Dog Tags (8 page)

Benny understood that replies were not required. Arthur ate; Arthur talked. Good. He turned to his own Aunt Rose. “How goes it, Rosey?”

“It goes all right. Nobody starves here. Your girl's beautiful, Benny. I mean really beautiful. It made my heart ache, so young and beautiful. You'll be happy.”

“I'm happy now. But getting married is murder.”

“Murder, no. Suicide, maybe.”

Besotted by ceremony, brutalized by gluttony, aching for the road, Benny clutched his wineglass and contemplated this new world. Prpl and Lin debated across a whiskey bottle. Stout burghers shook fingers, declaimed; others fox-trotted. Miss Carol Abravanel Untermeyer and Mr. Benjamin Beer. Joined today in matrimony by the learned rabbi—what was his name? Issachar. Zebulun. It would be on the certificate, doubtless illegible. Uncle Gordon breathed at a pince-nez, polished it on a serge sleeve. Mrs. Beer is the daughter of Dr. Amos Untermeyer, a notorious bungler, and Mrs. Untermeyer, a sexy bit, could be brighter but after all. Of Central Park West, the downtown end with palms in the lobby.

Miriam Karp came up to kiss him, and with her Ruth Pinsky, weeping. Benny patted, soothed, joked.

The groom is the son of Mr. Jacob Beer of Union Square, a widower specializing in hand-stitched single-breasted, waistcoat optional; ranking member of local klaberjass and pinochle clubs. A black waiter poured champagne, inscrutable, imperial. The bride was attended by Miss Deborah Abravanel, a saftig bundle who reported unsolicited attentions from Uncle Arthur Untermeyer, known among the desert tribes as Hands-in-Motion. Brief honeymoon. Groom will return to College of Leeching and Cupping, where he is concentrating in astrology. At home. Please send money.

Benny rose from the table and strode forth. He reclaimed his bride, kissed her soundly in the presence of witnesses, and danced before the Lord with all his might.

While Carol changed, the exhausted few wallowed among wedding presents. “Tiffany's,” Sylvia said. Stuporous, Benny admired a tablecloth. Jacob appraised. Amos collapsed into a leather chair: “Too much champagne. Too early in the day.” Jacob had given them five hundred dollars: “Nothing,” he confided. “What Amos tips the doorman. All the same, a little pin money.” Amos had lavished his all upon them: fifty shares of General Motors, fifty of Jersey Standard, a year's lease of a small flat on Riverside Drive, a view of the Hudson, elevators, beige corridors, incinerators. “Dunhill's,” Sylvia said. “Don't touch those stocks,” Amos ordered. “Solid gold. Put the profits back in.” Benny agreed. Romance, romance, where is romance? Am I burned out at twenty-five? No. Full of aunts and uncles and funeral baked meats. Christ Almighty. Weddings. A barbarism. A rotten full belly now and doubtless his breath stank. “Gimbel's?” Sylvia said. Jacob stood forlorn, and Benny's cup, his stirrup cup, a cup of sudden grief, ran over: man's lot was loneliness. He threw an arm across Jacob's shoulders. Jacob blinked through tears; one trickled down the sharp nose. “I'm leaving you again,” Benny said quietly, and Jacob nodded. Benny hugged him: “I'll give you grandchildren.” Jacob brightened. “I'll be a baby-sitter,” Jacob said. “You can teach them pinochle,” Benny said.

Carol emerged, a vision, bright, frightened, the Aztec maiden breathless beneath the obsidian knife. Benny went to her and kissed her gently. Sylvia wept at last. Amos cleared his throat. Jacob hung back, diffident, and Carol went to him and embraced him, with a glance at Benny; she knew, and in that moment Benny gave her all the heart. Jacob patted her shoulder. “A lovely couple,” he said. “Never a prettier couple. L'chayim. A thousand years.” “Ten thousand years,” Amos trumped. “Banzai.”

The newlyweds left them, Benny with a last easy wink for Jacob, and rode downstairs to a rented Ford, and drove north in quiet silence. At a red light Benny kissed Carol again, and she seized him. “Thank God,” she almost sobbed. “Let's never get married again. Let's never go back.”

“You too?” Benny laughed in giddy joy. “I thought you'd love it. All that silly fuss. All those people. Monsters. Here comes the bride.”

“I love you truly,” she gasped. “Tell you one thing about relatives.”

“Tell me.”

“They make the groom look good.” She snuggled. “Let's go to Australia.”

Happiness ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed. Benny drove and dreamed, squeezed her thigh, blessed his luck, subdued his lust. Late summer, and the thickets beside the highway gleamed rich green, lush and heavy, dales and glens, love nests; crows picked at a dead cat, glared balefully, flapped and glided; the sun rode westward. Benny mused upon the night to come, the adventure, the unknown; upon many nights to come; his breath quickened. My God, what a chance to take! One woman forever! He resolved to be tender. She knew so little. She was his to teach. Doctor Professor Beer. Never a cold bed, he thought fiercely. Never! He angled into a service station, stalled, set the brake and embraced her; frantically they kissed, lovingly he cupped her breasts. “Let's get arrested,” he said. She giggled and broke free. As a gangling attendant emerged they roared off, laughing wildly. Never a cold bed, he thought. One hundred and seven ways to make love. You lecher. This pure bride, and you plot her ruin. Doctor Professor Beer will lecture on the Kamasutra, with slides. Eminent practitioner of Jewish acupuncture. A dirty, dirty man! He groaned at his depravity.

“What was that? Regret?”

“Impatience.”

“Why sir, what have you in mind? I little thought, when I accepted this ride—”

“All in good time, my child.” She was silent, and he went on, “It's fun, you know. It's the most fun there is.”

“Better than mah-jongg?”

“I may beat you,” he said.

And so they voyaged to a honeymoon in the mountains, registering with appropriate aplomb and disappearing from human ken for some days. That night they learned what strangers they were, and for the first and only time Benny's pride and joy failed him. They soon cured this mysterious ailment, and joked about it, and Carol was breathless and acquiescent and curious and obedient. But there was plenty of the ancient Roman in Benny and not all the eagles in the world flying on his right hand would cancel out the omen. He lay awake in the middle watch straining to see through the fog of the future, but he was human, blind, doomed, and the fates were mute.

Weary, languid, they returned to Riverside Drive, and Carol set about cataloging, ranging, repairing, storing, stitching and baking; she proved severe with tradesmen, and Benny admired. She resolved to work for a year and think later about genetics, but changed her mind almost immediately; adventurous one night, Benny was put off gently, and Carol said softly, “The honeymoon is over.” Benny froze, but she hugged him and went on, “There's three of us now. Don't knock him around.”

Benny sat up and pressed a switch; Carol was grinning as if in guilt. Popeyed, stupefied, he could not speak. “Now everybody'll know what we've been doing,” she said.

“Jesus,” Benny managed. He kissed her. “Little mother. So soon!”

“I didn't know it was loaded,” she said, and he wheezed at the ancient joke. To his acute shame thoughts of other women crossed his mind, and he wondered briefly if unknown Beer by-blows might exist. He recalled himself to order. “Carol! A child. A baby Beer! A crown prince!”

“Yup. How's that for service?”

“Oh best of women,” he said, and kissed her again, slowly, warmly; he kissed her eyes, her throat, her breasts; lovingly, firmly, he kissed her downy mound, and said, “Thank you, little mother.”

“You pig,” she said. “Come back here.”

They rubbed noses. “Do you want to work anyway?”

“No. I think I'll do everything right. Quit smoking and get fat and eat chalk and truffles.”

“Damn right,” Benny said. “As a medical man, madam, I must inform you that frequent intercourse eases childbirth.”

“I married a maniac,” she said. “Well, get on with it.” And Benny, suffused with love, with awe, with the pride of a hundred generations, got on with it; and Carol, sparkling, pummeled him and laughed. In the morning he called Jacob, and she called Amos, who mentioned a trust fund.

And yet the event diminished Benny; beneath the natural joy an unnatural alteration worked, a confusion, an ambiguous and agonizing demand for new strengths and new dignities. Some of it he understood: a portion of his prodigious, transcendent sexual frenzy was being distilled to compassion; his bawdy Doppelgänger, his ruttish twin, a splendidly psychotic Deutero-Benny, a fiendish gonad in human form, had fallen afoul of a mysterious constabulary. At the obscure command of that enigmatic force he must consciously—if regretfully—subdue his infantile fantasies, deliberately—if regretfully—expurgate and abridge his Kamasutra. He must concede (not without sighs) that the companion of his joys and sorrows deserved a more human lord, and should be spared the scurvy monstrosities of a deranged incubus. She was not a succubus; she was Carol, who might some day be a geneticist, who was now a bachelor of science and a laboratory technician, whose mind and heart he had also married, who bore his child; a certain decorum seemed meet, classical and correct. Where she demurred (and she had) he would not insist; hating slavery, he renounced mastery.

It was not easy. He was, had been, hoped always to be, frank with himself, freely admitting to the deer park of his mind the most incendiary extremes of fanaticism, blasphemy, salacity—staunchly certain that his tender respect for all living things would happily, ungrudgingly police his behavior. But now he was acknowledging new hegemonies; colonized by a morality once scorned (which unchecked, established, dominant, became death-in-life), he grappled with the intruder. To Deutero-Benny marriage meant license, orgy; in theological disputation he defined heavenly bliss as eternal orgasm. In mortal combat now, Deutero-Benny fought back satanically: would Citizen Beer, by exorcising his gorgeously debauched shadow, work a secret and fatal violence upon himself? The old fiend, the mad doctor, was at any rate a lunatic lover; the reformed libertine might be an agent of doom and destruction. The angel of death was, after all, an angel and not a cheerful pornographer.

Some evenings Benny sat looking out at barges and sailboats, tankers and scows, as darkness gathered and the last sunlight faded over the western bank, and with mingled sorrow, righteousness and wry laughter bade farewell to his carnival youth. This was, he supposed tentatively, the onset of maturity: a necessary girding against reality's assaults, a stern replacement of polymorphous calisthenics by more useful exercises of power. Carol was sweet, loving, grateful, now an exquisite little girl playing house, now a grave matron sorting silver and napery. Another kind of fairy tale, grimmer and more worldly, had come true: place, family, work, future were his; nothing now lacked, and he would one day be king.

These ruminations were intense but infrequent; he was amply occupied by his fourth year among the phagocytes, purpuras and quaternary agues, by visits to Jacob, by the crown prince's progress, by plans for internship and a glance at the market, by spaghetti dinners and snow and sleet, by Van Gogh on the walls, bookcases of brick and plank, Beethoven by candlelight, Amos and Sylvia bustling in to bestow upon them roasts, a quilt, advice, twenty-dollar bills. It was an obstetrician's year, Carol's year, a year of blooming and rounding, of light exercises and manuals of childbirth, of lists of names, boys' names, girls' names, family names, Biblical names. They debated natural childbirth. Benny was properly chaffed by his classmates, and received in the mail tables of Jukes and Kallikaks. In bed Carol cried, “Quick! Quick!” and he was dismayed, heartsore: she wanted him not to start quickly but to finish quickly. He made allowances for a pregnant woman. Soon she drew apart from him to sit, to muse, to dream in an inviolable glow of privacy; he made further allowances, and was lonely. He was kind and flattering and utterly confused. She caressed her own belly, spoke to the child, smiled at nothing. She cooked interminably, and he was sated with planked fish, meat soups, roasts; “Protein,” she explained. The obstetrician guessed at a date: nine months and three days from the wedding! Amos jested: “If it's premature you'll answer to me, young man.” Sylvia hovered; soon her figure was better than Carol's, and when she showed it off Benny fell silent and sardonic.

He kept busy, rushing from class to clinic; he waded through glaucoma, cancer, cirrhosis, diabetes; he inhaled mists of pus, of blood, of urine; he cultivated—desperately he cultivated!—a cold unconcern, a professional indifference to raw wounds, shiny organs, pathetic senility, dead babies. Ah no, no, not an indifference, not an unconcern, but he coined a new definition of “doctor”: the one man in the room who is forbidden to weep. Rarely he found a moment for Pinsky's with Karp and Jacob. He was joshed; if it was a boy Karp would cut him a caftan, and Pinsky would supply the first year's sturgeon. Naturally it would be a boy. They took to calling Jacob grandpa. Jacob beamed. Benny too beamed, and drank tea like an old-timer, slurping and nodding. “I'll do the bar mitzvah free,” Pinsky said, and jiggled. Benny aged, and remembered his early loves, and tried to be scornful of young lust, and berated his licentious colleagues at work.

That was the year that became the year of Nan, that never came again, not in twelve years or twenty or a century, that reduced Benny to despair, treason, death in the soul, that magnified him to impossible exaltations. And yet he lived, roared, worked, howled through days and nights like a hurricane; survived, defied, swore great oaths and repulsed inexorable seas. His failings engendered energies: sleepless, he grew in strength; heartless, he grew in love; mindless, he grew in skill; hopeless he hoped, deathless he died; ignorant of all that was to come, he waited, bided, nerved himself, roused ancient forces to meet man's fate.