Andersen, Kurt (31 page)

Near the end of our walk, Chuck stopped, took a box of stick matches from the pocket of his leather jacket, struck one on the zipper of his jeans, and lit his cigarette, a move I’d never seen. I literally throbbed with desire.

I jacked up my courage. “Why,” I asked, “is this finally happening?”

“I’ve
always
liked you. I mean, definitely since eighth grade. Remember the last mission, at Riverview, I wanted to go through Helter Skelter with you but Alex wouldn’t let us? I thought the tilting floors and rolling barrels and all that would be my chance to, you know, accidentally get physical.”

“But is this also because Scott Norquist asked me out?”

“No. I mean, that got my attention, for sure, but no. I’ve been planning this a long time. The whole thing.” He said that in order to fly at night, he was required to take off and land several times in the dark, which he’d gone out to Palwaukee to do once a month since February.

“But why
now
? Why not last year or sophomore year?”

“Because real life is starting now. Because we’re definitely going to college together. I always felt like if we went out in high school, it’d be this
high school
thing. It wouldn’t be serious. And after graduation, poof, that’d be it.”

“I think I get that.” In all the analyses I’d conducted and scenarios I’d run since we were thirteen, that logic had never once occurred to me. Hearing it made me feel superficial. “Like we’d have been doomed? And now we have … a future?”

“Right, exactly.”

Dreams do come true. And this I hadn’t dared dream. But wait.

“What if you hadn’t gotten into Harvard or I hadn’t gotten into Radcliffe?”

“Why do you think I only applied where you applied?”

“Plus Amherst.” Amherst didn’t admit girls.

“Amherst only in case
you
went to
Smith
! So I’d be next door! It was all part of my plan. I wanted to tell you so bad. Let’s never lie to each other again. Okay? Not even just not lie—hold back nothing.”

I put one hand on his leather sleeve, and we kissed on the lips, but only for a couple of seconds. I looked at him. He was beautiful.

I thought of the Wordsworth poem I’d memorized a few months before:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

And then we kissed again, our first serious kiss, the kind where you start losing track of whose tongue and whose breath is whose.

I felt radioactive. As we continued walking in blissful silence, I found myself thinking about physics. Last year we’d learned about half-lifes, the time it takes for radioactive material to decay 50 percent. Love must have a half-life, right? But if it’s long enough, like uranium-232’s, sixty-nine years, who cares? I also thought of the transformations that happen on the molecular level, on the atomic level, at the instant a piece of matter changes from solid to liquid or liquid to gas or gas to plasma—the “phase transition point,” they call it. Ever since I’d learned about phase changes, I’d thought something analogous was happening to the whole world. And now, I thought, Chuck and I had unquestionably experienced our own phase change.

I had to find a place to pee yet again, so we didn’t get back to the airfield until almost midnight, after which the control tower would close and we wouldn’t be able to take off until morning. The deadline added to the perfect Cinderella glamour of the evening, and the chance of missing it, of being stuck in Chicago until morning, added to the sense of reckless bohemian romance. We took off at 11:58
P.M
.

Having made our political point by skipping prom, we decided it wouldn’t be a dignity violation to attend the Crawford twins’ after-party in Kenilworth. I was also eager to show our classmates that Chuck and I were
together.
However, given that he and Alex and I had been inseparable forever, the new permutation proved difficult to signal.

Except to Alex. For the last month we’d dissembled with him about our plans for the night, Guinevere and Lancelot concealing their love from Arthur. His defensiveness about attending prom—”Spare me any more of your too-cool-for-school crap,” he’d said when Chuck mentioned our Second City reservation—had prevented him from sniffing out the musky new aromas. A week before, when we’d all gone to see Buffalo Springfield at the Cellar, the converted warehouse in Arlington Heights, Chuck and I danced together, which we never did, but since Alex had brought Patti along, he’d assumed our togetherness was just old-friendly pre-graduation double-date symmetry.

But as soon as Chuck and I arrived at the Crawfords’ after-party, Alex locked his arm around Patti’s waist, mingling like someone playing a married man, and glanced at me again and again for a beat too long, stiffly smiling and silent. Sometime around three
A.M.
, after I’d been reduced to drinking a Scotch and Mountain Dew and gone to the bathroom for the millionth time, I rejoined Chuck and Alex in the Crawfords’ backyard. Patti was indoors, and the two boys had lit up a joint. They weren’t saying anything, just smoking and staring at the moon and stars.

Finally, I spoke. “Want to go see
Blow-Up
tomorrow at the Wilmette? I mean today?”

“Who,” the fully inhaled Alex croaked, then deliberately exhaled straight into my face, “are you asking? Both of us or just the boyfriend?”

“Don’t be a jerk, Alex,” I said.

“Me?”

“Really,” Chuck said, “don’t get all weird and uptight.”

“ ‘Jerk’? ‘Weird’? ‘Uptight’?
I’m
not the one who’s been sneaking around keeping this secret for months.”

“ ‘Sneaking around’?” I said. “ ‘Months’? And there was no ‘secret’ to ‘keep.’ That’s so unfair.”

“Oh, really—’unfair’? How about betraying their supposed best friend? That’s fair, I suppose.”

“
‘Betray’
?” Chuck said. “Oh, man, come
on.
Cool it.”

This duel of aggrieved scare-quoting continued for another minute.

The back door opened, and over the sudden blast of James Brown’s voice and horn section, we heard Patti shout, “
Alex!
Come in and play Twister! There’s four mats! It’s a
gas.
”

Alex didn’t respond but waited until the laughter and party roar and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” were muffled again.

“And what’s more,” he told us, “you wait to go public—”

“ ‘Go
public
’?” Chuck said.

“—until
after
I’ve told Penn no and sent my deposit to Harvard. Thanks. Thank you both so much.”

“You’re actually claiming,” I said, driving in for the cross-examination, “that you would’ve gone somewhere else to college, that you would’ve turned down Harvard so you wouldn’t be with us, if you’d known a month ago that we, that things were changing, and we might, you know …”

“Start
fucking
?” I had never heard the word used literally, out loud, not even in a movie. “No, fine with me. Do your own thing. But I don’t want to be
lied
to, especially not about this. It’s so … 
bourgeois.
”

The sun was just rising when Chuck pulled up to my house. We made out for a while, and we would’ve kept going—
bliss was it in that dawn!
—if I hadn’t needed to pee so badly.

In the delirium of that phase-changing night, I chalked up my odd spiral of unquenchable thirst and endless urination to enchiladas and Pabsts and having my period, to overexcitement and staying up late and Mountain Dew. But it continued the next day and the next and then the next, and on Tuesday a doctor in Evanston told my mother and me that I had juvenile diabetes. For mysterious reasons, my pancreas had stopped working. I would have to inject insulin every day for the rest of my life.

“You are a very lucky girl,” the doctor told me, “because you live
now,
in the 1960s.” Not only would I grow up and live “a relatively normal life,” but I could use the new strips to test my own urine for sugar every day at home! I’d have disposable plastic syringes I’d use just once! No muss, no fuss!

On the other hand, the chances of my eyes and kidneys and circulatory system failing had skyrocketed in the previous week, and my life expectancy diminished by a decade or more.

I had to comfort my mom, who was crying before we reached the parking lot. I was stunned by the news of my condition. But I did not cry. Within a few days, I was making jokes about it. One night at dinner, my dad said he’d learned that some scientists believed that diabetes is caused by one’s own immune system going haywire, attacking the pancreas and destroying its insulin-making capacity.

“What do you know,” I said, “I was the victim of a military coup inside my own body by my treasonous white blood cells, who decided my pancreas was the enemy within. And it’s May! My own
Seven Days in May
!”

Peter and my father laughed. My dad suggested I use the idea in my speech at commencement. Sabrina, obviously fed up with the new gobs of nonstop attention I was getting—Radcliffe, commencement speaker, and now a serious illness—excused herself to go watch
The Monkees.

After my mom finished the dishes and was about to head off to St. Joseph’s to continue her anti-diabetes novena, I asked her if she thought God was punishing me because I’d stopped believing in him. She didn’t smile and didn’t answer.

Although the endocrinologist had been ridiculously upbeat about my half-full glass, I did feel lucky. One of my uncles, my father’s older brother, had died from diabetes when he was four, in 1921, only months before scientists discovered and extracted insulin. And although Mom’s Catholic faith seemed ridiculous, I immediately formed my own superstitious understanding of what had happened to me that spring. I decided that luck came in clusters, good and bad bunched together, and that luck also existed in some cosmic balance, like matter and antimatter. In under two months, Harvard University admitted me and my two best friends; I was named salutatorian of my graduating class; I landed a cool summer job in New York City; Scott Norquist asked me out; and my love for Chuck Levy was at long, long last requited; but my pancreas stopped working. I just hoped that the diabetes was a large enough piece of bad luck to pay for my bumper crop of good. You can take the girl out of the church, but apparently, you cannot take the church out of the girl.

Until I got my diagnosis, nothing really terrible had ever happened to
me.
The misfortune of diabetes made me a more admirable and authentic human being. It didn’t make me want to surrender to a higher power. Instead, it reinforced my rationality and sense of self-reliance: something
I
did twice a day, every day, was the only thing keeping me alive.

It wasn’t just that my hard luck balanced out the great gift of Chuck revealing his feelings and plighting his troth. I was now his tragic inamorata, a fierce and doomed (but not too doomed) Juliet to his fierce enraptured Romeo, the two of us lovers and comrades headed off to an ivy-covered bower far away.

By graduation, we’d apologized to Alex for keeping him in the dark, and he had evidently forgiven us. I did mention the diabetes from the podium at commencement, although I badly misjudged the effect. The title of the speech was “Amerika the Beautiful.” I talked about how New Trier was named after Trier, a German city, and quoted JFK’s
Ich bin ein Berliner
line. After a series of rhetorical questions about what it meant to be an American in 1967 (“Is it ‘American’ to make war on civilians abroad and benefit from racism at home?”), I asked, “
Bin ich ein Amerikaner?
Am I an American? Am I an American?” I thought the
Seven Days in May
line would make me seem like Mort Sahl, soften them up for my hectoring, but rather than laughs, the announcement of my illness provoked gasps and mass pity. At least I went over better than Jimmy Graham, who summarized
The Lord of the Rings
as a geopolitical parable, recasting the Dark Lord Sauron as both Hitler and LBJ, the orcs as Gestapo and CIA, Gandalf as Ho Chi Minh and FDR, and the hobbits variously as World War II veterans, the Vietcong, and the members of the Class of ‘67. “Go forth to college and beyond,” he told us, “to unmake the Ring.” Alex accused him of “completely ripping off my
Henry the Fifth
concept,” but Dad said it didn’t matter, because “the Graham boy was even more confusing and sentimental than Mr. Tolkien.”

A couple of weeks later, Chuck took me to a club in Hyde Park to see Muddy Waters. I hadn’t considered myself a blues fan, but I was really enjoying the music.

“This is going to sounded stupid and conceited,” I said halfway through the set, returning from the bathroom, where I’d gone to inject a dose of insulin.

“No, it isn’t,” Chuck said. “What?”

“I feel like I finally understand this music,” said the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Danish marketing consultant to the eighteen-year-old son of a Jewish engineering professor. “I mean, I
get
the blues now.”

He grinned and glanced down. Muddy Waters had just played “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man,” so Chuck thought I felt newly bluesy because we’d started having sex.

That wasn’t it, not mainly. “Because of the diabetes. Because now I really know I’m going to die. And probably why. And it’s not as far away as I’d assumed.” I shrugged.

Chuck put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. “The carp is God,” he said.

I laughed hard, and teared up, and kissed him right there at our table in front of the world. Back in ninth grade, Alex and Chuck briefly convinced me that “Carpe diem” is a corruption of
“Carp est Deus”
and thus literally meant not “Seize the day” but “The carp is God.” In the month since I’d gotten diabetes, my seize-the-day outlook had been shaped by the line of Dr. Johnson’s that I’d just learned in English class—”When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”—and by the Schlitz beer slogan that ran on TV all the time: “You only go around once in life, so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can.”