by Mark Merlis
On Mickey’s desk was his high school yearbook. I thumbed through it for a minute or two, noting in particular the varsity wrestling team and, of course, the swimmers in their tiny shmattes. They look at once bold and abashed: conscious that it’s odd for a bunch of boys to be photographed in this way, displayed near-naked and with their legs shaved, like a lineup of Miss Rheingold contestants. But also of course proud of their lithe bodies, ready to plunge into life.
I arrived at the individual pictures of the seniors: Allen, Andropoulos, Antonelli, Aronowitz, Ascher. Ascher’s long blond hair was tamed by some kind of gunk that day-parted in the middle, the way I combed mine in 1928. He has a bland, pleasant expression, like the one worn by the guest of honor at an open-casket funeral. There is a smudge on his forehead where the photographer must have effaced a pimple. Below the picture a single activity: Science Club 9. All the other kids have lines and lines of achievement or at least participation: Student Government 1O, 11; Intramural Hopscotch 12; Latin Prize 11. Mickey just stopped, in ninth grade. The year I touched him.
Only a couple of friends have signed the book. “Have some high times this summer,” one writes. Referring, I take it, to his principal extracurricular activity. I don’t care so much about the drugs. I guess half his class has tried them, and he did manage to keep his grades up--they were good enough to get into Warwick, anyway, which is all his mother and assorted dead Axelrods wanted from him. It doesn’t even matter whether he played games or joined clubs. But it seems to me that Mickey has simply declined the whole life of his generation.
He has no politics, no hobbies, no enthusiasms--not even the soul music anymore. He isn’t rebelling against me or Martha or the military-industrial complex or anything. All the other kids are on fire just now--about the war, race, injustice. This youthful ferment, feckless and ill-directed as I may think it is, is what’s going on. Nothing is going on with Mickey. His fire has burned out, if he ever had one.
I feel that I am the one who extinguished it, feel it every time I look at him. I know I fucked him up, but he won’t let me close enough to find out just how. Or how to make it right.
I don’t know just how Jonathan did it, either. But it is certainly true that Mickey’s fire was put out, somehow. Here, maybe, is what struck me for the first time at the Lubitz Auditorium. I can’t recall ever hearing him in those last years say, as any boy will say: someday I’ll be or someday I’ll do or someday I’ll have or someday I’ll go.
Did he have some premonition, did he know inside that any predicate he might supply for those sentences would be a lie? Maybe he spoke to himself, much too early, the other sentence that I hear always now, a chant that has receded to mere background noise but that never ceases: someday I’ll die. No, I can’t believe he felt that, at least not until he was in country. But Jonathan is right about the main thing: some time in his teens, when he should have been white-hot with lust for the world, he forgot how to speak in the future tense.
If I saw this at the time, perhaps I just thought his future was all settled—Warwick, law, a normal life—that’s why he didn’t need to speak of it. But nothing was settled at all.
June 8, 197O
Martha wants to take Mickey to Truro again. She said at dinner this might be the last summer he and his cousin Alan will have to capsize the Sunfish together before they go off to their respective colleges, then on to their respective lives. Mickey just listened. I don’t guess he’d mind one more idle summer at Bernie’s place, but he must also be wondering where he’s going to get his drugs in a little hamlet populated entirely by shrinks and watercolorists.
I thought of pointing out that it’s also the last summer Mickey and I will have together. But of course we aren’t together, we haven’t been together since I fucked everything up. He never walks down the street with me, never asks me a question that doesn’t conclude with the mention of a sum of money, has apparently never wondered how I felt about his going off to Warwick or any of his other bourgeois life choices. And of course he has never, not once in four years, sat next to me on a sofa.
“Well, that’s fine,” I said to Martha. “I guess you’ll have a chance to catch up with your friends, too.”
Martha turned sharply toward me, signaling Not-in-front-of-the-B-A-B-Y. Amazing, she still thinks Mickey doesn’t know. He’s eighteen years old, if I had never told him anything he would probably have pieced together the facts of life by now.
Mickey said, his face blank as always but perhaps some mischief in his voice: “You’re not teaching this summer, why don’t you come to the Cape with us?”
“Well, your uncle and I …” I was about to say that Bernie and I weren’t getting along. But I was afraid Mickey would recall that his grandfather and I didn’t get along, either. Which might make him wonder: how come all the other adult males in Mickey’s family despise his father? “Your uncle understands this is the time of year when I have a chance to get some writing done.”
Martha got up abruptly and started taking plates to the kitchen. Mickey followed her; the only form of order that prevails in this house is that he has gone back to helping her with the dishes. I think she was signaling that, while she wasn’t going to contradict me, she wasn’t going to sit there while I told her son pathetic lies.
It isn’t a lie: look, here I am writing in a journal again, after so many years! It’s not a lie, but a pathetic truth. When I started the last journal--when was that? 1966, I hadn’t thought it was that long ago, I should put these jottings into binders and label them some time. Anyway, when I started the last one I had some notion that it would help me find my way into a real book. Instead it just got me into trouble.
That journal wasn’t just recording the trouble I got myself in, it was the trouble. Like spending too much time in the mirror, until your face is a stranger’s. Writing about yourself, unless you’re an utter naïf, you can’t help but remake your feelings so they’ll lead to more shapely sentences. I think of that fall as the time I went a little nuts. But I went nuts at the keyboard before I fucked up my life with Mickey.
I should stop this, maybe, before I find out what else I can fuck up.
June 29, 197O
Yesterday a gaggle of fairies marched up Sixth Avenue from the Village to Central Park--the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, they called it. Just a few hundred people when it started, but evidently more joined on the way, and I hear there were thousands by the time they got to the park. Who would have thought there were that many hairstylists in New York? Because obviously they’re the only people who can afford to appear publicly wearing their Fellatio Party buttons.
I’m ambivalent, of course. Sure, it would be nice if people didn’t go to jail for sucking cock, as it would be nice if urologists and tugboat captains could have marched in yesterday’s parade. Maybe these things will even happen someday. Not in my lifetime, or even Mickey’s probably, but someday. Still: I can’t help remembering what Ignaz Gruenthal implied, that we may get gay lib and women’s lib and whatever other libs are in store for us, and the graphite-lubed machine will go on screwing, screwing.
Martha isn’t ambivalent at all. She hated the parade, and not just because she had to make her away across it to get to her dental appointment. “I don’t care what they do behind closed doors,” she said. “I know they can’t help it, whatever causes it, so all right then. But it’s nothing to brag about. Next thing we’ll be seeing marches for Hemophilia Pride.” She said all this with a thoughtful expression, as if she were the very first person ever to utter these sentiments.
Mickey put his silverware down and asked to be excused. He must have been upset. Not that he showed anything, of course, but he had to be pretty distraught if he was ready to leave with half his meat loaf still on the plate. Martha didn’t notice--too busy composing further observations about etiquette for deviants--and just waved him away.
I have to assume that he figured Martha was talking about me, which means he knows about me. But I don
’t know if he was concerned that she was hurting my feelings, or if he just hated to be reminded that his Pop is a pervert.
The funny thing is: I’m pretty sure Martha’s remarks were not directed at me. I know she has a good idea what I do and who I do it with, but I don’t believe she thinks of me as a fairy--any more than I think of myself that way. Which raises the question: are there really fairies or gay people or whatever the right word is now? Or just people who call themselves names?
This is the sort of question that interests everybody at SLS. Everybody but me, which is why they all think I am frivolous. Unernst: unserious, the worst thing they can call you at SLS. Worse than fairy, even.
I don’t recall this discussion at all, and I can hardly believe I was so vehement. But this must be how I sound to Philip Marks. Still angry after thirty years: vexed, every time I try to cross Seventh Avenue, at the parade of deviants. So was Jonathan mistaken, was my anger really directed at him? For humiliating me, or for leaving me alone while he ran to find love in the toilets?
No, I think my anger was at men. I don’t mean men individually. I mean men together.
July 2, 197O
The cabbie said, “Penn Station.” I looked up, expecting to see Penn Station, and there was nothing there, just a monstrous cenotaph of concrete and black glass. “This is it, Pop,” Mickey said. “We’re here.” Here. Oh, of course: this was Penn Station now. Where granite once soared, we duck through little doorways now and down into a bargain basement.
I didn’t join in the uproar when they tore the old station down a few years ago. New York has always been about tearing stuff down and building something new. Why should I have grieved for some monument to corporate arrogance, an overblown replica of an old Roman bathhouse, but without the action? (Well, there was sometimes some action late at night in the john near Track 17.) I didn’t care when they tore it down but I felt a little twinge this morning. Nostalgia, which I just looked up and which turns out to mean aching for home. So, if I have that ache, does that mean the past is my home now? I, who always thought I was slashing the way to the future?
No such twinge, of course, perturbed Martha and Mickey, ready to take the New Haven line to Providence. Except I don’t think they even call it the New Haven line anymore. At the newsstand Martha got a Vogue--though she never dresses voguishly--and a Saturday Review to show fellow passengers her serious side. Mickey got something called Stranger in a Strange Land, which all his friends are reading. Science fiction, apparently, with some kind of religious overtones. Like the Book of Mormon, I guess.
Down at the track I hugged Martha--who was practically trembling, like a filly hearing the approaching hoofbeat of the stud. I shook Mickey’s hand, manfully. They mounted the steps to the car. I didn’t stick around to wave, I was kind of in heat myself.
I was forty-two: the last year I felt beautiful. It wasn’t as if, after that summer, my face suddenly cracked or my body fell apart. The loss was subtler, a change in the way the world flowed around me when I walked down a street. It took me time even to perceive it: that I held men’s eyes a little more briefly, that even women no longer looked at me in the same way. Perhaps this was an illusion—or perhaps my lost confidence that I was beautiful had always been an illusion. Anyway, I remember that summer of 1970 the way Europeans remembered 1913: the last good year.
Which I made the most of. Mickey was gone a lot of the time, hitching rides into Provincetown and creeping back into Bernie’s house at two in the morning. His cousin Alan didn’t go with him on these jaunts—I assume because Mickey was screwing fishermen’s daughters and smoking a little pot, and Alan was prissy about all that. With Mickey absent, I had more time for my own avocations.
It seems odd to me now that—while Jonathan in those years would just get up from the dinner table and head straight out to the bars or the baths or wherever he planned on rutting that evening—my own affairs happened only in Truro, only in the summer. Of course I couldn’t, like Jonathan, just go trolling for sex in subway restrooms. Still, plenty of men flirted with me in those days, opportunities for indiscretion arose every time we went to a cocktail party. But it was too complicated to follow through, or too consequential.
All of this changed after Jonathan died. I followed through, and it was always complicated or consequential. Never the same as those summers when I was transported to a magic realm of freedom and sensation and laughter. Never the same as that last summer in Truro. It’s funny, though: I can remember one evening on the beach, holding a man’s hand and looking at the twilight sky, rose yielding to indigo. But I can’t remember the man whose hand I was holding.
August 17, 197O
Martha and Mickey will be back next week. Earlier than I’d thought: Martha says they have to buy Mickey lots of stuff for college. To listen to her, getting him ready for school is about the same as outfitting him for a polar expedition. But of course for me going to college just meant taking the IND to 135th Street, not trekking off to boreal New Hampshire.
I abandoned this journal--and every other form of prose composition--the day after I saw the two of them off at the station. Of course there have been many summers I never managed to write anything. But I was always failing to write. This summer I was not writing, for the first time since I was a boy.
Maybe I’ll start again in the fall. Mickey will be gone, on with his life; he’ll never really be here again. I’ll go on with my life, too. As if he were just an interruption.
We rented a car and drove Mickey to New Hampshire. Jonathan drove about twice a decade: he hit the pedals too hard, so we jerked along up the Merritt Parkway, speeding or stopping short, drifting out of the lane, outraged horns all around us and Jonathan oblivious, squinting ahead and insisting that we play word games so he could win. Mickey was in the back seat, playing under duress. When it was his turn he mumbled the required place name or next letter, not caring when Jonathan crowed that he was a third of a ghost.
I was excited, maybe remembering the day I left for Smith, Daddy at the station, the train hissing behind us, impatient to carry me into the world. I kept turning to Mickey, we forgot to get you a desk lamp, what was your roommate’s name again, did you pack the extra blanket, it’s already cold at night in New Hampshire. Mickey would answer me irritably. I didn’t mind. I thought, he’s cutting the cord, getting ready, maybe he’s a little scared. I wished I were Mickey, everything ahead.
The first thing ahead was failing to be tapped by Daddy’s old fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. Mickey affected not to care much about this, and perhaps he really didn’t need to pledge eternal brotherhood to a bunch of strangers who played intramural lacrosse. So he wound up with a more … New York contingent, who mostly played sports involving bongs. Consequently the next thing ahead was academic probation after the first semester. At the end of the second semester he flunked out.
This was apparently quite an accomplishment: Warwick in those years demanded almost nothing of students. They had to come to class just often enough that they could pick their professor out in a police lineup, and maybe they had to write a paper with a few scattered thoughts about something they had read halfway through. All the other students managed to fulfill these requirements somewhere in between the morning joint and the three a.m. pizza run. Mickey did not.
Jonathan rented the same car, we jerked our way to New Hampshire to scoop up our failed son. Who had at least found the time to learn to drive; he got his New York license when he was in town for spring break. So, to my great relief, he drove on the trip home. We didn’t play word games this time, just silently (and smoothly) sped by all the dying industrial towns on the Connecticut River. I think Mickey and I were both waiting for Jonathan’s explosion.
It never came. I was the one who spoke first. “What are we going to do now?” Jonathan—in the front passenger seat, of course—turned his head toward Mickey as if he actually expected Mickey to have formed a plan.
Mickey said maybe we should stop and get something
to eat. A practical suggestion, to which Jonathan responded with an impractical one. Mickey should go to SLS in the fall, get a fresh start, Jonathan could work it out with the dean. Mickey shrugged. Nowadays I suppose he would have said, “Whatever.” That maddening, sneering word. A shrug was at once gentler and more eloquent.
I should have shrugged, too, I shouldn’t have argued in the car. But I couldn’t keep it in: SLS was a much stricter school than Warwick, if Mickey couldn’t even make it at Warwick …
“Nonsense,” Jonathan said. “He’s a smart kid, he just needs a little more supervision.”
“Which you’ll provide?” In between your visits to the tearooms?
I was behind Mickey, I couldn’t see his face as he listened to us.
FOURTEEN
January 18, 1972
I’ve been trying to write like Mickey. We need Mickey’s term paper to get at least a B from Ignaz Gruenthal, or else he’s going to fail that course. SLS will boot him out, and there’s really no other chance, if he blows this he’s blown his whole goddamn life before he’s twenty.
Now of course I can’t write my own essay on Émile Durkheim. Even if Ignaz couldn’t recognize my writing he could certainly tell it wasn’t the work of a little pothead who’d failed the midterm. I could be a bit dumber, get a couple facts wrong, maybe at some point make 2+2=5. But even that won’t do it. Ignaz reads stacks and stacks of papers by kids Mickey’s age every semester, he must know how they think now. It’s the sensibility I don’t know how to fake.
I used to call myself a novelist, and I don’t know how to mimic the voice of my own son. But when I wrote novels I was putting words in the mouths of people I had invented, I got to say what their voice was. Whereas I didn’t just make Mickey up. (Even as I type that, of course, I get the joke. I most certainly did make Mickey up.)