Dog Tags (6 page)

You know how the Orientals name their years—the year of the rat and the year of the tiger and so on, and they pass in cycles, once in every twelve years or twenty. Well, this was the year of Nan and all the rest was foolishness, maintenance, upholstery; it was the year of Nan and it never came again, not in twelve years or twenty or a century. She had thick, wavy blond hair and dark brown eyes and paradoxically a slight, tantalizing, shifting, Oriental look; take her features one by one and she was merely superlative; take her as a whole and she was a half-caste goddess. She was from Arizona, a lapsed Catholic family, and when she entered a room Benny half expected the walls and furnishings to melt away, leave not a rack behind, only Nan in a deep green glade at the foot of a mountain on the rim of a desert, giving birth every hour to another magnificent tawny child while the sun shone and the rain fell and crops grew and cattle multiplied and birds-of-paradise caroled. To make love to her was to walk barefoot through the botanical-zoological gardens, temperature 80° Fahrenheit, humidity 50%, scattered cirrus clouds, a southwest breeze at five knots bearing a hint of spring rain and the sweet smell of pears and pomegranates. Vital signs: 98.6°, pulse 72, respiration 18, blood pressure 110/70, identical to Benny's.

The demigod had found his demigoddess and they yielded cheerfully to every demiurge; when they stood unclothed, gravely gazing, half a room apart, solemnly teasing, it was a sacrament, an act of pure worship, of adoration, each the other's godhead and each merging fully with godhead; where the mystics failed, they succeeded, where the mystics lost, they won. A matter of glands, your friendly neighborhood physician will tell you; but Benny is your friendly neighborhood physician and he will tell you that it was not so. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-two, and they did not have all the time in the world.

Blessed are they who make love on the fly, for they know not ennui. They rarely had more than half a night together, or an afternoon hour. Her breasts were too full and sagged slightly; that excited Benny inordinately, and he thought of her as a true goddess, ancient Greek and not Botticelli, fertile, hot, full of hormones, nectar, ambrosia, ichor. She perverted him: she waited naked and when they had made love he delighted in clothing her, adorning her with doilies, antimacassars, tablecloths, his own sweater, his khaki trousers. They made love historically and pastorally, tragically and comically, on beds, sofas, chairs, the kitchen table, the carpet, the bare floor, standing, seated, prone and supine, looking out her window, washing dishes. Children! She was quickly roused and avaricious, taking a violent revenge on her early years, on her parents, on the Blessed Virgin Mary, and at times it seemed to him that he was living out a ghastly anti-morality play: Everyman Beer, burgher, doctor, alderman, meets the witch Swinburne and they proceed to exhaust the catalog of orgasm while waiting for the birth of God, or the Devil, who is never born; the seasons roll on and so do Benny and Nan and there is no retribution or even remission.

But more often it was simply funny, vulgar, stupendous, a series of one-line jokes from a suppressed (and properly so) magazine. Suitably illustrated. Tawdry. But to lovers? Uproarious. No sense was denied employment. “I can't rank them,” he said. “If I could see you but not touch you I'd go mad. If I could touch you but not taste you I'd go mad. I like your smell and I like your voice. I may go mad anyway. I just hope we don't kill ourselves.” Children!

His life was saved by aeons without her: in class, on the subway, at the clinic, at home (home, yes, important matters). Benny stared at a stained slide (gonococcus), a poster (Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth), a wall of books, a dish of beans or a dead whitefish, and always, between or beyond, hovered the fuzzy, wavering, persistent lineaments of his love, that unforgettable face constantly forgotten, the brows, the nose, the mouth melting and merging with Irene's, Felicia's, Marian's, Frances's: Nan, Nan, return! He thought of Athena, popping up in human guise; he wished a janitor good day, shared the elevator with an eminent obstetrician, ordered a sandwich from an acned soda jerk, and wondered if one or more of them were Nan. He loved everybody.

He was sad, too, sometimes. So was she. “I wish we had another lifetime,” he said. “Don't,” she said, “don't,” and he knew that she was thinking, or trying not to, of Fred. Fred was her fiancé and she loved him. In Arizona. Fred Wilcox. Really Alfred. Exotic, like an early English king. She loved him. They shared ecstasies, an accent, geography, mathematics (she was a graduate student in statistics). But for now it scarcely mattered. But. Therefore. Consequently. Nevertheless. “We all do so much damn explaining,” she said. “I suppose it's the Bible, all those stories when I was nine. Now I have a big black Hebrew of my own. Next thing to a beautiful Negro.” Benny was shocked but recovered quickly. His experience of master races was not encouraging. He pictured himself with a black girl. She was a housemaid. Conscientiously he gave her other occupations but to his shame his mind pressed her continually back into servitude. He saw her dusting, raised her skirt. Dismayed by this infidelity, he nibbled at Nan. His succulent pink pig, his Arizona ham.

Nan feared the irrevocable word and never said that she loved Benny. She said everything else: want, adore, need, assorted drivel. Benny too refrained from oratory but it broke out: “God! I love!” And their sadness never lingered. Twenty-five; twenty-two; what else mattered? What else should matter? Romp and hurrah and the world their oyster!

And the acrobatics! In the center ring Beniamino sways, twirls, swings from hoop to hoop in loops and twists and gyres and gainers, grinning like a seal, barking and snuffling likewise, peering through blond canyons, chasms and coppices at a sternum, a collarbone, a smile, a row of vertebrae caravanning single file over a tawny desert toward a tawny nape. And Nan, scaling the flanks of Ben Beer, blushed. Morals? Mere exertion? Blushed here, blushed there, checkered and patched pink and white—“It's your beard,” she said, and he ran to shave. Sometimes he was Benny the Navigator, dauntlessly ranging the hemispheres, pitching and rolling and yawing, beating and reaching and running, pausing in astonishment to check his position (celestial! stem to stern!) as if he were the first that ever burst into that silent she; then the laughter died; and waves rose to meet the black sky. Once he was Benny Agonized (he: ruined for life! she: the first fine careless rupture!) but recovered. That frightened him. He had heard from an earnest colleague that each man had in him precisely three thousand fucks; should he save one or two for his old age? Nah! Onward and upward with der Arzt!

Children. And yet they attempted respectability, as if desperately needing confirmation of an external, objective world. They talked. They talked of God and politics and sport, of books and movies. They talked of her family and his, her body and his, her first piece (Ford) and his (basement). They ate sandwiches and drank milk. Once they visited a restaurant. Benny was charmed and horrified by this outlander who doused eggs with ketchup, who guzzled coffee and spurned tea. They tried a movie and found public life unbearable. “Movies!” he groaned. “There's no time. I'm only superhuman, not omnipotent.”

“I wonder,” she murmured, and that killed another hour and took a few years off Benny's life. “Painters would die for you,” he said. “Sculptors would kill for you.” “Two boys beat each other up for me,” she said. “We were sixteen. I loved it.” He told her about his scars, about 57359. Fred had served in the Navy and soon she told him about that, and about Fred's brilliance in Boolean algebras and such, and the coming Ph.D.

She moved with a heavy, touching (because one day it would desert her) grace, the breasts he loved swinging gently, the large rosy nipples almost winking as he watched in delight; otherwise she was firm and did not bobble. He loved coming close behind her, taking a breast in either hand, pressing himself to her luxurious buttocks until his heat rose; feeling his strength she twisted, slammed herself against him, sought his mouth. Kissing her was a love affair in itself, no end to the smooch, lick, nibble, chew; he said it was like kissing a basket of eels and she said eels were essential to a good smorgasbord. They drowned in each other's liquids, unguents, nectars. But they parted always with a gentle domestic buss like their first kiss, as if each separation might be the last, as if they shared (they did, they did) a tender ache of foreknowledge.

Spring came, and bruised them. Days fled. The end was upon them and neither knew how it would come. For her a master's degree and Arizona. For him an M.D. and more, much more. In late May he left her for two days to be present at an accouchement of surpassing importance; he paced the waiting room with the others and chewed cigars, read magazines, worked puzzles, ran through the quartets. When it was all over he called her. They sat in a small oasis on upper Broadway, a minuscule park peopled by old men with wens and walking-sticks. The old men sat in the sun all day. They wore neckties and their faces were gray; the sun itself ignored them. Buses roared.

They found a bench to themselves. The sun was bright and a faint smell of sap and leaves softened the air. Small dogs frisked, straining leashes. An aged woman sat across the path from them reading a tabloid.

“What was it?” She sat stiffly on the green bench, her hair almost white in the sunlight.

“A boy.”

“Everything all right?”

“Everything's all right.” Benny touched her hair.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “No.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned to face him. They stared hot-eyed while the universe dissolved.

They kissed then, a chaste kiss, long, tender, annihilating; the sky fell; and she rose and walked away. She crossed a street. She turned a corner. She was gone.

It had been a magnificent year, but Benny was married to a lovely girl named Carol, and they called the boy Joseph.

4

Her name was Carol Untermeyer and she was the daughter of Amos Untermeyer, M.D., F.A.C.P., eminent internist and professor, and of his wife Sylvia; he ruddy and frail, strutting, nervously taking his own pulse in public, wearing eyeglasses and an elegant thin mustache, Sylvia more Egyptian, plump, benign, ordinary save for an occasional ironic lightning in the splendid Fayum eyes.

Benny and Carol had met at a hospital, where Amos taught one morning each week. Benny emerged from a comprehensive lecture on malfunctions of the spleen and almost ran down a little girl in the corridor. “I beg your pardon,” he said, and halted, focused, attended, and added, “my sweet.” She was indeed sweet, black-haired, with dark blue eyes and full arresting features. He also saw that she was twenty or so, obvious of breast and narrow of waist.

And steady of eye. “Your sweet?”

Benny nodded solemnly. “Will you have dinner with me?” He reconnoitered a possible ring, found none, and spied upon her full lips.

“Daddy,” she said, “can I have dinner with this one?”

Benny flinched like a thief, and turned.

“What? Dinner?” Amos Untermeyer blinked behind horn-rims, and glared grumpily. “Dinner? Why not? Which one are you?”

“Benjamin Beer. Third year.”

“Ah yes. Anaplastic nuclei. A silly mistake, my boy. You can't tell an adenoma from an adenosarcoma and you want to take my daughter to dinner.”

“Damn,” Benny said. “You know about that.”

“Conklin told me. Said you weren't bad.”

“Thank you.” God bless Conklin.

“Friend of that Chinese boy.”

Benny nodded.

“He'll go far. Well. Sorry to hear you have time to take young ladies to dinner. I haven't.”

They all laughed and soon enough the old man scampered off.

“First name,” Benny said.

“Carol. Don't be familiar.”

“My dear Miss Untermeyer. I'm saving everything for the right girl.”

That night Benny squired Carol to dinner at the Auberge des Bergers. “Romantic,” he said. “Pastoral. Do I wear leather shorts and suspenders?”

“The boss is named Sid Berger,” she said. She drank vermouth and smoked a cigarette; raked the artificial-candle-lit room with desperate, empty glances, as if seeking a celebrity; rearranged her silver; poked at her straight black hair. Her brows too were black, and thick; her frown was emphatic. She wore dark blue wool and sat tense, ungiving; spoke as if acknowledging his presence. Benny, urbane, kept a distance. She was in her last year at Hunter College. She might go on to graduate school. Genetics. Drosophila. Human genetics might someday require engineering. In her spare hours she had worked as a laboratory technician. Not certified. “Nickel and dime pathology. Daddy was pleased. Why do you order chopped liver here?”

“If the pâté maison is good,” he said, “you can trust the rest. In an American restaurant chipped beef is the key.”

She blew smoke disdainfully. “A connoisseur.”

“Horseflesh and women.”

“I knew it,” she said wearily, and looked about her at other couples; she might have been a jaded heiress on a Mediterranean cruise, in the first-class dining room.

Benny chose silence; he brooded into his whiskey, filched one of her cigarettes and smoked it without pleasure, thought of anaplastic nuclei, of Latin-American songs, of Prpl who would charm even this neurotic. She kept her upper arms close to her flanks, and gestured from the elbow. Recalled to a sense of duty, he groped for small talk. Politics: what could be smaller?

What the hell. Menstruating, doubtless. “Smile,” he said.

“Buy me another drink. Comfort me with flagons.”

“Oh.” His quick concern was real; her gaze softened. “I'm sorry. You're on the rebound.”

She showed grief, and nodded.

“I'll be respectful and sympathetic,” he said. “And it's stay me with flagons. Comfort me with apples. Shall I order an apple?”