Hoping he’d sensed wrong, he finally couldn’t resist venturing, while walking her home, to place a single finger in a belt loop on the side of the eudaemoniacal jeans. Instant havoc! She spun away in a cloud of speech and beauty that stirred the dust he’d become till the very air of the city turned brown. “I like you, Everett,” she said as he peered through the sediment. “And I find you ridiculous. I might even like having sex with you, and finding that ridiculous. But I’m a dinosaur, Everett. Because I believe in romance. Understand? And if we started a romance off with a Peachfuzz march, a used speech, a coffee and a fuck, where on earth could it go from there?”
When Everett spared her the “huh” and said nothing, she gave him back his own rhetorical “I’ll tell you where” and added: “Back to your imaginary revolution. And on to your next … girlfriend or groupie or whatever you call your rotation of female admirers. Which just ain’t my style. So I’ll see you around. Okay?”
That pretty well did it. Nothing left on the sidewalk beside her but a mute, half-blind, Everett-shaped pile of dry rot awaiting a dustpan. Which is why he didn’t even see the lips coming as they reached right in through the brownness and bequeathed him a kiss which, for all its fleetingness and all his experience, he swears was his very first.
9. Cat versus Wallace Stevens
Okay, you guys. Pair up in threes.
—Yogi Berra
In December 1969, after a brief visit home from Harvard, Peter hitchhiked up to Seattle to catch a plane back to Boston, and also to spend an afternoon and night with Everett, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly two years. They met, at Everett’s suggestion, in a U-district sandwich and beer joint—a small, smoky place decorated with neon-lit posters of Vincent van Gogh’s most lysergic-looking paintings, hence its teeth-grindingly groovy name, Van GoGo’s. Definitely a foreign country for the non-drinking, nonsmoking, vegetarian Peter. But, contrary to Everett’s expectation, Pete didn’t grow faint or nauseous upon entering. Like a regular guy in a beer ad (except for the ponytail and East Indian clothes), he smiled with delight as he clapped Everett on the shoulder, said how great it was to see him, and seemed to mean it. And though he couldn’t quite bring himself to order a Bud, he did spring for a pitcher of imported draft for them both.
But the old roommates had barely sucked the foam from their beers when a woman took the stool on Everett’s opposite side, ordered an Olympia (never a good sign), took a sip, then seemed to say to the beer, “You look just like Cat Stevens!”
Hearing her speak, both my brothers looked at her. Peter’s impression was that she was some soused suburban housewife drinking her way home from a party, where she’d worn her teenaged daughter’s tackiest clothes for a joke. But Everett’s reaction was quite different. Though he clearly saw the colorless, predatory eyes, the lime-green hip-hugger bellbottoms, the broad white plastic belt, and the literal bells (the kind Santa’s helpers sew on Christmas stockings) round the flared cuffs, none of this prevented him from remarking to his own beer, “You look like somebody who wouldn’t like Cat Stevens.”
Thinking this was mere friendliness, thinking that Everett was becoming less superficial about the appearance of others, Peter tried to think good thoughts as well as he watched the woman turn to Everett, note that his ponytail was thick and clean, that the ear on her side sported a small gold ring, and that the brown beard swirled down into the black chest hair in the open shirt. But he couldn’t help cringing as she moaned, again into her Oly, “I just adore Cat Stevens!”
“What say we move to a table?” Pete whispered to Everett.
“What for?” Everett asked.
“Exactly like him!” the woman repeated.
“To chat about matters of life, death and baseball,” Peter said. “And to give this nice lady and her beer some privacy so they can chat too.”
“What if she doesn’t want privacy?” Everett said.
“‘On the Road to Find Out,’” she said. “That’s my absolute favorite!”
“Let’s just go,” Peter whispered.
But Everett ignored him, and began to study the woman more closely.
Wondering what he could possibly be thinking now (deep people are often mystified by hopelessly shallow situations), Peter tried to study her too. But it wasn’t easy for him. Though his vegetarianism and Buddhism didn’t prevent him from noticing that her breasts were rather extensive, what really struck him was her abdomen. It was a pale, distended, sadlooking thing, completely exposed by her hideous pants and short, frilled blouse. Pete’s feeling was that, no matter whether babies, groceries, or beers from previous pit stops had brought it to its present pass, it was an abdomen that had seen years of hard use and now deserved a dignified life of privacy. But no sooner had he thought this than Everett looked the woman in the face and, with a tough little shrug, told her, “I prefer Mick Jagger.”
And her eyes began running up and down him like a pair of mice exploring a two-pound block of cheese.
Pete finally began to catch on: the R-rated brotherly chat for which he’d detoured through Seattle was in danger of being preempted by Everett’s conflicting role in an eventually to be X-rated performance with the Sad Abdomen Lady! He could hardly believe it. He felt ashamed to even think it. But Everett was clearly onstage now: he’d come entirely to his surface; everything he did or didn’t do was intended to convey messages to the woman. His manner was no longer aloof: it was a performance that said, Isn’t my manner aloof? His hair, beard and earring were no longer whimsical hippie paraphernalia: they were calculated image-implements designed to say: I like the Stones. I’m dangerous. What do you think of me? What was worse, it was all working. “Mick Jagger scares me!” the woman half gasped. “But I just love Cat Stevens.”
Everett swiveled round to face her now. The eyes were definitely not bright, the hair a lank blond, the clothes impossible. On the other hand, the hips and thighs were trimmer and the legs not as short as the belly led one to expect. And the breasts, truth to tell, were really quite large. “Don’t get excited,” he said, “but I am Cat Stevens.”
Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer and the trenches of World War I. Somewhere along in here Peter finally did begin to feel nauseous. But, again contrary to Everett’s theories about him, this nausea was not self-centered or self-preserving: it was entirely on his brother’s behalf. “What is wrong?” Peter was thinking. “What’s happened to Everett?” Because to be doing what he was doing, it seemed obvious to Peter that Everett must despise himself. The irony was that Everett was trying to love himself—and it was coming to the same thing.
At any rate, Pete wanted to help him. And the only way he could think to do this was to break the claim these two strangers were making on each other. He had no idea how to go about it. He felt stupid and half sick as he spoke. But he loved his brother. So in his dorkiest, most overstated attempt at a G. Q. Durham accent, he drawled, “Don’t get yerself all excited ’bout this either, ma’am, but I’m Cat’s younger brother, Dog!”
Maybe it was the word “ma’am” that got her. Too close to reality. Whatever it was, the woman, or old girl, or female bellbottomed person turned and looked at Peter so coldly that a big part of him wanted to just pour his beer on her head and walk away. But then he noticed Everett giving him the same cold look! It was a shock. It sent a jolt of despair through him. But it also made him mad enough to keep on fighting. “You’ve caught me out!” he said in a stuffy New England accent. “Most astute of you, ma’am. The truth is, I’m Cat’s older brother, Wallace. I sell insurance mostly, but write the occasional poem. Do you know my work at all?”
&n
bsp; This separated them a little: Everett’s poetic pretensions compelled him to smile faintly, while Bellbottom-Person just lit a Salem, then eyed Peter’s face as though, in a moment, she might need a place to stub it out. Okay, Peter thought. Stick with Stevens. Divide and conquer them with verse. And fortifying himself with a glug of beer, he turned to Bellbottom-Person and said, “Let me refresh your memory.” Then he shut his eyes, and slowly, pompously recited:
One must have a mind of beer to regard the cigarettes and sad faces of the tavern-dwellers crusted with pain, and have been lonely a long time to behold the hirsute youth, shagged o’er with self-sycophancy, and still believe you want him …
This did seem to divide them, but not in the way Peter had hoped. It confused the wiggles clean out of Bellbottom-Person. But Everett spun around to give him a look that said there’d be blood spilt if he didn’t back off.
Peter considered it. Out of anger, but also out of regard for his deluded brother, Peter the Hindu/Buddhist/Pacifist seriously considered punching his lights out and dragging him out the door. But when he noticed the woman eyeing them, thrilled to think that she’d been the cause, in less than one Oly, of both poetry and potential violence, he sighed, turned away, and refilled his glass.
Getting back to what she apparently considered the point, Bellbottom-Person showed her canyonesque cleavage to Everett and said, “Why, silly boy, did you think I wouldn’t like Cat Stevens?”
“The truth is,” Everett told her, “I could tell you loved Cat Stevens the instant you sat down. I just wanted us to have an argument. That way we’d have a little history.”
“Your strange!” she gushed. (She meant “You’re,” but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it “Your.”)
“It worked.” Everett shrugged.
“Your sweet,” she cooed.
“I know,” said he.
That did it for Pete. He jumped off his stool and gasped, “Gimme your car keys. Gimme your address. I gotta get outta here.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” the woman asked Everett, somehow ignoring all of Peter’s outburst but the word “car.”
“A big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser,” Everett growled, duplicating her feat.
“I think maybe your the big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser!” she giggled.
“The keys!” Peter wheezed. “Now.”
Everett spun on him a second time. “Lay off!”
Then, with a wriggling and giggling and tinkling of bells, Bellbottom-Person said, “I can, uh, give you a lift, Cat. I drive a li’l ol’ ’68 Firebird!”
For a moment Pete kicked himself for bringing up the fatal subject of cars. But when Everett flashed his perfect teeth at her and replied, “I think maybe you’re the li’l ol’ ’68 Firebird!” Peter realized he could have said, “The oracle demands your exhausted crustaceans!” or “Fire off the Number Eight flea coffin!” and the results would have been exactly the same. Then he realized something else: he had just seen enough of his big brother to last for years. And Peter has always been quick to act on an understanding: saying nothing, he headed straight for the door.
“Need these?” Everett smirked, jingling his keys.
Pete kept walking.
“Takin’ a taxi?”
Peter never slowed or turned.
“I didn’t give you my address!”
The windowless door opened. Everett squinted. Peter’s silhouette was black, the day bright white. Then the door closed, he was gone, the silhouette remained long enough to turn from green to red, then it too vanished. “If you ask me,” Bellbottom-Person declared, “your brother Wallace is a real jerk!”
“Who asked you?” Everett muttered, feeling as shabby, suddenly, as he really was. For the instant Peter vanished he not only missed him, but realized that he was using the woman to punish Peter for trading baseball in for Buddhism, and to punish Natasha for not buying into his revolution, and to punish Mama for her Puritanism and Babcock for his peabrain and Camas for being Camas and on and on and on.
I’m an idiot! he thought. I should run after him!
But even as he thought it he settled down on his stool, turned back to the woman, and slowly refilled their glasses.
Peter made his way, by city bus and thumb, to the airport, spent the night on three molded plastic chairs, flew to Boston the next day, and didn’t set eyes on Everett again for nearly four years.
Everett and Bellbottom-Person drank two more pitchers, smoked up her Salems, made a plan to drive to a nearby motel, stepped outside together—and in the rich evening light, as he strolled along with his arm around her, Everett looked down and saw a face so incurably forlorn and sad and hungry that even the breasts she now rubbed against him were no help at all.
They reached the li’l ol’ Firebird. It was the same lime green as her pants.
10. The Lady Vanishes
The mind rushes on, a drunk elephant.
—Kabir
Another Friday night, another party for Everett, and in the crowd again this evening was the incomparable Natasha, whose garb, goddammit, he aimed to vaporize and whose parts he planned to plunder just as soon as he hit on the correct technical approach. He was getting frustrated, though. He’d had to put himself rather heavily under the influence of Dr. Alcohol to protect his magic tongue from Natasha’s debilitating gaze, and so far the difference between mute imbecility and drunken magniloquence had not seemed to impress her. His first assault had consisted of inserting himself in a political argument she was having with some drooling poli-sci prof, and pouring out some icebreaking innuendo which used diplomacy as a metaphor—“all hostilities must be suspended,” “opposing forces must sit down face to face, in the same quiet place,” “meaningful maneuvers must come from both sides,” et cetera.
“Are you drunk?” she’d interrupted. And her eyes! They physically hurt him!
“No,” he lied.
“Then you’re an asshole,” she said.
“I’m drunk!” he cried.
“Too late,” she said. “I believed you the first time.”
Which wasn’t so unbearable. But it was her eyes that really did the damage! So beautiful, so expressive, and no mistaking their message: “Asshole!” they said. Damn! A few more seconds in the heat of that gaze and his nose would have spiraled up his sinuses and left a big red sphincter sitting in the middle of his face! It took him a full hour and two beers to regroup.
His second assault was made on the tail of an outburst by his old buddy Hank, a staunch SDSer (“Suckers for a Dumb Slogan,” Everett called them). Hank was a doctoral student in philosophy and, once upon a time, an eloquent guy, but several years of demonstrations, knee-jerk Marxism, hash-smoking and daytime TV had pared the tree of his knowledge down into a sort of bonsai. This evening, however, Hank had dusted off an old brain lobe or two, entered a sewing circle that included Natasha, and was soon loudly proclaiming that the bloody Gandhians, Martin Luther Kingians and Catholic peace workers should stop trying to shove their nonviolence doctrine down everybody’s throat. “It’s time the People got pissed!” he was soon happily bellowing. “It’s time some honky butt got kicked!”
It fascinated Everett to get to watch it from a distance: with a smile so beautiful that Hank didn’t seem to mind, Natasha serenely informed him that he was a moron. Hank looked miffed—till he glanced at her eyes: then he accepted her assertion without protest. But since he was only a moron, not an asshole, she was polite enough to offer a little corroborating evidence; she even tried to couch it in bonsai vocabulary. “The thing is, Hank,” she said, “if you kick the right honky butt, it’ll turn around and make tear-gassed, riot-clubbed hamburger out of your defenseless own.”
“You’re saying there’s a trade deficit,” Hank put in.
Natasha smiled. “More like a missile gap,” she said. She then went on to assert that Gandhian nonviolence and “every other deep New Testament or Buddhist or Vedantist value” was an inextricable
condition of peace whether Hank liked it or not. “You just can’t fight for peace,” she said, “without fighting for what lies at the heart of the world’s great spiritual traditions.” And Everett was suddenly reminded, uncomfortably, of a certain long-lost brother of his.
“You call hellfire a value?” Hank roared in rebuttal.
“I call hellfire a threat,” Natasha said, “and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.”
Hank seemed impressed, though it may have just been the scenery. But then Natasha committed the rookie mistake of trying to say something sincere and complicated at a party. Her little speech had to do with the tension between Christianity’s belligerent, supremist dogmas and its original universal compassion, and Everett found himself reluctantly liking her general drift. But when she tried to illustrate her point by reaching into her favorite cookie jar—Russian lit—and declaring Tolstoy’s late Christian novels inferior to his earlier, nonsectarian work, the buzzer went off on Hank’s attention span. “I understand what you’re driving at,” he said. “But it’s just book talk, Natasha. Student and professor talk. A campus is a flat little world, sweetie babe. And when you sail out over the edge, you really do fall off. By which I mean it’s weirder and uglier than you think out there. By which I mean I speak from experience. By which I mean screw Tolstoy. You wanna find out what Christians really believe these days, just flip on your TV Sunday morning. I hate to disappoint you, Natasha, but there’s no tension left between dogma and compassion out there at all. It’s pure-D belligerence all the way!”
The Brothers K Page 43
