I sat up. “It is.” One of the straps of her nightgown had fallen down to show her bare shoulder, and she moved it up. In college, her hair had been bobbed and shellacked into place. Now it was loose and long as was the fashion. “I like your hair this way.” I moved a strand aside as if that were necessary to see her better. “I’m sorry I missed the wedding.” She was not sure what to do with the blanket now that I was sitting up. I took it from her and held it in my lap since the sight of her in a nightgown was doing things to my body that were better kept to myself.
“It was a wedding,” she said.
She sat down on the couch behind me. I could have kissed her bare legs, her clean feet.
“What time is it?”
“Probably about three. The baby used to always wake up hungry at three, so I got used to it. He sleeps through the night now, but I haven’t been able to readjust.” She shrugged. “I guess this is how it will be from now on.”
It is a weakness of mine that I respond to loneliness in a physical way. It gets me in trouble a lot, and it is one of the reasons I don’t have tenure. I touched your mother’s leg. I think she shivered. She shivered, but then she had just told me the house was cold. I left my hand on her leg.
“I wish you didn’t have to go to war,” she said.
“I’m not too keen on it myself.” I moved my hand up her leg, and I felt something change in her, something invited me farther in.
“Why don’t you want me to go?” I asked.
“I don’t want anyone to go.” She touched my hair. “It will change you.”
“Everything changes you.”
“Jack, Jackeroo,” she said. “Why were you drawing pictures of me?”
If I were honest, I would have told her that once the image starts to form on the paper it isn’t her anymore. It’s partly me and partly a dream and partly a story, but it isn’t ever the physically and morally flawed person who breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide, because that person, whoever she is, even the woman whose ever-perfect form was the basis for the Venus de Milo, is a mix of the divine and the disgusting. She sings, and she shits. The image, the art, has to be more than that. It has to be beautiful in a way you believe human beings can be beautiful but in a way they never are. It isn’t real, those pictures we draw, not the yellow and green scribbles you drew that I pinned to my bulletin board for inspiration, not the butterflies, not the landscapes and the horses you drew and sent to me, Uncle Jack, the artist, until one day, around fifteen, you realized you weren’t any good at it. You weren’t bad—everyone recognized your butterfly as a butterfly, your golden sun as a sun, but not more than that, and it is the more than that that makes an artist. That makes someone think, when you have drawn a picture of her—unless you do some Lucian Freud version of their face—that it means you love her. Picasso chopped his lovers’ images up like the worst serial killer, but when he reassembled them, he put in the more than that, and they spread their legs and sacrificed their youth for him knowing it would never last.
“I wanted to give you a wedding present,” I said. I sat next to her on the couch, and she leaned her head against me. Then we kissed, a real kiss, parted mouth, tongue, and without thinking, automatically as if she were any girl, I felt for her breast with one hand and pushed her nightgown up her thigh with the other. Neither of us planned it, and as soon as we realized what we were doing, we stopped. She stopped first and pushed my hand away, and with that movement, she came into focus and was Annette again, my best friend’s wife, not just the body of a young woman. She removed my hands from her body. And I remember this distinctly: she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth the way you did once, around age five, and truth be told, it stung as much when you did it as when she did.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She nodded, mumbled something, went back to her room. In the dim light, I could see the outlines of her body, ghostly, almost translucent, carried away from me. I found the picture I had been drawing uncrumpled, pressed flat, and sitting on the kitchen table. I went back outside for a minute and stood in the empty street under the crescent moon and burned it so your father would never find it.
The next day I went to the draft office on Peachtree Street and registered for basic training.
War, Elizabeth. What can I tell you of the filth of war, the heat, the sweat, the exhaustion, the rot, the corpses, the lost souls, the screaming babies, the inside out, the upside down? What can I tell the girls swarming around, carrying yellow and white flowers and smiling for the picture, girls who seem to me at this moment made not of flesh but of some kind of soft marble? If I could sink a hot knife into them, their thighs would be white and smooth and cold all the way through. No blood would spurt, no muscle spasm. People who have been to war are different from everyone else. Yes, we know more about life and humanity, the boundaries of goodness and evil, but it’s like the bite of the proverbial apple. Whatever is left of Eden in your heart is lost when you obtain that knowledge.
I can’t be sorry for kissing your mother because she wrote me letters after that, and aside from a rare note from your father, they were the only letters I received. She loved your father. I don’t think it is a lack of fidelity to want your soul to be known by another. These days everyone smears the soul across the digital universe—the things your generation tells one another on the internet—but if the mother bird drops the worm into the mouth of the wrong baby, she feels no joy. You have to know the recipient, and your mother thought she knew me. She didn’t. She doesn’t. Those letters were sent some thirty years ago, so there are some truths I knew once about her, but I don’t know if they matter at all to the well-preserved woman who is directing today’s greatest show on earth, an American girl’s wedding.
The first news was that she had given birth to a baby girl. I read that letter on leave in Saigon while a whore massaged my feet. She said she had been certain it would be a boy, and she remembered Daisy’s line in The Great Gatsby where she hoped that her daughter would be a fool, and she thought that if we were going to send our men off to kill one another it seemed obvious to her that the men were the foolish ones and it would be better if the boys they sent to die were also fools. War was nothing more than a wrestling match with blood, and she wondered if we couldn’t just resolve our differences in the boxing ring or on the tennis court. Russia and the U.S. squared off everywhere, at the Olympics, in the United Nations. Vietnam was their new wrestling arena. She implored me to be safe, but then in the same sentence, she wrote, “I imagine in war most often there are no choices. On those few occasions where there are choices, please choose your own life, for those who love you if not for yourself.” She never said she loved me, and I was fairly certain that she didn’t. I wrote my letters to your father or both of them. I never wrote to her directly. I told myself that this was honorable. I told myself I did not want to share this war with her. I wanted her to remain innocent. In truth, Elizabeth, in love, as in war, I have always been passive, and your mother wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth losing your father’s friendship, hurting him, hurting her. Don’t take this personally. Although there have been women I have loved, women I have wanted to grow old with, there has never been a woman I would fight for. Maybe I came to love too late. Like war, love’s battles are best and most fiercely fought among boys.
They made me a medic. I exaggerated my hospital experience to get that job because I thought it would be safer. It was not. If anything, it was more dangerous because bandages, morphine, and tourniquets took up space in my pack where ammunition or food could have been. The medic gets put in the spotlight. While everyone fires his gun—and no one has the time to see who is advancing and who is huddling behind a tree, who is spraying bullets blindly and who is squeezing them off at targets—they all notice the man down, the man bleeding and screaming for help and waiting for the medic to come and pull him to safety and either save him or finish him off. Did you know that when a man’s leg is blown off, you have less th
an five seconds before the femoral artery retracts into the muscle? You have to grab that artery, slippery and spewing blood like a garden hose, and tie it off, or he will bleed to death; the blood will swell his thigh as if it were a water balloon; he will die before it bursts. We tried not to leave him there, but depending on the day and our weariness and the number of bullets and grenades and our fear, we made different choices. I plunged the morphine in as much to silence his screams as relieve him, and sometimes we shouldered him up until we could call for a helicopter; sometimes we tipped him into a shallow grave; sometimes we walked away and left him there for the rats. Sometimes I chose. There were men I favored and some I didn’t like. I would like to say it was logical, that I could judge the men who were kinder or had more to give the world, but it wasn’t. I could have tried harder for a father of twin boys, and perhaps that guy from Pensacola wasn’t worth the risk. When blood dries on your hands, it cracks the same way paint does. I am sure blood was the first medium used to make the first image on a cave or in the sand, the blood of a man or the blood of a beast.
Your parents and your brother and sister moved to this house where we are standing now, and they could not afford new furniture, so your grandfather had a living-room set delivered, and your mother hated it. Your sister did not sleep well, and your mother wrote letters to me one-handed, holding her with the other. A baby’s cry is weak, she said, compared to the scream of a man, but she was certain she would hear her child cry for her even if she was on the other side of the world and it made her think of the mothers of all the other soldiers. She didn’t know me well enough to know my mother was long dead. Your mother liked the world at 3 a.m., the quiet and the absence of human activity and striving. The branches of a pear tree she planted in the courtyard—that pear tree right there—rubbed up against one another. The night sounds of insects and owls went unappreciated. The world did not exist for human beings; it just was. If we disappeared, the owls and fireflies wouldn’t care. She doubted they would even notice. She wondered what animals slunk through the jungles of Vietnam and how they made sense of the explosions. She told me to be careful. Full of care. I dissected that word and decided it was the one thing someone in war should not be, but if you were lucky enough to return, it would be a noble aspiration. A really good idea, like western civilization.
Those few letters survive, Elizabeth. They have moved with me from apartment to house, from California to Nebraska to Minnesota, and right now they are in a box in the basement of an old Victorian in Massachusetts that I share with three people because, unlike your father, I have never owned a house, and the poor salary they give me as an adjunct professor at the semiprestigious school where I teach does not give me the luxury of both meeting my deductible and living alone. Truth is, I don’t mind it. I have never been good at intimacy, but I rather like the presence of other human beings as long as they are not trying to kill me.
In one letter, your mother said, “I am sure you have seen a man die by now. Death and birth, the only things shared by every human being on the planet, yet only women really know birth.” I think your father was busy setting up his law practice, providing for his growing family, and she was alone with the babies and the maid and no one to talk to. She never got to be a teacher, so she taught me, her anonymous student, who studied her letters more assiduously than I had studied anything in college. If you want to make a scholar, send him to the jungle and put a loud stopwatch in his ear counting down the seconds of his life. Still, I never acknowledged her thoughts, and I don’t think she cared. A true artist creates without a need for recognition. Your mother was a real Emily Dickinson, writing letters while she rocked a cradle, with a baby at her breast, waiting for the dinner to be done, in between setting the table and changing a diaper. She sent them off to me in Vietnam, but I was pretty sure she could as easily have put them in a bottle and sent them bobbing over the Atlantic. She wanted to be known by someone, anyone. We never talked about it when I got back. It helped that we didn’t see each other for several years.
I got through the war with nothing more than a few scars. At the beginning of it all, I wrote down the names of the boys I watched die, but that list mysteriously disappeared, and I could not re-create it, so I gave up. I think I would be a better person if I could give you an exact number—more than fifty but less than five hundred—but one of the things about war is that you learn how little your life—or anyone’s life—matters. Even Saul Logan, whom I grew to love, who started with me on day one and lasted 123 days by my side, whose loss briefly shattered me until I discovered that I could forget about him with opium in my veins, even Saul, whose black eyes and skinny body I swore I would commit to memory—and shouldn’t an artist above all else remember the shape and form, the angles and the shadows, of a body?—I have lost. Saul was a poet interrupted. The day he got his draft letter, Saul started to memorize the poems of his fellow black Irishman William Yeats. I had never heard of William Butler Yeats. English 101 skipped from Shakespeare to Dickens to Hemingway, a greatest hits of literature, even though everyone knows the songs on the B sides of albums are more real and raw. Saul’s father had fought in a war, as had his grandfather and his great-grandfather and almost certainly the one before him. He said in his family you weren’t grown-up until you’d watched someone die. You couldn’t be a father until you made room in the world for your child. He would say something beautiful like that, and then follow with “Logan sperm don’t start swimming ’til the life of another be dimming.” He didn’t have an Irish brogue, though he could put one on. It sounded real to me, but what did a boy from North Carolina know? He was four or five generations removed from the Emerald Isle, and his natural accent was pure Brooklyn, the sound of the English language after it has churned through the mouths of a thousand immigrants. Like all of them, he had a girl back home he thought he loved, but he actually looked at a picture of his little brother more than he looked at hers, and he wanted the war over before his brother, Pete, aged sixteen, would be called to take his place.
“I dreamed that one had died in a strange place / Near no accustomed hand / And they had nailed the boards above her face / The peasants of that land.” That was one of the poems he recited as we lay down to sleep whenever we found a place where the jungle parted and left us a bare patch of earth. After he died, after a bullet pierced his eye and came out the other side in a way I thought might be a relief for someone whose head was so full of thoughts, I started reading the poems of the mad Irishman. If you don’t write or paint, you leave nothing behind. Fortunately for the vast majority of the world, either this thought has not occurred to them or they don’t care. Actually, on second thought, we leave children behind. I won’t—too old for that, though I suppose by the grace of my gender I still could—but your father and mother will, and you will probably give them another baby or two to hold before they die, and though babies are no doubt more beautiful than paintings, my students still have to pause and think when I ask them about the flood and which one they would rescue, the Rembrandt or the baby—so in some cases, we can give them a run for their money. There are, after all, more babies than masterpieces, and though the depth of feeling that is the love of one human being for another has never been approached by even the greatest works of art, I might venture to say that the impact of the masterpiece is wider and more enduring.
You are getting married, Elizabeth! I have been advised by a friend, a poet herself, to use exclamation points sparingly, just as I have been advised to use caution with the colors red and orange, but as I age, I find my paintbrush heading more for the reds and my pen wants more exclamation points. That man, who better be good and kind, has kissed your lips! You have taken his hand, and you are gazing into his eyes with an unmatched ardor! Yes, ardor, while he gazes back at you with exactly as much joy as anyone who has ever loved you could pray for. I have a stupid, sloppy smile on my face, and I see that most people have the same smile, even through tears, though the old man in the wh
eelchair has fallen asleep and is drooling. And Marty’s kid, Carla! Ha! I remembered her name and that she’s actually kind of clever, poor thing, with that terrible birthmark—in real life, Picasso’s women would never get laid—trying to make up for her looks with her intellect. Carla looks fatally bored, and the man in the row behind me is scowling. Don’t worry, Elizabeth. There is always a scowling man. We take turns being him. We take turns being the one who will console him. We take turns falling down and lifting up.
After the war, I went back to New York. I could use Saul, the Vietnamese children, Jenny, my unrequited whatever with your mother, my father who beat me and my mother and my brothers, mortality, or poverty—any of them might make acceptable excuses for the choices I made, to slouch from squat to sublet, to steal when I needed money for heroin, to screw with abandon. I suppose, since it is your wedding day and you are no longer a child and the relationship I have had with you is changed forever, I suppose I should be honest. I came to Atlanta and told your father I needed help, but I didn’t really want help. I thought about who I knew who still had money, who I knew that would let me into the house, give me a place to sleep, and who I could rob blind when his back was turned. It was similar to the journey I took before the war although in the course of four years your brother had reached the ripe old age of six, your sister was three and a half, and you, my sweet baby girl, had just been born and were one week old. Your parents had moved from the house on Lindbergh to this house, more uptown, farther from the bus line so it took longer for me to trudge past a series of manicured lawns and mailboxes with their numbers discreetly displayed since if you had to ask, you shouldn’t be visiting. I carried a rucksack, and I had a long beard and was in need of a hot shower, and I am probably re-creating this in memory, but fathers cut off their lawn mowers and white-haired women walking poodles stopped to stare at me; children paused midleap through the sprinkler and bicycle bells went silent. This is a fancy way of saying I didn’t belong there, where there were National Guard deferments and maids in uniforms and everything was lemon scented and artificially flavored.
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