I

I WAS hurrying to the afternoon shift when I heard that Jack Kennedy was dead. My first thought was, Jesus Christ, now we’ve got Lyndon Baines Johnson! I’d had the morning off. While I’d been sitting in the sun rubbing my hair with lemon juice and my skin with baby oil, Kennedy had been shot; he’d been pronounced dead by the time I got to the hotel. I was late for my shift as usual, and late for the drama, stepping cueless in medias res into that mummer’s farce of busboys, waiters, and waitresses, even the cooks—the line between the restaurant staff and the customers dissolved as we all milled around in the dining room. Some people were jabbering frantically, some were crying, and I was stuck with Lyndon Johnson, that Southern asshole. All I knew of him was his public persona, cut from an old pop tune—I’M A LONG TALL TEXAN, RIDE A BIG WHITE HORSE—but that was enough to make me distrust him even more than other politicians, and I disliked and distrusted them all. I could never understand, except as metaphor, my old pal Revington’s fascination with politics and power, the way he could turn JFK in the White House into a new age with new possibilities, “the winds of change,” he used to say. And he was my next thought, emerging immediately on the boot heels of Texas Lyndon: Revington. Because he loved Kennedy, made much of him, and must even then be mourning him. Dead in Texas. Texas! I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.

Three years before, I’d been caught inadvertently by Kennedy’s inaugural address while getting my hair cut to please my father. JFK had been declaiming away on the TV: ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ETC. My barber had paused, scissors in one hand, the other on my shoulder, to say, “Pretty good speech.” A load of crap, I’d thought, and that’s what I’d told Revington, leading to our most bitter argument in all the time I’d known him.

And my final thought, standing in my immaculately clean white busboy’s uniform in the dining room of that posh Miami Beach hotel was this: My God, I’m not in school anymore. When the Confucians are in power, they always want you to take another test—another IQ test, or College Board Exam, or maybe a Graduate Placement Exam—and watch out, scholar, study hard or it will be a physical exam for the U. S. Army. Pretty soon there’s not going to be a man-jack left in the country who’s not in the service of the Emperor; Kennedy’s dead in Dallas, Lyndon’s on his way, and I no longer have a student deferment. HE’S COMING WITH A GUN AND HE JUST CAN’T BE BEAT .

When the Confucians are in power, the only sensible thing for Buddhists to do is retire to caves or mountains, so within days of the assassination, I was gone from Miami, on the road, my knapsack on my back, still chasing the vanishing white rabbit of Enlightenment. I dropped in unannounced on my friends and relatives—and distant friends of ever more distant friends and relatives—sustaining myself like Rilke’s hero, each of my frequent downfalls (so I told myself ) only a pretext for further existence, an ultimate rebirth. Riding my trusty thumb, I yo-yoed up and down the country from Cincinnati to Raysburg to Pittsburgh to New York to New Haven to Boston and points in between, but the only place I wouldn’t go was back to Morgantown; the very thought of it filled me with horror. I worked, sometimes for no longer than a day, as a busboy, waiter, short-order cook, stock boy, night clerk, house painter, janitor, common laborer—any job I could get with no résumé, nary a reference, but plenty of bullshit. “I love this town, think I’ll settle down here,” I’d say to prospective employers, giving them my widest Alfred E. Newman grin even as I was planning my getaway. I found neither cave nor mountain.

Eventually I began to fear that I’d exhausted my career opportunities on the East Coast. I’d fallen in love with Raymond Chandler, so I rode the Greyhound to Los Angeles. The Chinese herbalist I visited there failed to take seriously my request for apprenticeship, but I conned my way into a job as a clerk in a seedy camera store on Sunset Boulevard (Chandler would have loved it) and decided that I really would settle down—at least long enough to write the great Civil War saga I’d been planning, the big fat book that would, once published, be the hottest thing since Gone With the Wind, and, without a doubt, be made into a major motion picture and establish me as one of the most promising young writers in America. I read Civil War histories, banged away on my typewriter, drank lots of beer, and ate. I swelled up until none of my clothes fit. I watched, on the snowy TV in my shadowy rented room, Texas Lyndon’s invasion of the Dominican Republic. And, while plowing through a super deluxe banana split in a very famous drugstore in which someone once was discovered, I saw, walking in on the feet of an astonishingly beautiful girl—a long-legged, iconic, and exquisitely self-possessed girl (a starlet, surely)—the very first pair of white go-go boots ever worn in North America.

Just as I’d always feared that I would, I ended up back in Raysburg dead broke and out to lunch. It was the summer of sixtyfive. I hadn’t been home in over a year. All Revington could talk about was politics: “Johnson’s turning into a damn fine president.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Come on, Dupre, what about Selma?”

“What about Selma? He only did what any sane president would do. What about the Dominican Republic?”

“What do you want down there, another Cuba?”

And from Cassandra: “Will you guys cut the crap.”

The last time I’d seen Cassandra, she’d been playing the role of Canden High teen queen for all it was worth; a year at Bennington had changed her once again, stripped away any vestiges of her earlier personae, pared her down to an austere sexiness, and left her, so it appeared, with a Weltanschauung of unrelieved bleakness. She was dressed that night as she would be most other nights that summer—in glove-tight jeans and a boy’s white shirt. Her thick burntsienna hair was parted in the center of her forehead and hung, curling languidly on its own, halfway down her back. She outlined her wide-set eyes with fine black lines (carefully defining even the tear ducts), coated her lashes with inky mascara, used cover-up for lipstick, and (largely, I suspected, to appear outré in Raysburg), painted her fingernails dead white. When I was being honest with myself, I admitted that I’d always been in love with her.

Now, from where I was sitting, I could look across to the mirror behind the bar, see the three of us brooding in a booth like the characters in a Cubist painting, our images fractured into facets between the whiskey bottles. I imagined I could see myself getting fatter by the minute. “What are we going to do?” Revington said, assuming one of his quoting voices. “What are we ever going to do . . . pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door?”

“A game of chess?” I said, picking it up.

“He’s dead,” from Cassy.

“Yeah, I heard that,” I said.

“Let’s drink to him,” Revington said, raising his glass. “Here’s to you, Thomas Stearns, and to your magnificent obscurity. Long may you puzzle university freshmen.”

“Yes,” I said, “here’s to you, master of the mug’s game. You defined our age.”

“Thanks for the footnotes,” Cassandra said.

We drank to T. S. Eliot.

“Now what?” I said.

“We could drive to Pittsburgh,” Revington said.

“What the hell’s in Pittsburgh?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t got there yet.”

“Maybe there’s a good movie on,” Cassy said.

“We’d never make it in time,” Revington said, looking at his watch, then brightening, “unless I drove like hell.”

“That’s reason enough,” I said. “Let’s put it on the road.”

Outside, the wet heat engulfed us as palpably as if we’d stepped into an ocean of simmering mucilage. I began to sweat. The clock on the bank told us that it was ten minutes of eight, the thermometer that it was ninety-two degrees. I’d been back in town less than a week, and already it felt like a life sentence. “Isn’t it ever going to rain in this fucking place?” I said.

“It can’t stay at ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent humidity forever,” Revington said. “Eventually the whole valley’s going to supersaturate, and we’ll all drown.”

Overhead the nighthawks were pursuing insects across the bland cloudless sky. The damn birds were yelling their heads off. “Hey, do you guys really want to go to Pittsburgh?” I asked.

“Shit, no,” from Cassy.

“So what the fuck are we going to do?” from Revington.

“Going to the river,” I intoned, “going to take my rocking chair . . .”

Just as I’d wanted him to, Revington fell in with me and we chanted the rest of it in unison: “If the blues overtake me, going to rock away from here.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Cassandra said.

“Any beer left at your place?” he asked her, and then, like an evangelist, thrust his arms straight up into the steamy air. “Ah, that it should come to this!”

I looked at him, Revington, handsome lad with his Italian loafers and razor-cut hair and pressed chinos, and I thought how oddly the wheel had turned for us. When I’d been on the Dean’s List at WVU, he’d been the peripatetic fuck-up, but now he was the one who’d managed to screw out his Bachelor of Arts degree and was off to Harvard Law School in the fall. He’d even managed to get himself affianced to the granddaughter of a goddamn senator. Her name was Alicia (Revington poured the syllables of it through his mouth like syrup: Ah-Lee-Sha); she has wonderful taste, he told me; she dressed beautifully. She was sensitive, loved children, was a real woman—and reasonably intelligent to boot! And now I was the one, my Dean’s List days long gone, who’d fucked up, had dropped out of school with my mind in tatters, who didn’t have a degree in anything and wasn’t about to be getting one, who didn’t have a girlfriend, elegant or otherwise, who, if the truth were told, hadn’t even touched a girl since Morgantown: a fat, broke, horny, unemployed, draft-eligible, Buddhist Confederate. And Revington, Cassandra, and I were rolling through this vile hot night, across the Ohio River, over Raysburg Hill, to Meadowland and Cassy’s house.

Zoë met us at the door. She’d long ago stopped wearing Cassandra’s clothes, and she’d never had Cassandra’s taste. Her hair had been set and brushed into a swingy teenage pageboy with bangs that met her eyebrows; she wore the kind of simple little dress the fashion mags were calling a “skimmer” and, to complete the Young London Look, white go-go boots fetched down from Pittsburgh in the spring—her pride and joy. “Real kid,” she’d told us, “not this plastic junk that’s showing up in town now.”

Looking at her, I found myself generating a mad conceit: strange the inevitability of process in America. Back when our presence in Vietnam had been “advisory,” my Hollywood drugstore starlet must have bought her go-go boots in England or France, and God knows how much she’d paid for them; last winter when U.S. bombers first began to pound North Vietnam, the boots (by Herbert Levine) were advertised in Vogue for a hundred and fifty dollars a pair; by March, when we sent in the Marines, you could, like Zoë, buy them at Bergdorf Goodman’s for fifty bucks; by summer, we had seventy thousand U.S. personnel in Vietnam, were flying over six hundred bombing sorties a week over the north, and go-go boots could be had at Sears for $10.95; now Johnson was talking of increasing our commitment to a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, and every girl in town looked like a majorette. I RIDE FROM TEXAS ON A BIG WHITE HORSE. “Ah, Zoë,” Revington was saying in his best Gregory Peck manner, “you look stunning, as usual.”

Zoë had long ago grown accustomed to Cassy’s male friends, their teasing, their ridiculous comments. She paid Revington absolutely no attention, but his choice of words had not been ridiculous at all; she was stunning. I much preferred the dark intricacies of Cassandra’s beauty, but I suspected that most boys would not agree with me. Zoë had always been a very pretty little girl, but while I’d been gone, she’d been wonderfully transformed—had shot up to be a good two inches taller than her sister and had grown magnificent long legs that would have done any majorette proud. If she was still something of a gawky kid, she was a gawky kid who just happened to look exactly right for the times. Now she was prancing and chattering, dragging Cassandra along behind her, to the center (I gathered) of some immense and exciting project.

From the living room Doctor Markapolous called out, “Hey there, boys,” to Revington and me. As I followed Cassy following Zoë, I saw the good doctor laid out in his usual manner before the educational TV channel, his pipe in his lap and his newspapers piled up by his chair. He sent us a wave, a gesture of invitation. Revington grinned, stepped toward him (picking up the gage), while I, sniffing titillation, trailed after the girls, headed downstairs to the recreation room—little sister’s territory.

Zoë had spread the basement with fabric—gay colors, a Fauve’s palette; it looked as though every skirt and dress she owned was piled up there. At the center of things was her sewing machine, waiting, while, on the radio, the Beatles were telling us that they felt fine. “I finished it,” Zoë was squealing at her sister.

“Great,” Cassy said, “let’s see it on you.”

“You really want to?”

“Of course I really want to.”

Zoë shot upstairs. “She sees something in a magazine she likes,” Cassandra told me, “she copies it. Doesn’t even need the pattern, just something close.” I could hear in her voice a sisterly mixture of annoyance, amusement, and affection. “She’s a lot better than I ever was.”

Zoë was back in an instant, wearing a white dress—very simple, very white, and very short, the hemline at mid-thigh. She strutted in a circle around us, showing herself off. Cassandra was laughing, “My God, Zo, you’ll get arrested.” But dresses exactly like that had been in all the magazines for at least a year. “Terrific,” I said. “It looks like a Courrèges.”

“Oh, good,” Zoë said, clapping her hands, “that’s what it’s supposed to look like.”

“Where on earth do you think you’re going to wear it?” Cassandra said.

“I didn’t make it to wear anywhere. It’s for my book.”

“Yeah, your book. Right.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Cassy. I’m serious.”

“Believe me, little sister, I know you’re serious.”

“But I am going to shorten all my skirts.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Cassandra said dryly.

Frisky Zoë trotted about, grabbing up magazines, riffling through them to show us. “Look. Do you see how short some of them are? See? Here. Look at this one. Isn’t it cute? It’s how they’re wearing them in England,” and then to me: “How are the girls wearing them in L.A.?”

“Short,” I said. “Really short. The high-school girls anyway. They’re all above the knee. Some of them are really really short.”

“Oh, Raysburg’s so out of it! How short do you think I can go?” She drew an imaginary line an inch above her knee.

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” her sister said. “Don’t listen to him; he’s a dirty old man . . . Seriously, Zo, don’t shorten everything. That’s what they want you to do. Then they’ll drop the hemlines, and you’ll have to buy a whole bunch of new skirts.”

“Listen, kid,” I said, annoyed with Cassandra for dirty old man, “I’m in touch with the Zeitgeist, so you can take it from me. Skirts are going nowhere but up.”

“See,” Zoë said triumphantly, “John knows. He’s been in L.A.”

“Yeah,” Cassy said, giving me a wicked smile, “when it comes to skirts, John knows it all. Why don’t you get him to take your pictures. He’s a photographer.”

“Worked in a camera store,” I corrected her.

“Oh, would you?” Zoë said. “That’d be so cool.”

“All I did was take passport photos,” I said, but they weren’t listening to me.

“Here, let me show you my book,” Zoë said.

She handed me what looked like a slim leather briefcase, but I’d seen enough of these things to know what it was: a fancy portable photo album that camera stores sold to aspiring young models for far too much money. I opened it and looked at her pictures. There were a few professional eight-by-tens that certified Zoë as a lovely girl indeed, but, as photographs go, none of them was better than small-town mediocre. There were half a dozen more that looked exactly like what they were: blown-up snapshots taken by her dad; the best that could be said of them was “cute.” Her book wasn’t much—even by the fairly low standards I had for comparison, but I said, “Very nice, Zoë. It’s a good start.”

Sitting behind the counter in a camera store on Sunset Boulevard, I’d seen plenty of books. I’d never understood why the girls carried them around. “That’s how they know they’re models,” Mr. Feinstein told me. He’d owned the place for thirty years; he’d seen it all. “If you’re a model, you got a book. If you got a book, you carry it around.” The girls came in for head shots. Mr. Feinstein took them into the dirty little back room where he kept a roll of seamless, a stool, and the lights set up and ready to go. “You’re beautiful, kid,” he’d murmur at them in his gravelly Brooklyn voice. “You’re a knockout, baby, I swear to God,” and they always fell for it; the plainest little Jane from the Midwest would instantly be smiling back at the lens as though the love of her life were on the other side of it. “I feel sorry for them,” Mr. Feinstein told me. “If they’re getting their head shots from the back of a camera store, they’re going nowhere.” He thought most people in L.A. were going nowhere. He was right.

I followed the girls back upstairs. Zoë was chattering about Courrèges’ space girls, Mary Quant’s show in New York, the clubs in London, THE LOOK. “Oh, Zoë, it’s too short!” her mother wailed at her.

“It’s for her book,” Cassy said in a deadpan voice. I helped myself to a beer.

“You know, Cass,” Zoë was saying, “if you cut bangs in your hair, you’d look like Françoise Hardy.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Cassandra, your language,” from Mom.

Cassandra followed me into the living room, saying under her breath, “Cassandra, your language . . . Oh, Christ. Between Zoë and the old woman, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going in this goddamned house . . . They both keep wanting to make me over. Françoise Hardy, for fuck’s sake.”

We walked into an argument so good that Cassy’s dad had turned off the tube. Revington was blathering about “our overseas commitments.” He sounded like Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. Doctor Markapolous was replying with the French, Dien Bien Phu, the Bao Di, Vietnam’s traditional distrust of China, and the stupidity of the bombing. He sounded like The New York Review of Books. I’d heard it all before. “I’m sick of this crap,” I said. “We’ve got no business in Vietnam in any capacity whatsoever, and there’s no point in talking about how we got there. All we should be talking about is how fast we can get the hell out.” I’d stopped both of them in mid-flight, and, now that I had their attention, I wanted to tack on something mad and outrageous. “We’re collecting the karma from the War of Secession.”

Revington gave me a look that said, as clearly as if he’d sent it by telegram, “Oh, you shithead,” but the doctor, always eager for a new point of view, said, “What’s that, John? What are you saying?”

“It’s that goddamn Yankee meddling again. It’s what’s built this country. Yankee meddling. If there’s somebody somewhere who isn’t just like you, you’ve got to convert them. If you can’t convert them, then you kill them. And you institute the draft so you’ll have enough cannon fodder, and you fight the bloodiest war in American history to wipe out the last hope of regionalism, to force a centralized urbanized monolith down the throat of the South . . .” and I felt myself swelling out to full Confederate oratorical rotundity: “with a thirty-year Reconstruction called thorough, and thorough it was in every sense of the word, carried on with Yankee bayonets, carried on in a manner maybe two cuts above the Nazis, and you create a defeated, screwed-up people with night in their souls. But you keep the Union together . . . that machine. And you’re off for Manifest Destiny, for the Philippines . . . and for Vietnam. And now you’ve got a Southern asshole in the White House, the kind of Southerner the Yankees made, with night in his soul. And he’s been sent there to pay back the karma. He thinks he’s going to reconstruct Vietnam, but what he’s going to do is divide the United States right down the middle, the way it hasn’t been divided since 1861.”

The good doctor is doing his best to understand my hemorrhage of words. Am I talking about states’ rights? If the Southern states had maintained their rights in the Civil War, they would have maintained slavery. If they had those rights now, they’d maintain segregation. What would be the good in that? He’s giving me a puzzled look—ah, this younger generation—while Revington, who knows me, is saying, “Oh, hell, he’s not defending slavery. It’s just Dupre’s silly fantasy. He wishes we had a dozen small ineffective nations here instead of one powerful one.”

“You’re goddamned right,” I said, “a loose confederation . . . Swiss Cantons . . . anything but this centralized juggernaut.”

I’d long ago stopped caring for facts, for sound arguments, for seeing the justice of a position; all I was trying to do was articulate a vision growing in me: waste and damnation. “Christ,” I said, “Vietnam makes me sick . . . It’s like that speech crazy Mario Savio made: there comes a time finally when it just makes you so sick you’ve got to lie down on the machinery . . .”

“Oh, Mario Savio?” Revington said. “Come on, Dupre. When they write the history books, who do you think they’re going to remember? That little drop-out demagogue Savio or a man like Clark Kerr who’s written an incisive analysis of the university?”

“They’re not going to remember either of them particularly,” Doctor Markapolous said, nailing his words into the air with his pipe stem, “You understand? Both of them will be lucky to make the history books at all. What they will say is that in the mid-sixties great changes began to take place in America . . .”

“No,” said Revington, “no great changes. Every generation’s thought that. A time of great change. No. Things will continue the way they have been. Change will be gradual the way it always has been . . . and should be in a democracy. At the core things will stay the same . . . the political process . . .” ASK NOT, ETC. He unfolded himself and stretched. “I’m going home and take a shower,” he announced, and with a cavalier wave he was gone.

“I don’t know about your friend William Revington,” the good doctor said. “He’s made peace with himself too soon. I don’t understand. I’m fifty-four years old. I’m supposed to be the conservative in this outfit.”

• • •

CASSANDRA AND I sat in the dark on the front porch glider and offered ourselves to the mosquitoes. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. Every day it’s the same fucking thing. Wake up and it’s a hundred and fifty degrees. And it never rains. And we’re all going to do the same goddamn thing we did yesterday . . . nothing. We’re going to lay around the house, or have a beer, or drive over to Ohio to have a beer. And my crazy menopausal mother will change her clothes fourteen times, all the way down to her underwear. And Zoë will be copying another dress out of a magazine, or shortening her skirts, or driving around with her boyfriend playing kissy face. And William will drop by, and he’ll be as full of shit as he was the day before. And the old man will be parked in front of the tube, and he and William will argue about Vietnam. And now that you’re back in town, you can join the show. Jesus, it’s all so boring. Have you got a cigarette?”

I pounded one out of the pack and passed it to her. “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know why I came back here.”

She gave me a somber, intensely focused look, then looked away. “I don’t know why you did either.”

I was stung. What the hell had she meant by that? Would she have preferred it if I hadn’t come back?

“I wish I could get my head shaved,” she said, lifting her hair clear of her neck. “This fucking hair’s stifling me.” Her neck was wet with perspiration; her shirt was soaked with it.

In the old days I would have simply asked her what she’d meant and she would have told me in that absolutely straightforward way of hers, but now I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. I never would have imagined that I would have trouble talking to Cassandra. She, of course, had been the main reason I’d come back to Raysburg, but I’d already been home for over a week, and I still hadn’t connected with her in any kind of real way. I had to shuffle through the deck of possibilities in my mind to find the next thing to say: “So when did Zoë start this modeling stuff?”

“Last fall. Christ, it’s a crime the way they fill those little girls’ minds up with shit. Dad let her take this Mickey Mouse modeling course for teenagers last fall . . . just to shut her up . . . but that led to Level Two . . . you know, for the really serious girls, the really talented girls. And Level Two cost a hell of a lot more, of course, and then there was Level Three, and that one cost the national debt. Dad said he’d be damned if he was going to pay for it, so she went to Mom and said, ‘Oh, Mommy, puhleeze. I have to. I just have to. It’s my career! ’ You should see all the makeup they sold her. She keeps it in a goddamn tackle box.”

I laughed. “And of course there’s plenty of job opportunities here in Raysburg.”

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous. Even Zoë knows better than that. She’s going to New York, she says, as soon as she’s out of high school. You can imagine how much Dad likes hearing that one, but . . . I don’t know. Who the hell am I to dump on her? She’s not laying around here day after day bored out of her fucking mind.”

She slumped back in the glider, put her feet up on the railing; it was a characteristic posture for her, one that plunged me instantly into a thick soup of melancholic nostalgia: ah, the miraculous and lost summer of 1960 when we’d first met—ah, the miraculous and lost summer of 1961 when we’d made out night after night like a pair of lovesick ferrets. She was wearing the little black laceup shoes that completed her evening uniform. They fit her as tightly as ballet slippers, and she wore them without socks, had worn them so much that the shapes of her little toes were clearly outlined in the soft leather. I wanted to say, “Where the hell have you gone, Cassy?” but I didn’t.

OK, I thought, we’ve done Zoë, now let’s do Revington. “You think William’s really going to marry the senator’s granddaughter?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. It gives him something to do.”

“What’s she like? You’ve met her, haven’t you?”

“Ah-Lee-Sha? Sure, I’ve met her. William brought her up here over spring break. She’s . . . I couldn’t believe she was for real . . . OK, she’s a little ice blond via her hairdresser. Very much the lady. Great figure. Great clothes. And the accent . . . my God, you should hear it. This mush-mouthed molasses bullshit, and . . . Oh, Christ, the country-club set. Horses. Tennis. She goes to Hollis. Her girl friends call her ‘Lissy.’ She’s like one of Fitzgerald’s characters . . . I think in The Great Gatsby . . . the one who looks like she’s always balancing something fragile on the tip of her chin.”

“Hey, that’s a good one. And she’s really a senator’s granddaughter?”

“Oh, you better believe it. Their whole family’s involved in politics. You know how things are downstate . . . crooked as a dog’s hind leg. And William just loves it. Thinks he’s staring right into the heart of the American political system. And God knows, he probably is.”

“I don’t know how he does it. I could have lived my whole life and never even met a senator’s granddaughter.”

“Oh, sure you know how he does it. He’s a Revington. He met her at some fucking country-club dance . . . you know, a cotillion or some damn thing . . . and then he’s so goddamned sexy.”

I shot my cigarette away into the dark. “I’m going home,” I said. “Maybe I can read or something.”

• • •

DRIVING MY mother’s old clunker Dodge over Raysburg Hill back to the Island, I was, once again, reciting my private litany: Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. I wasn’t sure I knew Cassandra anymore. Yes, just who was it that was hiding out now behind the smart-ass persona, looking out at the world with penetrating grey eyes ringed with fine black lines like a cat’s? Nobody at nineteen could be quite as jaded, bored, cynical, worldly-wise, and damn well existentially flattened as she appeared to be at the moment, so it had to be a consciously chosen role, but always before she’d invited me backstage to discuss the nuances of her performance, and now I felt firmly excluded. I used to think I was closer to Cassandra than anybody. At dawn at the top of North High Street in Morgantown we’d stepped outside of time—by God, we’d fused together like the two halves of Plato’s egg—but was that moment of mystical union still as precious to her as it was to me? She’d only been sixteen, and I hadn’t done very well at keeping in touch since then—and, of course, I’d come back to Raysburg looking like Fatty Arbuckle’s little brother.

I parked the car in front of my parents’ apartment, but I couldn’t bring myself to go inside yet. I should never have come back to Raysburg. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. Going nowhere, I wandered up Front Street headed for the bridge. Dealing out the choices of my life like so many cards, laying them down with a snap like the riverboat gambler in my novel. GO BACK TO MORGANTOWN IN THE FALL. What, go back to the place where I lost my goddamn mind? OK, DON’T GO BACK TO MORGANTOWN. STAY IN RAYSBURG AND GET A JOB. What job? Stay in Raysburg and get drafted is more like it. OK, SO GET DRAFTED. ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ETC. Are you kidding? WELL THEN, APPLY FOR CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR STATUS. As what religion? Buddhist? “And just exactly which temple do you attend, Mr. Dupre?” BE A HERO, THE MARTYRED PACIFIST, GO TO JAIL. Screw that!

But in the meantime: Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. What it comes down to, finally, is not getting through the rest of my life, but merely surviving the rest of the summer: how am I going to get through tonight? A cold six-pack in the refrigerator and rock ’n roll on the radio and the excellent Mr. Cash’s The Mind of the South? The latest issue of Vogue? And Revington is sexy, is he? The bastard. Pulling that one out, finally: even Cassandra thinks he’s sexy, and, goddamn it, he’s always been sexy, always had that sense of command—one of the Revingtons—and now he’s perfecting it: I RIDE FROM TEXAS ON A BIG WHITE HORSE. Girls must like it. And suddenly, here are girls, as I look up from my preoccupation to find myself passing through a bevy of them; they’re hurrying, giggling, out too late, homeward: a gaggle of them as alike as if they’d been issued uniforms—blouses, shorts, and white go-go boots—pubescent majorettes. Hey mister, IS THAT YOUR HORSE? Revington’s dry edgy voice in my ear: “Ciao, Marcello.” I hadn’t seen him coming; he’d pulled over next to me, was leaning out the window of the car, posed, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. It didn’t feel a bit like coincidence.

“Evening, William,” I said, walked around to the passenger’s side and got in. “Another lovely evening in beautiful Raysburg, Queen of the Panhandle.”

“Indeed,” he said, putting the car in gear.

“How’d you find me?”

“Elemental. Your car was at your place, but your mom said you weren’t. Where else would you be?”

We were aimed right back to the bar in Ohio where we’d started. “What is this Confederate crap, Dupre?” Revington was saying; “you’re not any more of a Confederate than I am.”

“It’s my novel,” I said. “If you’re writing about Confederates, you’ve got to think like one. And while we’re on the subject of playing the role, how did you turn into such a fucking hawk?”

He laughed, then intoned, “They had their Spanish Civil War, we have our Vietnam . . . Yeah, so much for glory.”

As he drove, I looked over at him, at his profile; yes, he was as handsome as an actor. “Something honorable,” he muttered, a line from Lawrence of Arabia he’d been quoting ever since we’d seen the movie. “Yeah, John, I know it’s a stupid war. God knows, I know it. But shit, Johnson’s doing the best he can. He inherited a mess . . .”

“Crap.”

“Yeah. I know what you think, but I don’t agree. He’s a consummate politician. He’s not going to make any more mistakes than he has to.”

“Crap, again.”

“Fuck, let’s not get into that. It’s just that I’ve been thinking . . . Well, sometimes it comes down to tradition . . . something honorable, you know? And there’s been a Revington in every war this country’s ever fought.”

Though his voice had been heavy with melodrama, I felt that I had, finally, heard something from close to the heart of him. “Maybe,” I said, “this will be the first one without a Revington.”

“I’m not so sure. I keep thinking, what the hell business have I to go merrily off to law school? I should be in uniform.”

“Oh Jesus, man.”

“And then I think it’s not going to make any difference anyway. Pretty soon we’re all going to be in uniform whether we like it or not.”

“Oh shit, they’re not going to draft you out of law school.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Dupre. We’ll both be in by winter.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“I don’t see how you’re going to avoid it.”

I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t sure how I was going to avoid it either. “Did your family really fight for the Confederacy?” he asked suddenly.

I laughed. “Well, that depends on who you believe. My father always claimed that the First John Henry Dupre . . . after he’d killed a man in a knife fight down in New Orleans . . . or maybe it was a gun fight . . . anyhow, the story was that he came up to Kentucky and rode with Morgan. You know, John Hunt Morgan, the famous Confederate raider? But then again, my old man might have made the whole thing up . . . But on my mother’s side there’s no doubt. My great-grandfather Wheelwright,” I said slowly, “was a drummer in the Ohio National Guard.”

“A what?”

“A drummer. You know, fuckhead, he beat on a drum.”

Revington began to chuckle. “And in the Ohio National . . .”

“Yeah, in the Ohio National Guard,” I said flatly.

He burst into laughter. “Oh, Jesus, man, he beat the drum for the Union.”

“Shhhh,” I said, putting my finger to my lips, “don’t tell anyone.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful. That really is. That’s why I like you, Dupre, that’s why we’re friends. We’re both such fucking poseurs.”

Coming into it out of the hot night, I found the cool bar such a relief that I settled down to stay there till it closed. “This fucking town is driving me nuts,” Revington said, “and Alicia’s in Europe till the end of the month.” Ah-Lee-Sha.

“That must be nice for her.”

“Yeah, she was so excited to cross the great water. Just like a little kid. It was touching . . . It’s supposed to ‘broaden her horizons,’ but I think her parents just wanted to split us up for a while,” and then, in a voice that was a parody of a radio soap opera: “to see if our love is real.”

“That sounds positively Victorian.”

“They’re like that. It took me a while to believe they’re for real.” He grinned at me. “Hey, do you want to see some pictures?”

He pulled an envelope out of his back pocket, withdrew some Kodacolor snaps, and spread them on the table before me, fanning them out like cards. Alicia with her parents, Alicia alone, Alicia with Revington. The wind was blowing through Revington’s hair; he already looked the part of the young lawyer. Alicia wore what appeared to be an expensive suit: beautifully cut, young but not outrageous (the skirt just skimming the tops of her kneecaps), and, of course, white go-go boots, the Vogue hundred-and-fifty dollar pair I suspected; now that they’d made it down to the level of Sears, I was sure that she wouldn’t be caught dead in them. Money, I thought, she’s used to lots of it. That’s what will keep Revington on the straight and narrow. A beautiful girl to be sure, one of Lyndon’s majorettes. It felt like a trap to me (I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW), but I was so envious of Revington’s sure charted life, of his classy girlfriend, that I was momentarily sick with it, nauseated. “Very nice,” I said.

He retrieved the pictures, folded them away. “I miss her,” he said, a far gaze in his eyes. “Sometimes I think I’d like to get her pregnant before I go . . .”

“Go where?”

He pointed vaguely toward the bar, conjuring up the jungles of Vietnam. “I think the British fliers must have felt like that,” he said in his World War II movie voice. “They knew they weren’t going to come back . . . wanted to leave something of themselves behind for the world . . . something honorable . . . a baby.”

I was so angry with him I couldn’t even laugh. I lit a cigarette. “Get off it, Revington. You’re not going anywhere except to law school.”

“No, Dupre. That’s not our destiny any longer. We’re all going to be in uniform . . . the entire generation.”

“Revington, what the hell’s happened to you? You used to be so crazy.”

• • •

MY MEMORIES of him were as clear as any of the snapshots he’d just showed me. When, scared witless, I’d first appeared at the Raysburg Military Academy, Revington had been the only one of my classmates who’d bothered to talk to me. What the already supremely self-assured class wise-ass could have seen in shy, bookish, painfully thin (and still somewhat girlish) me, I was never sure, but he soon won me with his talent for imitating movie actors, politicians, and our teachers, for quoting great sluices of rhetoric from Shakespeare to Winston Churchill. He’d call me up and announce himself: “Hello, this is William Revington,” his delivery a trenchant drawl, half Rhett Butler, half British Intelligence. Then I’d begun to imitate him, echoing back in the same tones, “Hello, this is John Dupre.” Until finally, he’d begun to imitate me imitating him. As we’d become close friends, we’d cultivated these privately convoluted routines—reflections of reflections.

It’s Christmas vacation a few years back. I’m still at WVU, and Revington is still nominally at Yale, although he hasn’t set foot in New Haven in quite a while. We’re sitting in a young lady’s living room. It doesn’t matter which particular young lady; she’s merely one of Revington’s female audiences.

Alone with me, he speaks of his tours of America in a wry selfdeprecating way, making himself the butt of every joke, a goofy Li’l Abner stumbling through an ominous Burroughsian world. It’s a man-to-man tone; he knows full well that I will supply the unstated heroism. But now, for public consumption, his manner is altered. He is staring glassily at the wall. He’s just blown into town, has been awake for twenty-four hours, and “Shit, I’m not sleeping much these days anyway . . .” dismissing the concept of sleep with a pushing gesture, Camel cigarette in hand, fingers stained brown to the knuckle. Glancing at me, he deposits, in parenthesis, “They say in the last few months of his life that Modigliani was seen to be heavily salting all the food he ate.” Pause. “It scared the shit out of me when I read it. I’ve been piling salt on everything.” And he throws that away with the same laconic gesture. He’s talking about New York; he and a friend (“a beautiful lost sensitive madman”) had been stopped by a Negro pimp in Times Square. A detective had come over and asked the pimp to stand against the wall. “It was like a play that had been rehearsed too many times,” he’s saying, “rehearsed over and over again until the actors are totally bored.” He falls silent, as though he has become totally bored. His eyes fuse over again; he’s left us, to visit what land of Boschian horrors or delights we can only speculate.

“William?” the young lady says. No reaction. “William?”

He snaps around to look at her. “Oh, sorry . . . that seems to be happening to me a lot lately. Sorry . . . What was I saying?” He’s off again, pronouncing these magic names resonant with numina: The Port Authority, Harlem, The A Train, The Thalia, The Fat Black Pussy Cat. Now he is telling us that a model from Seventeen bought him lunch. “I hate to drop names,” he says, giving me a weighted look, “but she lives on Bleeker Street.” And he’s gone again.

“William? William!”

“What? . . . Oh, sorry . . .”

“Have you been drinking?” she asks him.

“Ask John how much I’ve had to drink.”

“Not a drop,” I say, playing the straight man, as always.

In a fatigued voice he begins to explain to her that he is tired, begins to tell her exactly what he has been doing that has made him so tired. His tiredness, his lassitude, his exhaustion is tremendous, but he will muster the effort to tell her about it; he will exhaust himself still further in the search for the origins of the exhaustion, knowing all the while that the enterprise is futile. Dull girl, she can’t perceive the beauty of the performance, interrupts to ask, “Have you seen Barbara?” That’s his old high-school girlfriend, “that wench,” as he calls her.

“This disturbs me,” he says wearily. “Everybody’s trying to hang onto the good old days . . . the good old friendships. Emotionally she’s still in high school. When will she realize that she’s got to accept a quiet mundane existence? She’s probably rolling around in an alley right now, dead drunk. Yes . . . she’s smashed. She’s throwing beer bottles at the moon and listening to them break. She’s tilting them back and letting the beer run through her hair . . .”

“Oh, William, you know she’s at the Oval, perfectly all right.”

“She’s stewed,” he says dogmatically. “I just don’t want to play games anymore. I played games with her for years. I just don’t want to do it anymore. She’s got to accept an ordinary life . . . and I . . . I’ve got to move on.”

Good show, I think. Dean Moriarity. Yes, yes!

• • •

NOW I looked at him across the table: that lean face I knew so well. We’d gone through a lot together. “Remember how you used to stagger down the streets of Morgantown dead drunk, yelling the opening lines from Howl ?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“The only time I’ve ever got stoned in my life was with you, asshole . . . when you showed up with that little bag of tea in your boot, twenty-four hours on the road from Boston.”

“That’s right,” he said, laughing. “It was a fucking bleak time, but there was something beautiful in it.” He grimaced. “It’s not easy, John, you know that?”

“What?”

“Growing up. Shit, you can’t stay twenty forever.”

“But you don’t have to be forty before you’re thirty.”

He grinned. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“Yeah, that’s what I think you’re doing.”

“I don’t know . . . but I think I’m finally on the right track now. If I can bring to politics something of what Kennedy meant to me . . .” His eyes glazed over the way they used to in the old days; then he came back, looked at me sharply: “How the hell did you get so fat? I think you’re fucking off, John. I think you’re drifting.”

“You’re goddamn right I’m drifting,” I told him, and I launched into fabulous tales of my drift. The high-proof Ohio beer was flowing nicely, and we helped it along from time to time with shots of Irish whiskey (Hemingway’s drink, Revington said, and he was paying for everything by then). I told him the story of the demon trucker who’d driven me from Huntington to Morgantown—but I moved it up in time and changed its location, inserted it into my trip to the west coast. Although I’d ridden the Greyhound to L.A., I told him I’d hitchhiked there. Although my guitar was gathering dust in my parents’ place on the Island, I told him I’d pawned it in Denver—so we could chant together (along with Kerouac): “Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die!”

“Why the hell’d you go to L.A.?” he asked me.

I couldn’t believe how beautifully he’d set me up. “My health,” I said in my flattest Bogart voice. “I went to L.A. for the waters.”

He got it instantly: “Waters? What waters? There’s no waters in L.A.”

Howling with laughter, we screamed out the next line in unison: “I WAS MISINFORMED.”

“You want to know what L.A. was like?” I said. “I’ll give you the perfect metaphor for what L.A. was like.”

What I told him was a true story, although I can’t say that I didn’t embellish it a little around the edges. There’d been a particularly bleak period during my stay in the City of Angels when I ate all of my meals in a restaurant directly across from where I was living (“I hate to drop names,” I told him) on Sunset Boulevard. It was one of those big fancy-ass glass-front drive-ins that never closed, and I loved the place. “Clean and well-lighted?” Revington said.

“You got it,” I said. And even if I stayed up half the night working on my Civil War novel, I knew that food was always available—a great consolation to me. I ate the same thing at every meal: a hot turkey sandwich with gravy. I liked the ritual of it.

One night around four in the morning, a girl came in and sat down next to me. She was pretty enough, late teens or early twenties, scrawny as a plucked chicken, with an antique look about her as though she’d stepped out of a high-school annual from the fifties: a weirdly convoluted hairdo with kiss curls, a little blue dress with puff sleeves and a droopy skirt. The dress had stains down the front and looked as though she’d slept in it. She was carrying a battered cardboard suitcase, and, by God, nobody was going to steal that damn thing from her; she plunked it down on the floor so close that she could keep the toe of one of her patent leather shoes pressed firmly up against the side of it. The moment she sat down, she started talking. She had an accent pungent enough to strip the paint off the walls; I guessed it to be Tennessee or Kentucky or even downstate West Virginia. She was right on the edge of making her big break into the movies, she said. She’d been seeing agents, producers, directors. Everyone was enthusiastic. Tomorrow she’d probably get to take her first screen test. In the meantime, could I buy her something to eat?

“Sure,” I said, “order what you want.”

She ordered fries and a Coke, went on telling me about the agents and the producers and the directors. She was wearing a blue ribbon around her neck. It seemed an odd touch even for her thoroughly odd outfit. As she talked, she got more excited. She gestured; her head bobbed up and down. The ribbon slid out of place, and I saw that someone had once tried to cut her throat.

I could see that Revington liked that tale—probably even well enough to tell it as his own. “Los Angeles,” he said, nodding, “yes, yes.” We ordered another round.

He told me that his father had pulled strings to get him into WVU, that the moment he’d got to Morgantown, he’d rented a ratty little apartment just like mine and put up a huge sign over his desk: DON’T FUCK UP AGAIN. And he’d worked his ass off. “I thought when you heard I was down there, you’d come back,” he said.

“I thought of it,” I said, although I hadn’t.

Ah, Morgantown—now that we’d both put the damned place behind us, it gleamed in our memories like a misty slate-grey Shangri-La. Ah, The Seventh Circle, cheeseburgers at Johnny’s, floating around with Cohen in the old days, how crazy he was with his throwing knives and his cream sodas—and Marge Levine, did I keep in touch with her? “No,” I said, “I don’t keep in touch with anybody.”

“Cohen went back to Harvard,” he said.

“Yeah, he did,” I said. “I was with him when he decided to do it.”

He didn’t come up with the obvious next line, so I supplied it for him: “I know. Everybody’s in school but me.”

“Had your physical yet?” ASK NOT, ETC.

“Yeah, in L.A. Oh, sweet Jesus, it was insane. They cranked hundreds of us through . . . God knows, maybe thousands . . . in less than two hours. They checked our hearts by tapping us briefly with a stethoscope. Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding. You know how they examined us for hemorrhoids? We stood in a circle, about fifty of us, with our pants down and the cheeks of our asses spread, while a doctor passed behind us at a dead run. Some jerk looked at my feet. ‘No, no, no, they’re not the least bit flat.’ Christ, William, they’re flat as pancakes. They wouldn’t believe anything I told them about the asthma I’d had when I was a kid . . .”

“Did you have asthma when you were a kid?”

“No, not really . . . But anyhow, I’m 1-A and fit to serve.”

“Congratulations. Now listen to me, you dumb fuck. Go straight back to WVU and register for the fall semester. And then notify your draft board. I’ll even drive you down to Morgantown.”

• • •

WE CLOSED down the bar. We returned to a night that had not become any cooler. We were hopelessly plastered by then, and I’d begun to think, Christ, what did I ever have against this guy? He’s my best friend.

“Hey,” he said, “let’s go wake Cassy up.”

The Markapolous house was dark, but we walked around to the backyard and found one lit window on the second floor. “Yep,” I said, “she’s still awake. I knew she would be.”

“OK,” he said, “boost me up onto the porch roof.” He took off his loafers. I knelt down, and he climbed onto my shoulders. The first thing I did was dump him onto the grass. I lay there giggling. “Jesus,” he said, “Come on, John, you can do better than that.” We tried again. He hooked his arms over the roof. I never would have imagined Revington doing it, but now he was giggling too. “Steady, you son of a bitch, you’ll break my head.” Then he was scrambling on up the roof, reaching with one long arm to scratch on the window screen.

Cassandra’s voice: “Jesus fucking Christ, you madman! What are you doing?” She sounded delighted.

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Revington said. “I’m in the process of falling off your roof.”

“Oh, John,” she said, seeing me standing below, “are you there too?” Was she disappointed to see me?

She let us in. Barefoot, her eye makeup scrubbed away, wearing pink cotton pajamas, she looked like a young girl, but she was carrying the book she’d been reading, one finger in it to mark the place: Camus, The Stranger. “Still reading that stuff?” Revington asked her.

“It’s better than watching television. Jesus, where have you guys been? God, are you drunk.”

“Got anything to eat?” I said.

We settled down around the kitchen table, and I constructed a massive sandwich out of every kind of lunch meat they had in the fridge. I helped myself to some leftover potato salad and a glass of buttermilk. Revington popped a beer. “We should enjoy this while we can,” he said. “Our last days of freedom . . .”

“Oh, fuck,” Cassandra said. “What are you going to do, William, enlist?”

“It might be the thing to do . . . something honorable . . .”

“Honorable, my ass. But yeah, William, it just might be the thing for you to do. With your family connections, you’d ride out your four years behind a desk. And a good war record wouldn’t hurt your political career any.”

“Listen to that salty bitch, will you?” he said to me. “Look, Cass, we’ve got to grow up sometime. We’ve got to do something.”

“Sure, yeah, we’ve got to do something. I’ve got three more years at Bennington to do.”

Chomping away on my sandwich, sweating in the too-bright, too-yellow kitchen, I realized just how drunk I was: pissed to the hairline. Revington wasn’t in any great shape either. “John’s going back to WVU,” he announced owlishly.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “That plan will last for about a day.”

He ignored her. “Look,” he said to me, “if you could just hang in there and get through . . . if you could just get that goddamned degree . . . you could go to law school. Shit, with your grades, you could get in anywhere . . . even Harvard. You’d like the practice of law, I really think you would. Not law school. Nobody likes law school. But the practice of the law . . .”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. I didn’t have the remotest interest in the law. I despised the law. But I was drunk enough, feeling such camaraderie with Revington, that it seemed like an excellent idea. “Maybe . . .”

“We could go into practice together,” said Revington. “We could do civil rights work . . .”

“Oh, my God,” Cassandra said, “if you clowns want to do civil rights work, why don’t you go down to Mississippi and register voters? You give me a pain in the ass, both of you. Civil rights work? Jesus. You’re just going to be another crooked politician like all the rest of them,” she said to Revington, “and if you’re crooked enough you’ll end up governor of the state”; and to me, “You’d last in law school about ten minutes. And you’re not going to write the next Gone With the Wind either. If you write anything, it’ll be ad copy for Eberhardts’ so they can sell more clothes to people like my silly little sister . . . And me . . . I’ll be pushing a baby carriage around some goddamned New England suburb.”

I was angry at her; glancing at Revington, I saw that he was too. But we had to laugh. She laughed with us. “We’re all caught,” she said as though telling us another joke. “We’re inescapably middleclass, all fucking three of us. And we’re goddamn well caught.”

A look passed between Revington and me, the message: What does she know? What can she understand of us, of our sorrows (young Werthers that we were), this beautiful girl? Our companion, but always, at the crucial shearing point, apart. Nobody was going to draft her.

As we drove drunkenly home, as we floated maudlin and gurgling home, talking about practicing law together, talking about the old days, he took my hand (peculiar gesture, that handshake), said, “Marcello . . . buonanotte.” I climbed out of the car, stumbled in to bed, saw by the thermometer on my mother’s sewing table that it was eighty-seven degrees, by my clock that it was four in the morning. It was late enough, and I was drunk enough, to sleep.

• • •

I WOKE the next afternoon, deep-fried in my own sweat, thirsty enough to drink a lake, thinking: Law school! Jesus Christ, I must have been out of my mind. ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU. Revington had been right, of course: I was fucking up; I was drifting. For the first few months after I’d dropped out of WVU, the world had still seemed shot through with dazzling possibilities. Cohen and I had run on the beach; he’d taught me how to meditate. But then, at the end of the summer, he’d gone back to Harvard, and I’d stayed in Miami. Why? I still didn’t have the answer. Over the years, Cohen seemed to have applied his motto “words are no damned good” even to writing letters; his messages had become more laconic, more infrequent (approaching, perhaps, the silence he’d always longed for); in a recent note, he’d said: “One thing appears to be certain: we’re not going to be young saints.” Saints? Hell, I would have settled for a reasonable facsimile of normal. Cohen had a girlfriend. I’d met her briefly, and liked her: a lean tall no-nonsense Cliffy who played field hockey and reminded me of Natalie. But I hadn’t been within ten feet of a girl, hadn’t even asked out the pretty teenage waitress who’d obviously been interested in me—that’s back when I’d been lean, brown, and golden haired, and that, my friends, was a long time ago. What had I been doing? Nothing that I could see beyond generating four hundred pages of raw writing that was, I knew, still a hell of a long way from being publishable. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable.

I’d been drinking so much that I’d long ago stopped having hangovers, merely arose aching and dull, needing Bromo, a pot of coffee, and, to settle my stomach, my usual breakfast of corn flakes and canned peaches swimming in heavy cream. Every day I’d ask my father how he was doing. He’d always answer, “Naw tah goo,” which I’d learned to translate into, “Not too good.” Nothing moved on the TV screen until evening when my mother turned it on for him, but he sat in front of it nonetheless, smoking cigarettes and watching its blank eye. One side of him remained paralyzed; he drooled occasionally down the rigid right side of his face. He’d been making a fair recovery; then, while I’d been in L.A., he’d had another stroke, a small one, but enough to blast away all but the last vestiges of speech. I sometimes wondered what he was thinking. Whatever it was, I’d never get to hear it. He did talk to me sometimes, but his words were thick, wet, and garbled. I was never absolutely certain I’d got the gist of them. All I could do with him was sit in front of the tube and watch reruns of Johnny Yuma. Strange to see him there: stopped: as if someone had driven a nail through a pocket watch.

While I’d been in L.A., my mother had sold our house. For years—while I’d been down at WVU, and then, later, while I’d been rambling pointlessly around the country—I’d always counted on that house, had always known it would be there waiting for me, everything in my bedroom exactly as I’d left it, but now we were living in a run-down apartment farther up Front Street and everything of mine was packed away in cartons and stored in a locker in the basement. There were only two bedrooms, one for each of my parents; when I’d arrived, my mother had moved into the front bedroom with my father, giving me her bedroom. I used her sewing table for a desk. When I paced up and down, smoking and trying to write, I couldn’t avoid seeing myself, fat and bleary-eyed, looking back from the mirror on her dresser. The scent of her powder—lilac and violets—was everywhere. She’d stacked a little white bookcase with her Wedgwood bowls, her blue Fostoria glass, her porcelain figurines. During the heat wave, she kept fans going in every room, but not even a gale could have cooled that back bedroom. Out of a morbid desire to know exactly how bad things could get, I’d put a stand-up thermometer next to my typewriter; by the middle of the afternoon, it was usually registering over a hundred.

It wasn’t just the house; she’d sold everything valuable, even her piano. She was working as a librarian’s assistant, and I guessed that her piss-ass salary must have been most of our income (or even, God knows, all of it), but I didn’t ask. She’d give me a few bucks from time to time—enough to buy beer and cigarettes— and when I thanked her for it, she’d always make a vague gesture of dismissal: “Oh, honey, I wish it was more.” She’d come home from the library and cook dinner for the three of us (for me it was lunch and sometimes even breakfast); I helped her out by doing the shopping. She never told me to be careful with the money, but I pinched every penny. We ate spaghetti and macaroni, rice and beans, Salisbury steak and pork chops.

My mother seemed to think it was important that I “go through my things.” She must have said that to me a dozen times. At first, I didn’t understand why—those cartons buried in the basement locker weren’t bothering anybody—but eventually I got it: going through your things is something you do before you leave. I’d dream up yarns about my future plans, making it all up as I went, look over and catch her tilting oddly away. It wasn’t as though she didn’t care. She’d always been, in some indefinable but crucial way, never quite at home for me, and now she seemed even more remote. She talked about the people she met at work; she talked about my father—and cried once: “Oh, John, it breaks my heart. He used to be such an immaculate man!”—but she never complained about herself. As I had my whole life, I tried to read her feelings from the vague clues she left floating in the air, elusive as butterflies. I never got the feeling that she was eager for me to leave, but she certainly didn’t want me hanging around forever. I guessed that all she wanted was for me to do something, preferably (although not necessarily) somewhere else—that is, simply to take care of myself. I suppose I could have looked for a job, but if I had, it would have been an admission that I was going to stay in Raysburg for a while, and I had no intention of staying in Raysburg for a while. But I had nowhere else to go. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable.