JD (35 page)

Mickey looked down at Jonathan, shook his head slowly. “Okay. If you don't think you can afford it.” If this was sarcastic, he managed to keep any edge out of his voice.

“Jeez, I wasn't talking about the money,” Jonathan said. Though it sure sounded as though he were.

“It's okay,” Mickey said. “I'm not sure I want to do it, anyway.” He left the room, left the apartment.

I remember this so clearly because of what happened next. Jonathan cried. As many times as he writes about crying in these journals, it wasn't something I saw very often. That night he cried, and the sight was ugly to me. I thought he was crying out of self-pity, because no one understood his perfectly reasonable position, or because his son had so deftly made him look like a louse.

I think now his resistance wasn't about the money at all, he couldn't really have cared that much about the money. He just didn't want to think about the dentist, didn't want Mickey to go, even if it was the practical thing to do. He was crying because they were already starting to take his Mickey apart, tooth by tooth. I was the practical one, or I would have cried with him.

July 8, 1972

Last night Mickey was in his room. Holding an ice bag to his jaw, as instructed, to stop the swelling from the extractions. We smoked some grass, which helped his pain, but after a while he said, “Maybe you could just leave me alone.”

I sat with Martha in the living room for a while, each of us trying to read. Finally I said I was going out. If Martha was annoyed or disappointed, she hid it quite well. I didn't go to Virgil's--not that I wasn't a little horny, but whatever I needed I wasn't going to get in ten minutes in the alley. I went to the Poplar, with the vague idea that, somewhere among all the gay people, there might still be somebody I knew.

Nobody, not when I got there, but there was one empty stool at the bar. I decided to just relax and try to practice not scowling at gay people, as it doesn't look like they're going anywhere and maybe one of them might actually put out. I tried to assume the kindly but neutral expression of a Unitarian minister. I didn't verify my success in the mirror above the bar. But I did find, after a couple of bourbons, that I really was starting to feel a little more
kindly toward the people around me. I guess it isn't, objectively, any sillier to talk about Bob Fosse and Barbra Streisand than to talk about Catfish Hunter and Pete Rose.

Geoffrey walked in. Dennis O'Grady's widower. He isn't a kid anymore, he's bulked up, but his face is still boyish, if a little tautened by grief. A hunk, in his late husband's word.

I didn't wave, but he saw me right away, stood still for a moment. Deciding whether to talk to me or to move on to some other bar, where he could go about his business of auditioning Dennis's replacement without my watching.

He came over. “Hi, Mr. Ascher.”

“Jonathan.”

“Jonathan. It's been a long time.”

“It has. I was sorry to hear about Dennis.”

There was a considerable silence. At last he said, “You know, I never know how to answer that. Thanks? Me, too? What are you supposed to say?”

“Search me. Do I look like Emily Post?”

“Who?” he said. “Listen, can you buy me a drink? Things are a little tight.” So that was why he had come over. I bought him a drink.

“So you … what have you been up to?” I said. “You must have finished school.”

“Yeah, years ago. Dennis thought I should go to graduate school or something, but I never figured out the something. So I've just been working here and there.”

“Where are you now?”

“G. Schirmer.” He smiled for the first time. “Dennis used to tell people I was in the music industry. But I just stuff sheet music into file cabinets.”

“At least you didn't get drafted,” I said.

“No, I was lucky. But I think my luck is running out.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know, I stayed on at Dennis's. But now I'm going to have to move. My name wasn't on the lease, and of course I don't count as a relative or anything. So the
apartment's going to go off rent stabilization, and there's no way I can handle it. Not even with a roommate.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don't know. Everybody wants two months up front. I couldn't come up with two months' rent on a cardboard box.”

“Well, there's always … where were you from again?”

“Cleveland. Actually Chagrin Falls.”

“Chagrin Falls? Sounds like something out of Sinclair Lewis.”

“It's a suburb. I guess kind of like Scarsdale or something back here. If I went out there I'd probably jump over the fall in no time.”

A stool opened up next to mine, but Geoffrey didn't take it. I figured he wasn't planning on a long visit. “I … I could help you out,” I said.

“Huh?” He looked down at his half-finished drink, as if that were what I meant.

“I mean, with a deposit, so you can get a place.” Yes, indeed, when Martha balances the checkbook, she'll simply overlook a check for a few hundred made out to Mr. Geoffrey With-a-G.

He looked at me speculatively. Thinking: What will this cost me, what will this old man want? It took him a long time to answer. Maybe he really was weighing it. “I'll be fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He managed a smile, but his voice was quite cold and flat.

I thought he'd go then, but he said, “So, are you still writing books?” All those years living with a writer, and he hadn't learned not to ask that question.

I said--aloud, for the first time, I've never even said it to myself: “No, I've stopped writing.”

“How come?”

That question seemed backward to me. How come I ever started would be the better question. “It was just time to shut up.”

To my surprise, he took my hand. “Dennis said that. Almost those words.”

“Did he?”

“A little while before he … He said lately he would be writing, and then he'd read what he'd done and it was-- what did he say? It was what you'd write if your hand just kept going by itself and you couldn't stop it. He needed to stop it.”

I can't deny it: I was gratified to learn that Dennis, too, had gone dry. No wonder Plato wanted to get rid of all the poets, we writers are a bitter and ugly breed.

I wanted to ask what had really happened to Dennis, was it drugs or … ? But Geoffrey had pulled into himself. He was listening to Dennis. And then he just wandered away, away and out of the bar without saying good-bye.

In the end, I did go to Virgil's. Found a boy I'd learned before could get at least half hard, despite the heroin, if you were patient. Knelt before him in the alley with the blasé rat looking on. As a penance, as an act of utter self-abasement.

Because I had had, even if for just a moment, the disgraceful fantasy of writing a check and acquiring another son. A replacement for the one I fucked up.

Dear, yes, that is an awful fantasy. Perhaps a little less disgraceful, in my case, because I had it decades after our son died, not while he was still breathing just a few blocks away.

What did I imagine would happen between me and Philip Marks? I am silly, but not so silly as to have supposed that Philip was going to become some kind of son. I know he's not going to visit me in the nursing home. He's not even going to
fail
to visit me in the nursing home, which might be more authentically filial. I am nothing to him but the keeper of Jonathan's secrets, someone he must get past.

So? What was I to Mickey but something to get past, get around? If I have the temerity to say that what I feel for Philip is at least the shadow of maternal love, maybe I mean that it is just that hopelessly one-sided, unrequited.

At least I feel something, after so long. I had thought I came through all right, but I see now that for years I have been awarding
myself a medal for
getting through
. Now I am almost through, and I only got through.

July 18, 1972

We have a couple days to go. I mean Mickey has a couple days before he reports, I must stop saying we He has shaved his little wisp of a beard and has had his hair lopped off, so he looks like a nice clean-cut youth. I guess the army would have taken care of all this, but he decided it would be prudent not to show up looking like a hippie.

He has taken to watching TV all day long, or rather the sliver of day left when he gets up. Quiz shows, soap operas, this afternoon he was watching a children's show with a frenetic clown who introduces cartoons so old that the closing credits include the National Recovery Act eagle and the slogan We Do Our Part. I don't guess Mickey cares what he's seeing, so long as it isn't pictures of what's ahead for him.

I sat down with him on the sofa. We watched the clown, the ads; pretty soon the clown gave way to a show about a boy named Beaver. I found the show pretty interesting, because this Beaver child has a stunning older brother, the classic diffident American boy who seems utterly unaware of his own beauty. Except I suppose the boy on the show was reminded of his beauty every time he opened his pay envelope.

I was conscious that Mickey and I were again sitting on this sofa, watching TV together, as we were the night I touched him the wrong way and he … noticed or didn't, I don't guess I'll ever know. Today I thought maybe we had recovered enough that I might put an arm around his shoulders. He let it remain there but did not take his eyes off the television. An ad for a carpet cleaner came on. I had been waiting for some opportunity to speak, and this looked like all I would get. “You know … um … I've had one or two students who were drafted and didn't go.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean, they just refused induction.”

“Right.” He shrugged off my arm. “And then they went to jail and got fucked.”

That rejoinder sat between us for a minute, until I said, feebly: “I don't know if they got fucked.” Probably they got fucked. This seemed to me a lot better than dying. Maybe it doesn't seem that way to straight boys. Like my son.

Mickey got up, turned the volume lower on the TV, sat back down with me.

Took my hand.

“Pop, it's too late to change it. I'm not going to prison, I'm not going to get sick, in two days I'm getting on a bus, I'll be gone. I'm already gone, practically.”

“I know that.”

“So we know what I'm going to do. What are
you
going to do?”

“Do?”

“About you and Mom. Are you going to stay?”

This fiercely sensible question had never crossed my mind. If I've been here for Mickey, why would I stay? Or is that really why I've been here?

I said, “We're used to each other, I don't guess I'll go anywhere. And it's going to be hard for your mother for a while.”

“Hard? My leaving?” He snorted. “She can't wait.”

“That's not true,” I said. Wondering if it was true. “She doesn't always show what she feels.”

“Maybe you just don't see it.”

Maybe not. It is a little chilling to think that I might have harbored in this place, for twenty years, a creature who has seen everything. Like a recording angel.

“She got tired of me,” Mickey said. “Like a job she was sick of doing.”

I thought of saying I never got tired of him, but that seemed pushing. I was lucky to still be holding his hand. “Maybe she's tired of me, too,” I said.

“Maybe. Maybe everybody should just leave her alone now. So she can figure out what to do.” He squeezed my hand tighter. “Maybe we should just let her have a life now.”

This last said with the tightly reined treble of a young man who is refusing to cry. I knew why, and I was jealous. He missed Martha, he longed for Martha. Here I'd thought I was the one who'd fucked everything up. But he was telling me that the great love of his life had turned away from him.

And that this was why he didn't care where the president sent him.

He let go of my hand, and there was nobody holding him.

I feel as though Jonathan wickedly set a trap for me, years ago, and I have blithely stepped into it. All of the journals a map leading me to this, the last door I must open, the end of resistance. I think it is all wrong, I never turned away from Mickey, how could I have mourned him my whole life if I had turned away, if I'd tired of him? But if Mickey felt I did, if Jonathan isn't lying—

Before Jonathan became a self-appointed sage, he was a mildly esteemed novelist. I have been reading a novel all these months, with characters who happen to share the names of the unhappy Ascher family. And now I can scarcely remember what the real family was like. This must have been what I feared, isn't it, all those years when I let these papers sit unopened? That they would displace my memories, the way Jonathan crowded out everything else in our household.

I
know
that I never stopped loving Mickey. He disappointed me, he infuriated me, but I never stopped loving him. Mickey must have known that, too. Jonathan just made this all up, one last effort to steal Mickey from me forever.

And he has won. I'll never be sure, not ever again, that my grief is distinguishable from guilt. My Mickey. Perhaps you really did say, “Maybe we should just let her have a life now.” But Jonathan ignored you. He didn't let me go even when he was dead.

September 12, 1972

Mickey is almost done basic training. They're going to
have a ceremony at Fort Dix, like some grisly parody of the commencement Mickey isn't going to get. I won't go. Martha has been nagging about this for days, begging, wheedling, finally today saying what is too obvious to say: “This might be the last time you see him alive.”

I want to answer, like Mickey, “No shit.” Or, spitefully, “At least I saw him, you never did.” But the real answer, dear God, is: when was that ever
not
true? Any time he stepped out the door, if you thought about it, it might be the last time. But you don't think about that. They're having this filthy ceremony to
make
everybody think that, a whole room full of people looking at their kids and thinking that. And the kids looking back, as if from open coffins, as their families come to say farewell.