Double Take (10 page)

1970

For a while, Cookie and Bando's friendship was on hiatus. There had been other such interruptions: Bando's off-and-on romance with a fifteen-year-old blonde Cookie had always referred to as Rainbow, though that was not her name, and Cookie's brief liaisons with guys Bando called the Transients. Cookie would get involved with these Transients suddenly, then just as suddenly she would get uninvolved. Bando had once accused her of engineering a breakup before she would have had to sleep with any of them, a theory she was unable to counter.

Ever since the Chad-bathroom incident, she had successfully avoided sex. She never had to actually say no to anyone, which wouldn't have been cool. Instead, she managed to find a way out of every relationship before the issue came up. (Sometimes this had to be done very quickly.) Bando had figured this out, and though she always denied it, she knew it was probably true, that she had learned, as he told her, to shut things out that she found disturbing. And sex was disturbing, though she had expected it to be wonderful.

But things with Arthur were okay. Arthur appeared on 57th Street some time in March or so, and a few weeks later during the Kent State protests, she ran into him again. She noticed him because he had long blonde hair and looked kind of like James Taylor, a singer she had recently begun to admire. She had been at the protests, lying next to Bando in a trench the protesting students had dug around the university chapel, listening to a suburban blues band play a Jimmy Reed song, when Arthur sat down on the other
side of them and offered them a sip from the gallon of Muscatel he was carrying. They drank some of his wine and smoked a joint with him, and then he left, with Bando glaring at the back of his head as he walked away. “Handsome fellow,” Bando said. “Just your type, Cookie.” He called her Cookie when he was annoyed.

A few days later, Arthur came into Casa Sanchez and sat at a table next to the jukebox. She handed him a menu.

“I knew I'd see you again,” he said with a vaguely “Fire and Rain” tasting note.

“Here I am,” she said. She happened to look out the front window and see Bando watching her through the glass. She waved, but he shook his head and walked away.

Arthur took her hand and pulled her closer to him. He was sitting sideways in his chair, one leg slung across the other, looking up at her with a James Taylor-like smile. She glanced into the kitchen to make sure Sanchez wasn't watching, then checked the front window to see if Bando had gone. As she leaned over to kiss him, she could smell peppermint and cigarettes on his breath. When she got off work, he was waiting for her, and as they stood on the street in front of Casa kissing, she hoped she didn't see Bando in the distance.

Arthur was a great kisser, which was why it took Cookie a while to realize they had nothing to say to each other. Their relationship seemed to have a physical momentum that was scary but grown-up in a way she thought she liked, and after a while she decided to have sex with him. He was so old—twenty-three—that it was kind of expected. He had his own apartment, and an ancient green Volkswagen that always had to be push-started. (Bando's theory was that he was looking for a girl with muscular forearms.)

It wasn't long before her relationship with Arthur evolved into a pattern. He would come see her while she was working, then when she got off work they would stand around kissing, then they would go to his apartment and have sex. Sex with Arthur was okay—he was nice about it, almost apologetic, and it was over pretty quickly. When they were finished he would drive her home, dropping her off a block from her house so she wouldn't have to explain him to her parents. She had a feeling her parents would have been only too pleased to meet someone she was spending time with, and knowing this made her feel even more secretive.

Now that she was sixteen, her parents never asked any more where she was or with whom, only required that she be home for dinner. Cookie hated having dinner with them. They would argue about the issues of the day—her mother taught sociology, her father was an economist—while she picked at her meat loaf. Lately she had been making up excuses to skip dinner, saying she had to work, or she'd missed the campus bus. She would go over to Arthur's house instead and he would cook for her, which made her feel grown up.

One day when they were hanging out on the street in front of Casa Sanchez, a police car pulled up. Everyone else on the street moved away as if they had somewhere important to get to, but Cookie and Arthur were too busy making out to notice until the policeman was at their side saying, “All right, move it, the bothayez.” Her stomach lurched when she saw that it was Officer Brazier, who had reputedly made more capricious arrests than anyone else in the whole police department, and that was really saying something. Jupiter told her that Brazier would bust someone if he didn't like their shoes. While Arthur was spread-eagled against the police car being frisked, Cookie stood
there wondering if she could get away if she started running. She knew she hadn't done anything wrong, unless kissing on the street was illegal, but the cops always made her feel as if she had some terrible secret they knew about and she had forgotten.

“Excuse me, sir,” Arthur said in a more polite voice than Cookie had known him to be capable of. “Could you tell me what the problem is?”

“Lemme see some ID,” Brazier said, whipping Arthur around to face him.

Arthur removed his wallet slowly from the pocket of his army jacket and took out several cards. Cookie found herself wondering why Arthur had so many ID cards, and realized that she really didn't know too much about him except he was a Taurus and came from Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

Something about the ID seemed to impress Officer Brazier, who took a step backwards, then stepped forward again and handed the cards back to Arthur. “See any action?” he asked.

“Spent a year in Nam,” Arthur said.

“You shoulda said so in the first place.” Officer Brazier got back into his squad car and drove away.

“You were in Vietnam?” Cookie asked as they walked back into Casa Sanchez. Arthur nodded. “What was it like?”

Arthur thought for a moment and then said, “Hot.”

“Were you drafted?”

“No, I was in the Corps. I enlisted.”

“You enlisted? Why?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't have a reason?”

“I guess I always wanted to be a marine. My dad was a marine.”

“Really?” Cookie looked at Arthur, trying to picture him with a buzz cut. “Why didn't you ever mention this to me?”

“I don't know. It didn't seem important.”

“Let me see your ID cards.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Just curious.”

Arthur took his wallet out of his pocket and handed her a Wisconsin driver's license and a military ID card. On each of them was a picture of a blond guy with close-cropped hair who did not bear the faintest resemblance to anyone she knew.

“You were in love with his hair,” Bando said to her about six weeks later, after she and Arthur had broken up. They were sitting on a bench in Jackson Park, drinking a bottle of Cold Duck from a paper bag. “Hair has magical properties.”

“It was nothing to do with that,” Cookie snapped at him.

“Of course not,” Bando said. “You just had no idea who he was. But that wasn't his fault. It was your fault, you didn't want to know who he was. You were scared to know. It's easier for you to have these transients. And then of course, you have me.”

“And you have beautiful tresses,” she said, touching a strand of his hair, which was now halfway down his back.

“That is correct,” he said.

“We'll always be best friends, won't we?” She handed him the bottle.

“Don't be maudlin, it makes me queasy.”

“Was that a yes?”

He didn't answer, but she thought the corner of his mouth turned up. He drank and handed the bottle back to her. In a soft voice, he said, “We should make love some time. Just so you'd know. It's not what you think it is.”

“And exactly how would you know that?”

“I just know.”

“Oh, right, I forgot about Rainbow.”

“No, Ramona and I have sex. I'm talking about making love—there's a difference. That's why you broke up with Arthur, because you know that.”

Cookie thought about it. “No. Maybe. I don't know. I think it was because when I looked at him I kept seeing that picture on his ID card. I kept imagining him in Vietnam. Killing people and stuff like that.”

“Be fair. Maybe he saved people.”

“Maybe.”

“What are you looking for, an
ubermensch
?”

“I'm not looking for anyone.” The bottle was empty, so she walked over to a garbage can that was already too full and wedged it in.

“Let's get married some day,” he said when she came back.

“Maybe. When we're really old. Like thirty or something.”

“I'll never be thirty,” he said.

“Of course you will,” she said.

1971

Bando knew he would never go to college. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in intellectual pursuits, but going to college would have required not only energy but faith he no longer possessed. He knew he would never finish high school; he could never return to the red brick prison of Martin Academy. It would mean cutting his hair, which he would not even consider, and sitting in a stifling classroom listening to some failure with chalk dust on his knees droning on about J. Peter Altgelt, who had been governor of Illinois during the Haymarket riots. No, the Haymarket riots were real and he was not going to let some idiot turn them into History. What was History, anyway? Lies told to warp the minds of the young. Generals with white wigs in books no one wanted to read. History was airless, people reduced to names and dates as if they had never been flesh, had never loved anyone or done anything but posture so future generations might regard them as facts, not as people but as data.

Two years before, he had discovered that history was real. The Haymarket riots, which he had dozed through in his U.S. History class, came to life for him one day while he was downtown seeing his dentist. He never told anyone but Rachel about this. It happened during what were later known as the Days of Rage. Somehow he had ended up in the heart of the large crowd—he couldn't even remember what had drawn him there—and all around him were people with long hair, people like him, full of what looked like patriotic power and glory. They were running through the streets of the Loop, and without even thinking about what he was doing, he ran with them. They surged up
Randolph Street and down Wabash Avenue, under the L tracks, and at the corner someone overturned a garbage can. With strength he hadn't known he possessed (like that of five men, he later told Rachel, like that of a maniac), he had picked up the heavy metal garbage can and hurled it through the front window of a florist. Some people behind him reached through the broken glass and drew out flowers, passing them around. Behind him, a crowd of people—whom he would later discover were called Weathermen—were wearing daisies, roses, gardenias, sprigs of baby's breath. All because of a chance act, a moment of rage (and it was rage, he told Rachel later, but rage against what? Against the dying of the light?). All because of him.

“You CAN make a difference,” droned the monotonous voice of his U.S. History teacher in his head. Bando laughed out loud. The crowd around him was chanting, “America eats its young.”

What would Rachel learn in college? She was leaving in twelve days. As a feeling resembling fear clutched his insides, he stifled it with sheer willpower. She would learn about someone like him, a real person full of love and lust—a great deal of love and lust, which she pretended not to notice—who had one day decided to fight back against the death force, against an imperialist machine, against oppression, and who had unluckily wandered into the corridors of history to be transformed there into dust.

College was an abattoir into which students stampeded like cattle to be turned into dead meat. He had driven past the old stockyards in his youth and was amazed to find that even though they had been closed for years, they still smelled of shit, of death. He was sure he had smelled the same odor in the halls of one of the university classroom buildings into which he had wandered one day (the odor was actually due to bad
plumbing). He imagined the halls of all the neo-Gothic buildings flooded with rivers of blood.

These images swirled in his mind when he thought about Rachel going away to college—in Southern California, of all places. She would probably come back in rhinestone sunglasses with a pink poodle under her arm. He tried not to think about it, but one afternoon he had walked past Casa Sanchez and seen her through the window and was nearly overcome with emotion. Even though he was not allowed in, even though they were just friends and it looked as if they would always stay that way, he was so glad to see her there, wiping a table, in her blue uniform. She was the one person on 57th Street besides Sebastian to whom he felt at all connected. It was as if he had found someone who was from the same planet he'd come from and spoke his language, their connection so highly evolved they could just converse with brain waves. Of course, he wanted to be even more connected to her—physically, for example—and sometimes he was filled with tragic emotions of operatic grandeur, but mostly he was satisfied with what he felt was their profound synchrony. He would never actually say this to her, in fact he felt he didn't have to, but he conceived of them as twin souls, as if on their native planet they had been one entity that had split into two. The sweat and the sheer bother of sex were somehow a lesser form of contact. His psychic connection with Rachel sustained him, and the thought of her not being there was almost too much to contemplate.

Then too, he was jealous—she was going to college and he was not. He admitted this to himself, but it shocked him. He had always thought of jealousy as the province of small minds. When Rachel was hanging around with that guy Arthur, Bando had
examined the complex series of feelings that went on within him as he watched them sucking face, as Sebastian put it. (Sebastian had been very indignant on Bando's behalf.) He had felt pain, and longing, and sometimes desperation, but beneath it all lay something timeless that was never really threatened: Arthur might have been good-looking in a cretinous way, but he was essentially a nonentity. Nothing Arthur had or did could begin impinge on Bando's territory, that of the soul.

And Arthur had been a marine, for God's sake. Unlike Sebastian, who had hauled his mother's enormous silver coffee urn to countless antiwar meetings, Bando did not oppose the idea of war. He loved
The Iliad
, which he read when he was eleven, and had always wanted to be like Achilles, noble in battle. He would have gone to war for Helen of Troy. But what bothered him, even enraged him about the Vietnam War was its irrationality. You want me to go over there for
what
? he had demanded, incredulous, of some asshole recruiter who had given a talk at Martin Academy. No, that's not logical, Bando had said. Sorry, does not compute.

Arthur was definitely no genius. Enlisting in the Marines during the Vietnam war, of all things. Sure, he had heard of people joining the Navy and circling the globe in submarines while they waited for the whole thing to blow over. But to volunteer as a grunt, to go over there and shoot at people with elegant cheekbones, people with beautiful children, people who were Buddhists, people who were obviously smarter than you—that was the act of a barbarian. So ultimately, Bando was not really jealous of Arthur. He told Rachel he thought he was a nice guy, and that was true. When their relationship blew over, Bando greeted the news with indifference. He and Rachel returned to their erratic pattern of walking around the neighborhood on weekend nights,
sneaking into events at the university, monitoring each other from across the room as each flirted with other people, warming their hands on cups of tea or cocoa in a coffeehouse, talking about Baudelaire or Kerouac, whom Rachel had recently read at his recommendation. Occasionally these evenings would culminate in a kiss, perhaps at the end of a bottle of cheap champagne shared in the park, but their kisses were platonic, in all senses of the word. He knew she wanted it that way, and maybe on some level he did, too. Moving through the physical world was so difficult; being twin souls was easy.

Every so often, they would cross some celestial barrier that convinced him things were just as they should be between them. One night during the Kent State protests, they hunkered down in a trench beside Rockefeller Chapel as yet another band played the blues. It was an unseasonably warm night, and as the notes from the electric guitar shot into the night like astral dust, he wished for the hundredth time he could play a glamorous instrument. She lay on the ground beside him in a denim jacket, green army surplus T-shirt, ripped bell-bottom jeans. Her hair fell across her face, and as she shook it away, his stomach tightened. There were some gestures that made you feel you had glimpsed someone's essence, and you felt incredibly lucky to be within their circumference when pieces of their soul flew from them like bolts of light. “Look,” he said, feeling it almost painful to hear the sound of his own voice. He waved his hand to indicate the sky. “There we are.” He pointed at two stars. He later realized that these twin stars were only part of a larger constellation, invisible through city air, but at the time all he saw was the two of them, surrounded by luminous halos, together across millions of miles.

She looked at the stars, and he heard her breath catch. Then she leaned over and kissed his eyelids, first one, then the other. For the rest of his short life as he fell asleep at night, he would feel her lips there, and the memory would comfort him. But when he thought about her leaving for college as he lay in bed at night, he fell through space alone with a shower of sparks behind him.

“Poor Phaeton,” she said to him once when he'd been angry at his father for not lending him his car. “You want to drive your father's chariot.”

“I've always thought of myself more as Icarus,” Bando said.

“You're all the flying boys rolled into one.”

“And who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“Aphrodite,” he said. “Obviously.”

“Don't make fun. It's serious.”

“Seriously, I don't know.”

She seemed disappointed. It wasn't until she left for college that he realized she was Persephone. For the next three years her presence and absence controlled the seasons, though he would never tell her that.