The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  When I opened the door, Dad was standing on the porch, looking bedraggled. His eyes were swollen. He must have driven all night. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in.

  “Dad? What’s wrong?”

  The folds of skin on either side of his eyes crinkled. He was holding an olive-green rucksack, one he’d had for as long as I could remember. Printed on the front beneath the logo of the Marine Corps were the words, semper fideles. His gun-metal gray hair was cut in a flattop to regulation one-quarter-inch length, his bearing was military, his grimace menacing. He plopped down on the sofa, pulled my high school diary out of his rucksack, and smacked it on the coffee table.

  “What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” he said. “I’m sick, thinking of those soldiers, boys your age— patriots—”

  His anger tossed me into memories of antiwar protests turned violent: police in riot gear swinging clubs, breaking bones, spilling blood. Feeling as if I were choking on tear gas, I walked to the window, intending to open it, but my path was blocked by dust particles reflecting sunlight, swirling in a vortex, and I burst into laughter. “Don’t tell me— don’t tell me you came all the way up here to pick a fight about the war.” When I caught my breath, he was still sitting on the sofa, staring at me. I went into the kitchen.

  “I’m making coffee,” I called out. “You want some?”

  When I returned to the living room, I said, “Tell me you didn’t read my diary.” But of course, he had. I could see it in his face. He’d figured it out, put it all together: protesting the war, smoking pot, making love, and rock ’n’ roll were all symptoms of the same plague. And I was a carrier of the disease.

  Instead of answering me, he put on his reading glasses. Then he opened my diary and began marking it with a highlighter. It wasn’t until then that the full impact of what he’d done hit me. He’d read about me and Georges making love. He’d read about sexual fantasies I’d never told another person. I thought about grabbing the diary; I thought about strangling him with my bare hands. And I thought about telling him he was a pervert. Instead, I said between shallow breaths, “We were trying to save lives.”

  He put his highlighter down. “Tell that to the boys left maimed,” he said, peering over the tops of his readers. “Tell it to the parents of the boys who are dead. Tell it to their wives and children. Make love, not war! What bullshit!” Then he returned to his work, stabbing a page of my diary with his highlighter.

  “You can talk to my friend Abdul-Bari,” I said, getting into it. He was on my turf now, or so I thought. “You can debate the war with someone who’s been there. You tell him what his sacrifice was for.”

  “Abdul-Bari? The boy who lost his legs when he stepped on a landmine on the outskirts of Da Nang? You call him,” he said, while continuing to mark up my diary with his highlighter. “I want him to know how you mocked his sacrifice. How you abandoned decency.”

  “There is nothing indecent protesting a senseless war,” I said.

  “Honor!” he said. “It’s about honor. Honor begins with honesty. When I said you could play in that rock and roll band, you promised me you would never use drugs.”

  “Is this about the war or is it about smoking pot?”

  He was quiet, and I thought he was considering the question until, without warning, he shouted, “It’s about betrayal. It’s about Georges.”

  I sat on the other side of the sofa, looking at the floor. He was quiet, breathing hard, not saying a word. He finished his coffee and asked for another cup.

  I couldn’t move. Apparently, the weight of the moment had the same effect on Dad because he, too, was motionless. We sat there, still, not talking, for only a few minutes, but I felt the passage of a generation.

  Dad capped the highlighter, put it in his shirt pocket, and closed my diary. “Well,” he said, “are you getting coffee?”

  When I returned from the kitchen he was pacing.

  “I trusted that boy, and he gave you dope and used you,” he said, waving my diary like an evangelical preacher threatening the mortal souls of his congregants with the Good Book. Then his voice cracked. “Well, I’m telling you now, if you marry that rodent, you’ll never have my blessing. I won’t be there.”

  I grabbed the diary and waved it in his face. “You read my diary! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “For what? For loving you? For protecting you from a drug-addled pervert?”

  “For possession of stolen property! For violating my privacy! For never really understanding me!” I threw my diary on the sofa. “Take your pick!”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll turn myself in. And when I do I’ll give the evidence to the police.” He picked up the diary, holding it like an indictment. “Evidence of statutory rape, possession of narcotics, and treason. Let the police read the passages I’ve highlighted and decide who should go to jail.” Then he sat on the sofa and looked away from me, rubbing his temples.

  “You make great coffee,” he said, “like your mother.”

  “Let me make you breakfast.”

  “No. I’m driving back to Coral Gables.”

  “No, you’re not. You need sleep. I’ll go out and get breakfast. When you wake up, we’ll eat. We can talk rationally. Then you can drive home.”

  He said okay. When I got back, my diary was on the coffee table and Dad was gone.

  It was dark outside when I finished telling Phoebe and Aurora the story.

  “I can’t imagine how you and your dad got beyond that,” Aurora said.

  “I told Georges that Dad needed time to cool off. But even a year later, when I mentioned Georges’s name Dad would say, ‘Who? The Pinko Penis?’”

  “Ouch,” Phoebe said.

  “Mom said she was Switzerland. Bruce never spoke to Georges again.”

  My eyes were drawn to one of Dad’s meticulous notes in The Pentagon Papers. He’d written: Capt. G. Allen – K.I.A. 4/25/75. The date struck me. It was four days before the fall of Saigon. Memories of our fights about the war flashed through my mind like a medley of nightmares. Then I began drowning in other memories: the passion Georges and I had shared the year we’d lived in Berkeley, his first year of law school, and the pain of breaking up when the alienation from my family became too much for me to bear.

  I remained in Dad’s study long after Phoebe and Aurora left, reminiscing, unable to forget the promise I’d made to Georges.

  Three years after I broke up with Georges, our high school class held its ten-year reunion in the Galaxy Ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel. The band played fifties, sixties, and seventies rock ’n’ roll, the hors d’oeuvres were scrumptious, and almost everyone was present or accounted for.

  I sat at a table toward the rear of the ballroom with Aurora and Phoebe, watching my classmates from a distance. Cliques reunited, orbiting each other. The lost and the found, the popular and the outcast, the jocks and the nerds, the druggies and the straights – unshackled from high school's hierarchical conventions – roamed the floor like rogue asteroids.

  Aurora nodded toward the ballroom entrance where Roger Knox was slinking in like a wounded dog, barefoot, wearing a scraggly beard and a bead necklace over the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk. “Talk about losers!” she said.

  “Is he homeless?” I said.

  Roger joined Ryan Hunter at the punchbowl. Roger had been an ardent pothead. Ryan, who wore a stylish suit, had been a preppy. They’d played together on the football team. Ryan removed a flask from his jacket pocket and poured a healthy amount of gold-colored liquid into each of their cups. Roger gestured toward a rogue asteroid passing by and they shared a laugh.

  “Seeing those two together is a visual oxymoron,” I said.

  Aurora said to Phoebe, “What a difference ten years makes. It’s hard for me to imagine that Roger is the boy who broke your heart.”

  “If I wasn’t over him before, I sure am now,” she said.

  “He was a hunk,” Aurora said. “Now he makes Manny look slim.
”

  “Watch it,” Phoebe said, poking Aurora with a rolled-up program. “Manny looks great. I couldn’t be happier.” Then she added, either with genuine curiosity or to divert the conversation from her breakup with Roger, “Do you think Georges will show?”

  “Georges who?” I said.

  “Gorgeous Georges,” Aurora said. “That’s who.”

  “Oh, that Georges.” I waved my hand dismissively.

  Aurora laid a crumpled bill on the table. “Ten bucks says he’ll show.”

  I slapped a five and five ones on the table.

  Aurora raised a glass. “All right! To Georges Who!”

  “To Georges, the no-show, that’s who,” I said.

  Aurora downed her drink.

  “Aurora, easy,” Phoebe said. “I thought you wanted to dance ’til dawn.”

  “’Course I do,” she said, “but we gotta lubricate our locomotion.”

  “It’s your elocution that’s lubricated,” I said.

  She turned her head in the direction of Phoebe’s gaze, then took her ten, my five, and my five ones, folded them neatly, and slipped them into her purse.

  Past crepe streamers hanging from the ceiling, past dazzling gowns and tuxedos rocking under spotlights on the dance floor, past familiar but older faces, past faces flirting, faces laughing, past the memorial for four classmates who’d passed away, past a slide show of senior-yearbook photos, past moms and dads I’d known as teens now living paycheck-to-paycheck, past nostalgia, and through a tunnel of time, I saw what Aurora saw: the face of Georges Bohem. He was at the bar talking to Roger and Ryan.

  I said, “I hope he doesn’t see us.” Their old pals surrounded them and swept them toward their tables.

  Aurora leapt from her chair. “C’mon. It’s ‘The Wah Watusi.’ Les’ dance.”

  And so we did, spinning and whirling, bumping and grinding, bopping to the beat, retracing the steps of dance fads of the past: The Watusi, The Jerk, The Fly, The Shake.

  As we stumbled off the dance floor, I looked around the room. Georges was nowhere in sight. “Do you think Georges is out by the pool, smoking a joint?” I said.

  “Who? Georges?” I trembled, hearing his maple-sugar voice. “He wasn’t in that degenerate crowd of yours, was he?”

  “Georges!” Aurora said. In a heartbeat, she was covering his face with kisses.

  “Aurora,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  Phoebe took Aurora by the arm, and they vanished in a throng of celebration.

  When we sat down, our knees touched. I dipped a napkin in a glass of water and wiped Aurora’s lipstick off his face. He was wearing a tropical linen suit, like the ones Humphrey Bogart wore in Casablanca, and Mickey Mouse cuff links I’d given him in high school. His hair was short – a look I hadn’t seen on him since he’d first left for UCLA. He could have just stepped off the cover of GQ.

  “You’ve kept in shape,” I said.

  “Want to meet in the morning for a run?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You seeing someone?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You?”

  “No,” he said. “Is it serious?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He cupped his hand behind my neck, massaging it, drawing my face toward his. When his breath was on my lips I whispered, “He’s Jewish, but Dad says I’ll never be happy with him.”

  He brushed his lips over mine and said softly, “Why not?”

  “Insufficient gravitas.”

  I put my arms around him, feeling safe. And then there it was, Georges’s sadness, a sadness at the core of his being. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never discovered its source. It was why I loved him – not because of his brilliance, not because of his integrity, not because of his strength or his beauty, but because of that ineffable sadness.

  “How’s your dad?” he said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  The band was playing “Dark Hollow,” a Grateful Dead song. Tethered balloons floated above the buffet tables, the stage, and the bars at opposite ends of the ballroom.

  “Nothing’s changed,” I said. “It wasn’t about Dad. It was you. You sold out.”

  “Me? You used to say your dad was a sellout. Now you’ve got the same establishment job he has, teaching at the same high school.”

  “Public schoolteachers,” I said. “Who do you help?” I ran my fingers over his lapels. “Look at this suit. You’re not practicing poverty law. And that bi-coastal thing. You’re my perihelion, so Coral Gables is my sun.”

  “Coral Gables is my perihelion; you’re my sun.” He caught my hand in his. “I’ll move to Coral Gables now. I passed the Florida bar exam. I’ll quit my job in L. A. and practice poverty law here if that’s what you want.”

  “Dad will never—”

  “He can. He can accept our love.”

  I tried to imagine Dad changing his mind about Georges, recalling the outbursts, the threats, the recriminations. I untied a white balloon from the back of the chair next to me, holding it by its ribbon. Then Georges slipped his hand into mine and the balloon drifted up to the ceiling.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Georges pulled me to my feet and sang with the band, “Dance all night/Play all day/Don’t let nothing get in the way,” rocking back on his heels, then twisting. He lifted my hand over my head, and I turned under it. He raised my hand again, I turned in the other direction, then spun toward him. When our bodies met he draped his arms around me, and we floated as one just above the music. When the song ended, we kissed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you can.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. If Molly Bloom could say yes, then I can.”

  “Yes,” we whispered in unison.

  Then, suddenly, we weren’t alone.

  “Hey, Georges.” It was Manny, walking briskly toward us.

  Georges raised his hand like a running back about to stiff-arm a safety. “Bad timing, Manny.”

  Manny stopped, looking befuddled. Phoebe, Aurora, and Al were heading in our direction. Georges gave me a rueful smile.

  There were bear hugs, back slaps, “How you doing, bro?” “Long time, man.” A bottle of champagne appeared, and we toasted the past – high school, college, the insanity of the war, an LSD trip that had taken us to the center of the universe and back.

  “I hear you’re a prosecutor, like Aurora,” Al said. “The Los Angeles District Attorney.”

  “I’m a federal deputy public defender, actually,” Georges said.

  “Who do you defend?” Al said. “Purse snatchers? Child molesters?”

  “People charged with crimes deserve due process,” Aurora said.

  “Crimes that do what?” Al said.

  “Last year, I was promoted to assistant chief of the Major Felonies Division. But it’s time for a change. I have an offer to practice transactional law. Hard work, a lot I’d have to learn.”

  “You were smart to go to law school.” Al’s face was expressionless, his voice bland.

  “Banking’s exciting,” Georges said with warmth.

  “Yeah? I’m assistant branch manager,” Al said, as if his job were a death sentence. “I approve loans up to five thousand bucks. You got a sports car?”

  “A Mustang convertible,” Georges said. “What are you driving?”

  “You got a beach house?” Al said.

  Georges laughed. “I am a government employee,” he said.

  “You’ll be a rich corporate lawyer,” Al said. “You’ll have that beach house.”

  “That’s not my ambition,” Georges said. “I’m also thinking about going to grad school.”

  “That’s intriguing,” Aurora said. “What would you study?”

  Al said, “You got a girl?”

  “No,” Georges said.

  Al, putting his arm around me, said, “Hailey and I are getting hitched.”

  “Al,” I said, pulling away from him. “It’s not official.”r />
  “Hey,” Aurora said. “How come you haven’ tol’ me?”

  Georges looked sadder than the day we broke up. I couldn’t speak.

  Together we walked toward the ballroom entrance. He placed his hands on my hips and touched his forehead to mine.

  “Promise me you’ll tell your dad I said hello.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  He walked to the ballroom doors, shaking a few hands along the way. Ryan Hunter joined him and they walked out of the ballroom.

  A week after Dad’s funeral, Phoebe and I met at Highway 61.

  “Did your mom tell you what she meant when she said your dad loved Georges?”

  She should have told me a long time ago. By the time Dad had revised his views about the Vietnam War, I was already married. Dad never felt threatened by my love for Al. What’s more, the times had changed: gang warfare and race riots had replaced civil disobedience. Dad had often said he wished that kids today would become as engaged in world affairs as we had. Maybe that was his way of apologizing.

  “Ma said that Dad saw a lot of himself in Georges.”

  “Well,” Phoebe said, “that was obvious. So did everyone else.”

  “They were as different as—” I looked at the posters on the wall “— the guardsmen and the students at Kent State, guns and wildflowers.”

  “Really?” Phoebe said. “You didn’t see it?”

  “Roger Knox?” I said. “Last I heard he was living in Ethiopia, posted to Addis Ababa.”

  “Our paths crossed from time to time over the years . . .” she said, but I lost the drift of what she was saying, thinking instead about Dad and Georges, both now gone, wondering what Dad’s reaction would have been had I kept my promise to Georges. I swirled the remaining drops of coffee around the bottom of the cup, watching the mud-colored liquid wash over the grounds.

  Father’s Day

  The Running Shoe

  Smog gave the air in the Los Angeles basin the look and feel of a crusty-brown haze over a warscape after a night of firebombing. Vehicles snarled; road rage was palpable. I was caught in gridlock eastbound in my Jeep on the Santa Monica Freeway, late to court. The traffic alert advised prayer.