by Mark Merlis
“No. Boys the way they are now. The tension between their … animal yearning and their love of human skill and their rough sense of honor. All of that, and then the monochrome, valueless world we expect them to grow into.”
“Oh,” Dennis said. “Another tract about gray flannel suits.”
Willis and Eddie were just rejoining us. Eddie, with no idea what we were talking about, put in: “I adore men in gray flannel suits.” It occurs to me, this morning, that there is some connection between this surprising tropism and his attachment to drab, prematurely old Willis. Maybe a guy who spends his days spinning around with men in leotards finds something calming about men in flannel.
I said, “I adore men naked.” Just for the rhythm, when I’m not even sure it’s so. I adore men in Samuel Gompers jackets.
Dennis said, “Well, nobody’s naked anymore, are they?” This, too, was only for the rhythm, something he didn’t think but that Geoffrey might find profound.
“That’s my point,” I said, just to be contrary. But then I realized it was: “Even their very bodies are alien to them, a costume they’ve been made to wear and don’t know how to walk in.”
Dennis considered this a second, then threw it off. “Hey, if you don’t know how to walk, you can always dance.” He grabbed little Geoffrey and headed for the floor.
They danced. I said to Willis, “Is that still the--what was it, the Frug?”
“No, I think it’s just something Dennis is making up.”
I was half watching Dennis and half turning over my last thought, or the last hint from the muse, whichever. Even their bodies aren’t theirs. Was this just glibness? Of course it was literally true: from mandatory vaccination to the Selective Service System, young men are not secure in their persons, they possess no corporeal estate that cannot be repossessed by the corporate state. But I meant more than that.
Watching Dennis fling himself around in the dance he was making up, one might have imagined that he, at least, had retained title to his body. He was taking up half the floor all by himself; the other dancers were annoyed or grudgingly amused. Little Geoffrey had his back turned, didn’t even look at Dennis’s … unfelt exuberance, I thought at first, just a show. But maybe real exuberance: maybe just throwing his body in motion that way let him cast something off. Maybe kids dance this way now just to recapture for a moment how men felt when their bodies were truly their own.
By now Dennis had tied his shirt around his waist and was wearing just a sleeveless undershirt that exposed, astoundingly, a Semper Fi tattoo on his right arm.
I thought of joining in. Cutting in, as we did at dances when I was a kid. You would tap a guy’s shoulder, and a bizarre etiquette required him to surrender his belle to you and slink off to the sidelines. You might get just once around the floor and then somebody would cut in on you. Well, obviously, as Dennis and Geoffrey weren’t actually dancing together, there was no shoulder to tap. Perhaps I could just go dance by myself. No one else seemed to need a partner.
I stayed in my seat. I told myself that it was just unseemly for grown men to cavort together like Mickey at his junior high sock hop. But I knew I was afraid. Of looking foolish? Even I who never quite mastered the foxtrot could probably flail around as well as anybody else. Perhaps I was afraid I might like it too much.
Dennis and Geoffrey took a break. Dennis was glowing a little with sweat. Little Geoffrey looked at him wide-eyed, as a deer must look at a salt lick. Funny, they hadn’t looked at one another on the dance floor, but it had been a mating dance after all.
Everyone was going to pair off, Willis and Eddie, Dennis and Geoffrey, as if ready for the ark. Except these couples could hardly be counted on to repopulate the postdiluvian planet. Imagine: if the bomb ever falls, suppose it spares only the Dubois or the Poplar Bar, suppose the last men and women on earth are fairies and dykes? Facing the categorical imperative, but just not up to it, so very sorry. Dancing the extinction quadrille.
Oh, and am I so special because, in between my rounds of cocksucking, I managed to step out of the tearoom for a moment and sire Mickey? Probably suckered into it, how can I not wonder if Martha meant to entrap me with her accident, the diaphragm so conveniently left in the drawer on that fateful night? If I learned anything from Dr. Bartholdy, it is that there are no accidents.
So I the quasi-accidental father am the natural one and O’Grady is some etiolated freak? No, fairies are just the too richly feathered canaries in the mine, warbling the truth about all of us: that we don’t believe in tomorrow, don’t believe the cycles of living and passing the world on and dying mean any more than the circling of the needle on the record player. I have a Mickey to care about. But I can’t imagine a future for Mickey to dwell in, any more than Dennis O’Grady can.
We all just sat for a while, until Dennis said, “I was thinking.”
I said, “You were able to think while you were doing St. Vitus’s dance?”
“Well, it’s not as though I had to concentrate on getting the steps right. I was thinking, what you said, about boys--what was it?--feeling alien in their own bodies.”
“That wasn’t quite right. What I meant was--” I found myself telling them about the kid in the tearoom, the JD with the Samuel Gompers jacket who despised himself because I made him come. I couldn’t help it; I knew it was a story for this journal and not for a fun evening of dancing at the Dubois, but I couldn’t help it.
I stopped, everyone was looking away. And I wonder why I’m not invited out much. At last Dennis said--not snide, really trying to get it: “So, let’s see, you want a world where boys let you blow them and feel just fine about it.”
“I want a world where boys feel fine about whatever it is they do, because they see a way forward in the world. A common world they can grow into and know how to be a man in.”
Here was my peroration, which--because this is my journal--I can make a tad more eloquent than I was last night.
“Here’s why the kids are the way they are: because they see a world where everything is artificial and mechanical. And they feel that they aren’t machines, they’re the only thing that isn’t, all heat and emotion and wonder. And sometimes they’re ashamed, as if the fact that they have feelings means they’re not streamlined enough, a jalopy in a world of gleaming silver Aston Martins. And sometimes they’re grandiose, because if they’re alive and everything else is inanimate, shouldn’t that mean they’re in charge? And sometimes--this is when the blade is clicked open, the zip gun brought forth from under the green deck jacket-sometimes they know they’re not in charge. That cocky as they may stand there--I saw two kids ready to fight once, pelvises thrust so far forward they were practically set for some kind of jazzing--they know they’re going to be fucked. Better: screwed, not the lead wolf banging them but some machine. Cool, graphite-lubed, inexorable.”
I didn’t say all this last night. But I said enough that even people at other tables were glancing my way. I tried to make light of it. “Of course, letting me blow them would also be nice.”
Dennis chuckled. “Yeah, if I had any kind of politics, I’d definitely be a member of the Fellatio Party. How about you, Geoffrey, think we ought to get buttons made?”
Geoffrey’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe everybody at the table had for a second the same crazy vision, of a city where you could actually wear that button.
Dennis said, “I’m going to dance a little.” I wished again that I could dance. I suppose what I’m scared of, in the end, is that I might turn into a fairy.
I didn’t dance, trudged home to 17th Street and my solitary bed. But I knew last night and know this morning. I have found it. Even if I was just making fancy talk, some elusive phantom of an idea forming in me. I know what to write. After the years of clot, dead ends, grinding, I know what to write.
NINE
I have been playing all morning with a Cubo-Futurist cookbook cover—modeled, more or less, after the Duchamp Passage from Virgin to Br
ide at the Modern. Except mine shows the passage of a chicken from barnyard to cacciatore. Passage de la poule is less fluent than the Duchamp, and of course much gorier—Duchamp seems to have imagined that the virgin’s passage could be accomplished without blood.
Of course they aren’t going to use this and are going to demand something like two peaches on an azure plate. But what a pleasure doing real work, just for a few hours, work that isn’t adorable. It makes me think that perhaps I am at last ready to draw what I want. Jobs are scarce anyway, why not make the passage from illustrator to artist? There’s still time. Hell, Grandma Moses didn’t pick up a brush until she was my age. There’s still time for me to be immortal. Until associate professors come around wanting to write my life.
These thoughts reminding me of the chore I have been postponing. I need to call Willis.
Who would have guessed that ungainly Willis Kern would have emerged as Jonathan’s favorite? The winner of the contest that must always have been going on among the little flock of apostles who surrounded Jonathan in his last years.
Willis, when I last saw him in the seventies, had come to a book party wearing cowboy boots and blue jeans. He had long, stringy hair parted on top, so that he looked like John Milton, except not as cheery. Evidently the competition for Jonathan’s favor wasn’t a beauty contest. Nor, I think, was Willis just an adept flatterer. Jonathan was, to understate, not without vanity; but he didn’t want to be lavishly praised. He wanted to be appreciated—that is to say, truly comprehended and then lavishly praised. I think this is true of every writer I’ve known.
At any rate, before he died Jonathan made plain to Laurence and me that Willis was to be the—what? Archivist? Curator? Once Jonathan’s papers had been carted away—purging the apartment of him all at once, not gradually as with Mickey—Willis spent the whole summer at the SLS library, getting the files in order. He found a scattering of unpublished ephemera and met with Laurence a few times to talk about a possible posthumous collection. I can’t remember what happened—whether the stuff was too dated and sketchy to see print, or whether Laurence already saw how quickly Jonathan’s star was dimming and figured there was no audience for minor Ascher. At any rate, the project faded, and Willis turned to the main event.
Laurence and I dubbed him the authorized biographer. It was a shame there couldn’t have been some ceremony, with me handing Willis a pen and Laurence forking over a large advance from Aurora. But there was no advance, so Willis had to take a job at some school in Nebraska. He would be back the next summer to pick up the project and start interviewing all of Jonathan’s friends. Or, a longer list, his former friends. All the people to whom Willis would get entrée because Laurence and I had waved our hands over him.
How is it that I so casually blessed a biography back then and have so much trouble now? Maybe because there were people for Willis to talk to, scads of people who had known us both. While all Philip Marks will have is Jonathan’s journals, just Jonathan’s side of every story.
Willis did not come back the next summer.
Willis, this is Martha Ascher.”
“Martha—no kidding?” I have no idea how to reply to no kidding. “It’s been … God.”
“Yes,” I say. It has indeed been.
“So you’re still in the same place,” he says. This is not a question.
“How do you know?”
“The number came up on caller ID. I saw it and I knew it right away, after all these years. For a second I thought … I’m getting a call from a ghost.”
“Only a third of a ghost,” I say, remembering the old game for some reason.
“What?”
“Never mind. And you’re still in Nebraska.” This comes out, I’m afraid, somewhere between an accusation and a condolence.
Whichever he hears, he answers defensively, “I love Nebraska.”
This is not starting well. I feel, as I did with Laurence the night we went to dinner: I’m not getting out enough, I’ve lost all my graces. So, gracelessly, I state my business. “I’m calling because … I was wondering if you were ever going to get back to your book.”
“My book?”
“About Jonathan.”
“Oh, that book. I’ve written a lot of books, you know.”
“Of course, yes,” I lie.
“And then I’m still editing the Nebraska Smollett.”
“The what?”
“The definitive edition of Tobias Smollett. Eighteenth-century novelist? Peregrine Pickle? Humphrey Clinker?”
“Right. You’ve had plenty to keep you busy, then.”
“To keep me—”
There is a dreadful pause, during which he must be wondering if I can really have meant that his whole career has been busy work. Finally he says: “At any rate, I will not be getting back to a book about Jonathan.”
“I see. Because …”
“I never even started. I’m sorry.” As if it were a term paper he had failed to hand in. “I read everything, all the papers, everything, and I—I don’t know, I lost interest.”
“You what?” Not that this was inconceivable. I never even got through all of Jonathan’s actual books. The novels especially, though I riffled through the last one, Straphangers, just to make sure I wasn’t in it.
“Okay, that isn’t quite right,” Willis says. “I stopped … admiring him quite so much. Or I wasn’t sure if I did or not. So I didn’t want to write about him.”
I think of inviting him to elaborate on Jonathan’s less admirable aspects. But then it might be a very long phone call. “So it would be … you wouldn’t object if someone else started to look through the papers?”
A silence. “Well,” he says. “Well, I don’t guess I have any right to stand in the way.”
Of course I have been hoping he would object. Yes, let Willis veto the book. Then it will be some kind of academic territorialism—the tenured dog letting no one else approach his literary manger. Instead of a pathetic old woman worrying about how she will be depicted, how she will be recalled.
“Willis, if there were even a chance you were going to …”
“There isn’t a chance. So who is this someone else?”
“His name is Philip Marks. He wants to write a book.”
“Never heard of him.”
I refrain from pointing out that Willis Kern isn’t exactly a household name. “He teaches in Delaware somewhere. Maybe you could find out something about him.”
“I guess.”
“Or maybe it doesn’t matter.” I add inanely, “He’s a nice boy.”
Willis practically spits. “Oh, good, maybe he’ll write a nice book about a nice man.”
I am startled. From his tone, you would think Jonathan hurt him somehow. Then it occurs to me: he read the journals, must have read about himself as I have read about myself. Is this his grievance, what Jonathan said about him? Or how little Jonathan said? Willis is just a walk-on, as I am.
“I know he wasn’t a nice man, Willis. I spent twenty-two years with him.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s not clear whether he’s sorry about his tone or sorry for me. “Listen, have you looked at the papers yourself?”
“I read one of the journals. 1964. I’ve been meaning to get back to the library and start in on the next one, 1966, but I had a commission and …”
“I think maybe you need to read some more.”
“Maybe I will. Anyway, if you’re never going back to it, I guess Laurence and I will talk.”
“Or, no—” There is a little silence, which I leave unfilled. “Martha, I don’t know what to tell you. He got kind of crazy. So I don’t know if you really want to read that stuff.”
“I know he acted crazy sometimes.”
“I don’t mean acting, I mean really. He was pretty crazy for a long time.”
“Well, I guess I knew that too.”
“No, I mean … really, there was only one person who knew.” Before I have a chance to ask just who this might be
, he abruptly changes tone. “So how have you been doing all this time? Did you ever remarry, or … ?”
“I never did. I guess one marriage was plenty.” We chuckle together. “And you? You made a life in Nebraska.”
“I did, honestly, a happy one. Settled down with a professor of poultry economics.”
“They have those?”
He laughed. “They have those. Not to be confused with poultry engineering. Anyway, not the life I’d expected.”
“Do you ever miss New York?”
“I do, sometimes. But then I realize I’m just missing my youth. Boy, I remember. I was so in love with this one guy, a dancer …”
“Eddie,” I blurt out.
A little coldly: “My, you have been doing your homework. Eddie. He died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. A lot of people died, while I stayed alive in Nebraska.”
August 22, 1966
Martha and Mickey are back from Truro. Martha is pretty tan, she should probably watch it--near forty, she’ll be leathery soon. Mickey looks like one of the boys gone savage in Lord of the Flies: almost mahogany, golden hair bleached white. Except Mickey presumably has an unsavage tan line.
Martha was pissed that I didn’t have anything in the place for dinner. I said I’d been uptown to a meeting with Laurence, which was true. I didn’t mention my sojourn in the 28th Street station. She said, “We were an hour in Bernie’s car to Hyannis and now that the Shore Route’s gone we had to take the bus to Providence and then change to the train and we were held over another two hours in New Haven, and now I have to schlep to Verducci’s because you couldn’t bother to stop off for a steak or something?”
I said, “There’s always something wrong when I do the shopping.”
“I’m talking about a steak, for crying out loud, even you can find a steak.”
I went, thinking it wouldn’t have hurt her big, probably also tan-lined, ass to walk to Verducci’s. Also I should never have taught her to say schlep. At the market I found: chuck steak, sirloin steak, strip steak, minute steak, several others. I thought of picking at random, just to teach Martha not to send me out on her job, but I was hungry myself.