I Sing the Body Electric (26 page)

She could see the dark figure in the front seat of the car, not moving, staring straight ahead.

“You—” she started to say, and opened the back screen door. She found a smile on her mouth. She stopped it. Her heart was slowing now. She made herself frown.

He shut off the motor. She waited. He climbed out of the car and threw the pumpkins in the garbage can and slammed the lid.

“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you home so early—?”

“Nothing.” He brushed by her with the two gallons of cider intact. He set them on the kitchen sink.

“But it's not ten yet—”

“That's right.” He went into the bedroom and sat down in the dark.

She waited five minutes. She always waited five minutes. He wanted her to come ask, he'd be mad if she didn't, so finally she went and looked into the dark bedroom.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Oh, they all stood around,” he said. “They just stood around like a bunch of fools and didn't do anything.”

“What a shame.”

“They just stood around like dumb fools.”

“Oh, that's a shame.”

“I tried to get them to do something, but they just stood around. Only eight of them showed up, eight out of twenty, eight, and me the only one in costume. I tell you. The only one. What a bunch of fools.”

“After all your trouble, too.”

“They had their girls and they just stood around with them and wouldn't do anything, no games, nothing. Some of them went off with the girls,” he said, in the dark, seated, not looking at her. “They went off up the beach and didn't come back. Honest to gosh.” He stood now, huge, and leaned against the wall, looking all disproportioned in the short trousers. He had forgotten the child's hat was on his head. He suddenly remembered it and took it off and threw it on the floor. “I tried to kid them. I played with a toy dog and did some other stuff but nobody did anything. I felt like a fool the only one there dressed like this, and them all different, and only eight out of twenty there, and most of them gone in half an hour. Vi was there. She tried to get me to walk up the beach, too. I was mad by then. I was really mad. I said no thanks. And here I am. You can have the lollipop. Where did I put it? Pour the cider down the sink, drink it, I don't care.”

She had not moved so much as an inch in all the time he talked. She opened her mouth.

The telephone rang.

“If that's them, I'm not home.”

“You'd better answer it,” she said.

He grabbed the phone and whipped off the receiver.

“Sammy?” said a loud high clear voice. He was holding the receiver out on the air, glaring at it in the dark. “That you?” He grunted. “This is Bob.” The eighteen-year-old voice rushed on. “Glad you're home. In a big rush, but—what about that game tomorrow?”

“What game?”

“What game? For cri-yi, you're kidding. Notre Dame and S.C.!”

“Oh, football.”

“Don't say oh football like that, you talked it, you played it up,
you
said—”

“That's no game,” he said, not looking at the telephone, the receiver, the woman, the wall, nothing.

“You mean you're not going? Heavy-Set, it won't be a
game
without you!”

“I got to water the lawn, polish the car—”

“You can do that Sunday!”

“Besides, I think my uncle's coming over to see me. So long.”

He hung up and walked out past his mother into the yard. She heard the sounds of him out there as she got ready for bed.

He must have drubbed the punching bag until three in the morning. Three, she thought, wide awake, listening to the concussions. He's always stopped at twelve, before.

At three thirty he came into the house.

She heard him just standing outside her door.

He did nothing else except stand there in the dark, breathing.

She had a feeling he still had the little boy suit on. But she didn't want to know if this were true.

After a long while the door swung slowly open.

He came into her dark room and lay down on the bed, next to her, not touching her. She pretended to be asleep.

He lay face up and rigid.

She could not see him. But she felt the bed shake as if he were laughing. She could hear no sound coming from him, so she could not be sure.

And then she heard the squeaking sounds of the little steel springs being crushed and uncrushed, crushed and uncrushed in his fists.

She wanted to sit up and scream for him to throw those awful noisy things away. She wanted to slap them out of his fingers.

But then, she thought, what would he do with his hands? What could he put in them? What would he, yes, what would he do with his hands?

So she did the only thing she could do, she held her breath, shut her eyes, listened, and prayed, O God, let it go on, let him keep squeezing those things, let him keep squeezing those things, let him, let him, oh let, let him, let him keep squeezing … let … let…

It was like lying in bed with a great dark cricket.

And a long time before dawn.

B
rokaw.

What a name!

Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of:

Immanuel Brokaw!

A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.

Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed:

Brokaw!

What ever happened to him?

One day, like a high-class vaudeville act, he vanished.

With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.

Silence for ten years. And more silence.

Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby Dick? To psychoanalyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?

Who knows?

I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.

“Good-bye forever!”

His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.

So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?

Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely shores of Newport.

The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.

“Brokaw! By the saints!”

And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like God manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal…

Immanuel Brokaw.

But not in a dark suit, no.

Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore:

Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A Los Angeles Dodgers' baseball cap. French sunglasses. And…

The shirt! Ah God! The shirt!

A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and crosshatch with mythological beasts and symbols!

Open at the neck, this vast shirt hung wind-whipped like a thousand flags from a parade of united but neurotic nations.

But now, Dr. Brokaw tilted his baseball cap, lifted his French sunglasses to survey the empty bus seats. Striding slowly down the aisle, he wheeled, he paused, he lingered, now here, now there, He whispered, he murmured, now to this man, this woman, that child.

I was about to cry out when I heard him say:

“Well, what do you make of it?”

A small boy, stunned by the circus-poster effect of the old man's attire, blinked, in need of nudging. The old man nudged:

“My
shirt
, boy! What do you
see!?
”

“Horses!” the child blurted, at last. “Dancing horses!”

“Bravo!” The doctor beamed, patted him, and strode on. “And
you
, sir?”

A young man, quite taken with the forthrightness of this invader from some summer world, said:

“Why … clouds, of course.”

“Cumulus of nimbus?”

“Er … not storm clouds, no, no. Fleecy, sheep clouds.”

“Well done!”

The psychiatrist plunged on.

“Mademoiselle?”

“Surfers!” A teen-age girl stared. “They're the waves, big ones. Surfboards. Super!”

And so it went, on down the length of the bus and as the great man progressed a few scraps and titters of laughter sprang up, then, grown infectious, turned to roars of hilarity. By now, a dozen passengers had
heard the first responses and so fell in with the game. This woman saw skyscrapers! The doctor scowled at her suspiciously. The doctor winked. That man saw crossword puzzles. The doctor shook his hand. This child found zebras all optical illusion on an African wild. The doctor slapped the animals and made them jump! This old woman saw vague Adams and misty Eves being driven from half-seen Gardens. The doctor scooched in on the seat with her awhile; they talked in fierce whispered elations, then up he jumped and forged on. Had the old woman seen an eviction? This young one saw the couple invited back in!

Dogs, lightnings, cats, cars, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies!

Each person, each response, brought greater outcries. We found ourselves all laughing together. This fine old man was a happening of nature, a caprice, God's rambunctious Will, sewing all our separateness up in one.

Elephants! Elevators! Alarums! Dooms!

When first he had bounded aboard we had wanted naught of each other. But now like an immense snowfall which we must gossip on or an electrical failure that blacked out two million homes and so thrown us all together in communal chat, laugh, guffaw, we felt the tears clean up our souls even as they cleaned down our cheeks.

Each answer seemed funnier than the previous, and no one shouted louder his great torments of laughter than this grand tall and marvelous physician who asked for, got, and cured us of our hairballs on the spot. Whales. Kelp. Grass meadows. Lost cities. Beauteous women. He paused. He wheeled. He sat. He rose. He flapped his wildly colored shirt, until at last he towered before me and said:

“Sir, what do
you
find?”

“Why, Dr. Brokaw, of course!”

The old man's laughter stopped as if he were shot. He seized his dark glasses off, then clapped them on and grabbed my shoulders as if to wrench me into focus.

“Simon Wincelaus, is that
you!
”

“Me, me!” I laughed. “Good grief, doctor, I thought you were dead and buried years ago. What's this you're up to?”

“Up to?” He squeezed and shook my hands and pummeled my arms and cheeks gently. Then he snorted a great self-forgiving laugh as he gazed down along the acreage of ridiculous shirting. “Up to? Retired. Swiftly gone. Overnight traveled three thousand miles from where last you saw me…” His peppermint breath warmed my face. “And now best known hereabouts as … listen!…the Man in the Rorschach Shirt.”

“In the what?” I cried.

“Rorschach Shirt.”

Light as a carnival gas balloon he touched into the seat beside me.

I sat stunned and silent.

We rode along by the blue sea under a bright summer sky.

The doctor gazed ahead as if reading my thoughts in vast skywriting among the clouds.

“Why, you ask, why? I see your face, startled, at the airport years ago. My Going Away Forever day. My plane should have been named the
Happy Titanic
. On it I sank forever into the traceless sky. Yet here I am in the absolute flesh, yes? Not drunk, nor mad, nor riven by age and retirement's boredom. Where, what, why, how come?”

“Yes,” I said, “why
did
you retire, with everything pitched for you? Skill, reputation, money. Not a breath of—”

“Scandal? None! Why, then? Because, this old camel had not one but two humps broken by two straws. Two amazing straws. Hump Number One—”

He paused. He cast me a sidelong glance from under his dark glasses.

“This is a confessional,” I said. “Mum's the word.”

“Confessional. Yes. Thanks.”

The bus hummed softly on the road.

His voice rose and fell with the hum.

“You know my photographic memory? Blessed, cursed, with total recall. Anything said, seen, done, touched, heard, can be snapped back to focus by me, forty, fifty, sixty years later. All, all of it, trapped in here.”

He stroked his temples lightly with the fingers of both hands.

“Hundreds of psychiatric cases, delivered through my door, day after day, year on year. And never once did I check my notes on any of those sessions. I found, early on, I need only play back what I had heard inside my head. Sound tapes, of course, were kept as a double-check, but never listened to. There you have the stage set for the whole shocking business.

“One day in my sixtieth year a woman patient spoke a single word. I asked her to repeat it. Why? Suddenly I had felt my semicircular canals shift as if some valves had opened upon cool fresh air at a subterranean level.

“‘Best,' she said.

“‘I thought you said “beast,” I said.

“‘Oh, no, doctor, “best.”

“One word. One pebble dropped off the edge. And then—the avalanche. For, distinctly, I had heard her claim: ‘He loved the beast in me,' which is one kettle of sexual fish, eh? When in reality she had said, ‘He loved the best in me,' which is quite another pan of cold cod, you must agree.

“That night I could not sleep. I smoked, I stared from windows. My
head, my ears, felt strangely clear, as if I had just gotten over a thirty years' cold. I suspected myself, my past, my senses, so at three in the deadfall morning I motored to my office and found the worst:

“The recalled conversations of hundreds of cases in my mind were not the same as those recorded on my tapes or typed out in my secretary's notes!”

“You mean…?”

“I mean when I heard beast it was truly best. Dumb was really numb. Ox were cocks and vice-versa. I heard bed and someone had said head. Sleep was creep. Lay was day. Paws were really pause. Rump was merely jump. Fiend was only leaned. Sex was hex or mix or, God knows, per
plex!
Yes-mess. No-slow. Binge-hinge. Wrong-long. Side-hide. Name a name, I'd heard it wrong. Ten million dozen misheard nouns! I panicked through my files! Good Grief! Great Jumping Josie!

“All those years, those people! Holy Moses, Brokaw, I cried, all these years down from the Mount, the word of God like a flea in your ear. And now, late in the day, old wise one, you think to consult your lightning-scribbled stones. And find your Laws, your Tables,
different!

“Moses fled his offices that night. I ran in dark, unraveling my despair. I trained to Far Rockaway, perhaps because of its lamenting name.

“I walked by a tumult of waves only equaled by the tumult in my breast. How? I cried, how can you have been half-deaf for a lifetime and not known it! And known it only now when through some fluke, the sense, the gift, returned, how, how?!

“My only answer was a great stroke of thunder wave upon the sands.

“So much for straw number one that broke hump number one of this odd-shaped human camel.”

There was a moment of silence.

We rode swaying on the bus. The bus moved along the golden shore road, through a gentle breeze.

“Straw number two? I asked, quietly, at last.

Dr. Brokaw held his French sunglasses up so sunlight struck fish-glitters all about the cavern of the bus. We watched the swimming rainbow patterns, he with detachment and at last half-amused concern.

“Sight. Vision. Texture. Detail. Aren't they miraculous. Aweful in the sense of meaning true awe? What is sight, vision, insight? Do we really want to see the world?”

“Oh, yes,” I cried, promptly.

“A young man's unthinking answer. No, my dear boy, we do not. At twenty, yes, we think we wish to see, know, be all. So thought I once. But I have had weak eyes most of my life, spent half my days being fitted out with new specs by oculists, hee? Well, comes the dawn of the corneal lens! At last, I decided, I will fit myself with those bright little
teardrop miracles, those invisible discs! Coincidence? Psychosomatic cause and effect? For, that same week I got my contact lenses was the week my hearing cleared up! There must be some physio-mental connection, but don't hazard me into an informed guess.

“All I know is I had my little crystal corneal lenses ground and installed upon my weak baby blue eyes and—
Voilà!

“There was the world!

“T
HERE
were people!

“And there, God save us, was the dirt, and the multitudinous pores upon the people.

“Simon,” he added, grieving gently, eyes shut for a moment behind his dark glasses, “have you ever thought, did you know, that people are for the most part pores?”

He let that sink in. I thought about it.

“Pores?” I said, at last.

“Pores! But who thinks of it? Who bothers to go look? But with my restored vision
I
saw! A thousand, a million, ten billion … pores. Large, small, pale, crimson … pores. Everyone and on everyone. People passing. People crowding buses, theaters, telephone booths, all pore and little substance. Small pores on tiny women. Big pores on monster men. Or vice versa. Pores as numerous as that foul dust which slides pell-mell down church-nave sunbeams late afternoons. Pores. They became my utter and riven fascination. I stared at fine ladies' complexions, not their eyes, mouths, or earlobes. Shouldn't a man watch a woman's skeleton hinge and unhinge itself within that sweet pincushion flesh? Yes! But no, I saw only cheese-grater, kitchen-sieve skins. All Beauty turned sour Grotesque. Swiveling my gaze was like swiveling the 200-inch Palomar telescope in my damned skull. Everywhere I looked I saw the meteor-bombarded moon, in dread super closeup!

“Myself?” God, shaving mornings was exquisite torture. I could not pluck my eyes from my lost battle-pitted face. Damnation, Immanuel Brokaw, I soughed, you are the Grand Canyon at high noon, an orange with a billion navels, a pomegranate with the skin stripped off.

“In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one's life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.

“I lay, a sleepless wreck. Ah, second Adolescence, take pity, I cried. How could I have been so blind, so many years? Blind, yes, and knew it, and always said it was of no importance. So I groped about the world as lustful myope, nearsightedly missing the holes, rips, tears, and bumps on others as well as myself. Now, Reality had run me down in the street. And the Reality was: Pores.