The End of the World as We Know It (19 page)

It must have ended. Life went on, after all. We grew up. I don't remember whether we ever played at being cowboys again, but we must have. It couldn't have been that big a deal.

My brother was stubborn, and he had a temper a mile wide. He wasn't mean; he just got mad. He once threw a pencil at me across the dining room, the pencil coming at my face like the spear in the 3-D movie, and it stuck in my forehead like an arrow and drew real blood that trickled down into my eyes. I walked into the middle of a cocktail party like a dork to show off what he had done. The pencil was still in my forehead. What an idiot. Now that was mean. I still have a tiny blue mark, just under the hairline.

Eat your lunch, cowboy. That's all she had to say. And she wouldn't say it. Not that afternoon. Clearly not ever.

But on that day, there must have been some resolution. It must
have ended by three o'clock, which was when my mother took her nap. We must have had supper. She had been fixing supper, and sitting down to it was a holy ritual: seven-thirty, everybody in place, everything lovely. Candles and silverware. My mother had a habit of making a delicious, complicated dinner in the morning when she was especially bored and all jacked up on coffee, not the meat part but things like creamed onions, and leaving it sitting on the stove all day, so sometimes it got a little frightening, but in general we sat down hungry and got up satisfied. Nobody ever had to be rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

Eat your lunch, cowboy. Four words. Life must have gone on. My mother adored my brother, everything he did made her love him even more, or laugh until she cried—he was that charming, and that smart, despite his temper.

But I know them both well enough to know that she never said it and he never ate the sandwich. That much is crystal clear.

Years later, my brother got kicked out of college. It was an unthinkable event. It was something nobody could comprehend. It was one of those things my parents wouldn't discuss with even their closest friends, as though my brother could somehow charm and cajole his way back into Williams and everything would be fine.

It was 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and the summer was filled with tears and acrimony and dread. Nobody could believe that my brilliant brother had not gone to class for six months. Nobody could believe that he had not turned in a single paper. Nobody could believe that he spent the entire time sleeping in his dorm room and going to parties, where he would
be charming and drink beer all night. All his roommates were hard partygoers, but they also went to class and got fantastic grades, and they, too, were stunned and mystified by my brother's behavior. He had done brilliantly in prep school, he had read
War and Peace
when he was thirteen, and things like that just didn't happen in our family. Failure was less final, more mortal perhaps, but less irrevocable. It took a long time, failure, not like having somebody slam a door in your face and then turn the lock.

I have a clear picture of him, that winter before he flunked out. It is Winter Carnival; he is standing in a fisherman's knit sweater, facing away from me, his hair long, his shoulders hunched against the cold. He hadn't opened a letter in six months. He would stay in his room for days, just lie on his bed except to eat and collect anecdotes.

He was a social animal, that weekend, except that he went to bed early while I stayed up late talking to his roommates. You would never have known anything was wrong.

Spring Weekend, his roommates, Daddy Jim, who had a brother called Lunch Madrid, and Bart and Robin, told me while he was sleeping that he was going to flunk out, and I was so horrified I never told anybody, so that, when it happened, my parents somehow blamed me, because I knew and should have said something, as though they hadn't been getting his grades in the mail for a year. Maybe they just assumed. Maybe they didn't look at them, assuming.

Every day, every night of that hot summer, there were long discussions about what was to be done and what had happened and how it had happened. We went over it a thousand thousand
times. And then we went out to parties to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I had suggested that he needed to see a psychiatrist, but my mother said we didn't do things like that, we didn't air our private affairs in public, even if public meant the confidentiality of a shrink's office.

My mother was crying. She cried a lot that summer, a hopeless kind of drizzle that fell from her eyes almost all the time. She and my brother were Discussing the Situation.

“Just tell me,” she pleaded, because my brother had remained mute about the whole thing, had not bothered to explain or justify his behavior in any way, just thrown around idle threats about becoming a conscientious objector or going to Canada like Jesse Winchester had done, “just tell me how all this began.”

“I'll tell you exactly,” said my brother. “It started because you wouldn't say, ‘Eat your lunch, cowboy.'”

She stared at him for a long moment, as though he were still eight and standing in his chaps and his vest and his sheriff's badge and his six-shooters and his hat.

And then they both began to laugh hysterically. They laughed so hard they cried. They laughed until the sweltering afternoon turned cool and Lyndon Johnson was a cardboard cutout and every eye was blue and my brother's academic career was relentlessly brilliant and everybody was unremittingly kind. And that was the way we dealt with trauma and pain and sadness in my family. At least, that's the way we dealt with my brother.

On the night of September 6, 1952, I woke up in the moonlit dark of a dead hot night to find that my father was fucking me. It was a month and two days after my fourth birthday.

I was a handsome little boy, beautiful my mother said. I didn't look a thing like I look now. I looked hopeful. I looked as though life was riveting with possibility.

I was in my mother and father's bed, in a pair of short striped pajamas. I was in my mother and father's bed because the next day was my aunt's wedding, and there were houseguests. I had gone to bed in my own bed and, after all the guests had left and the bartender Tiny had cleaned off the bar and washed all the glasses and the drinking had finally stopped for the night, I had been carried into my mother and father's bed so that one of the houseguests could sleep in mine. My mother and father were always having houseguests, house parties, and it wasn't a big house, it had five bedrooms but everybody was young and they liked camping out, and my parents were such lovely hosts, so the children were sort of shuffled around: my parents' bed, a chaise longue in my parents' room, or army cots set up in corners. Canvas
and sticks in corners while the grownups snored in their underwear.

Two rooms away, my grandfather lay dying. He was wearing striped pajamas, too. His glasses were on the night table next to the bed. I had sat on his lap while he read to me. He was too sick to read now, but he had been kind and good-hearted and distant but good with children.

It was in one of these army cots I had the first dream I can remember. I don't remember how old I was, but it was before, it was just before the September night. I must have been three. It was during one of the house parties. I was on a cot in the corner. It was almost dawn.

I was in a big city, even though I had never been in a city, standing on the top of a tall skyscraper, even though I had never seen a skyscraper. There were three identical buildings, square and tall, arranged around a central space, with one side open to the city, the way Lincoln Center is today. Two of the buildings were navy blue aluminum and one, the one I was standing on the top of, was maroon.

As I peered down from the great height, as I was looking over the edge at the large square below, the wind blew and I fell off. I was a tiny child. I began to fall faster and faster, the ground rushing at me with terrifying speed. I could see the paving stones. As I got nearer to the ground, I began to slow in my descent, slowing and slowing until I was wafting downward, back and forth like an autumn leaf. When I was about three feet off the ground, a beautiful angel, a rococo angel out of the Bible story books, swooped down and grabbed me in his arms and
held me gently like a pietà and flew up and into the sky and through the bright blue until he flew into my own room in the first light and deposited me gently in the cot in which I was sleeping.

I woke up and I was in the bed where I had started. There were grownups snoring softly in the room. The room smelled like liquor and night sweat. It was getting light out. The birds were beginning to sing.

Later, I used to dream that I was in a plane crash, before I had ever been in an airplane. The plane crashed into a tall building in a city. Everybody on the plane was killed, in the dream, but I walked away without a scratch. This happened over and over again, but the angel only caught me once.

When my grandfather died, two months after my aunt's wedding day, he was still wearing striped pajamas when they carried him, dead on a stretcher, not covered up or anything, just dead, down the stairs and up the walk. I remember how still he looked, how white. He didn't have his glasses on. I still have the tortoise-shell glasses he wasn't wearing.

Actually, at the moment I woke up, my father wasn't fucking me yet.

I was lying on my side, my left side. The top of my pajamas was open, perhaps he had opened them, perhaps it was just a hot September night. His thin arms were around me, I could feel his naked chest against my back. His long arms were around me, his thin beautiful hands rubbing up and down my body.

He had the family hands, his mother's hands, his sister's hands, with long, thin fingers, and delicate, thin skin, narrow and beautiful hands. He bit his nails, a habit he simply dropped
one day years later, the way people go cold turkey with smoking. I bit my nails, too, as a child. I don't do it anymore. My father was tickling me, running his beautiful hands over my thin ribs, down into the waistband of my pajamas, his beautiful fingers playing over my penis and my balls as though he were playing arpeggios on the piano, his thin arms around me, and I woke up giggling and squirming. Moonlight was coming through the window, thin and pale.

His left hand began to play with my left nipple, his thin fingers thrumming across it like strumming a guitar string, his long thumb brushing and brushing until my tiny nipple rose from my chest. His right hand, the beautiful fingers, began to play over my lips. I was laughing softly, twisting in his arms, my head moving from side to side.

S
OMETHING TERRIBLE WILL HAPPEN
.
I was told that, and I believe it. Terrible things did happen, of course, terrible things later, but worse things are coming.

T
HE SLIM FINGERS
of his right hand, the flesh soft and smooth, merely a fragrant sheath for the beautiful bones, began to open my mouth, began to play with my tongue, one and then two and then three in my mouth. The tips of his fingers ran over my tongue, ran over my teeth, pulled at my lips to open them farther.

His left hand strumming, a whispering flutter, across my left nipple, beat, beat, beat, like a hummingbird sipping at a flower, his right hand deeper and deeper in my mouth and then it wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't funny.

W
HAT MAKES A CHILD
of four realize that something awful is going to happen? Something awful in the dark? I began to know this, began to know it in my body.

H
IS RIGHT HAND WAS DEEP
in my mouth, reaching the thin fingers down my throat, and I began to gag. I began to squirm, trying to get out of his grasp, trying not to throw up with his hand down my throat, the round fingers of his soft hand on my windpipe.

That room. That dark room which I had to enter a thousand times again in later years. I don't go in there anymore. That room where the worst things that have ever happened to me in my life happened.

Then there was something poking and prodding at my behind, something thin and stiff and hard. My pajama top open to his hands, my mouth open to his fist, my pajama bottoms pulled down and something poking at me and then he was inside, inside my body, moving quick as a rabbit inside me, pushing and pushing, tearing my skin, small and quick as a rabbit, and he wouldn't stop strumming my nipple and his hand moved deeper into my throat and the moonlight was shining off the white door of his closet and I could see the furniture in the room, his clothes thrown any which way over the furniture, and he moved behind me, his hands in front, and he began to moan in my ear.

Something about my father. When he was sixteen, he was sent to college, a military school still known as the West Point of the South. He was, there's no other way to say it, pretty. He was delicate and bone-thin and pretty, with soft brown hair and fine features and beautiful hands. His introduction to military
life, the hazing, was, as it was for all cadets, brutal and dehumanizing and strident, but he made it through.

He was an athlete. He was a flyweight boxer, and he got beaten again and again but he kept on at it. He was a runner, and he once had cinders scraped from his knee with a horse currycomb after a fall on the track.

His years at VMI were some of his happiest memories, before everything, when he was still just a pretty child.

When he was in the war, he once sent a picture to my mother: my father standing in a combat helmet standing on a beach. On the back he wrote, in his beautiful handwriting, “I don't remember much about taking this picture; I just remember how badly I wanted a drink.”

I could smell his hot bourbon breath. I could feel the beard on his cheek, the stubble sharp now in the night. He was whispering to me, calling me his darling maybe, whispering words I don't remember. My legs were restless as though running and the pain was sudden and startling and excruciating and I couldn't get away, could not run away from the hand on my nipple or the fingers down my throat or this strange hard thing inside me. My father.