JD

by Mark Merlis

  I said, “April.” As casually as that. Yet as I stepped out of the ladies’ room, I had for the first time the sensation, not of being pregnant, but of being expectant.

  Jonathan had vacuumed up his half of the steak and was starting an incursion on mine. He looked up and said, thoughtfully, “You okay?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’ve had a little nausea lately. Off and on.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, without interest. He chewed, looked around the room. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He swallowed. I nodded.

  “Hm,” Jonathan said. He gazed into the unlit fireplace for a while. Finally he said, “What the hell.” He didn’t go all misty, but at least he didn’t mutter—as I had a few weeks earlier, sitting at my desk—“Oh shit.” But then, weeks earlier, there hadn’t been a job or an apartment.

  My appetite returned. I polished off my half of the steak and its attendant produce so fast that Jonathan stared at me. Then he poured me the last of the claret, lit my cigarette, and said, “I guess maybe we ought to think about …” Even Jonathan recognized this was too brusque. He cleared his throat, took my hand, and said, “I want you to be my wife.”

  I finished my wine and took a drag of my cigarette—what innocent mothers we were back then! I had, amazingly, the presence of mind to ask: “What if I—will you want to be my husband if it turns out there’s no baby?” I didn’t specify how things might turn out that way.

  Only in retrospect does it seem to me that I was turning Mickey into a test. What would I have done if Jonathan had failed to supply the right answer? As it was, he had to think a good while—still absently holding my hand.

  “I will,” he said. So unMickey became irrevocably Mickey. Or past my revocation, at any rate.

  “I will,” he said, and I said “I will,” as if we were taking the vows right then. Perhaps we meant the words more, that evening at the Café Lucien, than when we—soberly—repeated them a week later at City Hall.

  As the flames died down on the crêpes suzette, Jonathan leaned close and murmured, “You know, I’ve slept with a lot of people.” It was 1951, I was just a girl fresh out of school, but I must have registered that the object of the preposition was rather … inclusive. Must have, because I can remember the word “people” fifty years later. In retrospect, I guess I am thankful he didn’t say he’d slept with a lot of vertebrates. But then, what did I think of it then?

  Not enough to hesitate. It was just a couple of years after the Kinsey Report, which suggested that many, many men had sometimes slept with “people.” And we were in the Village, after all; a little catholic experimentation was almost mandatory in that not yet altogether sclerotic bohemia. I just shrugged, actually thought of offering a reassuring “me, too.” I didn’t, not just because it would have been a lie—unless two college boys plus Jonathan was a lot—but because somehow I already intuited that Jonathan’s wish to subvert bourgeois norms did not imply any eagerness to repeal the double standard.

  I shrugged; we dug into the crêpes suzette. Whatever he had been up to wouldn’t matter, not when we were married and raising our child.

  After we were done raising our child, and then done burying him, I took over Mickey’s bedroom and drew pictures. Then Jonathan died, and I drew pictures.

  Today I am drawing pictures of a dead daffodil. Something I have not shaken off.

  TWO

  Laurence calls. Jonathan’s old editor at Aurora, the one who found me that first cookbook job after Mickey died. I haven’t spoken to him in five or six years. Why? No business to transact, for one thing; the last of Jonathan’s books went out of print years ago, when Aurora was bought by Krupp or I.G. Farben or somebody and the whole backlist was pulped. Besides, I had the rather vertiginous sensation, the last time we met for lunch, that Laurence was flirting. When I had pretty much assumed that he, like everyone else in the entourage that surrounded Jonathan in his last years, was gay.

  Even now, as he proffers an indistinct “something to talk over,” he won’t just meet me in his office, but insists that we have dinner instead. Is this just manners, a gesture toward a doddering widow who probably doesn’t get out much? Or does he have a penchant for doddering widows?

  I capitulate.

  “Next Thursday?” he says. “I’ll come by around—”

  “I’ll meet you,” I say. Perhaps abruptly, but I will not have him coming by for me, as if it were a date.

  “All right. Maybe the Plymouth Room?”

  “Is there still a Plymouth Room?” How thoughtful, to take me to a restaurant as old as I am. “Fine. Six o’clock?”

  “Six?” he repeats, unable to keep the incredulity from his voice. I suppose for him six is practically lunchtime. But I insist: at six he can’t possibly imagine we’re having a date.

  Laurence never understood a word Jonathan wrote. Perhaps that is just a long way of saying Laurence was Jonathan’s editor. But he really did seem to think of Jonathan as some sort of fuzzy and benevolent social commentator, making earnest recommendations for small improvements. And that is how he packaged him. A friendly sage, a mild-mannered kvetch with an endearing one-sided smile and an unlit pipe. While Jonathan thought of himself as carrying around an unlit Molotov cocktail that he would ignite any day now, as soon as he got angry enough.

  The title of his most famous book, JD, referred, of course, both to juvenile delinquents and to James Dean. Some people never got past the awful little mock-pastoral elegy to Dean that opened the book. (“Strew, if you must, some bay on his blood-matted hair …”) But most people got further and found a love song to baby-faced hoodlums, tricked out with a mass of interdisciplinary hoo-ha. Bakunin and Jung meet the Jets and the Sharks.

  Jonathan called himself an anarchist sometimes—partly as a way of sticking his tongue out at his Marxist and ex- Marxist and neo-Marxist and Marxist-with-sprinkles buddies, and partly because he wasn’t sure what else to call himself. What Jonathan meant by anarchy wasn’t atomic individuals living in the woods and eating nuts and berries. His ideal society was the New York of his boyhood, twenties New York, in the reign of Tammany and gangsters and bohemians and immigrants and crooked cops, the heyday of Harlem and the Village, a seething ungovernable mess from which the skyscrapers rose like spontaneous manifestations of the orgasmic explosion of unfettered human energy.

  JD was a hymn to people in free association, little knots of people forming and dissolving, bumping up against one another, the friction and sparks lighting up the city. He claimed that the boys’ gangs, with their private language and their turf and their chivalric codes of honor, were the last example of the spontaneous coming-together that had made New York great, in contrast to the urban planning and the big corporations that utilized personnel and fed them like punch cards into their room-sized vacuum-tube computers.

  Of course there were plenty of people writing, all through the fifties and sixties, about masscult and organization men and status seekers. But all those other books seemed somehow like products of the very gray, mechanical Ike-world they were talking about: they had no prescription to offer, no alternative, and they were full of statistics that had been spat out by some UNIVAC. Well, JD didn’t really have a prescription either, maybe anarchists never do. What it had, what made it one of the opening fanfares of the cacophonous sixties, was a jazzy mix of politics and sex.

  The dense city of JD, through which his delinquents riffed and bernardoed, was a metropolis of Eros: skyscrapers and subways pulsating with sex, and everything/everyone in between, newsboys and butchers, debutantes and department store clerks, taxi horns and jack-hammers all singing lustfully. Through it all, the boy gangs promenading in their skin-tight blue jeans: the JDs all just masks for Jonathan himself—precociously wise, seeing everything, reciting it all with a sidewise grin and a hard-on. The staff with which he would lead the armies of life and nature against the machine.

  When JD came out in 1965, it was a riotous success that changed Jonathan, changed our li
ves, forever. First of all, we had money—not just from the book but from the college lecture circuit, two thousand dollars a pop just to stand up and wisecrack about IBM and Robert McNamara. I got some dresses and a winter coat that didn’t look as though I’d found them in a hospital auxiliary thrift store, and one year we were even able to send Mickey to camp and sail on the France.

  Jonathan became a guru. He appeared on panels; his letters to the editor got published; he was photographed at rallies. Once or twice he even appeared on Susskind or one of the more earnest Sunday morning talk shows. At SLS he didn’t have to teach undergraduates anymore, just one graduate seminar a week—if he wasn’t on tour or on a picket line or, every so often, on a binge. Aurora put out more books, collections of old papers and articles, even a little volume of his poems.

  Of course he started playing around. Well, he always had, after the first year or two of our marriage. I discovered this in the usual way: not lipstick on the collar, but wrinkles in the days. An hour missing here or there, an errand unaccountably protracted. I cried just once, in front of an amazed toddler who had never realized that Mommy ever cried. He bawled right back and, as I focused on consoling him, I stopped crying. For good.

  I had, after all, understood from the start that we were embarked on some adventure very different from the marriages of all my classmates. Different from the very first day. I had been bridesmaid half a dozen times, gone to the receptions and leaped for the bouquet, waved with the crowd as the couple headed off to Bermuda. Jonathan and I left City Hall and went straight to the movies. Streetcar Named Desire, I remember, it had just opened. And I found myself uneasily empathizing with Kim Hunter’s Stella—as if I, too, had been spellbound by a soulful brute.

  Once we had missed the boat for Bermuda, we found ourselves on an uncharted course. We weren’t picking Marriage Style C from an array of defined possibilities; we were departing from the only defined option and improvising a new one. As, in the schoolyard, a child who is strong-willed may invent a new game and gradually announce its rules—as if disclosing them rather than making them up on the spot. Of course in such games each new rule is declared only when someone has violated it.

  For years there were two rules. Jonathan could act suspiciously but not blatantly. And Jonathan could do whatever he liked in the summer, when Mickey and I went to the Cape and he stayed in the city. (I had a further rule, undisclosed to Jonathan: I could also do whatever I liked during our annual separation.) After JD, though, the rules were amended. Jonathan was just plain going out after dinner, gone for hours, rarely all night, and returning with no excuses. After the first shock, I found that I didn’t much care. I was happy enough that he had some … outlet.

  The Talmud, that mysterious text of Jonathan’s forsaken faith, apparently covers everything in life. Whether you can invest in pork belly futures so long as you don’t eat the actual commodity. Whether you can wear brown shoes with a blue suit. How often—this one is for real—a man must service his wife. The obligation is said to vary inversely with the demands of the husband’s occupation.

  Jonathan explained this to me once. A ditch digger comes home tired and can only be expected to rise to the occasion once or twice a week. A rabbi, with his sedentary life of study, is supposed to do his duty every night. While there is a sort of crude logic here, you have to remember that the book was written by rabbis. So I’m not sure if they were shouldering a burden or excusing a natural propensity. All I know is that, when Jonathan rose from long days at his desk with a surfeit of rabbinical energy, I was almost grateful that he took it outside the apartment and was back, most nights, by bedtime. I got the warm embrace, the soft wool of his chest against my back; some faceless “people” fed his endless hunger.

  I was almost grateful. Until he started talking about it at parties. “Last week I was in the sack with this red-headed philosophy major and her Negro boyfriend …” Until he started alluding to it in articles. Until that ghastly little volume of poems. “Sonnet: To Robert.” “YMHA: Locker Room Villanelle.”

  It wasn’t just the humiliation. He had done everything but hire a skywriter to proclaim to the world that I was—what is the feminine form of “cuckold”? Just cuckoo, I guess. But what I hated was that, sooner or later, it was all going to come back to Mickey. Maybe his little friends weren’t subscribers to the quarterlies Jonathan wrote for—Hesperides, [R]evolution, and the rest—and surely they weren’t thumbing through slim volumes of free verse looking for the dirty parts. But some kid would find out sooner or later, Mickey would have to hear about it. Maybe he already had, maybe that was why he seemed shifty and morose sometimes. Hard enough imagining your own conception without having to picture your father in so many other beds. Many and various: your polymorphous Pop. No wonder sometimes he wouldn’t look Jonathan in the eye.

  The lights in the Plymouth Room are very bright. All of the customers are at least our age; we have all reached the point at which vanity defers to reading the menu. I scarcely need to, I know I will only have a salad.

  When the waiter comes, Laurence orders for me in the old-fashioned way: “And the lady will have …” The very young waiter seems not to have encountered this practice before. He shoots me a quick glance, wondering if I am mute, retarded, or foreign.

  When he has gone, Laurence says, “Are you a vegetarian? If I’d known, I—”

  “Oh, no. Well, I’m not a principled vegetarian, just a habitual one. You know, Jonathan never ate vegetables.” Actually, he ate a few. The vegetable food group of Jonathan’s diet included frozen peas, cucumbers in sour cream, fried onions, dill pickles, and canned cream corn. I suppose that was his upbringing, years of eating at delis with his father. “So we had practically nothing but meat and potatoes for twenty years.”

  “I see. And you’ve spent the next twenty making up for it.”

  Closer to thirty; he is being kind. “Besides, it’s economical. I spend the days drawing eggplants and peppers, and in the evening I eat my models.”

  “So … you’re still doing cookbooks?”

  “A little. Things are slow.”

  “Are they? Sometimes I look at our list and it seems like that’s all we do, cookbooks and weight loss plans.”

  “I’m sure there are lots of cookbooks. But they don’t want my kind of work very much. They use photos, or if they have drawings they want these awfully precise illustrations of the seven steps in boning a goose.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, I’m scraping by.” I am doing a little better than scraping, between what I got from Mom and Daddy and Jonathan’s life insurance. “But I could certainly take on more projects,” I hint heavily.

  “Wish I could help. I’m not in that line at all anymore, but I could ask around.”

  “Well, don’t go to any trouble. Actually, I’m a little surprised you’re still …” I’m a little surprised Aurora hasn’t fired him. He must be practically my age—late sixties, anyway. The last of the old school of editors, who had trust funds and tweed jackets with leather patches.

  He leans close and stage-whispers, “I have Robert Crawley.”

  “Who?”

  “Who!” Laurence feigns shock. “Robert Crawley. Writes about this spy, sort of, with multiple personality disorder. Sells in airports and Walmarts.”

  “Doesn’t sound like your sort of writer.”

  He smiles, even as I regret my sniffy tone. “He just got handed off to me one day. Whoever was dealing with him had moved on, he had one more book under contract, and they figured even I couldn’t fail to move a Robert Crawley. Since then he’s absolutely devoted to me. If I go, he goes. I think I make him feel literary. So he’s saved me from the glue factory, and I occasionally push through a little project of my own.”

  We somehow make small talk through dinner, though it seems each time one of us brings up some gossip about a mutual friend the other softly imparts the ultimate piece of gossip. If I have, as at our last meeting, the sense
that Laurence is being courtly rather than just polite—he is flirting in a graveyard.

  When the waiter brings our decafs I remind Laurence that he had some business.

  “Oh, yes. I was having such a good time just catching up.” As he murmurs this fib, he pulls a letter from his inside breast pocket and hands it to me. I must fetch my glasses from the handbag beneath my chair, then I read:

  Philip Marks, Ph.D.

  Department of English, 197 Caesar Rodney Hall

  University of Delaware at Bairdsville

  Bairdsville, DE 19820

  March 20, 2003

  Mr. Laurence Ramsey

  Aurora Press

  28 E. 54th Street

  New York, NY 10022

  Dear Mr. Ramsey:

  I am writing to explore with you the possibility of obtaining access to the papers of Jonathan Ascher, with a view toward writing a critical monograph or, potentially, a biography. I have admired Dr. Ascher’s work for many years and was surprised to learn that no full-length treatment of his work or his life is available. I believe a book on this seminal figure could play an important role in exposing his ideas to a new generation of young readers.

  We haven’t gotten one of these letters in years. There were a couple in the seventies, but of course Jonathan’s young colleague Willis was planning to do the biography. He gave up for some reason. Writer’s block, maybe, or maybe he got tenure and didn’t need to write a book anymore.

  In the eighties, two or three nibbles from other suitors, graduate students shopping around for a dissertation topic. They had to come to Laurence and me: Jonathan’s will grandly named us his literary executors.

  Literary executors are different from ordinary executors. Ordinary executors hand things out, distribute what was left behind. Literary executors withhold. They edit, expurgate, burn. Jonathan’s papers are at the School for Liberal Studies, but he put a seal on them only we could break. We wouldn’t.