Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  “No, Kai. Loving you that way would be.”

  “But you might do it to save me from West Point?”

  She ran her tongue along her teeth. “I might,” she said, her voice laden not with desire or love, but with sacrifice.

  Like an ostrich, I closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them she would say something different. The lights in Zim’s seemed darker. I was so stupid, so lame, to try to win her love. Such an idiot. But no one loved her more. I saw that if I could endure her regally unrealistic view of the world, I could do anything, like remain committed to her until the end of time. I understood life while she lived in the bubble of the white middle class. I had known unhappiness and could embrace the joy of her company with soulful conviction. I was now at the Academy, in the center of the traditional white, American male experience, and would have all the tools to protect her when the time of the wolves arrived. Then I remembered that she had said I had a sweet face.

  “I’m good, Christine,” I said, trying to find my voice between seizures of unspeakable human worthlessness and surges of princely, martial splendor. Aim low, hit low, Arch had said.

  I looked at her intently. “Christine, I’d be so good for you.”

  She looked back at me with large, luminous eyes. She looked at me as if I had told her I had terminal cancer instead of an affliction of the heart.

  On my last night in the City, Christine and I walked north along the beach, the long string of coastal lights winking into the distant night fog behind us. Ahead was the tall, brooding, brightly lit Gothic restaurant, the Cliff House. It was high tide, and we had a band of only ten or fifteen feet on the edge of the seawall on which to walk. I inhaled the strong, pungent scent of the beach, the seaweed which now looked black, the smell of a living ocean, caressing the earth. I thought of the Hudson, stroking the banks of West Point. I loved this place, this border where sea met land, and I did not know why.

  “Look, Kai. Look at the crescent moon—how the clouds move across it. The sky’s filled with clouds we can’t see. The stars are so bright above us, and they fade as they approach the horizon. You can’t really see where the sky ends and the ocean begins.”

  The sky that had seemed so heavy and Chinese in the grove was now dark but without weight. “ ‘When the heavens separated from the earth,’ ” I said.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “How Chinese storytellers begin their stories, their version of ‘once upon a time.’ ” I looked at the seamless edge of the world. The Chinese side of my family would be looking east at our horizon, while we looked west at theirs.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said, shivering in the cold sea-wind, holding my hand in both of hers, leaning into me. I freed my hand and wrapped her to me, pressing my biceps into her soft shoulder.

  “I love you so much,” I said into her billowing hair as it wrapped around my face, the blond tips catching the moonlight. I placed my cheek against hers, my heart pounding.

  “I love being with you so much. I truly do,” she said, rubbing her smooth cheek against mine. She did not say, “And I feel the instant knowledge of consuming love for you, for which, in this instant, I surrender myself to you.”

  She leaned against me, careful to keep the point of her hip against mine, and I knew she knew more about boys than I knew about girls. I saw fragments of constellations. The moon appeared from the clouds, dimming the stars, creating small holes and relics of light.

  “Look,” she said into the roar of the surf, pointing at the track of the moon’s reflection on the Pacific. “That path, it’s like a bridge, that runs between you and me, from the East to the West, from us to the infinite, a path across the water. That’s how it feels to me to be your friend.”

  The moon was my old friend in a black sky. When I was a kid, I used to think that it followed me, wherever I went. Now it cast a fragile bridge of fleeting, shimmering light on the black water.

  “Look at me,” she said. I did. I put my hands on her waist, and she placed her hands on mine.

  “To walk on moonlit waters,” she said, smiling up at me, looking into my eyes, “To a horizon, ever near/Come to me on waves/Walk to me on its path/Hold moonbeams and kiss the moon.” She smiled. “Like it?” she asked. “I just made it up.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I remembered Uncle Shim’s poetry about an empty stove. “I inspire people around me to poetry, but they don’t want to tear their clothes off and kiss until the moon sets.”

  She giggled. “I’ve always wanted to be able to compose poetry while looking into the eyes of passion,” she said, smiling. “And your eyes are passionate … I do love how you adore me … but we have purity and innocence … there’s nothing I have to apologize to my mother and father for.”

  She turned away from me, blinking into the wind. “And although it’s not real poetry, I just did something like it. Isn’t this wonderful—like being in love, without sex, or jealousy, or worry, or guilt? When I can take risks with poetry, and you can write me long and glorious letters. And all the petty things mean nothing, and we’re still free to be absorbed by the universe, to be consumed by muses.” She smiled gaily, her Grace Kelly-like visage dazzling in the moonlight. She was impossibly beautiful.

  I didn’t want to be consumed by the muses. I wanted to kiss her. “Christine, I’ve always wanted to be your boyfriend.”

  She nodded at me solemnly, watching me, breathing fast.

  “Now I learn we’re better off as big-time, handshaking buddies, with you as a virgin poetess and I a platonic audience, throwing roses at your moonlight poetry.” I made a face.

  “Oh, Kai, oh Kai, thank you!” she cried, her eyes burning and liquid, her face, her lips offered to me, wet with the salt of the sea, and I kissed her. Her lips were soft and merged seamlessly with mine, and angels sang both near and far. I felt her fingertips on my cheek and felt myself breathing in a way I had never breathed before. She half-opened her eyes and looked so softly, so dreamily into mine that I kissed her again, gently folding her into me, and I was in love. Her hands touched my face and my arms, as she opened her mouth to me, teaching me an internal dance possessed of rhythms and rhapsodies borne only of instant knowledge. She made small, needful, urgent hums in her throat that carried me to the moon, where the goddess Gwan Yin brushed my heart and my life with sparkling light, filling me with a sweet music that was joy. I was consumed by her mouth, by her taste and smell. I kissed her deeply with unmeasured passions, making her whimper and grasp me. Panting, she pulled away, her chest heaving.

  “Christine,” I said, “oh, Christine,” reaching for her.

  “No,” she breathed, stepping back awkwardly, her long hair blowing across her face, her beautiful face full of heat. “I will not be consumed by this!” she exclaimed, tears in her eyes. “It’s too strong. It’s too—too—oh, damn it!”

  She walked away from me, toward the surf. She was stunning.

  I closed my eyes, remembering the kiss, remembering to breathe, the image of her beauty by the sea overwhelming. The kiss had been too incredible to be undone by her retreat, and I returned to its memory, astonished at the height of my good fortune and at the depth of the bad. I joined her near the water.

  “Tell me,” I said, “that wasn’t ‘instant knowledge.’ ”

  “It wasn’t,” she breathed.

  I memorized her mouth, her eyes, her face. I was leaving in the morning, and only my ability to remember her face would sustain me for another six months or a year. She was achingly gorgeous. No one could be more desirable. “Christine.” She turned away from me.

  I hated this. What the hell am I doing, messing around with someone beyond my reach who was also nuts? I’m a blooming idiot. I’ve done torture. I lived with Edna for a decade and endured Plebe year.

  “Can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t be your platonic buddy. I want to love you, always, forever. To be the man who honors you and cherishes you … made better by you … singing about you from mountaintop
s.” I cleared my throat. “And I can’t sing.”

  She looked at me with such sadness, shaking her lovely face in the wind. “Once I give myself to you, I’d be without power, without inspiration, without hope, burdened by you and your needs. You’re—you’re an anachronism. Like Don Quijote! A throwback to a day that doesn’t even exist anymore.” She crossed her arms across her chest in the cold, biting wind of the sea. “You’d stop my life before it’s even begun. I can’t allow that to happen.”

  “By being with you I feel I can do anything,” I said. “How come it has the opposite effect on you?”

  She looked at the horizon. “I believe in instant knowledge. Please don’t let me hurt your feelings—but when it occurs, there’s no talking, no debate.” The small, fine muscle along her jaw flexed. “I’m trying to be in control, and to be moral.” She brushed her long hair from her face. “Instant knowledge is correct because it naturally defeats reason, and control, and can’t be helped.” She wouldn’t look at me. She waited for my answer.

  “Okay, we don’t have it. Let’s call it ‘slow knowledge.’ Okay? Can we call it something so I have a chance with you?” She looked at me and I smiled broadly. “Smile, Christine, please. We’ve been friends so long, and I’ve been so patient trying to be worthy of you, and you kissed me as if you loved me. Please, smile.”

  She shook her head. “No, Kai. We’re not right for each other this way. It would be a disaster.”

  I breathed deeply from the sea. This kiss from heaven signaled for me life and joy. For her it was tragedy. I couldn’t help thinking it was because I was Chinese, that I was too different to generate in her the countdown sequence for her hated instant knowledge. I tried to look at the sea but couldn’t keep my eyes from her. I again felt the strange sensation of missing her while I was in her company.

  She stepped closer, still breathing rapidly, her lips parted, staring at my mouth, and I knew we could kiss again, magically, and then she would pull away, and tell me that we had just avoided catastrophe. How could she kiss me like that and still have reservations about anything? I wanted to pick her up and carry her to the dunes and kiss her, hold her, touch her.

  “Why did you kiss me like that if you don’t love me?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, Kai. I lost control,” she said. “I didn’t mean to.” I moved toward her and she backed away.

  Irresistibly, I heard Edna telling me that I was ugly, revolting, and unlovable. Christine had said I had a sweet face. I didn’t know who was right, but Edna was never wrong.

  The thought “It doesn’t mean anything” came to me from my past. I tried to say, “You mean everything to me” but I knew if I opened my mouth, I would weep. I ground my molars.

  I am a man and I do not cry, I repeated to myself, trying to soothe an unreachable hurt through repetition of fictional strengths. I couldn’t look at her and survive the night.

  I hardened my face and looked at the moon, seeing nothing, trying not to love her, trying to escape this place I loved, with this impossible, perplexing girl I adored. I tried to find a moment of comfort, an icon of sanctuary, and pictured the gray eminence of the chapel overlooking West Point, waiting for the numbness that always came.

  20

  SOCIETY

  West Point Bachelor Officers Quarters, April 16, 1966

  “See you—raise five.” I was a bold Yearling night patrol-leader, a nineteen-year-old apprentice infantryman, pulsing with the raw drive of a fearless, take-no-prisoners poker player. Yearlings rebelled against the system by dressing ineptly and playing at the outer bounds of military decorum. My shoes were nearly gross, my trousers lacked their spoony creases, and my sleeves were rolled up to advertise my biceps. To make it easier on Plebes, I ordered the Gazette and not The New York Times.

  Colonel Smits had two rules: no cap on bumps, and bets to table limits, which was no limit, and booze was gratis if you paid, which was hardly free. His table was covered with a coarse Army olive drab blanket. We were in casual dress—T-shirts and trou.

  I had jacks and nines with four of us still in.

  “Out,” said Colonel Smits, banging down his hand and taking a big slug of Bushmills from a dirty tumbler. The pot was right. I lay down my two pairs, beating Clint’s kings. Duke had three sixes and a big smile as he scooped the chips with large arms.

  The room was thick with smoke and rank with the thick aroma of pepperoni pizza, whiskey, beer belches, and warming bodies. Colonel Smits had a weak oscillating fan from his recent Vietnam tour, and from a small bookcase it pushed the bad air around like a tired traffic cop. The window was open, but little help came from it on a warm April night.

  Lieutenant Colonel Franz Alonzo Smits was attached to Post Command, West Point. He was our Wild Hairy Renegade. He had a rancid mouth, foul armpits, excess body hair, bachelor quarters he shared with cadets, and all the bad habits that young men admire. He had a large, semiflat, closed face that could have been shaped on an irregular cookie sheet in high heat. His nose had been broken at least twice by different forces bearing from different directions. Something sharp had tried to chop off his chin, leaving a pale incision where the hair grew with less abundance. The dark eyes were hooded, injured, reptilian. He was Bluto in the “Popeye” cartoons, with the predatory grin but without the good cheer.

  He had been a member of the 1952 Army grid team, but his tour in Vietnam had been compared to the play of snakes in Ireland. He had gone to MACV to win the Medal of Honor and had returned to West Point with a Combat Infantryman’s Badge and a Purple Heart, and no other decorations of distinction to match an enduring anger. The CIB and Purple Heart were revered awards, but they were not enough for him. He was six feet three and overly broad, with a chest designed for a lifetime of medals—all preferably centered on the constellation of stars on a dark blue field that denoted the nation’s highest award.

  Rumor Control said that he loved one person—Coach Red Blaik—and that this distant connection had been sufficient for him to overcome a bad combat tour and get posted to the Academy staff. Legend had it that in the fifties, assistant coach Vince Lombardi had applauded Smits’s talent but had prayed for his soul. Coach Blaik had seen the gold in Franz Smits and had never lost faith.

  After the Navy game last year, Smits invited Duke and Clint and other cadets to use his BOQ for poker, pizza, and drinking. Having access to this type of facility—bursting with food and stamped with the tattoos of adulthood—was an undeniable take-Big-Bites Good Deal for cadets.

  Officers were encouraged to develop relationships with cadets to facilitate the transfer of values and to provide a sense of kin. Officers served in a range of roles, from offering housing for cadet dates to direct, long-term mentorship. The Academy might have reconsidered the practice had it observed the Poker Society.

  Duke had introduced me to the Saturday Night Poker Society after we finished our advanced infantry and patrol training at Camp Buckner. We returned to West Point and its new four-regiment organization to accommodate the further-expanded Class of 1969. Company H-1 had been reorganized as Company A-3. Hell-One had become Aches-in-Three-Places. Hellraisers had become Avengers.

  Colonel Smits’s rotgut could be used as the poison you’d give a horse before you shot it with an unreliable gun. I was smug in rejecting it. Then Smits introduced me to Irish whiskey blended with brandy and chocolate ice cream—the Velvet Hammer. I drank Hammers like Popeye took spinach. It was candy with a kiss inside; I discovered the joys of inebriation: existential angst, incoherent speech, Falstaffian pronouncements, pounding headaches, and Olympian retching. My first binge was nothing to remember.

  “Big buddy, you threw up all night,” said Bob Lorbus.

  “Talked Chinese,” said Clint. “Had us worried, but we had to leave you in the showers or you’d tank the room.”

  “Was I—was I embarrassing?” I asked.

  “If I’m ever that blotto,” said Bob, “slit my throat.”

  “Don’t be a Snuffy’s S
pecial,” said Deke Schibsted. We couldn’t drink within ten miles of the Academy, and Snuffy’s was uncannily located just beyond the ten-mile perimeter line. Drinking with an officer in his quarters was not prohibited; the presumption was that a glass of port might enhance a lace-tablecloth dinner.

  I liked being drunk, pleased by the sensation of my brains sliding out of my ears. I liked the absence of tension, the giggling. Laughing had kept other demons from me. I felt quite adult, sophisticated, philosophical, and liberated.

  “Why, Hausheng,” Uncle Shim had asked, “were poets drunks? They put goliang in their bellies to forget gahng, lun, and duty. They paid homage to the gods of poetry and writing. In their wine cups, they could enter the Other World, where they could feel pity and emotion and forget themselves. Think of the poet Li Po, who habitually drank to excess. He drowned when he leaned over his boat to kiss his own image in the water, and fell in.”

  I had many Confucian relationships to maintain, but I was like Li Po; when the Irish whiskey went in, the gahng and lun went out.

  “Why do you mess with Smits and alcohol?” asked Mike Benjamin.

  “I kin handle it,” I said, embracing the commode like a baby koala holds its mother, trying to focus my bloodshot eyeballs. I used my best adult voice. “I’m, upperclassman.”

  “You’re trying to drink like an Irishman. Knock it off. You’re blowing away brain cells like Hitler killed Jews.”

  Mike set a rumbling tumbler of Alka-Seltzer next to me. I tried to think through the violent popping and fizzing. “Not nice comp’rison,” I said.

  “Wasn’t meant to be,” he said.

  “Wanna come ta Society, play cars—cards?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t go there if I were dead,” he said.

  “Number-one drink of the gods,” Smits mumbled, pouring the sludge of the Hammer into my beer mug. “Cures all ills. Cleanses the soul, stitches up sucking chest wounds. Keeps your dick hard.”

  Smits was a music fan. He played the Animals, Tom Jones, and Johnny Rivers at decibel levels that invited concussions and hearing loss. Sometimes, over my cards, I studied his hard, darkly bloated, crooked face as he mulled his whiskey, blinking from his blaring music, wondering why he favored us with his freedoms.