Stages (12 page)

That night David found out that Sandra did not fuck like a bunny. She fucked like the White Rabbit in the Jefferson Airplane song. In the process she did such things to David’s head that by the end of a week of nights he’d asked her to move in with him.

But as his love life improved, David’s problem with
his
local draft board worsened. Finally he had to borrow five hundred dollars from his father in order to give a lawyer a retainer. The lawyer then sent David’s draft board a letter as full of endless corridors as the Pentagon. It would buy time at least.

To support himself David was working twenty hours a week in his father’s Seventh Avenue dress business. At least he wasn’t driving a cab or waiting on tables, but he dreaded being bound up in the family firm if something didn’t happen soon.

Not long after moving in with David, Sandra was hired as a waitress at the Elephant and Castle restaurant, where she felt she fit in spiritually.

Much of their free time Sandra and David spent scouring the trades or going to auditions. They were together only in acting class and in bed at night. Sometimes in bed they would watch Johnny Carson. The guests on the “Tonight Show” usually had the effect on David of deepening the mystery of fame. One night Sandra sketched him after he’d yelled at Ed McMahon, “Just what exactly is it that you
do
?”
In the drawing, David looked like Donald Duck in a rage.

A week later David experienced an episode of light-headedness. The next morning when he went to the bathroom he saw that his stool was as black as the telephone. And the smell was overpowering, worse even than what had hung in the air those times when his mother would say to his father, “What crawled up inside you and died?”

Badly frightened and wobbly, David lit a match and sprayed Lysol all around.

Then he went into the kitchen and said to Sandra, “Something’s really wrong with me.”

She made him sit down. Heating water for tea, she looked up in the telephone book the number of his family’s doctor. After he’d had the tea, they went over to the day bed and she nestled against him, rubbing his back. Then they made love, slowly.

When he was in college David would have called it a “sympathy fuck.” He didn’t think of it that way now, though.

Two days later he learned that he had an ulcer.

And that night it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to have to worry about the draft anymore. The acid in his belly had chewed him out of the trap.

But now what? How much more could he take of the acting classes that went nowhere and the navy-blue fabric from Taiwan with the daisies the size of flies? He was even tiring of Sandra, though she rode him giddy as a child on her father’s shoulders. She was too content carrying her trays and doing her drawings that reduced people to their own big toes.

David knew he couldn’t survive this way, with his insides pouring out of him, the smell of his shit like steaming fresh tar.

He had to find a way out.

One afternoon, as he stood by a window in his father’s office, he saw a speck of a plane making a thin chalk line across the western sky.

Within a week, he was on his way to California.

22

They were taken on a bus to an army base surrounded by a chain link fence. By the base’s guardhouse a ragtag group of protesters was being harangued by two housewives who apparently were so outraged by the sight of the little demonstration that they had stopped their station wagon to do battle. Through the open window of the bus, Mike could hear one of the women shouting at the protesters.

“My brother got called up during the Korean War,” she yelled, “and he went.
He
went!”

So why shouldn
’t
you go now?
Mike thought, finishing the woman’s speech for her. All wars were the same war as far as people like her were concerned. They were as orthodox in their patriotism as they were in their religion. Mike could see in the women’s distorted faces their fury at the protesters’ serene indifference to them. In a way, he could understand their rage. These freaks and bums with their wild hair and bizarre clothes who sat cross-legged on the ground, silently defying them, were denying every value the women held dear. If the flag was not sacred, the church was not sacred, nor the home. How could anyone be unwilling to serve his country? There had to be sacrifices made. You had to do what everybody else had always done. Young men went into the service, and when they came out of the service they got married and had children. The service was one of the sacraments of masculinity. The women were trying to stop a sacrilege, Mike knew; for them, “supporting our boys in Vietnam” was a principle indistinguishable from that of a husband supporting his family. These hippies, with their demonstrations and their free love, were as threatening to them as adultery. Or homosexuality.

The gate was opened, and the bus rolled past the screaming women and the mute protesters onto the base. For Mike, this moment had been over a year in coming, and he was still unsure about what he was going to do. He knew he could get out of it simply by checking the box, but he was afraid of what doing that might mean. What if the women clerks who ran his local draft board started whispering and his parents found out? What if he couldn’t get a job? Of course in show business nobody cared—except when there had been blacklisting—and there could be blacklisting again.

Mike and the other young men on the bus were herded into a gray building that looked like a barn. Someone in a uniform ordered them to “Listen up” and they listened to his instructions. Then they were taken to a barren room filled with desks. There they took tests that seemed to Mike to be mostly the equations of automotive repair.

Next came the physical examinations. As they stripped to their underwear, Mike heard one of them tell an officer that he was going into the marines.

“Tough outfit,” the officer replied in respectful acknowledgment.

Mike blinked. All male proving grounds—gym class, football fields, the army, navy, and marines—were strange places as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know the customs or understand the rituals. He did know that men had to defeat other men in order to love women. As a faggot, he’d always been, automatically, vanquished. Like the protesters at the gate, all faggots of one stripe or another in the women’s eyes, he’d offered no resistance, except the threat of a separate peace, of the existence of an illegitimate state where men could love men. With some kind of war always on, that, of course, was more than enough.

They all peed stolidly into paper cups.

They lined up against a wall and were told, “Okay, bend over and spread ’em.”

“And no back talk,” one guy muttered. It was one of the few grunts of protest Mike heard that day.

At the end, each of them had to sit down with a military doctor who scrutinized the papers that in summary were a yes or a no. As he handed over his documents, Mike was trembling—he hoped not noticeably. The doctor’s hair was cut so short it looked like stubble. His appearance and his manner, all so crudely clipped, made Mike think,
If the marine corps builds men, then the army must build mental patients.

He wanted to believe in the insanity of all of this, because he had done something crazy himself! He’d checked the box.

Because he was sure now that whether or not it was insane, or abnormal, or perverted, his was a separate state of mind. He was not one of these people; he and the women screaming outside the gate were of two different worlds. To accept that about himself, he had to be rejected by the army.

As the doctor’s eyes paused, Mike’s fear gave way to an inexplicable feeling of strength. He had, like all faggots, been defeated a thousand times. Yet something in him could not be denied. What could they do to him, then? How could they win?

To confirm what he’d seen on the page the doctor gave Mike a cursory glance.

“You got soft-looking tits,” he said. “Okay, next.”

The remark had been meant to humiliate him, Mike knew, but it hadn’t. The truth had put him out of reach.

As he returned on the bus with the others to the recruitment center where they had assembled that morning, Mike knew that now there could be no turning back. He’d committed himself to being himself, finally and irrevocably.

He didn’t feel soft either, in the tits or anywhere else.

He felt hardened. He felt like a man.

Only different.

The next day he gave his notice to the kindly old lady who ran the Hallmark card shop where he’d been marking time for the past few months. The day after that, he took the bus to New York. A few blocks from the terminal, the driver had to stop to let out a crazy woman. She’d sat next to a guy with shoulder-length hair and gotten up shouting that she wasn’t going to ride with a draft dodger.

23

This was the third tape recording that James had sent to Lauren in a month. In the beginning, after her arrival in London eight months before, she had listened to some of the tapes five and six times. Now, after hearing a tape once, she erased it and recorded her reply.

Switching on the old Wallensack that she’d bought used, Lauren sat on her bed while from the faintly whirring reels came the outpouring of her absent lover’s heart.

“I was just sitting here looking out my office window and thinking about you, my darling,” the recording began. “It snowed all day here yesterday. The roads are a mess and—”

Lauren heard a terrible spasm of coughing. Then there was a jump in the tape to “’Scuse, me, darling.” He’d erased something, Lauren realized, probably the sound of him getting phlegm out of his throat
—hocking up a lunger,
as her father would have said.

“Sorry,” the tape continued. “As you can hear, I’ve got a terrible cold. January is absolutely the worst month of the year. But I’ve had a little sunshine in my day—Anderson the one-man light opera company was in here for a half hour bugging me. And all I could think of was you, darling. God, I miss you. Especially when I’ve had a week like this, you know the kind where you say to yourself,
I know what
I
have to put into this business of living, but just what the hell am I getting out of it?”

James tried to clear his throat. He coughed twice. Then he made a noise like that of a balloon rapping the spokes of a bicycle’s wheel. Lauren lit a cigarette.

“It all gets to be cumulative, you know?” James said. “Steve had this heavy date so I let him take the Buick and he skidded on a patch of ice and did sixteen hundred dollars’ damage to the front end. And over the weekend Ellen was feeling her oats. I don’t know if she can tell, but I have to drag myself along… Nothing would happen at all if I didn’t have these pictures of you in my mind, darling….
”

One of Lauren’s shoes was half off. She wiggled her toes so that the shoe swung back and forth, tapping against her heel.

“And I had to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour faculty meeting last night,” James went on. “Lulu Paladino must have been on her feet yapping fifty times, that bluestocking bitch. Her husband had a nervous breakdown and probably sweeps the floors somewhere now—nobody knows. But she’s worse than ever, and there I was sitting in the same row with her, and after the meeting she
stepped on
a notebook I had sitting on the floor. It was deliberate, I’m sure of it. I just blocked her out, though. I block them all out. In my mind I’m back in room twenty with you, the time you took my balls in your mouth….
”

Leaving her cigarette burning in the thick amber ashtray, Lauren got up and made herself a pot of tea. She opened a tin of the dry English biscuits she’d developed a taste for and adjusted the little valve in the gas-burning fireplace. By the time she’d resettled herself on the bed, James had finished his foreplay and was telling her how much he’d wanted her even when he was having her.

Lauren reached over to her huge old FM radio, and switched on the BBC. James sounded better with background music. This time is was Beethoven. The combination of the galloping symphony and James’s dirty talk was amusing, like getting a crank call from Charlton Heston or Kirk Douglas.

There was the sound of violent coughing.

“Oh, God,” said James after a few moments. “I only wish it had worked out for us over Christmas. If only I’d gotten that Fulbright. But I know I can get over there during spring break. I’m absolutely sure of it. I can’t be teaching contemporary drama in the fall and have no idea what’s going on in the West End, now, can I?”

“Sure you can,” Lauren said to the revolving reels. She got up and stopped the tape, then pressed the rewind button. While James silently went back to where he had started, she rinsed out her teacup in the sink.

Lately she was having trouble thinking of things to say to him. The college seemed so far away now. You either left school when you graduated or you hung around for a while, like the kids who got jobs selling records or books. And Lauren had left.

When she was in high school, she’d come across one day, beneath a sweater, a doll she’d dearly loved. For a minute or two, she had held it in her arms, rocking it the way she had when she was seven or eight. But she hadn’t felt the same way about it. Lauren wondered now if that was what growing up was all about—letting go, a little at a time, until you were on your own.

Impatient with herself, she put on her P-coat. Locking her door behind her, she entered the lift, a gilded cage that lowered her majestically to the first floor.