Moon Palace (39 page)

We went back to Chinatown together the next morning, but things were never the same again. We had both managed to convince ourselves that we could forget what had happened, but once we tried to return to our old life, we discovered that it was no longer there. After the miserable weeks of talk and quarreling, we both lapsed into silence, as though we were afraid to look at each other now. The abortion had been more difficult than Kitty had thought it would be, and in spite of her conviction that she had done the copy thing, she could not help thinking it was wrong. Depressed, battered by what she had been through, she sulked around the loft as though in mourning. I understood that I should be comforting her, but I could not muster the strength to overcome my own hurt. I just sat there and watched her suffer, and at a certain point I realized that I was enjoying it, that I wanted her to pay for what she had done. That was the worst moment of all, I think, and when I finally saw the ugliness and cruelty that were inside me, I turned against myself in horror. I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t bear to be who I was anymore. Every time I looked at Kitty, I saw nothing but my own contemptible weakness, the monstrous reflection of what I had become.

I told her that I needed to go away for a while to sort things out, but that was only because I did not have the courage to tell her the truth. Kitty understood, however. She didn’t have to hear the words to know what was going on, and when she saw me packing my things the next morning and getting ready to leave, she begged me to stay with her, she actually went down on her
knees and begged me not to go. Her face was all contorted and wet with tears, but I had become a block of wood by then, and nothing could stop me. I put my last thousand dollars on the table and told Kitty to use it while I was gone. Then I walked out the door. I was already sobbing by the time I made it down to the street.

B
arber put me up in his apartment for the rest of the spring. He refused to let me help him with the rent, but with my funds nearly down to zero again, I found myself a job almost at once. I slept on the couch in the living room, woke up every morning at six-thirty, and spent my days hauling furniture up and down flights of stairs for a friend who ran a small moving business. I hated the work, but it was sufficiently exhausting to numb my thoughts, at least in the beginning. Later on, when my body became more accustomed to the routine, I discovered that I wasn’t able to fall asleep without first drinking myself into a stupor. Barber and I would sit up talking until around midnight, and then I would be left alone in the living room, faced with the choice of staring up at the ceiling until dawn or getting drunk. It generally took a full bottle of wine before I was able to shut my eyes.

Barber could not have treated me better, could not have been more thoughtful or sympathetic, but I was in such a sorry state that I hardly noticed he was there. Kitty was the only person who was real for me, and her absence was so tangible, so overpoweringly insistent, that I could think of nothing else. Every night began with the same ache in my body, the same breathless, throbbing need to be touched by her again, and before I could register what
was happening, I would feel the assault along the inside of my skin, as though the tissues that held me together were about to explode. This was deprivation in its most sudden, most absolute form. Kitty’s body was a part of my body, and without it there beside me, I did not feel that I was myself anymore. I felt that I had been mutilated.

After the ache, images would begin to march through my head. I would see Kitty’s hands reaching out to touch me, I would see her bare back and shoulders, the curve of her buttocks, her smooth belly bunching together as she sat on the edge of the bed and slipped on her panties. It was impossible to make these pictures go away, and no sooner did one present itself than it would spawn another, reviving the smallest, most intimate details of our life together. I could not remember our happiness without feeling pain, and yet I persisted in seeking out this pain, oblivious to the damage it caused me. Every night, I would tell myself to pick up the phone and call her, and every night I would battle against the temptation, summoning every bit of self-hatred to keep me from doing it. After two weeks of torturing myself in this way, I began to feel that I had been set on fire.

Barber was distressed. He knew that something awful had happened, but neither Kitty nor I would tell him what it was. At first, he took it upon himself to act as go-between, talking to one of us and then going to the other to report on the conversation, but for all his shuttling back and forth, he never made any progress. Whenever he tried to get the secret out of us, we would each give him the same answer: I can’t tell you; go ask the other. Barber was never in doubt that Kitty and I were still in love, and our refusal to do anything about it bewildered and frustrated him. Kitty wants you to come back, he would say to me, but she doesn’t think you ever will. I can’t go back, I would answer. There’s nothing I want more, but it can’t be done. As a last-ditch strategy, Barber even went so far as to invite each of us out to dinner at the same time (without mentioning that the other would also be there), but his plan was foiled when Kitty caught sight of me
entering the restaurant. If she had turned the corner just two seconds later, the scheme might have worked, but as it was, she was able to avoid the trap, and instead of going in to join us, she simply turned around and went home. When Barber asked her about it the next morning, she told him that she didn’t believe in tricks. “It’s up to M. S. to make the first move,” she said. “I did something that broke his heart, and I wouldn’t blame him if he never wants to see me again. He knows I didn’t do it on purpose, but that doesn’t mean he has to forgive me.”

After that, Barber backed off. He stopped carrying messages between us and let things follow their own dismal course. Kitty’s last statement to him was typical of the courage and generosity I had always found in her, and for months and even years afterward I could not think of those words without feeling ashamed of myself. If anyone had suffered, it was Kitty, and yet she was the one who shouldered the responsibility for what had happened. If I had possessed even the smallest fraction of her goodness, I would have run to her on the spot, prostrated myself before her, and begged her to forgive me. But I did nothing. The days passed, and still I could not find it in myself to act. Like a wounded animal, I curled up inside my pain and refused to budge. I was still there, perhaps, but I could no longer be counted as present.

Barber had failed in his role as Cupid, but he continued to do everything he could to save me. He tried to get me interested in my writing again, he talked to me about books, he coaxed me into going to movies, to restaurants and bars, to lectures and concerts. None of this did much good, but I was not so far gone that I did not appreciate the effort. He worked hard at it, and inevitably I began to wonder why he was putting himself out for me in this way. He was going great guns on his book about Thomas Harriot, crouching over his typewriter for six or seven hours at a stretch, but the moment I entered the house, he always seemed ready to drop everything, as if my company were more interesting to him than his own work. This puzzled me, for I knew I was dreadful company just then, and I failed to see how anyone could enjoy
it. For lack of any other ideas, I began to speculate that he was a homosexual, thinking that perhaps he was too excited by my presence to concentrate on anything else. It was a logical guess, but there was nothing to it—just one more stab in the dark. He made no moves on me, and I could tell from the way he looked at women in the street that all his desires were confined to the opposite sex. What was the answer, then? Perhaps loneliness, I thought, loneliness pure and simple. He had no other friends in New York, and until someone else came along, he was willing to take me as I was.

One night in late June, we went out together for beers at the White Horse Tavern. It was a warm, sticky night, and as we sat at a table in the back room (the same one that Zimmer and I had often sat at in the fall of 1969), Barber’s face began oozing rivulets of sweat. Mopping himself with an oversized checkered handkerchief, he drank down his second beer in one or two gulps and then suddenly pounded his fist on the table. “It’s too bloody hot in this city,” he announced. “You stay away from it for twenty-five years, and you forget what the summers are like.”

“Wait until July and August,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“I’ve seen enough. If I hang around here much longer, I’ll have to start walking around in towels. The whole place is like a Turkish bath.”

“You could always take a vacation. Lots of people go away during the warm weather. The mountains, the beach, you could go anywhere you want.”

“There’s only one place I’m interested in. I think you know where it is.”

“But what about your book? I thought you wanted to finish it first.”

“I did. But now I’ve changed my mind.”

“It can’t just be the weather.”

“No, I need a little break. For that matter, so do you.”

“I’m fine, Sol, really I am.”

“A change of scenery would do you good. There’s nothing to hold you here anymore, and the longer you stay, the worse off you are. I’m not blind, you know.”

“I’ll get over it. Things will start turning around soon.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. You’re stuck, M. S., you’re eating yourself alive. The only cure is to get away from it.”

“I can’t just quit my job.”

“Why not?”

“I need the money, for one thing. For another, Stan depends on me. It wouldn’t be fair to walk out on him like that.”

“Give him a couple of weeks’ notice. He’ll find someone else.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, just like that. I know you’re a pretty strong young fellow, but somehow I don’t see you working as a furniture mover for the rest of your life.”

“I wasn’t planning to make a career of it. it’s what you’d call a temporary situation.”

“Well, I’m offering you another temporary situation. You can be my assistant, my trailblazer, my copy-hand man. The deal comes with room and board, free supplies, and any petty cash you feel you might need. If these terms don’t satisfy you, I’m willing to negotiate. What do you say to that?”

“It’s summer. If you think New York is bad, the desert is even worse. Our bodies would fry if we went out there now.”

“It’s not the Sahara. We’ll buy ourselves an air-conditioned car and go in comfort.”

“Go where? We don’t have the faintest idea of where to begin.”

“Of course we do. I’m not saying that we’ll find what we’re looking for, but we know the general area. Southeastern Utah, beginning with the town of Bluff. It can’t do us any harm to try.”

We went on with the discussion for several more hours, and little by little Barber wore down my resistance. For every argument I gave him, he came back with a counterargument; for each negative I proposed, he proposed two or three positives. I don’t know how he managed to do it, but in the end he made me feel almost
happy that I had surrendered. Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness of the venture that clinched it for me. If I had thought there was the slightest possibility of finding the cave, I doubt that I would have gone, but the idea of a useless quest, of setting out on a journey that was doomed to failure, appealed to my sense of things at that moment. We would search, but we would not find. Only the going itself would matter, and in the end we would be left with nothing but the futility of our own ambitions. This was a metaphor I could live with, the leap into emptiness I had always dreamed of. I shook hands with Barber on it and told him to count me in.

W
e perfected our plan over the next two weeks. Instead of traveling straight through, we decided to begin with a sentimental detour, stopping off in Chicago first and then heading north to Minnesota before we picked up the road to Utah. It would take us a thousand miles out of our way, but neither one of us considered that a problem. We were in no rush to get there, and when I told Barber that I wanted to visit the cemetery where my mother and uncle were buried, he did not raise any objections. Since we were going to be in Chicago, he said, why not veer a bit further off course and go on up to Northfield for a couple of days? He had some odds and ends of business to take care of, and in the meantime he could show me the collection of his father’s paintings and drawings in the attic of his house. I didn’t bother to mention to him that I had avoided those paintings in the past. In the spirit of the expedition we were about to embark on, I said yes to everything.

Three days later, Barber bought an air-conditioned car from a man in Queens. It was a red 1965 Pontiac Bonneville with only 47,000 miles on the odometer. He fell in love with its flashiness and speed and didn’t haggle much over the price. “What do you think?” he kept saying to me as we looked it over. “Is this a chariot or what?” We had to replace the muffler and the tires, the carburetor
needed adjusting, and the rear end was dented, but Barber’s mind was made up, and I didn’t see any point in trying to talk him out of it. For all its flaws, the car was a snappy little piece of machinery, as he put it, and I supposed it would serve as well as any other. We took it out for a trial spin, and as we crisscrossed the streets of Flushing, Barber lectured enthusiastically on Pontiac’s rebellion against Lord Amherst. We shouldn’t forget, he said, that this car was named after a great Indian chief. It will add another dimension to our trip. By driving this car out West, we’ll be paying homage to the dead, commemorating the valiant warriors who rose up in defense of the land we stole from them.

We bought hiking boots, sunglasses, backpacks, canteens, binoculars, sleeping bags, and a tent. After putting in another week and a half at my friend Stan’s moving business, I was able to retire with a good conscience when a cousin of his showed up in town for the summer and agreed to take my place. Barber and I went out for a last dinner in New York (corned beef sandwiches at the Stage Deli) and returned to the apartment by nine o’clock, planning to turn in at a reasonable hour so we could get an early start the next morning. It was early July, 1971. I was twenty-four years old, and I felt that my life had come to a dead end. As I lay on the couch in the darkness, I heard Barber tiptoe into the kitchen and call Kitty on the phone. I couldn’t make out everything he said, but apparently he was telling her about the trip. “Nothing is sure,” he whispered, “but it might do him some good. Maybe he’ll be ready to see you again by the time we get back.” It wasn’t hard for me to guess who he was referring to. After Barber returned to his room, I turned on the light and uncorked another bottle of wine, but alcohol seemed to have lost its power over me. When Barber came in to wake me at six o’clock the next morning, I don’t think I had been asleep for more than twenty or thirty minutes.