V. Page 3

  It was an uncomfortable afternoon. Sun beat down out of a cloudless, unprotective heaven. Profane, fat, sweated. Rachel played Do You Know the few kids she’d known who went to his high school and Profane lost. She talked about all the dates she was getting this summer, all it seemed with upperclassmen attending Ivy League colleges. Profane would agree from time to time how wonderful it was.

  She talked about Bennington, her alma mater. She talked about herself.

  Rachel came from the Five Towns on the south shore of Long Island, an area comprising Malverne, Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Hewlett and Woodmere and sometimes Long Beach and Atlantic Beach, though no one has ever thought of calling it the Seven Towns. Though the inhabitants are not Sephardim, the area seems afflicted with a kind of geographical incest. Daughters are constrained to pace demure and darkeyed like so many Rapunzels within the magic frontiers of a country where the elfin architecture of Chinese restaurants, seafood palaces and split-level synagogues is often enchanting as the sea; until they have ripened enough to be sent off to the mountains and colleges of the Northeast. Not to hunt husbands (for a certain parity has always obtained in the Five Towns whereby a nice boy can be predestined for husband as early as age sixteen or seventeen); but to be granted the illusion at least of having “played the field”—so necessary to a girl’s emotional development.

  Only the brave escape. Come Sunday nights, with golfing done, the Negro maids, having rectified the disorder of last night’s party, off to visit with relatives in Lawrence, and Ed Sullivan still hours away, the blood of this kingdom exit from their enormous homes, enter their automobiles and proceed to the business districts. There to divert themselves among seemingly endless vistas of butterfly shrimp and egg foo yung; Orientals bow, and smile, and flutter through summer’s twilight, and in their voices are the birds of summer. And with night’s fall comes a brief promenade in the street: the torso of the father solid and sure in its J. Press suit; the eyes of the daughters secret behind sunglasses rimmed in rhinestones. And as the jaguar has given its name to the mother’s car, so has it given its skin-pattern to the slacks which compass her sleek hips. Who could escape? Who could want to?

  Rachel wanted. Profane, having repaired roads around the Five Towns, could understand why.

  By the time the sun was going down they’d nearly finished the case between them. Profane was balefully drunk. He got out of the car, wandered off behind a tree and pointed west, with some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good and all, this being somehow important for him. (Inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do, and this is why Profane was pissing at the sun.)

  It went down; as if he’d extinguished it after all and continued on immortal, god of a darkened world.

  Rachel was watching him, curious. He zipped up and staggered back to the beer box. Two cans left. He opened them and handed one to her. “I put the sun out,” he said, “we drink to it.” He spilled most of it down his shirt.

  Two more folded cans fell to the bottom of the quarry, the empty case followed.

  She hadn’t moved from the car.

  “Benny,” one fingernail touched his face.

  “Wha.”

  “Will you be my friend?”

  “You look like you have enough.”

  She looked down the quarry. “Why don’t we make believe none of the other is real,” she said: “no Bennington, no Schlozhauer’s, and no Five Towns. Only this quarry: the dead rocks that were here before us and will be after us.”

  “Why.”

  “Isn’t that the world?”

  “They teach you that in freshman geology or something?”

  She looked hurt. “It’s just something I know. Benny,” she cried—a little cry—“be my friend, is all.”

  He shrugged.

  “Write.”

  “Now don’t expect—”

  “How the road is. Your boy’s road that I’ll never see, with its Diesels and dust, roadhouses, crossroads saloons. That’s all. What it’s like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I won’t know.”

  He scratched his stomach. “Sure.”

  Profane kept running into her in what was left of the summer at least once a day. They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn’t really talk back at.

  Soon enough what he was afraid would happen happened—he finagled himself into love for Rachel and was only surprised that it had taken so long. He lay in the bunkhouse nights smoking in the dark and apostrophizing the glowing end of his cigarette butt. Around two in the morning the occupant of the upper bunk would come in off the night shift—one Duke Wedge, a pimpled bravo from the Chelsea district, who always wanted to talk about how much he was getting, which was, in fact, plenty. It lulled Profane to sleep. One night he did indeed come upon Rachel and Wedge, the scoundrel, parked in the MG in front of her cabin. He slunk back to bed, not feeling particularly betrayed because he knew Wedge wouldn’t get anywhere. He even stayed awake and let Wedge regale him when he came in with a step-by-step account of how he had almost made it but not quite. As usual Profane fell asleep in the middle.

  He never got beyond or behind the chatter about her world—one of objects coveted or valued, an atmosphere Profane couldn’t breathe. The last time he saw her was Labor Day night. She was to leave the next day. Somebody stole Da Conho’s machine gun that evening, just before supper. Da Conho dashed around in tears looking for it. The head chef told Profane to make salads. Somehow Profane managed to get frozen strawberries in the French dressing and chopped liver in the Waldorf salad, plus accidentally dropping two dozen or so radishes in the French fryer (though these drew raves from the customers when he served them anyway, too lazy to go after more). From time to time the Brazilian would come charging through the kitchen crying.

  He never found his beloved machine gun. Lorn and drained-nervous, he was fired next day. The season was over anyway—for all Profane knew Da Conho may have even taken ship one day for Israel, to tinker with the guts of some tractor, trying to forget, like many exhausted workers abroad, some love back in the States.

  After teardown Profane set out to find Rachel. She was out, he was informed, with the captain of the Harvard crossbow team. Profane wandered by the bunkhouse and found a morose Wedge, unusually mateless for the evening. Till midnight they played blackjack for all the contraceptives Wedge had not used over the summer. These numbered about a hundred. Profane borrowed fifty and had a winning streak. When he’d cleaned Wedge out, Wedge dashed away to borrow more. He was back five minutes later, shaking his head. “Nobody believed me.” Profane loaned him a few. At midnight Profane informed Wedge he was thirty in the hole. Wedge made an appropriate comment. Profane gathered up the pile of rubbers. Wedge pounded his head against the table. “He’ll never use them,” he said to the table. “That’s the bitch of it. Never in his lifetime.”

  Profane wandered up by Rachel’s cabin again. He heard splashing and gurgling from the courtyard in back and walked around to investigate. There she was washing her car. In the middle of the night yet. Moreover, she was talking to it.

  “You beautiful stud,” he heard her say, “I love to touch you.” Wha, he thought. “Do you know what I feel when we’re out on the road? Alone, just us?” She was running the sponge caressingly over its front bumper. “Your funny responses, darling, that I know so well. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you’re excited. And you burn oil when you’re mad at me, don’t you? I know.” There was none of your madness in her voice; it might have been a schoolgirl’s game, though still, he admitted, quaint. “We’ll always be together,” running a chamois ove
r the hood, “and you needn’t worry about that black Buick we passed on the road today. Ugh: fat, greasy Mafia car. I expected to see a body come flying out the back door, didn’t you? Besides, you’re so angular and proper-English and tweedy—and oh, so Ivy that I couldn’t ever leave you, dear.” It occurred to Profane that he might vomit. Public displays of sentiment often affected him this way. She had climbed in the car and now lay back in the driver’s seat, her throat open to the summer constellations. He was about to approach her when he saw her left hand snake out all pale to fondle the gearshift. He watched and noticed how she was touching it. Having just been with Wedge he got the connection. He didn’t want to see any more. He ambled away over a hill and into the woods and when he got back to the Trocadero he couldn’t have said exactly where he’d been walking. All the cabins were dark. The front office was still open. The clerk had stepped out. Profane rooted around in desk drawers till he found a box of thumbtacks. He returned to the cabins and till three in the morning he moved along the starlit aisles between them, tacking up one of Wedge’s contraceptives on each door. No one interrupted him. He felt like the Angel of Death, marking the doors of tomorrow’s victims in blood. The purpose of a mezuzah was to fake the Angel out so he’d pass by. On these hundred or so cabins Profane didn’t see mezuzah one. So much the worse.

  After the summer, then, there’d been letters, his surly and full of wrong words, hers by turns witty, desperate, passionate. A year later she’d graduated from Bennington and come to New York to work as a receptionist in an employment agency, and so he’d seen her in New York, once or twice, when he passed through; and though they only thought about one another at random, though her yo-yo hand was usually busy at other things, now and again would come the invisible, umbilical tug, like tonight mnemonic, arousing, and he would wonder how much his own man he was. One thing he had to give her credit for, she’d never called it a Relationship.

  “What is it then, hey,” he’d asked once.

  “A secret,” with her small child’s smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.

  She visited him occasionally, as now, at night, like a succubus, coming in with the snow. There was no way he knew to keep either out.

  IV

  As it turned out, the New Year’s party was to end all yo-yoing, at least for a time. The reunion descended on Susanna Squaducci, conned the night watchman with a bottle of wine, and allowed a party from a destroyer in drydock (after some preliminary brawling) to come aboard.

  Paola stuck close at first to Profane, who had eyes for a voluptuous lady in some sort of fur coat who claimed to be an admiral’s wife. There was a portable radio, noisemakers, wine, wine. Dewey Gland decided to climb a mast. The mast had just been painted but Dewey climbed on, turning more zebralike the higher he went, guitar dangling below him. When he got to the cross-trees, Dewey sat down, plonked on the guitar and began to sing in hillbilly dialect:

  Depuis que je suis né

  J’ai vu mourir des pères,

  J’ai vu partir des frères,

  Et des enfants pleurer . . .

  The para again. Who haunted this week. Since I was born (said he) I’ve seen fathers die, brothers go away, little kids cry. . . .

  “What was that airborne boy’s problem,” Profane asked her the first time she translated it for him. “Who hasn’t seen that. It happens for other reasons besides war. Why blame war. I was born in a Hooverville, before the war.”

  “That’s it,” Paola said. “Je suis né. Being born. That’s all you have to do.”

  Dewey’s voice sounded like part of the inanimate wind, so high overhead. What had happened to Guy Lombardo and “Auld Lang Syne”?

  At one minute into 1956 Dewey was down on deck and Profane was up straddling a spar, looking down at Pig and the admiral’s wife, copulating directly below. A sea gull swooped in out of the snow’s sky, circled, lit on the spar a foot from Profane’s hand. “Yo, sea gull,” said Profane. Sea gull didn’t answer.

  “Oh, man,” Profane said to the night. “I like to see young people get together.” He scanned the main deck. Paola had disappeared. All at once things erupted. There was a siren, two, out in the street. Cars came roaring on to the pier, gray Chevys with U.S. Navy written on the sides. Spotlights came on, little men in white hats and black-and-yellow SP armbands milled around on the pier. Three alert revelers ran along the port side, throwing gangplanks into the water. A sound truck joined the vehicles on the dock, whose number was growing almost to a full-sized motor pool.

  “All right you men,” 50 watts of disembodied voice began to bellow: “all right you men.” That was about all it had to say. The admiral’s wife started shrieking about how it was her husband, caught up with her at last. Two or three spotlights pinned them where they lay (in burning sin), Pig trying to get the thirteen buttons on his blues into the right buttonholes, which is nearly impossible when you’re in a hurry. Cheers and laughter from the pier. Some of the SP’s were coming across rat-fashion on the mooring lines. Ex-Scaffold sailors, roused from sleep below decks, came stumbling up the ladders while Dewey yelled, “Now stand by to repel boarders,” and waved his guitar like a cutlass.

  Profane watched it all and half-worried about Paola. He looked for her but the spotlights kept moving around, screwing up the illumination on the main deck. It started to snow again. “Suppose,” said Profane to the sea gull, who was blinking at him, “suppose I was God.” He inched on to the platform and lay on his stomach, with nose, eyes and cowboy hat sticking over the edge, like a horizontal Kilroy.

  “If I was God . . .” He pointed at an SP; “Zap, SP, your ass has had it.” The SP kept on at what he’d been doing: battering a 250-pound fire controlman named Patsy Pagano in the stomach with a night stick.

  The motor pool on the pier was augmented by a cattle car, which is Navy for paddy wagon or Black Maria.

  “Zap,” said Profane, “cattle car, keep going and drive off the end of the pier,” which it almost did but braked in time. “Patsy Pagano, grow wings and fly out of here.” But a final clobber sent Patsy down for good. The SP left him where he was. It would take six men to move him. “What’s the matter,” Profane wondered. The sea bird, bored with all this, took off in the direction of N.O.B. Maybe, Profane thought, God is supposed to be more positive, instead of throwing thunderbolts all the time. Carefully he pointed a finger. “Dewey Gland. Sing them that Algerian pacifist song.” Dewey, now astride a lifeline on the bridge, gave a bass string intro and began to sing “Blue Suede Shoes,” after Elvis Presley. Profane flopped over on his back, blinking up into the snow.

  “Well, almost,” he said, to the gone bird, to the snow. He put the hat over his face, closed his eyes. And soon was asleep.

  Noise below diminished. Bodies were carried off, stacked in the cattle car. The sound truck, after several bursts of feedback noise, was switched off and driven away. Spotlights went out, sirens dopplered away in the direction of shore patrol headquarters.

  Profane woke up early in the morning, covered with a thin layer of snow and feeling the onset of a bad cold. He blundered down the ladder’s ice-covered rungs, slipping about every other step. The ship was deserted. He headed below decks to get warm.

  Again, he was in the guts of something inanimate. Noise a few decks below: night watchman, most likely. “You can’t ever be alone,” Profane mumbled, tiptoeing along a passageway. He spotted a mousetrap on deck, picked it up carefully and heaved it down the passageway. It hit a bulkhead and went off with a loud SNAP. Sound of the footsteps quit abruptly. Then started again, more cautious, moved under Profane and up a ladder, toward where the mousetrap lay.

  “Ha-ha,” said Profane. He sneaked around a corner, found another mousetrap and dropped it down a companionway. SNAP. Footsteps went pattering back down the ladder.

  Four mousetraps later, Profane found
himself in the galley, where the watchman had set up a primitive coffee mess. Figuring the watchman would be confused for a few minutes, Profane set a pot of water to boil on the hotplate.

  “Hey,” yelled the watchman, two decks above.

  “Oh, oh,” said Profane. He sneaky-Peted out of the galley and went looking for more mousetraps. He found one up on the next deck, stepped outside, lobbed it up in an invisible arc. If nothing else he was saving mice. There was a muffled snap and a scream from above.

  “My coffee,” Profane muttered, taking the steps down two at a time. He threw a handful of grounds into the boiling water and slipped out the other side, nearly running into the night watchman who was stalking along with a mousetrap hanging off his left sleeve. It was close enough so Profane could see the patient, martyred look on this watchman’s face. Watchman entered the galley and Profane was off. He made it up three decks before he heard the bellowing from the galley.

  “What now?” He wandered into a passageway lined with empty staterooms. Found a piece of chalk left by a welder, wrote: SCREW THE SUSANNA SQUADUCCI and DOWN WITH ALL YOU RICH BASTARDS on the bulkhead, signed it THE PHANTOM and felt better. Who’d be sailing off to Italy in this thing? Chairmen of the board, movie stars, deported racketeers, maybe. “Tonight,” Profane purred, “tonight, Susanna, you belong to me.” His to mark up, to set mousetraps off in. More than any paid passenger would ever do for her. He moseyed along the passageway, collecting mousetraps.