Mark Rudman

What is this about losing respect? Do I have to talk about it? He said he feared what I might write about him when he was gone, and I told him not to worry. He worried about the “streak of morbidity” in your work. He was a man of God, not of imagination. And it wasn’t his fault if he got the shakes. It was a familial tremor, not nerves. And it first happened at a gravesite. Near where Brigham Young did his number—“this is the place.” He called him Friggin Young. Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville, his congregants would tell nigger jokes and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat— a mere exercise in stretching the corners of his lips— a fake grin he would have noted on another face—false faces being one of the things we loved to laugh about when together we observed congregants’ idiosyncracies, their ruses, their guises, like one temple president, the son of the “richest Jew in Salt Lake” who, seated in the pulpit’s other red velvet wing chair, would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes while he batted his eyelashes to wake himself up— (though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier” didn’t turn me in for copying the wrong answers from Mary Weinstein on our “final exam” in Sunday school prior to       confirmation. He was ashamed for me, young Rosencavalier. He could hardly disguise the curled lips and downcast eyes of his contempt for this lawless “Rabbi’s son” whether or not my name was Strome or Rudman, but where teaching Judaism was concerned his plodding methodical reading to keep up each week was a pathetic substitution for Sidney’s well-wrought, impromptu riffs. So there!) Marty was ashamed of me. I left town. As night was falling? * In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age fourteen a lot of our talk was hard core car talk and somehow the word Volkswagen came up after confirmation class (it was no GTO but you could drive so far on so little gas...) and Marty’s father—a redhead like his son— made his way up the driveway’s ice, smoke billowing from the exhaust of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove. Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves he announced he’d “never buy a Kraut    car.” I was    bewildered (what, hold against a country now something that happened so long    ago?) and he held my gaze and I shivered inside the shiver I felt from the cold    I thought he would transmogrify into a southern sheriff and ask “what kind of    Jew are you    boy” but he didn’t have to say another word. * In other words you were ready to leave town. I’d had it with Utah. But you wanted to stay in the west, against your father’s wishes? Yes. Unequivocally? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools during your sojourn in the east that summer?

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile. The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become a show-and-tell-style reunion. I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance threw us together at a party given by his best friend whose brother was your

(JOHN F. KENNEDY’S INFORMAL APPOINTMENT OF DEAN MARTIN TO HIS CABINET) What the fuck did they want, these men who needed the company of others to make a life, as he needed a woman to make babies? —Dino, nick tosches I always plays to de common folk. — dean martin 1 It was casting time for The Young Lions. Brando wouldn’t hesitate given this chance to dye his hair white and do a German accent. And while no one would hire Monty Clift after his facially disfiguring car-wreck, Brando convinced the studio that the other, slightly older, kid from Omaha was the right man. No one could play a more sensitive-tough than Monty, like the artist-bugler-boxer Prewitt mistaken for the enemy, gunned down by his own men in the Pearl Harbor dawn; or the way, as the seraphic cowboy Matt Dunson, he got a rise out of his demented empire builder father, John Wayne, by kicking over a tin cup, sloshing the coffee into the dust to show his disgust. Clift knew that Lions director Edward Dmytryk was searching for someone to play a key supporting role—as Frank Sinatra had in From Here To Eternity—yet he was stunned to hear it was “Jerry Lewis’s partner in shlock.” Clift softened, nauseated when he saw Martin’s competition pander to the crowd on Broadway. Lucky for Monty that he let it go: the two men not only became friends; it was Dean who put the man with the wired-jaw to bed when he had the chloral hydrate and alcohol wobblies. Ignorant of Brando’s intervention on his behalf, Monty told Dean that Marlon’s fifty takes per scene were getting on his nerves more and more and he vowed to walk off the set if he tried ONE MORE TIME to have his German soldier die with arms spread wide to “echo the crucifixion.” Clift, wasted with self-recrimination at forty-five. Martin, an actor for whom one run through a scene almost always sufficed. Dean got a chuckle out of Monty with his response. “It should be awful good with so many takes.” Then the future flashed before him. “I guess there are directors who want us to do the same scene over and over again too.” “Sure, lots. Some of the best.” “I guess I got spoiled. Jerry and I got to where we pretty much called the shots.” And then—without any foreknowledge that he’d be doing his only two other serious roles in the next two years and be subject to directorial rule on the sets of Some Came Running and Rio Bravo— he vowed in the future to set up his golf net before shooting started on a picture. Dean appeared to float, perfection never an aspiration: that he was already as well known for his insouciance and drunk persona as for his singing and acting doesn’t mean he was so well-defended that he didn’t feel any pressure about working with such aces as Brando and Clift. He didn’t have to stretch to play a would-be draft dodger, Michael Whiteacre: “a likeable coward like myself,” a screenwriter in Shaw’s novel, a singer in the movie. The army doctor feeds Dean his first line in Lions as if his future were visible in the instant: art and life exquisitely commingled. Doctor: “For a man your age and in your profession you’re in excellent health. How do you manage it?” Martin doesn’t hesitate: “Clean liquor.” But sauntering through this role didn’t mean everything was swell: he felt so out-of-place on location in France he gave up the offer of a choice part in The Guns of Navarone because it meant going back to Europe. In his middle years, he ambled through the role of “Matt Helm” in another toneless Bondian takeoff, and when Columbia wanted to shoot Murderers’ Row on location in Cannes, Dino set the studio straight: “fuck no, just build some fake Riviera sets.” 2 A diffident crooner, he needed a stooge. License to fuck around on stage. After his split with Jerry, Dino’s drunk persona grew into a ghostly partner, and by the time he had his own TV show the public was so saturated with his presence, many conflated the persona and the person. When he landed the drunk’s key role in Rio Bravo, he turned to Brando for help, “what should I do?” Brando told him what to think about. The more inscrutable the subject the more this spectre stands out in relief. Part of Martin’s appeal was that no one knew him. It wasn’t a mask; his detachment was who he was. He showed up, his spirit remained elsewhere. His wives and children found him unknowable. It wasn’t personal. When the Martins entertained, the guests carried on while Dino disappeared into his room to watch westerns on TV, alone. It wasn’t personal. When the producer of “The Colgate Comedy Hour” suggested they have lunch to get to know one another, Dino set him straight: “No one gets to know me.” Martin was a man no one came close to knowing. What does it mean, to know someone? 3 Why ask such questions at all after Socrates beguiled us out of answers and set us on the inexhaustible path...dialectics? Don’t you think I haven’t wondered if I haven’t strayed from my true path as I find myself tracking the trajectory of such non-exemplary lives? You’re thinking it’s a trick, and will not answer, but before you judge my dissolute subject— who like the money but thought all the attention was a joke because “a singer is nothing”— as a derelict choice, consider how philosophy, while striving to become more concrete continues to recoil before the problem of other minds. And it is said that Monsieur Sartre turned paler than his martini, when Raymond Aron challenged the Husserlians, at the Bec de Gaz in Montparnasse, to make philosophy out of a cocktail glass. 4 There’s something about everyone no one can know. There was no question of Dino taking orders and being bossed around was out of bounds: penalty shot incurred for the perpetrator, who was, this time, the imperious Billy Wilder whose streak of hits was breaking fast. Dino as always was doing his job, which was to literally play himself in Kiss Me, Stupid

It's hard to get anywhere in Utah without going through Provo. I can't tell you the number of times I went there as a teenager, the number Of times I drove into town in the early Afternoon, hungry, and had to look around For a place to eat. You don't have to starve In Provo but you eat at your own risk. At no risk. I would never have gone to Provo On my own. I went accompanied— For reasons almost too trivial—or personal—to mention. There are moments when you simply must get into the car and drive And from Salt Lake there are only a few ways to go, Toward the Great Salt Lake or toward the canyons and to get To Zion or Moab you had to pass through Provo. I remember the population because it went With the number of miles from outskirt to outskirt, 45 miles, 45,000 people, 45 minutes (Keeping to the speed limit) $45 to spend on a suit at a 45% discount... There was nothing Provo's department store did not carry, Including pearl handled Colt 45's, But for a wider selection of fire arms, rifles With narrowing focal points, with greater precision over vast distances, You were better off Next door. O I guess it wasn't that different from entering A thousand other American towns, but this one Made my flesh crawl. I wanted to howl. The men walked with their hands deep in their pockets. The women were afraid to lift their eyes. It was as if something terrible had happened Or was about to happen. I'm not saying you have to love what you do In this life, but it isn't nice to practice The silent treatment on strangers in the desert, Strangers who would have to be wondering Where the other 44,990 people were, since Other than the one drowning potatoes in burning oil Beside the grill in the luncheonette And the one behind the register, And the three grim-faced, parchment-skinned Jack Mormons hunkered over cups, And the handful of impassive faces Placed against the windows Of one-story cinder-block houses, There was no one in Provo beyond the jackrabbits— Glimpsed in abundance en route— Who vanished as we crossed the town line, And drove past the population sign. Or was it a warning in disguise? There was something eerie in the air, An absence I could not identify. An immense single-pump gas station, Shimmering like a mirage in the heat, Took up a good part of the main drag. I pull in. Step into the heat stunned. The car is too hot to touch. I needed gas but didn't want to get it there. It meant digging up the attendant. You know the lights in hospital corridors, Those are the lights in the gas station in Provo. They're the kind of lights that show up whatever's wrong with a face; The kind of lights that make something wrong when there's nothing wrong. When I got there, I was afraid. It's hard To put my finger on the precise reason why. It's not as though something ominous rose From the sidewalks or Hell's Angels cycles Were parked outside the luncheonette. Nothing like that. Nor can I say why, even though there was almost No one on the street, I felt watched. While I slept fitfully in the tilt-back bucket seats, Someone scribbled obscenities on the headlights. I felt drawn by destiny to this nadir. You don't want to provoke anyone in Provo. It's that kind of place, that kind of absence— The desert flattens out, the plants Draw in their antennae. Provo is not where you can hope to find Boon companions. It's against the law To serve liquor in the bar And no one in the luncheonette looks up When you walk in. These are the fallen, Sunk in ashes, adrift In the smoke of unreason. They have masturbated without shame. They have coveted, envied. They have pocketed the tithe. It's hard to put it into words: Provo. It's more like a place without a name, A desert stopover with the semblance of a town. Provo is a place where there is no reason to be. A province that would never grow up to be a suburb, Like the backwaters where they exiled Ovid and Pascal. Only there is no water— Just landscape shorn of green and tawny desert colors. Burned skyline. Hills like craggy impenetrable fortresses. The rain gutters hiss in the dryness. There's a menacing blue tint on the rims Of impinging mountains.

When I brood on Germany in the night No hope for sleep. I know I'll lie Awake with my eyes wide open while Tears scald my cheeks. The years are a blur of past and future: A good twelve of them have passed since I last Laid eyes on my mother—which may be why I'm in such a frenzy to see her. And I am desperate with desire. I am under the old mutter's spell. She circles my mind like a ring of fire. I hope to god she is alive and well. She loves me to pieces, the old woman, And when in her letters her script breaks down, I know she's shaken to her depths, I know When the mother in her's shocked by her role. My mother never leaves my mental space Free of time past, the twelve long years, Twelve! —that vanished without a trace Since our last satisfying hug and kiss. Don't worry about Germany: it's the picture Of health. It will outlast us. All and all. I'll know its borders again by the flare Of its barbarous oaks and lime-trees' salute. I wouldn't waste a moment thinking on Germany were it not for my mother...; Fatherland-is-forever; but the old Woman, being mortal, may soon grow...cold. Since I left the country death has taken Many I loved. And now the unbreathing Impinge too much upon my sympathy. Numbering the dead does me in. And yet I feel compelled to count and each Body added to the tally has a say In how my mourning grows: hordes of corpses Crush my chest. What—relief—when they...give way. Praise the lord. And the lighter light of France That through this window breaks as my wife, well- Tempered, radiant as dawn, dispels My German burden with her lovely smile. after Heinrich Heine

And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world. * My mother’s father hunted and rode. My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside: maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades; he might have thought that this boy has to be outside at this time in his life. Maybe it’s more important that he roam the canyons and the hills that he know the streets that he come home covered with leaves and bark and mud, than that he sit there like a good young scholar like I was, a Rabbi at twenty giving money home to my parents in their cabbagy tenement in the Bronx. This is a boy who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit— he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house, limping like Ruffian after her last run in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes. * But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep. It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors. Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more. * Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers. And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain. * I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s. Even as an only child I was never lonely. My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts. My father rode “every morning before work.” I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life. My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride. Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride! * That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about— leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling; the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere, say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart. The Woman Who Rode She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit. I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting. She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair. Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers. Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory. The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense. Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down. The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.” * The light in her house was like the light before dawn. On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office. * Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was— as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in. Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again. * When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened. How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.

Dropouts Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage. Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret on the days when his report card made hard fact of what was already apparent from his absences. Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge— as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy, with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself, to climb higher into the hills above the city— of where nowhere was… Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons— * Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year older than me. He had stubble on his chin. I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks to inspire fast, early growth. “Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned, knowing I overdid everything, “or you’ll grow hair there later.” Later was a word I disdained, its insistence on the future tense, postponement— life on the back burner. * Mace seemed incapable of worry. His coolness and insouciance made girls stare. He was always brushing back the shock of raven- black hair that fell over his right eyebrow. The same teacher who sent me lickety split to the principal’s office would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper warmly, compassionately in his ear. They would nod together. I could fill in every blank. “What’s the matter Richard?” “Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,” this is where the whispering grew most intense, “I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend. Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability, Richard…” Mace would never protest, never defend himself. Indignation was a country where he’d never been. “You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not double the insult of the absence of her concern for me with a glance in my direction, “but deep down Mace and I are the same.” * Mace and I were running into the same problem at the same time. Mathematical wizards that we were we couldn’t solve advanced algebraic equations in our head; we were vexed by an added integer. We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil. History was being sold to us as a dead language of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy. What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow. * Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy with its secret store of power concealed under the hood. Mace too began the year in the front row, placed there on the strength of pure ability. He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one assigned book we read,Great Expectations. Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom. I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access. There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions. * For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City I can’t remember seeing a single bird. I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since that first day when the old geezer stepped out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty and without verticals, to reprimand my Double- mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter. But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds did I start to withdraw from sight. I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,” the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us. Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch. The sun glared on her helmet of curlers. Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.” But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway. I couldn’t get accustomed to the light in the trampled meadows around his house, the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds. Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read his thoughts:why couldn’t I wait until night? Why was I dragging myself down? Why skip history and rifle assembly? The movie would wait. But I would not. I was keen, and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace in the vast empty theater alive to each click and flicker in the projection room, and the radiant impalpable dust caught in the unstinting beam; released from the limits of our world until the screeching stopped and, looked at askance by strangers, we stepped into an iron dark which held no trace of the light we’d left. * I forked over whatever change I had to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor. One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts, I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents as an offering. Mace scorned them. He only smoked Marlboros. Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze of roads through the hills overlooking the city, he broke off the filters and smoked in silence. I was used to doing the talking for the two of us but this was different. He pulled up besides a long driveway. A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs. This was where he lived. He’d be “a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer. I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house, fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker, angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit… Our apartment could have fit into the living room… Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds. Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard through the landscaping I knew what the view must be like: that was the reason to live there; for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was, still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights. * On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,” but required to attend the final show-of-arms sat together in the bleachers, in splendid isolation, and watched as the rule-followers—led by the many-striped, other Mark R.— in their woolen khaki uniforms, shouldering their M 1 rifles, dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.

4 But you had the sense that he was always competing with your father for your affection. Not only my father. He didn’t understand my need to develop ties in these new worlds. He tried to legislate over my feelings. He was subject to extraordinarily inappropriate fits of jealousy. How are you the judge of that? Many small incidents. Such as… * The boy’s name was Warren. He was an orphan. As we pulled into the weed lot of the camp in the uncertain March air and patented silence, I could see him peeking down at us from a second story dormer window, like someone who had been dreaming of escape from the run-down resort: torn up turf; dirt basketball court, net hanging for its life by one thin strand of rope; horseshoes, shuffle board; musty, mildewed cabins with wet bedding; the stars pressing too hard against our faces in the catastrophic silence of the nights… I’d never been left so happily alone, alone, that is, in Warren’s wonderful company. His talk mimicked the cadence of the stones he kicked. Warren showed me the mica glow in the arrowheads and quartz-tipped spears he'd unearthed. Warren's cigar box overflowed with other people's souvenirs, miniature monuments, key chains, lighters, and initialed items like cuff links and bracelets. He scoured the corners of the rooms of the departed while his “mother,” slip of the tongue there, vacuumed. “People always leave something behind,” he said. I knew what he meant: taking their clothes on and off so many times something had to go. I wanted an initial bracelet even with someone else’s initials. The kids at summer camp in the Poconos all had initialed bracelets, except for me, but who among them had been west of the Mississippi? Warren wanted a home. I didn’t know what I wanted. I asked to bring Warren home and give him a home. “That’s ridiculous, he has a home here. Besides, you only just met.” My mother lamented his stick-thin, soot-blackened frame, the smell he gave off and his yellow teeth, his urchin eating with his hands, his short and choppy hair, his blousy shirt and baggy fatigues that gave him a bulk, a volume, he didn’t otherwise possess. What about his fits of giddy delight? As the days passed I forgot myself. I became more and more like Warren. I would brook no insults about my brother. It would no longer be me, but me and Warren. I’d share my meals with Warren, and my desk at school. Warren could stay and I would just—slip away. Next to Warren, I felt like I was on a clipper ship lifted out of the water by the powerful wind-breath of my two distant coastal families; my warring mother and “blood” father, her lovely companionable family in Los Angeles and Manhattan; his friendly, compliant relations in Manhattan and Bensonhurst… I dreamt both families were jammed on the deck of the ship, waving, gesticulating, shouting, and that I clung to a raft’s rope as a great wave flung me back and back, but the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to be near. I wanted to fly apart—in the nowhere—. When our two-door Chrysler Windsor edged off the gravel onto the highway I thrust my head right where the plush fabric of the front seat parted like the Red Sea, and said to my new dad. “You know what. I love Warren more than I love you.” “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “He’s just a little putz,and I can get rid of him with a snap of my fingers. Presto. See. Now—where is he?” The seat beside me was empty. I was empty. And my heart pounded in wild longing for its fullness lost. I should have kept my mouth shut but I thought my heart would burst with that secret locked in it: why doesn’t he understand? It wasn’t that I loved him less than I had but that I loved Warren more. He had the same reaction several years later, in Chicago, when I announced my love for Carol, a round-faced, soft spoken blond girl I’d brought home to play with my electric trains and drink hot chocolate one brutal winter afternoon. I loved her and I kissed her in the elevator on the way up. I wanted him to say:I’m so happy for you, let’s put on some 45’s and dance. He said, “You don't know what love is.” And for the first time slapped me in the face. I wrote my “blood” father of my love and he wrote back he was glad I was “making friends out there.” Why didn’t these men understand, I know what words mean, by love I meant love, however transitory. One word, two fathers, two red stone faces, unblinking, dismayed.

14 In the Wake Riding north on the bus after hours in cars or in the air or airports or bus stations, I felt almost happy for a moment as the tires hissed over the wet highway, I was both in the rain and protected from it, distracted from grief by the sensual pressure of the instant, water beading on the glass, the darkening hills. But how glad I was to be riding north! Sunoco on one side, Mobil on the other. His best friend was from Mobile. I always wanted to go there. He died too soon, or I left home, I can’t remember. Two days ago my stepfather’s body was laid to rest. Comatose, sucking air through a respirator, I can’t say he was resting; I saw him underground when I closed my eyes at night and went to bury the clock under mounds of towels and pillows—I had not heard it ticking so ferociously while he lived—and it would not quiet down. And the rain tonight, it’s not like any other, and I wish the bus would go faster. I saw the rain in the heavy hanging clouds. That’s a lie. Immense factories blackening under a charcoal sky— and rivers whose names I’ll never remember. I saw a sign reflected in my window: Milwaukee Light. * Whenever the Chicago White Sox beat the Braves it made his day. The Braves were in Milwaukee then, with lefty Warren Spahn and slugger Hank Aaron. The bus company is Peter Pan, and the Peter Pan coffee shop was our first stop in Chicago when we drove in; and that’s where I was when, though I didn’t know it then, he married my mother in Bermuda— watching Peter Pan in New York with my “real” father… And oh those prophetic lines, not to grow up, never to go to school. Never then to die! Only the living are immortal. Like these rain clouds. * The fact of death—a silence attends it; an absence with which we’re all He was the lightest sleeper I’d ever known; he’d open one eye if I merely peeked into his room. intimate. He’s there when I close my eyes but not when I reach out in the dark. At his bedside I peeled back his eyelids, rubbed his blue feet, his bloated hands, almost screamed in his ear, wake up, man, I’ll be lonely without you, I’ll be ANGRY if you don’t wake up; and in the silence of our nearness to death— the grinding hum of the generators working at their limit for too long to pump cool air in the killing heat; the glug of him swallowing through the respirator. * AT THE BUS STATION IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS The lateness of the bus angers a tough young woman from Montana travelling with her toddler son. And yet she knows the way: I can see it in her green peaked cap, her direct taut anger—bus late, I kill the driver—boy knock over suitcase—I kill him too. * BUS BOARDED The water bubbles on the windows break; there is less and less outside to see… And he was not even my real father. That should put a cap on it. It’s like knowing the name of the lake you pass never seeing it again and yet finding it tough to forget, that jagged square of black water just off the highway— that lake, and not another. * Baudelaire boasted that he laughed at funerals and wept at feasts. Now in the bus it’s only early evening; I turn around and everyone’s sleeping— mother and son, matron and magician. Half-awake, I stare at the tree line, and the blessing of rain, and I would like to lie down on the roadside and drink and drink and roll in the mud. * Mortifying, one’s presence in the face of nature’s sanguine gaze, green whitewashing the past. Whatever grooms the body for the afterlife pitches in this life like a tent in a night encampment before the dawn storming of the fortress. The yellow day lilies wag their heads at the first touch of wind and I see what others have always seen in flowers, a sign marked TRANSIENTS that keeps them awake; see now, as, standing catatonic at the kitchen sink, the overhead fluorescent light strip sinks into the pitch dark bottom of a coffee mug. Seeing is native to us and yet we stupefy our native sight. Not the eye’s sight. * Some mourners hurl dirt stiffly on the coffin because it seems the right thing to do. Some hold back. The flag-draped casket honors the first Army chaplain in the Pacific Theater, for praying good prayers above the bodies of the dead and of the living. Prelude to an Afterword Why should I feel compelled to write a thousand postscripts when I don’t work from life, but to hear the testimonials of people who knew the rider, the “little Rabbi,” moves me to tears while I am here to attend my mother who lies in bed with her stomach reaching toward the sky—(where Sam talks calmly to his “grandpa in heaven,” matter-of-fact celestial discourse)— and I listen to this Baptist preacher and hospice worker as he crouches beside my chair in her hospital room talk about his work with mourning; how difficult it is to get people to understand the element of surprise-over-time…; how he kissed the little Rabbi the first time he met him and the last time he saw him before “death took him so swiftly” there were no “last words” and he was enveloped in silence, in absence—“the way death often comes...” I see him more clearly through this stranger’s eyes. I wouldn’t have thought that he could help confirm my sense of what is real, but this man who knew him less than two years feels so indebted that I allow myself to think of the rider’s life in terms of the people he affected, the bizarre love he could elicit—not standard preacherly fare by any means but some connection by being entirely present for others— promiscuously present— meanwhile, as the nurses haul my mother from wheelchair to bed why do I feel impelled to turn away… (we think we have the answers) … and flash to an image of my friend caring for her father—bathing him?—but she didn’t come out of his penis, did she? or is that another wrong turning in my thought? The hospice preacher offers a prayer. He holds my mother’s swollen, psoriatic hand, the arthritic clumps poling from her fingers, and as the dry, flaky patches blaze in the unforgiving light, I find not a word to object to—except two— “religion” and “churches.” I tell him that I left home as soon as I could because I couldn’t stand being around the two of them; he admits he always felt sick “for hours afterward” when he’d been with them together; it wasn’t just quarreling, I have to add, seeking absolution for my absence, but hatred (can’t let my mother milk the bereaved widow role). He nods— matter-of-factly. And sets me free.

2 There is no end to the torment that comes from watching dead actors in old, and no so old, movies, and you always fall into the hole of uncertainty; you know you don’t know if they’re alive or dead, some of them look so radiant on films made not so long ago. Richard Harris, the hero of The Heroes of Telemark, is undergoing a second birth in old man roles, while in the rockface rappelling, snow on castles icecapade,Where Eagles Dare, two out of three leads, Richard Burton and Mary Ure, are both quite dead, as is her second husband, Robert Shaw. A lot happens in Eagles, but what sticks in my mind is the escape, where Mary Ure, coifed, oblique glimmer of a smile, cradling a machine gun like a weightless toy on the caboose’s deck, bullets in mesmerizingly endless supply, decorously mows down row on row of Nazi pursuers, who drop into the white Alpine ridges like knocked over counters in a game, as if she were answering the blasts from Jimmy Porter’s trumpet as they merge with a shrieking train whistle and screech of brakes. 3 To St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, for Robert Shaw’s memorial service. A beautiful, still day. There was a gathering of figures from the profession, plus friends and family. Harold Pinter gave a short address, stressing Bob the writer... It was a fairly joyful occasion, serious but not sad. I had my usual bewilderment about our lack of ritual. We all huddled together in the sunshine outside the church—Paul Scofield, Kenneth Haigh, Harold, and many, many others. We all wanted to be together in Bob's memory. But what could we, un-Christian as most of us are, do? Off to the Riverside Studios to see The Changeling, beautifully staged by Peter Gill, precise and clear. But I had the impression of a not very talented cast dutifully following the conception of a quite brilliant director. —1978, Saturday 7 October, Peter Hall’s Diaries I abhor assumptions but from the tension Robert Shaw emitted on screen and in his other incarnations, the athletic boozer’s fatal heart attack in middle-age seemed at first less surprising than Mary’s Ure’s ambiguous end. Shaw looks so painfully alive in Jaws as the shark- crazed minor Ahab it’s hard to digest how quickly he raced toward a death from natural causes, so shortly afterwards. There’s much that could be said about Robert Shaw, a ubiquitous, menacing, explosive presence during the previous decade in British films before the American public began to pin a name