I wrote often to Jack while I was in Rockville, inconsequential, newsy letters, beginning Dear Zadie and ending Your loving Grandson. These letters were composed with a false, utterly trumped-up sense of strategy—it added spine to the dull pudgy days to make myself believe that it was up to me to keep Jack on my side in order to ensure his continued financial support. This was completely absurd, of course, but I needed to believe that my life required clever maneuvers on my part, that it would somehow benefit me to keep track of nuances. Like a lonely paranoid with a hundred rituals and a hundred intrigues, I built a bathosphere of strategy in which I might live with some fearful, keen-eyed purpose beneath the overwhelming murky sea of my true circumstances. Not only did this include the needless buttering up of Jack Axelrod, but it meant sniffing food, refusing aspirin tablets or vitamins, though there was no reason whatsoever to think the doctors or staff would slip some tranquilizer into me—drugs, isolation, shock therapy, and all other forms of medical punishment were virtually unheard of at Rockville, and even if such things happened I was hardly a candidate for such treatment, being one of the more docile members of that “therapeutic community.” The vigilance added tone and made me feel like a soldier, a prisoner of war, and the we-aim-to-please letters to my grandfather were a part of my grand diplomacy—a diplomacy that sought a truce not between me and the rest of the world but between the part of myself that was learning to conform to life in an institution and the part of myself that was stiff with shame.
I wondered if my letters to Jack Axelrod were opened and read by the Rockville staff and I wondered if the brief, meticulously typed notes he occasionally sent in reply were also scrutinized. If I’d wanted to send him a message of passionate sedition I suppose I could have slipped it to my parents on one of their biweekly visits and had them mail it in the wild, thundering freedom of the Outside World. I don’t know what I could have said to my grandfather that would have raised any suspicions (I knew that my sincerity as a patient was in doubt), though I did feel our living situations had something in common: he in his balmy planned community with strangers in the communal garden, me learning to play the guitar and singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” with peers such as I would not have known or looked twice at under any other circumstances. But Rose and Arthur were not likely co-conspirators if I wanted wide, risky contact with Jack; they were uneasy with my relationship with him and the one weekend he flew north to visit me, they stayed home.
Of course the letters I truly longed to send I didn’t even dare seal into envelopes: the letters to Jade. Even if I’d known where to send them, I wouldn’t have risked detection—those pages and pages and pages of frantic scrawlings were the core of my secret life in Rockville and I never knowingly hinted at it, not even to Dr. Clark, the psychiatrist in charge of my case, who I actually liked and spoke to five hours a week. I prayed that Jade would know that I was writing those unreceivable letters. I believed, because I had to, in all sorts of mental miracles, like detailed telepathy or the power of my rich electrical thoughts to send to her a vivid, unmistakable sign—a heart-shaped constellation, a speaking wind, or a caterpillar that would find her alone in a field of tall grass, crawl up her arm and stop at the elbow, turn its hard black goggles toward her and implant in her consciousness not only the fact of my ceaseless, obsessional thoughts but their content as well. Perhaps if someone had told me that my stay in Rockville was going to be two years, or five, or even ten, I would have found the cunning and courage to get word to Jade. But from the moment I was installed in my room and began unpacking my rolled-up socks and folded tee shirts (it was a pine dresser with a sweet Butterfieldian aroma), I began anticipating my release, my return to Jade. I did not dream of this release as something that was months away—I felt it could happen any day, any day at all.
I didn’t want to do anything to draw suspicion. Like Rose, I believed I belonged in a prison more than a nuthouse, and was damn grateful to be stuck in the latter. My psychiatrist mentioned that the fear of anal rape is the most vivid terror people experience when they contemplate prison—more horrible than separation from loved ones, loss of time, collapse of career, etc. I don’t know quite what Clark was leading toward, whether he considered this a holdover from our pasts as baboons or if he meant to suggest that the phobia was the Halloween mask of a latent desire. But the fact is I did cringe at the thought of being served up to a cellblock of crazed prisoners. There is something so unbelievably cruel about fucking someone in the ass. Of course the opening is there and, I suppose, handy. But it takes advantage of the body. It’s like making faces at a blind man. I know that one is suspect no matter what one says about things like this. If you say you like anal fucking, it’s a bit strange, and if you bother to say that the idea is horrible then that is somehow even stranger. But I had to think about it when my case was pending and it wasn’t certain if I’d get by on my plea of insanity or if I’d be sent to Joliet. I have never been on either end of a brutal sexual transaction—even the old high-school stunt of getting a girl drunk and grabbing her cunt struck me as crazy and wrong. (Though I realize that a lot of the drunk girls wanted nothing more.)
Once when Jade and I were making love in her bedroom, around the time when we first got the double bed, and we’d been making love for so long that she was as wet as a river inside and could hardly feel me anymore and I could hardly feel her but we needed, for reasons that really weren’t physical, to keep on making love, she turned over on her belly and raised herself on her knees. I thought she was asking me to come in from behind, where the tilt of the vagina gives the illusion of newness and tightness, as we had done so many times. Her back was soaked with sweat and the sheets were like slush. I was panting and sweating myself and sore all over but I didn’t want to stop, neither of us did. The friction, our need of it, wasn’t really connected to pleasure at that point. It was more of an attempt to erase our bodies and explode out of them into pure matter. It was afternoon, there was soft light in her little room, and when she spread her legs and offered her rump to me I looked at the back half of her vagina, with the dark brown hair sopping wet and poking out in curly spikes. I’ll never understand exactly what the sight of her body did to me, I mean why it worked the way it did, but its effect was so powerful, so unfailingly powerful that I believed then and will always believe that I was born to see it, to look at her face, throat, breasts, genitals, and feel a heat and spaciousness that no word in my vocabulary can even begin to express. I think that after all of that wet, wet fucking I was only three-quarters hard but the sight of her backside restored me to my unanimous erection and at once I began to move myself into her. But she stopped me and said something a little bewildering, like Put it in the other one, something uncharacteristically peek-a-booish like that, but which I completely understood. I didn’t want to say no but I was immediately nervous. We’d never done that before, and I didn’t want to leave her alone in her willingness to go somewhere new. And so I made a clumsy jab at her asshole with my cock groping in its lilac blindness. Like the first time we made love, Jade had to guide me in, only now she was pointing me toward a path my mind and heart refused to follow. I drew back. I can’t do that, I said, It’ll hurt, it’s got to hurt. Do you think so? she said. People do it all the time, not only homos. She’d been reading a book about the Mochican Indians of—where was it, Peru? They were notorious ass fuckers and not only the Spanish conquistadors but the Incas used to punish them to the point of death in order to make them fuck more productively but the Mochicans held fast to their preference. (I don’t remember if this lesson in anthropology came right there in bed or if it was later.) Jade pulled me back toward her and pressed my cock to her asshole. She grabbed the pillow with her free hand and breathed out with a kind of yogic completeness as if to open herself further to me, but it was useless because her anus was as cryptic as a belly button. I could feel its stunned rejection of my approach. You see? I said. But Jade was caught in the logic of her proposal and she stuck a fing
er into her vagina and pulled it out wet and moved it in a circle around her asshole. Try it now, she said. Or why not put yourself inside me the regular way so you’ll be wet too? What resourcefulness! I felt the beginnings of sexual terror. Why was she being so determined? What was the cause of this sudden stubborn hunger for a new sensation? Was she nostalgic for the stretch of an untraveled passage? Or was there buried somewhere in the core of our lovemaking a hopelessness and shame she wanted to exorcise? I don’t want to do this, I said, even as the head of my cock pressed against her ass’s wrinkled middle, lilac to mauve. It was opening to me, slightly. I must have been pressing myself in without altogether knowing I was. Her asshole was shuddering like a puppy, like a small frightened heart, and I could see, in a glimpse, her inner walls, a flash of translucent red as spectacular as slag. Why not? she asked. Her voice was muffled. She was supporting all her weight with her forehead. Don’t know, not in the mood, something like that. I was wary enough to be cautious. Suddenly she rolled over onto her back. A gray scraggly feather from the pillow stuck to the sweat between her small breasts and she plucked it by its stem and twirled it between her fingers. I thought you’d like it, she said. No, I don’t think I would, I said. My stomach was pounding like a second heart. I stretched out beside her, with my leg resting on her thighs and my arms around her. I’m not ready for it, I said. I think it would be wrong. It would hurt. It wouldn’t be right. It would be right, Jade said. Because it’s you and me and we love each other. I wanted to do it because neither of us have ever done it before. It would be ours. We were silent for a while. We could hear the casual commotion of her house. Sammy and his crew were below playing poker, screaming at each other over every card. (I hate to think what they’d have done to each other if they’d actually played for money.) Keith was on the third floor listening to Joan Baez with the volume turned up so high she sounded like a middle-aged drunk. “Don’t sing love songs / You’ll wake my mother.” The lyrics of that song curled around our slightly embarrassed silence and first I laughed and then Jade laughed. Though it was only in the future, after my release from Rockville, that I learned the real joke to those words, when Ann confessed the full extent of her obsession with Jade and me, and how she had used the heat we generated to ignite her own elusive passions.
Dr. Clark counseled against it, but I kept a calendar on my wall and put an X through each day that passed—at a minute past midnight, if I was awake. I moved through time with constant terror. It moved too swiftly, separating me from my life; it barely moved at all, keeping me distant from the day of my release. In that way, each day was a victory and a humiliation. Yet a part of me refused to live inside of time at all; something of myself remained distant from those nervous skirmishes with the passing days. I thought of this part as my best and most secret self and I would not submit it to my losing war with time, just as no sane nation sends its finest tacticians and most lyrical poets to the front lines of a raging battle. Throughout my stay in Rockville, half of me remained sheltered in the lead-lined bunker of eternity.
As it turned out, my preserving half my heart in eternity contributed to my undoing in Rockville. It meant that I’d make virtually no friends and that I was more isolated than I ought to have been, more sequestered than I wanted—the loneliness was crushing, for the most part. In a community almost exclusively inhabited by perceptive people, my decision to reserve a part of myself from the reality of our shared circumstances was noticed constantly—causing me to be shunned, attacked, razzed, ignored, or, worse, much worse, wooed, drawn out, seduced, challenged, conned. My own doctor folded his arms and shook his head when he listened to me, and more often than I care to remember said “ho-hum, David” when I offered my careful, tidy descriptions of my feelings. “What’s your favorite color?” he once asked me. “Blue,” I answered, thinking of Jade, her Oxford cloth shirt, the shade of the ink in her last letter to me. Dr. Clark leaned forward and moved his small face closer to mine—a vein the width of a child’s finger beat in his high ivory forehead, as if his heart and brain were joined like Siamese twins. “Blue?” he said, and I avoided his eyes and nodded. “I don’t believe you,” he said. He slapped his knees and stood up. His hands were on my shoulders now and I squirmed away from him. “I don’t believe your favorite color is blue. You can’t even tell the truth about that. Do you know how to tell the truth, David?”
Of course I knew how to tell the truth. But the truth of the matter was I couldn’t. I wasn’t there in the same way as the others. I wasn’t an acid casualty or a compulsive eater or someone who believed that the lawn wept at night because I had walked over it. For all the encouragement I was given to whirl freely through my feelings, to become whole again by expressing everything that was inside of me, I hadn’t in fact been placed in Rockville to discover my true unbroken self. I was there on court order and I was there to change. And I was willing to change. But I knew there were things I could not say—not if I wanted Clark to report that I was ready to go home. I could not say that I wrote secret letters to Jade. I could not say that all that “getting well” really meant to me was the chance to find Jade, to find Ann, Hugh, Sammy, Keith—but most of all Jade, to find Jade, to hold her again and make her understand, as I did, that nothing had changed. I was willing to talk about anything else, but not once did I confess that the part of me I’d been sentenced to transform was as alive and unreasonable as ever.
My belief in the truth of my love for Jade as a higher and untouchable truth kept me from the despair that clawed at the hearts of many of the patients, but it also meant that after a full year in Rockville I was still very much there and had no immediate prospects of release. Ted Bowen (working without pay, refusing the money my parents tried to press on him, and neglecting to deposit the checks they mailed to his office on Oak Street) made a number of appeals to Judge Rogers, trying to get my so-called parole commuted, but it was clear (though Rose and Arthur tried to conceal this) that my leaving Rockville wasn’t being seriously considered.
A few days after the first anniversary of my institutionalization, Rose and Arthur appeared for their Saturday visit. It was mid-September. The first touches of slate were in the sky and though Rockville’s soft golf-coursey lawn was green, its best life was gone. I still lived with a student’s attentiveness to seasons—the first cool day always made me think of the crisp promise of blank notebooks, good intentions, new teachers, reunions with friends—and the panic and despair I felt at not being set free cut deeper because it was September. The world was changing and I was not.
Rose and Arthur always seemed ill at ease and a little pathetic when they came to Rockville. They did not, of course, believe in psychiatric cures. It would have been more to their way of thinking to send neurotic teenagers into a state forest to do a little conservation work, or perhaps a year on an assembly line to ground short-circuited emotions. And the high-priced Rockville with its necessarily privileged clientele might have been invented to stimulate my parents’ scorn. They also felt the ego tenderness of most parents whose child sees a psychiatrist: they were sure I said awful things about them. They feared that I talked about their long time in the Communist Party (which I did) and that I portrayed them as cruel and uncaring (which I did not). They walked the halls of Rockville with unnaturally soft footsteps, as thief-like as my own when I used to return home at six in the morning from Jade’s. They wore dark clothing and spoke barely above a whisper if anyone else was remotely near. Dr. Clark avoided them, which frightened them in one way, but was also a relief. They’d read Clark’s book, Adolescence and Agonia, and it disturbed them. It was a chatty, aphoristic book, which enjoyed a mild success. There were no copies of it in Rockville but I subsequently read it and could scarcely recognize in it the stern, skeptical man who treated me—it was faintly anarchist in tone and put forward such suggestions as parents giving their children complete control over them one day a week. (“He writes books?” I said, one visit. “Well, it can’t be for the dough. He makes a f
ortune right here.” This was just the kind of cheap remark my parents needed to hear and Rose gave me a little squeeze on the arm and said, “That’s the spirit.”)
Endless Love Page 4