Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  At Christmastime, Marcus told his father he had to return to Boston Saturday morning to see Robin about the school play. In Boston, snow was coming on. He arrived bone-broken and askew with longing for the sensation—very like the assurance of being wanted—that had come when Sukie had undressed and let him hold her. He was dull with a sense of humiliation he couldn’t identify. He thought, She needs me. He was racked by astonishment as much as by desire. From the hotel, he called Sukie; she said she would come as soon as she could. He waited, and the moments seemed to him to lack walls, roofs, and floors. Never since had he experienced anticipation so violently.

  At four o’clock, Robin and Sukie arrived—together. Marcus told Robin, “Please go away,” and when Robin left, without a word, Marcus began to undress Sukie. In the silence, it was as if certain sounds that had been curtained by a rush of noise became audible. Sukie grew nervous. Marcus told her to hold still. She said, “You don’t know what you’re doing; this is creepy,” and began to cry.

  Marcus said, “Sukie, what did I do wrong?”

  “You don’t act as if you like me.”

  Red-faced and taut, Marcus assured her that he liked her, swore that he did; he swore it on his soul.

  Sukie blinked, then said submissively, “All right.”

  After that they made love.

  When Robin came back, Marcus went to the door, wrapped in a blanket, and said, “Give us five minutes and we’ll get dressed.”

  Robin said, “No, let me in. I won’t peek,” and he came in and sat on the foot of the bed. He leaned across Sukie’s ankles and talked rapidly—chattered about what an ugly town Boston was, how dreary winter was. Sukie and Marcus lay as quietly as corpses. Robin turned his head away while Sukie got dressed. (He’d said like a gym instructor, “It’s time we got going.”) Marcus remained in bed, propped against the headboard, the blanket up to his shoulders. Robin’s weight hurt his ankles. Stiff-necked with excitement, Robin said, “I’ll bring her back whenever I can.”

  Marcus returned to school and told himself that people were all alike. Sukie would soon change for him, as he had changed for Nanna’s sake. She would become a warm, responsive, trustworthy girl. He would help her and be strong. At the same time, he longed to escape from her. But he wanted her, too. He wrote Sukie twice a day. He was tired and could not sleep. He toppled into periods of nervous exhaustion and lay staring at the wall, drenched with sweat. He’d lock the door of his room at such times; he wanted no one to see him. Feelings that he could not put a name to, incomprehensible but powerful feelings, like abstract paintings—a blue one, a blue-and-black one, a gray one shot through with viridian—filled his head and chest. The recollection of the texture of the skin on Sukie’s back drove him from the lunch table to walk slack-jawed, both exalted and wretched, in the snow. He began to avoid his mind. (When he grew older, he found he could avoid his mind easily whenever he wanted except when trying to fall asleep; to quiet his mind then, he would drink two shots of brandy and take a Seconal, and wander around his bedroom until he entered a state of near idiocy; only then, when he fell on his bed, would he find unconsciousness within reach.)

  Sukie’s letters burned like dry ice; in them she complained of her classmates, described her feelings—“Everybody looks at me; I think I’m blossoming”—begged him to arrange with Robin to drive down to her school: “I’m going out of my mind. I’m suicidal. I’m so bored, Marco. I must see you. I love you.”

  He’d make arrangements to go with Robin to Boston to stay in Gamma Foster’s house on Saturday night, and then, Robin telling Gamma Foster he and Marcus were going to the movies, they’d drive to Connecticut, both boys sitting hunched forward as if to hurry the car on. Sometimes he felt Sukie’s presence was unpleasant and he would tell himself passionately that she was stubborn, insisted on being unlovable, did not care if she alienated him or not; she was spoiled. He watched her face always. He knew its lineaments. He saw apparitions in it, landscapes, the hues of flowers. When his will faltered, he saw it as something associated with pain, a bandage. Sometimes a mood would warm that porcelain-white face and him, and he would begin again the fall of falling in love. On his way to see her, not knowing what he would find, his heart and nerves went rackatty-clack like a half-empty train rushing through a countryside at night. He’d arrive and his eyes would fly to that face. (“Don’t, Pony. It makes me so nervous when you stare at me.”) If her face was trampled or muddied, he would grow distant and emotionless, like a doctor; he was anxious to help her, not to be bad for her. He tried to be a proper lover, like one in books, and he told her—remembering another moment when he had been unable to speak—that she was the sun and wind and clouds and a rosebush. Sukie brightened and said, “Oh, that’s lovely.” He continued with increasing sincerity, and compared her to the craziness of dreams, to a beach, to warm sand and the sun making you dizzy, and sand fleas making your legs twitch. She said, “I don’t think I like that. No, it’s nasty.” She looked uneasy. He said he hadn’t meant anything, a beach was a force of nature—he’d only meant to compare her to a force of nature.

  She was most peaceful when he was tired, half asleep (although in his pride he did not like admitting to her that he was tired). Then, sometimes, she’d touch him or smile in a warm way. It excited and exhilarated her when the three of them—Sukie, Robin, and Marcus—went out together in Robin’s car. Bars wouldn’t serve Sukie; in the car, Robin, Marcus, and Sukie passed a pint of bourbon back and forth. They drove on back roads, safe from observation in their world inside the car. They often went at ninety, the automobile swaying, with only the loosest connection to the road, the earth, to fixed locations. The air inside the car was dry and warmed by the heater and chilled by cold leaking in at the windows, and faintly visible with their breaths, and sweetish with the smell of whiskey. Sukie’s excitement affected Marcus as if she were a flag.

  She cried, “A ciggy-boo, I must have a ciggy-boo. Did you remember my Sen-Sen?” She said, “That school’s a tomb!”

  Robin said, “ ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.’ ”

  Sukie said, “I love you, Marco.”

  Outside the car, moonlight lay tremulously on the thin fields. Marcus said, “The world is coming to an end tonight.”

  Sukie said, “Don’t be gloomy. Let yourself go on the Happiness Swings.” Happiness Swings were the opposite of Bad Weeks. “It’s a Bad Week,” Sukie sometimes said.

  Marcus said, “I am on it.”

  But Sukie said, “No, you’re not.” She turned to Robin. “Isn’t Marcus difficult? He scares me.”

  Robin agreed. Marcus was awesome.

  Marcus didn’t see it. Robin’s tongue was more cutting than his—Robin said Gamma Foster had a face like the Bible. Sukie and Robin were less sentimental, less eager to please, too, than he was. “Do I seem to you abnormal? Maybe what bothers you is that I’m Jewish.”

  “But you’re not all Jewish,” Robin said.

  Sukie said, “It isn’t being Jewish that makes you so difficult.”

  Marcus was accustomed to women approving of him most when he was happy. “Oh, God, I’m happy!” he exclaimed. “You just don’t know. I used to think when I was a kid nothing would ever happen.”

  “All kids think that,” Robin said, one arm on Sukie’s shoulder.

  Sukie said, “I did. Do you want to hear a joke? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Abie. Abie who? A.B.C.” She giggled and leaned her head on Marcus’s shoulder, then on Robin’s.

  They stopped and walked barefoot in the snowy field, shouting and laughing. Marcus threw himself down on the snow and stretched his arms out and said, “I am ready for Easter.” Sukie circled, turned round and around in the field, her shadow hopping behind her, then in front of her. Marcus said, “She’s dancing with crows.”

  Robin went for a walk while Marcus and Sukie lay in the car, their breaths feathery, their eyes shining in the dark. Robin returned, and then they drove to the do
or of Sukie’s school. The girl Marcus held was muffled in a coat, was warm, and smelled faintly of gardenia soap. “Oh, Pony, I have to go back to the tomb. I love you.”

  Robin said, “Wait, Suke! Better have some Sen-Sen.”

  Sukie said, “Oops, stupid me!” Smiling secretively, she put her arms around Robin’s neck and Robin kissed her ear.

  On the way back to Boston, Marcus said, “I don’t like the way you kiss Sukie. I’d like to smash your teeth in.”

  “Look, Pony. She happens to be my cousin. I—”

  “Shut up! Shut the hell up!” After a minute or so, Marcus said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Redbreast. You know I’m crazy. I’m so much in love, you know.” He sat slouched in his seat, tired, nervous, in an agony of fatigue. The dark, now stale air in the car seemed to him a fit setting for himself.

  IN THE MOVIE, Jehane, after coming to understand that Oskar does not intend to divorce his wife, returns to her pensione, opens the door of the room, and steps inside without turning on the light. At first, she simply sits in the darkness; then she begins to sob, reaching into her purse on the bureau for a handkerchief to stuff between her lips to prevent herself from making a noise and disturbing the other tenants in the pensione. She falls on the floor and cries without a sound, accepting almost with relief the humiliation. She does not move, but continues to cry silently on the floor.

  Earlier in the movie, before she meets Oskar, she walks along the Via Condotti, past the store windows, the reflections, the things for sale. (The camera will be low, at waist height, because Marcus thinks one of the secrets of the beauty and credibility of Italian Renaissance frescoes is that the figures seem to be taller or on higher ground than we are and we have to look up at them; this helps persuade us of their reality, because we remain children and continue all our lives to crane our necks to see the expressions on the grownups’ faces.) And she will walk past a young man in sunglasses similar to hers; she will slightly hesitate, as if amused that he is wearing similar sunglasses, but then, because the young man does not smile at her, she hurries on in an access of memory of what she expects for herself, ending what Marcus calls a masked moment, like the one when Robin told him, “I don’t see why it matters in what way I take my pleasure. I don’t see that it matters in what way anyone takes his pleasure.” She prefers flight to self-knowledge. She careers on, grandiose and virginal. Between the Jehane of the Via Condotti and the Jehane of the pensione lies the death of the hardness of her self-regard.

  Oskar intervenes between the two Jehanes. Marcus says to him, “It is your second day in Rome. You have left your hotel and walked through the Villa Borghese. Trees and children. The Latin sense of design. Your wife hangs heavily on your arm; you walk a little too fast for her. You made a mistake marrying her. She asks questions: ‘What is that? What is that?’ And ‘that’ is only the water clock. Yesterday with her was dull. Today seems it will be dull, too. But you don’t show irritation; you are good-natured. Always. You are clean in the sense that you never rebuke yourself. You have a very fine sense of life. Do you understand?” Oskar nods, his face slipping into lines of ease, intensely good-natured and impenetrable; his face looks scrubbed. Marcus gazes at him and says, “Good.”

  He glances over Oskar’s shoulder at Liselotte, the Munich stripteaser who is to play Oskar-Willi’s wife. She sits in a canvas chair beneath a tree, in speckled light and shadow, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. Marcus thinks, Her tooth still hurts. Oh, does she feel self-pity! And he grows cold, froglike. He beckons to Whitehart. “Tell her just to play she is in a strange city. Tell her not to try to act. I don’t want to touch her mood.” Whitehart winks, and hurries off. Marcus stands, measuring the two realities of Liselotte with the fingers of his mind. Her real inexperience and nervousness, her attempt to deceive the camera and to appear not like a striptease artist from Munich, will become on film the unhappy manner of a middle-class lady whose manners are all at sea with her pretenses. Her heavy breasts will be the lure and misinformation that caught Oskar-Willi. (Marcus thinks with amusement of Oskar-Willi’s illusions, and how easily he is fooled.) The audience, Marcus hopes, will recognize in Liselotte’s two realities the same blur of identity that obscures the people they know.

  MARCUS TOOK refuge in principle (his determination strengthened by a Gary Cooper film; the theater was dark, like chaos—the images on the screen clear and large, light-filled) when his trying to figure out what he felt, or what Robin was like, or Sukie, led him to the admission that he was guessing, that he did not know. He went to the school doctor and asked for a sedative, giving as the reason that he was studying too hard. He told Sukie he couldn’t see her in Boston over Easter vacation. “Nanna’s come up from Florida. I owe it to her—I want to see her. It’s not that I don’t want to see you, but I owe it to her.”

  But then Sukie followed him to Scantuate with her mother, Robin, and Gamma Foster; Gamma Foster wanted to smell the lilacs and the sea, and sat all morning on an open porch, wrapped in a blanket, not reading, not sleeping. (She fell the following winter and broke her hip and became an invalid until her death four years later.) The children roosted in the light damp chill of an upstairs porch. The wicker couch creaked when Robin stretched out and laid his head in Sukie’s lap.

  Marcus stood up and said, “I want to go photographing at Miller’s Pond.”

  “What a dreary idea,” Robin said.

  “I don’t feel energetic,” Sukie said.

  Marcus looked at Sukie and saw a short, square-shouldered, moon-bodied girl. He bit his thumbnail. “I’m going,” he said.

  “All right, all right,” Robin said. “What a bore. Our master’s voice.”

  “Where was Moses when the lights went out?” Sukie asked, with a giggle.

  “If you don’t want to come, don’t!” Marcus shouted, holding to his principles like a monk to a cross, exorcising demons.

  “We’re coming. We’re coming.”

  He did not get back to Nanna’s in time for lunch, and Nanna complained he had given her no warning he would miss the meal: “I didn’t know if you were stricken with illness. Or perhaps in a highway accident.”

  He apologized—“I’m sorry. I was photographing. There wasn’t a phone”—but he wasn’t humble.

  “Please don’t do it again. You know how easily Cook is unsettled.”

  “Oh. Well, I’d better warn you I might miss lunch the next few days. I’ll be out photographing.” He was distracted by a sensation that he was being rude, yet he did not back down.

  The next evening, Nanna said dryly, “I do not want to monopolize your time, but I had hoped to see something of you during your spring vacation, because I thought I might send you to Europe this summer.”

  Marcus said, “Oh,” and stopped photographing, and told Sukie he was going to Europe.

  He went to Europe with Mrs. Tredwell, Sukie, and Robin; Robin arranged the party. Europe made Marcus uneasy; it was an old prostitute armed with devices to catch the eye and the absence of principles. He told himself that he must be careful not to turn into a shallow person. He wrote Nanna every day, and the salutation, “Dearest Nanna,” evoked in him a spasm of sorrow. Europe had the strangeness of a carnival on the edge of town under a night sky, the lights of the Ferris wheel lifting and falling, and the shouts of the exiles echoing from behind the rim of colored lights.

  “They made their cathedrals like movie theaters!” he protested. Robin said, “Voilà, Moses!” Mrs. Tredwell looked at Marcus curiously.

  Sukie complained he was avoiding her. He said, “But we’re with your mother. I’m like a guest—the laws of hospitality!” Sukie said, “I hate my mother. My mother doesn’t matter.” She said, “Oh, God, what am I going to do! You don’t want me anymore.” He took her into his arms. Robin was in the next room, arranging the day’s plans with Mrs. Tredwell. Marcus matched Sukie’s eagerness; the wickedness of the situation so worked upon his senses that he was startled by the pleasure. Afterward, he was a
shamed, and avoided looking at Sukie. Sukie said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “I have a cold.” He thought, Oh, God, I’m cuckoo. At lunch, he drank too much and desperately imitated the Europeans as animals—as terriers, as poodles, then as amorous cocker spaniels—for Mrs. Tredwell, who laughed. She used the baritone register of her voice and said warmly, “We’ve never particularly liked Jews in our family. You might call us anti-Semitic. But we’re all terribly fond of you.”

  The drunken seventeen-year-old Marcus clung to the moral nicety of the point that he must not allow the mother of the girl he slept with to be fond of him, and he became surly toward Mrs. Tredwell. “That’s an Irish compliment,” he said. “You’re more impressed with your own sentiment than with me.”

  I don’t like her, he assured himself. He told himself that he mustn’t be a whore. His thoughts were dark, astronomical. His judgments of himself and of Sukie and Robin and Mrs. Tredwell were jumbled, as if several movies were being shown at once on the same screen. On the way back to Avignon, while Robin drove the car and Mrs. Tredwell talked, Sukie in the back seat beside Marcus indulged herself in a skittish series of blandishments and displays and sidelong glances from some reservoir of erotic imagination. His nerves reacted in a strained and exaggerated way, like a child’s—everything was mythological and immense; it was as if his nerves and the world were new to him: Mrs. Tredwell was fascinated by him. “You seem so old for your age.” He scowled at Mrs. Tredwell. Later, he said, “Sukie, we have to straighten out.” Sukie said, “You get pleasure making me hate myself.” He said, “Why can’t you admire me when I’m trying to do the right thing?” Mrs. Tredwell and Robin were walking ahead of them in the vineyard they were visiting above the Rhone on an afternoon when the sky was as much white as blue. Sukie went pale and said, “You’re crazy. You’re sick. You’re really neurotic.”

  That evening, Robin asked Marcus why he was treating Sukie so badly. “It’s a matter of honor,” Marcus said. Robin blinked. “You really don’t make sense, Pony.” Marcus shouted at him, “You wouldn’t understand! You’re slimy.” Robin went white. “You’re self-destructive,” he said, and lit a cigarette.