by Mark Merlis
I got four cannoli, thinking I’d sneak one to Mickey as an early birthday treat. I went home by way of Sixth Avenue and passed by Goldman’s Hobby Shop. I used to take Mickey there all the time. He’d look covetously at the train sets we didn’t have any room for, then we’d buy him a model kit. Revell, they were called, plastic kits that made a car or a ship or a plane. Mickey would put them together with his characteristic meticulousness, squeezing the glue delicately so there wouldn’t be any extra at the joints, carefully aligning the little decals that put the insignia on an airplane’s wing or the ship’s name at its bow. This was back when he was meticulous, before he dispensed with frivolities like showering to allow more time for sleep.
I went into Goldman’s. It seemed like there were fewer things to put together, more things already assembled: cars and boats with sleek finishes and remote controls. I don’t guess kids learned a whole lot from putting together a Revell kit. When they were done they had at best a little model that didn’t do anything; they were lucky if a plane’s propellers turned. But they built something, they didn’t just open a box.
Deep in the recesses at Goldman’s were a few dusty kits. The biggest were the U.S.S. Missouri and the Queen Mary. I bought the Queen Mary, 2O inches long and 21O parts. Wondering if maybe the 21O parts included tiny figures of Edgar Villard and Robert.
For some years now Martha and I, no longer able to divine what Mickey could possibly want or need, have just given him a check-following a ritual tussle about how big an inflation allowance is appropriate. This year Martha held out for $12O, which seems a hell of a lot for a birthday, especially when it will all go to pharmaceuticals. I got her down to $1OO, and now I was coming home with a kit and two tubes of glue and a paintbrush, total $21.78 with tax. I knew she’d be furious, and Mickey would be scornful. What did I think, he was going to sit down at his desk like a little kid and put together the fucking Queen Mary?
When I got home Martha was standing in the kitchen, red-eyed and grim. There were a few meatballs on the cutting board, on the floor the smashed bowl that held the rest of the hamburger. On one burner a pot of tomato sauce was going gloop-gloop, geysers of sauce shooting up and spilling out onto the stove. She looked at me and shook her head, the way she does when she is too angry even to hum, much less explain what’s wrong. I figured Mickey might have a clue, but he wasn’t in his room. So they must have had a fight--a pretty big one if he’d go outdoors instead of back to bed.
I stuck the Queen Mary kit in Mickey’s room before Martha noticed it. Then I went back and put the cannoli in the icebox, turned off the flame under the tomato sauce, started picking up the shards of glass and the little heap of raw meat and onions. Martha just watched, even when I got out the broom and dustpan, complex tools I am not usually allowed to operate.
I thought I should try to wrap the Queen Mary somehow, if only in newspaper. On Mickey’s desk was the open letter.
Jonathan had gone to fetch the cannoli, I had started the meatballs and the sauce. For a little break, I went down to fetch the mail.
Who knows how long I stood there in the vestibule, looking at the envelope, the block letters:
U.S. SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM
OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY
$500 PENALTY FOR MISUSE
For American boys in those days, and their mothers, no other icon was ever as powerful as that blunt letterhead. The death warrant nestling in the mailbox with the innocent postcards and magazines and bills.
I hadn’t even been worrying about it, really, but of course it was inevitable: SLS had to notify the draft board when a boy flunked out. Complicity with the war machine, Jonathan might have said, but they had to cooperate, or every boy would have lost his deferment. So the paperwork was set in motion. That it even took a couple of months just meant that some clerk had been too lazy to move Mickey’s fate from the inbox to the outbox.
To move Mickey himself, from that inbox where he lay suspended in a pot-smoke haze to the outbox of something happening next. I knew even then, standing in the vestibule, that my terror was mixed with a sort of fatal relief. He wasn’t going to die right there in the apartment, time was beginning for him again. Whatever the future was going to bring him, however short the future would be, he had one now, bestowed on him by some bureaucrat.
Mickey was asleep, in his underwear, on top of the sheets. His face all but buried in the pillow, his long, dirty golden hair flaring like a tangled sunburst. He smelled of tobacco and grass and male funk. I tried to, couldn’t, remember how he had smelled as a baby. His smell now: was it something the world had covered him with, that would wash off if I could take him in my arms and bathe him once again? Or did it come from inside, a way of announcing himself? I am not your unindividuated baby anymore, I am autonomous Mickey.
I sat on the edge of his bed and shook him awake. He rolled over. “Whatsa matter?”
If they had drafted babies, the envelope would have been addressed to me. But their business was with Michael A. Ascher. I handed it over, just the messenger.
He sat up, looked at the envelope, didn’t open it. I wished he would, I had the fleeting fantasy that there might be some kind of surprise in it. We are pleased to inform you that the army has recruited enough boys named Michael and wants you to get on with your life.
Still, he just looked at it, showing nothing. I was the one who started crying. Not for him, but for myself. Everything I’d done, bearing him, feeding him, changing him, bathing him—all just to hand him over to them. My whole life, every dream I’d given up, to find that I was all along just a humble worker on the assembly line that made soldiers.
He reached a hand up to my shoulder: trying to comfort me, but the warm damp fingers suddenly gave me a focus for my anger. I whispered: “You stupid little bastard.” And went on, helplessly, it was all his fault, he’d fucked up, we’d given him everything and he hadn’t even tried, he’d disappointed me and my father who’d had such hopes, it served him right. Winding up, “You won’t be able to call us this time, we can’t come and bring you home. You’re a man now.” You grew up, and you stink like a man, and I can’t save you anymore.
He took it. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t change his expression. Just looked at me and took it, like a man. Until I laid my face down on his skinny, naked chest and just sobbed. Wishing I could take it all back: I wasn’t mad at him, he was just in the way.
But who was I mad at, then? I had, first, the official thoughts Jonathan would have expected me to have. The little Jonathan I carried inside, still carry, pronounced: you are mad at the Government. At Richard Nixon and Melvin Laird and the Herr-Professor of Death Henry Kissinger, who stay up at night plotting to seize your son. But I wasn’t mad at them. They were just cartoons, too distant for anger. Maybe Jonathan took the Government personally, but to me it was just some natural disaster, a storm from which we had inadequately sheltered our baby.
It was me, then, I was mad at myself: this was my own failure. I hadn’t been making a soldier, I’d been making something else, and I’d spoiled it, marred it. They were just coming to collect something broken.
I had stopped crying, working out this puzzle. I was still lying there, feeling how heavy my head must be on my child’s frail chest. But he was motionless, patient. I wanted to sit up and see his face, but the puzzle was still nagging at me. How could it be so hard, just to figure out what I was feeling?
In analysis, Jonathan had reported, the doctor prattled all the time about resistance. This one concept was about all we got out of the couple of grand we had dumped into Jonathan’s little adventure. You are in a hallway with many doors, trapped, all the doors but one are unlocked. You try each in turn, but there is nothing behind them, no way out. You know that behind the locked door is a monster; if you can open it there will pour out of it disorder and destruction. So it is the one you must open, you must break it open.
Break twenty years of marriage, the whole life you’ve built, fling open th
e door and see Jonathan the destroyer, who had devoured his own child, torn apart the only thing I had ever made. I didn’t know how he had done it—back then, of course, I hadn’t read the journals. I told myself: this is absurd, Jonathan loves Mickey, he’s been the best father he could. But I couldn’t shake it. I wanted to tell Mickey, it’s not your fault, I’m sorry I bitched at you, this is all your father’s doing. Of course I couldn’t tell him anything of the kind, couldn’t figure out how to take back the recriminations he had borne so quietly. I never got another chance to take them back.
I sat up. Mickey had opened the letter. “It’s just a notice of reclassification. I’m I-A now.”
Class I-A: eligible for immediate call-up. Each local draft board had a quota to meet. It would call up the I-A boys in the order of their lottery number. If a boy made it to the end of the year without being called, he was free for life. But Mickey’s number was 35, they were bound to get to 35 before 1972 ended.
He shrugged, gave me a mournful little one-sided smile. I thought, my brave little man. You are the only strong one left here.
FIFTEEN
I must have fallen asleep watching the news. Now a talk show host—I don’t recognize him, I’m never up this late—is interviewing, so help me, Edgar Villard. Still alive, drawling some prepared bon mots about the Iraq War and the American Imperium.
I have been waiting up for Philip. I told him, just because he was staying here for the weekend, he didn’t have to keep me company all the time. And—serves me right—he has taken me at my word. It must be two in the morning. What am I angry about? He has a key, there wasn’t any need for me to stay up. He’s fifty years old, why shouldn’t he stay out until two in the morning?
I am angry because I am imagining what has kept him out. Picturing, with unwanted precision, little vignettes like lewd Pompeian frescoes. Why should this make me angry, what is it to me? I guess I am afraid of being abandoned. Here I have, however briefly, another creature in the house, and this very minute he may be with his next love, who will take him from me.
I make myself go to bed. Because I realize how silly I would feel if Philip came in and found me waiting. More exactly: because it is very silly of me to be waiting up for somebody else’s son.
I’m not sure when I got to sleep. This morning after I made the coffee I listened at the door of Philip’s room and didn’t hear snoring. So he has had a miracle cure or he never came home. I could open the door a little and just peek. But Jonathan’s exploits suggest that nothing good comes of bursting into that particular room. Which, I realize, I am calling Philip’s.
It is half past eight and I am nearly through the Times when I hear Philip’s key in the lock. He fumbles long enough that I am able to compose myself and look blandly incurious as he comes in, pipes “Good morning!” and starts the toast for his morning pill.
I can’t resist, finally. “Did you have a nice time?”
He emerges from the kitchen with his toast. “Did I have a naughty time, you mean.”
“I suppose.”
“No, I went to a few bars and struck out, and then I went to the sauna and fell asleep. I’m getting too old for this. And starting to show it, I guess.”
If he is fishing, I don’t take the bait. He goes on: “I was thinking last night—I started coming here sometimes for weekends in ‘71. I was eighteen, back then you could drink at eighteen in New York. And I went to some of the same bars Dr. Ascher writes about.”
“Do you have to keep calling him Dr. Ascher?”
“I can’t help it. Even when I’m reading about him kneeling in a puddle and … I’m sorry. Well, I guess you know what’s in that journal.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, I was a kid. Kind of geeky, big aviator glasses and a Jewish afro. But, hey, eighteen, people in the bars will forgive a lot when you’re eighteen. So I wonder—he was still alive then, I wonder if he ever saw me. Maybe even tried to make me. I would have turned him down flat, I was lousy to old men. As if their having the chutzpah to approach me were some kind of affront: you think in a million years I’d let you … ? Of course if I’d been really confident about my own looks back then I would have been gracious. Smiled, talked a little even with a gargoyle instead of just grimacing and swiveling away. But I would have been lousy to Dr. Ascher, if he had ever encountered me he would have walked away cursing me.”
“Do you think it happened?”
“Now that I think more about it, I kind of doubt I would have been his type. But I’m starting to know how he felt about being old.”
“You know, I don’t remember him ever talking about that.”
“Really? It’s all over the 1964 journal. Can I get you more coffee?”
“I already had too much, waiting …”
He tilts his head, registering the waiting. In the kitchen, he microwaves the last stale brew from this morning’s pot; he comes back in and sits across from me. “The ‘64 journal, it’s all about his … well, I guess just midlife crisis is too crude, I mean he got the book of his life out of it.” He chuckles, “Like Dante got his book out of the midlife crisis. But I think back to the book, JD, after reading the journal, and you can see, the book is all about his own aging. You think he’s talking about finding a way for young people to live, and it’s all about remaking a world so he still matters.”
“One of his colleagues thought it was just about making a world where he could have all the sex he wanted.”
“And I guess you agree?”
“No.” No, I have to be fair to him finally. “He wanted a decent world. A state that served citizens instead of stockholders, he said. A place where ‘productive’ wasn’t the nicest thing you could call somebody.”
“You could be him talking.”
“God knows I heard it plenty. And believed it, believed him. But it didn’t happen. He saw it himself, before he died—the gay liberation stuff. It may have freed you to go out to the saunas till all hours of the night, but it didn’t really free anybody.”
“Do you have any idea what my life would be like if it weren’t for the liberation stuff ? Of course you do, you must remember.” Then quietly, looking down into his cup: “Not to mention it’s my business what I do till all hours of the night.”
“I don’t mean your freedom shouldn’t have happened. Neither did Jonathan, I guess. He just thought it shouldn’t have been the only thing that happened.”
Philip sighs. “What did you want us to do? People keep waiting for gays to start the revolution, or women, or black people. But the only way to start the revolution is for straight white men to understand who’s fucking them. What was it Dr. Ascher said about the graphite-lubed machine? And their whole world depends on their not understanding that they’re being fucked.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I say. If only to stop him from saying fuck over and over again. “It’s just a shame that we never even tried for the world Jonathan wanted.”
“Well, but … I’d be dead, you know?”
“You’d be—?”
“If Dr. Ascher had got the world he wanted there wouldn’t have been these drugs I take, no one was going to brew this stuff in his home chemistry lab. If it wasn’t the big drug companies, it would be big government, something. I can think, in the abstract, I can think it isn’t worth it: helping me live a few years longer isn’t worth what it’s cost for the way everybody lives, better I should be without the drugs than see what’s happened to the world. But just in the abstract; I can’t feel it.”
“Who could possibly feel that way? A saint.”
“I guess maybe you don’t get a new world without saints.” He shrugged. “But I’m not volunteering.”
In the evening, Philip gets back from his day in the SLS library. He is through with the ‘64 journal, he says; now he’s looking at the manuscript of JD. Which, typed on Corrasable Bond, probably shows no false starts or emendations—nothing of any use to a biographer. He is too tactful to press me about when he
can see ‘66 or ‘70. Or ‘72, which I haven’t even finished reading, can’t get back to until Philip leaves for Delaware on Monday.
We have a glass of wine together, and I offer dinner, but he says, “No, it’d probably make me drowsy. I’ll just get a slice or something later.” He means in between hunting for … whatever he hunts for, exactly.
I think maybe we’re far enough along that I can ask: “Are you looking for someone to be with? Or just … someone to be with?”
He laughs at my unwillingness to use the obvious words. “I think you mean: for twenty minutes? Or for twenty years to life?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I … I don’t think I’ll be getting another life sentence.”
“Why? You’re still young.”
“Me? Not in gay years. But it’s not that. After Matt died—did we talk about Matt?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Anyway, I didn’t even try seeing people at first. And then I did, especially after I started getting better. But if I went on a date with somebody, we needed a table for three, so there’d be room for Matt’s ghost. You know how it is.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh.” He raises an eyebrow, as if he expects me to discuss my post-Jonathan dating history. He will wait a long time. “It was like … it’s not that I heard some haunt going, ‘Beware! Do not forsake me!’ It was more like, ‘Beware! This twerp doesn’t get your jokes! Beware! This guy is wearing fuchsia, for God’s sake!’ It was the comparison, you know? Of course, nobody was Matt.
“But then I realized it wasn’t the guys I was seeing. It was that I knew, inside, that I didn’t deserve anybody.”