Thomas Disch: 334

While Birdie stayed in bed digging at his toenails, Frances went down for the mail. Except when she was at work Birdie more or less lived in her room, his own having got out of hand during the period when he was writing his essay. It was not a sexual relationship, though a couple of times, just to be friendly, Frances had offered and Birdie’d accepted a blow-job, but it had been a chore for both of them.

What did bring them together, besides sharing a bathroom, was the sad, immovable fact that Frances’s Regents score was an absolute 20. Because of some disease she had. Aside from one kid at P.S. 141 who’d been a kind of dwarf and almost an idiot, Frances was Birdie’s first personal acquaintance who’d scored lower than he had. Her own 20 didn’t bother her, or she knew enough not to let it, but for the whole two months Birdie was working on “Problems of Creativeness” she’d listened to every draft of every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for her constant praise and her getting behind him and pushing whenever he got depressed and hopeless, he’d never have seen his way out the other end. It seemed unfair in a way that, now that he was through, he’d be going back to Milly. But Frances had said she didn’t mind about that either. Birdie had never known anyone so completely unselfish, but she said no, it wasn’t that. Helping him had been her way of fighting the system.

“Well?” he asked, when she came back.

“Nope. Just this.” She tossed a postcard onto the bed. A sunset somewhere with palm trees. For her.

“I didn’t think they could write, these guys.”

“Jock? Oh, he’s always sending me stuff. This—” she grabbed a handful of her heavy, glittering bathrobe “—came from Japan.”

Birdie snorted. He’d meant to buy Frances a present himself, as a token of his appreciation, but his money was gone. He was living, till his letter came, on what he could borrow from her. “He doesn’t have much to say for himself.”

“No, I suppose not.” She sounded down. Before she’d gone to get the mail, she’d been happy as an ad. The postcard must have meant more than she’d let on. Maybe she was in love with this Jock. Though back in June, on the night of their first heart-to-heart drunk, after he’d told her about Milly, she’d said that she was still waiting for the real thing to come along.

Whatever it was, he decided, he wasn’t going to let it bring him down too. He plugged himself into the idea of getting dressed. He’d get out his sky-blues and a green scarf and then he’d stroll in his clean bare feet to the river. Then uptown. Not as far as 11th Street, no. In any case it was Thursday, and Milly wouldn’t be home on a Thursday afternoon. In any case he wasn’t going to see her until he could rub her pretty nose in the story of his success.

“It’s bound to come tomorrow.”

“I suppose so.” Frances was sitting cross-legged on the floor, combing her wispy, dull-brown hair down across her face.

“It’s been two weeks. Almost.”

“Birdie?”

“That’s my name.”

“Yesterday when I was in Stuyvesant Town, the market, you know?” She found her part and pulled half the veil to one side. “I bought two pills.”

“Great.”

“Not that kind. The pills you take for … you know, so you can have babies again? They change the stuff that’s in the water. I thought maybe if we each took one… .”

“You can’t just go and do it like that, Frances. For Christ’s sake! They’d make you have an abortion before you could say Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp.”

It was her pet joke that she’d made up herself, but Frances not so much as smiled. “Why would they have to know? I mean, until it was too late.”

“You know what they do, don’t you, to people who try and pull that kind of stunt? To the man as well as the woman?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I do.” Then, to close the discussion: “Jesus Christ.”

She gathered all the hair at the back of her head and fumbled a knot into her strand of yellow yarn. She tried to make the next suggestion sound spontaneous. “We could go to Mexico.”

“Mexico! Goddamn, don’t you read anything but comic books?”

Birdie’s indignation was all the more fierce for the fact that not that long ago he’d made essentially the same proposition to Milly. “Mexico! Boy oh boy!”

Frances, her feelings hurt, went over to the mirror and started in with the lotion. Birdie had known her to spend half a day scraping and rubbing and puttying. The result was always the same scaly, middle-aged face. Frances was seventeen.

Their eyes met for a moment in the mirror. Frances’s skittered off. He realized that his letter had come. That she’d read it. That she knew. He went up behind her and took hold of the spindly arms inside the bulky sleeves of the robe. “Where is it, Frances?”

“Where is what?” But she knew, she knew.

He bent the two arms together like a spring exerciser.

“I—I threw it away.”

“You threw it away! My private letter?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I wanted you to be—I wanted just another day like the last couple.”

“What did it say?”

“Birdie, stop!”

“What did it fucking say?”

“Three points. You got three points.”

He let go of her. “That’s all? That’s all it said?”

She rubbed her arms where he’d held her. “It said you had every reason to be proud of what you’d written. Three points is a good score. The team who scored you didn’t know how much you needed. If you don’t believe me, read it yourself. It’s right here.” She opened a drawer, and there was the yellow envelope with its Albany postmark and the burning torch of knowledge in the other corner.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“I believe you.”

“It said if you wanted that one extra point you could get it by enlisting in the service.”

“Like your old friend Jock, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Birdie.”

“So am I.”

“Now maybe you’ll reconsider.”

“About what?”

“The pills I bought.”

“Will you leave me alone with those pills? Will you?”

“I’ll never say who the father is. I promise. Birdie, look at me. I promise.”

He looked at the black, bleary eyes, the greasy, flaking skin, the hard little lips that never smiled far enough to betray the fact of her teeth. “I’d as soon jerk off into the toilet as give it to you. Do you know what you are? You’re a moron.”

“I don’t care what you call me, Birdie.”

“You’re a goddamned subnormal.”

“I love you.”

He knew what he had to do. He’d seen the thing last week when he’d gone through her drawers. Not a whip, but he didn’t know what else to call it. He found it again at the bottom of the underwear.

“What was that you just said?” He thrust the thing into her face.

“I love you, Birdie. I really do. And I guess I’m about the only one who does.”

“Well, this is how I feel for you.”

He grabbed the collar of her robe and pulled it down off her shoulders. She’d never let him see her naked before and now he understood why. Welts and bruises covered her body. Her ass was like one big open wound from being whipped. This was what she got paid for, not being fucked. This.

He laid into her with his whole strength. He kept going until it didn’t matter anymore, until he had no feelings left.

The same afternoon, without even bothering to get drunk, he went to Times Square and enlisted in the U.S. Marines to go and defend democracy in Burma. Eight other guys were sworn in at the same time. They raised their right arms and took one step forward and rattled off the Pledge of Allegiance or whatever. Then the sergeant came up and slipped the black Marine Corps mask over Birdie’s sullen face. His new ID number was stenciled across the forehead in big white letters: USMC100-7011-D07. And that was it, they were gorillas.