by Joe Haldeman
He carried his stuff outside and stood under an awning in the April cool. A thin drizzle was not washing away the smell of the smoke from the riots. What a sorry fucking world. He stepped to the end of the awning and closed his eyes and let the rain wash his face.
After a while the door behind him opened. “John Speidel?” He spun around and almost dropped his stuff, trying to salute the pretty woman with captain’s bars. She returned his salute and smiled and took his arm. “Come on. Your aunt’s waiting for you up in Reception.” He walked along with her across the canteen floor and up the stairs, replying to her polite conversation with monosyllables, carefully not looking at her face.
Aunt Phyllis looked old under crusted makeup. Phony smile with perfect false teeth. She kissed him on the cheek and gave him a brittle hug.
Was she still his aunt now that Uncle Terry was dead? Had she still been his aunt after the divorce, before the suicide? She got along well with Mother. They had known each other since high school, and the presence or absence of husbands was probably not a big factor in their friendship. She had always given Spider the creeps.
It was a long ride home. Spider had decided not to mention Uncle Terry, but that was what she wanted to talk about. How could he do this to her, to the family? It made them all look bad, as if they hadn’t cared. As if they hadn’t put up with him year after year, him and his lunatic fantasies. He should have gotten help. He knew he needed help; he talked about it all the time. But the one time he went to a doctor he wound up yelling at him and then dropping out of sight on a six-week drunk. Spider knew the story, the litany. Men in his family did not go on sixweek drunks, not as a rule. Maybe he would be the second.
His father, as it turned out, may have been in the process of beating him to it. When he’d heard that Spider was coming home, he’d driven off to the Moose for a drink. He had been gone for two days. Aunt Phyllis said she didn’t know what had come over him. Did he want to lose his job?
Spider’s mother had scissored a sheet in half and lettered on the fat banner WELCOME HOME JOHN in red, black, and blue Magic Markers. It was thumbtacked over the front door, bleeding slightly in the rain.
Aunt Phyllis said she would love to come in but she was late for the garden club. Spider thanked her for the ride and balanced the duffle bag on his shoulder and tried to look sharp as he walked down the flagstone path, feeling like a sixties perversion of a World War II Norman Rockwell painting.
The front door was slightly ajar. From inside, the tinny sound of a small radio, chirping Walker & Scott’s theme song: “We are the Joy Boys … of ray-dee-oh … we chase elec-trons to and fro-oh-oh.” He pushed the door open.
His mother was lying on the couch with her shoes off, a hand over her eyes, listening to the radio. On the coffee table was a tall glass with an inch of slightly amber water and the small round ghost of an ice cube.
Spider eased the duffle bag down and she heard it and sat up suddenly. “John! Oh, John!” She tottered over to him and clasped him in a fierce hug. Her kiss was bourbon and ginger ale. “Your father, uh, your father has the car …”
“Aunt Phyllis told me.”
“Oh.” She looked around. “Phyllis couldn’t come in?”
“She had garden club.”
“Of course, Tuesday.” She pulled him toward the dining room. “You must be hungry.”
“No, no, Mother.” There was a horrifying radiation of déjà vu as he resisted. He didn’t want to see what was on the other side of the door. “Really, I’m not hungry, I ate at the canteen, the cafeteria, just now.”
“Well, you can have a drink.” She kicked the door open and it was just a dining room. “Beer or bourbon or what?”
“Just a, just a beer.” Each of the four chairs around the dining room table shimmered with bad luck. He took the chair closest to the kitchen and turned it around to face his mother, his back to whatever might appear in the other chairs. “Have you heard anything from Dad?”
The refrigerator had two solid rows of Budweiser cans. She studied it and picked one. “No. I called the Moose and Kerry Daniel, he was the bartender night before last, he said that he had drunk too much to drive and had Kerry call a cab. But he didn’t come home, and the next day the car was gone.” She popped the beer open and got a glass out of the dishwasher.
“Call the police?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t, no, not yet.” She brought the beer out with two coasters. “It’s like when he lost the job with Woodie’s, remember?”
“Vaguely, yeah.” Spider had just turned ten. He had noticed his father was not around, but hadn’t thought too much of it, since he wasn’t around all that much anyhow. Years later, he found out that the old man had holed up in a Baltimore hotel room, down on The Block, and stayed drunk for a week, probably with professional female sympathy.
“I just don’t understand.” She rattled ice cubes into a glass. “This should be a happy time. But you know, he wouldn’t even say a word about it? He just ate dinner and left.”
“Well, he was kind of funny about the whole thing. Me not wanting to go, getting drafted and all. As if Ho Chi Minh was fu … was Hitler or something. As if we belonged over there.”
“John, please don’t talk to him that way.” She poured a jigger of bourbon into the glass, hesitated, then measured out another jigger.
“He still believes all that crap?”
“More than ever. Ever since that Tet Offensive.” She poured a little ginger ale into the glass and joined him in the dining room. “You can tell me anything you want. Just try not to argue with him.”
“Sure. Don’t worry. I won’t be around that much anyhow; soon as I get a job I’ll find an apartment.”
“Oh no; don’t rush. The doctor said … it would be good for you to stay at home.”
“Not if I’m going to—”
“Besides, I fixed up your old room.” They’d rented it out when he left for college. “It’s just the way you used to have it.”
“Really?” That gave him an odd feeling. Safety. “Let me go see it.”
“Sure.” She stood up quickly. “You probably want to lie down.”
“Yeah, maybe.” After the long ride with Aunt Phyllis. They walked upstairs to his room, twelve feet square with a dormer window.
It did feel safe, and odd. It was the first time he’d had a beer in this room without having to sneak it in past his mother. All the science fiction books were in place, although in random order, in the brick-and-board shelving he’d dismantled for college. Guitar on the bed. His telescope stood in the corner, in front of the taller shelves with the science books. The Lick Observatory Moon photographs, now totally obsolete.
He moved the guitar and sat down on the bed. “Guess I would like to lie down.” His mother made nervous polite noises and left him alone.
He stretched out and looked at the constellation charts he’d pasted on the ceiling seven or eight years ago. Anxiety drained away. This was a place where the man with no face could never find him.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
Lee had indulged himself in the luxury of a new pair of wiper blades before they took off, and they made all the difference in the world. The old ones had made night driving a dangerous pain in the ass if it was raining. It was five in the morning and the Beltway was nearly deserted, but with every pair of headlights that whipped by, he remembered squinting through blear and glare, and was happy. He quietly hummed a few bars of “Early Morning Rain,” his left fingers chording on the steering wheel. Then he thought of Beverly asleep in the back and sang on silently, subvocalizing. She usually had a sweet disposition, but it was not wise to wake her up before she wanted to get up.
The idea was to drive well out of the Washington area before the morning rush; stop for breakfast somewhere around Frederick. He was already hungry, but the food box with its bag of apples was on the floor in the back, great planning. He took the cold joint out of the ashtray and sucked on it just to do something with his mouth. No
smoking while driving. People did do it; he did it, but Beverly thought it was dangerous, like drinking and driving. Well, dope affected her a lot more. It was a good rule, but one that Lee would have broken if he were alone in the car. A couple of tokes would make the time pass faster. He heard her moving and put the joint back in the ashtray.
“You doin’ okay?” she said behind his ear.
“Fine. We’ll be almost to Shady Grove by the time it gets light.”
“I want to come up.”
“Pull over?”
“Huh uh.” She angled one leg over the front seat and then the other, and squirmed over with girlish gracelessness. It made her tee shirt ride up to the bottom of her breasts, braless for sleeping. She tucked the shirt back into her gym shorts. Then she leaned back over the seat to retrieve the pillow and blanket. All the activity filled the stuffy car with female musk. Lee suddenly had an insistent erection. He reached inside his jeans to adjust himself.
“Aw … got a problem?” She stroked his thigh. He laughed. “Pull over and I’ll suck it off.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Well, you don’t have to pull over.” She started to undo his zipper one link at a time. “It would be safer, though.”
Spider woke up early, rain drumming in the darkness, a bad dream fading, sheets clammy with nervous sweat. He fought the sure feeling that there was somebody in the room with him, fumbled with the reading lamp and snapped it on. Books, guitar, telescope, microscope, pictures.
He padded over to the dresser and opened a drawer to select his first civilian outfit since October. He had put on his army costume on Halloween. The night before, his last day of pre-Vietnam leave, he’d sat with Beverly and his parents, watching a dumb horror movie on TV. Not knowing that in two weeks he would suddenly face the real thing, a white room full of decomposing corpses, reek of chemicals and rot. There was someone behind him in the mirror. He wouldn’t look. He studied his feet and let his hands find jeans and a shirt. He dressed facing the door and then opened the door slowly. There was no one in the hall. He walked down the pool of light to the stairs, switched on the light, walked down to the kitchen and reached inside to switch on that room’s light before entering.
He surprised two cockroaches. He watched them run for safety, then got a beer from the refrigerator and repeated his trip in reverse, leaving dark rooms behind him. He locked the door to his room and turned on all the lights. He opened the dormer window and enjoyed the cool humid breeze, the smell of civilized suburban vegetation. Smoking and drinking the beer, it felt so good. He was going to be all right. It would take time. But he was safe.
He uncovered the microscope and got out his collection of prepared slides. He looked at all the mineral specimens without any particular plan, just for the satisfying familiarity of them.
After the horror movie, his parents had gone to bed, leaving him and Beverly on the couch for their final goodbyes. She had used her mouth on him, the first and only time. There was something else, just on the edge of memory, but he did remember her mouth, the surprising coldness of it because she’d been panting. And then the warm moist envelopment, the small pain from her teeth.
He unzipped and looked at his erection, standing like a stranger in the bright light, growing out of civilian jeans. His collection of pictures from Playboy was still where he’d left it, hidden in the middle of a large biology text. He set them out on the dresser and studied their new familiarity, every curve and mound, the silly expressions, the perfect hair. He looked at them and at himself while he stroked as slowly as his hunger would let him.
Then he cleaned up and put the pictures back and left one small light on, the microscope’s stage illuminator, and lay down and turned the radio on low, an all-night classical music program. He stared at the ceiling and smoked.
Tomorrow he would call Beverly.
The sexual revolution
History records a constant, if uneven, ebb and flow of society’s tolerance for sexual enthusiasm and oddness. Spider’s chronic masturbation, in preanesthesia England, would have been “treated” by cauterizing the prostate gland and cutting the nerves of the penis. Lee’s bisexuality would have raised no more eyebrows in Imperial Rome than it did in Haight-Ashbury. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Wife of Bath would not have been shocked by Beverly’s straightforward lust—though Beverly’s mother would have been!
Beverly’s parents, and Spider’s, were in their twenties during World War II; their icons for sexuality were the Man in Uniform and the Pin-up Girl. Both women had boyfriends overseas; both men were soldiers with girlfriends back home. When they thought or talked about their future mates, it was likely to be in terms of love and children and a house with a den and a nursery, a neatly mowed lawn and a white picket fence, rather than specific sexual geometries.
Soldiers will be soldiers, of course. In his narrative history of America, The Glory and the Dream, William Manchester records this classic conversation between a World War II soldier and a war correspondent:
CORRESPONDENT: “What’s the first thing you’re going to do after the war?”
SOLDIER: “Hump my wife.”
CORRESPONDENT: “And the second thing?”
SOLDIER: “Take off these goddamned hobnail boots.”
But it was a time of terrible insecurity, at home and in the foxhole, and people didn’t want more excitement. They wanted normality.
They got the Eisenhower fifties. The desire for security ossified into conformity and conservatism. Anyone who was overly eccentric in public was scorned as a “beatnik,” though actual pot-smoking, dirty-word-using, free-loving beatniks were always a rare and endangered species.
A non-beatnik person coming of sexual age in the fifties had to contend with obstacles more profound than a forest of crinoline, a prison of girdle. Nice girls didn’t do It. They just plain didn’t. If they wanted It, they were nymphos. If they loved a boy enough, or were passionate enough, to do It, they were promoted from nympho to slut.
The double standard was absolute and unquestioned. Boys cajoled and pleaded and promised, but if a girl finally did give in, they would in all probability have sex with her for a month or two and then wander off looking for fresh blood, or meat, meanwhile telling all the other guys about how easy she was. She was a slut but he was normal, he was a man.
A 1954 Gallup poll asked “Should a wife’s adultery be more condemned than her husband’s?” Four out of five of the women polled said yes.
The sexual revolution was partly a reaction to this hypocrisy and suffocating conformity, but it was more complex than a simple reaction. Many factors combined and converged: women’s liberation, a growing permissiveness toward sexual content in books and movies, pharmaceutical and technological breakthroughs in birth control, the drug culture that evolved from the isolated beatniks into a pervasive hippy community. The young sexy presidency of John and Jacqueline Kennedy fueled the movement and, in a curious way, so did the culturewide body-blow of his assassination, with the subsequent Generation Gap that gave young people a mandate to rebel against their parents’ conventional morality.
In the fifties, a girl’s virginity was a carefully guarded treasure, as it had been for her mother and grandmother: a trophy that her husband-for-life would be awarded on their wedding night. By 1968, most girls considered their virginity an encumbrance, even an embarrassment, and some didn’t bother to wait until they were in love, let alone married, to get rid of it. In the sector of society that Lee and Beverly inhabited—white, middle-class, educated—peer pressure had made a complete about-face in half of a generation. A lot of girls and women had sex even if they didn’t much care for it, or for the boy or man they happened to be with. They didn’t want to be “out of it.”
Any revolution produces casualties. The epidemic of venereal disease hit both genders, but of course women had to pay the bill for unwanted conception. Botched abortions caused infections, sterility, even death. Sudden single motherhood stopped some li
ves cold, even though being an “unwed mother” wasn’t the social stigma it used to be.
There was a lot of sex, but not much reproduction. In 1968, America’s birth rate fell to 17.9 per thousand, the lowest since the Great Depression.
The word “revolution” had its astronomical meaning in Chaucer’s time; it was not to be a political term for another two centuries. When scholars began to use the word to describe a sudden transfer of power in government, they chose the term ironically, from an appreciation of history: The excesses of monarchy lead to democratization; the excesses of democracy lead back to monarchy. What goes around, in the words of a later generation, comes around.
Eisenhower begat the Revolution, but the Revolution begat Ronald Reagan.
Soldier’s home
Spider didn’t feel like talking to Beverly’s parents, since he didn’t want to answer questions about his own, but he didn’t have her new phone number. Ma Bell’s Information didn’t have it, unsurprisingly, but the house mother at her old dormitory gave him both address and phone. He called and there was no answer; probably at class.
It was ten o’clock and his mother still wasn’t up. He left a note on the refrigerator, took a couple of beers, and split.
His old Chevy was balky but did finally turn over. His father was supposed to have run it for a few minutes every week. He probably missed every now and then. When he could put the choke in without it going too ragged, he eased the car down the driveway and pointed it toward town.
There was one bit of army business to do. He had to go down to the Selective Service office and turn in his draft card. He found a parking place in back of Forty Alleys and crossed over to the nondescript chalk building. There were three clerks on duty, but as it happened, the one he handed the card to was the same old lady who had sent him off to his near-fatal induction. He remembered her as a vicious old crone who had been visibly elated that he had flunked out of college and fallen into her clutches. But now she saw that he had a medical discharge and a Purple Heart and got all choked up about how proud she was of him. She said she’d lost sons in both World War II and Korea.