by Mark Merlis
We’ve lived--half my adult life I have lived, his whole goddamn life Mickey has lived--with the knowledge that the thermonuclear war could start any minute, and then the cockroaches would take over. I made so much of this in JD, all the stuff about kids growing up in a world whose absurdity is highlighted by the constant threat of annihilation. But I was wrong.
We have had knowledge but not belief. Was it Freud who said that no one really believes in the possibility of his own extinction? For a few years we dutifully read the books and watched the movies: On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe; we all shivered during the Cuban thing; we gave our money to the SANE committee while sniggering a little at the goo-goo Bertrand Russell naïveté of it all. But we didn’t believe it. Even during the Cuban thing, we didn’t really look up into the skies for the incoming missile. Somehow the apprehension that the whole species could be vaporized Tuesday afternoon never sat so heavily on my heart as this new fear of the unpredictable thing some loony down the block might or might not be getting ready to do.
Meanwhile I’ve learned a few things about Ham. In the Talmud, a couple of rabbis argue about just what Ham’s awful crime was--figuring that all of his generations wouldn’t have been condemned to slavery just because he happened to catch a glimpse of his daddy’s bare ass. One rabbi thinks Ham fucked his dad; the other thinks he castrated the old drunk. There’s a lot of playing with words and reading backward from the punishment to the crime and all the other clever stuff rabbis do. Imagine! Two millennia ago they were showing off like bright sophomores.
But after slogging through all this, I think the Bible means just what it says. Seeing your father is the crime. And so is the father’s letting himself be seen: if he hadn’t been drunk out of his mind, he wouldn’t have been lying around with his cloak undone.
I know we can never get past that dead world of Genesis, we’ll never break through to the new life, until Mickey and I can see one another in the light.
September 21, 1966
I tried to take a shower this morning, even though I didn’t have to get ready for work till noon. Nothing today except afternoon office hours, and the mob that used to show up for office hours at the start of the term has already thinned considerably, most of the crowd having discovered that I couldn’t be relied on to dispense wisdom like a bubble gum machine.
The bathroom door was locked, Mickey was in there. I went to my study and stared for a while at the accusatory ziggurat of unanswered fan mail. After, perhaps, ten minutes, I tried the door again. Still locked. Either the kid had dysentery or …
I called through the door. “Why don’t you do it in your bed and let me take a shower?”
A few seconds silence. Through which I could hear the iron gate clanging shut, Mickey and I confined forever in our separate cells--in that cellblock with a billion solitaries they call manhood. Then, dear God, he laughed. “Why don’t you cool it a couple minutes?”
“Scoot. I promise I won’t interrupt you.”
The door unlocked. He was wearing his underpants, his hard-on forcing them straight out like a bowsprit. As instructed, he scooted to his room. I looked at him. His slender back, with a solitary pimple. His butt in his underpants.
September 26, 1966
Martha is back from Baltimore. While Mickey lugged her bags up the stairs, I asked her how her mother was. I think I did a fair imitation of someone who gave a damn. She just shook her head, didn’t say a word. And didn’t say a word most of the afternoon. Probably, after a few days of failing to interrupt her mother’s unceasing flow of content-free utterance, she forgot how to talk.
She recovered her power of speech when we sat down to dinner. It’s funny, I hadn’t even noticed: these last couple of weeks, when Mickey and I sat down to eat--take-out Chinese a few nights, pizza, a couple of breakfasts at Rappaport’s--we didn’t say a word. I write in here about talking to each other, but we didn’t do it when we had a chance. Now we are back to listening to Martha.
Soon only I was left listening to Martha. Mickey, under the new rules, left the table as soon as he had, tornado-like, swept through his plate.
Martha washed dishes and I dried. She cleared her throat. “Daddy isn’t looking very good.” This is like saying the sky is blue, but I managed a Hmm. “He’s tired all the time, he isn’t eating, and he can hardly walk, his feet are so swollen. I had to beg and beg to get him to a doctor, and it turns out his kidneys are failing.”
“What are they going to do about it?”
“Nothing. They say there’s this machine now, they hook you up to it and it works like a kidney. But there’s only a couple of them, and they’re in Seattle or somewhere.”
“So take him to Seattle. He can afford it.”
“No, they have a waiting list. And this committee of citizens that decides who can get it, who’s more … valuable to society.”
“There’s a committee?” I said.
“Uh-huh. And I don’t guess there’s much chance they’ll put a seventy-year-old man with a little drinking problem at the head of the list.”
Well, the old bastard wouldn’t have much chance if I were on the committee. Except of course I would never be on such a committee. Never be asked, for one thing, but wouldn’t do it, either. What kind of person would accept that awful job? Still, I bet there are people who line up for it.
“So there’s nothing else they can do?” I said.
“No. At some point, his kidneys are just going to shut down and he’s going to die. Maybe a couple more months. They say it isn’t painful, he’s just going to kind of drift away.”
I almost didn’t say, but did: “You seem calm about it.”
“I … if there were even a little bit of hope, then I’d be hoping, I’d probably be agitated. But there isn’t; they’re not going to magically build a hundred more machines next week. And if there’s no hope, then it’s just a fact, like the weather. You make your plans around it. I’m already thinking--this is awful, but it’s what I’m thinking-will it be over soon, or is it going to spoil Christmas?”
I decided I was supposed to hug her. She let me, then murmured, “I’m not sure what to do about my mother.”
In my head an awful blare of sirens, like an air-raid warning. “What about your mother?”
“Well, you know, she’s never lived by herself, her whole life. I don’t think she even knows how to balance a checkbook.”
I offered no suggestions. Finally Martha said, “I guess, once Daddy’s gone, I could go down … oh, maybe every couple of weeks, spend a night or two, make sure things are okay.”
“Oh. Well, that might be good. Mickey and I can fend by ourselves once in a while.” Bacchanalia!
From Mickey’s room came the sound of one of those soul singers he listens to now. Just last year he was listening to folk music--protest songs, the kind of stuff they used to sing at a Communist summer camp. Now he seems to have turned into what Mailer calls a White Negro. He’s even taken to wearing sunglasses when he goes to school, as if he were a saxophonist. I know this is all harmless, but it seems calculated to annoy me. Especially when he croaks along, in his newly changed voice, to an impassioned lament about how he’s been lovin’ some lady too long.
“What are you going to tell Mickey?” I said.
“I don’t know. I guess we have time to think about it. What would you tell him?”
“Lately I don’t know what to tell him about anything.”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
September 28, 1966
I was in the kitchen when Mickey appeared with his goddamn geometry textbook. I was still on my first cup of coffee and second cigarette, and he expected me to help him prove that parallel lines didn’t meet or something. Martha was at Verducci’s, so I couldn’t send him to her. I looked at the problem, and even if I’d been fully awake was no more able to solve it this morning than I was in 1926. “Why couldn’t we have done this last night?” I said.
“Cause you left right afte
r dinner.”
“Oh, right.”
“Where did you go?” he said.
“Um, Professor Gruenthal, you remember meeting him? He was giving a lecture. I didn’t want to go, but …”
“Is that where you go all the time? Lectures and stuff?”
“Uh-huh, pretty much.”
“Cause sometimes, you know, you’ll be just coming home and I’ll look at the clock and it’s real late.”
Even though he’s fourteen, he still faithfully winds his little clock with Donald Duck on it. Pop’s getting home, and look: Donald’s big hand is on the 12 and his little hand is on the 3!
I snuffed out my cigarette, took a sip of my coffee. “I …” I hadn’t even finished my first cup, I was still too woozy from last night to invent some business that kept me out until the wee hours. And maybe I was also just tired of lying, day and night lying. I thought, let him look at his father for a minute. “Last night I … went to see somebody.”
He could tell I wasn’t talking about Professor Gruenthal. I thought for one crazy instant of going even further, disclosing that I had been with Robert, just back from playing shuffleboard and sipping tea on the Queen Mary. I settled for the generic. “I’ve kind of been seeing people.”
He stuck out his lower lip. “Seeing.”
“Seeing.”
Mickey looked down, intensely, at his geometry book, full of exploded theorems. Parallel lines met, triangles had four sides. He closed the book, stood up, and said--with about as much expression as the operator when she tells you a number isn’t in service: “I’m going to be late for school.”
I said, “You see, your mother and I haven’t …”
So, after compelling him to contemplate Pop fucking some shadowy person seen, now I had made him imagine Pop-and-Mom-not-fucking. Which, as this guy Chomsky might point out, really means imagining (NOT + [Pop-and-Mom-fucking]). You can’t picture the not-doing without picturing the doing.
Mickey sat down again. And reached for one of my Pall Malls. I was too surprised to protest. He lit it so casually it was clear he’d been smoking for a while. Had I started by fourteen? I guess.
He suppressed a cough--probably he’s been smoking something with filters, maybe Marlboros filched from Martha--and then said, gravely, “So are you and Mom going to get a divorce?”
“What? Of course not.”
“But what if she finds out what you’ve been doing?”
I think--now that Mickey has gone off to school, with a note from me to excuse his tardiness--I think perhaps I should have told him the truth: Martha probably doesn’t much care what I’ve been doing or to whom I’ve been doing it. But instead I said, “Well, I’m not going to tell her.”
He took a drag of his cigarette, pondered this. “Me, either. If--”
“If what?”
“If you don’t tell her I’m smoking.”
“You got a deal.”
So we are conspirators, two boys with secrets. Except that one of us has a further secret he dares not uncover. Or maybe both of us do? I know he jerks off, I know he smokes. This can’t be all there is to know about him. But we have started the project of knowing.
How grand: The Project of Knowing! That is, the project of telling our boy things he didn’t need to know. Or, more precisely, things he would have figured out for himself when he needed to know them, not when Jonathan thought he should.
Oh, in fairness I suppose plenty of sons have known about their fathers’ philandering. Have even grown up where it was institutionalized: royal courts, odalisques. But they grew up in those worlds. And what they saw, whether they were princes of the realm or second son of the twenty-seventh wife, prepared them for the world they were expected to live in.
There, I think, is what was wrong with Jonathan’s project, maybe with his whole project for raising our son or everybody’s sons. He wanted to prepare Mickey for life in a world that didn’t exist at all, or not outside JD. It was like the joke one of our SLS friends used to tell about the economist stuck on a desert island with—what was it? A can of beans, I think, and no can opener. “We’ll just assume a can opener!” Jonathan wanted to assume a whole world, then cast Mickey ashore on it.
How funny, though, about Mickey’s smoking. Maybe I didn’t have whatever kind of sixth sense was needed to see beyond his placid mask, but I could still smell well enough.
October 3, 1966
At the Poplar, I encountered Dennis O’Grady--amazingly still accompanied, after at least two years, by Geoffrey-with-a-G. The G standing for glum, last night.
Dennis explained: “Geoffrey and his parents are having a little falling-out. They want him to go into the family business, and he doesn’t want to.”
“What’s the family business?” I asked.
“Insurance.”
“Ah, that was our family business. I didn’t take to it, either. Anyway, you’re a grown man,” I said to Geoffrey. Exaggerating.
Dennis said, “They feel I’m an unhealthy influence on him.”
“They’ve met you?”
“They’ve--how would you put it, Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey thought a moment, then said, “They … deduced him.”
We were all, even Geoffrey, startled by this near-epigram. But I can see how it must have been. Little Geoffrey, scheduled to be & Son, comes home from college full of poetry and rebellion. His sweater is too tight and he has a funny new way of talking with his hands. His parents wouldn’t have to be clairvoyant to know that, behind all this, there lurked a Dennis O’Grady. And I suppose they would have to be impossibly wise to understand that Geoffrey found O’Grady, not the other way round. That peculiar little boys like their son find their necessary O’Grady, find their guide into the world somehow.
“What does he want to do instead?”
“Nothing,” Dennis said. I was aware that we were talking over Geoffrey’s head, as if he were an eight-year-old choosing between fireman and cowboy. Geoffrey didn’t seem to mind, just sipped his fruity drink and listened. “He’s a junior, he has time to think of what he wants to be. Except we’re starting to worry about the draft.”
“When’s he going to graduate, ‘68? Vietnam will be over. Johnson isn’t going to let the war drag on when he’s running for reelection.”
“I guess not,” Dennis said. He ruffled Geoffrey’s hair; Geoffrey ducked away and went off to the men’s room.
“A junior,” I said, wonderingly.
“Well, it’s not like he’s--whatever the male equivalent of Lolita is. Lolito.” He said that again, liking the feel of it on his tongue: “Lolitooo. I know he acts like a kid sometimes, but he can be very wise. Who is it, the poet, who said we start out knowing everything and then forget it as we grow up?”
“Wordsworth, I think.”
“God, Wordsworth. I think he single-handedly made me change from English to economics.”
“You studied economics?”
“Yeah, I guess I had to bury myself in something proverbially dismal before I could grow my poet’s wings.” He giggled. But of course he really does believe he has wings.
There it is maybe, what has chafed me about Dennis O’Grady. That, whatever happens, even if he should some day run out of poems, he will never stop believing that he is one of the chosen, born to fly. As I once thought about myself.
“Anyway,” I said. “My own kid, he seems wise sometimes. And then sometimes he seems so fresh-hatched he’s still got eggshell in his hair.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Mickey.”
“Mickey. Willis says he’s cute.”
I recoiled just a little, at the idea that a couple of grown-up fairies were discussing my boy’s looks. But I guess pretty soon a lot of people, of assorted genders, are going to be sizing up Mickey. And it’s certainly just as well that he’s going to go through life cute. I said, “I haven’t noticed.”
“Really?” Dennis rolled his eyes, as if I had to be lying. Maybe I was; I gu
ess I’ve at least noticed. “I mean, look. I know objectively that my little brother is a hunk.”
“A what?”
“You haven’t heard that? A hunk. It’s what girls are calling cute boys these days. Anyway, my brother is a living doll, one part of me can’t help seeing that. But at the same time I never, you know, get aroused. So I wonder how that works. If it’s an instinct, not to drool over our kinfolk, or if we have to be taught.”
Geoffrey emerged from the men’s room, sticking a piece of paper in his coat pocket. Dennis’s back was to him, and I certainly wasn’t going to report that little with-a-G was making new friends at the urinals. When Geoffrey sat down, Dennis said, “Jonathan thinks you’re too young for me.”
I protested. “I didn’t say that.”
Geoffrey said to Dennis, “You think so, too.”
“What?”
“I can tell sometimes. You wonder what you’re doing with somebody who hasn’t read anything, or listened to all the records you have, or …”
Dennis groped him. “You don’t really wonder.”
Geoffrey squirmed away. “Other than that. You get that easy enough, lots of places.”
Dennis smiled perfunctorily, looked away. You could see there was something he was trying to work out.
“There’s some mysterious thing a man my age needs from a younger man. It’s not just--oh, of course it is, partly, that you’re firm and smooth and … neotonous.”
“Neotonous?” Geoffrey asked. So I didn’t have to confess my own ignorance.
“With juvenile features. I read this somewhere: all us mammals have this instinct to protect anything with big eyes and ears and a snub nose. Puppies, fawns, Geoffreys.”
Geoffrey frowned. “Do you think I have big ears?”
“But it’s not just that, it’s this need we old guys have to pass something on.”
“Old?” I said. “What are you, thirty?”
“And a smidge. Old enough that I want to share what I’ve learned somehow.”
I said, “So you impart your manly knowledge to him in between fucking him?” I was sorry right away. For my snideness, and also because Geoffrey’s faint smile told me I had guessed their positions wrong.