Chapter 8
Jane writes: I want to remember in order to keep from being an animal. I’m sure animals have hardly any memory excep — t for those exceptional ones that find their way home, travel hundreds of miles and return after months. If I forget things and sensations, and memories become less exact, I’ll be an animal, like everyone else. It wasn’t that Jane didn’t like animals. Domestic animals meant a kind of servitude she couldn’t stand. Dogs on leashes, having to be walked, a dog’s life.
Jimmy writes: Call me Ishmael. Call me Tom Sawyer. Call me Adam. Call me Roy Rogers. Call me Tarzan. Call me Dick Tracy. Call me Dick.
Jimmy dressed slowly. He had nowhere to go, except to his theater, which was like going nowhere. These mornings he awoke with his hand on his cock, cradling it like a baby. Sometimes it’d be stiff — and sometimes he’d take care of it, like it was his baby, sometimes he’d ignore it, as if it were a pest. It depended on his mood, which today was shabby, like his room, with its few really good antiques saved from the store, with the pictures of Marlene Dietrich over the bed, the ones from The Devil Is a Woman. He’d seen Jane last night and it was as it usually was. They saw two double features and after that it was late or early and he couldn’t take it, her, the situation, anywhere and she couldn’t either. But she acted as if there was nowhere for the situation to go. He said again, You do want to make love with me. And she got out of it as she always did. He didn’t know what he wanted either. Somehow here was this girl he’d known since they were kids, and she was still around. She was convinced their relationship meant something. Not that she’d say something as direct as that. His last year in high school, he’d called her, because he was miserable and she asked him something which he refused to answer, and she got so upset at his silence that he went over to see her and they went for a long drive and he talked more than he ever had to her but that was the last time really that that had happened. He had opened up. Opened up, Jimmy thought, like my antique store, then it closed up, now the cinema.…
He finally put his pants on, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked better, he thought, than he felt. Except for his teeth which he knew were dead giveaways. Jane was more interested in the past than he was. It was kind of a personal treasure to her, her past, and he was included in that. He had his jacket on. He looked at himself again. I suppose I look like a man, he thought, and walked out the door.
Jane lingered on the past, entirely disinterested in something called the future. It had absolutely no meaning to her. Jimmy and his science fiction, his teasing her about walking, no, running, backward in time. Jane telling him that there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future.
Uncle Larry explained again that their mother kicked their father out of the house, which was why, he went on, he slept in his mother’s bed until he was thirteen. “I was the baby of the family, like you, kid,” he said. Larry was sitting opposite her in the Stage Delicatessen, a favorite hangout of his. They ate like demons. Larry was telling her the story of the con men in the forties, during the war, when everyone was out to make a buck. “This guy came to see your father and me, you see, and he said, ‘All these American soldiers have died and there’s a warehouse full of coats, jackets, that can be bought for a penny.’ So your father and I went to meet him in Chicago but he wanted a lot of money right then, up front, you know, and we had to think about it, we said, and he couldn’t wait. So we didn’t lose our shirts on that one.” “Tell me the Scottsdale story again.” Larry lit his cigar and breathed expansively, his big stomach coming up, like the sun, out of his pants. “Yeah, well, for a while I thought I might like to be a cowboy — can you see me and your father as cowboys? — and I was going to a ranch out there, in Arizona. Now, nothing was happening out there back then, nothing. And they offered to sell me the ranch and a lot of land for a song. But your father couldn’t see leaving New York and living on the land. It would have been like, I don’t know, like…” “Like going back to Russia?” Jane asked. “Yeah, leaving the city…Anyway, if we’d have bought that ranch, we’d be sitting pretty. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s got a jewelry shop out there, it’s a watering hole for the rich. But you’ve heard this story a million times, Jane. I feel like I’m telling you a fairy tale.” Jane’s pants felt uncomfortably tight. “I guess it is like a fairy tale to me, about the past.”
Larry popped another Dexamyl and paid the check. Jane asked him if she seemed like a real girl to him. Larry laughed and reminded her that she didn’t have to do anything to be a girl. She was born that way. Jane continued, “But haven’t you ever wondered if you were a boy or a man?” Larry puffed harder and took a fast right to beat the light. “One time,” she told him, ‘“I was sitting with a couple of guys and they said, about the waitress, she’s a real girl.” “Are you still a virgin?” he asked. Jane looked out the window and said yes. “Maybe when you’re not a virgin you’ll feel more like a girl or a woman,” Larry answered. “Can I be more of a girl?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be easier in Samoa,” Larry went on. “I’m not even sure what you’re asking.” He pulled into a space in front of her apartment. Jane bent over to kiss her uncle’s big face, bigger than her father’s, and not as handsome. “You’re my kind of girl, how’s that, sweetheart?” His face was as full as the moon.
I remember, wrote Jane, that summer when I was eight. There was a twelve-year-old boy, very cute, dark hair. He’d just become tall and had stretch marks on his back, right at his waist. I liked his friend better than him; his friend was blond, like Troy Donahue. Or Tab Hunter. The dark-haired one was always with the blond one, around the pool. One day the blond wasn’t around and the dark one came over to me. We went for a walk on the beach. When no one was around he threw me down on the sand and sat on my stomach. He said, Kiss me. I kissed him. He said, No, like this. And he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Then a woman walked by and he threw sand in my face. We were just supposed to be playing. Child’s play. He told me that I looked like his sister. I immediately thought that that was a strange, a queer thing to say, and decided that there was something wrong with him. Something was wrong with him. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d had my first adult kiss, but I knew that’s what it was.
The mirror Sinuway had given her cracked when Jimmy sat on it. Jane looked into it anyway. Jimmy said she was a reliquary at nineteen. A person, she told him, cannot be a reliquary. He told her in his terms a person could. He didn’t care about the definition. “People,” he said, “fill themselves up, with memories, with things.” “You mean the mind is a reliquary.” “Some minds,” he said. “Are you saying that remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts?” “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t think the mind is like that,” Jane said. “And you,” he said, “probably believe that a person can love in unlimited amounts.” “I don’t know,” she said, “I never thought about that.”
People fill in the gaps left by other people, who you loved and who disappeared. Jane had lost friends — lost, she thought, as if I mislaid them. Now that his girlfriend was in New York, she saw less of Felix. But he wasn’t gone. Not lost, at least not yet. His eyes were a cracked blue-grey. She assumed that was from acid. Her mind wandered as her teacher spoke. Old Testament class led by a woman who appeared to have leaped out of that part of the Bible. The idea that the Bible was a written thing, a thing of men, was hard to imagine. What was the impulse they’d felt — A, J, and the other letters who stood for the men — and how had it been carried from one author to another? What were the circumstances? Now the teacher was describing a war and every time she said bloody she laughed and all the students laughed back and she laughed some more. She’s very nervous, Jane thought, Professor Rathmere, an ancient herself, a scholar of the old school, a spinster, a noble spinster. Her life was as incomprehensible to Jane as those of the authors of the Bible. Not as incomprehensible, but relatively so. Relatively. Rathmere was still smiling and laughing and describing battles. Her uncle had slept in the same bed with his mother until he was thirteen.