“I can’t imagine going to the jungle and living in that heat with all the bugs and wild animals.” Ann spoke with unaccustomed sharpness.
“But you grew up on a farm.”
“I know about bugs and mud, and I had to do chores, but that’s just what I want to get away from. And I wouldn’t want a gun.”
“I didn’t even have chores. I got an allowance and there were things I was supposed to do, like take out the garbage, and once I helped paint the garage, but that’s about it. I don’t know how to do anything.”
“Well, that’s just not true. Who made me bookshelves? And you do artistic things. You draw. You’re a wizard with a camera.”
“Maybe I should just get a wizard suit and a wand,” he said, pounding the steering wheel.
The streetlights made the bushy tops of the palm trees silvery like old men.
THEY FELL INTO bed, dazed, too sleepy to make love. Ann awoke before dawn, her head cracking. She regretted taking Jimmy to visit her Kentucky friends. The war argument was discombobulating. And Meredith was a drip. Ann and Jimmy shouldn’t be in disagreement. They should both be out protesting, but the exam was coming up and Jimmy couldn’t afford to lose his draft deferment. It hit her even more deeply than before what a looming monster the draft was for people who couldn’t afford college or keep up their grades. Jimmy had been so quiet about it, but she realized that he must be torn with both guilt and fear about the draft. He would be nervous about it all the time. His imagination would be full of the possibilities, and he would be questioning continually whether his deferment made sense.
Jimmy’s hair made a halo on the pillow. He had wound the sheet tightly around his shoulders and clasped it tightly to his neck. Ann pictured him sleeping on an army cot in a barracks full of snoring young men. She thought of Meredith and John’s boys, trapped in their chaste little beds. Through the half-open Venetian blinds, the headlights from a passing car made film-noir stripes on the wall. The clock said three past six. She eased herself from the bed. She needed to do some reading for class but couldn’t find her book. It was still dark outside. She accidentally clattered the soap dish in the bathroom, but Jimmy didn’t stir. She slipped back into bed and tried to sleep, but her head hurt and she was thirsty. She got up and drank a glass of water, but that made her feel worse. Meredith and John and their wine and their fancy fish. Now Ann realized that Jimmy had been standing up for people like her and her family in Kentucky. She felt grateful and proud, even closer to him.
Finally she slept again, and they awoke at the same time. As they struggled awake, they squeezed each other tightly, half in a dream. It was a luxurious feeling, as they squeezed deeper and deeper in mutual need. They clutched each other like long-separated lovers reunited.
JIMMY’S BATTERED ALUMINUM skillet appeared to be an antique from Conestoga wagon days, but his percolator was new.
“Chow’s on,” he said. He had made a complete breakfast—bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. He gave her his Porky Pig cup.
“This is good.” She laughed. “I’m trying to imagine my dad cooking an egg.”
“Or mine,” he said.
He stubbed out a cigarette, half-smoked.
He wasn’t eating. She had finished her eggs and a piece of toast when she realized that he was crying.
“What? What’s wrong?” She touched his face, dabbing the tear.
“I’m told a man never cries,” he said, rubbing his face with a wad of his hair.
“What’s wrong, Jimmy?”
“I feel so worthless,” he said. “You’re not the only one without confidence. I may seem to you like I know what I’m doing, but it’s not true. I feel like I have an empty bucket right in the center of my being.”
“That’s so strange,” she said. “A bucket.”
“I’m hollow,” he said. “There’s just nothing in there.”
“That can’t be true, Jimmy.”
He really was crying. She stood up and held his head in her arms. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You are full; you are overflowing. You’re good, kind, true.”
“You’ve been reading too much Christian bullshit in Western Civ. If there’s anything in the bucket, it is bullshit.”
“That’s not true.”
“Maybe you don’t really know me.”
A bad image—like the snake in Eden—was about to spill out their happiness into a sour slop bucket of hog swill. The empty bucket was a cockamamie metaphor, she thought.
“You’re so much better than me,” he said, pushing her away. “I don’t deserve you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I try so hard,” he said. “I always want to do what’s right, but sometimes I feel so inadequate.”
She sat down again at the table, and Jimmy forced a playful grin. He was no longer crying, but this wasn’t a joke. Ann tried to assure him that his fears were unfounded, that most people were shallow compared to him. How could he feel so empty? But she realized that his self-doubts were nothing she could simply shoo away.
“Listen, we’ve got each other. Tell me what I can do. I’m here. I’m listening.” She touched his cheek, but he wouldn’t turn toward her.
He told her a few things—his lack of direction, the absence of encouragement from his family—but she wasn’t convinced. She knew he was smart, he found school easy, he saw through sham and pretension, he possessed a critical mind that was always busy and alert. Why wasn’t that enough?
“I guess I’m a spoiled brat.”
“Jimmy,” she said, holding him as closely as she could. “You saved me, you know. I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She thought that saying this would give him confidence.
But she was worried about him, that he would cry over a scary emptiness that he couldn’t tell her about.
The sun blazed hot, the water burned, the breeze died down. After the pointless days on deck come the casual-chic evenings, the ceaseless vulgarity of the buffet table, the sunsets crowded with ooh-ahs, champagne, and shouting.
The silence of the sea. The thought of the norovirus spreading like nuclear fallout.
Railings lower than you’d expect.
“WRITING A PAPER is beside the point,” she said. “These are the words that count.” She ruffled the pages of her Riverside edition of Keats’s poetry, which she had found peeking from under the sofa skirt at Jimmy’s.
They were at her apartment that evening, writing their papers on Keats and Shelley. They had eaten some food she had made—broiled burgers, peas, baked potatoes. Jimmy didn’t want any ice cream. He was writing about Shelley’s clouds and idealism, and she was playing around with Keats’s birds. The memory of her banter with Jimmy about the banshee was an inspiration. Its demonic, wailing shriek made a counterpoint to Keats’s chipper chirper, the nightingale. She thought Jimmy had shown her that she had a choice—she could let the backwoods banshee of superstition stifle her own voice or she could soar with the nightingale. She wondered if Keats could see birds from his window as he lay dying in Rome. Probably he saw pigeons on the Spanish Steps. One of the last things he saw could have been bird shit spattered on those steps. Shelley’s last sight might have been clouds reflected in the Gulf of La Spezia as he went under, gurgling.
Jimmy closed his notebook and thrust it into his book bag. “I have to go home to write this. I can’t think with you sitting there tempting me—just like someone I saw in a picture on a dress once.”
“Jimmy,” she said, reaching for him at the door. “I meant what I said this morning. You saved me. You really did.”
He faced her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Remember what you told me about the cut worm and the Wordsworth sunset? You were right—what you said to the class. That’s what I love about you. I told you the day I met you what I thought of those brown-nose apple-polishing sycophants, sick elephants.” He touched her cheek. “We saved each other,” he said. He kissed her nose and gave her a long hug. “Ad
ios, Snooks. See you tomorrow.” He held the door open for a second, then added, with a little grin, “My Daisy of the Dardanelles.”
From the door, she watched him skip down the stairs in a hurry, his book bag over his shoulder, his footfalls ringing on the metal mesh steps. The hollowness he had spoken of, the empty bucket, frightened her. She thought of her father emptying the coal scuttle into the stove. How could Jimmy say she had saved him? Had she really?
As the sound of his car faded down the street, she remembered an evening when her father had not come home, and she had to help her mother milk the cows. Mama, although sick with worry, would not go to the police until nearly midnight, for fear of learning that he had had a wreck. And he had. He had hit ice, and the car rolled four times down an embankment. He spent a week in the hospital while Ann and her mother milked the cows every day—at five in the morning and five in the evening. Now she thought of her mother’s churning worry that night when Ann’s father had not come home.
“O.K., MISS SNOOKS. Listen to this.” Jimmy crossed the living room and searched among his record albums. In two days, he seemed to have jumped headlong out of his depression. “Forget Keats and Shelley. The greatest poem in the English language had already been written when they were still talking baby talk.”
She sat down on the couch. He placed a record on his turntable and dropped the needle into the groove.
“Listen to this.”
“Sounds like ‘Eleanor Rigby’—the violins. What is it?”
“Saint-Saëns—‘Danse Macabre.’”
“That’s the greatest poem?”
“No. Listen.” He lowered the volume and stood holding an imaginary microphone like a lounge crooner. He began reciting.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Jimmy recited the entire poem. Ann was thrilled that he knew the whole of “Kubla Khan” by heart. He was handsome, irresistible, his shaggy head aglow with the slanting light from his pole lamp, his faint lisp echoing like a subtle motif throughout. She could see Jimmy’s “flashing eyes, his floating hair.” At the end, she cried.
“That’s so beautiful.”
“Coleridge had already done it,” Jimmy said, flopping down on the couch. “Neither Keats nor Shelley, and certainly not Byron, could do better than ‘Kubla Khan.’ And that includes Wordsworth.”
“What’s all this about an empty bucket?” she said. “You’ve got that poem in it. What else do you need?”
Blotting her face with his shirttail, he said softly, “And which Romantic poet is the most quoted to this day, I ask you?”
“It’s Coleridge, isn’t it? ‘Water, water, everywhere . . .’”
“And the albatross! You can’t even walk across campus without stumbling over the fucking albatross.”
“The ancient mariner had an albatross around his neck, and you’ve got an empty bucket inside. Water, water, everywhere, but nothing in your bucket, Jimmy? That’s absurd.”
“Yeah.” A grin broke out. “You make me feel better.”
“You make me feel better.”
“You know, if Coleridge suddenly came back to life in the twentieth century, he would fit right in. He’d be so hip he’d be collaborating with the Beatles.”
“I heard that a new Beatles album is coming out the first of June.”
“Yeah, I heard. I love the Beatles. They could end the war.”
“Maybe they’ll know what to do about the albatross.”
They held each other tightly, and Ann felt sure he loved her. She would fill his bucket with love, although she knew that seemed soppy.
JIMMY SAID, “DID you hear what happened to Blankenship?”
“No, what?”
“He flunked an undergrad who begged him to change his grade because if he flunked out he’d be drafted. But Blankenship refused, said he had to abide by the rules. He had his principles. Well, Blankenship just the other day got word that this student was killed in Vietnam.”
“That’s terrible. He must feel awful.”
“But somebody else didn’t die. It evens out.”
“Oh, good, we’re supposed to be glad this prof condemned a student to his death.”
“Blankenship probably feels bad but rationalized his part in it. But there he is—prof in ivory tower demoting lowly minion to the battlefield because he wasn’t good enough for college.”
Ann had her eyes fixed on a bougainvillea vine—the rampant flowers devouring light and air.
THEY STOPPED TALKING about the war when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band arrived with the force of a church tent revival. It was the first week of June, and spring quarter exams loomed. The pervasive smell of citrus blossoms gave the campus a mellow, dreamy air, while the Beatles provided a whimsical yet revolutionary soundtrack. The new album overturned what Ann had been thinking about the study of literature, her background, her future. It seemed to throw everything onto a smiling, self-congratulatory merry-go-round of in-jokes and jests. She and Jimmy listened to the album over and over, discussing it as if it were on a level with Chaucer or Joyce. They analyzed the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, at length. The holes symbolized alienated individuals, pitfalls, potholes. Empty buckets, Ann understood but did not say.
“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” Jimmy said. “The Beatles were stoned. Acid. I bet you anything.”
He scrutinized the collage of figures on the album cover. “Here we have the leaders of the world. Bob Dylan. Marlon Brando. Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Marilyn Monroe,” Ann said.
As the album played on Jimmy’s stereo, they were smoking a joint together and trying to identify each figure. Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire. Most of them they didn’t recognize. The figures were portrayed like a crowd of mourners at a funeral. Ann thought the Beatles could have been English majors, like her and Jimmy.
“I wish I’d seen them at Candlestick Park last summer,” she said. “I got here two days later.”
“I know a couple of people who went,” said Jimmy. “They said you couldn’t hear them for the screams.”
Ann took another drag on the joint. She was getting more accustomed to the harsh smoke.
She cut out the pictures that came with the album—Sgt. Pepper, the two badges (the band logo and the head of Sgt. Pepper), the mustache, the sergeant’s stripes, and the stand-up card of the Beatles in their satin Day-Glo band uniforms. Jingles the landlady was ahead of her time with her Day-Glo decor.
Jimmy placed the mustache under his nose.
“I’m Sergeant Pepper,” he said. “I am here for the benefit of Mr. Kite. He and I see eye to eye. We know who is going to die.”
ANN HEARD THE songs at Tresidder Union. At the gas station, lovely Rita, the meter maid, was coming to life, and when Ann arrived at her building, the songs were wafting from the apartments downstairs. Pixie and Sanjay were playing opposite sides of the album. When Ann went to her appointment with Frank the psychologist—who was exploring her mind, fixing a hole in it—she heard the song “Within You Without You” coming from behind the door that said MENLO PARK DEAF SOCIETY. Each encounter with one of the songs seemed to have a meaning—the power of coincidence, the continuity of a theme, a motif in the novel that was her life in the sixties. Or that was how it would seem decades hence. Synchronicity.
“SOMETHING IS HAPPENING that is bigger than us,” Ann ventured to say. She had no idea what she meant.
“Yeah. The military-industrial complex, for instance,” said Jimmy. “My car is bigger than us.”
He was teasing. But there was a feeling in the air, Ann thought. Chip reported that he had heard the Beatles blaring from every doorway when he walked through the Haight-Ashbury district.
“That place is harder and harder to get through,” he said. “Don’t ask me what I was
doing in the Haight. Pixie wanted to go.”
Chip had just come from downstairs, after spending the night with Pixie. He complained that her pink pebbles hurt his arches.
“That gal is a madwoman,” he said.
IN THE CAR Ann and Jimmy talked about Sgt. Pepper all the way to the beach at Half Moon Bay. The radio was playing the album over and over. Jimmy sang along happily as if his “bucket” was filled with music now.
Ann saw the Lonely Hearts Club Band as an old vaudeville act telling stories to the future. “Billy Shears the band singer and his friends,” she told Jimmy. “Maybe they’re going to help him with a barn raising. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes is going boating. The girl running away from home. Rita the meter maid. Even the guy imagining his old age.”
She imagined that the meandering strains of the long song George Harrison played on the sitar was about a Buddhist monk.
Jimmy pointed out that the characters were all ordinary people except for the last one on the record. “Look what happens at the end. The lucky man blew his mind out in his car. The successful man—maybe he was even in the House of Lords.”
“He couldn’t face reality,” she said.
“And these stories are all interior,” Jimmy said. “That’s what acid is like.”
“Are you still trying to get me to take that?”
“Sometimes I try to explain something to you in acid terms and I can’t because you haven’t been there.”
Ann thought Jimmy was suggesting that she wouldn’t be so uptight if she took acid. He and Frank had both used the word repression several times. Albert had said the same thing.
CHIP, HOLDING UP the album cover, said, “I’ve identified more mourners.”
“Who?”
“Aubrey Beardsley. Here. And Aldous Huxley. Aleister Crowley.”
Dear Ann Page 11
