Broken Vessels Read online

  Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live. Forty-one years old and living in 1977, I still have that need to do something pure and clean and male about bread-winning, something to replace or at least supplement the paycheck: for the paycheck seems nothing more than a piece of paper with numbers and my name on it, a paper deposited monthly in my account, its numbers having nothing to do with my work, for I love teaching and so I rarely see the classroom and the salary as having any connection. And the business of paying bills, of writing checks and subtracting numbers, is not at all satisfying, but always impersonal, and always frustrating, because always there is never enough to pay everyone everything. I long then for the pheasants and rabbits on the table, the gun to be cleaned; once or twice a summer I fulfill that need with an afternoon of mackerel fishing with my children.

  I know I’m not supposed to yearn for these male pleasures, but I do anyway, and I end with uncertainty; and since these acts of breadwinning have to do with women, it is the women I’m uncertain about. I believe in most of the tenets of the female movement. There are some exceptions; I am bewildered and angered by the iron-clad liberationist whose name escapes me because I never wanted to house it anyway, who said: A man who tries to make a woman have an orgasm is a sexist pig. Which makes me ask: What, then, is a man who doesn’t try to make a woman have an orgasm? I am also bothered by the occasional woman who is likely to see any simple gesture as symbolic; once I offered to light a woman’s cigarette, but she said: No, I can take care of myself. I had no doubt that she could take care of herself and did not understand why lighting a cigarette had such significance. I was younger then.

  Later, though, I became so sympathetic to the sounds of pain from the female soul that I went through androgynous periods when, in a moment of total capitulation, I might have called myself a sexist pig for remembering with nostalgia the dead birds on the kitchen table in Iowa. There were many reasons for this. One was the work of Anton Chekhov, who showed me that a woman’s soul has a struggle all its own, neither more nor less serious than a man’s, but different. So did John Cheever and Joan Didion and Edna O’Brien, and many others, but Chekhov got there first with the most. There was, though, a deeper force working on me: my own life during five years of bachelorhood, when I listened to many women, women I wasn’t involved with, so that I was free to listen to them without concurrently preparing my own defense. I began to feel a special rapport with them, began to see their lives as struggles very close to those of a writer. I am speaking now of women who stay home, and whose children are old enough so that they have left breast, arms, and backpack and, like puppies, are wandering in the lawn smelling new things. Or have finally gone, with new shoes and lunchbox, to that terrible first day of school. These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can. This demands discipline, daily resilience, and a commitment to use time fully, to find or create joy in it, and we must always fear what Hemingway in A Moveable Feast calls “the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”

  I do not envy those men and women who have jobs instead of true work. But, for some of them, there is this: They know from one minute to the next what they must do at their place of work, they know at the day’s end they will feel they have accomplished something, even if it is no more than reporting in at a given hour, staying at a given place, going through motions and speaking words they understand and can even predict, until the hands of the clock reach that algebraic symbol which tells them they can go home. They have put in a day. But the women I’m speaking of can lie on the bathroom floor, staring at the ceiling and courting despair, until the children return loud and hungry at three o’clock. I can leave my desk and stare at the ceiling, too, and no one but I will suffer for it, unless I then turn on those I love, make them pay for my failure. And if the woman rises from the floor at the sound of the children’s voices, and passes out the peanut butter sandwiches, vacuums the floor, and girds herself to prepare dinner number three thousand nine hundred and forty-two, feeds the family and is cheerful at dinner, and cleans the kitchen, then she too can lead a life which only she suffers, only she knows is killing her so slowly and relentlessly that by the time it does, she will have long since stopped dreading the end. So, for me, talking to certain women is like talking to a fellow writer.

  And why did it take me so long to understand this, and why do I keep losing sight of it, wanting to bring dead birds to a woman whom I want to be happy, even if she has spent the entire day talking to no one but children while mortality screams at her from the walls which are supposed to be her love nest, her home? Because I am fixed in transition, static, pulled one way by my youth, and the other way by what I have learned since then. Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were. When I was thirteen, my sixteen-year-old sister quizzed me on baseball before her dates. I told her the leading teams and hitters, and after one of these catechism lessons, I asked why she had to know about Ted Williams anyway. Because you have to know these things for boys, she said. I asked her what the other girls talked about. They know these things, she said.

  The rest of what I learned as a boy gave me that vision of men and women which I had to discard during the first half of this decade, when I was a defrocked husband and was, for the first time since my teenage years, a-courting again, a-hunting again. My parents taught me to open doors for women, pull out chairs for them, to walk on their street-sides so that gutter spray from passing cars would hit me instead of them, to follow them up stairs and precede them down in case they fell, and, in general, to treat them like distant cousins who were making a fragile visit from the mental institutions where they spent their lives. Then there were the household tasks; neither my sisters nor I ever questioned the girls’ assignment to kitchen and housecleaning, and mine to the disposal of garbage and mowing the lawn. It was not until I came, too late, to bachelorhood and shared apartments with men that I learned that food, before it becomes a meal, does not belong strictly to the female province, and that when a meal becomes garbage, it does not belong strictly to the male province. And I further learned that dirty dishes are the responsibility of those who dirty them, as pots and pans are, and floors and rugs and sheets and clothes. My teenage sons are excellent cooks, and my nine-year-old stepson does not suck his thumb in a sudden spasm of sexual disorientation when he sees me pushing a vacuum cleaner, cooking a meal, or washing dishes.

  Reading Chekhov helped me into transit; one of his combatants was a character in another book, a harmless enough book for a boy to read, or so it would seem, but it was not harmless, for in my boyhood life of the imagination I learned much from Robin Hood. Not Errol Flynn, the Robin Hood who caused too much emotional swirl, not only in the ladies on the screen but in the audience as well, to make me feel that women should be handled with a delicacy which denied their very souls. No, it was the book that moved me to the sort of angelic devotion to the female, which is finally a form of exclusion, a tyrannical boundary (albeit usually unwitting) between the real world of men and the dream world of women, a world which was of course dreamed by men, not by the women who were held in deleterious yet tender captivity there. I read Robin Hood often, and my sisters, both older than I, were pleased by each reading, for in that lingering days-long nimbus of the book, which ends with Robin Hood’s murder by a woman, and his dying refusal of Little John’s request to kill her, with gentle Robin’s saying he had never in his life harmed a woman, and would not have it done in his name after he was dead, I walked about the house like a young boy who has just heard the whispers of angels, and knows that his destiny is sainthood. I brought my sisters and their gi
rlfriends cookies and soft drinks from the kitchen. I deferred, with the humble strength of Robin Hood (no trace of uxoriousness in that bowman), to all their wishes. I remember riding a city bus with a sister and her friends; we were going to the swimming pool. When I saw that I had taken a seat too soon, that one of those eleven- or twelve-year-old girls was left standing, I quickly rose and gave her my seat and stood holding the hand bar, pretending not to hear my sister murmur to her friend: He’s been reading Robin Hood again. On her face was a sweet smile of victory, the sort of victory women got in those days.

  So I remain static, pulled backward by my early years (they probably add up to thirty or more) and by Robin Hood, the hunter whose bow provided meat, the merry drinker of ale whose adventures and games and joy were with men, and whose purity and tender strength were given to women. And I am pulled forward by what I know, and I try to learn to erase the old boundaries, to see women as they are and I suppose always were: creatures like me, who live in the same world I live in, who do not need me to keep them from being splashed by cars, from falling down stairs. But boyhood is hard to leave, and perhaps one never does, and while I try to become a man of the times, I ask you, O ladies, for neither absolution nor understanding. All I ask is a smile. That wise and affectionate smile that only a woman can give.

  1977

  THE JUDGE AND OTHER SNAKES

  I WILL CALL the girl Jan. She was fifteen on that autumn night, early autumn, a warm Sunday night, the baseball season not yet ended. The young male who attacked her I will call Nick; he was twenty-one. Jan was sixteen by the morning of the trial in December. At the trial, The Judge referred to Jan and Nick as Eve and Adam: “What we have here is a typical case of Adam and Eve and the snake in the garden.”

  I suppose The Judge was trying to be colorful, to sound experienced and wise; but to me he seemed bored, impatient, and finally angry. He was also inaccurate. Jan was not seduced into tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge; nor did she persuade Nick to share her sin. She did not cause The Fall, and the condemnation to mortality and the sweat of the brow. And she and Nick were not banished together, to enter the world, to mate, and have children. She did, though, pour what she called punch onto Nick’s car and its upholstery. One cup of it, with perhaps a swallow or two gone, purchased at the Midway Pizza and Subs on South Main Street in Bradford, which is part of the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts.

  There were, though, some snakes: six or eight or more punks, males in their late teens or early twenties. I can call them neither boys nor men. It is possible that I recall my boyhood with a nostalgia that distorts, that too partially compares those years in the early nineteen fifties with what I see now. But I do not believe this. I would vividly remember seeing a boy shoving or striking or choking a girl. Certainly in the adult world, behind windows and walls, men were beating women. But not where we could see them, even when we were sixteen and drank in the two night clubs that, in Lafayette, Louisiana, would serve us liquor; and the other clubs in nearby towns, where we drank and played the jukebox, sometimes with dates, sometimes without: four or five of us boys at a table, drinking gin bucks or Seven and Sevens or bourbon and Cokes or Falstaffs, and smoking Lucky Strikes or Philip Morris from brown packages, and wearing ducktails and suede shoes. Not even in those clubs where older couples drank and danced, college students and working people: cheerful and feisty Cajuns and Creoles, with accents whose source was eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French, and a few drawling southerners, most of them Protestants. Not even there, in the dark and the music, among couples who were lovers or married, and so on the dance floor and at the tables there were elements of violence: passion and heartbreak as tangible as the sweat soaking through their shirts and blouses, and dripping on their brows, their cheeks.

  But we never saw a man hit a woman; and if we had, I know that the other men and boys would not have watched. They would have left their girls and women at the tables and on the dance floor and swarmed on the woman-hitter before the bouncer or bartender could reach him. In the Marine Corps I knew a staff sergeant who told me of sitting one night at a bar in San Francisco. A couple beside him were quarreling. Then the man slapped the woman, knocking her off the stool onto the floor. The sergeant got up and punched the man and knocked him to the floor. The man and woman then turned on the sergeant, the woman using a beer bottle on his head, and during his beating the sergeant realized they were husband and wife, and so vowed never again to interfere with marriages, save on an adulterous bed. But that was in the late fifties or early sixties, and my high school and college years in bars were in the fifties, and everything has changed now, and no one seems to know why, and I don’t know why, and to blame it on female liberation is I believe not too simple, but too shallow.

  I spent much of my boyhood as a moving target for bullies, both the perennials who bloomed each fall and lived in the classroom and at recess through the school year, then in May were gone; and the occasional bullies of summer: boys on a baseball diamond or at the public swimming pool or at the golf course or dances at the community center. When I got my driver’s license at sixteen, I weighed 105 pounds. The following summer, construction work and beer-drinking gave me twenty more. Then I was a high school senior. Then I was an eighteen-year-old, 125-pound college freshman, destined by my body and my feelings about it to enter a Marine officer candidate program. I record these pounds because for a long time, much too long, I believed they alone were the scents that drew a bully as garbage in the sea draws sharks. My two sons were both small boys, and they drew bullies too, until the oldest, while still in high school, built himself a new body with barbells and dumbells, and the youngest simply grew broad and tall and strong. The bullying did not stop, though, until each of them had stood his ground and fought and won and learned that inside his body each had a spirit which demanded respect from itself, and would prefer injury to cowardice. My sons are grown men now, and we often talk about bullies, and what they did to us, and why they did it.

  Our size was not the scent that drew them. It was our faces, and our movements in the world: as much as we tried to walk, and sit, and talk with confidence, we were transparent. And if our motions and voices did not betray us, our lips and eyes did: they showed the discerning eye of bullies what a wiser person, perhaps an older girl, may have recognized as the roots of vanity. What the bullies saw in our faces was fear; not fear of physical injury, as we believed then, but of humiliation, not only from the fists of a bully, but in all the forms it took in our boyhoods: public mistakes in the classroom or athletic field; not on written examinations, but mistakes our classmates could see. The bullies chose us over other boys who were as small, because a bully’s distorted focus is, like any pervert’s, out of proportion. The bully saw in us not the whole boy our friends saw, but that fulfillment of his need: boys who would bear anything from him with no resistance at all, save hiding or running away.

  My sons and I realize now that bullies never fought. In a classroom of boys from the first through the twelfth grades, there are usually some fighters. They are not bullies. They are easily provoked and at once become motion, action. The ones I knew were good company, most of them athletes, and I respected them and warmly drew safety from being with them. They walked on a different earth than the bullies did: we were in the same classrooms, and on the same playgrounds at recess and at athletic hour, but the fighters and bullies moved about, oblivious of each other, like wild animals at an African watering hole when the predators are not hungry.

  When the fighters were nearby we were safe, for the bullies retreated into their strange — and estranged — dark selves. Once, when I was a boy, some of us promoted a fight between our bully and one of the classroom fighters, who also fought in the boxing ring. I do not recall how we did this, but since we were cowards we probably used lies, whispered into the fighter’s ear that the bully had said this, and that, and so forth. After school we gathered behind a canebrake: three or four Iagos and the two boys we used, and I
imagine my comrades in cowardice felt the same cool shiver of self-hatred that I did, the same glimmer of recognition: that now we were the bullies, hoping for catharsis through the body and — we did not know it — the spirit of our boxer. The bully did not fight. He took the pre-fight abuse that boys use to increase their adrenaline until they can throw a punch, indeed cannot do anything but throw a punch: the bully took shoves and insults, and retreated and denied the reason for a fight, and so denied us. He was a dark-skinned Cajun boy, and in the new pallor of his face I saw my own fears. And still was too young to know the meaning of that pale and frightened face.

  Our fighter was bigger than the bully, and I thought again it was all a matter of size, and hated my lack of it, and walked home from school with that self-pity steeped in remorse that rose from a sin I could not name. The bully was, in fact, as small as I was; our only differences were his muscles, and my soft arms and cowardice. And the cowardice was not, as I believed, physical: it was broader and deeper than that, and touched nearly all my public actions. Its source was a frightened absorption with myself that spawned pride and vanity as often as cowardice: the A’s in school, the fluent and falsely humble answers in the classroom, the virtuous and solemn face returning from the Communion rail to the pew, where I kneeled and bowed my head and closed my eyes and, as the Host dissolved on my tongue, I prayed with the fervor of the painted profile of Christ kneeling before a large stone in the Garden of Olives, asking that His cup be lifted. Kneeled and prayed that way for anyone to see, and I believed that everyone but those kneeling in front of me saw, and that was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.