Last Bender

6.

We walked into Washington Square at around 11, having not said a word in many blocks. Drummers drummed, dealers dealt from dark benches, people were hanging out, roller skating by, getting drunk on wine, throwing their asses around.

A glob of glue and glitter had adhered to Sally’s cheekbone and was sparkling in the orange streetlight. She was walking very fast. “Can we just sit down a minute?” I asked. “I’m out of breath.”

“Turtle.”

“Sally, I’m not joking, can we just sit.”

She sat abruptly down and blinked hard.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m pissed off.”

“About what?”

“Is it not obvious? Because to me–”

“You mean what? My mother, your father, Roy?

She stood. “Christ!”

I tried to grab her arm but she walked away. I followed her under the arch and up Fifth Avenue till I caught up with her at 10th Street and marched alongside her. “Look, if it’s me I just don’t see what I’ve done.”

She stopped and jerked her head up and down with a weird look in her eye. She spread her hands and went, “Eh!”

“What.”

“The play! The play’s the thing that pisses me off, my part in the fucking show.”

We stopped walking. “But you were fine, until the end there, and you recovered. It was great.”

“It was not great.”

“Next time will better.”

“Ha! There won’t be a next time, I can tell you that.”

We walked along farther. “How come you never told me you were on that train?”

“What train would that be?” I asked. I couldn’t recall a recent train trip.

“Your mother talked about being on Robert Kennedy’s funeral train.”

“Oh that. It’s embarrassing. It feels wrong to tell people, and in the end, who cares?”

“But do you remember?”

“Yeah. The whole time I sat there watching the little kids run up and down the center aisle of the train. I was worried Roy would do something crazy, like smoke or steal. But he was very sober. It hit him hard. We were down at Hickory Hill once for some kid party. And Bobby tossed a football to Roy. After that, it was like he knew him.

“Look, my mother tells a good story, it’s part of her shtick. But there’s another side to that. All those nights she went to the theatre with the psychiatrist, she left us at home alone. I was in second grade and Roy was in fourth. We watched TV till they got back, at 12 or 2 or even 4 in the morning. We’d fall asleep on the floor with our pillows and blankets and bottles of coke. When he was a little older, 5 minutes after she was out the door he’d drag me off on an expedition. He lived World War 2 movies in his head. Every day was like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape; or he’d walk around whistling The Bridge Over the River Kwai song.

“Roy knew the buildings like a rat. I followed him down these dark halls, scoping things out in the basement. His favorite place was the incinerators. The rooms were covered in a film of greasy soot. It smelled like garbage and charcoal. That was where it all went when you put it down the chute, paper bags soaked through with putrid tuna salad and bacon fat and cans of beer and newspapers. And it all came out in smoke from the top. We followed the cycle; threw shit in, just to see how it would combust. Even if you were a little kid, you wanted to know, would it burn blacker if you threw all your crayons in? And what about forbidden things like spray paint and VO5? We threw them in and went outside to watch the smoke stacks explode like cannon.”

We got to 14th street. We were supposed to go to Jayda’s for a party but Sally’s parents said at the end of dinner that they were going back to the island for the night. The loft was available. No one knew it yet. Joseph had taken a cab to the party at Cynthia’s insistence, who thought she was sending him home. Jayda lived on 14th between Seventh and Eighth. We had to decide what to do.

“I want to go home,” she said. The Don’t Walk sign was blinking. Converged headlights crowed at the intersection.

I was a little surprised to say what I said since my preference would always be to go home and avoid one of these gatherings. Yet it was, I thought, an occasion worthy of celebration; that she should want to go and get drunk and yell loud for a few hours. It is customary and good to do so after an opening night, one way or another. Christopher and the others were wound up after the performance. The audience, Lou, we and assorted others, had laughed. The evening was a success. “Don’t you want to celebrate?” I asked.

“I want to hide.”

“Please Sally, don’t be like that. It really wasn’t bad.”

“I’ve been totally humiliated. I can’t possibly celebrate.”

We had the light again and crossed the avenue and then stood on the corner. “So you want to just go home then.”

“What do you care? You hate them all anyway. I would think you would be glad.”

“I like your brother, and Lou, and Christopher is….” Telling her how I felt about Christopher would do no good. It would change nothing. “I sweat when I talk to Christopher.”

“He can be intimidating.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m intimidated. I’m confused. He stares and doesn’t talk. It’s unnerving.”

“That’s because he’s tense.”

“So you say. But it is unnerving. I start to baaabble and then I feel stupid. Often this is when he begins to chisel away at some statement I’ve made.”

“But that’s just him, that’s how he is. It’s funny. It means he likes you.”

We headed up to 15th and over to the loft. She stayed in the bathroom a long time and came out in sweat pants and a T-shirt. Her hair was wet. She had scrubbed off all of her makeup, except for the waterproof mascara and a lone fleck of red glitter, which remained stuck to her cheek, just beneath the left eye. She looked a little like Fellini’s clown.

I was reading on the couch facing the TV. She put it on and started flipping channels. We watched naked fat men on channel J for five minutes. Then there was the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera on channel 13 and she sat down and leaned back against me, tense, and we watched The Phantom row around the tinted catacombs of Paris. The door chain jangled. In walked Christopher, Joseph, Jayda, Deb and Lou, one after the other, and they headed up a mob composed of assorted alumni and members of IA’PS and Columbia, plus a contingent of Larchmonters and another of Oberliners home for the summer.

The efflux poured into the room like a rogue foam. The elevator continued to disgorge guests into the narrow, short hallway, so the bottle neck at the door had to sort itself out in gregarious groupings of two and three.

“Amazing,” Joseph said, walking backwards, to Christopher.

“Alex!’ cried Christopher, waving a flagon of Vino.

Sally crossed her arms and pressed her chin to her chest. She shut her eyes and whispered as in prayer, “Shit. Goddamn cunt, fucking bitch.” She stood. “I’m going. See you later.”

Joseph and Christopher stopped talking and looked at Sally. But they could not contain their laughter. Their breath was short and their heads jerked with restraint; but when she said the word fun they laughed so hard they started to gasp.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“No no,” Joseph shouted, walking into the kitchen with a six of Olde English tallboys. He wheeled around into the living room, his eyes pink pools enclosed by puckered flesh. He was still in the cutaway coat and tails. “You can’t go now. We all came to see you.” Sally didn’t even look at him; she just walked into her room and shut the door. “She wasn’t that bad,” he said. “It was very funny.”

“Well she thinks she sucked,” I said.

“She did. But in a good way.” He laughed and looked around.

“Maman, maman, les pomplemousse! les pomplemousse!” cried a child’s voice, across the room, but there were no children there. Lou, out of breath, said, “I live and die by the knob. Like Lord bloody Byron! Greek boys and his sister. –Thackeray in India said of the servant girls, Let them run about in the yard like chickens!”

“Well she feels just awful,” I said.

Joseph looked a little guilty, sipped his beer and then started to flick the ash from his cigarette with increasing irritation. “It’s just like her to turn something fun deadly serious.”

Christopher, though he had removed the fatsuit and the mask, continued to walk as if he had it on, maybe because he was drunk. The wine sloshed around in the bottle, which he waved about as if he were conducting himself. “She was perfect,” he crooned. “I couldn’t have asked for more. And then when Lydia came in!”

Sally came out wearing sneakers and a sweater over a T-shirt and jeans. She patted herself down for her wallet and keys and walked up to me. “All right.”

“Just stay and have one beer,” Joseph said.

Sally sighed. Sylvio, Powell, Dean and Antonia had entered the loft and were slowly, peristalticaly arriving at our station by the couch.

Powell sort of yipped and touched Sally’s shoulder, “Girl you were great.” They kissed.

Antonia, with her helmet of red hair, purred, “It was just so totally disabling.”

“Hi hi dear,” Dean said, shaking her hand, bowing slightly. “You were spectacular, better than advertised. I don’t think you expressed a shred of emotion. I mean, it was perfect. I nearly wet my pants.”

Sylvio hugged her and smiled. “Very Mere Ubu. The essence of Ubu. Three cheers, bravo.”

Joseph handed her a beer. She glugged down three sips and said, “No emotion because I was so petrified!” Everyone laughed.

“You made it work for you,” Sylvio said.

“Like the first day of kindergarten,” Dean said.

“Did someone say they brought gin?” Powell asked.

“I did,” Antonia said. “Do you have tonic, Joe?”

“Uh, uh–” he said, gape mouthed.

“There’s some in the cabinet next to the fridge, the lower one,” Sally said. “Make me one too; this beer’s not doing it for me.” Antonia and Powell went into the kitchen. Sally sat on the couch and I put my feet on the floor to make room. We turned the sound down on the TV and Joseph put on a record. The only one of the Lacan Studies Group missing was Christopher, who in his mood of exultation rushed hither and thither.

Antonia handed Sally a gin and tonic in a jelly glass with a squeeze of lime. She stirred it around with her finger and tasted it off the tip. Antonia said, “The lime looked a little funky but it smelled o.k.”

“No,” Sally said. “It’s good.”

“Isn’t funk a smell?” I asked

Antonia sat on a chair facing us, back to the windows and all the lit windows they framed. Powell sat down next to Sally and crossed one leg under the other, stretching out the holes on her fishnets. Dean stood over us, his dinner jacket hanging open and his tie loosened. Off a little ways, near the television, the lights reflected in his round glasses, stood Sylvio, smiling and looking at the drink in his hand. When it was evident that Dean would not take a chair he sat down and appeared to giggle silently. But I couldn’t be quite sure if that was what he was doing, with his pale skin and red lips and sculpted black hair. He was like this life-sized doll they brought around with them to serve as their master. I wished we had left when we had a chance. But her friend’s praise had won her over to the side of celebration, the side I had just been on. I was playing Yojimbo with myself! And yet I had no sense of being even remotely in control of events. They just seemed to break around me. I was one of the billiard balls. I had no energy to initiate. And we were so close to sinking with the eight ball and walking out the door.

They began to complain about a professor they didn’t like. “Oh, he’s so ancient,” said Powell, gripping her bleached and colored blond hair and blinking at her cat glasses. “He’s like screechy glass.”

“And he farts,” said Dean. “Don’t go in his office alone.”

“I know,” Antonia said. “And he just doesn’t understand anything. Talking to him is like talking to some superannuated textebook, he’s like those 50s educational films they made us watch.”

“The one with the donuts!” Dean said.

“Homer Price,” Sally said. “It was a good book.”

Antonia continued. “I wrote about Foucault’s Gaze and he circled it and wrote in the margin, What’s this?” They all laughed.

“With him, any old bullshit is confusing,” Dean said.

“Foucault isn’t any old bullshit,” Antonia said.

Sylvio perked up and sat forward in his seat, his little piggy eyes sparkling.

Dean said, “Oh you know what I mean. You cite people and arguments and he doesn’t know who they are, but, it’s not like you’re doing anything but just citing an authority. You do it because it fits in with what you perceive to be successful scholarship. But then, that’s part of what Foucault is talking about.”

“So every time you make any kind of affirmative statement you have to become hyper vigilant that it not constitute itself as a new regime of truth,” Powell said.

“Re–” Sylvio said. There was a hush. “Reconstitute.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his hands on his rubber stomach and smiled beatifically, that is if there’s a porcine beatitude.

Sally was not really following the conversation either; she was looking at the floor or the TV. We watched the last ten minutes of The Phantom of the Opera. There was some sort of harrowing rock record on.

“Well,” Antonia said, “I don’t see why I should have to waste my time with a senile old man.”

I looked at her and said, “Maybe he thinks you’re an illiterate moron who’s just managed to master a meaningless jargon.”

“He might be an intentional reactionary. I just thought he was gross,” she said.

“Seriously, just because you don’t know anything about Foucault doesn’t make you a dolt.”

“It does if you’re a professor of Comparative Literature in 1981,” she said, to Sally, not me. But Sally wasn’t paying any attention to our conversation.

“I don’t know the difference between any of half the people you talk about and I think I’m well read.”

“You’re not a professor at Columbia,” Dean said. “She has a point. Things are changing and they should teach what we need to learn.”

“Oh, you mean everyone reads Foucault. You were just saying–”

“Yes, but you do have to engage in academia with a common group of authors, you can’t just function as if there were no other people in the field. It’s polyphonic.”

“O.K. whatever. But I wish someone would just explain to me what the hell has Nietzsche got to do with Foucault?”

Antonia scowled and Dean snickered; Sylvio blinked like a yellow light. Before anyone could speak, an age of terrible woe passed over us. Sally looked at me and smiled. There were tears in her eyes.

“It’s time to go,” she said, standing.

“Where?” Dean asked.

“Alex and I are going. Good night everyone. Thanks for cheering me up.” I had just warmed to the battle and we were going?

By the elevator we said nothing. We were just going. I said when we got to the street, “Which way?”

“Doesn’t matter.” She walked east. It was after midnight, a little chilly, but warm enough still to not have a coat on. There was fog around the Empire State Building. When we got to Union Square we turned south, cut over to Third Avenue and headed down, past Variety Photoplay. When we passed the Dugout she stopped. “Let’s go have a beer in a frosted mug. I’ve always wanted to do that.”