For the bicentennial, Arthur had taken many rolls of film, this known because he always took many rolls of film. Crowds by the river, tall ships. But the paper, at one page, had room for a single picture, which would be badly reproduced. Arthur developed his rolls in the FBH lab, he went over the strips briefly with the loupe—they were dull pictures, he said later, dull dull dull: but he picked out six of the least dull and made five-by-seven contact prints. For the kind of horrifying repro used for the summer paper—cheap offset, one step ahead of mimeograph—you wanted to lower the contrast. The one he liked: strange faces in the foreground, in focus, a man and a woman, the man in profile and his face and neck and upper chest and shoulders painted blue with white stars; on the parts of his body more distant from the lens, stripes, even in black and white a recognizable pattern. The woman held a sparkler and laughed. And behind them, out of focus, like a dream they were having together, a four-masted ship on the river, that whole Horatio Hornblower scene. So he’d brought the prints when dry to the office. The one he liked was third in the pile.
Pictures, Arthur said again.
Yes, yes, Louis said. Pictures. He looked through them quickly, picked the third.
Bless you, Arthur said.
You always put the good one third, Louis said.
No no. Not true. No. Sometimes fourth. Occasionally on the bottom, as a test.
But never on top, Louis said.
Well, if you put it on top, then they know. And they’ll reject it.
Who’s they? Louis said.
They is you, Arthur said. In this case.
But I always pick the good one.
Well, you’re good, yes, you’re good. With an eye. Still, give nothing away. My father told me this, many times, from when I was young. Reveal nothing. This is America. Whatever it is, shut up about it. Just keep quiet.
Wisdom from the heartland, Louis sang.
I’m glad you’re happy, Arthur said.
I’m not happy, Louis said. I’m semi-hysterical. But I’m glad you’re happy.
Let’s not exaggerate, Arthur said.
Well. You remain cheerful.
Yes, that’s right, yes. I remain cheerful. I’ll remember that. Remain cheerful.
And he left. Remain cheerful, he called from the hall. Louis thought he was gone but then there he was again, Arthur at the door: Continue to be driven by your overbrimming self-confidence, he said.
Fu-u-uck you-u, Louis sang.
* * *
THE NARRATIVE THAT George had sketched out for Louis of his evening and morning had been a fading approximation—such things were never as one told them. Indeed the telling could easily ruin what nuance memory managed to hold. Twice that night he had almost come when she was rubbing him through his underwear and kissing him and the second time, when he pulled away from her, she said it’s okay, I’d like it if you came and he’d said no, he didn’t want to, the idea of coming in his underwear was too depressing and junior high and she said what about in my hand and he said no, real thing only, lady, and started to crawl up between her legs causing her to back up laughing and he had tasted it, the power struggle, an iron tang like the taste of blood. It was going to be that way between them; and his simple principle, principle being the fancied-up word for one’s immutable inclinations of personality, hidden beneath his kindness and his attempts at humor, was never, ever, ever to give in. This inclination—this attribute—he recognized as the endowment of his mother—here she was, the trope of the dead mother and the fact of her, he hated confessing to it, so he rarely did—she had been absolutely relentless. Hide if you must, disappear if you must (his father had, after all, or after what was not nearly all), lie if you must, pretend if you must, but never surrender. Pretend to surrender, if you must; even after you’ve seemingly surrendered, keep fighting. Like the Viet Cong. His mother had grown fond in her later years of the Viet Cong, in their tunnels, enduring and vanquishing. The North Vietnamese Army. She was the only mother in Saybrook, he’d venture, who knew the name of General Giáp.
And so the morning had arrived, they’d slept, on and off, only a few hours in the single bed, she in her underpants pressed against him, the light pale blue on the west side of the building, the room cool with the fan. He’d taken off his underpants and she kept touching him—checking if he was still there, checking if it was still there, the hard-on, holding it and dozing. Finally they slept and then it was as George had told Louis, he’d woken very hard, needing to piss of course but holding that off, her hand had gone to it again and not been able to pull away and he drew down her panties and she’d climbed on top of him. There was something miraculous about her compact body, about her dark and intelligent beauty—she knew herself, she knew her own beauty. Or no, not that: she knew her own body, was at ease in it, did not live in it as if it were something he was looking at, some alien tool to be used for seduction and sex, but as if it were her own domain. He’d not encountered that before, the lack of an impulse to pose; he would have called it confidence, and thought of telling her later that’s what he saw, but for his suspicion that it was something other than confidence, his sense that almost certainly she’d deny any feelings of confidence—at times, in fact, as they’d moved together and apart, before he began to drive into her very quickly, he’d seen moments of uncertainty and alarm in her eyes. It wasn’t confidence but integrity. She was herself in an immutable way. And it wasn’t that she had no fear. It was that she liked it, she liked being aroused, she liked what her body was feeling, she even liked being a little afraid, and it was not fear of her body or of his body or of some forbidden thing, not fear of sex, but fear of what was real, the emotional vulnerability that stands behind sex, between it and the sunlight, casting its shadow. He stared into her as an explorer would and she had not looked away, not until she came; he’d whispered to her, he’d whispered as he moved very deep into her, “I want to open you up,” by which he meant both things, looking into her and fucking her, and this moment had set them off, brought on the speed, the hips, the climax. He believed she’d climaxed. She appeared to have done so at least the once. After, she’d been flushed in face and neck and chest. For a few minutes she’d been shy, her face buried away. He had spooned against her, his arms around her, ready to go back to sleep, but after three or four minutes—certainly not five—she squirmed out of his pupal embrace and said, I’m hungry. Are you hungry? I’m really hungry.
Women—how they look at change and adapt to it and move on. He was flattened, by exhaustion, by the sex, by the power of his feelings. She meanwhile was readying herself to go out for breakfast.
3
Anna’s lasting memory would be him wearing that T-shirt, which had been washed many times, the subdued red shade of raspberry sherbet, faded, filled with shoulders she wanted to have her hands on, wanted to have her teeth on, her mouth. Big rounded solid-looking hunks of meat. She’d said to him at one point that he looked as if he lifted weights or something, and he looked down at himself, right and left, and said no, he had crewed and repaired boats, sailboats, out of Old Saybrook for most of his adolescence and this was the fading remains of that work, the first summer in five years he had not been in a boatyard. He had the mashed-up Topsiders for it, the ones he’d gone on about. No one who wore them ever, ever had new ones. Ever. She would remind herself to inquire into this strange New England Protestant phenomenon—no clothes are ever new—at some future point of easier familiarity. He spoke slowly. He took care with his words, which was appropriate, it turned out, as he wrote for the paper and wanted to be a writer or journalist of some kind. As such it took a long time to find out if he was interesting; she felt as if she were still finding out. Somehow his physical presence made it difficult to determine what if anything was going on there.
Here was what had finally, thoroughly, taken her: the way he stopped and stared at her after she’d said Charles Aznavour. He’d been funny about Eddie Palmieri and his deck shoes but the Aznavour, that was real. Someti
mes you make contact with another human being and it’s like an electric current. Zzzzzp. That frightening buzz as when your finger touches the prong while the plug’s still largely in the socket. The little story of his cassette tape. Purchased after his mother died. Aznavour on The Mike Douglas Show. She’d gotten it out of him, this little tale. So many records have a story. Your story, with them. Carole King’s Tapestry. Shit. Not even worth thinking about. It was like the march of thirty million women to buy Tapestry. But Sgt. Pepper? She couldn’t even look at the cover anymore: her brother when it came out, his air of thrilled absorption. His records were hers now, among all else he’d left behind. She had a Japanese edition of Wilhelm Kempff playing his transcriptions of the Bach chorales. Mark, her older brother, had played piano. He’d been very good, and then at fourteen or fifteen he stopped. No longer interested. But he still played the records, the piano music, once in a while. The Kempff album was a Japanese release, the cover indecipherable. A warped cover and the record within it warped too: the arm of the turntable rose and fell like a conductor keeping time to the wrong piece of music. But it played. Or Ohio Players. The honey dripping on the body. She wanted warm honey dripped on her body. Ever since she’d seen that album cover she’d wanted that. She’d never told anyone. Maybe she’d tell this one. Maybe he’d get it.
He was sturdy and he was clearly wounded, and this was how she liked to think of herself but she didn’t express it physically the way he did; she wondered whether this was what turned her on. He was red, a little more golden red than his T-shirt, a white boy used to the sun. He wasn’t working this summer, just reading and writing stuff; he had social security survivor benefits from his mother and his father both, he’d told her, the orphan’s ransom. It would last until he was twenty-one. She didn’t realize children got social security. In his room after they’d finally picked a record, she’d held him around his neck while he kissed her and put one leg on him and then the other and essentially climbed up him, rubbing and rocking. There was a marvelous bulk and solidity. Like warm lumber. She so so so had not wanted to fuck him on the first night. She so so so believed this was a dooming habit of hers. Thus she held him off and held him off while she knew she was driving him crazy and driving herself crazy too, and pointlessly really, some rule she’d decided to adopt, and in the morning, that strong cock in her hand, leaking onto her fingers, she couldn’t hold off anymore and wouldn’t and didn’t and after all it was not the first night anymore, was it? In the pink and powder-blue light of dawn. Her panties on the floor. God, sliding onto him. He was thick across the hips she had to stretch herself out she felt opened up and then later that’s what he said, he wanted to open her, and that sent her over the edge and she came and came a second time and she loved the feel of his body, which never happened, she never loved their bodies until later, if at all. She liked the smell of him. Always important. They went for pancakes. They kissed at the counter with syrup on their lips. They were a little gross but she didn’t care. The guy behind the counter looked like a sleaze and kept leering at her.
4
Soon they were together, a couple. When do you say, I love you? It catches in the throat but won’t hold there for long. Autumn came, but first August, she went home for two weeks—it was Hershey PA she was from, that was what she hadn’t wanted to say—and George found a place to crash for the week when the dorms were closed, having no home to go to. It was long distance so they only spoke twice; he wrote to her, she wrote to him, interminable separation. Then exciting September, russet October. Of course he loved her. And she loved him. Why wouldn’t they love each other? They dropped acid on a windy clear autumn night that followed upon a crystalline day of crisp miraculous blue—and how he loved her. The day was limpid! pellucid! George was reading Conrad and the language was infecting him like some ancient virus that survived by spreading Latinates through the victim’s cerebral cortex and out into the world. The night sky glowed with starlight, more stars than one generally saw in New York. A wind was coming up, it blew dramatically at times, it had blown every trace of cloud and moisture from above the land—after heavy rains the night before—and it threw their hair back and brought a cool fire to their faces. It seemed at times a supernatural wind, a biblical wind, there was death in it, a complicated death, it carried a portent of wonders, of God’s wrath and his arbitrary, gorgeous salvation. George and Anna had dropped the acid at about eight thirty, everyone but them on the floor gathering in the lounge to watch game four of the World Series, which the Yankees were about to lose; George couldn’t believe they would subject themselves to it, unless they were all from Cincinnati. Most of the College, half at least, was from the tristate region. Games one through three had demonstrated with efficiency that these were two clubs playing presumably the same sport but with different orders of skill. Munson of course the exception. He was phenomenal. The rest of the team looked like scared cats. George wanted to be as far away from it as possible and the acid would take him very far from it indeed. Anna was pleased after losing him to the first three games to have him back. Those games had put him in foul humor. Now he was liberated, almost joyful; she felt it was for her.
George went down to the pub to have a beer. Anna, having gone back to her room, was planning to meet him in the lobby. The place was nearly empty, because of the game and because it was still relatively early, and while he was standing with his mug, ready to finish it off, the dean walked in. The fucking dean. He was about six six, and stooped, a scholar of Russian language and literature who spoke in an inaudible murmuring stutter. He was slightly hunched and all angles and he looked like a pterodactyl. He had a dactylic name: Harrington.
The dean needed someone to be talking to, not standing there looking freakishly tall, tweedy and out of place, and George was it, the only soul positioned near the entrance. The dean smiled. He was a courtly yet awkward man.
How are you, Dean? George said. He reached out his hand to shake, which he instantly perceived was a little weird with a school authority, but too late: Harrington took it, pressing his own hand around George’s; it was a large, soft pillow of a hand, almost baby-smooth, that George could hardly get his fingers to the far side of.
Fine, Harrington said, with his many teeth. It’s g-g-g-g-good to s-s-s-s-see you. The Ya-Ya-Ya-Yankees are losing. I th-th-th-thought I’d t-t-t-t-take a walk.
George, being five eleven, or just enough above five ten for him to believe for a few seconds at a time that he was five eleven, gazed up at Harrington, who stooped even beyond his default stoop in order to converse over the sound of funk guitar, a Hammond, and Donna Summer groaning. A smattering of white kids, dancing. There were black students in the College, constituting some five or six percent of the class, but where the white kids hung out, one rarely saw them—the social segregation was a dual-sided commitment.
The Series is a foregone conclusion, George said. It’s over.
S-s-s-s-so it s-s-s-s-s-seems. S-s-s-s-sad. And s-s-s-s-so th-th-th-th-this is where the ac-ac-action is, Harrington said. Again the teeth, lips pulled back, horse’s teeth, large and yellow. George was already stoned and the acid was beginning to outline the edges of things, and what took over his full brain at that moment—because of the teeth—was Equus. He’d sat on the stage, in student seating, and watched through the stage lights, the audience invisible behind the blinding wall of white, observing with horrified fascination the backlit Marian Seldes spray Anthony Perkins with spit for three acts; the red-haired girl lay down nude five feet in front of him, his first real redhead, with her ginger pubic hair and all-pink genitals—while the boy ran around blinding the horses, George just stared at that girl, the pale white of her body there before him, almost translucent. She was breathing hard, her stomach rising and falling, it mesmerized him. This acting was work. What, Dean? Can’t hear? Oh, this was the dean smiling. He was a nice man, it was plain, shy and kind; yet his severe face gave the smile a look of grimacing in pain. He was genial and he didn’t want trou
ble and, all in all, George thought, he must wonder how the fuck he ended up in the squall of running things—he was that worst of all appointments, an interim dean—his tongue and mouth betraying him so many times a day, holding him back, which was fine as he wasn’t supposed to say much of substance anyway.
A moment of awkward silence—how long?—and then the dean’s face began to shift and move. His head elongated and shimmered. The wall behind him undulated pleasantly. And then, oh god, what? He started talking again. What?
A g-g-g-g-g-great place to unwind after classes and stu-stu-stu-stu-studying…? Something. George envisioned Harrington suddenly morphing into the very pterodactyl he already resembled—the shattering caw, the brown paper explosion of his unfolding wings, his taking off with George hanging from his beak, gripped by his upper leg, with thrown back arms behind him and face of terror. The eyes wild and out of control—what was that face he had in his mind now? One of the Greek deities devouring his son. Fuck Western civilization, man, too much carnage.
Have you ever noticed, George said, then stopped.
Wh-what? Harrington said.
Have you ever noticed, um, how much carnage there is in Western civilization?
Oh indeed, said Harrington. He looked delighted. Nothing could have pleased him more than this comment from a student in the pub on a Friday night. Western Civ—the very identity of the place.
I’ve been thinking about that, George said. Like this Goya painting…
He drifted off.
Oh indeed yes, ma-ma-many of them. Quite b-b-b-b-bloody. Harrington almost had to spit the last word out. He shook his head to throw the words forward: again the horse.
One of the gods eating his children, George said, vaguely.
I b-b-b-b-believe it’s the T-T-T-Titan Cronus, Harrington said. I-I-I’m not an art s-s-s-scholar b-b-by any means. B-b-b-b-but I I thi-i-i-ink s-s-s-s-so, yes. In L-L-Latin S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s… He took a breath. S-S-S-S-Saturn. I think.
Crazy Sorrow Page 3