Asa, as I Knew Him

by Susanna Kaysen

  “You have to leave some,” said Asa. “He’ll be suspicious. See how many there are and leave at least half.”

  “Suppose there are only two? Nah, I’ll take them. He’ll decide he’s getting old and forgot when he used them.”

  Asa knew his father would never decide that. In truth, he saw no way to avoid a scene in which his father, pale and clenched, accused him of stealing. The only way would be if the whole bag vanished, as in a robbery. Silver, portraits, black bag—he wondered if they could arrange it. Leave the door unlocked. Then he’d be careless, reprehensible, but not a thief. That seemed too elaborate, and so calculating as to make him guiltier. Asa blanked his mind out and waited for Parker to finish. The bag was full of treasures, and Parker wanted them all.

  “What’s this—phenobarbital. We could really get high on this. This is terrific. And here’s some, some—”

  “It’s aspirin, for God’s sake. Just hurry up. Just get the ampules and let’s go.”

  “You are chickenshit.” Parker’s face was too even-featured to express much emotion; his face appeared every year in the school catalogue, poring over a book in the sunlit library. “Building young men of character …” To compensate he had developed a gravelly, rather ominous voice. “I bet you’re not even going to try it.”

  “I don’t have to try it.”

  “Because you know what it’s like? You’ve never tried it. You’re just scared.”

  “So what,” said Asa. “Let’s go.” He took the bag and put it back on its perch. He wanted to ride off on his bicycle to New Hampshire and disappear into the woods.

  Instead the two of them rode down Brattle Street away from the sunset. Asa had left the back door unlocked in case he decided to stage a burglary in the middle of the night. Parker’s pockets jingled. The street flashed below their tires; they moved as fast as airplanes through the humid night. At the intersection in front of the Solas’ they stopped, Parker jamming his brakes hard enough to skid himself around facing Asa.

  Somnolent evening in July, the crickets, the first patches of light in windows, Parker’s form dense against the approaching dark—Asa saw all this, all this crept toward him oppressively. He swallowed, blinked, tried to clear his head out. But his head was as full as if he had a flu. “I’m off,” he said, and rode away, down Brattle Street past the long curved driveway that drew Parker in like an arm.

  It was Friday and he had money, so he went to Harvard Square. He ate a hot-fudge sundae at Schrafft’s. He went to the Out-of-Town News and leafed through Look until he was told to “buy it or put it away.” He put it away. There was nothing left to do except try to sneak into the movie at the Brattle Theatre or stand in front of the entrance to the Casablanca, the bar under the theatre, and hope some seniors from Andover or Choate would appear and take him in. He was not in the mood for a solo confrontation with the bartender about his age; groups were less likely to be harassed and more likely to cajole the bartender into serving a few beers.

  For fifteen minutes he stood at the door to the Casablanca, a sorry figure with his hands pushed all the way in to the pockets of his pressed khakis. He had a sense of himself looking forlorn and ungainly and had just determined to leave—to bike to Walden Pond for a midnight swim—when Parker’s older brother, Clem, appeared with a girl. Clem was a junior at Harvard; the girl looked to be Asa’s age. She was lanky and dressed in red, and she had a wide-jawed face. Her full skirt swung out, then wrapped itself around her thighs as, twirled by Clem, she turned to greet Asa.

  “Hey, meeting the boys?” asked Clem. He held the girl close with a heavy arm. He was a lacrosse star; his nose had been broken twice before his senior year at Choate. “Oh yeah, you’re not of age.” Clem moved his hand from the girl’s waist to her neck, so her bare skin shone between his broad fingers. “Come on in, we’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Great,” said Asa. He extended his hand. “Asa Thayer.”

  “Oh, this is Jo,” said Clem. He opened the double doors and pushed her in before she and Asa could touch. “My cousin,” he added, over his shoulder. He winked.

  “First cousin?” asked Asa, when they were seated.

  “Third,” said Jo. She had large teeth, very white and well tended, and a rough, low voice like Parker’s. She took a package of Luckys from her red skirt and put one in her mouth. Asa, who had no matches, looked at Clem, but Clem was ordering drinks. “Hey,” growled Jo, and she put her hand on Clem’s arm. The cigarette dangled from her lip. “Hey, light me.”

  They had vodka martinis and Asa got drunk. It happened suddenly, in the middle of his second drink. A film of pleasure softened the contours of the bar and the two faces opposite him, giving everything a promising glisten. He felt hopeful; Jo leaned her head toward him when she talked, which she did more and more as Clem settled into his third martini. She talked about her hockey team at Winsor, about the sailing she was hoping to do over Labor Day, about her sister Anne’s new spaniel—“he loves to go out on the boat with us”—and the Pontiac she’d been promised for graduation. Clem leaned back and didn’t listen, but looked at her pale throat, which vibrated in the dark. She never asked a question, although her speech was dotted with interrogatives: “Do you see what I’m talking about?” “Isn’t that a sketch?” “Don’t you agree?” She tossed these first at Clem, then at Asa, snapping her wide, wicked eyes from one boy to the other. She was wicked, Asa saw through his haze, she was wickedly, deeply full of her flesh and her lanky limbs and her raspy, monotonous voice. There was an untidiness about her—a spot on her skirt, grit under her nails—that gave Asa an erotic tingle. She was not, quite, a girl he could imagine taking to a dinner dance. Undoubtedly she was taken to them, but he knew she would be the only one of her kind there.

  So they drifted through their third drink, Clem watching Jo, Asa interjecting ums and reallys, which were hardly needed. It was ten o’clock and the bar was starting to fill up. It was an odd bar, serving three distinct groups who segregated themselves automatically. Hard-drinking lawyers in their thirties with no reason to go home sat at the bar itself, in low conversation with the whiskey-colored bartender. Harvard boys and their dates sat in the wicker booths that lined three walls. In the middle, at wobbling tables meant for two, quartets of homosexual men spilled their stingers on the checked tablecloths. These groups were not absolute—doctors, writers, and professors joined the lawyers at the stools; the homosexuals included women with brightly colored stockings who were not homosexual; and prep-school boys toting finishing-school girls passed themselves off as their older brothers and sisters along the wall. Still, as in all bars, sorrow, sex, and love were the preoccupations, and a man hoping to swamp his sadness in gin doesn’t talk to a man thinking to score, or thinking of how those cashmere shoulders will look at forty. The only overlap occurred when one of the younger boys caught the eye of a man in the middle. Asa and Reuben and Parker had drawn many unacknowledged glances on other nights. Only Reuben had noticed them; when he pointed out admirers (“That fellow in the yellow shirt, he’s sweet for you, Asa”) the others cringed. “Knock it off,” Parker would say. “Fresh flesh,” Reuben said, pinching Asa’s thigh, which hung over the arm of his chair. He alerted them to this other world, this distorted mirror world, and to their own power in it. “For a little handjob you could get a Peugeot ten-speed.” “Yucchh,” said Parker. He spoke for them all, despite Reuben’s bravado. They bent their blond heads over their beers and the man in the yellow shirt sighed. “Like a young lion,” he said to his stinger and his three companions, seeing in his drink Asa’s lips open from sleepiness and the pale beard he didn’t need to shave.

  Asa, sixteen, having kissed two nice girls, one at a dinner dance only two months before (Jenny, dark-haired, tasting of a cigarette sneaked and shared behind a rosebush), having secretly, in June, spent most of his paycheck on a whore fifteen years older, who took a phone call in the middle of his session and whose thick waist he gripped with sad passion, having nobody to imagine
her as, was looking—staring—at Jo and thinking of—longing for—Reuben and company. He missed the comfort of being understood. He missed the familiar shape and smell of Reuben, and the dizzying competition among the other three for Reuben’s admiration, which, though hard to provoke, could be lavish. So when Jo, talked out at ten-fifteen, asked the first question of the evening, “What are you doing with your summer?,” he answered immediately, “Hanging out at the Solas’.”

  “Reuben Sola? Those rich Jews over near Sparks Street?”

  “Yes,” Asa said, startled, “them.” It was a new outlook on the situation.

  “Oh, well. Why don’t you come out on the boat next week? I think we’re all going to sail up from my uncle’s place in Duxbury to Manchester. Clem’s coming, isn’t that right?” Clem didn’t nod. “I think Parker’s coming too—you’re classmates, aren’t you? I’m sure he’s planning to come. And I’d love you to come.” She took another cigarette from her pack and kept her eyes on Asa. “It’ll be grand, don’t you think?”

  “I’m working.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know you had a job. You didn’t say you had a job.”

  “Yes, I’m working,” repeated Asa, taking refuge behind the gas pump and the hot, black tarmac. “Thanks, though. Maybe next year.” Then, sensing she must be placated more, “It sounds like it will be fun.”

  “They’re not so bad,” said Clem suddenly. “He’s an interesting man, Sola. Got a great art collection—you know that’s a Goya he’s got in the living room. Got some terrific dirty etchings, too, some Picassos. And a Daumier. You know that Daumier in the library?”

  “Clemmy, I didn’t know you knew about art. Isn’t that a sketch? Where in the world did he get that stuff?”

  “My minor concentration. Major concentration, European history; minor in art. Get the whole picture. I don’t know where he got it. Paris, I suppose. He was in France during the war.”

  “I think I’m going to major in English,” Asa said.

  “Oh, are you going to be a beatnik?” Jo put her hands in her red skirt and flipped the hem around her knees. “Live in a garret and stuff?” She was nasty from too many martinis.

  “I didn’t know you knew the Solas,” said Asa.

  “A girl in my class went out with Reuben last fall. I think it was Reuben. He’s the younger one, right? The good-looking one? Who doesn’t look Jewish.”

  But Asa had been talking to Clem. Clem was gone again, thinking of the whole picture, or Jo’s legs, or whether to have a fourth martini. “He did,” said Asa. “Who was that?” Everything was getting far away from him.

  “Marjorie Fish. She has curly hair.”

  “Oh yes, Marjorie,” Asa said. It was news to him. The evening was full of news, which he wanted to be considering, alone.

  Some social situations are difficult to disengage from, especially at sixteen. There was the matter of the bill (Asa refused to let Clem pay for his drinks), and snagging the waitress, and waiting for the change from Asa’s end-of-the-week five. Then there was a round of invitations to sail, swim, come to Western art classes at Harvard, buy gas at Asa’s station—none of which any of them wanted to do. Asa wanted air.

  “Well, well—” He had managed to stand up. “Good night.” Their smoky faces looked up at him; both had petulant expressions, and he realized they wanted to be alone as much as he did. He fairly ran out the door.

  There was his bicycle leaning on a lamppost, the dew of the hot night streaked down the street, the quietness everywhere. It was ten-forty. Asa turned his wheels west and rode down Brattle Street until he came to the Solas’ house. Then he stood on the street and looked at it.

  He was trying to impose his new information onto the familiar shape. He wanted to see it as a Jewish palace, a folly full of plundered goods, because that was how he understood Jo’s remarks. He thought of the paintings—those Goyas and Daumiers he had ignored, imagining them some Jewish equivalent of the ancestors who lived on his stairway—and the black statuettes in the bookshelves (these were by Degas, Clem had said), and tried to see them as objects with their own importance; that was how he defined art. They steadfastly remained Professor Sola’s things, the way his mother’s blue-and-white ginger jar on the mantelpiece was hers by virtue of the pencils it had held since the beginning of time. He didn’t understand the indignation in Jo’s voice. She had made it sound as though the Solas had no right to these things or this house, with its beautiful arced driveway, its pre-Revolutionary trees. But for Asa the Solas had merged with their house just as all the owners of Brattle Street houses had; if they had accomplished it in fifteen years rather than a century, that was to their credit.

  There were lights on the third floor. They were up there, Parker and Roberto, Reuben was up there, they had beer, they had drugs that had made them first dizzy, then sick, now bored and waiting for the next event. In the Casablanca Clem was breathing martinis into Jo’s small and not-clean ear, the bartender was wiping the copper counter, the clock above the bar was clicking on its electric way toward midnight. Asa was standing on the street straddling his old Raleigh while the night cooled. All his options were the opposite—constrictions. Back in Harvard Square there was nothing except circling around the empty, gray streets, leaving tire marks in the dew. At home just the ill-fitting tread on the second step on the way upstairs, the awful square bottle of milk, blue as ice, from whose thick, cream-clotted lip he would drink while holding the refrigerator open with his left hand and staring blankly at the leftovers in their covered bowls. And here, upstairs behind the canvas shade that smelled like second grade because it smelled of paste and dust and sunshine, Reuben lolling on the braided carpet, satisfied without Asa. Nobody was looking out the window for him; nobody was out on bicycles following his trail.

  He could go in by the secret way—through a door in the basement, where Reuben kept a mattress to sleep on, and kiss girls on, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. For instance, at Andover. Reuben took the train back to Cambridge on wintry Thursdays and lay there, under his father’s feet, reading magazines, watching the day go away through the slits of glass near the ceiling. Then in the dark down to North Station, onto the six o’clock train, back in the dorm by seven. Asa knew how to get in, but he didn’t want to get in. He wanted, he realized, to stand on the street and be forlorn.

  Asa made a short, difficult foray into his mind to look for the source of his wish to be forlorn and didn’t find it there. What’s the matter with me? was the deepest he could penetrate. His heart, calling for attention, made a little flurry of beats, but he put that down to martinis. He tried again: What’s the matter with you? By removing himself this one step more he kept himself safe from knowing.

  He rode home and drank milk and went to bed.

  Everything was different in the morning. First, it was wonderfully hot. At eight-thirty the tarmac at the gas station was oozing under his sneakers. Heat, Asa had noticed, exhausted adults; the party at the Solas’ would be less chaperoned than usual. Professor Sola would sit near his air conditioner and look at his bronzes rather than pace his flagstone terrace with a glass of gin the way he tended to do when Reuben gave parties. Second, his parents had not noticed the unlocked door, and his father had taken his black bag out of the closet, opened it, put his lunch into it, and gone off to his half-day at the office (lunch on the riverbank in front of the hospital as always) without finding anything amiss.

  And then, in the middle of the morning, Jo appeared in a Buick, wearing a sleeveless green blouse that made her eyes, which last night had been yellow, green also. She put her elbow on the edge of the door, exposing her pale armpit, and rasped out, “Asa.” Asa was stacking cans of oil. The day was so hot his hands ached from touching the seething metal. And Jo looked cool like fruit—all fresh white skin and green cloth peeping out her window.

  “I thought you were going sailing,” said Asa, standing up. He finished his pyramid of cans and went, automatically, toward her gas tank.


  “Hey, I don’t want gas,” Jo said. She moved across the seat and leaned out the other window, where Asa was pointing the nozzle at her. “I wanted to see you.”

  A few drops of gas dripped from the tip of the hose. “You did?” He put the pump line back in its socket. “I thought you were going sailing.” He realized he’d already said this and blushed.

  Jo, watching Asa blush, lifted her arms to her hair and pushed her hands into it, pulling it straight back from her face. She had thick hair, probably close to brown in the winter, but now tawny and shiny from the sun. She let her hands fall down abruptly. “Hot,” she said. “Want to get some iced tea?”

  “I don’t get lunch until eleven-thirty.”

  “I’ll come back.” She drove out cautiously. This surprised Asa; he had imagined her a reckless driver. She flashed her taillights at him as she left the lot. He had an hour to fill.

  First, time was slow and the sun made a glare in the spilled gasoline. Then two people wanted oil. When Jo came back there was a line of six cars waiting for gas, and Asa was sprinting from window to window taking money and orders. Jo parked near the office and smoked a Lucky. Asa did not look up, did not watch her smoke making circles on the solid atmosphere, counted change instead, said, “Thank you, sir,” kept her a secret from himself for a few minutes. Then he was done, and had to face her and where to have lunch in the nether end of Cambridge where nobody either of them knew lived or ate.

  “Wait a minute,” he mumbled as he passed her on his way to wash. His face in the mirror was tracked with grit. His hands smelled of fuel, and then of fuel and yellow soap. Through the open vent above the sink he heard the scratch of her match lighting her second cigarette. He was keeping her waiting, which was ungentlemanly.

  But what was he to do with her? There was a sub shop down the block; he imagined Jo in a red booth with her elbow avoiding a puddle of Coke. He preferred imagining her in the gloom of the Casablanca. He stood on tiptoe and looked at her through the vent. He had three dollars and she looked like a five-dollar lunch, maybe even an eight-dollar lunch. She was putting on pink lipstick, which didn’t become her. She had a mirror that fit the palm of her hand; she held it two feet away with an extended arm so as to get the whole picture. Her self-absorption enchanted Asa. He was spying on her privacy, which added interest to an already interesting scene. Jo and her mirror did a duet they’d practiced many times: She turned her head left and right, checking the sweep of her hair against her pale cheeks; she pushed her nose close to the glass and examined her pores—were they bigger? Did she need to use some alcohol?—then drew back and smiled; this showed her teeth, and she licked them quickly to make them shine. The mirror obediently reflected the prettiest girl in the parking lot. Asa’s arches began to ache from standing on tiptoe. Jo put her mirror in her purse and pulled out another cigarette.