“. . . grandfather night,” the poem ribboned forth, Marisa transfixed in its sonorities and beautiful impudence. She looked at me and smiled. She laid her head in my lap and held the book above her face, her long brown or was it black hair flowed over my thighs. She meant every one of those words with a fervor that suggested more than just that she believed the poem, but believed she’d even written it, out of her own pain and hipster wisdom, and she kept going, she was too much, exotic and authentic, wise in her way, and as I listened to her I understood she wouldn’t hate me if I kissed her forehead, would not resist if I lay my hand on the flat curve of her shoulder, began to move the tips of my fingers across the toffeelike skin of her neck and down underneath the fabric of her blouse.
And so it was I lost my worthless virginity.
Our days and nights were lived without much distinction made between one and the next. Marisa left, but seemed to return when she pleased, sometimes wearing the same clothes, in different clothes other times. She would drift in, a sack of groceries cradled in her arms, and proceed to make a deep dish of lasagna and a great salad of lettuce and sprouts. Once she arrived with two large pair of fresh shad roe, said they’d been a gift of a friend of hers who’d been on the Hudson fishing and who though it was late in the season had caught his limit that day, and proceeded to fry them with rings upon rings of onion in bacon grease.
—I thought you were a vegetarian, I said.
—Not when the shad are running, said Marisa.
I liked her for her inconsistencies. She kept erratic, nocturnal hours and yet seemed always to be the first person awake and out of bed in the morning, to have chicory black coffee made—she detested herb tea—and set out for her daily constitutional of some ten miles or so. —When you wake up you get up, that’s what my great grandmother says, and she is closing in on a hundred years old, so she ought to know. Marisa was hard and quaint at the same time. Plain and strange, giving and parsimonious all at once.
Did I love Marisa? Kip wondered.
I loved her, I supposed, in my own way, just as she probably loved me in hers.
When she vanished, at the end of the summer, I was disappointed though not surprised. I was disheartened less because Marisa had run away—no, not run: faded away is more like it—than because her absence left me free to begin weaving my fantasies about Jessica again, an exercise I resisted as best I could, with varying results.
Jessica is maternal. Not smothering—mothering with the s of squeezing, or suffocating, or short-pantsing in the fore of it—not maternal in a mama kind of way, just warm, and kindly disposed, especially toward the hurt. She wanted me, in her Jessica way, to be somehow more distressed by Marisa’s leaving than I was.
—I knew she was out there, but I wouldn’t have expected her to just up and go without saying something to you.
—But that’s Marisa for you. To be fair about it, she never promised anything different.
A frown from Jessica. Studied her lips, despite myself. All these shades of brown and red.
—Brice, she said, flat, undirecting.
Some part of me saw it was a moment to feign discouragement. —I mean, I guess I never expected her to stick around for too long . . . this was more or less what I managed to concoct. But what was I doing? that is, I did have feelings for Marisa, but I wasn’t so very sorry she’d left, and I did have feelings for Jessica, but wasn’t so happy about her being there, right in front of me, so near, asking me about Marisa.
—I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I feel responsible.
—Well, don’t.
Jessica must have said something. What she said I can’t remember, yet what I knew, at that moment, was that Marisa meant so little to me by comparison.
The best offense is defense, they say, and was I defensive about Jessica. There was no coming to a solemn peace with those days. My imbalance was secure, a pure fragility consecrated by the emotional stupidity of early manhood, crowned—or haloed, if you will—by the bright innocent light of inexperience, and made powerful by the sheer and unavoidable reality, to use that word, that I was in love.
“Little by little the bird builds its nest” is a folk saying, one of my favorites, from way back, that resides in my memory along with smatterings of this and that, nifty ditties and speculations picked up along my way from the heaving tide of verbal flotsam that never ceases bobbing by, and probably never shall. Like most folk wisdom it is true, I think. What it proposes is obvious, but what it doesn’t account for is upheaval.
There was a year when things didn’t go little by little, an exponential year, and it began with the infamous flight down to Chimayó. The last year of the fifties, the last year of a decade of outrageous optimism. Kip and I ran away, were brought back home, then Kip ran off on his own, failed again, and by autumn we were like a pair of whipped pups, neither members of the litter nor fully weaned, neither immature nor matured.
—Brice, what’s gonna happen with us? and I couldn’t believe that this was Kip, my strong and belligerent Kip, speaking.
—What do you mean, what’s gonna happen with us, what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna go away to school together and leave the Hill behind, and everything will be fine.
—Everything will be fine? Why?
—I don’t know. Because.
—Because why? he asked.
—Because because.
—Because because why, boy?
—Because we’re going to make it fine is why.
I didn’t know what I was talking about, of course. Why is the most enigmatic word in the language. Never ask why. We can know what, we can know how, we can know when. We never know precisely why. I remember thinking that, and may have made a significant advance toward weaning myself away from childish ways and thoughts. And besides, Kip was having fun at my expense, and that too had become newly tiresome.
Little by little the bird builds its nest. Here was another exponential year. Kip was sure things were going to turn out great. Graduation, then on to flight school, the service, then home and marriage, then happily ever after. What makes you think it will all turn out like that? I wanted in the worst way to ask him. Why will doing things like that be so great?
Because, he might have said if I’d asked.
Because why?
Because we’re going to make it so, he might have answered.
But I failed to ask. Instead, whether motivated by ripening resentment, newfound lust, plain confusion, or all three, I hurled myself into a sea of women in the hopes that I, like the legendary brand of Meleagar, might be quenched. There is a poem by Ezra Pound that proposes Meleagar’s carnal sea was composed of six lovers. How many I managed to have, if have is the word, might’ve been more or fewer. Now, I’m not sure.
There was Rachel, with her biblical name and her square build and heavy breasts, matched by her equally heavy, squarish sweaters. Jane smelled of coriander and clay soaked by hard rain. There was Margaret, whose hair was redder than any Pre-Raphaelite model’s, who spoke with intelligence far superior to mine on every topic, and in such measured tones, was both graven and grave, and who was more my friend than any kind of lover—our lovemaking was neat as the proverbial pin. There was Sam, short for Samantha—gray-green eyes and a Southern accent. She and I went for walkabouts, began in the morning, no itinerary, and took off into the streets to see what there was to see. We would piece together lunch from one grocer and another, as we marched along, side by side, saying whatever came to mind. Willa remains, in my memory, my dearest ally. Willa embraced the many grievances I held against this and that aspect of our society. She might not have been so interested in these matters when we met, but after some hours of listening to my passionate talk about not just the war, but all the maladies of our world, as I saw them then, she too became an advocate of some new order—or positive disorder—and together we would sit, try to write, try to think, and I would stay over at her place some nights, sleep with her, try to kiss her and I know she’d try
to kiss me too. Willa overlapped with Amy, Amy whose lissome strength was formidable, Amy who lived in jazz clubs and carried an abundance of rebellion in her heart. Amy cut all her hair off one night and I was, if taken aback, left to be supportive of this gesture, because what it signified to her was liberation.
And surely there were others. I wonder where they are now, who they became, and imagine that they might recall me in the same vaporous detail as I them, or perhaps they don’t remember me at all. But what it came down to, back then, was an abiding, a living along. We all walked hand in hand, slept together when the night came, we taught one another a little this and that. We tried with each other, we were kind. We drifted in. We remained for a while. There was true warmth. And then, we were gone.
These liaisons, these breakneck infatuations, came to as quick a conclusion as they had commenced, and all the while who was most in touch with my somewhat disembodied sexual meanderings but my mother? Kip swore he did not betray to her whatever it was I was doing. She simply knew. And didn’t disapprove, not altogether. She wrote me one of her letters, and swathed in obliquity was her opinion, though it took me some meandering of a different kind to come to it. She wrote, as a throwaway, hidden in the company of many ideas, many anecdotes, “Brice, never forget what I used to tell you about what the tortoise must be thinking during his marathon with the hare. ‘Slow and steady wins the race.’ Slow and steady, Brice, is what I say. Forget the race. There are no winners. But just think slow, steady.”
All roads led back to Jessica. There was another poem I recall from those days, “Mr. Housman’s Message,” by the same poet who wrote about the brand of Meleagar. It ran, thick with irony,
O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.
I knew who I wanted, was unable to hear any message that would suggest I relinquish even this fragilest, pipemost of dreams. I was not ready to act as if I were dead already.
By 1968 Vietnam was Vietnam. Vietnam in the sense of Vietnam, man. Vietnam qua Hades all our own.
Even those who had denied we’d been at war, waist-deep in quicksand war, war with casualties, more and more flown home in spartan boxes every week, were forced to admit now that we had lost over a thousand men in Ia Drang right in the dead middle of the decade, battalions of enemy mastering our Air Cav with shocking agility and resolve. Ia Drang brought Command to the recognition that it might take a few extra months, yes, maybe as much as a year, to get this situation under control. But it was like trying to push that river. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the Tet Offensive and that same burning winter the hilltown of Khe Sanh was besieged, fatigued marines dug in, shooting back when the fire came in, some looking to catch the next transport out, if there was a next transport and if the Viet Cong in the surrounding hills let them out, some looking to kill back. Names like Giap and Con Thien entered the language. The black-and-white images on television saturated our visual memories, the airlifting of wounded by dragonfly choppers, the length of jungle erupting into flame after one of our jets passed by, low and lightning-fast. Vietnam had become Vietnam and it was Vietnam in-country and it was Vietnam here at home.
When Kip finally shipped out to Saigon, Jessica and I kept our distance from one another. It was my doing at first, but she soon enough followed suit. The apartment never seemed more cramped with just the two of us knocking around in it. Routines that never felt intimate before now felt most intimate. Dinner together was inhibited by self-consciousness. Her clothing hung on the hook of the bathroom door was charged with some fresh meaning now, and it made me weak with discomfort. When around her my breath narrowed, every sound I made seemed too loud. Without discussing it with her, I found myself a small studio apartment and moved out. She expressed little surprise and didn’t make any effort to dissuade me from going. There was no resentment, no animosity. I left many of my things at the Colonial, and continued to pay my share of the rent. The studio was on a month-to-month lease.
And there was other business to attend. I read the Selective Service Act in search of the definition of conscientious objection, and what I found was that the lawmakers who’d drafted the act had foreseen every exigency. While it was written that nothing in the act “shall be construed to require any person to be subject to combatant training and service in the armed forces of the United States who, by reason of religious training and belief, is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form,” it was further stipulated that the term “‘religious training and belief’ does not include essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views, or a merely personal moral code.”
A merely personal moral code! Here the country was sinking under a plague of immorality while its congressmen wrote into law a depreciation of the value of having a personal moral code by which to act? The word “merely” I stared at in disbelief before reading on. Further in the same paragraph there was a final sneer, in the form of a provision for the lucky Quaker whose birthright exempted him from having to conceive his own morals. The provision made it possible for those who fit the prescribed definition of conscientious objector to be placed “in appropriate civilian work contributing to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest.” I thought, Great—if that is what they’re supposed to do, contribute to the country’s health, safety, and interest, where they should go is straight into the front lines of the next march, endure a little tear gas along with the rest of us, or a guardsman’s buckshot, in the interest of their nation.
Knowing better than even to apply for conscientious objector, I went about avoiding the draft another way altogether. When I entered Columbia Law School my military deferment was in default. I had considered leaving the country for Canada, and believe even now that what prevented me from following that course was a desire not to leave Jessica behind.
In the end, I went the basest route. President Carter would later pardon those who fled the country in protest against Vietnam. But there’d never come a pardon for me. At the time, I viewed the lie as a guerilla tactic. One lie mandated another, was what I told myself after procuring a 4-F—unfit for service—by means of false data worked up by an upstate physician sympathetic to the cause. It seems a tawdry nightmare, looking back. Bad heart was what his report said. Complete with someone else’s electrocardiogram.
Bad heart. While it wasn’t true, it wasn’t altogether false. Medical deferment for a very bad heart.
Kip left. Having given me a handshake, looking askance—he knew what it meant for me to have come to say goodbye to him, that I was betraying myself—he’d embraced Jessica. Then he turned and climbed onto the bus, silver with a lean leaping dog logoed on its side, so polished I could see my reflection next to Jessica’s as it pulled away for the cross-country trip to San Francisco, where he would catch his flight to operations. I recall thinking, Probably I will never see him again. I also felt peculiarly diminished, for all my moral superiority with regard to the conflict into which Kip was about to hurl himself; an odd experiential diminishment that arose from the certain knowledge he was about to see things—blood bleeding into soil, napalm tingeing jungle green—and hear things—mortal screams, the rocking power of helicopters’ blades, the hollow clack of rounds being launched into the dark—that I would never see or hear. It was a perverse jealousy I felt, envying him sensations no one should have to suffer.
That bus carried away in it a distorted mirror-image of my own experience. The eyes, dark and confident, that looked out at me and Jessica from behind the glinting windows (Kip didn’t wave; Jessica did; I did not) were in many ways my own, insofar as they had seen much of what I’d seen. I felt something akin to the tender hatred one can sense when staring hard at a photograph of oneself. Love and disgust wrapped themselves like caducean snakes weaving in neat opposition up a sword that neither cuts nor comforts. And only after Jessica and I had left Port Aut
hority and gone to have a coffee in Chelsea somewhere did I begin to understand that I’d probably lost not just one but two friends that afternoon.
Trinity Fields Page 21
