334

by Thomas M. Disch

  She lowered her voice, as though confiding a secret to the olive-drab film of dehydrated vegetable oil on her Koffee.

  “And then to go and do that. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him. Is it prejudice to want something better for your children, then I’m prejudiced. A good-looking boy, I don’t deny that, and even smart in his way I suppose. He wrote poems to her. In Spanish, so I wouldn’t be able to understand them. I told her, it’s your life, Lottie, go ahead and ruin it any way you like but don’t tell me I’m prejudiced. You children never heard me use words like that and you never will. I may not have more than a high school education but I know the difference between … right and wrong. At the wedding she wore this blue dress and I never said a word about how short it was. So beautiful. It still makes me cry.” She paused. Then, with great emphasis, as though this were the single unassailable conclusion that these many evidences remorselessly required of her: “He was always very polite.”

  Another longer pause.

  “You’re not listening to me, Boz.”

  “Yes, I am. You said he was always very polite.”

  “Who?”

  Boz searched through his inner family album for the face of anyone who might have behaved politely to his mother.

  “My brother-in-law?”

  Mrs. Hanson nodded. “Exactly. Juano. And she also said why didn’t I try religion.” She shook her head in a pantomime of amazement that such things could be allowed.

  “She? Who?”

  The dry lips puckered with disappointment. The discontinuity had been intended, a trap, but Boz had slipped past. She knew he wasn’t listening but she couldn’t prove it.

  “Mrs. Miller. She said it would be good for me. I told her one religious nut in the family is enough and besides I don’t call that religion. I mean, I enjoy a stick of Oraline as much as anyone, but religion has to come from the heart.” Again she rumpled the violet, orange, and heather-gold flames of her bodice. Down below there somewhere it filled up with blood and squirted it out into the arteries: her heart.

  “Are you still that way?” she asked.

  “Religious? No, I was off that before I got married. Milly’s dead against it too. It’s all chemistry.”

  “Try and tell that to your sister.”

  “Oh, but for Shrimp it’s a meaningful experience. She understands about the chemistry. She just doesn’t care, so long as it works.”

  Boz knew better than to take sides in any family quarrel. Once already in his life he had had to slip loose from those knots, and he knew their strength.

  Mickey returned with the mail, laid it on the TV, and was out the door before his grandmother could invent new errands.

  One envelope.

  “Is it for me?” Mrs. Hanson asked. Boz didn’t stir. She took a deep wheezing breath and pushed herself up out of the chair.

  “It’s for Lottie,” she announced, opening the envelope. “It’s from the Alexander Lowen School. Where Amparo wants to go.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “They’ll take her. She has a scholarship for one year. Six thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus. That’s great.”

  Mrs. Hanson sat down on the couch, across Boz’s ankles, and cried. She cried for well over five minutes. Then the kitchen timer went off: As the World Turns. She hadn’t missed an installment in years and neither had Boz. She stopped crying. They watched the program.

  Sitting there pinned beneath his mother’s weight, warmed by her flesh, Boz felt good. He could shrink down to the size of a postage stamp, a pearl, a pea, a wee small thing, mindless and happy, nonexistent, utterly lost in the mail.

  3

  Shrimp was digging God, and God (she felt sure) was digging Shrimp: her. Here on the roof of 334; Him, out there in the russet smogs of dusk, in the lovely poisons of the Jersey air, everywhere. Or maybe it wasn’t God but something moving more or less in that direction. Shrimp wasn’t sure.

  Boz, dangling his feet over the ledge, watched the double moire patterns of her skin and her shift. The spiral patterns of the cloth moved widdershins, the flesh patterns stenciled beneath ran deasil. The March wind fluttered the material and Shrimp swayed and the spirals spun, vortices of gold and green, lyric illusions.

  Off somewhere on another roof an illegal dog yapped. Yap, yap, yap; I love you, I love you, I love you.

  Usually Boz tried to stay on the surface of something nice like this, but tonight he was exiled to inside of himself, redefining his problem and coming to grips with it realistically. Basically (he decided) the trouble lay in his own character. He was weak. He had let Milly have her own way in everything until she’d forgotten that Boz might have his own legitimate demands. Even Boz had forgotten. It was a one-sided relationship. He felt he was vanishing, melting into air, sucked down into the green-gold whirlpool. He felt like shit. The pills had taken him in exactly the wrong direction, and Shrimp, out there in St. Theresa country, was no aid or comfort.

  The russet dimmed to a dark mauve and then it was night. God veiled His glory and Shrimp came down. “Poor Boz.” she said.

  “Poor Boz,” he agreed.

  “On the other hand you’ve gotten away from this.” Her hand whisked away the East Village roofscape and every ugliness. A second, more impatient whisk, as though she’d found the whole mess glued to her hand. In fact, it had become her hand, her arm, the whole stiff contraption of flesh she had managed for three hours and fifteen minutes to escape.

  “And poor Shrimp.”

  “Poor Shrimp too,” he agreed.

  “Because I’m stuck here.”

  “This morning who was telling me it isn’t where you live, it’s how you live?”

  She shrugged a sharp-edged scapula. She hadn’t been speaking of the building but of her own body, but it would have taken too much trouble to explain that to blossoming Narcissus. She was annoyed with Boz for dwelling on his miseries, his inner conflicts. She had her own dissatisfactions that she wanted to discuss, hundreds.

  “Your problem is very simple, Boz. Once you face it. Your problem is that basically you’re a Republican.”

  “Oh, come off it, Shrimp!”

  “Honestly. When you and Milly started living together, Lottie and I couldn’t believe it. It had always been clear as day to us.”

  “Just because I have a pretty face doesn’t mean—”

  “Oh, Boz, you’re being dense. You know that has nothing to do with it one way or the other. And I’m not saying you should vote Republican because I do. But I can read the signs. If you’d look at yourself with a little psychoanalysis you’d be forced to see how much you’ve been repressing.”

  He flared up. It was one thing to be called a Republican but no one was going to call him repressed. “Well, shit on you, sister. If you want to know my party, I’ll tell you. When I was thirteen I used to jerk off while I watched you undress, and believe me, it takes a pretty dedicated Democrat to do that.”

  “That’s nasty,” she said.

  It was nasty, and as untrue as it was nasty. He’d fantasized often enough about Lottie, about Shrimp never. Her short thin brittle body appalled him. She was a gothic cathedral bristling with crockets and pinnacles, a forest of leafless trees; he wanted nice sunshiny cortiles and flowery glades. She was a Dürer engraving; he was a landscape by Domenichino. Screw Shrimp? He’d as soon turn Republican, even if she was his own sister.

  “Not that I’m against Republicanism,” he added diplomatically. “I’m no Puritan. I just don’t enjoy having sex with other guys.”

  “You’ve never given it a chance.” She spoke in an aggrieved tone.

  “Sure I have. Plenty of times.”

  “Then why is your marriage breaking up?”

  Tears started dripping. He cried all the time nowadays, like an air conditioner. Shrimp, skilled in compassion, wept right along with him, wrapping a length of wiry arm around his bare, exquisite shoulders.

  Snuffling, he threw back his head. Flip flop of aubur
n, big brave smile. “How about the party?”

  “Not for me, not tonight. I’m feeling too religious and holy, sort of. Maybe later perhaps.”

  “Aw, Shrimp.”

  “Really.” She wrapped herself in her arms, stuck out her chin, waited for him to plead.

  The dog in the distance made new noises.

  “One time, when I was a kid… right after we moved here, in fact…” Boz began dreamily.

  But he could see she wasn’t listening.

  Dogs had just been made finally illegal and the dog owners were doing Anne-Frank numbers to protect their pups from the city Gestapo. They stopped walking them on the streets, so the roof of 334, which the Park Commission had declared to be a playground (they’d built a cyclone fence all round the edge to give it a playground atmosphere), got to be ankle-deep in dogshit. A war developed between the kids and dogs to see who the roof would belong to. The kids would hunt down off-leash dogs, usually at night, and throw them over the edge. German shepherds fought back the hardest. Boz had seen a shepherd take one of Milly’s cousins down to the pavement with him.

  All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you just forget them, one after another. He felt an elegant, controlled sadness, as though, were he to sit down now and work at it, he might write a fine, mature piece of philosophy.

  “I’m going to sail away now. Okay?”

  “Enjoy yourself,” Shrimp said.

  He touched her ear with his lips, but it wasn’t, even in a brotherly sense, a kiss. A sign, rather, of the distance between them, like the signs on highways that tell you how far it is in miles to New York City.

  The party was not by any means a form of insanity but Boz enjoyed himself in a quiet decorative way, sitting on a bench and looking at knees. Then Williken, the photographer from 334, came over and told Boz about Nuancism, Williken being a Nuancist from way back when, how it was overdue for a renaissance. he looked older than Boz remembered him, parched and fleshless and pathetically forty-three.

  “Forty-three is the best age,” Williken said again, having at last disposed of the history of art to his satisfaction.

  “Better than twenty-one?” Which was Boz’s age, of course.

  Williken decided this was a joke and coughed. (Williken smoked tobacco.) Boz looked away and caught the fellow with the red beard eyeing him. A small gold earring twinkled in his left ear.

  “Twice as good,” Williken said, “and then a bit.” Since this was a joke too, he coughed again.

  He was (the red beard, the gold earring), next to Boz, the best-looking person there. Boz got up, with a pat to the old man’s frayed and folded hands.

  “And how old are you?” he asked the red beard, the gold earring.

  “Six foot two. Yourself?”

  “I’m versatile, pretty much. Where do you live?”

  “The East Seventies. Yourself?”

  “I’ve been evacuated.” Boz struck a pose: Sebastian (Guido’s) spreading himself open, flowerlike, to receive the arrows of men’s admiration. Oh, Boz could charm the plaster off the walls! “Are you a friend of January’s?”

  “A friend of a friend, but that friend didn’t show. Yourself?”

  “The same thing, sort of.”

  Danny (his name was Danny) grabbed a handful of the auburn hair.

  “I like your knees,” Boz said.

  “You don’t think they’re too bushy?”

  “No, I like bushy knees.”

  When they left January was in the bathroom. They shouted their good-byes through the paper panel. All the way home—going down the stairs, in the street, in the subway, in the elevator of Danny’s building—they kissed and touched and rubbed up against each other, but though this was exciting to Boz in a psychological way, it didn’t give him a hard-on.

  Nothing gave Boz a hard-on.

  While Danny, behind the screen, stirred the instant milk over the hot-coil, Boz, alone in all that double bed, watched the hamsters in their cage. The hamsters were screwing in the jumpy, jittery way that hamsters have, and the lady hamsters said, “Shirk, shirk, shirk.” All nature reproached Boz.

  “Sweetener?” Danny asked, emerging with the cups.

  “Thanks just the same. I shouldn’t be wasting your time like this.”

  “Who’s to say the time’s been wasted? Maybe in another half-hour …” the moustache detached itself from the beard: a smile.

  Boz smoothed his pubic hairs sadly, ruefully, wobbled the oblivious soft cock. “No, it’s out of commission tonight.”

  “Maybe a bit of roughing up! I know guys who— ”

  Boz shook his head. “It wouldn’t help.”

  “Well, drink your Koffee. Sex isn’t that important, believe me. There are other things.”

  The hamster said, “Shirk! Shirk, shirk.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “It isn’t,” Danny insisted. “Are you always impotent?” There, he had said the dreaded word.

  “God, no!” (The horror of it!)

  “So? One off-night is nothing to worry about. It happens to me all the time and I do it for a living. I’m a hygiene demonstrator.”

  “You?”

  “Why not? A Democrat by day and a Republican in my spare time. By the way, how are you registered?”

  Boz shrugged. “What difference does it make if you don’t vote?”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I’m a Democrat actually, but before I got married I was Independent. That’s why, tonight, I never thought, when I came home with you, that—I mean, you’re damned good-looking, Danny.”

  Danny blushed agreement. “Get off it. So tell me, what’s wrong with your marriage?”

  “You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Boz said, and then he went through the whole story of Boz and Milly: of how they had had a beautiful relationship, of how that relationship had then soured, of how he didn’t understand why.

  “Have you seen a counselor?” Danny asked.

  “What good would that do?”

  Danny had manufactured a tear of real compassion and he lifted Boz’s chin to make certain he would notice. “You should. Your marriage still means a lot to you and if something’s gone wrong you should at least know what. I mean, it might just be something stupid, like getting your metabolic cycles synchronized.”

  “You’re right, I guess.”

  Danny bent over and squeezed Boz’s calf earnestly. “Of course I’m right. Tell you what, I know someone who’s supposed to be terrific. On Park Avenue. I’ll give you his number.” He kissed Boz quickly on the nose, just in time for the tear of his empathy to plop on Boz’s cheek.

  Later, after one last determined effort, Danny, in nothing but his transparency, saw Boz down to the moat, which (also) was defunct.

  When they had kissed good-bye and while they were still shaking hands, Boz asked, as though off-handedly, as though he had been thinking of anything else for the last half-hour: “By the way, you wouldn’t have worked at Erasmus Hall, would you?”

  “No. Why? Did you go there? I wouldn’t have been teaching anywhere in your time.”

  “No. I have a friend who works there. At Washington Irving?”

  “I’m out in Bedford-Stuyvesant, actually.” The admission was not without its pennyworth of chagrin. “But what’s his name? Maybe we met at a union meeting, or something like that.”

  “It’s a she—Milly Hanson.”

  “Sorry, never heard of her. There are a lot of us, you know. This is a big city.” In every direction the pavement and the walls agreed.

  Their hands unclasped. Their smiles faded, and they became invisible to each other, like boats that draw apart, moving across the water into heavy mists.

  4

  227 Park Avenue, where McGonagall’s office was, was a dowdy sixtyish affair that had been a bit player back in the glass-and-steel boom. But then came the ground-test tremors of ’96 and it had to be wrapped. Now it had the look, outside, of Milly
’s last-year dirty-yellow Wooly© waistcoat. That, plus the fact that McGonagall was an old-fashioned-type Republican (a style that still mostly inspired distrust), made it hard for him to get even the official Guild minimum for his services. Not that it made much difference for them—after the first fifty dollars the Board of Education would pay the rest under its sanity-and-health clause.

  The waiting room was simply done up with paper mattresses and a couple authenticated Saroyans to cheer up the noonday-white walls: an

  Alice

  and:

  or

  or

  Fashionwise, Milly was doing an imitation of maiden modesty in her old PanAm uniform, a blue-gray gauzy jerkin over crisp business-like pajamas. Boz, meanwhile, was sporting creamy street shorts and a length of the same blue-gray gauze knotted round his throat. When he moved it fluttered after him like a shadow. Between them they were altogether tout ensemble, a picture. They didn’t talk. They waited in the room designed for that purpose.

  Half a damned hour.

  The entrance to McGonagall’s office was something from the annals of the Met. The door sublimed into flame and they passed through, a Pamina, a Tamino, accompanied appropriately by flute and drum, strings and horns. A fat man in a white shift welcomed them mutely into his bargain-rate temple of wisdom, clasping first Pamina’s, then Tamino’s hands in his. A sensitivist obviously.

  He pressed his pink-frosted middle-aged face close to Boz’s, as though he were reading its fine print. “You’re Boz,” he said reverently. Then with a glance in her direction: “And you’re Milly.”

  “No,” she said peevishly (it was that half hour), “I’m Boz, and she’s Milly.”

  “Sometimes,” McGonagall said, letting go, “the best solution is divorce. I want you both to understand that if that should be my opinion in your case, I won’t hesitate to say so. If you’re annoyed that I kept you waiting so long, tant pis, since it was for a good reason. It rids us of our company manners from the start. And what is the first thing you say when you come in here? That your husband is a woman! How did it make you feel, Boz, to know that Milly would like to cut off your balls and wear them herself?”