The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  One day I requested the following Saturday off. Then I asked a schoolmate to bring me to the Lawn Club as his guest. Arriving there wearing tennis clothes, I felt awkward meeting up with people I worked with every day, and I wondered how I could not have anticipated that. I felt fraudulent—as though they could all see me passing myself off. A worry ran through me that I had violated a code, overstepped in some crucial way, and would lose my job. I spent the afternoon playing tennis, competing in such a rage of resentment that I overwhelmed whoever stood across from me, pummeling the ball past them with savage, unschooled forehands, playing as well as I had ever played, laboring for breath between points as my opponent tapped clay from his Adidas. Afterward, I sat at a table and ate one of the berry desserts. It tasted stale, too long refrigerated.

  When I came back to work, I had not lost my job, but not many days after that I was switched to working alone, seven nights a week, as the club watchman. I sat by myself at a desk and made periodic rounds through the empty rooms, glad to be no longer a part of any of it.

  Such a steamy, miserable time, adolescence. I dreamed of the girls I saw in furtive and smitten glimpses around the city. A redhead with eyes the color of hulled pecans standing in brow-to-brow conversation with a guy my age along Livingston Street, I wondering how he could manage the composure to form sentences, take adequate breaths, she gazing at him as he’s telling her what he watched on TV last night. Up in the chair at the Lawn Club pool, the water-nymph lifeguard, the allness of her tank-suited self right there, tanned and alert in the heat, the soft hairs on her skin warmed to a pristine, dry bone-china white by all the hours in the sun. Wasn’t she a twin? If so, maybe her other was turning out less pretty, within my hopes. But still pretty.

  At school, every day surveying the Levi’s corduroy asses shifting in compact rotations as they strode the corridors. Here was L.’s bullfighter ass singing “Toreador,” prancing high. How impressive of P.’s to synchronize with the industrious to-and-fro of her ponytail. K.’s said sheriff; it was easy to imagine holstered six-shooters. But in the end nothing could match the grandeur of C.’s near-autonomous dual pockets swaying down the hallway in the heroic struggle to keep up with the rest of her. How fortunate they all were to have ownership of these asses. How lucky were the chairs they sat in. I knew about these asses because I looked at girls only from the reverse angle where no face could find mine.

  I with my sheep’s eyes, my first-Eucharist voice, such an unbearable innocent. When it came to blow-jobs, I imagined the involvement of puffing. A rim-job? I couldn’t get past the bathtub drain. And nowhere to research the answers to these graphic and undermining riddles; everybody else just seemed to know already.

  What did I think about when I thought about love? I thought about Laura Ingalls and Cilla Lapham and Ántonia Shimerda and Becky Thatcher. What absurdity, going into life relying on imagined descriptions of experience as my guide to experience. But Laura and Cilla and Ántonia and Becky were the only girls I really knew.

  My Lawn Club maintenance-crew colleague, aged John, once had offered to sub-in any weekend shift for me if I had a date. “A kid should have fun on the weekend in the summer,” he said. A date for me! At school, when Stanley and a dimpled, square-jawed friend secretly wagered to see which of them could win kisses from more different girls in a month, the first entry in their contest totals surpassed mine of a lifetime. What was love? Some vapor available to others, never to be breathed by me. Even when present, I did not exist. One day a kid named Arnold and I were chatting at the end of a school afternoon as Debbie came over to join us until her ride appeared. A car pulled up. She collected her books. “Goodbye, just Arnold,” she said.

  Over at a friend’s, looking around the house for him, I walked in on his mother when she was changing. In bra and panties she grinned as I froze. A television flickered behind her. The shades were down. She said, “Well, at least you didn’t catch me bare-assed naked!” That she didn’t seem at all upset confused me. If she was not alarmed, why was I?

  All these years since we left my father, my mother still never, ever had a boyfriend and I didn’t even think about it. This was the way life was. At home when I encountered my sister’s and mother’s undergarments out on the clothesline, I averted my eyes. The sight of people kissing flustered me. It had suddenly become uncomfortable to be alone with a woman in an elevator. Why did I fear sex harmed nice women, believe that they didn’t like it? Could I remember my father getting rough with her? I thought about divorce the way people said children of suicides couldn’t get it out of their heads that someday they’d do themselves in. So many confusions. From the first, my courtship strategy would be to advertise the honor of my intentions by displaying my eagerness to do what girls wanted—just talk. The result was a lot of long conversations about other guys. I was not deterred. If I was loyal to my methods, eventually my virtue would earn me happiness. Or maybe not. In which case happiness had never been meant for me. I accepted it as a condition of my life that I was someone to whom love would not happen until I married. But how would I ever cross the gangway and become a viable groom? Did life have a schedule in mind whereby gravity suddenly relented? Would I someday develop a preference for classical music and golfing? How many billions of teenagers had there been in the world before me, and yet the ways life worked kept occurring to me as though I was the first one. So much of it seemed to involve figuring out what I should have figured out earlier. Perhaps my complete absence of experience was evidence that I was gay. I had never met someone who said he was gay. It was a different time; the word still meant light of heart. Nobody I knew ever talked about homosexuality except in derision, as life’s most odious condition. When people called me a queer fag after I made a lame joke or misheard something because I was daydreaming, I just smiled, but I worried about what they knew. I just wanted to be like everyone else. If I really was queer, I reasoned to myself, wouldn’t I think about penises all the time? That I didn’t think about penises ever was some relief. Yet how would I prove to the guys in the locker room that I was not queer if they accused me? I tried to assemble escape routes for such an emergency. And just to be safe, when we ballplayers showered together, my eyes never tilted downward.

  I imagined wooing women with something higher than desire. What would it be? Just what could I offer someone else? In a huge world filled with boys for girls to choose from, I believed I was irreplaceable only to myself.

  My father had manic will and drive, and for a while, he concentrated it on legal prose. In 1973, he’d merged the great preoccupations of his life by publishing a book, The Malpractice of Psychiatrists, which he dedicated to Sally and to me. It was the first important analysis of the legal responsibilities of psychiatrists in relation to therapy, medication, hospitalization, suicide, and shock treatment. That my father could have risen from the abyss to write an accomplished legal treatise didn’t seem miraculous to me because I scarcely looked at the book at all. I couldn’t understand many of the long technical words he used, gave up after a page.

  The book that stood there untouched on my shelf for all those years is itself a model of detachment. Nowhere is there any sign inside that the scholarly lawyer who is holding forth in such a disciplined way about “the utility for law of the nonscientific character of psychiatric evidence” may have been drawn to the topic through his own mental illness.

  My father also wrote articles for law journals, letters to the editors of periodicals and newspapers, and rafts of personal letters. As my high school years progressed, he had begun writing to me frequently, copiously, and with varying degrees of sanity. I could always tell when the letters were going to make me upset just by the way he had addressed the envelope. The handwriting would shift from cursive to print letters. As his condition declined, the printed words would grow smaller; eventually they became almost microscopic. Weeks of silence followed. Then one day an envelope from New York addressed in a booming scrawl would be waiting when I came home from sch
ool, and the cycle would begin again. When he was healthy, his way with words made him witty. When he got sick, he quite literally lost his wits, and the wordplay went out of control. He punned compulsively and said things that were grandiose, lewd, bigoted, and cruel. Then he misplaced words, lost track of their meaning, forgot his own name. Finally it all turned completely incoherent. I didn’t keep any of those letters, but I always read them.

  To my knowledge, after I threw a letter away, I never afterward thought about it. When stressful thoughts came into my head, I reflexively dissociated from them, picking up and vanishing myself from the present—my image of myself in those moments was a boy in a hot-air balloon basket. People at school would do imitations of me with my slumped posture, my mouth half open, my dilating eyes fixed on a distant horizon. They gave me another nickname—The Fogman.

  At our round wooden dining table there were four wooden chairs with machine-woven cane seats, and the three yellow plastic place mats. My mother sat to my left, Sally was across from me, and because these positions never shifted, for the fifteen years I lived in New Haven, the chair to my right was always empty, with no place mat in front of it. The cane straws in that chair retained their tight-strung gloss as the other three seats faded and grew slack and frayed. Now every night my mother, my sister, and I brought books to the dinner table. My mother’s periodic solution to being “sick and tired of you kids ruining meal after meal with your endless carping at each other” was to ban conversation in favor of reading. Once reading at meals was instituted, things quieted except for the turning of pages, the chink of fork tines against plates and bowls, and the resonant sounds of my mother’s swallowing; she scarcely ate all day and came home famished.

  Silencing me was a good idea. Too often of late I had been compelled to visit disorder upon my mother’s orderly rooms with bursts of sibling aggression. To listen to my end in these mealtime exchanges, you would think Sally to have been lacking for nothing in life but fraternal critique—a deficit that I was so up for filling it was at times difficult for my sister to do or say anything without my bruitous intervention, followed up with a mocking I-know-better laugh. Sally sat down to breakfast one day wearing new shoes. “You’re going to wear those?” I asked her. At dinner the state capital of Rhode Island came up in conversation. Sally didn’t know it was Providence. “How can you not know that?” I asked. Into her room she’d go to practice her flute: “Mom,” I’d loudly warn from my room, “I can’t get anything done in here with her in there piping.” In my bandolier, “un” was the prefix of choice, as in “How uncool can one person be?” Again and again and again riding her, these harsh sorties, and what had she done? She could be perhaps moody and a little bossy. I was the Dodge Ram pickup roaring up behind a bicycle, racing the motor and then leaning on the horn just for hate. In the moment there was always the tissue of cause, the roweled spur of circular justification. She had to be provoking me, otherwise why was I angry? But here were her real provocations: she was near and she was safe—safe to impose upon with my precarious moods, safe to share the secret of my truculent discontent, safe because she understood I was unhappy even if I didn’t, safe because I knew that she loved me in spite of it all. I inflicted my cares on her and on my mother, allowing what I disliked about myself to seem like their doing, and they forgave me. We three were a little family.

  That was the real novelty of my adolescent discontents, that I was so unaware of them. I had moods that could shrink the house, and I never had any idea. When in my presence somebody began to talk about a couple getting divorced or I overheard Joan Baez singing “Daddy You Been on My Mind,” to my surprise I’d lose control of my eyes and throat. Immediately I’d focus on hurrying myself past it. Wretched as I sometimes was, I knew I must not seem down because things could always be worse. I was fortunate, had my own room, while in New Hampshire, my grandparents had known a local family that had numbered so many children five boys shared a bunk. And think of my mother, asleep in the living room, turning herself out so I could have a private space. I firmly believed myself to be having a happy childhood. “You were such a sunny kid,” people tell me. How then to account for my miseries? I refused to think of them as miseries. I viewed them instead as wrongs committed by others, which fate would someday prosecute because in the long run life was fair. My mother did not know that I found it comforting to see the world as a place where ultimate justice was pending, but she encouraged my interest in delayed gratification when she told me that it was okay with her that I was not “one of those people who is peaking in high school. Most of them never go anywhere.” That my time would come had abstract appeal. Then I’d get tripped up by the usual snare of how unprepared I would be to face my moment when finally it arrived.

  Out behind our house was our forsaken backyard, the grassless firmament sinking lower and lower beneath exposed tree roots that arched from the dried-out topsoil like ruptured tendons. I wanted to fix it up but didn’t know where to begin. When I thought about how to solve such deficits of knowledge, I now often pictured somebody in a plaid shirt as the one to guide me. He would be there to talk me around a tool belt; to teach me to—I had an ever-increasing list—fly cast, chop wood, train a dog, keep a treehouse aloft, drive and then to lend me the car on the condition that I’d wash it Sunday afternoon; to lead me out back for lessons on how to put up a tent before taking me camping; to show me where I was going wrong with my math homework; to come to my games and diagnose my swing afterward; to tell me the way to behave around women; to fill the empty chair at dinner; to make an after-bedtime murmur of adult voices with my mother. I was mortified by my manly inabilities. Could it be so difficult to master a fuse box, learn to fix a flat bicycle tire, or lay down fresh seed and fertilizer? I didn’t learn because—how can I explain this?—there seemed to me a wrong way to know.

  I wanted help so I wouldn’t need the help I wasn’t going to ask for. I wanted help to keep me from messing up my life and ending up broke, friendless, alone, and strapped down. Yet if you’d asked me then what I wished for most in the world, I’d have said with complete candor, “I want the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series.”

  The inability to see myself distorted my vision of others. I knew that suffering had visited the homes of many of my classmates. A house burglar killed one boy’s father after which the boy seemed to me to grow so increasingly fair and fragile that by the time we were seniors he spoke in a sweet childlike contralto, and his delicate blond lashes lit his face in angelic forbearance. A second boy’s dad had been crossing a city street when a car struck him down. That boy was among the most popular members of our class, though around me he always acted scornful. Another kid’s dad died and the kid quietly left our school. Divorce was not uncommon. When a separated mother returned for visits to the house where one of my friends and his siblings lived with their father, I saw how life was transformed by her presence right down to the more upbeat rock that went onto the turntable and the baked goods that appeared on the kitchen counter. I never knew any kids who talked about the unpleasant parts of their lives, and I would not have known how to do so with them, would have been too fearful of visiting that kind of pain, would have distanced myself by all means possible. I wanted everyone to be unaffected by their hardships and disappointments, and I found it possible to imagine that they were all taking what life brought them in perfect stride, just like me.

  Once I stood in a New Haven backyard as a good friend and his father argued. I was paying scant attention. In this year when the father bought himself a steel-blue Porsche, wrecked it, and went out and got another, my friend and his dad had been quarreling a lot. The impetus for this latest squabble was nothing so remarkable. Then suddenly I watched astonished as the father struck out with his arm at my friend, who captured the arm and judo-flipped his father head over shoes onto the turf. The father bounced, then lay on his back so still he could have been sunbathing. I was marveling at this, marveling at the sight of my friend panting over his v
anquished progenitor, when I heard a maternal voice breaking through the weird calm, “Nicky, go home,” and out the garden gate I floated, the whole incident begun and ended with such blurry celerity I wondered on my way back to Willow Street if it could have really happened. Then I got to thinking what a gorgeous flip it was, that I didn’t know my friend had it in him. Soon enough I was back over there at the house, joking in the convivial kitchen with both parents, none of us acknowledging that something surprising had happened, something that might have suggested to me that the world out there was a place much stranger and more tragic than I pretended, and more forgiving.

  One of the kids in my neighborhood passed along to me a new record he’d come into and didn’t want. On the cover was a knock-kneed, splay-legged, pigeon-toed man in cuffed jeans, skinny necktie, and a blazer, holding a guitar in a way that made me think he was concerned about dropping it. The man had on a pair of eyeglasses with the thick black frames popular among Treasury men during the Eisenhower administration, a lumpy pomp of black hair and such a pale face that his glowing head appeared to be levitating free between his collars. He was seething. The laid-back Eagles did not look like this. The stadium-filling, blow-dried members of Yes, Kansas, Foreigner, Van Halen, Journey, and Styx didn’t either, and not the merciful James Taylor. Nobody pictured on the front of the black souvenir T-shirts with the scrolled list of tour cities down the back that kids wore to school the day after going to concerts bore any resemblance to him. This lone misfit without a band was either torturously ashamed of his own geekdom or enraged about it enough to want vengeance. Maybe it was all a joke to him. He was calling himself Elvis Costello, he’d named his record My Aim Is True, and over and over across the album cover in small, manic type he was proclaiming himself king. What the hell was this?