Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel

by David Rakoff

  Him, “it’s serious, no joking, your classmates are old.

  And though you’re fifteen, you will still be the best.

  Just wait, they’ll be bug-eyed, bedazzled, impressed.

  And soon you’ll draw bodies just like as you see ’em,

  It’s this class today and tomorrow, museum!

  But Cliffie,” she said—yes she really was shrewd—

  “The models you draw you will draw in the nude.”

  And paying close heed to her dear son’s reflexes,

  She added “Nude men and women, it is both sexes.”

  And there it was! An almost invisible thing

  Like seeing a breeze or a hummingbird’s wing,

  The mention of men had gone straight to his heart

  And her son gave an almost electrical start

  Which caused within her some invisible flower

  To bloom, because dear ones, all knowledge is power.

  Of course she was right, Cliff drew circles around

  All the others, and what’s more, he happily found

  His talent his most pronounced characteristic,

  Not “longhair” or “pansy” or other sadistic

  Abuse, instead he was now deemed “The Professor.”

  And his youth made him safe, he was also confessor:

  Marie, whose red thermos contains scotch and water,

  Barbara who hates that she hates her own daughter,

  Dan’s sorrow masked by the face of a bon vivant,

  Clifford stayed silent like any good confidant.

  Grown-ups, it seemed, were quite blithely un-curious,

  A silence and safety Cliff found quite luxurious

  Their secrets would never expand to a chat.

  He would listen, was young, he could draw, that was that.

  And as for the drawing, he loved the deep rigor

  Demanded of him, he attacked with new vigor

  The honing of skill, lines were finer, less crude

  It registered barely that subjects were nude.

  The occasional breast, due to space, time, and gravity

  Might give a brief shock, but there was no depravity

  Nor any great interest about what was there

  He was frankly relieved for the chevron of hair

  Concealing some deeper and unwanted knowledge,

  Until one day Paul, on the track team at college,

  Posed and put Cliff through the sufferings of Job

  The instant he untied and took off his robe.

  His limbs like the David’s, impossibly fine,

  And lacing just under like flesh-covered twine

  The veins that gave life to this ambulant art,

  Shunting blood from his (sure to be beautiful) heart

  ’Cross the shoulders and down to the backside’s deep cleft,

  To his manhood that hung with imperious heft,

  To the ribs, blue with shade ’neath his chest’s cantilever,

  Cliff was undone as if he’d caught a fever.

  His charcoal went wide in an anarchic scrawl

  Clifford felt hot, cold, then started to fall

  He heard someone laugh, as though this was a game

  Then he blacked out as everyone shouted his name.

  Infirmary couch, with its cool, ox-blood Naugahyde

  Clifford felt boneless and battered and raw inside.

  A verdict passed down that could not be revoked,

  Something was loosed that felt formerly choked;

  A process, unstoppable, once it began

  Like trying to put shaving cream back in its can.

  A vaguely elating but frightening bubble,

  He felt buoyant and free and yet somehow in trouble.

  In excess of caution, they’d summoned his mother

  And asked her, concerned, had there been any other

  Such fevers of late, whether he had been sick,

  “His head hit the floor like a cloth-covered brick.”

  They told her that it had been Paul who had carried him

  (Cliff, dimly conscious, thought they’d said married him).

  Surveying this savior, she said with a stealthy

  Murmur that no one could hear, “He seems healthy.”

  Clifford seemed fine, all were happy, relieved.

  He was no worse for wear, and the others believed

  That the culprit was likely the heat of the room

  To which Clifford’s mother responded with “Hmmm …”

  Children’s illogic can be an exquisitely

  structured mistake. Take Aunt Sally’s visit:

  Each May Clifford’s mother took two weeks off work

  For her sister and niece who would come from New York.

  They’d go meet their train (Cliff inspecting their berth)

  Then back to the house for a fortnight of mirth.

  Albums to leaf through, plus meals to eat. After

  They’d sit on the porch, both exploding with laughter

  From nonsense, like asking “How big were his feet?”

  About a man Sally had seen on the street.

  Everything lilted or swooped with their joking,

  Baby talk always accompanied smoking:

  “Weach fow a Wucky inthtead of a thweet!”

  Eyes bugged and lips smacked. Oh, what a rare treat!

  His mother’s delivery, so usually brusque

  Would, during those visits—especially near dusk—

  Ooze sultry and slower and wooze on the brink

  Of the “ ‘D’-to-‘J’ journey” (where “drink” becomes “jrink”).

  The change wasn’t only confined to their speech:

  Everything that came within Sally’s reach

  Seemed somehow transformed, and largely because

  Of just her, like when the house landed in Oz.

  Prior and post, life could hardly be duller

  But during! The world buzzed in bright Technicolor.

  An adverb of joy, to his six-year-old thinking,

  To “do it ‘Auntsally’ ” meant action plus drinking,

  Ice cream for breakfast and socks never matching!

  Bark like a dog for a fierce tummy-scratching.

  There was none of the darkness that can come with alcohol.

  Just a delightful ignoring of protocol.

  As he grew older, he realized the frivolous

  Nature hid goodness that bordered on chivalrous.

  Sally was truly the bestest of eggs,

  She’d spend hours massaging the chicken-bone legs

  Of Cliff’s unresponsive but darting-eyed father,

  She’d keep up the chatter, like it was no bother

  “There you are, Hiram. As handsome as ever.”

  Her kindness encased in a varnish of clever,

  She’d talcum his feet, or bring in fresh flowers,

  Read him a Photoplay for what seemed like hours.

  “For what seemed like hours,” while always subjective

  Was now so unknowable, flimsy, selective,

  In thrall to the twists of his brain’s involutions

  The cranial mists and synaptic occlusions

  He’d had to contend with since he’d had his stroke,

  Like trying to sculpt something solid from smoke.

  Everything now: liquid Space, rubber Time,

  Tenuous grasps of both reason or rhyme

  Could now trap his words in a Mobius loop,

  He’d spent a whole day thinking “Elegant Soup”

  (Despite that no broth was remotely forthcoming

  And how could it be that his knees would be humming?

  Or buzzing? Bees’ Knees? {Be Sneeze!}). So confusing

  Hours might go by in such meaningless musing.

  Hiram was Hirschl, of that he was certain—

  Though other details were obscured by a curtain

  Of knowledge he no longer knew if he knew,

  So, Hiram wa
s Hirschl, and Hirschl is … you?

  Hirschl came more than three decades before,

  A lead to some landsman outside Baltimore

  Had failed to achieve a reliable connection,

  And so in the Forverts’s classified section,

  From Bozeman, Montana, a dry goods concern:

  “Be ready to work and be willing to learn.”

  And so with no warning and no indication,

  The years concertina’d; expansion, deflation…

  Images atomized, sudden dispersals

  Time barreled forward, loped back through reversals,

  And now, from some darkest recess of his brain

  A vision—long-lost—of The Girl on the Train.

  He’d come upon others while riding the rails

  But no one that young, nor as haunted or frail.

  And hair! Surely reddest hair he ever saw

  He’d briefly thought there was a fire in the straw.

  Out there alone, barely thirteen years old

  Such shaking! And not only due to the cold.

  She knew, in some way, that he meant her no harm

  And silently slid herself into his arms.

  To try to allay any feelings of skittish-

  ness, he rocked her to sleep with an old song in Yiddish.

  “Raisins and almonds,” “A little white goat,”

  She burrowed herself in the depths of his coat.

  Clifford is here now, his good, gentle child,

  He’d love nothing more than to be able to smile,

  To look at the drawings Cliff spread ’cross the bed,

  Be anything but unresponsive, half dead

  Perhaps the return of this strange, red-haired flower

  Is simple nostalgia for when he had power.

  “Let’s let him sleep, Cliff.” Sally turns out the light.

  Hirschl stares forward at nothing all night.

  The only plant Sally’s bright light failed to nourish

  Was Helen, her daughter, too timid to flourish.

  And Sally’s attempts were, quite frankly, misguided,

  Always a cut-up, she joshed and she chided

  And went on and on at uncomfortable length

  Thinking (in error) that Helen had strength

  To be able to laugh, or at least grasp the gist

  That the jests were at scars whose wounds did not exist.

  In this regard, Helen was tone-deaf. Fantastic

  Untruths sounded real, not the least bit sarcastic.

  Ah, but tone deafness shuttles in any direction;

  To Sally, the japing was naught but affection.

  She had no idea that her joking fell flat,

  That calling her slender girl “Porky” and “fat”

  Or just outright fictions like, “Try not to limp,”

  Made Helen curl inward: a cowed, sheepish shrimp.

  Constantly braced for harsh words or cold looks,

  Perpetually hunched, as if carrying books

  With titles like Helen, the Girl No One Wanted.

  Cliff felt the bond of the outcast, the taunted.

  Where he had been strengthened almost to unbreakable

  (By sketching his tormentors’ torments unspeakable)

  She was contrite, too polite, over-dutiful

  Never aware that, in truth, she was beautiful.

  Taller, it’s true, than a girl ought to be,

  Boys, when they looked, called her “Flagpole” or “Tree,”

  But Clifford could see with an eye almost clinical—

  Yet open, affectionate, not at all cynical—

  The classic proportions informing her shape.

  It was all he could do not to grab her and drape

  Her in bedsheets as toga, and once he had made

  That, he’d ringlet her hair with a daub of pomade.

  And Helen would let him, though she, two years older,

  Felt Clifford was wiser than she, he was bolder,

  With deeply held views on all manner of things:

  Mustard (No!), Claude Monet (Yes!), cabbages, kings.

  When they were young, they’d begun each trip shyly—

  Regarding the other suspiciously, slyly—

  Until, not unlike the way both of their mothers

  Resumed their old bond, quite impervious to others,

  By Day Two, to see them, it would have seemed quibbling

  To call them just cousins. They acted like siblings.

  And though his allegiance was chief to his art

  She felt he had only her interests at heart.

  She never felt his deep absorption neglect, nor

  Ever stopped feeling he was her protector.

  If Clifford proposed it, she’d echo with “Me, too!”

  To things she’d have otherwise never agreed to.

  To wit: behind privets and glinting like jewels

  Lay largely unguarded cerulean pools.

  All maintained perfectly, pristine as new,

  Temptingly empty, impossibly blue.

  The owners, at country homes up in the mountains,

  Cared little, it seemed, for the frothing of fountains

  Nor for the colonnades, marble, mosaic

  (A rectangle would have been far too prosaic),

  The plaster Poseidons on acanthus plinths,

  Friezes aswirl with young mermaids and nymphs

  All lay unnoticed, unloved, un-enjoyed,

  How could they not but dive into this void?

  Daily—when either was seized by the whim—

  They’d slip through the hedges and go for a swim.

  Make free with the towels in poolside cabanas,

  And eat from the trees: mangoes, loquats, bananas.

  One time they’d both scrambled up into trees

  And stayed well concealed ’til the old Japanese

  Man who tended the grounds had passed by out of sight.

  Helen had never felt such thrilling fright.

  She’d all but stopped breathing, so’s not to arouse

  The gardener’s gaze up into the green boughs.

  The coast clear, she clambered to earth and then joined

  Clifford, his arms full of fruit he’d purloined.

  “Take these,” he said, filling her arms with the loot

  That he’d pulled from the branches. Now laden with fruit,

  Clutching them all to her rubberized bodice

  Clifford regarded her, whispering “Goddess.”

  The bright orange globes did their best to defeat her,

  And fall from the grasp of their poolside Demeter.

  “Cliffie, they’re dropping, there must be a dozen …”

  She started to say, but was stopped by her cousin

  With a quietly stern admonition, “Don’t talk, I

  Just need to compose you.” His black Brownie Hawkeye

  The charm, like a mesmerist’s watch on a chain

  Helen fell silent and wondered again

  How Clifford could somehow just know how to take light

  And coax magic into a box of black Bakelite.

  Moving her under an arch of white flowers

  Artist and muse worked together for hours.

  Dismissing some poses as “striving for cute,”

  Clifford said softly, “Now roll down your suit.”

  He gave her a couple of oranges, “Here.”

  And showed her just how she should hold up each sphere.

  His voice held no sneer nor a trace of a jest.

  She trusted him fully that baring her chest

  Would make the best pictures. She laughed when she saw

  The inside-out breasts of the cups of the bra.

  “Keep laughing,” he said, didn’t need to ask twice;

  She felt so secure and the breeze felt so nice.

  They worked thirty minutes or so, ’til the sun

  Started to set, at which Clifford said, “Done.”

&nbs
p; Back through the hedge to the house where they let

  Sally juice the “breasts” for crêpes suzette.

  Ten a.m. in December in midtown Manhattan,

  Helen sits at her desk in a dress of blue satin.

  A pearl among swine, so at odds with the bustling

  Of mid-morning business, her taffeta’s rustling.

  A vision of cocktails in coffee-break light.

  She is garbed for the company party that night.

  It is too far a trek out to Avenue J,

  Just to go home to change at the end of the day,

  So she sits, doing work, ignoring the mounting

  Whispers and jokes, led by Kay in Accounting.

  She’s aware that her dress makes the other girls laugh

  As they congregate over the mimeograph.

  Helen gamely endures not the kindest of stares,

  With aplomb, for you see, Helen no longer cares.

  Well, that’s mostly the truth. Though some doubts still impinge

  Each year ’round Thanksgiving, an unwelcome twinge

  Starts to niggle and rankle and by mid-December

  She wonders anew, Do they all still remember?

  Helen turns a blind eye to the smirks and the winks.

  Surely it’s not still about that, she thinks.

  Time’s gone by since that silly, regrettable business

  When she became known as The Girl Who Ruined Christmas.

  Helen harbors the hope that the passing five years

  Have made folks forget both the vomit and tears

  And throwing of glassware and drunken oration,

  That half-hour tirade of recrimination

  Where, feeling misused, she had got pretty plastered,

  And named His name publicly, called him a bastard.

  The details are fuzzy, though others have told her

  She insulted this one and cried on that shoulder,

  Then lurched ’round the ballroom, all pitching and weaving

  And ended the night in the ladies’ lounge, heaving.

  How had it begun, before things all turned rotten?

  She can pinpoint the day, she has never forgotten