“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go stand by my buddy,” Jeff says, walking purposefully ahead of us. “I mean his name.”
Silently we follow him past a high podium where the Book of the Dead, protected by a plastic shield, is open to its alphabetical list of Americans who died in Vietnam. An elderly couple is methodically consulting the Book as if it were the Yellow Pages. The short, shapeless, gray-haired woman is wearing a catalogue-style cotton outfit—a blouse tucked into the elasticized waist of matching slacks. She is from the Midwest—dressed by Monkey Ward with makeup from Maybelline. Although she is clutching a collection of tote bags, a camera and road maps, the paraphernalia of tourism does not detract from her dignity. She and her tall, thin, farm-tanned husband have clearly traveled to Washington as the parents of a dead soldier.
The government, pressured by a small group of veterans, had finally raised this memorial to acknowledge their loss. Something about the couple suggests that they have taken a great deal of friendly fire during their time—even before their country took their son.
Clearly agitated, Jeff leads us past the weekend tourists milling around near the bronze statue of three Vietnam vets that traditionalists insisted be placed near the unconventional, black granite memorial wall. He is moving steadily deeper into the earth as the slope of land sharpens and the wall bearing the names of the dead grows higher beside us. We descend into a darkness illuminated only by low-set spotlights. Suddenly I feel as if I am inside a tunnel, a tunnel like the war, a tunnel like the past leading up to this particular present. The L-shaped memorial directs attention out toward the Washington Monument on one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. The wall points at the places where peace marchers met to protest the war.
“This is it,” Jeff says, suddenly stopping near the right angle where the wall turns eastward.
He moves forward to scan the long list of names engraved in the granite, seeking the friend he’d lost first in Vietnam and now in the crowded inventory of dead soldiers.
“This is the biggest fucking tombstone in the world,” Jeff says, squinting as he tries to read the names stacked like corpses one atop the other. “Fifty-eight thousand dead souls. It always takes me a while to find him.”
Finally, Jeff reaches out to touch the name of his friend with flat fingertips. We wait. After a few seconds he steps back and rejoins us. “But the real weirdness is that—now my time in Vietnam is starting to look good compared to what came after.”
That is silencing. How could Vietnam seem preferable to anything else? But in one sense I can understand: it is not the war that vets miss, but the camaraderie of fighting together. By now, both participants and protesters find their experiences sweetened by the kiss of time. Resisters and soldiers alike crave the crowded past like aging junkies. The decade between 1965 and 1975 bottled the best years of our lives—as we slipped from our thirties into our forties—making everything that followed feel like epilogue.
And who would not feel nostalgia for a past when people felt linked and loved, when our togetherness was like a lovely summer day full of sweetness? The war years were busy years when we were taking care of babies, testing the current, challenging the old order, ricocheting inside the security of our marriages—rebelling and relapsing as regularly as ocean waves—within our relationships. We never limped until our spirits were broken.
I turn and look at the black wall which some people call the healing memorial. Camus wanted to be able to love his country and justice too. Same with me. We all feel that our generation didn’t get a chance to make any positive political contributions because we were totally occupied with just trying to stop the madness.
Some of us went abroad to do good. Back in the fifties, two of our Barbaras drove one of Franco’s prisoners out of Spain under a blanket in the backseat of a rented car. Margaret lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua for twenty-three years before coming home to discover that the INS didn’t want to grant her citizenship again and wouldn’t even give her a green card. Elizabeth is still writing about Cambodia, Elsie is in the South African underground and Carla is working with the Sendero Luminoso.
For years, Perdita received grateful telephone calls from Algerian men whose names she didn’t recognize. They would provide detailed accounts of experiences they’d shared with her when she was nursing wounded guerrillas in the mountains near Algiers. But last Christmas, Perdita suddenly realized that these men who telephoned her had simply forgotten their “war names”—their revolutionary aliases—the only ones by which she knew them. She only remembered who they used to be and they only knew who they were now. She said she’d sent this message on a Christmas card to Sukie for her modern metaphor file.
Jeff’s blond hair is gleaming in the soft spotlights and his face is illuminated both from within and without. Other tourists are making wide detours around us, courteously not walking between Jeff and his patch of wall. The rest of us stand in bereaved silence as we stare at the names of the dead. A line from Faulkner flits through my mind. The past isn’t dead, he said, it isn’t even past.
We start walking again. But as we approach the end of the wall, where the names of the last Americans to die in Vietnam are engraved, we see the couple who had been consulting the Book of the Dead. By now they have found the name they were seeking and are taping a small American flag, a red plastic rose and a folded paper—clearly a letter—beside the name. Standing in the shadows, we watch them affix their message.
Suddenly, Jeff makes a deep, guttural noise that rises like a groan from the dead. Then he turns and begins running into the darkness.
“Hey,” Max calls, starting after him.
Joanne and I follow. It is too dark to see the ground we cover as we move farther away from the Memorial. Dimly I make out the shape of the two men near a distant tree and as we approach we hear Jeff being violently sick. He is doubled over, leaning against the trunk. His body is lurching in rhythm with the spasmodic retchings that have begun to convulse him and he seems near collapse.
Max is holding him.
Max is keeping Jeff on his feet, supporting his weight, while Jeff, totally out of control, is vomiting both on the ground and on Max, retching from the dope and the liquor and the struggle with his fish and Sukie’s death and the memorial and the parents leaving a letter to their dead son and the war and the people who went and the ones who stayed home and for himself and his life. And the longtime husband of the woman he had loved holds his head as tenderly as a father supporting a child over a toilet basin, one hand pressed to Jeff’s forehead to comfort, as much as cradle, him while he is being sick.
I feel somehow as if we are watching a scene we shouldn’t see, so I take Joanne’s hand and walk her back toward Constitution Avenue, where we find Jeff’s cab and lean against its hood while we wait for the men.
Eventually they materialize out of the darkness.
Max is walking in front of Jeff. He is bare-chested but carrying nothing so I assume he threw away his shirt. He looks handsome wearing only jeans and walking through the fast flashes of lights flung at him from speeding cars. After a while I see the hot flash of his cigarette lighter in the darkness as they approach us.
Jeff seems almost shriveled as he hugs the shadows while unlocking the car doors. When we get inside the taxi we can all smell the odor of vomit still clinging to both men. Jeff pulls out of the parking place and makes a U-turn in the middle of Constitution Avenue.
“Want to hear something crazy?” he says tersely. “When you came over to my place before, I had a Bruce Springsteen tape on and I was listening to his lines about throwing up after he strafed his old high school from a B-52. I think that’s maybe what made me barf.”
No one speaks until we’re back in Georgetown. Jeff double-parks near Max’s car.
“What about the manuscript?” Max asks.
“I’m going to take care of that,” Joanne says softly, but firmly, from the front seat. “Jeff and I are going out to get coffee some
where and talk about it a little more. I’ll get home under my own steam later. Don’t worry about the manuscript, Max. I’ll take care of everything.”
I begin getting out of the cab, but Max is still seated, watching Joanne anxiously.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “She’ll take care of it.”
Reluctantly, Max gets out of the cab and transfers us back into his own car. Then he drives me to Sukie’s house in total, uninterrupted silence.
He doesn’t even say good night.
I don’t mind. In what is fast becoming a habit, as soon as I’m ensconced in Sukie’s room, I strip off my clothes, randomly select another portion of her journal, prop up the pillows and get into bed to begin reading again.
CHAPTER 17
SEPTEMBER 1984
I have a new doctor. Her name is Dr. Annie Austen. I met her on the bus. Her office is near the zoo and she was sitting behind me when I started to cry. She thinks she can help me. She is going to let me run a tab. When I asked her why, she just smiled. I have to go to her office first thing every morning to plan out my day. I must attend one or two AA meetings, play tennis for at least an hour in the morning or afternoon, put in four hours of writing (articles only, fiction’s too scary at the moment, although she thinks I should start a funny novel about a woman like me who looks for the perfect act of revenge against her unfaithful husband), and have dinner with some friend who might like or need my company.
“Don’t you have any homework, David?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Just a little Spanish.”
“You want to play some Ping-Pong?”
This is the AA Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
No matter how hard I try, I can not memorize the AA Serenity Prayer. I copied it down in the pink floral notebook that I carry in my purse all day and keep beside my bed at night, but I still can’t learn it. I can remember some of the AA slogans, although I am also unable to recall the twelve steps, or the twelve traditions, that bind the group together. I know they say, “A day at a time,” “Turning it over,” and “Letting God.”
At one AA meeting, a woman spoke with flat matter-of-factness: “When I’m alone at night,” she said, “my favorite hotlines are AA and something called FACT, which is a family counseling group.”
Ah. A slight shiver slides through me. So other people have favorite hotlines for when they feel suicidal. That’s how they survive those black hours when the city is asleep and there is nowhere to go and no one to telephone for help to get through the night.
I wonder if there is an 800 number for God.
Sometimes I go to AA meetings just to feel the fellowship of decent strangers struggling to survive. Occasionally I drop into the basement of a church on Rhode Island A venue for their noon brown-bag lunch meeting. It is warming to hear other addictive personalities speaking about their pain and their plans and their loyalty to this program. Sometimes I take a drink before I go, but either way I always sob softly when the members clasp hands at the end and say the Lord’s Prayer. That is still a very beautiful and moving poem to me. Afterwards I like to have coffee with some of the eager, friendly people.
Once I met a handsome man at an AA meeting—well, not met him exactly, but noticed him noticing me. Before, when I saw such a man, I simply assumed we would smile and chat and then go out for a drink to some dark bar. Now I was stymied. He, however, came over to me while I was emptying my ashtray.
“Do you like Häagen-Dazs ice cream?” he asked.
I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.
Sometimes when my children write me letters, they forget to put a comma between the word “love” and their signatures. Perhaps they don’t forget. Perhaps they’re saying, “Love me!!” But I do. I have always loved both of them according to their needs.
Possible titles for a spoof: Dirty Linen, Second Helpings, Bad Connections, Split Ends.
Margaret from up the block called and wants to fix me up with some shrink friend of hers who saw me down at the tennis courts. His name? Norman Naylor. I didn’t believe it.
Just last month I started having a few dinner dates. Wanting to look svelte, I would fast all day so my stomach would be completely flat beneath my black velour dress. Luckily, anticipation always dims my appetite and late in the afternoon I walk around the house hugging memories of lovely dinners I’ve eaten in elegant restaurants, warmed by a velvet ambience and serenaded by a soft chorus of stylish voices.
I remember back to the mid-fifties when I was flying for Delta and dating a lot, going out for expensive dinners that were sexual preludes played to the tune of sumptuous foods that left languorous tastes upon the tongue like a lingering melody while we sipped a last glass of wine and anticipated passion. Back then, of course, the last course was always intercourse—part of the dinner. I can also remember sipping slow cocktails afterwards in dark corners of hotel bars, while I knitted a new mood around us, crocheting postcoital intimacy into a shawl for our shoulders.
But the realities of my so-called dates with so-called suitable men now are completely different. Restaurant dinners are totally without romance. People eat in dark ethnic dens that serve Ethiopian peanut-butter sauces in which to dip raw, damp-tasting bread. Everything seems austere again. Meals are no longer extravagant gestures, silent but passionate promises; now they are exercises in avoiding excesses. My dinner companions pay practical attention to the economics and logistical details of eating, rather than elaborating upon any meanings. These evenings are profoundly disappointing to me, although I try not to expect too much.
Actually, I only accept these invitations because Dr. Annie Austen wants me to. I can’t really make myself care much anymore. Now I just wear some old silk blouse tucked into my faded, quite-tight jeans. I top it off with my fur jacket, which I no longer dare wear over a dress anymore. My tired fur jacket and worn-out cowboy boots serve me as a memo about changing times and my new life-style.
How sad it is. How shabby.
Lately I have begun to yearn for the smell of garlic and onion on my hands once more. I want to brown bits of beef in olive oil, turning them over like dice, again and again, before stewing them slowly in red wine alongside plump yellow carrots and new potatoes whose thin spring jackets seem too skimpy to keep them warm. I can remember all the times I resented going to one grocery for a superior steak and to another for the most verdant vegetables. I remember past impatience standing in line to buy pastries at Avignon Frères, liking the thought of a French conclusion to dinner, but disliking the inconveniences of marketing. I remember the first time I ever pressed the butcher’s call button at the supermarket to ask for a special cut of meat. That made me feel so matronly I never did it again.
Now she’s put me on Antabuse. This is getting serious. This is a whole different trip altogether.
MAY 20, 1984
I’ve met a man. He picked me up. Not in the old way, but in a taxi. Ha ha. He was the cabbie and he liked how I smelled because I had vanilla smeared all over me on account of the Antabuse. He said I smelled like his favorite kind of cookie, that I smelled good enough to eat. Ha ha.
His name is Jeff Conroy and he’s thirty-five, handsome and enormously sweet. He took me out for lunch at Clyde’s and then asked me over to his place. He said he lived right across the street. He did. I did. We did.
But not that fast. First we had omelets in Clyde’s mirror room where the light is a real presence, like some rowdy drunk who sits down at your table to make trouble. The sunshine comes pouring through the skylight and then splashes up against the mirrors that toss it back and forth across the room like white water.
It was too bright in there for me. I could actually feel the imperfections, the impurities, in my complexion, growing larger as we sat there. I thought people could see it happen, like you think you can hear corn growing. But
Jeff didn’t seem to notice anything. He kept smiling at me like I was lovely, like I was maybe Anouk Aimée in A Man and a Woman.
“So. You’re in AA,” he said. “What got you into so much trouble?”
I told him. I gave him the Garvin’s Laugh-Inn scenario.
He laughed and told me about two women he’d gone with who’d made scenes like that with him. Beautiful women, ugly scenes, he said. But he couldn’t understand why women never learn that husbands don’t have the heart for big scenes. Lovers have to handle them, but they’re too heavy for husbands. He said men get married just to avoid having scenes like that in public.
“Were you sleeping around right before it happened?” he asked me.
I was stunned.
“Around where? I mean when? When do you mean?”
So he dropped it.
“What do you plan to do now?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got a new shrink. A woman. She’s great. She doesn’t jerk me around. She’s more like a teacher. She’s teaching me a lot.”
“I bet you’re teaching her a few things, too.”
Then that sweet smile. Wonderfully white squarish teeth that look super strong, like he could chew glass or something.
“So what’s your story?” I asked him.
He said he’d been in Vietnam, gone back to graduate school, wanted to get married and have five kids. He wanted to name them Ricki, Rory, Robin, Randy and Arthur. The first four names could cover either boys or girls. Even crazier, he meant it.
That hurt my feelings. For the first time I felt a bit barren and bitter. Out of it.
Lunch didn’t take long because he didn’t order anything to drink either. I think he was trying to be helpful. So afterwards we walked across the street to his studio, which is a second-floor walkup right on M Street in the center of the universe.
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