JD (17 page)

Very early on--after we were married, I think, I'm pretty sure she didn't start humming until she had hooked me--early on, I used to beg her to give me some goddamn hint about her grievance. She didn't have to pinpoint it, maybe if I could just know the general topic. Money, say, or sex, my hygiene. Any broad category. She would only hum louder, and I learned to stop asking.

I was pretty sure Martha wasn't in Schubert dudgeon over my forgetting to procure a vegetable, or even my predictable failure to defrost the icebox for two months. Was she mad because she had an idea what I'd been up to, these months? Or because she'd had to leave whoever she'd been up to?

Martha found a can of squash. And then she cooked the strip steaks to her taste, so well done you could hammer nails with them. While she and Mickey dug in, she said brightly, “Mickey's been learning to sail.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mickey confirmed, his mouth full of squash.

“Bernie has a sailboat?” I said, picturing my brother in a yachting costume.

“Just a little Sunfish,” Mickey said. “Like a big surfboard, but with a mast. Alan and I must have capsized it a million times till I figured out how to come about. You have to practically flatten yourself on the board while you let out the sheet, or else the boom catches you right in the noggin.”

This was mighty voluble for Mickey. Usually he's about as communicative as a Trappist monk. I tried to think of some question, to keep him going, but I don't know a boom from a
butthole, and of course I didn't want to sound stupid. I'm sure I sound stupid to Mickey often enough without going out of my way.

“We used to sail back home,” Martha put in. “A sloop we kept at Gibson Island. My, I used to love it. I was just a little girl, but sometimes Daddy would let me take the tiller. Just holding it in place took all my strength, it was like an animal straining to break free.”

“Yeah, that's how it feels when you're sailing into the wind,” Mickey said.

“I guess it was during the war we stopped going down, because of the gas rationing. And then, after the war-well, I was away at school, but we could have gone summers. I guess Daddy was … working too hard.” Drinking too hard would have been a better bet.

So there we were. Martha-and-Mickey. Also me. I'm not sure I had ever felt this before. Oh sure, sometimes when they ganged up on me to extract something, but sometimes it was Mickey-and-I wheedling Martha, or Martha-and-I begging Mickey to, say, use the potty. The shifting ententes of domestic politics. This was different, not temporary cahoots but a deep conspiracy from which I was excluded. Squash and sloops and fossilized strip steaks.

I remember the first time Martha's parents saw Mickey, glanced over at me, looked again at Mickey with excessively bright smiles that I took--perhaps unfairly--to mean, thank God he doesn't look anything like the kike. And yes, thank God. I've always been proud of Mickey's patrician beauty, his sheer unblemished Roland Parkness. Fourteen, and rarely a zit on his noble, shrewd face. I've never for an instant surmised that his radical non-Ascherhood meant he had been spawned by a non-Ascher. Even his blond hair, I guess, comes from a recessive gene kindly bequeathed me by some Cossack. But he did seem, last night, thoroughly Axelrod, as if there'd been a virgin birth.

Mickey had already wolfed down his steak and was staring at his blank plate while Martha prattled on about all the
friends she had encountered on the Cape. After a minute he said, “May I be excused?”

“When your mother and I have finished,” I said. Merely restating a rule laid down by Martha years ago.

“It's only light out a little longer. I want to see if any of the guys are around.”

“And then who's going to help your mother with the dishes?” I said.

“Oh, let him go,” Martha said. “I can dry the dishes myself this once.”

Mickey didn't wait for confirmation, just lit out for the street. Martha said, “You know, the rules are kind of different at Bernie's. It'll take a little while to get over the summer routine.”

Fine, I thought. We'll just all live the way we did this summer. Pardon me, dear, I have a previous engagement in the 28th Street tearoom. And your summer friend, does he live in New York? Maybe you can keep that up, too. All new rules.

After dinner, I went to my office, started trying to think about planning my Existentialism course for the fall, wound up reading Thurber. Not so funny as he used to be in the thirties, already about as dated as, say,
The Abandoned Steam Shovel
. But perhaps not an inappropriate guide to the new phase of married life we seemed to be embarking on, with a gigantic Martha in whose shadow little Jonathan cowers in a battered homburg.

I came out of the office to find Mickey in the living room. Still up at quarter to twelve and watching television! This wasn't a new set of rules, this was anarchy. Not the utopian kind, where I am free from all restraints, but the dystopian one, where Mickey is free from all restraints. I was so amazed I watched with him for a second. There was a skinny, twitchy guy named Johnny something who sat behind a desk and was interviewing, so help me, Edgar Villard.

I restored order, packed Mickey off to bed, turned off the TV. Headed toward our bedroom and realized, from the
light under the door: Martha was sitting up in bed, reading. Performance of marital duties might have been contemplated.

I didn't feel like it. I don't just mean I wasn't in the mood; I wasn't, but I could probably have performed, as a courtesy. Then off the hook for a few weeks, anyway. So I thought, why not get it over with? As I edged toward the bedroom with the eagerness of a dog about to get a bath, I poked inside my head a little, and found: I was absolutely certain that, once I did the expected amatory clearing of the throat she would, first, murmur something about the very long trip with Mickey and then, with a barely audible sigh, relent.

Or perhaps she wasn't plotting this way at all. There she was, sitting up in bed and pretending to read Taylor Caldwell or whatever tea-cozy crap she picked up to take on the train. Perhaps she was reciprocally wondering what I intended and whether I really wanted it and whether she wanted it and …

Suddenly I was, inexplicably, overflowing with love for her, almost to the point of an unwelcome tear. Pissed off, too, wishing I could be dealing at that moment with some will-he-won't-he greaser--the pas de deux almost equally baroque, but also elemental, creaturely, with a sexy whiff of danger about it. Wishing I could just get the fuck out of the apartment, but at the same time filled with--not love, that wasn't right. Wonderment, at least, and a sort of grudging gratitude. That there should be another consciousness, ten steps away now, another fully sentient being right here in this apartment, nine steps, trying to make me out and herself out and just as tangled up as I was, eight steps, to the point where neither of us knew anymore who was gratifying whom, who was the desirer and who … seven steps.

Then I felt there was no desire anywhere in the place. Just courtesy, self-annihilating stinking politeness. All she desired was to be back groping in the sand with whatever son of a bitch was ringing her chime all summer, all I
desired … I didn't desire anything last night. I thought, I'll know what I desire when I spring a boner spontaneously instead of following the awful etiquette manual we've been writing in each other's blood for so long.

So I was not freeing myself only but freeing both of us when, six steps from the door to the bedroom, I called out--really full of love now, this is for you my helpmeet, my dearest: “I'm going out for a little fresh air.”

Fresh air! A suffocating night, the handful of stragglers on Seventh Avenue shuffling along in a sort of narcotic torpor, trudging from one pool of light to the next. I ducked into Faherty's, looked around at the handful of guys who were still there at midnight. Guys like me, who weren't there for anything special--when had anything special ever happened at Faherty's? They were there instead of being home. Free, like me.

Free, for example, to go see if I could find a quick one at 28th Street. Which I almost did, would have if it hadn't been so hot. Instead I just lifted my beer.

To the new rules. As in Sleeping Beauty, when all the thorny vines are dispelled by a single kiss--in this case a kiss freely withheld--and the place is awake, sunny, full of air. New rules for the world, everybody free.

August 23, 1966

I stopped journalizing when I got going on JD. Now I find myself starting again.

I had supposed that the journal two years ago was just a way of filling up a fallow and disconsolate time while I waited for the muse to drop by. But really: it was how I found my way into
JD
. I scratched first, and figured out where the itch was later. So perhaps this is what's happening again? I haven't known what to do next, so many false starts. The novel about my boyhood, with everything real left out because Laurence says no one wants to read about a teenage cocksucker. The one last try at breathing air into the dissertation I never finished, which just reminded me how
little I really cared about Wilfred Owen, the slant-rhymed sadistic little fairy. So maybe this journal is my path to the …

The
next
, I was about to write. As dreary an idea as reincarnation. I have to do this again? And then another time, book after book, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Ascher? What will I get from the next, if it ever comes, or the next after that?

I thought
JD
would make everything
okay
. The review in the
Times
, the twenty-minute slot on David Susskind, the panels and the conferences and the trips on jet planes to exotic places like Omaha, where the speaker's bureau booked me at a couple thousand a pop to mouth off to a theater full of college kids, and then I could select two or three corn-fed ephebes to join me for a beer. Most of all, maybe, just seeing my name flash out like neon from the middle of an article in the
Saturday Review
or the
Reporter
. “Jonathan Ascher, for example …” The writer confident that everyone would know my name.

Everything I ever wanted. Except that after I've read the same paragraph in the magazine a dozen times my name turns into an autonomous object. They aren't talking about me, they're talking about this paper creature Jonathan A. While I sit clutching a magazine that I can file or put out with the trash, no difference, I am still homely and every week less potent Johnny. Sniffing out my next lay and not getting it mostly, or sometimes getting it and an hour later sniffing again, as if men were Chinese food, sub gum dick.

I don't just mean that success, the old bitch-goddess, hasn't brought me everything I hoped it would. What did I even hope for? More glittery parties, when I hate parties? Fan mail, which I have to answer when all I can say is, er, thanks? Or which I don't answer, the letters sit there reproachfully at the bottom of a stack of bills. What a stuckup schmuck, somebody takes the trouble to write him, and does he answer?

I never had anything in mind, just that if other people got famous I should get famous and then, and then. This is what I've learned: wanting to be famous was a way of avoiding finding out what I needed. Now I can't put that off anymore.

Oh, yeah: and the world didn't change. I thought I was going to remake the world, into one where a boy had a chance of growing up. And instead it just gets more and more McNamara. Ford Ford Ford, orgy-porgy, except now the machine is one that is geared for slaughter and is chewing up other men's sons every day in a war nobody understands.

August 27, 1966

It rained all day yesterday. I looked up from the paper and found that Mickey was just sitting on the sofa, sneaking glances at the blank television screen. I said we could play pinochle, and he said okay. I'm not sure who was doing whom a favor.

While we played, I said. “So what did you do all summer, other than flip over your Starfish?”

“Sunfish. You know, nothing much.”

“I guess not, judging from the voluminous correspondence.”

“Huh?”

“You didn't write, all summer.” I was sorry at once. Not just because I sounded like a Jewish mother, but because it was wrong to pretend I had missed his letters. Who the hell wants to read letters from a vacationing fourteen-year-old? New rule: don't pretend to care about stuff just because you're supposed to. “It's okay. I guess you had nothing much to tell me.”

“You know, what's to tell? Alan and me fooled around.”

“Alan and I. Fooled around?”

“Yeah. We'd go to the beach, hang out with girls, play badminton, you know.” He said this so fluently I figured he and his cousin Alan must have fooled around.

“How about your mother? What did she do all day?”

“I don't know, ask her. She mostly read books and stuff.”

“And at night?”

“You know, depends. If we could get the signal from Boston and the picture wasn't too snowy we'd watch TV, or else we'd play Monopoly or something, or--”

“I meant your mother.”

“Oh.” He stuck his lower lip out. When Pop did this, when I do, it means I'm getting ready to tell the truth. When Bernie does it, it means a lie is coming. So which tribe does Mickey belong to?

He threw down a card, and I reacted automatically: “You can't slough the diamond, you gotta trump.”

“Oh.” He played the queen of spades.

“For Christ's sake,” I said. “You could have melded that. Aren't you paying any attention at all?”

“Fuck,” he said. I wonder if fourteen is old enough to say fuck. Martha will surely know the rules. I am ready to say fuck myself right now. Fuck, I might have gotten a little news if I hadn't jumped on him about a stupid card game.

Not news about Martha. I already know about Martha, that's not the news I needed to hear. But about which tribe he belonged to.