“Yeah, well, he’s not here, is he? And I’m not saying the missions haven’t been fun.”
Secrets from one another within our secret cabal, doctrinal fissures, Chuck entrusting me alone with his doubts. Thrilling. Almost too exquisitely thrilling. “I never really liked Maverick,” I said, “but he was great, James Garner.” He’d played one of the POWs in the movie.
“He kind of reminds me of your dad. He’s funny like that, and he knows German.” Chuck took a last drag on his cigarette, and as he flexed his arm to flick it into the gutter, I noticed his biceps, lightly draped by his T-shirt sleeve, bulging. Had he always had such muscles? Could six weeks of pushing lawn mowers account for it? Chuck Levy had turned into Steve McQueen. “I wonder if his Nazi prison camp, your dad’s, was like the one in the movie.”
“With secret tunnels and guys sewing disguises? I don’t think so. But he never talks about the specifics. The only thing he says is that it could’ve gone so much worse for him, that he was just unbelievably lucky.”
After a pause, Chuck said, “You know, I don’t care if your dad’s Jewish or not—”
“He’s not.”
“—and you know that even if he was, you wouldn’t be Jewish.”
“What?” I snapped, realizing immediately I was upset that this new information somehow may have reduced my chances of living happily ever after with Chuck Levy.
“It goes through mothers, Jewishness. God, I would love to have a motorcycle.” He held his fists out on the invisible handlebars. He was imagining himself as McQueen, racing across the Bavarian fields, jumping a barbed-wire fence ahead of Nazi pursuers. I watched his muscles again as he throttled and swerved.
I swooned.
Just as quickly, he deflated and turned back into a fourteen-year-old boy in the suburbs, loping into the university where his father was an engineering professor. “My goddamn parents would kill me if I even rode one.”
After a little while, I asked, “Do you think you could kill people?”
“What, you mean like in the movie, Nazis, in the war? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t you?”
“Maybe. If I was convinced it was good versus evil. But even then, jeez, you don’t necessarily have the big picture.”
“What, you’re worried about your whole ‘unintended consequences’ thing?” I’d written a short story in which the teenage American heroine travels back in time to 1929 to seduce and assassinate Hitler, but when she returns to 1963, she finds her family imprisoned in a Soviet gulag in Montana—because she had killed Hitler and prevented World War II, she had also enabled the Soviet Union to develop more quickly, create the first atomic bomb, and then defeat the U.S. in a war in the 1950s and take over the world.
“You can’t overthink everything,” Chuck said, “ ‘on the one hand, it might turn out this way, and on the other hand, it could turn out that way.’ Sometimes you have to take a stand and act, do the thing that feels right.”
“Yeah. Like the monk in Saigon.” I’d been galvanized by the newspaper picture of a Buddhist monk sitting on a street in flames. He had doused himself in gasoline and lit a match to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the Catholic regime in South Vietnam.
“No, not like the monk, like the Jews in Warsaw in World War II. Like your dad. Fight the bad guys. Damn the consequences. You know?”
“Yeah …”
Do the thing that feels right. I was no longer thinking of political morality and armed resistance.
Damn the consequences. Hold my hand. Touch me. Be my boyfriend, Chuck Levy.
“… I guess.”
“So you want to go to the library and hang out? It’s pretty cool, and it’s open until six. I’ve got my dad’s pass.”
Back then, “hang out” and “cool” were real signifiers, fresh and meaningful, not yet unremarkable Americanisms used by squares and adults. So was a middle-class teenage boy wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt in public. So was carrying my transistor radio tuned to WLS, listening to its tiny speaker play Little Stevie Wonder as we walked, just the two of us, toward an old ivy-covered stone building across a hot, fragrant, freshly mowed campus green.
The library was almost empty. It was like a dream cathedral, with arches and leaded glass windows and a black-and-white checkerboard floor but books instead of figures of Jesus and Mary and the saints, a card catalog with hundreds of drawers in place of an altar. We wandered without any plan, sometimes together—was this his plan? to kiss me in the dim deserted stacks?—but mostly alone, our heads cocked as we examined spines on shelves, squatting as we looked at journals and obscure magazines, sitting in carrels, leaning in doorways, skimming this and that, ricocheting from room to room, returning to the card catalog every so often before venturing off on some new search that caught our fancies, one accidental discovery leading to another.
I’d always liked libraries, but this—my God, this treasure house wasn’t nice and handy like the (new, nice, beige, bland) Wilmette Public Library. It was old and vast and dark and a little scary, like Lake Michigan the first time I swam away from shore. Here was everything, all information and knowledge, an infinitude of print, things I’d heard about but never seen, things whose existence I’d only inferred or suspected, things of which I’d been entirely ignorant. I’d moved over to the adults’ table, and I was not so much feasting as nibbling from every dish and platter, and no one was telling me to stop or go away. I was in paradise.
I lost track of time, but I also knew time was short. Because I couldn’t check anything out, and I didn’t know when, if ever, I’d return, I became more frenzied as the afternoon passed. It felt like a quest.
The Miracle Worker had been one of my favorite movies last year, so I found a biography of Helen Keller in which I learned that she’d been a pacifist and a socialist (no wonder my mother named baby Helen Helen). Then on to discovering the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature and Current Biography, which I loved, because unlike regular reference books, these combined the important, like U Thant, with the frivolous, like Patty Duke, from The Miracle Worker. I discovered she was not even three years older than I was, that she was about to star in her own TV show, and that she’d recently met Brigitte Bardot in Paris.
I found an article about Bardot and read about her new movie, Contempt, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. I looked up Godard—my first time reading microfilm, which felt very grown-up and modern. Breathless sounded wonderful, especially its documentary footage of Parisian crowds cheering the actual President Charles de Gaulle.
From there I found a recent issue of the French magazine Paris Match and made out the gist of a two-page spread about all the attempts on de Gaulle’s life. I’d heard on the news about the machine-gun ambush of his limousine outside Paris, but I had no idea that assassins had also planted four kilos of plastique near his Citroën, dispatched a sniper to shoot him in Athens with a gun rigged as a camera, and plotted to sprinkle poison on the hosts at the church near his country house where he took Holy Communion. So James Bond!
As soon as I spotted an issue of Evergreen Review—with its handwritten cover lines, its antiwar poem by Allen Ginsberg, its anti-heroin essay by William Burroughs, its Jack Kerouac short story—I knew I’d found a portal directly into the bohemian world I’d been reading about second- and thirdhand in Newsweek and MAD. Another issue had a cover photograph of a torn, dirty campaign poster of President Kennedy’s face; another had an article about the legal case over the American publication of Tropic of Cancer. I’d heard of the novel from Alex, whose older brother said it was the dirtiest book ever published.
“Dear?” A librarian had crept up and startled me. “It’s after five-thirty,” she whispered. “The library will be closing soon.”
I put back the magazines, rushed to the card catalog, found Miller, Henry, and made my way into the stacks on the third floor. The book was on a special shelf, inside a locked steel mesh cage. Back at the card catalog, I found a listing for an academic book (Miller’s Trop
ic of Cancer: A Critical Appraisal), returned to the stacks and, yes, there it was, out in the open. And filled, conveniently, with excerpts of some of the most outrageous passages. “ ‘I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you’re afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately.’” And “ ‘There’s my Danish cunt,’ he grunts. ‘See that ass? Danish. How that woman loves it. She just begs me for it.’” And from a female character: “‘He kept begging me always to fuck him.’” And my favorite, maybe because of its recapitulation of what Chuck had said to me a few hours earlier about killing Nazis: “ ‘Fuck your two ways of looking at things! Fuck your pluralistic universe …’” My life was imitating art! Anticipating art!
I took a deep breath and stuck the book in the elastic waistband of my skirt, pulled my blouse over it, and walked past the guard out of the building. And then stopped.
A few paces in front of me, Chuck was lying on the grass, staring up at the sky, his hands behind his head. Why do boys and men do that but not women?
Between his jeans and T-shirt, two inches of flesh was exposed. I stopped and beheld. I stared at his navel, let my eyes examine certain denim creases and seams and shadows as I never had before.
What if he happened to glance back and see me ogling? I crammed the stolen book into my purse and ran to him. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I figured you’d come eventually.” He stood, brushing bits of grass out of his beautiful dark hair and off his gorgeous, tanned arms. “I was looking at college catalogs and stuff.” We were still days away from being high school freshmen, but it was New Trier; college was already on our minds. “Stanford? Is an hour from the ocean.” Chuck was desperate to become a surfer. “And did you know that at the Air Force Academy, they pay you to go to college?”
I wasn’t not sure I knew there was an Air Force Academy. “Really?”
“Completely free college in the Rocky Mountains, plus a thousand bucks a year! And when you get out, you’re a lieutenant. You think Alex could get his old man to ask Senator Douglas to nominate me? That’s how you get in.”
“Because of The Great Escape”—Steve McQueen and most of the other POWs were fliers—”you want to join the air force?” I was surprised, but I worried that I sounded snippy. My old comrades-in-arms manner hadn’t been fully updated to jibe with my new feelings for Chuck. Rushing to seem interested in this air force idea, I made things worse. “I thought you said the military is full of homosexuals.”
He looked at me. “The navy, I said, and I was just quoting my dad. Imagine being a jet fighter pilot for real.”
“It’d be nerve-racking. It’s incredibly sweaty in the hot little cockpits.” Desperate to seem engaged and knowledgeable, I was drawing on my combat aviation research from half an hour before, the Ginsberg poem in Evergreen Review: The bombers jet through the sky in unison of twelve / the pilots are sweating and nervous at the controls in the hot / cabins. I very much wished I hadn’t said “hot little cockpits.” “I found this interesting article about all these different assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle. By this secret group of French soldiers against Algerian independence. They had a kamikaze who was supposed to crash his plane into de Gaulle’s helicopter as it took off. But because the French security had all these decoy helicopters, the guy didn’t know which one to go for.”
“Sounds like From Russia with Love.”
We had arrived at the bus stop and sat on the bench, just us. Service was infrequent.
This would be the moment for him to take my hand.
He didn’t. I took out the radio and turned it on. “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” was playing.
“So what else did you find?” I asked Chuck. “In the library?”
“There’s no statute of limitations for murder.”
“I think I knew that.”
“All the new elements that have been discovered since we’ve been alive, like a dozen? Every single one because of the atom bomb.”
“Huh.”
“In New Jersey you can marry your first cousin—and it’s legal to have sex there at thirteen.”
“Huh,” I said again. A random fact or a deliberate conversational turn? Should I chuckle? It seemed like an opportunity, but I was too stunned to take advantage.
And then the opening closed, because Chuck shot up off the bench and out to the curb to peer down Green Bay Road, as if for the bus. If we’d biked, we’d be home by now, but this was the summer that riding a bicycle had come to seem to me both unfeminine and uncool.
“Something else I discovered,” he said when he sat back down, “you know how the Pledge of Allegiance says ‘one nation under God’? The Catholics convinced the president and Congress to stick that in when we were in kindergarten. I assumed it was always there.”
“Wow, that’s like what Mr. Fortini says about the dictionary—the people in charge change things, and then before you know it, everyone forgets and assumes that’s normal, the way it’s been forever.”
Chuck pulled his damp T-shirt from his chest with two fingers and pumped it like a bellows to cool off. It was the sexiest thing I had ever seen in real life.
“Can I have another smoke?” he asked, and I was so nervous that I bobbled the cigarette. This time I handed him the matches to light himself.
I recognized the next song on WLS as soon as I heard the opening drum line—bass, bass-bass, snare …
Oh, since the day I saw you
I have been waiting for you
“I’m really not a homo, you know,” Chuck said.
I know, I know. “I didn’t think so.”
You know I will adore you
Till eternity so won’t you please
“Good. Thanks.”
“Me, neither,” I said, trying to keep things light as I engaged in the most intimate conversation I’d ever had with any boy, let alone—Jesus God—Chuck. “A lesbian, I mean.”
He chuckled and nodded. I took that as a good sign. Then he turned to look right at me. “Alex says because I think some of the girls who aren’t as developed are the prettiest ones that I could be. A homo.”
“That’s stupid,” I said as I thought of one of Henry Miller’s lines: “He kept begging me always to fuck him.”
So come on and be
Be my, be my, be my little baby
My one and only
say you’ll be my darling
Be my, be my, be my baby now.
“Plus,” I continued, “I wouldn’t take Alex’s word. For that.”
He nodded again and, fortunately, didn’t ask, What do you mean? “You know, at the Air Force Academy?” He was changing the subject.
I could breathe again. I nodded, and he continued.
“They have this really simple, really serious honor code that the cadets all swear to: ‘We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.’ I was thinking we should make that our honor code.”
Oh, God, God, God. My face flushed. Since I hadn’t yet sworn the oath, maybe the stolen copy of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: A Critical Appraisal in my bag didn’t count as a violation. “An oath … between … you and me?”
“All three of us, I mean.”
Crap, crap, crap. I’d overreached. “Oh. Sure.”
“We should start planning a new mission. A great big one. To do before school starts. Because once we’re at New Trier …”
“We’ll be busy. Homework, activities, everything.”
That wasn’t what he meant. He meant performing Bond missions would be conduct unbecoming a high school freshman. “Yeah,” he said, “that, too.”
I know I’ve insisted I don’t like how memory and history are automatically sugarcoated and shrink-wrapped in generic pop nostalgia, but the following moment was what it was: as the Wilmette bus finally arrived and stopped, its air brakes making that mechanical-dinosaur sigh, Ronnie Spector sang her last Be my little baby and segued to her final, fading oh-oh-oh-oh, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa ululation.
When we got to my house, our parting was a little more awkward than usual, which I interpreted, hopefully, as a good sign.
After dinner, Peter retreated to his room to work on his mail-order model rockets. Sabrina and her friend with cystic fibrosis, who was sleeping over, went out to the backyard to whack croquet balls and catch fireflies. I sat down on the rug in the TV room to watch Saturday Night at the Movies with my parents. It was The Sun Also Rises.
During the first commercial, after I said I’d thought this was the one about the Spanish Civil War and my dad said that was For Whom the Bell Tolls, he told me about his friend Einar who, the day after they’d finished their high school exit exams in Copenhagen, enlisted to go fight in Spain and had been shot dead by the fascists before the end of the summer, at eighteen.
“There but for the grace of God,” my mother said.
“There but for my lack of balls,” my father replied.
“Nils,” my mother scolded.
I didn’t ask exactly how his war experience made Jake Barnes unable to have sex, even though I knew the question would’ve made Dad chuckle. I also silently noted that Ava Gardner was sort of flat-chested.
“I think I’m gonna go to bed and read,” I announced at the next commercial. Curiosity followed me out of the basement and up to my room and jumped up on the bed. He snuggled in next to me, as usual, laying his head on my leg. I started the book at the beginning, the preface first, then the introduction, then chapter one. I really was interested in the novel, in Miller’s intentions, in its fraught publishing history, in its influence on postwar writers, the full scholarly and critical appraisal.
But soon I was skipping pages, searching for the good parts. And then I was reading certain quoted sentences again and again. “He bent down and kissed her breasts, and after he had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her corsage.” I’d never encountered that meaning of “corsage.” “She commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it.” I’d never read the word “pussy” in the anatomical sense.
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