Men and Cartoons (2 page)

I replaced the books on the shelf and went digging in the walk-in closet instead.

“Hello?” Someone had entered the room behind me. It was Doe, swinging a beer bottle elegantly by the neck.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for something.”

“Something?”

“A costume, or a cape,” I said. “It's a long story.” I emerged from the closet, which seemed to hold only wool coats and ski gear anyway. “Did you get voted out of the village?”

“Right after you.”

“Sorry. I guess I dragged us both down with that suspicious side talk. A rookie mistake.”

“It's okay. They were right to. I was in the mafia.”

“Ah. Now I feel truly foolish.”

“Don't. It was brave of you to speak up at all. The first time I played I just cowered.” Her tiny mouth was perfect apart from one incisor that seemed to have been inserted sideways for variation, like a domino.

“How do you know Adam and Roberta?”

“Adam was my dissertation adviser. At Columbia.” Doe squinted at me oddly, expectantly, perhaps sensing I didn't know the first thing about Adam. She was right and wrong, of course.

“I'm just the friendly neighbor,” I said. I considered how the word
friendly
could mean
not an actual friend
—like friendish, or friendlike. “Is this a whole, ah, Columbia group, upstairs?” I wondered what the man who'd been the Vision would teach: Android identity politics?

“Just that guy Barth who got killed. The rest I don't know. Adam and Roberta seem to collect people from all over the place.”

“They're not big on introductions, are they? They prefer keeping everyone in the dark, and dependent on them.”

“Maybe they figure we're grown-ups and can take care of ourselves.”

I'd touched the limits of Doe's disloyalty, and been admonished. I rather liked it. “Yes, of course,” I agreed. “The way we are, now, for instance. You and I, I mean. Taking care of ourselves.”

Doe only blinked, as when, in the circle upstairs, I'd probed her mafia status.

There commenced a clunking and scraping of chairs above our heads. The village had shrunk, or dissolved. I stepped forward and took Doe's hand, thinking I only had a minute. I had less, as it happened. For a giantess Roberta Jar moved silently, and now she was in the doorway. Doe's hand slipped from mine as a newt darts from view on a forest path.

“Game over?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Roberta, cat-ate-canaryishly. “The mafia won.”

“The mafia always wins,” said Doe, a little petulantly, I thought, given her own affiliation.

“Not really,” said Roberta. “But they have had their way recently, it's true.”

“They did fine without
my
help,” mused Doe. This accounted for her bitterness: she'd wanted to prove essential.

We returned upstairs on a quest for more beer. The smokers had returned from the stoop, and villagers and mafia alike mingled in excited dissection of the game's plot:
I told you so
was the general thrust. There was hopeful talk of another game, but Val and Irene, a couple with babysitter problems, had to go. A few more defections followed, and suddenly we didn't have numbers enough for a village. “Don't everybody go,” said Adam, as one after another made their excuses. “The night is young.”

Seven of us remained. Happily, this included Doe. There were also two younger men vying for the attention of an Asian woman named Flour. Perhaps predictably, it was singles who'd stayed—us with nothing to rush home to. We sat in the sea of empty bottles and abandoned chairs, a ghost village. But Adam Cressner and Roberta Jar seemed glad to have us. He went downstairs and soon Chet Baker emanated from speakers in the parlor's corners. Roberta lowered the lights.

“I know a game,” I said.

“Yes?” said Roberta.

“It's called I Never. It's a drinking game, though. We all have to have an alcoholic beverage in our hands.”

Adam plopped two fresh sixes of Pale Ale at our feet. I explained the rules: Each of us in turn made a statement—a true statement—beginning with the words
I never
. Those in the circle who'd done the things the speaker hadn't were required to confess their experience, by sipping their beer. Thus the worldly among us were made to grow embarrassed, and intoxicated, and thus secrets were flushed into the open.

“For example, I'll start,” I said. “I've never had sex on an airplane.”

Adam and Roberta smiled at one another and tipped their bottles. Flour also wet her lips, and one of her suitors as well. Doe and the second of Flour's men were in my more innocent camp.

“Excellent,” I said. “The rest is just a matter of thinking of good questions.” I felt now an unexpectedly sharp appetite for this game—I wanted Adam and Roberta, and Doe too, to see how false the drama of Mafia was compared to our real lives. Of course, after my example we first had to endure a tentative round of inquiries into sex on trains, in restaurant coatrooms, in film projection booths, etc. When my turn came again I ratcheted things up a notch.

“I've never had sex with anyone in this room,” I said.

Adam and Roberta clinked bottles, toasting smug coupledom.

Then Doe raised her drink and gulped, eyes closed. “
Oooh
,” said one of the single men. I did the easy math, then inspected Roberta for her reaction. If anything, she looked ready to toast Doe's confession as well. Certainly it came as no surprise.

“I've . . . never . . .” Flour thought hard, eager to fill the loud silence. We were eager to have her fill it. “I've . . . never . . . had sex with a married person.”

“Good one,” congratulated one of her suitors.

I was forced to drink to this, as were our sybaritic hosts—and, yes, Doe. Her long-lashed eyes remained cast down to the floor, or squeezed as if in pain.

It was Adam's turn. “I've never killed anything bigger than a cockroach,” he said.

Neither had I. Nor Roberta Jar, nor the woman named Flour or her two wannabe boyfriends. No, it was Doe again who had been trapped by the odd question, who raised her bottle once more to her thin-pressed lips. I wasn't sure she actually drank, but I wasn't about to call her on it.

It's the nature of I Never, as in other of life's arenas, that though explanations aren't called for in the rules one often feels compelled to explain. I can't claim our circle didn't look to Doe for some gloss on her lonely confession.

“I was five,” she began, and there was something ominous in the specificity: not
four or five
, or
five or six
. “My uncle had given me a new kitten, and I was playing alone in the yard with it, with some string. I hadn't even given the kitten a name yet.” Doe looked at Adam Cressner, as if the whole game had devolved to the authority of his eerie question. “There was a tree in the yard, it's still there”—she spoke as though hypnotized, and seeing the tree float before her—“my parents still have the house. I used to climb the tree, and I had the idea I would take the kitten up the tree with me. I tied the string around the kitten's neck”—here Flour gasped—“and tried to pulley it up with me, across a branch.”

Her tale's Clint Eastwoodian climax having been telegraphed by Adam's question, Doe was permitted a graceful elision. “A neighbor saw the whole thing from a window across the yard. He thought I'd done it on purpose, and he told my parents.”

“Did they believe you?” asked Roberta Jar, clinically impassive.

“I don't know,” said Doe, raising her eyebrows. “It didn't matter, really. Every since then I think something broke inside me . . . when my parents made me understand that the kitten wasn't alive anymore . . . there's always been a part of me missing.”

“That's
horrible
,” said one of Flour's men.

“I mean, I still have a capacity for happiness,” said Doe, matter-of-factly, almost impatiently. It was as though she wanted to protect us from her story now, felt bad for telling it.

We meditated in silence on what we'd learned. Someone guzzled their beer, not as a gesture within the game, just to do it: a quiet pop of bottle mouth unsealing from lips was audible in a break between songs, Chet Baker finishing “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” then, absurdly, beginning “Everything Happens to Me.” I'd have been tempted to put my arm around Doe's shoulders, or even lead her from the room, if she as much as met my eye. She didn't. Tears streaked Flour's ivory cheeks instead.

Adam Cressner began speaking. At first it seemed a hollow gambit, an attempt to distract us from Doe's testimony by non sequitur. “When I was last in Germany, I visited the Glyptotek in Munich,” he said. “It's full of statuary the Europeans ripped out of the old temples. They've got a Roman copy of a Greek marble by Boëthus—the original's in the Vatican—showing a boy with a goose. The bird's practically as big as the boy, and they're wrestling. The kid's got the goose by the neck. A museum guard came up behind me, he saw I was transfixed by this sculpture, and he uttered this line I'll never forget, it shot through me like a bolt: ‘Spielend, doch, mit toedlichem Griff.'
He thinks it's a game, but he's choking the goose
. But in the guard's High German it was more allusive and grand—‘playing, but with a deadly grip.'”

“Like something from Rilke,” said Roberta Jar.

Oh yes, I thought viciously,
Rilke
and
High German
after four or five beers. You're both such fine people. However slow my uptake, a picture formed: I now supposed Doe's dissertation had been in art history, for example. And that Adam Cressner and Roberta Jar had together known, from intimate experience, how easily Doe might be induced to turn herself inside out for us.

I wanted revenge on Doe's behalf. “I've never,” I said loudly.

All stared. I began again. “I've never pretended I was a character from a comic book. Never, say, dressed up in a superhero costume, not even on Halloween.” I glared at Adam Cressner: Let him eat cape.

It was Roberta Jar who drew our attention, though, by lifting her bottle high, as if to toast again before she sipped. We looked to her as we had to Doe.

“I met a man once,” Roberta said. “I liked this man, well, very, very much. This was eight years ago now.” She lolled her big head, a little shy to tell it, though her voice was still strong and resonant in her chest. “When we began to see one another, this man and I, there was something between us that was difficult, a secret—a secret priority in his life. It had to do with this, exactly: dressing up as a character from a comic book. And this priority was difficult for both of us.”

She'd turned my hostile joke into another confession, to give Doe company. We listened wide-eyed—I caught Flour glancing at me, likely wondering how I'd known to ask the question, as I'd wondered before at Adam Cressner. As for Adam, he sat quietly adoring his paramour while she spilled on.

“I realized I had to learn as much about this as I could, or it would beat us, and I was determined not to be beaten. I discovered that the comic-book character in question had gotten married, to another character, called the Scarlet Witch. I thought this was very unusual, two married superheroes, and I took it as a good sign. So, I went shopping for fabric, and hand-sewed a Scarlet Witch costume. Tights, and pink boots, a sort of pink headpiece to hold back my hair. I did a good job, really impressed myself. It was the most sustained arts-and-crafts project of my life, actually.”

Roberta paused, and in the silence we were allowed to sense the result of her efforts, a climax as inevitable and in its way as horrible as the kitten's execution. I wondered if Adam still wore the red food coloring for face paint, or whether he'd found some better method, easier to remove when he'd wanted to pass for a mere Columbia professor. I thought of the Scarlet Witch as I knew her from Marvel Comics, an exotic beauty whose powers, loosely defined as “sorcery,” mostly consisted of throwing up pink force fields, but whose real achievement was a stoical, unwavering devotion to her Spock-like emotional mute of a husband.

I looked again to Adam Cressner. I still faintly wished for the satisfaction of an unmasking, but his eyes gave me nothing. Adam Cressner was as little interested in my impressions of his Visionhood as he'd been at second base, all those years ago. He hadn't even sipped his beer to confess the truth.

“I have to go,” said Doe suddenly. She flinched her head from me, from all of us, hastily gathered a load of beer bottles into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink. I wondered if she'd also been enticed into a costume—Ant-Girl, or Thumbelina.

“Well, anyway, that's my story,” said Roberta, the sardonic twang restored to her voice. One of the men gave an artificial laugh, barely adequate to break the tension. It was only now that Adam Cressner followed the game's protocol and also drank. I'd had my answer, though not as I'd wanted it, from Adam's mouth. I don't even know whether Flour or the two men had any understanding of what had happened—for all Roberta had told us, the man in question could have been someone other than Adam. Strangely, it was as if he and I were allies, having each forced confession from the other's woman. Except that neither woman was mine, and both might be his.

“A beautiful story it is,” said Adam Cressner. “With that we'll see our dear guests to the door, yes?”

No one resisted. The spell was broken.
We
were in some way broken, shattered by the game, unable to recover any sense of delight in one another's company, if we'd ever had that—I no longer knew. We cleared bottles, shuffled chairs, mumbled excuses, made promises to be in touch, to forward one another's e-mail addresses, which rang hollow. Within ten minutes we were out on the street, each headed home alone. At least I think we were alone. Certainly Doe strolled away, apart from the others, a tiny figure vanishing on the pavement, before I'd turned my back and descended into my basement entrance, before I'd even had a chance to wish her good night or kiss her equivocally on the cheek. It's possible one of Flour's suitors followed her home, but I doubt it. It had all been a little much for us poor singles, the tyranny of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch.