by Carson, Tom
“Well. He didn’t know about Prof and me—I didn’t know about Prof and me. Not yet. But the two of them went at it hammer and tongs in history class about two days a week. An inverted obsession is still an obsession, and America’s sins were now a way of going on taking America personally. What it was really all about, needless to say, was that he couldn’t get his head screwed on right about his own father—who was the bad-guy CIA, and had been one of those guys running around destabilizing governments and bribing officials and helping to keep dictators propped up, and all those other eagle-in-a-china-shop things we did and do. But Dad was also the brave Marine who’d fought on Iwo Jima, which complicated things a good deal.”
That certainly gave I, Mary-Ann, a start—of not only recognition but an inexplicable suspicion that I had invented her father to cope with mine, of course. For the first time, I found myself mentally blinking at the date on my daddy’s tombstone—and the one on Corporal John G. Egan’s letter to my mother, too. “Well, that does complicate things,” I told my roommate, in a slightly jumpy voice.
“It did for him. I think he was too awed by the Bronze Star in Dad’s dresser drawer to ever figure out that his father had been, maybe, seventeen on Iwo Jima, or wonder what going through that must have done to a seventeen-year-old. But his dad was the kind of guy who’d made up his mind right afterward that he wasn’t ever going to wonder about it, either. I mean, maybe what had frozen in his eyes were tears, but all there was there now was ice. It scared me to look at him, and I don’t think it did a whole lot to relax his son, either.”
“What about his mother?” I asked.
“Oh! Her I liked. She’d been in the Foreign Service before she got married, and I once made myself a mite unpopular with her husband by voicing my frisky curiosity as to why she hadn’t gone on doing that afterward. By the time I knew her, she was one of those friendly blonde women in slightly accidental clothes, whose hands are on a first-name basis with everybody’s arms and shoulders the minute she says hello, and who had concocted a sort of kidding fetish about the Rat Pack to give her personality a focal point. You know, like the birthstone necklace that someone tells you they always wear—meet me, meet my necklace. But she was nice.”
“And beside the point,” I guessed.
“For a lot of women her age, that’s the only place they felt safe calling home,” my roommate said. “She’d even had that little bit of a career, but when I met her, it was: Oh, I didn’t know they had a girls’ debate team at your school.’ No, no, I said, it’s just the debate team. Oh, my. Jack, did you hear that? It’s the debate team.’ But not to rebuke him: more as if she had been put in possession of a fact that she didn’t want to be solely responsible for. She was passing it up the chain of command.”
“And he—your boyfriend—was between a rock and a soft place,” I guessed again. Though both the perception and the manner of articulating it made I, Mary-Ann, feel my old irksome sense of being no more than a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy. “But if he wasn’t your boyfriend anymore, how did you get to be part of the horrible mess? That’s a really strange billboard behind you, by the way.”
“Timing,” my roommate said, as the hands on the Maxwell House clock began to tick and tock. “Just before he and I got together, the Phoenix program had started to stink so bad in the papers that somebody had to be the scapegoat—and his father was one of the gung-ho guys who’d helped set it up, which was another reason it was kind of scary to meet those eyes across a dinner table. Guess who carves the roast! But he fell on his electric knife, because he had just enough seniority to satisfy the Hill and not enough of it for Langley to protect him, and they gave him the boot from the Agency. That’s Washington: the story runs below the fold, and mostly not even on Page One. There’s somebody’s picture, with that expressionless smile they all have in their work photograph—what are they looking at, to be that happy and that vague?—and you know you’re reading an obituary. Between the lines is a small elegy for black passports and the day Suharto shook your hand, and that great time with old Joe Doakes in Rangoon, and a gray panic about making the car payment. Sometimes you went to school with their kid.”
“But they didn’t leave,” I said.
“Oh, no. Nobody does. Nobody goes back to Kansas, unless it’s to Leavenworth. Or back to Rochester, Minnesota, either. His dad was one of the lucky ones. He had friends in Nixon’s re-election campaign. They found him a good job.”
“Wait,” I said, bewildered. “Re-elec-, what are you-”
My roommate’s snicker was grim. “He ended up as one of the White House Plumbers, working for his fellow ex-gyrene Chuck Colson. That’s some career progression, wouldn’t you say—USMC, CIA, CREEP? I’m actually not sure if he would have gone to jail, but I guess he was still one of the lucky ones. He didn’t end up in prison. Right in the middle of Watergate, he ended up in a hospital instead—with terminal cancer, at the age of all of forty-five.”
Between the UN, the Plaza, and the Sherry-Netherland, I, Mary-Ann, did not consider myself uninformed. But to my ears, my roommate had started spouting gibberish, in the iron-cold Manhattan dark. I had no idea what she meant by “Watergate,” and while I could see that working as a plumber, even in the Executive Mansion, might well qualify as a comedown for a white-collar type of fellow, my roommate’s unexpected snobbery annoyed me to my Russell, Kansas, toes—now clad, I noticed, in the red pumps I’d worn to the top of the Tour Eiffel. Nor had I ever heard of any television show such as the “Phoenix” program, which came under the heading of “pacification” in bureaucrat-speak and operated as a CIArun assassination bureau in Vietnam.
“O.K.,” I said, “I’m getting lost here.” Since we had just flown over what I knew perfectly well to be the Lincoln Memorial, which was now passing from sight beneath our helicopter as we dipped toward a large building whose scalloped balconies had an uncanny resemblance to stacked dentures before veering south over an island in what must be the Potomac River, this was not literally true. But I was beginning to feel frustrated.
“Well,” my roommate shouted, as we crept out from underneath our chopper’s clickety-clacking blades, “while his father was in intensive care, he came upon you and Prof—here in the woods behind your house. It was April Fool’s Day, 1974.”
And for me it was still winter; but for you it was already spring. So far as the weather went, you were right; it was so mild that I didn’t even have a sweater on when I ran out of the hospital and past that damned billboard to find you, not so incidentally leaving my mother in the ICU alone. But if she and I tried to treat forgiveness for either my or her behavior at the time on a case-by-case basis, we’d still be at it today.
“He hadn’t known?”
“No. And since you’ve got your top off"—with a yelp, I crossed my wrists over my collarbones-”you can’t really tell him that Prof’s just helping you work up your cards on that year’s debate topic. Which was, by the by, and not without a certain irony, ‘Was Alger Hiss Unjustly Accused?’ “
“Was he?” I asked, shivering in her back yard.
“Well, this was debate. The trick was, if you built the case that the government fiddled the evidence to get him, you were going off on a tangent so far as the judges were concerned,” my roommate explained briskly. “I had all that in my notes, but I surprised myself by deciding that anyone who thought the S.O.B, was innocent was definitely barking up the wrong crucifix. As I say, though, you can’t really pretend that this is the point of your rendezvous—not when Boyfriend has just seen you with Prof’s robust thumbs and index fingers twiddling your bare nipples like two pieces of pink classroom chalk, Mary-Ann.”
“But hadn’t you broken up with him by then?” I asked, relieved that we were back in my apartment, I had my checked top on again, and no strange hands were in sight.
“Try telling him that,” my roommate said from the sofa. “One and only, love story for the ages, so on and so forth. It was a little scary, to be honest�
�he was more like his father than he thought.”
“Well, I’d call that pretty good I’m-going-to-be-messed-up-there-for-a-while stuff,” I said. “But is it really Grade-A I’ll-hate-you-for-the-rest-of-my-life stuff?”
At which she looked blank; then realized what she’d left out. “The reason he’d come looking for me in the first place was to tell me that his father had just died.”
“Oh,” I said.
“April fool, Gil. Too bad, wouldn’t you say? Too bad all around. Well, for everyone but Prof, I guess—he didn’t give a damn.”
Leaning forward, she turned up the volume on the radio. As the elusive tune gained on the knitting or else the knitting paused, I heard this:
“Monday; Monday…”
“What happened afterward?” I asked.
“Well—it wasn’t good. I think he spent a solid week sniffing glue, which he used to do in between PT boats when he was younger, and listening over and over to that record whose cover you were glancing at in such perplexity a while back. It must have been something to be around the house, because Mom was losing herself to the delights of the medicine cabinet. And didn’t much notice or care who saw-”
But then my roommate stopped, because I told you that in confidence, and you aren’t going to repeat it—not even to Mary-Ann. As I say, afterward we found it easier to forgive each other in bulk. I wish Lovey hadn’t let it slip out, but too late now.
“What about later?” I asked, as she apparently wasn’t going to complete the sentence.
“Oh, later was all sorts of things. Later was June, when I found myself—courtesy of Prof—sitting in Doctor Rubicon’s waiting room, a very scared almost-seventeen. When the nurse called my name, my knees were shaking so bad I wasn’t sure I could even stand up.” Lips compressed, she paused to inspect her clamped hands. “But I did, and slowly gathered that, even though it was what I had come there to prevent, somebody was going to get born anyway: me.”
I had just realized what she meant; not, needless to say, that this had ever been a problem I, Mary-Ann, had had to contend with. “Lordy! Did you go to Tijuana, or-”
“Shit, no,” she said. “I went to a clinic in the District. Why would—oh, right. You don’t know yet. Never mind. Anyway: later was college. Gil and I ended up in facing dorms, but of course he was my bitter enemy by then. I’d walk past his window on my way to Commons, and hear him playing Aladdin Sane’ at full blast as if he’d put it on when he saw me coming. It was all Bowie and Lou fucking Reed from freshman to junior year. But I don’t think anything ever really made him happy until the Ramones came along.”
“The who?” I stammered in confusion.
“No. I told you: that was earlier. But then he went away this way, and I went away that way, and we probably both tried real hard to grow up until one day we realized we’d succeeded beyond our wildest dreams at it. That’s that.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“No.” Her smile was rueful, but the way it pinched one side of her face made it look as if she’d winked. “I mean, I can guess—and so, I guess, can he. But we didn’t exactly keep in touch.”
“What did you say his name was?” I asked. “His whole name.”
So she told me, which was how I learned that ex-Corporal John G. Egan—if that had indeed been him I’d seen briskly striding to hoist up a three-year-old, as a bomb went off and a Marlboro bobbed, on the Boulevard St. Germain one day—had kept his promise to stop calling his son “Junior” from then on. But then she re-pronounced the same three syllables she’d just spoken, whoopingly altering the stresses:
“…I mean, the poor son of a bitch!” my roommate was saying, giggling and shaking her head. “You can imagine how long it took to spot that nickname in tenth grade—even though I never called him that,” for which I thank you. “And he even looked a little like Bob Denver, so of course the nickname stuck. No wonder he could hardly stand the show.”
“The show?” I said confusedly, not yet remotely aware that she was that Mary-Ann. Yet in my mind, I’d just re-seen the pointing bystanders near the Pont des Arts, and just re-heard what they were shouting; had re-felt a hand on my shoulder, and had re-looked into green eyes. I knew that this unveiling was connected to that one in some way I couldn’t grasp, but all I wished for at the moment was an exit from this flimsy, endlessly mutable, peculiarly clickety-clacking maze. Sleepily, I longed to find a place whose reality—which I equated, simply and naively and despite everything that Jean-Luc ever tried to teach me, with its constancy—I could count on.
I’d like to be somewhere that never changes, I thought. Rather ironically, in hindsight.
“It’s in my antithesis,” my roommate said, apparently meaning the show, in a tone that suggested she was under an impression of explaining something. “The last chapter, in fact.”
“What’s your antithesis about?” I asked somewhat timidly, my summer program at the Sorbonne having stopped well short of connoisseurship of this type of project. I had heard of theses, but not antitheses.
“Sometimes I wish I had a good short answer to that one,” my roommate said. “But Paul Burns—my adviser—thinks I ought to try to turn it into a book just the same. Want to take a look at the table of contents? It might give you an idea.”
“Sure,” I said, by now completely at sea and guessing that information of any sort would be helpful. Wrong again I was. Pulling a single sheet from her typescript, my roommate passed it over, and I stumbled my way through this:
A Cage Is a Cage Is a Cage
A Master’s Antithesis
By Susan Β. O’Hara
1. The Myth of Purity and the Cult of Hysteria:
From Quentin Compson to The Catcher in the Rye
2. Hung Up on GI Dad:
Find Your Own Big One or Shut Up
3. Let’s Call It “Macho-Chism”:
Why Male Romantics Love to Rescue Women Who Might Have Learned to Swim Instead
4. Dreams in a Funhouse Mirror:
Transcending the Self Inventing the Other; and the Allure of the Lesbian Fantasy
5. Goodbye, Doctor:
Cheesecake as Therapy
6. We’ll Be His Mirror:
The Narcissist (Male) as Superpower (Guess)
7. Pre-Feminist Archetypes Marooned in a Midcentury Eden:
Was That “Uncharted Desert Isle” Paradise—or the Alamo?
“Well?” my roommate said, with a faint smile, as I handed it back. At which point I, Mary-Ann, exploded.
“What do you mean, ‘Well?’ ” I hollered. “None of this makes any sense to me! I am Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas, and briefly of the Sorbonne, and I have no idea what’s going on! You tell me an interminable story about you and your high-school boyfriend, when all I wanted to hear about was how you lost your virginity—and I don’t even know why I felt curious about that! You keep mentioning all these crazy things I haven’t heard of and don’t want to hear of—Phoenix program! Watergate! Nixon’s reelection campaign—for what, dogcatcher? For gosh sakes, he couldn’t even get elected governor of California! Next, you’ll be telling me that Ronald Reagan did, AND GOD KNOWS WHAT-ALL ELSE! I am Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas, and I hardly even know what the CIA is, for gosh sakesl And that’s supposed to be an oldies station, and I have never heard that song in my life until now! THE CLICKETY-CLACKING THROUGH THE DUMB WALL IS DRIVING ME PLUMB NUTS! And you keep talking about a TV show that I never saw in my life—and you get the most infuriating damn smirk on your face when you do! And we’re not DONE, oh no, because THEN you show me what you say is the table of CONTENTS for something called a master’s antithesis, of which I have never heard, and what do you know? BIG surprise coming, folks! I CAN’T MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT EITHER! It reads like one half of a telephone conversation on MARS, and all I can tell you about that is that you start out on Mars sounding like you’re arguing with somebody else on Mars, and then you decide you agree with them on Marsl Well, JIMDANDY! SO WHAT! WH
AT IN HELL DOES ANY OF IT HAVE TO DO WITH ME? AND WHAT MAKES IT WORSE IS THAT THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO ME MY WHOLE LIFE, AND I DON’T KNOW WHY!”
Taking a breath, I looked around.
“Where’s the TV set?” I said.
“Actually,” Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective, told me comfortably, “I think it was the other way around. The argument, I mean—so far as which of us ended up agreeing with the other.” Then, raising her voice and addressing Monsieur Defarge’s increasingly translucent wall, she bafflingly went on: “I didn’t think you’d even remember the day I made you take me to Occoquan.”
Come on. When you told me that you wanted to go, I’d only had my license for a week. It was the first time I’d driven anywhere outside of Arlington, and when we got there, we kept wandering around, because you were so stubbornly convinced that there must be a monument somewhere. But even at that little Tourist Information shack, they didn’t know what you were talking about; all they could give us was directions to the prison. Then, among weeds and whizzing cars, we finally found that sad little plaque from the Fairfax County League of Women Voters, which was and is the only indication of what happened there in 1911, when a few women armed only with their own bodies fought a battle with the U.S. government and won. You sat down on the median strip in your white peasant blouse and jeans and started bawling, and even then I understood you well enough to know it wasn’t grief. It was fury.
Before I could even get started trying to make sense of what my roommate had just said, which I suspected would be a fool’s errand in any case, she had kindly resumed talking to me: “Anyway, you’re right, Mary-Ann. I don’t blame you for getting fed up. Even without the sudden dizzying changes of clothing and scenery, accompanied only by that persistent, annoying clacking sound, this whole conversation would be out of whack. In real life, I think I’m at least fifteen years younger than you are—or than Dawn Wells is, anyway. And if it’s 1964, then feminism isn’t much more thàn a gleam in Betty Friedan’s eye—you know, sort of like a locomotive coming at you in the dark, but from really far away. And to be honest, while I’ve always been fond of you, I don’t think that you and I would ever be roommates, much less the torrid lovers I suspect we briefly were in danger of becoming. But Gil never did get why I always rooted more for Ginger—and also objected to the choice.”