by Mark Merlis
“Jonathan Ascher! My. You know, a good many of my friends try to get Robert.”
“Is he hard to get?”
“Evidently not.” He called out, “Robert! A suitor!” Back on the line: “You know, I’m having a few people in to watch the end of the Republican convention next Thursday, perhaps you’d come.”
“I don’t--”
“Of course you will. I’ve capitulated at last and bought a color television, just so I can see the dear red, white, and blue Goldwaterettes or whatever those captivating children are called. Ah, here’s Robert. Eightish, then.”
Robert was on the line before I could say neverish. “Hey, buddy.”
“I thought her highness never answered the phone.”
“Heh, right. Except I was taking a crap.”
This vulgarity seems to me, a day later, to have been calculated. Partly to impress on me that he was a real guy, even if he roosted in Edgar’s gilded cage. But something more, something at my expense? With, undoubtedly, Edgar still listening.
Whatever the subtext, I was annoyed. Not enough to deter me from my--purpose, I was about to write, but what was my purpose in calling Robert Last-name-I-don’t-even-know? Well, to get laid, obviously. But for that objective I have a drawer full of scrawled phone numbers.
Did I set out to steal something from Edgar Villard? Except he practically gave Robert away, like the father of the bride.
Robert said Monday night would be good, but I have class, so I suggested Tuesday afternoon.
“I don’t …” Robert hesitated. “I don’t usually, you know …”
I knew. “We have heavy drapes,” I said. “Cause there’s this bar across the street with neon. So it stays dark in the room, even in the daytime.”
“Oh, that’s okay, then. I don’t know, it’s just a thing I got.”
He and half the working stiffs I’ve known. It wasn’t about being ashamed of fucking a guy. The proletariat won’t fuck man, woman, or beast with the lights on or all their clothes off.
So I have a date. I’m not sure I’ve ever had exactly this sort of assignation before. This isn’t Let’s meet for a drink (meaning, let’s fuck) or Let’s go to the movies (meaning, let’s fuck). Just, baldly, come over and I will pull the curtains tight and …
Of course I am inclined to say this is the way things ought to be: healthy, forthright. But that is a political view. It is not what I feel, exactly. Even bugs do some kind of little dance first. They don’t just pull the damn curtains.
July 14, 1964
Last night Genet. Our Lady of the Flowers.
I mentioned to Willis that I was going to teach Genet, and he said, “Oh, you want to shake them up?”
“No, they’re unshakeable. I bet the only thing that really offends them is that Our Lady isn’t in paperback yet. So they had to shell out $6.5O.”
“Wow. My Germans would be really unhappy.”
Of course I wanted to shake them up. To make them read about what the translator calls, for some reason, “homoseckshuals.”
In class I brandished the April issue of Playboy, the cover of which showed, bizarrely, Peter Sellers in some kind of sheik costume, along with a kneeling houri suggestively nuzzling the hilt of his sword. There was a little contented tittering, from both genders. Playboy is safely racy, in a clean American way, not like that weird explosive French stuff, full of queenly thugs and blasphemy. The Playboy interview that month was with Genet, and I read aloud one passage: “I now think that if my books arouse readers sexually, they’re badly written, because the poetic emotion should be so strong that no reader is moved sexually. In so far as my books are pornographic, I don’t reject them. I simply say that I lacked grace.”
“So what do you think?” I said. “Is the poetic emotion so strong that none of you was moved sexually?”
Stolid Glover answered, perhaps too promptly, “Hell, I sure wasn’t moved sexually.” There were some approving murmurs. Of course no one would want it thought that all those fantastic degeneracies excited them.
Then, astoundingly, the one Negro in the class spoke for the first time all summer. What is his name? Bentley, I think. “I don’t know there’s much difference between poetry and sex.”
Glover rolled his eyes. Bentley was behind him but must have intuited his expression. He said emphatically, orating to the back of Glover’s neck: “I mean they both--they make sense of things for just a little while. They take you out of the world for a minute. And then it’s over.”
I started to say, “Yes, I see--”
He cut me off. “But what happens, see, what happens in this Genet stuff, is people go out of the world and don’t come back. Like he’s saying you shouldn’t come back, you got to find a way of staying out there. Or …” That was all. He subsided.
All the other students looked down at their desks, apparently embarrassed for him. As if any of them would ever, for one instant of their lives, have a thought half as clear as Bentley’s.
“You can reread a poem,” I said. “You can have the sensation again and again.”
Bentley shrugged. Not an oh-you-got-me-there shrug, but a this-square-will-never-get-it shrug.
I said, “Why don’t we take our coffee break now.” There’s not supposed to be a coffee break, but I can’t hurl myself against the wall of their incomprehension for ninety uninterrupted minutes. A few of us filed downstairs to the vending machines. I got a Coke. It comes in one of those new cans with a doohickey I can never pry open. Glover helped, giving me a pitying look. Poor unworldly prof, when I just can’t open it because I bite my nails.
Bentley didn’t buy anything, looked out the window for a while. At last he turned and said, “Reading a poem twice isn’t the same at all, any more than making it with the same chick twice.” Then he left the break room and, I knew, was headed downstairs and out the front door. He didn’t come back after the break, I wonder if he’ll be back again. If not, that was the last flash of insight that will trouble Mr. Ascher’s Twentieth Century Fiction class in the summer session of 1964. Or the rest of the century, for that matter.
I’ve been turning it over since last night. You got to find a way of staying out there.
This afternoon is my “date” with Robert. I find I am rather dreading it, earlier this morning I even thought for a moment of calling it off. I didn’t. Partly because I didn’t want to call and risk talking to Edgar Villard again. Partly because I need to find a way of staying out there.
July 15, 1964
I couldn’t buzz Robert in because the landlord still hasn’t fixed the goddamn thing, after all these months. So I went downstairs. Robert had traded his Upper East Side costume for coarse twill pants and a broad-striped jersey; I half wondered where his longshoreman’s hook was.
As he trudged up behind me, he said, “Jeez, no wonder you stay so skinny. Them’s some stairs.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“It’s okay, when I was a kid in Plainfield we was six flights up. Just got kinda spoiled in Villa Villard.”
“Is that what he calls it?”
“No, I do. It’s Italian.”
“Like you?”
“Me? No, I’m Greek.”
When we got upstairs, he looked around. I don’t mean glanced, I mean he practically cased the joint, eyeing everything. Including the picture of Mickey. “Your kid?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You still with his mother?”
“Uh-huh. They’re away, though. At the beach.”
“I got it. So you get a little summer fun. Like that movie, the guy and Marilyn Monroe.”
“Yeah, The Seven Year Itch,” I said. “I’m getting close to a fourteen-year itch. You want something to drink?”
“Nah. Turns out I’m in kind of a hurry, me and Edgar are going to some party I forgot about, and I gotta get back.” He was already peeling off his jersey, revealing an oddly delicate Orthodox crucifix, with the extra bar, glittering from a forest of black hair. Before I could cros
s the room to him, he had found his way to my bedroom and was pulling the drapes closed.
I was a little put off by his kind-of-a-hurry, even if there was no other business on the agenda. I said, “Well, I think I could use a glass of water,” and headed to the kitchen. I heard him chuckle.
I loitered a good seven or eight seconds before joining him. He still had his shorts on, and his socks--silk and calf-high, in odd contrast to the working man’s costume scattered on the floor. He closed the door behind me, and the bedroom was almost as dark as I had promised.
We sat on the edge of the bed. I put an arm around his damp back and moved in to kiss him, but he eluded me, so my lips just grazed stubble. I sat a minute, wondering how to proceed--wondering if I wanted to. He looked at me with, as best I could make out, a mix of amusement and perplexity. Finally he said, in what I can only characterize as a commanding whisper, “Why don’t you get undressed and lie on your belly?”
I complied with this practical suggestion, he started, he finished, he withdrew. At once he was on his feet, pulling his shorts back up; he had never removed the socks. “I got to take a leak,” he said.
He opened the door, found his way to the bathroom without asking--having cased the joint. A trapezoid of light washed over my abashed body. Shamed, used. No, that isn’t right; here it is, just a couple of hours later, and already something is slipping away. I really should try to articulate what I felt those few seconds, looking down at myself in the light while I listened to Robert pissing.
Used is almost there. Not abused or misused, but put to use, like a faithful workhorse or a tool congenial to the hand. And then put down, the business being done.
I had let a few guys do it before. Simply as a favor, or once or twice just a way of getting somebody off when I didn’t have the energy to go on ministering to him. It was just a physical act, just a convexity meeting a concavity, it didn’t define me in some way. But in Robert’s mind--I suppose from the moment he set eyes on me--this is what I was on the planet for. He had formed an intention, carried it out, and was now back in the room dressing without looking at me. He wasn’t contemptuous, he was just done. He sat down next to me to lace his shoes, looked at me at last. “Ain’t you getting up?”
“Yeah, in a second.”
He patted my thigh, smiled, stood up. “I guess I will go get a glass of water. Unless you got a beer.”
“Maybe, in the icebox. I thought you were in a hurry.”
“Yeah, well.” He grinned. “I was.”
He went off to the kitchen.
I was almost dizzy. Still am, at the thought that for a few minutes somebody--not I, but somebody--had a clear idea of what I was on the planet for and was happy I had been put here. As though I had been pulled, just for a second, into the present tense. And as I write this I long to have him back here, his weight on me.
I have heard Edgar Villard say, more than once, that he has never been fucked by anyone. I rarely see Villard, if even I have heard this more than once he must say it very often indeed. But I’m sure now it isn’t true. Edgar has to have felt the same way I did: taken, and wanting to be taken again.
I pulled my shorts on, went out, and found Robert, beer in hand, looking again at Mickey’s picture. “How old’s your boy?” he said.
“Twelve.”
“Oh, same age as mine.”
“You have a son?”
“Yeah, lives with his mother in Jersey City.” He got a distant look--well, distant as Jersey City, anyway. “A shortstop,” he said.
He waited for me to name my son’s position. “Um … my kid plays basketball some.”
“Ah,” he said, dismissively. Back to his boy: “I’m starting to see a little more of Tony, now he’s old enough his mother lets him take the Hudson Tubes into town. We’ll meet at Thirty-Third Street, maybe every couple weeks. I’ll take him to Gimbel’s or wherever, maybe buy him some clothes his mother doesn’t like. You see the kids are wearing these kinda white jeans that stop three inches above their ankles? And then we’ll have lunch at the Automat, he still loves the Automat.”
“Does he ever stay over?”
“You mean at the Villa? With Edgar?”
We both chuckled. He wet his lips with his tongue, deciding whether to tell me this next: “I don’t know what--what she told him about me. I mean, I hope nothing, he never acts like he knows nothing. But I … I’m happy to be with Edgar, you know? I don’t want you thinking I’m there just because he, you know, pays for stuff.”
Which I had been thinking.
“Hell, I got my workmen’s comp, I could make it. I’m there because I … I like the guy.” He sighed. “I’m me, I live the way I do. I wish I had a life I could let my kid see. A kid ought to be able to see his father.”
I didn’t register this, I was wondering what work Robert had done and what injury he was being compensated for.
He shrugged and put his beer down. He had been, I guess, expecting some kind of answer. Since he had told me something he’d probably never told Edgar.
As he headed to the door I heard myself saying, “Hey, you don’t have my number.”
He wheeled around, grinning. “I don’t. How much longer is your family away?”
“About a month.”
“Yeah, I’ll take your number.”
He stood behind me as I wrote the number down. He didn’t touch me, but I felt as though my whole body was vibrating to his presence, a few inches away.
When he was gone, I found myself thinking about Ham, who saw his father. Saw Noah drunk and naked, and was cursed for it, he and all his generations.
I couldn’t at first pinpoint just why Jonathan’s little conceit, about being used like a tool congenial to the hand, caused me to shiver in revulsion. Then I understood. Obviously what he stopped himself from writing was: used like a woman. Maybe he even did write this, then effaced it on the magic Corrasable Bond. Deciding that, whomever this journal was meant for, it wouldn’t do for the reader to discover that Jonathan for one instant felt like a woman. And of course he didn’t. Women—or at least this woman—may have felt used now and then, but I never felt it was what I was put on the planet for. That is a man’s idea of how a woman feels: it justifies everything.
July 17, 1964
I had assumed that, if even I was included on Villard’s guest list for last night, it had to be very long. But there was just a handful of people--Dennis O’Grady and his postulant, the architect with the enormous glasses, Willis and his Cro-Magnon dancer friend. Villard had rearranged his divans and hassocks so we could all sit in a semicircle facing the TV. He said, heavily, to me: “I’m afraid Robert couldn’t be here. So I shall be fetching your cocktail.”
“Oh. Is he okay?”
“Yes. Actually he could have been here, but since I’m monopolizing the television receiver and he wishes to see a baseball game, he has adjourned to Clancy’s on Second Avenue.”
I was tempted to adjourn myself. But I joined the others gathered around the (for God’s sake) receiver. It was, as promised, color, which I have never seen outside a store window. Living color, they call it in the ads. This would be accurate if one lived in a community where everyone had jaundice and all the rooms were painted cerulean blue.
Dennis O’Grady said, “Edgar, I don’t think you’ve got this tuned in right.”
“How do you mean?”
“Isn’t there some way to fix the color? Or is this how it’s supposed to be?”
“I should imagine this is how it is supposed to be. It was installed by a burly young man who fairly exuded technical competence and electronic savoir faire.”
It turned out the show was in color only for the commercials. Once they went to the live feed from the hall, the picture was black and white. Goldwater wasn’t on yet. Various lesser luminaries took the podium; while they brayed, the TV showed reporters wandering through the hall interviewing delegates, or sometimes two men who were suspended above the floor, as in the gondola of a d
irigible, surveying the puny creatures below them. Villard knew their names--Hunter and Brinker, something like that--one sepulchral, the other with the wry look of a reporter on the police beat who’s seen it all.
They chatted. One would read something--a statement just issued by pathetic Governor Scranton, a list of other important events that had happened there in the San Francisco Cow Palace (presumably hosed down for this occasion), a snippet about the youngest and oldest delegates. Then the other would make some comment, the two would chuckle. So this is what happens on television! Like a minstrel show, Interlocutor and Bones, but without the subtle wit. I would rather have heard the old-fashioned speakers on the podium, with their flat Midwestern voices and their encomia to the great state of Bontana.
Willis turned to O’Grady and said, “I did one of your poems last night.”
“Did? You tricked with one of my poems?”
Stolid Willis didn’t get this. “I mean I taught it. To my class.”
“Jeez. I didn’t even know I was dead. Which poem?”
“Well, it’s … called ‘Poem.’ I mean, they’re kind of all called ‘Poem,’ aren’t they?”
O’Grady giggled. “Yeah. Titles--I think giving titles to poems is like giving them to people. Reverend. Professor.” He winked at me. “It tells you what to think about them before you have a chance to get to know them.”
“Hm,” Willis said, not unimpressed. “Anyway, it’s the one that starts out with the patterns the shadows of the fire escapes make on the sidewalk.”
“What? I’ve never written about that.”
“Really? I was sure--”
Heh. I may not be a rising young poet--I am none of those three things, I guess--but anybody reading my little arbeits can be pretty sure whether I am or am not talking about fire escapes. Am I philistine to think this is a virtue?
“So how did your class like the poem?” O’Grady yawned, to make plain that it didn’t matter. Except it mattered enough for him to ask.
“They--well, they don’t seem to like poems.”
“Ah.” O’Grady shrugged. “Me either, some days.” His little minion looked at him wonderingly. The child probably imagined that artists are artists every waking hour. That O’Grady denies this is a clue that he may be an authentic artist.