The Story of a Marriage (20 page)

“It’s too late,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment before he nodded. Gratitude and love was on his face. Then, in one of those strange miracles of the cinema, an officer on the screen began to mirror Buzz’s movements: standing up, taking his hat, and walking through a door that, swinging just like the theater door, produced the painful dazzling surprise of a sunny day.

It was only much later, when I learned the rest of his story, that I fully understood what he had offered with those four words: “I could go away.” The solitary life he might have returned to. His story of pain, which he told me at last. I have said that pain reveals things, and that is sometimes what it takes to break our solitude. To open, briefly, that small window, that view out of ourselves: the life of someone else.

In the final days of the experiment, Buzz told me, his dreams ransacked his memories, turning them into nightmares. His brain recast familiar scenes like the train ride to Minnesota but this time he appeared as a cannibal, running through the cars. Even his memories were not safe; the hunger got to them, as well. This was not as bad as the blackouts experienced by other men who would lose whole afternoons. They arrived at their rooms unable to explain their absences, terrified of what they might have done. They were not acting; they had gone mad. One spent days stealing fruit from markets and erasing it from his memory. Another ate from garbage cans; another stared at restaurant patrons for hours. And one had to be sent away from the program for good. That was Buzz.

It was the spring of 1945; peace was coming, though the boys in Minnesota could never have known it. “We had almost forgotten about the war,” he told me. “They told us it was nearly over, and we would help the survivors, but it was very hard to think about that.” Six months had passed, and the starvation segment of the experiment, at least, had come to an end. Hair was falling out; lips and nails were blue; their flesh was puckered and gray, like the skin of butchered animals. But they had survived it. “The stick men,” they called themselves, and would have laughed if they could. “The zombie soldiers.” Buzz’s mind began to glow again, faintly, at the notion that it was over. The hunger. A sturdy, dependable subject for all those months—an ideal subject, in many ways—no one could guess he was about to lose his mind.

It happened the day they announced the increase in food. Not everyone would get the same amount, the doctors said. The purpose of the experiment, they explained, wasn’t, as the men had been led to believe, to find the best way to bring someone back to life. It was to find the cheapest way. Millions of hungry refugees wandered out of the cities of Europe, and the money had to go as far as possible to save them. There were so many mouths. The group had to find what was enough, what was too little. And so some men were given large portions of food, some less, some still less, and some barely more than they’d eaten all along. It was a bullet to the brain when Buzz heard he was part of this last group.

Apparently you cannot feed a starving man and expect gratitude. That is what they learned from the study, and later from the concentration camps. A man, nearly dead, will snarl at his plate of food. In that way, we are untamable.

He shouted several times a day at mealtime, taunting the men whose plates were two or three times the size of his; sometimes he refused his food altogether, tossing it onto the floor in a rage he could never explain. But he was a good subject; he pulled himself together. He told himself it would be over soon; this was not real life. It was just war; it was the life eventually you leave behind. It took all he had to sit at the table and eat the food they gave him, at least to stay alive.

“I don’t remember,” he told me, “what eventually happened to me.” He accepted the refeeding system for about two weeks, and the doctors were surprised to see he began to lose instead of gain weight, because even his small diet was four hundred more calories than he’d eaten for half a year. Once again, he became irritable with doctors and with his fellow patients. He spoke to no one, read no books, would not even listen to the radio with his former friends. He would pour water into his plate and mush it like a milk shake, staring at the others as if daring them to do something about it. Eventually, though, he ate it with a spoon. He did not remember doing anything more unspeakable than this.

“They tell me I disappeared one afternoon, didn’t show up for my physical, didn’t leave any sign that I’d gone to town or anything. I suppose I blacked it all out, like the others. I don’t remember. I can’t explain it.”

He did not remember being discovered in a garage. Or how a gleaming ax lay near him on the ground, among all the bits of metal, or how he crouched beside the workbench, involved in some activity. It was only when they got closer, he told me, that they noticed the blood freely flowing from his left hand and watched, with horror, as—delicately, lovingly—he fed himself tiny gobbets of his flesh.

This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass. Not an ordinary story of men in battle but of those who did not go to war. The cowards and shirkers; those who let an error keep them from their duty, those who saw it and hid, those who stood up and refused it; even those too young to know that one day they would rise and flee their own country, like my son would, when his time came to go to war. The story of those men, and of a woman in a window, unable to do a thing but watch.

I saw it all. Holland Cook silhouetted in his hiding chamber and years later on a gray beach, staring at the sea that had swallowed him. William Platt home from Virginia in his uniform, wife running to him, smiling as he saluted with his one remaining hand. Buzz Drumer rubbing his hand as his “tell” in conversation, and blasted with grief in the white light of that movie theater, greeting the return of his own madness. Sonny’s voice on the phone, the day I would get his draft card, years later. I saw it and thought, “I’ll save this one.” A reprieve for one man, a release from the turning wheel. Surely the world won’t miss one more. Surely there has been enough.

It is madness not to do as you are told. Not to step forward from a hiding place, a deferral, from a line of frightened young men. But it is astounding how different men are; not all from the same clay, for when it comes to the kiln, some break wide open or change in ways even the maker can’t predict.

Where is the dollar bill for those men? For the cowards, the shirkers? Like the one Buzz gave me, by accident, on our first meeting by the sea? Covered with the signatures of nineteen-yearold soldiers headed of year-olding in bars and signing dozens of bills, using them to pay for drinks, hoping their memory would still circulate after they shipped off, and fought, and died for their country.

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names.

How else will we be remembered?

A few nights later, a succession of streetcars took me far from the Sunset. I was no longer Pearlie Cook; I was a stranger in a cloth coat and cat-whisker bow, a mystery on the tramline, a colored girl clutching her purse, headed who knows where. This was not unusual for most people, used to being surrounded by strangers, nothing expected of them. At one point, the streetcar lost its electricity and the driver had to walk outside with a long pole to reconnect the wires, and as we sat in darkness, the man across from me gave me three glances: my legs, my hands, my eyes. I could be any girl, headed anywhere. A late-night shift at a factory, a date at a nightclub, an affair out at the farthest edge of town. The car awakened with light and he gave me one more appraising look before he got off at his stop. No one ever glanced at Pearlie Cook, but I was someone else that night.

As a WAVE, I had always considered taking a streetcar to its very last stop, and now that I lived at the very end—nothing is more final than an ocean—I traveled backward to downtown, and in a quiet, dreamlike state, I made my way to where Chinatown met North Beach, to the spot where sailors have been coming since the Gold Rush. It used to be called the Barbary Coast. It wasn’t called that in my day. It was called the International Settlement—it said that, in fact, spelled out in huge metal letters over the archway on Broadway.

The priests had long ago doused the red lights, so it was probably only half as seedy as a hundred years earlier. Coffee shops and bars full of long-haired poets, bearded radicals. One particularly elegant woman, in a melon-sleeved princess coat and a daisy veil, could have been transported that instant from Paris. All that gave her away was her walk (horribly burlesque) and her eyes, fishing everywhere for a customer. She even caught my glance and gave me a pleasant snarl. I didn’t mind; I had been given worse in soda shops. She passed under the blade sign of a dance hall (
MADAME DUPONT: DANCES FIFTY CENTS
) and was lost in its atomic neon glow.

There it was, at the corner of Broadway and Kearny: a bar called the Black Cat. It had been there since the thirties. No windows, barely a sign, but it seemed full when the door swung open and revealed a bare bulb hanging, black or nearly black walls, posters tacked to them, a man standing just inside the door with a basket of buttons. I stood there for an hour as he handed them to transvestites with a smile, and the “ladies” would pin them to their stuffed bosoms or their hats, laughing, and walk inside. I later got close enough to read one, and found it said:
I AM A MAN
. The bar had been turned inside out by police every week or so, on the pretense of a law banning deliberate intent to pass for the opposite sex. So to keep from being arrested they wore these buttons. I heard later that the men inside—not just the transvestites but all of the men—stood a few feet apart from one another, because there was a law about that, too.

I didn’t go inside. I just stood and watched the men. Two fairly young ones came out, laughing, smoking cigarettes, coat collars turned up against the night air, white shirts and black ties like clerks. Lovers, I assumed. It amazed and terrified me to see people name their desires so freely, so easily, as if there were nothing to lose; as if it were as simple as pinning them on like a button. The men stubbed their cigarettes out against their shoes in a kind of dance, and then field-stripped them—tore them apart so the tobacco floated in the air. A soldier’s habit. So the enemy couldn’t track them.

An older man in a cowboy hat arrived and put his hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. They spoke for a moment before going inside together, and the men I had been watching exchanged a single smile before only one was left, looking defiantly around. Not lovers, then. I could not get anything right.

But I did sense something. Beyond the inscrutable movements of these men, the world they had built beneath the ordinary one; beyond the seedy lights and grimy hotels, the hauntings of sex that had not changed for a century; it was a feeling, which I could not name at the time, of something awakening. It was happening all around me, in the bookstore across the street, in the cafés, and in the bars. It was as if part of the body was stirring, moving very slowly to rouse the rest. Some change was coming; I was part of it. The way we lived would not do, would not hold. A decade from now, and nothing would be familiar in this spot. Not even me.