Part One 3 страница

I wondered if my letters to Jack Axelrod were opened and read by the Rockville staff and I wondered if the brief, meticulously typed notes he occasionally sent in reply were also scrutinized. If I’d wanted to send him a message of passionate sedition I suppose I could have slipped it to my parents on one of their biweekly visits and had them mail it in the wild, thundering freedom of the Outside World. I don’t know what I could have said to my grandfather that would have raised any suspicions (I knew that my sincerity as a patient was in doubt), though I did feel our living situations had something in common: he in his balmy planned community with strangers in the communal garden, me learning to play the guitar and singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” with peers such as I would not have known or looked twice at under any other circumstances. But Rose and Arthur were not likely co-conspirators if I wanted wide, risky contact with Jack; they were uneasy with my relationship with him and the one weekend he flew north to visit me, they stayed home.

Of course the letters I truly longed to send I didn’t even dare seal into envelopes: the letters to Jade. Even if I’d known where to send them, I wouldn’t have risked detection—those pages and pages and pages of frantic scrawlings were the core of my secret life in Rockville and I never knowingly hinted at it, not even to Dr. Clark, the psychiatrist in charge of my case, who I actually liked and spoke to five hours a week. I prayed that Jade would know that I was writing those unreceivable letters. I believed, because I had to, in all sorts of mental miracles, like detailed telepathy or the power of my rich electrical thoughts to send to her a vivid, unmistakable sign—a heart-shaped constellation, a speaking wind, or a caterpillar that would find her alone in a field of tall grass, crawl up her arm and stop at the elbow, turn its hard black goggles toward her and implant in her consciousness not only the fact of my ceaseless, obsessional thoughts but their content as well. Perhaps if someone had told me that my stay in Rockville was going to be two years, or five, or even ten, I would have found the cunning and courage to get word to Jade. But from the moment I was installed in my room and began unpacking my rolled-up socks and folded tee shirts (it was a pine dresser with a sweet Butterfieldian aroma), I began anticipating my release, my return to Jade. I did not dream of this release as something that was months away—I felt it could happen any day, any day at all.

I didn’t want to do anything to draw suspicion. Like Rose, I believed I belonged in a prison more than a nuthouse, and was damn grateful to be stuck in the latter. My psychiatrist mentioned that the fear of anal rape is the most vivid terror people experience when they contemplate prison—more horrible than separation from loved ones, loss of time, collapse of career, etc. I don’t know quite what Clark was leading toward, whether he considered this a holdover from our pasts as baboons or if he meant to suggest that the phobia was the Halloween mask of a latent desire. But the fact is I did cringe at the thought of being served up to a cellblock of crazed prisoners. There is something so unbelievably cruel about fucking someone in the ass. Of course the opening is there and, I suppose, handy. But it takes advantage of the body. It’s like making faces at a blind man. I know that one is suspect no matter what one says about things like this. If you say you like anal fucking, it’s a bit strange, and if you bother to say that the idea is horrible then that is somehow even stranger. But I had to think about it when my case was pending and it wasn’t certain if I’d get by on my plea of insanity or if I’d be sent to Joliet. I have never been on either end of a brutal sexual transaction—even the old high-school stunt of getting a girl drunk and grabbing her cunt struck me as crazy and wrong. (Though I realize that a lot of the drunk girls wanted nothing more.)

Once when Jade and I were making love in her bedroom, around the time when we first got the double bed, and we’d been making love for so long that she was as wet as a river inside and could hardly feel me anymore and I could hardly feel her but we needed, for reasons that really weren’t physical, to keep on making love, she turned over on her belly and raised herself on her knees. I thought she was asking me to come in from behind, where the tilt of the vagina gives the illusion of newness and tightness, as we had done so many times. Her back was soaked with sweat and the sheets were like slush. I was panting and sweating myself and sore all over but I didn’t want to stop, neither of us did. The friction, our need of it, wasn’t really connected to pleasure at that point. It was more of an attempt to erase our bodies and explode out of them into pure matter. It was afternoon, there was soft light in her little room, and when she spread her legs and offered her rump to me I looked at the back half of her vagina, with the dark brown hair sopping wet and poking out in curly spikes. I’ll never understand exactly what the sight of her body did to me, I mean why it worked the way it did, but its effect was so powerful, so unfailingly powerful that I believed then and will always believe that I was born to see it, to look at her face, throat, breasts, genitals, and feel a heat and spaciousness that no word in my vocabulary can even begin to express. I think that after all of that wet, wet fucking I was only three-quarters hard but the sight of her backside restored me to my unanimous erection and at once I began to move myself into her. But she stopped me and said something a little bewildering, like Put it in the other one, something uncharacteristically peek-a-booish like that, but which I completely understood. I didn’t want to say no but I was immediately nervous. We’d never done that before, and I didn’t want to leave her alone in her willingness to go somewhere new. And so I made a clumsy jab at her asshole with my cock groping in its lilac blindness. Like the first time we made love, Jade had to guide me in, only now she was pointing me toward a path my mind and heart refused to follow. I drew back. I can’t do that, I said, It’ll hurt, it’s got to hurt. Do you think so? she said. People do it all the time, not only homos. She’d been reading a book about the Mochican Indians of—where was it, Peru? They were notorious ass fuckers and not only the Spanish conquistadors but the Incas used to punish them to the point of death in order to make them fuck more productively but the Mochicans held fast to their preference. (I don’t remember if this lesson in anthropology came right there in bed or if it was later.) Jade pulled me back toward her and pressed my cock to her asshole. She grabbed the pillow with her free hand and breathed out with a kind of yogic completeness as if to open herself further to me, but it was useless because her anus was as cryptic as a belly button. I could feel its stunned rejection of my approach. You see? I said. But Jade was caught in the logic of her proposal and she stuck a finger into her vagina and pulled it out wet and moved it in a circle around her asshole. Try it now, she said. Or why not put yourself inside me the regular way so you’ll be wet too? What resourcefulness! I felt the beginnings of sexual terror. Why was she being so determined? What was the cause of this sudden stubborn hunger for a new sensation? Was she nostalgic for the stretch of an untraveled passage? Or was there buried somewhere in the core of our lovemaking a hopelessness and shame she wanted to exorcise? I don’t want to do this, I said, even as the head of my cock pressed against her ass’s wrinkled middle, lilac to mauve. It was opening to me, slightly. I must have been pressing myself in without altogether knowing I was. Her asshole was shuddering like a puppy, like a small frightened heart, and I could see, in a glimpse, her inner walls, a flash of translucent red as spectacular as slag. Why not? she asked. Her voice was muffled. She was supporting all her weight with her forehead. Don’t know, not in the mood, something like that. I was wary enough to be cautious. Suddenly she rolled over onto her back. A gray scraggly feather from the pillow stuck to the sweat between her small breasts and she plucked it by its stem and twirled it between her fingers. I thought you’d like it, she said. No, I don’t think I would, I said. My stomach was pounding like a second heart. I stretched out beside her, with my leg resting on her thighs and my arms around her. I’m not ready for it, I said. I think it would be wrong. It would hurt. It wouldn’t be right. It would be right, Jade said. Because it’s you and me and we love each other. I wanted to do it because neither of us have ever done it before. It would be ours. We were silent for a while. We could hear the casual commotion of her house. Sammy and his crew were below playing poker, screaming at each other over every card. (I hate to think what they’d have done to each other if they’d actually played for money.) Keith was on the third floor listening to Joan Baez with the volume turned up so high she sounded like a middle-aged drunk. “Don’t sing love songs / You’ll wake my mother.” The lyrics of that song curled around our slightly embarrassed silence and first I laughed and then Jade laughed. Though it was only in the future, after my release from Rockville, that I learned the real joke to those words, when Ann confessed the full extent of her obsession with Jade and me, and how she had used the heat we generated to ignite her own elusive passions.

Dr. Clark counseled against it, but I kept a calendar on my wall and put an X through each day that passed—at a minute past midnight, if I was awake. I moved through time with constant terror. It moved too swiftly, separating me from my life; it barely moved at all, keeping me distant from the day of my release. In that way, each day was a victory and a humiliation. Yet a part of me refused to live inside of time at all; something of myself remained distant from those nervous skirmishes with the passing days. I thought of this part as my best and most secret self and I would not submit it to my losing war with time, just as no sane nation sends its finest tacticians and most lyrical poets to the front lines of a raging battle. Throughout my stay in Rockville, half of me remained sheltered in the lead-lined bunker of eternity.

As it turned out, my preserving half my heart in eternity contributed to my undoing in Rockville. It meant that I’d make virtually no friends and that I was more isolated than I ought to have been, more sequestered than I wanted—the loneliness was crushing, for the most part. In a community almost exclusively inhabited by perceptive people, my decision to reserve a part of myself from the reality of our shared circumstances was noticed constantly—causing me to be shunned, attacked, razzed, ignored, or, worse, much worse, wooed, drawn out, seduced, challenged, conned. My own doctor folded his arms and shook his head when he listened to me, and more often than I care to remember said “ho-hum, David” when I offered my careful, tidy descriptions of my feelings. “What’s your favorite color?” he once asked me. “Blue,” I answered, thinking of Jade, her Oxford cloth shirt, the shade of the ink in her last letter to me. Dr. Clark leaned forward and moved his small face closer to mine—a vein the width of a child’s finger beat in his high ivory forehead, as if his heart and brain were joined like Siamese twins. “Blue?” he said, and I avoided his eyes and nodded. “I don’t believe you,” he said. He slapped his knees and stood up. His hands were on my shoulders now and I squirmed away from him. “I don’t believe your favorite color is blue. You can’t even tell the truth about that. Do you know how to tell the truth, David?”

Of course I knew how to tell the truth. But the truth of the matter was I couldn’t. I wasn’t there in the same way as the others. I wasn’t an acid casualty or a compulsive eater or someone who believed that the lawn wept at night because I had walked over it. For all the encouragement I was given to whirl freely through my feelings, to become whole again by expressing everything that was inside of me, I hadn’t in fact been placed in Rockville to discover my true unbroken self. I was there on court order and I was there to change. And I was willing to change. But I knew there were things I could not say—not if I wanted Clark to report that I was ready to go home. I could not say that I wrote secret letters to Jade. I could not say that all that “getting well” really meant to me was the chance to find Jade, to find Ann, Hugh, Sammy, Keith—but most of all Jade, to find Jade, to hold her again and make her understand, as I did, that nothing had changed. I was willing to talk about anything else, but not once did I confess that the part of me I’d been sentenced to transform was as alive and unreasonable as ever.

My belief in the truth of my love for Jade as a higher and untouchable truth kept me from the despair that clawed at the hearts of many of the patients, but it also meant that after a full year in Rockville I was still very much there and had no immediate prospects of release. Ted Bowen (working without pay, refusing the money my parents tried to press on him, and neglecting to deposit the checks they mailed to his office on Oak Street) made a number of appeals to Judge Rogers, trying to get my so-called parole commuted, but it was clear (though Rose and Arthur tried to conceal this) that my leaving Rockville wasn’t being seriously considered.

A few days after the first anniversary of my institutionalization, Rose and Arthur appeared for their Saturday visit. It was mid-September. The first touches of slate were in the sky and though Rockville’s soft golf-coursey lawn was green, its best life was gone. I still lived with a student’s attentiveness to seasons—the first cool day always made me think of the crisp promise of blank notebooks, good intentions, new teachers, reunions with friends—and the panic and despair I felt at not being set free cut deeper because it was September. The world was changing and I was not.

Rose and Arthur always seemed ill at ease and a little pathetic when they came to Rockville. They did not, of course, believe in psychiatric cures. It would have been more to their way of thinking to send neurotic teenagers into a state forest to do a little conservation work, or perhaps a year on an assembly line to ground short-circuited emotions. And the high-priced Rockville with its necessarily privileged clientele might have been invented to stimulate my parents’ scorn. They also felt the ego tenderness of most parents whose child sees a psychiatrist: they were sure I said awful things about them. They feared that I talked about their long time in the Communist Party (which I did) and that I portrayed them as cruel and uncaring (which I did not). They walked the halls of Rockville with unnaturally soft footsteps, as thief-like as my own when I used to return home at six in the morning from Jade’s. They wore dark clothing and spoke barely above a whisper if anyone else was remotely near. Dr. Clark avoided them, which frightened them in one way, but was also a relief. They’d read Clark’s book, Adolescence and Agonia, and it disturbed them. It was a chatty, aphoristic book, which enjoyed a mild success. There were no copies of it in Rockville but I subsequently read it and could scarcely recognize in it the stern, skeptical man who treated me—it was faintly anarchist in tone and put forward such suggestions as parents giving their children complete control over them one day a week. (“He writes books?” I said, one visit. “Well, it can’t be for the dough. He makes a fortune right here.” This was just the kind of cheap remark my parents needed to hear and Rose gave me a little squeeze on the arm and said, “That’s the spirit.”)

This time, however, Rose and Arthur were more uneasy than usual. I thought at first that they shared my desperation over a full year’s passing, but something in their muffled voices, stiff gestures, and coolish, guilty eyes made me suspect that their unhappiness was rooted in something more specific than despair. They looked absolutely miserable. And then I knew in an icy, uncaring instant that their unhappiness had nothing to do with me, that it was between the two of them, and that it was connected to the death of feelings between them. Once, when Rose showed up alone for a visit, she hinted briefly that the story of my father being in bed with the flu wasn’t entirely true, and the one time Arthur appeared without Rose he said quite explicitly that without her he and I might be able to speak more freely, more meaningfully. (We didn’t; he took me to the town, fed me, and then took me to a deserted back road he’d “discovered” and let me drive the car—I tried to scare him by speeding into the sunset but he just leaned back and smiled: it was so odd.) Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own. I sat in the nautical-style desk chair in my little room and looked at Rose and Arthur seated on the edge of my single bed. Arthur plucked at the nubby spread and Rose poked about her purse for Sen-Sen, and I saw that my absence had robbed them of their last excuse to remain together.

“I’ve got an idea,” Arthur was saying. “Why don’t we go to that old farmhouse we pass on our way out here?” He was looking at Rose, but now he turned to me. “It’s been preserved, nothing changed since eighteen twenty-something. All the original furniture, everything. It might be interesting.”

“Sounds like it could be fun,” Rose said. She said it with a frown, as if to put us on notice: even if she enjoyed the antique farmhouse, her spirits would remain low.

“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I asked. “It’s always a drag. You two spend half the day driving down here and then as soon as you arrive we get in the car and drive some more.”

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Arthur said. “It’s a beautiful day. We can walk around here.”

“I’d think you’d want to get out and see the world for a couple hours,” Rose said.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me. A guy who’s here has a pretty fair telescope back home and his parents are bringing it next week. There’s pretty good visibility here at night and as we all know I have a lot of time, especially at night. The nights are nice and long and we have supper at five thirty so that gives us even more time at night. You have no idea how much of it we have, time.”

“I hate when you get like this,” said Rose.

“Like what?”

She shook her head.

“Like what?” I repeated.

“You’re not the only one in the world who’s upset about this whole situation.”

“Drop it, you two,” said Arthur. Suddenly, his psychological politics seemed more clumsy and transparent than ever: how he loved to place himself between Rose and me, as if only he kept us from killing each other. It was true, he had stopped my mother and me from fighting countless times, yet he had never brought us closer and the distance he allowed us to maintain was as important as the truces. “I think we should get some fresh air. Before long, winter.” He pressed his lips together and swallowed; he hadn’t meant to suggest that another season lay in wait for me.

“Of course we couldn’t simply sit around,” I said. “We couldn’t talk. Tha’s what was so amazing to me about the…” I paused, letting my parents become anxious about the taboo that was about to be broken “…the Butterfields. To be with a family that actually talked to one another.”

“That’s a new one,” said Rose.

“It’s not a new one. You remember what you remember and I remember what really happened,” I said. “After all, I’ve had more of an occasion to talk about the past and remember it. Professional help, you know. The Butterfields were interested in each other and there was nothing you couldn’t say. You weren’t asked not to mention things and if you said something that maybe wasn’t so nice you weren’t told, ‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’ We always lost track of the time because I’d be talking or Ann would or one of the boys…or anyone else. Everyone talked and everyone listened and you had ideas and thoughts and feelings you never had anywhere else because there was nowhere else where anyone would care or would listen.”

“Oh, they cared so much about you,” said Rose.

“There’s no need to argue about this,” said Arthur.

“A bunch of fools in love with their feelings, is what they were,” said Rose, reddening, leaning forward. “And they didn’t give two cents about you.”

“When they let me stay with them I felt my life had been saved,” I said.

“Well maybe you did, but you were wrong.” Rose paused. “As you can see.”

“OK,” said Arthur. “That’s it.” He put up his hands.

“I’d rather be here than turn out to be what I would have if…”

Rose nodded. “If what?”

“If I hadn’t known them. If I’d been what you wanted me to be.”

“We’re putting on a wonderful show for the whole school,” said Arthur.

I slammed my open palms on the desk violently. I got up and knocked the chair over. I picked it up and thought I might throw it—at my parents, through the window, against the wall. My parents were silent. They looked at me with that mixture of embarrassment, disgust, and envy we feel when someone gives vent to their ugliest, most unreasonable feelings. I let the chair drop and walked toward my parents. I certainly wasn’t going to do them any great harm, though I did have a fleeting vision of taking them by the shoulders and shaking them.

“David,” said my father, with pointed neutrality.

Rose planted her small feet squarely on the floor and leaned back, like a drunk trying to sit erect and miscalculating the angle.

“I never asked you for anything,” I said.

“David,” said Arthur, letting his voice drift toward its natural warmth.

“I’ve been here more than a year and you haven’t done anything to help me.”

Quickly I turned away from them and walked back toward my desk and righted the chair.

“I think we should leave while the day’s still nice,” said Rose.

“Good. Go home. I want you to go home,” I said.

“Don’t pull this,” Rose said.

“We don’t want to go home,” said Arthur.

“Then visit with someone else. That way you won’t waste the long drive.”

Rose and Arthur exchanged glances and for an instant I thought they might discuss me in my presence. It had never been their way, of course. I’d almost never seen them disagree or reveal confusion. Running our tiny family on the principles of centralism, they shielded me from their uncertainties—captains of an imperiled ship staving off the panic of the passengers with buttered rolls and routine announcements.

“Well,” said Rose, with what was meant to be a sigh of finality, “are you through trying to make us miserable? As I’ve said, you’re not the only one in the world who’s upset.”

“I really don’t care,” I said. “With all my heart, I don’t care.”

“Your mother means that this whole mess is as tough on us as you,” said Arthur. He shook his head and lowered his eyes: it wasn’t what he’d meant to say, exactly.

“Do something for me,” I said.

“Our life is very sad these days,” said Rose.

“Do something for me,” I said.

“There’s no reason to discuss our personal lives at this time,” said Rose. “And I refuse to listen if you’re going to pretend you’re the only person in the world with troubles.”

“He knows that,” Arthur said.

“Do something for me,” I said once again. I thought of getting on the floor and chanting it, the way one of the orderlies had taught me to chant Coca-Cola Coca-Cola until my thoughts disappeared and my mind existed only as a pitchless hum. “Do something for me.”

“We want to,” said Arthur. “Surely you know that.”

“I want a new lawyer,” I said. “Who’s looking after my case? Who’s in charge of getting me out?”

“It’s in the hands of the court,” said Arthur. “There’s not much that can be done.”

“Who’s handling it?”

“Ted is,” said Rose. “You know that.”

“Bowen?” I said. “Bowen is a total fucking jerkoff asshole idiot. He’s been losing cases all his life—this is the kind of lawyer you get me? A Communist lawyer with as much influence as a stray dog?”

“You have no right to talk that way about Ted,” Rose said. “This is a man who’s been loyal to you. It’s time you learned who your real friends are.”

“I know,” I said. “Ted Bowen watched me grow up. Well, I don’t care. I don’t want him to have anything to do with me anymore. Don’t I have the right to fire him? I’m eighteen. If you’re too fucking loyal to tell him he’s through, then I’ll tell him.”

“You’re making a mistake,” said Arthur. “Ted’s a very capable attorney.”

“You have to say that,” I said.

“I don’t have to say that—or anything else.”

“Yes, you do. You have to say he’s good because he’s the same kind of lawyer you are.”

I glared at them both and waited for a reply. But they were silent. They didn’t sigh, or shrug, or even move their fingers. Their eyes fixed on a space three or four feet to the left of my face, like people you are shouting at in a dream.

Finally, Rose said, “Obnoxious.”

“Is it the money?” I said.

“You know it’s not,” said Arthur.

“Because if it is, I’ll get the money. Grandpa will give it to me. It’ll cost him less to pay a good lawyer than to keep me here. I want the best. I want someone smart and tough, someone with a little influence for God’s sake, someone who won’t get walked over and laughed at. I need string pulling and pressure and deals. Ted’s not the one.”

“He has an excellent record, David,” said Arthur.

“But he’s not doing anything for me.”

“You think you’re going to find some outsider and get the kind of dedication we get from Ted?” said Rose. “A man who was struggling for the rights of people before you were even born?”

“I don’t want to hear anything about it,” I said. I slapped at my shirt in that open-handed gesture of innocence and exasperation; a little coin of perspiration had formed in the hollow of my chest, trapped in its crater by the pounding of my heart and the hardness of my belly. “I want a new lawyer. I’d find one myself, but how can I? If you don’t do this for me…You have to do this for me. Tell Bowen he’s out. He has nothing to do with this anymore. The next time someone talks about my case it has to be a different kind of lawyer—not some little nobody with soup on his tie. I want the best. I want to get out of here. This is completely unfair. You better find me a new lawyer even if it’s someone you hate.”

 

 

 

They eventually got a new lawyer, and it was the kind of lawyer they truly disliked, with an office in the Wrigley Building and a picture of Mayor Daley on his wall, but even so it was practically another two years before the court gave me permission to return home.

 

 

 

They took me home in the middle of August on a day turned absurd by melodramatic weather. I sat in the back seat of their car with my tan valise on my knees, like a soldier on a crowded train. I’d been advised by my only friend in Rockville, a boy named Warren Hawkes, who had been in and out of three such places, that the best way to make the journey was to remain as lifeless as possible, and I held my mind tightly, as if in two cranial hands. Arthur drove and each time he glanced at me through the rear-view mirror he took his foot off the accelerator and the Ford slowed down. Rose said two things I remember: “This is the last time we’ll make this trip,” and, “I wonder if you’ve heard there’s been an upsurge in anti-Semitism lately.” We traveled a narrow back route, a short-cut to Chicago they’d discovered just recently; nearly ripened fields of corn thronged the sides of the road, pressing forward like spectators awaiting a parade. Above us, the thunder groaned away and first to the west and then to the north leapt platinum branches of lightning—in momentary silence and then with a great electrical crunch. The cornfields flashed, the air grew heavy, oppressive, almost purple, and before we were thirty minutes away from Rockville it was raining so hard the windshield looked as if it were being splashed with silver paint.

The weather somehow intensified my silence and made Rose and Arthur miserable on a day they’d counted on. I could feel myself failing them and in truth I didn’t want to. But I didn’t dare make a civil gesture. I was sure that if I let myself come forward at all, I would do something to disgrace myself and terrify my parents. I might holler, or cry, I might curl up in the back seat and whisper “I’m scared.” It was better, safer, to remain as inanimate as my raging senses would allow, and before long Arthur and Rose drifted into the haze of silence I’d manufactured. On and on we drove, slowed by the rain and startled now and again when the lightning broke so nearby that it sounded as if it were your own bones being snapped in two. Through the small towns, past the churches, the shopping malls, the hasty clusters of ranch-style houses, the storm and its crazy drama followed us every inch of the way. I dozed off at one point and woke with a start that was doubled by a long roll of thunder. My valise fell from my knees and balanced on the steering- column hump that went through the center of the car. I stared at my lap; the suitcase had left a perfect parallelogram of sweat. “You’re awake,” said Arthur, looking through the rear-view mirror. The car slowed down. There was a high hum beneath us and I saw we were going over a metal bridge. We were in Chicago, crossing over the Chicago River, dead now but curiously beautiful, moving beneath us like melted candle wax.