The chorus is really the weakest element. It wobbles around and gets way ahead of the pianist. Gerard’s voice, for the most part, is clear and strong. He’s a fairly confident Don José and rarely looks at the score, until a bad note undoes him. I can see him redden, hesitate, lose his place, flounder back into his book.
Nonetheless, everyone loves the Flower Song, that song of the not-forgotten rose.
Gerard keeps insisting on buying the drinks. I have to fight and argue and end up having to say belligerent-sounding things to the waitress, who refuses to run a tab. “If I ever have kids,” he says, “I’m going to name them Methyl and Ethyl.” He toasts and swigs.
Something’s tired between Gerard and me. It’s as if we have disappointed each other into irritation; we have witnessed the other’s failures for too long, and it has made us cranky.
“You really thought it was okay?” asks Gerard again.
“Yes, Gerard, I thought it was okay.” I am on the verge of a sigh or a snap or a shout.
We try speaking of other things, of the decline of the world, how humanity is done for, how Gerard has been seeing Darrel around town with another woman, how Gerard thought I should know, and how Gerard seems a little too eager to tell me, how Gerard drinks way too much, and how Gerard felt our goddamned friendship was about truth and honesty, and how some things are better not to know or tell like for instance the man in the red turtleneck who left early because the whole production was a joke how’s honesty if you like honesty. And how I’m so volatile, and how it is that all this is happening, how I shouldn’t have to sit and listen to some drunk musician tell me about Darrel screwing around, and how sorry Gerard is, he really shouldn’t have said anything he just thought it would be for the best, and how Gerard is just a washed-up, no-talent Huck Finn or should we say Hack lounge act playing at everything and just because he’s drunk he’s pretending he’s hurt, don’t pretend you’re hurt, for godsakes he should just drink himself to death, and how I just don’t have the character for alcohol, it requires too much sweetness and commitment, and how Gerard should just go fuck himself, and how so should I.
And how did this happen? I never know how anything happens.
In the student union snack bar the teacher was scanning student blank verse—something different from blank student verse, she thought, but not that different. She looked up, gazed abstractedly out the window at the walk, that silly artificial promenade, that highway of undergraduate love, of sweet constitutionals. And then a student of hers named Darrel was suddenly strolling by out there with someone young and pretty and their bodies were touching, bowed slightly toward one another, and they drank from cans of Diet Pepsi as they walked. Perhaps they were having some political or intellectual discussion, thought the teacher. Perhaps this woman was a Marxist. You could always tell a Marxist: They wore the best clothes.
The teacher turned her gaze away, stared back down at the tabletop, near the edge, at something scratched into the wood. DROP ACID, it said. And then beneath it, in different writing, NO, TAKE IT PASS-FAIL.
· · ·
I have always wanted to grow old with someone, to be with someone through all of life, to lie under an electric blanket together, in the daytime, and compare operations.
Darrel is wearing a t-shirt that says APOCALYPSE PRETTY SOON. He places his hand on my crotch. “Nice place ya got here,” he says. I don’t smile. We’ve been talking about his future and now he’s trying to change the subject. I maneuver away, squirm on the sofa.
“Don’t change the subject,” I say. “Look, I want to talk about this. I don’t get it: You truly want to go to dental school?” This is what he’s just told me again. He’s smiling.
“Yeah, I like the chairs. Those dentist chairs. They’re like rocket ships.”
“But you don’t get to sit in them. That’s the other guy.” The electric chair, I don’t tell him, was invented by a dentist. “You really want to be a dentist.”
“Yes, eventually.” He stiffens, defensive, his smile vanished. I look for his lie look, his lie face, but can’t seem to spot it. “I’m thinking of becoming an orthodontist. I’ve told you this before, Benna.”
But it’s an absurdity that doesn’t register with me. Here we are on the god-knows-what anniversary of John Lennon’s death and Darrel is saying he wants to be an orthodontist. Maybe I am hearing things wrong. That sometimes happens this time of year: People hear things wrong. The night John Lennon died I was standing in a deli and someone burst in and shouted, “Guess who’s been shot? Jack Lemmon!”
These things happen this week in December. Look at the screw-up at Pearl Harbor. Darrel has meant something else all along. Surely he doesn’t want to become a jeweler of teeth, a bruiser of gums. It’s a joke. “Yeah, right,” I laugh. “I can see you as an orthodontist.”
Darrel looks suddenly irritated, screws up his leathery face into a fist, bunched like one of those soft handbags. “What, isn’t that good enough for you, Benna? Upward mobility for the oppressed? Is that just not angry enough for you?”
It’s true. That’s what I want for Darrel, from Darrel. He should be angry like Huey Newton. Or in a wheelchair making speeches, like Jon Voight.
“You want me to be a little black boy vet with a Ph.D. and a lot of pissed-off poetry?”
“Why not?” I say. It doesn’t sound bad, it’s just the way he’s saying it. Darrel stands up and paces peevedly about the living room.
“I can’t believe it. You’re just like everyone else. You want me to be your little cultural artifact. Like a Fresh-Air child. Come off it, Benna.”
“You come off it,” I say. This is the old children’s strategy of retort. I’ve learned it from Georgianne or remembered it or maybe simply saved and practiced it. “You’re being so, well … bourgeois.”
This is the word that intelligent, twentieth-century adults use when they want to criticize each other. It is the thinking man’s insult. It is the wrong word. Don’t let your mouth write a check that your ass can’t cash, Darrel said once, and this time I truly have. Darrel’s been storing up for it and leaps on it like a wild man. “Bourgeois!?” He’s pacing quick and hard, left to right. “You!” he shouts, freezes, points at me.
“You don’t have to point at me.” He is my student. He shouldn’t be pointing at me.
“You, Benna, are the most bourgeois person I know.”
I wonder if it’s true. Behind him I imagine I see all the other people he knows, a winding queue of ethnic celebrants, weathered hitchhikers, Vietnamese women, off-off-Broadway actresses. None of them owns a TV set. They have large peasant breasts. And though they occasionally drink Diet Pepsi, they are cool, practicing Marxists, anarchists, Trotskyites, vegetarians with finished dissertations.
Darrel continues. “I don’t know, Benna. What would you have me do? Flounder through graduate school, never finish my doctoral thesis, then marry some lawyer for their money and bitch at them until they’re another drunken suicide?”
My vision snaps, sails off like a kite let go. That’s me he’s talking about. That’s supposedly what I’ve done. “You’re wrong, buddy. You’re dead wrong.” Now I struggle to my feet, up off the sofa. Darrel stops pacing, turns to face me. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I don’t know where you got that idea about me, but it’s wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “It’s just something that gets said, you know, around.”
“Who’s said that?”
Darrel wipes his forehead in frustrated apology. “No one in particular. It’s just what’s said … by people.”
“Well, it’s wrong. And get out of my house!” I’m screaming. “Get out!” I feel suddenly, terribly, old. Maybe now’s the time for a group sestina. I feel the parentheses around my mouth, the turmoil of exhaustion in my gut. Here are the end words: SO, this, is, what, we, are. My body, if a surgeon looked inside, would look like a drawerful of old socks and shoes. My eyes
feel like stones in my forehead and my heart has blasted several sharp pains and disappeared entirely. I have always wanted to grow old with someone, but this is not what I had in mind.
Darrel picks up his things slowly, his coat over one arm, his books under the other. “You see, you can’t operate within this relationship unless it’s a little classroom for you. You need that power.”
“Get out!”
Darrel heaves his coat up onto one shoulder and before he opens and slams the door he turns and says, “I love you, but there’s one thing you’ve gotta understand: I’m not just one of your fucking students.” Then the front door swallows him up and closes like a book. I look at it for one long dumb minute before I’m out the door myself, watching Darrel get into his car, and standing on the porch, loathsome and coatless in the cold, I shout, “Yes, you are! Yes, you are! That’s exactly what you are!”
And he guns the engine and drives away. There is a wind with ice in it, and the streetlights blink on.
In nature certain species, in order not to be eaten, will take on the characteristics of something that is an unpleasant meal. The viceroy, for instance, as a caterpillar looks so much like a bird dropping, and as an adult so much like the ill-tasting monarch, that birds, as agents of natural selection, as Darwinian loser-zappers, leave the viceroy alone. Similarly, the ant-mimicking spider is avoided because it appears to have the fierce mandibles of an ant, though it’s really only a dressed-up spider making pretend. The function of disguise is to convince the world you’re not there, or that if you are, you should not be eaten. You camouflage yourself as imperious teacher, as imperious lover, as imperious bitch, simply to hang out and survive.
I sit in front of the TV and, for twenty minutes, without turning it on, stare at a woman mechanically eating a cabbage and mayonnaise salad from a large bowl in her lap. Afterward I feel nauseated, and devour an entire pound cake, its lovely topskin soft as leather. I feel like I’m part of a documentary on evolution and I’m one of the species that didn’t make it because regardless of everything else, it was just plain too stupid.
III
Gerard wasn’t at breakfast, and I had to sit there and make pleasant little faces in Hank’s direction to let him know all was well, the eggs were fine, the coffee hot, the silverware clean. Everything’s okay. The semester is winding up. Or is it winding down.
It’s Novemberish weather for December, that sort of still, ochre chill, no snow, no wind, just the old bones of trees, the damp, dead mat of leaves, the infinity of phone poles and wires along the streets. In the backyard the wrens gather and cry like kittens.
Inside the house the furnace kicks on. The living room’s warm with red and dust.
I have to think of Christmas presents: what to get George, Gerard, my dad—he’s always the hardest. George is sprawled out on a chair across from me, imitating me, limbs thrown out and apart, coat still on, body in the configuration of a slumped, crash-landed star.
“What should we get Grampup for Christmas?” I ask her.
“Get him …” She pauses, giving this great consideration. Her face looks profound and little in her new spectacles. “Get him some plates.”
“Plates?”
“Get him … get him a new car.”
“He doesn’t need a new car. He never drives over thirty-five.” Slow for a fireman; he’s retired. “I need a new car, not him.” My car is now one of those cars that will never go sixty except over a cliff.
Georgianne gets up, trudges over, sits on the edge of my chair. She is a heap of layers: tights, dress, sweater, coat. I put one arm inside her coat, around her waist, hold her. She presses her face close, her glasses knocking into my cheekbone. “Give him a big kiss!” she says, and gives me a juicy smack right near my eye, saliva getting in it, my little whimper-whamper, my Christmas elf, my mush-tush.
It is December tenth, a new moon. The phone rings and it’s not Darrel, it’s Maple. “Gerard’s in the hospital,” he says.
“Oh my god.” I sink into a nearby chair and switch the receiver to my other ear. My whole life I can think only of car accidents. “He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
“Probably,” sighs Maple. “He slipped in his tub and cracked his head open and broke a rib. It sounds appalling, but it’s serious.”
Gerard apparently had lain in his bathroom in and out of consciousness for about ten hours. Merrilee, the human Playboy magazine, discovered him there when she stopped by, after a fight, with a contrite, Yuletide loaf of zucchini bread. It is all ludicrous enough to begin with, but to have Merrilee in on it in such an heroic fashion seems preposterous, suited only to the fact of the tub, not to the gravity of the injuries, wrappings, tubes, round-the-clock watch at Methodist Central.
“You can’t go in there,” a nurse whispers loudly to Maple and me in the corridor. I am pulling open the Intensive Care Unit door.
“I’m Gerard Maines’s brother,” says Maple.
“I’m Gerard’s wife,” I add.
The nurse, head floor supervisor Sheila Simpson, smiles at me. “His wife’s already been here.”
“Merrilee, that bitch,” I whisper to Maple, and bit my thumb cuticle.
“Come back tomorrow,” smiles Sheila Simpson. “During visiting hours. He’s already doing much better, and we may move him out of I.C.U. tomorrow.”
Maple’s face mirrors my relief. “That’s good news,” he says.
“Sure is,” she says.
“Tomorrow,” I repeat dumbly.
“Yes,” she says. “Now why don’t you go on home. It’s six-thirty. You’re missing the real news.” She chuckles. She is not funny. I stand on my tiptoes and try to sneak a peek through the small window on the I.C.U. door and think I see Gerard lying there asleep, something plastic jammed up his nose.
George is watching Dan Rather and eating cheeze popcorn out of a bag. “Is Gerard gonna die?” she turns and asks; she has the face of an old, worried Yugoslavian woman, binging on popcorn. An airliner has exploded over St. Louis. The scribblings on Madame Charpentier have formed a dark, circular splot, like a black ball of string between her breasts, and horrid black shapes all over her face, like a catcher’s mask.
“No,” I say, and in my heart I take back everything mean I’ve ever said about God.
In class the teacher put her elbows on the desk and talked into her fists.
“We all have ways of erasing ourselves,” she said, and then passed out photocopies of “Modern Love,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” and several poems by Anne Sexton. She never had been able to organize her courses well.
The hospital is all purposeful white bustle and smells more strongly than last night of soup and rubber and isopropyl alcohol. I have found Gerard’s room number from the main desk downstairs and am checking out the plastic-wood plaques over all the doorways to figure out if I’m headed in the right direction. I turn a corner and finally locate 262. “Excuse me,” blurts an orderly trying to wheel a cart quickly by me. I’ve stepped out in front of him like a dazed woman.
“Sorry,” I say.
The door is heavy, knobless, and ajar. I push it open further and glance around. A white-gowned Gerard, no plastic up his nose and no beard, is propped against pillows and staring straight ahead. His head, neck, and back are in some sort of traction, part swingset, part backpack. His skull is wrapped in gauze. His arms, thin and bare, are attached to I.V. tubes like a marionette.
I step all the way in. “Hey, Q-tip head, you’ll do anything for a free meal, won’t you?”
Gerard glances up slowly, like someone with a huge headache. I imagine his head has stitches in it like a baseball. He looks fragile, smooth chin and all cheeks, boyish without his beard. He grins weakly and I can see that one of his front teeth is chipped at a diagonal. “A body in motion tends to need some rest,” he says. He has a bruise and scratch on the left side of his face. I lean over and kiss him. His lips are dry, swollen lavender with cracks of red. I can taste the slightly metallic taste o
f blood. I want to tell him how very sorry I am. I want to make up with everyone. When I get home, I’m going to phone Darrel. “Benna,” Gerard says, his voice gone soft and husky. “I’m glad you’re here. Have a seat.”
I drag one from over by the partition, behind which is an old man reading a magazine. “Don’t mind me,” calls the old man.
“Don’t mind him,” says Gerard.
I sit down and cross my legs. Gerard looks smaller and smaller to me, fading in and out like a quasar. “Do you hurt?”
“Not really. I’m just a little dizzy. They’re probably not going to keep this apparatus on for very long. I’m okay. Maple was in earlier.”
“Yeah, I know. We arranged it that way, splitting up our visiting slots. We’re a two-act show.”
“Even Merrilee came.” He smiles, lost.
I attempt a skeptical, quizzical face, then let go of it. “Thank god for Merrilee, huh. Thank god for the staples in life.” I am thinking here of the zucchini bread, though the centerfold does, of course, come to mind.
“I don’t know what happened. One minute I was unlocking my apartment door, the next I’m here.”
“They shaved your beard.”
“I did that in my drunken stupor, somewhere between the front door and the tub. Not too many razor cuts even. I truly am an amazing fellow. In case you didn’t know.”
I put my palm to his face. He badly needs another shave. “The new Gerard,” I say, not coming up with anything better. “I brought some books to read to you.”
“I already know Habakkuk by heart.”
“I know, I know.” Gerard’s right eye is wandering off to one side, as it does when he’s tired, a lost Ping-Pong ball. The tooth makes him look like a pirate or a street kid. I look down at my lap; I’ve brought Turkish Fairy Tales and Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps my problem is that I try to turn everyone into a child.
“How’s lover boy?” asks Gerard. His eyes close for a moment. The question is teasing, like a brother, but the face is weary, like an old person visited insincerely by a young one. Maybe I’m not handling the visit energetically enough and am tiring him out. I dance the books around as if they’re playthings. I try to distract him. “Zoopty-doopty-doo,” I sing loudly, for a joke.