Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Well, take care of yourself, Macklin,” Mrs. Stahl said, frowning and serious, as though she wasn’t sure she should trust Mack with the job.

  “You too,” Mack said, his head bobbing.

  When they shut the door behind them, Mack sat down, relieved. He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, feeling the ache, the pull in his muscles. On the street, the Stahls seemed to confer for a moment, then turned north, toward Fifty-third Street.

  Mack ordered another beer. He was thinking of Annie, of how energetic, how unselfconscious she was. Sometimes he would cue her lines in one of the student productions she acted in. His reading was always embarrassed and mechanical. But Annie would respond with stage-level commitment: passionate, amused, weepy, thoughtful—whatever was required to be the exact person in the exact moment she was pretending to live. It had astonished Mack, turned him on.

  Mrs. Stahl looked a little like her daughter. And her frowning face had reminded him of his mother’s, of the frown that made a curved vertical crease, like the print of a sharp thumbnail, between her dark eyebrows whenever she looked at him. Yesterday she had asked him what time he was leaving, and when he’d been vague, when he’d said there might be some guys driving back, that very frown had appeared.

  “So you didn’t get a round-trip ticket?” she asked. They’d sent him a check to cover the airfare for the holiday.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  “Well, why not, darling? That’s what it was for.”

  He smiled at her. “Because, Mom, I didn’t know if I’d be flying back,” he said. The frown had already vanished; she had capitulated before he’d even begun to speak.

  It was almost ten when he got to Jimmy’s, a dark bar formed of two adjoining rooms behind a double storefront on Fifty-fifty. It was as close to a student hangout as the University of Chicago had, except it was graduate students, some well into their thirties, and hangers-on who came here—people who should have left Hyde Park long before but hadn’t, people still working every now and then on their theses, people who had part-time jobs in bookstores or bars, who were disillusioned teachers, or worked for Legal Aid or poverty programs, or made music or art that didn’t sell. The mismatched tables were randomly placed, perpetually pushed around by customers forming parties. The floor was bare wood, worn. The bartender for the most part drew big glasses and pitchers of beer, with the occasional shot of whiskey. Mack went up and stood at the bar. He ordered another beer. The bartender asked to see his ID.

  While he was looking at it, the big man next to Mack leaned toward him. “Be grateful, kid,” he said. “When they stop carding you, it’s all over. Easy pussy, for instance. It’s all over. Sleeping through the night without getting up two or three times to piss. Eating without gaining weight.”

  “All that good stuff,” the bartender said to the man as he pushed Mack’s ID back across the bar and turned to draw the beer.

  “Damn straight,” the man said. He set his glass down, hard. “You a student?” he asked Mack.

  Mack said yes, and the man was off. He’d gone downstate, he said. Not U of C. Basketball scholarship.

  Mack barely responded, a polite noise.

  The guy explained his high school career, said that he’d been an all-state player eighteen years before. He described his specialty, a fadeaway jump shot. “It was like I was floating backward, you know what I mean? Like I was flying, but in reverse.”

  Mack nodded. The man must have been very good-looking once, but everything in his face now was too thick, puffy and coarse.

  “And do you know, that year, on that all-state team, there were a total, a total, of three black guys? Three black guys from the city of Chicago. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Mack turned away slightly—he could tell, suddenly, where this was heading—but the big man leaned forward. He took up the little distance Mack had created between them. “That’ll never happen again. It’s a black man’s game now. Within ten years, I promise you, there won’t be a white guy in the NBA. Playing in the NBA. And you want to know why?” He burped, and his hand rose delicately in a halfhearted gesture that suggested that if he’d been sober, he would have covered his mouth prettily. “They’re better than we are. That’s the truth. They’re better. Genetically.”

  The bartender had moved again at this last. He caught Mack’s eye from halfway down the bar and shook his head.

  “Stan, my man, give it a rest,” he called.

  The big man turned, perplexed. “It’s the truth,” he said, once his gaze found the bartender. His voice was petulant.

  The bartender shrugged. “Give it a rest anyway. It’s boring.”

  There was a short pause, and Stan laughed, with a forced good nature. Then he leaned forward across the bar. “That’s because you don’t care. You don’t care about basketball. You’re short anyway. A short guy. But I care, and my friend here”—he reached out and rested his hand on Mack’s shoulder—“he cares too.”

  The bartender came down and stood in front of them. “Let me put it this way,” he said quietly. “I’ll give you a free beer if you shut up about the black race. This isn’t a good place for this kind of public discussion, see?”

  “I get you,” Stan said. “I understand exactly what you mean.” And he waited with a child’s attentive eagerness as the bartender drew him another beer. “A done deal,” he said, and scooped the bear toward him.

  But almost as soon as the bartender moved away, he started up again, comparing the game as it had been played in his day with the game now. Mack looked around the room, hoping for a familiar face, a way to excuse himself.

  The man was relentless. Black people moved differently, jumped differently, used their bodies differently. It was undeniable. It had changed the sport completely. Yet, he revealed to Mack, no one would talk about this. Except him. Not the newspapers, not TV. “Lookit even this guy.” He gestured toward the bartender. “A little guy like that, what does he know? But you still can’t talk about it. Can’t bring it up. Can’t mention it. But I do. I do.” He was nearly whispering. “Because you know and I know: the truth. I mean, I’m not saying anything bad about the colored. I’m saying they’re good. I’m actually saying they’re better. Better than we are. Why should that bother anybody?”

  “You’re saying they’re different,” Mack said.

  The man’s face eased into a big, grateful smile. “Right. That’s what I’m saying. They are different. They are different.”

  “Kind of, like, less human.”

  Now he frowned. He was very thoughtful. “Now there might, there might be an element of truth to that. Because, for instance, did you see that Hustler, that Hustler magazine with the African guy? with his dick, you know … ?” His face was serious, intense, and his big hands made a complicated circling motion in the air.

  “Afraid not,” Mack said.

  “It was tied in a knot. His dick. It was so fucking huge he had to tie it in a knot. I saw it!” His voice had risen with enthusiasm.

  “In a reputable magazine.”

  “Right. Now, you won’t see a white guy with his dick tied in a knot. I guarantee you that much.”

  From farther down the bar Mack saw the bartender’s head lift from a chore, his eyebrows pull together. He began to move in their direction.

  “But you might see a white guy with his head up his ass,” Mack said pleasantly, smiling.

  He watched as awareness slowly dawned through the smog of alcohol in the man’s heavy face. He felt a thrill of fear, of adrenaline, as it turned ugly and angry.

  The big man straightened. “You want to say that again?”

  Mack turned so he was directly facing him. He said slowly and carefully, a little louder this time, “You might see a white guy with his head up his ass, though.”

  The bartender was right there quickly, his upper body lurched across the bar in one move, grabbing Stan’s arm before his slowed reflexes allowed him the punch.

  Mack had stepped ba
ck, grinning, happy. He was nearly dancing in his excitement as the two of them struggled. “Hey, okay,” he said. He laughed. “It’s okay now.” He lifted his beer glass above his head.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look here!” And carefully and slowly he poured the beer out onto himself, a sheet falling onto his hair, down his shirt.

  After a moment’s pause, the big man’s arms relaxed, dropped to the bar. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. He began to laugh. “I’ll be goddamned.” And then the bartender laughed, too, and slid back onto his side of the bar; and those nearest the bar in the room turned and saw Mack dripping, grinning, in a spreading puddle, and they all began to laugh.

  When he got home, everyone was in bed. Drunk, stinking of beer, he washed his face in the first-floor lavatory and took a long, gratifying piss. He left his shoes and socks there, carefully lined up under the sink. He turned the lights off behind him before he tiptoed up the stairs. He congratulated himself on his precision, his thoroughness.

  For a moment in his room, he stood still. He imagined himself getting undressed before he went to bed, but it seemed like a lengthy and a complicated task; so he slid, fully clothed, under the covers. His legs in their damp trousers were tired and sore. His bare feet felt chilled at first from the cold of the stairs on the way up, from the icy sheets; but he concentrated on skating, on the memory of it, of that rhythmic alternation, and they slowly warmed up. It was all he thought of—that motion, over and over—as he dropped quickly into a heavy, drunken sleep.

  He would go back, he told his mother the next day. He would, in a couple of days. He just needed some time to sort things out. Things hadn’t been so good at school. He’d been having some real problems with work; he wasn’t happy. But he would go back. No one would notice his absence for a few days.

  In the daytime he stayed up in his room, sleeping, or listening to music, or reading. Late in the afternoon, before his father got home, he went out: sometimes to a movie, or to Rob McKinnock’s apartment—he was a senior at the U of C—or to a bar or restaurant. He tried to stay out until midnight or so, when they’d all be in bed. When he did see his father, David was silent, but Mack had the sense of being watched. He knew that his mother had spoken up on his behalf, that she’d told his father just to wait a bit, to allow Mack some time. The question was only how long he had.

  The truth was, Mack had barely gone to school this fall. He’d met with his adviser, he’d registered, signed up for the requisite courses. He’d even gone to the first few weeks of classes. But then he’d stopped.

  He’d slept a good deal. Three or four times he’d seen a shrink, but the man seemed stupid to Mack, not as bright as he was, and what was the point of that? He sat or walked along the river a fair amount until the weather got too cold. He’d gotten drunk or stoned nearly every night. He’d been thrown out of the Bick, out of Hazens and the Casablanca. He’d written long letters he didn’t mail to a girl he’d been in love with earlier.

  His roommate was gone nearly every weekend, campaigning for Humphrey in Maine and New Hampshire or western Massachusetts, and those were the worst times for Mack: the empty, silent room, the liquor bottles lined up on the mantel. He played Ray Charles endlessly. He read, almost never anything connected with school. He read The Sound and the Fury. He read Camus. He read David Cooper and R. D. Laing and Philip Slater. He read Sylvia Plath and the New Testament. When he got so drunk that the lines blurred, he would shower and go out for coffee or a movie. Occasionally he found someone to go with him.

  This long slide had begun in the summer. He’d decided not to go to Chicago. To stay in Boston instead and do community work in North Cambridge. He signed up to live in a group house in Somerville with seven other students involved in the community or political action. Margaret was one of them. When he met her she was standing in a bandanna-print bikini and a faded blue work shirt in the messy kitchen, making French toast amid a lot of vanilla-scented smoke. She turned to face him, squinting through the perfumed clouds, and he saw she had freckles everywhere—all over her face, her chest, her flat, tanned belly, her slightly sunburned kneecaps. She was laughing, and her long red hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. There was nothing about her that Mack didn’t like.

  They were lovers for almost a week. Mack moved his things into her room and the two of them stayed there, with the door locked, for hours in the late afternoon and evening. They’d get up in the middle of the night and go for a walk down the deserted, black, treeless streets, bumping into each other in their fatigue. They’d point out absurdities to each other: an ornate iron gate attached to a chain-link fence, a madonna in a blue-painted shell in someone’s littered front yard. “A bandshell, with a one-woman orchestra,” Margaret offered.

  “Or a censored version of The Birth of Venus,” he said.

  They’d shop in the all-night store in Union Square, buying ice cream fudge sauce, cherries, lime soda; and come home and make a sugary meal, trying to suppress their giggles so they wouldn’t wake the others.

  Mack had never been so happy. It was like being stoned all the time. Margaret was skinny and strong, with tiny breasts, all upturned nipple. Her favorite position was squatting on him, her feet planted next to his rib cage, her bony freckled knees rising so he could grip them and rock her with his motion. He called her his jockey; he told her he loved her.

  She was an artist. She drew him over and over in those few days, naked, sleeping. She drew his cock limp, and erect. Her room was a mess, as his sisters’ rooms had been at home—strewn with underwear and projects, things her Head Start kids had made for her or she for them, sketches and paintings. It smelled of oil paint, of her, of sweat and funk. She was the most uninhibited lover he’d ever had. She walked around her room naked, she bent over unselfconsciously in front of him. She loved him to look at her; in fact, it excited her. He drew her once, in charcoal, the first drawing he’d done since high school. She was sprawled on the bed, one knee up, her thighs spread wide. She got so aroused by the intensity of his gaze, she made him stop and enter her.

  It was the day after this, actually, that Jay Staley moved into the house, and when Mack came home, late, from work, he knew it was over. The group was still eating at the table in the kitchen—he could hear them when he came in the front door—and over the rumble of their voices Margaret’s laughter rose shrill and almost hysterical. He could tell she was excited, she was turned on by someone else. They made love a few more times after that, but she was passive, absent. The last time, he pulled his cock out of her when he’d finished and said, “That was very polite, Margaret.”

  Her body rolled away. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.

  “It’s Jay, isn’t it?” he said, and she began to cry.

  He wouldn’t let her help him move his stuff back out.

  Jay was a photographer. He’d come up from Yale to do an inner-city arts project. Jay Staley the Yalie, Mack called him. He spoke of making contact with street kids.

  “How is that different from, say, hanging around with them?” Mack asked. They were all at dinner again, a few days after Mack had moved his belongings out of Margaret’s room. This was the first time Mack had spoken during the meal.

  “Mack!” Margaret said, and blushed.

  “What?” he asked.

  She made a face at the others around the table, a request for their support.

  “What? It’s a reasonable question,” he said.

  “It’s hostile,” she said softly. “It’s aggressive.”

  Jay touched her arm. “I can answer it,” he said. He smiled at Mack and began to explain his philosophy—that you couldn’t impose yourself on the kids. You just had to be there, waiting for the right moment. He called the Polaroid camera a godsend to his work, said it drew them in a way nothing else could have. The whole time he spoke, Margaret watched his face as though he were a holy man, a guru.

  Mack was doing a sports program in the parks. He was working with high school kids, coaching
basketball, volleyball, organizing tournaments. He drove around from park to park in a battered project station wagon filled with balls and nets. He worked with Portuguese kids, Irish kids, black kids. Many of them were dropouts, a few of them recent high school graduates. Already three or four kids he’d come to know pretty well had been drafted. Sometimes, stringing up a net, demonstrating a serve, or blowing his whistle, he felt like an asshole—as though this could do anything to change their lives, their possibilities. It was just a way to make privileged guys like him feel better about themselves.

  Jay seemed to have no such doubts, no hesitation. He seemed really to believe that he could have an impact. And maybe, for all Mack knew, that was true. Maybe his work did offer the kids something that Mack and his work couldn’t.

  Jay tended to be out in the evenings a lot—a good time to make contact, apparently—but sometimes in the late afternoons, when Mack was just getting home from work, he could hear them making love in her bedroom: the loud pumping squeak of the bedsprings, sometimes the repeated thump of the frame as it smacked the plaster. Once Mack sat down in the hall to wait it out, his back against the trembling wall. Finally the bed was still. Then, faintly, he could hear them talking for a long time, murmurs and laughter. After half an hour or so, the door swung open and Margaret came out in a bathrobe. She nearly tripped over Mack and then stood there, looking down at him. He could smell her, smell the sex. He could have reached out and touched her freckled bare leg.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said, and then she spun around and went back into her room.

  Margaret had pointed out to Mack when she split up with him that they barely knew each other, really, that she was sure he wasn’t in love with her truly, deeply. In his clearheaded moments Mack suspected that this might be true. But at the same time he wanted to feel it wasn’t. And he enjoyed his misery, in some perverse sense. It made him feel alive, intense, and that gave him the only comfort he could find in the situation.