Andersen, Kurt (30 page)

Apart from the evening news, by senior year I’d mostly stopped watching television. Like all the cool toys that came out right after I was too old for them, the new TV shows were geared to kids Sabrina’s and Peter’s age—
The Addams Family,
Lost in Space,
The Munsters,
Star Trek.
My sister was also an
I Dream of Jeannie
fan, and she started wearing her blond hair in a ponytail updo in eighth grade, the year she turned from cute to beautiful.

There was one new show I loved. Inevitably and unfortunately, however, my parents also loved
The
Smothers Brothers.
Because my mother and dad and Peter and Sabrina all smiled and chuckled at the jokes about Vietnam and the Pentagon and President Johnson and segregation, my own enjoyment was diminished. For them it was not just groovy and satirical, proof that progressives had a national platform, but also a heartwarming, generation-gap-bridging ritual. For me, the fact that the show aired on Sunday nights made watching it even more uncomfortably cozy.

My parents thought Tom Smothers’s boy-man shtick was cute, but I was fascinated by the serious lunatic rage smoldering beneath his smiling jacket-and-tie cuteness. His catchphrase, “Mom always liked you best,” turned the air in our TV room slightly acrid and electric until the next joke came along.

There is no question that Mom liked Sabrina best when we were teenagers. As I was heroically attempting to exceed the bounds of parental likability, my sister rushed in to bask in the maternal sunshine, bringing up
Newsweek
and
Commonweal
articles about the Second Vatican Council, waving away the smoke and pretending to cough whenever I lit a cigarette. As soon as she got to New Trier, Sabrina restarted the Esperantists with her new boyfriend, Jamie, the Esperanto boy I’d crushed the year before. That was the line in the sand for me, after which I started thinking of Sabrina as something more like an enemy than just an annoying, square, too-pretty little sister.

With Mom’s help, Sabrina and Jamie organized a screening in the school theater of
Incubus,
a movie filmed entirely in Esperanto—a horror movie in which the hero, played by William Shatner, drags his demon lover to a cathedral to deprogram her with images of Christ and the Apostles. I went only because Alex thought it would be a hoot, and it was: eleven-year-old Peter yelled “
Kie estas
Spock
?
” (
Where is Mr. Spock?
) at the screen whenever Shatner appeared, and my mother hated the actors’ terrible Esperanto pronunciations.

I know I’ve written earlier that I started feeling like an adult the summer I turned sixteen, and then even more so the summer I turned seventeen. But in the spring of 1967, as I raced toward eighteen, I realized those earlier coming-of-age seasons had been wishful prefaces to the real thing, that
now
my life was finally and dramatically taking shape.

“Karen?” It was a boy’s voice on the phone, but not Alex or Chuck, who almost never used my first name. “It’s Scott Norquist. Hey—Radcliffe! Way to go.”

I’d gotten the acceptance letter only the day before, but at New Trier Township High School, the news of who’d gotten into which college traveled on some mysterious instant-communications network.

“Thanks!” But why was he calling? Scott and I had spoken on the phone exactly twice before, once about an English assignment and once concerning his three-dollar contribution to the twelve-dollar ounce of grass Flip Macallister bought for us. “And you’re going to … Cornell?”

“My old man’s pushing hard for Northwestern.”

“He wants you close to home?”

“He wants me to play Big Ten football.” He paused. “So Alex and Chuck and you are gonna be all together in Cambridge!” Chuck and Alex had been admitted to Harvard. “You get to stay the three musketeers, huh?” That was the kind thing people at New Trier sometimes called us, the three musketeers. We were also known as Wendy (me), Peter Pan (Chuck) and Tinker Bell (Alex).

“Yeah. I’m excited.” Actually, I had mixed feelings.

There was a long silence, then a throat-clearing. “So, I was wondering …” he said.
Scott must want my help buying some marijuana.
“Do you want to go to prom? With me?”

This was the most unexpected and shocking moment of my life since Alex’s cap gun went off at the Lake Shore Club in 1962. Tall, blond, handsome Scott Norquist, the football and pole-vaulting star, the vice president of the senior class, the boy on whom I’d had an almost secret and essentially theoretical crush from age twelve on, was asking me out—asking
me
to
senior
prom.
Several supercharged emotions erupted and collided in the instant after his question: surprise, deeply flattered pleasure, lust, embarrassment, a taste of heartbreaking impossibility, then a quick flip-flop of terror and—when I reminded myself he couldn’t know I’d lost my virginity—relief. I was dumbstruck.

“Karen?” Scott said.

“I’ll be right there, Mom!” I shouted, half covering the mouthpiece. My mother wasn’t at home. “Sorry. Anyhow—that’s really, really nice of you. But I can’t.”

“Oh. Okay. Too bad.”

“Yeah, Chuck and I are going out that night. But we’re not going to prom.” It was true that Chuck and I had made fun of Alex the month before for asking Patti to prom, which had turned into a critique of the prom as a hateful, anachronistic symbol of suburban American backwardness. And which delighted me because it meant Chuck wasn’t taking Wendy Reichman or anyone else. However, it was certainly not true that Chuck had asked me out for prom night.

“Right. Okay. Some other time, maybe.”

Jesus. I was turning down a prom date with Scott Norquist partly because prom was square but mainly because I didn’t have the guts to make my imaginary boyfriend jealous. I was pathetic. And now that Chuck and I were going to attend college together, my pathetic fantasy wouldn’t even have the chance to die a normal, graceful natural death after we graduated high school.

A few afternoons later, I drove Chuck home from our SDS chapter meeting. Alex was still at school, rehearsing the spring play.

“You doing anything for your birthday?” I asked. Chuck was turning eighteen the next day. I’d bought him a pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses as a combination birthday-graduation gift.

He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “So I hear Norquist asked you to prom.”

As a swimmer, Chuck was wired in to the jock grapevine. “Yeah. It was sweet, actually.” Had Chuck also heard the details of the excuse I’d given? Should I apologize for the fib or lie again? I thought of my mother’s annoying line whenever she discovered any of her children engaged in a cover-up:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

“I was surprised you turned him down. Actually, I was impressed. I mean—
Scott Norquist.
”

“Yeah, but—
prom.
” I glanced over at him. Maybe Chuck didn’t know about my fabricated prom-night plans. “If I’d gone, it would’ve given Alex way too much satisfaction.”

“Why don’t we do something that night?”

That probably meant watching
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
and eating a frozen pizza in my basement.

“I mean,” he said, “go out.”

I had learned my lesson well over the last three years. That didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Just you and I,” he said. “It’s about time, right?”

Being asked to prom by Scott Norquist had shocked me. Being asked out on an actual date by Chuck Levy should have been flabbergasting, too, but it wasn’t. I’d spent so much time over so many years pining for and daydreaming about and discounting and dismissing the possibility of romantic involvement, when the moment arrived, it had come to seem equally impossible and inevitable. Does that make sense? It was the way I’d thought about nuclear war since I was little: both unthinkable and thinkable, surprised if it did happen, surprised if it didn’t.

But with this, going out on prom night and Chuck as my potential boyfriend, I did feel almost as if I’d acquired the magic power to make my fondest wish—that is, my lies—come true.

“That’s
my
birthday,” I said, grateful that I was driving, which made it easier to sound nonchalant, “May nineteenth.”

“I know.”

He knows.
“Then sure. That sounds great.”

It’s about time,
he’d said.
No shit,
I thought. I was trembling. I felt like laughing and crying. And did both as soon as I dropped Chuck off.

My GPA wound up being second highest in the class—in part, as the valedictorian, Jimmy Graham, informed me, because I hadn’t taken advanced calculus. In any case, being salutatorian meant that I’d give a speech at commencement. When Chuck suggested that my speech should be a collage of lyrics from our favorite songs of the last four years, I said, loudly and fake-earnestly, “Fellow graduates of the class of sixty-seven, you make my heart sing—you make everything … 
groovy.
”

I thought I might begin by talking about how sad it was that the birthplace of democracy had been taken over by right-wing colonels in a coup last month—Greece—and argue that the birthplace of
modern
democracy, America, wasn’t immune from such a takeover.

“Maybe,” Alex said, “although no one gives a shit about Greece.” But he offered what I took to be a brilliant piece of advice. He said to write my speech way in advance and with short sentences, then learn to half-read and half-recite it as if I were making it up on the spot.

“You have to learn to perform a slightly fake, more lovable version of yourself,” he said. “That’s the only way to seem real and get everyone to pay attention. You have to learn to lie.”

“Karen doesn’t lie,” Chuck said.

Oh, Chuck Levy, you think I’m better than I am.
I wanted to press myself against him, to kiss him. I wanted him on me. The sexual hunger I experienced during the month between proposed date and date was ferocious, and the secrecy made it all the more intense. It was like five weeks of chaste foreplay, the most joyful pain and painful joy of my life.

“Not about
what
she’s saying,” Alex explained, “but
how
she’s saying it. And you have to fool
yourself
so it doesn’t even feel like lying. Be Kennedy, not Johnson.”

Alex was a skilled actor by senior year. In May he played the title role in
Henry V
and was billed on the program as codirector with the drama teacher, Mr. Hendricks. I’d never seen a more moving piece of theater. The actors wore contemporary military uniforms and camo, and the score alternated between Sousa marches and Asian lute-and-zither music. Over the two and a half hours Prince Hal and his men changed from prancing imperialists into ragged and noble guerrillas fighting the arrogant French in Vietnam, the Battle of Agincourt 1415 transformed to Dien Bien Phu 1954. Neither Chuck nor I had read or seen the play before. In Act 3, when Alex said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” we turned to look at each other—we knew it as one of James Bond’s lines in
From Russia with Love.
And when Alex, his face covered in fake dirt, delivered the St. Crispin’s Day speech—

If we are marked to die, we are enough

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour …

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother …

—I choked up and turned to Chuck. In the dark he touched my cheeks and wiped away the tears. My insides shook. It was as if we’d kissed already.

Every morning for the next month, I woke up happy. However, there was nobody with whom I could revel and squeal. I had girlfriends, but since I’d never revealed to anyone the extent of my crush, I couldn’t reveal the full extent of my delight. After all, it was just another night out with Chuck Levy, on the surface nothing very special. My mother understood it was a big deal, however, and I was secretly grateful for her irritating excitement on my behalf.

Neither Chuck nor I had uttered the D-word, but our first date was the date-iest of my life, before or since. When he picked me up around two in the afternoon, he presented me with a corsage—a parody of a corsage, really, five white daisies, the antiwar flower, bundled together with a pink ribbon and a peace button to pin it to my dress, which I did for my mother to take a Polaroid and then promptly removed.

We could’ve driven into Chicago in an hour, but instead, we drove to his flying club’s hangar.

Chuck had always been mechanically fluent—he’d used a power saw to build a tree house in sixth grade, he’d made the silencer for his jazz-club Luger, he’d helped his uncle build a duck-hunting blind, he replaced tubes in his guitar amplifier—but as I sat next to him in his rented Piper Cherokee, I was in awe of his competence. He wasn’t playing a character on a mission when he said, “Magnetos, check,” or that he was flying at “sixty knots.”
He was actually piloting an airplane.
As he talked on the radio (“Affirmative, taxi four, Piper seven three niner”) and stepped on the rudder pedals and steered and throttled and checked all those dials, he was completely adult, a man.

We flew to Miegs Field, the tiny downtown airport on an island in Lake Michigan, aiming for the planetarium dome as we landed. It was a five-minute walk to Shedd Aquarium, our first stop because, Chuck said, I’d wanted to go there four years ago on the evening of our last, best, scariest Bond mission. As we strolled between the sharks and the otters, Chuck took my hand in his, and I jumped as if I’d gotten an electric shock, which made him smile.

Holding hands with Chuck Levy. Chuck Levy acting like my boyfriend. Chuck Levy was my boyfriend.

We went to a movie, the Bond parody
Casino Royale,
with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen; we went to a comedy show at Second City on North Wells Street; and I had my first dinner ever at a Mexican restaurant, where they didn’t card us when we ordered Pabst Blue Ribbons. As we wandered the miles back toward Miegs Field though Old Town, pretending not to stare at the hippies, he put his arm around my waist. I made us stop twice to buy Cokes and go to the bathroom.