Gates was apparently in no great hurry. A week went by without my hearing anything further from him. My mind, meanwhile, feasted on fantasies of weekends in Paris, London, Rome: myself seated before a small glass filled with amber liquid at twilight at the Brasserie Lipp; being fitted for an elegant and indestructible English suit on Jermyn Street, Savile Row; dashing about on a Vespa in the neighborhood of Vatican City. The contrast with the likely alternatives—beery weekends in Rollins, Missouri, tattoo shops in Killeen, Texas—was more than demoralizing. My patience ran out.
“Jackson,” I asked one morning as we walked back from chow, “hear anything from your man in G-1 about getting me to Europe?”
“I told him about you, baby. Told him you ofay but okay. He say he gonna look into it. He supposed to let me know tonight.”
I awaited Gates that night in the latrine. I tried to read Turgenev, but it was no-go. My mind drifted to tableaux of myself squirting wine into my mouth from a leather pouch in Andalusia, strolling leisurely among the tables at Blackwell’s in Oxford, skiing in Austria. Around 11:30 Gates walked in.
“What’s happenin’, daddy?”
“My question to you exactly, Jackson.”
“How do Brussels, Belgium, sound, daddy?”
“Really? Brussels? It sounds beautiful. Tell me more.”
“They need typists at something called NATO headquarters there—eight of them. My man says, why shouldn’t you be one of them typists? Trouble is, there ain’t no American base in Brussels, so you’ll got to live in an apartment. Just like a civilian, pops.” Knowing this made it all the sweeter, Gates flashed a gold-toothed smile.
“What about the money? Does your man want it now?”
Much as I ached for Brussels, I was still wary of being conned. Important to keep my head here.
“Not yet,” Gates said. “He says wait till the final orders is cut—that’ll be time enough to pay him.”
“Jackson, I’m very grateful to you for this. I want you to know that.”
“No big deal, baby. I say, if you can help a cat, why not help a cat?”
“What about your two hundred? Do you need it now?”
“Keep it, man, you’ll be needing it in Europe. One day maybe you’ll find a way to return the favor.”
My condition was one of edgy ecstasy. Brussels! Wonderful! I pictured the map of Europe and placed Brussels at its center. Yet so many things could go wrong. We had seventeen days left at Chaffee. Orders, we were told, would be issued in fifteen days. In fifteen days, then, I would know for certain. As the days dragged on, I found myself wanting to ask Gates if things were proceeding as planned. But I hesitated to do so, lest I seem a pest, or, as bad, somehow uncool. Instead I asked him about his own plans to return to Detroit.
“The cat has it fixed up for me to work in a recruiting office about a mile from where I live. It gonna be sweet, baby, real sweet. You can have Europe, daddy. Detroit is Paris enough for me.”
I could have Europe. I read hope in that line. Oh, I would take it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Give me Europe. But my hope was mixed with dread that it wouldn’t come off; dread of scandal; dread of some illness that would keep me at Chaffee. I stopped playing poker, for fear I would lose back my winnings and not have the money to pay off Gates’s man at G-l. I could no longer concentrate on my reading, and so went to bed at lights-out, where I alternated thoughts of European delight (a Belgian mistress) with U.S. disaster (venereal disease in Oklahoma). The days crept on. With six to go I asked Gates if he had heard anything about orders having been cut, on the thin pretext of wondering if his man wanted his money yet.
“Stay cool, daddy, stay cool. He’ll let me know when he need the bread.”
With three days to go, Gates told me he wanted a word with me outside the barracks.
“Orders is cut,” he said. “Like the man promised, yours is for NATO headquarters, Brussels, Belgium. Mine is for Detroit, Michigan, U.S. of A.”
“What about the money?”
“He says he don’t need it till after you got them golden little orders in your hands. But I think maybe it’s a good idea to give him half now, the other half after the orders is posted. Anyways, that’s what I going to do—to show the man appreciation for the trouble he gone through.”
This was the first indication I had that Gates, like me, was coming up with money. Somehow, foolishly, I thought that his being black, as I assumed the sergeant in G-l was, would get him the transfer to Detroit for nothing. We were, then, Gates and I, in the same boat. It made his not taking the $200 from me for setting this up all the more impressive. I went back into the barracks and took my poker winnings from where I had them hidden, in the pages of the Penguin edition of Felix Holt, counted out seven twenties and a ten, and brought it back out to Gates.
“Thanks, Jackson,” I said, “for everything.”
We shook hands. “Hey, daddy,” he said, “no sweat.”
Orders were to be posted on the bulletin board outside the orderly room on Saturday afternoon after chow. Sunday and Monday we would draw travel vouchers and ship out to our new assignments. I rather hoped that I might have a day between flights in New York to spend with college friends. If not, all right; but still, a day in Manhattan would be nice.
I was on my way to the bulletin board outside the orderly room, trying to control myself from breaking into a run, when I passed Walt Doherty, who was in my platoon in basic at Leonard Wood. He was angry.
“Something wrong, Walt?”
“Fuckin’ A, something’s wrong. I’m being sent to fuckin’ Fort Hood right in the middle of fuckin’ Texas.”
“That’s really lousy luck,” I said.
“Save your sympathy for yourself,” he said. “You’re going there, too.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Unless I misread the list, you are.”
I ran the rest of the way over to the orderly room. A crowd had gathered in front of the bulletin board. Names were listed in alphabetical order with destinations for each man marked on the right-hand side of the page alongside his name. Easily the majority of our company was being sent off to Fort Hood. When I found my own name, so, damn it, was I. What about Gates? I looked down the list; I looked down it again. Gates, Jackson, was not on it.
I walked back to the barracks in a daze. No Europe—Texas! Gates better have some explanation. At a minimum, I would get my money back, or goddamn know the reason why. Eighteen months of Texas loomed unrelievedly ahead. I walked faster, then broke into a sprint.
Gates’s bunk was stripped, the blankets and sheets gone, the mattress turned back against the foot of the bed. The door of his locker was open, the inside emptied out of all but a few hangers. Six or seven guys were in the barracks. Over in the far corner I saw Otis Cook, who had collected money for Gates’s return to Detroit after receiving his Dear John letter. Otis was packing his gear and looked up as I approached.
“Where they sending you?”
“Fort Hood,” I said, becoming by now half accustomed to the dismal idea.
“Me too. Supposed to be a place loaded with snakes. Ain’t my idea of much of a place to be.”
“Otis, have you seen Jackson Gates? I need to talk with him.”
“Too late, man. Jackson went home early this morning, back to Detroit.”
“I didn’t see his name on the orders sheet.”
“That’s ’cause he got him a Section 8. Jackson done psychoed himself out.”
“Gates psychoed out of the army?”
“He been taking tests the whole of the last two weeks. Trying to convince a headshrinker that what with his marriage bust-up and all he’s having a nervous breakdown or something and going crazy. Jackson’s about as crazy as a fox, for my money. But I guess he convinced them. He’s gone. The crazy fox is a gone goose.”
Otis stuffed a boot into his duff
el bag, then began to stuff a second boot in. “See ya in Texas, man.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in Texas.” I thought to add, “No sweat, daddy,” but I realized that during the next eighteen months, under the scorching Texas sun, sweating and little else was precisely what I figured to be doing.
The Casanova of LaSalle Street
I am sitting here at the bar in the restaurant called Kiki, on Franklin, not far from the East Bank Club. I’m awaiting Cindy Olsen, a personal trainer who works out of the East Bank. She’s not my trainer, I don’t have one, but I have had my eye on Cindy for several months now, and last week, after an earlier meeting in the club over coffee, I asked her out to lunch. My sense is that women are much more likely to accept a lunch over a dinner invitation. Lunch suggests a briefer meeting, fewer strings attached, no trips to apartments afterward, “the victim ate a hearty meal” and all that. I hope to wind up in bed with Cindy, who is a knockout, Scandinavian division: blond, deeply blue eyes, in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, the body you would expect of a woman who exercises all day long.
I’m thirty-eight, a personal injury lawyer, a partner at Dubinsky, Kotler, and Levy at 101 North LaSalle Street, and have been married for twelve years, having cheated on Carol, my wife, for roughly the last nine of them. I’m fairly sure Carol has to know about my extracurricular activities, though she has never said anything about them. Perhaps because she hates a confrontation, which she does, perhaps because she is afraid to be out on her own if she forced a divorce, she lets it ride, doesn’t say a word. We have a son (Zack) and a daughter (Melissa), both in middle school. How do I justify cheating on my wife? Truth is, I don’t. But I have no desire to be separated from her either. She and my kids need me, and having a family gives ballast to my life.
I sometimes think that being married also adds to such allure as I might have, at least with certain women. Having a family makes me safe. I’ve never once suggested to any of my lady friends that I planned to leave my wife for them, and none has ever suggested I do so. They all seem to have understood that another marriage is not what I’m looking for, and it turns out that neither were they. We are all after something else.
I don’t pursue married women. The few times I’ve done so I’ve found the complications outweigh the pleasure. For one thing, I have no interest in breaking up homes. For another, married women ready for love affairs usually have too long stories, and I have no taste for hearing elaborate bills of complaint about negligent husbands. Nor do I want to be chased down by these same husbands looking to punch me out or worse.
Neither am I one of those guys I think of as actuarial seducers, playing the long odds, hitting on every woman they meet, figuring they’re eventually bound to get lucky. The humiliation factor seems not to trouble them. The line of reasoning here seems to be that the first ninety-nine women may kick you in a tender place, but the hundredth will make it all well. Herb Margolis, a lawyer in our firm a couple of years older than I, operates on this assumption, or so I’ve noticed. He tries them all. He also doesn’t mind telling women anything that will get them in the sack. Herb is maybe sixty pounds overweight, untidy to the point of scruffiness, sweats a lot. That he actually finds women who will take him up on his propositions does not speak well for womanhood. A year or so ago he told me that he arrived home to discover one of his recent lady friends, a paralegal in the Friedman & Levine firm, in his living room in Lincoln-wood. “Come on in, Herbie,” his wife said. “Kimberley here tells me that you are planning to leave me to marry her. Is there anything to it?” I asked him what he did. “What the hell could I do?” he said. “I got the girl out of the house as quickly as possible, and promised Franny I’d go back into therapy.”
Philandering is expensive, and while I make a decent living—it fluctuates, but averages somewhere around three hundred grand a year—I can’t afford to court my extramural lady friends in the grand style: no Bvlgari watches, apartments on the Gold Coast, open credit cards. No romance without finance, I’ve heard men much older than I say. But I’m not ready to consider myself a variant of a sugar daddy, someone women make love with because of his money. I have too much vanity for any such arrangement.
I notice the term “sex addiction” is getting a pretty good workout these days. I’ve never counted, but I suppose I must have slept with maybe a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy or so women over the years; that is, from my earlier bachelor days and now since my marriage. With luck, I hope to sleep with maybe thirty or forty more before I hang it up. Does this make me a sex addict, or instead, as I prefer to think of myself, merely someone who likes women? I do like them, I like talking with them, I like all the steps in the elaborate dance of seduction, I like to make them like me, I like the deep intimacy with them that only sex makes possible. If things don’t work out, I don’t take it personally. I move on.
Unlike the Herb Margolises of this world, I have to be really attracted to a woman. The reasons for the attraction aren’t always obvious. I need to see a mystery in her that I want revealed, if only to myself. Shyness in a woman can sometimes do it for me, but then so, sometimes, can an apparent hardness. The central thing for me in a love affair is the revelation it brings with it. I’ve never looked on seduction as any sort of triumph. Conquest’s not what’s in it for me. When I pursue a woman, I leave my ego at the door. Strange though it may seem to say this, in some sense it isn’t really about me. To win over the confidence in a woman to the point where the outer shell she shows to the world slips off is for me the pleasure and the thrill of the game. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the sex, I do, a lot, only that sex isn’t the only, or even the main thing, at least not for me it isn’t.
Take Cindy Olson. Never married, I learned from my earlier coffee meeting with her. Brought up in the western suburbs, went to La Grange High School, did two years at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her father died when she was fourteen. He worked for Allstate. She has very few pretensions, cultural or otherwise. Not all that much humor, either, at least not that I can thus far make out. Yet I sense something beneath this blandness; a grand passion, maybe. I could be wrong. I hope fairly soon to find out.
What, you might around now be wondering, would Cindy Olson see in me? I’m not a lavish spender. I’m not impressively good looking or well set-up physically. But then women are better, more tolerant about physical deficiencies than are men, who tend to be interested only in the obvious: face, boobs, bottom, legs, over and out. I like to think my general agreeableness first attracted Ms. Olson, at least enough to accept my invitation to coffee at the East Bank, and now to this lunch at Kiki. Maybe she thinks I’m someone she can talk to, complain to about her clients or the various jokers who must regularly hit on her in the club. My greatest weapon is the art of patient listening. I can usually tell after half an hour or so with a woman whether I have a chance. With Cindy Olson, the vibes have been good. We’ll see.
Here she is now. The man holding open the door for her is—Jesus!—the man is my father. With him is a striking redhead, deeply tanned, obviously high maintenance, and distinctly not my mother. I don’t wave, for Cindy sees me and begins walking over to the bar. My father, though he obviously also sees me, shows no sign of recognizing me. I stand up to greet Cindy. My father and his redheaded friend are given a table toward the back of the room. We order drinks: a vodka and tonic for me, a margarita for her. Before the drinks arrive, I excuse myself to use the men’s room. I need a moment to think.
Standing at one of the urinals, I hear the door to the men’s room open, and my father, without looking at me, takes his place at the adjoining urinal.
“You know, kiddo,” he says, staring straight into the wall, “this is damn awkward. I think one of us ought to leave, and I’m going to claim seniority here and ask you to be the one to do so. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” I say. “I understand completely.”
“Tha
nks,” he says. “Much appreciated.”
I zip up and walk out. We, my father and I, never make eye contact.
I’ve long suspected, until now without actual proof, that my father, like me, is a player. He kept odd hours, even when I was a kid, and I gather does so still. Women were always drawn to him. He’s tall, with dark good looks. (I more closely resemble my mother.) At sixty-two his hair is still without a touch of gray, and he seems to have lost none of it. He’d been a high-school athlete—football and basketball at Roosevelt in Albany Park—and he moves with a jock’s easy grace. Clothes look good on him. He’s kept himself well groomed, always closely shaven, shoes shined.
He was in Vietnam, my Dad, though he rarely talked about it. He sells cars, Nissans, at a dealership in Schamburg. He does reasonably well, though my sense is that his heart has never been in it. His marriage hasn’t been an easy one. My mother can be a tough customer. She’s one of those maniacs of common sense, her version of common sense that is, which means that one does things her way or it’s the highway. My mother can’t imagine how anyone of any intelligence can think other than the way she does. “What do you want to do that for?” I remember her saying to me as a kid whenever I suggested doing anything with which she didn’t agree. “Are you crazy?” was another of her favorite expressions. She hauled it out when I told her I was planning to marry Carol. I could escape her, and when I married finally did, but his marriage can’t have been a smooth ride for my father, who, for reasons unknown to me, has chosen to stick it out with her.
I’ve never felt especially close to either my mother or my father, even though I was their only child. They married young; my father was twenty-four when I was born. Why they married, why they bothered to have a child, was never clear to me. They must once have loved each other, and the love soon died out, maybe under the tyranny of her common sense. The three of us went through the paces of being a family: had family dinners with cousins, celebrated Jewish holidays, even went on a few not especially joyful vacations together. True good feeling, though, was never there, or if it was I never felt it. As I grew older I began to feel sorry for both of them.
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