When she glanced at him, he was surprised at the intensity of bitterness he saw in her face. “I have a knack,” she said with an attempt at self-irony, “for falling in love with the wrong men.” A wry smile. “I shouldn’t have told you that, but I think you have the idea that because I pretend to take things easy I have no feelings.” Her child face shone, damp-eyed.
“How old are you again?” he asked. “Are you twenty-one or twenty-two?”
“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said. Having said more than she meant to, she picked up her scarf and purse from the couch, in a hurry to get away. “I’ll be twenty-three in ten days,” she added. “You don’t remember anything I tell you. Good night, Peter.”
“If you wait a few seconds I’ll drive you home.”
“I’d rather take the subway, if you don’t mind,” she said, looking through her purse for a token, not finding any.
“Let me drive you home,” he said.
“No. I don’t want you to.”
“I’m grateful to you for taking care of me,” he said, standing up like a spectator at a game, the ache in his back a recollection of itself. “I feel much better now.”
“I feel much worse,” she said. Then, looking at the door:
“I didn’t mean that. Peter?” Turning to him.
“Yeah?”
“Did you know how I felt about you?”
He was standing next to her, listening to the machinery in his back. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“You should have,” she said. “Why did you think I came here tonight? Why do you think I spend so much time with you? I can’t believe that you didn’t know.”
What could he say? That it seemed inconceivable to him that a young and beautiful girl could be seriously interested in him, a man who had done nothing with his life of account, nothing he could be proud of. It seemed presumption to him to believe even now, even in the face of her confession, that Diane was in love with him. “Why do you spend so much time with me?” he wanted to know.
“God knows,” she said and bolted, leaving the door, for some reason, open behind her. Did she want him to follow? How could he be sure? Indecision, no friend of his, held him back.
When he finally made up his mind to go after her, she had just caught the elevator. He watched the indicators light up (5. ….4. ….3…), then he went after her down the stairs, racing the elevator. The faster he scrambled down the steps, the less aware he was of the jabbing pains in his back, and he had the feeling as he ran that if he went fast enough—a little nervous about the risk—he could escape his disabilities, outdistance them.
It took a while for him to discover her—shaken by the sense at first that he had lost her—Diane sitting, almost invisible, in a semi-lit corner of the lobby next to a potted plant, crying silently.
She didn’t notice him until he was standing directly over her. “Hello, jerk,” he said, still out of breath. “I’ve come to walk you to the station.”
“All right,” she said sullenly, grudged him, behind his back, a smile.
They walked the long block to Broadway in silence. It reminded him of times when he was a kid (eighteen or nineteen at most), taking a girl home after a date and having nothing to say to her, anxious about how he would approach her at the door for a kiss—the ambition of his desires slighter then, mostly symbolic. Out of regret for the failures of his youth—too late perhaps to undo them—he reached over and took Diane’s hand. She pressed it to her side, looked up at him, spying on his face, her eyes dark, noncommittal. Like a kid, he had moments with Diane—this one of them—when he was in awe of her beauty. As they walked he remembered a time with Lois, walking with her, a few days after their marriage—it had ended in a fight. The memory pained him.
“I’m not such a baby,” she said in her songlike child’s voice, looking at him, it seemed (how could he know in the dark?), with something like wonder.
The idea of it came almost as an aftermath of the act. The face was there, glistening, ingenuous as a child’s, tilted toward him. What else could he do? In the street light of Broadway and Seventy-third Street, Peter leaned over and kissed her, her face, meaning it only as a gesture, the convention of a kiss good-night. A connection with the past.
The past or the future? Diane held on to him, and with unexpected fervor—what had he expected?—kissed his face, kept kissing him, face, eyes, mouth—Peter standing there, an interested and incredulous bystander—the street lamp almost like a spotlight illuminating them. What was hard for him to believe was that all this affection, all of it, was meant for him. He had a sense of being an impostor, of impersonating the man he hadn’t yet become—the new Becker, the newer, the newest. His back, which knew him better than he knew himself, kept accounts.
“Talk to me, Peter,” she said.
It was hard for him to talk. “You’re lovely,” he said, which was only part of what he meant. He studied her face, amazed at it.
“Will you be good to me?” she wanted to know, hugging him. “Will you, Peter?” Then, without waiting for an answer, Diane ran down the street, away from him, turning around after a while to look back, waving, backing into someone, nearly falling, brushing hair out of her eyes, finally descending into the darkness of the subway. She had hardly gone and he missed her. What was the matter with him? He had enough trouble keeping in touch with the past without having to revise his commitment to the present. Watch yourself, Becker, something warned him. Watch where you’re going.
Restless, too exhilarated to go right home, he walked across Seventy-second Street to the park. It was a warm evening—the benches along Central Park West lined with people. The desolation of their faces—their vigil not to see—touched and frightened him. The eyes of so many of them seemed like prisoners, humiliated at the compromise of their lives, intent impassively on revenge. A crowd had gathered in a semicircle on the next corner. Peter, who had been walking slowly to protect his back, quickened his pace, curious to see what was going on. Two boys, both Negroes, were wrestling, the heavier of the two had pinned the other to the ground, and was now banging his head against the sidewalk. The crowd, mostly white, watched impassively. A few shouted encouragement to the boy on the bottom. “Why doesn’t someone break it up?” Peter asked. The man next to him shrugged. “You got a good fight to watch, mister. Don’t complain.” The smaller boy had gotten his knee in the bigger one’s groin and had succeeded in turning him over. The man next to Peter cheered. “I love an underdog,” he said. “It’s the American way—to love an underdog.” In a moment the big one was on top again, his knee in the smaller boy’s stomach. Peter stood with the crowd for a while, more out of lethargy than will, until his back began to throb, and then, with the caution of a man who had a frightening amount to lose, he made his way home. He didn’t interfere, he told himself, because Phil was arriving tomorrow, and his obligation, his first obligation, was to his son. Who could believe it? In some ways, he decided, he liked the old Becker (hard to tell them apart sometimes without a score card for a memory) better than the new.
As he got out of the elevator, he heard the ringing of a phone and sensed—though how could he be sure?—that it was coming from his apartment. It took him a while to find his key, to get it out of his pocket, to get it into the lock, to get the door opened. It took a while. And the more he hurried, the longer it seemed to take—his back as burdensome now as it had been at its worst. Just as he got the door open, the ringing stopped. Could he know what he had lost? He sat down, cautious of himself, in the stiff-backed leather chair and waited with dim and undefined prospect for the phone to ring again. Narrowing down the possibilities, Peter decided that it was Diane who had called, or possibly Lois, or Oscar Patton, or even—it was not impossible—his son Phil. It could even have been a wrong number. Not knowing was always worse for Peter than knowing the worst. If the call had been important, he decided, making an effort to keep himself awake, the phone would most likely ring again, but it didn’t. Or if it
did, he had no recollection of it in his dreams.
If he remembered anything, it was the thumping on his door, a series of thunderous knocks that actually seemed to shake the walls of the room. As Peter went to answer it, the door cracked loose from its hinges, capsized murderously in front of him a few inches from his feet.
“I didn’t mean it, Pop,” someone said, a huge boy lumbering in. (Peter, who was six foot two himself, came up to the boy’s chin.) “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”
Pop? Peter looked around to see what the boy’s father was like—another, even larger monster perhaps—but there was no one else there.
“Phil?”
“Pop.” They embraced, the son almost crushing the father with his enormous arms. Why hadn’t his in-laws told him that the boy was almost a giant, almost a freak of a creature, too big to be kept in a New York apartment? (He would do his best, he vowed, to make room for his son.)
There was a party going on in his living room, dancing and drinking, a couple on the couch making love with their clothes on. He was embarrassed to bring the boy in; enormous as he was, he was only thirteen, an innocent.
“Everyone will have to go home now,” he announced in a loud voice. Lois, dancing with Herbie, waved to him. No one else seemed to notice him. “The party is over,” he yelled. Phil stood next to him, staring, mouth agape, his tongue hanging out, lolling like a dog’s.
“Let’s go to a movie, Phil. How about a movie, boy?” Peter tugged at his son’s arm.
His jaw hanging as though dislodged, Phil continued to stare blankly ahead of him. One of the girls, a secretary from Peter’s office, was doing a strip on an improvised stage in the center of the living room, the others standing in a circle around her, clapping, chanting: “Shake those tits, rock that ass.” It was no place for a young boy.
Peter pleaded with Lois for help. “What do you want me to do?” she said. “He’s not my son. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with him, Peter? He looks rabid to me. When I was a kid we had a dog that got like that and we had to gas him.”
“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Peter insisted. “He’s just big for his age. If he were smaller, you’d think his behavior was perfectly normal.”
The boy was guffawing at something.
“Phil, what are you laughing at? Cut it out. Everyone’s looking at you. Cut it out.”
“You may have to gas him,” Lois said.
“What are you saying? It’s just that he’s probably not used to crowds. Come on, Phil. Let’s get out of here. Come on, son.”
Diane went by. Like a sleepwalker, his arms out in front of him, Phil lumbered after her, knocking over, not meaning to, whoever was in his way. Peter couldn’t watch.
Someone screamed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lois said, “before the police come.”
“What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s just trampled a little girl,” someone said, “and all she did, the little thing, was offer him a flower.”
“Phil,” Peter called. “Phil, come here.”
“They got him now,” the man next to him said—Peter remembered him as the fight fan from the park. “They’ll teach the boy that in this country of ours you got to make a fair fight. Oh, if only Dempsey were still around, or Willard, or any of the good old boys …”
When Peter tried to get to the boy, no longer able to see him, Lois held him back. “That’s a mean crowd, Peter. If I were you I wouldn’t get too close, and whatever you do, don’t let them know he’s a friend of yours.”
Friend? Peter pushed his way into the crowd. “Let me through,” he yelled, knocking people out of his way, someone always in front of him blocking his view. One of the men he had knocked down, he noticed, was his father. “Sorry,” he said, “but my son’s in there somewhere.”
“My son too,” the old man said. “What’s his name? Maybe we got the same son.”
“Pop,” Phil called as though from a long way off, a child’s frightened voice. “Don’t let them hurt me.”
“I’m coming, Phil,” he called back. He had tears in his throat for his son. “Leave the boy alone,” he tried to say, his voice trapped in his throat. “I’ll put in the hospital the next man who touches my son.”
“Fuck off, buddy.” Someone tripped him.
“Pop …” The voice much fainter than before. “Pop …” Fainter still. It was an agony to listen.
As soon as Peter got to his feet, he was tripped again. Two policemen were sitting on him, one holding down his hands, the other his feet.
“I haven’t had so much fun,” the fatter of the two said, “since I shot my own son for running away.”
“I know what you mean,” the other said. “Kids nowadays are spoiled silly by their parents.”
Somehow Peter got up. The crowd had dispersed and he saw clearly that his son was dead, a huge formless carrion, vultures gnawing at the flesh, a dead girl lying next to him, a woman in black crying over the bodies.
“I’m responsible,” he announced, “but I’m innocent.” He tried to flee, though there was nowhere to go, a network of police surrounding him.
He leaped toward the ceiling. Shots. A bullet catching him in the back. He kept going, his hands out in front of him like a diver. The ceiling yielded, and suddenly he was outside, free of everything, flying. The air like water. The only problem was: Which way to fly? And did it matter? There seemed to be too many choices and no means of making a choice. No place he wanted to go. It struck him that his son Phil was dead, Diane also perhaps. He continued to fly straight up (or was it down?)—imprisoned, in his freedom, by regret. “Forgive me, Phil,” he said. “Forgive me, Father.” He had a feeling that no matter how far he flew he would never arrive anywhere. It was what he remembered first—the first and last of his knowledge—when he awoke.
In the morning (his back a little better—a few tame, if uncharted, pains all that remained) Peter received a telegram from his son.
JUNE 28—
BAD SUMMER COLD. REGRET CAN’T COME TOMORROW, HAVE FEVER. COUGHING AND SORE THROAT, WILL TRY TO COME SOON. REALLY SORRY.
YOUR SON PHILIP
Peter was disappointed. Yet at the same time—he couldn’t deny it—the telegram was in its way a reprieve, a stay of execution. For all the sense of relief it gave him, he regretted the postponement and began to believe, on his third close reading of the telegram, that possibly Phil would not come at all now, that the “bad summer cold” was merely a tactful way of putting him off. On the fourth reading he was able to believe in the bad cold—too obvious a choice of excuse to be a lie. Thinking about it, however, Peter conceived of the cold (like the soreness in his own back) as a psychological convenience, the body saving the spirit from the guilt of deceit. The telegram obsessed him. Worse than not knowing the boy’s real motive for not coming was the sense Peter had that he himself had somehow unwished the boy’s arrival—a man with a gift for undoing himself. It was an extension of his theory about his own life, that his failure was a fulfillment of the desire not to have, a triumph of metaphysical will over physiological possibility—all of it (all he knew) in his travel book. A godsend perhaps: he would use the two weeks of vacation he had taken to spend with his son, in order to work some more on the book—the book for his son. The book to be a better father than the man writing it. The idea gave him solace. Yet his dreams, the one about his son most of all, continued to worry him—a hellish prophecy from the nightmare of his secret will. Avoid prophecies, he told himself. Don’t kill your father. Stay clear of your son.
| 5 |
His son. It was something to conjure with. Peter was waiting for the boy to return from the men’s room, standing guard like a deflocked shepherd over two new bought-for-the-trip-looking brown leather valises. He didn’t mind waiting, but why had the boy run off as soon as they had met, before he had even had a chance to ask him how he was? There were toilets on the plane, weren’t there? He worried that
the boy had been embarrassed by the effusiveness of his greeting. A thirteen-year-old boy brought up in Ohio wasn’t used to being hugged in public, he guessed.
“Phil!” he called. The boy had come out of the bathroom, and apparently confused, was heading in the wrong direction. “Phil!” An announcement came over the loudspeaker. Some flight from the West Coast had been held up because of bad weather; another flight (from Miami) had just arrived at Gate B. “Philly!” he yelled across the enormous waiting room, panicked that he would lose him. An old man looked into Peter’s face to see if by some chance the call had been for him; the boy, still wandering at the other end of the room, gave no indication that he had heard. “Philly,” he called again, “down here!” The boy looked up, but then, as if mistaking the direction of the voice, turned into another corridor. His son out of sight, Peter went after him. The boy was talking to a policeman, on the verge of tears it seemed, when Peter reached him.
“That’s all right, officer. I’m …” he started to say when he realized that the boy, this boy he had come after, was not his son, was smaller and younger than Phil. He turned.
The policeman detained him. “Do you know this little guy?” he said.
“It was a mistake,” Peter said. “I have to find …” Looking around for Phil—his son missing, lost.
“Is this your uncle?” the policeman asked the boy, his hand like a weight still on Peter’s shoulder.
The boy looked at him closely, his reedy eyes baleful, tremulously courageous in the face of deception and disappointment. “Who said he was?” the boy said.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I thought you were my son. The thing is, I haven’t seen him in a number of years.” The boy looked away.
“C’mon, Herb,” the policeman said to the boy. “We’ll page your uncle on the loudspeaker.”
Peter retraced his steps in a hurry, Phil waiting for him disconsolately at the place of their separation. “My bags are gone, Dad,” he said.
A Man to Conjure With Page 26