“How ’bout a joint?” Jeff asks helpfully. “I can’t handle wine; it really brings me down.”
Max nods. “Sounds good to me.”
So Jeff busies himself with a little red cigarette-rolling machine, and we all watch, like children, as he slowly crumbles and folds some marijuana into the paper and fondly licks it closed. He hands Joanne and Max their joints and then passes me one before sitting down on a nearby chair.
“It’s not fair,” Jeff finally says, sucking in all the relief the dope can provide. “Maybe a guy who’s thirty-five shouldn’t feel like an orphan, but I do. My folks are dead, my best buddy got killed two days before we were supposed to leave Vietnam, and now Sukie dies for no fucking good reason.”
“Look. Let’s try to relax a little,” Joanne suggests. “Let’s try to think about something else for a while.”
I start puffing away on my joint.
CHAPTER 16
So we sit there, an ad hoc committee of Sukie’s survivors: her former husband, her last lover, and two of her best friends, all getting high together the night before her funeral. The four of us form a sexual pentagon—two men, two women and a ghost—linked together by invisible pencil lines that connect the dots of our lives.
Gradually the dope unknots my tension so that it unravels and slips away, falling like a ribbon to the floor.
After another long, fuzzy while, there is a shifting and softening so that the hard geometric frame connecting us turns into a soft-spun gossamer pentagonal spiderweb. No. A Sukieweb. Our pentagon becomes a sweet, connective Sukieweb.
Max is sitting quietly on the sofa, but I know his mind is rioting. His head lolls back over the rim of the sofa to rest against the wall while he stares up at the cracked and water-stained ceiling. He, too, is caught in the Sukieweb. He cannot defend himself against her portrayal of him. There is no way to respond to her book because the author has died. The indictment she brought down means Max will have to prove his innocence. He is shaken and angry.
Like twin Nancy Drews, Joanne and I are staying on top of The Case of the Missing Manuscript. The atmosphere in the room is full of white-hot electricity. Cartoon lightning bolts are being hurtled all around us. Much is happening. We’re making a heavy-rock music recording without any lyrics. Lots of sound and fury. No language.
“The last thing this world needs is another kvetch novel about Jewish husbands,” Max finally says. “I think we’ve OD’d on those. And given the circumstances, we don’t really know what Sukie would want done with the book. So I think we should just turn it over to some neutral third party until we sort everything out.”
“That’s not the way it’s going to be,” says Jeff.
He is sitting in an old, misshapen armchair, clearly his favorite roost for drinking morning tea or coffee and reading the newspapers. He looks handsome, slouched and comfortable in his own digs, more relaxed than when he had sat in Sukie’s kitchen. There is a stillness that encircles Jeff like a spotlight, setting him apart, making him seem special.
Beside his chair is a tall, tired avocado plant, listing like a palm tree during a hurricane. A cluster of four brownish leaves droops sadly over the chair, serving as a weathered beach umbrella. Jeff takes a final drag off the roach he’s holding and tamps it out in an ashtray. Then, reaching up, he pats the dying avocado leaves as if petting a dog.
“This avocado loves me,” he sighs philosophically.
Joanne smiles so that warm lights rush into her eyes.
She is curled up at the end of the sofa, the spill of her hair running down over her thin shoulders. Her bleached muslin shirt drapes over her faded sea-blue glove-tight jeans that trace the length of her body, tapering down her long legs.
I can see she is positioning herself for love. She is flowing forward toward Jeff, like a glass of spilled water. I can almost feel her senses becoming indistinct and indiscriminate as she softens toward the object of her affection. Her neediness, like a steady rain, is preparing the ground for seduction.
Occasionally Max looks over at Joanne with accusative and warning eyes, because he, of course, doesn’t know that her objectives this time are serious rather than frivolous—meaningful rather than meaningless. Only Jeff remains oblivious to Joanne’s eager availability because he is still thinking of Sukie.
“This book was important to her, not just because of its intrinsic value, but because it marked her recovery, understand? It was a sign of her recovery. People own their own survival stories as well as their own horror stories, you know?”
In the bookcase behind Jeff’s chair, empty spaces have destabilized his library. His books are listing like the tall stalk of his avocado plant. Missing books have caused the dislocation of the remaining ones, leaving them to tilt, precariously off-balance, a physical manifestation of removal and loss.
Now Max is studying Jeff with stoned concentration in a high-schoolish, but somehow endearing, attempt to size up his opposition. Max is struggling to control the final image of Sukie’s life. If Jeff establishes preemptive control over her book, he also achieves a proprietary position toward her life. His closeness to Sukie, right before her death, can make their relationship definitive and thus diminish the importance of her marriage to Max. This is the phantom Max feels he must fight.
We are now in a time of life when our cumulative history is as active an agent as the present in determining our behavior. The past has become our savings account and, of course, has a much larger balance than our paltry NOW accounts. Max doesn’t want to be robbed of his savings, but Jeff is quietly chipping away at Max’s preferred version of the past.
“There’s a good joke I know about a situation like this one,” Max says suddenly. “You think you’re up for it? No one’s going to get insulted?”
We shake our heads.
“Okay.” He sits forward on the sofa and dons a boyish, but earnest, expression he must have created years ago when he told his first dirty joke.
“A man’s wife dies. For years she’d been having an affair with her husband’s best friend who, of course, turns up at the funeral. The lover is hysterical with grief and collapses sobbing beside the wife’s grave following her burial. Then the husband walks over to his friend, puts his hand on his shoulder, and says: ‘Don’t cry; don’t worry. I’ll get married again.’”
We all look at Max with astonishment.
It’s Jeff who laughs first.
“Jesus,” he groans, chuckling and shaking his head to indicate his incredulity at both the joke and Max’s perception of the present situation. But then he stands up.
“I know it’s just a joke, Max, but it seems you’ve got everything turned upside down and inside out. I didn’t take your wife away. You dumped her. I just picked up the pieces and helped her get through some of the last rough patches before she died. See—I think you treated her like shit.”
“Hey.” Max stands up, compelled to defend his honor in front of Joanne and me. He cannot allow such an accusation to stand unchallenged. “You don’t know shit about anything.”
“Sukie told me everything.”
“Sukie told you her side of the story.”
“You left her, didn’t you, Max? And you never once looked back, did you?”
“Fuck you.” Max grabs the front of Jeff’s shirt. He’s shorter than Jeff, but solid on his feet,
“I had plenty against you even before I saw you,” Jeff says, stiff-arming Max. “So don’t fuck around here. This is my cave. Now back off.”
But when Max moves away, it is only to create enough space to swing at Jeff.
Clearly Jeff wasn’t expecting an actual strike, so when Max connects he falls back against his desk, sending papers and books spilling down onto the floor. Then, outraged by such a violation, Jeff comes at Max with full speed and fury.
“You’re an ego nut, Max. You can’t even see anything that’s right in your face.”
Joanne and I are both standing up.
This is a movie. This is
television. This is not real.
Now the men are clenched together, dancing around the center of the room, edging back to get space and then embracing each other again, hugging in hatred.
“You asshole,” Jeff says. “Don’t you know enough not to fuck with a grunt? What do you think we learned over there?”
And then he pulls back and releases the cudgel of his arm. Max turns so that Jeff’s fist only sideswipes his face and grazes his head, but then he stumbles backwards and falls against the aquarium. The heavy glass case totters for a second atop its wrought-iron base and then crashes onto the bare floor of the kitchen and explodes. The glass shatters, in what seems like slow motion, sending shards, water and silver piranha flying upward—like birds in a silver arc—before they crash back down to the floor.
Jeff howls as if he’s been knifed.
Rushing forward, he falls to his knees, grasping for a fish. Then, holding it in both hands, he gets it to the kitchen sink and turns on the water. But there is no drain stopper and the fish starts throwing itself against the sides of the sink.
Now Jeff panics.
The other three fish are flopping on the floor as he rushes into the bathroom. I can hear him stopping up the tub and running water into it. Now one of the fish is thrusting itself up and off the floor, flopping against a cabinet so that the door thumps like a heartbeat again and again. The third piranha is already spent and waiting to die.
“Help me,” Jeff yells. “Get them in here into the bathtub.” He is standing half inside and half outside his bathroom. “Get that one. Sacco. Vanzetti.”
Obediently I move forward but I am unable to touch, let alone lift, either of the slim silver fish flopping upon the floor in a struggle to live.
Joanne, too, remains frozen in the center of the room.
“I’m wiped out,” Jeff howls. His body is heaving and his face is wet.
It is Max, shamefaced and frightened, who finally clasps the last two fish and carries them to the tub.
“It’s too small,” Jeff groans, but he stays inside the bathroom for a long while, apparently putting some kind of cover over part of the tub.
Silently, Joanne and I begin to pick up the books and papers that have fallen off Jeff’s desk. Max finds an empty grocery bag and slowly begins picking up the biggest shards of glass. He has withdrawn into himself, ashamed of what has happened and the vulnerability it has exposed. His distress acknowledges his understanding of Jeff’s anguish.
I wonder if Jeff, like Joanne, has only a limited number of objects to love and if the fish were on his endangered love list.
“Look, I’m sorry as hell,” Max says when Jeff finally reappears. “I’ll pick up a new aquarium for you tomorrow if you tell me where to go and what size you need.” He pauses and then shrugs as he remembers the funeral. “I guess it’ll have to be first thing Tuesday morning.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Jeff snaps. “What time is it?”
“Nine o’clock,” I say, squinting at the expensive watch I could finally afford to buy, but can no longer read without glasses.
“Let’s go get a drink.”
Joanne watches without objection as Jeff puts Sukie’s manuscript back on his desk.
Immediately, Max moves forward, gesturing toward the pile of pages. “What about that?” he asks.
“Let’s have a drink first,” Jeff says firmly, gesturing us to precede him through the door.
“But we’ve got to settle this tonight,” Max insists.
“We will,” Jeff promises.
Outside, the heat has lessened.
“Wow, it’s crowded,” Joanne says, looking at the suburban kids in urban drag strolling along M Street.
“Actually, it’s kind of deserted for Georgetown,” Jeff disagrees, eyeing the passing crowd like a cautious driver entering freeway traffic from an interchange. “Most folks aren’t back from their vacations yet. Georgetown doesn’t really get crowded till next week. Hang a left,” he says, starting to steer us upstream against the crowd.
Night is drifting down upon Georgetown, igniting soft lights and sweet illusions. We walk past narrow boutiques, fast-food outlets and hanging-fern French bistros. All the doorways are indented like new paragraphs in the justified line of red brick storefronts. Glassed in by bay windows, people are eating expensive meals inches away from passersby on the sidewalk.
Max has his hand cupped around my elbow. Still mildly stoned, we feel little impulse to speak. Jeff and Joanne walk ahead of us, moving closer together as they talk. Tall and narrow from the rear, they seem to belong together—slim, blond, casual Americans who can cruise crowded streets in any city around the country with consummate confidence.
The humidity hovers above us like an open parachute. The faces of the people who approach and do-si-do around us are glistening with sweat. Although my mouth is dry, my dress and hairline are damp. I am very tired of being hot. The heat of the city and my grief over Sukie have been stirred together like sand and water into a brick of summer discomfort.
Suddenly I experience a hot flashback that returns me to a winter morning, several years ago, when I was bent over the sizzling steam radiator in my apartment trying to recover a keyring that had dropped behind it. Dry fingers of heat reached out to claw my face, making my features flinch and my skin curdle. A hot flash, backed up by my sizzling hot flashback, plus the Washington heat brings me to the cusp of hallucination. My body temperature soars and even though it is almost dark, I think I see waves of hot air quivering above the sidewalk as we walk along the strip. I step over them as if they are puddles.
We are inspecting saloons, entering and standing in the doorways while we measure the sex appeal and weigh the potential embrace of each particular place. We receive long looks from people who wonder who we are and what we’re doing. But we don’t care. We are just “out drinking.”
We go out drinking as though it hasn’t gone out of style the way it has. We go out drinking like back in the fifties when we set out with that sole goal, that single purpose, in mind. Back then, we sometimes called it bar-hopping, because that’s what it was. We’d hit a place, have a drink, have a second, and stay only if we got a boost off the atmosphere. Otherwise we’d hop over to the next bar with a decent name above its door and try again. We did it for hours. It was an old-fashioned, 1950s way of bonding.
And bonding we are.
Joanne is flashing herself at Jeff, showing her stuff, and Jeff has finally begun to notice. Although thoroughly distraught and distracted at first, he becomes more centered as he downs more drinks. Ordering two drinks for each one of ours, and drinking twice as fast as we do, Jeff is both drowning his pain and surfing on the tidal waves of the alcohol he’s consuming.
By the time we hit the fifth bar, we are, of course, drunk.
Walking beside Max, entering saloons and sitting beside him, talking as a team with him to Joanne and Jeff, brushing against him accidentally, watching him jockey Jeff into confrontational discussions, feeling him operating at full capacity every minute, I realize that he is exactly the kind of trouble we used to crave years ago. Men like Max confirmed us—assured us that we were really players in the game. Now, moving around Georgetown with him, I can feel what Sukie wanted from Max—the possible conquest of a male supremacist. A home run with the bases loaded.
I am on my fourth vodka and tonic. Still slightly stoned when I started drinking, I am now far out in orbit and suddenly—in a hot flash—I see this scene from Sukie’s celestial perspective. It does not look good. Sukie would not be happy to see her biological husband, her handsome young lover and two of her best friends tanking up together in a raunchy tavern, each couple getting a contact high off the other, and all four players only one bounce away from bawdiness.
—What’s happening, Diana? You’re not even going to wait until you bury me?—Sukie’s spirit inquires inside the inner sanctum of my mind.
—Sukie. This is so complicated. It has to do with you. We’re all in a l
ot of pain.
—So was I, Diana. You’re not planning to sleep with Max are you?
—He wasn’t always your enemy, Sukie. You had some good times with him. We all did. Great times. Remember all our summers out at the beach when the kids were growing up?
Suddenly I wonder if I’m talking out loud.
“Why don’t we take a ride somewhere to cool off?” Jeff suggests, dispatching Sukie’s ghost from our party.
We are sitting in a dark wooden booth in a bar above a disco.
“Maybe down to Haines Point. Or wait. Have you seen the Vietnam Memorial yet?” he asks Joanne.
She shakes her head.
“Well, let’s go over there. You should see it.”
We go outside onto M Street again and then up to 33rd where we turn right. Here the first-floor windows of haughty Federal row houses flash long drapes like taunting tongues stuck out at trespassing tourists. Jeff’s battered Checker cab, parked directly in front of an enormous mansion, is a hulking insult to the insularity of the neighborhood. As soon as we’re inside the taxi, I feel Max’s presence expand and start to crowd me in the spacious back seat. I move further away but I can still feel his willfulness like a tent around me.
Then I embark upon a roll of hot flashes. They start coming closer and closer together, while growing longer and hotter, until they produce a sudden, white-hot insight: Sukie’s cerebral hemorrhage was the ultimate hot flash, a streaking sensation of roiling, boiling blood which raced up to her brain while her life flashed fast forward before her eyes. Perhaps death is the final hot flash. Perhaps death is life’s menopause.
I stare out the car window as Jeff drives along the Potomac River before swinging off onto the surprising broadness of Constitution Avenue. There he parks his cab and we all slide out on the curb side because the street has become a river of splashing headlights. Walking away from the white water of lights into the tree-studded darkness of the Mall, we can see no sign of the Vietnam Memorial. From where we are, the memorial—like the dead it honors—is hidden below us in the earth.
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