by Glen Duncan
Now he wanted her to have his baby. He felt this too had been precipitated by the moon landing. Armstrong’s “mankind” had heightened everyone’s sense of species membership. That long look back at suddenly poignant Earth—“the Earth is a beautiful blue!”—evoking for Augustus geological time, dinosaurs, the systole and diastole of coming into being and passing away, had released in him the basic male seed-scattering imperative and a fascination with physical creation. He’d lain awake long after Selina had fallen asleep imagining her pregnant. It was revolting (a fetal version of himself in her womb, red-lit, claustrophobic, an eggy odor and warm blood feeding him the ghost flavors of her lunch) but beneath the revulsion were calm and certainty: this was what we did, why we were the envy of angels. The revelation matter-of-factly closed his adolescence and opened his manhood. It was a curious thrill to realize you were a man, that you could legitimately add your portion to the world’s clamor. Almost a disappointment, how easily you made the transition.
He wanted to tell her but couldn’t. She wasn’t allowing herself the idea of the future while Michael was still in Vietnam. Once he was home intact she could return to her journey away from him but while death hung over him she felt entitled to nothing. Being in love with Augustus was already a concussive wrong under which she staggered and crawled, sick with guilt half the time. Michael never wrote to her. Does he even know about us? Augustus asked. Oh yeah, she said. My mom’ll have poured it all over him like a liqueur. That’s why he doesn’t write me.
There had been two encounters with Selina’s parents. The first was accidental and brief. Selina and Augustus were on their way to a meeting of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and her parents were on their way to an evening show of Funny Girl. Selina’s father wrong-footed Augustus by shaking hands and saying it was a pleasure to meet him at last. Selina got them away but not before her father had invited them to dinner the following weekend. There’s no way, she said as they hurried down Broadway. It’s a scheme. We’re not going. But they did go. Augustus’s curiosity and her own compulsive combativeness made it irresistible. The evening, at the five-floor house in Gramercy Park (the official family seat—The Confected Mansion, as Selina called it—was an hour upstate) was surreally volatile. Oh, Mom you’ve given Ruthie the night off, Selina said, when a pretty Latina maid came to take their coats. What a shame! She and Augustus could’ve Lindy Hopped or sung the blues after dinner. Ruthie’s the regular maid, she told Augustus in an exaggerated aside, but she’s catastrophically negro. It would’ve been indelicate. Mom you didn’t fire her just so we could come to dinner did you? Selina’s mother, Meredith, a striking blonde in her mid-forties with Selina’s sly eyes and high cheekbones, lifted her chin and addressed Augustus across her daughter: Our housekeeper, Ruthie, has been off all week because her grandson’s ill with glandular fever. Darling you’re not going to succumb to predictability by making tonight unpleasant are you? Selina breezed away, saying I doubt tonight’ll need any help from me. Augustus entered the sitting room (modern Italian furniture presided over by an asymmetrical chandelier of buttery yellow orbs that pulsed as if with jovial awareness) wishing he’d had the sense to smoke a joint in preparation. Selina’s father, Jack, officiated at the room’s wet bar. Augustus, what’s your poison? He was a tall dark-eyed man whose close-cropped silver curls you could picture a laurel wreath on. Oh I guess bourbon, thanks, Augustus said, just ice. That was the last of the evening’s uncomplicated exchanges. Laughably benign remarks led in seconds to trouble, though Jack had a marvelous facility for defusing them with a joke or funny story. By dessert Selina was drunk and dangerous. Give up, Dad, she said. I already warned him you’d be charming. You’re wasting your time. Your baby girl’s banging a jigaboo and the entire Trent ancestry’s turning in its overornamented grave. You’re homicidal when you think about it so let’s not have charm, shall we? Augustus, half-drunk himself, felt the room fill with ironish energy. Meredith closed her eyes and clamped her jaws together. It was apparent to Augustus that despite their consumption Jack still glittered with sobriety. Selina got up from the table. I’m going to the Mario Bellini, she said. The Mario Bellini’s got my name on it. One of the elephantine red leather armchairs. She crossed the floor with immense high-heels concentration then collapsed into it and glared back at them all. Augustus felt the room revolving: Jack’s generous bourbons, white wine with the meal (tiny soufflés, a beetroot salad, sea bream with saffron sauce, profiteroles), port with the cheese and now a balloon of brandy. He had to stop drinking right now. Maybe Augustus would like to see the space stuff, Meredith said to her husband. Hon? Augustus had imagined there might be something like this, a quiet word. He glanced at Selina but she’d closed her eyes.
“The space stuff” was Jack’s collection of antique astronomical instruments housed on the top floor. I won’t give you any bullshit, Jack said to him when they were up there. You know the score. It’s not going to happen. Augustus had determined to say as little as possible. Jack leaned against a long table housing a dozen astrolabes. There were many other devices and instruments that did God only knew what, lots of glowing brass, iron, copper. You’re manifestly a man of quality, Jack said, then paused to light his and Augustus’s cigarettes. Not to mention physical glamour. Selina’s more trouble than any man should have to put up with but she’s got taste, she’s got the eye. Be that as it may you know it’s not going to happen. In the end it’s not going to happen. I want us to understand each other. Do we? Augustus wished he was leaning against something himself. He said: I think I understand you pretty clearly, Jack. That’s half your desired equation—maybe you should settle for that? Jack smiled, nodded, accepted all the relevant information was in. He looked around at the instruments. You interested in any of this shit? he asked Augustus. As a matter of fact I am, Augustus said, but I think it’s time we made tracks. Walking home, Selina threw up in the gutter. Augustus had to carry her up the building’s last two flights. That was six months ago.
“You’re an unbelievably beautiful woman,” he said to her as she leaned back into him and over her shoulder he watched a teenage girl who’d obviously only very recently got the knack of skating backward tentatively moving across the ice with a face of anxious concentration and delight in herself.
“Not without you,” Selina said. “Without you I’m a mean-faced miserable poisonous witch.”
“Not mean-faced.”
“Yeah well without me you’re an Oedipal train-wreck. A spooked dog snapping at the legs on Madison Avenue.”
“Lucky your legs came along.”
“Damn right.”
Her mood had darkened, he knew, the combination of affection and the laughing skaters saying the world was okay, the pleasure of having a cashmere scarf around her neck and thin suede gloves on her hands. She had to snap herself out of the good moments in case their price was Michael’s arms or legs or life. It made Augustus feel like a lousy Satanic tempter. In moments of clarity he wished Michael would just step on a mine and have done with it. It would put an end to this never being able to enjoy anything cleanly, and solve the problem of having to deal with him when the war was over. It’s a fucking ménage à trois, Augustus had complained to Harry, who in the manner of bartenders through history soaked up his customers’ traumas and triumphs—like God, Selina said, but without the judgment. I swear one day I’m going to go down on her and find he’s there already, in full fucking combat uniform. Whatever their fights were ostensibly about they were always somewhat about (they’d uppercased it) the Meaning Of Michael, or MOM for short. Give me a break, Augustus had said. I’m the sin your brother won’t be able to forgive, soiling yourself with a nigger. Otherwise he’ll have you for the rest of his life, assuming he doesn’t get his head blown off. This last remark had been purely to force her to imagine the violence of it. That day the Chappaquiddick story had broken and bled out, making everyone feel dismal. Yeah, she said, you’re right. So what? We’re all someone’s love for some
fucked-up reason. You think you’re immune? You’re hilarious, getting a hard-on every time your mother mispronounces a word in front of me. Thank Christ she’s not Jewish. You’d have me in a fucking SS uniform.
He loved her for cutting to the core. Underneath every fight between them was the deeper fight to be the best at telling the truth. Invariably the fights segued into heightened sex, staring at each other with what to an observer would’ve looked like focused hatred but was both of them trying to burn themselves out in each other, without success. Harry said to Augustus: You guys are a grand passion, man. You know how rare that is? I’m here and I can see it, people want to get close enough to catch a bit of that heat from you. It’s beautiful. Most bizarrely, Augustus had begun to see that his mother and Cardillo had something of the same heat, drew people the same way. We can see everything, Selina said, if we’re willing to look. Not that most of us are willing. You can tell with kids from infancy: some have to look, others have to look away. The more you look and see the colder you get. Artists with big eyes have small hearts and vice versa. She joked about the great injustice of her having no artistic talent. If you take the actual writing out of the equation I’m probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. She’d once started a novel, soon stalled, defeated not by how little she could see but how much. Art lied by omission, she said, got its glowing portion by ignoring the whole. What, so only God should write novels? someone at Harry’s asked. Novel, singular, Selina said. There’s only one and He’s already written it. You’re reading it with every breath. The rest’s just noble beautiful fraud. Obviously this was to stir the crowd, half of whom were aspiring artists of one stripe or another. The real explanation was that she’d seen what literary greatness would require, knew she didn’t have it and, since nothing but greatness would do, stopped right there.
They wandered away from the rink, back out onto Fifth Avenue where three horse-drawn carriages stood waiting for tourists. Look at horses for Christ’s sake, Cardillo had said. Look at horses and tell me there’s no God. Listen, Augustus had replied once, quietly, while his mother’s shoulders visibly tightened, listen to me, will you for just a few moments? There’s this thing called The Design Argument, okay? Now every time you come out with some crap about horses or lions or fucking chimps you’re espousing—claiming, making this argument…. In the new generosity of his latent fatherhood Augustus felt sorry for the restaurateur. He surprised himself by thinking he ought to be kinder to the man who so crazily loved his mother, who had in effect taken his probably soon to be difficult mother off his hands. It was only thinking this that he realized his own loyalty had shifted: he loved Selina more than he loved his mother. If he could put only one of them in the lifeboat he’d let his mother drown. This was visceral and elating but carried the imprimatur of his own mortality, of the reassuring ephemerality of everything, in fact. He glanced at Selina, the hard little face and pale blond hair, felt renewed excitement at her imperfections, everything from her fucked-up love affair with Michael to the misangled canine tooth that gave her a slight sneer in repose. He knew he’d remember this moment for the rest of his life: the big steaming horses and the buzz of Christmas, the long avenue and subdued sentience of the park, her chilled face and force field of trouble and hunger.
“What?” Selina asked, seeing his look.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing you don’t already know.”
Which was enough, because she did know, could see it in his face. He watched her absorb it as if swallowing a drop of something delicious. She had to look away, squeeze his hand. Though she craved—demanded, if she was truthful—love from the world getting it at random moments in pure portions left her rosy with shame. It lifted her mood again.
There had been another march yesterday and the sparkling sidewalk was littered with bits of discarded banners and leaflets. Augustus wondered what energy he’d have for protesting the war if Selina dropped it. They’d started the year with a trip to Washington to decry Nixon’s inauguration and ended it with a wrecking raid on the Army and Air Force’s ROTC offices. They’d been tear-gassed at Fort Dix when they’d gone out there to support the thirty-eight soldiers under political arrest and narrowly missed arrest themselves in the Weathermen’s Chicago action. Governor Reagan in California was calling for the cessation of federal funding to “rioting students.” Augustus had been first courted then spurned as a white-lovin’ chickenshit by the Black Panthers when he declined membership on the grounds that it was too late for him to start feeling black brotherhood. Go look in the mirror, asshole, Ronnie said. You think some white pig’s gonna ask you if you feel black brotherhood before he shoots your fuckin knees out?
“We’re not going to this thing tonight, right?” Augustus said, as one of the horses tossed its head and made its harness bells jingle. A little sound brought Switzerland or the steppes with such immediacy you thought maybe you’d had a past life.
“God no. You don’t want to, do you?”
“I don’t have the energy.”
“Neither do I.”
There was a “freak-in” in the Loeb student building scheduled for that night. Or possibly a “happening”; the nomenclature hadn’t settled. Through the year these things had made the news under the umbrella of the antiwar movement, though by now neither Selina nor Augustus saw them as anything more than a chance to get wasted and fuck people you wouldn’t normally fuck. Vietnam’s gift to the Dumb and the Ugly, she’d labeled them.
“Let’s go get a drink,” she said. “Couldn’t you use a drink right now?”
“Sure. Harry’s?”
“No, let’s go somewhere else. I’m sick of Harry’s.”
They ended up in a bar on East 40th Street, a long low-ceilinged place with leatherette booths and despite the low ceiling two large chandeliers. Selina was in a phase of never knowing what she wanted to drink, ordered a Long Island Iced Tea. Augustus had a scotch on the rocks. There was a copy of the day’s New York Times on the table open at the sports. Sports near the back so that after you waded through all the reasons for despair there was something to imply continuity and optimism. Athletes in motion had moral innocence. The year before, Cardillo had brought in a color TV for the Mexico Games and Augustus had discovered the therapeutic relief of dissolving into the runner’s purity of purpose. The prelapsarian state would’ve been like that, undivided, eternally in the moment. It was like the Fall all over again when they crossed the finish line and their personalities flooded back in and they started crying and giving interviews. He began leafing through the broadsheet, not really reading anything.
“When I was a kid,” Selina said, “I had this obsession with being kind to animals.”
“You? No.”
“It wasn’t noble, just an extension of superstition, like not stepping on the sidewalk cracks. Anyway one day in the bathroom I stepped on an ant.”
In the time it had taken them to come in here, order a drink and sit down it had gone dark outside. Suddenly the bar was a cozy secret haven.