“Dad, can you tell me—”
“Keep your voice down, please. You speak of privilege, but I’d like to know what gives you the privilege to be a foulmouth?”
For the Lewins, civility is the essence of being human. It is what makes communication possible. The absence of civility disturbs them because it can mean anything from rudeness at a table to suicide. Or genocide. I won’t go into this now in any detail but it is bound up with Robert Lewin’s love of the law. He knows the law is vulnerable to the mentality of the people who live by it, but he is concerned to see it evolve toward perfection. He is concerned to be moral. My mother too: she is a refugee, hunted by the Nazis all across Europe as a kid. Who am I to claim privilege by my suffering? After all they’ve done, and never once holding it up to me, why am I so quick to shame them?
“He can’t even get her out of there!” I tell them. “He can’t get her out of a public asylum for wards of the state and bums they pick up off the street.”
“Another twenty-four hours in what happens to be one of the best facilities in the East is not going to hurt your sister,” Duberstein says coolly. “I had a long talk with one of the staff people who, as it happens, took his residency at Jacobi when I was there. It’s a mistake that they admitted her. But the situation is under control.”
“He makes it sound like a personal triumph,”
“Danny.” My mother takes a handkerchief out of her pocketbook. “We’re all under a strain. Please, Danny.”
Duberstein says: “Why do you resent anyone who tries to help Susan?” He looks keenly at me as befits his question.
“Screw off, Doc. Go find your golf clubs and play a round with Dwight David Eisenhower.” It is a witless, anachronistic retort that astonishes even me. I must be on the edge. Everyone is pale. Even the baby has felt the current. He’s begun to cry. I leave the table.
Daniel leaving the Howard Johnson’s dining room perceived walking ahead of him, toward the crowd of people waiting for a table, the draped aqua ass of the hostess. And a regal ass it was, well girdled, and set on a pair of still-young legs. Her golden beehive bobbed on her neck and wisps of untucked hair at its base intimated dirty times for the lucky dong who happened to be there when all that hair came down. Her arm was raised, and for a moment Daniel thought she made the peace sign with her fingers. But it was a table for two.
Daniel made his way through the hungry families standing on tiptoe. Kids swarmed in front of the candy display. Popcorn lay in the carpet. In the men’s room all the crappers but two required a coin in the slot. On the other side of this wall, Susan had opened her veins and stood over the toilet until she fainted. He tried to get the picture. The sound of fountaining urinals distracted him. He noted on the wall a dispenser which, for twenty-five cents, offered the discriminating customer the choice of a pre-moistened soap-impregnated paper hanky, or a sanitized pocket comb, or a compass from Hong Kong in the form of an automobile tire, or two plastic dog magnets, one black, one white, stuck together in the pack by their magnetized feet.
He went outside. People eating ice-cream cones drifted through the parking lot. A stout woman in a housedress walked a bulldog from the tires of one car to the tires of another. At the gas pumps cars were waiting on line. The sun was out now, late in the afternoon, and the air was close and full of fumes. The thing is, Robert and Lise Lewin do not belong in highway service stops. It is misleading to show them out of their element. Especially when they are not feeling their best.
Daniel walked between the rows of parked cars. He found the Volvo. It was black and covered with a layer of grit. It was parked between an old station wagon, low on its springs with kids climbing in and out of the back, and a blue Futura convertible in which a teenage girl in shorts and halter was rolling her hair in curlers, the rear-view mirror tilted so that she could see what she was doing. Daniel took the keys out of his pocket. He felt that it would be obvious to this girl in the convertible and these children in the station wagon that he was not the owner of the Volvo. Through the window he saw on the seat beside the driver’s seat a plaid suitcase. And next to it, half hidden, the celluloid and cardboard wrapping for a pack of Gillette Super Stainless blades. This describes the picture the moment before Daniel got the picture. To be just, he had started something in the restaurant so as to get to Susan’s car. He had needed to see the car. The feeling that crept upon me was of being summoned. They’re still fucking us. That somehow it wasn’t the old pain-burn across Susan’s eyes that was important, or the brand-new wreckage of someone who has tried something devastating and has failed, no, nor that grieving for her or being in agony for her agony could matter, or believing that some of the force that propelled her razor was supplied by me — none of this mattered — or imagining, even, the scene in its details — locking the stall door, taking out a fresh Gillette Super Stainless blade, slicing veins, holding the opened veins over a toilet bowl in a public bathroom, fainting from loss of blood or courage or both, perhaps hearing a scream from a stout lady in a housedress, or a child, and, in a coma, perceiving the door as it opens, the lady in the blond beehive hairdo with the master key attached to a wooden handle holding up her fingers — V for Victory, or V for Peace? Or V for the victory over peace? — an error, I say, to dwell in any of this gore or pity, or to think how bad it is now, and how much worse it is than it was, and that it is definitely worse and getting worse, remembering moments when the Lewins were still solemnly charmed by the two fresh orphans to whom they had committed their lives, and the orphans charmed by peace. And how they would take us to Boston on the Beacon Street trolley and we’d ride on the swan boats and trudge through the Commons and see where Paul Revere was buried, and Sam Adams, feeling the flesh healing, the flesh of the soul healing in peace and irony — Oh, Freedom Trail! It was better then. Hope was not tested then — all of it a mistake for being beside the point, and unimportant because Susan had communicated with me; just that; and if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required — and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. Susan and I, we were the only ones left. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time.
FIRE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
One picture poster, 36 × 24, used in demonstrations. Like new! Black and white double portrait depicts Isaacsons two faces historical curiosity cheap very cheap worthless comes in its own up-yours tube corners slightly deteriorated weighted with pieces of plaster amuse your friends with this historical curio free them. I remember his cock. Face it, if I do, I do. Always shaved without clothes. She, too, shameless by design. I remember the hair around her slit, sparse and uneven. One of the theories of aspiring modernity. Treat the body without shame. Let the kid see it, let him learn to be natural and uninhibited. They didn’t go so far as to let me watch them fucking, but I did that too one way or another — I was a small criminal of perception; and that doesn’t mean just to see them or hear them, which is the same as seeing, but knowing when they had and sometimes even when they were going to. But everything was theory. Everything was done for a reason, and was usually not the way the rest of the world did it. All the more reason. All part of the plan. The idea I had was of life as training. We were all training for something. There was some kind of moral, intellectual and physical award that would be available to those who worked for it, and were worthy of it. The State of Perfection Award. And I was not to be amazed that we were serious candidates, or that our pursuit of this perfection never brought us any closer. And I wasn’t, I bought it all. Why shouldn’t I? We were us.