!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Only The Birthday Party, by Harold Pinter, had open rush tickets. I didn’t tell Mike, but the New Yorker critic had panned it. It involved a lot of word play, scary confrontations, and the occasional blackout during the worst of the spats. Mike thought much of it was funny, and was in a jolly mood as we left the Booth theatre into a chilly drizzle. We found a small deli near the park, glad to spend more time out of the rain.
Still a little energized from his first Broadway play, Mike enthused, “That was fun. I like it when you almost can’t figure out what they’re talking about.”
“He’s English, you know. British.”
“Who?”
“Pinter, the writer. All those actors are American, but the play opened in London ten years ago. Maybe that’s why it seemed a little odd.”
“Mmm…” was all he said. Then, “I didn’t tell you yet, but my father wants to take us out to Sun Valley this Christmas, to see S. He wants to learn how to ski, he says. He’s a real jock, you know.”
“A jock?”
“Yeah, he was a triple letterman at the Naval Academy. He’s always learning some new sport. First, golf, when he got to Cincinnati. He’s got a little trophy from a tournament he won. Then he started ice skating, pulled my sister and I into it, remember? And he built that pool in the backyard, so he could swim half the year. Put in a basketball hoop, coached a Knothole team, and all that.”
“Knothole?”
“It’s baseball for kids. I played when I was 8, 10, 12 maybe.”
“Were you any good?”
“Well, not so much when I started out in the third grade, But then I got glasses, and I could actually see the ball, so I could get some hits. Say, I got spiked once, playing second base, when somebody slid into me. Wanna see?” he said, starting to pull up his left pant leg.
“No! No, not here.”
“Oh” he rubbed his left shin, as if remembering. “It was weird. I had a big gash in my skin half way down my leg, but it didn’t really hurt, just was bleeding. My father took me to the doctor after the game ‘cause there was this little thing hanging out, and he thought I might need stitches. We got there, the doctor took a quick look, said, “Oh, that’s just a little piece of fat. Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.’ He grabbed a pair of scissors, and cut it right off. He was right, I didn’t feel anything. I guess there’s no nerves in fat? He only put on a little band-aid. You sure you don’t want to see the scar?”
I scruchned up my nose, and wondered how he could find all that so fascinating, playing baseball, his father’s sports, getting injured. I worked on my corn beef sandwich and thought, that’s one of the things intriguing, attractive, really, about him, that’s he’s so at home in his body. He really does have a hidden grace when he moves, doesn’t have to worry that he might accidentally knock over a glass of water when he’s reaching for his hot pastrami sandwich. That and his little boy eagerness, in such contrast to his poems and his late-night thoughts when we talked about who we were and wanted to be, made him hard to resist.
Outside, the rain had stopped. Cars, buses, taxis, people, the whole panoply of New York Street life assaulted us as we left the deli. Soon we found ourselves outside the Plaza, looking across to Central Park.
“You need to – we need to – go in and walk, show you what’s here.”
“This is Central Park? It’s so big. And hilly. I thought it was all flat, Manhattan.”
Darting across 59th street, we skirted the pond and soon arrived at the bridge spanning its northern end. Fall colors were in full, defiant beauty, as if holding back the coming winter. A riot of flaming red ivy covered the stonework arch. Iridescent orange, sun-like yellow, and fading green flanked the upward curving piers on each side. Above, grey clouds lightened to white, a smattering of blue fighting to push through. Birds were everywhere, flying, flitting, alighting on the branches above, knocking leaves free to float like swinging hammocks to the water below.
“It’s so much…quieter in here, “ Mike marveled.
“Come on. I want to show you something.”
“What? Where?”
We skirted the zoo, animals pacing in the wrought-iron cages, looking out-of-place and desolate. To our left, Wollman Rink appeared to be open, maybe for the first time this year. A Zamboni turned tight circles. leaving a sheen of wetness behind, quickly freezing. Families with ear muffs and scarves laced up, waiting to slip and slide. Children’s cries pierced the quiet, anticipating excitements to come. “Wait, OK? You’ll like it. It’s up near the Met.”
Soon, we turned off the road, heading east, and came to the statue of Hans Christian Anderson. Tiny sailboats, remotely controlled from the far edge of the lake, motored along its surface. Off to one side, the Mad Hatter smiled at a mouse, sitting on its haunches atop a bronze toadstool, while the White Rabbit checked his watch. Alice, Dinah in her lap, stretched her hands out towards the edges of her own, much larger mushroom, as if deciding which side to eat.
“Yeah, wow, I love Alice in Wonderland.” Mike exalted. “In seventh grade, we read that, and then had to write a story based on it. I made up an encounter she had with a unihorn, that’s a unicorn who could play music through its horn! And before, when I was maybe three or four, I told my mother I wanted to be Alice for Halloween.”
“How’d that go?”
“I remember getting a lot of candy that year, and wearing a blue skirt with a white blouse.”
“It doesn’t seem to have affected you too much. I mean, you don’t still want to be a girl. Or is there something you’re not telling me?”
He took the question seriously. “Humm…I guess not. The next year, kindergarten, I had a crush on a girl in class, then every year at Woodland Park, it was another girl, until Kathy – you remember Kathy?”
Kathy. The girl with the curly black hair. Miss Cincinnati. A little gruffly, I said, “Sure, she got you into South Pacific, right?”
“You never forget anything, do you?”
“Yeah, it’s a curse. But it did come in handy on the SATs, and It’s Academic.”
We kept walking towards the Met. Mike continued, “I feel sometimes like there are two of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s one part of you that’s all serious and adult. No-nonesense, intense. The other side, you love little kids, love to laugh and have silly fun. Maybe even love me?”
“I don’t think that’s so surprising. We all – or at least you and me, and the friends we have – we’re not so far from when we were little, and it’s not that long until maybe we have a family of our own ahead, more kids. But to get from one to the other, we have to, for want of a better word, grow up. We have to find a life, create it from a vague dream, build it, and that takes work, serious work.’
“I know, I know, but I don’t want to change. That’s like Alice, she was always changing, and she got very confused. I want to always like having fun, to play at life, not have life play with me. Even when I’m older, I don’t see myself losing that, becoming too serious about anything. Never forget the little kid who made me what I am today, or something like that.”
We’d come to the Met, it’s stolid grant walls rising almost menacingly above us. ‘You’re sounding just like Holden Caulfield, now that you’ve come to Manhattan.” I looked at my watch. “Think we should get back to Grand Central? It’s almost 5.”
“How do we do that?”
“Just go out here, take the subway, I guess. Should only take 15 minutes.” I didn’t want to lose the thoughts I was getting, so I went on. “I’m not nearly so sure of who I am as you seem to be. I get all mixed up with what’s expected of me, and what I feel inside about myself. And that’s all wrapped up with being a girl, I think. At Avondale, and now at Harvard, I’ve always felt a little on the outside looking in.”
“You?” He sounded incredulous. “You were the queen of your class. And you got into the best college in the country!”
“Yeah, but being at Radcliffe, as smart as we all are supposed to be, we’re still second-class citizens. Harvard was there first, it’s their professors and classes. We’re still fighting to just be considered an equal part of it. They still think it’s a finishing school for very ambitious women.” I wanted to say, “You’ll never get what it’s like being a woman, no matter how hard you try, Michael Harrison,” but I held back. I felt a pull, a need inside fighting to rule me, a need to have, to possess, and be possessed by him.
We made it back to Meriden by nine, got to his room in Clark Hall by 9:30. No one was home. A little note, stuck to the temporary wall, a maroon burlap curtain actually, which cordoned off Mike’s space from the living room, read. “Larry and I are off to my house this weekend. Be back for dinner Sunday night.” It was signed, “Rich.”
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