maybe anarchists never do. What it had, what made it one of the opening fanfares of the cacophonous sixties, was a jazzy mix of politics and sex.

The dense city of
JD
, through which his delinquents riffed and bernardoed, was a metropolis of Eros: skyscrapers and subways pulsating with sex, and everything/everyone in between, newsboys and butchers, debutantes and department store clerks, taxi horns and jack-hammers all singing lustfully. Through it all, the boy gangs promenading in their skin-tight blue jeans: the JDs all just masks for Jonathan himself—precociously wise, seeing everything, reciting it all with a sidewise grin and a hard-on. The staff with which he would lead the armies of life and nature against the machine.

When
JD
came out in 1965, it was a riotous success that changed Jonathan, changed our lives, forever. First of all, we had money—not just from the book but from the college lecture circuit, two thousand dollars a pop just to stand up and wisecrack about IBM and Robert McNamara. I got some dresses and a winter coat that didn't look as though I'd found them in a hospital auxiliary thrift store, and one year we were even able to send Mickey to camp and sail on the
France
.

Jonathan became a guru. He appeared on panels; his letters to the editor got published; he was photographed at rallies. Once or twice he even appeared on Susskind or one of the more earnest Sunday morning talk shows. At SLS he didn't have to teach undergraduates anymore, just one graduate seminar a week—if he wasn't on tour or on a picket line or, every so often, on a binge. Aurora put out more books, collections of old papers and articles, even a little volume of his poems.

Of course he started playing around. Well, he always had, after the first year or two of our marriage. I discovered this in the usual way: not lipstick on the collar, but wrinkles in the days. An hour missing here or there, an errand unaccountably protracted. I cried just once, in front of an amazed toddler who had never realized that Mommy
ever cried. He bawled right back and, as I focused on consoling him, I stopped crying. For good.

I had, after all, understood from the start that we were embarked on some adventure very different from the marriages of all my classmates. Different from the very first day. I had been bridesmaid half a dozen times, gone to the receptions and leaped for the bouquet, waved with the crowd as the couple headed off to Bermuda. Jonathan and I left City Hall and went straight to the movies.
Streetcar Named Desire
, I remember, it had just opened. And I found myself uneasily empathizing with Kim Hunter's Stella—as if I, too, had been spellbound by a soulful brute.

Once we had missed the boat for Bermuda, we found ourselves on an uncharted course. We weren't picking Marriage Style C from an array of defined possibilities; we were departing from the only defined option and improvising a new one. As, in the schoolyard, a child who is strong-willed may invent a new game and gradually announce its rules—as if disclosing them rather than making them up on the spot. Of course in such games each new rule is declared only when someone has violated it.

For years there were two rules. Jonathan could act suspiciously but not blatantly. And Jonathan could do whatever he liked in the summer, when Mickey and I went to the Cape and he stayed in the city. (I had a further rule, undisclosed to Jonathan: I could also do whatever I liked during our annual separation.) After
JD
, though, the rules were amended. Jonathan was just plain going out after dinner, gone for hours, rarely all night, and returning with no excuses. After the first shock, I found that I didn't much care. I was happy enough that he had some … outlet.

The Talmud, that mysterious text of Jonathan's forsaken faith, apparently covers everything in life. Whether you can invest in pork belly futures so long as you don't eat the actual commodity. Whether you can wear brown shoes with a blue suit. How often—this one is for real—a man must service his wife. The obligation is said to vary inversely with the demands of the husband's occupation.

Jonathan explained this to me once. A ditch digger comes home tired and can only be expected to rise to the occasion once or twice a week. A rabbi, with his sedentary life of study, is supposed to do his
duty every night. While there is a sort of crude logic here, you have to remember that the book was written by rabbis. So I'm not sure if they were shouldering a burden or excusing a natural propensity. All I know is that, when Jonathan rose from long days at his desk with a surfeit of rabbinical energy, I was almost grateful that he took it outside the apartment and was back, most nights, by bedtime. I got the warm embrace, the soft wool of his chest against my back; some faceless “people” fed his endless hunger.

I was almost grateful. Until he started talking about it at parties. “Last week I was in the sack with this red-headed philosophy major and her Negro boyfriend …” Until he started alluding to it in articles. Until that ghastly little volume of poems. “Sonnet: To Robert.” “YMHA: Locker Room Villanelle.”

It wasn't just the humiliation. He had done everything but hire a skywriter to proclaim to the world that I was—what is the feminine form of “cuckold”? Just cuckoo, I guess. But what I hated was that, sooner or later, it was all going to come back to Mickey. Maybe his little friends weren't subscribers to the quarterlies Jonathan wrote for—
Hesperides, [R]evolution
, and the rest—and surely they weren't thumbing through slim volumes of free verse looking for the dirty parts. But some kid would find out sooner or later, Mickey would have to hear about it. Maybe he already had, maybe that was why he seemed shifty and morose sometimes. Hard enough imagining your own conception without having to picture your father in so many other beds. Many and various: your polymorphous Pop. No wonder sometimes he wouldn't look Jonathan in the eye.

T
he lights in the Plymouth Room are very bright. All of the customers are at least our age; we have all reached the point at which vanity defers to reading the menu. I scarcely need to, I know I will only have a salad.

When the waiter comes, Laurence orders for me in the old-fashioned way: “And the lady will have …” The very young waiter seems not to have encountered this practice before. He shoots me a quick glance, wondering if I am mute, retarded, or foreign.

When he has gone, Laurence says, “Are you a vegetarian? If I'd known, I—”

“Oh, no. Well, I'm not a principled vegetarian, just a habitual one. You know, Jonathan never ate vegetables.” Actually, he ate a few. The vegetable food group of Jonathan's diet included frozen peas, cucumbers in sour cream, fried onions, dill pickles, and canned cream corn. I suppose that was his upbringing, years of eating at delis with his father. “So we had practically nothing but meat and potatoes for twenty years.”

“I see. And you've spent the next twenty making up for it.”

Closer to thirty; he is being kind. “Besides, it's economical. I spend the days drawing eggplants and peppers, and in the evening I eat my models.”

“So … you're still doing cookbooks?”

“A little. Things are slow.”

“Are they? Sometimes I look at our list and it seems like that's all we do, cookbooks and weight loss plans.”

“I'm sure there are lots of cookbooks. But they don't want my kind of work very much. They use photos, or if they have drawings they want these awfully precise illustrations of the seven steps in boning a goose.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's all right, I'm scraping by.” I am doing a little better than scraping, between what I got from Mom and Daddy and Jonathan's life insurance. “But I could certainly take on more projects,” I hint heavily.

“Wish I could help. I'm not in that line at all anymore, but I could ask around.”

“Well, don't go to any trouble. Actually, I'm a little surprised you're still …” I'm a little surprised Aurora hasn't fired him. He must be practically my age—late sixties, anyway. The last of the old school of editors, who had trust funds and tweed jackets with leather patches.

He leans close and stage-whispers, “I have Robert Crawley.”

“Who?”

“Who!” Laurence feigns shock. “Robert Crawley. Writes about this spy, sort of, with multiple personality disorder. Sells in airports and Walmarts.”

“Doesn't sound like your sort of writer.”

He smiles, even as I regret my sniffy tone. “He just got handed off to me one day. Whoever was dealing with him had moved on, he had
one more book under contract, and they figured even I couldn't fail to move a Robert Crawley. Since then he's absolutely devoted to me. If I go, he goes. I think I make him feel literary. So he's saved me from the glue factory, and I occasionally push through a little project of my own.”

We somehow make small talk through dinner, though it seems each time one of us brings up some gossip about a mutual friend the other softly imparts the ultimate piece of gossip. If I have, as at our last meeting, the sense that Laurence is being courtly rather than just polite—he is flirting in a graveyard.

When the waiter brings our decafs I remind Laurence that he had some business.

“Oh, yes. I was having such a good time just catching up.” As he murmurs this fib, he pulls a letter from his inside breast pocket and hands it to me. I must fetch my glasses from the handbag beneath my chair, then I read:

Philip Marks, Ph.D.

Department of English, 197 Caesar Rodney Hall
University of Delaware at Bairdsville
Bairdsville, DE 19820

March 20, 2003

Mr. Laurence Ramsey

Aurora Press

28 E. 54th Street

New York, NY 10022

Dear Mr. Ramsey:

I am writing to explore with you the possibility of obtaining access to the papers of Jonathan Ascher, with a view toward writing a critical monograph or, potentially, a biography. I have admired Dr. Ascher's work for many years and was surprised to learn that no full-length treatment of his work or his life is available. I believe a book on this seminal figure could play an important role in exposing his ideas to a new generation of young readers.

We haven't gotten one of these letters in years. There were a couple in the seventies, but of course Jonathan's young colleague Willis was planning to do the biography. He gave up for some reason. Writer's block, maybe, or maybe he got tenure and didn't need to write a book anymore.

In the eighties, two or three nibbles from other suitors, graduate students shopping around for a dissertation topic. They had to come to Laurence and me: Jonathan's will grandly named us his literary executors.

Literary executors are different from ordinary executors. Ordinary executors hand things out, distribute what was left behind. Literary executors withhold. They edit, expurgate, burn. Jonathan's papers are at the School for Liberal Studies, but he put a seal on them only we could break. We wouldn't.

In the nineties, no more letters.

While my thinking will undoubtedly evolve as my research continues, I envision the core of my project as involving a demonstration of how Dr. Ascher, by conflating anarchism and sexual liberation, constructs a new imaginary in which sexual and political deviance function as homologous threats to narratives that valorize other-directed or anaclitic libidinal flow by offering in their place a narcissistically—in the best sense—eroticized polity.

I want to giggle: here is poor Jonathan, a fly caught in some postmodern web, spun of that tortuous jargon I have read so much about. Not read: I haven't actually read criticism since college, when Mr. Rountree had us all struggle through
The Well Wrought Urn
. Read
about
, in one of those latest-ideas-for-the-hurried pages of the
Times
. I want to giggle, not because this stuff is funny, though I suppose it is, but because I am embarrassed not to understand it. However hermetic and pretentious it all is, there is something there, something these people have seen about the world that I have not.

And won't now: I'm no more likely to delve into these mysteries at my age than into hieroglyphics or nuclear physics. There comes a day when you admit that there isn't time left to read every book you meant to read, learn everything you really ought to know more about. I am
content not to be able to tell a quasar from a quark. I'm sure I am being bombarded by—or am I emitting?—these elusive creatures every day, but I don't give a fig for them or they for me. Why should I give a fig about an anaclitic libidinal flow, unless I were about to drown in it? I suppose because I drowned in something, and I imagine, or wish, that this Philip Marks could tell me what it was.

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware at Bairdsville and am the author of
John Horne Burns and the Transgressive Gesture
. I have already had a preliminary expression of interest from the University Press of the Mid-Atlantic States. Your cooperation in this important project would be invaluable. I would be happy to visit New York at your earliest convenience to discuss it with you.

Sincerely,
Philip Marks

I shake my head. “I'm sorry, I … We didn't need to—I mean, it's lovely to see you, but we didn't need to meet over this.”

“Martha, maybe it's time to think about it.”

“I—” It wasn't that
we
wouldn't open up the papers. Laurence probably never cared one way or the other, he has merely been deferring to me. I am the one who has stood in the way of all the little publishing scoundrels.