by Mark Merlis
I brought all this up. I am dreading whatever kind of self-absorbed lament is coming, I am already composing in my mind some all-purpose comforting remarks. But I was the one who brought it up.
“I’ve never told anybody this,” he says. The way people say it when they are beginning a well-rehearsed confession. “Matt and I, you know, got diagnosed around the same time. I wondered sometimes if I was to blame. Well, not to blame, or even responsible: those words suggest agency. Possibly I was the … what do they call it? The vector. Probably: I’d been a pretty bad boy—not as bad as I wanted to be, but pretty frisky. While Matt had only been with a handful of guys since he’d left his wife. Just statistically I was the more likely culprit, suspect …”
“So that’s what makes you feel undeserving?”
“No. I just can’t find neutral words, words as innocent as I am. No, it was … Look, we were both positive, both with a lousy prognosis, and I had—for all I know both of us did—the strangest mix of desires. I wanted to go first, because I didn’t want to be the one who was left alone with strangers taking care of me. I wanted him to go first, because I wanted to take care of him. I wanted him to go first because I wanted to live.
“And finally, when he got really sick and it was clear that he probably was going first: I wanted him to go. I nursed him, I shared the good days with him, I cleaned up after him, and I wanted him to hurry up and fucking go. So I—I know, I may be kind to animals and I give money to panhandlers and charities and I cuddle sweetly with perfect strangers for a few hours, but I know I am … vile. Deep inside there is no love in me.”
“Because you had a wish? How can we blame ourselves for what we wish, what could be less voluntary than a wish?”
“What could be more voluntary?” he says. “What does voluntary even mean, other than that you’re obeying your own wishes?”
“But you didn’t obey.”
He doesn’t answer this. “I better get changed,” he says.
He emerges from his room—Mickey’s room—wearing one of his stretchy T-shirts and a fleece jacket with a little hood, such as I see on sixteen-year-olds. He looks at himself in the mirror, runs a hand through his hair to muss it just a little, a precise little. “Don’t wait up,” he says.
Monday morning. Philip is dressed in corduroy and tweed, playing a college professor as last night he played a high school letterman. “I need to get back for a two o’clock class,” he says. “I’ll just get coffee or something at the station.”
“All right. When do you think you’ll be back here?”
“I’m not sure. Midterms are coming up.” He adds, face neutral, “Maybe when there’s something more to read.”
I pretend not to get this; he departs.
A wave of desolation passes over me as I close the door. Just for an instant, I am over it that quickly.
April 11, 1972
I called my brother, Bernie.
“Johnny. Long time. What’s up?” Bernie’s voice was tight with alarm. He must have figured, if I was calling after all these years, somebody had died.
I explained about Mickey. “Jeez,” Bernie said. “That poor sweet kid. What’s he going to do?”
“That’s why I’m calling my brother the doctor.”
“Huh?”
“I thought …”
“Oh. You mean some kind of medical thing.” He was silent for a minute. “I don’t know, I’m not sure that kind of thing is right.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Look, I’m not even sure it does much good. I got colleagues, tried all kinds of stuff, and off their sons have gone.”
“There has to be something.”
“Hell, why doesn’t he just go in and tell them he’s a faggot?” He didn’t add: like his father.
We have never come close to talking about this. But it occurs to me that every conversation we’ve had in the last-maybe forty years, we’ve been distant that long--every terse, strained colloquy has been about not discussing my little peculiarity. Forty years ago, maybe, somebody told him something, or he just followed my eyes some time and made out what I was gazing at. If either of us had ever spoken, if one of us spoke now, would the ice be broken or would the freeze be forever?
Bernie said, “I’m sorry.” But he didn’t specify what he was sorry about.
“What are you going to do about Alan?” I said.
“He’s going to Penn Med next year. They’ll let him finish, and then, you know, he’ll go in the service as a doctor. He’ll survive.”
I didn’t answer, and he heard what he had said. My son will survive, my perfect Alan, we didn’t fuck up like you did. I was jealous, but also glad for Alan: he, too, was a sweet kid, the last I’d seen him.
“Maybe there’s something,” Bernie said. “I’ll think about it.”
“Please. But listen, I don’t want to tell Martha just now. Get her hopes up.”
“Okay.”
“We should all see each other some time. I know Mickey would love to see Alan.”
“Johnny, um …” No one else on earth calls me Johnny, not since Pop died. “No, I don’t think we’re going to see each other. I’ll see what we can do for Mickey.”
I suppose our estrangement goes back even more than forty years, probably to when we were kids and Pop used me as a stick to beat Bernie with. Why can’t you get As like Johnny? Why can’t you learn a few fershlugginer lines of Hebrew like Johnny so we can get the damned bar mitzvah over with and you won’t shame me in front of the family? He lived to be Pop’s pride, a medical doctor, a specialist mind you, studies the brain. While Johnny writes books nobody reads and has to teach school. A schoolteacher, Pop said, with holes in his shoes. You would think Bernie’s ultimate triumph would have softened him a little, but I guess it was too late.
And now, triumphantly, his Alan will be a medical doctor, a specialist no doubt, and my boy may go to die. My boy who refused everything.
I am proud of my boy, I would rather have my Mickey than a dozen little neurologists. How I hate to God that I have to beg Bernie to save him.
I guess the next time Bernie saw his brother was in the hospital, after Jonathan’s second stroke. Jonathan, of course, did not see Bernie, or hear him.
Bernie came out of the room, sat with me in the waiting area. He took my hand and said, “This is awful, he’s lying there helpless and I’m still mad at him.”
I didn’t know how to answer this, just nodded. He looked so much like Jonathan, he might as well have been saying he was mad at himself.
He chuckled. “I went to a shrink a couple years ago and we talked about it. I’ve always thought they were quacks, but I picked the least loony guy in the department, and we talked about it. How I couldn’t get past this irrational anger at my big brother. I told a little bit about our lives. And you know what the guy said?”
“What?”
“He said: ‘Your brother is a shit. If he were my brother I wouldn’t talk to him either.’” It occurs to me now that this was rather an odd story to tell a woman who was waiting for her husband to die, but at the time I just nodded. He went on: “If he could hear me, I’d tell him off. Now I’ll never get to tell him off.”
Bernie stayed for the—wake, I guess; there wasn’t any service, just a cocktail party. The next summer he invited me to Truro, but I didn’t go. It was hard enough being in the apartment without Mickey, I couldn’t go to the summer place where Mickey had happily capsized the Sunfish. We spoke a few more times over the years. Now he’s almost ninety, I guess, having lived—like me—thirty years past Jonathan. We don’t speak anymore.
April 15, 1972
Already the memory of last night is freezing into a snapshot instead of a sequence of events. Sneakers, I just see the sneakers. Partly because I was high, of course, and accordingly tunnel-visioned. But partly because I didn’t understand anything was happening at all until we were halfway through it.
I had given Mickey the money for the grass. He had
gone and fetched it from wherever he gets it, I don’t ask. He and I were going to share a little before he went off to see friends. He rolled the joint, because I still don’t do that right, and I put a record on the turntable. The Bach cello suites, which I thought would be nice to hear stoned. Of course he would rather have listened to something else, one of those groups whose albums are engineered to track the course of a high. But I was paying for the party.
We sat side by side, a few inches apart, on the edge of Mickey’s bed. We passed the joint as usual, but it seemed to me that Mickey wasn’t getting his share, just a quick puff before returning the joint to me. In any event, I got very high indeed, to the point of being fascinated by the way the spokes of light danced on the record as it spun around.
I’d had a long day yesterday: Ignaz Gruenthal’s funeral in the morning, an inconclusive tryst with punctual Louis right after lunch, a whispered fight with Martha about money--which we have enough of, we fight about it because we can’t figure out how to fight about Mickey. On top of that, I felt pretty sure I wasn’t ever going to hear back from Bernie, if he had an answer to our problem he would have called by now.
A long day, I was tired, ready to just give myself up to the high. I started to half drowse, hearing the wordless arietta of the cello as if I were singing it myself. Absentmindedly I put my arm around Mickey’s shoulder. Absentmindedly I left it there, I don’t know how long, until-- startled by my own transgression--I withdrew it. Almost ready to say sorry. Except that, once again, even to say sorry would have been to say that something had happened.
So, for I don’t know how long, I sat with my hands cupping my knees, like a statue of a pharaoh. The record ended, we listened to the faint tidal sound of the needle tracking the innermost groove. Mickey stood up, went to the turntable--I thought to change the record. Instead he flipped it over. “Play something you like,” I said.
“This is okay.”
As he bent over to lower the needle to the record, so carefully, I regarded his butt: wide for such a skinny guy, almost feminine. The denim at the base of the cheeks faded to near-white, so worn it was nearly diaphanous.
Mickey turned. He stepped toward me, frowned--as if he had meant to do something but couldn’t remember what. He shut his eyes a second, opened them, took another step toward me. Swallowed. And slowly--maybe it was the pot, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody move so slowly--unbuttoned his fly. No underwear on, his soft dick hanging out. He swallowed again and said, “Why don’t you suck it?”
I don’t think I said anything, just looked at him. Not his dick or his face, I couldn’t look at either of those. At his belt buckle, the flat square kind, which I noticed-- still high enough to notice--was tarnished with secret signs.
“You’re a cocksucker, why don’t you suck my cock?” When I write that, it looks like a snarl. But he spoke softly, his tone was matter-of-fact, almost neutral: why don’t you? As if it were practically a tautology. You’re a screwdriver, here’s a screw, why not get busy?
Of course a hundred questions ran through my mind. How long has he known? How long has he been carrying this epithet around--like a slingshot in his back pocket? How could he reduce everything I am and have been for him to that word? I am pretty sure that the only important question, the really vital one, didn’t occur to me at all last night. Why is he doing this, why now?
I didn’t get to ask any of my questions. Because already he had a hand around the back of my head and was gently pulling me toward him. “Here it is, it’s what you’ve always wanted.” I remember, through everything else I was feeling, gratitude: that after so long he was touching me.
I said, “No.” Feebly. Meaning, no, that isn’t precisely what I’ve always wanted. I couldn’t say--even if I hadn’t been stoned and tongue-tied I couldn’t have said what I’d wanted from him. But this corrugated little tuber of flesh, that looked a century older than the rest of him, that wasn’t quite it.
“My whole life, all you wanted.”
Something I’ve wanted, surely, not quite his whole life and certainly not, not exactly, to find myself, woozy and on my knees, gazing at his limp dick. But something I’ve wanted for years. And for years he must have felt my wanting.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
I looked down for a second. Trying to decide, that’s what I tell myself this morning, but I think I had already decided. It wasn’t what I wanted, it was all I was going to get. Except--before going ahead and doing what was left for me to do--I just happened to glance down.
At his feet, at his dirty sneakers, one lace half undone. I remembered tying his shoes when he was little, how he used to stand--patient and trusting--as his Pop tied his scuffed shoes. I started to cry, I buried my face in the denim of his thigh and sobbed. I had destroyed everything, must have done it years ago.
When I looked up his face was unbearably sorrowful and resigned. Hooded eyes and half-opened mouth, still Mickey but somehow too beautiful even to look at. I hid my face again, held onto his legs, and thought: I will hold him now as long as he’ll let me, he’s never going to let me again.
His hand gripped my shoulder, for a long minute. He buttoned his fly. I tied his shoe. And, as when he was a toddler, he slipped away as soon as I was done.
I didn’t even tell Ms. Busch I was going so she could put the binder away, just fled my cubicle and headed for the park. As I sit here, I try to watch the people going by. Part of me registers that it is a beautiful Indian summer day; the park is crowded with couples, dogs, the usual guitarist or two. All I can see is my husband kneeling before my son.
All I can hear is Mickey whispering, “It’s okay.” With those mysterious words shutting me out entirely. Past my disgust and anger, I feel even more that I was left out. I was probably in my bedroom, reading, that very night. Perhaps miffed that they were smoking pot together again, sharing something without me. And behind that locked door they were playing out a drama that was only between them, for them.
“It’s okay.” The great scene is over. Jonathan comes to bed, smelling of pot. Martha puts away her mystery. Mickey slips out to smoke the rest of the pot with his friends. Martha, who has no idea anything has happened, drifts off to sleep.
And sleeps through the rest of her life. I slept through everything.
April 16, 1972
Of course we haven’t smoked pot since that night, until today we didn’t exchange any words more weighty than “pass the mustard.” This afternoon on impulse I knocked on Mickey’s door and said, “Hey, Mickey, I’m going for fish, you want to come?”
There was a long silence; I felt like a fool, gave up, started for the front door. “Yeah, sure,” he called. “Let me go to the john first.”
He came out wearing just his jeans. On his thin chest a little broth of goldish hair. I had never seen this, it’s been so long since he’s even let me see him without a shirt. He hid from me while he turned into a man.
When I glanced into his room I saw that the desk lamp was on. And under it, half-finished, the Queen Mary. Assembled with his customary care. If only there were some career path that would allow him to spend his life putting together plastic models. This seems no sillier than the career path we launched him on, before he--what do the space people say? Aborted the mission.
We walked toward Second Avenue, the afternoon sun on our backs. His shadow is longer than mine now. If I had thought that getting him out of the apartment would unleash some torrent of speech, I was mistaken. But for the moment I was content just to look at our companionable shadows, side by side as they have not been for years.
We had gotten the lox and were halfway home. I was trying to figure out how to ask him to forgive me when he cleared his throat and said, “I went … at Warwick I went to this English class once.”
I blurted, “You went to an English class!”
He ignored me. “And after class the professor asked me if I was Jonathan Ascher’s son. So I said yeah, and he said he’d always liked
your poetry. I didn’t think you wrote poetry.”
“No one else thinks so, either.”
“So I went to the library, and there it was. Poems.”
There it was. I thought: I wish that professor were here now, so I could throttle him. But there it was, Mickey had to stumble on it sooner or later.
He went on. “There was this one poem about a kid. The one where you call me George?”
“That wasn’t about you, you weren’t the kid in that poem.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, dismissively. I decided it was better to leave it at that, rather than explain who George was. Besides, if Mickey saw himself, maybe he was right. I’m not sure I’ve written a word, these last twenty years, that wasn’t about Mickey.
“Anyway, I read that one poem, and I realized somehow I always knew that’s what you wanted. I always knew it.”
“And it--I guess it bothered you?”
“Bothered me.” He snorted, I suppose at the comical inadequacy of the word. Then he went on--slowly, as if I were uncommonly stupid. “I mean, we were buddies, you mattered more to me than practically anybody. And one day I realized you were looking at me, looking, always looking. Until sometimes it got so all I wanted to do was get out of the house so you wouldn’t look at me. I hated it. I hated thinking that was the only thing you cared about.”
“You know it wasn’t. I hated it, too. I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t help it.”
He looked at me, intently, for a while before saying, “You can’t help what you wish for.”
This was offered, I guess, as a kind of absolution, and I was grateful. But I’m not at all sure it’s true. I don’t think Mickey is sure, either.
“Anyway,” he said. “I thought we had to do something finally.” He bit his lip. “You haven’t touched me in so long, Mom doesn’t even look at me anymore, she’s so mad all the time. I’m just all by myself, facing all this shit by myself. So I just thought, fuck, let him do it and it’ll be over with and we can …”