Page 98 of Playworld
“We could talk,” she said.
“We could.”
“It doesn’t seem to me like we ever struggle for things to talk about.”
I felt the same way.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “I think that all the conversations you and I will ever have will be in places like this. Buses, elevators. The apartment where I babysit. My room. If that was for the rest of our lives, how much time would that add up to?” She took my hand; hers was damp.And the tenderness I felt toward her surpassed my lovesickness, because I could tell that she, too, was a bit scared. “Do you ever think about that? How much time you’ll spend doing dishes? Or that you’ll really have with someone, like your brother or sister, if you do the math?”
The lights came on. We blinked at the brightness. The door opened. She said, “You’re so talented,” and kissed my cheek, which was partly a command to stay, and stepped off the car. Then she turned to wave goodbye and the door closed.
The elevator sank. I thought about what Amanda’s mother had said the previous week, about picking the ones who don’t run and how Amanda had been taught that love was a chase. Shouldn’t love be a swimmingwith,like fish in a school, as opposed to a swimmingafter? And if I wasn’t chasing, what was I doing?
That these questions had no answers made me miserable.
In the car, once I’d taken my seat in the back, Dad said to me, very gently, “Why don’t you come sit up front?”
When I came around and took the seat next to him, he paused to regard me before shifting into gear. I sat slumped against the door, arms crossed, with my temple pressed to the window. He eased down the street, stopping again at the light. We stared at Saint John the Divine, its facade filling the entire windshield. It was late and the streets were empty. We could have parked here if we wished.
“Beautiful building,” Dad said, and leaned forward, over the steering wheel, to look up at the cathedral. When I remained silent, he said, “You want to tell me about her.”
I gave him a complete account of the past several weeks. They had seemed like years, and when I mentioned this, he nodded knowingly. By now he had backed into what, at an earlier hour, might not be considered a parking space, but did not kill the motor. He listened with the same respectful silence as earlier, sometimes lightly laughing with me, other times, with his elbow at rest on the door, rubbing his finger over his lips, as if he were thinking thoughts entirely private and tangential to mine. He had questions, now and again. I felt unburdened answering everything he asked, but when I concluded none of it mattered, it was all hopeless, he said, in what at the time felt like a such a complete rebukeof Dr. West I wanted to hug him, “You can’t ever predict how a person’s feelings might change over time.”
We considered the cathedral again.
“When were you first in love?” I asked.
Whatever my father recalled, whatever made him shake his head, there was no acting in it.
He shifted the car into gear.
“Let’s take a drive,” he said.
Voiceover
This happened in 1952. My father had just turned nineteen. He was about to be drafted into the Korean War. The girl’s name—thewoman,he should say—was Millie Van Bourne. They had met several months beforehand, at the studio of their singing coach, Max Henson. They instantly fell in love. How else to explain this spotlight recognition? “She was very beautiful,” my father said, “like your friend, but a platinum blond.” Sharp-featured. Bright-eyed. From Wilmington, she’d come to New York to make a go of it as an actress. She hadn’t had much success doing anything serious, nothing that could be called acting per se, though she was earning steady money as a color-TV model. In his mind there she stands, under the torpedo lights arrayed above the soundstage, her arms akimbo, her green sweater, brown skirt, blue eyes, and crimson lips matching up bar to bar with the spectrum’s test wheel posted behind her. To save on rent, she was living on the Upper West Side with her two sisters. They were remarkably beautiful as well and shared a strong family resemblance, a gift evident in their faces’ shape, a fullness to their lips, even a similarity in the appearance of their teeth that showed when they smiled and was subtly and gloriously altered in each: Glenda, the eldest, was the most imperious. She’d inherited their father’s coloring and his down-the-nose glare. Maxine, the middle sister,was the most gorgeous, perhaps because she was the kindest. The tallest too, she slouched slightly. Stories dazzled her; she’d easily be brought to tears or laughter by them; she would touch her lips with her fingers while she listened. As for Millie, both women watched over her fiercely because she was the most impulsive, always breaking off whenever she saw a bright thing shining. They were always turning around to discover her gone. She elicited in men one of the most consuming desires there was, which was to rescue her. Out for an evening, at a party, standing together in the corner of a room, each with a drink in hand, they waited patiently for my father to join them, and when he did, they welcomed him like family. They spoke of holiday gatherings they’d invite him to, the countless cousins they wanted him to meet, Mom’s huge spread.Thiswas what he remembered most clearly, what made being in their presence such a powerful thing, this unconditional acceptance—to be Millie’sandtheirs—for they were so exotically American, so put together and stylish and educated, while he was a Jew from Middle Village, Queens, the son of a poor furrier living in the two-story home his grandfather had built, where curses were uttered in Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, while his own hopes, which he dreamed of in English, were far too presumptuous to share with anyone, even in his native tongue.
But he was drafted that summer, placed in the navy, and did basic at Bainbridge, though none of his training seemed to correspond with anything a seaman might need to function on a ship. There were countless hours of marching in pitiless heat, barely enough riflery to repulse an enemy’s advance, and so much attention to the misbegotten task of doing laundry you might think crotch rot was a greater threat to the free world than communism. In the evenings he wrote Millie a letter about his day, taking great pains to find something new to tell her, some moronic exercise to describe or something some fool had said. Shel backfilled the monotony by asking about her sisters, her work, the number of times she’d thought of him, and he overanalyzed her letters, finding ominous hints in her asides and omissions, spying suitors at parties she described in missives he noticed were becoming shorter and more infrequent with each passing week. In the afternoons he posted his daily letter and, if he received one from her, waited to read it until he was lying in his bunk. Though occasionally there were nights when he couldn’t helpit: he walked across the several-hundred-yard-wide marching field to the mess hall—this a long, low-slung building lit by sodium lights—to the base’s pay phone. During those first weeks, when he was lucky enough to catch her at home, she was exuberant with longing—she missed him so, she said—but after a month, their conversations became truncated, forced; she was easily distracted, and more often than not his calls were answered by one of her sisters (Millie was out, Maxine said apologetically; he’d just missed her, Glenda explained, try back tomorrow?). For a desperate stretch of days, he reached no one at all. By now Millie’s letters had stopped without explanation. He thought he might Section 8 and discharge, he was so frantic. On the final night they spoke, he’d walked the field in a furious thunderstorm, no delay between the flash and rumble, the rain silvered in waving sheets, the puddles as big as ponds and, when the lightning unfurled its white wings, bright as mercury. Millie was determined, distant. She’d already moved on. Hehadto understand why she was breaking things off between them. He’d be gone for eighteen months, which to her seemed as long as for good, and it was better, wasn’t it, Shel, if they ended this now?
Walking back across the field, he called the lightning upon himself, but it did not obey. He hung his soaked clothes in the shower and wept with them. In bed, once he’d calmed down, he considered the rightness of what Millie had done, for their lives were mistimed, a fate he promised himself to redress if he were ever to see her again, and the next morning he left for Norfolk, where he shipped off for the Mediterranean on the USSDes Moines.
Shel at sea. No romance to be found in the North Atlantic crossing, only seasickness, at least during the voyage’s first week. Men, singly or in pairs, dotted the heavy cruiser’s gunwale port and starboard to bend double at the giant cleats and grab rails to offer long eels of puke to the ocean, which webbed to filament downwind and then broke apart in patterns as complex as snowflakes, disappearing without so much as a splash. He was assigned to the deck force, the ship’s cleaning crew, charged to polish brass—the ever-tarnished brightworks—to swab the deck, and to scrub the latrines fiendishly decorated by the sailors who failed to barf above. The food was beyond awful, the cuts of meat tough as soaked rope, corned beef senior officers dubbed “baboon ass,” so saltyhe woke at night cottonmouthed as if he’d been on a bender. He was friendless, and the friendless avoided one another so as to not be singled out. Two men committed suicide before they made the Azores. A fat sailor named Stranch leaped from the bow at midwatch, his execution demonstrating foresight: if the fall didn’t kill him then the prow would slice him in half. There was a brief nighttime search. Spotlights feebly inspected the black-and-white chop. “He’s shark shit,” said an officer, “let’s get a move on.” The second snuck down to his berth at dinner and put a rifle in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his toe, the bullet pasting a divot of skull against the wall so firmly it was as if it had been nailed there. “Gooned that up good, didn’t he?” said a sailor. Thankfully Shel wasn’t on duty for that cleanup job.
His general misery crowded out thoughts of Millie; the hatred he soon encountered made him fear for his life. In the chaos of that first week, in the smoke pit belowdecks, amid men seeking vassals, allegiances, a sun to orbit; stunned by their circumstances and homesickness and fear of battle, Shel had clocked more than a few men who looked at him with hopeful aggression. It was another seaman named Logan who had it in for him. One night, after mess, he spotted his enemy leaning against the wall. They locked eyes like lovers. Already the man was seething. Bad luck: he had two sidekicks. Shel looked down, regarding the cigarette burning in his fist. Six black shoes formed a scalloped crescent around his.
“Fuck’s your name?” Logan said. A southern twang—fux—and the diphthong tacked to “name” sounding vaguely Hebraic:nay-m.
“Excuse me?”
Growing up, Shel’s older brother, Marty, regularly beat him. Such instruction had taught him to make any fight as short as possible, so he took a drag on his cigarette and then smashed his forehead into the man’s nose. A sound like a split picket. As they fell together, Shel shoved the cigarette into Logan’s mouth and clapped his hand over the man’s lips to seal the squib inside, watching the man’s eyes widen as the cherry scorched the back of his throat. Shel had anticipated the ensuing pile-on separating them, each man cursing the other over the heads of their respective scrums, which bore them aloft like a bride and groom in the hora.
“I’ll kill you, you hear me?” Logan screamed. His mouth and chin were dark with blood. “I swear I’ll kill you, you kike son of a bitch!”
In bed later, Shel held his Ka-Bar knife beneath the sheets. Night noises in the berthing: if you picked out a single sound it might drive you mad. He waited for the attack, which never came. On the bed adjacent his, a sailor named Barney Freele could be relied upon to converse with you while he dreamed. Now he said, “The fish. Get it.”
“What kind of fish?” Shel whispered.
“Bass,” he said. “Get it in the net.”