Whatever’s going to happen, it’s not over yet.
Parks passed me in the hall and asked how I was doing. Suggested we go for a cup of coffee. I made some excuse about having to study, then followed him home. He looks worried. What has he done? (Who has he raped?)
I had a bad moment when the doorbell rang after dinner. It was nothing, a student of my father’s. My father comes out of his study, tells me my breath is bad, goes back.
About eight o’clock, I’m lying down, my mother comes into my room. I pretend, facing the wall, to be asleep, but she talks anyway. Her song and dance. About what a brilliant child I was. Talking at less than a year. Toilet trained. Other things. How well-behaved I was. A beautiful child, everyone said.
“Your father is upset at your lack of direction,” she says. “The two of you are so much alike.”
“Cut it out.”
“So you’re not sleeping after all.”
“How can I sleep, for God’s sake?” We both, almost at once, start in to laugh. I throw my pillow at her.
I roll over on the bed, clutching my sides with laughter. Too much to bear. When she leaves I pull my pin until flames come and I go off.
June 15
B’KLYN BOY
FOUND DEAD
IN ICEBOX
My father won’t look at me. He turns away when I come into the room. I think he knows something. I asked my mother what’s bothering him. She said he feels unloved.
I’ve been having bad dreams again. Three nights in a row now. I see my father’s reflection in the mirror. He says he’s dying, that I want him to die. I turn and look behind me and he’s not there. The rest I don’t remember.
I’ll be twenty-one in ten days.
June 16
Another bad dream. My mother woke me in the middle, said I was groaning in my sleep. “Why can’t you have happy dreams?”
My luck holds out. Parks and Rosemary had some kind of fight in the street. Rosemary, coming in my direction, discovered me. Showed no surprise at my being there.
I’d like to suck the nipples of her big soft tits.
She was wearing a pale-yellow dress which made her look like a goddess. The white queen of some lost tribe. Her hair loose. I walked her home. She kept glancing at me, big white queen, Chris the soldier loading between my legs ready to fire. My hands in my pockets.
When she went in, I cursed myself for not going up with her. I stood in front of the building, thinking of waiting for her. Finishing what I started. A cop told me to move along. I could barely walk.
I was out of my head to talk to her.
DEFENSE SEC’Y
BARS STEP-UP
IN BOMBINGS
ADMITS IT WOULDN’T HELP
Read the Post on the subway. A record number of bombing raids in the North, two short of the record in the South. Report enemy defectors at new high. Allied spokesman says reason for guarded optimism. “We’ve killed more of them this month than at any time in the past. The worm is turning.” A picture of a headless corpse, unidentified — neither side claims him.
Harris poll says 51 percent of the population approves the President’s conduct of the war. A sixteen-year-old boy is shot to death by an off-duty cop when trying to break into a car which had a SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE sticker in the back. The car, it turns out, belonging to the boy’s father. The father, a former war hero, embraces the cop (on page two), says he was only doing his duty.
I have this sense, which gets me nervous, of not seeing things. As an exercise, I looked around me in the subway. Stared at faces. Photographed them in my mind, pasted them together, heads on bodies. They were gone as soon as I stopped looking. Only shadows remained.
My mother answered the door — I had forgotten my key. Daubing at her eyes with a wadded Kleenex. (I could hear my father typing away in his study — the typewriter the sound of his presence.)
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, blowing her nose, her face scarred with mascara and rouge, like the inside of something.
I went to my room, closed the door to shut out the noise of his typing. Head burning as if the typewriter were inside. He pounds on the keys.
“Don’t expect any dinner,” my mother called through the door. “I don’t feel up to it.”
“That’s all right. I’m not hungry.”
“What?” she called, though it was impossible for her not to have heard me.
She opened the door. “I’ll make you dinner, Chrissy, if you want some.”
“I told you I didn’t want any.”
“There’s some leftover pot roast,” she said. “Your sister’s marriage is breaking up. I’m afraid to tell your father. He’ll just go out of his mind when he finds out. You know how Dad gets.”
“Is she coming home?”
My mother took a letter from her apron pocket. Shoved it into my hand as if it were the kind of bad news I deserved.
“Hey, I didn’t do it,” I said.
“We all share the blame for this,” she said. “There’s no need to blame anyone, Chris. No one’s to blame for this. Sometimes with all the goodwill in the world people don’t get along.”
It was all Hank’s fault, according to Phyllis — who blamed no one but herself, who had suffered like a saint, cooking and slaving, while her husband was having other women. Having endured all she could humanly endure, she threw him out.
My mother sighed. “It’s probably all for the best.” Her voice a prayer for the dead. “He wasn’t any good. He wasn’t our kind of guy, as Dad would say.”
“You used to like him,” I reminded her. “When she married him you said he was a dream of a son-in-law.”
“It’s probably just a squabble, a temporary thing. You’ll see, Chrissy, in a week or two they’ll be together as if nothing had been wrong. Even in the best of marriages, I don’t have to tell you, the course of true love — which Dad will say is cliché …” She went on as she always does, lamenting her life, discovering consolations on all sides.
I told her I had a nuclear-theory final to study for and asked her to leave.
She hung on another five minutes, talking, hardly aware who she was talking to. Once she called me Ludwig.
I called her Phyllis back, but she didn’t notice.
“We don’t speak clichés in front of Ludwig, but between you and me, Chrissy, sometimes there isn’t any other way. There just isn’t, precious.”
When she turned to go I almost goosed her.
“If you knew how happy it made your father, you’d study more,” she once told me. I turned through the pages of my physics book. “Our progress in the area of atomic knowledge has been so overwhelming in the past decade that the science fiction of just a few years ago seems old-fashioned in the light of the discoveries of true science. For example, what is popularly called the relativity theory …” My eyes burning, I fell asleep.
I was at a wedding. It was held on an enormous lawn in some kind of magnificent park. A place I had never been before. The bride and groom were on a podium (like a launching pad), facing away from their audience. I was trying to remember whose wedding I had been invited to. From the back, the groom looked like my brother-in-law Hank. It seemed to me strange that Hank was getting married again. Could the divorce — I was sure the girl wasn’t Phyllis — have gone through already? I was wondering what to do, if I should say anything or not, when the ceremony started. (My hands were bleeding so I kept them in my pockets.) I was trying to get closer to hear what was being said, but couldn’t get through the crowd. I asked a few of the watchers around me if they knew who was getting married. No one seemed to know. The couple, the bride and groom, began to dance. It looked to be part of the ceremony. They separated, did a series of push-ups on the stage, then moved to dance with their guests, who were lined up in two columns. Men on one side, women on the other. I wanted to leave — I don’t like to dance (I don’t know how) — but there was a high wall at the other end with a DANGER sign on it. No way else of getting out. I decided that when my turn came I would tell the bride that I didn’t know how, and we would just talk or she would go on to the next person. I explained how I felt to the man ahead of me — an old math teacher of mine — who nodded without saying anything. Before I knew it, she was dancing with the old math teacher. The bride danced beautifully. I had the sense, without any empirical evidence for it, that I knew her from somewhere. That she was someone I knew from somewhere. Waiting my turn, I thought maybe she would let me lift her veil so I could see who she was. If she said no, I would pull it up when she wasn’t looking. When I looked up she was dancing with the man who had been behind me in the line. Some guy in an Air Force uniform. I complained that it was my turn, that by mistake my turn had been skipped. No one seemed to care. I got mad. I wanted what was coming to me. I went on the stage where the dancers were. A guard tried to stop me, but I knocked him down. His head bleeding. A bullet hole in the forehead. I caught the bride’s arm and pulled her away from her partner. “Excuse me, but I was next in line.” “You renounced your turn,” someone yelled. “Get off the bloody stage.” Shaking his fist. It was Hank. I picked him up and threw him against the wall. “All I said was I didn’t know how. I want my turn. I have a right to my turn.” “Do you know how?” the bride asked me. I didn’t want to lie to her so I admitted I didn’t. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If you can’t dance, you can’t dance,” and went back to her partner, who was a tired-looking middle-aged man. She called to me over her shoulder, “Maybe later, honey.” They danced off, leaving me. I was alone. Standing at attention in the dark. The stage empty.