They were on her mattress on the floor, a cotton blanket over it, nothing over them, nothing on the windows, quite a show when they thought about it.
You want to go out and get a beer? he said. It’s not that late.
Sure, Anna said. She slowly removed herself from his body. They rose and dressed.
Do you ever wear underwear? she asked him. I seem to remember you did sometimes.
Not much, he said. If I’m wearing something thin or if I think I’m going to get sweaty I might.
Didn’t you think you’d get sweaty here?
He looked at her with a funny smile.
I mean moving stuff, she said.
I don’t know, he said. I don’t know what I was thinking. He started to laugh. She started to laugh too.
They would not spend the night together. This was it. The mattress on the floor was not that accommodating. And they weren’t together in that way. He would walk Broadway for two hours after leaving her, before going home, letting himself be transformed by his telling, by his reliving of the story. Before that dropping her back at her door, on the sidewalk he held her, kissed her forehead and cheeks and finally lips and said, not quite sure where it came from, I never won’t be thinking about you.
Oh my god that is such bullshit, she said. Such a total lie! She pushed herself back from him. Why do men lie so much?
We’re trying to make something pretty to give you, he said. A big pretty version of the world. A big pretty version of us, as noble heroes in this big pretty world we’re giving you. It’s kind of like chivalry in the age of public relations.
Well, thanks. I mean, it was nice even if untrue. Here’s what I’ll say, to mark the occasion—be good. Be strong and brave. You are that. So be it.
You’re strong and brave too, he said. Plus you’re kind and smart and good-looking. So you’ll go far.
She laughed at that but still felt that rush of intensity about her future—she wanted to go far. He touched her cheek and was turning to go and she said, Wait! She hugged him really hard.
No crying, he said.
No crying, she said.
Then one more kiss outside a different doorway from the first soft kiss outside the Carman Hall entrance three years ago. Very similar kiss, he noticed. Short. Full of something that back then he hadn’t known but which now he did. It felt now, as then, almost too much like the kisses of the dreams he’d told her about, such a haunting feeling to be kissed now that way—the tenderness of it—and only she had ever managed it, to kiss him that way. This was a realization he would store for later study. He looked at her and gave her a small smile, an unextravagant smile, a smile recognizing all the sadness of the evening—and then he turned and walked away.
* * *
THE WORLD IS charg’d with the grandeur of God… All the thoughts that were unleashed by telling her. He heard in his head the voice of his great-aunt, sometime in the months after his mother died, before he had moved to New York:
Your father, god bless him, I know how much you miss him, dear, your father was a saint. He was a saint. What he put up with from your mother—I’m sorry, it’s true—what he put up with you’ll never know. You have no idea, dear. I wouldn’t want you to know. He put up with the worst. The worst. More than anyone should be asked. You know, he did it for you. He loved you, he was crazy about you. It killed him. She killed him—she was like a disease and she killed him. I’m sorry, I have to say it. You have no idea, dear. This is what she did.
This was his father’s aunt. Grandiose and destructive in her own way. But one part was true: his mother lived as a kind of intimacy terrorist.
Early in freshman year, still September, maybe two or three weeks in, he’d had a dream: A Jungian cunt. Large, wet, disembodied, belonging to no woman but to the universe. Then, a bright light. He could hear his own voice as if on a resounding speaker, exhausted, portentous: I assign this light to all of them… And then he dreamed he was having sex… on a foosball table? No, impossible. He had by then in his life been with two prostitutes and one girlfriend, Carrie. He felt himself very inexperienced at the time, but here he was in front of the world. Not foosball, idiotic, how could it be—it was the hockey-puck bowling-lane thing they’d had in The Gold Rail, a bar and burger joint between 111th and 110th. An enormous crowd there, the bar packed, beyond it the restaurant full, every table taken, he could see all the faces, everyone he knew, professors now and teachers from high school and friends from high school and a few of the new college friends, and his relatives, he could see them all at their tables and booths laughing, smiling, talking—seeming to laugh and smile at him—while on the gently sloped bowling machine, which was near the bar, on the slightly rising surface of the white wood lane, he fucked this creature with a perfect body—it was the body from A Clockwork Orange, the scene after Malcolm McDowell has been reprogrammed, they bring out this naked woman and he is unable to touch her, psychologically indoctrinated to the point that if he attempted it he would get sick—that kind of body, with prominent hard nipples and large perfect breasts and lean strong slightly rounded stomach and legs like a jumper, thick and ropy with muscle. As from a comic book; he was humping some Stan Lee fantasy—and he was large and extremely hard, she was splayed out on this table-like surface before him, and he was almost slicing into her with this dream-cock of his, slamming against her with contemplative force, bang in and slowly out, and bang again, he felt a calm fire. His eyes traveled slowly up that movie-perfect body from rich wet tangled pubic hair along belly and over breasts and shoulders and long neck and there it was: the face, glamorous, haggard, staring back at him, his mother’s face, aged and harrowed and grotesque—he looked up to the crowd, all looking back at him. And then the dream went black.
* * *
TELLING ANNA HAD been the first break in the dam wall. He’d had flood dreams all through his teen years, tidal waves that were warned of and arrived and towered and crashed over him while he gripped lampposts or some other unlikely dream-objects; or else the dreams were of rising waters, flat, reflective, inexorable, he’d watch as the water approached the window ledges. Now he knew what the water really was: the water was the facts. He wanted to find some version of himself that was not complicit and he kept failing, kept remembering with gutwrench in the delicatessen, at the newsstand, awaiting the train, the sensations, the sudden overwhelming horror with what had been in front of him—her—and what was within him, himself. It cut his breath off short, made his stomach hurt, literally, made him want to hit things, made him want someone to hit him. Never leaving him, that half second, before he fully understood (he’d always primitively understood) the knowledge, the memory, that moment of wanting it. He’d been hard for it. Jesus. She’d raised him to want it. The memories other than that moment so vague. He was asleep and couldn’t have heard these things, seen these things: he’d been asleep: he’d been asleep. She must have come in and kissed him—kissed his lips, kissed him with a yielding, infinite intention, while he slept but was not asleep. And his cock hardened, as it would then, and his desire rose, as it would then, like floodwaters. The lips. This was a sweet, sweet dream he kept having, the loving kisses, the desire and comfort of it. There was tenderness in it, love, more than she had showed him in her strictly maternal relations. Oh, look at you. Then it was her hand. He kept his eyes closed, a deep tunnel of dark, not asleep but actively believing he was asleep; and as on so many nights, but this one more so, he felt every sensation in a granular way that dreams never provided. He was seventeen. He had to think it was a dream, what else could it have been? And many times in the years since when a woman took him, tenderly or brazenly or hungrily or with bawdy lewdness in her hand or into her mouth, he felt behind his arousal and even occasionally his love a stirring anger, a desire to fuck her throat and drown her in a biblical flood of semen. Then came the night his mother went further—pulled off her nightgown, he’d heard it, felt her movements, he didn’t know what. But that was when he’d opened fina
lly, finally, finally, his eyes—to look at her there, standing two feet from his head, naked, her dark pubic triangle and her world-knowing cunt mounded there, visible beneath the hair, the rest of her pale as rice paper in moonlight, and while he was paralyzed trying to process what this was, she climbed on top of him and he finally proved himself awake by shouting—roaring really—he had never felt such an anger before or since, he could have killed her—goddamn you goddamn you and throwing her off him, onto the floor. She landed on that shoulder and broke that collarbone, she never got over it that he’d broken her, and she hollered and wept, lying there, naked. Her hair like a rumpled silk cloth covering her head. He got up and left, left the room, stepped over her somehow, left her most importantly, didn’t know where to go, he went out the front door in sweatpants and flannel shirt, barefoot, coatless, early October in New England, and began to walk, but where to go? Where was it safe? There was nowhere to go that solved this problem, that walled it off from him. Where was the absolution, where was the forgetting, where could he have gone in the end? He was almost eighteen, she was forty-three. He walked into town, the town dark, nothing open around there, he went around the village green and sat there on a bench for a while—until the police car came—he had lifted her off him as he might have lifted a child, hands across her ribs on either side and up! And now he could feel the skin still against his palms and thumbs. He picked her up as if she were a child and threw her down as if he were a child abuser and now he could feel her skin on his hands and the weight of her flesh gathered above his two thumbs, his extended fingers. Goddamn her. Goddamn her again. The sound of crickets, the exhilaration of autumn, the promise of hearth and harvest, and of death, loss, mysteries.
After a time in the green, waiting there on that bench, damp-footed, feeling the air but oblivious to the chill, falling into a capsule within himself, with the calm of the gravely wounded, the more clearly he felt he could see his life. As it was and, in some hazy but definite way, as it would be, in his adulthood. All those years to come. He felt oddly strong, he knew suddenly that he would win and she would lose, he didn’t know exactly that she would die, but he knew that she would lose, and the price, the price, well, he didn’t know yet that things such as this, such victories and all that sudden, radical change, crashing into adulthood from a fiery plane, came with an enduring price, a weekly shakedown, daily even, the screaming unrelenting vig of his life, his broken self; he hadn’t realized that the enormous shame wouldn’t diminish as did guilt about some misdeed, fading into the past, but would multiply and take on the shape of his daily life, the shape of himself, like clothes that require a bit of time to fit. And the phantoms came and slit the tires and sugared the gasoline of his psyche and his history. He hadn’t slept that night or so it felt to him but he must have dozed a little because after, when he rose at close to six, he had found her downstairs in what the family, including his father, had called the sun room, which was full of plants that various housekeepers took care of. She was lying on the couch in there, dressed more or less: a shift on, she had no bra, quite plainly, and she said, You broke my collarbone. And he said, Whatever is broken in you, you broke it. He went back up to his room, dressed, and left. The big meal with Wyndham meant he wasn’t hungry; he walked again to the center of the village and back to the Eden Roc, took a place this time at the counter, ordered coffee. This was the new him: he had stepped into a semi-permanent costume of near-adulthood and aloneness, an enforced solitude. He remembered, always would remember, walking back into that house in the predawn morning, four a.m. or later, while she was still at the hospital, and finding this place, the only place he’d ever known, too conflicted a place to call home in any but casual ways yet a deeply felt abode: he knew the place, and it was as if he were coming back to it after years and years away, to find it oddly transformed, reduced, the way spaces known in time past are always smaller when one sees them again. That was the way this was, only the time here so much shorter, the evidence of lived reality sitting before him from only eight hours before—a half apple, now browning, that before bed he’d left on a dish in the kitchen—everything now was cast in amber. The whole place was like a memory, an eerie dream. It was as if the familiarity of the objects, once known, long forgotten, made them inherently strange. He never lived in the same house with her again; he barely spoke to her until she fell ill after Christmas. Dead that April, before he graduated from high school. In his life he had told this only to Anna… He had told her all this and watched her cry for him, but he had not cried himself, ever—he hadn’t shed a tear about his mother, but Anna could see it in him of course, grief caught inside, trapped in glass, behind some door with bent latch that would not open to let the stuff out. Anna held him and then he stood, walked, tested his breathing, like a man recovering from a confusing and frightening dream, and said, Hey, let’s go get a beer. Sometimes he thought he was a monster with no feelings at all. Several other women had thought so too. He drew people in and then pushed them away because being loved was not safe; it was being wanted and needed and it was a dangerous thing and it was not a place that promised him well-being.
There was relief in death. She died. It was as if he had killed her dead—he had killed her in order to be rid of her leaden needs and terrible legacy—he had always felt that way, but never admitted it out loud. Whatever death was working inside her was sprung into high force that night when he’d thrown her onto the floor. He felt guilty of it, as if he’d committed a crime, murder, but he felt no remorse. He didn’t wish to be caught or punished for it—he’d do it again and should have done it sooner. You should be a lawyer, she used to say: unrelenting and logical, he could argue her into a frenzy. Then it was over. Early in the morning hours of April 1, 1975, well before dawn on Easter Tuesday, his mother died. He was eighteen, two months from his high school graduation. Despite her long illness George had not known, not officially, that she was going to die from what was ailing her, until the Thursday prior—Maundy Thursday, the Episcopal service that featured the washing of the feet—when her doctor took him aside in the waiting room, took him out of the waiting room in fact, where he was sitting with his grandparents, her parents, who hardly forgave her and would be even angrier in a short time when he told them she was dying; she’d lied not just to him but to them, to the last. His grandmother, his mother’s mother, with a hard-set mouth and tears down both cheeks—furious. Her father, numb, selfish, mean, he had ever been so and would remain so; what was worst in her had probably been delivered in seeds from him. George followed the doctor out of the lobby; this doctor was a kind man, it became clear, he took George into a curtained-off area largely unlit, they stood near a glass door in the light from the lamps outside so the doctor could tell him that his mother had a badly diseased liver and would not survive very long, a few days more at most, that despite what she’d been telling everyone (that she was merely anemic and just had to rest in order to recover her strength) she had been very ill for months and now was going to die. That final evening, Monday, George saw her, tented, tubed, unable to speak, face hollowed, forty-three years old going on seventy, large eyes watching him, never leaving his face as he moved around her bed, fixing her covers, her IV, eyes in which he saw sadness and regret but also something enormous and new—fear, he saw fear writ large, he had never seen her afraid before. She was bleeding internally and on the way out and now, now, finally, she’d encountered something to be afraid of. George touched her arm, through the cotton blanket, this is how he remembered it, touching her or trying to touch her though she was inaccessible behind tent and tape and tubes and the double blankets, those hospital cotton blankets of wide white weave, slightly rough to the touch, raw. He did not remember saying anything to her. What skin of hers he could touch, her arm and hand, was dry like powder. Yet the room—a corner of the ICU, no one near her, again the darkness, darkness at the corners lighting only in the center of the frame—the room and the darkness itself were loud with his anger and his goo
dbye. She knew he was angry—perhaps that, and not death, was what frightened her so, to depart without forgiveness. She had committed a series of crimes in raising him and now was committing a last one in leaving him before he was grown.
And when he got the call, from that same kind doctor at two in the morning, phoning his grandparents’ house where George was staying as if in vigil, the doctor said he was sorry, and George had said, Thank you, thank you for all you’ve done. When the doctor said finally that she was dead, relief filled him like light, a relief so encompassing and powerful he was shocked by it, shocked by what seemed to him its naked immorality, which made him feel ashamed. But not sufficiently ashamed to dampen the feeling, to put a halt to this overwhelming relief.
The pieties of her dismissal from the world—the wakes (afternoon and evening), the funeral, the party after the funeral, all the bullshit about how much she loved him. She loved me all right, he wanted to say. Instead, good Episcopalian boy, he smiled, he said thank you, he said, to all of them, You’re kind, she spoke of you, yes, she liked you a good deal, she admired you, yes, thank you, she was a remarkable woman, yes. One of the village elders said to him, Well, I know there was some trouble between you at the end but none of that matters now. But wait, actually it rather did matter… George nodded, half smiled at the man. You’re kind, thank you. Thank you. If I need anything, yes. Yes, I know, thank you. You still feel her spirit, I think I know what you mean. She was full of life, yes.
His sexuality. Her. On the sofa, leg crossed, one tucked under her, the other with shoe dangling, the evening’s first drink with its lipstick crescent below the rim. The cigarettes similarly stained.
And then his bloody aunt on the phone after she died. Your father, I’m telling you, he was a saint. With the lions in the den he wouldn’t have had it worse. Nothing could be worse than what he put up with from that woman—you don’t know, dear, you’ll never know. She was your mother, God bless I shouldn’t say, of course you love her. But what he put up with was the worst. The. Worst. More than any man should even have to imagine. She couldn’t control herself, or she wouldn’t. He stayed with her for you. He did it for you. Until he died.
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