Men and Cartoons

The Vision

I FIRST MET THE KID KNOWN AS THE VISION at second base, during a kickball game in the P.S. 29 gymnasium, fifth grade. That's what passed for physical education in 1974: a giant rubbery ball, faded red and pebbled like a bath mat, more bowled than pitched in the direction of home plate. A better kick got the ball aloft, and a fly was nearly uncatchable — after the outfielder stepped aside, as he or she invariably did, nearly anything in the air was a home run. Everyone fell down, there'd be a kid on his ass at each base as you went past. Alternately, a mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher, and you were thrown out at first.

The Vision booted a double. His real name was Adam Cressner, but he believed himself or anyway claimed to be the Vision: the brooding, superpowered android from Marvel Comics' Avengers. The comic-book Vision had the power to vary the density of his body, becoming a ghost if he wished to float through walls or doors, becoming diamond hard if he wished to stop bullets like Superman. Adam Cressner couldn't do any of this. This day he wasn't even wearing his cape or costume, but under black curls his broad face was smeared unevenly with red food dye, as it always was. I was fascinated. The Vision had come to be taken for granted at Public School 29, but I'd never seen him up close.

“Nice kick,” I ventured, to Adam Cressner's back. The Vision had assumed a stance of readiness, one foot on the painted base, hands dangling between his knees Lou Brock — style. “Ultron-5 constructed me well,” replied the Vision in the mournful monotone of a synthetic humanoid. Before I could speak again the ball was in the air, and Adam Cressner had scooted home to score, not pausing as he rounded third.

Now the Vision was a grown man in a sweatshirt moving an open Martini & Rossi carton-load of compact discs into the basement entrance of the next-door brownstone. I spotted Captain Beefheart, Sonny Sharrock, Eugene Chadbourne. I'd been returning from the corner bodega with a quart of milk when I recognized him instantly, even without his red face and green hood, or the yellow cape he'd worn in winter months. “Adam Cressner?” I asked. I made it a question to be polite: it was Adam Cressner.

“Do I know you?” Cressner's hair was still curly and loose, his eyes still wild blue.

“Not really. We went to school together.”

“Purchase?”

“P.S. 29, fifth grade.” I pointed thumbwise in the direction of Henry Street. I didn't want to say: You were the Vision, man! But I supposed in a way I'd just said it. “Joel Porush.”

“Possibly I remember you.” He said this with a weird premeditated hardness, as if not remembering but possibly remembering was a firm policy.

“Migrated back to the old neighborhood?”

Cressner placed the box at the slate lip of the basement stairwell and stepped around his gate to take my hand. “By the time we had a down payment we could barely afford this part of the city,” he said. “But Roberta doesn't care that I grew up around here. She became entranced with the neighborhood reports in the City section.”

“Wife?”

“Paramour.”

“Ah.” This left me with nothing to say except, “I should have you guys over for drinks.”

The Vision lifted one Nimoy-esque eyebrow.

“When you get in and catch your breath, of course.” You and the paramour.

I met Roberta at the border of our two backyards, the next Sunday. The rear gardens through the middle of the block were divided by rows of potted plants but no fence, allowing easy passage of cats and conversation. These communal yards were a legacy from the seventies that most new owners hadn't chosen to reverse. I had a basement renter's usual garden privileges, and was watering the plants which formed the border when Roberta Jar appeared at her back door. She introduced herself, and explained that she and Cressner had bought the house.

“Yes, I met Adam a few days ago,” I said. “I know him, actually. From around here.”

“Oh?”

I'd supposed he'd told of our encounter in front, mentioned being recognized by a schoolmate. Now I had to wonder whether to explain Cressner's childhood fame. “We were at grade school together, on Henry Street. Long before this was a fashionable address. Surely he's walked you past his alma mater.”

“Adam doesn't reminisce,” said Roberta Jar coolly and, I thought, strangely. The assertion which could have been fond or defiant had managed to be neither. I thought of how Adam had possibly remembered, the week before.

“Funny, I do nothing else,” I said. I hoped it was a charming line. Roberta Jar didn't smile, but her eyes flashed a little encouragement.

“Does it pay well?” she asked.

“Only when something gets optioned for the movies.”

“How often is that?”

“It's like the lottery,” I said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing. But that one time and you're golden.”

I'd been blunted from the fact of my instinctive attraction to Roberta Jar, in those first moments, by her towering height. Roberta was six two, or three, I calculated, and with none of that hunched manner with which women apologize for great height or sizable breasts. So I'd been awed before being struck. By this time, though, I was struck too. Paramour-pyramid-pylon, I fooled with in my head.

I mentioned again having the two of them over for a drink. My evenings were very free since parting from Gia Maucelli, and I was stuck on what I'd blurted to Adam Cressner and had visualized ever since — a grown-up encounter, involving wine and sophisticated talk. No longer a couple, I still socialized like one in my imagination. Cressner and his tall woman would visit my apartment for drinks. They'd see the couple I'd been by Gia's phantom-limb absence, and ratify the couple I'd likely be again by the fact of themselves. In other words, perhaps Roberta Jar had a friend she could set me up with.

“Maybe,” she said, utterly disinterested. “Or you could come along tonight. We're having a few people in.”

“A housewarming party?”

“Actually, we're playing a game. You'd like it.”

“Truth-or-dare, spin-the-bottle sort of thing?”

“More interesting than that. It's called Mafia. You should come — I think we still need a fifteenth.”

For bridge or a dinner party you might need a fourth or a sixth — Roberta Jar and Adam Cressner needed a fifteenth. That was how close to essential I'd been encouraged to feel myself to be.

“How do you play Mafia?”

“It's hard to explain, but not to play.”

I turned up with wine, still imposing my paradigm, but it was a beer thing I'd turned up at. Adam Cressner ushered me into the parlor, which was restored — new white marble fireplace and mantel, freshly remodeled plaster-rosette ceiling, blond polished floor — but unfurnished, and full instead of gray metal folding chairs like those you'd find in a church basement. The chairs were packed with Adam and Roberta's friends, all drinking from bottles and laughing noisily, too caught up to bother with introductions — when I counted I found myself precisely fifteenth. Roberta Jar was part of the circle, tall in her chair. I wondered if she stood taller than Adam — this was the first time I'd seen them together.

Adam had just been explaining the game, and he started again for me. I was one of four or five in the group who'd never played. Others threw in comments and suggestions as Adam explained the rules. “I'll be the narrator,” Adam told us. “That means I'm not playing the game, but leading you through it.”

“We want you to play, Adam,” someone shouted. “Someone else can narrate. We've played, we know how.”

“No, you need a strong narrator,” said Adam. “You're an unruly bunch.” I imagined I heard in his tone a hint of the Vision's selfless patronage of humanity.

According to the rules of Mafia, the group of fourteen comprised a “village”—except that three of us were “mafia” instead: false villagers working to bring the village down. These identities were assigned by dealt cards, black for village, red for mafia. The game then unfolded in cycles of “night” and “day.” Night was when we closed our eyes and lowered our heads—“The village is asleep,” Adam explained — with the exception of the three mafiosi. They instead kept their eyes open, and by an exchange of glances silently conspired to select a villager to kill. The victim would be informed of his or her death by the narrator, when night was over, and then make an orderly exit from the game.

Day, by contrast, was chaos, a period of free talk and paranoia among the sincere and baffled villagers — who, of course, included three dissembling mafiosi. Each day closed with the village agreeing by democratic vote on a suspect to banish. This McCarthyesque ritual lynching brought about night, and another attack from the mafia. And so on. The mafia won if they winnowed the village down to two or three, a number they could dominate in any voting, before the village purged all mafiosi from its ranks. It seemed to me like relentless jargonish nonsense, but I worked on a beer (telling Roberta the wine was “for the cellar”), checked out the women, and allowed myself to be swept into the group's flow. We began our first day in the village, peppered by Adam-the-narrator's portentous reminders, such as “Dead, keep your silence.” I'd drawn a black card: villager.

Our village was young and boisterous, full of hot, beer-bright faces whose attachments I couldn't judge. It was also splendidly bloodthirsty. “It pretty much doesn't matter who we vote out on the first day,” some veteran player announced. “We don't have any information yet.” I wondered how we were meant to gather information at any point in the agitated cross talk, but never mind. A regular named Barth was quickly exiled, on grounds of past performance — he'd proven such a generally deceptive player that he couldn't be trusted now. Roberta, who with her stature and chesty volume was strongly dominant in the village, led this charge. Barth succumbed to our lynch mob under groaning protest. “Night” fell, we “slept,” and when day came again Adam announced that a woman named Kelly had been taken out by the mafia.

Kelly's murder drew shouts and giggles of surprise. Why had they picked her? Perhaps this was the information that would lead us to an informed lynching, instead of Barth's whimsical sacrifice. The village again plunged into an uproar of accusations and deflection. I turned to the woman beside me, a sylphlike girl with dyed-black shortish hair, who hadn't spoken. “Are you in the mafia?” I asked her, not quite whispering.

She blinked at me. “I'm a villager.”

“Me too.” I told her my name, and she told me hers — Doe. Our exchange was easily covered by the shouts of the village leadership, mainly Roberta Jar and a couple of strident men, as they led our next purge.

“First time?” Doe asked.

“Yes.”

“That doesn't mean you aren't lying to me.”

“No, it doesn't,” I said. “But I'm not. Whom do you suspect?”

“I'm hopeless at this.” Unashamed, she met my eye. I felt a pang. Doe was everything Roberta Jar was not: diminutive, vulnerable, and, I began to hope, single.

“We'll work together,” I suggested. “Be watchful.”

Mafia was a kind of fun, I decided. It elicited from us heaps of behavior: embarrassment and self-reproach, chummy consensus building that curdled at a moment's notice to feints of real paranoia and isolation, even measures of self-righteous, persecuted fury. The intensity was enthralling, but it was also strangely hollow, because it lacked any real content. For all the theatrics, we revealed nothing of ourselves, told no tales. It was that for which I yearned.

It was the morning of the third day that I fell under suspicion. Irrevocably, as it turned out. “I think we're ignoring the new people,” said Roberta Jar. “I've seen it again and again, some newcomer draws the mafia card and sits there, playing innocent and silent, just mowing the village down while we argue. I think we ought to look at Joel, for instance. He isn't saying anything.”

“I heard him talking to Doe,” someone volunteered. “They have some little thing going on the side.”

“Both mafia, then,” said one of the leader men, whose every pronouncement was full of unearned certainty. “Take them both out.”

“I'm a villager,” I said. This was the standard protest, despite its deep meaninglessness: Who wouldn't say that? Someone laughed at me sharply for being unpersuasive. Before I'd assembled a better defense, hands shot up all around the circle. Even Doe voted for my banishment.

Adam Cressner then shepherded the village into night. “The dead usually wander off where they can talk without disturbing the village,” he stage-whispered across their bowed heads. I took the hint. As I moved into the hall, Adam returned to narration: “Mafia, open your eyes, and silently agree on someone to kill—” I wondered who the dastards were.

The zombies who'd vacated the parlor were gathered out on the brownstone's stoop, smoking cigarettes and gabbling. They spotted me peering through the front door's doubled glass panes. I made a gesture meant to be interpretable as Be right there, just going for a pee. Someone waved back. I went downstairs.

The half-basement's front room was furnished as a suburban den, with a stereo and large-screen TV, and walls lined with CDs, laser discs, and books, many of them expensive museum catalogues, compendiums of film stills, photo-essays from boutique imprints. I spotted a brightly colored paperback on a shelf of oversized volumes on art and antiquities: Origins, by Stan Lee, a reprint compendium of comic books introducing various Marvel characters: Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four. A sequel, Son of Origins, was shelved beside it. I browsed both, but the Vision wasn't included. He wasn't the sort of character who'd had such a prominent debut — more of a cult figure, I recalled. Like Rhoda or Fraser, he'd been an unplanned star, spun from an ensemble.

The pop-art panels looked thin and fraudulent on white paper, instead of the soft, yellowed rag of the old comics from which they'd been reprinted. Nevertheless, I felt a howling nostalgia rise in me at the sight of the Silver Surfer and Daredevil, characters who'd meant a tremendous amount to me for a brief moment in junior high, then been utterly forgotten. I'd discovered Marvel Comics a year or two after leaving P.S. 29 and Adam Cressner behind. The oddness of Adam's choice in identifying with the Vision had had a troubling chicken-or-egg quality to me then — did the character seem so depressed and diffident to me because of Adam's red face paint? The answer wasn't in Origins, or Son of Origins.

I replaced the books on the shelf and went digging in the walk-in closet instead.

“Hello?” Someone had entered the room behind me. It was Doe, swinging a beer bottle elegantly by the neck.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for something.”

“Something?”

“A costume, or a cape,” I said. “It's a long story.” I emerged from the closet, which seemed to hold only wool coats and ski gear anyway. “Did you get voted out of the village?”

“Right after you.”

“Sorry. I guess I dragged us both down with that suspicious side talk. A rookie mistake.”

“It's okay. They were right to. I was in the mafia.”

“Ah. Now I feel truly foolish.”

“Don't. It was brave of you to speak up at all. The first time I played I just cowered.” Her tiny mouth was perfect apart from one incisor that seemed to have been inserted sideways for variation, like a domino.

“How do you know Adam and Roberta?”

“Adam was my dissertation adviser. At Columbia.” Doe squinted at me oddly, expectantly, perhaps sensing I didn't know the first thing about Adam. She was right and wrong, of course.

“I'm just the friendly neighbor,” I said. I considered how the word friendly could mean not an actual friend—like friendish, or friendlike. “Is this a whole, ah, Columbia group, upstairs?” I wondered what the man who'd been the Vision would teach: Android identity politics?

“Just that guy Barth who got killed. The rest I don't know. Adam and Roberta seem to collect people from all over the place.”

“They're not big on introductions, are they? They prefer keeping everyone in the dark, and dependent on them.”

“Maybe they figure we're grown-ups and can take care of ourselves.”

I'd touched the limits of Doe's disloyalty, and been admonished. I rather liked it. “Yes, of course,” I agreed. “The way we are, now, for instance. You and I, I mean. Taking care of ourselves.”

Doe only blinked, as when, in the circle upstairs, I'd probed her mafia status.

There commenced a clunking and scraping of chairs above our heads. The village had shrunk, or dissolved. I stepped forward and took Doe's hand, thinking I only had a minute. I had less, as it happened. For a giantess Roberta Jar moved silently, and now she was in the doorway. Doe's hand slipped from mine as a newt darts from view on a forest path.

“Game over?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Roberta, cat-ate-canaryishly. “The mafia won.”

“The mafia always wins,” said Doe, a little petulantly, I thought, given her own affiliation.

“Not really,” said Roberta. “But they have had their way recently, it's true.”

“They did fine without my help,” mused Doe. This accounted for her bitterness: she'd wanted to prove essential.

We returned upstairs on a quest for more beer. The smokers had returned from the stoop, and villagers and mafia alike mingled in excited dissection of the game's plot: I told you so was the general thrust. There was hopeful talk of another game, but Val and Irene, a couple with babysitter problems, had to go. A few more defections followed, and suddenly we didn't have numbers enough for a village. “Don't everybody go,” said Adam, as one after another made their excuses. “The night is young.”

Seven of us remained. Happily, this included Doe. There were also two younger men vying for the attention of an Asian woman named Flour. Perhaps predictably, it was singles who'd stayed — us with nothing to rush home to. We sat in the sea of empty bottles and abandoned chairs, a ghost village. But Adam Cressner and Roberta Jar seemed glad to have us. He went downstairs and soon Chet Baker emanated from speakers in the parlor's corners. Roberta lowered the lights.

“I know a game,” I said.

“Yes?” said Roberta.

“It's called I Never. It's a drinking game, though. We all have to have an alcoholic beverage in our hands.”

Adam plopped two fresh sixes of Pale Ale at our feet. I explained the rules: Each of us in turn made a statement — a true statement — beginning with the words I never. Those in the circle who'd done the things the speaker hadn't were required to confess their experience, by sipping their beer. Thus the worldly among us were made to grow embarrassed, and intoxicated, and thus secrets were flushed into the open.

“For example, I'll start,” I said. “I've never had sex on an airplane.”

Adam and Roberta smiled at one another and tipped their bottles. Flour also wet her lips, and one of her suitors as well. Doe and the second of Flour's men were in my more innocent camp.

“Excellent,” I said. “The rest is just a matter of thinking of good questions.” I felt now an unexpectedly sharp appetite for this game — I wanted Adam and Roberta, and Doe too, to see how false the drama of Mafia was compared to our real lives. Of course, after my example we first had to endure a tentative round of inquiries into sex on trains, in restaurant coatrooms, in film projection booths, etc. When my turn came again I ratcheted things up a notch.

“I've never had sex with anyone in this room,” I said.

Adam and Roberta clinked bottles, toasting smug coupledom.

Then Doe raised her drink and gulped, eyes closed. “Oooh,” said one of the single men. I did the easy math, then inspected Roberta for her reaction. If anything, she looked ready to toast Doe's confession as well. Certainly it came as no surprise.

“I've. . never. .” Flour thought hard, eager to fill the loud silence. We were eager to have her fill it. “I've. . never. . had sex with a married person.”

“Good one,” congratulated one of her suitors.

I was forced to drink to this, as were our sybaritic hosts — and, yes, Doe. Her long-lashed eyes remained cast down to the floor, or squeezed as if in pain.

It was Adam's turn. “I've never killed anything bigger than a cockroach,” he said.

Neither had I. Nor Roberta Jar, nor the woman named Flour or her two wannabe boyfriends. No, it was Doe again who had been trapped by the odd question, who raised her bottle once more to her thin-pressed lips. I wasn't sure she actually drank, but I wasn't about to call her on it.

It's the nature of I Never, as in other of life's arenas, that though explanations aren't called for in the rules one often feels compelled to explain. I can't claim our circle didn't look to Doe for some gloss on her lonely confession.

“I was five,” she began, and there was something ominous in the specificity: not four or five, or five or six. “My uncle had given me a new kitten, and I was playing alone in the yard with it, with some string. I hadn't even given the kitten a name yet.” Doe looked at Adam Cressner, as if the whole game had devolved to the authority of his eerie question. “There was a tree in the yard, it's still there”—she spoke as though hypnotized, and seeing the tree float before her—“my parents still have the house. I used to climb the tree, and I had the idea I would take the kitten up the tree with me. I tied the string around the kitten's neck”—here Flour gasped—“and tried to pulley it up with me, across a branch.”

Her tale's Clint Eastwoodian climax having been telegraphed by Adam's question, Doe was permitted a graceful elision. “A neighbor saw the whole thing from a window across the yard. He thought I'd done it on purpose, and he told my parents.”

“Did they believe you?” asked Roberta Jar, clinically impassive.

“I don't know,” said Doe, raising her eyebrows. “It didn't matter, really. Every since then I think something broke inside me. . when my parents made me understand that the kitten wasn't alive anymore. . there's always been a part of me missing.”

“That's horrible,” said one of Flour's men.

“I mean, I still have a capacity for happiness,” said Doe, matter-of-factly, almost impatiently. It was as though she wanted to protect us from her story now, felt bad for telling it.

We meditated in silence on what we'd learned. Someone guzzled their beer, not as a gesture within the game, just to do it: a quiet pop of bottle mouth unsealing from lips was audible in a break between songs, Chet Baker finishing “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” then, absurdly, beginning “Everything Happens to Me.” I'd have been tempted to put my arm around Doe's shoulders, or even lead her from the room, if she as much as met my eye. She didn't. Tears streaked Flour's ivory cheeks instead.

Adam Cressner began speaking. At first it seemed a hollow gambit, an attempt to distract us from Doe's testimony by non sequitur. “When I was last in Germany, I visited the Glyptotek in Munich,” he said. “It's full of statuary the Europeans ripped out of the old temples. They've got a Roman copy of a Greek marble by Boëthus — the original's in the Vatican — showing a boy with a goose. The bird's practically as big as the boy, and they're wrestling. The kid's got the goose by the neck. A museum guard came up behind me, he saw I was transfixed by this sculpture, and he uttered this line I'll never forget, it shot through me like a bolt: ‘Spielend, doch, mit toedlichem Griff.' He thinks it's a game, but he's choking the goose. But in the guard's High German it was more allusive and grand—‘playing, but with a deadly grip.'”

“Like something from Rilke,” said Roberta Jar.

Oh yes, I thought viciously, Rilke and High German after four or five beers. You're both such fine people. However slow my uptake, a picture formed: I now supposed Doe's dissertation had been in art history, for example. And that Adam Cressner and Roberta Jar had together known, from intimate experience, how easily Doe might be induced to turn herself inside out for us.

I wanted revenge on Doe's behalf. “I've never,” I said loudly.

All stared. I began again. “I've never pretended I was a character from a comic book. Never, say, dressed up in a superhero costume, not even on Halloween.” I glared at Adam Cressner: Let him eat cape.

It was Roberta Jar who drew our attention, though, by lifting her bottle high, as if to toast again before she sipped. We looked to her as we had to Doe.

“I met a man once,” Roberta said. “I liked this man, well, very, very much. This was eight years ago now.” She lolled her big head, a little shy to tell it, though her voice was still strong and resonant in her chest. “When we began to see one another, this man and I, there was something between us that was difficult, a secret — a secret priority in his life. It had to do with this, exactly: dressing up as a character from a comic book. And this priority was difficult for both of us.”

She'd turned my hostile joke into another confession, to give Doe company. We listened wide-eyed — I caught Flour glancing at me, likely wondering how I'd known to ask the question, as I'd wondered before at Adam Cressner. As for Adam, he sat quietly adoring his paramour while she spilled on.

“I realized I had to learn as much about this as I could, or it would beat us, and I was determined not to be beaten. I discovered that the comic-book character in question had gotten married, to another character, called the Scarlet Witch. I thought this was very unusual, two married superheroes, and I took it as a good sign. So, I went shopping for fabric, and hand-sewed a Scarlet Witch costume. Tights, and pink boots, a sort of pink headpiece to hold back my hair. I did a good job, really impressed myself. It was the most sustained arts-and-crafts project of my life, actually.”

Roberta paused, and in the silence we were allowed to sense the result of her efforts, a climax as inevitable and in its way as horrible as the kitten's execution. I wondered if Adam still wore the red food coloring for face paint, or whether he'd found some better method, easier to remove when he'd wanted to pass for a mere Columbia professor. I thought of the Scarlet Witch as I knew her from Marvel Comics, an exotic beauty whose powers, loosely defined as “sorcery,” mostly consisted of throwing up pink force fields, but whose real achievement was a stoical, unwavering devotion to her Spock-like emotional mute of a husband.

I looked again to Adam Cressner. I still faintly wished for the satisfaction of an unmasking, but his eyes gave me nothing. Adam Cressner was as little interested in my impressions of his Visionhood as he'd been at second base, all those years ago. He hadn't even sipped his beer to confess the truth.

“I have to go,” said Doe suddenly. She flinched her head from me, from all of us, hastily gathered a load of beer bottles into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink. I wondered if she'd also been enticed into a costume — Ant-Girl, or Thumbelina.

“Well, anyway, that's my story,” said Roberta, the sardonic twang restored to her voice. One of the men gave an artificial laugh, barely adequate to break the tension. It was only now that Adam Cressner followed the game's protocol and also drank. I'd had my answer, though not as I'd wanted it, from Adam's mouth. I don't even know whether Flour or the two men had any understanding of what had happened — for all Roberta had told us, the man in question could have been someone other than Adam. Strangely, it was as if he and I were allies, having each forced confession from the other's woman. Except that neither woman was mine, and both might be his.

“A beautiful story it is,” said Adam Cressner. “With that we'll see our dear guests to the door, yes?”

No one resisted. The spell was broken. We were in some way broken, shattered by the game, unable to recover any sense of delight in one another's company, if we'd ever had that — I no longer knew. We cleared bottles, shuffled chairs, mumbled excuses, made promises to be in touch, to forward one another's e-mail addresses, which rang hollow. Within ten minutes we were out on the street, each headed home alone. At least I think we were alone. Certainly Doe strolled away, apart from the others, a tiny figure vanishing on the pavement, before I'd turned my back and descended into my basement entrance, before I'd even had a chance to wish her good night or kiss her equivocally on the cheek. It's possible one of Flour's suitors followed her home, but I doubt it. It had all been a little much for us poor singles, the tyranny of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch.