Eastman Was Here

by Alex Gilvarry

  ALSO BY ALEX GILVARRY

  From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Alex Gilvarry

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101981528

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA AVAILABLE

  ISBN: 978-1-101-98150-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Alexandra Kleeman

  Contents

  Also by Alex Gilvarry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: The Call Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  II: Bao Chi Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  III: The Phantom Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I

  The Call

  1.

  Eastman, the timid bastard, look at him! Seated in his reading chair, all worn and tousled, face behind a book (The Metaphysical Poets, an anthology), hiding from a world he had come to fear. The month was May in the year of the polymorphous perverse, 1973. This is Eastman at the beginning of his journey, not the end. And what was he doing? Paralyzed? Hardly. Eastman was cowardly ducking. His legs were tightly crossed in poor man’s corduroys (once brown)—the pants he had been sleeping in for four nights—his right leg atop his left, a protective barrier of what remained between his crotch. He had all the distinguished signs of middle age. A well-formed belly, testament to better years, smiling out of a shrunken T-shirt; his white back hair peeking out of the shirt’s neck; that mess of overgrown curls atop his head (once jet black). Eastman did not even possess the will to shave, to wash, to eat, only to sit, to read, to hide behind a book of poetry.

  The poem that held his attention presently: “Mediocritie in love rejected,” Thomas Carew.

  Give me more love, or more disdaine.

  He did not know how he felt about either.

  Four nights ago, Alan Eastman, beaten husband, lover, and devout father of three, one from a previous marriage, was informed by his current wife of ten years, Penny, that he had fallen out of love with her (news to him) and that he was no longer the proud bearer of her love, nor would he be the recipient of her sex. There would be no more waving around of his proud, uncircumcised flag, humping in every corner of the house, deep in the throes of marriage, or love (the two often fell out of sync).

  And who would be the recipient of her sex now? Eastman wondered. Who will have my Penny in his arms? He did not really want to know, nor did he have any substantial proof of an affair, but experience had taught him that no man or woman made such a jump out of love without another flaming hoop to jump through.

  Four nights ago, when Penny had informed him of this new development in their marriage, in the kitchen (how domestic!), the thought of their sex crept up on Eastman and triggered a tempered panic. How awful to admit here that he fell into the male stereotype championed and conceptualized by women’s liberators. He did not think of himself as the stereotypical man, in fact, he fought hard against it.

  The sex with Penny was often good; perhaps this is why it came to him at that moment in the kitchen, possibly at the very second of her attack upon him. He still desired Penny. Penny standing before him, half clothed (pessimist, Eastman!), her undergarments on the kitchen counter next to the breadbox and crumbs from the children, and her wonderful ass bouncing atop his lap as he sat in their kitchen chair, her hands gripping beneath his knees, his face looking down at what transpired between his cock and her cunt, the very odor of sex, of bodies, rising into his breath. Only this was a memory, an illusion of love. For instead, she stood before Eastman informing him of her plans to depart that very evening. The children were already at her mother’s. Would he take her there in his car? His car, the children, not ours, though he knew he would be helpless were they left in his care alone. Assets were being divided, her plan had already been set in motion, and he had not been the least bit aware. He was used to doing what she told him, it suited his disposition, and this time it was no different. She was leaving. So Eastman waited in his study among his books while she gathered an assortment of personal belongings in the upstairs bedroom. He had been sitting in the same reading chair he was sitting in now, wearing the same corduroy pants, thinking of the sex with her—as he was now—and when she had finished packing and come downstairs with two suitcases, he dutifully carried them to the car and drove his wife to her mother’s in Pequannock, New Jersey, Platonic Parkway due west.

  Eastman ruminated on the event of four nights ago. He paged through his book of poets with ambivalence. He entertained taking his own life. Sex, violence, the two seemed, to Eastman, inherently connected, the poets knew it. There was so much despair and death in love. Both sex and violence provided Eastman with guilt. Did one starve or feed the other? Would he become a murderer of himself now that she was gone? He did not know whether the thought of suicide was real or simply an idea, a gut reaction to the loss. In fact, he was not imagining ways to do himself in, only the language of the idea drew on him. There was a penknife in his desk drawer, and for a second he imagined the dull blade that he so often used to open his mail, and the object frightened him. No, he knew then that he was not suicidal. He had not lost the will to live. Only to act alive.

  A call came. To hear each of the lines in the empty house go off at once, the phone in the kitchen, the line in the hall, the new one he had installed in the upstairs bedroom, and the phone before him in his study, couldn’t have been more lonely. The chimes throughout the house terrified him, made him aware of his loneliness. He still hid behind the metaphysical poets. It occurred to Eastman that it might be Penny calling to say that it was now over, and she was coming home. Or it would be the children. God, his boys; he had put them aside to brood.

  “Yes?” he answered, clothing his voice with a little sorrow.

  But it was not his wife on the other end, or the boys. It was Baxter Broadwater of the defunct New York Herald, now the International Herald. Eastman knew Broadwater from Harvard. The two were both on the staff of the Advocate. Broadwater was Pegasus, and for years Eastman despised him for his refusal to print one of Eastman’s poems in 1942, “Of What May Ne’er Come to Pass,” an elegy for Pearl Harbor. Eastman maintained the notion that if Broadwater wanted to
run the same muck of mannered short stories and odes to prep school, then let it be his own mediocre funeral. The grudge lasted ten years, up until the day Broadwater married Elaine Pottsdam, younger sister to Eastman’s first wife, Barbara. Eastman and Broadwater set aside their bad blood because they had become themselves blood, and on a cold evening in November 1952, at the rehearsal dinner at a restaurant lodge in New Hampshire, they reconciled.

  “Broadwater, is that you? How’s my favorite sister-in-law doing?”

  “Just fine, Alan. Just fine. It’s so nice that you still consider us family. We still think of you as family, I hope you’ve always known that.”

  “That must be why we haven’t spoken for a decade.”

  “Oh, come now, Alan, it hasn’t been that long.”

  “Okay, cut the crap, Broadwater. What is it you want? Your timing is impeccable, as always.”

  Broadwater, likewise, dropped his affectations. “Why, Alan, I’m amazed that you even picked up the phone. I have half a mind to think this is some sort of miracle.”

  “I’m expecting a call from someone important. And you, Broadwater, lack even a smidgen of importance.”

  “Now don’t you want to know why I’m calling?” There it was, thought Eastman, Broadwater’s prep school lilt (Deerfield) coming to the surface. He was not treating Broadwater indecently, for Eastman had learned to keep his guard up when dealing with the type of Harvard men he knew so intimately.

  “Not in the least,” Eastman said.

  “Oh, come now. You’re not still sore about that poem, are you?”

  The poem in question had been written by Eastman as an undergraduate in 1941 when the news hit that the Japanese had bombed the American naval base. Young Eastman was coming back from the library, bundled in a peacoat, scarf, mittens, all sent by his mother. He walked across the frozen grass heading for Dunster House, his redbrick dormitory along the Charles. Martin Lutz, his roommate, had CBS radio turned up. The boy had been listening for the New York Philharmonic when the announcement overtook the airwaves. Eastman dropped his books to the floor once the report registered with him. “The Japanese have today attacked Pearl Harbor.” Lutz, another Brooklynite from a similar middle-class background, had an older brother in the army. Arnold, a true fuckup, as Lutz described him. But Eastman knew, perhaps before Lutz did (that’s how intuitive he was even at that age), this could be the final tussle that tipped America into war. Arnold’s fate would be determined. Eastman saw the fear in Lutz’s face. Something called to him between his roommate’s despair and the posters of Virginia Bruce and Joan Blondell. The event alone became Eastman’s political awakening, even though he hadn’t any familial connections to the military like Lutz. For months he had been ambivalent to the prowar sentiment around campus that began with Hitler’s invasion of Russia. He took no stand next to the leftist Student Union protesting in the Commons. But this, this was Lutz, good old Lutz, staring off with thoughts of Arnie. Eastman sat down next to him on the bed. The boys said nothing, only listened to what transpired live. When darkness fell, an eruption began in the Commons, but Eastman stayed in. He took out the notebook he used for advanced composition and wrote the poem Broadwater referenced now. It would become Eastman’s first bit of war writing, and it wasn’t half bad either.

  “Goddamnit, no,” Eastman said into the phone. “I’m not still sore about that poem. I thought we put it behind us. But now that you bring it up, I should be sore about that poem, shouldn’t I? You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to hang it over my goddamn head.”

  Eastman continued to berate Broadwater. And it wasn’t just meaningless lambasting against Broadwater’s masculinity, although Eastman did fit in that he always thought Broadwater a homosexual at Harvard and wasn’t the least bit convinced when Broadwater married Elaine Pottsdam. The two old classmates exchanged recollections of the controversy surrounding the poem’s candidacy for publication in the Advocate. Eastman wanted the poem in the January issue, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet Broadwater found the poem exploitative, and far too leftist at a time when the Crimson had even shifted its stance to prowar. Broadwater’s rank as Pegasus gave him seniority at the Advocate, and even though most of the staff knew Eastman as someone with literary flair and a good bit of talent, they took Broadwater’s side, deciding not to run Eastman’s poem. Eastman blamed Broadwater solely, though the decision against him was unanimous.

  They continued to argue, circuitously perhaps, about what was respectable to print in those years. Eastman brought up the exclusion he felt he endured for four years among the WASPs of Cambridge as a Jew from Brooklyn. But now this was Eastman blowing off steam. Broadwater was the first person he was speaking to in the four nights since Penny’s departure. Something had been building up in him, sitting at home, grieving, and Broadwater’s timing, as Eastman had admitted freely, was indeed impeccable.

  “Now, Eastman, listen to me here. Let’s get serious a minute. I’m calling with a proposition for you.”

  “A proposition? You sound like a pimp.”

  “Now just a minute.”

  “Or should I say a madam,” Eastman countered.

  “Alan, they want to send you to Vietnam.”

  Right away Eastman perked his stance. Was it the rebellious sound of the word that got him? The foreignness that had infiltrated the American lexicon?

  “Who? Who wants to send me to Vietnam? You’re still as cryptic as you were thirty years ago.”

  “The higher-ups,” said Broadwater. “Jay Husskler suggested sending someone big into Vietnam now that we’ve pulled out. You know, get the feeling on the ground, the sentiment. Get both sides of the thing. First name out of Husskler’s mouth is you, Alan. Believe me, I nearly shat myself. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “To tell me that you nearly shit your slacks, or that Husskler would think of me, the most important war journalist of our generation?”

  “You’re still pretty important, Alan. Around here you are, I admit that. Then we suggested someone a little more proven than you, currently. But Husskler, well, Husskler just shot it down.”

  “Fuck you. Moreover, who the hell do you think is more proven than me?”

  “Now this is all said in confidence, Alan. Some of us feel you haven’t done anything in a while, but Husskler still wants you. He said that. And I’m on your side on this. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “I am important, you ten-cent pimp.”

  Eastman looked around his study and couldn’t help feeling rather unimportant. His family was gone. His love, Penny, whom he drove to New Jersey willingly. Coward, Eastman.

  “What day is it?” he asked Broadwater.

  “Thursday, of course.”

  “Then it’s been four nights.”

  “What has?”

  “Never mind that now, Broadwater. I’m assuming you have a foreign bureau in Saigon.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So why the hell are you calling me?”

  “Between you and me, Alan, the paper’s in trouble. I tell you openly because we have a history. A lot is at stake now, and, and, and . . .”

  “You’re stammering, Broadwater.”

  “Fuck you, Alan. Fact of the matter is a washed-up writer such as yourself, who may still have a few thousand words left in him, sending dispatches from Saigon and Hanoi is something that Husskler wants to print, and that, we can only hope, people want to read. Provided they give a shit. It’s about selling papers, Alan. As Husskler called it, it’d be a revenue booster. I thought it would interest you since you might be able to get a book out of it.”

  “So Husskler wants to send me into certain death. Have me write a dispatch on getting my ass shot off, maybe stepping on a VC mine? I know what he’s up to. He despises me as much as you do.”

  “I don’t despise you, Alan. No one here despises
you. Where do you get such notions? To be honest I haven’t thought of you in years until Husskler suggested your name.”

  “Are you sorry you never ran my poem?”

  “Jesus, Alan. Now we’re back to that again.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “We’ve cleared this up.”

  “Well?”

  “No, I’m not sorry I never ran your damn poem. It was unfit for print. We determined that then. The atmosphere was too precarious.”

  “Precarious? There’s nothing precarious about it. Broadwater, you’ve never been able to put yourself aside for the greater good. I’m afraid you can tell your boy Husskler to stick it up his ass. Tell him I was contemplating it. No. Tell him I was seriously considering his offer. I want you to relay that to him. ‘Seriously considering.’ And that you fucked it up over a silly little thing that happened to us thirty years ago.”

  “Eastman—”

  Eastman hung up. Through the course of their conversation, he had never truly considered taking Broadwater up on his offer to report on Vietnam. He had been against the war from the beginning and had made it known. He appeared on television next to left-wing intellectuals and draft dodgers. He did not consider himself among the liberals, though he felt he was indeed a champion of the poor and a combatant to the conservative wing. To Eastman, America’s involvement in Asia was nothing more than a misguided panic, an aggression without merit against an idea that, if spread, had zero consequences. Vietnam was merely a symbol to stop the idea in the Orient, a desperate act of fear, a refusal to admit defeat. It was an evil war that had brought every horror in America bubbling up from the sewer. Eastman said as much on television whenever they would grant him an appearance. So why would Husskler want him for the job? Eastman had gone to war himself, it was true. He knew the military mind intimately. Maybe it was precisely his discomforting feelings about Vietnam that made Husskler think of him. Though this would just make Eastman a walking target, and a bullet would just as likely come from Uncle Sam’s chamber as it would a VC sniper.