Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  She was not much to look at—raw-cheeked, long-nosed, tall, and deceivingly prim—but that was okay with me. She had as much to forgive as I did, and in any case, I have never found anything more reliably sexy in a woman than a passion for 1) reading difficult novels and 2) me. We had been selected by the casting director of destiny to play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus in the school production of The Skin of Our Teeth, and in time-honored Dick-and-Liz fashion, one thing led to another. I got her to laugh at something I said, and then she passed me a note in the hallway, ornamented with a star of glitter and glue. After the elapse of a gratifyingly brief interval she brought me home to her bedroom in the basement of her family’s town house, and she bestowed upon me the magic of her permission.

  I will try as hard as I can not to exaggerate here: I estimate that I spent merely forty-three minutes of the prolonged episode that followed in conducting a detailed and glorious survey, a USGS mapping expedition, complete with aerial reconnaissance and depth soundings, of the young woman’s vagina. I would not affirm that I was more interested in studying it than in introducing my penis therein, but it was awfully close. I had spent years looking at doubtful (and in the end worthless) photographs of vaginas in scrounged copies of Penthouse and Hustler. In the end these proved to bear as much relation to the wonder of which I found myself that night—the unchallenged and loving custodian—as the portrait of a daube of beef in a cookbook bears to the fragrant, homely, hard-earned stew that presents itself, steaming on a plate, to the nose and eyes of a hungry man.

  That was a Saturday night; the next day my mother took my brother and me out to Falls Church, Virginia, to visit our grandmother. I had not showered or washed my hands, and I spent the whole day dreaming over the smell of her on my fingers. I was a traveler returned from a fabled land. I wanted to tell everyone—my brother, my mother, my grandmother—what splendors and vistas I had encountered. The next weekend there was a dance, and my first lover invited me afterward into the great dark wastes of her backseat, where there was no time for science or exploration. And then on Monday she dumped me.

  She had done me so many favors—had indulged, with a tenderness that even at the time I recognized as a kind of grace, all my exclamations over and examinations of her body, especially that astonishing evolutionary feat of origami between her legs—and now she did me the final one of being honest. She liked me, she said, and she liked having sex with me, but I was too young for her. I would not talk to her in the hallways of school when my male friends were around; I would not hold hands or hang out on the blacktop or in the cafeteria. In short, I was not comfortable with all the essential ancillaries of having a girlfriend. I could not handle it. I was—somehow she said it without hurting my feelings or inspiring any kind of attempt at denial from me—too immature.

  No such compunction or misgiving seemed to trouble my mother’s friend. As in a letter to Penthouse Forum, my mother and brother conveniently left town on the weekend following the late-night party, and I was by myself. My second lover came over around nine that Saturday night, much later than I would have liked, since by the time she arrived, looking pretty and smelling very good and carrying an impossibly adult bottle of wine, I was already wishing, with a fervor that shocked me, to get the whole thing over with.

  I led her into the living room, and we sat down on two chairs. I managed to get the wine open, and she drank a little, and I pretended to drink a little, and then with the quenching heat of the wine against my dry throat, I took a long dark swallow. Here I am, I thought, pretending to care for wine, pretending to speak wittily of inconsequential things, pretending to be the kind of kid whose mother’s girlfriends decide to come over and throw him a fuck. I guess at some point we must have started to make out. I employed the careful, phased techniques, starting at the top of one’s partner and working ritualistically down, that I had been taught by my seventeen-year-old ex-non-girlfriend.

  “We don’t need to do all that teenager stuff,” said my mother’s friend. “Where should we go?”

  I suggested that we do it right there on the floor, on the green-and-blue shag rug, and that was what we did. When it was over, I rolled off and instructed her, in very plain terms, to go home. I felt none of the rapture, the stunned cartographic joy I had felt during and after my first time. Though objectively, she was much better-looking—soft and shapely—I had no desire to make a study of her. I had wanted to get the thing over with, and so I had.

  “Go?” she said, and I saw to my horror that I had hurt her feelings. “But I—”

  I actually employed the words “I just remembered that I have an appointment,” which is how I know for sure that I was fifteen. “I have to go see a friend.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her eyes resumed their customary sly-eyed coolness. “Okay.”

  She sat up and pulled on her underpants, rolled her tights back up her white thighs, shivered herself into her wool jumper. I wanted to tell her, to explain to her, that I was not ready, that I was too immature, that I just couldn’t handle it. She stood up and gathered her purse and her coat, and I saw her to the door, where she turned to me, her eyes looking vulnerable again, wondering, maybe asking me to help her make it through the night. And suddenly, with the smell of wine and cunt in the air between us, I wanted to do it again, in a bed, all night and with science and art.

  “Good night,” she said. She kissed me in a final kind of way. I stood on the doorstep until she got into her car, started the engine, and drove home, leaving me one regret, one empty house, one night closer to being ready.

  I was standing on Forbes Avenue, across from the laboratory where I had sold my blood plasma to buy irises and halvah for Rebecca, the first great love of my life, waiting for the bus that would take me to her lover’s house. It was one o’clock in the morning. Giddy fireworks of snow exploded over my head in the light from the streetlamp; there were already four inches on the ground. Under my peacoat I wore only a pajama top, and in my haste to get out the door, I’d neglected to put on my overshoes. My gloves I had lost weeks before. I carried my frozen hands in my pockets, the right one jammed in beside a dented Grove Press edition of Illuminations, Rebecca’s favorite book, which, like Rebecca herself, couched everything in terms of torment and ecstasy and moved me strangely without making much sense.

  “This is very embarrassing, Mike,” Rebecca’s lover had said over the phone. “But I’m just incredibly fucked up, and I think there might really be something wrong with her. She keeps making this sound.” Alarmed, half asleep, I’d told him I would be there as soon as I could. An hour spent waiting for the 61C, sneakers ankle-deep in a pool of black slush, had given me ample time to wonder why, given the circumstances, I should be the one to rescue Rebecca yet again from the burning-down house of her brain. Let him, the other man, begin to lose nights of his life in emergency rooms and in the lyrical labyrinths of her mysterious fevers and furors.

  My anger abated somewhat in the warmth of the bus’s interior and by well past two, when I reached the Squirrel Hill duplex where Rebecca’s lover lived, I had once more donned the full panoply, the ax, tackle, and stouthearted gravity, of a resolute fireman of love. I would save Rebecca if it was not already too late. When her lover opened the door, I thought he was going to tell me that she had died.

  “She’s upstairs,” he said. He was willowy, frail, with the smooth cheeks and puffy eyes of a newborn. Like Rebecca, he admired aesthetic suicides and madmen such as van Gogh and Syd Barrett. His health was poor, he wore heavy wool sweaters even in the heat of August, and to counteract the jitters of a stomach so nervous that he threw up just waiting for a DJ to play his request on the radio, he smoked great quantities of marijuana. We had not seen each other since the night two weeks earlier when I learned that he was Rebecca’s lover. I wanted him to look mortified now, chastened by my gallant fireman’s air, but he seemed only stoned and not much put out. He shied away from the blast of cold wind that had followed me like a pack of dogs into the house.
“Man, I don’t know what happened to her. She just kind of fell over.”

  “Michael?” Rebecca called as I came up the stairs. The house had the old-potato stink of bong water, and the steam heat was turned all the way up. There was a childish note of shame in her voice, and as I came into the sweltering bedroom of her lover and caught her smell of lily of the valley, I felt my heart, like a muscular reflex or spasm, forgive her. “Michael, what are you doing? I’m all right.”

  Her forehead was damp, her eyes clouded with fever tears. I stood up. I looked at her lover’s bed. There were shoes in the bedsheets, a Coke bottle, an open jar of cold cream, plates streaked with hardened food. On the nightstand they had built a tiny Stonehenge of pill bottles and bronchial inhalers, and on one slipless pillow sat a porcelain water pipe in the shape of a human skull.

  “We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”

  “Please, Michael.” She looked at her lover reproachfully, I thought. “I don’t want to go outside.”

  Couldn’t she see that the house all around her was falling in a shower of sparks and burned beams? Ignoring Rebecca’s protests, I helped her down the stairs, zipped her into her parka, pulled on her red rubber boots, tucked her piano-black hair into her knit beret. I called a taxi that took us back to the apartment on Meyran Avenue, and I gave my last five dollars to the driver. I put her in bed, and told her I loved her, and tried to enfold all her trembling limbs in the warm envelope of my body.

  Rebecca moved out two days later and ever since, as far as I know, has been leaping, afire, from high windows that belch black smoke. In all that time, though there have been many other leapers, I have never managed to catch a single one, or learned how to stand back and just watch them fall.

  One spring afternoon when I was fifteen years old, a kid who was new to the tenth grade showed up at our front door unannounced, with a backgammon set folded under his arm. I had no talent for backgammon or friend-making. I hated games that, like backgammon or the making of friends, depended in any way on a roll of the dice or a gift for seizing opportunities. I disliked surprises and all changes of plan, even changes for the better—except in retrospect. At the art of retrospection I was a young grandmaster. (If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!) True, I might have felt some disposition to like this kid already, but I never would have dared to act upon it. I was an early subscriber to Marxian doctrine as espoused by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, which had been my favorite movie for the last year or so, and the mere fact that this kid wanted to be friends with me at all seemed to impeach his judgment and fitness for the role.

  “I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon,” said the kid, gravely mistaken.

  I stood there at the front door with nothing in particular to do—I think I was reading a book when he knocked, likely some book I had already read—no good friend my age to speak of, no plausible excuse to send him away, though every strand and dendrite of instinct crying out to be left alone to my friendless but well-planned solitude. I think I might have told him that I had homework, or I had to take care of my little brother, or since my mother was at work, we weren’t allowed to have anybody over. I might have tried to be honestly rude and said that I had no interest in backgammon at all. But the confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.

  I said he might as well come in, and he wiped the floor with me several times at backgammon until I confessed—armed with fresh evidence—that I hated the game, and we found something else to do. Within a few weeks he had become the best friend, save one, that I have ever had.

  In 1992, almost exactly fifteen years after that afternoon, this kid, grown now to a man, called to tell me about this girl, woman, whatever. She shared a Stuyvesant Town apartment on the Lower East Side with his friend Audrey, and she had just been dumped by her boyfriend, among whose numerous flaws, apart from the chief flaw of not appreciating her, were a staunch Catholicism and a lack of Catholicity when it came to practicing a certain act of oral love-making extremely popular among many women who have tried it.

  “I told her I knew a Jewish guy who would give her head,” my friend explained, kidding, not kidding at all. He assured me that the young woman in question was smart, attractive, lively, fun to be around. He had taken her out himself once. Though they liked each other, there was no spark.

  “A blind date,” I summarized in a doubtful if not faintly nauseated tone when he had finished unfolding the backgammon set of his proposition.

  At this epoch, after a period of adventure and modest uproar, my life had resumed, like Larry Talbot after a lycanthropic spree, its true shape: a dull business. I was living in a small carriage-house apartment in the Hudson Valley, two hours north of the city, in the fifth year of trying to finish my second novel: alone with a book again. Nothing to do, nobody to do it with, nothing going on at all. Just the way I liked it, or rather, just the way I always seemed to fall out, whether I did like it that way or not. When it came to the art of living, the only medium susceptible to my genius was inertia. If someone wanted to get married, I would marry her. If she wanted out, then it was time to get a divorce. Otherwise, in either case, I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed—all I have ever needed—was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.

  “Suit yourself,” said my old friend when I declined this girl’s number. He was getting ready to hang up on me and my dial tone of a life.

  I could feel the familiar sensation as I said goodbye to him, the train pulling away from the platform, the call to adventure fading on the air, the tumult in the blood as the moon tries to fight its way out from behind a cloud and turn a man to a wolfman. Longing for change and fearing it, caught in a tissue woven from dread and regret shot through with purest gold threads of a yearning to get out of my book, my room, my house, my body, my skull, my life.

  “All right,” I said, as I had said to him when he bicycled over with his backgammon board. “Just give me her number.”

  Not very long afterward, in an ongoing act of surrender to the world beyond my window, with no possibility of knowing what joy or disaster might result, I married her. And since that afternoon in Berkeley, California, standing along the deepest seam of the Hayward Fault—no, since our first date—this woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake, that I have known or made. I’m grateful for that, because if it were not for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along.

  She will have none of that. She is quick, mercurial, intemperate. She has a big mouth, a rash heart, a generous nature (always a liability, in my view), and if my way is always to opt out, to sit in the window seat with a book in my lap, pressing my face against the pane, then her great weakness, indistinguishable from her great strength, is a fatal, manic aptitude for saying yes. She gets herself, and us, and me, into tr
ouble: into noble causes and silly disputes, into pregnancies and terminations, into journeys and strange hotel beds and awkward situations, into putting my money where my mouth is and my name on fund-raising pitch letters for the things that I believe in but otherwise, I don’t know, haven’t gotten around to yet. She is the curse and the wolfman charm in my blood, calling me to shed my flannel shirt and my pressed pants with their sensible belt and lope on all fours into the forest.

  Once she and I found ourselves talking about this picture that hangs on the wall of our house. It’s a magnificent Lothar Osterburg photogravure, shadowy and mysterious, of a miniature clipper sailing across a scale-model ocean. This picture seemed to both of us to embody our marriage—I was the sails, and she was the tiller. Or vice versa. Honestly, I can’t quite remember how it seemed at the time. But I know that in considering the image of that great ship in full sail, what we both understood, have always understood, was that whether I am the wind and she is the waves, or she is the rigging and I am the rudder—at this point I have pretty much exhausted my nautical vocabulary—the crucial point for a moral landlubber like me is that we are embarked. I answered the call of adventure; I rolled the dice. I jumped out of the window, holding tightly to her hand. See us, sailing into the blue.

  When I was nine years old, I fell in love with a superheroine whose unlikely name—a name that still brings me a wince of lust and embarrassment when I say it—was Barda. Big Barda. I have never recovered, thank God, from my first sight of her in Mister Miracle #8 (September 1972).