The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The next morning I liked her more. I could not explain it. I was wilted with defeat and yet somehow humiliation had kindled worship. I had just acquired Days of Future Passed, a Moody Blues album that melded their rock ’n’ roll with classical intervals of the London Festival Orchestra. The record described a day in the life of an Everyman, and those songs so drenched in yearning with their gusting strings and melodramatic lyrics—“I’m just beginning to see, now I’m on my way”—were with me wherever I walked, as was Annette. She and the record became connected; whenever I heard my favorite songs, “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon,” I thought of her. I played the record over and over, descending each time into a moonstruck rapture of melancholy as the singer crooned “And I love you / Oh, how I love you.” Annette and I had constant imagined conversations, I telling her all the humdrum events in my no longer humdrum days, for she was the figure perched atop all my thoughts. She became my source of inspiration and purpose. Everything I did, I did for her, everything I experienced I experienced through her, saw through her eyes, and suddenly life was no longer itself. I was sleepless, anxious, miserable, and the most alive I’d ever been. Nobody had ever felt this way before.

  The school yearbook was distributed, and I broke the spine of my copy by turning every day to her page. In the photograph she was lying on grass. You could see the faint scree of freckles on her slender face, her features so graceful that after a moment of looking at them I would lower my eyes. Demolished with love, I assumed everyone was now seeing her the way I did. When I spotted Southerton talking with her once by a door at school, I hated him as a rival. Her flaws and blemishes would have moved me terribly, except that she had no flaws, not one blemish. I pined over her so much that when I actually talked with her it was surprising not to enjoy it. Because I knew so little about her, on my own I was forever supplying the facts. In her presence, I was thrown off by the reality, would flush and stammer with burning ears.

  I did not know any of her habits, but because her mother was English, there was Britain in Annette’s elocution, and now as I found myself favoring phrases and words I’d heard Annette say like “meant to” and “don’t be foolish,” and “chocolate chip cookies,” and “Bitensky,” I’d also catch a little London slipping into my voice as I said them, I tasting those words like balms. I felt exposed to a blizzard of love, to torrents of love, bursting with love, wanted love to take over my life. That she should respond with indifference seemed unsurprising, not an obstacle, but the opposite. To me shame was a natural ingredient of the condition.

  I didn’t tell anybody at school about my prom volte-face. A few days later, Annette called to invite me to play tennis. One of her Sue friends joined us. A chaperone, I thought bitterly. They took one side of the court, I the other. Sue played careful baseline strokes. Annette swung at every ball as hard as she could, some of her shots hitting halfway up the fence behind me on the fly. Once in a while, one of her balls landed in. I had never seen anybody play tennis that way. She had long legs and long arms, and when she struck at a ball, her limbs were saplings in swirling winds.

  Afterward, Sue went home, and Annette and I walked back to her house for a snack. We found her father sitting in a turquoise kitchen watching the Mets on a small, countertop, black and white television. He was a political science professor at Yale, a jovial, ruddy-faced man with a spray of white hair and bright button eyes who, Annette now told me, played tennis the same way she did. “Tennis is a game of velocity,” he said. The ballplayers moved on the screen. Her father waved to me. “Pull up a chair,” he told me, motioning to the stool beside him. I took a step in that direction. Then I looked at her. “Oh, Daddy,” Annette said, “you’re stealing him!” He widened his eyes. I made a motion to turn back and she said, “No, no, I know when I’m overmatched. You men watch the baseball.” We sat in that large kitchen cozily cluttered with cookie tins, pie plates, and dog-eared cookbooks, lit with the kind of thick, still, heavy light found inside barns, I hoping more than ever to be loved by Annette. If you were loved by a girl, her family too would love you.

  I wanted to tell others about her to make her present in my moments as much as possible. The first person in whom I confided was a man. “She’s not interested in you; she’s trying to let you know in a nice way,” he said. After that I waited a long time—weeks!—before I told a female friend about Annette. All my friend could do was hope for me, but hopes could be discussed over and over. To have an object of adoration filled the heart with possibility. Maybe her feelings would change.

  That summer we continued to do things together, and, when I was away, she wrote me careful, good-humored replies to the epistles I’d drafted and redrafted. Around her I had begun to feel cultivated, like a mascot. We had a picnic one day on the lawn in front of a Yale library, and I was glum to be going back to high school while this would be her lawn, her library. But the next fall it was exciting occasionally to visit her at college, see the interior of buildings all my life I had only passed by, to meet her glamorous roommates—not a Sue in the bunch; they all had clipped, impossibly hip names like Dana and Jana—to whom she introduced me as either “my high school friend,” which made me bristle, or “sort of my little brother,” which didn’t.

  Gradually, over those next few years we became close. Once, on my birthday at college, I opened my mailbox to discover fifteen envelopes postmarked New Haven, all of them scented with perfume. “I wanted to improve your reputation,” she told me on the telephone. When she graduated from Yale, I sat in the audience with her mother, her brothers, and her father in his mismatching suit. It was a lengthy ceremony held outdoors in a cold, steady rain, and halfway through, her father announced that he needed fortification. The next thing I knew, led by her father, her family was getting up, filing down the aisle, and abandoning the commencement for a nearby Burger King. I followed, flabbergasted. At Burger King, we sat in orange bucketed seats at a corner table, everyone happily feasting on Whoppers, looking out at the empty New Haven streets through fogged windows. Her father proudly explained his attire; he’d worn his best suit jacket but opted for trousers from an older ensemble so as to preserve the good pants from the rain and mud. Everyone thought this was very practical of him. Afterward, when Annette learned that no Hamburgers had seen her graduate because they were off eating, well, hamburgers, she was indignant. “I can’t believe my family would bag out on my graduation for a snack,” she huffed. “Well, I can believe it of my father, but you, Nicky, should know better.” I hung my head, and as I did I saw to my surprise that she wasn’t really upset, that, yes, she was annoyed, but mostly she didn’t care. I wanted her to care. It came to me that this was the way they were, and that she knew it, and that she was secure in their love.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Leaving

  The summer of 1980, by myself I went to see Breaking Away. I’d never gone to a movie without a companion before, and being in that sunken chair alone in the dark made it only easier to feel I was right there, in the story. It told of Dave Stoller, recent high school graduate, a stonecutter’s son who’d grown up in the university town of Bloomington, Indiana, and was trying not to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Dave lived at home, didn’t have a job, rode his racing bicycle long distances every day, and had convinced himself he was Italian. His walls were covered with posters of Italian cyclists, he listened obsessively to Verdi and Puccini, and every time he joyfully greeted his dad, “Bongiorno Papa!” his father hated “that Ity talk” from “that got-damned lazy deadbeat” a little more. Eventually, wearing a shirt that said “Cutters,” Dave entered the big local bicycle race at the university stadium, and defeated all the college fraternity teams with his father showing up halfway through to watch, belatedly proud, cheering him on, encouraging him afterward to go for it in life too, to apply to The U. In my seat I got all excited, got so swept up in the one great sports victory and all of Dave’s other victories and reconciliations, th
at, back on the sidewalk, it was like walking out of The Big Sleep, a movie so good that for ten minutes you were talking like Bogie and feeling all tough and hard-boiled and invincible yourself. In the high of the moment I was thinking that it could be me moving on, except that it was only a movie and not me at all.

  The point seemed to be that this was a movie about class, and my class, like so much about me, was ambiguous. I wasn’t truly deprived or truly advantaged either, wasn’t quite a New Haven townie, wasn’t a Yalie, wasn’t exactly anything. I was a kid with a reasonably promising future; by most standards I had plenty. Whenever I’d catch myself doubting it, I’d think about the South Bronx or the lives of some of the kids I played baseball with who carried food stamps in their uniform pockets. So what was it that filled me with such insistent need? Could it truly be about clothing and food, or was the inexhaustible craving, the intense desires that fixated on such small things about something else? I think it was the lack of a sense that I was really part of anything that felt solid. I didn’t quite belong anywhere, orbited around the periphery of all sorts of communities, instinctively floating free and apart—and of all the things I desired, what I wanted most was to change that. But I was unequipped, had no idea how to do it. Then, slowly and just a little, with the tentative and erratic progressions that are youth, life began to do it for me.

  My eighteenth year, all durations seemed to speed up. I grew several inches, my voice finally deepened and so did my social resources: I became friends with boys and girls from all the various constituencies of our class, and as the cooler kids began to invite me to their weekend house parties and I went on outings with them to Grateful Dead concerts and Yale bars, it was a little startling to hear people who had given me a hard time for years now calling out “Hey, big guy!” as I came down the corridor. I wondered if our class was coming together or if it was me, and a part of me wished they hadn’t liked me so late, when I didn’t need them anymore. That’s the problem with high school; you never know who you are and yet you expect other people to know who you are.

  To be the child of a parent of fierce convictions made sharing my mother’s opinions almost as complicated as disagreeing with them. I wanted to find a way for the opinion to be mine. Television, like baseball, was the American mainstream, and for a long time I had wished to have one in our house not only so I could see Planet of the Apes, but also as my ally in not feeling like an outcast from the culture, not seeming like a freak to others. That last year in New Haven, I could go out to friends’ houses more or less when I wanted to and watch television as often as I liked, only to find that now I agreed with my mother about TV. I had begun not to like what happened to me when I watched. Given the chance, I stared like a guppy, immobilized for hours in somebody’s den on an increasingly itchy wall-to-wall carpet, intent on things I didn’t even enjoy, passive and yet also anxious, too aware of how soon the hour would be up when the little world in front of me would evaporate and I’d have nothing left but an uneasy regret and another new show beginning that I couldn’t get up and walk away from. It was so easy not to resist because television was doing all the work for me, making all the decisions. That was especially true, I noticed, when I watched baseball. The field became reduced to the fragment that fit on the screen, minimizing the game into a fraction of itself, implying that everything happening off-camera was irrelevant. The players were minimized as well, because they did not exist unless the ball came their way. Then the lens swooped into their faces and there was too much of them—which weirdly created distance. Following on the radio, by contrast, what I saw was up to me, and the basic rhythms and landscape of the game remained intact. Soon I was developing a cherished idea of myself as a radio partisan as well as a sense of distinction about having no television—glad that at school I could shrug and look baffled when a Gilligan’s Island or Brady Bunch reference was made. “He doesn’t have television!” people then would exclaim, and it seemed I was now being rewarded for an old liability. Mystique had found me.

  Except for one problem. When given the option of whether to watch or listen, I always watched. It was like being a vegetarian who can never pass up the veal—horrible to be so susceptible. I’d recently discovered Raymond Chandler. He said, “You can always tell a TV detective. He never takes his hat off,” and there it was: television was a charlatan and made me one too, made me someone I did not like to recognize. And yet how much like life was the situation, life always so different from how you envision it, and you always somebody other than who you imagine yourself to be. Growing up. Everybody does it. How was I supposed to know.

  I began to pay attention to kids at school who were less cautious about the way they presented themselves. Among them was Tom, a boy who’d let his hair grow until it hung thin and greasy well past his shoulders. As he passed along the hallway outside the student lounge, people in letterman’s jackets called out “wash your hair!” but he ignored them, kept moving at the same measured pace with eyes straight ahead, carrying an unintimidated ease that eventually made them give up. He wore a blue coat to school every day and kept it buttoned to the neck at all times, even indoors, like soft body armor. When the school yearbook was published, one of the quotations by his photograph was a line from the late nineteenth-century English poet laureate Alfred Austin that I found jarring, as though he’d had me in mind when he selected it: “Public opinion is no more than this, what people think that other people think.”

  Another classmate, Nick, loved to lie on a couch in the student lounge and talk about trout fishing. He was genial, plump, and easygoing, unhurried about everything. On his yearbook page I would discover a long passage by the author Robert Traver that compared expert fishermen to drug addicts and philosophers, saying: “Under his smiling coat of tan there often lurks a layer of melancholy and disillusion, a quiet awareness—and acceptance—of the fugitive quality of man and all his enterprises.” There was the sense that Nick had decisively defined himself by his passion. It was the same with dimpled, cheery, “Big” Steve, displaying the measure of his gustatory powers to acclaim as our newspaper’s pizza columnist, and my close friend Evans, a briefcase-toting future financier who had already been watching Dallas for a full season before anyone else had heard of Ewing Oil. All of a sudden I was sure that what had enabled each of them to endure adolescence was that they could see so far past it.

  I too would have liked to show myself freely and not care what others thought. Or was it that I would have liked to show myself to myself and not care what I thought? Of all the diffident parts of me, it was my inward revelations that bloomed the latest. My youth was now completed, but I was still a child because the oldest and most suppressed fear still held, the fear that I was not just different, but incurably different, that there was deep inner warpage, that somebody would find out how I was and then that I would have to know. My secret was that my secret was always in the hands of others. I held them responsible for my sense of well-being and, as a result, they could not be trusted to know anything about me. When you are young there is the terrible inability to understand that it’s your deficits that will make others not only like you but feel close to you.

  One of the prettiest girls in the class began to come to me to discuss her troubles. She would mention her sort-of boyfriend, Stanley, and her best friend, but in a way so cryptic that I had no idea what she was talking about. While she spoke, her dark eyebrows would come together in concern over sad brown eyes, and everything I imagined of her life would go straight to my heart. I leapt blind to the cause, spoke with her for hours, trying to soothe it all—whatever it was. I’d listen, and then I’d think and think and think for her, my brain churning to find solutions to these obscure wrongs she was enduring. Were they talking behind her back? But how could I advise, how could I fix, I so easily shocked, so haplessly removed that only years later would I discover that an entire demimonde had existed casually around me at school. Kids were making out in the shadowed basement corners by the emergenc
y exits and then scorning one another in the light. They were stashing booze in the chemistry lab cabinets for a late morning pick-me-up. The parking lots and the woods were alive with smoke and mirrors and sex. At night the phone lines trembled with rumors perverse and heartbreaking, some of them true. One day Stanley came sidling down the hall, saw my friend, gave all of us there a smile, slid an arm around her and led her outside. Guys were shaking their heads. “Both of them,” someone said with admiration. I gaped, foolish and a little stunned. Why ever had she been listening to me?

  John Lennon was killed and the radio filled with his music for days. On the weekend, while putting together the school newspaper, led by the arts editor we took time out, sat in a circle, and had an informal Lennon memorial service, a moment of silence and then people, one by one, saying how much he’d meant to them. But he hadn’t meant anything special to me. Over and over now I heard “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” his song to his son—“Close your eyes / Have no fear / The monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here.” The heartfelt lullaby of this now lost father crosscut me, because what if your father was what frightened you? Over the years, my father’s musical brother, my Uncle Robert, had given me a few country records, and I began to listen to them more and more because I liked how direct, matter-of-fact, and permanent lines like “There’s a dark and a troubled side of life / There’s a bright and a sunny side too” sounded. Bob Dylan said that the first time he heard a country record as a kid in Minnesota, it made him feel “I was not born to the right parents or something,” and I heard that. The forlorn intimacy and Saturday night high spirits of the old Carter Family and Hank Williams songs moved me in a way that was different from the heightened desire of rock ’n’ roll. These songs about shattered hearts and broken bottles and faith, family, and sorrow were music that came from somewhere far away, places named Brown’s Ferry, Old Kentucky, Flint Hill, and San Antone, and it took me there, took me into these public yet private spaces of music for a few afternoon hours and made me feel that here was life as most people lived it. Those were sounds that would hold you. The music went right at emotion, said that out there in America, a lot of people were going day to day and feeling as though the world was filled with consequences, ordinary little ambushes all designed to remind them that this too would pass, and then more would come. You just had to keep on, like everybody else.