The Book of Skulls

chapter eleven Eli

We came into Chicago at twilight, after a long day of driving. Sixty, seventy miles an hour, hour after hour after hour broken only by infrequent rest stops. The last four hours we didn’t even stop, Oliver hurtling like a madman down the turnpike. Cramped legs. Stiff ass. Glazed eyes. My brain fuggy, blurred by excessive traveling. Highway hypnosis. As the sun sank, all color seemed to leave the world; an all-pervading blue engulfed everything — blue sky, blue fields, blue pavement, the whole spectrum draining toward the ultraviolet. It was like being on the ocean, unable to distinguish what lies above the horizon from what lies below. I had very little sleep last night. Two hours at the very most, probably less. When we weren’t actually talking or making love, we lay side by side in a groggy doze. Mickeyl Ah, Mickey! The scent of you is on my fingertips. I inhale. Three tumbles between midnight and dawn. How shy you were at first, in the narrow bedroom, flaking pale green paint, psychedelic posters, John Lennon and saggy-cheeked Yoko looking down on us as we stripped, and you huddled your shoulders together, you tried to hide your breasts from me, you slipped into bed quickly, seeking the safety of the sheets. Why? Do you think your body’s so deficient? All right, you’re thin, your elbows are sharp, your breasts are small. You’re not Aphrodite. Do you need to be? Am I Apollo? At least you didn’t shrink from my touch. I wonder if you came. I can never tell if they come. Where are the great wailing, shrieking, whooping spasms I read about? Other girls, I suppose. Mine are too polite for such volcanic orgasmic eruptions. I should become a monk. Leave screwing for the screwers and channel my energies into the pursuit of the profound. I’m probably not much good at fuckery anyway. Let Origen be my guide: in a moment of exaltation I’ll perform an autoorchidectomy and deposit my balls on the holy altar as an offering. Thereafter no longer to feel the distractions of passion. Alas, no, I enjoy it too much. Grant me chastity, God, but, please, not just yet. I have Mickey’s phone number. When I came back from Arizona I’ll give her a ring. (When I come back. If I come back! And when and if, what will I be?) Mickey’s the right sort of girl for me, indeed. I must set modest sexual goals. Not for me the blonde sex bomb, not for me the cheerleader, not for me the sophisticated society-girl contralto. For me the sweet shy mice. Oliver’s LuAnn would bore me flaccid in fifteen minutes, though I imagine I could tolerate her once for the sake of her breasts. And Timothy’s Margo? Let’s not think about her, shall we? Mickey for me. Mickey: bright, pale, retiring, available. Eight hundred miles east of me at the moment. I wonder what she’s telling her friends about me. Let her magnify me. Let her romanticize me. I can use it.

So we are in Chicago. Why Chicago? Does it not lie somewhat off the direct route between New York and Phoenix? I think it does. If I were navigating, I’d have plotted a course that sagged from one corner of the continent to the other, through Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but maybe the fastest highways don’t take the most direct line, and in any event here we are up in Chicago, apparently on Timothy’s whim. He has a sentimental fondness for the city. He grew up here; at least, that part of his childhood that he didn’t spend on his father’s Pennsylvania estate he spent in his mother’s penthouse on Lake Shore Drive. Are there any Episcopalians who don’t get divorced every sixteen years? Are there any who don’t have two full sets of mothers and fathers, as a bare minimum? I see the wedding announcements in the Sunday newspapers. “Miss Rowan Demarest Hemple, daughter of Mrs. Charles Holt Wilmerding of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and Mr. Dayton Belknap Hemple of Bedford Hills, New York, and Montego Bay, Jamaica, were . married here this afternoon in All Saints Episcopal Chapel to Dr. Forrester Chiswell Birdsall the 4th, son of Mrs. Elliott Moulton Peck of Bar Harbor, Maine, and Mr. Forrester Chiswell Birdsall the 3rd of East Islip, Long Island.” Et cetera ad infinitum. What a conclave such a wedding must be, with the multiple couples gathering round to jubilate, everybody cousin to everyone else, all of them married two or three times apiece. The names, the triple names, sanctified by time, girls named Rowan and Choate and Palmer, boys named Amory and McGeorge and Harcourt. I grew up with Barbaras and Loises and Claires, Mikes and Dicks and Sheldons, McGeorge becomes “Mac,” but what do you call young Harcourt when you’re playing ring-a-levio? What about a girl named Palmer or Choate? A different world, these Wasps, a different world. Divorce! The mother (Mrs. X.Y.Z.) lives in Chicago, the father (Mr. A.B.C. the 3rd) lives just outside Philadelphia. My parents, who are going to observe their thirtieth anniversary come August, screamed at each other all through my boyhood: divorce, divorce, divorce, I’ve had enough, I’m going to walk out and never come back! The normal middle-class incompatibility. But divorce? Call a lawyer? My father would have himself uncircumcized first. My mother would walk naked into Gimbels first. In every Jewish family there’s an aunt who got divorced once, a long time ago, we don’t talk about it now. (You always find out by overhearing two of your elderly relatives in their cups, reminiscing.) But never anyone with children. You never have these clusters of parents, requiring such intricate introductions: I’d like you to meet my mother and her husband, I’d like you to meet my father and his wife.

Timothy didn’t visit his mother while we were in Chicago. We stayed not very far south of her, in a lakefront motel opposite Grant Park (Timothy paid for the room, with a credit card, no less) but he didn’t even phone her. The warm, strong bonds of goyishe family life, yes, indeed. (Call up, have a fight, so why not?) Instead he took us on a nighttime tour of the city, behaving in part as though he were its sole proprietor and in part, as if he were the guide on a Gray Line bus tour. Here we have the twin towers of Marina City, here we have the John Hancock Building, this is the Art Institute, this is the fabulous shopping district of Michigan Avenue. Actually, I was impressed, I who had never been west of Parsippany, New Jersey, but who had a clear and vivid impression of the probable nature of the great American heartland. I had expected Chicago to be grimy and cramped, the summit of midwestern dreariness, with nineteenth-century red-brick buildings seven stories high and a population made up entirely of Polish, Hungarian, and Irish workmen in overalls. Whereas this was a city of broad avenues and glowing towers. The architecture was stunning; there was nothing in New York to equal it. Of course, we stayed close to the lake. Go five blocks inland, you’ll see all the dreariness you want, Ned promised. The narrow strip of Chicago we saw was a wonderland. Timothy took us to dinner at a French restaurant, his favorite, opposite a curious monument of antiquity known as the Water Tower. One more reminder of the truth of Fitzgerald’s maxim about the very rich: they are different from you and me. I know from French restaurants the way you know from Tibetan or Martian ones. My parents never took me to Le Pavilion or Chambord for celebrations; I got the Brass Rail for my high school graduation, Schrafft’s the day I won my scholarship, dinner for three something under twelve dollars, and considered myself lucky at that. On those infrequent occasions when I take a girl out to dinner, the cuisine necessarily is no hauter than pizza or kung po chi ding. The menu at Timothy’s place, an extravaganza of engraved gold lettering on sheets of vellum somewhat larger than the Times, was a mystery to me. Yet here was Timothy, my classmate, my roommate, making his way easily through its arcana, suggesting to us that we try the quenelles aux huitres, the crepes farcies et roulees, the escalopes de veau a l’estragon, the tournedos sautes chasseur, the homard a l’Americaine. Oliver, naturally, was as much adrift as I, but to my surprise, Ned, with a lower-middle-class background not much different from my own, proved knowledgeable, and learnedly discussed with Timothy the relative merits of the gratin de ris de veau; the rognons de veau a la Borde-laise, the caneton aux cerises, the supremes de volaille aux champignons. (The summer he was sixteen, he explained afterward, he had served as catamite to a distinguished Southampton gourmet.) It was ultimately impossible for me to cope with the menu, and Ned selected a dinner for me, Timothy doing the same for Oliver. I remember oysters, turtle soup, white wine followed by red, a marvelous something of lamb, potatoes made mostly of air, broccoli in a thick yellow sauce. Snifters of cognac for everyone afterward. Legions of waiters hovered over us as solicitously as though we were four bankers out on a binge, not four shabbily dressed college boys. I caught a glimpse of the check and it stunned me: $112, exclusive of tip. With a grand nourish Timothy produced his credit card. I felt feverish, dizzy, overstuffed; I thought I might vomit at the table, there amid the crystal chandeliers, the red plush wallpaper, the elegant linens. The spasm passed without disgrace and once outside I felt better, though still queasy. I made a mental note to spend forty or fifty years of my immortality in a serious study of the culinary arts. Timothy spoke of forging onward to groovy coffeehouses farther to the north, but the rest of us were tired and we voted him down. Back to the hotel, a long walk, perhaps an hour through the cutting cold.

We had taken a suite, two bedrooms, Ned and I in one, Timothy and Oliver in the other. I dumped my clothes and collapsed quickly into bed. Not enough sleep, too much food: ghastly, ghastly. Exhausted though I was, I remained awake, more or less, dozing, stupefied. The rich dinner lay like stones in my gut. A good puking, I decided some hours later, would be best for me. Purge-bound, I staggered naked toward the bathroom separating the two bedrooms. And encountered a terrifying apparition in the dark corridor. A naked girl, taller than I, with long heavy breasts, startlingly flaring hips, a corona of short curling brown hair. A succubus of the night! A phantom spawned by my overheated imagination! “Hi, handsome,” she said, and winked, and passed me in a miasma of perfume and lust-smells, leaving me to stare in astonishment at her opulent retreating buttocks until the bathroom door closed behind them. I shivered with fright and horniness. Not even on acid had I experienced such tangible hallucinations; could Escoffier achieve what LSD could not? How beautiful, how meaty, how elegant she was. I heard water running in the John. Peered into the far bedroom, my eyes fully adjusted to the darkness now. Frilly feminine clothes scattered everywhere. Timothy snoring in one bed; in the other, Oliver, and on Oliver’s pillow, a second head, female. No hallucinations, then. Where had they found these girls? The room next door? No. I understood. Call girls supplied by room service. The trusty credit card strikes again. Timothy comprehends the American way as I, poor cramped studious ghetto lad, never could hope to do. Want a woman? You have but to lift the phone and ask. My throat was dry; my mast was raised; I felt thunder in my chest. Timothy sleeps; very well, since she’s been hired for the night, I’ll borrow her awhile. When she comes out of the john I’ll swagger up to her, one hand on her tits, one to the rump, feel the silky satiny smoothness of her, give her the Bogart rumble deep down in the throat, invite her to my bed. Indeed. And the bathroom door opened. She glided forth, breasts swaying, ding-dong-ding-dong. Another wink. And past me, gone. I groped air. Her long, lean back, swelling into two astounding globular cheeks; the scent of cheap musky fragrance; the fluid, hip-wiggling stride; the bedroom door closing in my face. She is hired, but not for me. She is Timothy’s. I went into the john, knelt before the throne, spent eons upchucking. Then to my lonely bed for cold bad-trip dreams. In the morning, no girls visible. We were on the road before nine, Oliver at the wheel, St. Louis our next port of call. I sank into apocalyptic gloom. I would have shattered empires that morning, if my thumb had been on the right button. I would have unleashed Strangelove. I would have set free the Fenris wolf. I would have zapped the universe, had the chance been mine.