Men and Cartoons

by Jonathan Lethem

  “How did it go?” she asked when she noticed me.

  “Par: two friends, two enemies, one sleeper.”

  “And the president?”

  “Nice, but she wasn't giving anything away.” I put my hands on her shoulders. She closed the book.

  “You seem distant,” Angela said. “Memories?”

  “Yes.” In fact, I was thinking about Super Goat Man. I'd never before considered the sacrifice he'd made, enunciating his political views so long ago. Fruitlessly, it seemed to me. In exchanging his iconic, trapped-in-amber status, what had he gained? Had Super Goat Man really accomplished much outside the parameters of his comics? However unglamorous the chores, didn't kittens need rescuing from trees? Didn't Vest Man require periodic defeating? Why jettison Ralph Gersten if in the end all you attained was life as a campus mascot?

  I wanted to convey some of this to Angela, but didn't know where to begin. “When you were here—” I began, then stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know Super Goat Man?”

  I felt her stiffen. “Of course, everybody knew him,” she said.

  “He's still here.” I watched her as I spoke. Her gaze dipped to the ground.

  “You saw him?”

  “No, but we will at dinner tonight.”

  “How . . . unexpected.” Now Angela was the one in fugue.

  “Did you study with him?”

  “He rarely taught. I attended a few talks.”

  “I thought you didn't like that stuff.”

  She shrugged. “I was curious.”

  I waited to understand. Crickets had begun a chorus in the grass. The sun ebbed. Soon we'd need to visit our bed-and-breakfast outside campus, to change into fresh clothes for the dinner party. Ordinarily such gatherings were clumsy at best, with grudges incompletely smothered under the surface of the talk, among tenured faculty who knew one another far too well. Something in me now curdled at the prospect of this one. In fact, I'd begun to dread it.

  “Everett.” There was something Angela wanted to tell me.

  I made a preemptive guess. “Did you have some sort of something with Super Goat Man?” This was how she and I blundered through one another's past liaisons—we'd never been systematic.

  I moved around the bench, to try and look her in the eye.

  “Just an—affair. Nothing.”

  “What's nothing?”

  She shrugged, and flipped her fingers as though dispelling a small fog. “We fooled around a few times. It was stupid.”

  I felt the poison of bitterness leach into my bloodstream. “I don't know why but I find that totally disgusting.”

  “Oh, Everett.” Angela raised her arms, moved to assuage me, knowing as she did my visceral possessiveness, the bolt of jealousy that shot through me when contemplating her real past, anytime it arose. Of course, she couldn't understand my special history with Super Goat Man. How could she if I didn't? I'd never even mentioned him.

  “I was a silly girl.” She spoke gently. “And I didn't know you yet.”

  Unsatisfied, I wished her to declare that the encounter had been abusive, an ethical violation. Not that I had any ground to stand on. Anyway, she was Italian in this, as in all things. It was just an affair.

  “Do you want to skip the dinner?”

  She scowled. “That's silly. He wouldn't even remember. And I don't care. It's really nothing, my darling. My love.”

  At the president's house Super Goat Man was the last to arrive, so I was allowed to fantasize briefly that I'd been spared. The sight, when he did come in, was startling. He'd not only aged, but shrunk—I doubted if he was even five feet tall. He was, as ever, barefooted, and wore white muslin pajamas, with purple piping. The knees of the pajama bottoms were smudged with mud. As he entered the room, creeping in among us as we stood with our cocktail glasses, I quickly saw the reason for the smudges: as Super Goat Man's rickety steps faltered he dropped briefly to all fours. There, on the ground, he'd shake himself, almost like a wet dog. Then he'd rise again, on palsied limbs.

  No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table.

  I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Toward the end we were served a course of cognac and dessert, and the president's husband passed around cigars, which he bragged were Cuban. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor.

  Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic.

  Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread—the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.

  “I . . . knew . . . your . . . father.” His voice was mossy, sepulchral.

  “Yes,” I said simply, keeping my voice low. No one was paying us any attention, yet. Not apart from Angela.

  “You . . . remember . . . ?”

  “Of course.”

  “We . . . love . . . jazz . . .”

  I wondered whether he meant my father or, somehow, me. I had in fact over the years come around to my father's love of jazz, though my preference was not so much Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.

  “. . . poker . . .”

  “He cleaned you out,” I reminded him.

  “Yezz . . . good times . . . beautiful women . . .” He struggled, swallowed hard, blinked. “All this controversy . . . not worth it . . .”

  “My father was never involved in any controversy,” I heard myself say, though I knew Super Goat Man was speaking only of himself, his lost career.

  “No . . . absolutely true . . . knew how to live . . .”

  Angela had leaned back, pursing her lips to savor the cigar. I might have noticed the room's gabble of conversation had dampened somewhat—might have noticed it sooner, I mean.

  “So . . . many . . . hangovers . . .”

  “But you and I have something in common besides my father,” I told Super Goat Man.

  “Yezz . . . yezz . . . ?”

  “Of course we do,” I began, and though I now understood we had the attention of the entire room, that the novelty of Super Goat Man's reminiscences had drawn every ear, I found myself unable to quit before I finished the thought. Further, having gained their attention, I allowed my voice to rise to a garrulous, plummy tone, as if I were starring in dinner theater. Before the line was half out of my mouth, I knew that the words, by airing the sort of laundry so desperately repressed in a community as precious as Corcor
an, damned my candidacy. But that was a prize I no longer sought. Broader repercussions I could only guess at. My wife's eyes were on me now, her cigar's blunt tip flaring. I'd answer to her, later, if she gave me the chance.

  It was the worst thing I could think to say. The impulse had formed in the grip of sexual jealousy, of course. But before it crossed my lips I knew my loathing had its origins in an even deeper place, the mind of a child wondering at his father's own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.

  What I said was this: “I once saw you rescue a paper clip.”

  The

  National Anthem

  1/12/03

  Dear M,

  Our long letters are pleasing to me, but they do come slowly. Lulled by the intrinsic properties of e-mail, I've been willing to let most of my other correspondence slide down that slippery slope, into hectic witty ping-pong. But our deep connection, for twenty years or more now unrefreshed or diluted or whatever it would be by regular communications in person or on the phone, is precious to me, and demands more traditional letters, even if those mean long gaps. I suppose three-month breaks are not so much in a friendship once treated so casually that we let nearly a decade go by, eh?

  You asked about A. We've finally broken it off, the end of a nearly three-year chapter in my life, and a secret chapter as well. For, apart from you, safely remote in Japan, I've confided in no one. Her horrible marriage survived us, a fact that would have seemed absurd to me at the beginning, if some time traveler had come back to whisper it in my ear. The break was mutual—mutual enough to give it that name—and I'd be helpless to guess who is the more scarred. We won't be friends, but we were never going to be. Dissolving a secret affair is eerily simple: A and I only had to quit lying that we didn't exist.

  Did I tell you about “The National Anthem”? I don't think so. This was the first night we stole together from her husband, the first intentional rendezvous, at a bed-and-breakfast outside Portland, Maine. A always traveled with a Walkman and a wallet of CDs, and that night, as we lay entwined in a twee canopy bed, she insisted on playing me a song, though there was no way for us to listen to it together. Instead she cued it up and watched me while it played, her ungroggy eyes inspecting me from below the horizon of my chest, mine a posture of submission: James Carr singing “The Dark End of the Street.” I recognized it, but I'd never listened closely before. It's a song of infidelity and hopeless love, full of doomed certainty that the lovers, the love, will fail.

  “I've got a friend who calls that ‘The National Anthem,'” she said.

  I gave her what was surely a weak-sickly smile, though likely I thought it was a cool and dispassionate one, at the time. She didn't elaborate, just let it sink in. I didn't ask who the friend might be—the unspecificity seemed as essential to the mood between us as the dual rental cars, the welcoming basket of cookies and fruit we'd ignored downstairs, or the silent fucking we'd enjoyed, our orgasms discrete, in turn. To press one another back into the world of names, of our real individual lives, would have seemed a rent in the shroud of worldly arbitrariness which enclosed our passion. Of course this was morbid, I see it now.

  “There's a Bob Dylan song,” I said then. “‘Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street).' I think it's a cover, actually. Same thing: We're on a bad motorcycle with a devil in the seat, going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street . . .”

  “Yes, but this is ‘The National Anthem.'”

  By refusing the comparison A put me on notice that this wasn't a dialogue, but a preemptive declaration. She'd be the one to manage our yearnings, by her foreknowledge of despair. Fair enough: her jadedness was what I'd been drawn to in the first place.

  Of course you know, M, because I've told you stories, how we rode her jadedness—our bad motorcycle—down our own dead-end street. It wasn't kept anonymously cute, with baskets of cookies, for long. The perversity of the affair, it seems to me now, is that under cover of delivering her from the marriage she claimed to be so tired of, A and I climbed inside the armature of that marriage instead. By skulking at its foundations, its skirts, we only proved its superiority. However aggrieved she and R might be, however dubious their prospect, it wasn't a secret affair, wasn't nearly as contemptible as us. Certainly that can be the only explanation for why, in a world of motels and with my own apartment free, we so often met at her place—at theirs. And I think now that though I mimed indifference whenever she predicted imminent destruction, I'd lusted to destroy a marriage, that I was far more interested in R than I allowed myself to know.

  But I don't want to make this letter about A. You've written at length about your uncertainties in your own marriage—written poignantly, then switched to a tone of flippancy, as though to reassure me not to be too concerned. Yet the flippancy is the most poignant of all—your joshing about your vagrant daily lusts in such an unguarded voice makes them real to me. Having never been to Japan, nor met your wife and child, I've been guilty of picturing it as some rosy, implacable surface, as though by moving from New York to Tokyo and entering a “traditional” Japanese marriage you'd migrated from the complicated world into an elegantly calm piece of eighteenth-century screen art. I'm probably not the first person guilty of finding it convenient to imagine my friends' lives are simpler than my own. It's also possible I began this letter by speaking of A in order to discredit myself as any sort of reasonable counsel, to put you in mind of my abhorrent track record (or maybe I'm just obsessed).

  Let me be more honest. I don't spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at music and art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you're a digital wraith. What would it take to displace the visceral daily knowledge of our teenage years—how extensive would the letters have to be? When I try to think of your marriage I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don't mean to suggest anyone doesn't find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.

  Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, a ninth grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being two years older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we'd never attained. I'll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess's appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she liked me too.

  Bess Hersh saw through me shortly after that. I hadn't known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don't work on girls in high school. What's required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what give a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You mastered those poses in short order—I'd wait until college.

  Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Sean Hyman's arm, and I felt that I'd only alerted the hipper Sean to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she'd mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too-big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I'd glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.

  Funny, though, I don't remember speaking to her more
than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her, chortling about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big empty sky. I recall talking this way with you too about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we'd write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in Mad magazine, Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.

  When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it seems to me now. I felt all the music you listened to was wrong, a betrayal—you'd quit liking the inane clever stuff, and moved on to music that felt postured and sexy instead. I felt you'd forgotten yourself, and I tried to show you what you'd forgotten. When I'd third around with you and your new Vietnamese girlfriend, I'd seek to remind you of our secret languages, our jokes—if they hadn't worked on Bess they should at least still mean something to you—but those japes now fell flat, and you'd rebuff me, embarrassed.

  Of course the worse I fared the harder I tried. For a while. Then that became our falling-out. I must have appeared so angry—this is painful speculation, now. Of course, what seemed so elaborately cultural or aesthetic to me at the time—I faulted you for hairstyle, music, Tu-Lin's Asianness—all appears simply emotional in retrospect. I was threatened by the fact that you'd gone from pining for girls to having them, sure. But I'd also invested in you all my intimations of what I was about to surrender in myself, by growing up. By investing them in you I could make them something to loathe, rather than fear. Loathing was safer.

  Oh, the simple pain of growing up at different speeds!

  A page or two ago I supposed I was going to build back from this reminiscence, to some musings on your current quandary, your adult ambivalence about the commitments you entered when you married (I nearly wrote entered precociously, but that's only the case by my retarded standard). But I find I'm reeling even deeper into the past. When I was seven or eight, years before you and I had met, my parents befriended a young couple, weirdly named August and Sincerely. I guess those were their hippie names—at least Sincerely's must have been. August was a war resister. My parents had sort of adopted him during his trial, for he'd made the gesture of throwing himself an eighteenth birthday party in the office of his local draft board, a dippy bit of agitprop which got him singled out, two years later, for prosecution. Sincerely was a potter, with a muddy wheel and a red-brick kiln in the backyard of her apartment. She was blond and stolid and unpretentious, the kind of woman who'd impress me now as mannish, a lesbian perhaps, at least as a more plausible candidate for chumming around than for an attraction (I felt she was a woman, then, but she must have been barely twenty, if that).