I resented my uncle more than ever. He had lured the loathsome creature in me out of its lair and gave it a club to kill my father. I said so to Halston. He, in turn, explained the concept of projection, and once again, there was no villain in the world but me. My ruthless uncle was just another dark face of Rafe’s, another monster from my subconscious. I was the whole world: I had swallowed reality and everything was born from me: God and Satan, love and death, truth and lies.
It was hardly a surprise, then, that Sandy was infatuated with me. I seemed, even to myself, to have become quite irresistible, in a dreadful sort of way. She called me every night that week and, much to Julie’s astonished and, I hoped, also jealous eyes, openly took me to bed with her the next Friday. That was how Sandy announced our affair to her roommates. The following morning we came to breakfast together, her arm draped around my bare shoulders — I was wearing only my underpants. I said in a friendly voice, “Hi Julie,” to my cousin’s grave expression.
Kathy, smoking a joint, hunched over the New York Times, looked up. “This is definitely heavy,” she said in a mumble.
“Sandy,” Julie said, nodding toward the hallway, “I have to talk to you.”
“About me and Rafe?” Sandy said, letting go of me. She moved to the coffee pot. “You want some?” she asked me.
“Yep,” I said and sat down. Kathy offered me the joint. I sucked in the harsh smoke and felt truly and beautifully evil. I had had intercourse three times that night, quadrupling my lifetime experience in a few hours. Sandy had taken me into her mouth, I had used my tongue the way I knew how to use my hand, I had rolled her nipples between my teeth, licked the soft tissue of her inner thighs and kissed the firm cheeks of her ass. I was brimming with self-hatred, but it was a supremely confident self-hatred. I may not be a genius, I thought, but I’m a genius at living.
Julie didn’t answer Sandy. She stared at me — I grinned back — with a hopeless and rather sad expression. Sandy poured coffee for us, handing me a mug. She sat down, rubbed my shoulder lovingly for a moment before reaching for the milk carton. “Go ahead,” she said, glancing at Julie.
Julie sighed. “I think we should talk about this alone.”
“If it’s about me and Rafe then he should be part of it,” Sandy said.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s okay,” Sandy said.
“I don’t have a problem with what Rafe is doing,” Julie said, surprising all of us with her angry, pointed tone.
“What does that mean?” Sandy asked, pushing her chair away from me to face Julie. The raspy sound it made on the floor lent an ominous sound to her question.
“Of course Rafe is going to like …” Julie shook her head, irritated and embarrassed. “I mean, I can’t hold him responsible …” Again, she couldn’t finish the thought.
“Responsible for what?” Sandy leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, coffee mug dangling between her legs. Her pose was like a construction worker’s on a break.
“He’s a teenager!” Julie said as if that settled everything.
“Not in bed,” Sandy said and laughed with pleasure.
Kathy giggled, then lowered her eyes.
“It’s not funny,” Julie said.
“You wouldn’t have a problem about this if I were a man,” Sandy said.
“Of course I would. Everybody would. Especially you. You’d be screaming about what a pig you are.”
Sandy shook her head, turned away from Julie, put her coffee cup on the table and said to Kathy, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what this is about.”
“Look,” Julie said. “I’m responsible for Rafe. He’s sixteen years old. Look at him. He’s dropped out of the math program, he’s sitting in his shorts smoking a joint. This is crazy. This is just irresponsible. That’s all. You can tell yourself all kinds of stories, but what it amounts to—”Julie abruptly cut off her speech and slammed an open cabinet door shut. Its bang made us all jump. She shouted at Sandy, “God damn it! This isn’t what we’re fighting for!”
“You’re not my baby-sitter,” I said.
Julie, concentrating on her friend, glanced at me as if she had forgotten I was there. She was fully dressed, in the same leotard and jeans she wore to the demonstration the previous week. She looked more beautiful than ever, almost a different species than Sandy. Despite my odd state of mind, I understood that her concern for me was genuine — whether or not my hope that it was motivated by jealousy was right. It was obvious Julie cared about my welfare in a way Sandy did not, or ever would.
“I’m okay,” I said to her in an intimate tone, wishing that the others weren’t there. I felt, at that moment, that if we were alone, I would have had the strength to tell her the truth, that I loved her, had loved her since the day she had tried to defend me from my mother’s scolding about the hunt for the Afikomen, that I knew she possessed something almost no one did: an unselfish heart. I could measure the breadth of its generosity against the narrowness of my own.
“I’m not angry at you, Rafe,” she said softly.
“This is fucked up,” Sandy said. She stood up and got between me and Julie. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk and deal with this.”
They left. Kathy passed me the joint. Looked down at her paper while I took a couple of hits. She raised her eyes when I passed it back and said, “The Vietcong are amazing, you know?”
I agreed.
I felt alone. Increasingly, as I absorbed Dr. Halston’s interpretation, that was how I experienced life. Not the quaking terror of a self without boundaries, but claustrophobic behind the walls he had built. Since everything was really happening inside me, the real world had lost its frightening quality, its ability to trigger panic. That was good, but unfortunately, it had also lost its promise of redemption. By the time Julie and Sandy returned, I didn’t care what they had said to each other, or felt impelled to act by the revelation that I was still deeply in love with Julie. One was unimportant, the other hopeless. I liked having sex with Sandy, and if Julie had managed to put a stop to it (she had failed) I would have been angry, but without much conviction, since other than the sex, I really didn’t want to go on spending time with Sandy. When Sandy took me to her room after the walk, and somewhat gleefully told me of Julie’s “bougie and fucked-up reaction to our liberated relationship,” how she had “forced Julie to confront the contradictions inside her head,” all I felt was despair that more people had become a victim of my evil machinations. Why were they all so helpless against me, whether they were dull or successful, Latin or Jew, adult or youth, Communist or capitalist? Was it a world of fools? Was that what my mother had really meant, that being crazy is knowing, really knowing, just how easily humanity can be manipulated and therefore, how hopeless it is to try and save them?
I believe it was then, or sometime during those weeks, that I first thought of adopting my mother’s solution and killing myself. Her method didn’t appeal to me. I learned of her self-immolation from Dr. Halston. I had known of the fact of her suicide for a few years, but not much about the details. He told them to me in a rather cold voice — her actions were, after all, something of a professional rebuke. He wanted to know why I asked, but I didn’t tell him. I had no secrets from him and I was glad to have one. By then I had come to the conclusion that keeping secrets was part of my genetic makeup. The night I heard the full story of her suicide from Halston, I wondered why the images of Ruth, putting up her sign, pouring gasoline over her wild hair, staring at the crowds with her green eyes, and lighting a match, didn’t move me, either to horror or pity. Because I didn’t think she was wrong or foolish or mad to have done it, except for her choice of dying. Too painful, for one thing. And not damning enough. Her statement, THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD WILL END, was too easy to dismiss.