Eastman Was Here

by Alex Gilvarry

  “Man of principle.”

  “Principle, yes.”

  “You see, Alan, I need assurances you’re not going to throw gasoline on a fire were I to stick my neck out. Are you capable of writing a war story and not the kind of anti-shitshow that is published every damn day in the New York Times?”

  “I don’t write for the Times. And assurances—no—I won’t give those. I won’t tell you what I will and won’t write because I don’t know yet. But you know who I am, what I’ve written. Where I served. Maybe we differ on some matters. But I’m the same man who wrote that book all those years ago. The one that brought me here to meet you.”

  Burke sat back in his chair and watched the door. He glanced at Eastman, pleased with himself. The general’s eye began to twitch as if he had something in it. It was a tick, Eastman noticed. Burke put his sunglasses back on and said, “I heard you were a hard son of a bitch. It’s good to finally meet you.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Gen’ral,” said Eastman, returning to his Texan talk.

  “You can call me Don. All my friends do.”

  The waiter brought them their steaks and Burke cut his into equal, bite-sized pieces, not even trying the meat until the whole thing was divided. Eastman waited patiently, and drank his water until Burke was done, and they started their lunch. Burke spoke with his mouth full.

  “Dak Pek, does that mean anything to you?” asked Burke.

  “I don’t know it.”

  “It’s northwest of Kon Tum near the Laos border. I think you should go there. There’s fighting up in Dak Pek, and I have good contacts up there.”

  Eastman wrote down Dak Pek and Kon Tum.

  “The VC had our base up there seized for a few months, then cleared out, and ARVN took it back over. Also, I’ll fix you up with the new ARVN press officer so you can get into some of these press conferences that go on each week and just stink to high hell.”

  “I won’t be reporting anything as newsmen do. I’ll be writing my impressions of this country as it is now. But I will sit in on some press conferences for a start.”

  “Well, your ID says Bao Chi, doesn’t it? As far as transport to Dak Pek and wherever else you want to go, you let me know first and I’ll see what I can do. But remember, even if you won’t give me any assurances on what you write, I’m counting on you. I’m not sitting here with Norman Heimish, am I?”

  Eastman considered the comment, the anti-Semitic remarks made earlier. He said, “Why would you be sitting here with him?”

  “Cuz he’s in Saigon, that’s why.”

  “Heimish?”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t run into him. All you boys seem to know each other.”

  “He’s writing a book, too. If he’s here, that’s what he’s doing. Heimish is going to scoop me.”

  “I thought you said you wouldn’t be reporting anything. It was just . . . impressions.”

  “I know what I said. But this changes things drastically. Do you know where he’s staying?”

  “Why would I know that? I’m not his babysitter. He’s either at the Continental where you are or he’s at the Caravelle. That’s where I would start.”

  Eastman felt stifled. He began to get those heavy feelings in his chest again, the kind that weighed on him so deeply for the past two days. He felt the oncoming nausea, the hot and cold sweat on his temple. He began to scratch at his knuckles. Then to breathe in and out through his nostrils. He could use a Valium; he had them in his room, only he was too proud to bring them along, thinking all of his anxiety was behind him.

  “Your steak’s getting cold,” said Burke.

  “Goddamn Heimish,” said Eastman. He steadied himself and tried to mask his irritation. The general seemed to be having fun watching Eastman fume. Maybe they were alike, and the general enjoyed seeing others suffer just as Eastman did. Then this was just what he had coming. But no, he was able to steady himself in the presence of others, the distraction of talk took him out of his head.

  “Oh, I wonder before our lunch is over,” said Burke, “would you mind autographing a book for me?” Burke called over the waiter and Eastman’s American War was produced on a tray. “I want you to address it: To General Donald Burke, a true friend from the 112th, San Antone. And to his wife, Kitty. In warm admiration, Alan Eastman. Something like that.”

  Eastman hated it when people instructed him what to write and it almost always set him off. He took the book and wrote quickly, To Gen. Don Burke, thanks for your vote, you mensch. L’chaim! et cetera. And he got up and excused himself to the toilet.

  • • •

  Eastman had written Adrien McClure, his editor at Rhinehart, in November of 1963, while on his honeymoon with Penny in San Sebastian. The subject: adventures and travails with Norman Heimish. The honeymoon was a happy time for both Penny and Eastman; in fact, it was a reunion for the two newlyweds. That summer, shortly before they married, they had split up for a month. Eastman had somehow forgotten this, apropos of his current situation. Why had he suppressed the fact that this had happened to them before? It was Penny back then who made them take a “pause” before the wedding, a pause needed to warm her cold feet.

  Penny had been exchanging letters with a friend in London, a man she swore was “as gay as they come.” (In truth, back then Eastman used to go through her mail whenever he saw a man’s name on the return address, usually in a handwriting he didn’t like. So he was already familiar with a man named Eric Nagel.) Eastman knew by Nagel’s hand that he wasn’t opposed to Penny’s affections. The two had exchanged letters, several lengthy letters, and planned to meet when she would be visiting the London School of Economics for an academic conference. Eastman knew something was up by the tone in their correspondence. There were innuendos he didn’t quite understand, pages from the letters missing here and there, and so he was unable to track what exactly was being implied. All of it was strange behavior for Penny, and upon discovery he accused her of foul, unfaithful intentions, things he couldn’t take back nor had he really wanted to put forth. She denied it with fervor, took off to London, stayed with Nagel under the pretense that he was gay, and as they fought over the phone, she extended her stay from what was to be a long weekend in August to another three and a half weeks. Penny needed some time to breathe before the wedding and no, she didn’t want him there.

  He would have flown to London and brought her back had he not been strapped down making edits on To Each His Own, a collection of previously published essays. He was correcting the proofs and suddenly adding extensive changes. His attentions were needed on his work, and he figured let her have her time. He could certainly use the three weeks to complete the book. In between writing, Eastman still had a good amount of time to rummage through her things upstairs, her closets and her desk. He was looking for evidence, proof of what he knew but didn’t want to admit. Then, in the top corner of her closet he found a pink shoebox with white lace tied tightly around it, Penny’s precious secrets waiting for him to unravel. What he found inside were old photographs of her ex-boyfriends from high school, college, graduate school, old love letters, and most important, the missing pages of her correspondence with Nagel. To his horror the pages were from very recently, and in their exchange were feelings and intentions that proved Nagel was not “as gay as they come”; in fact he was far from it. In one of the more filthy pages Eastman had come across, Nagel graphically described what he intended to do with Penny’s cunt once he got his mouth around it (transcribed here verbatim). Nagel had also detailed a kiss they had in New York when the English rat was visiting. Eastman looked for the evidence—that Nagel had fucked her—but where was it? All he could determine from Nagel’s pages was that they had shared a kiss, a long, drawn-out, poorly rendered peck. And that these dreams of defiling Penny’s cunt were Nagel’s dreams alone. He couldn’t find proof of Penny reciprocating Nagel’s wet dreams (of course, her res
ponses he didn’t have, they were on the other side of the Atlantic). Though he couldn’t prove they hadn’t slept together when Nagel was in New York, he somehow knew Penny had refrained from going to bed with him.

  But the truth of the matter wasn’t found in the letters, it was discovered through her actions. She was in England with Nagel, and would be for three more weeks through to September. And it was only a few months before they were to be married. In his heart he wanted to strangle her, Nagel too, and die himself, alone. But his head was still quite level and told him to leave it be. If she wanted to be with someone else, how could he stop her? There was no sense in forcing her to be by his side when it wouldn’t be true and of her own volition.

  While Penny stayed on in London, Eastman, tired, betrayed, horrified, vengeful, flew not to London but drove himself to Norman Heimish’s sixty-acre ranch in Illinois. He had met Heimish in the fifties as a correspondent. Norman Heimish of the Chicago Tribune, who had expanded his reporting into a beautiful book called In the Shadow of Eden. It was more of an autobiographical novel than a work of nonfiction, and had it been published as such, Eastman would have taken the Pulitzer instead of Heimish. Eastman wrote to Heimish via his publisher, stating that it was Eastman’s honest opinion that they were the two best writers in America. This sort of competitive camaraderie was endearing to Heimish. So they met one night in New York City, where they went from the bar in Heimish’s hotel on the Upper East Side and drank themselves down to the bottom of the Bowery. Eastman felt Heimish was someone he could sincerely relate to. Of course, once Heimish indeed won the Pulitzer, Eastman couldn’t stand the fact that he was now the lesser writer in the eyes of the Pulitzer committee and quite possibly the American public. Eastman’s huge success had been diminished, especially when in the presence of Norman Heimish. Because of this, Eastman chose to keep his distance, and that competitive camaraderie began to decay.

  Heimish had set up a type of writers’ commune on a working farm, and these early hippies took to the fields naked, strung out, doing each other bodily harm night after night. It was, indeed, a place to get off the map and to begin living however you wanted. When Eastman arrived he sensed underneath the farm’s bucolic serenity a sourness, as if all the crops were about to rot. There were nudists, communists, Marxists, polygamists. Open love was encouraged. Everyone was either bisexual or open to it. It seemed the kind of place where the voyeur in Eastman could stretch his arms and legs, howl at the moon, and forget Penny for a few days.

  Heimish’s circumstances were the strangest of this crazy lot. He was sharing a woman, Sylvie Dietrich, who was married to Gerd Dietrich. The Dietrichs lived in a small house on the far north side of the sixty acres. The couple co-owned the land along with Heimish. Eastman thought Heimish might have also been bedding Gerd Dietrich, for the whole setup was beyond his understanding. At the same time, seeing Heimish and Sylvie and Gerd entangled in this open love triangle made Eastman wonder whether he was being too hard on Penny for wanting sex outside their relationship. If the times were changing, the people would go with it, and where would that leave him? If Heimish’s artists’ colony was a model for the second half of the century, then maybe Eastman needed to get his hands dirty and open his mind to experiences he had often rejected. Man and wife, that was what he always thought was decent. Looking around the farm in Marshall, with Sylvie’s head resting on Heimish’s shoulder and Gerd Dietrich on the other side, holding her hand . . . Was this what we were all heading for? And should a man adapt to the change in order to be with the woman he wanted?

  Eastman had once thought of himself as bisexual, back in the days when he was experimenting with marijuana and Seconal. His first sexual experiences were with other boys, and where he grew up, that wasn’t so unusual. He learned to masturbate with a high school friend on the wrestling team, and they had once masturbated each other while looking at a nude magazine. He grew out of it, and as a young man and an adult his sexual appetite was solely for women.

  He stayed on the farm for a few days and was reintroduced to marijuana, which relaxed him. Heimish gave him a room in the main house, where Heimish lived along with a cute teenage couple, the girl a painter, and the boy a poet who built Heimish bookshelves and whatever else was needed. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and the boy looked even younger, especially the way he went around the compound, shirtless at all hours, his skinny, frail torso, ribs and all. They had matching haircuts and wore dirty jeans.

  He woke the second morning to the sound of gunfire. He rushed to look out the window (perhaps Dietrich wasn’t so hip with sharing his wife after all), but it was just Heimish out in the field. He was walking to the house with a rabbit by the ears and a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder.

  These were eccentrics living at the edge of the world.

  Late nights he spoke with Penny on the phone in the kitchen and pleaded with her to return to New York. He tried to get her to tell him what was going on. A few more days was all she wanted now. A few more days alone and then she would come back and they would be married. He brought up the letters and how she had lied about Nagel being gay and this only seemed to make matters worse. Penny did not like being put in her place. She scolded him for going through her things and swore that there was nothing going on between her and Nagel. It was a lie told in order not to worry him. He tried to believe her. He tried to look around him at this shitty colony and trick himself into thinking this is how his life would be. Rabbit for dinner. Teenage couple fucking in an adjacent room. Shared relations. Forced friendships.

  One night after a long phone conversation, Heimish was up and came into the kitchen in a bathrobe. In his hand was a coffee mug of bourbon. He poured Eastman a splash into the only clean jar and laid it down on the country table.

  “Tell me brother,” said Heimish. “What’s with these late-night sessions?”

  “I’m getting remarried.”

  “To your ex-wife?”

  “Barbara? No.”

  “I’m always confused by the term ‘remarried.’ You’re getting married. Is it to this little Penny in your pocket? I’m listening to you plead: Penny, listen. Penny, wait. It’s none of my business. But it is my phone.”

  “I’ll pay the bill for the month. You’ve been kind enough.”

  “That’s not what I’m getting at. I got ears you can chew on.”

  “I think there’s someone else. She’s fucking someone when we’re to be married in a few months. It’s not an open thing, her and me. We’re . . . committed.”

  “I’m not against it. Obviously there’s someone else. You’ve been accusing her of it for four nights. Instincts are usually right in this kind of thing, if you’re levelheaded and an observer of human beings, like we are.”

  Heimish brought over the bottle and the two sat at the shabby table under the dim kitchen light.

  “Your choice now,” said Heimish, “knowing what you know, is to accept this third party or react. Your reaction could work against what you saw as your future. Or your reaction could prove beneficial to the relationship as a whole. You want control, I get it. Don’t we all? But you live in the here and now, where things fluctuate, sometimes beautifully, to no end.”

  “To no end?” Eastman thought Heimish’s ideas were spiritual nonsense. “I’ve flirted with existentialism for many years. Who wants to live a life to no end? Yes, I want control. But no, not complete control, I’m not a maniac. I want control of my own life. I know I can’t control a person, that’s why I’m here and not on a plane to Heathrow. I’m accepting the situation and I’m leaving it up to her. Ultimately it’s her decision. I’ll plead my case every night because she’s the only thing that matters to me. She’s everything, Norman.”

  “You’re accepting of her, that’s good, Alan. Acceptance is what we practice here.”

  “Then I accept your offer to get drunk on your whiskey.”

  They stayed
up into the night talking, and Heimish told the story of how he fixed up with the Dietrichs. He had run into a substantial sum from the sale of the movie rights for In the Shadow of Eden and put most of it into the Dietrich farm. Heimish believed in the colony life, having finished Eden there after he quit the Chicago Tribune, and as he spoke of Sylvie, Eastman really believed he loved her.

  That didn’t help Eastman get on with the Dietrichs. As the week went on, the colonists met in the Dietrich house every evening for a communal dinner. Each member of the colony took on a job, either peeling carrots and potatoes, chopping garlic, onion, greens, stirring sauce to thicken, or worse, doing dishes. Now, Eastman had done his share of cooking in the marines and believed he knew his way around the kitchen. He had wanted to help the first night, feeling grateful for Heimish hosting him. But Sylvie, who assigned the duties like a sergeant with a pearl oyster up her ass, stuck Eastman on dish duty every night. Once, he said to her, “Let me get my hands dirty, Sylvia. Toss me that peeler.”

  “It’s Sylvie, and you can get your hands dirty after dinner by washing the dishes with Cameron. We pitch in here and things run smoothly.”

  Eastman, a little drunk by the five o’clock hour, imitated her in front of the other colonists, and didn’t win any laughs or favors with his sordid imitation. Even Cameron, a novelist from Michigan who’d been on dish duty for weeks, didn’t find the impression the least bit humorous. “What’s a matter with you?” Eastman asked him. “You wanna do dishes forever?”

  “Well, I can’t cook, so I don’t mind,” said Cameron.

  “You don’t seem to mind anything. Do you mind licking my nuts?”

  The young Cameron shook his head in disgust.

  Eastman began to wonder what else had been lodged up Sylvie’s ass that made her such a dominatrix. What had he done to cross her? He had been a pleasant enough guest with the exception of the late night phone calls with Penny, he tried not to eat too much and to take an equal share of the meat and potatoes and greens. Since he was Heimish’s guest, he didn’t think it necessary that he help with anything around the farm. Mostly he stayed in his room and read through his proofs, made corrections, wrote additions and footnotes for To Each His Own. He had made this clear to Heimish, that he was coming to the country to work, to get out of the city for a few days. What was Sylvie’s issue with him? Every evening he chose to sit across from her in order to loosen her up, but there was always tension. And after dinner the tension only grew, as Eastman dunked dishes into the soapy water as he’d been instructed, then passed them to his fellow dishwasher, Cameron. After a few minutes of washing he’d usually excuse himself to the toilet, where he would take pleasure in a bowel movement for the good part of a half hour, reading a copy of Commentary that had been left on top of the toilet seat.