Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  Did you hear or see them struggle?

  No sir. I heard them argue.

  Tex’s voice was mid-range and resonant—it was large—and made all the more dissociative from his small body by the fact it issued forth without him looking at you or making any but the smallest facial expressions.

  They were being very loud, he said. Other folks heard it. You can ask ’em. Tex gestured with his chin down the hallway and carefully dropped a long ash behind the radiator. Snetts, as if cued, flicked his Parliament in the radiator’s general direction. He missed widely; but the carpet was a hideous green plaid that no amount of abuse could make worse.

  Snetts stood, thanked Tex, and went off. George stayed.

  I’m with Spectator, he said. My name is George Langland.

  I’ve seen your name in there, Tex said.

  Did you know the guy? George said.

  Yeah. I mean, we didn’t socialize but I’d talked to him in the lounge and shit.

  Tex pulled a furtive hand to his mouth and inhaled the last draw on his cigarette. The words came out of his mouth like a line of small boats in a river of smoke.

  I think the guy he was with didn’t want to be ID’d as a fag. I think that’s what it was about.

  Is there a gay community on the floor? Or in Jay? Like a tight group?

  This drew a hard look.

  I’m Tex, he said. I live in Jay but there is no Tex community, far as I know.

  I’m just trying to get a handle on the scene here, George said.

  Tex waved his hand around in a circle like a helicopter blade. Go on, wander around and check it out, my brother. This is the scene. And it ain’t no scene. It’s John Jay, son. Man was burned in effigy but hey, he was one of ours, Kings College, the year seventeen-whatever.

  George had a pen, he always had a pen, but nothing to write on. Do you have some paper? he asked. Tex rose slowly from his crouch and went into his room across the corridor, came out with three sheets of loose-leaf paper. George folded them lengthwise into a tall booklet shape, folded that again to half height, and carefully ripped the bottom fold creating pages.

  What’s your full name, Tex?

  You’re putting me in the story?

  George looked at him. I don’t know yet what the story is or what will go in it but I do know that I don’t want to notice in two hours that I have no name for you. Then it’s like said one floor resident who didn’t provide his name. Because the reporter didn’t ask for it, that means.

  Robert Wallace, he said. But use Tex. If you put Robert Wallace no one’s going to know who the fuck you’re talking about.

  Scottish? George said.

  My father’s people, in the 1700s. Since 1831, pure Texan.

  George said. What year you in?

  Sophomore.

  George moved down the hall to where Snetts was with the other cops; he was looking at the open window, around the frame of it, leaning out of it. In the lounge, which was an end-of-the-hall area with some furniture and Tex’s TEE-vee, George saw a kid he knew named Kenneth; every time George saw Kenneth’s face he thought of Montgomery Clift. He was in George’s Keats class. He was crying.

  George said, Hey.

  Kenneth said, Oh, hi. He wiped his face on a sleeve of a black turtleneck, with the usual silvering effect of mucus on black cotton.

  I’m here for the paper, George said.

  Oh yeah, you write for it, Kenneth said.

  You knew this guy? Jeff?

  Jeffrey, Kenneth said. Yeah. He preferred Jeffrey.

  I’m really sorry, George said. Were you guys friends?

  George was undergoing his usual set of anxiety and misgivings asking these questions. The conflict: he wanted the story and he wanted not to be an asshole. But mainly he was supposed to want the story. More excitement than sorrow once you were after the story.

  I mean we were friends, yeah. Not close but yeah.

  What happened? George said.

  Jeffrey always wanted these jocks, Kenneth said. Always always always.

  Kenneth too had a shockingly deep voice, plus a huge Adam’s apple for such a small guy; he really did look just like Clift. Heavy beard shadow almost always. The voice had a strong tinge of mid-Atlantic Brahmin.

  Big butch guys, you know. Maybe it had to do with his father, I mean I don’t know. I mean, that’s just a guess.

  Kenneth’s cheeks were still wet with tears and he wiped his nose on the back of his hand. George’s eye was caught by the sheen now on the hand, a hairy hand, like dew drops in morning grass, only—not. Snot.

  Jeffrey was desperate! Kenneth said. He told the guy—I think his name was Thomas, maybe it was John Thomas, ha—he said, You think I won’t tell your parents? I’ll tell them. Threatening the guy, you know? Which was stupid. And the guy Thomas was like, You’re going to blackmail me into something? Like you think you can blackmail someone into being your friend? But Jeffrey was going full Joan Crawford. He said something like, can you imagine, Your father will want to kill you.

  George almost said, but didn’t, I need a line I can quote here, Kenneth baby, and Jeffrey was going full Joan Crawford probably won’t fly.

  7

  Anna was in George’s room and there was the can of Coke on his bookshelf, as promised. She found a cloudy glass and washed it with hand soap in his room’s little sink. She didn’t like soda from the can, she liked it poured out. You had to let it breathe. This made her laugh: as if it were good wine. She peeled off the tab and decanted.

  Oh my god, it was so good. Even warm. It was so so good.

  She poured some more. Oh my god.

  Then more: she tried to go slowly. But then—it was gone!

  And with that, a flickering sense of trivial sadness and she saw again the broken body of the boy on the pavement. And up it came: she barely got to the sink: Coca-Cola and bile and oh fuck, the drain was a little clogged. So many hours since she’d eaten. Fortunate.

  She washed out her mouth, got the sink clean, opened his window for the smell—she could hear the wind but it was passing along the building side and didn’t come in. She lay down on his bed, her hands landed between her legs, and thoughtless of it she pushed down onto herself, massaging, then fingertips on her clit. Oh. She realized when she touched herself that she’d been wet forever, all night? No, couldn’t have been. On the subway and in the cab and the moment on the ferry she remembered now the moment when he’d whispered in her ear that he was going to touch her breasts and then he touched her breasts, how hard her nipples were and how sensitive in the cold wind. She thought of this and kept her right hand on herself outside her skirt and underpants and her left came up to her breasts. Nipple tightening in her fingers. Oh. And she arched to it, to the feeling, but then it was over, blink—she was breathing and nothing of it left in her anymore, just the hint of bile and the boy the boy the boy, Lord, he was dead. He looked like her brother. So many of the skinny ones like that, with the stringy hair, looked like her brother. Lying like that. Where? In the yard. Just sleeping. Probably stoned or drunk or both. Sleeping it off. In the middle of her small lawn. He was sixteen probably so she was nine? He left for good right after his seventeenth birthday, which he was not home for, and they heard from him twice, each time for money. The second time her father said no—the first round of money her father had wired him, Mark had been supposed to use to come home, that was the point of it—so this time no, and Mark said, That’s it then, and her father had said, No, there’s lots more than that to talk about, and Mark had hung up. Just hung up. This was a story in the family as sharp and hurtful as the tale of an accidental death, the pipe coming off the truck on the highway to pierce the windshield, the stumbling fall off the mountain, the new husband pulled out to sea in a sudden wicked current. Bad stories. Mark had called collect from Santa Fe, New Mexico, then he’d hung up, and they’d never heard from him again. Nine years. He’d be twenty-six now. Her father had called the police down there and telexed them a photograph and ot
her life details but no one had ever called or reported anything about him. It made her cry to think of him—more so now, tonight, with the dead boy on the pavement, because that was the problem, of course, she was seeing him dead and had long suspected him dead, and every time she cried over him she grew angry that she was crying, angry at herself: she wasn’t someone he had ever cried about, that was for sure, she would have been easy to find if he’d missed her.

  She used to think: maybe he’s in New York.

  But no one was in New York now. Not the faux hippies anyway. There were people Mark’s age in white wigs and black eyeliner downtown playing in ironically crude rock bands and painting ironically crude imitations of masterpiece paintings and writing barely ironic imitations of Wordsworth but very few staggering fucked-up Neil Young imitators who’d started out with the greatest sincerity wanting to burn down the system. They were gone. There was worse, but not that many in New York either, the Todd Rundgren imitators. Like the ones in the suburbs, like the guys with carefully managed metal-band hair and rock-tour T-shirts still wandering the towns outside Philly and Harrisburg. Like the Loud brother who wasn’t gay and wasn’t interesting—not Lance, in other words, but the next oldest one—just stoned and pissed off in Santa Barbara. That. That guy. Those guys were not in New York anymore. She kicked her legs up and down like a kid having a tantrum. It felt good. She did it some more. It made her laugh, face still wet from crying. She had a moment—here it was—she loved herself. She wanted to hug herself. She wished George were here to hug her for her, to kiss her for her, to touch her for her, to put his mouth against her cunt for her. Oh that. And her hand again. But again it didn’t go. She decided to walk over to the paper. See him. That would mean fixing her face: cleaning it anyway. Eyeliner running to clown’s tears. That picture of Anna Karina weeping. Vivre sa vie. The mirror. The face. Living her life.

  She washed her face in the tiny sink; she splashed and splashed then rubbed it with his towel, smudging it with black. Oh dear, the school-issue white towel. She’d wash it for him later if he cared. Outside his door before letting it lock she pushed his key into the torn bit between the carpet and the wall.

  And then she was out. Out in that wind again. Like hands in silk. She stopped in front of the library on the long terrace and leaned up against the stone wall and let the wind have her, closed her eyes and felt it run across her body and felt it slow and stop and rise again and gust so that she shivered.

  Well—she heard a voice but didn’t open her eyes—if you aren’t the sexiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.

  Her friend Susan. Voluptuous Susan. The voice.

  You’re Susan, Anna said. Her eyes were still closed.

  Yup, Susan said.

  Anna opened one eye. As she’d expected, there was Keith, her gangly boyfriend.

  That does look good, Keith said.

  That. He referred to her as that. He had a look on his face… How to describe it? Stupid? She closed the eye again.

  You should try it, she said. She said it very low.

  She ended up with Keith on her left and Susan on her right—You feel it, right? she said, and they said yes, the warm stone, the cool wind—and then somehow she ended up—in a deeper sense of ending up—in Susan’s room at Barnard smoking another joint and in no time at all—she couldn’t even remember the concept of time passing and, of course, how could it have been otherwise—she was on the bed and legs open as wet as she could be with Keith on her left and Susan on her right and they were kissing her and touching her and Susan was saying, Just close your eyes. Close your eyes like on the terrace.

  Just close your eyes. The blue and orange of low flame and high flame. She slept after, they all slept, but she was still aroused and kept half waking with her mouth wet—drooling essentially, but in a controlled way, her face next to Susan’s rib cage and Keith on the other side. She slept again and then, when she rose again slowly out of sleep, she felt a mouth kissing her body, in a slightly greedy unpleasant way, she felt hands exploring her, and she was dreaming of her brother, it was Mark, somehow they’d been reunited, oh my god it was Mark, grabbing at her with his mouth like that, but she was still so happy they were together and it was natural they would do this, she wanted it, it wasn’t pleasant but it was good… but then she was waking more and it felt too real—was it real? Yes, it was real, how real it was—but oh my god was it Mark? She screamed. Not a little scream, but a big scream. A clarifying moment.

  This put a damper on skinny Keith, though she told him it wasn’t his fault.

  I was having a really bad dream, she said. Really bad.

  What was it? Susan said. She was sitting with her breasts loose and hair a mess and sheets covering her to the waist. Anna just gave a little shake of her head, waved her hand. Susan flopped back down on the bed, reached for her boyfriend. Anna rose and dressed.

  * * *

  GEORGE AT THE paper, writing the story, Richard, the editor in chief, hanging over his shoulder—three thirty in the morning, they were holding up production, they’d halted a printing and trashed it, it would cost them a mint—Richard finally said, We’re gonna do personal problems and rife with speculation. Nothing specific.

  George said, Why is it always rife with speculation? Why can’t it be rich with speculation? Dense with speculation. Dappled and strewn with feverish speculation?

  Fuck, I don’t give a shit, Richard said. He was working his ice cream cone, licking around the sides to hold back the inevitable gravitational flow of melting green drips. Mint chocolate chip. New York: twenty-four-hour ice cream.

  Hurry up and write it if you’re writing it, he said. We’re holding the presses here, mucho dinero. Write that part how you like. Then I’ll just change it to rife with speculation and then, like the man said, all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

  It wasn’t a maa-aan, Louis sang from his desk, not looking up. It was Julian of Norrr-wich, who was a wo-maaan…

  No one acknowledged him.

  * * *

  WHEN ANNA GOT back George’s door was open against the latch—it was maybe eight thirty in the morning. She had to work later and felt as if she were falling off a cliff. George was sitting at his desk, chair turned at an angle, away from the desk and toward the room and the door. He had the black-streaked white towel in his lap. He looked stricken.

  Where were you? he said.

  I was going to Spec but I ran into Susan, Anna said.

  She could feel how slippery this was already; the cliff was going muddy underfoot. Which image reminded her, as it always had, muddy terrain, of the story she’d heard growing up from her father, about the retreat in Korea, in winter, troop trucks sliding off the mountain roads and falling two thousand or three thousand feet, no one knew how far, in those mountains. Nobody’s family was ever told your boy died sliding off the side of the mountain in a truck during a massive panic-stricken retreat. That’s how this felt now, like that: she could see herself sliding over the side.

  George looked at her, waiting for more.

  We went to her room and smoked a bunch and I ended up falling asleep for a while.

  Pause.

  He was staring at the wall, his hands fidgeting with the towel.

  I’m sorry about your towel, she said.

  Yeah, what is that, he said. Now he was looking at the towel.

  She readied her lips to speak. Eyeliner, she wanted to say. Due to weeping. She looked at him. She would tell him about her brother—she wanted to. But his face looked so needy—fuck fuck fuck. She couldn’t then. Normally she respected his face. What was this? He was wounded. Resentful. This irritated her. It was a form of entanglement she wasn’t ready for. She hadn’t realized she wasn’t ready for it until she saw it there. She didn’t want this, these syrupy strings.

  Oh, just trippy shit.

  Yeah, he said. He held up the towel as if it had cooties, which, in fact, it did.

  Listen, she said. It wasn’t just Susa
n, baby, it was Susan and Keith. And we had sex. The three of us.

  His face. Oh god, he looked as if he’d been shot in the groin. If the soul had a groin, that’s where she’d shot him.

  He turned away from her. Like, gave her his back. She wanted to say this was effeminate but then what would she be standing for? She was surprised how furious his reactions made her. She had gone unexpectedly all testosterone to his femme—she wanted to hit him. Of course this was stupid stupid stupid. How did she think he’d react? She’d said it to hurt him because he was pouting and pissing her off and now look: she’d hurt him.

  Please, she said. Please please please. Don’t do this. To me or to you. I was high out of my mind. It was sex. It wasn’t, you know, planting a nuclear weapon or poisoning babies. It’s not a relationship. It was just sex.

  He stood up. Jesus Christ, he said.

  Well, I was high but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there.

  This did not get a laugh—as she could have predicted, it made him angrier. He started to leave—he walked brusquely past her, nearly shouldering her to get by in the small space, but it was his room, which he must have realized, because he stopped. He finally looked at her.

  How did it happen? he said.

  He was still holding the towel, so she decided to talk about that. It’s eyeliner, she said. I was crying.

  Wait, why were you crying?

  Okay, here it was. She hotly—for a moment—wanted to say it: I was crying about my brother. She’d not told anyone of her brother. No one here, that is. Not George, no one. A few friends at home knew. Probably more than a few but only a few she would acknowledge. In any case, home was over.

  I was sad, she said.

  What I meant was, how did the sex happen?

  Look how he moved right past the sad, couldn’t give a shit.

  I told you, she said. I was high.