Sweet Reason (12 page)
The
Ebersole
heeled over sharply to port and the two young men in Main Plot braced themselves with their palms flat against the deck. The metal-bound loose-leaf book containing the
Rules of Engagement
slid across the top of the computer and thudded against the bulkhead. Then the ship steadied on a new course and Joyce and Boeth sat listening to the noises a ship makes at sea and the Brandenburg.
The Poet, who seemed emotionally drained, said softly: “I wish we could go to New York now. New York is a great town in the spring. God how I love the spring. It’s the one thing I miss most at sea.”
“It’s the thing I miss the least,” Boeth said. “I hate spring.”
Joyce was genuinely amazed. “I never met anyone who actually hated spring.”
“See, there you go again. That’s what I mean by innocent. You make hating spring sound like an un-American activity. What you mean is you never met anybody who
admitted
hating spring. My God, millions of people hate spring, but they don’t go around boasting about it because it makes them sound like a pervert or something like that.”
“Why?” asked the Poet. “Why do you hate the spring?”
Boeth looked down at the deck, at the bits of eggshell spread out under his hand. He began to toy with the pieces,
trying halfheartedly to jigsaw them back together again. “I hate spring because of the green. Green is for rebirth. Everything and everyone around is coming back to life — except me, and I detest that.”
“They say April is the cruelest month,” Joyce said. “You know the line?”
“I know it, but it’s all wrong. August is the cruelest month.”
“Why August?”
“That’s when all the psychiatrists go on vacation, in August, leaving their patients stranded for four weeks without a couch. So to a lot of people August is the cruelest month.”
Here it comes, the Poet thought, now he’s going to tell me about it, about the hospitals and the psychiatrists and the physical scars they erased and the mental scars they couldn’t do anything about. But Boeth only smiled bitterly and shook his head. He finished peeling the second egg and tossed it to the Poet. Then he picked up the first one and tossed it over too.
“Why do you peel them if you don’t eat them?” Joyce asked.
Boeth shrugged. “I peel them to pass the time. Why do you write poetry?”
“I write poetry because I like poetry.”
“Why do you like poetry?”
Now it was the Poet’s turn to shrug. “I like poetry … I like it because the whole equals more than the sum of its parts.”
Boeth laughed nervously. “I’d like to write about the war, but I don’t know where to begin. Tell me something, Poet, how do you decide whether to use the present tense or the past?”
“You have to have a feeling for the difference,” Joyce explained. “When you use the present — ‘He walks into the room and turns to the girl’ — there is a real sense of immediacy.
Nobody, neither the guy walking into the room nor the guy writing the line, nobody knows what will happen next. But when you use the past tense — ‘He walked into the room and turned to the girl’ — it’s obvious that the narrator knows, even if he hasn’t said yet, what will happen next. He knows because the thing he’s describing has already happened. See?”
“When you write about the war, which do you use?”
“The past tense. This creates the feeling that there are no surprises, that the narrator knows what’s going to happen.”
Boeth was interested. “What does the narrator know that the rest of us don’t?”
Joyce thought a second. “I guess what he knows is that everyone who takes part in a war is a victim.”
After a while Joyce asked casually: “You hear anything from Mariana?”
“I got a letter when we refueled from the
Taluga
. It started off with a headline in big red letters that said ‘
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
.’ Under that she listed half-a-dozen items. One said tombs for unknown soldiers glorify war. Mistrust anyone in uniform, soldiers, bellboys, Western Union messengers, that was another. And she quoted Henry James — about how a hotel spirit was coming to America which would make life like living in a luxurious hotel, with all the choices left to the management. Except for the part about luxury, it sounds like a description of the
Eugene Ebersole
, doesn’t it?”
The Poet shook his head. “She never lets go, does she? Didn’t she have anything personal to say — about us, about New York, about me?”
Boeth took a folded paper from the back pocket of his dungarees and began to read it to himself. “Yes, she says she hopes you’re okay. She says …” Boeth’s voice petered out.
“Come on, read it.”
“She says you confuse her. One minute you put all your emotions on the table the way a child lays out cards for a
game of solitaire. The next, you hold back part of yourself as if you were keeping a jerry can of gasoline in reserve. She says when you talk about politics your sentences sound like second pressings.” Boeth looked up and shrugged. “That’s what she says.”
Joyce avoided his eye. “She’s —”
“Very intuitive,” Boeth supplied.
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say …”
But Boeth wasn’t listening. He was back in New York waving and saying “Be my guest” and watching Mariana and Joyce disappear into the bedroom. He was slowly grinding the phonograph needle across the grooves and creating a sound that matched his emotions.
The Brandenburg tape ran out and Boeth got up and turned off the machine.
Joyce asked: “What do you think of this Sweet Reason business?”
Boeth responded too quickly, too lightly. “Whatever else he’s doing, he’s making time on this antiquated chicken-of-the-sea pass more quickly.”
“That’s what you said about peeling eggs.”
“You have a good memory, Poet. It’s one of the standards by which I measure things — eggshells, Sweet Reason leaflets, you name it. Every hour under the belt is another hour you don’t have to worry about again.” Boeth glanced at the clock on the bulkhead. It was five minutes to midnight. “Sometimes it seems as if all human activity is designed to make time pass more quickly.”
“The trouble with Sweet Reason,” the Poet said, “is he’s not doing what he’s doing well.”
Boeth said: “Did you ever think, Poet, that if something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly?”
The Ship’s Barber Sees Red
The ship’s barber, a sour-grapes superpatriot from Detroit named Joe Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski, spotted it first. His head thrown back, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his taut neck muscles, he squinted up at the mast and poked Lustig in the ribs.
“Is it?” he asked angrily. “Supposed to be like that?”
Cee-Dee happened to be on the bridge as a result of a conversation he had with Lustig the night before in the barber shop, a converted paint locker back aft equipped with a used swivel barber’s chair Richardson acquired in exchange for a potato-peeling machine and the musical services of Tevepaugh at another ship’s picnic. The compartment was so cramped (Cee-Dee insisted on having some spare chairs and a small table for magazines) that there was no room to swivel in, so Cee-Dee danced around the barber’s chair like a sparring partner, ducking and squinting and lunging and nipping nervously away as he went. A mirror hung from the bulkhead, along with an American flag, copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettsyburg Address, a “God Is On Our Side” bumper sticker and a poster that said “Fuck Communism.”
Arranged in a half-moon over the spare chairs — and looking like a homosexual’s rogues’ gallery — were eight framed pictures of various styles of haircuts clipped from a
Barber’s World
Cee-Dee had swiped from the eighteen-chair shop on the Norfolk Naval Station. Actually, the pictures were there for atmosphere; Cee-Dee himself could only give one basic cut, a rounded-off, high-necked affair that left a tuft of hair falling across the forehead like the brim of a baseball cap. “Ain’t nobody gonna take you for one of them friggin’ college faggots when I’m through wit you,” Cee-Dee would boast.
Cee-Dee always did the sideburns last — crossing the Ts after finishing the sentence, he called it. Standing directly behind the customer and squinting into the mirror to get the right angle, he would chop away with his mechanical trimmer, first on the right side, then on the left, then a touch on the right again, then a correcting smidge on the left until both sides had risen, like rungs of a ladder, to the top of the ears.
“Not too short on the sideburns,” Lustig had said, trying not to move his head as he spoke. He was leafing through one of Cee-Dee’s dirty magazines that, more than the haircuts, is what kept the customers coming back for more. The pages, worn thin and greasy from fingering, were full of garter belts and paraffin breasts — the kind of thing that turned Lustig off rather than on. But he studied them with the proper amount of intensity, grunting here or sneering there to keep up appearances.
“Enough, enough,” Lustig had said, glancing at his exposed ears jutting conspicuously from the sides of his head. “There’s not much you can do with the ship rolling and pitching like this. I’ll straighten them myself.” (“What did you do — flunk sideburns?” Lustig thought to say when he reviewed the scene later.)
Cee-Dee had held a small mirror behind Lustig so that he could see the back of his head in the mirror in front of him. It was a touch that Cee-Dee had picked up from a $1.25 barber shop in Detroit and reserved for his officer customers.
“Looks great, just great,” Lustig had said, studying the back of the head that was supposed to be his in the mirror. He didn’t know what else to say.
“Whata cunt, huh?” Cee-Dee had said conversationally, nodding down at the girl peering up at Lustig from the magazine. “There’s a cow on the cover, but inside is real good stuff. Well, they say you can’t judge a book by the cover.”
(Later Lustig thought to respond: “Some people can’t even judge it by its contents.”)
Cee-Dee had begun unpinning the sheet that kept some of the hair off the customer. “Hey, Mister Lustig, why did the XO put that note in tomorrow’s plan of the day about no sightseers on the bridge?”
“Because the skipper was pissed by everyone and his uncle rushing up there when that plane went down today.”
“I guess that means I’ll never get to see the friggin’ bridge,” Cee-Dee had said.
“What do you mean never?” Lustig had asked. “Haven’t you ever been on the bridge?”
“Nope, I never been. I been on the
Eugene Ebersole
a year come August but I never thought to go till I read you can’t. Ain’t that something. Closing the barn door after the horse’s skedaddled.” The aphorism was wildly inappropriate but Lustig didn’t want to embarrass Cee-Dee, so he let it pass.
“Listen, Cee-Dee, I got the four-to-eight tomorrow morning. After reveille you grab a cup of coffee and come up and if anyone stops you, you say the coffee is for me, that I asked for it. And put three sugars in it, okay?”
“That’s friggin’ decent of you Mister Lustig, to go to all that trouble for me.”
“Is it,” Cee-Dee said moments after he arrived on the bridge, coffee in hand, “supposed to be like that?”
“Is what supposed to be like what?” Lustig asked. He and
Cee-Dee were on the signal bridge along with two signalmen, Angry Pettis Foreman and Jefferson Waterman.
“The American flag — is it supposed to be like
that?
A friggin’ disgrace, that’s what it is.”
Lustig followed Cee-Dee’s gaze. He could see the The Stars and Stripes shedding their wrinkles into the morning air. And he could see — “Oh my God Almighty” — that the flag was
upside-down
.
“What do you mean upside-down?” the XO yelled into the phone when Lustig woke him with the news.
“Upside-down! What do you mean upside-down?” Captain Jones fumed when the XO burst into his cabin.
“You know what an upside-down flag means,” the Captain told the XO after the two of them had trooped to the signal bridge to see the apparition for themselves. “Good Christ, imagine if the people on the aircraft carrier had spotted it, eh? We’d have been laughed out of the war zone.”
Jones covered his eyes to keep the vision at bay.
Captain Jones Puts a Foot into a Mine Field