by Mark Merlis
I caught myself wishing Mickey were more like that kid. Mickey’s not spoiled exactly--or maybe he is, summers in Truro, never worked a day in his life, already talking about what college he might go to. Well, good, I am happy enough to have spoiled him, to be able to give him some kind of future. I just wish he were tougher. Not a delinquent, exactly, but hard and knowing as that kid.
The kid turned around, ready to get off, his butt surpassed any conjecture, I could imagine plunging … I was sitting on the IND, refolding my Times to conceal an incipient hard-on, drooling over the butt of a boy just a little older than Mickey. Well, as Villard says, the Greeks had a name for it.
August 7, 1964
The Times and the Trib are full every morning of stories about these attacks on our destroyers by little Vietnamese putt-putts in the Gulf of Tonkin, a place nobody had heard of two weeks ago but which is now practically Pearl Harbor. Johnson has started sending bombers, which seems a bit of an overreaction by a lion nipped at by a mouse. Bizarrely, these little forays are called Operation Pierce Arrow. Why not Hupmobile, or Stanley Steamer? All of this charade just meant to deflect Goldwater’s charges that Johnson is lily-livered and soft on Bolshevism. Once the election is over, I’m sure we’ll never hear about the little Tonkinese and their squabbles again.
School’s out until the fall, which means two things. First, I have no excuse left at all for not sitting here and whacking out my next Negroes-and-dwarves epic. So I think I will just stop trying to excuse it, for a while or maybe forever. If I have nothing to write I have nothing to write. Why am I beating my head against the desk in vain protest at a tautology?
Second, Martha and Mickey will be back in just a couple of weeks. God knows I’m ready, for Mickey anyway. No, for Martha, too. For our sticking-taped simulacrum of a marriage. Look at the anarchist, needing this obsolete strait-jacket to keep his life from spinning away! All right, guilty. I am ready for them to come back, but of course I am also aware that I have just seventeen days left of my estival festival. Here I am sitting glumly before a typewriter when I should be
Perhaps the next page is missing, or perhaps he just sprinted away from the Olivetti in midsentence. To continue the festival, scarcely distinguishable from a penance.
Of course in hindsight it is easy enough to see that the little news story he made jokes about was kind of important. But I don’t even remember reading or hearing about the Tonkin Gulf incident while I was in Truro. I suppose I was focused, as much as Jonathan, on making the most of the final weeks of our summer apart. And what else should we have done? If we’d had an inkling that these faraway events would shape the rest of our lives: what would we have done?
The Greeks heard oracles foretelling a future they could not alter. Jonathan and I could just turn to the next story in the Times.
August 8, 1964
When I was a kid I was ready to fuck anything that wasn’t nailed down. Mostly girls were nailed down. There was Deirdre, sure, at Evander Childs. I can’t quite remember the quote under her misleadingly demure picture in our yearbook, something from James Whitcomb Riley about how she spread her love. Harvey the editor was thrilled to have got away with that, because half the boys in the senior class knew what else she was spreading.
Jeez, Deirdre, poor Deirdre, wide-eyed and sort of sticky all over, her cheap stockings pooled at her ankles, murmuring, “You read a lot of books, don’t you Johnny?” “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” “You’re a brain, you’re going someplace.” “Uuhhh …”
So: Deirdre, and then just a couple of times Judith at City College, who had read a few books herself and was eager enough to undertake a little independent study. Just a couple times, first a soggy and interrupted encounter in St. Nicholas Park, second a more leisurely tutorial in my father’s apartment when he was off visiting my uncle in Asbury Park. Second and last because I ascertained that Judith didn’t shave her armpits. Not to mention that, as I dozed in, possibly, the same iron bed in which I myself had been conceived, I half heard that Judith’s mother was expecting me for Shabbos dinner and was going to buy a rib roast.
Boys were not nailed down, that’s all. I read some cretin like Erik Erikson, who thinks men get fucked “with the implied idea of gaining love and control forever through anal incorporation …” (I had to look that up, and of course lost twenty minutes reading the rest of the chapter. Must teach myself to stop looking stuff up when I’m writing.) When I read this stuff, with the everyday ecstatic currency of our lives turned into something clinical and monitory, I think: no, no, no, our histories might just be awfully simple.
Girls were nailed down, boys were boys. The Bronx was, for this boy, a veritable bazaar teeming with guys who could barely keep their flies buttoned. Andy the shortstop and Moe who worked over at the tire repair and even Harvey the yearbook editor, who wound up a periodontist in South Orange and read Rupert Brooke (“rough male kiss of blankets”) and--nevertheless? therefore?--wielded a surprisingly sturdy and enthusiastic drill.
All this nostalgie de verge prompted by this morning’s encounter at the salon du thé in the 28th Street station. Getting up, I lost my balance, wound up on one knee, in the conventional pose of a suitor, except that the knee was in a little puddle of urine. The kid I’d been doing, pocked face and a sneer he’d borrowed from an Elia Kazan movie, looked down at me and shook his head in disgust. From the way he scowled I knew it was disgust at himself, not me: that I was kneeling in piss seemed to him a logical sequela of what we had been up to. (Or: he up to, I down to.)
I wouldn’t have minded his loathing me. There is sometimes a little frisson in doing it with someone who loathes you. But that I should be the cause of self-loathing! That he should have looked down at me, his come still halfway down my throat, and felt sullied and ashamed because--because someone so repulsive had made him feel good.
Well, fine, I thought, the fuck I care, he should go hang himself in remorse. Then, right away, wishing I could make it better. Wishing I could say something, not to make him think better of me--that was impossible--but to forgive himself. To just be glad he came, for God’s sake, just be glad that a minute ago he was moaning in pleasure, and nobody gets it so much they should turn right to scowling.
He clenched, thought about punching me. Thought about it, which already told me he wouldn’t. Didn’t, why? I can’t figure out what primordial code of honor he carried with him, somewhere in the space between his sneer and his greasy, assiduously combed ducktail. Something like this: hitting me would have meant I’d done something to him, would have meant I was able to do something.
He turned away; the back of his baseball jacket said Samuel Gompers Voc Tech. The kid had to be 22, 23. If he’d learned any voc or any tech he wouldn’t have been hanging out in a subway john at 11 in the morning. Nothing for him, no calling for him in all this great city.
I got up, dabbed at my knee with my handkerchief. Not too bad, just looked like I’d dribbled. Which I do more every year, all these little signs of aging no one tells you about. Martha won’t even notice, I thought for a second, before I remembered of course that Martha and Mickey are still away. Leaving me with this paradox: (a) I am relieved that there is no one at home to see that I’ve been wallowing in piss, and (b) if there’s no one at home to see, I will wallow in piss.
Two, count them, two girls. Then me. Perhaps there were others, scattered among his very long list of people. I really had supposed, all these years, that he had gone on pollinating a variety of flowers all through his life. But, if this journal is representative, his vaunted bisexuality was more a political stance than a description of how he actually lived. Making him, in a way, the mocking inverse of those evangelists you see on TV, the ones who get caught with a hooker. Jonathan, as much as they, preached an ideal he couldn’t live up to. The spirit was bisexual, but the flesh was gay.
Why did he insist? Just so he wouldn’t have to look in a mirror and see a fairy? And why does it bother me to learn that he was kidding himself, what is
it to me? Perhaps I should even be flattered to be a member of the tiny sorority of women-who-attracted-Jonathan. I was the one who wasn’t sticky or hairy.
I was the one who married a man who wallowed in piss.
August 13, 1964
I was lonesome and went down to SLS. Sat in my office with the door open, actually encouraging visits from the doddering phenomenologists who wander the halls on long summer afternoons; that’s how lonesome I was. But no one passed by. I went down to the break room, got a can of Coke, and hoped it wouldn’t get too warm before someone came along and helped me open the damn thing. Presently Willis appeared. We’ve seen each other enough this summer that he felt entitled to say, as he opened the Coke, “You know, there must be some reason you bite your nails that way.”
“My! I thought all shrinks took off for the month of August.”
“I’m just filling in,” he said. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Not enough. You?”
He shrugged. “Still seeing Edouard.” He stretched this to about thirty seconds of Edoooaaah.
“Your dancer friend?”
“Uh-huh.” He shrugged again, showing that he was crazy in love. “Actually, it’s just Eddie, but I like to call him Edoooaaah.”
“Does he like that?”
“He tolerates it,” Willis said, with a sudden enormous grin. Meaning, I think: it annoys Eddie, but he likes me enough to put up with it, and ain’t that wonderful?
I thought of remarking that doing things because they are annoying hasn’t worked out so well for Martha and me. But I just grinned back. It was, after all, kind of wonderful-amazing, really, that scraggly Willis has found himself tolerated by a blue-jawed stud with monumental thighs.
“I gotta get back to the library,” Willis said. I guess he’s studying for his orals, reading Spenser and all the other claptrap you have to read just so you can require the next generation to read it. “I’m meeting Eddie later for a drink, you want to come?”
“Sure. Just stop by my office when you’re ready.”
I stayed a while, with my tepid Coke, thinking about Willis and Edouard. A tangle of thoughts that I can’t, this morning, reconstruct. But something like what I was thinking on my way home from Villard’s party a few weeks ago. I have never had a--what could the word possibly be? Willis probably says boyfriend, for God’s sake, but I’m not sure I have any better word. Lover? Camerado, as old Walt would have had it? Not, on the one hand, just someone you’ve fucked a few times. And not, on the other, some kind of romance. Just someone who assumes you will be seeing him tonight or have a damn good excuse. Of course, that pretty well sums up life with Martha. Why should I wish to have it with a man? But if that isn’t quite it, what is it? Here is the question Freud never asked. What do men want?
When Willis got back to my office he said Eddie was rehearsing overtime a little and maybe we could have dinner and meet him later at the Dubois. The bar where fairies dance together. Fat chance I was going to the Dubois, I was pretty sure I would arrive where angels dance together before I’d set foot in the Dubois. But we did go off to dinner, at a little Italian joint on Waverly. Willis’s choice: a place he couldn’t afford but that wasn’t so costly I couldn’t pay for both of us. Rather a crafty way of getting me to buy dinner, maybe I’ve underestimated Willis.
Anyway, after dinner and a few drinks, I found that I was after all willing enough to go to the Dubois. I might see some friends, it was too hot to write, it was too hot to look for love in the West Fourth Street tearoom, anybody probably ought to see the Dubois just once. This morning I think that, beneath all these excuses, I was really going with some half-framed intention of making time with Eddie. Not to hurt Willis, and not because I was so irresistibly drawn to Eddie. I just had a momentary flash of how it might be, Eddie and I kissing forthrightly, stubble grazing stubble.
The Dubois was practically empty--maybe a dozen people scattered around when we got there at about 8:3O. It would just have been another dreary bar except for a cleared space with scuffed linoleum about the size of an SLS seminar table. The Dance Floor of Gomorrah! Fairies take up so little acreage in the world. This little ten-by-ten island hidden away in the great island of Manhattan, yet so dire a threat to decency and order that merely to set foot on it is to risk arrest.
Eddie was alone at a table for six. Willis kissed him on the cheek; I didn’t. “Why such a big table?” Willis said. “You expecting people?”
“Dennis O’Grady thought he might come by.”
Why does it seem lately I can’t go anywhere without running into Dennis O’Grady? I knew if he showed up I was going to wind up sparring with him. Which is fine, usually, I like a fight. But last night I just wanted to hang out.
While Willis went to fetch drinks--after waiting to see if I’d offer, when I’d already sprung for dinner--I said lamely, “Willis says you’re a dancer.”
“Yes. With Brent Nicholas.” This said so modestly I figured being with this Brent Nicholas must be hot stuff, so I offered an appropriate little admiring grunt. “I was with the Manhattan Ensemble, but it’s all so conventional, warmed-over Balanchine. What we do at Brent Nicholas is … almost like a Happening. Except more structured, you know, the art and the lighting and the dance all coming together to …” He hunted for the word for a very long time, at last settling for a rococo hand gesture.
Ordinarily, this explosion of swishiness should have quite ended any notion I’d had of stealing Eddie from Willis. Instead I was, mystifyingly, even more attracted. I wonder if Willis was drawn to the same thing, the paradox of a flaming Apollo with a five o’clock shadow. I wonder what he and Willis do in bed.
Willis was back with our drinks.
I said, “Eddie was telling me about his dance company.”
“Oh, yes, you should go,” Willis said. “I mean … when does your new season start?”
“End of September.”
“Great. Maybe I can get Jonathan to come.”
I shrugged. “We’ll have to see. I’ve never paid much attention to that stuff.” Possibly dismissing Eddie’s life work wasn’t an express route into his pants. But having to sit through an evening of art-lighting-and-dance was too high a price, no matter what it might have been like to have my head gripped by those powerful thighs.
One daring couple had at last ventured onto the little dance floor. They seemed to be enacting the mating ritual of orangutans. “Is that the Twist?” I said.
“No, that’s the Frug. Nobody’s done the Twist in years.”
“They’re not even moving their legs. How is that dancing?”
“Edouard moves his legs. You want to see?”
I did, very much, but I just shrugged. They pranced to the floor and began doing roughly the same thing as the other couple. Eddie did indeed move his legs, while Willis stood stock still and dared only little hand waves.
I turned away from the floor show to find that Dennis and his little protégé had arrived. I said “Hi there!” to the kid--I’m afraid in the voice I use when I talk to infants and small animals. “I didn’t catch your name the last time.”
“Geoffrey-with-a-G,” he said.
“Yeah, I got the same problem. I always have to go Ascher-with-a-C.” This puzzled the puppy: I could see him trying to figure where the C would go. “How’ve you been, Dennis?”
“Great. We’re just back from Fire Island. What are you going to drink, my sweet lobster tail?”
Geoffrey blushed through his sunburn and asked, who could have guessed, for a whiskey with ginger ale. He watched adoringly as Dennis went for the drinks. Then the kid turned to me and said, so help me, “How’s your book going?”
I wanted to answer, “How’s your diaper rash?” But it was an innocent question. I guess he’d heard me talking about it at Villard’s and just figured it was a good icebreaker. Seeing how I was this famous writer and all. I settled for, “Ah. You know, summer, you get distracted.”
“I don’t think Dennis ev
er gets distracted. Even at Fire Island, no matter how late we were out, he was up the next morning, writing away.”
This, too, was probably innocent. Sooner or later somebody is going to remodel sweet innocent with-a-G’s face. I just said, “My.”
“It’s funny, sometimes he writes about me. I don’t mean anything mushy, I mean he’ll write, ‘It’s eight in the morning on Wednesday and Geoffrey is lying on the chaise longue and outside there are gulls and Sam is starting to cook bacon.’”
“This is poetry, or … ?”
“He writes it like poetry. I mean there’s lots of short lines. But here’s the thing: when he writes that way I could be the gulls or the bacon, you understand? I mean like, I’m a fact and they’re facts.”
That is, yes, the way Dennis O’Grady writes. Perhaps a little more lyrically, but flattening things that way, until boy and gull and bacon carry the same weight in the world. What is remarkable, I think, is that with-a-G should acquiesce, that he seems content to be just one of an infinitely extensible list of the things Dennis can see as he looks around him on a Wednesday morning. Well, I suppose the list is shorter on a Tuesday night, in the dark. Geoffrey must command Dennis’s entire attention.
Dennis was back with Geoffrey’s drinky and a beer for himself. Geoffrey said, importantly, “We were talking about writing.” And we had been, however briefly--instead of, as writers do, talking about money.
“About Jonathan’s--what was it?--sociology book?”
“It’s not sociology,” I said. “I want to--”
Then she arrived. It isn’t just silly talk, about the muse. When she comes, with her tiny almost inaudible hint that you will spend the next months or years giving voice to, it doesn’t feel like something going on inside your skull. It feels like something behind you, pressing gently on your shoulders: this way, this way forward.
I blurted out, “I want to write about boys.”
Dennis laughed. “Some Uranian thing? Boys with golden tresses, splashing around in the lily pads?”