Loving Women (2 page)

It was easy to pack my bags and drive down here, to the places I had not seen in more than thirty years. I was weary of many things: New York and the people I knew there. Photography. Myself. We were in a time of plague. All around me people were dying, as a fierce and murderous virus spread through their blood and destroyed all those immune systems that had made them so briefly human. Each day’s newspaper carried the names of the previous day’s body count. I knew some of them. Their names filled my head as I remembered them in life and tried to imagine their painful final days, but after a few hours they just became part of the blur.

In restaurants with my wife, Rose, in the final weeks, I heard other names staining the air around me: Bernie Goetz. Donna Rice. Ivan Boesky. Fawn Hall. Oliver North. A hundred others. They were chewed along with the food, their squalid tales consumed like everything else in the city that season. I would gaze around, and see the young in their West Side uniforms talking about junk bonds and arbitrage and leveraged buy-outs and treacherous partners, and I would feel suddenly old at fifty-one. I smoked too much, and most nights was growled at in restaurants by the lean young men with
the health-club tans, while their women pawed self-righteously at the smoky air. The cigarettes marked me as part of another generation, my style and attitudes (though not my work) shaped by Bogart and Murrow, Camus and Malraux, those once-living icons who jammed cigarettes in their mouths as signals of their manhood, inhaled a billion of them, and died. Worse, I was twenty pounds overweight in a time when eating was paid for by hours at a Nautilus machine. I was not yet old and no longer young, and on the night of my birthday, Rose leaned over and asked me in her gray-eyed, direct way: “Michael, what
is
it that you want?”

I was quiet for a long while, looking out at the spring crowds parading on Columbus Avenue. I told her: “1953.”

She didn’t understand. In 1953, Rose Donofrio was not yet born. In the months when we were, as they used to say, courting, she would have smiled, and asked what I meant and tried to pry some answer from me. But that night she didn’t really care. That night, Rose had other matters on her mind. That night, Rose blinked at me and shook her head; her gaze drifted away, and when she came back, she told me that she’d met another man and wanted to go and live with him. Her eyes were suddenly liquid, as if she expected some melancholy response from me or some explosion of protest. I couldn’t give her either. That was the problem. That had been the problem for a long time. Rose gave me this fresh information, this trembling admission of betrayal, and it merely drifted like my cigarette smoke into the great blurry fog of other information, along with the contras and the calorie count of sushi. I waved at the waiter and asked for a check and Rose and I walked home in silence. By midnight, we’d agreed that she could keep the loft and I would get the country house. She packed three bags and said she would spend the night at a girlfriend’s house, a fiction to spare my feelings. We’d call the lawyers in the morning.

“You never loved me, did you?” Rose said at the door.

“Yes, I did. More than you’ll ever know.”

She closed the door, all teary now, and I looked at my watch and thought:
I’d better go down soon, and buy the
Times. Rose had a gift, inherited from her Italian mother, for the melodramatic gesture and the venomous aria, the cutting word and the slammed door. In a way, that was what had attracted me to her when we met, four years earlier at a party on East 71st Street. But I didn’t, or couldn’t, respond any more. There was nothing left in me of such theatrics.
Maybe I was just too old. Maybe I had seen too many real bodies in too many real places for too many years. Passion had killed them all. Political passion, or religious passion, or personal passion. And I had known for years that the greatest occupational hazard I faced as a photographer was indifference. So I never plunged into her dark Sicilian storms. And I felt nothing about her abrupt and treacherous departure. It had been a long time since I’d felt anything at all.

But late on that first night alone, emptying my file cabinets and packing cartons in one of the sad ceremonies of departure, something shifted in me. I had little interest in the old tear sheets of my work, the yellowing pages of magazines (some of them dead), the folders full of birth and death certificates, licenses and diplomas. I was too old to be moved by the snapshots of people I’d once loved, and I couldn’t bear to read again the letters from vanished friends, postmarked Saigon or Lagos or Beirut. And then I came up short. Lying flat on the bottom of a file drawer was a thick, dog-eared folder. It was marked in large tight lettering, done in India ink with a Speedball pen,
Personal Stuff
. There were some letters inside, a group of drawings held together with a rusting paper clip, a few slips of paper bearing phone numbers, and The Blue Notebook.

I was seventeen years old when I had first started writing in The Blue Notebook—a kid in the Navy. And here it was, intact. Improbably, that sweet and serious boy I used to be had survived in its pages into the years of manhood. I set the Notebook aside. I finished packing the files and stacked the cartons along the wall beside the door. I took some pictures off the walls: a drawing by José Luis Cuevas, a painting of city rooftops by Anne Freilicher, a watercolor of Coney Island by David Levine. Over the fireplace was a nude photograph of Rose Donofrio, her hair streaming forward, her features obscured. I left it there. I filled a steamer trunk with winter clothes. I packed three more cartons with records—all those people Rose could not bear to hear: Charlie Parker and Sinatra and Dinah Washington and Wynonie Harris. A hundred others. I sealed the cartons with masking tape, then went down and bought the
Times
.

But toward morning, lying alone on the futon, staring at light patterns on the ceiling, listening to the slow murmur of the early-morning traffic, my head began to fill with long-gone images. Faces. Sounds. I heard the clatter of palm trees in the Florida night and
Hank Williams singing on a jukebox. I smelled great tons of bacon frying in a mess hall. I saw the faces of men I used to know. And a woman I once loved more than life itself.

When I woke that afternoon, I thought I had better go South.

From
The Blue Notebook

Journey
.
n
. 1 Travel from one place to another, usually taking a rather long time. 2 A distance, course, or area traveled or suitable for traveling. 3 A period of travel. 4 A passage or progress from one stage to another.

I’ve said good-bye to everybody now. I am going away. They have said their good-byes too, but I don’t think they even know who I am. Not my friends. Not my family. Not the girl I loved. They see me now as Michael Patrick Devlin, USN, a sailor. Just like they used to see me, only a year ago, as a high school student or a stickball player or the crazy kid who drew his own comics. I could tell them (or anyone else who asks) that I was born June 24, 1935, which makes me seventeen and a half. I could tell them that I went to Holy Name School in Brooklyn for eight years and Bishop Loughlin High School for three. I could tell them I have dark blond hair and blue eyes that are turning gray and that I’m five-foot-eleven and weigh 178 pounds. I’m a Dodger fan (of course). For fourteen months I boxed (not very well) at the Police Athletic League as a middleweight. I could tell them that my father was born in Ireland, in the city of Belfast, and that makes me Irish-American. I could tell them that my mother was born in The Bronx and is dead. Catholics. What else? I could tell them I have two younger brothers and a sister. That the greatest book I ever read was
Rabble in Arms
by Kenneth Roberts. That I want to be a comic-strip artist. But even if I told them all those things, it wouldn’t add up to me
.

They don’t really know me, not one of them, and I’m not telling any of them
.

I’m going away
.

On a journey
.

Every Navy man has two jobs: he is a fighting man and a specialist. His fighting duty at his battle station comes first; his daily work and his special jobs are important, too. Each man’s job may seem small, but it is part of the fighting efficiency of his ship. Every man’s job is small compared to the ship as a whole, but if one man falls down on his job, the ship may be lost
.

—The Bluejackets’ Manual.

Aunt Margaret asked me when I came home from boot camp what it was that I wanted. I couldn’t tell her. It would have felt as if I were asking her for something, and I don’t want to ever have to ask anyone for anything. But there were some things I wanted: a Parker 51 pen. A television set for my brothers and sister. A telephone too. Rooms with doors. I wanted Craftint paper so I could draw like Roy Crane. A set of Lionel trains. Every one of the
Bomba the Jungle Boy
series. I wanted to wake up one morning and discover that I looked like a combination of Wiliam Holden and Chet Baker. I wanted a new girl. But when she asked me, I just shrugged and said, “Nothing, Aunt Margaret. I don’t want anything at all.” A complete lie
.

Love
.
n
. 1 The profoundly tender or passionate affection for a person of the opposite sex. 2 A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child or friend. 3 Sexual passion or desire, or its gratification. 4 A person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart. 5 A love affair; amour. 6 A personification of sexual affection, as Eros or Cupid. 7 Affectionate concern for the well-being of others. 8 Strong predilection or liking of anything (the ~ of books). 9 The object or thing so liked. 10 The benevolent affection of God for His creatures, or the reverent affection due from them to God.

Chapter

1

A
nd so, early one chilly spring morning, the sky still purple, I drove out through the Holland Tunnel. Slowly, then vividly, the images of an old journey began to emerge, like a photograph in a developing tray. I began to hear voices and music and the sounds of travel. And then I was on a Greyhound bus. It was New Year’s Eve, 1952, the bus was heading South. I was desperate for the love a woman.

I stared at my reflection in the window and wondered again how women saw me. My white Navy hat was pulled rakishly (I thought) over one eye, the collar of my pea jacket was up high, and I kept trying to set my mouth in the weary, knowing way that Flip Corkin used in
Terry and the Pirates
. To be sure, my hair was still too boot-camp short, my nose too long, my teeth in need of work. I would never be mistaken for a movie star. But I looked at myself a lot then, and it was not just some adolescent exercise in narcissism. I simply wondered how I looked to others, especially to women.

The snow was falling steadily when the bus reached the iron of New Jersey. The boy I was then stared at the fat wet flakes and wondered how everything had gone so wrong that Christmas, with a girl named Maureen Crowley (the name living on for years in my head when so many others had joined the general blur), and why all the guys he knew had girls, even wives, and he had none. The boy wished his mother was alive, sure he could ask her questions about such matters. He couldn’t ask his father anything. My father was big and gruff and strong, with eyebrows that met over his nose; he knew a lot about electrical wiring and radio circuits and the
construction of lamps. He just didn’t know how to explain anything to me about the mysteries of the human heart. Or so I thought on the last day of 1952. The old man was from Ireland and my mother was from The Bronx, a mick and a narrowback joined in holy matrimony, and if he never said anything sweet or tender to me, well, in my presence he never said anything human to her either.

I was sure then, as only young men can be sure, that he didn’t even say much of anything when she was dying in the public ward at the hospital. The doctors wouldn’t let me watch her die, because I was only fourteen and tuberculosis was contagious and there were other people dying there too and I could never be expected to understand any of it. Not yet. Sex and death in those days were only rumors and whispers. And besides, I was the oldest and had to mind my brothers and my sister every night while my father went to visit her. I stayed with them each night, listening to
Gangbusters
or
The Inner Sanctum
or Jimmy Durante on the radio, hearing the voices of cops and gangsters and comedians, when what I most truly wanted was to know what it was I was supposed to do to make a woman love me. My mother would know. But she was kept hidden as she died, and my father was silent and I was full of questions, right up to the evening he learned that he didn’t have to visit her ever again. I do know that he cried in his bed that last night of my mother’s life. I heard him. But he never said a goddamned thing to me.

So I sat in the dark on that empty bus, the uniform identifying me as a man prepared to die for his country, and told myself that 1952 had turned out to be rotten but maybe 1953 would be better. Neither could ever be as bad as the year my mother died. And in some way, I was happy to be on the road, going out of New York, away from Brooklyn. This had nothing to do with the new president; Dwight Eisenhower was a famous general with a baby face and a simple smile, and he told everybody he would go to Korea and end the war. But the truth was that, in our part of Brooklyn we never cared much for generals and didn’t care at all for Republicans. Even when Douglas MacArthur came back after Harry Truman fired him, and they kept playing “Old Soldiers Never Die,” and there was talk about impeaching Truman and making MacArthur president, we sided with Truman. So when the radios played MacArthur’s song in the bars, most of the men answered it with “Anchors Aweigh.” There were some soldiers from our neighborhood
and a few Marines, but mostly we were Navy. When our people fought for their country, they went to sea. So it was no big deal that when I was old enough to go, I dropped out of high school and went to boot camp in Bainbridge. Like almost everybody else.