When I returned to the embassy, I didn’t tell Marilyn what the doll did. She found out after listening to the Voice of America on the shortwave. Nothing was mentioned at the state dinner that evening. “Get rid of it” was all she said before turning off the lights and rolling over in bed.
Maybe I should have washed the plum. I was up all night in the bathroom. I brought the doll in there with me. As I sat in the bright tile light, I contemplated the thing. Its enigmatic smile, the way one eye seemed to wink, how its arms and hands and fingers looked like vines grown into the trunk of its body, what did it mean?
Everything I touch transforms into things I cannot begin to understand. I was terrified when I squeezed from my own penis its first drop of semen. I was twelve, taking a bath, soaping myself hard when I felt the shiver. I thought it was the chill in the air of the room, then I saw the little white pill slip out of me. It was soap, I thought. It burned. It had gotten inside. But it wasn’t soap. What had I done? Who could I tell? I had hurt myself badly, I thought, and once I thought that, it did not surprise me to then think that I had gotten what I deserved. I have always gotten what I deserved. I washed and washed myself. Years after that, here I was sick again in a strange bathroom in Chile, and a souvenir that didn’t have a name regarded me as my insides rearranged themselves spontaneously.
In Chile, I found out later, the ending — ito gets glued to every name. It means little, — ito. It’s affectionate. Little this, little that. And the kind of doll I bought that day in the market is now called Quayleito after me.
The guts of the thing are all spread out on my desk. I know now how it works. The springs, the trapdoor, the counterweights, the whole mechanism of the joke. I still don’t know its purpose, why it was made. Poor little Quayleito. What to do now? My days are empty. Idle hands. Devil’s playground.
On The Little Prince
The children are out in front selling lemonade to raise money for Jerry’s kids. One of them comes running in for more mix. It’s a holiday so we all have to shift for ourselves. The old Naval Observatory where we live is near the neighborhood of embassies. A pack of Africans in native dress have surrounded the card table, drinking from the tiny Dixie Cups while the kids are dumping the powdered mix into the picnic jug and wetting it down with the hose. I can see this from the house. Foreigners don’t understand why we have a labor day at the end of summer instead of in May. They are all working today, even the Marxists who live down the road. They are heading back to their desks after lunch, killing time at the stand.
I’ve got the television tuned to the telethon. Crystal Gayle, who is from Wabash, Indiana, is supposed to be on soon. Jerry staggers around the stage. His eyes are crossed, and he’s yammering out of the side of his mouth. The French think he is a genius. I hear that all the time. How the French think he is a genius. Personally, I liked him better when he was teamed up with Dean Martin, whose suave manners stood out against his sidekick’s clowning. I like the movie where Lewis plays a goofy caddy for Martin, who is a smooth golf pro. The high-pitched whining, bending the clubs, the divots. Martin gets the girl, wins the open. Now, Jerry looks doughy, the sheen on his hair matches the satin stripes on his formal trousers. My God, it’s time already to undo the bow tie. What the French say about him has to have gone to his head. He rants at enemies then leers buck-toothed, eyes bulging. He wears aviator glasses that look like copies of the pair the President wears.
French is still the language of diplomacy, I guess. It makes sense since everything they seem to say says the opposite of what should be said. Jerry Lewis is a genius. They use language as a kind of disguise for what they really mean. They praise adults who act like children. Is a genius, Jerry Lewis? I would have studied it in high school, where they made it hard on purpose, all those little la’s and le’s, to weed out the Z lane kids, who were routed into Spanish. I took Latin because it didn’t move around, because it would help me with my English, and because I was going to be a lawyer.
When they were younger, I read to my kids. I took turns when I could and chose the stories with a lot of words and few pictures assuming that, after a while, I would look up and the kids would be asleep, their faces smashed into their pillows, their arms hanging over the sides of the bunk beds. That’s the biggest myth, that reading bedtime stories puts kids to sleep. It revs them up, and after I had closed the book, I had to hang around in the dark and answer questions about the strangest things. They always wanted to know if I was there when the story happened and was the story different when I was their age. I’d rock in the rocking chair while they thrashed in their blankets pretending they were characters from a book, that there was something scary in the closet. “Settle down. Settle down.” I thought of torts and contracts, the stories of the man who falls down an old dry well, posted but uncovered, on a neighbor’s property while he is cutting the lawn as repayment of a previous debt. Who can sue whom? On what grounds? There were ways out of those stories. It ends up being settled. One could walk away, fall asleep.
I could have killed the Little Prince. Reading his story, I felt so guilty for growing up and having no imagination anymore. But one night, I understood that that was the point. I was supposed to feel bad because I no longer had an imagination. The French. This thing they have for innocence. “Go to sleep!” I always wound up screaming. “Pipe down!” I’d storm out of the room, the children whimpering. “Grow up!” I’d yell and yell at them until, one day it seemed, they had done just that, grown up.
I stay away from them now. They have their own lives, their lemonade stands. The Africans must be thirsty. They crowd the table. Somewhere among them are my children refilling their glasses with lemonade that is not lemonade.
Let me try to explain it to myself. Those books never are about what they are supposed to be. Reading transmits a disease that you get through your eyes. A thing like The Little Prince gives it to you. You feel worse. You feel like you have lost something you’ll never get back. But you never had it and that makes you feel bad too. Therefore: Don’t read. Stop now. Don’t even crack the book open. In every story there is a dangerous formula hidden in the forest of the letters. It is there already, always.
On Planet of the Apes
I was always one of those who hid in the trunk. You paid by the head at the Lincolndale Drive-in off U.S. 30 on the north edge of Fort Wayne. There was an orange A & W shack across the highway from the entrance. We stopped there just as the sun was going down and drank root beers, sitting on the bumpers of somebody’s father’s car. The parking lot had been oiled, and the heat of the day had squeezed out little blobs of tar breaded with dust. You flashed your lights on and off when you were finished, and a car hop who knew we were from the county and ignored us came over to gather up the mugs. Then three or four of us climbed into the trunk, fitting ourselves together like a puzzle. Two others always rode up front, somebody alone would be suspicious. One of them would drop the lid on us. bouncing it a time or two to make sure it latched.
At first, the dark smelled like rubber, the rubber of the spare tire and someone’s sneaker in my face. The car rolled slowly over the packed dirt of the lot, stepped around the ruts, then made a short burst across the highway to join the conga line of cars leading up to the theater gates. It was hot inching our way up to the box office. The trunk was lined with a stadium blanket. Who knows what we were breathing, the mothballs, the exhaust from the idling car. The brakes clinched next to my head. The radio from the cabin was muffled by the seat. I always thought I would almost faint from the lack of oxygen, and then I would. I went light-headed, floating in space, my limbs all pins and needles and the roof of the world pricked by stars.