Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (8 page)

Swardlow was at a loss. “We still have phone communications, sir,” was all he could think to say. The general was outraged.

In saluting a general the trick was to wait, perhaps humming tunelessly as he bore down, until the last split second before he could legitimately bring you up on charges of ignoring him. Since a general didn’t want to admit the possibility that it would enter into anyone’s mind to ignore him, you had a certain amount of slack to work with. It was bracing to feel that you had frustrated a general for even a moment.

You could also say to a general, “Good morning, sir,” quite confidently, at, say, 1900 hours. I found that a general so addressed would never exclaim, “Good God, Lieutenant, it’s getting dark!” If some general had, I could have looked at him blankly and said, “Yes, sir,” and I doubt he could have made a case stand up against me in any proper court-martial.

That’s the way I handled generals at Governors Island, where in those days (the coast guard has it now) First Army Headquarters was based. Because so many generals came and went there, and because I never had to brief any of them, their effect was like that of Norse gods on someone raised a Methodist: entertaining. For the second half of my tour, however, I was transferred to Fort Totten, New York, in Queens, where there was only one general. He was often alluded to as The General. He gave the impression from a distance of being that uncommon sort of officer who could have made it as a sergeant if he’d wanted to. I developed a fear that he would enter into my life.

It was at Fort Totten that Emmy, a white cat, came through our kitchen window one day fully grown: a sizable, fleecy, impure but robust Persian, fluffy even to the bottoms of her feet. No one could say where she had come from. She took up with us, and soon became widely known on the post for all the things she was seen chasing. “If it moves, run it up the flagpole” was her attitude.

There was a pheasant whose periodic appearances from out of the woods bordering Fort Totten made him something of a post institution; Emmy chased him through a soft-ball game. The paper girl, collecting at our door one evening, looked over at Emmy admiringly and said, “She chases all the
doougs.”
A captain’s wife reported having seen Emmy scooping something up out of Little Neck Bay “and struggling with it.”

Emmy would also chase, or at least run out at, officers emerging from the Regional Air Defense Command building at close of day. She would lie in wait under the Command building until they came down the front steps. Like a big, somehow sinewy powder puff she would pounce and light right in front of them and then scurry back to her hiding place, having shaken their composure. But The General did not rattle easily. He took a shine to her.

I didn’t work in the Command building, but we were quartered right across from it. Through our kitchen window I would see The General poking playfully at Emmy with his swagger stick and hear him calling her “WP,” which stands for white phosphorus, a particularly loathsome kind of explosive. She would loll when he came at her, and then she would slap at his stick. Once, she and I were out walking. Emmy was the only cat I ever had who would go on long walks with me, and keep up; but she always acted as if she only happened to be heading in the same direction I was. We passed the garden-plot area. There was The General, digging. I veered toward a grove of trees, but Emmy ran over to him. As I looked on, frozen, she wet his mustard greens. It didn’t faze him. Word did get around that he disapproved of her chasing the pheasant, whose appearance in some way pleased him, but months passed and he never took that matter, or any other, up with me.

Then one afternoon I was outside in full uniform hanging diapers. Regulations prohibited doing such a thing without changing into fatigues or civilian clothes, but I was in a hurry because the diapers had to be dry before the hour at which, pursuant to post regulations, you couldn’t have any laundry in view.

So I was contending with a flapping damp diaper and a high-tension clothespin when I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a specialist 6 approaching with a gleam in his.

When a superior fails to notice that you are saluting him, you are supposed to say “By your leave, sir,” and he is supposed to look up and return your salute. I had the clothespin and the diaper in my hands, and my hat was resting unevenly on my head, and I was pivoting slowly so as to keep my back always to the advancing spec 6, when I heard him say, “By your lea —
YO
!”

Emmy had made her only recorded spring at an enlisted man, and had timed it perfectly. I said, “Carry on, soldier,” with relish, over my shoulder, and made to get on with my work.

Then I saw The General coming up the hill from the other direction. It was the closest I had seen him. He was one of those people who are overweight but stay in pretty good shape by dint of the vigor it takes to carry themselves as if in excellent shape. He appeared to be bursting out of his uniform. Wind caught the diaper and wrapped it around my head.

Well, maybe I should have peeled that diaper off forthrightly, faced up to The General, and cried:

“Sir! I shouldn’t be here. I got married too young and I don’t believe in the war. I want to be skinny-dipping and taking consciousness-exfoliating mushrooms with someone who looks like Grace Slick.”

I just stood there. Obliquity saved me. Just as I did not want to admit to myself that I was in the army, The General may not have wanted to admit to himself that I was either. Or maybe Emmy struck a pose so beguiling to The General’s eye that he was loath to spoil the moment by taking into account a diapered lieutenant. (She may have represented to him a freedom beyond even a general’s: she could be soft, she could be fierce, she could simply choose.) Either way, he must have angled his eyes so as to make it credible, even to himself, that I was not in his field of vision.

“Quite some cat!” I heard The General say to the spec 6. “Got a bit of the devil in her.”

“Yes, sir!” I heard the spec 6 say.

When I unwrapped my head, they were all three gone.

The next time I saw Emmy, I told her, with, I am afraid, some reediness of tone, “Quite some cat is right.” She was intent on something under an armored personnel carrier and didn’t return my salute.

What if I had buttonholed The General, and a dialectic had been wrought: I accepting that America was not cut out for a state of nature, he that napalming Asian peasants was not going to liberate them. The spec 6 might have joined in and reminded us that at heart this was a nation of shifting and mingling middle, not rapidly diverging upper and lower, classes. Together we might have charted a wholesome course toward the seventies, and the eighties might have had some soul.

But how often do people really face up to each other, flush? And how well does it turn out when they do? We are all slanty-eyed.

Even John Wayne in
The Sands of Iwo Jima.
On liberty, and planning to get polluted and fight some MPs because he is divorced and his son never writes him, he meets a quite attractive and decent-seeming woman named Mary in a bar. She gets him to lighten up a bit, and takes him to her apartment.

The two of them see something in each other — in the sixties it would have been no cheap encounter. But at her place, from a back room, a cry is heard. It’s a baby. Nice-looking kid, well taken care of. Mary is picking up soldiers, inferably talking to them nude, and getting money from them so she can feed the baby — whose father, she tells Wayne when he asks, is “gone.” She adds, “There are a lot tougher ways of making a living than going to war.”

Oof. Wayne gets that grim-wry look in the corners of his eyes, softens and toughens all at once, tosses all his cash to the baby in the crib, and moves his essentially compassionate gruffness to the doorway, which he fills.

“You’re a very good man,” Mary tells him.

Looking off, Wayne vouchsafes a quick, grave near-grin. “You can get odds on that in the Marine Corps,” he rumbles, and then he moves on toward Iwo Jima.

Women have told me that I am too oblique. “Tell it to John Wayne,” I should have replied. All these years, and it has only just lately begun to occur to me; if he is so good, how come he can’t keep any loved ones? Here he is, putting distance between himself and the very things — women and children — whose absence is driving him to drink.

What if Mary’s cat had done a quick figure-eight around John Wayne’s ankles, causing him to stand there in the doorway for a while and then to come back and sit on the couch; and the cat had jumped up next to him and stared at the side of his head intently, the way cats will do, and caused him to reflect.

We may think of cats as oblique, because by our standards there is an odd cast in their eyes. But insofar as a cat is interested at all, a cat is at least as un-hung-up and up-front as the sixties. If a cat spoke, a cat would say things like, “Hey. I don’t see the
problem
here.”

What if this cat had moved John Wayne to reflect, “Yuh know … the truth of the matter is, gettin’ shot by people, and burnin’ ’em alive … It’s a tougher dollar than bringin’ ’em home with you for … intimacies and … considerations. And — dag burn it, it’s less
savory.
Now, I’m not sayin’ what you do is
right,
but …”

And Mary had seen his point, and then … I believe
The Sands of Two Jima
would have had a healthier formative effect on me if John Wayne had petted the cat, and exchanged looks with it, and done the same with Mary, and she had undressed. I
like
it when women undress in movies — okay, it has been run into the ground, but I’m glad it got started.

And John Wayne had said, “I’ve got something else to get off my chest. You know how, a lot of times, I am aware of something that other people aren’t, something that can’t be told, so that I have to appear less caring than I am? And a lot of times … like in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
I let it be believed that Jimmy Stewart shot Liberty Valance, when actually
I
did, but that’s all right; but I
also
let Jimmy have the woman I love, because … well, because even though he can’t handle a gun, he’s better for her than I am.”

“Oh, who says?”

“Well, the thing of it is … Here’s the thing: I can’t get over the notion that honchos and women aren’t
right
for each other.”

“That’s not
true.”

“Oh, no? Why do you think I gravitate toward raw recruits? You can
get on
a raw recruit, that’s why. The way you can’t with a nude woman. You can
bark
at a raw recruit — in such a way that it’s tougher’n hell but six months later the raw recruit, well, he realizes it was for his own good. To a raw recruit you can say — excuse me — you can say, ‘You better shape your ass up, mister!’ That doesn’t work with a nude woman.”

“Well …”

“Yeah, and nude women always want you to say such obvious things! Things that kinda go without saying: ‘You have beautiful breasts and I love to touch them!’ Well, I’m touching them, aren’t I?”

“Mm …”

“Nude women think it’s easy to talk to a nude woman. It’s not! It’s so personal! And there’s a woman present!”

“Yes, but …”

“It’s
hard.”

“I know. Shhh. I know.”

And after a while Mary had added, “Isn’t this better than bashing and being bashed by MPs?”

“Well …
yeah. Sure
it is.”

And still later Mary had made the observation that people should not enter upon a family (“or a war,” John Wayne had put in) until they have talked nude with enough members of the opposite sex (“or nationality”) to dispel some of that virulent
defensiveness
that cats don’t have.

I know what would have happened the next morning, though. Because it happened to me in civilian life, with a brand-new leather jacket, not long after I got divorced. John Wayne and Mary would have waked, stretched, smiled a little abashedly at each other, reached for their clothes, and found that Mary’s cat had sprayed foully — and that stuff will not come out — on John Wayne’s Marine Corps tunic.

Frankly, having been in the situation myself and having given some thought to what he would do in it, I don’t think John Wayne could have come up with an expression in the corners of his eyes potent enough to return that salute. I think he would have tried to murder the cat, and Mary would have screamed and the baby would have waked up and screamed and John Wayne would have screamed and the cat would have screamed, lap dissolve to beachhead, projectiles shrieking.

What
is
the problem?

I
SN’T EVERYONE INTO WOMEN’S
underwear? In some sense. Reaching out toward it, wearing it, designing it, something. Women have now even managed to make men’s underwear interesting. By adopting it. After a fashion. Yes, women are wearing little brief Jockey-type shorts, and boxer-type shorts (which they call “tap pants;” a term that may have something to do with the verb “to hit on”) and undershirts instead of bras.

In some versions, the boxers have fly fronts. It is all right with me if women want to wear fly fronts. (What I wish is that more things for men had fly fronts — I am thinking of sweatpants and jockstraps. A jockstrap could have a Velcro fly, couldn’t it? Have you ever tried to take a leak in — that is, while wearing — sweatpants and a jockstrap? It is enough to make you shrink from the fitness craze.)

I think the main reason designers build fly fronts into women’s drawers is to make things awkward for the male underwear critic. There is an adversary relationship between underwear designers and underwear critics, and no one will ever win a Pulitzer in underwear criticism if he backs off from the hard questions, such as what to say about women’s drawers that have fly fronts. Nor will anyone win a Pulitzer if he says the obvious — that women’s drawers with fly fronts certainly do not have a certain famous drawback that panty hose have.

Women, if they dust, use men’s underwear to dust with. Whereas women’s underwear makes men’s heads swim. As long as that situation holds, and I do not see a radical shift on the horizon, we are a long way from unisexualism.