— XX —
He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.
Before his orders had been cut for Fort Ord and FECOM, he was stationed for a brief time at Fort Meade, Maryland. A friend of his, in the Marines at Camp Lejeune, thought it might be a good idea if they met maybe in Baltimore for a weekend of disorderly drunkenness, etc. He said O.K., and they agreed to meet at a bar on Charles Street that they both knew. He got out to the highway on a post bus to hitchhike, in clean and starched Class-A khakis. What a soldier, standing tall!
After ten minutes, a powder-blue Cadillac Coupe deVille rocketed to a halt just past him, and then backed up, white-walls screaming, and he got in. The driver was going to Wilmington, and he’d take him right into fuckin’ Baltimore. He was a man of maybe fifty, sunburned and sweaty and absolutely drunk in that placid way that alcoholics know how to polish to perfection. On the seat, between his legs, was a quart of Gordon’s gin, from which he drank regularly. He’d occasionally light a Pall Mall, at which times he’d steer with one knee, smiling childishly. He maintained an average speed of about eighty-five to ninety miles an hour, looking at the road, or so it seemed, but now and again. At one point, the car hit a patch of gravelly sand and sailed through the summer air, quite beautifully, for some twenty yards, while the driver hooted with pleasure at, perhaps, the sight of death, grinning on the hood. But the Caddy landed gently and on they went, spared for something or other. We know why the soldier was spared, of course.
Incidentally, the driver offered the soldier a drink and a cigarette only after their unexpected flight: maybe he thought they were now true comrades.
— XXI —
It became clear to Larry and Martha that she didn’t, much of the time, really hear what he said to her, even though she responded in what he had thought, for some years, to be a cogent and rational way, if sometimes tangentially or abstractly. Martha absorbed Larry’s words, in some curious way, their rhythms, grammatical structures, and syntagmatic relationships, but the content of these words — assuming that there was, on occasion, “useful” content — were, to Martha, empty of meaning or even allusions to cognate meanings. She made courageous stabs at what he said, tried hard to listen, but her guesses — for that’s what they came to — were, unsurprisingly, most often startlingly wrong. So Martha constructed for their marriage an improvisatory fantasia: what Larry said became what Larry did not say, which, in turn, became what he really said — the latter Martha’s total invention. So their domestic intercourse proceeded, a strange path discoverable only as it was traveled.
That Larry came to accept and then believe that what he had not said was what he had said, and that the converse was also the case, is perhaps, surprising, but only if it is not known that Larry never remembered just what he had said. He was easily convinced that opinions that he did not hold were dear beliefs, and so on. As words left his mouth, they disappeared into oblivion, or, in this case, into Martha’s linguistic workshop. So their marriage moved along, a series of deft disguises, masquerades, and incredible stories, a kind of anthology of make-believe. Both of them came to embrace the world that their conversations created as if it was life itself — it was, in a way, of course, and no worse, really, than that loved by couples who pride themselves on the honesty and candor that most often leads to misery. Their marriage was, as Larry would put it, “swell,” which Martha would call “deeply respectful of each other’s feelings.”
— XXII —
It was a little vanity case, its cloth covering worn and faded with years and use. It had also been subjected to the moisture of the various bathrooms in which she’d kept it since well before they were married. It sported a small, blurred, essentially useless mirror on the inside of its lid, and in its compartments were lipsticks, tweezers, nail files, emery boards, mascara, cuticle scissors, and the like.
On its outer lid there was an inept cartoonish drawing of a little girl in pigtails and a tulip-patterned dress, and a little boy in shorts, holding hands. They wore imbecilic and oddly sinister smiles. Above these figures, in a semicircle, were the words, HANDLOME IL AL HANDLOME DOEL. He read these words every day over the seven years that they’d been married, and in his self-centeredness, and supreme lack of curiosity, he had assumed that this message was some soppy maxim, an insufferable platitude in a bastard language whose phonemes were strangely close to English yet repulsively distant and vulgar.
After he discovered that his wife had been relentlessly unfaithful to him with God knows how many men, friends, acquaintances, pickups, the butcher, the baker — anyone in pants, as they say — and often in their bed—“their” took on a grim comic shimmer in his mind — they separated. Some months later, in a kind of sudden dazzle of lucidity, he read, he understood, he saw clearly the message on the vanity case — of course! Handsome is as handsome does. Of course! He stepped back as if slapped, for the obscurity of the message lay, all those years, in its candor. The message was, this he knew, a counter, a sign for his wife, somehow. He did not know how to put this, or think about this, but the plain message, which to him was unreadable, was her message. She had always been in plain sight, but he had failed to see her, he had dismissed her, he had not read or cared to read that which had been, always, before him.
— XXIII —
The elevator is huge, the size of a small apartment, and is filled with rows of desks, more, it would appear, than can fit into the space. On the rear wall of the elevator is a blackboard with chemical and mathematical symbols scattered across its surface. The door opens and he is on the sixth floor of the building in which he lived just after his divorce. This was his floor and he walks down the corridor, its walls now filthy, smeared with dirt and grease, the tiles underfoot pitted, scarred, and broken. He comes to his door and checks the apartment number, which is, rather strangely, he thinks, 6&6$6 %. But he opens the door.
The apartment is the one he lived in when he was a little boy, complete with the faded brown studio couch, the Philco floor-model radio, and the hammered copper bas-relief reproduction of The Last Supper, with its Latin inscription across the upper border: AMEN DICO VOBIS QUIA UNUS VESTRUM ME TRADITURUS EST. He hears a noise in the kitchen and looks away from the vaguely glowing image on the wall to see his mother standing in the kitchen doorway.
She seems pleased to see him, even though he is clearly startled at her appearance, that of a young woman in a summer pinafore, her blond hair in a loose chignon. He is about to speak to her, when she says, “I hope you’re not hungry, I’m dead.” She is apologetic and he remembers that the reason he is here is to tell her why he wasn’t with her when she died. He knows that he won’t tell her the truth, but decides that a lie is all to the good in this situation, especially with the radio tuned to The Make-Believe Ballroom. She smiles at him and says that it’s all right, she knows that he wanted to be there, and “after all, who wants to travel in the bitter cold to Jersey City?!” She sits on the studio couch and motions for him to sit next to her. “I thought I’d ask you over so that we can listen to the Lux Radio Theater,” she says. “Lana Turner is on tonight. They discovered her in a drugstore, you know.” The radio is playing Bix Beiderbecke’s “Margie,” and he starts to laugh.