Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  And one day near Thanksgiving I recall walking stoned with him through Central Park, where an expectant group of children has gathered near the entry to the zoo with their mothers and au pairs to hear the Delacorte Clock strike the hour. A few snowflakes are falling and Eric, smiling, holds a finger up as atop the brick pavilion the bronze monkey clangs the bell and, below, the carousel of animals begins to turn to the tune of a carillon. The elephant, the bear, the goat, the hippopotamus, the kangaroo, the penguin drummer —the delighted children point out their favorites, but one little boy no more than three or four stands crying in a blue coat, displeased or frightened by the spectacle, his eyes like rain-streaked city streets at midnight, as though he knows bronze animals aren’t supposed to do this, to spring to life this way and do this joyless dance with fixed postures and expressions. When the clock stops, though, he stops and looks at his Person with relief and satisfaction as though his cries have stopped it. Eric and I trade looks at this the way we do when Miles or Shorter release a genius nugget or fire a Roman candle, not sure what we’ve witnessed but sure we’ve witnessed something and sure the other gets it, our friendship like a room that you could go to knowing the other would be waiting when you got there. And looking back, I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I’d ever felt this, perhaps with Pa, the first George A., bottom-fishing in the Albemarle before our little kingdom sank beneath the ocean.

  With Eric at the time, this seems no more than hanging with a cool friend from an exotic background. Looking back, though, it seems to me that I was at a master class in Eric’s room, the greatest one I took anywhere. I slip from the shaken shell of my identity and into his, like Jacob into Esau’s skins, and for a spell of years, I fancy myself a smart Jewish kid from Manhattan, and I not only absorb Eric’s cultural influences, I ape his tics and affectations, the way he laughs, the rhythms of his speech. When Eric thinks Grace Slick is the sexiest woman alive, I affect to think it, and I throw non sequiturs and puns into my conversation, too, to blow up like whoopee cushions. And so before I’ve read Absalom, Absalom! and Delta Wedding, I’ve read Portnoy’s Complaint and Henderson the Rain King, and Eric’s room is less a class, it strikes me now, than an operating room in which I’m the patient, and what I receive from him are blood transfusions, pint after saving pint, and by the time I emerge years later, there’s been some fundamental alteration in my DNA. And so Who I Am is as tied up with Eric as with Bill and Margaret and Eva Brame, as with Mary Rose and Letty Payne and George A. Rose and George A. Payne, my brother. In Eric’s room I’m seized by some thalassic current that carries me and turns me into someone my parents seem bemused by, and the truth is I don’t know who I’m becoming either, and I’m experiencing massive failure in the subject I was best at.

  After Latin 21A, I end up back in Mr. Coffin’s class for Latin 41, fourth-year Latin, and by this point, as we embark on the Aeneid, I can no longer really translate from the text or follow the discussion. Mr. Coffin greets my first failure with a look of hurt surprise, the second with his feared acerbity, meant to reawaken excellence in a former star. With advancing repetition, though, he begins to hold his tongue and simply stares at me the way the housemaster did the night when Margaret called the dorm, the way people do at funerals. Now as we go around the table, boy by boy, each translating his ten lines of Virgil, there’s a tense, embarrassed silence when it comes to me that even the boys I formerly exulted over seem to take no pleasure in. And though Mother Exeter is an institution and screws you institutionally, and though she should have screwed me, too, according to the same clear, equitable policies she used to send home almost two-thirds of the boys in our prep class who didn’t make it through to graduation, Mr. Coffin, the severest master there, lets me slide. And for years—years, literally—I’ll dream I’m back in class with him, and when it comes to my ten lines of Virgil, I look down at the book and can no longer even recognize the language.

  And by this time, I’ve given up on all my other subjects except English. I’ve begun to shoplift little items from the stores downtown, and I steal a dictionary, too, from Eric, a big expensive Random House unabridged, and Eric knows the score and when he asks, I lie to him. It’s as if his words, the tradition of scholarship he comes from, are things that I can never earn by honest means, and though I love him like a brother the contest has been too unequal for too long and I’m tired of losing, tired of not quite knowing if he’s laughing with or at me.

  Crossing campus in the snow one night, I start to chase him and throw snowballs. Eric runs and falls, and I stand over him, laughing and pushing snow into his face, pretending it’s a big joke. He can’t breathe, there’s a stricken look, a panic in his black, good-natured eyes that are so like my mother’s and my brother’s. And years later, after we’re both grown men with families, when I finally apologize for this, he’ll say he knew I was just goofing, but I wasn’t. The dark force that erupted in my father in the hotel room in Boston has begun to erupt in me now, too, and between Eric and me it’s never the same after this night. And I wonder now how different I really was from the wounded, dangerous children in Washington Square Park, and if the same tenderness that drew him to the hustlers and runaways drew him to me also. And this metamorphosis that’s occurring, which began with puns and black armbands, has become quite worrisome by this point.

  And the malaise has spread to basketball, where I make varsity as a junior and as a senior have a chance to start. Early in the season, the coach makes some remark about my hair, which falls below my shoulders now.

  –I know you’re going to want to get that cut before Monday’s practice, Payne, he says, joking, but not really.

  –Well, I would, Coach, if you’d explain its relevance to my performance, I reply, not really joking either.

  When he looks at me, his eyes blaze with coldness now, and the distance between us widens. Season by season, my attitude’s become an issue he can’t overlook, or won’t, and since the other boys are giving it their all, why should he overlook it?

  What happened to your heart, Payne?

  I guess my family broke it.

  Boo hoo, son, whose family didn’t? You think there’s a boy out here who doesn’t have a sob story just as sad as yours or sadder?

  I guess not.

  Take the bench, son.

  Okay, Coach, okay. I turn and start to walk away, but something stops me. At the last minute I turn back, it’s too much like swallowing the burning coal, and I can’t do it . . .

  But you know what, Coach?

  He presses his lips and shakes his head and stares down at the floor as though he knows what’s coming.

  Goddamn basketball, I say. Goddamn basketball and the team and you . . . And while we’re at it, goddamn Exeter and non sibi and the Academy Building and Phillips Church on Sundays. Goddamn the Apostles and their creed and the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body and Holy Innocents where I learned to chant these spells and Henderson, North Carolina, and New Hampshire and New England and the United States of America. And, first and foremost, goddamn my people and family love which is supposed to be stronger than time or death except it isn’t. And if my sob story’s no sadder than anybody else’s, maybe that’s why there are cities burning all across this country.

  But, no, this conversation never happens . . . In the real world of outward fact, I cut my hair, though minimally, and lose the starting job and ride out the season, moving farther and farther down the bench, taking such consolation as I can in lettering while telling myself that competition doesn’t matter and winning’s an illusion. And yet in another way, it does happen, I have this conversation with myself, with the boy whose parents told him, not in words, You must redeem in blood for us the sacrifice we made in blood for you, who came to Exeter to do that, to try to win their love and their approval. I’m not him anymore. This is where I turn my back and toss the match across my shoulder as I go.

  And in the tra
dition of my forebears, an Eric Robert Rudolph type myself, I head off into the wilderness, and the wilderness for me lies out beyond the playing fields at Exeter, beyond the stadium. That’s where you can find me now on Sundays, doing cannonballs off the bridge and getting high with the other miscreants, mes frères, mes semblables. I like to sit on the riverbank beneath the trees, relishing the rawness of sun through scarce-created leaves. And sometimes out there, as the breeze sways the canopies, I lift my face and almost fancy I can metabolize sunlight like a green plant.

  And after the goddamning, what’s left? After the bomb’s exploded and the banks have failed, when the Statue of Liberty’s torch lies gleaming dully underwater, what remains, the one true thing?

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky . . .

  What I felt the day Bill read me that, when it was as if a breeze wafted through, blowing all the doors and windows open.

  And one day not long after this, I walk out to class one morning in my sackcloth coat and my bolo tie that observes the letter of the dress code as it parodies the spirit. There’s something different in the air. I stop and look around. And then I realize: The trees have buds on them, the air is soft, the spring sun on my face feels good . . . What is this curious sensation? Happiness! It’s been years since I’ve felt truly happy, years since I’ve remembered spring. Noticing again, some nameless impulse wells up from inside me; I start to trot and then I break into a run. On the path beneath the elms and maples, I jump the way I did on Eric’s landing long ago, I shout and pump my fist and do 360s in the air, landing in a backward cat crouch on the lawn. What is this upwelling? I only know I’ve left behind the road my parents set me on and am free to find my own now. I’m going to write, I’m going to be a poet.

  And two years later here I am this blue September afternoon at Avery as the marching band plays up the hill at Kenan, and the room is like a crime scene and I’m implicated in some way that I don’t want to look at, and poetry which I’ve followed like religion hasn’t saved me.

  Maybe I’ll go running. Twelve or fifteen miles may change the way I’m feeling, stop the rumbling in the underwater portion of the iceberg. And Sal comes from the shower wrapped only in a towel, and as he dries himself the pythons of the pythons slither.

  –So what time did she leave? I ask him.

  –She didn’t.

  –She slept here?

  –She stayed. I can’t say she did much sleeping . . .

  Sal grins and takes a beat. Drumroll . . . Top hat . . .

  –Or me either for that matter.

  –Bullshit! You’re telling me you screwed her? With me here?

  –What’s the big deal? It’s not like you were going to.

  Badda boom, badda bing!

  I don’t know what hits me in this moment—something does, though, like one of Jung’s stone blocks tumbling from the heavens. I stagger downstairs and set out. Meaning to run twelve or fifteen miles, I make it maybe twelve or fifteen steps and sit down. A great fatigue steals over me; I’m shivery and faint as though I’ve suddenly contracted dengue. There’s pressure building in my head like steam behind a closed valve. Sitting makes it worse, I need to move, I need to get up, so that’s me wandering downhill, a tall, skinny, shirtless kid in flats and running shorts like hot pants, my dark hair loose around my shoulders, reeling though the Rams Head parking lot at halftime.

  Well-heeled alums with season tickets are eating fried chicken and potato salad on their tailgates—dads in sweater vests or blazers in tropic wool or broadcloth, dyed Carolina blue or subtle shades of grass or apple, splashing bourbon into Cokes from silver flasks with monograms, the signets winking on their fingers. Their good-looking wives are dressed in tasteful styles that occultly shave away ten years, autumnal plaids with round, black fabric-covered buttons, and I can smell their perfume, overheavy, and when they smile, I see the lipstick on their teeth, reapplied out here without the benefit of mirrors. I know them so well and regret the impasse that we’ve come to, for on game days once upon a time I ate fried chicken off the tailgate with them or, more often, rare roast beef sandwiches from the Rathskeller downtown with thin-sliced Bermuda onion served on dented pewter platters by black men in vests and bowties with the mien and dignity of privy counselors. And later at the stadium or Woollen Gym when they sang the Fight Song, I sang Rah, rah, Car’lina-lina with them, and when the Tar Heels lost, sometimes George A. cried and I put my arm around his shoulder and said, It’s okay, buddy, we’ll get ’em next time, but what I wouldn’t do is mutter Bullshit, ever. And now these people who were once my people regard me like a lunatic escaped from an asylum, and I want to ask them, Don’t you get it, I’m yours, I’m one of you, I know you, why don’t you know me? Your daughter with the ribbon in her hair? I slow-danced with her in a basement playroom the night before I went away to Exeter. Your son—I once had his haircut and his manners and tassel loafers just like he has. I shined them for the last time in 1969 in a hotel room in Boston. I was him and my brother George A. still is, he still has the haircut and the blazer and made eleven tackles and he’s starting, the thing you came here today to cheer for he did last night at Woodberry, and I helped him—he called me on the phone to say so—and our parents are going to see him play in his big game against Episcopal, Jack and Margaret are driving up from Winston, and Bill, who didn’t make it to my graduation, all the way from Alabama, and from Henderson, the Paynes, our grandparents, Letty and the Principal, Bill Sr.

  And, see, I went away to Exeter to win their love and their approval, Don’t measure out your life in coffee spoons, they told me, and when I came home this is who I was, and they looked at me like you do, only Margaret’s look was worse, it said or seemed to me to say, I still love you, David, no matter what, whatever you’ve turned into, despite who you are, though you seem so angry and can’t let bygones be bygones the way in this world we all have to, sweetheart, and you say you want to be a poet and I don’t know what poets are or how they make a living or what their service is to others, I only know that in our family the men have always dealt in timber, farms and profits and found in that their duty and in duty honor, and you say you want to be a Taoist and escape the material world and metabolize sunlight like a green plant and that frightens me, I don’t know how to understand or help you.

  You see, they get George A. and know who he is, but they don’t get or know who I am, and I don’t know who I am either, I only know the answer isn’t in the Rams Head parking lot this afternoon or up there in the stadium or in Big Frat Court where the dancers seem happier than I am, but that was like a dream I had to wake from, I didn’t ask to wake, the glass broke and I heard my mother crying in the bathroom and I knocked and Bill said Get back in bed or else I’m going to kill you, I couldn’t just go back to sleep, could I? I had to wake and George A. didn’t, he’s still on the path that leads to Big Frat Court and maybe one day he’ll be here in a blazer in a subtle shade of grass or apple and have a pretty wife like these and pour bourbon from a silver flask and when he pours Pa’s signet will flash on his finger, but I won’t, my path leads elsewhere, I don’t know where though, maybe to a precipice, perhaps I’ve fallen off already and that’s what’s happening, maybe I’m in free fall and any minute now I’m going to hit the bottom. I only know the pressure’s building in my head, and I don’t know what to do, so I make my way uphill into the pinewood on the east side of the stadium.

  There’s dappled sunlight on the paths, which are bronze and needle-strewn. Kenan Stadium, which I pass each day and barely glance at, today seems massive, elemental, frightening. It’s like a rock formation, a volcanic caldera from which energy rises as it does from Steamboat or Old Faithful. The snare drums and the whistle are puffs of CO2 and methane, and then the roar comes, and the roar’s the geyser, the roar is energy, pure energy, shooting miles into the atmosphere, and it isn’t sentiment that makes the
hair rise on my forearms, the energy’s a subtle wind that lifts it physically.

  Both teams are competing for that energy, the crowd’s approval; that energy is lifeforce—qi, the Taoists call it. The winners are uplifted by it and leave the field with shining eyes, while the losers walk away depleted. Last night Sal and I were like the teams competing for the girl and sex was her approval, the form of energy she bestowed upon the winner, and because Sal won he woke up glowing, and because I lost, I’ve skulked away into the pinewood, and this feels familiar, so familiar.

  Damnit, though, my head is splitting, I’ve reached my limit and can go no farther, so I lie down in the straw just off the path under the old pine trees, where stragglers steer a wide berth around me. I sling an arm across my brow and gaze up at the old sun winking through the young green needles. When the breeze moves through them, they whisper in a way that seems intelligent and purposeful. Beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear. So says Rilke, but I’m not at the beginning, the pressure’s moving past the point where I can bear it. I close my eyes.

  Against the screen of my closed lids, I see the redbrick campus path we crossed last night, the girl and I, how we stopped to make out in a doorway and set out again, only suddenly the path’s become the Freedom Trail in Boston, the scene goes double and the path to Avery becomes the path to the hotel and in the hotel are Bill and Margaret and David and in the dorm are David and the girl from He’s Not Here and Sal, and as Bill woke up and remembered nothing and I had to tell him, so in Avery five years later I wake up, remembering nothing, and Sal tells me. And Sal is Bill now and I’m still David, or am I Bill and is Sal David? The whole thing’s mixed up, scrambled somehow, and the faceless, nameless girl is Margaret, who said I have to go and went and she’s gone again now, and everything’s repeating, everything is playing out the way it did the first time, Stories A and B are the same story, and my competition’s not with Bill now. Is it with Sal? Or is it with George A., who made eleven tackles and is going to get the roar, the family qi, and be lifted up like Abel? Abel got the qi and was lifted up and Cain went without and was wroth and slew his brother, and how did I become Cain and end up in the pinewoods east of Kenan or of Eden? I don’t know, I only know the competition is an old one, and out beyond the bridge, beyond the stadium at Exeter, as I sat beneath the trees, I conceived a wish to escape the contest altogether, to be a Poet and to find another Earth where there’s no casting down of one so one can be uplifted. And I’ve followed poetry like a religious practice and spent hour after hour in my carrel reading Jung and Eliot and Whitman to seek a path out of the fracas, to prove that the dark force that was in my father isn’t in me also.