JD (21 page)

This morning Martha said that Mickey needed a suit. For her niece's wedding in Baltimore in December.

“What? Are we going to your niece's wedding?”

“I'm going. You're going to have the mumps or something.”

“Then why are you dragging Mickey along?”

“He already had the mumps. Anyway, he wants to go, he likes Emily. So he needs a suit.”

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

“What?”

“Thoreau,” I said. “I think he'd be better off if he never had a suit.”

“You can't leave him feeling like a misfit because you want to make some kind of statement. He'll be proud in a suit.” This seemed like an odd locution, but I suppose it's true. I can't single-handedly make a world where he won't need a suit to be proud. “Anyway,” she added. “He may need a suit before December.”

“What for?” She didn't answer and I, dummy, realized she was talking about her father. “Fine, so get him a suit.”

“He's too old for me to take him.” She said this as if it were obvious, so I couldn't argue.

We went over to Barney Pressman's. Mickey was proud right away that I took him to the Young Men section instead of Boys, a life passage that means a couple of extra inches of cloth and at least ten bucks on the price tag. A salesman who had probably been working at Barney's when New-York was hyphenated hobbled over, glanced at Mickey, and said, “Size sixteen regular, over this way.” I look at the emergent body of a boy stretching into a young man and see into
the heart of the cosmos; he sees a size sixteen. Regular! Where are the sixteen-deviants, I should have asked. But my Mickey is almost certainly regular.

The senex pulled out a couple of suits, one with velvet around the collar, another with a belt in the back of the jacket, such as Dr. Watson might have worn when the game was afoot. Mickey didn't even glance at them, just silently pointed to a gray suit with a tiny checked pattern.

“Oh, yes, many of the young men are wearing glen plaid this fall.”

Mickey nodded. I have somehow missed this important trend, perhaps because the young men to whom my eyes are drawn are not wearing suits. I guess I'm a little perturbed that Mickey knew what other young men were wearing this fall. It is only a step from that to thinking what other young men are thinking.

In the fitting room, Mickey stood on the little block like a statue on a pedestal while the alterations guy … palpated him. Grazed a hand down Mickey's inner thigh, drew a chalk line at the crotch where they'd take it in a little, grabbed Mickey's calf with one hand while, with the other, he rolled up and pinned the trouser cuff. Through all this, Mickey was gazing at himself, triplicate in the fitting room mirror. His eyes were narrowed, he had a trace of a little smug smile.

He was, I think--or imagine--just at that minute becoming aware of his own body as an object to be contemplated, as a locus of erotic possibility. I guess this happens some time to every boy. One day your body is just the self you move around in, the next day your body is something you present to the world. Mickey has quite a little gift to offer. I guess he is, in Dennis's word, a hunk. If I were a teenage girl I'd be all over him.

His eye caught mine in the mirror, and he frowned for a second, as if he understood why I was staring at him. To cover, I said, “You think the sleeve length is right?”

“Perfect,” the tailor said. “The young men like to show an inch of shirt cuff nowadays.” So all the staff at Barney's must be taught this patter, which makes a fourteen-year-old feel like a man and makes me feel like a ghost.

After I paid a goddamn 42 bucks for a boy's--pardon me, young man's--suit, Mickey and I decided to stroll uptown to Tad's. Where the steak still costs 99 cents, even if you're not sure what quadruped it was carved from. We walked up through the garment district, dodging the guys pushing racks of suits that looked just like Mickey's but were probably going to sell somewhere for half as much. When did Barney's stop being a discount joint?

We got to Tad's: baked potato, sour cream, slice of garlic bread, Coke for him, cream soda for me. We got a table, he sawed into his steak and said, “You were out late again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, did you
see
somebody last night?” he said. More or less; that was a lot of sibilants to wrap a steak-filled mouth around.

I wanted to laugh, at the way he parroted my euphemism from the other day. But I just said, “That's right.”

“Are you … this somebody: are you, you know, dating?”

Now it was quite hard not to laugh. The next question would be, is it a nize Jewish girl? “You mean like going steady?”

“I guess.”

“No, I--usually I just meet somebody and we … do it and that's it.”

He looked at me with amazement. Probably he has read
Playboy
and imagined the life it depicts: parking the Jaguar in front of the bachelor pad, a new bunny every night. He has not imagined his doddering old man living this life.

He looked out the window and composed his face before I could decipher what he was thinking. So I don't know if he admired me or was disgusted.

When we got back outside I lit a cigarette. He said, “Hey,” and I gave him one, lit it for him. This time he didn't cough.

There is something enchanting about watching a boy Mickey's age smoking. The earnest wickedness of it, the angelic face trying to shape itself into a hard, grown-up mask. He exhaled, blowing the smoke out straight, the way kids do; it was as if he held an ethereal trumpet to his lips.

I started walking again, after a moment realized he wasn't with me. I turned around. He took another drag from his cigarette and said solemnly, “I … I said I wasn't going to tell. I'm not, I'm still not. But how would you feel if Mom just went out and … ?”

“Did what I do?”

“Yeah.”

I did have a momentary scruple about answering. The way you do when you have to decide whether to tell a kid the truth about Santa Claus. “I thought … hasn't your mother had a few friends on Cape Cod?”

He stood still, the cigarette held a few inches from his face, his eyes opaque. He was thinking of every time Martha went off for a swim and came back two hours later without a hair out of place. Every time, at one of Bernie's barbecues, he looked for her to tell her something and couldn't find her.

He gave a little dry chuckle. Here I'd been worrying that I shouldn't have been in such a hurry to sew a scarlet A on the breast from which Mickey--it seemed like only yesterday--had been weaned. But he chuckled and slowly nodded his head. I hadn't blown up his world, I had made the pieces fit, everything he'd seen and couldn't put together.

At Times Square we watched the Camel billboard blowing smoke rings. Mickey tried to emulate it; I tried to show
him how, but it was too breezy. I have few enough manly skills to impart to him. Maybe sometime I can at least teach him to blow smoke rings.

The ladies' room is the most Brutal corner of the SLS Library. The naked cement walls, the bands of fluorescent light, the mirror in which I see plainly--as I hardly ever do, at home--a woman of seventy-five.

Now that I've put some water on my face, I'm a little calmer. The extraordinary thing about living with an anarch--and I am, it seems, living with him again these days--is the way he throws everything into question. It seems so obvious that a man shouldn't tell a fourteen-year-old boy that his mother is screwing around. It seems obvious, but I can't think why. Or at least can't think why it would have been better to let Mickey puzzle out, on his own, why Mom was absent from the barbecue.

I suppose in a way Jonathan was conducting a grand experiment. Since the way other people were raising their kids was producing unhappy automatons, why not try something new, however improvisatory? This sounds almost plausible, until you recall that the subject of the experiment didn't survive it.

October 9, 1966

When I was writing about what happened yesterday, I omitted this. For just an instant, as I watched the tailor nonchalantly groping my son, I wished I too could touch him. Funny, so many years I touched him anywhere I felt like, and he and I both glad of it. To this day I kiss him good night on the lips. But I know this is different. Or else why couldn't I write about it in my own journal? Even just now, as I typed the words,
touch him
, I felt a cool breath ruffling the hairs on the back of my neck, a tiny zephyr stirred up by the distant wingbeat of the Furies.

I remember Dennis O'Grady speculating, last week, about whether something instinctual keeps us from desiring too close to home. I think not, I think it may take vigilance. Perhaps this just confirms Bartholdy's old gibe, about how I
lacked a superego. But I think there is something more, something primeval, a fragment of the collective unconscious that I am dragging into the light. If I have the courage: this would be the next thing to write about, the farthest shore.

Which is the same, isn't it, as saying that I am ready to wager my happiness, and maybe Mickey's, just to get to the next thing to write? Of course this isn't so, I'm not going to do anything to hurt Mickey. But if I'm afraid to even
think
about what I feel, afraid to write it down: then I might as well haul this typewriter down to the pawnshop next to Faherty's.

Y
esterday Miss Busch the librarian tapped on my cubicle door. Closing time. Would I be back tomorrow? I said, “Yes, I didn't get very far.” But I didn't know if I would be back, or if I had already gotten too far. I wondered if maybe everyone wouldn't have been better off if Jonathan had gone ahead and pawned the Olivetti.

There are a lot of pages left in 1966. I cannot suppose he filled them all with courageous introspection about his feelings for Mickey—as if he were the first intrepid voyager to find his way to the far, forbidden shores of the family romance! No, he did something, after swearing not to hurt our baby, he did
something
. How could it help me, or Mickey now, if I were to learn just what he did, what shore he beached us on?

Here is why I have returned to SLS this morning: because there is a chance that the worst did not happen. Some near-atrophied vestige of a superego overtook Jonathan, or Mickey resisted, there's a chance. I feel that, if I just let the folder be sent back to humidity-controlled oblivion in Elizabeth, I will have abandoned Mickey to Jonathan's
touch
, his poisonous touch.

October 16, 1966

Last night Martha threw her fall cocktail party. When she started doing this, a dozen years ago, we both thought it would advance my career. Perhaps it did, when I was the most junior guy at SLS and we had to somehow break through
the reserve of the older faculty. Amazing how the crustiest Viennese phenomenologist would loosen up after a couple glasses of schnapps. But now we just have the party because we always have the party. Anyway, Martha loves making the canapés. She says there's something relaxing about spending a whole day making scores of identical, fussy little nibbles.

Martha recalled that I had mentioned meeting Edgar Villard now and then. Did I think he'd want to come? I said I didn't think so, but later I realized that I was ashamed to have him see our place. So I made myself call and ask him, and was flabbergasted when he agreed to appear.

Villard arrived with Robert in tow. Robert can't have been eager to hang out at an SLS faculty party, so I figured Villard had dragged him along to embarrass me somehow. I introduced Villard to Martha.

“Oh, I would have guessed,” he said. “I had heard how very striking you were.” I too have heard that word used about Martha and once repeated it to her. She wasn't as pleased as I thought she'd be; as she remarked, Georgia O'Keefe is striking. Villard went on: “Mrs. Ascher, this is my friend Robert Peridis. Robert, I believe you and Jonathan have met?” I cannot describe the precise spin he put on
met
, but Martha cocked her head a little.

While I was pouring their drinks, Ignaz Gruenthal called over from the sofa. “You're Mr. Villard the writer?”

“I am,” Villard said. He dutifully headed over with a bright meet-the-fans smile.

Ignaz didn't get up or shake Villard's proffered hand. In the Gruenthal hierarchy a Herr-Professor-Doktor-Doktor outranked a drugstore bestseller. “My wife reads your books,” Ignaz said.

Villard kept the smile in place. “That's nice.”

“I read part of one. Forgive me, I don't read many fictions unless I'm sick in bed. I was left not sure how … what your politics are.”

Fey fellow-traveler was the correct answer, but Villard was annoyed enough to say, “I suppose I'm an anarcho-syndicalist.”

“What is that?” Robert said. “I thought you were a Democrat.”

“They don't let you register as anarcho-syndicalist. We believe that in place of government, communities should be run by democratic networks of trade unions.” This said with an absolutely straight face.

Robert snorted. “You ever been in a trade union, you might think twice about that.”

“Oh, but I have been,” Villard said. “Screen Writers Guild, during my little Hollywood fling. One look at that bunch and you'd have no trouble at all picturing them running the worker's paradise.”

Ignaz had no idea he was being teased. “I've seen the worker's paradise. In Barcelona in 1936.”

“Yes, exactly,” Villard said. He explained to Robert: “In Barcelona, the workers took over everything--the railroads and the mines and the factories, even the movie theaters and the bars. No bosses at all.” I was surprised he knew any of this. And he was so earnest, I thought for a second maybe he wasn't kidding.

“I was in Barcelona,” Ignaz said. “I saw how Barcelona worked. As soon as workers' committees got to be bosses they acted like bosses. They wanted overtime, they fired the shirkers, when the workers questioned them they brought in thugs.”