Crazy Sorrow Read online

  They moved ahead along the northern edges of the crowd, went out via Chambers Street, and managed to get an express train there, heading uptown. No one spoke on the hard-packed train. All the pop and boom and daylong celebrations had drained the crowd of sound. It was perhaps 110 degrees in the car. Everyone’s face was moist, shirts darkened. From 14th to Penn Station, Anna and George were forced into the middle of the car with nothing to hold on to: he was tall enough to place his fist against the low ceiling for balance: she held on to his belt. This made him a little crazy. A few times they caught each other’s eye, or both eyes, stared a moment, but they were too close, it was too much, they looked away. At 96th they were disgorged. Here was the transfer point between the express trains and the local, which they would need to take in order to continue up Broadway to the campus. Several other expresses had already been through and the station, holding so many transfers waiting, became so dense with people that the most recent arrivals seemed in actual danger of being shoved off the platform and down onto the tracks, where if a train didn’t get them, rats the size of eggplants might. They were like rodent alligators down there. George took Anna’s hand and pulled her along with the bulk of the assembled, who were exiting the station. They would walk the last twenty blocks.

  I never walk down here, she said.

  By down here she meant anywhere from 110th down to 79th Street, a stretch of pimps, whores, junkies and drunks, mad Vietnam vets, and other traditionally crazy-ass people just out of the state institutions and living in the single-room hotels that populated most of the side streets.

  George offered his arm, which she took.

  But I like seeing it all, she said.

  Along Broadway the bars, the bodegas, everything had a mean fluorescent glare. It was loud. The music was entirely salsa and it was everywhere tonight, down the streets both east and west in impromptu festivals and schoolyard dance parties. When they got to Morningside Heights, the quiet set in, the usual few drunks on the benches in the Broadway median, the students heading home in small groups or alone, the nurses from the hospital going in early for the night shift. They entered the campus at 114th. He had a room in the big freshman dorm, a double normally, rented during summers as a large single for cash-paying visiting students. He paid for it with his social security money.

  What are you doing now? he said.

  Sleep had occurred to me, she said.

  It was past midnight. She was living in a Barnard building on 116th and Claremont.

  We could listen to some music. Get high.

  Right, she said. We already are high. And then?

  And then what? he said. Who knows. Talk about Nietzsche. Read Zarathustra lately?

  She had a pleasant laugh, musical. Yes, I have, actually. What music?

  He recognized this immediately as a question that stood in for about a dozen larger ones.

  Whatever you like, he said.

  Whatever?

  Sure. I have, you know, a bunch of different stuff. What do you like?

  I’m looking at you, she said. You have Dylan, I know that. You have Joni Mitchell, you definitely have the Doors. You have some bad suburban shit. Lots and lots of the Who, I bet.

  Okay, that’s all true. I mean I have three albums by the Who, that’s not excessive.

  Yes, it is, she said.

  She said: You have Kind of Blue by Miles. That was like a big deal when you got that.

  Whoa, he said.

  I’m sorry, she said.

  It’s all right, I can take it. Keep going.

  Do you have Janis Joplin?

  I have the Holding Company record.

  Good, she said. Glenn Gould?

  Who’s Glenn Gould? he said.

  Oh, my, she said. How about, let’s see. Do you have Procol Harum?

  Procol Harum? he said. Really? Procol Harum? It so happens I do have Procol Harum. Do you actually listen to Procol Harum?

  No, she said. I mean, occasionally but never mind. Do you have Tito Puente?

  No. Just Santana. You know, with the Puente song.

  Ooh, she said. That’s bad. How about Eddie Palmieri?

  Wait a minute, that’s bad? That I don’t have Tito Puente and… what? Eddie Palmieri? Are you kidding? Yeah, sure, I have Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, I got both of them. Right. Look at me, yes, absolutely. I was the only guy from coastal Connecticut with my Topsiders who was into Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri. With a whole salsa collection. I had to hide the tapes from all my burly white friends, in their Topsiders, Jesus. You’re lucky I’m not making you listen to Renaissance.

  No, you’re lucky you’re not trying to make me listen to Renaissance.

  You’re testing me with all this? I’m just a suburban white boy strung up halfway between the haute bourgeoisie and working class.

  Which side was which, she said.

  My mother was toney but mostly cut off from the money. My father was a high school teacher. Civics and health. One step above gym. Where he was asked to fill in from time to time. He was a good-looking guy. Loved boats.

  Was?

  Both dead, he said.

  Oh, she said. Oh.

  He said nothing.

  She said, That’s hard. I’m sorry.

  He never knew quite how to react to this. Honesty would have been a grating howl.

  He said, Yeah. But don’t let it bring you down. As Neil Young would say.

  No Neil Young, she said.

  Not a moment of Neil Young, he said.

  You give up so easily, she said.

  I take the long view, he said. Skirmishes are never the war. I’ll have you stoned and listening to 4 Way Street and you’ll be singing along and suddenly look up and go, what?

  She screamed: No no no.

  Two guys on the way into Carman Hall looked at them.

  George sang in falsetto: Old man sitting by the side of the road… with the lorries rolling by…

  No! No no no no! No! She was laughing.

  This will happen, he said.

  They walked. She said, How about Charles Aznavour? Do you have any Charles Aznavour?

  He stopped. She had to turn around and wait, staring at him. What? she said.

  That’s so fucked up, he said.

  What’s so fucked up?

  I shouldn’t even know who that is.

  But you do, she said.

  I actually have Charles Aznavour. I have a cassette I bought in high school and I did keep it hidden from my friends. I like him.

  The eternal recurrence, she said.

  He looked at her.

  Things happen over and over, she said. I thought you’d read Zarathustra.

  I never said I’d read Zarathustra, you said you’d read Zarathustra. I’m still working on The Birth of Tragedy, which I was supposed to read last year. My analysis so far is, Nietzsche probably would have dug the Stones. They have the whole Dionysian-Apollonian thing down.

  I’m not seeing the Apollo part, she said.

  You must be hard to please, he said.

  You have no idea, she said.

  They were standing now, and had been, near the entrance to Carman Hall, against a cinderblock wall painted a cold white that glowed in the lamplight. They were quite close and inching ever closer.

  The silence fell between them, the locking of eyes that they hadn’t had nerve for on the subway, and then she kissed him. He kissed her back, slowly, easily. Her lips were soft, like the soft, unimaginable lips he’d felt in certain eerie dreams. He didn’t want to remember those dreams, not now. He wanted to hold this woman. They went upstairs, to his room. They kissed and smoked some more and he put on Sketches of Spain, turned medium low, music like a watery poem with glints of reflected starlight leaping up from its small waves. The sound of night air. A little sad. Whatever happened he wanted it to be slow. They lay on his bed and kissed and kissed and he moved his hands across her body, barely touching her, just grazing her skin, like the wind. She arched toward it.
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  Ferris Booth Hall, a dollop of modernity dropped amid the neoclassical effusions of Columbia’s McKim, Mead & White–designed campus. He was fond of this misplaced little imitation Philip Johnson building, with its terrace of slate and walls of polished granite and glass. That wall against which he had stood and cooled himself last night, where the granite of the façade met the white cinderblock rear wall of FBH, as it was called. Through the doors the triangular café to the left and ahead, farther on, more granite, a white staircase with chrome banisters curving to the second floor. The other buildings around FBH dwarfed it: Carman looming behind, a federal housing project type nightmare; the library looming to the left, colonnaded, stone, Caucasian monumental; old Furnald Hall, another dorm, brick and stone, looming to the right. Ferris Booth was completely incorrect but lovely, like an elegant child in a white dress waiting in the fallen-on-hard-times gloom of her grandparents’ parlor.

  Second floor, the offices, a more utilitarian ambience, black and gray tile floors, cinderblock walls, fluorescent lighting behind grids of tin. Spectator was, in summer, a minimal operation. The paper, an eight-page or sixteen-page daily during the school year, was reduced from June to September to a single broadsheet once a week. George found only Louis there, typing a feature on the tall ships and fireworks—one of his first-person things. He was summer editor for now, would return for his second term of being features editor in fall. He was the only out-of-the-closet homosexual George knew. He often turned his chair back-to-desk, knelt on it and rested his ass on his heels as if he were offering a fuck in a tent near the campfire. Louis had given George the horrors for most of freshman year but three facts, which would prove decisive in so many of George’s relationships with men, overcame all other considerations: Louis was smart, funny, and observant, which meant he was usually correct.

  Who puts the bi in bicentennial, baby? Louis called, without looking up from the typewriter.

  You’re not bi, George said. So far as you let on.

  A, that’s not true, B, how would you know, and C, everyone’s at least a little bi, Louis said. Including you.

  What the fuck is going on with your feet?

  What feet?

  The ones down there at the end of your legs, in the centurion-style sandals, George said. They were nice sandals actually, leather with brass rings: the biblical look. It was the Chiclets variety pack display of unshapely toenails at the front end that was disorienting.

  You mean my gorgeous nails?

  I have to hide my eyes.

  I gave myself a pedicure and I bought five different colors of polish because I just couldn’t decide and it was the bicentennial. But the red and white and blue thing is a cliché. And look! What joy! And… (finger tapping George’s chest) they… are… beautiful… to… me. So, in short, my broad-shouldered friend, fuck off.

  He went back to his copy.

  Then: Are you here for a reason?

  Just seeing what’s going on, George said.

  Nothing’s going on. You’re going on. The herald cries of your coital activities.

  Jesus, already?

  I saw Joe at Chocks, he was drinking with Robbie and Logan last night at the West End. Where Joe learned you’d gone off with the lady, not to be seen again. He gave you up in about, oh gosh, I don’t know, six or seven seconds.

  We discussed Nietzsche. There was hardly coitus, George said.

  Give me a break, Louis said.

  Okay, there was—until this morning, okay. But before that were hours of near-coitus.

  Ohhh, Louis said, as if being shown photos of a baby or a kitten. That’s so nice.

  Discussion of coitus, George said. How we feel. What it means. Why not to. Lathery kisses. Application of hands. More talk of how we feel. Family histories, in brief. Watching trails made by our cigarettes. More kisses, more talk. We were naked in a cold comforting sand, powdery and dry. Except it was my bed and we had underpants on. First Miles Davis then Blind Faith playing, on repeat. Which I have to say, but for Presence of the Lord, much of it doesn’t bear repeating. So then Billy Cobham on repeat, though with Cobham you can’t tell you’re hearing something a second or eighth time. Trippy shit, all the sensations. Then finally we went to sleep. A sweet awakening. A hard-on like from the petrified forest. She was amused, she was interested, she was a little excited. She was for a time truly enthralled, or so it appeared. And then she settled herself upon it like a tablecloth settling over a table in one of those commercials where tablecloths fall in slow motion and settle over a table. I’m sure you know the ones.

  Like they’ve been washed in Woolite? Louis said.

  Exactly. Or Breck.

  Breck’s for hair, Louis said.

  It falls, George said.

  Yeah, it falls. Anyway, you’re making me all hot and bothered.

  Down boy, George said.

  It started with petrified forest, Louis said.

  Keep it to yourself, George said.

  I’d like to take it as my own, Louis said. Then I’d keep it to myself.

  Note that I’m ignoring you, George said. Anyway, afterward we hung out and we’ll see each other again tonight. We went for breakfast. I’m in love. There. You happy now?

  Happy? Happy? I’m never happy, Louis said. Where did you go for breakfast?

  Jesus, George said.

  Details, details! Louis said. Details are the story.

  Mac’s. We split the eggs-pancakes-bacon special.

  You took her to Hungry Mac’s? That’s disgusting.

  We sat at the counter.

  They’re going to have to incinerate that place after the next inspection.

  Great breakfasts. Pancakes eggs bacon juice coffee, one sixty-five.

  You’re just tipping the executioner.

  Is that why the counterman has a hood?

  I don’t understand straight people, Louis said.

  What are you writing?

  My personal impressions of the—his voice shifted almost professionally into song—bi-bi-bi… centennial celeBRAAAA—shun.

  I hope you’re putting something patriotic in there for the alums, George said.

  You don’t hope that at all, Louis said.

  Arthur came in. Arthur was a photographer.

  Mr. Pennybaker, Mr. Langland, he said. Pictures. He half-bowed with his usual ersatz formality. He would have been the summer photo editor, but this was a problem since he wasn’t enrolled and hadn’t been for a year or, more likely, two. His full name, Arthur Augustine Townes. Pronounced, he would be quick to tell you, Ah-GUS-tuhn, like the theologian, not AWE-gus-teen like the city in Florida. A light-skinned black man, round of shoulder and belly and voice, he was the adopted child of a white minister and the minister’s wife, an otherwise childless couple, in the Midwest. Methodists. With all that ramrod certainty of grace. How he had convinced them to let him go to school with Communists in Harlem was a wonder. He dressed out of the Eddie Bauer and L.L.Bean catalogues with an occasional Brooks Brothers shirt received, George assumed, at Christmas from his mother; in his oxford cloth and khakis, he was a study in racial mixed messages, late in graduating, hairline just beginning to recede, language hectic and repetitive yet precise, black beard with a gray hair or two already coiled within, vivid-eyed, excited to tell you a story, focused mostly (as were the majority of people George knew) on the comic absurdity of the world. He was a Photographer, with the capital P. He’d been Spectator’s full-time photo editor for two years, the yearbook’s for one, now superannuated. He remained a frequent ghost in the halls and because he was there and because he had regular meetings with the dean about readmission—working putatively on some prodigious number of incompletes—he qualified as an actual student of sorts. He possessed many keys to various offices and supply cabinets. Darkroom. Photo equipment. Film. Beside photography—directly beside it—he had made himself expert in photocopy technologies; he knew the capacities, the time requirements, what the machines could take, he kne
w their dark, black-dusted innards and, like a farmer with his cows at dawn, he could be heard speaking to them in low singsong or cursing them lyrically when they were overheated and jammed. He had taken a work-study job in the printing center and had quickly risen so that now he assistant-managed the core of the university’s enormous paper-production facilities—through which passed, for printing or copying and binding, the reports, the committee reviews and projections, the presidential speeches, the staff directories, the schedules of classes and bulletins of offerings, the faculty tenure documents (eyes-only stuff that was), the assessments and refinements, the curriculum reviews and accreditation preparations. The director of printing went to meetings and left operations largely to Arthur, who was becoming the Robert Moses of the university’s paper flow.

  As for the racial ambiguities, George had heard him address it once, near the end of the spring semester, with a tale of how on an early-darkness winter day back in Milwaukee, in ninth grade, at home, late in the afternoon, he realized he’d forgotten a book—Four thirty or something, he said in that way of his, yes, close to lock-up time, it was, yes, the building where he attended a medium respectable private high school closed at five so what could he do—he dashed out the door into the Wisconsin gloom and ice and ran to the school and then returned with the book, successful. His mother was waiting for him in the kitchen, where mothers, George thought, oft waited in their anger.

  Arthur said, Oh yes. She was pissed. She was pissed. She said you do not run out of this house after dark, you do not run, oh no. No no. You’re a young black man running through the streets after dark in Wisconsin. You will be shot. It was a simple fact, okay, jump off the chimney you will die, right? Run these streets, black kid, you will be shot, okay? Like, what are you thinking, right? Like, the point is not debatable, uh uh. No no no no. This is Wisconsin. This is one of the biggest KKK states in the country. Men in sheets. More than Mississippi, right? Yes. And so what did I say? I said, Okay. Right. Right you are, Mother. Yes. I won’t do that again, no. No, no, you don’t. You don’t run down the street in Wisconsin. Ha ha ha. No.