by Mark Merlis
“I’ve got a lighter.”
“Oh, good.” As he lights the candle I say, “You smoke, then. You could smoke if you wanted.”
“That’s okay, I only smoke in bars.”
“You shouldn’t at all.” How inane: why not, so he could live to be ninety? We lapse again into silence. Rivulets of sweat trickle down Philip’s face, there are damp blotches on his stretchy T-shirt. Perhaps he wishes he could take it off. Perhaps he also wishes he were at whatever bar he has been planning to wear his getup in, if there are any bars open.
“I was wondering,” Philip said. “You must have photos.”
“Photos?”
“I mean, I was thinking, what did people do in the evening, before there was TV or whatever? And I guess one of the things they did was, you know, look at family albums.”
This is either sincere or amazingly maladroit. What is he going to do, pick the illustrations for his book before I even decide to let him write it? But we can’t just go on sitting demurely in the parlor, like Ashley and Melanie Wilkes, watching each other perspire. “You know, I haven’t looked at our pictures in years,” I say. “I’m not even sure where—” As I say this, I remember exactly where the album is, in the low cabinet under the TV, with the board games. I wonder if maybe I should suggest a little Scrabble. On the chance that, when Philip beats me, he won’t cackle like Jonathan.
I open the cabinet door. It has to have been at least twenty years since I last looked in there, some afternoon so long ago when I discovered that pictures offered no comfort at all—or, rather, decided that it would not do to keep on dipping into the solace they provided. The photo album, with its puffy white leatherette covers, rests atop the Scrabble set and the Uncle Wiggily game at which Mickey could beat me, cackling childishly, by the time he could read the numbers on the cards. These are, perhaps, the only two cubic feet of space in this whole apartment that have gone inviolate for so long, like the inner chamber of a tomb. Pried open by the intrepid Philip Marks.
As I pull out the album, a few pictures flutter to the floor. I was never very diligent about mounting them, with the little black doohickeys you were supposed to stick at each corner. I gather up the loose photos: the top one is Mickey in uniform. His visored cap, a half size too large, resting low on his forehead, so he looks like a little boy playing soldier. I clutch the stack of pictures to my breast and hand Philip the album, but he asks at once, “Is that your son?”
A complicated question. “Yes.” It’s what they made of him.
I surrender the picture. Philip looks at it, nodding for some reason, then announces, “He was in the army!” As if I hadn’t known.
“Yes.”
“So is that how he—? I mean, I knew he … but: Vietnam?”
“Yes.”
He makes a little clucking sound. “It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? That Dr. Ascher was such a prominent opponent of the war, and his son …” He trails off, perhaps belatedly comprehending that I might not savor the irony.
I can see it, though. I can understand that, if Philip were to write about Mickey, any reader would say, “How ironic.” And might even think it was just a little too pat.
He riffles through the album—looking for what? The pictures are unlabeled, he doesn’t even know who these people were. When I’m gone no one will know. I should give the album to my niece Emily, sit down with her and say, this was your great-aunt Rose, and … She won’t give a damn, she won’t remember.
“This is Mickey too?” Philip says.
“Yes. At … I guess fourteen.” Emily’s wedding, probably, he is wearing the infamous glen plaid suit.
“He was cute.” I recoil, as Jonathan did when he heard that word. I suppose I must have shown it: Philip says, “Oh, I’m sorry—”
“You like young boys?” I know this is unfair, it is Jonathan and not Philip I am rebuking.
“I said I was sorry.”
“Jonathan did, did you know that? Did you know he paid sixteen-year-old boys for sex?”
“I—I’m not surprised. I mean one of the poems seems to hint at that.”
I think: it does? Maybe it’s the poems I should be reading. Maybe all Jonathan’s secrets were in plain sight. “And that doesn’t disgust you? That he abused children?”
“It was the sixties, things were different then.”
“How were they different?”
“Anything a gay man did was pathological and degraded. So I’m not sure people were very careful about sorting out which degraded acts were okay and not okay.”
“Oh.” This makes sense, in a sad way. “Oh. But maybe people who spent their days writing about how everyone else should live might have given it a little thought once in a while.”
After a thoughtful silence, Philip says, “I think maybe I’ll go.”
“No, please,” I say. Only as I say it do I realize how very much I want him to stay. “I’m just fighting with Jonathan’s ghost.”
“It’s okay. But I’m getting hungry. Maybe there’s someplace open, somebody cooking with gas.”
“I have gas, maybe I could whip up something.”
“Let’s go out,” he says. Then apologetically: “I’m sure you’re a wonderful cook. Let’s just get out.”
In Bernini’s it is like a party, an Italian family dinner. The tables are candlelit, they’re practically giving the food away because it will be no good tomorrow, the red wine is flowing. Philip has abandoned the delicate-eater act and scarfed up most of our supposedly shared antipasto; now he is tucking into a platter of manicotti. In between mouthfuls he is telling me the story of his life.
“I grew up … well all over, my father was in sales and transferred a lot, but mostly near Washington, northern Virginia. That’s where my parents still are.”
“So you’re not far, you must see them.”
“No. My mother calls sometimes. But I don’t go there. So, anyway, I went to Union for undergraduate, and then—”
“Where?”
“Union College, in Schenectady?”
“Uh-huh.” I have missed something. “Your father doesn’t talk to you?”
“No.” He shrugs—not because he is actually indifferent, I think, but because he has practiced shrugging when he gets to this part of his story. “He kind of disowned me.”
“Because …”
“Right.”
“And your mother can’t do anything about it?”
“She feels the same way he does. But she’ll call and talk sometimes.”
“Then she can’t feel the same way he does. It can’t be simple, what she feels.”
“No? It seems pretty simple to me.” Maybe it is. I don’t know how I would have felt, if Mickey had turned out to be gay.
“There wasn’t any big blowup. I drove down from Delaware to see them. This would have been Thanksgiving. I think I’d just started teaching there, so I must have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine. And my house key, the one I’d been carrying since I was big enough to have a key, didn’t fit in the lock. I thought, oh, they changed the locks and didn’t tell me. I rang the bell, knocked, started to get worried that something had happened to them. I went to the window, we had one of those fifties houses with the huge picture window, and there they were. Sitting on the loveseat, looking at me through the window as if I were a movie. Just expressionless or, maybe, the tiniest bit bewildered. Like, who is this fellow?
“Then I realized that they’d—I don’t know if they found out or they figured out. I mean, maybe my sister told them, though she swears she never did. Or maybe it just came to them, something suddenly made all the clues they must have picked up over the years fall into place. I can almost imagine them, just eating breakfast or whatever, looking across the table at each other and suddenly going …” He makes an O-face of utter astonishment.
I can’t help laughing. “I’m sorry.”
“I meant to be funny,” he says.
“I just … I can imagine being disappointed or con
fused. I have a hard time imagining just disowning you.”
“You know, for my father I think it was almost like … like finally having a name for everything he always despised about me. Maybe he was even relieved. Now he didn’t have to reproach himself anymore for having treated me like shit, because—look!—I really was shit. Case closed. Lock on the door changed.”
How would I have felt, if Mickey had turned out to be gay? Of course Mickey went out with girls, and he had those copies of Playboy hidden in his sock drawer—the little dummy, how did he suppose that fresh socks materialized in that drawer? But Jonathan went out with girls in his day, even took time out to marry one. Why am I sure about Mickey?
So how would I have felt? Furious, I think. I would have blamed it on Jonathan, because of some gene he had or because he somehow spread a miasma around the house that seeped into his son. One way or the other depriving me of grandchildren and leaving me with a son who was too much like him, that’s what I would have said.
And how would I have treated Mickey? Of course I couldn’t have been as cruel as Philip’s parents. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been one of those mothers who march with banners in the gay parades. I would not have masked my disappointment and chagrin. Like Mrs. Marks: if my son had lived I might not have thought how lucky I was.
I wonder if Mrs. Marks knows he’s sick. I wonder it almost strongly enough to ask. But part of me doesn’t want to acknowledge that Philip has a mother.
We split a dessert the way we split the antipasto; I get one spoonful. There is no coffee because the machine is electric. I wouldn’t have it anyway, not at ten o’clock, and should have demurred when Philip ordered grappa. But somehow, even with all the lugubrious family talk, this is as merry a night as I’ve had in years.
I get up and can’t make coffee because my own machine won’t work. Then I go all the way downstairs to discover that there is no Times. On my way up I remember I have the gas, so I could make tea. Then I figure I might as well draw something, just for exercise. I am actually about to walk into my studio, carrying my tea and an artichoke, when I recall that Philip Marks is asleep on the daybed.
I have more tea, the power comes back on, I read a New Yorker I never finished. Nine-thirty, I’ve read everything except a ballet review, and I am fuming. As if Philip were sleeping deliberately, just to annoy me. I listen at the door and hear faint, regular, ursine snoring. I draw back. There is something painfully familiar about the way I am aware of him, behind that door.
Of course: it is like Mickey, those last months at home before he was drafted, when he would sleep until after noon. And the whole apartment was somehow inhabited by that sleeping beast, he was at the heart of it. I would go about my business, and Jonathan his, we didn’t worry about what racket we made; Mickey was imperturbable. But always, all morning long, the sense that he was there. And that I didn’t want him to wake up. I don’t mean I worried about waking him, I mean that for some reason I dreaded the moment when he would rouse himself. To begin a day of futility. As if, while he slept, he was at least on a plateau; when he woke he would resume his descent, we all would.
I am still standing outside the door when Philip Marks opens it. He is wearing just his boxer shorts. I have time to notice that the carpet of black hair on his ornamental pectorals is very like Jonathan’s, before he slams the door and cries, “Sorry!”
“Would you like some coffee?” I call through the door. “The power’s back on.”
“Is it? Then the trains must be running. I should be getting back.”
“You could at least have some breakfast.”
“Actually, if I could just have, you know, maybe one piece of toast?”
“That’s all?”
“I shouldn’t have anything, I was such a piggy last night. But there’s this one pill that I have to take with food.”
While I’m in the kitchen I hear him emerge from the studio. He doesn’t come into the kitchen, so I assume he’s gone to the bathroom. But when I come out he’s sitting in the living room, holding the picture of Mickey in the glen plaid suit.
He thrusts the picture into the album, remembering our colloquy about young boys from last night.
I say, “It’s all right. You can look at him.”
He takes the picture out again, sits on the sofa. I sit next to him, look with him. I haven’t had the album out in so many years. I look at Mickey.
Grinning, standing on the front step of our house in Baltimore. Funny, how Jonathan kept calling him patrician and Axelrod; no Axelrod had that nose. Nor those unblinking eyes, somehow wise and amazed at the same time. Just like the eyes that drew me into Jonathan.
I can’t look anymore, this is why I haven’t had the album out. “Your toast must be ready.”
He follows me into the kitchen, takes his pill, nibbles on the toast. “You know I sometimes think—reading Dr. Ascher’s work, that it’s all about Mickey somehow.”
“Hmm.” It certainly isn’t about me.
“JD especially. It’s sort of about making a world fit for his son.”
“He didn’t even make an apartment fit for his son.”
Philip chewed on this with his toast. “You mean he was … difficult.”
As if he were an examination, or a crossword puzzle. “Sometimes.” Just when he was awake.
Philip follows me back to the living room.
I begin: “May I ask you—” No, I won’t. I will. “The pills you take, are they for …”
“Yes.”
“Do you have to take a lot?”
“Not as many as ten years ago. But of course I’d take a hundred a day if I had to.”
“So you’ve had … it a long time.”
“It, yeah. A long time. After Matt went, I thought I was going pretty soon, too. That was 1991. Shit, in those days I went to funerals about as often as I went to the movies, and I just figured mine was somewhere on the list of coming attractions. So I stopped writing, pretty much ad-libbed when I was teaching, what was the use? And then the pills came along.”
“Matt?”
“Matt. If he’d made it just a couple more years he might still be here. Probably not with me, but he’d be here.” He looked down at the floor. “Anyway, I’m here. And … it took a long time, but I finally decided I needed to start living like I was maybe going to be living for a while. So …”
“So?”
“So I thought I might write this book.” There. We’ve been together almost a full day, how patiently he has waited to bring it up. “You never did say what happened when you talked to … the other biographer.”
“The other—? Oh, you mean Willis.”
“Willis. So it was Willis Kern?”
“Yes. How would you guess Willis Kern?”
“He wrote a couple articles with Dr. Ascher.”
“My, you know a lot,” I say, fatuously.
“You’re kind of supposed to. So you talked to him and …”
“He didn’t care, he’s never going to write about Jonathan.” Philip stares. Thinking, I am sure: how many more months before the old bitch was planning to tell me? He doesn’t say anything, and I add, “He did think I should look through some of the material myself, so I’ve been doing that.”
“Uh-huh.” He takes another bite or two of the dry toast. “To see if there was anything you didn’t want me to look at.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you know, if you could let me see the stuff that’s okay to look at, then I’d be farther than I am now. And then if there’s other stuff I shouldn’t see, then so be it.”
“That isn’t—”
“You know, I’ve already lost the summer.”
“Yes, I know you deserve an answer. But it isn’t … it isn’t about some stuff you can see and some you can’t.” What is it about? I have to tell him something. “I have to find out who Jonathan was.”
“I see,” he says. Not seeing. He sighs and walks out to the living room. Stuffs hi
s pill bottles into the knapsack. “Thanks so much for letting me stay over. Why don’t you call and let me know when you …” He lets his voice drift off rather than repeat my facile excuse.
He is almost out the door when I say, “You could start with the 1964 journal. It’s all about how he got the idea for JD. I could let you see that.”
THIRTEEN
I go to SLS and ask to see Miss Busch, the librarian whom I have come to think of as having joint custody of Jonathan. I wonder if she, or anyone else here, has read any of the papers. Do they do that, librarians? Or do they just incuriously shelve things?
While I wait I look again at the painting above the main desk. It still withholds itself, the vast gray field, the single red line, but something in me vibrates to it now. Today the red line seems to have a futile nobility about it, as if it were struggling to hold itself in place against the gray encroachment.
“Mrs. Ascher. It’s been some time.”
“Yes, I … I’ve been rather busy.”
“I wish you had called ahead. You see, since you stopped coming, everything’s back in the Annex.”
“Oh.” I think for a second of saying, “Oh, too bad,” and just leaving. Everything’s back in the Annex, everything I’m not sure I want to know is hidden in faraway Elizabeth.
“But we can have whatever you want here tomorrow morning. Did you need to look at the inventory again?”
“No, I left off in the journals. I think I was ready for 1970.” Or not ready, as 1970 was the year things happened. I mean, things I already know about. The year things started to go wrong.
I’m not in the mood to go home, I’d planned to spend the whole morning here. So I stroll over to Washington Square, thinking I’ll sit a while and look at the crowd. Not as colorful as it used to be, it seems to me that nothing in the Village is as colorful as it used to be.
When I get there, I see that I’ve stumbled on the fall art exhibit. All these hopeful people, sitting on their camp stools in front of their paintings of cisterns on rooftops or bowls of oranges. I could pay the entrance fee and hang my own stuff here. I bet there’s actually a market for eggplants or artichokes—maybe tiny paintings in brushed gold frames that would fit in the most diminutive of apartment kitchens. Perhaps I—