by W. S. Penn
Bernie’s burden was Tammy. He had pursued it with an assiduity that only a Jew with his belief in law, obedience, and study could have. I, on the other hand, those nights he and I watched Rolf and Tammy pumping away at each other, had made them dissolve but had taken on the voices, the sounds of sex and love. I, with the patience of Job and the hopefulness of the little engine that could, had been spinning my wheels in slothful pursuit of those sounds.
So it was, after she said “Tell me” and I had told her as best I could without boring her like Death, that Sara came to the same conclusion.
“It’s the same cargo,” she said as we sat on the rocks overlooking the lake. “The one difference is that Bernie gave his a name. Tammy. Not a name I’d pick, but I suppose I’m not Bernie. Yours, like interchangeable parts, probably had a succession of names. And,” she said timidly, “forgive me for saying this. I know you hate psychologizing, but you also had Laura P., your mother, and even your uncle’s now new wife, the Vegomatic. Maybe even Elanna and Pamela—a sort of combination for you, a composite that was positive, but fell apart on you when Pamela died.”
“That raft,” I said, pointing. “I had to take Bernie out to it every day and hang him over the edge in the cool water to stop him from shivering over his vision of Rolf and Tammy.”
“Hey,” Sara said, “let’s swim out to it. You want?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking at the shadows cast by the trees. “It’s getting pretty late.”
Sara didn’t wait for me but began tearing off her clothes and heaping them on the beach. Feeling like I was miscast in a movie wet with romanticism, I followed her down to the water’s edge.
“Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.” She stood knee-deep in the water, her temerity more frightening to me than her naked body as I began to slowly undress, neatly folding my shirt and beginning to unbutton my pants.
“Jesus,” she said, running out of the water and pushing me to the sand. “Don’t you do anything without thinking about it?”
She tugged at the cuffs of my pants, threw them into a heap, and then dashed backed to the water. Diving in, she surfaced and rolled on her back long enough to yell out the water was freezing. Then she began stroking out to the raft.
“It happens, if it happens at all, this way,” I told myself as I sidestroked towards her, each scissor kick of my long legs making me gain a foot on her as she swam the crawl. By the time I had reached the raft, Sara was up on it, wringing her hair dry and beginning to braid it. My body had adjusted to the water’s temperature but climbing onto the raft it was cold again, even though the sky was windless, and my penis shrank. I sat facing away from Sara, embarrassed and yet not embarrassed.
“You know you do have a funny body,” Sara said. “But,” she said before the sting of her words could swell, “I love it.”
She pulled me farther up onto the raft and positioned herself beside me, beginning to kiss me all over. When she focused on my midsection, I tried to draw her up onto me, believing as always that I had a responsibility to give her her pleasure, that no one would take pleasure in doing that for me. Sara paused, briefly, and gently straight-armed me onto my back again.
“Relax,” she whispered. “I want to do this. Just relax and enjoy it.”
I did, as best I could. But when she slid up beside me, threw her arm across my chest and rested her head on my shoulder and said, “Ummm. That tasted good,” all the embarrassment of years returned. “What’s the matter?” Sara asked. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Yes,” I said. “But …”
“So did I,” she said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Staring up at the blue-black of the sky, I made a decision. “I believe you,” I said, feeling that my words must have the ring of untruth and suspecting that Sara knew it. “I’ll try to believe you.”
“You can take my word for it,” she said, standing up and preparing to dive back into the water.
Later, after we’d made love on the splintery floor of “Spotted Eagle’s Nest,” it was my turn to ask her if she’d enjoyed that.
“Yes,” she said. Frowning, she asked, “Did you come?”
“Yes,” I lied, smiling, knowing that it didn’t matter, really, whether I had or not as well as knowing why. Of course, it would matter if it happened this way time after time. But once or twice, here or there, who cared? “Nothing gives me pleasure more than giving you pleasure,” I said.
“That’s your way of telling me you didn’t come, isn’t it? Come on. Want to try again?”
“No. It’s okay, really. Maybe later, when we both feel like it? Now it would seem like work, all aimed at giving me some kind of physical satisfaction. I already have that,” I added.
“I guess it’s my turn to take your word for it, huh?”
“I guess it is.”
On the drive home, Sara asked me what I was thinking and I told her. “I always thought I would marry an Indian,” I said.
“That’s strange. Why?”
“I don’t know. I just did.”
“Does that mean you’re thinking about marrying someone who isn’t an Indian?”
“Maybe,” I said.
That night, which she spent at the Tompsons’—a fact that made the Tompsons happy (at least if Delia’s saying “It’s about time” meant anything)—I apologized for the way it sounded silly, for the way the phrase seemed to have so much sawdust in it and yet for the way it could sound empty and hollow if spoken even by the right person to a wrong one. “But,” I said, “I love you.”
“The only reason it sounds silly is that you don’t have to say it. I know it. I’ve always known it. But … it’s nice to hear,” she added, drifting off toward sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
47.
Dr. “You-can-call-me-Josh” Weinstein scheduled Operation Sawdust for the first day of Sara’s spring vacation, a date I asked for specifically, telling Dr. Weinstein that that way, if I died, she could save the plane fare. Weinstein raised his eyebrows less in surprise and more in an attempt not to grin. Recognizing with doctorly insight that I was one of those patients who’d be debilitated by false confidences and frightened by half-truths, he had been direct and honest with me. With a 50/50 chance, I had better odds than Harrah’s, Lake Tahoe.
It wasn’t the raw hardiness of ‘Give it to me straight, Doc.’ Rather, my attitude was formed by my old familiarity with Death. Having seen something of Death himself, Josh Weinstein understood my attitude. After explaining the possibilities in detail, he joked with me about the things he wouldn’t know until I had journeyed halfway into the Absence of Angels.
I liked him. “You’re the best, Josh,” I’d say.
“That, I am,” he’d reply. In an age when being good enough was an aspiration, it was refreshing to meet someone whose goal was to be the best at what he did, and I would grin a grin as big as a Bentley.
Sara didn’t want to talk about it and she took my playful references to Operation Sawdust like vicious personal criticism.
“Death is strange,” I’d say, and she’d look stung, distrustful and hurt as though I’d confessed to having an affair, as meaningless as it all might be, ultimately.
“I would appreciate not hearing about it,” she’d say. “I do not want to talk about it.”
But I needed to talk about it, not out of some morbid desire to reap sympathy or tolerance, but out of a need to know and understand everything I could about how I felt, which I could get only by trying to describe it.
“When I was little, the first time I flew in a plane I was frightened by the way the wings moved up and down like a pterodactyl’s. My uncle taught me about stress and flex and I learned that the time to be afraid was when the wings stopped flapping, not while they were.”
I told her this in an attempt to explain how knowing made me unafraid; all I feared was the vague discomfort of not knowing.
“I was quite the fun child to fly with, aft
er that. I’d make sure everyone saw how the wings were flapping. I thought that if they learned what I’d learned, they’d be unafraid, too. Mostly they ignored me, looked away from me, pretended they didn’t hear me, lit cigarettes and ordered thirds on drinks.”
“I would’ve, too,” she said.
With the permission of the Tompsons, Sara moved into the apartment above the garage. When Delia worried about what her father might feel, Sara laughed and said that being a hard-line liberal was almost as hard as being an orthodox Jew.
“There are rules you have to follow consistently, whether you like them or not. Dad will work it out. Besides, his defense of his dissertation is coming up so I doubt he’ll even notice that I’m not around.”
In happy moments, when Sara and I were lying awake together in bed, I’d forget how upset she could become when I mentioned dying and I’d slip and say something like, “At least I’ve been in love once in my life. That’s more often than …”
“Stop it, Albert,” she would say. “If you don’t, I’m going to move out. Stop seeing you, and move home. Seriously, Alley, I mean it. Promise.”
“I promise.”
It wasn’t easy. It had begun to seem to me that it was not Death alone who was boring, but what people did with Death. To me, He seemed comical, like the fool in Lear; and like King Lear, I was almost grateful to have Him around. He touched everything. Even the aftermath of lovemaking was like a small death, and it was that which made making love with her so much fun. After each subsequent time, I felt like a virgin again, reborn, clean and fresh and unburdened by the worries so many men have about what to say in the harsh morning light to women they don’t love. Oral sex still embarrassed me slightly, especially when it was Sara’s oral and my sex. True, too, too much touching—hand-holding, hugging, squeezing, caressing—made me feel not embarrassed but slightly foreign. But I was learning to enjoy it; I even looked forward to the day I might be able to give Elanna a real brotherly hug. True to my nature and race, despite these small quirky feelings, I soon began to feel comfortable wearing only a T-shirt in the privacy of the apartment over the Tompsons’ garage.
Sometimes, though, I’d look at my life, at the miracle of love, and think, “No young man deserves this happiness. I don’t deserve such happiness, anyway,” and I’d slip again and mention that Death had the viscosity of a bad fart in a vacuum chamber, telling Sara what disguises I’d seen Death wear, trying to make her laugh, to feel with me how laughable Death really was.
“I told you,” she would say, sighing past her threat to leave me and move out if I mentioned it again. “You are not going to die.”
“You’re probably right,” I’d say, feigning disappointment. “After all, Death still owes me one.”
Sara would slam out of the room and go for long walks on which I would follow her at a distance, shouting apologies.
I was not trying to be cruel. Laura P. had once said it was a miracle that I was still in two pieces. Now, during those months, faced with the potential of Death, with an inward assurance the origins of which were as difficult to discover as the origins of sawdust, I felt as though the two pieces were becoming one.
At the beginning of spring term, I had attended classes with Sara, reading her assignments in history and art, and often studying with her late into the night. A few of the lectures were worth the walk to campus, but some of the teachers seemed to be unnerved by the presence of an auditor who listened and thought about what they were saying instead of taking down notes as though they were the words of the prophets. Other teachers were just plain boring, producing old ideas like magicians extracting planaria from a top hat, seeming better suited to professions as keypunch operators. Gradually, though I went on doing the homework with Sara, I stopped attending the lectures, choosing to spend my time the way people faced with the potential of death do, getting things in order. Since I didn’t have many of my own things to order, I painted the Tompsons’ porch, mended window screens, replaced and puttied panes of glass, mowed the lawns, or read. Whereas I had hated mowing lawns as a boy, I now found that even a task as mundane and sneezy as that gave me a certain pleasure and that pleasure was increased when neither Delia nor the Proctor redid what I had finished; they always appreciated what I’d done as though it were really something important. Given those feelings, along with my increasingly cheerful mood, it was no accident that when I repointed the bricks on the chimney, I buried the top-of-the-line Swiss Army knife in a hollowed brick like a time capsule.
“It belongs there,” I told Sara, who surprised me in the act.
“The joy of daily tasks,” she said.
“I feel like Wonder Bread,” I said as I cleaned up. Sara was already into her class work. “Vitamin enriched and puffed full enough with air to float.”
“Thanks a whole lot,” Sara said, looking over the covers of the book resting on her lap. “What’s that make me, Skippy?”
This joy kept increasing, the nearer the operation came, and when I wrote Elanna, downplaying the upcoming operation, telling her it wasn’t much more serious than having a mole removed, I said I was happy. In fact, I was, with an elation and exuberance that made Death seem smaller than ever before and that made unhappiness seem only a bad dream. I began writing happy letters to nearly everyone I could think of, letters that some readers might think mad instead of happy because of the way everything related to anything else—in other words, because of the endless metaphors. Saguaro Cactuses were billboards if you looked at them without undue reverence; a hawk was an X-15.
Sanchez wrote back, happy for me and so infected by the exuberance of my long letter that his letter seemed entirely composed of verbs. But then Sanchez was happy, himself. Rachel’s pregnancy was coming along without complications.
“Soon, there’ll be one more red bogger interfacing with this patchwork world of ours.”
The trading post had flourished since I’d left, which Sanchez attributed to Johnny Three Feet having been carted off and imprisoned. While Sanchez didn’t dare to say that Johnny had kept the post from doing well, he did suspect that Johnny had been just weird enough to disrupt the consumption of goods by tourists, as though Johnny gave them indigestion. The post had expanded. There was a paved patio area in front and a parking area for cars and buses enclosed by a curb, and during the summer, they could count on a dozen or more tour buses a day stopping to dump money into the tills on their way to the Grand Canyon or London Bridge or Zion National Park. He ended by paying lip service to the disappointment of not having me return to work with him the next summer, yet, as he said, it was probably for the best.
“Given the torture of time, Rachel’s feelings towards you may atrophy if not change, and then we can all visit happily together.”
In a postscript he added that he knew he’d like Sara when he met her, and enclosed in the envelope were some Polaroids of the post—one with Grandfather perched on the seat of his Raleigh out front.
Elanna didn’t write back. It wasn’t because she didn’t think of me; nor was it because she hadn’t gotten my letters. Maybe she hadn’t received all of them, but I’d heard the sounds of envelopes being torn open above the low-ratio growl of a jeep as it wound into the hills behind Iraklion and odds favored some of those envelopes being mine. One day, after I got a letter from father saying he had written Elanna, I realized what Elanna was doing, and when Sara got home from classes she found me trimming the Tompsons’ hedge back to the size of an incipient bush in my distress.
“Shit,” I told Sara. “Elanna’s flying home for my operation.”
“How do you know?”
“I phoned TWA. They said seat 17-A had been booked from Athens to San Francisco on a flight that arrives the day before Operation Sawdust.”
“So?” Sara said.
“I phoned Pan Am first. Row 17 is unbooked on their 747. Elanna always flies either Pan Am or TWA, and she always sits in 17-A when she flies west.”
“She’s got a right to be ther
e,” Sara said. “Don’t you want her to come?”
“No. It’s a waste of her time.”
“Don’t lie to me. You’ll be glad to have her there. Besides, you can’t keep her away any more than you can me.”
“Huh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Sara was right. I was always glad to see Elanna.
Mother even responded to my increasing exuberance, writing me formal letters interspersed with dialogue from T.V. westerns. Not unsurprisingly, mother’s favorite programs and movies were about cowboys and Indians, and sometimes she rewrote the scenes to make the culprit Indians allegories of evil. Mother never would forgive father for marrying her.
I worried most about father. He typed me letters, photocopied them, and mailed me the photocopies, sometimes forgetting to sign them.
“What’s he doing, collecting an archive?” I asked Sara, showing her the letters.
They were long letters. Instead of delineating the mowing of lawns or washing of cars or installing of ceiling fans and solar hot-water heaters—the normal fatherly tales—they were about the Lord God (never God, always the Lord God), retirement, or the circumstances of my birth. Addressed to “Dear Son Albert,” his letters were trying to tell me something in a very unfunny way, and it was then that I began to understand how my birth had skewed father’s emotions and bruised his sense of humor. Remembering the time when my uncle had thought father was morally angry at him for shacking up with Karen Manowitz, it dawned on me that father preached at moments Grandfather would tease, not because he liked preaching but because his sense of humor had been stolen from him the day I was born.
“No wonder father’s jokes were never funny,” I said to Sara.
“What’s wrong?” Delia asked that evening around the fireplace.