Goldenrod

by Peter Gault

  The bus was a world unto itself, a traveling microcosm. There was a house on the bus, and an enemy was hunting us. We ran through the rooms, cleverly eluding them, laughing at our own cleverness. The enemy was growing in number. It was becoming more difficult to outsmart them and we were getting nervous. I stood on a chair pretending to fix a light bulb as a decoy for Phil to escape. It was our last laugh, because the game had become serious, at least for me. While Phil was getting away, I concentrated on survival. I fled down the back staircase, across a field, and up to the top of a mountain. The enemy came from every direction. Anticipating combat, I built a barricade around myself. They scrambled across the field like a vast army of ants, circled the mountain, and wasted no time commencing the attack. They threw things at me, rocks, toy boats, rubber tires, anything they could get their hands on. I threw the same missiles back at them.

  I was on the mountain for five years, The Five Year War. Although there was no lull in the fighting, a peculiar relationship developed between the enemy and me, a feeling of respect, a warmth which escalated almost into love. As a tribute to my perseverance, someone threw a pair of shoes up to me. The shoes fit and enabled me to run down the mountain and get away. I ran through the suburbs of Chicago, the enemy still after me, wondering whatever happened to my friend Phil.

  A bus stopped in the center of the town of Stockton. I got off wearing shoes and a suit jacket. Walking down the street, I felt safe and confident and then overheard an excerpt of the news from the radio of a passing car. It said that anti-Semitism was on the rise. There was a crowd of reporters jostling to get into an auditorium to see the Shah of Iran. I joined the gathering because I was doing an article on “The Shah and Prejudice,” and was concerned by the fact that my friend Phil was one of the hostages. I flirted with a woman reporter in the lineup.

  “I’m sure either you’ll be calling me or I’ll be calling you,” she said, disappearing into the mob.

  “Don’t be too sure,” I thought. “You’re not all that attractive.”

  Inside, there was a stage set up for the Shah who hadn’t arrived yet. Everyone was talking excitedly, but I concerned myself with finding a bathroom. I had to urinate. I had to urinate so badly I was afraid of peeing my pants.

  The phone shrieked obnoxiously from the other side of the room. I awoke on my feet in a karate pose, my heart pounding; 4:15 a.m., read the clock radio. I struggled to quell the panic that raced through my body. The phone screamed in steady, even intervals. I picked up the receiver. I heard Elizabeth’s voice, barely distinguishable through a background of disco music and hysterical laughter. Her voice was unusually high-pitched, which meant she was drunk, very drunk, so drunk she could hardly talk. It was a party. I could hear nothing but men, men swearing, maybe one other woman.

  “Elizabeth!” I shouted, running around in a circle. She had put the phone down or dropped it on something soft, a bed. I heard noises in the background, noises that made me nauseous, sexual noises.

  “Elizabeth!” I shouted, sensing that someone had picked up the phone.

  “Which one?” asked a male voice, as if Elizabeth was a pork chop. The phone dropped on the bed again.

  “Ride her!” said a distant voice.

  “Elizabeth,” I shouted.

  “Have you seen my car keys?” laughed a male voice into the phone. He had a European accent.

  It felt like it was a dream, a nightmare, and yet it was real.

  “Get me Elizabeth, you Greek bastard,” I yelled. “She has a name, Elizabeth! If I get hold of you, I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ ugly wop.”

  “I didn’t bother with names, if you know what I mean,” said the European voice, unalarmed by my threat. “What does she look like?”

  “She’s got curly brown hair,” I said.

  “It’s curly all right, and there’s a hunk of meat hanging from it,” he laughed and hung up the phone.

  I was left with a picture in my mind. Elizabeth on a bed, one other girl, a lineup of greasy pigs with moustaches and hairy backs, who drive Trans-ams and have fluffy dice dangling from their rearview mirrors, cheering each other, competing, taking turns climbing between her legs, a gang bang. Vultures preying on a wounded deer, stabbing at an open gash. They saw bleeding flesh, a free meal, not a desperate little girl gasping for oxygen, clutching at anything that would save her from herself.

  I continued to hold the receiver.

  “Elizabeth!” I yelled.

  11. Elizabeth is on the Roof

  The Barren Room was bolted shut, a closed casket. I knocked and kicked and whimpered at the door. I climbed onto the banana seat and rode my bike to Father’s old apartment building where he no longer lived. From behind a battered ’69 Strato-Chief in the parking lot, I watched dispassionate eyes enter and exit, as if today was like any other day. They stepped over dead bodies and confronted the apocalypse with businesslike detachment. I sneaked up to the back door, abhorring the thought of having to meet someone, or talk, or even nod at a stranger. I tore my social security card into shreds in an unsuccessful attempt to slip open the lock. In the past, the door had no lock, but security was tightened because, recently, an attractive young woman—who didn’t live there—had managed to get in, take the elevator to the roof, and jump off. Suicide, an unseemly and profitless distraction from daily apartment living, had to be discouraged.

  The violent nature of the death appealed to newspaper people. They came in droves, shoving cameras in tearful faces, squeezing every painful detail out of the parents’ mouths, converting the tragedy into a cheaply sensationalized back-page cover story. Look what happened to the high school beauty! When she hit ground, every bone in her shapely body was shattered; yet she climbed back onto her broken legs, standing up briefly before dying. The neighbors only remembered an unnerving thump, as loud as the clang of a church bell, but deeper, chest-felt. It was a fourteen story drop, and the sound carried an alarming distance. No one guessed it was the sound of a human body.

  I had no retreat. Meditation held no salvation for me. My life was inside The Barren Room. There would be people at the funeral, Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin, Phil, friends, acquaintances, cousins, and I wanted nothing to do with people. I had enough to contend with without having to contend with people. I could contend with dogs because they didn’t talk, but not with people. I left my bike unlocked against a fence, expecting it to be stolen, and walked downtown. I needed more time alone.

  “The Barren Room is no place to socialize,” I said aloud.

  Elizabeth preferred me in my gentle moods. It was Elizabeth’s day, and I resolved to be gentle from beginning to end. I would be attentive, talk softly, listen compassionately, refrain from barking at passing dogs. I wouldn’t refer to Elizabeth’s mother as Mrs. Ajax. My hands were in my pockets. I fondled myself distractedly and studied my feet.

  I imagined Elizabeth on my arm, radiant, laughing, hopping up to kiss my cheek. Strangers of the world united in envy, stared in jealous fascination at Elizabeth and me, a model couple, perfection. It was not uncommon to see a beautiful woman with an ugly man, or vice versa, but to see such an ideally compatible physical combination was a rarity. We were tailor-made for each other, fitting together like spoons in a drawer. We had the same complexion and the same features, except mine were classically male and hers classically female. We had the kind of faces found on billboards across North America selling cars, clothing, toothpaste. We teetered high above society on a narrow pedestal, arms flailing, struggling to maintain our balance.

  “Is a funeral anything like a gang bang?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “Yes indeed! Everyone stands around and waits his turn while one person is lowered into the hole.”

  “You slut. You pig fucker. You …” I stopped myself. I felt weak all over. My legs were heavy as lead. I reminded myself, “It’s Elizabeth’s day.”

  Leaves blared forth their individuality in technicolor. In the fall, leaves alight from trees, engineers drop
from clock towers, pretty girls jump off the roofs of apartment buildings. It was the season to witness the toppling of a golden boy.

  “Can I forgive you, Elizabeth, for what you’ve done to October?”

  Like the leaves, the engineers, and the pretty girls, hair was falling out of my head. I massaged my scalp for a few yards and dropped my arms. I decided that going bald was the best thing that could happen to me. Let me go bald and get fat and ugly with pimples, a humped back, rotten teeth, and bunions on my feet. I wanted to cultivate bad breath and bad habits, fart profusely, refuse to wash my crotch, flick snot into people’s food. I wanted the comfort of being the lowest thing on earth.

  “You can’t fall off the floor,” I said, using another one of my father’s lines.

  “You can fall into a hole,” said Elizabeth with profound ambiguity, alluding to death and sex. I thought about it and massaged my head a little longer.

  In my mind’s eye, I lived with Elizabeth across from a graveyard downtown in a small flat above a second-hand book store. After some dangerous early morning detective work for the police, risking my life in a vain attempt to save a young girl from killing herself, I returned home to the bed Elizabeth was keeping warm. I felt weary, depressed. The coroner found two quarts of alcohol and a quart of sperm in the girl’s stomach. Elizabeth awoke slowly, opened the blankets, and invited me to crawl in beside her. She welcomed me softly, soothing as sleep. I tapped my hand against her chest between her breasts. I liked the hollow sound it made. She got on top of me and we made love slowly, creating powerful sensations from a minuscule amount of movement.

  “I love you, Ken.”

  Elizabeth’s face was tender and moist. She was crying, crying as we made love, crying because that lousy-piece-of-shit-fuckin’-lonely-goddam feeling in the pit of her stomach was no longer there, crying because she was struck by such an overwhelming sensation of love that it hurt. “It hurt good,” as Kim aptly put it, referring to her boyfriend’s massive penis. I let the tears flood out and roll down my face, just tears, no wailing or gagging or embarrassing hiccup noises. We cried and screwed and screwed and cried. It was silent, impetuous, and agonizingly beautiful. It was what some people call a religious experience. I call it crying and screwing.

  “What the fuck happened, Elizabeth, between you and me? There was so much fuckin’ love, so much fuckin’ love it hurt. It hurt good!”

  I stopped and used my shirt sleeve to dry my face. There was a little girl ahead of me on the sidewalk. She was about five years old with a long brown ponytail extending down her back and wearing a pair of green corduroy pants that needed a stronger elastic in the waistband. She absent-mindedly hoisted up her pants and cocked back her head as she walked. I couldn’t fathom how her tiny head could produce such a thick crop of hair. She had a coquettish gait, and her nose stuck up in the air in a very snobbish and feminine manner. It was Elizabeth as a child. I was spellbound and followed her for quite a distance through a maze of residential streets and across a school yard.

  It was my first experience with one of the most basic human instincts: paternalism. It was as startling a discovery as masturbation, but since it was the type of thing that didn’t get much attention in the media like sex did, it was less expected. Children had seemed to me the most obnoxious little bastards on the face of the earth, shit-disturbers that deserved to be locked in a soundproof vault and dropped into the deepest part of the Arctic Ocean. I was mystified by their widespread popularity, by why their existence was tolerated at all, by why the adult world didn’t unanimously conspire to wipe them out. Suddenly, I could see the appeal of having a child. I felt the commonplace desire to nurture and protect, to participate in the continuity of life-death-life, which was a tediously recurring motif in English literature essays at the university. I had Elizabeth to thank or blame for prompting this change in attitude.

  Before being mistaken as a pedophile, or arrested on suspicion of child molesting, I changed course and made a bee-line for the cemetery. The graveside was crowded with familiar faces, but I avoided eyes. I hoped to discourage pre-funeral conversationalists and didn’t want to be nodding “hello” like a maniac throughout the whole service. My mother came up behind me and, without uttering a word, gave me a kiss and a hug, and stepped back again, leaving me to myself. It was such a perfect thing to do I almost cried.

  The preacher gave a heart-warming sermon about what a slut the deceased was, and that all sluts eventually kill themselves and rot in hell and, that if a woman doesn’t want to die and go to hell, she’d better keep her legs and mouth shut. He didn’t say it in so many words, of course, but that was what he meant. Because his religion prevented him from having sex, he didn’t want anyone else to have fun. It was the most insensitive, dogmatic, cavalier monologue I had ever heard. He exploited the opportunity to parade his chauvinism and intolerance, pushing God with the brazenness of a used car salesman, offering nothing personal or insightful about the real topic of the day: Elizabeth. Not that I expected a great revelation on the source of Elizabeth’s desperate unhappiness, but I did feel a touch of compassion was in order, at least for the parents’ sakes. Thank God my sisters didn’t show up. There was no telling what they would do. I had promised to be gentle, but I would have preferred to strangle the preacher with his starched collar and throw him into the hole with Elizabeth.

  I gradually became conscious of the principal players around me. Paul and Ross huddled beside big Phil whose eyes were red, swollen, and guilty. Phil looked bigger and sadder than he had ever looked before. I realized that Phil was in love with Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s parents looked about ninety years old, especially Mr. Baldwin who I don’t think could have remained standing if his wife wasn’t holding him up. Elizabeth had found a way to keep her parents together; no divorce marred the Baldwin reputation. Their only baby, the most beautiful baby on the street, or in the neighborhood, was gone, and they would stay together to keep the memory of her alive.

  “So this is it,” I whispered as the coffin was lowered into the hole. “This is what it’s all about. This is the thing everyone makes such a fuss over since the very fuckin’ beginning.”

  The preacher was butchering the air with words. My mother, who was not one for keeping her mouth or her legs shut, winged a dirt bomb over my shoulder and hit the man of the cloth in the chaste section between his legs. Mother never missed the bull’s-eye, like Robin Hood splitting the arrow. The preacher doubled over and dropped to his knees. Most people were busy staring at the ground in front of their feet, which is the habit of someone who’s being preached at, and completely missed the accident. There were one or two who thought they saw something thrown from our direction, but Mother and I had absolutely solemn expressions, and suspicion died away. Phil and Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin noticed nothing, not even when the preacher was on all fours, taking deep, regulated breaths to regain his composure. The mourners forgot about him and filtered away from the graveside.

  I stayed to listen to three blonde girls compete for the limelight. They didn’t like Elizabeth when she was alive because Elizabeth was pretty and popular and because they were the type who disliked someone for being pretty and popular. However, they pretended that Elizabeth was their best friend and that they were hurt, hurt bad when she mysteriously stopped phoning them. But they loved Elizabeth now that she was dead. They screeched, retched, and hacked up phlegm, generally making a disgusting spectacle of themselves. I couldn’t leave Elizabeth alone with three hysterical bitches and a preacher who was suffering from bruised testicles, not alone in the ground in a dark box, not when it was getting cold and winter was coming and she had nothing to keep her warm. The cold air made her nipples spring up like submarine periscopes. I could see Elizabeth’s big brown nipples through her white blouse as she held onto my arm.

  “I cried seven hours straight,” bragged one blonde.

  “That’s nothing. I cried fourteen hours and didn’t eat,” said another proudly.

  “I cried f
orty-eight hours and didn’t eat or sleep,” claimed the third blonde triumphantly.

  “I cried for seven days standing on my head and made a puddle so big I almost drowned,” I interrupted as they passed by. They stared at me compassionately.

  I had shed more tears over the loss of Shultz than Elizabeth, which didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Mother who was not the type to go to wakes at the Baldwins’ house, blew me a kiss and disappeared. Phil waited at his car and offered me a ride. I gladly acquiesced. Phil was relieved that I was no longer angry at him. What I felt for him was pity. Everything had changed between us, between everyone. Everything had turned upside down, and there was no way of slowing the pace or going back. The thought of going back, of basking in Elizabeth’s love hit me over and over again, like a goddam sledgehammer, giving me a burning sensation in my chest. I was a glutton for the past and so was Phil. I gravitated to the past as naturally as the family drunk gravitates to the bottle of scotch hidden in the kitchen closet. But I realized, I realized over and over again, and this is the sledgehammer part, that I had no past to go back to. The walls were closing in on us all, and there was no time for petty grudges or feelings of enmity.

  “I didn’t sell enough hair driers,” confessed Phil, his voice barely discernible over the hum of the engine. “I was fired.”

  “Maybe you threw too many hair driers out the window.”

  Phil had presented himself as a model of success, bounding up the corporate ladder with the agility of a mountain goat, as extravangant and as wasteful as anyone would ever want to be. I expected him to be king of the hair driers by the time I obtained my useless drama degree, taking me out for meals on his expense account, credit cards, double martinis, and conservative pinstripe suits. I was surprised to discover that it was untrue. Phil relied on this public image of success and youth. Failure was morally shameful, an indecency that should be kept from the light of day. He would make this confession to no one but me. To everyone else, he quit, told the boss to “Fuck himself,” had a better offer from another firm. He was giving me a pound of his own flesh to equal the score. He didn’t understand that I had come to believe in defeat, that I was fast becoming an enemy of billboards and public images, that his pound of flesh gave me no satisfaction.