St. Urbain's Horseman (38 page)

Ruminating in his study, Jake grasped it wasn't only London or Canada that was exasperating him, but also the books, films, and plays he had consumed. Years and years ago, he recalled, another Jake, ponderously searching for a better way than St. Urbain's, had started out on his intellectual trek immensely heartened to discover, through the books that shaped him, that he wasn't a freak. There were others who thought and felt as he did. Now the same liberated bunch dissatisfied, even bored, him. The novels he devoured so hopefully, conned by overexcited reviews, were sometimes diverting, but told him nothing he had not already known. On the contrary, they only served to reaffirm, albeit on occasion with style, his own feelings.
In a word, they were self-regarding. As he was, as his friends were. If it had given the callow Canadian boy who had once been Jake reassurance and pleasure to see his own dilemmas endorsed, rendered real in print, now the further prospect of others torn by his own concerns, more malcontent and swollen egos, filled him with ennui.

Literature, once his consolation, was no longer enough. To read of meanness in others, promiscuity well observed or greed understood, to discover his own inadequacies shared no longer licensed them, any more than all the deaths that had come before could begin to make his own endurable.

Oh, Horseman, Horseman, where are you?

Jake craved answers, a revelation, something out there, a certitude, like the Bomb before it was discovered. Meanwhile, he was choked with self-disgust. Given his
curriculum vitae
, orthodox Jewish background, emergent working class, urban Canadian, his life until now read to him like any Jewish intellectual journeyman's case history. To begin with, his
zeyda
was a cliché. A gentle Jew. A chess player. His childhood street fights, the stuff of everybody's protest novel, lacked only one trite detail. Nobody had ever said to him, “You killed Christ.” On the other hand, his mother actually said, “Eat, eat.” She was aggressive, a culture snob, and his father was henpecked. As they were divorced, he could also qualify as the product of a broken home. At fifteen he had been sufficiently puerile to tell his father, “The synagogue is full of hypocrites,” and two years later he had the originality to describe himself as … ghetto-liberated.

If, rather than a code of unspoken nonconformities, there was a battery of written tests for intellectual novices, then Jake felt he would have passed top of the latter-day yeshiva class. He had done all the right wrong things, even to marrying a
shiksa
, voting for the better candidate to this day and, squeezed in a vise between the moral values of two generations, worrying about Arab civil rights in Israel, on the one hand, and kids having to make do with impurities in their pot, on the other.

Luke still swam into focus from time to time. Back from Rome, on his way to Hollywood, between trips to New York. On his return from Malibu, they went out to dinner together, not talking to begin with, but instead replaying their friendship like an old movie. Exchanging anecdotes like bubble-gum cards.

“You must understand I'm not exaggerating,” Luke said, “this is exactly how they go about it. Before they sit down to the poker table, they remove their trousers. All the men, six of them. There's a girl under the table and she blows them, one by one, as the game goes on …”

“Oh, God, Luke, what's to become of us?”

“Look here, baby. We're on the
Titanic
. It's going down. Everything, everybody. Me, I've decided to travel first class.”

“Is that all?”

“Before you turn around, you're dead.” Luke fiddled with his glasses, embarrassed. “All right, then, what do you believe in?”

“Praising those who were truly great, those who came nearest the sun. I believe in theirs and ours. Dr. Johnson, yes, Dr. Leary, no.”

I'm a liberal, Jake thought, driving home. If only he labored for Dow Chemical, yielding napalm, and so was utterly committed to evil, or if, conversely, he practiced medicine among the Bantu, death's enemy … As it was, he was merely another ranks contributor to the arts. Like most of what he read or saw on stage or screen, only to deprecate it fiercely afterwards, he felt his own work had no importance other than the intermittent pleasure it gave him. The time it filled, the social office it provided. After all the posturing, the assumed moral stance, he was, like his mindless uncles, no more than a provider. Worse. A provider with pretensions. Applying Norman Mailer's stricture as a rule, he could not honestly claim that he was adding an inch to the house.

Which is not to say on some mornings, for no ostensible reason whatsoever, Jake did not wake ineffably happy. Nancy stretching beside him. Sammy and Molly romping on the bed. Waken to
descend into the kitchen, prepare a delicious breakfast, and drive them into the country. Then, cavorting in a meadow, savoring the sun and his family, he would all at once be riddled with anxiety.
Why am I being allowed to enjoy myself?
The Gods raise you, only the better to strike you down. So look sharp, Yankel, there's something lousy in store.

His glee only simulated as he chased Sammy now, Jake would scrutinize the surrounding woods for advancing Nazi troops. Search the grass for poisonous snakes. Rake the skies for falling planets. Stealthily maneuvering his giggly, frolicking brood closer to the car, he would assure himself that his jack handle was within reach in case they were suddenly set upon by Black Panthers zonked out of their minds on speed. Remember, immediately before Oswald took aim, John Kennedy seemed the most blessed of princes. Malcolm X had further speaking engagements. Even Albert Camus must have had plans for when he reached Paris.

Still playing, but hard put to conceal his apprehensions, Jake would try to outwit the avenging Gods by trying to conjure up the most appalling things that could befall him, forearming himself as it were.

Nancy discovers a lump on her breast. Molly's heart springs a leak. Sammy, a sex maniac's meal. For him, lung cancer.

Whenever Jake flew anywhere, he arrived untimely early to loiter by the insurance machine, just to make sure nobody was investing too heavily. Among the credit cards in his wallet, there was a card that read: “This is to declare that in the event of my death in a Street accident, I, the undersigned, wish to be buried intact. None of my organs are available for transplants under any conditions whatsoever.”

Unknown to Nancy, or so Jake assumed, he kept a baseball bat under his bed. He had joined a shooting club, which entitled him to keep a rifle. He had even planned, before retiring, to distribute plates on the stairs leading to their bedroom, so that when the vandals came he could be roused from his sleep in time to defend his family. But he could think of no satisfactory explanation for Nancy.

Nancy, his love. Seized unawares by a joyous mood in the evening, taking Nancy to dinner on impulse, ordering succulent dishes and wines too splendid for him to appreciate, except by price, following it with brandies and protestations of love, he would suddenly, unexpectedly, clamor for the bill.
Gas leak
.

“Why do we have to run?” Nancy would ask, irritated, believing him to be bored with her.

GAS LEAK!
My God, can't she see them? Sammy and Molly. Sprawled lifeless on their beds.

Gone, gone.

When it wasn't the children's safety, death, or the Germans' second coming that plagued him, it was the fact that he felt his generation was unjustly squeezed between two raging and carnivorous ones. The old establishment and the young hipsters. The shits and the shit-heads. Unwillingly, without justice, they had been cast in Kerensky's role. Neither as obscene as the Czar, nor as bloodthirsty as Lenin. Even as Jews, they did not fit a mythology. Not having gone like sheep to the slaughterhouse, but also too fastidious to punish Arab villages with napalm. What Jake stood for would not fire the countryside; decency, tolerance, honor. With E. M. Forster, he wearily offered two cheers for democracy. After George Orwell, he was for a closer look at anybody's panacea.

Jake was a liberal.

He would have been willing to vote for the legalization of pot, but he couldn't feel that a sixteen-year-old was deprived if he lacked for a pack of Acapulco Gold. He was
against
puritan repression,
for
fucking, but not necessarily on stage. A born cop-hater, he still wouldn't offer one a sandwich with shit spread between the bread. Though he felt the university was too intricately involved with the military-industrial complex he didn't think it was a blow struck for universal love when students tore a professor's work of twenty years to shreds. Admittedly, Hollywood had lied, so had the
Satevepost
, but he didn't want Molly to feel a wallflower if at fourteen she didn't submit to a gang bang. When Reb Allen Ginsberg preached to the unformed that all history was bunk, what first sprang to mind was Goering reaching for his gun when he heard the word culture. Increasingly, wherever he turned, Jake felt his generation was being crushed by two hysterical forces, the outraged work-oriented old and the spitefully playful
young, each heaving half truths at one another. Not that his own bunch filled him with jubilance. For one day, Jake feared, they would be dismissed as trivial, a peripheral generation. Crazy about bad old movies, nostalgic for comic books. Their Gods and mine, he allowed, don't fail. At worst, they grow infirm. They suffer pinched nerves, like Paul Hornung. Or arthritic arms, like Sandy Koufax.

But, above all, it was the injustice collectors Jake feared. The concentration camp survivors. The hungry millions of India. The starvelings of Africa. Months after his first film had been released, a letter reached him from Canada.