My Life as a Man (4 page)

They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon, but only because of Miss Benson
’
s age, position, and character. Zuckerman had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all but overpowering.

His eight unhappy weeks of basic infantry training were followed by eight equally unhappy weeks of military police training with a herd of city roughnecks and southern hillbillies under the equatorial sun at Fort Benning, Georgia. In Georgia he learned to direct traffic so that it flowed
“
through
the hips
”
(as the handbook had it) and to break a man
’
s larynx, if he should wish to, with a swat of the billy club. Zuckerman was as alert and attentive at these army schools as he had been earning his summa cum laude degree from Bass. He did not like the environment, his comrades, or
“
the system,
”
but he did not wish to
the
in Asia either, and so applied himself to every detail of his training as if his life depended upon it—as it would. He did not pretend, as did some of the other college graduates i
n his
training company, to be offended or amused by the bayonet drill. One thing to be contemptuous of soldierly skills while an undergraduate at Bass, another when you were a member of an army at war.
“
KILL!
”
he screamed,
“
KILL!
”
just as
“
aggressively
”
as he was instructed to, and drove the bayonet deep into the bowels of the sandbag; he would have spat upon the dying dummy too if he had been told that that was standard operating procedure. He knew when to be superior and when not to be —or was beginning at least to find out.
“
What are you?
”
Sergeant Vinnie Bono snarled at them from the instructor
’
s platform (a jockey before Korea, Sergeant Bono was reputed to have slain a whole North Korean platoon with nothing but an entrenching tool)
—“
What are you with your stiff steel pricks, you troopers—pussycats or lions?
”
“
LIONS!
”
roared Zuckerman, because he did not wish to
the
in Asia, or anywhere for that matter, ever.

But he would, and, he feared, sooner rather than later. At those Georgia reveille formations, the captain, a difficult man to please, would be giving the troopers their first dressing down of the long day
—“
I guaran
-
fuckin
-
tee you gentlemen, not one swingin
’
dick will be leavin
’
this fiddle
-
fuckin
’
area to so much as chew on a nanny goat
’
s tittie
—“
and Zuckerman, ordinarily a cheery, a dynamic morning riser, would suddenly have a vision of himself falling beneath the weight of some drunken redneck in an alley back of a whorehouse in Seoul. He would expertly crack the offending soldier in the larynx, in the groin, on the patella, in all the places where he had crippled
the
dummy in the drill, but the man face-down in the mud would be Zuckerman, crushed beneath the drunken lawbreaker
’
s brute strength—and then from nowhere, his end would come, by way of the knife or the razor blade. Schools and dummies were one thing—the world and the flesh something else: How would Zuckerman find the wherewithal to crack his club against a real human patella, when he had never been able to do so much as punch somebody
’
s face with his
fist in a schoolyard fight? And
yet he had his father
’
s short fuse, didn
’
t he? And the seething self-righteousness to go with it. Nor was he wholly without physical courage. After all, as a boy he had never been much more than skin and bones beneath his shoulder pads and helmet, and yet in the sandlot football games he played in weekly every fall, he had not flinched or cried aloud when the stampede had come sweeping around his end of the line; he was fast, he was shifty
—“
wiry
”
was the word with which he preferred to describe himself at that time,
“
Wiry Nate Zuckerman
”
—and he was
“
smart,
”
and could fake and twist and fight his way through a pack of thirteen-year-old boys built like hippos, for all that he was a boy built like a giraffe. He had in fact been pretty fearless on the football field,
so long as everybody flayed, according to the rules and within the spirit of the game.
But when (to his surprise) that era of good fellowship came to an end, Wiry Nate Zuckerman retired. To be smashed to the ground because he was the left end streaking for the goal line with the ball had always been all right with him; indeed he rather liked the precarious drama of plucking a spiral from the air one moment, and then in the next, tasting dirt, as the pounds piled up above him. However, on a Saturday morning in
the
fall of 1947, when one of the Irish kids on the Mount Holly Hurricanes came flying onto the pileup (at the bottom of which lay Zuckerman, with the ball) screaming,
“
Cream that Yid!
”
he knew that his football career was over. Henceforth football was no longer to be a game played by the rules, but a battle in which each of the combatants would try to get away with as much as he could, for whatever
“
reasons
”
he had. And Zuckerman could get away with nothing—he could not even hit back when attacked. He could use what strength he had to try to restrain somebody else from going at him, he would struggle like hell to prevent damage or disfigurement to himself, but when it came to bringing his own knuckles or knees into violent contact with another, he just could not make it happen. Had never been up to it on the neighborhood playground,
would be paralyzed for sure on
the mainland of Asia. An attentive and highly motivated student, he had earned the esteem of a trained killer for the manner in which he disemboweled the sandbag in basic training—
“
That
’
s it, Slim,
”
Sergeant Bono would megaphone down to his favorite college graduate,
“
that
’
s grabbin
’
that gook by his gizzard, that
’
s cuttin
’
off the Commie bastard
’
s cock!
”
—but face to face with a real live enemy, he might just as well be carrying a parasol and wearing a bustle for all the good his training as a warrior was going to do himself or the Free World.

So, it looked as though he would not be taking
that
pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral after all, nor would he get to see the Poets
’
Corner in Westminster Abbey, or the churches where John Donne had preached, or the Lake District, or Bath, the setting of
Persuasion
(Miss Benson
’
s favorite novel), or the Abbey Theatre, or
the
River Liffey, nor would he live to be a professor of literature some day, with a D. Litt. from Oxford or Cambridge and a house of his own cozy with fireplaces and walled with books; he would never see Miss Benson again, or her garden, or those fortunate 4FS, Fischbach and Osterwald —and worse, no one, ever again, would see him.

It was enough to make him cry; so he did, invariably after being heroically lighthearted on the telephone with his worried mother and fa
th
er in New Jersey. Yes, outside the phone booth, within hearing distance of the PX jukebox
—“
Oh, the red we want is the red we got
in th’
old red, white, and blue
”
—he would find himself at the age of twenty-one as tearful and panic-stricken as he had been at four when he had finally had to learn to sleep with all the lights off in his room. And no less desperate for his mommy
’
s arms and the feel of his daddy
’
s unshaven cheek.

Telephoning Sharon, being brave with her, would also reduce him to tears afterward. He could hold up all right during the conversations, while
she
cried, but when it came time to give up the phone to the soldier standing next in the line, when he left
the
phone booth where he had been so good at cheering her
up
and started back
through
the dark across that alien post
—“
Yes, the red we want is the red we got in th
’
old red, white, and blue
”
—he had all he could do not to scream out against the horrible injustice of his impending doom. No more Sharon.
No more Sharon!
NO MORE SHARON! What proportions the loss of Sharon Shatzky assumed in young Zuckerman
’
s mind. And who was she? Who was Sharon Shatzky that the thought of leaving her forever would cause him to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself from howling at the moon?

Sharon was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Al
“
the Zipper King
”
Shatzky. With her family she had recen
tly
moved into Country Club Hills, the development of expensive ranch-type houses where his own parents now lived, on the outskirts of Camden, in a landscape as flat and treeless as
the
Dakota badlands. Zuckerman had met her in the four weeks between his graduation from Bass and his induction into the army in July. Before their meeting his mother had described Sharon as
“
a perfect little lady,
”
and his father had said she was
“
a lovely lovely child,
”
with the result that Zuckerman was not at all prepared for
the
rangy Amazon, red-headed and green-eyed, who arrived in short shorts that night, trailing sullenly behind Al and Minna. All four parents present fell over themselves treating her like a baby, as though that might convince
the
college graduate to keep his eyes from the powerful curve of haunch beneath the girl
’
s skimpy summer outfit. Mrs. Shatzky had just that day taken Sharon shopping in Philadelphia for her
“
college wardrobe.
”
“
Mother,
please,
”
Sharon said, when Minna began to describe how
“
adorable
”
Sharon looked in each of her new outfits. Al said (proudly) that Sharon Shatzky here now owned more pairs of shoes than he owned undershorts.
“
Daddy,
”
moaned Sharon, closing her jungle eyes in exasperation. Zuckerman
’
s father said that if Sharon had any questions about college life she should ask his son, who had been editor up at Bass of
“
the
school paper.
”
It had been the literary magazine that Zuckerman had edited, but he was
by now accustomed to the inac
curacies that accompanied his parents
’
public celebration of his achievements. Indeed, of late, his tolerance for their failings was growing by leaps and bounds. Where only the year before he might have been incensed by some line of his mother
’
s that he knew came straight out of
McCall
’
s
(or by the fact that she did not know what an
“
objective correlative
”
was or in what century Dryden had lived), now he was hardly perturbed. He had also given up trying to educate his father about the ins and outs of the syllogism; to be sure, the man simply could not get it through his head that an argument in which the middle term was not distributed at least once was invalid—but what difference did that make to Zuckerman any more? He could afford to be generous to parents who loved him the way they did (illogical and uneducated though they were). Besides, if the truth be known, in the past four years he had become more Miss Benson
’
s student than their offspring
…
So he was kind and charitable to all that night, albeit
“
amused
”
by much of what he saw and heard; he answered the Shatzkys
’
questions about
“
college life
”
without a trace of sarcasm or snobbishness (none, at any rate, that he could hear), and all the while (without success) tried to keep his eyes from their daughter
’
s perky breasts beneath her shrunken polo shirt, and the tempting cage of her torso rising from that slender, mobile waist, and the panthery way she moved across the wall-to-wall carpet on the balls of her bare feet
…
After all: what business did a student of English letters who had taken tea and watercress sandwiches only a few weeks earlier in the garden of Caroline Benson have with the pampered middle-class daughter of Al
“
the Zipper King
”
Shatzky? By the time Zuckerman was about to graduate (third in his class, same rank as at Bass) from MP school, Sharon was a freshman at Juliana Junior College, near Providence. Every night she wrote him scandalous letters on the monogrammed pink stationery with the scalloped edges that Zuckerman
’
s mother had given the perfect young lady for a going-away present:
“
dearest dearest all
I
could
think
ab
out while playing tennis in gym
class was getting down on my hands and knees and crawling across the room toward your prick and then pressing your prick against my face i love it with your prick in my face just pressing your prick against my cheeks my lips my tongue my nose my eyes my ears wrapping your gorgeous prick in my hair
—“
and so on. The word, which (among others) he had taught her and encouraged her to use during the sex act and also, for titillation
’
s sake, on the phone and through the mails—had a strong hold over the young girl locked up in the dormitory room in Rhode Island:
“
every time the ball came over the net,
”
wrote Sharon,
“
i saw your wonderful prick on top of it.
”
This last, of course, he didn
’
t believe. If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality, it was a tendency to try a little too hard, with the result that her prose (to which Zuckerman, trained by Miss Benson in her brand of the New Criticism, was particularly attuned) often offended him by a too facile hyperbole. Instead of acting upon him as an aphrodisiac, her style frequen
tly
jarred him by its banal insistence, reminding him less of Lawrence than of those mimeographed stories his brother used to smuggle home to him from the navy. In particular her use of
“
cunt
”
(modified by
“
hot
”
) and
“
prick
”
(modified by
“
big
”
or
“
gorgeous
”
or both) could be as mannered and incantatory, in a word, as sentimental, as his own use, or misuse, in college of the adjective
“
human.
”
Nor was he pleased by her refusal to abide by the simple rules of grammar; the absence of punctuation and capitalization in her obscene letters was not exac
tly
an original gesture of defiance (or an interesting one ei
the
r, to Zuckerman
’
s mind, whether the iconoclast was Shatzky or cummings), and as a device to communicate the unbridled flow of passion, it seemed to him, a votary not only of
Mrs. Dall
ow
ay
and
To the Lighthouse,
but also of
Madame Bovary
and
The Ambassadors
(he really could not read Thomas Wolfe any more), to have been conceived at a rather primitive level of imagination.