Asa, as I Knew Him (13 page)

“No, no, Reuben, I see what he means,” Jerry said. “It’s sort of a combination plate of your characteristics; it’s got Asa’s features and it’s got your bad temper—you can see that in its scowl.” He laughed.

Reuben turned back to the painting, which he looked at briefly, then looked at Asa, then at Jerry. “I see why you like it,” he said to Jerry. “It’s a Jewish angel—an avenging angel. It doesn’t have that wishy-washy expression you see on Christmas-tree angels. But I think it’s a trashy painting; romantic, pseudo-Blake stuff. And yes, it looks like Asa. I’m sure he’s a cousin. Now let’s go.”

“Son of the art collector has spoken,” said Jerry. He turned off the light. “I think he used his daughters as models—there are some more conventional portraits in the other room.”

Neither Reuben nor Asa had an inclination to go into the other room, Reuben because he wanted to leave, Asa because he did not want to leave off looking at his celestial double. In the now-dim hallway the painting was nearly imperceivable, merely a darker darkness framed in gold, spattered with the occasional glimmers that were the backlit halo and right arm. Reuben was on the landing kicking pieces of gravel around; Jerry had gone into the room where the more conventional portraits were hung. Asa stood undisturbed before the Angel of Monadnock.

But the painting disturbed him. First because he was unable to make a judgment of it as art, whereas Jerry and Reuben could and differed. He told himself it was an excellent painting; that was credible. Then he told himself it was romantic daubing, and that was credible too. Maintaining such a distance from it was difficult, though—he kept being entranced by what it meant rather than by its style. Wasn’t that a proof of its claim to being “art”? Maybe only a proof of his sentimentality—that quality responsible for the blocking of his throat and the blurring of his eyes while he looked at the painting, or the dash of his pulse when the train pulled into Andover Station. Likewise for somber yet not unhappy dreams in which he and Jo walked down dark lanes between trees,
and Reuben was a badger or an owl or even a stone fence, present but not himself. Asa knew his sentimentality was a poor substitute for passion, although the only way he could formulate this was to deride his life for its safeness and predictability and envy others who surprised themselves, and him, with the way things turned out. “Others” meant Reuben; Parker made attempts to surprise himself, but Asa could too easily project him five years into the future at a desk in his father’s law firm. Reuben was unprojectable.

For this reason the painting disturbed him—because while Asa looked at it he had the illusion of seeing himself as a knotty, unpredictable person, although he knew himself to be otherwise. Yet there was his head and his neck (even the outstretched naked arms had dimpled elbows and broad wrists like his), imbued with danger, revenge, authority, and mystery. This was a portrait of his unrealizable ambitions.

Was he to let them go? Ought Reuben to be discarded because he was nothing but a form of self-torture, a way for Asa to have his face rubbed in failure? Alternatively, had he been hoping that Reuben would “rub off” on him? Soberly, he considered the likelihood of his changing into a more compelling, compelled person; he had to admit it was chancy. At Harvard things would be different: He would be his own guardian; two hours every evening women would be free to come to his rooms; there was no telling what the combination of new ideas and new people would do. But all these opportunities seemed tame. They were opportunities offered to him in the normal course of things, not pathways he’d hacked out for himself. There was no tall building he yearned to climb, nor had he desired Jo enough to bed her in the back of the garage.

On the landing Reuben tapped his feet urgently. But Asa wasn’t finished with the painting. What had his ancestor
Abbott meant by it? Was it a message, and what was it? He could not, of course, have imagined an Asa to stand before it a generation in the future, pondering his own character; therefore, it was a message for a larger audience.

“Let’s
go,”
Reuben called. Jerry came out of a room down the hall and stood beside Asa.

“What do you think this painting is about?” Asa asked him.

“About? It’s not about anything. It’s not a book.”

“Aren’t paintings about things too?”

“What do
you
think it’s about?” When Asa didn’t say anything, Jerry continued. “You think it’s about you, don’t you? You think it’s a picture of your genetic heritage, or something like that, right?”

“What? No.” Asa had no idea what Jerry meant.

“The Puritan will imposed on New England, the shaping of America—that sort of stuff. Well, it isn’t. It’s a picture of one of his daughters draped in a sheet, standing in front of a window that looks out on some mountains.”

Asa looked at the painting from this point of view; it was exactly what Jerry said. And yet, it was other things too. A pebble hit him on the shoulder.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, I’m tired of this place,” Reuben said. He had a handful of pebbles and was tossing them at the ceiling. The rope was slung over his shoulder, wrinkling and wriggling every time he raised his arm. “I’m tired. I played a soccer game today. I just want to sack out.”

Asa shut his eyes, to have the pleasure of opening them and seeing the angel still there. But Jerry took him by the arm, while his eyes were closed, and turned him toward the stairwell, so that he saw the arched window and Reuben’s yellow head, upright this time but silhouetted as it had been when he was falling. There was to be no more dawdling. Asa
buttoned his blue coat. On the way out, both to impress Reuben and to keep alive a memory for himself, he snitched a postcard of the painting from the rack on the information desk.

“Why not steal the painting?” Reuben said. “That’s not much of a reproduction.”

For a minute it seemed like a good idea—that is, an idea Asa could imagine enacting. They could slice it out of its frame and he could roll it up and take it back to Choate in his suitcase. This was how art thieves operated in movies. He desired the painting enough to consider doing it; did that mean Reuben acted on his desires because they were more powerful than Asa’s? But what possible desire could he have to break into this museum? Or to steal rugs from out of his neighbor’s front hall, or steam open his father’s mail, or any of the daring and useless things he did? Perhaps he desired action—any action—and would go to great lengths to provide himself with it. Reuben wanted to make an impression on the world, to leave his footprints all over the snow; Asa wanted to enjoy the snowstorm. No, he was not being accurate, he was letting himself off too easily. He just wanted to get through life, and that was difficult enough without adding the danger of falling off the scaffolding or ending up in juvenile court for larceny.

Just to get through life was no ambition. It was the opposite of ambition. Walking through the leaves with Jerry and Reuben, both yawning, Asa tried to infuse himself with desires and hopes and plans. The night was helpful; dim now, and misty, warming as rainy air moved in, it was an atmosphere of change in which trees and buildings blurred and might be something else, anything. Halloween was coming, and Asa recalled himself as a pirate, a soldier, a ghost (this gave him pause, but he refused to dwell on past ghostliness), knocking
on Brattle Street doors. Blackening his upper lip with cork had convinced him of his mustache; a costume was useful in that way—it could catapult you into another life. Would a white silk scarf and different shoes make his life at Harvard dangerous and free?

Asa resolved to do a dangerous thing sometime before going off to college.

Early in April, Parker and Asa were accepted at Harvard. This was no surprise. What was surprising was that Reuben managed to get in as well, and that they were to room together. Jerry would be their fourth. This, and the fact that their rooms were in Weld Hall, an ungainly Victorian folly, rather than in the more distinguished Georgian Holworthy, upset Asa. Weld had the reputation of housing out-of-towners and football players. “We don’t belong in there,” Asa said. Parker was unsympathetic. “We’ll never be in there,” he said, “we’ll be busy.” And then there was the problem of Jerry.

“I don’t see what’s the matter with him,” Parker said.

“He knows too much.”

“You mean he’s a wonk?”

“No, I think he just knows stuff, without studying. His parents are Communists.”

“Hey, terrific. Does he have a beard?”

“He and Reuben kind of shut people out, you know.”

“They won’t shut us out. Reuben can’t shut us out, we’re his pals.”

Asa wasn’t sure of anything. Packing his suitcases in June, taking down his framed photographs of the farm in New Hampshire and himself with father and mother on the Nantucket beach, shaking hands with his teachers, exchanging summer plans with his classmates—a full quarter of whom would be in the Yard with him in September—he brooded
on the summer ahead of him, the Last Summer, and how to cement his relations with Reuben, and what bold feat he could achieve.

It was late in June, approaching another midsummer, and they were racing up the coast in Reuben’s car. Jo sat in the front seat with her hand on Reuben’s naked thigh, Asa and Parker sat in the back, squirming on the sand left over from previous trips. As usual, they had argued about where to go. Asa and Jo wanted to go south, where the sand was fine and the water warm. Parker always took Reuben’s side, and Reuben wanted to go north, to Plum Island, because there it was forbidden to swim or picnic. “It’s too cold up there,” Asa said, “and we’re not supposed to swim anyhow.” “No crowds,” Reuben answered, and blasted out of the circular driveway at forty miles an hour. “Skinny-dipping, herons, no lifeguards—it’s paradise.” Asa and Jo smoked more than usual in protest.

Each time Jo took out a cigarette Asa leaned forward between the front seats to light it. Sometimes their hands brushed. Then, in reparation, Jo stroked the gold hairs on Reuben’s leg more intently. Reuben had become gold all over, like a perfectly done piece of french toast. Jo was brown, dark brown, and the whites of her eyes and her teeth looked like porcelain chips. Parker burned, so he kept a hat on his head and a towel around his neck at all times; nonetheless, his nose was blistered. To protect it, he’d bought a plastic nose cover, which he kept in place with a piece of masking tape. He looked somewhat like a heron with this beaky attachment, which he called “my nib.” Reuben now referred to him as His Nibs. Asa found all of this irritating. He did not burn, he did not toast, either. He became ruddied and flushed and looked like a six-year-old who’d spent too long making sandcastles. He
put tropical balms all over himself and wished he had a real tan, but he never achieved one until August.

They sped north, weaving from lane to lane because Reuben wanted to break his record from the last trip. They had a cold chicken and a loaf of rye bread and eight hard-boiled eggs packed by Lolly in a hamper. Parker had supplied a six-pack bought by Clem and warming rapidly in the hot car. The hope of a still-cool beer kept Reuben’s foot on the accelerator; Parker kept placing his hand on the bottles and yelling, “Faster, faster, it’s cooking!”

The road out of the city passed over the Mystic River. From the crest of the bridge Asa could see all of the Charlestown shipyards laid out in a snaking line, with half-built boats—gray destroyers and cargo carriers—fixed in the still, silver water. It was a view he looked forward to. The bridge was high enough to miniaturize the sight, so that it seemed to be a toy industrial center, complete with tiny workers and thin plumes of factory smoke. Reuben had noticed him craning and twisting around to take in the spectacle each time they passed it. On this steamy late-morning ride he chose to comment.

“Some bridge,” he said.

Asa shifted his glance up; it was an extraordinary bridge. The lacework of its struts and wires was beautiful in the way a birch forest is beautiful in winter: feathery, spare, seeming to have great depth by virtue of intricacy. “Yes, pretty,” he said.

“It’s a goddam monument,” said Reuben. “Anything this high and complicated is a work of art.”

“I was really looking at the shipyard,” Asa mumbled.

“Huh?” Reuben said. He passed a few cars. “How’s the beer?”

“Hot, hot, hot,” said Parker.

At the beach Asa and Parker spread their towels the customary twenty feet away from Reuben and Jo, to leave them in privacy. As payoff for this, Asa and Parker kept the food in their area. Parker dug a hole near the high-water mark and buried the beer. Asa draped Parker’s shirt over the hamper and put a rock on top. But the beer never cooled down, the shirt blew off the hamper twice, and the eggs, when unpeeled, were sweating and rubbery. Still, the pleasures of the beach—the simplicity of the horizon, the fresh, tart smell of the sand, the gulls who circled the picnic crying for scraps—put them all in a good mood. After eating, Reuben and Jo retired to their towel, where they stripped and lay in each other’s arms for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes their limbs thrashed a little. Asa tried not to look in their direction.

That was difficult. Parker had a tendency to stare at them and describe what they were doing to Asa, who sat with his back resolutely turned toward them. But the descriptions were tantalizing and incomplete—“Oh wow, she’s really … boy”—and Asa would crane his head over his shoulder to see for himself. What he saw made him miserable. They were beautiful and naked and in each other’s arms and he was hot, stupid from beer, and alone. He wished he could tap Reuben on the shoulder and cut in, replace him as Jo’s partner as simply as he might at a dance.

Could he steal Jo away with cigarettes and subtle touches? After all, she had kissed him. That would be a dangerous project. Why had she kissed him? He pretended to look down the beach and watched, for a moment, the star shape they had made of themselves on the red towel. Reuben lay sideways on top of Jo reading a comic book; she was staring up at the sky. One breast pointed toward Asa. The day was very hot, and their images wiggled before Asa’s eyes, as if they were melting. He turned toward the sea, which was also
quivering. At the horizon a band of dancing molecules confused the border between water and air. There was a melting boat—or was it a gull? Maybe only a wave cresting on a sandbar. The shape of everything began to change. Even his own feet, where he rested his eyes for relief, were huge and pulsing and nacreous in the heat. It had been nearly a year since she’d kissed him. She might not remember doing it. But didn’t the fact of it guarantee him some sort of access to her? He peeked over at them again. Reuben had shifted and now lay blocking Jo’s body with his own. One of his legs enclosed both of hers, his weight was on his elbow, his hand was on her belly. Some of her thick, salt-curled hair was caught in the crook of his arm.