“The good thing about beer,” he said about five minutes later, “is that you piss it all out. Like a one-out, one-on double play, nothing’s left over.”
He studied me as I ate.
“So why do you read books all the time?” he asked again.
I washed down the last piece of herring and set the plate aside. Then I picked up my copy of A Sentimental Education and flipped through the pages.
“It’s because Flaubert’s already dead.”
“So you don’t read books by living writers?”
“No, I don’t see the point.”
“Why not?”
“I guess because I feel like I can forgive dead people,” I said, shifting my attention to the Route 66 rerun on the portable TV behind the bar. “As a rule, that is.” That sent the Rat back to thinking.
“So then what about people who are alive and breathing?” he said a few minutes later. “As a rule, you can’t forgive them?”
“I wonder. Haven’t given it much thought. But if you backed me into a corner then I’d have to say, yeah, it’s possible. Maybe I can’t forgive them.”
J came and set two fresh beers on the counter in front of us.
“So then what would you do?”
“I’d go to bed and hug my pillow,” I answered.
“That’s too weird for me,” the Rat said, shaking his head.
I poured beer in the Rat’s glass, but he just sat there hunched over, lost in thought.
“The last book I read was last summer,” he said presently. “Can’t remember the title or the author’s name. Forget why I read it, too. Anyway, it was by a woman. The main character is this fashion designer, a woman about thirty, who’s obsessed with this idea that she’s got an incurable disease.”
“What kind of incurable disease?”
“I dunno, maybe cancer. Is there any other kind?…So she goes to a seaside resort where she spends all her time masturbating. In the bath, in the woods, on the bed, in the ocean, that’s all she does, masturbates everywhere you can imagine.”
“In the ocean?”
“Yeah…Can you believe it? Why would anybody put that in a novel? There’s plenty of other things to write about, right?”
“You’d think so.”
“A novel like that’s not for me. Makes me want to puke.”
I nodded.
“If it were my novel, I’d do it differently.”
“Like how?”
The Rat fiddled with the rim of his glass and thought.
“Okay, how about this? I’m on a boat in the middle of the Pacific, see, and it sinks. So I grab a life preserver, and there I am floating around in the water all by myself, looking up at the stars. It’s a beautiful, quiet night. And then I see this young woman paddling toward me, clinging to her own life preserver.”
“Is she hot?”
“You bet.”
I took a sip of my beer.
“Sounds pretty lame,” I said, shaking my head.
“Hold on, I’m not done. So then the two of us start talking, floating right there in the middle of the ocean. We talk about all kinds of stuff—the past and the future, our hobbies, how many girls I’ve slept with, what TV shows we like, what we dreamed the night before, that sort of thing. Then we start drinking beer.”
“Wait a minute there. Where does the beer come from?”
The Rat thought for a moment. “It’s drifting in the water,” he said. “Cans of beer that floated out from the ship’s kitchen. Cans of sardines, too. Does that work?”
“Okay.”
“After a while it grows light. ‘What’ll you do now?’ the girl asks. ‘I’ve got a hunch an island is nearby; I think I’ll swim in that direction.’ But I know her hunch may be wrong. So I tell her, ‘Let’s just keep floating here and drinking beer. An airplane is sure to come and rescue us in the end.’ But she swims off alone.”
The Rat sighed and took a swig of beer.
“She swims for two days and two nights and finally reaches an island. True to form, I’ve got a major hangover by the time the airplane finds me. Then, years later, the two of us bump into each other in a little neighborhood bar.”
“And you start drinking beer again, right?”
“Doesn’t it make you want to cry?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
6
The Rat’s novel had two good things about it. First, there were no sex scenes; second, no one died. Guys don’t need any encouragement—left to themselves, they still die and sleep with girls. That’s just the way it is.
*
“Do you think I was wrong?” the girl asks.
The Rat takes another swig of beer. “To be blunt,” he says, slowly shaking his head, “we’re all wrong, every one of us.”
“Why do you think that?”
The Rat sighs and licks his upper lip. There’s no way to answer her.
“I swam and swam toward that island until I thought my arms would fall off. It hurt so much I thought I would die. And you know what I kept thinking as I swam? That maybe you were right and I was wrong. I kept asking myself, how could you just float there not doing anything when I was suffering?”
The girl gives a small, sad laugh and presses the corners of her eyes with her fingertips. The Rat squirms and fishes about in his pockets. Three years without a cigarette, but now he’s got to have one.
“Did you wish I were dead?”
“A little.”
“Really just a little?”
“…I forget what I felt.”
They both fall silent. The Rat senses the need to say something.
“All men are not created equal, you know.”
“Who said that?”
“John F. Kennedy.”
7
I was a very quiet child. So quiet, in fact, that my worried parents took me to see a friend of theirs who was a psychiatrist.
This doctor’s house was perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean. I sat on his sofa in a bright, sunlit drawing room while an elegant middle-aged lady served me cold orange juice and two doughnuts. I drank the juice and ate half of one of the doughnuts, taking care not to spill any of the sugar on my knees.
“Want some more juice?” the doctor asked. I shook my head. Just the two of us were there, sitting face-to-face. On the opposite wall hung a portrait of Mozart. He glared at me in reproach, like a timid cat.
“Long ago,” began the doctor, “there lived a friendly goat.” It was a great opening. I closed my eyes and imagined a friendly goat.
“The goat carried a heavy gold watch on a chain around his neck that made him huff and puff when he walked. Not only was this watch an awful burden, its hands no longer moved. One day, the rabbit, a friend of the goat, came to see him. ‘Why lug that useless watch around everywhere?’ he asked the goat. ‘It doesn’t work, and it looks very heavy.’ ‘You’re right, it is heavy,’ answered the goat. ‘But I’ve grown used to it. To its weight, and the fact that its hands don’t move.’ ”
The doctor took a sip from his own glass of orange juice and smiled at me. I sat there and waited for him to continue.
“One afternoon, on the friendly goat’s birthday, the rabbit showed up carrying a small box tied with a beautiful ribbon. Inside was a glittering, lightweight new watch in perfect working order. The goat happily hung the watch from his neck and ran around to show it to all of his friends.”
The story abruptly broke off there.
“You are the goat,” said the doctor. “I am the rabbit, and the watch is your heart.”
I felt helpless, as if I had been tricked. All I could do was nod.
After that we began meeting every Sunday afternoon. I had to take a train and then a bus to reach the doctor’s home, where, each visit, I was treated to muffins, apple pie, syrupy pancakes, honeyed croissants, and other sweets. These treatments lasted a whole year, after which I was stuck paying regular visits to the dentist.
—
“Civilization is
communication,” the doctor said. “That which is not expressed doesn’t exist. Understand? A big fat zero. Let’s say you want something to eat. All you need to do is say the words, ‘I’m hungry.’ Then I give you cookies. Go ahead, take them. [I grabbed a cookie.] If you don’t speak, then there are no cookies. [As if to be mean, the doctor snatched the plate of cookies and hid it under his desk.] Zero. Got it? You don’t want to talk. But you’re hungry. So you want to tell people without using words. Like a game of pantomime. Try it.”
I grabbed my stomach and made a painful face. The doctor laughed. “You look like you’ve got a stomachache,” he said.
A stomachache…
—
We went on from there to free association.
“Say something about a cat. Anything.”
I slowly rotated my head, pretending to be thinking.
“Whatever comes to mind.”
“It has four legs.”
“So does an elephant.”
“It’s a lot smaller.”
“What else?”
“It lives in people’s homes and kills mice when it feels like it.”
“What does it eat?”
“Fish.”
“How about sausages?”
“Sausages too.”
We carried on in that vein.
The doctor was right. Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end. Click…OFF.
In the spring of my fourteenth year, without warning, a torrent of words came gushing from my mouth. It was as if a dam had broken. I have no memory of what I said, but for the next three months I talked nonstop, as if trying to fill in the void of the previous fourteen years. When the flood of words ended in mid-July, I developed a high fever and had to stay home from school for three days. Once the fever subsided, I was no longer a chatterbox, nor was I tongue-tied. I was just an ordinary kid.
8
I woke before 6 a.m. feeling very thirsty. Whenever I wake up in someone else’s home, I feel like I’m stuck in another body inhabited by someone else’s spirit. It took every ounce of energy just to drag myself out of the narrow bed and walk to the sink by the door, where I drank like a horse, draining glass after glass of water before staggering back to bed.
Through an open window, a thin slice of ocean was visible, its ripples glittering in the early-morning sun. If I looked hard I could make out several grimy, tired-looking freighters floating far offshore. All signs pointed to another scorcher of a day. The whole neighborhood was asleep, the only sounds the occasional creak of the train tracks and the faint melody of a radio calisthenics broadcast.
Still naked, I propped myself against the headboard, lit a cigarette, and studied the girl lying beside me. Since the window faced south, her whole body was in direct sunlight. She was sound asleep with the terry-cloth blanket pushed down to her ankles. Every so often her breath would quicken, and her well-shaped breasts would rise and fall. She had a deep tan, but the sheen had dulled with time, and the white patches left by her swimsuit looked almost rotten.
I finished my smoke and then wasted the next ten minutes attempting to recall her name. The problem was I couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned it in the first place. Giving up, I yawned and took another look at her body. She was on the skinny side, probably a year or two shy of twenty. Using my open hand, I measured her from head to toe. Eight hand lengths, with a thumb left over for her heel. It added up to precisely five feet three inches.
There was a coin-sized mark the color of Worcestershire sauce below her right breast. Her delicate pubic hair reminded me of river grass after a flood. To top things off, her left hand had only four fingers.
9
It took her about three hours to wake up and another five minutes to become aware of her surroundings. All that time I sat there with my arms folded, watching the thick clouds on the horizon change shape as they headed east.
The next time I checked, she had pulled her terry-cloth blanket up to her neck and was looking up at me with a vacant expression. She seemed to be fighting the fumes of what whiskey remained in her belly.
“Who…are you?”
“You don’t remember?”
She gave a quick shake of her head. I lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she ignored.
“Explain.”
“Where should I begin?”
“At the beginning.”
The beginning? I hadn’t a clue where that was, or how to explain things in a way she could accept. It might work, but then again it might not. It took me ten seconds to put my thoughts in order.
“It was a balmy day,” I began. “I spent the afternoon swimming at the pool, then went home, took a nap, and had dinner. By then it was after eight. I got in my car and went for a drive. I stopped along the coast road and looked at the ocean while listening to the radio. It’s a habit of mine.
“After about half an hour of that I started feeling like I wanted some company. Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean. It’s weird. Anyway, I decided to go to J’s Bar. A cold beer was calling me, and I figured my buddy would be there. He wasn’t, though. So I drank alone. Three beers in just an hour.”
I broke off to flick my ash into the ashtray.
“By the way, did you ever read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?”
She didn’t reply, just lay there glaring at the ceiling and clutching her blanket like a beached mermaid. No big deal. I went on with my story.
“See, I always think of that play when I’m drinking alone. As if I’ll reach a moment when something will click in my head and all my problems will disappear. But it never works that way. Nothing ever clicks. Anyway, after a while I got tired of waiting for my buddy, so I phoned his apartment. Figured I’d invite him out for a few drinks. But a girl answered the phone…Freaked me out. I mean, he’s not that kind of guy. There could be fifty girls there with him totally sloshed, but he’d still answer his own phone. Know what I mean?
“I pretended I’d dialed the wrong number and hung up. Still, the call made me feel kind of low. Don’t know why exactly. So I had another beer. But it didn’t cheer me up. Sure, I was acting like an idiot. But, hey, what else is new? I finished my beer and called J over so I could pay my tab. Figured I’d head home, listen to the baseball scores, and go to bed. But he tells me to go to the washroom and wash my face. J believes you can drink a case of beer and still drive as long as you splash water on your face first. So I head off in the direction of the washroom. To tell you the truth, though, I wasn’t really planning to wash up. I was just going to fake it. J’s sink is usually backed up, with water in the basin. I don’t like going in there. But last night, for a change, the sink was fine. But you were sprawled out on the floor.”
She sighed and closed her eyes.
“And then?”
“Then I hoisted you off the washroom floor and lugged you back to the bar, figuring I could find someone who knew you. But no one did. Then J and I patched up your wound.”
“Wound?”
“You whacked your head when you fell. Just a little cut.”
Nodding, she drew her hand from the blanket and passed it across the cut on her forehead.
“So J and I talked it over. To decide what to do about you. In the end, I brought you home in my car. We went through your bag and came up with a change purse, a key holder, and a postcard with your name and address on it. I took money from the change purse to pay your tab, drove to the address on the postcard, and used your key to let us in. Then I put you to bed. End of story. The receipt for the bar bill is in your purse.”
She took a deep breath.
“So why did you crash here?”
“?”
“Why didn’t you just take off once you’d put me to bed?”
“A friend of mine died of alcohol poisoning. He chugged some whiskey, said goodbye, walked home, brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas, and went to bed.
Next morning he was stone cold. Fine funeral, though.”
“…You mean to say you nursed me all night?”
“I planned to head home around four. But I fell asleep. I thought of leaving when I woke up too. But I decided to hang around.”
“Why?”
“I figured you should at least know what happened.”
“A real gentleman, huh?”
Her words were as poisonous as she could make them. I shrugged and let them pass. Then I went back to watching the clouds.
“Did I…say anything?”
“A little.”
“Like what?”
“Like a few things. I’ve forgotten what. No big deal.”
She groaned without opening her eyes.
“The postcard?”
“It’s in your bag.”
“Did you read it?”
“Give me a break.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I?”
I was getting fed up. Something about her tone pissed me off. At the same time, though, I have to admit she was making me feel a little nostalgic. For something in the distant past. If we’d had the good fortune to meet under more normal circumstances, we might have spent our time together more pleasantly. Or so it felt. Yet for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was like to meet a girl under normal circumstances.
“What time is it?” she asked.
Somewhat relieved, I got out of bed and checked the electric clock on her desk, then filled a glass with water and brought it back to her.
“Nine o’clock.”
She gave a weak nod, sat up, and drained the glass with her back against the wall.
“Did I drink a lot?”
“Quite a bit. I would have died.”
“I feel half dead right now.”
She took a cigarette from the pack next to the bed, lit it, and let out a sigh with the first puff. She flipped the match out the open window toward the harbor.
“Grab me something to wear.”
“Like what?”