by Carson, Tom
Why, that’s probably what he’d have done, I thought. But it took me me a second to sort out that I had meant my daddy, whom both I and the Marine Corps graves-registration office knew to have been a patriot and who I had always guessed would have liked to be a voyager. I would have given anything to have that childhood, and not only because then he would have been alive. With him holding my hand as I grew taller, and my mother now a librarian of photo albums, we Kilroys might have gone ‘round and ‘round the globe together for our country’s sake, learning new languages, seeing fantastic sights and returning to Russell—arms laden with miniature Tour Eiffels and Taj Mahals—only for the Unveiling. “Oh, he was lucky,” I said, meaning my roommate’s boyfriend.
“That’s sure as shit what I thought,” she genially agreed—using the second-worst word in English with a casualness I, Mary-Ann, found flabbergasting. “But would you believe they all felt sorry for themselves? They envied us—because we got to stay in the U.S.A.! With sitcoms, and yard swings from Sears. They couldn’t imagine it. Once they got posted back here, the kids would sort of try to go native phonetically, but they were like piñatas. Bop ‘em at the right angle and ‘When we were in Katmandu’ comes out, just pissing everybody off. The only reason they weren’t a clique was that they shunned each other—you know, like lepers tinkling ‘Unclean, unclean.’ They were all trying to pass for normal! But it was all mixed up with creepy vanity-’I am the only Martian. I am my favorite Martian.’ One day, in a madcap mood, it occurred to me to point out to Boyfriend that maybe he’d have an easier time blending in beneath the blue suburban skies if he didn’t natter on about how unique he was. Well, he couldn’t decide which was more important to him. They’re all like that—they don’t make sense even to themselves.”
“He thought you would,” I said, not knowing how I had divined this.
“Exactly,” my roommate said. “I was supposed to be port, you know—after all those three-year tours.”
“Those what?” I said, for something in the sound of the words was inexplicably familiar.
“Three-year tours,” she said. “I think he used to just feel marooned out there—in these places where just being American was the thing that made him different from anybody else, at the same time that he didn’t know anything about being American except that he’d been told he was one. Or about America either, except from books and overheard adult conversation. The latter being both tantalizing and gnomic, of course, when your parents are having a cocktail party for Sam Screwsmith, the departing commercial attaché, and you can hear them chortling in their crewcut voices about Ohio and Ike and a new dance they’ve all read about in Newsweek called the Twist. But you’re standing on tiptoe on the landing in your GI Joe pajamas, and you’re trying so hard to understand that you’ve even forgotten to take off that idiotic fez your mom thinks is so darling and always urges you to wear for company. You can hear the call to prayer mixing with the roar of the brand-new jet fighters whose sale your daddy helped swing, nice item in his dossier, and they’re up there ripping the evening sky a new one while your amah tries to get young sir to come to bed and the grownups fix another round of drinks. So then you’re reading Huckleberry Finn by flashlight and feeling deeply puzzled by Huck’s references to Cairo as they get out the old swingband records downstairs and fix another round and talk about which foreign country you’re all going to be posted to next. That was Boyfriend in his youth, which he spent nursing this sort of bonkers, unrequited love affair with the mysterious United States. You know? The way little boys who want to grow up to be astronauts are crazy about the moon. He’d learned to walk on the Champs-Elysées, but he’d have crawled to Virginia. He’d lived in Baghdad—but we were the Arabian Nights.”
The truth is, it was worse than that: “By the rivers of Babylon…”
There in my apartment in the iron-cold Manhattan dark, where I, Mary-Ann, was still bedeviled by the sense that an important piece of furniture was missing, a feeling too indefinable for me to even call it intuition chose this moment to walk on spider legs across the back of my head. It was a spider that talked: “‘All the kids say ‘Daddy’ there,’ “it said. Worsening my confusion, I had just noticed that I hadn’t changed into my jammies before going to bed after all. Instead, I was wearing a red-and-white checked top and blue denim short-shorts, as if I were already on my vacation. But my roommate was still talking:
“About the only thing he knew for sure about us was that we had won World War Two, which he had an inkling had something to do with his present situation. Including his father, of course, who had fought in it, of course. He told me he was nine before he fully grasped that it wasn’t still going on somewhere. Bummed him out more than no Santa Claus. Even in Arlington, he still had a whole shelf in his bedroom closet filled with all the model warplanes and plastic PT boats he’d assembled on his personal desert island; as a result, I soon began expressing a preference for getting my firm young breasts mauled in the basement instead. There was something depressing about seeing those boats and planes over his shoulder and knowing you were getting a hickey from the guy who’d glued them together, especially since about every other time I could feel him coming wnglued in my arms. He knew they were childish things, but he couldn’t just toss them in the trash, you know, because they were sacramental. And so was I, putting me under a slightly unnerving obligation to behave symbolically.”
Having spent some innings personifying America myself, I knew how burdensome this could be. “Boy! Isn’t it just a pain in the neck sometimes?” I sympathetically exclaimed, meanwhile noticing—somehow without special surprise—that the skyline outside the window now showed sixteen church steeples in silhouette. From the casual way they had unveiled themselves, I gathered they would vanish just as casually. Since I was not one to waste time on phenomena over which I evidently had no control, my more immediate preoccupation at the moment was with the last mini-marshmallow in the cocoa I had made for myself at some point, which kept bobbing to the mug’s far rim each time I ducked my mouth to retrieve it.
“Oh, no—you’re not getting away that easy, Mister,” I said. Setting down the mug on the lawn chair’s armrest, I stood up and marched around it, fists to hips, until I had the mini-marshmallow where I wanted it. Then I swiftly crouched and my lips took it by surprise, filling me with satisfaction. “There,” I said, resuming my seat. “It was driving me crazy”
Clutching her own mug on the sofa, my roommate—who was now, I noted, wearing my pajamas—nodded approvingly. “It’s really the only way,” she said. “You can’t think about anything else when you’ve got that white dot taunting you. But anyway: that was Boyfriend. Back in the promised land at last, and convinced in his own head that I was his manifest destiny. Sure we were, oh Christ, a love story for the ages, each other’s one and only, and utterly oblivious to how all this is getting me just a little rattled, here and there around the teacups. Not only because you sort of have to measure up, but because everything was always all about how he felt about how he felt about me, and he didn’t see how that made it all about him. But I didn’t want to be the only person in the world who understood him—and he wanted to be the only person in the world who understood me, which it took me a while to realize was the proof he didn’t.”
I could see how surrendering your virginity to such a person might not be the wisest plan. “So that was why-” I started to say, and stopped. The halt was not volitional, since a blush can contract the throat as well as coloring one’s face, and my eyes and skin alike had just given me the news that I didn’t have a stitch on underneath the all but transparent shortie nightgown I was now wearing.
When I glanced at my roommate, her current apparel could have come straight from the finest lingerie shops in the Rue St. Honoré, although designer labels would have been a serious case of the tail wagging the dog so far as the amount of cloth involved went. But she seemed remarkably unfazed to find her alabaster torso bare between two upper and one lower shreds
of irisdescent silk, above which her eyes added two additional green prizes to her body’s startling invitation—though not to I, Mary-Ann, of course—to play Capture the Flag. As either water began to gurgle like faint music or music began to gurgle like faint water, a palm-frond fan above us gently dipped and rose.
“Yes and no,” she said, “and ultimately yes. But it wasn’t like we didn’t try once. Or twice, depending on how you count.”
“What happened?”
My father had built a doghouse for a dog who ran away, giving his son my first hint that moving back to the States wasn’t going to be all idyll. Since it looked depressing out in the yard and we still talked sometimes about getting another dog, it had been moved down to the basement, but I didn’t take having to step past it as an omen. When I did and saw her on the sofa, all she was wearing was a copy of The Great Gatsby—face down over her pubic moss, and open to page One Thousand and One.
With a sigh, my roommate stretched out on her back, hands clasped over her navel and gazing ceilingward. Only to erupt in giggles:
“Oh, God! The poor fucker came before he even got his shorts off. I was six feet away, Mary-Ann! Lying in more or less this position in his parents’ basement, modestly nude but for my book and with my eyes closed since I’m waiting for my Christmas present, when instead of choirs I hear a strangled little voice say, ‘Oh merde.’ As this marks the first time I’ve gotten him to say anything in French to me, since as soon as he got back to the States he started refusing to speak it, I stubbornly tell myself that he’s just being romantic. But then I open my eyes, and clearly it’s just been whoops-a-daisy time. At which point I take a deep breath, lying modestly nude in his parents’ basement, and gently suggest that we just hold each other for a while.”
“I’ve been there” I, Mary-Ann, said with feeling, remembering the occasional misfires when I hadn’t gotten to stop being a virgin for even a second before I became one again. You’re each holding yourself, and you know it.
“I hadn’t,” she said. “But I didn’t expect him to consider that this might be a little disconcerting for me too. At any rate, it’s kind of an awkward transition. He’s still got to walk those last six feet to get to me, and the look on his face is something only Chuck Jones could do justice to. Still, we manage. Doing my best to act playful about it, I indicate by means of gestures and tugging that maybe he should get rid of his Jockey shorts, since their sticky reminder of the recent unfortunate turn of events probably isn’t going to help things a whole lot. So then we’re lying there naked, both feeling somewhat at a loss for appropriate small talk—he knows that ‘Gee, how’s the debate team going?’ won’t do, and I know that neither will ‘Say, talk French some more’—and pretending we aren’t just counting the minutes and working up our nerve to try again. Even so, I’m doing what I hope is a reasonably good job of acting girlish and quite satisfied with things as they are, since I know it probably isn’t a good idea for him to be thinking too much about how we’re going to try again until we do.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “He thought about it.”
“Oh, yes. So, of course, when we did work up our nerve to try again, he couldn’t have gotten it up with a derrick. And, well—not much of a middle ground here, I can’t help thinking to myself, as he keeps trying to screw his courage to the sticking place and rubbing against me like I’m Aladdin’s lamp, and getting more and more frantic that no genie is in sight. Finally, we kind of collapsed like wet laundry, but it made for a mighty awkward sort of post-non-coital interlude. I mean, this was not someone you could rely on to laugh off the situation. Especially since, at the time, his dad-”
“Hang on a second.” Getting out of my chair, I trotted over in my checked top and short-shorts to give the wall of my room in the hotel on the Rue de Lille a good smack. It quivered glassily. “Hey!” I called out. “Madame Defarge! Cut out the gosh darn knitting out there! I can’t hear myself think, for gosh sakes.” As I sat back down, my roommate—by then pulling a pair of jeans back on—had a droll expression on her face.
“Well, you know-’If at first you don’t succeed,’ “I quoted. And realized as I spoke that this saying had some claim to being my, Mary-Ann’s, motto; though in a somewhat different context, which had had its origins in this very hotel room. Then my apartment reappeared, clamped on three sides by iron-cold Manhattan dark and on the fourth by that exasperating knitting. Something that should have been there still wasn’t.
Now fully dressed again, my roommate shook her head. “You don’t understand. After that, I realized I couldn’t. Not with him. Even if we had been able to manage The Deed, which I assume we could have sooner or later. Shit, it’s not that complicated,” she giggled suddenly. “It really isn’t, you dumb bastard. If it was, we’d all have died out a long time ago.”
“Then why?” I said, blinking in the basement’s yellow light as a nearby washer and dryer began to click and clack. In front of me was a record player, next to which was an LP jacket depicting a monolith standing in a slag heap. Four men with perplexingly long hair appeared to have just relieved themselves on the stone, which was distracting.
Sighing, my roommate drew a meditative finger along the ridge of the sofa from which, since one of us was going to have to sooner or later, she finally swung herself onto her feet and started to collect her clothes. When I finally looked up, she was holding them bunched in front of her and looking back at me with a smile that—if I’d only known it then—was her real gift to me. “Since this is the kind of thing jerks always tell you you’ll laugh about someday,” she said cheerfully, “you want to try knocking ’em for loop and starting now?”
“It meant too much to him,” she said. “And I realized that I didn’t want it to mean that much to anybody. And I absolutely didn’t want it to mean more to him than it did to me, which it now dawned on me had been the problem all along. You know, sometimes it’s the sensitive ones who are the real bullies, and they don’t know it. He didn’t, anyway. But even so, I realized that, basically, he was still a kid—and I wasn’t, which I hadn’t known before.” She smiled. “So: ‘Hello, Prof! In case you haven’t noticed, I’m sixteen, and I’m not sure, but I think these are my boobies. Can you tell me if I’m right?’ “
“My God!” I, Mary-Ann, squealed, having just sat bolt upright in what were, after all, my jammies. “Was that a gunshot? I swear, the big Apple wasn’t anywhere near this dangerous when I moved in.”
“Mackintosh,” my roommate murmured, as if she knew something I didn’t. “But I think it was just an exploding cigar,” and she grinned. “Otherwise, Monsieur—I mean Madame—Defarge would have quit, and you could hear yourself think.”
“Fat chance of that!” I said, jumping up in my corset and high-heeled black boots to give #6’s brick wall another smack.
“It won’t do any good,” my roommate murmured. However, my banging must have changed the light, which incidentally had no evident source that I could see. As it quivered, it made her seem older, for she briefly appeared to be in her forties—or rather, like a luminous sketch of herself in her forties, drawn by a hand whose lack of firsthand information alternated with both a desire to believe and a flickering sense of utter impossibility. But then the tentative age lines vanished, though not the retrospective cast of her expression.
“So you never saw him again?” I asked.
“Boyfriend? I saw him all the time. In school, anyway; Prof’s classroom, too, since we had history together. Even if I had wanted to stop having a relationship with him, which I didn’t, I couldn’t’ve. His idea of being gallant was to turn his suffering into a role—to amuse me, you know, so that my attention wouldn’t have wandered by the time I came back to my senses. I mean, his family was as Catholic as you can get when Mom keeps making fish on Saturday from forgetfulness, but this was when Hollywood had just discovered Jewishness was funny, and since everything was mimicry for the government Martians, he decided that was his favorite fake him: ‘I tried to
assimilate, but you schmatte goyim would never tell me why you act the way you do. Then came the pogrom.’ The pogrom was me. Not a lot of girls at Pickett were getting courted that way—which was what he was doing, of course. He didn’t mind if everybody else thought he was goofy—or Jewish, for that matter—so long as he could still make me laugh.”
“But it didn’t work,” I said.
“No. On top of everything else, his home life was turning into a horrible mess around then—and I did not, not, not want to be the answer to that horrible mess. I mean, help, yes—anything I could do, and he knew it. But answer? Call the fire department, because I’ll just make it worse. Which I’m afraid I did anyway,” she admitted-”but I didn’t mean to.”
“What happened?” I asked, glancing with fascination around the small patch of woods behind the tawny-bricked ranch house where my roommate had lived in high school. Off in the distance, in the skewed perspective of a primitive painting, I could see a fat-pillared mansion on a hill surrounded by Scrabble tiles. Unseen traffic honked. Closer by, a clickety-clacking weathervane was turning in an interesting manner, and I should probably explain that I was keeping my attention on the scenery because I was embarrassed to look at her. She had folded her arms to cover her bare bosom.
“It’s another long story, so brace yourself.” From the sofa, she looked at me quizzically; then glanced at Monsieur Defarge’s wall, which now appeared to be growing somewhat more translucent. More unnervingly, it also seemed to have moved closer. With a good-natured roll of her eyes, my roommate brought them back to my face.
“No. I want to hear it,” I forced my yawning mouth to say, not having a whole lot of choice in the matter. “Anything to distract me from that racket, my gosh! It sounds like fifty sweaters all getting made at once. Les Deux Magots was never this noisy before,” I complained, sipping my café crème, as cups clicked and clacked into saucers all around us and Sartre and de Beauvoir began to bicker at the table next to ours.