Gerard turns and beams. His eye wanders off to one side like a haywire satellite. “Thanks for coming. Let’s walk.” He takes my arm and we march loudly off down the corridor to the left. It’s one of those hallways with a long glass wall on one side. Outside it’s night and bushes. “I just need someone to pace with,” says Gerard, and our legs are close, brushing and in step, identical, like pals, like siblings. “Two siamese twins,” says Gerard. “Tragically joined at the hip.”
“I like this,” I say. “I’m absconding with the leading man. I think it’s something that with a little practice I could learn to do very well.” Gerard isn’t really listening. He seems nervous, a slight rose flush behind his forehead and eyes. “Are you nervous?” I ask. “You don’t really seem nervous.”
“There’s a guy in the audience from City Opera. It might be nice to impress him, you know, shake his hand backstage, all that gladhanding stuff. He’s got white hair and is wearing a red turtleneck — I saw him from the stage. Did you happen to notice him?”
“No.”
Gerard looks at me, clearly tense, this the ravage of ambition. “You think this is all bush league, don’t you?”
“No, of course not, Gerard.”
“Where’s my rose?” he grins.
“Damn. I forgot it. I’m sorry.” We have stopped walking. We are both looking at each other’s feet.
“Well,” says Gerard, looking up, hopeful as a fisherman. “I still say this is better than the Ramada. What’s wrong with your face?”
“Thanks a lot, Gerard.”
“No, I mean your cheek. It’s swollen.”
“My wisdom was removed. I told you about that.”
“That’s right,” he smiles. “Now I remember. You taking funny pills?”
“Yeah, but they’re never funny enough. This morning I told my students they were responsible for the Holocaust. They never looked up, just wrote it in their notebooks. I’ll buy you a drink after you kill that bitch Carmen.”
“I’ll need one,” he sighs, and then we walk back up the corridor. When we get to the stage door, the corridor is emptying and I take Gerard by the elbow and say, “Well, good luck!”
“I don’t believe in luck,” he says. “I believe in miracles.” He stops and tucks in his shirt. “That’s just part of my personality.”
The chorus is really the weakest element. It wobbles around and gets way ahead of the pianist. Gerard’s voice, for the most part, is clear and strong. He’s a fairly confident Don José and rarely looks at the score, until a bad note undoes him. I can see him redden, hesitate, lose his place, flounder back into his book.
Nonetheless, everyone loves the Flower Song, that song of the not-forgotten rose.
Gerard keeps insisting on buying the drinks. I have to fight and argue and end up having to say belligerent-sounding things to the waitress, who refuses to run a tab. “If I ever have kids,” he says, “I’m going to name them Methyl and Ethyl.” He toasts and swigs.
Something’s tired between Gerard and me. It’s as if we have disappointed each other into irritation; we have witnessed the other’s failures for too long, and it has made us cranky.
“You really thought it was okay?” asks Gerard again.
“Yes, Gerard, I thought it was okay.” I am on the verge of a sigh or a snap or a shout.
We try speaking of other things, of the decline of the world, how humanity is done for, how Gerard has been seeing Darrel around town with another woman, how Gerard thought I should know, and how Gerard seems a little too eager to tell me, how Gerard drinks way too much, and how Gerard felt our goddamned friendship was about truth and honesty, and how some things are better not to know or tell like for instance the man in the red turtleneck who left early because the whole production was a joke how’s honesty if you like honesty. And how I’m so volatile, and how it is that all this is happening, how I shouldn’t have to sit and listen to some drunk musician tell me about Darrel screwing around, and how sorry Gerard is, he really shouldn’t have said anything he just thought it would be for the best, and how Gerard is just a washed-up, no-talent Huck Finn or should we say Hack lounge act playing at everything and just because he’s drunk he’s pretending he’s hurt, don’t pretend you’re hurt, for godsakes he should just drink himself to death, and how I just don’t have the character for alcohol, it requires too much sweetness and commitment, and how Gerard should just go fuck himself, and how so should I.
And how did this happen? I never know how anything happens.
In the student union snack bar the teacher was scanning student blank verse — something different from blank student verse, she thought, but not that different. She looked up, gazed abstractedly out the window at the walk, that silly artificial promenade, that highway of undergraduate love, of sweet constitutionals. And then a student of hers named Darrel was suddenly strolling by out there with someone young and pretty and their bodies were touching, bowed slightly toward one another, and they drank from cans of Diet Pepsi as they walked. Perhaps they were having some political or intellectual discussion, thought the teacher. Perhaps this woman was a Marxist. You could always tell a Marxist: They wore the best clothes.
The teacher turned her gaze away, stared back down at the tabletop, near the edge, at something scratched into the wood. DROP ACID, it said. And then beneath it, in different writing, NO, TAKE IT PASS-FAIL.
· · ·
I have always wanted to grow old with someone, to be with someone through all of life, to lie under an electric blanket together, in the daytime, and compare operations.
Darrel is wearing a t-shirt that says APOCALYPSE PRETTY SOON. He places his hand on my crotch. “Nice place ya got here,” he says. I don’t smile. We’ve been talking about his future and now he’s trying to change the subject. I maneuver away, squirm on the sofa.
“Don’t change the subject,” I say. “Look, I want to talk about this. I don’t get it: You truly want to go to dental school?” This is what he’s just told me again. He’s smiling.
“Yeah, I like the chairs. Those dentist chairs. They’re like rocket ships.”
“But you don’t get to sit in them. That’s the other guy.” The electric chair, I don’t tell him, was invented by a dentist. “You really want to be a dentist.”
“Yes, eventually.” He stiffens, defensive, his smile vanished. I look for his lie look, his lie face, but can’t seem to spot it. “I’m thinking of becoming an orthodontist. I’ve told you this before, Benna.”
But it’s an absurdity that doesn’t register with me. Here we are on the god-knows-what anniversary of John Lennon’s death and Darrel is saying he wants to be an orthodontist. Maybe I am hearing things wrong. That sometimes happens this time of year: People hear things wrong. The night John Lennon died I was standing in a deli and someone burst in and shouted, “Guess who’s been shot? Jack Lemmon!”
These things happen this week in December. Look at the screw-up at Pearl Harbor. Darrel has meant something else all along. Surely he doesn’t want to become a jeweler of teeth, a bruiser of gums. It’s a joke. “Yeah, right,” I laugh. “I can see you as an orthodontist.”
Darrel looks suddenly irritated, screws up his leathery face into a fist, bunched like one of those soft handbags. “What, isn’t that good enough for you, Benna? Upward mobility for the oppressed? Is that just not angry enough for you?”
It’s true. That’s what I want for Darrel, from Darrel. He should be angry like Huey Newton. Or in a wheelchair making speeches, like Jon Voight.