by Mark Merlis
“So you … what have you been up to?” I said. “You must have finished school.”
“Yeah, years ago. Dennis thought I should go to graduate school or something, but I never figured out the something. So I’ve just been working here and there.”
“Where are you now?”
“G. Schirmer.” He smiled for the first time. “Dennis used to tell people I was in the music industry. But I just stuff sheet music into file cabinets.”
“At least you didn’t get drafted,” I said.
“No, I was lucky. But I think my luck is running out.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know, I stayed on at Dennis’s. But now I’m going to have to move. My name wasn’t on the lease, and of course I don’t count as a relative or anything. So the apartment’s going to go off rent stabilization, and there’s no way I can handle it. Not even with a roommate.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. Everybody wants two months up front. I couldn’t come up with two months’ rent on a cardboard box.”
“Well, there’s always … where were you from again?”
“Cleveland. Actually Chagrin Falls.”
“Chagrin Falls? Sounds like something out of Sinclair Lewis.”
“It’s a suburb. I guess kind of like Scarsdale or something back here. If I went out there I’d probably jump over the fall in no time.”
A stool opened up next to mine, but Geoffrey didn’t take it. I figured he wasn’t planning on a long visit. “I … I could help you out,” I said.
“Huh?” He looked down at his half-finished drink, as if that were what I meant.
“I mean, with a deposit, so you can get a place.” Yes, indeed, when Martha balances the checkbook, she’ll simply overlook a check for a few hundred made out to Mr. Geoffrey With-a-G.
He looked at me speculatively. Thinking: What will this cost me, what will this old man want? It took him a long time to answer. Maybe he really was weighing it. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He managed a smile, but his voice was quite cold and flat.
I thought he’d go then, but he said, “So, are you still writing books?” All those years living with a writer, and he hadn’t learned not to ask that question.
I said--aloud, for the first time, I’ve never even said it to myself: “No, I’ve stopped writing.”
“How come?”
That question seemed backward to me. How come I ever started would be the better question. “It was just time to shut up.”
To my surprise, he took my hand. “Dennis said that. Almost those words.”
“Did he?”
“A little while before he … He said lately he would be writing, and then he’d read what he’d done and it was-- what did he say? It was what you’d write if your hand just kept going by itself and you couldn’t stop it. He needed to stop it.”
I can’t deny it: I was gratified to learn that Dennis, too, had gone dry. No wonder Plato wanted to get rid of all the poets, we writers are a bitter and ugly breed.
I wanted to ask what had really happened to Dennis, was it drugs or … ? But Geoffrey had pulled into himself. He was listening to Dennis. And then he just wandered away, away and out of the bar without saying good-bye.
In the end, I did go to Virgil’s. Found a boy I’d learned before could get at least half hard, despite the heroin, if you were patient. Knelt before him in the alley with the blasé rat looking on. As a penance, as an act of utter self-abasement.
Because I had had, even if for just a moment, the disgraceful fantasy of writing a check and acquiring another son. A replacement for the one I fucked up.
Dear, yes, that is an awful fantasy. Perhaps a little less disgraceful, in my case, because I had it decades after our son died, not while he was still breathing just a few blocks away.
What did I imagine would happen between me and Philip Marks? I am silly, but not so silly as to have supposed that Philip was going to become some kind of son. I know he’s not going to visit me in the nursing home. He’s not even going to fail to visit me in the nursing home, which might be more authentically filial. I am nothing to him but the keeper of Jonathan’s secrets, someone he must get past.
So? What was I to Mickey but something to get past, get around? If I have the temerity to say that what I feel for Philip is at least the shadow of maternal love, maybe I mean that it is just that hopelessly one-sided, unrequited.
At least I feel something, after so long. I had thought I came through all right, but I see now that for years I have been awarding myself a medal for getting through. Now I am almost through, and I only got through.
July 18, 1972
We have a couple days to go. I mean Mickey has a couple days before he reports, I must stop saying we He has shaved his little wisp of a beard and has had his hair lopped off, so he looks like a nice clean-cut youth. I guess the army would have taken care of all this, but he decided it would be prudent not to show up looking like a hippie.
He has taken to watching TV all day long, or rather the sliver of day left when he gets up. Quiz shows, soap operas, this afternoon he was watching a children’s show with a frenetic clown who introduces cartoons so old that the closing credits include the National Recovery Act eagle and the slogan We Do Our Part. I don’t guess Mickey cares what he’s seeing, so long as it isn’t pictures of what’s ahead for him.
I sat down with him on the sofa. We watched the clown, the ads; pretty soon the clown gave way to a show about a boy named Beaver. I found the show pretty interesting, because this Beaver child has a stunning older brother, the classic diffident American boy who seems utterly unaware of his own beauty. Except I suppose the boy on the show was reminded of his beauty every time he opened his pay envelope.
I was conscious that Mickey and I were again sitting on this sofa, watching TV together, as we were the night I touched him the wrong way and he … noticed or didn’t, I don’t guess I’ll ever know. Today I thought maybe we had recovered enough that I might put an arm around his shoulders. He let it remain there but did not take his eyes off the television. An ad for a carpet cleaner came on. I had been waiting for some opportunity to speak, and this looked like all I would get. “You know … um … I’ve had one or two students who were drafted and didn’t go.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, they just refused induction.”
“Right.” He shrugged off my arm. “And then they went to jail and got fucked.”
That rejoinder sat between us for a minute, until I said, feebly: “I don’t know if they got fucked.” Probably they got fucked. This seemed to me a lot better than dying. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to straight boys. Like my son.
Mickey got up, turned the volume lower on the TV, sat back down with me.
Took my hand.
“Pop, it’s too late to change it. I’m not going to prison, I’m not going to get sick, in two days I’m getting on a bus, I’ll be gone. I’m already gone, practically.”
“I know that.”
“So we know what I’m going to do. What are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“About you and Mom. Are you going to stay?”
This fiercely sensible question had never crossed my mind. If I’ve been here for Mickey, why would I stay? Or is that really why I’ve been here?
I said, “We’re used to each other, I don’t guess I’ll go anywhere. And it’s going to be hard for your mother for a while.”
“Hard? My leaving?” He snorted. “She can’t wait.”
“That’s not true,” I said. Wondering if it was true. “She doesn’t always show what she feels.”
“Maybe you just don’t see it.”
Maybe not. It is a little chilling to think that I might have harbored in this place, for twenty years, a creature who has seen everything. Like a recording angel.
“She got tired of me,” Mickey said. “Like a job she was sick of doing.”
I thought
of saying I never got tired of him, but that seemed pushing. I was lucky to still be holding his hand. “Maybe she’s tired of me, too,” I said.
“Maybe. Maybe everybody should just leave her alone now. So she can figure out what to do.” He squeezed my hand tighter. “Maybe we should just let her have a life now.”
This last said with the tightly reined treble of a young man who is refusing to cry. I knew why, and I was jealous. He missed Martha, he longed for Martha. Here I’d thought I was the one who’d fucked everything up. But he was telling me that the great love of his life had turned away from him.
And that this was why he didn’t care where the president sent him.
He let go of my hand, and there was nobody holding him.
I feel as though Jonathan wickedly set a trap for me, years ago, and I have blithely stepped into it. All of the journals a map leading me to this, the last door I must open, the end of resistance. I think it is all wrong, I never turned away from Mickey, how could I have mourned him my whole life if I had turned away, if I’d tired of him? But if Mickey felt I did, if Jonathan isn’t lying—
Before Jonathan became a self-appointed sage, he was a mildly esteemed novelist. I have been reading a novel all these months, with characters who happen to share the names of the unhappy Ascher family. And now I can scarcely remember what the real family was like. This must have been what I feared, isn’t it, all those years when I let these papers sit unopened? That they would displace my memories, the way Jonathan crowded out everything else in our household.
I know that I never stopped loving Mickey. He disappointed me, he infuriated me, but I never stopped loving him. Mickey must have known that, too. Jonathan just made this all up, one last effort to steal Mickey from me forever.
And he has won. I’ll never be sure, not ever again, that my grief is distinguishable from guilt. My Mickey. Perhaps you really did say, “Maybe we should just let her have a life now.” But Jonathan ignored you. He didn’t let me go even when he was dead.
September 12, 1972
Mickey is almost done basic training. They’re going to have a ceremony at Fort Dix, like some grisly parody of the commencement Mickey isn’t going to get. I won’t go. Martha has been nagging about this for days, begging, wheedling, finally today saying what is too obvious to say: “This might be the last time you see him alive.”
I want to answer, like Mickey, “No shit.” Or, spitefully, “At least I saw him, you never did.” But the real answer, dear God, is: when was that ever not true? Any time he stepped out the door, if you thought about it, it might be the last time. But you don’t think about that. They’re having this filthy ceremony to make everybody think that, a whole room full of people looking at their kids and thinking that. And the kids looking back, as if from open coffins, as their families come to say farewell.
Mickey let go of my hand, a couple days before he left. I cannot take it up again. He will go on without me. Here, maybe, is what I’m really afraid of: that seeing him now would be the first time I see him alive, maybe this is the life he was meant for, and not the life I thought I was giving him. Maybe I’m just scared to watch him move on without me.
As I went on without Pop, free to go on finally but also without, as I had always been without. I had always been without his love-- I got praise or heckling, depending on his mood, but never love. And then at last he wasn’t around anymore. I didn’t see his shadow everywhere, reading in it everywhere that maybe I was the one who had withheld his love.
His last night, I was impatient--I can’t even remember what for, some assignation, or maybe I just wanted a drink. Just impatient to get out, as who doesn’t want to get out of a hospital room? I said, “See you in the morning,” took his hand, held it a moment. His eyes were closed, I figured he’d fallen asleep. I was going to let go and found he was holding on tight. I let him, for another second or two, then I felt awkward, we weren’t hand-holding guys. I pulled away. I didn’t see him in the morning.
For years I have reproached myself, figured: he knew this was it, he was trying to say good-bye. I’m not even sure that’s possible, do people really know? “Johnny won’t be back till eight and I’m clocking out at four in the morning.” I’m not even sure he was holding onto me personally, maybe just holding. But after all these rationalizations, I know it was true, he was holding me good-bye and I pulled away.
So I tell myself I am sparing Mickey this, that I am saving him from having to pull away. I tell myself.
Of course I agreed with Jonathan that this seemed like a bitter joke, but it was our last chance to see him before they shipped him off to Arkansas for some graduate education in mayhem. Jonathan wouldn’t go. I nagged, I begged, I told him it might be the last time he’d see Mickey alive. He didn’t even answer. Now I have seen his answers. But I think I already understood: if it really was the last time, if maybe Mickey wasn’t coming home, he wanted to remember our Mickey, not Mickey-the-soldier. I would as soon my own last memory weren’t of Private Mickey. But at the time it seemed inhuman not to want to see him, touch him.
I took a bus from the Port Authority terminal. I had to go the night before, because the ceremony was early and the bus—two buses, I think, with a long wait for a transfer somewhere deep in New Jersey—took hours. Riding with me were, I guessed, a few other parents and a lot of desolate boys returning from leave. I stayed in a little cabin at a place called something like Kozy Kottages. There was no TV, I’d forgotten to pack anything to read, and I seriously thought about hiking down the highway to one of the roadhouses that seemed to be the pillars of the local economy. Yes, indeed, have a few drinks, get picked up by a soldier. Surely Jonathan wasn’t just sitting at home. And I already had the Kozy Kottage. It is only thirty years later, and after having read a little too much of Jonathan, that I see this fancy as skirting the incestuous.
In the morning I sat with the other parents on folding steel chairs. I tried to chat with my neighbors. “New York City,” they’d say. “My, that’s a long way to come.” We all ran out of small talk pretty quickly; there was just a long funereal silence until our sons filed in.
Some of the parents looked as pleased and proud as if they were sitting on folding chairs in Harvard Yard. Not the fathers—even the ones with steel-colored crew cuts were reticent and withdrawn—just a few of the mothers, murmuring, “Oh, look at our boy.” I almost wanted to scream at them, “Do you know what they’re going to do to your boy?” Only some time later did I understand that they knew exactly, yes, thank you. And, as there was nothing further they could do to shelter their sons, they could only look at them. At the things into which the army had sculpted them.
I almost didn’t recognize Mickey. Not just because his head was shaved, nor because he must have gained fifteen hard pounds. It was his face: taut, wary, the subtle mouth that had been the only semaphore of his feelings drawn into a thin illegible line. I wondered if he could see me from where he stood, or if he was even looking for me.
I don’t remember much of the ceremony. The Pledge, I guess, maybe some patriotic song, a speech about the war or valor or something. A roll call beginning, as Jonathan surmised, with Ascher.
Afterward, each family gathered around its boy, separate little clusters scattered on the boot-worn marching ground. I found Mickey, even as I hugged him I could feel him looking around for his father. I had been trying to think of what I might say when he asked why Jonathan hadn’t come. But he didn’t ask.
I was so conscious of the gravity of our little time together that I couldn’t think of what to say. I managed, finally, some remark about how big he had gotten. He smirked at me.
It was when I saw that smirk, if ever, that my love flickered for an instant before rekindling. Mickey wore a face I knew: I’d seen it on some of the Dartmouth or Williams boys who showed up at mixers at Smith, and earlier on some of the boys in Roland Park. Arrogant, coarse, stupid. Had the army made this boy or merely uncovered him?
He talked about
what happened next. “I got a few more weeks of training stateside, and then a few weeks in country before my final posting. By then—you know, they say it may be almost over, it could be over before I even get there.” His tone was gruff and condescending, the he-man withholding from the frail female what she couldn’t handle. “And if not,” he said, putting on a grim face like a boy playing savage. “I’m ready to take care of myself.”
They had killed him. My complicated, inscrutable Mickey: they had sandblasted away everything Mickey about him, leaving this smirking, brutal, standard-issue grunt. Who must always have been inside there. Or maybe, I decided—had to believe—this was just some armor he had put on, Mickey was somewhere under there.
I held him, tight as I ever had, as if I could squeeze my way through to the Mickey inside. After a minute he pulled away from my embrace, his face stern. I thought at the time because he was embarrassed to hug me too long in front of his buddies. But now I think—Jonathan has made me think, but maybe I knew it all along—he was saying: too late to hold me now.
September 15, 1972
Martha headed off to see Mickey yesterday. Last night I went into his room and lay on his bed, on top of the New York Yankees bedspread. I had not lain there before. We had sat together on that bed, those months when we smoked pot. I had tucked him into it, years before that, or sometimes I sat on the edge and read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. For a while he demanded that book night after night, I could probably recite it today. More easily than my own steam shovel book.
Last night I lay down and felt the room around me as he must have felt it. The window to my left, the desk straight ahead, with the Donald Duck clock on it--stopped, with no one winding it. To my right the bookshelves. With my books mostly, H to R. My presence physically crowding him out, just a shelf or two saved for Mickey’s own books and albums and the unfinished Queen Mary.
Perhaps I was only imagining that I could smell him on the sheets, the pillowcase. Martha is an efficient woman: she probably washed them as soon as he left for Fort Dix. So he’d have clean linen whenever he came home on leave. But if he hadn’t left behind even a trace of his funk, no sweat, no jism, he had left his shape there in the mattress. I fitted my body into the hollow left by Mickey’s.