Now he was lying in her bed and Jesus, all that was over a year ago, and man, time does get by, doesn’t it? Little over a year ago, Samantha Hand’s trying to lay on that tired-assed trip about the war, next thing Slaight knows, her brother’s in his squad in Beast Barracks, and now he’s dead, a faggot, killed up there in Lake Popolopen by somebody who’d just stuck it up his ass … Jesus … who’d have guessed that day they were handing out daisies in May of ’67 what would happen a year later, almost to the day? Seemed like nothing made sense any more. Nothing … added up … it was all … coming apart, splattering in every goddamn direction at once. West Point was like this piece of granite, a national anchor, but even West Point was pulling loose now….
Feet shuffling in the hall, just whispering across the carpet … Slaight whipped his head around, startled. Irit Dov’s footsteps faded in the direction of the kitchen, all the way across the living room, huge, forty feet by forty feet square. Irit Dov’s penthouse, sitting on top of an apartment building at the corner of East Eighty-second Street and Madison, was rather small as such places go—only two rooms, really, living room and bedroom. The kitchen and bath seemed like afterthoughts. But the penthouse had a spacious, airy feeling, high ceilings, windows all around, everything painted in a dull-finish oyster white.
On the north side of the living room was Slaight’s favorite spot, a greenhouselike alcove, a sunroom jutting out over an odd extension of the building below, completely enclosed by casement windows. The sunroom was full of plants, palms mostly. They were tinged with brown edges and had been clipped back, an attempt to fight off some New York palm disease. The palms looked like plants with haircuts. The little room reminded Slaight of the screen porch on his parents’ place, outside of Leavenworth. It was bright and green and you could sit in there reading, listening to the steady rumble of the city, and it was like you were in the woods, hearing the invisible sounds woods make, rustling and flapping and whispering away, trees talking to each other, squirrels chattering and birds calling, the quite rattle of the absence of human beings. Up in that penthouse it was like that … nobody visible and yet all this life around you … humming and grinding away.
The whole place was full of plants—plants and white furniture, low-slung and deeply pillowed in white muslin. Matching tuxedo couches faced each other at right angles to a fireplace on the west side of the living room. Between them a white Formica coffee table sat close to the floor. Chrome frame chairs with dark brown leather seats and arms faced the fireplace at the end of the white table. Overhead lights, similar to those in the hallway, illuminated barren white walls, where they existed at all. Mostly there were windows, waist-high to the ceiling—windows on either side of the sunroom to the north; overlooking the small terrace to the west; along the entire south end of the penthouse, a glass door in the middle, through which you walked out on a wide terrace, shaded by potted ginkgo trees. The bedroom had four windows, facing south and west. The window in the bathroom was a foot wide and six feet high, a narrow glass peek at the world through the end of the tub.
The penthouse came perilously close to looking like it had been done over by a designer, that spare, Sunday Times Magazine look, uncluttered with human interference. But crazy little touches rescued the place from hellish perfection, like the phone running down the hall from the living room to the bedroom, white cord getting in the way underfoot. A thin, threadbare Persian rug lay between the couches. It was faded and frayed, not antiquery, just worn out. Three or four pieces of battered wicker furniture, in dire need of repair, were scattered about—two chairs in the corners of the bedroom, a table in the sunroom, hiding among the plants, another rattan table on the terrace, weather-beaten, ready to collapse.
And everywhere were magazines, stacks of the damn things, fashion magazines, news magazines, piles of old Esquires and New Yorkers, French magazines, Italian magazines, untouched stacks of old Sunday Timeses, evidence of a compulsive collector of printed matter. The piles were neatly, even cleverly hidden—behind furniture, under tables, stacked on deep-set bookshelves. They looked like they belonged. So did Irit Dov.
Slaight had wandered around the place many times over the past year, exploring. It was his way. He poked into corners, opened drawers, peeked in closets, ruffled through stacks of papers and magazines. He examined the penthouse the way he read books: close-up, giving the place his undivided attention. He was fascinated by Irit Dov’s penthouse, its deliberate excesses, casual messiness. In the rooms people lived, he knew, could be found all of their obsessions, some of their secrets. Slaight’s year-long inspection of Irit Dov’s penthouse apartment bordered on fetish. He wasn’t nosy. He was a pack rat, gathering pieces of others’ lives, storing them away inside himself. He was vaguely aware of what he did, but he had no idea why. All he knew was, Irit Dov’s penthouse had captured him and held him tightly. So did she.
He heard her out in the kitchen: comfortable, muffled sounds, plates and cups and saucers and silverware, running water—reminded him of lying in bed when he was a kid, listening to his mother fixing breakfast downstairs, banging around, listening to the weather on the radio. Slaight reached over and flipped on the clock radio. Some FM station was playing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Purple Haze,” a little heavy at 9 A.M., so he turned it off.
Something was up. West Point was showing its seams, the nearly invisible little side effects of a system which required absolute precision all year long, absolute adherence to the Honor Code, absolute attention to detail in all the science and engineering courses, absolute total memorization of a million little (f)X = YZ proofs you had to keep filed away in your head all the time. West Point was this hermetically sealed society, closed off from the rest of the world, and to the casual observer, it looked like West Point would remain forever unreachable, perfect in its distance from the grubby world outside its gates, forever frozen in the celluloid of the late show on TV.
But from the inside there was always this subliminal anxiety, just beneath the surface of cadet lives, pent-up frustrations and doubts, imperfections that had to be hidden, contained, controlled, checked and balanced by self-confidence which appeared to come from nowhere, but which really came from West Point itself, from the United States Military Academy, from the final truth that you were a goddamn cadet, and when push came to shove you dropped all your doubts and insecurities and believed all the bullshit. West Point said it was so, and you believed it: You were better than the rest of them, all those fuckers outside, everybody who didn’t know the definition of gray, all the nongrads and the civilians and the politicians, the goddamn enemy.
But now even that last-ditch circling of the wagons, final defensive perimeter belief was breaking down. Slaight could feel it go. He’d been watching it happen, little by little, all through his cow year. The death of David Hand was widening the cracks in the system. Slaight didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but he had a few ideas. All the time, cadets were holding back, repressing these doubts and unconscious feelings they weren’t supposed to have. The system caused the cadet to be totally confident, on top of it all, in control 100 per cent of the time. But then came weekends, and weekends afforded that brief instant of relief when repressed feelings could bubble to the surface. Up would come the gas you held down in there in that little spot in your belly where you lived, grumbling, ulcerous, vile, everything you didn’t want to believe about yourself but you knew, you just fuckin’ knew, was true. He’d watched it happen a dozen times, and he knew it would keep happening. Somehow, he knew the David Hand thing fit, but he couldn’t figure which way.
Slaight, his roommate, Leroy Buck, every cadet, was sensitive to every comment on the war, the military, the academy. And the comments hit with gale force in ’67–’68, raining down from every side. You couldn’t dodge it. When cadets would go down to New York City and hang out in the singles bars on the East Side, the operative method for dealing with the inevitable what do you do for a living? question was to mumble, I go t
o school near here, like the girl you were talking to should just know where you meant—Princeton, Rutgers, some damn place. Sometimes it worked.
But there was always the haircut, close on the sides, two inches max on top. And the distinctive cadet manner, inbred, almost impossible to conceal: the stiff back … the walk, a quick gait executed with crispness … the irresistible urge to say “sir” when you were talking to a guy only a few years older than you, like he was an upperclassman or something. And no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t help but slip up, sometime.
Then the hostility, Jesus, the hostility! A chance remark, a comment like, “Oh, I see they just made you get another haircut,” anything could set off the time bomb inside cadets, the repressed humiliation, the feeling they were always being watched over like a bunch of children, scolded and punished and sent to the corner—anything could explode that time bomb. When it went, it was circuit-blowing pain, the kind of jolt you never felt in sports, the ache that made a pulled leg muscle seem like a stain on your goddamn pants. Cadets would wheel and snap like Dobermans, not caring who said exactly what or when or where, just so they could tear off a chunk, get that feeling they were tasting blood.
Once, in a bar in north New Jersey, Slaight watched a classmate bite the top of a guy’s ear off, a guy from Princeton, when he’d mumbled something like West Point sucks under his breath at the bar. The cadet just reached over, grabbed the guy by the hair, hit him a couple of times in the face, and at first sight of blood spewing from the guy’s nose, the cadet pulled the guy’s head toward him, held it down on the bar, and chomped the tip of his ear off, spit it out right onto the bar, a grisly, incredible scene. The whole bar just ground to a halt, and everybody stood there, staring, the guy clutching at his bleeding ear, the cadet standing there with this grimly satisfied look on his face; then he turned and walked out, and nobody did anything, nobody fucked with him because they all caught the vibe that the guy would kill, he was so pissed.
Another time, Slaight saw a guy slap his girl friend halfway across the dance floor at Snuffy’s, then stumble out to the parking lot and lean against a car and start crying like a little kid, just sobbing and dripping snot all over his shirt front, weeping like a baby. Slaight asked him what happened. The girl had yelled something at him when they were dancing, the guy couldn’t remember what she’d said, all he could say was … she just don’t understand, you see, man? She just don’t understand, man, how flicked up things are, you know? Slaight watched the guy cry for a while, not saying anything to him. There was nothing you could say to a guy who was blubbering like a fool, who’d just about knocked the girl friend’s teeth out, and who’d probably do the same to you if you accidentally pressed the wrong psychological button.
Later the next week, he saw the same guy in the mess hall, and the guy said thanks for being there, down at Snuffy’s, and Slaight mumbled forget it, man. Then the guy said he and his girl friend had patched things up, checked into a motel down in Stony Point and spent the whole night fucking. The guy started jabbering about belly fucking, ass fucking, tit fucking, elbow fucking, toe sucking, doing it standing up, sitting down, across the motel room dresser, over the edge of the tub … on and on until Slaight finally wandered away, leaving the guy standing there in the aisle in the mess hall, talking to himself about what he had planned for next weekend.
The year ’67–’68 was that kind of scene, blown-out, hanging right there on the edge all the time. Bobby Kennedy had been murdered a week to the day after Slaight got off the area, and he and Leroy Buck stayed up all night watching the live TV coverage. There wasn’t any widespread cadet sentiment for Kennedy. In fact, a lot of guys had gone around the next day complaining that Kennedy had picked a hell of a time to get himself blown away. His death was putting off the First Class Trip for two days, because all the Air Force C-141’s were being held on alert to airlift troops to Detroit and New York in case there were riots in the ghettos, like there had been when Martin Luther King died, another event which hadn’t drawn much cadet sympathy.
But Bobby Kennedy had appeared to Slaight and Buck like a dim beam of bleak hope, symbolizing a glimmer of forward motion in a country which seemed to have come to a halt the day his brother, the President, was killed five years before. Now RFK as dead, too, and the papers were chasing Gene McCarthy around the country like a pack of rabid dogs, trying to force-feed an image of liberal leadership to an electorate that had fallen asleep with a beer in hand in front of the tube watching scenes from the siege of Khesanh flicker across the screen in full color. It was a sorry-ass state of affairs, 1968, a sorry-ass year with sorry-ass campaigns being run by a bunch of sorry-ass lamester politicians running around saying a lot of sorry-ass shit … a lot of sorry-ass shit about the war.
It was so pathetic, it was almost funny. Only a couple of years before, in 1966, West Point was still a hook, a sure-thing name-drop for a free drink at a bar, a come-on to a girl sitting next to you on a plane. Now everything had changed. Down in New York, on June 26, 1968, a rock group called the Velvet Underground would play a smoke-filled hole of a club called the Plastic Exploding Inevitable. Fifty miles up the Hudson, West Point was getting ready again for the first day of Beast Barracks, a week away. The two places coexisted in a sphere so close to splitting at the seams, only sex seemed to be holding things together. The press had noticed as much and coined a neat but illusory headline, “The Sexual Revolution,” to describe a carnivorousness between men and women which said fucking was okay as an end in itself. No rules, no court-and-spark, no nothing. Just strip and fuck. Anything goes.
Everywhere you looked, order was collapsing into chaos, but that wasn’t it, either. Everything was just turning casual, even sex. This was a circumstance greeted by cadets with great enthusiasm. What did they have to lose? Their virginity?
Thank God West Point couldn’t touch you while you were on leave. And thank God for fucking.
11
Irit Dov appeared in the door of her bedroom carrying a wicker breakfast tray with toast and coffee for two. She was wearing a light cotton robe, tied at the waist. Her black hair fell past her shoulders, shadowing her face and her breasts in the dim light.
“Ry Slaight! Ry! Open your eyes! Wake up, you lazy thing! It looks like midnight in here. Come. Take this tray from me. I won’t hold it forever.” She had a mocking, teasing tone in her voice, and she smiled widely as she appeared to berate him for napping while she had been slaving in the kitchen over breakfast. It was this way between them every morning. He wanted to sleep late, imagining he was skipping reveille, getting away with breaking the rules. She wanted ro rush from bed to bath to street, as if they hadn’t a moment to lose, the city was getting away from them, the museums were closing, it would all be over before she got him out of bed and out of the house. Usually, they compromised, as they had this morning, Irit letting him nap while she washed and fixed breakfast. Then she’d push him out the door and into the park or wherever they were headed for the day.
What they really did was to make deals:
I’ll trade you one sleep-in for a visit to the Metropolitan.
Okay, I’ll cook dinner tonight if we can go over to the Five Spot and listen to jazz later.
It’s a deal.
Theirs was a way of life which a few years later would be called liberated, as if in deal-making there was to be found some measure of freedom for both parties. Irit Dov and Ry Slaight found not freedom but comfort. There was a tension between them, for each was strong-willed, but they worked out part of the tension in their constant bartering, trading of experiences and duties. The rest of it they worked off in bed.
“Sit up, you sleepy fool! What do they call guys like you up there? Rackhounds! I remember. Your friend Leroy, he is always calling you a rackhound. Well, sit up, rackhound. Eat your breakfast. Drink your coffee. There is much for us to do today!”
Slaight grabbed the tray, and Irit eased herself onto the bed next to him. He was awake but about one-thi
rd functional, still worn out and hung over from three weeks riding around on wooden benches in deuce-and-a-half trucks, eating dust from the column ahead. Day after day they listened to lectures on the wonders and miracles of modern warfare—"the electronic battlefield,” they were starting to call it—then they’d mount up in the goddamn deuce-and-a-halfs and road-march out to some godforsaken military reservation and watch firepower demonstrations. Battalion-sized, elaborately staged, fully armed attacks on undefended objectives, ail these tracks and tanks and companies of troops firing live ammunition, all tracers, blazing red and yellow around dusk, with flame throwers and mo-gas explosions all over the place, a goddamn firepower demonstration looked like ten Fourth of July’s all going off at once. The assembled West Point first class would watch this incredibly expensive fireworks from bleachers on a nearby hillside, then climb back in the deuce-and-a-halfs and eat dust all the way back to the post officers’ club, where they’d pretend it had all been for real and get good and stinking drunk.
Three solid weeks of trucks and dust and lectures and C-141s and formal balls and bullets and booze. Slaight felt like someone had blowtorched his ears, then crawled into his mouth and turned the flame down his throat. His tongue felt like a small sandpile. His eyeballs felt like they’d gone 100,000 miles without a lube job.
‘"Hey. Thanks.” He managed to get the words out before Irit stuffed a piece of buttered toast and jam into his mouth and handed him a steaming cup of black coffee. He munched his toast and sipped his coffee and looked over at the woman sitting next to him on the bed. She sat there watching him like she was making sure he got it all down, he was sick and she was taking care of him. There it was again. All that niceness. Like she knew what kind of bullshit oof-goofing-half-stepping nonsense the Firstie Trip had been, but of course she didn’t. She was just sitting there eyeballing him possessively. It was the first time they’d been together since before Slaight started walking the area in the beginning of May. Made him nervous, the way she sat there, not eating her breakfast, just watching him like that. Nervous and … wanted. Slaight sipped his coffee. Irit Dov waited.
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