The Labors of Love

"Annette Miller is a Hooer," Harold Isaacs whispered to me one day when I was in the 2B in P. S. 54.

"What's a hooer?" I whispered back, looking at Annette Miller over in the third row.

"She does it with everybody!"

I stared at Annette Miller. I'd never known anyone who actually did it. I looked at her very carefully, searching for some mark or trace, but I couldn't find any. I tried to picture her doing it, but this was difficult, too—not only because she was eight years old like me, but because I didn't know exactly what it was. I only knew about it, the way you know about a secret you haven't been told. Hooer ... hooing ... wonderingly I murmured these words to myself. Hooer ... hooing ... and then in my mind's eye I saw Annette Miller in a ghostly moonlit landscape, wearing a loose white dress like a nightgown, her long golden hair spilling over her shoulders, her arms stretched out toward me like a sleepwalker's, her high little voice crooning hooooo ... hooooo ... hooooo ...

For a year after that, Annette Miller and I kept a moonlit rendezvous where I held out my arms to her, too, and answered her hoo, hoo, hoo from the bottom of my heart, a bottom whose boundaries I hadn't guessed. My indistinct dreams of love were all fitted on her, size eight, but I maintained a gallant discretion by never speaking to her in school, or even so much as meeting her eye.

When I was promoted to the 3B, I found that Annette Miller was no longer in my class. And as though someone had erased the blackboard, her image soon disappeared from my memory, too. Like the fairy tales and fables of the first grade, it faded away under the rub of reality.

This reality stole up on me mainly in the shape of "dirty" jokes, which seems to be the only way it can be made understandable to little boys. Dirty jokes are simply fairy tales in reverse: on closer inspection, the princess turns out to be a bleached blonde, and you live unhappily ever after.

Wendell Pogue told me the first one. It was about a bride who fired off a hidden horse pistol in bed to make her husband think he had burst her maidenhead. I had no idea what this was all about, but I realized that the joke was somehow on me. I knew instinctively that I would have to change my thinking, and when Wendell Pogue laughed at the end of the story I laughed, too, at the end of my innocence.

Soon everybody and his brother was telling me jokes. Some days I heard as many as half a dozen. I didn't always get them, but I laughed anyway and learned. I learned that Jewish mothers braided their daughters' hair down there so you couldn't (continued on page 159)Labors of Love(continued from page 103) get in; that babies reluctant to be born could be frozen out if their mothers ate enough ice cream; that men and women sometimes got stuck together like dogs, and firemen had to turn the hose on them; that some women were so big they walked knock-kneed to keep their insides from falling out, and some men had to carry their works in a wheelbarrow. I learned that bowlegged girls were pleasure-bent; that every man was allotted five thousand times; that there was a mysterious little man in a boat who excited women more than anything else.

I collected a whole encyclopedia of these items and patiently fitted them together like a jigsaw puzzle until at last I arrived at a complete and conglomerate image even more splendid than that famous cup of Cellini's, in which he sets an iridescent dragon astride a golden turtle, then crowns them with a hymeneal sea shell on whose edge a jeweled sphinx with pearls for breasts is brooding.

These extravagances—which would make any cup run over—never fazed me in the least. In fact, I accepted them much more willingly than I would have the truth, for I was already a devoted follower of Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories and Weird Tales. Nothing was too much to believe, and for me this was sex' finest hour. Romanticism never had such a neophyte, before or since.

Inevitably, though, science fiction led to scientism and sex soon suffered Santa Claus' fate. For the builder of model airplanes, accuracy is a fetish, and in the blueprint there's no place for poetry. Doubt reared its ugly head—I went to the library and looked everything up, or hunted it down, behind the librarian's back. Like a rapist, I rushed through the biology section until I found a book on sex. See, I said to myself, my smart-aleck suspicions confirmed, there's nothing to it! As if it were a rose pressed in those pages, all the life crushed out of it, the secret of secrets became just a dried-up remnant of romance. Deflowered by diagrams and dictionary words, sex lost its mystery—and, of course, its magic. Familiarity bred contempt, and I broke out in cynicism like pimples.

The body was a machine. Your mother's womb was an oven where you were the Thanksgiving turkey. In the sex act your father simply oiled the machine, a locomotive engineer with his long-nozzled can.

Luckily, this didn't last. A hypothesis has to satisfy the evidence, and this one left too many questions unanswered. If it was only that, I had to ask myself, what was all the shouting about? Why would everyone always want to do it? And unless it was so exciting as to be actually dangerous, why would it be forbidden?

With the beginning of wisdom, as they say, I realized how little I knew. I had discovered only the mechanics—a typical nominalist mistake—and now I sensed that the difference between this and the sex act itself was like the difference between studying the blueprint of the model airplane and actually flying it. My heart had wings again.

There was still another argument for the extreme urgency and importance of sex: the Word. Written everywhere on walls and sidewalks, wherever there was a blank space, the Word had been waiting for me when I learned to read, had been, in fact, the first word I deciphered outside of school. In the beginning was the Word. I had never seen anyone write it—it was simply there, given, a priori, a mysterious imperative issuing from life itself, a cryptic command whose very universality banished all dissension or doubt.

Sometimes the Word was followed by you. In these instances I naturally took you to be not the object but the subject, as in come here you. I felt then that I was personally commanded, and I earnestly replied Yes, I will, I will, as soon as I can.

Meanwhile I prepared myself by meditation. At first, these meditations didn't know what form to take. Annette Miller no longer called to me with her hoo, hoo, hoo, and the chimeras of my science-fiction phase were as hopelessly behind me as the spick-and-span mechanics of the textbook. Stripped of these, I groped toward the ineffable, the sweet mystery of life itself. I sank into abstraction for hours at a time, and my expression grew so lyrical that my mother tried to give me a laxative.

• • •

The world, though, continued to intrude on my imagination, and it wasn't long before something started the whole cycle all over again. Coming out of Segal's candy store one day, I heard Curtis St. Clair say to George Hanlan, who was lounging there against the window with him, "I laid Viola last night."

These words hit me from behind like a rabbit punch. But I quickly recovered myself, swallowed them at a gulp, and hurried away. Then, as certain animals do, I regurgitated them in the safety of my room and slowly digested them. Here, for the first time, was the actual fact—not a joke, or a description in a book, but the thing itself, the party of the first part. I was immensely impressed. I was surprised, too, to find myself so impressed, because I thought I'd been through all that. I didn't understand yet that growing up was just a matter of meeting the same problems again and again on increasingly intimate terms.

I felt that there were a thousand questions I wanted to ask Curtis St. Clair. You couldn't ask a book questions. I pictured myself talking to him, man to man, hearing firsthand. I began to frame my questions, just how I'd put it to him ...

But here this daydream of mine suddenly broke off. With my imagination teeming like an anthill, I discovered that I couldn't think of anything to say. Not that I was bashful or tongue-tied or anything like that—it was just that every time I started a question I realized that I already knew the answer.

Finally it dawned on me that I didn't really know what I wanted to ask Curtis St. Clair. I had a pretty fair idea how the thing was done, I knew the topography more or less ... it wasn't that. Then what could it be, I wondered, because there certainly was something. I could almost hear the question buzzing like a bug in my ear.

I thought about it for a long time, but I kept arriving at the same dead end—What? What could it be? What?—until at last, as though the echo of this word had come back clearer, I realized that it was precisely this—the whatness—that I wanted to understand, the quiddity or essence of the experience itself. I had arrived at the heart of the matter. In other words: What is it like?

This was what Curtis St. Clair could tell me. But would he? There again was a large question. With any other guy on the block, it would have been easy—but then, of course, it couldn't have been anyone else. It had to be Curtis St. Clair, because he was as far removed from the ordinary as this thing that he, and he alone, had done. He never played ball. I had never seen him riding a bike or skating. And he never spoke to anyone except George Hanlan, who wasn't from the block. In inscrutable contrast to the perpetual motion of my friends and myself, he spent his days standing in front of Segal's candy store or sitting on the stoop of his house, doing nothing and looking at nothing, unmoving as a mystic.

Though he lived on my block—in a tenement on the far side—and had lived there since the day I was born, Curtis St. Clair had never so much as nodded to me or in any way recognized my existence. I would have to find some way to incarnate myself before his eyes. And since he was fourteen to my eleven, this would call for strategy.

I pondered what sort of tone I ought to take with him. I rehearsed an assortment of deliveries, drawn mostly from gangster and Western movies, but none of these seemed to fit. They sounded like I was playing cowboys and Indians or something. Then I found one exactly right for my purpose. It was from a movie, too, a war movie: Just before he goes over the top under heavy bombarding, the young rookie casually says to the Charles Bickford–type top sergeant, "What's it like up there, Sarge?"

As a final preparation I wore my sneakers, even though it was past the season for them. I couldn't have said exactly why I did. To sneak up on the act of love like a maniac in the park? To run away from Curtis St. Clair if necessary? To run away from what I might find out?

Setting off like Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo, I found him sitting alone on his stoop. With his long sideburns and his collar always turned up, he was a junior Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., good-looking in a hard sort of way and big for his age. He looked bigger and bigger as I came closer. He was staring straight ahead, into space as far as I could tell, so I stopped a couple of paces to one side and waited for him to ask me what was on my mind.

He didn't. I shifted my feet and waited. He was still staring off, so I cleared my throat. He didn't even blink. I waited a long minute more and then I plunged in. In a voice neither of us had heard before, I said, "Hiya, Curtis."

He flicked me an incurious glance—he had green eyes flecked with yellow like a tiger's and long curly lashes—then his eyes flicked away again and I was a child who should be neither seen nor heard.

I blushed. I hadn't prepared for this, and I stood there, excruciatingly irrelevant, in front of Curtis St. Clair's stoop. I deeply wished I wasn't there, but I couldn't take back what I'd begun, so I said, all my false soprano familiarity gone, "I wanted to ask you something ..."

The tiger eyes turned on me again, more deliberately this time, and I felt like that unknown Viola, hypnotized and helpless. I dropped my eyes, then raised them again to his, pushed from inside by the deep need to know. Then he said, "What are you talking about, kid?"

His voice was flat and cold. Still I grabbed at the straw. "I heard what you said that day ... in front of Segal's candy store ..." For me, there was only that day, but his eyes showed nothing, so I ran on. "You know, you were talking to George Hanlan ... about Viola."

"Viola!" he said. "What do you know about Viola?"

"Nothing!" I said hastily. He looked angry, and I thought, He's going to jump up and hit me. I gathered myself to run. But as in a dream, I felt that I couldn't if I tried, so I gave it up and just watched him.

He didn't jump up and hit me. He didn't do anything. I saw that he wasn't even looking at me and I felt my breath coming back. "You said you 'laid' Viola," I hesitated over the word, "and I wondered ... well, I wondered what is it like."

A long pause. "You wondered what is it like." He said this without looking at me, as though he was musing sardonically to himself. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his knife.

Holy Mary! He's going to kill me!

He made a sudden movement and the blade flashed open and clicked into place.

I only asked! All I did was ask!

Holding the knife delicately, his little finger extended as if he were going to draw freehand, Curtis St. Clair began to clean the nail of his left index finger. "So you wondered what it's like ..." The knife moved to his middle finger. "Well, I'll tell you ..."

Reprieved, speechless, I couldn't pull my eyes away from the knife. It wasn't a Scout knife like the one I had at home, or a pearl-handled one like my father's—it was long and slender, with a handle that looked like imitation blue marble. I watched the point as it curved slowly under his nail, pushing before it a little wad of gray-black that overflowed onto the blade. My eleven-year-old heart still just a Valentine to Mother, my passions a memory of Post Office and Spin-the-Bottle, I waited for Curtis St. Clair's knife to circumcise me into irrevocable manhood.

He raised his head. He narrowed his eyes. He stared, not at me, but into the distance. "I'll tell you what it's like," he said. "—It's greasy."

• • •

Like the flowers that pushed up each spring in the ashes-strewn empty lots of my neighborhood, some stubborn faith kept blossoming amid the debris of my disappointments. Therefore, when I was thirteen, I spent a trembling hour moving my hand by infinitesimal degrees from Marjorie Balfour's lower ribs upward to her left breast, which I located geographically, since I couldn't see it through her clothes, or feel it either. Letting my flattened palm lie there ever so lightly lest she take offense and thrust it away, I felt like "proud Cortez (Balboa) when with eagle eye he spied the Pacific." It would be hard to say whether I trembled with passion, love or awe—or all three—but this much was clear: the magic and the mystery were still there, a Christmas package as yet unwrapped.

It was not long after this scene with Marjorie that I became aware of a change in myself. It was a peculiar and subtle change, not easily recognized like the down, for example, that had appeared on my upper lip. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I felt almost as though I had developed another dimension. Like a fourth dimension, it was intangible and difficult to define, but this didn't seem to make it any less important. I sensed that the acoustics of my self had somehow changed: I had a kind of organ resonance now. I felt magnetized, pneumatic, haloed, complete almost to coziness.

Although I didn't know how to apply it, I enjoyed my new dimension. Like a man who buys a house and then discovers that it has underground passages and secret panels, I was always exploring it and feeling my way through different areas. It wasn't static, either, this new aspect of mine—it had an ebb and flow, a weather of its own that I would follow and try to chart from time to time while I might be walking along the street, or lying in bed, or sitting in my room with a book in my lap.

One day in particular I felt this weather gathering, getting heavy. I was taking a bath, and it seemed as if with my clothes off my extra dimension could expand and take shape more easily. It was filling the bathroom like smoke. I felt it more and more distinctly. It began to hum, like a generator, an uncanny humming that seemed to come from somewhere in, and yet outside of, me. It grew louder, and now I began to feel afraid of it. It grew louder still. It pounded in my ears and my whole body vibrated with it ... Then an electrical storm suddenly brewed in the bathtub and my own potentiality broke over me like a tidal wave.

• • •

In every Brooklyn neighborhood there was at least one bad girl—in ours it was Dolores Howell—and a near-unanimity of Peck's bad boys, so it was only a question of time until they got together. This was now happening on my block. Overnight, we went from Doc Savage to Don Juan, and every day some fledgling satyr took his turn at telling out of school. This one had done it in the cellar, that one in a hallway; another while his parents were out, and one had even lost his virginity in the schoolyard.

I leered as lewdly and guffawed as loudly as the others, but inside I was silent and thoughtful. I knew Dolores Howell and where to find her, and hardly a day passed when she wasn't in my mind, but I hesitated. When everyone—even boys a year younger than myself—had described at least one encounter with Dolores, I felt that my silence was becoming conspicuous. I brooded on this, and then I made up my mind. I went and sat on a fence where I could see Dolores' house. I sat there naming cars and not thinking about her until she came out. She went the other way, up the block, and I followed her. I walked half a block behind her until she bought a ticket and went into the Loew's Sumner. I stood across the street, staring at the door where she had disappeared. I looked up at the marquee—there were two love pictures playing—then I turned around and went home.

The next day it was my turn to boast, and since it was not merely embellished like the others but pure art unfettered by facts, my story was a masterpiece and soon became a legend on the block.

In this way, a year went by. Though I now carried a contraceptive in my wallet, too, I was still a virgin. Like those brothers or sisters who always delayed eating their dessert until everyone else's was gone, I hoarded my sweet dream and waited. I waited and I worried, because I was almost fifteen and where was it? When would it come true?

My fifteenth birthday passed, and then I met Serena Haas. She had very big, very dark eyes, and she wore very high heels. She didn't know anyone I knew, and when I met her at a party she kissed me in a bedroom and held me so tightly that she ripped the sleeve of my jacket.

That was in August, and I met her again over Labor Day at a beach party with the same people. Everyone sat around a fire singing, but we walked off in the dark and I slipped down the top of her bathing suit and kissed her where I had never kissed a girl before. As she pulled her bathing suit back up, she invited me to come and see her next Saturday, and, just before we came back into the light, she said, "My folks will be out."

The next few days those words were the lyrics of a song. Our song. I sang them to myself and refrained from eating candy or doing anything else that might make my face break out. I borrowed an anthology of poetry from the library and wrote out a list of clever remarks and compliments. I resumed my weight-lifting, which I had given up, and exhumed my pipe. I listened to classical music on the radio and brushed my teeth three times a day. I went for long walks and fell into brown studies. I danced a slow two-step with her in my room to Glen Gray and his Casa Lomas.

I recalled and re-examined every single thing I knew about her, every word we'd said and all its possible meanings. I looked up her family in the phone book and rejoiced at her name on the page. In inward-smiling secret tribute, I used the word serene in conversation whenever I could. I walked through her neighborhood several times, but was careful not to meet her, just as the groom mustn't see the bride on their wedding day until they come together at the altar.

• • •

She answered the door with a cigarette in her hand, and I thought she looked extremely poised and breath-takingly pretty. The apartment was like any other in Brooklyn, except that she was in it. She led me to the living room, where I sat in the center of the sofa while she leaned back and smiled at me from the corner.

Twin streams of smoke came from her nostrils, and I was about to bring out my pipe when I remembered that I had decided against it because it made a bulge in my pocket.

"Would you like a drink?"

"Yes," I said, stupefied by a week's suspense.

She went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses. She clinked hers against mine and smiled into my eyes. I couldn't tell whether it was bourbon, rye or Scotch.

The beating of my heart was keeping me very busy, and I found it difficult to meet her eyes. I looked at the glass in my hand. I lifted it and emptied it, then I put it down and with an effort I looked at her.

She put her glass down, too, and suddenly she was in my arms. I didn't know how she got there, but she was there, and her warm wet tongue was in my mouth. She fell backward on the sofa, carrying me with her. "Pull out the light," she whispered.

I drowned in kisses, then I swam in desire. I slid my hand up over her breast, but I didn't have to locate it geographically because it was round and pointed under her dress. She wasn't wearing a bra, and my heart almost burst with gratitude.

She took my hand in hers and pushed it down—away, I thought at first—down, down, over her ribs, her belly. Then she arched upward and her dress slid from under my hand like a table-cloth that's yanked without disturbing the dishes.

That was the last barrier, there was nothing else between us. Love and incredulity struggled for supremacy in me, and then they fused into a single feeling. I allowed myself to acknowledge that I was really touching her, and as though her little belly were a Bible under my hand, I was ready to swear to anything.

I might have died happy right there, but she unzipped me. I remembered the thing in my wallet and fumbled with it. Then I dropped through the funnel of her legs and fingers into love's last hiding place.

I would never have believed such happiness. Or that it could change so quickly, because minutes later I was overwhelmingly unhappy. Inexperienced as I was, I could tell—she had done it before.

• • •

As I said before, the world is always intruding on my imagination. Of course, this might be partly my fault. Perhaps, as a Chinese philosopher said, to be sincere in love is to be grotesque. I don't know—you can't prove or disprove it by me. All my life I've been gathering evidence for a generalization, but it seems I haven't been able to reach it. Meanwhile, I've gone on clinging to my original idea, or ideal, like a man clinging to a raft in a rough sea. Or rather, it has gone on clinging to me. Like a mongrel pup that picks you up in the street, love dogs my heels. It keeps following me, no matter how fast I run or how hard I try to cover my tracks.

So here I am, my soul in a sling and my heart on my sleeve. I almost blush to admit it, but in spite of all the dirty jokes and all the F Yous on the walls all over the world, in spite of Curtis St. Clair and the last twist of the knife, in spite of Dolores Howell and Serena Haas and a number of others whose names I've forgotten or never even asked, in spite, especially, of a strong feeling that the worst is yet to come ... I'm still willing to try.

As a contemporary poet put it, my heart must be a bag of manure, because it keeps encouraging flowers to grow. Like those flowers that pushed up each spring in the ashes-strewn empty lots, et cetera, as I also said before. So what the hell ... hurrah for love. Believe it or not, I'm all for it. I just hope, though, that no one's going to complain if my feet turn out to be a bit cold under the covers.