JD (7 page)

The first page I turn to, in the 1964 volume, is so faint it could be a century old. I thought they were keeping it under some ideal archival conditions in—where was it?—Elizabeth. Then I remember: Jonathan always used Eaton's Corrasable Bond. If you made a mistake when you were typing, you could erase it with just an ordinary pencil eraser. Corrasable Bond was expensive, but Jonathan insisted on it, even for rough drafts, even—I learn now—for journals, because he couldn't stand to leave behind uncorrected mistakes. Not in writing, anyway.

Corrasable Bond was so easily erasable because the ink of the letters you typed didn't soak into the paper; it floated on some kind of coating and could be rubbed right off. Unfortunately, over time, half the ink floated away into the ether, all on its own.

I shift to the other side of the table, so that the notebook bathes in the bar of light from the slit of a window.

June 20, 1964

I typed the date an hour ago. It is still there, I haven't erased it yet. So it has already survived longer than anything else I've typed in the last few weeks. Maybe because it's the first thing I've gotten down on paper that wasn't a lie.

Well, of course I've always lied, mine is the liar's craft. As Martha once said, perhaps not unaffectionately, she lives with a man who spends his days concocting scurrilous stories about people who never existed.

But lately I've been writing a different kind of untruth. Pallid, overdetermined: my characters doing things just because I tell them to, not because they need to. My dialogue about as natural as the radio soap operas Martha used to listen to when she thought I was absorbed here in my study.

Farewell to fiction, then! It is incontrovertibly June 20. More irrefutables:

1. Martha and Mickey are off at my brother's place on the Cape for the summer, so I have the apartment to myself. I look forward to this all year, like a kid waiting for the last day of school. And, like a kid, by the end of June I'm ready for normal life to resume.

2. The Senate passed the Civil Rights Act yesterday, after breaking a long filibuster. Now people of every hue can sit knee-to-knee at the lunch counter at Woolworth's and eat tuna fish sandwiches. I'm sure I would care more if I had spent my life unable to buy a goddamn sandwich. But of course the law does nothing about the suffocating fact of Woolworth's.

3. I'm already running out of underwear and I have no idea how to operate the devices at the laundromat. So I'll have to take my stuff to those robbers next to St. Anselm's. I could swear the Mob has stopped running numbers and dope and has started running cleaners.

Is this how it's done, a journal or diary or whatever that neon date at the top of the page portends? Just write
down whatever comes into my head? Recount my dreams, describe my breakfast? I suppose I will find out what I am doing after I've done it for a while.

There: maybe it isn't just fiction I need to free myself from. It is, for a time at least, intention.

There is a lot more of this journal, and four more to come. I assume all these blue binders aren't filled with plaints about his dirty laundry or wisecracks about the headlines in the
Times
. Someone keeping a diary out of some sense of duty might fill the pages with stuff like that, but Jonathan wasn't a dutiful man. He must eventually have figured out what he was doing.

I catch myself thinking that I would rather he just wrote about laundry, year after year. Then I could be sure I wouldn't learn anything I don't want to know. Not to mention that I am rather beguiled by the idea of this Philip Marks person spending months of his life reading about Jonathan's underwear.

June 24, 1964

This summer I'm teaching a couple of evening classes at SLS. I tell people it's just for a little extra money, and of course the money is nice. Martha has been intimating that, as she embarks on middle age, perhaps she could at last have a sofa that isn't propped up on a couple of volumes of Huxley at the corner where the leg is missing. Or that she would like, just once, to go to a party dressed as someone other than Martha the Match Girl. Or that maybe she could get to Paris while her gams might still turn heads.

So yes, money. But I am doing it, too, to fill in the time. I think I must have known, even before the summer started, that I wasn't going to make much headway on
Untitled Novel
, the catchy name assigned to it in the last contract. God, for years I waited for classes to end because I was hot to write during the summer break. Now I volunteer for extra classes because I am broken.

No, I didn't set out just to fill the time. I must have had some notion that it would be revivifying, taking on
these evening Adult Enrichment classes for grown-ups. I was thinking back to the old days, in the thirties, when I taught the night classes in the basement at the pattern cutters' union, up in the Garment District. Jews and Italians who dragged in after ten or twelve hours of piecework, and at the end of those grim days coming to me! Starving for a little culture, puzzling their way through a few lines of the simplest poetry I could find, Sandburg or Blake.

Maybe once or twice every class--every single night!--I would see comprehension steal across one of those tired faces. And a sort of rapture, the primal experience of poetry that my undergraduates today will never know, all the rapture beaten out of them in high school Advanced Placement courses. I can picture, after thirty years, one sharp-faced yid, youngish but already bent over from his work. Scowling down at his text and then looking up, startled, electrified, as he read those words of Blake, the paradox at the heart of all revolutionary fervor:
One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression
.

That's what I was hoping for, moments like that. But it's different now. I sound even to myself like a crotchety old man, but it
is
different. The students now aren't tailors crawling out of the sweatshops and trying to catch a glimpse of the empyrean. They are advertising copywriters and tax accountants and spinsters who work the cosmetic floor at Bonwit Teller, and they want to be
enriched
, as the catalogue promised.

The other night we were supposed to talk about Kafka's
Trial
. I tried to be interesting, get them to draw parallels to HUAC and Hoover and …

Not a breeze from the open classroom windows, just the summer traffic noise with its undertones of chafing incipient violence, over our heads a vagrant moth beating against the fluorescent light. The students just stared at me, when I called on Mr. Glover by name he shrugged and, embarrassed, unscrewed his ballpoint pen, screwed it, unscrewed it. Of course he was the last guy I should have called on, it just
happened his was the only name I had bothered to learn. Which had nothing to do with the cleft chin or the earnest bow tie or the intricate flexions of his massive forearms as he twisted, twisted the little pen.

I turned to his neighbor, the girl with the pencil skirt so tight she couldn't cross her legs. “Miss … uh.” She was flustered--she had been focusing on Mr. Glover, not Mr. Kafka--but managed to stammer out what I suppose I had been asking for, simple pieties about unjust accusations and the apparatus of the state crushing individual conscience. Everyone in the room dutifully nodded. They hadn't come to the School for Liberal Studies without being good little liberals.

I felt like a charlatan. I had only meant to get someone to say something, so I wouldn't have to keep listening to myself, yammering away like some loony on the IND. But I had betrayed Kafka and myself and these yearning kids, too. I didn't want to be interesting, I wanted to tell the truth.

“Yes, very good,” I said. Miss Uh preened a little, the way my female students always do after praise, trying to hold in place an expression of modest, somber attentive-ness. The effect undercut, alas, by her unhappy choice of periwinkle eyeliner and false eyelashes as big as hairbrushes. She didn't look thoughtful, she looked as though she'd been scared by a rat. Which would not be, at the SLS, unprecedented.

“Very good,” I repeated. “Except I think … just possibly …” I have been trying to remember to do this, play at being tentative so they won't feel as though I'm shoving ideas into their skulls. “Just possibly Kafka's real point is that, if we are scrutinized, examined, we know ourselves to be guilty. When a McCarthy or a Hoover investigates you, he might nail you for the wrong crime--he is sure to, you are incomprehensible to him--and then you can whine about the injustice, meetings will be held, editorials written, you might even be vindicated. Except you'll know, always,
you
were
guilty. And they know, too, they just charged you with the wrong violation.”

Miss Uh knew she had been … what is that new phrase of Mickey's?--“put down” somehow. Mr. Glover cast her a sympathetic look, a few of the other students shifted uneasily. There was an air of indolent sedition in the room. What crime was I talking about, is that really all this weird book is trying to say, if Kafka really meant anything he could goddamn well have just spilled it.

Somehow I finished the hour, made my way to the tearoom at the West Fourth Street station. No one there but a guy I had done before: my age at least and stocky, modestly hung, a broken face masking some unutterable injury. I had done him before and I did him again, quickly, spitting out his sour aggrieved come and then hightailing it home, shamed but exhilarated.

Exhilarated because I was ashamed. Because I pictured Glover stumbling into the john and catching Professor Ascher on his knees. He would learn more from that than from anything I could say in a year of classes on Twentieth Century Fiction. This is what I have to teach, I think--teach not Glover and Miss Uh but the world. This is, somehow, the way to the revolution.

I am the one who has stumbled into the john and caught Professor Ascher on his knees.

Of course I've always known that, as he put it the night he proposed, he had
been
with a lot of
people
. And, if I had ever chosen to think about it, I might have recognized that being with people required him to select from a limited catalogue of achievable postures. But I never did choose to think about it. If anything, I envisioned Jonathan and his latest paramour lying stiffly side-by-side, like the tomb effigies of a knight and his dame.

I'm sure I could have gotten through the rest of my days quite happily without ever learning whether Jonathan swallowed or spat. But it isn't what I learn that counts, is it? Will Mr. Philip Marks, eager to expose Jonathan to a new generation of young readers, choose to
expose him in the tearoom? And if he doesn't, would he be protecting Jonathan or betraying him?

Really, I could have gotten through the rest of my days without ever learning the expression “tearoom.”

June 26, 1964

Last night I was more lonesome than horny, so instead of going to the subway or the baths I headed for the Poplar Inn to have a couple beers and listen to the painters' bullshit. But as I was nearing the door I saw Jim Something, a French teacher at a Catholic high school who brays about Camus while batting his eyes like a love-crazed librarian.

I didn't even go in, just staggered home in the heat. Stood at the base of our stoop, drenched, thinking next summer I'll go to Cape Cod and Martha can camp out on the fourth floor of a row house like a brick oven on 17th Street. At last I went over to Faherty's, the bar on the corner.

Half a block from home, and I'd never been in it. Not a queer bar, I don't think, just one of the thousand Irish dives that litter this island. But sometimes you'll see a couple of guys walk out together--not faggoty, just ordinary schmos, a bus driver still in uniform and a super with a hundred keys dangling from his belt. They'll keep a decorous distance between them, just buddies who'd had a few beers, yet you can tell by the way they
don't
look at each other that their night isn't over.

Certainly not a queer bar last night: my quick survey of the patrons yielded not so much as a maybe-if-he-had-a-few-more-drinks-he'd-let-me-suck-him-and-not-punch-me-after. But the beer was cold and the air conditioning worked. Didn't altogether succeed in making the room bearable but worked hard.

They had a baseball game on. I hate baseball--not anything about the game itself, but all those boyhood summers when my brother, Bernie, had the game on the radio, the awful incessant droning when I was trying to read. Last night, though, last night there was something comforting,
companionable about sitting with a bunch of gray, tipsy strangers, watching the perennial rhythmic monotony. (And still the droning, on TV where we can see everything for ourselves, they still have to tell us what we're looking at.)

So I was feeling pretty good this morning, ready to return to my … life's work, I was about to write, which is not just pretentious but also scary, as if I were chiseling my own tombstone. Anyway, I didn't get very far, and instead I find myself writing this. Because otherwise the page that glared up at me from the platen for three hours would still be blank. Now instead I have two whole pages and could easily fill dozens more. No wonder people keep journals! It's so effortless, you just put down what happened and you've done something that almost looks like writing.

This is a vice. At least, when I sit in front of the typewriter for hours with my fingers poised over the keys, awaiting dictation from my comatose muse, I know exactly what I'm
not
doing. Now that my fingers are flying I know what I'm doing, I'm masturbating. And, just as when I was a kid and told myself so many times, I'm going to stop, I must stop: I know I'm not going to stop for a while.

This would have been, I guess, the summer before he started
JD
. Almost ten years since his last novel,
Straphangers
. Nearly that long since he'd signed the contract for
Untitled Novel
. The first time he got an advance that might have bought, say, an Oldsmobile. So for a while Jonathan could still believe he was on an upward trajectory. Through the rest of the Eisenhower years, he was working frenziedly on THE BIG ONE. During the Kennedy years, he was working sporadically on something a little less ambitious.