* * *
IF YOUR BUS departed from the basement level at Port Authority, as the buses to western New Jersey did, the diesel fumes filled the hallways, stung eyes and lungs while waiting. Snacks available at the newsstand in the middle, just before the restrooms. Stay away from these. George had broken through his lethargy and begun a short-lived relationship with a soon-to-be sophomore girl, named Susan, she went by Suzy, with high ambitions, high energy, a vivid face. She had almost no bust but this was compensated as is so often the case by gorgeous legs and ass and, not often the case, a wild jungle of red hair. He was at Port Authority to put Suzy of the stunning legs and ass on her bus home, after an afternoon and early evening of what Henry James called intimacy. She had a libido, that girl, she just wanted to come and come and come, and they were sexually suited in a way that allowed him with relative ease to oblige her. How she presented from behind… Her hair—it almost defined her—that luscious golden red. She was working that summer of 1977 at a big PR firm and living with her parents in Clinton, and these once-a-week trysts usually started with George picking her up outside her office in Midtown. They would go somewhere, a quick bite, definitely drinks, then to his summer sublet apartment on 110th to fuck and sweat in the heat. If it was a Friday, as it usually was—she had Friday afternoons off in summer, the place closed shop after one p.m., but she hadn’t told her parents so—it meant they had all afternoon and into the evening. They walked uptown commenting on people’s looks, clothes, movements—women’s mostly, she was an eagle for the social signifiers women took charge of displaying—and if he commented approvingly on a woman’s looks, she was cheerful in discussing it, only growing dark, he soon learned, if the compliment went to the other lady’s hair.
* * *
SOON HE DROPPED her—dropped her entirely before the end of July, rudely, crudely, in a cowardly way he would forever regret—simply stopped calling, wouldn’t answer his phone. The problem was, she really liked him. That night, though, he was still in it, and he left her boarding her bus for Clinton, an hour west. He went up to the street.
And—suddenly the lights went out. Times Square. It was insane to see the lights go out here, of all places. For a moment everyone stopped. Looked around. In this state of charcoal darkness, after the minute or two it took for him to become accustomed, the scene struck him as a horror movie. Silhouettes without detail against a murky background. Instant traffic jam. He had intended to walk across 42nd Street to Seventh for the IRT uptown but that was pointless now—he’d need to stay on Eighth for a bus. After the passing of another minute, no more, the streets became a carnival, impassable with humans mingled unnaturally out in the street with the autos. The people, the cars, bright headlights burning through the exposure. The cars moved inch by inch; sometimes the kids outside banging on the hoods and roofs, the car drivers’ faces behind the glass showing a kind of staved-in panic. George, face dripping, shirt soaked with sweat—it was even hotter out on the macadam with the two hundred idling engines on 42nd and Eighth—he wished he had a camera for the faces of the drivers, their windows clear, the zombie-movie effect with the drivers underlit by dashboard glow, the terrified wives, grim-jawed husbands, with kids gazing out as if into a circus they were not allowed to go to, no reflections on the glass but for the taillights of the cars ahead of them. Some of the drivers cursed him out and gave him the finger and gestured at him to go away but none of them dared get out of their cars. And the faces on the street—none of them looked panicked, oh no, on the street there was nothing to lose, it was a kind of arsonist freedom, with everything, the entire social order, gone in minutes. The powers of darkness claiming us for their own… There were, suddenly, no old people around, no infirm, no nervous middle-class people wondering how to get safely—emphasize safely—home. Some of them were likely on the buses that moved through, stuffed full, not stopping for pickup or drop-off. And then there it was—like a magic vision stopped before him in the middle of the avenue, near 41st Street—a maroon double-decker tour bus, absolutely empty. Every bus that had gone by, public buses, had been full, then suddenly this—amazing. Look at it. No one went near it. Tavern on the Green stenciled on its side. Newly reopened, the restaurant was sending double-decker buses around Midtown like that old steakhouse, what was the name. Perhaps that would stave off the next bankruptcy. George approached the open doorway.
Not taking anybody, the driver said.
That’s crazy, George said. It’s an emergency and you have an empty bus. He climbed on.
Driver said, I’m only going to 67th by the park, leaving it there.
That’s fine, George said, as long as it’s out of here.
He made his way toward the back of the bus and immediately behind him perhaps forty teenagers followed, shouting, quickly ascending the stairs to the top level, calling out destinations, A hundred twenty-fifth street and Saint Nicholas! Kids laughing, jostling. Modern piracy, a forced boarding of the ship. Once the bus was past the traffic at Times Square, 45th or 46th Street, they moved pretty well, there were no traffic lights and the only delicate maneuvering required was at Columbus Circle, in the primeval blackness. From the circle the driver went straight up Central Park West instead of going the legal way, around via Broadway—he wanted away from this scene. They pulled into the Tavern on the Green entryway at 67th Street, the driver parked and the multitude of teenagers flew off the bus as quickly as they’d come aboard, asking no questions, making no demands. They spread into the night. In thirty seconds they were gone. George left last and stopped to thank the uptight driver, a not terrifically intelligent-looking guy about thirty years old, who looked pissed off his double-decker got hijacked. As if he could have stopped it.
* * *
THAT SUMMER ANNA was cat caretaker for a professor of classical history and his wife who were in Rome and environs on a Fulbright grant. Their apartment was a gorgeous, nicely air-conditioned place on the fifth floor of a building on Morningside Drive. It would be for years to come the model in her mind of how to live in New York City, floor to picture rail bookshelves and warm carpets, even a grand piano that shamed her, for she had given up lessons at nine, when Mark did, imitating, and did not dare now to play it; big windows staring northward across 121st Street and east into the trees of Morningside Park, sycamores, maples, oaks, and elms. Mornings, the place flooded with sunlight from the east; afternoons, it cooled in the dusty indirect light. And tonight, in the east, the glow of fires, fires, fires.
Every spring and summer produced its own boyfriend—most winters she’d been without, it must have been some biological program her body enacted on the world that she was unaware of—and this summer she was with Francis for much of the time, a sharp-boned, board-thin, tawny-haired boy from County Kerry in Ireland, with white skin that in certain lights looked almost blue; for such a cardboard build, a surprisingly substantial member. It sprung pink from a light brown bush of hair. It was the only hair on his body other than what was on his head and a few gallant strands in his armpits. He was always ready for sex, eager as a dog for a walk, but it also rather terrified him, she could tell. Every new sexual foray created a kind of palpable nervousness in the process and afterward left him in awe—even the first time she sucked his cock, the first time he fucked her from behind. Simple things, she thought, but she was no Irishman. His cock was a heavy cock, she noted this every time she took it in her hand. On this overheated and hazy night they were on the roof of the building looking at the fires burning just across Morningside and from there eastward, all the way to the far side of Harlem and up into the South Bronx; she counted twenty visible fires, with no other lights, no greens or reds at the intersections, no yellow lights in stamp-sized windows, all black on black; occasional sirens with the flashing rising and falling of redness from the roof lights; she had Francis’s cock out of his cutoff shorts and stiffening under her fingers. He was wearing sneakers with brown socks and she was wishing he weren’t.
Take your shoes off,
she commanded him, lightly stroking him. He did.
And socks, she said. His feet white as two cave fish. She took the socks from him and balled them up and tossed them over the side of the building into the alleyway between it and the next building to the south.
Apparently you don’t like a fellow’s socks, he said.
Apparently, she said. She was wearing a cotton print skirt and she pulled her underwear off but did not throw it over the side. She climbed on top of him, with him still in her hand: she was facing the short parapet, which had been enhanced with a chain-link barrier atop it to keep one from toppling or tossing oneself down to the street below; she fucked him as she watched the fires. He slid his hands up under her T-shirt and onto her breasts, pressed her nipples between two fingers.
Pinch them harder, she said after a minute, and he did, and she moved faster on top of him and he groaned and she whispered, Not yet, not yet! and looked down at his face; it was funny, and she wouldn’t forget it, he gritted his teeth to keep from coming. He looked with his teeth gritted and his red hair like a Dick Tracy gangster going Grrrr! It was not an ejaculation-control method she thought would work so she held herself above him for a long count until his breathing slowed; then she started again. Now it was better and she gripped his chest tight and dug into it through his shirt with her nails, really dug, hoping the pain of it would hold him off, which it seemed to do, until she speeded up and he speeded up from below her. She used her fingers on herself and came and then he came with five or six growling grunts—she’d been almost silent—and then they slowed and, with him still in her and her fingers spread again across his chest, rocking a little, she watched the fires, these almost shapeless dancing beasts on the landscape. People would speak of the blackout and she would remember fucking that boy on that rooftop, digging her nails into him and the bruises on that alabaster skin of his, which shamed her a bit, but only a bit, in the sunlight of the following day.
11
Winter came. With a special vengeance after the Hades summer. Record snows. January 1978, a day before registration: almost everyone was back. George, in the swirling blizzard with two black beauties in him, that finest of diet-pill speed, and a half-pint bottle of Jim Beam in his coat pocket just in case, ran into Louis on College Walk; Louis seemed also to be in a state of enhanced enthusiasm, George wondered on what. It was past midnight and they were alone there, standing in more than a foot of snow, which was continuing to fall heavily. Cocaine was George’s guess. To go with a snowy evening. This was the opening salvo of what would be the double storm of January 1978, two blizzards back to back. The first was the largest: they stood on the walk with the stuff still falling, blowing, engulfing. There would be by next day almost three feet, a record of some kind, and a few days later another fifteen inches, all of which would then freeze a meter above paving level on all the walkways of the university and become so hard and slick there would be no dislodging it until March. Daily doses of minimal sand, plywood boards to allow cumbersome passage up and down the many steps. Rumor had it a multitude of lawsuits followed, hundreds of falls and injuries to compensate for, the head of B&G went down of course: they didn’t clear it in time and once it was on the ground they couldn’t move it, they would have needed the Vietnam-era land-clearing bulldozers like those the Montrealers used to clean their streets, plows and blowers the size of alpine chalets. Louis told George he looked dashing in his parka and ski-cap-under-hood, like a good straight New England boy, and the L.L.Bean duck-hunting boots laced tight, with the dun corduroys tucked in.
Louis said, And a new erotic archetype is born! The Bean-boy! The ones in the catalogue are so not it—but you—well, yes. Hello Small-boat Sailor!
Give me a break, George said.
As for Louis’s look, he was far from a parka state of mind and had chosen an old velvet collared tweed overcoat salvaged, he told George later, during his freshman year from his grandfather’s house in Short Hills, before they opened it up for the estate sale. The weekend before the sale, the relatives had come through—most of them early, waiting outside for the agent’s arrival at nine—like locusts except picky, they were picky locusts. They had the heart and spirit of locusts but were unwilling to be seen by the other relations as needing the stuff or even condescending to want it. Yet every decent piece of art disappeared before Louis even got himself over there at midday; and every watch and every gold tie pin and every cuff link and shirt stud.
According to Louis, he’d just wanted to accessorize. All the old man’s suits had been a little bit too short and a little bit too tight but the tweed velvet-collared coat just fit. It must have been long on the old boy.
For the snow Louis also wore another grandfather remnant, the warmest gloves imaginable, deerskin with separate wool liners. George admired them. They cinched with a little strap around the wrist. On his head, a beret, but that came from Broadway. He did not look French: he looked maybe like a Spaniard—a clerk for a town merchant perhaps, a Spanish Bob Cratchit. Or else he looked like a Swiss writer of science articles, perhaps a onetime school friend of Walter Benjamin, yes, that type, a thwarted intellectual. With the glasses, yes. That was closer, he’d go with that one.
I’m Swiss and ready for a hike, he said. We Swiss are always ready for a hike.
George said he’d been going down to the park to see what it looked like but Louis said, No no no! We’re going to go to Fifth Avenue! I’m already on my way! You’ll join.
It was a lot of work, it turned out, this trudging through the snow. The trains were slow too, of course, it was midnight and a blizzard. At 42nd they had to wait half an hour for an uptown BMT train, the RR, that would take them to 59th and Fifth.
We’ll go to the Plaza and it’ll be like Scott and Zelda meet Admiral Byrd, Louis said.
George said, You know we could have walked across from Columbus Circle and been there already.
No, Louis said. Then we’d be tired. I want to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. I want to take pictures!
He pulled from the pocket of his coat a little Yashica automatic camera.
I’m going to give it that Arthur feel, lots of tonality, abrupt composition, you know, low-impact high-impact the way he does. Except they’re all going to be crooked and gay.
You’re going to have trouble with that coat, George said.
What? Why?
The tails are too long, They’ll drag in the snow. Look, they’re already wet from walking across campus. You’re going to be wearing a thirty-pound wet wool coat soon.
Louis thought about it and took off his belt and said, Here, hold this. Then he hiked the coat up and told George to pass the belt around his waist.
Who do you think I am, Mr. French? George said.
Help me, Louis said. He stood there like that until George reached around him in an unmistakable embrace and passed the belt around the coat.
I should have said nothing, George said.
You know you wanted it, Louis said.
No, I don’t know that, George said. He got the belt tip through the buckle and let Louis pull it tight.
You look like a banker Robin Hood, George said.
As if there ever would be such a creature, Louis said. Someday I’ll have to invent him.
At 59th Street the stairs up out of the subway—there were no stairs, essentially, just a long, ruffled, steep embankment of snow. George grabbed the railing, which was perhaps eight inches above the snow line, and felt with his feet but to no purpose; each foot, dug down, found only snow, so he proceeded to yank himself up by estimation with Louis hard-breathing behind him. Up to the top and out onto 59th Street, the park in whitecapped darkness behind them.
They dragged their legs through the snow to Fifth and gazed down it, empty and miraculous.
Falling faintly, faintly falling! Louis sang into the whiteness.
For George the shock came from the softened lines of everything and the diamond glitter of the streetlights on the crystalline pow
der. And the silence: the silence: the silence. The trees bent like old crones looming behind them. Or—like spirits descending. Elms with white wigs. Everything so white, with night sky above and dark meer below, as yet unfrozen, the charcoal gray matte bordering it all.
Louis took a few quick shots—the camera apparently did everything for him, aperture and shutter speed, and he kept it focused at infinity so he could just hold it up and shoot without even looking through the finder.
George said, God, I love this place.
It’s a field of angels, Louis said, and shot some more.
You have more film? George said.
One more.
Crazy Sorrow Page 9