JD

by Mark Merlis

  “Hush, now, I want to listen,” Villard said.

  We all turned dutifully back to the TV, even Willis and his dancer. The dancer tried to look serious, a miscalculation.

  Goldwater was at the podium, waiting for the clapping and cheering to end. He smiled and performed the required little gestures, Oh, this is embarrassing, please stop so I can speak. We demand this self-deprecation by a man who is receiving the ovation that is the climax of his life. In the old newsreels, even Hitler at his enormous rallies sometimes managed to look surprised and abashed by the thundering crowds.

  The architect said, “You have to give him this. He’s kind of a handsome guy.”

  True enough, I guess--especially if you compare him to the basset-eared hick we call the leader of the Free World. (I am the actual leader of the Free World, at least until Martha gets back to town.) I don’t like handsome men. Is this merely envy?

  I know I’m a homely guy. Profoundly: ears the size of bread-and-butter plates, a huge but squashed canine nose, a chin that has failed to report for duty. I thrust my mug out into the world, but I have no illusions about it, and of course I wish it were an asset instead of a liability I must make up for with fast talk or my charming willingness to abase myself.

  Not just envy, no: it is their innocence I despise. If, your whole life, you walk into rooms and people are gratified to see you, simply as a physical object, you must develop the delusion that people are glad to see you, personally. That they love your soul and not just your face. And it’s only a step from that to imagining that your soul is not, like others’ souls, a cesspool of barbarity and infantile greed. When Jesus declaimed, “Let him who is without sin, etc.” I bet it was some Pharisee with a cleft chin and wavy hair who cast the first stone.

  I went for another drink. As I came back, Goldwater was saying, “And I needn’t remind you--but I will--it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.”

  O’Grady’s catamite looked perplexed. “Is that true?” O’Grady just smiled at him, as one might at an especially goofy puppy.

  The architect said, “Arguably.”

  “Of course you’d think that, you old Nazi,” Villard said. “What I especially like is, ‘I needn’t remind you--but I will.’”

  “Yes,” I said. “There must be a Greek name for that little rhetorical turn.”

  “Ah, there’s a Greek name for everything. As Robert will, perhaps, have taught you.”

  I said, “Oh, I already knew those names.”

  O’Grady looked over at me … alertly. I wonder if he has also received a little language instruction from Robert.

  Goldwater was still expostulating about the coming liberation of Europe. “Now, this is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.”

  O’Grady drawled: “Oh, Mary! Step away from the podium and give us the moon shot!”

  Everyone laughed--even Villard--so I refused to. Not that it wasn’t a little clever, in a juvenile way. I had, still have this morning, some uninvestigated sore spot about O’Grady.

  My mind wandered--or rather, it headed quite happily, tail wagging, toward the recollection of various Greek things Robert had taught me. By the time I turned back to the TV, Goldwater was saying, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And--”

  The crowd erupted; he couldn’t get through the next sentence, but was left inanely murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank …”

  Villard sneered. “There, you see, he positively revels in it. He--”

  I put in, “It’s true, isn’t it?” I said this just to torment, but it is true.

  O’Grady said, “Well, if it’s not a vice I want no part of it.”

  Goldwater could at last go on: “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The rhythm had been spoiled, but the crowd went crazy again: it was their chance to spit on Rockefeller and Scranton and the like. All those fancy-pants Easterners who lived in states full of snobs and Greeks.

  Goldwater finished up pretty soon, and then there were the usual balloons and the embrace of the vice-presidential candidate, some obscure schmuck from Long Island, and a conga line of the promised Goldwaterettes. The girls looked like cheerleaders, the boys like Hitlerjugend.

  I went to the Venetian Powder Room to take a leak. When I got back to the living room, the famous architect was saying, “All this politics is pointless, we’ll have blown ourselves up one way or another soon enough.”

  “But that’s why politics is so vitally important!” Villard said. “To stop the bombs and the--”

  “That stuff in the milk,” someone put in.

  Willis offered, pedantically: “Strontium 9O.”

  “It’s not going to stop,” Dennis O’Grady said. “We’re done one way or another.”

  “Then why don’t you just do away with yourself now?” Villard said, fluttering his hands as if he could make Dennis disappear.

  “I want to listen to a little more Scriabin.”

  What made me, makes me, so angry about this hedonistic nihilism? Because O’Grady doesn’t have kids, I thought, he’s not part of the common world of getting and begetting. He doesn’t care that, when he’s gone and the needle is just circling, circling on the innermost groove of the last Scriabin record on his phonograph, my Mickey and all the Mickeys will have to find a way to be in this world.

  I got out pretty soon after that. Martha has warned me: I apparently have a little tendency to rant at parties. When she is here she can steer me. As I am alone, I must actually control myself. I can’t do that very long, so I just headed back out into the heat. Down to Clancy’s on Second Avenue, hoping to watch the ball game with Robert.

  Robert wasn’t there; maybe he hadn’t ever been, maybe it was just a story to get out of Villa Villard. But there were other men to watch with. Men who valued their baseball as much as O’Grady his Scriabin. But who also, likely as not, had kids of their own, or would. Who cared if the world went on.

  Only this morning does it occur to me that Dennis O’Grady accepted an invitation to come to Edgar Villard’s gloomy apartment and watch the Republican National Convention. Which does, surely, belie his studied indifference to tiresome old politics?

  July 21, 1964

  Last night I was lonesome enough that I called my brother Bernie’s house in Truro. He said, “Oh, Johnny, hi,” minutely more cordial than if I were a bill collector. “Martha can’t come to the phone.”

  “Okay,” I said, assuming this meant she was in the john. “Listen, why don’t you put Mickey on while I’m waiting?” Why not? I’d already paid for the first three minutes. About three times the average duration of a phone conversation between Mickey and me. Neither of us is a virtuoso on this instrument.

  “Mickey’s out somewhere,” Bernie said.

  “Okay, well, can you have Martha call me right back?”

  “Um.”

  A pause, during which I assumed Bernie was calculating the cost of an evening station-to-station to New York. As I would do. I added, “Collect, collect would be okay.”

  “Um, actually, Martha’s … she’s kind of under the weather. I mean, to tell you the truth, cocktail hour ran a little long, and she went to bed right after dinner.” He said this terribly slowly and seriously.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Bernie was a sneak from the time we were kids. No, he didn’t know what happened to my jackknife. No, he didn’t eat my last piece of gum. No, he didn’t know why Pop’s gold watch with the Masonic symbols wasn’t in the box of his effects; probably one of the hospital workers had stolen it. And always these lies were uttered with a furrowed brow, the lower lip thrust forward thoughtfully in the mannerism we both inherited from Pop. I could see that face now.

  Maybe if he hadn’t said “to tell you the truth,” I would have let it go until morning. “Well, I’m sorry she’s feeling bad, but I’m not kidding, this is important. Could you wake
her up, please?”

  A woman’s voice: “Excuse me, could you finish up? I’m expecting a call from my mother.” Some neighbor of Bernie’s cutting in, I’d forgotten he was on a party line. “It’s long distance!” she said reverently.

  Martha called back about a half hour later, so I figured Bernie had gone and fetched her from wherever she was. “Hi,” she said, quite brightly for a woman who had passed out after dinner. “Sorry to be so long. Took forever to get use of the line.”

  I went ahead and talked business, improvised bull about something to do with our life insurance. Martha pointed out that it could have waited till morning, I really didn’t have to make Bernie wake her up. I said, “You know me, I worry about money.”

  She sighed. “I know, you and Bernie, just alike.”

  “Bernie. What should he have to worry about?”

  “You made your choices,” she said. This dark utterance went over my head, as I was pondering whether to ask her where she’d been or with whom. I didn’t, partly because someone might have been listening in, partly because I was, to tell the truth, incurious. I knew where she’d been and I didn’t care who she’d been with, I wouldn’t have known the schmuck anyway. I wanted to know: does Mickey know what’s going on? Do you fuck around in front of my son?

  I didn’t ask these things, either.

  “You made your choices.” By which she meant, I figure this morning, what she said so long ago: you could have been a neurologist. You could have made money. Of course, when I figured this out, I was furious. So, after all these years, she’s still whining that I don’t make enough? But of course she wasn’t. I was the one whining.

  I don’t mind that Bernie has money. I did make my choices. And in the winter, when we’re busy, seminars with a scattering of people who actually want to be there, parties, off to the movies or the park with Mickey: in the winter I feel I made my choices and I’m living in a world Bernie couldn’t imagine.

  Bernie spends his days hitting people’s knees with a rubber hammer and I spend my evenings trying to explain existentialism to drugstore clerks. Yet I find that I am nagged by the feeling that what he’s doing is real and what I’m doing isn’t. Nagged as I must always have been. When Bernie listened to the goddamn baseball game and I read--what would it have been then? Look Homeward, Angel, maybe, I was in my moony phase. I must have thought, those August afternoons, that he was real and I wasn’t somehow. Even if we were both sitting in our BVDs and sweating fraternally.

  I said, “Is Mickey back yet?”

  “No, he’s out somewhere with his cousin.”

  “How come you let him out so late?”

  “It’s Truro. What could happen to him, a mosquito bite? It’s the summer, he needs a little freedom.”

  Yeah, like you, I thought. Didn’t say, because her riposte would be so obvious.

  I’m not a caveman, I understand in the abstract that she is as entitled to spend the summer fucking around as I am. So why does it piss me off so? I suppose because it occurs to me that the odds aren’t so good this is the first summer she’s done it. She and Mickey have been taking these trips-how long? Seven or eight years at least, and it seems to me, now I think of it, they stay away a few more days each time. So: she has been pulling away as long as I have.

  I haven’t been swimming by myself, venturing far from the shore and then turning back, because our beached marriage is at least someplace to stand. We have both been swimming, both independently decided every time to head to shore. The more I turn it over, I kind of like this idea, that she isn’t some helpless, bound creature waiting for my return, but that we return to each other.

  Yet even as I write this, I’m still angry.

  Oh. It’s not her, I’m not angry at Martha at all. It’s Bernie I’m steamed about. Why? What was he supposed to be, her cicerone, shadowing her so she doesn’t get in trouble, or her jailor? What do I expect him to do, snitch? None of his business, I guess, that must be what he figures. But actually telling lies for her, colluding--well, maybe even that was a way of staying neutral.

  But maybe a brother isn’t supposed to stay neutral. Maybe Bernie fucking Ascher is supposed to be on the side of Johnny Ascher.

  Or maybe he likes it, maybe he’s delighted that his big brother, Johnny, is being cuckolded by some shikse named Martha Axelrod.

  Why look who’s here! Martha Axelrod, in a brief appearance. Phoning her performance in, as the critics say. Of course Jonathan’s conjecture was right: we spent our summers the same way, sleeping around. Except I lived for the summers, all year I waited for those weeks of freedom and joy. While freedom apparently left Jonathan just cranky and dejected.

  Our summer visits to Bernie’s place in Truro started when Mickey was three or four and went on until … 1970, I guess, that last summer before Mickey went to college. Mickey would be so excited he could burst, starting in the cab to Penn Station, when there still was a Penn Station. Then on the train—how Mickey loved the train!—six long hours on the New Haven shore line to Hyannis, where Bernie would meet us. By the time we got there, Mickey would be exhausted and I would be a little tipsy. But also, quietly, so excited I could burst. In the club car, while Mickey looked out the window, I sipped my whiskey sour and flirted with the machine tool salesman or the army recruiting officer. A little preview of what became a summer ritual as unvarying as Bernie’s Fourth of July cookout: my affair.

  They don’t entirely run together. The elfin classicist from Tufts, the shrink—school of Harry Stack Sullivan—who told me I was sleeping with him because I had a self-esteem problem. The painter, long-muscled and smooth, who made the portrait I didn’t dare take home. Not because I posed naked for it: you could scarcely tell whether Afternoon Martha was animal, vegetable, or mineral, much less its state of attire. But because of the way its exuberant impasto, which might have been laid down with a trowel rather than a palette knife, belied yet somehow also recalled the gentleness and tact with which he …

  I know they were as different as the years, 1955, 1956, 1957. But it is so long ago now. All those sharply individual players in the serial movie Summers without Jonathan form a single montage: beach, moonlight, thermos of gibsons. While back at the house Bernie patiently played Monopoly with Mickey and Mickey’s cousin Alan.

  Jonathan did get one thing wrong: Bernie’s feelings were complicated. Bernie was—not shocked, exactly, or even disapproving. He liked that I was putting something over on his brother, but he was a little unnerved.

  I wonder if this is all there will be of me. So far, the little bit Jonathan wrote about me is practically courtly. I don’t know why I expected pages of scurrility and grievance; perhaps I should have known that I would scarcely show up at all, an extra, a Rosencrantz or Guilden-stern in the princely drama of Jonathan. So what could be the harm in letting Marks take a crack at that drama? Maybe it is, after all, better to be an extra than to be left on the cutting-room floor for eternity.

  SEVEN

  I am for some reason worried about how I will look to Philip Marks. I try first the suit I sometimes wear for editorial meetings uptown, a tweed number my mother might have worn, with a cream blouse and the cameo Jonathan got me—where? I remember: Sorrento, a conference he went to by himself because they wouldn’t spring for my airfare. Or maybe he just said that so he would be free to chase Neapolitan ragazzi. Anyway, I got the cameo, whether because he felt guilty or just because he loved cameos and couldn’t wear one himself. Even today, after all the liberation, you don’t see men wearing cameos.

  I am amused by the idea that the tweed suit will confuse Philip Marks: that the anarch’s widow should be a schoolmarm. And then I am afraid he will accept that all too readily, so I think about the other extreme, artiste, with a shawl and about eleven Navajo bracelets. Finally I settle on what I am already wearing, jeans and a sweater. Perhaps he will think I am trying to look forty years younger than I am. But it’s what I am already wearing. What can anyone accuse me of? And how did accusin
g get into the room?

  When the doorbell rings I buzz Marks in. Presently I hear his steps, ponderous and deliberate. I call out, “Fourth floor. Sorry!” No answer. What should he answer? Just his steps, even slower. At last he makes the final turn and I see that he is … a doll.

  Wavy black hair, grave dark eyes: he reminds me of the young Gregory Peck—but more powerful, muscles rippling under his black turtleneck. He stops midway up the last flight. “Mrs. Ascher?” he says, looking puzzled. I am not what he expected, I think. Vainly. Well, he is certainly not what I expected.

  “How do you do?” he says, basso profundo. He takes my hand in both of his. “It’s so wonderful of you to see me.” His voice cracks on the “won”: basso simulato, then.

  I can’t think how to answer and say, lamely, “Thank you.”

  He says, reflexively, “You’re welcome,” and steps back, his exuberance dampened a little by this odd colloquy.

  Under the hall light, I see now that he has a diamond stud in his left ear. I think: homosexual. Of course I knew this, but the word flashes in my head like a neon sign. He is a man with a stud in his ear and big muscles and a phony deep voice and a suspiciously unfurrowed forehead. Maybe his hair isn’t really black.

  I see these burly sissies on the streets of Chelsea all the time, flocks of them. Why am I distressed? I suppose I just didn’t want him to be quite so emphatically …

  If he hadn’t just clambered up three flights of stairs I might say, “Sorry, no book,” and shut the door on his smooth, handsome face. Instead I make myself say, “How was your train ride?”

  “Oh, fine. I love taking the train. You see … um … the insouciant hindquarters of the industrial beast, black brick, cinders and slag, all the unburnished secrets of … um … I forget.”

  I suppose I fail to conceal my dismay at this outburst. He hurries to add, “I was quoting Dr. Ascher. It’s from ‘Jersey Nocturne.’”