by John Sanford
* * *
He left the subway-station and walked eastward through a side-street toward a loft-building several blocks distant. On the way, he passed under the framework of a canopy in front of an apartment-house, and the break in his stride, little more than a muscular twitch, was imperceptible. Recovering from it almost instantly, he continued thereafter, but steadily now, along the course he had chosen. With less than a block to go, he felt his will begin to give, and on what seemed to be momentum alone, he reached the threshold of his objective. His will gone and his momentum spent, he went no further, and for a brief time he stood before the lighted doorway, watching a few vaguely familiar faces approach and pass, and then, seized by a rising counter-desire, he turned abruptly and headed for the apartment-house.
He had come very close to attending Lecture X.
* * *
On his back near the edge of the bed, he lay with an arm overboard, as if the bed were a boat. Above him, across the plaster sky, swam a school of mechanical planets.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Dan,” she said.
“Of guilt,” he said. “A guilt so high, wide, thick, and everlasting that only a fifth dimension could bound it.”
“That isn’t a thought; it’s a feeling.”
“If so, it’s the only decent one I’ve had in months.”
“What about the feeling you have for me?”
“As a person, place, or thing?” he said. “But forgive that.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. “I’m a place or thing, just as you say, but a place or thing that you chose yourself. I don’t know what kind of place or thing you were used to, but it can’t’ve been much, or you’d not be here. You like this place, Dan. You like this thing.”
“What I have to find out, though, is why—and above all, why more than once? What did I hope to find here the second time, the fourth, the ninth?”
“The same thing you’ll be looking for the fiftieth—me.”
“All that remains is to discover what ‘me’ stands for, and I can put on my hat.”
The woman fought the covers until they were crumpled against the footboard of the bed. “This is what ‘me’ stands for!” she said, and she moved her hands along her body, but when he tried to touch her himself, she spun away from the embrace, saying, “And now you can put on your hat!”
* * *
“The mile-high winter, I called it,” he said, “but I meant much more by that than a season in Colorado. I meant the summit of the first great range of my life, and having reached it, I saw the further and far greater ranges as merely a flight of steps into a topless sky, but there were gaps in the stairs, and I overlooked them and fell. I’ve been falling ever since: there was no top for me once, and now there’s no bottom. Deep down in my mind, I always had the idea that I could stop the descent by making Julia let go, but I see now that I was holding her, and I know why: because as long as I kept the connection, I could dream my way back to where all things were still possible, to that first great range. It’s time I let go.”
“Do you think that’ll rid you of her?”
“No,” he said, “but it’ll help to rid me of you.”
“Not by next week, it won’t.”
* * *
Peterson said, “Where were you all morning, kid?”
“I overslept,” Dan said. “There’s only one more lecture left, and I was up late studying for it. Another week, Pete, and the jig’ll be up for the capitalist system.”
“What you mean is, it’ll be up for you. Just before noon, your wife called from Newark to find out whether I knew where you were.”
“I forgot to say that I didn’t go home. I wanted to be ready for that last session, so I spent the night going over the material with somebody from the class.”
“You look like you went over it on your hands and knees.”
“I don’t think I like you today, and I don’t think I’m going to like you any better tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir, you’re a man that takes his studying seriously. I look at you every Tuesday morning, and I tell myself, ‘Watch out, Pete. There’s a revolutionary that puts his all into the movement.’”
“I’m not even sure that I liked you yesterday.”
“Come off your shaky stilts, kid. You’ve got all the earmarks of a little pink cheat.”
Dan rose, and rounding his desk to Peterson’s chair, he stood glaring down at the man for a moment, and then, his anger wilting, he moved to a window that framed a gray winter day. “What’re the earmarks, Pete?” he said. “What shows?”
“All but the woman’s name.”
“Does it show to everybody, or only to you?”
“It gets in people’s way. They have to walk over it.”
“Even Mary?”
“Mary more than anyone else.”
“I feel as if I’d killed myself by mistake.”
“Tell her that. It’s a good thing to say.”
* * *
“The fight has never been against you,” he said. “From start to finish, it’s been against me, but in trying to injure myself, I’ve in jured you—with what I’ve done, with what I’ve said, and with what I’ve thought. The words can’t be taken back now, the thoughts can’t be unthought, and the deeds can’t be undone, but all the same I’d like to go away without your hatred, as you remain without mine.”
“Take another course and come back next Monday.”
He shook his head, saying, “I’m afraid you still don’t understand.”
* * *
Mary was asleep when Dan entered the flat, but she was awakened by the kiss he bowed down to leave on her hand.
“Hello, Danny,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Too late to matter much,” he said, and lighting a lamp near the window, he watched the curtains infold the wind. “I have something to tell you.”
“Sit next to me while you tell it.”
“I can’t do that, Mary,” he said, and after a moment he turned to her.
LET’S SWIM to SPAIN
Above the elevated tracks, the air seemed to simmer in the sun, making the buildings beyond waver as if submerged, and on the checkerboard of light and shade below, people were perpetual moves. It was Saturday afternoon, and the saturday-stillness of the office was broken only once, by a phone-ring that went unanswered and soon ended; the occasional trains that passed the window had become part of the daily sound-pattern, now hardly heard unless attended. The last to leave the rooms of the agency, Dan went downstairs and paused in the entrance to witness the summer-day throng, some of it drifting past and some stock-still before the gritty trash of shop-displays. The passageway exhaled the bad breath of age, and Dan moved on. A few blocks uptown, he entered a side-street of toothless brownstones, many of them bars now.
“A light one,” he said, and his gaze wandered upward to a fading film-memory of the turf: THE PORTER, J. BUT WELL UP, BEATING DR. CLARK IN THE HAVRE DE GRACE.
The bartender cut suds into a brass drain. “If I had the day off,” he said, “I’d be at the Polo Grounds.”
“Too hot,” Dan said.
“Too hot, you sit in back of first-base.”
“Too hot even in the shade.”
“Me, I don’t sweat. The hottest days, I’m dry as a bone.”
A man along the bar said, “That’s supposed to be a bad thing.”
The bartender ragged off the mahogany in front of Dan. “Listen to people, and you can go crazy,” he said.
“I’m telling you for your own good,” the other customer said. “You don’t sweat, it means you’re overworking your kidneys.”
“Everybody’s a doctor,” the bartender said.
Dan tilted his head for a mouthful of beer and read: CLEOPATRA, L. MCATEE UP, TAKING THE COACHING CLUB AMERICAN OAKS. He put the glass down empty, but it bled moisture. He turned it. He turned it again. He continued to turn it.
“Another?” the bartender said.
“
Too hot,” Dan said, and he dropped a quarter on the drain.
* * *
He walked up Sixth Avenue to Central Park, and there he followed the bank of a pond to a cove sheltered by rises of black rock. Sitting with his back against a tree, he stared at sluggish water-borne dust, twigs, and peanut-shells until a galleon made of a cigar-box and a propped-up rag sailed into view.
A boy was guiding its progress with a stick, and absorbed in problems of navigation and command, he was speaking to the officers and crew of his mind. “I am going to discover the Unite Estates, and if anybody mutinies on board of this boat, I will throw him to the sharks!” A fancied mutineer mutinied, and the boy, with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face, said, “Nobody can talk like that to Amiral Clumbus! Throw that sailor to the sharks!” The mutiny was quelled, and the ship sailed on.
* * *
Dredging a key from cards, other keys, and change, Dan opened the door of the flat and then suddenly stood very still: from the kitchen came the knock of crockery on crockery.
“Mary!” he said, and now he ran, saying, “Mary-baby!”
But it was Florencia Homer, and she smiled as she said, “You are very flatteringly.”
He kissed her on both cheeks and the mouth. “When I heard sounds in here, I thought…,” he said. “I thought…. Anyway, it’s been a long time since there were any sounds in here.”
“It is also a long time since is any soap in here.”
“I’m a bum housekeeper, Flo.”
“Genio too is indifferent to soap. All men are a great failure of housekeeping.”
“What’re you doing in town, Spanish?”
“As you see, I am wash up your dirt.”
“With soap?” he said. “It’ll take a lot more than soap.”
“Conceivably,” she said. “You are quite dirty, Daniel.”
“I know it,” he said, and he stooped for a dust-mouse under the sink. “Do you think I don’t know it?”
“I think you know it,” she said. “I think most of men know it. But is a great pity you know it only after you acquire the dirtiness. People should not have to esperience dirt to know what is dirty.”
“Sometimes I wish people didn’t have to be people.”
“People always have to be people, but they do not have to be dirty people. I know what I am talking, Daniel.”
He glanced at her, saying, “Genio too?”
“What is Genio? Genio also is a people.”
“I’d never’ve thought it of him,” he said. “But then, I guess he’d never’ve thought it of me.”
“Yes, but would you thought it of yourself?”
“Tell me something, Flo. What did you do when you found out about Genio?”
“What was to do?” she said. “Kill him, like in the films? Would that kill the dirty esperience too?”
“Don’t say you let him get away with it.”
“He do the dirty thing, and then is no more talk of get away or not get away. Is done. I cry, I scold, I walk out on the house—what good it is? The dirty esperience remain.”
“You didn’t leave him, then?”
“For a short time, yes.”
“Where did you go?”
“Escuse me, but I go to the bathroom. When I am unhappy, is a necessity.”
Dan smiled at her, saying, “Spanish, you’re fascinating.”
“And your wife? What your wife is?”
He went to the window and spoke back through a cape of curtains. “How is she, Flo?” he said.
“She lives.”
“Is she feeling all right? I mean, how does she feel?”
“If you desire to know, why you not go in Nev Jersey?”
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
“How you learn that—by sit here in your dirt?” the woman said, and she joined him at the window. “Yesterday I tell her I am shopping in Nev York today. I say, ‘Maria, do you wish anything of Nev York? I am shopping.’ She say, ‘If you see Daniel, deliver him please a message.’ I say, ‘Daniel is not in the shop where I am shopping.’ She say, ‘Yes, but it may be that you will see him in a different place, and there is something that I would speak him with.’ I say, ‘What is the message? If it is the one I have insisted, then it is possibly that I will see him in this place or that.’ But when she tell me the message, I know not if it is good or bad. Thus I deliver it, and you will be the judge. She say, ‘Ask him if he still wish to swim to España.’”
He turned to look at her, but she seemed to be under water and wavering, and he tried his best to speak.
* * *
They showed their permit to the sentry and walked up a graveled road for a way, Dan carrying a wicker creel and Mary a rod-case, and where a footpath forked to the right among holly trees and beach-plum, they descended to the ocean-front of the Hook. It was floodtide, and a countercurrent so slanted the breaker-line that it came quartering toward the sand, like quilt after quilt being drawn up over a bed. In the deep water beyond the surf, a carvel-built power-dory slapped along like a slipper, heading for nets that were no more than a clump of reeds in the distance.
“Out for the afternoon catch,” Mary said. “From Seabright.”
Dan sat on the sun-warmed sand while Mary set up the rod, a spring-butt split-bamboo, and when she had the reel and the rig arranged, she baited a barb with a long strip of squid.
“Well, I’m ready,” she said.
She stepped out of her sneakers and dropped her skirt, and in a blouse and swimming-trunks, she crossed the beach and waded thigh-deep into the churning water. Balancing the rod, she held off for a wave to fall short of cresting, and with a slick to put the tackle at, she flung it hard on a long diagonal, took up slack, and began to troll. She played a semicircle for almost an hour without a strike, and finally, snapping her bait loose in a line-jam, she returned to the sand.
“Sit for a while,” Dan said.
“Mullet’s breaking all over out there,” she said. “Something big is running them, and it won’t take squid. If I had half a dozen killies, we’d have a striper for supper.”
“Want me to go back for some?”
“It’s too far,” she said. “And besides, I’d like you to be around if I luck anything.”
“Why?” he said.
“I missed you, Danny.”
“Likewise.”
“I shouldn’t’ve gone away.”
“You never went away,” he said. “Just because you packed a bag?”
She said, “Why did you do it, Dan?” and then she said. “You don’t have to answer that. I had to ask, but you don’t have to answer.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I did it because of all the sons-of-bitches on earth, I’m king.”
“That’s what I thought at the time.”
He watched a shoal of mullet flash up the water like thrown coins. “What do you think now?” he said.
“What I should’ve thought in the first place: that what you did is done, and that it isn’t enough.”
“I didn’t mean to make you admit that.”
“You didn’t make me. I said it because it’s true, and I only wish I’d been able to say it right away. Then I’d’ve been honest, like Flo was when she found out about Gene, but I couldn’t help myself, and I had to run away. I’m sorry, because running away cost us so much time that we could’ve spent together.”
“But, Jesus Christ!” he said. “Aren’t you going to make me say how sorry I am? Don’t I have to crawl? Peterson guessed, and he called me a little pink cheat, but how do you punish me? By apologizing! My God, I’d feel better if I had to beg, if you made me eat dirt!”
“I’m not concerned with how you feel, Dan, and you have no right to expect me to be. I don’t want any explanations from you, because I don’t think you could explain anything so that I’d understand. And I don’t want you to beg, because begging won’t get you more than you can have for the asking: I’ll even sleep with you whenever you find me desirable
enough. But don’t ask me to forgive you, Dan, because I never will.”
“I thought of a lot of things on the train this morning,” he said, “but I can only remember one of them now, and I’m not going to say it, because I know you won’t believe it. All the same, it’s a true thing, and maybe some day when you like me again, you won’t laugh in my face when I tell you what it is.”
“I never stopped liking you, Dan,” she said. “Like—what a lukewarm word! I never stopped loving you.”
“That’s the thing I was going to say to you.”
PART SIX
WAR IS A SPORT
In Raymond Powell’s parlor, Julie Pollard was saying, “President Frankie Delano say no more Ethiopia, folks, and mighty few Ethiopians, so I’m lifting them sanctions what I put on Italy, and you can go ahead and sell Mussolini more bombs and crap to dump on some other country. Sanctions! Now, what the jesusbechrist was sanctions but talky-talk? Wasn’t no sanctions would’ve sanctionized them wop bastards, only buckshot-sanctions in the entrals. Instead, us niggers give out clouds of talky-talk, Tootsie-talk, and when the clouds blew away, we were off the map. Too bad.
Wonder where we went, God damn it!”
“Mr. Wildfire,” Tootsie said, “I got a thing I want to say at you.”
“Let me say this first,” his father said. “Working through the League was a correct tactic. We had a right to assume that the Articles of the Covenant meant what they said, and that if they were ever invoked, they’d be enforced. We put the League to the test, and it failed, and Ethiopia was thrown to the dogs, but that doesn’t mean we were wrong. The entire world knows now that Ethiopia was double-crossed by every nation on earth except the Soviet Union. That was a gain for the Soviet Union and a gain for us.”
“Fat lot of good that does Ethiopia,” Julie said. “It got screwed all over Switzerland, and finally it got screwed right out of the globe—and what do we do about it? We pick wax out of our ear and say, ‘Gained something that time, man.’ What do the Ethiopians care about we gained something? They’re dead!”
