A Single Man (15 page)

But this time he has escaped. And now he closes the house door with the care of a burglar, sits himself down on the top step, takes a deep breath, and gives himself a
calm stern talking-to. You are drunk. Oh, you stupid old thing, how dare you get so drunk? Well, now, listen: We are going to walk down those steps very slowly, and when we are at the bottom we are going straight home and upstairs and right into bed, without even brushing our teeth. All right, that’s understood? Now, here we go —

Well and good.

How to explain, then, that, with his foot actually on the bridge over the creek, George suddenly turns, chuckles to himself, and with the movement of a child wriggling free of a grown-up – old guardian Cortex – runs off down the road, laughing, toward the ocean?

As he trots out of Camphor Tree Lane on to Las Ondas, he sees the round green porthole lights of The Starboard Side, down on the corner of the ocean highway across from the beach, shining to welcome him.

The Starboard Side has been here since the earliest days of the colony. Its bar, formerly a lunch-counter, served the neighbours with their first post-prohibition beers; and the mirror behind it was sometimes honoured by the reflection of Tom Mix. But its finest hours came later. That summer of 1945! The War as good as over. The blackout no more than an excuse for keeping the lights out at a gangbang. A sign over the bar said, ‘In case of a direct hit, we close immediately’. Which was meant to be funny, of course. And yet, out across the bay, in deep water under the cliffs of Palos Verdes, lay a real Japanese submarine full of real dead Japanese, depth-bombed after they had sunk two or three ships in sight of the Californian coast.

You pushed aside the blackout curtain and elbowed your way through a jam-packed bar-crowd, scarcely able to breathe or see for smoke. Here, in the complete privacy of the din and the crowd, you and your pick-up yelled the preliminary sex-advances at each other. You could flirt but you couldn’t fight; there wasn’t even room to smack someone’s face. For that, you had to step outside. Oh, the bloody battles and the side-walk vomitings! The punches flying wide, the heads crashing backwards against the fenders of parked cars! Huge diesel-dikes slugging it out, grimmer far than the men. The siren-wailing arrival of the police; the sudden swoopings of the shore patrol. Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk upstairs to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed like a miracle of joy. Hitch-hiking servicemen delayed at this corner for hours, nights, days; proceeding at last on their journeys with black eyes, crablice, clap, and only the dimmest memory of their hostess or host.

And then the War’s end and the mad spree of driving up and down the highway on the instantly derationed gas, shedding great black chunks of your recaps all the way to Malibu. And then the beach-months of 1946. The magic squalor of those hot nights, when the whole shore was alive with tongues of flame, the watch-fires of a vast naked barbarian tribe – each group or pair to itself and bothering no one, yet all a part of the life of the tribal encampment – swimming in the darkness, cooking fish, dancing to the radio, coupling without shame on the sand. George and Jim (who had just met) were out there among them evening after evening, yet not often enough
to satisfy the sad fierce appetite of memory, as it looks back hungrily on that glorious Indian summer of lust.

The hitch-hiking servicemen are few now and mostly domesticated; going back and forth between the rocket-base and their homes and wives. Beach-fires are forbidden, except in designated picnic-areas where you must eat sitting up on benches at communal tables, and mustn’t screw at all. But, though so much of the glory has faded, nevertheless – thanks to the persecuted yet undying old gods of disorder – this last block of Las Ondas is still a bad neighbourhood. Respectable people avoid it instinctively. Realtors deplore it. Property values are low, here. The motels are new but cheaply stuck together and already slum-sordid; they cater to one-night stands. And, though the charcoal remnants of those barbarian orgy-fires have long since been ground into the sand, this stretch of the shore is still filthy with trash; high-school gangs still daub huge scandalous words on its beach-wall, and seashells are still less easy to find here than discarded rubbers.

The glory has faded, too, from The Starboard Side; only a true devotee like George can still detect even a last faint gleam of it. The place has been stripped of its dusty marine trophies and yellow group-photographs. Right after the New Year it’s to be what they dare to call redecorated; that’s to say, desecrated in readiness for next summer’s mob of blank-faced strangers. Already there is a new juke-box, and a new television fixed high up on the wall; so you can turn half right, rest your elbows on the bar and go into a cow-daze, watching it. This is what most of the customers are doing as George enters.

He makes unsteadily but purposefully for his favourite
little table in the corner, from which the TV screen is invisible. At the table next to him, two other unhypnotized nonconformists, an elderly couple who belong to the last handful of surviving colonists, are practising their way of love; a mild quarrelsome alcoholism which makes it possible for them to live in a play-relationship, like children.
You old bag, you old prick, you old bitch, you old bastard;
rage without resentment, abuse without venom. This is how it will be for them, till the end. Let’s hope they will never be parted, but die in the same hour of the same night, in their beer-stained bed.

And now George’s eyes move along the bar; stop on a figure seated alone, at the end nearest the door. The young man isn’t watching the TV; indeed he is quite intent upon something he is writing on the back of an envelope. As he writes, he smiles to himself and rubs the side of his large nose with his forefinger. It is Kenny Potter.

At first, George doesn’t move; seems hardly to react at all. But then a slow intent smile parts his lips. He leans forward, watching Kenny with the delight of a naturalist who has identified a rosy finch out of the high sierras on a tree in a city park. After a minute he rises, crosses almost stealthily to the bar and slips on to the stool beside Kenny.

‘Hello, there,’ he says.

Kenny turns quickly, sees who it is, laughs loudly, crumples the envelope and tosses it over the bar into a trash container. ‘Hello, Sir.’

‘What did you do that for?’

‘Oh. Nothing.’

‘I disturbed you. You were writing.’

‘It was nothing. Only a poem.’

‘And now it’s lost to the world!’

‘I’ll remember it. Now I’ve written it down.’

‘Would you say it for me?’

This sends Kenny into convulsions of laughter. ‘It’s crazy. It’s —’ he gulps down his giggles. ‘It’s a – a
haiku
!’

‘Well, what’s so crazy about a haiku?’

‘I’d have to count the syllables first.’

But Kenny obviously isn’t going to count them now. So George says, ‘I didn’t expect to see you in this neck of the woods. Don’t you live over on the other side of town, near campus?’

‘That’s right. Only sometimes I like to get way away from there.’

‘But imagine your happening to pick on this particular bar!’

‘Oh, that was because one of the kids told me you’re in here a lot.’

‘You mean, you came out here to see me?’ Perhaps George says this a little too eagerly. Anyhow, Kenny shrugs it off with a teasing smile: ‘I thought I’d see what kind of a joint it was.’

‘It’s nothing, now. It used to be quite something, though. And I’ve gotten accustomed to coming here. You see, I live very close.’

‘Camphor Tree Lane?’

‘How in the world did you know that?’

‘Is it supposed to be a secret?’

‘Why no – of course not! I have students come over to see me, now and then. I mean, about their work —’ George is immediately aware that this sounds defensive and guilty as hell. Has Kenny noticed? He is grinning;
but then he has been grinning all the time. George adds, rather feebly, ‘You seem to know an awful lot about me and my habits. A lot more than I know about any of you —’

‘There isn’t much to know about us, I guess!’ Kenny gives him a teasing challenging look. ‘What would you like to know about us, Sir?’

‘Oh, I’ll think of something. Give me time. . . . Say, what are you drinking?’

‘Nothing!’ Kenny giggles. ‘He hasn’t even noticed me yet.’ And, indeed, the bartender is absorbed in a TV wrestling-match.

‘Well, what’ll you have?’

‘What are you having, Sir?’

‘Scotch.’

‘Okay,’ Kenny says, in a tone which suggests that he would have agreed just as readily to buttermilk. George calls the bartender – very loudly, so he can’t pretend not to have heard – and orders. The bartender, always a bit of a bitch, demands to see Kenny’s I.D. So they go through all of that. George says stuffily to the bartender, ‘You ought to know me by this time; do you really think I’d be such an idiot as to try to buy drinks for a minor?’

‘We have to check,’ says the bartender, through a skin inches thick. He turns his back on them and moves away. George feels a brief spurt of powerless rage. He has been made to look like an ass; and in front of Kenny, too.

While they are waiting for the drinks, he asks, ‘How did you get here? In your car?’

‘I don’t have one. Lois drove me.’

‘Where is she now, then?’

‘Gone home, I guess.’

George senses something not quite in order. But,
whatever it is, Kenny doesn’t seem worried about it. He adds vaguely, ‘I thought I’d walk around for a while.’

‘But how’ll you get back?’

‘Oh, I’ll manage.’

(A voice inside George says, You could invite him to stay the night at your place. Tell him you’ll drive him back in the morning.

What in hell do you think I am? George asks it.

It was merely a suggestion, says the voice.)

The drinks arrive. George says to Kenny, ‘Look, why don’t we sit over there, at the table in the corner? That damned television keeps catching my eye.’

‘All right.’

It
would
be fun, George thinks, if the Young were just a little less passive. But that’s too much to ask. You have to play it their way, or not at all. As they take their chairs, facing each other, George says, ‘I’ve still got my pencil sharpener’, and, bringing it out of his pocket, he tosses it down on the table, as though shooting craps.

Kenny laughs, ‘I already lost mine!’

And now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk; Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well – to put it very crudely – it’s like Plato; it’s a Dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching-match; not a debate on some dreary set theme. You can talk about anything and change the subject as often as you
like. In fact, what really matters is not what you talk about, but the being together in this particular relationship. George can’t imagine having a dialogue of this kind with a woman, because women can only talk in terms of the personal. A man of his own age would do, if there was some sort of polarity; for instance, if he was a Negro. You and your dialogue-partner have to be somehow opposites. Why? Because you have to be symbolic figures – like, in this case, Youth and Age. Why do you have to be symbolic? Because the dialogue is by its nature impersonal. It’s a symbolic encounter. It doesn’t involve either party personally. That’s why, in a dialogue, you can say absolutely anything. Even the closest confidence, the deadliest secret, comes out objectively as a mere metaphor or illustration, which could never be used against you.

George would like to explain all of this to Kenny. But it is so complicated; and he doesn’t want to run the risk of finding that Kenny can’t understand him. More than anything, he wants Kenny to understand; wants to be able to believe that Kenny knows what this dialogue is all about. And really, at this moment, it seems possible that Kenny
does
know. George can almost feel the electric field of the dialogue surrounding and irradiating them.
He
certainly feels irradiated. As for Kenny, he looks quite beautiful.
Radiant with rapport
is the phrase which George finds to describe him. For what shines out of Kenny isn’t mere intelligence or any kind of switched-on charm. There the two of them sit, smiling at each other – oh, far more than that – fairly beaming with mutual insight.

‘Say something,’ he commands Kenny.

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’ll I say?’

‘Anything. Anything that seems to be important, right now.’

‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know what is important and what isn’t. I feel like my head is stopped up with stuff that doesn’t matter – I mean, matter to me.’

‘Such as —’

‘Look, I don’t mean to be personal, Sir – but – well, the stuff our classes are about —’

‘That doesn’t matter to you?’

‘Jesus Christ, Sir – I
said
I wasn’t being personal! Yours are a whole lot better than most; we all think that. And you do try to make these books fit in with what’s going on, nowadays – only, it’s not your fault, but – we always seem to end up getting bogged down in the Past; like this morning, with Tithonus. Look, I don’t want to pan the Past; maybe it’ll mean a whole lot to me when I’m older. All I’m saying is, the Past doesn’t really matter to most kids my age. When we talk like it does, we’re just being polite. I guess that’s because we don’t have any pasts of our own – except stuff we want to forget, like things in high school, and times we acted like idiots —’