Recapitulation (11 page)

If there were a streetcar in sight now he would take it; any number, it wouldn’t matter. 5, up First South to the university, or 6, down State Street to Murray, or the one, whatever number it was, that went north around Ensign Peak to Beck’s Hot Springs. On this alien new-city sidewalk he was homesick for the smell of ozone, the slickness of a caned seat, the
dang
of the motorman’s bell, the
pink
of the stop signal, the pneumatic sigh of opening and closing doors, the familiar car cards above the windows: Arrow Collars, BVD’s, Lux, Listerine (even your best friends won’t tell you), Paris Garters, Knox Hats, Stacomb, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. And Herpicide, with its pictures of three stages of human defoliation: one of a man with thinning hair (Herpicide can save it), one of a man with only a fringe (Herpicide can still save it), and one of a man gone stony bald (too late for Herpicide.)

It would be pleasant to ride clear to the end of some line, while the car emptied by ones and twos until at the last stop the motorman would rise from behind his curtain and open his door and step out and stretch, and leisurely engage the front trolley for the reversed trip back, while the conductor came down the aisle yanking on the brass handles of seats, two at a time, facing them the other way.

Ends and beginnings, familiar and repetitive routines. When
he first came to Salt Lake he had never even seen a streetcar—had barely made the acquaintance of the water closet. The pure American frontier savage, with everything to learn about how people live in groups, he had ridden every line in town, just to see where it went. For a while he had believed that the conductors carried little revolvers in the holsters next to the change boxes on their belts, and he was shamed by his own ignorance when he found they were only the punches with which they punched out transfers.

Simply by its public transportation, Salt Lake had opened the door to membership just when he most needed something to belong to. It served native and stranger, young and old, Gentile and Mormon, alike. It prompted the beginning of a wary confidence. He knew where he was and how to get somewhere else, and he had a book of blue student tickets that would take him there.

But this face-lifted street bled away a confidence that he had taken for granted. He felt the absence of old friends. He failed to recognize what he saw.

The light was different, too. He remembered Main Street as white, lighted by electric signs outlined by scores of individual bulbs, some of them comfortably burned out. Now the whole of downtown, like downtown of every city in the world, was lurid with red and green and blue. He would never have noticed this anywhere else—he expected neon. But here where he remembered an earlier stage he found neon garish.

Had he expected that the city would stand still in fact as it had in his mind, a Pompeii silenced and preserved as it was before neon, diesel buses, streamlined cars, balloon tires, parking meters? Before television, before even radio in anything but its crystal-to-superheterodyne forms? Before World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the counterculture? Before the Fall? Before sin and death? Did he think he could walk down Main Street as into a black-and-white, silent, wheels-running-backward 1920’s newsreel?

Apparently he did. He wanted the womb kept warm.

Nevertheless, there were some things, passing First South, that he carefully did not look for.

At Fourth South, where rehabilitation ended and the old shabbiness
resumed, he was not tempted to go on into the shabbiness in search of familiarity. Instead, he crossed the street to the post office and started back up the other side. Most of what he walked past on his way back to the hotel was not there. It was as if the things he passed were inventions or dreams. But if inventions, persuasive; if dreams, indelible.

He stopped before a place called the Cat’s Meow (and there was an echo in that—for a while in the twenties everything was the cat’s meow, or the bee’s knees, or the snake’s hips). It dealt in gifts and art objects, but throughout his years in Salt Lake it, or a building very close to it, was a clothing store, Mullett Kelley’s. Beyond the plastic and chrome and leather of the displays, beyond the reflections of lights and pedestrians and his own peering face, he saw the dim aisles and counters of 1923, the year of his summer job with the news company and his brief flirtation with the fleshpots of Saltair. There he stood with his hoarded pay in the pocket of his knee pants, selecting his first long-pants suit (electric blue) and his first grown-up shoes (Selz Sixes, so called from their six-dollar price tag)—Scotch-grain brogues with wing tips. And black silk socks.

Not even the dazed adulthood of the long pants that the mirrors reflected back at him could give him the pleasure those black silk socks did. For months he would not look down at his feet in their shiny Selz Sixes and see his sleek ankles without a thrill of gratification. He was that way about gloves, too. He couldn’t help playing with them, pulling one on and snugging it around his fingers and clenching the fist to see the stitched back tighten into a wonderful smoothness, turning the upper part down to reveal his wrist merging into leather elegance. To any outsider, a scrawny kid, a plucked chicken. To himself, a creature of infinite interest, a marvel, transformed by clothes.

All by himself he came to Mullett Kelley’s. Strange that his mother had let him. Perhaps because he had earned the money himself, perhaps because she understood his need for independence. Even the electric-blue suit she never criticized, though after one wearing he himself knew he had made a terrible mistake, and his father, at sight of it, threw a fit.

There were other ghosts back in the night-lighted aisles of vanished Mullett Kelley’s. His later dudism would not be tentative, uninstructed, and solitary, as was that first attempt, but social and imitative. He would dress the way his friends dressed. He could see them in there, crowding toward the windows in Oxford bags with twenty-two-inch cuffs, in Cantbustem white corduroys and crew-necked sweaters, in ROTC breeches and prospector’s boots, in pegged whipcord and British leather, in straw skimmers with rainbow bands, in narrow-brimmed hats of rabbit-fur felt dyed red or green or orange—a brief fad borrowed from some movie, perhaps
Brown of Harvard.
And in white flannels and white buck shoes, in golf knickers and Argyle socks, in three-buttoned, short-lapelled suits made by Hickey Freeman or Hart, Schaffner and Marx out of (apparently) grain sacks. What one wore, all wore. Witness those Navy-surplus ducks he had seen disappearing down Main Street before dinner.

He stood and stared in past the little scene of the window display to where Bruce Mason at eighteen or nineteen, the Bruce Mason of the Holly phase or just before, surveyed himself in triple mirrors, a creation almost too perfect for profane eyes: white linen plus sixes, black stockings, black-and-white shoes, black sleeveless cable-knit sweater, black knit tie, white shirt with long arty “studio” collar points. The grasshopper at summer’s end. Medium-big man about campus, editor and tennis player, poeticule, fop.

With a refocusing of his eyes he made it a year or two earlier, say spring of his sophomore year in college. He was seventeen. Joe Mulder was with him, a couple of years older and cubits bigger. They had peeled off their red athletic sweaters with the white U’s on them and were being shown the new line of suits by Jack Bailey, just returned in disgrace from his aborted mission to Tongatabu.

Bailey had always been a scandal. In high school he spent his time playing football and tennis and his nights in what he and his peers called cunt-hunting. Their reports on how the hunting had gone drew crowds in corridors and locker rooms. Twice he had wrecked his father’s car, the second time killing the girl who was joyriding with him. In his one year at the university he had
raised so much hell that his father had conspired with the bishop of their ward to get him called on a mission.

Tonga was not a good choice. Bailey was not exactly repentant about getting recalled. He admitted that he had been teaching the girls on the beach at Nukualofa more than the story of the Golden Plates, and that they had taught him more than the ukulele. With small encouragement he would detail what he had taught and what he had learned.

It was Bailey’s theory that women like it. He believed that there was not a woman alive he couldn’t do it to, given time and circumstances. That was very interesting to virgins like Bruce Mason and Joe Mulder. Having experimented with how far a nice girl would let you go, they demanded to know how Bailey would go about persuading a girl who was saving it. He replied that he would ding their clitoris. Ding their clitoris and they fell like ducks in a shooting gallery. Oh, sure, they said, hooting. How you going to ding their clitoris? Just go ahead and ding, is that what they’re going to tell you? You have my permission?

Who said anything about permission? said honest Jack Bailey.

As a haberdasher’s clerk he was a natural. He would appraise your leg and tell you whether you should wear plus fours or plus sixes. He would instruct you in the right style of Arrow collar to wear with your tux. He would show you how to keep your shirt from ballooning out over your belt by attaching a rubber band between a lower shirt button and the top button of your pants. He bought his clothes at a discount and looked snappy in them. He wore his belt buckle snuggled against the point of his left hip. He was a husky, curly-headed, laughing satyr with a good tenor voice, an encyclopedic knowledge of clothes, cars, female anatomy, and the postures of fornication, and no interest in anything else. Joe, with his large tolerance, found him enormously amusing. Bruce found him fascinating because of the possibilities he suggested.

Bailey had the supreme confidence that he could talk his way out of anything. He liked to tell of the night he was parked with a girl out by the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon, and had to leak so bad he was dying of it. So he got out, saying he’d better take a look at the right rear tire, it had been feeling soft, and while he looked he took out old Elmer and let fly, and while letting fly he
talked a blue streak to his girl in the front seat, ten feet away, so that she wouldn’t hear the waterfall against the wheel.

Chortling, he raised his eyes and sang:

The story he was telling now topped them all. Probably he was right, probably he
could
talk his way out of anything.

“We’re on her porch,” he was saying. “I’ve been working her over and she’s hot as a firecracker. But there’s no porch swing or anything, so I’ve got her backed up against the wall beside the door. You ever try it standing up? With a tall enough woman it’s O.K. Not like a wheelbarrow—oh, mama!—but O.K. So we’re giving it to each other good. Every time I sock Elmer to her he lifts her off her feet. Every time she comes down she buckles my knees. Sometimes I don’t get in but three or four pumps before I come, but last night I got in ten or fifteen. And then just when I’m coming, and it’s all pinwheels and skyrockets, her old lady opens the door.”

Cries of disbelief. Laughter. “Bailey, you liar, you could sell that to the Mulder Nursery for ten dollars a ton.”

“Swear to God,” Bailey said, with his hand raised.

“So what did you do, you bullshitter?”

“What
could
I do? Jesus, I’m in her, I’m going off like Big Bertha. And there’s her old lady three feet away with her nose against the screen door. I couldn’t even quiver. If she turns on the light I’m gone. There we’d have been, stuck together like a couple dogs. So all I can do is hold old Agnes up on my pecker, and brace my hands against the wall like I’m penning her in, trying to kiss her or something, and I say to her old lady, ‘Mrs. Larson, I’ve been trying to get a good-night kiss from your daughter and she won’t give me one. Have you got any influence with her?’ ”

“You didn’t!”

“I sure as hell did. ‘I know I’m keeping her up late,’ I says, ‘but she’s been holding us up here for fifteen minutes.’ ”

Bailey rolled his eyes toward heaven; his cocky, square-jawed
face wore a look like prayer. “Jesus, it was me holding
her
up, and Elmer was losing his holt. There’s no way I can turn away, or get her skirts down, or button up, or anything. I just have to lean there against her and spill this line to her old lady about what a stingy daughter she has, won’t even give a guy a good-night kiss. ‘Maybe if you told her to,’ I says, ‘she’d give me one little smack and I could go home and we could all go to bed.’ All the time old Agnes is fainting down the wall, and I’m scared shitless her old lady will turn on the light, or come clear out.”

“Penis erectus non compos mentis,” said Joe, who had a lawyer brother.

“And then what happened?” said Bruce Mason, snake-charmed by this tale.

“So I lean on old Agnes and I sing a little song in her ear,” Bailey said. “ ‘How about a little kiss, Cecilia? A little kiss you’ll never miss, Cecilia?’ Just like Whispering Smith.”

“Bailey, you’re the goddamnedest …”

“If my boyish charm don’t work, I’m ruined,” Bailey said. “I’m still into Agnes about a foot.…”

“Ah, ah,” Joe said. “Vanity, vanity.”

“And then her old lady says, ‘I don’t find any of this very funny, Mister Bailey. Agnes, I want you in here in two minutes, you hear?’ And shuts the door. Oo woo. Oh boy.”

“So then you screwed her again, I suppose.”

“No,” Bailey said. “As soon as she shut the door, I discreetly withdrew.”

They shouted with laughter, and Bailey, with one eye on the office door in the back where the boss might be listening, began straightening up a rack of ties. (
Laughter
, Mason thought, staring through the window at that embryo of himself inside. Could there have been a time when he thought Bailey
funny?
And answered himself: yes.)

But Bailey’s grin faded, he twitched his little mustache and knocked irritably, twice, on the counter. “Shit, though. I went away from there still wearing the condom, and when I got home I threw it in the can and flushed it down and went to bed. But it didn’t go down, and this morning my old lady goes into the bathroom and sees this evidence floating there, and there’s hell to pay. I don’t know if I dare go home. If she tells my old man, I won’t.”