JD (14 page)

Having said his piece, Glover folded his hands on his desk. Just like a schoolboy trying to be good and disguise
his impatience on the last day of school. The gesture highlighted the sublime architecture of muscle and sinew on his forearms. I thought, I'm not going to see this again. Sometimes I'll sit across from a guy on the subway, or stand behind him in a long line at the bank, and--even as I'm drinking in his beauty--I am aware that in this city of too many souls it's unlikely our paths will cross again. So I scarcely get a moment of pleasure before this veil of valediction descends to blot it out.

I hadn't been listening to what Miss Rosoff was saying, tuned in just in time for her peroration. “It seems like all these people are looking for some kind of meaning in their lives.” She left her mouth open for a little while, so I thought she might want to further develop this percept. She closed her mouth.

“That's right,” I said. At the start of the summer, I might have said, “That's right!” But I used up all my exclamation points in June, when we were still running through the maze of Kafka and failing to find the reward.

What saddened me was that she
was
right. Yes, indeedy, Joseph K and Stein's Melanctha and Genet's Divine were looking for meaning. What Miss Rosoff didn't grasp was that she herself was looking for the same thing. There is my enormous, irremediable failure as a pedagogue. That I stand before kids in the fall and winter and then grown-ups in the summer and I unveil to them these shocking portraits of flayed, anguished people and they never ever see themselves. They just see Great Books, and next summer they'll take Landmarks of Modern Art and look at
Guernica
and see a horsey and a lightbulb. I cannot make them understand that they are in agony.

After class I thought of going to the baths. Not because I was especially horny, but because I didn't want to go home and I didn't want to go someplace, like the Poplar, where I'd have to talk to people who listened to Scriabin. I wound up at Faherty's, sitting anonymously among the
other guys watching what I gather is the astonishing train wreck of this new Mets team that plays in Queens, over by the World's Fair.

I couldn't honestly say that any of these schmos were in agony, or even looking real hard for meaning. Maybe I'm the deluded one. Looking around at the masses and thinking, Jeez, they can't be as happy as they look. They're just drugged on nine innings of opiate. But of course they weren't drugged, they brought all their human faculties to their observation of this silly game: annotating it with references to similar events in 1949 or 1957, noting how this new guy swung just like Phil Rizzuto, entering into learned disputations over arcana like bunts and balks. They were as lively and wise as the Council of Trent, except what they were arguing over was actually happening. Imagine if their collective wisdom and passion could be brought to bear on politics! Imagine the world they would build, a proper abode for the astounding Creatures, in the old sense, we call ordinary men!

August 5, 1964

On the IND train today, a little hood of indeterminate ethnicity smirked at me. I hadn't even been staring at him, maybe a couple of quick glances, it was as if he just scented me somehow. So, discovered and let off with just a smirk, I was free to stare, at his dark eyes, the black hair larded and sculpted into a cantilevered swoop, the way his little blue-jeaned pelvis tilted just so, like the Donatello David's. I couldn't see but could intuit his tiny behind, the way it would nest in my cupped hands as I …

He was fourteen or fifteen, maybe, a couple of years older than Mickey. Funny, Mickey and all his buddies are little Beatles, hair teased across their foreheads, while the working-class kids still sport the greasy elaborate styles from the fifties. I suppose it's the hint of androgyny they can't handle, the nice-boy whiff of the Beatles, but
there's also maybe a kind of class solidarity about it. Man, I'm from the Bronx, I'm not going to get some little girlie cut like a cocksucker from New Rochelle.

I caught myself wishing Mickey were more like that kid. Mickey's not spoiled exactly--or maybe he is, summers in Truro, never worked a day in his life, already talking about what college he might go to. Well, good, I am happy enough to have spoiled him, to be able to give him some kind of future. I just wish he were tougher. Not a delinquent, exactly, but hard and knowing as that kid.

The kid turned around, ready to get off, his butt surpassed any conjecture, I could imagine plunging … I was sitting on the IND, refolding my
Times
to conceal an incipient hard-on, drooling over the butt of a boy just a little older than Mickey. Well, as Villard says, the Greeks had a name for it.

August 7, 1964

The
Times
and the
Trib
are full every morning of stories about these attacks on our destroyers by little Vietnamese putt-putts in the Gulf of Tonkin, a place nobody had heard of two weeks ago but which is now practically Pearl Harbor. Johnson has started sending bombers, which seems a bit of an overreaction by a lion nipped at by a mouse. Bizarrely, these little forays are called Operation Pierce Arrow. Why not Hupmobile, or Stanley Steamer? All of this charade just meant to deflect Goldwater's charges that Johnson is lily-livered and soft on Bolshevism. Once the election is over, I'm sure we'll never hear about the little Tonkinese and their squabbles again.

School's out until the fall, which means two things. First, I have no excuse left at all for not sitting here and whacking out my next Negroes-and-dwarves epic. So I think I will just stop trying to excuse it, for a while or maybe forever. If I have nothing to write I have nothing to write. Why am I beating my head against the desk in vain protest at a tautology?

Second, Martha and Mickey will be back in just a couple of weeks. God knows I'm ready, for Mickey anyway. No, for Martha, too. For our sticking-taped simulacrum of a marriage. Look at the anarchist, needing this obsolete strait-jacket to keep his life from spinning away! All right, guilty. I am ready for them to come back, but of course I am also aware that I have just seventeen days left of my estival festival. Here I am sitting glumly before a typewriter when I should be

Perhaps the next page is missing, or perhaps he just sprinted away from the Olivetti in midsentence. To continue the festival, scarcely distinguishable from a penance.

Of course in hindsight it is easy enough to see that the little news story he made jokes about was kind of important. But I don't even remember reading or hearing about the Tonkin Gulf incident while I was in Truro. I suppose I was focused, as much as Jonathan, on making the most of the final weeks of our summer apart. And what else should we have done? If we'd had an inkling that these faraway events would shape the rest of our lives: what would we have done?

The Greeks heard oracles foretelling a future they could not alter. Jonathan and I could just turn to the next story in the
Times
.

August 8, 1964

When I was a kid I was ready to fuck anything that wasn't nailed down. Mostly girls were nailed down. There was Deirdre, sure, at Evander Childs. I can't quite remember the quote under her misleadingly demure picture in our yearbook, something from James Whitcomb Riley about how she spread her love. Harvey the editor was thrilled to have got away with that, because half the boys in the senior class knew what else she was spreading.

Jeez, Deirdre, poor Deirdre, wide-eyed and sort of sticky all over, her cheap stockings pooled at her ankles, murmuring, “You read a lot of books, don't you Johnny?” “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” “You're a brain, you're going someplace.” “Uuhhh …”

So: Deirdre, and then just a couple of times Judith at City College, who had read a few books herself and was eager enough to undertake a little independent study. Just a couple times, first a soggy and interrupted encounter in St. Nicholas Park, second a more leisurely tutorial in my father's apartment when he was off visiting my uncle in Asbury Park. Second and last because I ascertained that Judith didn't shave her armpits. Not to mention that, as I dozed in, possibly, the same iron bed in which I myself had been conceived, I half heard that Judith's mother was expecting me for Shabbos dinner and was going to buy a rib roast.

Boys were not nailed down, that's all. I read some cretin like Erik Erikson, who thinks men get fucked “with the implied idea of gaining love and control forever through anal incorporation …” (I had to look that up, and of course lost twenty minutes reading the rest of the chapter. Must teach myself to stop looking stuff up when I'm writing.) When I read this stuff, with the everyday ecstatic currency of our lives turned into something clinical and monitory, I think: no, no, no, our histories might just be awfully simple.

Girls were nailed down, boys were boys. The Bronx was, for this boy, a veritable bazaar teeming with guys who could barely keep their flies buttoned. Andy the shortstop and Moe who worked over at the tire repair and even Harvey the yearbook editor, who wound up a periodontist in South Orange and read Rupert Brooke (“rough male kiss of blankets”) and--nevertheless? therefore?--wielded a surprisingly sturdy and enthusiastic drill.

All this
nostalgie de verge
prompted by this morning's encounter at the
salon du thé
in the 28th Street station. Getting up, I lost my balance, wound up on one knee, in the conventional pose of a suitor, except that the knee was in a little puddle of urine. The kid I'd been doing, pocked face and a sneer he'd borrowed from an Elia Kazan movie, looked down at me and shook his head in disgust. From the
way he scowled I knew it was disgust at himself, not me: that I was kneeling in piss seemed to him a logical sequela of what we had been up to. (Or: he up to, I down to.)

I wouldn't have minded his loathing
me
. There is sometimes a little frisson in doing it with someone who loathes you. But that I should be the cause of self-loathing! That he should have looked down at me, his come still halfway down my throat, and felt sullied and ashamed because--because someone so repulsive had made him feel good.

Well, fine, I thought, the fuck I care, he should go hang himself in remorse. Then, right away, wishing I could make it better. Wishing I could say something, not to make him think better of me--that was impossible--but to forgive himself. To just be glad he came, for God's sake, just be glad that a minute ago he was moaning in pleasure, and nobody gets it so much they should turn right to scowling.

He clenched, thought about punching me. Thought about it, which already told me he wouldn't. Didn't, why? I can't figure out what primordial code of honor he carried with him, somewhere in the space between his sneer and his greasy, assiduously combed ducktail. Something like this: hitting me would have meant I'd done something to him, would have meant I was able to do something.

He turned away; the back of his baseball jacket said Samuel Gompers Voc Tech. The kid had to be 22, 23. If he'd learned any voc or any tech he wouldn't have been hanging out in a subway john at 11 in the morning. Nothing for him, no calling for him in all this great city.

I got up, dabbed at my knee with my handkerchief. Not too bad, just looked like I'd dribbled. Which I do more every year, all these little signs of aging no one tells you about. Martha won't even notice, I thought for a second, before I remembered of course that Martha and Mickey are still away. Leaving me with this paradox: (a) I am relieved that there is no one at home to see that I've been wallowing in piss, and (b) if there's no one at home to see, I will wallow in piss.

Two, count them, two girls. Then me. Perhaps there were others, scattered among his very long list of
people
. I really had supposed, all these years, that he had gone on pollinating a variety of flowers all through his life. But, if this journal is representative, his vaunted bisexuality was more a political stance than a description of how he actually lived. Making him, in a way, the mocking inverse of those evangelists you see on TV, the ones who get caught with a hooker. Jonathan, as much as they, preached an ideal he couldn't live up to. The spirit was bisexual, but the flesh was gay.

Why did he insist? Just so he wouldn't have to look in a mirror and see a fairy? And why does it bother me to learn that he was kidding himself, what is it to me? Perhaps I should even be flattered to be a member of the tiny sorority of women-who-attracted-Jonathan. I was the one who wasn't sticky or hairy.

I was the one who married a man who wallowed in piss.

August 13, 1964

I was lonesome and went down to SLS. Sat in my office with the door open, actually encouraging visits from the doddering phenomenologists who wander the halls on long summer afternoons; that's how lonesome I was. But no one passed by. I went down to the break room, got a can of Coke, and hoped it wouldn't get too warm before someone came along and helped me open the damn thing. Presently Willis appeared. We've seen each other enough this summer that he felt entitled to say, as he opened the Coke, “You know, there must be some reason you bite your nails that way.”

“My! I thought all shrinks took off for the month of August.”

“I'm just filling in,” he said. “What've you been up to?”

“Not enough. You?”

He shrugged. “Still seeing Edouard.” He stretched this to about thirty seconds of Edoooaaah.

“Your dancer friend?”

“Uh-huh.” He shrugged again, showing that he was crazy in love. “Actually, it's just Eddie, but I like to call him Edoooaaah.”

“Does he like that?”

“He tolerates it,” Willis said, with a sudden enormous grin. Meaning, I think: it annoys Eddie, but he likes me enough to put up with it, and ain't that wonderful?

I thought of remarking that doing things
because
they are annoying hasn't worked out so well for Martha and me. But I just grinned back. It was, after all, kind of wonderful-amazing, really, that scraggly Willis has found himself tolerated by a blue-jawed stud with monumental thighs.