A wave of fright washes over her. She turns off the light, gets into bed, pulls the light bedspread to her chin. To the air she says, “You’re so strange, Garth. Like you were behind the door when they handed out guilt.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Stop it.”
He sighs. “There’s so much stupid pain in the world, think about that. There are so many ways to feel bad. You have to balance it out. Does that eye feel as bad as it looks?”
She doesn’t reply. She lies under her covers with her eyes closed, but she sees his face in her mind more clearly than her own. Does she want him? She wants something so much she has forgotten to breathe. She rolls away from him toward the wall, shielding herself with the bones of her back.
The move was a mistake, though. There is now room in her bed, and he crawls in behind her, takes hold of her bad hand. He kisses the small palm, then each nub of finger, as if the monstrosity is precious, like a starfish or the hand of a new baby. He puts her thumb in his mouth and sucks gently. She moans involuntarily. “Vera, is it okay? We don’t have to do anything. I’m sad and you’re sad. We’ll hold each other.”
She doesn’t speak or move, but it’s as if she has acquiesced. He nestles against her back as if he belongs there. He smells like dirt and salt. “For a minute,” she says, yawning self-consciously.
“I can relax you,” he says.
“Where did you get that line?”
He giggles, and she loves the sound. His hands move up and down the cloth over her back. She takes a shallow breath. He pulls up the back of her pajama top and touches her skin. “Lots of zits here.”
“Mosquito bites. Stop, you’re making me itch.”
“You have a ton, man,” he says almost reverently. “Do you want some lotion?”
“No. Why don’t you go back to bed now?”
“I’ll get you something. For your eye too.”
He leaves and returns with Caladryl. Gentle as a parent he turns her on her stomach, squirts the lotion into his hand, and coats her shoulder blades. “I’ve thought it all through, Vera. After we graduate college we’ll get an apartment together. We’ll get along great since we know each other so well and we’re so much alike.”
“The weird DeVito kids.”
“We’ll go to New York. You can dance in the New York City Ballet.”
“How about the New York City zoo?” she murmurs. “Or the circus?”
“Or San Francisco, where nobody knows us,” he goes on. “It’s a new world there. No rules about love. I’ll get a job. We could have a family.”
“Kids with two heads.”
“Two heads are better than one.”
“That gives me the creeps!”
“One day you’ll see,” he says. “The world is changing.”
His voice trembles uttering his last statement, but she doesn’t know whether it’s from uncertainty or its opposite, an apprehension of the enormity that he is contemplating. They look at each other, inches apart, her nose at the level of his mouth. She inhales his breath, which tastes sweet whether or not he brushes his teeth. How she loves Garth, no one but Garth. Then with an urge so ambivalent, so weakened with doubt and resistance that the gesture makes her arms and chest ache, she pushes him away from her. “Garth, you disgust me.”
He lies where she moved him, hard and still. He’s hurt, she knows. And when she’s gone, he’ll hurt more. Tears spring to her eyes. How long has it been since her eyes were moist? She has always disdained notions the nuns would throw at her. Listen to the voice of God in you. Be quiet inside and you will hear. Blessed be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. While, in fact, she has no idea what combo of God, Satan, and her own twisted psyche, rotten as her hand, wants her to be with Garth and no one but Garth. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. She puts her feet against the small of his back and pushes him out of the bed, propels him out of the room, shuts the door, and hooks a chair under the knob. She pushes her desk in front of the chair.
On the desk are her cutoffs, which smell rank. She takes them to the closet, starts to scrunch them down into her laundry bag, and feels the Pledge from a million years ago, which she is glad she signed. She and her friends, her trusted, trustworthy, cherished friends. She folds the paper into a tinier square and transfers it to the deep side pocket of her good winter coat, which, having already been cleaned, will escape her mother’s compulsion until next spring, when it will all long have been over.
8
CJ
It’s three-thirty A.M. by his nightstand clock, but he’s into his book and reading fast, with only thirteen days to finish this and all the other books on his shelf. This one, The Last of the Just, is about a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. CJ craves Holocaust stories. His father, who was interned and survived, will tell him nothing, not even the name of his camp, though CJ was able to prize this fact from his mother. In bed now, propped against pillows, CJ imagines himself in Auschwitz, starved and terrorized down to his essential savagery or heroism. With skeletal legs and arms, will he share his bowl of scummy soup? Will he suck up to the Kommandant? He imagines himself as the Kommandant—obese, charismatic Hermann Goering, or perverse, pitiless Dr. Mengele, his nod directing a line of trembling humanity toward life, toward death.
After some minutes, though, he closes the book. He shuts off the light. He closes his eyes and presses twin spots in their inner corners, lost suddenly in the wilderness of wanting. Wanting? It’s a feeble word for what he feels. Lust? Love? No single word can contain it. It’s “want” to the hundredth power. CJ pictures the face of his beloved but won’t say the name even under his breath. Wanting and unable to speak, he feels as if he’s about to die, though his heart beats stoically.
Back on goes the light. CJ returns to his book and reads about the German schoolteacher who, in class, kicks the Jewish boy in the stomach for not being able to sing properly. No one protests. Tormented and outcast, the boy wonders if he might be one of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, thirty-six righteous men who aren’t known to one another or even necessarily to themselves but whose business is to suffer so the world can go on. What a job, CJ says to Mick Jagger, who looks down on the room from a wall poster. CJ gets out of bed, retapes a loose corner of the poster, aligns the spines of the college catalogues that have been arriving all summer, though he didn’t send for them. He shivers, which isn’t strange—the air-conditioned room is freezing—and opens a window, inhales some of the damp, warm night. Among the thirty-six, the worst off are the ones who don’t recognize their earthly purpose. They ascend to heaven so cold that God has to warm them between His fingers for a thousand years. CJ puts on a sweatshirt, not that he thinks he’s a Lamed Vavnik. He’s not even sure he is a Jew. Does Jewishness disappear from one’s blood when it isn’t practiced? Named Christopher Joseph Walker, he sounds pure Aryan. Of course, Hitler would think otherwise.
A bit disoriented in the endless middle of this night, he puts the book down and plucks a college catalogue from the shelf. On the cover handsome young men and women walk curving paths before an old stone building, in which agreeable discussions no doubt occur, ideas batted back and forth with the fervent courtesy of tennis players: Cornell University. In the foreground a slim girl holds the hand of a broad-shouldered boy the right number of inches taller than she. There’s a catalogue from Harvard too, where his father wants him to go, though he won’t admit it. Inside is an application form, questions to be answered seriously. “Describe yourself and what you see as your place in the universe.” CJ rolls his eyes up at Jagger, who seems to share his derision, his wide pink lips like some internal organ.
CJ gets up, sits at his desk, and turns on his electric typewriter. He writes, I exist in opposition to the word “no.” I challenge the 613 Judaic commandments and a few more. Thou shalt not deposit the pickings of thy nose upon the underside of thy desk, even if thou art seated in the back row. Thou shalt not enter thy brother’s bedroom with the purpo
se of pressing a pillow upon his seraphic face. Thou shalt not cut off thy dick and leave it to bleed on thy father’s desk no matter what he does to emasculate you. Thou shalt not call S____ (my love) in the middle of the night no matter how much you want to talk to him. Thou shalt not call S____ (my love) at any hour of the day or night.
He rather likes what he’s written. At least it doesn’t kiss ass.
Now it’s four-fifteen; in an hour the sky will lighten, but his horsefly brain is buzzing. Almost of itself, his body rises from the chair. On quiet feet he walks darkened hallways till he arrives at the door behind which his parents sleep. Almost involuntarily he turns the knob. He steps onto carpet thick and soundless. There’s his mother’s light breathing, and from his father the occasional rattle of a snore. The sleep of the just? The sleep of a former Auschwitz inmate, an honest-to-God survivor who married a shiksa, named their firstborn Christopher, and joined the Unitarian Church, his demons buried deep or maybe too stupid to locate him—crafty old Judah Wachsberger, hiding out as Dr. Jack Walker, orthopedic surgeon, in this row of gentile mansions-on-the-lake. Not even his German accent gives him away. You think scientist or even Nazi before you think Jew.
Across from the king-sized bed, silently CJ slides open the top drawer of his father’s bureau. There’s a giant economy-size pack of condoms, squares aligned like thin mints. He has checked these out before, surprised by the rapidity with which the contents diminish. They won’t be needed for a bit, as tomorrow Mrs. Walker is flying to New York to spend time with her sister, who recently lost her husband.
CJ gazes down at his sleeping mother, who loves her sister and seems to like most of the people in the world. There’s a nugget of goodness in everyone, she says, you just have to find it. But she had no response when he said, Even Hitler? She prefers his brother, he’s sure, though she denied it the one time he confronted her. Her dominant feeling for him seems to be worry, which makes him worry about himself. You have such high standards for yourself, she said. To which he said, Isn’t that a good thing? To which she replied with a little sigh, Just give yourself a break sometimes. He still wonders what sort of break. He used to adore his mother. She was the one he sat by on airplanes, at restaurants, or even at home on the couch watching TV; he would cry if he couldn’t have her beside him. For a moment he regards her in her tranquil, good-sister sleep, rocked by dreams as blithe as Broadway musicals, and he considers her reaction to the news of his death—which might occur while she and Aunt Lottie are out shopping, or at a play, or visiting Uncle Jed at the cemetery. She will not know, then she will know. The image disturbs him. With a forcible tug from his will, CJ exits the room, along with two of the items that exist to save him from acquiring a second younger brother.
Danny’s room is next to their parents’, and the door is open as usual. A nightlight reveals disorder of an athletic strain—gym shoes, tennis and golf balls, a deluxe hockey game with players that swivel and charge. The boy himself looks frighteningly vulnerable lying on his back in his cotton pajamas. Ten years old and tall for his age, he still sleeps with his cheek against an ancient stuffed dog. For a fraction of a second CJ’s eyes start to water. It will be strange never to see Danny again, if only for his look of wondering pleasure when CJ tells him something he doesn’t know. Where does that dauntless openness come from? CJ stands with his hand on the doorknob till the question subsides into the broth of other unanswerable, irrelevant questions, and he is once more intact.
CJ’s final destination is the large Victorian-style bathroom that adjoins his bedroom. Dropping his boxers, he balances on the curved side of the old claw-foot tub and regards himself in the framed mirror over the sink. He is no Greek god for many reasons, chief among them a disproportion remediable only through butchery, his lean frame made ridiculous by a cock so pornographically large that, after the misery of overnight camp, he faked asthma in order to get permanent leave from gym. Faked it well enough to fool both his doctor-father and his allergist. On a shelf in the medicine chest is his bronchodilator, which he discharges every so often. He’s good at acting—at anything that heightens the ecstatic shame of what is about to happen.
Perched on the side of the tub, eyes fixed on the mirror, he touches himself, imagining popular, brainless boys from his school standing just outside his door, nauseated but transfixed. There is pleasure in being disgusting, he has discovered, a refined pleasure akin to what nineteenth-century lords probably felt when they visited a brothel. Contemplating any new lewdness, a man of courage has no choice but to act on it. He puts the condom on, lubricated and nearly translucent, watching his hands in the mirror as if they belonged to someone else. To S, perhaps (but who, pray, is S)? He runs a hand along the shaft of his cock, thinking, The compadres like me, but they don’t know this part of me, not even Vera, who applauds perversion. If they saw his soul, their warmth would turn to revulsion; no question. But it’s his destiny to seek revulsion. His excessive dick points at the ceiling. In the mirror he sees its seamed and rivered underside. He is not happy, he will never be happy, but he feels strong and right, like Christ on the cross apprehending his place in the scheme of things. Like a martyr of the Talmudic persuasion, a concentration camp internee, one of the thirty-six just, whose anguish sustains the world. Balancing, cresting on his fantasy of sacrifice, he doesn’t ejaculate.
Back in his room now, the finale exceeds grand. Lying in bed he imagines himself to be former Reichsmarschall Goering in his cell at Nuremberg. It’s October 15, 1946, eighteen months after V-E Day—the sad finish to the German stab at glory as Goering conceived it—and fifteen days after the tribunal’s verdict came down: death by hanging, despite the Nazi leader’s passionate nine-day defense of himself. Hermann Goering, just a poor old Nazi bastard now, lies on his back in his bunk, reviewing the events of the trial, if you could call it that. He spoke well, he believes, with the same humor, sincerity, and intelligence that raised him to National Socialist power, buddy of Hitler and designated successor. That the trial was a sham doesn’t bother him; how, after a war like that, could the Allies let him live? But as an officer he has the right to a firing squad—to be executed as the enemy soldier he was. He claimed this right with his head high, but die Schweine wanted the last full measure, his Aryan blood not even spilled on German soil but left to rot in the veins of the carcass of a hanged man.
In the confines of his father’s condom, CJ pulses with Goering’s shame and fear. He can see the man on his last earthly night, prone on the wooden slab in his cell. Physically—ironically!—he’s feeling good, fifty pounds lighter on the prison diet. Gone, the old yen for morphine. Then his buddy, an American lieutenant—hunter, lover of woodland like himself, the one friend he has cultivated from among the conqueror dogs and pigs—gives him the news: It will be tomorrow. CJ can hear Goering’s sincere thank-you, his German accent with its slight British inflection like CJ’s father’s. At which, following instructions, the kind and able American locates the stored suitcase and extracts from under the quilted lining the poison capsule Goering has hidden there for just this occasion.
No, Goering already has the capsule—he has always had it, his final escape—wrapped in foil in the bottom of a jar of pomade on the table in his cell. Under the eyes of the guard posted to prevent exactly this, he rises as if on an afterthought and locates his comb along with the jar. Immaculate to the end. He almost smiles, probing the creamy bottom of the jar. Shortly afterward, hair oiled and combed, he returns to his cot, feeling in the waistband of his boxers the sticky, foil-wrapped capsule. Then, even as the guard’s eyes are turned upon him—a Brit this one, slow-witted and incorruptible, ensuring the world that no “German criminal” will cheat the gallows—he reaches into his clothing as if to scratch. The movement is almost absentminded, and afterward he lies still, listening to his heartbeat, picturing his two handsome wives (he was a lucky man), his dear, disappointed Hitler, and the Fatherland in a thousand years, freed at last but by someone else. (Still, they’d
fought a good fight.) Then, casually covering his yawning mouth, he inserts the cyanide cap that will end his days with the only sovereignty that remains to him. But sovereignty it is. Gazing upon the guard’s young, stupid face, he suppresses the urge to wink at him, and bites down. CJ lies in his own bed, breathing in gasps, thinking first of Goering in his death throes, his hand maybe in the hand of the kind American, who is trying not to weep, and then it’s he and Saint hand in hand on the edge of the bluff.
He comes ferociously.
He is trying to move from that pleasure straight into sleep when he hears the shrill rising yowl of a cat. They don’t have a cat. Cocking his head he hears it again. He raises the window screen, sticks his head out, and sees in the paling dark before dawn’s early light a vision from a dream. He whispers the name, “Saint.” He clears his throat, holding on to the windowsill, hating the expression he must have on his face. But it is Saint, his wild hair, wide shoulders, and—my God!—his large, pale body sitting on the walk below his window, naked as the day he was born.
9
Our Story
Before we of 4EVER caught the first glimpse of one another, when the idea of a cherishing group was just a yearning in our disparate minds, while my mother was still pretending to be a happy Evanston housewife and Saint was finding safe routes to and from his various apartments in Detroit, CJ was out East at boarding school. He was ten, eleven, twelve, almost thirteen, trying to find a place in the world of competitive, confident boys—unlike himself, he thought, but he could fake it. He was not only brainy in a school that lauded brains, he could bat a dime across the room with the side of his pencil. In seventh grade he was first in singles on the Grosvenor School tennis team, and he played shortstop on the Grosvenor baseball team. Then one afternoon, with a lousy batter at the plate, he saw in the bleachers a blond, square-jawed eighth-grade boy who had played the sax in a school assembly—played it tenderly, swaying from side to side—and his dick swelled. An easy grounder rolled through his legs. Before the game was over, he had made three more errors.
Once, in Lourdes Page 10