Chapter 15

At first the burned places on my face and chest wouldn’t take the tan, and stayed pink and peeled away one layer after another. But gradually the skin hardened, and the outlines of the scars merged with the healthy skin. The burned places never tanned as dark as the rest, but by October there was only a kind of mottled effect here and there in the brown skin. It was only when you came close that you could see my face had been patched together like a clumsily made rag doll. For a long time the palms of my hands stayed pink, like a Negro’s.

Ary was in the sun as much as I was, but she hardly seemed to tan at all; instead her skin seemed to turn from ivory to a translucent olive without darkening, as though she somehow absorbed the sun through her pores. When we went up in the afternoon to make love in the blue bedroom I would have a rather foolish stripe of white around my middle, but she was the same color all over. Her shoulders and legs were only slightly darker; along her breasts and flanks the amber shaded imperceptibly into a shadowy ivory, lightly fragrant and cool to the touch. Why her skin didn’t show the marks of her bathing suit I didn’t know. Like Leo, I had stopped trying to understand women and I was content with what I could touch and possess on the outside.

It took me a long time to get used to these two strange beings, my body and hers, and the way they felt when they were together. For over a year I did almost nothing but walk, swim, lie on the beach, eat, and make love. Make love: I pondered over this expression. Make: to create. Love—to desire? To wish someone else well? It wasn’t quite either. Then I (we) would perform the ritual again to see if I could solve the mystery. It was not that I wanted that badly to go on repeating this same set of gestures over and over, but I felt somehow I had to go on doing this thing until I grasped the secret of it that seemed to hover elusively just out of touch. It wasn’t this way at first; at first I just accepted, but then as my brain began to work again I got sex in the head and I thought about it all the time. I thought about it from all angles, and the more I thought about it the less it seemed I understood. Sometimes I used to get angry with myself for thinking so much, and at other times I blamed it on her, because it seemed to me that if I had never met her I would have gone on the rest of my life understanding women perfectly. I had never had any difficulty understanding all the Claras and Connies; you simply spread their legs and there was nothing more to understand. Then there was the other kind, the brisk efficient ones like the nurses in Pearl Harbor. I could deal with them all right too but there was no question of sex; it would be like going to bed with a file cabinet or a typewriter.

I had always classified women in these two groups (receptacles and machines) and at first I couldn’t figure out which Ary was. In her tailored suit, dealing with Gore and the others in the hospital, she had been brisk and efficient. Then in bed that first time on the ship I had discovered another side, a sorcery that had sharpened something quick and insistent in me I hadn’t even known was there. While I was still puzzling this out we arrived in Laguna and she slipped away from me unexpectedly into a world of Hollywood friends, laughter, brandy in balloon glasses, Albeniz, and owlish allusions to Homer. It wasn’t enough for her to have two sides, it seemed she was some kind of a polyhedron. Then as I came to know her a little better I saw that all the sides were one, but this didn’t any easier to understand. For a long time I didn’t like the tangoing, flower-strewing, slightly affected Ary, and I fought against it and tried to pull her away from that world. When we were together again in the blue bedroom it would be the same as before and I would think I had won, then the next night the house would be full of friends and she would be a stranger again. When I got to know the friends better that side of her seemed less mysterious, but by that time I had discovered other sides I hadn’t even suspected. The more I knew her outwardly the more something inward and secret in her seemed to elude me. Who was she anyhow? I was the one who was supposed to be a mystery! By now it seemed I knew everything about her past, what she had studied at Claremont and how she had gone to bed with a teddy bear named Orestes when she was seven years old, but there was still something that seemed to slip away elusively when I reached out for it. For months the whole point of my existence seemed to center in those brief moments in bed, and yet these were the times when I seemed to understand myself and her the least. Something was working in me all that time, a new and obscure land of understanding was forming in the blood almost beyond my will. It was different from the kind of understanding that forms in the mind, and somehow it was connected with the physical act of love and the difficulty of comprehending what it was and how it really happened. Sometimes after we had made love and she had gone to sleep I would lie there contemplating her for what seemed like hours on end. There the two long amber legs came together, the even swell of the stomach tapered away between them, and deeper there was only shadow, mute and chthonic. What was I, some kind of a voyeur? The more I looked the less I understood. But I was looking in the wrong place for the mystery. I began to realize finally that it was not in her body, in this simple concave mechanism which was designed to receive a convexity, but in myself.

And after all what was so complicated about myself, about this part of my body that had always been nothing more than a subject for crude jokes before? It had its needs, everybody knew that, and everybody knew what to do about it. I had thought I knew everything there was to know about this need and the gesture that satisfied it, the gesture that the people I had lived among described with a single ugly word. And for what they had done, and what I had done, the word was precise and expressive. It was simply a matter of gratifying my own body, or rather the small part of my body where the need seemed to be concentrated and which demanded its own way before it would leave the rest of the body at peace. Now I began pondering over the way this part of my body was made and studying its design (what the hell, I was an engineer!) and it struck me for the first time what its real purpose was: to give pleasure to others. This was the only possible way of accounting for its shape; otherwise it would merely by a vague sensitive spot I could propitiate by myself. And this discovery led me at last to the definition—love: to give yourself. Make love: to create through giving yourself to others. And it had taken me twenty-six years of my life to understand this? No wonder I spent all those first months at Laguna brooding over this thing which to most people, those who love and give themselves simply and freely, is as natural as the coming of spring.

Perhaps it was worth the time I spent learning it. Anyhow this is what I did from January of 1943 to late February of 1944. It was not a time when most people could devote themselves to their private education. I hear several moralists inquiring whether I spent the worst months of the war, one of the most critical periods in history, contemplating my private parts and making love in a blue bedroom to a woman who was not my wife. I’m afraid that’s about the way it was. I didn’t know whether it was admirable or not, but I had never been either a moralist or a patriot and I didn’t worry very much about it. It was only sometime later (perhaps about the time I made my little Norman Corwin speech to Widdison) that I began to realize the world had been saved and me along with it, that other people had died so I could enjoy my private happiness, like the unknown sailor with the Texas accent who had used the last of his strength to push me up on a raft and then drowned without a word. To tell the truth we didn’t take a newspaper, and except for the rationing we almost forgot the war was going on. Once in a while I would remember they were still fighting out in the Pacific or hear on the radio about the landing in Sicily, and it would seem strangely unreal, a kind of drama written daily by the script-writers in the radio stations that had nothing to do with my own war hidden in the blurry scraps of recollection somewhere in the back of mv head. As for other people, it was agreed on all sides that I had done my part by getting sunk, and nobody asked me for anything more. If anyone wanted to see my documents as a noncombatant I could show them my hands.

For a long time I was content to go on this way, but later I understood that this period of my life was only a prolonged convalescence, a kind of limbo. Or perhaps the right word was purgatory; I wasn’t much of a theologian. Dostoyevsky said that hell was the state of being unable to love. I had got beyond hell, I knew what love was now, but I didn’t know who it was I loved because I didn’t know who she was yet. Most of all I didn’t know who I was. This was the question I had viewed with such a fervent indifference when I was in the hospital and for a long time afterwards, the secret that Gore had tried to help me find out, as though we were two tots sitting happily down together to solve a jigsaw puzzle. Poor Gore, he didn’t know what he was asking, and so he never found out what it was that would cure me. But perhaps he had an inkling when he had threatened me with shock treatment: “It jolts the psychic patterns and breaks up mental blocks. It also breaks bones sometimes. Old fellow.”

In that winter of 1944 there was a warm spell in February, and the high school kids from Santa Ana used to cut classes in the afternoon and come to the beach to swim. One afternoon I sat on the beach watching four of them trying to launch a boat in the surf. It was an ordinary flat-bottomed skiff, the kind you rent in city parks, and even the gentle breakers at Laguna were enough to capsize it. The four big bronzed kids in skimpy trunks would push it out and all pile into it at once, and the first wave that came along would swamp it. Then they would dump out the water and start over. Finally they managed to get it out beyond the surf line. The rest of the afternoon they rowed clumsily around bailing it out with a tin can. I almost offered to help them when they were trying to get it launched, but then I remembered they were only seventeen or eighteen, and I was almost twenty-seven now, a middle-aged war veteran. There were too many of them for the boat anyhow and it was the wrong kind of a boat for the surf, you would need a dory or something with sides high enough to vault over the breakers when you were pushing it out. But it was a long time since I had seen anybody having that much fun, and that night I asked Leo if they had ever had a boat on the beach.

“A boat? You can’t use a boat in the surf.”

“You could if it were the right kind of a boat.”

“Okay, you’re a sailor, I’m just a vegetable clerk from Seventh Avenue.”

I didn’t say anything more about it that night, but the idea was still in the back of my mind. The fact was that I was getting a little bored lying around on the beach and wanted something to do with myself. The next afternoon I borrowed Ary’s car and went to look around in the boat shops in Newport and Costa Mesa. In Newport all I could find was a nine-foot dinghy, probably originally built as a tender for a small yacht. Because of the war the dealer wanted two hundred dollars for it. In the old days I would probably have told him where to put it; now I just said politely, “Thank you very much,” and drove away. There was nothing in Costa Mesa or Balboa either except a few of the Snowbird-class sailboats the kids used for racing in the bay. On an impulse I decided to drive on to Long Beach; it was only about an hour on the coast highway and I would still get back in time for dinner. Somewhere beyond American Avenue I got lost and ended up in Wilmington, on the road that led out to Terminal Island. It was the first time I had ever been in the harbor district in a car and I was a little confused about the streets. I thought I remembered there was a yacht harbor and some boat yards somewhere near the foot of Avalon Boulevard, and I drove around trying to find them. Finally I saw some inflatable rubber boats sitting in a yard with a wire fence around it. It wasn’t the kind of a boat I was looking for, but I stopped anyhow. The place was a kind of junk yard that had bought up a lot of used Army boots and defective parachutes and now called itself a war surplus store. The yard in front was full of wooden crates, old airplane wings, and various kinds of junk. In the back was a tin warehouse with a sign: “L. Pollbock — Surplus. Plumbing Fixtures. Parachutes. Boots and Weather Gear. Camouflage Cloth. AU Govt. Contract Material at Fraction of Case.”

I went in through the gate and walked over to look at one of the rubber boats. It was getting rotten from standing in the sun and it was not what I wanted anyhow. I didn’t quite understand why I had gotten out of the car. I stood for a while in the thin winter sunshine looking at the boat and then I realized that I didn’t feel very well; I didn’t know what was wrong with me but it was an unpleasant empty feeling that seemed to be partly in the viscera and partly around me in the air. And yet I couldn’t turn away; I went on standing there looking at the boat and the little puddle of dirty water in the bottom and the instructions printed on the side in black letters that wouldn’t quite come into focus. Finally I managed to walk away and get in the car. I drove for about a block and then I realized I didn’t know where I was driving or how I had got there. I was on a road that ran along the Terminal Island channel; on one side, the beer parlor on the corner, but the only thing I couldn’t figure out was why I was in the car and dressed in these clothes, and why I seemed to be getting sick and had a vague inchoate feeling that I didn’t belong here. I stared at the beer parlor for a long time, and finally I opened the door of the car and got out and walked toward it, across the white sidewalk in the piercing white sunlight.

It was a typical waterfront beer joint, dark inside with a cool dank smell, and coming in from the sunlight I couldn’t see very well. I sat down at the bar and saw the white blur of the bartender’s shirt coming toward me.

“What’s yours?”

“Beer.”

“Draught, Lucky, Budweiser?”

I had to think for a minute what I wanted. Finally I ordered a draught. When my eyes began to adjust to the light I saw the other customers in the place were looking at me, probably wondering what I was doing in there in those clothes. There were a couple of longshoremen at the other end of the bar and some merchant seamen sitting in a booth at one side. The bartender was an old bull-shaped character who looked as though he might have been a longshoreman once himself. He was giving me the once-over too, and then I wondered if he could see what was happening on the inside of me, if any of it showed on the outside. I didn’t know what was happening myself. These people, this place, it was all familiar and yet the familiarity wasn’t reassuring, there was something disquieting about it. I had an odd sensation of doubleness, a feeling of being there and yet not being there, as though a part of me were about to float away and leave my corpse sitting there on that bar stool forever. When my beer came I realized I was thirsty and I finished half of it at one swallow. I thought perhaps I was just thirsty and the sun had hit me a little and I would feel better when I had drunk the beer. I didn’t feel much better, however, and the beer was probably bad for me because it made the floating sensation a little worse. The bartender was mopping up the bar with a beery old rag. It was a small place and you could hear everything anyone was saying. The two longshoremen at the other end of the bar were talking about boosting whiskey and Swiss watches out of the cargo. I realized that I was listening to them with a vague sense of wrongness, of guilt, and yet with fascination, die way you might listen to the intimate conversation of a married couple from the next room.

“Ole Hymie, I seen him drop a case yesterday. He didn’t know how to drop it and he damn near bust his foot. You could smell the stuff a mile. Ole Hymie, he started stuffing it in his shirt.”

“You drop a case of them watches and you might as well throw ’em away. Hell, there’s better ways than dropping.”

“Yeah, I seen you the other day, prying ‘em with a crow. Ole Fairbanks was around, you know the shapeup man. He ast me what you was doing, and I said you lost your watch and was trying to find out if it was time to knock off. He didn’t say nothing.”

Then one of them glanced down the bar and made a motion toward me with his head, and they stopped talking. For a few minutes the place was silent. The bartender got out a dry rag and began polishing his whiskey bottles, standing behind the bar and looking at me.

“You work along the front?” he asked me after a while.

“In a way.

“I floured maybe you was an engineer or something. You over at the Moore yards?”

“What’s eating you anyhow? What do you take me for, a cop?”

“I don’t take you for anything. I was just talking, that’s all.”

I had finished my beer and I felt now I wanted to get out of that place and into the daylight. But the daylight was bad for me, the daylight had made me giddy and ill and that was why I had come in here in the first place. And yet I knew that wasn’t the reason. But what was the reason? I remembered my car then and I wanted to be in it, driving along the road. I felt that as soon as I was in my car again I would be alright. But I didn’t want to leave right away because everyone in the place was watching me now and they would think I was leaving because the bartender had started asking me questions. In the mirror I could see the two merchant seaman in the booth. One of them had a queer kind of a bulging forehead with a crease in the middle of it that somehow seemed familiar, and I had an irrational feeling that he recognized me; there were hundreds of people I had sailed with and I couldn’t remember them all. I picked the beer glass up again, found it was empty, and set it down.

“What do I owe you again?”

“Fifteen.”

In my pocket I only had a nickel and a few pennies in change, and when I felt around in the back pocket for my billfold it wasn’t there. With deliberate calm I looked for my checkbook and found it in the other back pocket.

“Listen, can I give you a small check?”

The bartender looked dubious. “How much?”

“Say five?”

He made a vague noncommittal gesture. I unfolded the checkbook and began writing the check, and then I came to the line for the signature. I hesitated, the pen making slow circles in the air over the check, and I had no idea what I was going to write. I didn’t know what was the matter, but it was as though something inside my head was the part that I thought was healed was still paralyzed, and what was paralyzed was the part where I knew how to move the pen. The bartender had stopped polishing bottles and was watching me curiously.

I turned the checkbook over and found the name where the bank had printed it on the outside. Then, forcing myself to act slowly and methodically, I wrote it on the check syllable by syllable: Ben . . . ton. Da . . . ve . . . nant.

“You got some identification, something with your name on it? Driver’s license?”

“I’m sorry. I seem to have lost my billfold. That’s why I had to write a check.”

He turned the check over dubiously in his hands. Finally he handed it back to me. “Skip it. It’s only a beer. Take care of it the next time you come in.”

Everybody in the place had stopped drinking now and they were watching to see what I would do. Mechanically I stuck the check in my pocket and walked to the door. Out in the bright sunshine, the light rising in waves from the pavement, I found the car and got in it. When I opened the door I saw the billfold lying on the seat; it had simply slipped out of my pocket when I was driving. I didn’t go back to pay for the beer and I didn’t bother to pick up the billfold. I found the key and put it in the ignition, but then I took my hand away and sat quietly, fixedly, looking at something I saw out through the windshield. A hundred yards away a ship was going down the channel, a grimy British freighter with a deck load of gray-painted bombers for England. The deck gang was stowing the cargo gear for sea, and I could hear the voices and the rattle of winches as the booms came down into the cradles. A cook was standing in the galley door in his undershirt, looking at me as the ship went past. Then a plume of steam formed over the funnel, and an instant later came the sound of the whistle, a deep hoarse blast that went through my bones and shook in the sill of the car door under my hand. It went on for a long time, and as I listened to that bass shaking I felt something inside me, my entrails, stirring and pulling me helplessly toward it. And then I knew that the sickness that had been hanging over me all that day had finally found a weak place to enter. I knew that the thing that pulled me was a parr of myself, a part of me that was sick, and yet I had no power to resist it. I knew the meaning of that cook who had looked at me silently from his doorway, and what he had wanted to say to me. In that moment I could have opened the door of the car and walked away, leaving the billfold with the money and the driver’s license and all the documents neatly on the seat. The person I had pretended to be would simply never have been, and yet I knew if I did that, if I obeyed the sound of that whistle and followed it, something vital would be broken in me and there would be no going on, I would cease to exist. Finally the deep shaking stopped. It came with a sense of relief, but it was as though a knife had been withdrawn from my flesh and left the wound behind.

Somehow I started the car and turned it around on the road. I wasn’t conscious of turning onto the coast highway or of going through Long Beach; I only remember putting the car in the garage and carefully shutting the garage door, even checking afterward to be sure it was locked. Then I went into the house and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Ary heard me from the kitchen; I heard her call “Hi.” I shut the door of the bedroom, and at that moment something pulled loose in me and I was no longer aware of my body or had any control over it. Although I was not conscious of falling I was lying on my back looking up at the ceiling. I knew I was sick but it wasn’t the way it had been before, in the hospital. There everything had just been a blur and it didn’t seem worthwhile to bring it into focus. Now I knew I was on the point of madness because something I had pretended was not there suddenly appeared before me in perfect clarity, like a ghost in broad daylight. I saw everything, everything I had tried to forget, the degradations and betrayals and deceits, magnified a thousand times and precise in every detail.

Even the objects around me had a terrifying kind of precision, as though I was seeing them through a microscope. I had never understood that madness was just this kind of lucidity, this seeing things too clearly. Something was wrong with my body too, my throat gradually tightened as though a hand was gripping it and the rest of me lay in a kind of slack paralysis. While this was going on I lay there conducting a quite rational conversation with him; it seemed perfectly natural for him to be there, even though I had never worked out in my mind exactly who he was. I think I talked to him for a long time, although perhaps it was only for a few minutes, and I think I talked to him aloud, although I may have been mistaken about that too. I don’t remember very much about what we said, except that I felt awkward and vaguely guilty because I refused to admit I knew who he was, and we both knew that I knew who he was. I remember at one point he told me I was hooked on something, I forget what, and when I told him I wasn’t he said Get up off the floor if you’re not hooked. But he was right, I couldn’t get up. off the floor, and when I told him again I didn’t know him he said You know who I am, kid. Quit faking. How can you tell so goddam many lies? After a while I didn’t answer anymore, and the voice went on talking to me while I looked at the ceiling. I knew if I made an effort I could kill him. I didn’t have to stand up and strike him, I could do it lying there; it was only necessary to will to do it. There wasn’t any particular emotion involved, it was simply a practical question whether I should kill him or not. But my mind was operating quite clearly and I realized that killing him or myself or anybody else was not the answer, that people for whom life is too complicated always want to pull a trigger or press a pillow over a face and imagine that in some way that will make things simpler. But instead of solving the problem it only makes it more complicated, or it ends everything. There wasn’t any simple way; I would just have to take it complicated. I knew now that the only way to make the voice stop was to kill myself, because this was what killing him would mean. He was inside me and he was not going to get out, and if I wanted to go on living I would have to live with him.

I lay for a long time thinking of this. Then Ary came in and found me lying on the floor. My face was wet with perspiration and when she spoke to me I couldn’t answer. She tried to help me up, but my arms and legs were heavy and I had no will to move myself. Finally she got me onto the bed.

“I don’t want to anymore,” I told her. “Let me alone, I’m tired. I don’t want to try anymore.”

“Don’t talk.”

“I’m tired of trying, it’s no good.”

She went away without saying anything, and after a while she came back with an enormous highball. When she handed it to me I looked at her. Her face showed nothing and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“Did you hear what I was saying?”

“Drink it.”

She had something else in her hand, a capsule, and I put it in mouth first and swallowed it. Then with my hands that were still heavy and clumsy I raised the glass and began sipping. Gradually my throat loosened. She sat across the room watching me.

When I had finished half the drink I relaxed and began to feel a little foolish. I was still covered with perspiration but it was cool sweat now; I could feel it trickling under my armpits. “I guess this is what you call a nervous breakdown,” I said after a while.

“For the moment you have what is called an alcohol deficiency. Drink.”

I began trying to explain, rather incoherently. “It’s as though— you know, some people have been hurt and they have hunks of metal inside them that the doctors don’t find. I guess one of them worked loose. It’s stupid, I’m sorry.”

She didn’t seem to take it very seriously. “We’ve all got our problems. If you have hunks of metal inside it’s probably better for them to work loose. I suppose there are a lot worse problems to have. Some people are born without any arms or legs, although that’s never very much of a consolation, for some reason.”

She said this matter-of-factly and without even any particular sympathy in her voice, as though we were discussing the fact that her fingernails broke or my hair was falling out. This was the only discussion we ever had about my fit or trance, or whatever it had been. I didn’t know if the voices had been real or whether she heard them too or what it was that she was thinking. But at least I was grateful she hadn’t acted like most women, running off to call a doctor and asking me how I felt and badgering me with a lot of questions, and instead had just sat there quietly so there would be somebody with me while I worked it out for myself. After a while she went away and got herself a whiskey and soda too, and sat there sipping it while she watched me. I remember thinking it must have got to her a little after all, because she never drank in the daytime. Then the capsule worked and I went to sleep.