Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon such bounty!” Ethel cried, still carrying on. “I shall not dishonor my marital vows and the felicity and integrity of the relationship we shared to play the role of harlot to political procurers!”

  Political procurers—! That pissed me off. “Crap! You don’t love him, goddamn it, and you never have!” Her eyes blazed with fury, the veins in her neck throbbed, she clenched and unclenched her hands. I thought she might lash out at me, claw at my eyes, start shrieking or something, but I was no longer afraid—I was no longer afraid of anything! The worst of the crisis, I knew, was past. This was the creative phase now! “It’s all been just an act, Ethel, and you know it! Part of the strategy!”

  “What…what are you saying—!”

  “Who do you think you’re fooling? You even forgot your anniversary last year!”

  She was trembling. I was towering over her. “You’re…you’re saying this to divide us! It’s not enough we have to die—”

  “Admit it, Ethel! You’ve dreamed of love all your life! You dream of it now! I know, because I dream of it, too! But you’ve never known it, you’ve never given yourself to him, you’ve never given yourself to anybody!” My God! I was amazing!

  “I… I don’t believe in bourgeois romance,” she said hoarsely, but there was no conviction in it. “That kind of love is sick, it’s selfish, we mustn’t—”

  “Damn it, you know better than that! You’re an artist, Ethel, a poet! You know what love is, what it might be! All the rest is just lies!”

  Her resistance crumbled. I was amazed to watch it. She turned away, lowering her head. Almost inaudibly, she whispered: “I respect him so…”

  “Yes, and you needed him, I know that—when you met him you felt abused and alone, and he was kind and sympathetic. I know all this, all about the illnesses and bad luck. I know about the bastard who tried to force himself on you, know how your own family frustrated your best hopes, how they failed to understand you, and then the Depression—what a lousy future you had to look forward to! And you thought Julie could save you from it, you thought—do you know what you thought back then?”

  “Please…stop…”

  “You thought he could save you from a meaningless martyrdom!”

  She let out a soft anguished cry. I thought she would fall. I gripped her shoulders, turned her to face me. “We’ve both been victims of the same lie, Ethel! There is no purpose, there are no causes, all that’s just stuff we make up to hold the goddamn world together—all we’ve really got is what we have right here and now: being alive! Don’t throw it away, Ethel!” Her lips parted. When she looked up at me, I saw a big soft tear welling up in her eye. “Ethel! Oh my God! I… I…” I kissed her.

  She was taken unawares. So was I. I had not planned this. She tried to cry out, but I muffled her mouth with my own, keeping my eye on the door at the far end. She twisted in my grip, fought, pounded at me with her fists, but I held on. In a flush of weakness, I felt guilty about overpowering her like this, even started to release her and apologize—but no, goddamn it, that had been my trouble all my life, I didn’t know what I was doing but I did know I was through being polite, I was through being Mr. Nice Guy, I was all done with trying to outargue women, or men either, Uncle Sam included, to hell with respect and consideration, I knew better. If I’d learned anything from seven years of politics, it was that you didn’t get anything you wanted by dealing politely from weakness! The meek inherited nothing but regrets and failure in this world! And I was fighting for my political life, wasn’t I? And more! God knows what all I was fighting for! I kept my lips glued to hers, partly out of a fierce determination to succeed, partly in fear of what she might do if I let her go, and partly just for the sensation of it, not having tasted such wildness since back when I’d dated the police chief’s daughter. And this was different, very different, there was nothing frivolous and jazz-babyish about this kiss—there was blood in it, ferocity, danger! Sheba the lion’s gaping maw was one of Aunt Jane’s henpecks by comparison! There was rejection in it, too, oh yes, I could taste her scorn, her disgust, her big-city derision, but for the first time in my life I no longer felt inadequate, no longer felt embarrassed and bumpkinish, I was on top of this, I was enjoying it, it felt good, it tasted good! Not sweet—no, it was acrid even, bitter, there was the sour taste of grinding traffic in it, musty corridors and overladen elevators, sweat, steam, asphalt playgrounds, loneliness, gutter fights and sudden death—but I liked it! In fact it was terrific! I pushed my tongue between her lips as she jerked and twisted helplessly in my arms—I was glad I hadn’t shaved, I was glad it was rough for her! I felt mean and bulky like a bear (partly no doubt because my shirtsleeves were still bunched up inside my jacket) but erotically powerful at the same time. I’ll be goddamned! I thought. This was what I’d been planning to do all along! Fuck all the phony excuses I’d made to myself, this was what I’d come all the way up here for, I’d been bent upon this clinch since I’d fled the Capital, maybe before, maybe since last night already, or out at Burning Tree—this brink, this body, this mouth! And oh, this was a cold mouth to kiss, a ruthless mouth, an exciting mouth, nothing like this back in Whittier, California—I felt I had to hold on just to stay alive! At moments I felt almost swallowed up, lost, disoriented, pursued even—and frightened: what was going to happen to me now? where was this road going? what was I going to tell Pat? how high were the stakes? But I held her all the more tightly, pushing my tongue along her teeth, prying, probing, battering at the gates of her buried soul! And slowly her mouth opened, her struggling subsided, her muffled plaint faded to soft groans, her tongue touched mine, her hand reached for my shoulder, then slid upwards to grip my neck, her body pressed softly against my own, her tongue slithered past my lips, between my teeth—and now there was a new taste, a far richer taste, the fear was gone, the repulsion, the contempt, her lips became sweeter, her mouth widened and new flavors flowed forth, exotic and strange, an incredible variety, all competing with each other, many alien, yet none disagreeable, all beautiful in their diversity. The tart bite of danger was still there, the bitterness of loneliness and ruthlessness, but they were blended now with the delicacy of innocence, the tang of the unexpected, the nutty savor of playfulness, the subtlety of first encounter—in each corner of her mouth I discovered something new, under her tongue, behind each tooth, there seemed no exhausting the possibilities and I relished them all! I roamed the avenues and alleyways of her mouth, tunneled below her tongue, scaled her alveolar ridge, slipped through secret passageways, taxied down her palate, delirious with the joy of it! In my excitement, I felt somewhat like I’d felt when I came down with undulant fever back in high school. Her own tongue now searched wildly through my mouth: I opened myself to her as to no other woman in my life. One of her hands clutched at my neck, scratching at the short bristle above the nape; the other crawled inside my suit jacket, tugged at my shirt—I felt like my very roots were being pulled up! I dropped the homburg and explored her back, her breasts, her hips (I’d been right about the underwear—was this one of the rules for electrocutions?), searched for the slit on the left side of her skirt. I was breathless, desperate to inhale deeply, I pulled back, but now it was she who clung to me, her tongue darting and flashing through my mouth, her lips sucking on mine. I snuffled, snorted in her hair, lovely smell, freshly shampooed—she’d shampooed her hair for her electrocution!—and past her head (how had we got turned around? I saw the electric chair, empty, waiting, built for men twice her size, garishly lit in its bright white room. I seemed to see sparks flying already from the electrodes, but this might have been her hair which was wild and fluttery and getting in my eyes. And the time—? I couldn’t see, but I had the sensation that somehow I was holding it back by holding her. I closed my eyes: my mind seemed to expand, it was as though her hand were kneading it, stretching it, her tongue lapping its edges, her other hand now digging for its root far below. Oh w
hat a mind! I hardly recognized it! It was full of hidden memories, astonishing thoughts, I’d never seen it like this before, a vast moving darkness and brilliant flickering pictures, new and strange, called forth by the charged explorations of our mouths and hands. Some were frightening: girls knocked down by fire hoses, men gassed in trenches and run down by police on galloping horses, villagers buried in bomb-rubble, lives blighted by disease and poverty, children monstrously deformed by radiation or eaten up by vermin—yet it was all somehow exciting, I reveled in all this experience and knew it to be good. I grasped Ethel’s bottom and saw the face of a child. He seemed to live in a great city. I couldn’t tell if he was black or white, Mexican, Italian, or Polish, but it didn’t matter. I shared his dreams: he was a poet, a scientist, a great teacher, a proud craftsman. He was America itself, everything we’ve ever hoped to be, everything we’ve dared to dream to be. But he awoke—we both awoke—to the nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair. He failed in school. He ended up on welfare. He was drafted and died in Korea. I saw all this as my tongue roamed behind Ethel’s incisors. I was weeping, but it was as if with joy, because I also saw Grandma Milhous and she was smiling. Why are you nervous? she seemed to be saying. Ethel was clawing through the hair on my chest. The child was reborn. There was peace. My peace and Grandma’s. I was trying to get both of Ethel’s breasts into one hand. I saw the villages rebuilt and the demeaned lives uplifted. I smelled Mom’s hot pies, felt my fingers moving brilliantly on the organ keys, playing “My Rosary,” heard the magical call of faraway train whistles in the night, and it was the sweetest music I’d ever heard. I saw the shackles of work gangs fall away, walls between peoples come tumbling down (I had them both in my hand for a moment, soft and firm and full—One if by land, I thought, two if by sea—then let them slip away, reaching up for her face), slum tenements emptying their multitudes into sunny green meadows. I licked feverishly at Ethel’s bruised lips and tasted fresh hot bread, stroked her throat and smelled the fragrance of roses, explored the cleft between her buttocks and felt a peace and warmth and brotherhood I had not known since those mornings we all huddled around the kitchen stove in Yorba Linda and we were still all alive. I felt I’d reached some new plateau of awareness, of consciousness, things would never be the same again, for me or for anyone else—how glad I was I’d come here! I jerked her hard into my body, trapping her hand between us: I wished to squeeze her heart and soul up into her mouth where I could get my tongue into them. I could no longer see her, I could not even open my eyes, but she had become extraordinarily beautiful, a vision almost medieval in its wholeness and purity—even her dress, wrinkling under my grip, had become soft and flowing like a Greek tunic. I couldn’t even remember the woman who had entered the corridor. The real Ethel Greenglass, childlike and exquisitely lovely—like Audrey Hepburn, I thought, whom I’d just seen on the cover of some magazine, though Ethel’s bottom was softer—had come to the surface and absorbed all other emanations (was this what the dialectics of history was all about? I wondered), and it was I who had called her out, I, Richard Milhous Nixon, who had produced this miracle, my God, I was out of my mind with the ecstasy of it! My head was full of poems and justice and unbelievable end runs. I saw millions of people running to embrace me. I thought: I am making history this evening, not for myself alone, but for all the ages!

  We broke at last, gasping, groaning, sucking our battered lips, clutching each other desperately. She buried her head on my shoulder, nibbling frantically at my neck. “Oh, Richard!” she moaned. “You’re so strong, so powerful!” She tangled her fingers in the matted hair on my chest. “I feel so weak!”

  I could hardly breathe for the need to, I was afraid I might have an attack of hay fever (girls’ hair often set me off), but all in all I was feeling very good, I won’t say I’d never felt better in my life, because I was already beginning to have worries about how the hell I was going to get out of here and hopefully get her out as well, but I was feeling very good. That she had called me Richard and not Dick moved me deeply. I thought: if I’d taken this direct approach more often, I might have had a lot more fun in life!

  My mouth was near her ear. I realized she was waiting for me to say something. All I could think of were some lines from a play I was once in long ago: Gentlemen of the Jury! In a few moments you will be called upon to decide the fate of a woman! Is it in you to understand her? Is it in you to understand the man she loved? Who is on trial in this case? And they weren’t even my lines! “I always… I always used to admire Judge Brandeis!” I gasped. Jesus, where the hell had such a thought come from, I wondered? “And Justice, uh, Cardozo!”

  “Oh, Richard!” she cried, and kissed me again. Apparently, I could do nothing wrong. Again our hands roamed, again our tongues played. I was beginning to feel at home in there, beginning to discover some tastes for the second time, and I found I enjoyed this even more than the first. She was panting hotly down my collar, clawing at my shirt and pants, ripping away buttons and safety pins, shredding what was not already shredded. I’d found the slit in the dress. Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between tyranny and freedom, I thought, there are gray areas. “Oh, Richard! You don’t know what it’s been like for me, these two years here…and…and the years before…”

  “I know, Ethel. Believe me, I know…”

  She gripped me tightly, rubbing her body rhythmically against mine, as though to bring to life that cabbie’s story of her Morse-code bumps and grinds. “I’m not like this! You won’t believe me, but I’ve never kissed any man but Julie in my life! Not seriously!”

  “I believe you,” I whispered. “I… I haven’t either!” I pulled her close to me. “Kissed a woman, I mean.”

  “Oh, Richard! What’s happening to us?”

  I remembered crossing upstage a step, then again facing the jury. This was not The Trysting Place or The Dark Tower. It was not The Little Accident. This was the Night of January 16th and I was the Prosecuting Attorney, kindly in appearance but shrewd in manner. Backstage, Pat was watching me. A few months ago, that well-known figure stood with kingdoms and nations in one hand and a whip in the other. Then why should he commit suicide?

  “It’s so strange…waiting to die,” Ethel said softly. It was incredible this rapport, this perfectly reflected image, it made shivers run up and down my spine. Or maybe that was her fingernail. But there was another, one whom fate had sent him for his salvation…. “I never dreamed…anything like this…”

  “Listen, Ethel, maybe we can still—”

  “Did you think you’d be Vice President of the United States one day?”

  “What?”

  “When you were a little boy, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?”

  “Uh…a railroad engineer. But, Ethel—”

  “I thought I was going to be a singer. A famous singer. I really believed that!”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “You know?”

  “Yes. Later I wanted to be a lawyer in New York and I was in New York the night you met Julie. I was looking for a job. We might have found each other that night. Things might have been different.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be anything but what you are, Richard! I envy you your power. Your majesty. You are a great man, and I…”

  “But I always wanted to be free. I wanted to be a bum.”

  “I wanted to be a great actress. I dreamed of going to Hollywood. I would have had to struggle, work in soda fountains, take bit parts—but in the end everybody would have loved me. We might have met there. I might have got a job in your home town.”

  “I… I gave a speech in Hollywood once. Darryl Zanuck said it was the most tremendous performance he’d ever seen.”

  “Yes. I know,” she said.

  “You know?”

  “I was accepted for the Schola Cantorum. I was the youngest voice the choir had ever had. But I couldn’t go on tour because I couldn’t leave my job, my mother wouldn’t—” Suddenly, she b
urst into tears, began weeping helplessly on my shoulder.

  “Ethel! My God! What is it?”

  “Somebody…somebody came…” She could hardly get it out, she was breaking my heart with the struggle: “…to measure me today!”

  “What? To measure—?”

  “They said…they said it was for a wax museum! Oh, Richard!” She was sobbing uncontrollably now, trembling violently all over.

  “Ethel…that’s…that’s terrible!” And I began to cry as well. Real tears!

  “I don’t want …I don’t want to die!”

  “I don’t want you to die either, Ethel!” I sobbed. It was like a dam-burst, all falling out of me. We were clutching each other desperately, completely dissolved in tears. I don’t know how we stayed on our feet. “It’s terrible! I can’t stand thinking about it!”

  She squeezed me more tightly than ever. “You won’t die, Richard! Don’t be afraid!”

  “Two of my brothers died!” I bawled. “I always thought… I would be next!”

  “Oohh!” she wailed. “Brothers! Don’t talk about brothers!”

  “It nearly killed my mother, trying to keep my brother alive! And then he died anyway!”

  “My mother made fun of me! She said there was no place in life for arty people! She sent me out to work!”

  “She was cruel to you!”

  “She took my money! She hated me!”

  “My mother sent me away to live with my aunt! She—she didn’t want me!”

  “Oh, Richard!”

  “Once I went all the way to Arizona to—to clean the horsepoop out of stables just to be with her and she didn’t appreciate it!”