It is odd how much I loved her, and yet how suddenly that love grew cold and died. There was a break so sharp and so clean that it was almost a knife thrust, a piece of clinical surgery, delicately removing the heart and holding it pulsing in the hand before dropping it in a surgical container. She was everything in the world to me, and then she was nothing. I told her on the trolley car coming back from Mount Vernon where we had gone to the Loew’s there to see a movie — I think it was Strike Up the Band with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. I think it was that, though it may have been something else; my mind was really concentrating on how I would tell her. I had discussed it that summer with L.J. and Beethoven, we had gone someplace for the summer, I don’t think Red Vest was along; no, he didn’t come into the crowd until later. But I had discussed it with the boys in the quiet dark, lying in our separate beds in the small wallpapered room. I can remember the woman who made salads, yes, we were busboys, that’s right, her name was Gladys, she was a big woman who had a son in college, she lived on Fordham Road. I can remember she got into L.J.’s bed one night, but I don’t think he did anything with her, and yet I can’t for the life of me understand why she got into his bed, had he said he was cold? I could never understand it. But I had discussed Doris with them, it seems there was another girl involved, or perhaps that was only the excuse I seized upon, perhaps it was finished with Doris long before the boys and I left for the mountains, yes, of course, it was in the Borscht Belt someplace, Goldschmidt’s Hacienda? No, that was only what we called it, well.
I told her on the trolley car. It was September; the boys and I had just come back from Goldschmidt’s. She was wearing my silver scholarship pin on the lapel of that same plaid coat, or perhaps it was a different coat, I only remember fastening my eyes to the silver high school scholarship pin. The pin made it easier to tell her. L.J. had said the best way was clean and sharp, so I kept staring at the silver pin, and I said, “There’s something I have to tell you, Doris,” but she already knew. I saw the sudden lowering of her brown eyes, and then I saw the way her hands were fluttering in her lap, and I knew she already knew, I hadn’t even kissed her in the movies, the things we used to do in the movies. “I want to break off,” I said, clean and sharp, just the way L.J. said I should do it, clean and sharp, I could feel that gleaming surgical knife sliding in between her ribs. She nodded.
“All right,” she said. She did not raise her eyes.
Clean and sharp.
Nothing is clean and sharp. I saw her again when I was home on leave from the navy, oh, it must have been two years later. Her father was a trumpet teacher, when I got to her house that day he had a kid in the living room, and the kid was running up and down his chromatic scales. I wore dress blues, and the flattop hat which I never got a chance to wear except in New York, and I had three rubbers in the elastic band behind the crest of the hat. I took her to a movie, and then parked my father’s car on a hill overlooking Ely Avenue.
I had known this girl, I had known her very well. And she stopped my hands, and said, “No. I’ve heard all about you sailors.” I took her home. I guess that was her revenge, I guess she was entitled to a small revenge after the entrance of a surgical knife on a trolley car on a bright September day. But the thing that bothered me — the real revenge, the revenge she hadn’t even intended — was not that she was denying everything we’d known together, the time we got caught in the rain and the lightning crashed in the trees around us, and we couldn’t stay dry, we were soaked to the skin waiting for the storm to pass, wanting to touch each other again, and then finally running out of the woods, and we stopped at a gas station to hide from that fearful rain, she was sixteen then, this was the spring before we broke off, and her blouse was stuck to her, the attendant watching her, I wanted to hit him, to kill him. Not the things we did, not her denial of these, not her pretending we were strangers when we were really all either of us had known up to a certain point in our lives, but... but denying me. Not the things. Me. Pretending I was only a sailor, only another sailor, she had heard all about us sailors. I was me underneath those dress blues, she had held me in her hands, she knew me, I was not a goddamn sailor, I was
I was
Tears were streaming down his face. He tried to see through the tears because he knew he had to find a barbershop, had to get a shave before he met Janet again. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and he thought, Well, that was long ago, that was even before Beethoven died, what the hell, why bring it up now? What’s it got to do with anything? She didn’t know who I was that night in the parked car, she thought I was some goddamn sailor, and now it’s twenty years later, however much later, and now I don’t know who I am, so what the hell difference does it make?
He saw a clock in a restaurant window. The time was 10:50. What time had Janet’s hour begun? 10:30, isn’t that what she’d said? That meant she would be out at 11:20; he had a half hour to get a shave. If he could find a barbershop.
He walked to Lexington Avenue and then made a right turn, heading downtown. He saw the barbershop in the middle of the next block, and was approaching it when his vision blurred.
8
He thought at first his eyes were still tearing, but when he rubbed at them he found they were dry. It was then that he really thought he was Edward Voegler, the escaped madman. He blinked his eyes shut, and then opened them again suddenly, as though anxious to prove the blurring was only a momentary thing. But as he looked down Lexington Avenue, he could see only a curious optical chaos, and he thought, I’m in the middle of some kind of paranoid fit; something dreadful is about to happen to me. He did not know what this fearful thing would be. Perhaps he would fall to the sidewalk frothing at the mouth like an epileptic, perhaps he would rush down the street, berserk, and break store windows or strangle women and children. He knew only that something was wrong with his vision, and that this curious lopsided askewness made it seem as though everything were wrong, outside his body and deep inside it as well. He kept looking through his own eyes as though he were someone trapped in a room with rain beating against the windows. But no, his vision wasn’t actually blurred, no, not that way, not the way rain will dissolve a window, not the way watercolors will run into each other. Instead, it was as though there were a single sharp image, and then a ghost of that image, overlapping it, so that there were two images, side by side and partially covering each other, the ghostly image on the right dissolving somewhat, as if its edges were melting. At the same time, there seemed to be a curiously odd flicker somewhere off to his side, a pulsing flicker of light that he could not focus because it was somehow behind the field of his vision, far behind his right temple, but he could see it nonetheless, a flicker, flicker, flicker of light, colorless, on, off, on, off. A throbbing pain was beginning in his left temple, and he had the strangest feeling that the left-hand side of his face was going numb, and that his left hand was getting thick and clumsy, the way a hand feels when it has fallen asleep. He was frightened because he did not know what was going to happen next, and he suspected it would be something terrible. But at the same time, he knew this thing that was happening to him had happened to him often before, that he had learned to live with it, and that it would not really be so horrible after all. He found that he could walk quite well despite the strange double-exposed landscape ahead of him, that he could reach for the handle on the barbershop door and touch it with a great degree of accuracy, and open the door, and walk into the barbershop, all without falling. The flickering light was stronger now, like a candle guttering in a sharp wind, just beyond his field of vision, behind his right temple. The barber smiled at him, and there were two faces superimposed, one of the faces melting away at the edges, the barber’s nose smearing into his mustache, the other image sharp and clear beneath the superimposed and slightly askew one.