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from Morgantown
1962–1963
Fun? Drinking a bubbly brown fluid with a celery stick in
it, talking nonstop, laughing, even giggling, her eyes turned
up to full blast, Carol shoved me into an uproarious sea of
relatives: “This is John Dupre, my friend from WVU.”
(I imagined every one of them thinking: Dupre? Is he Jewish?)
Uncle Max, Uncle Sol, and Uncle Jake who lifted a squealing
Carol into the air by her Scarlett O’Hara waist: “This
is the college girl? You gotta be kidding. She should be in
movies.” Uncle Izzy, Uncle Joey, Uncle Art. (“He’s
not really my uncle,” she said about half of them.) Aunt
Ruth, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Essie. (Carol waved her fingers in
their faces: “Look at my nails! Aren’t you proud
of me?”) Brother Michael who seemed like a nice guy.
(At any rate, he spent a full minute talking to me: “English,
huh? I bet that’s why you get along with Carol. What
do you plan to do, teach?”) Her father, short and wiry
with inky black eyebrows, who shook my hand and then dismissed
me just as quickly as his wife had done—but, guzzling
the superb imported beer (“Pilsner from Pilsen!”
brother Michael had said, pouring me a huge mug of it), I
decided that Carol’s parents could go to hell. I was
feeling that old reliable buzz coming on.
Grinning like a cretin, I followed Carol
into a surging tangle of cousins, and boyfriends and girlfriends
of cousins, and more kids our age who looked like cousins
but weren’t really cousins—the whole lot of them
whooping their way toward midnight. Handsome dark-haired boys
in Ivy League suits and polished Florsheims seized my hand
with the grip of death. Girls met girls, shrieked, hugged,
and then yelled at each other over the din: “Oh, Carol,
I hate you. You’ve lost so much weight...”
“It’s an optical illusion. You
wouldn’t believe the waspie I’m wearing.” We
wormed our way into the living room, where middle-aged couples
were dancing to a stack of LPs. (Every record sounded like
Glenn Miller, and I despised Glenn Miller). The children were
supposed to be down in the rec room, but they kept exploding
back upstairs: rampaging little boys with noise makers shoved
into their mouths, screaming little girls with their petticoats
flying, playing hide-and- seek, using the adults for cover.
Fat old geezers were collapsed into overstuffed chairs (a
couple of them had fired up cigars). A strident cluster of
cute teenage girls pushed past us, giggling, every one of
them as dressed up as Carol: “Come on, Michael, play
some rock ‘n roll. Please. Pretty please.”
We worked our way through the crowd and
on into the dining room to contemplate the main event: roast
beef with silver tureens of red horseradish, fat shiny yellow
braided loaves (“Chullah,” Carol said as she walked
me along the sideboard), bagels and lox, pickled herring,
gefilte fish, chicken baked to a moist umber in a liquor of
garlic and onions—and blintzes, knishes, and verenikes,
a strange orange goo called tzimmes, kugel (it looked to me
like an exotic macaroni and cheese, but it turned out to be
a dessert), and chocolate cake, cheese-cake, apple cake, poppyseed
cake, plates of cookies (and scattered throughout all of the
rooms on the first floor: silver bowels of nuts, chips, crackers,
pretzels, and hard candy in case you might be threat-ened
with starvation before you got to the sideboard). But I didn’t
want to eat. Not yet. Eating would kill the buzz, and by now,
the Pilsner from Pilsen was hitting me with a good wallop
as the blare and clangor of the party beat my head in. I’d
long ago lost track of which cousin was a cousin I’d
met, and yet more people were pouring through the door, raising
the ante on the whole damn works, pushing it toward fortissimo.
“I’ll be right back,” Carol said, patting my
hand.
She was rushing over to greet a boy—an
astonishingly good-looking boy, wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo.
She gave him a hug and one of her bizarre kisses that never
quite landed (if they had, half the males at the party would
have been branded with her scarlet lip prints). I couldn’t
hear his laughter over the racket, but I could see it—and
the big, self-assured, delighted smile that went with it.
If I were a girl, I’d drop dead for a smile like that.
I felt a stab of jealousy and then, on some other level, a
vicarious pleasure as though I’d just watched my best
friend score a hard point in a tennis match.
The boy was leading her away. The little
bitch didn’t even cast a backward glance in my direction.
Oh, but it wasn’t really away—just over to
meet a friend, another damnably good looking boy—no,
several boys. Now Carol was surrounded by boys. They
seemed to be a clique. Maybe they all went to Marshall. Even
at that distance, I could feel the full power of her performance.
There were four of them—no, five. One of them offered
her a cigarette; she took it, and I imagined the rest of the
scene playing out exactly like something I’d seen in
a musical comedy: in a moment all of the boys would, simultaneously,
whip out their lighters, light them, and surround her with
fire. They didn’t do that, of course, but she was surrounded
with fire nonetheless.
I threaded my way back to the kitchen and
refilled my mug with Pilsner from Pilsen. When I came back,
Carol was still scintillating for her wolf pack. Seeing her
like that dispelled any of my screwy conceits that I might
have created her to fit my fantasies; no, she was herself,
absolutely independent of me, and did what she did for her
own reasons (the world is everything that is the case), but
if I hadn’t created her, I’d certainly chosen
her. I’d always thought of falling in love as a fantastic
event like being hit by a meteorite, something that had nothing
to do with volition, but I’d been wrong; it had everything
to do with volition. That rainy morning in the Lair when I’d
first seen her, I must have, in a flash, gathered innumerable
tiny clues: the girlish raincoat, the preppy skirt, the nylons
instead of socks, the prissy pageboy, the coy voice and even
the first words I heard her say with it: “I don’t
know what I’m going to do! I’m so used to
having a boyfriend... with his own car and apartment,”
and I must have added it all up and decided that she was perfect—because
you choose something that matches what’s already in your
mind.
I looked around, found an empty space on
a wall and backed myself into it, taking myself out of the
traffic. I didn’t want anyone to see me standing alone
and try to talk to me. Oh, dear God, I thought, how many more
times am I destined to stand at the back of some crowded room,
getting pissed, my mind racing? Having, more than once, been
on the receiving end of Carol’s glitter, I could easily
jump into the mind of that tall boy in his beautiful tuxedo—feel
his feelings, think his thoughts. Smiling and smiling at Carol:
hey, you exquisite little creampuff, I’d love to fuck
the living daylights out of you. But, strangely enough, I
could also jump into Carol’s mind, feel myself the center
of all that wolfish attention, feel myself perched on gleaming
spike heels, my waist cinched in, crinolines swirling around
my thighs, waving my scarlet nails in the air, perfumed, powdered,
painted, smiling, turning up the signal to a million watts
of clear power: come on, come on, come on!
Come on to what? Did this show have
a conclusion, or was it stuck forever in the middle of the
act? Playing the boy in the tuxedo, I took Carol into my arms
none too gently, thrust my tongue between her painted lips,
unzipped her dress, stripped it from her—kissing her,
kissing her—stripped off her bra, her crinolines, her
wisp of lace panties, and what I had left was a men’s
magazine image melting backward onto the bed—passive,
eager, compliant—her legs open: come on! And then?
Click: an obscure switch in my mind flipped over, and
I was Carol. The boy’s tongue was in my mouth, and I
was the one melting backward onto the bed. Hey, wait a minute…
Then, just as quickly, I was the boy again. Wanting her. But,
not twelve feet away from me, a real boy was smiling at a
real Carol who was a creature of pure reflected light: ultramarine
flickering from her green taffeta, a shudder of brilliance
from the curve of her heels.
I felt a ghastly lurch of Sartrian nausea,
but I was fascinated too, and I couldn’t stop looking.
I kept trying to hold either position, the boy’s or the
girl’s, and I couldn’t do it—couldn’t
take either of them to its natural conclusion. In each position,
the thought of the other ultimately undermined me. Each side
corrupted the other. But no, that metaphor wasn’t right.
It was like two lights: when one winked on, the other winked
off. But no, that still wasn’t right. The two sides made
a whole, a puzzle, a demonic construction that was unstable,
irresolvable. Which meant that I was unstable, irresolvable—or
maybe just drunk at somebody else’s New Year’s Eve
party, out of place as always, doomed to be the eternal outsider,
the only boy in the beauty salon, the only Gentile in the
house, as alien as any visitor from outer space that Cohen
might have invented for himself to play.
Wir sindt nicht einig, I thought.
Rilke’s words. Absolutely true—about me, at any
rate. It’s so nicely compact in German; in English, you
have to scramble a bit to get at it: we’re not all
of a piece, not all one thing, not single-minded. I don’t
know how long I would have stood there, propping up the wall,
running around in frantic circles in my mind, but I heard
a girl’s voice saying, “Boy, do you look uncomfortable.”
I jumped as if something had stung me, heard
a wry laugh, saw a skinny girl I didn’t know. Was she
speaking to me? But then the world tumbled back into place,
and the stranger turned into Marge Levine. Oh, I thought,
that’s right, of course she’d be here: she’s
Carol’s cousin. “My God,” I said, “you’re
wearing a cocktail dress.”
“My God,” she said in an absolutely
deadpan voice, “and you’re wearing a suit and tie.”
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