Sacred Monster

Flashback 3

It was a cold and drizzly day in Grover’s Corners, the needle-thin rain pasting trash and candy wrappers to the cement of street and sidewalk, the passing traffic a monotonous symphony of shashing tires and flwacking windshield wipers. Beside the big, lumpy blacktop parking lot with its few wet, mud-streaked automobiles like minor artifacts of a preceding civilization, the small building was incongruously bright and exuberant, with its impermeable pale green aluminum siding and the red neon bus-company name dominating its picture window. Posters and other signs cluttered that window with high-pitched come-ons: ski vacations, reliable taxi services, guaranteed package delivery, all-inclusive tours. Here in this false little building, fevered outside, grimy within, here nevertheless there stood the magic doorway between Grover’s Corners and the world. Step through, or stay at home; no one can do both.

Inside, Jack and Buddy, both twenty-one, stood looking out, through the runnels of rain, waiting for their separate buses. They’d talked themselves out. Expectation, bravado, doubt, and then apprehension had each moved in its turn through their minds and speeches and expressions of face, leaving them now drained, emptied, waiting for a world of new experience to refill them. The only remaining residue of emotion was a faint embarrassment, a hint of premature homesickness, causing an inability to speak or to stand naturally, an unwillingness to meet each other’s eyes for more than a glancing second before the gaze of each would slide away, back to the window, the rain, the inactive parking lot, the anonymous traffic on Main Street.

A bus appeared, out there, beyond the nearer line of traffic, signaling hugely for a left turn with a powerful and slowly blinking yellow light — the only vibrantly alive point in all that gray outdoors. The bus’s huge windshield wipers moved vertically back and forth arrhythmically, to separate patterns, narrow straight-standing sentries patrolling to different beats.

Jack made a sound, then cleared his throat. He said, “Yours, or mine?”

“What dif?”

Both stood hipshot, palms against backs, fingers jammed down into hip pockets, in unconscious imitation of the calm insouciance of characters in westerns, but with angular tension in their poses. More than ever, that false familial similarity hovered over them.

A break in the streaming traffic; the bus made the turn, massively, arthritically, the fat driver visible in his rainy fishbowl, turning and turning the huge flat wheel. CHICAGO, said the sign above the windshield: Buddy’s bus.

Jack’s grin was spastic; he’d wanted it to be his bus. “Well, Buddy,” he said, “you’re on.”

“Here I go,” Buddy said, looking around for his single small suitcase. He saw it, pointed at it, but didn’t pick it up yet. Just beyond the window, the bus heaved to a stop with a great hissing of air brakes. Passengers began to disembark. Buddy grinned at Jack. “Knock ‘em dead, Dad,” he said.

“You, too, Buddy.”

Buddy’s grin widened. “Well, sure,” he said, and mimed spraying the interior of the depot with a machine gun.

Ex-passengers leaped the wet space from bus to depot doorway. Jack said, “I’ll miss you.”

“We’ll both be around,” Buddy said with a shrug. “Send my folks your address when you get to Big Town.”

“Sure. And I’ll get yours.”

Buddy took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook out two, gave one to Jack. Jack brought a Zippo lighter from his trouser pocket and started to light Buddy’s cigarette, but Buddy took the lighter out of his hand and lit both cigarettes. Then Buddy held the lighter up, flame off. He grinned at Jack and closed his hand around the lighter, saying, “To remember you by, huh, Dad?”

There was just the slightest, tiniest hesitation, and then Jack became effusively agreeable: “Oh, sure! Take it, Buddy, sure thing. What a good idea. I should have thought of it myself.”

“Fine,” Buddy said, and pocketed the lighter, as outside the Chicago bus gave an irritable-sounding honk.

“Well,” Jack said, suddenly exuding nervousness, “I guess you’re off.”

“Right.” Buddy picked up his suitcase and grinned again. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Dad.”

Awkwardly trying for a joke, Jack said, “Gives me plenty of leeway, huh?”

“That’s right.”

The two friends shook hands, firmly, smiling at each other. Then Buddy stepped out the door, ignored the rain, crossed through it to the bus and boarded, instantly disappearing, though Jack kept peering through the wet plate-glass window, paying no attention to the young couple in their twenties near him, kissing farewell. The young man said a quick final word to the girl, then turned and hurried out to the bus. The girl stood beside Jack, watching, as the young man followed Buddy up into the bus, and the bus door closed.

For a long second nothing happened.

The bus groaned away, as though movement was something alien to it. Jack stood where he was, but the girl moved sideways along the window, paralleling the bus, until she bumped into Jack, startling them both. “Oh!” she cried. “I’m sorry!”

The bus moved on. Jack looked at the girl, saw she was pretty. He grinned at her. “That’s okay, I enjoyed it.”

The girl seemed drawn to him, seemed about to respond in kind, then remembered herself. She looked past him at the receding bus, then more neutrally again at Jack, saying, “Well. Bye.”

“We must do it again sometime,” Jack told her.

No response at all. She left the depot and hurried through the rain across the parking lot toward one of the cars waiting there. Jack watched her until his view was cut off by the abrupt appearance of the next bus, its bulk filling the space in front of the window, the sign beside its door reading NEW YORK. Then he blinked, shook his head as though waking up or rousing from hypnosis, and turned to find his luggage: a round, soft bag and a soft suit-carrier. He picked them up.

One door closed. Another opened.

He was smiling by the time he boarded the bus.

And now I’m cold. Why now? Why cold? It’s warm here in the sun, on the slates, on my own land, in my one life, where only the warm is permitted.

It was cold then, that day, the bus station, the girl that crossed my scanners just as the big ship was banking away toward the depths, cold and wet, but I knew nothing of cold then, felt nothing that was cold in those days. Here, now, in my estancia, I feel myself feeling cold despite the warmth here, señor, the muy caliente. (Is that right? We all learn servant Spanish here, Spiclish, but it can’t be trusted; it’s at the level of collies barking at sheep, moving the slow and docile creatures through the fences.) Muy caliente. But I’m cold!

I see that girl’s eyes more clearly now than on the day she looked at me in the rain, in the bus depot, when her boyfriend and my friend had gone away, and she was about to turn and walk through the rain to her car. I could have walked with her that day, I could have gone home with her, I could have lain with her on the softly crumpled sheets, our torsos hot, cool flutters on the flesh of our arms, on the backs of our legs, the rain soft on the glass, her eyes looking at me with trust and knowingness. We could have spent forty-seven years in the task, just the two of us, recapturing that first afternoon, or at least reaching for it. Isn’t that what marriage is?

But how could I? What choice did I have? I was never free to choose.

Slowly, pulling the robe closed more tightly around my throat, I look at the gray slates and I say, “Sometimes I wonder who I would have been, if I’d just stayed there, you know? In Grover’s Corners. Got a job at the bank, got a suit, got married.”

The interviewer doesn’t speak. The flimsy high clouds write words in an undiscovered alphabet. I’m interviewing myself, I’m doing this clod’s work for him. But I don’t mind, it’s as easy as sleep, it’s calm. I’m calm. I can be a very calm person.

“If I’d lived a normal life,” I say.

“But you went to New York.” The interviewer’s voice is neutral, but I know he’s interested. Who the fuck is he, that he should not be interested?

“New York,” I say, and with the words I can see it as it was when I first saw it; jazzy, fast, full. And me walking through it, striding through it, carrying that round soft bag and that soft suit-carrier. “I loved it, man,” I say, and I can hear that sound in my voice. I’m saying love as I never said it about any woman, and I know I’m not really saying it about the city but about myself; who I was then, who I planned to be. But I say it again, because this is the surface of the prism we show in the interviews: “I loved that city, everything about it.”

“And the acting class?”

“I dropped that fruit right away. I met people, I got taken on by Venashka. Do you know who Venashka was?”

“Famous acting teacher.”

“Brilliant,” I say, meaning it as a correction. He wasn’t a famous acting teacher, Venashka, he was brilliant. “Brilliant mind,” I say, while the sky writes those words in its own language. “Brilliant soul,” I say.

“He helped you.”

“I learned so much. Venashka was such a dynamite person, man, he’d take you right out of yourself. I learned to be, you know? Not act; any door-to-door salesman can act. To be. And I met wonderful people in those classes.”

I smile. I’m remembering a girl named Tricia, first girl I ever actually lived with. We were all in the class, on the floor, being dogs. Venashka moved among us, touching a shoulder here, a head there, murmuring encouragement or corrections. I was being a very specific puppy, searching myself for fleas because I wanted to play with them. Venashka moved by, nodding at me, and then I saw Tricia across the way being a hunting dog, pointing at quail. My puppy loped over and sniffed her crotch. She broke character for just a second, shocked, I think maybe even repulsed, and my puppy lolled his tongue and panted at her, bright-eyed. I didn’t have a tail, of course, but I wagged it, and I think anybody looking at me would know I was wagging my tail. And Tricia got back into character and reared around to bite me on the shoulder, and that weekend I moved in with her.

The interviewer walks on the garden of my reverie, all unknowing: “Were you just taking classes then? Not acting professionally yet?”

“God, no!” Happy memories bounce me around on the slate like a beach ball. “Making the rounds, trying out for parts. Trying to be a real actor! Incredible!”